Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Plutopia 2011 during SXSW Interactive will have as its theme “the future of play.” I just found a great on-topic video, a 2.5-year-old’s first encounter with the iPad. (Via Technology Futurist) “I did it! It wasn’t broken!”

Maurice Benayoun and Jean-Baptiste Barrière play the maps of the emotions extracted in real time from the Net. On stage a big screen displays the mixing of the maps of different emotions.

They also have  Strozzi – an art installation turns the map of world emotions into a music score

The World Emotional Mapping - real-time maps of world emotions from the Net maps made up of words, words as big as the number of hits related to the 3200 biggest cities emotions around the world.

Mixing-by-Watching

When in the installation, visitors use VR binoculars to visually explore the maps, from inside the globe. They select-by- watching the zones of the world that will reveal their emotional states of minds. And watching, through observing the world, becomes a way to mix up feelings and produce a euphoric, enigmatic, or pathetic music from it.

The Installation

binoculars, and two screens

Screen 1 shows the map of the world, where words are displayed, according to the emotions, that the watchers spot.

Screen 2 presents the globe from outside, increasingly covered by the words, and the never-ending list of the emotional rating of the 3200 cities.

e-Spotting 9/11

The maps watched by the visitors are the maps built on 9/11 2007, by scanning the news on the Net. Six years after, they give an interesting interpretation of how it feels this day through 11 emotions:

Mad, outraged, shocked, terrified, bad, sad, nervous, glad, excited, proud, satisfied The emotions are spread all over the map like obscure data scrutinised as paradoxical feelings waiting for being deciphered by compulsive spotters.

Music by Jean-Baptiste Barrière

Software: Brigit Lichtenegger, Sofiane Souidi

Curator Franzizka Nori, La Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi,

Then there is the Emotion Vending Machine – Maurice Benayoun, Jean-Baptiste Barrière (musical design) (France) Development: Evolutie (Brigit Lichtenegger), V2 Lab, Artem Baguinski, Paul Girard, Adrien Mazaud.

Emotion Vending Machine looks like a beverage vending machine, where users can select a range of emotions, shaped as dynamic cards, updated in real-time with web data. Users select three from a list of nine emotions, such as “fear”, “joy” or “ecstasy”, and validate their choices. The machine, built around a search-engine application, browses the world network and displays the result in the shape of words representing the previously selected emotions, accompanied by sounds composed by Jean-Baptiste Barrière. Users can then connect their USB flash drive and collect their musical emotional cocktails, each of which is prepared in real-time and therefore unique. This new version of the Vending MAchine provides Ringtones that can be used on cellphones.

Patti Smith and Steven Sebring: Objects of Life

Robert Miller Gallery
Chelsea
524 West 26th Street, 212-366-4774
January 6 – February 6, 2010
Opening: Wednesday, January 6, 7 – 11 PM

Steven Sebring is the writer and director of the documentary film, Patti Smith Dream of Life. The exhibition “Objects of Life,” was inspired by the process of discovery during 11 years of filming. It features a selection of large scale photographs, video, and a rare unseen painting by Patti Smith, as well as personal belongings from both artists, whose collaboration is grounded in their relationship to the film and their individual experiences.

Web Site

The Birth of The Stone
A New Artists’ Space in the East Village

The Stone is a not-for-profit performance space dedicated to the
EXPERIMENTAL and AVANT-GARDE.

All expenses are paid for by the MUSIC itself – through the online sale of special Limited Edition CDs released yearly on the Tzadik label. Each month a different musician is responsible for curating the programs with 100% of the nightly revenue going directly to the musicians.

Check out this new release:

The Stone—Issue Three
Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn

A special concert to benefit The Stone by three legends of the New York Underground! Indisputably one of the greatest and most influential musicians in Rock History, Lou Reed has been exploding and exploring new sounds since the mid sixties. Always with a connection to the avant-garde, Lou here teams up with maverick composer/performer John Zorn for a series of improvisations and sound compositions that will surprise and startle even their hardcore fans. With a special appearance by Laurie Anderson, one of the most original voices of this or any other century, this is one of the most unusual and legendary meetings in the New Music scene. Available online only through the Downtown Music Gallery and Tzadik, all proceeds from the sale of this limited edition CD will go directly to support The Stone. Only with your help can we keep The Stone alive, so be sure to buy all three volumes of these limited edition benefit cds before they go out of print!

