Helen Thorington is Founder and Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. She is a sound artist and radio producer whose works have been aired internationally and received numerous prestigious awards. Helen has also created compositions for film and dance, including the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company. She has exhibited, performed, published and lectured world-wide.
"Like artists such as Nancy Rubins, Vik Muniz, and Sarah Sze, Washburn composes her pieces with items from the world of manufacturing, and this choice seems to comment on the profusion and waste of consumer culture. But she says her recycling of refuse is not an ecological act: “A lot of my working process involves skimming off of other industries, but my decision to collect and repurpose materials was not born out of trying to make a statement at all.” She explains that her compulsion to accumulate discarded materials to feed her art is motivated by “greed” rather than notions of conservation. Yet her work continues to resonate with ideas about economy and sustainability."
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
(Image Courtesy of Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery)
In a sun-less room, plants thrive using light emanating from within their own living tissue. Technological and biological merge to create a unique hybrid living system which inverts the fundamental biological relationship between inside and outside. Clusters of Equisetum Hyemale (Common Horsetail) surgically-embedded with LEDs radiate the equivalent of internal sunshine, enabling photosynthesis in darkness. Sunrise and sunset programmatically occur from within each plant, allowing viewers to navigate a field of organisms flourishing off their own internal sun cycle.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at
11:00 am
Junior Return is a set of glass capsules that provide a miniature, computer controlled hydroponic environment; the plants’ roots are submerged in nutrient-infused water, while LED lights supply the illumination required. These pods are tethered by electrical wire to a battery pack that supplies the energy for all of the plan's requirements. A digital timer counts the seconds that remain until a small pump is activated, briefly moving air to the plant and the water that bathes its roots. Then, with little notice, a few bubbles appear in the water, the only resolve of the anticipation.
The system keeps its enclosed plant in a dwarf state by supplying only enough resources to survive but not thrive. I kept a broccoli seedling alive for almost three years using this technique, and wanted to formalize this behavior in a device. The plant in this container could flourish in the most meager of environments, but would also be invisible to us in significance and aesthetic consideration.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Consisting of 17 vibrant hornbeam trees formally planted in a grid pattern, at the heart of this landscape three trees will slowly rotate. In place of the familiar movement of shade according to the rotation of the earth around the sun, here shade migrates at an artificial speed, transforming the familiar patterns of the natural world into artificial creations.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at
3:30 pm
This system provides light and food in the form of hydroponic solution for the plant. The plant reacts to the device by growing. The device in-turn reacts to the plant by producing a rasterized inkjet drawing of the plant every twenty-four hours. After a new drawing is produced the system scrolls the roll of paper approximately four inches so a new drawing can be produced during the next cycle. This system is allowed to run indefinitely and the final outcome is not predetermined.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at
12:45 pm
The Fragmented Orchestra is a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain's neurons. The Fragmented Orchestra connects 24 public sites across the UK to form a tiny networked cortex, which will adapt, evolve and trigger site-specific sounds via FACT in Liverpool.
Each of the sites has a soundbox installed, which will stream human-made and elemental sounds from the site via an artificial neuron to one of 24 speakers in FACT. The sound will only be transmitted when the neuron fires. A firing event will cause fragments of sound to be relayed to the gallery and will also be communicated to the cortex as a whole. The combined sound of the 24 speakers at the gallery will be continuously transmitted back to the sites and to each of the 24 sites.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Friday, July 24th, 2009 at
1:20 pm
Image: Michael Joaquin Grey, Perpetual ZOOZ (Madonna and Child), 2005-2009 (Stills)
In the twenty years that Michael Joaquin Grey has been exhibiting, critics have often employed phrases like “back to basics” and “building blocks” to describe his interest in the conventions dictating the representation of concepts that form the foundation of human knowledge. An exhibition of Grey’s new and old work currently on view at P.S.1 includes a drawing that distills his approach: an outline of an infant playing with two red blocks is the image of a nascent mind grappling with the concept of one plus one. A larger drawing on an adjacent wall reuses the red squares to demonstrate the meaning of prepositions—above, under, behind, etc.—like a diagram in a grammar textbook. Object as preposition (1988-2007), also uses orange circles, a colored form that appears several times in the gallery. The fruit suggested by an orange round is a favorite symbol for Grey (his web site is www.citroid.com). Perhaps it’s because the tautology of the object’s name and the color that describes it produces a conundrum: a schematic picture of an orange is both an abstraction and a concrete representation. The repetition of the orange (or just orange, with no definite article) forces viewers to struggle with the same problem that Grey does: even at the most fundamental level, our descriptions of the world are frustratingly paradoxical and slippery.
