Rhizome News

Green is the New Black?

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-31T16:21:00+01:00

As our cities get bigger, our buildings grow taller, but our farms and gardens shrink. Trendy clothing stores and greenwashed corporate slogans are working double time to convince us that green is the new black, but what are our real strategies for building and staying green? A group exhibition at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, entitled "The Gatherers" addresses this question by presenting projects that merge art and activism to address urban environments. This includes work by Fallen Fruit, Amy Franceschini with Wilson Diaz, The National Bitter Melon Council, Oda Projesi, Marjetica Potrc, Public Matters, Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Rebar, roomservices, and Åsa Sonjasdotter--some of whom use parody to point out the absurdity of existing (non)strategies, while others take a more proactive approach. On a micro-level, LA-based collective Fallen Fruit maps the free fruit in their city's neighborhoods and encourages public consumption and awareness at "Public Jams" in which jam is made of these freebies. On a larger scale, Swedish artist Åsa Sonjasdotter created The Potato Perspective in order to use this root vegetable as a touchstone for tracking food trade, genetic modification, the political barriers to growing and eating healthy foods, and the future of sustenance in increasingly-colder climates. YBCA will also be hosting a series of public talks and workshops that address the themes of the show while inviting the audience to participate in the solutions presented. - Marisa Olson

Fallen Fruit, American Family, 2008, (Credit: Fallen Fruit)

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Video Disharmonies

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-24T15:45:00+01:00

On October 29th, the new Temporäre Kunsthalle will open in Berlin, making the city even more of an international art mecca. Their inaugural exhibition features four ambitious multi-channel video installations by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz. The show will open in two waves, beginning with her installations Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna). In each of these pieces, fans of the musicians have been invited to sing entire albums by Madonna, Michael Jackson, and John Lennon. With each performance shot in precisely the same way, the resulting headshots are presented in the round, a circle of voices aimed at each other, almost duking it out for the title of ultimate spectator, in front of a perpetual blue screen that marks the whole thing as a production. While Breitz is often celebrated for her witty and clever embrace of pop culture, there is a deeper current to her work which revolves around close scrutiny of the relationship between the formation of celebrity at the hands of mass media and the role of these machinations in the culture industry. In these ways, her often autobiographical parodies of pop figures are not so different from the real thing--afterall, it's the idea of Madonna that we see in the media, more than Madonna herself. If a circle of people singing Madge's hits can constitute a "portrait" of her, it's because her image is best reflected in the way that consumers drink-up her message. Then again, this creates a nice tension in the new work Breitz will premiere in the second half of the show. Him + Her is a two channel project employing several decades' worth of found footage from the films of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Putting the fan-element aside, in the Him half, Nicholson faces off against 23 versions of himself, while the Her side features a melange of 28 Streeps. Arguably two of the most successful, famous American actors, their clips will speak directly to the paradox implied by the phrase "Jack Nicholson character," where that person's media persona, archetypal constructions, and efforts to play against type inevitably conflict to comprise the type of median impression visualized here. So ultimately, of course, the cycle is still completed by spectators, and Breitz fans are sure to applaud. - Marisa Olson

Image: Candice Breitz, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), 2005

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World of Goo

Ed Halter — 2008-10-22T18:20:00+01:00

Designed in the 18th century, the Parc de Bruxelles, located in the center of Brussels, allegedly contains a hidden symbol in its layout, visible only from the air: a Masonic compass, signified by a circle atop a triangle. For GEO GOO (Info Park), currently on view at iMAL with elements online, Internet art trailblazers JODI have created a series of their own arcane symbols by employing 21st century geographic technology, leveraging Google Maps' innate functions in the service of graphic expression. Manipulating a variety of default icons, some of JODI's animations use maps of the Parc de Bruxelles itself: one places a crowd of tiny green explorers on the Parc, hiking the Masonic compass; another iteration generates new symbols on the Parc's layout each time it loads -- including euros, yen, houses, touristy cameras and red crosses -- obliquely evoking semi-random political significance when layered atop the center of the EU. Other examples utilize global maps, pushing the limits of Google's service to create jittering compositions, while some avoid the land altogether to enable exercises in a more pure abstraction. GEO GOO harkens back to a 2007 work by JODI, GEO GEO, in which they traced words and whole sentences onto the maps of various cities (chosen for having lent their names to fonts). Both projects continue the Dutch-Belgian duo's intricate and obsessive drive to derange the Internet from inside out, taking advantage of innate quirks and loopholes in available systems in the service of a punked-out creative jujitsu. - Ed Halter

