A Million Keys

Interview with Joe Winter on Rhizome

Ceci Moss — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:21:27 +0000

Joe Winter, The Stars Below, 2011. Mixed media installation

I did an interview with New York artist Joe Winter for Rhizome’s ongoing Artist Profile series. Teaser below, full article here.

One thing I like about your work is the fact that you seem to operate like a hacker, taking things apart, finding new ways to misuse technology. But throughout your approach appears to be deliberately poetic, wherein you bring out these singular moments of beauty. For example, when you first started working on your scanner films during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, you mentioned that you began by simply placing a scanner outside of your cabin at night. The footage became a kind of accidental biological study, as the scanner intrigued light-seeking moths and other bugs, resulting in a time-lapsed nighttime sample of the various critters in the forest. I’m wondering if you can comment on how you “hack” technology in your work, and what you hope to achieve in that process. Are you guided by a kind of poetic hacking? How so?

In most of my works that involve a technological device (printer, scanner, photocopier, etc.) the technology itself is actually fairly un-altered. I tend to adjust the context in which the object is placed, or introduce variables or conditions that exist outside what I might call the area of expertise of the device. To use your example of the scanner: whether I’m scanning documents or moths in the woods, the scanner is still executing its function in exactly the same way; I’ve simply adjusted the expected input. I’m interested in looking at a given system and seeing what else it has the potential to speak about aside from its narrow band of acceptable usage, and how its native landscape (office, classroom, computer lab) might be related to other sorts of spaces, systems, or sets of ideas.

Since you brought up the topic of systems, I’m wondering if you could discuss that further. How do you approach the notion of “system” in your work? How do you reveal the presence of these systems, is it simply an act of mimesis or a disturbance or something else?

At different moments, I might describe my work in terms of systems, structures, frameworks, rules, and/or devices. I think there are a few things at play for me on that page of the thesaurus. The first is that I am always looking for various sorts of engines to move a project forward. Just like a physical device I take up may immediately describe a set of material and procedural constraints, I’ll often involve a secondary framework–south polar exploration, the history of astronomy–that will both move a material system beyond itself and help to select supporting materials, an installation’s logic, etc. The second is developing a relationship between the system immediately at work and the secondary framework through a third, usually less visible system. To use my recent piece, The Stars Below, as an example: I first developed the material process. A series of solenoid valves release drips of water onto upright sticks of chalk, slowly eroding them. The secondary framework–an installation space suggesting something between an office and a classroom–arises from the materials involved (what is the domain of a stick of chalk? Where does this drip of water originate?) and provides a context in which to situate the erosive activity. Between these two things is a conception of Deep Time, of which slate and chalk are both products, which complicates the scales of time at play within institutional spaces. So, the work tries to establish a series of interrelations between a set of materials, landscapes, and ideas. In short, a system. Whether or not the audience is able to unravel all of that immediately is not as important to me as their awareness that there is a sense of order, an underlying logic at work.

Type | A record label » RRRighteous Mix by Mike Shiflet

Ceci Moss — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:43:17 +0000

A blistering blend of fuzzy noise from Ron Lessard’s legendary rrr label (based out of New England’s Lowell), expertly pieced together by noise survivor Mike Shiflet. This is no mere patchwork of tracks, either – Mike has layered and sculpted this mix as if it was one of his own records, and the result is breathtaking.

Josephine Meckseper | The Final Shop « DIS Magazine

Ceci Moss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:42:26 +0000

The misunderstanding that my work should reference an idea of revolutionary chic probably has to do with a projection of that same audience of how they view their environment. Contrary to this belief, I see my work as a call for street activism, in opposition to a rarified elitist art viewership. My aim is to present consumer display systems that have an auto-critique built within. This can take place, for instance, by inserting images of the opposition produced by capitalist society, namely protestors and rioters, or by using pieces of shattered glass. As a starting point I usually work with films of riots and protests and confront them with forms that refer directly to shop windows smashed by demonstrators. The installations of display forms like shelves and vitrines represent the static face of capitalism. The collective performative aspect of consumption is frozen inside the vitrine and the flip side of capitalism (like images of exploited factory workers) is literally glued to the back of displayed objects. The concealed power structures that are the core of alienated production are made visible here.

Vague Terrain 21: Electric Speed | Vague Terrain

Ceci Moss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:39:44 +0000

The urban screen as a form typically fluctuates, a bit uneasily, between two poles: Not purely commercial and rarely purely cultural, a common tactic of the urban screen is to deliver culture in interstitial spaces or timeslots, for example showing video or media art in the last minute of each hour or working with public transit authorities to show animation or experimental video on the television screens in trains or subways….In response to these complex and multivalent conditions, an international network of artists, curators and theorists has emerged for the purpose of discussing and examining the role of the urban screen and to creating discourse among “artists, curators, cultural managers, architects, government institutions, screen operators as well as theoreticians” so as to rethink “the relationship between architecture and public space in the digital age” and to consider the implications of ongoing tensions between commercial and artistic concerns as well as the restrictions that arise from questions of ownership and control in relation to the public context. Whether through the cultural bureaucracy of a municipality or a multi-national corporation such as Clear Channel, screens are regulated, and ultimately cause an examination of what is and is not public.
For us, the networked, global form of the public screen manifestly raises questions about simultaneity, relationships between public and private, issues of centralization and control, as well as causing an examination of the ways in which cultural and commercial spheres intersect – all issues that pierce through and overlay the theme of “electric speed”.
This project might be characterized as an invitation to the six artists – Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, Jeremy Bailey, Jillian Mcdonald, Jon Sasaki, and Will Gill – to test the formal qualities of the public screen as a medium, because on some level the urban screen implicitly suggests an investigation of the contemporary media environment itself.

