By Ed Halter on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 3:40 pm.
U.S. Pavilion Montreal Expo 67, Buckminster Fuller, 1967 (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)
In the late 1960s, when the merger of art and technology became a touchstone for both countercultural mind-liberation and New Frontier futurism, Buckminster Fuller served as a central, if gnomic, philosopher of the moment. The first issue of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 features a semi-mystical autobiographical fragment by Fuller and his poem-cum-manifesto "God is a Verb"; Gene Youngblood's seminal 1970 study Expanded Cinema includes a lengthy introduction by Fuller, in which he praises the "forward, omni-humanity educating function of man's total communication system"; and the premier issue of early video art's central journal Radical Software published a "pirated transcription" of an interview videotaped by the Raindance Corporation. "We hear people talk about technology as something very threatening," Fuller says in the stream-of-language transcript, "but we are technology, the universe is technology...it's simply a matter of understanding these things." Fuller's own book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth became an underground best-seller after its publication in 1969. Multimedia collectives like USCO and Ant Farm cited "Bucky" as inspiration; members of the latter group even went so far as to abduct Fuller when he came to speak at the University of Houston, picking him up from the airport under false pretense and taking him instead to see a touring MoMA exhibit entitled The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age.
This summer, the Whitney mounted a major exhibit on Fuller's life and work, Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe, on view through September. The show features a variety of Fulleriana, arranged in chronological order, allowing for a roughly biographic experience: sketches, architectural models, concept designs, numerous looped clips from the 1971 documentary The World of Buckminster Fuller, maps and diagrams, original publications, and a 12 foot high cardboard geodesic dome built for the exhibit. Though largely a show about architecture, Starting With the Universe presents Fuller as a revolutionary and visionary thinker who worked, as he put it, "comprehensively," across disciplines, and a forerunner of 21st century environmental design and networked culture.
It took Fuller many decades to achieve the iconic status he enjoyed in the 1960s. The son of a prominent intellectual New England family (his aunt was Margaret Fuller, the Transcendentalist and pioneering woman journalist), Fuller attended Harvard, dropped out twice, then entered the Navy and served during World War I. After the war, following a failed business enterprise, he claimed to have had a quasi-religious experience while on the brink of suicide. "Apparently addressing myself, I said, 'You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe," Fuller wrote years later in the Whole Earth Catalog. "You are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage of others."
On display at the Whitney are a generous sampling of Fuller's ambitious humanity-enhancing projects of the 20s and 30s, none of which advanced beyond prototypes. Included is an original, cartoonish sketch from 1927 of the world, which he called "One Ocean World Town," expressing a core Fullerian notion of global interconnectedness inspired by the rise of intercontinental air flight. This became the setting for a 1929 drawing of skyscraper-like structures he called "Lightful Towers" -- all-in-one multi-family dwellings that could be planted in the ground like trees, and delivered to sites by zeppelin. These evolved into a single-family dwelling dubbed the 4D House, a hexagonal one-floor structure hung from one central pole containing minimal-waste plumbing, electricity and air conditioning; meant to be constructed cheaply, they were also designed to be easily deconstructable and therefore as portable as a large piece of furniture.
A scale model of Fuller's 4D House was presented to the public at a surprising location: the Interior Decorating department of Marshall Field's department store in Chicago, timed to promote a new line of modern furniture. The store's publicity agent renamed the structure the Dymaxion House (a portmanteau of "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion"), a term that Fuller later trademarked and used on a variety of concepts. The Whitney show includes a video clip of outtakes from a 1929 Fox Movietone newsreel of a young Fuller explaining his Dymaxion House model. Shot when the technology of sound movies was still new, Fuller is unusually awkward, evincing none of the smooth charisma that would entrance later generations, speaking stiffly with an old New England uppah-clahss accent. Fiddling with his collapsible scale mock-up, he explains that its odd circus-tent shape "is not an aesthetic choice of my own." Rather, he continues, its shape is due to the fact that "we are living in a spherical universe." For Fuller, the structure's true beauty lay not in its visual form but rather in its denial of conventional ornament and design in favor of structural integrity and efficiency. To follow the deep mathematical patterns of nature, in Fuller's view, was a means to be in sync with the Universe.
Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House and photograph from the Collections of The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI. 1934 Dymaxion "2" 4D Transport courtesy of the National Automobile Museum (the Harrah Collection), Reno, NV.
Jeremy Bailey is a video and performance artist whose work is often confidently self-depricating in offering hilarious parodies of new media vocabularies. In his Video Terraform Dance Party (2008), Bailey plays an enthusiastic nerd channeling Bob Ross as he dons a forehead-mounted VR controller to demonstrate a new modeling software that will allow him to bop his head around and "plan the ideal landscape." As he narrates, his bespectacled eyes rise and fall at the horizon of a CGI world (outlined by vague computer icons and a $100 sign) and his movements trigger topographic changes in the blobby green island growing before him. The piece trades on two themes common in Bailey's work: the infomercial and a kind of ridiculously subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) implosion of metaphors about the use of the body in video-based performance art. The artist translates these well-worn themes into his performance of the anything-goes chaos of dot-com era product demos in SOS (2008), a video that cheerleads a brand new operating system (with a "bold new interface!") of the same name. Designed by Bailey, SOS bids farewell to the world's most popular software platforms and says hello to artist-created masterpieces--inspiring viewers to wonder which is truly "better." In describing the unusual look of the interface, Bailey's deadpan character says, "We're artists, so we thought, let's do it visually." So the "canvas" usurps the "desktop" and "your computer is a painting and your files and folders have been replaced by shapes and colors" which fit into three categories: rectangles show you things, circles analyze things, and triangles edit things. (Clearly this is much more intuitive than Windows!) When Bailey finally manages to get the program to open a file, we see a clip of the artist carrying out what can only be described as a quintessentially clichéd parody of scatalogical performance, after which the circle analyzes the video and tells him that he is pathetic. Bailey's response? Sometimes computers tell us things we don't want to hear...It's a new world and "we've just got to get used to this." In the artist's next project, Your Ad Here, he'll be transmitting messages some people do want to hear...He's turning his body into a billboard and offering advertisers a spot on the scrolling virtual LEDs on his head and plasma gun-shaped arms (of course there's a demo--the caption: "This sh*t is real time ballers, mf'ing real time"), for broadcast on Toronto subway platform screens during the Toronto Urban Film Festival. Leave it to Bailey to take the human billboard trope to the next game level! More of his spot-on projects can be seen on his YouTube channel. You'll want to see his Transhuman Dance Recital (2007) in which he "freed [him]self of the imitative constraints of the natural world" in order to dance around like an octopus with a triangle-shaped buddy. - Marisa Olson
Interaction, Interactivity, Interactive Art
a buzzword of new media under scrutiny
Conference organized by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research.
at Ars Electronica 2008 on September 4, 2008, Brucknerhaus, Linz (AT)
Concept: Katja Kwastek
'Interactivity' has become virtually a magic word for the promotion of new media and the media arts alike. The term refers not only to a certain technology, it also stands for social concepts and visions ranging from grassroots democracy all the way to consumer freedom. This imbues the term with its broad-ranging impact, but also contributes to its dilution.
This year's conference of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. invites experts from different disciplines to examine the origins and applications of the various concepts of interactivity. It questions the extent to which interactivity should be considered a fundamental concept in the social and technological, cultural and artistic context, or as an outdated buzzword, useful only for the self-promotion of the different fields.
'It's happening', announces the invitation to Manifesta 7. This is a cheerful fact not to be taken for granted after a four year absence -- Manifesta 6, the 2006 edition, was to be held in the divided city of Nicosia in Cyprus, but was cancelled after the divisions between the Turkish and Greek halves of the island proved too wide to be bridged by an art exhibition. Known for reinvention, Manifesta this year spans 130km and four mountain towns of Italy's stunning South Tyrol: Rovereto, Trento, Bolzano/Bozen and Fortezza/Franzenfeste.
