Book Launch: The Social Media Reader

Mar 30, ’12 7:04 PM

I’ll be speaking on Monday April 2nd at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn at the book launch for The Social Media Reader, edited by Michael Mandiberg. I’ll be sharing the panel with Michael and artist David Horvitz – should be fun, join us!

The powerHouse Arena presents the launch of The Social Media Reader, a collection of essays exploring the rise of a participatory culture that blurs the boundaries between creators and audiences. The book features key essays from the major authors in the field, including Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Siva Vaidhyanathan. The Social Media Reader editor Michael Mandiberg will be joined by Ceci Moss and David Horvitz to discuss social media and its relationship to art on and off the web and articulating a theory of post-internet art; creating and replicating a few memes in the process.

About the speakers:

David Horvitz is a Brooklyn-based artist, known for his often bizarre and absurdist DIY instructional projects, and work on Wikipedia. He has published many pamphlets and artist books, including Everything That Can Happen in a Day. He has exhibited widely, including shows at Art Metropole, the Or Gallery, and the New Museum, and his projects live at http://davidhorvitz.com/

Michael Mandiberg is an artist and Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, and Doctoral Faculty at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is the coauthor of Digital Foundations and Collaborative Futures. His work can been accessed via Mandiberg.com.

Ceci Moss is a freelance writer, musician, DJ, curator and academic. She is a PhD candidate and an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice, digital technology and perception, the materiality of media, postmodernism and digital art preservation. For more visit: http://amillionkeys.com/

Powerhouse Arena
April 2nd, 7PM
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

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Soundwwwalk at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam

Mar 29, ’12 3:35 PM

I have a composition in tonight’s Soundwwwalk program at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam. Like my performance at ISEA for the same series, the concept is based around recordings of the human voice found online. This time, I’ve prepared an homage to Phil Collins’s dünya dinlemiyor (“The World Won’t Listen”) (2005), using various covers of The Smiths’s “How Soon Is Now?”. More info about the event below.

SPSound in association with NIMk present: Soundwwwalk – live browser-based sound performances
With Jamie Allen, Constant Dullaart, Bernhard Garnicnig, JODI, Joseph Lai Orchestra, Peter Moosgaard, Ceci Moss and Will Schrimshaw
Thursday 29 March, 20.30 hrs
Doors open: 20.00 hrs | Start: 20.30 hrs | Tickets: € 5,00
SMART Project Space | Arie Biemondstraat 111 | 1054 PD Amsterdam | tel 31 (0)20 427 59 51
Reservations: reservations@smartprojectspace.net

Soundwwwalk performances are an emerging genre of live browser-based performances where improvisation meets plugin sound-collage and multitab mixing, shamelessly blending the traditions of acoustic ecologies, pro-surfing and laptop performance. Eight artists will take the audience on a sonic detour through the World Wide Web. A Soundwwwalk considers the act of surfing the World Wide Web as a form of sonic action in the networked space of the Internet, a place where multitudes of sound sources, sonic events and acoustic phenomena converge. All performances follow the Soundwwwalk One-Line-Manifesto: “All sound sources must be played in a browser, must not be self-produced and must be publicly accessible.” The artists will perform their Soundwwwalks in person on stage or transmit the notation, sometimes in real time, to a local interpreter operating the browser.The Vienna based artist Bernhard Garnicnig has initiated this performance series in 2009, inspired by the world wide web becoming the largest possible library of sonic artefacts and recordings, considering any sound and video file uploaded to the web as potential but fluctuative material for sonic ideas and actions.

Live Soundwwwalk performances and compositions by Jamie Allen, Constant Dullaart, Bernhard Garnicnig, JODI, Joseph Lai Orchestra, Peter Moosgaard, Ceci Moss and Will Schrimshaw.

Jamie Allen will perform a Soundwwwalk which references and mines the vast functional audio archives of the internet. Audio for hardware, through hardware.

In previous Soundwwwalk performances, Constant Dullaart has been connecting text to speech generators, noise generators and effect library samples to shape abstract but wildly entertaining stage performances. These sometimes involve the interpreter banging his head on the keyboard to feed characters into a text to speech engine.

JODI is the pioneering net art collective of Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. JODI’s work displays the way online systems (dis)function.

The Joseph Lai Orchestra will perform the first ever on stage Soundwwwalk group performance, focussing on the poetic space between being – musically speaking – in tune and not quite getting there.

Peter Moosgaard makes associative sound collages inspired by radical constructivism, science fiction father figures and sweaty disco hymns.

Ceci Moss composition is a dense, eclectic chorus of recordings of the human voice found on the web.

Will Schrimshaw’s composition is based on the sonic phenomena and resonating properties of the physical network infrastructure the world wide web is built upon.

