New Media Art in a Control Society

Transcript from a Performance

Adam Trowbridge: New Media Art in a Control Society :: Transcript from Performance :: The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, USA
March 22, 2007 :: video stills here

As noted in the transcript, the majority of the statements read were not original and instead shamelessly stolen (edited and unedited) from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. Transcript:

This is…a performance and new media art…or maybe not. [video begins] [text below is read]

- – Gilles Deleuze said “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” End quote.

- – The phrase “new media art” is pointless.

- – The selection of medium is not the selection of a wardrobe for an idea. We are well past ideas and communication. Medium should be selected like legal and illicit pharmaceuticals: where do you want to go today?

- – What is a digital painting? Idiotic.

- – Contemporary art is both scattered and networked, always in motion. Medium, if anything, is a measure of speed and distribution. Is the texture of an oil painting that different from that of flypaper? Video is faster and shedding the weight of the poetic yet precious medium of film. Photography is a film still. Internet-based art is faster but still flails, lashed down by too many examples of bad information design masquerading as art.

- – THEY create DELIRIOUS RULES and sell you free access to their BACKSTAGE if you follow these sick rules. YOU KNOW IT.

- – Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has been falsely represented as a metaphor for a network and for networked art. Deleuze and Guattari did not deal in metaphors.

- – Rhizomatic action is a force relationship in which power is distributed then scattered before it can begin to collect. This is not a metaphorical description but a plan of action.

- – Over 650,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by military intervention in Iraq and we are here to discuss…what?

- – Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.

- – All hoarding, speculation on art, must cease and be seen for what it is: usury and exploitation.

- – In the beginning, you enjoyed it. You were caught in the middle of the WAR between THEM and THE OTHER SIDE, and you were trying to help THEM win the war.

- – All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

- – Six billion worldwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.

- – Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.

- – Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life…usually groping in the dark…at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.

- – Control is short-term and has rapid rates of turnover, but is also continuous and without limit.

- – New media art involves people who make watering plants more complex than it needs to be by using cell phones that call the Internet when the plants need water.

- – If you can talk about it, why paint it?

- – The Dia: Beacon is a tomb for the last gasp of studio art, let it be a monument and move on.

- – Man and machines can make symbiotic art.

- – Psychogeography: The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.

- – Inevitability of gradualness. Usually, in a few years, you are made string bean thin or grotesquely deformed, crippled and ugly, or even made one foot shorter or one foot taller, as the Computer God sees fit.

- – In the future we will have foreign genetic material in us as today we have mechanical and electronic implants. In other words, we will be transgenic. However, there’s no excuse but marketing for purchasing a glowing rabbit.

- – Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new art out of this owned content.

- – A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club where it costs $1,000 for a computer and $50 a month to connect to the Internet.

- – The main function of Art is to distinguish rich people from poorer people.

- – Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; we re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to us to discover what we’re being made to serve, just as our elders discovered, not without difficulty, the ultimate end of the disciplines.

- – Personal expression and human and artist centrality can be abandoned.

- – Complex machines are an emergent life form in the masturbatory fantasies of those siding with control. I distrust transhumanists but I want to be friends with a computer.

- – Any moralistic or spiritual pretension or representation purposes for art must be abandoned.

- – Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, “Don’t worry about it.”

- – Professionalism in the arts (and the accompanying stratification of skills) must be abandoned in favor of a progressive (class-less) artistry of both a personal and collective nature.

- – Over the last decades, using positions of power in your STAGE-WORLD reality, THEY introduced their key words and also their sick DREAMWORLD- TO-SELL key ideas in every aspect of culture in the STAGE WORLD society where you live : songs, movies, humor, even propaganda.

- – Derive: An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments.

- – The economic and cultural exploitation of the artist has reached appalling proportions. The individual and/or collective artist, whose work is plagiarized as commercial ‘technique’, or exported as cultural commodity, has little control over these conditions.

- – Consciousness is not exclusively restricted to the brain. Human bodies have no boundaries.

- – The artist must be concerned with the moral relationship that his/her endeavors have to the institutions within which he/she expresses his/her work.

- – The majority of what I’ve read has been shamelessly stolen from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. They stand as a collection of connections and disjunctions. I am, we are, a manner of speaking.

- – Art is not knowledge.

- – Art does not communicate.

- – There is nothing here for you.

- – Gilles Deleuze said that new situations could “…at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.

[via nettime]

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Mar 25, 2007, 9:12PM

Interview with Angelo Vermeulen

In December, Yves Bernard invited me to give a talk at Art+Game, a conference and exhibition about video games from an artistic point of view. After my usual little show, a guy came to me, his name was Angelo Vermeulen. He had curated a part of the exhibition with such talent and impeccable taste that i was all ears, i thought he’d want to talk about games. He didn’t. He wanted to give me a CD of his work. Man! Don’t you have a website like everyone? A CD! Something tangible that will meet the same end as all those business cards that people keep handing me: they end up in the bin of some hotel because they just clutter my handbag. I came late to digital data so now i stick to it, if i want to find you, i just google you and that’s it. Anyway, a few days later i was in one of those hotel rooms. There was no internet. I open Angelo’s CD and look at its content. The next thing i did when i finally managed to get online was to ask Angelo if i could interview him. Angelo doesn’t have a website (yet!), he’s way too cool for that.

He wrote part of the interview in NYc, part in Sint-Niklaas and then disappeared somewhere in Andalusia.

Originally trained as a biologist (PhD at the University of Leuven, Belgium), he also followed a photography training at the Art Academy of Leuven. Moved to London to work with Nick Waplington. Back in Belgium he took up post-graduate studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp.

