By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, October 30th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
Performa, New York's super duper mega whirlwind performance biennial, will take over the city for the next month. I thought I'd assemble a list of events that might be of interest to our audience. Before you dive in, I want to mention that one of our 2009 commissions, Brody Condon's Case, is also part of Performa. Case, a six hour performance and installation based on the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, will take place at the New Museum on Sunday November 22nd from 12pm-6pm, so pencil it in!
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at
5:00 pm
In the spirit of Raphaël Rozendaal's One Question Interviews, I conducted a "1-bit" interview with Rhizome-commissioned artist Tristan Perich. (I felt the idea was apropos given the artist's interest in the possibilities and constraints of basic forms.) Perich performed earlier this week at bitforms gallery in a benefit for his new album 1-Bit Symphony, which is a 45 minute long, five movement composition for a single microchip. 1-Bit Symphony is currently on display through November 7th at bitforms in New York City, along with Perich's Machine Drawings and his 1-Bit Video. Perich will also kick off a two month, cross-country tour with Lesley Flanigan beginning tomorrow, at the Stone in the East Village. He will be performing his composition for harpsichord and 4-channel 1-bit electronics titled "Dual Synthesis". (Full dates and details here.) I visited his bitforms show today (see photos below) where I had the opportunity to listen to 1-Bit Symphony, and it's truly extraordinary. I encourage readers to stop by. - Ceci Moss
What is your favorite unit of measurement and why?
The first unit of measurement to blow my mind was the parsec, which I came across in middle school in that amazing book, Powers of Ten. It described immensely vast distances, larger than a light year, which was really large. It quantified the universe. It was the first time I realized measurements could actually be cool, really cool. The book also went down to angstroms and fermis and pico fermis, accompanied by colorful illustrations of molecules and atoms. They're the only way we can relate to these huge and small places beyond our perception, essentially meaning, "bigger than you can possibly imagine" or "smaller than you can possibly imagine." A great book called Where Mathematics Comes From goes into how we can only understand mathematical abstractions through "grounding metaphors," like "number as distance." We seek recourse to our ineptitude by further refining our measure on the world, which Lorentz and Einstein proved will ultimately fail, our Icarus syndrome. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has some blocks on its campus that measure exactly 1 cubic inch, or weigh exactly one pound, creating the official word on measurement. They are free from inaccuracies since they define what an inch is in the first place: a physical embodiment of language.
But recently, I have settled to truly appreciate the millimeter. As a kid I always thought millimeters were too small to perceive, but they are actually pretty big. I've put them to work a lot recently to determine the precise wire lengths for 1-Bit Symphony, adding a mm here or subtracting a mm there. It's finally supplanted their intangibility with a new meaningfulness. Then Squires Wires, my wire company, blasphemously converts them to decimaled inches…
Join us at the New Museum tomorrow night at 7pm for a variety show organized by Berlin-based collective, curatorial-project and website VVORK (Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer and Christoph Priglinger). For "Variety Evening at the New Museum" local performers will stage works by artists Wojciech Kosma, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas, ladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. Containing readings, video, performance, dance and music, Variety will present the acts together in a dramaturgy that can be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. When finished, the evening will be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future.
This event is part of Rhizome's New Silent Series at the New Museum.
