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The story started last week: Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art and Playlist, it's not (just) about nostalgia. Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. The format of Mediateca Expandida goes beyond the traditional exhibition format, allowing visitors to touch and play with the same instruments that the artists have developed and sometimes use in their performances, offering a lounge to listen to dozens of 8-bit music tunes, a programme of concerts, etc. Music take center stage in the exhibition but Playlist has also a very physical dimension that deals with the pleasure of manipulating and tweaking the devices and the aesthetic delectation in the vintage look of arcades and handheld consoles, breathing new life into devices which would otherwise have been given a one way ticket to the e-waste inferno after only a couple of years of existence.
Pong is an analogue recreation of the 1970s Atari arcade videogame. Released in 1972, Pong was the first videogame to achieve widespread popularity in both arcade and home console. André Gonçalves gave Pong a new twist by excluding the physics behind its programming algorithms. Instead his installation relies a physical process: it's the air blown by small fans that controls a real ping-pong ball. The machine is made of two pieces connected through a cable and located in different rooms. The first part is a coin-operated arcade wooden box (picture above) with analog joysticks, buttons and 2 tv screens, one showing the graphics and another displaying the game view.
The main part of the installation awaits you in a dark room. It is a wooden structure where all the physical action of the game occurs, filmed by a video camera. Check out this video of the installation: Because early Game Boy models had the shape and almost the weight of a brick, Game Boy musicians sometimes call them "bricks". Gijs Gieskes took the idea literally by crafting and baking a Gameboy Bricks. He then then erected a wall of Gameboy Bricks, and left ivy grew over it for archeologists to maybe uncover them one day, when all the original plastic Gameboy will have disappeared.
Joey Mariano's Juvenile Amplifier embraces the cult for chiptune with gusto. As a kid, the artist took delight in listening to the sound coming from the single mono speaker of his gameboy, but he wanted the sound to be louder. His Juvenile Amplifier beefs up the sound without the use of headphones or a large PA system.
The Hupel Pupel, by Dragan Espenschied, is a quirky little magazine of lo-tech comics created using a Game Boy camera with the built-in paint/stamp tools and a Palm running TealPaint 4.4.
With Protopixel HARDcade, by VjVISUALOOP embedded a software into a vintage videogame arcade cabinet. Visitors can create live visuals using the original joystick and buttons. The visuals are generated by the software and displayed through the monitor of the cabinet and two video projectors. The monitor displays the images at a rather blurred and slow refresh rates (15Khz), in a similar way to the '80s arcade games. The images projected on the walls are more crisp. The moving images are low resolution, have limited frame rate and set of colours, as well as loops and "old school" effects such as colour cycling and '80s style patterns. The software also includes electronic 8-bit glitch sound, related to the images displayed on the screens.
The opening of the exhibition was quite a success. Great performance by VjVISUALOOP and Jeff Donaldson/noteNdo, lovely food (as always in Asturias) and a big crowd of people who seemed to be genuinely interested. However, the number of young people was disappointingly low. Which makes me want to end with the conclusion of Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz' essay for the Playlist catalog: "The artists of the Game Boy generation may be the last for whom chiptunes can hold a nostalgic appeal. Will their fans simply age with them, or will the chirping arpeggios, square waves, and creative spirirt of chiptune music similarly captivate a younger audience reared on PlayStation and the Xbox?"
Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, the second exhibition of Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, is open until May 17, 2010 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. Image on the homepage: Antonio Cavadini / Tonylight who just had a solo show at the Fabio Paris Art Gallery in Brescia, Italy. |
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Previously: Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art.
Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. Playlist follows a long long trails of game-related exhibitions at Laboral (see for example Homo Ludens Ludens) and just when i thought "oh nooo! Not another one!", they managed to bring an exciting new perspective on the world of game art.
Despite its geeky, garage, masculine aura, Chiptune music is less anecdotal a theme as one might think. It didn't exactly become the new "folk music for the digital age" nor the "next step in the evolution of rock and roll" that Malcolm McLaren, the legendary ex-manager of the Sex Pistols, had forecast but that's probably part of its charm. If chiptune music had found its way towards mass culture after roughly two decades of existence, you'd see this exhibition at MOMA or the Fondation Cartier, not at a more adventurous space like Laboral. This doesn't mean that chip tune music 'failed' to reach the music charts. It's just that it would probably lose its soul if it were assimilated by corporations and turned into mainstream candy.
