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My Broken iPhone

joanne mcneil — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:30:57 -0500

Doug Aitken (Victoria Miro) at Art Basel Miami (via)

The day I moved to Brooklyn was the day my iPhone screen first shattered. I struggled to get my keys out of my purse while a group of students were waiting at the door for a friend to buzz them in. Unlocking the door in a confused jetlagged state, I held it open for each of them while juggling several bags with the other hand. After the last student entered the building, I stopped the door with my foot while attempting to redistribute the weight of my belongings. My iPhone slid out of my back pocket and on to the concrete.

The resulting spiderweb of a crack had no impact on the iPhone's haptic sensitivity. It looked ruined but worked just as well. Eventually, I got used to reading without much eye strain. There were even some benefits. Everyone knew which phone was mine at dinner parties with iPhones strewn on various counters and end tables. I never worried about dropping it again as the screen wasn’t going to get any worse. And I didn’t worry much about it getting stolen, either.

My broken iPhone brought about many random conversations with strangers. In queues for restaurant bathrooms, on public transportation and park benches, I was asked again and again what happened, and why didn’t I just take care of it?

"What are you doing?" a man sitting next to me on the train once asked with a look of concern. "You are going to hurt yourself!" Though I told him it still worked, he insisted, "You are going to cut yourself! What? Are you crazy?" I let him touch the screen to see the surface was smooth even over the crack. Another time, another train ride, someone glanced at my phone and looked at me, with a pitying expression, "You know, you can get that fixed. It doesn't cost much. Maybe $25. Really, it's not that much money."

People of all demographics would comment on my iPhone’s cracked screen —children, the elderly, anyone really—but it typically came from men around my age. But, this wasn’t an excuse to proposition me. There was always a whiff of rebuke. These strangers were chiding me for acting irresponsibly with Apple gadgetry.

Takeshi Murata, Golden Banana, (2011)

There are objects that are timeless in design. You can’t improve much upon simple tools like a spoon or a compass. Brands can do this too—Dieter Rams designs for Braun fit in almost any decade and it is hard to imagine much by Muji looking dated. But a digital device is not an alarm clock or a shelving unit. It will grow obsolete very quickly. Which makes the atemporal look of electronics by Apple more uncanny, more rarefied. The personal computer as Holly Golightly's little black dress.

The most committed Apple consumers hesitate to throw away their old products. The durable hardware and reliable operating system means old computers can be used for storage or passed on to less demanding users—parents, grandparents, schools, or nonprofits. Unlike a boxy DVD player from ten years ago, a decade-old Apple computer doesn't look out of place today.

The iPhone in particular seems born out of years of science fiction fantasies of handheld gadgets with boundless capabilities. It appears to have arrived not from China, but from just a few years ahead of time. A little piece of the future we were lucky enough to receive early.

A Western consumer’s incapacity to begin to imagine the perilous conditions that went into the creation of the phone mostly spares him more than minor cognitive dissonance regarding Foxconn. Sometimes, but very rarely, there are spectral traces—like test photos of the factory a worker forgot to delete. But fresh out of the box, it is hard to believe another human’s hands yet touched it.

There are two prevailing science fictional design aesthetics. One is a worn, rusty, lived-in-looking future. It is the junkyards in Philip K Dick novels and the dust collecting on Star Wars flight control interfaces. Then, there’s the world of tomorrow imagined as a sterile place of white and translucent surfaces. This was typically an earlier vision, that of post-Great Depression and post-war anxiety, although you can trace this aesthetic to Luna Park or Villa Savoye. Future worlds so clean that if you so much as sneeze in them, you risk a teletransporting vehicle beaming you back to a less civilized era. This is the aesthetic that Apple mimics and improves upon.

Apple even held their media event last month to launch iBooks 2 at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, a building that seems like a cousin to the white iPhone. It will always feel like the cleaner world of tomorrow in this iconic white structure.

Apple gadgets only look out of place in rooms rustic or untidy. No longer are the apartments of young people decorated in thrifted, mismatching things. Instead, you’ll find uncluttered homages to the Apple stores themselves in teak wood and neutral color solid furnishings. With Target and Muji providing cost-saving minimalism, if you can afford Apple products, you can afford to live in an Apple-like space.

A willingness to try Apple products at all suggests appreciation for, if not commitment to its value of simplicity over ornamentation. Design asceticism was a way of life for the company’s founder, a vegetarian and Buddhist known for wearing the same outfit everyday, Steve Jobs. In 1982, Diana Walker for Time magazine took a photo of Jobs sitting on the floor of his living room—empty apart from a record player, records, and lamp. “This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had,” he later commented. Photographs of the interior of what was his home until his death show some basic tables and chairs—perhaps a spousal compromise.

The cleanliness of Apple design inspires more than a sense of guilt while snacking on something crumbly while using its products. Like an escape hatch from a world of reality television and rehabilitation center celebrities, most notable about Apple's brand identity is what is absent—vulgarity. Even the advertisements seem refined—simple product demos on white backgrounds.

To return the favor, some Apple consumers practice a kind of Western interpretation of Shintoism, valuing and caring for the products as if they were living creatures. They respect the objects — their painstaking craftsmanship, and the promise of a better, less dirty, less vapid world —by keeping them in just-unboxed condition.

This is probably why so many strangers in the city found my broken iPhone offensive. Refusing to repair it in a timely manner appears to be a rejection of the tomorrowland that Jobs and Ive worked so hard deliver to us.

I dropped my iPhone a second time, several months after the first blow and the crack deepened. I could no longer slide the unlock button. Now it’s repaired, and looks like the future again.

Rhizome Presents Renowned Digital Artist Rafael Rozendaal in web-based VIP Art Fair

Rhizome — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:57:00 -0500

Rhizome is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by outstanding artist Rafaël Rozendaal, who is known for his trailblazing explorations of the web browser, and for his forward-thinking contributions to the curation and sale of digital art.

Rhizome will present eight recent works by Rozendaal at the VIP Art Fair, all unique websites, each one an animation representative of the artist’s exploration of the browser as a limitless pictorial space. Here, in the ‘white walls’ of the online VIP Art Fair, each work is represented as a screenshot: a single frame that also includes the browser window that demonstrates how these works exist natively online. Colorful, minimal and redolent with feeling, the exhibited works range from figurative, such as Hot Doom. com’s depiction of a volcanic explosion, to abstract, as seen in From The Dark Past. com’s rendering of a scorched emotional terrain. Rozendaal’s formal aesthetic—his tendency to render commodities, like popcorn, or familiar scenes, like sunsets--recalls Pop art’s interest in the mass market and kitsch. Yet, in these works, each image has been pared down, stripped of idiosyncrasies related to place or time, and transported into a visual language of computer graphics and figuration--a language the artist suggests is more ‘universal’ today.

Rozendaal is noted not only for his own digital work, but for his inventive, free-form curatorial project BYOBthat has been staged around the world, and his contract that outlines how a browser-based work can be sold. This contract applies to all works for purchase at VIP Art Fair, and is available online here. As an organization dedicated to advocacy of digital art, and education around its history, preservation, and exhibition, Rhizome is proud to share Rozendaal’s contract within the VIP Art Fair as an example of an artist’s bold move towards defining best practices around the sale of digital art. Proceeds from the sale of Rozendaal’s donated works will be split between the artist and Rhizome.

The Art of Fieldwork

Rachel Wetzler — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:35:28 -0500

Simon Fujiwara, The Museum of Incest: A Guided Tour, 2009 (performance), courtesy of Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt

In 2008, the New York-based artist Ellie Ga joined the crew of the Tara, a sailboat drifting in the Arctic Ocean as part of a scientific expedition, occupying the incongruous position of the ship’s “artist-in-residence” among a team of scientific researchers. The role of “artist in residence” on a scientific expedition is a malleable one, without clearly defined parameters, thus Ga decided that her project would be to become the ship’s archivist, attempting to capture the various facets of life aboard the Tara: the ways in which the crew organized the world around them without conventional landmarks; how they entertained themselves; the sense of uncertainty that results from following the whims of weather patterns, never quite knowing where they would move next; as well as her own personal associations and insights about the expedition and their surroundings, unburdened by the demands of scientific fact or reportage.

In the resulting body of work, which has taken various forms, including lectures, performances, slideshows, and videos, her personal narratives and memories often occupy a central role. In the performance Reading the Deck of Tara at the Lower East Side gallery Bureau in 2011, visitors were given one-on-one readings with the artist herself, in which she used a custom deck of cards inspired by those used in fortunetelling to relay aspects of her life aboard Tara. Each visitor’s particular cards determined the form and content of the narrative, with each reading—and thus each version of the story she’d tell—being particular to that visitor, the performance’s element of chance echoing the movement of a ship adrift.

Ellie Ga, Reading the Deck of Tara installation (2011)

Borrowing methods from various disciplines, from sociology to fiction writing, Ga is one of a number of younger contemporary artists whose work is tied to a kind of artistic fieldwork, investigating aspects of their lives and interests by merging the apparent objectivity of documentary forms and anthropological research with a plainly subjective, flexible approach, drawing on multiple methodologies and discourses. While the “archival impulse” in contemporary art is hardly a new phenomenon, and research-oriented practices have arguably become the norm rather than the exception, what seems to differentiate work like Ga’s from those that fall under the broad, often contested banner of “relational,” “dialogical,” or “socially-engaged art,” is that the endgame here isn’t to offer a historiographic corrective or engage an outside community; rather, the role of artist is treated as license to borrow freely, to temporarily adopt and explore different modes of working, living, or thinking.

Like Ga, New York-based Swedish artist Sara Jordenö’s projects also often take the form of atypical archives, presenting the results of her research in the form of films, installations, animations, drawings, and text. Heavily informed by sociology, she has referred to her work as “performative investigations,” highlighting the tensions implicit in artistic research and the shifting roles she plays in the process of creating it. The Persona Project (2000-2010) is a work in seven parts revolving around Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, the artist’s favorite film. Created over the course of a decade, the resulting archive examines what Jordenö describes as the film’s “peripheral” voices: those impacting the film’s creation, circulation, and reception but rarely, if ever, considered, ranging from translators and voice-over actors to the woman who lives in the house where Persona was filmed. Ultimately the archive Jordenö creates with the Persona Project is an idiosyncratic one, less a portrait of Bergman’s Persona—its ostensible subject—than a reflection of the artist’s own concerns mediated through a form of near-obsessive research.

Sara Jordenö , film still from "The Set House (Hedvig)", (2010), from the Persona Project

Sara Jordenö, Installation view of "The Diamond People--Instructions for a film", (2010) at the Bildmuseet, Umeå

Similarly, her project Diamond People—Instructions for a film (2010) examines issues of labor and globalization through an investigation into the synthetic diamond industry in Sweden, South Africa, and China. However, the project goes beyond merely charting the relationship between these geographically distant and yet economically intertwined sites. Combining more typically “documentary” media like photography and video with drawing, poetry, and animation, the project equally reflects Jordenö’s concern with the implications of her anthropological approach and her own shifting relationship to the subjects of her inquiry: one of the places she considers is her hometown, the Swedish industrial town of Robertsfors, and the synthetic diamond factory around which life in the community revolves was her first employer, working in the payroll office during summers as a teenager. The subtitle, “Instructions for a film,” is itself enigmatic, hinting at something in need of assembly, as in industrial manufacturing, but also suggesting a work-in-progress, or perhaps even a coy invitation to the viewer to take up the task of attempting to resolve the project’s inherent complexities and contradictions.

Though his projects might appear, at first glance, to have little in common with Jordenö’s, the work of Berlin-based British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara is similarly concerned with adopting multiple roles to probe aspects of his own personal history, casting himself variously as anthropologist, architect, novelist, and raconteur. In the project The Museum of Incest, Fujiwara created a proposal for a museum at the “Cradle of Mankind” in Africa, where many of the oldest hominid fossils have been discovered. The premise for Fujiwara’s museum is that the origins of man are rooted in incest, envisioning an alternative natural history museum in which we are all products of society’s greatest taboo. Drawing on the conventions of academic lectures and archaeological displays, the absurd proposal includes an exploration of the architectural complex that would house the museum, composed of parts of existing buildings designed by Fujiwara’s architect father.

Simon Fujiwara, Welcome to the Hotel Munber, 2010, installation at Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, courtesy Neue Alte Brücke

Likewise, for the multi-layered project “Welcome to The Hotel Munber,” the artist took inspiration from a hotel owned and operated by his parents in Franco’s Spain during the 1970s, reconstructing the hotel bar based on descriptions and photographs, and attempting to write an erotic novel set in it, casting his father as the gay protagonist. When presenting the work as a lecture, Fujiwara similarly adopts a pseudo-academic mode, combining extracts from his fictionalized narrative of his parents’ life in Spain with their photographs, memorabilia from the hotel, and newspaper clippings, blurring the boundaries between the factual and fictional. That a dramatized version of “Welcome to the Hotel Mumber” formed the second act of Fujiwara’s recent Performa commission “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” only serves to further challenge our ability to distinguish between the elements Fujiwara has invented wholesale and those that are accurate recollections of events

When asked, in a 2009 interview, about the ways in which he adopts various identities in creating his works, borrowing from their tropes and methodologies, but never fully conforming to their professional standards, Fujiwara responded:

Who says I’m not a writer or an architect or anything? Who has the authority to decide these things? […] Honestly, I am a fraud, I’m an outsider in all these fields, but this gives me the liberty to work subjectively. Truth and accuracy are not my concerns. If an academic would work with fiction in this way, it would be dishonest, wrong even, whereas you’d be a fool to trust an artist in the first place.