Our Weirdness Is Free – Triple Canopy

Ceci Moss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:35:13 +0000

The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; more recently, the Yes Men have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-foot-long golden penis (“employee visualization appendage”) at a WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution, along with its combination of feral tricksterism and expert online organizing.

An Internet of Things | e-flux

Ceci Moss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:07:39 +0000

An “internet of things” describes a world embedded with so many digital devices that the space between them consists not of dark circuitry but rather the space of the city itself. The computer has escaped the box, and ordinary objects in space are carriers of digital signals. This capacity seems to finally fulfill the dream of artists and architects of the mid- to late twentieth century, among them Jack Burnham, Cedric Price, Archigram, and Christopher Alexander, who experimented with a cybernetic apparatus for modeling space. It might also be the practical answer to quests by Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group and architects exploring Artificial Intelligence, who rehearse interplay between digital machines and the space of the city and the body—reciprocal modeling that enhances the capacities of each. On the contemporary scene, manifestoes like Carlo Ratti’s “Open Source Architecture” imagine that in digitized space—this web of things—architecture can be constructed in much the same way that a wiki is assembled.

As art and architecture adopt technologies to embrace a new imaginary or model a new relationship, digital technologies often become an essential prosthetic for an idea about form-making. Yet these nourishing and exciting projects also perhaps prematurely stop, short of, or even foreclose on, a much more expansive investigation. Even when resisting the vampiric modernist impulse to declare a new regime, these projects may be drawn into a cul-du-sac; their production of artifacts risks being yet another anecdotal, even marginal, expression in a succession of ideas.

A non-modern question—the artifacts of which have always been with us, the boundaries of which include but exceed all of the above experiments, and the answer to which we already know—is how space, without digital or media enhancement, is itself information.1

(the teeming void): An Interview with Paul Prudence (for Neural 40)

Ceci Moss — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:03:10 +0000

I would argue that every generative artwork involves a framework of proposition, resolution and conclusion. It is the formal and procedural structure of the generative system that creates the work: a set of entities, attributes, relationships, processs, rules, constraints, and visualisations (more here). The problem, for the way generative art is both made and received, is that that system is often hard to get at – it’s an abstract thing, which the artist may or may not describe or publish. A lot of work in the digital generative scene operates in an image culture where “look” is valued over process or concept. So although it’s sometimes hard to access, I would argue that there is often a narrative inside even the most “retinal” generative art – it’s the narrative of the system. Sometimes it’s fairly clear – for example Brandon Morse’s wonderful procedural animations of collapsing structures (also another dystopian work!). For me Morse’s work is wonderfully poignant because it works by resemblance – it reminds us of real things collapsing – but it also works by metonymy, referring to the idealised world of computer graphics and simulation; so it seems like the simulation itself is collapsing as well

“New Document” at Johansson Projects Reviewed in Artforum

Ceci Moss — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:52:40 +0000

My first review for Artforum’s Critics Picks section just went live to their site. I covered the group show “New Document” at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA. Teaser below, full article here.

Hunter Longe and Matthew Draving’s floor-bound sculpture Open Screen Unit (all works 2011) grounds many of the ideas afoot in this concise group show. Here, a projection of a mesh pattern shines through a sheet of mesh draped over a square frame, producing an ethereal illumination. The title indicates that this “screen” is not a surface for the serial, filmic play of images, but a site that responds to the simultaneous, software-enabled production of images. Indeed, throughout the exhibition screens are employed not as spaces of fixity or one-way transmission, but as sites open to fluidity and mutation by their environment and the user.

‡ FaceTime « On Stellar Rays ‡

Ceci Moss — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:28:47 +0000

FaceTime deals with the state of the face today – a face, which we avidly manipulate, perform, display, distort, detect, scan, enhance, blur, veil and avoid. A face that behaves both as object and subject. Most works incorporate the face as a visual paradigm, a platform for broader explorations and new subjectivities. Questions of identity in such a malleable state of the face, and in the presence of online structures, are at the core of many works.

DIAMOND VARIATIONS: Activated Memory I & II by Sabrina Ratté

Ceci Moss — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:45:28 +0000

Activated Memory is a two video project based on animated photographs of different parks and buildings of Montreal. Through the use of video feedback, 3D animation and color manipulations, the pictures render a new kind of space, a virtual world where only fragments of “reality” subsist. The music accompaniment is composed by Roger Tellier-Craig.