Spanning the abolitionist movement, early labor movements, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, and up to the present antiglobalization movement and beyond, A People’s Art History of the United States is a tool kit for today’s artists and activists to adapt past tactics to the present, utilizing art and media as a form of civil disobedience
This year’s edition of the GAMERZ festival not only demonstrated that there is nothing trivial about play but it also explored how our relationship to play has changed with the advances of technology. And, more interestingly, it invited us to join artists whose work investigates how the digital age is changing man, whether we’re talking about Huizinga’s homo ludens, the working man (Homo Faber) or more generally the modern man (Homo sapiens.)
Famous Deaths, IDFA International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam. Photo Nichon Glerum Would you like to know or even experience […]
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V12 Laraki is a perfect copy of a Mercedes-Benz 6.2L V12 engine. Except that each of its 465 components was handcrafted by Moroccan artisans who used 53 materials traditional to the country. The artist bought a Mercedes engine, his team disassembled it and faithfully replicated each piece using brass, marble, bone, mother of pearl, malachite, agate, precious woods, ammonite fossils, terracotta enamel, and other local materials. Then they assembled the engine using 660 casted copper bolts and the 465 exquisitely reproduced parts
Will tomorrow’s wars be dominated by autonomous drones, land robots and warriors wired into a cybernetic network which can read their thoughts? Will war be fought with greater or lesser humanity? Will it be played out in cyberspace and further afield in Low Earth Orbit? Or will it be fought more intensely still in the sprawling cities of the developing world, the grim black holes of social exclusion on our increasingly unequal planet? Will the Great Powers reinvent conflict between themselves or is war destined to become much ‘smaller’ both in terms of its actors and the beliefs for which they will be willing to kill?
Nicolas Grospierre has a rare talent for producing images that deliver a sharp and unexpected commentary on utopias that have lost their spark and on architectures that fascinate less for their intrinsic elegance than for the collective memories that still inhabit them
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The 11th edition of this festival of unconventional and radical art was anchored into the most banal manifestations of our networked society, one that is made of surveillance, social bullying, aesthetics of power, communication guerrilla and disintegration of the space of free speech and ideas that internet was meant to be
YES! !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Love these guys. I didn’t realize how much at first. I knew several of their works. The parcel for Assange, the architectural bug at HeK in Basel, the bot that shops on the darknet. I just didn’t realize these works were from the same 2 people
The exhibition presents eleven case studies spanning the period from the invention of ‘metric’ photography of crime scenes in the 19th century to the reconstruction of a drone attack in Pakistan in 2012 using digital and satellite technologies. These offer an analysis of the historical and geopolitical contexts in which the images appeared, as well as their purpose, production process and dissemination
DocLab Expo: Seamless Reality, IDFA International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam. Photo Nichon Glerum The DocLab Expo: Seamless Reality exhibition […]
The Microbiome Security Agency investigates the future of microbiome privacy issues and prepares citizens for a future where our personal information is at risk through our biological datasets
The event is a one-day meeting for filmmakers, producers, artists, designers, entrepreneurs and anyone else interested in exploring how digital technologies and new forms of interactivity are shaping the future of documentary storytelling. The conference is one of the highlights of the Seamless Reality program set up by IDFA DocLab, a festival program for ‘undefined art and unexpected experiences’
A broad view on media piracy as well as comparative perspectives on recent issues and historical facts regarding piracy. The book contains a compilation of texts on grass-roots situations whose stories describe strategies developed to share, distribute and experience cultural content outside of the confines of local economies, politics or laws
Zofia Rydet was 67 years old when she set herself the herculean task of photographing the inside of every single house in Poland. From 1978 until her death in 1997, she would frantically travel by bus or foot over the country, have people sit in their interior, straight in front of her, and shoot them using a wide-angle lens and flash
For this work the visual anatomy of the artist’s brain is used to influence the behavior and learning of a drone. Computer code links this visual information, including the number, placement, and thickness of neurological connections in Ms. Haines’s brain, to the movement and decision-making of the drone
Authors Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it
Visit the scene of a crime by live webcam or inform the police of an offense. In Sheriff Software, media artist Dries Depoorter allows us to peer over the police’s shoulder – or even play traffic cop ourselves
Designer Isaac Monté has used a pig heart as if it were a material that can be tattooed, coloured, and otherwise transformed. The work aims to explore how far a ghost organ can be manipulated for its creative potential, but it also questions whether biological interventions and aesthetic manipulation can be used as tools for the transformation of inner beauty
A few days ago i popped by the The World Press Photo exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall in London. It’s a show i always look forward to visiting. The quality of the prints is often ridiculously low but the photos that win the photojournalism competition give me some time to reflect on the stories that made the news over these past few months but also to discovered under-discussed cultural or political issues
The four sculptures are derived from 3D models of popular cartoon characters that the artist found online and remixed in order to obtain a new version of these pop icons: Every Mickey, Merge Simpson, Gogogogogoku, and Spongebool are new forms of the popular cartoon characters
Age of Wonderland interrogated the sustainability of our food systems, looked at how they interconnect with the environment and searched for alternatives to feed communities. The festival basically did the job that the Expo Milan was supposed to do but with less fanfare and more sense
This exploration of visual protest since 9/11 isn’t constricted by boundaries nor hierarchies. Online interventions rub shoulders with good old posters, murals with performances, court sketches with design objects. The people who rebel, resist and visually express their opposition are famous artists such as Banksy and Ai Weiwei. More often than not, however, they are anonymous or operate behind pseudonyms
I was going to post this story next month but i just realized that the show closes this weekend already. If you are in Barcelona at the moment, DON’T MISS IT!
