No Disc (2006) - Rafaël Rozendaal
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Rhizome Presents:
Seven on Seven
Rhizome is pleased to announce Seven on Seven a new major initiative that reflects our mission to connect art and new technology. Seven on Seven will pair seven artists with seven technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new --be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine-- over the course of a single day. The seven teams will present their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th. Recalling the groundbreaking 1966 event 9 Evenings, in which dancers, visual artists and musicians were paired with engineers and scientists, Seven on Seven is aimed at enriching all involved, and putting forth important, new projects that tie to Rhizome’s mission of openness and innovation in art. Documentation of the event will be made available online following the event.
Seven on Seven Participants include, on the technology side, Ayah Bdeir, Jeff Hammerbacher, David Karp, Andrew Kortina, Hilary Mason, Matt Mullenweg, and Josh Schachter, and on the art side, Tauba Auerbach, Cao Fei, Aaron Koblin, Monica Narula, Marc Andre Robinson, Evan Roth and Ryan Trecartin.
Full details and ticket purchase: http://www.rhizome.org/sevenonseven
Seven on Seven is a new program set to recur annually, and raise support for Rhizome. In its first year, Seven on Seven is made possible through the generous support and collaboration of Wieden + Kennedy / PIE. Additional lead support was provided by Betaworks and Mozilla. We would also like to thank our media partner, Mashable, and Kickstarter for donating space for the teams to work Thanks to FUTURE FRIENDS for Seven on Seven's logo design..
Sampling #1 (2009) - Eva Paulitsch and Uta Weyrich
Since 2006, the two artists have been collecting films from mobile phones in the public sphere. It is the mixture of amateurish documentation of your own life, of a direct, unhampered view on your own reality, of unmotivated, unguided camera movements as the expression of boredom but also of directed little scenarios that aroused our collector's instincts. Paulitsch and Weyrich are accepting all films into their archive uncensored. This is increasingly developing into a fascinating document of our times, to a sort of evidence-gathering on and siting of the present. Above all, however, it resembles a bizarre album of weltering digital imagery.
For the exhibition YOU_ser 2.0 in the ZKM | Media Museum, the two artists make their mobile film archive accessible for visitors via mobile tagging. The mobile films are concealed behind the colourful QR codes, which visitors can decipher with their own WLAN-mobiles or with the mobiles provided by the museum. In this way, the content of the films Paulitsch and Weyrich are collecting on the street and publishing on the Net returns to the private sphere and into the medium where they originate. The video blog serves to show new extracts from this archive and offers a platform to films currently being collected.
Google Portrait Series (2007-2009) - Aram Bartholl
Each code represents a visual enryption of a search on 'Aram Bartholl' in a specific language on Google.
A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person's name at Google.
A large number of people can be found by name on Google today. Everyone who is working on a computer and uses the internet regularly can be found on Google. Even people who don't use computers can be found sometimes because their names appear in 'old' media (i.e. books) on the net.
'Egosurfing' is a popular way for a user to find out what websites and information Google returns on his/her name search.
How many hits does Google show on my name? Am I popular? Do I want to be found at all? Who writes about me? What do people find out about me when they google my name? Am I in concurrence to other persons with the same name? Do I rely on the results Google shows me on a person's name? In which way do I relate to someone which I only known by Google results?
You Are What You Buy (2007) - Michele Pred
I chose to create an embroidered version of a barcode to represent how technology has become interwoven, fused with our lives and our identity- to represent how we have become one and the same with technology.
Through new technology cell phones are now capable of scanning and decoding barcodes. However, these barcodes are a little different than the ones you see scanned at the grocery store: they are called 2D barcodes and are composed of black and white squares that encode the URLs to any website of creator's choice. In other words, these Data Matrix format barcodes are a physical hyperlink. Through my research I have learned how to create and program 2D barcodes with embedded text messages. I have also discovered that these barcodes can be reproduced in a variety of materials and are still capable of being scanned/read with a mobile phone.
N Building (2009) - Teradadesign and Qosmo
N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures' identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
-- PRESS RELEASE FOR "N BUILDING"
More Than Super
THERE IS ANOTHER SUPER BOWL AND IT’S IN QUEENS IN AN OLD SYNAGOGUE
You can watch “More Than Super” live at http://www.livestream.com/mattandjudebowl at 6:00 pm, February 7 starting with pregame activities. Kick off will be around 6:25 pm EST.