Image: JODI, GEO GOO (Info Park), 2008

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Changing the (Art?) World

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-20T15:24:00+01:00

While both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are running for office on the platform of change, the question that seems to be on many peoples' minds is the kind of change that will in fact be effected--no matter whom is elected. Mobilization around the leading candidate, in many ways, resembles a swelling social movement, but the extent to which the mainstream media is implicated in this movement begs the question of the shifting relationship between politics and those other visual spectacles we call Art. The current exhibition at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, entitled "After October," asks precisely this question of what's changing (or what needs to change) in art's ability to operate politically, while pivoting on a double entendre that speculates on what will happen after election day and ruminating on what happened to art following the October Revolution. Curator Tim Saltarelli's curatorial statement poses the question of whether a new approach might be taken, given the recent misfires in protest art wherein an effort to negate a political system or scenario instead resulted in entrenching it. The work of Andreas Bunte, Duncan Campbell, Thea Djordjadze, Matias Faldbakken, Claire Fontaine, Luca Frei, Cyprien Gaillard and Pia Rönicke is presented in remembrance of these historical moments and their resultant iconography. After all, the recognizability of, say, "May 1968 Art," which has effectively become a brand, is part of the problem. Saltarelli's invitation is for the art world to begin allowing "for works of art to resonate in different ways than being literal, that are not, always, immediately, accessible." Perhaps in our efforts to break these codes we will decipher new ways of thinking about how to change the world. - Marisa Olson

Image credit: Claire Fontaine, First Flight (2001), 2005. (Two twenty-five cent coins, steel box-cutter blades, solder and rivets)

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Whoops!

Tyler Coburn — 2008-10-17T15:37:00+01:00

A perfect thesis for Olaf Breuning's current exhibition at Metro Pictures greets one at the gallery's entrance: several vinyl versions of the artist's name, in different fonts, have been crossed out and appended with the statement, "...at least I tried." The failure to achieve a perfect consonance of authorial name and aesthetic, and the pathetic comedy played out in the multiplication and dismissal of alternatives, carries throughout the exhibition's various bodies of work, which collectively offer a veritable symptomatology of cultural consumption in the networked age. Six white, ceramic busts form vaguely biomorphic bases for "heads" like The Big Challenge (all works 2008), a scale balancing a bucket of plastic boobs and a stack of books, and the Koonsian collection of primary color PVC gloves that comprise the visage of Bird Dog. Giant C-prints alternate between irreverent portraits, like that of a man balancing tiers of filled shot glasses with hands, feet, and nose (Impossible Balance Act), and performative and digital interventions into landscapes. Dozens of smoke bombs yield a painterly action, in Smoke Bombs, while Fire and Why Can't You Not Be Nice With Nature? foreground global concerns, the former depicting a NYC street scene overlaid with hundreds of digitized fire effects, and the latter a bucolic landscape interrupted by an airborne flock of birds, arranged into the letters of the image's title. Over forty of the artist's "Adderall Series" drawings fill every conceivable bit of remaining wall space, frequently jabbing at history and politics with a comparably dumb and unsettling humor to that of the photographs. An oil well sprouts and spouts from a head (More Oil More Oil), or the Chinese Wall surrounds a tiny White House (Chinese Wall), and we chuckle, partly to mask our unease. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Olaf Breuning, Helicopter Hair, 2008

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Earth Sounds

Ceci Moss — 2008-10-16T15:00:00+01:00

Returning for its third year, the Electronic Music Foundation's acclaimed sound art, music and ecology festival Ear to the Earth will take place this month in locations all over New York City. Ear to the Earth is organized around the principle that sound's distinct emotional impact makes it a significant medium in which to explore environmental concerns such as global warming, extinction and habitat destruction. Divided into two sections, "New York Soundscapes" and "Other Soundscapes," this year's events maintain a strong urban emphasis. Andrea Polli's installation Cloud Car, takes the automobile, a key force within the development of American cities, as its locus. With the aide of special effects technician Chuck Varga, Polli will envelop a Ford Taurus station wagon entirely in mist. Visitors will be invited to sit in the car and listen to environmental sound compositions. Resembling a broken down vehicle on the side of a highway, the work is a poignant symbol for America's current predicament in regards to oil dependency. Cloud Car will be on display at Eyebeam October 18th and will then move to the New York Hall of Science on October 25th. LoVid will also examine energy in their performance Sunification (for Sync Armonica & solar sound) on Thursday October 16th. Drawing from their 2007 Turbulence commission Bonding Energy, in which the duo positioned seven solar panels across New York State in order to collect and transmit solar energy information to a site that visualized this data, their performance will use this same solar data as a basis for live mixing and manipulation with a device known as the Sync Armonica. Other performances scheduled for the festival will foreground the experience of the city from a personal perspective. On October 17th, Marina Rosenfeld will debut Near Speakers, where she will use field recordings of the 'bleed' from cheap earbud headphones in spaces such as trains and elevators, an everyday experience for many, in a unique DJ set. Following Near Speakers, Miya Masaoka will present Quest for Minetta Creek, which looks at the mythology surrounding the underground streams of New York City. Departing from the idea that waterways will eventually go above ground and take over the streets in the event that humans were to depart, Masaoka interviewed residents living near the underground water source Minetta Creek about their knowledge of and interaction with the stream and pairs this with field recordings of the Minetta itself. Imaginative and slightly dystopic, the work captures city dwellers' common remove from environmental forces. - Ceci Moss

