What’s On | Showing Art in the Age of New Media

CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) have collaborated with Charlie Gere at Lancaster University to present a one-day conference exploring the issues around curating time-based art. Speakers include experts in the field such as Kelli Dipple, Intermedia Curator from Tate Modern; Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, MOMA, New York; and Franz Thalmair, co-founder of CONT3XT collaborative curatorial group, Vienna.

From the AND Festival website: Showing time-based art is very different to exhibiting art objects, so how can art which uses the Internet, interactivity, social systems, or real-time computing different from video, live art, or performance?

This one-day conference aims to share the knowledge of those involved in exhibition practices beyond the object of art, and asks, should we abandon ‘normal’ curating practices, or adapt these modes to integrate ‘the new’? This event draws experts and researchers from the fields of art practice, curating, history and criticism to confront the slippery question of time — including the timelines of production, of showing, and of participation.

The conference takes place on 24 September during the debut edition of the North West’s Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival at Liverpool John Moores University. Other highlights from the Festival include performance events with Rules & Regs, the family-friendly Portable Pixel Playground and masterclasses with filmmakers Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century), Jamie King (Steal this Film) and Duane Hopkins (Better Things).

Tickets for the one-day symposium are £18.50/£15.50 from the FACT shop. For more information about the AND Festival programme check out the Festival’s website.

What’s On| Elles @ Centre Pompidou

Guerrilla Girls poster, 1989

The Pompidou Centre in Paris has launched elles@centrepompidou, a new exhibition that features the work of over 200 international female artists from its permanent collection, in a move to bring female artists who have been historically excluded back into the spotlight. Over the last four years the curators have been trying to readdress the imbalance by actively collecting art made by women.

The show includes seminal works by many renowned female artists: Cindy Sherman, Roni Horn, Gina Pane, Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois, to name but a few. Also, the show features the work of French canal art/performance artists Orlan, who can be seen here being interviewed about her practice on The Guardian site and the Guerrilla Girls, an activist art collective, who for the last 24 years have been highlighting the sexism and racism within the art world and the film industry. And from the UK, the Pompidou is showing works by sculptor Rachel Whiteread and filmmaker Tacita Dean.

Here’s more from Syma Tariq about the show, in an article highlighting how under-represented women are still within major art collections.

The exhibition runs until 24 May 2010.

Calls & Commissions | The Pixel Pitch

The Pixel Pitch is Power to the Pixel’s ground-breaking new pitching forum for up to ten of the best UK and international cross-media film projects. They are looking for stories that can span film, TV, online, mobile and gaming to be presented to a select group of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media companies in front of an audience of PTTP participants.

The selected project teams will compete for the BABELGUM PIXEL PITCH PRIZE of £6,000.

Teams will benefit from significant international publicity and be introduced to new international business and partnership opportunities as well as one-to-one consultancies.

Last year’s Launch saw four cross-media projects presented to international companies including Babelgum, Sony Computer Entertainment, BBC, YouTube, MySpace, Amazon, Channel 4, UK Film Council, Arts Council of England, Tribeca Film Institute.

Download the Pixel Pitch application form here.

They’re looking from applications from producer-led teams whose projects are taking advantage of the growth of new tools, platforms, services and devices to develop innovative ways of telling stories and extend the opportunities to reach and interact with core and wider audiences. Projects can be in development or a work-in-progress. Part of the distribution strategy for the project should take place in a cinema or include a live event. Teams must have a strong track record within the film and other relevant creative industries. NB: Applications from teams that include students will not be eligible.

You can follow developments via twitter tag #pttp09. For more information visit Power to the Pixel.

What’s On | Converging Pathways to New Knowledge with LabforCulture

Converging Pathways to New Knowledge is a LabforCulture initiative considering the future of knowledge building and knowledge sharing within a new digital paradigm.

