ecopolis

A mobile opera house that can be pulled apart and fit into a shipping container was unveiled by the Bavarian State Opera. The €2.1 million Pavillion 21 - designed by architect Wolf Prix of the firm Coop Himmelb(l)au – seats 300 people and it will host its first performances during the Munich Opera Festival in the summer of 2010.

COOP HIMMELB(L)AU was founded by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Michael Holzer in Vienna, Austria in 1968, and is active in architecture, urban planning, design, and art.

The Pavillon 21 building has perforated, sloping aluminium walls with a “crystalline outer skin” ; gleaming spikes on the outside the opera house were based on a computer space modelling of sound frequencies from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze and Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni”, overlayed and parametrically transferred into the pyramidal forms.

The inside is similarly angular and includes a lobby and a large stage. The main auditorium is free of clutter to house experimental performances. It is being built in collapsible modules that can be dismantled and fit in a shipping container: the philosophy behind the portable building is staging travelling shows. It will then return “home” every summer for the festival, but the rest of the year it will travel the world and can be hired out to other opera and theatre companies.

What to do on a Sunday afternoon when you’ve worked up an appetite for art? The galleries are closed and you’ve seen what’s up in the museums. Browse through Art Forum and you’ll see an ad from “The Performance Call Girl”! The Icelandic artist, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, has for more than a year now been alert by her computer every Sunday in case someone anticipating a web performance rings her on Skype. Each person gets a special treatment, a spontaneous, dreamlike fantasy that invokes questions of the identity of the performer, who transcends a diversity of mythical roles via current image technology.

They are a modern merger of female stereotypes, e.g. the Gypsy fortune-teller and the prostitute who accepts appointments by call. Ásdís has a variety of oddments close at hand; wigs, glimmer, Christmas decorations, feathers, mirrors and lights. Should someone call, she delivers an abstract display – a “visual poem”, she calls it – reciting improvised phrases and demonstrating all sorts of gimmicks. It is fascinating to associate the ridiculously frivolous stunts that she actually employs with the baffling outcome at the other end of the line. The viewer will only get a partial glimpse of what is going on, distorted colours, blurred shimmers and vague messages. Behind the razzmatazz there is a serious investigation into the relationship between artist and viewer.

As an art experience, the Skype performances take place in a unique set-up and far from the traditional art space. The viewer is one on one with the artist, who not only performs for him or her alone, but sees them in the same way as they se her. It is an intimate situation evoking the notion of various trades of the sex industry, such as the peep show, and Ásdís certainly does not attempt to conceal this reference by literally naming the happening “The Performance Call Girl”. However, hers is less an attempt to take on the clichéd metaphor of art and prostitution, as it is a pun aimed at highlighting the unorthodox art site, which is the Internet.

The work became an experiment in presence and absence of artist and viewer … She and the viewer are both looking at a computer screen with a built-in camera, they gaze at her and she gazes back at them. The screen becomes a mystical tool, where the body and the senses get distorted. In Iceland (where there is a tradition for the creation of new local words for new inventions) the word for “computer” is “tölva”, a portmanteau word deriving from “tölur” for numbers and “völva” for seeing stone. The computer becomes a crystal ball that Ásdís and the viewer scry simultaneously.

She flirts with the notion that the persistent enchantment with technology finds its roots in religious or transcendental imagination. Marshall McLuhan, who is considered a leading thinker of the electronic age, once remarked that the telephone might be likened to a form of telepathy. Technology is pursued in order to extend the human condition and the various ways human beings extend themselves affects our relationships with one another. Skype is certainly a form of human extension, a medium that abolishes the limitations of space between people who wish to communicate.

She is generous enough to offer one “client” after the other a beautiful and unique moment every Sunday, a genuine afternoon delight. As they engage in the conduct, mesmerized, their senses are challenged and the relationship of art and audience put to the test.

From Afternoon Delight
on Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir’s Performance Call Girl
by Markús T. Andrésson (2008)

Tour vittoriese dei “Lago Morto”, band punk hardcore composta dall’artista Nico Vascellari, da Giovanni Donadini, creatore del laboratorio “Canedicoda”, Riccardo Mazza e Christian Zandonella.

