By
Melissa Gronlund
on
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Stuart Marshall, The Love Show (parts 1–3), 1980
(Courtesy the estate of Stuart Marshall and LUX, London)
Britain, under the Conservative government in 1974, slowed to a government-mandated three-day week: not an immense gift of extended vacation, but a foreshortening of the working week based on the amount of electricity available. From January to March of that year, businesses, shops and services were only open for three consecutive days, and television companies were forced to end their broadcasts at 10:30pm. The remarkable visibility of this retrenchment is perhaps an apposite introduction to the fiscal circumstances of Britain at that time, as it was counterbalanced by extreme activity in the visual arts, with a burgeoning moving image practice taking place in various underground clubs and cooperatives in London and other regional centers, and mainstream television ("mainstream" being redundant; except for some regional variations, there were only three channels at the time) airing artists’ film and video, primarily on Channel 4, which was established in 1982.
This is the period revisited by Raven Row’s current show "Polytechnic" – the late 1970s and early 80s, when artists began using the new medium of video to reflect upon and deconstruct codes of representation, politics and social mores. It’s a smart and striking choice for an exhibition, as the legacy of this time is ambivalent and is still in the process of being settled: art-historically, it’s been partially eclipsed by what preceded it (the medium-specific investigations associated with the London Film-Makers’ Co-op) and by what followed – that is, the yBas, who pretty much turned around and rejected the commitment to politics, collective production and art as labor (not commodity) that this group stood for. At the same time, many of the artists included in the show – Catherine Elwes, Susan Hiller, Ian Breakwell, Stuart Marshall – went on to teach in various art schools (many of them former polytechnics, hence, perhaps, the title) and showed their work on Channel 4 during the 1980s, meaning they have had a much more dispersed, though less visible, impact on art and the wider sphere of culture. Have had and have: Elwes, for example, has recently founded a journal devoted to the moving image (MIRAJ), so the territory contested in this earlier period continues, to a certain extent, to be contested.
By
Nat Roe
on
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at
10:00 am
"The Built From Scratch Apparatus" is the general title for a series
of projects by Pierre Gordeeff initiated in 2006. Composed of parts
salvaged from the trash, yard sales and equipment purchased from
bankrupt hospitals, schools and factories, Gordeeff's work has slowly
evolved into an ornate sculpture and light show along with amplified
moving parts fed into a mixer. This particular configuration of The
Built-From-Scratch Apparatus, La Trombe, is performed alongside a duo with electronic
musician Boris Jacobek on laptop and Bontempi keyboard.
La Trombe was built
specifically for a performance at Lyon, France's DIY venue Grrrndzero
and this video was shot during one evening of La Trombe's installation period at the space in June of 2008. Although it seems that throughout most of this
improvisation the sculpture is obscured in shadow, spectators could
observe the well-lit sculpture before and after the performance.
Initially, Gordeeff's pieces were a less complex juxtaposition of
drawings, sculpture and found objects, often depicting images of dystopian angst. By 2004, he began to make use
of light and motion as his work became more performative. He eventually added sound by amplifying various moving portions of the sculpture and in his recent musical performances, the process of obscuring and illuminating portions of the sculpture "becomes more detailed than
if I were [merely] drawing or sculpting it." When asked about the sculpture's
transformation into an improvisatory musical instrument, Gordeeff
observes, "I used sound and motion as a tool to overcome my habits of
plastic composition. I followed the technical bias of all the items I
could find [rather than my own aesthetic decisions] to end up with
hybrid objects and shadows of elaborate graphic design. Sometimes
sound inhabits space in a more present manner than a volume."
This heavy reliance on the innate qualities of salvaged objects along
with a compositional method employing engineering and physical
principles mesh well with Gordeeff's sociological concerns. As
Gordeeff waxes in an artist's statement on his website, "The consumer today is
far from necessity. We have a myriad of objects for functions more or
less futile.... We produce more and more objects that last less time.
Here we will address the abandonment of the object rather than
repair.... I try to question our system of assessments, our scale of
values for the useful, the necessary....."
Other notable works using different configurations of the Built From
Scratch Apparatus include Jean Pierre, a collaboration with Jean
Barbier on prepared electric bass, high-pitched machine and voice, as
well as Prudeeff, a duo with saxophonist Mathieu Prual. Many
recordings from Gordeeff and his circle are available for free
download under Creative Commons license from the Aposcaphe label's
website. See below for a mix of Gordeeff's recordings, from the Free Music Archive.
Nat Roe is a DJ with WFMU and the
editor of WFMU's blog. He has contributed in the past to Wire, Signal
To Noise and the Free Music Archive. Nat also cooperatively manages
Silent Barn, a DIY venue in Ridgewood, Queens.
