By
Marisa Olson
on
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at
3:00 pm
Does anyone know how many biennials there are in the world, now? There is a whole sub-field of biennial studies that looks at such issues as the economic impacts of the shows on their host cities and the artists' market values, or the relationship between Eastern biennials and Westernization. Of course, the latter question hinges on whether the show is called a "biennial" or a "biennale"... The truth is, there are now so many of these that it's easy to overlook them. Even the fledging field of electronic art has a few! But Sweden's Electrohype is a unique one, bringing ambitious installations to the beautiful Malmö Konsthall. Now in its fifth incarnation, the show draws large audiences but avoids the temptation to be a mega-show, instead opting to give serious space and consideration to good work by often more emerging artists. Electrohype 08 features ten international artists whose projects focus on "ongoing processes and time." These are Doug Back (CA), Ralf Baecker (DE), Serina Erfjord (NO), Kerstin Ergenzinger (DE), Jessica Field (CA), Voldemars Johansons (LV), Diane Morin (CA), Kristoffer Myskja (NO), Erik Olofsen (NL), and Bill Vorn (CA). While time and endurance are age-old themes in the modern art world, there's not a usual suspect in the bunch! Nonetheless, there is due notice paid to the histories and influences traced by the show. For instance, Doug Back's Sticks (1979) is showing aside Ralf Baecker's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) (2007). Despite a large difference in scale and nearly thirty years between them, both are kinetic sculptures fleshing out what it means to compute and how mechanics might be used to reflect upon human movement. Ironically, the big piece looks at micro-motions within the body and the smaller one looks at social interaction! Other interesting works include Serina Erfjord's Black Stain and Cold Stain (both 2008), which are small stains on the wall that respectively trap magnetic fluid and humidity, so that the respectively light and dark spots bring growth and lifespan into the proverbial room. Voldemars Johansons' Aero Torrents (2007) draws on the old science trick of displaying sound vibrations on the surface of a liquid. In this case, a small pool of water (not altogether dissimilar-looking from an AeroBed) echoes the sonic iteration of meteorological data from recent major storms in Europe. The piece embodies a sort of poetic form of translation, carrying on both bigger water-related weather patterns that have obviously long-predated our field, and reciting a once-novel and now almost vernacular form of representation within electronic art. The presentation of works like these trace enduring practices in the field, while spotlighting new experiments and practitioners. - Marisa Olson
Statement: This video is an animation of the process of saving an image file in continuously lower file formats over hundreds of times.
This image is of a quote, taken from Douglas Davis' essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction," which argues (in part) that unlike analogue signals, which are like waves crashing upon a beach and losing clarity with every ebb of the tide, digital bits "can be endlessly reproduced, without degradation, always the same, always perfect."
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at
8:59 am
Video artist Pipilotti Rist's large scale multimedia installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) opened last night at MoMA. The space is designed to immerse and overwhelm the visitor -- a sensation captured by the work's title Pour Your Body Out. Twenty-five foot high projections surround an immense circular couch -- in an interview in one of the videos below MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach likens the perspective to the experience of looking up while laying at the bottom of a pool. Rist is also interviewed, and she discusses how she staged the project.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at
3:00 pm
Image: 386DX performance at Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2000. (Photo by Jenny Marketou)
Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugget of criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop", an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour
Your recent exhibition was called "CritiPop." Could you explain where this label came from, and what it means?
We spent a long time thinking about what to call the exhibition. Media Art 2.0 no longer fit. We had moved away from media art and no longer wanted to be associated with it. Eventually, we singled out the most important feature uniting the works: critical communication contained in a popular form, with shiny plastic, bright colors, primitive interactivity, a resemblance to consumer goods, glowing LED screens and so on. Thus, "CritiPop" was born. Its effect is akin to that of advertising or propaganda: vivid, universally recognizable images that conceal a subliminal message.
There is a striking amount of texts and manifestos accompanying "CritiPop." Are you concerned that the critical component of your work won't be read without them?
Almost all these texts were written in the years preceding "CritiPop," for exhibitions in our gallery. So, it was natural to include them. But basically you're right. We had to introduce the viewer to the context, because our works are easy to read on the superficial level of real-time, eye-candy effects, brightly polished plastic and impressive animation.
