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You'll (N)ever Watch Alone

Rhizome — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:44:21 -0500

Still from Art21 Telethon, May 2012

There's performance: immediate, rehearsed and present; then there's television: distant, canned, and broadcast. One offspring of their coupling is the telethon. 'Telethon' became a recognized portmanteau of 'television' and 'marathon' with Jerry Lewis' aid in the 1950s. His telethons for the Muscular Dystrophy Association ran and ran: there'd be a song, a celebrity, a mail carrier, a joke, banter and filler. The marathon viewing sessions kept attention on the cause at hand by providing various entertainment in service of one goal: to raise awareness and funds for the organization. The camera was always on: in order to look away, the viewer had to hit the clicker to change the view (or turn off the box). Inside, the telethon continued.

Recently, Art21 held their own artist-led telethon. Hosted by Ronnie Bass, who had explored the format in 2007 in order to raise funds for his Performa TV piece, the event came to be after the NEA cut funding to the PBS art documentary program. Artists replaced entertainers to create some nine hours of durational broadcast performance streaming from Algus Greenspon Gallery to the Art21 site. It was telethon to its core, making up what it lacked in big-production finesse with performative sincerity, intimacy, and palpable camaraderie.

The telethon as a fundraiser makes less viable sense today: crowd-funding options are less time-consuming and presentation-intensive. What remains is its value as a style: the telethon as an experience that fills time with performance, and an endurance event in service of an objective.

Screen. Image. Text.

Orit Gat — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:57:39 -0500

Tauba Auerbach, RGB Colorspace Atlas. (2011)

I once heard Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College, compare books to stairs. “They’ve invented the elevator,” he said, “but sometimes you still walk up.” There are countless discussions on the future of the book—they are picked up in magazine feature articles, in trade conferences, and in academic roundtables—and in all of these, the future of the printed word seems certain: in a generation or two, print will become obsolete. In this age of changing habits, if print is the stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?

This moment in time, and the awareness of the possibilities electronic publishing grant, affect the manner in which we relate to texts in a way that is under constant scrutiny. But images prove to be a different problem. The separation between text and images has a long history. In fact, images have posed a challenge for publishers from the early days of print—be it the cost of printing them; the payments for illustrators, photographers, and designers; or simply contextualizing the images and their relation to the text—but they have become crucial to our understanding of texts. When the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper, began publishing in 1842, the relationship between the text and the engraved images in the paper was such a novelty that it took the weekly about a decade to stake a hold in that era’s news distribution channels. Once it did, it became one of the most widely circulated newspapers in Victorian Britain. The marriage of text and the engraved image marked a new level of fluency in communication via images, which does away with staples of early print day, even though the separation between image and text lasted for many decades later, and can still be traced today. (Think, for example, of the plate pages, where color images were glued onto the paper, so that the book or magazine would be printed in black and white, adding the color pages later in a way that saves money on printing, but also generates a wholly different relationship with images. These are often associated with encyclopedias, but a large number of artist’s monographs retained this design even after color printing became widely accessible, creating the odd text-image relationship where an artwork is described to the most minute detail, with a comment in parenthesis directing the reader to “color plate 3,” where the mentioned piece could be seen in glossy print.)

The generations to come of age in the days of digital publishing and reading on screens have a much more complicated relationship with images. The human eye-brain system is capable of reading a large number of high quality images in a matter of split seconds, and this, alongside the hand-eye coordination—think about the pleasure of a touch screen versus inky newspaper pages—is rapidly developing to mirror our changing habits of consuming information. So much so that the contemporary heightened sensitivity to the way we read images can lead to an ability to, at times, ignore the quality of the images when inserted into a text, the way our brain glides over a typo in the flow of reading. The way we read images online is only one thing these magazines deal with in the process of publishing, but it is surely an element that dictates a large portion of the reading experience of these publications.

The first issue of the Illustrated London News (1842)

The endless discussions on the future of print bring up the contemporary fluency with images on a regular basis. Aside from the fact that digital publishing is often cheaper and always easier to disseminate, many consider the role of the image in digital publishing to be a key aspect in the contemporary experience of reading. The benefits of handheld devices are considered time and again, especially in relation to embedding a variety of image formats: slideshows, moving images, animated GIFs, and so forth. A number of start-ups like Flyp bring screen-based reading beyond the initial technology, and enhanced e-books are quite widely considered to be the next major option offered by electronic reading devices.

Whereas some of the aforementioned key possibilities that publishing online presents may seem so pertinent to contemporary art publishing, they also bring up a number of crucial issues in the relationship between the screen, the text, and the image. In the past few years, contemporary art publishing has had to somehow consider all of these questions—be it print publications that have to strategize their web presence or online publications that need to carve out a place for themselves in the web’s infinite possibilities for distraction. Taking into consideration a number of web-based contemporary art magazines, I asked editors to answer a number of questions about the way their editorial lines react to the possibilities and restrictions of the internet environment. Questions considered things like what online distribution offered, the economies of attention on the internet, sourcing images online, and finally, the relationship between print and web-based media, especially considering current tendencies of online art publications to come out with print readers.

Distribution: The Internet’s Nuts and Bolts

Mousse iPad Screenshot

“Intention follows a platform that you can deal with and afford,” says Mousse's Head of Publications Stefano Cernuschi. Mousse is printed in newspaper form, but also has extensive online presence and recently launched a dedicated iPad app. The distribution of print publications follows certain sets of rules—perfect binding, for example, helps—and a number of print publications utilize the internet as another distribution platform. Artforum and Frieze, for instance, upload each issue’s table of contents but only make a number of articles in each issue available online for free, thus enticing readers to buy the print magazine. Frieze uploads all older content, whereas Artforum has a unique website too, which includes web-only features like certain reviews and the infamous Diary section.

At the early days of the internet, users became accustomed to getting things for free, content especially, but once the first popular sites introduced paywalls, many followed and many will trail. Online magazine Triple Canopy recently introduced a membership system, asking its readers for $3 a month; the magazine will still be freely accessible to non-members, but a system of remuneration is indeed being considered, a complex idea based on a notion of community: That readers will pay for what they can get for free because they would like to support the magazine. So what about Cernuschi’s “platform you can afford”? Clearly, publishing online comes to a fraction of the printing costs, which is one of the obvious reasons to go online. Another is distribution. While going viral on the internet is still a process that is a mystery to many (not to mention the example of the somewhat unexpected online popularity of cats), web readership, even if murky and somewhat untrackable really, can be a constant surprise that is inexistent in a print magazine, even when considering the idea that a print product might circulate between more than the one person who pays for it at a given store. And with online readership comes the new idea of participation. In “The Journey West,” his editorial and declaration of intent, Thomas Lawson, the Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles–based online magazine East of Borneo, explains that the magazine’s “genesis has been long and deliberative: several years of thinking past the delights and constraints of the printed page, and one very intense year of thinking through the actual possibilities of current online publication.” [1] One of the publication’s stated intents is to build up an ongoing archive about Los Angeles and its cultural scene, and one way East of Borneo found to do this is incorporate its readers. Thus, readers can upload content to the site, contribute texts and source material, and partake in the construction of the site as a resource. These examples take the idea of the dated notion of web 2.0 user-generated content to a level different than Facebook, to use the obvious example. While Facebook makes its users work for it, they do not partake in a larger Facebook community (in fact, the social network parcels out users’ sense of community for them: a school attended, a workplace, etc.). What these publications do is harness the user-generated labor and value (monetary or cultural) in order to create a sense of public.

What We Pay for Attention

The internet gets confusing at times. We consume enormous amounts of information online, the origins of which we often can’t point to, except for in our browser’s history. Publishing online seems like such an obvious choice—it’s cheap, widely accessible, and so “of our time,” to paraphrase Baudelaire’s il faut être de son temps—but it also means that online publications are continuously fighting for the reader’s attention. Online attention is a constant battle. Apart from the traffic of a site, web analytics also measure how much time a given person will spend on this or that website. Five minutes is not bad at all. The economy of attention online is radically different than anything known in print. “Though we all spent hours each day scanning screens for information, what on the internet did we actually read?”[2] Ask the editors of Triple Canopy, whose (much repeated) mantra is to “slow down the internet.” Text has a built-in duration: we take a few milliseconds to recognize words; being image literate also means that even those seconds may seem like much. “Slowing down the internet” seems like one way in, both textually and visually: “Our thinking of images in relationship to economies of attention is no different than how we consider writing,” says Triple Canopy’s Hannah Whitaker. “The photographs that we publish might require more attention and consideration than others online. We cater to a readership that accepts expending time and effort on a piece.” The process of contextualizing online images, among the amazing diversity of the web, takes time. Demanding that the reader spend this time with the magazine is in fact quite refreshing and may push the viewer to, indeed, read online.

Another possible answer to the question of what content online do we actually read is built-in to mobile devices’ interfaces. Ironically enough, even though mobile devices are supposedly designed to keep us company in transit (even considering the fact that Apple now advertises the iPad as a handheld device meant mainly for people who tend to sit on the couch most of the time, and don’t want to walk over to their macbooks), the relatively new idea of apps actually introduces a new sense of undivided attention online. iOS, Apple’s operating system, does not really allow for simultaneous use of two apps. The result is that while on our computer we always have another tab open on the browser, another program open in the background, or another memo blinking on the calendar view, when we use the internet on our mobile devices, we focus on the app we are using. Reading the New York Times on its dedicated app doesn’t allow for a quick change to look at the new email that just came in without leaving the newspaper app and switching to the email one—a decision much more conscious than that of switching tabs, for example. The iPad, iPhone, and other handheld devices also rid themselves of the cursor, so that their users are not really directed anywhere anymore. This is an interaction that designers are apparently much challenged by—a way of looking at a page that is closer to reading print. Where the cursor was a stand-in for the user’s finger, the finger is now used again, and the eye follows a part of the body rather than an element embedded in the screen.

Now that such a screen-based platform exists, how to use it? “No one reads Mousse from cover to cover—and I’d imagine the iPad app is the same,” says Cernuschi. “When it comes to attention, I think it is also a derivative of the way in which information is presented graphically. We try to work with reduction—when the quantity of textual and visual content you can upload is limitless, it gets quite difficult—and we didn’t want to be a Wikipedia kind of experience. We use one font across the range, keep the text simple, and try to focus on the images.” Cernuschi moves on to explain, “In a way, we’re all children of the iPod.” The act of using a touch screen is so pleasurable, such a radically different movement, scrolling with one’s finger rather than flipping through paper, that it changes the user’s interaction with the visual content. What the editors at Mousse claim was difficult in the development of the app is its boundless nature. In print, every addition might be translated to printing costs—so physical constraints bring about the necessity of making choices, and with it, an editorial line. Which led the editors to understand the iPad as a reading platform—“it’s still two-dimensional,” sayd Cernuschi—and so the app is not completely based on multimedia, even though it does include a number of videos, for example. But the shift from a printed copy of Mousse to its iPad app is not as sweeping as one may imagine.

The Location of the Online Image

Screenshot from Red Hook, with images provided through Katya Sander’s Hard Drive (where images accompanying the texts are automatically pulled from the web, based on each reader’s hard drive as well as key words and themes in the articles).

When requesting images for a print publication, some guidelines are quite clear: The digital image needs to be 300dpi, it needs to be of a certain size, measured in inches and centimeters rather than pixels, and (at least usually) the rights for it need to be cleared.[3] Online publishing muddles all of these. While some of the publications contacted for this article attested that they have a photo editor or image editor (the leap to “image editor” in order to describe publishing in the online sphere is slowly being made. As Whitaker noted, “It points to an opening up of the field to include the non-photographic image”), their role is more curatorial than that of a traditional image editor. Are there any rules as to which images are published, the way they are retrieved, and their integration in the magazines? Surely, many images are harvested from a variety of online repository, Google Images being the obvious example. This nods to the flattening of the digital image in a complicated way. On screen, the different kinds of images—say, film stills, digital or analogue photography, digital renderings, and so forth—can be quite similar. While we are becoming increasingly visually literate, few are the people who truly interact with the distinction between the digital image and the physical print. No one is stunned anymore by the idea of a collector buying a photograph based on an image sent to him or her via email from a gallery. The printing process—moving from the screen to the physical object, that is—becomes a formality. In her introduction to Triple Canopy’s issue on photography, “Black Box,” Whitaker points out the fact that a large number of the images found online (be they images uploaded to social networks, news-related ones, or commercial photographs) were shot digitally and uploaded to the internet, without, according to her, “so much as a passing consideration of printing them in a physical form.”[4]

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College recently introduced Red Hook, an online journal for curatorial studies. Red Hook’s relationship with images is one example that truly considers the magazine’s online existence and presence. In the editorial for the first issue, its editor Tirdad Zolghadr states, “Although this journal will certainly attempt to do justice to opportunities for revisiting traditional hierarchies between image and text, it will be careful not to imply that language is diminishing in comparative importance, or that the online sphere can heal old wounds. On the contrary, the idea is to highlight and complicate an enduring hegemony in the hermeneutic food chain of online circulation.”[5] One way to complicate those old wounds Zolghadr mentions—the text/image divide being a painful one—is the magazine’s particular approach to images. Issue 1 is fully illustrated by one artist project: Katya Sander’s Hard Drive, where all images accompanying the texts are automatically pulled from the web, based on each reader’s hard drive as well as key words and themes in the articles. Red Hook does not have an image editor, but rather, it recruits artists to think through and further explore the magazine’s relationship to images. Zolghadr further explains, “This was not meant to delegate image-editing responsibilities, at least not in a lazy and self-effacing way, but to avoid putting the cart before the horse. In a curatorial context, the specific mode of knowledge production I find the most productive is one that is developed and tested via an imbrication of theory and practice, saying and doing—preferably though not necessarily in tandem with artists. When Sander was invited to partake in the first issue, the instrumentalization of images in a publication context—and the lack of online signposts that traditionally steer this kind of process—was a cornerstone of the conversation.” The resulting project is refreshing—I haven’t seen an image repeated twice in the issue—, and also confusing—the images accompanying the texts on my screen varied from milk bottles in a crate to demonstrators in Eastern Europe, and the link to the images' original contexts may be an interesting addition, but one that can be distracting, in that it sends the reader back to the wilderness of online image repositories, asking him or her to make sense of the images once those no longer have any relationship to the original text where they were encountered. It may be an interesting exercise in decoding images, but it’s also a losing hand in the battle on online attention.

From Print to Screen and Back Again

(from print to screen):

“When Triple Canopy was founded,” its editors recall, “the content was bounded in a box and you ‘flipped’ through the pages as you would a print magazine. We hoped that this page metaphor would underline our relationship the kind of serious content more associated with printed media—to (as we’ve often stated) ‘slow down the internet.’ In the end, this format proved to be limiting and, ultimately, anathema to our mission to consider the internet’s specific qualities as a form. We eventually redesigned the magazine and scrapped the page in favor of horizontally scrolling columns. In this new format, the relationships between image and text are more fluid. A given image is seen in the context of text that comes both before and after it and the bounds of the magazine are constrained by the size of the browser window and by the computer's screen size, or are in other words, set by the reader.” What this description exemplifies is the way in which the design of web-based art publications considers itself in face of print. The design of numerous online art publications considers the history and tradition of print in a myriad of nostalgic, more or less skeumorphic ways while bringing up old fears that reading habits are almost unchangeable. Even though Triple Canopy is quite unique in its horizontal scroll, it shares a similar attention to the print versus screen reading experience. One interesting element of which is the persisting presence of the table of contents in web-based publications: as part of the linking culture of the internet, the links to the other articles in the same issue are visible across the board. Another aspect of online culture that these publications have picked up on is tagging by subject and “for further reading” tabs, which try to anticipate the reader’s interests according with the stated themes of a given article.

Where do images fall within these design questions? Triple Canopy’s editors attest that, “One issue that came up in the transition between the two formats [the flip box and the horizontal scroll] is that you lose the impact of a photograph when it slides onto the page rather than appearing in an instant. But, we do have a full screen function for those images that require more white space around them.” Most other publications have a vertical design that introduces images as sidebars or directly aligned in the text, mainly without linking the images out or allowing for a full-screen viewing option. I would argue that this is another remnant of print culture in the digital sphere. Considering that the content of these online publications generally sways toward the theoretical more so than the glossy-print-magazine type, this brings forth a relationship with images where they are more illustrative and do not require a very specific—say, full-screen view—attention. Mousse’s Cernuschi says, “We have a complicated relationship with images because we print in a newspaper format but we’re a fine arts magazine. So we flirt with this idea of inaccurate reproduction in the first place. The priority with images is not exactly to ‘get it,’—for that, I think paper printing is a very honest filter: it looks cool, but not really good. On the screen, images look much better. I would much prefer an image printed on appropriate paper than on a screen, but that’s usually not the case. So for us it’s very different, especially considering that we can reproduce media. You develop a so-called video still aesthetic on paper.”

(and back again):

When considering the multiplicity of valid reasons why so many contemporary art publications choose to go online, it is quite astonishing to see how extensively they consider print as an option.[6] Take e-flux journal: It was launched by an organization that made its name and brand by being the first to give a very specific—and much called-for—online service. The journal, too, started in 2008 as a web-based initiative; but it soon introduced a series of readers in book form, published in collaboration with the Berlin-based publishing house Sternberg Press, and a print-on-demand system that allows readers and institutions to print out full issues followed. e-flux journal’s distribution system includes art institutions and bookstores around the world, who all download a PDF generated directly from the online articles, in what is a nod to ideas of open circulation and transmission of ideas on the internet, only in an offline, widely distributed but still independent, version.

A number of other web-based magazines seem inclined to follow e-flux journal’s direction. Triple Canopy published a first reader, Invalid Format, in the end of 2011. The cover of the book reads “Volume 1”—and indeed, the reader only covers issues 1 through 4, bringing up the amusing question of whether Triple Canopy will forever chase its own tail: Will the book-form readers catch up with the online journals? And Red Hook editor Zolghadr states that publishing a reader could be one direction for the magazine, but according to him “we’re taking these things pedantically seriously, and are in no hurry to expand to other media just yet. The journal will first need to take its time to familiarize itself with its technical and institutional specificities.”

So what does it mean to print out the internet? In the introduction to Invalid Format, the editors of Triple Canopy discuss their initial speculations as to the possible longevity of a web-based publication: “We had a sense of the inevitability of obsolescence—think of cassette tapes, LaserDiscs, Mosaic Netscape 0.9—and of the need to safeguard our work being reduced to so many broken links and 404 errors.” The idea of publishing books based on the online journal came up as a way of “artful archiving.”

Downloading, so to say, the content of these publications from the online sphere to print can also introduce new problem of design. When taken offline, the images gain a new visual character: whereas on the screen, all images are in color but are indiscernible in context (especially when linked out of the specific journal—an image used in an online publication is totally different when viewed through Google Images) and in origin, in a printed form it is tied in with the text and the design in a way that relates to the history of publishing and to our expectations as readers in a wholly different way. Take, for example, Boris Groys’s article, “The Weak Universalism,” in e-flux journal. The piece, where Groys considers avant-garde’s nondistinction between artists and non-artists, is accompanied by a number of images, like a photograph of Kasimir Malevich teaching a class, a painting by Kandinsky, and a screenshot of Andy Warhol’s Facebook page (“Sign up for Facebook to connect with Andy Warhol!”). The randomness of the screenshot may seem more intentional in print—in the print version of that issue, for example, it sits on the same spread as a still from Empire—and it loses its interconnected nature that it may have with its online home (imagine reading that article on one browser tab while keeping Facebook open in another tab). And, unlike traditional print, where a screenshot or a video still may be of visibly lesser quality than a high-resolution photograph of a Kandinsky, the printed versions of online art publications tend to retain the flattened-out, non-hierarchical nature of the image as it was seen online. But whether images printed in poor quality, off the internet, become simply signifiers or rather, an “aesthetic of screenshots,” remains with the reader.

To end at the beginning, let me bring up the question of the escalator one more time. Unlike an elevator or stairs, which can be featured in private homes or apartment buildings, an escalator is generally inherently public. It’s not the exact middle ground between the stairs and the elevator because it picks up on certain elements of both while remaining a different variant of them as a mode of transport. Like the stairs, it considers only the human body (it will barely tolerate a baby carriage or luggage); and like the elevator, it has a built-in sense of pace. It seems pertinent here that the escalator is a trope of public space—train stations, airport, department stores, and so forth. What are the needs of the escalator riders? It allows them the possibility of cutting distances short while eliminating the sense of a group that an elevator may create.

The specificities of contemporary art publishing initiatives online may echo the escalator at times, while also embodying certain characteristics of the stairs and the elevator. We are only getting more image-savvy with time, which confuses and collides the relationship between text and images. The current decade is a very particular one in the history of publishing, as it will be full of moments that will be declared to be decisive for the “fate of the book.” And maybe books are like taking the stairs—it may be old-fashioned, but still seems natural, and our brain-eye coordination is accustomed to it in a way similar to how quickly toddlers learn to crawl and walk up and down stairs. But the elevator? Standing in a slow-moving elevator seems more nerve wrecking than walking up the stairs. This is what reading an old e-book will be like one day. The need for constant reinvention in digital publishing calls for a certain flexibility, and one that online art publications seem to be offering simply by the sheer fact of their constant consideration of what publishing online means. A hybrid model of print-to-screen-and-back-again might teach us much about our relationship with images, which will define and shape the history of art and the way it is taught and written about in coming years. This might just be the equivalent of the possibility to run up or down the escalator in the opposite direction than it is heading. It’s possible, even if exhausting. But sometimes, you just want to stand there on the escalator and see the ground distance itself from you while you take in the view.

[1] See Thomas Lawson introduction-cum-editorial statement, “The Journey West,” on East of Borneo (October 10, 2010).

[2] See Triple Canopy’s editors’ article, “The Binder and the Server,” at the College Art Association’s Art Journal (vol. 70, n. 2: winter 2011), 40–57.

[3] The “wild west” of online reproduction and intellectual property rights in the internet environment is an incredibly complex subject that is currently tackled by people in many fields in a constant attempt to define it for themselves at the moment. The question of best practices for online reproduction and online intellectual property rights is too large to consider seriously here and the literature about it is slowly building.

[4] Whitaker’s introduction deals with the space of photography in contemporary society a way that the elusive terminology of “images” (therefore converting all photographs, illustrative drawings, film stills, and so forth to one all-encompassing class—which can mainly be characterized by the fact that the people who view it do not often think about those images’ origins) in a way this article could never do. See her essay, “A Note on Black Box,” in Triple Canopy, issue 12.

[5] See Zolghadr’s editorial, “Notes from the Editor,” in Red Hook, issue 1.

[6] The idea of the possible obsolescence of online media and the fact that technology seems to be developing at a pace much more rapid than the pace of editorial decision is cheekily picked up by Zolghadr in his editorial: “Curatorial education aside, a second moving target here, one that is at least as mystifying, perhaps even more so, is the new field of online publishing. This is where you get an even clearer sense of the privilege and vertigo of inhabiting a historical threshold, leading to a constant suspicion that you’re missing key conversations unfolding concurrently all around you, coupled with yet another nagging suspicion, that much of your eagerness and anxiety will be considered quaint only a few years from now.”

Artist Profile: Bunny Rogers

Louis Doulas — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:15:32 -0500

Sister Unn's, 2011

A lot of your work seems to explore the transitional moments of adolescence into adulthood through sexual introductions like Dotyk and Waiting for Anne, as well as through sentimental mementos like the embroidered letterman jackets of Sister Jackets and even the webpage Dad’s Big Socks. With this type of memorialization, there’s also this recurrent fascination with animals as self-identifying symbols: Bunny Rogers, Pones, A Very Young Rider, Lambslut, etc. I wonder where these animal identities intersect with this loss of naïve youth and what your relationship to them is within these transgressive adolescent shifts? Why concentrate on the prepubescent stage? What role do animals play within this shift?

I am interested in deconstructing the comfort felt regarding how we view the transition from girlhood to adulthood. I do not think I concentrate on the prepubescent stage, at least in the biological sense of the word. When my work is categorized with that term it sets up a discussion of a socially-familiar understanding of what [female] prepubescence means, the definition of which is confusing and contradictory. We build value systems based on that understanding. These terms are applied in an assessment of my work and me. Some of my works try to make these terms unstable, by questioning how we arrive at them. The challenge is how to broaden the grounds on which these concepts are positioned as is evident by the limitations of phrasing we have even when trying to interpret the works investigating these concerns. I see a lot of overlap in mass culture’s sexualization and exploitation of children and animals.

i.e.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hix7Ie-IlYU [Dance Precisions / Single Ladies / Pomona]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RP19fnff_c [The Chipettes - Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It]

This area of conversation (which the above videos are a part of) is one I want to expand upon.

Since 2008 you’ve been using Twitter to archive every Facebook status update you’ve made, rendering your Twitter account as regurgitory. Twitter has a 140 limit while Facebook’s is 63,206. By archiving with Twitter you have to make a conscious decision on your Facebook to keep within this 140 limit. This works out for you as your updates are generally a word or a sentence long. How do your status updates inform or continue your process of performance? Are they related at all?

I have never been able to consistently maintain an up-to-date private journal in the traditional way that I know them to be – physical or online, despite wanting to and believing in the relevance of personal recordkeeping. As a kid I enjoyed re-reading and analyzing old diary entries while entertaining the fantasy of dying young and leaving behind evidence of my perceived precociousness and unparalleled imagination. In this way there has always been an audience in mind. I still relate to these feelings but I have gained a desire to share and connect with greater immediacy. Building a public archive is one way in which I am able to realize aspects of these motivations.

As a tribute to the Rego Park flower shop and homage to the two characters in the novel, The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas, Sister Unn’s was a flower shop run by you and Filip Olszewski in Forest Hills Queens. The shop seems to have caught much of the local resident’s attention; curious and confused about its purpose and intention. A gallery is always immediately recognized as a space for art, but with Sister Unn’s this context is obfuscated. What were some of your intentions surrounding this allegorical intervention?

To build a house of worship

“True love is a rose behind glass

It's locked and kept closed”

Grieving over someone, something and someplace are central themes found throughout your body of work. Could you talk more about the process of mourning and what it means to make it a focal point in your work?

I think some things you get over and some you do not. I disagree that mourning is a finite experience (the ‘mourning period’). There are beliefs that there is a correct way or length of time to grieve the death of a loved one, yet it is popular and accepted to say, “you never really get over your first love.” This is a telling convergence of values that has informed a number of my magical artistic creations.

Your entire online identity seems to culminate in an ongoing performance and I wonder where you differentiate between acting and a more consolidated separate persona? I’m also wondering how your online and offline performances such as 9years and Dotyk allow for playful, childlike gender representation or to what degree they reinforce them?

It is freeing to be able to have subtle shifts between doing online works, presenting documentation of work, and connecting with like-minded people. I really enjoy working online because I can interact with a variety of audiences that are not easily accessible otherwise.

Age: Beautiful

Location: NY, NY

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

AOL Kids’ art forums were deeply impactful and inspiring. I began making drawings in MS Paint around this time (~1997). Neopets personal pet pages motivated me to learn how to build a website (~2000). LiveJournal was a space in which I could more fully immerse myself into alt characters and identities via creative fiction (~2001).

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

Out of need

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

I received my BFA from Parsons the New School for Design.

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

Yes

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

I write poetry. I am learning to play piano. I like making soups, baking.

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?

Hand beading jobs, pretzel twisting.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Elliott Smith, my greatest love

Filip Olszewski, my greatest teacher

Ben Kellogg, my highschool sweetheart

Brigid Mason, my muse

Shawn Jeffers, mein bruder und geist

My parents, my heroes

Shoutout to Eric S. Oresick!!!

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

I have roped Ben Kellogg into a heavy investment and we should have something to show for it Fall 2012.

Filip Olszewski and I have made a lot of work together (most recently, Sister Unn’s). He is also the photographer behind much of my photograph-dependent work. (i.e. The Ice Garden)

Arielle Gavin and I made a video. [http://vimeo.com/22496851]

Many performances with Shawn Jeffers.

Do you actively study art history?

http://iamachild.wordpress.com/

http://pigtailsinpaint.wordpress.com/

That about covers it.

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

Rarely.

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

No.

Art from Outside the Googleplex: An Interview with Andrew Norman Wilson

Louis Doulas — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:18 -0500

The Inland Printer – 164, 2012

Through webinars, installations, power points, performances, audio meditations and videos, Andrew Norman Wilson's interventions into the brands and infrastructures of Silicon Valley and other worldwide tech corporations question the roles of labor, power and capital; instigations, integral to understanding the movement of information economies in the global marketplace as well as the power relations that emerge from within them.

ScanOps, titled after the internal department for Google's onsite book scanning contractors, is Wilson's latest series of works that reveal the software distortions and hands of ScanOps employees found in the photographic scanning site.

During June, ScanOps will be on view at both American Medium in New York City and Document in Chicago. A ScanOps subscription service and book will be published by Art Metropole later this year.

LD: Workers Leaving the Googleplex, responded to two versions of the film Workers Leaving the Factory: one by Harun Farocki and the other, the original by the Lumière brothers. The premise of your own video of course was to make a work that captured the shift in labor from the industrial proletariat into the informational proletariat. The yellow badge workers were presented in parallel to Lumières' workers and have become the focal point of another series of works, ScanOps. Could you first talk about the meta-hierarchies that existed at Google, specifically the perks, benefits, opportunities or lack thereof that existed between various color badges?

ANW: Using Workers Leaving the Googleplex as an illustration of these hierarchies, white, red, and green badge workers on the left side of the image are seen passing by, entering, and exiting a variety of buildings at the Googleplex. Some of them ride the Google loaner bikes, some of them enter a luxury limo shuttle headed towards San Francisco. Some of them may be leaving work, some may be walking to another building to pick up their laundry or exercise in one of the gyms, some may even be just arriving at the Google campus to eat a free meal from one of Google's 20 gourmet cafes after a day of working at home. The yellow badge workers on the right side of the image are seen leaving the one building they are allowed access to. Much like the workers in the Lumière film, the yellow badge workers are leaving at the same time because their superiors have asked them to. But their synchronized departure is not especially arranged for a camera. They are leaving at 2:15 pm, like they do every day. The separation and exclusion of the yellow badge class creates difference in movement. Their movement is much closer to the industrial proletariat of the prior two films (by Lumière and Farocki) than the kinetic elite of the white, red, and green badged workers sharing the screen.

Representing movement was the primary goal of the Lumière film, and I was interested in doing the same with the Googleplex video. Yet, as Farocki points out in his film, we have come to recognize that moving images not only represent movement, but can also grasp for concepts. And so Workers Leaving the Googleplex suggests both transformations and continuities from where Farocki and Lumière had left us, grasping for connections in social/aesthetic systems.

LD: Could you extrapolate a bit more on these notions of movement, especially with regards to its positioning within particular social systems?

ANW: In all three works, what we see are work forces in motion, organized simultaneously by the work structure (a temporal synchronization), the factory gates (a spatial grouping), and the filmmakers' choreography of this spatio-temporal relationship. In the Googleplex video, we are presented with a class-based system of access (or lack thereof) that can script different flows of movement. Google allows a lot of room for its white, red, and green badge workers to engage in free play; however, movement and action that exceeds the boundaries of that scripting and poses a threat to the company, such as my activity around the exterior of the yellow badges building, can set Google Security and Google Legal into specified movements around that atypical behavior.

