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For the first time in my life, i'm happy with Iberia services. They cancelled my flight from Gijón to Madrid and i was informed at the last minute that i was booked on a plane that departed before dawn. The new schedule meant that i'd have to wait 8 hours for my connecting flight in Barajas airport (stunning architecture, crap-est over-priced food in the entire universe.) I decided i would take the opportunity generously bestowed upon me by the dreadful airline and do something more interesting than spend hours in duty free shops. I left Barajas, took the metro to the center of Madrid, got a decent meal and visited an exhibition.
The lunch wasn't memorable but the show was a joy. Post-it City. Occasional urbanities - Ciudades ocasionales at Centro Centro looks into temporary occupations of public space that appear on the fringe of urban-planning. Neither authorities nor architects have planned these informal uses of space. Whether they emerge for commercial, recreational, sexual or survival reasons, post-it practices answer needs that the city isn't able to answer adequately. Post-it City phenomena emphasise the reality of the urban territory as the place where distinctive uses and situations legitimately overlap, in opposition to the growing pressures to homogenise public space. In contrast to the ideals of the city as a place of consensus and consumption, temporary occupations of space reaffirm use value, reveal different needs and lacks that affect given collectives, and even promote creativity and the subjective imagination.
From another standpoint, the temporary activities that contaminate public space with numerous para-architectural artefacts enable reflection on urban experience to redirect its attention towards the minuscule, thus correcting the arrogance of traditional architecture. The exhibition has been touring for a few years and i even got my hands on the catalogue a while ago. I can't seem to be able to locate it right now but it's available on Amazon USA Every Autumn, the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, New York, are sprinkled with temporary outdoor structures called sukkah. People live there for 7 days as a way to remember the fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.
Another of Francisca Benítez's photo series is part of Post-It City. The images show bundles nesting in Parisian trees. They are the personal belongings of Afghani immigrants. In July 2005, two months before the Paris riots, Benítez recorded every tree next to the Gare de l'Est. (Illegal) immigrants stack there their possessions while waiting for another odd job, for continuing their journey.
The photo documentation that most shocked me is Old Wreck City. Federica Verona and Cecilia Pirovano investigated what they call 'the city of abandoned cars' in Milan. Abandoned and stolen cars become a refuge where homeless Italians or foreigners sleep, eat, drink and take shelter from the rain and people's gazes. The images are accompanied by the story of some of the people who sleep in cars. Some of them have slept there for years, continuously or between jobs, some are couple waiting to be allocated social housing.
Unlike European cemeteries, Cairo's historic cemeteries are not walled, they open onto the city, even merging with it. Driven by the difficulty of finding a home in the overcrowded city, some people have established their living space inside Cairo's cemeteries. Authorities do not officially recognise these informal settlements even though they supply them with water and light.
The Cora Garrido Boxe Centre in São Paulo is a social institution as well as a gymnasium established below the motorway. The non-profit and free center seeks to attract marginalised people - the homeless, former addicts and prisoners, children and teenagers at risk - and to promote actions to bring about social reintegration through sport. The gymnasium uses makeshift equipment. Lorry tyres are transformed into sand bags, lorry axles become barbells and shock absorbers converted into strength-training equipment.
Each year, the "Day of the Dead" and "All Saints" see thousands of people visit their forefathers in the cemeteries of La Paz and El Alto. The commemorative event is also a festive ritual in which music is played and people are invited to take fruit, bread, drinks or coca that have been laid out to receive the souls of the departed. Informal markets are set up between graves and children's games appear where prayers are swapped for food and drink.
Bas Princen's photos are always worth mentioning. The exhibition is showing a few photos from Utopian Debris, a photo series that attempts to illustrate the future of urbanism and landscape. The first photograph below shows the section of a construction site which is excavating the ground under an existing village, and the second one, the sand-storage area for the construction of the Olympic Park in Beijing. Both demonstrate how the artificial nature of places is temporarily disguising itself as the natural.