Image: Andrea Polli, Cloud Car, 2008

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Sounds Across Town

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-13T16:00:00+01:00

It would be hard to identify a small town with a bigger history than Marfa, Texas. This little desert town is an artistic oasis and has been a polestar for installation and land art (the Chinati and Judd Foundations reside here), the film community (many a major movie has been filmed here, including most recently No Country For Old Men), and enthusiasts of natural phenomena, for whom the Marfa Lights and Big Bend Natural Park create a mecca. Ballroom Marfa is a diamond in this dust bowl. While Marfa is often visited for its permanent installations, the organization presents temporary exhibitions of newer work by interesting artists from around the world. Their current show is co-organized by power house curators Regine Basha, Lucy Raven, and Rebecca Gates. Entitled "The Marfa Sessions," the show features fifteen artists -- five of whom are presenting original work -- who engage sound as a way to engage and transcend spaces. Rather than being confined to the gallery, their work broadcasts "sounds across town," as the exhibition subtitle advertises, nesting itself into the nooks and crannies of the tiny West Texas city. These artists are Emily Jacir, Nina Katchadourian, Christina Kubisch, Louise Lawler, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kaffe Matthews, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Dario Robleto, Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello, Steve Rowell & Simparch, Deborah Stratman & Steven Badgett, and Julianne Swartz. Many of them are well-known for their contributions to the field of sound art, while others are best-known for work in other media, which makes their participation in "The Marfa Sessions" so exciting. Their works and associated public programs and performances are documented on the show's blog, in the unfortunate event that you can't make it south in time. - Marisa Olson

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Art-Up Your Computering

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-10T12:45:00+01:00

The awesome New York arts organization Artists Space has come up with three new ways to spice up your computering, no matter where you live. If we had to make a list of the main things we do on our computers everyday, wouldn't typing, watching YouTube videos, and staring at our desktop be high on the index? Now Artists Space--under the savvy influence of curator Joseph Del Pesco--has initiated three ways to art-up those acts. The first, "TypeCast", is a series highlighting one artist-designed font per month, available as a free download. This month, you can find Mungo Thomson's Negative Space, which he describes as "a graphic scaffolding for the sake of alpha-numeric meaning." It's cool and it will totally impress your employer. Following "TypeCast" is "YouTube Commentary Project," which addresses a major problem with the video-sharing site. There just isn't enough commentary and recursion there! (sic!) Nonetheless, inviting smart international artists to verbalize their reactions atop the video of their choice sounds like a can't-lose idea. Stay tuned to Artists Space's YouTube channel for more of these videos, which premiered with a work by Cesare Pietroiusti. And finally, if you're a fan of the element of surprise, then "Artists Space Daily" is for you. It's "a free software program that downloads an artist 'postcard' from the internet and places it on the desktop of your computer, once per day." While this brings art into viewers' lives that they neither have to pay for nor live with for more than 24 hours, the project brings attention to international emerging artists you just may want to see again. It's all fun, it's all free, and it's all for the love of contemporary art, so get with the program and get to downloading. - Marisa Olson

Image: Mungo Thomson, Negative Space, 2008

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Viva Svetlana!

Tyler Coburn — 2008-10-08T13:17:00+01:00

Opening this weekend at S1 Artspace, in Sheffield, "Svetlana" is the second project by Pil and Galia Kollectiv to draw inspiration from a work by Waw Pierogi. While Pierogi is best known as the founder of 1980s New Jersey-based synth outfit xex (and was only then known to a handful of obscurantists), he also concocted an unrealized, audio-visual homage to the asparagus ("Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet") and an operatic account of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, who twice defected from the Soviet Union. The scarce information available about each work lends particularly well to the Kollectiv's method of post-historical assemblage, predicated less on faithful recreation than on "the possibilities opened up by marrying the ideas left by yesterday's art movements." For "Svetlana," the Kollectiv strikes a Kittleresque pose, weaving its protagonist's life into an espionage epic involving Leon Theremin, the eponymous instrument's inventor later kidnapped by the KGB, and a plot to create sound weapons from the acoustic locators that preceded radar technology, but were subsequently used, as props, to conceal radar from the Germans. These elements visually coalesce in the form of fictional photo documentation of rehearsals for the opera, as well as location shots, all resembling a Bauhaus drama class and reminding viewers of one of many historical intersections between aesthetics and military technology. - Tyler Coburn

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Questions, Comments, Reactions?

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-06T16:01:00+01:00

When the cinematic masterpiece Wayne's World was released in 1992, their tag line was, "You'll Laugh, You'll Cry...You'll Hurl!" Who among us couldn't say the same about the media blunders we've seen recently, in connection with the U.S. presidential elections? Brooklyn-based artistic duo MTAA dramatize this sort of overwhelming desire to emote in their newest project, Our Political Work, which they describe as Beckett-like. The "Waiting For Godot" playwright might well approve of their creation, which features 141 clips of the artists screaming, laughing, and yelling as they wait in vain for something to change. The clips are randomly strung together using generative software, not unlike the clips in their One Year Performance Video, thus locking them in a state of perpetual indignity. The longer one watches, though, the more they are called upon to consider the roles of the artists and the very nature of their "political work." Are they political agents or spectators? Are their blurts and indiscretions responses to the behavior of political actors, or are they themselves enacting politics? Take a look for yourself, online. The piece is hosted by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, whose LX 2.0 Project commissioned the work. - Marisa Olson

Image: MTAA, Our Political Work, 2008 (Screenshot)

