The loop is the unsteady cornerstone of contemporary technology, both a basic structure of computer code and the physical shape of reels of film and tape that continue to inform conceptual understanding of digital media. The loop is also a metaphor for time—a cycle that returns to the same disasters again and again—that opposes the sunnier notion of time as a river running forward. The Wheel of the Devil, a screening of video- and internet-based art presented by MTAA and critic Ed Halter, promises a dark reflection on those ideas, which they collapse in the formula “while (history) { history = true; }.” The Friday night program will feature loops by JODI, Rick Silva, Brody Condon, Jon Rafman, Deidre LaCarte, Michael Sarff, MTAA, Hayley A. Silverman, Mathwrath, Chris Coy, Michael Bell-Smith, jimpunk, and more. The first loop will be launched at 8, and the last will be cut off at 10.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at
11:30 am
The most distributed image ever is being phased out. What remains is a hill in Sonoma Valley, California. In the context of this project we have re-visited the hill. “After Microsoft” tells the story of a January day in the late 90’s when the hill came to coincide with a global branding strategy.
After Microsoft has been exhibited as an installation piece, including a projection of the re-photographed view together with a voice-over.
By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at
10:20 am
Pattern recognition is a field in full expansion. It constitutes a key technology in the domains of safety, of the management of the rights, of marketing… « Logo.Hallucination » proposes to use technologies of recognition of images in order to detect subliminal forms of logos or emblems, hidden (generally involuntarily) in the visual environment or in the whole of the images of the Internet. The found images will be accessible in a weblog, proposing a comparison between the original on the one hand and, on the other hand, the brand and its logo.
« Logo.Hallucination » lies thus within the scope of Web 2.0 insofar as the raw data (images) are mashed up with additional visual information (the hallucination of the brand) and that their juxtaposition takes part of new economic stakes, pointed here in an ironic way.
Logo.Hallucination continuously monitors the images circulating on the Internet looking for hidden logos.
By
Carolyn Kane on
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at
3:00 pm
Image: Natalie Bookchin, Mass Ornament, 2009 (Still)
Natalie Bookchin is a California based new media artist trained in photography, film history, and theory. Her most recent video installation, Mass Ornament (2009) appropriates YouTube clips of different people dancing alone in their rooms and edits them together in a single-channel video installation. The piece takes its reference points from the classic dance and movement routines of the Tiller Girls, Busby Berkley, and Leni Riefenstahl, filtered through Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 theory of the mass ornament. Kracauer argued that synchronized acts, such as the Tiller Girls, reflect the mechanized gestured involved in the industrial factory work of a mass society. The installation addresses issues of globalization, post-Fordist economics, and the new forms of visuality and perception they engender. This interview was conducted by Rhizome’s curatorial fellow, Carolyn Kane, in conjunction with Bookchin’s upcoming exhibition of Mass Ornament at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, May 14––Jul 12, 2009.
Carolyn Kane: Could tell me why you are returning to the mass ornament, a concept popular in the 1920s, today? Also, how are Mass Ornament’s dance movements distinct from the original Tiller Girls, Berkley, or movement in Riefenstahl’s work?
Natalie Bookchin: I have taken up the idea of the Mass Ornament because it is a provocative way to speak about today’s social and economic realities. Kracauer analyzed a dance genre popular in the late 1920s, one that would become even more popular in the 1930s, during the Depression. The dance involved rows of choreographed bodies moving together in synchronicity. Kracauer described the image produced by the movement of the Tiller Girls as a lifeless monster that he termed the Mass Ornament. Individual dancers had no say in its form and it held no value for them. In its formation, they lost their individuality, humanity, and sexuality. The Mass Ornament reflects the abstraction involved in capitalist profit formation. Workers in a factory, like dancers in a stadium, labored to produce surplus value that existed for its own sake.
The installation makes reference to the Tiller-Girls dance, and samples music from Busby Berkley’s Gold Diggers of 1935, The Triumph of the Will, and from the original YouTube clips. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films had a radically different set of effects than a Busby Berkley musical, or the Tiller Girls routine, they all depict a mass movement that was controlled, efficient, and rationalized, also defining features of modernity that cut across the economy, politics, and entertainment.
The Tiller Girls dance line-up, with its precise geometry, dynamism, and machine-like quality was seen by critics as the perfect expression of the age. The YouTube dancer alone in her room, performing a dance routine that is both extremely private, and extraordinarily public is, in its own way, a perfect expression of our age. Just as rows of spectators in the 1920s and 1930s sat in movie theaters and stadiums watching rows of bodies moving in formation, with YouTube videos, single viewers sit alone in front of computer screens watching individual dancers voluntarily moving in formation, alone in their rooms.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at
1:45 pm
Psychic sees the spectators and describes what she sees using phrases projected on the wall. And she sees maybe a little more/differently than what we see : she perceives the internal states and motivations of the spectators. The text is printed letter by letter like by a typewriter which we can also hear. (Installation design inspired by a work by Pierre Bismuth)
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at
12:27 pm
Image: Original Healey Hall, Northumberland, UK, for Jamie
The PSI_NET project reclaims a psychic drawing method researched, developed and utilised by the US military since 1972 and further developed in the private sphere by an ex-US Army remote viewer since 1989.
Clients/participants are requested to provide details of a remote site, person, object or event which they do not have access to, but about which they would like to gain information.
