Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest

Ghosting (2006) - Riley Harmon

Jacob Gaboury — 2010-09-07T17:00:00+01:00

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.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM ARTIST STATEMENT

Glitches (2010) - Robert Overweg

Jacob Gaboury — 2010-09-07T15:00:00+01:00

[The Facade, Half-Life 2]

[Lights in Mid-Air Glitch, Grand Theft Auto 4]

[The Facade 2, Left 4 Dead 2]

via creativeapplications.net

You, the World and I (2010) - Jon Rafman

Ceci Moss — 2010-09-06T15:00:00+01:00

When Orpheus’ beloved Eurydice dies, he cajoles his way into the underworld with his musical charms and his lyre. Wanting her but not her shade, he cannot forbear looking back to physically see her and so loses her forever. In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love. Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.

Our narrator remembers that once, with her back turned while facing the Adriatic Sea, a Google Street View car drove by and took a picture of his beloved, who detested being photographed, without her realizing it. Our narrator cherishes this photograph and the entire relationship becomes encapsulated in the screen capture replacing all other experiences and memories. Soon it is not enough. Our narrator cannot imagine that, in a world where everything is recorded, that someone could completely disappear. In daily systematic searches for photographs of the nameless other, Google Street View and Google Earth allow him to move seamlessly through vast detailed three-dimensional space. This extraordinary geographical and social exploration is favored by Google satellite images, user-created 3D renderings of Stonehenge and Machu Picchu and Street View panoramas of favorite vacation spots. As an undifferentiated series of cultural, historical and contemporary symbols float together or follow one another in rapid succession, in a world where Dutch anthropologists discover pre-Socratic fragments on Turkish islands, perhaps we come to wonder as to the significance of anything and the place of tradition and history itself. Unlike Orpheus, our narrator is not seeking for his lost love but for photos of his love, he yearns for records of the relationship not the woman herself or the relationship itself. In the ultimate irony when he returns to the original photograph, it has been removed. By getting as close to possible to the world through technology, has our narrator not unwittingly distanced himself from this world? But maybe even more than a doomed quest, does not this whirlwind tour of an individual’s personal history and the world’s cultural history, this modern tale of loss, retrieval and loss again, expose that the change in our consciousness has preceded the change in our technology?

“Wherever I go, there I am” is the old adage, be it Yogi Berra or the Buddha. The detached gaze of a satellite image or an automatic Street View camera confronts a human consciousness whose ability to seek connectedness and meaning has already been compromised. Contemporary technological tools simultaneously open and close vistas on our inner and outer worlds.

-- ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION FROM "STATE"

John Cage - 4'33" [May '68 Comeback Special RECON] (2010) - Dick Whyte

Ceci Moss — 2010-09-03T16:30:00+01:00

A reconstruction [RECON] of John Cage’s infamous 4’33″ (silence) using 68 amateur and professional performances sourced from YouTube.
Originally via mediateletipos

Wave Machine (2005) - Duncan Malashock

John Michael Boling — 2010-09-03T15:00:00+01:00

Early Neoist Computer Animation - Boris Wanowitch

John Michael Boling — 2010-09-02T15:32:00+01:00

Neoism Propaganda (1984)

The Unknown Neoist on Broadway (1983)

MACHINES / MACHINES (1984)

Dr. Amok's Brain Waves (1984)

Richard S. Mitchell on 16777216

Ceci Moss — 2010-09-01T15:00:00+01:00

16777216 is a new online work by Richard S. Mitchell, a San Francisco-based artist with a background in video. 16777216 is viewable through the Jancar Jones Gallery's website from August 28th until September 4th, click here to see it. The work consists of over 16.7 million frames, each a color in the RGB color model, displayed at 25 frames per a second. Colors are displayed when the web browser synchronizes with the server, where the colors slowly move from black towards white.

Your project 16777216 launches on the Jancar Jones Gallery's website this week - can you talk a little more about this project - what are you trying to achieve with this work?

