|
I can't seem to hold their flash website against the Gamerz festival. It remains one of my favourite events of the year.
The 7th edition of GAMERZ took place last November in postcard pretty Aix-en-Provence. As its name suggests, the festival presents video games, interactive works and a playground atmosphere but gaming is more a pretext than the whole raison d'être of GAMERZ. The free exhibitions, performances, concerts and conferences embrace all kinds of art forms that refer to or use digital technology. So yes, Gamerz offers machinima and AR video games but also paintings, light performances and choir singers. I like GAMERZ because it's eclectic, because it makes me discover plenty of artists i had never heard about before but also because it reminds me that festivals should be left more often in the hands of artists. They take risk, follow their whim, trust other artists barely out of the academy, and care little about sticking to genres and formulas.
Talking about taking risks....
One of the most popular pieces in the exhibition was Paul Destieu's Fade-Out, a video that records the progressive burying of a drum set under gravels. The gravel hitting the percussion parts produces a rhythm section, which rapidly turns into a sound and visual chocking. I watched the video a first time for the images and came back to it, just to take the sound in. The sequence shot proposes experimentation around the technical state of Fade-out, by materializing the decrease of sound and visual signal, until a complete silence and disappearance.
Monsieur Moo's Meule 2 Foin (french for haystack) is a big hay ball that emits loud sound when you push it. To turn the loud noise into a melody, visitors have to keep a certain, equal pace. It looks like the most elementary way to 'interact' with an artwork: you just have to roll it around. In fact, the work's sole ambition is to cheer up visitors. However, once you're in front of the ball, you realize it's not going to be a piece of cake. First of all the hay ball is ultra heavy and you might need some help in order to get it rolling. Add to that that the surface around the hay ball is slippery and you're in for a good sweat moving that damn ball around. Mr Moo imposes a forced walk that illustrates his mocking analysis of mobility and interactivity issues in contemporary art.
Le Faussiare (The Forger) by artists' collective Dardex-Mort2Faim (Quentin Destieu, Romain Senatore, Sylvain Huguet and Stephane Kyles) is a robotic arm that counterfeits the autograph of famous artists. The work is intended to satisfy an audience that has elevated famous artists to the rank of major rock stars but also to set the artists themselves free from any unwanted social obligation towards the public. So far the robotic device only fakes Andy Warhol's autograph but it will soon offer art fans a databank of famous artists' signatures to chose from.
Antonin Fourneau was showing the work in progress version of Oterp, a mobile phone game using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player's position on Earth. Players have to locate and capture sounds in their surrounding, the more sound creatures they catch, the more sophisticated the music becomes. I played with Oterp at the exhibition opening. It was fun to be that rude girl walking through groups of people having conversation and frustrating not to be able to catch a creature because that would have implied jumping into a pond. What makes Oterp stand from similar dérive-like games is the quality of its design. The music was created by Jankenpopp and Thomas Michalak aka T M. The graphic designer is Syclo. They all did such an outstanding job that players tend to stick to the game longer than they would normally.
Dipterous experience is an archaic visual process combined with a micrographic device paying tribute to flies... some fruit burst open so that you may enjoy it better. No idea how to explain this one clearly, i guess you just have to pop your head into Servovalve's Dipterous Experience.
ELIZA meets an old Olivetti typewriter in Gauthier Le Rouzic's TypeWriterBot. Ask the typewriter a question and it will engage in a conversation with you, greeting you with a 'hello, night bird!' if it's late, asking you about your hopes for the national elections if there's a political election running at the moment and answering your most stupid questions with humour and astuteness. Reading through the printed conversations, it immediately appears that the typewriter is far wittier than the humans.
