Rhizome News

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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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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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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A Big New Space for New Media

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-03T13:48:00+01:00

As of today, the U.S. will have a bold new venue for new media art and performance: EMPAC. Short for Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, the Troy, NY-based facility embodies state-of-the-artness and its affiliation with the highly regarded research university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ensures that the installations, performances, and concerts presented there will always be ahead of the technological curve. The space, itself, is a masterpiece. The 220,000-square foot building, designed by Grimshaw, includes a 1200-seat concert hall with an adjustable fabric ceiling; a 400-seat theater with a 70-foot fly tower; two black-box studio spaces with tunable, tilting wall tiles; and acoustically isolated artist/researcher work spaces. Within these walls, and under the direction of Johannes Goebel (who helped found ZKM) and curators Kathleen Forde, Hélène Lesterlin, and Micah Silver, visitors will experience work that emphasizes immersion, interactivity, and time-based media. For the next three weekends, EMPAC will present a major festival full of provocative performances and installations by The Wooster Group, dumb type, Workspace Unlimited, Verdensteatret, Vox Vocal Ensemble and International Contemporary Ensemble, Per Tengstrand, Madlib, Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, Richard Siegal/The Bakery, Robert Normandeau, Fieldwork, Gamelan Galak Tika + Ensemble Robot, and others. This unveiling has been several years in the making but reservations are going fast, so you won't want to wait to get your tickets and get over to Troy. - Marisa Olson

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Computational Poetics

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-01T17:30:00+01:00

Caleb Larsen's solo exhibition at Philadelphia's Esther Klein Gallery presents a series of conjectures, testing our assumptions, estimations, and in some cases naiveté with regard to digital information. His installation, Monument, constantly scans 4,500 English-language news feeds and drops yellow BBs on the floor each time it finds a report of a person dying. Over time, the tiny balls will pile-up and form a sort of monochromatic monument to the unknown dead. In a sense, it visually cashes-in on the death craze that often seems to grip the media. Many of his other pieces draw on appropriation and literary adaptation. Who's Life Is It Anyway? asks what it would mean to pilfer other people's Twitter pages for autobiographical lines of one's own (and here, the "auto-" seems tongue-in-cheek, if not ironic). In other works, Larsen has taken on the not-so-small feat of converting both Shakespeare's entire oeuvre and the Epic of Gilgamesh into new forms. In the former case, he's translated all of the text into a visual field of colored squares, while the latter is returned to orality when a computer is ordered to read the ancient epic aloud. Larsen's stated interest is one of using logic-based systems to explore the differences between digital and physical spaces. At times, the results are poetic and, at other times, he seems to be leading us to the discordant conclusion that the proposed affinities do not compute. - Marisa Olson

Image: Caleb Larsen, Monument (Detail), 2006

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Continually Redefining Game Art

Marisa Olson — 2008-09-29T18:00:00+01:00

No longer mere distractions cooked-up by programmers as a form of light relief in the early days of computers, video games have evolved into a variety of forms and have had a wide impact on multiple generations. To some extent, the same can now be said of art that addresses video games, the visual complexity and conceptual richness of which has grown with the medium. An exhibition guest-curated by artists Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum at Arthouse explores "the history, control mechanisms, political and art-historical implications of electronic games" by surveying both better-known and more emerging practitioners of game-related art, including Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Mike Beradino, Brody Condon, Alex Galloway, JODI, Guthrie Lonergan, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay, Michael Smith, Eddo Stern, and Keita Takahashi. RESET/PLAY is up through November 2nd and is accompanied by a series of public events that includes a night of video game competitions and a performance by New York-based sound artists Loud Objects. - Marisa Olson

Image: Brody Condon, Judgment Modification (After Memling), 2008 (Courtesy of the artist and Virgil de Voldère Gallery, New York, NY)