The project comprises of three interconnected stages:

1. a series of three online debates, involving invited experts and the LabforCulture community discussing and commenting on knowledge production, sharing and regulation.
2. a one-day roundtable in Göteborg on July 28 will bring together foundations, governments and cultural organisations and will coincide with the conference of the Swedish presidency, Promoting a Creative Generation.
3. a reflection document, produced in collaboration with Kennisland which will contain the outcomes of the online debates, the roundtable reflection and recommendations to policy makers and it will be launched at the Cultural Forum in Brussels at the end of September.

We are all invited to participate in the three online debates starting on the 7th July 16:00-17:30, 8th July 16:00-17:30 and 13th July 11:00-12:30 CET.

Some of  the questions that will be asked are; where do cultural operators fit in to the new “digital picture”, what does it mean for artists and what are the burning issues that should be addressed by policy makers to support this cultural shift?

www.labforculture.org/newknowledge

Get more information, case studies and send your questions for the online debates via the link or using @labforculture on Twitter. To get notifications and updates via email on the upcoming events, follow this link: cpnk-register@office.labforculture.org

Web check | The Future Of Money: Stowe Boyd talks to Christian Nold about The Bijlmer Euro

Stowe Boyd has launched a new interview series examining the future of money. He’s planning to talk with all sorts of people including artists (like Christian Nold), futurists (like Jamais Cascio), writers (like Bruce Sterling and Steven Berlin Johnson), economists, philanthropists, and all sorts of other people interested in where this is headed.

Here’s the second interview in this series with Christian Nold. Christian talks with Stowe about a recent project called The Bijlmer Euro, based in the Bijlmer District in South East Amsterdam. Commissioned by Imagine IC, The Bijlmer Euro examines how cash transfer and trust networks function in the Bijlmer area. The aim of the project is to develop a prototype system for an alternative local currency that could support local development and work in conjunction with the Euro.

I couldn't embed for some reason - click here to view Stowe's interview with Christian on blip.tv

In terms of how it works, Christian reprograms RFID tags stripped from local transport tickets and sticks them on to legitimate Euro currency in circulation within the Bijlmer District. As well as being able to track where and how money is spent across the Bijlmar, local shop keepers can also use the the Bijlmar Euro to offer discounts (and possible other added value local services) to people spending with ‘this currency.’  The idea is to encourage the local community to support their economy and spend locally.

From a research perspective and being a ‘fan of the local,’ Christian is also using this project to examine the cultural, social and economic viability of an alternative currency for the Bijlmer area. I’ve listed some of the more specific research questions below, but if you’re interested you can find out more about Christians broader aims, methods and ambitions for the project here:

• How would a local currency affect the relationship between the local residents and the different types of local economies?
• What relationships could be formed between the residents, local manufacturing, local shops, international chains and the black market?
• How reproducable is this model for other targeted communities in other contexts?

After listening to the interview in full, as well as getting a closer feel for the project itself it sounds like there’s some interesting stuff starting to happen around the sustainability of the Bijlmer Euro as a longer term project. This includes growing support from national arts and culture institutions in Holland (including the museum of money) and a follow up project in Surinam, a country in South America closely connected to the Buljmer District community and the districts migrant history.

I can recommend listening to this interview as you potter round the house on a Sunday – I found it enlightening but needed time for stuff to sink in. For those of you that are short of time, the lovely Stowe Boyd has also posted a quick summary of the interview here.

-claire_w-

Test from phone

Hi all…this is a test post to see if I can update interventtech from my new swish phone . . .

What’s On | Bernie Lubell at FACT, Liverpool

A Theory of Entanglement, Bernie Lubell

Currently at FACT you’ll find a solo exhibition of works by San Francisco based artist Bernie Lubell, who since the early 1980s has been creating interactive wood machines.

The exhibition features a giant new commission A Theory of Entanglement for FACT’s atrium, alongside installations of previous works: Conservation of Intimacy, …and the Synapse Sweetly Singing and Etiology of Innocence.