Post-it City. Occasional urbanities - Ciudades ocasionales remains open at Centro Centro in Madrid through 19 February 2012. Entrance is free. |
and 
. The show is packed with fantastic information, photographs and stories. I wish i could talk about every single one of them but that won't be necessary as all the projects have been listed on the Post-it City 
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I think i'll have to put a stop soon-ish to this avalanche of posts about ARCO, the contemporary art fair that closed 10 days ago in Madrid. But there's still a couple of stories i owe you. On top of the list is a report on Expanded Box, ARCO's section that specializes in new media art and video art. I'll focus on the former. Obviously. Art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta curated the programme with an eye on selecting artworks that feature both a marketable appeal and a critical approach of the cultural impacts of media and technologies. I think Quaranta was the ideal man for the job. He's digustingly young and as such doesn't come with the preconception and 'burden' of the old new media art crowd. He's nevertheless extremely well informed, respected by the nma family and has proved his caliber on several occasions, in particular last year when he curated Holy Fire, art of the digital age together with Yves Bernard at iMAL in Brussels. Everthing could only run smoothly.... The press release quotes Quaranta who explains that the programme "showcases a type of art that looks outside the parameters of contemporary art to art developed on the Net, the art produced in research centres and labs and that has all the potential to change our present-day notion of art. A change of perspective that should not scare collectors or art lovers, because these works are representative of the information society and of the globalised world we all live in."
Before i give more details about the artworks exhibited, allow me to write a few words about the experts' forum i participated to. Between Fields, New Media Art Between Isolation and Integration, Inter-disciplinarity and Media Specificity, chaired by Domenico Quaranta.
Because i had been suffering from a particularly vicious flu that week, i had to miss the first presentations. Fortunately, Geert Lovink dedicated a blog entry titled Discussing the Crisis in New Media Art @ ARCO Madrid to the talks of Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito , the charming and witty authors of the book At the Edge of Art, and to the one of Roberta Bosco, a journalist who has been covering media art for the mainstream and more specialized Spanish and Italian press with a remarkable knowledge and passion for the genre.
I regrettably missed Geert Lovink's talk. But i did catch the following speakers: HMKV has a talent for showing new media art works in a 'transversal' and very approachable way. The exhibitions of the Dortmund center focus on phenomenon that go way beyond the new media art sphere and take technology and media as a starting point to demonstrate their wide-ranging imprint on culture and life in general. Inke Arns illustrated that point with one example taken from the show Art in the Age of Intellectual Property: a copy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office certificate. Kembrew McLeod, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa but also a prankster, trademarked in 1998 the phrase "Freedom of Expression®" as a comment on how the intellectual property law is being used to fence off culture and restrict the way in which people can express their ideas. Trailer of the documentary Freedom of Expression based on McLeod's book of the same title: After Inke it was my turn. I'll spare you that part and offer you a video of dazzling Demis. Media artist and curator Zhang Ga gave a wonderfully well-researched presentation on the many links that tie closely new media art with other art forms, demonstrating how much media art refers to and owes to many of the most important contemporary art movements. Zhang Ga also gave an overview of Synthetic Times - Media Art China at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing (part 1 and part 2 of my review of the show). Finally he mentioned the art fair dedicated to new media art galleries that he is curating in Shanghai. Joasia Krysa was the last to speak. She analyzed brilliantly Cao Fei's RMB City and its bankable success, both online and offline. Now a quick selection of the pieces shown in the Expanded Box exhibition: One of the most popular art pieces of the Expanded Box section was a 3D animation piece by John Gerrard, on view at the booth of Galerie Ernst Hilger contemporary.
Grow / Finish Unit (Eva, Oklahoma) 2008, is a representation of an unmanned pig production site near to Boise City, Oklahoma. The scene represented unfolds in real time over the course of one year, its light conditions through dawn and dusk match that of the local site. At this start of the industrialised food production chain, pigs are raised on corn which is grown using nitrogen derived from oil and gas, thus rendering the occupants of these sheds in essence, oil derived pigs. At no point are the many thousands of occupants of the eight sheds visible, as this is the case in reality. An autonomous virtual wind animates the surface dust, creating the principal movements in the piece. However, a single transport truck pulls to each building every 6-8 months and waits for 1 hour. As in many of the artist's works the public can manipulate the frame to navigate a large arc around the scene.