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A Big New Space for New Media

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-03T13:48:00+01:00

As of today, the U.S. will have a bold new venue for new media art and performance: EMPAC. Short for Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, the Troy, NY-based facility embodies state-of-the-artness and its affiliation with the highly regarded research university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, ensures that the installations, performances, and concerts presented there will always be ahead of the technological curve. The space, itself, is a masterpiece. The 220,000-square foot building, designed by Grimshaw, includes a 1200-seat concert hall with an adjustable fabric ceiling; a 400-seat theater with a 70-foot fly tower; two black-box studio spaces with tunable, tilting wall tiles; and acoustically isolated artist/researcher work spaces. Within these walls, and under the direction of Johannes Goebel (who helped found ZKM) and curators Kathleen Forde, Hélène Lesterlin, and Micah Silver, visitors will experience work that emphasizes immersion, interactivity, and time-based media. For the next three weekends, EMPAC will present a major festival full of provocative performances and installations by The Wooster Group, dumb type, Workspace Unlimited, Verdensteatret, Vox Vocal Ensemble and International Contemporary Ensemble, Per Tengstrand, Madlib, Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, Richard Siegal/The Bakery, Robert Normandeau, Fieldwork, Gamelan Galak Tika + Ensemble Robot, and others. This unveiling has been several years in the making but reservations are going fast, so you won't want to wait to get your tickets and get over to Troy. - Marisa Olson

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Computational Poetics

Marisa Olson — 2008-10-01T17:30:00+01:00

Caleb Larsen's solo exhibition at Philadelphia's Esther Klein Gallery presents a series of conjectures, testing our assumptions, estimations, and in some cases naiveté with regard to digital information. His installation, Monument, constantly scans 4,500 English-language news feeds and drops yellow BBs on the floor each time it finds a report of a person dying. Over time, the tiny balls will pile-up and form a sort of monochromatic monument to the unknown dead. In a sense, it visually cashes-in on the death craze that often seems to grip the media. Many of his other pieces draw on appropriation and literary adaptation. Who's Life Is It Anyway? asks what it would mean to pilfer other people's Twitter pages for autobiographical lines of one's own (and here, the "auto-" seems tongue-in-cheek, if not ironic). In other works, Larsen has taken on the not-so-small feat of converting both Shakespeare's entire oeuvre and the Epic of Gilgamesh into new forms. In the former case, he's translated all of the text into a visual field of colored squares, while the latter is returned to orality when a computer is ordered to read the ancient epic aloud. Larsen's stated interest is one of using logic-based systems to explore the differences between digital and physical spaces. At times, the results are poetic and, at other times, he seems to be leading us to the discordant conclusion that the proposed affinities do not compute. - Marisa Olson

Image: Caleb Larsen, Monument (Detail), 2006

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Continually Redefining Game Art

Marisa Olson — 2008-09-29T18:00:00+01:00

No longer mere distractions cooked-up by programmers as a form of light relief in the early days of computers, video games have evolved into a variety of forms and have had a wide impact on multiple generations. To some extent, the same can now be said of art that addresses video games, the visual complexity and conceptual richness of which has grown with the medium. An exhibition guest-curated by artists Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum at Arthouse explores "the history, control mechanisms, political and art-historical implications of electronic games" by surveying both better-known and more emerging practitioners of game-related art, including Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Mike Beradino, Brody Condon, Alex Galloway, JODI, Guthrie Lonergan, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay, Michael Smith, Eddo Stern, and Keita Takahashi. RESET/PLAY is up through November 2nd and is accompanied by a series of public events that includes a night of video game competitions and a performance by New York-based sound artists Loud Objects. - Marisa Olson

Image: Brody Condon, Judgment Modification (After Memling), 2008 (Courtesy of the artist and Virgil de Voldère Gallery, New York, NY)

Object Study

Tyler Coburn — 2008-09-26T15:15:00+01:00

Familiar objects double, stretch and twist in "Manufacturing Flaws," Mexican-Japanese artist Hisae Ikenaga's current exhibition at Praxis, in New York. Large wall sculptures of a helicopter, plane, motorcycle and car, made with brightly colored carpet felt, hang on pins throughout the gallery space. Adopting a playful take on "the possible physical anomalies developed in mass-produced objects," Ikenaga has distorted each rendering: the helicopter sprouts two propellers, for instance; and, in a potentially sobering turn, an airplane sprouts twin heads. Unfortunately, small, paper collage replicas of these artworks, also included in the show, detract from the novelty and material charm of their big brothers. More interesting is Ikenaga's Aislados (Isolated) (2007), a three-dimensional island topography created within the pages of a Spanish telephone book. The book sits open on a pedestal, its right side holding the island elevation, and its left side the relief. The winner of the Generación 2008 prize, Aislados (Isolated) creates an interesting overlap between population and geography, in building an island out of a book of names, while also offering a funny amplification of the antisocial, labor-intensive process its creation entailed. A similar agenda informs Siamese Book, a hardcover copy of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude that the artist has torqued at its binding and seamed, page-by-page, at its center. Books and solitude, it would seem, are excellent materials for self-reflexive art-making. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Hisae Ikenaga, Aislados (Isolated), 2007

