“Séance” is a mechanical sound installation that reflects routine human actions such as working, sleeping, eating and walking that people talk about in online conversations such as in Twitter, filtered to be limited to a specific time zone. Throughout the gallery’s floor, ceiling and walls, there are pieces of paper with these basic actions written on them. Every time the corresponding word on the paper is tweeted, the motors hit the structure they are fixed to. The frequency of a given word changes based on the time of day and also which day of the week it is, reflecting the cycle of action or inaction.

Dumbo Arts Center’s video_dumbo is an annual festival for international video art curated by Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy. This year video_dumbo will be held on September 23-25th as part of the 2011 Dumbo Arts Festival.

I will be participating among eight installations under the exhibition title Quasi Cinema, featuring works that re-appropriate film technology as well as cinematic metaphors. Exhibition artists: Leslie Thornton, Aram Bartholl, Ernesto Klar, Ali Miharbi, Naho Taruishi, Andy Graydon, Cristobal Mendoza + Annica Cuppetelli and Ken Jacobs.

http://www.videodumbo.org/11-video-installations.html

Séance 9/9/2011 – 10/8/2011

Solo exhibition at Interstate Projects; Séance is also the name of my recent mechanical sound installation that reflects basic human actions such as working, sleeping, eating and walking through live Twitter feeds.

http://www.interstateprojects.com/?p=182

I will be participating with an updated version of Movie Mirrors.

July 19 to August 21, 2011 :: FIESP Cultural Center – Ruth Cardoso, Avenida Paulista 1313, São Paulo, Brazil.

Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio; Ali Miharbi; Andreas muk Haider; Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza; Ben Jack; Christoph Haag, Martin Rumori, Franziska Windisch & Ludwig Zeller; Coletivo COLETORES: Toni William, Flávio Camargo, Daniela Cordeiro & Karina Marques; Daniela Arrais & Luiza Voll; Eduardo Omine; Elie Zananiri, Hugues Bruyère & Mathieu Léger; Eric Siu (Support: Yoshihiro Watanabe, Hiroaki Ohno, Hideki Takeoka & Benjamin Xiao); Esther Hunziker; Hye Yeon Nam; Joachim Smetschka; Joon Y. Moon; Julian Jaramillo Arango; Julian Palacz; Juliana Mori; Karina Smigla-Bobinski; Kimchi & Chips; Lars Lundehave Hansen; Lauren McCarthy; Lawrence Malstaf; Matt Roberts; NaJa & deOstos (Project Team: Ricardo de Ostos, Nannette Jackowski, Manuel Jimenez, Thomas Sicouri); PirarucuDuo: Fernando Visockis & Thiago Parizi; Rafaël Rozendaal; Rejane Cantoni & Leonardo Crescenti; Ricardo Barreto, Maria Hsu & AMUDI; Ricardo Iglesias García; Ryoichi Kurokawa; Soraya Braz & Fábio FON; Tamás Waliczky; Tim Coe; Yoshi Akai; Yujiro Kabutoya & Kazushi Mukaiyama

Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica / Electronic Language international Festival
http://filefestival.org

With some delay, here’s a quick documentation of the first working prototype for a mechanical sound installation that I have been working on. It reflects the use of basic human actions such as work, sleep, eat, walk, etc. that people talk about on Twitter, filtered to be limited to a specific time zone. In this version 10 words are linked to a solenoid each of which is tied to the wall (to be extended to ceiling, floor or anything suitable in the space that can create a noise) and hit it every time it is mentioned. Frequency of a given word changes based on the time of the day and the day of the week since the average human behavior in the city is expected to have certain patterns, such as “work” being mentioned less in a Saturday afternoon compared to a Monday morning; or “sleep” being mentioned more certain times of the day.

In Common Ground in a Liquid City, anarchist architect Matt Hern argued that the most successful cities have been the ones that managed to balance planned and organic development. Manuel De Landa wrote in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History that the rise of Europe highly relied on a mixture of Central Place hierarchies such as Paris, Prague, Milan and networked Gateway cities like Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London. Philip Galanter started his paper What is Complexism? Generative Art and the Cultures of  Science and the Humanities by first naming usual polarities such as absolute-relative, progress-circulation, fixed-random, hierarchy-collapse, authority-contention, author-text in order to contrast modern and postmodern culture and then proposed a synthesis of the two: “Complexism” that is associated with terms such as distributed, emergent, chaotic and connectionist.

This list for me is just a way of thinking aloud, by counting examples that aren’t necessarily binary oppositions nor dichotomies, but rather approaches, processes that can run simultaneously in opposite directions within an abstract machine, with the potential of creating a complex system with feedback.