On Sunday, February 7, the great American event that is the Super Bowl will be contested twice. Super Bowl XLIV will be played in Miami, Florida in front of a packed stadium and an international television audience of millions. Simultaneously an “improved” version of the game will be played in Ridgewood, Queens before a live audience of a few dozen enthusiasts and streamed online to perhaps hundreds more. Artists Matt Freedman and Jude Tallichet are producing “More Than Super”, a simultaneous, play-by-play restaging of the Super Bowl with a small army of collaborators who will substitute themselves for all the roles in the spectacle--players, referees, TV producers, half-time performers, advertisers, team owners, and fans in the stadium. The duplicate game will be staged in the artists’ studio, a defunct synagogue in Queens. Freedman and Tallichet have created a miniature football stadium in the old sanctuary; stained glass windows bracket the end zones and dusty chandeliers illuminate the field. The entire production will stream live as the actual game is played. Freedman and Tallichet will play a game identical to the Super Bowl, but better.
The artists will use the slivers of time between the broadcast plays in the “real” football game to restage the action that had just taken place. Just two people in Queens will do the work of the 90 professional athletes playing the game in Miami. Freedman will play all the positions, offensive and defensive, for the NFC champion New Orleans Saints and Tallichet will portray the entire AFC champion Indianapolis Colts team.
Great care will be taken to recreate the ambience of the television broadcast as accurately as possible, down to the half-time entertainment, but “More Than Super” will be a collaboration rather than a competition, more an awkward dance than a sublimated war. The game in the synagogue will engage America’s greatest spectacle and cut it down to size.
Interview with Jeff Hnilicka of FEAST
As the second part of a series on art, labor, and politics, I spoke with Jeff Hnilicka of FEAST, a Brooklyn-based community dinner that funds the work of emerging artists. FEAST will be hosting their next meal tomorrow evening, February 6, from 5-8 p.m. at Church of the Messiah, 129 Russell St, Brooklyn NY. The event is open to the public. - Jenny Jaskey
What is FEAST and how did you begin?
Jeff Hnilicka: FEAST has been going on for a little over a year and runs out of a church basement in Greenpoint. There are around twenty people who help facilitate it. We come from the art world, food world, and design world, and we are connected to ideas of collectivism and immediacy – things like zines, living room dance parties, bike rides, and dinners. Many of us are also involved with Hit Factorie, an artist collective.
FEAST grew out of our desire to investigate the collapse of cultural production in the face of emerging sustainable food production systems that were successful. We wanted to ask “what is localism?” in relation to cultural production and how the structures of a farm co-op translate to an art economy. In the food world, the sustainable is the heirloom – that is the desired experience. In cultural production, the sustainable is relegated to the amateur, the “craft.” But we wondered: can you produce high quality cultural products using a sustainable model? Those were our basic goals. What developed was a dinner party, where around 300 people come to a church basement every couple of months. We ask for $10-20 donations at the door to attend the dinner, although no one is turned away. Artists propose projects over the course of the meal, and the guests select one project to fund. We vote democratically. Whichever artists get the most votes get a big bag of money with a dollar sign on it. We ask them to come back to the next dinner and present how they used the money.
I should mention that the model for FEAST is not our idea. InCUBATE in Chicago has been doing something called Sunday Soup for a long time. Other similar meals exist through Stock in Portland, Stew in Baltimore, Sugar City in Buffalo, Feast in Columbus, and I recently facilitated a FEAST in Minneapolis during a residency there.
Call for Applications :
Experimental Television Center's Finishing Funds 2010
Experimental Television Center is seeking applications for the 2010 cycle of their Finishing Funds program. Brief description below, for more information and to download the application, visit the grants section of their site. Deadline is March 15, 2010.
FINISHING FUNDS provides media and new media artists with grants up to $2,500 to help with the completion of diverse and innovative moving-image and sonic art projects, and works for the Web and new technologies. Eligible forms include film and video as single or multiple channel presentation, computer based moving-imagery and sound works, installations and performances, interactive works and works for new technologies, DVD, multimedia and the Web. We also support new media, and interactive performance. Work must be surprising, creative and approach the various media as art forms; all genres are eligible, including experimental, narrative and documentary art works. Individual artists can apply directly to the program and do not need a sponsoring organization. Applicants must be residents of New York State; undergraduate students are not eligible. The application requires a project description, resume and support materials, including a sample of the proposed project. Selection is made by a peer review panel. About $25,000 is awarded each year. Announcement is made in early June.