Image: Installation view at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (Photo by Anton Akimov)
Moscow critics often frame the history of Russian art after perestroika around artists like Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who worked with actions and other ephemeral forms of art during the chaotic 1990s and turned to object-based practice during the relative stability of the Putin administration. Your career follows a similar trajectory. Do you think this is a fairly accurate description of what happened? Why did you abandon net.art and begin to produce objects in collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev?
I think there are similarities here, but also significant differences. Unlike Kulik or Osmolovsky, who always worked on the territory of institutionalized contemporary art, I was working on the internet, which in the 1990s was an open zone for experimentation. I had become disgusted with the world of museums and galleries, where I spent quite some time in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, thanks to perestroika and the boom for Soviet art. I even decided to stop being an artist for a while.
The term net.art came later. In the mid-1990s you could make art on the internet without getting stuck in a particular context. The internet itself was the context. Eventually even net.art was institutionalized. But it did not create its own economy; only JODI could survive as internet artists, thanks to the generous grant system in the Netherlands. But net.art disappeared simply because the internet developed. As soon as a large number of people obtained access to the internet, net.art became meaningless. It dissolved in the mass of blogs and platforms. You could say that net.art invented and investigated methods and technologies used in Web 2.0.
Image: Alexei Shulgin, Natalie Bookchin, Blank+Jeron, Introduction to Net Art, 1994-1999
In the early 2000s I saw some creative potential in software art, which could be called the heir to net.art, and organized with Olga Goriunova four Read.me festivals, as well as the repository Runme.org (along with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean), which is active to this day. While working on Read.me, I noticed that software art was following the same path to demise as net.art -- it was gradually becoming absorbed by media culture and new IT products, by digital banality. That was when I began to work with Aristarkh Chernyshev. Our first project, in 2003, was Super-i Real Virtuality Goggles . But that wasn't my first material project after net.art. In 1998 I made 386 DX, the singing computer, and I've given 100 concerts around the world with it.
Web 2.0 marked the end of net.art, as it had to compete with the glut of ideas published on Livejournal and other sites like it, and thus introduced a crisis of originality. Moreover, the inability of political activism to affect policy -- the main shock here was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- cast doubts on its reasons for existence. That brings us to the mid-2000s. With the strategies of the 1990s facing a crisis, we created Electroboutique as a laboratory for studying new strategies in art. We wanted to create media works that were plug-and-play and zero-maintenance. Furthermore, we wanted to distance ourselves from media activism, which had hit a dead end. Since art equals consumption in the conditions of the unipolar capitalist world, we decided to make a commercial object. We put protest and critique in its body. That's how we arrived at our style, which we called commercial protest. Then we added exciting shapes and sound. And that's how we got CritiPop.
By
Marisa Olson
on
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at
1:00 pm
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are a married couple of New York-based artists whose collaborative work conveys a love of film and televised narratives. Their early projects embodied database aesthetics as they chopped shows like 8 is Enough, Kung Fu, and Starsky and Hutch into short clips, often inviting viewers to rearrange them according to what we'd now call metadata. For instance, one could choose from a bank of DVDs in their Every Shot, Every Episode to watch every occurrence of the color blue, or of extreme close-ups. More recent works have entailed building elaborate miniature film sets, complete with working cameras, to shoot microfilms. In the case of High Seas, the set is a sort of kinetic sculpture in its own right, mimicking its subject as it moves around to create shots of the famed Titanic loosing its footing on the ocean. The role of filmic media in mythologizing the ill-fated boat is of course implicit in the installation. While these projects have always been infused with a sense of subjectivity, as the artists perform their fandom through their selective decisions, lately their work has incorporated more explicitly autobiographical elements. Their piece, Our Second Date, for instance, is a miniature movie set which features the artists watching the film from their second date, Weekend, reenacted through a mobile sculpture and video streamed live to a tiny screen. The choice to position themselves as spectators within their own reality, and moreover to confess that their romance budded around screen pleasure opens up a number of interpretations of their ongoing work and paves the way to their newest project, which opens November 22nd at Postmasters Gallery. In I'll Replace You, the artists again place themselves at center stage, without stepping in front of the camera. Instead, a series of different actors (some of whom are quite miscast) play them in enacting a "day in the life" of the artists. Of course, this day is unfathomably long in that it includes every type of activity in which the artists, parents, lovers, and