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Previously: OrganOOn at Electrified.
It seems like ages ago that i dragged my photo camera and laptop at the biennial Electrified - Hacking Public Space in Ghent, Belgium. Yet, it was one of the most refreshing events i've visited this year. In a rather unusual move, Electrified brings together two contemporary art institutions which have different orientations: S.M.A.K. is a museum with a focus on visual art and Vooruit is an art center dedicated to media art, sound and performance art. At the core of the collaboration is a desire to expose the frictions but also the connecting threads that the two institutions might want to explore together.
The theme of the biennial this year is Hacking Public Space. Sixteen artists, with strikingly different backgrounds, are showing new and existing work in the S.M.A.K. museum. More than half of them are also undertaking actions -or 'city hacks'- in the town. Many of these actions are unannounced, some of them even remain a surprise for the organizers until almost the last moment. The actions are video documented and gradually inserted into the exhibition space over the course of the biennial.
For Electrified 02, public space has to be explored in its broadest sense, one that doesn't distinguish between real and virtual public space. In this context, the term 'hacking' refers to the guerrilla-like nature of some actions on the internet and at the same time to equally clandestine 'squatting' in the physical public space. Moreover, a Flashback section brings the biennial into a historical context by documenting the work of artists who pioneered actions in the public space in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Alessandro Ludovico, the famous editor of Neural magazine, has curated a Flashback section that presents online works which hack the internet territory. On June 2, Ludovico will give a lecture about the online works he selected for the biennial. Don't you dare miss it if you're in the neighbourhood! Here's a small selection of interventions created by some of the artists invited to take part in Electrified 02:
Pierre-Laurent Cassière 's contribution to Electrified 02 keeps on exploring the limits of human perception and sound pollution. In 2006, Cassière created the Schizophone, a simple (not tech required!) set of headphones that makes anyone who wears it doubt their perception of sounds in the environment. With no electronic applications, the two conical hearing aids are shaped so that the slightest shift in space (even just turning one's head) causes the wearer to experience a sense of disorientation. Video.
The Transphere (urban soundscape bending), a sound object which Cassière devised at last year at Summercamp Electrified, is a sophisticated evolution of the Schizophone. The Transphere, an instrument for 'urban soundscape bending, behaves like an electro-acoustic 'performance' in which the performer breaks into the normal arrangement of ambient sounds. The instrument consists of two parabolas, one in each hand, whereby one acts as a microphone and the other as a speaker. Schizophone is available for you to try at S.M.A.K. while Transphere is 'activated' by several unannounced actions in the city. With Trans-Sphere, an instrument for 'urban soundscape bending'.
Furniture-maker, lock specialist and artist Lucas Murgida added a mirror to 2 of the public/private male urinals in the city, giving passers-by a sneak peek of the joy of public urination as a unwitting man relieves himself. People assume they can encounter privacy in public places. Some men find it behind a tree, down an alley, or under a bridge. In parks people lay claim to a patch of earth by spreading a blanket on the ground. Phone booths and bathroom stalls have been especially installed in public space by cities to give citizens private moments. Murgida reverses the "unspoken social contract" that gives a person the right to create privacy in public space, reminding us that public/privacy is nothing but an illusion and a creation of society.
In another public intervention, Murgida dressed as an undertaker, then stripped down, donned a gas mask and buried homemade, child-size (but fortunately empty) coffins in a strip of green by the dock. With his performance the artist grabbed passersby's sensitivity and emotion. People had no clue about what was going on, they didn't know why a man in underwear and gas mask was silently burring a child's coffin but the image could only linger in their mind long after they went back home.
Dancer, performer and visual artist Ben Benaouisse dressed as a homeless immigrant and perched himself on the roof of the public library and other buildings around the city. In his role of a 'roofless' (a homeless man on a roof) he addressed passersby and asked them to take a picture of him, capturing thus the view that Ghent inhabitants might have on tramps of immigrant origin. The portraits can only be collected by accident, when they pop up on blogs, on flickr or sometimes in newspapers. Other artists participating to the biennial: Carlos Rodriguez-Mendez, Amilcar Packer, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost collaboration Alec De Busscher, Dogma00, Javier Núñez Gasco, Messieurs Delmotte, Wilfredo Prieto, Miet Warlop, Helmut Smits, Christophe Bruno.
Previously: Lucas Murgida's performance at the Conflux festival in 2008. The biennale Electrified - Hacking Public Space is on view at Vooruit Art Center and S.M.A.K. in Ghent (BE) until June, 13, 2010. |
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Electrified - Hacking Public Space is a biennale organized by Vooruit and the S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium. At the core of this collaboration is a desire to expose the friction but also the possible understandings that exist between two contemporary art institutions which have different orientations and emphasis: S.M.A.K. is a museum with a focus on visual art, whereas the Vooruit art center dedicates its programme to media art, sound and performance art.
