A modified black and white hairdryer of the same brand are installed on a grey platform. Directed towards each other they get into a direct relation, blowing with hot air at the opponent. The circuits and the plastic cover heat up until a decision is made: Either, one breaks earlier than the other, leaving a „winner“, both break at the same time or, being equally weak, none breaks, leaving the situation in a vital draw.
A lead ball rests on the "g" key of a laptop, producing the letter "g" within the body of a Word document. Eventually, the document becomes so large that it crashes the computer.
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."
This month I’m traveling through southeastern Europe from Venice to Athens, where I’m looking at art and blogging. Part one of the travelogue is about Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Before the Internet Pavilion, there was the first meeting of nettime at the 1995 Venice Biennale. Vuk Ćosić, one of the core participants, told me about it over lunch in Ljubljana last week. Internet theorists and artists gathered for three days of discussion just upstairs from Club Berlin, a non-stop rave where art stars worked the bar. “I remember Joseph Kosuth handing me a beer,” Ćosić said.
The rave was a recurring theme of the four days I spent in Slovenia, and there seemed to be more to it than the Slavs’ enduring love for techno. My visit happened to coincide with the opening night of Sonica, a sound art festival, and the kickoff featured Andi Studer and Matt Spendlove’s Netaudio Ping Pong, where two players build dance music by taking turns at composing four-bar phrases on mixers installed on two ends of a ping-pong table. Škuc, a gallery that has been showcasing progressive art since 1978, was hosting a “live archive” of Slovenian video art from the 1980s and 1990s, and I spent an hour watching works by Mirko Simic, including distillations of his veejay acts at parties fifteen years ago. On Wednesday night, Luka Prinčič performed at a small theater in a university’s basement; between the somber, wordy beginning and end, he danced himself into a sweat wearing silver tights and sparkling tank top. The next night, after a presentation at Kiberpipa where he demonstrated his Puredata modification that introduces elements of probability to the dance tracks he writes to accompany his ...
Using the public/commercial space of the online trading community Ebay in conjunction with his online catalogue Allmylifeforsale.com, John Freyer catalogued and sold nearly everything that he owned, from his kitchen cutlery to his personal hygiene products, his Star Wars sheets and finally even the domain name Allmylifeforsale.com itself.
Edwin VanGorder