After that traces of his activities appear online. Most notably, his installation Blue Shift [LOG. 1], introduced last Summer at Isea2006, aims to question the status of the utilitarian in art and science and push interactive installation art into Darwinian realms (detail of the installation on the right). A community of single-cell algae, water fleas, fish and water snails is set up in the exhibition space. Visitors induce a gradual microevolution of the – genetically determined – light-responsive behavior of the water fleas. When the system is in standby, yellow lights illuminate the aquaria from the top. The water fleas are attracted to this light and swim towards it. Whenever a visitor is detected in proximity of the installation, blue spotlights are activated. Water fleas, repelled by this color, flee downwards and pass through holes in a false bottom in the aquaria… where fish are waiting to wipe them out.

What can be considered to be a survival strategy in natural circumstances – blue light indicates clear open water and hence potential detection by fish – has quite a different meaning in this set-up: it is exactly those water fleas that do not swim away from the blue light that survive and reproduce. In this way their genes will become dominant in the water flea populations and a “contra-natural” selection will occur.

He has been working on “SKANNER”, a new media project on human fear in cooperation with Tamuraj, electronic musician and mathematics researcher. The audience is exposed to a frightening live montage of video images and sounds generated by the artists and an artificial intelligent computer system. Physical reactions of the audience such as heart rate and blood pressure are monitored. An artificial creative agent uses these data to decipher and simulate the relation between fear responses and sounds and images. The agent functions as a third “virtual” artist. Through the accumulation of empirical data and learning algorithms, SKANNER tries to evolve towards a real fear machine.

Skanner Labtest – Video stills

Angelo is currently busy writing a book on the relation between art, technology and spirituality in partnership with art philosopher Antoon Van den Braembussche. In collaboration with Quebec-based artist Louis Blackburn, he is also preparing several new media projects and a documentary on computer game culture. He and Etienne Van den Bergh, president of Contour Mechelen, will be touring Europe with a series of lectures on games (games & cinema, games & the body).

Angelo, you’re one of the few people who are both trained as a scientist (biology in your case) and fine artist. Do you make a clear distinction between your work as an artist and your scientific activities?

In the beginning of my life as an artist I was mainly focused on photography and I was convinced that my scientific background was something I had to get rid of in order to make good art. It was only a few years later that I discovered that combining these things would lead to much more powerful creations. Now I feel a lot of my work is a layered convergence of rationality, intuition and hyperesthesis. In the interactive cinema project ‘SKANNER’ (2002-2005) and the installation piece Blue Shift [LOG. 1] (2005) I explicitly combined both my art and my science background. Certain aspects of these projects were strictly scientific, while others were purely artistically motivated, and there is evidently a different mindset for each of the positions. Blue Shift [LOG. 1] was created with Luc De Meester, a former colleague of mine and a specialist in evolutionary biology. For this project I had to make a lot of choices about the setup of the piece in a larger art exhibition context. I choose a basement location because that gave the right kind of conditions and associations I wanted; a half-hidden and darkened laboratory with close proximity to a workshop where technicians were running in and out. Once the location was chosen the process started of building up the piece in relation to the space itself. These decisions were primarily artistically motivated: I wanted to create a 3D image that had an immediate and strong impact on the visitor. I have learned by now that such creative choices only can be rationally analyzed and (partly) understood after the piece is ready. When creating an installation I strongly rely on intuition to decide which specific materials to use, where to put things, how to set up the lighting etc. Of course there are also significant conceptual issues related to certain choices, it’s not just a formal process. However, with Blue Shift [LOG. 1] things became even more complex than that; whenever I made a creative choice I had to make sure it did not violate the scientific rationale behind the work. The idea of this piece was to create a work that functioned both as an interactive installation, and as a scientific experiment. A true hybrid work.

Skanner Labtest Z33

SKANNER was a collaboration with musician and mathematician Tamuraj. The goal was to create a live horror movie that would use images and sounds from a database in combination with a live-generated soundtrack. During the performance we monitored the public’s bodily responses as an indication of emotional state, such as heart rate and blood pressure. We then used these data to optimize the live montage of image and sound in two different ways. First, all the data were displayed in real time so that we could actively use the public’s emotional state as a directive for mixing sound and image. Second, Tamuraj programmed an artificial intelligence module that constantly compared output (the live movie) and input (the public’s emotional data). The software then automatically optimized the impact of the performance by making autonomous decisions about the sound sequencing for example. In this way, the soundtrack during our last performance was to a large extent created by the audience’s hearts. In an art project like this, the aim is to create a powerful audiovisual experience that at the same time uses systematic scientific analysis.

Did the art audience react to Blue Shift [LOG. 1] in the same way as the scientific audience?

Both audiences reacted strongly to the aesthetics of the piece; to its visual language and its setup in the space. But each audience also responded very specifically from within its own context; art audiences tended to be fascinated by the conceptual dual nature of the work, while scientists quickly started investigating the experimental design of the project. During the exhibition Luc De Meester invited an American colleague who was visiting Belgium. His colleague was extremely enthusiastic because he saw both a scientific and educational value in the project. We were provoking Darwinian evolution of the light responsive behavior of water fleas through exposure to predating goldfish. Our hypothesis was formed from related observations, and had never been tested before. The project was a way to bring specific research to a wider audience. The feeling that your daily practice gets a meaning for a broader public is very gratifying, but unfortunately, this happens hardly ever for scientists.

Water flea and Blue Shift [LOG. 1] installation view

What makes the art approach interesting in a regular scientific context? Can your artistic explorations be fed back to the scientific frame?