Isabelle Arvers curated a Machinima exhibition for GAMERZ. All the details can be found on her webpage so i'll only highlight Josh Bricker's Post Newtonianism, a two channel video that shows side by side images from the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and actual war footage taken from cameras mounted on American military aircraft during the first Gulf War in 1991 as well as during the recent occupation of Iraq. There are bombing of vehicles, military targets, shooting of insurgents and oppositional forces. The sound track mixes the audio from the video game with the sound of a classified material released in 2010 by Wikileaks showing Apache helicopters killing two Reuters reporters and attacking, wounding or killing other targets on dubious grounds. The pictures from both sources are disturbingly similar. Josh Bricker's experiment is a simple but effective analysis of why images should be watched with a certain suspicion. The documentary value of this film is not only on what we see, but on how incapable we are to recognize the origin of the images our own society produces. I wanted to embed directly the video in this post but YouTube first asked me to login to 'verify' that i'm 18 or older and when i tried to do so, the page said that "YouTube is not available for wmmna.com". But here's the link to the video and my blog will make do with the comment from the artist: And with that i'm wishing you all a happy 2012! Previously: Arena at Gamerz festival. |
|
Over 50 years ago, Philips commissioned Le Corbusier to create their pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Designed to showcase the company's engineering prowess, the pavilion was a cluster of nine hyperbolic paraboloid in which music was spatialized by sound projectionists using telephone dials. Edgard Varèse composed a piece of electronic music, the Poème Electronique, and drew up a detailed spatialization scheme for the entire piece. Neither Varèse nor Le Corbusier were Dutch but Varèse's composition was developed with the engineers at Philips' NatLab, in Eindhoven. This experimental laboratory gave light to many inventions such as the radio tube, short wave transmitter, videodisc and compact disc. The NatLab was located at the Klokgebouw, a 1928 industrial hall which in November was housing the STRP festival for the fifth time.
STRP was in great shape this year. It's a real pleasure to follow a festival that gets from strength to strength in such a fast and steady way. The symposium was impeccable, the night programme as edgy and spectacular as ever. At least that's what i was told. At night i either sleep or blog but as you can see the crowd was clearly satisfied:
The organizers and curators also had the excellent idea of setting up an exhibition that brought the spotlight on the history of Dutch art and technology. The show was both a celebration of the talent of media artists in The Netherlands but also a gesture of support towards the Dutch new media institutes (namely V2_, Waag Society, STEIM, Mediamatic, WORM, Submarine Channel, NIMk) whose survival is threatened by drastic (and short-sighted) governmental cuts. Regarded by some as the first "multimedia work of art" and developed at the very location of the STRP festival, the Poème Electronique was the best opener to the exhibition timeline of past and present media art works in The Netherlands. The exhibition was a captivating journey that brought me from old favourite such as Spatial Sounds....
To classics of Dutch media art (many of which i was only discovering) and world premiere of installations developed by young Dutch artists. Here's a quick selection:
The video of the re-enactment of Dick Raaijmakers' 1979 excruciatingly slow performance. In Graphic Method Bicycle, a naked cyclist covers a distance of 10 metres in 30 minutes. The bicycle is pulled forwards by a motorized winch and steel cable. Lifted up off the saddle by one of the pedals extremely slowly, the cyclist is forced to dismount. It's like a slow-motion video in flesh and bone. The performance requires considerable strength, concentration and balance and one can hear his pulse, breath and see his muscles quivering.
Perhaps my favourite work in the exhibition, Edwin van der Heide's DSLE -2- plays with light and sound to throw off spatial perception. The immersive environment uses octophonic loudspeakers and a surround installation made of LED panels that light up a screen. Moments where sound and light appear to interrelate with each other are complemented with moments where the spatial perception of sound and light contradict with each other and lead to distinct ambivalences in our perception of space. STRP had also toured the country's art academies to find some of the most promising artists. One of them is Jeffrey Van Oers whose Ambisonic Flightcase is a dark box for one person that encloses you into 3-D surround sound. At a time when every single work is multi-sensory, multi-disciplinary, it's fantastic to be offered the opportunity to focus on hearing only:
Marnix de Nijs gave a world wide update to his installation Exploded Views. The immersive piece invites visitors to physically navigate 3D models of some of the world's most photographed sites constructed from images uploaded on Flickr. The amount of detail in the 3-D model corresponds to the amount of photos of a given location. The 2.0. suffix is thus still very much in vogue in the NL.
