Ellie Irons is one of those rare artists whose work opens your eyes to what is just under your nose but remains unnoticed. Some artists bring the spotlight on data collecting, others on corruption, corporate malpractice, or land grabbing. Ellie forces us to consider the wild and often reviled urban ecology that sprouts all around us. She uses galleries to provide asylum to wild and invasive plant species, extracts the pigments from local weeds to paint their map-like portraits, photographs the vigorous life growing inside vacant lots, and is actively collecting the seeds of the most humble but robust plants that mirror population growth and flux in globalized cities
Bruce Gilden, Factory in the Midlands, from the series The Black Country, 2014 Evelyn Hofer, Crossing Guard, London, […]
From painting to digital technologies to crowdsourcing, over the last few decades the means of making artworks have become more extraordinary and diverse. Yet we rarely consider the implications of how art is made
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When he is not painting murals in Latin America, creating coloring books for children living in refugee camps or stealing Berlin’s iconic and kitschy buddy bears, Avignon turns himself into “neoangin”, a performer of electronic music that doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously either.
There is a surprising similarity in the way neural networks and analogue modular synthesizers function, in that for both, voltages are passed through components to produce data or sound. The neural interface we developed juxtaposes these two networks and in a sense creates a continuum that creates one unified network. With CellF, the musician and musical instrument become one entity to create a cybernetic musician, a rock star in a petri dish.
The installation’s mechanical workings and network of strings allow us to explore the poetic potential of technology via its materiality, so that Interface I sits on the boundary between an imaginary field and an epistemological condition
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The objects, books, artifacts, gadgets and artworks offer a contemplation on autonomy as a disappearing modus operandi of political action, while workshops, discussions and demos focus on the devices we use every day: How do they work? What individual data traces do they capture? Where do these go, and what kind of control can one regain?
Through the course of these lifeworks, Hsieh moved from a year of solitary confinement in a cell to a year in which he punched a worker’s time clock in his studio every hour on the hour to a year spent living without shelter in Manhattan to a year in which he was tied by a rope to artist Linda Montano and finally to a year of total abstention from all art activities. In 1986 Hsieh announced that he would spend the next thirteen years making art but not showing it publicly
The mobile ecosystem has a robotic core wrapped in twelve garden modules. Whenever the lowermost plants require more sunlight, they ‘vote’ to have the sphere gently roll over. If it becomes too hot for the majority of them, they will steer the structure towards the shade
Martin Roemers’ photographs take us to abandoned army bases and bunker complexes, military training areas, technical installations, monitoring facilities and military cemeteries
Like all Pictoplasma guests, Julian Glander creates little fellows. His have been dipped in cotton candy and other similarly sugary substances. They live a merry life, star in comic strips, music videos, short films, adverts and illustrations but they particularly shine when they get to frolic in GIFs!
Ploeger is an artist who looks at the broad picture, who realizes that e-waste, sexuality, ecology or violence are all valid points of entries into the study of the many paradoxes, complexities and entanglements of our consumer culture and its impacts on the planet
In 1961, Donald Michie, a British WWII code breaker and a researcher in artificial intelligence, developed MENACE (the Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine), one of the first programs capable of learning to play and win a game of Noughts and Crosses (or Tic-Tac-Toe if you’re American.) Since he had no computers at his disposal at the time, he created a device built out of matchboxes and glass beads to simulate a learning algorithm.
With an emphasis on the ‘now’ and the most recent exhibitions, this book examines the variety and richness of curating practices today, from public commissions by Art Angel to experimental projects such as the ‘Ghetto Biennale’ in Haiti or the Rhizome digital archive
Bits and Pieces transforms the gallery into a space of poetic performance through the choreographic movements of ordinary objects. The organic rhythms of the sculpture allow for a new language to emerge that influences how we come to understand the functions of everyday, disregarded objects
The Promise of Total Automation, an exhibition recently opened at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, looks at our troubled relationship with machines. Technical devices that were originally designed to serve and assist us and are now getting smarter and harder to control and comprehend. Does their growing autonomy mean that the machines will one day overpower us? Or will they remain our subservient little helpers, our gateway to greater knowledge and sovereignty?
