Thu Mar 08, 2012 00:00

Call for works: artfem.tv

http://artfem.tv

artfem.tv is an online television programming which presents Art and Feminism.
The aim of artfem.tv is to foster Women in the Arts, their art works and projects, to create an international online television screen for the creativity, images and voices of Women.
artfem.tv is a non-profit artist run ITV about Art and Feminism.

For submitting your video works please contact:
Evelin Stermitz es@mur.at

Sat Sep 08, 2007 00:00 - Sun Sep 09, 2007

CROSSING OVER 2007

The End of the World!
La Fine del Mondo!

4th Contemporary Art Exhibition
curated by Piera Nodari
Cultural Association Ateneo delle Idee
President Roberta Bignozzi

VISIONARIO
Via Asquini, Udine, Italy
8 - 16 September 2007

Participating Artists:
Nikolaus Suchentrunk
Mimmo Mirabile
Giulia Tosato
Virginia Di Lazzaro
BNTMRC77
Karl Kilian
Lucia Morandini
Giusi Foschia
BROCCOLI Art Group
Susanna Castelli
Riccardo Modena
Lionel Favre
Marco Juratovec
Philipp Hardikov
Marco Corain
Diego Mosca
Claudia Bortolato
Christian Falsnaes
Emanuela Messina
Marina Zuliani
Sebastian Degli Innocenti

Prize of the Jury Crossing Over 2007 Associazione Culturale Ateneo delle Idee:

GOING BLIND
End of the World Stream
Mixed Media Installation
by BROCCOLI Art Group
http://es.mur.at/broccoli

GOING BLIND
End of the World Stream
from the Garden of the VISIONARIO

12 lost surveillance birds are watching the world go down.
View the stream at http://es.mur.at/goingblind

GOING BLIND mixed media installation describes scenarios of the apocalypse and the empty hyper-consumption of images with its lost meanings in a multi-mediated post-post-modern society.

Mixed Media Installation including 12 surveillance cameras, 6 trees, 1 web interface.

A project by BROCCOLI Art Group
Cym, Evelin Stermitz, Maki Stolberg, Eva Ursprung.

BROCCOLI Art Group for social art happenings has been founded in the year 2003 in Graz (A): Cym (NL/A) net artist and art center host / Evelin Stermitz (A/SLO) media artist and third-wave feminist / Maki Stolberg (A) artist and art researcher / Eva Ursprung (A) media artist, performer, feminist art activist and curator.

Special credits to Matjaz Jogan (SLO).

http://es.mur.at/broccoli/goingblind.htm

Tue Aug 21, 2007 00:00 - Tue Aug 21, 2007

Interview with Nina Sobell

Nina Sobell pioneered the use of video, computers, and interactivity in art; she also pioneered performance on the Web (in collaboration with Emily Hartzell as ParkBench). In 1975 she installed the "Interactive Encephalographic Brainwave Drawing Installation" at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Sobell presented "Brainwave Drawings" and "Videophone Voyeur" (1977) at Joseph Beuys' "Free International University" at Documenta 6. She has continued to develop the piece over the years, and is currently working on a piece in which participants will collaborate on Brainwave Drawings internationally, over the Web.

http://ninasobell.com
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/portfolio/index.html
http://brainwavedrawings.com

An interview about Nina Sobell's work in media and new media art
by Evelin Stermitz, August 2007, New York, NY.

ES: What was your first approach to media art?