Movement entails an object and its change in position with respect to time. As we transition from the dominance of analog media such as film and books to digital media such as video and digitized books, the newer forms are still wholly inseparable from the material world. There are voltages in electronic circuits, server farms, upgraded tech for every new product cycle, and a persistent necessity for repetitive, manual labor despite technological progress and the increasing prominence of cultural and informational labor.

The video also presents us with the expansive aesthetic distributive system that it participates in as a viral video. It includes a spatial montage of multiple images - like the ads, related content, icons, additional windows and tabs, etc. that compose a screen during the viewing of a video online. The colored borders in the video are an information visualization of worker ratios within the respective images. Even the use of color HD video (with sound) is conceptually important in relation to Lumières' film. Both works are emblematic of their particular historical moments, and both now circulate through contemporary distribution networks.

The Jolly Beggar – 12, 2012

LD: The digitalization of the Lumière film is actually a nice transitional point into understanding the contained content of ScanOps--which attempts to document the manual labor that continues to permeate under technological progress. Because of the hyper specialization of industries existing within a global market, we are increasingly isolated from the production and politics of our commodities. The tech commodity, Apple products for example, seem to be ever more hidden and locked away from the consumer view: an opaqueness that conceals understanding and restricts infrastructural intervention. Friendly UI graphics and sleek, ornament free, minimal design begins to take on a fetishized aura that most digital ephemera is marketed from the ground up in. First, how were you able to obtain these scans? And second, what can you say about this type of containment/exposure as it relates to the Google commodity?

ANW: I have been quietly collecting anomalies from Google Books for a couple years now. It's another way of getting closer to those people I worked with, while of course still remaining out of touch with them. Krissy Wilson's blog The Art of Google Books has made my searching much easier. Her criteria allows for a much more broad collection of images than what I'm after, and I'm more interested in printing the images than posting my finds online. I prefer to call what I'm collecting photographs as opposed to scans. Mass market books can be sliced open and fed into scanners, but the books I'm looking at come from library collections and need to be photographed from above. Therefore we occasionally see the backsides of workers hands. The project is called ScanOps because that is (or was) the internal department name for Google’s onsite book scanning contractors.

The photographs that I chose are Google Books images in which software distortions, the imaging site, and the hands of ScanOps employees are visible. They’re both indexical, and medium-specific. Their processes, digital manipulations, and material supports are folded within them. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the Books project, they can't possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. Removed "for me" The accidents then complicate the categorizations of “immaterial” and “informational” labor in the Information Technology sector.

I choose photographs that have formal similarities to contemporary photography that emphasizes the materiality of the photographic support, such as work by Walead Beshty and Elad Lassry. By positioning ScanOps in relation to theirs, they can "read" as photographs, and extend in relationships to painting and sculpture through the discourses surrounding those artist's work. And then there's the fact that they're photographs of books.

As Karen Barad puts it,

"That which is excluded in the enactment of knowledge-discourse-power practices plays a constitutive role in the production of phenomena – exclusions matter both to bodies that come to matter and those excluded from mattering."

The fingers and software distortions that obscure the "pure information" in the books complicate Google's technocratic proposals for a utopia of universally accessible knowledge. What emerges is an argument for the inseparability of matter and meaning, fusing a discussion of knowledge with ontological, ethical, and aesthetic issues.

LD: And Sergey Brin and Larry Page initially got in trouble for attempting the project, right?

ANW: Yes, because the complete copying of an entire book violates copyright, the photographers have been faced with lawsuits from the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and more. The settlement they all came to was rejected in court last year, but they're scheduled to go to court again soon. And that's just in the US, there's much more resistance in certain European countries.

LD: I'm sure, as most of the texts (at least the ones featured throughout your series) originate from western spheres. But, the momentary visibility of the hand in each of the photographs also signifies and reveals something else here too: the social systems the workers exist within. Which relates back to the two films, especially the 'movements' of Lumières' workers.

ANW: Someone has to turn a page and press a button. The workers compose part of the photographic apparatus, which, conceived in a broad sense includes not only the machinery, but the social systems within which photography operates. The anonymous workers, electrons, Sergey and Larry, the pink finger condoms, infrared cameras, the auto-correction software, the ink on my rag paper prints, me, the capital required to fund the project - we're all in it. It's not a dematerialized image world.

Our Wonderful Progress – 515 and The Inland Printer – 164, 2012

LD: Right, the worker's presence reaffirms, or rather reasserts the materiality of information production. I suppose that this is the inherent contradiction that's become especially apparent today in networked western societies: the liberation of information, of knowledge as a public commons that should be free and distributed--which isn't a new idea--and then its simultaneous commodification and profitability. Before, you've often stated that Google, in this sense, is actually a factory and with this in mind, your work perhaps isn't rendered so ambivalently, so I'm curious to hear your positions in regards to this type of information economy, and Google itself.

ANW: Everyone who uses the free Google perks - gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube - becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We’re performing freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.

A few years ago the company afforded me free Naked Juice every day, Metronaps and the ability to have a conversation with Obama. You and I, Louis, are on g-chat now and fact checking through Google search. All art and artistic discourse participates in the market economy. This isn't to say that art either supports or rejects the notion of a market transaction, or that art can't affect social change. Just that there's no outside.

Art's radical potential is in its transparency. It has come to reject the form/content divide, whereas other disciplines have not been able to do so. The discourse of art is capable of becoming continuous with the world it sets out to describe, fully embracing its own material condition. Google, however, is a multinational corporation, and it values both the simplicity of its products and the privacy of its internal functions. There's not much room for the consideration of things like the monetization of thought. It's a company.

The Encyclopedia Americana – 879 and The Inland Printer – 152, 2012

Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon

Rhizome — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:30:31 -0500

Shu Lea Cheang, Brandon, Bigdoll interface,
collaboration with Jordy Jones and Cherise Fong, 1998

In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum launched its first web-based art commission, Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon. Over the course of a year, the collaborative, dynamic piece would look at the complexity of gender, sexuality, and identity through the life and death of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, a Nebraska youth who was raped and murdered after his biological sex as a woman came to light in 1993.

Oft-cited in new media art history as one of the first widely recognized pieces of net art, the Brandon site has been offline for the last year or so; the Guggenheim plans to restore the work in the very near future.

Cheang now resides and works in Paris. I spoke to her about Brandon, 14 years after its launch:

YH: How did you first come to conceptualize Brandon? What were the circumstances for its commission?

SLC: Brandon was conceived at a time that I moved from actual space to cyber/virtual, claiming myself a cyber-nomad. It was around the mid-90s, and there was high hope for a super-highway, for a virtual world where race/gender does not matter any more. (I think it was the ad copy of MCI communications?). Meanwhile, two articles came out at Village Voice, one about Brandon Teena's rape/murder case by Donna Minkowitz and the other Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace. I had been experimenting with boundary crossing between the actual (state/nation) and virtual (anonymous/avatars), which needed to take up a durational performative format.

By 1995, I wrote out a proposal which was to be a one-year web narrative project following my feature film Fresh Kill (1994). At the time, I guess it was unusual to conceive a durational web work, to be unfolded by episodes, by staged virtual performance 'events' supported by actual space installation. At the time, David Ross was the director of the Whitney Museum. He had the vision to expand the museum into cyberspace. Curator John Hanhardt (who has exhibited three of my major works: color schemes (a solo show in 1990), Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1993, Whitney Biennial), and Fresh Kill (1995, Whitney Biennial)) took up the curation of Brandon. By 1998, Hanhardt had moved to the Guggenheim Museum and took Brandon with him. At the Guggenheim, Matthew Drutt, Associate Curator for Research, helped realize the curatorial admist the Guggenheim's venture into the virtual museum with Asymptote Architects.

Brandon, Roadtrip interface,
collaboration with Jordy Jones, Susan Stryker, and Cherise Fong

Brandon, Panopticon interface,
collaboration with Auriea Harvey and Beth Stryker

How were you thinking of interfaces? Did your work in film and other medium inform how you work in digital form?

The interfaces in Brandon—bigdoll, roadtrip, mooplay, panopticon, and Theatrum Anatomicum—are each a launch pad, a collaborative platform. Each interface is programmed as a mainframe, a structural construct while the contents and the inhabitants can move in and out in flux. While the programming language is definitive, the narrative shifts and progresses with more add-ons and plug-ins.

Yes, I do come from a video installation and film production background. In films, my narrative is parallel, non-linear. In installations, I also have multi-streams narratives proposed by the collaborators. I leapt into netspace (digital is a recent term), bypassing the CD-ROM format, where I see the streams converge with open circuit possibilities.

Brandon, Interface / Intervention

Brandon, Mooplay interface,
collaboration with Francesca Da Remini, Lawrence Chua, Pat Cadigan, and Linda Tauscher

Materially, did you have to consider the technology platforms on which Brandon would be run? Where did the images that appear onsite come from (were they all culled from the internet? / of digital or physical origin)?

Yes. Surely. Please also remember Brandon is a multi-artist, multi-site, multi-institution collaboration. Each interface is a design/programmation with others, mostly working with, i.e. Javascript and Java applet. Today, many of these programming languages have been updated, i.e., AV streaming. Many images are works by various designers (i.e., Jordy Jones, Auriea Harvey). There were also actual court documents from the Brandon Teena trial.

Brandon, Theatrum Anatomicum interface,
collaboration with Waag Society: Mieke Gerritzen, Janine Huizenga, Yariv Alterfin, and Roos Eisma

Installation view, Theatrum Anatomicum, 1998

Installation view, Guggenheim Soho, 1998

There are several interfaces and the architecture of the site itself is discoverable by interaction. I had the sense that I was finding fragments of an identity. What were you thinking when you created those interactions, different interfaces, and pop-up windows? Was the piece envisioned primarily as web-based? How did you modify the piece for the video wall installation? Did any of your conceptual tenets adjust for its physical mode?

Brandon is like a puzzle? I guess. It was deliberately designed with no easy/clear marked icons to help you navigate through the site. One's ability to investigate, negotiate with the mouse(over) brings different experience of the work. Within a one year stretch, which includes installation, live chat format, actual/virtual performance, no one (including myself) can claim to have viewed the entirety of this work. Pop-up windows on the roadtrip interface, cells of panopticon interface, are allen expansion of the space, spaces to be occupied by various narratives and inhabitants. Surely, non-linear and non-conformative.

Yes, the work was conceived for the web space. However, there remains the necessity at the time to have a real space for public interaction. The exhibition at the Guggenheim Soho's multi-screenwall is a direct translation of the website with kiosks for mouse interaction. I was also able to create installations that 'bridges' actual/virtual with the Theatrum Anatomicum installations set up at Waag Society in Amsterdam from 1998 to 1999. The opportunity to work with the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue in collaboration with Harvard Law School allowed for the realization of actual/virtual court rooms scenes in "Would the Jurors Please Stand Up? Crime and Punishment as Net Spectacle." I guess I would have done it if there were no real space offered. But with the real spaces, they offer great chances to merge the actual/virtual public.

What was the response to the piece when it appeared? When did it go offline and were there specific reasons it went offline? How does not being able to see a piece impact its existence?

There was great enthusiasm about this work, for its grand scale, its unprecedented approach to web art. It has been used a lot by media art students and there were several Ph.D. dissertations based on this work.

The Brandon website started out with a sponsored server which was terminated. Then, it was moved to an in-house Guggenheim server managed by its IT department. Around 2005, there was a great reconstruction effort with some funds for digital preservation. It was also brought back in two media art exhibitions, one with Rhizome at the New Museum and the other in The Art Formerly Known As New Media at Banff Canada. In this past year, the website was offline (I don't know for what reason, exactly) and created much confusion for media art studies — I constantly received complaints about it.

Recently, there are efforts to restore this work online by the Guggenheim's collection and curatorial departments. A rather long story, indeed.

For more on Brandon in Rhizome, see an 1998 interview between the artist and Alex Galloway and the piece's entry in the ArtBase.

Frieze New York: The Art Outside the Tent

Rhizome — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:30:07 -0500

Joshua Callaghan’s Two Dollar Umbrella (2011)

As far as art fairs go, Frieze New York was better than most: the booths were spacious, the tent well lit, and the amenities for visitors excellent. The quality of the work on view, too, was a vast improvement over the first round of fairs this past March; many of the participating galleries brought impressive pieces by both emerging and established artists.

Supplementing the art lining gallery booths inside were a host of works presented outdoors, organized by appointed curators: Frieze Projects, a series of site-specific commissions curated by Cecelia Alemani, and the Sculpture Park curated by Bard CCS director Tom Eccles—technically separate, though physically intermingling with the Frieze Projects commissions.

The Sculpture Park was largely composed of the sorts of dull, oversized abstraction typical of corporate plazas and civic commissions—inoffensive, vaguely industrial, often colourful (Katja Strunz, Gabriel Kuri) or shiny (Tomas Saraceno, Jeppe Hein.) In short: perfectly positioned to move swiftly from the fairgrounds at Randall’s Island to the backyard of some collector’s summer home. Indeed, each work was labelled not only with the artist’s name, title, and date, but also the gallery representing it—all of them participants in the fair—making it essentially an extension of select gallery booths.

Others read merely as oversized gimmicks. For Subodh Gupta’s Et Tu Duchamp? (2009–2010), the artist translated Duchamp’s famous moustachioed reproduction of the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., into three dimensions, casting it as a large-scale bronze. The title of Gupta’s work suggests that his intent was to replicate Duchamp’s gesture of comically appropriating a canonical work—in the twenty-first century, Duchamp is as recognizable as Da Vinci—but Et Tu Duchamp? is less a subversive violation of a masterpiece than a self-aggrandizing, one-note gag. Likewise, Joshua Callaghan’s Two Dollar Umbrella (2011) presents the titular object amplified to monumental proportions; with its loose spokes pointing skyward like Laocoön’s outstretched arm, Callaghan’s pathetic umbrella has its own odd pathos—given the overcast skies during much of the fair’s run, discarded umbrellas littering the city’s street were a common sight—but elevating an everyday inconvenience to the status of mythic tragedy is neither new nor compelling.

Louis Bourgeois, Untitled (2004)

Works that engaged the setting more directly fared somewhat better: Louis Bourgeois’s untitled metallic cocoons (2004) dangled from trees, catching the light perfectly. Likewise, Susan Philipsz’s sound installation We All Go Together (2009) takes the form of an unexpected dialogue between speakers in adjacent trees playing a multi-part recording of an Appalachian folk song. Obscured by the branches and leaves, it was difficult to tell, at first, where the voices were coming from, provoking a momentary, but welcome, sense of disorientation. Philipsz is well-known for sound-based projects that utilize public space, making her an ideal choice for this kind of site; her Turner Prize-winning work Lowlands (2009), for instance, was installed under three Glasgow bridges, playing recordings of different versions of the sixteenth-century Scottish lament “Lowlands Away.” Philipsz’s work is specifically about asking those who encounter it to consider their environments, activating mundane spaces through the introduction of unfamiliar, perhaps even incongruous, elements—but in a far subtler way than the visual cacophony of the large-scale sculptural projects. We’ll All Go Together slowed the dizzying pace of the art fair setting, rewarding those who stopped to listen.

Frieze Projects commissions are presented under the auspices of the fair’s nonprofit wing, but such a distinction comes across as a mere technicality, particularly since many of the artists selected are represented by participating galleries, whose booths announce the commissioned projects. Incorporating works by artists such as John Ahearn and Tim Rollins & K.O.S. — associated with socially-engaged, community-driven art practices— seems like an attempt on the part of organizers to defend the fair against accusations of elitism, as if seeing the names of such artists on the roster of Frieze Projects participants will counteract the branded BMWs chauffeuring VIPs, the Soho House outpost, and the ethically dubious practice of undercutting union contractors. This distinction between the nonprofit Frieze Projects and the plainly for-profit operations of the fair seemed particularly slippery given that Ahearn’s project—a recreation of his 1979 exhibition “South Bronx Hall of Fame” at the now-closed alternative art space Fashion Moda, for which he created sculptural “casts” of the faces of neighborhood residents for free, displaying them in the gallery’s storefront window as a means of both engaging and representing a segment of the public largely excluded from the art world—invited Frieze collectors to commission their own portraits for the not-insignificant fee of $3000 each.

Joel Kyack’s Most Games Are Lost, Not Won (2012)

At the very least, several other projects commissioned for the fair acknowledged its resemblance to a kind of amusement park, most notably Los Angeles-based artist Joel Kyack’s Most Games Are Lost, Not Won (2012), a somewhat perverse take on carnival kitsch, modelled after county fair games. Yet taken as a whole, Frieze’s public projects do not transform the fair into an idyllic “fantasy world,” as Alemani states, but rather a reminder of how out of touch it is with the social and cultural realities of the city, whose “existing local communities” and “unique landscape—both social and geographic” the fair purports to engage.

This is perhaps best exemplified by Christoph Büchel’s contribution to the Sculpture Park, several examples of his new series 1% which were placed, unmarked, around the fair’s grounds. Comprising six shopping carts, each filled with all of the belongings of a homeless New Yorker, purchased by Büchel for $300 to $500 apiece, the carts are being sold by Büchel’s gallery Hauser & Wirth, with prices ranging from $30,000 to $50,000; the “1%” in question refers to the fact that the amount Büchel paid for each cart represents 1% of its new value, once inscribed as a work of art. Though there is, I suppose, an argument to be made for the project as a critique of art-market capitalism, in which the authorial touch of the artist can transform objects that are otherwise considered not only worthless, but also downright squalid by most, into things of monetary and cultural value; it might function better if the artist himself—and his gallery—didn’t profit so heavily from it. Whatever Büchel’s aims for the project might have been, it struck me as exploitative.

There is an alarming tendency among art fairs to conflate projects that are open to the public with democratic approaches, talks and panel discussions with critical discourse, and the display of art with exhibitions. But placing projects outside does not an accessible platform make. At best, these are only gestures toward inclusivity; at worse, insidious attempts at marketing commercially available artwork by participating galleries under the guise of curated programming.

From Basel to Hong Kong, Don’t Miss These Dreamy Exhibitions and Events

Karen Archey — Tue, 08 May 2012 15:00:30 -0500

Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin, Installation view at the Center for Curatorial Studies: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

I'm going to imagine a time in which post-internet megabucks are really rolling in, and I'm equipped with a private Rhizome Vistajet. If that time happened to be this week, I’d be sure to hit up these exhibitions and events, ranging from Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin's upstate New York exhibition to Robin Peckham's new art fair excursions in Hong Kong. Check out the upcoming exhibitions listed below, with a couple outstanding shows not to be missed.

“Bcc 9: Das Ei ohne Schale.” at Oslo10, Basel, Switzerland
Opening Thursday, May 10th at 7PM.

Is Bcc the new BYOB? Oslo10, a new exhibition space in Kunstfreilager/Dreispitz, just outside of Basel, Switzerland, will host the ninth edition of Bcc. Originated by Aurélia Defrance, Julie Grosche and Aude Pariset, who have also curated this edition, the exhibition format mandates that all artists submit their work digitally, rather than physically. Artists in this round include Harm van den Dorpel, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Stephen Lichty, Sara Ludy, Mélodie Mousset.

Kate Steciw, “Live Laugh Love” at The Green Room, London
Opening Friday May 11th at 6:00pm, runs through June 17

Surprisingly, this is Kate Steciw’s (much belated) first exhibition in Europe. Green Room programmer Ché Zara Blomfield seems to be aggressively bringing the work of American “internet-related” artists to London, her last exhibition mounting the work of Artie Vierkant, and previously showing Petra Cortright.

Rhizome Benefit – New York, NY
May 9th at 7pm, VIP Cocktails with a silent auction and DJ set by Venus X, 9PM, Afterparty with LE1F and Extreme Animals

Alright, this is a shoo-in, but come party with us! Support Rhizome, drink some drinks, and enjoy tunes by ultra-hot DJ Venus X, LE1F, and everyone’s favorite band, Extreme Animals. What’s not to like?

LUX / ICA Biennial of Moving Images
May 24 – 27th

Organized by LUX Moving Image and the Institute of Contemoprary Art, London, the Biennial of Moving Images includes programming by eleven curators and artists: Thomas Beard & Ed Halter (who are clearly wonderful curators, but can we please choose someone else to curate film biennials?!), Elena Filipovic, Michelle Cotton, Martha Kirszenbaum, Shanay Jhaveri, Mark Webber, Ben Rivers and Rosa Barba. The ambitious program also includes various panel discussions, live performance commissions; an Artists’ School run by Ian White; a Curating Course led by George Clark; a Live Journal edited by Isla Leaver-Yap; and a dedicated reader including newly commissioned essays and artists’ projects.

Lance Wakeling “A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable” at Supplement, London
Event Friday May 11th

If anyone actually believes that the internet is truly a medium emancipated from material means, they should check out Lance Wakeling’s endlessly interesting project, “A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable.” For this project, Wakeling visited the four landing points of a telecommunications cable known as Atlantic Crossing 1, passing through Fire Island, New York; Sennen Cove, England; Castricum, the Netherlands; and Sylt, Germany. The project will be presented as a video with performance remnants at Supplement in London.

Motion, curated by Ceci Moss and Tim Steer at Seventeen, London
Opening May 17th, 6pm

Rhizome’s own Ceci Moss has co-curated what looks like a star-studded exhibition with artist and Seventeen main man Tim Steer. The exhibition combines work ranging from Artie Vierkant to Merce Cunningham, and includes personal favorites Harm van den Dorpel, Oliver Laric, Sean Raspet, and Kari Altmann.

Nadim Abbas and Jon Rafman at Saamlung’s booth within ARTHK12
May 17th – 20th, Hong Kong International Art Fair, Art Futures Booth No. AF24
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center

Critic, curator and gallerist Robin Peckham seems to be killing it in Hong Kong. Saamlung, his downtown central gallery, recently launched the exhibition “Untouchables,” featuring the work of Jo-ey Tang and Travess Smalley, among others (the exhibition closes May 10th), and will mount the work of Jon Rafman and Nadim Abbas at ARTHK12.

Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin, Curated by Agatha Wara, at CCS Bard’s thesis exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Red Hook, NY
Open through May 27th

Si-Qin is gainfully paired with curator and artist Katja Novitskova in Agatha Wara’s Bard CCS thesis exhibition, balancing current dude-heavy conversations related to natural selection, desire, and corporate branding.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, “Notes on American Performance” at T293, Naples
Open through May 25th

One of my favorite aspects of this exhibition is that Henkel and Pitegoff employed their lovers to hang their work. A “labor of love,” if there ever was one.

“E-Vapor-8,” Curated by Francesca Gavin at 319 Scholes
Open through May 18th

319 Scholes is really on a roll, after mounting writer and curator (and Rhizome Poetry Editor) Brian Droitcour’s “Big Reality,” and now London-based writer, editor, and curator Francesca Gavin’s rave-tastic “E-Vapor-8.”

"Social Media Marketing Masterclass [In 3 Easy Steps]" by Jesse Darling

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Lesson One:

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING,
SO LONG AS IT'S WORKING.

██████ 01 December at 17:31

heh. your videos, blog and online presence are like a window on some sort of amazing, magical, brighter-than-life parallel universe – full of beautiful people, glamour, enchanted bric-a-brac and generally cool stuff.

rock on. and good luck in ██████ :)

______________________________________

Jesse Darling 01 December at 09:40

██████ If only you could see the mice, the mould, the incessant rain, the ██████ & the bank balance. Still, it’s ██████; it’s home. ;) So thank you.

███████████████████████

xx JD

______________________________________

Lesson Two:

GIVE YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT,
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY'RE ASKING FOR.

██████ 26 December, 2011

Dear Jesse,

I have some questions to ask you because of your physical nuance— the awareness you have— the sensitivity— the life— yet still the ability to move. This must require constant cleaning, writing, talking, expressing— I think you are in a sense an evolution of ██████ — please do not take this as an insult — I could only insult myself if simplifying— but what I see in your manner of expressing with words is an ability to communicate subtleties in a way that does not appear to be so. ██████.

Something very clear about you— and which fains from he word artist or philosopher, though you are an artist— you are also knowing of— existing outside of— █████████ — and these are ██████ tendencies — not of the preceding university ‘objective’ era, but something cunning to ‘information’ and its know not, as well as ‘art’ and its know not—

Anyway, questions pending.

██████

______________________________________

Jesse Darling 26 December 2011

██████. Hit me up.

______________________________________

Lesson Three:

HATERS GONNA HATE.
NEVER STOP BELIEVING.

██████ 15 February at 01:18

If one is an artist does that mean that life has to be constantly challenging and painful and tragic? Does it have to be constantly entertaining (and therefore dramatic and full of conflict) for the “audience”?

If so, I guess that makes lasting love pretty much impossible.

I’m too old and tired for all that. I just want to love ██████ and for her to love me. ████████████████████████ I still love forever and ███████████████████████ I was at work).

I’m good at that. Making things simple. Just a simple contented little life. But quite beautiful nonetheless.

Does the artist sacrifice the chance of that for the audience?

______________________________________

Reply:

Rhizome Benefit May 9

Rhizome — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:17:40 -0500

Tickets are still available for our Benefit party on May 9th! Performances by Venus X, Extreme Animals, and LE1F.

Venus X

Extreme Animals

LE1F

Report from Frieze New York

Karen Archey — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:30:44 -0500

The verdict from Frieze New York? Not so bad! While the city has experienced a rash of yawn-worthy art fairs — this year's Armory no exception — yesterday saw the impressively successful debut of Frieze Art Fair on New York's Randall's Island. Combining mainstays such as Gagosian with younger, more innovative galleries such as 47 Canal, T293, and Balice Hertling, Frieze NY offered a crowd-pleasing multifaceted, international approach. Some stand-out works below.

Stephen G Rhodes, "Untitled," 2012 at Overduin and Kite. All photographs by Marcus Cuffie

While I'm familiar with Rhodes' installation work through a recent solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, this collages proves his two-dimensional work to be much more pared down and sensitive to detail. Rhodes, who splits his time between Berlin and New Orleans, has gathered materials around both of his studios, using spraypainted reliefs of New Orleans flora as a background to this composition. Although the most satisfying details of the piece are lost in this jpeg, Rhodes further layers his collage with text from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, "'Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.' -- Judge. GO OUTSIDE."

Keltie Ferris, "(*)", 2012 at Mitchell Innes and Nash

On view at Mitchelle Innes and Nash's booth is Keltie Ferris' large, graffiti-inspired paintings. While the term "graffiti-inspired" alone may be enough to turn many a viewer off, Ferris' paintings seem timely, and dare I say, internet-aware. With titles that frequently employ various combinations of punctuation marks, Ferris' paintings appear at once almost pixelated or digitally inspired as well as cognizant of the delicate position that abstract painting occupies in 2012.

Sarah Braman, "Untitled," 2012 at Mitchell Innes and Nash

Sarah Braman also kills it at Mitchell Innes and Nash.

Carissa Rodriguez and Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, Zurich

Artist and Reena Spaulings director Carissa Rodriguez is excellently paired with Pamela Rosenkranz by Karma International of Zurich. Rosenkranz, whose Fiji bottles are pictured alongside Rodriguez's sperm photos and ikebana, recently enjoyed a stand-out solo exhibition at Reena Spauling's Chinatown neighbor Miguel Abreu.

Oliver Laric, "Sun Tzu Janus," 2012 at Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Laric expands the polyurethane sculpture annex of his Versions projects to include the head of Sun Tzu, which appears curiously akin to the bust of the two-faced Roman god Janus. "Sun Tzu Janus" is also currently on view within Cecelia Alemani's exhibition "Lilliput" on the High Line.

Aleksandra Domanovic, "Bubanj Fist Relief," 2012 at Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Created out of MDF and tadelakt, a lime plaster usually used to coat the palaces in Morocco, Aleksandra Domanovic has re-envisioned 20th-century Croation sculptor Ivan Sabolic’s famous monument of three raised fists at the Bubanj Memorial Park in Niš, Serbia.

Oliver Laric "Ise Gulloche," 2012 at Seventeen, London

Another offering by Oliver Laric, this work builds on the artist's series of custom-made holograms.

Martin Boyce, "Waves," 2012 at Tanya Bonakdar, New York

Previously, I'd only been familiar with Boyce's more popular custom-made steel constructions, mobiles and fluorescent tube trees, which are often accompanied by poetic titles. Out of curiosity, I checked who made this somewhat unremarkable piece at Tanya Bonakdar's booth. After learning the title, "Waves," the piece took on a more elegiac tone.

Calla Henekel and Max Pitegoff "New Media (Cocktails)" 2012 at T293, Naples and Rome, Italy

I can't express how pleased I am to see the work of artistic duo Max Pitegoff and Calla Henkel at Frieze NY. The recent Cooper Union graduates moved to Berlin last year to found Times, a bar, exhibition and event in the city's Neukolln district which now serves as a meeting point for many in the German capital's art community. These works, Times cocktail glasses filled with acrylic ice cubes encased in resin, act as markers of an audience recently left, such as at the end of a long night. Curiously fitting for the art fair setting.

Anders Clausen at Broadway 1602

This might not be my favorite Clausen piece, but after perusing his artist portfolio, I'm convinced no one can make screenshots look better than Anders Clausen. Check out the rest of his work on the Hotel site here.

Greg Parma Smith "Ultimate Color Pencil..." 2012 at Balice Hertling, Paris

Parma Smith's jubilant, meticulous oil paintings playfully juxtapose faux-naif symbols and instruments endemic to art instruction, such as the Prismacolor, with the more serious undertaking of adult artistic practice.

Michele Abeles at 47 Canal, New York

It was only a few years ago that Margaret Lee began 179 Canal, an exhibition space in New York's Chinatown, via gaining free rent through acting as a sort of art-world real estate agent by renting out studio spaces in the building's remaining floors. Since this time, Lee has moved east to 47 Canal, closer to the Orchard Street gallery district, and has established her aptitude as a prescient talent-spotter. For her first major fair, Lee has brought the work of photographer Michele Abeles, who has created collages out of her own previous work.

Simon Denny, "Diligent Boardbooks," 2011 at Friedrich Petzel

Berlin-based, New Zealand-born artist on the up-and-up Simon Denny showed with both Friedrich Petzel and Daniel Buchholz. "Diligent Boardbooks," shown above at Petzel, creates abstracted, analog versions of the television screen.

Cheyney Thompson, "Motif IX," 2010 at Andrew Kreps

A painterly ink blot by Cheyney Thompson at Andrew Kreps.

Diana Thater, "Untitled (Kelly)," 2011 at Hauser and Wirth

Despite Thater being a pioneering new media artist, for which she deserves credit, I can't get over the sickeningly decorative nature of this work. I suppose it's only fitting that this represents one of the only new media offerings of the mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth.

Lutz Bacher, "Club Bud," 2008 at Cabinet, London

At first glance, I hoped this might be an Americanized, art-fair-booth-sized version of Cyprien Gaillard's beer pyramid, "The Recovery of Discovery," originally shown at KW, Berlin. Alas, the beer was not intended for drinking, as it belonged rather to 2012 Whitney Biennial mainstay Lutz Bacher.

Rudolf Stingel at Gagosian

To create these works, Stingel washes his canvas in burgundy paint, then directly screenprints upon it the pattern of an oriental carpet in silver enamel.

What Price Love?

