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Site-specific map plotting the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. Power lines are drawn in pencil on the back of the map which conduct the electricity from the radio to the front of poster. Placing a metal pushpin onto each station then allows us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist whose work deals with the cultural and political dimensions of new technologies. Between 1991 and 1995 he was the editor of Blast, a multimedia magazine that was initially published in a box format. Blast evolved alongside the popularization of the Internet, and much of its work occurred at the intersection of publishing, digital culture, and the production and distribution of art objects. This spring, Crandall spoke with Triple Canopy about the history of Blast, the nature of the magazine as a form, and the days of accessing bulletin board systems via suitcase-size modems.
-- FROM "UNMARKED BOX ON A COUNTER: JORDAN CRANDALL IN CONVERSATION WITH CALEB WALDORF" IN TRIPLE CANOPY, ISSUE #9
As a memorial for the ".yu" domain – subject of conflicts during the war, now switched off as of the end of March 2010 – she developed a series of paper sculptures. They consist of several thousand printed A4-sheets. Stacked, they make a picture appear, showing nationalist Ultras in Belgrade’s football stadium.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE EXHIBITION BOOKLET FOR "SURFING CLUB"
In 2009 the editorial team at Mute (in association with Autonomedia) published a collection of past magazine content under the title Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net. It was an exercise in content curation, but not, as they point out, an attempt to assemble a greatest hits album. Rather, it reorganises a body of Mute’s diverse output around a selection of themes that are perhaps more apparent (up to) fifteen years later.
In many respects – through the early newspapers, magazines, websites and recent print-on-demand journals – Mute has long engaged in providing content navigation systems for internet-inspired knowledge and the darker side thereof. And they have been doing so in an era defined by its obsession with charting and re-charting the information landscape. What Proud to be Flesh does, therefore, is offer up yet another entry portal to Mute’s rich and important net-knowledge while, in its very book-i-ness, commenting on the current upheaval in text interface products.
Beryl Korot describes the impetus behind the innovative 1970s publication Radical Software, elucidating the history of video in art and the impact of mass media on society. Emerging from an independent video community that included media visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and groups such as Televisionaries, Videofreex, People’s Video Theater, and Global Village, the first issue of Radical Software debuted in Spring of 1970 as a publication by the Raindance Corporation. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Segura (Gershuny) acted as Editors, while Michael Shamburg served as Publisher with Ira Schneider as co-Originator. Early contributors included Nam June Paik, Buckminster Fuller, Ant Farm, Frank Gillette, and Paul Ryan, among others. After eleven issues, Radical Software ceased publication in the Spring of 1974 and is now an invaluable time capsule of an era. This video is published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the first issue.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM ART21
hello process! shows a machine doing what it does best, deleting, copying and moving blocks of data. The installation consists solely of a computer and a printer. The computer functions as it usually does, as a black box theatre of processes. The only output comes through the printer, giving us clues about the activity inside, while in the background, the raw noise of the machine creates a sound scape, a sonification of this theatre of naive computation.
A file of 128 blocks is created. In this file, each block can be occupied by a small piece of code. Every piece of code has its own strategy. Some try to conquer as many blocks as possible, others simply target one specific piece of code or an unsuspecting neighbour. When the process is set in motion, all blocks are executed one after the other. This results in a battle between the file’s inhabitants. After forty iterations, a fresh file is created with a new combination of code.
Each piece of code has a special ID. This ID is sent to the printer every time the block is loaded in which the code is residing. Each printed line represents the result of one battle cycle. 128 small graphical representations of code are printed. This process repeats 40 times, creating a map of abstract patterns depicting the changes that took place. There is some duality in this theatre of naive and nonproductive computation. We like to think of processes as actors in a machine theatre, playing with anthropomorphism and metaphors to trigger the imagination. Each piece of code has a descriptive name such as copycat, eraserhead, destroyer, or swapmaster, and displays behaviour to match. But at the same time these programs are just mechanical low level operations, totally inhuman. In the end the computer “computes” and the printer “prints” as a debug device and leaves on paper the only trace of these ephemeral permutations.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM MARLOES DE VALK'S SITE
As a lead-up to the Headless Conference, co-organizer Ginny Kollak shares her essay “Putting the capital in decapitation” which is excerpted from the brochure accompanying the exhibition “The Office for Parafictional Research Presents Headless: Work by Goldin+Senneby” on view through March 21 at CCS Bard. The Headless Conference is a mini-symposium for this exhibition.