NS: When I was at Cornell University going to graduate school in Sculpture (1969), I created objects that deconstructed from participants' interaction with them. Jud Fine said, why don't you talk to David Shearer, he has video equipment, you could borrow and document this interaction. David Shearer was the librarian for art, architecture and urban planning, he was very helpful giving me access to video equipment. So I worked with the early Sony portapacks and editing equipment. And then after simply documenting the interactions with the objects, I began to think in terms of the video in experience: time, space and memory. I began to think in terms of my works as constructed symbolic pieces, deconstructed through interaction with them. In another words video became an interstitial vehicle, it extended and expanded time and space, which was integral to the sculpture works: both became my first video installation. So I was really interested in creating huge sculptures, that were reduced into tapes. I took six weeks of time as a sculptural space and divided it up into spacial relationships, of people with the objects I made and the documentation of these objects, the recreation of those objects, within the sequencial time period as a video installation demarcating time and experience. So people entered the gallery and found themselves in an area with four monitors (N, S, E, W) and in the center of those four monitors was a physically symbolic representation of what they where seeing: N was the 1st week; E was the 2nd week; S the 3rd week; W the 4th week of the objects they saw. The symbolic representation in the center surrounded by the monitors was a rockable couch, made of different parts of the objects, they were seeing on those monitors. The first week, on the N monitor was the interaction with the Rockable, 12 ft high by 6 ft deep. It looked like an omega, with curves, it was weighted so that it gently rolled 180 degrees if a person was inside and rolled over. It was made of overlapped aluminum arches, lead weights, band iron and padding and was placed outside. I did not want anyone to know why it was there. I wanted it to be discovered, played and experimented with. I wanted the preciousness and purpose removed from the art object, no art objective in the art object. It was positioned behind the museum's open grassy area at the White Museum, Cornell. On the following Tuesday in the foyer of the museum, I installed the Movable Ceiling: a raised convex couch that people could climb on and a concave ceiling with foam rubber appendages and a remote control. The remote control had 35 ft of cable and two unlabled buttons. Participants experimented with its variable speed and reverse functions, having the ceiling come down into the convex couch. It was based on an elevator block and tackle system. Some people lay there with no expectations and maybe somebody remotely controlled it from another room and again there was no indentification with who made the art work. I documented this interaction until the next Tuesday. Again there was discovery and play in a non-expective situation. The following Tuesday I placed five 10 ft diameter wooden cones, four of them were faced inwards, one out to the sunset on the quad. Again there was no identification of the artist and in the papers they appeared as an architectural student's work. People climbed, stacked or rolled around in them. The following fourth Tuesday I released 500 white balloons on the same quad at 6 am and then at noon I released 500 more. It was the dematerialisation of the object transposed into video experience. The following week, the fifth Tuesday I edited the tapes for the monitors for the gallery space. The sixth Tuesday was the gallery opening and the re-creation of objects within a sequential time period. In the space people experienced the installation about the past with others or individual experiences, bringing the past to the present time. A six second time lapse monitor documented visitors coming from the four monitors to present time and at the exit a closed circuit monitor represented the immediate moment.

ES: How was the situation for a female student at your university and what were your first experiences as a woman in media art?

NS: I had not been directly admitted to the sculpture department. I received a call from the chairman of Cornell and was encouraged to accept an offer by Jason Seley the chairman of the art department to accept a third floor painting studio because the sculpture department did not want to have a woman in the sculpture department. As it happened, a visiting artist David Von Schlegell from Yale was very supportive of my work, Jud Fine had graduated and left me the key to his sculpture studio, and they all said just go in and ignore the head of the sculpture department and continue working. The sculpture department did not want to give me a teaching assistantship because I was a woman. I was encouraged by David Shearer, the librarian of Art, Architecture and Urban Planning, who instructed students how to use video equipment. My thesis was idiosyncratically video, in fact the first video thesis, but the sculpture professors at Cornell did not understand my concepts. Then I moved to Los Angeles and was part of the very new video art scene, worked on my own works and shared the equipment with another graduate from Cornell.

ES: What are the main themes in your video works, what did you like to explore?

NS: I made a transition from public installations, time, space, memory, deconstruction and a conceptualized approach to being alone in my studio; getting used to my private space, intimacy with my environment, interaction with objects, and then focusing the camera on myself. I did not know that this was performance art; I just let myself do spontaneous actions. Working through the drawing process, physicalizing it, documenting it, really getting inside to that time that video is capable of capturing - that immediate moment, breaking glass with no eye protection, all that could not be rehearsed, not to be re-recorded again, that was purely video performance, but I was not aware of it at that time.

ES: Could you tell more about your brain wave drawings project?

