Martin John Callanan is an artist whose work spans numerous mediums and engages both emerging and commonplace technology. His work has included translating active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years.
Martin's work is always decidedly deadpan and served with a dash of ennui. Some of his more well-known pieces include Letters 2004-2006 published by Book Works, the ambient audio installation Sonification of You, the meta-news aggregator I Wanted to See All the News From Today and Text Trends, which abstracts the casual manner in which we receive, scan and process information and language on a daily basis.
Martin's work has been exhibited, published and screened at venues throughout Europe, Russia, North America, South America, Asia and Australia. Participating with, among others, Es Baluard Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Moscow International Film Festival, Ars Electronic Centre, ISEA 2010, FutureEverything, Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Riga Centre for New Media Culture, UCL Environment Institute, Science Museum (London), Tate Britain, Folly Festival of Digital Culture, Book Works, The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, File Prix Lux, and in several editions of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Brasil.
Martin is currently:
- Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media (Digital Media & Print) at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and a member of Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art (SCEMFA) and Word Image research group.
- Editor, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
- Publisher, Merkske
http://greyisgood.eu
Mail Nothing to the Tate Modern
You'd have to be pretty desperate to stick that on your CV. "Yeah, I sent an empty box to Rhizome and they had a heap of 'em behind their fold-up table in the Turbine Hall."
Nice one.
Mail Nothing to the Tate Modern
mental as in, in my head, as in imaginary?
Astronomy, Lunacies and Ends of the World, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Astronomy, Lunacies and Ends of the World, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Open Call
In many mythologies, celestial events connect to the earth and the fates of human civilizations.
We know that catastrophic collisions of asteroids with the earth have had large effects on the evolution of the web of life on this planet. Such collisions will occur again in the future.
Solar variability, and the variations in the orbit of the earth, have driven long term climate variations on the earth. The sun, when it has exhausted its nuclear fuel, will swell and envelope the earth.
We know that the human civilization now imposes an unsustainable burden on the planet as ecosystem. Are we fated to disappear in a hot-house like the planet Venus?
The Astronomy, Lunacies and Ends of the World issue of LEA, in preparation for 2012, is an interdisciplinary issue opened to historical and sociological analysis, astronomical insights, ways that the universe connects to life on earth, artists dealing with the heavens or the cataclysmic end of the world, the search for extra terrestrial life and intelligence and human migration off the planet.
Astronomy, Lunacies and Ends of the World will analyze the role played by astronomy and earth sciences in the arts and sciences, but more importantly in shaping sociological relations, mass behaviors and hysteria that are at times inspiration for new artistic practices or scientific rigor.
Raymond H. Wilson, Jr., wrote that “the realm of the heavens is obviously large and mysterious, and its tantalizing unattainability has always invited myths and illusions, even among the proudest sophisticates.”
Are the contemporary lunacies and conspiracy theories on the end of the world in 2012 just another cultural fad similar to the end of the world in the year 2000 or in the year 1000? Is the world really destined to end or the Mayan calendar’s prediction represents another excuse to develop myths and illusions?
Alternative reactions to catastrophic futures include the drive for deep ecology and the global management of the earth ecosystem. New observational technologies allow us to watch and monitor the earth and sky in detail, anticipate future catastrophes, and put in place mechanisms that would preserve the planet and the web of life. Can we anticipate, and deflect, incoming asteroids that threaten life on earth? Can we learn to manage Buckminster Fuller’s “Spaceship Earth”? Is the “Space Option” the only way to develop approaches for balancing the earth as a system? How will the evolution of the web of life on earth be managed?
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these themes co-edited by Lanfranco Aceti and Roger Malina.
Proposals are invited from artists and scientists that work on issues related to astronomy, mythologies, social behaviors, conspiracy theories inspired by astronomy as well as eschatological interpretations of historical and contemporary times. Interdisciplinary proposals that merge astronomical science and psychology, popular culture, sociology, mass media or philosophical analyses are particularly welcome. We welcome exploration of deep ecology and global management of the earth as a system as ways of avoiding catastrophic futures.