Special thanks to Loic Guilmard for
translation help.
The core of the Program will be semi-monthly Seminars directed at the theoretical and critical examination of current art and law issues. Seminars will take place at the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP. Faculty as well as leading legal scholars and visiting artists will lead these Seminars. During the course of the Program, artists and writers will develop new projects and papers and receive support from Faculty on a regular basis to discuss and address the aesthetic, practical, philosophical, legal and judicial aspects of their work. The Residency will culminate in a public Exhibition and Symposium held at the Maccarone Gallery in New York City where the participants will exhibit their projects and present papers.
Program Provides
1. Seminars: Twice a month, a legal scholar, artist and/or Program Faculty will lead Seminars as well as assign related readings. Topics for lectures and group discussions will include practical, theoretical, philosophical and speculative perspectives on art, property (tangible and intangible), contract, constitutional, and international law as well as free speech.
2. Legal consultation and representation: Access to private consultations with attorneys and work with assigned pro bono representation for individual projects as required. Additional legal advice and guidance in the form of individual meetings to discuss general practical and theoretical questions may be arranged.
3. Exhibition and Symposium: The culminating Exhibition and Symposium will be held at the Maccarone Gallery, in New York City, in August 2011. Art criticism participants will present papers at an evening Symposium and visual artists will display their final work during this Exhibition. A modest stipend will be provided towards production costs and/or research materials.
4. Van Lier Fellowships : VLA is pleased to announce that the residency will offer Van Lier Fellowships in its second and third years which VLA administers on behalf of the Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust. Van Lier Fellowships are made possible with the generous support of the New York Community Trust’s Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Monday, October 25th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
[Source: Artist's site]
[Source: We Make Money Not Art]
In this work Wim Janssen cuts polarization filter into small rectangles of one cm, in random orientations, like large pixels. These little squares are fixed between two large rectangular pieces of plexiglass. At first sight, the screen looks like a banal, slightly darkened window. But in front of this screen stands a slowly rotating disc, also made of polarization filter. When the screen is seen through this disc, it changes into a half transparent field of video noise.
This phenomenon occurs because lightwaves, besides their frequency and amplitude, also have an orientation. Polarization filter let light pass in only one direction. When you look through a piece of this filter, it's perfectly transparent, just a bit darker than normal plexi or glass. When you look through the filter at an other piece of this material which is rotated 90°, the second piece becomes an opaque black surface, because the light passing through the first filter, can't pass through the second filter. Every other orientation gives a different degree of opacity.
By cutting thousands of little pieces of polarization filter and putting a rotating polarization filter in front of them, Wim Janssen succeeds in imitating television static by using an almost banal technique.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at
11:30 am
Takeshi Murata, I, Popeye, 2010
The group exhibition "Free" opened this week at the New Museum, and will remain on view until January 23rd. There are a number of events coming up related to the show, as well as a dedicated "Free" website, with a blog and commissioned essays by critic Ed Halter, blogger Joanne McNeil, critic Brian Droitcour, and entrepreneur Caterina Fake.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at
9:00 am
This rich pamphlet grew out of The Internet as Playground and Factory,
a conference organized at The New School and held in November 2009.
In this seventh pamphlet in the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series,
Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu reflect on the relationship between labor
and technology in urban space, where communication, attention, and
physical movement generate financial value for a small number of
private stakeholders. Online and off, Internet users are increasingly
wielded as a resource for economic amelioration, for private capture,
and the channels of communication are becoming increasingly inscrutable. The Internet has become a simple-to-join, anyone-can-play system
where the sites and practices of work and play, as well as production and
reproduction, are increasingly unnoticeable.
Norbert Wiener warned that the role of new technology under capitalism
would intensify the exploitation of workers. For Michel Foucault, institutions used technologies of power to control individual bodies. In her essay
“Free Labor” (1999), Tiziana Terranova described what constitutes “voluntarily given, unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net.” Along
these lines, Liu and Scholz ask: How does the intertwining of labor and play
complicate our understanding of exploitation and “the urban”?
This pamphlet aims to understand “the urban” through the lens of digital
and not-digital work in terms of those less visible sites and forms of work
such as homework, care work, interactivity on social networking sites,
life energy spent contributing to corporate crowd sourcing projects, and
other unpaid work. While we are discussing the shift of labor markets to
the Internet, the authors contend that traditional sweatshop economies
continue to structure the urban environment.