This New Silent Series program is made possible by the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, and the Experimental Television Center, New York.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at
1:00 pm
Image: Art Business Consulting, Your Call Is Very Important to Us, 2005
"Contact," the most recent exhibition by the group Art Business Consulting, featured a rocket ship built from computer hardware, with a trio of yuppies floating weightlessly on a video screen inside. The trappings and denizens of the office have figured in ABC's work since Mikhail Kosoplapov, Maxim Ilyukhin, and Natalia Struchkova formed the group in 2001, and as in "Contact," they have always been subject to some sort of disfigurement. Early on, ABC established a pseudo-corporate identity by showing up at art openings in expensive cars and nice suits, performing the role of Russia's nascent upper-middle class while their colleagues in the Moscow boheme were riding public transport in sweaters and jeans. To solidify that image, ABC made good on their name's promise of "business"--in 2004, they became dealers, selling the work of artists they liked at ABC Gallery. Change happens quickly in Moscow; now that the market has dwarfed institutional influence in Russia's art world, linking the words "art" and "business" doesn't feel as novel as it did in 2001, and Western-style corporate culture has lost the cachet of an exotic interloper. ABC's symbolic launch of the office into space in "Contact" came on the heels of the loss of their own office space; at the end of May, the arts complex where ABC Gallery was located shut down to make room for a new development. While Ilyukhin, Kosolapov, and Struchkova continue to work as artists, businesspeople, and consultants, the events of last summer seem to mark a turning point, a time for reflecting on the future of a project initiated to document social change now that those changes are entrenched.
Image: Art Business Consulting, installation in the office of Prezentuar, 2004
"The idea for ABC began with horror at the notion that I would have to work at an office," Ilyukhin, the group's de facto spokesperson, said in a conversation in Moscow last month. And though he did end up working in an office--for the Moscow branch of Halliburton, no less--the work of ABC always balanced horror with sympathy. Their use of the office's visual vocabulary was never dark or grotesque enough to be read as a critique of corporatism. The Yes Men impersonate companies to infiltrate media platforms, like news shows and conferences, where they use exaggeration and parody as tools to highlight corporations' socially ruinous practices. Goldin+Senneby engage actual companies as well as artists and thinkers in their mimicry of corporate language and behavior, all to create structures that demonstrate how theories of the virtual are embodied in the everyday operations of business. ABC's approach is looser, more ambiguous and playful. Their first intervention at a real company had nothing to do with criticality; a maker of installation equipment for business expos commissioned them to do a show in its office. It brought a lot of media attention to both the company and the artists, and as ABC told the Russian magazine Artchronika in a recent interview, they subsequently fended off a flood of requests for similar shows by making outrageous proposals to their corporate suitors (for example, they told one would-be client to build a living billboard, with employees working in a transparent enclosure above a highway). ABC flirts with the appearance of both branding agencies and activist projects; their art isolates the values and quirks of corporations by transposing them to incongruous settings.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
A proposal to remake Ed Ruscha’s classic
bookwork, replacing the corporate lots with
the private lots that spring up in my neighborhood
once a year, during the Canadian National Exhibition.
A folk-art archive of sorts.
Cars are a defining feature of the landscape and social space of Southern California. Especially in San Diego, where freeways weave like dangerous ribbons through a terrain of strip malls and tract housing, driving is an almost inescapable part of daily life...
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
I was going to write an artist statement about how I wanted to turn an oversized, macho, gas-guzzling vehicle into a technological ghost by shrouding it in a white, fuzzy cover, reminiscent of women's handwork from another time, another place.
What happened when I re-entered the US from Canada made me re-examine what my lowly art project could mean in a larger political sphere. And it gave me an idea for a title.
My worn-out passport set off the first alarm with the US Border Patrol. US citizen who have traveled to the places I've been over the past 9 years (Africa, Australia, Mexico, Central and South America, Turkey and Europe) need to be looked at more carefully.
A half hour at the computer gave the agent cause to put me into another suspicious category that merited a full car search. After going through my computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cads, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook in hand. I was taken to a room and told to sit on a bench with handcuffs at both ends.
"Just what were you doing in Canada? We think you're engaged in some kind of copyright infringement." The accusation was based on drawings of cars like this. After a lively discussion, my university faculty status and positive ID persuaded her to call of the dogs. Then she welcomed me back to the US.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Need for Speed is a Lamborghini Countach from 1985 made in cast urethane branches. The original 3D model for the car was extracted from the popular racing simulation Need for Speed. The term “cargo cult” refers to the history of low tech, ritualized simulation of military aircraft by indigenous South Pacific tribes in the mid 20th century.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 26th, 2009 at
10:56 am
The Georgia Tech Center for Musical Technology is hosting a competition for new musical instruments. More information and a link to the original call below.