The articles can take the form of traditional academic papers, that will be refereed or more creative approaches to the proposed theme as videos, online artworks and collections of images.
We are open to unconventional submissions that exploit functionalities of the world wide web.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.
Proposals to: info@leoalmanac.org
a)Subject heading: Astronomy and Lunacies
b)500 hundred word abstract for articles
c)Open deadline
d)2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 300dpi width for artists
e)Links to previous work, videos or personal sites
Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)
*For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.
*For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.
*Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused - include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.
*In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)
For further information or images submission contact: Ozden.Sahin@leoalmanac.org
Full details online:
http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/astronomy_lunacies_and_ends_of_the_world/
WORDS / WORLDS: Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Practice
Date: 9 May 2013
Time: 1.30-5.30pm
9th May 2013 The Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University: Centre for Performance and Practice
Convened to mark the appointment of Tim Etchells as Professor of Performance and Practice at LICA, Words / Worlds is an afternoon symposium focused on approaches to writing in an interdisciplinary context. The event takes its title from a two-part neon work All We Have is Words / All We Have is Worlds by Etchells, which quotes and then repeats with modification, a line from Samuel Beckett.
Beginning with a keynote paper/performance from Etchells, which opens questions relating his to text-work in different media, WORDS / WORLDS proceeds with panels and presentations from visual artists Martin John Callanan and Penny McCarthy, from curator Mathieu Copeland, from the novelist Tony White and from the performance maker and scholar Andrew Quick. WORDS / WORLDS celebrates the possibilities of a cross-disciplinary conversation between and about text-based work and writing. A statement by William Burroughs – that the purpose of writing is to make things happen – provides one point of departure for the discussions, which will see each of the participants touch upon key works and ideas from their practise as they think around texts and inter-texts, texts as interventions in, and transformations of, the world, texts as tests or probes of reality, and text as a tool for fragile and temporary world-building.
Free to attend
Organising departments and research centres: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts
(Im)material Labour, Art Exchange, Colchester
(IM)MATERIAL LABOUR
MONDAY 24 JUNE 2013 – SATURDAY 20 JULY 2013
(Im)material Labour explores our shifting position in an economically functioning society. From the systemisation of post-fordist labour through to the de-materialisation of the service sector, our patterns of working behaviour are constantly being reconfigured.
(Im)material Labour draws together the work of a number of artists who interrogate this phenomenon in light of the current economic climate. Seeking to decode and humanise the financial crisis through analytical ideas and research, the works on display often result in therapeutic and humorous outcomes.
The exhibition includes works by SUPERFLEX, Zachary Formwalt, Ignacio Uriarte, Martin John Callanan, Paul Westcombe and Arnaud Desjardin.
The exhibition will take place both onsite and offsite in a disused office block situated in Colchester Town. Curated by MA Critical Curating students Warren Harper, Matylda Taszycka and alumnus Jonathan Weston.
Curators Tour
Saturday 1 June, 1-2pm
Join the exhibition’s curators for a tour of (Im)material Labour at Art Exchange. To reserve your place, please email immaterial.labour@live.co.uk
Boing Boing: Big pictures of small change
David Pescovitz writes on Boing Boing: Artist Martin John Callanan and the Advanced Engineered Materials Group at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory used an infinite 3D optical microscope to capture 400 million pixel images of the lowest denomination coin from many currencies. “The Fundamental Units”
Business Insider: The World’s Currencies Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before
Max Rosenberg writes:
Some nations have debated getting rid of their smallest monetary denominations.
Even President Obama came out against the penny earlier this year.
