Jurisdiction Shopping by Paolo Cirio Senior Curator: Lanfranco Aceti Associate Curator: Vince Dziekan Curators: Ozden Sahin and Jonathan Munro

“As a general rule, it is taxation that monetarizes the economy; it is taxation that creates money, and it necessarily creates it in motion, in circulation, with turnover, and also in a correspondence with services and goods in the current of that circulation.” [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 443.]

Paolo Cirio’s Jurisdiction Shopping is an exhibition that focuses on the current schizophrenic post-postmodern relationships between state, corporations and citizens. The personification of corporations and their increasingly transnational nature has produced a new set of relationships that have excluded and exempted some people from participation in the shared onus (responsibility) towards the state. At the same time, these privileged few continue operating illegally within the state; living, abusing and corrupting through financial malpractices the very society within which they live.

Cirio’s work democratizes this process of escaping from one’s obligations towards the state by allowing a liberalized and widespread participation in the process of tax evasion – no longer a privilege of the ‘rich few.’

Jurisdiction Shopping offers the viewer the possibility of engaging with a series of artworks that are based on the artist’s experience of attempting to generalize practices of illegality, therefore, presenting the possibility of a world within which exist frameworks for a generalized tax evasion.

This is a period in which social injustice, illegal market and financial behaviors, corporate malfeasance as well as multiple obscure and hidden charges have become a form of private taxation and vexation parallel to the public taxations and vexations of corrupt states. These are phenomena that are contributing to the creation of large under classes within Europe and North America. In this context, it is important to understand Cirio’s artistic vision as one that presents mass tax evasion as the new great social equalizer and democratic approach to illegality.

This exhibition and its artworks poke fun directly at the failure of the state in recycling itself in a new corporate and economic identity, as well as the failure of the social body to understand that the new corporate mythology and its systems are, in Deleuzian terms, part of the same old apparatus of capture or extortion. Both the state and the social body have been captured and are being squeezed from the corporate global economics that were presented as the saving grace of a concept of society that had been declared dead in the 1980s and that no longer exists.

Kasa Gallery is proud to present its new exhibition Jurisdiction Shopping by Paolo Cirio, opening on June 14, 2013, based on the artist’s most recent Internet artwork Loophole for All.

Jurisdiction Shopping and Decoding the Flow are two solo exhibitions by Paolo Cirio that were made possible by the partnership between Kasa Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts.

Exhibition Dates: June 14 – July 31, 2013

Opening Cocktail: June 14, 2013 at 19:00

Address: Kasa Galeri Bankalar Cad. No: 2 Karakoy Istanbul

Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday

Notes on the Artist and the Artworks

Paolo Cirio is a contemporary artist whose artworks evoke activism for a more equal world. Cirio’s latest artwork Loophole for All is an art performance and intervention that fights against corruption and injustice whilst reconsidering the artist’s position and role in contemporary post-postmodern society.

Loophole for All aims to draw attention towards the relationship between today’s global economy and the alarming amount of tax-dodging activities by international corporations. The focal point of Loophole for All is international companies currently profiting from the legal secrecy provided by the Cayman Islands. Cirio’s activism is directed towards 200,000 companies, which he has identified by hacking into the government servers of the Cayman Islands. After stealing the list of all involved companies, Cirio has issued counterfeited “Certificates of Incorporation” from the Cayman Islands’ company registry. He has made them available for a short period of time on the website Loophole4All.com, in exchange for US Dollar 0.99.

Following and battling with legal threats and after having being accused of making profits over illegal data, the artist now distributes these certificates for free.

The installation at Kasa Gallery, the paper trail of this project, will be displayed with prints of the documents of this scheme.

Among the printed and framed subsidiary certificates, there are the IDs and bills of the artist. The audience at the exhibition space will be able to peruse through the identities of companies from a pile of thousands of counterfeited “Certificates of Incorporation.”

Loophole for All and other works of Paolo Cirio indicate a vital relation between activism and art. Other important works of Paolo Cirio include; Google will Eat Itself (2005), Amazon Noir (2006) and Face to Facebook (2011), all part of his Hacking Monopolism Trilogy.

In these three works, the idea of revelation of the hegemony of online systems and the ‘loophole’ possibility generated as a result of the legal enforceability of such systems provide the viewer with an aesthetic perspective on the current interwoven relationships between art, society and issues related to political economy.

Other Cirio’s artworks that touch upon the related topics include, P2P Gift Credit Card (2010) which challenges the inequalities present in the current financial circuit by presenting the viewers with a new visionary monetary policy.

Cirio’s artist statement underlines that his works aspire to educate, inform, investigate, organize and influence contemporary society through the manipulation of media, information and communication. The artist creates aesthetic mythologies which play with and adopt themes and techniques used for the fabrication of realities in advertising strategies, political spin and entertainment, as well as in the economic and legal languages and their social applications.

Artist Biography:

Paolo Cirio

Award-winning artist born in 1979, Italy. Paolo Cirio has worked as a media artist in various fields: net-art, street-art, video-art, software-art and experimental fiction. He investigates perception and the creation of cultural, political and economic realities manipulated by modes of control over information’s power. His work is built up on the interaction between media and performance.

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Website: http://kasagaleri.sabanciuniv.edu

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kasa-Galeri/77695156678

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kasagaleri

A POUND OF FLESH by Lanfranco Aceti sponsored by NeMe, Cyprus When: Thursday May 23, 2013, from 10:30 to 12:30 Where: Limassol Municipal Market, Kanari st, Limassol Curated by: Helene Black, Ozden Sahin and Jonathan Munro Coordinated by: Yiannis Colakides

MoCC and NeMe present A Pound of Flesh, a series of interventions and new artworks by Lanfranco Aceti. The artworks, installations, performances, videos and photographs, focus on the current social crisis and question relationships of power and money.

“They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes [sic.]. […] They produce their daubs undisturbed by the mighty or by the screams of the ravaged.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 149-150.

A Pound of Flesh will see a performance taking place at the local market in Limassol in order to question the current European economic crisis and its social impact.

If the political abuse of the economically deprived of society is nothing else than a process of consumption and devouring, what is left for European citizens but to offer a pound of flesh?

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Trimming the Arts: Art Cuts and the Role of the Artist within Societies in Crisis by Lanfranco Aceti at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Megaro Hadjisavva 2, Evagorou Avenue 1097, Nicosia, Cyprus Wednesday May 22, 2013, from 19:30 to 20:30

Introduction by: Andre Zivanari
Chaired by: Yiannis Colakides

The Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Kasa Gallery, NeMe and Point Center for Contemporary Art present a talk by Lanfranco Aceti “Trimming the Arts: Art Cuts and the Role of the Artist within Societies in Crisis.”

Taking as its starting point Pier Paolo Pasolini’s analysis of exploitation of labor and Jean Baudrillard’s idea of commodification Trimming the Arts examines the current metaphysical remnants of state, society and the citizen.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” (let them eat cake), exclaimed Queen Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). Similarly, Silvio Berlusconi, denying the effects of the crisis in Italy at the press conference of the G20 in Cannes, declared that “i ristoranti sono pieni,” (the restaurants are full.)

The talk will present and discuss the artistic and curatorial practice of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, addressing the role that art has to play, if any role at all, in the current crisis that is not solely economic but a crisis of society itself, since the concepts of citizenship and state are not just in crisis but have become trite illusory representations; simulacra of no value.

If you are interested in the topics related to the financial crisis and its impact on the arts, MoCC has created an online form to survey the field.

