Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and reBlog

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2008-09-05T16:41:18+01:00

Starfield Simulation #33 -- Audio Response Mirror- Site specific sound installation by e+l (Ken Ehrlich/Brandon LaBelle) in the "sound bowl" at Scania Park in Malmo, Sweden. From the artist's statement: "Focusing on the existing electronic system in place, we approached the Scaniaparken location as a site structurally determined by the amplification of music and sound. The existing electronic sound system was used as the sole source for the production of the sound work through a series of feedback investigations."

Underground art galleries serve a special niche- Article from the San Francisco Chronicle covering San Francisco's many "guerilla" art galleries.

K.I.S.S. at Club Internet- Paddy from Art Fag City reviews the current Club Internet exhibition K.I.S.S.:
"K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid), Club Internet's current collection of web art put together by constant dullaart, presents a focused curatorial theme of artists working with design simplicity, many of whom bring the user static websites, and various utilities commonly found on the web that don't work the way they are supposed to. The success of the work varies from piece to piece, though for the most part it's strong."

Aspects of Transmateriality: Specificity- Entry from (the teeming void): "Transmateriality is a notion I'm working on that treats the digital as always and everywhere material - embodied from "end to end" - while maintaining a sense of how the digital functions as if it were immaterial. The core idea is well stated by Kirschenbaum (blogged earlier): "Digital systems are material systems designed to support an illusion of immateriality."...while the digital in general relies on holding specificity at bay, there seems to be a wave of creative interest in the specific material conditions of how the digital is manifest...recently we've seen a wave of arrays that can be read as anti- or post-screens: special-purpose displays that acknowledge their physical substrates. Think of Troika's Cloud (or indeed Rokeby's Cloud), Daniel Rozin's mirrors (above, his Wooden Mirror), or Art+Com's kinetic array for the BMW Museum (video)"

Aleksander Komarov: Weichensteller / Kunsthalle Winterthur / Interview- Interview with artist Aleksander Komarov from VernissageTV. Komarov explains the concept behind his two video installations On Translation: Transparency / Architecture and Estate, currently on view at Kunsthalle Winterthur.

Dual Ghoul II (2008) - Nate Boyce

2008-09-05T15:43:41+01:00

Dual Ghoul II from NateBoyce on Vimeo
More work by Nate Boyce
Via Cory Arcangel

Rhizome News: The Scale of Intervention

2008-09-05T12:00:00+01:00

Co-organized by Conflux
Moderated by Wooster Collective, with CutUp Collective, Leon Reid IV (of Darius + Downey), Betsey Biggs, and Roadsworth

Friday, September 5th, 7:30pm
the New Museum, New York, NY
$6 Members, $8 General Public

Join us this evening at 7:30pm for this month's New Silent Series program at the New Museum, entitled "The Scale of Intervention." Co-organized by Conflux, an annual festival dedicated to psychogeography, and moderated by the founders of the celebrated street art website Wooster Collective, this panel will look at possibilities for artistic disruption within urban environments. Taking its name from a film by the London-based Cutup Collective, which plays with the viewer's perception of a street scene, the panel will feature artists whose work ranges across a variety of mediums and materials. From reformulation of billboard advertisements into powerful, politically-oriented collages to the subversive reformulation of street signs, such as pedestrian crossings and bike lanes, the featured artists will demonstrate how they dislodge the customary navigation and perception of urban space.

Image: Roadsworth, North American Footprint (Parc Ave., Montreal, Quebec, September 2004)

http://www.newmuseum.org/events/245

Tools of the Trade: Umwelt III (HOME) at 119 Chambers

2008-09-04T17:13:25+01:00

Here tech writer Melody Chamlee describes Rob Seward's work Umwelt III (HOME) for Rhizome's ongoing series "Tools of the Trade." - Ceci Moss

Currently on display at 119 Chambers Street is kinetic sculpture Umwelt III (HOME) by artist Rob Seward. Using common fluorescent vacuum tubes to light the sign, Seward says he referenced the Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok definition of an umwelt, a subjective universe which includes meaning producing aspects for all life forms - in this case the narrative of the building inhabitant to the sidewalk passer-by.

