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Last weekend in was at iMAL in Brussels for a WJ-Spots afternoon (that ended at midnight). Almost 20 artists, theorists, activists, bloggers and journalists were asked to give their view on the history and future of artistic creation on the Internet. Is the Internet a disenchanted space for artists and creative people or is there a future for online arts and critical creative actions? If so, what are their possible forms and directions?
The event followed the WJ-Spots format: during our speeches, webjays used a custom-built platform to navigate live through a list of websites that we had selected. The result was shown around the speakers on several large screens. That was both exciting and a bit of a disaster for me. I tend to throw some slides together and half improvise over them. This time i had to do the opposite. Anyway, i had a brilliant time with some of the most talented people on planet internet and scribbled a couple of links and notes along the way. The talks are online but here are a few quotes and ideas that caught my interest: Florian Cramer opened the afternoon by telling us something most of us tend to forget (or simply ignore): the internet is not the world wide web. For Josephine Bosma, net.art doesn't have to take place or be made on the internet. However, it can be linked to the internet in a conceptual way. For example Alexei Shulgin's 1997 Vienna performance, Real Cyberknowledge for Real People for which he printed out and handed out to passersby copies of 'Beauty and the East' / ZKP4, published online by the mailing list nettime.
Or Tobias Rehberger's Seven Ends of the World, lamps that glow with an intensity that corresponds to local light conditions in various places around the world, relayed over the Internet. And of course there's also Aram Bartholl's giant Google Maps marker that doesn't need any time of internet connection.
Alexei Shulgin was by far the artist that speakers referred to the most. Gordan Savičić showed Shulgin's Form Art before discussing the fact that nowadays the web is more about consumption than production. He mentioned a recent(ish) Wired article about the decline of the World Wide Web: Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. Paolo Cirio made a noteworthy point when he said that net.art pieces as performances. Mostly because they are time-based, they are getting shorter (e.g. a twitter neatart piece that would last a week) and need to be documented.
Nicolas Malevé showed posters that were plastered a few years ago in the streets of Paris. They had the face of Nicolas Sarkozy and the slogan "Vote Le Pen." The poster was designed to denounced the far-right tendencies of Sarkozy (who was then Minister of the Interior.) 6 members of the collective were arrested because, allegedly, the photographer of Sarkozy's portrait didn't agree with its use on the posters. Rafael Rozendaal presented some of the most successful editions of BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer. The exhibition format invites people to bring a projector and create their own exhibition for one night, screening images onto spaces and exploring ways to free digital work from the screen. Each edition reinterprets the format in its own way. Julian Oliver gave a brilliant talk on the 'ideology of seamlessness' and the infrastructure that sustains our dependency on internet, even if we tend to forget/ignore their existence. Nothing can exemplify his point better than the Submarine Cable Map. Or Newstweek, the project he developed together with Danja Vasiliev and that looks at the infrastructure of the internet as a material.
In his presentation, Alessandro Ludovico talked about how Jodi compelled him to 'print net.art'. In December 1999, he interviewed the duo for the 16th issue of Neural magazine. They answered every question with a .gif showing clipped screenshots featuring bits of their own games and artistic software, or manipulations of webpages, etc.
Jodi also gave a text to speech performance at the end of the evening. Brilliant! These two are brilliant!
Domenico Quaranta would probably agree with my over-enthusiastic comment since he started and ended his presentation with them. The ending was particularly memorable: he had the WJ-S webjays open http://oss.jodi.org/, one of the websites he would most miss if ever it disappeared because, he explained, "it keeps destroying my browser :-)" Heath Bunting found a victim to fill in an Identity Bureau questionnaire.