Melissa Gira Grant — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:28:24 -0500

photo: Melissa Gira Grant

“I wanted us to be so naked with each other,” Acker/Laure writes to Bataille, “that the violence of my passion was amputating me for you.” But “as soon as you saw that I got pleasure from yielding to you, you turned away from me… You stated that you were denying me because you needed to be private. But what’s real to you isn’t real to me. I’m not you. Precisely: my truth is that for me your presence in my life is absence.”

- Steven Shaviro, quoting Kathy Acker as Laure as if writing a love letter to Georges Bataille

I carry every love letter I wrote to B in a Gmail label on my phone. They aren't all love letters; they pitch and shift through six months of taking a conversation that began in public, across two blogs, into a more protected space.

For the last two months, I've been publishing these letters to readers who bought a subscription. I have four months left to send these letters, in which the reader receives my half of the correspondence, time-shifted one year after I wrote and sent them to B.

It's called What Price Love? and so far, in sum, love is priced at about a thousand dollars.

"...for me your presence in my life is absence."

I think about how I have made a living exposing sex, including my own, for the last 14 years. How nearly anything we are supposed to do for love but instead accept money for can be defamed – by someone uncomfortable with that exchange and our decision to enter into it – as "prostitution." Is selling a love letter prostitution? Is telling you to buy it somehow worse? I want you to read them but I am not sure I could say I "enjoy" this.

(But then that's not that different from any other kind of work.)

(Am I turning my love into work?)

All I knew when I started is that I didn't want to alter the form of the letters. They are what is left of the affair, and I trust them more than my own ideas about what happened.

Here's what I do with with them: I read through them a few at a time before I send them out to my subscribers. I don't format them. I take each email in turn (does anyone say "love email"?) and turn it into a text-only email newsletter using a web-based program designed for marketers and canvassers. I can't pretend this isn't about publicity. I'm constantly reminded. Under the rows of check-boxes I could tick to track opens and bounces and the SEND button, there's a line of italicized text, like a motto, that I'd never noticed before and it reads "Here is your moment of glory."

"...because you needed to be private."

Would we drag misshapen boxes and bundles of paper around the city with us, to keep our correspondence near, if we had to give consideration to it? I've always wanted to be able to flip back. Even as I wrote these letters (in bed, on trains, for the most part), even though they were my own feelings, I felt I needed a reference. How did we meet? When did we start this? Who sent who what first? This kind of love affair was so ungrounded: someone I met diffused through photos, audio files, bullet pointed lists.

How can you love a bullet pointed list?

How have we confined our feelings to valid entries in a database?

"I wanted us to be so naked with each other..."

The email is still a whisper. It's a way of keeping quiet in a chattering web. Using email as we did is an abuse of this invention. Email was born as a bug report. It never meant to make us feel.

My phone, similarly (and B's phone and now, your phone) was never intended to carry such a spectacle.

I think about the old red light district in Boston that was both the eastern terminus of the old postal road and where Alexander Graham Bell kept his studio. I think about the other loves we carry around the city with us: romance novels now concealed in Kindles, appointments made with escorts on BlackBerrys because there's so little street left for prostitutes to stand on. Protest signs, too, are a kind of declaration of love, of the possible, only though even as I occupy space beside them, no one around me knows I agree with their sentiments unless they are following me on Instagram at that precise moment and see my photos expressing solidarity.

I want to take my love public, even though it isn't only mine and it doesn't exist anymore.

Mark Leckey releases Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore on vinyl

Rhizome — Thu, 03 May 2012 10:26:23 -0500

Turner Prize winning artist Mark Leckey is releasing the audio from his 1999 video work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. The record is the first release on Boomkat in house label The Death Of Rave, and the B side contains the audio fromGreenScreenRefridgerator, which features a black talking Samsung fridge in front of green screen visuals.

The soundtrack from Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is lifted straight from the original work, disconnected from the video, and the GreenScreenRefridgerator audio has been edited for length. There's no information on what else the label will be releasing yet, but Boomkat say it will not be restricted to work by Leckey.

The record has been pressed in an edition of 500, cut at Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering, and is due for release on 21 May. Watch Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, and part one of GreenScreenRefridgerator below. More information imminent at Boomkat.

via The Wire

Transmissions from Locations Unknown

Yin Ho — Wed, 02 May 2012 12:17:50 -0500

Mat (Clodagh Emoe, 2008-ongoing) via

On a recent episode of Fringe, a mad scientist arch-villain primes two parallel worlds for destruction by re-tuning the frequency of each planet to resonate at the same pitch. A semi-literal bridge that connects the worlds makes this simultaneous ruination possible. The uniting functionality is familiar: an open line enables communication, and much like the telephone and its network offspring, a bridge makes connection possible. That open line has served as a hopeful means of connection to magic, the fuzzily understood, and the otherworldy.

Remote became routinely possible with the telephone. Electronically transmitted speech enabled nearly immediate, if once-removed, conversation. The device, as described by philosopher Avital Ronell, both amplified a voice across distance and marked the physical absence of the other. A call's origin, the voice on the other side, could be logically anywhere, or from beyond. One story goes: Alexander Graham Bell, influenced by Thomas Watson's interest in phatasmic communication and seeking a means to communicate with his much-loved departed brother, ended up inventing the telephone.

Could transmission and recording instruments reveal the unknown? Ethereal forces were felt and unseen — what was imperceptible to the naked eye might be seen by a technologically augmented one:

The Medium Eva C. with a Materialization on Her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between Her Hands (Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, 1912) via

The mind-consciousness interface is direct and hopefully unburdened by interpretative infrastructure. Fringe's FBI agent heroine possesses slight telepathic and telekinetic abilities that lubricate her passage between worlds. She requires no intervening interface; her mind is the bridge, her thoughts go unmediated from input to considered output. (For more on brain interfaces and interaction, go here for the Near Future Laboratories SXSW talk; slideshow here).

Direct communication from mind to the external results in actions that range from the mundane ("Push the red button") to the mystical (spells), though the very lack of an intermediary or medium give these interactions a supernatural flavor. For now, brain control for the everyday still needs a sensor headdress, an electroencephalogram reader, and data extrapolation. (To read brains using a store-bought EEG, go here for Eric Mika's DIY hack).

In contrast, energy healing, occurring by mysterious transmission, requires no hardware, can be given in the absence of physical touch, and practiced remotely. I'll leave you with an example:

The Signal Interviews Ben Fino-Radin about Conservation and Digital Art

Rhizome — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:21:04 -0500

Barbra Latanzi, The Letter and the Fly (2002 )

Trevor Owens interviewed Rhizome Digital Conservator Ben Fino-Radin for the Library of Congress blog on digital preservation, The Signal. In the interview, he discusses Rhizome's ArtBase collection, including work like Barbara Lattanzi's The Letter and the Fly (2002) and Lev Manovich's Little Movies (1994). He also talks about the role the collection plays in the Rhizome community as well as his unique job with the organization:

Trevor: Could you tell us a bit about how the collection is being used? To what extent is the audience for the collection artists in search of inspiration? To what extent is it for the general public? To what extent is it for scholars and researchers?

Ben: Currently the collection is used most heavily in academia, and by curators and researchers. Many professors of new media integrate the ArtBase into their lesson plan, designing research and curatorial assignments centered around the students using our members tools to curate exhibitions.

Trevor: I don’t think there are many people out there with the title of digital conservator. Could you tell us a bit about how you define this role? To what extent do you think this role is similar and different to analog art conservation? Similarly, to what extent is this work similar or different to roles like digital archivist or digital curator?

Ben: I drew the distinction with my title for two reasons: 1) I am at the service of an institution that lives within a museum, and 2) the digital objects I am cataloging and preserving access to are not “records” by the archival definition. They are artifacts – and as such require a different kind of care.

I am responsible for the stewardship of intellectual entities that are often inseparable from their digital carriers, due to the artist’s exploitation of the inherent characteristics of the material. It calls for a high degree of regard for the creator’s intent, and a thorough understanding of the subtleties of the materials. A digital archivist tasked with preserving the records of an office probably isn’t going to wonder if the use of Comic Sans in the accountant’s email signature has artifactual significance.

Of course the lines are much blurrier than that and there plenty of examples of people with the title “digital archivist” or “digital curator” doing significant work on preserving the subtle artifactual quality of digital materials (not to mention the incredible people who are contributing to significant projects in their spare time). This is a new phenomenon though, where you have individuals with the title “archivist” or “curator” devoting a level of care to documents, that with paper materials would be the work of a document conservator.

While I would hesitate to compare the two, I think that the conservation of digital artifacts, and the conservation of objects, documents and the like, at their essence hold many similarities. They both require an empathy for the artist, expertise with the medium, and understanding of the proper environment. Sometimes I go to the Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, and daydream about what net art from the 90’s will look like hundreds of years from now....

Artist Profile: David Kraftsow

Louis Doulas — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:39 -0500

David Kraftsow's Vlog Artifacts, is featured this month on The Download.

Screenshot of At My Funeral, 2011

Much of your work involves recontextualizing a lot of YouTube and Twitter content. Through this rearranging and reorganizing you compose and assign new meaning to the often banal, unwittingly revealing always-growing archive of user-uploaded videos and status updates. User content here surpasses individual critique and instead is aesthetically reframed and sometimes even gamified under your curation. What does it mean for you to work with the uploads of others? What can you say about the role of the curator in this process?

I'm not really sure if "curation" is the right word to describe my YouTube projects. While I do, on occasion, go out and hand-pick specific content for display (like for my fun cat video blog or Violet Flame supercut), most of the rest of my YouTube work is either the result of an autonomous script, or a user-initiated generator.

For example, I have a cron (autonomously executing process) running for my At My Funeral project that specifies search criteria for YouTube videos with comments that contain the phrase "at my funeral". The script has generated a database of (to date) 21,000+ videos that people want to have played in their honor after they die.

Does this kind of algorithmic selection count as curation? The result can be really interesting and even kind of comedic. There is something hilarious to me about mechanically collecting every single "better than Bieber" YouTube comment ever written. But, beyond the initial specification of the program that does the collecting, it doesn't involve any of my creative/curatorial input at all. The content is selected and displayed automatically.

If curation can simply involve the design and execution of such an algorithm, then the role of the curator in this case seems to be very similar to that of a data miner. Both are interested in creating programs that mechanically extract hidden patterns to reveal new meanings from a large dataset.

In a 2009 Rhizome interview it’s mentioned you received a cease and desist letter from Google for your platform YooouuuTuuube. After briefly explaining Google’s argument, you hoped that they would continue to stand behind their ‘don’t be evil’ brand. Slowly today, with revealing videos like Workers Leaving the Googleplex and corporations increasingly pressured into transparency, do you still feel their motto is applicable to themselves today? Could you walk through the legal processes of your own Google interaction and explain its current legal status?

I think the Google motto is interesting just in the fact that a corporation apparently felt that it wasn't enough to leave an ethical no-brainer like "Don't Be Evil" an unstated, common sense assumption. Instead they went and codified it into an actual corporate motto. This may have started originally as a kind of joke within the company about corporate culture or something. But as Google becomes bigger and bigger, and wields more and more influence in our lives, it seems they are under an obligation to take the motto very seriously. In some instances, they apparently don't do this.

Having said that, I don't think Google is currently, by-and-large, an evil company, but they could still change my mind! I did watch that Workers Leaving the Googleplex video when it first came out, and I remember thinking it was pretty overblown overall. I wasn't very convinced of any Great Google Atrocities in watching it.

And regarding the whole YooouuuTuuube thing: basically, what happened was their lawyers sent me a C&D stating that their main concern was the name of the project being too close to the YouTube trademark name, and that my use of their favicon was also an infringement of their copyright. In a fit of teen-rebellion, I changed the favicon to the CopyLeft symbol, and ignored the request to take the site down. Eventually they sent me another one, and I wrote back with a long letter emphasizing the project's status as an art piece with no competitive intention, and offered to move the project to a new domain but also to publicize the reason for the move. At this point the site had millions of visitors, and I guess they didn't really want to bother with it anymore since they never wrote me back after that.

So, I can't actually say what the current status of the project is exactly. My best guess is "legal grey area".

A fun footnote on the topic of evil corporations: last year when I went to submit a mobile version of YooouuuTuuube to the iOS App Store, Apple rejected it immediately because the name was too close to "YouTube". It wasn't even their own trademark, but they still saw it as a reason for rejection. So I ended up being forced to change the name of the mobile version to (super lame) "MultiTube" because of this. Ironically, on the Google-controlled Android market, the original name was never an issue. Food for thought!

You work exclusively on the Internet and I’m curious if you’ve ever considered translating any of your works offline? Perhaps, First-Person Tetris is the closest to maybe revealing some of these desires, but do you ever feel the need to work offline? Or is the web the most flexible and fluid environment for you? How do you think browser based works can be restrictive or limiting?

I work mostly on the web because it reaches the most people. I grew up with it, and still love the idea of the web being this fluid, free, and open place. This has, sadly, started to change in the last decade with the rise of mobile platforms, walled-off social networks and other services. But as long as I can still make fun things that reach a lot of people, I'll continue to make web-based stuff. That said, I'm starting to get more into making mobile apps and also desktop things, and I'll probably be moving more in that direction in the future.

Similar to the authorship conflicts of Relational Aesthetics, Internet-based artwork that incorporates the outsourcing of creative labor or the mining of user content faces contention when perpetuated within the art economy where autonomous authorship is valorized above all. As society and labor become more specialized where do you draw the line when acknowledging or attributing authorship? Are these notions merely misunderstood notions of democratic constituencies?

Is it a cliché to invoke the "everything is a remix" mantra? When YooouuuTuuube first started getting attention, I found myself thinking a lot about questions of authorship, especially with regards to the most popular configuration, a mashup-style remix of Disney's Alice In Wonderland. It's a fun example to go through and try to count the number of contributing authors: there's Lewis Caroll for writing the original narrative, then Disney's team of artists for animating a version of that narrative, then Pogo, the Australian musician who remixed that animation and put it on YouTube, then there's me for writing the YooouuuTuuube effect generator, and finally the person (as far as I can tell a Reddit user) who first decided to run Pogo's video through it. So that's five major points of authorship, but still ignoring the thousands of other people involved in making the work technically possible at all: YouTube employees, server managers, programmers who made the tools we use, etc.

I don't see how any one entity can claim total creative authorship, although I'm sure Disney's lawyers might see it differently. I don't, however, think that this kind of case renders the notion obsolete. Authorship, at least in a very abstract sense, is actually pretty straightforward: you are simply the author of the part of the work that originated with you. Yes, you are always going to be indebted to a logistical and cultural background, but that's the case with literally everything you do anyway. I think the idea is still a coherent one, at least insofar as it applies on an abstract level. Practical, legal authorship is another matter, which I think is hopelessly confused, and also kind of vulgar. It seems like legal authorship is really just about who has the monetary rights to a work, like in the Richard Prince or Jeff Koons lawsuits. I understand why those kinds of issues arise, and I'm actually somewhat sympathetic with the plaintiffs in those cases, but it doesn't seem like the system is at all equipped to handle them with any real nuance. Though I'm not exactly qualified to be commenting on this kind of thing.

As the web becomes increasingly trodden down with restrictions both hidden and brazen, how do you think it will impact your own practice as well as the creative applications of others? What can we do?

The only thing I really hate about the Internet right now is the growing number of walled gardens and closed-off platforms that splinter the web into a bunch of disjointed, restricted factions. As far as my things go, I've mostly tried to just ignore this shift, or work around it, or engage with it in such a way that it forces an otherwise closed system to be open. I miss Web 1.0, but technology marches on. I don't want to be get too weighted down with pointless nostalgia, so I just try to change with the internet, but on my own terms. I will always maintain total control over my own domains, and my own hosting, for example. But some of the conveniences of the modern web, as insidious as they might end up being in the long run, are hard to pass up. Tumblr's simple blog format or Twitter's ability to use their login on your site are good examples of this. I guess the only thing we can really do is use the services that are the least restrictive and vocally oppose the ones that don't carry on in the spirit of the web's early carefree days. :)

Age:

Location:

NYC

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

Since I was a real little kid. My first computer was a Mac Classic, and I was in love with it. It had an old copy of black & white Photoshop, and I would mess around with that for hours and hours. I also loved hacking with ResEdit and HyperCard. I once tried to make my own HyperCard version of MYST with images I had rendered in a demo version of Bryce 3D that I hacked. I was obviously a huge hit with the ladies.

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

I use a lot of different tools. Among them, the Adobe suite for design stuff, and a number of different Eclipse builds for coding. I mostly work with the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack on the back-end and the Flash platform client-side. I know it's extremely unfashionable at the moment, but I still love Flash. (Hi Haters!!) I got into it when I was in college, since the ActionScript 3 language was very similar to the Java I was writing for class projects. Most people who hate on Flash don't appreciate how Flash's AVM (Actionscript Virtual Machine) actually fulfilled Java's original promise on the web: write once, run anywhere. But where Java was cumbersome and slow to load, the Flash plugin was only a few MB and quick to initialize, which is a big reason why it's so widely adopted now. I still have a special place in my heart for virtual machines, and I don't think many people realize how good (despite its myriad of hacks and security issues) the AVM actually is. They also don't seem to know that you can write great Flash apps for free. You don't have to pay Adobe to be a developer. The majority of the platform is relatively open.

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

University of Central Florida for Computer Science

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

You mean like dead bugs and animal hides and plants and stuff?

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

Not presently. I used to try to play drums when I didn't live in New York, but that was awhile ago. I love music and would love to get into making music in the future, but I just haven't found the time.

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?

Freelance advertising/digital media work. I'm sure it's had a subconscious effect on some of the things I do, but I can't think of anything where I've explicitly tried to relate it. I'm skeptical of advertising as an industry, but at the same time I know some profoundly creative people that work in it who produce really beautiful ideas despite their consumerist restrictions. These people are inspirations to me just on a general level.

Who are your key artistic influences?

This is hard to pin down, because I'm really bad at remembering names. I remember specific projects very vividly though. I know Cory Arcangel and John Michael Boling have influenced me. I was aware of the work of both those guys before I really knew their names. The first thing I saw by Cory Arcangel was Pizza Party and it kind of killed me. I didn't know who made it or that it was considered an artwork until later. I love that project. Other people like Christian Marclay, Paul Pfieiffer and that dextro.org guy I think all influence me on some level. Also the entire spectrum of internet content creators in aggregate: YouTube commentors, cool tweeters, people who make vids of their cats... too many to list.

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

I haven't really yet, but I would like to. I have a lot of dumb video ideas, like ideas for web videos or whatever. But I don't know anything about how to film stuff or produce that kind of project. Also I have a lot of supercut ideas that may never get made because I'm too lazy. If anyone reading this wants to make videos with me, get in touch plz!

Do you actively study art history?

I wouldn't say actively. I took a class on 20th century art in school, and often get absorbed in Wikipedia & Google Art Project (and even sometimes go to museums IRL!) but I wouldn't call it an active pursuit.

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

I do have a kind of amateur interest in philosophy. I take continuing education classes and listen to a lot of podcasts and online lectures. I never got a chance to formally study much in the way of humanities as a CS student, so I've been slowly trying to fill the gaps in my knowledge. I just finished three John Searle courses that are available through Berkeley's online lecture offerings, and have grown to appreciate the level of clarity that comes from the ordinary language approach to solving big problems. I wouldn't say it really influences the things I make, however. And I don't really read much Theory or art criticism. On occasion, I'll stumble into some stuff online and will often feel either hopelessly lost or like I'm wasting my time parsing obscurantist trivialities. But this may just be the result of my low tolerance for what I perceive as the over-intellectualization of art, most likely due to my technical background.

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

Not really, but I haven't been asked to exhibit my things all that much. Though every time I see a computer in a gallery running a piece of net art or whatever, I do think it can look a little out of place. Like the internet, which anyone can access from anywhere, has been forced into this stodgy artificial context which does little to reproduce the wonderful experience of surfing around from site to site and suddenly discovering something really beautiful in the middle of your living room. But it's no big deal. Besides, if we didn't put websites in galleries then how else would we know that they've been officially canonized as cool artworks? :)

Commissions Deadline Tonight and Benefit on May 9th

Rhizome — Tue, 01 May 2012 10:36:59 -0500

Tonight is the deadline for Rhizome commissions! Proposals are due at midnight tonight.

Also, tickets are still available for our Benefit party on May 9th! Performances by Venus X, Extreme Animals, and LE1F.

Mapping the Social

Louis Doulas — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:36:49 -0500

The Internet, specifically social media, is often perpetuated as being a new kind of ‘revolution celebrity’ and indeed to some point its played a hefty distributive role in accelerating the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Occupy and even the SOPA protests to name but a recent few. Yet, it simultaneously is this other exploitative entity, capitalizing on our movement through online space and constantly collecting data with often vague, ill-defined intentions. Can social media’s two dynamic roles—both as a constructive social platform for anti-government efforts and a data aggregating system—be synthesized into a critical and valuable commons? Can personal user data collection be used for more than advertising and increased commodification?

Techno-sociologist, Zeynep Tufekci proposes that today, connection and friendship are moving from the ‘ascribed ties’ of inherited local relationships consisting of one’s neighborhood friends, family, etc. to ‘achieved ties’ or relationships located based on the shared affinities of people ‘with whom you interact using multiple means of communication’. What can such shifts reveal about territorial and even regional interaction? Of neighborhoods, boroughs and its socio-economic behaviors? How can geography be re-defined?

The Livehood Research Project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University is potentially one example of how data collection can be used in a constructive, illuminating way, by demonstrating how place can be defined by social activity (maybe rather than by jurisdiction). Livehood uses the data of over 18 million foursquare check-ins to map both geographic distance of frequented venues as well as plotting its ‘social distance’, or ‘the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them’. Through accumulation of foursquare check-ins, Livehood algorithmically condenses this data into neighborhoods allowing a user to view the pattern sets of other people’s use of space.

Though the project in its current stages is still extremely limited (restricted so far to only three US cities, as well as accessible only to foursquare users) Livehood could develop into an extremely valuable tool for future governments and its citizens, as both a social lubricant and political tool. It also could just as easily fulfill yet another advertiser’s dream.

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome April

Rhizome — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:00:11 -0500

Remote Control

Essays

Photoshopped Sherman

Interviews

Artist Profiles

The Impermanent Book

Reviews

Wordworks

More

A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem

Joanne McNeil — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:49:09 -0500

Jesse England, E-Book backup (ongoing)

In 2007, novelist Jonathan Lethem published an essay in Harper's ending with a grand reveal: "every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together." The patchwork includes dozens of sources — part of a Steve Erickson novel, something from a Pitchfork review, a quote from an interview with Rick Prelinger. Sandra Day O'Connor and Ralph Waldo Emerson are stitched in too.

The Ecstasy of Influence, now the title of his recent collection of writings, often addresses the process of integrating and "cobbling together" ideas and culture to make something new. Yet, stories Lethem relates of hosting "mailing parties" for the Philip K Dick Society or working in a bookstore seem like snapshots from pre-digital age. Recently I talked with the author about our rapidly dematerializing culture as well as appropriation as an art practice:

JM: Have you ever tried to imagine what kind of career path you would have had without a culture of physical objects?

JL: It’s really interesting because I do think of the procedural experience of having to dig, having to find out what, let’s say, all of those names in the back of Greil Marcus’ “Stranded” were. Now when I read that collection, I see it put together like his esoteric nod to the history of rock and roll and like 80 percent of it was terra incognita. I didn’t know the names at all, and I couldn’t just go skimming around and get a little taste. I had to make each and every one of those things that compelled me —because of the name or his description — a search. I’d have to go find some broken down piece of media, some old vinyl or something, and you know, the delay that inserts, the relationship to time. I spent a lot of time thinking about a culture that wasn’t right at hand.

I might envision a given song or movie for five or ten years before I’d lay hands on it at times, and that creates this sort of personal, fictional vision. It’s like having a book unread on your shelf and just staring at the jacket or the title or what you’ve heard about it, and having it emanating all this promise. Books I guess, can still do that, but it’s a really peculiar thing for me to think about how I would relate differently.

I mean, I was advantaged. I grew up in New York City. Compared to other versions of access in our generation, I had great access. My parents had a good record collection and really interesting books on the shelves and pointed me to them. There was no quarantine. I was in New York City and there were great repertory houses and I started going to them when I was 14 or 15 years old, just gobbling down some curators’ ideas of cinema. I was getting all these versions of importance or interest out of the obscure past or out of other national cinemas. So in that way, it was like I was surrounded. I didn't even think of myself as deprived.

The strange thing that the question sets up is an image of me, or anyone my age, as somehow suffering from a drought. But I wouldn't have, of course, had the comparison. I wouldn't have had any notion that I was lacking materials. I still had to make really complicated priorities for myself because there was so much that seemed so compelling, potentially compelling. And it wasn't too hard to get a hold of it. But I did, in retrospect I did have these kinds of limits and always a physical relationship — a movie theater that smelled a certain way. What it was to go to the Thalia and watch Bunuel films. It's associated for me with the feeling of that lobby and the strange loneliness in that place on a Thursday afternoon and the other people who would be there present or the kinds of record stores where I would at look at things or the bookstores and the way the objects themselves felt and became talismanic. And the way my own room was changing if I brought these things! It wasn't like I could close the computer and it would all go away. It was like I was changing my body practically. To just start accruing all this stuff like armor, like an exoskeleton.

JM: I'm sure your consumption of culture now is different though. Do you have a Kindle or an iPad? Are you an ebook reader? I'm sure you have MP3s, at least.

JL: I have a lot of MP3s! I'm going to qualify this in a number of different ways. I've always been a very late adopter. I mean even MP3s, I didn't have them after other people I knew did. Something about me always sort of wants them to become a little more part of the world. It's like I need to believe in them by seeing people form attachments before I make that move. I've got a friend who teases me because he remembers me saying that I would probably never bother with email. I knew a few people who were doing it and it just didn't seem that appealing to me. Now I'm ten years into an unbelievable promiscuous emailing binge that will never end. So I've been a late adopter a lot of times with tech. I wrote novels on an electric typewriter after it was possible to begin writing prose on computers. I just wasn't quite there. I wasn't ready to make a move from something that felt very important and material and personal to me. So who knows what I might do later on, but I've never read anything on a Kindle and I haven't even really had an iPad or a Kindle in my hands. The nearest I've been has been in the seat beside me in an airplane when I feel smug because they have to stop reading when the announcement goes out and my book is still open.

I think as a writer about the shape and heft of a book. And so I think the reason I am attached to reading them is I’m writing into that form. For better or worse, I still think of where physically my hands would be turning the pages. Feeling, oh, maybe now I’m ten pages from the end. And so some of those things are sacrificed in the Kindle.

Also, the kind of doubling back that I do as a reader seems very fundamental to pages. I’ll keep my finger sometimes even three or four pages width in two places in a book. Because I’m interested in doing a doubling. It’s very much a part of the physical object to me.

JM: It’s almost like screens in that sense that you have the multiple views at once.

JL: It is, yeah. But the other thing, the conversation that I don’t ever hear — the single object versus the single object; Kindle versus the book. I have this very, very intense, lifelong relationship to the roomful of books. And the idea of walls of these objects. Rooms that are given over to them – libraries, bookstores, or personal collections. And I don’t hear this description very often, that even if somehow they could make a Kindle that you held and it would be like a book in every regard as you held it – the paper would feel papery and the weight would feel weightful and so forth, you’d hit refresh and it would be a different book — but you only have the single object. But I actually feel that I would be even more hard-pressed to give up these kinds of rooms and the sense of orientation with a spatial field of books. That’s so crucial, so formative, for me.

JM: I had a funny experience the other day where I was waiting for a bus that was very late and my book was out of batteries.

JL: I don’t want my books to get out of batteries.

JM: You probably know this — I want to say there is a writer who travelled around with a suitcase full of books. There are probably a lot of them but there’s one who is known for this.

JL: I think most famously – Somerset Maugham writes about his steamer trunk full of books that had to go everywhere with him. I think more than one person has bragged of this or confessed this. That’s another thing – it’s funny because, ironically, if someone wants to have the dummy argument with you: “Oh wait, you don’t have a Kindle yet?” Their surest foot forward, the one where they think they have won the argument before it has even begun is they’ll say “for travel.” “Come on, for travel. You must.” But in fact, one of my most precious interactions with my books is when I’m going for a trip that is long enough that I don’t need just one. When I’m going for a two- or three-week trip, you’re not relocating your office; you’re not shipping a whole bunch of stuff ahead of you, you’re really just packing exactly that range of things you might want to read. And it is a kind of visualizing of a grouping of things that you want to have with you, and then packing them and having them with you. That has got a lot of charm, actually. Sure, I would save space with just the Kindle, but even that, I’ll express a little bit of resistance on. There is something about taking the cluster of three or four books and visualizing I’m going to read this one, start it off, but then I’ll have this particular one waiting. I won’t have very many choices. I’ll just have the ones I’ve brought. There’s something so intense and clarifying about that selection.

JM: Because you consume so many books and films and a lot of other things, how do you think that comes out in your original work? How is that blended into something? I’m thinking of Richard Nash’s project Small Demons — what it does is it cross-references the metadata. So for example, with Empire of the Sun it will show all the movies that are referenced there. It will show all the actresses; it will show all the proper nouns as images from Google Search or another service. I feel like your books are probably covered with a lot of interesting references as well. Is that something that you think a lot about in terms of making the work time-sensitive?

JL: There’s a number of concepts that I grapple with frequently and sometimes in conversations that are frustrating to me because the terms are circumscribed. But this won’t be that. To take the simplest thing first – and I’ll offer what may be by now kind of a rote defense of temporal references – David Foster Wallace has that great quote which I stole and injected as a paragraph of The Ecstasy of Influence essay, where he is talking about being in a writing class with someone who he calls “the gray eminence.” And the gray eminence is criticizing his characters’ uses of recent technology or references to recent cultural things as not being timeless enough and wrecking the fiction for posterity or for anything but a kind of immediate reader. And then Wallace sort of reflects on how this guy’s fiction is of course full of all his personal stack of technologies – cars, telephones, and mimeograph machines or whatever it might be, and all sorts of cultural things that seem quite natural and embedded in the texture of mimetic reality to this guy. And he realizes this is just generational anxiety, anytime that you are getting this pressure.

The fact is, fiction is made up of reference. Obviously, you could make a scale and put a Kafka parable on one side, and you could have Thomas Pynchon on the other side or somebody, Mark Leyner, I guess, or somebody who exfoliates into innumerable culturally sticky arrows pointing in all directions. But most of us are in the range in-between. And it’s okay. It’s just okay. It’s what it is. You do this. You make reference. In fact even Kafka, you find there are things that are immediate to his culture. Scholarship is endlessly proving that he was looking at a particular film or something before he wrote. So he may not wear it on his sleeve, but it happens anyway. We’re not abstract expressionist painters. We’re using language and we’re using culture and narrative and human life. We’re immersed in stuff and some of it is often wanting to be referential in a pretty specific way. And if you read Dickens, in fact, the texture of his London is all over — the advertising jingles of his day and street names and so forth. And so at some point I just inoculated myself against that anxiety totally.

