By
Marisa Olson
on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm.
"When the power of love, overcomes the love of power, the world will know the peace." This prophecy by rock legend Jimi Hendrix could be the foreword to a manifesto on the use of music in the propagation of nationalism, but instead it's a point of inspiration for "The Sonic Self," an exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum. Open through August 30, the show brings together a range of "participating artists from around the world with the main goal that their collaborative projects will bridge disparate audio-visual practices and expose their shared languages." In keeping with recent curatorial trends, "The Sonic Self" is part-exhibition and part-workshop, aiming to explore the relationship between sound and identity through installations, audio/visual performances, and participatory events in which collaborators work to innovate new devices for the creation of auditory autobiographies. While the relationship at stake seems most universally to be about "being heard," the selected artists are working with material ranging from live performances to field recordings to computer-generated sound to DJ samples. In the spirit of tracing "similarities and differences in the growing confluence of audio and visual experiences in contemporary complex and diverse global culture," the project will travel to St. Petersberg, Russia, and Chennai, India, following its New York debut. - Marisa Olson
Video: Philip Dadson and Don McGlashan in From Scratch's performance of "Drum/Sing."
Despite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter
Image: Huutajat, The Screaming Men, 2003 (Still image from video, 76 min., Directed by Mika Ronkainen) Courtesy the artist Photo by Matthew Septimus.
'Quad', the first in a series of minimalist experimental television plays made by Beckett in the 1980s for the broadcaster Süddeutscher Rundfunk, operates with a serial game involving the motional pattern of four actors, but equally accommodating four soloists, six duos, and four trios. Four actors, whose coloured hoods make them identifiable yet anonymous, accomplish a relentless closed-circuit drama. Once inside the square, they are condemned to monotonously and synchronously pace the respectively six steps of the lengthwise and diagonal lines it contains, in part accompanied by varying drumbeat rhythms. The mathematical precision and choreography is made possible by the exactness of the timing. Choreographic variation is confined to the number of performers, and the resultant changes in color constellations. The middle of the square, which is marked by a dot, must always be bypassed on the left-hand side. In the course of the production, the feet leave behind faint traces on the diagonals of the white square. 'Quad' (here you see the first version) is, for all its reducedness, the most dramatic of Beckett's last teleplays. The playwright also shot a black-and-white version with four figures dressed identically in white and acting to the beat of a metronome.
-- Rudolf Frieling (from Media Art Net)
By
Tyler Coburn
on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm.
A couple of months ago, a message appeared on the roof of Steve Turner Contemporary Art, loosely painted in white across a black ground, reading "Help Us." Given the gallery's location, just across Wilshire Boulevard from the Los Angeles County Museum or Art (LACMA) and the dazzling new home for all things blue-chip, The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, one would be tempted to infer a dissenting tone in the sign, made by Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford. But as Bradford's message is not actually visible to the windowless buildings surrounding the gallery, and can only properly be seen from the air and via a live video feed the gallery has established, it's clear that the artist's SOS reaches beyond the limits of contemporary art. Bradford adopts a fundamental position of appeal that is heavily colored by its similarities to those of Hurricane Katrina victims, including Angela Antoinette Perkins, who repeated these very words outside the New Orleans Convention Center, on September 1st 2005, and roused survivors into a chant. Seen through this lens, the selective visibility Bradford grants his piece may reference the infamous account of Bush flying over New Orleans while returning from vacation, as well as the extent to which Katrina, like most contemporary disasters, was delivered unto the majority of the world populous through varying levels of technological mediation: mass-media all the way down to cell-phone videos. The gallery's video feed feels particularly poignant, in this regard, in that it documents, in real-time, a message that has already been painted and that never changes. With each day that elapses, in other words, Bradford's entreaty only more compellingly tells its story of expectation, desperation and thwarted relief. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Mark Bradford, HELP US: An Installation (Aerial View), 2008
circle up now uses "human aerial art" to draw attention to issues of human rights, social justice and freedom. on july 12th, in 20 locations across the world, from kathmandu to tel-aviv to mexico, they organized thousands of amnesty international supporters to join together to form images of the words "freedom," "dignity" and "justice" representing the principles of the universal declaration of human rights. you can see more photos from circle up now's global day of action right here.
