Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait.

The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.

Images courtesy Jen Hui Liao

The project aims to explore the cooperation process of human & machine. The designer explains: I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in.

P.S. the website of Self-Portrait Machine will be on line soon, it will show more about the background research and the building process of it. I'll update this post as soon as the website is up.

Videos of the machine in action.

Exhibition view. The designer had aligned portraits made by the machines along with portraits made by painters

The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.

View of the exhibition space

Toys, by Tommaso Lanza, was initially inspired by the fall of American energy company Enron. The scandal that shocked America so deeply it was turned into a musical and a documentary film.

By December 31, 2000, Enron's stock was priced at $83.13 and its market capitalization exceeded $60 billion, 70 times earnings and six times book value, an indication of the stock market's high expectations about its future prospects. The company was also rated the most innovative large company in America in Fortune's Most Admired Companies survey. Almost a year later, plagued by its questionable business model, clumsy accounting, financing maneuvers, and failure to hide any further its critical state of affairs, Enron's stock price fell to $0.61. The day Enron filed for bankruptcy, employees were told to pack up their belongings and were given 30 minutes to vacate the building

Lanza's project brings us to 2005. A fictitious company he calls ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. It progressively closes or sells all of its international operations.

Square Mile Auctions' original catalogue from 2005

The quick collapse of the company led to a fire-sale of most of ENT's assets. In the months following the Chapter 11 filing, the liquidation team split the enormous sale across a number of auction dealers. Lanza created a photographic essay of some of the items surfaced by the bankruptcy auction, some of them perfectly mundane (executive chairs, workstations, gold balls and clubs, luxury cars, a range of sat nav, etc.), others fictitious. They are listed in the catalogue of an auction that dealt with low to mid-valued items and leftovers from previous auctions; despite the low-key of the sale, the dealers got their hands on a few items which were sold at much higher prices than originally expected thanks to their unique nature.

Narcotic vaporisers featuring biometric identification via an integrated IriScan system. The double nozzle system is automatically sanitized after each use (digitally rendered model)

Viewfinder probably owned by a small number of executives and used for monitoring stocks and other financial products too sensitive to be displayed on-screen or retrieved on the company's computers (digitally rendered model)

Item 987V: six rapid deployment emergency shredders featuring MicroCut technology and dual feed which makes mass shredding much faster and efficient (digitally rendered model)

The unabridged reprint of the SMA auction catalogue brings page after page a series of clues about the arcane and at times scandalous inner workings of a large corporation. It brings the keen observer one step closer to unravelling the secrets behind one the biggest bankruptcies in recent times.

The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.

The subjects eventually became bored, restless, disoriented, had difficulty concentrating, and their performance on problem-solving tests progressively deteriorated the longer they were isolated in the cubicle. After they left the isolation chamber, the perceptions of many were temporarily distorted, and their brain-wave patterns, which had slowed down during the experiment, took several hours to return to normal. Solitary confinement is not only regarded as a severe form of punishment in prisons but is also a popular form of torture because the way it leaves no visible trace.

On the other hand, it has been observed that too much arousal can produce stress and impair a person's mental and physical abilities. Hence, the use and even commercialization of floatation tank for relaxation and therapy.

Exhibition view: a panel showing the ExtraRoom inside the building architecture (small black room at the bottom of the map) and model of the room

One of my favourite projects at the Design Interactions Summer show was ExtraRoom by Gunnar Green (in collaboration with Bernhard Hopfengaertner). Directly influenced by the 50s and '60s experiments, ExtraRoom puts the sensory deprivation practice in a near futuristic scenario, when mind reading technologies are in common use and thoughts are not private anymore.

What would happen if your thoughts became directly accessible to others? What would happen to your innermost desires and believes? Would you still be you?

Military, carceral and therapeutic rooms would be adapted for the civilian realm. These extra rooms would be added to buildings as effective means for its inhabitants to (re-)gain self control, defend their inner thoughts and find a space for mental adjustment to the outside world.

The image above shows the 'food dispenser". The subject would suck nutrients from it: normal meals would indeed be too rich in stimuli (shape, textures, ordering on the plate, smell, etc.). Besides, their elimination would erase any sense of time. The rest of the room would be totally bland and white, with only a toilet. It is soundproof and features no window. The architecture of the room with its surfaces that are never horizontal nor vertical induces mental unrest.

