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There's a lot of photography these days on the blog. Maybe it's time to give some space to another artwork i saw at the exhibition Awake Are Only the Spirits in Dortmund (DE), i've been keeping it in my cupboard for way too long.
'Awake Are Only the Spirits' - On Ghosts and Their Media investigates the presence of the supernatural, the manifestations of spirits, and (trans)communication with the beyond facilitated by technical media. Sam Ashley's career embodies perfectly the theme of the exhibition. Ashley's work often engages with hallucination, coincidence and luck. The artist is particularly keen on exploring "spirit possession".
His Ghost Detector is a musical instrument built by 'hacking' any electronic device that generates sound. Random lengths of wire are connected to randomly chosen places on its circuit board. The wires receive radiation of all kinds, and the results are translated into sound. The device becomes a "synthesizer". It is unstable, responsive to slight influences and what it synthesizes can therefore not be controlled. A larger Ghost Detector randomly interconnects several such individual devices. Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of "ghost detectors" read the "auras" of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output. 'Awake Are Only the Spirits' - On Ghosts and Their Media runs until 18 October 2009 at Hartware Medienkunstverein Phoenix Halle, Dortmund, Germany. |
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The Palais de Tokyo's ongoing exhibition, Spy Numbers, takes as its starting point the mysterious and vaguely distressing Numbers Stations. These shortwave radio stations have been broadcasting for several decades, yet their precise function and origin are an enigma. Artificially generated voices are reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code. Are they sending messages to secret agents? To governments? To weapon or drug traffickers?
Spy Numbers echoes GAKONA, the previous exhibit inspired by the work of Nikola Tesla, in its exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum and its margins. Extending beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores the themes of intrigue and conspiracy. It's a small exhibition. Just a dozen pieces. Some if them very good.
Pascal Broccolichi used a program to capture the electromagnetic activity taking place inside and around the Palais de Tokyo. Sonotubes, an apparatus one would expect to see on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey, broadcasts the reverberations of these flows of buried waves. Installed at the entrance of the exhibition, Sonotubes sets the tone of the exhibition. We are in for an unsettling and mystifying ride.
I saw the exhibition almost a month ago and the image that haunts my memory is the one of an invisible man. For the series Erased Lynching, Ken Gonzales-Day erased all traces of lynching from postcards and old photos. The lifeless bodies, the ropes have disappeared, leaving only the setting, the onlookers, the executioners. The images deliberately ignore the victims to highlight the true mechanisms of lynching: the crowd gathered to watch the show, the photographer who immortalizes these executions. Invisible, the victims are more omnipresent than ever. As the artists writes: The Erased Lynching series sought to reveal that racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed, and that in California, the majority of Lynchings were perpetrated against Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans; and that more Latinos were lynched in California than were persons of any other race or ethnicity.
La Terrella by Dove Allouche & Evariste Richer follows the steps of Kristian Birkeland. Around 1895, the Norwegian scientist tried to simulate and understand the phenomenon of aurora borealis with a Terrella, a sphere in a vacuum tank to which he directed beams of cathode rays. Birkeland found they were transformed into rings of light at the magnetic poles of a sphere, Birkeland deduced that this was the origin of the aurora borealis.
Allouche and Richer produced a replica of the Terrella, which had since been abandoned, with the help of laboratories and scientists, the two artists embarked on producing a replica. For the Paris exhibition the artists made it operate in accordance with the calendar of the aurora borealis in the year when Birkeland presented his invention to the public.
The piece that alludes most directly to the numbers station is a 5 meter high Numbers Station Beacon / Community Broadcast Tower that broadcasts in the exhibition space recordings of enigmatic voices reading out numbers. The mystery surrounding the meaning of the information relayed engenders anxiety. Besides, the form of the sculpture evokes other towers: powerful lighting devices, big sound broadcasting systems, transmitting antennas, or indeed watch towers. Spy Numbers opens until August 30th, 2009 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Previously: Transmediale exhibition: Conspire!, A suspicious radio/printer for Mike Corley, GAKONA at the Palais de Tokyo. |
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Anyone visiting LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre before September 7 will get face to face with a mysterious installation by young artist Félix Luque Sánchez. Chapter I: The Discovery is an impenetrable, geometric object and a series of videos restaging the moment of its discovery, as if it were a scene from a sci-fi movie, where the hero is suddenly confronted with an alien, slightly chilling figure.
Chapter I: The Discovery questions the viewer's perception about the truthfulness of what is shown, right from the visioning of videos with synthetic images and ending up in an encounter with an interactive object which co-opts information flows, sound and light transmission. Rather than answering questions--such as, How can technological advances be controlled? On what ethical bases can its purposes be chosen? Who is entitled to decide on the ultimate mission of machines? Can machines destroy us?--this installation, on the contrary, is about reformulating those modern philosophical questions through the use of images associated with the popular culture of science fiction. Wow! That's quite a programme!