NS: A friend visited my studio with an audio-alpha wave monitor that made a sound when one emitted alpha waves. I realized that I as a human being am an electronic medium. Since the human being is an electronic medium, and since I was working with video as an electronic medium, I saw the possibility of visualizing communication. Most especially the singular existential moment of perception between two people. How could I express the communication of that thought process with another human being? By creating a physical and mental portrait of the non-verbal communication between people involves their ego and identity. That's the place where art is, in itself art is the drawing of communication processes. I was introduced to Michael Trivich by my Cornell engineer collaborators and we are still collaborating on this work more than 35 years later. He suggested using an oscilloscope to visualize the communication between two people. By simultaneously having one person's brain waves on the X axis and the other on the Y axis a lissajous pattern is formed. A lissajous pattern is an irregular circular configuaration; when both participants emit the same brain wave (amplitude and frequency), a circle is formed. If one person is more distracted than the other or emitting another brain wave, the circle will distort horizontally or vertically. Finally after working on it for thousands of thousands hours, and now with a patent pending, we were able to make a brain wave drawing over the web between Poland and Los Angeles on July 17, 2007. Although there is a nine hour time difference, we could see each others physical image, color-keyed brainwave output, and text message, all in web-time. My idea is creating a non-verbal intimacy in cyberspace, one world one time. In the past brain wave drawings one heard the song of two, and now joyously, listening to a universal song of our mind and heartbeat.

ES: How do you view your own body connected to the media?

NS: By capturing ones physical image in video, one is able to capture the essence of ones ego and observe the unmitigated relationship to ones physical behaviour and mental responses to it.

ES: In which context do you see your performance works?

NS: Psychosociological behavioural works.

_

Wed Jul 25, 2007 00:00 - Thu Jul 26, 2007

resp.project
time for responsibility

http://resp.en-bloc.de

by en bloc | Simona Koch 2007
Simona Koch, new media artist, lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
http://en-bloc.de

coding by
http://ratato.com

About resp.

We are living in a world, which is getting more and more fast and complex. The speed of technical developments is increasing and the enormous amounts of information we are confronted with make it even more difficult for man to digest them and deal with in daily life. This leads to that one can hardly see the effect of his own actions to the big whole. The single person doesn’t see himself responsible for his actions, but the ruling authorities.
Is it possible, in a complex information society, to spread or receive lasting information, to make out the connections of the own actions to the superordinated context and take the responsibility?

The project uses an ancient way of information transfer - the pyramid scheme - with direct personal contact, to stand out from the huge amount of information. The participation is voluntary and not combined with obligations like chain letters.

The process

At the beginning of the project Simona Koch is arranging invitations in the cities of Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna and Zurich. In each city 3 to 6 people are invited to a common evening, standing under the topic "time for responsibility". The invitation gives the possibility to discuss about this topic. At the end the discussion will be summarized as a short text at the website. Then the guests turn to hosts and invite themselves 3 to 6 people and use the conclusion of the invitation they took part as a topic for their own invitation. With this principle the project goes on until the process dies. On the website one can obtain all reports and see how the original topic developed in different directions.

So an independent growing organism is created. People are the building blocks, conversations connect them and the website makes the process visible - thus the single person can see his connection to the big whole.

The project initiation by Simona Koch in Vienna has been held at
Austrian Association of Women Artists, Vienna, Austria
on July 25th, 2007

Invited guests:
Christoph Kolar, student of post-conceptual art practices
Andreas Landl, chief editor http://friedensnews.at
accompanied by Doro Erharter, architect
Mareike Spilger, student of international development
Evelin Stermitz, media artist
Karin Sulimma, sculptress

Fri Oct 20, 2006 00:00 - Wed May 16, 2007

Cyberfem. Feminisms on the electronic landscape.
http://cyberfem.net/
curated by Ana Martinez-Collado
October 20th, 2006 - January 21st, 2007
Espai d'art contemporani de Castello (EACC), Castello, Spain
http://eacc.es/

Cyberfem. Feminisms on the electronic landscape, a wider territory; a hybrid space for creativity and activism, constructed with the new digital technologies. For just over a decade now, we have been seeing the rapid revolution and permanent redefinition of feminist issues, policies on identity, artistic practices and new technologies. Theoretical discourses that widen their paradigms and become polluted by other disciplines, myths and stereotypes, are questioned. Artistic practices that reach beyond their own limits, nomad identities, all in the context of gradually advancing information technology.

At the heart of the debate is the issue of identity. It is, unavoidably, a political issue, based on a premise that is fast becoming a paradigm during these first few years of the 21st century: the concept of identity as a “social construct”. The cyborg identity (or identities) is used as a visual metaphor for contemporary subjects. Today, more than ever, Donna Haraway’s famous affirmation that “we are all Cyborgs now” is no longer such a stunning and provocative statement. But what in fact are we? What race, sex, identity, sexuality, race, cultural identity…? Representing identity is, today, a more attractive and dangerous battlefield than ever before.

