By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 12th, 2010 at
11:00 am
DIS Magazine will host a talk in conjunction with the exhibition "Free" on Sunday at 3pm, information below:
The first in a series of lectures organized by the fashion, art and commerce magazine DIS, Elastic Youth: Interpreting the Scrunchie, David Riley offers an in-depth analysis of the controversial hair accessory. Drawing on patent documents, fashion, and pop culture, he traces its history from mass marketed phenomenon to object of derision among the fashion elite. David Riley is an artist and musician living in NYC, known for his involvement with the band Mirror Mirror and the collaborative group The Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness. He has exhibited and/or performed at The Kitchen, Momenta, John Connelly Presents, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Andrew Edlin, Audio Visual Arts (AVA) and Index Art Center, as well as venues around the US and Europe.
Collaborators of Lizzie Fitch, a featured artist in “Free,” DIS Magazine are a fashion, art and commerce publication that seeks to expand creative economies. Beyond reporting the popular surfaces of culture, DIS materializes and projects contemporary identity poetics and politics. DIS is currently available in digital form at dismagazine.com. DIS is, collectively: Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl, and David Toro.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 12th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Marina Abramović, view of The Artist is Present at the MoMA. Photo: C-Monster.
Inevitably, the fast pace of consumerism is accompanied by the tantalizing promise of slow time—Allen Ginsberg once complained of a heart attack en route to his weekly meditation.
Just as the arts were reinvented in the age of the camera, so too must they be in the age of accelerated time. If the internet and the touch screen represent the apparatuses of our age, then the material and the prolonged have become a niche for the discursive and formal role of the arts. Much like a spa, the arts play host to a malnourished subject eager to experience something nostalgically other. Slow time and tangible bodies become so rare experientially that their aesthetic value finds a home in the cul-de-sac of scarcity that is art.
Since the advent of mechanical production, the arts have been the space in which the hard-to-find seeks refuge. And while the art market has been much discussed, we now find another form of scarcity in forms of experience. At times in tension, at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as—and thus more distinguishable from—the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations, sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space. In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial, and bodily escape.
This kind of shifted aesthetic disposition resists not only the pace of the information economy, but, perhaps more importantly, our very ability to consume our experience. If we are frantic, it is only because we need to be so in order to keep up. Slowness does not only characterize a mode of consumption, but also a mode of behavior. To that end, we now find numerous forms of contemporary art that gain resonance by tweaking behavioral codes with regard to the body and temporality. Some projects comprise bite-sized moments that are quickly consumed, context-specific chunks of experience that enter the mind and dissipate quickly, in harmony with the frantic and the contingent. They are brain candy and they are meant to be delicious. While there is nothing new in describing numerous forms of participatory art as mere products of an information economy that caters to the needs of power, their temporal qualities certainly play a role as pithy and poetic correspondences to capitalist consumption.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland, pressed into three records, cast, and frozen with the meltwater from each of these glaciers, and played on three turntables until they completely melt. The records were played once and now exist as three digital films. The turntables begin playing together, and for the first ten minutes as the needles trace their way around, the sounds from each glacier merge in and out with the sounds the ice itself creates. The needle catches on the last loop, and the records play for nearly two hours, until completely melted.
Evelien Lohbeck’s multimedia artwork noteboek (2008), has been selected as a Top Video in the Biennial of Creative Video, the showcase organized by the Guggenheim Museum and YouTube. 1Noteboek exemplifies what I call ‘reversed remediation’. 2 This aesthetic strategy subverts Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notion of ‘remediation,’ which serves a historical desire for immediacy.3 Countering Marshall McLuhan’s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium; reversed remediation offers a chance to wake up the viewer. 4 It creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one’s perception of the world. (Art)works that employ reversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making media visible instead of transparent. It makes critical awareness possible because it lays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them. The following discussion distinguishes between the theories of remediation and reversed remediation and applies this theoretical foundation to Lohbeck’s noteboek.
Hypermediacy, Remediation, and Reversed Remediation
Hypermediacy, the multiplying of technologies, is the central operational method for both remediation and reversed remediation. According to Bolter and Grusin, in remediation, hypermediacy is used to enable a seamless transition between different (older and newer) media in order to render all media transparent, which follows a historically-determined desire for immediacy. In reversed remediation, hypermediacy is used to display the incongruities between media in order to frustrate immersion and fosters critical awareness. Hypermediacy’s oscillation between remediation and reversed remediation has at its mid-way point a fulcrum, where the movement hovers for a moment and can be pushed in either direction. To push it towards remediation, the multiple media used must work together to create a familiar outcome that soothes the user into immersion. To push it towards reversed remediation, the multiple media used must work together to create an unfamiliar (uncanny) outcome that propels the user out of immersion and into a state of critical awareness. In Lohbeck’s noteboek, this happens when one wants to manipulate a drawn duration bar but suddenly realizes that an analog environment is inserted into a digital environment, calling one’s attention to this irreconcilable incongruity between different registers of media.
