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For an invention meant to help us express ourselves, language sure comes with a lot of rules. To some, this is an exciting artistic challenge, while to others this is a barrier to the full expression of an identity that may no more adhere to a culture's norms than it does to the grammar of the mother tongue that culture gave her. This quandary has led many media studies scholars to take an interest in the relationship between natural languages and computer languages, between social codes and computer codes. A new online exhibition, entitled "You Own Me Now Until You Forget About Me," traces these issues and adds to the grist questions about the ownership of language (from authorship to identification with a lexicon to branded alignment with various software platforms, etc) and the looming potential of languages to die. Enveloped within these issues is an aspiration to study and encourage human interaction, and to preserve the traces of these conversations. The show includes work by Karl Heinz Jeron & Valie Djordjevic; Martin Wattenberg & Marek Walczak; Codemanipulator; Jörg Piringer; carlos katastrofsky; Mary-Anne Breeze (a.k.a. mez); and Christina Goestl. Some of these contributions are classic net art pieces already experiencing the interestingly adverse effects of time on web-based media, but all of them are important contributions to this discussion of communication. Surf them for yourself and then add to the show, if you'd like. That's right! Curators CONT3XT.NET have adopted an open curatorial model that allows visitors to chime in and widen the vocabulary used "in the exploration of our language with its arbitrary systems and rules, its corresponding functions within society, as well as with its absurdities and restrictions for the individual." The show will also be installed at the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana from May 16th-June 22nd, 2008. - Marisa Olson
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Codemanipulator is a Polish artist whose work revolves entirely around code and the pleasurable binary between the latter as text versus its ability to constitute an image. He makes "coded paintings," interactive installations, and data visualizations that address such topics as architecture, urban planning, and that public space we call the internet. While these themes coalesce around physical models, the work is intended to inquire about the impacts of seemingly immaterial code on creativity and social interaction. In a broader sense, this entails a consideration of the ways in which binary models of thought have further polarized or developed, following the emergence of network culture. For his show at Krakow's Foto-Medium-Art Gallery, entitled "I am code" (open May 9-June 20, 2008), Codemanipulator will present "CodePainting, CodePoetry, CodeMovies, CodeSculpture, CodeArchitecture...CodeEverything." That is, he takes the same sequence of code and explores how different machines and systems--from web browsers to video processors--interpret it differently, manifesting in a variety of forms. Judging from the gallery's photos of the exhibition's opening, the most popular manifestation was an installation of printed tiles resembling large-scale magnetic poetry. Despite the simplicity of these shingles laid out on a table, it was the ability to interact with and manipulate the code--physically and syntactically--that made it so popular. Take this as a reminder of the ongoing importance of playing language games. - Marisa Olson
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paraflows08 - festival for digital arts and cultures :: The topic of the 3rd festival for digital arts and cultures in the city of Vienna is UTOPIA.
UTOPIA: The term utopia, the non-place, derived from old Greek u-, non, and topos, place, denotes a nowhere which is untraceable and therefore projecting all longing into an unreachable beyond. Utopia is therefore an imagination which is thinkable as an idea, yet is not directly realisable. It is the great dream, concept, and vision of a world or a time with a new social, religious or technical order.
UTOPIA can be traced back to the book De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque nova insula Utopia Libellus vere aureaus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus (Of the best state law and of the new island Utopia, truly a golden booklet, as pleasant as it is cheerful) by Thomas Morus which was first published in 1516. The text alludes to positive scenarios of technical, spatial and social constructs which have not been realised. Usually, technology plays a major role in utopian phantasms. More often than not their realistic implementation is a matter of availability of technology and very often it is especially in digital art the starting point of a work of art.
In 2008, Paraflows 08 UTOPIA will try to develop the perspective, the linguistic roots of which corresponds with last year's exhibitions. In the context of the topic UTOPIA, we want to gather concepts of a possible future, draw perspectives, dreams and prognoses, dare take a prognostic look at the future. Directly tying in with last year's festival topic UN_SPACE which dealt with non-space and impossible spaces this year we will again strive to provide a multi-layered examination involving the overwhelming architectonic and historical reality of the venue the MAK Gegenwartskunstdepot Gefechtsturm Arenbergpark.