Evelina Domnitch and Dmtry Gelfand's Hydrogeny is a tank of ultra-pure water scanned by a laser sheet. Electrodes at the bottom of the tank split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas which form bubbles that slowly make their way to the surface. The water is further disturbed by sound and as the sonic frequency and amplitude rises, the hydrogen bubbles start to coalesce with one another while a white laser sheet scans and illuminates their movements. Beyond macroscopically observable bubbles, an expanse of nanobubbles hides within the water's internal architecture. Some researchers presume that these nanobubbles of dissolved gas are the carriers of water's magnetic 'memory', enabling electromagnetic fields to saturate its innards for hours and even days after their initial appearance. In the seas and oceans, the lingering presence of electromagnetic fields photonically imparted by sunlight, triggers the electrolysis responsible for most of the Earth's hydrogen. An essential form of photosynthesis, solar water splitting is the cleanest and most efficient means imaginable for generating and storing energy.
Bert Schutter's windmill is best enjoyed with sound and movement: And here's Floris Kaayk's Metalosis Maligna because i find it as good as when i first saw it back in 2006.
More images in STRP's flickr set and on mine. |
|
Let's pretend it's November 2010 and i'm writing a perfectly timely report from the STRP festival in Eindhoven. Well, i did try at the time (cf. The Physiognomic Scrutinizer and Pattern Recognition - Art for animals) but that was very far from making justice to the programme. STRP is one ambitious art & tech affair which most of the taxi drivers who dropped me to the old klokgebouw venue unceremoniously called 'The Party'. STRP does indeed offers one hell of 10 day long party:
The last edition of STRP attracted almost 30,000 visitors. They came for the concerts and parties of course, but also for the performances, exhibitions, screenings, live discussions, conferences, games and workshops. The exhibition was particularly exciting with its mix of low tech and high tech. Zilvinas Kempinas' Double O which i had seen only in contemporary art fairs so far is made of just two fans and a strip of recording tape. You switch on the fans and hey presto! you get a sculpture that hovers between sheer poetry and vintage tech. At the other end of the spectrum were works such as Acclair's Art Valuation Service (AVS) that monitors your brain activity as you visit STRP's art exhibition. For the first time since its creation, STRP dedicated part of his enormous exhibition space to a survey of the work by a young artist. They had the magnificent idea to chose Lawrence Malstaf, an ex-theatre set designer who's been quietly building his artistic career in the mid-1990s. The international new media art circuit discovered Malstaf's work a couple of years ago and his installations have been gracing the likes of ZKM, Vooruit and the Japan Media Arts festival ever since.
Malstaf's most puzzling and iconic works were there. From the now world famous vacuum-packing experience provided by Shrink....
... to the ars electronica anointed Nemo Observatorium:
And then there were pieces which are equally noteworthy but might not have attained the same media-attention just yet. Such as a belt to navigate invisible architecture, the moving labyrinth of Nevel...
... a duo of conveyor belts running very slowly in opposite directions. Rolls and wheels hidden underneath add a tactile dimension to the experience.
I was both attracted and horrified by Shaft which has you laying with your face under a transparent shaft where plates hover and dance until they collide and break on the bulletproof glass. Just. Above. Your nose.
More goodies awaited in the other exhibition rooms: Lyndsey Housden & Yoko Seyama's Transient Landscapes is a performance installation that constructs and re-constructs the architecture of a room. On entering this field of vertical white lines performers as well as visitors can shape the space into patterns and images reminiscent of cityscapes and landscapes.
I felt immensely sorry for the poor electric fish brought from the Amazon River to be squeezed in a tank, endlessly photographed by curious visitors and form a choir based on their sonified electric fields.