This 'target' can be located in the past, present or future, can be lost, forgotten, government or otherwise protected, and will be beyond the scope of the internet.
For each request two or more remote viewing drawings will be made at a single sitting. Images of these will be sent electronically to the client.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at
12:03 pm
With the work Telemistica, Jankowski plunges into the medial world of the Italian local TV. Speaking live on telephone with several TV-fortunetellers he asks questions about his forthcoming artwork. The TV sequences are recorded and are Jankowski's later artwork. Here the mystic not only lays in the private prophecy but gains significance within the work as it prophecies itself.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at
1:30 pm
In psychology, anhedonia is an inability to experience satisfaction from normally pleasurable life events such as eating, exercise and social or sexual interaction. It was also supposed to be the original title of Annie Hall, but was considered unmarketable.
By
Carolyn Kane on
Monday, May 25th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: Sadie Benning, drawing for Play Pause, 2001-06
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1973, video artist and musician Sadie Benning came of age in the art world in the 1990s with well-known journalesque-video tapes, experimental exposés made on the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera that her father, experimental filmmaker James Benning, had given her. Also a former member of the band Le Tigre, Benning is known for her bold and brazen style. Her works have previously shown in the Whitney Biennial in 1993 and in 2000. Her current installation Play Pause (2006), is also now on display at the Whitney.
Play Pause is a two channel video installation that projects images of thousands of hand drawn, gouache on paper, illustrations that Benning made between 2001-2006. Most of them are drawn in black and white with a light gray wash underneath, but a few of the images are also treated with a monochrome tint of red, blue, or green. The piece runs for 29 minutes on a loop. The illustrations were all scanned and arranged in this sequence for the piece. Coupled with surround sound, they tell a story of a “day in the life,” of an anonymous protagonist. Each image appears for only a few seconds, and then another similar image appears: from the first steps on the street, the stores, advertisements, shop fronts, anonymous people, night life, dance clubs, after hours sex, television, and scenes of departure from the train station and airport.
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Image: Raster Noton, Shop, installation view, Tokyo
e-flux's Lower East Side space will host a temporary record store for German electronic label Raster-Noton over the next two months. The record label came out of artists Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider's label Rastermusic and artist Carsten Nicolai's own Noton.archiv für ton und nichtton in 1999, and their individual sensibilities have shaped the minimalist aesthetic the label is now known for. Many of the artists who have releases on Raster-Norton, such as Ryoji Ikeda, CM Von Hausswolff and Marc Behrens, examine the materiality of sound as part of their visual arts practice. No wonder, then, that the label's short residency in Manhattan will take the form of an installation, titled The Shop, where none of their over 100 releases will actually be for purchase. Instead, all of their output will be exhibited as artifacts, with CDs displayed and recordings audible via listening stations. Some of these recordings will activate the movement of light in White Line Light, a work by Olaf Bender and Carsten Nicolai that will illuminate the installation. The Shop opens May 26th with a performance by Nicolai and Bender and runs until the end of July.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at
12:00 pm
Originally written as an internal guideline for the University of Maine's New Media Department, "New Criteria for New Media" describes revised promotion and tenure criteria for faculty working in New Media departments. Acknowledging the increased importance of digital scholarship and publication outside the closed network of peer-reviewed paper journals, this paper argues for the need for universities to support new models of research and discussion by rewarding those who publish in non-traditional avenues. Jon Ippolito posted this paper to Rhizome recently, but it also came out in the Winter 2009 issue of Leonardo and has been circulating elsewhere. When Networked_Performance posted "New Criteria for New Media", one commentator noted that universities in the UK have long honored academics in new media and understand that many of them produce their work online. Perhaps this document is more specific to the American university system and certain pockets that exist within it, such as the University of Maine. The title of Ippolito's Rhizome post is "Prod your university into the 21st century" and no doubt some prodding is due here in the United States. For one radical approach, check Mark C. Taylor's "End the University as We Know It".
That's correct. The Rhizome Benefit is now one week away. It will be a great night with live music and performance and all the proceeds will go towards Rhizome's programs and operations! We hope you'll join us!
By
Rhizome on
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at
12:47 pm
We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to Rhizome over the last seven weeks by purchasing pixels on The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage. We missed a few people in our first post so here's an updated version. Thank you so much to all the contributors. There's one week left to participate so we urge you: get involved now, make your mark, buy pixels today!
By
John Michael Boling and Ceci Moss on
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at
12:22 pm
For this installment of General Web Content, our monthly series spotlighting cultural developments on the web, we visit one sub-genre of the mashup, the re-cut trailer. These short clips spoof the original storyline of the film, thus Sleepless In Seattle becomes a horror movie in which Meg Ryan comes to Seattle to terrorize Tom Hanks and his son, and The Ring becomes a romantic drama. These videos started bubbling up in a big way after The Shining re-cut trailer hit in 2005, and as a result of easy access to video editing suites, there are tons of 'em all over the web. See below for a few choice selections, please post your favorites in the comments section.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at
11:20 am
Digital arts organization onedotzero announced a final call for submissions to their upcoming festival, which kicks off at the BFI Southbank in September before heading out to a world and UK tour. In its twelfth year, this is the first time the festival has ever toured their event. The organizers want your "digitally inflected" moving image works, which can span music video, animation, motion graphics, narrative shorts, experimental, documentary and generative art. The deadline is May 29th.
