By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at
3:00 pm
For my exhibition I would like to present to viewers artworks that can be interminably downloaded and displayed concomitantly in several areas. Berlin based artist collective AIDS-3D will present a framed print titled Berserker, a computer generated portrait of an alien, which will be accompanied with a flash drive containing a file for the actual print. New York artist Ben Schumacher will showcase seven 3D models of iPhones all found off of Google’s 3D Warehouse and displayed on IKEA shelves. Artist Victor Vaughn, from Baltimore, will present a series of prints detailing his family’s history of internationally outsourcing for horse breeding. All of these works at the PPOW will be available for free download off the Internet for public access and simultaneously all pieces will be exhibited at REFERENCE Art Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. All works address concurrent issues of originality, distance, and reproduction – a theme attended to with the actual exhibition itself.
By
Jonah Brucker-Cohen on
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Scott Sona Snibbe, Bubble Harp, 2010
In the summer of 2009, I wrote an article here at Rhizome about the burgeoning activities of media artists creating new works or updating versions of their older interactive screen-based projects for Apple's iPhone and iTouch mobile devices. As the article made its way throughout the blogosphere, comments surfaced ranging from criticism of the "closed world of Apple's App Store and iPhone devices" to a championing of the availability of inexpensive multi-touch technology now available to artists who had been waiting for a platform that could adequately display and allow for the type of interaction their projects demanded. A year after the article came out, the draw of these devices and their potentially expansive audience has become even more irresistible to artists enough so that several more "apps" have surfaced. The following article catalogs several new iPhone works which have emerged over the past year, works that are pioneering the next generation of portable media art.
"I've been dreaming of this opportunity since the mid-nineties, a distribution platform for screen-based digital work," explains San Francisco Bay Area based media artist Scott Sona Snibbe, "It's why I abandoned doing this work in the mid-00s, because of a lack of a distribution model. [It] seemed silly hacking apart laptops to put on the wall." This quote exemplifies the reasons why the iPhone and iPod Touch have become key instigators for driving media artists to revisit their past work and release new versions for the devices. Snibbe has since released three "Apps" for the devices, including Gravilux, which was originally written for desktop computers back in 1998 and now exists as a free app that produces a starscape from thousands of small points that can be dragged around and played with using multitouch points on the screen. Gravity can be customized using the settings as well as heat amounts, antigravity, and the total amount of stars that are displayed. Snibbe's other classic software piece, Bubbleharp (1998) is also available as an app and allows for the user to drag their finger across the screen to create cell-like bubbles on the screen that animate based on the path the user moves while creating them. This work is an organic display that resembles the natural movements of single-cell organisms squirming around a petri dish.
By
Greg J. Smith on
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
VisiCalc running on an Apple II computer (~1979) [image: Wikimedia Commons]
I sympathize with the protagonist of a cartoon claiming to have transferred x amount of megabytes, physically exhausted after a day of downloading. The simple act of moving information from one place to another today constitutes a significant cultural act in and of itself. I think it's fair to say that most of us spend hours each day shifting content into different containers. Some of us call this writing. - Kenneth Goldsmith, 20041
While Kenneth Goldsmith's wry statement about knowledge jockeying is directly discussing the plight of the contemporary author, his comments are useful for thinking about other disciplines. In editing this quote, the word "writing" could easily be replaced by any number of verbs (programming, composing, painting, storyboarding, etc.) as we undoubtedly inhabit an era where creative transposition rather than raw creativity can be enough to drive a project. The ctrl-c clipboard, the layer palette in photo editing software and the flash memory of a microcontroller are all examples of spaces that serve as staging grounds for storytelling and crafting aesthetic experiences — these are interstitial zones where art gestates. Goldsmith clearly doesn't approach the creative process with reverence, and his blasé attitude is an excellent springboard into reading contemporary artistic production in relation to knowledge work. An important question: How might we appropriate this daily activity of "shifting content between containers" as a site (rather than a means) of artistic production? This article will consider the aesthetics of the spreadsheet, and act as the first installment of a series that will engage projects that explore the documents, software, interior architecture and politics of the contemporary workplace.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 8th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Germany’s first computer graphics were jointly produced in 1960 by the artist Kurd Alsleben and the physicist Cord Passow. They worked on an analog computer which was linked to an automatic drafting unit and transformed parameters of a differential equation into deviations and disturbances.
