ecopolis

Interview with Rosina Gómez-Baeza by Domenico Quaranta

It was difficult to be more promising. The LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre, opened in March 2007 in Gijon (Asturias), with its rich and gorgeous opening program seems to announce a serious engagement at the intersection of art, design and new technologies. In this short interview, Rosina Gómez-Baeza Tinturé, Director of the Center and former Director of Arco Art Fair, talks about her ambitions. The interview was conducted via email some weeks ago, while writing an article for Flash Art. In the meantime, LABoral appointed a Chief Curator (Austrian artist and engineer Erich Berger, the former Art Director and Curator of The Interface & Society Project of Oslo) and opened a new show, It’s Simply Beautiful.

DQ. LABoral opened in March with two big exhibitions, curated by international curators such as Christiane Paul (Whitney Museum), Jemima Rellie (Tate Gallery), Carl Goodman (Museum of the Moving Image). Why didn’t you involve Spanish curators? Are you going to do it in the future? And why don’t you have a stable curator?
RG. The LABoral mission is underpinned by diversity and a desire to be a true reflection of a global vision of the emerging trends in the art world and the creative industries. I want to generate a dynamic setting, capable of stimulating interaction between creators, technicians and scientists from different parts of the world. This engagement with the outside world (outside Spain, outside Asturias) had to be made explicit from the inception of our exhibition programming. Thus my choice of our very talented curatorial team. The name of our Chief Curator will be made public at the end of June.

DQ. What’s your relation with the territory? Do you want to be a window on the international scene of New Media Art or to help developing a local New Media Art scene (or both)?
RG. Both, naturally. I was actually born here, close to the Universidad Laboral complex which houses our Centre and most of the Universidad de Asturias technical schools plus a technological hub. There is political unanimity in considering the ICT sector as strategic sector for development of the origin. Asturias is also a region particularly focused on encouraging relations between groups of persons from different origins,promoting the exchange of ideas and technologies and the development of art practices based on shared experiences. These particularities of the region are highly conducive to creative vitality and innovation. As a resource centre we will of course also focus on facilitating the necessary resources for local artists.

DQ. The New Media Art world and the Contemporary Art world often act as two parallel lines that never cross. Coming from Arco – the only art fair that opened to New Media Art, by the way – are you trying to make LABoral kind of a bridge between those two worlds?
RG. Why not? This project will provide a platform for an intense and profound dialogue between different forms of artistic expression, providing room for the various disciplines, which must exist in harmony as essential parts of the innovative path through art and creation at the beginning of the 21st century.

DQ. LABoral is an art center, not a museum. Nevertheless, do you have in mind to start a collection of art works?
RG. Setting up a centre dedicated to production, education, exhibition and diffusion of art and technology and the creative industries, is a response to a need expressed by many creators, technicians and producers. The fact that there are no centres for research and experimentation in Spain means that LABoral has a practically unlimited potential. We hope to be able to enrich the current debates. That will be our priority but of course we would like to “anchor” our findings and be able to trace the first technological advances: light, camera, cinema, video, computer, and their use by the artist and industry. A collection that would reflect the work of both pioneers and emerging artists is of course at the back of my head.

DQ. What about your future projects?
RG. During the first phase of the programming at LABoral, we will outline a critical route through our historical-artistic legacy while underscoring the contributions of new technologies. We hope to reflect the truly overwhelming visual culture of the moment. “Emergentes” will
open in November. Curated by José-Carlos Mariátegui and coproduced with Fundación Telefónica, it addresses new forms of art in Latin America, mostly from the multidisciplinary research field. Research is indeed one of LABoral’s pivotal concerns, backing up
exhibition concepts but also paving the way for new exhibitions. I cannot understand the two separately. We are starting our workshops this coming month of July with a very interesting program focusing on videogames from a practical angle, tackling phenomena such as Second
Life, 8bit music, modding. In August we have put together our second series of workshops with Hangar, exploring new tools for creators from various perspectives: image, sound and hardware.