What do elementary school audiovisual departments have in their arsenals these days? Are fifth-grade teachers teaching with PowerPoint? That seems hard to believe, since mine barely mastered the overhead projector. She could never put the transparency right-side up and left-side left on the first try. The overhead projector’s flipping technique required the user’s brain to undo what the eyes do for it, in order to make one sheet of paper’s worth of information available to collective vision.
The tricky optics alone should be enough to interest artists in the overhead projector, but an exhibition dedicated to the device in Malmo, Sweden, focuses on the precious, nostalgic appeal of this quaint technology. Opening Friday and running through May 30, “The Art of the Overhead” will feature an archive of projectable documents and a spate of live programs: a projection-based performance by Katrin Bethge, an analogue computer game by magic-lantern artists Milk Milk Lemonade, and an interactive planetarium from Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser. Since Sunday these artists and others have been taking part in an OHPen Surface Workshop, sharing the projects they’ve prepared for the overhead projector and discussing how they’ve adapted the technologies they use in their usual practices, which range from sound art to minimal robotics. The full program is available at www.overheads.org, a site that makes nice use of another obsolete technology, the marquee.
By
Jonah Brucker-Cohen on
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at
1:51 pm
Image: Drew Hemment introduces the conference
Focusing on a wide array of themes such as the context of a rapidly changing planet, our evolving human / natural ecosystem, the growing global strain on natural resources, and the advancement of artistic methods on potential of technological infrastructures, the 10th edition of the FutureSonic festival spanning 14 years integrated a wide and impressive array of international speakers, workshops, exhibitions, and performances. Scattered around the bustling city of Manchester in the United Kingdom, the festival took into account both its local strengths and its global outreach to encourage debate and showcase a wide arrange of artistic projects that examined just how far we have come in these debates and how far we have to go to make sense of the evolving technological apparatus that surrounds us.
The Contact theater on the campus of the University of Manchester served as the main venue for the symposium talks and workshops. Opening the debate, keynote speaker Jamais Casio, an affiliate of the Institute for the Future, spoke about the ecological and economic tensions that global climate change, population density, and bio engineering have created on our fragile planet. Cascio sees a future where "nature is no longer natural" and our planet can be easily "hacked" through methods of pervasive "geo-engineering". Although an outspoken heckler in the audience seemed to disagree with his points, the debate was an interesting introduction to how FutureSonic is positioning itself into a festival focused on presenting a wider array of viewpoints and multidisciplinary perspectives in its transition next year to the new name, "Future Everything".
Speaking specifically about the pervasive use of networks, innovative thinker and author Stowe Boyd began a discussion on what he coined as "social tools" of technology and how they are shaping our world views and the future of culture. Beginning by referencing Marshall McLuhan's thoughts on "Global Computer Automization" or a prediction the theorist had for a pre-Internet, "global network that would change everything", Boyd explained that social tools must have mass participation in order for them to bring about significant impact and that “social” has begun to mean "me first" where the individual is the replacement for the old "group". He cited the shift from the use of email to microblogging sites like Twitter as an inevitable trend towards more transparent system structures. The last speaker of the day was James Marriott of "PLATFORM", a group of artists and curators that integrate methods of activism and ecological justice to campaign for social change. Reinforcing Boyd's stance on the increasing power of networked social tools, Marriott explained that by leveraging the power of these forms of communication, transparency increases while risks also emerge.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at
10:30 am
Video: Matthew Ostrowski, Atopia, 2004
Mixology, the annual festival curated by the new music and new media organization Roulette, got off to a strong start last week with opening night performances by Pamela Z and Elliott Sharp, presented in collaboration with Harvestworks. Pamela Z demonstrated her use of gesture to control sound, which she produces with her own operatic voice as well as electronically. Elliott Sharp was a one-man noise band, playing both an amplified saxophone and a keyboard-based instrument while manipulating both on his laptop. The night ended with an improvised duet, in which Pamela Z played her iPhone like an ocarina.
Performances continued through the weekend and will resume tonight. Tomorrow’s program features Matthew Ostrowski, who will pick up themes of gesture and sampling with a new work titled “Patterns of Changing Light.” Mixology runs through May 30, concluding with a performance by downtown stalwart David Rosenbloom, whose piece Sound and Light I continues his thirty-year-long exploration of dense sonic textures with a more recent integration of video as the basis for an evolving score. The full program for the rest of Mixology can be found on Roulette’s calendar.
The second round of member voting for the Rhizome Commissions Program, known as the Ranking Phase, is here. Through this process, Rhizome members will determine two projects out of twenty-five finalists to receive awards. Members are asked to list proposals in order of preference from 1-25 (with 1 being greatest). The results are determined by single transferable vote, also known as instant runoff voting. These votes are tallied to determine the grant winners. All of our Voting Procedures are detailed here. The Ranking stage is open from May 14th through June 4th.
Note to Applicants: Your proposals are considered by both members and, separately, by a jury who will determine seven of the total awards. All awards will be announced mid-June and all applicants will be emailed in advance.
By
John Michael Boling on
Monday, May 18th, 2009 at
1:30 pm
The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, May 18th, 2009 at
12:30 pm
"Spamtrap" is an interactive installation piece that prints, shreds and blacklists spam email. It interacts with spammers by monitoring several email addresses I created specifically to lure in spam and an old unused personal email address I use to lure in spam. I do not use these email addresses for any other communication. I post these individual email addresses on websites and online bulletin boards that cause them to be harvested by spambots and then to start receiving spam.