At Issue Project Room, 232  3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

01/06 @ 9:00pm – Jason Lescalleet + Sean Meehan + Pauline Monin

Buy Tickets | Admission: $15 for members

Please note: Doors @ 8:30 show starts at 9

Jason Lescalleet + Sean Meehan

Jason Lescalleet + Pauline Monin

Jason Lescalleet (Berwick, Maine) and Pauline Monin (Lyon, France) are exploring the relationships between the way that sound impacts space and how the body can interpret this for visual stimuli.  Jason will be premiering two new compositions of electro-acoustic music this evening, one of which will be accompanied by Pauline Monin’s extended techniques in body movement.

Calling Out Of Context Season

This special edition of The Experiment comes from the ICA Upper Galleries in London, where over eight furiously fulfilling days a temporary recording studio was set up as part of the Calling Out Of Context Season. Listen to tracks from each of the eight days that were conjured up from scratch by participants – either in live collaborative form or solo sample based endeavors with the assistance of Charles Poulet, James Oglivey and Manuel Mera on engineering duties. The podcast begins with a short discussion with Charles, Manuel and the ICA’s music curator Jamie Eastman before providing for your listening enjoyment tracks from sessions curated by Gravid Hands and The Experiment itself – and then work taken from sessions with Michachu, Seb Rochford/Drew McConnell/Pamelia Kurstin,Alexander Tucker, Actress/Lukid from Werk Discs, Woebot and About.

The Experiment would also like to take this opportunity to thank participants from its own curated recording studio session – a wonderful day of cakes and culinary creativity of the highest caliber. !POWER POWER!.

The Experiment is a monthly podcast commissioned by the ICA and presented and produced by Kevin Quigley. Calling Out Of Context was a nine-day season of experimental music and sound at the ICA in conjunction with Jamie Eastman and Charles Poulet.

Interview with Ele Carpenter

By Ceci Moss on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 10:00 am.

Image: Open Source Embroidery Window Display at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art 
(Photo credit: Travis Meinolf)

The exhibition “Open Source Embroidery” opens tonight at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco and it will be on view until January 24, 2010. The show is part of an ongoing project, initiated by Ele Carpenter in 2005, which examines how both embroidery and code can be used as tools in participatory, open source production and distribution models. “Open Source Embroidery” brings together artists, crafters, and programmers to explore this topic in the form of workshops and exhibitions. I spoke to curator Ele Carpenter further about the evolution and multiple realizations of the Open Source Embroidery project. – Ceci Moss

How did your larger research into socially engaged art and new media art evolve into Open Source Embroidery?

Socially engaged art and new media art practices share the language and concepts of social networks, participation and collaboration but they also have distinct histories and operate within very different social spheres. In the world of media arts people have been excited about the potential of the internet to be used to connect communities of interest for a long time. But new media didn’t invent participation; people who work with social networks on the ground already knew how much time and genuine involvement is needed to facilitate meaningful interaction. New media seems to have pulled ‘participation’ into the culture of ‘cool’ technology. But the most radical impact is the politicized culture of digital media testing the legal and ethical frameworks of production and distribution.

I was looking for a way to make tangible some of these ideas: to make visible older forms of collaborative production such as patchwork, and newer collaborative projects such as open source software. I wanted to try and articulate the different ethical aspects of OS through a material form. I was reading Zeros and Ones (Sadie Plant, 1997) and learning HTML. So my first project was to stitch HTML as a way of showing how easy it is: it’s free, it’s simple and it works. Customising a blog can be easy if you know how. But HTML gives you the tools to create your own space on the net, rather than selecting templates. It is the basic building blocks of the web. Back stitch is the best stitch for text because it keeps an even tension, and you don’t need a template. To my surprise craft networks are huge on the web (ravellry, stitch n bitch etc), and smoking seems to have been replaced by knitting as a socially acceptable activity.

You’ve organized Open Source Embroidery within a number of different arts spaces, such as HTTP Gallery in London and HUMLab in Sweden, and I’m wondering how the project has shifted or changed according to those partnerships.