Fujiwara’s quote might arguably best sum up this tendency: if art can be anything, then the artist can also be anyone. Though their work is strikingly different in process and final form, Ga, Jordenö, and Fujiwara, to consider only a few of the artists working in this vein, explore the possibilities offered by different disciplines, choosing to be as rigorous—or as lax—as they see fit. Yet, rather than resulting in watered-down versions of social science, in which the methods of a more supposedly “serious” field are employed to confer a veneer of relevance or gravity on an artistic project, the work of these artists is enlivened by the marrying of the subjective and idiosyncratic with the academic and research-intensive.

For a younger generation of artists, for whom the use of technology is natural and the Internet an inextricable part of information gathering, the ability to adopt these various strategies and roles is greatly enhanced by the accessibility of information: in an Internet age, the barriers to research begin to collapse. While these projects are typically presented in a physical format—as an installation, a book, a film, a performance, and so on—what is striking is that the form itself is flexible; each of the artists discussed here has presented the results of their research in multiple different ways, allowing each project to take on several different incarnations. This, too, arguably reflects a new attitude towards a research-based practice, and the influence of the digital world: rather than conceiving of their work as a physical entity, with a particular, fixed form, it is instead versatile and open-ended.

Artist Profile: Rick Silva

Zoë Salditch — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:06:06 -0500

Rick Silva's La Région Decentralized is featured this month on The Download.

Still from La Région Decentralized, image courtesy of the artist

Nature and land are prominent subjects in your work. Could you speak a bit about your interest in nature? Do you spend a lot of time outdoors?

Working with nature and land feels natural to me. Nature and land are part of a larger fascination I have with perception, light, and time. I do spend a lot of time outdoors, my new project/blog En plein air http://enpleinair.org is all about that actually. For the project I’m taking my laptop outside and seeing what I can create while reacting to the immediate landscape and elements.

For your piece in The Download, La Région Decentralized, you explore and remix iconography of Michael Snow's 1971 experimental film La Région Centrale in a endless, self-playing video game. What about Snow's film fascinates you?

I’m interested in Snow’s use of a rotating camera/horizon. Spinning terrains are a reoccurring theme in my recent videos. Texts about La Région Centrale suggest that the camera/horizon movement in Snow’s film creates a cosmic perspective of space at the human scale, and I agree with this reading. My video game version adds an endless random time component to this idea as well.

Is La Région Decentralized your first time working with video-games as a medium?

In 2010 I used video game engines to generate scenes and imagery for video projects. I’ve used 3D spaces like Google Earth for projects since 2005 with my Satellite Jockey performances, but this is the first time that I’m releasing a game as an application. There is something very interesting in the stretching and randomizing of time that video game engines can do so easily that would be much more difficult using traditional video methods.

I sense an underlying battle between nature and technology in much of your work. In Antlers Wifi, landscapes are haunted by glitchy geometries and Massif depicts a mountain possessed by a vortex. Do you think that technology is inherently at odds with the natural world?

I see technology as nature, as Jean-Luc Nancy describes; It is not a question of "nature." "Nature," as it is most often understood, is an abstraction, as is the idea of man standing before it. What is real is the earth, the sea, the sky, the sand, one's feet on the ground, and one's breath, the smell of grass and of coal, the crackling of electricity, the swarming of pixels...

Age: 34

 Location: Calgary, Canada

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

MacPaint as a kid, mostly cameras and DJ mixers in my teens, somewhere around 20 I bought my first PC so I could make electronic music.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

Over the past 15 or so years I’ve used countless configurations of computers, softwares and cameras. Almost always it’s commercial software like Photoshop and Cinema 4D that I use and misuse. And for the last 5 years or so running mostly on Macs. Cameras are usually a light and cheap Canon pocket camera, or a nicer borrowed Sony HD camera.

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I studied Film at the University of Colorado and received my BFA there in 2001, right after that I did a couple years at The European Graduate School, and then went back to the University of Colorado, this time in the Art Department, and received my MFA in 2007.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

The sun. Yes!

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I think I’m going to start DJing again.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I’ve been teaching New Media art full time for the last 5 years, first at University of Georgia Athens, and now at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Stan Brakhage, he was at the University of Colorado while I was an undergrad there. I took a class with him my first year there, and at least one more class every year thereafter. And Mark Amerika, whowas/is also at the University of Colorado, I took one class with him my last year of undergrad, we began to collaborate on a few things after I graduated, and then I had a chance to work closely with him during graduate school.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Mark Amerika and I have worked on various projects throughout the years, most recently I curated and remixed works for his remixthebook project. I also work with Michelle Ellsworth for her stage performances and websites. I’ve collaborated on several net art projects with Marisa Olson and Jimpunk, and on live A/V projects with musician/artists like Adam Tindale and Michael Theodore. A few years back I was lucky to work on a project with Carolee Schneemann. Plus a whole host of other smaller collabs scattered around the web and on old hard drives.

Do you actively study art history?

Yes, projects like La Région Decentralized, and my 2011 remix of Phil Morton’s Colorful Colorado are kind of excuses for me to spend a long time with one work. In the Brakhage Criterion Collection DVD he has this quote on the menu before his The Garden of Earthly Delights film that says the work “is an homage (but also argument with) Hieronymous Bosh”. I feel like these remixes/versions I make are done in that same spirit.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Here and there, I’m mostly drawn to artist writings/theory, so I find myself returning year after year to the texts of Maya Deren, John Cage, and Brakhage.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

Maybe it should be more like music.

Artist Profile: Joe Winter

Ceci Moss — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:03:19 -0500

The Stars Below, 2011. Mixed media installation

One thing I like about your work is the fact that you seem to operate like a hacker, taking things apart, finding new ways to misuse technology. But throughout your approach appears to be deliberately poetic, wherein you bring out these singular moments of beauty. For example, when you first started working on your scanner films during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, you mentioned that you began by simply placing a scanner outside of your cabin at night. The footage became a kind of accidental biological study, as the scanner intrigued light-seeking moths and other bugs, resulting in a time-lapsed nighttime sample of the various critters in the forest. I’m wondering if you can comment on how you “hack” technology in your work, and what you hope to achieve in that process. Are you guided by a kind of poetic hacking? How so?

In most of my works that involve a technological device (printer, scanner, photocopier, etc.) the technology itself is actually fairly un-altered. I tend to adjust the context in which the object is placed, or introduce variables or conditions that exist outside what I might call the area of expertise of the device. To use your example of the scanner: whether I'm scanning documents or moths in the woods, the scanner is still executing its function in exactly the same way; I've simply adjusted the expected input. I'm interested in looking at a given system and seeing what else it has the potential to speak about aside from its narrow band of acceptable usage, and how its native landscape (office, classroom, computer lab) might be related to other sorts of spaces, systems, or sets of ideas.

Since you brought up the topic of systems, I’m wondering if you could discuss that further. How do you approach the notion of “system” in your work? How do you reveal the presence of these systems, is it simply an act of mimesis or a disturbance or something else?

At different moments, I might describe my work in terms of systems, structures, frameworks, rules, and/or devices. I think there are a few things at play for me on that page of the thesaurus. The first is that I am always looking for various sorts of engines to move a project forward. Just like a physical device I take up may immediately describe a set of material and procedural constraints, I'll often involve a secondary framework--south polar exploration, the history of astronomy--that will both move a material system beyond itself and help to select supporting materials, an installation’s logic, etc. The second is developing a relationship between the system immediately at work and the secondary framework through a third, usually less visible system. To use my recent piece, The Stars Below, as an example: I first developed the material process. A series of solenoid valves release drips of water onto upright sticks of chalk, slowly eroding them. The secondary framework--an installation space suggesting something between an office and a classroom--arises from the materials involved (what is the domain of a stick of chalk? Where does this drip of water originate?) and provides a context in which to situate the erosive activity. Between these two things is a conception of Deep Time, of which slate and chalk are both products, which complicates the scales of time at play within institutional spaces. So, the work tries to establish a series of interrelations between a set of materials, landscapes, and ideas. In short, a system. Whether or not the audience is able to unravel all of that immediately is not as important to me as their awareness that there is a sense of order, an underlying logic at work.

I feel that in your work you abuse technology not only to see that technology anew in itself, but also so that we, as viewers interacting with that technology, can see the world through it in a different way. Towards this end, the viewer’s perception is always a key component for you, such as in Xerox Astronomy and the Nebulous Object-Image Archive (2008), which, using a strange configuration of a cubicle, a photocopier, and numerous mechanical lamps, produces Xerox copies that closely resemble telescopic images of outer space. How does perception factor into your practice, and how does this relate to your approach to technology?

I am often thinking about modes of viewership that provide alternatives, foils, stand-ins, or compliments to looking at objects and images in an exclusively art context. These modes could be scientific, commercial, historical, info-graphical. There are different frames that get erected around objects and images in different contexts, and I'm interested in things that slip between these frames. I got serious about researching and thinking about astronomy when I started to transition from making sound-based works to ones in which the visual is more central. Considering stars and planets requires extreme conceptions of space and scale (so in that way astronomy is super-sculptural, especially material) but for thousands of years our knowledge about them came exclusively through looking (more recently, of course, we have non-visual approaches, radio telescopes, etc.). So, the history of astronomy seems like a case study in the impulse to look deeper, further. People initially saw the sky as a planar surface because that's the way it more or less looks. Contemporary viewers project a current-day understanding of cosmic space onto that flatness, and so we perceive deep space. We are basically imagining something we can't actually see whenever we look up. The variable distance between direct sensory experience and all the non-sensory layers that go on top of that, that shape our interpretation of objects and events really interests me, especially when this received knowledge doesn't cleanly align with our own perceptions.

It seems your fascination with technology is deeply routed to your parallel interest in scientific inquiry – an aspect apparent in your recent exhibition “The Stars Below” at the Kitchen in New York City. The solo exhibition centered around the piece The Stars Below (2011) which replicated staple artifacts from the science classroom, complete with a dry erase board and fluorescent lighting. Like Xerox Astronomy and the Nebulous Object-Image Archive (2008), you seem to be turning the assumed certainty of scientific objectivity upside down, through the appropriation of its tools and ephemera. Can you say more about this thread within your practice?

As an undergraduate, I started off studying biology and geology, then switched to history before settling on a program of art and technology. Those first three disciplines continue to inform and inspire my work in the studio. At the first, and most superficial level, the perceived objectivity of scientific investigation would seem to provide a foil for the more fluid and subjective frameworks associated with art making and viewership. Looking a bit more carefully at the history and philosophy of science reveals that scientists with at least a touch of historical perspective readily admit the limitations of a given theoretical framework, and that current science represents a selection of the best available models. That is, a given theoretical model is only true insofar as it conforms to current observations and does the best job of predicting future outcomes. Scientific theories are constantly being revised, and get completely tossed out when and if something better comes along. So, the history of science is full of radical transformations in how we look at and think about the world. I find the possibility of these shifts, and the way science is ideologically equipped to incorporate (even encourage) them within its seemingly strict framework incredibly inspiring. I think my interest in this structural flexibility and these transformations in thinking probably explains why I tend to make my materials (technological and otherwise) operate as more than one thing at once, or operate within more than one intellectual framework at a time.

Some of your works, such as …a History of Light (2011) and Printershake (2007-2008), concentrate on light and the fabrication of color – how color comes to be under certain limitations, technological, scientific, historical, etc. I’m wondering if you can talk more about the use of color in your practice.

I have a hard time choosing colors. Lately, the objects I've been making are intended to appear as some kind of institutional (and therefore impersonal) artifacts, so seeming color preferences undermine that to me. I try to avoid thinking about individual colors in favor of color options in a given scenario. So of course, like many artists, I am drawn to pre-selected color palettes, and often the raw systems that produce colors in a given scenario. My working process is really material-centric, so I tend to deal with colors that are, or at least come close to feeling "native" to a given material. Another way of putting this is that I typically work with "found" color palettes, which lately could be the colors in a variety pack of construction paper, or the available colors of dry erase markers. So maybe yes, each set of materials I deal with has its own particular rainbow. The work I am starting to think about now has one foot in interior decorating, and I am starting to think about something we like to call taste as a kind of foil or anti-system to scientific methodology, so color choice is an issue I am going to be confronting head on pretty soon. I'm looking forward to collecting swatches.

Sound is another important component for you – and it seemed to be a major focus especially while you were in graduate school at UCSD. During that time, you built a mobile modified piano called the Myano (2003-2006) that you would perform around the city of San Diego, as well as the installation One ship encounters a series of notable exceptions (2006) which was an experiment in sculptural storytelling wherein you recounted a narrative detailing the passage of ships through polar waters in an elaborate, sonified acrylic sculpture. How do you approach sound in your work?