To widen the framework to the question that really engages me and that for me is a consuming one — well, I just feel like I am cursed with, in a way, an autism about the injunctions or the inhibitions against, first, knowing when you're borrowing and, second, saying so. I just always can tell the flow of other people's rhythms — spoken, written — the flow of musical or filmic echoes into my work is constant. It's tangible, it's enjoyable, and I don't really understand how I could be expected to somehow play at barricading myself against what happens, which is that you make work out of everything that's at hand. Everything inside yourself is eligible and you usually find that eventually you're using most everything that's in there and you use your friends, yes, and your family and people you never got to know, but you heard them say a line in a restaurant or on television when they were a bystander at a bicycle-pedestrian accident or anything. You use characters from other people's fiction. It all gets in there. It all gets transformed. That's also automatic. The blessing and the reason to take in so much is to see it all transformed. And to see how that unifies your work and makes it personal and makes it fundamentally authentic.

I'm not really interested in worrying about divisions of originality versus sourcing or appropriations. I'm interested in the authentic, vivid, remarkable, and intimate. I want to feel the grain of another person's intelligence and voice and expressivity and their own version of this kind of helpless intensity that that they feel in the face of existence. Just being alive, being subjective, living in a world of humans and their stuff. It's overwhelming and so the art I like and the art I try to license myself to make doesn't pretend to have control over that plenitude, but to just abide, just to be inside it and make something. And if you do that, it guarantees what other people might tend to call originality, but I just avoid the word as much as I can. What they mean by originality is that it just feels intensely real and persuasive and necessary. Personal. Not borrowed in a pointless way.

JM: This reminds me of what Simon Reynolds said at the Goethe-Institute a few months back. He was commentating on your essay, The Ecstasy of Influence and said that the power of that essay was that you're a novelist known for your originality. Were you aware when you wrote it that it would perhaps come across with more authority coming from you as opposed to someone better known for appropriation in his or her work?

JL: First of all, I am honored that Simon was making this remark, and I swelled to hearing anything like this, but, at the same time I sort of want to play at it and say, “Well I may be known for my originality but, I am not known to myself for my originality.” Because, I think of my work as super-extensively sourced and I am really going to be insistent on that. Mostly when people see things as original it means they don’t know where they came from. It’s kind of that simple but, I don’t mean that as “Whoa snap, I can’t believe you said that, it’s so mean.” I mean that I don’t know where everything came from either, who does? Things come from places largely and then they get recombined or spun or give a different flavor or different emphasis. I can think of a 100 precursors to almost anything I’ve done and honestly, sometimes you don’t stand on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes you stand on shoulders of dwarfs. There are things that I thought. “Oh, that’s minimally interesting, but I think there is something about it I can improve and turn into my own.” Other times you are conscious of a series of precursors that no one else would ever spot or think about unless you pointed it out — and I’m that dope who is always pointing it out. For originality is really truly an overrated concept except as a nice form of praise. It’s like you want to say “wow.” It’s a way of saying wow.

What I think Simon is trying to say — I’ll backtrack a little bit. I’ve come of age inside the family of a painter who’d been trained in an era of modernism. He’d studied in Paris and then Columbia. My father’s first attempt was to be an abstract impressionist but he was a little too late to be a modernist. So he, along with everybody else, went back to figuration and he arrived at a style, which in a very, very loose way, you could say he was an early post-modern painter. I don’t think he identifies with it. That word very few people do comfortably. He devised a kind of a figurative expressionism and started using some collage elements and this was the beginning of the 60’s. He taught me about the twentieth century and I couldn’t help noticing that just about every single art gesture except that of the abstract expressionists was a collage gesture. The cubists, the dadaists, the pop artists, everybody was grabbing stuff. Ad Reinhardt and Mondrian even. You just saw that art was made of appropriations and references in a very enthusiastic way. Simultaneously, I was being schooled at the low end, you might say, by Bugs Bunny — Warner Bros cartoons, which were exhilarating. One of my earliest private aesthetic experiences, because it wasn’t confirmed —my parents didn’t hand that over to me. They did a lot of great stuff. And it was all jokes about references outside the frame, many of which I didn’t understand but, I liked them anyway and this was really important. I could think that it is very funny for Bugs Bunny to pretend to be Edward G. Robinson without having seen an Edward G. Robinson movie. I could think that The Barber of Seville sequence was hilarious without knowing what The Barber of Seville opera sounded like. And, in fact, there are lots of even more temporal things. They make jokes about contemporary news events and those cartoons and stuff that has been forgotten, lost completely. And that just made me feel — ok, this kind of embedded referentiality and borrowing and parody within powerfully expressive, in this case, powerfully ludicrous artwork — good! It's all good. I like it.

And this carried over to one of my earliest and most formative literary experiences, which was Lewis Carroll, and I still think there's almost no text as central for me in becoming a writer as the two Alice books. You can't help noticing, even at eleven or twelve, those things are loaded with all sorts of arch-borrowings and references and pastiches and parodies. And then you could also get the Martin Gardner “Annotated Alice” and find out what a lot of those things are. And it was, again, all good. So from high and from low, I was just like, this is what it's about. It was in my body. It was basic.

So when I then found myself in an atmosphere where people were putting up barricades or quarantines or expressing this anxiety that you aren't meant to be so influenced or so referential or that you better temper it or sublimate it or pretend not to be, even when you are, I just didn't get it at all. And, again, my organic aesthetic response was right there with me when sampling first emerged in music. When I heard the first Public Enemy record or whatever that moment was and I was like, “Crazy quilt of sonic collage. That's music. Great music. I'm all for that.”

I had no reservations and I had to really always work not to think that people who were protesting or, you know, made indignant about it, "That's not music" or something were not in total bad faith because I just thought, "It's you versus the entire 20th Century, dude. Everything points to this. How could you possibly misunderstand?"

And when I then also developed my specific ambition to be a writer and to work in this arena of narrative and fiction, which is in some ways very staid. The art form has some very staid elements and the world of its reception has a lot of, let's say, pre-modern biases still floating around. And I realize, writers and novelists are among the most not-yet-up-to-speed on appropriation. I'm not just in an average arena here. I'm in a real retrograde zone.

Well, it amused me. It didn't necessarily seem really important or my big problem because the kind of reference I do actually doesn't, unless you point to it, you know, I'm not going to get sued. I'm never going to get sued for what I do, but when the arguments began to emerge from what we would, I guess, pretty much agree simply to call "the copyleft", right? And then suddenly there's really energetic stuff going on. Lawrence Lessig and, artists like Negativland, who are provocateurs, or The Tape-beatles. Also the arguments that emerged, the legal arguments and the legal feats for someone like Hank Shocklee. Suddenly it was politicized on both sides and the digital age led to the backlash. The very industry that, of course, had digitized their entire catalog suddenly didn't want you to use it that way.

And there was a political discourse. It was very compelling to me. I knew which side I was on very definitely, and when I listened to it, I didn't hear my own voice. I heard two different kinds of voices, both of them very persuasive and appropriate in their very different ways. One was like the, legal intervention like Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan. People who were lending their brilliance to shoring up the rights of artists from the outside, not working artists. And they would tend always to offer a kind of nuanced or a pragmatist position about ideas of copyrights, for instance. And then there were artists, but the artists were all tending to the avant-garde side of say, Cory Doctorow. They were provocateurs. They were interested in web-based activities specifically, for the most part, or digital activities. They were making work often that was defiantly illegal or provoked cultural norms about appropriation and they were strident. They were funny, strident, they were pissed off, they were irreverent, and this was also very persuasive to me and appropriate, but I didn't hear about someone speaking passionately in the copyleft perspective from the middle of a career, of a normative regular kind of, "I've got a publisher. It's a big publisher. I make my living by copyrights. My work doesn't get my sued so I have no personal stake in somehow giving myself more elbow room. You know, I'm not in Hank Shocklee's position or something on being on the verge of losing my tools."

And yet, I wanted to say, even for one such as me who could just placidly go along ignoring this whole fuss, I actually have a very powerful motive for throwing everything I have, rhetorically, passionately, emotionally onto the side of the copyleft, and the reason being that the other side tells a lie about what artists do and how they really think and feel and thrive. And also, there is a risk for every artist of damage being done not just to the ethos of how art is made, but to the actual traditions and behaviors. If more and more people really buy into this image of the Promethean isolated creator who's only legitimate because he invents out of nothing — and it really informs the culture and the laws and the way art is taught and the way art is received — it's propagating a dangerous befuddlement about how we really go about things. We're in a really messy area. We pick stuff up and we fool around with it and it's stuff. It's stuff that's around us. Some of it is owned, in some sense, by someone else and some of it isn't, and sometimes we don't even know, and sometimes we're doing it half consciously. And we must. We must do all of these things. There's no other possibility.

JM: Have you thought about at what point is it maybe ethical to cite someone else for any contributions to your work?

JL: There are all sorts of ethical judgments we can make about these behaviors. You know, morality is the grave level of life and death and ethics is the next layer up. Some of these I would even put at another thinner layer of civility or courtesy. You can make lots of judgments about ethics, civility, courtesy, etc, but it's really, first of all, important to specify this is not actually a moral area. Even though people will express enormous amounts of indignation and righteousness about it, these are not generally life and death matters. Very, very often they're much, much less like matters of livelihood than people make them out to be. It's very hard to hurt someone else's livelihood by plagiarizing them for instance. It's just about impossible to even in the most aggressive and pernicious way, to take away, unless you literally have access to their computer and you steal their draft before they can publish it, under your own name. It's just really hard to do anything. It could be totally yucky, but it's not really actually very easy to make much of a dent in their livelihood. These are not mostly moral matters. These are ethics and norms and matters of courtesy and protocol and so forth. Well yeah, we can make lots of judgments in that zone. I do all the time. I think lots of people do. The really crucial thing to say about those is, when the question comes, just as it did from you, "is there a point?" To say in each specific case, yes, there is, but the generalization still works. You can't say, "So here's how we're going to do it." It's actually always very individual, I think.

When I'm challenging people to think about it this way, the suggestion I always use is that we talk about music because people can really latch onto these feelings in music and the reference is usually familiar to everyone. Also there's a lot of transparency in that realm. There are sort of two primary axes on which we make the individual judgment. One is: degree of transformation and the other is degree of transparency and or citation. In other words, how much do they really make something different out of what they appropriated? And how much did they make it easy to see that there was someone else’s gesture behind their own? Every single appropriating gesture can be looked at on both of these axes and sometimes something will score very high on one but score very poorly on the other or sometimes it's a mixture. So take my dummy examples: Willy Dixon, great blues man, was radically appropriated by Led Zeppelin and for a long time this struck people as a kind of hideous example of kind of exploitative appropriation because they took his name off the songs until they were literally sued into putting his name back on the songs. Because they were fabulously wealthy white guys running around the world having sex with groupies, while he was like and old black guy, who we tend to sentimentalize as the victim in this scenario and I think there's every reason that we have those kinds of feelings about it. It scored terribly poorly on the transparency — they're unbelievably world famous, he's not a household name. They specifically deleted his name from his own compositions. Just egregious gesture on the level of transparency or citation. On the other hand, on the level of transformation, those Led Zeppelin songs do not sound like Willy Dixon to me. They took his composition and they made something very different and that difference was so earth shattering. First of all, it made them wealthy and it changed music forever, the whole genre of music was basically piled on top of this gesture, so it was a totally high score on transformation. They did not just play those songs the way Willy Dixon did. The transformation was staggering, in fact that's probably why they thought they could get away with the appropriation. They didn't seem to have a relationship anymore to some people. So that's one where you have a very high score on one side. It's like the fiddler crab image, the transformation is organic and the claw of transparency, terrible. Let's flip it, lets find an opposite example: Paul Simon goes to Africa and he hears some stuff he likes and he puts out this record, which if you've never heard any African music, ever in your life, it's the most radical, mind blowing, extraordinary record anyone's ever heard called Graceland. It changes everything. How could this be? What are these sounds? They're making my head spin! If you know anything about African music, especially if you know quite a lot about African music, it was like, that is so wearisome. He basically took Soweto sound and he laid a thin layer of neurotic upper west side Jew stuff on top of it. It's just like Paul Simon nattering away over the top of African music. So the claw of transformation very poor, very inadequate for a lot of people. But on the other hand, what did he do? He not only credited these guys, he put them in a van and he drove around the country and he played on stage with them. Right beside them. The claw of transparency is the most amazing gesture ever. He was just like, "Hey, don't look at me, look at these great African guys!" It was like if Willie Dixon was the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. So he has reversed it completely. Now, in an ideal world every appropriative gesture would have Led Zeppelin- level transformation with Paul Simon-level transparency. That would be great. We don’t always get that. We often get some imbalance or some weird mixture or we’re not sure. Also, we’re not always sure. Sometimes things come also from somewhere else. Or there’s a common denominator or whatever. It’s like it’s not always so clear-cut. So you have to look at each and every gesture and decide how you feel about it. You can’t make a law about it.

But I’ll add even on to that, that there are also really important differences medium to medium, even in the capacity to cite. T.S. Elliott has this appendix to The Wasteland where there are all these citations. We’ll put aside the fact that probably no one ever bothers to read that. But it’s there. He tried. It’s right there. But if a painter makes a canvas, it does not have room for footnotes on it. And a lot of art, the form doesn’t invite the same kinds of embrace of transparency. The specific gestures just don’t work. So what do you do? There might be follow-up. You could speak in an interview, you could make a gesture. But you know what? Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone wants to be interviewed about their work at all. They want to just make it. And that’s okay.

This is one of these places where I just want to keep reminding people that art is not principally in the moral sphere. It’s not really about do we feel like this is a good purpose or not. It’s more about – Holy shit! What’s that? And that is what it’s for. And how does it make us feel? The ethics and even the morals is mostly about what happens inside of us on meeting it. Which is why, ironically, we are so prone to feeling betrayed by the artist in some way. Because the art does something so extraordinary to us that then we find out some detail. “Oh! He stole that from Willie Dixon.” “Oh! He beat his wife.” “Oh! He picks his nose in public.” “Wait a minute. He made that thing that changed my life. This is incongruent. I don’t like it!” That’s why we get so betrayed by the knowledge of appropriations, because we’re holding art to this very weird standard where it is actually about us. It’s about our own lives. It’s not about the artist’s life. Sometimes we want to be fooled, too. It’s silly that people can be so complicated, but then again we don’t have any other model. And a lot of us want to be fooled at the same time we get angry that we’re fooled. We want the artist to be a kind of Houdini who does magic tricks. And then we simultaneously want to find out that it’s an esoteric, comes from an esoteric place where we could never understand how the magic was made. And we want the cards to be turned over so we can understand and make the person seem humble and normal and like us. And then we get angry at them for just being a normal humble person. So what we want is very problematic.

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Rhizome — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:36:14 -0500

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

ArtPrize – Part art competition, part social experiment that awards $560,000 total in prizes; registration through May 24.
Pulse Art Fair – Pulse New York runs May 3–6, 2012, at The Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 West 18th Street, New York.
BAMart Silent Auction – Auction featuring over 100 artworks, with proceeds to benefit the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its programs
Saatchi Online – Online gallery that connects artists and art lovers directly: discover art, get discovered.
Dumbo Arts Festival - Brooklyn’s biggest arts event takes over Brooklyn’s waterfront with visual arts, music, and literature on 9/28-30.
Norte Maar – Community-building nonprofit organization with an emphasis on collaborative projects
UncommonGoods – Cool and unusual gifts for any occasion.
Adam Lindemann – Follow what the New York Observer columnist is seeing and reading at his site.
Storefront Bushwick – Bushwick gallery currently featuring artists Carol Salmanson and Stephen Traux
Unnamed Broadway Musical: The Musical! – An experimental, legally questionable restaging of an orphan-themed Broadway musical, at EFA Project Space
Pernod Art & Absinthe Guide – A handy mobile app that lists galleries, events and bars serving Pernod in Brooklyn
Artspan – Contemporary art destination and service providing totally customizable artist websites
FIT Art Market MA Program – The group exhibition “No Other Medicine” is now on view at NY Studio Gallery through May 19
“Oh hey. What’s going on?” – a project by artist Jesus Benavente
Art Systems – Professional art gallery, antiques and collections management software
Tyler Summer Painting & Sculpture Intensives – 7-week immersion program for artists interested in developing their work in a challenging and supportive environment
950 Hart Gallery – The Lowbrow Society Smut! Show, a public celebration of private affairs, May 4–5.
Claremont Graduate University MFA – A highly focused graduate-only studio-art program

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

Artist Profile: Sami Ben Larbi

Louis Doulas — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:53:17 -0500

Parle moi je t'écoute, 2006-7

Fiction, history and reality are constantly being intertwined throughout your work. How do you balance the phantasmic with reality? How do these techniques propel or help understand the history and politics in works like As it might, could, did happen and Was Bourguiba, then Ben Ali, awaiting the next?

The balance is very vague and I keep it so as long as possible. I want the viewers to find their own balance.

When Bourguiba first came to power, he was hailed as a savior, a liberator of the oppressive French. Images of him where everywhere. He cultivated that cult, just like any other dictator and was able to hold on to power for a long time. The fiction of the liberator was trying to negate the reality of living under his reign.

In my work I ask the viewers to consider what is being presented, to form their own understanding and opinion. In As it might, could, did happen, I recreated a bedroom (with furniture made of cardboard and wood imitation vinyl) in what was a East German Pioneers boarding house. The furniture looked almost authentic, but not quite. It played with the pre-conceptions of how East German furniture looked cheap and homogeneous. But the environment was real. So the balance here between fiction and reality is very flexible.

In one of your project’s statements you describe the struggle with your identity as the following: “I want to be this icon, this Frenchness, while also being who I am a mix breed, neither one nor the other. Arab, but French, but American, but becoming German?”

With this, works like, La distinction entre un carthaginois et un hexadecagone, au subjonctif, Layered Tense, and Pictures I wish I had are attempts at contextualizing the fragmented identity in all its disparate variations. The dynamic between the placement of the ‘individual’ and the ‘group’ is constantly being challenged in today’s nobody-lives-where-there ancestors-did world. How do you deal with and approach this spectrum?

This fragmentation is very much at the center of my work. As you mentioned I am a member of various identities, nationalities. I identify, understand, relate with each of these groups. But I am always an outsider, because of these other affiliations and identities.

In my work I exploit and subvert the roles of the maker and the audience. In La distinction entre un carthaginois et un hexadecagone, au subjonctif, I play the role of Antoine Doinel, the lead character, and the viewers are the audience in the scene. But there is no way to enter the rotor, there is a clear separation, a frustration. I try to be this French icon, but I am not and in the installation I am trapped, doomed to repeat the scene over and over. Pictures I wish I had also deal with a certain frustration. The installation is a familiar environment, a living room but the pictures on the walls are blank and the viewers cannot sit on the chairs. So one could almost belong but a barrier exists preventing that.

The fragmentation is recurring. In North by Northwest, Erased and Reshot, the cinematic language of the famous scene from Hitchcock's film has been restructured. On one side the original scene is stripped of characters, autos and a plane. Stripped of its identity. On the other side the reshot scene is with me as Cary Grant, always looking toward the camera, transforming the viewer into the other protagonists in the scene. As a viewer, to experience the installation is to re-edit the scene and try to make sense of what is happening. Re-creating an identity. Maybe sensing a déjà vu but not quite placing it.

It seems that the autonomy of the art object and the film are never enough for you in your work. When used, they always exist within a larger constellation of things, as essential ‘props’ to the faithful conveying of a ‘scene’. These large, encompassing installations create a certain cinematic mood: a direct immersive environment for viewers to conceive a narrative. I’m interested in the way you approach these designed spaces as well as how architecture is considered throughout your body of work. Where do you place these environments in relation to film? Why awake and privilege the senses this way?

The reality and the fiction come here into play. Transposing time. Placing the viewers in a set and creating an interaction. I want to create an experience. Something, a feeling, a personal understanding between the installations and the viewers. A very early piece, Un der Pres S Ure, had the viewers become actors and only witness the audience to this interaction. It's a desire to communicate on a very basic level and at first, physical. My work begins with a physical experience, like architecture. The viewers are in a total environment that considers its environment, its architecture and its history. To refer back to the film reference, the viewers step into a set. I consider it live cinema, or real cinema, frozen in a certain time period.

The gallery space is abandoned as a sufficient, pre-requisite space to work within and that this abandonment seems most beneficial to you, as most of your work often alters the entirety of a space. I’m curious as to what kind of interference, or intervention you’re interested in creating by choosing to present ideas and experiences in such locations as a FDJ boarding room or a deserted military base. What does ‘art’ outside of its gallery context mean for you? How does it lend toward the ‘situational’?

I am not sure that the gallery has ever been sufficient, it's a display-space marketed toward sales just like any other product. It's blank and as such works well for singular objects (painting, sculptures...). I tend to create environments where everything in the space has been considered, the architecture, its history and my alterations / additions.

The FDJ boarding room is a great example of that. One could argue that I could have done the installation anywhere else. However prior to entering my room the viewers experienced stairs with a hand rail at kid height, a long hallway with multiple numbered doors on each side. This set the understanding and mood of the space in a certain direction. It felt authentic, because it was. Upon entering my installation one could believe what one saw. In other word an alternative space (to that of the gallery) lends to more interpretative potential.

But this is also double edged. My artwork exist rarely outside the installations I create, which are time based. They have a relatively short life spam. I rarely recreate the same installations somewhere else.

Age: 39

Location: Berlin, Germany

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

About 10 years ago I was experimenting with lots of materials and genres at the UW and I was always interested in Cinema, its development and its theories. I was then taking lots of film history and theory classes. I was interested in furthering the idea of “real cinema” put forth by the french and italian movements. The idea of creating an art form closer to reality. I started incorporating live cameras and monitors in an early installation I did and I have been using technology ever since.

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

I use tools as I need them. If I do not know a tool or a process I will teach myself. I started doing carpentry work in my undergrad studies by pretending I could do the job, and set myself up to learn as fast and as good as possible. I can do lots of things (wood work, metal work, casting, sewing, computer work...). All pretty much self taught, with lots and lots of trial and error. I still have lots to learn.

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

I went to The University of Washington where I studied Ceramics with the great Jamie Walker, Akio Takamori and Doug Jeck. I then went to Virginia Commonwealth University to study Sculpture and Extended media with Siemon Allen, Kendall Buster, Elizabeth King and Amy Hauft.

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

I use them all, all the time. It's part of my artistic process. It's a means to an end, just like media is. They are both intertwined. I could not conceive and realize the installations I create without the understanding of both.

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

I go mushroom hunting when I can. I travel and cook sweet dishes for people whenever I can. I plan on doing more acting in the near future.

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?

For the moment I work installing art shows in museums and for artists. I have also taught art at TU Berlin. I was a building manager. I was also a house cleaner, a carpenter, a mason, a dishwasher, a math and physics tutor, a basket-ball coach, a gardener, a graphic designer, a seamster, a pizza delivery boy. They all have influenced me. I have either re-used the knowledge and experience to physically produce the work or they influenced the way I see.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Stan Douglas comes quickly to mind, as did early Tony Oursler and Gary Hill pieces. I like a lot Steve Mc Queen, Bruce Naumann, Omer Fast. Tsai Ming-Liang is also a key figure.

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

I have worked with Fionn Meade and Mary Simpson on a few of their projects, short films/ sequences. I am currently developing projects with Philine Sollmann on a photo-film series.

Do you actively study art history?

I did in school. Installing artworks, from old renaissance paintings to current artists, I do get to experience and learn from them, which I find a lot more informative than seeing slides or a reproduction in a book. One gets to really experience the materiality of the artwork and gain a deeper appreciation, or not.

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

I am familiar with some of the art theories out there but I must say it rather turns me off. When I read Bourriaud and then experience some of the artwork it champions the two do not compute. I prefer to read historical or semi historical books and essays like Amin Maalouf. I do read art criticism and reviews to keep me informed.

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

Very much so..I use media in my work, but it's not about media. The various materials used in the work are just a vehicle. As such I have a hard time getting funding for projects. In a typical grant-funding application, one must either enter images, or video, not both. To get a sense of my work I need to have both to give a sense of the experience. The granting foundations and associations are still very slow in recognizing this hybrid genre.

Poems by Steve Roggenbuck

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Steve Roggenbuck, carpe dime you only live ounce, 2012

smile at me using the dead girls mouth

it hurts with me.

im in california hugging with my dead family.

we're alredy

simple in the western u.s. crying in my bed

im dead with you sad girl.

i want you in the airports of my country

i am about the size of a dead nine year old

i am about the size of a dead nine year old

in her cool bed room

in september

i am ugly with dead children

it is early september at 7 in the morning

i want to listen to birds outside of my

bed room

i love birds

i love them more than humans

there are also dead

bodies hanging from my familys tire swing

dead girl, you are dead

i am crying in you and being fucked at the same

time by january rain. i hurt

when i move.

i am being rained on with dead

children now dead five year olds.

i dont care if my blood

chokes me,

i no longer want to have blood. i want your

cold pointless hands.

i want to put flowers in your cold pointless mouth

Rebecca Allen's 3D Graphics for Kraftwerk

Rhizome — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:14:47 -0500

Geeta Dayal interviews Rebecca Allen, who created computer graphics for the video for “Musique Non Stop” and other 3d work:

Creating the milestone video, which made Allen a major force behind the German band’s visual aesthetic in the ’80s, was a painstaking process that took nearly two years for Allen and her team at the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Laboratory to complete.

“Nowadays you can pretty easily digitize a 3-D object,” said Allen in an interview with Wired. “Back then, it was a very crafted process. I would have to put little pieces of tape over the models…. Then you put it in this reference cube, and then point by point you’d digitize.”

In the abstract video, animated heads flash across the screen. It took hundreds of hours just to get the colors exactly the way Allen wanted them. (See behind-the-scenes photographs of the creative process in the exclusive gallery above.)

“There’s so much involved — not just the color, but then you had to get the lighting … and it’s on some crummy TV, ultimately,” said Allen, now a design professor at UCLA. “But that’s the way I am. If you’re an animator, it’s already clear that you’re a fanatic — an obsessive. Anybody who wants to make frames for every second of movement is obviously pretty obsessive about things.”

The attention to detail paid off: The “Musique Non Stop” music video still looks prescient, even today. In Kraftwerk’s recent eight-day stand at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the band made ample use of visuals gleaned from the video. Other pioneering music videos with rendered 3-D graphics sequences — such as Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing,” which won Video of the Year at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards — look dated in comparison...

JODI: Street Digital

Karen Archey — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:07:10 -0500

Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, collectively known as JODI, are rightfully venerated for their countless contributions to art and technology, working as an artistic duo since the mid-90’s. Generally referred to as pioneers of “net.art,” that oft-misunderstood “movement” combining the efforts of artists using the internet as a medium circa 1994, JODI is revered not only for their artistic meditations on the increasing presence of new technology in our daily lives, but also for their fuck-if-I-care attitude toward both the establishments of the technology and art worlds. JODI’s famous five-word “acceptance” speech—if you could call it that—for their 1999 Webby Award in art, simply read, “Ugly commercial sons of bitches.”

Unlike an overwhelming majority of artists, and especially those in art and tech, JODI has managed to sustain a successful career for over 15 years, mounting exhibitions internationally. February 2011 saw the duo literally blow its audience in the face with bomb-like cans of oxygen at Foxy Production, accounting for one of the best performances of the year.

Yet, their recently launched exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) finds a flashy, overly simplistic exhibition that fails to represent the deeply important perspective that JODI has come to represent over the last two decades. Comprising work made from 1999 to the present, “Street Digital” extends JODI’s focus from the desktop computer to hardware’s broader, more public landscape including cellular phones, LED signs, and iPods. A projection split into four channels, YTCT (Folksomy) (2008/2010), combines Youtube videos of “people doing weird things with hardware,” or more specifically, the video features mostly-teenage boys destroying old iPods, cameras, laptops, etc., by throwing, bashing, or hammering them. Periodically, a legitimately strange occurrence replaces the usual simple, hormonally charged violent acting-out of an enfants terrible. (An extra special moment occurs when a young man puts an iPod in his mouth for a while.) In a 2009 interview with Motherboard, Heemskerk says that she prefers these truly uncanny and bizarre moments, to which Paesmans added, “I feel really sorry for [technology], that it needs to display information. It can do so much more.” Paesmans has seemingly stumbled into a manifesto for glitch art.

The further one traverses into “Street Digital,” the more it becomes plain that its target audience is probably a young, tech-friendly male—one who particularly enjoys playing video games. Burnout (History of Car Games) (2004–2012), a set of nine wall-mounted screens, takes screen recordings of various video games in which cars are made to perform virtual “doughnuts,” their tires screeching around in circles. SK8MONKEYS ON TWITTER (2009) provides a more participatory experience, consisting of a desktop keyboard fitted to a skateboard. Its viewer is asked to stand atop the skateboard, effectively mashing the buttons on the keyboard, which should send a series of nonsensical characters to a nearby computer. These characters are meant to be sent as Tweets, shown on the computer’s monitor, though at the time of my visit the keyboard was jammed, failing to send characters to Twitter. Bad juju for a technology museum.

Similarly nonfunctional was ZYX (mobile app), 2012, a mobile device application (first debuted this past February as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series) acting as equal parts game and choreographer. Prompting its user to enact various postures endemic to using a cellular phone, such as looking for reception with an outstretched arm, the app is installed on two iPod touches, one of which was broken, the other’s battery dead.

While the app nods to contemporary performance (or from what I could tell), LED Puzzled (2012) provides the most gallery-specific installation within “Street Digital.” Appearing akin to a post-apocalyptic Jenny Holzer, LED Puzzled strews jumbled, illuminated LED panels on the gallery floor. Usually formed into a large grid of smaller constituent parts, the schizophrenically pulsating panels bathe the gallery walls in a brilliant blue. Elsewhere in the gallery finds Untitled Game ("Arena," "A-X," "Ctrl-Space," "Spawn") (1996/2001), a compendium of modified game code installed on a circle of monitors, as well as an “internet reading room” of JODI’s past websites.

GEO GOO (2008), video documentation of the duo’s Web-based work installed on wall-mounted monitors, is sort of an animation using Google Maps as its subject. This piece encapsulates many of the problematic aspects of “Street Digital.” The wall text reads, “’GEO GOO’ has no meaningful relationship to spatial reality. Instead, it transforms an encounter with Google Maps into an aesthetic experience, calling to attention to the fact that the tool we increasingly use to navigate the world is itself an abstraction.” [Emphasis mine.] Does anyone actually forget that a digital map is not a 1:1 depiction of ontological reality? Is this a problem that we really need to parse out through artistic or any other means? I think not. Rather, the charge here is much more simplistic and perhaps intuitive than that: to aestheticize and abstract widely used digital technologies in order to glean something from their dismantling. A problem arises when it is assumed that the pure aestheticization of digital technologies necessitates its politicization, or some sort of grand reflection on its widespread usage. The way in which GEO GOO has been aestheticized, for example, expounds not on how we use or interact with such technology, but merely creates a pretty picture with its characteristic qualities.

While curator Michael Connor may contextualize “Street Digital” as being “gleefully disruptive,” it may be better termed “gleefully simplistic.” This isn’t to cast JODI’s entire oeuvre in a negative light, but rather to assert that when the vein of contemporary art or performance is elided in the work’s contextualization--as is the case in the extremely family-friendly Museum of Moving Image--the resulting experience is one that lauds sensationalism and disregards criticality.

UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that it was actually the keyboard that malfunctioned within "Sk8MONKEYS ON TWITTER," not the Tweet function, which is automatic when the piece does function properly. It was previously stated that the Tweet component was malfunctioning. These changes have been appended.