I've been interested in using the Web as a medium for art for a long time. By medium I mean the place, center, and means of production, and not simply as a way to distribute work produced elsewhere. One early idea was a dynamic HTML spinning beach ball, using the inherent capabilities of a Web browser to display color and change its display over time, even without interaction from a user. I didn’t follow through on the beachball because I felt it was too much a one-liner, not multi-dimensional.

Issues surrounding sequencing, series, and serialization have been a major point in my video work for several years now: including numbers, text, and colors (from color sample sheets, etc.). Obviously, the RGB system is a numbered sequence of colors with many possible routes through it depending on how you map the total number of colors, a 24-bit number, to each of the 8-bit channels, which are semi-independent.

My goal with 16777216 is, on the one hand, to make tangible certain aspects of the computer’s representation of reality and, on the other, to produce a work pleasing to look at and contemplate.

What are some of the techniques you've used in your video work to address serialization and sequencing? Are your videos analog or digital - does this difference in format come into the conversation at all?

At this point my videos are entirely digital. I am striving, however, for an aesthetic that relates to film but isn't merely imitating it. In my latest video Zing, all the images are digital but I processed them only in ways analogous to film processing: double exposure, negative/positive, fades and dissolves, looping, etc. I uploaded 'Zing' to my website today.

I scan a lot of stuff and use scripting in Photoshop to generate the video frames. The material I scan ranges from 8, 16, and 35mm film to sheets of plastic or paint. I'm also partial to things which form series like color samples and color correction cards. I collected my bus transfers for several years and used them in a count down sequence, mimicking the countdown you see on video/film. I also use Max/MSP Jitter for audio and visual processing.

I still collect images and objects that have some property of sequence. I'm also turning my attention to close examination of things and patterns around me---common things, visual and audio---that I can investigate, speed up, slow down, magnify, and convert to sequences.

You had mentioned in our correspondence the 1966 essay by Bruno Munari "12,000 Different Colours"- how does this essay connect with 16777216?

“Red, green, yellow, blue, white, brown, violet, orange, turquoise, grey … a list of colors such as this ends almost as soon as it has begun, but there are in fact twelve thousand colours in existence, like cockleshells all in a row. Think of it. Maybe it is not possible to tell them all apart, but they are there all the same. They exist in the catalogue of an American company which produces plastics, and their purpose is to guarantee a constant production that will always satisfy the needs of the market….

“How does one arrive at such a vast number of colours? There are various methods…. So we may in theory set about obtaining a great number of colours in the following way: let us imagine a red which contains not even the most infinitesimal quantity of yellow, blue, or other colour. Take this red … and paint a disc as big as a penny on a very long strip of paper. Add one drop of black to the red and paint another disc. Then another drop, another disc—and so on until the red has turned black. On the same strip, working towards the other end, paint other red discs, but this time progressively lightened by the addition of white, one drop at a time. By the time we have finished we will be extremely tired and our strip of paper will be several miles long. We can then repeat the operation starting with another red, for example with one drop of yellow added to the original pure colour. Then we start with a red with two drops of yellow added….”
—Bruno Munari. Design as Art. 1966.

When I read the Munari essay it seemed a perfect fit, strategy, or solution, to bringing out the properties of computer color and display we don't normally notice—the huge number of colors and their sequence and structure, and how they are tied to numbering/counting. I wanted to reveal this, to make it palpable, tangible. Something you can watch.

In the past, you've worked primarily in film and photography - when did you decide to also implement the internet into your practice? Have you worked on other online projects?

I have been working on Web stuff for a long time. The first website I built, in 1995, was to display works by me and other artists involved in a group I belonged to called untitled. As the number of artists on the site grew, the problem of keeping the data up to date and correct led to my interest in content management development. I had been working as a programmer since the mid 80's and was familiar with databases. So it seemed natural to use a database to manage the content of a site. (Incidentally, I'm an artist who took up programming, not vice versa. I went to college intending to major in chemistry but graduated with a degree in fine art/painting and almost a minor in music.)