Goldin+Senneby is the identity-resistant “framework for collaboration” established by Stockholm-based artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in 2004. An interest in capitalist logic and networked culture guides their investigative practice, which explores juridical, financial, and spatial infrastructures through performance and role-playing, invented (and often virtual) realities, writing and publishing, and public interventions.
Headless (2007–) is the artists’ ongoing analysis of the shadowy realm of offshore finance. The subject represents a nearly perfect encapsulation of Goldin+Senneby’s many preoccupations, but perhaps its most relevant feature is its provocative and strategic use of masking, secrecy, and withdrawal. The system is evasive by definition: its procedures allow a company’s assets to be protected from taxation or other bureaucratic regulation, and the identities of its owners and their true business practices can be concealed. In spatial terms, examining an offshore company can be thought of as encountering a space that shifts readily from an impenetrable barrier to an empty void—like a hologram, it appears and disappears according to the perspective from which it is viewed. From a moral standpoint, offshore’s slippery visage is just as apt to inspire bored yawns as righteous indignation: one man’s exploitation is another’s tedious paperwork. Still, like most unknown territories, offshore triggers mainly sinister readings. A more anthropomorphic understanding might conceive the offshore company as something monstrous—a decentralized, elusive body that moves without any visible means of control—a headless organization.
Headless Ltd is a real company registered in the Bahamas, one of a number of sun-soaked former British colonies in which the offshore financial industry flourishes. The company is the focal point for Goldin+Senneby’s multivalent inquiry, whose numerous manifestations—texts, performances, interventions, and illustrations—take place in the open and behind closed doors.
► The web web
thewebweb is a net art website in seven acts.
The balance between Internet mythology and new html technology (canvas & js) is perfect.
By Anton Gerasimenko, Sergey Chikuyonok, Kostya Loginov, Showpanorama, Vladislav Yakovlev, Natasha Klimchuk, Kate Malykh, Sergey Filippov, Andrey Zubrilov, Anton Schnaider, Vasily Dubovoy
► Webjam
< ~ ~> surfing club
► Avastard by Carlo Lowfi
A great piece with Twitter avatars.
► Temporary.cc
The question about archive when visit really matters.
► GEO GOO by JODI
One of my favorite 2009 exhibition. The way they expose net art in real life was for me inspiring.
Photo gallery
► Mybiennalisbetterthanyours
A Fresh net art overview for 2009 by Tolga Taluy
► Ben Schumacher
Especially his piece 0%
► Junk Jet
A nerdy fanzine discovered in 2009.
► net.art GIANT FUNNEL
The feed I should take on a desert island.
Caitlin Jones is the Executive Director of the Western Front Society in Vancouver, BC. Prior to this appointment she had a combined curatorial and conservation position at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and was the Director of Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York. A key member of the Variable Media Network, Caitlin has also been responsible for developing important tools and policy for the preservation of electronic and ephemeral artworks. She has been a contributor to Rhizome and her other writings have appeared in a wide range of exhibition catalogues, periodicals and other international publications.
► The Real Thing« curated by VVORK
VVORK taking it to the next level.
► Donk -- Music World.
Never thought I would be so into something that Vice Magazine was responsible for, but this documentary is fantastic.
Thanks Michael Bell-Smith for telling me about it.
► The Bichon Frisé in Art @ Art since the Summer 69
http://www.artsince69.com/index.php?/upcoming/the-bichon-frise-in-art/
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~eshephar/bichoninart/bichoninart.html
C-U-T-E
► See This Sound
http://www.lentos.at/en/45_1769.asp
http://beta.see-this-sound.at/
One of the best "historical" shows I've seen in years.
► Digital Folklore Reader
(full disclosure, I worked as an editor on this book)
Smart, original and has unicorns on the cover.