Because I know that all email sent to these email addresses are spam, I have set the installation to print and then shred each email as it arrives. Simultaneously the installation is feeding spam blacklists on the web with information gathered from all the received spam (a newly added feature). This in turn helps to feed spam filtering systems across the web that are working to reduce the amount of spam we all receive. Click here for more information about Spamtraps.
The installation uses a Pentium II computer connected to a wireless network, personal printer, personal shredder, aluminum rails, Spamtrap email addresses, automatic printing software, email client software, antivirus software, and a SpamCop user account. The paper is recycled after the spam email has been shredded.
Join us tomorrow, May 16th at 3pm, for this month's New Silent Series event, No Fun: Infinite Sound and Image. Produced in collaboration with the annual experimental music festival No Fun, which kicks off tonight at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, the afternoon will feature films and performances by Jim O'Rourke, Makino Takashi, Robert Beatty, Takeshi Murata, Sarah Lipstate, Dominick Fernow, C. Spencer Yeh, Megan Ellis and Carlos Giffoni. For more information and to purchase tickets,
click here.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Friday, May 15th, 2009 at
2:18 pm
Image: Mike Rosenthal, The Traveling Sound Museum, 2009
The spring show of ITP, New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, which was open to the public last Sunday and Monday, was a like science fair, with students eager to show the results of their projects, and also like a job fair, with middle-aged men in suits prowling for fresh-faced innovators. There’s an atmosphere of authentic creative exploration surrounding the projects displayed, but more often than not the starting point is a vaguely corporate-sounding buzzword: Sustainability! Wearable technologies! Arduino! Connecting to nature was a particularly hot topic, with variations on it ranging from urban botany—like the iPhone app Twigster that helps users identify species of plant life they encounter in parks—to the New-Age crunch of Root Boots, bark-covered footwear that encourages the wearer to stand still and contemplate nature by providing pleasant, low-frequency vibrations when at rest and making scary uprooting sounds when lifted. Voice from the Past also followed the trend of adapting technology to slow the pace of life down; the program lets callers leave a voice message and designate a time in the near or distant future when the recipient will be notified of it. The inverse of that was the whimsical Traveling Sound Museum, with sounds of events like the 1293 sacking of Jaisalmer by the emperor Ala-ud-din Khilji and the 1835 arrival of European explorers in Galapagos in mason jars displayed on an antique wooden cart. (The creator cagily batted away questions about what the burlap in the jars was hiding, and where they “really” came from.) Other projects let computers and audience share the credit for art-making. The “cobots” ShadowBot and SoundBot moved in response to environmental light or noise, respectively, to create messy, Spirogram-like doodles. With the heavy crowds at the show Monday, both were spinning out of control. Outis generates music from live video feed, performing a sonification of the input its camera picks up. If the structure and atmosphere of the ITP Spring Show recalled a science fair or job fair, the individual pieces were like fair sideshows, each designed to grab an audience’s attention for a short time before letting them continue to the next attraction. That has an analogy to the kind of viral fame that apps and devices like these might aspire to--postings on Boing Boing or Slashdot that momentarily tickle the interest of a few thousand readers before they move on to the next one.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at
3:30 pm
Video: Lucky Dragons at Pehr Space, August 2008
Any set has begin and end, but the Lucky Dragons played that down in a New York appearance last Saturday; they switched on some recorded sounds as the audience was taking seats, and demonstrated their equipment and chatted after the music’s long, slow fadeout. The structure suits the group’s hippie philosophy that doesn’t assign prominence to any musical moments, but treats all sounds (and people) equally. They also tried to erase borders between performer and audience by encouraging listeners to be mobile, approach the instruments, and improvise, although the narrow length of The Stone, crammed with folding chairs, made it tough for anyone past the two front rows to join in. Lucky Dragons stalwarts Luke Fishbeck and Sarah Andersen were joined by drummer Ches Smith and guitarist Grey Gersten, the curator of The Stone’s program this month.
Once everyone was settled in place, Smith and Gersten entered lightly, playing inside the framework of the electronic pulse already hovering in the venue. Gersten struck and dampened his instrument’s strings percussively, rather than playing melodies. Over time the drums and guitar settled into a hazy backdrop for electronic, pentatonic glissandos emanating from Fishbeck and Andersen’s hacked instruments. Later on they handed audience members a short-circuited wire—wrapped in a colorful knit cozy for safety—that played triadic chords when touched, varying volume according to intensity of squeezes and the amount of grounding (Fader recorded a demonstration of it). The accidental harmonies of that cord, like most of the sonorities in the Lucky Dragons’ music, seems to skip across the overtone series, as if the electronic tool is just picking up the natural vibrations hanging in the air. It could be the signature instrument in their wired drum circle.
Image: Lucky Dragons performance in Providence from February 2006 (photo by Claire Evans)
By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at
12:30 pm
Export to World seeks to comment ironically on the design and production of merchandise in virtual worlds. At Ars Electronica in Linz, retail space on Marienstrasse was temporarily converted into a shop like those found in Second Life. Large scale display ads showed what's for sale: custom-made or purchased virtual objects that shoppers could buy at a price determined daily by the current Linden dollar/euro exchange rate. Instead of the acquired object suddenly appearing in the purchaser's inventory, though, the proud owner received a a two-dimensional paper representation of it which he/she could manually fit together into a three-dimensional object on site. The final results are paper representations of digital representations of real objects, including all the flaws that copying entails.
