Karolina Sobecka’s video game reverses the logic of First Person Shooter games. In her work, the gun is AI-assisted. It fires automatically when a ‘target’ enters its field of view and guides the player’s hand to aim more effectively. The player cannot drop the weapon or stop it from firing, but he/she can obstruct it (and the gun’s) vision. The object of the game is to shoot as few people as possible
Category Archive: LABoral
From realistic renderings to imagined environments, painters have made landscape their subject, or used it as a backdrop for portraiture for centuries. In a certain sense, the artists who participate in this exhibition perpetuate this tradition of depicting our environment – whether real or fantasized, although they also reflect upon the intricate blend of visual information and the data enhancement that has modified our world
Flone is a drone (an unmanned aerial vehicle) which uses a smartphone as a flight controller and explores novel ways to “occupy” public space, in particular the air and claim the right to use it before legislation makes it illegal
advertising
In this episode we will talk about the ultimate cliché vacation but also about the Networks of Dispossession, the collective mapping of data about the relations of capital and power within urban transformation in Turkey. I also had plenty of questions about Graph Commons which seems to be a brilliant tool for reporters, researchers, activists, etc.
As one surfs the net, data packets are sent from the user’s computer to the target server. The data packets go on a journey hopping from server to server potentially crossing multiple countries until the packets reach the desired website. In each of the countries that are passed different laws and practices can apply to the data, influencing whether or not authorities can inspect, store or modify that data
The robotic installation consists of large groups of autonomous water vehicles. With roughly 50 individuals in a population, the robotic agents interact with each other and their environment to form a simple ecosystem. Their collective, emergent behaviour resembles the social interactions in a community of living creatures
social
The participating artists not only play with distortions of the “real”, but also pioneer new ways to interact with their work. The formal exploration of new interfaces is as much part of their preoccupation, as is the content of their work, and the kind of commentary on the current state of reality we live in
In Tarnac. Le chaos et la grâce, Joachim Olender explores a police and judicial blunder that hit France in November 2008 when a group of policemen wearing black balaclavas stormed into the small village of Tarnac and arrested a group of people who were later accused of being far-left terrorists plotting to overthrow the state
LABoral’s latest show is all about performance and installation art but they are never dissociated from the role that the public takes in the exhibition space. Implicitly or explicitly. Physically or psychologically
eCLIPSe surveys the creativity of music videos with a selection of the 50 videos that may be considered crucial for a proper appreciation of the discipline. Perhaps there are some missing but all that are included are beyond dispute. The clips are divided into several sections, to be screened in separate projections, starting with a historical overview and continuing with monographs devoted to who we believe to be the most seminal video directors: Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham
Interview express with Chris Salter about n-Polytope. The light and sound environment combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and artificial intelligence software technologies was inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s radical 1960s-1970s works named “Polytopes”. As large scale, immersive architectural environments that made the indeterminate and chaotic patterns and behavior of natural phenomena experiential through the temporal dynamics of light and the spatial dynamics of sound, the polytopes still to this day are relatively unknown but were far ahead of their time: a major landmark in the history of the audio-visual arts and performative architectural practice
The exhibition focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we’d otherwise regard as perfectly silent
The Lost in Space section of the exhibition explores the outer space, that part of the universe that excites the imagination of scientists and artists alike. Because of its high percentage of science fiction, pure speculation and enigma, that was the part of the show i liked the best
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
In his b&w series Demonstrations, Caleb Charland used everyday objects to explore the laws and wonders of physics. The wonderful images are the only traces left of the many exposures, the long trials and errors the artist had to go through before he managed to make the perfect portrait of a physical phenomenon. The admiration for his tenacity and curiosity increases tenfold when you remember that we live in the age of photoshop
The similarity between fireworks and movies is at the very heart of this exhibition. Both are intermittent ephemeral projection of light in the darkness. Fireworks are yesterday’s action movies. They used to last 90 minutes and followed complex, narrative structures, often telling a story of war and chaos upon which the hero would prevail
Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 1987 film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss following a 30 minute long, uninterrupted chain of physical and chemical experiments. One explosion leads to a fire that heats up a teakettle until its steam whistle flies away and hits a bottle that falls and pour its content over a… It goes on and on. One chemical trigger leads to another or sparks a physical phenomenon. The film watches like a thriller (even if you’ve seen it twice already) because every single step can go wrong
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
Passages. Travels in Hyperspace is a selection of works drawn from the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Consisting primarily of large-scale sculptural or installation work, the exhibition was designed so as to foster a contemplative stroll, making the body central to the visitor’s experience of art and offering a journey into a perceptual dimension that activates the physical, the sensory, and the cerebral
To discover M10, you have to open a very mundane door. Then another one on your right. And another one in front of you. There are ten of them, each leading to a plain, beige room so claustrophobic you quickly look for more doors that will take you out of there as the art critics mayhem pictured here demonstrates
Habitar is a walk through new emerging scenarios in the city. It is a catalogue of ideas and images from artists, design and architecture studios, and hybrid research centres. Together they come up with a series of potential tools, solutions and languages to negotiate everyday life in this living organism that we call city
Two of them. One is the catalogue of the exhibition El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm. The second comes courtesy of LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre again, it’s the magazine/catalogue of Habitar, an exhibition which engages with cities where bits and flows of information shape the urban experience as much as brick and mortar
One of the sections of the new exhibition at Laboral presents artworks that specifically require other people to engage in the realization process. The collaborative practice erodes the traditional model of creation which recognizes only one author.
