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I encountered Stockholm-based artist Albin Karlsson's work at the recent Icon Experiment, an island of interesting projects of an otherwise often ghastly design expo at the ExCeL center in London's uber-gentrified Docklands.
Among works by Jurgen Bey, Studio Glithero and Julia Lohmann, his piece was sitting somewhat on the fringe, but was quite literally becoming increasingly present because it was spinning a web of fine glue-fibers across the stand. Asking what it was, I was told that the work, titled 1g/min, is actually a clock, dripping 1 gram of hot glue per minute from a rotating nozzle. Over time, a stalagmite-like structure arisis which physically visualizes the time that has passed. The material quality of the object is somewhat of a honeycomb, yet there's often that whitish web attached which also gives it a delicate cobweb-like appearance. Time lapse-videos of the clock in progress are wonderful to watch and say a lot about the possibilities procedural and generative sculpture.
Later I had the chance to talk to lovely Albin and he told me that the main body of his work so far had been revolving around timepieces. He has explored measuring and displaying the passing of time in many different ways. He says "Time fascinates me both as physical phenomena and as a philosophical and personal matter. The sense of time have changes during the years. The changes go hand in hand with the technical inventions to measure it."
Another good example for such a time-based work is the public-space installation Minuterna, a robotic arm at Stockholm's Odenplan subway station, which in 129600 minutes (3 months) had several panes of glass covered with the same number of dots, eventually obscuring the whole surface. This process must have given commuters such an interesting sense of how time passes. Especially since it was located in a highly controlled urban environment which we, as opposed to a forest for instance, usually do not associate with change.
A third work on this subject sits probably kind of in between the previous two and is called Thermopaper 2 in which a big sheet of thermochromic paper is slowly wound from one spool to another. A rotating heat source draws a circle on the paper, one cycle per minute. However, since the sheet is constantly in motion, the circle can never be completed and instead becomes a spiral which grows longer and more intricate as time goes by, in a sense letting time become a medium as such on the paper. More images from the event to be found here. |
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The Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid is currently running a (very timely) exhibition on the controversial topic of Extraordinary Rendition. The expression was coined by the Bush administration to define new legal measures designed to sidestep the existing Human Rights system and deprive some individuals from its protection in the name of the fight against terrorism.
The Patriot Act, for example, expands the authority of US law enforcement agencies for "terrorism investigation." It limits -when it does not completely abolish it- citizens' right to privacy or freedom of expression, allows for kidnapping and confinement of persons without charges, without trial or a detention period as has been happening in Guantanamo since 2002. The gallery invited four renowned artists to reflect on the issue.
Phone Home (2003), by Elmgreen & Dragset, is the only work on exhibit that has not been created specifically for the show. The installation looks at the loss of the right to privacy in communications. Five telephone cabins are lined up in the gallery. A note informs visitors that they can call anyone they want in the world for free. Of course there's a trick: the conversation you are planning to have will be broadcast in the gallery, recorded and a table with audio players and headphones will enable future visitors to listen to what you said. Under the new rules of extraordinary rendition, physical and psychological torture is justified. Spanish Inquisition-like methods of torture get toned down but that's because some of them are given new names, like waterboarding, in an attempt to disguise their true meaning.
True to his wam bam approach, Santiago Sierra chose to address torture and one of its most commonly applied methods: the sleep deprivation of detainees for days and months. A huge spotlight operated by a generator are the only elements in Público iluminado con generador de gasolina [Public illuminated by oil generator]. Unfortunately the gallery had run out of oil (another very timely issue) when i went there and the installation was turned off.
Alicia Framis is presenting the first part of a wider project called Welcome to Guantánamo Museum. The installation documents the key elements that would form this hypothetical museum on the US detention centre in Cuba. Scale models, drawings, prototypes, floor plans and structures are exhibited together with an audio piece created with Enrique Vila Matas and Blixa Bargeld. The project echoes our society's need to museify everything, think of Auschwitz and Alcatraz. Should we recoil at the idea of turning horror into a tourist attraction or should we decide that such museums are not a necessary evil, a way of ensuring that atrocities are not forgotten?