It has been observed that deprivation rooms increase the receptivity to propaganda. After 36 hours spent in the room, the mind of its inhabitant would be ready to receive desirable messages through speakers. The input would be repeated several times until the appropriate psychological alteration has been reached. The door will then open. The person can now go back to their normal life.

More details in the video:

The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.

"Yawn! Do we really need to read about yet another exhibition around that theme?" will you ask. Yes! It is a great show. A bit on the spectacular side but really intelligent, i'll detail that later on this week. Not because i'm a big fan of suspense (i always pause thrillers and go online to see how it ends) but because i'm short on time. Here's a project i liked a lot:

Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort's series, Daimlerstrasse 38 (2001) lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera.

Greenfort made "traps" using garbage he found in the area. He put a camera inside. At the other end of the camera flex is the sausage. When a fox bit in the sausage, it activated the camera and made an auto-portrait of itself. One week later the animals had learned to eat the sausage without being photographed.

Radical Nature - Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 runs until 18 October 2009 at the Barbican Art Gallery.

Haarlem is just a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam. I was there a couple of weeks ago to see an exhibition called Green Revolution at Nieuwe Vide, a new art space located in an old industrial area turned into a hotspot for all kinds of creative practices.

Green revolution is an agricultural revolution of the 50's that encouraged the use of industrial and biological technology in agriculture. Not in order to create alluring black flowers but to feed nations. Today, some agronomists state that the Green Revolution has allowed food production to keep pace with worldwide population growth while others believe that it caused the great population increases seen today. What is sure is that the Green Revolution has had major social and ecological impacts, making it a popular topic of study among sociologists.

Exhibition view. Image courtesy Nieuwe Vide

The exhibition Green revolution, which invaded the walls of the Nieuwe Vide art space until last June 13th, offers a broader, contemporary and decidedly darker take on the idea of a green revolution. The show brought together artists whose work investigates and comments on the current, complex and often hard to fully grasp mutations in our environment, whether it's the environment in its green and eco sense or more generally the new political climate. Some of the artists selected use or comment on man-made disasters, others bring about distressing scenarios of a future life, others investigate the field of biotechnology, opening up new perspectives and questioning the world we live in. That was a lot to take in in one go.

The Bureau of Inverse Technology's Antiterror line accumulates audio reports on civil liberty infringements and other 'anti-terror' events.

You make a simple phone call and leave a message. Your audio recording is automatically uploaded to an open online terror database, thanks to BIT's uphone system which enables any phone to act like a distributed microphone. The audio files can also be monitored, syndicated or remixed for your purposes. An audio accumulation of micro- incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.

Akos Maroy's project bio.display is of a more playful and experimental nature. Its purpose was to create a dynamic display made of millions of genetically modified fluorescent bacteria.

The project is inspired by GFPixel, a static display made of fluorescent and non-fluorescent bacteria and created by Reinhard Nestelbacher and Gerfried Stocker. Unlike its precursor, bio.display would change its contents with time.

The display used using E-Coli bacteria that has TorA-Green Fluorescent Protein mutant 3* (TorA-GFPmut3*) added to it. The pixel of E-Coli can be turned 'on' and 'off' by changing the pH value of its surroundings.

bio.display. Installation view

Other works in the exhibition include Jon Ardern's project Design Solutions for Post-Crash civilization that stems from the discrepancy between the mounting body of scientific evidence that reveal the dangers inherent in continuing with our current lifestyle and the fear of impeding the current economic paradigm. His project is echoed in drama and aesthetic by Alice Miceli's photographies of Chernobyl's exclusion zone (check also the interview with Miceli, Chernobyl Project - Images of the Invisible).

Investment consultation between, ark member, Shem and ARK-INC

Critical Art Ensemble, Immolation

I was also glad to see again Immolation, a video installation concerned with the use of incendiary weapons on civilians after the Geneva Convention and the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons of 1980. The U.S. have refused to sign the convention and make regular use of firebombs in the Middle East.

This video highlights the major war crimes of the United States involving these weapons on a ( macro) landscape level, and contrasts it with the damage done to the body on the (micro) cellular level. To reach the cellular level, the Critical Art Ensemble grew human tissue at SymbioticA, and using high-end microscopy shot the micro footage of skin cells dying by either exploding or imploding. In parallel, CAE shows film footage of present and past wars that have used immolation against civilian targets as a strategic choice for the sole purpose of terrorizing entire populations.