The works in the section called The Autonomous Automat: Beyond the Newtonian machine perform the same task over and over again. They are imbued with an almost neurotic behaviour that recalls some of J/G. Ballard’s dystopian short stories
Hello Process, by Marloes de Valk and Aymeric Mansoux, is part of Laboral’s new exhibition, “El proceso como paradigma – Process Becomes Paradigm.” The show reflects the shift in contemporary art and culture from finished, stable objects to processes. Flourishing beyond the limits imposed by the market, this art is in continuous flux and execution, that has a life of its own, that grows, changes and decays
Vegetation and microorganisms live symbiotically inside the body of this robot. The robot draws water from a contaminated river, decomposes its elements, helps to create energy to feed its brain circuits and the surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to fulfill their own life cycle
Music take center stage in the exhibition but Playlist has also a very physical dimension that deals with the pleasure of manipulating and tweaking the devices and the aesthetic delectation in the vintage look of the game arcades and handheld consoles
Chip music is low-key. Its scene is relatively small, its sound is raw and lo-fi, but more importantly, its tools are outmoded goods of mass consumptions. This obsolescence of the media was at the heart of curator Quaranta’s reflections for the exhibition
The exhibition, curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral’s new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. I’m going to be the usual procrastinator and promise that i’ll come back with a report later on this week. In the meantime, here’s a link to the catalog of the exhibition and to videos by the extremely talented Raquel Meyers
Together, the projects featured in Feedforward create a complex picture of the global political and social forces that drive us forward. The exhibition features both the problematic aspects of the present and future, and the potential for collectivity and responsible action. At the nadir of the current global economic crisis, Feedforward is in effect about cleaning up after the 20th century and asks the question, what is progress now?
The exhibition addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces–largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies–inexorably feed us forward
The installation echoes the artist’s concern for the relentless threats against Iran made by many countries in recent years. Sentences that include “attack Iran” are scavenged from Google News and spoken using a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is then picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of smoke ring makers
Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón has opened a very very good exhibition a few days ago. ‘FEEDFORWARD – The Angel of History’ addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces–largely enabled by the “progress” of digital information technologies–inexorably feed us forward. I’ll write about it in details in the near future but i’d like to share with you straight away one of the most interesting artworks i’ve discovered there
The exhibition reveals how what sociologist Avery F. Gordon calls “the ghosts of memory” reach out from the past through the present, influencing how we understand and construct it. More precisely, the show investigates the mutual influence between this phantom of memory and the territory
Rather than answering questions–such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?–this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction
Leonardo Da Vinci was credited with sketching the world’s first self-propelled vehicle back in 1478. But da Vinci was a Renaissance Man, a man at ease in front of a religious scene to paint as much as in front of a technological challenge. There’s no artist from the Renaissance in the exhibition, the majority of the works exhibited come from the last two decades but they demonstrate that contemporary artists do not need to graduate as engineers to re-invent the car… even if the result of their experimentation has no ambition to compete with what comes out of a Porsche factory
At the beginning of the 20th century, cars were hand built by small teams of highly skilled craftsmen and women. Only a small elite could afford to buy one until Henry Ford developed a system of mass-producing automobiles that lowered the unit price and enabled the average consumer to buy a car.
Tobias Rehberger takes history backwards. In 1999, the artist embarked on a project that saw him sending simple sketches, composed essentially from memory, of iconic cars such as a Porsche 911 and a McLaren F1 to a workshop in Thailand
Cars have shaped the 20th century probably more than any other product of technology. Ever since Carl Benz created the first “horseless carriage” (1885), the automobile has had a deep impact on almost every single aspect of our life: landscapes, architecture, geo-political relationships (necessity to gain control of the areas that produce its fuel), social and labour movements, even the air we breathe
The latest exhibition at Laboral, AUTO. DREAM AND MATERIAL, showcases 100 artworks which, each in their own way, explore the relationship between car culture and art creation in recent decades