By
Christo Doherty on
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, The Gallerist, 2009
This past month, Johannesburg’s AOP Gallery, a space devoted to works on paper, hosted the exhibition “Passing Between” which showcased the collaborative output between digital artist Nathaniel Stern and printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. At the outset, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approached the collaboration as a chance to learn each other's techniques. But they quickly chose to focus on their own strengths in a process they call, "passing between", hence the title of the exhibition. For Stern, the move toward printmaking comes from a long interest in the technique. In recent work, he has engaged with an expanded form of digital print making, using a hacked portable scanner to produce densely patterned sequences of natural images, in a project called Compressionism. For “Passing Between,” Stern concentrated on using digital photo frames as a medium for displaying loops of video obtained through live filming, and sampled machinima taken from Second Life. Meuninck-Ganger responded to the framed video loops with an encyclopedic range of printmaking techniques from wood block to mono print, silkscreen, etching, and photogravure. In some cases, she printed or etched directly on the screens of the digital photo frames; in other cases, the prints were layered over the screens creating a delicate conjunction between the fibers of the paper medium and the illumination of the underlying video. In The Gallerist, a prominent New York art dealer is portrayed anxiously perched on a chair in middle of a lithograph while below the surface of the paper machinima sharks circle him endlessly.
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Twin Cities, 2009
The effect is both magical and subtle. Jessica's images often capture a static moment from the subject matter of the video in etching or ink. The pleasure offered by the composite images comes from the interplay between the stasis of the printed image and the temporal flow of the video, producing witty and sometimes fascinating results. In the diptych Twin Cities the 2009 tornado is represented with an animated twister from Second Life. Jessica’s lithograph shows a flying pig coming to rest momentarily in alignment with its outline before whirling back to the beginning of the looped tornado. In general, the artist’s subject matter is deliberately low-key and it presents samples from their lives as artists and young parents in Milwaukee and Johannesburg exploring moments of fun, awkwardness and good humor. However, the rich range of techniques and visual allusions layered over the works also references an entire history of contemporary art and print making, ranging from Hokusai to Velazquez.
Christo Doherty is head of the department of Digital Arts at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. He is a photographer, video artist, and VJ. His most recent solo exhibition – SMALL WORLDS – was a visual study of miniature railway technology, nostalgia and the South African landscape.
OpenProcessing.org is a site that has built a community around sharing visual coding examples created in Processing. As user number 36, I had the unique privilege of watching the idea take shape, while in a thesis group with Sinan at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. During it’s first two years of activity, the site has grown to host thousands of user-generated sketches and subsequent conversations between artists / programmers, teachers, and students from around the world. Sinan and I escaped the snow recently at a café outside Washington Square Park to discuss OpenProcessing’s origins, Rhizome’s collaboration with OpenProcessing in the Tiny Sketch competition, and what we can expect for the future. - Tim Stutts
Tim: How did you first come up with the idea for OpenProcessing?
