Tag Interview

Entries 28 Total

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.

Comments Off

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.

MORE

Comments (0)

Rhizome | Artist Profile: Haroon Mirza

Feb 16, ’12 6:22 PM

All your found sculptural assemblages are culled from your immediate local surroundings and re-appropriated into Rube Goldberg like contraptions with each object serving a very specified transmissive function. The sculptural forms then become crucial as they exist to explicate the sounds themselves. Can you expand on the intentionality of the material used, or lack thereof? How do you approach the documentation of these sculptures as images on the internet, without the accompanied support/context of audio? 

As images or objects devoid of their operational potential, the works are sculptures like any other static and quiet object of art.  I see their formal qualities as a thing in itself – the aesthetic result of a process of engineering music.  So the form follows function and therefore the composition or constellation of objects becomes somehow more gestural than designed.  Of course as images it is difficult to understand the work as a whole but I hope that the form opens up some ideas around traditional sculpture.

Comments Off

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen

Feb 13, ’12 8:56 PM

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. He is one of many artists who have evolved new and various ways of engaging with the military and the secret state in the years following the declaration of the “War on Terror.” The work of these artists remains as apposite as ever, as the U.S. and its allies continue to bomb suspected enemies (and anyone else who gets “too close”) and to run “black” sites and secret gulags in which people are held (and tortured) beyond the reach of the law. Paglen has made works that raise fundamental questions about what can be known and seen, while simultaneously writing investigative exposés of the shadow state. This interview explores some of the relations and tensions between the two practices.

Comments Off

In Digital Age, Sourcing Images Is as Legitimate as Making Them | Raw File | Wired.com

Feb 13, ’12 8:50 PM

For decades, photographer Paul Shambroom has trained his lens on the infrastructure of America, from nuclear weapons storage facilities to manufacturing plants; local council meetings to emergency response teams.

His investigations require mountains of research and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. Known for his large-format, purposefully composed photographs, Shambroom is a distinguished name. And yet, he is ready to put his approach and techniques aside for a joyride in the sea of online digital images.

“I love image making … but it’s something I know I can do. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same things,” he says.

Instead, Shambroom is teaching students at the University of Minnesota about navigating images found on the internet and how image production and consumption are evolving. As he trades in his car keys for a keyboard, Raw File taps Shambroom’s thoughts about online imagery, the photographer-artists best swimming through the swell of images, Boolean searches and bombarding students with left-field assignments.

Comments Off

Interview with Joe Winter on Rhizome

Jan 31, ’12 3:21 PM

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.

MORE

Comments (0)

Josephine Meckseper | The Final Shop « DIS Magazine

Jan 25, ’12 3:42 PM

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.

Comments Off

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.

Comments Off

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

Jan 25, ’12 3:03 PM

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

Comments Off

A new documentation. an interview to joao vasco paiva – Robin Peckham

Dec 12, ’11 12:32 AM

João Vasco Paiva (n. 1979) is a Portuguese artist based in Hong Kong since 2006. He has taught at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media and Hong Kong Art School/ RMIT University. With a background in painting and advanced training in media technology, his work is characterized by the appropriation of observed phenomena, mapping apparently random situations and presenting them in an aesthetically organized framework through video, audiovisual performance, recording, and installation.

One of his best known projects in this rubric is Experiments on the Notation of Shapes (2010): taking the city as a sculptural playground, two projections present images of the Hong Kong skyline at a distance: largely still, contemplative, and gray, they offer a dispassionate glimpse of urban planning and architectonic monumentality. Facing the ceiling in a box on the floor, a monitor depicts a different vision, frenetically winding through back alleys and service roads amidst the architecture of spectacle, and generating an audio signal that is, in turn, modulated in frequency by the projected images. The resulting cocoon of sound and image runs the gamut of the urban experience, from the quietest moments of stillness to the madness of the intersection.

More recently, the project Forced Empathy (2011) consists of a single-channel video, a kinetic sculpture, and a series of prints. A number of floating objects in the harbor of Hong Kong subject to wind, waves, and other factors causing them to bob and sway, sometimes gently but other times rather wildly, are recorded by a stationary camera. When edited, the filmic object is computationally “forced” to remain stable and equidistant from all edges of the frame, such that the background environment inversely adopts the motion of the floating platform and takes on the role of visual noise. A wooden sculpture of the floating object is kinetically animated to inversely follow the motion of the video, causing a moment of confused parallelism in flat image and habitable space. Behind this kinetic moment of mimicry sits a simple graphic print, an abstraction of the harbor background.
 
His aesthetics often emerges at the point where generative processes come into contact with urban topographies, exploring control through randomness and quotation. The work discussed here is concerned with new modalities of documentation that rewrite originary aesthetics—creating new worlds as it restructures our shared sphere of perception. As Paiva prepares his latest solo exhibition, Palimpsest, which consists of an electronic installation, generative video, prints, and paintings based on the non-space of the mass transit station, he responds to a few questions about the role of new media in his practice and the status of the outsider in cosmopolitan Hong Kong. The exhibition opens at Saamlung in Hong Kong on 18 November.

Comments Off