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 PRESS RELEASE FOR THE "LYRICS" EXHIBITION AT PALAIS DE TOKYO

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Image: Work by 2008 Location One Virtual Residents Andy Deck, Susanne Berkenheger, and Hidenori Watanave

Downtown New York art non-profit Location One are seeking submissions for their Virtual Residency Project. The program is in its second year, and is one of the few residencies of its type out there. Deadline is April 15, 2009. More info below:

Location One presents its second Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise. The goal of this residency is to find two participants who are not physically proximate but who are willing to work with someone they've most likely never met before using some form of non-F2F (face to face) interface such as webcams, email, chat, video, blogs, telerobotic prostheses, Second Life, MIDI, skype, social networks, walkie-talkie, snail mail, mental telepathy, radio, networked video gaming, POTS (plain old telephone service), tin cans on string, or any other means of collaboration to develop a project that will be presented at Location One in the Fall of 2009, either on our web space or in our exhibition space. The theme of this project is "Levels of Undo".

The two participants will also use a blog set up expressly for the Virtual Residency Project to discuss ideas, possible projects and to track the progress of the work. The conversation will be public and open for public comments and will be considered an intrinsic part of the Virtual Residency.

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Light composition currently on view at ZKM Karlsruhe. Description below from ZKM's site:

With HYPERION_Fragment, and in addition to HELIOS (to be seen at the ZKM_Cube) another of rosalie's works is to be presented at the ZKM. The work was created as a collaborative project between the Stuttgart artist and the composer, Georg Friedrich Hass, on the occasion of the Donaueschingen Music Festival, in 2006. With its presentation at the ZKM_Foyer, it has now attained a new dimension but, at the same time, a new level of meaning as a unique example of light sculpture. 3.150 computer-guided lighting units display a continual river of light between the most diverse color nuances.

In dialogue with "Light Music for a Large Orchestra" by Georg Friedrich Haas, this river of light represents the visual counterpart to the continual sound tapes of Haas' composition. At the ZKM, however, the music will no longer be sounding. HYPERION_Fragment has far more become an autonomous work of art - almost as if light itself has been composed once again. At the Foyer, the light installation, with a scale of c. 9.25 x 27 m, is given new, monumental arrangement.

Via Mediaarchitecture

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In Street With A View, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley take a fresh approach to the age-old practice of street theater. Working in tandem with the Google Street View team and the surrounding community of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, they staged a number of playfully silly scenes, ranging from the laboratory of a mad scientist to a seventeenth century sword fight, which now appear in Google Street View. These acts introduce a vibrancy normally omitted from the utilitarian Google Street View feature, while also opening up the possibility of collaboration between artists and the company.

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An exhibition at Philadelphia's Basekamp, entitled "What's Mine Is Yours" speculates loosely about the origin of the eponymous phrase, asking if it a Jewish proverb or a socialist ideal, while also working to answer the bigger question of why on earth artists would want to collaborate -- with each other or their audiences. While the art market encourages single authors, hierarchy, and conceptual or physical territorialism, in "What's Mine Is Yours" curator Sara Reisman has encouraged artists to share their feelings about.... sharing. The results are intriguingly as politically charged as they are mystical. Take, for example, Star Systems, a video work in which Bjorn Kjelltoft and Shana Moulton merged their identities. While Rey Akdogan's list of the pros and cons of collaborating could be read as a manifesto, tongue-in-cheek, or fair warning, the Mercury Twins' nebulous Cloud City invites the public to cluster like instant cloud formations. The show opens today and also includes radio-performance work by Kabir Carter and a real-time public networking project by vydavy sindikat. - Marisa Olson

Image: Bjorn Kjelltoft and Shana Moulton, Broken Meatballs with Infinity, 2007 (Video Still)

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One of the hallmarks of the current era of net art is the exhibitory display of one's consumption. While a lot of early net art was self-reflexively directed at the traits of networked environments, newer work seems to be largely about running around and exploring those environments, then generating responses. The output of the pseudonymous artists behind Triptych.tv (Jimpunk, Abe Linkoln, and Mr. Tamale) forms a bridge between these two eras. It incubated in the hour of the first boom's waning and waxed ahead of the current surf blog curve. As a result, Triptych.tv (which, readers are forewarned, could very much hijack its predecessor Screenfull.net's motto, "We Crash Your Browser With Content") marries the best qualities of these two eras. The site simultaneously evades initial detection as a blog while exploiting (in the true hacker sense of the word) all of the default structural conditions that make blogs such a performative space. The artists post heavily and skillfully manipulated videos, sound clips, images, and animations, to the order of optical poptitude; and while their individual posts stand on their own, the degree to which they harmonize with each other could finally--after so many decades--stand to illustrate the truly exquisite nature of the exquisite corpse. This is net art decadence at its richest. Now if the site sounds familiar to you, we'll admit to having covered it before, but the group's current summer marathon inspired us to remind you of its presence. This, afterall, is another trait of current net art blogs. There are no one-hit-wonders, and despite the ".tv" in the site's URL, there are no reruns here. To truly take in this collaborative artwork's beauty, one needs to resign themselves to the compulsion to repeat. - Marisa Olson