Chip music is low-key. Its scene is relatively small, its sound is raw and lo-fi, but more importantly, its tools are outmoded goods of mass consumption. This obsolescence of the media was at the heart of curator Quaranta's reflections. The very essence of chip music is indeed at odds with the so-called 'planned obsolescence' model that has come to be part and parcel of the industrial stream of electronic goods since the early decades of the 20th century. By 'upcycling' vintage computer and video game systems, hacking, tweaking and bringing to light their untapped potential or turning their very shortcomings into musical or visual features, the artists and computer hobbyists not only defy any assumption that their passion is only driven by nostalgia, they also go against this almost universally endorsed model of planned obsolescence. In the florid essay he wrote for the Playlist catalog, Matteo Bittanti reminds us what a great purveyor of quotes McLuhan was. He believed that "obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it's just the beginning." Here's the first part of my report about the exhibition.
Jeff Donaldson/noteNdo's RESET v2.0 embodies perfectly the way the 8-bit community makes the most of the defects and limitations that come with old game consoles. Each NES console has been prepared to instigate generative system crashes/malfunctions which are triggered by laser light. As the participant walks through the installation space/laser field, different audio-visual effects are produced when different beams are obstructed. The work is inspired by system glitches, or imperfections, which are unique to the 8-bit NES hardware. In provoking these errors, abstract and colourful effects, unintended by the commercial systems designers, are produced. Eat Shit, by Jeremiah Johnson/Nullsleep and Don Miller/NO CARRIER, demonstrates again artists' interest for glitches and data corruption. The interactive installation explores controlled data corruption on the Nintendo Entertainment System, based around Johann Sebastian Bach's piano piece Minuet in G.
They might be using outdated instruments but the close-knit chiptune community has its feet firmly planted in today's sharing culture. Gino Esposito wrapped all the knowledge and the years of work of micromusic.net - the first 8-bit and low-tech music Internet community platform - into microbuilder. The "community construction kit" package offers amateurs all they need to create a successful internet community. The software can be installed easily, you learn quickly how to operate the system and the package is simple to adapt and extend. In the book you can browse through the history of Internet communities, the process of building up micromusic.net and other online projects. Illustrations and graphic art work from micromusic.net artists will give you a lasting visual impression and the installation guide makes the software installation process as quick-and-easy as possible. And of course you can listen to the included audio CD.
Homage to DIY/"pirate" multicarts often found in Hong Kong markets which take multiple games and illegally cram them all on one cartridge, Paul B. Davis's aptly called 5 in 1 crams multiple artworks from the Beige catalogue. There are stylistic nods to multicart culture in the somewhat awkward main selection screen, the misspelling of the component names (this is also a reference to bootleg hip-hop records), the lack of navigation instructions, and a slightly buggy feel. However, its authentic/illegal "pirate" nature is tempered by the fact that the source codes for most Beige artworks are freely available from their website. Anyone could download and make their own edition of the original pieces if they learned the technique and could be bothered. This is the paradox of "open source" software when manifested in an art object: the object is reduced to the application of a technical skill because the code/ concepts already exist in the public domain (except, of course, for Davis' code that runs this multicart). My pictures of the shows are not as good as Domenico's but that's ok i got used to be such a lame photographer a while ago. Photo on the homepage: Don Miller/NO CARRIER, glitchNES, 2009. Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, the second exhibition of Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, is open until May 17, 2010 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. To be continued.... |
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Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta for Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, explores the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation of obsolete technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms, etc. I'm going to be the usual procrastinator and promise that i'll come back with a report later on this week. I might be a vile idler but at least i'm a fairly generous one. First, here's a link to the kick-ass catalog of the exhibition with essays by the curator and other experts, a brief description of the dozens of artworks selected and a list of the concerts that accompany the show.
Another link, this time to a series of videos by Raquel Meyers. I didn't know her name before visiting Playlist. Shame on me! She's one of the most famous and active VJs and video makers of the chiptune music community. More importantly, she is extremely talented.
Playlist - Playing Games, Music, Art is the second exhibition of Laboral's new Mediateca Expandida, a multidisciplinary space dedicated to cultural projects hovering at the border between mainstream culture and experimental research. You can visit it until May 17, 2010 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. Photo on the homepage: Raquelmeyers. Photo by Florence Bourgade. |
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The future seen from here is gloomy. It is made of ecological disasters, political tensions, economical apartheid, overpopulation and promises never fulfilled. Feedforward, the exhibition opened a couple of weeks ago at the Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, offers space for artist to reflect and comment on the global political and social forces that drive us forward.