Will Gompertz on Net Art
BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz writes the following about
net-based art:
"It's interesting that, as far as I am aware, no
contemporary artist has yet harnessed this extraordinary technology to
make a significant artwork. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and am missing
something great - do you know of any net-based art works that are
worth a look? Maybe you have made one (an artwork made specifically
for the medium, as opposed to a film such as the one above, which uses
the net only as a means of dissemination)? If you, like me, can't find
any net-based art of note, why do you think that is? Why, when there's
been such a boom in contemporary art around the world, has no artist
made the medium of the web his or her canvas? And if someone were to
use the net as a medium, as opposed to making an image, or a video, or
even an interactive Flash animation, what would the resulting art
look, or sound, or feel like?"
As with many things that are relatively new, there is a general lack of awareness surrounding internet-based art: how its defined, how to find it, how it operates, and so on. Internet art is also troubled by a problem of perpetual discovery: while its history evolves, it is often not elaborated, but instead rediscovered, again and again, by the critical establishment.
As the above comments by BBC's arts editor demonstrate, this moment of discovery can be wonderful, but its also glaringly ignorant of an important field that has been thriving for nearly two decades now. Gompertz also lays claim to a rather inverted sense of how the boom operates. He assumes that a boom in contemporary art would leverage net art; on the contrary, a boom doesn't elevate practices that aren't associated with high price-tags, it pushes them further to to the margins. This is a situation that makes it even more urgent for critics, curators and organizations to locate these practices, learn about them, support them and bring them to the forefront. Its unnecessary to tell this readership that the artist mentioned by Gompertz, Celeste Boursier-Mourgenot, is only one of a countless range of artists engaging with the participatory nature of the web. But, it does raise a larger question: Perhaps one positive side of the bust is that more critics might step back and look at work not (or not yet) squarely within the art market.
While I won't single out any artists here, I suggest that Gompertz spend some time looking at this website, and many others, like VVORK, Turbulence or Furtherfield, that promote an incredible range of internet-based art, as well as new methods through which artists are collecting and promoting each others work. When looking, I hope he will not try to find instances or reinforcements of Duchamp, but rather be open to new kinds of practices. 2010 is a very exciting moment in art, online and off, if you can see it.
Will Gompertz's blog post via Radiovisual
Orbite Rosse (Red Orbits) (2009) - Grazia Toderi
Tender Prey (2002-2008) - Ran Slavin
Tender Prey is a modular, synchronized 3 to 6 channel video and sound installation expansion of an earlier work "Organic Urbanic" from 2002. Inspired by satellite images, urban plans, kaleidoscopic examinations and signal interceptions. It is a cortex of an imagined city. Aerial videos are joined into science fiction panoramas, in-versed fields of digitalia and disquiet, scenarios of urban out foldings forming metallic robotic ornamentations. Tel Aviv is the dirty digital city behind "Tender Prey". It is featured in ultrasonic transparency, amplified, duplicated and warped.
Airshaft (to Piranesi) (2008) - Ana Maria Tavares
Ana Maria Tavares is known for installations employing materials such as steel, glass and mirrors. Resembling architectural structures, her installations call to mind the artificial, emotionally vacuous atmosphere of airports, office buildings, and other forms of urban architecture. Through her re-deployment of industrial architectural materials, such materials lose their function, and viewers are subtly thrown off balance in their physical experience and sense of time. Recently, Tavares has been creating films in which steel columns connect with stairways running in all directions. By introducing reflections she renders the space in the films all the more complex. Airshaft (to Piranesi) (2008) examines the realities of human circulation through anonymous urban spaces as found all over the world. The video depicts a modern architectural space in the manner of the complex, labyrinthine expanses depicted by the 18th century Italian artist Piranesi, but wavering fluidly like a mirage. The chaos of Brazil’s enormous urban spaces is reflected here. Tavares’s videos produce an encounter with “somewhere” that is not quite “here” and make us aware of how unreal our reality can be.
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Danny Snelson
Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" centers around faith in the power of the keyword to unlock its bottomless treasure chest and put the right answer in one window. Years have passed since the company's ranking algorithm outpaced the approach of human navigators filing information into channels -- an approach that Yahoo has been trying to keep alive by farming the digital labor to users themselves. But even as search algorithms make dinosaurs of the Dewey decimal and other brain-powered systems, it might be worth considering the benefits of staying open to a plurality of variously scaled methods.