Green Revolution, curated by Emilie Oursel, closed on June 13th, 2009.

See also Transmediale 09 - Survival and Utopia, Sk-interfaces (Part 1).

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.

One of the images for Sonar 2008

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.

Lovers of interactive tables were having a blast this year

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.

Video by mediateletipos

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.

Prepared Turntable, 2008

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...

For a pretty accurate and smart review of the exhibition with videos, just run to mediateletipos.

Image on the homepage courtesy Yuri Suzuki.

Wanted to share with you a couple of links that have deeply interested and distressed me today and yesterday. The first one is a lecture that Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California, gave at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent research focuses on the concept of political sovereignty as it is connected to globalization and other transnational forces. Archived by Resist, a project i am involved in, the lecture explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Whether they aim to deter poor people, illegal workers, asylum seekers, drugs, weapons and other contraband, enslaved youth, ethnic or religious mixing, walls and fences basically do not work.

An Iraqi boy walks near a blast wall in the Karrada neighborhood. US troops are building a wall around the Adhamiya Sunni neighborhood, which is surrounded by Shia areas, north of Baghdad (photo)

The list of walls she gave is absolutely alarming, especially considered that she focused on the ones that have risen since the much celebrated fall of the Berlin Wall: the U.S. border with Mexico and the Israeli West Bank barrier (these two share high technology, sub-contracting and they also reference each other for legitimation), Post-Apartheid South Africa's internal maze of walls and check point, Saudi Arabia concrete structure along its border with Yemen, India's reinforced border with Pakistan and Bengladesh, Botswana's electric fence along the border with Zimbabwe, the wall between Egypt and Gaza, etc. But also walls within walls: gated communities so popular in the U.S. (in particular in Southern Californian communities living closer to the Mexico border), walls around Israel settlements in West Bank, walls around the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem and the walls that partition the city itself, the triple layer of walls around Spanish enclaves in Morocco, the wall of Via Anelli inside the Italian city of Padua that separate white middle class with immigrants living in an "African ghetto" (i'd recommend Italian readers the documentary Stato di Paura, you can find the trailer here), the Baghdad wall built by the U.S. military, etc. The list goes on and on and the analysis Brown makes of the phenomenon is thought-provoking. I can't recommend enough the audio file of Prof. Brown's lecture.

A Palestinian carries a wheelchair bought in Egypt across the border back to Gaza after militants exploded the border wall between Gaza Strip and Egypt, in Rafah, on Jan. 24, 2008 (image)

The second video depicts in a particularly moving way a project which might not be new to most of you but i had never heard about it so far. Israeli NGO B'Tselem has given Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Simple, smart and apparently effective.

Here's two interviews with Oren Yakobovich, Director of Video at B'Tselem: a video and an audio.

The blog Subtopia covers this kind of topic in a very documented and intelligent way.
Photo on the homepage: AP Photo/Eyad Baba.

At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures. Authorization of the manager of the establishment is obviously never requested.

While in Barcelona for the LOOP festival, i had the wonderful opportunity to attend a talk by Harun Farocki, an independent filmmaker who has spent the past decades investigating the relationship between technology and our representation and understanding of the world. I only got to discover his work at Documenta XII where 12 screens were showing in real time different views of the 2006 World Cup final (France - Italy), some were surveillance camera footage, some focused on isolated players, others overlaid the game with graphic and statistical analysis of ball direction and player speed. Titled Deep Screen, the installation provided an excellent case of 'too information kills information.'

Deep Play, 2007 (photo)

Harun Farocki's presentation in Barcelona focused on two of his short experimental documentaries which, each in its own way, explore the status of new technical images.

I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (video extract) is a two-screen installation. On the first screen are images from the maximum- security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a concrete yard where the prisoners are allowed to spend half an hour a day. The camera suddenly zooms in on a fight between two prisoners. Those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads. They know that fires rubber bullets are coming if the convicts ignore the warning calls. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent. The camera and the gun are right next to each other. This video also emphasizes the social relationship between the one who fires and the one who films, between the one with force and the one who takes shots. After that, it takes nine minutes before the convict is taken away on a stretcher. Farocki explained that in the course of 10 years, guns went off 2000 times in the prison. Hundreds of inmates were wounded, a few dozen heavily injured, five were shot dead.

I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000

The second screen displays found sequences, images generated by computers that track shoppers as they move through the aisle of the supermarket.