On a quiet night, the gliding mechanical display of short white tubes rotates in a seemingly chaotic pattern out the window, slowly aligning and deconstructing the word "home" in bright white fluorescent fashion. The tubes meet and slowly scatter in clockwork formation, generating a slow animation of random pattern display that floats back together in a clear display of the word "home." What seems at first chaotic movement becomes a perfectly formed idea in alignment with viewer recognition. The concept of "home" is presented much the same way a disoriented traveler recognizes a familiar place.

Says Seward, "Before Umwelt III (HOME), I made pieces that spelled KILL and RUN. These where based on flight or fight instincts. The Umwelt III (HOME) piece is part of an earlier series to play on simple, old emotions. Umwelt III (HOME) is inspired by the need for shelter and feelings associated with it."

Rather than compromise between empiricism and rationalism, the sculpture continues to scatter and realign without adding additional context, leaving the viewer to complete the semiosphere with personal significance.

Seward says he was inspired by the idea of an umwelt to display these ideas, and is already working on a new sculpture, entitled WORK WORK WORK. In the new concept, the word "work" aligns in different rows to produce a chanting effect in visual space.

The artist's other experiments include the CONSCIOUSNESS FIELD RESONATOR (CFR) a random number generator that tests for "micropsychokenisis," a theory that patterns manifest more strongly during times of great shared social experience even when, all else being equal, such patterns should not exist. Elevated examples of patterns from the number generator are recorded and considered in relation to national and world events.

Linked In

2008-09-04T16:30:44+01:00

daniel everett- from i heart photograph: "daniel everett's 'building a more meaningful existence'. as he explains: "for this project i used a graphics editor built into an early arcade game to convert spam emails i had received into a virtual landscape. by reconfiguring the graphics editor interface to accept keystrokes as input, i was able to build these landscapes solely by transcribing the spam messages and compiling them. for this piece i specifically chose spam messages that promised me a more meaningful life, increased happiness, and a greater sense of self-worth."

A Speech Recognition Sing-A-Long this Friday- I love Machine Project in Los Angeles, they do such wonderful work. In this tutorial and performance Friday on speech technology, Joe Tepperman will "talk about some of the ways we can apply speech recognition, speech synthesis, and linguistic theories to music, followed by a performance by his alter ego, Mooey Moobau."

Ian Burns- Studio visit with artist Ian Burns from NewArtTV. Burns' low-fi motorized sculptures attempt to demythologize the contemporary creation and consumption of images.

Olga Chernysheva- New solo exhibition of photography and video by Moscow-based Olga Chernysheva at Foxy Production opens next Tuesday. "In New Work, Chernysheva fuses this visual language to her native city, dramatizing the experience of loss, isolation, and renewal. Moving between empathy and voyeurism, and belief and disillusionment, she appropriates Realism to question what can be known and what can be held as truth."

THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP (2007) - Billy Rennekamp

2008-09-04T14:56:46+01:00

THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP
THIS IS NEVER GOING TO STOP

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More work by Billy Rennekamp

Interview with Kevin Bewersdorf

2008-09-03T19:21:00+01:00

In this interview, conducted by Rhizome Editorial Fellow Gene McHugh, artist Kevin Bewersdorf discusses his philosophy toward surfing the web, the spiritual dimension of his work and his upcoming show "Monuments to the INFOspirit" at the New York gallery V&A. - Ceci Moss

Gene McHugh: The name of your website is Maximum Sorrow. What does this phrase mean to you?