The Deadly Cuts Form will provide us with the data regarding art organizations that have closed as a consequence of the current economic crisis or that have had their funding cut.

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Not Here Not There, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 19 Issue 1 ISBN: 978-1-906897-20-8 ISSN: 1071-4391 Date of Publication: January 15, 2013 Number of Pages: 177 Volume Editors: Lanfranco Aceti and Richard Rinehart Editors: Ozden Sahin, Jonathan Munro and Catherine M. Weir

The print issue of LEA Volume 19 Issue 1 Not Here Not There is available on Amazon.

This LEA publication has a simple goal: surveying the current trends in augmented reality artistic interventions. There is no other substantive academic collection currently available, and it is with a certain pride that LEA presents this volume which provides a snapshot of current trends as well as a moment of reflection on the future of AR interventions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Not Here, Not There: An Analysis Of An International Collaboration To Survey Augmented Reality Art
Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti
Click here for full article.

Site, Non-site, and Website
Introduction by Richard Rinehart
Click here for full article.

The Variable Museum: Off-Topic Art
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by John Bell
Click here for full article.

Translocated Boundaries
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Jacob Garbe
Click here for full article.

In Between: Experiencing Liminality
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Dragoş Gheorghiu & Livia Ştefan
Click here for full article.

Hacking: A New Political and Cultural Practice
by Christina Grammatikopoulou
Click here for full article.

Connecticity, Augmented Perception of the City
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Salvatore Iaconesi & Oriana Persico
Click here for full article.

Augmented Resistance: The Possibilities for AR and Data Driven Art
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Conor McGarrigle
Click here for full article.

Situated Soundscapes: Redefining Media Art and the Urban Experience
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Natasa Paterson & Fionnuala Conway
Click here for full article.

A New Relic Emerges: Image as Subject to Object
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Rebecca Peel
Click here for full article.

Re-Visualizing Afghanistan in “what if im the bad guy”: Using Palimpsest to Create an AR Documentary
+ Interview, Statement, Artwork
by Aaron A. Reed & Phoenix Toews
Click here for full article.

DEADLY CUTS TO THE ARTS: THE ART OF SURVIVAL, RESISTANCE OR FIGHT?
by Lanfranco Aceti
Art-Athina – International Contemporary Art Fair
Faliro Pavilion (Taekwondo)
Hellenic Olympic Properties
2 Moraitini str., 175 61 Palaio Faliro
Athens, Greece
Sunday May 19, 2013, from 15:00 to 16:00
Chaired by: Artemis Potamianou
Curator & Co-ordinator for Art Athina 2013: Contemporaries & Platform Project

A talk at the Art-Athina – International Contemporary Art Fair that will provide an overview of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) and its new initiative, Deadly Cuts to the Arts.

Abstract
As the art community continues to see a slew of cuts across artistic fields and across countries, it becomes clearer that the financial crisis is not abating. Cities in Europe – even within Northern European countries – have been hit hard by failed investments in financial schemes and funds that continue to reveal their rigged structures and malpractices within both the banking and political systems.

The consequence is that cuts across the art world, historically considered by the system as superfluous and unnecessary, are now happening in conjunction with cuts to essential public services such as health and education. This culture of cuts and budget severity is implemented largely on the lowest strata of society, sparing those who have contributed the most to create the current status of economic disarray and social turmoil.

Cities and regional governments try to rescue their budgets by eliminating expenditures for cultural events, branding as useless the cultural lives of entire cities and regions, or by branding as leeches those who have worked and toiled for years and are now being deprived of essential services.

In the context of the public support to the arts, public funds have traditionally assisted the cultural development of artistic practices and models that would have not survived in a private competition system and have, on the long term, helped to create thriving communities.

This year sees numerous talks and art organizations presenting and debating topics on the current economic crisis. Nevertheless some of the most pertinent questions that should be addressed are: Is the current capitalistic framework and its economics a form of violence? What should the response be from the art world to economic violence? Is survival a good enough strategy and what kind of legacy will it leave? Or should we be looking at more active forms of resistance? Should the advocacy of social fight and economic re-distribution be part of the economic approach of artistic practices? Or should we just ignore the whole problem and blissfully bathe in a ‘simulated’ concern for current social realities?

The talk – in conjunction with an international online survey titled Deadly Cuts to the Arts http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/deadly-cuts-form/ – will explore the contemporary issues that artists and cultural creators face in order to develop an analysis that moves beyond some of the more institutionalized experiences and discourses on contemporary social failures.

The Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) is developing a research project, under my directorship, to assess and map the impact of the arts funding reductions in several European Countries and North America, and would like to invite individuals and funded organizations to contribute their data.

This is a form that will provide us with the data regarding art organizations that have closed as a consequence of the current economic crisis or that have had their funding cut.

The research project will analyze the impact of the current economic crisis on the arts throughout the following countries (Austria, Canada, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States) comparing official data with data provided on each specific territory.

The project aims to create a repository of data that can be accessed and poured through to gain a clear impression of the affected organizations and the current state of the arts from 2007 to present.

MoCC will create, using the information gathered, a series of data visualizations, as well as art commissions, curatorial projects, exhibitions, research analyses and publications. It will promote initiatives that will be showcased and presented at international events and biennials.

At the end of 2012, one such organization effected, was the NIMk. The activities of the Netherlands Media Art Institute ceased as of 31 December, 2012.

To assist us with this task, we are asking individuals and arts organizations to send us the following information on the art organizations that have closed or have received funding cuts in the period 2007 – present.

You can provide this information by using our online web form available at this link: http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/deadly-cuts-form/

Also, we would like to display, online, the Letter of Funding Cuts that art institutions received during the period 2007 – present.

These Letter of Funding Cuts can be scanned at 300dpi resolution and emailed to: museumofcontemporarycuts@gmail.com or posted, as a physical copy to be archived by MoCC.

Postal address: Ref. Letter of Funding Cuts To: Lanfranco Aceti, MoCC Director, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Orhanli/Tuzla, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey

Letters should be sent ideally by December 31, 2013 – but we will continue to accept them throughout the life of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts.

Enquires about this particular project, collaborations for exhibitions and research with MoCC should be sent to: info@museumofcontemporarycuts.org

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We acknowledge the support of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR), International Association for Visual Culture, Kasa Gallery, Sabanci University, Chelsea College, Westminster University and Goldsmiths College.

Image credit: Vacant, 2013, Jonathan Munro. Digital image.

Fifty Sisters (And Other Relations) by Jon McCormak is the new exhibition by MEP (the Media Exhibition Platform) in collaboration with LEA (the Leonardo Electronic Almanac). Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti, Vince Dziekan and Christiane Paul.

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Jon McCormack’s Fifty Sisters is a series of images algorithmically “grown” from computer code using artificial evolution and generative grammars. Each plant-like form in the series is derived from deconstructed graphic elements derived from oil company logos. The title of the work refers to the original “Seven Sisters” – a cartel of seven oil companies that dominated the global petrochemical industry and Middle East oil production from the mid-1940s until the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Oil has shaped our civilisation and driven its unprecedented growth over the last century. Fossil fuels began as plants that over millions of years were transformed by geological processes into the coal and oil that powers modern civilisation. To create this artwork, a variety of “digital genes” (a computer equivalent of DNA) were crafted to replicate the structure and form of plants from the Mesozoic Age, the geologic period when oil deposits began to accumulate. These digital genes were used to “grow” imaginary plant species in the computer, being then subject to evolutionary processes of mutation and selection. Through a process akin to selective breeding, new and exotic species were evolved. The geometric elements of these digital organisms were derived from the geometric abstractions of oil company logos, which often subtly reference plants and the environment. In the final images, some or the original elements remain quite obvious, others are so strangely distorted or changed by evolution, that they are only subliminally recognisable.

