By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at
10:00 am
David Rokeby, Very Nervous System, 1983-
Montreal's art and science organization the Daniel Langlois Foundation announced a new collection of online materials for Canadian artist David Rokeby's work Very Nervous System (1983-), an interactive sound installation that reacts to the movement of visitors. The work has developed over the years, and has exhibited in many contexts. This particular collection of documentation is interesting because they bring in the audience's response to the work, through a series of interviews. You can read more about the project and their approach in the excerpt below from the "Introduction to the Collection" by Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller.
This is the second documentary collection that we have created for artworks by David Rokeby. In 2007 we produced a collection for the artwork Giver of Names (1991-), through which we developed a documentary approach to media art that captures the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience or, as we have described it, “between real and ideal” (1). The aim of this strategy is to acknowledge the fundamental importance of audience experience to the existence of media artworks and to create a place for the audience within the documentary record.
We believe this approach offers a productive way to reconcile how media artworks exist in the world and how they are represented in an archival context. In recent publications, we have begun to refer to the product of this approach as an “Indeterminate Archive”: a collection of materials that provides multiple perspectives of the work, as well as multiple layers of information, held together with—but not secondary to—the idea of the artist's intent (2). This indeterminate archive, we have argued, captures the mutability and contingency of the artwork’s existence, creating a more, not less, “complete” account. For a full explanation of how we developed this approach as well as a fuller discussion of the issues surrounding documentation, archives and audience experience, please see the introduction to our 2007 collection for the Giver of Names on the Daniel Langlois Web site (3).
The invitation to produce a second collection for Rokeby’s Very Nervous System (1981- ) came from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz, Austria. This artwork is a particularly interesting case study for the Indeterminate Archive for two reasons. Firstly, it offers an unmatched demonstration of the importance of experience in media art. Very Nervous System is, as many audience members pointed out in our interviews with them, essentially an empty room until someone walks in and activates it. It is a work that is brought into being very literally through experience.
Secondly, it is a seminal work in the history of media art, with a lifespan of more than 28 years. Its celebrity and longevity pose some particularly interesting questions about documentation and contextualisation of media artworks over time and through change. The Very Nervous System’s celebrity makes it a fascinating focus from the point of view of the relationship between real and ideal. The work is, for many, one of the first successful artistic experiments in gestural, embodied interaction. An enormous number of texts have been written about it, and many curators and critics of media art have read about it without ever having experienced it themselves. This notion of an “ideal” Very Nervous System has, therefore, a powerful role within the discourse of media art. This begs the question of how the “real” individual experience of the work, here and now, relates to this powerful ideal.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at
10:00 am
YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji), Coal Fired Computers, 2010. (Installation view at Discovery Museum, Newcastle, courtesy the artists. Photograph: Louise Hepworth)
This interview follows on from a project called “Coal Fired Computers
(300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs)” carried out in Newcastle
in spring 2010 for the AV Festival. The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko
Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram
between components in production as they undergo transformations across
different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The
project found a way of working with such things that was particularly
powerful. The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off
into databases and a certain understanding of their material force.
One thing we don’t cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired
Computers project’s work with miner activists, including the
inspirational Dave Douglass. (See information on his memoirs here ). More
of this can be found in a booklet about the project here, including links
to all the groups involved. The interview was carried out by email in May and June 2010.
By
Robin Peckham on
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Samson Young, Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 - nr. 14 (Senza Misura), 2010
The exhibition "Resonance" was initiated in early 2010 as an experiment in the conceptual underpinnings and practical manifestations of sound art as a genre and form in contemporary greater China. Growing out of a series of readings and conversations in Hong Kong with artists as varied as Yan Jun, Feng Jiangzhou, and Zhou Risheng, the final exhibition program included two installations by artists Samson Young, an artist and composer based in Hong Kong, and Yao Chung-Han, a sound artist based in Taipei. This selection of artists allows the experiment to step beyond the mainland sound art and experimental music scene, which is largely incoherent in its current free-for-all exploration of new sonic forms--a site of artistic freedom indeed, but also a difficult territory in which to reflect on the modes of sound already in use in the contemporary art community. Samson Young contributed a piece entitled Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr. 1 - nr. 14 (Senza Misura) (2010), a series of open circuit boards hung in rows on the gallery wall. Each board houses two LEDs and a speaker, each marking the tempo of a single movement of fourteen of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas. In the second gallery room, Yao Chung-Han installed an audiovisual piece entitled I Will Be Broken (2010), a suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together with power cords that illuminates in a semi-random fashion and emits a prerecorded sequence of sounds. The two pieces engage in a dialogue of light and sound that confronts the tension between sound as aesthetic spectacle and sound as conceptual material, opening a productive conversation between styles and historical developments in the trajectory of sound in art. "Resonance" is on view at I/O Gallery in Hong Kong until September 5, 2010.
