One of the reasons i visited Antwerp is that i had never seen the Museum of Photography. This is going to be one of my regular stops. The exhibitions i checked out last week are now closed but the upcoming ones look great
For no particular reason
Meet Jimmy Kets, one of the most brilliant photographers i’ve seen this year. He shot photo series around the world but the ones i found most remarkable were taken in Belgium
advertising
When i met the talented and sexy video artist in Barcelona we discussed forms of control, men desiring to perform the tasks of robots and why video artists shoudln’t be afraid to share their work on you tube
For his video series, War Tourist, Licha traveled to five cities which have recently been through war, deep crisis, natural catastrophe or which are known to be dangerous. There, he hires a professional tourist guide and asks him to organize a guided tour of the worst destruction or the most dangerous zones of the city
Just back from LOOP video art festival and fair in Barcelona. The event is for video art lovers only. So what was a video art sceptic like me doing there? Well, i was busy becoming a convert. I’ll come back with the why and how in a lengthier post. In the meantime, here’s an example of an artwork i discovered (and unsurprisingly liked) at LOOP
social
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
VASTAL is a temporary research and education institute that Adam Zaretsky has set up in Amsterdam following an invitation by the Waag Society. Zaretsky will give lectures and workshops on Art and Life Sciences. The School was born with the objective of showing what it means to work artistically and scientifically with living organisms and materials. It also aims to make this form of art-science accessible for a broader audience and invite them to discuss the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake.
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
Can the OS model be applied to artworks or even exhibitions? In how far does the open source model differ from other forms of artistic collaboration? Is there a new role model for both the artist and the curator in the future? Which (economic) value and impact has expertise in open source production? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend and create public domains?
This panel looked at the geographical shift that media culture currently undergoes. Europe, North America and Japan used to be at the forefront of digital production, design, art and technological research. Now that technologies become available at lower prices and spread more widely on the globe, new initiatives and bottom-up organisations are burgeoning in East Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America
All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can’t put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life
Knowbotic Research is looking for new zones of intransparency in which people can fully experiment and circulate, where one is neither representable nor identifiable. What would happen if we fight surveillance society with transparency?
The Iraqi born artist, who gained worldwide fame in 2007 with his performance Domestic Tension (aka. Shoot an Iraqi), explained why media art has the potential to contribute to a discussion about today’s most burning political and social issues
Hans Bernhard on why UBERMORGEN.COM are not activists, but ‘actionists – in the communicative and experimental tradition of viennese actionism – performing in the global media, communication and technology networks’
The symposium ‘Positions in flux’ focused on some of the major parameters for the current and future development of contemporary art. In particular it aimed to reflect on the aspect of cultural sustainability of art projects, art and technology initiatives and art curating
Last Thursday was my merry day walking around Chelsea art galleries. Here’s a tiny selection of what i saw
One week before the MFA Exhibition, here are a couple more works i discovered when i met the students of Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA in Los Angeles
One always has a good reason to take the L train from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I give you two of them, the first is an exhibition that explores Brooklyn’s immigrant communities, the other is a show dedicated to Ward Shelley’s time-line drawings
Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. Hurry up! the show closes on May 2nd
While i was in Los Angeles ealier this month, i had the great opportunity to visit the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and chat with some of the students. The department educates designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation
The exhibition is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There’s a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program
The Salone del Mobile in Milan was boring but Jurgen Bey saved my day with his Slow Car
The project aimed at developing a series of tools that would enable city-dwellers to manage/monitor/research an urban garden using open-software and as much recycled materials as possible (mostly city waste that may include computers, printers, traffic lights or plastic bottles.)
One year after the Brussels’ exhibition Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age, Yves Bernard from iMAL and Domenico Quaranta curate a show that, once again, puts a magnifying lens on the new media art pieces that have found their place on the art market
The kinetic sculptures are part of a delightful exhibition titled Poetry of Motion featuring also a music machine made of wine glasses and jumping balls as well as videos of Maywa Denki’s Tsukuba Series and of McMurtrie’s Totemobile
Neural 32 features the usual mix of reviews, interviews with artists, short news and more in-depth coverage of issues as diverse as polymorphic intelligence, sex & love with robots, machines that play drums and other musical instruments or media art in New Zealand
A remarkable exhibition at LACMA in Los Angeles traces the paths followed by a Germany split in two after World War II. Each side developed distinctive versions of modern and postmodern art–at times in accord with their political cultures, at other times in opposition to them. I knew i would get a powerful lesson of history but i was not expecting the show to be so overwhelmingly good
What happens when we are “tagging” , “posting” and “sharing” our experiences and opinions in platforms such as those of Facebook, YouTube, flickr or del.icio.us? Are we really connecting and interacting or are we also forming the content and the structure of the social web itself?
I’ve never had any interest in football (that’s soccer for you, American friendz.) Never ever. I come from a country that never won any championship (and if they ever did, well… i still don’t care), i find men in shorts a rather pathetic affair and i just don’t get sport on tv anyway. There’s been just one exception to this until last week and it was Eric Cantona, his sardines, his iced tea commercials
Postopolis Day 5 was the day i realized once more that many people in the audience should have been on the programme too. It was the day i fell in love with stripped trousers and the day i decided all those hours spent on the roof of The Standard had not been that cold after all
A day that featured a Deputy Chief of LAPD, traffic Islands, fruit that grow on private soil but fall into the hands of LA citizens, data in Stamen wonderland, Texan oilscape and an audio mirror somewhere in Denmark
Notes from the talk given by Benjamin Ball from Ball-Nogues Studio, the wonder boys whose temporary installations explore the crossroads between art, architecture and design
Second day of the blogathon in Los Angeles. I’ve lost my notes and my memory is not that great. Still, here’s for you a couple of architecture wonders, a strange floating landscape that makes pollution glow, and a project to turn America into a commune
Using some DIY laboratory equipment, Andy Gracie’s team developed a system of variable strength magnetic field generators and related apparatus which allowed them to observe living micro-organisms as they were exposed and responded to various magnetic fields
Highlights of Day one includes postborder city, gardening instead of mowing the lawn, temperature architecture, adventures in Kazakhstan and live interviews. Do not forget to bring on the blankets tonight. It’s freezing up there on the roof top
Having this dream of painting a whole town, Brazilian street artists Calma traveled to Lençóis (Bahia) and started painting murals onto villagers’ houses. He soon ended up painting the inside of a chapel and even tombstones in the cemetery.
Could chemical reactions in fruits be also used to create on-off switches, the basic building blocks of computer logic and memory? Would it be possible to create a computer with fruits? The Fruit Computer Laboratory project proposes to create a temporary laboratory, open to the general public, that will raise questions and reflections about the construction of a future computer based on fruits