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Interview with Aaron Levy: Co-curator of this year's U.S. Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 11th International Architecture Exhibition discusses "Into the Open: Positioning Practice"

Ceci Moss — 2008-10-10T19:45:00+01:00

This week I spoke with Aaron Levy, Executive Director and a Senior Curator of the Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary non-profit art space Slought Foundation, about his participation in the U.S. Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, 11th International Architecture Exhibition. Working in a team with William Menking and Andrew Strum, the exhibition, titled "Into the Open: Positioning Practice," investigates contemporary socially-engaged architectural practice in the United States. Sixteen practitioners were selected for the exhibition, including The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Design Corps, Detroit Collaborative Design Center, Gans Studio, The Heidelberg Project, International Center for Urban Ecology, Jonathan Kirschenfeld Associates,Project Row Houses, Rebar, Rural Studio, Spatial Information Design Lab/Laura Kurgan, Studio 804, Smith and Others, The Edible Schoolyard/Yale Sustainable Food Project, and Estudio Teddy Cruz. Levy, along with William Menking and Andrew Strum, will discuss the exhibition at Columbia University on October 13th and downtown at Studio-X on October 14th. - Ceci Moss

Ceci Moss: The title for the U.S. Pavilion is "Into the Open: Positioning Practice." Considering the wide range of approaches represented in this exhibition, I'm wondering if you can discuss why you selected this title, and how it speaks to the premise of community involvement through architectural practice.

Aaron Levy: What should our place be in this world, and how should architects help shape our sense of place? These are two of the questions that our exhibition gestures towards, through a new American taxonomy of conflict and urgency that takes visitors through some of the richest and the poorest neighborhoods of North America. The sixteen practices we have selected embody an expanded definition of architectural responsibility, whereby architects and designers become activists, developers, facilitators of a more inclusive urban policy, and producers of unique urban research. The exhibition explores not just what these architects and activists have built, but how they have built. In this sense, it is very much in keeping with the contemporary focus on process.

I recently read Karsten Harries' The Ethical Function of Architecture, which follows Sigfried Giedion in arguing that the main task for architecture today is the interpretation of a way of life valid for our time. Harries argues that architecture is more than just an aesthetic approach, and that for some time now, architecture has been profoundly uncertain of its way. Can the problem of where architecture is going ever be thought separately from the larger problem of community and public forms of solidarity? Why must the ethical and the aesthetic always be in opposition? These questions are not just for philosophers; these are some of the questions that the field of architecture needs to consider today.

Image: The Edible Schoolyard/Yale Sustainable Food Project, Model Schoolyard Garden (Installation Photograph) (Photo credit: Ryan Reitbauer/Duggal Visual Solutions)

How did you become involved with this exhibition?

It's a really great question--although it doesn't have all that interesting an answer...There were a fair share of procedural and logistical headaches that are incredibly mundane though perhaps interesting to curators!

Our team (William Menking of The Architect's Newspaper, Andrew Sturm from PARC Foundation, and myself, in dialogue with architects Teddy Cruz and Deborah Gans) submitted a preliminary conceptualization to the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), responding to a public call for proposals. Once our proposal was accepted, we only had about 90 days to actualize what was a fairly rough schematic and fundraise. The lack of easily available documentation for many of the community-oriented practices in our exhibition called into question a typical curatorial approach privileging the display of cultural artifact and encouraged us to highlight architectural process instead. We viewed limitations such as these productively, allowing them to organically determine our approach.

I can't even begin to describe how difficult it was to stage this exhibition in Venice! The biennale opens just days after Ferragosto, an Italian holiday which effectively shuts down Venice for the month of August. Additionally, everything in the exhibition -- from our shipping crates filled with cultural artifacts to the vegetables we planted in the courtyard of the pavilion for Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard -- arrived to the pavilion by barge (a rather curious process which you can view online on our blog). In hindsight, perhaps what was most difficult about curating the U.S. Pavilion was not the pressure to deliver, but rather the lack of time for extended deliberation -- an aspect that I think of as quite central to any curatorial process. The exhibition was ultimately installed on-site in less than two weeks, with the finishing touches made as the press conference began.