Object Study

Tyler Coburn — 2008-09-26T15:15:00+01:00

Familiar objects double, stretch and twist in "Manufacturing Flaws," Mexican-Japanese artist Hisae Ikenaga's current exhibition at Praxis, in New York. Large wall sculptures of a helicopter, plane, motorcycle and car, made with brightly colored carpet felt, hang on pins throughout the gallery space. Adopting a playful take on "the possible physical anomalies developed in mass-produced objects," Ikenaga has distorted each rendering: the helicopter sprouts two propellers, for instance; and, in a potentially sobering turn, an airplane sprouts twin heads. Unfortunately, small, paper collage replicas of these artworks, also included in the show, detract from the novelty and material charm of their big brothers. More interesting is Ikenaga's Aislados (Isolated) (2007), a three-dimensional island topography created within the pages of a Spanish telephone book. The book sits open on a pedestal, its right side holding the island elevation, and its left side the relief. The winner of the Generación 2008 prize, Aislados (Isolated) creates an interesting overlap between population and geography, in building an island out of a book of names, while also offering a funny amplification of the antisocial, labor-intensive process its creation entailed. A similar agenda informs Siamese Book, a hardcover copy of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude that the artist has torqued at its binding and seamed, page-by-page, at its center. Books and solitude, it would seem, are excellent materials for self-reflexive art-making. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Hisae Ikenaga, Aislados (Isolated), 2007

Free Play

Ed Halter — 2008-09-24T15:20:00+01:00

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games). People who absorb free, round ideas stay green and happy, while those who only consume square market-produced ones become grey and inverted. The game never really ends: you can only do better or worse, suggesting by analogy that the fight for free culture will be an ongoing struggle without end. For those who wish to kill additional worktime minutes, Molleindustria's site includes an archive of past games, which take on topics such as the clash of religions, the Catholic Church pedophile scandal, flextime, labor and their notorious take on McDonald's, a cute simulator that takes you from slaughterhouse to boardroom. - Ed Halter

Image: Free Culture Game (Screenshot)

Re-Animator

2008-09-22T12:00:00+01:00

Kota Ezawa's current exhibit at Murray Guy, New York presents two new pieces done in the artist's own established method of rotoscoping, for which he uses a computer to re-draw individual frames from video or film source materials, then compiles them into moving images, granting his work the look of motion-captured digital animation, but created through a more classic, labor-intensive process. The first is Brawl, based on a YouTube video of an infamous 2004 Pistons-Pacers game that erupted into a massive free-for-all fight. Ezawa retains the footage's original soundtrack, and has transferred his animation to 16mm, looped for exhibition. The second, LYAM 3D, repurposes moments from Alain Resnais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, choosing sequences in which actors stand stock-still while the camera pans. His video is processed in stereoscopic 3D, and watched through colored glasses, giving the re-drawn actors the quality of 2.5-D cut-out puppets. The two pieces continue the artist's penchant for taking on emotionally-charged sources (the OJ Simpson trial, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape, the Kennedy assassination) and draining them of their punch by rendering them as superflat, designy cartoons. The artist has said that he aims for a "banality" or "hollowed-out" quality for his work, and in this objective he succeeds. He also claims to see his work as moving paintings, rather than films or videos per se -- citing Brawl, for example, as a nod to compositions one might find in a work by Rubens. However, these would be rather unambitious goals for anyone who takes on the medium of animation; one wonders, for example, if the use of 16mm might bear any greater consequence than its ability to project more muted tones. Though some viewers apparently find satisfaction in Ezawa's coy formal references and cool graphic capability, those who expect a more complicated and significant experience from the moving image will not. - Ed Halter

Image: Kota Ezawa, LYAM 3D, 2008

Termite Art for Terminators

2008-09-19T12:00:00+01:00

For a show with such a substantial title -- Hyper-Spatial Sentient Sopper Serum Scillystrations of Morph-Feral-Foglet-Fabbed Smart-Gels and Quacker-Cast Dataclouds of Public Panopticon Powder on Airborne Algorithmicracked-Out Recreational Diseases -- Shane Hope's exhibit at the Schroeder Romero / Winkleman Gallery Project Space in New York is easy to miss. Mounted in the short, cramped hallway connected the Schroeder Romero to the adjacent Winkleman gallery, it consists of hand-drawn museum-style wall plaques, each marked with a paper tag, as if the actual contents of the exhibit had been moved or borrowed. Upon closer inspection, the story told is much weirder: each absent artwork and its plaque appear to be from an art exhibit decades in the future. One piece entitled Going Splaces is "attributed to endLoc_encod*rk" and is said to consist of "Non-rival routing hyper-spatial wormhole in floating sheet of veiny tissue culture"; its tag claims that the artwork itself was removed for "interspecies study." Another work named How to Display Trans-Substrational Smartificial-Stoop-Ditty Cystemics Sic Schtick Ball, dated from 2066, by getArtistTrace (is that a name or a glitch?) purports to be made of an "airborne recreational disease induced qulinked crystalline rod matrix manifold pushed psy-pry pub-moldy foldies on a seeing-eye orb." This "Gift of cRo0k{$uE^Y1@, 2080.8.54" has been taken away due to "Quarantine/Immunizations." Spoofing both the cryptic inflations of contemporary art-speak and the rapid linguistic-mutations wrought by technological change (imagine explaining "text-messaging" or "phone pictures" to a time-traveler from 1985), Hope's whacked-out art-as-language-game has a warmly and disjunctively retro Joycean feel, but also alludes to the heretofore seldom-asked question of what art will be like in a post-Singularity existence. - Ed Halter