Reminding us that the current predominance of oil commerce originated from plants, McCormack’s Fifty Sisters – and his more recent extension of the work, which playfully situates computer-rendered oil company logo elements in real photographic landscapes – generates a multitude of allusions: to the world economy’s dependency on oil, to the all-pervasiveness in everyday life of oil-based products like plastic, to the natural resource petroleum, and to environmental destruction on a massive scale caused by drilling and transporting oil.

The work is currently on semi-permanent display in the museum foyer at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Together with Codeform (a virtual ecosystem running in the museum’s Deep Space environment through until September 2013), these new works were developed at the Ars Electronica FutureLab as part of the Australian Artist-in-Residence program, which was initiated and produced by Novamedia in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts and Ars Electronica. The artist acknowledges the generous support of these organisations, along with Monash University and the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP1094064), in realising this work.

Vince Dziekan
Digital Media Curator, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Co-director, Media Exhibition Platform

Director:

Lanfranco Aceti
Director and Senior Curator, Kasa Gallery
Founder and Director, Media Exhibition Platform

Co-Directors:

Christiane Paul
Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Vince Dziekan
Monash Art Design + Architecture

Featured Artist:

Jon McCormack is an Australian-based electronic media artist and researcher in computing. He is currently Associate Professor in Computer Science, an ARC Australian Research Fellow and co-director of the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA) at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Since the late 1980s McCormack has worked with computer code as a medium for creative expression. Inspired by the complexity and wonder of a diminishing natural world, his work is concerned with electronic “after natures” – alternate forms of artificial life that may one day replace the biological nature lost through human progress and development.

His artworks have been widely exhibited at leading galleries, museums and symposia, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Gallery (Liverpool, UK), ACM SIGGRAPH (USA), Prix Ars Electronica (Austria) and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Australia). He is the recipient of 16 awards for new media art and computing research including prizes at Ars Electronica (Austria), Images du Futur (Canada), New Voices, New Visions (USA), Alias/Wavefront (USA), The John Lansdown Award for Interactive Media (Europe/UK), Nagoya Biennial (Japan) and the 2012 Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. The monograph, Impossible Nature: the art of Jon McCormack, was published by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in 2005 and documents McCormack’s creative achievements over the last 15 years.

LEA International Curatoriate

Lanfranco Aceti, Christiane Paul & Vince Dziekan

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For more information contact:
Ozden Sahin, ozden.sahin@leoalmanac.org

Leonardo is a registered trademark of the ISAST.

Connor Graham, Martin Gibbs, and Lanfranco Aceti, eds., “Death, Afterlife and Immortality of Bodies and Data,” The Information Society 29, no. 3: (2013).

The edited volume for Routledge is out. It has been a great collaboration with Connor and Martin and I hope you will like the result. The link to The Information Society where there are the abstracts.

If you can access the Taylor & Francis site directly, please click here.

Extract from the introduction to the issue
This special issue poses questions concerning death, afterlife and immortality in the age of the Internet. It extends previous work by examining current and emerging practices of grieving and memorializing supported by new media. It suggests that people’s lives today are extended, prolonged and ultimately transformed through the new circulations, repetitions and re-contextualizations on the Internet and other platforms. It also shows that publics are being formed and connected with in new ways and new practices and rituals are emerging, as the traditional notions of the body are being challenged. We argue that these developments have implications for how people will be discovered and conceived of in the future. We consider possible extensions to the research presented here in terms of people, practices and data. Firstly, some sections of the population, in particular those who are the dying and populations in developing countries and the Global South, have largely been neglected to date. Secondly, practices such as (online) suicide and sacrilegious or profane behaviours remain largely uninvestigated. Thirdly, the discussion of the management of the digital self after death has only begun. We conclude by posing further questions concerning the prospect of emerging cities of the dead.

ARTICLES
Millions Now Living Will Never Die: Cultural Anxieties about the Afterlife of Information
Grant David Bollmer

Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning
Jed R. Brubaker, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish

Larger than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-enchantment of Society
Alexandra Sherlock

PERSPECTIVES
Designing for Death and Apocalypse: Theodicy of Networks and Uncanny Archives
Denisa Kera

Digital Gravescapes: Digital Memorializing on Facebook
Scott H. Church

The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief
Jessa Lingel

Perspectives on Virtual Veneration
William Sims Bainbridge

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We Have Come to Shack Up with You is a new art project by Lanfranco Aceti.

Lanfranco Aceti Inc. sponsors 10 return train trips from London to Wendover, to the country home of the current Prime Minister. In the spirit of sacrifice and in order to share the costs of the current debt, perhaps the Prime Minister may consider providing accommodation in the extra number of rooms of his country home.

This rambling performance that sees an idyllic journey in the English countryside as well as a walk up to the country house of the PM will provide an artistic and aesthetic moment to reflect on the philosophical implications of a growing divide between the haves and have nots, between petty crimes by the lower classes heavily punished and global criminal activities by the higher classes that go unpunished.

On the 1st April, 2013 (as a bad April Fools’ joke) a set of new stringent changes have been made to the United Kingdom’s welfare system. One of the most controversial changes by the current government is to penalize those living in social housing; the disadvantaged and out of work. Find out more about the bedroom tax.

When: 13th April 2013

Time: 10am – 5pm

Where: Leaving from London Marylebone to Wendover

To apply for this trip and be one of the lucky 10 to participate in the artwork please get in touch with the Museum of Contemporary Cuts by accessing the link to the form and provide your name, email, telephone number and a short text explaining the reason why you should join the trip.

Additional to the cost of train travel the 10 attendees will receive lunch and a pint in one of the local pubs.

If you have any queries about this event, please contact Jonathan Munro and Ozden Sahin:
info@museumofcontemporarycuts.org

About Chequers the residency of the current Prime Minister

Chequers is the official country home of the Prime Minister of the UK. It is an Elizabethan mansion in the Chiltern hills near Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, and was given to the nation by Lord Lee of Fareham under the Chequers Estate Act 1917, which came into effect in 1921. Its estate contains about 500 ha/1235 acres of farmlands and woods.

We Have Come to Shack Up with You is realized by Lanfranco Aceti Inc. with the collaboration of MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts).

Artworks by Lanfranco Aceti.
Senior Curators: Joasia Krysa and Marquard Smith.
Curators: Jonathan Munro and Ozden Sahin.

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The Cost of Living: Metastasising Epistemes and Social Crisis

Thursday 11th April, 6 pm
Royal College of Art, South Kensington, Stevens Building, Humanities Seminar Room
Participants: Professor Lanfranco Aceti, Professor Johnny Golding, Dr Marquard Smith and Professor Julian Stallabrass.

In absentia: Dr Tom Corby

Convenor: Bill Balaskas

This seminar will investigate the way in which artists can employ different media in combination with scientific methods and data in order to express a critique of the socioeconomic environment they live in.

If we were to draw a parallel between the human body and the social body, today’s economic evaluations and parameters argue in favor of discarding from the social body those elements that are defined – in economic terms – as unproductive and dysfunctional.