Joan Leandre had a spectacularly suggesting video at Project Gentili. The piece puts viewers inside an unmanned flying vehicle that slowly glide over locations that are part of everybody's culture (from Disneyland to Chernobyl) yet, acquire an uncanny pattern when seem from above. Check out rhizome's interview with Joan Leandre and the PDF catalogue of the exhibition, it's bilingual italian / english.
Thomson & Craighead' homage to John Cage's Prepared Piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings) was minding its own business at the booth of the ARC Projects gallery from Sofia. Unprepared Piano is connected to a database of music MIDI files compiled from the web, no matter whether they have been intended for piano only or for a variety of instruments. The electronic scores are then "performed" automatically according to a simple set of rules.
UBERMORGEN.COM's EKMRZ Trilogy engages in a shrewd and critical with the cultural consequences of media and technologies. The booth of Fabio Paris Art Gallery which hosted their installation was certainly the most creatively designed of the section . One of the pieces exhibited was awareded the ARCO Beep new media award this year.
The award for the 'artwork everybody wanted to try' goes to Compass by Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf and presented at the booth of the Fortlaan 17 gallery. Domenico Quaranta images |
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Yesterday i met with the other members of the jury for the fifth edition of the ARCO Beep Award. The aim of this Award is to promote the research, production, and exhibition of art linked to new technologies, or new media art. The art pieces are submitted by commercial galleries participating to the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair ARCO. It was a real pleasure to discuss with the other members of the jury: curator and art critic Domenico Quaranta, Fernando Castro from the Reina Sofía National Museum, the mythical art critic Arnau Puig and the charming artist Marie-France Veyrat. It was the fastest jury deliberation i had ever attended in my life. Although most entries were of remarkable quality, the work that stood out was a triptych part of the EKMRZ-Trilogy, by UBERMORGEN.COM.
Presented for the first time as a single installation on view until the end of the art fair at the booth of Fabio Paris Gallery, this "e-commerce trilogy" is the outcome of almost four years of work which i'm sure most of you are quite familiar with. Its episodes are called: - GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, an operation aiming at buying Google with Google's own money (in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio) Fabio Paris Gallery had made a rather audacious challenge in choosing to present the EKMRZ-Trilogy and i'm delighted to see that audacity pays once in a while. The ARCO installation presents the iconography and mythology of the trilogy by means of prints, a google cheque, projections, music, animations, etc. You can visit it at the Pavilion 6 of ARCO, it is part of Expanded Box, the section dedicated to the intertwining of technologies and art. On occasion of the event, FPEditions is publishing the book UBERMORGEN.COM.
And if you live in the area of Milan, you might want to check out the Fabio Paris Art Gallery itself which is showing the world preview of the Austrian duo's latest project Superenhanced, which is dedicated to the issue of torture. |
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Previously: Winners of VIDA 11.0 announced (part 1) The second Prize of the VIDA competition was given to Performative Ecologies, a work by young artist, architect and too rare blogger Ruairi Glynn.
Performative Ecologies is made of 4 independent 'creatures' that observe the public and dance for them. At the beginning of the exhibition, the creatures are rather dumb, they have little understanding of the way to move their heads and react to visitors. The only instinct they have is 'to be looked at" so they search their environment for people. As soon as their camera has detected that someone is watching them, they start dancing in order to keep the attention on them. In the beginning, they perform randomly. As time passes however, the little machines learn which kind of dance is more successful with observers, they improve their movements and choreography. They become increasingly smart and informed. The dancers learn and behave as individuals. In fact, they even compete with each other to get your attention. But they also form a community. When foreigners are out of the room, the dancers share what they have learnt. Just like what happens in real life, their relationships is based on mutual understanding but also on disagreement. Glynn believes that his role is not to come up with a pre-choreographed set of 'interactions', he merely built an environment for these creatures and gave them the ability to develop their own individual personality. Instead of working on the usual action-reaction mode that characterizes many of the so-called 'interactive installations', Performative Ecologies evolves through a series of experiences that generate genuine and new information, unexpected results and multiple layers. The third prize of the competition went to Chico MacMurtrie's Sixteen Birds.