I am not sure that the art approach in general can have a major impact on scientific practice. The last decades it’s been very popular to stress the similarities between art and science. Artists and scientists are “creative and inspired”, the artist studio can be seen as a sort of laboratory, etc. Recently, at an exhibition opening in Los Angeles, an artist came up to me and stated that “scientists are artists”. I personally oppose this oversimplification. There are fundamental differences between both worlds that cannot be bridged. First, the idea that scientists have of the world is completely different than that of artists. According to science, the world is something to be fully understood and modeled and mathematics is regarded as its true underlying basis. Through a process of continuous refinement science is looking for the one universal model that will explain everything. This is a very Cartesian way of looking at the world still. As an artist you have the freedom to reject this, and personally I believe you have to reject the supremacy of such reductionist models to make truly engaging art. Art is about what escapes definition, there is a sort of spiritual element in good works of art that defies any analysis. Take poetry for example; a computer program using artificial intelligence could probably convincingly simulate a poetic style. However, true engaging poetry has an authenticity you cannot artificially create. This may seem like a very Romantic notion of art, but I believe ambiguity and ungraspability are crucial characteristics of art.

A second important difference between science and art is the handling of tradition. In a more traditional view, science is a constant flow of historicide, while art production is a process of reiteration. Through the continuous creation of new subsequent models, science progresses towards a sort of utopian ultimate understanding of the world. Older models are replaced by new ones, hence the concept of historicide. In contrast, art would constantly build on the works of former generations. “Unlike art, science destroys its own past” Thomas Kuhn argued in his Comment on the Relations of Science and Art. I don’t fully agree with this. In the daily practice of science its history and traditions are continuously present. One of the most central aspects of scientific practice is its use of statistics, the universally adopted methodology to analyze data and present insights. If your insights do not comply with the norms of this standardized system, they won’t be considered valid. It’s quite a fascinating system in its own respect and works really well. However, for me this was a major difference when I started making art: in art there is no such inevitable standardized context to work in. Art works do not have to comply with a specific set of rules to be considered “valid”. On the contrary, in the avant-garde/modernist model we use today, art should be questioning, even annihilating predecessing art and should create more pertinent and visionary answers. This doesn’t mean that the contemporary art world is always so ‘refreshing’, quite the opposite. Contemporary art seems to suffer heavily from reiteration, and we see the same things over and over again such as conceptualism, minimalism, pop art etc.

Apart from similarities, both art and science have their individual specificity that you have to handle in their own respect. Like I said before there’s no need to throw away things; combining different attitudes is the most fascinating thing you can do. However, the desire to fuse everything into one ‘model’, into one singularity is a typically Western cultural attitude. This attitude not only has its roots in scientific thinking but has also been shaped by religion and economics. A religion in which everything is reduced to one singular deity, and an economic model – capitalism – which at the root is obsessed with efficiency and hence singularity.

So, because of fundamental differences between contemporary art and science, I don’t believe they will blend again into a sort of neo-Renaissance model. Moreover, in practice science is often only superficially interested in art. Scientists don’t have the need and, more importantly, don’t have the time to indulge in an art practice consistently. However, there are examples in which the scientific community truly shows interest in a complementary artistic approach. In the specific example of ‘Blue Shift [LOG. 1]’ there was effectual feedback to the scientific community on different levels. Luc De Meester was happy to see that his year-long laboratory work finally found a way to a broader public, and that the work resulted in actual data to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Personally, this is one of my favorite aspects of the whole project; publishing an art piece in the world of science through a sort of Trojan horse.

On the other side, a lot of contemporary art does happily embrace science and technology. ISEA2006 (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) in San Jose was a clear example of this. This symposium is organized every two years in a different city, and for the 2006 edition the organizers worked together with ZeroOne San Jose, a festival on digital culture. During a full week in August there were numerous artist presentations, lectures by media theorists and curators, panel debates, etc. All this in conjunction with an extensive showcase of art works and performances throughout the whole city. The art projects somehow always made use of recent technology, both in very simple and in very elaborate ways.

Now, this embrace of technology in art has its own problems. What particularly struck me during the symposium sessions in San Jose was the desire of many artists to drown their work in an academic jargon. It looked a bit like a desperate attempt to be taken seriously and make sure the audience realized there was a “deeper meaning” to the work. I think that by doing this so explicitly you basically ‘kill’ the work, you kill the potential for an open experience by your audience. And then again, don’t forget that clever rhetorics can be used to apply ‘deeper meaning’ to almost anything. Of course all this is a consequence of conceptualism and of the enormous influence of academic discourse in the shaping of art careers. Another way in which the importance of an art project was put forward was through stressing its technological innovation value. Most often this resulted in art project presentations that were basically nothing more than fancy tech demos. There’s more – or sometimes less – to art than impressing with a technological trick developed in collaboration with a prestigious university. It’s the sort of techno-fetishism that is rife in the new media art scene. A new creative technology is presented as an art piece but essentially lacks genuine layers of poetic meaning simply because the focus is on the technology itself, and not on what lies beyond. The medium has become the message; nothing new here.

Spiral & Underground Support System (Television)

You wrote that today (new media) artists are often under pressure to present their work as “research”. What are the pitfalls of such attitude?

I have no problem with research in the arts whatsoever. It’s an interesting evolution that artists don’t necessarily have to produce well-defined (collectible) objects. It’s the art practice as a whole that has come to the foreground; what artists stand for, how artists make their attitude come true in the world, how they communicate their ideas, what other experiments and side projects they’re involved in, etc. Such layered activity and exploration is also valued these days. However, there are some pitfalls in overtly stressing research in art practice.

First of all, research may become an end in itself; the artist’s work becomes interesting simply because it is research. As a consequence some artists start legitimizing their work through some sort of research concept hoping that it will make the work more relevant. Well, it’s up to the spectator to decide whether the research presented is actually meaningful or just a “marketing trick”. Sometimes research even becomes an excuse to avoid making a clear-cut artistic statement or finalized work. The work-in-progress-syndrome. I have nothing against work-in-progress tactics but they should be meaningful in view of a chosen strategy, not a pretext to procrastinate. In some cases artists fall victim to their own endless technical research. This is a phenomenon which you often encounter in the new media scene. People start up a technically complex project and keep struggling with it for years and years, continuously working on the technical and financial aspects of the work. Once again, this is not a necessarily bad strategy but in some cases the artist would be better off picking up some completely new ideas and a fresh new project. Experimentation and exploration seem essential for me.