DQ. Can you tell me something about the show curated by Peter Doroshenko and Jèrôme Sans that will open at LABoral in July?
RG. It’s Simply Beautiful rethinks the concept of beauty in today’s world. It will have a very different feel to Feedback or LABcyberspaces, as it includes only five artists taking over approximately 3.000 square metres. I believe strongly in producing new work, and not just limiting the role of the institution to borrowing preexisting pieces going from one institution to another. Peter and Jérôme selected four artists from France (Fabien Verschaere), the UK (Mark Titchner), the US (Dzine) and Thailand (Surasi Kusolwong), but also visited local studios and chose to include Carlos Coronas, a very interesting artist born and based in
Asturias.

DQ. What’s your view on the future of New Media Art? There will be a sustainable market for it?
RG. Today´s art reflects the sea changes taking place in society. I think there is an enormous feeling of optimism in the art world in general and an intense and profound dialogue between different forms of art which certainly encourages and generates a dynamic setting, capable of attracting larger, younger audiences interested in those emerging trends which reflect today´s visual culture. These new art practices appeal to the new audiences, respond to their demands.

www.laboralcentrodearte.org
www.domenicoquaranta.net

Interview with Jaromil, founder of Dyne.org, rasta coder that trough his work try to “develop and distribute software to manipulate and broadcast audio and video, free as in free speech” and “mantain a GNU/Linux distribution for multimedia production, optimized to run well on old computers and game consoles, for the sake of ecology and accessibility.”
And if you want the T-shirt with the shortest fork-bomb ever, check the gadgets.

He’ll be performing with his HasciiCam at the Stream Fest, Salento New Media Festival, in Galatina from the 26th of july till the 28th.

ECO: the dyne can be defined as “the force required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimeter per second squared.“, in the open source world which is the force, what is weight and waht is lenght?
J: depends to which open source world you are referring
in mine (and i speak only for me)

- – the force is passion and injustice, curiosity and idealism

- – the weight is code

- – the length is how clean, readable and documented is what you write

ECO: Do you have any plans for the Chaos Communication Camp 2007?
J: sure, i’ll be there camping with my tent, but only after attending the zappanale.de

ECO: can you tell something about how the (H)ASCII CAM was born many years ago? in which context? why? with whom?
J: it was inspired by the typical hacker aesthetics in the early 2000 i was around in Austria, peeking in cyberpunk contexts as stadtwerkstadt / servus.at / sil.at / time’s up , as well regularly attending the yearly hackmeeting in italy which we started already in 1998.

when i wrote the software HasciiCam i was working at the Futurelab in the ARS Electronica Center and there was a camera left on the shelf coz the power cord was lost. i took it at home, found out the voltage needed and put it in action: that was the first time i ever made a video camera work on my screen!

then of course the idea came quickly out of Jan Hubicka’s AAlib, the coolest video hack ever done: i wanted to see it live and stream it on the web in the easiest way possible.

the concept was to have a video streaming system for slow networks and old computers, so that even people with a modem could stream something cool: even cooler than canonical videos produced by proprietary software. It was the case of the hackmeeting in Catania in year 2000, where we had a very slow connection from the Freaknet, the southern medialab of Europe.

as soon as i released the software, it quickly grew in popularity, to the point it was mentioned on Slashdot for being used by a department of Sun in California, pointed on a lava lamp, to produce a live random seed for encruption
i have to admit i had never thought of that while writing it..

among the people that contributed to development i’d like to mention Blended: we are friends since more than 10 years i knew him as the cook in the pizzeria Maruzzella in Pescara, now he is a coder and last year he updated HasciiCam’s code to support all USB webcams. big up \o/

William Furlong (1944) belongs to the generation of British artists who developed a new concept of sculpture in the 1970’s and 80’s (Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean, Paul Richards etc.). Furlong’s special contribution has been in the area of “Sound Scuplture” and, with the founding of Audio Arts (together with Michael Archer) in 1973, he began a project of mapping the territory of contemporary art in a series of cassette editions.
Since its inception in 1972, Audio Arts has grown to become the world’s most comprehensive and coherently focused sound archive of artists’ voices as well as sound art but also contains documents of important exhibitions, symposia and festivals. The cassette-magazine has been in continuous and regular publication for thirty-five years, with over twenty-five volumes of four issues each.