By
Rhizome on
Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at
11:00 am
Rhizome and Internet Week NY, an annual festival of events celebrating New York's thriving Internet industry and community, seek submissions
for a new competition: the Featured Online Artwork of Internet Week
NY. Artists and innovators of any stripe are invited to participate
by submitting existing or new works around the theme of Web 2.0.
Variously conceived as pioneering business paradigm, mass
entertainment, hype or simply old hat, the concept of Web 2.0 has
captured the public's imagination while the websites that have come to represent it, have captured the public's free time.
Building on Rhizome’s 13-year history as a leading organization
dedicated to the challenging and dynamic field of Internet art,
we are seeking artworks that consider the Web 2.0 in
all its complexity, from its underlying philosophy and history to the
possibilities and also problems it opens up for the millions of users now
online. Relevant artworks will explore the formal mechanics of Web
2.0 websites, intervene in their rote operation, use them as a
platform for performance, mine their databases for use as source
material, or any other form of expression that turns Web 2.0 into art
inspiration. The only stipulation outside this theme is that works be
fully realized and viewable online.
The selected artwork will be featured on the Internet Week NY website
for the duration of the festival (June 1 - 8, 2009) and permanently
archived in Rhizome's singular archive of digital art, the ArtBase.
To enter the competition please e-mail a link to the work, a
description, a bio and contact information to web20@rhizome.org with the
subject line "Internet Week". The deadline for submission is May
29th.
Even if one were a diehard short film aficionado, taking in everything would have been an impossible task. I tried my best to see many of the distributor showcases. The Helsinki-based media art center AV-arkki put together a lively program by works from primarily Finnish artists. Hand-painted onto 35mm film, the techniques used in Miia Rinne’s Pori-Helsinki recalled those honed by legendary avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Sixteen minutes long, the film’s free jazz soundtrack follows the ebb and flow of vibrant swatches of color as they diagonally scurry across the screen. Music was also central to Liisa Lounila’s Gig (2007), which navigates the crowd in a dark, smokey nightclub to a dramatic score by a string symphony. The camera traverses the bar while the film’s subjects - young, fashionable club-goers - remain completely still, illuminated by fluttering light. Lounila has developed a technique in which she scans and edits images taken using a 360-degree pinhole camera capable of recording shots from many different angles at once. The end result imbues her films an almost holographic quality. The Netherlands Media Art Institute had some rather humorous technical problems during their screening, thus Dutch media artist eddie d’s Heads and Globes, Similarity Matrix (2008), which begins with a warning for those prone to epileptic seizures, mistakenly launched roughly five times by my count. The beginning of the work scrambles together logos and sets from television news stations featuring a map of the world, and swiftly speeds up to superimposed footage of newscasters. By layering this material, eddie d reveals the uniformity of both the design and format of news programs. Seoungho Cho’s meditative Buoy (2008) was tranquil in comparison. Featuring a soundtrack by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, the film compiles footage of California’s Death Valley, separated into multiple vertical bars presented side-by-side, to create a roughly hewn landscape. Most of the distributors showed only new and recent work, but Electronic Arts Intermix set themselves apart by also including restorations in their program, such as a number of comedic shorts by Stuart Sherman from the 1970s and 1980s, and Jud Yalkut’s Opera Sextronique, a 1967 restaging of Charlotte Moorman’s topless cello performance, one of Nam June Paik's most well known happenings.
By
Rhizome on
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at
2:00 pm
Oh No! You are running out of time to participate in "The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage". You only have TWO more weeks to purchase pixels. On May 28th the grid will be locked and will be on display at the New Museum for our annual benefit event. Purchasing pixels on "The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage" is a great way to bring exposure to your project and at the same time lend crucial financial support to a non-profit organization in a harsh economic climate. If you need help of ANY kind (we can create graphics for you, resize an existing image, or talk you through the entire process over the phone!) please don't hesitate to e-mail us at 50k@rhizome.org.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at
11:45 am
This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment . This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.
Medialab-Prado announced a call for papers for their upcoming 4th INCLUSIVA-NET MEETING on P2P networks and processes to be held in Madrid from July 6 to 10th. The deadline is May 31, 2009. Details below:
Medialab-Prado issues a call for the presentation of papers to be publicly presented during the 4th International Inclusiva-net Meeting. This edition will focus on an analysis of “peer-to-peer” networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.
Selected papers will be presented within a program that will also include invited lecturers and debates.
Many topics will be addressed such as P2P networks as a way of democratizing access to culture, legal issues and controversies, educational and artistic applications, their role in the emergent countries, as well as other perspectives that make a broader reflection on P2P networks possible.
This is a reminder to join us next weekend, May 16th at 3pm, for this month's New Silent Series event. Produced in collaboration with the annual experimental music festival No Fun, the afternoon will feature films and performances by Jim O'Rourke, Makino Takashi, Robert Beatty, Takeshi Murata, Sarah Lipstate, Dominick Fernow, C. Spencer Yeh, Megan Ellis and Carlos Giffoni. Full details and ticket information below.