Colin Ponthot's Monster Happy Tape is a blob of used audio tape hanging from the ceiling. By grabbing one of the yellow cables with magnetic heads at their extremity, visitors could play back sounds that might have been registered on the tape. A particular success with the kids who probably needed to be explained what a tape and a walkman are/used to be but also how physical sound can be.
The installation was part of the REwind: Compact Cassette programme which reminded visitors that the tape cassette was originally developed by Philips in Eindhoven back in the early 1960s. In another building Christoph De Boeck had built a Staalhemel, a 'steel sky'. Tiny hammers tap rhythmic patterns on steel plates, activated by the brainwaves of a visitor wearing an EEG scanner.
There was also a big plush cat in the adjacent room:
More images on flickr: Photos by Mick Visser, photos by Boudewijn Bollmann and mine. Previous posts about the last edition of STRP: The Physiognomic Scrutinizer and Pattern Recognition - Art for animals. |
|
Prédiction was the biggest exhibition of the International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne. Its ambition was to reposition the boundaries of contemporary design, exploring in over 150 artefacts and 2000 m2 the new types, methods, and practices of the discipline.
SMS Printer, brainwave sofa, amorph objects for lonely people or unpredicted needs. It was so fast, so bright, so 'finger on the pulse', i sometimes had the feeling of walking physically inside one of the design blogs dedicated to the chase of the 'ultimate coolness.' Not that it prevents the objects exhibited (or the design blogs just mentioned) to have depth and intelligence of course.
The exhibition space was shaped at the image of a Gallic Village (i kid you not!) half guarded behind high fences.
Curator Benjamin Loyauté had selected both established names and young, still unknown talents from the hundreds of submissions his call for design had gathered. Here is a walk through some of the discoveries i made at the show: One of the most interesting design projects for me is The T-shirt Issue, by Linda Kostowski, Hande Akcayli and Murat Kocyigit from Marshallah Design. 3 people got their portrait in t-shirt -not 'on' a t-shirt. Their bodies were scanned, then turned into a 3D file. Linked with their biographical memories a digital twin of the body was thus created, which expanded and personified the garment. The 3D data then became sewing patterns by the use of the same unfolding function that is used in industrial design to make paper models. The single fabric pieces and the inner interface which defines the edges were cut out by the help of a lasercutter.
By hacking a very mundane SNILLE office chair, Sander van Bussel, converted a hyper-impersonal IKEA piece of furniture into the place where the most intimate and personal activities take place.
I never thought that one of the most memorable designs of the exhibition for me would be a chair. So you get a second image of it.
Part of Richard Hutten's Playing with Tradition series of oriental rugs, this wool carpet design evokes the time of the good old dial-up modem when images failed to load properly.
China is both the country where many European companies have their products manufactured and one of the largest producers of copied and pirated goods.
Designer Laura Strasser decided to take the copying of her work in her own hands. She found a "business to business platform" and emailed 40 Chinese manufacturers, asking them to copy her physionomy. 31 producers replied immediately. When I described my project in greater detail and gave the quantity and the time-frame, eleven turned down my request because the quantity was too small, four because they only produced tableware, but six agreed emphatically.
In the exhibition space, the little porcelain reproductions evoke the soldiers of the Terracotta Army.
Union Political Table Radio by Nanar Kradjian symbolizes the political tensions in Lebanon. Up to six people can sit together at the same table, plug headphones in the cube and listen to the political message of their choice since Kradjian's radio integrates 6 radios, one for each of the main political parties in the country.
Wieki Somers's Consume or Conserve? series uses human ashes to create sculptures as different as dung beetles and toasters.
Jo Meesters' Ornamental Inheritance is a series of sand blasted used ceramics that combine the immediately recognizable delfware ornaments with contemporary symbols, such as airplanes, wind turbine and architecture.