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The 2008 Columbia M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition, curated by Drawing Center curator João Ribas, is one of the more unmemorable in recent years, which is not to say that there was not some evidence, among the works of the twenty-six graduating students, of rigor and sophistication, but rather that the show was resoundingly devoid of the type of flashy, ready-to-be-consumed showstoppers characteristic of past rounds. This might account, in part, for the fact that several of the artists, including Brendan Harman, Sara Stracey and Carlos Sandoval De Leon, work in interdisciplinary installation and sculptural assemblage, practices that have been subject to considerable curatorial and commercial attention in recent months and that, by nature, favor the associative and the fragmentary over totalized aesthetic forms. To claim further overarching themes to be anything but conjectural would, in a sense, miss the point of the unwieldy beast that is the thesis show. A certain expressive, narrational tendency could be observed in the work of several graduating painters, like Nate Wolf, Allison Katz and Jessica Williams, coming as a refreshing counterpoint to all of the hard-edged abstraction currently hanging about Chelsea and suggesting the rule of Dana Schutz (MFA '02) may be, as yet, ongoing. Standouts include the oversize drawings of Alyssa Pheobus, which revisit the history of American decorative arts through paper collage and technically accomplished graphite drawing; Leigh Ledare's psychologically charged photographs and videos of his mother, a ballet dancer-turned-stripper; and Oz Malul's elegant, mechanical sculptures. On the occasion of my visit, I had the pleasure of witnessing one in an ongoing series of collaborative performances staged by Georgia Sagri, today finding the petite artist alternately recording vocal loops and executing endless ambulatory loops across a carpet of fabric hides. While bearing no explicit critique of the thesis exhibition, Sagri's compulsive execution cleverly played on the way that even performance can (and, in this context, may be expected to) spin itself into commodity. - Tyler Coburn
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Did You Know?: The default Mac OS X (I'm on version 10.4.11) screensaver picture slideshow function can read an alpha channel in a .gif file. That is to say, as the slideshow plays your images, a .gif with an alpha channel will appear to be "on top" of the previous image, and as the slideshow goes on, the .gifs will continue to "layer" on until an image of a different format is displayed, which has a default white or black background.
So what?
Take advantage of the randomizing function to create some home-made screensaver machinima art!
The animation above is a sample implementation: The NEW Office Party Screensaver from FATLAB.
In the spirit of Men of the Internet, this screensaver is a series of carefully-sliced 800×600 .gifs, sourced from the faces of the hardest working local board members, regional vice presidents, administrative assistants, and other fruitful regular-dude-generating search terms on the internet. The .gifs layer over one another to hybridize these generic gentlemen into a randomly-generated ultimate budget-balancing force of suits. Its dudes! (< -- math joke)
Click here to download a small .zip file of the .gifs. Point your screensaver to it and set your preferences like this:
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Daphne Dragona is an independent new media arts curator and organiser, based in Athens with a special interest in the game arts field. She was the Programme Curator of Gaming Realities (Medi@terra, International Art and Technology Festival) which took place in Athens in 2006, and the Associate Curator of Gameworld which was hosted in Laboral in 2007. She has been involved as an organiser or as a participant in different new media events and since 2004 she is also collaborating with the International New Media Collective Personal Cinema.
Together with Erich Berger and Laura Baigorri, Daphne curated Homo Ludens Ludens (an exhibition about play in contemporary culture and society which runs until September 22 at LABoral, Spain) and I had a couple of questions for her about her latest adventures in games and art.
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An exhibition opening next week at San Francisco's Southern Exposure gallery asks some tough questions. Namely: "What does it mean to be an American now, and why would one want to identify as such, amid the current maelstrom of international bile directed at this country? What is the point in speaking out?" Not surprisingly, this less than optimistic premise gives the show its title, "Hopeless and Otherwise," but the thirteen artists included may manage to let some of the hot air out of the balloon of gloom bobbing above this sphere of angst. They do so by resisting emotional overreactions to social injustices, and instead offering proactive glances at the given scenarios. For instance, April Banks immersed herself in the West African cacao-processing cycle, in order to expose the contradictory lifestyle fantasies and foul labor policies perpetuated by the American chocolate industry. For Mary Walling Blackburn's, This Dream, This Frequency, the artist conversed with American soldiers in Iraq, via MySpace, and wove together audio recordings of their dreams with details of the dreams of Iraq's much more ancient inhabitants, as etched into ancient Mesopotamian tablets. Broadcast throughout San Francisco, over the air waves, the piece traces the historical fantasy-life of this ancient region. Both Alison Pebworth and The Renaming Bush Street Project explore our relationship to the spaces in which we live. Pebworth creates images drawing on historical figures and events, recorded mythologies, and speculative narratives about the future of the present. In this case, her work looks at the colonization of North America and the systematic sabotaging of its natural resources. The