It is quite interesting that the different perspectives, tensions, and sensibilities that each member of our team brought to the table are still evident in the exhibition. What role should artifacts play? How should process be communicated without too heavily relying on text? What position should text and video occupy in the exhibition? In the end, we decided that visitors to the U.S. Pavilion should be able to interact and engage with the featured practices in a variety of ways, rather than through just one interface. There are models to interact with, video panoramas and slideshows to watch, but also books to read, blogs to contribute to, and even installations to walk through. The exhibition is less a site of formal instruction than one of participation and social critique. In this sense, the pavilion is decidedly unmonumental this year, intimate even, resisting spectacularity.

How did your work with Slought Foundation contribute to your position on the team?

At Slought Foundation, we encourage sociability and activism through public programs that are purposely critical and provocative; we invite audiences to consider culture and critical exchange as a source of dynamism and enjoyment. As a young organization, we stand for a quintessentially American do-it-yourself culture that is intellectually entrepreneurial and newly resurgent. Our projects take place in Philadelphia against a backdrop of inequality, urban blight, and socioeconomic disparity, which is very much in keeping with the practices and sites of conflict represented in the U.S. Pavilion.

In Venice, we were specifically interested in exploring how architecture can go beyond building (director Aaron Betsky's overall theme for this year's biennale), but also how architecture can go beyond the biennale itself. We wanted to invite viewers to think of architecture not just as a physical infrastructure but also as a social practice. Is an exhibition more than the display of models or cultural artifact? What is possible, and what is placed at risk, when architects become developers, work as artists, curators, or even community activists, acting not just intellectually but also entrepreneurially? We hope that the exhibition catalyzes contemporary practice by prompting questions such as these.

Many of the artists, architects and theorists we work with in Philadelphia and in Venice consider research as a fundamental component of their work; they challenge us to reconsider the politics of exhibition display and prevailing curatorial approaches by evading clear distinctions between artist, architect, critic, and curator. In Venice we also departed from past convention by omitting celebrity practices from consideration, instead highlighting projects with a grassroots, community sensibility. These practices work primarily with communities through complex choreographies of collaboration that balance on the edge of the professional. The sixteen practices offer sixteen different models of community engagement--a diversity of approaches in place of one.

Would you argue Slought Foundation's own place vis-à-vis the culture and community in Philadelphia provided you with a unique vantage point in which to think about civic engagement?

The selection of Slought Foundation (in partnership with PARC Foundation) to represent the United States is an enormous honor for our small West Philadelphia non-profit, but also recognizes a new spirit of community activism and inclusiveness across the country. Our selection highlights how the local site and emergent practices are newly empowered today, despite the absence of major public and private support for grass-roots social and cultural organizations that challenge conventional wisdom. In preparing for Venice, we thought a great deal about how to scale intimacy and informality to the international level of a biennale. European audiences seem to have noticed and appreciated these gestures of curatorial humility in representing the United States.

The curatorial statement describes how local initiatives, such as Project Row Houses and the Heidelberg Project, arose out of the lack of large-scale public infrastructure projects in the United States. While these organizations successfully and creatively navigated private, public, and non-profit sectors in order to support and stage their projects, their existence also speaks to the abandonment, in part, of the communities they serve by larger government. Given the potential overreaching effects of the economic downturn of the past few weeks, do you see local initiatives such as these becoming more central to the health and well being of our cities? Could you argue that this direction is potentially problematic?

I completely agree. In the absence of large-scale public infrastructure projects in the United States, local initiatives are necessarily becoming newly empowered and dynamic arenas for the exploration and generation of new forms of sociability and activism. Teddy Cruz has referred to this development as the "radicalization of the local;" by this he means that the unique complexity of the local urgently demands our attention today. Project Row Houses and the Heidelberg Project are two great examples of the way in which grassroots non-governmental organizations are reclaiming the ability to shape community and the built environment on the scale of the individual neighborhood.

You collaborated with architects Teddy Cruz and Deborah Gans for this exhibit. I wanted to touch on their work, because their individual projects take on issues of migration and national boundaries. Due to a continued growth of population displacement, movement, and migration, these in-between zones have become more prevalent. Can you tell us more about their practices? Within the nation-specific format of the biennial, how were their ideas in particular framed in the exhibition?