Farocki pointed us to Prison Focus, a Californian organization which, in virtue of the Freedom of Information Act, makes prison surveillance images public.

Check also this interview of Farocki about I Thought I was Seeing Convicts.

Immersion (2009)

The second film, Farocki discussed was Immersion (2009). He recently attended a workshop where films war veterans undergoing therapy for their Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research centre that develops and uses virtual reality and games to recruit and train the soldiers, but also to treat them. The traumatized soldier has to done a head mounted display and immerse himself into the first person shooter game while a psychotherapist coax them into re-living the most traumatizing moments of their war experience.

Immersion (2009)

What interested the film maker was the fact that if in the past an image was a direct reference, today it is in competition with images generated by computer science. The computer image have now acquired a higher status of believability because scientists have worked together to tune it and make it as close to the reality as possible. These sophisticated models are now competing with 'the real thing.'

Video art is best screened inside isolated dark rooms. Seats are more than welcome, especially if you have to watch tens of videos in a row. LOOP art fair understands the importance of the comfort factor better than most biennales, museums or even film theatres. The fair took place inside the snug rooms of the Hotel Catalonia Ramblas (great breakfast buffet, über-shitty wifi) right in the center of Barcelona during 3 afternoons. Videos were displayed on big screens inside bedrooms and some galleries added a smaller screen in the bathroom to show another piece. So here we were all cosying into armchairs, spreading over beds, taking notes in the dark and chatting in the corridors of the hotel.

Here's a few works i noticed:

Specta Gallery brought two animations by Lars Arrhenius. One of them is The Big Store. A collaboration with Johannes Müntzing, The Big Store is set in the Stockholm department store where Swedish minister of foreign affairs Anna Lindh was assassinated in 2003. Arrhenius/Müntzing have set their focus on the minutes before the murder, as any other day at the store, except that customers, shop keepers, and other protagonists appear as if their body had passed through an x-ray machines. People wander quietly inside what is probably many people's nightmare: a long walk inside a shopping mall emptied of the only elements that makes it remotely appealing: its goods.

En dag i varehuset / The Big Store. Still from animation, in collaboration with Johannes Müntzing, 2008

En dag i varehuset / The Big Store. Still from animation, in collaboration with Johannes Müntzing, 2008

I couldn't find a video of The Big Store online but you tube features two other videos by Lars Arrhenius:
The Man Without Qualities and The Street.

Max Estrella Galería de Arte selected the work of Daniel Canogar to represent his gallery. Now Canogar's didn't come with artworks that could be described strictly as videos and that's what made the gallery's bedroom all the more interesting.

Jackpot at Matadero in Madrid. Image courtesy Daniel Canogar

One of the pieces on show, Jackpot, a collaged panel formed by broken fragments of slot machines. A projection back-lights the panel with Las Vegas-type flashing lights. The piece looks at our fascination with media screens, the extolling of money as the new religion of late capitalism, and indirectly alludes to the financial system as a game, whose current troubles highlight the inherent dangers of being seduced by its glimmering light. 'Screen' is the key word where LOOP and Jackpot intersect. The video installation is indeed the result of the artist's quest for new ways to break the traditional frames of the screen.
Video.

The bedroom of the gallery Filomena Soares was the magical one. I sat there for almost 40 minutes to watch in loop a video that lasts only a few minutes while people around me kept whispering words such as "fantastic" and "magnificent". "O Percurso" (El Camino), a video by Vasco Araújo, attempts to encapsulate three key elements that define gipsy culture: inheritance, nomadism and oral tradition. The video shows the journey through the inhospitable landscape of Andalusia of a man and his son, they just left a land behind them and are looking for a new one. While walking, the son wonders when they are going to arrive and his father tells him again and again that no land is theirs, just like the wind isn't, that what matters is never to stop. What matters is freedom.

Vasco Araújo, O Percurso (El Camino), 2009

Vasco Araújo, O Percurso (El Camino), 2009

Susi Jirkuff is interested in media perceptions and relations between reality and fictions, stories and images. Her videoanimations are playing with different TV genres. By remixing viewer assumptions they reveal the manipulation by the media. The espaivisor - Visor Gallery in Valencia, Spain, brought two of her videoanimations to the fair.

The works on show explored the paradox of pop music: on the one hand it's a product made to be a commercial success, no matter its quality. On the other, it's a expression for intense emotions.