A small part of the vast Audio Arts archive is currently showing at Tate Britain and for the first time in U.K until the 27th of August. Four hours of recorded clips of interviews with main artist from 1973 to 2006 can be accessed here online by clicking on…

Roma 16 October 2006. An interview with BILL FURLONG

Ilari Valbonesi: Audio art. Why recording?
William Furlong: It’s difficult to say why. Certainly natural curiosity moves you towards things. I bought my first recorder in the sixties before they got popular . A small “real to real”. Somehow I’ve always been fascinated by recording. Later I started thinking about “VOICE” and discourse. The seventies were the years of conceptual art with text adding value to the actual works. As an artist I was more interested in “discussion”, the idea of language and the people that already worked in conceptual fields in Great Britain. Soon I realised there weren’t magazines capable of reporting such material inspired by conversation, sounds and discussions. The evocative force of a voice is lost with the written word as it will only ever be a written voice. Audio tapes were already a radical form of communication but only for pre-recorded music. I asked myself if it would have been possible to create a spoken magazine. Recorded voice through a production of tapes to give out. The tape was also an economic form of production and distribution.

IV: Recording as a way to distance the textuality of “art and language”. And also from Andy Warhol’s “interview” as you produced recordings.
WF: I’m glad you mentioned him. Andy Warhol, whom I interviewed and met, understood immediately the importance of recording . He recorded everything and called his recorder “my wife” . I recorded a lot to. Personally I prefer the word “conversation”. Conversing is a very creative process; it allows you to get to know the world through the people you are talking with. Therefore if you talk to someone it’s as if you are making a portrait of them: You understand their roots. Human voice is very rich, stratified, ethnic, sensual. You can talk without telling what you are thinking and vice versa…I can hold back my thoughts. For the roman exhibition I’m presenting a work called “conversation piece”. Duchamp is an other artist that understood. They knew that the voice is an important instrument to understand and communicate. It took a long time to make people understand this simple concept. We still live in an era where everything has to be documented as a will, but in the tones of a voice there are many more things than in a written page.

IV: Every body has it’s sound … does it mean that sound is a body?
WF: t’s correct to say we resonate in different ways. There is a deep truth in a voice that inspires stories, values and differences. This is why I started using voice as artistic material. A voice brings the story to the present, where we come from , what we have done , what we will do … because as we are doing this interview we are thinking of other things . voice is an expression of an entire identity. As for Joseph Beuys , voice is an “organic sculpture”.

IV: Is voice a deep material?
WF: Trough voice resonates thoughts and ideologies we carry with us .”Audio Arts” started simply as a reflection on voice as a stratified material . It started by chance, and now shows a intricate coherence . I started to use voices to unveil a complex space .

IV: How was the English audience response to audio arts in those years?
WF: The intellectual stream of “art and language” was spreading in Great Britain. But only a restricted group of art critics had understood its importance : Peter Townsend of Studio International Magazine, recently missing , the critic Caroline Tisdall, Richard Cork, or art dealers like Jack Wender and Richard Hamilton . few had understood and thought it was an important project . Acute people counting Lawrence Weiner with whom I did some recording projects in the late seventies.

IV: What type of exhibitions did you do in these years?
WF: I’m an artist with a classic and visual background. Not an “editor”. Therefore I’ve done some exhibitions where I presented my recordings , voices and combined works. The archive is a public art form. Dan Graham also has an archive. I’ve never seen the difference between an “audio arts” archive and a personal one. I don’t divide the practices . The space for “audio arts” is the same one of listening. Therefore I like the idea that sending a tape to Australia it may end up in a bedroom a museum a gallery . Sound acts on the space and needs space to be heard. To hear it’s self .