[all from circle up now's global day of action, july 12, 2008. top to bottom: malmoe, sweden. bamako, mali. karnataka, india.]
BRENDA RAY: WORLD VOICES PROJECT
A SOUND INSTALLATION OF NEARLY 50 VOICES FROM DIFFERENT
COUNTRIES FEATURING THE READING OF EXCERPTS OF THE DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
JULY 20-AUGUST 3, 2008, SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
New York, NY (July 1, 2008) From July 20 through August 3, 2008,
nearly 50 different voices reading the United Nation's Universal
Declaration of Human Rights may be heard in World Voices Project. An
engaging and poetic sound installation created by artist Brenda Ray, this project is a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights. Held at The South Street Seaport, Pier 17, Third Floor Atrium,
Fulton and South Streets, admission to the event is free and open to the
public. Hours are: Weekdays 12-7pm, weekends 12-9pm. Opening reception: Sunday, July 20, 6-9pm. For more information, contact 212.477.0961 or log on to www.worldvoicesproject.com.
Brenda Ray began the World Voices Project two years ago, and the project continues to evolve. She has interviewed friends, colleagues and artists from different countries, covering nearly 50 nations and different languages. Among the many voice recordings are languages such as Tigrinya of Eritrea, Amharic of Ethiopia, Mongolian, Zulu and Shona of Zimbabwe.
Letting each voice speak for itself, Ray taped the readings with little
treatment. At South Street Seaport, she has installed a jungle of hanging
headphones, offering a pristine listening environment. Several headphones
include multiple languages mixed together, transforming the recordings into
a mosaic of sounds with the understanding that our common humanity transcends language barriers.
By
Marisa Olson
on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 11:13 am.
Has anyone noticed that it's summer in much of the world? Inspired by this deeply intellectual curatorial premise, a number of beach-based art invitations have been hitting our inboxes. The fiery purple and magenta gradient html invite for Glow Santa Monica reads, "Whether you get your brain waves translated onto a LED display or find yourself lost in a Neptunian lair of a surreal persuasion, please join us on July 19th to spend the night and greet the dawn with others so inclined as to believe our common spaces can be playful, inspiring, and thought-provoking, not just functional." If you are so inclined, and in the neighborhood, a visit to the Santa Monica beach, pier, and Palisades park from 7pm-7am, July 19-20 will put you in contact with installations by highly-regarded artists like Usman Haque and Shih Chieh Huang, and installations organized by such venerable orgs as Machine Project, VJ Culture, and the 18th Street Arts Center. The works slated for inclusion are colorful, interactive, luminescent (perhaps not surprisingly, given the promising title), and big...as in ambitious. There will also be all-night DJ sets and live performances. Now, you could throw on some swim trunks and flip flops to see work like this in a museum, but we're guessing it wouldn't be the same. - Marisa Olson
Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience; Edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip -- Popular culture in this "biological" seems to feed on proliferating fears, anxieties, and hopes around the life sciences at a time when such basic concepts as scientific truth, race and gender identity, and the human itself are destabilized in the public eye. Tactical Biopolitics suggests that the political challenges at the intersection of life, science, and art are best addressed through a combination of artistic intervention, critical theorizing, and reflective practices. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, contributions to this volume focus on the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences and explore the possibility of public participation in scientific discourse, drawing on research and practice in art, biology, critical theory, anthropology, and cultural studies.
After framing the subject in terms of both biology and art, Tactical Biopolitics discusses such topics as race and genetics (with contributions from leading biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins); feminist bioscience; the politics of scientific expertise; bioart and the public sphere (with an essay by artist Claire Pentecost); activism and public health (with an essay by Treatment Action Group co-founder Mark Harrington); biosecurity after 9/11 (with essays by artists' collective Critical Art Ensemble and anthropologist Paul Rabinow); and human-animal interaction (with a framing essay by cultural theorist Donna Haraway).