Estudio Teddy Cruz's contribution to the U.S. Pavilion is a photographic reproduction of the border fence that spans the U.S. border with Mexico at San Diego. It is at once a form of architectural research and a political practice of intervention. This visual representation of the border, together with its photographic montage illustrating the 30 miles north and south of the fence, take visitors through a landscape of conflict that courses through the affluence north of San Diego and the homelessness and neglect in Tijuana. Visitors to the pavilion literally and metaphorically pass through perforations in this porous border to enter the exhibition in the courtyard and inner galleries. These perforations, rather than taking the form of clear interruptions or breaks along the entire facade, instead take the form of small, vertical micro-incisions, thus encouraging on the part of the visitor a landscape of swerves and detours. With this small shift in perspective, the seemingly formal relationship between San Diego and its informal counterpart Tijuana, gives way to San Diego and Tijuana being understood as part of the same, larger urban system.

Image: Estudio Teddy Cruz (Installation Photograph), 60 linear mile section, San Diego/Tijuana, 2008 (Photo credit: Ryan Reitbauer/Duggal Visual Solutions)

Gans Studio is devoted to rethinking how architecture can participate in the emergence of social forms. It focuses on extreme situations that also foretell the general. It has designed housing and infrastructure for populations displaced by environmental and political disaster in Kosovo, New Orleans, and New York City. The current universal solution to refugee housing is a tarp that cannot withstand extreme climate conditions; it does not provide for basic domestic needs such as bathing and cooking. Refugee camps lack many forms of urban infrastructure and also deplete natural resources, wreaking ecological havoc and disempowering the refugee population in their will to become self-sufficient.

For the biennale, Deborah Gans designed a "Roll Out House" prototype that responds to the extremely degraded conditions on Native American reservations, where a lack of infrastructure and endemic poverty calls for an urgent and easily deployable response. A house can be rebuilt around the deployed "roll out" house. One column holds a cistern, and the other a kitchen. Three hollow columns of various materials can support a roof or even a second floor. They also make possible a domestically-scaled infrastructure of waste, water, or heat. The "roll out" houses can also be assembled in larger formations to cultivate the structure of a town. A physical and social infrastructure emerges according to new principles of "roll out" housing.

Image: Gans Studio, House with Roll Out Core, 2008

The theme for this year's biennial is "Out There: Beyond Architecture"- thus salient topics such as the implementation of emerging technologies with architectural practices, green design, and the intersection between contemporary art and architecture were elaborated in the exhibits. Clearly, there's an underlying progressive ethos at work here, and I'm wondering if there will be any effort to continue these dialogues and/or projects beyond the realm of the biennial.

Right now our organization is working to realize a mixed-income, mixed-use community development near Lancaster Avenue here in Philadelphia. We are undertaking this project with People's Emergency Center, a social services and community development corporation, in partnership with PARC Foundation and Estudio Teddy Cruz.

The exhibition in Venice is therefore a sort of testing ground, a conceptual prelude to what we hope to actualize in the coming months in Philadelphia. Although we are still in the planning stages, we envision a series of social and cultural services being joined under one roof, including digital inclusion programs, employment offices, and a dedicated space for Slought Foundation. In so doing, we hope to mitigate the paucity of social and cultural organizations in neighborhoods of need.

Enduring Freedom (2008) - Ramsay Stirling

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-10T18:30:00+01:00

More work by Ramsay Stirling

Home on the ZEE[RANGE]

Tyler Coburn — 2008-10-10T15:25:00+01:00

Running through the end of December, "ZEE[RANGE]," at Pittsburgh's Wood Street Galleries, furthers Kurt Hentschlager's inquiry into the facets and limits of multi-sensory perception. The Austrian artist describes the exhibition's central work, ZEE (2008), as a "mind-scape" composed of artificial fog, stroboscopic light and adaptive surround sound. These elements conspire to efface the traditional contours of the exhibition space, replacing them with "a psychedelic architecture of pure light." An accompanying piece, RANGE (2008), makes its world premiere in this exhibition. Building upon Hentschlager's past work with 3D video game software, such as KARMA / cell (2006), RANGE presents a collection of virtual characters, contained in a small space, dividing from and agglutinating into a larger mass. Taken together, Hentschlager's latest works recall FEED (2005-6), a multi-tiered performance, created for the Theater Biennial Venice, first featuring a projection of suspended, virtual characters, followed by "a composition for artificial fog, pulse- and stroboscopic light." These seemingly unrelated modes of production thus work together, staging a condition of unreality characteristic of contemporary life and then immersing the audience in an affective simulation of this condition. But if Hentschlager's uniform, virtual mass betrays a nihilistic take on society, the subsequent dissolution of the audience into a phenomenal field may also suggest other forms of self- and collective constitution to still be possible. - Tyler Coburn

Kurt Hentschlager, ZEE, 2008

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Ceci Moss — 2008-10-10T15:07:00+01:00

Media Facades Festival Berlin 2008: Myths and Potentials of Media Architecture and Urban Screens- "The MEDIA FACADES FESTIVAL BERLIN 2008 is an innovative project, engaging a wide range of stakeholders with distinctive interests in the public space. Through round tables, a workshop, panel sessions, lectures, urban screenings on media facades and an architecture exhibition the event will promote a multi-disciplinary action research approach to technology, architecture and media art in modern cities." Media Facades Festival Berlin kicks off October 16th.