Robin Peckham (RP): I’d like to start with our initial thoughts when we set out to put this exhibition together. We were interested in how different cultural labels, specifically including music, experimental music, sound, and sound art, are distinguished in the Chinese context. During curatorial projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we found that artists and musicians working under these different labels all share the same live performance events and even exhibition contexts. I want to ask how the two of you see yourselves fitting into this system personally, and how you have experienced these distinctions in Hong Kong and Taipei respectively.
Samson Young (SY): In Hong Kong there is a circle of people working with, writing, and playing classical music, and that’s a very specific and self-contained scene. Then there’s a set of people outside this scene who also share a series of different and unrelated events, such as William Lane of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and myself. We both come from classical music backgrounds originally, but we’re also involved with other things, learning from different kinds of artists and musicians. The scenes are defined but the content of the work produced in each of these circles is not. As for defining my identity in all of this, I don’t have any strong feelings in terms of being a certain kind of artist working within the territory of sound art. I come out of the classical music world, but I make work that might function as contemporary music in the concert hall or something else entirely within the gallery context. No matter what the work is, it should be evident that my interest lies in a certain set of ideas of music to some degree or another. I tend to resist being labeled as a sound artist because this term is so ideologically and politically loaded. There are so many problems with it that have yet to be resolved. Its aesthetics are still being defined, particularly the question of how to judge a work of art within this territory. The question is very much still under discussion. That’s one problem. The question of how to judge or test a work of art is often mixed up with this other question of “what is sound art,” where these should be very separate questions. A work might emit sound of some sort of sound in a gallery setting, but the strategy of judging it through the criteria of sound rather than as conceptual or visual art is a very political process. It is a value judgment. It is very dangerous to judge the work within or using these unresolved debates over the nature of sound art, because it introduces all kinds of ideological questions. The discussion of aesthetics and the discussion of the identity of sound art should be separated. But now they exist within the same conversation, mixing the idea of a value judgment from the idea of a judgment of quality. We have a conversation and a discourse over these questions, but no sense of definition. If we introduce the question of “what is art,” then the entire project becomes compartmentalized and limited to its own territory without any further possibility of the expansion of the genre. As for how I define my own work, I will do some things within the gallery setting with the materials of sound and music, and people can label it as they please. But I don’t think I’ve answered the question.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Intel and Vice-affiliated media channel The Creators Project speak with video artist Takeshi Murata in this short clip. They provide a snapshot of his practice, touching on his unique approach to animation. There's a brief interview with Murata on their website as well, here.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Another great interview by Nicholas O'Brien for Chicago-based contemporary art blog Bad At Sports! In this clip, O'Brien speaks with game designer and artist Jason Rohrer. For this series of interviews, O'Brien captures media artists within the medium in which they work - whether it be Second Life, Video, or in the case of the above, Rohrer's game, Sleep Is Death. Rohrer was a panelist for the Rhizome New Silent Series event on indie gaming "Next Level" a few years ago, if you want to watch a video of that talk as an addendum to this interview, go here.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The Dying Gauls are plaster casts of Hellenistic sculptures on which video interviews of young men from Lahore are superimposed. The men are asked about their view of heaven, hell, death and dying.
The casts used here are Dying Gauls. The Dying Gauls were commissioned in commemoration of the victory of the Greek over the Galatians, Celts from Asia Minor. They are part of a larger group of defeated enemies made up of Gauls, Amazons, giants and Persians. Unique in the representations of these Greek enemies is that they are depicted without a triumphing victor.They are seen as defeated but heroic warriors.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, June 11th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Nicoline van Harskamp, Any Other Business (Stage) (Photograph by Willem Sluyterman van Loo)
On June 18th at 7pm, artist Nicoline van Harskamp will present for the first time in the U.S. her performance work Expressive Power Series Part 1: Max Bonner on the Phenomenology of Speech at the New Museum, an event part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series. Her practice investigates the political implications of language and speech, and her pieces often take the form of performance. Van Harskamp took some time to answer a few questions regarding her upcoming Expressive Power Series Part 1: Max Bonner on the Phenomenology of Speech.