View from the train / Ricardo Jacinto, Labyrithitis, 2007, in the courtyard of the Manifattura Tabacchi in Rovereto
Three curatorial teams take a town each: Adam Budak (Rovereto), Anselm Franke and Hilde Peleg (Trento), and the Raqs Media Collective (Bolzano/Bozen), with the teams collaborating on an exhibition in the fortress at Fortezza. This structure, it would seem, allows for a deeper level of engagement with the area, taking in several types of sites and histories rather than focusing on one or two. It also seems to circumvent the dubious artworld 'swamping' that biennales tend to inspire, where we all sweep into town for a few days, then promptly disappear.
A standout at the recent GLOW festival in Santa Monica was Usman Haque's mind blowing art installation called Primal Source. Looking like the northern lights or a supernova on the beach, Primal Source was made up of a huge water spray screen with a rear projected light patterns. The changing display was controlled by crowd reaction and ambient noise. Microphones spread around the outside of the display picked up the cheers and shouts of the crowd which were then translated into the patterns and colors on the water screen. Check out the video below.
By
Tyler Coburn
on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm.
Currently on display at Baltimore's Contemporary Museum, "Cottage Industry" foregrounds the entrepreneurial and communitarian ethos of six artists/organizations, including Andrea Zittel and Christine Hill. The exhibition positions these practices, many taking the form of real- or pseudo-business and cultural ventures, in an extensive history of relational projects: from Beuys' "social sculpture" to Matta-Clark's "Food" restaurant/cooperative. Several of the participants interpolate conceptual production with community organization, including Lisa Anne Auerbach, whose project, The Tract House, makes available to museum visitors and online users a series of "manifestos, diatribes, stories, [and] rants" written by friends and acquaintances of the artist, as well as visitors to her website. Auerbach thus overlaps two meanings of "tract" (an area of land and a loosely distributed, often socially- or politically-conscious text), as if to suggest her open document pool to be a foundation for a new architecture of social exchange. The City Reliquary will also contribute something from its dusty coffers. First established as a window display in 2000, the City Reliquary has become a much-loved spot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, displaying the eccentric accumulations of local collectors, old New York ephemera, and organizing events like the annual Bicycle Fetish Day (which is pretty much what its title suggests). For the exhibition, a mini-City Reliquary will be set up in the gallery in the form of a shadowbox containing special finds from their collection. In addition to exhibiting past works by participants, Contemporary Museum has helped a handful of them realize site-specific projects throughout Baltimore, including the sixth "regional prototype garden" of Fritz Haeg'sEdible Estates, an ongoing project to replace "the domestic front lawn with a highly productive edible landscape." While the exhibition will conclude on August 24th, Haeg's garden will continue indefinitely -- one of many excellent examples the exhibition offers of art extending into community life. - Tyler Coburn
Jill Magid is a visual artist working in a variety of media including literature, video, sculpture, photography and performance. Magid currently teaches Sculpture at The Cooper Union in New York.
Interview with artist Jill Magid conducted during the 2008 Tokion Creativity Now conference.
By
Marisa Olson
on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 11:44 am.
Those three words are the declaration of Manuel Buerger, a young German artist whose practice encompasses graphic design, fine art, theory, and music. Buerger did his graduate studies in Media Art under the direction of pioneering internet artist Olia Lialina and this reveals itself best in the humor Buerger directs at his projects that are often just as goofy as they are subtly, intelligently deconstructive of media culture and its conventions. His Master's thesis was an artist book-cum-manifesto on the cultural and economic imperative towards newness, with the figure of a UFO used to navigate the philosophy of novelty. Buerger followed this project with an A5 fanzine that was, in fact, a critical examination of the role of individuality in the Microsoft software platform. Designed in MS Word, I doc. you will! both celebrates and critiques the rigidity and dominance of this environment, pointing to the strict adherence to publishing protocols written into Word, despite the seeming emphasis on personalization within tools and templates. Predicated on a reading of Deleuze's theories on societies of control, Buerger argues, "The last 25 years have rapidly changed the means of computer aided self-portrayal. 'Individualization' is the product of this development--consumption stresses our uniqueness." That said, a number of Buerger's projects end up focusing on consumer culture, or the fine line between that culture and its production. While net-based experiments like his Nostril Karaoke leave us a bit speechless, his Designerz is a clever, gif-based trope-popping of the archetypal designer-holding-poster portrait, reflected in the style of a permanent zoom into a hall of mirrors. The artist is currently at work on a MIDI-album called "10/10," in which "the idea is to take ten ultra-cool midi-instruments (10 of 128) and dedicate a song to each instrument," and he's an active collaborator in the "Shake Your Tree" Network. Revolving around their self-published magazine of the same name, the group is a posse of diverse artists joined together "in their battle against boredom...as an intermedial instrument, designed to support communication and collaboration on the field of contemporary youth culture." It's clear that Buerger takes playtime seriously. His professional mantra? "Touch the hype but reverse it at the same time. Have fun." Words to live by. - Marisa Olson
CONFLUX FESTIVAL 2008.
SEPT 11-14.
CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE, NYC.
Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment.
People from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures come together at the festival to re-imagine the city as a playground, a space for positive change and an opportunity for civic engagement. The Village Voice describes Conflux as a "network of maverick artists and unorthodox urban investigators...making fresh, if underground, contributions to pedestrian life in New York City, and upping the ante on today's fight for the soul of high-density metropolises."
From architects to skateboarders, Conflux participants have an enthusiasm for the city that's contagious. Over the course of the long weekend the sidewalks are literally transformed into a mobile laboratory for creative action. With tools ranging from traditional paper maps to high-tech mobile devices, artists present walking tours, public installations and interactive performance, as well as bike and subway expeditions, workshops, a lecture series, a film program and live music performances at night.
Conflux is produced by Glowlab, an independent, Brooklyn-based production and publishing studio with a gallery in Williamsburg and a web-based magazine at glowlab.com.
Japanese media art unit Exonemo's latest work focuses on the differences between two worlds - the real, physical and our increasingly information-based, virtual. Citations of doubt in the real world itself among the two artists (Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa) led to an identification and consideration of a gap between the two worlds, namely one of "death." For the duo, "death" in the real world has no relation to a death in the proposed imaginary world of information. Un-Dead-Link (exhibited at Plug-In, Basel till August 24) works to connect the different realities and blur such a boundary by relying on a pre-programmed software with electronic goods Exonemo bought in Basel. "We modified the game Half-Life2 by using Garry's mod. The game is connected to the piano while all electrical goods are connected by midi/dmx (protocol) with custom devices." With that, the audience can see, feel and hear the effects of a symbolic death in a computer game in an actual physical environment, bridging the gap. The gallery has two contrasting spaces- the ground floor is bright and open while the basement floor is dark and closed; reflecting the two worlds in the space. -- Vicente Gutierrez, Neural.
By
Marisa Olson
on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 1:15 pm.
Jon Rubin's work "explores the social dynamics of public spaces and the lives of ordinary individuals." Often working in collaboration with other artists, institutions, and members of the general public, his projects have included setting up a gallery that exhibits only information about the neighborhood's inhabitants, broadcasting an office's telephone conversations through a talking piano, producing a cable access variety show at a senior center, and a variety of fake businesses that traded on interaction and the art of conversation. The artist's two most recent projects offer a glimpse into the delicate balance of precision and irony that render his work so poignant. Earlier this month, at Los Angeles' Machine Project, Rubin's A Practical Demonstration was "an exercise in suspended orbits, suspended disbelief, and circular group formations." It's the latter, the part about people standing in circles, that is so interesting. As the artist played director, a group of local amateur videographers captured a 360-degree image of a stuntman jumping from the gallery's second floor window. (He was going for "a very clumsy 'Matrix' effect.") Simultaneously, a circle of international collaborators documented the activity of the sun over a 24-hour period. The result of all this participatory documentation was an edited two-channel video in which both the jumper and the sun appear to float in mid-air. On its own, such a video project visually resembles many that have come before it, but Rubin sets his apart by devoting special attention to the details of social collaboration, thus creating a more meaningful experience. The same can be said of his current project taking place on the streets of Pittsburgh, in collaboration with the legendary installation art museum, The Mattress Factory. Like many of his initiatives, Join the Human to Robot Army began with a call for participation. Those who were interested could attend a free hypnosis seminar, run by professional hypnotist John Weir and "newly trained hypnotists John Pena and Jon Rubin," after which they would be given a special cell phone ringtone and training in how to respond to the tone. Subsequently, this army of hundreds of phone owners are now receiving daily audio triggers prompting them to act like a robot. In a true act of art as social practice, Rubin plastered Pittsburgh with 150 unique promotional posters that both solicit participation and "make the public aware of the possibility of human/robots in their midst." Just in case the raised zombie arms and beeping noises of fellow Pittsburg residents didn't tip them off... - Marisa Olson
This summer's Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition, held in Dutch city of Arnhem, takes on the theme of "Grandeur" for its 2008 edition, described on the festival's site as "the aspiration for human greatness" and "the urge, the dream, the conflict and the struggle that are linked to this aspiration." For American artist Brody Condon's contribution to this year's event, this conflict and struggle will be fought out in the woods, using home-made weapons and armor. Condon conceived of -- and is currently overseeing -- a site-specific live-action role-playing game entitled SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation, taking place in seven week-long games that began last month. Players gather in Arnhem's woody Sonsbeek Park to enact a retro-futuristic scenario set in a neo-medieval far future. Condon describes the visual style of the event as "think leather and plastic", and local builders have erected a temporary woodland-mod encampment tower for housing, complete with Japanese-style sleeping pods. The enacted narrative involves small bands composed of pre-determined character types -- Herald, Band Leader, Duel Master, and Ritual Master/Shaman and Archivist -- competing with one another inside the holy forest of Sonsbeek for the favors of the Immortals, godlike beings who grant humans the gifts of technology. SonsbeekLive continues Condon's longstanding interest in blurring games and life, and proposes a re-evaluation of LARPing from mere nerd kitsch to theatrical art. The games continue through September, and folks in the Netherlands can still sign up for upcoming weeks; those who can't attend can peek via player-generatedmedia and the official Dutch weblog. - Ed Halter
Image: Players in SonsbeekLive: The Twentfivefold Manifestation, from the official weblog
By
Ceci Moss
on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 10:56 am.
A minisite, published in conjunction with the New Museum's current exhibition After Nature, launched last Thursday. Text from the sermons of American folk artist Reverend Howard Finster guide the visitor through several pages of photos and documentation from the show. The ominous tenor of Finster's words layered over several eerie images from After Nature work to convey the unease and dystopianism underlying the exhibition itself. The website was designed by Perry Garvin.
Ergin Çavuşoğlu's video installations reflect the complex and constantly changing migration of people between places and countries. Often filmed in ports, airports or markets, his videos treat the themes of travel and the process of transition that determines our reality. In this way they construct a lyrical narrative about the personal experiences of individuals within a broader collective history.
At the centre of the exhibition is the video installation Point of Departure, 2006 that was filmed in two airports, Stansted in southern England and Trabzon in the Turkish Black Sea region. Facing each other from the opposite ends of the European landmass, these two locations are subtly separated and recombined. Point of Departure explores the airport both as architectural structure, a machine for processing travellers and their belongings, but also as a space that lends itself to a certain poetic treatment.
Midnight Express, 2008 is a single channel video work that explores ideas on transience and mobility. The work was filmed on the Asian side of Istanbul on the main train line, which connects the Western part of the country to the East. The footage was filmed at night when the city space becomes liminal, showing the trains carving their ways in both directions at irregular intervals with only their lit windows visible. The work interprets the passage of the trains as a poetic representation exposing the boundaries of economic and personal motivations for movement.
The new two channel video installation Silent Glide, 2008 presents a 'point of departure', from a cut 'different' multitude of perspectives. The work is presented across two screens, which respectively show scenes from the downward spiral of a couple's relationship, and their surroundings. The setting is the dim industrial town of Hereke, Turkey. Once famous for the production of the finest silk carpets, nowadays the landscape is dominated by the largest cement factory in Europe. The mixture of and the striking contrast between history and modernity in Hereke, the aesthetic and the obtrusive and their coexistence in an absurd harmony further highlight the themes explored in the video.