In a previous post, Feedforward. The Angel of History. Part 1, i focused on two chapters of the exhibition dedicated to wreckage and countermeasures. I'm now going to skip the section on the Aesthetic and Symbolic Language and concentrate on the ones that address globalization and agency. The artworks that engage with the forces of economic globalization highlight how globe-spanning modes of industry --such as outsourcing and migration-- uses digital technologies to intertwine even more intimately political, economic and cultural factors.
Headless (2007 -) is one of the most exciting projects i've seen at Feedforward. Part of my enthusiasm is due to Dr Angus Cameron's lecture during the symposium that accompanied the opening of the exhibition. Cameron presented himself as a Human Geographer at University of Leicester, acting as the emissary of artist collaboration GOLDIN + SENNEBY. He almost immediately added that this definition of himself might not even be true, 'maybe i'm just an actor pretending to be a Human Geographer.' The tone of the project was set. Headless looks into offshore finance, and its production of virtual space through legal code.Through actions and theoretical pursuits, the artists interrogate the mythologies created by virtual economies and fictional personae. The project began in 2007 with the investigation of the offshore company Headless Ltd located in the Bahamas.
Goldin+Senneby have commissioned author John Barlow, using the pseudonym K.D., to be both an employee at an offshore consultancy company and the ghostwriter of a murder mystery where both real and fictional characters are allowed to appear in the story and in reality. Barlow went to the Bahamas to visit the offshore company Headless. He never managed to visit it. You can send money to an offshore company but because it should not have any physical presence, you cannot visit it.
One of Goldin+Senneby's hypothesis is that Headless Ltd is a contemporary incarnation of 'Acéphale,' the secret society initiated by philosopher Georges Bataille in the 1930s ((Acéphale does indeed come from the Greek a-cephalus, literally "headless"). Headless is not a simulation. Several people are involved in the project and because each of them knows only a part of it, they play a role in an ongoing performance that is almost a pastiche of offshore practices. The project, however, uses human capital, not financial capital (no one gets paid.)
Mixing human drama and poetic narrative, Cao Fei's Whose Utopia? proposes a vision of a reality where even the most mind-numbing mechanized production system cannot crush human dreams and aspirations. The bitter-sweet video was shot at OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta, which has led the massive boom in China's economy and has drawn workers from throughout China in search of a better life. Cao Fei's video show the workers endlessly repeating the same gestures: they insert tiny filaments into delicate light bulbs, they test then pack them into boxes.
In the following chapter of Whose Utopia?, heavy machines and monotonous gestures give way to a "Factory Fairytale." Workers become dancers and musicians gliding and playing while their colleagues haven't left their seat in the chain. But that was just a dream. Reality kicks in by the end of the video.
The last section of the exhibition explores possibilities of reconstruction and agency. Do we still have hope and space for collectivity and responsible action? Is it possible to clean up after the 20th century? What is democracy now? What does progress mean when older concepts, such as continuous economic growth, seem to have failed?
Daniel G. Andújar's Postcapital Archive is an installation that gives access to over 250,000 text, video, and audio documents that the artist has compiled from the Internet. The archive spans the years that separate the fall of the Berlin Wall from the attacks on September 11.
Although the collection of documents opens with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Andújar takes the perspective not of post-Communism, but of post-capitalism. How much have capitalist societies really adjusted and evolved in absence of their erstwhile counterparts? Deep changes have indeed affected the social, political, economic and cultural all over the world over the past two decades. However, new walls are being erected all over the world, both physically and metaphorically, by capitalist societies. What matter in Andujar's installation is not so much the compilation of the videos and texts but what visitors make of them, the way they explore, learn, draw their own conclusions and interact with this mass of information.
Feedforward. The Angel of History is a dense exhibition. I made three tours of it, read the press material, browsed through the catalog, attended the first day of the symposium and still feel the desire to see the show again. Feedforward is one of those rare shows that brings me back into the arms of media art when i least expect it. Feedforward is also very North American in the selection of the issues highlighted and the way they are covered. This is absolutely not a bad thing when the exhibition is so intelligent but the Euro-centric blogger that i am couldn't stop wondering how European curators would have handled the same exhibition. Just a last hurray for the elegant work done by Office for Strategic Spaces. The architects were in charge with the spatial design of the exhibition. Instead of separating the artworks into isolated thematic groups, the dividing walls that OSS designed are light and transparent enough to let the works coexist in a single landscape. All my images from the exhibition. Previous posts about this exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006 and Smoke and Hot Air. |
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Previous posts about this exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006 and Smoke and Hot Air. Feedforward. The Angel of History, a compelling exhibition that opened a few weeks ago at LABoral in Gijón, addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces--largely enabled by the "progress" of digital information technologies--inexorably feed us forward. The exhibition title references Paul Klee's watercolor Angelus Novus. Walter Benjamin saw it as depicting "the angel of history" transfixed by the wreckage of the past that is accumulating in front of him while being propelled into the uncertain future by progress.