What of your other projects and/or research may have laid the
groundwork for Expressive Power Series Part 1?
The performance takes as its basis the script for Any Other Business, a 6-hour performance that I made last year, set in a conference center in Amsterdam. I wanted to bring out the central thesis of that work, to summarize it down to an hour in a way. So, for Expressive Power Series Part 1, I took four of its most contradictory and most outspoken characters and planted them in a seminar room of an art center. During the 6-hour Any Other Business piece, the characters never get to speak to each other, but are merely juxtaposed. In the new piece, I wanted them to confront each other directly. And when writing their new lines, they started to say things they didn’t say before.
Things that I learned or heard since last year; things that I am working on for new pieces; things that I was thinking about a long time ago and that suddenly seemed relevant again. They ended up summarizing my own thinking at the moment, in a way representing the voices in my own head that argue over topics that are central to my work. Whiff does it from a radicalist point of view; Alexandra from a humanitarian point of view; Mrs. Malik from an academic point of view; and Max, the consultant, from a reformist or (semi-) scientific point of view. In the piece, I am the person handing the microphones to various characters, indicating who I want to hear at what moment.
As a result of that, perhaps, I simultaneously, and to an equal extent, agree and disagree with each of the characters. To the audience, I want them to be equally sympathetic and unsympathetic. It's a bit like a morality play with rather confused personifications. There is no center to their debate; no plot in the script; nobody wins or loses. In a way that's how thought works (for me, at least) and what makes it productive. I hope that I can extend some of this to the audience, too.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Nicholas O'Brien has produced another killer interview for Bad At Sports. (We posted his previous one, A Conversation with Jon Rafman a few weeks back.) This time, he speaks with artist Eric Fleischauer about his work and his current exhibition "Post-Cursor" at Chicago's threewalls. Fleischauer is keenly interested in the process of obsolescence in recording technology, and its importance for storage and archives. It seems fitting then, that the entire interview is recorded on videotape.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
The following interviews were sourced from netpioneers 1.0, a research initiative active from 2007 to 2009 that was devoted to early net-based art, organized by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. in Linz, Austria. All the interviews were conducted by Dr. Dieter Daniels.
By
David Duncan on
Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
MTAA, Automatic for the
People ( ) Voting Kiosk, 2008 (Photo: M.River)
In the fall of 2008, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art invited several artists to create a
new work for the exhibition "Art of Participation: 1950 to Now." One such invitation was extended to
MTAA, a Brooklyn-based duo comprised of Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden, alternately known as M.River
& T.Whid Art Associates. In response, MTAA constructed a poll-based project entitled Automatic for the
People ( ), which asked the audience to vote upon the parameters for a theatrical performance executed at
the conclusion of the exhibition (the title’s empty parentheses refer to an undetermined subtitle).
Technically, the voting consisted of ten different electronic ballots addressing such creative and procedural
elements as duration, space, and props, with each being accessible for one week at a museum kiosk and
remotely online. All ten ballots contained ten options, and the most popular selections were incorporated
into the live finale. During the summer of 2009, I enlisted MTAA in an email-based interview regarding the
practical consequences and conceptual implications associated with producing their participatory poll and
performance for SFMOMA.
Automatic for the
People ( ) Performance (Photo: Aimee Friberg; Courtesy of SFMOMA. )
DAVID DUNCAN: Let’s begin with the project’s finale. Can you give an overview of the performance—
the staging, players and performers, costumes, and actions?
MIKE SARFF and TIM WHIDDEN: We began with the idea that the live work should come together as a
unified whole; we felt that a series of unconnected actions would feel untrue to the vote process. We also
wanted the audience to participate in the performance. To achieve this, we established three boundaries—
installation, duration and action. For the installation we had a location outside the museum’s freight
elevator that was selected by vote. The performance’s duration (the same length as the REM album
Automatic for the People) was also selected by vote. The action involved two teams competing to create the
best robot costume—again, an element determined by vote. Lastly, we included interruptions to the robot
costume building competition. These we called interludes and digressions—they were essentially acts
between acts that helped to pace the performance. The goal was to make it all seem solid even if an
audience member did not know anything about the whole of the AFTP: ( ) voting process.