professors might possibly engage on a given day, thus exploring the roles and experiences that constitute our identities. Nonetheless, the fake McCoys manage to do it all, with the actors changing shift throughout the day, while engaging with the artists' real children, students, friends, and colleagues. The resultant video installation is accompanied by a series of photo portraits of the artists in which passersby and friends stand in for one or another member of the couple (raising questions about the deeper psychic or cosmic nature of compatibility and the implausibility of replacement) and a series of "artist talks" in which actors from outside of the art world discuss work by famous artists as if it was their own. Once again returning to the database form, the latter piece promises to shed light on the genre conventions of art-related discourse and critique with clips that are both humorous and poetic. Leave it to the McCoys to sketch out the formal boundaries of a practice and then show us how fun and beautiful it can be to color within those lines! - Marisa Olson
Image: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, I'll Replace You, 2008 (Photo courtesy of Postmasters Gallery)
Statement:Radio Astronomy is an art and science project which broadcasts sounds intercepted from space live on the internet and on the airwaves. Listeners will hear the acoustic output of radio telescopes live. The content of the live transmission will depend on the objects being observed by partner telescopes. On any given occasion listeners may hear the planet Jupiter and its interaction with its moons, radiation from the Sun, activity from far-off pulsars or other astronomical phenomena.
Statement: Stephen Vitiello's first solo project for the web, Tetrasomia presents intriguing web-based archives of sounds from the natural and physical world, including such sounds as a fruit fly courtship, an underwater volcano, and poison frogs, as the source for an interactive sound project. Tetrasomia also features four new sound compositions by Vitiello: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at
9:00 am
"Assembly Instructions" is a visual thought map, comprised of over 120 small framed black and white xeroxed collages, by Brooklyn-based artist Alexandre Singh. Each collage represents an idea, which the artist connects to other collages via a network of dotted lines. The city of San Francisco is the originating point for the series, and the visitor can follow Singh's train of thought related to this subject by following the intricate and tangential maze of images, which spread throughout the gallery. In a sense, this project is almost a tactile answer to the visual sequence of ideas encountered on sites such as FFFFOUND!, while also drawing on the older practice of free association. The exhibition is up at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco until the end of November.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at
2:40 pm
With the recession in full swing, the upcoming year will undoubtedly be a difficult one for the arts. Many crucial organizations are feeling the heat, such as New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Earlier this year their budget was cut $2.6 million or 6% and now they face major cut backs again. A special legislative session will convene this week on November 18th to discuss cuts, which includes an additional $7 million to NYSCA's current budget. If this proposal goes through, almost 400 grantees in the October cycle and a similar number in the December cycle will receive almost nothing. Arts Action for NY have set up a letter writing campaign to the governor to stop this proposal from passing, see link below.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at
12:28 pm
This past Sunday the New York Times Magazine profiled Lewis Hyde, a writer and poet whose 1983 book The Gift described the value of art and literature in a market system as "the commerce of the creative spirit." Now a fellow Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Hyde is at work on a book that attempts to define how the market of cultural property should be regulated. Excerpts below, see link at the bottom for the full article.
In the late 1990s, Hyde began extending his lifelong project of examining "the public life of the imagination" into what had become newly topical territory: the "cultural commons." The advent of Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Gnutella sparked urgent debates over how to strike a balance between public and private claims to creative work. For more than a decade, the so-called Copy Left -- a diverse group of lawyers, activists, artists and intellectuals -- has argued that new digital technologies are responsible for an unprecedented wave of innovation and that excessive legal restrictions should not be placed on, say, music remixes, image mashups or "read-write" sites like Wikipedia, where users create their own content. The Copy Left, or the "free culture movement," as it is sometimes known, has articulated this position in part by drawing on the tradition of the medieval agricultural commons, the collective right of villagers, vassals and serfs -- "commoners" -- to make use of a plot of land. This analogy is also central to Hyde's book in progress, which looks closely at how the tradition of the commons was transformed once it was brought from Europe to America.
...
Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. "The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms," he writes, "is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every 'town should have ... a primitive forest ..., where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,' the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance 'exclusive right' with 'limited times.' It is a tradition worth recovering."
