This year’s edition of the FutureEverything festival in Manchester brought a well-known and much discussed phenomenon to the fore: participatory culture. From Wikileaks to Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution, to the Arab Spring, participatory technologies have demonstrated their powerful political potential. The world of culture is harnessing the same connected energies with projects that involve citizen scientists cataloging celestial bodies in the Milky Way galaxy, crowd-curated photo exhibitions and of course the many projects created by artists and designers who either directly use collective action or bring it under a new light
Category Archive: installation
An architectural Time Machine by architect Heechan Park explores how to create an architectural time-based event.
As the machines blow vapour rings that double as ephemeral scent zones, the public not only experience a visual performance of smoke vortices travelling through space, but they also perceive scents that are temporally spatialised and visualised
Ollie Palmer’s Ant Ballet is a three-year research project into control systems, paranoia and dancing insects, and has culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. The projected insects is part of the FutureEverybody Art Exhibition at the 1830 Warehouse in Manchester
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One of the works on show at the AV Festival this month is the extremely long-term project that sees Agnes Meyer-Brandis training a flock of young geese to fly to the moon. The whole training started last Spring and according to her schedule, the birds will go on their first unmanned flight to the satellite in 2024
A wire brush spins around randomly, threatening your open-toe sandals. A motion activated vacuum pump sucks out the air from a sealed gallery space: the longer the viewers remain inside, the less air for them to breathe. A cobble stone is rotating on a rope. The sole purpose of that kettle is to spread red acrylic paint on your shoes. An electric fence used to control livestock on farms criss-crosses the path that leads to an art gallery or the bar. Elsewhere a randomly activated tripwire awaits visitors…
It took me longer than most to discover the work of Anri Sala but once i looked into it, i started seeing his work everywhere. A few months ago, i was invited to the Absolut Art Award in Stockholm to see some of his videos, attend a screening with popcorn of 1395 Days without Red and interview the artist. A few weeks after, Anri Sala had a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The show is now closed. I’ve waited far too long to write about Anri Sala’s work
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I like GAMERZ because it’s eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas
This year, the organizers and curators at STRP had the admirable and timely idea of setting up an exhibition that brought the spotlight on the history of Dutch art and technology. The show was both a celebration of the talent of media artists in The Netherlands but also a gesture of support towards the Dutch new media institutes (namely V2_, Waag Society, STEIM, Mediamatic, WORM, Submarine Channel, NIMk) whose survival is threatened by drastic (and short-sighted) governmental cuts
Delusions of Self-Immolation, aka ‘the suicide machine’, was a built by Erik Hobijn in the 1990s to set members of the public on fire. Literally
The exhibition is divided into 4 sections that sometimes intertwine and overlap. I’ve already explored the chapter about artists in the laboratory. Here’s my notes on the artists who leave the lab to explore nature and on those who are looking for alternative uses of existing technology
A tornado recreated inside an exhibition room, an exercise in Health & Safety violation and a mock-up that illustrate a physics theory that questions the laws of gravity inherited from Newton
For Z33, design collective Numen / For Use left the gaffer tape in Vienna and Zagreb and used nets to turn the whole exhibition space into a giant playground that can be explored horizontally as well as vertically. The idea might look incredibly simple but the result evokes floating architecture and flexible “landscape” as much as jungle gym
To understand how mysterious jumping fish can survive in a puddle with trucks driving through it, Mateusz Herczka recreated a South American puddle in an unheated Belgian space. The huge cube of glass and metal contains a reconstruction of a puddle found in the middle of a road in Guyana, with a truck wheel rolling through it. His work is documented in an exhibition which recently opened in Antwerp
Le Cadavre Exquis, a digital re-interpretation of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse and the parlour game Consequences. In the interactive installation designed by Brendan Oliver and Brendan Randall, members of the public are invited to record a short stop-frame animation as a response piece to a previously recorded submission. The texual narrative is then created by online participants
The work of Kris Verdonck focuses on the confusion of man in an estranged world due to technological development. The tension between man and machine, between living species and dead materials creates an atmosphere of Unheimlichkeit or eeriness. This ‘current state of the world’ – with its environmental problems, ecological disasters and wars – is the central theme through his oeuvre
A few weeks ago, i was in The Netherlands to see the result of the first competition. You might remember that i had interviewed the 3 winning artists/designers just as they were about to start developing their projects (The Miscroscopic Opera, 2.6g 329m/s, aka the ‘bulletproof skin’ and System Synthetics) so i was curious to see whether the final pieces lived up to their (and my!) expectations
If you happen to be in or around Sao Paulo this Summer don’t miss FILE, the Electronic Language International Festival that takes place at the FIESP Cultural Center and all over the Avenida Paulista till late August. And because FILE makes it its duty to attract the general public and not just the art&tech aficionados, the event is not only free but also packed with surprising installations, games, videos and events
As usual, the FILE festival in Sao Paulo mixes and matches immersive installations, animations movies, performances, machinimas, besides works of web art, documentary, and other goodies you expect from this ambitious new media art festival. This year, however, i’ve been particularly blown away by the least techy works in the exhibition.