A transformer designed to utilize slight, wasted energies such as:
the excess of pressure on an electric switch
the exhalation of tobacco smoke
the growth of a head of hair, of other body hair and of the nails
the fall of urine and excrement
movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, anger
laughter
dropping of tears
demonstrative gestures of hands, feet, nervous tics
forbidding glances
falling over with surprise
stretching, yawning, sneezing
ordinary spitting and of blood
vomiting
ejaculation
unruly hair, cowlicks
the sound of nose-blowing, snoring
fainting
whistling, singing
sighs, etc. [...]

Although not nearly as poetic, here’s an image from Human Generated Power for Mobile Electronics by Thad Starner & Joseph A. Paradiso:

Possible power recovery from body-centered sources. (Total power in parentheses)

A poetic writing from mid-20th century on the everyday and the infra-slim evoking current research on energy harvesting seems to be another case where a once-marginal artistic idea turns (not entirely, but still) into a necessity, similar to Oulipo and Twitter.

New Media Showcase & Reception at SVA MFA Computer Art Department
SVA MFA Computer Art Department – 133-141 West 21st Street
Showcase: Wed 2/9, 6-8pm, Room 101-C Lecture Hall
Reception: Wed 2/9, 8-10pm, 10th Floor

Join us at the School of Visual Arts MFA Computer Arts Department for an impressive lineup of 18 presentations by NMC member artists about their work. Following the presentations will be a reception with food and drink, and video screenings of work from members of the NMC in an informal, relaxed atmosphere! NMC Showcase Presentations by: Victoria Bradbury, Jon Cates, Rachel Clarke, Seth Cluett, Peter DiPietro, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Dave Gordon, B. Colby Jennings, Patrick Lichty, Justin Lincoln, Christina McPhee, Ali Miharbi, A. Bill Miller, Molly Morin, Leila Nadir, Simone Paterson, Jack Stenner, and Daniel Temkin.

Other NMC events occurring during the week of CAA:
http://www.newmediacaucus.org/wp/caa-2011-conference-nmc-events-and-activities

We’re camping near Ajaccio. Lovely weather. We eat well. I’ve got sunburnt. Fondest love.

We’re at the Hotel Alcazar. Getting a tan. Really nice! We’ve made loads of friends. Back on the 7th.

We’re sailing off L’Ile-Rousse. Getting ourselves a tan. Food admirable. I’ve gone and got sunburnt! Love etc.

Greetings from Hellenie. Sunning ourselves. Super! We’ve made heaps of friends. Many regards.

Visiting the Channel. Very restful. Lovely beaches. I’ve got sunburnt. Love.

Here we are in Frejus. Doing nothing all day except relax. Really nice. I go aquaplaning. Back as planned.

We’re camping next to Formentera. Weather good. Vast beach. My shoulders are roasted. Fond love to all boys and girls.

This sounds very much like a list of Twitter feeds to me. This is no surprise considering the connections and similarities between postcards, text-messaging and micro-blogging. Twitter’s 140-character limit is based on the 160-character limit in SMS. When trying to find an ideal length for modern short messages Friedhelm Hillebrand made the observation that most postcards have 150 characters or less. However the resemblance is not only in this limitation but also in the type of content.

According to the Twitter Facts & Figures compiled by Website Monitoring Blog earlier this year, the majority of Twitter messages are about the daily life: 27% of the content consists of private conversations, 30% is about user’s current status while current news and links to blog articles only sum up to a 16%. When it comes to the popularity of the content, we have a different picture. Based on the findings of Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon in their 2009 research What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? over 85% of trending topics on Twitter are headline news or persistent news. Although expressions of the daily life don’t individually reach the wide audience that sensation-biased mainstream news reach, the sum of everyday conversations outnumbers any other category. On one hand people no longer have to stick with the mainstream media, on the other hand we see that even the banal is commodified where each instance of a daily conversation has become just another number in the statistical data collected by web companies. Oulipo’s use of constraints to trigger new ideas and inspiration crossed its way with micro-blogging, thanks to a combination of technological limitations (originally the character limit in SMS) and people’s increasing time constraints with decreasing attention spans. It’s interesting to see how artificial constraints used by avant-garde writers turned into a reality in the way we live, followed by technology companies reinventing and popularizing practices based on those constraints.

A good commentary on this subject is Oliver Laric‘s Versions (2009). Laric created a video entirely made of found material from the Web to turn it into a narrative about versions, sampling, Internet memes and originality. Then two other versions of the same video are made, both as a reference to music singles as well as comments on the fact that the piece itself has no originality and can mutate to different variations. One of them features the artist Guthrie Lonergan as The Internet which also points to the merging of the individual and collective creativity.

Departing from these changes happening in cultural production, I attempt to group here different approaches to remake, hoping that this would also partially reflect the conditions that sparked artists’ interest in these similar yet distinct modes of (re)production.

Reenactment-based remakes:

In 1995, Pierre Huyghe created “Remake” in which the every scene of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is re-enacted by amateur French actors. The classic Hitchcock film was moved from the realm of the movie studio to the public in the form of a script that can be forever replayed. This project can be seen as a precursor of the idea of the common people becoming celebrities. At the same time it creates an alienation effect that makes the viewers focus on the way the production is made rather than being engaged with the story.