Rhizome staff writer Ed Halter posted a bootleg recording of Cory Arcangel's lecture/performance "Continual Partial Awareness" on Friday to his blog this morning. See above. For those so inclined, imeem also allows you to download it as a ringtone. We will post an entire video of the performance to Rhizome's Video and Vimeo pages soon.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
5:00 pm
Rhizome's Curator-at-Large and Staff Writer Marisa Olson recently curated the online segment of the exhibition "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding," which is currently on view in New York City at Parsons' Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. The exhibition, on a whole, looks at how democracy has become situated as a consumer brand in order to disseminate American values worldwide. The online portion of the show specifically examines subversive strategies emergent from network culture, and how these methods may produce and disseminate ideas that may work against the sway of branding. In light of the recent success of Barack Obama's campaign for presidency, largely due to Web-based grassroots organizing, the scope of "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding" seems to take on a whole new significance. Given this backdrop, I wanted to speak with Marisa about some of the fundamental questions asked by the exhibition. - Ceci Moss
Many of the projects in the online portion of "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding" are a direct response to the troublesome policies of the Bush Administration, whether it be the divisive rhetoric of "Us" vs. "Them" as seen in Steve Lambert's WhyTheyHate.US or war propaganda as in Joseph DeLappe's Dead-In-Iraq. Now that Obama has been elected president, do you think the tone of politically minded art will change? Working on this show, do you have any sense of what that change might be?
It's funny, a lot of people have been asking me this. One person asked me if there's no longer a need for activist art. Of course there is! I think there's a sense of relief and excitement about Obama's election, but I think things will only gain momentum. What's interesting is that activism doesn't always have to be about saying no. Sometimes it can be about saying yes -- speaking in the affirmative, either to amplify the awfulness of the status quo or to point your target in the right direction. That would be the torque behind the "power of positive thinking." If anything, I believe that Obama has sold people on the fantasy that he will listen to them -- "especially when we disagree," as he so often said in his campaign speeches. A project like this week's NY Times Special Edition (while in the works for several months prior to his election) speaks to this belief and in fact I believe that's why they decided to release the paper after the election, rather than before it, as they'd originally planned. But now that someone in power seems to be listening, activists have all the more reason to speak up and ask for what we want. Truth be told, while the nightmare of the last eight years are coming to an end, it will take a long time to implement the changes we need. And we need to keep asking for these changes. But yes, it will be interesting to see how people's creative and rhetorical strategies shift in this new climate.
Can you flesh-out the way in which you are using the word "branding" in the show?
Carin Kuoni first came up with the idea for the show and then asked if I'd like to curate an online component. I agreed because I thought it was important to address the branding of democracy, particularly during election cycles. I once made a video comparing presidential elections to the "Pepsi Challenge." They tend to feel like a non-choice: one's red, one's blue, but they both taste about the same, and they're both pretty bad for you. Their only difference is that they are branded differently. In prior elections, the concept of democracy had seemed more like a fantasy that one buys into, rather than a reality. For this reason, I particularly liked the first word in the show's title: "Ours." For me, it raises this question of the possibility of voters having ownership over the democratic process (of "having a purchase" on it), vs. the sensation that votes can be bought, or the constant state of slippage in which consumption and investment move from something you do to keep yourself healthy to something you're lured into doing in alignment with an ideological fantasy.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
2:28 pm
Artist's Statement: A video demonstration of a classic Experimental Philosophy experiment on "The Concept of Intentional Action" (AKA the "Knobe Effect"). Comedian Eugene Mirman narrates.
Statement: Since ancient times cartography has been used to describe the world as a geometric ensemble of measurable points, lines, areas and data-labels on a plane. While the world slowly fades away in an increasingly multiplication of self-representations, the map making process - missing its real reference - becomes nothing more than an empty-meaning abstract practice: so, what do all those maps stand now for?