I promised myself i would make a pass at the RCA people projects just once but sometimes temptation cannot be resisted:
Also Part of the Prédiction exhibition: The House That Herman Built. |
|
Previously: Feeding the Tardigotchi. Fast, furious and merry images from Sao Paulo and the 11th edition of the FILE Electronic Language International Festival, i think the report will have to wait till i'm back in Europe. Sao Paulo. Exotic plants, skyscrapers and where did i leave that picture showing helicopter landing pads on top of said skyscrapers?
City of much admired street art.
Quirky fashion shops.
...and shoezz! Cult plastic sandals, high heels and pumps from Melissa Galeria.
I'm fairly enthusiastic about them. Here's the booty (so far):
Dear Sao Paulo, please please never get rid of your generous trash 'bins'.
The FILE Festival is remarkably popular with the public
In the morning the queues to play with games or interactive works are still reasonable so keep the lie in for another day.
Every evening ends with some fantastic performances.
FILE is open until August 29, 2010. |
|
As announced last week, i'm going to dedicate a few posts to the International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts - aka BIP2010 - which is taking place all over Liège until April 25, 2010.
Because the city is located in the french-speaking part of Belgium and is only a short distance away from The Netherlands and Germany, the biennale is in french, dutch and german. Not just the website but all the captions and information inside the exhibition spaces are in 3 languages. Which i think is pretty laudable. Only the theme of the biennale, (OUT OF) CONTROL, is english though. BIP2010 has invited about a hundred artists to question society's growing desire for control, surveillance, and regulation. A worrying tendency which (fortunately) leaves space for accident, irrationality, for the unexpected and the absurd. Each exhibition space focuses on a different aspect of this (OUT OF) CONTROL theme. The Musée d'Art Wallon (the Museum of Walloon Art), for example, had chosen to turn its gaze on Equilibrium and Accident. Some artists push the limits of control or protection and go -or rather perform- all the way to the fall. Others, stop right at its borders, right before they loose balance. The MAW is a gloomy, austere building right in the middle of the historical part Liège. But before i proceed with a brief review of what hangs inside its walls, here are some images i took in the neighbourhood of the museum:
Visitors get to experience the idea of Equilibrium and Accident right at the entrance of the exhibition room. There, Julien Berthier's Revolution light spins around the room fast and furious just above their head. I'm not sure how tall you have to be experiment with the sensation of receiving the chandelier right onto your face. You want to get nearer and observe it better, yet the object is fairly menacing. How close can you go? I couldn't help wonder what the notoriously fastidious Health and Safety would have done with the piece had it been installed in the UK.
In comparison with the chandelier, Tilman Peschel's Revolution photo series portray an almost mute and collected notion of danger. Protected by the layers of foam he had wrapped around his body, the artist wanders around the Black Forest in search of risky situations he can put himself into.
Roman Signer's video 56 Kleine Helicopter shows 56 toy helicopters neatly positioned on the floor. The moment they take off, they seem to turn into a swarm of dragonflies. Only they are just a dumb, noisy and pathetic version of the insect, they collide onto one another and come crashing to the floor. Video.
A few steps away from the MAW is the cultural center Les Brasseurs / L'Annexe. The space is remarkably similar to any ex-industrial or ex-commercial venue converted into a contemporary art space...
but their café is charming (Les Brasseurs, after all, means "the brewers"), with disparate chairs, mismatched floor tiles and wooden ceiling.
The sub-theme explored at Les Brasseurs is (Out of) Time. Time, which unlike space appears to be entirely beyond man's control, is the material investigated by artists, in a more or less literal way. The reflective world photographed by Sarah van Marcke is both out of space and out of time. Even the architectural elements seem to be in search for function and meaning.
Young photographer Laurie Polson's take on time is an investigation into the professions associated with death. Hence this portrait of an undertaker from Florenville, Belgium:
Matthew Pillsbury made almost palpable the hours that passes in the rooms of these guardians of time called museums.
BIP2010, the International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, is open until April 25, 2010 in Liège, Belgium. |