The proposal for a Guantanamo Museum will include a selection of exhibition objects and merchandising that reflect the museum's theme and motto -- Things to forget. There will be a Le Corbusier chaise longue turned into an electric chair, a non-existent mailbox, shoes which contain inside their heels a system to allow prisoners to commit suicide, a series of orange clothing and objects designed by Framis together with students during workshops, furniture for the museum will be designed and built using the material of inmates' cells, etc. At the same time a sound room will recall the names of all the caged prisoners in Guantanamo.
James Casebere made photos of what he calls Flooded Cells. These images conjure up allusions to prisons, claustrophobic and oppressive spaces somehow reminiscent of Piranesi's fictitious and distressing prisons (carceri) yet also referencing the method of torture by simulated drowning. Extraordinary is part of the Off programme of PhotoEspana. You can see the show until July 19 at the Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid. My images. Related stories: Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale, Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy, They make art not bioterrorism, Tracking the Torture Taxis. |
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I'm back from Asturias which was as lovely as ever. We even had real vegetable to eat this time. The LAboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón was opening Banquete_nodos y redes, Interactions Between Art, Science, Technology and Society in Spain's Digital Culture, an exhibition initiated by Karin Ohlenschläger and Luis Rico.
The press conference started with a string of surprising figures listed by LABoral's Director Rosina Gómez-Baeza Tinturé. In its 14 months of activity, the centre -which has given itself the mission to foster the interaction between art, society and technology- has hosted the work of 261 creators (45 of them come from the region of Asturias), 54 workshops given by some 90 teachers to more than 3000 participants. Add to that many concerts, conferences, debates and other activities. Amazing, even for a space that covers more than 14.000 m². Which reminds me that it would be good to come back one day on the design and architecture of the centre. The public bathrooms only are worth the visit, i feel like stepping inside 2001: A Space Odyssey each time i enter there.
Banquete_nodos y redes presents more than 30 digital and interactive works that critically and creatively explore the notion of Network as a shared matrix, not just from a technological perspective but also from a socio-cultural perspective. I'll be back with a lengthier overview of the exhibition and a small interview with its curator, the art critic Karin Ohlenschläger, later on but right now i wanted to share with you one of the best projects i saw in Gijón last week.
You've probably read about Clara Boj and Diego Diaz before, either in some media art catalog or on this blog, i interviewed them a few months ago about their project AR Magic System, their Lalalab studio and their interest for the visualization of wifi networks. For the LABoral exhibition, the Valencia-based duo developed a sightseeing telescope named Observatorio (Observatory). Observatorio builds upon Boj and DIaz' 2004 project Red Libre Red Visible (Free Network, Visible Network) which was born in an optimistic time when it seemed possible to achieve an utopia made of wireless, open communication networks managed by social groups offering services to the local community. At that (not so distant) time, several city governments offered free access to the WiFi network, sometimes in the entire city. The CMT (Telecommunications Market Commission) denounced those city governments for unfair competition with telecom companies, the free wifi municipal projects were canceled, and grassroot groups started installing, maintaining and extending open WiFi networks throughout Spain. Today, some companies have adopted new tactics based on the deceptive slogan "Share your WiFi". Companies like FON, and commercial projects such as Whisher and Wefi exploit the current infrastructure of access nodes to the Internet in urban space to provide coverage to the whole city if it were an open, shared structure.
Obervatorio reflects on this scenario by informing viewers about the current state of wireless networks located in the area where the device is installed. The sightseeing telescope, installed on the Laboral tower, tracks and shows where Gijon's wifi networks are located in real time. You can visualize them on the screen of the telescope, swing it around and see which areas have a denser wifi coverage, and get additional data such as which ones among these networks are open or private. Because Observatorio is programmed to try and connect to any open network available in the area, it can send the information from the observation tower to the exhibition hall, where it is displayed on a big screen. If there is no open networks detected in the area, Observatorio remains separated from the main exhibition space, located in another building. A modification of these networks is also offered, showing an ideal configuration in which the local residents of large areas in the city could gain or share access to it.