Contributors: Gaymon Bennett, Larry Carbone, Karen Cardozo, Gary Cass, Beatriz da Costa, Oron Catts, Gabriella Coleman, Critical Art Ensemble, Gwen D'Arcangelis, Troy Duster, Donna Haraway, Mark Harrington, Jens Hauser, Kathy High, Fatimah Jackson, Gwyneth Jones, Jonathan King, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Rachel Mayeri, Sherie McDonald, Claire Pentecost, Kavita Philip, Paul Rabinow, Banu Subramanian, subRosa, Abha Sur, Samir Sur, Jacqueline Stevens, Eugene Thacker, Paul Vanouse, Ionat Zurr.
By
Marisa Olson
on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 12:04 pm.
A new copyright-related exhibition curated by Inke Arns, Artistic Director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein, in Dortmund (DE), has one heck of a title: "Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System: Art in the Age of Intellectual Property." Then again, it sounds like a heck of a show. The first piece visitors will see when they enter the HMKV exhibition space is a video by Negativland and Tim Maloney, called Gimme the Mermaid, in which Disney's Little Mermaid character is seen shouting, "You can't use it without my permission...I'm gonna sue your ass!" The exhibit, which runs July 19-October 19 is part of a larger initiative called "Work 2.0: Copyright and Creative Work in the Digital Age," which includes a iRights.info, web-based research project exploring new labor relations emerging in this litigious era; and a September 26-28 symposium on "Creative Work and Copyright." Arns is one of Europe's biggest new media curators and her show features a good mix of established artists in that field as well as others from the world of fine art and media production, including Christophe Bruno, Nate Harrison, John Heartfield, Kembrew McLeod, Monochrom, Alexei Shulgin + Aristarkh Chernyshev, Cornelia Sollfrank, Stay Free, UBERMORGEN.COM + Alessandro Ludovico + Paolo Cirio, and others. The show's title is plucked from a short story by participating artist David Rice who writes of a time in the future when stars' brands are maintained by laserbeam-armed satellites who snuff out unauthorized copycats. In the story, the "real" tennis star Anna Kournikova is accidentally misrecognized as a fake and "deleted" by the system. These sorts of sci-fi narratives always provide a touchstone for public fears and fantasies about the future, particularly in relationship to technology. This exhibition emerges from a contemporary context in which the development of new technologies that make copying easier have led to unprecedentedly stringent copyright restrictions. Arns writes that the exhibit "puts forward the thesis that the increasingly strict application of intellectual property law hampers the development of culture as a whole." Interestingly, this thesis hinges on the argument that it is the recitation of "images, logos, or soundbites of this very culture" that both generates and recycles (i.e. re-produces) this culture. The hard work of these mechanical reproductions takes center stage in the HMKV show, whereas labor is very often overlooked in discourse that celebrates a readers' "authorship" of a work in which she is engaged. Between this trip to the movies and this dose of real world-informed philosophy, the show itself seems immensely engaging. - Marisa Olson
Image: Negativland and Tim Maloney, Gimme the Mermaid, 2002
Biophionitos generates artificial life using a system similar to the zoetrope, an early animation device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. Horacio González, Paola Guimerans and Igor González added to the concept a touch of Processing and a whiff of Arduino to develop an interface able to create a physical animation which runs in an old-style but interactive phenakistoscope (one of them reacts to your caresses, another one wakes up when you talk to it, etc).
This virtual pet created with the system is made of a limited series of simple polygons which the program has modified in order to give the drawing what looks like a biological life.
The artists also uploaded online a tutorial to do your own Biophionitos.