Photographer Martin John Callanan is trying to save these coins for future generations, using images.
and Capital Online
Daily Mail: Look after your pennies: microscopic pictures of world’s lowest value coins to save them for future generations
Look after your pennies: Photographer takes microscopic pictures of world’s lowest value coins to save them for future generations
With every battered line, scrape and knock, each coin has been rendered as individual as the many thousands of hands they have passed through.
Now, as governments across the world debate whether to do away with their lowest value coins, one photographer is on a mission to save as many pennies as he can before they are consigned forever to history,
Photographer Martin John Callanan is busy working on a photo project entitled The Fundamental Units – a series of extremely large prints showing the lowest value coins of countries around the world.
He has teamed up with National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, to use ‘Europe’s best microscope’ to show each coin in all its worn charm.
Each coin is photographed with 4,000 individual tiny exposures, and it takes three days of processing to turn the individual photos into a single composite photograph weighing 400 megapixels. Printed out, each photo measures 1.2 and 1.2 meters (~3.9 square feet).
‘In this sense, and in response to the dominance of macroeconomics in the discourse of the media, the artist chooses a microscopic view of the world economy.
‘The Fundamental Units, a series that begins with the works produced by Horrach Moyà Gallery for this exhibition, is an exploration of the lowest denomination coins from the world’s currencies using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.’
‘The images obtained with the microscope have been combined to form an extremely detailed large scale reproduction of the least valuable coins from Australia, Chile, the Euro, Myanmar and the Kingdom of Swaziland.
‘In these images the humble metal acquires a planetary dimension and is displayed as the atoms that shape the global economy.’
There are many precedents for scrapping small coins.
In America, the half-cent was abolished in 1857, and in 1984 the UK’s halfpenny was withdrawn.
New Zealand and Australia abandoned the one-cent and two-cent coin in the 1990s.
Campaigners in the US and UK also want the penny and cent coins to be consigned to history, because nothing can be bought with a one-cent or one-penny coin.
see the full article by Amanda Williams
Reposted on Numismatica
Small Change Writ Large: ‘The Fundamental Units’ by Martin John Callanan
Rain Noe at Core77 writes:
What does that look like to you? The cave drawings at Lascaux, maybe?
How about this one? A shield from an ancient civilization?
Nope, these are the lowest of the world’s low-value coins, those forgotten bits of metal that keep lint company in our pockets or fill forgotten jars. Perhaps sensing that cents are on the way out, Martin John Callanan—self-described as “an artist researching an individual’s place within systems”—is photographically preserving them for posterity with his The Fundamental Units project.
The kicker is that a regular camera wouldn’t do, not for what Callanan had in mind; so he teamed up with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, which is that country’s national measurement standards lab, to use their infinite focus 3D optical microscope. Callanan then captured some 4,000 exposures of each freaking coin, resulting in a series of 400 megapixel images that, blown up and hanging on a gallery wall, reveal details you’d never spot on the real deal. Every nick, scratch, dent, ding and discoloration are laid bare.
So far he’s captured cents, pesos and pence from Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Lituania, Myanmar, Poland, Romania, Swaziland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, not to mention the Euro; but by the project’s end, Callanan plans to have captured “the lowest denomination coin from each of the world’s 166 active currencies.”
Coins of the World Photographed Using Europe’s Best Microscope
Michael Zhang writes about the Fundamental Units over on Peta Pixel with lots of images.
Did you know that it costs the US Mint 2 cents to produce every 1 cent coin due to the cost of materials and production? Countries such as Canada have already done away with their lowest denomination coins due to their costs and lack of usefulness.
As these “worthless” coins cause debates in their governments about whether or not they should be abolished, photographer Martin John Callanan is on a mission to save them… not as a currency, but rather in photographs.