After having installed Observatorio, the artists discovered many more open nodes than they expected. While testing the project at their studio in Valencia, they couldn't find more than 5% of open networks. In Gijón the percentage is higher, around 30% in the LABoral area. From the tower Observatorio can reach theoretically almost the whole city of Gijón. The device comprises a high power uni-directional WiFi antenna with a 30º aperture, able to detect wireless networks within 1 to 4 kilometers depending on the number of obstacles encountered; a video surveillance camera with a telephoto lens with the same aperture as the WiFi antenna; and a viewer which, like a periscope, offers a real time image taken by the camera, with the WiFi networks detected by the antenna placed geographically on it. Banquete_nodos y redes runs at LAboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón, Spain, until November, 03, 2008. The exhibition will then travel to the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, March-July 2009. More sightseeing telescope: The timetravel telescope, the Jurascope and the Elastic time and space telescope. Also related: Wifi Camera Obscura. |
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From what i can learn from the press we are living in food mayhem: yesterday morning a nutritionist was complaining on French tv that because the country had turned its back on the usual bread and jam breakfast in favour of American-style fat and sugar-loaded cereals, the population was at risk of fattening. In the afternoon, i was reading in La Repubblica that the soaring costs of pasta, bread, fruit and vegetables are making Mediterranean diet harder to afford. Italians are eating more cheap processed foods high in fat, sugar and salt (via WSJ.) The whole continent is complaining about the food crisis. Meanwhile, bananas are dying, eating local might not always be that energy-efficient after all and a livestock meltdown is under way across Africa, Asia and Latin America. An alarming report states that native breeds are increasingly being supplanted by Western farm animals, which may be less well able to adapt to their new environment in times of drought or disease. In Europe, some 98 per cent of vegetable varieties have disappeared over the past century and EU regulations are hastening the decline.
Mind you, researchers have devised new but rather unappealing ways to have us enjoy food like never before: fish are being trained to catch themselves, we'll be able to choose between meat from cloned animals and in vitro meat and encouraged to get better proteins by snacking on insects.
Matias Viegener and David Burns have added the corn issue on the table. Back in 2004, Matias and David worked on an installation which i discovered only recently. That year, Fritz Haeg (of the Edible Estates fame) and Francois Perrin produced and curated the GardenLAb experiment. Set in a 1942 supersonic wind tunnel, the event explored the relationship Los Angeles residents have with their environment by experimenting and speculating on current and future ecologies.
Corn Study humourously addresses the future of human food production and the ongoing consequences of issues that range from the latest developments in genetic manipulation, mistreatment of plants and animal species, corporate control and profit motivation, diminishing genetic diversity, modification of our ecosystem, privatization of ownership of plant's genome, etc.
One of Corn Study's objectives was to develop a new relationship with the corn species. While great effort has been put into the human understanding of plants, very little has been expended to educate the corn and teaching it about the humans that control its fate. The project creates a school for corn with an experimental curriculum to educate the corn in human psychology and sociology, the economics of commerce, important languages, current events and the history of colonialism.
Through the use of audio and autosuggestion the artists deployed Aldous Huxley's theories of hypnopedia: the most powerful educational device being unconscious suggestion to the embryo to maximize its developmental potential.
The school is set up on ten tabletops with different learning stations, with the corn seeds learning through audio speakers as well as by the use of electric fans behind a row of books, which carry knowledge through the air like pollen. In this program of accelerated learning, the individual kernel is not expected to learn everything -- the species as a whole will absorb the knowledge collectively. The variety of knowledge bases is hoped to heighten the corn's wisdom, especially since despite their enormous acquisition of knowledge, humans have acquired so little wisdom. As the artists conclude in their presentation of the project: While it may take many generations before the outcome of our experiment can be demonstrated, we are hoping for positive mutations and raised consciousness in the corn, to be passed along to other species. At this stage of global development, humans can no longer be entrusted with full stewardship of the environment. Perhaps if other species can intervene, they will do a better job. I asked Matias and David to tell me more about the school for corn species: We've been hearing and reading about genetic manipulation for years now. I sometimes think that consumers got used to it, accepted the idea and wouldn't mind buying and eating GMO (or even cloned meat when it lands in our supermarket fridges.) While we were interested in genetic manipulation we wanted to work away from it. The basis of Corn Study was the idea that corn had been studied and manipulated more than any other plant than perhaps soybeans. While we're disinclined to GM foods, it seems clear that all our agricultural foods have been manipulated for millennia. So we wanted to refocus the question of GM foods into the broader question of how humans have studied and changed our foods without any seeming consideration for the nature (or the education) of the foods themselves. What if we could give the corn some agency of its own, educating it about its human hosts. Our ironic goal was to find a way for the corn to gain some power over its own fate, to "speak out" if it could, by learning more about us and both the good and the bad of the human universe.