Lean, instructional-pamphlet drawings dominate the first of the show’s two galleries; Perpetual ZOOZ (Madonna and Child) (2005-2009), a video projected in the second, darkened room, looks Baroque by comparison. In Grey’s “computational cinema,” The Wizard of Oz plays on both sides of a square that spins against a yellow field. The characters and scenery of the family classic throb in three-dimensional ridges that visualize the rumbling soundtrack, the heartbeats of the artist and his mother. Here Grey dispensed with the anonymity of monochromatic geometry in favor of a popular film, to make his manipulations of the material more vivid. Several other reasons for his use of Oz come to mind. The film’s associations with the comforts of childhood resonate with the tenderness of mother-son heartbeats. The palindrome of “Oz” written forward and backward can be easily recognized when flipped, like a double of the square in the video, and also builds a false etymological link to Grey’s earlier modeling project, Zoob. And the heartbeat’s position as the engine of dramatic action makes the bold hypothesis that human biology is driven by narrative impulse.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: Shane Hope, Copylution, 2009
Shane Hope’s sprawling prints can’t be processed with one or two looks. They are built on thousands of tiny details, rather than around a single focal point, and as the eye travels across the picture field, it sees lines and pieces accumulating in recognizable bodies and then collapsing into chaos, or maybe an order that can’t be discerned by the naked eye. Hope calls them Molecular Modeling prints, or “Mol Mods,” and they are informed by his belief that “the molecule is the brushstroke of the future”—that nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale, will transform industry sometime soon. For now, Hope’s tools are coding languages Python and Perl. Because of the Mol Mods’ size he can only work on one screen-sized swath at a time, and because of their complexity, that is all that can be rendered even on Hope’s homemade desktop, which he proudly calls "faster than any factory-built Mac on the planet."
“Your Mom Is Open Source,” an exhibition of Hope’s work at Winkelman Gallery that opens Friday, features Mol Mods as well as the series “Compile-A-Child,” imagined school assignments by artificial kids (only the latter are reproduced here, because the Mol Mods lose too much when shrunk to bloggable dimensions). Hope’s art is a visual analogy to hard science fiction, a genre where authors base their narratives on projected technologies rather than transposing contemporary dramas to a fantasized, futuristic stage. For viewers poorly versed in hard sci-fi, the conceptual platform of Hope’s work can be opaque; the announcement for “Your Mom Is Open Source” concludes with a mystifying list of keywords, both of his own coinage and borrowed from the fields of his interest. Hope agreed to discuss some of them here.
Image: Shane Hope, mehums are going, 2009
Singularitarianism
In an analogy to the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity, Vernor Vinge defined the Singularity as a theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence, an artificial brain more intelligent and creative than the human mind. Hard sci-fi authors, as well as professional forecasters, realized some two decades ago that nobody could realistically write about anything occurring past this Singularity. Far-flinging extrapolations could be flung no further. Simply put, they realized that we were inching toward inventing the next inventors and couldn't presume to imagine their imaginings. Futurological films and other envisionings became sort of mostly doomed to deploy dystopic dramatic drivel—a.k.a. disasterbation—because it's plainly more possible, however implausible, to picture a future having fallen into decay than having been sustainably built. An exponentially divergent Posthuman technocracy couldn't necessarily be pictured as a trompe-l'œil, for it was as likely that everything would be powderized into fuzzy storms of computational matter as it was that advanced augmentations would invisibly piggy-back upon what looked no different from the current everyday reality.