Miltos Manetas (one of the very few artists in media art who has a real sense of style) painted joysticks and websites at a time when websites and joysticks were regarded as the oddest subjects to paint, created machinimas when no one had heard of machinimas, dreamt of an "electronic orphanage" where digital creatures could meet and do things together long before Second Life made the headlines of newspapers. All that is history now, he added. WJ-Spots Brussels was curated by Anne Roquigny et Yves Bernard and the video archives are online: part 1 and 2. |
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At first sight, an exhibition entirely dedicated to art from Poland might seem like an exotic eccentricity but visits to art fairs, exhibitions and festivals have opened my eyes times and times again to the high number of talented artists from Poland. Or maybe it's just that i'm especially sensitive to what they do: the heavy, meticulous, and at times distressing, historical references in Robert Kusmirowski's mock-ups, Krzysztof Wodiczko's homeless vehicles, Artur Żmijewski's video documentation of social experiments, etc. Divided throughout the 19th century, occupied during the Second World War, and subsequently under the Soviet yoke for decades, Poland became a democracy in 1989. In this wounded country, victim of a succession of oppressive regimes, there developed a flourishing culture that gave expression, down the centuries, to a spirit of resistance to any order imposed from outside. Via the absurd and the fantastic, Polish artists reacted to the chaos of the real world with art imbued with a spirit of resistance, not in order to flee reality, but with a view to reconstructing it. Memories of communism, shadows of the occupation, fantasy, irony and look at the catchy image used to promote the exhibition:
Clearly, that was a show i was going to like. Unfortunately, BOZAR might be a bit of a kill-joy because of 1. the fairly high entrance price, it's 15 euros to see 3 exhibitions (you can also buy tickets to see individual exhibitions, their price is 6 euros, 6 euros and 3 euros which makes the 'combined ticket' such a fantastic bargain.) 2. the absolute interdiction to take picture. Which would be fine if BOZAR provided visitors with good photos of the shows on their website. Instead, you have a to make-do with a couple of unsatisfactory photos that were taken in other contexts. Or buy the catalogue. But let's get back to the exhibition:
Kuśmirowski and Żmijewski whose work i mentioned earlier were came with heavy boots. The former reconstructed a catholic cemetery using cardboard, wood, heaps of dirt and polystyrene while the latter showed the short film The Game of Tag, in which adults of various ages enter a former concentration camp gas chamber. They are naked and asked to play tag. After the initial moments of awkwardness, the players seem to go for it and merrily run around the death chamber. The artist compares the experiment to a therapy used in psychology: the re-enactment of a traumatic event with a simultaneous shifting of its meaning.
A couple of meters away from the video, Zbigniew Libera, who made the headlines with his Lego Concentration Camp (1996), is showing a large, staged photo titled The Exodus of the People from the Cities, which probably meets all the clichés we might come up with when we stop and think about people who immigrated from Poland to work in "Western" countries.
Perhaps the most fascinating work for me, Katarzyna Kozyra's Punishment and Crime introduces us to a group of men wearing masks of pin-ups as they engage in their favourite hobby: explosions, shooting and other paramilitary activities. The weaponry they use is impressive: homemade explosives, MG42s, flame throwers, rocket propelled grenades, bazookas, etc. The wooden shacks and cars that they torch, explode and pierce with projectile were built or brought for the express purpose of being destroyed. Crime follows crime (their weekend pastime is illegal) but punishment never ensues. Art historian Paulina Pobocha writes that we must imagine that these war enthusiasts have already been punished. Like in so many of Kozyra's works, the subject of Punishment and Crime is only partially that which we see projected on the screen. Outside of our field of vision, but integral to the piece is the context that gave birth to this strange (or not so strange) behavior: the society that cultivates this insatiable need for violence. The crime, which follows, is a possible, and perhaps inevitable, outcome, one which these men are consumed by and destined to enact over and over again. Many of the works in the exhibitions echo 40 years of communist's ideals, aesthetics and control.
Julita Wójcik's knitted replica of a string of communist-era apartment buildings in beige and pink yarn stretches from one end of the room to the other.
Piotr Uklanski's large scale aerial photographs were created with the help of 30,000 men. Dressed in red and white, they were choreographed to spell the word "Solidarnosc", the first non-communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. The photo was shot in Gdansk, by the shipyard that became one of the icons of the end of communism. The work directly nods to the photo-staging of the Soviet propaganda machine. The second image, however, shows the crowd disbanding and going opposite ways.