Sinan: I guess the first thing to talk about is OpenVisuals, which was my Master’s thesis project at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University). I was reading Edward Tufte’s books at the time, and I became very interested in data visualization. In the meantime I was also fascinated with the social revolution that was happening on the web, through a class I was taking at NYU with professor Clay Shirky. Before studying with Clay, I didn’t understand Facebook—I didn’t even have a Facebook account. I knew I was missing some concepts, and wanted to understand what was going on. Through his classes, I decided that my thesis would have a social component. I also discovered ManyEyes, a site where users can upload datasets, and choose between different the visualization methods for augmentation. Users comment on each other’s visualizations, and may even suggest other ways of looking at or representing the dataset. What was missing from ManyEyes was the ability to contribute new visualization methods. During this time, I was involved with the Processing community, where many users were creating visualizations, and I thought, why can’t there be a platform for bringing visualization artists and dataset owners together? That’s when I started building the OpenVisuals platform, which utilized a Processing library to mix datasets and visualizations. That library made it possible for a visualization to work with any dataset. While I was working on this, my advisor, Daniel Shiffman, who used Processing to teach programming classes, was thrilled that I’d come up with a way for people to upload Processing projects onto a website and attach datasets to them. He pushed me to expand my approach and wanted to know if I could make a website where users could upload any kind of processing sketch, not just data visualization. The Processing community didn’t have a space for that—the Exhibition section on the Processing website is just handpicked projects, that linked to works that individuals had uploaded on their own blogs or websites. So one night I just copy / pasted all of the source code from OpenVisuals server to a new server for OpenProcessing. After that I found initial users by testing it out with students in Daniel’s classes taught at ITP.
Based in Paris, Sharon Kanach worked very closely Xenakis for two decades, as a translator of his works, as a scholar and as Vice-President of Centre Iannis Xenakis (formerly CCMIX) in France. Carey Lovelace is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Both are former students of Xenakis.
I’m wondering how you, Carey and Sharon, began working on this exhibition and pulling together materials for the show.
Sharon: Iannis, during his lifetime, put his archives on deposit at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. So, these 80 moving boxes arrived at the Bibliothèque and the Bibliothèque called up Françoise, his wife, and said, “Now what do we do with them?” And then she said, call Sharon. I said we should start with an inventory. When I saw the wealth of the material, I said I couldn’t do it alone, and so we created a small team. It was through this inventory process that I was amazed, because here I had worked with him very very closely, but I had no idea of what was in those folders […] When I started this inventory process, I just saw that there was this treasure trove of material about everything, not only the architectural projects, but all of his sketches, for the musical works, and a lot of unpublished articles. As we said in the catalog, he was always thinking through the hand, one way or the other. Either drawing or writing, he always had a pen in hand. That’s when Carey and I happened to have lunch, and I said you have to see this. […] The idea of creating a critical edition of his writings came out of this inventory process. [Note: Sharon Kanach is working on a critical edition of Xenakis’s writings and unpublished papers with Makis Solomos and Benoît Gibson.]
Carey: Right, so Sharon was involved with this critical edition project, which was quite exciting and really interesting. She was talking about how these things had surfaced, launching an English edition here, and I said, well, we should do an exhibition together. Sharon said, you should come to France and look at the documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I said that’s a great idea. […] When we were thinking about doing this show and where the dream place to organize it – I definitely thought of the Drawing Center because of the material itself and because I think it’s such a great institution. The more I got into this project, for me personally, the more I realized just how much he did think through the hand, and he did draw and it was so much a part of his process. It was so ideal for this place. I knew him really as a composer dealing with mathematical models, and I knew of his architectural background. The more you get into him, the more levels there are, and the more you discover. […]
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, January 8th, 2010 at
10:16 am
F.A.T. Labs have declared this week "Graffiti Markup Language Week" on their blog - and each day they've posted GML-related updates. What exactly is Graffiti Markup Language? It's an XML file type developed by F.A.T. Labs that stores the motion data created by tagging -- allowing graffiti writers to share, study, and catalog their tags. Check the below for a brief overview:
► Graffiti Analysis 2.0 - the new and improved Graffiti Analysis includes the aforementioned iPhone App DustTag v1.0, along with updates to the tracking, playback, controls and graphics, as well as previously unreleased source code and downloads to Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the playback and capture applications.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at
12:45 pm
Printershake/Earthquake (Concentric Circles), 2007/2008 (8.5" x 11", shown with detail. Image courtesy of the artist.)