Free Play

Ed Halter — 2008-09-24T15:20:00+01:00

Italian artists Molleindustria promise "radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment," and their latest effort may be their most direct statement against the pleasure industry to date. Touted as "playable theory," the Free Culture Game offers a ludic metaphor for the battle between copyright encroachments and the free exchange of knowledge, ideas and art. A circular field represents The Common, where knowledge can be freely shared and created; your job is to maintain a healthy ecology of yellow idea-bubbles bouncing from person to person before they can be sucked into the dark outer ring representing the forces of The Market. Your cursor, shaped like the Creative Commons logo, pushes the ideas around with a sort of reverse-magnetic repulsion field (a clever alternative to the typical shooting, eating or jumping-on-top-of-and-smooshing actions of many other 2-D games). People who absorb free, round ideas stay green and happy, while those who only consume square market-produced ones become grey and inverted. The game never really ends: you can only do better or worse, suggesting by analogy that the fight for free culture will be an ongoing struggle without end. For those who wish to kill additional worktime minutes, Molleindustria's site includes an archive of past games, which take on topics such as the clash of religions, the Catholic Church pedophile scandal, flextime, labor and their notorious take on McDonald's, a cute simulator that takes you from slaughterhouse to boardroom. - Ed Halter

Image: Free Culture Game (Screenshot)

Re-Animator

2008-09-22T12:00:00+01:00

Kota Ezawa's current exhibit at Murray Guy, New York presents two new pieces done in the artist's own established method of rotoscoping, for which he uses a computer to re-draw individual frames from video or film source materials, then compiles them into moving images, granting his work the look of motion-captured digital animation, but created through a more classic, labor-intensive process. The first is Brawl, based on a YouTube video of an infamous 2004 Pistons-Pacers game that erupted into a massive free-for-all fight. Ezawa retains the footage's original soundtrack, and has transferred his animation to 16mm, looped for exhibition. The second, LYAM 3D, repurposes moments from Alain Resnais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, choosing sequences in which actors stand stock-still while the camera pans. His video is processed in stereoscopic 3D, and watched through colored glasses, giving the re-drawn actors the quality of 2.5-D cut-out puppets. The two pieces continue the artist's penchant for taking on emotionally-charged sources (the OJ Simpson trial, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape, the Kennedy assassination) and draining them of their punch by rendering them as superflat, designy cartoons. The artist has said that he aims for a "banality" or "hollowed-out" quality for his work, and in this objective he succeeds. He also claims to see his work as moving paintings, rather than films or videos per se -- citing Brawl, for example, as a nod to compositions one might find in a work by Rubens. However, these would be rather unambitious goals for anyone who takes on the medium of animation; one wonders, for example, if the use of 16mm might bear any greater consequence than its ability to project more muted tones. Though some viewers apparently find satisfaction in Ezawa's coy formal references and cool graphic capability, those who expect a more complicated and significant experience from the moving image will not. - Ed Halter

Image: Kota Ezawa, LYAM 3D, 2008

Termite Art for Terminators

2008-09-19T12:00:00+01:00

For a show with such a substantial title -- Hyper-Spatial Sentient Sopper Serum Scillystrations of Morph-Feral-Foglet-Fabbed Smart-Gels and Quacker-Cast Dataclouds of Public Panopticon Powder on Airborne Algorithmicracked-Out Recreational Diseases -- Shane Hope's exhibit at the Schroeder Romero / Winkleman Gallery Project Space in New York is easy to miss. Mounted in the short, cramped hallway connected the Schroeder Romero to the adjacent Winkleman gallery, it consists of hand-drawn museum-style wall plaques, each marked with a paper tag, as if the actual contents of the exhibit had been moved or borrowed. Upon closer inspection, the story told is much weirder: each absent artwork and its plaque appear to be from an art exhibit decades in the future. One piece entitled Going Splaces is "attributed to endLoc_encod*rk" and is said to consist of "Non-rival routing hyper-spatial wormhole in floating sheet of veiny tissue culture"; its tag claims that the artwork itself was removed for "interspecies study." Another work named How to Display Trans-Substrational Smartificial-Stoop-Ditty Cystemics Sic Schtick Ball, dated from 2066, by getArtistTrace (is that a name or a glitch?) purports to be made of an "airborne recreational disease induced qulinked crystalline rod matrix manifold pushed psy-pry pub-moldy foldies on a seeing-eye orb." This "Gift of cRo0k{$uE^Y1@, 2080.8.54" has been taken away due to "Quarantine/Immunizations." Spoofing both the cryptic inflations of contemporary art-speak and the rapid linguistic-mutations wrought by technological change (imagine explaining "text-messaging" or "phone pictures" to a time-traveler from 1985), Hope's whacked-out art-as-language-game has a warmly and disjunctively retro Joycean feel, but also alludes to the heretofore seldom-asked question of what art will be like in a post-Singularity existence. - Ed Halter