It involves the construction, redefinition and vindication of new configurations of identity in a new technological and information-based social fabric. In the early stages, artists, critics, political activists and historians were drawn by the ide of colonizing the web and building on the larger landscape provided by IT communications. Driven on by a final Utopian urge, they got involved in cyberspace with the purpose of making global creativity and universal freedom a reality.

It was in this context that feminism encountered a wide-open space, full of possibilities; web territory was clearly a “seductive” area for women to get involved in: this was cyber-feminism. The origins of cyber-feminism coincided with the growth of the wider-ranging feminism typical of the 1990s. It was a feminism that burst onto the culture scene, expanding its theoretical and practical developments. Feminism, like the entire modern programme, has undergone an intensely self-critical process, distancing itself from any form of dogmatism and opening its doors to a multitude of narrative options. These forms of feminism extended their boundaries in terms of recounting experience, discussions on gender and sex, the intercultural universe and the development of new technologies.

Today, to talk of (cyber)-feminism - feminism, the Internet, art, and activism - is to talk of experimental creativity, communication, research, interactivity, activism and association. The Internet has become firmly established as a space where women are visible from multiple and diverse angles.

This multi-faceted diversity was made apparent at the very beginning of the so-called cyber-feminist movement. The movement’s theoretical foundations were provided by Donna Haraway, Sadie Plant, or the scandalous and provocative VNS Matrix. But it became an actual movement when, in September 1997, the First Cyber-feminist International was held during Documenta X, organised by OBN (Old Boys Network).

The aim of the exhibition Cyberfem. Feminisms on the electronic landscape, is to provide an overview of the diverse range of options, discourses and narratives in which women are involved, in the expanded territory provided by the new technologies. It is an open landscape, in which different discourses on gender, sex, controversial biotechnology and intercultural debates all converge, in the global context of new information technology.

This diversity is a feature of the selected participants; artists, critics and activists, both solo and in groups. By widening the field, the chosen formats are also affected, ranging from pieces designed exclusively as Web projects, to installation pieces, performances and associative projects.

Faced with a state of permanent confrontation, conflict and ambiguity, the key to establishing an organised understanding of visual imagery is to take a stance. Taking a stance implies responsibility and political commitment. Technologies are ways of life, social orders, ways of viewing things. World disputes are disputes about how to see things. How should we look at things? Where should we look at them from?

Cyberfem is an attempt to show us this process and query its potential developments in the future. In the context of current geo-political, economic and cultural conflict, a wider, or expanded, version of cyber-feminism can, via partial policies, help to keep presumptions of difference within the same social order alive, and help us to visualize these differences.

Cyberfem imposes its expanded model of projects, embracing installations using various digital technologies, ranging from video to the PC screen with incorporated web devices, interactive projects, performances, lectures, documentation and Web projects. In most cases there is a notable incursion of the expanded field of feminist production into the electronic space, fostering an interrelation of real and virtual spaces as specific to the post-media condition of our culture.

The exhibition occupies the main spaces at the Espai d´Art Contemporani of Castello. In some cases, the projects step outside the confines of the museum walls with performances, works in the public space and off-museum devices.

Participating artists:
Annie Abrahams, Natalie Bookchin & Alexei Shulguin, Critical Art Ensemble, Salome Cuesta, Shu Lea Cheang, Coco Fusco & Ricardo Dominguez, Cindy Gabriela Flores, Dora Garcia, Marina Grzinic & Aina Smid, Lynn Hershmann, Identity\_Runners (Diane Ludin, Agnese Trocchi, Francesca da Rimini), Deb King, Olia Lialina, Jess Loseby, Margot Lovejoy, Kristin Lucas, Prema Murthy, Ana Navarrete, OBN (Old Boys Network), Julia Scher, Anne-Marie Schleiner & Talice Lee, Elisabeth Smolarz, Evelin Stermitz, Cornelia Sollfrank, subRosa (Hyla Willis Faith Wilding and James Tsang), Victoria Vesna, Linda Wallace and Eva Wohlgemuth.