The inflatable robotic birds extend and move their wings in a coordinated flight-like motion as they sense the presence of visitors. But beware! If people come too close and in too high a number, the birds suffocate and deflate, as if deperishing. A strong environmentalist position is already implicit in the bio-mimetic shape of the birds, and is reinforced in other features of the work. For example, in the first exhibition of Sixteen Birds, the configuration of the sculptural group as a whole suggested the flow of the local river, threatened by over-development. Ruair Glynn made a brilliant little video about the VIDA exhibition: The list of Honorary Mentions is full of small jewels. Here's just two of them:
Meet the two robots of Sobra La Falta: the "dibujante" (sketcher) is in charge of drawing sketches on the floor using rubbish thrown on the floor by the audience. Dibujante collects the rubbish and arranges it on the floor to create a drawing of a stickman, a "@" symbol, or other iconic symbols. The second robot enters when the drawing is over. It's the "barredor" (sweeper) and it will diligently undo the drawing by collecting the rubbish and storing it to one side. With this work, Argentine group Proyecto Biopus questions the point of creating a work of art using technology in a country like theirs, which has to face so many social problems.
Allison Kudla's Search for Luminosity stars six living shamrocks, arranged on a disc; an array of six lamps above, and in the center, a rotating custom optical scanner. Because it has a programmed memory, or an endogenous rhythm, the Oxalis plants open up their leaves in the morning in preparation for the sunrise. The scanner detects this movement and switches on the lamp for that plant. The plants have been prearranged such that they awaken in a clockwise sequence over 24 hours. The lighting of a lamp, based on the respective plants behavior, also switches off the lamp diametrically opposite, putting that plant to sleep. Viewers are therefore able to see in one look the plant in several periods of its cycle from fully awake to fully asleep. An ironic echo of those dreaful floral clocks found in old gardens. |
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One of the issues raised by the development of new technologies, is how they will impact our identity of human beings. Interested in the conversation between art, science, technology and society, Fundación Telefónica has launched an International competition dedicated to art and artificial art called VIDA . This years they are celebrating the 11th edition of the competition by launching an online archive that documents thematically and chronologically the evolution of the discipline it has been so closely following for more than a decade. Besides, Fundación Telefónica is setting up for the first time an exhibition of the winners of its competition (outside of the usual booth at the ARCO art fair that is). The three winners of VIDA 11.0 as well as a couple of other pieces are currently on view at Matadero Madrid. During the press conference yesterday, Francisco Serrano, Director of the foundation, couldn't help but point to the irony of hosting VIDA (which means 'life' in spanish) into a stunning art center called Matadero ('slaughterhouse' in spanish.)
The winner of the first prize this year is the uncanny, poetical and fascinating Hylozoic Soil, an immersive sculpture by artist and architect Philip Beesley. Hylozoic Soil takes its cue from Hylozoism, the philosophical view that all or some material things possess life. It takes the shape of an artificial environment that seems to be made of the same substance as jellyfish, breathing like one, wrapping itself around you and exhibiting complex behaviour as you walk through it.
Delicate arms made of a shape memory alloy called nitidol gently move in reaction to people's behaviour, while hanging pillars transmit a very quiet energy, miles away from the more direct and manly energy displayed by most robotic installations. Although the work manage to almost absorb visitors it has been developed using as little material as possible. The structure was expanded into an ethereal meshwork. Allow me to copy and past a short text that gives more details about the artwork: Video documenting the construction of Hylozoic Soil, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in September, 2007: More information in the book Hylozoic Soil, published by Riverside Architectural Press. Part two of the report: Winners of VIDA 11.0 (part 2) More details about the VIDA awards: Interview with Daniel Canogar. Last year's coverage: Winners of VIDA 10.0, Honorary Mentions at VIDA 10.0. |
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There's so much more i'd like to write regarding the PHotoEspaña festival which runs in Madrid until July 28. Time has come to cover other exhibitions and artistic events i've visited more recently. However, i can't turn the page without mentioning this little fellow playing as ghetto policeman. Almost every mainstream Spanish newspaper selected this image among those offered by the press kit to illustrate their coverage of the festival.
The portrait was made by Henryk Ross, a Polish Jewish photographer who was employed by the Department of Statistics for the Jewish Council within the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust. Ross documented everyday life in the ghetto while staying officially in the good graces of the German occupier. Before the closure of the ghetto in 1944, Ross buried his negatives in the hope to leave a record of the martyrdom. |
