Rhizome News

Walking on Coals, er...Sunshine

2008-08-27T04:00:00Z

Video, performance, and installation artist Kate Gilmore often draws on pop culture and musical lyrics to frame her work. We think, then, that she might not mind our saying that the elaborate, yet beautifully and sophisticatedly straightforward challenges she designs for herself might best be described by reciting the first words of the theme song for perpetually syndicated sitcom, Cheers: "Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got." This melancholy refrain is the perfect truism against which to witness Gilmore's physical testimony to the facts that life is hard, the life of an artist is hard, and the life of a female artist is, well... hard. But of course, Gilmore manages to make clear--in a way that channels Valie Export as much as Charlie Chaplin--that there's no reason that one can't have fun climbing whatever furniture piles life may throw in one's way. In fact, if one dolls themselves up in slick satins and slathers themselves in the lipstick befitting a lady, then snaking one's way through the kinds of trap doors and tumultuous tunnels the artist creates in her work is nearly a piece of cake--not that she doesn't put a pot of elbow grease into conquering every such obstacle. On September 5th, Philadelphia's Institute for Contemporary Art will open a solo exhibition of Gilmore's work. It will survey previous projects and present a new entry to this trademark series in which installation, performance, and video documentation commingle. - Marisa Olson

Image: Kate Gilmore, Every Girl Loves Pink, 2006, Video

http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/gilmore.php

A Series of 'Tubes

2008-08-25T04:00:00Z

Constant Dullaart's series "YouTube as Subject" plays with the image of the arrow-in-a-square button that appears in an embedded YouTube video. When clicked, Dullaart's videos retain their initial black backgrounds, but the arrow-buttons remain, plummeting, strobing, trembling, or turning into a mini-disco light show. In true YouTube spirit, Ben Coonley recently posted his own series as response, this time appropriating the spinning wheel of dots that eager viewers need to sit through as a video loads—in keeping with his longstanding interest in media breakdowns and frustrations. Coonley's dot-wheel now drifts off into the distance, accelerates rotation, and (betraying Coonley's Providence-scene roots) expands into a psychedelic black-and-white OpArt swirl. Better not put off watching Dullaart and Coonley's 'tubed conversation, however. Cory Arcangel's Blue Tube, made only last year, has quickly become near-obsolete. Back then, YouTube embedded a logo bug in the corner of its videos, and Blue Tube simply turned that logo blue. Now, however, after its host site's redesign, it doesn't always function in quite the right way. Who knows how long our friends arrow-button and spinning-wheel-thingy will last? - Ed Halter

Image: Constant Dullaart, "YouTube Disco" from the series "YouTube as Subject", 2008

Change It Up

2008-08-22T04:00:00Z

The ongoing US Presidential race is coming to such a head that even media stories about media coverage of the campaigns are flooding the wires. But how does this grand spectacle translate abroad? Given that America is so invested in branding itself as an exporter of democracy, the elections are a key opportunity to transmit this ideology. A new performance exchange project initiated by artist Elana Mann, entitled "Exchange Rate," invites artists from Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, Israel, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and, of course, the USA to collaborate on "producing, exchanging and interpreting performance directions related to the election campaign." Towing the choose or lose line, the participants will post instructions for creative acts that other artists will elect to perform. Part of the effort is to see how the further development of mass media has effected the evolution of collaborative artistic models borne in the Fluxus era, by strategically conflating artistic media, the communicative media by which the work is broadcast, and the news media through which the President is arguably elected. The resulting performances will be highlighted in partnership with the upcoming UnConvention project, with Trade & Row's "Campaign Trail" series, and in other online and offline events. Stay tuned to see if "Exchange Rate" can bring new meaning to the phrase "making change." - Marisa Olson

http://exchangerate2008.com/blog/

Prickly Situations

2008-08-20T04:00:00Z

Jonathan Soderstrom's Ad Nauseam 2 is a space shooter game that provides an overwhelming synesthetic experience: start playing and you'll find yourself restarting over and over again as you learn to master its maneuvers and get drawn into its psychoactive swirl of color and sound. Your podlike ship shoots two kinds of energy blasts and can also emit a kind of gravity pulse that beautifully blows away debris around it; your enemies begin as a pair of crudely-drawn semi-happy-face blobs that grow into menacing starfishes, turn into ASCII robo-ships, then ramp up to a final boss battle. Ad Nauseam 2 is one of several indie games available on Soderstrom's Cactus Software site, including Burn the Trash and Shotgun Ninja, that work with ancient arcade and first-gen console forms like the shooter and platformer, ramping up their audio-visual intensity, twitchiness and formal ingenuity for a hungrier generation of gamers. But other Cactus games are more contemplative, playing with narrative structures and standard expectations: for that kind of head trip, try out the Lewis-Carroll-esque Psychosomnium, which presents a world in a dream, or the starkly existential explorations of Mondo Medicals. - Ed Halter