Kevin Bewersdorf: Maximum Sorrow is my self brand and self corporation. It is a body of information waiting day and night to be wandered through, a corporate body whose only shape is the reverberation of the information passing through it. It is partly a philosophy of "corporate spiritualism" realized through marketing practices and continuous web surfing. I've recently written a text called "The Four Sacred Logos" that introduces some of the basic concepts of Maximum Sorrow. With each new sacred text and addition to maximumsorrow.com, I try to better understand my own spiritual relationship with the web. Hopefully the definition of Maximum Sorrow will become clearer as the site and I evolve together.

There seems to be a genuine interest in some of your recent work in locating or describing how the spiritual could interface with the digital. For example, Spirit Surfers surf club and the "Stock Photography Watermarks as the Presence of God" photo essay on Art Fag City. Is that accurate and, if so, what conclusions have you come to (if any)?

Well, the internet has hardly changed our physical lives at all, but it has drastically changed our spiritual lives. I think this perspective goes largely undiscussed when the web is viewed through less pertinent but more common sociological and technological lenses. While the internet is a physical body of wires and chips, the web is a shared non-physical realm of experience that requires many aspects of spiritual faith to interact with. We post and commune on a plane of information that we cannot touch or see. We tend to wander the web in private, confronting the massive database alone each day. We are inclined to use the web for the satisfaction of our emotional and intellectual needs rather than for our physical needs. We make pilgrimage to the same web sites at regular and repeated intervals, paying homage to them by contributing or partaking, and then we move on to our other daily needs like eating and sleeping. But all the while, we have faith that this plane of information we have become so dependent on is tangible enough to provide a worthwhile connectedness. For many of us, the web has become almost sacred, its ritual use is the embodiment of our spiritual needs. So I suppose that my conclusion is this: surfing the web can be a fulfilling spiritual experience and a direct interaction with a transcendent reality.

The written signature plays a prominent role in your self-portraits. What is it about this gesture that interests you?

There is something I have noticed about a lot of artists these days, especially net artists: they want to do everything. At one time artists were content with specialization, like in making only stained glass windows or etchings all day long. Now it is more common for artists to want to tackle all the forms of expression that the net can carry -- the still image, the moving image, music, writing, design, and so on. Many net artists may not be willing to admit it, but what they are really trying to do is to build an empire, to be a brand that offers it all. There is an absurdity to that. Having your own website is like building an unnecessary shrine to yourself. We can try to deny this by convincing ourselves that what we are doing is somehow a selfless gift, but the web has not asked us for these gifts. The web would go on without us. As net artists, we are pushing ourselves unsolicited on an already saturated marketplace. So I use my signature and various logos to point out the absurdity of this vanity, the struggle to give of yourself without becoming consumed with yourself.

The signature also makes my marketing tactics very obvious and shows that I accept myself as nothing more than a product to be marketed. Whether a net artist brands themself with a sparse list of links on a humble white field or with loud layers of noise and color or with contrived logos in a bland grid, they are constructing their own web persona for all to see. They are branding their self corporation. I think this self branding can be done with functionless art intentions rather than functioning business intentions. All the marketing materials are just shouted into the roaring whirlpool of the web where they swirl around in the great database with everyone else's personal information empires. I think these persona empires are the great artworks of our time, and they inspire me to keep building my own brand.

What qualifies as a "boon" in Spirit Surfing? Can you describe the physical experience that occurs when you discover a boon?

Try to wrap yourself around this cliché -- if surfing is wandering for 40 days and 40 nights in a desert, the boon is the vision brought back from the quest and the wake is the path of the whole quest's footsteps. The boon is like a jewel, a memento from a moment when the sacred nature of the web was clearly revealed to the surfer. In my experience the boon may spur on a deeper search, provide an idea for some kind of poetic game, sum up an emotional reaction to a particular zone of the web, or just float there like an impenetrable nugget outside of language. A lot of people have responded to the boon and wake separation on Spirit Surfers with confusion, as if there was some right or wrong way to interpret the juxtaposition. Really the boon/wake is only meant to set up a dialogue that, through repeated investigation, might eventually take on its own definition and allow the post to be not just about itself but also about the greater structure around it. On Spirit Surfers we have set up this structure to be continually practiced, and we are only just beginning to figure the conversation out.