Hypermediacy achieves a sense of immediacy through an illusion of transparency. Bolter and Grusin’s critique of transparency as a feature of hypermediacy only concerns “the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and regarding it as a ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation”.5 They acknowledge instances in which the medium is foregrounded rather than made transparent. For example, they suggest that the viewer of a collage becomes hyperconscious, as s/he oscillates between interpreting the paper clippings and torn up photographs and looking through the actual objects into an imagined representational space beyond the surface. They do not however, explore the possibility that this oscillation space offers artists the ability to critique the medium that is used and for viewers the opportunity to contemplate how one perceives and makes sense of multiple layers of media. In other words, they use the notion of hypermediacy exclusively as a vehicle for explaining remediation where it could serve just as well as a vehicle for explaining its opposite - reversed remediation. Hypermediacy creates an opportunity to actually see the media at work. It can interrupt the advancement of remediation, render turbid the metaphorical transparent window between user and medium and transform it into a mirror. Reversed remediation thus can be explained as a strategy that purposely makes media visible by displaying its characteristics in order to raise the awareness of the workings of the media employed.
By
Jacob Gaboury
on
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at
10:00 am
It could be argued that template-style exploitable memes are the bread-and-butter of image board communities like those found on 4chan. Taking a popular, strange, or funny image and editing it down to the simplest components allows them to be photoshopped into a variety of contexts. It's easy and allows for a wide range of iterations, many of which gesture back to previous memes to construct intricate networks of reference that require elaborate explanations and complex genealogies to decipher. Some of the most popular template memes come from 4chan's Cartoons and Comics board /co/, and usually involve stripping a drawn image to it's most basic outlines so that it can be adapted to various popular cartoon or comic characters. Popular examples include Optimized Gif Dude (2006), Gentlemen (2006), fsjal (2008), and X Everywhere (2010).
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 5th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
A Young Kim, We Listen to Bach Transfixed Because This Is Listening to A Human Mind, 2010 (from the studio alabaster booth)
Printed Matter's annual contemporary art book extravaganza The NY Art Book Fair opened last night, and I dropped by today to take some shots of the festivities for the blog. Easily one of my favorite
yearly art events in New York, the fair hosts an overwhelming amount of booths, lectures, screenings, performances, and more by 200+ participating independent publishers, booksellers, zinesters, and artists. The fair is at PS1 in Long Island City, it's free, and it will be open today until 7pm, Saturday from 11am-7pm, and on Sunday from 11am-5pm. Also, be sure to scroll down to the end of this post for a round-up of media art and digital culture-related highlights.
Booth for Swiss independent publisher Nieves Books
"You Are Her" a mini-exhibit of 1990s riot grrrl zines, organized by San Francisco's Goteblüd
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at
11:30 am
Lisa Oppenheim, The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006
The "Free" exhibition is up and running, and I'd like to point you to some events organized in conjunction with the exhibition this week and later this month, so you can add them to your calendar. Be sure to the dedicated Free site for more information about the show, events, a blog, and more.
Artist Steve Lambert will discuss the various definitions of “Free,” from human liberation, the law, freedom of movement, to economics. Tying together hippies, punk rock, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Free Software movement, the program will begin with a short lecture, followed by a short walking tour through the galleries and into the streets to see how these ideas apply in the real world.
For the first in a series of lectures organized by the online fashion magazine DIS, Elastic Youth: Interpreting the Scrunchie, David Riley offers an in-depth analysis of the controversial hair accessory. Drawing on patent documents, fashion, and pop culture, he traces its history from mass marketed phenomenon to object of derision among the fashion elite. David Riley is an artist and musician living in NYC, known for his involvement with the band Mirror Mirror and the collaborative group The Society for the Advancement of Inflammatory Consciousness. He has exhibited and/or performed at The Kitchen, Momenta, John Connelly Presents, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Andrew Edlin, Audio Visual Arts (AVA) and Index Art Center, as well as venues around the USA and Europe.
Collaborators of Lizzie Fitch, a featured artist in Free, DIS Magazine are a fashion, art and commerce publication that seeks to expand creative economies. Beyond reporting the popular surfaces of culture, DIS materializes and projects contemporary identity poetics and politics. DIS is currently available in digital form at dismagazine.com. DIS is, collectively: Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl, and David Toro.
New Style Curators
November 18th, 2010, 7 PM
Free to New Museum Members, $8 General Public
Last year, the New York Times proclaimed, “The Word ‘Curate’ No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowd.” This panel takes a look at “curation” online and how the word applies to social media and Internet use. New media companies sometimes hire “curators” to filter the web for specialized information and data. But missing from this analogy is the importance of context and preservation. Are we all curators of the web? How are sites like Tumblr and Delicious contributing to this trend? Does the Internet even need curation? What can social media learn from the art world? More importantly, with everyone busy curating, who is making the original content online? Organized by Joanne McNeil.