When I first started working with sound, I was drawn to its immediacy, its physical impact on the body, and its ability to invisibly fill and transform space. I am not working with sound so much lately, but I think it has been useful to me as a material that bridges a kind of structural, analytic framework (i.e., acoustics, western systems of tonality, etc.) with a visceral non-lingual experience. This aspect of sound is similar to how I have been thinking about astronomy and the sky more recently. A musical instrument (like the piano) is a perfect example of a system that presents itself with a specific set of behaviors, inputs and outputs that it expects, that others expect about it. I think there is not much of a leap between engaging (bending) the rules of a piano and the rules of a printer or photocopier. All of these things come pre-loaded with a prescribed set of activities and implications, which, for me, prime a terrain for investigation.

Age:

Location:

Long Island City, NY

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

I think I had a penchant for science and engineering style toys as a kid. Legos, Capsela, chemistry sets. I remember being in some kind of computer club in the 5^th or 6^th grade where I spent my lunchtime programming with LOGO. I made my first website (on AOL!) using HTML when I was in junior high.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

I don’t have a standard set of tools that I am always using. I like to be able to do everything myself, and this has lead me to try to acquire new skills as I need them, which typically involves consulting people who know more than me, tutorials online, and a lot of trial and error in the studio. In one of my first sound performances, I wired a bunch of telephones and mini-speakers together in such a way that smoke came out of the headphone jack of my laptop. No one believed me, but I had the scorch mark to prove it. This led me to learn something about resistance, which set me on the path of learning just a little bit about electronics. I took two computer-programming classes in college, which have enabled me to muddle through well enough with whatever new languages and programming interfaces have appeared in the intervening years. A lot of the sculptural fabrication-related skills I acquired in grad school under the guidance of a truly excellent facilities/shop manager, but I am always using new materials and trying to figure out how to work with them as I develop new work.

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I received my Bachelor’s degree at Brown University in New Media Studies and my MFA in Visual Art from University of California, San Diego.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I use a lot of materials in my work, and they tend to be fairly integrated. Personally, I don’t really respect any division between those that might be considered traditional and those that are more clearly technological.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I’ve curated a few small exhibitions and have done some writing in relation to them. Thinking and writing about other artists’ work is sometimes a productive way to deal with ideas that interest me that aren’t necessarily directly applicable to what I happen to be making in the studio at a given moment.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I’ve been teaching undergraduates for the last five years. When I first moved to New York, I worked in an office full time for about three months, and since then have worked on-and-off part time in a similar setting. It’s probably obvious that my experience in various institutional environments has had a heavy influence on my work of the last five years.

Who are your key artistic influences?

I am drawn to radical investigations of form, deep sensitivity to material, and compulsively pitched humor. I had formative experiences as a student with the work of OULIPO writers like Raymond Queneau and George Perec and composers like John Cage and Alvin Lucier. Some films that inspire me include Peter Greenaway’s The Falls and Vertical Features Remake, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, and Charles Atlas’ Hail the New Puritan. Sculptors I can get behind include Mark Manders, Cosima Von Bonin, Ester Partegas, and Charles Ray.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

A few years ago, I collaborated with Zerek Kempf on an artist book published by Onestar Press. My partner--Adam Shecter—and I started a project called 2-UP in 2010. As a collective of artists and writers, 2-UP produces a series of double-sided posters, each of which is a collaboration between two members of the collective. The project is completely funded by dues from its members, enabling us to give away the posters for free at events around the city. The project is also supported by a group of subscribers who receive the posters by mail. We’re just starting our second series of posters in January 2012.

Do you actively study art history?

You are much more likely to find me reading other kinds of history: intellectual history, cultural history, history of science and technology, or just plain history. I read art history more selectively, based on recommendation or relation to a particular project I am thinking about, but it’s not a section of the library or bookstore I find myself casually browsing.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

There are certain authors in this vein that I keep floating around (Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Manuel DeLanda) and return to every once in a while, but criticism/theory/philosophy is not necessarily a place to which I am naturally drawn. In addition to the areas I mentioned above, I read a fair amount of fiction. I find novels inspiring in a lot of ways, both in terms of formal innovation (I often think of novels as sculptures), and also as a way to balance my analytic tendencies with a hefty dose of the imaginary. The contemporary authors that inspire me include Steve Erickson, John Crowley, and Ursula K. Leguin.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

I think this is mostly a problem for curators, but I’ll say that of works that involve technology, I am most interested in those that are aware of and actively make meaning out of their technological infrastructure.

Rhizome Recommends: Art and Technology SXSW Panels

Rhizome — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:04:28 -0500

Nick Hasty moderates "Emerging Trends in Internet Art" at SXSW 2011

SXSW Interactive is a little over a month away, and with hundreds of talks and panels, it is easy to miss some of the great ones. This year, Rhizome Director of Technology Nick Hasty is leading the panel "Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web" and Senior Editor Joanne McNeil will be on the panel "The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices." Here are a dozen other art and technology oriented panels that might be of interest to the Rhizome community. Please add anything we missed in the comments!

FRIDAY:

Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory
Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cardenas, Pinar Yoldas, Zach Blas
AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER ROOM 10AB
3:30 -4:40PM

MIT Media Lab: Making Connections
Andy Bardagjy, Catherine Havasi, Joichi Ito, Yadid Ayzenberg, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
HILTON AUSTIN DOWNTOWN SALON FG
5:00PM - 6:00PM

SATURDAY:

Journalists Discuss the Future of Games
Dale North, Jamin Brophy-Warren, Morgan Webb, N'Gai Croal, Ross Miller
PALMER ROOM 1-2
11:00AM -12:00PM

Shoebox Full of Photos: Beyond Digital Storage
Jesse Chan-Norris
OMNI DOWNTOWN LONE STAR
12:30PM - 1:30PM

The Curators and the Curated
Alexis Madrigal, Maria Popova, Max Linsky, Mia Quagliarello, Noah Brier
SHERATON AUSTIN CAPITOL ABCD
3:30PM - 4:30PM

The Public Is Present: Exhibition Subsites at MoMA
Chiara Bernasconi, Dan Phiffer, Lotte Meijer, Shannon Darrough
AT&T CONFERENCE HOTEL CLASSROOM 203
5:00PM - 6:00PM

SUNDAY:

The Mind & Consciousness As an Interface
Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova
HILTON AUSTIN DOWNTOWN SALON FG
9:30AM -10:30

Designing Tomorrow’s Digital/Physical Interfaces
David Merrill, Fabian Hemmert, Leah Buechley
HILTON AUSTIN DOWNTOWN SALON FG
11:00AM -12:00PM

Open Art, Open Audiences: The Edinburgh Festivals
Andrew Coulton, Kath M Mainland
AT&T CONFERENCE HOTEL SALON E
12:30PM - 1:30PM

Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web
Jason Scott, Kari Kraus, Nick Hasty
AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER ROOM 9ABC
3:30PM - 4:30PM

The Love You Make
Catarina Fake
AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER EXHIBIT HALL 5
3:30PM - 4:30PM

The Power of Contemplative Play
Ben Cerveny, Justin Hall, Robin Hunicke
PALMER ROOM 1-2
3:30PM - 4:30PM

On the Internet, Everyone Knows You're a Dog
Christopher Poole, Heather Champ, Michael Sippey, Rick Webb, Ted Rheingold
SHERATON AUSTIN CAPITOL ABCD
5:00PM - 6:00PM

MONDAY:

The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices
Aaron Cope, Ben Terrett, James Bridle, Joanne McNeil, Kevin Slavin
DRISKILL HOTEL DRISKILL BALLROOM
9:30AM -10:30AM

Artists in Labs: Participatory Design at Eyebeam
Fran Ilich, Jon Cohrs, Kaho Abe, Nova Jiang
SHERATON AUSTIN CAPITOL EFGH
11:00AM -12:00PM

Expanding Our Intelligence Without Limit
Lev Grossman, Ray Kurzweil
AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER EXHIBIT HALL 5
2:00PM - 3:00PM

What WebGL Will Mean for the Web
Aaron Koblin, Gregg Tavares, Henrik Bennetsen, Ken Russell, Shanna Tellerman
AUSTIN CONVENTION CENTER BALLROOM A
5:00PM - 6:00PM

Jim Punk: exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s

Louis Doulas — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:11:19 -0500

Jim Punk is prolific and anonymous.

His website is encased largely in a cryptic vernacular predominately of his own design: A laptop is rendered in ‘Oldskool’ ASCII style illustration graphics with the ‘keyboard’ displaying letters and symbols (such as “&” or “n”) arranged in no particular order—as if Punk had button smashed his keyboard and left the results to exist as is. There are no direct title links, or any kind of straightforward archive list of projects, instead it’s these arranged letters and symbols that when painstakingly, individually clicked on, lead the viewer down into a further maze of Punk’s own glitchy, early net art based work.

&é '(-è _ç à)#+

a z e r t y u i o p ^$¨£

q s d f g h j k l m ù %*µ !§

<>w x c v b n ,?;.:/~"{@

It’s this jumbled arrangement of symbols and navigation confusion that has come to define Punk’s work over the years. Responding to blog comments, tweets and even emails with this seemingly incomprehensible employment of language, Punk avoids a certain communicative regularity; rejecting the comprehensibility and clarity that often lends itself to distinct individual recognition. Instead, Punk’s non-linear, schizophrenic performance draws attention to the form language and communication take, all the while disrupting standardized information flow and producing an irregularity in the way we expect to approach and access content.

Punk's latest user generated project, exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s, is a glitched out Twitter feed that anyone can post to. Utilizing a customized keyboard, comprised solely of unicode symbols, users can easily create and tweet glitchy status updates. With currently more than 600 tweets, Punk’s project works within the hyper consumptive pace of Twitter and utilizes it as an alternative platform for formalized making. While Twitter predominately exists as a website used to communicate in short, concise bursts of text, with users usually promoting an event or revealing the banal adventures crucial to their own existences, Punk’s Twitter demonstrates the formal exploits of such a system; its purpose, re-purpose and what it is capable of doing.

In a time when the capture and dispersal of information seems crucial to maintaining productivity, Jim Punk decides that playfulness and experimentation are still worth pursuing.

Follow and contribute here.

Hidden Information: The Work of Jim Sanborn

Yin Ho — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:04:28 -0500

Jim Sanborn's cryptographic sculptures, pieces on atomic energy, and large-scale projections might already seem familiar. Installed in front of the CIA headquarters, the ciphers in his sculpture Kryptos have puzzled many a code-cracker (three out of four of the coded sections have been solved), and he has been the subject of several museum shows. The artist answered a few questions we had on his work via email:

There's often something hidden in plain sight in your work. In public installations like Kryptos (at the CIA plaza) and A Comma, A in Houston, among others (I'm thinking also of the Covert Obsolescence and Archeotranscription pieces), it's letters/word/code. How does written communication affect your work? Is there a background story that drives these pieces?

Prior to the Kryptos commission my work documented hidden or invisible natural forces, Earth’s magnetic field etc. For the Kryptos piece and for the 20 years since, the hidden forces/content in text and language have taken over.

For most of my life both of my parents worked at the Library of Congress, My father as the Director of Exhibitions and my mother as a photo researcher, this privileged access to the historic record was tremendously enabling. The texts I chose for my public projects were heavily researched at the L.C. and in these works in particular the International, Classical, and Native American texts were used to encourage collaboration among cultures to fully decipher. Like Kryptos, the other public works are designed to exude their information slowly.

The “background story” is either above, or resides in the following: The Archeological record offers us a frustratingly fragmented view of the past. Though fragmentary, this archeoview is pregnant with secrets yet to be discovered and is thrilling in its potential. Secrecy is power even if it is just a little something kept from view, buried, so to speak, in the matrix of everyday life.

For the past 30 years, my task as an artist has been to release this hidden information at a rate commensurate with its importance, and at the time of my choosing so as to prolong the experience of discovery. As we all know, artwork that gives up its form or content quickly is soon forgotten.

Eerie luminescence is a part of many of your pieces from a print of an autoradiograph to projections on arresting landscapes and thrown across buildings. How do you think of light? Are you interested in the objects that provide light or make it seen (e.g, projector, radiograph)? Does evolving technology alter the way you consider your work? Respond anyway you'd like: What do you think of when you think of landscape, affect, and uranium?

The large format projections I did in the mid 1990’s offered some relief from the psychological burden of the secrecy work, i.e. Kryptos, Covert Obsolescence and the Archeotranscriptions.

After completing Paleos a commission for MIT in Cambridge, I duplicated the projection system I used there, threw it and a generator and a 4x5 camera in the back of my Jeep, left DC and headed out west to areas very familiar to me to begin the Topographic Projections and Implied Geometry Series.

The tortured, sculptural, landscapes of Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, were so familiar because I had spent two decades there collecting materials for my work on natural forces. This “collecting” regimen began to wear on my environmentalism, so I completed the large format projections as a way to affect a large landscape without effecting it, to leave no trace, etc. The resulting large digital prints, and the project as a whole, was a bit tongue-in-cheek. At that time, the digital manipulation of art photography was just revving up, and I decided to develop a series of real-time images that appeared digitally manipulated but were not.

The final western US projection trip in the fall of 1998 followed a summer projecting in Ireland for the Sirius Project residency, and it led me to White Sands, New Mexico. This intensely beautiful landscape was ironically juxtaposed to the site of the first atomic bomb test. And not shying away from irony or questionable personal safety, I began my ten-year dalliance with nuclear physics, uranium and nuclear fission as art.