By
Marisa Olson on
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at
10:00 am
For much of the world, and even for residents of America's other 49 states, California is more of a fantasy than a place. This fantasy stipulates in part that this West Coast territory is comprised mostly of balmy beaches swarming with beach bunnies, palm trees, and pina coladas. There are many flaws in this fantasy, but the idea that California is rich in resources is true. Among those to be celebrated are its artists and, in particular, the large number of brilliant new media practitioners employed by the University of California system. Talk about brain trusts! Curator Christiane Paul has tapped into this vast resource in organizing "Scalable Relations," a series of exhibitions featuring artists who are faculty members of the UC Digital Arts Research Network (DARnet). Ordinarily this kind of members-only context would have a sour ring to it, but the assignment to bring together such a large and diversely talented group of artists actually establishes the onus to make some deeper comment about what they do have in common: new media. There is a kind of challenge in the act of curating or criticizing new media art, which revolves around the question of the extent to which one should foreground technology. For some artists, the medium is, well, the message, while for others it's merely a tool to address the subject of technology. And of course, there's so much middle ground... This show include works that very diversely "illustrate the complexities and shifting contexts of today's information society." But the very fact that our society is an information society points to a scenario in which technology will sometimes be blatantly paramount, while at other times it will be transparent or embedded. Frankly, the very notion of what constitutes "high tech" is shifting so rapidly, that the haute aspiration might best be downplayed in favor of emphasizing the long history of information itself and the roles it has played in our lives and, in turn, our art-making. This seems to be the success of the "Scalable Relations" project, whether looking at the complex networks that establish the social life and labor practices of teensy micro-organisms, as in Beatriz da Costa'sInvisible Earthlings, or making tangible and discernible cartographs of the social networks, behavioral patterns, and technical protocols linked with human email communication, as in Warren Sack'sConversation Map. The first iteration of the show just opened at UC Irvine's BEALL Center for Art and Technology and will be touring to venues at UCLA, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Barbara, but you can follow it online, here. - Marisa Olson
By
John Alderman on
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at
10:30 am
Image: Philip Ross, Junior Return, 2005
It's easy to see Philip Ross as a recent embodiment of an age-old spirit of inquiry, where aesthetics, personal discovery, and scientific knowledge are linked, and all seem to tap into the fertile edges of local industry. In San Francisco that means computing and biotechnology, and Ross's work makes use of both. The transplanted New Yorker has a body of artwork that centers around human interaction with biological materials like fungus, plants, and mollusks. Ross was also curator of the BioTechnique exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and frequently teaches classes and gives lectures, such as one he delivered December 2 to amateur mycologists at the Oakland Museum of California.
His current projects include a long-term effort to grow a large building out of mushrooms, and a new, ongoing salon ("Critter") at the Studio for Urban Projects, a unique cultural center opened in 2008 by Alison Sant and Marina MacDougal. Ross describes the studio as "a collective of collectives," with about five or six contributing programmers, all similarly interested in ecology, education,
technology and other related fields. - John Alderman
John Alderman: Can you tell me about Critter and the new center that is hosting it?
Philip Ross: One of the reasons we're interested in urban ecologies is that -- with the writing that's been on the wall for a long time -- we wonder how to make our cities better and more interesting places, so that you don't have to drive out of the city necessarily to get a nature experience. You might just walk down the corner to the Studio for Urban Projects. They've done things like An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park with walking tours showing how
our nature has been constructed.
Often we demonstrate to people how something is done, in a neighborhood space, as opposed to an institution which might carry with it some prohibitions. At Critter, there are fun crossover events, stuff like music or cooking -- interesting things that you might want to do anyway.
Images: Snapshots from the most recent Critter event, a presentation by Adriane Colburn and Amy Balkin
So it's more hands-on and educational?
Absolutely. We're not interested in doing shows so much, but exploring things that people can do themselves or contribute to. The next event that I'm having, called "Clone Home," is a drop-in plant-cloning afternoon. We'll serve tea and have live
music, and you can bring a plant and we'll have people who will show you how to make cuttings of it. We'll also have people who do more advanced cloning, like orchid growing, and people who can show you how to make genetically engineered plants if you care to. Just basic stuff showing how easy it is to do this, and how if you have a plant you can make all kinds of other things.
Another event is a kimchee contest. There's a huge repository of knowledge in this city around pickling, particularly around kimchee, and there's like 10,000 people whose grandmother makes the best kimchee – it's sort of like chicken soup – so we have an open call to put it to the test with a cash reward. I'm just thrilled to the idea of having a room with 200 open jars of kimchee in it; like a wall of sound, but this will be a wall of smell.
Is this a coming around to something that existed in the past?
I think so, we're at this strange place in history where there's a sense that something is about to be lost that we're not ready to lose yet. But if you can't go to your mother or father or a cousin to learn that, where do you turn? Especially since some of these things don't seem important enough to learn in college.