The Game by Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG- "This summer I was commissioned by the recently opened Liverpool Biennial International 08 - the theme of which is MADE UP - to write an essay about the idea of "made-up" cities. That essay, called "The Game," was just published in the Biennial's gigantic, 300-page catalog alongside stories and essays by Haruki Murakami, Bruno Latour, Jonathan Allen, Rana Dasgupta, Brian Hatton, and many others. "The Game" explores the idea that we might not actually know what it means to be urban, using a remark by Ole Bouman as a jumping-off point. In an essay of his own called "Desperate Decadence," published in Volume magazine #6, Bouman writes: "We have come to take for granted that those locations with large congregations of architecture must be cities.""

Marc Lepson, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, M.Y. Art Prospects, New York City- "For this exhibition, Marc Lepson creates another simultaneously comforting and disquieting space, filling the gallery walls with digital images enlarged from low-resolution files taken by a cell phone camera. With this super handy tool, the artist's viewpoints travel from New York Times front pages to public spaces traversing spheres both domestic and global from former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to a sea turtle in a Brooklyn aquarium, from mounted policemen in Gaza to the artist's son in the bathtub."

Art-Up Your Computering

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-10T12:45:00+01:00

The awesome New York arts organization Artists Space has come up with three new ways to spice up your computering, no matter where you live. If we had to make a list of the main things we do on our computers everyday, wouldn't typing, watching YouTube videos, and staring at our desktop be high on the index? Now Artists Space--under the savvy influence of curator Joseph Del Pesco--has initiated three ways to art-up those acts. The first, "TypeCast", is a series highlighting one artist-designed font per month, available as a free download. This month, you can find Mungo Thomson's Negative Space, which he describes as "a graphic scaffolding for the sake of alpha-numeric meaning." It's cool and it will totally impress your employer. Following "TypeCast" is "YouTube Commentary Project," which addresses a major problem with the video-sharing site. There just isn't enough commentary and recursion there! (sic!) Nonetheless, inviting smart international artists to verbalize their reactions atop the video of their choice sounds like a can't-lose idea. Stay tuned to Artists Space's YouTube channel for more of these videos, which premiered with a work by Cesare Pietroiusti. And finally, if you're a fan of the element of surprise, then "Artists Space Daily" is for you. It's "a free software program that downloads an artist 'postcard' from the internet and places it on the desktop of your computer, once per day." While this brings art into viewers' lives that they neither have to pay for nor live with for more than 24 hours, the project brings attention to international emerging artists you just may want to see again. It's all fun, it's all free, and it's all for the love of contemporary art, so get with the program and get to downloading. - Marisa Olson

Image: Mungo Thomson, Negative Space, 2008

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THIS WEEKEND -- Two Rhizome Events!

Rhizome — 2008-10-09T17:50:00+01:00

Yes, it's true! Two great Rhizome events this weekend. Please join us.

Image: Mark Essen, Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, 2008

Next Level: New Independent Gaming
Friday, October 10th, 7:30pm
the New Museum, New York, NY
$6 Members/$8 General Public

Bringing together prominent game designers, artists and critics, Next Level takes a look at the recent rise of indie gaming: a vibrant new culture of individually made and self-distributed video games that blur the line between digital art and creative entertainment.

Featuring artist and game designers Mark Essen, Jason Rohrer and Greg Costikyan. Moderated by Rhizome staff writer Ed Halter, an author, critic, and curator whose book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games was published in 2006.

Part of Rhizome's New Silent Series at the New Museum.

[ BUY TICKETS HERE ]

Image: Lee Walton, Watching TV, from the "Remote Instructions" series, 2008

Rhizome Commissions '08
Saturday, October 11th, 3:00pm
the New Museum, New York, NY
$6 Members/$8 General Public

The last in a three-part series that features presentations by artists awarded grants through Rhizome's Commissions Program. Founded in 2001 to support artists working with technology, the Rhizome Commissions Program has awarded fifty-four commissions to date. Projects realized through the Program represent some of the most forward-thinking and innovative works of media and Internet-based art.