How long does the "wake" of a boon typically last until it has receded?

Time really isn't part of my awareness when I am surfing. With surfing, instead of being bound to a time and space dependent experience (like sitting through the linear duration of a movie or a song or walking around the perimeter of a sculpture) we wander in a landscape that is without temperature, without light, without size, without shape, and without time. But somehow we can still come away from surfing with an experience that has a sense of order to it. Most of the really enlightening surfs I've had did not end with a post to a surf club -- surfing is so private, it rarely ends in a public act. I would invite others to start clubs that use the same boon/wake ideology, but I'm not sure if the ideology is clear enough yet to be useful to others.

In the accompanying text to your latest collection of music, Babes, you stress the virtues of struggle and mere survival in making music. Is this something specific to music or could you extend this stress to creative work, in general?

Struggle has not been a very popular theme in the American art of my lifetime. My generation is better summed up in the word "whatever," an attitude that opposes all forms of struggle. I think we are headed for a digital middle ages when struggle will become more relevant. The surge of awareness that the web has caused in us is sweeping across the marketplace like a leveling tsunami, and we're starting to drown in this sensation of information surplus. Not much seems to be rising to the surface and an endless number of self corporations are toiling away in obscurity. The general confusion and helplessness that many are experiencing over what is to be done with this massive flood of information are indications that the digital middle ages have already begun, and that these times will be about great suffering and struggle for all artists and consumers. I'm not sure how long this plague will last, but luckily after a flood there is usually a blossoming.

Your first New York solo show opens on September 7th at V&A on the Lower East Side. What will be on view?

The show is called "Monuments to the INFOspirit" and will display some physical monuments to mediocre source of all information, the INFOspirit. The INFOspirit is the forth logo in "The Four Sacred Logos" and the forth brochure in "The Four Sacred Brochures." A brochure altar will be installed in the gallery where the brochures will be made available. Another monument is an animated gif mandala made from hundreds of obscure and recognizable gif icons, characters, and arrows that symmetrically pulsate around a self portrait in meditation. I wanted to try pushing a web native format to its limits by building a gif at a resolution too large to play over the internet or fit in any browser window, requiring the viewer to visit the gallery to see the file. There will also be some commemorative monuments and promotional items ordered from the web.

Image: Kevin Bewersdorf, Monument to the INFOspirit 1, 2008

What's your strategy for working between the gallery and the internet?

Artworks in "gallery space" are products that we pretend are not products within a business that we pretend is not a business. It's hard for many net and new media artists to deal with this, to cram their ethereal web concepts into furniture products for the wealthy so that their own artistic progress can be financed. It's also hard for art consumers to become invested in immaterial art because that would require a deeper acceptance of physical objects as trivial and ineffectual products, and most art consumers are very wrapped up in the material world of restaurants and nice coats and taxis waiting outside the gallery. I care very little about the material world, and I'm completely certain that the most profound experiences in life can't be contained by gallery walls, so the art object in "gallery space" for me can only represent a limitation, a disappointment.

I try to deal with this by presenting the object itself as pathetic and mediocre, but the information it conducts as sacred. The products I exhibit are ordered from the web and are made by a series of default operations on order forms that travel from virtual space to a physical product shippable by UPS. Once in the gallery, the product stands in for the flow of information that caused it, it is merely a conduit for the INFOspirit. I document these products on my website, completing the circle of info by joining the product back with the web. The object refers to the web and the web refers to the object. The web leads to the maximum and the sacred, the object leads to the limited and the sorrowful. When I sell an object, I see the sale as an offering, a gesture of support for the ongoing practices of my self corporation. That's really all I need -- as long as I am able to continue surfing and updating my website, I feel fulfilled.