The second annual Guthman Musical Instrument Competition presented by the Georgia Tech center for Music Technology will award $10,000 to the best novel musical instruments as judged by a panel of experts. There will be a $5,000 grand prize — all participants eligible — given by Sharon Perry Galloway in honor of her husband, Dr. Thomas D. Galloway, Dean of the College of Architecture, 1992-2007.
Any new musical instrument is eligible for the competition. Instruments may generate sound acoustically or electronically, they may exist in physical or virtual manifestations, and they may be played by humans, robots, or computers. They may modify, improve, or extend existing instruments — including the human voice — or they may offer entirely new design paradigms. New instruments which cross over these categories or which defy any such categorization are also welcome.
By
Rhizome on
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: Wojciech Kosma, Wait, 2008 (Courtesy of VVORK)
Join us next week, Friday Oct. 30th at 7pm, for this month's New Silent Series event "Variety Evening at the New Museum." Berlin-based collective VVORK will present a contemporary variety show, composed of daring and experimental translations of original artworks. Variety is inspired by how culture of all kinds--sound, moving image, graphics--cycles easily between states and forms. For this one-night event, local performers will stage works by artists Wojciech Kosma, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas and Claire Fontaine. Containing readings, video, performance, dance and music, Variety will present the acts together in a dramaturgy that can be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. When finished, the evening will be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future. VVORK is a website (vvork.com) and curatorial project by artists Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer and Christoph Priglinger.
This New Silent Series program is made possible by the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, and the Experimental Television Center, New York.
Friday, October 30th @ 7pm
at the New Museum, New York, NY BUY TICKETS HERE
By
Geeta Dayal on
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at
1:00 pm
Image: Cover of Brian Eno's 1974 album "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)"
Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word
itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots –
the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics
was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as
the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the
machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but
at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics
is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a
living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980.
Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena,
with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines,
ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived
inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be
one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its
theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an
array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably
infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for
example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the
studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the
1970s.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the
mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College.
Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas
from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy
Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College,
where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing
presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his
offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at
Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying.
"The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of
those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of
complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years
later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's
teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration
exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” --
and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything
to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study
the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and
his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each
other.
Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply
those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into
observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative
process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to
think in different ways about the process of making music, and these
ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key
ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be
conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece
of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed
using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from
the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a
fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to
specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the
Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of
the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived
inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.”
“To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the
top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going
up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a
“heuristic” to music.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at
1:00 pm
In this video from VernissageTV, San Francisco-based artist Stephanie Syjuco discusses her project for Frieze this year Copystand: an autonomous manufacturing zone, where Syjuco facilitated a workshop producing copies, handmade by artists, of 3D work on sale during the fair by other artists. In the clip, she terms the process "object karaoke" - suggesting that the artists involved contribute their own voice to their duplications. In a way, it seems like a sculpture-based version of Copyshop, B'L'ing or Werkplaats Typografie's copy station at the NY Art Book Fair. Maybe the time has come for someone to bring all of these bootleggers together in a group show?
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at
11:30 am
Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics and the result is a book that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up with the added element of dynamic interactivity.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Apply for the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowships program! Deadlines are around the corner, in early November:
Artists' Fellowships are $7,000 cash awards made to individual originating artists living and working in the state of New York for unrestricted use. Grants are awarded in 16 artistic disciplines, with applications accepted in eight categories each year. Since the awards began in 1985, NYFA has awarded over $22 million to over 3,688 artists. In 2009, NYFA awarded 131 Fellowships to 134 artists, with six of them working in a collaboration.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 19th, 2009 at
12:55 pm
New York art and technology center Eyebeam will host Open Studios this Friday and Saturday for their 2009 Senior Fellows and Summer/Fall residents. From 3-6pm, artists Diana Eng, Ligorano/Reese, Marina Zurkow, Rashaad Newsome, Scott Kildall, Jeff Crouse, Steve Lambert, Ayah Bdeir, and Michael Mandiberg will showcase their current work and research to the public. Eyebeam chose a remarkably strong and diverse group of participants this year - stop by if you can!