What does corn education involves exactly? Could you guide us through the whole curriculum? While there was a lot of specific material, there was no defined curriculum for the corn school. Or maybe a better way to say this is that we could have endlessly kept adding educational material to the school. Here's a quote from the original text that was distributed to visitors: "The curriculum is composed of texts, lectures and readings in political science, history, psychology, philosophy, foreign languages and cultural studies; we have tried to select materials that help outline the background of our global socioeconomic, political and environmental circumstances. For the student's personal growth we include tapes on self-actualization, meditation, hypno-suggestion, and personal dynamics. The songs are mostly pop music from the 60's and 70's, chosen to reflect the optimism of a time now fallen by the wayside. Included in our coursework are Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marxist theory, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Neil Armstrong, Machiavelli, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Abraham Lincoln, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Lao Tzu, Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Vandiver, greek myths, Howard Zinn, Ken Wilber, Malcolm x, Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Lyndon B. Johnson, Al Sharpton, Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley, Paul Scheele, Michael Pollan, Henry Thoreau, various international Pimsleur language audiobooks, The New Christie Minstrels, Melanie, Paul Williams, Ray Charles, The Carpenters, Cher, Three Dog Night, The 5th Dimension, Donovan, Bread, Dolly Parton, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, the Doors, and John Denver." Do you welcome both "natural" and modified corns in your classes? Is there any segregation? We welcomed all corn to the school, including GM corn. We tried for a good mix of modern hybrids and ancient or "heirloom" corn varieties. We don't think one group is in any way superior to the others. The idea was to empower the species as a whole to make collective decisions and perhaps take actions to both improve their lot in the world and deflect any more human mismanagement of it. Halfway through the design we realized that all seeds of all species should be welcomed to the school, without distinction between crops and weeds, the good or the bad, which are all values that come from humans and not from nature itself.
Why did you choose to work with corn? Wouldn't animals seem like a more natural and rewarding choice? We worked with corn because of the place it holds in American culture. Americans consume more corn products than any other nationality (and in recent years corn has been blamed for a host of our health problems.) We love animals but this sort of project was hard enough to mount with the immobile corn plants... it's hard to think how we would have done it with a herd of cattle. I read that plants communicate. Do you expect your corn students to spread their newly acquired knowledge to their companions? It's certainly possible for plants to communicate, and perhaps we succeeded in communicating with them, and that our ideas got passed along the botanical spectrum. Of course the real audience for Corn Study was human. We felt that in addressing the corn, the humans might consider seeing the universe from a less human-centric position. Just as we have no preconception about how these ideas would flow through to the plants, we were very open to how they might arrive to the human spectator. A key to our work here is the use of play combined with what we think of as vital issues of our times. Much of our work plays on corniness as a way to be serious, on the relation between pure, purposeful aesthetic or cultural ideas and the low, foolhardy kitsch of the ordinary world. We're not interested in art that's pedantic, but we do care about conveying ideas and questioning values. We're not especially interested in art that creates objects either, but we are invested in the way in which artmaking expands the variety of containers for ideas (and can make things in general look nicer). Thanks Matias and David! All images are from the installation at GardenLAb. Related: Nigel Helyer´s Host, in which an audience of several crickets attend a lecture concerning the sex life of insects and Aron's School for Frogs. |
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I'm back from New York for more than a week and getting ready for new adventures in little Europe. Time to turn a page on the transcontinental trip by throwing in a couple of posts the best exhibitions i saw while i was in Manhattan. Some of them are still up till the end of the month, others have already closed their doors. Here we go... In the collective exhibition AMERIKA: Back to the Future, David Herbert, Anthony Goicolea, Marcus Kenney, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy play with American icons. The artists vision is somewhat dark, critical (how could it not be) but often humorous. Starship Enterprise is re-visited by future cavemen, Mickey Mouse goes on a size-zero diet and a burnt-down chain retailer's suburban storefront aimlessly rotates on a plate.