As Curator, Karen Newman says: “Constructed from soft, sustainable woods the works on show are adamantly low-tech. Bernie uses simple natural materials to highlight the genius of old technologies that lend fresh consideration to contemporary issues. In particular the artist takes inspiration from the work of French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey who was obsessed with understanding movement. From horses and birds to human limbs and the heartbeat, Marey’s work was pioneering in cinematography, medical imaging, cardiology and aviation. After suffering cardio problems in 1995 Bernie adapted Marey’s pneumatic sensor technologies to explore the conflicted relationship we have with the machines we have become so dependent on.”

The exhibition runs from 19 June – 6 September. Check out an interview with Bernie Lubell at FACT here on Fact TV, before you head down to road test his inventive machines.

What’s On | Alice Anderson amongst others

The Dolls' Day, Alice Anderson

The sublime fairytales of Alice Anderson are currently on tank.tv, in a solo exhibition featuring a selection of 6 films made in the last six years. Anderson creates eerie, fantastical tales of murderous children and secretive eccentrics. Where the combination of unsettling soundtracks, stylised acting and minimalistic settings create dark, theatrical and magical stories. Anderson’s films are often concerned with representations of families where the relationships are less than happy. Her film Bluebeard is particularly interesting for the subversion of gender roles that is presented and the use of layering and shadow play. Anderson’s films are online till 7 June.

There are also a few new gallery openings in London worth mentioning (and, even better, they’re all free to see):

The Last Days of Jack Sheppard, Anja Kirschner and David Panos

There’s a new film and installation by Anja Kirschner and David Panos at the Chisenhale Gallery till 21 June. The Last Days of Jack Sheppard is a 55-minute film with a fragmented narrative, that plays with notions of historical reconstruction, imagining the liaisons between criminal Jack Sheppard and writer Daniel Defoe at a time of the first British financial crisis,the South Sea Bubble of 1720. The film was shot in the Chisenhale Gallery space and is shown on a screen amongst the sculptural white sets featured in the film.

Anja Kirschner also recently completed a short film for LUX’s Associate Artists Programme, which you can watch on The Politics in the Room website.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard present a new 3D video installation at the BFI Southbank Gallery until 11 July. Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work is inspired by one of the first 3D films: The Man from M.A.R.S., aka Radio-Mania that was produced to showcase the Teleview stereoscopic projection system in the 1920s. The installation focuses on a rehearsal for the reworked film capturing the actors, musicians and the artists themselves, using the latest 3D technology to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. Forsyth and Pollard create multi-media events that often recreate momentous cultural events, such as File Under Sacred Music, which saw the duo re-enact The Cramps seminal 1978 performance at the Napa Mental Institute.

Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, Luke Fowler

Jarman Award 2008 winner Luke Fowler is at the Serpentine Gallery until 14 June. The exhibition includes new work made for Channel 4’s Three Minute Wonders scheme, alongside previous works that profile unique historical characters, including composer Cornelius Cardew and David Bell, patient of radical psychiatrist RD Laing. The films are shown alongside photographs, paintings, interviews and other archival materials adding to the documentary feel of the work. I particularly liked the work Composition for Flutter Screen, made with Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, that explores the use of light, sound and projection in a more abstract way than other works. 

Floating Coffins, Zineb Sedira

Zineb Sedira has a solo exhibition at Rivington Place until 25 July. Currents of Time centres on Sedira’s fantastic multi-screen installation Floating Coffins, which looks at the decomposing, abandoned ships along the Mauritan coastline to explore ideas around migration and the human impact on the environment. There are also a selection of light boxes and photographs taken during the filming of Floating Coffins that complement the instllation. Zineb Sedira’s photography and film works often explore ideas of identity and displacement – in Mother Tongue, Sedira shows three generations of women talking to one another in their own language; where the breakdown in communication flags up the divide between generations growing up with different cultural backgrounds.