I'll be back with a fleshier report on my visit to the biennale. In the meantime, a few lines about Roberta Gigante's contribution to Electrified. I wasn't there on the day of the concert so my text relies heavily on information i found online. For Electrified02, the young artist decided to 'hack' the harbour of Ghent with a sound installation that turned twelve rusty, gigantic metal pipes stored there into didgeridoo-like sound cylinders. The pipes lie next to one another, like separate organ pipes waiting to be brought together in one instrument. Each pipe was sealed off on one side and equipped with a amplifier and sub woofer. Each pipe has its own resonance frequency depending on its thickness, diameter and length. These twelve frequencies are measured and used as the basis for the in situ sound installation. The calculated base tones can be used as keynotes for further musical experiment.
OrganOOn was a one day only organ concert that questions the classical organisation and setting in which concerts are held.
The biennale Electrified - Hacking Public Space is on view at Vooruit Art Center and S.M.A.K. in Ghent (BE) until June, 13, 2010. |
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Raise your hand if you know where Aalst is! Aalst is a city of some 80 000 inhabitants in the North of Belgium. It's a pretty charmless and very quiet place. Yet, that's the city where you should go this Spring if you want to visit a fantastic exhibition on sound art.
Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker, at netwerk Center for Contemporary Art, breaks the traditional boundaries between concerts, sound installations, sculpture and music. The exhibition creates as such a place where the dynamic of exchange between performance and spatiality. Only 5 artists or group of artists participate to the show but together they form an exhibition that balances perfectly the entertaining, the meditative, and the immersive. Distributed over 3 luminous and spacious floors, the works come with powerful visual qualities as well.
If you believe that sound art is absolutely not your cup of tea then i suggest you get locked in a room with Sean Dower 's work. You might not want to get out. Specially made for the exhibition, his Ground Control installation greets visitors as they enter netwerk. The white car with fluorescent green painted glass is trembling and shaking due to low frequency sounds emanating from a soundsystem inside. The result is an unlikely mix of elements from different subcultures, aligning surprising parallels between noise, DIY and car tuning.
The Brown Sound is a 12" 45 rpm brown vinyl record with sound frequencies so low at times they are no longer audible to the human ear. Yet many a musician would tell you that they have an impact on the human body. The so-called Brown noise is supposed to make humans lose control of their bowels and causing nausea, due to resonance, and is presented here as a scatological counterpart to the more polished Stendhal Syndrome (a fit of hysterics because of the overwhelming beauty of art).
The Ultrasound of Therapy involves visitors body in a very direct and way. The work is an improved version that the ever-creative and quirky Staalplaat Soundsystem was invited to create for a building that used to be a hospital, a former 'salle des malades' in Lille, northern France.
On entering the waiting room of the infirmary, each patient fills in a questionnaire about their habits, implants, diet, etc. The 'doctor' establishes a diagnosis, points them to one of the beds in the hospital and submits them to one of the therapies. As i was told when i wanted to try one bed after the other, he patient is allowed to follow only one therapy alas!
Each bed is used for a different acoustic and sensory treatment which envelops and engages the whole body. The treatments, designed by Staalplaat Soundsystem and invited artists, vary according to your needs: some have a relaxing effect, others produce energetic responses. Hot Shaking for example, is a treatment with an electric blanket, a 1000W theatre lamp and a blindfold. The blanket is equipped with audio transmitters that play excerpts from the repertoire of vocalist and composer Adham Hafez. The Electro Pattern therapy, where electro-massage pads are placed upon the patient so that the rhythmic patterns from pieces of music by Ryoji Ikeda, can be experienced through body and muscles. I was submitted to the Digital Sunami therapy, the bed was shacking, the wind was blowing on my face and the soundscape evolved from kids laughing to the sound of rain and wind.
The work of Joris Van de Moortel was probably the best surprise in the show for me. The artist presents two works at netwerk, Hit the snare, don't you dare, is a drum kit locked in a tight white and glass box.
The second sculpture, One hit makes it split, encloses an amplifier inside a glass case. The case is completely shattered after the amplifier exploded with a big bang. Both pieces are completely silent but their power to suggest noise, energy and disruption is unmissable.
This pendulum between destruction and protection, between opening up and shuttering, gives his work a strong autonomous character. All my images. Musik für Barbaren und Klassiker is on view at netwerk on Aalst, Belgium until June 12, 2010. |
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Previously: Salone del Mobile: It's lamp time, everybody! The one exhibition not to miss at the Ventura Lambrate area is Hotel RCA. I wish i were not writing so often about RCA but why should i resist when they keep on churning out some of the best projects around.
Their exhibition for the Salone del Mobile is called Hotel RCA because it fulfills the functions of a hotel as an organizational structure to exhibit a broad selection of new designs. There's a reception, a bar, a breakfast room and all kinds of service areas. Hotel RCA was built inside a disused warehouse by the Design Products department, a two-year postgraduate masters course including diverse design approaches -called Platforms- that range from the quirky to the practical and innovative, from the speculative to experiments with materials and techniques. The new Head of the Department, Tord Boontje, has invited alumni to present either the projects they had exhibited at the Summer exhibition last year or the new projects they developed since they had left the College. Damn it was good!