My favourite by far were Marcus Kenney's assemblage of discarded and old magazine clippings, book illustrations, old receipts, stamps, wallpaper etc. to create nostalgic imagery dealing with contemporary issues. The stars of his compositions are weird children, young women setting foot on distant planets or a girl walking on crutches painted with the motifs of the U.S. flag, etc. A closer look reveal the figures of U.S. presidents and American natives. The colourful and (at first sight) cheerful collages are hinting at some of the pages of American history which do not tend to make its citizens very proud.
On view at Postmasters through June 21, 2008. More images. I walked to the edge of the art Chelsea area to see Actus Reus, Tamara Kostianovsky's solo show. Ready to be butchered beef carcasses were hanging on hooks. Disturbing and so "life"-like that the gallery almost smelled of meat, the animals were made out of discarded human clothes.
Actus Reus is the second part of The Proper Animal, a three-part multidisciplinary program comprised of three solo exhibitions by artists who utilize sometimes disturbing animal iconography to bring ethical considerations into play. The next episode, a show by Julian Montague, looks equally fascinating and as it will focus on spiders i suspect it will be equally repulsive as well.
Closed recently at the Black and White Gallery, Chelsea. My images. I got to discover the work of Dutch collective Antistrot by chance. I was in the building where they are having a solo exhibition to see another show. I happened to take the wrong corridor and enter the wrong gallery. That was for the best. Wild and powerful styles manage to cohabit almost peacefully on Antistrot's paintings: animals you'd see on the walls of your favourite city, gangster faces you encounter mostly in fanzines, monsters like you'd get in a fairy tale without happy ending and busty girls being well... mostly very busty.
Current members of Antistrot are Paul Börchers, David Elshout, Johan Kleinjan, Silas Schletterer, Michiel Walrave and Bruno Ferro Xavier da Silva, with additional help from Charlie Dronkers. Video:
What we do is Secret is at Sara Tecchia Roma New York until June 21. My antiimages, also on artnet. Shot in coastal waters and regions as far apart on every aspect as Australia, Japan, Antarctica, Kuwait, Iraq and California, An-My Lê's photographs examine intersecting themes of scientific exploration, military power, environmental crises, fantasies of empire and the vast ungovernable oceans that connect nations and continents.
Although the themes and settings are deeply grounded into reality, the images give an eerie feeling. The structures, military equipment, boats and landscapes captured by the photographer seem almost too big and out of this world to be true. Seen at Murray Guy (the show is now closed) Shuli Hallak's photographs document cargo in its state of transit between production and consumption. Almost every manufactured product humans consume spends time in a shipping container, yet most of us have little clue about the process by which goods are actually transported.
Fascinated by cargos, the photographer embarked on a container ship in New York and traveled to Florida, crossed the Panama Canal and ended the journey in Guayaquil, Ecuador to pick up some bananas.
On view at Moti Hasson through June 28. |
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It's not everyday that Dick Cheney gives its title to an art exhibition. In the weeks following September 11, the U.S. Vice President justified a steep increase of surveillance measures by explaining that "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy." Almost 7 years later, the collection and sharing of personal data by governments, luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps have indeed become part of a "new normal" in American life.
