Artist Profile: Bunny Rogers
Sister Unn's, 2011
A lot of your work seems to explore the transitional moments of adolescence into adulthood through sexual introductions like Dotyk and Waiting for Anne, as well as through sentimental mementos like the embroidered letterman jackets of Sister Jackets and even the webpage Dad’s Big Socks. With this type of memorialization, there’s also this recurrent fascination with animals as self-identifying symbols: Bunny Rogers, Pones, A Very Young Rider, Lambslut, etc. I wonder where these animal identities intersect with this loss of naïve youth and what your relationship to them is within these transgressive adolescent shifts? Why concentrate on the prepubescent stage? What role do animals play within this shift?
I am interested in deconstructing the comfort felt regarding how we view the transition from girlhood to adulthood. I do not think I concentrate on the prepubescent stage, at least in the biological sense of the word. When my work is categorized with that term it sets up a discussion of a socially-familiar understanding of what [female] prepubescence means, the definition of which is confusing and contradictory. We build value systems based on that understanding. These terms are applied in an assessment of my work and me. Some of my works try to make these terms unstable, by questioning how we arrive at them. The challenge is how to broaden the grounds on which these concepts are positioned as is evident by the limitations of phrasing we have even when trying to interpret the works investigating these concerns. I see a lot of overlap in mass culture’s sexualization and exploitation of children and animals.
i.e.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hix7Ie-IlYU [Dance Precisions / Single Ladies / Pomona]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RP19fnff_c [The Chipettes - Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It]
This ...
Art from Outside the Googleplex: An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson
The Inland Printer – 164, 2012
Through webinars, installations, power points, performances, audio meditations and videos, Andrew Norman Wilson's interventions into the brands and infrastructures of Silicon Valley and other worldwide tech corporations question the roles of labor, power and capital; instigations, integral to understanding the movement of information economies in the global marketplace as well as the power relations that emerge from within them.
ScanOps, titled after the internal department for Google's onsite book scanning contractors, is Wilson's latest series of works that reveal the software distortions and hands of ScanOps employees found in the photographic scanning site.
During June, ScanOps will be on view at both American Medium in New York City and Document in Chicago. A ScanOps subscription service and book will be published by Art Metropole later this year.
LD: Workers Leaving the Googleplex, responded to two versions of the film Workers Leaving the Factory: one by Harun Farocki and the other, the original by the Lumière brothers. The premise of your own video of course was to make a work that captured the shift in labor from the industrial proletariat into the informational proletariat. The yellow badge workers were presented in parallel to Lumières' workers and have become the focal point of another series of works, ScanOps. Could you first talk about the meta-hierarchies that existed at Google, specifically the perks, benefits, opportunities or lack thereof that existed between various color badges?
ANW: Using Workers Leaving the Googleplex as an illustration of these hierarchies, white, red, and green badge workers on the left side of the image are seen passing by, entering, and exiting a variety of buildings at the Googleplex. Some of them ride the Google loaner bikes, some of them enter a luxury limo shuttle headed towards San Francisco. Some of ...
Artist Profile: David Kraftsow
David Kraftsow's Vlog Artifacts, is featured this month on The Download.
Screenshot of At My Funeral, 2011
Much of your work involves recontextualizing a lot of YouTube and Twitter content. Through this rearranging and reorganizing you compose and assign new meaning to the often banal, unwittingly revealing always-growing archive of user-uploaded videos and status updates. User content here surpasses individual critique and instead is aesthetically reframed and sometimes even gamified under your curation. What does it mean for you to work with the uploads of others? What can you say about the role of the curator in this process?
I'm not really sure if "curation" is the right word to describe my YouTube projects. While I do, on occasion, go out and hand-pick specific content for display (like for my fun cat video blog or Violet Flame supercut), most of the rest of my YouTube work is either the result of an autonomous script, or a user-initiated generator.
For example, I have a cron (autonomously executing process) running for my At My Funeral project that specifies search criteria for YouTube videos with comments that contain the phrase "at my funeral". The script has generated a database of (to date) 21,000+ videos that people want to have played in their honor after they die.
Does this kind of algorithmic selection count as curation? The result can be really interesting and even kind of comedic. There is something hilarious to me about mechanically collecting every single "better than Bieber" YouTube comment ever written. But, beyond the initial specification of the program that does the collecting, it doesn't involve any of my creative/curatorial input at all. The content is selected and displayed automatically.
If curation can simply involve the design and execution of such an algorithm, then the ...
Mapping the Social
The Internet, specifically social media, is often perpetuated as being a new kind of ‘revolution celebrity’ and indeed to some point its played a hefty distributive role in accelerating the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Occupy and even the SOPA protests to name but a recent few. Yet, it simultaneously is this other exploitative entity, capitalizing on our movement through online space and constantly collecting data with often vague, ill-defined intentions. Can social media’s two dynamic roles—both as a constructive social platform for anti-government efforts and a data aggregating system—be synthesized into a critical and valuable commons? Can personal user data collection be used for more than advertising and increased commodification?
Techno-sociologist, Zeynep Tufekci proposes that today, connection and friendship are moving from the ‘ascribed ties’ of inherited local relationships consisting of one’s neighborhood friends, family, etc. to ‘achieved ties’ or relationships located based on the shared affinities of people ‘with whom you interact using multiple means of communication’. What can such shifts reveal about territorial and even regional interaction? Of neighborhoods, boroughs and its socio-economic behaviors? How can geography be re-defined?