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 19th, 2009 at
10:33 am
Minneapolis-based arts organization Northern Lights is now seeking applications for their Art(ists) on the Verge 2 commissions program, which supports Minnesota-based artists working at the intersection of art, technology and digital culture. Those selected will participate in an intensive 9-month fellowship program from January 2010 to September 2010 and will be awarded $5,000. At the end of the fellowship, participants will have the opportunity to exhibit at the Spark Festival from October 5-10, 2010. This year's jury includes Darsie Alexander, Chief Curator, Walker Art Center, Steve Dietz, Artistic Director, Northern Lights, and Kathleen Forde, Curator for Time-Based Arts at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY. The deadline is November 16th, 2009. See the link below for more detailed information and an application.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, October 16th, 2009 at
3:00 pm
Polished ABS plastic, bolts, acoustic equipment (Images courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber)
The new sculpture I'm making is...based on an old picture of a jungle gym that was constructed out of four-inch PVC sewer pipe. I liked the idea that this utopian object was constructed out of plumbing material and maybe it is now the plumber taking on the role of the social-engineer-- this is his meditation on how to create equilibrium and harmony amongst young people! I first constructed a small-scale model out of half inch copper plumbing pipe that followed the design from as much as I could see in the photograph, and then I extrapolated the rest of the design. The preliminary model sort of took on its own life. We polished it up and there was something jewel-like about it and also something crazy about its endless maze of plumbing fittings. I thought about plating the model after it was done too, but I liked the idea that it was totally Home Depot, just copper plumbing pipe and Brasso. The full-sized PVC version will be about nine square feet, and it will have a sound component to it that will generate subtle vibrations and tones that I plan to make with a bass guitar, kind of like chimes trying to summon people. Speakers along with tactile transducers will be housed within it to create an illusion that the tones become louder when you touch the sculpture. I like the idea of a sculpture that tries to turn people's bodies into instruments.
By
John Michael Boling on
Friday, October 16th, 2009 at
10:00 am
printed circuit board, wire, components, LEDs (4.5" x 14.5")
"I found a way to translate bitmap images into the circuit design program I was using, and converted actual and recreated images that I made when I was a toddler and a rebellious youth. The drawings are rendered in tin-plated copper on standard circuit board material, and were produced at a professional circuit board manufacturing shop using the same process as any electronic prototype board. The lines in the images are integrated with very simple circuits that illuminate LEDs and a neon lamp."
By
Jeanne Gerrity on
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
Image: Jill Magid, Prologue, 2009 (Courtesy Jill Magid, Courtesy Yvon Lambert Paris, New York)
"The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation." Written backward and presented through translucent paper, this text can be deciphered on the obverse of a large framed page of the suppressed novel Becoming Tarden in Jill Magid's solo exhibition at the Yvon Lambert Gallery. On another wall hang seven detailed photographs of banal notebooks with brightly colored tabs and scrawled titles, a white pedestal with a glass case contains a stack of prints neatly wrapped in paper, and a monitor plays a fuzzy live feed from a security camera at the Tate Modern. "Objects to Be Handed Over or Destroyed" documents a project that explores the connections between transparency, secrecy, and, ultimately, power.
Image: Installation shots of Jill Magid's "Objects to be Handed Over or Destroyed" at Yvon Lambert New York (Courtesy Jill Magid, Courtesy Yvon Lambert Paris, New York)
In 2005, the Dutch secret service (AIVD) invited Magid to create a work of art for their headquarters with the dual objective of improving the agency's public image as well as fulfilling a Dutch law requiring new buildings to commission art. In response to their offer, Magid posed as an undercover agent and interviewed members of the AIVD with the intention of giving a personal face to the organization without revealing individual identities. The commission resulted in the exhibition "Article 12" in 2008, but the agency refused to allow the public display of seven prints from the letterpress series "18 Spies", and heavily redacted a manuscript for a novel based on her experience.