The Atomic Time and Terrestrial Physics installations both studied that moment in scientific research when technology takes over from pure science. The difficulties with this transition notwithstanding, the seductive nature of nuclear science is reinforced by the stunningly powerful imagery it can produce. From the shocking visage of a hydrogen bomb explosion to the deadly blue-green glow that emanates from highly radioactive materials, these particularly toxic light sources are mysteriously fascinating and are a far cry from the recently banished incandescent bulb.

Feb 10th at the New Museum: Untitled (mobile.app) + (one more thing..), JODI 2012 (premiere)

Rhizome — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:22:43 -0500

At this event, renowned Dutch collective JODI will premiere a new mobile application, outfitted for iPhone and Android, that is invested in “Motion/ Figure/ Posture Actions.” The application records users’ quotidian movements and turns them into choreography—one that captures our awkward, mundane, frustrated, addicted interactions with our ubiquitous devices. This focus on dynamics of control, as well as the psychology and behavior produced by technology, is at the core of JODI’s work. For this presentation, the collective will present and discuss the work, and hired performers will enact its choreography.

Friday, February 10th, 2012 7 p.m at the New Museum

$6 Members, $8 General Public (tickets)

This Week on Rhizome Community Boards: I'm Here and There, Jobs, Opportunities, and More

Rhizome — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:21:05 -0500

Recently added to the Artbase: I'm Here and There by Jonas Lund

Through a custom browser extension, Lund has opened his personal web browsing to a level of full transparency and public scrutiny. At imhereandthere.com the URL of the website the artist is currently browsing is published in real time. When the artist visits a new site the work automatically refreshes – providing a mirror to the artist's life and browser

Events/Lectures/Exhibitions:

French new media artist Maurice Benayoun at Streaming Museum's Fourth anniversary celebration, New York, NY, Tue Jan 31 2012, 6PM
Being Social, Sat Feb 25, 2012 - Sat Apr 28, 2012 in London
Artefact festival 2012, Tue Feb 14, 2012 - Thu Feb 23, 2012, Leuven, Belgium

Jobs:

Assistant Professor of Art+Design / Film & Media Studies, School of Art+Design and School of Film & Media studies at Purchase College, SUNY
Assistant Professor, Interactive Media/Gaming, Tenure Track, The School of Communication at the University of Miami
Creative Programmers & Web/Software Developers, Linden Lab
The Shift Webzine Editor, The Shift Webzine
3D Animation Full-Time Faculty, Maryland Institute College of Art

Call for Submissions:

Call for Reviews/Commentaries/Papers/ for Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus – Spring edition is making an open call for submissions to the Reviews, Commentaries and Papers section of our upcoming spring issue. The deadline for submission is February 10th.
2012 MUSE Awards, Recognizing outstanding achievement in museum media, the AAM Media and Technology Committee announces the 23rd annual MUSE Awards competition.
Currents 2012 Santa Fe International New Media Festival June 22 – July 8, 2012, Call for New Media Submissions Currents 2012, the 3rd annual Santa Fe International New Media Festival will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA – June 22 – July 8, 2012

Misc:

transmediale 2012: in/compatible, will take place from 31 January to 5 February at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt with the new Artistic Director Kristoffer Gansing
ARTS,DESIGN & VIRTUAL WORLDS 2012, 25-27 September 2012, Darmstadt, Germany, Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research
Broadcast Art, Sound & Independent Culture, asic.fm is a new radio station that forms part of Pixel Palace, Mon, Feb 20, 2012
@party Demoparty, April 27, 2012 Artisan’s Asylum, Boston

More...

Physibles

Rhizome — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:40 -0500

The Pirate Bay just announced a new file type available on the site: "physibles," digital files for 3D printing. It expects in 20 years you'll be downloading sneakers. In the meantime there are lawn darts and plastic toys:

We're always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it's time for the next step.

Today most data is born digitally. It's not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don't talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we're physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We'll be able to print food for hungry people. We'll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We'll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We're thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay - but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we'll download one.

Sexts from Patricia Lockwood

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:35:48 -0500

Image by altffour

Editor’s Note: “"Tricia u MUST join Twitter to network with Poets" *tricia joins twitter, falls in with a million Comedy Fuckers, forgets what poem even is*” — @TriciaLockwood, September 2, 2011

Patricia Lockwood is an actual poet—published in the New Yorker, even!—who has inappropriately touched the imaginations of a thousand followers with her “sexts.” Born around the time of the Anthony Weiner scandal, the genre congeals gobs of glowing poetry from networked life’s greasy stew of blunt spam copy, collaged pop culture, and constant little spells of titillation. This is a selection of Lockwood’s hottest sexts.

A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud

Do you smell like a mousetrap? I am a cruel woman and I simply adore the smell of mousetraps

A Teenage Turtle takes extreme pleasure from sticking his head in and out of his shell very slowly while a rat watches

Midnight. My wife and children are asleep. Breathlessly I begin to search for my favorite kind of porn: "Women Standing in Big Jeans"

THE BIGGEST WOMEN IN THE TIGHTEST JEANS!!! U WONT BELIEVE YOUR EYES! THESE WOMEN SIMPLY CANT GET ENOUGH STANDING AROUND IN BIG JEANS!

These jeansluts stand up really straight with their tits out, holding the jeans as far away from their bodies as possible! SO RAW

This girl wants a denim vest, a denim scrunchie, and denim Keds -- are YOU the sicko who's going to give them to her

You are miniature, and I put you in the bell of a saxophone and play a long soulful B-flat

I am Everest and I JO while a 100-year-old grampa tries to climb me. At the moment he reaches my peak I produce a thunderous rockslide

I am FWB with Scrooge McDuck. He asks me to pretend to rob him. "IS IT A BEAGLE BOY," he gasps, as I break into his money bin

"I'm so wet," you murmur. Marmaduke raises his glistening face. "That's because I'm famous for drool," he laughs

Easy-Listening Dracula drinks the blood of a saxophonist. He smiles and feels the mellow blood spread through him like smooth jazz

I am a Charmin bear. You are a bear trap that is baited with a soft roll of toilet paper. I step inside you and "lose" my "leg"

I am a mushroom in a forest. There are drops of dew all over my tip. Nabokov reaches down a hand to pick me

I teach an African Grey Parrot to sext. He sexts at the level of a two-year-old -- "mama, mama, mama"

I guess the number of gumballs in a jar. I'm off by just one gumball. "I'm pink," it whispers, & then leaps into my mouth & chews me

I repeatedly crush dollhouse furniture under my feet until I feel "big enough"

A leprechaun sits in a pot o gold. He removes gold pieces 1 by 1 to reveal his nudity. At the end he tears off his beard. It's a woman

An elephant picks up his 1000000th peanut. Whoops, it is the orange candy. He sucks it up his trunk and tastes sugar for the 1st time

The year is 1960 and I am Cary Grant. Kinetic typography sneaks up and fingers me. It writes STARRING CARY GRANT all up in my guts

I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me

Rainbow go into a prism and it shoot SO MUCH white light

You walk into the bathroom and see a baby in a tuxedo peeing at one of the urinals. He turns around and smiles. It's Jordy

You unzip and begin to tinkle like a man. Jordy looks over and his eyes get huge. He begins to cry. "It's hard to be a baby," he sobs

I kill a big wasp with an Animorphs book. When I turn the book over there's a baby leg stuck to it! Animorphs are real

The word "gaylord" falls in love with another word that means the same thing. His dad Shakespeare CRIES with joy when he tells him

I play Whac-A-Mole and all the moles let me whac them. They rise up to meet me, they desire nothing more than to be whac

You get a Tyra Mail that tells you the date of your death. You scream uncontrollably in the voice of an excited model

Mavis Beacon bursts out of the computer and shows me where to put my fingers

Mavis Beacon urges my fingers to move faster, faster, and ever faster. "80 words a minute or your money back," she whispers

"Type this random sequence," instructs Mavis Beacon. The letters T-E-A-C-H-E-R W-A-N-T-S T-O F-R-E-E-K appear before my eyes

Mavis Beacon's neck gets long & she bursts out of her clothes. She was a bronto all along. "Type my new name APATOSAUR," she thunders

I read "The Monster at the End of This Book" to you. Together we turn the final page. Surprise, I cut a hole in it to put my d through

I go up to heaven and open God's Bible. It contains only a single sext: "Im hard"

Artists Respond to W.A.G.E. Open Forum with Hans Abbing

Rhizome — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:51:14 -0500

Photo by John Powers

Earlier this month, Dutch artist/economist Hans Abbing, author of Why Are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, lectured at Artists Space, the first of a series of open forums organized by W.A.G.E. Artists John Powers and William Powhida attended the event. I asked over email for their thoughts on the talk - JM:

John Powers:

I didn't read Hans Abbing's book, but I did listen to his lecture carefully, with an ear to the fact that he is an economist, and that he's a Dutch economist, not an Austrian one. So when he voiced his suspicions of subsidies, he is doing so as someone who comes from a nation with a lot of subsides for the arts, it was clear that Abbing is not Friedrich Hayek. He was, for instance, very quick to say that it was unfortunate that all Americans don't benefit from universal health care. I do think the title of Abbing's lecture was misleading. the subject he seemed to be addressing best was not why artists are poor, but why aren't artists like other poor people - when he talked about that I found his ideas really interesting.

Abbing observed, "artists are what a Marxist might call less “alienated”; that statistically we (artists) have the educational and family backgrounds similar to professionals, but that choosing to become (and remain) an artist defies the logic of a career choice. Abbing said art does not seem to be a choice, but something that artists feel compelled to do despite the obvious economic downsides- that art is less a profession and something closer to a "vocation": something we are called to do, and that we are able to answer that call not because we come from wealthy families, but because we come from families that don’t count on us for financial support (this jibes with the artists I know).

What I got from Abbing, was not that with more subsidies come more artists, but that no reasonable amount of subsidies will raise artists out of poverty because of the low value we (as a group) put on not being poor. I don't see that as an indictment (Abbing may), I see it as a very hopeful sign. As societies grow more affluent, I very much like the idea that more people self-identify as artists. Perhaps that means that the End of History is a bunch of happy, well-educated poor people.

Because there is so little attention given to fine art by economists I very much enjoyed hearing an economist’s ideas applied directly to the world of galleries and artist studios, rather than trying to glean lesson about the artworld from economist’s descriptions of drug dealers and cabbies. For that reason alone, I’m glad Bill invited me to join him that night.

William Powhida's notes from the lecture

William Powhida:

When W.A.G.E recently proposed a collaboration around this series of open forums, I was introduced to the writings of Hans Abbing. When I first read Poor Artists, a chapter from his forthcoming book, Value of Art, I recognized many of the paradoxical and contradictory relationships between ‘being artist’, as Abbing defines it, and income. While I agree with critic Ben Davis that Abbing’s conclusions in his earlier book, Why Are Artists Poor, about the value of subsidies for the arts are flawed, I found Abbing’s writing to be a valuable attempt at demystifying stereotypes of poverty in the arts. It also provides some perspective on how and why poor artists are able to persist and even celebrated when we consider poverty to be a social problem, not the result of specific choices, or a ‘work preference’ by artists over consumption. This aspect of Abbing’s writing is what inspired W.A.G.E, not his explicit conclusions that government subsidies in Amsterdam do not raise the overall incomes of artists (Or as Davis argued with John and I after the lecture that it subsidizes the wrong kind of art, conceptual art, in Abbing’s conservative view).

Unfortunately, I found Abbing’s fragmentary lecture to be much less effective than his written analysis. The lecture ended up confusing, boring, and even antagonizing the large audience and it was (painfully) clear that not only cultural differences contributed to this, but also his lack of understanding of the contemporary art market in the last decade. His choice of anecdotal descriptions including references to ‘greedy dancers’ and ‘disliking poor people’ added to the tension with the audience, who I felt were hoping for more radical solutions to the glaring problem of income inequality in the arts, which is effectively concentrated into the hands of a small group of super star artists,yet is still equated with certain kinds of success and failure. Given the recent efforts OWS arts-related groups like Occupy Museums and Arts and Labor, Abbing’s lecture came across as rather conservative and frustrating.

For me, despite the problems with Abbing’s lecture or conclusions about subsidies, his writing serves an important role by explaining how the ‘exceptional nature of art’ leads to seemingly unresolvable paradoxes including the persistent denial of economic activity associated with art. This traditional denial of the commercial aspect of art, which is seen as a threat to its autonomy, makes it difficult to even discuss issues like income inequality or artists’ fees. The value of Abbing’s analysis is not in his conclusions, but in his particular effort look clearly at the economic and sociological dimensions of the artist’s vocation, and not deny them through our shared language. We don’t call collectors ‘consumers’ or galleries ‘shops’ because we don’t want art to be a product or a commodity, we want it to be a cultural gift free from commerce. W.A.G.E chose Abbing because they are both suggesting that we need to talk about the ‘dirty’ and impure parts of art; that it’s work, that it involves money, that people run businesses, and that we need to ask impolite questions about finances and money.