By
Geeta Dayal on
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
Cover of David Toop's Sinister Resonance
David Toop is the author of several landmark books about music, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), and Haunted Weather (2004). He is also a musician, with a discography spanning nearly four decades. His first record – a collaboration with the sound sculptor Max Eastley titled New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments -- was released in 1975 on Brian Eno's Obscure label.
In Toop's previous books Ocean of Sound and Haunted Weather, he explored sound in all its ephemeral, enigmatic, amorphous connotations. His new book Sinister Resonance, out soon on Continuum, takes those explorations a step further, drawing a dense web of connections between sound and visual art. Toop begins the book with the concept that “sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory.” To explore sound’s intangibility and mystery, Toop wanders through a bewildering array of references from fiction, myth, painting, and architecture, allowing him to approach sound in oblique and unexpected ways.
Let's talk about Sinister Resonance. What drove you to write this book?
I was thinking about the senses a lot and I was thinking about the repositioning of the senses, and the focus on seeing and looking and touching in our culture, and I thought about John Berger's book Ways of Seeing. Obviously, there’s no auditory equivalent to Ways of Seeing; there’s no Ways of Hearing. I contemplated writing a book called Ways of Hearing, which this book is and it isn’t.
Cover of John Berger's Ways of Seeing
In the process of doing that, I was re-reading his book. I began to think about what he said about his prioritization of seeing as the way we locate ourselves in the world. And what he said about the silence of Vermeer. It reawakened something in me. My background is partly in music and it was partly in visual arts. I dropped out of two art schools, in fact. I studied graphic design and painting. Then I dropped out and really went with music at that point. And I think that music and my concentration on sound has really taken over, in that 35-year period I'm talking about.
I started to look again at visual art. And that’s my attempt at it. I had a revelation; I was in the Wallace Collection and I saw this painting by Nicolas Maes, The Listening Housewife (The Eavesdropper), and it really struck me because it was a representation of a moment of listening. And that’s quite unusual. I researched this painting and I discovered that he painted a whole series of these eavesdropper images when he was a very young man. And that was a starting point for me of a whole train of thought, in which I really began to think about a history of listening, and how silent media represent the history of listening. Before the advent of audio recording in the late 19th century, all we have in terms of a memory of listening experiences, auditory experiences, is what is preserved through silent media – whether it's notation and writing or painting and sculpture. And to some extent in musical instruments. And auditory technology – basically, we glean some sense of auditory history from silent media. It really began to fascinate me. On one hand, it leads into a deeper exploration of the difference between the senses, and the overlapping between the senses and what’s actually going on with listening, and on the other hand it leads deeper into an exploration of incidents of listening.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
The art and design behind DIS Magazine is unlike any other fashion publication to date. Its contributors eschew the standard conventions of print publication to create an ever evolving series of related threads, organized around categories such as distaste, dystopia, discover, and dysmorphia. DIS is a collaborative project amongst artists, designers, stylists, writers and friends. They are Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, S. Adrian Massey III, Marco Roso, Patrik Sandberg, Nicholas Scholl, and David Toro, along with guest contributors that include artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Anna Lundh and Scott Hug. I recently conducted this Q&A via email with the members of DIS, in which they discuss the magazine's goals, its unique use of digital media technologies and the Web, and the future of the publication.
What are the goals of DIS? What is your motivation in producing (this type of) fashion magazine?
DIS provides an optimistic and critical voice that upends the notion that fashion moves in a single direction from "high" to "low". To DIS, fashion is choral, rather than oracular. The value of DIS is in the horizontal exploration of fashion and the collaborative nature of the Internet.
Avena Gallagher and Marco Roso, A Sunday with Susan, 2010 (From DIS Magazine)
The format of DIS is very unique. The magazine doesn't resemble a blog, but it doesn't seem to emulate a paper magazine either. What is your intent in producing the magazine this way? Is there something about the Web that lends itself to this style?
Our focus was to develop options of format and platform that are appropriate and flexible to the content. A blog format, for instance, requires a persistent connection to the content and flow of that content. Although the desire for that type of connection is a valid one, it's not always appropriate. Some of DIS's editorials necessitate a more granular method of apprehension. In these cases, we seek to provide a "digital analog" to the experience of flipping pages.