The Livehood Research Project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is potentially one example of how data collection can be used in a constructive, illuminating way, by demonstrating how place can be defined by social activity (maybe rather than by jurisdiction). Livehood uses the data of over 18 million foursquare check-ins to map both geographic distance of frequented venues as well as plotting its ‘social distance’, or ‘the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them’. Through accumulation of foursquare check-ins, Livehood algorithmically condenses this data into neighborhoods allowing a user to view the pattern sets of other people’s use of space.
Though the project in its current stages is still extremely limited (restricted so far to only three US cities, as well as accessible only to foursquare users) Livehood could develop into an extremely valuable tool for future governments and its citizens, as both a social lubricant and political tool. It also could just easily fulfill yet another advertiser’s dream.
Artist Profile: Sami Ben Larbi
Parle moi je t'écoute, 2006-7
Fiction, history and reality are constantly being intertwined throughout your work. How do you balance the phantasmic with reality? How do these techniques propel or help understand the history and politics in works like As it might, could, did happen and Was Bourguiba, then Ben Ali, awaiting the next?
The balance is very vague and I keep it so as long as possible. I want the viewers to find their own balance.
When Bourguiba first came to power, he was hailed as a savior, a liberator of the oppressive French. Images of him where everywhere. He cultivated that cult, just like any other dictator and was able to hold on to power for a long time. The fiction of the liberator was trying to negate the reality of living under his reign.
In my work I ask the viewers to consider what is being presented, to form their own understanding and opinion. In As it might, could, did happen, I recreated a bedroom (with furniture made of cardboard and wood imitation vinyl) in what was a East German Pioneers boarding house. The furniture looked almost authentic, but not quite. It played with the pre-conceptions of how East German furniture looked cheap and homogeneous. But the environment was real. So the balance here between fiction and reality is very flexible.
In one of your project’s statements you describe the struggle with your identity as the following: “I want to be this icon, this Frenchness, while also being who I am a mix breed, neither one nor the other. Arab, but French, but American, but becoming German?”
With this, works like, La distinction entre un carthaginois et un hexadecagone, au subjonctif, Layered Tense, and Pictures I wish I had are attempts at contextualizing ...
Edition 3/12 for December
Every month for one year I will create and upload content everyday to a password protected blog. One viewer will be selected at random and given exclusive access to this blog. Though the user may decide at any given point in time to share the contents of the blog, they will always be confirmed as collector of the works in the heading as such:
Various Content 2010 by Louis Doulas
Edition _/12
Collection of ___________
Again, the user may share the blog at any moment in time or choose to continue viewing it privately.
Each work created will never be featured on my own website, nor will I ever personally be able to exhibit/distribute each piece.
Work will never be repeated or used more than once in any edition.
Dispersion of the content is left up to the viewer.
Users will selected randomly through a monthly raffle.
This project will run for 1 year in 12 editions.
If you would like to participate in EDITION 3/12 for the month of December, simply ATTEND the Facebook event HERE or email your first and last name to: louisdoulas@gmail.com
Collector of 3/12 will be notified Wednesday, December 1st.
OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
United States of America
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
CME #5 will be exhibiting both online at www.cmeex.info and the Sullivan Galleries on 33 S. State St. in Chicago, IL
Friday, March 18th at 7pm
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
1. Remix anything from www.cmeex.info, as many times as you want.
2. Send remixes to cmmeee@gmail.com (Jpeg only)
3. On March 18th at 7pm watch work flood in online or in the Sullivan Galleries
Submissions will be accepted from Feb 27 - Mar 10
All submissions will remain anonymous
Editions
If you would like to participate in Edition 2/12 for the month of November simply select "Attending" in the Facebook Event
or
you can email me at:
louisdoulas@gmail.com
Please include your first and last name in the subject line.
The collector of Edition 2/12 will be notified Sunday, October 31st.
Editions:
Every month for one year I will create and upload original content everyday to a password protected blog.
One viewer will be selected at random and given exclusive access to this blog.
Though the user may decide at any time to share the contents of the blog,
their name will always be confirmed as collector of the works in the title as such:
"Various Content 2010 by Louis Doulas, Edition _/12, Collection of ______"
Again, the user may share the blog at any given moment in time or choose to continue viewing it
privately. Each work I create will never be featured on my own website, nor will I ever be able to
distribute each work anywhere be it materially or immaterially. Work will never be repeated or
used more than once in any edition. Users will be selected at random.
This project will run for 1 year in 12 Editions.
Ryan Barone: Request Line
Ryan Barone: Request Line
If you don't see something, say something.
Beginning Wednesday, October 13th Ryan Barone and The Gallery Space will invite the public to propose the creation of several new works. Using each request as a formal or conceptual constraint, Barone will create and publish new content for the remainder of the exhibition.
All requests will remain anonymous.
Requests will be taken all day Wednesday starting at midnight on www.thegalleryspace.info
Ryan Barone
www.ryanbarone.tumblr.com
The Gallery Space
www.thegalleryspace.info
Edition 1/12 for October
One viewer will be selected at random and given exclusive access to this blog. Though the user may decide at any time to share the contents of the blog, their name will always be confirmed as collector of the works in the title as such:
"Various Works 2010 by Louis Doulas, Edition 1/12, Collection of ______"
Again, the user may share the blog at any given moment in time or choose to continue viewing it privately.
Each work I create will never be featured on my own website, nor will I ever be able to distribute each work anywhere be it materially or immaterially.
Work will never be repeated or used more than once in any edition.
Users will be selected at random.
This project will run for 1 year.
12 Editions
If you would like to participate please email me your first and last name to: louisdoulas@gmail.com
The user for October will be notified within a few days.
: )
