Archive for the ‘Art’ tag
MMIX by Nicolas Clauss
MMIX* is a timeless work in four interactive tableaus, where each visitor is invited to follow with his eyes and ears what his mouse gestures reveal. At each caress, sound and visual elements get randomly muddled up on the screen creating always new combinations. A work travelling between real and surreal, dream and mind, rage and fright, where humour and drama are cruelly mixed to suggest the sad patterns of our contemporary reality.
These works are part of Nicolas Clauss‘ virtual gallery, flyingpuppet, a collection of digital tableaus started in 2001.
MMIX is currently exhibited at Japan Media Art Festival, National Art Center, Tokyo.
Playlist
Video selection for the series “Playlist”, Neoncampobase, Bologna (Italy)
http://www.neoncampobase.blogspot.com/
Opening: January 27, 2010
Curated by: Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com).
Founded by the American writer Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) was a catalogue of tools that was regarded as a bible by the counterculture generation – that is, by those who shaped the techno-cultural environment we are living in. Published regularly until 1972 and sporadically until 1998, it definitely died with the rise of the Web, of which it is considered a conceptual forerunner by people such as Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) and Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired). WEC was conceived as an “evaluation and access device” meant to bring power and knowledge to the people. It featured excellent reviews of books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes, along with objects of any kind, from gardening tools to computers. Everybody could submit a review for the catalogue.
Like the WEC reviewers, the artists in this exhibition are contributing to a shared resource; like them, they love their tools and, like them, they are interested in understanding the world as a whole. What did change, in the meantime – and mostly thanks to the WEC generation – is the world itself.
These artists – WE – live in a world in which media don’t just reproduce reality, nor just simulate it, in Baudrillardian terms: they shape reality, improve it, sometimes they build parallel worlds in which we can spend our time. They redesign our way to live, to think, to make and enjoy culture, to eat, to sleep, to die. And to think about God.
These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays.
This peculiar realism can bring somebody to go back to when everything started. Notoriously, psychedelic drugs played an important rule in the beginning of digital culture. Without Sun, by Brody Condon, is a mesh-up of various found videos of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Why do people broadcast these materials? Do these “out of the body” experiences have any relationship with other now common forms of projection of the self, such as online videogaming? Some artists, such as Cory Arcangel or Oliver Laric, are interested in the conceptual consequences of technologies, and on the way they are updating fundamental concerns of our culture; others, such as the duo AIDS-3D, explore how technologies are increasingly affecting our spiritual life. In their own words, they want to make “the intangible magic of technology visible”. Not necessarily trough technologies themselves: Constant Dullart’s video, for example, turns Youtube’s “loading” animation into a suggestive, hypnotic object using light and styrofoam balls.
This concern with magic and transcendence is shared by many of the artists on show, from Petra Cortright to Damon Zucconi, from Harm Van den Dorpel to Martin Kohout. In their hands, a video filter can become the best way to explore how consistent the outer world is, and how consistent we are. It can become the best way to get a better knowledge of the world we live in, whatever we may mean with this word.
Lavori selezionati / Selected works:
AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller & Nik Kosmas, US/DE), Motion Capture Dance, 2008. Video, 08.34 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://www.aids-3d.com/motioncapture.mov.
Cory Arcangel (US), Drei Klavierstücke op. II – I, 2009. Video, 04.21 min. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York. Online at http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/DreiKlavierstucke.
Brody Condon (US), Without Sun, 2008. Video, 15.12 min. Courtesy Virgil De Voldere, New York. Online at http://www.tmpspace.com/video/WithoutSun.mov (excerpt).
Petra Cortright (US), Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009. Video, 03.41 min. Online at http://petracortright.com/das_helle_modell/das_helle_modell.html.
Paul B. Davis (UK/US), Compression Study #4 (Barney), 2007. Video, 02.49 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWG5jqzYsEI.
Constant Dullart (NL), Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009. Video, 00.33 min. Online at http://www.youtube.com/constantdullaart.
Martijn Hendriks (NL), Untitled (12 glowing men), 2008. Video, 04.10 min. Online at http://www.12glowingmen.com/.
Jodi (BE/NL), Mal Au Pixel, 2009. Video, 01.14 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE8VIKXnsQ0.