A Question of Form

2008-09-17T12:00:00+01:00

Conceptual formalism receives a contemporary appraisal in "The Form Itself," a group show currently on display at New York's Priska C. Jushka Fine Art. Curated by artist Michael Bühler-Rose, the exhibition finds nine predominantly emerging artists conducting "a self-reflective dialogue on the potential and purity" of their mediums, be they painting, photography, video or sculpture. This broad and somewhat undercooked curatorial conceit results in an elegant but uneven show, where self-reflectivity is often manifest in a tautological affirmation of an object or discipline's constituent parts, as with Talia Chetrit's Grotjahn-esque color investigations or the Lewitt-meets-readymade sculpture Possible Form (from "100 Variations") (2008) by Roula Partheniou, made from one-hundred monochrome Rubik's Cubes. The strongest works end up being the least discursively entrenched, mining the formal qualities and social and economic connotations of contemporary objects. Joy Drury Cox's spare, precise graphite drawings of employment applications of chains like Starbucks and Wendy's, stripped of all textual content, expose the common structural parameters within which applicants render their professional self-portraits. Another standout is Adrian Crabbs' Shipping Pallet 2 (2008), one in a larger series of paintings the artist made by pressing one side of a paint-covered pallet onto linen. Given the pallet's paradoxical role in contemporary trade -- a sub-structure so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible to consumers -- Crabbs' concrete utilization of the object to generate its own trace-like representation is appropriate and evocative. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Roula Partheniou, "Possible Form" (from "100 Variations"), 2008

I'm On The Computer

2008-09-15T12:00:00+01:00

Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Erving Goffman proposed in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that the very warp and woof of the social world consists of carefully constructed dramaturgy, albeit of a manner that most performers were unconscious. Our daily lives and cultural rituals provide all the settings, costumes, props and scripts we need to take our roles. The same logic underpins our movement through digital spaces and online communities, but unhinged from the necessities of physical limitations, and with a greater promise of self-transformation -- the dream of a complete rebooting of the self. Such notions may emerge at "Avatar: the New You," an exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography that mixes the Web 2.0 vernacular of user-generated images with parallel but more self-critical art projects. The show includes fan-created screenshots from massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Second Life and documentation of SimGuys.net, a virtual emporium of fashionable dude wear for Sims characters, but also media installations by artists Claudia Hart, Myfanwy Ashmore, Melissa Ramos and Rhys Turner, and Tobias Bernstrup, as well as photography by Daniel Handal and performance documentation by Justin Shoulder. Two artists' works that themselves gained a foothold in greater internet culture are also included: screenshots from Tale of Tales' gentle multiplayer game The Endless Forest (2006), in which players take the roles of deer, and Aram Bartholl's First Person Shooter (2005), a pair of custom specs that give you the look of Doom. - Ed Halter

Image: Arahan Claveau, Lupus Delacroix, Second Life 2008

Democracy Now

2008-09-12T12:00:00+01:00

"Democracy in America: The National Campaign" sounds more like the title of an action movie than a blockbuster public art initiative, but the Creative Time-produced project promises to be a heavy-hitter. The title for this prominent series of multifarious happenings, art projects, performances, and more takes its name from a novel written by a young Alexis de Tocqueville after his first tour of the US, in which he searched for an answer to the question of why the concept of representative republican democracy had been so successful in America. The importance of this question endures, especially now, and it is central to curator Nato Thompson's undertaking, which is a serious evaluation of the state of participatory politics in this country. On September 21st, The Democracy in America Convergence Center at Park Avenue Armory will open, the exhibition portion of the campaign. Containing over 40 artists and filling three very large floors in Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the show includes newly-commissioned work, seminal tactical media projects, and several live speeches and performances, all of which succeed in demonstrating the important role that spectacle can play in representing the fantasies and needs of the republic. - Marisa Olson

Image: Rachel Mason, Kissing President Bush, 2004

Vertex on the Verge

2008-09-10T12:00:00+01:00

Long devoted to contemporary technology art in its many forms, Williamsburg Brooklyn's half-decade-old Vertexlist Gallery promises much more in the future: the exhibitor recently announced a "new 5-year plan of growth and development," now under the auspices of gallery director Charles Beronio, who takes over the reigns from founder Marcin Ramocki. To kick off its next phase, Vertexlist is hosting the exhibit "New Blood," which promises to "probe" the "the empty, vacant, and vacuous nature" of contemporary existence, featuring an array of work by Double Happiness, Lance Wakeling, Jeanne Verdoux, Sergio De La Torre, Sujin Lee and Sasha Dela. The event launches with on September 13th with "Given to Want," a live performance by the funny, fantastic and sometimes frightening artist Nao Bustamante. - Ed Halter

The Future of New Media, Two Years at a Time

2008-09-08T16:35:00+01:00

For the last ten years, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale has been among the most accurate and important touchstones for activity in the field of new media art. This year's biennale (open September 12-November 5) seeks not only to act as the kind of hotness barometer than many such shows function as, but also as a convergence site for the so-called traditional media and new media communities, asking how the two can work together in the future--or, indeed, looking at how they already overlap. Operating under the subtitle "Turn and Widen," the exhibition and associated symposium is organized into sub-themes on Light, Time, and Communication and features dozens of international artists. If you're not in Korea, consider visiting their artist pages from the comfort of your computer. - Marisa Olson