In this evening's program, the artists will discuss their commissioned projects and larger bodies of work. This event features Will Pappenheimer, John Craig Freeman, Annie Abrahams, Nadia Anderson and Fritz Donnelly, Lee Walton, Marek Walczak, and Martin Wattenberg.

Part of Rhizome's New Silent Series at the New Museum.

[ BUY TICKETS HERE ]

The Shape of Things to Come

Ed Halter — 2008-10-09T15:50:00+01:00

Video: Superstruct: the Final Threat

"We are living in interesting times," science fiction author Charles Stross observed on his blog last week. "In fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF." The makers of Superstruct, a new project created by the Institute for the Future, would disagree. The IFTF has launched what they're calling "the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game;" in it, players are asked to imagine themselves ten years from now, then flesh out the details of that near-future world through posts to a wiki, discussion forums, Facebook, Superstruct's own site, and elsewhere. But players won't be creating this collective vision of tomorrow from scratch: the game provides a core set of hot-button issues that need to be addressed in 2019 -- couched as reports from the Global Extinction Awareness System -- which include a growing pandemic, the immanent collapse of the world's food supplies, power struggles over energy sources, and the "diaspora of diasporas" of displaced masses. Using a speculative fiction to ask thousands of users to cobble together potentially useful solutions to very real problems, Superstruct can be seen as an online variant of alternative reality gaming, juiced up with elements of crowdsourcing, prediction markets and the collaborative authorship of expanded universes. The very premise of this new mutation in science fiction writing says a great deal about what we think about our own life now in these interesting times: the future is not so much a brave new world to be explored, but a complex problem to be solved. - Ed Halter

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Ceci Moss — 2008-10-09T15:33:00+01:00

Memory Cloud at Trafalgar Square, project supported by ICA London- "For three evenings in October, a new interactive smoky communication will be underway in central London - one that combines a very modern medium with a 5,000-year-old one. In Memory Cloud, visitors can text any message they like to the artists' creation, and that phone message will be made into light-and-air smoke signals and huge in Trafalgar Square. This new exploration of personal expression in public spaces is from Minimaforms, founded in 2002 by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos as an experimental architecture and design practice that explores projects that provoke and facilitate new means of communication."

Interstitial Zones: Historical Facts, Archaeologies of the Present and Dialectics of Seeing at Argos- "Interstitial Zones offers a critical alternative or opposing space, with the work of fifteen artists that have sought out the crooks and crannies of post-war history that the mass media never reveal. The topics are diverse: The Red Army Faction or RAF, George Bush's inaugural speech, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, 9/11, Iraq, the extra-legal regime of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, the assault on Salvador Allende, the Gaza conflict, religious suicide attacks and so on. These specific historic events could equally be exchanged for others. The meta-narrative breaking up of the mechanisms of media representation and seeking out intervals make up the starting point of the exhibition. These intervals manifest themselves, for example, in voice-overs detached from the visual presentation, interchanging multiple time spans and the use of black or white monochrome images."

manuel vazquez- Photographs from the series "Traces" by Manuel Vazquez on i heart photograph. From the artist's statement: "This project researches the visual traces that are left in public places. In our daily lives we dwell in public spaces, where our journeys are filmed and stored as CCTV records. The omnipresence of the gaze of surveillance turns the city into a spectacle, and us into actors....Traces looks at the city as a theatrical scenario created with those visual codes, a 'theatrum mundi' . Here, each image is a montage of single photographs where the "mise en scène" is deliberated, composed, and where the deep black canvas is an allegory to the city where commuters are continuously under the spotlight."