At the exhibit "Bobo's on 27th," currently on view at Foxy Production in Chelsea, wall-text printed onto a section of the ceiling reads REINTERPRETATION PROHIBITED; easy to miss amidst the jumble of the show itself, the two words are only visible once you've entered the gallery, walked through most of it, and turned to face the doors. Despite the dire warning, the farrago of plastic and styrofoam floor trash, aggressively colorful, punk-ugly sculptures and monstrously expressionist paintings does indeed call for certain readings. At first, the debris seems real and accidental-- like you've stumbled into someone else's art-party a few hours after the beer ran out -- but on closer inspection, each piece of apparent garbage is revealed as its own carefully placed objet: crushed water bottles covered in painted foil or laser-printed labels, a handful of flyers for a (conceptually faux) Philadelphia technical college, a set of lightly abused Colonial-dress souvenir dolls, a cloud of color-coordinated plastic deli bags with their logos meticulously removed. The seeming collapse of a young collective's studio into the gallery ultimately reveals itself as careful artifice: theatrical props for the staging of an image of a 21st century bohemia-echo, a fake fiesta that actually took a lot of work and planning by more than a dozen individual artists. Desire the real thing, then? The show includes a live if buggy webcam feed from the parallel exhibit Bobo's on 9th, which runs concurrently at the art-band's home space in Philly -- but viewers are likely to spy Boboites in their native habitat doing nothing more riotous than checking email. The total effect is that not so much of a playroom but a set of a playroom: no wonder so much of the exhibit resembles a warped memory of a children's TV show, as seen in Barkev Gulesserian's giant golden Dog-buddha, Jesse Greenberg's toy-box-like "touchables" sculptures, and Bobo's own crudely built, push-button jukebox, which twitches, exhales and bubbles bongwater when a song is requested. The myth of the crazy young art-gang rubs off to reveal some industrious chums mixing labor and fun—and in the process, perfecting the mixture's recipe to allow for an effective blend of determined madness. - Ed Halter
By
Marisa Olson
on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am.
Cat Mazza is a practitioner of what sociologist Betsy Greer has called "craftivism." She's used knitting and other needlecraft-related processes to address pertinent political issues. Her projects are particularly adept at effecting a tactical turning of the tables on issues; for instance, using hand-made (though often computer- or software-assisted) processes to address labor conditions. Her latest project is similarly successful at fighting fire with fire (or should we say "fiber"?), parodying a US government program--even using its own explicit instructions--to critique the ideas behind it. Stitch for Senate is a contemporary take on the historic practice of charitable knitting. During WWII, women and children supported the war effort by knitting clothing and protective gear for soldiers abroad. Following the US invasion of Iraq, Americans were encouraged to make similar efforts for soldiers stationed in Iraq and Aghanistan. However, as Mazza points out in a video on her site, this war is not as popular as WWII, consequently neither is the knitting initiative. On the fourth anniversary of the invasion, in order to spur more thought and dialogue about the war, Mazza launched Stitch for Senate which encourages users to download patterns and knit helmet liners not for combat troops but for every member of the US Senate (the legislative body that votes to declare war), giving them the responsibility of distributing the fuzzy armaments. Meanwhile, the website is a space for documentation of these efforts as well as posts by users about war-related discussions and acts of charity, patriotism, and activism within radius of their own local knitting circles. A few helmet liners won't unravel the war, but as with craft groups before them, projects like these do provide a safe platform for approaching (or stabbing a needle into) bigger issues. - Marisa Olson
Submit any media files, playlists, links,node coordinates, live webcasts or URLs.
Please read criteria for Border Transmissions at ISEA 2008 Singapore for related context.
Your media can be uploaded or linked into the Mediatopia database and be included in the participatory sequence produced onsite at the National Gallery of Singapore and viewable / re mixable / mash-up-able on the net via live webcast.
For more information on this project, to submit images and to view the live broadcast visit the project site at: www.mediatopia.org.
Project Details:
The Mediatopia Project and related events will reflect upon the ISEA 2008 Border Transmissions Theme and will exploit the potential of networks, communication tools, alternate economies and experiential technologies as a collaborative engine to enable the emergence of a different conception of borders, and of the transmissions that problematize these demarcations.
