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.
Architecture of Fear – a conversation with Trevor Paglen – we make money not art
Nov 22, ’11
6:22 PM
JON RAFMAN interviewed by AIDS 3D « KALEIDOSCOPE blog!
Nov 18, ’11
5:35 PM
Aids3d: As an artist you’ve got a lot of different things going on. Do you think it’s important as an artist to have a seemingly cohesive body of work, or at least some kind of delineation between different sub-practices. Could you outline some structure that organizes your practice as a whole?
Jon Rafman: What ties my practice together is not so much a particular style, form, or material but an underlying perception of contemporary experience and a desire to convey this understanding. One theme that I am continually interested in is the way technology seems to bring us closer to each other while simultaneously estranging us from ourselves. Another one is the quest to marry opposites or at least have conversations between them, the past and the present, the romantic and the ironic, even though these conversations often end in total clashes. All my work tends to combines irony, humor and melancholy.
cmd – Kari Altmann – Kari Altmann
Nov 14, ’11
12:54 PM
Is there a certain logic to your image-aggregating projects? Perhaps you could relate this to your notion of “human search algorithms” and the fact that you’ve run into people online who don’t see the underlying structure.
The logic is a VITAL LOGIC. Each project is figuring out a way to survive in the hype economy, either by colonizing more content or diversifying itself, creating some emergent new sub-product, or simply outlasting its bootleg competitors by reaggregating them. If it fails to go viral it makes that failure part of its statement so that it can outlive the lack of favs or reblogs it gets, or it crafts a way to be part of a bigger statement. Basically by setting up these accounts I’m creating an attractor, an algorithm, that starts to build its own DNA sequence of parameters and set up shop via a results page. It’s sampling each post for the material and labor it needs to keep going, like a rebranding parasite. Once its parameters reach a certain critical mass, they can start to colonize everything. (It’s alive!)
Even the R-U-IN?S project at one point became about explaining itself, and it was a really brand-fatigued era. People who are somehow participating in it don’t always get it, but that’s a part of the territory. I have a background that’s found me in a lot of different creative communities, including online ones, and I’ve seen what fizzles out and what outlasts the social group. R-U-In?S for me was just a different approach than anything I’d been a part of before.
The way it’s structured represents a trickled down, black-market-mutated global economy, one in which distanced research entities communicate primarily through their reproduced image-object goods and rebrands in a very public marketplace full of mistranslation, competition, ripoffs, forced diversification, and constantly morphing call and response that is not so obvious to a general audience who isn’t participating. It started as a looted artifact trade based on treating the results of search queries as anthropological records, and it’s grown to encompass all kinds of products and materials in its lexicon of critical currency. Each meme tries to build tiny empires through exchange routes over time that are either supported or abandoned. That’s why the presentations of it have leaned toward Trade Shows, Catalogues, Storefronts, Meeting Rooms, etc. An unspoken social contract develops between each entity as they become entangled. It’s like some warped surf club between fake brands.
Rhizome | Artist Profile: Artie Vierkant
Nov 10, ’11
8:29 PM
The thinking behind Image Objects has always been that by introducing distortions (and layers of other imagery) into the images I can make the viewing experience on the Internet or through other mediated sources fundamentally different from viewing the objects in an installation setting. It also allows me to make a lot more pieces than I could otherwise. These all start as digital files, so ultimately it’s rather arbitrary at what point I decide that a file I’m working on is ready to be physically produced—any one of these could easily have undergone more changes, had more or less layers, &c. So by having a piece produced physically and then splitting it into all of these different variations I have the opportunity to sort of go back into it and reshape it into all of the other shapes it could have been.
All of this does stem a bit from, yes, feeling that for the most part installation photographs very accurately represent what a physical sculpture looks like. When I see documentation of works before I visit the exhibition, usually the act of visiting does little more than produce a sense of deja vu. Even if not, install photos are usually an idealized version of the pieces that make them look closer to how the artist intended them to look.
The problem with this is that, really, it’s so much easier and for the most part makes so much more sense now to just Photoshop or 3D-sculpt how you want your work to look rather than ever printing it or painting it or assembling it. That was part of the impetus behind Image Objects as well. If I’m going to be making a physical object that will be seen 99% of the time through another image I felt there should be something unique about both types of experiences. Otherwise, why have the physical object at all?
Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim – NOWNESS
Nov 9, ’11
8:15 PM
Cult photographer and filmmaker Todd Selby’s latest short is a revealing portrait of performance artist Christine Sun Kim. Deaf from birth, Kim turned to using sound as a medium during an artist residency in Berlin in 2008, and has since developed a practice of lo-fi experimentation that aims to re-appropriate sound by translating it into movement and vision. “It’s a lot more interesting to explore a medium that I don’t have direct access to and yet has the most direct connection to society at large,” says the artist. “Social norms surrounding sound are so deeply ingrained that, in a sense, our identities cannot be complete without it.” Selby filmed an exclusive performance from Kim in a Brooklyn studio as the artist played with field recordings of the street sounds of her Chinatown neighborhood, feedback and helium balloons, and made “seismic calligraphy” drawings from ink- and powder-drenched quills, nails and cogs dancing across paper to the vibrations of subwoofers beneath. Working with sound designer Arrow Kleeman, Selby carefully choreographed the film’s ambient score to reveal the Orange County native’s unique relationship with sound. “Her work deals with reclaiming sound because it’s a foreign world to her and one she’s not comfortable in,” explains Selby. “I wanted the film to act as an artistic conduit for her to tell her story to the world.”
Frieze Magazine | Archive | Surround Sound
Oct 18, ’11
6:16 PM
On the occasion of a major retrospective in London, Paul Schütze talked to pioneering composer Eliane Radigue about her 50-year career, which spans electronic music, Tibetan Buddhism, musique concrète and ‘anti-acoustics’
Born in Paris in 1932, Eliane Radigue occupies a unique place in the 20th-century musical avant-garde. Trained first in classical piano, she became a student of musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer and an assistant to composer Pierre Henry. Drawn to the American minimalists, Radigue availed herself of the newly developed synthesizer technology at New York University in the early 1970s. While many of her European contemporaries were slicing, splicing and shattering sound into recombined shapes and montages, she teased and caressed it into forms so large and tremulous their edges were seldom even glimpsed. Radigue has developed a sound world of infinitesimal delicacy, languorous duration and psychoacoustic daring. In the late ’70s she encountered Tibetan Buddhism and, soon after, the influence was expressed through a cycle of works based upon the Book of the Dead. This summer, Sound & Music presented an extensive retrospective of concerts in London, premiering Radigue’s first works for acoustic instruments and transmitting a language, honed over decades working alone in electronics, to a new generation of collaborating performers.
YOSHI SODEOKA | TRIANGULATION BLOG
Oct 7, ’11
4:35 PM
I’m so pleased to announce the following interview of the great japanese New York based artist Yoshi Sodeoka. I’m a big fan of his mesmerizing audiovisual carrier and interested on all around it, today he tells us everything about this trajectory, including details which he had never told before. As a exclusivity, Yoshi presents here at Triangulation as a first time online one of his new pieces called “Violet Dark of Spring of the Numinous Orb”.
Sodeoka’s psychedelic video, sound art and prints are a dystopian clash of noise and beatitude. His projects have been shown all over the world, from London’s Tate Britain, New York City’s Deitch Projects, Paris’ Festival Némo, Edinburgh’s MU, São Paulo’s Rojo Nova, Barcelona’s OFFF, Baltimore Museum of Art, London’s OneDotZero, Barcelona’s Sonar Festival, Haifa Museum Israel, Berlin’s Transmediale, Poland’s Krakow Film Festival.
cmd – Artie Vierkant – Artie Vierkant
Sep 8, ’11
10:01 PM
…increasingly I feel we learn more about the character of physical entities through digital means. Or at least a huge amount of the things created in a digital environment (if such a designation is important) are quantifying or augmenting things that already exist. For instance, every tree in Paris is now equipped with an RFID chip. For the moment that mostly means we have some sort of efficient database / cataloguing system set up to help us maintain these trees, but as the technology gets more advanced that data will get further and further imbricated into how we conceive of “tree”. So suddenly not only is an object tagged with some unique identifier and a little package of metadata: it’s also sending and receiving signals, interacting with other objects moving around it, and in some way affecting how we interact with it.
Annotations – Triple Canopy
Aug 23, ’11
10:16 PM
A pixel is an abstract container that holds a value capable of being translated into any physical size. Of course, making it physical brings about certain material contingencies. I became interested in the structure that the camera overlays in the process of re-photographing. In certain of the “Aggregates” photographs the cells of the grid are really small, and some have over 50,000 color combinations. In these instances the camera sensor has trouble making out the edges of such a fine grid, and in turn creates a moiré pattern, which causes a cyan or magenta fringe at the edges of the gridlines. As I re-photograph and re-print the sheet, the fringe builds into a layer of color imposed by the camera itself. For me, the errors that occur as this rational system of computation breaks down offer some interesting possibilities.
Rhizome | Artist Profile: Laura Brothers
Aug 23, ’11
10:14 PM
I assume that the way in which my work is normally viewed is through the action of scrolling. You’re on a computer and you are gliding the images in succession past your gaze. I liken this to a sort of super slow motion film strip. It’s a way of storytelling. For a post, each individual image is viewed in relation to the one that comes before it and the one that follows. Meanwhile, they are all sort of floating in an endless black space. There’s no real clear-cut definition between the images in this context. So to me, within each post, each distinct image is really part of the same piece; the same story.
