Archive for the 'Culture' Category
Open Burble
In Open Burble, members of the public come together to compose, assemble and control an immense rippling, glowing, bustling ‘Burble’ that sways in the evening sky, in response to the crowd interacting below. This massive structure, the form of which the public has themselves designed, exists at such a large scale that it is able to compete visually in an urban context with the skyscrapers that surround it.
Article by Florian Wupperfeld, 15/05/2010
The 2000 decade is over and Michael Jackson is dead.
But his death also manifested perhaps the death of ‘pop’ and decades of America’s pole position in business, art and entertainment. Pop somehow started on the 4th of July 1776 with the American declaration of independence, with constitutional rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Today we call it ‘fun’ and our world seems to be divided between the ones who can afford it, and the ones who can’t. In a world though which gets smaller by the day, more and more inter-connected, those lines might be difficult to draw.. ‘Pop’ was for sure more than a style of music, it connected the world, offered identification with something to desire - like religion it is a the dose of hope in everyones everyday life.
Pop’s death also went along with a weakening America, distracted by war, squeezed by financial crises and “Michael” himself symbolized this ’sick America’. When one speaks to consumers aged 18-24 they don’t even think of pop as a concept of self assurance or self identification but as a period of time when music was a product bought by consumers in shops and which gave people like the Beatles, Michael Jackson and even Samantha Fox incredible wealth. And this, obviously, will never happen again.
Pop music will live forever but the concept of ‘pop living’ is over. Pop was about being sexy, inspired and different but contemporary media concepts like Amercian Idol, X Factor or ‘Britains Next TopModel’ offer a fascinating view into today’s social mediocrity. What are the drivers of people who watch other people with no talent nor looks? Rock’n Roll and the sexual revolution has pathed the way how we think, love, dance and feel. How will this new ‘talent show’ generation (or sometimes even more appropriate ‘no talent show’ generation) effect our patterns of life moving forward?
‘Rethinking location’ curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
RETHINKING LOCATION | curated by Johannes Fricke-Waldthausen
Rosa Barba, Cyprien Gaillard, Andreas Hofer, Koo Jeong-A, David Maljkovic, Trevor Paglen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Sterling Ruby, Paul Sietsema, Taryn Simon, Armando Andrade Tudela, Andro Wekua
Evolving from the work of twelve conceptual artists, filmmakers and photographers presenting alternate interpretations of fictional geographies, imaginary sites and ‘mash-up’ destinations, the exhibition Rethinking Location reconsiders the notion of location. In a era characterized by a rapidly changing perception of time and space due to ever increasing mobility, migration and globalisation, our understanding of what a location is has significantly tranformed. Taking these changes for granted, the exhibition investigates how artists consider location and geography as source material for their work.
The work of Rosa Barba and Taryn Simon often derives from an interest in unusal places or improbable situations: Barba´s film The Empirical Effect (2009) explores a geographical ‘Red Zone’: weaving a fiction around the Vesuvio Vulcano, her film was shot during an actual evacuation test and, on another level, points towards the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. Collaborating with the scientific research laboratory Osservatorio Vesuviano in Naples, Barba creates a fictional documentary including surveillance cameras, seismographs and early archival material of Napels by the Lumière Brothers. Empathising with the role of a contemporary ethnographer, the work of New York based photographer Taryn Simon oscillates between an aestheticized realism and collective memory. The works shown in Rethinking Location symbolically refer to sites of geopolitical weight, such as the interior of Fidel Castro’s Palace of the Revolution in Havanna and night shots of a checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah on the West Bank.
In his work Cyprien Gaillard alters the hierarchy of geographical sites and their representative value by detaching them from their original connotations: it deconstructs and conflates actual landscapes perpetuated by a spirit of anachronism and ruin of both past and present. His Fields of Rest series (2010) evolves around decomposed architecture of Second World War bunkers at the coastlines of the French Normandy.
Paul Sietsema’s 16 mm films, drawings and sculptures bridge color, space and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. Over the last years, Sietsema has gathered archival photographs of artifacts of ‘lost cultures’, often from rare anthropological and ethnographic books. The artifacts he examines and transcribes into his own work often derive from western colonialism, industrialisation and geographic explorations including Oceania, South Asia and Africa. In his film Analyse d´une épave (2008) he traces a shipwreck, capturing its ruins on celluloid like timeless sculptures of a lost cultural memory.
Christodoulos Panayiotou´s Soliloquy (The Sea) of 2010 proposes a dynamic yet open narrative that pervades the imagery of colonial expeditions; the work is part of a series of acquisitions of historical theatre backdrops by the artist, shown lying, folded, on the floor, together with an accompanying archival photograph of it installed as original theatre stage set. Being interested in the subject of absence or ‘negative presence’, for Panayiotou it is generated from both the legacy of the modern spectacle and his interest in anthropology.
Recalling thoughts by Bourriaud of the artist as Semionaut, treating geography as source material for new work, the drifting and the displacement between different cities allows artists to enter multi-dimensional, seminal dialogues within different contexts. Within both a local and global artistic practice charted by increasing displacement, expeditions, distances and routes are elements that become incrementally significant.