Curated by Steve Dietz and Christiane Paul, the show explores a 21st century made of deep inequalities, complex tensions and a general feeling of instability. Can we count on the media to reflect accurately the political and cultural landscape? Are the media addressing and monitoring the disturbances that surround us? Or are they instead accomplice to the situation?
If the media do not do what we expect from them, can art step in? Which kind of role can artists play in this scenario? Is providing feedback to what they observe enough? Shouldn't we instead hope that they will adopt a more "feed-forward" attitude and inspire greater awareness and collective reaction? The 29 artworks on show do not pretend to provide all the answers nor to cover the full spectrum of the dilemmas and tensions of our time but they explore them under many different angles. The art pieces are distributed according to five themes. One of them investigates the "wreckage" of the 21th century created by conflicts, corruption, economical inequalities, terrorism and corporatism.
Proyecto Coche explores the wreckage quite literally. A few years ago, Barbara Fluxá discovered a Seat 127 car in the Nalón River, Asturias. Together with an archaeologist she excavated the car and documented its removal, conservation and transformation into a beautifully polished debris.
The car's specific re-discovery parallels the dawning realization of the automobile's unsustainable cultural role at the beginning of the 21st century. After the exhibition, the car will be abandoned yet again, this time at a scrap yard where it will be dismantled for re-use. Proyecto Coche is part of a series of projects that focuses on material culture as a reflection of consumer society.
Baghdad in No Particular Order consists of footage that Paul Chan shot when visiting Baghdad in 2002 as a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a group formed to nonviolently challenge the economic warfare being waged by the US against the people of Iraq. The video essay of life in Baghdad shows Iraqis engaged in everyday activities. The images are almost shockingly banal. They shows Iraqis in their homes, at work, among friends, in places of worship. It's the daily, unthreatening life newspaper don't show us. Six year after the beginning of the war, Chan's film amplifies awareness of the damage inflicted on human lives. The people that appear in the movie have survived the first Gulf War. They've been dragged into another war, into oppression and occupation. Are they still alive today? Another theme explored by the exhibition is the countermeasures of surveillance and repression that the state as well as global capital set up in an to attempt to maintain control and clean up or minimize the wreckage.
Trevor Paglan's Limit Telephotography photo series uses high powered telescopes to picture US government "black" sites and spy satellites. Paradoxically his images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than uncover it. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Paglen's subjects are much closer but also even more difficult to photograph. To physical distance, one has indeed to add the obstacle of informational obfuscation. To be continued... FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History is on view until April 5, 2010 at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. |
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I'm having a fairly busy week but i promised myself i wouldn't abandon my blog as i tend to do when i'm on the road. So... quick post about an installation i was hoping to see earlier this month at Vooruit's festival Almost Cinema in Gent. Sadly, i couldn't make it to Belgium that week. But, youpiiie! Feedforward. The Angel of History, the exhibition that LABoral which opened last Thursday, gave me a second chance to finally get to see Smoke and Hot Air. Designed by Iranian artist Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel, with participation of artist Matthew Brackett, Smoke and Hot Air reflects Momeni's concern about the relentless threats that Iran has been receiving from many other countries in recent years.
The system searches for sentences including the words "attack Iran" on Google News. The sentences go through a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is in turn picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of wooden smoke ring makers. Reflecting on the perception of countries as they are shaped by the news and media landscape, Smoke and Hot Air reverses the general view of Iran, which is frequently depicted as aggressor. The recent global support for the uprising after the 2009 Iranian election showed how quickly the general attitude towards a country can shift. Translating the news into old-fashioned smoke signals, Momeni's and Mandel's project illustrates how the complexities of national and political identity can get reduced to false impressions, deceit, and posturing.
I found the artwork particularly moving. Is simplicity can only be equaled by its efficiency and its peacefulness by the distressing political situation in the Middle East. The quiet and smoky atmosphere incites you to make a pause and reflect on the issue at stake. Also in the exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006. |
