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In pop culture, “ghosting” is:
n. the appearance of one or more false images on a television screen.
v. when players that have been killed in a video game watch other players.
As viewers look through the gas mask, a video self-portrait is super-imposed onto the action figures via the pepper’s ghost theatrical illusion.
This sculpture generates a three scene narrative with the scene lengths and order controlled by a mechanical randomizing mechanism which is also part of the sculpture. All video and audio switching occurs via mechanical switches.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S SITE
With this latest work, the Texas-based artist duo breaks new ground in the development of their sophisticated "story-telling machines". Cliff Hanger's narrative is assembled from five separate scene-generating contraptions that output timed segments of a choreographed black and white "movie". The atmosphere of their work is akin to Ansel Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto photography imbued with early David Lynch film noir.
The creation of these works is a collaborative process between the artists: Shore develops the mechanics and the set-scenes, while Fisher programs the microchips and composes the soundtracks using original compositions, digital audio samples and mechanically operated instruments. The combination of all these elements results in a poetic complexity that is both surreal and cinematic.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE MCCLAIN GALLERY
SOUND BARRIER is a new work by Maia Urstad, a sound installation consisting of some 130 CD-and cassette radios assembled as a wall. Visually, these devices function as elements in a structure inspired by historical stone constructions
SOUND BARRIER relates to earlier works such as STATIONS; a sound installation deriving its visual basis from the Roman arch; and CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLES; a concert performance inspired by Pharonic Egyptian structures.
The creative impulses for SOUND BARRIER originate in the historical remains of buildings, i.e., ruins. Technology, here, electronics - a development from our own time, comprises the 'stones'.
The CD-and cassette radios in the installation have a double, visual and conceptual function. On an auditory level they are mediating the sound image implemented in the installation. Visually they are the concrete building blocks, the obvious function in the wall, but they also reflects issues related to the technical development and our culture of consumption.
The CD players in the wall are playback units for a composition of electronically treated sounds borrowed from radio waves, Morse code, FM- and satellite radio etc. Sound signals that also will be obsolete and forgotten sooner than we might expect.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Commitment Radio examines radio presets and what it means to make a choice. Instead of using unmarked generic buttons, presets on Commitment Radio create permanent marks. Over time, Commitment Radio will become personalized with your changing musical tastes, political leanings, locations, and age.
The functioning physical prototype of Commitment Radio allows you to scan for stations by moving a dial along the tuning strip. To listen to a station, however, you must push the dial into the radio, leaving an indelible mark.
Over time, Commitment Radio will become personalized with your changing musical tastes, political leanings, locations, and age. Because the radio has a finite amount of space, Commitment Radio encourages deliberateness in your choices and actions.
-- 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
Fold Loud is a (de)constructing musical play interface that uses origami paper-folding techniques and ritualistic Taoist principles to give users a sense of slow, soothing relaxation.
Fold Loud interconnects ancient traditions and modern technology by combining origami, vocal sound and interactive techniques. Unlike mainstream technology intended for fast-paced life, Fold Loud is healing, recovering and balancing.
Playing Fold Loud involves folding origami shapes to create soothing harmonic vocal sounds. Each fold is assigned to a different human vocal sound so that combinations of folds create harmonies. Users can fold multiple Fold Loud sheets together to produce a chorus of voices. Opened circuits made out of conductive fabric are visibly stitched onto the sheets of paper which creates a meta-technological aesthetic. When the sheets are folded along crease lines, a circuit is closed like a switch. Thus, the interface guides participants to use repetitive delicate hand gestures such as flipping, pushing and creasing. Fold Loud invites users to slow down and reflect on different physical senses by crafting paper into both geometric origami objects and harmonic music.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
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.
-- FROM THE DESCRIPTION OF "zu täuschen den Schutzhund" CURATED BY JAMES SHAEFFER
The exhibition "Resonance" was initiated in early 2010 as an experiment in the conceptual underpinnings and practical manifestations of sound art as a genre and form in contemporary greater China. Growing out of a series of readings and conversations in Hong Kong with artists as varied as Yan Jun, Feng Jiangzhou, and Zhou Risheng, the final exhibition program included two installations by artists Samson Young, an artist and composer based in Hong Kong, and Yao Chung-Han, a sound artist based in Taipei. This selection of artists allows the experiment to step beyond the mainland sound art and experimental music scene, which is largely incoherent in its current free-for-all exploration of new sonic forms--a site of artistic freedom indeed, but also a difficult territory in which to reflect on the modes of sound already in use in the contemporary art community. Samson Young contributed a piece entitled Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 - nr. 14 (Senza Misura) (2010), a series of open circuit boards hung in rows on the gallery wall. Each board houses two LEDs and a speaker, each marking the tempo of a single movement of fourteen of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas. In the second gallery room, Yao Chung-Han installed an audiovisual piece entitled I Will Be Broken (2010), a suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together with power cords that illuminates in a semi-random fashion and emits a prerecorded sequence of sounds. The two pieces engage in a dialogue of light and sound that confronts the tension between sound as aesthetic spectacle and sound as conceptual material, opening a productive conversation between styles and historical developments in the trajectory of sound in art. "Resonance" is on view at I/O Gallery in Hong Kong until September 5, 2010.