I’ll come back to them in the coming days but i’d like to kick off my reports from the festival with a few words about ADA – analoge interactive installation, by Karina Smigla-Bobinski
The exhibition “Gambiólogos – Kludging in a Digital Era” gathered objects, sculptures and installations that explore the concept of technological gambiarra: they adapt, reinvent recycled and found materials using electronic technologies and much improvisation
A couple of years ago, Nils Völker built a robot out of Lego parts that replicates the way we look. The resulting large scale images demonstrate how differently the same objects have been perceived. The robot was the one work that attracted me to Nils Völker’s portfolio but it’s his creative path that started with communication design and moved to the use of physical computing in contexts as different as advertising and art exhibitions that kept my attention
This exhibition brings together 3 pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition features live performance, and material from the artists’ archives
Back to Berlin where a few weeks ago i was visiting the DMY design festival. As i explained the other day, the most exciting part of the exhibition was the MakerLab where visitors could discover, discuss and handle new technologies, materials, tools, open-source ideas and concepts. In the middle of this happy creative feast, a group of young smiling girls were introducing visitors to the joys of mushroom cultivation. All ‘in the comfort of their own home’
Oscar Lhermitte attempts to turn our attention back the stars in the city sky by adding new constellations, narrating contemporary myths about London. Twelve groups of stars have been designed and catapulted guerrilla-style at different locations in the city, and can only be observed by the naked eye at night time. Each of these constellations tells a story that is directly relevant to the Londoner
The book presents an international spectrum of interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of laboratory, trade show, and urban space that play with the new frontiers of perception, interaction, and staging created by current technology. The work reveals how technology is fundamentally changing and expanding strategies for the targeted use of architecture, art, communication, and design for the future
ASPECT Magazine releases periodically DVDs documenting works by 5-10 artists working in new or experimental media. The videos of the pieces can be viewed in their original version or accompanied by the audio commentary of an expert. The commentators usually start with a description of the work then they go deeper by bringing the work in the broader context of history/art history/history of technology, by revealing anecdotes about the career of the artist, by explaining the technological challenges of the work or highlighting the issues the artist wanted to raise
Niklas is one of the most facetious characters of the ‘new media art’ world. His dance machine without ‘annoying Dj”, moving curtain, ‘distributed’ fountains, white cube gallery in a box, physical teapot inside a Commodore cabinet or his electromechanical version of the game Pong are certainly entertaining, absurd and at times, even hilarious. But don’t let the jesting fool you. Behind the playfulness of Roy’s machines, lay much irony and lucidity about the world of art & tech he belongs to
The expedition as an artistic endeavour…
A growing number of artists are choosing this framework: relocating creation in order to define it differently, setting out, installing the work of art or producing it outside of its conventional environment
I had never heard of Laurent Montaron before last week. I was preparing a trip to Paris and going through the list of exhibitions open when i stumbled upon a small photo of a Catholic saint and, more interestingly, a press release that mentioned the artist’s interest in the history of media from the appearance of mechanical modes of representation in the late 19th century up to today’s different digital forms
The piece currently on view in Florence is directly inspired by early prototypes of sound weapons. As the artist explained: I found a series of very suggestive images of some real “sound armies” set up by the Japanese army during the Second World War. They were like guns pointing to the sky, conceived for shooting down planes by using particular airwaves. Unlike current acoustic weapons, which are real weapons, those first prototypes have never been activated. Those images fascinated me a lot. This work probably still recalls these suggestions. It is a structure that juts out a lot from the wall, overhanging and conveying a sort of dangerousness. It produces a deep guttural sound and can be “exhibited” in every sense, both from a spatial and a sound viewpoint