A Question of Form

2008-09-17T12:00:00+01:00

Conceptual formalism receives a contemporary appraisal in "The Form Itself," a group show currently on display at New York's Priska C. Jushka Fine Art. Curated by artist Michael Bühler-Rose, the exhibition finds nine predominantly emerging artists conducting "a self-reflective dialogue on the potential and purity" of their mediums, be they painting, photography, video or sculpture. This broad and somewhat undercooked curatorial conceit results in an elegant but uneven show, where self-reflectivity is often manifest in a tautological affirmation of an object or discipline's constituent parts, as with Talia Chetrit's Grotjahn-esque color investigations or the Lewitt-meets-readymade sculpture Possible Form (from "100 Variations") (2008) by Roula Partheniou, made from one-hundred monochrome Rubik's Cubes. The strongest works end up being the least discursively entrenched, mining the formal qualities and social and economic connotations of contemporary objects. Joy Drury Cox's spare, precise graphite drawings of employment applications of chains like Starbucks and Wendy's, stripped of all textual content, expose the common structural parameters within which applicants render their professional self-portraits. Another standout is Adrian Crabbs' Shipping Pallet 2 (2008), one in a larger series of paintings the artist made by pressing one side of a paint-covered pallet onto linen. Given the pallet's paradoxical role in contemporary trade -- a sub-structure so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible to consumers -- Crabbs' concrete utilization of the object to generate its own trace-like representation is appropriate and evocative. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Roula Partheniou, "Possible Form" (from "100 Variations"), 2008

I'm On The Computer

2008-09-15T12:00:00+01:00

Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Erving Goffman proposed in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that the very warp and woof of the social world consists of carefully constructed dramaturgy, albeit of a manner that most performers were unconscious. Our daily lives and cultural rituals provide all the settings, costumes, props and scripts we need to take our roles. The same logic underpins our movement through digital spaces and online communities, but unhinged from the necessities of physical limitations, and with a greater promise of self-transformation -- the dream of a complete rebooting of the self. Such notions may emerge at "Avatar: the New You," an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography that mixes the Web 2.0 vernacular of user-generated images with parallel but more self-critical art projects. The show includes fan-created screenshots from massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Second Life and documentation of SimGuys.net, a virtual emporium of fashionable dude wear for Sims characters, but also media installations by artists Claudia Hart, Myfanwy Ashmore, Melissa Ramos and Rhys Turner, and Tobias Bernstrup, as well as photography by Daniel Handal and performance documentation by Justin Shoulder. Two artists' works that themselves gained a foothold in greater internet culture are also included: screenshots from Tale of Tales' gentle multiplayer game The Endless Forest (2006), in which players take the roles of deer, and Aram Bartholl's First Person Shooter (2005), a pair of custom specs that give you the look of Doom. - Ed Halter

Image: Arahan Claveau, Lupus Delacroix, Second Life 2008

Democracy Now

2008-09-12T12:00:00+01:00

"Democracy in America: The National Campaign" sounds more like the title of an action movie than a blockbuster public art initiative, but the Creative Time-produced project promises to be a heavy-hitter. The title for this prominent series of multifarious happenings, art projects, performances, and more takes its name from a novel written by a young Alexis de Tocqueville after his first tour of the US, in which he searched for an answer to the question of why the concept of representative republican democracy had been so successful in America. The importance of this question endures, especially now, and it is central to curator Nato Thompson's undertaking, which is a serious evaluation of the state of participatory politics in this country. On September 21st, The Democracy in America Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory will open, the exhibition portion of the campaign. Containing over 40 artists and filling three very large floors in Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the show includes newly-commissioned work, seminal tactical media projects, and several live speeches and performances, all of which succeed in demonstrating the important role that spectacle can play in representing the fantasies and needs of the republic. - Marisa Olson