Merel Karhof's Wind Knitting Factory harnesses the power of the wind to activate a knitting machine, right from a free, natural element to a finished product. The machine visualizes directly what you can produce with the present amount of urban wind. Along the façade, the knitwear moves slowly through the window into the building as a long scarf, going faster at high wind speed. Every now and then, the wool is harvested and rounded off in individual labeled scarves. The time to knit one is related to its length, and people will protect their neck from the element that has actually conceived the scarf. Each scarf comes with a label that tells you in how much time it has been knitted and on which date.
I probably walked by Shu-Chun Hsiao's Emf Chime without paying much attention to it. It's only now that i'm back home and clicking all over the Hotel RCA website that i'm discovering it. The suspended chimes play sound when sensing the electromagnetic field in the air. Movements are made by the invisible force and respond with a harmony sound. Any visitor making a call may trigger the chime, actually feeling the invisible existence of EM fields.
Wearable Sound Systems are part of Benjamin Newland's reseach on how mobile infrastructures of sound reproduction can open up new ways to perform, and engage with surroundings and the people within them.
Jen-Hui Liao is not only showing his blockbuster Self-Portrait Machine but also the tongue-in-cheek How to Train a Man to be a Father. During the mother's pregnancy, a Pavlov's Dog training principle is applied to help the male partner create an instant response to the baby's crying in his mind. The machine is radio-linked with a baby doll and wired to a home entertainment system like a TV or PS3. When the doll simulates crying, the trainee must hold and cradle it correctly. Depending on the correctness and reaction time, he will receive levels of rewards as positive reinforcement (they range from one pound coin to a voucher of great sex.) If the trainee ignores the baby's crying, the machine will shut off the power to the linked TV or PS3 as a negative reinforcement.. Once the baby has been born, the father will be able to react to it correctly.
Georgi Manassiev's washing machine doesn't just wash clothes, it also aims to bring people together outdoors, by relocating the public laundry in the park. The concept is based on the classical playground seesaw where more than one person is required for it to work. The washing machine uses rainwater and no electricity at all.
CCTV chandelier - Virtual Doppelganger Simulator, by Hwang Kim, has a dozen CCTV cameras distributed around the viewer's face and engineering their experience to show their Virtual Doppelganger in the connected TVs. The system allows the participant to see his/her own body or the surrounding environment from a third person's perspective. Therefore, the viewer and visitor is displayed as an object in the gallery.
Sarah Colson, Fungi Furnature / Distortion was utterly repulsive to me. Yet, fascinating: Dowel soaked in a mushroom spawn solution, usually intended in domestic cultivation, has been a catalyst for inspirations within this project. The intention is for spawned dowels to be used in furniture construction lending themselves to domestic objects. Due to the nature of cultivating mushrooms the objects will be made from green timber in order for the fungi to have the optimum conditions to grow as it would naturally. Over a period of six months the mushrooms will flourish and the wood will distort, debilitating the object's initial purpose, but regenerating a new function fit for human consumption. The final transformation will be when the nutrients that the fungi needs are absorbed and its life will cease to flourish. The object will then be given back to nature providing further nourishment for the continued life cycle of future objects. |
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Acoustic Botany, by David Benqué, extracts Synthetic Biology and Genetic Engineering from the usual context of health care, food and environment and examines instead the role they could play in the sphere of culture and entertainment.
Acoustic Botany, the project for a "genetically engineered sound garden", seeks to find new ways of imagining the nature of tomorrow (will we still call it 'nature'?), where engineered species of plants, insects and animals interact within a composed ecosystem and create a new form of musical performance. Benqué visited the Plant Sciences department in Cambridge, and researched botany in his own to find existing species from which to extrapolate, and the ideas for this work in progress developed from there. A few examples:
String Nut contains inside a fibrous pulp, which is eaten away by bugs engineered to chew in rhythm. They enter the fruit by the holes in the shell and remain inside until they have eating everything but the few stronger fibers. Left standing inside an empty shell, the fibers are like resonating strings. It should take a couple of days until the remaining strings finally snap and release the nut to the ground, where the seed can sprout.
Giant Speaker Lily is inspired by an actual species. The flower at the center of the 3 meter leaf captures bugs to coat them in pollen for 24 hours before it dies. During that time, the plant amplifies the vibrations of the bug through a membrane tensed over the leaf, becoming a giant monotone speaker.
The Popping Pod Fruit is made from little capsules which fill with air and bacteria as they mature. When ready, the seed is dispersed by the explosion of the capsule. The popping season could be a carefully orchestrated over 2 months with periods of activity more intense than others. I discovered Acoustic Botany at the Design Interactions work in progress show, Royal College of Art, London. I'm looking forward to see how his ideas will grow until the Summer show at the RCA: "This is indeed one of the projects I will be developing for the final show," explains Benqué. "I aim to make it more of an experience, with sound and bigger models, to engage the audience more directly. I would also like to have a small book with diagrams and illustrations, going into more detail about the different species, as well as the ecosystem that ties them together." The designer imagines that the soundtrack would be more composed and harmonic than the nature sounds we know, but it wouldn't be as controlled as 'music' either because of the unknown factors that plant growth almost inevitably brings. All images courtesy David Benqué. Also part of the show were The Gesundheit Radio and Crowbot Jenny. |
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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.... |