The Cost of Living will adopt as its starting point two recent exhibitions by British artist Tom Corby: No Detectable Level, taking place online, at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC); and Body of Evidence, which takes place at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul under the directorship and curatorship of Lanfranco Aceti. Using the condition of his own body as the ‘raw material’ of his work, Corby blurs the boundaries between medicine, data, documentation, economics and art and invites us to experiment with visual languages and communication tools.

The event aims at exploring interdisciplinary modes of working by addressing a diverse audience of artists, designers and theoreticians. It will bring together academics and artists working in a variety of institutions in view of forging new collaborations, through highlighting the common preoccupations that the ongoing economic crisis has generated.

Museum of Contemporary Cuts: www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org

Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curator).

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No Detectable Level

Exhibition Dates: March 21 – April 20, 2013

Artists: Tom Corby and Gavin Baily

Senior Curator: Lanfranco Aceti
Associate Curator: Vince Dziekan
Curator: Ozden Sahin
Curator: Jonathan Munro

Produced in collaboration with Goldsmiths College, Sabanci University, Kasa Gallery, the University of Westminster and IAVC (International Association for Visual Culture).

No Detectable Level (Art, Data, Economics and Health) is a new exhibition by British artist Tom Corby, in collaboration with Gavin Baily. Developed for the MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts) platform on Facebook and Twitter, the project consists of images, texts, sound, video and data set that are distributed online daily and archived on the exhibition page of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts [www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org]. The exhibition can be followed on Facebook and Twitter, starting March 21 until April 20, 2013.

Bodies in pain, bodies undergoing change and bodies that malfunction produce huge amounts of medical data which connect to other systems (medical, financial, bio systemic and affective). No Detectable Level (Art, Data, Economics and Health) presents a series of artistic responses based on the concept that the information flow between these systems produces complex ecologies of matter and information that evidence the ridiculous normative distinctions between matter and virtuality. For those, who like the artist are undergoing medical processes and procedures, the existential condition is that of being both subject and producer of data. This is a unique context that allows the artist to reconsider his own potential and to use and mould his condition to new ends; to make work from this experience that interprets and acts on it in different ways.

No Detectable Level forms part of a larger artistic multifaceted project (Blood and Bones) that questions the meaning of life and death. The exhibition seeks to find ways of understanding this complex process of relational engagements between the body and its data, its functions and dysfunctions, and its part in larger and more complex ecologies: those of the financial systems, social structures and aesthetic frameworks. Through producing new artworks as part of this exhibition, Corby provides an aesthetic understanding of the sick body framed within parameters of financial impact and financial gain.

The sick body becomes an ill for society and, within the current ideological framework, is an ‘ill body’ or a ‘bad body.’ In some cases there is a presumption and assumption of negativity and burden: the ill body is costly to society, and within the medical system is functional as long as it is a financial source of revenue, a useful experiment or a body that can be carved up, and sold. Yet, the body resiliently continues to be a barer of emotions, lots of emotions that are connected to the data flows, to the financial flows, to the social engagements and to the various processes of exploitation against which the open access body no longer has defenses. Cut, dissected, portioned, slashed, sectioned, divided, separated, chopped and fragmented in a dispersed multiplicity of data, needs, wants and gains that are no longer those of the body itself, but of a corporate society at large, ready to recycle, re-invest, re-use and re-appropriate bodies.

Tom Corby’s No Detectable Level challenges the viewer to ask questions that are ignored and left unanswered on the future of contemporary society and our place in it. A place that has to respond to a range of financial, social and systemic criteria within which there is no longer space for emotions, nor time for considering their value or loss.

Museum of Contemporary Cuts: www.museumofcontemporarycuts.org

Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curator).

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Artist Biographies:

Tom Corby

Tom is the Director of CREAM’s Doctoral Programme, deputy Director of CREAM at the University of Westminster. He studied painting at Chelsea college of Art (1990) and completed a PhD at Chelsea in 2001. He has taught at Westminster since 2001 after previously working at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the University of Hertfordshire.

His interdisciplinary artworks (in collaboration with Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards including: nomination for the FILE Festival Digital Language award 2010; the jury nominated award at the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2007; honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 and 2000; honorary mention: “The Post-Cagian Interactive”, “Art on the Net” The Machida City Museum of Arts, Tokyo and the main festival prize Cynet Art 1999. In 2000 he was nominated for the “International Media Art Award 2000″, at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany and was the artist in residence at the ICA London 1998. Reviews include Art Review, Art Monthly, Intercommunication, Artist’s Newsletter and Acoustic Space.

Gavin Baily

Gavin is a producer, developer, and founder of TraceMedia. He has worked on arts, visualisation and research projects in various commercial and academic contexts. He studied Fine Art at Oxford University and Computer Science at University College London.

[*] The project also involves Kasa Gallery’s 2013 art residency: Body in Residence. This special international residence focuses on the relationship between human data and the body. During this period, Tom Corby will present his international solo exhibition titled Body of Evidence at Kasa Gallery and, in collaboration with MoCC – the Museum of Contemporary Cuts – will produce a new set of artworks for the exhibition titled No Detectable Level that will analyze the relationship between contemporary financial cuts and the body representing and re-asking basic questions that have been left unanswered.

Body of Evidence
by Tom Corby and Gavin Baily

Senior Curator: Lanfranco Aceti
Associate Curator: Vince Dziekan
Curator: Ozden Sahin
Junior Curator: Jonathan Munro

Produced in collaboration with MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts), Goldsmiths College, Sabanci University and the University of Westminster.

Body of Evidence by British artist Tom Corby, in collaboration with Gavin Baily, is taking place at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul from March 21 to April 20, 2013.

The exhibition initiates a series of new artworks and installations designed to blur the boundaries between medicine, data, documentation, economics and art. Conceived as a complex autoportrait of the body undergoing advanced treatment for cancer, the exhibition serves as the primary site where the possibilities, visibilities and public manifestations of the body at its most vulnerable are tested to their limits.

Body of Evidence forms part of a larger, multi-faceted project (Blood and Bones) in which the artist faces a complex set of questions about the meaning of life and death. [*] These are fundamental questions that art has wrestled with for centuries. The challenge presented in the case of Tom Corby’s exhibition is how to make sense of the relationship between physicality and data; materiality and immateriality; medical intervention and metastasis (where, in the broadest material and clinical sense of the word, the death spiral of the afflicted body is mirrored by the wider economic and environmental ecologies within which it is situated).

Employing an idiosyncratic set of approaches to the process of data visualization, the installation is composed of a series of objects related to the artist’s treatment that together act as a physical visualization of the data his illness is producing during his treatment. These data touch upon and use personal objects such as the hats he wears on a daily basis and which he documents via his blog. Together, these elements reveal a meticulous and methodically structured approach that challenges viewers to detach themselves from all emotional aspects. As the body becomes subjected to the procedures and processes of ordering, selecting, sectioning and framing, it transforms into a grand taxonomic work. In this sense, the exhibition exhibits a certain character typical of the British mindset; particularly, calling upon the indexing fetish attributable to the great scientific explorers of the Victorian era.

In this case, however, the exploration that Tom Corby is embarking upon is not across an uncharted ocean, unexplored land mass or previously unseen/inaccessible dimension of physical reality. The exhibition Body of Evidence charts the artist’s expedition inside his own body and across his own soul, exploring the existential data of a body/object subjected to medical intervention; the body as a system that while in the process of shutting down, continues to produce data.

In equal parts heroic and obsessive, this project touches on attitudes to death and disease in a wider sense, namely a desire to find ways, processes and forms to transcend the act of termination and come to an accord with our feelings about it.