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Cat Mazza is a practitioner of what sociologist Betsy Greer has called "craftivism." She's used knitting and other needlecraft-related processes to address pertinent political issues. Her projects are particularly adept at effecting a tactical turning of the tables on issues; for instance, using hand-made (though often computer- or software-assisted) processes to address labor conditions. Her latest project is similarly successful at fighting fire with fire (or should we say "fiber"?), parodying a US government program--even using its own explicit instructions--to critique the ideas behind it. Stitch for Senate is a contemporary take on the historic practice of charitable knitting. During WWII, women and children supported the war effort by knitting clothing and protective gear for soldiers abroad. Following the US invasion of Iraq, Americans were encouraged to make similar efforts for soldiers stationed in Iraq and Aghanistan. However, as Mazza points out in a video on her site, this war is not as popular as WWII, consequently neither is the knitting initiative. On the fourth anniversary of the invasion, in order to spur more thought and dialogue about the war, Mazza launched Stitch for Senate which encourages users to download patterns and knit helmet liners not for combat troops but for every member of the US Senate (the legislative body that votes to declare war), giving them the responsibility of distributing the fuzzy armaments. Meanwhile, the website is a space for documentation of these efforts as well as posts by users about war-related discussions and acts of charity, patriotism, and activism within radius of their own local knitting circles. A few helmet liners won't unravel the war, but as with craft groups before them, projects like these do provide a safe platform for approaching (or stabbing a needle into) bigger issues. - Marisa Olson

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The relationship between sound and image has long entertained comparative theorists and geeks in both literary and music circles. Of course, this relationship keeps evolving with new technologies, and couplings between audio and the visual continue to grow, particularly in the context of live performances. But how do these two dyads manifest themselves in still forms? This is the question raised by "Frozen," an exhibition organized by Norwegian artist and curator Marius Watz, who has led the field of generative art with his own work, his Generator.x blog, and events focused on the work of others. The show is up through July 26th at Amsterdam's Melkweg Mediaroom, Paradiso, in conjunction with the 5 days off MEDIA festival. Everything included in it is the result of an assignment, which seems in keeping with an exhibition that responds to generative practices and computer-programmed processes. Artists Andreas Nicolas Fischer & Benjamin Maus; Leander Herzo; Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan; and Marius Watz have created digital prints and "audio sculptures" that respond to audioworks by Freiband and Alexander Rishaug. The artists have used techniques such as rapid prototyping, CNC, and laser cutting to make objects that map and visualize sound, in "frozen" form. Of course, these works may purport to stop time--existing almost like a single frame in a film strip--but they are utterly-time based, with the concept of frozen motion entirely scripted by the concept of time, and a processing of the structural qualities (timbre, tempo, rhythm, etc) of sounds informing the logic and form of the ultimate objects. A nice Flickr set documents the results which demonstrate both the diversity of ways in which sound can be interpreted and the fact that beauty still lies in the ear of the beholder. - Marisa Olson

Image: Marius Watz, Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto), 2008 ...

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Cover yourself in post-it notes and become a digital puppet. Sit under the soothing sounds of wii wind chimes. Watch yourself travel back in time on video. Interact with a hotter, fitter 3D version of yourself. These are the prompts offered by the artists in "Double Take," an exhibition opening this weekend at Eyebeam with a promise to "challenge viewers to reconsider what we take for granted as reality in our technologically-mediated lives." A total of nine projects will be presented in the show which results from the Interactivos workshop organized by Madrid-based Medialab-Prado and hosted in New York by Eyebeam. All of the works were created collaboratively by an international group of artists, hackers, and tinkerers brought together under the premise of exploring "the blurry line between the real and the fake." But the interactive prototypes need your participation to bring them alive, so check out these "technologically-enabled illusions" between July 12-August 9. - Marisa Olson

Image: Tine Papendick, Digital Puppetry

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Artists are often credited with inventing new languages, but of course the building blocks of these code hacks, if you will, are the letters of the alphabet. A new online exhibition entitled "Abecedarium:NYC" takes the Modern English alphabet as its starting point. Curated by Susan Agliata and Lynne Sachs and appropriately hosted by the New York Public Library, that longstanding database of the alphanumeric, the show invited artists to imagine readings of the city of New York and its boroughs, based on their interpretation of a word beginning with their assigned letter. The twenty-six final pieces construct overlapping narratives about the city and its denizens, as portrayed in interactive maps, videos, and audio works. Each entry takes a different approach as to the genre of story told, ranging from noirish mysteries to nonfiction historiographies to humorous character studies. Start with your favorite letter and see if you're able to resist the other twenty-five. - Marisa Olson

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