appropriation
Shared Frequencies (2007) - Kabir Carter
Shared Frequencies is a portable sound installation and performance environment that relies on multiplex radio communications events as its primary performance material. An array of radio scanners is paired with a set of analog synthesizer modules, and assembled on a set of small, modest folding tables. The scanners pick up a wide variety of speech, encoded data streams, and noise that are converted into (more) synthetic sound. The results of these electroacoustic interactions are projected into the air, and the sounds heard are physically modified by the shape and volume of the installation's site.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENTLearning is So Tangible (2009) - Colin Self
Transitioning between heirloom mentalities is hard. Calista knows and isn't afraid to speak her mind about it! Every girl needs something colorful in her life and that's why impressions always stick best while wet. So the next time you're ready to uproot your sandcastle watercolors, just remember: nobodys gotcha back like dollys on the beast team. In fact, no East Coast Sisterhood (ECS) ever felt so good! So relax! Sit back and track the date.... cause this calender is about to get B.E.A.T. U.P.!!!!!!!!!!!
-- VIDEO DESCRIPTION
George Barber Day
(Image sourced from Seventeen Gallery's exhibition "SCRATCH!")
I first discovered video artist George Barber's work via a review of his DVD BEYOND LANGUAGE on LUX by Ed Halter in Artforum last year. Associated with the Scratch Video movement, Barber's witty appropriation of mainstream movies and television as well as his fast-paced editing techniques resonated with many of the YouTube mash-ups I've seen, and his work was clearly pioneering for what has now become a fairly widespread approach. Today I will post up a number of Barber's videos, spanning the last few decades of his career.
The Star Wars Kid (2010) - Comenius Roethlisberger & Admir Jahic
Drawings of YouTube video "Star Wars Kid," exhibited here at the Invisible Heroes booth at SCOPE Art Fair Basel. From the series "Without You Baby There Ain't No Us".
Ready to Rumble
[via -rumblr]
Rumblr is a new web application that allows users to pit Tumblr blogs against one another by placing randomly selected images from two or more blogs in juxtaposition with one another. Users then select the preferred image and after a certain number have been judged a winner is declared. The site launched in alpha about a month ago alongside TUMBLR_WRS, a party held at Home Sweet Home in New York City.
[via Feminine Itch]
The site capitalizes on the decontextualization and random juxtaposition of images that Tumblr is known for and attempts to objectively judge the taste of users and the quality of sites through a competition or brawl. This random selection often produces unexpected, odd, and beautiful combinations which are frequently screencapped and placed back on Tumblr. These same screencapped images might then appear as standalone images in yet another Rumblr battle, producing a kind of Russian Doll effect.
[via -rumblr]
Rumblr in still in beta and the site's producer, Benjamin Lotan is hoping to add additional features that quantify and visualize user's decisions in new ways, such as producing average color gradients based on the images selected. Check out the site to pit your favorite Tumblrs against each other.
Animated Gif Mashup 2.0 (2010) - Evan Roth
Evan Roth's Animated Gif Mashup 2.0 allows users to mash-up animated gifs found on the web into a collage and add sound. It's a bit like YTMND except you can pile on an unlimited amount of gifs.
Roth launched Animated Gif Mashup 2.0 last week at SPEED SHOW vol.1: TELE-INTERNET curated by Aram Bartholl.
Images in the Sky (2005) - Marc Kremers and Damien Poulain
200 images from the Internet were released into the sky via red, green and blue helium filled balloons on the 2nd of October 2005 in Victoria Park, London. For all we know they could all just fall into the Channel. But we hope that if someone finds an image they will get back to us and let us know where they are, and participate by sending us an image or message of their own.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE "IMAGES IN THE SKY" SITE
The Simpson Verdict (2002) - Kota Ezawa
The reading of the verdict in the trial of OJ Simpson. Using sound from the actual TV footage - only one camera was allowed in the courtroom - and reducing movement to a minimum of changes in facial expression, Ezawa's animation heightens the racial implications of the trial and the cynicism of the verdict.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM UBUWEBEzawa meticulously recreates, frame-by-frame, animated sequences from television, cinema, and art history using basic digital drawing and animation software. His aesthetic is a highly stylized mixture of Pop Art, Alex Katz, and paint-by-numbers pictures, to name but a few of his stylistic antecedents. This painstaking process creates an in intriguing facsimile of the source material, which include the Kennedy assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, and clips from the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (1966) .
-- DESCRIPTION FROM UBUWEBImmaterial Incoherence:
Art Collective JOGGING
If we consider Internet art to be a distinct category of art making that uses the Internet as its primary medium or platform, we necessarily distinguish it from other forms in which the Internet does not play a primary role. The objects of Internet art are necessarily immaterial, and it is this immaterial quality that makes them so notoriously difficult to exhibit and archive. For some artists this has led to a kind of hybridization of Internet aesthetics and real world objects, such that they might be purchased or viewed in a real-world setting such as a museum or gallery space. For others it becomes a matter of the careful curation of digital images and documentation in an effort to brand oneself and build cultural capital where there is little possibility for financial compensation. After all, how do you monetize an object whose natural setting is a networked space that encourages many-to-many distribution practices? How do you sell a website, a .jpeg? These are responses to a crisis in image making and distribution in which older curatorial models that rely on the limitations of physical space and the exchange of physical objects are increasingly undermined by distanced, virtual, and distributed viewership online.
For art collective JOGGING - artists Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen - this crisis is not limited to Internet art, but has instead become the normative condition under which art is produced and viewed today. In an essay on "Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age," JOGGING notes that:
Art cannot exist without an audience, as it relies on media for its existence as art. With today’s burgeoning potential for digital mass viewership, transmission becomes as important as creation. Contemporary online artists are aware of this fact and seek to actively make use of its potential. Dematerialization is not an oppressive suffocation of art but a possibility for art to flourish in disparate and progressive discourses. The web offers infinite room for expansion and participation unlimited by the more severe constraints of space and finance.
For the vast majority of young artists, regardless of their medium, the work they produce is viewed primarily online as images or video uploaded onto artist's sites and blogs. Even when artists participate in small shows, the majority of publication and viewership takes place in the form of documentation. The museum and gallery space serves a resume building function for art that is largely produced and distributed online. It no longer functions primarily as a space that draws potential viewers or buyers, but is instead a formality, something to be put on a CV.
DEEPHORIZON (2010) - UBERMORGEN.COM
The supreme discipline of art - oil painting - is back. It has been 13 days since a BP oil and gas exploration well blew out, setting fire to the drilling rig, which sank, killing 11 people. Ever since, crude oil has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, raising the prospects of a historic environmental disaster. Winds from the southeast have nudged the slick northward, where it floated Saturday near the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi and has begun to paint the coastlines.
Finally oil painting has evolved into generative bio-art, a dynamic process the world audience can watch live via mass media. Never before has this art form been as relevant and visible as today - only 9-11 was nearly as perfect, but in the genre of performance art. An oil painting on a 80.000 square miles ocean canvas with 32 million liters of oil - a unique piece of art.
We exclusively use aerial images from the oil spill. The files are ready-mades but we waived our right to use them "as is" and decided to use a special digital technique to produce a statement about the disconnection of form and color and about contemporary and futuristic imaging procedures. We use a compressor (sorenso codec) and consumer video editing-software and manually loop 2 frames, the image becomes liquid, transforms and deforms. These visualisations represent the "Verkuenstlichung" of nature and the "Vernatuerlichung" of art. Unedited oil-paintings of the event can be found via search-engines, on boston.com or on the NASA Earth Observatory website.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