People Who Like Bonnie Tyler, 2009, 6´ 05´´, videoanimation

The artist explained: I'm interested in the gap between the media presentation and the message that is received by the consumer. In pop music this gap is deep: on the one hand a settled product consisting of a constructed personality, visual perfection and music, on the other hand an often young recipient who is very much emotional involved in his own life and uses this product to express himself. Emotions are transferred into feelings, a sentimental consumable print of psychic experiences. We more and more learn to act and stage aside an authentic emotional expression believing that we are very authentic.
This mirroring of false authenticity to true emotions back to false authenticity is the starting point for 'People Who Like Bonnie Tyler'. I drew some potraits of fans who use this website for chatting and asked my sister, a musician, to record 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' with some of her students. I gave them some of the drawings and they gave them their voices. Bonnie Tyler herself appears as a ghost from her 1984 music video and texts by fans show that their admiration is everlasting.

Braverman Gallery was screening an arresting video by Gilad Ratman. The 588 Project started when the artist discovered on you tube videos showing men immerging themselves completely inside thick mud, breathing only through plastic tubes. Ratman went to see those mud immersion enthusiasts and documented them as they are swallowed up by the mud. Watching the video only makes you feel claustrophobic.

Because of the huge amount of art events i attend each year i sometimes have the feeling that i'm slowly mithridatizing myself against the pleasures of art. I'm glad events like this reminded me why i got into art blogging in the first place. See you next year at LOOP, ok?

Otto sent me a paper copy of the thesis last year and because i'm about to leave to the airport i'm just going to copy/paste its abstract. It does what it says on the tin after all:

This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able.

Image courtesy Otto von Busch

As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through "open source" fashion "cookbooks". By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative "hacking" at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on.

Related: Interview with Otto von Busch, Experiments in fashion heresy.

I love Antwerp. I think the Fashion Department at its Royal Academy is the best in the world, its art scene is never dull (the MoMu, Museum of Fashion, is currently showing that Paper Fashion exhibition i reviewed a few months ago), i like shopping there, people are friendly, plus there's a harbour and i have that thing about sailors.

An exhibition at Objectif Exhibitions

As i wrote on Sunday, one of the reasons i visited Antwerp is that i had never seen the Museum of Photography. This is going to be one of my regular stops. The exhibitions i checked out last week are now closed but the upcoming ones look great. There's going to be Geert van Kesteren's Baghdad Calling/ Why Mister, Why? and Theatres of the Real. British photography today. They both open on June 19, 2009.

There were 4 exhibitions last week. Two i liked a lot, one that was as ok as i expected and a last one i was not so much into. I already mentioned how much i admired the talent of Jimmy Kets. But my happiness didn't stop there. On the 4th floor of the museum, I fell head over heels in front of the six channel video installation, East of Que Village, of Yang Fudong.

Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2007

The images of East of Que Village are miles away from the ones that the international press showed during their coverage of the Olympics last Summer. The film attempts to depict the sense of isolation and loss increasingly present in China's contemporary society as communities are scattered, traditional rural villages dissolved, and the fight for survival takes precedence. The imagery is of a desolate and hostile landscape, the host to a group of wild dogs fighting a merciless life-and-death struggle for survival, with only a sporadic presence of human life and social values.

Yang Fudong, East of Que Village, 2007

The b&w video installation is mesmerizing rawboned dogs walk in the wind and get into fights, people inside their home are quietly performing routine activities, and the landscape is fiercely inhospitable.

Erwin Olaf, Julius Caesar, from the Royal Blood Serie

But the pièce de résistance at the museum at the time was the solo exhibition of Erwin Olaf. His work is indeed bound to fascinate audiences. It talks of gender issues, sex, violence, body, entertainment, fashion, beauty, darkness, death. Some of his most provocative series were on display: Chessmen, Blacks, Mature, Fashion Victims, Royal Blood, Paradise 'the Club', Separation, Paradise Portraits, New York Times Couture, etc.

Erwin Olaf, Cindy C, from the Mature series

Erwin Olaf, Kate M from the series Mature, 1999

Erwin Olaf, Anna Nicole S, from the Mature series

The photos that shocked me the most by far are part of the Mature series -not because i find them scandalous but because i can very well imagine me with that kind of body within a few years and i'm vain and time passes so fast. Women of a certain age (read, at least 70 years old) pose as Playboy pinups, with a bikini, bath foam, or their wobbly skin as only attire. Their identity is reduced to just a name and the first letter of their surname, they are Kate M., Cindy C., Anna Nicole S., Christy T., Claudia S., etc. There's something magnificently defiant in their attitude. Are they beautiful? Ridiculous? Inspiring? Outrageous? You are the judge.