The positive results already emerging out of Artists Space are an encouraging sign that those in power; directors, curators, board members, etc., need to hear directly from the people, the artists, creating the very objects, ideas, and performances upon which the institutions depend. It should be painfully obvious, but Artists Space doesn’t exist without artists including unknown, emerging, and underrepresented artists whose practices may not serve the market. So, W.A.G.E has started a discussion that asks us to talk about the parts of the art that we often minimize or pretend aren’t really important, because art isn’t about money, right? It’s deeper, more profound, autonomous, and Sotheby’s doesn’t exist and there are no art handlers currently locked-out from their jobs either while precious objects trade for millions.

Book Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

Casey Gollan — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 10:08:20 -0500

ENIAC programmers, late 1940s. (U.S. military photo, Redstone Arsenal Archives, Huntsville, Alabama), from Programmed Visions by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.

After “getting fit” and whatever else people typically declare to be their new year’s resolutions, this year’s most popular goal is surprisingly nerdy: learning to code. Within the first week of 2012, over 250,000 people, including New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, had signed up for weekly interactive programming lessons on a site called Code Year. The website promises to put its users “on the path to building great websites, games, and apps.” But as New Yorker web editor Blake Eskin writes, “The Code Year campaign also taps into deeper feelings of inadequacy... If you can code, the implicit promise is that you will not be wiped out by the enormous waves of digital change sweeping through our economy and society.”

If the entrepreneurs behind Code Year (and the masses of users they’ve signed up for lessons) are all hoping to ride the wave of digital change, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, a professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, is the academic trying to pause for a moment to take stock of the present situation and see where software is actually headed. All the frenzy about apps and “the cloud,” Chun argues, is just another turn in the “cycles of obsolescence and renewal” that define new media. The real change, which Chun lays out in her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, is that “programmability,” the logic of computers, has come to reach beyond screens into both the systems of government and economics and the metaphors we use to make sense of the world.

“Without [computers, human and mechanical],” writes Chun, “there would be no government, no corporations, no schools, no global marketplace, or, at the very least, they would be difficult to operate...Computers, understood as networked software and hardware machines, are—or perhaps more precisely set the grounds for—neoliberal governmental technologies...not simply through the problems (population genetics, bioinformatics, nuclear weapons, state welfare, and climate) they make it possible to both pose and solve, but also through their very logos, their embodiment of logic.”

To illustrate this logic, Chun draws extensively on history, theory, and detailed technical explanations, enriching cursory understandings of software. “Understanding software as a thing,” she writes, “means engaging its odd materializations and visualizations closely and refusing to reduce software to codes and algorithms—readily readable objects—by grappling with its simultaneous ambiguity and specificity.” Indeed, Chun spends a lot of time specifying computer terms. What's the difference between hardware, software, firmware, and wetware? Source code, compiled code, and written instructions? What is a thing and how did software become one? Even for a fairly nerdy computer user there’s a lot to pick up on. The book really shines, however, when Chun waxes poetic on the more ambiguous aspects of software.

The term “vaporware” refers to software that’s announced and advertised but never actually released for use, such as Ted Nelson’s infamous Xanadu project. Vaporware is problematic when it comes to theory because grand ideas and slick renderings rarely (if ever) align with the way technology looks and works in real life. Geert Lovink, Alexander Galloway, and others have called to banish “vapor theory,” theory built on hypothetical ideas about software rather than instantiations of it, which Lovink criticizes as, “gaseous flapping of the gums...generated with little exposure, much less involvement with those self-same technologies and artworks.” Chun concedes that while this embargo on vapor has been essential to grounding new media studies, “a rigorous engagement with software makes new media studies more, rather than less, vapory.” Vapor is not incidental to software, she argues, but actually essential to its understanding. This is what makes Chun’s theories exciting to follow: she engages renderings, dreams, and misunderstandings about technology rather than casting them aside. The key source of these misunderstandings is the use of the computer as metaphor.

People in previous generations conceptualized the world around them using technologies like clocks and steam engines. While these analog, mechanical devices are intricate, if one were to take apart a clock and and put it back together its inner workings could be understood. Digital computers are more complex because they are made of both tangible chips and immaterial codes, neither of which are intuitive to deconstruct. Further, all software interfaces, like the “paintbrush” tool in Photoshop, are metaphors themselves. “Who completely understands what one’s computer is actually doing at any given moment?” asks Chun, knowing that the answer is nobody. Yet this murky recursion of “unknowability” and vapors is exactly why Chun finds software to be such an apt metaphor for the world we live in. Recalling Stewart Brand’s call for a picture of the whole earth in 1968, Chun poses the question: what would a picture of the whole Internet look like? Except, in this case, to find out may not be the point. In the way that the stock market is based on speculation—virally spreading fear about the future of a company (as opposed to concrete evidence or actual bad management decisions) can cause a stock to tank—a technologized world is increasingly based on conjecture. In its unseeable, untouchable, and effectively unknowable nature, the computer represents the lens we need in order to think about the enormous and incomprehensible forces of social, economic, and political power that govern our lives. “[Software’s] ghostly interfaces embody—conceptually, metaphorically, virtually—a way to navigate our increasingly complex world,” writes Chun.

The book looks at a broad range of examples from artists, scholars, and technologists to situate “programmability” in relation to everything from global systems like capitalist economics, neoliberal politics, and knowledge production to those of the mind and body: gender, race, and the structure of thought. The footnotes are full of interesting paths waiting to be followed: Frederick P. Brooks on why programming is fun and hacking is addictive, Ben Shneiderman on direct manipulation interfaces, Brenda Laurel on computers as theatre and how that relates to skeuomorphism, and Thomas Y. Levin on the temporality of surveillance, to name just a few. While it’s tempting to look to this web of ideas and the history of computing as an answer for why things are the way they are today, Chun's point in invoking all these voices is that it’s not that clear cut.

Some of the book’s propositions about our relationship to computers seem overblown: a priestly source of power, a form of magic, code as a fetish. If nothing else, these phrases are provocative and point to how potent Chun finds software to be in the world today. As more and more people find themselves able to create things out of code, it feels critical to understand software on both a practical and fundamental level.

Artist Profile: Huong Ngo

Ian Glover — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:39:57 -0500

Huong Ngo is part of Fantastic Futures, a 2011 Rhizome Commissions winner for their proposal, Fantastic Futures

Acting the Words is Enacting the World, 2011 more at Enacting the Words Photo: Dwayne Dixon

Your Rhizome commission is a continuation of the Fantastic Futures project (which already includes recordings of birds in Baghdad and someone making tea in Brooklyn). It seems to be another in a continuing series of projects exploring contemporary education practices and ways of learning like Secret School and "How To Do Things With Words." How do you see this project fitting into your larger educational practice? What sort of transformations do you hope to see in education that could result from a project like Fantastic Futures?

Yes, it’s continuing a collaboration with a group of students in the US (in particular at Parsons The New School for Design) and at the University of Baghdad, that began with And Longing is No Longer Sleeps (the project that we did for the exhibit “How to Do Things With Words”), and further develops some of the collaborative processes from Secret School (a curatorial and discursive project about pedagogy), Acting the Words is Enacting the World, a project with artist Hong-An Truong and a group of young folks completed this past summer, and generally the strategies and techniques that I use in my classes.

Our goals for Fantastic Futures are fairly modest: we aim towards facilitating a diversity of exchanges (experiential, social, political, etc), advocating for a free and open cultural commons, leaving a gesture that serves as a collective protest against past and future violence. Nevertheless, I always secretly hope that something from our collective process is transformative for all involved.

In an interview for the Walker Art Center, you talk about preferring to keeping these education oriented projects 'outside the realm' of artistic context. Yet in their presentation and mode, these projects often seem to have artistic elements. I'm interested in what you see as separating the two.

I understand the importance of an artistic context for having critical reflection of the work, but the life of the art need not be limited to that. Currently, I’m working on projects that are online, that are performed in people’s homes and music venues, that are tested and developed in the classroom, and that are worn on people’s bodies. Some of these lives might be represented in an art context, but that might just one slice of its existence in the world. It’s a new way of working for me, but I find it to be a refreshing challenge to discover a daily existence with my work. I’ve been reading Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions about the Constructivists’ relationships to their everyday objects―one of camaraderie rather than ownership. It is a beautiful way of thinking that might be worth revisiting.

Your multi-media installations and sculptures such as Stratocumulus and Kosmolet seem quite fanciful and relatively other-worldy but also seem to have a distinct social and collaborative component. Even as you maintain the aforementioned separation between the two modes, do you find that ever they inform one another? How do you see sculptures like Dark Star functioning in your practice?

There are some projects like Escape and Pop-Up Studio where the objects are quite integral as functioning architecture and metaphors for social structures. Right now, I'm working on a collaborative project with Or Zubalsky about the Mercury 13, a group of women tested to become astronauts in 1959-1963 (the program was jointly shut down by Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and NASA for political reasons). So far, the project involves research, videos, performance, and even music but this micro-architecture seems to find its way back into my practice, so I see inflated, blobby futuristic clouds in my horizon. Actually, I always thought of the Dark Stars as black holes, so maybe I should say... in my event horizon!

Age:

64 going on 13.

Location:

Yes! I am a body that exists in this world. It is usually in Brooklyn or Manhattan these days, but would like to be in Mongolia or Antarctica ... soon.

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

I think of language as my primary technology, so in that case, I started speaking Vietnamese as a child and then English once I started school in the United States. Speaking of, I was just reading a book about reading (Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid) about how your brain wires itself differently depending on which language you learn first. My brain operates differently in Vietnamese than in English or even if I am learning a new language today. Noticing these subtle differences has helped me understand how the brain learns and responds to different demands at various stages in life.

My dad has an engineer-brain and would always bring home motors and things for my brother and I to tinker with, so I started to learn to fix mechanical and electrical objects when I was around 8. My mom and my grandmother always wrote poetry and made things with their hands, so I learned technology needed to construct objects and metaphors from them. As far as digital technology, I took a Turbo Pascal (!) class in high school and used to program fun things on my graphing calculator.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

I don't have set tools, but prefer to stay versatile and use whatever tool is appropriate. I love learning and creating new processes for construction. My sister gave me a book when I was 10, I think it was called Crafts and Hobbies or something. It covered all of these different “traditional” skills for construction. I loved it! I think I tried everything in the book, down to découpage and macramé. Hobbies are a very powerful foundation of the secret revolution.

I came to digital technology because it was a new way to construct. Like many other people, my first response to web programming and animation technology was NOT to make websites for businesses, but to make weird flashing spazzy clicking breathing living things that could operate in such a different way from everything I knew in the world. It's still refreshing to see artists revive these original pleasures even as these technologies have become more ubiquitous.

Did you study art in school?

Yes, but my first love was always science. I was a shy child and just wanted to learn about how the world worked. I adored making my own microscopic slides and being outside looking at bugs, mosses, the sky, etc. I memorized bird songs and animal tracks. I didn't study art seriously until college, but even then was attracted to artists/scientists like James Turrell or Étienne-Jules Marey who devoted their lives to understanding and representing phenomenology, or the limits thereof. I came to the art world because it offered another way of exploring these early epistemological interests.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I always return to sewing and collaging, which are like sketching to me. I love words and they find their way into my work in mysterious ways. The more I can relate the corporeal to the technological, the richer the work is for me.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I play music with Or Zubalsky as The Youngest (and sometimes Juviley). I've just started playing songs written by Bertholt Brecht with a group of friends at the Whitney Independent Study Program. We perform under the super geeky name: The Society of the Brechtacles. I also play music with housemates and with my family (we just had our annual talent show). I'm a big advocate for social and economic justice, so I do community organizing and activism that is related to my art practice.

What do you do for a living? Do you think your job relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I teach. This is hugely related to my art practice as an organizer and an advocate for social justice. I also try out a lot of games, performance strategies, and facilitation techniques in the classroom. This last semester, I taught a class called [Un]Fashion in the integrated design program at Parsons where the students developed their own processes for garment construction. This class was incredibly helpful for me in returning to a consistent object-making practice and rearticulating the importance of material research and knowledge. It was also an interesting place to discuss the OWS movement and economic inequality. These students have the tools to bring about a revolution!

Who are your key artistic influences?

Yoko Ono, Virginia Woolf, hollAnd, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett. Right now, I'm really into Olivier Messiaen, to whom I was introduced by a friend Sam Ishii-Gonzalez. Look him up on YouTube. Wow. I’ve also been listening to Mountain Man nonstop recently. These ladies are the business.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Yeah, I have some steady collaborators with whom I've worked with through the years. Most notably, I've worked with my good friend Hong-An Truong on quite a few projects that have really long names: Acting the Words is Enacting the World (along with a fantastic group of students), AND, AND, AND - Stammering: An Interview, and The Book of the Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy Made to Withstand the Effects of Time. On Fantastic Futures, I work with Or Zubalsky, Andrew Persoff, Ali Salim Abood, and a slew of amazing students from the US and Iraq. There are many more wonderful collaborators: Caroline Woolard, George Monteleone, Alexander Stewart, Colin McMullan, Rob Allen (a friend who I’ve know since middle school), Melanie Crean, and even Rhizome’s own Mark Tribe!

Do you actively study art history?

