Exhibition | A Million Keys

Motion at Seventeen

May 15, ’12 9:56 PM

A group show I co-curated with Tim Steer opens in London on Thursday at Seventeen! We’ve assembled a truly wonderful group of artists for the exhibit, which spans both floors of the gallery. The concept is something we’ve been developing for awhile now. Info below.

Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Points in Space, 1986. Photo: Robert Hill for the BBC.

Motion

May 17–June 23, 2012
Opening: Thursday, May 17, 6–8pm

Seventeen
17 Kingsland Road
London E2 8AA
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 11–6pm

T 44 (0)20 77295777
info@seventeengallery.com

www.seventeengallery.com

Participating artists:
Kari Altmann, Merce Cunningham, Harm van den Dorpel, Michael Guidetti, Oliver Laric, Mark Leckey, Sean Raspet, Emanuel Rossetti, Hito Steyerl, Artie Vierkant

Curated by Ceci Moss and Tim Steer.

The object that exists in motion spans different points, relations, and existences but always remains the same thing. Like the digital file, the bootlegged copy, the icon, or Capital, it reproduces, travels, and accelerates, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable its movement. As it occupies these different spaces and forms it is always reconstituting itself. It doesn’t have an autonomous singular existence; it is only ever activated within the network of nodes and channels of transportation.

Both a distributed process and an independent occurrence, it is like an expanded object ceaselessly circulating, assembling, and dispersing. To stop it would mean to break the whole process, infrastructure or chain that propagates and reproduces it.

The object in motion becomes the simultaneous obfuscation and revelation of the points that sustain it. It’s both completely transparent and completely mediated. Transparent because it ignores the different instantiations and embodiments that require it to exist across a material infrastructure and mediated because of its dependency on these multiple parts to exist at all. It flows through networked channels, forgetting any idea of a singular autonomy.

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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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Vague Terrain 21: Electric Speed | Vague Terrain

Jan 25, ’12 3:39 PM

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.

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‡ FaceTime « On Stellar Rays ‡

Jan 1, ’12 5:28 PM

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.

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Architecture of Fear – a conversation with Trevor Paglen – we make money not art

Nov 22, ’11 6:22 PM

I suspect that there are very few places left on this planet that haven’t been discovered by intrepid explorers. Yet, Trevor Paglen has found and investigated territories that still need to be documented and exposed to the world. If you’ve never seen his photographs, i suggest you swing by the Z33 House for Contemporary Art Center in Hasselt, Belgium. They are part of Architecture of Fear, an exhibition that examines how feelings of fear pervade our daily life.

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“Rendered Aura” by Travess Smalley

Nov 19, ’11 5:21 PM

Last night, Travess Smalley’s exhibition “Rendered Aura” opened at Gloria Maria Gallery in Milan. I’m excited to announce that I wrote an essay entitled “Flashback” to accompany the show. You can read a small teaser below, full text and press release available here.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan writes:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be “a good thing” is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering them all together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, pgs. 3-4)

The possibilities of an expanded consciousness, ushered in from the promises of new technologies, the “electric age” and pharmaceuticals shook the historical moment in which McLuhan wrote the above, and it is responsible for producing the aesthetic, cultural sensibility and genre known as “psychedelia.” The circumstances McLuhan described in 1964 are still with us. And with it, psychedelia, which has resurfaced in varying forms over the past few decades, over and over again.

The commercial interest was there at the very start, already present in
McLuhan’s question of whether extended consciousness is “a good thing” or not. The use of psychedelia for profit is so ubiquitous and commonplace, that it’s easy to forget its original spark of revolutionary potential. Psychedelia emerges now as a stylistic motif, a mood enhancer, nostalgia. With its every resurgence, it’s imperative that we understand the surrounding conditions, as they detail how the mind is extended, and towards what end.

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Hyperjunk: Notes on a New Nature : Bad at Sports

Nov 11, ’11 9:17 PM

This week I am in New York City installing a show at 319 Scholes, a recently cited “go to” venue for all sorts of media-related arts including live audio/performance, digital interactive work, and netart. The show entitled Notes on a New Nature is a physical iteration of an ongoing research project that started several years ago with a lecture presented at The School of the Art Institute and has since had many manifestations in my own visual practice, as well as an ongoing image blogg and other literature/writing.
The above video is an introduction recited from the Front Range of Colorado concerning the central thoughts I’ve been developing with this research, as well as questions I continue to have regarding the depiction of landscape and nature amidst the proliferation of digital culture.

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Review of Jennie C. Jones’s Exhibit “Absorb/Diffuse” in the Wire

Nov 7, ’11 5:30 PM

I wrote a review of a solo exhibition by Jennie C. Jones entitled “Absorb/Diffuse” in the November issue of the Wire. The exhibit was up at the Kitchen in New York City from September through October. I won’t give it away, but I examine how Jones integrates aspects of graphic notation into her practice. You can read the full article in the print or digital edition, available here.

"Absorb/Diffuse" at the Kitchen (Photo: David Allison, courtesy of The Kitchen)

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Better than a haunted house…

Oct 29, ’10 1:24 PM

I checked out “Lost Symbols” last Saturday at St. Cecilia’s Convent in Greenpoint, a group show on the occult curated by Victoria Keddie and Jennifer Zazo. The building itself is gorgeous, with crumbling ceilings, old stained glass, and 19th century molding. The exhibit stretches across all four floors of the convent, and the majority of the artists were provided a room of their own to completely take over. There are 30+ artists involved, with performances and screenings each weekend. (Schedule here.) Given the theme, there were plenty of pentagrams, altar candles, incense, and the like. The creepiest work by far was a small room on the third floor, whose walls and ceiling were entirely covered in meticulously neat, ancient-looking script. I had my camera in tow, and took some shots below.

Today and tomorrow are the last days to see Lost Symbols, and the space is open from 11am-11pm.

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Ear to Ear Documentation

Jun 4, ’09 1:05 AM

I contributed two mix CDs to the exhibition “Ear to Ear”:http://jeffkhonsary.com/ear-to-ear/1 organized by Jeff Khonsary last year. The first mix compiled all my favorite songs from 1996 (the height of my riot grrrl days) and the second was a selection of “ice music” – music that was either made with ice or sounds like music made with ice. My old fanzine from middle school/high school Suburbia was also on view. Here are some photos: