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The Rhizome Commissions panel is tonight at the New Museum! Don't miss out! Join us at 7:30PM as we honor Rhizome's commissioned artists Mushon Zer-Aviv, Dan Phiffer, David Nolen, Carolyn Strauss and Melanie Crean. Each artist will present their project and discuss their larger bodies of work.
It's no secret that the Rhizome staff loves animated gifs. The best to roll through our feed readers are often reblogged to our front page, and in 2005 we presented The GIF Show, an exhibition of 12 artists using animated gifs to make new work. When we heard about the upcoming "Graphics Interchange Format" exhibition, we knew we had to share the news. Curated by Laurel Ptak, keeper of the popular I Heart Photograph blog, the show at emerging Brooklyn art space Bond Street Gallery features 67 animated gifs made by 26 artists, including Rhizome's own staff writer Tyler Coburn, Petra Cortright, C. Coy, Ilia Ovechkin, M. River, Trevor Shimizu, Jo-ey Tang, Anne De Vries, and Damon Zucconi. Some of the artists are among the net's gif stars and others made their first gifs for the show--they were all commissioned on three days' notice by Ptak and are being sold in unlimited editions (accompanied by a personalized note from the artist) for $20, instigating "gif shop" puns across the net art blogosphere. The curator promises a show that will demonstrate the diversity of what this beloved file format has come to prove capable of since its inception by CompuServe in 1987. Nonetheless, as a show nestled within a group show of group photo shows, called "Young Curators, New Ideas," the artists were encouraged to use photographic media and the resultant works are poised to trigger references to the history of lens-based practices and proto-filmic experimental cell animation. Either that or they will just flicker their way into your hearts as they clearly have ours. - Marisa Olson
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Eduardo Navas posted two interviews with the artists involved with this exhibition to Rhizome. Click the below to view:
Interview with Adriene Jenik
Interview with *particle group*
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Sound of Art. Music and Visual Arts
Museum der Moderne Salzburg Moenchsberg
Moenchsberg 32
5020 Salzburg
Austria
Contact:
christine.forstner[AT]mdmsalzburg.at
Sound of Art' shows up the bonds between music and visual arts. The exhibition will present scores, objects, photographs, videos and video installations, records of actions and many more exhibits. Right at the beginning the exhibition focuses on its main themes: the radical break of the avant-garde art movements emerging at the beginning of the 20th century with 19th century bourgeois culture (dominated by the cult of genius, classical instruments, musical harmonies and melodies, etc.), and the various revaluations of its inherent categories, such as virtuosity.
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'Since the early years of video art, works have been made which do not actually produce a standard TV signal waveform and therefore cannot be directly recorded. Some are based primarily upon magnetic distortion of the normal TV scan pattern, others utilise a Cathode Ray Tube as if it were an oscilloscope screen.'
Gert-Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk's Synchronator project continues a lineage of experimentation originally embarked upon by the likes of Nam June Paik and the Vasulka's. Both artists teamed up after a shared need to transcend the technical limitations of the video signal and through a shared aesthetic. Accessing the inner working of their audiovisual equipment, they crosswire sound and image to produce a glitchy synaesthetic montage - sometimes with tantalizing hints at representation as seen in the online video.
Syncronator is dysfunctional roboid ghost in the machine, choreographing an interference dervish to a montage of extreme noise textures.
As we hit the slower weeks of summer, take five minutes to play Jason Rohrer's Passage, a contemplative art game created for last year's Gamma 256 competition in Montreal, which challenged indie designers to create games with tiny, irregular aspect ratios of no more than 256x256 pixels. In its half-year of existence, Rohrer's entry has become a micro sensation on its own, garnering kudos in scads of the most widely read games blogs as well as mainstream press. In Passage, you play a character who travels across a narrow horizontal corridor representing nothing less than the passage of life itself, from childhood to old age. Since it's very much a game about exploration and discovery, to say any more about what happens would spoil the impact -- so with that in mind, don't read Rohrer's heartfelt statement on the game until after you've played it. Rather, prepare for ingeniously low-res visuals and minimal but meaningful interactivity that maximize a miniature platform in terms of the metaphoric potential for gameplay. After Passage, Rohrer created something of a sequel with Gravitation, a slightly more complex game about creative inspiration and a father's love for his daughter. Or, as Rohrer puts it, "explores how a particular corner of my life feels, as only a game can." - Ed Halter
Designer/researcher Greg J. Smith has curated an online exhibition that surveys twelve of the most influential mapping-related new media projects of the last ten years. "City of Nodes" is the 21st show presented by CONT3XT.NET, who use social bookmarking site del.icio.us as a platform for their TAGallery. The sites Smith selected actually skim the longstanding relationship between tagging and urban studies, with a focus on cartography and locative media. In his curatorial introduction (in this case, a "tag description"), Smith synthesizes Lewis Mumford's late-1930s conception of the city as "a nexus of social, creative, and economic collaboration," in contrast to William J. Mitchell's '90s era take on cities as including "not only asphalt and concrete, but bandwidth, code, and connectivity." This is the filter through which the twelve selected projects are viewed. They include the seminal Amsterdam Realtime (2002) project by Esther Polak and Jeroen Kee (the Waag Society) in which GPS devices worn by volunteers create a comparative portrait of the personal occupation of the city; iSee (2005), the Institute for Applied Autonomy's web-based program for locating CCTV cameras throughout a city and planning your travel route accordingly; and One Block Radius, Dave Mandl and Christina Ray's (a.k.a. Glowlab's) psychogeographic documentary of the immediate neighborhood surrounding what was then the future site of the new New Museum building. Given that so many of the selected projects are about tracing a collective experience, the folksonomic curatorial platform seems a perfect one on which to contemplate the work, with guest-curators' tags suggesting an interpretation before inviting viewers to travel off on their own. - Marisa Olson
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Dedicated to supporting a wide range of writing on contemporary visual art -- from general-audience to scholarly -- the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program awards project-based grants to individual authors. In its 2008 cycle, the program will fund approximately 20 projects, in amounts ranging from $3,000-$50,000, in the following categories: books; articles; short-form writing; and blogs/new and alternative media. All writers who meet our eligibility requirements are encouraged to apply.
Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Grant Program is now accepting applications. Click the above for more information.
Australian artist Lynette Wallworth is bringing a high tech touch to this year's Mostly Mozart festival at New York's venerable Lincoln Center. At first glance, the pairing of a new media installation artist with a celebration of an old dead white guy's music may seem formulaically nouveau, but Wallworth's interactive works bring a nice visual meditation on this year's festival theme: mortality and transcendence. If anyone could speak from the grave about this topic, it's Mozart, the legend of whose death surrounds the mythologizing of his oeuvre and who has been the subject of remixes (or variations, as the ancients call them) by a number of significant classical composers. Wallworth's video installations Hold Vessel 1 and 2 and Invisible by Night create a truly immersive space, one which relies on the viewer to proactively enter and activate these areas. In Hold Vessel 1 and 2, viewers carry a bowl-shaped screen into the room, to capture "projected images of microscopic marine life and telescopic astronomical imagery." The physical analogy here seems equal parts panning for gold and holding the whole world in your hands, with the artist's expressed intention being that of revealing "the hidden intricacies of human immersion in the wide, complex world." Invisible by Night uniquely engages the context of the Lincoln Center complex, which is not only a family of concert halls but also a shopping center, luxury apartment building, and corporate headquarters. Wallworth encourages visitors to slow down, ponder the emotional history of the site, and practice empathy in engaging with video footage of a grieving woman whose gestures will mirror those of viewers who elect to touch the projection surface. The piece is meant to speak to "the transient nature of compassion," and the interactive installation format's engagement with time and space lends itself well to such work. True Mozart die hards might here insert an analogy to the mysterious Mozart Effect, in which the spatio-temporal reasoning of listeners is said to be enhanced by the maestro's music. - Marisa Olson
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From the exhibition "Deep Screen – Art in Digital Culture" currently on view at the Stedelijk Museum CS.
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Sunday, August 10th, 2008
1pm - 3pm
tex is a meetup for those seeking skills trade, collaboration, inspiration, techniques, and exposure to topics with an emphasis on fiber, physical computing, textiles, wearables, and all matters of materials.
THE FORMAT:
contribute a tutorial introducing a single topic or technique
gather to make connections across disciplines
leave with tangible, usable techniques and patterns
submit a topic by sending an email to textopic[AT]gmail.com
As any techno-cultural aficionado will enthusiastically tell you, the 21st century is the century of "convergence", in which the communications industry progressively rolled out its own rendition of the Swiss Army knife: pocket-sized, hand-held, wireless devices which function simultaneously as movie and music players, mobile phones, gaming engines, internet connectivity devices, still image and video cameras, musical instruments, calculators...with so many functions now capable of being handled by little equipment and energy expenditure, visions of the future both Utopian and dystopian have flown off the shelves at a hitherto unprecedented rate (and wireless electricity is just around the corner as well.) Prophesies abound that this synthesis of communicative modes and cross-pollination of technological functionality is a stepping stone towards realizing some kind of fully-integrated Übermensch; eventually our ability to communicate with and comprehend each other will accelerate to the point where humans morph into sophisticated telepaths. More grandiose yet, there are the fantasies of some ultimate "awakening" along the lines of the "Omega Point" suggested by rogue priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an ultimate synthesis of human intelligence with cosmic consciousness -- the inventor Ray Kurzweil calls the same "universal awakening" phenomenon the "Singularity," albeit with a much more technophiliac gloss to it.
While technological synthesis is being put forward as the harbinger of unbelievable revelations to come, other forms of actually-existing synthesis have been somewhat ignored: fascinating fusions much closer to home than the apocalyptic mergers and comic book catastrophes suggested by overwhelmed "tech-Gnostics" and Silicon Valley shamans. Much has been said and printed about the ongoing fusion of cultures, of genders, of technological functionality, and plenty more besides -- but what about taking this obsession with convergence to a neural and perceptual level, and investigating the fusion of the senses themselves? Consider synesthesia, the common term used for sensory fusion, in which one type of sensory information leads to involuntary responses from another sensory pathway. Within modern culture, this still seems to be a bizarre and novel thing, since we are acclimated to compartmentalization and ordering of just about everything, including our capacities for sound, vision and so on. Although synesthesia has been under research by the scientific community since the late 19th century (Francis Galton is widely recognized as having lit this particular flame in the 1880s), it is still brushed aside by many as an unreliable pseudo-science, as the whimsy of 'loose cannon' mystics who have the most tangential connections to the larger social universe. Over the last quarter-century or so, it has finally gained some ground in the peer-based research community (papers looked over for material to supplement this article almost all dated from the present decade), with a definite neural basis for this phenomenon coming into play: the part of the brain's temporal lobe dealing with textual recognition -- the fusiform gyrus -- is situated next to the part normally associated with processing color information, often leading to situations where synesthetes believe printed characters to have a certain color, even when appearing with a different color on the printed page. Legitimate research aside, a cultural stereotype of the synesthete as a drug-besotted, 'way-out hippie' who 'hears colors' is still not uncommon as comic fodder. The belief still persists that the various means of communicating the synesthetic experience, especially verbally, are nothing more than metaphor. Sorting out voluntary metaphorical expressions from involuntary experiences with synesthesia can be a difficult undertaking indeed. As daunting of a task as it may be to present an image in a 1:1 ratio of correspondence with a sound (we will focus on this type of synesthesia for the purposes of this article, despite color-grapheme synesthesia being the most common form among acknowledged synesthetes), this has not stopped a steady procession of inspired minds from developing a variety of intriguing 'synesthesia simulators.' From the DIMI-S system of Finnish composer Erkki Kurienemmi to the UPIC graphic / sound translating computer of Iannis Xenakis, the late 20th century and early 21st century has seen a steady increase in tools attempting to establish, however awkwardly, the parameters and vocabulary of a synesthetic 'language.'
It is somewhat interesting to note that, despite the admirable efforts of software and hardware designers to create new means of simulating the synesthetic experience, one quite successful method was discovered over a half-century ago, without the aid of any computer equipment. Dr. Hans Jenny, the father of this method, named it cymatics (from the Greek word for wave, "kyma".) Jenny's studies in wave phenomena, their kinetics, and their dynamics are sadly overlooked or unknown by most practitioners of electronic music -- only two volumes of Jenny's studies are currently in print -- but the conclusions drawn by his research into phenomenology would be well worth looking at again, as we collectively lurch towards the discovery of more accurate light and sound synthesizing machines.
Dr. Jenny's method now seems almost laughably simple, a low-budget form of scientific rigor when viewed in the light of the tools mentioned above. Jenny would place substances such as sand or viscous fluids on a metal plate, which was in turn attached to an oscillator controlled by a frequency generator. The plate would amplify the vibrations of the oscillator, and, as the tones produced by the frequency generator were raised or lowered, different patterns would appear in the previously stationary materials: almost without fail, higher frequencies would produce more intricate and elegant patterns in the vibrating piles of sand, gelatin, or whatever other material Jenny was using at the time. The current publisher of Jenny's studies admits to his awe when seeing a small pool of glycerin reveal a "snake" while under the influence of sound waves and some strategic lighting. In these experiments, the tendency of the higher frequencies to 'sculpt' forms with spiritual connotations, such as complex mandalas or yantras, eerily approached Arthur Schopenhauer's personal philosophy of frequency: namely, that higher tones corresponded to a striving toward superhuman greatness while the lower, almost inaudible tones corresponded to the inorganic: the planet's lifeless and will-less forms and masses. Jenny's line of thinking follows Schopenhauer, in that density or heaviness, manifested in bass tones, represented physicality, while flights of thought and emotion were manifest in 'lighter', more evanescent, higher tones.
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The Rest of Now is the title of the Manifesta 7-exhibition in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. The Rest of Now, curated by the Raqs Media Collective, is set in the disused Alumix aluminium factory. In the first part of our coverage of Manifesta 7's "The Rest of Now" we have a look at works by Harold de Bree, M-City, Dayanita Singh, Zilvinas Kempinas, Nikolaus Hirsch & Michael Muller, Candida TV, and Latifa Echakhch.
The Raqs Media Collective is a group of three media pracitioners: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Before co-curating Manifesta 7, Raqs Media Collective has presented work at major international shows such as Documenta and Venice Biennale. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series.
Manifesta 7, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. The Rest of Now. Curated by Raqs Media Collective. Ex Alumix, Bolzano / Bozen, Italy. July 27, 2008. Part 1/2.
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the piece uses a combinatory structure and the rhetoric of children's literature to tell the story of a restless shadow on a nighttime adventure. I describe it as a "zoom narrative" which takes advantage of the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch to allow readers to swipe their fingers across the screen and zoom in and out of images instead of turning pages.
There are Web-based demos and videos of the piece for those (like me) who lack iProducts. (Luckily, I did get to see Aya show off the piece at her MFA thesis reading this past May, and enjoyed it. Sure, I didn't rush out to buy an iPhone afterwards, but I'm stubborn.) The application is programmed by Nick Dalton; Roxanne Carter modeled to provide the shadow silhouettes.
For "The Young and Evil," the latest in tank.tv's ambitious program of guest-curated exhibitions, Stuart Comer considers the "historical contours and shifting relationships of sex and community in the digital age." Comer contends that the Internet has increasingly eclipsed the cinema as the preeminent cultural screen, and consequently divides his exhibition between the venues. Invited guests, including Andrea Geyer, Carlos Motta and Daria Martin, have each selected one contemporary work, for exhibition on tank.tv, and one historical film to be screened in Tate Modern's cinema on September 20th, 2008. But if the separation of venues emphasizes the historical division between works, the exhibition's focus on social deviance and erotics provides a compelling, unifying thread. The most notable of the works currently up on tank.tv play into what Comer describes as the Internet's state of being an "uncanny hybrid of personal longing and collective interaction." Mansfield 1962 (2006), for example, appropriates a Highway Safety Foundation video William E. Jones found on the Internet, which uses 1962 police footage of gay sex in a public restroom to instruct officers about covert recording techniques. Jones has edited the footage to concentrate on discreet moments of sexual pleasure and, at the video's end, the mug shots of participants, who all went on to serve time on charges of sodomy. For The Shape of a Right Statement I (2008), Wu Ingrid Tsang performs one section of autism rights activist Amanda Baggs' forceful address, In My Language, which she published on YouTube in 2007. Tsang's strong, androgynous features and affected computerspeak (true to In My Language) complicate the original work's register of alterity. "The thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language," he recites, at one moment, an assertion that rings true for many situated along the margins of society. - Tyler Coburn
Los Angeles-based artist Xtine Hanson calls her Mechanical Olympics "an alternative media spectacle to the Olympic games." Indeed, the project humorously turns the otherwise tightly-regulated machinery of both web commerce and international sports competition on their heads. Launching simultaneously with the Beijing games, on August 8th, The Mechanical Olympics invite the public to compete in sports previously restricted to people of specific genders and nationalities. The artist has enlisted participants via Amazon's Mechanical Turk site in which users receive paid commissions for completing tasks almost but not quite so simple a machine could complete them, thus joining the ranks of participatory projects like AddArt, Sheep Market, and Ten Thousand Cents, which also employed this service. Hanson likens this playful outsourcing of labor to working with artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, it's clear that her worker bees are bringing a hefty dose of personal creativity to this web-based role-playing game. A perusal of the videos thus far uploaded to The Mechanical Olympics' YouTube channel features Starbucks baristas working overtime to put their own spin on the classic sport of Hockey, and the woman who represents South Africa in the Freestyle Swimming event could win a gold medal in charm for her combined use of a spray bottle and trippy arm movements. When accepting one of the project's Human Intelligence Tasks (or HITs), the athletes agree to wear a pre-designed sign indicating their sport, gender, and country (they get to pick their own number) and to be paid between $1-3 dollars upon emailing Hanson a URL to their 30-60 second video. The footage will be posted daily, during the Olympics, and voted upon by blog readers. Rather than medals, the winning artificial Olympians receive bonus commissions, much like their more famous counterparts whose accomplishments score them lucrative endorsement deals. - Marisa Olson
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Installing 'Disneylend Express' sign at Rovereto train station
ARC Projects roster artist Kamen Stoyanov has created new artworks for Manifesta 7, taking place in Trentino, Italy, 19 July - 2 November 2008. Stoyanov's work is showing within the context of 'ManifeSTATION' curated by The Office for Cognitive Urbanism.
Migration is a central topic for Stoyanov, whether based on economical, political or personal reasons. If one's attempts at assimilation fail, there remains nothing but a life at the margins of society, excluded and isolated amidst everyday cultural life -- something well known but still foreign. For Manifesta 7, Stoyanov addresses the topic of urban events and art biennials themselves, since they characterize entire cities as cultural territory and thus contain implicit mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The cultural homogenization of urban spaces divides the people into those that consume these places and those that have to live in them. The Disneylend Express connects both.
Click on the image below to see a slide show of Kamen Stoyanov’s artwork for Manifesta 7.
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Rhizome Commissions 08: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!