Exhibition Dates: March 21 – April 20, 2013
Opening Cocktail: March 21, 2013 at 18:00
Address: Kasa Galeri Bankalar Cad. No: 2 Karakoy Istanbul
Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday
Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curatorial Assistant)

Lanfranco & Co. Newsletters: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/newsletters

Artist Biographies:

Tom Corby

Tom is the Director of CREAM’s Doctoral Programme, deputy Director of CREAM at the University of Westminster. He studied painting at Chelsea college of Art (1990) and completed a PhD at Chelsea in 2001. He has taught at Westminster since 2001 after previously working at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the University of Hertfordshire.

His interdisciplinary artworks (in collaboration with Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards including: nomination for the FILE Festival Digital Language award 2010; the jury nominated award at the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2007; honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 and 2000; honorary mention: “The Post-Cagian Interactive”, “Art on the Net” The Machida City Museum of Arts, Tokyo and the main festival prize Cynet Art 1999. In 2000 he was nominated for the “International Media Art Award 2000″, at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany and was the artist in residence at the ICA London 1998. Reviews include Art Review, Art Monthly, Intercommunication, Artist’s Newsletter and Acoustic Space.

Gavin Baily

Gavin is a producer, developer, and founder of TraceMedia. He has worked on arts, visualisation and research projects in various commercial and academic contexts. He studied Fine Art at Oxford University and Computer Science at University College London.

[*] The project also involves Kasa Gallery’s 2013 art residency: Body in Residence. This special international residence focuses on the relationship between human data and the body. During this period, Tom Corby will present his international solo exhibition titled Body of Evidence at Kasa Gallery and, in collaboration with MoCC – the Museum of Contemporary Cuts – will produce a new set of artworks for the exhibition titled No Detectable Level that will analyze the relationship between contemporary financial cuts and the body representing and re-asking basic questions that have been left unanswered.

This year opens with two major international exhibitions and a series of art events by Bill Balaskas. The press release below provides information on the exhibitions and events.

The Market Will Save The World at Kasa Gallery January 25 to March 8, 2013
The Vision of the Market at the Museum of Contemporary Cuts January 25 to March 8, 2013

Artist: Bill Balaskas
Image credit: Bill Balaskas, You are Leaving the Fantasy Sector, 2011, Mixed media installation.
Lego plastic toys (train, rails, Harry Potter figure), piece from the Berlin Wall (concrete), 75 x 75 x 20 cm.
Courtesy of Kalfayan Galleries (Athens – Thessaloniki). Photo by Constantin Paschou.

We thank for their gracious support: Sabanci University, the Royal College of Art and Kalfayan Galleries (Athens – Thessaloniki).

Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Senior Curator)
Ozden Sahin (Curator)
Jonathan Munro (Curatorial Assistant)

Is it possible to understand what is the image that the Market has of the world? And what is the image that we consume every day? What is the image that the Market portrays of itself, the world, and us?

Kasa Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) present two international exhibitions The Market Will Save The World and The Vision of the Market by London-based Greek artist Bill Balaskas.

The Market Will Save the World will present a survey of Balaskas’ practice that spans from the analysis of the economic crisis in Greece to the artist’s latest work, Monopoly (2013), a site-specific installation for Kasa Gallery.

The exhibition at Kasa Gallery follows Bill Balaskas’ intervention on the facade of the Royal College of Art in London, one of the most renowned art schools in the world.

The Vision of the Market will present images, video, or text by the artist every day on MoCC’s twitter and Facebook from January 25 to March 8, 2013. The images will then be collated and archived online.

The exhibition is part of a series of international events that see Balaskas’ artworks and art interventions develop between London and Istanbul – London, the traditional and historical site of financial markets and Istanbul, the financial center of a new emerging market, rapidly rising in the global economic landscape.

This international art project consists of four different major art events:

1) Bill Balaskas’ intervention on the facade of the Royal College of Art in London, one of the most renowned art schools in the world. In this unique and historical public location, next to the Royal Albert Hall, a 23-meter high banner reads “The market will save us.” This work is part of the RCA Research Biennial exhibition at the College from 21-27 January, where Balaskas is undertaking a PhD in Critical Writing.

2) Balaskas’ solo exhibition at Kasa Gallery titled The Market Will Save the World, which will present a survey of the artist’s practice that spans from the analysis of the economic crisis in Greece to his latest work, the site-specific installation Monopoly (2013). The exhibition at Kasa Gallery will open on January 25, 2013 with a performance during which Bill Balaskas will be handing helium balloons with the RCA banner phrase The market will save us printed on them. The balloons will be signed by the artist and tied on the wrists of 100 visitors on the opening night.

3) Kasa Gallery, which is supported by Sabanci University, will also present as part of the exhibition The Market Will Save the World the phrase The market will save us as a public advert on a full page of Frieze magazine’s March issue. By becoming part of the magazine, Bill Balaskas’ artwork shall adopt the dual and ambivalent character of an advert/commentary on the influence of globalized capitalism on art. This is a Kasa Gallery collaboration with the Royal College of Art, Kalfayan Galleries (Athens – Thessaloniki) and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC).

4) The exhibition The Vision of the Market will feature a series of images and videos shot in London and Istanbul by Bill Balaskas, which are inspired by and reference the artist’s video The Wealth of Nations (2010). This material will be accompanied by texts selected or written by the artist that will be disseminated one per day on MoCC’s Twitter and Facebook.

The exhibitions, arts interventions, images and videos will provide viewers with a vision of the omnipotence of the market: as a new god, this vision is holy, mystic, dogmatic and unassailable. A vision of the market’s forces that does not allow for any criticism, analyses or questions. “The righteousness of the Market is such, that to question it means to be forced on the Foucauldian boat of madness and being condemned to the empty wasteland of a hopeless horizon. The problem is that hopelessness, for an increasingly large strata of society, is the characterizing element of the current capitalistic vision,” said Lanfranco Aceti introducing these international events that will take place between London and Istanbul from January 25 to March 8, 2013.

Kasa Gallery is sponsored and supported by Sabanci University.

Venue information and dates

Address: Sabanci University Kasa Gallery Minerva Han Bankalar Caddesi No: 2 Karakoy 34420 Istanbul Turkey

Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 everyday except Sunday

Exhibition Dates: 25 January – 8 March 2013

2013 opens with a new curated exhibition titled The Market Will Save The World by Bill Balaskas. The exhibition is a Kasa Gallery collaboration with the Royal College of Art, Kalfayan Galleries (Athens – Thessaloniki) and the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC).

The Market Will Save the World will present a survey of Balaskas’ practice that spans from the analysis of the economic crisis in Greece to the artist’s latest work, Monopoly (2013), a site-specific installation for Kasa Gallery.

The exhibition at Kasa Gallery follows Bill Balaskas’ intervention on the facade of the Royal College of Art in London, one of the most renowned art schools in the world. In this unique and historical public location, next to the Royal Albert Hall, a 23-meter high banner will cover the facade of the Royal College of Art, featuring the phrase The market will save us.

The full press release is available on Kasa Gallery and on the website of the Royal College of Art.