The line-up of robots, sculptures and installations Fernando Orellana summoned to his show is pretty impressive: there are suitcases maniacally monitoring the space, dysfunctional toys, a bird that talks in its dreams, people trying to jump the queue, Adam, Eve, even the Spaceman is there. I asked the artist to talk to us about his latest pieces
With this installation, Riley Harmon went for the visceral and the powerful. Each time a player dies in a game of Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, electronic solenoid valves open up and dispense a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of virtual kills, bridging the two realities. During the show’s run players who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and cause the sculpture to active
No matter how much I love exhibitions at new media art festivals, i often find myself suspecting that the curatorial vision behind many of them is little more than an after-thought. This was certainly not the case with Alles, was Sie über Chemie wissen müssen and i can’t praise the work of curators Hicham Khalidi and Suzanne Wallinga enough for their exquisite, intelligent contribution to Club Transmediale
Right now i’m wrapped up inside a Book Sprint, a one week-long collective authoring of a book. Our A/S/T Book Sprint explores the work of contemporary artists who are working at the intersection of art/science/technology, with a focus on the recent shift from artist/inventor dependent on industry or academy (as embodied by pioneering programs from the 1960s such as Art and Technology at LACMA and Experiments in Art & Technology), to independent agent (artists conducting scientific research or technological experiments outside the framework and discourse of an institution)
Every single day, Christin Lahr is giving 1 cent to the German Federal Ministry of Finance via an online bank transfer. She fills in the 108 characters of the ‘reason for payment’ box with a few words from Karl Marx’s CAPITAL – A Critique of Political Economy. Members of The House Of Natural Fiber are teaching Indonesians how to make their own safe, affordable booze and Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern ruffled a few feathers when they launched Wikipedia Art
Vincent Evrard graduated from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels with a thesis that explored the relationship between men, the clouds and the internet. One of the outcomes of his investigation is Aphrogenea, an installation that plunges a computer into a bath of sterile oil. The computer does survive the ordeal. It breathes bubbles that slowly rise from the bottom of its screen. Once it has reached the top of the screen, the virtual bubble becomes an air bubble that rises through the oil to the surface of the tank where it vanishes into thin air
The last edition of STRP attracted almost 30,000 visitors. They came for the concerts and parties of course, but also for the performances, exhibitions, conferences, workshops and associated events that were taking place in the city of Eindhoven. The exhibition was particularly exciting with its mix of no tech and high tech
The winning projects of the first Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award were revealed last month: a bullet proof skin, an ecological bioreactor and an opera performed by mutated worms. I’m going to dedicate several posts on the winning projects as well as on the award itself in the coming day. And i’m opening the series with the Microscopic Opera! Matthijs Munnik is going to collaborate with Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology on an audiovisual installation in which tiny, transparent mutated lab worms are producing sounds and images
The last edition of Artissima was good. But then i’d usually say such thing because i love art fairs. The booth ladies always wear fancy, sexy attires, none of them has ever heard about the existence of art blogs, i see free booze in my fancy press bag, the concept of a fair makes it possible to ask questions you’d never dare to ask in a gallery or museum, and there are more artworks than even i can absorb
The installation borrows the name of the famous tennis champion, except that the sole role humans can play here is the most humble one: picking up lost balls. That’s if they dare to approach NADAL. In this degenerated form of tennis, several tennis ball machines propel balls on a meticulously calibrated trajectory that animate and play with the architectural space
GAMERZ festival runs until the 19th December and spreads in various cultural centers all over the city. The focus of the festival is gaming of course but the installations, performances, talks and videos by 85 French and international artists also reach out to other areas where contemporary art and new technologies interact. Not strictly and solely game thus but there’s always an element of entertainment. Which doesn’t prevent some of the works to come with a critical agenda as well