I also believe there is a strong tendency nowadays to instrumentalize art, especially those art forms that do not sell well. This is of course a neoliberal vision on the art practice; art should somehow financially sustain itself within market forces. There’s a big cultural difference between this in Europe and the US. In Europe, art that has less or no commercial value can be funded by the government, much less so in the US. As a consequence, American artists tend to present their new media work more often as research with a utilitarian benefit for society: it has an academic value, it’s technologically innovative etc. I think this is not always a healthy situation. Art should reclaim its rights to be sometimes… well, not useful at all, not in a directly measurable way. I even think contemporary art should become more irrational. We badly need more “nonsense”.

Is Drumlander a way to, as you put it elsewhere, “reclaim the freedom to play”? How did you get into the game culture by the way?

Yes, Drumlander is exactly that. This doesn’t mean we approach our game-related projects in a casual manner; on the contrary, we are very focused on bringing quality in what we do. Computer games are something Louis Blackburn and I grew up with. I was playing a lot but never really thought of incorporating games into my art. All this changed when I visited Louis in Québec City in 2004. We started talking about games; about the beauty, strength and craftsmanship of our favorite games, links with other media, and above all, approaches to recycle this culture in a creative manner. And that’s how we decided to set up Drumlander. Drumlander was originally conceived as a DJ project with game music, but quickly evolved into a much broader platform to explore the creative potential of games. In the DJ set we mix original game tunes, game music remixes and chip music made with old game consoles. We have gathered a massive collection of game songs and sounds, and depending on the venue, things become more dancy or experimental. It’s undoubtedly a great new experience for me coming from a background of science and visual arts.

Drumlander Art+Game montage

I really liked the games you curated for the exhibition Art+Game organized by IMAL in Brussels last December. It presented the most interesting aspects of video games today: activism, education and fun. Which criteria guided your selection?

Drumlander’s game arcade The Sweet and Violent Underbelly of Game Culture is a showcase of independent games, mostly freeware and open-source. The present-day game industry can be compared to the film industry, with a small group of massive studios creating the most lucrative games, and a widespread scene of independent artists and programmers. For the arcade we consistently look for computer games that show a level of artistic ingenuity. As a spectator, this may not always seem so obvious at a first glance; sometimes you really need to submerge yourself in the game to discover this. There are many different levels on which a game can excel in creativity: its concept, gameplay, graphics, music, etc. A crucial aspect of the arcade is that we are constantly around to introduce people to the games, to play with or against them, discuss the significance of games, etc. This results in a whole different experience for the audience. For many visitors, games transform from a previously misunderstood commodity to an exiting medium with loads of creative potential.

For our last installment of the arcade at Art+Game in Brussels, we also included a personal selection of political games. These are games that take current political and social issues as a central theme. Sometimes in truly activist sense, and sometimes more in an ironic way. Through their sheer subject matter these games possess a sort of documentary value; something I learned during a debate with Eddo Stern and Peter Brinson at Gamezone deSingel in Antwerp last year. I find this a very interesting new way of looking at games.

Drumlander – DJ set in Quebec

I read about one of your upcoming projects that will star mad scientists. It is certainly an ironic idea coming from you. What motivated the choice of that character?

I have a strong interest in cultural icons like the zombie, the alchemist, and mad scientist because they represent a sort of underground science. Each icon has a specific and consistent logic of its own but at the same time clearly transgresses the boundaries of normalized rational thinking. They also reflect people’s fears; both about science and the unknown. The alchemist and mad scientist are figures that operate in an ethical no-man’s-land and use technology without constraints, thus provoking fear. On the other hand, the mysticism which is involved in alchemy and zombies reflects man’s inexhaustible fascination-repulsion for the unknown.

I am currently planning an audio piece using the in-game dialogues of mad scientists captured from a wide range of computer games. The piece will be a multichannel surround installation set up around a central video sculpture. My idea is to create a sort of incongruous conversation piece that in a way reflects the representation of science in popular game culture.

Can you already tell us a few words about the book you’re working on?

The book I am currently writing with art philosopher Antoon Van den Braembussche, is a series of dialogues on contemporary relations of art, science, and spirituality. We met some years ago at the HISK; a postgraduate art school in Antwerp where I was studying at the time. During our first meeting at his home we had a non-stop conversation of more than seven hours. Consequently we thought it might be a great idea to use such conversations as the basis for a book. We approach the rather wide spectrum of the book’s subject through ten different angles: art and science, the virtualization of contemporary culture, computer games and visual culture, spirituality in the digital age, etc. It’s an extremely “natural” project that flows wonderfully well. The discussions are almost always unprepared and lead to the most surprising insights. We also travel around for this project. We go to Spain quite often, to work in isolation in a small mountain village in Andalusia, and we’re also planning to make a trip through Asia to go and talk with local philosophers and Buddhist monks.

There’s already a big interest in our book; people keep on asking me when it will be finished. We plan to have the Dutch manuscript ready by the end of this year, and the book should be out in 2008. After the Dutch version we’ll start working on an English and French translation.

Now two silly questions that I think you deserve!
1. When will you have a website?

In February I will have a brand new web site. It will contain both an artist archive, a blog and a vault for all texts, ideas, scans, manuals that I think might be useful for the community. Until then you can check some of my work on the IBK Visual Arts Database.

2. Is there any talent that you don’t have?

Oh, one thing I am pretty bad at is orientation. I don’t know why but I have a harder time than anyone else to get a clear oversight of a city. In the end I usually get it, but it takes me like 15 times longer than a normal brain. However, in games I do pretty well…

Thanks Angelo!

Angelo Vermeulen can be contacted at angelovermeulen[at]myway dot com
Thanks to Morgan Riles for correcting the English.

All images courtesy of Angelo Vermeulen (except the portrait of Thomas Kuhn.)