To me so much of the stuff that is biotech-y is really low tech-y also, or that people don't realize that they're doing all the time. So if your grandmother is making kimchee or you're doing plant cuttings, you're actually doing something that is not dissimilar to what technologists are doing but with slightly fancier tools or surroundings.
By
Marisa Olsonon
Friday, June 6th, 2008 at
11:14 am
The connections between science and technology are always evolving, and their vocabularies continue to merge as networks further permeate our lives. Much has been written about the coincident emergence of the AIDS virus and computer viruses (and the resultant panic surrounding both) and we've subsequently seen communicative transmissions signify the transmission of communicative diseases as much as any form of broadcast. In the 1990s, a group of scientists, technologists, and humanists interested in collaborating and learning from each others' research formed the Spanish group Art-Science-Technology-Society (which they abbreviate ACTS). Among other activities, these scholars organize an annual exhibition entitled "Banquete_Nodos y Redes" and this year's installation will be at the LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries from June 6th-November 3rd. The show includes "thirty digital and interactive art projects which posit a series of critical reflections and participative experiences while also exploring the new shared matrix of the net." The primary interest, here, is in using Santiago Ramón y Cajal's research on neuronal networks to cross-examine Manuel Castells's research on social and telecommunicational networks--and vice-versa. A very diverse range of projects by mostly Spanish artists is suggested as outlining "a path through these neuronal micro-worlds and the global dynamics of contemporary societies." - Marisa Olson
By
Marisa Olsonon
Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at
1:44 pm
By now, many Rhizome readers are familiar with the ordeal endured by Steve Kurtz, a member of the tactical media collective Critical Art Ensemble dubiously charged with "mail fraud" (when bioterrorism allegations didn't stick) following the sudden death of his wife. More details on the case, which resonated in ripples throughout the art world and raised many important questions about free speech rights, can be found on the CAE Defense Fund website. Now CAE and their frequent collaborators, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, are teaming-up in an exhibition at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, in Kurtz's city of residence, Buffalo, NY. The show, entitled "Seized," revolves around the materials taken by the FBI in their occupation and search of Kurtz's home. The negative spaces left behind by these absent books, art works, and other seemingly innocuous objects are filled by the garbage the FBI left behind. The show will also include the works in which CAE was engaged at the time, and which came under Homeland scrutiny. These include Free Range Grain, Molecular Invasion, and GenTerra, all of which explore the systems of scientific research as models for discussing the impact of biotechnology on our food, our bodies, and ironically, our security. The exhibition will be open June 7-July 13 and, like the negative spaces filled by government garbage in the exhibited documentation, the show offers an opportunity to fill the hole punched by this unfortunate series of events with critical conversation. - Marisa Olson
Audio-visual performance duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, better known as LoVid, will be reading people's auras tonight at the Museum of Modern Art in New York-- or at least generating an electronic approximation. For their live work "Video Fingerprints," which premieres in the show, a select group of participants (including a few artists and curators familiar to Rhizome readers) will hold a quarter-inch plug in their bare hands, thereby generating natural electric currents which will be translated into analog video images corresponding to each person's unique body signal. The cords carrying these biofeedback signals have a touch of the handmade as well, crafted with homey cardboard and fabric coverings that mirror the chunky, multicolored video patterns created in their performances. "Video Fingerprints" is the latest in LoVid's growing body of elaborately low-tech projects based around the rough malleability of the electronic signal, updating the image processing practices of first-generation video artists like Stephen Beck and Skip Sweeney with a 21st century taste for noise, overload and disruption. In addition, LoVid will enact "Venus Mapped," a double video projection which Hinkis and Lapidus perform live A/V patching to create one image that follows a prerecorded "visual score" on the other. They'll also give a talk about their work, and screen a number of single-channel recordings produced over the last few years. - Ed Halter
By
Ed Halteron
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at
10:36 am
