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Previous stories on this panel: Positions in Flux - Panel 1: Art goes politics - Hans Bernhard from UBERMORGEN.COM and Positions in Flux - Panel 1: Art goes politics - Wafaa Bilal. Geert Lovink has already reviewed the whole panel on his blog: Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis.
The third person to take the stage was Christian Huebler from Knowbotic Research who are also artist in residence at NIMk this year. Knowbotic Research (Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler, Alexander Tuchacek) was established in 1991, and has experimented with formations of information, interface and networked agencies. Ok, now this will sound weird but Knowbotic Research happens to be one of the art groups i find most interesting today. And that's in spite of the fact that i don't understand fully what their work is about. But now was my chance to get a better idea of what they are doing.
Huebler's presentation focused on BlackBenz Race (BBR), a semi-fictitious car race of black Mercedes from Zurich to Pristina (Kosovo) and back to Zurich. The project refers to the big Kosovo-Albanian community that migrate to Western Europe with Zurich as a node. The aim of BBR is to make visible the translocal space produced by Kosovo-Albanian migration across Europe. BBR explores the intersection of public spheres and migrant networks by using the metaphor of the race. The 'Black Benz' represents both a status symbol, and a symbol of the mobility that is inherent in migrant culture. The site of that mobility is the corridor along which the cars travel, from Pristina and Tirana to Zurich, Rotterdam, or London. The Black Benz is both a tool and a symbol, a vehicle for trading and trafficking of people and goods, as well as a sign of economic success. Knowbotic Research was using a discrimination platform to hack into the space.
Unfortunately, the city of Zurich (which had commissioned the project to KR) was not ready to accept their idea. It would have been an interesting experience for Albanians living in Zurich as they feel alienated both in Switzerland and in their home country. KR doesn't work with participants but provide a framework for them to get involved. Certain stages of the races nevertheless took place. The artists managed to get the authorization to organize a race in front of the United Nations headquarters in Pristina. They pretended they were shooting a film and got the city blocked for the ghost race from 3 am to 6 am. While in Pristina they discovered there was also a burnout party going on. A group of men would block a car that a driver brings into full gear until the tyres totally dissolve and no one can see anything because of the fume. NEWBORN - undeliverable? is the second project of Knowbotic Research that engages with translocal spaces and Kosovarian migration. It took place in Zurich but this time the artists didn't ask for any permission. The idea was inspired by a photo (see below) the group saw in NYT article about Kosovo declaring its independence from Serbia.
Knowbotic Research copied the sign and paraded it on a truck around Zurich. Obviously the reference to the historical event was evident mostly to migrants from the Balkans. KR invited a rapper form Kosovo who had migrated to Switzerland to use the sign as a starting point to explain what it means to be 'newborn' in a political space. Besides the circulation of the NEWBORN sign through Zürich coincided with the kick off of the EURO2008. Because the public and imaginary space was monopolized by commercialism, people who do not belong to the Kosovo Albanian community probably assumed that the NEWBORN circulating through the streets was just another advertisement signage on its way to be installed somewhere in the city. The Project NEWBORN -- Undeliverable? conducts research into the constitution and interaction of multiple, parallel publics within the local space of Zurich shaped by the dynamics of translocal migration, national identity and globalized commercialism. Such a research endeavor needs to take place in the public space itself. Only by intervening directly the latent, often invisible dynamics can be brought to the surface. Activating existing and triggering new dynamics is an essential part of the approach. One of the battle cries of KR is that they want to see the development of new zones of intransparency in which people can fully experiment and circulate, where one is neither representable nor identifiable. A bit like the character (some kind of Cousin Itt alter-ego) that appears in their projects macghilie - just a void. What would happen if we fight surveillance society with transparency?
The project tiger_stealth explored in a more tangible and direct way this idea of navigating through space without being detected. Together with with Peter Sandbichler, the group re-engineered a stealth boat as depicted in a propaganda video of the Tamil Tigers, the Tamil liberation army based in northern Sri Lanka. The boat (which appears in an online video) seems to be a formal adaptation of the stealth bomber F117 Nighthawk, a myth of invisibility.