The OSE project is about bringing people together, so each time a workshop or exhibition takes place the concepts explored are configured by the people and the context. At Access Space, the Html Patchwork encouraged an exploration of the gender divide between working with fabric and cables, within a very strict Open Source Software environment. The DIY culture was so strong, everyone just got on with it. The patchwork provided the opportunity for Access Space to expand their network, and make connections between different kinds of art practice and independent culture in the city.

HTTP Gallery presented OSE within the field of Media Arts and gave the project a good web profile. Artists in the UK came to see the exhibition, and I met David Littler and Kate Pemberton there (who are now taking part of the exhibition).

Image: Suzanne Hardy, Knitted Blog, 2008
(Source: HTTP Gallery’s Open Source Embroidery set on Flickr)

I came to HUMlab at Umeå University because they support interdisciplinary Humanities projects. I ran workshops in the lab, and presented the HUMlab Syjunta exhibition before developing the large-scale show for BildMuseet and MOCFA. I don’t think anyone had made such a physical intervention in the lab before, and it was great to be able to talk about my research ideas with the actual works there on the wall. The exhibition at BildMuseet gave me the opportunity to develop a major art exhibition, collecting together all the different things people had made through workshops, alongside new work by artists. I was delighted to find that Umeå’s bid to be the EU City of Culture in 2014 was based on an ‘Open Source Strategy’. When the Jury came to Umeå in August I took the opportunity to travel with them to map their journey using GPS as part of Southern, Hamilton & St Amand’s artwork Running Stitch. And Umeå won!

Now the exhibition is flying over to the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco (MOCFA). I’m really interested to see how it’s received there. I like the idea of folksonomy, where meta-data classification is defined by ‘folk’ rather than curators. The Internet has enabled folk and amateur communities to network across distance. Folk culture represents a community of interest defined by its users. The principle of openness and interactivity on the net and the question of how to sort and filter data has led to new social forms of taxonomy sometimes called ‘folksonomy’. Social tagging values the ‘amateur’ perspective, not as unprofessional, but as rooted in everyday experience. Critical Art Ensemble (2005) also values the role of the amateur as a radical interventionist, respecting the relationship between amateur and expert.

(At MOCFA artist Michele Pred will be giving a talk about her work using 2D barcodes, and Action Weaver Travis Meinolf will be weaving a network cable for the window.)

Image: Travis Meinolf and Ele Carpenter after Paul Grimmer, Weaving the Web, 2009.
(Photo of installation)

When working with these different organizations, have you found that the audience for Open Source Embroidery has shifted as well?

The OSE workshops are aimed at people with craft of programming and / or HTML skills to come together and explore the ethics and principles of their practice. They are invited and encouraged to make new pieces of code, scripts, knitting, patchwork, weaving, informed by our conversations. In most situations, there isn’t much concern for what is ‘Art’ or not. People who knit or code get involved fairly quickly. People who aren’t involved in either activity are often a bit confused, and it takes awhile to unpack the ideas involved in the production process. But like any art form, the work requires time and thought, and some contextual knowledge, to engage with the whole experience of viewing.

You discuss the possibility of “open source curating” on your blog. I am wondering if you can elaborate, for our readers, how you understand “open source curating” and if your experience with Open Source Embroidery has lead you to consider new curatorial models that might fall under this category.

My blog post tries to describe some of the complex issues involved in the idea of ‘open source curating’. In many ways, there is no such thing. There are just different approaches to negotiating the relationships between artist, curator, participant, intern, maker, crafter, technician, audience, etc.

We often think of curating as ‘selection’ of artwork, but it really includes a process of research and contextualizing artwork within a public space and within a group of people. For me, the OSE workshops are part of the curatorial research process. I have to make sure the concept works in practice. That is to say, the practitioners in the field have to make sense of the interdisciplinary relationship otherwise it’s meaningless. I’m not a programmer or a crafter, but I collaborate with people to make new things from our conversations.

My approach to curating OSE has purposefully included works by people who took part in OSE workshops alongside established artists. I’m inspired by Critical Art Ensemble’s discussion of the importance of the relationship between expert and amateur knowledge (Critical Art Ensemble, 2005 and 2001). So I didn’t want to create a Folk Archive, like Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (Deller & Kane, 2005), which is a general collection of folk production. Instead I wanted to create a space where both the expert and the amateur could come together within a critical context. Many of the artists have facilitated collective projects, so the distinctions become a bit arbitrary.