Interested in topographies of detachment and displacement, Aramando Andrade Tudela explores the notion of ‘tropical abstraction’. Referring to the potential of 1960s utopian modernist architecture from South America, his 16 mm film Untitled Film #2 (Espace Niemeyer and Infra Red Light) of 2007 takes place in the headquarters of the French communist party in Paris. Shot mostly in close-up mode, Tudela transformed the site built 1967–1972 by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer into a ‘non-place’: a fictional site without geographical foundation.
David Majlkovic´s work develops from the potential of ‘utopian’ heritage, highlighting forgotten monuments occuring during a period of optimism towards the future in the 1960s and 1970s in former Yugoslavia. His Lost Pavilion series (2008) takes shape around the reconstruction of a futuristic American World Expo site, prototyped for the World Fair in Zagreb in 1956.
Koo Jeong-A creates mythologies and imaginary sites within the logic of existing places. Her work often gives prominence to the hidden, the ephemere and the invisbile. For the exhibition Koo Jeong-A produced a new series of works, consisting of geological and social layers where maps, drawings and signs extend to a notional geography. Furthermore, she created a site specific, secret location yet to be discovered in the exhibition.
Andro Wekua´s approach arises from the reconstruction of memory, confronting us with projections of our subconscious and the media. Merging archival material, found imagery and magazine pages of both autobiographical and popular culture references, his My Bike and your swamp (yesterday) 2 (2008) collages convey velocity and rapid location changes.
Andreas Hofer´s work overlaps science fiction, scientific research and popular culture. Often evolving around early film noir, comics and crime literature, his multi-media installation Robert and Matt Maitland (2010) responds to the notion of the artist as an explorer. His work in the exhibition archly superimposes the protagonist from J.G. Ballard´s 1974 science fiction novel Concrete Island and the setting of a geographic exploration from a 1950s comic classic. By blending two originally detached storylines, Hofer proposes a new imaginary landscape.
In Carthographic yard work: Dog behavior (2009), a meditative video-performance by Sterling Ruby, the artist loads holes in a detritus filled industrial yard. The camera pans the yard in 360 degrees, becoming a double exposure as a slowed down voiceover intones techniques for the training of a misbehaving dog.
Today, intersections between actual sites, mass media and communication technology transform places into virtual ‘mash-up’ locations: archipelagos of alternating signs oscillating between the actual and the virtual. Moreover, the internet has significantly increased the presence of maps and navigation systems in our thinking. For example, it has become easier to generate maps, to share and alter them, and to create them collaboratively (e.g. GPS and geotagging systems like Google Maps and Google Earth).
The art of Trevor Paglen blurs the border of art, science and politics. Holding a Ph.D. in geography and operating at UC Berkeley´s geography department, Paglen uses data analysis, advanced research skills and state-of-the-art photo observation techniques to map the terrain of American military secrets. He appropriates scientific imagery and discourses of astronomy to provide the framing for what he calls an ‘experimental geography’. In his series The Other Night Sky (2008) Paglen turns our attention to some 189 secret intelligence satellites operated by the U.S. military to keep most of the world under surveillance.
The juxtaposed positions within Rethinking Location express a vast area of interconnected ideas and systems in a world where places are increasingly rearticulated and interrelated. Fostering an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition aims to serve as inspiration to reconsider what the notion of location implies today. After the recent emphasis on networks and communities, could the focus now shift to location as a new key dimension?
Organised in cooperation with Image Movement, the exhibition will be accompanied by a film program focusing on Land Art.
For further information and press inquiries please contact Jan Salewski (js@spruethmagers.com).
Art Made at the Speed of the Internet
When Robert Rauschenberg and a buttoned-down Bell Labs engineer named Billy Kluver began thinking, in the mid-1960s, about ways that people from the world of technology could help artists make art, Mr. Kluver surveyed the mighty gulf between the two groups and almost thought better of the idea. “I was scared,” he said once in an interview. “The amazing thing was that it’s possible for artists and scientists to talk together at all.”
Nearly half a century after that influential experiment, one in the same spirit, though crazily compressed into a single day, was taking place on Friday in a chilly loft office on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. An artist and a technical whiz sat together at a long table, their faces made silvery by the glow from their laptops — the only tools they had brought, besides their digital cameras. Anyone unfamiliar with the pair — Evan Roth, a kind of Web-centric graffiti artist, and Matt Mullenweg, a creator of the popular blogging platform WordPress — would have had to listen a long time to figure out which one came from which world. They free-associated at Web speed, their conversation sprinkled with things like hex values, detection algorithms and executable code.
“Let’s try to stay away from the Web-nerdy stuff,” Mr. Mullenweg, 26, warned, as Mr. Roth, 32, trolling for help on Twitter, was compiling video clips for the work of art they had conceived that morning.