Video of the installation: I had to ask Félix for more information about the installation: Your essay about Chapter 1, the Discovery draws parallels with science-fiction. You mention authors such as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick. who are the scifi writers today who, in your opinion, do a similar job of "opening up unforeseen possibilities that are sure to become realities in a very short time"? Don't you feel sometimes that technological progress is going faster than science-fiction anyway? First, I have to say that I'm not a SF expert. I am interested in SF because I like the freedom and potential it has to explore its central subject: the relationship between humans and machines, society and technology. A subject that is central for me in digital art. Science fiction is for me a perfect framework for artistic expression with technologies, given that it questions the role of science and technology in the definition of the human. I think that you could find examples that go both ways. For me Science Fiction mirrors reality in the same way as reality mirrors science fiction. As such, the relationship is confusing, with one continually projecting onto the other. So what I find very interesting is the fact that being a cultural production, the visions of the present, near or faraway future it makes, are in fact reflections of the society we are living in and its relationship to machines and technologies. We can then use SF to reinvent trajectories crossing the past, present and future of the relationships between man and technologies. For me, the most interesting things about these works are what they tell us about our present culture, more than what they predict about our future.
The description of the work says: "As the viewer gets closer, the machine detects the movement and tries to engage in communication by generating a light and sound code." Can you give us more details and explain which kind of 'interaction' (if that's indeed an interaction) takes place between the piece and the viewer? The interaction is very simple : it is one to one. If someone approaches the dodecahedron, the zone facing the visitor detects his presence and reacts to it with a series of lights animations. These series of lights animations change depending on the distance of the visitor from the zone of the dodecahedron. The object's code is made by these changes, which generate different light animations resulting in a light-sound code (in the piece sound is made out of the electronic circuits dimming the light tubes). The importance of the interaction resides in its meanings, which try to convey the idea of artificial intelligence. The interaction is meant to simulate this very complex concept through a language of very simple behaviours. In order to fully engage with "Chapter 1, the Discover", how much does the public need to know about the work and the way it functions? Is it necessary to keep some mystery and guessing? Or would you rather communicate as much information about it beforehand? I think that there is no need to know anything before experiencing the piece. In fact the narration through the whole installation is quite simple. You first enter a room where you watch several videos with different versions of the same moment: the discovery of a strange object in the form of a dodecahedron. Once you move to the second part of the installation, you physically encounter the object, and it reacts to your presence. It tries to communicate. It's not important for me if the visitors can read the interaction clearly; I only want them to feel a certain reaction from the object to their presence. By this simple process I hope that people will ask themselves about the meaning and the reality of this experience.
Finally, can you tell us a few words about the aesthetics of the machine? It seems to be quite unfriendly (as opposed to the openly fun, entertaining, playful installations one can see in many media art festivals and exhibitions today), at the point of being slightly alienating? The object is a representation of a technological alter. The piece explores the concept of alterity from an anthropological point of view: The fear of the other, the exotic, the "primitive" or as in this case the technological other. The choice of the dodecahedron as a sculptural form is grounded in its symbolism in science fiction and in popular culture in general. My goal is to use the symbolic potential of this figure to favor its conscious or unconscious mental association with images from that popular "subculture". The aesthetics of the object resides then in its capacity to become unfamiliar, to make it appear as a machine more than a sculpture. To attend this goal we had to express the apparent simplicity of the form, make disappear the technology, create an indistinct surface, texture, and matter. Thanks Félix! Chapter 1, the Discovery is on view at LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijon, Spain, until September 7 , 2009. |
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Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i'm going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona's International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What's left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition. Sonar's participants' fashion sense was tamer than i expected this year. Hop! Hop! Let's move on to the festival's advertising campaign which have, so far, shown an unconstrained taste for shocking, surprising and amazing. Taxidermied animals, Smiley, people with pee stains on their pants, creatures of worrying genetic heritage, notorious fraudsters and even Maradona have starred in Sonar's posters and promotional videos. Have a look at the photo set of Sonar's most provocative ad campaigns and at the video that the festival created back in 2001. That year, broadcasters refused to air the original video but didn't object to this ridiculously censored version.
This time, the Sónar image is on the safe side but it is nevertheless striking. The heroes of the posters and video are cute majorettes from the world of dreams, who have lost their bearings in the land of the living as a result of calls from a fiendish telephone booth. Follow their 14 minute long adventures: SonarMàtica is actually what usually brings me to Sonar. The title of the exhibition this year was Mecànics. It aimed to give a platform to some of the driving forces behind nowadays' artistic and mostly DIY creation: mostly centres of production based in Barcelona (with notable exceptions such as MediaLab Prado in Madrid) which were given the opportunity to showcase ongoing projects and postgraduate projects but also to organize workshops, tours and open rehearsals. Mecànics is the third and final exhibition in the SonarMàtica XIXth Century trilogy, a research project drawing comparisons between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century. Unlike the two previous exhibitions, Et Voilà!, which highlighted the relationship between magic and technology, and Future Past Cinema, which looked at the recovery of pre-film formats in contemporary, Mecànics had a fairly diluted identity/ The reason for that lays probably in the fact that the exhibition was showcasing the best of what Barcelona makes in art production center rather than exploring with brilliance and cohesion a defined theme. The result is rolllercoaster that leads you from gems to strikingly weak pieces.
