After Agri is a collaborative investigation between Michiko Nitta and Michael Burton. Their collaboration looks at the future evolutions of our food systems, asking What new cultural revolution will replace agriculture? How will our species and civilisation be transformed?
Category Archive: interview
I met Signe Lidén over the Summer at the FARM festival where she was performing the sound pieces she had recorded while traveling on a rural train line in Southern Italy.
I had actually come upon the work of this young artist several times in the past. Two years ago, when i visited Bergen for the Piksel festival and back in May when i spent a whole afternoon listening to the sound files and watching the videos collected for the project The Cold Coast Archive: Future Artifacts from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Being more used to visual arts, i’m fascinated by Signe Lidén’s work, by the way uses field recordings to evoke and communicate the places and spaces she investigates.
Time machines, false memory, earthly landscape, moon rock gardening, flying saucers, lunacy, galactic adventures and the occasional rabbit. That’s the world sketched by Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser. Roughly speaking, Sue is a printmaker and Hagen is a ‘New New Media’ artist but together they are more than the sum of their parts, they are We Colonised the Moon.
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I had a little chat with the artist who hung a gigantic disco-ball over Paris, threw 12 tons of asphalt on the road to create a absurdly twisted bike lane in Montreal, rode his polluting bicycle in parks, knitted New Orleans street lamps into a satellite-shaped structure, silenced an alarm bell under a vacuum system and famously got his pedal-powered 86′ Buick Regal car pulled over by the police
One of the current interests of the Office involves an ‘overt research’ that attempts to build up an alternative and experimental knowledge source about the UK’s “Dark Places”, the labs and facilities of advanced technological development which are often (purposefully or not) concealed, secret or inaccessible to the public
Jacobsen is a media artist based in Copenhagen and an Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture and Mobile Communication at IT University, Copenhagen. His artistic work either closely follows social, political and ethical questions or sabotages technology, by mix-matching new and old media or by inviting web users to subvert web banners
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KULTIVATOR was founded in 2005 by 3 artists and 2 organic farmers in the village Dyestad, on the Swedish island of Öland. This cooperation of farming and visual art practice involves an organic farm with where pigs are raised, cows are milked, potatoes are harvested and linseed oil is pressed. But Kutltivator is also a space for artist residencies, exhibitions, performances, installations and screenings. And in between are activities that draw in both the artist and the farming community. The result looks both experimental and remarkably productive
The Finnish artist is the only person i’ve heard about who was actually arrested for pretending to guillotine a cheap Ronald Mc Donald statue. With the help of a friend, i got in touch with Jani Leinonen and bombarded him with questions about the beggars signs he’s been exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, his crazy sexed-up versions of cereal boxes for children, his successful attempts at selling contemporary art works by the bulk as if they were vegetables and of course i was curious about the aftermath of the Ronald affair
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…
Earlier this year, Jeremy Hutchison sent emails to manufacturers around the world, asking them to produce a fairly simple and common item. He added a special requirement though: the product had to be imperfect, come with an intentional error. Moreover, the worker was in charge of deciding what error, malfunction or fault he would add to the good. No matter how much i had read and seen about the project, i still wanted to interview the artist
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
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
If you want to see a penguin, you go to the zoo. If you’re curious about dinosaurs, any natural history museum will enlighten you. But what if you want to learn about spider silk-producing goats, anti-malarial mosquitoes, fluorescent zebrafish or the terminator gene? Right now, we can only rely on good old internet. But in June, the Center for PostNatural History will finally open its doors to anyone interested in genetically engineered life forms. This public outreach organization is dedicated to collecting, documenting and exhibiting life forms that have been intentionally altered by people through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering
A couple of weeks ago, Rui Guerra answered one of my facebook rants (which usually target museum press people who refuse to give me access to press images because i’m a blogger therefore ‘images are not safe” with me!) with a comment so smart and informative that i wanted to know more about his opinion about online strategies for cultural spaces
Justin is pursuing responsive media in the physical world, exploring the intersection between media technology and architecture, in order to produce programmed and interactive spaces that act at the scale of the spectator’s body
I doubt there are many galleries like heliumcowboy. First there’s that name. Charming and puzzling. Not even an interview with the gallery director has helped me uncover its origin. Then of course there’s the artists the space represents. Since its opening in 2003, heliumcowboy has been showcasing artists ‘who are capable of pushing boundaries, are a little underground and whose aesthetic is the forecast of art’