Review | Cultural blogging in Europe by LabforCulture

LabforCulture recently set out to investigate the state of cultural blogging in Europe. The aim was to find out more about who cultural bloggers in Europe actually are, what they’re talking about, which audiences and communities are being engaged and how sustainable they are. I was one of the interviewees…

Cultural blogging is not (yet) a well-known category within the blogosphere. LabforCulture wanted to find out more about the role of blogging in the cultural sector generally and what it means for LabforCulture specifically. They asked Annette Wolfsberger from Virtueel Platform, the Dutch sector institute for e-culture, to interview cultural bloggers across Europe. The results of research will be published in a short paper.

The focus of the interviews was to look at individual European blogs that take contemporary and popular culture as their main starting point. This ‘viral exploration’ includes a series of in-depth interviews with bloggers from the United Kingdom, Poland, Italy and the Netherlands, among others, with an attempt to map cultural blogs more widely across Europe.

Interview: Marco Mancuso, Digicult

“I consider blogging or web journalism and critique the present and the future (…) one of the most important voices in the cultural sector.”

Italian-based critic, art curator and journalist Marco Mancuso specialises in digital art and culture. Marco is the founder and director of Digicult, a multiple communication channel focusing on digital art and culture – including a news channel; a monthly online magazine; an audiovisual podcast; and an art agency. Over 40 journalists, artists, curators and critics contribute on a voluntary basis to Digicult, keeping the costs of running the project extremely low. Marco reveals that this is crucial to the operation of Digicult, which does not have any external funding. Marco also shares the secrets of his successful marketing strategy to attract more visitors – from mailing lists to Google searches to social networking.

Read LabforCulture interview with Marco Mancuso

Interview: Alek Tarkowski, Kultura 2.0

“…if there is discussion, it is almost always in the comments, and not between blogs.”

Polish-based new media expert Alek Tarkowski blogs about cultural practices related to new media. Alek has been writing Kultura 2.0 since 2006, when he co-organised a conference of the same name that explored culture in the Web 2.0 era. Read Alek’s interview to find out how he uses his blog to introduce new issues into the cultural debate in Poland.

Read LabforCulture interview with Alek Tarkowski

Interview: Michelle Kasprzak, Curating.info

“Blogging is an excellent way of establishing several streams of discourse. It’s not just about the art critic in the newspaper anymore.”

Michelle Kasprzak is a Scottish-based curator and artist. Since 2006, Michelle has been publishing her views on contemporary art curating on her blog, Curating.info. In this in-depth interview, Michelle reveals how her blog was first born, how she multi-tasks to combine blogging with her day job at the Scottish Arts Council, and how she has taken the first steps towards promoting her blog using Facebook and Google Adwords.

Read LabforCulture interview with Michelle Kasprzak

Interview: claire_w, InterventTech.net

“I think blogging is important if you’ve got something to say that isn’t being said.”

I set up InterventTech.net in 2007 as a platform for the UK’s art and technology movement. In this interview, I talk about why I created InterventTech, where I see it going and the problem with mail-lists. I also talk about how I go about establishing an active and loyal user community, how I choose subjects to blog about and the various options to get funding.

Read LabforCulture interview with me (claire_w)

More about LabforCulture

LabforCulture works with and for artists, arts and culture organisations and networks, cultural professionals and audiences in the 50 countries of Europe, as well as providing a platform for cultural cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world.

The mission is to ensure that all those working on cultural collaboration have access to up-to-the-minute information and to encourage the cultural sector to become more experimental with online technologies.

-claire_w-

Review | Jonah Brucker-Cohen does social subversion at Futuresonic09

Taking a break from the glamour of Space 1 at Futuresonic 09, I stumbled across the ultra-talented and sparky Jonah Brucker-Cohen of coin-operated in Space 2.