In 1980, the Sunday Times Magazine asked war photographer Raymond Depardon to go and photograph Glasgow. His images was deemed too upsetting and Sunday Times Magazine never published them
Destructables.org is a DIY repository of projects of protest and creative dissent. The site features user generated step-by-step video and photo/text based instructions for a wide range of dissenting actions, including art actions, billboard alterations, shop-dropping, protest strategies, protest props, methods of civil disobedience, stencil work, and many other forms of public dissent – from the practical and tactical to the creative and illegal. It is a living archive and resource for the art and activist communities
global aCtIVISm (the capitalized letters form the Latin word civis, emphasizing the power of citizens) describes and documents politically inspired art—global art practices that draw attention to grievances and demand the transformation of existing conditions through actions, demonstrations, and performances in public space
In 2011, Mr Bingo started mailing insulting postcards to total strangers. All you had to do was ask and pay 50 pounds for the service. Probably because his hand-drawn messages had more foolishness than bile, people queued to be mocked and abused. If you’ve missed the Hate Mail brouhaha, you might have encountered his work in austere newspapers, dandy magazines, or on cans of beer, restaurant walls and skateboards
A few years ago, artist Nick Laessing stumbled upon a book in a second-hand bookshop. Titled The Search of Free Energy, the publication introduced him to the world of people who are searching for alternatives to fossil fuel as a source of energy
A Photo series ‘exploring the real world of scientific research. Not the stainless steel surfaces bathed in purple light, but real people in their basements working on selfbuilt contraptions. All shot in state of the art research institutions across Europe and the US, showing experiments with human subjects’
British photographer Edmund Clark and counterterrorism investigator Crofton Black have assembled photographs and documents that confront the nature of contemporary warfare and the invisible mechanisms of state control
Luque Sánchez uses matter and technology to seduce, puzzle and inspire viewers. His art installations, which double as science fiction works, materialize scientific concepts and theories that might seem arcane to most people: artificial intelligence, chaos theory, infinity
Nova and Vacheron’s book explores the impact of algorithms in cultural production. Through a wide range of examples, the main essay, called “DADABOT: An Introduction to Machinic Creolization” presents the contemporary forms of hybridization in music, visual arts, literature, photography, etc.
The main exhibition space presents objects and evidence collected from 24 real-life case files. Some of them relate to the capital’s most notorious crimes. From the Great Train Robbery to the Kray twins. Other cases earned their place in the show because of the important role they’ve played in the the development of forensics, because they’ve changed the law or because of the impact they had on society
Every single day and every single night, rain or shine, the movements of people living in Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan, are watched over by huge surveillance balloons. The U.S. army calls them aerostat or Persistent Threat Detection System
The People’s History Museum in Manchester has recently opened a photo exhibition that explores how industrial workers went from objects in photos, to heroic representations of industry and finally to photographers themselves
Machine Wilderness explores what our technologies could look like if they are native to our landscapes, part of material flows, foodchains and layers of communication. In particular it looks at environmental robotics, designing ‘pseudo-organisms’ that relate to specific habitats
The exhibition brings side by side poetry and suspense, art and physics, children book and video art, Greek mythology and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, music by Philip Glass and Tarot cards, spirituality and human cloning. But in a form that is fortunately far more digestible than my introduction would suggest…
Among the topics examined are the use of commercial platforms for art practice, what art means in an age of increasing surveillance, and questions surrounding such recent concepts as “postinternet.”
Alec Soth spent five years crisscrossing the country in search for the hippies, hermits, monks, survivalists and other loners who are ill at ease with society and decide to live off the grid
The artist’s work investigates issues as different from each other as perception, international power networks, religion, changes in the human condition through technology, surveillance and electronic and physical warfare
A couple of weeks ago, MU in Eindhoven invited the public to a 2 day long immersion into all things bio art and bio design. The Body of Matter / BAD Award Special weekend lined up a series talk, panels, workshops and performances and explored how the techniques and challenges of life sciences are embraced by contemporary artists and designers
With Body of Matter, MU zooms in on the body and the possibilities biotechnology has to offer to change, enhance, investigate and replace it, now and in the near future
The artist gave a brilliant talk about how the fish, the beaches and even ourselves are chocking on plastic, about King Leopold II of Belgium and his brutal exploitation of Congo, and about the Homo Sapiens, a species so presumptuous it gives itself the title of ‘doubly wise.’
Maja devises equipment enabling biological survival in apocalyptic situations, built an installation ‘infused’ with the serotonin of the both herself and her dog Byron and explored the problem of invasive species with the help of native and tropical crayfish.
An old family Volvo 240 is changed into four smaller vehicles of various types: drones recalling military equipment used for killing, but also for observation, navigation and surveillance, vehicles used to save lives
With his performances, apps and other works, Satrom is opening the black box of the operating system we daily use. He is even inviting each of us to join the glitch party. Together with Ben Syverson, he created the sOS or Satromizer Operating System, the world’s first ‘100% problem-based operating system’ which you can download to turn your laptop, iPad and phone into a neverending glitch party
Second and last chapter of my report from the GAMERZ festival, one of the very few French festivals that doesn’t play it safe nor stiff with a programme that endorses the unexpected, a laid-back atmosphere, a few famous names but also an impressive line-up of fresh talents. Plus, it’s in Aix-en-Provence so as the French say “y’a pas photo!” (which means something like ‘it’s a no-brainer.’)