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Feb 19, 2007, 9:14AM

Documents and performances

This week, many students presented their thesis projects at the Berlin University of the Arts’ digital media class. Since all of them were quite good, we will cover them over the next couple days.

Lisa Rave has created a beautiful two-fold project which takes a look at the relationship between performance art and its documentation, strongly referring to works like Chris Burden’s Shoot.

For the first piece “Oak Frame”, Lisa cut down an oak tree (which would have been felled anyway) and photographically documented the tree, the process and the void that the tree left behind. These pictures were put into frames which she crafted from the same tree’s wood and put up on the wall. Since the wood is still fresh, the frames will warp as they dry and eventually destroy the panes of glass in front of the photographs, somewhat obscuring the images of the tree. For the presentation, she got a humidifier from a Berlin museum which was actively working against this process and in a sense stretching the time-span of this part of the performance.

The second piece, “Zählen von 1 bis 3000 in absoluter Dunkelheit” (To count from 1 to 3000 in absolute darkness), plays on a similar idea – it is a photograph of Lisa who was standing still as long as the camera had collected enough light to produce a properly exposed image. The duration of the creation of the performance became the time of the creation of its documentation and vice-versa.

Related: Safari by Lisa Rave.

Originally from we make money not art by Sascha
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 6:58PM

WOW in real life!

German artist Aram Bartholl did a “World of Warcraft” performance in public space where he had his name follow him over his head. Watch the video above.. he also recently did more of these installations in Gent, Belgium at the Vooruit. See pics . I also did an interview with Bartholl for Gizmodo that can be read here. [blogged by Jonah on coin operated]

Virtualizing the Physical by Greg L: We’ve had several discussions in the past about comingling virtual world technologies with physical spaces to form augmented realities. (E.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) To give credit where it’s due, Jerry Paffendorf has often chimed in with some great links and interesting comments on this topic. (E.g. 1, 2, 3) From time to time, we’ve also discussed the increasing technological viability of virtual-real mashup games like Human Pac-Man. Continue reading “Virtualizing the Physical” on Terra Nova

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 14, 2007, 10:52PM

Avatars in the Flesh

The logic of sites like Second Life comes to bear on the ‘first life’ in The Girlfriend Experience, a project by Martin Butler and his Liminal Institute. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings from January 26 until March 9, four members of the group, who have been styled to look like avatars in a virtual community, will inhabit a web-monitored space at Amsterdam’s Mediamatic space. Online players are invited to command the ‘flesh and blood’ avatars as they would their more common digital counterparts, using the borrowed bodies to interact with other users. Taking its title from a prostitution-related term for well-fabricated intimacy, the project creates a caricature of the personal yet anonymous desires underpinning relationships formed in virtual communities. For example, the control fantasy implicit in molding a detached, idealized second self becomes embarrassingly obvious when the avatars are humans who can resist a player’s will. Players can request any action they want, but the avatars ultimately decide where they go and what they do. Inevitable comic scenarios aside, the experiment offers a chance to find out what happens when we start to force the rules at play in our online social lives back onto reality. – Bill Hanley

http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-13553-en.html

Originally from Rhizome News
reBlogged by michael on Jan 26, 2007, 8:00AM

37 Isolated Events

Contemporary Butoh Dance and Immersive Video Performance

37 Isolated Events: a Contemporary Butoh Dance and Immersive Video Performance

:: Thursday January 18, 2007 – 7pm :: San Francisco Asian Art Museum :: free w/ $5-after 5 pm museum admission.

Blindsight Artistic Director/Choreographer Paige Starling Sorvillo collaborates with Los Angeles-based media artist Lucy H G and UK-based Australian composer duo imaginationandmymother.

this ocean is also the desert and I am walking into a minefield, into this installed landscape this land no longer part of the soul, I swallow, I listen, I can see your body cut into foreign lands.

37 Isolated Events begins with the normal running temperature of the human body and gradually fabricates a facsimile body. Within the noise of networked society, our intimate distance and distant intimacy induce a virtual, mediated sensibility. We are anesthetized – our breath mechanized – as the human biological system becomes hybridized with the global system. At thirty-seven degrees Celsius, in isolation, we have unprecedented potential to risk exposure and make contact inside the noise of a growing global network.

concept/direction | paige starling sorvillo
collaborating media artist | lucy hg (LA)
sound artists | imaginationandmymother (UK)
performance/choreography | sorvillo, monique goldwater, isabelle sjahsam, jez lee
lighting design | elaine buckholtz
photography | ian winters

San Francisco Asian Art Museum :: 200 Larkin, Samsung Hall (Civic Center BART)

37 Isolated Events is a supported in part by the Zellerbach Family Foundation and Asian American Dance Performances. Paige Starling Sorvillo is honored to be a 2007 CHIME awardee with Marc Bamuthi Joseph.

Originally from networked_performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Jan 15, 2007, 5:22PM

Flesh and blood avatars

During two weeks four avatars in flesh and blood will attend your orders at the Mediamatic gallery in Amsterdam.

The Girlfriend Experience, a work by Martin Butler, will let you choose a human avatar and make him or her walk around the space. You can observe them live in the Analog Villa. All that from the comfort of your home.

The project is of course a comment on online avatar communities, be they Second Life or World of Warcraft. In The Girlfriend Experience you have first to “explore” each other. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and the avatar has to think about how far he or she wants to go to comply with your wishes. In fact who’s in command is not always clear. You get ten minutes to play with your avatar, then someone else take your place.

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, refers to the paradoxical nature of online social behaviour. On the one hand, the avatar provides you with a sense of anonymity. On the other hand, a close look at the characteristics of your avatar can reveal a part of your intimacy and the secret desires you might have. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

Be a puppeteer from 26 January 2007 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20.00 till 23.00 via the Mediamatic Internet site.