These issues converge in Danny Snelson's work as a writer, editor, and archivist. His titles increasingly overlap in the internet's library without walls--an environment that often embodies the Foucauldian idea that "one never archives without editorial frames and 'writerly' narratives (or designs)," as Snelson put it in an email. As an archivist, he has made substantial efforts to preserve endangered cultural artifacts -- making them universally accessible and useful, you might say -- on behalf of PennSound, an audio archive specializing in recorded poetry, and UbuWeb, where, at the suggestion of founder Kenneth Goldsmith, he scanned out-of-print titles and reformatted them as PDFs for free distribution via the site's /ubu channel. The PennSounds and UbuWebs of the internet undertake preservation projects that small presses and recording labels can't touch due to financial reasons, thus ensuring that experimental work will continue to reach audiences in years to come. Distribution networks like these matter in an environment where the internet (for those without access to academic libraries, at least) is often the first and last stop for research -- a realization that impelled Goldsmith to formulate a radical ontology in the title of his 2005 essay, "If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist."
The copyright struggles of the last decade give archivists of Snelson's generation reason to be wary of the legal and political ramifications of distributed networks -- perhaps more so than people like Goldsmith, who first encountered the internet in its early, utopian days with fully formed ideas about the limits of print publishing. This, in part, is why Snelson balances his expansion of searchable online catalogues with the creation of hermetic archives. One of these is a site devoted to digitizing Marshall McLuhan's legacy; the link to it is passed hand-to-hand, and the site is coded with a robots.txt file blocking search engines and the unfavorable copyright attention they might bring. Then there is Endless Nameless, a collaboration with James Hoff under the brand of No Input Books. Hoff and Snelson fill hard drives with downloaded avant-garde content and sell them, iTunes-like, for $0.99 per GB. Materials are sorted in folders with the names of the publishers, labels, and galleries that first brought them to the public--a decision intended, Snelson writes, to preserve "the material production history that often gets lost in digital distribution." The list of folder titles ranges from Ace Books to Zone Books (along with a few dozen numerical titles), adding up to approximately four terabytes, a number that, in Snelson's estimation, exceeds the data hosted on UbuWeb. For each Endless Nameless customer, the folders are selected randomly to fit the desired amount of memory. The hard drive's discrete physical form makes it easy to keep it off the grid.
TXTual Healing (2006 - Ongoing) - Paul Notzold
TXTual Healing was created in the early days of 2006 by Paul Notzold and has become a collection of interactive public projections and performance formats that encourage creation of dialog through text messaging from mobile phones. Whether interacting with custom digital signage, or live performers TXTual Healing builds community through public story telling via the mobile phone.
The Representative (2005) - Carey Young
The Representative is a ‘portrait’ of a call centre worker that can be accessed by telephone.
Call centres are an increasingly ubiquitous and technocratic interface between large organisations and the public, and their spread has been described as endemic to a globalised world. With The Representative, visitors are invited to sit within an installation of domestic lounge-type furniture and use a single phone to connect direct to a call centre agent working at a remote location. The callers are offered the chance to ‘get to know’ the agent, and thus to experience a ‘portrait’ of the call centre agent accessible via a call centre interface. Young hired the agent and defined a ‘vignette' of them by agreeing a generic script of topics for possible conversation to be offered to callers at the start of each call, based on interviews with the agent about their personal background and experiences of call centre work. Following these initial options, calls were unscripted and based on the conversational interests of the caller.
The Representative is a development of Nothing Ventured, an earlier work by Carey Young which was staged at fig-1, London in 2000, in which she hired a call centre to ‘represent’ her. The Representative, at its simplest level, offers a view of the life and experiences of a call centre operative whose individuality and identity would normally be denied to the caller. The calls would exist somewhere between a personal chat, an interview, the reality-TV style exposure of a ‘civilian’, a script, an exposé of working conditions, a piece of journalistic research, a portrait and a service, with the caller put in the position of researcher, audience, voyeur, client and potential friend.
National Dinner Tour (2004) - Marc Horowitz
I was working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel. While on set one day, I wrote “dinner w/ marc 510-872-7326,” my name and cell phone, on a dry erase board featured in a desk product shot. A few months later, the catalog, containing my dinner invitation, was printed and sent to millions of people. I eventually received over 30,000 calls from people wanting to dine with me. As a result, I traveled the USA in a tiny RV for a year dining with strangers.