In its sixth year, the No Fun Festival has emerged as one of the most unique and vital festivals for experimental music worldwide. Curated by No Fun organizer and label head Carlos Giffoni, this special screening will present moving image work by a selection of artists performing in the 2009 Festival. Jim O'Rourke and filmmaker Makino Takashi collaborate on The Seasons, a dense abstract film that fluctuates in tandem with O'Rourke's dramatic and resonant score. Robert Beatty (of Hair Police and Three Legged Race) will provide a live soundtrack to artist Takeshi Murata's hypnotic videos and animations. Experimental filmmaker and sound artist Sarah Lipstate (of Noveller) presents Interior Variations, a collage of 16 mm hand-painted film, black-and-white super 8mm, and found footage, which will be accompanied by a new Noveller composition titled Telecine. Dominick Fernow/Prurient will screen spins the worlds wheel again, a short film inspired by his 180-page hardcover book of collages, Rose Pillar published by Heartworm Press,which deals directly with mortality within the family structure. Sound artist/composer C. Spencer Yeh (of Burning Star Core), known for his arrangements that draw on both aural and physical experience, will premiere a new work using voice as its central component. Megan Ellis and Carlos Giffoni will also showcase a new piece, created specifically for this show, which will pair minimalist visuals with an evolving electronic sound score.
Saturday, May 16th, at 3pm
at the New Museum
$8 General/ $6 Members BUY TICKETS HERE
By
Brian Droitcour on
Friday, May 8th, 2009 at
3:00 pm
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, The Abboutthing (in the air), 2009 (Image Courtesy of Elizabeth Dee)
Few things are farther from the cool white walls of Chelsea than the anxieties and values of teenage suburbia, which is probably why Ryan Trecartin’s videos about them, untranslated into the art world’s dominant dialect of aloof criticality, looked so exotic and aroused so much excitement when he made his gallery debut here a year and a half ago. Trecartin’s work grows out of YouTube rants, Myspace intros, and other random homemade shorts , and while grotesque histrionics set his videos apart from the average upload, he keeps them close to their sources of inspiration by addressing issues of popularity, independence, and social approval, and shooting them in spacious beige interiors that approximate the bedroom of the regular webcam-wielding kid. Lizzie Fitch, who has collaborated with Trecartin on his videos as an actress and set designer, makes installations based on the same bland domestic environment, using furniture and appliances from big-box stores. Trecartin and Fitch’s current video-free exhibition at Elizabeth Dee, the first time they’ve had a double billing at the New York gallery, lies closer to Fitch’s territory than Trecartin’s, and the calculated result doesn’t indicate a promising direction for either artist to take.
Trecartin and Fitch use the gallery’s two rooms to simulate the interior and exterior of a suburban home, but they’ve switched the order of the front and back so that the viewer becomes an intruder, passing through the backyard before entering the living room. The first installation, The Aboutthing (in the air), suggests a good time that ended in disaster. Rubbermaid boxes bobbing in an above-ground pool-- a lowbrow luxury, not as fancy as an inground pool -- contain the residue of a deck party: a working stereo and empty cans of Red Bull. Pieces of dummies and mannequins float in the water or lie at the bottom, like drowning victims. On the “inside,” amid ladders and clusters of unpacked luggage, deformed mannequins are posed in front of the lenses of mass-market photo and video equipment. These heavy-handed allusions to the self-documentation that inspires Trecartin’s videos have variations in a few sight gags about representation: there’s an opaque window painted on one wall, and a slapdash rendering of a blue chair on another, next to an actual blue chair. But the humor comes off as studied and strained. The presence of the unused recording equipment adds up to an admission that video is missing, and that neither of these artists are entirely comfortable building a stage set that they’re not going to perform in.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, Now, in the Sunroom an After Now 1, 2009 (Image Courtesy of Elizabeth Dee)
Theatricality without theater is common in installation art, and often done well. But these particular piles of distressed consumer goods would benefit from text and action. Performance is a way for Trecartin and friends to put themselves on the same level as the regular teenage webcam user, and that’s what makes his videos feel fresh. By displacing live actors with dummies, Trecartin and Fitch remove themselves from youthful hysteria and assume the same old detached gaze so pervasive in contemporary art.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at
12:30 pm
Our sister institution, the New Museum, will jump start a new residency for performance, RE:NEW RE:PLAY, tonight. The month long residencies allow invited artists to workshop works-in-progress at the New Museum's theater every Thursday at 7pm. Singer and composer Nick Hallett is the program's inaugural resident, and over the course of the next four weeks he will stage performances that connect the human voice to multimedia ritual in a series entitled "VOICE + LIGHT SYSTEMS". In collaboration with Brock Monroe, each performance will be set in an environment illuminated using interdisciplinary techniques taken from psychedelic lightshows and structuralist film. This evening Hallett will sing selections from Meredith Monk’s "Our Lady of Late", a cycle for solo voice and wineglass, written in 1972 and rendered as a concert piece by the composer a year later. (See the above video for a preview.) Hallett will be joined by Peter Sciscioli and Emily Eagen of The M6, who will sing duets from Monk's "Facing North Suite", as well as Miguel Frasconi, who will play glass percussion solos. Upcoming scheduled performances in Hallett's residency include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung (May 14), a premiere of a new work from an opera-in-progress Whispering Exercises (May 21), and an "audiovisual travelogue, a tribute band" Auroville (May 28). Not to be missed!