It strikes me there are two ways of using the Web for artistic purposes: as a form of production and/or as the means of distribution. My early efforts focused on digitizing existing works and publishing them on the Web. One could also create the works digitally, but that site of creation is still outside the browser. I wanted to use a partnership between the page code and the browser itself as the site of creation. As I say this, it seems rather difficult to assign clear boundaries to where creation takes place. The idea arises in my head; I code it, test it, code it some more; I distribute it over the internet; the browser parses the code and displays the work. Is there an analogy here with painting or film? Or is video art more analogous? In this case it’s self-generating, purely iconic, i.e. with no indexical or symbolic dimension.

16777216 uses the Web for both production and distribution: the piece 'performs' in a web browser, is distributed via the Web, and is synched through the server. No matter where a user/viewer is, the 'performance' happens at the same time, discounting network latency and inaccurate clocks on clients.

General Web Content: CAPTCHArt

Jacob Gaboury — 2010-08-31T15:00:00+01:00

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

CAPTCHA-related humor began with the widespread use of CAPTCHA (and more recently reCAPTCHA) on popular blogging and forum sites. The technology is intended to stop spam by asking the user to verify a pair of distorted words, thereby proving they are not a bot. In the case of reCAPTCHA these words are pulled somewhat randomly from an archive of textual documents requiring digitization, and that random pairing of words often produces strange and comical combinations. While simple reCAPTCHA screengrabs have appeared on sites such as lamebook, and "draw your CAPTCHA" threads have been around on the Something Awful forums for well over a year, the practice really took off when Moot implemented reCAPTCHA on the 4chan boards. Users took their extensive MS Paint skills and trollface comic generators and produced a wide variety of CAPTCHA related art and images, a sample of which we have included here.

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

[Source: CAPTCHArt]

Haven (2008) - Ian Burns

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-30T18:30:00+01:00

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

Cliff Hanger (2009) - Jeff Shore and John Fisher

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-30T17:00:00+01:00

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

Dream Sequence (2006) - Jennifer & Kevin McCoy

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-30T15:00:00+01:00

Dream Sequence is a two-channel video installation in which a series of dream images from Jenn and Kevin respectively are seen rotating over our sleeping heads.

Michelle Ceja's M O M E N T U M at Important Projects

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-27T15:00:00+01:00

I'm in the Bay Area this week, and I stopped by Important Projects in the Rockridge area of Oakland. Started by SAIC grads and recent Chicago transplants Jason Benson, Sean Buckelew and Joel Dean, Important Projects is run out of the top floor of their house. It reminded me of some of New York's pocket-sized exhibition spaces I've discussed here on Rhizome, like Art Since the Summer of '69. All the exhibits at Important Projects last for four weeks, and so far, they've organized seven shows in total.

They are currently showing Michelle Ceja's M O M E N T U M until September 10th. A fully immersive installation accompanied by a continually building ambient sound loop, the work seemed to deliberately intensify one's sense of claustrophobia and confusion. In that sense, it felt like an enclosed physical version of Ceja's project Silicon Velocity for Jstchillin, while the use of black paint, lights and mirrors recalled Banks Violette's sculptures, but on a smaller scale. I took some shots of the show, see below.

OFF BEAT REPEAT (2010) - Sally Thurer and Mylinh Nguyen

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-26T19:00:00+01:00

OFF BEAT REPEAT is a pattern making machine developed and designed by Sally Thurer and Mylinh Nguyen with the help of Dan Michaelson.

Via Ryder Ripps

Thank You For Posting (2010) - Claire L. Evans

Ceci Moss — 2010-08-26T17:00:00+01:00

Originally via pietmondriaan.com

Untitled (2010) - Peter Rand

John Michael Boling — 2010-08-26T15:00:00+01:00

Double Rainbow/ Donald Judd Mash-up