FREE getwell cards email a friend (2006) - Paper Rad

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-09T13:20:00+01:00

LAUNCH
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Rising From the Undead

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-08T18:09:00+01:00

Jillian McDonald has noticed a zombie trend. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. Zombie walks, zombie novelty stores, and zombie-themed musical lyrics are popping up everywhere and the zombie film persists as the bone chiller par excellence. McDonald's work often deals with popular tropes and genre conventions, in film, and in this sense horror movies are ripe with opportunity for the analytically-inclined. Last weekend, in a project entitled Zombies in Condoland , the artist invited residents of Toronto (incidentally, the setting for director George Romero's latest film, Diary of a Zombie) to join the ranks of the proverbial undead. Working in collaboration with local arts project Nuit Blanche, McDonald established public film sets around town on which locals were invited to act the part in an effort to address the issue of gentrification. If the connection between scary characters and housing development is less than clear to you, consider a world in which you can run but not hide from the creeping threat of being swallowed-up and reprogrammed by a bland aesthetic of sameness and non-individuality. Sounds fun, right? Well, even if you missed last weekend's party, you can peruse McDonald's web-based instructions on how to look and act undead, scroll through her blog on all things zombiephile, or visit her previous horrifically hilarious projects. - Marisa Olson

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You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD (2008) - Ginger Anyhow

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-08T15:26:00+01:00

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Ceci Moss — 2008-10-08T15:20:00+01:00

Annie Abrahams - The Big Kiss at OTO Oct 10- Artist Annie Abrahams will perform at Over the Opening on October 10th from 7pm to 10 pm. "The Big Kiss" will ask "What's contact in a machine mediated world? What's the power of the image? How does it feel to kiss without touching? Does the act change because we see it? What does it mean to construct an image with your tongue? And is there still desire? Does the act provoke it? What's contact in a machine mediated world?"

Untethered at Eyebeam- Nice review of "Untethered" at Eyebeam from We Make Money Not Art. Read our interview with the exhibition's curator Sarah Cook.

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)- Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) will be an "online, trans-disciplinary book that will address recent artistic developments made possible by computers, networks, and mobile connectivity." Turbulence is currently seeking five writers to develop chapters for this book. Click the above link for more details about the project and submission guidelines.

Viva Svetlana!

Tyler Coburn — 2008-10-08T13:17:00+01:00

Opening this weekend at S1 Artspace, in Sheffield, "Svetlana" is the second project by Pil and Galia Kollectiv to draw inspiration from a work by Waw Pierogi. While Pierogi is best known as the founder of 1980s New Jersey-based synth outfit xex (and was only then known to a handful of obscurantists), he also concocted an unrealized, audio-visual homage to the asparagus ("Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet") and an operatic account of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who twice defected from the Soviet Union. The scarce information available about each work lends particularly well to the Kollectiv's method of post-historical assemblage, predicated less on faithful recreation than on "the possibilities opened up by marrying the ideas left by yesterday's art movements." For "Svetlana," the Kollectiv strikes a Kittleresque pose, weaving its protagonist's life into an espionage epic involving Leon Theremin, the eponymous instrument's inventor later kidnapped by the KGB, and a plot to create sound weapons from the acoustic locators that preceded radar technology, but were subsequently used, as props, to conceal radar from the Germans. These elements visually coalesce in the form of fictional photo documentation of rehearsals for the opera, as well as location shots, all resembling a Bauhaus drama class and reminding viewers of one of many historical intersections between aesthetics and military technology. - Tyler Coburn

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SSSSSSSWWWRRRRLLL (2008) - Petra Cortright

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-07T17:17:00+01:00

SSSSSSSSSSSSWWWWRRRRRLLLLLL from petra on Vimeo.
More work by Petra Cortright

Worlds of Wonder

Ed Halter — 2008-10-07T14:55:00+01:00

The Tokyo Game Show, Japan's massive video game expo, traditionally serves as a major convention for the commercial gaming industry, but this year launches a sidebar delicately named Sense of Wonder Night, which embraces work created from the international indie gaming world. Inspired by the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, which began at the Game Developers' Conference six years ago, Sense of Wonder Night focuses on innovative games that, in the words of the organizers, evoke "a feeling that something will change in their world and make them gasp at the moment they lay eyes on the games or hear the game concepts." For those who can't be in Japan on October 10th for the presentation, many of the finalists' games can be downloaded or have trailers posted online. Among them are Depict, by Jesús Cuauhtémoc Moreno Ramos, which promises to be a shape-recognition game played with phone cameras; Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories, a love story with multiple narrative outcomes and an ingenious Polaroid-snapshot gameplay structure; an optical-illusion 3D shooter called The Unfinished Swan by Ian Dallas; and Mark Essen's druggy hypercolor trip Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist. Opening stateside concurrent with Sense of Wonder Night is the Bellevue, Washington edition of IndieCade, which will include a preview of fl0wer, the new title from the makers of indie success story fl0w, and an exhibit of thirteen indie games including Eddo Stern's sensory-deprivation experiment Darkgame, Jason Rohrer's gently allegorical Gravitation, and Faith Denham's Block H, which takes on the history of political conflict in Northern Ireland. Both positioned on the overlap of art and industry, these two showcases are testament to the wide variety of endeavors that currently fall under the "indie" label, which includes everything from browser-based games to politically-minded gallery installations to (possibly) next year's big hit on Xbox Live Arcade. - Ed Halter