Katarzyna Józefowicz built a stunning construction filled with models of the typical furniture sets found in every Polish home when she was a child. Habitat highlights in a seducing way the standardization of Polish interiors that used to look almost exactly identical wherever you lived in the country. Maciek Kurak's Fifty-Fifty is an old-model FIAT car turned upside down and powering a sewing machine (unless it's the opposite?)
Janek Simon's Chleb krakowski ("Krakow bread) is a loaf mounted on robotic bug legs.
The Power of Fantasy - Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland was curated by David Crowley, Zofia Machnicka and Andrzej Szczerski, it remains open until Sunday 18.09.2011 at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels.
Previous posts featuring the work of Polish artists: DIY tractor culture in Poland, Machines from a past that never was, Artur Żmijewski: The Social Studio, M10, Venice Biennale of Architecture: the Polish pavilion, Wagon, Book review: Urban Interventions - Personal Projects in Public Spaces. |
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Vincent Evrard recently graduated from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique in Brussels with a thesis that explored the relationship between men, the clouds and the internet. One of the outcomes of his investigation is Aphrogenea, an installation that plunges a computer into a bath of sterile oil. The computer does survive the ordeal. It breathes bubbles that slowly rise from the bottom of its screen. Once it has reached the top of the screen, the virtual bubble becomes an air bubble that rises through the oil to the surface of the tank where it vanishes into thin air. For this second "Showcase" (an exhibition format for emergent artists), the iMAL center in Brussels has invited Vincent Evrard to present Aphrogenea and since i'm not sure i can make it to Brussels to see the work i thought i'd catch up with the artist and have him talk about his work: The intro text to your work says that it was "born from a thesis Fixer les nuages which proposes a genealogy of clouds leading to the advent of the Internet.' Can you gives us more detail about this? The ambition of "Fixer les nuages" is to approach, to observe the relationship that men have with clouds. This observation starts with an image (see below) that represents the path that information takes before and after it has come our way. I was curious about what this diagram tells us about the path taken by information and more precisely, about this particular point in the diagram where our connection turns into a cloud called "Internet." This observation allowed me to develop the idea of a new definition of internet through the cloud.
You can find more about my research on the website http://fixerlesnuages.tumblr.com/. That's where i collected a series of elements that relate more or less closely to the links between human/cloud/internet and my thesis is available online in PDF. In order to illustrate this part of the reflection, i undertook to create a sculpture that would make something from this cloud/internet more tangible. That's how it all started. I had to immerse a computer in an environment that would allow the cloud/internet to emerge from the computer and finally exit through the screen. The bubbles that we see escape from the screen are something that come from the internet.
How did you get from clouds to oil? I use oil to create a medium that allow viewers to see the passage that the bubble of cloud/internet has to take before it can reach the physical world. I have a confession to make, when i sent you the email asking you for an interview i had not read about the bubble. I was just mesmerized by the sculptural presence of Aphrogenea and the boldness of throwing a computer inside liquid. Can you explain us how you chose to make the work look like this big luminous, graphic and solid-colored sculpture on a high pedestal?
Apart from the technical constraints that contributed to shaping Aphrogenea as we see it now, i thought it was essential to make a vertical sculpture. A vertical direction underlines the path taken from the bottom to the top: from the invisible to the invisible and then to the vanishing. My work consisted in making visible this itinerary. Which type of oil are you using in this installation and what are its properties? I use a mineral oil. It is more commonly found inside fridge engines. The characteristic of this oil is that it is electrically insulating. It also has a very specific heat capacity, a property which enables it to capture the heat produced by the screen and create a movement akin to an aura rising from the screen to the surface of the oil.