Rhizome's Seven on Seven on Vimeo

Rhizome — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:23:40 -0500

Videos from Seven on Seven are now posted to Vimeo. For more documentation, check out the Live Blog from Saturday. Videos from the previous conferences are also available on Rhizome's Vimeo page.

Seven on Seven 2012: Introductions and Keynote by Douglas Rushkoff

Aaron Swartz and Taryn Simon

Jon Rafman and Charles Forman

Stephanie Syjuco and Jeremy Ashkenas

Khoi Vihn and Aram Bartholl

Blaine Cook and Naeem Mohaiemen

Anthony Volodkin and Xavier Cha

Michael Herf and LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Impermanent Book

The Piracy Project — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:05:59 -0500

A few months ago, Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom, was quoted by The Telegraph from his Cartagena’s Hay Festival presentation:

“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring… and he goes on … Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

His speech raised heated discussions in newspaper columns and on the internet. The focus was mainly on defending technology and e-books as a viable and improved evolution, and on how he was being retrograde. What was missing from the discourse was the fact that technology has also violently altered printed books in a way from which there is no return. We are so disconnected from the means of production that nobody seems to be aware that books are produced very differently then they were 100 years ago. Digital files are exchanged between writers, publishers and printers all over the world.

In the context of the Piracy Project, which we initiated in London in 2010, we discovered cases, which not only took control over the object, but over the content. Inspired by Daniel Alarcon's article in Granta magazine, “Life Among Pirates”, we traveled to Peru and discovered, for instance, a pirated version of Jaime Bayly’s novel No se lo digas a nadie with two extra chapters added. This physical object may look obviously pirated to a trained eye but could easily pass as the original if you were not looking for differences. The extra chapters are good, good enough to pass undetected by readers.

right: No se lo digas a nadie by Jaime Bayly; left pirated copy with two extra chapters added by an anonymous writer. Bought in Lima Peru, The Piracy Collection

These books are sold in small markets, bookshops or by street vendors at traffic crossings. We had to buy several books and to compare page by page until we found a book with extra content. Asking the vendors for help didn’t work. They were quite offended with the insinuation that they carried modified books. Buyers don’t want to read a book by an anonymous author when they are buying Mario Vargas Llosa.

Friends in Peru seemed extremely surprised to see an altered book. The same type of trust that Franzen had applied to printed books was broken. What have they been reading? According to popular literary theory, when reading a book we become joint authors by virtue of subjectively interpreting and shifting the context through our own personal sets of experience. In this sense, it might be very difficult to realize, in discussion with others, whether or not the book you just read has been altered. And then what happens when that seed of distrust is planted in your head?

Street vendor in Lima, Peru, 2010 (photograph Andrea Francke)

A similar experience was reported by a friend when she grabbed one of the copies of Franzen’s novel Freedom that was accidentally printed from an earlier draft and distributed in London for a few weeks before being re-called, destroyed and replaced by the “correct” version. Knowing that there were mistakes in the text, or passages that had been added made her read the text in a very suspicious manner. There were quite a few passages where she was completely sure she had spotted one of the “wrong” bits. ”I’ll never know if I was right in my suspicions.” she said “Comparing the two versions seemed like too much work. Anyway, I quite like the idea of having read the text in this undefined space.”

(Freedom Jonathan Franzen, recalled edition, The Piracy Collection)

The modified books in Peru are a direct result of technological changes. Older pirated books looked more like photocopies. Re-typing a whole novel is a lot of work and inserting new content would be demanding. Currently, pirated books are produced using original text files stolen from the publishers or a pdf in transit to the printers.

A respectable percentage of all the books in the world are currently printed in the Guangzhou province in China. The distance between publishers and printers embedded in a local culture, which has a different understanding of copying and its moral implications has created an interesting phenomenon. China is not only inundated with pirated versions of western books (which many suspect may be simply cases of printers printing extra copies of the originals) but it also has generated an interesting number of "curators," who select material from all these different publications and collate new volumes – a bizarre reflection of internet content curators.

The piracy of architecture books is very common in China and vendors regularly visit architectural practices carrying a specially tailored selection. It’s a mixture of our contemporary curatorial culture and Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory. The Architectural Association in London, for example, seems to be quite influential. It was the only university press we encountered on our visits that deemed worth the extra expense of translation. Chinese architects proved not to be that popular, but Rem Koolhaas is a best seller. It is interesting to note how the selection of books for sale made by the pirate sellers and the cross-contamination of taste and interest they carry from one office to the other could be one of the defining elements of how urban China is going to look in the next twenty years. But some of these copies are not simple mechanical translations. We found a copy of a pirated MARK Magazine which seemed condensed from six other Mark issues and edited down into this one edition. We bought it fascinated with the idea that somebody had gone through the issues selecting what they considered important. But after comparing it with the originals we realized that the process wasn’t that obvious. It was the whole content of just one issue - only a full-page photograph showing a female Chinese architect was removed - with added pages from an unidentified Italian magazine, which was left in Italian.

Mark 7 Another Architecture, The Piracy Collection

We see similar tendencies in contemporary publishing. For instance, AND Public, another AND Publishing project exploring the potential of print-on-demand (POD). It is a platform for artists, writers and curators to use the possibility of printing books in very small numbers as they get distributed. The project gives users a distribution structure that tries to solve the biggest question in self-publishing: I made my book now how do I find its public?

But it also raises questions of how books exist as permanent objects. In traditional publishing one version of a book is printed. Any new edition may bring corrections or modifications, but each is clearly attributed. With print-on-demand, the author has the option to keep changing their artwork and re-printing the book. "Editions" or versions of the book are not necessarily identified.

Zadie Smith, spoke at the New York Public Library in 2011about her observations at literary festivals. She saw writers sitting behind curtains at literary festivals, armed with red pens, correcting their own two year old books just before their readings. This was a unique chance to re-address the text and to make real the book they wished they had written. With AND Public, as with many other POD platforms, to re-write is a concrete and constant possibility. There won’t be a guarantee that the POD book you bought is identical with the next buyer’s book. In fact, many artists use this mutable production process as an intrinsic part of their work and keep changing their texts to test the conceptual boundaries of the book.

AND Public, at Publish And Be Damned 2012, ICA London

In the beginning of recorded history, books used to be copied by hand and constantly modified through these interpretations. It is the technological advances of the analog printing press that construct our contemporary idea of books as fixed objects, where immutability is a key factor that allows for mass and consistent reproduction. But now, with digital printing technologies, mass production and mutability live hand in hand. The values and attributes that define books are much more malleable than we wish to face and, once again, we must be diligent of where knowledge is being generated. It is undeniable that books are an incredible technology that will most likely never be abandoned, but that doesn’t mean they will remain the same. They have never remained the same.

The Piracy Project is an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and creative modes of reproduction. Through an international call for contributions The Piracy Project has gathered a collection of more than one hundred modified, appropriated and copied books from artists across the world. The collection, which is catalogued online, is the starting point for talks and workgroups around the concept of originality, the notion of authorship and politics of copyright. The next set of events will be hosted by The Showroom in London in 2012. The Piracy Project is an collaboration between AND Publishing and Andrea Francke.

If you are interested to submit a book project for the collection please email and.publishing@csm.arts.ac.uk

AND, is a platform exploring new digital technologies to publish conceptual artists' books. Photocopied or glossy printed, we define digital print-on-demand as a tool to directly interact with an audience. Due to short print runs (starting from one copy) and low productions costs we can sustain an adventurous and inquiring creative practice without having to conform to the mass market. We’re also developing AND Public, a unique print-on-demand facility for self-publishing which allows artists to publish and distribute their own work. AND is run by Lynn Harris and Eva Weinmayr. www.andpublishing.org

Artist Profile: Jordan Tate

Jason Huff — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:05:23 -0500

Study for New Work #151 (2012), Jordan Tate

In New Work #90 you capture the animated dotted selection lines common in Photoshop and present them as an animated image themselves. This feels like your bringing part of the interface used to make digital images into the final piece. Do you think the visuals of operating systems and software have made an aesthetic impact on digital works at large?

Absolutely, yes. I think this relates to a broader discussion of process-based or self-reflexive works that are indicative of a new modernist inquiry into technology as a medium. In many ways, this is a specific contextualization of many theories of the New Aesthetic but tied to role of process in understanding our relationships with these media, their implications, and functions.

Since 2009 you’ve framed your work as ongoing research concerning the “visual and conceptual process of image comprehension.” You’ve also done some experiments trying to produce animated GIFs as lenticular prints - taking the digital GIF into physical space. Have those experiments been successful and has that process changed your understanding of digital image processing?

They have been very successful, as well as some other processes intended to translate screen-based works to physical prints. I am currently working with Atelier Boba in Paris on a few other processes that address in some fashion the interaction with viewer and object. Our current project is an attempt to create UV triggered inkjet prints that shift over the course of small periods of time (3 weeks – 6 months) in response to their environments.

I am also in the production phase of a manual that details the experiments and process of the lenticular printing, the UV triggered inkjet, and the other various processes I am working on - that will be open-source and available soon.

Historical figures and antiquity are common subjects in your work. Is there a particular contrast you hope to draw between the tools you use to make your work and the subjects you render?

Not necessarily, however, I do hope to utilize the weight of the canon to circumvent the notion that media works or process-based works do not carry the same weight as art objects. Essentially, it is an attempt to parachute onto a polder to instantly exist within the canon of art history (ideally without the addition of nostalgia), and allow the media / technology to be considered as the art object rather than a hindrance to its understanding.

In the essay you contributed to pooool.info last September you put internet memes in the geographic context of polders, or small tracts of land enclosed by enbankments. Could you talk more about that analogy and how it might help someone understand the phenomenon of memes?

I use the term polder here very purposefully, and adapt the structure of the polder model to more broadly discuss the idea that we construct understandings of media collectively, and without consensus in defining media and its place in contemporary art, we would be unable to engage in any form of meaningful discourse. Memes, in a way, allow us to express that internet identity and function as some form of voting platform to shape the culture of collective. The viral spread of the meme helps define the boundaries of the polder that we share, and allows each participant to voice their opinion as the vote comes to the floor, adapting and resubmitting the meme as their participation in this democratic contextualization of our internet -- as a distinct and separate place from, but inherently related to the Internet. This relation relies most firmly on the polder model of isolation of land from the sea, and one aspect of the geographic feature most appropriately addresses the temporality of the structure – if you do not vigilantly and consistently maintain a polder, the sea will reclaim it.

Age:

Location:

Cincinnati, OH

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

On and off for a decade, but I didn’t get serious about the engagement with technology as a medium until about 5 years ago. The more recent explorations started with looking at early meta-photographic work (mostly the Dutch) and wanting to expand that dialogue to a broader definition of photography (viewing photography as a subset of technology).
Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? The vast majority of my experience with technology is through experimentation and the desire to test the capabilities of the tools I have at hand.

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

Miami University – Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies

Indiana University – MFA in Photography

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

I still photograph, but generally as a starting point rather than a final product. My use of photography is an attempt to expand the notions of what a photograph is, and how that functions - essentially, to use technological mediation to highlight the role of photography as a medium. Note: here I am separating photography from technology as is common parlance, but I work under the definition that all augmentations of human understanding and capability are technology (writing, drawing, fire, etc.)

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

I write, curate, and keep a daily art blog http://www.ilikethisart.net, as well as organizing (or at least starting to) an online lecture series that allows for a broader dialogue with internet/new media work.

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 am an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Cincinnati, which has a huge positive impact on my practice as it allows me to focus on and stay engaged with my work while fostering the growth of young artists.

Who are your key artistic influences?

The internet. While understanding that this is a non-answer answer, I feel it is most reflective of how my practice of sourcing inspiration / influence operates. Clearly there are the seminal artists that I have an affinity for, as well as the aesthetics and concerns of early Dutch meta-photography, but I find their work less specifically influential than the constantly shifting tides of what I am looking at. In the process of keeping ilikethisart.net, I spend a great deal of time looking at work online, and that has had a tremendous effect on my work.

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

I have worked with several people on projects, and really enjoy the opportunity to do so. I collaborated with Adam Tindale on some color sorting projects in Canada and Paris. I will be conducting some research this summer with Atelier Boba (Ryan Boatright and Caroline Barcella) on the formulation of new, dynamic output methodologies, and I have also had a great deal of assistance on http://www.ilikethisart.net from a number of people: Wyatt Niehaus, Jacob Riddle, Nicholas O’Brien, Rick Silva, and Nate Larson.

Do you actively study art history?

Actively, no. But I do incidentally study art history quite frequently.

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

I do – my current two favorites are Vilem Flusser and Walter J. Ong.

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

As a product of the systems of internet/new media work, the production and dissemination of tropes and memes are a vital and important part of establishing a community of peers and collective understanding. That said, I often find that the frequently adopted structures of memes/tropes dull the potential effect of more critical works that have the potential to really engage with the possibilities of media.

Remote Control

Charmian Griffin — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:55:14 -0500

Simon Denny, Those who don't change will be switched off, (2012)

A TV set burns fiercely. These are the last days of the British analog television broadcast.

I kid you not, the United Kingdom limps sorely behind on digital conversion. Luxembourg was first to the finish line, followed by most of Europe, the States, North Africa, Japan. The UK, a chain-smoking marathon runner, who might or might not have gout, has decided — to hell with the lot of you — to race dressed as Chewbacca.

As we drag ourselves sodden and bronchial through those final steps, a slow clap from the ICA gallery greets us. The exhibition 'Remote Control' (April 3, 2012 - 10 June 10, 2012) marks the end of the analog signal by uniting works that take TV and break it apart.

Artist David Hall set television ablaze in 1971. His TV Interruptions were broadcast during normal BBC scheduling in Scotland. No announcement, nor explanation. A tap in the top right-hand corner filled the screen up with water as if it were a cross-section of a sink, a man filmed out at the audience from inside the set, a television burned to cinders in an open field. Each short film held its own during broadcast with a cool irony. Yet the creation and destruction of illusions simultaneously undermined the tyranny of any box masquerading as a window into reality. Hall pioneered art in television and continues to work with the medium and concept. With it, and in opposition to it, for the artists in 'Remote Control' hold their enemy close.

Still from David Hall, TV Interruptions (Tap piece) (1971)

Commercial broadcasting is the adversary in Television Delivers People (1973) by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman. A six and a half minute credit roll tells us merrily that we are the end product of TV, delivered through broadcast to be consumed by advertisers. The medium itself emerges banal, or shrill; the mechanisms of corporate control form the malevolent baseline. Screened in the ICA alongside these works by Hall and Serra as well as Gerry Schum, are further exposés on television advertising from TVTV, misogyny from Joan Braderman, and violence from Marcel Odenbach. Sixteen CRT televisions line up neatly to show us how artists rankled with the system over the decades past.

It doesn't sound very radical does it? The wit of Interruptions has already been dampened by their removal from the broadcast context. They confront an engaged, expectant audience, not their passive target. Can we understand quite how difficult it must have been to infiltrate the mainstay of the British broadcasting industry, the BBC, when there is such a multitude of platforms available today? Should an institution that holds the contemporary at its core not be addressing the hidden power lines of the mass media that immerse us now?

"Sooner or later, everything turns into television."

― Professor Sanger in J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation (1987)

Simon Denny proposes an answer. He has dropped a decommissioned analog television transmitter squarely in the centre of the space. The fortified cabinets of circuits, oscillators and amplifiers all but fill the ICA's downstairs gallery; the solid mass of this engineered equipment heavy in its obsolescence. Just as Hall undermined the implied reality of moving pictures four decades earlier, Denny exposes the mechanics of the signal that has invisibly invaded the nation’s homes until now. Alongside Ira Schneider's (1971) Center for Decentralized Television, an enlarged pen and paper drawing that fills the back gallery wall, Denny's contribution shows visitors the machine behind the specter. His work suggests a direction. For there are gadgets and phantoms that form our current broadcast networks that could also do with an ousting. The ICA does not set about to track a new mutiny with its current show, but the implication is, at some point, it will.

Simon Denny, Channel 4 Analogue Broadcasting Hardware from Arqiva’s, Sudbury transmitter (2012)

Upstairs, the awkwardness of television machinery is left below, and so too a little hostility. Mark Leckey's Felix Gets Broadcasted (2007) takes the image of the earliest test broadcast put out by a New York station in 1928. The silent-era cartoon character Felix the Cat, modeled in papier-mâché and spinning on a record turntable, had been television's first star. Leckey reframes the story, borrowing his title from an episode of the cartoon series where Felix is transmitted through telephone wire to Egypt. Leckey has consistently mined the history of television broadcast for the enigmatic and the peculiar. Taken from their context his plundered images celebrate the eccentricity of television, the first breather the exhibition's maligned medium of choice has had so far.

Format too is given more space upstairs and works manifest as sculpture, video, screenprint and installation. Forty-two hand-held shots of the moon over a clock tower instantly scatter the viewer's gaze. Dividing the frames over two screens installed at a distance from each other, Hilary Lloyd's Moon (2010) exaggerates the minute, subconscious eye flickers of television watching into bodily movement. The artist gently hands back a scrap of self-awareness and so, control, to a screen-locked audience.

Image: Tauba Auerbach and Hilary Lloyd

Installed adjacent to Moon, Tauba Auerbach's large-scale C-type prints of analog static capture a television screen as it attempts to make a picture of surrounding electronic noise. In observing a moment when analog becomes digital, just as the ICA marks this point in time, Auerbach elegantly reflects this transition and provides some concision on the exhibition itself. Her viewer, like the TV set, attempts to shift the random information into patterns, just as the audience of 'Remote Control' is left to make sense of our fragmented and uncomfortably recent broadcast history. The ICA shows television broadcast to be a fertile, but evasive point of artistic investigation. TV is dismantled, but the pieces not yet discarded.

Artist Profile: Hannah Sawtell

Yin Ho — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 09:58:42 -0500

Hannah Sawtell, Swap Meet (Ijen Mix) Optic, 2012

The images that you show most often have digital origins, whether combined and assembled into one image, transformed into the surface of a physical object, or edited into sequence as moving image. What is the importance of using digital images (and sound, in the case of your films) as opposed to their analog predecessors? Are your sources always culled from the Internet? If so, do you gather them systematically? How do you refine the selection?

The images, textures and surfaces I reconstruct or redeploy are sourced from the ‘contemporary global arcade’. When my work considers the internet, it is to think of it as at once a tool that presents access to a commons, and also a globalised shop, the ‘autocracy of choice machine’... images/sites are bought by multinations, searches made first fall on what the engines have as priority, the majors are all linked, many of the interesting images disappear as websites go down, and there's matters of copyright and how the virtual is policed, etc… with all this in mind and the fact that as I say this, it's outdated, I follow streams to find the right tone for the work. Talking formally, the different pixel or image qualities give a porous or dense cadence to the video or collage. It’s the same with the sound in the videos. It is edited, leaving the glitches at the edge to force the screen to represent the materiality of digital production or cut and paste editing. I use what I have access to...ideas of access are obviously a moot point with regard to global social economics and therefore the possible agency of the collaborator, actor or author.

The industry and economy of objects seem to figure into much of your work. In the Degreasor In The Province Of Accumulation series (to use but one example), the pieces are conspicuously fabricated and notably man or machine-made: Cut pieces of bent lacquered steel partner with sections of a billboard or archival print, their placement highlighting the presence of an author. Would you expand on that intention? What is the relationship between the paired industrial objects with fabricated images in the Degreasor and Optic series?

Both the Degreasor and Swap Meet—Optic series have elements that I design, then industrially manufacture locally, and materialize in print a glimpse of the proliferate contemporary digital image. This is to propose the dialectics of manual and digital labour, specifically with regard to the surplus value concerned with sound, image, and art production. The Degreasors metal parts are cut out using templates that I download and then adjust (for example, an mp3 case, etc.). They are bent, adulterated with acid, and then lacquered; the process is undertaken by me and the person running the machine. In the Swap Meet—Optic series, the stickers utilize the zones of cultural fetishism, which are sliced as real-time collage by generic video transitions/wipes. The sculptures are adjustable, tipped and deployed as a series of mixes that collide with digital noise. For me, both these series feel like proposals of agency and a concrete desire to graphically communicate. Yes, I would say I mostly consider the politics of objects, spaces and the author as producer.

Your titles offer an entry point to the concepts and actions present in each piece. In the short film series Entroludes 1-6, shown by Serpentine Cinema, you allude to Claude Levi-Strauss' term 'entropology'. He presents the word as a more accurate descriptor than anthropology for the study of human behavior: mankind's production results in the creation of material artifacts, and those artifacts can only tend towards entropy. Do you see certain mediums as more inclined toward entropy than others? Does dysfunction arise as artifacts disintegrate? Do you see a conceptual difference between the decline of digital and physical artifacts?

The Entroludes videos are shorts that exist as a group of autonomous objects or modular works to be placed between other people's work as if porous interventions.

The intention is not to do with loss or decline, the reference to ‘Entropology’ was to think about production now, in Strauss’ words, the study of humans as a "process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms”...It is not about straight anthropology in art either: in Britain in the 30’s, Mass Observation's data was detourned and used to find out what people would buy... so it's to imagine the current by altering the detritus of digital sound and image that the multitude make into a subrealist event;‘rent’ is reworked at the same time as any possible colonization. Using the screen as a lens; collecting and sharing images/skins/ideas (digital storage we define) and creating a dialectical flash in the form of a document.

Hannah Sawtell, Degreasor In The Province Of Accumulation 11, 2012

Age:

Location:

Born and works, London, UK.

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

Using the screen to record started with the video You Never Walk Alone (2006/7) to create a real-time screen movie with an accessible video transition. The generic wipe has become a constant tool for me, I also used it in the first piece of work that considered the different textures/ tones and the object of the internet as a sculpture, RENT (2008/2009), an installation. The Serpentine event of Entroludes that you mentioned was in April 2010, low-res media pushed into HD video, taking a private/low resolution reception into a place of group or high definition reception. I then started making collages with video wipes; that happened after making online posters for Entroludes; the first Swap Meet piece was 2010.

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

The type of editing that I use comes from working as a DJ and running a record label. Studying at Chelsea from 2004-7 influenced my progress in thinking about art and contemporary commons, economics of objects, copyright or access, and how the internet or screen could function.… the metal work started as I wondered about how British industrial design is now... my Uncle, Jamie Jamieson, puts the rivets in the wings for Airbus, which are then shipped to France to attach to the rest of the plane.

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

Fine Art BA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and Postgraduate in Fine Art at the Royal Academy, London.

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

I only use contemporary matter and media; i.e., what reveals or irradiates the current.

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 am a tutor at Reading University in the ‘Fine’ Art Department. My past life and occupations infect all of my work: my parents were/are communists and artists, writers, teachers, activists. This climate led me to work in music and organising rather than art. I left school at 16 in the late 80's and immersed myself in the rave/music scene. At the time it was all mixed up: house/acid, hiphop, indie, etc.; Manchester raves in flats and London underground venues —it became unhealthy in the end. At that time I worked in London record labels, record stores and as a DJ until the mid 90’s when I moved to Detroit where my partner and I ran an independent electronic music label and organised underground events, DJ’ed.

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

Politically active; teach; use sound and text: DJ.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Mike Banks and Ron Hardy are important for attitude.

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

Currently collaborating with workers and people in various states of unemployment on a sound work for Mayday (May 1st) to be played live from the Clocktower radio station, Tribeca, New York 2012.

Do you actively study art history?

No, wouldn't say actively.

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

I still read industrial and post industrial porn: Marx, Benjamin, Luxemburg, Foucault, Baudrillard…

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

Right now I am mostly concerned about access to art education in Britain: fees for university have been tripled. I fear this will have an effect on the work made.

Rhizome Seven on Seven: The Live Blog

Yin Ho — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:13:42 -0500

12:12 Welcome! Seven on Seven begins shortly — watch this space for conference liveblogging.

12:17 A video welcome from Mayor Bloomberg: technology and art are vital to the city's fabric and "best of luck to all of the contributors."

12:19 HTC's Scott Croyle speaks: it's the journey that drives him; the construct of artists and technologists coming up w/ an idea and presenting them today exemplifies that journey. He introduces Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome. She presents Rhizome's context as "all contemporary art that engages technology," and a broad conversation between art and tech that has grown since the mid-90s. She juxtaposes that context with a summary of E.A.T.'s 9 evenings in 1966 (performances and music by Rauschenberg, Rainer, Cage), a time when engineers and artists seemed much farther apart.

She recounts a conversation w/ a technologist this year who was excited about not creating a product and an artist who wanted "to create a hot start-up." Presentations to follow on what these teams came up w/in a day. Lauren ends by thanking the people, corporations, and organizations involved in making Seven on Seven happen, and introducing Douglas Rushkoff, the keynote speaker.

12:27 Douglas: an artsier Apple = an Apple less open for artistic intervention. Anyway, he's happy to play around w/ the HTC phone he received. He recalls joining the geeks (those who tended to turn sharp corners while walking in straight lines) in 1976 as an artsy theater guy to try programming, but "using computer science to solve mathematical problems" wasn't enough of a motivation to really get him hooked or to understand programming's scope. Being in California in the late 70s introduced him to the artier, psychedelic, hard-core math/computer science folks in Silicon Valley. Executives then 'needed psychedelics because they were employing people "capable of operating in a realm where their hallucinations can become real." Artists were injected into a culture that wasn't yet ready to imagine.

12:34 Douglas: Now, there's a reversal: in an "ITP Rhizome era" technologists are less bound, and it's the artists who bring the social and intellectual discourse and discipline to technological craft. The technologists: sky's the limit! The artists are more: "The Delueuzian sense...." — they contextualize a way to make what's happening make sense. The Art kids are catching up.

12:38 "How do we maintain human agency in a world that is being consciously programmed to defeat human agency?" These are questions that have existed at the onset of each new technology, and it's the artist's role to preserve human agency. So, "program to not be programmed." Learning to program is not like learning to fix the car, it's like learning how to drive the car. The future if you don't know how to program is one where "the wallpaper might as well be the window." But, learn programming as a liberal art and as a means to think critically about the world in which we live.

12:42 "God bless Mayor Bloomberg, but this is not about jobs in the city—who wants a job?!" Machines are the ones that should be doing the work so we can make art! Today, we can witness a process, the marriage of art and technology, where "technology is a catalyst for the human adventure rather than something else." Applause.

12:44 Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz take the stage. They've been working together for the last 12 hours. Taryn normally takes 3-4 years to complete a project, so rapid speed is new and daunting. The two wanted to create a spectacle unrelated to a product. They first looked at data on the conference audience to create an experience w/in today's space, worked on the concept, then learned it wasn't possible for legal reasons. So, they couldn't do it. Taryn: "we took a couple walks, there were moments of complete despair."

At 8 last night, they knew they wanted to present something, and that something indexed "visual material established via mediating features." Aaron: programs that present a seemingly unmediated view of the world are programmed; they wanted to expose that. Their piece statistically looks at images that are associated with words, and repetitions in popularly distributed digital material with the intention of highlighting the cultural complexities of forming a visual language. Example:a query via word translated to the language of a country translated to an image. More on that as they show the result.

12:52 Onscreen, they show examples of images from search results via country. Some terms so far: painting, freedom, war, liar, crazy, sadness, beauty. 'Freedom' is so different in Brazil and Syria—in Syria, freedom would be meetings (!) The audience wants more time to absorb the images and compare the distinctions between the results presented. The Iranian view of 'America' is a zombie-fied Statue of Liberty in front of an Amercan flag. 'Celebrity' in Syria is the Mona Lisa; in the U.S., it's Paris Hilton. A German search for 'Jew' yields Jude Law - that language! In Israel, Taryn Simon is a hot dog! The Syrian results are consistently interesting: the first image result for 'management' is the barrel of a gun.

13:02 Lauren begins with questions about the piece. How long did this take, especially taking into account the earlier mentioned 'despair'? Taryn: "Well, Aaron is a really fast programmer."

Lauren asks how this work relates to Taryn's larger practice, whose photographic work is often indexical. Taryn responds that this piece similarly considers ideas/things where seeming neutrality exists. In her work, she writes and create images, and examines the space between the two where interpretation happens. With this piece, it's about the borders between images and images. e.g., Less and less people can read cursive (written language); language is more and more visual. There's an imagination that images have an universal ability to communicate, but how, why, and really?

13:09 Question from the audience: how did you choose to order the countries listed? In this iteration, it was for entertainment purposes, but alphabetically would make the most sense. A question about translation: is it textual? Then, how did you prioritize among multiple translations? Aaron: "meaning can be very multi-faceted in other languages" Taryn: "those collapses are exactly what's at the root of it all." Another question on the translation tool - via Google translate? It differed depending on country. Question: Is the Internet an effective bridge between cultures? Taryn: there's an "illusion of cultural flattening that's erased borders" but she highlights that they are still very much present.

13:13 Charles Forman and Jon Rafman are on stage now. They had 'zero despair,' did their bit, then went to see a Broadway play ;). The theme they agreed on was memory. Jon, drinking a Modelo, recounts a girlfriend who left him that never allowed him to take a photo of her. He lacked any images to remember her w/, but then recalled a Google Street View car was taking photos when they were on vacation in Italy. He found a photo on Street View with her on the beach, and became obsessed with it. Later, he realized he had constructed the narrative: the photo couldn't have been of her: they were inland, always arguing, and never at a beach.

13:18 The team's piece: The Memory Box: you view an image and record your response. In seven years, the memory box starts vibrating, you open it, and see a photo you looked at seven years ago (the watercolor illustrations of the prototype are gorgeous). Then, it records your reaction to looking at the image/video, memorializing a memorable moment in time. The piece is a means to reflect about changes over time.

13:21 Jon quotes Heracitus to illustrate this passage and difference: a man never steps in the same river twice. The screen is the shared external reality. The memory box gives a person a stronger role in constructing ourselves, allowing images to anchor reflection in life. It's an aid to answer the age-old philosophical problem of What is Self?

And it's not only the person who changes, it's the people around you that change. He gives an example of the many things that can happen in between images shown by projecting a photo of his best friend from high school, Joe. They were in a band, formed a business, were bffs; later, Joe stole Jon's wife, they were involved in a lawsuit, and haven't spoken in years. Charles: "Joe sounds like a dick."

13:26 Charles talks about recollection through old photos: in looking through those images, it reminds him there's no use in worrying (e.g., upon looking at a photo of when he first started his company, he realizes the anxiety and worries he had at that time were needless).

The implications of the memory box? Jon: there's a ritual that's potentially involved in using this object. And, from a practical standpoint, the Box must be immune to obsolescence. Charles: it would be great to pass on to the future: to talk and see someone from the past in action.

13:30 Is it a product or a service? Charles:"A service is available to many people, but when it's out of sight, it's out of mind." Jon: It could technically be an iPhone app tomorrow, but no, it will be a box made of ivory with gold circuitry! Audience laughs. They chose an image, but perhaps the object of recollection could be a line of poetry, a smell (Jon: "He [Charles]'s actually figured out a way to digitize smell").

Charles wishes this Box had existed 7 years ago — it would've been great to see himself then. Jon: "And, if you look under your seat...." Ha!

While Charles was coding, Jon was writing sci-fi short stories, and thought of hypotheticals involving the government in memory: a 1984-inspired Ministry of Memories where memories had to be reported, could be falsified, implanted. Charles reassures us that the Box is not evil (with a wink?)