Exhibition Dates: January 25 – March 8, 2013
Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday
Address: Kasa Galeri Bankalar Cad. No: 2 Karakoy Istanbul
Opening Cocktail: January 25, 2013 at 18:00
Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator)
Ozden Sahin (Curator)
Jonathan Munro (Curatorial Assistant)

This was my keynote at Through the Roadblocks a conference and exhibition organized in Cyprus by NeMe. As part of the show I exhibited a new artwork titled Reactions. Through the Roadblocks was a meta-project within which there were a variety of events and I curated Art, Culture, Memory and Trauma hosted by Prof. Janis Jefferies as part of the Thursday Club at Goldsmiths College in collaboration with Sabanci University, Kasa Gallery and LEA.

The final participation at the conference and exhibition in Cyprus was developed over two semesters and saw the participation of my MA student at Sabanci University, Caglar Cetin, who presented a paper titled Trauma as a Political Tool, Parodic Art as a Response: a Glimpse to Parody within “A Small Picture” in Cyprus and a new artwork produced for this project, A Small Picture. Both well received. (We wish to acknowledge the support for this project of Sabanci University and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.)

Currently I am planning to launch a special call for an edited book and create a research group of likeminded academics, artists and curators who would be interested in developing activities around Art, Culture, Memory and Trauma. I will launch the initial thematic proposal as part of OCR (Operational and Curatorial Research in Contemporary Art, Design, Science and Technology) – the new research center I am developing.

The abstract of the keynote is below, the full article will follow soon.

REACTIONS, INHERITANCE AND MEMORIES: GENETIC TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA THROUGH BLOOD AND NEURONS?

ABSTRACT

The paper will question if the human body is the physical invisible monument for memorialization, trauma and cultural inheritance. The argument for a biological alteration of the human body due to cultural traumatic experiences and the possible genetic transmission of these experiences through chemical and biological alteration has been part of bio-cultural debates that from the field of zoology and ethology have increasingly moved in to the realm of human biology and cultural studies. F. T. Cloak Jr. in the introduction to the article Is a Cultural Ethology Possible? presents the genetic inheritance of culture as a possibility to be considered “in order to describe and explain human behaviors which are species-specific, panhuman, and presumably genetically controlled.” [1]

If the body is the situ where invisible (or better almost physically invisible) traumatic inheritance and memories are located – the analysis of the body as locus of embodied memorialization and possible genetic transmission creates a new relationship between the individual’s body and the Body politic. It is literally the skin of the individual and not that of the statue that would provide a point of exchange “between the inner self and the outside world.” [2] The traumatized human body would become the ‘invisible monument’ for the memorialization of war, diaspora and other destructive events. It is the human body of the individual subject and object of trauma, and that of its descendants, that through genetic inheritance would become memorials calling “on the spectator to witness the follies and excesses of the state.” [3]

The process of memorialization, and even the diaspora following an event of destruction, could be interpreted no longer simply as a phenomenon of documentation and delocalization but as one of challenge to the Body politic and its endorsed historical interpretations. The art monument of the state is no longer the embodiment of the traumatic event and its memorialization is substituted by the body as the vessel of the invisible monument able to escape in its biology the structures, formulae and conditioning of national identity/conflict.

Art no longer “exists in that space between the memory of the witness and those documentary facts that the historian accepts as ‘objective’” and it no longer has to “seek and explore and make visible that indefinable perfect moment, knowable only from instant to instant, in which a person becomes a witness.” [4] The body, its neurons, its blood, its entire physicality are the constant place of memory: an invisible monument and a living record made of flesh and blood.

KEYWORDS

Invisible monument, Body politic, trauma, memorialization, XXIst century art,

Endnotes

[1] F. T. Cloak, Jr., “Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?,” Human Ecology 3, no. 3 (Jul., 1975): 161.
[2] Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London: Routledge, 1995), 79.
[3] Ibid., 93.
[4] Ibid., 198.

This was my keynote for the IMAC2012 and the Re-New Digital Art Festival, at Aalborg University Copenhagen. The conference is chaired by Morten Søndergaard.

The annual Re-New digital arts festival presents a wide selection of the newest ground-breaking works in digital music, video, installations, performative, and distributed / collaborative art.

The abstract is below. The full article is forthcoming.

WHO TERMINATED THE CYBORG?
THE NORMALIZATION OF CYBERNETICS, THE LOSS OF REVOLUTIONARY POWER AND THE RISE OF THE BUREAUCRAT

ABSTRACT

What remains of the revolutionary value of the cyborg? Donna Haraway’s vision that the cyborg would bring a new dawn, challenging the capitalistic, militaristic and patriarchal structures of contemporary society has not come to fruition. Is the failure of the revolutionary potential of technology (as a community and rhizomic force) allowing the cyborg to be subsumed and reined in by those very capitalistic, militaristic and patriarchal social hierarchies?

Rethinking the role that the cyborg and cyborgology play within contemporary society requires an analysis of the realities of the 21st century, beyond the ideological positioning and posturing of Cartesian dualistic approaches. Is there a third order, or any new order for that matter, that by moving beyond the established realities can offer an alternative to the reduction of the cyborg to a mass-marketable aesthetic and to a purchasable and downloadable series of upgrades? The lack of revolutionary value in current cyborgology stems from the fact that the ‘cyborg revolution’ is now offered by a global corporate world and presented as the latest fashionable tech gear. In this socio-political context, what remains of the initial vision of the cyborg are innovative new forms of enslavement and servitude that control the biomechanical parts of the body.

The article argues that the liberating contribution of the cyborg is nothing more than a controlled societal participation. The cyborg as a disruptive and innovative force no longer exists and with the loss of its revolutionary power comes the rise of the cyborg in a new ‘fashion,’ that of the bureaucrat.

KEYWORDS
Cyborg, revolution, politics, digital aesthetic, dystopia, utopia, technological innovation, Futurism

Touch and Go Special Issue Launch, Leonardo Electronic Almanac

6:30 – 8:30pm
Wednesday 26th September 2012
Watermans Arts Centre
40 High Street
Brentford
London TW8 0DS

An introduction by Lanfranco Aceti about Touch and Go, a special LEA issue produced on the occasion of Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art; a year-long festival coinciding with the Olympics and Paralympics in London hosting a series of installations that explore the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, boundaries and issues of interaction and participation.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac special issue Touch and Go is the result of discussions and the themes explored during the year-long Festival seminars at Watermans in collaboration with Goldsmiths University of London including audience engagement, new media geographies, digital art and illusion, gesture and art in virtual reality.

This issue explores the role interactivity and participation, as well as light art and new media approaches to the public space, may play in fostering engagement and shared forms of participation.

The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art has been made possible with the kind support of:

London Borough of Hounslow
Arts Council England
The Outer London Fund
Goldsmiths, University of London
The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation
The Japan Foundation
The Australian Government through the Australia Council and the NSW
Government through Arts NSW
Royal Holloway, University of London
Action Sharing and Camera di Commercio Industria Artigianato e
Agricoltura di Torino
Bonfiglioli Transmissions
Show Laser Systems
Atelier Michel Delarasse
Athens Video Art Festival
onedotzero

I am giving a talk on the 27th of September at Chelsea College. The talk is titled Experimenting, Curating and Commissioning: LEA, a Case for Art Experimentation in The Age of Social Media.

A presentation by Lanfanco Aceti, followed by a conversation with Prof. David Garcia, September 27, 2012.
LEA at Chelsea College for the CCW Graduate School Public Research Program.
5:30 – 7:00pm
Thursday 27th September 2012
Red Room
Chelsea College of Art & Design
16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU

Abstract: The current technological developments are re-designing the socio-political landscape within a complex economic context, obliging the art institutions and artists to re-thing old methodologies and find new approaches. The Leonardo Electronic Almanac, under the directorship of Lanfranco Aceti, is responding to these technological challenges with re-newed commitment by creating a series of international synergies that allow multiple project collaborations. Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, Goldsmiths College, Chelsea College, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Monash University and FACT are some of the institutions that by collaborating are developing new curatorial approaches, art commissions and publications to pursue an integrated and visible approach in the development and testing of creative ideas.