In order to disclose this contradiction - or just to give a paradoxical point of view about it - the imaginary art-group Les Liens Invisibles has explored the world along its self-referential techno-linguistic layers, moving through its hidden mechanisms and forcing the grammar of its public-released API code.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
10:30 am
Machine Project's Mark Allen discussed their massive undertaking in an interview Rhizome published last week, but in case you missed it, this Los Angeles interdisciplinary non-profit arts organization will be taking over LACMA tomorrow for a full 10 hours. With over 60 separate projects, the program is ridiculously elaborate, so I suggest you view the full schedule here. Let's see...the Center for Tactical Magic will exhibit their wand collection, Lewis Keller will do live remixes of LACMA's air conditioning system, Walter Kitundu and Robin Sukhadia will play tabla within Richard Serra's sculpture, one workshop will invite visitors to make replicas from the Classical sculpture collection using the museum's trash, while another will crochet birds to accompany Chris Burden's Urban Light....This is going to be awesome. I mean, a few weeks ago they were auditioning for the "ultimate black/speed/grind/doom metal guitarist" to perform hourly under a gothic arch viewable from LACMA for the project. Seriously -- so cool! I wanna go!
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
9:32 am
Transmission Arts non-profit free103point9 have announced a new distribution grant for New York State artists working in film, video, sound, new-media, and media-installation. The grant will assist artists in making their work available to public audiences, and applicants may request funding of up to $10,000. Deadline is December 31, 2008. For more information, click the link below.
By
Marisa Olson
on
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at
11:45 am
Given that you're reading this article on a blog (a blog that addresses technology, in fact!), you are quite likely familiar not only with the phrase "Web 2.0," but moreover the concept of beta versions. The latter are ideas or applications that are the result of extensive research and yet manage to live an active life despite being defined by their own self-admission of imperfection. The Centre Pour L'Image Contemporaine in Sant-Gervais Geneve has made "Beta" the theme of their 2008 Version Biennial. The show consistently surveys contemporary work in emergent media, but this year's exhibition and related public programs investigate the state of new media art from a perspective of transition. Their position is that the field's been around long enough to have established some standard operating procedures, but there is a question as to where it's headed. More than anything, their question is that of the state of the new media artist. Is she an inventor? Someone for whom the tools are secondary to or primary to their work? Or someone who places technology first or second in their creative practices? In the case of the Centre, their effort is even to expand what we might consider art, by looking at the artfulness with which media and tech skills are applied in different social scenarios. A series of workshops, screenings, performances, and public forums will augment the installed exhibition and seek to flesh-out preconceived notions about issues like real-time communication, disembodiment, virtuality, mobility, and reproducibility that once seemed inherent to new media and yet may now be in need of updating. Meanwhile, the Centre is presenting important works by Vaibhav Bhawsar, Bureau d'études, Coldcenter, John Klima, Golan Levin, Julie Morel, Esther Polak, Andrea Polli, Tania Ruiz, Mizuki Watanabe, and many others -- so you can take in the cutting edge while getting your critical discourse on. - Marisa Olson
Tomorrow evening join us at the New Museum at 8:30pm for a premiere of a new performance by artist Cory Arcangel titled "Continual Partial Awareness."
According to the artist: "This performance is going to be about 'Continuous Partial Awareness' -- a phrase that was first described to me as meaning 'you know, like, when you have three IM windows open, two e-mail in boxes dinging away, are texting five different people, and also have five tabs open on your browser, each with updated content.' It is about paying attention to everything all the time, but not really concentrating on anything. It is different from multitasking, because with multitasking, one actually is expected to concentrate on tasks at some point, even if in small doses. 'Continuous Partial Awareness' is the eroded degenerate modern version of multitasking. I still don't know how this performance will take shape, it might be a lecture, a music show, a broadcast, a chess game, etc., but what I do know is that the feeling of 'non-concentration' that has seeped into today's life through our flat-screen displays and Wi-Fi will be its starting point."
This event is part of Rhizome's ongoing New Silent Series at the New Museum.
By
Greg J. Smith
on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
2:45 pm
Image: Mitchell Whitelaw, 05.02_540_radial - Watching the Sky, 2008
Mitchell Whitelaw is an artist and writer with interests in digital ontology and generative systems. His work and theory are invested in a close reading of the networks and tools we engage on a daily basis and questioning modes of representation. Whitelaw is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra and he also authors (the teeming void), a blog on generative and data aesthetics. In this interview conducted by Greg J. Smith, Whitelaw discusses his recent work and contextualizes several of his writing projects.
Greg J. Smith: A central focus in your recent writing is the notion of transmateriality. Instead of reading information and mediated experience as virtual or "disembodied" this investigation focuses on the tangible, idiosyncratic nature of the digital. Can you identify and contextualize a few new media projects that explicitly explore or invoke the materiality of data?