It also seeks to expand the models of production and distribution that have arisen as social networks, hardware, generative software components, small-scale download practices and peer-to-peer protocols have changed the nature of not only how material is made but distributed. Mediatopia will act as an incubator and working model for experimentation, inquiry, and cross-cultural collaboration within the framework of these overarching themes...
By
Marisa Olson
on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 3:30 pm.
In their 2005 project With Respect to Residue, the Raqs Media Collective printed a theory of residues on disposable placemats, which were then distributed to various restaurants. Defining residue as, "that which never finds its way into the manifest narrative of how something (an object, a person, a state, or a state of being) is produced, or comes into existence," the placemats demanded that diners consider why and how "residues" were left out of history, as they themselves consumed. Raqs Media Collective's latest endeavor, co-curated as a portion of the nomadic biennial Manifesta 7, resides much in the same vein. From July 19th-November 2nd, they will be presenting an exhibition entitled "The Rest of Now" which includes many net art pioneers as well as other artists and non-explicitly artist-practitioners in addressing historic residues in the present tense. Set in an abandoned aluminum factory in Bolzano, Italy, the show works "to see what can be salvaged from the oblivion to which the residues of Modernism are normally consigned." In other words, both the site of the show and the works presented explore the ideas, qualities, and realities that have been swept under the rug in the process of European industrialization. The layers of self-reflexivity are piled high, here. The curators acknowledge that Europe is known for hosting many art spaces sited within old industrial spaces and their show works to juxtapose "remembered industrial energy and a more current melancholia of abandonment" to explore what the cultural embrace (or even coddling) of these spaces means. Their suggestion is that it is "symptomatic of Europe's unwillingness to come to terms with aspects of its own difficult path into, and through, the 20th century." So, in a sense, this show will work to retrace these footsteps of so-called progress, with the almost performative results of "The Rest of Now" coming in the form of a question: "What transpires in the course of a second, closer look at the narrative of progress and the velocity of our times?" - Marisa Olson
Recorded at the New School on April 30, 2008, this passionate speech by artist Paul Chan describes the powerful events which hold sway over our time -- recession, war, and a banking scandal -- and their influence on human agency. Towards the end of the talk, Chan urgently underscores the importance of creative expression, as a means to endure and convey the negative consequences of capitalism.
The sculptures and installations of Saâdane Afif's back catalog become departure points for the French artist's ambitious new show, "Technical Specifications," at Witte de With in Rotterdam. Maintaining his characteristic skepticism to self-enfranchisement, Afif has produced an exhibition colored by evasion and delegation, including a series of untitled works, each built of the same materials as previous pieces; wall texts of lyrics written, at Afif's request, in response to his artwork; and three radios, tuned to FM 107.5 Mhz, which, for the duration of the exhibition, will broadcast the songs incorporating these lyrics and the materials lists of the source artworks, as read in the style of popular radio DJs. Unlike an earlier movement of French conceptualists like Pierre Bismuth, who approached inter-media translation through a structuralist lens, Afif and contemporary Loris Gréaud cross-pollinate studio, exhibition and performance spaces with a beguiling energy that builds itself -- more associatively than analytically -- from the lesser defined realms of creative consciousness. Indeed, the parameters Afif has here set for "Technical Specifications" make their points without stifling the artist's inventive return to familiar materials. Ghost (Round bar of wood/ White Dufa, White Alpa, White Ace, White Email, 179 x 3.5 cm) (2005), an Andre Cadere-inspired modular stick, painted in four brands of white, is revisited as double-helix sculpture Untitled (Ghost, 2005 / White paint from four different brands, wood/ 185 x 3.5 cm diameter) (2008). A ghostly, black-and-white rendering of Bauhaus-esque architecture, Le fantôme (2003), becomes a series of five paintings, split along the diagonal to collectively form a monochromatic gradient. These untitled phantoms both channel and displace their source image, in a confrontation with personal and aesthetic histories that reveals the vitality of Afif's restless practice. - Tyler Coburn
Every year, Rhizome awards commissions to a group of international artists for the creation of new work. Read about
the nine projects commissioned in our 2009 cycle!