Printershake/Earthquake (Performance Documentation), 2007/2008 (Image courtesy of the artist.)
For this project, artist Joe Winter aggressively shakes a computer printer during the process of printing. The movement creates the above colorful effect.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at
5:00 pm
In the spirit of Raphaël Rozendaal's One Question Interviews, I conducted a "1-bit" interview with Rhizome-commissioned artist Tristan Perich. (I felt the idea was apropos given the artist's interest in the possibilities and constraints of basic forms.) Perich performed earlier this week at bitforms gallery in a benefit for his new album 1-Bit Symphony, which is a 45 minute long, five movement composition for a single microchip. 1-Bit Symphony is currently on display through November 7th at bitforms in New York City, along with Perich's Machine Drawings and his 1-Bit Video. Perich will also kick off a two month, cross-country tour with Lesley Flanigan beginning tomorrow, at the Stone in the East Village. He will be performing his composition for harpsichord and 4-channel 1-bit electronics titled "Dual Synthesis". (Full dates and details here.) I visited his bitforms show today (see photos below) where I had the opportunity to listen to 1-Bit Symphony, and it's truly extraordinary. I encourage readers to stop by. - Ceci Moss
What is your favorite unit of measurement and why?
The first unit of measurement to blow my mind was the parsec, which I came across in middle school in that amazing book, Powers of Ten. It described immensely vast distances, larger than a light year, which was really large. It quantified the universe. It was the first time I realized measurements could actually be cool, really cool. The book also went down to angstroms and fermis and pico fermis, accompanied by colorful illustrations of molecules and atoms. They're the only way we can relate to these huge and small places beyond our perception, essentially meaning, "bigger than you can possibly imagine" or "smaller than you can possibly imagine." A great book called Where Mathematics Comes From goes into how we can only understand mathematical abstractions through "grounding metaphors," like "number as distance." We seek recourse to our ineptitude by further refining our measure on the world, which Lorentz and Einstein proved will ultimately fail, our Icarus syndrome. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has some blocks on its campus that measure exactly 1 cubic inch, or weigh exactly one pound, creating the official word on measurement. They are free from inaccuracies since they define what an inch is in the first place: a physical embodiment of language.
But recently, I have settled to truly appreciate the millimeter. As a kid I always thought millimeters were too small to perceive, but they are actually pretty big. I've put them to work a lot recently to determine the precise wire lengths for 1-Bit Symphony, adding a mm here or subtracting a mm there. It's finally supplanted their intangibility with a new meaningfulness. Then Squires Wires, my wire company, blasphemously converts them to decimaled inches…
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 5th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
While combing through the tables and displays set up by artists, book publishers, periodicals, small press bookstores, non profit arts organizations, collectives and presses who participated in the NY Art Book Fair over the weekend, I could not help but recall this past summer's No Soul For Sale festival. Both events succeeded in fostering a feel good environment, while also serving as an inspiring reminder of the number of independent, DIY initiatives out there.
I managed to take some photos yesterday, below. Even if I had camped out in P.S.1 for the entire fair, I would not have been able to see everything. Perhaps the subheader for this post should be "Incomplete Highlights" or "Some Stuff I Saw." As always, if readers want to share information or link to projects I missed, please do so in the comments section.
Artist Amy Prior playing the record from the book/record set Slumber Party she produced with Lucky Dragons at the JUNCTURE booth. Slumber Party is "a book and music about sleep - from dozing to waking. Made during an economic crisis, 'Slumber Party' imagines the ultimate easy escape; it is really only during sleep that nothing can get bought or sold."
Close up of the Slumber Party book.
Two prints from Brett Ian Balogh's A Noospheric Atlas of the United States on view at the free103point9 booth. The work aims to "map the hertzian space created by the United States' mass media broadcast stations."