Recordings of previous performances can be found on http://soundwwwalk.com

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“Big Reality” at 319 Scholes Reviewed in Artforum

Mar 22, ’12 2:30 PM

Daniel Leyva, Save Point, 2012

I reviewed “Big Reality” at 319 Scholes for Artforum’s Critic’s Picks section. Teaser below, full article here.

Curated by Brian Droitcour, this group show of twenty-six artists examines the reach of fantasy role-playing games in everyday life, carefully balancing geeky fandom with a critical stance. The negotiation of identity in RPGs is one of the central themes of the show, and, as Droitcour explains in the catalogue, this personal exploration within a structured system often extends to other platforms––such as social media sites. Hence, in a nod to Joseph Beuys’s well-known maxim, Droitcour declares: “Everyone is a gamer.”

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Frieze Magazine | Archive | Dear Painter …

Mar 21, ’12 5:10 PM

Tomma Abts, Tauba Auerbach, Matt Connors, Charline von Heyl and Bernd Ribbeck talk about the role of abstraction in painting today.

What does the term ‘abstraction’ mean to non-figurative painters working today? I spoke to five artists, all of whom make work grounded in process and materiality. There is a dissonance between the directness of their work and the fuzzier set of interests and objectives – high-minded, metaphysical and historical – that ‘abstraction’ suggests. None of these painters seem interested in spirituality as a social idea or abstraction as a historical category, but they share a real belief in the metaphysical properties of work, materials, process and practice, a kind of secular faith in the possibilities of non-objective image-making. Their desire is not for transcendence through abstraction, but for a greater embeddedness in the world through materials and work.

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Frieze Magazine | Archive | Stock Piles

Mar 21, ’12 5:08 PM

Informed by the online debris of stock photography, many artists – including Aleksandra Domanović, Oliver Laric, Helen Marten, James Richards, Hannah Sawtell and the Yemenwed collective – are exploring the ‘off-world’ of digital imagery with a new fluency.

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Remote Control | e-flux

Mar 21, ’12 12:45 PM

Remote Control includes a range of work by artists who explore the way television shapes contemporary culture, and also highlights a number of contemporaries who are responding to the mediums digital convergence. Coinciding with the digital switchover in the UK, the exhibition marks the end of analogue broadcasting—a milestone in the evolution of television.

The exhibition includes significant works that examine how television has changed the way artists engage with material and form, and how adopting techniques of television broadcasting has contributed to the deconstruction of traditional definitions of art. Exploring the role of television in the public sphere, many of the works presented in the exhibition challenge themes of gender, race, propaganda, identity, pop imagery and consumerism.

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World as Medium: On the Work of Stano Filko | e-flux

Mar 21, ’12 12:44 PM

Stano Filko’s work is never just about the world. It is world. Because Filko speaks world. World is his medium, his language, his means of artistic production: using the medium of world Filko produces (anti)happenings, environments, installations, objects and diagrammatic drawings of all kinds. Some look very different from others. But that is the freedom of a mind that speaks world. It can choose the means and materials that seem apt in a given situation. What matters first and foremost is that each and every work articulates a particular stance, attitude, and point of view: it addresses the world as a whole from the limits of that world, that is, from the point where a world begins and ends, where α and Ω coincide. In each work Filko projects a view of the world as a whole by formulating conditions—and formalizing terms—under which the world could be viewed as a whole. When Filko builds an immersive environment, these terms and conditions are spelled out in a spatial and physical manner. But they can equally be rendered in a purely semiotic form, as a paradigmatic system, when he draws up diagrams and scribbles words on a sheet of graph paper. And finally (the conditions for articulating) a world can simply be given in a thought, as in the pivotal HAPPSOC 1 piece, in which Filko and Alex Mlynárčik designated all life in the city of Bratislava as a work of art for the time between May 2 and 8, 1965.

This is a provocation! And to see why, we have to grasp the radical sense of possibility with which Filko confronts us: in his work a world can be articulated through spaces, signs, and thoughts alike. From the point of view of his production, therefore, the spatiophysical, the semiotic, and the speculative (and to this we may add the spiritual, political, and sexual) are alternative prisms, but, practically speaking, as prisms they are tools with similar use value. As an artist Filko can use all of them. So, when it articulates a world, a diagrammatic drawing or simple gesture in principle has the same status as a fully designed room installation. Even the smallest thing can show the big picture. These are conditions of autonomy produced within a material practice: Filko creates the freedom to define the value of any artifact or sign according to his own terms, that is, according to the terms of the world systems that he constructs.