The Scale of Intervention

2008-09-05T12:00:00+01:00

Co-organized by Conflux
Moderated by Wooster Collective, with CutUp Collective, Leon Reid IV (of Darius + Downey), Betsey Biggs, and Roadsworth

Friday, September 5th, 7:30pm
the New Museum, New York, NY
$6 Members, $8 General Public

Join us this evening at 7:30pm for this month's New Silent Series program at the New Museum, entitled "The Scale of Intervention." Co-organized by Conflux, an annual festival dedicated to psychogeography, and moderated by the founders of the celebrated street art website Wooster Collective, this panel will look at possibilities for artistic disruption within urban environments. Taking its name from a film by the London-based Cutup Collective, which plays with the viewer's perception of a street scene, the panel will feature artists whose work ranges across a variety of mediums and materials. From reformulation of billboard advertisements into powerful, politically-oriented collages to the subversive reformulation of street signs, such as pedestrian crossings and bike lanes, the featured artists will demonstrate how they dislodge the customary navigation and perception of urban space.

Image: Roadsworth, North American Footprint (Parc Ave., Montreal, Quebec, September 2004)

Exploring Big Boxes, In and Out of the White Cube

2008-09-03T12:00:00+01:00

The face of the American landscape has been forever changed by the invention of the "big box." These giant, typically nondescript retail meccas exemplified by Wal-Mart not only lead to the mowing-over of existing terrain, they also shift the cultural ecology of a space and bring with them more roads, more cars, and more garbage. But what happens when companies abandon these spaces in favor of paired-down, web-based operations? This is the question that artist Julia Christensen asks in her project Big Box Reuse. She's spent the last five years touring these renounced superstores, photographing them, collecting local residents' stories about the community impacts of the big boxes, and writing a forthcoming book. Documentation of these efforts are being exhibited through November 23rd at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery in an show curated by Astria Suparak, entitled "Your Town, Inc." Meanwhile, Turbulence has commissioned a forthcoming wiki on which the artist will invite people from across the country to upload their own stories, photos, and videos. Among the project's most poignant ironies is the question of what happens when the retailers that trade in over-packaged, often not-recyclable goods fail to successfully repurpose the structures in which they once perpetuated disposable culture. - Marisa Olson

Image: Julia Christensen, the Snowy Range Academy (Renovated Wal-Mart located in Laramie, WY) from Big Box Reuse, 2006

Somewhere Out There

2008-09-01T12:00:00+01:00

"Artificial World," a two-week exhibition on view at New York's Mountain Fold, assembles works by six Japanese and American artists that explore "ideas of made-up, artificial, or simulated worlds." Visually, the show could not be more eclectic -- shelves of compact discs, knit objects, sprawling fabric paintings and gelatinous sculptures populate the small gallery. Common to many of the works, however, is an interest in the social and creative parameters of virtual space. Ben Fino-Radin, for example, has struck upon a neat, if somewhat twee, techno-meets-craft aesthetic vocabulary. In wall installations like Potience Module (2008), discreet, knit objects (largely depicting computer iconography, including code, mouse icons and the much-reviled hourglass) aggregate in symmetrical, totemic structures. Strips of black tape become disciplinary intermediaries in Aki Goto's big, energetic wall piece (Untitled, 2008), linking fabric and canvas paintings of cats with small, exquisite drawings in graphite and pen. The strongest of the latter presents a humorous take on virtual communities, equally steeped in the visual language of early-80s arcade games and the urban-abstraction of Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-3), as small, smiling heads form points within webs of overlapping lines. While these and most of the exhibition's other works settle on shallow inquiry - at times to their benefit - Masaru Aikawa's My 25 CDs (2008) strikes a deeper chord. Citing an interest in Benjamin and Warhol and a concern for the status of the artwork in the digital era, Aikawa has "passionately and respectfully duplicated," a cappella, twenty-five of his CDs. Aikawa's heartfelt vocal imitation of the ambient electronics of Kraftwerk's Autobahn provides the most hysterical treat. On a broader level, Aikawa makes a serious comment on twenty-first century virtual consumption, by means of his self-portrait as strange, irreverent fan. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Ben Fino-Radin, Process NG Unit, 2008

Northwesterly

2008-08-29T12:00:00+01:00

Vanessa Renwick, who produces video under the rubric of The Oregon Department of Kick Ass, is one of the cornerstones of Portland's remarkably fecund scene for moving-image art. Her video Portrait #2: Trojan (2006) documents the last days of the locally-maligned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant, which once rose like a toxic concrete toadstool above the lush temperate rainforests that cover the area's rolling landscape; at the video's end, the plant explodes under planned detonations, sending a quiet plume of smoke into the sky. The strange marriage Renwick chronicles between nature and technology is one familiar to the culture of the region, as captured in the Seattle Art Museum's current show "Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest." In addition to Renwick's piece, Ron Tran's The Peckers (2004) records an experiment in which the artist covered electric guitars and drum kits with birdseed and set them in a park, then recorded the ensuing avian orchestra. Further north, Kevin Schmidt's Long Beach Led Zep (2002) depicts Schmidt on a beach in British Columbia, performing a rendition of "Stairway to Heaven" on a generator-powered electric guitar. The Canadian-American lineup rounds out with short works by Jeremy Shaw, Miranda July, Will Rogan, and Jack Daws. - Ed Halter