Image: Jonathan Soderstrom, Ad Nauseam 2 (Still)

http://www.cactus-soft.co.nr/

Defense Strategies

2008-08-18T04:00:00Z

Over the weekend, Mobile Art Production's group exhibition, "Defence," occupied Stockholm's Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen. These islands formerly served as fortifications for the city but now primarily function as picnic grounds, a change that has led curator Magdalena Malm to consider both historical and contemporary defense systems, as well as the potential danger of forgetting or repressing a place's past entanglements with violence and military force. Such open reflection is further important, Malm claims, to curtail the type of profiling that has become one outgrowth of the shift, in our terroristic age, from external to personal, psychological defense: "If we previously held the belief that the armed forces would protect us, the responsibility has now been firmly placed on each and every one of us to be aware of empty bags and people behaving suspiciously." A stellar collection of artworks explored these variegated topics, including the video Testimony, Kutlug Ataman's study of Turkey's amnesia about its oppression of Armenians during World War I, manifest by his father's old wet-nurse's delusional, autobiographical recollection of that era. A composite of white sugar cubes turns black and melts beneath a stream of motor oil, in Kader Attia's video Oil and Sugar #2, a powerful, symbolic pairing of two materials that have each dictated East-West commerce. Henrik Andersson specifically addressed the exhibition's site with real-time recordings of the underwater area surrounding the islands, a reference to the alleged intrusion of Russian submarines, in the 1980s, into the Swedish territorial waters around the Stockholm archipelago. While political relations have shifted since this historical incident, Andersson's work acknowledges how the mere possibility of an external threat transforms listening into a process of detection, and every foreign, underwater sound into something suspicious. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Kader Attia, Oil and Sugar #2, 2007

http://www.mobileartproduction.se/English/skal_projects.html

In Dreams I Walk With You

2008-08-15T04:00:00Z

NETMARES & NETDREAMS v 2.0, an online exhibit that launched on August 8, feels like the brooding step-sibling of Harm van den Dorpel's Club Internet. Whereas Club Internet does its best to simulate a gallery's clean white box, NETMARES & NETDREAMS projects its content into an alternating background of white or black, set beneath a ghostly, reverberating browser frame with links delineated via a somnolent parade of sibilants: z Z z Z z Z z. Each page presents a single work by one artist; the total curatorial effect is one of dark confusions, subterranean logic, and primal unease. Mark Brown's video Requiem for a Bogus Journey image-echoes Bill and Ted into a demonic wormhole, Damon Zucconi's Shining flickers a human figure in and out of its low-res existence, Kari Altmann's Soft 404 dissolves the error-message code into a blurring field, and Nathan Hauenstein's eldritch Pillars floats creepy icon totem poles through an expanse of galactic space. The show includes other work by James Whipple, Martijn Hendriks, Ryan Trecartin, Yannick Antoine, Harm van den Dorpel and others. The project's 1.0 iteration consisted of group blogs (one dreams, one 'mares), with respective channels on flickr and vimeo, initiated by Altmann and Brown with many other participants. The dream/nightmare continues next week, when a Netdreams 3.0 will coalesce in the waking world at Current Gallery in Baltimore on August 22. - Ed Halter

Image: John Holland, uralone, 2008

http://netmaresnetdreams.net/

No Media

2008-08-13T04:00:00Z

Sigmund Freud had an interesting take on nightmares. He argued that not only were all dreams exercises in wish fulfillment, but that even nightmares showed us our desires....in reverse. Such a principle can be applied to looking at any number of creative gestures that approach meaning through forms and concepts presented in reverse or even in absentia. Through this lens, we might see artist Tino Sehgal's work as teaching us a lot about media by virtue of his employing what looks like no medium. The Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts (CCA) is now entering its second year of continuously presenting Sehgal's situational projects. In each, there is no physical object at which to gaze, but rather a human actor, instructed to enact an interpretation (of a newspaper headline, a press release about a concurrent show, etc), to sing, or to initiate an interaction with a gallery visitor. The Wattis's two-year presentation of Sehgal's work--simultaneous with other shows, thus directly contextualizing it in relation to institutional and spectatorial conventions--is a rare demonstration of commitment to studying a complicated and visionary artist's singular work. In this, it is apparent that the artist's relationship to media is a very specific one. He wants the experiences he creates to be seen as objects that can be bought and sold (albeit without printed receipts, instructions, photos, or other documentation), but their lack of physicality is at least partly a response to the earth's dwindling resources, and his primary medium is thus conversation--whether it's an initial one in the gallery or the oral narrative that perpetuates and historicizes his practice outside of the gallery. The translations and exchanges he programs are thus given a material weight by virtue of their ability to influence (as if by pushing on) others. - Marisa Olson

