In one of the largest halls of the Architecture Biennale’s Arsenale exhibition space, Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects created an artificial 800sqm cloud. A spiraling cantilevered ramp allows the visitors of the installation to experience the ethereal cloudscape from below, within, and above.

The cloud is created through climate engineering. Creating the cloud is based on a stabile temperature and humidity stratification in the space in 3 layers: below the cloud 18 - 24°C, 60\% humidity, in the cloud 26 - 32°C at 100\% humidity and above the cloud with 32 - 38°C at around 50\%.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM VERNISSAGETV

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The first physical art work that you encounter when entering “Trust: Media City Seoul,” the sixth edition of Korea’s international media arts biennial, is Willem de Rooij’s Bouquet VII, a collaboration with local florist Kim Da Ra. A large-scale spherical gathering of blossoms in various hues of pink stands on a pedestal, resembling a centerpiece at an upscale wedding or a museum benefit party. The floral arrangement seamlessly integrates natural and synthetic flowers, blurring the boundary between the real and the artificial. Innocuous and timeless, this work sets the tone for this year’s Media City, an exhibition that eschews the embrace of new technologies in visual art in favor of a return to more traditional media and a broader definition of the term “media” itself. Bouquet VII also subtly introduces a method utilized by many of the artists in the exhibition: the conflation of fiction and reality.

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Dream Sequence is a two-channel video installation in which a series of dream images from Jenn and Kevin respectively are seen rotating over our sleeping heads.

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I'm in the Bay Area this week, and I stopped by Important Projects in the Rockridge area of Oakland. Started by SAIC grads and recent Chicago transplants Jason Benson, Sean Buckelew and Joel Dean, Important Projects is run out of the top floor of their house. It reminded me of some of New York's pocket-sized exhibition spaces I've discussed here on Rhizome, like Art Since the Summer of '69. All the exhibits at Important Projects last for four weeks, and so far, they've organized seven shows in total.

They are currently showing Michelle Ceja's M O M E N T U M until September 10th. A fully immersive installation accompanied by a continually building ambient sound loop, the work seemed to deliberately intensify one's sense of claustrophobia and confusion. In that sense, it felt like an enclosed physical version of Ceja's project Silicon Velocity for Jstchillin, while the use of black paint, lights and mirrors recalled Banks Violette's sculptures, but on a smaller scale. I took some shots of the show, see below.

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Montreal's art and science organization the Daniel Langlois Foundation announced a new collection of online materials for Canadian artist David Rokeby's work Very Nervous System (1983-), an interactive sound installation that reacts to the movement of visitors. The work has developed over the years, and has exhibited in many contexts. This particular collection of documentation is interesting because they bring in the audience's response to the work, through a series of interviews. You can read more about the project and their approach in the excerpt below from the "Introduction to the Collection" by Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller.

This is the second documentary collection that we have created for artworks by David Rokeby. In 2007 we produced a collection for the artwork Giver of Names (1991-), through which we developed a documentary approach to media art that captures the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience or, as we have described it, “between real and ideal” (1). The aim of this strategy is to acknowledge the fundamental importance of audience experience to the existence of media artworks and to create a place for the audience within the documentary record.

We believe this approach offers a productive way to reconcile how media artworks exist in the world and how they are represented in an archival context. In recent publications, we have begun to refer to the product of this approach as an “Indeterminate Archive”: a collection of materials that provides multiple perspectives of the work, as well as multiple layers of information, held together with—but not secondary to—the idea of the artist's intent (2). This indeterminate archive, we have argued, captures the mutability and contingency of the artwork’s existence, creating a more, not less ...

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This Is My Life (Shirley Bassey) by Conrad Ventur was one of my favorite pieces in PS1's "Greater New York," so I was delighted to come across this short interview with the artist on MoMA/PS1's INSIDE/OUT blog. Burrowed away in a small room in PS1's basement, the work involves a number of projectors looping performances by singer Shirley Bassey sourced from YouTube. Slowly rotating crystals hang over the lens of the projectors, refracting the images and illuminating the room in a soft, hazey light. Ventur discusses his interest in connecting to the past through repurposing old performance footage and the affective quality of his installations.

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Chris Salter's Entangled is a massive undertaking and a book long overdue. In this ambitious project, Salter sets out to provide a historical overview of the intersections between technology and artistic performance in order to demonstrate the profound entanglement in the historical trajectories of both sets of practices and developments. Entangled seeks to address how technological developments have altered our making and perception of artistic performance and the socio-political, cultural and economic contexts of such developments (p. xiii). Furthermore, Salter understands the histories of new media arts, theater, and other stage-based artforms as divided in a tension between the technophilic and technophobic, and his investigation is an attempt to fill this gap.

Peter Sellars describes, in his Foreword to the book, Salter's approach as radically inclusive. Indeed, Salter sets out to frame an impressively diverse range of practices as performance. Those practices include, but are not limited to, theatre, opera, scenography, architecture, video art, installations, environments, sonic arts, robotics, media arts, live and body art, expressions of popular culture such as music gigs, and more. Entangled consists of eight chapters, each focusing on a different form. This distinction is not designed to separate disciplinary trajectories though; instead, it challenges disciplinary boundaries through its fluid narrative that consistently foregrounds intersections, crossovers and common histories.

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