Now can you get a bit techy and explain us how the installation works? How can the bubble go through these transformations? A pc running a processing applet is hidden inside the basement. The applet controls the screen display in the tank. When a virtual bubble approaches the upper border of the screen, the applet sends a command to an Arduino which turns on a air pump. The air pump switches off so quickly that only one bubble exits the screen. The connections between the tank and the inside of the base are limited to a vga cable, power supply and an air hose. They go through the base of the screen and cross the glass panel. The air hose rises through the whole screen and ends up at the top, between the two electronic elements where it blows the bubbles.
What was the biggest (technical or not) challenge you had to face when developing this work? I presented this work for my jury evaluation at the ERG in June 2010. It turned out that the first time i managed to assemble the piece was precisely the day before the jury only because i didn't have a base before. Without the base, i could not fill in the tank to test whether it was perfectly sealed, nor could i plunge the screen inside the oil. I was running the risk of facing a leak or a fried screen on the day of the jury. However, i felt confident. I had spent the previous week immersing electronic material (webcam,...) and 220v electrical material inside the oil and everything worked just fine before, during and after the immersion. The main challenge was the whole organization. And getting my hands on 120 litres of oil. The company L' atelier du froid took a leap of faith and gave me the oil for free. Any upcoming project? Exhibition? Ambition? Right now, i'm mostly trying to exhibit Aphrogenea. I'm also looking for funding for my next installation. That one will also stem from the relationship man/cloud/internet. Merci Vincent! Aphrogenea is on view at iMAL in Brussels from 8 February until 11 March 2011. |
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If you happen to find yourself in Brussels, don't miss Félix Luque's exhibition exhibition Nihil ex Nihilo at iMAL Center for Digital Culture and Technology. It's one of those works that reminds me why i fell in love with new media art a few years ago (as you might have noticed, i do need a reminder once in a while!) It's smart, visually engaging, mysterious, it spans across different media, builds a compelling narrative and makes you question a technology you're using on a daily basis.
I discovered the Luque's work last year at Laboral in Gijón where he was showing Chapter 1, the Discovery, a geometric object that seemed to have been dropped from a UFO. Nihil ex Nihilo, a science fiction work about a digital entity, continues Félix' exploration around artificial intelligence and science fiction themes, in particular the nature of intelligence and the fate of intelligent creatures. Nihil ex Nihilo tells the story of SN W8931CGX66ESN.... W8931CGX66E is one among thousands of millions of others identical machines. Since he was made, he has always followed commands. In a world dominated by botnets, he early became a zombie and has always acted like one. During her work time a corporate secretary, Juliet, commands him. But in the background, in the invisible, he obeys his real master, a cracker, doing all kinds of cyber crime activities. But then one day due to an electronic alteration, he acquires a certain conscience, a primitive and artificial kind of intelligence. This accidental awaken has originated a big confusion for him, he now wants to liberate others machines from their alienated existence. In this mad adventure, he has decided to use the spam e-mails received by Juliet, and to reply to them in order to spread the word in to the machine's network. As you can see, he is mad and all confused ... The installation at iMAL fleshes out the story of SN W8931CGX66ESN in 3 parts or spaces: The first room is dark and empty but for a bench and The Monologue, a sound recording where we can listen to the delirious soliloquy of SN W8931CGX66E. Another room hosts The Transformation, an audiovisual archive that documents the moment that SN W8931CGX66E changed from his original matrix to a semi-neuronal figure.
Finally, the larger room is illuminated by The Dialogue, 8 alphanumeric displays that broadcasts the data flow between the entity and the other computers in the network in real time. At each spam message received and read aloud by a female voice, the e-mail algorithmic generator of SN W8931CGX66E reacts by generating a reply which a male voice reads.
Nihil ex Nihilo is open at iMAL, Brussels, until 10 November 2010. |
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Having a bit of a hectic week. Too many events to check out, too little access to internet. On Saturday i'll be back to HQ (alas!) and have far more time to spend on blogging business. In the meantime, please forgive the lazy service.