By
Chloe Gray on
Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Tonight at MOCA in Los Angeles, Rhizome-commissioned artistsKnifeandfork (Brian House and Sue Huang) will invite visitors to race remote-control cars through the museum's current exhibition, "A Changing Ratio: Painting and Sculpture from the Collection." Titled MOCA Grand Prix, the race marks the final event of Knifeandfork's three-month Engagement Party residency at the museum. Each Wi-Fi-enabled car is mounted with a camera, allowing players to remotely direct the cars through the space via a videogame interface showing the car’s point of view. Awards will be presented for the fastest times of the evening. This event is free and open to the public.
By
Carolyn Kane on
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at
12:30 pm
Image: Nam June Paik, Beuys Voice, 1990 (Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery)
If we look back forty years, video’s ability to continuously process new data in real time and render it for visual display make it an important correlate technology for contemporary computing systems. In 1965, SONY placed the first black and white portapak video camera on the commercial market. The new technology granted easy portability, immediacy, low monetary investment, and for the first time, made video available to artists.1 Video historian John Hanhardt has noted that, at the time, the excitement surrounding the new medium was most keenly reflected in the early experimental works of Nam June Paik (1932-2006). This era in Paik’s career is also marked by his emerging interest in cybernetics.
Cybernetics emerged in the 1940s from MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener. Instead of viewing communication as a one-way ticket between cause and effect, Wiener looked at communication as a circular system of information exchange. His most well known example is a ship’s steering system, an example that echoes the Greek origin of the term, kybernetikos, meaning to steer or guide.2 While cybernetics eventually opened the doors to artificial intelligence projects such as smart bombs, smart planes, robots, and various other military “defense” technologies, Wiener has nonetheless maintained a sharp critical and ethical eye on the applications of the automated systems he doctored.
Wiener was not alone. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nam June Paik, and many of his pioneering video artist colleagues and Fluxus collaborators took the visionary work of Wiener, the electric prophesies of McLuhan and Gregory Bateson and the utopic designs of Buckminster Fuller and concurred that the new video medium would usher in a social utopia that would extend far beyond the spheres of the 1970s experimental art world. For these early media artists, the feedback loops, live circuits, and video flows, coupled with the electronic image’s immediate and physiological stimulations, when used in distinction to commercial models, posited potent possibilities for cybernetic consciousness, ecological human-machine systems, and an end to top-down power relations. In short, the rise of an egalitarian, democratic society through electronic media. In order to fully appreciate Paik’s work, we must remember this historical context. A solo show is now on view at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea, "Nam June Paik: Live Feed: 1972 -1994." The show features several of Paik’s older and more recent video installations, all of which reflect his cybernetic ambitions for video technology.
12_Series is a new generative multichannel computer installation by Telcosystems. The installation is an audiovisual horizon comprised of twelve identical image and sound generating machines. Built around the notion of decentralized autonomous decision making and evolution, 12_Series implements forms of audiovisual imitation, mutation and recombination, aiming for the emergence of captivating complexity from a vocabulary of rudimentary shapes, sounds and logic.
The system is built around the notion of decentralized autonomous decision making, with each machine displaying its own generative behavior, while reacting to behavior of neighboring machines and adapting to centrally organized environmental variables. The installation focuses on the tension between the individual and the group, between the machine-specific development and the group dynamics that determine the ever-evolving horizon.
You only have
left to purchase pixels on The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage. What are you waiting for buddy? The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage is an excellent way to simultaneously promote your own exploits and provide critical support to a nonprofit organization during a challenging time! (AND it is 100% tax-deductible!!!) If you need help of ANY kind (we can create graphics for you, resize an existing image, or talk you through the entire process over the phone!) please don't hesitate to e-mail us at 50k@rhizome.org.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
Image: Becket Bowes, Alan Turing, 2009
Hypertext fiction was proclaimed at its inception as the literary genre of the future, but now it already feels like a relic of the past. Ironically, nineteen years after a software company published the first hypertext story, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, fast internet connections and popular reference sites have made habits of fragmentary, non-linear reading common enough to prepare a wide audience for tackling hypertext fiction (who clicked on the link above before finishing this sentence?), but hardly any artists and writers are making serious attempts at it. Becket Bowes is one exception. His project [sic]ipedia, conceived for and developed during SculptureCenter’s "In Practice” program, takes the form of an evocative description of an arcane curio cabinet, with backstories of the items it contains.
Image: Becket Bowes, Social Isolate Club, 2009 (Installation View at SculptureCenter)
Bowes’ installation in the back of SculptureCenter’s basement was composed of those items—two Ships of Theseus, a Comfortable Chair, a simulation of Alan Turing’s death mask and a model of his bust spinning on a computer monitor, to name a few. [sic]ipedia began as a simple site, with a gray sphere and blank prompt in a stripped-down variation on Wikipedia’s home page. But over the course of the “In Practice” exhibition’s run at SculptureCenter, Bowes gathered his friends—members of the Social Isolate Club, or SIC—inside his installation, to talk out the histories and significance of the objects there. At each meeting, Bowes would take notes in composition books, and then convert the notes into pages on [sic]ipedia. Taken together, [sic]ipedia (the web site) and Social Isolate Club (the installation) suggested parallels between reading hypertext and viewing an installation: both give the viewer a degree of autonomy in ordering their perception of several discrete elements and determining the nature of the connections between them.
Afif has chosen the Palais de Tokyo as the last stage of a project that he has been working on for months. "Lyrics," his "sung retrospective" at the Palais de Tokyo, is an extension of the shows "Melancholic Beat", presented at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, "Down at the Rock and Roll Club" for the Moscow Biennial, and his exhibition at Albi's Centre d'Art Cimaises et Portiques of Albi. It is certainly a far cry from a classic retrospective. For each of these shows, the artist has invited a composer to "translate" into music his earlier installations, pushing to the extreme the potential of translation and re-creation of his work "in song."