The Leonardo Digital Media Platform founded and directed by Lanfranco Aceti sees the participation and support as senior curators of Christiane Paul and Vince Dziekan.

Short Biography: Lanfranco Aceti works as an academic, artist and curator. He is Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, Department of Art and Computing; teaches Contemporary Art and Digital Culture at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,Sabanci University, Istanbul; and is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (The MIT Press, Leonardo journal and ISAST). He was the Artistic Director and Conference Chair for ISEA2011 Istanbul and works as gallery director atKasa Gallery in Istanbul. He has a Ph.D. from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. His work has been published in Leonardo, Routledge and Art Inquiry and his interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection between digital arts, visual culture and new media technologies.

Lanfranco Aceti is also the founder and director of the LEA Digital Media Platform and of the research center ORADST (Operational Research in Art, Design, Science and Technology) to be launched in 2013.

Together with Richard Rinehart I am announcing a special issue on augmented reality art of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac titled Not Here Not There at the ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose. This special issue is a curatorial and academic collaboration between Kasa Gallery (Sabanci University) and the Samek Art Gallery (Bucknell University). The issue follows two exhibitions of augmented reality art, one at Samek Art Gallery titled Not Here and the other at Kasa Gallery titled Not There. In this special issue of LEA there are contributions by artists that work with AR technology and curators and writers that work on issues related to AR, sited art in relation to new media, or site-specific interventions. It is a survey of the field in order to understand how contemporary art practices are evolving.

To attend the event at the Zero1 Biennial:
Where – California Theatre Courtyard, 345 South First Street, San Jose, CA 95113.
When – September 14th at 6:30pm.

The performance a Dream Came Through was on the BBC News as one of the highlights of the AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival. The performance and the following installation have had a great response from both public and critics. The artwork was part of the exhibition What Have I Done To (De)serve This? at Cornerhouse and Blankspace in collaboration withe the Blank Media Collective. Curators: Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks.

As the complexity of the economic situation creates barriers between the haves and have nots, we are also assisting to a resurgence of national pride. National Panties is a project that, first presented at the AND Festival and showcased in the Guardian, speaks of the contemporary social realities which are increasingly made of people left wearing, as the title says, just their panties and the national pride.

The project started in Italy and will travel across the world, generating a series of images made of ‘panties, landscapes and people.’

The panties displayed in different urban and iconic landscapes across the globe, will create a unique collection of what is the remainder of people’s aspirations at the beginning of the 21st century.

I am currently working with Janice Glowski and Charles Csuri to the catalog Sketchbooks of Time that follows the exhibition by the same name held at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul.

This image, courtesy of the artist, will be appearing in the catalog in order to showcase how things have changed and continue to change in the history of contemporary art. “I can’t imagine ARTFORUM ever doing a special issue on electronics or computer in art” is a phrase that still characterizes, albeit less and less, many fine art institutions across the world.

In a way there is a deplorable trend – that of adversity to experimentation in art that challenges the pre-conceptions of what an artwork should be. It has been a trend that characterized experimentations in video art (largely accepted, sought after and celebrated today), performance (Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present at MoMA placed squarely performance art in the pantheon of the legitimate arts) and computer/new media art.

It is my intention with Sketchbooks of Time to offer an insight in the career of an artist, who has contributed so much with his experimental artworks and aesthetic to the advancement of the fine arts through the use of computer, animation and new media.

Wanted: male participants for performance

A Dream Came Through
Have you ever dreamed of doing nothing but ‘fanning yourself’ all day long? This is the dream come true – you will be paid to sit around and fan yourself for the duration of a working day. There will be a contract signed between you and the artist producing this art project. And yes, you will be the art object, sitting there, fanning yourself, for all to see.

Please send an expression of interest, plus your contact details and basic information about yourself to dream@andfestival.org.uk

Note the performance takes place Wed 29 Aug 18:00 – 21:00 and Thu 30 Aug 11:00 – 18:00, participants absolutely must be available for the entire duration.

After signing a contract of exploitation, the workers are literally paid to do nothing, fanning themselves for all to see. At first glance an ideal situation perhaps, or alternatively the impossibility of any labour to be more than an institutional process of enslavement. How successful is the real promise of a minimum wage, of economic liberation, within a ‘dream’ society? Or indeed, within the context of an art world event?

An article that discusses the issue of art, exploitation and labor titled The Disappearance of Signs in a Landscape of Deceptions was published on the NeMe platform in 2009.

I am delighted to announce this new exhibition by Chris Meigh-Andres, In Darwin’s Garden, curated by Vince Dziekan, that will take place on the LEA Digital Media Platform during the month of August.

As the LEA Digital Media Platform (Curatoriate: Lanfranco Aceti, Vince Dziekan and Christiane Paul) continues to grow – we have just set up new collaborations with FACT as well as with Chelsea; Camberwell and Wimbledon part of UAL – new opportunities will develop for exhibitions, publications and lectures that showcase the best of international research in the fine arts.

LEA Digital Media Exhibition Platform

SUMMER EXHIBITION: CHRIS MEIGH-ANDREWS, ‘IN DARWIN’S GARDEN’

Chris Meigh-Andrews’ art practice involves moving image installations that aspire to create links between aspects of location, history, technology, landscape, ambient conditions and natural forces. Over recent years he has produced a number of digital video projections and site-specific installations that explore the relationship between iconic or historical photographic images, people or locations and contemporary views, perspectives and visualizations. His approach seeks to reproduce an exact framing and composition based on an historical photographic image and to explore ideas suggested by establishing relationships between the composition of the original and the present circumstances of that same view.

Meigh-Andrews’ latest project is a site-specific, web-based installation on the grounds of Down House – the family home of naturalist Charles Darwin – in Kent, England. This project takes as its focus an old mulberry tree growing at back of the house, which serves to represent the relationship between the domestic life of the Darwin Family, the garden as a site for Charles Darwin’s careful and systematic observation of natural processes that he drew on in developing his theory of Natural Selection, and the slow but inevitable change in the cycle of life and the seasons. The work has been developed by the artist with the collaboration and assistance of Alan Summers (University of Chester) and Rowan Blaik (Head gardener, Down House).

Vince Dziekan
Digital Media Curator, Leonardo Electronic Almanac

Senior Curators:
Lanfranco Aceti
Director and Senior Curator, Kasa Gallery

Christiane Paul
Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Featured Artist and collaborators:

Chris Meigh-Andrews is an artist, writer and curator and Emeritus Professor of Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. He has been exhibiting his video and installation work internationally since the late 1970’s and has held numerous artist-in-residence posts in the UK, Canada and Europe. Meigh-Andrews’ commissioned and site-specific installation work includes For William Henry Fox Talbot (The Pencil of Nature) for the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2002), Interwoven Motion, a solar and wind powered outdoor video installation in Grizedale Forest in the English Lake District (2004) and more recently The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice) (2009-2011) commissioned by architects Julian Harrap, for the Monument in the City of London. He has also initiated and curated a number of major international exhibition events focusing on artists’ video. His book, A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function (Berg, Oxford & New York, 2006) provides an overview of the development of video as an art form since its inception in the early 1960’s.