I caught myself thinking i shouldn't have bothered. This edition of SonarMàtica had decided to write off SonarCinema, Digital à La Carte and also the artists talks and debates i had enjoyed so much last time i was there (unless, damn! i've missed it). A few projects i've (re)discovered in the exhibition made it worth the trip though: The Sounds of Science (los sonidos de la ciencia), developed by Jay Barros during MediaLab Prado's Interactivos?'09: Garage Science workshop, uses off the shelf and mostly recycled equipment to create audio visual remixes of sounds and images captured from the urban micro-environment, to "lay-down" some beats and frequencies that serves as a musical score for a visual display of what exists beyond the realm of our everyday vision. At the heart of the project is a home-made microscope designed with a CCD sensor from a camera and the lens from a CD player. Image processing programs analyze various samples from protozoa gathered in urban environments and turn them into algorithms which provide the basis for visual and sound composition.
L'Orquestra dels Luthiers Drapaires (the Luthiers Drapaires Orchestra) is made of spectacular robotic instruments that have been created out of technological waste found on rubbish dumps and in the street. Telenoika has decorticated the waste and enhanced it with a little help from circuit prototyping and acoustic research. "Luthiers Drapaires" is proof that the waste we generate provides enough raw material to build sophisticated devices. Besides, the growing amount of tools and information available online provide everyone with the possibility to access the knowledge needed to turn rubbish into artworks.
For Sónar, the orchestra was composed of a percussion set made of electromagnetic pistons; a theremin made from two radios; an adapted television which works as an oscilloscope; a guitar made of string, a crate of wine and the engines from a hair removal machine; and a set of automated tubular bells.
Yuri Suzuki brought some much-needed poetry to the exhibition. He displayed some of his charming Physical Value of Sound pieces but also a 2004 piece called Jelly Fish Theremin. The movement of a fish in a horizontal bowl controls the sound, air- conditioning, the visual image and lighting. Small gold fish were swimming inside the instrument at Sonar but the original work used a jellyfish: I used jellyfish as the control center, since jellyfish are made up of 98% water, and I thought that the will of the water would be reflected in the movement of the jellyfish, if only a little. If we were able to create a space controlled by jellyfish, wouldn't it be the ultimate place of relaxation? And if you understand japanese...
Image on the homepage courtesy Yuri Suzuki. |
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In case you forgot that something like 5 months ago i posted the first part of this story, here's a link to it: A visit to UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts, part 1. The department is located inside the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus, right next to T.E.U.C.L.A., Richard Serra's 42.5-ton ellipse sculpture. And that's where you should go next week. On May 14, D|MA graduate students are showing some of their work at the MFA Exhibition. I wrote about the projects of David Elliott, Michael Kontopoulos, Nova Jiang, and Justin Lui last time. Here's a few words about two of the other students i met while i was in Los Angeles:
Gil Kuno is doing mostly, but not only, sound-based projects. He recently collaborated with GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) to develop an application and performance that amplify and treat the sound of an aerosol can to create a live soundscape. The image of the can discharging is projected behind the performers to deliver the audiovisual articulations of erosion and entropy. The performance ends when the can is empty. A year ago, the artist exhibited the most frightening musical instrument i've ever seen: Christo Allegra's work intersects information design, dynamic media and performance. Among the works he showed me, the one i like the best is Phi Two, a series that uses an algorithm to construct a form based on phyllotaxis, the arrangement of the leaves on the stem of a plant. Phyllotaxis was described mathematically as morphogenesis by Alan Turing as part of his final work. Morphogenesis attempts to account for biological pattern formation as documented by phyllotaxis.
In the Phi Two series, the application was rewritten for tracing the nodes of the phyllotaxis as they were generated. For each drawing, 200+ nodes/lines were traced in silver ink on black paper, and 100 drawings were generated. All of the resulting drawings were given away at their showing in return for an explanation from attendees as to why they had chosen the particular drawing. Marks generated in the drawing process were then fed back into the system for redraw. |
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There's a remarkable exhibition running for just a couple more days at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. I wish i could find the time to write a more comprehensive post about it. Instead, i'll just mention the piece i found most interesting:
For Search, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle transformed a monumental bullfight ring in Tijuana into a radio telescope complete with an antenna and a large reflector dish that would search for signs of aliens from outer space. The signals picked up by the telescope created a "white noise" that the artist broadcast to the Tijuana region on pirate FM radio. Realized some 100 feet away from the U.S. border, Search comments also on the constant search along the border for 'aliens' of a more terrestrial kind. Rhizome has a nice write-up of the exhibition. |