Sure, though I am much more interested in a more general category of visual culture because I can then explore many different histories and sites of reception. I love learning about the history of photography because of its connections to scientists, artists, and amateurs. I also love it for bringing art to a crisis and revealing art for what it is--a human construction that finds value not just in its use, but also in the structure of belief around it. I studied with Jonathan Crary at Columbia University for a couple of semesters and I really appreciate his perspective on modernity and visual history. Even though he’s often talking about the 19th century, his work always feels like a fresh perspective on our own cultural moment.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Yes, here's an eclectic assortment of philosophical badasses that have inspired me over the years (This feels like the funniest shout out ever): Bell Hooks, Myles Horton, Paolo Freire, Roland Barthes, Gayatri Spivak, Jorge Luis Borges, Deleuze and Guattari, Judith Butler, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzche. What all of these folks have in common for me is that they are interested in revealing the invisible and questioning existing structures of power, which they usually do in their own beautiful, sometimes humorous, always radical way.

I used to read a lot of psychoanalysis--Freud, Jung, Lacan--they still resonate with me though I now have a healthy skepticism and critical distance from them. Through the art program that I’m in, I’ve been reading a bit of David Harvey, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams. Currently, I'm reading Pamela Lee's Chronophobia and Nicholas de Monchaux’s beautiful Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo that Nancy Lim turned me onto.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you’re concerned about?

I’m concerned about a general blind march towards technology and a conflation of novelty with progress. I have noticed more than a few museums that have turned contemplative spaces into zones of overstimulation with screens, lights, and buttons that beg for attention but don’t ask for attentiveness. I’ve seen students building huge power-guzzling contraptions that perversely are meant to speak about some vague notion of sustainability and artists that are still making “arm-waving” installations that ask participants to wave their arms or dance to actualize the work.

These versions of programmed interaction do not replace the important work of critical inquiry, poetic engagement, social and political empowerment, or epistemological investigation that art has the capacity to do. Having attended a graduate program in Art & Technology, I’m also guilty of either having made these kinds of things or thinking about making them. Maybe it’s a phase we go through in having access to all of this newness, but hopefully one that we can move past. Perhaps I am wrong and there is something productive in this tension between the pleasures of experimentation and the necessity of criticality. I suppose that’s where the art is.

In regards to our society’s relationship with technology in general, I’m much more concerned with the increasing commodification, privatization, and regulation of our social relations and leisure time, the erosion of speech rights online and off, and the potential dissolution of net neutrality. The ideal of the internet as a commons is something for which we can and should fight.

I think about the future quite a bit. “New Media Art” (the term already feels quite old) has the ability to reference both our present moment and invoke our society’s ideals about the future, so I wonder how within this discourse, we can imagine our future with fewer gadgets and other possessions (but ones that we learn to repair and care for), more time for each other, and more art in our every day. That would really be fantastic.

Karen Archey on a Panel with Hans Ulrich Obrist at DLD12

Rhizome — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:01:39 -0500

Rhizome editor-at-large Karen Archey is speaking at DLD (Digital-Life-Design) in Munich Jan 22-24. Moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, she will be part of the Saturday panel "Ways Beyond the Internet." Artists Oliver Laric, Cory Arcangel, and Rafaël Rozendaal are also presenting in addition to a number of innovators in art and technology like Yoko Ono, Sheryl Sandberg, David Karp, and Chris Poole.

Terence Gower’s New Utopias

Rhizome — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:31:56 -0500

Still from The Mothership Connection, 1974.

Terence Gower’s New Utopias is, as Bomb magazine describes, a lecture "filmed in the style of a 1950s Walt Disney documentary. Among the utopias under analysis are Parliament/Funkadelic’s 1974Mothership Connection tour in which George Clinton proposes to improve the world by bringing us The Funk from outer space; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where a society promotes uninhibited sexual behavior; and the world of Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, an aesthetic utopia of beautiful artists who are perpetually falling in love." Pedro Reyes interviews him for the magazine, which also includes a clip from the film.

Pedro Reyes I got so excited when I saw New Utopias because it’s not stuck in nostalgia; it’s a prognosis, a promise, an invitation to reimagine the world. The key line in the video is the last sentence: “I’m curious to see what new visions of utopia will replace these.” I’d like to ask you how the three utopias in the video—the funk, the meta-sexual, and the cheerful musical utopia—tap into the viewers’ desires. Desire is a driving force for change, as Augusto Boal wrote. Without desire, you focus on the problem; with desire, on the solution. You have to desire the change you want to see. That’s the intoxication of utopia.

Terence Gower Exactly. New Utopias is about the attraction of ideals, the desire to move toward them. The three utopias I feature are about pleasure. Desire serves two purposes here, to trigger progress and change (by enacting a utopian response) and to entertain (as a catalyst for the viewer to enter the work)—hence music, sex, and architecture. I wanted to feature the most diverse and unlikely examples of ideal societies, partly to be funny (pleasure again), and partly to stretch the boundaries of what utopia could be.

Rhizome Joins Jan 18 Internet Blackout to Raise Awareness of PIPA/SOPA

Rhizome — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:20:30 -0500

Rhizome is joining sites like Reddit, Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and others tomorrow in blacking out our site for 24 hours to protest and raise awareness of PIPA and SOPA. We believe in an open internet and recommend other organizations consider participating in this important action.

For more information, please check out EFF's coverage of this and other "blacklist" creating legislation. Updates from the blog Tech Dirt are also essential reading. Further information and templates to join in the internet blackout are located on the site American Censorship.

Artist Profile: Jason Eppink

Orit Gat — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:22:51 -0500

Astoria Scum River Bridge, 2010.

You define yourself as a "dude who is just trying to make things a little better." Each one of your works tries to improve the world, one funny step at a time. But they also include observations into the way in which society—and especially media and advertising—affect the way we see things. How do your works try to tamper with those viewpoints or comment on them? And can you talk a little about some key terms like subversiveness, pranks, humor, and dialogue in relation to this?

I'm interested in creating provocations that disrupt systems for good and/or fun. In particular, I'm hyper aware of the consumption narratives that shape our daily lives. Advertising literally works by telling you that you're not good enough, and all of media is shaped—directly or indirectly—around selling you stories framed by this intentionally soul-crushing lie so you'll consume more.

So a lot of what I do is prototype critical "solutions" for systems like these, exploring new answers outside of the usual channels. I've rarely seen real, important change come from inside a system; the system exists, first and foremost, to perpetuate itself. And many of the best solutions threaten the status quo of the system, so they're never realized because they will change how the system itself works.

I have the luxury of being outside those systems, so I can propose crazy, radical, preposterous, silly ideas. And not just propose them, but execute them and see what happens. Of course sometimes these interventions will be interpreted as threats, but that's how you move a conversation forward.

And, well, solutions are better when they're funny or clever or playful. Most people like jokes, in my experience.

You reflect on the workings of our society, commenting about the way the city works (including a slight obsession with the MTA), the way the art world works (in Museum Water Gun Fight and Subway Art Gallery Opening for example), and the way we use space around us. Do you expect certain results from these gestures?

Bless the MTA and their patient silence. I'm not through with them yet.

In daily life, I try to employ a stoic technique called negative visualization, which is (roughly) an attempt to eliminate all expectations. While this leads to some inefficiencies, it also creates a life full of wonder and surprise, and eliminates a lot of disappointment.

So I don't expect water gun fights or joke signs to do much of anything. I certainly don't expect them to Change The World, if that's what you mean. But I do think they can prototype ideas for using everything around us that we take for granted in inspiring, generous, novel ways.That larger system of thinking – being an active participant in your own environment—maybe that can change the world. At the very least I expect to have fun, which is maybe a radical act by itself.

The bio on your website includes the following: "His doings have been seen worldwide because they're all on the internet. Also they've been seen worldwide in galleries, but no one really goes to those…" You react to the internet in a variety of very different ways: first of all, you seem to be very committed to open source and creative commons. Secondly, you rebel against internet authorities, so to say, in projects like @free NYTimes and Kickbackstarter, and third, your own website operates both as an archive of works and a way of disseminating them further, being that some works are available to download and be returned to society (like Total Crisis Panic Button). What is your response to the internet? How do you think about the elaborate ways in which you use it?

Underlying all of this is an assumption that the internet is a public commons. Art gallery attendees are a tiny, self-selected audience, but everyone inhabits the internet like they inhabit public space (third world countries and class caveats aside). That's second nature to me, and probably anyone my age and younger. It wasn't until I read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everyone that I started to really understand the costs of groups and communication before the web. I mean, literally, what was prohibitively expensive is now virtually free.

But the concept of "Intellectual Property" (sorry Richard Stallman) hasn't caught up. The history of ideas has only recently made room for authorship, and there are a lot of problems with this insistence that every idea has an owner. I know that nothing I made sprung from a vacuum, and I work hard to cite prior art. It seems disingenuous to try to lock up everything I've made, so I respond by doing the opposite and opening it up. I guess that fits within the larger ethos of a historical online culture.

But also, I find a project is most rewarding when it inspires someone else to recreate it or improve on it. I want to be a force for helping them succeed and push the dialogue forward, so I consider the act of giving away all my files and knowledge to be part of the project. That costs me nothing more than my hosting bill and domain name rental, so, you know, what's to lose?

Your work is experienced mainly via chance encounters, surprises, and other odd, funny moments. When there isn't always a plaque with your name by the work, what is your sense of authorship when considering the ways you present it? It seems like in a few of them, it took you weeks to claim authorship for a work that might have been around for a while and received some attention. In other cases, the work could be verging on the illegal, making your signature also a slight risk. How does authorship function for you? And do you really worry about it?

The last thing I want to do is create an authentic moment for someone and interrupt it with some sort of "Brought to you by Jason Eppink!" message. The initial (if not eventual) anonymity is vital in creating a profound sense of a world greater than our imagination, a world that magically, generously challenges itself and provides its own solutions. The specificity of authorship interrupts the mystery. "WTF?" is more important than "Who?" or "Why?." My goal is usually to create awe or wonder or puzzlement or whimsy, not to stamp my name on another part of the world. Sure I like to get pats on the back just like everyone else, but that's secondary. There's more joy to be derived from simply knowing I did something cool than from making sure the rest of the world knows it was me.

Also, I really like the feeling of giving away, of letting go, and when my livelihood doesn't depend on some sort of name recognition, I have the luxury of indulging that. If nothing else, not scrambling for attribution helps me prove to myself that whatever I'm doing is something more than a desperate plea for attention in some stage of arrested adolescence.

To address the question of legality, certainly there is some strategy to not leaving my card at the scene of a "crime," but I'm not applying paint or gluing paper to walls, and I've made the act of disassembly as simple as possible for the guy who ends up having to deal with that. The authorities would be hard pressed to accuse me of anything worse than littering.

Museum Water Gun Fight, 2011. Photograph: Keith Haskel

Age:

Location:

NYC

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

I made the official Twin Creeks Middle School website when I was in 8^th grade. It didn't occur to me at the time to use my power for mischief. This is a big regret.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

Not to be obtuse, but I guess I basically find the tools that accomplish what I want to accomplish, and then I figure it out through trial and error?

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I finished at University of Southern California with a degree in Cinema-Television Production.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

That's a funny dichotomy. I'm not sure what falls into "traditional" media now. Video has been around for over half a century. Is it traditional yet? I use whatever media seems right for the job.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I'm entering my second year of residency at Flux Factory, an art collective in Long Island City, and I'm involved in "participatory culture" communities here in NYC.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I serve as the Assistant Curator of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image. This is both wonderfully related to and entirely at odds with my extracurricular activities. At the office, I work inside an institution that must kowtow to powerful forces to sustain itself and that relies on its authoritative voice, and I end up asking for permission a lot. At home, I tell powerful forces to fuck off, try to dismantle authoritative voices, and focus on how to get away with as much as possible.

But in both spaces, I get to dive into what is novel, fun, futuristic, and changing the world, and I spend a lot of time creating interactive experiences. I'm extraordinarily lucky to be able to lead both of these lives.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Some people who initially inspired me are Rob Cockerham, Charlie Todd, the Graffiti Research Lab, Steve Lambert, and Banksy. Recently I've been digging into prankster history: provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs, Alan Abel, all the way back to trickster mythology. Most recently: Stephen Colbert. I'm not sure how many of those people would appreciate being accused of being artists, though.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

My best projects are collaborations! Or at least they were the most fun. I work really well with Toronto-based street artist Posterchild, and I do some work with Improv Everywhere. Many of my collaborations are unauthorized, though.

Do you actively study art history?

I actively study history, some of which may include art.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Not in those terms. I'd say my daily reading consists primarily of what Jason Kottke calls Liberal Arts 2.0.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

Yes! Giant corporations are trying to claim an extraordinary amount of power over the internet as we know it. With the SOPA and PIPA bills currently in congress, we're at a critical moment in the history of our data networks. These bills would essentially criminalize the internet! And incredibly, the debate continues over net neutrality: whether the FCC should require ISPs to treat all network traffic equally. If these decisions go the wrong way, they would stymie cultural innovation online, creating enormous costs for anyone imagining new and exciting uses for these incredible tools that we've only begun exploring.

Final Day of Rhizome's Annual Community Campaign

Zoë Salditch — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:57:20 -0500

Today is the final day of Rhizome's Community Campaign! We are incredibly close to reaching our $25,000 goal. If you have not made your contribution yet, we ask that you please do so now. It takes only a few moments to make a donation but it makes an impact that lasts an entire year.

Throughout our history, Rhizome has brought together a forward-thinking, international community of artists, writers, curators, technologists and new media enthusiasts. Together, we can continue to promote this emerging artistic field!

