Shana Moulton and Nick Hallett's epic multimedia one-act opera Whispering Pines 10 will run at the New Museum on Saturday and Sunday, January 8 and 9, 2011. If you missed the performance of this piece at the Kitchen last Spring, now is your second chance to see the show! Read more about Whispering Pines 10 below, and be sure to pick up your tickets early through the New Museum site.

Note: We ran a short essay in Rhizome News by Brian Droitcour on Moulton's series Whispering Pines when the opera debuted, check it out.

Whispering Pines 10 is a one-act opera by artist Shana Moulton in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, and featuring vocalist Daisy Press. It features a live performance by Moulton as her alter ego Cynthia, a hypochondriac agoraphobe prone to colorful hallucinations and absurd fantasies. While Cynthia seeks health and total happiness within her virtual environment—an interactive video set that utilizes real-time multimedia techniques its creators call “live animation”—she usually settles for fad cures and new-age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal.

Whispering Pines is the celebrated video serial created by Moulton in 2002 that has previously spawned nine episodes, along with related performances, videos, and gallery installations. Whispering Pines 10—the latest installment—is an innovative performance hybrid that incorporates elements of traditional opera into contemporary video and performance art. Its premise—a woman alone in her private environment, aided by technology—enables a flexible sensibility wherein popular and experimental forms can mingle. The original music and libretto composed by Hallett takes advantage of the narrative’s dream logic to weave what is essentially a pop music vocabulary into an experimental idiom, enabling a virtuosic exploration of the human voice. As the protagonist does not effectively speak, the sounds ...

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This PDF is to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation to objects and images in Post-Internet culture. More than anything, it poses a survey of contemplations and open questions on contemporary art and culture after the Internet.

“Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog “Post Internet” during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh's definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'-when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'-or when the photo of the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to the idea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001.

Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.

Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism.

New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image ...

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In protest of the Smithsonian's decision to pull David Wojnarowicz's A Fire In My Belly from the "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery after pressure from the Catholic League, Rhizome's sister organization, the New Museum, will screen the work in the lobby until January 23, 2011. Many other museums, galleries and universities around the country (and world!) are following suit. Check HIDESEEK.ORG for a full listing of screenings of A Fire In My Belly organized in response to the controversy.

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Gloria Maximo - Director, Painting
Jonathan Turner - Director, Animation
Shawn Maximo - Architectural Design, Sculpture
Kate Rosko - Musical Director, Piano
Joseph Fraioli - Sound Designer
Megha Barnabas - Movement
Jason Farrer - Movement, Sculpture
Busy Gangnes - Movement
Paul Kopkau - Movement, Sculpture
Heather Kosch - Movement, Sculpture
David Santa Maria - Sculpture
Laura Foxman - Writing
Mary Voorhees - Graphic Design
Black Cracker - Vocal Engineer
Peter Zuspan - Audio Installation
Shannon Funchess - Vocals
Nina Mehta - Recorder
Natalie LeBrecht - Vocals
Mick Barr - Guitar
Abby Portner - Drum Machine
Colin Marston - Guitar
Lev Weinstein - Drums

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Artist Beryl Korot discusses her 1977 video installation Text and Commentary in this brief clip. Korot's solo exhibition "Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010" is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum until January 2nd.

Note: We reblogged another Art21 interview with Korot earlier this year, in which she talks about her involvement with the pioneering 1970s video art publication Radical Software.

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Somewhere between a home-video mixtape and a postmodern travelogue, "oops"—a ten-minute art video composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, seamlessly stitched together via a motif of camera drops—serves both as transportative adventure and metaphorical elucidation of YouTube itself (i.e. endless related videos), exemplifying the Internet's infinite repository of "throwaway" social documentation. From suburbia to subterranea, the radically shuffling environs induce a vertiginous yet aesthetically contextual thread—a transcendent, reincarnating POV; our omnipresent Camera—by which, the nature of the ultra-verité videos, eschewing any filmic grounding, plunges the viewer into a relationship of fleeting immediacy w/ its many videographers: a self-portrait at arms length, the digital blur of an obscuring thumb, a disembodied narrating voice.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

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