The two were part of Seven on Seven, a project conceived by Rhizome, the new-media art organization in New York, to match seven artists with seven “technologists,” a Google engineer and an early Facebook developer among them. The pairs were given a reality-show-era deadline of 24 hours in which to sit together in rooms across Manhattan and come up with creations to present on Saturday to an audience at the New Museum, where Rhizome is based.
Whether the brainchildren of these collaborations ended up feeling more like apps or like art was up to the teams, and the distinction didn’t seem to matter to artists nearly as much as it might have even 14 years ago, when Rhizome was founded to explore the emerging field of Web-based art, said Lauren Cornell, the organization’s executive director.
But Ms. Cornell, who created the team-up project along with some of her tech-world board members and supporters, added that even now, after decades of increasing overlap between art and technology, the idea remained daunting to many of the artists and Web people she approached. “This was something we went into with the knowledge that it was an experiment and that it could end up being a failure,” she said. “A lot of people I called to see if they were interested, people I know — friends of mine — didn’t even get back to me.”
More than 150 people turned out for the New Museum presentation, some paying as much as $350 for tickets. With a couple of exceptions what they saw were not objects but ideas — some funny and entertaining, some deadly serious — situated at the fertile nexus where social networking and the Web’s data-gathering power is providing artists and scientists with immense piles of raw material about society and psychology.
Joshua Schachter, a software engineer at Google, and Monica Narula, an artist from New Delhi, came up with a rough plan to convert private guilt into charitable giving, allowing Internet users collectively to assign dollar values to various misdeeds so that guilt might be assuaged through donations. (On Friday the team paid Web users small amounts to help come up with categories of misbehavior and attendant fines. They arrived at $47 for forgetting one’s mother’s birthday, for example, and $20 for “being mad at my spouse because of a dream.”)
The artist Ryan Trecartin and David Karp, a creator of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, came up with a streaming video site that feels like plugging YouTube directly into the cerebral cortex. The artist Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina, who builds social Web applications, proposed a way for people to exchange identities — in essence, to take a break from themselves — via Twitter. Ayah Bdeir, an engineer and designer, and Tauba Auerbach, her artist collaborator, made a randomly moving moiré-pattern sculpture designed to freeze when a viewer enters the room, leaving its actions when unwatched a mystery.
Jeff Hammerbacher, a former Facebook engineer, and Aaron Koblin, an artist specializing in data visualization, theorized about Wiki ways to improve the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And Hilary Mason, a computer scientist, and Marc André Robinson, a sculptor, both intrigued by trying to change the culture of disposable goods in the United States, took on the “cheap umbrella issue” in New York. They created a prototype for an umbrella-sharing service in which the umbrellas would record their own histories, using embedded cameras and GPS.
Mr. Roth and Mr. Mullenweg, who like the other teams were not allowed to confer before meeting — they had a brief Skype chat only to say hello — arrived Friday morning at the offices of Kickstarter, a Web fund-raising service, which had loaned its spare, tin-ceilinged back room as a workspace. Both men knew they had a resource that most artists throughout history could only envy: a potential audience of 12 million people, the number who use WordPress to create blogs, which Mr. Mullenweg could tap into as easily as tapping his keyboard.
Their idea, one that might seem a little esoteric to the nonblogging populace but that drew a hearty round of applause when introduced on Saturday, was to create a new function on WordPress called “Surprise Me. (Funmode),” so that when a blogger hits the publish button — an act that Mr. Roth described as a moment of great existential loneliness, “like sending the bottle out to sea” — a random congratulatory video suddenly fills the screen. (The example they showed on a large screen was a heartwarming slow-clap locker-room clip from the movie “Hoosiers.” Mr. Mullenweg and Mr. Roth also collected feel-good video from “The Price Is Right,” “American Idol” and the Beijing Olympics.)
They described their creation as an “emotional plug-in,” a virtual artwork to celebrate the “sacred act of publishing,” which the Web has transformed as fundamentally as Gutenberg did and which is, in turn, transforming society. After some highly anti-climactic code programming by Mr. Mullenweg and a lot of cackling by Mr. Roth, who sat with his earphones in, compiling clips — “there’s way too much happiness on the Web,” he said at one point — the two finished their project at 3:30 Saturday morning and introduced it on WordPress, announcing its existence by blog, mostly to users in Europe and on the Indian subcontinent, who were awake.
By Sunday afternoon New York time, more than 11,000 people had decided to turn on the “surprise me” feature and experience some randomized positive-reinforcement art, a response that heartened its creators. Though Mr. Mullenweg, in perhaps his first professional encounter with art critics, noted worriedly that 563 of those people had already decided to turn the art off.
“The opt-out rate,” he said, recasting the age-old language of creative rejection in the precise words of the technologist, “is higher than I would like.”
Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new –be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine– over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.
80s nostalgia at Lazarides Shop
Faile are a Brooklyn-based collaborative duo and pioneers of the contemporary street art movement. Their partner for this show, long-time collaborator BAST is a fellow Brooklyn native, and an elusive character who has rarely been seen in public and whose very existence has been debated. For this show they produced an environment of 80s nostalgia with custom made arcade games.
The show is at Lazarides, Greek Street, until March 19 2010.