Karaoke Wrong Number (2001-2004) - Rachel Perry Welty
Rachel Perry Welty’s video shows a frontal head and shoulders view of the artist herself lip-synching to messages left in error on her telephone answering machine. Welty uses expert timing and facial gesturing and maintains a priceless deadpan expression during the intervals between messages. Karaoke Wrong Number reveals the simultaneous connections and disconnections of contemporary life, where technology both assists and impedes communication.
-- FROM THE ENTRY FOR "KARAOKE WRONG NUMBER" ON THE ICA BOSTON SITE
Telephone Piece (1997/2008) - Yoko Ono
Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1986-1987)
Andy Warhol hosted the television show "Fifteen Minutes" on MTV from 1986-1987, making only five episodes. Four of the five episodes are available below, the videos and text are sourced from The Jailbreak and the videos were originally discovered via Zamboni Soundtracks.
(Note: For those who want to view more art television shows, Rhizome dedicated a day to art-related public access TV shows in December. To view the posts from that day, visit the December 2009 archive and scroll down to December 8, 2009.)
EPISODE 1 (1986): Robin Leach, Jerry Hall, John Oates, Dweezel and Moon Zappa, Tama Jamowitz, Paulina Porizkova, Sally Kirkland, Tracy Johns, Katherine Hamnett including fashion show with models Maria Kay, Anna Jonsson and Eric Perron, The Parachute Club, and The Pyramid Club with Happy Face, Lady Bunny, Dean Johnson, John Kelley as Dagmar Onasis and Lypsinka.
EPISODE 2 (ca. January 1987): Grace Jones, Kenny Scharf, Marc Jacobs including fashion show with models Charlotte Dawson, Pam Piper and Cynthia De Maria, Peter Beard, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Francesco Quinn, William Burroughs, Chris Stein, Angel Estrada including fashion show with models Lori Milligan and Rochelle Redfield, Elizabeth Peña, Gregory Abbott, Judd Nelson, Das Furlines, Isabel Toledo, Ruben Toledo, Suzie Zabrowska (fashion model for Isabel Toledo), Dovanna Pagowska (fashion model for Isabel Toledo), and Angelo Colon.
EPISODE 3 (ca. February 1987): Victor Love, Bobbi Humphrey, Wall to Wall (singing Tuff Luck), Ian McKellen, Bo Diddley, Moto-Fashion by Michael Schmidt and Anita Martire Schmidt models: Grace Nemergut, Raphael and Thomas H. Street, Martire models: Ralph Scibelli and Barb Carboy, Motorcycles: Pilar Limosner, Sally Randall, Hugh Mackie, Dimitri Turin and Willard, The Fleshtones, Saqqara Dogs with Ruby Ray and Bond Bergland, The Tunnel nightclub with Rudolf (club director), Thomas Leeser (co-owner) and Carla Steiner (bartender & singer), Regina Beukes (violinist), Miriam Bendahan including fashion show with models Jennifer Hamden and Gabriela G., Suzanne Lanza, Robert Longo with clip from the New Order Bizarre Love Triangle music video directed by Longo, The Mudd Club (footage from 1979), Brook Larsen of B. Larsen Frames, Inc. (The company that took over the Mudd Club premises).
Scene from the Josep Papp presents The Opera at the Academy production of The Magic Flute with Jeffrey W. Reynolds (Tamino), Susan Hanson (Pamina) and Eric Fraad (Director) and interviews with: Heather Watts (principal dancer), Michael Torke and Jack Soto (principal dancer)
EPISODE 4 (1987): Debbie Harry, Nick Rhodes, Bryan Adams, Ric Ocasek and Andy Warhol visit the new Factory premises at the old Con Edison building, Phoebe Cates, Diane Brill, Susan Hess, Charlie Clough (artist), Stephen Sprouse with models Ariane, Michael McGale, Salvatore Xverb, Katherine Hammond, Suzanne, Nick Camen, Parish Fashions.
Amatuer Night at the Apollo featuring: Emanon Johnson (The Baby Beat Box), Ralph Cooper Sr. (host), Howard B. Sims, Sr. (Sandman), Phyllis Yvonne Stickley (comic), Audra Cassell (dancer), Herman Johnson (lead guitarist), Betty Du Chantier (singer), Ralph Cooper II, Latasha Spencer (The Gospel Princess).
Andy Warhol - Braniff Air - TV Commercial
From Braniff Airlines 1968 "When You Got It, Flaunt It" ad campaign. Salvador Dali was another celebrity featured in the campaign, to view that video, go here.