Bearing a deceptively straightforward name, The Thursday Club at Goldsmiths College, University of London plays host to a wide range of technologist-artists for its recently-announced Summer Season; in upcoming weeks, the Club's guests will explore such diverse topics as narrative interactivity, biofeedback, coded textiles and "strategic walking." On April 17, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer presents works in progress from her ongoing art-melds of knitting and coding, including a knit zoetrope and knitting with the Wii. Writers Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph talk about their "networked book" Flight Paths on April 24; a novel to be based partially on strange-but-true occurrences of immigrant airline stowaways tragically plummeting to earth, Flight Paths is currently crowdsourcing research and ideas in its online forum. May 8th brings two artists who use medical technologies to esthetic ends: Camille Baker, whose MINDTouch combines biofeedback and mobile phones to create live performances, and Marilene Oliver, who creates artworks with MRI and CT scanning data. Future clubbers include E:vent organizers Colm Lally and Verina Gfader, artist/writer Richard Colson, and "live coders" Alex McLean and Dave Griffiths. - Ed Halter
Image Credit: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Detail of Knit Zoetrope (Work in Progress)
By
Marisa Olsonon
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at
10:53 am
Who hasn't had the synaesthetic experience of a scent triggering a memory? Some argue that the sense of smell is among our body's strongest, and yet--"smellivision" aspirations aside--media culture revolves so much more around our eyes and ears. At present, New York's Lower East Side (a piquant sensorium, to be sure) is home to two olfactorily driven projects. At nonprofit art space Cuchifritos through April 26th is a group show entitled, "If There Ever Was," featuring seven "extinct and impossible smells" that have been "re-created" by Koan-Jeff Baysa, Bertrand Duchaufour, Christoph Hornetz, Christophe Laudamiel, Patricia Millns, Steven Pearce, David Pybus, and Geza Schön. Some of these creators call themselves artists while some work as scientists, engineers, or others with a vested interest in "olfactory images." For instance, botanist James Wong created a hyperreal scent equivalent to a bouquet of extinct flowers, calling attention to art's ability to invoke the absent, fantastical, or what cannot otherwise be said or seen. Neighboring nonprofit Participant, Inc is also supporting artists' exploration of the interface between sight and smell with Lisa Kirk and Jelena Behrend's Revolution Pipe Bomb project. The work was initially conceived as a fragrance by Kirk, who then approached Behrend to produce it as a special limited edition in the form of "a precious metal pipe bomb to contain a vile of [a] faintly aggressive fragrance." The perfume's core elements were determined after interviews with war journalists, activists, and others who've been on the frontlines of revolutions. It bears hints of "smoke, gasoline, tear gas, burnt rubber, and decaying flesh." Doesn't that make you wish this website was scratch-and-sniff? In all seriousness, this project explores the important subject of the commodification and marketing of violence and like Wong's imagined bouquet, makes the issue "more real than real" by addressing it in the realm of the senses. If you're in New York, follow your nose downtown. - Marisa Olson
Lisa Kirk and Jelena Behrend, Revolution Pipe Bomb, 2007
By
Marisa Olsonon
Monday, March 31st, 2008 at
12:05 pm
There's a very nepotistic event happening tonight at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (the new venue with a whopper of a name presenting great science-related art), and it looks good! Chris, Birgitta, and Geoff Bjornsson happen to be siblings with some shared interests--go figure, maybe they had similar childhoods--but they are each making distinct "artworks that represent living biological systems." The common thread in the work they'll present at tonight's panel, "Essence: Transfigure," is an interest in "transformation from one state to another," whether that shift happens in a single cell, an entire organism, or a larger ecosystem. The Bjornssons use a variety of media to address and imagine these transfigurations. Birgitta Bjornsson's project, The Space of Disgust employs photography, film, sculpture, installation, and drawing to explore the terrain between the idealized no-place of utopian environments and the reality of the disorder and decay wrought by the very nature of our own biological existence, if not our culture's compulsion to pollute. Real-life scientist Chris Bjornsson'sThe Illuminated Veil, uses "immunohistochemistry and spectral confocal microscopy to highlight specific cells within the brain." The end result is a series of large-scale microscopic images that seek to map and pinpoint the identifying characteristics and relationships between every cell of our brain. If Chris's creative impetus seems to entail an almost impossible feat, his brother Geoff Bjornsson's work is more fantastical. Inspired by a constellation of interests in minimal Japanese animation, science fiction, and the tradition of hand-crafting, his sculpture, Sleeping golem II, is a vessel made with the potential to "enshrine a spirit." The container sleeps until aroused by a spirit, though that spirit will suffer karmic damage by choosing the vessel as its home. Obvious mechanical challenges ensue... Each of the artists seems to be reaching to grasp concepts so difficult as to often elude us. In some cases, science seems a more obvious filter than in others, but it's interesting all around to see a mode of inquiry trump the modes of production, in the spirit of new media. - Marisa Olson