4-D Hyper Movie (1962) - A. Michael Noll

2008-09-03T16:37:02+01:00

"The notion of creating art works through the medium of machines may seem a little strange. Most people who have heard about the experimental use of digital computers in creative endeavors have probably shrugged them off as being of no consequence. On the one hand, creativity has universally been regarded as the personal and somewhat mysterious domain of man; and, on the one hand, as every engineer knows, the computer can only do what it has been programmed to do - which hardly anyone would be generous enough to call creative. Nonetheless, artists have usually been responsive to experimenting with and even adopting certain concepts and devices resulting from new scientific and technological developments. Computers are no exception."

-A. Michael Noll -The Digital Computer as a Creative Medium (1967)

Linked In

2008-09-03T16:00:43+01:00

Paul Chan: Baghdad In No Particular Order- From Heart As Arena, this video essay by Paul Chan chronicles daily life in Baghdad before the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

OUT NOW!- Organized by Anton Vidokle, OUT NOW! is an exhibition and several lectures on the occupation of Iraq. "The questions involved in mounting a political art exhibition are extremely complex. In the past I've been skeptical of such direct forms of political expression, primarily due to the instrumentalizing effect they have on artistic production. And yet I have been extremely disconcerted by the near total lack of involvement or discussion of this subject by art institutions here in the only country capable of ending the occupation of Iraq...[OUT NOW!] is less of a curated exhibition than an attempt to explore possibilities for a sympathetic cultural backdrop for urgent action and discussion toward ending this war."

Buckminster Fuller Symposium- In conjunction with the Buckminster Fuller exhibition "Starting With the Universe," the Whitney, the Architectural League, and Cooper Union will sponsor a symposium which examines the continuation of Fuller's ideas within the work of contemporary scholars and practitioners.

One Hundred $1 Grants- Unique opportunity from ASDF: ASDF is offering One Hundred $1 Grants. All selected projects will be available in a downloadable exhibition in February 2009. Anyone is eligible. There are no restrictions on proposed projects. All forms of creative activity are encouraged. Money can be used for cost of production or for monetary compensation.

Suicide (2007) - Gregory Wagenheim

2008-09-03T15:02:28+01:00

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More work by Gregory Wagenheim

Rhizome News: Exploring Big Boxes, In and Out of the White Cube

2008-09-03T12:00:00+01:00

The face of the American landscape has been forever changed by the invention of the "big box." These giant, typically nondescript retail meccas exemplified by Wal-Mart not only lead to the mowing-over of existing terrain, they also shift the cultural ecology of a space and bring with them more roads, more cars, and more garbage. But what happens when companies abandon these spaces in favor of paired-down, web-based operations? This is the question that artist Julia Christensen asks in her project Big Box Reuse. She's spent the last five years touring these renounced superstores, photographing them, collecting local residents' stories about the community impacts of the big boxes, and writing a forthcoming book. Documentation of these efforts are being exhibited through November 23rd at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery in an show curated by Astria Suparak, entitled "Your Town, Inc." Meanwhile, Turbulence has commissioned a forthcoming wiki on which the artist will invite people from across the country to upload their own stories, photos, and videos. Among the project's most poignant ironies is the question of what happens when the retailers that trade in over-packaged, often not-recyclable goods fail to successfully repurpose the structures in which they once perpetuated disposable culture. - Marisa Olson

Image: Julia Christensen, the Snowy Range Academy (Renovated Wal-Mart located in Laramie, WY) from Big Box Reuse, 2006

http://www.bigboxreuse.com

A Tasty Mixture: J&L's "Videos and Vodka"