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Stano Filko at Emanuel Layr (Contemporary Art Daily)

Mar 21, ’12 12:42 PM

Galerie Emanuel Layr is pleased to announce Stano Filko’s first solo show at the gallery, an exhibition of new works by the Slovak artist, opening on Thursday, January 26.
The ‘vacuum’ originally represented the ideal of empty space in antiquity. For Plato and Aristotle such a substance was frightening and impossible. Aristotle refused the notion, stating, “a vacuum does not exist”. However, since antiquity generations of physicists and philosophers, as well as psychologists and artists, have considered the concept of “total emptiness” useful and inspiring. Yet the concept of the vacuum no longer represents an ideal empty space; it has come to simply mean a space that is empty of matter.  From modern particle physics we learn that the vacuum is considered the ground state of matter. The most representative and enigmatic moment for such a state of matter is the BIG BANG. This is what Stano Filko takes as the subject matter for his new show at Galerie Emanuel Layr – the vacuum as an intermediary phase between, before and after the UNIVERSE. Filko’s concept of the vacuum is, of course, not a direct answer, but rather an indirect conceptual and imaginative background to Leibniz’ famous question: Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? (Fedor Blascak)

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Stream the archive of Lea Bertucci live on EVR

Mar 12, ’12 1:57 PM

Artist Lea Bertucci played two sets during Radio Heart yesterday afternoon. She performed a new tape composition, Rods and Cones, that draws from various sources of concrete sound (from dripping water to bowed vibraphone) followed by an untitled work that uses an assortment of insect recordings. We also played some unreleased solo material, as well as a track from her other group, Twistycat.

You can listen to an archive of the show here.

Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist who works with Photography, Sound, Video and Installation. She received her BA in Photography from Bard College in 2007, the same year she was awarded a fellowship from the Tierney Foundation. The emphasis of her work lies in exciting the liminal areas of perception. She uses tactics such as slide projection, stop motion video and lo-fi filtering of sound to engage with these ideas. In 2009 she was awarded a residency from Smack Mellon and a Young Composer’s Commission from Roulette. She has performed solo and collaborative works at venues such as Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, St. Marks Ontological-Hysteric Theater, free103point9, Galapagos Artspace, The Queens Museum of Art and the High Zero Festival.

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Interview with Michael Guidetti on Rhizome

Mar 2, ’12 10:37 PM

Michael Guidetti, Snare, 2011

I’ve been out of town, and I haven’t had a chance to reblog the Artist Profile interview with Michael Guidetti I did for Rhizome last week until now. I’ve wanted to cover Guidetti’s work in more depth for awhile, after seeing his solo show at Jancar Jones Gallery in 2009. You can read an excerpt from the interview below, full article here.

You originally studied painting as an undergraduate. How did this spark or inform your interest in perspective? How and when did you begin to investigate 3D digital imaging software (like Maya) and its use of perspective?

When studying painting I became interested in the viewer’s physical relationship to the image and that naturally led into thinking about perspective. Since then, a lot of my paintings have been composed from a one-point perspective with the idea that the scene is drawn from the perspective of the viewer as they are standing in front of it. This began to dovetail with my longstanding interests in computer graphics and virtual environments, which due to their dependence on the user’s subjective viewpoint, most often use this same visual perspective. With an image drawn from this type of perspective, one may feel as if they are no longer looking at an objective depiction of a space, but are looking into or existing inside it.

I was also interested in the relationship between abstract and representational imagery in painting, a pretty common painting concern. I was particularly curious about how the context of a semi-representational setting could influence the reading of an abstract shape. My early paintings were trying to smash these two types of representation together. I was then intrigued by the possibility of expanding this idea further into the work’s form and I began layering projected 3D computer graphics on top of the mixed-media paintings I was doing.

A few of your pieces, such as Untitled (Standards) (2009), Bounce Room 1 (2009), and Bounce Room 2 (2009), depict standard figures and shapes used in digital animation, such as balls and the Utah teapot. Why are these ubiquitous and recognizable figures featured so prominently in your work?

Untitled (Standards) may be the most intentional in acknowledging these standard objects’ historical roles like you mention. The objects in the piece are shown as some type of archetypical virtual object reverently being preserved in a timeless environment. Most of the models on the pedestals in that piece are rendered with the actual data from Stanford where they were originally digitally scanned (all but the teapot). It’s interesting to think of these early models as an origin story for computer graphics and the starting point for a new kind of visual experience. When a new 3D graphics technology is developed, out of some sense of lineage or tribute, the creators make sure that rendering a teapot or a clay bunny work nicely. I find something funny and compelling about that.

On the other hand, Bounce Room 1 and Bounce Room 2 are using that aesthetic for more economical reasons. I think both of these works are attempting to embody something basic about their form in order to make the co-operative relationship between the two separate elements as evident as possible; a one-point perspective painting with a projected digital image overlaid. The digital projection represented as three red, green, and blue spherical lights; and the painted environment as five flat planes receding in perspective. That’s about as far as I could boil them down to. Separately they are elementary and flat, but when they come together, the simulated light and physics of the spheres bouncing around in the space becomes illusionistic. Bounce Room 2 complicates things a little further by adding the wood structure and lights.

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