Annie Machon is an intelligence expert and author who worked for 6 years as an intelligence officer for MI5, the UK domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. Together with her ex-partner, David Shayler, she resigned in the late 1990s to blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes
A week or so ago, i was in Eindhoven for the Age of Wonderland festival and realized the city was in full Dutch Design Week swing. There was far far too much to see for someone like me who has only a mild interest in design. So i went for the blockbusters. One of them was the Graduation Show of the students from Design Academy Eindhoven.
The work takes the shape of a matrix of 99 balloons that inflate individually to surround visitors in a physical, sonic, and visual experience. The piece inhales and exhales, expands and deflates, building up an almost claustrophobic experience that aims to echo the crises and dilemmas our society is going through
My notes from the Future Food Seminar which took place at Baltan Laboratories on Monday evening and gathered people with radically different backgrounds and insights to reflect on the re-invention of global strategies for the design of our future food system
Media artist and beekeeper Annemarie Maes has been monitoring and working with urban bee colonies since 2009, not only to develop novel art works but also to better understand the connections between city honeybees and urban ecosystems, to raise awareness among citizens about the plight of the pollinating bees and to call for ecological activism
Abu Bakarr Mansaray draws futuristic worlds inhabited by flying machines piloted by skeletons, tanks that look like dinosaurs, dangerous computer virus, ‘Hell Extinguisher’, aliens and other ‘sinister projects.’
The 56th Biennale is thus set against the backdrop of economic, ecological and humanitarian crises. Any kind of art or design event has to pretend you care for the state of the world these days (unless you’re at the Frieze art fair of course) but somehow this edition of the biennale demonstrates far more energy, determination and spirit in tackling the sufferings of our world than many much younger and openly socially-engaged events i’ve attended recently
What’s hot and what will be hot in contemporary art in Italy. This book explores various aspects of art in Italy from 2000 through 2010: production centers, benchmark exhibitions, the major artistic developments that often contributed to extending if not shifting the domains of art, and the leading Italian artists in recent generations. The story is mainly told through images…
I finally made it to the Venice Bienniale this week. I hadn’t set foot there for years. My number one preoccupation was to locate the Pavilion of the Indonesian Republic. It’s at the Arsenale, I had seen a photo of it. Some kind of rusty dinosaur with angels flying around it.
It turns out there was no dinosaur but a cross between the Trojan Horse and a Komodo dragon, a large species of lizard found in Indonesia
In an era of fast-paced technological progress and with the impact of humans on the environment increasing, the concept of “nature” itself seems called into question. Bio Art explores the work of “bio artists,” those who work with living organisms and life processes to address the possibilities and dangers posed by biotechnological advancement
The piece is made of Exxon, Shell, BP, and Mobil oil cans, but overnight, the local gallery staff had them secretly changed to Petronas labels. Though this violates the contract, I decided to keep the piece in the show because of the strange situation this tampering creates–a nationally owned oil company rushing to put its logo on a piece of art that is highly critical of the oil industry and what it appropriates and extracts
Project Nimbus is the outcome of 5 years of collaborative research by artist and inventor Dave Lynch and Chemical Physicist & Laser Expert Mike Nix. Using off-the-shelf technology, the team built an experimental device that projects moving images onto clouds. Onto pretty much anything cloudy actually: clouds of course but also cooling towers or urban vents.
Project Nimbus is based on the zoopraxiscope developed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1879 and regarded as the first movie projector
Simon Farid is a visual artist interested in the relationship between administrative identity and the body it purports to codify and represent. In practice, this means that the artist is ‘squatting’ identities that have been constructed by other people for surveillance, marketing or institutional purposes and then discarded.
He notoriously ‘inhabited’ the identity of an undercover police officer and the one of a politician who moonlighted as a web marketing guru
The Shock of the Anthropocene. Or what does it mean to have the future of the planet into our hands?
Scientists tell us that the Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. We are not facing simply an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point?
At this year’s edition of TodaysArt, Mike Rijnierse will submit a 100 kg church bell to regular sessions of bungee jumping. The sounding bell will drop from a bungee jump tower at the Scheveningse Pier near The Hague and its sixty meter fall will cause a Doppler effect…
Next week, NOME, one of those too rare galleries exploring art, politics, and technology, is going to open Jacob Appelbaum’s first solo show in Germany. There will be stuffed pandas, portraits of political dissidents and far too many secrets
Pater is a graphic designer who gave himself the mission to create visual narratives about complex political issues. He is not only interested in flying machines of death but also in disaster floods caused by global warming, Dutch sweets that evoke everyday racism, fishermen vs oil tankers, citizen journalism in countries with censorship, digital surveillance, etc