Image credit: Chris Bjornsson, "Triple-labeled vascular casting of rat cerebral cortex," projected 3D confocal microscope image stack (2007)
By
Rhizome on
Friday, March 21st, 2008 at
12:41 pm
Madison Square Park Conservancy described their calendar for this year as "ambitious" in their press release and, judging from the amount of coverage we've allotted their public art program in the Rhizome blog this week, this is certainly so. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, the Montreal-based artist slated to present work in the park this November, gave an informative lecture about his upcoming project Pulse Park (2008) at the Parsons The New School for Design last week. The inspiration for Pulse Park came about during his wife's pregnancy, when the artist listened to the heartbeats of his twins for the first time. "We could hear how different the heartbeats were, and the pattern - the music - that was generated by the pulses was really fascinating," he reminisced. Imagine that rhythmic pattern scaled up one hundred times, and you'll have an idea of the scope of his proposal for the interactive light installation Pulse Park, which is set to transform the oval lawn of Manhattan's Madison Square Park into a complex matrix of throbbing lights in synchronization with the heartbeats of passersby. During his talk, he explained how this complex operation would function. Two hundred aircraft landing lights will surround the oval lawn, pointing toward the center; on the north and south sides of the lawn will be a computer-equipped stand with two cylindrical metal tubes. When a user grabs the tubes, a sensor picks up the heart rate as well as the amplitude and shape of the beat's waveform. The system translates those variables into a unique pulse of light, which appears in the first light to the left. When the next user records his heart rate, the first person's pulse moves one down the line along the perimeter, and so on. After a pulse has traveled all the way down the line, it is extinguished, providing "a little bit of a memento mori," Lozano-Hemmer said in an interview. While the heartbeat holds myriad poetic and romantic connotations, in post-9/11 New York, co-opting biometric technologies gives the piece a certain political significance. "I'm interested in trying to identify what makes us unique, and instead of using it for tracking individuals, converting it into something that is an array - to make it connective, social, and architectural," he explained. - Lisa Delgado
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Proposal for Pulse Park, 2008
A brief round-up of events, small and large, for our readers, this Friday:
First, a little self-promotion, here's your reminder that the next installment of Rhizome's New Silent Series is taking place tonight at the New Museum. Regine Debatty will moderate a panel entitled Media Art in the Age of Transgenics, Cloning and Genomics with artists Caitlin Berrigan, Brandon Ballengee, Kathy High and Adam Zaretsky. (Video documentation of the event will be up on the Rhizome site shortly.)
Second, this weekend, Pixelache 2008 will unfold in Helsinki. Organized by artist and curator Juha Huuskonen, Pixelache is known for bringing together innovators across discipline through provocative presentations and discussions. The focus of this year's edition is Pixelache University with "education in the cross-roads of science, technology, art and culture" explored across the four days of the festival. Following are a few highlights. For those who will be nowhere near Helsinki this weekend, some of the events will be streamed.
Friday, March 14th (5:30-8 pm)
N.I.P. - New Interfaces in Performance is a touring presentation, network and workshop series, currently featuring artists from UK, Netherlands and Portugal. This artist lead initiative is exploring gesture and movement based interfaces within live performance and interactive, mixed media installation. Teresa Dillon (UK) will give a presentation about N.I.P. in Kiasma seminar, followed by N.I.P performances in Kiasma Theatre:
-Burning the Sound by Rudolfo Quintas & Andre Goncalves (PT)
-Resonant Objects by Andre Gon�alves (PT)
-Air Stick by Ivan Franco (PT)
-BOP by Teresa Dillon & Kathy Hinde (UK)
Saturday, March 15th (time tba)
Traveling without moving seminar is exploring various means to cut down the amount of international air travel, featuring John Thackara (UK), Andreas Zachariah / Carbon Hero project (UK), Matt Jones / Dopplr (remote participation) and Daniel Peltz (US, remote participation). The three sessions in Kiasma Seminar room, Re-mixed reality seminar, Open hardware seminar and Pixelache Open Forum, are mostly targeted for students and professionals of digital media and media art.
- TokTek / Tom Verbruggen (NL)
And, finally, mark your calendars for the second coming of 01SJ, the massive biennial of digital art that will take place in San Jose June 4-8, 2008. More information is on the 01sj website.
For more a thorough and daily updated events listings, see the Rhizome Calendar.