Per 15 giorni il gruppo, del quale è in uscita l’lp + dvd per “Von Archives”, etichetta di Nico Vascellari e Carlos Casas (filmaker di Barcellona), si è esibito solo ed esclusivamente a Vittorio Veneto, nei posti più insoliti della città, costantemente videoripreso: alla pizzeria a metro il “Crostino”, alla lavanderia a gettoni in via Oberdan e al negozio dell’usato “Chi cerca trova”.

“Questo è uno sforzo collettivo” ha più volte ripetuto Nico Vascellari durante i concerti. “Lago Morto”, infatti, non è solo un gruppo ma è un progetto artistico, che si configura come occasione di aggregazione, come momento sociale, al quale, di volta in volta, ha contribuito il pubblico presente. “Lago Morto nasce per rimanere a Vittorio Veneto – spiega il Nico Vascellari - Abbiamo accettato di suonare a Graz solamente a patto che una parte di Vittorio Veneto potesse venire con noi. La Kunsthaus pagherà due corriere che trasporteranno circa 120 persone da Vittorio Veneto per assistere al concerto”.

Il progetto è stato presentato alla Kunsthaus di Graz sotto forma di installazione video, nell’ambito della mostra “Rock – Paper – Scissors. Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art”, a cura di Diedrich Diederichsen

via oggitreviso.it

EXPLODING CAVE
Giornate di libera ricerca tra cinema, suono, video e digitale

17 – 18 Aprile 2009
C.S.O.A. Cox18
Via Conchetta 18 – Milano

Info: cox18@inventati.org ; info@digicult.it
Info: http://cox18.noblogs.org ; http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

A cura di: Marco Mancuso, Marco Lorenzin, Claudia D’Alonzo Trafficando con le forze tecnologiche emergenti, tra il 1966 e il 1967 Andy Warhol crea l’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, formando uno spazio contradditorio e sperimentale. Invece di una loro naturalizzazione, produceva un montaggio che scomponeva lo spazio nel quale diversi media interferivano ed entravano in competizione gli uni con gli altri (…). Improvvisamente, il ritmo della musica suonata dai Velvet Underground e dall’attrice/cantante Nico, i giochi di luce, i movimenti dei diversi film di Warhol, le performance dei ballerini si univano per creare qualcosa di significativo, ma prima di cogliere il senso di quello che stava avvenendo, tutto diventava nuovamente confuso e caotico. Il rumore ti colpiva. Volevi urlare, o lanciarti in una danza sfrenata, dovevi muoverti, agire (…). Nell’apparente oscurità e nel caos dell’Exploding Plastic Inevitable, si poteva trovare una possibilità di trasformazione, se non di liberazione”. – [Branden W. Joseph, My Mind Split Open]

Conosciamo una Milano che dagli anni Cinquanta è stata progettata “a somiglianza dell’organizzazione generale del lavoro, i quartieri sono divisi per ceti, si calcolano le distanze tra luogo di lavoro e abitazione. Si progetta una specifica famiglia. Si pianifica un certo tipo di abitazione (…). La sensazione generale era quella di un futuro bloccato, dominato da eventi in gran parte incomprensibili e a cui non si poteva partecipare (…). Nella ‘cava esistenzialista’ della Milano degli anni Cinquanta, ai codici tradizionali della sala da ballo meneghina si sostituisce la sperimentazione di nuovi generi musicali e nuove modalità di scambio tra suoni e visioni che comportano a loro volta dinamiche specifiche. Il rapporto di seduzione si manifesta attraverso la liberazione del corpo mosso dai ritmi musicali e non più dalle ‘figure classiche’ della danza da balera. Il look delle persone si libera dell’estetica borghese del ‘giacca e cravatta’ (…). – [John Martin, Primo Moroni, La Luna sotto casa ]

http://www.digicult.it/ExplodingCave.asp

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved and a database of several million human feelings is formed, that can can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices. We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone that grows and changes according to what’s on our blogs, what’s in our minds.

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has made projects about human emotion, human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity and language. The winner of two 2005 Webby Awards, Harris’ work has also been recognized by well known festivals and journals globally.

Sep Kamvar is a Consulting Professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University and the chairman of Wildflower Capital. He founded Kaltix, a search engine that was acquired by Google in 2003, and Distilled, a clothing line and artist collective based out of San Francisco.

1. Radical makeover of Indymedia into an irresistible network of networks, aimed to link local initiatives, worldwide, that aim to bring down corporate capitalism. In order to do this Indymedia needs to go beyond the (alternative) news paradigm. This is the time to do it. If not now, when? The debate should be about the possible adaptation, or perhaps transcendence (think negative dialectics) of the social networking approach. Is it enough if we all start to twitter? Perhaps not. A lot of the online conversations at the moment circle around these topics. There is a real momentum building up here, and that’s exciting.

