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)

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but on that day, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them.

Back in 2006 they had around 200 people shop in slow motion at a Manhattan Home Depot. For part two of that mission everyone froze in place. As it turned out the slow motion was subtle, but the freezing in place was absolutely striking. Home Depot had many aisles and multiple floors so you could never see more than a handful of frozen people at a time. At Grand Central’s enormous Main Concourse, we would be able to see everyone simultaneously.

Signal is a live audio visual show realized by Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender.
It’s really great show and compared to past Alva Noto’s performance is more “easy listening”….
the digital noise goes rock!!

Alva Noto and Frank Bretschneider at Audiovisiva 5.0

Olaf Bender at Audiovisiva 5.0

Front is a design group of four: Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren and Katja Sävström. They work as a group where all members are involved in the design process from initial discussions and ideas to final product. Their works are based on common discussions, exploring and investigations about different topics. And the final products often communicates a story to the observer about the design process, about conventions within the product field or about the material it is made of.

The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined.
Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.

The Swedish design group FRONT has been working in Japan since September. During this time they have developed and explored the technique they used in the making of Sketch Furniture which they showed in Art Basel Miami / Design 05 with Barry Friedman Gallery Ltd ( New York ). Front make design as a performance. During Tokyo Design week they will show the process of making Sketch Furniture and the final pieces of furniture at Tokyo Wonder Site 31 October – 5 November.

PUBLIC ENEMY – FIGHT THE POWER

Hurra Torpedo is the world’s leading kitchen appliance rock group. Since 1993 they have played for full houses all over their native Norway with their eclectic mixture of cover tunes and original material. Now, thanks to the wonders of the internet, their heartbreaking version of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart is known all over the world .

In October/November 2005 they became part of a viral ad campaign by going on a coast to coast tour in the U.S. that was paid for by Ford in order to promote the Ford Fusion car. As part of the ad campaign, a mockumentary movie called “The Crushing Blow” is being made, directed by the “character” Pip Simon who is played by the actress Tara Copeland.

Kasou Taishou (欽ちゃん＆香取慎吾の全日本仮装大賞; Kinchan and Katori Shingo’s All Japan Costume Grand Prix) is a semi-annual show on NTV in which various amateurs perform short skits, which are rated by a panel of judges. One of the most successful at faking “special effects” was a skit, widely known as the “Matrix ping pong”.

The roots of this “utterance” lie in early 20th-century Fururistic rebellions and Cubist experiments with mixed media, further accomplished Dada performances. However, the antecedent of performance art, can be found in the happenings of the late 1950s and the 1960s : Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple. Event scores such as George Brecht’s “Drip Music”, are essentially performance scripts consist of descriptions of actions to be performed rather than dialogue.

First performer on a tall ladder pours water from a pitcher very slowly down into the bell of a French horn or tuba held in the playing position by a second performer at floor level

Fluxus happenings and performances have progressily incorporated vary elements as electronic music, song, dance, television, film, sculpture, spoken dialogue, and storytelling.

Albert Reyes has been known to spit art on his hands and knees with a mouth full of beer in the middle of the street which tackles both performance and graffiti art inspired not only by street art, comic books, and American pop culture; but also by icons of corporate America to Hollywood stars to mass media to politics to consumerism. Toward a new Refluxus? http://pimplywimp.com/

NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafè, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants “whose identities remain unknown to one another” agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 – 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.

NOSO is produced by Glowlab’s Christina Ray as a commissioned project for the ongoing SoEx Off-Site, Southern Exposure’s yearlong series of public art and related programs investigating artists’ strategies for exploring and mapping public space.