13:35 Lauren: they were in it to win it! (There are no winners in 7on7; we are all winners) The presentation was less testosterone-fueled than she had expected after that display of competiveness. They answer that they were "just really into memory". Charles: "It's just a simple idea, but I think a powerful concept."

13.38 Audience: What's the significance of seven years? They started with ten, but that felt like too long. The time lapse can be reconfigured. From a psychologist in the audience: There's also a practical usage: "it can create an external container of the self as the external self is disintegrated."

Another: "Jon, you're a liar. What do you think your relation to the object would be?...Personal memories are often more honest than those we pass on to our descendents...what would the relation be with lying in this tool"...is there a mode of erasure, a reset button? Jon: "You can't escape the lying aspect. Sometimes there's truth in fiction." Charles: the disparity between the lie and the truth could be pretty interesting to see.

Lauren can see how this piece relates to Jon's work; how does it relate to Charles' work as an entrepreneur? He's been creating photo software since he started having digital photos: in 2002, he went to a mobile blogging conference in Tokyo and had created software to organize his photos even then. Charles: "I'm not a good photographer, but I am prolific" and he uses the images as a way to remember. Relevant to this product, taking a photo today would be a way to remember that he was "the funniest guy here" and "there's nothing stopping me!"

13:44 Audience question: Would you make it public? What if there were two people in the photo? Then, in seven years, the two could/would recount their views to one another about that documented experience.

Charles: "Would you guys like something like this?"

Jon:"Well, it's coming, and it will be sublime."

13:48 Stephanie Syjuco and Jeremy Ashkenas are up. They begin by talking about the freedom in having a short time to make something and the pressure. Stephanie was excited about the technological aspect, and Jeremy had no interest in making an app. Jeremy talks about Stephanie's work, which looks at counterfeiting, bootlegging, and Stephanie talks about Jeremy's work at the NYTimes "making information transparent." Jeremy came to the table with a flow chart of ideas based on looking at Stephanie's website. It's a tidy, great-looking diagram.

13:52 Jeremy: if you work in the Times newsroom, you can't be publicly political. So there can be "less felicitous pairings" (e.g., w/ highly poltical artists). Their premise from Jeremy's idea flow, considering Stephanie's ideas of counterfeit, is a counterfeit Seven on Seven.

This one happened yesterday in Central Park: artists and technologists were invited from the Park (Stephanie: "a lot of it had to do with proximity") and had 15 minutes (15!) to come up with an idea. The results would be presented today (Stephanie: "So we kinda outsourced our labor").

They discuss their obstacles: a lot of people didn't want to brainstorm for 15 minutes with a stranger and responded "No English" to Jeremy (and his clipboard). Team 1 was an advertising associate, and a student who came up with Hushmaphones: noise-silencing headphones to wear outdoors to enjoy the environment without the hubbub. Team 2: a classically-trained musician and a start-up entrepreneur who discussed what they had in common, realized it was Bruce Springsteen, and came up with a Bossdoc (?).

14:02 Team 3's concerns were there were too many statues in the park that no one looked at. "Everyday Monuments" erects a (revolving?) monument a year for the "lawyer" the mom, etc. Team 4 looked at making artwork about technology: they proposed paintings of key words (in programming language, words like void, if, var, false) which mean one thing to a programmer in a specific context, and other things in other parts of life. Team 5: put more real estate in NYC and make prices more reasonable by creating an artificial island. Team 6: a barista and venture specialist. Stephanie: most people were receptive after hearing she and Jeremy were working on an art project for the New Museum, but many suits were unimpressed. Team 6 had incompatible viewpoints, and came up with a way of making intanglibles like freedom tangible on a scrolling market index board. Team 7 agreed on Wikipedia's authority, but can we trust what's real? Their result: the DisinfopediaBot which shows false 'encyclopedic' results.

14:09 Lauren: Would you consider realizing any of these projects, and would you take the credit? Jeremy: We wouldn't, but many of the ideas seem very do-able, apart from the Artificial Island.

Then, the reveal: Stephanie: this was a fictional project, a great story to tell you guys. They met the people, took pictures, but made up the rest. Lauren:"I was uh, completely deceived." Applause. Stephanie: It's a true counterfeit. If someone googles Seven on Seven, this site might come up. Lauren, wryly: "I thought of that."

14:15 Audience: "What do you hope we learn from this?" Stephanie: Jeremy has to be truthful because of his job: both of them are interested in truth or fiction and the way they cross in online presentation. So, the presentational format seemed a good way to explore that space. They downloaded the existing site, spent most of their time on content, and purchased sevenonsevenagain.org for $10. Question: How did you pair the fake teams? Answer: They worked backwards: they started from the idea, and thought which of the people that agreed to have their photos taken in the park would be the most likely to come up with that idea. Stephanie: an interest in truth became an entry point for an exploration of fiction.

14:20 To lunch.

15:29 Round 2. Lauren welcomes us all back. Khoi Vin and Aram Bartholl are on. Aram likes the speed project aspect; Khoi thought the constraints were unusual in that the time limit was the only restriction they had. They had similar artist v. technologist discussions where the artist wanted to do something super-tech, and the technologist, more than an implementor, wanted to do something other than 'pixels.' They started by going through all their dumb (their words) ideas. They tell the Donut Story to highlight some of their earlier work activities: At Wieden + Kennedy (but not *every* Friday), there's an inflated pool filled w/ stale donuts: the goal: jump off ramp, over hay (!), and land on cushions.

Khoi discusses Aram's work on where the Internet is. Aram: it's ubiquitous, in everyone's pocket; he likes literal translations and transitions from digital analog, for example, doing a show in an Internet cafe, or taking dumped screens on sidewalks and using them as a screen/frame for art and/or all that's shown within that rectangle. He shows his Online Gallery Playset; Khoi thought of it as a space of humor, and a jumping off point to do something w/o commercial purpose.

15:59 They talked a lot about screens.

Aram: There's a gap between what happens in physical and digital space: you don't strip naked on the street, but on ChatRoulette... He doesn't believe in "the AR thing," but w/ the Google glasses, it will probably come sooner or later: vestigial spaces are unfolding into the world rather than sucking the world into them.

They show a hi-lar-ious video of Khoi and Aram around the city, sporting spray-painted 'NY' caps and neon-colored glasses, showcasing their enormous gangsta anime medalions: a gold spiky thought bubble with hot pink trim that show what look to be random images coming from the same visual family. Khoi: We don't have a name for it yet. Aram: I like the title of the song: "Express Yourself."

15:46 Express Yourself's screen was an iPad in a spiky bubble bag. As Khoi lists his attire, Aram brands each noun: "Watch" "Rolex rolex" "Phone" "HTC HTC."

Lauren begins the questions: So, they were at Wieden and they have a project on branding. Could you take it further? Khoi: No. Aram: Maybe with 'My Art Party': in the way everyone shows things on their phone, why not go to an opening and show their work the same way: on a screen, worn around their neck. "I'm not thinking 'where's the product?" but yeah, this could be a product."

Lauren brings up Aram's dead-drop piece and though the 7on7 piece might be a parody, the ideas do relate to his work. They discussed what happens when someone drops their iPhone on the subway: everyone freezes because of the acknowledged importance our phones have to us.

15.52 Khoi: They wanted to be comedic from the start. A question from someone from Wieden: he brings up the aspect of touch in the gestural interface they built. Aram: Yes, but it's jewelry, and you don't touch jewelry. Khoi: "What if people were comfortable enough with their personal space that you could come up and just interact with that person's device and it would be non-offensive and not sexual harassment?"

Audience: A question on content: they showed Mixels, what else did they think of? Aram: Woulda been great to show animated gifs; there were 30 frames. Khoi: Chosen due to the time constraint, and they thought of the screen as a mini-gallery.

A question from the front row: How about a different usage, like a walking advertisement? Aram adds: With targeted ads!

How did they decide on the circle? Aram: it couldn't be a rectangle becuase that's the usual shape of a screen. Khoi: Then it becomes not about an iPad.

The 'product' was duct-taped together, so the iPad is locked, its unlock button made inaccesible. Khoi: "It turns out a circular screen is not a commercially viable idea."

15:59 Naeem Mohaiemen and Blaine Cook are onstage. "How do you follow that up?" asks Blaine. Naeem says their presentation will be an interesting contrast to some of the previous ones. They discussed concepts to some of the possibilities of the mind being both stimulated and weakened by the screen. Naeem: Found objects are a way to think through ideas, accurately or not. They kept coming back to the aesthetic stimulus; Naeem uses an 'upside-down' technique to work through his images: printing them out and arranging them in an analog manner first.

Naeem quotes Blaine: "poetry looks like ass on a blog." They're talking about the 'togetherness' the Internet offers via social media. Anonymous' emergence is the re-emergence of the social collective: there's safety in numbers, so you can punish the individual but the collective doesn't break.

Naeem tells an anecdote about the know-it-all-ability made possible by Google: during a conversation with a friend, Naeem mentions a historical figure passing away. His friend pauses, then returns, "Oh yeah, the general involved in the Bangladesh War" and Naeem calls her out: she's just responded with the first sentence of the man's Wikipedia entry.

Blaine introduces linguistic structure and its effect on the brain: what of the existence of the German word 'doch' which affirms a negative assertion?

16:10 Blaine and Naeem bring up a novel on punk Muslims. Though the author's characters were fictional, he received correspondence asking "Where do I find these people?" from individuals who identified with them as a community that would like to belong to.

Naeem: how do we return to the room where we think, where actions take place, when so much of our mindspace is in the rectangle? Blaine: volume and speed are the enemies of contemplation. They'll say it: they're against Pecha Kucha and TED—they prefer a slow jam, learning to love you more. Their intention is to slow down time.

The title: Slow Time or Room of My Own. It's a collage interface that they built over the lunch break, purposefully not doing it the night before. From the concept of Levi-Strauss' bricolage, a user can add images alongside pre-loaded terms like assassinations, hijackings, Bangladesh, Cute Overload - but you cannot add indiscriminately: there is a limit to space (a physical aspect to a web tool). Comments, if I understand correctly, can come only from trusted friends (in opposition to the possibility of thousands of FB friends).

16:21 Lauren asks what the collage affects. Naeem: thinking through an idea without excess stimulus. The idea is a creative process that has limits. There are different media-related interactions of a function nowadays: students can look through highlighted pages via Kindle or paper. Blaine: del.icio.us lets you collect all your links (ideas) that don't take formation. In this project, your bookmarks present your ideas in a way that you can reflect upon.

A question from Kellan: the bookmarking experience is still very fast, even with your intention of creating a more thoughtful, slower space. Why make the bookmarklet seamless and instantaneous? Blaine: he wanted the tool to be invisible so you could be alone with your thoughts.

From the audience: he overheard the team discussing/disagreeing about patenting the idea. How do they see this out in the world? Naeem: It was a joke! Blaine: I don't feel any ownership of it. Naeem: the prototype is a means to the ends of how to slow things down. There are different ways to go through the question of how our minds are interacting with technology.

16:32 Xavier Cha and Anthony Volodkin are up. They were initially concerned that 7on7 would be The Hunger Games. They discuss their differences, and begin by talking about what satisfies them about their work. For Anthony, it's his part in connecting people through like-minded search. And for Xavier, it's for something to be both abstract and have clarity at the same time. She shows a piece she showed at the Whitney last year of performers wearing a self-worn camera rig.

Anthony: In X's work, she creates co-existing experiences that take effort; these experiences already exist online. A binary: authenticity vs projection, where a version of actuality comes up. Their title, You are what you eat, refers to how what you consume can affect changes in behavior.

They obsessively love flux. Anthony talks about a program for programmers that auto-dims their screen as night comes, so you don't constantly look at something "as bright as the surface of the sun" and how it changed his work habits. Onscreen, they show a chart of Anthony's activity online: a glamorous life, he says, with a lot of Gmail. The idea is by simply seeing your personal data, that perspective can change habits, life.

16:44 Opportunity cost for them is how else time could've been spent. Anthony: looking at someone else's feeds (check-ins, etc) can show what a person could've been doing. Xavier: On Twitter, seeing what a person is consuming (i.e., reading) rather than projecting gives a better idea of who they are. This team decided to look at the presentation of a person via private Twitter list. Their prototype, 'Peep', shows Twitter through another user's eyes and you can read what they read.

16:52 Questions: Are there any other platforms that you can apply this model to where you can observe what a person consumes? Anthony: with other services, there are less meaning. Lauren: feeds gain meaning because you know the other person. What's the motivation when you lose that? Answer: it's more of a portrait. Jamin asks about privacy/the boundaries: where's the sacred space when you follow the followers? Anthony cites Zuckerberg's idea of the same: you can follow them all manually, they're all the same, the data's there (Audience laughs. Mark!)

17:00 Refreshment break. Back on at 5:20 for LaToya Ruby Frazier and Michael Herf, the final presentation.

17:29 Lauren introduces the last team, and invites the audience to the afterparty in the Skyroom. LaToya:"This has been pretty intense. To be asked to do something w/ a total stranger...w/ different roles and functionalities." She and Michael had serious conversations about how seriously they viewed their practices, and their sentiment and concern about the use of technology. Michael recounts their initial talks about politics, how people talk about these things: how to tell the truth and be authentic. Michael lives in LA, where people are "really good at telling stories" and works in software, where people are pretty obsessed with telling the truth. What are our tools now in telling a truth or a story? Online spaces might not have true facts, and care too much about citations, but it's a way of recording history.

LaToya: we rely so much on erasing things, we don't want to talk about the past in America, though it might help with resolution. How do we build the intelligence to grow with visual literacy? We know we heavily rely on consumer, commercial culture. Onscreen are images of a Bolshevik work poster and a factory worker and the text "We are all workers". LaToya asks the audience to think deeply about what that means.

Michael: They wanted to capture antecedents of images and the embedded histories they may show. LaToya: she's a trained artist and knows how to read images, but does her audience comprehend perspective and reference? There needs to be a balance to discuss the messages of the images in a discursive way. "Are we selling a product or are we selling a lifestyle?"

Their piece: Decode "An Encyclopedia of Visual Culture". Onscreen is a NYMag cover of "The Bloodiest Campaign" a photoshopped image of bruised, battered Romney and Obama, with Gingrich between the in the background. LaToya thought immediately of Rineke Dijkstra's Bullfighters. Michael: though a person may not see that reference, it begins the discussion of viewing images critically. And then, they had thoughts about the modification that took place for so many current images to exist. But, how to capture the differences in responses (to images like the NYMag cover) based on cultural background? They're looking a collection of reactions: more input could say a lot more about culture. LaToya teaches individuals about this at different levels: People care about the images that they see.

They show the Mad Men poster of a silhouetted man falling in stark white space: first response: Robert Longo (art crowd!); second: 9-11. The responses can highlight our differences and begin a conversation that allow us to embrace and discuss them.

Lauren: Rushkoff was a great keynote address as ideas of being sensitive to images keep coming up in today's presentations. Striped shirt asks about the Mad Men image: people that most often take offense to the 9-11 events are most often public figures, unrelated to the 9-11: it's unlikely that the marketing team knowingly presented the ad in relation to 9-11 so isn't there a largely separate interpretive context of this image? LaToya: With Decode, you could drop in that image and see what interpretations might come up, elevating the perception of image. Naeem: the demographic of a population affects the interpretation. LaToya: Decode brings to life something that she's teaches; it's made a living model.

18:00 Applause and, woohoo, we're done! Lauren directs everyone to the afterparty. To quasi-paraphrase (and nerdify) Brian's ending entry from last year's liveblog: May these ideas live long and prosper.

Artist Profile: Laure Prouvost

Louis Doulas — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:50:30 -0500

Before, before, 2011

Works like IT, HEAT, HIT, Owt and The Artist—among many others—approach storytelling through frenetic, non-linear progressions and cuts. Narratives seem to emerge spontaneously from what seems to be your immediate environment without much premeditation. Why is it important for you to develop language this way? What is lost or gained through such fragmented communication?

Anything that is not shown has to be imagined.

So here I am answering these questions, in the middle of the woods on this lovely Sunday afternoon on top of a beautiful big tree, water running beneath me…I shouldn’t drop the computer. Now it’s up to you to imagine how I got up here, the colour of the leaves and the smell in the air.

The condensing of films is a way of relating to our experiences, of the multiple textures we constantly have to deal with and how our brain constantly has to edit for us. The fact that a lot of the footage comes from my immediate surroundings is just me looking at what is around me – then I can start to create a story around, say the bread on the table, or whatever. It is a chance to look at things closely and then differently, to imagine things in another way.

Nothing is normal.

But sometimes it’s completely constructed environments as well, like in, The Artist.

Regarding editing: An image can generate different meanings depending what you see after or before it. This is what triggers associations, connections and eventually narratives and this is the potential in the editing that I love. Spontaneity is also important for me. I need to make mistakes. If things are controlled and pre-determined then often I am not happy with what I am producing.

Problems bring new levels to the work. Lacking control is an important part of my practice. Losing interpretation of the work too.

For Frieze 2011 you made 28 black and white signs and scattered them around the fair. The slogans on these signs propose nonexistent scenarios ranging from the banal to the absurd—ones that can be rendered impossible or absent from the viewers local control. These works encourage a type of ‘escape’; a set of imaginative proposals used to confront the everyday, or a least the world of Frieze. The signs follow in similar vain to your previous works: maze like encounters and convergences between fiction and reality. How do you approach the dynamic between fiction and reality with these sign pieces? How do these worlds inform one another? What are its potentials?

Imagination plays a strong part in my work. I like that the work exists in the someone’s head, that someone created its own vision, re-imagined the space, placed or worked in its head. Words are the most powerful tool to conjure images without using an image itself. More powerful in fact because a new image is created each time. I don’t need to produce anything anymore. It can always exist differently in each interpretation. I like using subtitles in my films as the audience then uses their own voice. Reading the text, you are a bit more part of the process, more linked to the work.

Also it’s about reinventing the meanings of things and I don’t even have to create it as a visual response. It’s about what is not shown but lets you imagine a fork dancing. A way for me to work with the fictional is to always link it to things that are very obvious that are here now and start a story totally normal, slowly it getting weirder and weirder but then realizing you already in it. Also bringing relics to the film as a way to assure the reality of the fiction.

I create these fictions but always want to make conscious the position of the viewer, of the audience. So I pull you along and then stop and talk about the space you are reading this text within. Or how you need to concentrate. IDEALLY THESE WORDS WOULD TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE ELSE ALL LYING IN THE SUN ON A BEACH, the computers buried under the sand.

Ideally these words would make sense.

Free!

Our reality is imagined; only constructed through rules of social norms.

The actual materials that are used and featured throughout both your installations and videos are often found, hastily assembled and generally ‘sloppy’. Additionally, your videos seem to be shot on consumer grade equipment as if ready to be uploaded to YouTube. How do these materials inform your intentions and vice versa? Are they another attempt at imbuing everyday life with a ‘story’?

I like the everyday. I like the fact we mix fiction to reality or vice versa. How everyone and everything has its purpose. I quite like the quote of Marcel Broodthaers:

“I don’t believe in film, nor do I believe in any other art. I don’t believe in the unique artists or the unique work of art. I believe in phenomena, and in men who put ideas together.”

The fact that it’s low tech, that it’s footage I collect gives me a lot of freedom and therefore technology or the perfect shot doesn’t interest me so much. I had this sort of idea that I did not want to create attractive, pleasing things. I have this thing that I thought was too easy, going against the idea of improving the world.

; )

My recent project was filmed on HD and with a crew so it’s not always like that.

; )

You are the founder of the online moving image museum, tank.tv. Could you explain your motivations for initiating such a project? Why showcase content strictly on the internet? What is inferred by the 'moving image'?

I am not the founder of tank.tv but I directed it at its beginning.

When Tank started in 2003, video art was a totally different thing and there were very few platforms or appetites to show it, so TANK was really useful in that sense. But I think its definitely preferable to view a projection or installation in person –you get immersed in the work a lot more than you can on a computer screen. I think the internet is an interesting platform to discover things to get a terse idea of someone’s work but I think it’s definitely not as a good as seeing a projection or installation. It has a different purpose, and sometimes when it’s made just for that purpose it’s doing something else, it’s interesting.

But its all just moving images, images moving from one to the next. Its not real.

Age:

Location:

London – UK

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

Since I am not 20, I’m not smooth with technology. But, moving images I like for its immediacies—not it’s technology.

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

I do things very basic, on Final Cut and with my own camera.

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

Film and Video. Fine Art at St. Marts London and then Goldsmiths London.

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

I just use sensors for light and sound. I find video funny as very straightforward projection, so much you can do with this already. I don’t want to lose myself in technical stuff.

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

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 was running tank.tv and did many other things: worked in a cinema and made some jackets from blankets and curtain. Everything comes together and influences everything

Who are your key artistic influences?

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

Rory McBeth on the film, ‘The Wanderer’

Do you actively study art history?

I studied art history in Belgium.

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

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

I am not so interested in interactive technologies. It becomes too much about the machines and loses the purpose of the work, I often feel. But of course it depends so much on how it’s used.

Photoshopped Sherman

Rachel Wetzler — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:21:32 -0500

Images from Cindy Sherman's society portraits series (2008.)

A friend recently recounted an anecdote about teaching Cindy Sherman’s work to her undergraduate students. She was in the middle of her lecture, explaining Sherman’s elaborate, chameleonic process of casting herself in various roles in her photographs, when one student interrupted, insisting that the photograph projected on screen must have been Photoshopped, that it was impossible that the woman in this image was the same person as in the one before. The others nodded in agreement. Faced with this chorus of disbelief, my friend checked her notes: the image on her slide was from the mid-1980s, several years before Photoshop’s commercial release. The process of creating it was, indeed, analog: the photograph was shot on film, and Sherman’s apparent physical mutation in it the result of costuming and skillfully applied makeup rather than digital manipulation. However, the students’ responses raise interesting questions about how we might conceive of her work in the wake of the digital, particularly since her most recent work has, in fact, made use of such software.

For those of us who first encountered Sherman’s photographs before “Photoshopped” became part of the vernacular, her work carries rather different connotations: it is less about a process of editing or altering the image than one of altering the self through a kind of private performance staged for the camera. Sherman transforms herself, in each image, to the point that she is not only no longer wholly recognizable, but also no longer present as “Cindy Sherman” at all, instead appearing as a litany of characters and stock types. As she noted in an interview with filmmaker John Waters in the catalogue of her current MoMA retrospective, “Before I ever photographed it, I was playing around in costumes and dressing up as characters in my bedroom.”

It is precisely this aspect of dressing up—of adopting and embodying different types—around which much of the critical reception of her work has revolved over the past decades. Moreover, she has maintained a rigorously private studio practice throughout her career, rarely, if ever, working with assistants: Sherman is not only photographer and model, but also hairdresser, costumer, makeup artist, and prop stylist. She performs in front of the camera, but also behind it, adopting multiple roles and functions over the course of creating each photograph. When presented in serial form, the photographs reveal the meticulousness of her process, with each successive image calling further attention to the laborious transformation involved in creating the one preceding it.

Yet over the past decade, Sherman has increasingly embraced the digital, resulting most recently in works that do, in fact, achieve their transformative effects through Photoshop rather than prosthetics, makeup, and careful staging. Her experimentation with working digitally began with the “Clown” series (2003–04), for which she added lurid, patterned backgrounds to images initially shot on slide film, and culminates in the large-scale untitled wall murals she began in 2010, one of which lines the entrance to her MoMA exhibition. In them, her bizarre characters are inserted into a pixelated black-and-white landscape, where they hover flatly against the crudely rendered trees. Moreover, she wears no makeup, transforming her facial features exclusively through digital means, suggesting that Sherman has steadily shifted the orientation of her practice from performance to post-production.

In addition to the murals, the MoMA show includes Untitled #512 (2011), part of a series commissioned by POP magazine, which depicts a figure set against a trompe l’oeil backdrop of a craggy landscape digitally altered to resemble paint on canvas. While these works are overtly manipulated, the use of digital means is more subtle in others: the “Society Portraits” (2008), which cast the artist as aging doyennes, appear less obviously edited than uncannily off. Up close, signs of digital intervention become more apparent: rather than photographing herself in situ, Sherman adds the backgrounds after-the-fact, resulting in awkward, claustrophobic compositions. Wrinkles, pores, and other signs of age are enhanced, making them unabashedly visible.

In one sense, this is a logical step: on a pragmatic level, working digitally offers a quicker, easier way to achieve the same effects—as Sherman noted in a New York Times interview, “it’s horrifying how easy it is to make changes” using Photoshop. It also opens up new possibilities, allowing her to experiment with techniques previously unavailable to her, such as inserting multiple figures into the same image, or placing them in unfamiliar settings. However, for an artist whose work has long been tied to her process, the implications of such a shift seem significant.

Sherman’s photographs have always been ontologically complex, challenging our ability to properly categorize them: they are photographs of Cindy Sherman that are also, simultaneously, not photographs of Cindy Sherman, portraits of the artist in which she is both present and absent. From the beginning of her career, her photographs have insisted upon the constructed nature of images, their potential to manipulate and lie to the viewer, yet they have been anchored by the fact that, on some level, everything in them has actually occurred—she is not a clown, nor an old Hollywood vamp, nor a Renaissance Madonna, but she has dressed like one. The illusion is never seamless: we see incongruous details (a shutter cord in her hand, an obvious prosthesis) that call attention to the fictitious construction of the scenario depicted, but nevertheless, such details also serve to highlight the fact that Sherman has actually constructed it in real life; they are not just images, but documents of her activity.

The digitally altered photographs, too, call attention to their fabrication, but the terms have changed: they lack the implicit tension that underpins the earlier works, between Cindy Sherman as artist who constructs the tableau and Cindy Sherman as model who effaces herself in the image; between the knowledge that the scene is staged and yet, that it has also taken place. Part of what has always been so captivating about her photographs is exactly what made my friend’s student insist that they were faked: no matter how convincing her costume, her staging, her makeup, we know that the same woman lies underneath it.

What to make of this turn toward the digital? In spite of her embrace of software, Sherman’s work is still made for the gallery rather than the screen. Just as the “Film Stills” mimic the old promotional stills produced by movie studios not only through style, but also print size and paper type, the “Society Portraits” echo the gaudy, overlarge scale of a wealthy patroness’s portrait, resembling the sort of thing that might hang in one of her subjects’ living rooms. Even the murals, though they escape the frame, are resolutely oriented in the material, quite literally bound to a physical space.

At first, I couldn’t help but feel that by exchanging the elaborate masquerade for Photoshop, Sherman was, somehow, cheating. But perhaps this new direction is fitting: though they have often been read in terms of performance, Sherman’s photographs have always been, at their core, images about images: about the way images function, how they are created, trafficked, and coded, the ways in which they manufacture and disseminate meaning. Now that Photoshop has become the norm, we know better than to have faith in their fidelity—we assume that what we see is mediated, altered, and edited, regardless of whether it is an Instagrammed iPhone snapshot or an airbrushed celebrity on the cover of a magazine.

Throughout her career, Sherman has been singularly attuned to the cultural role of images, and her digital works, too, capture and comment on the way we understand photographs today—not as documents of reality, but as raw materials that can be endlessly refashioned.

Robot Literature by Angelo Plessas

Brian Droitcour — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Angelo Plessas, from Untitled Portrait Gallery, 2009

Double Faced

For those who Know Best their mirror,

a Conspiracy revolves around.

Silence from behind devours a relic from the past.

Life is usually attached to lengths of magnetic fields.

You might be Emerging as something else.

I might Switch Back. All I wish is that when I start up,

my life will be OkaY

Around us

Keep, Art was Stolen By a Masked man in thong.

I thank Obama because he\’s black,

he said We love Colors.

You are feeling suicidal now please stop.

Apocalyptic, I contemplate the Universe around us.

elated quilt

elated quilt establishes despairingly

victorious coma becomes elatedly

thoughtful income clips deprecatively

beautiful sidewalk checks long-windedly

combative pie cracks giddily

crowded haircut buzzes dazzlingly

quaint answer enhances garishly

A TYPICAL DAY OF DALI AND GALA

DALI, materialized in a apartment. Many persons in a single body. It was the

sixth game of attention. Behaving scarcely angered, DALI punched a ninja star,

but this certainly didn't encourage DALI deciding what to do in smart way. Out of

nowhere, DALI hoped that DALI's marginal fidelity is to be perpetually positive,

because hatred is born out of fear. Unconsciously DALI emailed GALA, DALI's

neighbor/accomplice 'Free yourself from common sense', said DALI. DALI must

have seen GALA for 20 hours in Tahrir square during the Revolution some of

them were modest diabolical and empirical inspirations. GALA was a nobody.

Many persons outside a single body. Between the line of black and white. GALA

was outgoing more or less... pestering. DALI called GALA 'Somebody has to

listen to me' he said. 'These are the symptoms of the liberal-democratic affluent

society', said DALI.

GALA hypnotized by lazy DALI. 'Why and for whom does philosophy work today

?' , said GALA. GALA deliriously assured DALI that communists sneeze before

gaining mastery, yet spotted wolf androids usually indiscriminately turn red after

spinning rave vinyls from the 90's. GALA was not interested. GALA was

patronizing DALI but made him feel safer. 'I have Nothing to Admit', said GALA.

Why was GALA attempting to compromise the aesthetic values of DALI? While

GALA had deceived DALI with the scandal only three years prior. It was a crucial

worker... how could GALA resist? The narrator of the quasi-object.

'The growing realization of your affair', said GALA.

In an undefined moment, GALA screamed 'The problem now is the management

of real-time.' 'Surrender to a flying camera' 'If this person acts crazy so well, then

he must be mad!' A lie. A primitive thought came to the mind of DALI's, he

mumbled 'Human beings are not fundamentaly social.' DALI turned his memory

to notice a rectangle that seemed clearly out of place 'Honestly I am beginning to

give up on television.' 'Th-th-is boiling sun is driving me crazy!' Words copied

from indifferences republicans. 'This is what I learnt from society.' DALI nodded

with a fake smile...then, before GALA could react, DALI aptly moved toward the

rectangle and looked at it 'The internet is the product of the Pentagon.' The

celebration was the dominating problem.

'Enough with dialectical Utopia', said DALI. 'I am drifting into the void', said

GALA. But then Zeus appeared flamboyantly with his charismatic omen and

recreated DALI's worker. Sensing displeased, The Archibishop poured the animal

on the wet carpet. Entered the trance of '82 Corolla and zipped away with the

enthusiasm of 61 avatars jumping from a teensy bunch of germans. DALI flipped

cheerfully when saw this. DALI's secret was on a chessboard. It was a great

thing, too, because in ten fractions DALI's favorite Tv show, was going to come

on (followed immediately by 'When albino zombies encounter Kurdish grenade').

DALI was ecstatic. And so, everyone including GALA and a few weapon of mass

destruction-adding up royal tigers lived blissfully happy, forever after?

'Phychoanalysis is a formidable enterprise'. Who knows? The couple reunited for

good.

'The faster I travel to the end of the world, the faster I come back', said DALI.

New Full Length Documentary on the Demoscene

Rhizome — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:21:30 -0500

Moleman 2 – Demoscene – The Art of the Algorithms (2012)

HD, colour, 90′

Moleman 2 is about the demoscene subculture, told by mostly Hungarian sceneres, but it features also some other nationalities.