2. Renaissance of theory, radical texts that appeal to young people and help them to dream again, aimed to develop critical concepts, cool memes and audio-visual whispers that can feed the collective imagination with new, powerful ideas that are capable to move people into action. Theory, in this context, means speculative philosophies, not academic writing or hermetic bible texts, aimed to exclude outsiders and those with the wrong belief system. Overcoming political correctness in the way that beats populism would be the way to go.

3. Dismantling the academic exclusion machine. With this I mean the hilarious peer review dramas that we see around us everywhere, aimed to reproduce the old boys networks, excluding different voices, discourses and networked research practices. We need to have the civil courage to say no to these suppressive and utterly wrong bureaucratic procedures that, in the end, result in the elimination of quality, creativity and criticism (and, ironically, of innovation, too). In the same way we need to unleash a social movement of those who dare to say no to all these silly copyright contracts that we’re forced to sign. We should stop signing away our ‘intellectual property’ and begin to radicalize and help democratize and popularize the creative commons and floss movements.

4. Overcoming media genres and expertise prisons in order to productively connect our knowledge and experience. With this I do not mean diplomatic gestures to open up token channels for interdisciplinary dialogue. Any formal attempt to bring together people from different backgrounds is bound to fail. What might be a solution is to go for hybrid-pervert situations in order to investigate the absurd edges of the knowledge universe. Again, any model that somehow wants to move towards a synthesis (or convergence) is doomed to be irrelevant and will only be instrumentalized in institutional restructurings in which the creative-subversive elements are the ones that will be excluded.

5. Squatting the overlooked ruins of the 2009 crisis. There is an enormous economic infrastructure that is being abandoned at the moment, ripe to be socialized. The problem, however, is that we do not really ‘see’ it, in the same way as in the 1970s and 80s many did not see the subversive potential of squatting warehouses, factories and old housing stock. Luckily this is merely a matter of start wearing the right pair of glasses. Put them on and you discover an abundance of abandoned resources, ready to be re-used.

6. Global crackdown of the corporate consultancy class. We have to get a better understanding of the dubious role that the Ernst & Young/PricewaterhouseCooper etc. consultants are playing, from downsizing firms, coaching NGOs and global civil society professionals, privatizing public infrastructure, to running entire education sectors. Not only are they experts in cooking the books (see the dotcom crash). Their role as (invisible) advisers, speech writers and PR managers needs some serious investigative journalism a la Naomi Klein.

7. Opening channels for collective imagination. It’s not enough to say that another world is possible (we know that). Radical reform plans are available–and are being implemented as we speak–by the bankrupt neo-liberal elites, in a desperate attempt to somehow make it to 2010 or 2011, when the recession will be over and old policies can be continued again. It’s not enough to be satisfied with the promise of a green GM car, made in the USA. We can think, and build, so much more. For this to happen, the corporate elites need to be dispossessed of their power. Calling for ‘change’ comes with consequences: dethronement. Sorry, you fu*ked up badly. It’s time to step down and move on. Exit.

by Geert Lovink.

Porno 2.0
Ursula Biemann, CUM2CUT, JLNDRR, Deborah Kelly, Sophie Lautru, Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, John Tonkin
November 13 – December 14 2008, kunst/politik/projekte, leipzig

With the advent of the word wide web a global space opened up for sexual fantasies: Like almost any new medium the internet too has grown with and through pornography. The boundary between porn producer and consumer is blurring. Internet users are creating individual digital alter egos for which the limitations of the physical body do not apply: perfect beauty can be software edited. Beyond sexual taboos has originated a unique sex culture with numerous practices, a specific vocabulary and stereotypes. Despite all fabrications of liberalization, sexual exploitation and prostitution does multiply in the digital world too. Old stereotypes are being revived.

Opening: 12.11.2008, 19 Uhr/Nov 12, 7 pm
Gaia Novati is introducing the indie-porn-shortfilm-festival CUM2CUT.
http://www.d21-leipzig.de/porno+zwei+null

Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina) is a contemporary artist, graphic designer and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene and became known initially for his “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker campaign and finally for the series of posters supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy for President in 2008, including the “HOPE” portrait

http://www.thegiant.org/