The pages of this pamphlet unfold between a film still from Alex Rivera’s
Sleep Dealer on the front cover and an image by Lewis Hine on the
back. Set in the near future, Sleep Dealer imagines a world in which
closed borders have brought an end to immigration, where workers in
poor countries are plugged into a global digital network that enables
them to control robots that work remotely in the Global North. Rivera’s
protagonist lives in Mexico, but his workplace is the United States.
Hooked up to the network, he delivers “work without the worker.”
Lewis Hine, by contrast, documented domestic labor: children tying
tags, doing crochet, sewing under the guiding control of a mother in tiny
living rooms or dirty kitchens. What are the flows or discontinuities
between these forms of labor?
Liu and Scholz analyze the situation of digital labor in relation to the
city but also suggest tangible alternatives. Today, we are not only “on”
the Social Web, we are becoming it–no matter where we are. Internet
users are becoming more vulnerable to novel enticements, conveniences, and marketing approaches. Commercial and government surveillance are sure to escalate as new generations become increasingly
equipped with mobile platforms, interacting with “networked things.”
The goal of this pamphlet is to start a public debate about contemporary
forms of exploitation. Attention must be focused on social action and,
while always in need of scrutiny, state regulation and policy.
Note: There will be a panel discussion with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,
Laura Y. Liu, Trebor Scholz and Neil Smith organized in conjunction with this issue of Situated Technologies, published by the Architectural League, on Monday, November 1st at 7pm at Cabinet in Brooklyn, 300 Nevins Street (between Union and Sackett). More info here.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, October 21st, 2010 at
10:00 am
YouTube Play, the biennial of creative video organized by the Guggenheim, YouTube, and HP, has been up for awhile, but tonight from 8-9:30pm the Guggenheim Museum in New York will host an event celebrating the project. The top videos, selected by an eclectic jury ranging from the likes of Laurie Anderson to Ryan McGinley, will be projected on the facade and in the interior rotunda, and there will live performances by OK Go, Kutman, LXD, Megan Washington and Mike Relm.
If you can't make it in person, there will be a live stream as well.
Note: Next month on November 10th, we will run an essay by Saskia Korsten on one of the YouTube Play selections, Evelien Lohbeck's noteboek (2008), which will discuss the work as it relates to Korsten's concept of "reversed remediation."
By
Peter Merrington
on
Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The latest edition of Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival has jumped across the Northwest UK from Liverpool, where it debuted last year to Manchester. In its second major urban manifestation, after a small rural retreat in the Peak District, the festival followed its previous format and presented exhibitions, performances, cinema screening, talks and workshops across cultural venues in the city. Seeking to agitate, AND’s theme of questioning normality in various forms was represented in Manchester with a focus on identity.
The festival showcased two artists presenting debut feature films, Gillian Wearing showing Self Made and Pipilotti Rist showing Pepperminta. Both artists elaborately explored the personalities and subconscious of the characters portrayed on screen in entirely different ways.
Gillian Wearing, Self Made, 2010 (Still)
Wearing began the search for the film’s characters by advertising in newspapers and job centers:
“Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian”
Merging and interchanging the real and imagined lives of seven selected members of the public, Self Made documents the participants’ exploration of personal and social identities, deconstructed and constructed through a hybrid of performance and method acting processes.
Sensitively negotiated workshop session scenes, led by acting coach Sam Rumbelow, punctuated the fictional, theatrical or cinematic scenes devised by the chosen ‘actors’. Each participant went on a journey through three stages–method workshop, the final cut of their film scene and the behind-the-scenes action of the filming process.
Part documentary, artwork, and anthropological experiment, the film’s discourse of personal discovery through performance makes for (at times) uncomfortable viewing. Drawing on the darker side of human nature, the participants were encouraged to develop scenes that evoked a strong personal affect, resulting in a sometimes brutal physicality on screen, where acted out scenes heightened and reflected the relationship between human experience and the construction of filmic narrative.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
This just in: Lower East Side gallery Ludlow 38 will organize an exhibit of sound artist Maryanne Amacher'sCity-Links (1967-1981), an early networked sound installation. You can read more about the original project below, show opens on October 20th.
Ludlow 38 is pleased to present the exhibition Maryanne Amacher: City-Links. Between 1967 and 1981 the pioneering sound artist produced 22 City-Links projects in total, connecting distant microphones to installations and performances using dedicated FM-quality analog phone lines. Areas of downtown Buffalo, MIT, Boston Harbor, the Mississippi River, the New York harbor, studios in various locations, and other sites in the USA and abroad were transported, sometimes integrating performers near the microphones (such as John Cage and George Lewis for City-Links #18 performed at The Kitchen in 1979). The exhibition at Ludlow 38 brings together a number of documents, images and sound samples selected and reproduced from the nascent Amacher Archive as a first look at this important series of early telematic art works about which little has been published.