Image: Html Patchwork, Facilitated by Ele Carpenter

References

Critical Art Ensemble, (2005) “The Amateur.” In: Nato Thompson The Interventionists: User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Massachusetts: Mass MoCA. 147.

Critical Art Ensemble (2001). Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media. New York: Autonomedia.

Deller, Jeremy,. and Alan Kane (2005) Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK. London: Bookworks.

WarMail (2008) – Jeremy Bailey

By John Michael Boling on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

War Mail Part 1

Warmail is a live, collaborative software performance, led by Jeremy Bailey, commissioned by HTTP Gallery in London, UK. Warmail uses the audience’s latent song and dance potential to write and send an email to my mother while simultaneously directing a space war campaign

Also check out War Mail 2 at http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremybailey06#play/uploads/4/EZs37BQq8rk

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival Report

By Peter Merrington on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm

Image: Abandon Normal Devices logo

The debut Abandon Normal Devices (AND) launched in the North West of England, 23rd -27th September 2009. The inaugural festival was centred in the city of Liverpool with satellite events taking place in Manchester. AND, a collaboration between FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool, folly in Lancaster andCornerhouse in Manchester positions itself as a mixture of new cinema, digital culture and media art, showcasing work in partnership with galleries, venues and public spaces around the city. Over five days, the festival featured a broad array of conferences, talks, exhibitions, screenings, performances and online works, with artists and practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds including, The Yes Men, MARIN (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), Blast Theory, DJ Spooky and Michael Connor. FACT acted as the central hub for the festival and hosted the majority of screenings, talks and events; it also celebrated its 20-year anniversary on the opening night.

In line with its snappy title, the festival set out to discard all that is typical, regular or average, seeking to question normality in an array of forms. There was a particular focus on exploring disruption to traditional methods of production and distribution in cinema and media art. Interfering and interrupting the familiar and ordinary were played out in public space, on screen and through performance.

The festival opened with a new performance/lecture by Carolee Schneemann, renowned for her performance work of the 60’s and 70’s that challenged the normalised perceptions of the body, sexuality and gender. In a work which took the format of a lecture, titled Mysteries of the Iconographies, Schneemann went on a journey through the creative products of her life from early childhood drawings, through painting, to performance and video installation. The performance was accompanied by an exhibition of a new multi-screen video installation at Tate Liverpool titled Precarious. The work consists of fragments of visuals and sounds referencing Schneemann’s personal surroundings including an affectionate yellow cockatoo dancing to the Gnarls Barkley song ‘Crazy.’

At Plutopia 2009, we had a live Q&A link up with artist, Adam Zaretsky, who was at the time in Amsterdam attending a conference.  Adam is a Vivoartist working in Biology and Art Wet Lab Practice. This involves biological lab immersion as a process towards inspired artistic projects. His personal research interests revolve around life, living systems, exploration into the mysteries of life and interrogating varied cultural definitions that stratify life’s popular categorizations. He also focuses on legal, ethical and social implications of some of the newer biotechnological materials and methods: Molecular Biology, ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] and Transgenic Protocols. Zaretsky also teaches Vivoarts: Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Live Art and Gastronomy. Focus is on artistic uses and the social implications of molecular biology, tissue culture, genomics and developmental biology.

Adam Zaretsky graduated in Art Studio from University of California at Davis, 1995. He has an Art and Technology MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, 1999. He has two years experience as a Research Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Arnold Demain Laboratory for Microbiology and Industrial Fermentation, 1999-2001. He has two years experience as an Organic Farmer, working to aid subsistence farmers in such disparate climes as Guatemala, Sumatra, New York and Hawaii, 1993-1995. He also has two years experience as a sex worker/activist, gleaning the underbelly of our human behavioral repertoire for biological commentary on sexual variety, 1996-1998.

Adam Zaretsky has been published in Nature Magazine, Red Herring, Leonardo, The Washington Post and Johnny’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader. He has spoken at Harvard, NYU, CAA and SCIARC.

Why Biotechnology and the Arts?

For artists (and the public in general), laboratories are the most intimidating and foreign sites of bio-interface. We are also in the center of a wave of biological fetishism, which is likely to unfold into spurts of unbelievable difference in the coming years. Assuming we have not annihilated ourselves in aggressive tech-war maneuvers, there is a good chance that our kindred ten to twenty generations from now will be appear to be of non-human origin. For this reason, these places and the headspaces of their inhabitants need to be anthropologically explored before intelligent commentary can be made.