Mitchell Whitelaw: There's been a huge wave of them. Self.detach, by Tim Horntrich and Jens Wunderling "decomposes" Flickr self-portraits into grains of colored sand, literally materializing the pixels; Caleb Larsen's Monument (If it Bleeds it Leads) takes a similar approach, analyzing news feeds for reports of war casualties and presenting each death as a tiny yellow BB, dropped into a hopper. So, tangible data is one aspect of this idea, but it also relates to the current explosion of hardware tinkering and custom devices, which create local, specific, and material instances of digital systems. A beautiful example of this is H C Gilje's wind-up birds, a group of mechanical woodpeckers - microcontroller-driven solenoids that tap on hand-made wooden slit drums - installed in a forest also inhabited by real woodpeckers. Materializing digital systems also embeds them more deeply in their surrounding environment, of course. A final example fascinates me because it's a kind of non-digital transmateriality: Thomas Traxler's The Idea of a Tree is a solar-powered mechanical system that turns a spindle to fabricate objects from epoxy and string. Variations in solar energy change the speed of the spindle, which changes the amount of dye on the string, so that the resulting object manifests that variation.
Image: Thomas Traxler, The Idea of a Tree (machine & generated artefacts), 2008
The Idea of a Tree is quite compelling. How would you read the output from that device? Is it explicitly about the indeterminacy of the output? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the relationship that apparatus has with the "natural processes" it measures and emulates.
As I understand it, the artifacts can be read as records of solar energy over the span of a day. The length of the object depends on the total amount of sunlight (more sunlight, more length); the bands of color reveal variations in energy throughout the day. The slower the string moves through the dye, the more the dye penetrates, giving a darker color - this mechanism is ingenious. So, I don't think it's about indeterminacy. I also don't think it's particularly about natural processes, despite the analogy of the title. I would distinguish "material" from "natural"; this is a material system that manifests structures in its specific, local environment. There's nothing inherently "natural" about the data it gathers: those variations in solar energy could relate to shadows from nearby buildings, or atmospheric pollution, as much as clouds and seasons. In a way, I think the tree analogy works best in reverse, here; tree as (local, material) machine seems more interesting than machine as tree-like.
Would you frame your photo-based Watching the Sky project in the same way? That is, sky as (local material) machine?
Yes, exactly. Watching the Sky is a very simple work. Long series of time-lapse images, shot every three minutes, are compressed or "revisualised" to reveal patterns within and between days and weeks (perhaps eventually years). It's essentially a digital slit-scan process, where narrow slices of each image are extracted and recompiled. As Golan Levin has shown this is a well-worn technique; this work tries to recast it as a form of data visualization - as well as slowing it down. Digital images are an interesting data source because they are so obviously indiscriminate; they show whatever is in the field of view, regardless of what is ostensibly being "measured" (the Google Street View controversy illustrates this nicely). So, like the solar energy in Thomas Traxler's work, the image can cut across domains and scales like a kind of core sample; and yes, in this work the image is a trace of a changing material field. Initially the work was focused on the sky as a visual data source; but the initial sketches used images scraped from a webcam that included trees, power lines and other foreground clutter. To my surprise, some of the most interesting structures emerged from this extraneous stuff; from trees shifting in the breeze, shadows moving, and so on. I later realized these were all traces of the material field's interactions with itself; when the images show the foliage shifting as the wind changes, the landscape is acting as both object and instrument, it's a kind of self-revelation. The images also show human or social patterns; like cars being parked on the grass, outside my office window. I like the idea of all these scales, from the distant clouds to the local shadows, and domains from the weather to the parking, being compressed into a single field, but still readable.
Image: Mitchell Whitelaw, Stacked Histogram - The Visible Archive, 2008
You are currently working on The Visible Archive, a project to visualize the holdings of the National Archives of Australia. Could you briefly describe the scope of this project and how this "data practice" extends out of or informs your broader research?