KR's stealth boat cannot be detected by radar and other modern technology. It appears to be unmanned, but a person is hidden inside the boat. Equipped with a silent electrical engine it stays invisible for a radar station positioned on the river bank. The boat can be purchased online. It is thus fed back into a commercial public context where its technical invisibility becomes a good that must be shown. |
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Previous post on this panel: Positions in Flux - Panel 1: Art goes politics - Hans Bernhard from UBERMORGEN.COM
Art goes politics, the first panel of Positions in Flux, discussed how/whether media art has the potential to contribute to global and local problems such as religious and territorial conflicts, environmental or social crisis. One of the three artists invited to participate to the discussion is Wafaa Bilal. Born in Iraq, Bilal gained worldwide fame in 2007 with his performance Domestic Tension (aka. Shoot an Iraqi) which enabled web users around the world to control a paintball gun and shoot at him 24 hours a day. For a whole month. His works are being exhibited and discussed internationally and he is currently Assistant Arts Professor at Tisch School of Arts, NYU. The artist presentation was articulated around his artworks: Domestic Tension How can artists today make images mean something, stimulate people and provoke them? Problems that political art face: disengagement of the issue and tendency of some artists to express the issues at stake through aesthetic pain rather than aesthetic pleasure. Bilal grew up in an oppressed society and didn't have the leisure to meditate on aesthetic alone. He therefore works with both aesthetic pain and aesthetic pleasure. On May 4, 2007, Bilal set up his living and working quarters in a Chicago art gallery to perform Domestic Tension - Shoot an Iraqi. The project was a way for him to deal with the grief over the death of his brother in his hometown back in 2004. Bilal realized that he lives a comfortable life in the USA while his family is still in Iraq. Americans have been relatively shielded of the pain and suffering people experience in Iraq in their name. What kind of ethical consequence would seeing the consequences of war trigger? Would it humanize the issue? How can an artist go beyond a mere street protest (which alienates people most of the time anyway)? Bilal found out that internet enables an artist to enter the safety zone of people's house whether they like it or not. Domestic Tension ended up exposing more complex issues than the artist had imagined at first. It was also a bigger success than he had hoped for. By the end of the one month performance in the gallery, the Domestic Tension website had received 80 million hits. The results of the work were both healing and disturbing for him. Some took control of the paintball gun in a very aggressive way, hacking the system so that the gun would shoot non-stop but by day 21, Bilal noticed that the gun was going right and left, not aiming at him. It turned out that a group of 39 people had united force to prevent people from shooting at the artist. They called themselves 'the virtual human shield.' On day 14 of Domestic Tension, a link to the project was posted on Digg.com and Bilal was bombarded non stop, he couldn't fill the paintball fast enough to keep up with the demand. The themes Domestic Tension explored: Domestic Tension embedded the horror in the experience and allowed webusers to participate. People invested their own narrative and integrated the one of the artist. After Domestic Tension
In 2008, while he was in residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wafaa created Dog or Iraqi, asking people to vote who -- a dog named "Buddy," or an Iraqi, himself -- would be submitted to waterboarding, a form of torture that consists in immobilizing the victim and pouring water into the breathing passages to have them experience drowning. PETA obviously went mad about the idea that a dog would be harmed in the project, they were quite undisturbed by the fate of the Iraqi. Bilal lost to the dog and was submitted to waterboarding. The next project was Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi, a modified version of the first person shooter video game Quest for Bush, itself a "hacked" version of the commercial video game Quest for Saddam. In Bilal's version the artist inserted his personal narrative by casting himself as a suicide bomber who gets sent on a mission to assassinate President George W. Bush. He was intrigued by the idea that a terrorist organization had released a free game to recruit people. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute had to cancel the show after governmental pressures. At the time, the College Republicans called the RPI's Arts department "a safe haven for terrorists" on their blog. A second exhibition of the project had to be shut down due to the fact that the gallery didn't comply with some regulation about the size of its doors. The objectives of the game were many: For Bilal, new media art and interactivity presuppose the active involvement of a public whose function was once limited to viewing only. If the audience takes an interest in the work, they are more likely to engage in a dialogue that might, in the best cases, be revolutionary. I would, once again, like to recommend Waffa Bilal's book Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun to get to know more about his experience and art work. Previously: A few words with Wafaa Bilal and When interactive art becomes bored with you. |
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The first panel of Positions in Flux, a symposium organized by the Netherlands Institute of Media Art in Amsterdam last Saturday, was Art goes politics. The presentations and following discussion explored the artistic practices that turn their back on the assumption that art is something purely aesthetic, distant and contemplative. Instead, art can bite and get people involved in political, social or ethical issues: Does art have the potential to contribute to global and local problems such as religious conflicts, environmental or social crisis? Or is art constrained to raising awareness only? Should art become an agency for political and social affairs at all? How to successfully implement and conduct art projects in zones of crisis? How far do these projects benefit from the dubious attention of the mass media?