Image: Jill Magid, Notebook I Personal Data, 2008 (Courtesy Jill Magid, Courtesy Yvon Lambert Paris, New York)
Consistent with her earlier work, Magid's project attempts to personalize, and even lend intimacy to, an institutional system. She begins by entering an organization that is traditionally impenetrable and seemingly omnipotent. Her success in revealing its human side renders the agency unexpectedly vulnerable and asserts the unanticipated power of the artist. In response, the AIVD imposes further restrictions on Magid, creating both a literal and a psychological impasse. She ultimately appeases the secret service by displaying the novel under glass at the Tate Modern and then via closed circuit camera at Yvon Lambert-- a solution that plays with the paradoxical interaction of opacity and visibility, mirroring the constant flip-flop of power between artist and organization. Like French conceptualist Sophie Calle, Magid crosses boundaries to delve into the lives of strangers, but in the end, the project avoids inner reflection, instead commenting on entrenched government systems. Each work in the exhibition exists in an uncertain state of partial transparency, a testimony to the uneasy conflict between pervasive Big Brother organizations and the potential power of the individual.
Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.
By
Caitlin Jones on
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at
12:30 pm
Image: Laurie Anderson, Handphone Table, 1978 (Image courtesy of the artist)
There seems to be an unshakable division of labor between two of our major senses. 'Sight and Sound' and 'Audio and Visual,' are often paired as binary opposites, understood both as semantically and biologically distinct yet totally interdependent. “See This Sound,” an exhibition currently on view at the Lentos Museum in Linz, Austria, delves deeply into this co-dependent relationship. Far from another "art and music" show, the exhibition looks at numerous cultural, metaphysical, biological and neurological explorations of these senses – and how artists have mined them for decades. By highlighting their distinct and convergent streams of influence, “See This Sound” uses sight and sound as a metaphor for similar divisions and dependencies between "visual," "sound" and "media" art.
Well over a hundred works fill the top floor of the Lentos. Typically, and for good reason, this show begins where most discussions around art and music begin -- in the 1920s with the work of filmmakers like Oskar Fischinger, Viking Eggling, Mary Ellen Bute, Hans Richter, Norman McLaren and Len Lye. Often grouped together under poetic monikers like "visual music," or "music for the eye," the themes explored by these artists, such as language, syntax, and sensory experimentation, are seen continuously throughout visual culture. Hans Richter's Rhythmus 21 (1921/24) is a classic early example of the form, and Norman McLaren's 1951 Pen Point Discussion, in which he illustrates his process of drawing directly on a film’s soundtrack, serves as a primer for the genre. Other works such as Len Lye's Colour Box (1933) and Mary Ellen Bute's Rhythm in Light (1934), as well as numerous drawings, paintings and film stills, challenge distinctions between vision and sound, and music and visual art -- providing fertile historical ground for the rest of the show.
By
Nick Hallett on
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at
1:15 pm
Image: Suzanne Fiol in 1997, photo taken by Michelle Handelman
The New York art and music community mourns the loss of one of its fiercest advocates for experimental culture, Suzanne Fiol, founder and director of the ISSUE Project Room, a venue for music, performance, film, and literature currently located at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. She passed away last Monday at age 49 after a year-long battle with lung cancer.
Born and raised in New York, Suzanne studied photography at Antioch College in Ohio and the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning home in 1983 to earn her MFA from Pratt Institute, cultivating a style that superimposed layers of paint over her original photos in an attempt to capture the “ecstatic moment” of her subject material. Her career yoked creative pursuits with the business end of the art world. She worked as a gallerist in SoHo while immersing herself in downtown’s No-Wave-tinged culture, where she met her husband, Joaquin Fiol at the Mudd Club. The birth of their daughter, Sarah in 1991, prompted a sabbatical, but after the dissolution of her marriage at the dawn of the 21st century, Suzanne was back on the scene, working with artists and, once again, engaging passionately with music, becoming active in the community that orbited around avant-jazz club Tonic on the Lower East Side.