Image: Marisa Olson, GIS for Tino Sehgal, 2008 (Editor's Note: Tino Sehgal does not permit documentation of his work. Thus, for the above, Marisa took a screengrab of a blank image that appeared after conducting a Google image search for Tino Sehgal.)

http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/tinosehgal

Soul Driver

2008-08-11T04:00:00Z

Einstein famously reflected that "the mysterious" was what stood "at the cradle of true art and true science." But considering the ensuing decades, marked by the increasing technological specialization of the sciences and perennially high-brow parameters of art world discourse, it is easy to now believe that the fields have all but separated. "Souls and Machines," the current exhibition at Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia, however, maintains that "art and science move along parallel paths" and offers up a handful of creative practices that exemplify the twenty-first century marriage of new media and empathetic production. While most of the participating artists work across media, a significant number are exhibiting works that connect older forms of image-making, like painting, with the latest in programming and design. Artist, graphic designer and university professor John Maeda presents seven "paintings in motion": digital animations generated by custom software, which find colorful, abstract patterns aggregating into naturalistic structures. These animations, titled Nature, are projected onto hanging, translucent screens, a strategy that moves them into the sculptural realm and seems in keeping with Maeda's declared interest in "post-digital" aesthetic renewal. Digital painting becomes an exercise in decentralized production in Evru's TECURA, an interactive application and image/sound archive open to a user's every creative whim. A printer and WAN network hookup feature in TECURA's exhibition installation, thereby underscoring Evru's role as facilitator (not author) of a broader community's experimentation with contemporary methods of image-making. - Tyler Coburn

Image: John Maeda, Nature, 2008

http://www.museoreinasofia.com/s-artistas-contemp/home.php

The Game of Life

2008-08-08T04:00:00Z

As we hit the slower weeks of summer, take five minutes to play Jason Rohrer's Passage, a contemplative art game created for last year's Gamma 256 competition in Montreal, which challenged indie designers to create games with tiny, irregular aspect ratios of no more than 256x256 pixels. In its half-year of existence, Rohrer's entry has become a micro sensation on its own, garnering kudos in scads of the most widely read games blogs as well as mainstream press. In Passage, you play a character who travels across a narrow horizontal corridor representing nothing less than the passage of life itself, from childhood to old age. Since it's very much a game about exploration and discovery, to say any more about what happens would spoil the impact -- so with that in mind, don't read Rohrer's heartfelt statement on the game until after you've played it. Rather, prepare for ingeniously low-res visuals and minimal but meaningful interactivity that maximize a miniature platform in terms of the metaphoric potential for gameplay. After Passage, Rohrer created something of a sequel with Gravitation, a slightly more complex game about creative inspiration and a father's love for his daughter. Or, as Rohrer puts it, "explores how a particular corner of my life feels, as only a game can." - Ed Halter

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/

Company Men

2008-08-06T04:00:00Z

In the late 1960s, the LACMA's ambitious Art and Technology project sought to bring together contemporary artists with the biggest high-tech corporations of the day. The pairing was inspired: at the time, the art world of Los Angeles played second fiddle to New York, but Southern California was in the midst of an enormous boom in the technology industry, partially aided by an influx of military contracts during the drawn-out war in Vietnam. This year, LACMA published an online resource dedicated to the project, centered on a 392-page pdf of A & T's long out-of-print catalog, along with a selection of press clippings (one major criticism of the day: no women or people of color were invited as artists.) Over 40 corporations participated, including Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Lockheed and Pan Am; of the 76 artists asked to submit proposals, 23 found productive matches with engineers and manufacturers. Fruitful combos included Andy Warhol and Cowles Communications (3-D printing), Robert Whitman and Philco-Ford (a massive mirror sculpture) and Claes Oldenberg and Disney (a giant hydraulic icebag), but many other projects were deemed technically or financially unfeasible. A & T's catalog makes for juicy reading, detailing the elaborate culture clash that occurred when suits and scientists had to work with cosmopolitan creative types and utopian longhairs. Perhaps the strangest marriage was that of John Chamberlain and the RAND Corporation, a military-aligned think-tank then largely seen as intellectual architects of nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. For his project, Chamberlain arranged daily screenings in the RAND offices of his nudity-filled film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez, starring Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead, and circulated a series of conceptual memos asking staffers to submit "answers." One reply simply read: "The answer is to terminate Chamberlain." - Ed Halter

http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/MWEB/archives/artandtechnology/at_home.asp