Donations are essential to the operation of our programs and artist initiatives here at Rhizome. With the support from our community, we are able to bring you more content on the blog, bigger and better programs, and new features on the website.

We have been overwhelmed with the generous support from the nearly 300 individuals who have contributed to the campaign. Please consider taking a moment to join the list of Rhizome supporters today.

Extreme Animals Pictureplane Remix and Video

Rhizome — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:52:08 -0500

Pictureplane "Body Mods" remix by Extreme Animals from Jacob Ciocci.

Support a community of forward-thinking artists, writers, curators and technologist and receive Extreme Animals's limited edition ringtone by making a $25 donation during Rhizome's Community Campaign.

"Money is His Medium"

Rhizome — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:03:11 -0500

Poems by Erik Stinson

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:55:10 -0500

Erik Stinson, untitled, 2010

go upstream young man: drugs, guns, advertising and the nyc art world 1700-2010

i’m seeking a legnthy

ethics-agnostic history of

corporate america from

dutch manhattan to

google silicon valley.

can anyone help me?

time is running out.

i think i’m being

followed, my phones

are tapped and all

i want is an entry

level job

Erik Stinson, Untitled, 2011

executive microsystem

three small, harsh

cubes in

concert with

your massive

pulsing

ego circa

1998

teen dads let it all hang out

we went out

to the salt flats

with a 12 rack

of bud and talked

about new

young starlets

Erik Stinson, Untitled, 2010

Anonymous asked: why r u gay

whoa internet literary scene strikes again

‘for the fans’

Letter from the Poetry Editor

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:54:41 -0500

I keep hearing artists say they are writing. What can they do with what they have written? Leave it in the notebook, like a sketch—a trace of a private activity done in the studio. Get it printed in a literary zine and become a hybrid artist/writer. Attach it to the brochure of a gallery exhibition and let it function, like a press release, for the show’s promotional apparatus—an ephemeral accessory to a saleable thing. Make an artist’s book. By joining work with words and work with materials in a tangible object, the artist’s book leads an audience to see the two as equal members in an artist’s output. But what else is there?

The question looks familiar from Rhizome’s perspective. It doubles the one facing artists who work online. With internet art, as with writing, choices about display are wrapped in choices about distribution. At one point or another, many artists wonder whether what they do online is an end in itself or a public sketchbook, a way to work through ideas that will later be embodied in a work to be shown in a gallery. Furthermore, it’s harder to make work online than on a canvas without touching problems of language. The internet may be a medium of visual culture, but the keyword is what finds the image, the tag brings you back to it, chat spreads it. There is plenty of popular-science speculation on how these new everyday forms of language use are “changing our minds.” Until ways are found to measure these changes, art and poetry can tell us more about them than prose.

Today marks the beginning of a project to regularly feature artists’ texts, poetry, and experimental writing on Rhizome’s blog. Posts in the series will be gathered under the editorial tag “wordworks.” They will appear twice monthly, starting today with selections from Erik Stinson. Submissions are welcome.

Recorded Motion Path of Drum Sticks

Rhizome — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:32:57 -0500

This animated drawing is a recorded motion path of drum sticks in process of performing rhythmic composition. Motion trajectory was captured by Vicon MX system, raw CSV files were translated into visual language in C4D. - odaibe

via Prosthetic Knowledge

City of Work by Michael Lewy

joanne mcneil — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:18:52 -0500

City of Work is a project by Michael Lewy including maps, charts, videos, letters, and 3D rendering made with Vue and Google SketchUp. I caught up with Lewy over email to find out more about how this city operates.

City of Work appears to be a superfiction of videos and architectural rendering. Could you describe the story behind it?

City of Work is a dystopian society. Work is all encompassing, vacation is chosen by lottery and each individual is tested at the HUMAN POTENTIAL INSTITUTE. I wanted to create a work that would use a lot of different media to discuss the ideas of success and failure. Along with the video I have also created blueprints, advertising, PowerPoint charts, social media, websites and architectural renderings.

The project seems inspired by corporate management training videos and human resources handbooks. Did you do any research outside of your own office experiences?

The Prelinger Archives, is a great resource for industrial films form the 40’s and 50’s – I look at those a lot. I also look at a lot of architecture from the 1970’s, I have a fondness for the Brutalism period and Russian architecture.

How does one escape the City of Work?

It is gated city but I don’t think of it as a prison. People end there by choice. So I guess you would escape by moving away.

Phenakistoscope, Hypnoscope, Centograph, Animatoscope, Chronophotographoscope, Variscope, Criterioscope, Vitropticon, Vivrescope, Xograph...

Rhizome — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:21:52 -0500

Matthew Battles at Hilobrow uncovers this 1898 New York Times piece listing and considering potential emerging moving image technologies:

Battles comments, "It’s a vibrant bestiary of images, actions, and ideals: time, light, vitality, movement, judgment, change, vision, epiphany, and the animal world. Although the writer of this piece talks about a single machine, these weren’t all names for the same thing; moving pictures emerged in a radiant bouquet of formats, modes of presentation, and proprietary media. The names are evocative of another time—and taken together, they express a condition familiar to us all."

Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique) at London Science Museum

Rhizome — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 10:12:13 -0500

Images from Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique) pop-up at the Science Museum. On display 23 Nov 2011 - 14 Feb 2012

Documentary on the art scene in Cairo after the revolution

Rhizome — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:32:34 -0500

The Noise of Cairo via African Digital Art

I Would Rather My Streets — Gui Machiavelli (2011)

Rhizome — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:08:06 -0500

I Would Rather My Streets is a project by Gui Machiavelli mapping short narratives accessible through QR codes placed throughout Stockholm. It was inspired by Adam Rothstein's essay for Rhizome, City of QR Codes.

Public spaces are treasure troves of countless stories — events, memories and marks. Walking around a city, I am always tempted to know what happened in a certain spot. Look, that tree: did someone scratch his or her name there, decades ago?

I have placed some of my memories created in Stockholm in the same places they were formed. Deposited in QR Codes as a memory layer on top of the world. Small narratives, from commonplace to slightly extravagant, from confessions to puzzling moments, hints of the countless brief experiences that populate our world.

RHIZOME COMMISSIONS: Deadline April 15, 2012

Rhizome — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:27:13 -0500

2011 Rhizome Commissions winning entry: Video still from a study for iParade#2: Unchanged When Exhumed by Tali Hinkis.

Time to get your applications in for Rhizome's 2012 Commissions cycle! Each year, this program supports emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices. Rhizome Commissions awards generally range from $1,000 to $5,000. Deadline is Sunday, April 15th. Be sure to read over the eligibility, policy and procedures before you begin the application process.

Application Deadline: Sunday April 15, 2012

Approval Voting: Wednesday April 18, 2012 - Saturday May 12, 2012

Rank Voting: Monday May 14, 2012 - Friday June 01, 2012

The Rhizome Commissions program is supported, in part, by funds from Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Wieden + Kennedy, the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support is provided by generous individuals and Rhizome members.

Rhizome Recommends: RSS Bundle for Google Reader

Rhizome — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:41:16 -0500

Check out some of our favorite blogs and tumblrs with a Google Bundle compiled by Rhizome senior editor Joanne McNeil: Rhizome Recommends.

via TumblrLRJP

via VVORK

via i like this art

via Field Notes

Artist Profile: Clement Valla

Zoë Salditch — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:45:07 -0500

Clement Valla and John Cayley's Hapax Phaenomena is featured this month on The Download.

Certificate of Authenticity, Hapax Phaenomena (2011)

In Hapax Phaenomena and other projects such as Google Earth Sites, you refer to your art objects as artifacts or curios. Do you see yourself as an observer documenting an endangered technological curiosity?

Yes. These things will all disappear, and probably soon, in the name of progress. These artifacts are atypical ephemera, and often accidental products created by various internet algorithms. There is very little direct human hand in these artifacts. Though the purpose in collecting them is not simply for their preservation. It's more about framing them, allowing them to be seen, and showing a kind of bizarre byproduct of these super-functioning and useful systems, such as Google.

When did you first notice the glitch in Google Earth? What inspired you to begin capturing these surreal moments?

It was accidental. I was Google-Earthing a location in China, and I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down. I could tell there were two competing visual inputs here - the 3d model, and the mapping of the satellite photography, and they didn't match up. The computer is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, but the depth cues of the aerials, the perspective, the shadows and lighting, were not aligning with depth cues of the 3d earth model. I figured that this was not a unique situation in Google Earth, and I started looking at obvious situations where the depth cues would be off—bridges, tall skyscrapers, canyons. Soon I noticed the photos being updated, and the aerial photographs would be 'flatter' (taken from less of an angle) or the shadows below bridges would be more muted. Google Earth is a constantly changing dynamic system, so I had to capture these specific moments as still images.

Could you talk a bit about your reasoning behind using Amazon's mechanical turk in "A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals"?

It's a project that's about iteration and recursion. Mechanical Turk is typically set up to get a massive number of different responses to a single topic or question - like a poll. But I was interested in doing something recursive, where each person's output is then recycled back into the task. So the process is a feedback loop. In this way there was no expectation of a particular output, I simply created the structure and let it run. This project is similar to the childhood game of telephone (in which one person whispers a message to another, who whispers it to another, and so forth). The message gets corrupted or distorted from the endless recycling of the same piece of data. On a grander sense, I think it's really about how a copy can be a unique object. Copies that are made in an absence of context can create something new and unexpected, and that's a nontraditional framework for the idea of what a copy is. The thing about Mechanical Turk is that it's absolutely the place where an output has no context. The workers are most often disassociated from the purpose of what they're doing. It's possibly a questionable ethic— and I think this is a product of any machine age, in which tasks are broken down, and only few have privileged information about overarching purpose. The copy can be free to deviate wildly from it's origin because there is no idea of the 'original.'

Your work often addresses ideas of human vs computer aided interpretation. In your observations, what differences and similarities exists between the two?

At this moment I think human and computer activity is hardly distinguishable. I am interested in the moments where the typical distinction is blurred or even inverted. Take Amazon's Mechanical Turk, billed as artificial-artificial intelligence. Amazon took the name from an 18th Century automaton that successfully beat humans at chess. A figurine that looked like a seated Turk sat behind a huge contraption filled with gear and levers, that would whir and smoke as it played. It was eventually revealed that the machine was operated by a human hidden inside. We see here an example of a machine using a human to accomplish its task; I like to think of it as the machine outsourcing to a human. In Amazon's Mechanical Turk, they built a system whereby computer programs can query humans, get responses, and react accordingly: human aided computation as opposed to computer aided design.With Hapax Phenomena, I have collected unique word and image combinations that are created by a human individual at the source, and then Google's algorithms put them together as the result of a search. But sometimes the source is actually created by automated machines for commercial purposes. It gets confusing to parse out what the humans are doing versus what the algorithms are doing. I think Mechanical Turk, just the fact that it exists, first awakened me to that reality. There is something similar going on in the projects I have done with the Chinese Oil Painting Factories; the paintings are 'factory' made copies, produced with a consistent and expected output, but the whole value is derived from the human hand that created it. The visible mark of the hand is what distinguishes these images from other reproduction processes.

Age:

Location:

Brooklyn

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

About 5 years, strictly speaking, but earlier than that I started tinkering with programming while working as an architect. Digital tools were really appearing all over the workplace for architects at that time—3D modeling and such, and as I began using them, I found it interesting that the tools could be customized through programming. I was interested in all the possibility that programming allowed, so much systematic thinking, procedure, iteration, algorithm. Also, I figured, if I learned how to program, I could begin to have insight into how the digital tools I used were made and how they could be unmade, tampered with and altered.Some of my projects now require a lot of programming, and are technologically challenging to realize, and some of my projects require almost no technological expertise - they're simply screenshots of a freely available software. But learning how to code, and how software systems operate has provided me with a framework through which to look at digital technologies.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

My main tool is the algorithm, and this tends to be how I tap into the core processes in my work: iteration, loop, recursion, copying, chance, recombination. By programming computers, I tend to be able to create my own tools, or modify existing ones to suit my needs. Beyond that, I use whatever best suits the project I am working on.

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I recieved a BA from Columbia University, where my major was architecture, and then an MFA from RISD in the Digital + Media department.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

I don't paint, but I have made paintings, and I'm not a printmaker but I have made prints. At the core of my work is an interest in process and algorithm. Beyond that, each project requires its own media - the output is varied and comes out of the process.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

No.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

I used to work as a designer in architecture offices. I now teach at RISD. I also freelance as designer and programmer. I don't make any separation between these different activities - I constantly let them feed into one another.

Who are your key artistic influences?

They are changing all the time, depending on what I am working on and looking at. Right now, I'm obsessing over Natalie Jeremijenko, Jodi, Cyprien Gaillard, Allan McCollum, Matt Mullican and Tauba Auerbach. Last month it was Manfred Mohr, Takeshi Murata, Rem Kollhaas, Lust and Stephen Wolfram.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

Yes. Recently I've collaborated with John Cayley on the Hapax Phaenomena project.

Do you actively study art history?