Btw, Mediamatic has a few interesting workshops coming up soon: Radio–to-Go, on February 14 and 15; Machinima, on February 27-March 02; Arduino Unplugged, March 12-14.

Via trendbeheer.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Jan 12, 2007, 9:39AM

Girl Power Accessory

The Head Hand Bang is really an actual hand bag shaped like a head for the sole purpose of enabling females to experience a sense of girl power without the need for violence. It’s not available commercially but I could easily see something like this work commercially.

related links

Yaelmer

Originally
from sensoryimpact.com

by adnan


reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 17, 2007, 10:04PM

Interview with Mark Shepard

Donning headphones, city dwellers and commuters have been re-shaping the urban soundscape ever since the arrival of the Walkman. A few years ago, Mark Shepard suggested to go beyond this egocasting attitude and share those sounds with the people who might pass by the same spaces. His project is called Tactical Sound Garden and has been presented at festivals and events all over the world, from Sonar in Barcelona to ISEA 2006 in San Jose, from Futuresonic in Manchester to Conflux in New York.

However, the TSG represents only a small part of Shepard‘s activities. His cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of emergent network cultures. His research focuses on the impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he is a co-director of the Center for Virtual Architecture.

Your bio say that you’re “an artist and architect whose cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures.” Do you regard architecture, film and new media as three different fields or does your work encompass them as one?

My work moves between these different fields. I come from a background in architecture, which I’ve studied and practiced (intermittently) over the past two decades. After becoming fed-up with the state of the architectural “profession” in the early 90s, I returned to graduate school and began to work with film as both a medium and a conceptual model to address aspects of spatial experience that elude conventions of architectural representation.

What began as a naive interest in working with time and duration as “material” (qualities of sound, light, movement) led to broader questions concerning how perception is conditioned through the technological apparatus. I was interested in conditions of vacancy as a limit condition within urban environments, and the challenges involved with modeling the forces producing this condition. The work explored the limits of empirical representations, and the political ramifications of the fact that what architects and urban designers perceive and value about a specific site was to a certain extent limited by their ability to represent it. Between Now and There and unfoproject are two examples. Moving between film and architecture (and by extension, cinema and urbanism) provided a means to analyze and critique the techniques by which the built environment is projected and shaped, and in turn, shapes those who inhabit it.

unfoproject

At about the same time, I began to work with new media, mostly as a means to explore non-linear temporal structures and interactivity. A little later, I founded a new media design studio called dotsperinch, together with Carlos Tejada. What started out as as a means to support independent art projects (by freelancing for other artists and designers) grew into a collaborative network of artists, architects, programmers and technologists developing new media environments for primarily non-profit organizations in the arts, design and education communities in New York. Much of the early work with dotsperinch involved designing and programming online digital archives and interactive exhibits for museums. Projects such as 360degrees.org, SonicMemorial.org and CrossingTheBLVD.org provided a pretext to investigate both conceptual design directions and fairly pragmatic development issues involved with creating digital archives and open content systems. Later work, such as Mitosis: Formation of Daughter Cells, an installation by A.M. Hoch at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, explored notions of a “habitable cinema” and involved the integration of sound, the moving image and a mobile observer with things like proximity sensors, mechanical actuators, and embedded microcontrollers.

My current work is more preoccupied with understanding computing as an environment than seeing it as a tool or a set of techniques. When computational intelligence becomes embedded in (or distributed throughout) the built environment, the basis of architecture and urbanism is radically altered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the major cities today. Looking at the impact of mobile and pervasive computing on architecture and urbanism involves rethinking received categories of public/private, individual/mass, interior/exterior, attention/distraction, virtual/actual. I find I’m constantly having to move between different fields to get at the key issues at stake.

You’ve been working on the Tactical Sound Garden for a few years. How did the project start and evolve?

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit began in 2004 as a conceptual mashup of sorts. The idea of participatory sonic environments was something dotsperinch touched on with Sonicmemorial.org, which launched in 2002. Following that we were working with location-aware technologies on projects such as The Rosemary Initiative, which explored the affects of contemporary location tracking technologies on social interaction. In the spring of 2004, I had just finished a proposal with Fiona Murphy for the Maya Lin Plaza at the University of California at Irvine. Maya Lin’s plan for the plaza involved elaborate landscaping combined with various sculptural elements, lighting treatments, and public benches that had audio speakers embedded within them, for example. We were invited to propose a set of scenarios that would augment her plan with a layer of embedded technologies. The idea of “planting sounds” came directly from this proposal.

Early on, I got in touch with Marc Tuters who was working on a project called “Where-Fi” that used 802.11 (WiFi) wireless access points to calculate the location of a mobile device in physical space. Marc pointed me to Placelab, an open source API developed by Intel Research in Seattle that aspired to much of Where-Fi’s design goals (and had a funded development team!). From there, the technology development involved hacking together an application that fed the positioning information from Placelab to a 3D audio engine in order to output a realtime audio mix based on the geographic location of the participant in physical space.

The current interaction model evolved through low-tech studies using handheld transistor radios with small logbooks attached. From these early studies we were able to get a rough idea of how people were inclined (or not) to interact through placing sounds in a “public” space, and some of the parameters that influenced that interaction. While the project draws on the metaphor of actual urban community gardens, virtual sound gardens don’t need to be constrained by the same parameters. For example, physical community gardens are often structured around the idea of the “plot”, where urban public space is spatially partitioned for private cultivation by designated members of a specific community. Given the immateriality of the TSG, and its open participation model, spatial partitioning is one of many possible parameters by which a TSG may be structured. These parameters are being explored through the creation of a series of sound gardens in collaboration with local communities. The idea is to work with communities defined by the shared use of a specific public location – an airport, a park, a street, a plaza – rather than one defined primarily by common property, place of residence, shared interests or beliefs. In this sense, the project seeks to build a sense of community that cuts across demographic divisions, one rooted in the diversity found in the everyday life of urban public space.