Edited by Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied
Designed by Manuel Buerger
Texts and projects by: Cory Arcangel, Julia Böger, Manuel Buerger, Helene Dams, Dragan Espenschied, Jörg Frohnmayer, Mark Grimm, Christopher Heller, Yunchul Kim, Dennis Knopf, Stefan Krappitz, Florian Kröner, Tobias Leingruber, Olia Lialina, Leo Merz, Bernadette Neuroth, o+ro, johannes p osterhoff, Isabel Pettinato, Michael Ruß, Theo Seemann, Alexander Schlegel, Bert Schutzbach, Siegfried Zielinsky
Electronic Popables is an interactive pop-up book that sparkles, sings, and moves. The book integrates traditional pop-up mechanisms with thin, flexible, paper-based electronics and the result is a book that looks and functions much like an ordinary pop-up with the added element of dynamic interactivity.
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.
The following is an excerpt of an ongoing correspondence between Seth Price and Boško Blagojević.
A list:
Seth Price, Title Variable, (2001--) :
http://www.ubu.com/sound/price.html
Seth Price, 8-4, 9-5, 10-6, 11-7, (2007) :
http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/price_seth/8-4%209-5%2010-6%2011-7.mp3
Interview with Seth Price by Gwen Allen, Excerpts from Title Variable :
http://rhizome.org/editorial/media/09.09.09-seth_price.pdf
Seth Price, For A Friend (excerpt), 2008 :
http://rhizome.org/editorial/media/09.09.09-Friend.pdf
Boško Blagojević: So I played your 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7 mix [2007] for some students the other day. It felt a little perverse. It's a work mix, right? For listening to at work?
Seth Price: I didn’t have a particular use in mind. I was thinking about work days, where different sets of working hours represent different kinds of work and different cultural areas: a union job, an office job, an art gallery, a boutique… But it’s true, I liked the fact that the track could be played perfectly, start to finish, during an 8-hour work day, so yes, a work mix, why not.
BB: Then the piece takes only its form from the eight hour work day? You worked on it for a long time, yes?
SP: I spent a while tinkering with it, yes. It was something to work on in the edges and margins. Like a vacation from my real work.
BB: I guess the mixtape has become something of a vernacular form, something "everyone can do," maybe now more than ever. Though the texture of your particular piece is really worked -- it's extensively mixed and edited, it shows quite explicitly the work that has accrued over the time you've worked on it, as well as the range of the music it features and samples. It's a bit more professional in this sense, closer to what a DJ might produce rather than an amateur or casual music lover. Yet it's also related to this notion of leisure, of a more leisurely type of work.
SP: And the spread of music, the way it appears everywhere, in stores and hotels and restaurants and waiting rooms. These are workplaces, but also places of consumption, and music somehow greases that boundary.
BB: There is both an industry and a culture of tremendous material and technical means built to support something that is formally quite immaterial. Why do you think this is? Why is music this social grease as you say?
SP: I don't know. Why would it be different from writing, something else that is immaterial? Maybe because music is tied to so many other, more material, areas: performance, fashion, bodies, ritual. Being always in-between makes it easy to project on to. You can talk about the way something moves and is contextualized, what it represents, as a way of discussing other things.
ASDF, the joint collaboration between Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz, announced a new project yesterday, S.A.S.E.. Adopting the format of the self-addressed stamped envelope, where the receiving party sends an empty envelope to the sender in order to obtain a reply, potential viewers of the ten email-based exhibitions must send an email request to ASDF to receive the show in their inbox. Each exhibition contains a statement, a works list, and a selection of images. Many of the exhibitions read much like art projects, such as Michael Mandiberg's "FDIC Insured" in which the artist assembles the corporate logos for banks recently closed by the recession, found from images searches and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Image searches figure into Jess Wilcox's "Discovery of Orange" as well, a show that loosely collects images referring to the color in an effort to illustrate its artificial manufacturing. The results fluctuate from Vincent Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Night to a photograph of construction cones to the Nickelodeon logo. ASDF are offering 11" x 17" prints of the email exhibitions as well, but only through - you guessed it - a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Endnode is a networked sculpture in the form of a large tree. Printers nested within the sculpture's plywood branches produce hardcopy of email communication that fall to the ground like leaves or apples; the branching of the Internet is literally and figuratively brought into physical space. As the leaves/apples/email fall to the ground, they become end nodes in the worldwide information flow.
Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.
Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause.
This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.
The printed thermal receipt paper is then reused in future projects and exhibitions or recycled.
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