Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
Suited for Subversion is a project to create a suit that protects the wearer at large-scale street protests. The suit also monitors the wearer's pulse and projects an amplified heartbeat out of a speaker in the chest of the suit.
I designed and fabricated the first prototype of the suit as part of my Masters Degree in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. The project draws on my work as an activist involved in street demonstrations in New York, and is influenced by the work of other activists and demonstrators who wear protective clothing and make creative use of tools and technologies for protest.
Of particular influence are the 'white' or ‘white overall’ tactics of the Ya Basta, WOMBLES, or the Tutti bianche, who wear white protective-wear to protests. Like the Pret a revolter clothing line produced by my friends Las Agencias, and pictured below, centre, my suit fuses white tactics with more playful, carnivalesque, or 'pink' tactics. As much as my suit is armour, it is also disarming; as much provocation as protection.
F.A.T. Labs have declared this week "Graffiti Markup Language Week" on their blog - and each day they've posted GML-related updates. What exactly is Graffiti Markup Language? It's an XML file type developed by F.A.T. Labs that stores the motion data created by tagging -- allowing graffiti writers to share, study, and catalog their tags. Check the below for a brief overview:
What has GML week brought us so far? Over the past few days, F.A.T. Labs introduced:
► An iPhone version of Graffiti Analysis DustTag v1.0 - this handy App allows users to trace their tags and add them to the GML database http://000000book.com/ using an iPhone.
► Graffiti Analysis 2.0 - the new and improved Graffiti Analysis includes the aforementioned iPhone App DustTag v1.0, along with updates to the tracking, playback, controls and graphics, as well as previously unreleased source code and downloads to Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the playback and capture applications.
► FatTag Deluxe - the Katsu Edition - an updated version of the Fat Tag App made in collaboration with graffiti legend Katsu.
.jpeg)
TextBild MMIX curated by Agnes Altziebler, Werner Fenz, Evelyn Kraus & Birgit Kulterer.
Text plays a special role in the complex make-up of the public space - even if it is often barely perceptible in all the densely packed visual overlaps. The “TextBild MMIX” project liberates it from different contexts, isolating it and thus helping it achieve its own effect: A sentence appears in the form of neon writing on a single day in a single place in Styria - then the van, vehicle of this unfamiliar, foreign text, which is a synonym for strangeness as a social source of irritation, vanishes again. In this way, Styrian artists and writers inscribe their own specific texts into the various places, thus seeking to achieve a radical concentration. The subject is strictly the present: MMIX are the Roman numerals for the year 2009.
Never mind that the decade really ends in a little over a year, it's time to take stock of it. Today's post looks back at the decade just past while tomorrow's will look at the decade to come.
As I observed before, this decade is marked by atemporality. The greatest symptom of this is our inability to name the decade and, although commentators have tried to dub it the naughties, the aughts, and the 00s (is that pronounced the ooze?), the decade remains, as Paul Krugman suggests, a Big Zero, and we are unable to periodize it. This is not just a matter of linguistic discomfort, its a reflection of the atemporality of network culture. Jean Baudrillard is proved right. History, it seems, came to an end with the millennium, which was a countdown not only to the end of a millennium but also to the end of meaning itself. Perhaps, the Daily Miltonian suggested, we didn't have a name for the decade because it was so bad.
-- EXCERPT FROM "A DECADE IN RETROSPECT" BY KAZYS VARNELIS
It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.
In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear ...
This essay was originally commissioned by Hordaland Kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre) in Bergen, Norway, to coincide with HC Gilje's solo exhibition blink. Thank you to Mitchell Whitelaw, HC Gilje and Hordaland Kunstsenter for allowing us to republish it to Rhizome News.
HC Gilje's work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an "extended now". This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.
Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., a small, not-for-profit experimental arts organization whose current projects include Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) and Upgrade! Boston. She is also an artist, writer, curator, and Adjunct Faculty at Emerson College.
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.
► "Natural Fuse" by Haque Design + Research
► "Tantalum Memorial" by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji on Network Research
► "Video Vortex" Institute for Network Cultures
► V_2 Test_Lab: Intimate Interfaces
► fibreculture #14: Web 2.0: Before, during and after the event
► Public Sphere_s by Steve Dietz on Medien Kunst Netz
► "Primal Source" by Usman Haque on Interactive Architecture.org
► "Ergenekon.tc" by Burak Arikan
The project Inversion will transform two Art League houses on the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Willard Street. The Art League offered Havel and Ruck the old studio buildings before they are demolished this spring making way for a new Art League building.
This intervention consists of a tunnel build through the gallery space that transformed the non-public space of the gallery into a public space. By removing one of the windows at the front and a garage door at the back we allowed twenty-four hour access through the tunnel. The design of the tunnel was strongly related to the space’s architecture- which is why there was a long narrow section, a very narrow corner, and a wide section. There were still areas which were not accessible-one of these was visible through a window at the front of the gallery and another, which was only accessible for the audience, could be accessed through the front door. In the gallery’s office, where the owner usually received visitors, there was no control over the space via the tunnel. In the three weeks that the tunnel was public it was decorated with graffiti-the public used the tunnel to a far greater extent than we had anticipated.
Video projection in which motorist and passer-by go through a special experience. I mounted a videocamera on the rotating part of a cement mixer truck and drove it back and forth through the Y-tunnel in Amsterdam endlessly. The result is a totally disorienting projection causing the motorist to never be able to drive and look through Y-tunnel again as he used to. This video was projected on a large screen on the Mediamatic building located next to the Y-tunnel.
Edwin VanGorder