2008-09-02T18:18:58+01:00

Available this month, "Videos and Vodka," the second DVD anthology from J&L Video, comprises selections from a video salon artist Jacob Dyrenforth and curator Eva Respini ran out of their Brooklyn loft from 2004-2006. A strong sense of community binds the works, owing in part to the fact that Dyrenforth received his MFA from Columbia alongside many of the featured artists, including Ohad Meromi, Guy Ben-Ner and Lisi Raskin, as well as to the number of emerging, New York-based artists in the program. In an essay accompanying the anthology, Dyrenforth and Respini foreground these facts, describing their decision to create Video Salon as arising, in part, from a need to provide their friends and the broader public with "non-traditional viewing spaces," in the style of the "collectives, collaboratives and artist-run spaces" established in New York in the 1970s. While the 1990s saw the rise of high-production films, videos and moving-image installations from artists like Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken and Jane and Louise Wilson, many younger artists, the curators claim, "are reconnecting to a history that pre-dates the black-boxed multi-channel universe." Several of the works, for example, build whimsical or fantastical scenarios from patently everyday materials and circumstances, like Untitled, Air Guitar (2005), in which Robin Rhode plays and destroys a guitar drawn, sequentially, on a wall; or Ben-Ner's Berkeley's Island (2000) where the artist/father's desire for solitude manifests itself as a Crusoe-esque life on a desert island, comically set in the center of his kitchen. Others present intensively personal or shared narratives, from the deconstructed footage and text of Lisa Oppenheim's Dioptric (2003) - taken from an imaginary scrapbook - to the three-way telephone conversation in John Pilson's Sunday Scenario (2005), where the back-and-forth between baseball aficionados becomes a language unto itself. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Guy Ben-Ner, Berkeley's Island, 2000

Link »

Abused Amazon Images (2005) - Nat Gertler

2008-09-02T16:30:44+01:00

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Linked In

2008-09-02T16:04:49+01:00

Urban computing, locative media and everyday life in the future city- Anne Galloway from Space & Culture posted her recently completed PhD dissertation (as a pdf) on urban computing. "An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation..."

FILE Sao Paulo 2008- Giles Askham reviews the festival FILE for Furtherfield.

The Digital Dragon: Synthetic Times in Beijing- Régine Debatty takes stock of the current (and future) media art scene in China for ArtReview.

halter.ed - Experimental Cinema Resources -Links to research materials on experimental cinema collected by Rhizome Staff Writer Ed Halter.

Word Art Encouragement (2008) - Micaela Durand

2008-09-02T13:05:53+01:00

(In collaboration with BFFA3AE)
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More work by Micaela Durand Here and Here.
Via Travis Hallenbeck

Rhizome News: Somewhere Out There

2008-09-01T12:00:00+01:00

"Artificial World," a two-week exhibition on view at New York's Mountain Fold, assembles works by six Japanese and American artists that explore "ideas of made-up, artificial, or simulated worlds." Visually, the show could not be more eclectic -- shelves of compact discs, knit objects, sprawling fabric paintings and gelatinous sculptures populate the small gallery. Common to many of the works, however, is an interest in the social and creative parameters of virtual space. Ben Fino-Radin, for example, has struck upon a neat, if somewhat twee, techno-meets-craft aesthetic vocabulary. In wall installations like Potience Module (2008), discreet, knit objects (largely depicting computer iconography, including code, mouse icons and the much-reviled hourglass) aggregate in symmetrical, totemic structures. Strips of black tape become disciplinary intermediaries in Aki Goto's big, energetic wall piece (Untitled, 2008), linking fabric and canvas paintings of cats with small, exquisite drawings in graphite and pen. The strongest of the latter presents a humorous take on virtual communities, equally steeped in the visual language of early-80s arcade games and the urban-abstraction of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-3), as small, smiling heads form points within webs of overlapping lines. While these and most of the exhibition's other works settle on shallow inquiry - at times to their benefit - Masaru Aikawa's My 25 CDs (2008) strikes a deeper chord. Citing an interest in Benjamin and Warhol and a concern for the status of the artwork in the digital era, Aikawa has "passionately and respectfully duplicated," a cappella, twenty-five of his CDs. Aikawa's heartfelt vocal imitation of the ambient electronics of Kraftwerk's Autobahn provides the most hysterical treat. On a broader level, Aikawa makes a serious comment on twenty-first century virtual consumption, by means of his self-portrait as strange, irreverent fan. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Ben Fino-Radin, Process NG Unit, 2008

http://www.mfoldgallery.com/#/current/

Early Digital Animations by Juha Terho

2008-08-29T22:30:43+01:00

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Mark Your Calendars for September 5th!