Yes.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

Again, this is an ever changing list. I usually have a big pile of photocopies and books laying around, but I never get through it. Recent good reads (or viewings) include some Peter Halley essays, Brian Massumi, Rem Koolhaas, Adam Curtis, Jonathan Lethem, Douglas Hoefstader, David F. Wallace, Adam Curtis, Manuel De Landa, Umberto Eco, Claire Bishop, The Critical Art Ensemble. Also, radicalart.info - this site is amazing.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

The thing I try to avoid is the 'wow' factor that often accompanies new media art. I'm very wary of the impressive novelty of a new piece of technology for its own sake. I almost feel that a technology has to be slightly outdated or at least second-generation technology before it can turn into interesting art. Before that, the novelty, the 'progress' embedded in new media is its principal message, and this tends to drown out everything else.

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome 2011

Rhizome — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:29:13 -0500

Paul Chan, burningkindlepointone.gif (2011.) (Rhizome Interview)

Essays

Interviews

Reviews

BYOB Venezia

Criticism

Premieres

Artist Profiles

Monument to Internet Hookups, performance sculpture (2009) at the 2nd Athens Biennale, by Angelo Plessas (Artist Profile)

Studio Visits

More

screengrab from Kane and Lynch 2 via Steam Postcards (Post: Architectural Uncanny Valley)

Thank You to This Month’s Sponsors

Rhizome — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:13:34 -0500

We would like to take a break from our daily posting to thank this month’s sponsors. These are the organizations and companies that keep us publishing, so be sure to check them out!

Artspace. Collect art from the world’s best contemporary artists at accessible prices.
NYU Steinhardt. MA in Studio Art: Three-Summer Master’s Program in Berlin.
Fred Torres Collaborations. Gretchen Ryan, Cheers in Heaven, November 15, 2011 – January 7, 2012.
The International Center of Photography. Apply for the ICP-Bard MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies.
Dia:Beacon. Now on view is Opus+One, a solo exhibition by Jean-Luck Moulene at Dia:Beacon concurrent with a new work by the artist at the Dan Flavin Art Institute.
Artsystems. Efficient, comprehensive and powerful software tools for fine art and antiques management.
The School of Visual Arts. Apply now for the new MA program in Critical Theory and the Arts.
The Rhode Island School of Design. Apply for open academic positions, including Assistant Professor, Department of Painting.
Kianga Ellis Projects. The New York Group Show — “I am the judge. I am the jury.” Rebellion & Empowerment in Contemporary Art.
Emily Carr University. Focus your talents. Applications for the 2012 Master of Applied Arts now open.
Fountain Art Fair. An exhibition of avant garde artwork in Los Angeles during Art Platform, New York during Armory week and Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach.

If you are interested in advertising on Rhizome, please get in touch with Nectar Ads, the Art Ad Network.

Rhizome Community Campaign: Jon Rafman

Rhizome — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:07:59 -0500

For our most generous supporters, we offer two high quality, archival prints by Jon Rafman from his New Age Demanded series. During the annual Community Campaign, all donations come with a limited edition art work from some of the great artists in our community. Support the arts this year by making a donation today.

New Age Demanded (Dubuftet)

Rafman has created two unique digital prints from his New Age Demanded series. The prints are 3-D models of Greek busts that incorporate Sci-Fi elements, which Rafman suggests “evoke the covers of records for long-lost Space Operas.” Each bust represents an individual existing within their own realm, and features the settings and recognizable features of each person it is modeled after. For the works for Rhizome, this includes the artists Franz Kline and Jean Dubuffet. The series takes its name from Ezra Pound’s poem, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” which is partly about an aspiring young artist’s struggle to write poetry in a philistine age.

Hasan Elahi at TEDxBrussels

Rhizome — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:39:24 -0500

Hasan Elahi tells TEDxBrussels his story of becoming a well-known media artist. 8 years ago he started forfeiting his privacy to avoid FBI surveillance. He put his entire life online, but says he managed to keep his privacy. In our time, culture is changing fast, technology is developing rapidly, but the policies can not keep up with this speed, but "the rules of yesterday simply cannot apply for the life of tomorrow".

Rhizome Community Campaign: Limited Edition Ringtones from Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals

Rhizome — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:07:55 -0500

Members who contribute a $25 donation to Rhizome's Community Campaign will receive limited edition ringtones from Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals.

Extreme Animals's DARK GREEN, video by Jacob Ciocci

Anamanaguchi makes loud and fast chiptune music with a hacked Nintendo Entertainment System from 1985. They composed the original soundtrack for Scott Pilgram vs the World: The Game, and recently returned from a tour in Japan. You can check out their latest album Dawn Metropolis on their website.

Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci and David Wightman) blends together an unique combination of noise, dance music, and performance art. Over the last nine years, they have released numerous CD-Rs, tapes and videos, and regularly book DIY tours. Their ability to cross between fine art and music scenes has allowed them to play in galleries and museums, and underground music venues.

Both bands will be playing together in Ottowa, ON at SAW Gallery January 19th.

Miko no Inori - Mariko Mori (1996)

Rhizome — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:03:41 -0500

This Week on Rhizome Community Boards: QR Calligraphy, Jobs, Opportunities, and More

Rhizome — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:08:58 -0500

Recently added to the Artbase: QR Calligraphy

The piece is a reflection about the history of the reproduction of images, extending its boundaries to the interactive scope, it requires audience participation to complete. Draws a parallel between the traditional context of printmaking and contemporary mas media dissemination of images in the digital age of Internet and mobile phones. Start from the visual similarities found between the geometric Kufic Arabic calligraphy and QR codes (Quick Response) used to transmit information current data can be decoded with a mobile phone camera. This type of calligraphy, best known for being the first in which the Quran is written, it also has great importance in the dissemination of mystical poetry. Using computer software, were coded Mathnavi different fragments, a masterpiece of Sufi mystical poetry, unlike other branches of Islam, using the intuitive practice and experience, to get a direct knowledge of spiritual realities (Tahqeeq) throughunveiling (kashf) and inspiration (ilham). The computer language of process and production codes, is scheduled and runs on an arabic numeral system, the binary system of zeros and ones, thus the contents of a medieval expression that seems to have stuck in time, serves as a starting point for a process that generates an image of the 21st century. The project consists of eight parts, one for each volume of Mathnavi. - Manuel Fernández

Events/Lectures/Exhibitions:

Resonate - Belgrade New Media Festival - March 2012
Johansson Projects presents Follies of the Digital Arcade, Oakland, CA. Thu Jan 26, 2012 12:00 - Sat Mar 17, 2012
A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance, apexart, NYC. Jan 11, 2012 18:00 - Sat Mar 10, 2012

Jobs:

Tenure-Track Faculty, History of Design, MassArt
Assistant Professor, specializing in Digital Sculpture, School of Art+Design and School of Film & Media studies at Purchase College, SUNY
Adjunct Professor, Dymanic Web Design, Art Department at The College of New Jersey.
Chair for the Department of Art, College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University
Editorial Fellow, Rhizome

Call for Submissions:

39th SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques seeks artists. The conference takes place next year in Los Angeles and the deadline for submission is January 10, 2012.
Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School announce a call for papers and projects to the 12th annual Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference, taking place April 13-14,2012. Deadline: JANUARY 15, 2012
Gays Hate Techno is a new web project seeking to publish thoughtful, subjective writings on the intersection of techno music, identity, perception, history, and politics from a queer perspective.

Misc:

Podcast: Conversation with William Bennett, Ràdio Web MACBA radiophonic project
DIGIMAG 69 - NOVEMBER 2011
VisualcontainerTv presents on ExhibitContainer — "Flowers Of Chaos " Chinese Animation Videoart selection curated by Cecilia Freschini. An online broadcast of video art through Wed Jan 18, 2012

MORE...

Videos from Chaos Computer Congress (28C3)

Rhizome — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:21:12 -0500

Chaos Computer Congress just released videos from the conference including...

Cory Doctorow — The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

Kai Denker — Does Hacktivism Matter?

Stefan Burschka — Datamining for Hackers

Andy Müller-Maguhn — BuggedPlanet

Errol Morris: 'We've forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world'

Rhizome — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:56:38 -0500

Writer and Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art and propaganda in photography. Drawing examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean war, cited in his book Believing is Seeing, he argues we've often underplayed the link between photographs and the physical world - The Guardian

Rhizome Community Campaign: Ofri Cnaani

Rhizome — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 11:06:56 -0500

You can give the gift of art with Rhizome's limited edition art work, like Slide show #15 (no title, 1988) by Ofri Cnaani, only available during the Community Campaign. Make a donation today by selecting an artwork of your choice.

Cnaani has donated a lush digital print that recalls a recent, but now obsolete past. Banks of bulky desktop computers under rows of neon lights in an overcrowded, here depicted in a sepia-tinted slide provides a glimpse of what the workplace and our working habits used to be like not so long ago.

To learn more about Cnaani and her work, see our interview with the artist.

Rhizome Community Campaign: SymbiosisC

Rhizome — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:26:34 -0500

SymbiosisO on Vimeo.

Kärt Ojavee & Eszter Ozsvald's SymbiosisO project is a collection of textile interfaces that react to the human touch. SymbiosisC is a low-tech member of the collection, a cushion that responds to heat and body warmth by changing its color, and is available now during the Community Campaign.

The geometry of these textiles are generated with Voronoi tessellation algorithm and utilizes the conducive properties of felt as a substrate material. A heat sensitive coating is applied to the felt and activated by electronics embedded into the material.

Support Rhizome's Community Campaign by making a contribution today!

Hello World, Christopher Baker's collection of 5000 video diaries, at The Saatchi Gallery

Rhizome — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 11:27:33 -0500

The Saatchi Gallery's screening room opens January 3rd with Christopher Baker’s video installation, Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise. (via FAD)

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise from Christopher Baker

Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.

On one hand, new media technologies like YouTube have enabled new speakers at an alarming rate. On the other hand, no new technologies have emerged that allow us to listen to all of these new public speakers. Each video consists of a single lone individual speaking candidly to a (potentially massive) imagined audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The multi-channel sound composition glides between individuals and the group, allowing viewers to listen in on unique speakers or become immersed in the cacophony. Viewers are encouraged to dwell in the space.

Spamm (Super Art Modern Museum)

Rhizome — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:55:06 -0500

Curated by Thomas Cheneseau + Systaime, Spamm (Super Art Modern Museum) is a new online art gallery featuring an impressive list of artists — JODI, Françoise Gamma, Angelo Plessas, Mr Doob, Rosa Menkman, Jeremy Bailey, Petra Cortright, among many others

Art or Not

Rhizome — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:17:19 -0500

Art or Not — Hot or Not for the art world, created by OKFocus (Jonathan Vingiano and Ryder Ripps.)

The Rhizome Frontpage RSS

My Broken iPhone

Rhizome Presents Renowned Digital Artist Rafael Rozendaal in web-based VIP Art Fair

The Art of Fieldwork

Artist Profile: Rick Silva

Artist Profile: Joe Winter

Rhizome Recommends: Art and Technology SXSW Panels

Jim Punk: exq=.s.te =n.c&de/s

Hidden Information: The Work of Jim Sanborn

Feb 10th at the New Museum: Untitled (mobile.app) + (one more thing..), JODI 2012 (premiere)

This Week on Rhizome Community Boards: I'm Here and There, Jobs, Opportunities, and More

Physibles

Sexts from Patricia Lockwood

Artists Respond to W.A.G.E. Open Forum with Hans Abbing

Book Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

Artist Profile: Huong Ngo

Karen Archey on a Panel with Hans Ulrich Obrist at DLD12

Terence Gower’s New Utopias

Rhizome Joins Jan 18 Internet Blackout to Raise Awareness of PIPA/SOPA

Artist Profile: Jason Eppink

Final Day of Rhizome's Annual Community Campaign

Extreme Animals Pictureplane Remix and Video

"Money is His Medium"

Poems by Erik Stinson

Letter from the Poetry Editor

Recorded Motion Path of Drum Sticks

City of Work by Michael Lewy

RECOMMENDED READING: Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone by Simon Sellars

Phenakistoscope, Hypnoscope, Centograph, Animatoscope, Chronophotographoscope, Variscope, Criterioscope, Vitropticon, Vivrescope, Xograph...

Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique) at London Science Museum

Documentary on the art scene in Cairo after the revolution

RECOMMENDED READING: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012

I Would Rather My Streets — Gui Machiavelli (2011)

RHIZOME COMMISSIONS: Deadline April 15, 2012

Rhizome Recommends: RSS Bundle for Google Reader

Artist Profile: Clement Valla

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome 2011

Thank You to This Month’s Sponsors

Rhizome Community Campaign: Jon Rafman

Hasan Elahi at TEDxBrussels

Rhizome Community Campaign: Limited Edition Ringtones from Anamanaguchi and Extreme Animals

Miko no Inori - Mariko Mori (1996)

This Week on Rhizome Community Boards: QR Calligraphy, Jobs, Opportunities, and More

Videos from Chaos Computer Congress (28C3)

Errol Morris: 'We've forgotten that photographs are connected to the physical world'

Rhizome Community Campaign: Ofri Cnaani

Rhizome Community Campaign: SymbiosisC

Hello World, Christopher Baker's collection of 5000 video diaries, at The Saatchi Gallery

Spamm (Super Art Modern Museum)

RECOMMENDED READING: The Curse of Cow Clicker

Art or Not