In 2003, her involvement with the Issue Management photo agency, whose office space was on East 6th street, yielded the earliest version of ISSUE Project Room, which quickly took off as an important new venue for the presentation of experimental music and multi-disciplinary performance. When the photo agency folded and the landlord raised the rent, Suzanne fully committed herself to finding ISSUE Project Room a more permanent residence in the borough she called home, Brooklyn, relocating to a disused oil silo overlooking the Gowanus canal. The organization began to garner a unique reputation, implementing a signature 16-channel speaker system designed, built and donated by composer Stephan Moore, which reflected the organization’s commitment to nascent forms.
Modeled after traditional Balinese and Javanese gamelan orchestras, the GamelaTron is an amalgamation of traditional instruments with a suite of percussive sound makers. MIDI sequences control 117 robotic striking mechanisms that produce intricately woven and rhythmic sound. Performances follow an arc similar to classic Indonesian gatherings, where stories from great epics, such as the Ramayana, are told and settings given in words that are continued in music.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at
11:10 am
prototype for an infinite array of semi-autonomous percussive devices is a group of small robotic sculptures, each connected to its immediate neighbors via wires, that together form a net of robotic life that spreads across the Garden at the Mattress Factory and over nearby structures. These twenty-five mechanical crickets fill the garden with sound as they listen to their neighbors and act accordingly during Pittsburgh's Robot250 festival. Using Dr. John Conway’s rules for The Game of Life, each robot activates when a preset number of his neighbors is active and deactivates if too few or too many of his neighbors are active.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at
10:00 am
The Basic Plan - On Sunday September 20 at 2pm, MTAA, Mike Koller and anyone else who wants to join us will set out a brightly colored blanket surround by a circle of chairs at McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They will have amplified iPhones on which they have downloaded touchscreen drum and bongo applications. They will have open amp jacks that you can plug into. For the next hour we will attempt to "jam."
As explained by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead "The main objective (of a drum circle) is to share rhythm and get in tune with each other and themselves. To form a group consciousness. To entrain and resonate. By entrainment, I mean that a new voice, a collective voice, emerges from the group as they drum together."
As explained by M.River of MTAA "The main objective of the iPhone Drum Circle is to get a total stranger to do a little dance on our blanket. That and hopefully enjoying the last summer Sunday in the park this year for an hour."
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 12th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Michael Jackson’s iconic music video for “Thriller” stripped entirely of its dancers and music, instead the artist presents an emptied set, accompanied by an ambient soundtrack.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, October 9th, 2009 at
3:00 pm
Tabor Robak's "Heaven" is originally from Internet Archaeology's Guest Galleries. Internet Archaeology discovers and archives graphic artifacts from earlier Internet Culture, and their Guest Galleries features work sourced from some of this material. As described in the mission statement, "[t]he purpose of the Guest Galleries is to create a dialogue between old and new; enforcing the belief that digital artifacts should be preserved and showcased for their cultural, historical and aesthetic value."
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, October 9th, 2009 at
10:30 am
Borna Sammak's debut solo show "Best Buy" took place last night for an exclusive two hour stint in the Soho location of electronics mega-retailer Best Buy. Thirteen of his vibrant and hallucinogenic high-definition "video paintings" were displayed on every single television on the lower level floor, making for an incredible (and gloriously surreal) sight. I snapped a few photos of the installation, below. To read the full backstory behind the show, check this interview with Borna Sammak and curator Thomas McDonell, conducted by artist Kari Altmann.