IV: Have you ever used radio as a medium ?
WF: This further extends the concept of audio as sound has no barriers it can be diffused by a small radio or an auditorium. I broadcasted in Vienna. With radio I’ve presented many of my works with sound. Interviews with artists as well as interviews with people on the street. It’s important to remember that my job is recording contemporary events , recording reality . I don’t enjoy manipulating sound , it’s identity , I’d call this recording Roma 16 October 2006, sound art museum , for ever.

IV: “Recording reality”. With a recording do you produce reality or listen to it ?
WF: A recording starts by listening to it, then I reproduce it to turn it into art.

IV: Does this imply there are different ways to listen?
WF: I’ll give you an example: when I record a conversation , I listen to it many times – when I first listen – I don’t hear everything. The human ear selects whilst the recorder holds all. Therefore listening more times is interesting because within a conversation, whilst you are talking you can only hear it once. This is the reason that I insert silence in a recording. This giving the opportunity to re listen to a conversation otherwise continuous . and it allows to produce a conversation as a “sound object”.

IV: What is the difference between a conversation on the street and with an artist ?
WF: When I conduct an interview on the street I’m interested in building a particular image, of a group of people and the atmosphere surrounding. The construction of a place and a space and those inhabiting it. That’s why I don’t ask complex questions : where are you going? where are you coming from? what do you like to eat? what are you doing tonight? and I receive answers . The voices transmit their emotional state , where they come from , their worries, their passions. Simple questions that give you a lot of material . On the other hand when I interview an artist it’s to go in depth on a study. Two are the directions of my studies . Recording is the common denominator …

“conservation pieces” is a work including recordings . Sections of conversations with Marchel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, John Cage e Andy Wahrol, edited to recreate a single conversation. I like making impossible things happen . Unpredictable . Cage wants unpredictability . A conversation is unpredictable . Duchamp talking to Beuys … it makes sense because you start believing it. There is another “pieces” where I work with sound in space entitled “what are you doing in taping?” It’s a sequence recorded in Dublin whist some kids sell newspapers on the street . A kid turns round and asks me “what” I was recording as if I was committing an appropriation : are you observing me…

IV: There is therefore a communication between time and different spaces.
WF: It refers to belief , listening is believing. a perceptive faith.

IV: Audioarts Is A Social Organism?
WF: It’s a social sculpture . That’s how the art critic Mel Gooding described theoretically this involvement of different people as a part of a sound sculpture which embodies the people I meet. An Organism which becomes a corporation of sounds.

°the italian translation of this interview was published on Teknemedia

Once upon a time, before he was acclaimed by the Rolling Stones as best keyboard player in 1986, Howard Jones was a piano player and he used to give piano lessons. Then he order his first synthesiser: aYahamaDX7. The shop delivered two by mistake, but he liked the combination of the two so he kept them both…

IV: Your career is very complex and articulated
HJ: I suppose the music I have done is quite eclectic

IV: More then eclectic, it sounds like you started with electronic generated sounds but always concerned with human emotions, which is a leit motive.
HJ: Synthesisers were not machines to me but instruments to bring out human expression. That’s why I used them. On the first album none of the key board parts were into sequencer. They were all played. That is fundamentally a different approach to electronic music.

IV: Your first song is “New song”. Why did you call it so.
HJ: It was just naivety. I did not realize you need to give a catchy name and it was not a very good idea (laugh).

IV: It was a good idea, and the title was very promising.
HJ: I suppose, in the retrospect.

IV: That was in 1983. “New Song” belongs together with “What Is Love” in your first album, “Human’ Lib”, which define your electronic understanding.
HJ: The album was based on one man show around London and south of England. For three years I developed these ideas and I captured those ‘life songs’ in the studio with great producers.

IV: With your second album “Dream in Action”, you introduced your own backing band, including future “Soul to Soul” ’s Caron Wheleer and your electronic sounds opened up to the percussive side of music.
HJ: I think that came from the fact that I listened to all sorts of music trough my life. My influences came from all different places and groove based music. I’ve always loved grooves and percussive instruments. Always very strong with me.