No one dons the moustache like Fernando Llanos. He’s a video artist, a musician, a writer, a blogger, a curator, he makes drawings, he’s the über macho-looking Mexican guy who walks around the city with a chihuahua in his bag. He also produces tv shows, a competition of animation movies, and the moto of his own radio programme is “There’s no need to talk about art in order to talk about art”. When he’s not performing Llanos is always impeccably dressed. He’s probably the one and only media artist whose sense of style i admire
Los Angeles-based Jiacong “jay” Yan completed his degree at the cradle of young talents that is UCLA Design|Media Arts Department. Fresh from UCLA, Jay started exhibiting his interactive installations and videos in galleries in the U.S., Asia and Europe as well. This is my attempt to extract a few words from a very laconic and clever artist
The online channel covers in a very professional and surprisingly fast and elegant way the opening receptions (vernissages) of exhibitions and events and i’m grateful to them for that. I profess an intense dislike for vernissages where people seemed to be more passionate about tepid wine and showing off their mere presence at an art event than about the artworks on show…. but that doesn’t mean i’m not curious about vernissages
Last Summer, curatorial research group Capsula embarked on the first of its Curated Expeditions, a series of research trips that engage with earthly phenomena through artistic investigation.
3 artists were invited to the scientific Zoo in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, in order to collaborate with scientists and other experts and study the impact of a total solar eclipse on animals and human beings
Material Beliefs takes emerging biomedical and cybernetic technology out of labs and into public spaces. Its members use design as a tool for public engagement, a mean to stimulate discussion about the value and impact of these new technologies which blur the boundaries between our bodies and materials
Cultural Resistance, Psychological Exploration and Material Intervention are the key themes of an exhibition that the famous designer duo El Último Grito has curated at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Although Daniel Canogar is a media artist who’d deserve an interview about his own work, our conversation focused on the 11th edition of VIDA, a competition that rewards works of art produced with and commenting on artificial life technologies
The artist has just received a Design for our Future Selves award for Commuter Thrival, a brilliant communication campaign that aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding public transport through posters visualising people’s emotions with quirky costumes
PSJM acts as an trademark of happening art addressing issues of the artwork in the market, communication with consumers, or function as an artistic quality, using communication resources borrowed from capitalism of the spectacle to underscore the paradoxes produced by its unbridled development.
Or how Karl Marx made me buy a blue Summer dress
I’ve been covering a few editions of the Interactivos? workshops so far and have usually focused on a couple of my favourite projects. Today however, i thought i’d ask two of the workshop leaders/teachers to give us a broader overview of the workshops, how they evolve, why certain directions are being taken, what the mood is like over these two intense weeks of work, etc.
Kumao’s performative technologies generate artistic spectacles in order to visualize the unseen: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, thinking patterns, and dreams
A robot is dreaming, others are struggling to make a decision, an elevator appears to be self-aware and a vintage radio relentlessly searches for God. Welcome to the world of Fernando Orellana
A Dutch fashion designer inspired by prosthetic technology, fetishism, genetic manipulation and animals
Kate’s quirky design, fashion, performative and space projects focus on the body, its habits, movements, and the dynamic sectional relationship to its surrounding structures
Marisa’s work combine performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology, as they effect the voice, power, and persona
The Course Director of MAID on collage, ecological issues, gene mutation cutlery, clay animation and that famous hamster paper shredder
Meet the artist who is hunting for moss bears, communicating with electric fish and combining woodworks and electronic music to create novel instruments and performances
Graham Pullin currently leads second and third year projects on the Interactive Media Design programme, in Dundee. He is responsible for some rather unconventional Social Mobile handsets and the mysterious Museum of Lost Interactions
The organizer of Pixelache, a very peculiar and engaging festival of electronic art and subcultures held in Helsinki and many other cities over the world
Cat Mazza, the founder of microRevolt, develops projects which combine knitting with machines, and digital social networks to investigate and initiate discussion about sweatshop labour.
Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine. He also collaborate on art projects which have toured the world such as Amazon Noir and Google Eat Itself.
A low profile (that’s their words) artist group whose work focuses on the research and creation of open-source minor architectures and low-tech modifications of everyday life
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