Some artists choose to stay outside conflict zones and reflect on the issues at stake, others step right inside the fight and either try to come up with possible solutions or subvert dominant systems.
The three speakers of the panel were Wafaa Bilal, Hans Bernhard from UBERMORGEN.COM and Christian Huebler from Knowbotic Research. It was fascinating to see that there's no such thing as 'just activism'. Each of them had a different view on the role and meaning of artists' involvement in burning issues. I took notes from Hans Bernhard's talk but because i found his statement truly thought-provoking, i begged him to get his text. He was kind enough to upload it online. One of the points that i find most striking in his talk is when Bernhard explains that UBERMORGEN.COM are not, as most of us would lazily assume, activists but rather actionists in the Viennese Actionism tradition. Just go and read the manifesto, it speaks of their view on all sorts of media outlets, the real life (e.g. legal) impact and side-products of their online actions, and the group's lack of political agenda. But most of all, even if it is not written by self-declared activists, the text has nevertheless a deep relevance on the Art Goes Politics front.
If you're interested in going beyond the manifesto, i would recommend two recent books dedicated to the Austrian duo. The first one is UM.BOOK, UBERMORGEN.COM - MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART by HANS BERNHARD and LIZVLX (no worries, the text is all in english), a book compiling texts by critics, curators and artists and celebrating the 10th anniversary of UBERMORGEN.COM. The other book is UBERMORGEN.COM which provides an overview of work and features contributions by the art critics Inke Arns and Domenico Quaranta and the net.art duo Jodi.org. Image on the homepage: Superenhanced Familiarization: S2E2, Fabio Paris Gallery. |
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I got a pleasant and at the same time painful wave of nostalgia last night when i read Bryan's overview of Postopolis on his blog Subtopia. It has been such an amazing adventure for us all. Day 4 of Postopolis was quite a day. It kicked off with a presentation by Michael Downing, Deputy Chief at LAPD and i missed it, i arrived just after it ended, that was not my intention, sorry Deputy Chief. Let's move on to bits and pieces i grabbed that day:
One talk i very much enjoyed was the one by Ari Kletzky, Founder, Islands of LA. Since September 2007, the artist has been exploring the possibility to use traffic islands as public space for discussion and interaction. The project is an art-research experiment and responds to the narrative of loss about public space with a narrative of possibility around interstitial public property that verges on the absurd.
Kletzky defined the traffic islands his project investigates: they are accessible to pedestrians + pieces of land surrounded by roadways + interstitial (on multiple levels, even on a legal level) + they are quite small and can only welcome the activity of one to fifty people + no one really knows who owns them + highly visible, ubiquitous yet overlooked + in the middle of everyday happening + no permanent building on traffic island (except sometimes war memorials and placemarkers + most likely protected under the first amendment for assembly and expression.
Kletzky would thus organize small gatherings or performances, invite people for a picnics, plant tomatoes, all kinds of activities that are not likely to interfere with traffic or public safety. Images Islands of LA.
Matthew Coolidge, the Director of Center for Land Use Interpretation, showed some spectacular photos and a video of oil extraction and refining plants in Texas. Their LA space is currently exhibiting photos of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, one of the longest oil pipelines in the world. I wish i had seen that show. David Burns and Matias Viegener from Fallen Fruit have charmed and rocked the crowd.
Their project reminds inhabitants of Los Angeles of a city law that makes all fruit and vegetables growing over sidewalks "public," even if the trees are rooted in private yards. They organize tours (including night time fruit forage) to pick fruit and map public fruit trees in the L.A. urban area. They also hold jam-making parties using fruit collected from the public portions of the trees and now produce liquor. These products, like their ingredients, are distributed to the public, like the fruit they are made of, they belong to them. At some point they posted on youtube a video showing a public fruit picking tour. The comments of youtube users were so distressingly negative they became hilarious: homophobic, racists, unsympathetic ("only white people would try to not to pay for fruit", "Dipshit liberals. Always looking for a handout," etc.) Fallen Fruit made a short video of it, superposing images of the fruit tour with the youtube comments.