Erwin Olaf, Le Dernier Cri

Olaf's video and photos Le Dernier Cri gives another, almost blunter, view of what alternative beauty can be. The bourgeois, chic and polite protagonists wear elegant face adornment that are all the more frightful that we are use to associate this kind of flesh accessory with body mod-addicts.

Video Le Dernier Cri:

I'll end with my favourite series by Olaf: Separation. I don't need to comment on this one.

Erwin Olaf, Separation

Small extract of Olaf's video Separation:

You can see some images of the exhibition space on Jordan Hellemans Photography.

Found on sexblogs.

Wal-Mart, USA, 2002

In 'Brightside' Jimmy Kets follows roaming individuals in their lonely search for happiness, satisfaction and a carefree existence. The journey leads to holiday paradises and fun fairs, from Disney Land to Las Vegas, via erotica exhibitions and zoos.

Kets is the amused outsider. He gazes dreamily, but not without a message. He shows the small things that make us human. The footing and happiness we are all looking for. Our desires and insatiable lust.

Las Vegas Blues, 2008

There were many photos he took in the USA. But the series i liked the best were shot in Belgium.

I particularly like the Volkscafes series:

Jimmy Kets [°1979] is press photographer for "De Standaard" newspaper with an impressive blossoming career. He was awarded the Nikon Press Photo Award 2008 and, to coincide with the exhibition, the book "Brightside" about his work will be published by Ludion publishers.

DOLLS explores forms of control or the codes and expressions of power, submission and violence. Five men are evolving in an almost blank space, performing excruciatingly banal tasks or just waiting to be served. The men don't seem to have any further meaning or purpose than to their fulfill routine tasks: pouring coffee in a cup or going from point A to point B in order to serve a piece of white bread with butter on a small white plate. These actions are so pedestrian, measured and dull, one would expect robots rather than human to perform them. But what will happen when we all have robots at home that perform menial tasks for us? Won't we find it desirable and exotic after some time to prepare coffee ourselves once in a while?

As the five men are evolving inside the highly abstract space, they obey rules that escape us, they crush objects in close-up with crampon mountain shoes, glide over the floor on their ice skates and their eyes never ever betray emotion.

The careful framing, cold colours, close-ups, slow-motions and Sean McBride's music further contribute to the derealizing effect.

The three-part video takes place in an uncomfortably closed space, a location that would evoke a contemporary art "white cube" would it not be for the coloured markings and geometrical symbols carefully placed on the walls and ground. Is it a playground that could come straight out of a scene from Mon Oncle? Is it a video game set? Both? Or is it rather a Suprematism painting stirred into motion? The signs on the floor and walls are actually similar to the ones used to teach humanoid robots how to find their way and execute some tasks in a given space.

A gentleman sitting on the floor right next to me at the opening had some really interesting shoes

DOLLS was screened inside the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and I can't imagine a more suitable place than the pavilion to show Larsson's video. They have the same geometrical architecture and coldish beauty.

Annika Larsson, DOG, 2001.

Annika Larsson, POLIISI, 2001.

I was surprised to discover that Annika Larsson is generously making some of her work available online. As far as i could have observed, not many video artists are ready to share their work on youtube or vimeo. I had the opportunity to meet the video artist in Barcelona and asked why she didn't restrict her video screening to the strict perimeters of a brick and mortar art gallery. She told me that first of all, watching a video on a laptop screen at home is a very different experience than the one that would see you dress up, go to an art gallery and experience in a space that the gallery has dedicated to it, with the sound played at the right intensity and quality.

Larsson isn't afraid that the online distribution would enable other people to take undue inspiration in her work, "being an artist has always been about copying and stealing anyway," she explained.

She even shot PIRATE, a short film using images taken during a demonstration by the Swedish anti-copyright movement (Piratbyrån and the Swedish Pirate Party) in Stockholm. I'm going to bow goodbye and leave you with the film:

Annika Larsson's work was also part of the LOOP video art fair where she was represented by one of my favourite galleries in Madrid: La Fábrica Galería.