The project is funded by the National Archives, simply exploring interactive visualizations of their collection. In many ways it's a fairly straight-ahead data visualization project, based on the premise that visualization is a useful way to reveal structure in large datasets, and can give a sense of context or orientation to users navigating that data. I'm working with two main datasets; one describes the entire collection in around 35,000 groups, or series; the other is a single series with some 20,000 individual items. The exciting part here is what that data is: primary materials from the history of modern Australia. The very first visualization I made of the series data was a simple histogram, counting how many series commenced in a given year. The histogram had three big spikes: at 1901, 1914 and 1939. So three big historical moments - Federation and the two Wars - popped out of the visualization as a simple statistical property of the data. I'm most interested in revealing these kind of emergent structures within the datasets.
My interests in "data practice" started out as critical and theoretical; I've been observing the rise of a kind of data aesthetics in sound, music and the media arts over the past decade, and it's a fascinating moment, as culture and practice come to grips with a material that is so central to contemporary society. "Art Against Information", a paper on data art published earlier this year, develops a critical response. My own experiments in sonification and visualization are partly ways for me to test out theoretical hunches, but largely (and increasingly) rewarding in themselves. You can view data as a kind of generative strategy for the arts in one sense - it's just another way of making stuff - but also, and this interests me a lot, it's broader than art; it's about epistemology, ways of understanding the world, whatever that is. It can be art if it wants to, but frankly I'm more interested in what else it can do.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
2:07 pm
Taking the train to class this morning, I had a somewhat curious encounter. A man standing next to me held up a NY Times paper with the headline IRAQ WAR ENDS. Having read the NY Times that morning, I knew that this was not the day's headlines, and over the course of the entire ride, I kept quizzically peeking over at his paper in an effort to figure it out. He held the paper up in such a performative way, that I sensed something was askew. As I walked from the subway, I checked my phone and read, in a mass email from artist Joseph DeLappe, that a group of artists had created a spoof version of today's times announcing an end to the Iraq War, and distributed it around New York City. Brilliant. And so perfectly serendipitous. You can view a website for the project here.
UPDATE: A number of artists organized the prank, including Rhizome-commissioned artist Steve Lambert, The Yes Men, the Anti-Advertising Agency, CODEPINK, United for Peace and Justice, Not An Alternative, May First/People Link, Improv Everywhere, Evil Twin, and Cultures of Resistance.
By
Rhizome
on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
11:29 am
Our Community Campaign is off to a head start and we would like to take a moment to thank our generous supporters thus far. We will be listing our supporters on this page continually throughout the campaign. Your contributions keep all of our commissioning, preservation, criticism and participatory programs running -- so thank you!
By
Ceci Moss
on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
8:36 am
Troika, whose shimmering flip-dot sculpture Cloud at the Heathrow Terminal 5 made them the darlings of a wide swath of art, design and architecture blogs earlier this year, will premiere a new commission this week during London's festival for the moving image onedotzero. Asked by the organizers to create a work that dually represents the festival's title and the theme "citystates", this London-based art and design studio produced a modern "digital zoetrope." Looks pretty dazzling from the mock-up above.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at
3:25 pm
Image: The Golden Notebook (Screengrab)
In his 1970 book S/Z , Roland Barthes attempted to interject a new form of textual interpretation which foregrounds the experience of the reader. His description of the topos of meaning in which a text passes is beautifully prophetic to the sensation of reading within the networked environment, stating, "The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network -- all the movements and inflections of a vast "dissolve," which permits both the overlapping and loss of messages." Barthes' sentiments echo through the genre of electronic literature, emergent in the 1990s, and carry on in the Institute for the Future of the Book's latest project, The Golden Notebook, which went live yesterday. This 1962 novel by Doris Lessing candidly chronicles the life of Anna Wulf, and is narrated through the vantage of several separate notebooks. Uploaded on a site similar to Google Books, the Institute invited seven notable female authors to read the book and carry on conversations in a forum adjacent to the text. While group discussion online is old news, the possibility of uploading and reading entire books online is still a recent development, and it carries with it a number of crucial debates. By adapting the model of a reading group, one that parallels the text itself, it follows precisely with the Institute's mission to investigate the "ecology of readers, authors and texts" surrounding the networked book. One other dimension to the project, which is strangely absent from the press release and the site's Q&A section, is the decision to invite a group of female writers to collectively read a highly regarded feminist novel. Clearly, this will influence the ensuing conversation, and, most likely, make it a more interesting read overall.