Art and Biology Research:

While immersed as a Researcher in the MIT Biology Labs, Adam created (in the lab) MicroSushi, First Attempts at Embryonic Transplant Surgery and The PostHuman Herald all three of which were presented at SEAFair 2001 Skopje Electronic Arts Fair, Society and Genomic Culture, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. During his time at MIT, Adam also teamed up with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of Tissue Culture and Art in the Vacanti Lab of Mass General Hospital to design a proof of concept experimental ‘Dynamic Seeding Musical Bioreactor’ based on Adam’s Experimental Fermentations known as The Humperdinck Effect.

His time spent in the lab gave him the impetus to craft the concepts behind The Workhorse Zoo and MMMM…, both of which were funded by The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology. The grant in the amount of $20,000 was awarded to these support projects. The WorkHorse Zoo was presented at Unmediated Vision, Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas, 2001 and MMMM… was presented at Biofeel, Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, August 1-25 2002. The Pig Wings Project by the Tissue Culture & Art Project in collaboration with Adam Zaretsky was displayed at the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA on March 8 – May 25, 2003. This included a video of our dancing Biopolymers.

The Langlois Foundation also helped fund Adam’s BioArt Practice as an Honorary Visiting Researcher in the Department of Human Anatomy, University of Western Australia as a part of SymbioticA. While immersed as a Researcher in these labs, Adam created (in the lab), The Pineal Extendor, The Brainus/Analolly Complex and GLACK! These projects have gone on to exhibit in Australia, Macedonia and the USA.

What is VivoArts?

The goal of this course is to create an open ended interface between life and the arts. To keep all expressive options dilated, the focus of the class is not on the logic of the biologic. Instead, our cultural relationships to the world of life are exposed in their contradictory and slippery illogics. The interfaces between human society and the ecosphere are identified, rethought and collaged together to form signs of definitional breakdown. Some initial categories for treating to artistic xenophilia: Food, Nature, Laboratory, Our Bodies and Pets. By defining where and how we interface with these lifeforms and by mixing these logics we arrive at unusual conceptual re-evaluations.

Vivoarts and the Body:

Throughout his Career, Adam has consitantly explored Body Art, Sexuality, Sex Activism, ArtPorn and Fetishism as guiding forces for technological innovation and arenas to de-repress in the name of more pleasurable futures. His collaborative video Squart (w. Yoshie Suzuki) was confiscated from the PORN AR(t)OUND THE WORLD festival, 2002 by the Moral Police of Mechelen, Belgium. And he was the Curator of the Flesh Pod and Moderator of the panel: Transhumanism from the Inside Out: Flesh Creatives and the Ethics of Body Design at Version>03, Museum of Contemporary Art and Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, 2003.

While teaching at RPI, Adam wrote pFARM, the Power Farm conceptual sketch. He was funded by two radical, independent, local Woodstockers a total of $20,000 to develop and shoot the weeklong performance. pFARM is a Biotech-Intensive Fetish Powered Organic Farm Incorporated Cult Corporation. PFARM seems to incorporate the critical vantage points of Biotechnology, Fetish Industry/Underground and Alternative Farming… Three Subcultures that Adam has spent Ethnographic Quality Time immersed in. In many ways pFARM represents a thorough conglomeration of all the disparate complexity which informs Adam’s visions of an erotically charged post-human vivocentrism.

VivoArts and Animal Relations:

Adam will continue to be an interested commentator on and practitioner of cultural aspects of biotechnological applications from both inside and outside the laboratory. But, in his course and art productions, he has expanded the realm of Biology to be inclusive of the entirety of the life world, hence VivoArts. Beyond the Biotechnological Arts, VivoArts includes… Ecology Arts, Gastronomic Arts, Body Arts, Breeding Arts and Animal Relation Arts. These subsets have become foci for his work, both professional and pedagogical.

‘Rewilding from the Urban Out.’

Concepts of Rewilding and Enrichment have come to inform Adam’s Ideas about the process of enculturation and the hopes for a life after deprogramming. The projects I will describe in the last segment of this application stem from the ecological, environmental and cultural oddity of ‘our natural world’ conceptualized through concepts of Rewilding, Enrichment and Wilderness Refuges.