King (a portrait of Michael Jackson) was a multiple-screen video installation by Candice Breitz in which 16 fanatic fans of Jackson were given the opportunity to perform the entire Thriller album in a professional recording studio. Breitz recruited participants via advertisements on Michael Jackson online fan sites and in newspapers and magazines. Most of her work looks at the stereotypes and visual conventions in film and popular culture.

Phil Collins created a video triology called The World Won’t Listen (2005), featuring fans of the British band The Smiths performing karaoke versions of tracks from their 1987 compilation album “The World Won’t Listen”. Different cultures and ages create different versions of the available material. Similar to Breitz’s piece, a committed group of people sing and perform to their favorite lyrics while placing it to a global context.

Remakes based on crowdsourcing:

In addition to the classic way of hiring people, some artists started to use the Internet as a means for crowd-sourcing.

Paul Slocum‘s project You’re Not My Father (2007), commissioned by Turbulence, is another example of remake in contemporary art. Remakes of a scene from “Full House” featuring Candice Cameron and Dave Coulier with the help of actors and fans hired online. The new versions take place in a variety of places such as a photocopy depot, an actors studio, suburban homes, none matching the exact rhythm of the original dialog delivery. It is different from Huyghe’s remake in the sense that the actors are hired by using the Internet and several different variations are made. The piece also reflects on the new ways of production in the networked culture.

Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake by Perry Bard was a participatory video project shot by people around the world to interpret Vertov’s 1929 classic film Man With A Movie Camera. They sent the videos to the artist who used custom software to sequence and stream the video. As the same shot can be uploaded more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. Using a source where many cinematic techniques were experimented with for the first time, Bard attempts to take those further and looked into possibilities of creating narratives in a networked society.

Not only videos, but many kinds of other works are made by artists using crowdsourcing, one of them being Ten Thousand Cents (2007-2008) by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to get 10,000 workers (referred as “anonymous artists”, maybe to make the hierarchy that exists within this process less apparent – but this is a different issue) to draw small pieces of a $100 bill, eventually remaking the image of the bill. Similar to Bard’s project but preferring to focus on the digital and networked production rather than cinematic production, Ten Thousand Cents also questions the economic aspect of crowdsourcing and digital labor.

Readymade Dictionary of the Author by .-_-. refers to Roland Barthes‘ essay “The Death of the Author” by taking a meta-level approach to remakes and attempts to create a free/open-source dictionary consisting of short video samples of people speaking single words. This is different than the other approaches in focusing on tool-creation rather than product-making, thus commenting directly on the idea of remix, remakes, originality and intellectual property.

Video collages to remake an existing work

In year 2007, (and later as a variation in 2008) Oliver Laric made 50 50 where he put together fifty home videos of people rapping along to 50 Cent songs to create a whole piece.  This can be described as a remake made of exiting remakes of the same subject or better a closed-loop mashup where the already existing variations, versions, remakes are sampled and used to reconstruct the same piece again. Such a complex process can only be possible with the excessive but accessible material available online as well as the new way of creative consumption of cultural material.

Although not being closed-loop, a different and relatively new form of mashups is a combination of remakes and sampling: An original work of which a variation is recreated entirely from samples used from other sources. One of the remarkable examples for this is Cory Arcangel‘s series Arnold Schoenberg, op. 11 I, II, III – Cute Kittens (2009), a remix which shows Arnold Schoenberg’s “Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11 I, II and III” played by cats on pianos, entirely made of found footage of cats on online videos.

Imitating a real system using remix:

This isn’t exactly a remake but more like a kind of representation that is closely tied to remakes and remixes. A well known example of this group is Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), a 24-hour single channel video consisting of thousands of fragments from movies where the clock in the scene shows the exact time at the moment. Being highly reliable to the vast amount of information available today, this approach takes images, videos or sounds and uses them for a different specific purpose, in a way to demonstrate what unlimited access to audio-visual information can do while also questioning autonomy of imagery.

I also have a personal interest in this type of production, but with a slight difference: Remix or remake created using intelligent software. This makes a further comment on the amount of information we have after the Internet: We also have increasing amount of computing power and machine intelligence which can even automate the process of remix. I incorporated this approach in Movie Mirrors (2009-2010) where a single film or a collection of trailers serve collectively as a mirror where the viewer can see his or her movement reconstructed from existing images.

The act of representing a real system by using collected samples from unrelated sources are similar to what Duchamp described as reciprocal readymade: “using a Rembrandt as an ironing-board”. Instead of taking an artwork and using as an everyday object, samples from cultural products are rearranged to serve a simple everyday function such as that of a clock or a mirror. Another way to describe it would be: the act of recycling the cultural memory in order to represent the present.