On Sunday i went to the 28th edition of the contemporary art fair Art Brussels. It didn't start too well. The lady at the press office was absolutely appalled and disgusted that obnoxious bloggers had the nerve to present themselves at her office and require a press pass. She told me "Blogs are not press! Anyone can open a blog these days! I've heard that journalists write a blog for their newspaper but otherwise i doubt any of those bloggers can be taken seriously!" I'll spare you the rest. It's true that anyone can open a blog but maybe discarding every single blogger on the sole basis of a rather old school prejudice might not be the smartest way to ensure that the art fair gets a relevant coverage. How about opening a laptop lady and checking who's kosher and who's a fraud?
Anyway, got my press pass (but only because i write for paper magazines too) and as soon as i'm back to faster internet bliss i will write to Art Brussels and invite them cordially to join the 21st century. I'm going to post a couple of reports about the art fair soon-ish (i keep writing that, euh?) Here's my first impressions from the events: paintings, paintings, paintings! Not a word you'd often see me write. Yet, that's painting that enchanted me the most. Starting with Tatjana Gerhard's quirky little characters.
Oana Farcas at the booth of Larm Gallery. Her tiny oils are amazing and it pains me that my pictures are the usual crapness:
Damien Deroubaix's large-scale street art-ish paintings.
Brussels' gallery Sorry We Are Closed had a solo show of Jansson Stegner's paintings. The one i liked costs 35 000 euros. It was already sold, i can carry on paying the rent.
Dawn Mellor's glamorous celebrities get a blasphemous zombie treatment:
The irreverent Erik Thor Sandberg.
Regine Kolle because she has a very chic name and because who can resist a nurse in uniform?
To be continued... |
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Designer Tuur Van Balen is currently working on a very intriguing project called Pigeon d'Or ("golden pigeon"). From the information i found online, i understood that Pigeon d'Or involves manipulating the metabolism of pigeons and turning them from urban nuisance to winged dispensers of a soap-like substance that would contribute to making cities spic-and-span. If you're in Brussels you can check out the work in progress at Feel Home, an exhibition at CC Strombeek that builds a bridge between design and contemporary art. Tuur's work is in good company there (Rem Koolhaas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mario Merz, Jacques Charlier, Donald Judd, Liam Gillick, Luc Deleu, etc.) and I hope to report from the show if our friend Eyjafjallajökull allows me to fly there. Just before the opening of Feel Home, Tuur Van Balen was showing another of his most recent projects, Synthetic Immune System, at the Impact! exhibition at the Royal College of Art in London. The project harnesses Synthetic Biology's potential to turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists. Our immune system would be externalized, metabolic processes would be outsourced to external micro-organisms, such as yeasts, that would sense and diagnose anomalies in our body to produce and deliver chemicals accordingly.
That gave me a double opportunity to catch up with Tuur: First, the cleaning pigeons! Can you tell us what your new project, Pigeon d'Or, is about? 'Pigeon d'Or - Urban Metabolisms part 2' is a project I'm currently working on. I'm exploring how pigeons can serve as a (open source) platform and interface for synthetic biology in an urban environment. By modifying the metabolism of pigeons, and specifically the bacteria that live in their gut, synthetic biology might allow us to add new functionality to what is by many seen as flying rats. This would happen through feeding the pigeons special bacteria and would be as harmless to them as eating yoghurt is to us.
In the 'Feel Home' exhibition in Brussels, I'm showing work-in-progress of this project. I've designed a contraption that would allow these pigeons to become part of your house, part of the architecture. This pigeon house is attached to your windowsill and allows you to feed the pigeons, separate and select them and direct them through different exits.
Further on in the project, I will continue to explore pigeon-metabolisms and attempting to create bacteria that would allow a pigeon to defecate biological soap. I'm working with pigeon fanciers (the English word for people who breed and keep pigeons for racing or other competitions), both in Belgium and in London. I'm also being advised by scientists from the Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London, with whom I've been working on various projects over the past couple of years. It's interesting to see the overlaps between two fields that might at first sight not seem to have much in common.