By
Lisa Baldini
on
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 at
10:00 am
JODI, Jet Set Willy Variations, 2002
Humor, fun and nonsense often figure greatly in the current modes of communication on the web, whereby memes and sardonic blog comments are commonplace -- if not expected. Such trappings have found their way into media art practices from Cory Arcangel’s cover of Arnold Schoenberg’s op.11 Drie Klavierstucke using cat videos on YouTube to F.A.T. Lab’s Kanye West Interrupt bookmarklet. The question that these works and others like it raises is this: does humor appear to be a synergistic outgrowth of technology (and how does it relate to its development)?
In the latest exhibition "Fun with Software" at Bristol’s Arnolfini, curator Olga Goriunova seeks to document and explore how humorous approaches to software lead to innovation. Working with early net and media artists from JODI to Graham Harwood, the exhibition is a retrospective of peculiar approaches to computation. I sat down with Goriunova to talk about the show’s premise and how that premise contextualizes and contrasts the current era of humor and technology.
A great deal of media art has gone the way of social media, mining memes for cultural critique. Why do you think humor seems so endemic to technology and community? Does this at all translate to computation and software cultures?
The concept of meme is an interesting one. On the one hand, it doesn't exist, but on the other hand, the concept fills some void in the drive to understand and explain how network culture works, and is being widely, and successfully, used. In my opinion, a meme is about repetition, imitation. If we are to use a Nietzschean eternal return and the interpretation of it in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, there are three kinds of return: a repetition of habit (almost physical), a repetition of memory and a third (ontological repetition) that undoes the previous two. The third repetition is about passing an “exam” of becoming: only the excessive, powerful, or different can indeed return, become. The third repetition is a “pure act of difference”. Here, meme concerns the first two kinds of repetition, whereas the “fun” that interests me, is about the third one, the eternal return.
This is not to say that the first two are uninteresting, and meme seems to be able to reveal something about the ways in which digital culture operates, the stages creative production might be going through, the aesthetics about to become.
What I am interested in with this exhibition is to show, to put it crudely, that freaks run the world. It is about people inventing codes, usages, concepts, computer functions and a variety of things that change the world through a joke, through absurd acts, through unnecessary and un-pragmatic thriving for a difference.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Jean-Luc Godard, Voyage(s)
en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard,
1946–2006, 2006 (Installation view
of the “Aujourd’hui” section.
Centre Pompidou, Paris.)
In order to explore the contradictions and the potential of time-
based art, especially in its cinematic guise, I trace a number of overlapping and conflicting genealogies of film and video art. I believe that
only by creating a constellation of such genealogies can the logic and
structural antinomies of film and video art—and of time-based art in
general—be brought into relief and related to the wider changes in the
political economy of time during the past decades, during which the
West has seen a gradual demise of Fordist assembly-line production
and a disintegration of the strict separation between work and “free
time.” The classic alternation of work and leisure can be called, with
Guy Debord, a form of pseudocyclical time, an apparent return to agricultural, “mythical” cycles in a temporal regime built on irreversible,
historical time—or rather, on a reified form of such historical time, that
of commodity production.
“Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of
owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic
history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because
it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of
specialists in the possession of thingswho are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a
new immobility within history.7
This immobility is manifested in pseudocyclical time, a commodified
temporality that is homogenous and suppresses “any qualitative
dimension” or, at most, mimics such dimensions in moments of sham
liberation.8 For Debord, time-based art from the 1960s could consist
only of such pseudoindividual, pseudoliberatory moments because it
did not change economic structures. However, with or without art,
these structures were changing, and changing practices and analyses
of the temporality of art have to be seen in this context. As Antonio
Negri has argued, the industrial era tended to reduce all labor to a
merely quantitative, measured time, to a state in which “Complexity
is reduced to articulation, ontological time to discrete and manoeuvrable time,” but the times have been a-changing for quite a while
now—and Negri’s work is as indispensable in coming to terms with
this as are certain works of art.9
The dissolution of measured Fordist time became manifest in the
1960s and 1970s, although Debord never truly charted the shifts that
were occurring, basing his analysis largely on “classic” industrial
capitalism. Even in the work of Negri and other former “operaists,” the
consequences of these shifts were articulated only gradually and with
some delay. In this light, the recent rediscoveries and revaluations of
certain art and film practices of the 1960s and 1970s are more than
mere pseudocyclical fashions that have created new artistic brands
and upgraded a number of commodities. They can be seen as deferred
actions, as repetitions of a failed encounter with and in time.