Renaming Bush Street Project turns on a similar question of viewers' relationship to the history of their own backyard, manifesting in a survey of local inhabitants regarding the possibility of renaming a major thoroughfare. Space continues to be a site for political inquiry in the work of photographer Michael Light, whose Two Burials And A Utility Corridor Looking Northwest; Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery, Los Angeles, CA provides an aerial perspective on the intense influence of death upon the contemporary landscape, evoking a tension between the capitalist drive to develop and the human endeavor to rest in peace. Jonathan Santos's Gettysburg Address translates Abraham Lincoln's eponymous speech into Morse code, with the last line reading, "We here highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The installation draws an all too often overlooked parallel between war and crime, while pointing out the unfortunate perpetuity of this nation's battle drive. Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project re-presents speeches from the New Left movements of the 60s and 70s, at their original sites. For this exhibition, he shows video of a reenactment of Howard Zinn's 1971 speech on Boston Common, in which the assembled audience reacts to the temporal reverb of Zinn's statement that "we need to do something to disturb that calm, smiling, murderous president in the White House." These and other projects by Siemon Allen, BLW, Melissa Day, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Nathan Lynch, and The Visible Collective seem to indicate that there is a hope for change to be found in the repetition of history. - Marisa Olson
Jonathan Santos, Gettysburg Address, 2006 - 2008
Artist Robert Rauschenberg passed away on Monday. He was 82. Easily one of the most significant artists to come out of the twentieth century, Rauschenberg began painting in the 1940's, and eventually integrated collage, sculpture, performance, choreography, set design, and printmaking into his trailblazing practice. Throughout his career, he was continually dedicated to the concept that the artist must take on an active, participatory role in relation to the culture at large. This perspective was perhaps encouraged and strengthened while studying in the 1950's at the experimental and visionary Black Mountain College. During this period, he met John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and in 1952, the three participated in Theater Piece #1, cited by some as the first "happening" which involved the simultaneous performance of music, dance, and visual art. In 1967, he co-founded the groundbreaking organization Experiments in Art and Technology, whose mission to foster collaborations between artists and engineers served to bolster the creative application of new technologies in ways unimaginable before. To this day, the formation of Experiments in Art and Technology, along with the series of performances in 1966 from which it emerged, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, mark a major milestone in the history of art and technology. Rauschenberg's openness to experimentation- both formally and conceptually- remain one of his principal contributions to American art. - Ceci Moss
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Participating artists: Anonymous (RO), Heman Chong (SG), Shahram Entekhabi (IR), Kristofer Hultenberg (SE/DK), C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (NG), Lasse Lau (DK), Lize Mogel (US), Ursula Nistrup (DK), Dan Rees (UK) and Jee Young Sim (KR/US).
Johanne Løgstrup has invited a number of Danish and international artists to comment on and elaborate the possibilities inherent in geographical maps as media. Both the map as a medium and the artists participating in the project seek to represent the world. Whereas maps are associated with accuracy, factuality and intentional objectivity, the artist's gaze upon the world is characterised by openness and subjective interpretation.
The artists have used the conventional measures and folding functions of the map as a general template for the artworks. In completely different and very playful and experimental ways they have made maps of places -- some of them fictitious, some of them real. The maps vary from Heman Chong's private landscape of knowledge shown by his personal list of literature to Lize Mogel's map which has zoomed in on the centre of The UN's logotype, the North Pole, to take a look at the political conflicts that have lately arisen in this area. Dan Rees contributes with a map where snails have drawn mucos routes across a world map with almost invisible silvery trails and C. Krydz Ikwuemesi's map is animated with features that contrast the right angels and concise metrical elements that usually characterise maps. Thereby "The World is Flat" gives new perceptions of the networks, associations and representations of places, people and power.
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Sue de Beer, Annika Line Trust (Psychedelic Light), 2006 (detail)
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Rhizome's videos document our exhibitions and events, as well as provide coverage of non-Rhizome exhibitions and events relevant to our mission
Due May 17, 2008
Call for Proposals: African Americans in New Media
Due May 18, 2008
Due May 20, 2008
Call for Texts: The Mirror Stage
Call for Sessional Curators: artselector
Due May 21, 2008
Job Posting: Visual Studies Visiting Professor
Due May 23, 2008
Call for Artists: Next Star Artist competition
Call for Proposals: Pourinfos Newsletter / from 16-04 to 23-04-2008
Call for Proposals: JOBS @ ARS ELECTRONICA
Due May 24, 2008
Call for Blog entries/submissions: Taboo Theater 2.0
Due May 27, 2008
The Approval Voting stage for Rhizome's 2009 Commissions cycle began April 17th and will continue until May 20th 8pm EST. This year, members of our community will select two of the seven artists awarded with grants ranging from $3000- $5000. View proposals and cast your vote today!
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