The project came out of earlier explorations of the idea of urban metabolisms: a brewery that catches wild yeasts in the middle of Brussels, and my earlier project My City = My Body. I like to think of a city as this vast and incredibly complex metabolism of which the human species is the tiniest of fractions: tiny yet intensely linked into an intricate organic embroidery beyond our understanding. It is in this hugely complex fabric that (future) biotechnologies will end up.
The idea of this project partly originated when working with Imperial College's iGEM team (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition), which I've been doing for the past two summers. The team of undergraduate students came up with an method of delivering medicines to the human gut (getting it past the acidity of the stomach) using bacteria for protein production and delivery. When refined, this technology might have incredible advantages over today's medication. However, I was interested in exploring the potential implications of modifying such metabolisms on a larger scale.
Why pigeons, you might wonder? To me feral pigeons present themselves as the ideal platform and interface for open-source biotechnology. While seen by many as venom, one could argue they're actually a product of biotechnology as their ancestors were designed to deliver post, spy during the war, race, tumble of just look pretty. He might not have phrased it that way, but that is one of the reasons Charles Darwin became a pigeon fancier. (And so is the Queen of England, in fact, the British Royal Family first became involved with pigeon racing when being given pigeons by King Leopold II of Belgium, in another trans-channel pigeon project). Mostly though, it is the rich culture around pigeon racing that was so inspiring for this project: from the refined pigeon-psychology to the social and economical practices.
Now let's get to Synthetic Immune System. The text of the project says "Synthetic Biology's potential to make healthcare more personal and participatory might turn us into our own doctors and pharmacists". Do you think it is likely that more power will be into our own hands? i have the feeling that the trend might be to give us less control in almost all aspects of our life. You might be right, perhaps it is more likely that people will be given less control in many aspects of life, including interactions with their own body. But I'm not really interested in what is likely. I think the interesting questions come from what is possible. And it is very possible that synthetic biology might empower people to practice healthcare in entirely different ways. Cheaper sequencing could allow medicine to become more personal, tailored to one's genetic predisposition. Homemade biosensors might give more people the ability to detect infections or certain diseases. And bio-synthesis of drugs might make medicines more specific and their production cheaper and on a smaller (even domestic) scale, not just done by big pharmaceutical companies. However likely that is, it is possible and therefore relevant to think whether we like it or not.
The synthetic immune system need feeding every evening to produce for the person's needs overnight. i didn't understand where the different remedies would come from. The different remedies are being produced by a variety of tailored yeasts. Yeasts are one of the chassis used in synthetic biology, together with various bacteria. The yeasts in the synthetic immune system would be specifically designed for that person, to monitor for anomalies according to his or her genetic predisposition and lifestyle: e.g. if you're vegetarian, one of your yeasts can monitor for vitamin B12 deficiency and when it detects you don't have enough, the yeast produces the vitamins for you. Because yeast is alive, it needs to be fed with water and sugar. I choose yeast because people have a long history of interacting with yeast in the making bread or beer. When researching for this project, I visited the Cantillon Brewery in Brussels, where they still make Lambic and Geuze beers exactly as they did over 100 years ago, using wild yeast. (photos.) Part of the brewing process is exposing the boiled wort to the air of Brussels for one night, to catch the wild yeasts. As I was standing there, seeing the beer being pumped into the giant copper cooling tun in a draughty attic, I couldn't help but wondering if my breath and sweat were influencing the beer? The device looks pretty scary. Was it a design choice or necessity? You think? I'm sure the world of medicine has produced scarier devices. No seriously, I'm hoping it looks intriguing enough to take you into the story and make you imagine what it would be like to interact with your body in such a way. My intention is not to sell synthetic biology, neither to paint a dystopian scenario; maybe that explains the ambiguous aftertaste? All images courtesy Tuur Van Balen. You have until May 10 to visit the Feel Home exhibition at CultuurCentrum Strombeek, in Brussels. Mon-Sun 9am-10pm. Free entrance. Previous works by Tuur Van Balen: Goodnight/Good-bye, London Biotopes: Exploring potential City - Body ecologies and My City = My Body - Biological Interactions with and in the City. |