Image: Rachel Mason, Kissing President Bush, 2004

Vertex on the Verge

2008-09-10T12:00:00+01:00

Long devoted to contemporary technology art in its many forms, Williamsburg Brooklyn's half-decade-old Vertexlist Gallery promises much more in the future: the exhibitor recently announced a "new 5-year plan of growth and development," now under the auspices of gallery director Charles Beronio, who takes over the reigns from founder Marcin Ramocki. To kick off its next phase, Vertexlist is hosting the exhibit "New Blood," which promises to "probe" the "the empty, vacant, and vacuous nature" of contemporary existence, featuring an array of work by Double Happiness, Lance Wakeling, Jeanne Verdoux, Sergio De La Torre, Sujin Lee and Sasha Dela. The event launches with on September 13th with "Given to Want," a live performance by the funny, fantastic and sometimes frightening artist Nao Bustamante. - Ed Halter

The Future of New Media, Two Years at a Time

2008-09-08T16:35:00+01:00

For the last ten years, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale has been among the most accurate and important touchstones for activity in the field of new media art. This year's biennale (open September 12-November 5) seeks not only to act as the kind of hotness barometer than many such shows function as, but also as a convergence site for the so-called traditional media and new media communities, asking how the two can work together in the future--or, indeed, looking at how they already overlap. Operating under the subtitle "Turn and Widen," the exhibition and associated symposium is organized into sub-themes on Light, Time, and Communication and features dozens of international artists. If you're not in Korea, consider visiting their artist pages from the comfort of your computer. - Marisa Olson

The Scale of Intervention

2008-09-05T12:00:00+01:00

Co-organized by Conflux
Moderated by Wooster Collective, with CutUp Collective, Leon Reid IV (of Darius + Downey), Betsey Biggs, and Roadsworth

Friday, September 5th, 7:30pm
the New Museum, New York, NY
$6 Members, $8 General Public

Join us this evening at 7:30pm for this month's New Silent Series program at the New Museum, entitled "The Scale of Intervention." Co-organized by Conflux, an annual festival dedicated to psychogeography, and moderated by the founders of the celebrated street art website Wooster Collective, this panel will look at possibilities for artistic disruption within urban environments. Taking its name from a film by the London-based Cutup Collective, which plays with the viewer's perception of a street scene, the panel will feature artists whose work ranges across a variety of mediums and materials. From reformulation of billboard advertisements into powerful, politically-oriented collages to the subversive reformulation of street signs, such as pedestrian crossings and bike lanes, the featured artists will demonstrate how they dislodge the customary navigation and perception of urban space.

Image: Roadsworth, North American Footprint (Parc Ave., Montreal, Quebec, September 2004)

Exploring Big Boxes, In and Out of the White Cube

2008-09-03T12:00:00+01:00

The face of the American landscape has been forever changed by the invention of the "big box." These giant, typically nondescript retail meccas exemplified by Wal-Mart not only lead to the mowing-over of existing terrain, they also shift the cultural ecology of a space and bring with them more roads, more cars, and more garbage. But what happens when companies abandon these spaces in favor of paired-down, web-based operations? This is the question that artist Julia Christensen asks in her project Big Box Reuse. She's spent the last five years touring these renounced superstores, photographing them, collecting local residents' stories about the community impacts of the big boxes, and writing a forthcoming book. Documentation of these efforts are being exhibited through November 23rd at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery in an show curated by Astria Suparak, entitled "Your Town, Inc." Meanwhile, Turbulence has commissioned a forthcoming wiki on which the artist will invite people from across the country to upload their own stories, photos, and videos. Among the project's most poignant ironies is the question of what happens when the retailers that trade in over-packaged, often not-recyclable goods fail to successfully repurpose the structures in which they once perpetuated disposable culture. - Marisa Olson

Image: Julia Christensen, the Snowy Range Academy (Renovated Wal-Mart located in Laramie, WY) from Big Box Reuse, 2006