Robin Peckham (RP): I’d like to start with our initial thoughts when we set out to put this exhibition together. We were interested in how different cultural labels, specifically including music, experimental music, sound, and sound art, are distinguished in the Chinese context. During curatorial projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we found that artists and musicians working under these different labels all share the same live performance events and even exhibition contexts. I want to ask how the two of you see yourselves fitting into this system personally, and how you have experienced these distinctions in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively.
Samson Young (SY): In Hong Kong there is a circle of people working with, writing, and playing classical music, and that’s a very specific and self-contained scene. Then there’s a set of people outside this scene who also share a series of different and unrelated events, such as William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and myself. We both come from classical music backgrounds originally, but we’re also involved with other things, learning from different kinds of artists and musicians. The scenes are defined but the content of the work produced in each of these circles is not. As for defining my identity in all of this, I don’t have any strong feelings in terms of being a certain kind of artist working within the territory of sound art. I come out of the classical music world, but I make work that might function as contemporary music in the concert hall or something else entirely within the gallery context. No matter what the work is, it should be evident that my interest lies in a certain set of ideas of music to some degree or another. I tend to resist being labeled as a sound artist because this term is so ideologically and politically loaded. There are so many problems with it that have yet to be resolved. Its aesthetics are still being defined, particularly the question of how to judge a work of art within this territory. The question is very much still under discussion. That’s one problem. The question of how to judge or test a work of art is often mixed up with this other question of “what is sound art,” where these should be very separate questions. A work might emit sound of some sort of sound in a gallery setting, but the strategy of judging it through the criteria of sound rather than as conceptual or visual art is a very political process. It is a value judgment. It is very dangerous to judge the work within or using these unresolved debates over the nature of sound art, because it introduces all kinds of ideological questions. The discussion of aesthetics and the discussion of the identity of sound art should be separated. But now they exist within the same conversation, mixing the idea of a value judgment from the idea of a judgment of quality. We have a conversation and a discourse over these questions, but no sense of definition. If we introduce the question of “what is art,” then the entire project becomes compartmentalized and limited to its own territory without any further possibility of the expansion of the genre. As for how I define my own work, I will do some things within the gallery setting with the materials of sound and music, and people can label it as they please. But I don’t think I’ve answered the question.
A new gallery for video art, Vidéoclubparis offers a single, hybrid space with two parallel modes of screening. The first is a monthly, online exhibition of a dozen young artists, centered around a variety of themes (from ‘soundtrack’ to ‘bathing suit’, among many others); presented with basic information about the pieces and their creators. The second part is a live screening-event organized for each opening, in unlikely, semi-private places ranging from a sauna to a Bollywood video store. By seeking out unique locations for screenings, the event challenges the idea of the formal white cube – an aspect that is emphasized by the parallel screenings on the web. “The aim is to create bipolar screenings, we’re trying to do the high jump between watching videos online and taking people to a place completely unexpected,” said Stéphanie Cottin, co-founder of the organization, “the two work well together, because the extravagance of the events balances out the conventionalism of the online curation.”
Vidéoclubparis emerged out of Cottin and partner Bernard Guégan’s fascination for video rental machines placed outside video stores all over the capital – holes in the wall, which have been increasingly unpopular since the arrival of the Internet. “We like the idea of a cinema at home, and today, the closest thing is YouTube,” said Guégan, “so we wanted to keep the idea of diffusion of both the stores and the Internet.”
H3X3N is a group of Computer Witches who have built an enchanted cube that casts magical spells on computers. This cube, called IX, is a New Media Artwork that will be shown at DEADTECH, an art and technology center and gallery in Chicago, this Saturday May 10. The IX cube casts spells on Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers, hacking and hexing these operating systems. IX combines traditional stage magic tricks and irony as elements of Hacker culture to create an Interactive Installation and Software Art project. IX has been exhibited previously at the Interactivos? exhibition at the Media Lab Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE H3X3N BLOGRootkit : a type of software that is designed to gain administrative-level control over a computer system without being detected. Ping : A utility used to determine whether a particular IP address is reachable online by sending out a packet of data and waiting for a response. Ping is used to test and debug a network as well as see if a user or server is online.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S SITE
Fantasy Vision Meditation (In Color), a room-sized sculptural video installation, is the first "episode" in a series investigating the parallel historical narratives of disco, gay liberation movements and AIDS. Lozano creates a phantasmagoric elegy for the fallen soldiers in the hidden cultural wars of the 70s and 80s by transforming two sources generally dismissed as vapid and disposable. "I Need Somebody To Love Tonight" by disco singer Sylvester James (a victim of AIDS) and producer Patrick Cowley (who succumbed to AIDS less than three months after the disease was codified) and A Night At Halsted's by queer porn auteur Fred Halsted (who overdosed on sleeping pills after the death of his lover from AIDS) helped in defining the culture of the era. Lozano imbues his materials with pathos by a careful and labor-intensive digital exegesis of the unconscious spiritual elements hidden in the originals.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S SITE
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"Subscribe via email or RSS feed to Rhizome's blog, newsletters, community discussion, or announcements (jobs, opportunities and events)!