As an impact of the spreading of computer technology, some new art sections have been born. Some of them just digitized the analogue forms, but some produced whole new artistic forms. In former times, image-, and sound-based arts required not only intellectual but physical skills as well. Nowadays, computer programming allows us to create new-styled artworks using only our intellectual skills. We don’t need our physical skills for that anymore. Computer technics is the fastest developing part of our world, which produces more and more new opportunities for art. Moleman shows you now a digital subculture, where artists don’t use always the latest technology, but their aim is also to bring out the best from 30 year-old computer technics.

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The demoscene first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, and came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit home computers (the Amiga and the Atari ST). In the early years, demos had a strong connection with software cracking. When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit with a graphical introduction called a “crack intro” (shortenedcracktro). Later, the making of intros and standalone demos evolved into a new subculture independent of the software (piracy) scene.

Rhizome Commissions: Deadline May 1st (Extended)

Rhizome — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:12:53 -0500

The deadline for Rhizome Commissions has been extended to May 1st.

⇒ Please read all about eligibility, policy and procedures before applying!

Application Deadline: Tuesday May 01, 2012

Approval Voting: Saturday May 05, 2012 - Friday May 25, 2012

Rank Voting: Friday June 01, 2012 - Saturday June 16, 2012

Post-Trolling: A Conversation with Art404

Louis Doulas — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:05:33 -0500

Motorola Droid XL, 2011

Art404 is comprised of Manuel Palou and Moises Sanabria.

This interview was conducted over multiple online chat sessions beginning in March 2012 through April 2012.

louisdoulas: Let’s start with Art Not Found or Art404. Could you tell me a little more about its connotations?

artnotfound: Art404 is a pun for artnotfound, a motto that gives us a certain level of transparency. We don't want to get hung up on making art and exclude anybody from our work.

louisdoulas: So the absence implies a kind of non-context for framing production?

artnotfound: Well the internet functions in a non-context anyway. We want to create content and value more than we want to create art.

louisdoulas: Right, without the prerequisite motivations of making an artwork per se, just ‘pure’ creative production.

artnotfound: It's relentless creative production and discussion. That’s the future of content.

louisdoulas: So then there’s this awareness of the potential insularities or exclusiveness of the art world, or at least a hesitation to participate within this context? Perhaps which is why you're attracted to the internet in the first place, as it levels out all content.

artnotfound: Yes definitely. By opening up the discussion to everyone it democratizes content. And if successful, any further discussion of that content gives it social value.

louisdoulas: Cultural Capital

artnotfound: Art404 likes this.

louisdoulas: I'm interested in these notions of 'opening up discussion', surrounding content, in this case specifically your work; what does this mean for you?

artnotfound: It means our mothers can engage with our work as much as a gallerist can. The internet is allowing people to take part in things they never would have before, opening up the possibilities for a much larger discussion. When both ends of the spectrum: high and low culture, exist on the same field, exciting things happen. The outcome of this discussion creates a higher, or "purer" value.

A gallerist once talked to us about "the kitty cat realm", a world where artists are reduced to a sort of novelty, enjoyable by a wide audience, much the way a cute kitten is. The art world seems to try to stray away from this phenomenon, where we find value and possibility in it.

louisdoulas: And our relationship with the internet only seems to get more confrontational with sites like Mega Upload forced offline, Pirate Bay switching to their Swedish domain to avoid domain seizure, the increased exploitation of users within Facebook and issues with self-proclaimed 'democratic' art practices and ideology itself. Your poem, BE reflects on some of these conflicts, specifically on corporatization and lifestyle commodification.

artnotfound: In BE, we weren't trying highlight the negative in advertising, but rather make a sort of mock manifesto for what advertising proposes. Lifestyle marketing is changing rapidly with the internet and while people complain about ads and search engines becoming more targeted, it's actually making the ad industry more transparent. Technology is getting better at revealing our desires and making us aware of them, and this tension should empower people, not scare them. Now that the technology is here, people can be content aware.

It's going to back to the idea of high and low co-existing. On one hand it's opening these brands to critique, and at the same time linking to them so you can explore and form your own thoughts. In this way, we can accept and negate advertising at the same time.

louisdoulas: There is quite a divide on these issues of privacy and advertising. I think this simultaneity is interesting: this acceptance and rejection of advertising, of commodified desires that seem to be especially apparent in interface design and marketing campaigns for most digital ephemera. Seeing brands like Nike or Carhartt feature user product reviews directly on their websites as a kind of crowdsourced testimony to their product illustrate this type of transparency you mentioned.

What you seem to be alluding to though, is this empowering of the user, of the consumer, in an ultimate transparent society that eventually leads corporations and consumers to exist in a perpetual public sphere causing both to act within less deceptive, falsifying modes?

artnotfound: That's the idea and ultimately what we hope will happen. People have always consumed products and content intuitively, but now we live in an age of information where people have the means to inform themselves and others. This "informed intuition" is an important principle to us in all aspects of life, from making artwork to getting the right product.

If you have the internet, there really is no excuse to be ignorant anymore.

BE, 2011

louisdoulas: Then the decision to work with Verizon Wireless to make a supersized version of the Motorola Droid was obviously an important one?

artnotfound: For us, it's important to diversify the people we collaborate with, especially to go beyond the art scene. We see big brands like Verizon or Google as an opportunity to reach more people. We plan on bringing the phone out in public to call attention both to the absurdity of the phone and to highlight the future of this technology by showing you the complete opposite. Phones are trying to get physically smaller while their function and importance in our culture is exploding. By using the Droid XL as a "practical" object instead of an artwork we can make fun of the technology while glorifying it as something that's so important it needs to be mocked.

louisdoulas: The mockery of phone size to this reality of reliance produces a certain ambivalence for a future increasingly automated. Is this accurate? Perhaps some of the ideas and reactions in Droid XL can be found in Simages?

artnotfound: We're obsessed with automation, both as something scary and beautiful. Simages starts to point at that. We created this lovely, "ideal" living situation and then let it run automatically, only to watch the Sims lives crumble as they run on autopilot. Dirty dishes begin to pile up, the family stops talking to each other and they lose the things that make them a "perfect" family.

As we move to a more automated culture, we're making our lives easier while changing the perceived value of time management. We're working on an app that will automatically text your mother every night. Both as a practical way of automating love, and as a comment on how technology is changing time management. By exploring the limits of automation, we can have a better understanding of what it means to us and what the best path to take is. We can make an "informed" choice, so to speak.

louisdoulas: Time, seems to have become more combative, or least its passing more 'apparent' today. Have you ever used Steve Lambert's Self-Control app?

I think productivity and what it challenges and defines seems to be more and more of a preoccupation for this generation of cultural producers. These notions of leisure: recreation in contrast to 'productivity' and the strive for this supposed balance is something we think automation would hope to make easier, such as the app you're working on. But of course we can see this becoming problematic, this gesture of an automated text to one's mother.

artnotfound: It's post-trolling, an ironic and almost sinister gesture that reveals something really telling. It definitely makes texting your mother manually more meaningful if you have the option to do it automatically.

Simages, 2011

louisdoulas: Going back to the potential threats the internet faces, your work 5 millions dollars 1 TB consists of a myriad of torrented software files ranging from Adobe Suite to the Rosetta Stone Language Pack. You've even made these files available to download online. You've made your politics quite clear here and so I wanted to ask what your role is as artists with a work like this?

artnotfound: Well we're just playing devils advocate to the larger issue at hand, rather than trying to instill too much of our own politics. In 5m1t, the issue is obviously the amount of freely available content on the web and the translation of that value into the physical space. Our role as artists is merely to reveal the elephant in the room; these files already existed on the web and were easily searchable. It wasn't until we started archiving them on the hard drive that we realized the magnitude of the situation.

louisdoulas: The presentation of this piece in the gallery: the external hard drive as this slick humming black monolith where upon realizing its hidden worth and actual 'value' becomes a sort of spectacle. Its physical manifestation creates this weight of worth and it becomes a banal and brazen presentation of the fixivity of 'illegal' data.

artnotfound: We like that description. Ultimately we think the piece succeeds in offering a point of reference to the rampant amount of piracy going on the internet. The grotesque value of the files being contrasted by the small, sleek hard drive is a nice metaphor for the ease of file sharing versus their perceived damage.

5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte, 2011

louisdoulas: We're used to being weightless in a way when it comes to dispersing and acquiring content online. We often forget the actual materiality and reality of our communicative devices, their storage and maintenance, electricity, etc. and also the actual repercussions of online activity. On one level that's why SOPA seemed so profound (the success of the protests against it and experiencing this 'win' as an online collective).

artnotfound: All online activity has real life consequences. Our piece and SOPA are just physical incarnations of that. The digital coming into the real, and the real going digital, it's a beautiful thing.

louisdoulas: Conrad I think is worth mentioning here—Conrad's internet presence as a way of dealing with the loss of his wife. This work, along with Man's Google Search for Meaning and even Simages all kind of depict an absence; there's a hint of depression, or a self-devouring nihilism in these three.

artnotfound: If we can harness this nihilism in a way that has poetic resonance, we'll have something of value. If we can get you to see it, understand it, and experience it, we can get you to reflect on it. Once people start reflecting they can form their own ideas and empower themselves through that. You can be nihilistic while still suggesting a resolution.

Conrad, 2011

louisdoulas: And how did you stumble upon Conrad? What made you want to highlight him?

artnotfound: We stumbled on Conrad on a small, private message board and were immediately captivated. He's such a perfect example of humans giving technology a higher significance. To record yourself is to quantify ones self, and he's devoted quite a bit of time doing that. The motivation for him is simply to communicate, and the sheer number his videos really tells you how urgent it is. Because all his videos are essentially the same, it really makes it a digital ritual.

louisdoulas: Art404 seems to be very optimistic about the future, especially technology and the internet's role in it, but what are some of your concerns at the moment?

artnotfound: We are digital natives, any concerns we do have about technology we feel comfortable confronting them. The more informed you are, the less vulnerable you are. Any problems with technology can be tackled with technology. As long as we're responsible when using technology to replace and augment our lives, we think we'll be OK.

There needs to be a humanist approach to the ethics of technology. Innovation and advancement without compromising the human, those are the types of things we are a part of.

louisdoulas: With these changes the role of the artist changes as well. Besides incorporating various digital ephemera/aesthetic into works of art, how do you see the position of the artist changing in all of this? The artist's role in production and distribution?

artnotfound: We're biased, but we see it as the most exciting time ever. Artists can do everything now, they can be their own photographer, gallerist, curator, critic, market team, audience, everything. Producing and distributing is no longer an industry thing, but an everybody thing. Anybody can post a picture and someone else can immediately remix it into something new and this is happening exponentially so. Even if most of the internet is creating content just to LOL, the energy that comes with that is inspiring.

The old "everyone is an artist" adage has never been more true in today's there's-an-app-for-that world. It's no coincidence that this internet generation has seen a rise in artsy, creative people that are obsessed with sharing their ideas. Whether the content they're producing has artistic merit or not is irrelevant, the enthusiasm to do so is what matters.

Now that everybody is a content creator, it's going to push the artist wishing to rise above the clutter to work harder, do more, and innovate constantly. In a world where everyone's fighting for attention, people are going to get more creative. A new breed of work and art making will lead the relentless content creating culture and we’re excited about it.

Man's Google Search For Meaning, 2011

louisdoulas: There is obviously a danger in complete democratization, or in everyone becoming an artist. Boris Groys talks a little about this in his essay, ‘The Weak Universalism’. But, I want to know where critique comes in for you? What is being done in the name of all this mass creative progress?

artnotfound: Critique is a very complex subject now that so many people are involved. Practically everything we say is public now and this really affects the way we communicate. When not covered by the veil of anonymity, our critique is subject to its own critique. We hope that this won't become a norm, and that people will always speak their mind, otherwise the internet will devolve into a giant circle jerk.

louisdoulas: These ideas of public transparency, anonymity and collectivity are all pertinent strategies or alternative ways of 'movement' and governance. This dynamic between individualism and the group is interesting and I'm curious to hear your positions on these things. Maybe a good place to start would be on a tangent, with the Anonymous vs. Gagosian incident?

artnotfound: Anonymous vs. Gagosian was a sort of chance art happening, the kind that only happens on the internet. A hacker identifying with the internet "group" Anonymous thought it would be funny to take down our website, screenshot it, and email it to us. It was funny, and we immediately wanted more. After a few emails, he admitted he had been trying to get into the art scene for years. We convinced him/her that they would be better suited taking down more important art websites as institutional critique. The next day, he had taken down the front pages of Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Tate.

If one person can censor an entire power structure with the press of a few keystrokes, what does that say about the politics of digital culture? People aren't afraid to take action behind a computer screen. The net allows everyday people can become leaders, tastemakers, and icons. By documenting these happenings we hope it will motivate people to talk, troll, spam and flame their thoughts to the world. We always look forward to collaborating with the internet.

The great thing is that you can be an individual and a group, you don't have to pick a side. You can be a boy or a girl, old or young, whatever you want. There's tons of up and downs to this new ability, and a whole new set of rules. Understanding the dynamics between real and digital culture will prepare us for the future.

Anonymous Vs. Gagosian, 2011

louisdoulas: The Pirate Bay's Aerial Server Drones are also a good example of some of these emerging techniques and strategies.

artnotfound: Those are really next level. Props to The Pirate Bay.

Anonymous Vs. Gagosian, 2011

louisdoulas: I think as you said, 'understanding the dynamics between the real and the digital', will prepare us for the future. Often times social networking, emerging technology and the internet is treated, at least by the media, as a kind of new 'revolution celebrity' and so a lot of emphasis and faith is placed on these various kinds of cybernetic theories. And through all this it seems that there isn't a declared political form, but rather that a form supposedly emerges in and out from reactions to various events. It’s an abandonment of political action by pure force that’s in favor more so of an accumulative power. I even want to draw a parallel to the practice of Relational Aesthetics and the type of technique used: the creation of 'alternatives' and 'comprises' rather than a complete redesigning and reconfiguring of society and the world.

artnotfound: Alternative sounds like it's outside of something. We're not splitting off from reality, just augmenting it. Now, the collective actions of a lot of individual people and small groups can snowball into something much faster. It's the same strategy that's always been around, just on steroids.

Rhizome Seven on Seven: Tickets still available at Artist/Student/Developer Rate!

Rhizome — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 11:45:15 -0500

Thanks to increased support from our sponsors we are opening up more student/artist/developer Seven on Seven tickets.

Presented by HTC, the Rhizome Seven on Seven conference pairs seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenges them to develop something new—be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine—over the course of a single day.

Technologists participating in this year's conference represent some of the most influential technologists working today; they are: Jeremy Ashkenas, Blaine Cook, Michael Herf, Marissa Mayer, Aaron Swartz, Khoi Vinh and Anthony Volodkin. The artists participating in Seven on Seven are similarly impactful and working in a range of mediums from dance, to film, to installation to web-based projects; they are: Aram Bartholl, Xavier Cha, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Naeem Mohaiemen Jon Rafman, Taryn Simon and Stephanie Syjuco.

Seven on Seven will take place Saturday, April 14th from noon-6pm at the New Museum.

Learn more about the participants on the Seven on Seven website or purchase your tickets now.

Art on the Beautiful Island

Ron Hanson — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:26:38 -0500

Yao Jui-chung, Recover Main-Land China : Action (1996)

As an outsider the Taipei art scene can be difficult to access. The dearth of information in English and the lack of an international profile – compared to other countries in Asia – can make it appear a mysterious black hole. And perhaps that’s precisely the appeal. Amidst the increasing standardization of the global art world, somehow Taiwan missed the brief. As usual it was left out of the loop.

Not officially recognised as a country – after it was abandoned by its allies and booted out of the UN in 1971, as the body instead came to recognise the Communist People’s Republic of China – Taiwanese life seems characterised by diplomatic and cultural isolation. I remember living in Taiwan during the SARS epidemic of 2003 when, as Taiwan is blocked from attaining membership of the World Health Organization (WHO), the island was refused medical expertise and information. Eventually the U.N. body sent over an expert, only he became infected with the disease and had to leave. The front page of the newspaper showed a photograph of him walking back to the airplane, dressed in strange protective clothing, looking like a displaced astronaut. Once again Taiwan was left to its own devices.

I’ve heard it said that the uncertainty of Taiwan’s future leads to a kind of nihilism. I first encountered this dark vision when I watched Tsai Ming-liang’s feature film The Hole (1998) shortly before I moved to Taiwan in 2000. The film is set in Taipei in the final days of 1999. A strange virus has spread throughout the city causing its infected persons to writhe on the ground in cockroach-like movements. An evacuation order is ignored by the residents of an apartment building who decide to wait out the storm. One of the residents answers a knock at his door to encounter a plumber who has come to check the pipes. The resident leaves to open his small grocery store and upon returning home discovers that the plumber has drilled a hole through his concrete floor. The man begins voyeuristically using the hole to observe his woman neighbour who lives below, but eventually the hole becomes the only means of human interaction the two neighbours have. The film is bleak and claustrophobic, mostly set at night in the city where it seems to never stop raining. But the darkness is broken by occasional jolts into wild and colourful musical scenes, hopelessly nostalgic and desperate in their overexuberance.

Chen Chieh-jen, The Route, (2006)

Taiwan’s best-known artist Chen Chieh-jen draws on the island’s isolation in his 2006 video installation The Route. The work, commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial, restages or re-imagines an historical event, the global dockworkers protest of the 1990s. The protest began after 500 Liverpool dockworkers were fired in 1995 for refusing to cross a picket line. Later, when the scab-loaded ship Neptune Jade left England for Oakland in the US, word spread of the workers’ struggle. The ship was met in Oakland by a picket line of labor activists and community organizers who, in solidarity with the Liverpool dockworkers, defied a court order in refusing to allow the unloading of the ship. After three-and-a-half days the ship headed onto Vancouver where it met the same scenario and then onto Yokohama, and then Kobe, Japan, where again dockworkers refused to unload the ship. Eventually the ship sailed to Kaosiung, Taiwan where Taiwanese dockworkers were unaware of the global action. There the ship was sold and its cargo discharged. For his installation Chen staged and filmed a belated protest in Kaosiung, interspersing these scenes with archival documentary footage of the global protest, echoing the Liverpool dockworker’s phrase, “The world is our picket line.”

But perhaps I am making too much of this isolation or employing nostalgia myself for a time I never experienced. The 1990s in Taiwan is referred to as a period of “Taiwanization”. Following the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the rise to power, in 1988, of the first Taiwan-born president Lee Tung Hui, there was an explosion of artistic activity as artists explored the island’s long suppressed history, languages and indigenous cultures in a concerted effort to develop a culture and identity that was uniquely its own. The island became a democracy and the economy boomed in a time when anything seemed possible. There was a crescendo of optimism in 2000 when the independence-minded Chen Sui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party was elected president, despite threats from Mainland China and military exercises conducted just of the island’s shores. But such optimism now seems a distant memory as Chen Sui-bian sits in prison, serving a life sentence for money laundering, bribery and embezzlement of government funds.

The tide of globalisation has swept over Taiwan as its factories have relocated to mainland China, in search of cheaper labor, and even its artists are moving to the mainland in increasing numbers, looking for opportunities. A friend of mine, a businessman, who is one of the most patriotic Taiwanese I know, recently told me that, after resisting the tide for many years, he has resigned himself to the situation. He is moving to the mainland. In contemporary Taiwan consumerism runs rife. “Taiwan,” Chen Chieh-jen told Studio Banana TV, “has become ‘a fast-forgetting’ society that has abandoned its right to self-narration…” A new generation of Taiwanese artists seems detached from the island’s historical situation, which seemed so urgent only a decade ago.

“Most younger artists are no longer interested in grand narratives,” Yao Jui-chung, one of the island’s leading artists, told me when I interviewed him for Afterall Online last year, “nor do they directly challenge traditional or exalted values, but rather use gentler, more personal strategies, avoid problems (both intentionally and unintentionally) and escape into their own communities... While most of this work is clever, ethereal and speaks of personal experience, this is not enough. If they cannot construct their pastiche of fragments on a fully elaborated genealogy of knowledge, then the superficiality of their project is likely to cause it to collapse.”

Yao is among many Taiwanese who are determined to counter the amnesiac state created by rapid commercialization. Any visitor to Taiwan interested in its history and art scene would do well to meet Yao. We first met at Adam Art Gallery in Wellington in 2006 when he came over for the exhibition Islanded. Upon returning to Taiwan, with my brother Mark, in early 2009, Yao took us on a whirlwind tour of Taipei, introducing us to artists, galleries, curators and daring us to try local delicacies, like “The Four Gods Soup”, containing pig’s bladder, urinal and sperm tract, offering us betel nuts and taking us to a traditional puppet theater where the performances are intended for the gods. Yao’s patriotism for Taiwan and political outspokenness can be problematic for his art career. His work has, at times, been banned from being exhibited in the mainland. Yao’s photographic action series, Recovering Mainland China (1997), parodies Taiwan’s former official policy of one day retaking the mainland. As a member of the last generation to still be taught the policy in school, Yao photographed himself standing, feet floating above the ground, in front of various Chinese historical sites. Dressed in military uniform, leftover from his compulsory military service, Yao is there as a one-man army ready to carry out the official government policy. I remember Yao telling me about some trouble he once had with Chinese customs officials at the airport due to the work as he struggled to explain that this was art and that he wasn’t really intending to retake the mainland.

Yao is currently the interim Director of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center. The center, which opened in 2010, is at the heart of a grassroots movement by the art community to reclaim its self-determinism. Situated in the Ximen district — a strange mix of rundown historical buildings, teen pop culture and veteran soldiers and the seedy underworld they inhabit — the center, despite its official-sounding name, is a non-profit organization formed by a group of artists, scholars, curators and cultural workers endeavouring to create an independent initiative whose operations are not affected by government policy or business interests. Prominent artists, including Chen Cheih-jen, donated artworks to help raise money for its establishment. The center now appears set to move to a new location at Zhong Shan ArtsPark where it will have an office and access to facilities in the park. The center will be participating in the Shanghai Biennial in October. Yao is also a founding member of a group of artists who run VT Artsalon, an independent gallery and bar which functions as an informal meeting point for artists.

Isa Ho is another artist who has been a strong profile the past few years. Ho’s photographic collages draw on a rapid flux of different characters, played by the artist herself, exploring the contradictions and demands created by rapid modernisation and its uneasy relationship with a still dominant traditional culture. “For women,” Ho says, “we are taught to follow the teachings of the “three obediences and the four virtues,” and this includes to be docile. Quite simply put, typical families in Taiwan think that girls should talk less and not have too many thoughts and suggestions. However, as the girls enter the job field, they can’t afford not to talk or have any thoughts. They must play the game to compete. On the other hand, traditional education preaches that men should take on the responsibility of supporting their families. However, in the real world, due to intense economic pressures, men have to accept the fact that their significant others are also bringing home the bacon; thereby, the male status at home is also shifting”.

Isa Ho, This New Year's Eve we signed the peace treaty (2008)

One of things I’ve noticed about mainstream culture in Taiwan is an almost universal obsession with fairytales. In her photographic series I Got Super Strong Courage – I Am Snow White (2005-2010), Ho plays Snow White, hyper naive and innocent, set in a range of complicated environments, surrounded by even more complicated characters, also played by Ho, often contradictory female roles brought on by contemporary Taiwanese conditions. “The [obsession with] so-called fairy tales is because they bring us a better vision and always have a happy ending,” Ho says. “Everyone in childhood was told that the prince and the princess lived happily ever after, which means the good outcome is also a symbol of marriage."

Technology and political developments in Taiwan have presented their opportunities. With the high speed railway one can now travel from Taipei to Taichung City in one hour, and Kaosiung in two hours. There are now direct flights to the mainland, whereas previously, due to political reasons, one would have to first fly to Hong Kong and apply there for a visa. There are still restrictions on mainland Chinese visiting Taiwan. It is not always simple for artists to make the trip over.

Recently the magazine I edit White Fungus flew over the Beijing noise artist, writer and record label boss Yan Jun to perform in an event at Taipei Contemporary Art Center alongside the Taipei artists Wang Fujui, Dino and Wang Chung-kun. Yan has been familiar with Taiwanese experimental music for a long time and it was interesting to hear his thoughts after returning to the island for the first time in many years. “My impression is that Taiwanese musicians have clearer directions and figures than Chinese ones. I feel there is more of a working atmosphere. In China many musicians are constantly trying and struggle in the crazy reality. And there is no community. You know how difficult it is to meet people in Beijing – now I’m waiting for someone who is already two hours late – and how difficult it is to do anything in a smaller city in China. Anyway, I like the quality of Taiwanese musicians and the energy of Chinese musicians.”

Jeph Lo has written extensively on the history of experimental music and sound art in Taiwan. In his article “The Taiwanese Sound Liberation Movement” he ties the emergence of these forms directly to the political climate of the times. “Soon after martial law was lifted, the government gradually removed the many existing prohibitions, and a wave of political and social movements swelled up, including the environmental, gender / sexuality, labor, and Taiwan independence movements. All positions, no matter how controversial, could now be voiced publicly… The first wave of the Taiwanese sound liberation movement was born against this backdrop.”

Hsia Yu, Pink Noise (2007)

One of the artists Yan Jun has introduced me to is the Taipei poet and publisher Hsia Yu. Hsia, inspired by the underground noise community, seeks to create in her poetry a verbal equivalent that she describes as “lettristic noise”. Hsia’s 2007 book Pink Noise was an underground hit, selling 4000 copies and reaching number 4 on the bestseller list for the Eslite Bookstore chain. The book is a series of 33 poems published in Chinese and English. Printed on transparent leaves, the poems, in black and pink, ink bleed into one another in a staticky mesh. The artist composed the poems in English using lines found by clicking hyper links on spam emails, mixing in lines from literary classics by Pushkin, Poe and Shakespeare, among others. Once composed Hsia fed the poems through the automated translator “Sherlock” and then continued working with the awkwardly transferred text, feeding the Chinese back through the machine to obtain the English text.

“It ‘translates’ word-for-word,”Hsia said in an interview with Full Tilt “closely following the letter of the text, and yet the translated version provides no secure meaning. It makes no commitment; it doesn’t flow: words keep coming but it doesn’t move forward. Nor does it take you anywhere; it persists in place even if it eventually crumbles. Sentence by sentence it crumbles and then suddenly it has arrived somewhere… You know, I’ve never really cared that much for computers or the Net. No consensual hallucination induced by virtual reality can hold a candle to the most rickety sentence precariously contrived. But now I feel a new romance coming on with this automated translation software, my machine poet. And what really turns me on is that, like any lethal lover, it announces from the beginning that it is not to be trusted…”

Wang Fujui is one of the pioneers of experimental music and digital art in Taiwan. In 1993 Fujui founded Noise, the first experimental music magazine and record label in Taiwan. In 2000 he joined Etat, an independent organization, founded in 1995 by the avant-garde artist Wen-Hao Huang, dedicated to media and digital art. Wang curated Bias in 2003 and 2005, the first exhibition of sound art in Taiwan, organized by Etat. In his own work he makes sensuously-charged installations combining light and sound. Yan Jun describes Wang’s recent performance in Taipei as “so beautiful and elegantly wild”. Since 2006 Etat has directed the Digital Art Center. Wang has curated both the Taipei Digital Art Festival and the interdisciplinary TranSonic festival.

Since 2007 Lacking Sound Festival, an organization founded by four artists, Chung–Han Yao, Chung-Kun Wang, Ting-Hao Yeh and Shin-Yuan Tsai has held monthly events at Nanjing Gallery. Kandala Music organizes a range of experimental and improv concerts. There is a growing amount of institutional support for digital art in Taiwan, with the establishment of the Digital Art Center in 2006 and a plethora of new media festivals and exhibitions. However, both Yan Jun and Jeph Lo are ambivalent about the development and institutionalization of sound art in Taiwan. Speaking of the mid-2000s in Taiwan Yan says, “That was the time of ‘noise’ turning into ‘sound art’, synchronised with the process of formalising a capitalist democratic society. Now everything is named. People know what they are doing and where they are.”

Wang Fujui performing at the White Fungus Issue 12 Release Event, December 3, 2011. Photo: Feng Hsin

I’ve always found Taiwan itself to be its greatest artwork. There’s an unpredictability to life on the island which leads to constant surprises. But while I’ve felt drawn to the island’s dystopian elements, I’ve also enjoyed the traditional currents which somehow continue on despite all the upheavals. Living amidst the urban chaos of Taipei it can be easy to forget that the island was once named Formosa (“beautiful island”) by the Dutch, but there are still incredibly beautiful stretches of nature to encounter on the outskirts of urban sprawl, even if a nuclear power plant sits on Kenting, the island’s most beautiful beach. French sound artist Yannick Dauby has been based in Taipei since 2007 after first coming to the island in 2004 to do a residency at Taipei Artist Village. Now lecturing in sound art at Taipei National University, Dauby has done a number of collaborative projects in rural Taiwan, working in Aboriginal villages and learning about the island’s ecology. Currently is he doing a project recording the sounds of Taiwan’s frogs. “Taiwanese people often say that Europe is more suitable for people interested in culture,” Dauby says. “I often reply that culture exists in specific places in Europe such as concert halls or museums, but in Taiwan it still exists in the countryside, nearby a temple or in a tea garden.”

Taipei experimental film festival Urban Nomad, started by expat journalists David Frazier and Sean Scanlan in 2002 is one of the most successful examples of an art project started by foreigners in Taiwan. The festival, which now travels from Taipei to Hsinchu and Taichung and is hoping to reach an audience of more than 10,000 people in 2012, began in warehouses and alternative spaces throughout Taipei using VHS tapes and a few computer files and DVDs. “The only reason that year succeeded,” Frazier says, “was because Saturday night turned into a party and we made a bunch of money selling beer. Since then, I guess you could say we’ve been coming up from the underground, but, to tell the truth, we’re still a lot more comfortable there.” Frazier and Scanlan’s festival has succeeded in independently funding itself which has kept it out of local art politics. Despite its growth the festival still creates a social and community experience of film, distinct from the “black box” impersonal movie environment. “Now the festival involves a lot more spreadsheets, invoices, etc,” Frazier says, “but venue and atmosphere are super important. We don’t want people to just show up, pay for entertainment, download it to their brains and leave.”

Rhizome Commissions Deadline May 1, 2012

Rhizome — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:55:37 -0500

Update: the Deadline has now been extended to May 1st. Dates have been corrected to reflect new deadline

Aram Bartholl's Dust, Awarded Rhizome Commission in 2011

The deadline is fast approaching 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 Tuesday May, 1st. Be sure to read over the eligibility, policy and procedures before you begin the application process.

Two of the commissions will be determined by Rhizome's membership through an open vote. The majority will be decided by a jury moderated by Lauren Cornell, executive director of Rhizome.

The jury includes:

Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London
Jonathan Lethem, author of The Ecstasy of Influence, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn
Caitlin Jones, executive director of Western Front

Application Deadline: Tuesday May 01, 2012

Approval Voting: Saturday May 05, 2012 - Friday May 25, 2012

Rank Voting: Friday June 01, 2012 - Saturday June 16, 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.

Artist Profile: Antoine Catala

Rachel Wetzler — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:04:43 -0500

In a statement for your 2009 exhibition "TV Show" at 179 Canal, you described television as a dying medium, suggesting that the work in the show was a kind of eulogy for TV. Television is a recurring theme in your work, but you’ve used it in various ways, both as a material and as a subject, often taking the most familiar types of programs—the news, for instance—and altering the way we see it. What is it about television that appeals to you? Are you interested in defamiliarizing something we take for granted, forcing the viewer to reconsider its place in everyday life? Is this work reflecting a sense of nostalgia for television’s past? If it’s a dying medium, what do you think has replaced it?