The New Normal brings together thirteen artworks which explore private information. All the works have been developed after 2001, the year that ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, a major exhibition on privacy and surveillance opened at the ZKM center in Karlsruhe, Germany. It's not a redux of the exhibition: new factors have changed the surveillance panorama since the ZKM exhibition opened. There's President Bush signing the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001, the number and efficiency of technologies of surveillance have skyrocketed and we have come to accept the new state of "normality". The New Normal reveals how difficult it is to set clear boundaries around the concept of privacy. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, personal data, the content of your pocket, bodies, thoughts, communication, and behaviors--contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries. What is most remarkable about the show is the subtle way it engages with the complex concept of privacy. The videos and installations do not hammer their messages on your head, you're not told what to think and what to be very afraid about. Instead, the exhibition argues that today's society is indeed living Cheney's new normal life but this doesn't meant that the new condition of public disclosure cannot be harnessed in the service of artistic endeavours and the creation of "tactics for political critique."
Submitting oneself to security measures can be turned upside down by adopting what Hassan Elahi calls an "aggressive compliance". Elahi daily points a mocking finger to absurd security measures with the real-time self-tracking website he set up in a bid to demonstrate to the FBI investigator that he's not spending his time traveling to the Middle East and plotting some attack in the U.S. The models features in Sharif Waked's Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints video seem to have adopted a similar strategy.
Sharif Waked's video features male models catwalking in clothes designed to expose the flesh of body parts such as chests and abdomens. It would be hilarious and cheeky were the images not juxtaposed with stills taken from recent years displaying Palestinian men having to lift their shirts, take off their pants and kneel shirtless in order to be authorized to cross Israeli checkpoints. The absurd pieces of clothing evoke the bodily humiliation experienced by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints.
Equally politically-loaded is the series of badly photocopies of passports of CIA agents researched by Italian authorities in connection with the abduction of radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. On February 17, 2003, Abu Omar disappeared off the streets of Milan. The man had been kidnapped by the CIA, transferred to Cairo, where he was secluded, interrogated and allegedly tortured and abused. He was released 4 years later. The Imam Rapito (or "kidnapped Imam") affair prompted a series of investigations in Italy.
Twenty-six Americans were submitted to a trial in absentia along with several former Italian intelligence officials for their role in this case of extraordinary rendition. Trevor Paglen managed to get a copy of the photocopy of the fake passports that the agents had to deliver while they were checking in posh hotels in Italy in preparation for the kidnapping. The documents were released by Italian prosecutors in 2005. Although every element appearing on the identity document is fake, the picture had to be authentic. This ensured that the cover of the agents was blown and that the surveillance tools used by a government to achieve questionable goals can also become an instrument of justice.
Back to New York City after five years spent in The Netherlands, Magid kept hearing this announcement in the subway "You may be a subject to searches "for security reasons"." She approached a police officer and asked him to search her. He refused because only women officer had the right to search a woman but she managed to convince him to call her and tell her each night where he was on shift. She'd join him to be "trained" and kept record of the meetings in different forms: diary (read excerpts), photos, objects, etc. He would lend her his duty shirt, she'd give him a picture of her wearing it in return. She makes him tuna sandwiches, one day he allowed her to hold his gun. The relationship they build bit by bit is both intimate and somehow doomed: they are so different, the officer has never been to an art museum, Magid is "one of those liberals". Several works show that the intrusion into the private sphere is not just made of CCTV systems and biometric apparatus, it can also be voluntarily self-inflicted now that new online platforms called blogs, Facebook and image sharing call for self-disclosure. As curator Michael Connor writes, Private information has never been less private. The best example of this is probably the collection of videos that Guthrie Lonergan archived on you tube under the title MySpace Intro Playlist. Although they were made to be viewed by others, they convey an embarrassingly intimate echo once they have been decontextualized and exhibited in an art exhibition.
Developed by Michael Frumin during the 2004 Campaign in the U.S., FundRace is back. The website maps donation made to the candidates of the Presidential Election in the U.S. and enables you to search by name or address to see who your friends, co-workers, and neighbors are supporting. You can also search by profession and discover who celebs and museum curators are donating to.
THE NEW NORMAL is a traveling exhibition co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and Artists Space, New York. It is on view at Artists Space until June 21, 2008. Hasan Elahi at The Colbert Report: Related: Sousveillance culture, Orwellian Projects, Book review - ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, Transmediale exhibition: Conspire, Trevor Paglen's talk at Transmediale, etc. |
