Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature
Jen Hui Liao’s Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model’s help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait
A fictitious company called ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
Some of the items listed in the catalogue of the bankruptcy clearance auction are perfectly mundane, others are fictitious. Put together they offer a detailed insight into the inner workings of a large corporation closely inspired by the Enron scandal
advertising
Directly influenced by the 50s and ’60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort’s photo series, Daimlerstrasse 38 lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera
The artists brought together for this show reveal an imagery that has been inspired by the current mutations in our environment. They deal with diverse matters such as Chernobyl, global warming and the rise in oil rates. At times close to science-fiction, these artists imagine new stories which pay witness to the curiosity and fears derived from this changing reality
social
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i’m going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What’s left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition
The audio file of a lecture by Prof. Wendy Brown who explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Bonus! Videos of Shooting Back, the project of an Isreali NGO that gives Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures
The German independent filmmaker has been investigating the relationship between technology and information for decades. His talk in Barcelona explored the way blurry, raw images from surveillance and sophisticated computer-generated images are now competing with “the real thing”
LOOP art fair understands the importance of the comfort factor for video art lovers. The fair took place inside the snug rooms of a 4 stars hotel right in the center of Barcelona during 3 afternoons. Videos were displayed on big screens inside bedrooms and some galleries added a smaller screen in the bathroom to show another piece. So here we were all cosying into armchairs, spreading over beds, taking notes in the dark and chatting in the corridors of the hotel
Just found out that the utterly brilliant and fascinating thesis that Otto von Busch presented last year at the University of Gothenburg is available as an online PDF. So leave Dan Brown on the shelves and take this one on the beach this Summer, ok?
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
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
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