Every era develops its specific, culturally defined awareness of space as well as forms of its aesthetic reification. In music, we can trace a development from an architectural place of sound to the symbolical space of formal and structural projections and finally to the imaginitive, musically immanent space of compositional fantasy. From thereon the actual space can be functionalised musically, it can, however, also be opened to and expanded by technical spaces. These, as digital simulations, enable both universal manipulation and boundless scaling. The conception of an "acoustic cyberspace" becomes constitutive for new aesthetical conceptions of form as well as for the generation and manipulation of sounds.
In 2007 the Technische Universität Berlin has installed the largest wavefield synthesis system worldwide with 832 channels and 2700 loudspeakers in a 700 seats lecture hall. During the 5th SMC 'Space in Sound -- Sound in Space' works for this system will be performed. This system will be augmented by a 20 channel Klangdome and an Acousmonium provided by GRM Paris in the same hall. The simultaneous installation allows a combination of different sound systems with their individual qualities as well as an analytical listening of the same works performed on different systems.
The scientific program of the SMC08 will have a special focus on different concepts and technologies of spatialisation, including sound art, acousmatic music, stereophonic reproduction, and wavefield synthesis. The talks will cover historical, aesthetical, technical as well as genre specific aspects of sound and space.
By
Marisa Olson
on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm.
"When the power of love, overcomes the love of power, the world will know the peace." This prophecy by rock legend Jimi Hendrix could be the foreword to a manifesto on the use of music in the propagation of nationalism, but instead it's a point of inspiration for "The Sonic Self," an exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum. Open through August 30, the show brings together a range of "participating artists from around the world with the main goal that their collaborative projects will bridge disparate audio-visual practices and expose their shared languages." In keeping with recent curatorial trends, "The Sonic Self" is part-exhibition and part-workshop, aiming to explore the relationship between sound and identity through installations, audio/visual performances, and participatory events in which collaborators work to innovate new devices for the creation of auditory autobiographies. While the relationship at stake seems most universally to be about "being heard," the selected artists are working with material ranging from live performances to field recordings to computer-generated sound to DJ samples. In the spirit of tracing "similarities and differences in the growing confluence of audio and visual experiences in contemporary complex and diverse global culture," the project will travel to St. Petersberg, Russia, and Chennai, India, following its New York debut. - Marisa Olson
Video: Philip Dadson and Don McGlashan in From Scratch's performance of "Drum/Sing."
Despite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter
Image: Huutajat, The Screaming Men, 2003 (Still image from video, 76 min., Directed by Mika Ronkainen) Courtesy the artist Photo by Matthew Septimus.
'Quad', the first in a series of minimalist experimental television plays made by Beckett in the 1980s for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk, operates with a serial game involving the motional pattern of four actors, but equally accommodating four soloists, six duos, and four trios. Four actors, whose coloured hoods make them identifiable yet anonymous, accomplish a relentless closed-circuit drama. Once inside the square, they are condemned to monotonously and synchronously pace the respectively six steps of the lengthwise and diagonal lines it contains, in part accompanied by varying drumbeat rhythms. The mathematical precision and choreography is made possible by the exactness of the timing. Choreographic variation is confined to the number of performers, and the resultant changes in color constellations. The middle of the square, which is marked by a dot, must always be bypassed on the left-hand side. In the course of the production, the feet leave behind faint traces on the diagonals of the white square. 'Quad' (here you see the first version) is, for all its reducedness, the most dramatic of Beckett's last teleplays. The playwright also shot a black-and-white version with four figures dressed identically in white and acting to the beat of a metronome.
-- Rudolf Frieling (from Media Art Net)
Rhizome Commissions 08:
Conversations with Mushon Zer-Aviv, Carolyn Strauss and Melanie Crean
Moderated by Ceci Moss
Friday, August 8 at 7:30pm
$8 General/ $6 Members
Every year, Rhizome awards commissions to a group of international artists for the creation of new work. Read about
the nine projects commissioned in our 2009 cycle!