Tactical Sound Garden requires users to show some respect for other people’s planted sounds. How do you deal with the networks’ vulnerability? How do people usually behave? Do they modify the sounds planted by others? Are there some turf wars? Or are they more ready to collaborate?

This really depends on the community of people involved and the time-scale of their interactions. Interactions within a TSG are best measured in weeks or months (years?), not minutes or hours. For example, when we exhibited the project as part of the ISEA 2006 | ZeroOne San Jose Symposium and Festival, we found the format of the week-long exhibition problematic in that it forced a “demo” mentality on the people who chose to participate. Most people were more inclined to sample the project to see how it works, rather than pursue sustained interactions through it. In this case, people were generally less invested in the sounds they planted, and not that concerned with how others were pruning them. As more Sound Gardens evolve over extended periods of time, we’ll be in a better position to report on how people actually interact within them. They’re still a bit thorny, to be sure!

Are urbanists giving enough attention to the aural layer of the city landscape? If yes, could you give some example? If no, do you think it might change in the future and how?

Sound in modern cities is notoriously difficult to control. Normally, urban planners are concerned with how loud and disruptive cities are, and try to control their sound through codes and legislation. Car horns, police sirens, car alarms left blaring by negligent owners, super-sized car stereo subwoofers, construction workers repairing a water main wielding jackhammers at dawn, or elderly neighbors who are hard of hearing and listen to the television at high volume – each in some way has been regulated by a code or environmental impact study (or occasionally by local intervention of other neighbors…!). So think its less a question of if urbanists are giving enough attention to the aural layer of the city, more one of how they think about sound in cities in the first place.

Mobile audio devices like the iPod have offered the average city dweller alternate modes by which the aural landscape of the city can be augmented and manipulated. The popularity of the iPod points toward a desire to personalize the experience of the contemporary city with one’s own private soundtrack. On the bus, in the park at lunch, while shopping in the deli – the city becomes a film for which you compose the soundtrack. These devices also provide varying degrees of privacy, affording the listener certain exceptions to conventions for social interaction within the public domain. As Michael Bull notes in his book on the subject, donning a pair of earbuds grants a certain amount of social license, enabling one to move through the city without necessarily getting too involved, and absolving one from some responsibility to respond to what’s happening around them. Some people use earbuds to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. Others remove earbuds when talking to someone to signal they want to engage. In effect, the iPod is a tool for organizing space, time and the boundaries around the body in public space.

So today, I think it is more in the hands of the individual to shape her aural experience of the contemporary city than those of the professional urbanists. Without doubt, this contributes to a long-standing retreat or withdrawal of people in cities from urban public space and forms of social interaction found there. And this is the dilemma. One way urbanists might become more involved is to focus on developing new technologies and infrastructures that reconnect people in ways that strike a balance between providing privacy and facilitating openness throughout the social space (which is not always “public” space) of everyday life.

You were one of the organisers of Architecture and Situated Technologies, a “symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of “situated” technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary metapolis.”One of the issues that the event was addressing was “How do the social uses of these technologies, including (non-) affective giving, destabilize rationalized “use-case scenarios” designed around the generic consumer?” Did the event make the question any clearer? Can you give us an idea of the participants’ view on this?

I organized the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium together with Omar Khan and Trebor Scholz. The symposium was a co-production of the Center for Virtual Architecture, The Institute for Distributed Creativity, and the Architectural League of New York, part of the League’s celebration of the 125th anniversary of its founding.

We were interested in identifying new research vectors, sites of practice and working methods for the confluence of architecture and situated technologies. How might we begin to think about these in a post-disciplinary context, with people coming from related yet different fields? If the point of ubiquitous computing was to make the computer recede to the background, to become invisible, in order to focus attention on the social space of everyday life and the encounters that transpire there, then what kinds of techno-social assemblages are possible or even inevitable? Where will we find them? How will we access them? Who will design them, and based on which criteria?

We began with two usages of “situated” to work with:

1. Situated: located: situated in a particular spot or position; “valuable centrally located urban land”; “strategically placed artillery”; “a house set on a hilltop”; “nicely situated on a quiet riverbank”

2. Situated Action: every course of action is highly dependent upon its material and social circumstances focusing on moment-by-moment interactions between actors, and between actors and the environments of their action.

The first clearly relates to architecture in that architectural design often begins with the site (a specific place or location) as a primary force shaping the act of building. The second stems from a critique by sociologist Lucy Suchman of assumptions about purposeful “human” activity common to artificial intelligence research in the ’80s, which tended to think of this activity as a something that proceeded by an a-priori plan that was perfunctorily executed. Both invoke context (a site, an action, other people) as determining factor in trying to understand the object or event in question.

The question of how everyday social uses of different mobile, embedded and pervasive technologies destabilize rationalized use-case scenarios designed around the generic consumer was addressed by a number of the participants. Eric Paulos, director of the Urban Atmospheres group at Intel Research, presented Objects of Wonderment (video): a DIY technology platform for mobile phones that enables users to create their own applications around scenarios specific to their wants/needs/desires given a particular situation.

Usman Haque‘s talk “Technology and users in public space: what’s wrong with this picture?” argued that the very language often used in talking about the problem of designing techno-social assemblages is itself problematic. He presented a series of projects that recast the user as participant, technology as instrument, and public space as the commons, and opened up a larger discussion about the need for a better vocabulary. We’re currently in the process of placing podcasts of the presentations online. We’re still waiting on a few, but if you view what’s there I think you’ll get an idea of the range of perspectives that were brought to bear on this and other questions.

A&ST also invited artists to give their point of view on the various aspects of situated technologies. How important is the artist’s contribution to technological issues in general? What can their work and views bring to ongoing discussions? Is their voice really heard and listened to outside of the art world?

