Video assembled by Bruce Conner
No Static - Bottin (2009)
Music video, edited by Iris Lateral, using all appropriated footage from Lucio Fulci's Warriors of the Year 2072.
Dispatches from No Soul For Sale
No Soul For Sale closed yesterday, ending a mad week of performances, exhibitions, lectures, and more. See below for the last of our mini-reports from the festival.
Light Industry
Light Industry put together a packed program this past week, and I would expect no less from this smart and savvy Brooklyn-based cinematheque.
Latitudes
Latitudes, a curatorial office in Barcelona run by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa, reconstructed the interior of a Burger King restaurant in their space. The plastic booths ended up as an impromptu rest area for visitors, who could sit and chat or read through the publications and posters documenting Latitudes previous projects.
K48
K48 is a fun and chaotic local fanzine that has showcased many emerging artists and musicians over the past few years. For their project, they built the below inflatable room out of stitched together trash bags. Once inside, there was a sound installation and strobe light.
Participant, Inc.
Lower East Side non-profit arts space Participant, Inc. showed two films by Luther Price on television monitors in their space.
Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado
This Lisbon-based curatorial team put together the group exhibition, "If you don't know what the South is it's simply because you are from the North", named after the piece below by Runo Lagomarsino. The show proposed to "respond, comment, and speculate on globalization, displacement and identity on the current international art scene ...
On Tour
This month I’m traveling through southeastern Europe from Venice to Athens, where I’m looking at art and blogging. Part two of the travelogue is about Zagreb, Croatia. Part one is here.
Zagreb’s center has more street names than streets; the names change every few blocks so meters can be allotted to every worthy Croatian hero. And many names differ from the ones streets bore twenty years ago, since a different history needed to be inscribed in Zagreb’s map after Yugoslavia dissolved and Croatia became independent. “The Renaming Machine,” an exhibition currently on view at Zagreb’s Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, addresses the obsession with names. Sanja Ivekovic’s contribution is inspired by Zagreb’s Street of the Unknown Heroine—a name that is both unsettling and appropriate when virtually all other streets are named for men—which takes the form of a poster with maps, e-mails, and other supporting documents describing the artist’s attempt to give the same name to a street in Utrecht during her retrospective at Van Abbemuseum.
Just as street names reflect political values, so do the uses of buildings on them. After arriving in Zagreb and settling in the Angelina Jolie room at The Movie Hotel, I met with Tomislav Medak, director of Mama, an organization that was founded in 1999 as a center for internet activists and artists, but in recent years has shifted its attention to urban development, specifically the use of former industrial sites that abound in Zagreb (as they do in many other large, formerly socialist cities). Mama lobbies the municipal government to reserve abandoned factories for public use—whether cultural activities or low-cost housing—rather than handing them to private investors ...
Ancient Pixels (2009) - Jose A. Olivares
Ancient Pixels ITP Spring Show 2009 from Jose Olivares on Vimeo.
Ancient Pixels is my current work in progress where lo-resolution video game graphics, Andean textile art and psychedelic poster art are merged produce the visual aesthetic and the grammar blocks (via Andean symbol interpretation) of a multi-channel interactive video installation depicting scenes of an imaginary Inca temple. The installation is made up of several components such as "animated rugs", immersive video walls and sculptural pieces.
A Whole New World? On the 53rd Venice Biennale
“Making Worlds”, the theme for this year’s 53rd International Art Exhibition curated by Daniel Birnbaum, argues that art should be seen as a form of “world making” and taken seriously as such. His accompanying essay in the catalog holds a distinctively transcendent ring to it, one that calls out for a universal solidarity through art, in stating, “Perhaps art can be one way out of a world ruled by leveling impulses and dull sameness. Can each artwork be a principle of hope and an intriguing plan for escape? Behind the immediate surface we are many - together and individually, through the multiplicity of imaginative worlds we hold within.” Given the very real worlds of national and political ambitions on the table in the Biennale’s pavilions, not to mention the surreal economic and class component to these sorts of events, Birnbaum’s curatorial statement, which suggests that art is autonomous from these factors, seemed like floral hyperbole in comparison. Why would the U.S. Pavilion be the only country to extend their Bruce Nauman exhibition to three locations across the city? And why would the United Arab Emirates Pavilion feature numerous models of large-scale cultural projects proposed for Abu Dhabi? The world’s fair mentality is here for the long run, that is to be sure. The strongest projects I viewed, in both the main exhibition and the pavilions, were able to eek out a space, certainly not a “world”, with a degree of critical distance and integrity away from the Biennale circus.
Venice is one of the few cities in the world to completely rely on boats for delivery, transportation, garbage disposal, and every other municipal need you can think of. The upkeep of the city is expensive due ...
Call for Submissions:
IEEE VISAP'15 / Data Improvisations / Call for Papers and Artworks
Posted by Angus Forbes
Edwin VanGorder