Image: Daniel Benmergui, Moon Stories

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Ceci Moss — 2008-10-07T14:38:00+01:00

Difference Tones: Cory Arcangel on the San Francisco Tape Music Center- Cory Arcangels reviews The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, edited by David W. Bernstein, in the October issue of ArtForum.

Border-Crossing: Passage Oublié- Interactive artwork Passage Oublié on Space & Culture. The piece allows "the public to send messages to a touchscreen kiosk located in Pearson's International Airport. Messages received are animated along flight trajectories on a map featuring airports involved in rendition flights. A rendition flight is a detainee-transfer practice where people, currently mostly Muslim men, are transported in rented commercial jets to interrogation sites around the world known as black sites. Although there exists a legal form of rendition to hand suspects over to another country, the procedure is also conducted outside any legal system, hence offering no protection for the detainees."

"Touching Gravity 2/Tilt" by Caryn Heilman- New commission by Turbulence. "Touching Gravity 2/Tilt is an interactive, aerial videodance superimposed on a composited image of two rivers in the towns of North Adams and Adams, Massachusetts. Part of the Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses project, the two New England towns are (re)connected through a colorful, fluid, multilayered dance that incorporates the movement of the natural landscape from each town, seen through the "difference" blend mode of the Flash interface."

the joy of painting (2008) - Max Kotelchuck and Peter Nowogrodzki

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-06T19:00:00+01:00

More work by Max Kotelchuck and Peter Nowogrodzki

Questions, Comments, Reactions?

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-06T16:01:00+01:00

When the cinematic masterpiece Wayne's World was released in 1992, their tag line was, "You'll Laugh, You'll Cry...You'll Hurl!" Who among us couldn't say the same about the media blunders we've seen recently, in connection with the U.S. presidential elections? Brooklyn-based artistic duo MTAA dramatize this sort of overwhelming desire to emote in their newest project, Our Political Work, which they describe as Beckett-like. The "Waiting For Godot" playwright might well approve of their creation, which features 141 clips of the artists screaming, laughing, and yelling as they wait in vain for something to change. The clips are randomly strung together using generative software, not unlike the clips in their One Year Performance Video, thus locking them in a state of perpetual indignity. The longer one watches, though, the more they are called upon to consider the roles of the artists and the very nature of their "political work." Are they political agents or spectators? Are their blurts and indiscretions responses to the behavior of political actors, or are they themselves enacting politics? Take a look for yourself, online. The piece is hosted by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, whose LX 2.0 Project commissioned the work. - Marisa Olson

Image: MTAA, Our Political Work, 2008 (Screenshot)

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Ceci Moss — 2008-10-06T15:03:00+01:00

The Living Room Candidate - An online archive of more than 300 campaign commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image. "In a media-saturated environment in which news, opinions, and entertainment surround us all day on our television sets, computers, and cell phones, the television commercial remains the one area where presidential candidates have complete control over their images. Television commercials use all the tools of fiction filmmaking, including script, visuals, editing, and performance, to distill a candidate's major campaign themes into a few powerful images. Ads elicit emotional reactions, inspiring support for a candidate or raising doubts about his opponent. While commercials reflect the styles and techniques of the times in which they were made, the fundamental strategies and messages have tended to remain the same over the years."

Monday October 6: Two events organized by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies - Tonight, in conjunction with the exhibition "Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures," CAVS will present a tour with designer Damon Rich at 5:30 followed by a "Roundtable on the Mortgage Crisis" at 7:30 with Margaret Crawford (Harvard Graduate School of Design), Lynn Fisher (MIT Center for Real Estate), Richard Healey (Grassroots Policy Project), Phil Thompson (MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning), moderated by Damon Rich.

>>www.coldvoid.com< <, 2008 by Rafaël Rozendaal- Nice new work by Rafaël Rozendaal on vvork.

olafur eliasson vs sprinkler lady (2008) - Zach Shipko

John Michael Boling — 2008-10-06T13:42:00+01:00

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More work by Zach Shipko