Ken Ehrlich, an artist i realized recently i was following the blog ended the evening by presenting some of his projects. One of the most fascinating for me was Audio Response Mirror in the Scaniaparken location (Malmö).
See you tomorrow for a report of the last day at Postopolis! *The text reads: Dipshit liberals, |
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Back in July 2007, Russia's parliament voted to allow the country's biggest energy monopolies, Gazprom and the state oil pipeline company Transneft, to employ and arm private security units in order to 'protect themselves from terrorist attack.' Russia's interior ministry said they would supply Gazprom with guns from its own armoury. Some feared that the law would turn out to be 'a Pandora box' that paves the way for the creation of corporate armies. This was the starting point of Corporate Armies, a project of 'political fiction' in which PSJM (whom i interviewed last year) push to the extreme the possible sequels of the Russian proposal. A mock Hollywood-style Corporate Armies trailer describes a world ruled by corporations: marketing and totalitarianism unite in a dystopian scenario that reflects how the world would be if capitalism were unconstrained and liberated from any limit that democratic institutions impose upon it. «Corporate Armies also features sculptures made using 3D digital technology. They bring an ironic twist on merchandising, that cash-milking element the entertainment industry is increasingly relying on.
On the walls, next to the 3D animation, a series of black and white 'historical drawings' push further the reference to mass culture and the fascination for the 'beauty of war'. The drawings combine super-heroes in the Marvel tradition with a more Manga action, they portray Wal-Mart and Visa joining forces to fight and defeat Nike.
For this project, PSJM (aka Pablo San José and Cynthia Viera), have collaborated with Naone (Fernando Feito) for the 3D animation, Emiliano González for the scenario and Esteban Ruíz who composed the music of the trailer. Seen at the booth of Espacio Liquido. |
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While in Madrid, i discovered that Santiago Sierra had a show at the Helga de Alvear gallery. I dragged my paracetamols, high fever and microbes out of the bed and headed to Calle Doctor Fourquet. I felt so bad that day i thought nothing Sierra could do would affect me. The show is called Los Penetrados / The Penetrated and it is exactly what you imagine. Sierra hardly ever trifles with subtlety.
October 12th is the National Day of Spain. It used to be called Día de la Raza (Day of the Race) as a celebration of the day Columbus arrived in the Americas, the day Europeans encountered Native Americans. Several countries celebrate October 12th. Over time, however, Día de la Raza took the form in many countries of a counter to Columbus Day. It is used to resist the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and celebrate native races.
On October 12th, 2008, Sierra shot The Penetrated, a series of photographies and a 45 min video in 8 Acts. Couples are geometrically arranged into compositions of up to 110 bodies with two colours. The Acts feature the various possible combinations of penetrator / penetrated: white man-white woman, white man-white man, white man-black woman, white man-black man, black man-black woman, black man-black man, black man-white woman, black man-white man. The persons' faces have been digitally erased to accentuate the modular character of the actors. A mirror set at an angle behind the actors multiplies the couples and the viewpoints. The current reality of Spain can be applied to the body patterns. The theoretical structural geometry of the action is echoed in a weave formed by the 10 blankets on which the successive couples are to be placed. The reality of the proposal is expressed when some of the blankets are left empty in those Acts in which the circumstances did not provide the necessary elements/actors to undertake it. For instance, in Act 3 there are only three couples, given that due to police pressure the majority of women did not turn up. On another note, social and cultural conditioning hampered the appearance of passive black men.
The final element of the action is the penetration and the negative connotation that almost inevitably accompanies it. The title of this work "Los penetrados" [The Penetrated] throws the focus onto the passiveness and submission of the penetrated. Sierra explains his work as a comment on immigration and racial issues: "The traditional paranoia of white people towards black people or of Europeans towards Africans is linked to a strong phobia. We thinks that sooner or later we will have to pay for our past and present greedy misdeeds. But this white paranoia is also related to the size of the dick or to the fear of a sexuality that demeans us. Our female and males might fall in love with it and that frightens us more than the perspective to lose our jobs, only your boss can take work away from us. The political reflections and the actions that derive from them are more primitive than what is ordinarily thought. Behaviours of racial identity are very animal because we are animals."
On view until February 28, 2009 at Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid. There's another work by Santiago Sierra on view in London until the end of the Year, Death Counter. Previously: Holocaust installation by Santiago Sierra, Guantanamo museum and other tales of extraordinary rendition at Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid, Image of the day, All-Inclusive. A Tourist World. |
