In the last year my practice has grown out of the studio in the form of large-scale rooftop paintings for Google Earth. This project uses materials from the waste stream (discarded house paint) to mark a physical presence in digital space.

My work is generally concerned with human perception of current conditions; the Paintings for Satellites are specifically concerned with the effects of the digital on our physical bodies.

All my work begins a series of rules derived from existing conditions. For example, the color palette for the rooftop paintings is made from the discarded paint available on a given day; the physical surface of the roof determines the shape of the painting.

As this project proliferates, it will take two forms - a community model, using local volunteers and paint from the waste stream and a design/build model, using solar-reflective paint, solar panels and green roofing contractors.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION

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Today we'll be turning the blog over to the many people involved with #hi11, a New Year's Eve happening produced by Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. For the event, the organizers took over three floors of a house in Los Angeles, transforming it into an interactive, multimedia environment. (The full list of names of everyone behind #hi11 is available here on the 2240hill site.) The house was equipped with video capture throughout, which allowed live video feeds between the rooms and a broadcast online. One of the rooms was covered over entirely in green screen fabric, so video captured therein could be augmented. Inspired by the organizational design of IKEA, the rooms in the house were assigned a letter and a number, for example, B2, C4, etc. The rooms themselves operated much like sets, and in many cases, IKEA furniture was used, mostly beds and couches for lounging. The house was illuminated by black lights, red lights, projections (some of the dump.fm chat room), and videos from the other rooms, giving the space an overwhelming feeling akin to Trecartin's delirious videos. An impressive amount of work went into #hi11. To name a few of my personal favorite details: the chandelier constructed out of Brita water filters, the herbal sexual enhancement pills freely distributed at the bar, the professional Diva wearing a headset connected to the PA on the dance floor, who would break out into song while walking around the party, the one water cooler (out of 4) in DIS Magazine's "refresh_forum" room which contained solely vodka (quite a surprise!), a small room off the dance floor which was intended as a secret Nine Inch Nails sex chamber, where participants could wear headphones (with flashlights attached to the top) blasting the band on repeat while ...

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If our eyes were to be turned into a camera, it would be a rather poor device. More precisely, it would not resemble a single-frame snapshot camera, but a video stream of a mostly blurred visual field with only spots of clarity. Our eyes move rapidly and continuously update the image in the brain, and it has been concluded that the brain, resembling a high-tech processor, cleans up the received input. Paradoxically, one of the functions of photography is to remind us of the impossibility of our eyes to perceive reality as a still image - as the saccadic scanning of our eyes show, there is nothing fixed or stable in nature. Matter is always in flux.

In his artistic practice, Rune Peitersen explores precisely this aspect of the visual apparatus through a research project he started two years ago. This summer, he presented the most recent series of his results in Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, in a show entitled “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein and Bohr.” In a secluded room, one was able to indulge in the three main elements of the show: a short text on Einstein and Bohr, Observing Uncertainty - an enigmatic large photograph of a hallucinatory scene covered with a map of small printed squares, accompanied by Observer Effect - a series of smaller black photographs with dots of visual clarity representing each of the square from the large photograph.

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A site-specific artwork that auto-generates films based upon narrative data collected from Facebook profiles. Using a combination of status updates, YouTube uploads and video portraits, the work looks at people in Barrow-in-Furness from a range of different perspectives, each one a form of surveillance.

The project uses status updates and demographic profiles, from Facebook users who live in Barrow, to automatically generate video narratives. Data from Facebook is combined with related footage from YouTube and selections from a database of video portraits to create one new video each day. The result is a dynamic snapshot of how we fit into the network of stories that we participate in every day. The videos evolve to keep pace with how we change, both individually and collectively.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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The Porte-Parole Mouthpiece is an instrument for strangers, its function is to empower those who are deprived of power.

This object encircles the jaw with a small video monitor and loud speakers placed directly over the wearer’s mouth, showing the lips moving in sync to the prerecorded narrative. It is designed to replace the hesitations and fearful silent of an immigrant’s personal voice with a fully formed version of the immmigrant’s story. It function both as a conduit of ones' voice and image as well as a gag that blocks the mouth and prevents from speaking.

Porte-Parole transforms its user into a virtual subject, literally, a cyborg communicating through a high-tech device rather than your own bodily apparatus for speech. The small size screen drives viewers to come closer to the user face in order to see the image of the moving lips and hear the voice.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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"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.

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.

Consistent with her earlier work, Magid's project attempts to personalize ...

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Two online exhibitions from ongoing curatorial initiatives Why + Wherefore and Club Internet opened within the last week. See below for a quick summary of each, plus a few highlights.

"Sound" Curated by Bozidar Brazda (part of the 7 x 7 series) for Why + Wherefore

For the first installment of 7 x 7, Why + Wherefore (Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist) invited 7 organizations to produce an exhibition composed of 7 items around a theme. Rhizome was one contributor, and staff writer Brian Droitcour put together an exhibition of 7 vertical works that exceeded the browser frame. (Other guests included Sundays, iheartphotograph, Triple Canopy, The Highlights, VVORK, and Humble Arts Foundation.) Continuing with the 7 guests, 7 items format is the second round of 7 x 7, where individual curators were asked to contribute an exhibition. So far, João Ribas, Kate McNamara, Josh Kline and Mark Beasley have chimed in with exhibitions ranging from items made in Photoshop to men modeling the durability of their outerwear in advertisements from 1969. The second (the first was VVORK's) sound-specific theme in the 7 x 7 series went live this week, curated by artist Bozidar Brazda. Simply titled "Sound," the show's logo (above) resembles a CAPTCHA, and the works operate in a similar fashion, being both comprehensible and somewhat obscured. Ryan Foerster's Untitled (2009) assembles roughly 15 separate clips of (what I presume) is the Ramones counting off, "1,2,3,4" before launching into a song. The song is omitted, thus the listener is simply left with the lead up. Rich Alrdich's (The Lights Went Out In) Massachusetts (2009) is an acapella version of the Bee Gees' 1967 song and on first listen, it sounds like a late night, drunken recording of a group of ...

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This essay originated from the anthology DATA browser 04: Creating Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security edited by Wolfgang Sützl and Geoff Cox. The book was published by Autonomedia this year and is licensed under Creative Commons.

Where does security end, and insecurity begin? Systems analysts recognise this as a classic boundary question. Its answer determines the precise deployment of any security system. But as we shall see, this particular boundary question cannot be answered under present conditions, except through the definition of a second system, a specifically interrogatory one. Drawing on the work of an American art critic of the 1960s, I’ll call this second kind of bounded entity an ‘aesthetic system’.

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A small but international group show organized by Mireille Bourgeois and Anais Lellouche, "They Told You So" takes its inspiration from the Situationists’ concept of détournement, reusing existing media to convey an opposing or alternate viewpoint. Here sound installation and video are the primary forms utilized. Purporting to address and ensnare the viewer, and using deliberate miscommunication to examine rhetoric and technologies that are oriented towards control, the works achieve varying degrees of success.

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