Image: Kevin Schmidt, Long Beach Led Zep, 2002

Walking on Coals, er...Sunshine

2008-08-27T16:10:00+01:00

Video, performance, and installation artist Kate Gilmore often draws on pop culture and musical lyrics to frame her work. We think, then, that she might not mind our saying that the elaborate, yet beautifully and sophisticatedly straightforward challenges she designs for herself might best be described by reciting the first words of the theme song for perpetually syndicated sitcom, Cheers: "Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got." This melancholy refrain is the perfect truism against which to witness Gilmore's physical testimony to the facts that life is hard, the life of an artist is hard, and the life of a female artist is, well... hard. But of course, Gilmore manages to make clear--in a way that channels Valie Export as much as Charlie Chaplin--that there's no reason that one can't have fun climbing whatever furniture piles life may throw in one's way. In fact, if one dolls themselves up in slick satins and slathers themselves in the lipstick befitting a lady, then snaking one's way through the kinds of trap doors and tumultuous tunnels the artist creates in her work is nearly a piece of cake--not that she doesn't put a pot of elbow grease into conquering every such obstacle. On September 5th, Philadelphia's Institute for Contemporary Art will open a solo exhibition of Gilmore's work. It will survey previous projects and present a new entry to this trademark series in which installation, performance, and video documentation commingle. - Marisa Olson

Image: Kate Gilmore, Every Girl Loves Pink, 2006, Video

A Series of 'Tubes

2008-08-25T12:00:00+01:00

Constant Dullaart's series "YouTube as Subject" plays with the image of the arrow-in-a-square button that appears in an embedded YouTube video. When clicked, Dullaart's videos retain their initial black backgrounds, but the arrow-buttons remain, plummeting, strobing, trembling, or turning into a mini-disco light show. In true YouTube spirit, Ben Coonley recently posted his own series as response, this time appropriating the spinning wheel of dots that eager viewers need to sit through as a video loads—in keeping with his longstanding interest in media breakdowns and frustrations. Coonley's dot-wheel now drifts off into the distance, accelerates rotation, and (betraying Coonley's Providence-scene roots) expands into a psychedelic black-and-white OpArt swirl. Better not put off watching Dullaart and Coonley's 'tubed conversation, however. Cory Arcangel's Blue Tube, made only last year, has quickly become near-obsolete. Back then, YouTube embedded a logo bug in the corner of its videos, and Blue Tube simply turned that logo blue. Now, however, after its host site's redesign, it doesn't always function in quite the right way. Who knows how long our friends arrow-button and spinning-wheel-thingy will last? - Ed Halter

Image: Constant Dullaart, "YouTube Disco" from the series "YouTube as Subject", 2008

Change It Up

2008-08-22T12:00:00+01:00

The ongoing US Presidential race is coming to such a head that even media stories about media coverage of the campaigns are flooding the wires. But how does this grand spectacle translate abroad? Given that America is so invested in branding itself as an exporter of democracy, the elections are a key opportunity to transmit this ideology. A new performance exchange project initiated by artist Elana Mann, entitled "Exchange Rate," invites artists from Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, Israel, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and, of course, the USA to collaborate on "producing, exchanging and interpreting performance directions related to the election campaign." Towing the choose or lose line, the participants will post instructions for creative acts that other artists will elect to perform. Part of the effort is to see how the further development of mass media has effected the evolution of collaborative artistic models borne in the Fluxus era, by strategically conflating artistic media, the communicative media by which the work is broadcast, and the news media through which the President is arguably elected. The resulting performances will be highlighted in partnership with the upcoming UnConvention project, with Trade & Row's "Campaign Trail" series, and in other online and offline events. Stay tuned to see if "Exchange Rate" can bring new meaning to the phrase "making change." - Marisa Olson

Prickly Situations

2008-08-20T12:00:00+01:00

Jonathan Soderstrom's Ad Nauseam 2 is a space shooter game that provides an overwhelming synesthetic experience: start playing and you'll find yourself restarting over and over again as you learn to master its maneuvers and get drawn into its psychoactive swirl of color and sound. Your podlike ship shoots two kinds of energy blasts and can also emit a kind of gravity pulse that beautifully blows away debris around it; your enemies begin as a pair of crudely-drawn semi-happy-face blobs that grow into menacing starfishes, turn into ASCII robo-ships, then ramp up to a final boss battle. Ad Nauseam 2 is one of several indie games available on Soderstrom's Cactus Software site, including Burn the Trash and Shotgun Ninja, that work with ancient arcade and first-gen console forms like the shooter and platformer, ramping up their audio-visual intensity, twitchiness and formal ingenuity for a hungrier generation of gamers. But other Cactus games are more contemplative, playing with narrative structures and standard expectations: for that kind of head trip, try out the Lewis-Carroll-esque Psychosomnium, which presents a world in a dream, or the starkly existential explorations of Mondo Medicals. - Ed Halter

Image: Jonathan Soderstrom, Ad Nauseam 2 (Still)