IV: What about The Acoustic Tour experience with a grand piano accompanied only by Carol Steel on percussion in 1996?
HJ: That was really good. When I suggested that I was going to do the tour, lots of people said that they thought it was not a good idea. It wouldn’t work. But it did work really well. Extremely well. I was very pleased.

IV: You have produced lots of successful electronic albums. Then you started collaborating with other instruments and musicians which formed a full band.
HJ: That’s right. I tried developing from my particular point of view, which was an one man band. I’ve never had guitars, only bass and electronic drum kit. I just wanted to do it differently. I didn’t want to be involved. The eighties were a break with that tradition. I wanted to challenge the 60’s and the 70’s idea of a band and break with that tradition. I wanted to challenge the idea of what is a band.

IV: In 2002 “Piano Solos for Friends and Loves One” came out like another “Hide and Seek” moment of your life. Then in October 2005 you release your new electronic album “Revolution of the Heart”. After all these different experiences, how do you feel now about electronic music?

HJ: I see electronic music as another way of doing music, but I think it’s more important than that. Rock music and pop music are terribly conservative and prejudiced. You would expect that would be the challenging thing, but it’s the opposite, that always maintains. So I see electronic music as a noise to conservative tendencies. It’s another important form of expression, which shouldn’t be discriminated because it’s not made out of wood or metal. If it was another kind of music to challenge the accepted idea, I would do that.

IV: Which has characterized your career. You reach the top, you change …

HJ: It’s like I never wanted to be put into a box. You are this or that. That’s why I don’t mind doing small venues. Even though I rarely it…(laugh). An incredible musician is not supposed to do something like this. That’s why I do it. You know what I mean? It is important to challenge your own idea of what is cool…

HERE AND NOW IN BRIGHTON 2007
The Eighties Here & Now celebrates the big hair decade with an eclectic line-up of acts including ABC, Kim Wilde, Go West, Paul Young, Limahl and Altered Images and Howard Jones.
JUNE Fri 22nd | BRIGHTON Stanmer Park, The Music Park

Formed in 1996 by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, Exonemo is group devoted to the experimentation of new ways of interaction between art and pubblic.

ECO: Object B presents, compared to the consumer society, a different kind of immersion between real and virtual spaces. what do you think about the relationships of virtual and real spaces of contemporary world? And what do you want to communicate trough the hacked interactions of Object B?
EXO: When considering about the “real” and “virtual” space, we feel the border between them has been getting more ambiguous than before. It might be no longer an indivisible concept. But actually, not only “real space to virtual space” but also divided world such as “country to country”, “culture to culture” or “person to person” exist around us and make conflicts between them.

The Object B focuses on “communication” between divided worlds.
By multiple approach to the installation, for example, from the exhibit space (physically) or from the game space (as a nonphysical avatar), you will experience an obvious communication gap between two worlds.
We think that’s the interesting point on communication.

ECO: Which seeds where the starting point to think this piece?
EXO: Maybe at the moment when I doubted if a person on the other side of the internet was a real human being…or not!?

ECO: What do you think about game industry today?
EXO: Regading the Half-Life, the game company VALVE opens the developement environment partly to get the scene active and also let expert programmer join the company. It’s intersting that we can touch the structure of the game by modification. Game modification has a potential for expansion but we have a limited feeling about the distribution system STEAM because they tighten controls on license. Meanwhile, game industry in Japan seems different. Japanese game companies almost never open the developement environment to the public, but they activate the game scene by allowing re-creation of game characters such as cosplay, fan fiction and so on.
Each environment is open and closed at different point and we see an interesting difference of game culture there.

ECO: Open source and free exchange are important vectors of innovation, don’t you think that with all this new and specialized hardware and software instrument, that are quite “closed”,that users will have a little range of creative possibilities?
EXO: Focusing on open source and free exchange in art creation, we think it is different from software development.
For the software development, “function” is absolutely imperative and we can share the function by getting source code. So we think the open source for software development is very important but for the art work, “function” is not important thing so there isn’t much point in sharing the source. To represent the concept through an art work might expect next creativity like open source and free exchange on software development.

ECO: Water, what makes you thinkin?
EXO: MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA

http://exonemo.com