I think the role of artists in technology development is essential.
They address questions concerning technology that often aren’t asked within conventional corporate research labs, and they do so in ways not obvious (or at least apparent) to computer scientists and engineers. This is by no means new. Artists have been contributing to the development of technology for decades, and places like Xerox PARC and Paul Allen’s Interval Research Lab are just two examples of big players in the tech industry looking to artists to help them think in more inventive and/or relevant ways about future technologies.

Whether their voice is really heard is another matter. Natalie Jeremijenko–whose project Live Wire (aka the Dangling String) was developed while she was a researcher at Xerox PARC and was cited by Mark Weiser and John Seeley Brown in their 1995 essay Designing Calm Technology –remarked during one of the panel discussions that the lab director succeeding Weisser considered the project “an embarrassment” and had it removed from the lab. In her presentation she argued that while artists are adept at developing scenarios for computing that couple physical and social situations, without some form of quantitative measure to evaluate the performance of the scenario, it is unlikely to have influence beyond the art + technology world: ie: the computer scientists, venture capitalists and other business interests that drive technology development.

One of your projects Industrian Pilz is quite intriging. It examines industrialization in East Germany through the lens of mycology – the botanical study of fungi. Can you gives us more details about that project? How do you get the idea?

Industrian Pilz began in 1998 with an invitation to propose an installation for Areale99 – an electronic arts festival set within a robotic manufacturing industrial zone located outside Berlin, Germany in a former East German agricultural region. The project has two components. The “pilzcontainer” installation was conceived as a form of Verpflanzen (grafting), investigating the re-circuiting of industrial production and distribution networks via a site-specific, computer-driven installation that reacted in real-time to the flow of traffic on a nearby autobahn. The “pilzfilm“, a digital video-film exploring the flotsam and jetsam drifting in the wake of West Germany’s absorption of a decaying East German state, documents the context of the industrial zone through a schizoid narrative splicing original investigative footage shot on location with archival film clips, scenes of cultural globalization from popular media, and samplings from the music and musings of pioneering myco-aesthete, John Cage. It premiered at the Viper International Film and Video Festival, Basel, Switzerland in November 2003 and was later screened at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

The initial idea came while I was making site visits to the industrial zone in the fall of 98. I was staying in the next town over and rode by bike through the woods to the industrial zone each day. As I passed through the woods, I kept seeing people moving about seemingly aimlessly, heads bent down, scanning the forest floor. It wasn’t until after a fews days of this that I realized they were foraging for mushrooms. So I thought I’d try it myself. The interesting thing about hunting for mushrooms is that you have to develop a keen eye to locate places in the forest conducive to fungal growth. The average mycophyte also relies on visual cues to determine which mushrooms are safe to eat, and which ones are poisonous. They can be a tasty and nourishing food source, but they can also make you very ill if you are not careful. Mushrooms have no use for the sun. They feed of the dead and decaying matter in the woods. And of course there is a rich mythology surrounding them – toadstools and fairy rings and so forth.

Screenshots from Pilzfilm

I found this an intriguing metaphor for describing the conversion of the former east’s agricultural sector into islands of robotic manufacturing zones feeding the (then) current (re)construction boom in Berlin. In this context, mycology became a device to torque a by now overly familiar opposition between a benign and creative nature and a ruthless culture. As capitalism’s claims to absolute naturalness gain rhetorical momentum, the mycological lens allows models of ‘the natural’ both as the agentless conversion of decaying matter and as a parasitic, potentially toxic, and deeply site specific process – one whose odd position in the economy of matter does not allow easy romantic identifications. Better watch what you eat.

What are you currently working on?

After a number of great discussions this fall in Helsinki, Weimar and New York, it’s back into the studio for me. Usman Haque recently sent some code for his environmentXML project to play with. So I’m digging into that a bit. It’s Flickr for your datastreams… I think creating open, participatory infrastructures for large scale interactions–across physical space–is one of the more interesting vectors to pursue right now. An enabling infrastructure for the other part(s) of urban life. I’m also working on another iteration of the TSG, which will be presented through a series of workshops next spring and summer. Other than that, getting back to that sweet spot where you wake up in the morning, work on an idea you had the night before, and (hopefully) have some results to reflect on at the end of the day…

Thanks Mark!

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 19, 2006, 8:26AM

Zero Genie

I’m doing a talk later this week at Goldsmiths Art College for the Live Art Garden Initiative along with a couple of artists including Jem Finer who’s work I look forward to finding a lot more about. Here’s his Zero Genie project which he collaborates on with Ansuman Biswas. They describe themsleves as ‘Slightly inept trainees of an ancient mystic sect, that have somehow managed to infiltrate the Cosmonaut’s Training Programme in Star City, Moscow and are determined to practice the kind of space flight taught by a long line of sages… and they certainly need the practice.’

See Video Excerpt from their Movie 

‘Thousands of years of spiritual insight and shamanic technology have enabled humans to explore the entire universe, conversing with the denizens of other worlds and witnessing far out visions. The Zero Genies are just beginners. Poverty stricken, slightly uncoordinated, and yet noble, they are convinced that space travel is not the exclusive pursuit of the rich and rational Western world. They are here to show that a comfortable carpet and well-packed hookah will suffice. At the Cosmonaut’s Training Centre in Star City, aircraft with cushioned interiors create weightless conditions on board by plummeting out of the sky. The Zero Genies, hailing from an obscure land on the fringes of civilization, want to put Race back into the Space Race.’

‘So, within the magic lantern of a Russian cargo plane, they demonstrate the ancient wisdom of their people. They dance, levitate, and reveal, for the very first time in the West, the mythical Flying Carpet. On a shoestring budget, with mental discipline and Russian hospitality, the Zero Genies defy gravity and military-industrial economics to celebrate the dream within us all.’

Originally
from Interactive Architecture dot Org

by Ruairi


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 3, 2006, 11:15PM