Somewhere Out There

2008-09-01T12:00:00+01:00

"Artificial World," a two-week exhibition on view at New York's Mountain Fold, assembles works by six Japanese and American artists that explore "ideas of made-up, artificial, or simulated worlds." Visually, the show could not be more eclectic -- shelves of compact discs, knit objects, sprawling fabric paintings and gelatinous sculptures populate the small gallery. Common to many of the works, however, is an interest in the social and creative parameters of virtual space. Ben Fino-Radin, for example, has struck upon a neat, if somewhat twee, techno-meets-craft aesthetic vocabulary. In wall installations like Potience Module (2008), discreet, knit objects (largely depicting computer iconography, including code, mouse icons and the much-reviled hourglass) aggregate in symmetrical, totemic structures. Strips of black tape become disciplinary intermediaries in Aki Goto's big, energetic wall piece (Untitled, 2008), linking fabric and canvas paintings of cats with small, exquisite drawings in graphite and pen. The strongest of the latter presents a humorous take on virtual communities, equally steeped in the visual language of early-80s arcade games and the urban-abstraction of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-3), as small, smiling heads form points within webs of overlapping lines. While these and most of the exhibition's other works settle on shallow inquiry - at times to their benefit - Masaru Aikawa's My 25 CDs (2008) strikes a deeper chord. Citing an interest in Benjamin and Warhol and a concern for the status of the artwork in the digital era, Aikawa has "passionately and respectfully duplicated," a cappella, twenty-five of his CDs. Aikawa's heartfelt vocal imitation of the ambient electronics of Kraftwerk's Autobahn provides the most hysterical treat. On a broader level, Aikawa makes a serious comment on twenty-first century virtual consumption, by means of his self-portrait as strange, irreverent fan. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Ben Fino-Radin, Process NG Unit, 2008

Northwesterly

2008-08-29T12:00:00+01:00

Vanessa Renwick, who produces video under the rubric of The Oregon Department of Kick Ass, is one of the cornerstones of Portland's remarkably fecund scene for moving-image art. Her video Portrait #2: Trojan (2006) documents the last days of the locally-maligned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which once rose like a toxic concrete toadstool above the lush temperate rainforests that cover the area's rolling landscape; at the video's end, the plant explodes under planned detonations, sending a quiet plume of smoke into the sky. The strange marriage Renwick chronicles between nature and technology is one familiar to the culture of the region, as captured in the Seattle Art Museum's current show "Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest." In addition to Renwick's piece, Ron Tran's The Peckers (2004) records an experiment in which the artist covered electric guitars and drum kits with birdseed and set them in a park, then recorded the ensuing avian orchestra. Further north, Kevin Schmidt's Long Beach Led Zep (2002) depicts Schmidt on a beach in British Columbia, performing a rendition of "Stairway to Heaven" on a generator-powered electric guitar. The Canadian-American lineup rounds out with short works by Jeremy Shaw, Miranda July, Will Rogan, and Jack Daws. - Ed Halter

Image: Kevin Schmidt, Long Beach Led Zep, 2002

Walking on Coals, er...Sunshine

2008-08-27T16:10:00+01:00

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

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

A Series of 'Tubes

2008-08-25T12:00:00+01:00

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

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

Change It Up

2008-08-22T12:00:00+01:00

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

Prickly Situations

2008-08-20T12:00:00+01:00

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

Image: Jonathan Soderstrom, Ad Nauseam 2 (Still)

Defense Strategies

2008-08-18T16:40:00+01:00

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

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

In Dreams I Walk With You

2008-08-15T12:00:00+01:00

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

Image: John Holland, uralone, 2008

No Media

2008-08-13T15:00:00+01:00

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

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

Soul Driver

2008-08-11T12:00:00+01:00

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

Image: John Maeda, Nature, 2008

The Game of Life

2008-08-08T12:00:00+01:00

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

Company Men

2008-08-06T12:00:00+01:00

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

Putting Participation on the Map

2008-08-04T15:05:00+01:00

While the internet has enabled new, transnational collaborations in the form of participatory art projects, the challenge with these increasingly popular initiatives is to credit the contributions and individual ideas of artists who might otherwise float lost in the crowdsourced sea. Wooloo Productions has managed to excel at meeting this challenge, while building the logistics of web-based participation into the concept of their works. Wooloo's newest project is Rebranding Acts, "an investigation into cultural identity in an age of global migration." The initiative invites artists from around the world to consider the ways in which "nationality" is manufactured in their home country, and to "rebrand" these concepts, from their own perspective. While the open call is predicated on the argument that such hegemonic nationalist constructions often exclude identities that don't fit the mold, Rebranding Acts invites anyone to add their voice to the discussion by uploading videos of their own public interventions. The best of these videos will be curated into major exhibitions in Prague and New York, later this year. This is not the first of Wooloo Production's projects to deal with national identity. Co-founding artists Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard gained worldwide notoriety when Defending Denmark, their "international campaign to rebrand the country of Denmark" which documented 18 months of membership in the ultra-right Danish People's Party, was covered on Al Jazeera TV, launching an international discussion about party lines and artist interventions. If you'd like to join the party of people bringing such important projects to life, visit Wooloo.org. - Marisa Olson

Image: Wooloo Productions (Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard), Attendance at the Danish People's Party National Congress from "Defending Denmark," 2006