Afif produces these songs as works of art by integrating them visually into the exhibition space. The lyrics cover the walls and visitors can listen to the songs on headphones. An installation made up of various materials scavenged by the artist from the holdings of the Palais de Tokyo will also serve as a stage for a concert scheduled to be performed the evening of the show's opening. Having drawn up a list of precise instructions, Afif commissioned various authors to write texts, then got the word out to musicians. Afif interpreting, interpreted, and reinterpreting his own work, which gives rise to a constant back-and-forth that certainly shakes up our perception of art.
From the US to Mexico, Jamaica, Africa, and beyond – Auto-Tune usage has splintered, with different approaches from scene to scene and artist to artist. (It remains the most sonically extreme in Berber Morocco.) The plug-in creates a different relation of voice to machine than ever before. Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. Auto-Tune operates as a duet between the electronics and the personal. A reconciliation with technology.
To all those who want to participate in The Rhizome 50,000 Webpage but
need a little help with graphic tweaking, we've got a new service for
you! Because we don't want an unfamiliarity with or dislike of
Photoshop or other image programs to deter you from contributing to
this special website, we are offering to produce your image for you
in-house free of charge. That's right: Send your idea, or an image and
the URL you want to promote to 50k@rhizome.org and our staff can format
it into the size and corresponding pixel price you desire.
As the online component of Rhizome's spring fundraising drive, this
Webpage will provide important funds to the organization during tough
times. Already, artists, non-profits, galleries, businesses,
entrepreneurial bloggers, hopeless romantics and pranksters have made
their mark on what is becoming a colorful representation of the
community we support. We hope you'll get involved today!
This week I interviewed Jason Sigal, Managing Director of the Free Music Archive, a brand new initiative developed by the acclaimed independent freeform New York-based FM and streaming radio station WFMU. Launched last month, the Free Music Archive is a curated archive of high quality legal audio downloads. The FMA pairs WFMU’s longstanding reputation and expertise with a model inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, and presents a useful solution to copyright and regulation quandaries now facing the distribution of music online. - Ceci Moss
What conversations inspired the Free Music Archive?
The idea came from our Station Manager Ken Freedman and Assistant Station Manager Liz Berg, so you'd need to talk to them personally about the run up to the project. But this is the basic idea:
Radio is not enough. WFMU is at the forefront of using new technology to fulfill our mission, but outdated copyright law and the looming possibility of unfairly high royalties make it difficult to provide audio on-demand, to podcast, to archive, even to stream online. A lot of webcasters closed down as a result, because they would be paying more to webcast than to broadcast over FM/AM or what we would call 'terrestrial' radio. We want to support the artists we play. But SoundExchange (the performing rights organization who claims to collect royalties on behalf of all the world's recordings, not just those registered with the RIAA) has a gargantuan list of Unpaid Artists that they can't seem to track down. Glancing through it now...Kraftwerk's on here, the Afghan Whigs, X-Ray Spex, Ted Nugent...SoundExchange has a very difficult task at hand, and it's a valiant one, but if they can't find these artists, they're NEVER gonna be able to find some of the shit we play, so our money mostly goes to support SoundExchange's operating expenses so that they can pay Metallica.
Concurrent to these debates and the whole "Save Net Radio" campaign, major record labels and large corporate music radio stations were involved in this whole pay-for-play scandal. These commercial stations were getting bribed with mountains of cocaine and Ferraris and stuff to play the same top-40 artists that everyone already knows about. Meanwhile, non-profits like WFMU -- who even refuse underwriting support because we feel it's just another form of advertising -- we were told that we had to pay much more than we could possibly afford in order to play our freeform mix of primarily unknown artists. It just seemed ridiculous.
Then Eliot Spitzer came along, attacked everyone involved in payola in NY state, and set up the New York State Music Fund. The fund supports projects that spread the word about all the great music out there. You can read more here.
Our grant enabled us to put on free concerts that we called the Free Music Series. Shows included Alan Vega, Oneida, and Old Time Relijun at Southpaw on 10/13/2007, the free Sonic Youth show with the Feelies at Battery Park on 7/4/2008, and the August 20th 2008 show at Lincoln Center, perhaps my favorite, which was WFMU Music Director Brian Turner's dream bill (he set up all of these) with Dutch avant-punks The Ex collaborating with legendary Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, the Either/Orchestra backing legendary Ethiopian vocalists Mahmoud Ahmed and Alemayu Eshete, and the Kenyan/American group Extra Golden.
Image: Poster for WFMU's Free Music Series Concert with Sonic Youth and the Feelies
Our grant also laid the groundwork for the Free Music Archive, a social music website of podsafe audio. There are already libraries of free music out there, like archive.org and jamendo.com that provide free LEGAL music. Then there are the myriad ways of finding free music online that is NOT considered legal, there's just so much free music at our fingertips these days. The FMA is unique in that it’s not just legal, but curated, so it combines the user-generated content with the curatorial role that WFMU has always played. WFMU’s Station Manager Ken calls our model "web 1.5" – meaning, if web 2.0 is all user generated content and web 1.0 is WFMU streaming without comments or user feedback, then the FMA is somewhere in between.
Within days after the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music.
Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.