Article made it to the top of Digg.com
and Complex
and the Baltic News Network
and DB.lv
and Botanwang in China
and CNBCE in Turkey
and Cekin
and Wander Lust Mind
Directory Of Fictitious Telephone Numbers – Impossible Transmissions
An aseptic space. One white table and on it a printed directory, accompanied by an apparently normal looking telephone. It would seem the right environment to make a call. And calls are, in fact, made. The phone operates automatically, dialling random numbers from the many listed in the phone book . The diffused audio allows visitors to listen to the classic dialling sounds, followed by a precise dead tone or a message saying, in varying languages, ‘the number you dialled does not exist’. The process repeats itself tirelessly; another number, another country, another language. A loop of sounds and dead time; a form of a dance, a ritual. A monologue or perhaps a soliloquy. No matter which of the many available numbers are dialled, it is certain that no calls will ever be answered because the list of numbers is officially exposed as The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers – an extensive list of numbers certified as non-existent and neatly divided into geographic areas of the world. The compilation of this phone book includes official requests from telecommunication regulators in different countries. The artwork, resulting from research by the British artist John Martin Callanan and presented first in Spain and then at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, is indefinitely offered as a resource for use in drama or film productions so that unsuspecting people aren’t disturbed by inquisitive viewers. Art in defence of privacy?
Data as Culture: Open Day 16 March
Your chance to get hold of issue #3 of Text Trends newspaper.
The Open Data Institute (ODI) and MzTEK invite you to the Data as Culture Open Day.
The Data as Culture collection is set in the offices of the ODI, and aims to bring tangible interventions into the
mass accretion of data around us. This is an opportunity to see the artworks in the collection and speak to the curators and some of the artists.
Informal presentations from 2.30pm – 4pm, refreshments provided.
Find out more about the artists and the collection visit: theodi.org/culture/collection
Data as Culture: Open Day
16 March 2013, 12pm – 6pm.
Open Data Institute, 3rd Floor, 65 Clifton Street, London, EC2A 4JE
Along Some Sympathetic Lines, Or Gallery, Berlin
23 February – 27 April 2013
Opening 7pm, 22 February 2013
Or Gallery, Oranienstr 37, Berlin 10999, Germany
Or Gallery is pleased to present Along Some Sympathetic Lines, an exhibition of artwork by London-based artist Martin John Callanan, and an archive project by curator Liz Bruchet. The exhibition considers the poetic possibilities of data and its documentation, and the tenuous process of making meaning.
Martin John Callanan is an artist researching an individual’s place within systems. Callanan generates and reworks photographs, letters and electronic data into evidence of exchanges – between the individual, the institution and the networks of power that intertwine them. The exhibition presents four of the artist’s series: The Fundamental Units, the result of amassing millions of pixels of data, to photographs, in microscopic detail far beyond the capacity of the human eye, the lowest monetary unit of each of the 166 active currencies of world, only to enlarge and print them to vast scale; Wars During My Lifetime, an evolving newspaper listing of every war fought during the course of the artist’s life; Grounds, an ongoing photographic archive which charts ‘important places’ in the world where security restrictions limit the image to the carpeted, tiled or concrete floors; and Letters 2004-2006, Callanan’s correspondence with various heads of states and religious leaders which implicate them in conversations that question their very rationale of their authority. These acts of excavating, accumulating and visualising data draw out the sympathetic aspects within documentation and in so doing, mark and disrupt the underlying power dynamics.
A second gallery features an archive project by London-based curator Liz Bruchet. The display of ephemera from the personal archive of the curator’s grandfather, a Canadian insurance salesman and aspiring radio presenter, takes its inspiration from a found audio recording – part monologue, part autobiography, and part radio show – made in 1974. Harnessing the impulses of the collector, archivist and biographer, the curator reasserts her role as custodian and caretaker to nurture narratives and give weight to the subjective remnants of one man’s life.
This exhibition is curated by Liz Bruchet.
The exhibition is possible with the generous support of Or Gallery, the National Physical Laboratory, and UCL European Institute.
With thanks to Galeria Horrach Moya, (Hiper)vincles, Whitechapel Gallery, Book Works, David Karl, and Pau Waelder.
