CTM’s work combines appealing aesthetics, humour and language with actions that invite people to think, question and reclaim their civil rights. Their most famous project is the Tactical Ice Cream Unit, a truck distributing free ice cream along with propaganda developed by local progressive groups. Another of their initiative saw them launch a bank heist contest…
Category Archive: performance
Karl Philips is a Belgian (h)activist, performance and conceptual artist who casts a critical but always witty glance at society, paying particular attention to cracks in consumerism, town planning, advertising, and turning upside-down their logic
Karla Diaz asked friends serving time in prisons in California to send her their own food recipes and collected them for a print on demand book called Prison Gourmet.
On a documentary and curiosity level, Prison Gourmet is a kind of culinary version of Prisoners Inventions. But Prison Gourmet is also a performance in which the artist addresses the politics of food and incarceration by reproducing prison recipes devised by inmates
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In September 2012, the English Disco Lovers movement was founded, as a subversive Google-bombing campaign, looking to replace the English Defence League website as the top result when ‘EDL’ was searched on Google
DRONE.2000 is a performance where autonomous objects moved by simple algorithms are patrolling over the audience. Their latent and dysfunctional presence is a concrete threat. Drone.2000 takes us into a dystopian situation, thus illustrating the military origins of these entertaining objects. Here, trusting the autonomy of the machine is not only a discursive concept but a true experience shared with the audience
Jennifer Lyn Morone has turned herself into a corporation and collection of marketable goods and services. Everything she is biologically and intellectually, everything she does, learns and creates has the potential to be turned into profits. Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc is a graduation project in Design Interactions but as Jennifer underlines, this is not a speculative project
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Inspired by Bell’s patent for the photophone (a kind of telephone that uses light instead of electricity), artist Arcangel Constantini developed the Phonotube which uses fluorescent tubes and strips of leds as light instruments and sound sequencers for audio and visual performances
The crystal forming robots are a physical simulation of a growth process, similar to the growth of crystal structures. Each robot operates autonomously and is driven by the light of the overhead projector…
Over the course of a several hour long performance, the Volta team built up a giant and foul-smelling pile that alternated copper plates, clothes drenched in acid and zinc.
I didn’t stand and stare until the final moments of the performance but I wish i had. The goal was to use the oversized battery to produce enough energy for one light bulb, suspended from the ceiling
Eniarof looks like nothing you’ve ever experienced. It’s like a very wild, very Far West version of a digital art festival, with elements of village fair, hacker meeting and circus thrown here and there
Award-winning science communicator Professor Marcus du Sautoy and actress and mathematician Victoria Gould use mathematics and the theatre to navigate the known and unknown reaches of our world
For her project Ergo Sum Charlotte Jarvis donated blood, skin and urine to the stem cell research laboratory at the University of Leiden. These donations have been transformed into stem cells, which in turn have been programmed to grow into cells with different functions such as heart, brain and vascular cells.
The result is a biological self-portrait; a second self; biologically and genetically ‘Charlotte’ although also ‘alien’ to her – as these cells have never actually been inside her body
I had an exchange of emails with Mario De Vega to talk about Thermal, a performance in which he uses microwave ovenss to alter the molecular composition of different materials. The work also uses custom-built hardware to sonify the electromagnetic activity produced by the overheating of the content of the ovens
Marco Donnarumma is a young performer and sound artist who gained fame across the world for a series of performances and instruments that use open biophysical systems to explore the sonic dimensions of the human body. His interactive instrument Xth Sense won the first prize in the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition and was named the 2012 “world’s most innovative new musical instrument”
Atau Tanaka is a composer and performer whose practice bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. During the show we will talk about the relationship between art & tech and how it has evolved over the past few years, about reenacting one of John Cage’s performances, about the space and place for (new) media art in the contemporary art world, etc.
Oil City takes audiences into the underbelly of London’s oil economy, looking at UK finance for Canadian tar sands projects. By eavesdropping on business people and seeking out secret documents hidden in dead-drops, you will help piece together a puzzle that interweaves government files with financial deals
A new work by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen in which a product was designed especially to be made in China. The object’s only function is to choreograph a dance performed by the labourers manufacturing it. By shifting the purpose of the labourer’s actions from the efficient production of objects to the performance of choreographed acts, mechanical movement is reinterpreted into dance. What is the value of this artefact that only exists to support the performance of its own creation? As the product dictates the movement, does it become the subject, rendering the worker the object?
Cultural Hijack explores the role of art and the artist in contemporary society and offers the opportunity to rethink the growing field of intervention in relation to cultural activism and social change
Today is the last day to witness the week-long performance from Liberate Tate at the Tate Modern gallery. Filming devices strapped on to their bodies, performers are reading aloud sections of the transcripts of the trial which started in February in New Orleans and sees BP stand accused of gross negligence over the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry
More than 2 years ago, i was interviewing Marguerite Humeau about her attempt to bring back to life the voice of extinct creatures by reconstructing their voice box. She started by giving her voice back to Lucy (aka Australopithecus Afarensis), one of the first hominids. Since then, the resuscitation endeavour has expanded to more extinct animals. A mammoth, the Walking Whale and the Terminator Pig have now joined the loud party. The prehistoric creatures where recently in Eindhoven for the STRP biennial where they performed live for the first time together with Dutch musician and DJ Jameszoo. Sadly, i missed the performance. But that gave me a good excuse to contact Marguerite and get more details about her work
The Art of Walking: a field guide is the first extensive survey of walking in contemporary art. Combining short texts on the subject with a variety of artists work, The Art of Walking provides a new way of looking at this everyday subject
Kira is a performer whose work i’ve encountered a number of times in biotech art context. I’ve been particularly drawn to the works that address the ethics of human/animal interactions and more generally our complex relationships with animals. The most discussed of her work is probably inthewrongplaceness, an intimate performance that Kira developed on her return from a residency at SymbioticA in 2004. Realizing the similarities between the pig’s skin and her own, Kira danced skin to skin with a dead pig and invited members of the audience to touch both her own and the skin of the nonhuman animal,
A few years later, Kira presented the performance, Falling Asleep With a Pig in which she cohabited with a live pig called Deliah in a specially constructed sty
The theme of this year’s exhibition is City of Cyborgs. Not the city of androids, clunky clones and man/machines contraptions but the city we are already walking through, smartphones in our pockets, implants in our bodies for some and ready to get our hands on Google glasses. City of Cyborgs in STRP speak means animatronics, opera for prehistoric creatures, a forest of interactive lasers, tapas made from edible solar cells, absurd mega machines and lots of dance. The high tech, the low tech, the digital, the organic and everything in between and beyond.
‘What does performance have to do with architecture?’ and ‘How can a building perform, and how can we perform a building?’ Call me an ignorant but i had never heard about Performing Architecture so i’m gathering here a few notes i wrote down during the Late at Tate night
Charlotte has donated parts of her body to stem cell research. Her tissue and blood samples are now in a lab where they will be transformed into induced pluripotent stem cells and from there into a range of completely different substances. A second self of Charlotte will be created, made from a collage of in vitro body parts.
The project is called Ergo Sum and it recently received the Designers and Artist’s for Genomics Award. It will be exhibited this Summer in The Netherlands. But until then, Charlotte is in the studio to tell us more about this work.
This week i’m talking with Ollie Palmer is a designer, artist, a tutor at Bartlett but he is also the guy who’s so interested in dancing insects that he’s embarked on a 6 year project to choreograph and stage an Ant Ballet.
During the interview, Ollie talks ants and more precisely Argentine ants, a particularly invasive species that the UK wants nowhere near its shores. We also learn about the best way to collect ants, to synthesize pheromones and end the show with a few words about the Godot Machine, a device built for the sole purpose of preventing a single ant to move around
London Fieldworks asked avant-garde artist Gustav Metzger to sit on a chair for 20 minutes thinking of nothing. Meanwhile, readings were taken of the electrical activity taking place inside his brain. The resulting electroencephalograms were then analyzed and turned into instructions for a factory robot to drill a hole inside a bloc of stone
This week we are talking with Nelly Ben Hayoun about space science technologies, aliens and music. The designer spent a whole Summer in California to direct the International Space Orchestra. The cast of the opera is pretty spectacular. It is performed by space scientists from NASA Ames, Singularity University, International Space University and the SETI Institute. The music was composed by Damon Albarn, Bobby Womack, Maywa Denki and Arthur Jeffes. The lyrics are by Bruce Sterling & Jasmina Tesanovic. Finally, Grammy-Award winner Evan Price was in charge of the musical direction
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
The works exhibited by the 9 participating artists are extremely strong. As much as i admire Ai Weiwei and his opinion of the show, i do believe that artists can create meaningful, valid works even if they are not openly criticizing their country’s politics. Besides, some of the works exhibited did comment on political issues such as censorship and international relationships. Ai Weiwei is probably right though when he writes that “The Chinese art world does not exist.” At least probably not in a uniformed, self-conscious fashion
Blighted by Kenning is a bioart work that Charlotte Jarvis developed in close collaboration with The Netherlands Proteomics Centre (NPC), a research center located in Utrecht that studies proteome, the ‘set of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism’.
Together they bio-engineered a bacteria so that its DNA encodes for the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Sebastian Stumpf’s photo documentation of his performances in the ‘gaps’ of Tokyo architecture. The artist is literally filling in the hiatus in the dense architectural structure of the city, squeezing himself in the overlooked spaces between the buildings. The action makes us suddenly aware of this ‘urbanism interrupted’, and calls our attention to what is in-between, behind, or beyond
A speech recognition algorithm searches radio waves for conversations about money. As an ongoing investigation of the Viterbi algorithm, this project seeks to understand the agency of a mathematical entity that operates as structural thread within the fabric of contemporary society.
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 film that inspires you to google your name again….
My name is Janez Janša is a documentary film about names and name changes, focusing on one particular and rather unique name change that took place 5 years ago, when three artists officially changed their names into the name of the Prime Minister of Slovenia, Janez Janša
Guido van der Werve spent 24 hours in almost complete immobility on the axis of the world at the geographic North Pole. His only movements consisted in turning slowly clockwise as the planet under his feet turned counterclockwise.
This means that in these 24 hours, he didn’t indeed “turn with the world” but let the Earth rotate around him
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
In a bold self-experiment aimed at blurring the boundaries between species, Marion Laval-Jeantet was injected with horse blood plasma. Over the course of several months, the artist prepared her body by gradually introducing into her bloodstream horse immunoglobulins, the glycoproteins that circulate in the blood serum, and which, for example, can function as antibodies in immune response. The artist called the process “mithridatization”, after Mithridates VI of Pontus who cultivated an immunity to poisons by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of the same
The latest project by Demitrios Kargotis and Dash Macdonald is inspired by the exercises performed by members of Casualties Union, a charity organisation funded during the Second World War as a course where acting, made-up casualties were recreated to provide added ‘realism’ to civil defense and rescue training exercises. For over 60 years, their methodologies and exercises have been showing actors how to simulate ‘authentically’ both the emotional shock of disaster and physical trauma
One of the artists i was most happy to discover at the exhibition Alter Nature: We Can in Hasselt a few days ago was Antti Laitinen. The finish artist fills one room of the art space with a video triptych and a series of photos from It’s My Island. The work documents Laitinen’s sisyphean attempt to build his own island (and therefore micro-nation) in the Baltic Sea. The artist accepted to answer my questions for a short interview