Alan Summers is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chester where he is programme leader for the MA in Design. His current PhD research is in the application of experiential systems within digital environments and how real world knowledge influences the design and implementation of virtual worlds and the behaviour of people within them. Examining how designers interpret real world environments and use their individual cultural knowledge to shape environments used online by users with different cultural references. Through a body of research exploring cognitive processes and how cultural differences affects spatial awareness in virtual environments Alan is using the spatial analysis of popular game spaces to inform future designers when building multi cultural online spaces.

LEA International Curatoriate

Lanfranco Aceti, Christiane Paul & Vince Dziekan

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Ozden Sahin, ozden.sahin@leoalmanac.org

Leonardo is a registered trademark of the ISAST.

Check out DISLOCATIONS on Amazon.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac presents its second catalog Dislocations available on Amazon. Dislocations showcases the artworks that were exhibited on the Media Facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb and part of the 12th Istanbul biennial.

The catalog sees the collaboration of several international institutions: Kasa Gallery, ISEA2011 Istanbul, Goldsmiths College and Sabanci University. Dislocations presents the artworks by Charles Csuri, David Cotterrell, Danielle Roney & Jeff Conefry, Matthias Fuchs and Songul Boyraz that interpret in a variety of aesthetics and media forms the theme of conflict and war. The exhibition program was curated Lanfranco Aceti and Tihomir Milovac. The catalog is authored by Lanfranco Aceti; Deniz Cem Onduygu (Art Director) and Zeynep Ozel (Designer).

Check out DAC09 on Amazon.

This is the first special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac that is available on Amazon. This special issue is titled DAC09: After Media: Embodiment and Context and presents a series of research articles on contemporary interdisciplinary research in digital art culture and media part of the DAC09 conference.

Special issue volume editors are Lanfranco Aceti and Simon Penny; contributors: Stephanie Boluk, Mauro Carassai, Kenny Chow, Sharon Daniel, Kristen Galvin, D. Fox Harrell, Sneha Veeragoudar Harrell, Garnet Hertz, Ji-hoon Felix Kim, Patrick LeMieux, Elisabeth Losh, Mark Marino, Michael Mateas, Chandler B. McWilliams, Carrie Noland, Anne Sullivan, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Jichen Zhu; Deniz Cem Onduygu (Art Director) and Zeynep Ozel (Designer).

Check out E-SCAPES on Amazon.

This is the first catalog that I have authored with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac and is available on Amazon. The catalog is titled E-SCAPES: Artistic Explorations of Nature and Science and presents the artworks of Jane Prophet and Paul Catanese exhibited on the LEA exhibition platforms and at Kasa Gallery, Istanbul.

The catalog is authored by Lanfranco Aceti and Vince Dziekan, Ozden Sahin (Editor), Deniz Cem Onduygu (Art Director) and Zeynep Ozel (Designer).

Check out Mish Mash on Amazon.

I am rolling out the LEA publications on Amazon. The first one is MISH MASH on which I worked as volume editor. Since I took it over in 2009 LEA has had a major re-vamp and is re-establishing itself as an internationally regarded publication. It has been an incredible hard work and the second part of 2012 will see more publications coming out.

It has been my intent all along to make of LEA a publication able to withstand the current changes in academia and the publishing industry as well as repositioning itself as a receptacle of diverse instances within the large community of art, science and technology.

As we continue to work hard in order to implement changes and make sure that we reach the objectives set, it is a pleasure to showcase the design of LEA’s first publication on Amazon.

Ozden and I often joke about the above snippet of video from Doctor Who, that represents ‘The Editor in Chief.’

Although Ozden and I have not reached ‘world domination’ yet, we continue to work on the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) ensuring its transformation into an international publication and research hub. Six months ago we completed the transfer from the old system to the new WordPress site, which will improve interaction and workflow. Publication are being churned out at a faster pace and new projects are in development.

LEA was born as an electronic publication, but publications will become only one of its multiple outputs. My goal for LEA is for it to be much more: a research hub and incubator able to implement new projects, exhibitions, develop synergies and collaborative efforts through online sytems. We have set up new collaborations with FACT, Digicult, KASA Gallery and we will be announcing new research strands, partnerships, themes and projects in the forthcoming months. We have been working, for example, with Vince Dziekan and Ozden Sahin on exhibition projects that exist online first and then are materialized in physical exhibitions, which then travel across the world.

As we move in what we internally refer to the ‘third phase,’ I have to thank the very many people that kept supporting me, believed in the vision I had for LEA and that worked, and are still working, tirelessly with me in order to accomplish it.

My thanks go to: Ozden Sahin, Deniz Cem Onduygu, Vince Dziekan, Christiane Paul, Nina Czegledy, Paul Thomas, Sean Cubitt, Mike Stubbs, Oliver Grau and William Uricchio.

As we continue to explore and experience the value of globalized collaborations, I am keen to work with many of the friends, colleagues and researchers at Goldsmiths, the Royal College, MIT, FACT, Harvard, Arizona State University, Monash, Hong Kong and many others.

With my heartfelt thanks to you all.

Lanfranco Aceti

LEA Editor in Chief

I am glad to present another publication of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

DAC09: After Media: Embodiment and Context, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 2

ISBN: 978-1-906897-16-1
ISSN: 1071-4391

Senior Editors for this volume: Lanfranco Aceti and Simon Penny

Vol 17 Issue 2 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.

CONTENTS

Making Inroads: Promoting Quality and Excellency of Contemporary Digital Cultural Practices and Interdisciplinarity
Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti
Click here for full article.

Two Decades of Digital Art and Culture: An Introduction to the LEA DAC 09 Special Edition
Introduction by Simon Penny
Click here for full article.

Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers: Seriality and Critical Game Practices
by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux
Click here for full article.

Electronic Literature as Language Game: A Philosophical Approach to Digital Artifact Subjectivity
by Mauro Carassai
Click here for full article.

Understanding Material-Based Imagination: Cognitive Coupling of Animation and User Action in Interactive Digital Artworks
by Kenny K. N. Chow & D. Fox Harrell
Click here for full article.

Public Records/ Secret Public: Information Architecture for New Political Subjects
by Sharon Daniel
Click here for full article.

Imagination, Computation, and Self-Expression: Situated Character and Avatar Mediated Identity
by D. Fox Harrell & S. Veeragoudar Harrell
Click here for full article.

Play, Things, Rules, and Information: Hybridized Learning in the Digital University
by Elizabeth Losh
Click here for full article.

Language in the Other Software
by Chandler B. McWilliams
Click here for full article.

Energy Geared to an Intensity High Enough to Melt Steel: Merce Cunningham, Movement, and Motion Capture
by Carrie Noland
Click here for full article.

An Interview with Simon Penny: Techno-Utopianism, Embodied Interaction and the Aesthetics of Behavior
by Jihoon Felix Kim and Kristen Galvin
Click here for full article.

Making Quests Playable: Choices, CRPGs, and The Grail Framework
by Anne Sullivan, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Click here for full article.

Narrating System Intentionality: Copycat and the Artificial Intelligence Hermeneutic Network
by Jichen Zhu & D. Fox Harrell
Click here for full article.

Art After New Media: Exploring Black Boxes, Tactics and Archaeologies
by Garnet Hertz
Click here for full article.

Of Sex, Cylons, and Worms: A Critical Code Study of Heteronormativity
by Mark C. Marino
Click here for full article.