TV is no longer the all-powerful medium it used to be. It’s dead in the same way radio is dead, whereby it only occupies a peripheral position in our lives. Internet is the new place, because it encompasses words, images, videos, audio, as well as the viewer’s participation. The internet packs more information; in that sense it’s more HD than TV and that’s what people go for, the better, more fulfilling, more entertaining medium.

I was interested in TV broadcasts initially because I thought it was funny to bring live TV into the museum or the gallery. In my TV work I encourage the use of any entertaining program. However, screening an episode of Spongebob (a personal favorite) doesn’t work the same, in an exhibition context, than say the news or any program with live content. That’s because the viewer’s common assumption is that if a video is shown, it must be pre-recorded. But I am not at all interested in working with pre-recorded TV shows. I want to deal with the flux of what is produced at that very moment. These are pieces that are permanently up-to-date. I think the pop paradigm has shifted. We are no longer dealing with iconic pop culture, in the sense of Warhol—who was an orthodox Christian by the way. Images have become subliminal, transient: these are the images I am interested in. [Even a pop idol like Lady Gaga, one wouldn’t have a clear picture of her.]

I have no interest in nostalgia. To deal with the TV, before it completely vanishes was perfect timing, because it allowed me to treat the TV as is. Before, when video art dealt with television broadcasts, because TV was the most powerful medium around, the artwork was read as conflating with the medium. That’s inherent to the position of TV in society, not the nature of the work. Now that TV is about to die, we can contemplate TV for what it is, as an incredibly crafted language. It did things that nothing else can nor will ever do again.

As for using the TV sets as a material, I do so because they are a familiar way of viewing images.

Your exhibition at 47 Canal, “I See Catastrophes Ahead,” takes the form of a rebus, in which each of the five pieces in the gallery represents a part of the titular sentence. As the press release notes, “Every digitized image, sound, video, smell, taste and object is associated with [key]words. In an internet search, typing a word opens the door to an infinite universe of possibilities.” The rebus is a centuries-old form of translating words into images, and yet you’re employing it here to reflect the impact of recent technology—the Internet search—on the way we conceive of language. Do you see a connection between the two? There’s something about a rebus that is curiously reflective of the way the Internet works: when you type the word “cat,” for instance, into Google, you get a whole list of unrelated suggested search terms. Was this something that you were thinking about specifically when you made this work?

I was specifically focusing on Google Image Searches. Google Image search makes connections between images and words. A rebus operates similarly. Like you say, searching for the word cat brings up a near endless flow of images of cats. The rebus reader operates the other way; he or she sees an image and has to attach a word to it, in the process sometimes making wrong associations. The rebus reader is a bit like the Internet algorithms, attaching words to images.

The Internet, at its inception, was silent and drab; now it’s an exciting place, with plenty of videos, sounds, and images. There is a tendency for the Internet to “flesh up,” to develop substance on top of the underlying text backbone. Now objects are thrown in the mix. With an Internet search one can cull and print (via 3D printing) objects.

So, via an Internet search, a word can conjure up many quasi-physical or physical incarnations, be it images, sounds, videos or now objects. I was specifically interested in the triad word – image – object in making the works for “I See Catastrophes Ahead”. Each piece in the show is an in-between stage, part image, part object, and part word.

Even though much of your work draws on the immaterial—television broadcasts, digital video, the Internet—it often takes the form of installations, sculptures, and other interventions into physical space. Moreover, when you use technology, you often call attention to it physically—I’m thinking in particular of the way that you incorporate the wires, tubes, and machines that power your 47 Canal show into the work itself; the Mac Mini that controls the projections, for instance, is encased within one of the sculptures, plainly on view. Are you actively trying to create a material experience of these things?

I guess I have a structuralist perspective: I am interested in the structure of the medium I deal with. I find the structuralist tactics visceral: it deals with embodiment of the medium. Ernie Gehr said: “A moving picture is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind.” I bring in even more physicality to an image—moving or not—to exaggerate the underlying affective relationship we have with it.

Your use of technology ranges from the highly sophisticated—for instance, you’ve employed technology developed recently by scientists at Carnegie Mellon in your work—to the relatively rudimentary, as in the hologram sculptures, which use light and mirrors to give the impression of an object floating in space. Are you specifically interested in merging high- and low-tech methods in your work, or do you simply use whichever techniques you think are most appropriate for individual pieces?

Dan Graham says that my show at 47 Canal is a bit like going back to being a 12 year old who builds his own radios sets. I use technology that is familiar to people: I used CRT TV when it was the most popular, flat screen now, because they are the most familiar ways of showing images. For my show at 47 Canal, I use cutting edge technology of different eras: holograms of the Victorian times, nano projectors and arduinos, for instance, of today.

You have degrees in both mathematics and visual art. Does your background in mathematics inform your work as an artist? If so, how?

Mathematics is a language, a unique one.

Age:

37

Location:

NYC

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

My mother says that because I was a premature baby, the doctors put me in an incubator. When the incubator broke, I fixed it.

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

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

I studied Mathematics in France, then Sound Art and then Fine Arts in the UK. In art school, I set for myself the goal of using new “techniques” for each project I would make. I feel I still operate with the same motto.

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

My work deals mostly with our relationship to technology, or more specifically to images and the machines that produce them. That’s because it’s an environment we create for ourselves and that in turn we (as humans) respond to. This relationship is one of the vehicles for our mutations.

As for my practice, I am after results. I would use anything as long it produces what I am after. I used drawings for my show at 179 Canal. Drawing is still a great place to explore.

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

I have curated exhibitions. I am not as good a writer as I would like to be, but I still intend to write: to write about my work and the work of the people I know or that interest me. That’s because artists have a privileged position to discuss their peers’ works. I think artists should make use of this position to defend not only their personal voice, but also of the one of their peers. It’s all about bonding and bonding makes for better art works.

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 run a one-person company called “Bonjour Computer, LLC”. I help people with their computers; or rather I help them in dealing with their frustration with technology. It’s akin to being a pet psychologist. It fits my practice and offers the double advantage of a decent pay as well as flexible hours. [Plus, most of my clients come to my exhibitions.]

Who are your key artistic influences?

I have diverse influences, starting from dialogues with people around me. Each piece I make is informed by several people or works. For my last show at 47 Canal I was thinking of American “Pictures Generation” artists (Matt Mullican, John Miller), Belgium surrealism (Marcel Broodthaers, Magritte), as well as Google Image Searches and rebuses.

For me, Mullican deals with a collective unconscious, a residual of collective pop culture lodged in his subconscious, that, via a system of personal symbolism, he merges with a collective unconscious. Broodthaers and Magritte brought the “word” to surrealism. Both these sources are, at least for me, a more abstract form of surrealism and share similarities. I thought the two could be bridged.

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

I like collaborations and exchanges. For instance, I have been interested for a while in Christophe Hanna / LA REDACTION’s book Valérie par Valérie. Hanna is an incredible writer; sadly his work has not been translated to English yet. Hanna’s book deals with the constant fabrication of a public identity—it’s more a document than a narrative. In an (maybe failed) attempt to assimilate the book, I gave a conference at the New Museum as part of the New Silent series organized by Rhizome, about the construct of my own public identity. For the project I enlisted Philipp Furtenbach, a founding member of AO&, a collective of itinerant chefs, whose focus is on the social fabric of small communities. With Philiipp we set a regimen of stringent meetings and questions, that he asked me every week (“How do you picture yourself in the future?” was one of these questions for instance). The meetings and questions were directly derived from Hanna’s book. I met with Philipp on a weekly basis for 7 or 8 months. The questions served as the basis of the reflection for the conference.

Do you actively study art history?

I develop specific interest for certain artists and I would read about them. I have a focused interest. There is so much information out there, that I find it distracting.

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

I recently read some Willem Flusser; I enjoyed it. Also Paul Ryan, Cybernetics of the Sacred, is an amazing read. It’s one thing I struggle with being in New York, finding time to read. I’d like to read more science fiction. My friend Josh Kline has good recommendations.

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

My nature is to be carefree. With time and experience I am starting to realize that new media work or at least mine is based on illusion and that strict display conditions have to be respected for the work to function. For instance, the room needs to be lit a certain way, the sound be set at a certain volume or the video be projected a certain size. If the conditions are not met, my work does not function. It’s pretty basic stuff, but people still do not know how to deal with technological works. So I am learning how to be more specific and direct when I install shows. I do not deal with the archival aspect of my work yet.

Rhizome Benefit: May 9, 2012

Rhizome — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:49:17 -0500

The Scanner at Saamlung

Yin Ho — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 09:29:20 -0500

Prepared Scanner, a composition in clay (Travess Smalley, 2011)

Untitled (Jo-ey Tang, 2011-2012)

Rhizome asked Travess Smalley and Jo-ey Tang, two artists with digitally-based work in the upcoming group exhibition "The Untouchables" at Saamlung in Hong Kong, to answer the same question(s) via email.

Surface is a theme of this show: is there a particular way you connect the visual elements of your pieces to something non-visual? Considering each piece has a digital and physical aspect, would you expand on the relationship between the two forms? What do you consider your pieces to be made of (e.g., substance, bit, concept, etc.)?

Travess Smalley: I have always looked for ways to bring the home office into my studio practice. I mean, for most artists the home office holds many of the tools we use on a day-to-day basis -- inkjet printer, scanner, personal computer, even scotch tape and staples. I've always felt that my role as an artist and creator would be somewhat dependent on these tools. I mean, it's always been easier for me to find a mouse than a paintbrush.

Of all the home office devices, the printer/scanner is the most interesting to me. These are the two devices that convert the digital to the physical and back again. They are one of the few ports where the visual can get in and out of the separated digital and physical worlds. The printer and scanner have been my most important tools for the past few years. From my experiences and processes using them for artistic ends, I have come to think of my relationship to them akin to a contemporary printmaker. A home office printmaker perhaps. I've developed an understanding and elaborate choreography of process that attempts to blur the line of these convertors. It rarely actually blurs the distinction of the physical and digital for me, but I'm thrilled when it appears indistinguishable to others.

Prepared Scanner, a composition in clay (Travess Smalley, 2011)

Last year, I made a book of collages called Capture Physical Presence. The collages themselves are hybrid objects: compositions that are as much digital as they are physical. Through being digitized on the scanner and physically printed repeatedly, they are images that no longer have a set medium or even a "proper" or "finalized" way to be presented. To see the physical collages is nothing like what you'd find on the digital altered image on the screen, which once again is not really the same as the image that was flattened and printed in the book. For Capture Physical Presence, I started by constructing digital images and gradients in Photoshop and then printed them out. Once printed, I cut them up and physically collaged them with other print-outs from digital files, as well as from other papers and photos. From these physical collages, I scanned the physical compositions back into my computer. This digital/physical process continued, creating a sort of dissonant medium that was not quite digital nor physical. No longer is a pixel distinguishable. Neither is print toner. What is left is some hybrid other. I love when the medium starts to corrode this way. My generation is good at discerning the credibility of an image (understanding if an image has been digitally altered). It's satisfying when a viewer looks at these works and cannot easily recognize the medium, let alone if it's been altered, or even how it is made.

Prepared Scanner, a composition in clay (Travess Smalley, 2011)

I digress into my history with the scanner only to explain and help inform how I am using it in this current series of sculpture objects. For "The Untouchables" at Saamlung Gallery, I will be showing a series of prepared scanners. Each scanner lays open, displaying paintings made with clay. The paintings are tightly composed on top of the scanning glass. I used a type of clay called plastalina, a very vibrant, yet highly malleable and expressive material that shows all of my fingerprints and gestures. While the viewers of the exhibition will see these expressive compositions and textures framed by the "home office"greys and fading plastics of the various scanner beds, a whole other image can be viewed digitally from the scanner as a functional object. The scanner then becomes not only the artwork, but the means for producing the digital work. Specifically, the user of the sculpture can create a digital image that can be blown up quite large.

Prepared Scanner, a composition in clay (Travess Smalley, 2011)

In most of my practice I try to find modes for coming to terms with the dual physical/digital studio practice that almost all artists currently find themselves in. I am involved in ways of bringing my painterly and formal practice into conceptual unison with the practicalities of a digital life. With the prepared scanners, I am able to explore elements of composition, form, and texture and involve those directly in the discussion of art making after the physical. Specifically, I have been really drawn to clay and plaster because as a medium it possesses so many of the characteristics I was using and imitating with Photoshop. The liquify tool swirls around a digital image in much the same way that I gradually work colors into wet plaster.

Untitled (Jo-ey Tang, 2011-2012)

Jo-ey Tang: Surface is where the work’s limit resides. The subject/object of vision is always that surface that comes between you (the viewer) and I; it is that mental and physical thing that allows the constant movements and obstructions of subjectivity and objectivity.

It’s contemporary consciousness that I engage in, not digital per se. Think of digits (fingers) in the digital, as both embedded and disembodied. Proof (the scanner plane), and its distance, enabled by the physical acts of moving the scanner lid towards and away from the machine.

The images are willing the impossibility of an empty image into existence. The trio of images (only two will be shown at the exhibition) are my only and last images with a flatbed scanner.

Artist Profile: Ed Fornieles

joanne mcneil — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:38:13 -0500

Could you tell me a little about your "Facebook sitcom" Dorm Daze? How long did the narrative play out on Facebook?

Dorm Daze was a performance conducted on a self-contained network on Facebook. Participants inhabited profiles scalped from real life American college students, which over three months were developed within a semi-scripted narrative - through interaction with each other and direction from me.

In general, social networking sites reward engagement with engagement, and those characters that invested most time within the community became the lead roles of the sitcom. The exciting thing for me was watching these local narratives develop, feeding into and accelerating the narrative as a whole. Further, playing out the sitcom over three months gave opportunity to bring in real world events; for example, one character became very involved in the Occupy movement, propagating within our fictitious environment at the same time as these events were kicking off all around the world. In fact series one ended on a cliffhanger when a group that evolved out of the occupy movement blew up Wells Fargo bank and took to the road.

Important also is that Dorm Daze was a piece in itself, but also a content generating system which has created material I’ve then been able to use in sculptural and installation works, brought together in the show The Hangover (Part II). Beyond these physical environments, the project has also spawned a book and a read only version of Dorm Daze 1, soon to be available for limited time only online. Recently, we’ve also begun talking to a TV network about the potential of turning it into a TV series. The point that this happens, the point that Dorm Daze becomes part of a cultural feedback loop in a very real, tangible way, is the point where things get very exciting.

Did the participants think of themselves as acting or gaming?

The skills used to generate and sustain a profile on Facebook have become incredibly nuanced and habitual, and in Dorm Daze I think participants’ characters existed in a very similar space to their real life profiles.

Characters informed their navigation of that with your previous experience of the real world; of its codes, conventions and understandings. So in a sense, and after a certain point, you’d be neither acting nor gaming; it’s more of a transferal of skills. Yet there’s this incredible dialogue occurring, always, between our experience of fiction and our experience of reality. So skills learnt during this hypothetical three month exodus would be reapplied in conventional reality, and so on, offering you a new perspective and an enhanced narrative within your original profile. Video games, cinema and even novels are all becoming as experiences more immersive, and I think there’s a sense of our culture courting this, collapsing the fictional/real binary and looking for a new space to explore. Facebook, cinema, the office - all these have tremendous value as locations, and as tools for grounding shared experience.

But to answer your question I’m not sure. I think perhaps different people framed it in different ways, and also this changed as the project developed.

And you've worked on another piece about American fraternity life with Animal House. Ironically, theirs is the level of debauchery most might expect from the art world. Is this a culture you've encountered directly or just over the internet? Is this a critical or ethnographic investigation?

Animal House was a series of college party performances which emulated the dorm/ frat environment. Over 200 people were briefed on their characters and actions prior to the event. The performances that they had all assigned were based on scenes from films, pranks and college scenarios, which played themselves out over the evening. It began directed but collapsed into chaos after people began to open themselves up to their characters and take on a certain mindset, I think that’s when it became most successful.

The Animal House/Dorm Daze are part of a large series of work that is looking at life stages, power structures and the narratives that surround them. The college moment is an interesting one because for those who attend, its the end of a unified story that started from birth. After college it becomes a lot more diverse; some people become farmers, others become reality TV stars. It gets messy after college.

I suppose this is a culture I’ve encountered directly, but which I’ve explored further and learnt more about in a removed sense through films and in a more direct way through the internet. Gang signs are a good example. It’s possible to have very direct encounters with these forms of communication - especially in the parts of London and Hollywood where I’ve lived - yet at first encounter you can only be a foreigner, an outsider to the information they convey. However, through a technology such as the internet, helped enormously by hip hop videos of course, a huge white demographic has picked up the terminology of gang signs to the point where an unconfident teenager might be pulling blood signs after beating a new level on Dungeons & Dragons - there’s this really weird cross-pollination of culture and experience. In a way this is what I’ve done with college life, explored which ways I can infiltrate a culture and what you can do with a language when you bring it into a new context.

Dorm Dazes had 35 characters. How do you plan to scale to 2,000 characters with Jefferson High?

Ideally Jefferson High would be a self directing network that exists solely on Facebook. Members would be taught to scalp real life High School student’s profiles and then with photos, images and likes build a new one. this would be the starting point for a new character. Linked by a headmaster they would be able to improvise narrative by interacting with each other as well as instigating direction through a forum on the Jefferson High website. To be honest its an ambitious project and maybe has its own failure contained within it, we’ll see.

A common criticism of Facebook is that users don't elbow its sides or push until it fits; in other words, Facebook shapes its users rather than is shaped by user activity. Following Dorm Daze, which seems a rejection of its Terms of Service and hegemonic structure; can you use Facebook for its expressed social networking purposes — liking, friending, messaging, etc and not subvert it?

I dont know, one of the after effects of Dorm Daze was this a disruption to Facebook, it must have looked off from Facebooks point of view, this self contained group in England existing as if they were in Berkeley California, characters liking things that went against their users preferences. So some senses it messes with their data but in another it brings committed users.

Age:

28

Location:

London / LA

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

All forms of creativity probably involve technology at some stage. I’m happy to be grouped as part of the new technology / internet discourse, but my perspective is not technology specific, In fact my background was in performance and maybe that hasn’t changed.

Although the next phase is looking at new media culture, we’re graduating and going to work, so perhaps this year the work will get technology centric.

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

I joined Facebook in 2005 and haven’t looked back.

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

I studied at the Ruskin and the Royal College of Art but spent years in between working as a data analyst, first contractually and then freelance. It’s amazing the information that is given over to you, I still have somewhere an entire report on the optimum consumer conditions in which to sell baby food, although I haven’t found a use for it yet.

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

I find it very hard to draw a line between the two; the websites, social networks, sculptures, companies, music, books, clothing all feedback back into themselves.

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

In my data days I used to be quite involved in a couple of economic strategy groups but now I’m busier with art I don’t have the time; all I’ve got left is the wardrobe. I also started Frat House records, which keeps me close to music.

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 invested all the money i made as a data analyst but that’s all coming to an end now. The skills I learnt there definitely informed how i look at things.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Todd Philips, George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Josh Schwartz, Stephanie Savage, Edward Bernays, David Allen.

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

I sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with the fact the work goes out under my name. Most of the work is a collaboration in some way, sometimes involving hundreds of people, sometimes its an intense dialogue between one or a couple of people. Also I think the way i make art is closer to running a small company or producing a film.

Do you actively study art history?

No. You can’t escape where you come from which for me is definitely an art / art school background. But I’m not into art references in art. I think the conversation in advertising is probably ahead of whats being talked about in most art magazines. And it’s hard to make anything new if you constantly have one eye on the past, screw the art history..

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

Currently I’m in a business/productivity manual phase. As much as I don’t believe in zeitgeist or any other essentialist notions of culture, I feel that these have a lot to say about contemporary ways of thinking. They are to popular culture what e-flux is to art. Also, Tom McCarthy as a contemporary author is fascinating, although I don’t read as much as I should. I do try to watch a movie a day.

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

No.

The Download: James Howard

Zoë Salditch — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Rhizome is pleased to announce London-based artist James Howard is featured this month on The Download.

Still from www.luckyluckydice.com (2012)

Utilizing spam that lands in his junk email folder and pop up ads, Howard appropriates the deceitful images and text in his collages highlighting the emotional tiggers that trap users. Rhizome members can download www.luckyluckydice.com (2012), a 51MB animated GIF of 1990s internet-style advertisments; a file size too large for dial-up speeds, but now easily viewable in any internet browser once downloaded. Rhizome editor Joanne McNeil interviewed him last year about the images he collects:

Images in online scams and phishing schemes can seem as artificially generated as the text — like botnet generated folk art. But there is a human hand at work. What do you think is the human element that draws people into these schemes?

People are like machines - their brains react to temptation like a computer does. Most people are able to recognise a scam, but if someone pulls the right string, sooner or later all that subconscious stuff inside you is going to lead you down the wrong path. Scams get people by playing on insecurities, desires, fears, greed, whatever - it's uncontrollable and causes one in a thousand people to make a snap decision and pay up.

What do you consider the visual clues of this kind of kitsch of deception? Any interesting patterns or trends you've spotted over the years of collecting examples?

Squashed grinning businessmen looking into fisheye lenses, sunsets over serene oceans, happy families, sexy nurses- it's an endless and totally recognisable global visual language. There's a gruesome image of someone hooked up to a life support machine that keeps landing in my junk-mail folder these days -it always comes from a new person, with a different story every time...

Thank You to This Month’s Sponsors

Rhizome — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 08:02:47 -0500

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

20×200, a great place to browse and buy contemporary art prints at reasonable prices.
Artspace. Collect art from the world’s best contemporary artists at accessible prices.
Pulse Art Fair. New dates Pulse NY, MAY 3-6, 2012 at The Metropolitan Pavilion 125 West 18th Street, New York.
Tyler School of Art. 2012 MFA Thesis exhibitions on view through May 12.
Pernod Art & Absinthe Guide. A handy mobile App that lists Galleries, Events and Bars in BK.
Storefront Bushwick. Bushwick Gallery currently featuring artist Kirk Stoller.
Artspan. A contemporary art destination and service providing totally customizable artist websites.
Norte Maar. Community building non-profit organization with an emphasis on collaborative projects.
Art Systems. Professional art gallery, antiques and collections management software.
Tyler Summer Painting & Sculpture Intensive. 7-week immersion program for artists interested in developing their work in a challenging and supportive environment.
SVA MPS Graduate Fashion Photography Program. An intensive one-year degree program offering practicing photographers the opportunity to advance their bodies of work.
Art New England Summer Workshops. Immerse yourself in your art without the interruptions and responsibilities of daily life.
Bernard Klevickas. New York-based sculptor.
Adam Lindeman. Follow what the NY Observer columnist is seeing and reading at his site.
Danube University Krems MediaArtHistories Masters Program conveys the most important developments of contemporary art through a network of renowned international theorists, artists and curators.
Transart Institute. Low-residency MFA and practice-based PhD programs for working artists in highly individualized format.

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

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome March

Rhizome — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:04:20 -0500

Essays

Artist Profiles

Wordworks

More

The Diacritics of Glitchr

Louis Doulas — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:28:53 -0500

Diacritics are accent marks used to indicate the type of pronunciation a certain word infers. Diacritics are used in Latin script, but are also specific to other alphabetic systems such as the vowel pointing scripts of the Arabic harakat. In Laimonas Zakas’ project, Glitchr, a facebook page is dedicated to glitchily deforming the posting interfaces of Facebook. Diacritical marks are emptied from their primary communicative signifiers and repurposed as formalized, aestheticized objects; accomplices in the jailbreaking of Facebook page hegemony.

Rather then its users shaping and determining its network, Facebook is known—amongst other things—for creating quite the opposite for users: a loss of control, of malleability and the continued reiteration of a standardized user conduct. Glitchr then, in such a world, becomes a refreshing, if not odd spectacle: gifs become enabled, symbols and text float around up and down the page never adhering to the coded structure within.

Though Glitchr to some degree interrupts the normativity of the Facebook structure revealing what one can safetly get away with, its subversive aesthetics survive only as mirage in the desert of the Zuckerberg empire.

Artist Profile: Mike Ruiz

Louis Doulas — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:47:48 -0500

Extended Bliss, 2010. Digital C-print

In many of your works (Blank is the New Blank, Replaced, Extensions, Auto-CAD Freestyle) you utilize chance operations to simultaneously demonstrate the creative successes and failures of software and technology. The calculated spontaneity of generative systems such as the Content Aware Fill or the Roomba, become exposed through their capacity to adequately finish or begin an artwork. Your works highlight the novelty of these systems and how they algorithmically output formal expression. Could you speak more about this automative process and the motives behind working this way?

I am interested in automated improvisation. I design situations in which an artwork can take place. Often time what I am asking from the technology is something it is not intended to do. So there is a collaborative process between the automated tools I employ and myself. I am interested in co-authoring works--arriving at traditional media such as drawing, painting, prints and sculpture0--with various consumer forms of artificial intelligence.

In Replaced you use Content Aware Fill on the Mona Lisa. The resulting image contains not a modified software interpretation of the sitter but rather her entire absence from the scene. Filling her place instead are assorted fragments of the background landscape; attempts made by the software to cohesively continue the vista; the portrait becoming a glitchy patterned landscape--though in a way 'failing' due to the lack of landscape found originally in the picture. From the software finishing your gesture to the outsourcing of your image to China to be made an oil painting, there's a certain distancing, or alienation, found in both your making process and then carried out in its actual methods of production. Besides the obvious dynamic of image to object to image again, what does it mean for you to outsource this image and have it be made into a painting? Is 'Replaced' also just another attempt to historically continue the heavy mockery and modification this exhausted icon has endured? Is this your 'upgraded' version?

The work was produced as a painting for conceptual reasons. I was interested in manufacturing the painting in a similar form to that of the original, a 77 x 53 cm oil painting. I wanted to make a painting that could essentially replace the original, and therewith also replace the entire history and mythos of the icon, literally replace Mona Lisa both physically and conceptually. In a more expanded form this work is an application of the many-worlds theory, by creating a mythology about the work and providing potential alternative histories and futures.

Your Extensions series are first interesting because the Content Aware Fill that is applied actually works to fluently continue each images' surrounding space. Within the series though I'm particularly interested in Extended Bliss and Extended Aurora. The default desktop images found on Windows and Mac computers are usually perfect, idealized, seemingly non-existent images of nature (Windows' classic saturated hill) or captured natural phenomena (Mac's Aurora Borealis). Similar to the purpose of skeuomorphic design, nature here is meant to coax the user into a familiarized safe, 'authentic' space while also simultaneously using that familiarity to conflate and coat the product with a certain impossible utopian aura, demonstrating an infinite exaggeration of user/product possibility and compatibility. Extensions becomes the over indulgence, the overkill; the residue of the over consumer. The scenes potentially extending forever if it were not for their fixed and paused existences as digital images / prints. Why choose to 'end' them this way? Is this done to hint at the banality of the Content Aware Filter's subtle 'extensions'?

I like very simple ideas, beginning from the default, using the lowest common denominators or presets. What is the default situation for so many people? It is starring at a computer screen, and what are they looking at? The same image, Bliss, is probably the most widely recognized image of all time. What we see in Extended Bliss is an extension of this default from standard to panorama format. The idea was to just continue the piece to a feasible point. I didn't want it to look exaggerated. I wanted it to appear as a realistic image, one that could have been cropped to create the original. I wanted to engage with the mythos of the image, create an alternate reality where this image supercedes the original.

'Ugly is the New Fun', 'Geeks is the New Currency', 'Learning is the New Wine', 'Ginger is the New Vegan'. These are just some of the snowclones that your website www.blankisthenewblank.info generates. 'X is the new Y', or 'Blank is the new Blank' is an expression that signifies a sudden, perhaps unexpected, rise in popularity amongst something. However, with your website there is no logic per se to the phrasal template. Because the phrases don't reflect any solidified reality, in that they don't actually represent any established cultural trends, they become immediately absurd and humorous, producing unforeseen linkages between concepts where literally anything is and becomes anything else. Randomizing the flow and delivery of content within an Internet of filter bubbles, predetermined search destinations and targeted advertising is one strategy of prioritizing creative thinking today, which also just means finding value in play and experimentation (Fluxus). Could you speak more about preserving and encouraging these aspects of non-productivity and randomness? Within art? Within your own practice?

I think the work, although yielding random results, is quite productive. I don't equate randomness with non-productivity, quite the opposite. If the situation is designed to create random results, there can be a very specific reason for that. In this case, I was interested in the arbitrary nature of this phrasal template or snowclone, rather than exposing that fact already inherent in the structure of the language, I was interested in the chance moments where the new statements actually created new 'truths', more convincing or real than their originals, when the words line up and create something of political, factual, or comedic significance. Essentially the work is an infinite poem, constantly refreshing it's relationship to itself through the constant recombination of its elements.

You freestyle for nine minutes straight over a muted Oliver Laric Versions (2010) video. Where in previous works you use CAF to literally fill a scene, in Versions Freestyle your stream of conscious rap is reduced to just that: a filler. Where CAF tries to mathematically determine new space by interpreting surrounding content, you use the video's content, whatever is momentarily on screen, to feed, riff off of and contextualize. Rapping here becomes another tool used to achieve constant engagement with content in an accelerated environment, while producing meaningful unexpected improvisations. Lil' B does this too. Can you tell me more about your relationship to hip-hop and rap?

I have been freestyle rapping since I was about 16, I can improvise well. I have been a big fan of hip-hop and rap for as long as I can remember. But I have always been attracted to freestyling in particular, I like the idea that something is formed in a very specific way in a very specific moment under very specific conditions, which will never be duplicated, pure thought verbalized. This work was actually birthed out of my relationship with Oliver, a friend and fellow freestyle rapper. This was a way to engage with his work on a very familiar level. I wanted to literally create a remix of versions. Here my improvised vocals illustrate one interpretation of the work.

Age:

Location:

Berlin

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

My dad always had a computer since I was like 5 or something and I just started drawing with kid pix. I guess that was my first creative encounter with technology.

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

I usually see how something works, but rather than see it for what it can do rather than what it is intended to do. It then becomes a sort of game of experiment , putting things to work doing counter-intuitive tasks.

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

I went to a St. Edward's University in Austin, TX where I got my bachelors in philosophy. I am currently finishing my MFA in sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts.

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

Many traditional materials are used in the execution of my works. I am interested in reimagining possibilities for arriving at these media, approaching them from new angles. For example, create a drawing without actually drawing.

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

Freestyle rapping and running Future Gallery.

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 teach English, edit texts, and sell work. I think all three activities have influenced my practice is someway or another.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Luigi Serafini, Thomas Ruff, Godfrey Reggio

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

I have collaborated with many of my peers through Future Gallery.

Do you actively study art history?

On a case by case basis.

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

Sure, it varies from project to project. I am into Plato, Alain Badiou and Paul Virilio. I am currently reading Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology.

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

Yes

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The Download: James Howard

Thank You to This Month’s Sponsors

Rhizome Digest: Best of Rhizome March

The Diacritics of Glitchr

Artist Profile: Mike Ruiz