Maryanne Amacher wrote about her City-Links series: In my first sound works I developed the idea of sonic telepresence, introducing the use of telecommunication in sound installations. In the telelink installations "CITY-LINKS" #1-22 (1967- ) the sounds from one or more remote environment (in a city, or in several cities) are transmitted “live” to the exhibition space, as an ongoing sonic environment. I produce the "CITY-LINKS" installations using real-time telelinks to transmit the sound from microphones I place in the selected environments, spatializing these works with many different sonic environments: harbors, steel mills, stone towers, flour mills, factories, silos, airports, rivers, open fields, utility companies, and with musicians "on location." The adventure is in receiving live sonic spaces from more than one location at the same time - the tower, the ocean, the abandoned mill. Remote sound environments enter our local spaces and become part of our rooms. Installations of "CITY-LINKS" include works created for solo and group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1974); Walker Arts Center "Projected Images," Minneapolis (1974); Hayden Gallery MIT, "Interventions In Landscape," Cambridge, Mass (1975); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass. (1975); Corps de Garde, Groningen, Holland (1978); the Kitchen Center, NYC (1979); Radio France Musique (1976); Mills College (1980 & 1994).
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The Retrospectroscope was made using a single sheet of Plexiglas 5 ft. in diameter, and was mounted directly on a stand and illuminated from behind. As an optical device, its function was to create the illusion of movement utilizing large format still images. The "Retrospectroscope" apparatus has gone through many incarnations, its presence belies the processes that have created it. As a pre-cinematic device, it traces an evolutionary trajectory, encircling the viewer in a procession of flickering fantasies of fragmented lyricism. This re-invention simulates the illusion of the analysis of motion to recall early mysteries of the quest for this very discovery now taken for granted; the "Muses of Cinema" represented by the female figures on the disk, have emerged from a dark Neoclassical past.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Monday, October 18th, 2010 at
10:30 am
Jan Robert Leegte, Scrollbar, 2002
Contemporary media art collective CONT3XT.NETposted an interview with Amsterdam-based artist Jan Robert Leegte. Leegte discusses his practice, and how his physical sculptural works engage the virtual. See the introduction below, full interview here.
Between reality and illusion, between abstraction and the ornament, between the virtual and the real, between architecture and art – the main focus in Jan Robert Leegte’s artworks are the spaces inbetween. The Amsterdam-based artist continuously deconstructs the experience of architecture and sculpture by questioning the perception of space and material which is alternately brought into relation to the real as well as to the digital space. Since the mid-1990s the academically trained sculptor and architect works on the transfer of digital media into expanded installative arrangements. Very early he started exploring the multifaceted formal possibilities of the Internet-browser for its sculptural feature: buttons, scrollbars and table borders were used for real space installations which had the same quality as his previous studio and computer work. The elements of the browser appear to have a striking physical reality mostly gained by the large public daily use, interactivity, animation and especially the three-dimensional extrusion.
The experience-based way of testing physical reality defines the choice of material in his installations and Internet-based work, which has often been said to have late-modernistic tendencies. Ultimately he develops so called single-serving-sites, which are defined as “web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing.” In Blue Monochrome .com (2008) for example Jan Robert Leegte makes use of the tools of Google-Earth to transform satellite images of the globe’s water surface into ready-mades. Geographic coordinates are linked to the coordinates of a website, the real space is linked to the virtual; the title of the artwork represents on a linguistic level, what can be seen on the screen image: a granulated blue surface with minimal elevations, which can immediately be associated with thick acrylic on canvas and finally with its predecessors in art history. In the following interview Leegte explains how the Internet can be seen as a space and why the artist is still fascinated by the “new medium.”
Why Are We Here, Are We Really What We Eat, What Element Killed Godzilla?
The latest Science & the City event series launches October 5 with a talk on Big History by David Christian. Christian will share a riveting account of the known world. You will leave with a vastly expanded understanding of where you came from. This event will take place live at the New York Academy of Sciences in downtown Manhattan, and also as a webinar that you can sign into from anywhere in the world.
Celebrating the 3rd start of the internationally unique MediaArtHistories, MA
The Internationally unique MediaArtHistories course celebrates the start of its third Master of Arts program in November 2010 at Danube University, in the UNESCO world-heritage Wachau. This two year, low-residency degree opens a passageway into a deeper understanding of and practical orientation in the most important developments of contemporary art through a network of renowned international theorists, artists and curators like: Erkki HUHTAMO, Jeffrey SHAW, Sarah COOK, Oliver GRAU and many others.