By
Greg J. Smith on
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: DEVO, Duty Now for the Future - album artwork, 1979
But the whole discourse of noise-as-threat is bankrupt, positively inimical to the remnants of power that still cling to noise. Forget subversion. The point is self-subversion, overthrowing the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the mind's tendency to systematize, sew up experience, place a distance between itself and immediacy... The goal is OBLIVION.1 - Simon Reynolds, "Noise"
Replace the word OBLIVION with DE-EVOLUTION and you have encapsulated the essence of the strangest art-music project that ever emerged from Akron, Ohio. While a quintet of jerky ectomorphs in hazmat suits (seemingly) singing about sadomasochism breaching the Billboard Top 20 in 1980 seemed unlikely, the legacy of DEVO is fraught with such contradiction. Formed in 1973, DEVO began as a polemical performance project, became a major buzz band and then crumbled under the weight of the attention they had cultivated. Outside of influencing a generation of musicians and artists, a surface reading would suggest the band only registered a few blips on the broader pop culture radar—"Whip It", their pioneering music video work and a legendary Saturday Night Live performance—but tracing the dramatic arc of DEVO reveals a fascinating back story. While the group might be most easily read in relation to their 1970s Ohio peers Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys or Chi-Pig, more enduring points of reference may be found in the deadpan, dour and decidedly humorless synthpop of Telex, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. Comparisons notwithstanding, DEVO defied categorization and their creative exploration of emerging technology, hermetic logic and contentious relationship with the mass market make them quite relevant to new media artists—they're just the band you want!
So, in celebration of homebrew science fiction, multimedia r&d and a profound cynicism regarding human nature, the following series of vignettes have been drafted to chart the circuitous mythology of DEVO. A critical listener might dismiss the band as a kitschy counterpoint to Reaganism, or worse yet, a 1980s footnote. However, careful consideration of DEVO's legacy reveals a morbid obsession with the decay of technology and an uncanny aptitude for the graphic dissection of pop culture. In the DEVO universe, there is no distinction between the prison colony and the shopping mall, suburbia is a blighted landscape of genetic defects and "space junk" rains down from the heavens. There is an order to this metamorphosis in the Midwest, attentive listening will reveal the pulse of a prescient rhythm section and a melodic snarl that is simply too odd to neatly file away in the standard punk, post-punk or new wave historical dustbins.
By
Rhizome on
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Driving through Iceland (2009) - dotlassie
Recently, Rhizome partnered with OpenProcessing to launch Tiny Sketch, an open challenge to artists and programmers to create the most compelling creative work possible with the programming language Processing using 200 characters or less. The submission and voting phases are over and the results are in! We are proud to announce that the winning sketch, as determined by Rhizome's membership, is Driving through Iceland by OpenProcessing user dotlassie. We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in Tiny Sketch -- it was a real success and we couldn't have pulled it off without your support. The collection will be on permanent display in two locations; it will exist as a closed archive containing all of the entries that were submitted to the original contest in Rhizome's ArtBase, and as an open collection at OpenProcessing where people can continue to submit sketches that follow the Tiny Sketch rules.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 5th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
While combing through the tables and displays set up by artists, book publishers, periodicals, small press bookstores, non profit arts organizations, collectives and presses who participated in the NY Art Book Fair over the weekend, I could not help but recall this past summer's No Soul For Sale festival. Both events succeeded in fostering a feel good environment, while also serving as an inspiring reminder of the number of independent, DIY initiatives out there.
I managed to take some photos yesterday, below. Even if I had camped out in P.S.1 for the entire fair, I would not have been able to see everything. Perhaps the subheader for this post should be "Incomplete Highlights" or "Some Stuff I Saw." As always, if readers want to share information or link to projects I missed, please do so in the comments section.
Artist Amy Prior playing the record from the book/record set Slumber Party she produced with Lucky Dragons at the JUNCTURE booth. Slumber Party is "a book and music about sleep - from dozing to waking. Made during an economic crisis, 'Slumber Party' imagines the ultimate easy escape; it is really only during sleep that nothing can get bought or sold."