2008-08-29T18:30:46+01:00

Join us at the New Museum next week, on September 5th, for this month's New Silent Series event "the Scale of Intervention." An official warm-up for the psychogeographic festival Conflux, the panel will explore possibilities for artistic disruption within urban environments. Artists CutUp Collective, Leon Reid IV (of Darius + Downey), Betsey Biggs, and Roadsworth will present their diverse body of work, followed by an in-depth discussion led by the founders of the celebrated street-art site Wooster Collective.

[Information and tickets here.]

CBS Outdoor Pull Suzanne Opton's "Soldier" Billboards During the Republican National Convention

2008-08-29T16:32:50+01:00

The Republican National Convention is still a handful of days away, but controversy is already being courted in Minneapolis-St. Paul over CBS Outdoor's decision to cancel its contract with artist Suzanne Opton due to the politically-sensitive nature of her photographs. Working with local organization Forecast Public Art and curator Susan Reynolds, Opton aimed to display several billboards depicting active-duty American soldiers, whom she photographed at Fort Drum, New York in 2004 and 2005. Like Rineke Dijkstra's series of photographs of young soldiers serving in the French Foreign Legion and Israeli Army, Opton's works offer empathetic portraits of her subjects, at a time when American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan elicits increasing national dissent. Her striking, monumental images find their subjects stripped of body armor and military dress and leaning their heads against a table. The photographs are vertically-scaled and cropped to only show each subject's head and neck, a visual decision Opton has suggested lends vulnerability to these unarmed soldiers, but which also, in light of past Al Qaeda videos, carries a far more disturbing undertone. On the project's website -- now the most significant record of the billboards -- Opton accompanies each of the nine photographs with the length of time served, by a given subject, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a sense, because of the ambivalent mix of emotions these images conjure, Opton's choice to exhibit them in equally ambivalent public spaces seemed very appropriate. Yet that ambiguity, the artist claimed, was precisely the cause of CBS Outdoor's concern. Worry about possible misinterpretation of the images -- and the lack of explicit indication that they were artworks, as opposed to advertisements -- contributed, she said, to the organization's decision to discontinue her contract. If nothing else, Opton's proposal will serve as an example of a thoughtful, timely coalescence of public and political art, and a reminder of the effect foreign policy continues to have on private enterprise. - Tyler Coburn

Link »

Linked In

2008-08-29T16:12:08+01:00

View of Barack Obama's Speech at Invesco Field in Denver (from the New York Times)- I don't think the television broadcast of Obama's speech last night accurately captured the sheer immensity of the crowd. This interactive feature (a QuickTime VR file) by the New York Times provides a 360 degree view of the Invesco Field from the perspective of an attendee.

2008 Presidential Election in the Blogosphere- information aesthetics discuss perspctv "an online information dashboard that summarizes & graphs the Internet activity relating to the 2008 presidential elections, in an attempt to compare the similarities & the disparities between the mainstream media & user-generated content."

EcoArtTech's "Externalities: Wilderness and its Others"- On September 5 from 7pm to 10pm at OTO, EcoArtTech (Christine Nadir & Cary Peppermint) will "continue to rethink relations between humans, technics, technology, and the environment with Externalities: Wilderness and its Others a networked, video-based performance piece."

Michael Snow: So Is This / Manifesta 7, Fortezza / Franzensfeste- Video documentation of Michael Snow's So Is This by VernissageTV from Manifesta 7. So Is This is "a silent film of 45 minutes consisting of single words of this script or score placed on the screen one by one, one after another, for specific lengths of time."