The title "DIS" seems in keeping with the deconstructive tone of much of the magazine's content. Do you see the work as a form of critique or parody in this sense?
DIS falls somewhere between commentary and celebration. The prefix "dis-" tends to have negative connotations, and we adopt and apply that critical tone as much to ourselves as to our subjects.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, February 1st, 2010 at
1:00 pm
Andy Warhol hosted the television show "Fifteen Minutes" on MTV from 1986-1987, making only five episodes. Four of the five episodes are available below, the videos and text are sourced from The Jailbreak and the videos were originally discovered via Zamboni Soundtracks.
EPISODE 1 (1986): Robin Leach, Jerry Hall, John Oates, Dweezel and Moon Zappa, Tama Jamowitz, Paulina Porizkova, Sally Kirkland, Tracy Johns, Katherine Hamnett including fashion show with models Maria Kay, Anna Jonsson and Eric Perron, The Parachute Club, and The Pyramid Club with Happy Face, Lady Bunny, Dean Johnson, John Kelley as Dagmar Onasis and Lypsinka.
EPISODE 2 (ca. January 1987): Grace Jones, Kenny Scharf, Marc Jacobs including fashion show with models Charlotte Dawson, Pam Piper and Cynthia De Maria, Peter Beard, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, Francesco Quinn, William Burroughs, Chris Stein, Angel Estrada including fashion show with models Lori Milligan and Rochelle Redfield, Elizabeth Peña, Gregory Abbott, Judd Nelson, Das Furlines, Isabel Toledo, Ruben Toledo, Suzie Zabrowska (fashion model for Isabel Toledo), Dovanna Pagowska (fashion model for Isabel Toledo), and Angelo Colon.
EPISODE 3 (ca. February 1987): Victor Love, Bobbi Humphrey, Wall to Wall (singing Tuff Luck), Ian McKellen, Bo Diddley, Moto-Fashion by Michael Schmidt and Anita Martire Schmidt models: Grace Nemergut, Raphael and Thomas H. Street, Martire models: Ralph Scibelli and Barb Carboy, Motorcycles: Pilar Limosner, Sally Randall, Hugh Mackie, Dimitri Turin and Willard, The Fleshtones, Saqqara Dogs with Ruby Ray and Bond Bergland, The Tunnel nightclub with Rudolf (club director), Thomas Leeser (co-owner) and Carla Steiner (bartender & singer), Regina Beukes (violinist), Miriam Bendahan including fashion show with models Jennifer Hamden and Gabriela G., Suzanne Lanza, Robert Longo with clip from the New Order Bizarre Love Triangle music video directed by Longo, The Mudd Club (footage from 1979), Brook Larsen of B. Larsen Frames, Inc. (The company that took over the Mudd Club premises).
Scene from the Josep Papp presents The Opera at the Academy production of The Magic Flute with Jeffrey W. Reynolds (Tamino), Susan Hanson (Pamina) and Eric Fraad (Director) and interviews with: Heather Watts (principal dancer), Michael Torke and Jack Soto (principal dancer)
EPISODE 4 (1987): Debbie Harry, Nick Rhodes, Bryan Adams, Ric Ocasek and Andy Warhol visit the new Factory premises at the old Con Edison building, Phoebe Cates, Diane Brill, Susan Hess, Charlie Clough (artist), Stephen Sprouse with models Ariane, Michael McGale, Salvatore Xverb, Katherine Hammond, Suzanne, Nick Camen, Parish Fashions.
Amatuer Night at the Apollo featuring: Emanon Johnson (The Baby Beat Box), Ralph Cooper Sr. (host), Howard B. Sims, Sr. (Sandman), Phyllis Yvonne Stickley (comic), Audra Cassell (dancer), Herman Johnson (lead guitarist), Betty Du Chantier (singer), Ralph Cooper II, Latasha Spencer (The Gospel Princess).
By
Nick Hallett on
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
Music with Roots in the Aether, an artwork by Robert Ashley, is comprised of seven two-hour programs featuring noted American experimental composers, created during the 1970's.
Each program is two hours long and consists of one part Landscape / Interview (one hour) and one part live performance (one hour).