Close up of the Slumber Party book.
Two prints from Brett Ian Balogh's A Noospheric Atlas of the United States on view at the free103point9 booth. The work aims to "map the hertzian space created by the United States' mass media broadcast stations."
By
Peter Merrington on
Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at
12:00 pm
Image: Abandon Normal Devices logo
The debut Abandon Normal Devices (AND) launched in the North West of England, 23rd -27th September 2009. The inaugural festival was centred in the city of Liverpool with satellite events taking place in Manchester. AND, a collaboration between FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, folly in Lancaster and Cornerhouse in Manchester positions itself as a mixture of new cinema, digital culture and media art, showcasing work in partnership with galleries, venues and public spaces around the city. Over five days, the festival featured a broad array of conferences, talks, exhibitions, screenings, performances and online works, with artists and practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds including, The Yes Men, MARIN (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), Blast Theory, DJ Spooky and Michael Connor. FACT acted as the central hub for the festival and hosted the majority of screenings, talks and events; it also celebrated its 20-year anniversary on the opening night.
In line with its snappy title, the festival set out to discard all that is typical, regular or average, seeking to question normality in an array of forms. There was a particular focus on exploring disruption to traditional methods of production and distribution in cinema and media art. Interfering and interrupting the familiar and ordinary were played out in public space, on screen and through performance.
The festival opened with a new performance/lecture by Carolee Schneemann, renowned for her performance work of the 60’s and 70’s that challenged the normalised perceptions of the body, sexuality and gender. In a work which took the format of a lecture, titled Mysteries of the Iconographies, Schneemann went on a journey through the creative products of her life from early childhood drawings, through painting, to performance and video installation. The performance was accompanied by an exhibition of a new multi-screen video installation at Tate Liverpool titled Precarious. The work consists of fragments of visuals and sounds referencing Schneemann’s personal surroundings including an affectionate yellow cockatoo dancing to the Gnarls Barkley song ‘Crazy.’
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: Open Source Embroidery Window Display at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (Photo credit: Travis Meinolf)
The exhibition “Open Source Embroidery” opens tonight at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco and it will be on view until January 24, 2010. The show is part of an ongoing project, initiated by Ele Carpenter in 2005, which examines how both embroidery and code can be used as tools in participatory, open source production and distribution models. “Open Source Embroidery” brings together artists, crafters, and programmers to explore this topic in the form of workshops and exhibitions. I spoke to curator Ele Carpenter further about the evolution and multiple realizations of the Open Source Embroidery project. - Ceci Moss
How did your larger research into socially engaged art and new media art evolve into Open Source Embroidery?
Socially engaged art and new media art practices share the language and concepts of social networks, participation and collaboration but they also have distinct histories and operate within very different social spheres. In the world of media arts people have been excited about the potential of the internet to be used to connect communities of interest for a long time. But new media didn’t invent participation; people who work with social networks on the ground already knew how much time and genuine involvement is needed to facilitate meaningful interaction. New media seems to have pulled ‘participation’ into the culture of ‘cool’ technology. But the most radical impact is the politicized culture of digital media testing the legal and ethical frameworks of production and distribution.
I was looking for a way to make tangible some of these ideas: to make visible older forms of collaborative production such as patchwork, and newer collaborative projects such as open source software. I wanted to try and articulate the different ethical aspects of OS through a material form. I was reading Zeros and Ones (Sadie Plant, 1997) and learning HTML. So my first project was to stitch HTML as a way of showing how easy it is: it’s free, it’s simple and it works. Customising a blog can be easy if you know how. But HTML gives you the tools to create your own space on the net, rather than selecting templates. It is the basic building blocks of the web. Back stitch is the best stitch for text because it keeps an even tension, and you don’t need a template. To my surprise craft networks are huge on the web (ravellry, stitch n bitch etc), and smoking seems to have been replaced by knitting as a socially acceptable activity.