Martin Kohout (CZ/DE), Close Up, 2009. Video loop, 03.11 min. Online at http://www.martinkohout.com/new/close-up/.
Oliver Laric (DE), Aircondition, 2006. Video, 01.59 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London. Online at http://www.oliverlaric.com/airconditionvideo.htm.
Les Liens Invisibles (IT), Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle, 2008. Video loop, 02.14 min. Online at http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org/too-close-to-duchamps-bicycle/.
Miltos Manetas (GR/UK), King Kong After Peter Jackson, 2006. Video, 03.05 min. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMkjWpdC4c.
Pascual Sisto (US), No strings attached, 2007. Video, 01.30 min. Online at http://www.pascualsisto.com/projects/no-strings-attached/.
Paul Slocum (US), You’re Not My Father, 2007. Video, 04.05 min. Online at http://turbulence.org/Works/notmyfather/.
Harm Van den Dorpel (NL), Resurrections, 2007. 3 animated found photos, 04.18 min. Online at http://www.harmvandendorpel.com/work/resurrections.
Damon Zucconi (US), Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008. Video, 00.35. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://damonzucconi.com/uploads/Video/woodshed_w.mov.
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Domenico Quaranta
web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/
email. info@domenicoquaranta.com
mob. +39 340 2392478
skype. dom_40
Primal Source
Primal Source (video documentation) from haque d+r.
Specially commissioned by the City of Santa Monica, California, for Glow 08, Primal Source was an all-night performance/installation brought to life through the active participation of festival-goers (estimated at approx. 200,000 over the course of the night).
Located on the beach near the Pier in an area that had been specifically landscaped over the course of several days, and making use of a large-scale outdoor waterscreen/mist projection system, the mirage-like installation glowed with colours and ebullient patterns created in response to the competing and collaborative voices, music and screams of people nearby.
Responding to sounds emanating from the crowd, the system’s modes changed every few minutes depending on how active the crowd participation was (more quickly when there was more noise). Each mode responded in a slightly different way to the individual voices and sounds picked up by 8 microphones distributed towards the front.
Some modes created “creatures” whose colour, shape and movement followed the frequency and amplitude dynamics of individual syllables and sentences picked up; other modes responded to wider collective phenomena, e.g. distorting a grid in response to the crowd volume, or creating a rush of wind through a wheat-field landscape.
VISUAL FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS_BERLIN
Visual Foreign Correspondents is a platform for international video artists to reflect on recent events and to take the role of correspondent through their work. Die ZEIT online will provide additional background information and interviews to the invited artists and projects, and invites for critical discourse about the work.
Coinciding with the 20th commemoration of the fall of the Berlin wall, WL Project Berlin | Hong Kong together with Visual Foreign Correspondents Foundation, invited seven international artists to develop work relating to borders and boundaries and to take different positions relating to the nature of virtual or physical boundaries, walls or barriers as well as reflecting on the current state of the world. In times of a global economic crisis and international acts of terrorism, there is a clear tendency to re-erect or strengthen existing barriers; just as the European Union is strengthening its exterior borders.
A project of Visual Foreign Correspondents, Amsterdam, and WL Project Berlin | Hong Kong in collaboration with ZEIT Online.
SCREENINGS IN BERLIN:
- U Bahnhof Kochstraße/Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin-Mitte
(21 September – 9 November 2009, 7 – 21 hrs, Sat & Sun 11:30 – 20 hrs)
- Media facade of Collegium Hungaricum,
Dorotheenstraße 12, 10117 Berlin (9 November 2009)
SCREENINGS IN AMSTERDAM:
- Melkweg, Die Wende Festival, 1-30 November 2009 http://www.die-wende.nl/
- CASz in Amsterdam (December 2009)
(more information to follow)
ARTISTS:
Giselle Beiguelman (Brazil), Simon Faithfull (Great Britain), Mariam Ghani (US, Afghanistan), Han Hoogerbrugge (Netherlands), Little Warsaw (András Gálik & Bálint Havas, Hungary), Lena Merhej (Lebanon), Berit Zemke (Germany)
http://www.visualcorrespondents.com
http://www.wl-project.org
http://www.zeit.de/kultur