Jonah used his session to talk about some of his social subversion projects. These projects interrogate and play with different kinds of online social architectures and data networks. They also intervene in these networks in some way to reveal how underlying structure affects the character of the community such networks facilitate and often challenge this in some way. Here’s some highlights:

Alerting infrastructure

Alerting Infrastructure! is a physical hit counter that translates hits to the website of an organisation into interior damage of the organisations physical building. The point of Alerting Infrastructure! is to amplify the concern that physical spaces are slowly losing ground to their virtual counterparts. The amount of structural damage to the building directly correlates to the amount of exposure and attention their website gets, exposing the physical structure’s temporal existence.

Each new website hit is translated into a physical output in the form of activating a large, pneumatic jackhammer. With each virtual hit, the jackhammer slowly destroys the walls of the physical building. Since web sites and virtual interfaces can garner an almost unlimited amount of “virtual hits” without showing any visible signs of decay or extended use, Alerting Infrastructure! attempts to illustrate a fundamental reversal in role of physical spaces losing importance and relevance to their virtual counterparts.

Bump-list by Jonah Brucker-Cohen & Mike Bennett

Described as the mail-list for the ‘determined, Bump-list plays around with the mailing-list format. A net art work, Bump-list reveals how putting constraints on the structure of a communication system (in this case an email subscription list) shape how that community works. The constraint of Bump-list is the number of people that can be ’subscribed’ at any one time, which is six. When new mails are posted  the oldest post is ‘bumped off. Members that want their post to stay on the list (for whatever reason) must re-subscribe and show their commitment. Having tried it recently, Bump-list really is weirdly addictive. Subscribe to Bump-list and try it out for yourself.

Thwonk

Launched at Futuresonic 09 (though I’m not sure it’s totally complete yet), Thwonk takes the idea of Bump-list one step further. Thwonk invites people to set up their own online communication lists with their own rules. Taking inspiration from the different kinds of mail-list tools created by developers in the early days of the web, Thwonk inspires a new generation of digirati to design their own. You can choose from:

• Bump lists
• Convergent lists
• Divergent lists
• Location lists

Join Thwonk to find out more and create your own mail list

PoliceState

PoliceState is an interface of 20 radio controlled toy police vehicles that are simultaneously controlled by occurrences of ‘blacklist’ keywords used by the FBI to communicate indications of terrorist attacks on American territory.The police codes used in this work correspond with actual radio codes used by the Californian State Police, referring to potential terrorist threats by numbers (for instance, ‘10-79’ for a bomb attack, and ‘1000’ for a crashed plane).

PoliceState is a Carnivore client. Carnivore was the third incarnation of surveillance software created by the FBI to snoop on data such as email, urls, Instant Messages sent through Commercial ISPs. Police State connects to the open-source version of Carnivore (which exists as a server and packet sniffer) developed by the NYC-based Radical Software Group and attempts to reverse the surveillance role of law enforcement into a subservient one for the data being gathered.

The data being “snooped” by the authorities is the same data used to control the police vehicles. So the police become puppets of their own surveillance. This signifies a reversal of the control of information appropriated by police by using the same information they gather to apprehend criminals but instead, uses it to control the police themselves.

In the gallery, the PoliceState police cars are setup on a raised platform with a projection of the screen interface so that visitors can see the data being parsed in real-time through the network. With each police code received, the toy cars start to drive around in a new pattern, while a siren wails and the current threat is announced by loudspeakers. Find out more about Police State.

Wi-Fi Hog

Wi-Fi Hog is personal system for a laptop or portable computer that enables people to gain complete control over a public access wireless network. The project presents an alternative to the utopian vision of wireless networks being open, shared, and utilitarian for everyone.

A cautionary project designed to highlight the power of telecom companies in determining who does and doesn’t ‘get access,’ Wi-Fi Hog was produced as a reaction to the battle over free wireless spectrum where corporate pay-per-use and free community networks are fighting for signal dominance in public spaces. Wifi-Hog exists as a tactical media tool for controlling and subverting this claim of ownership and regulation over free spectrum, by allowing a means of control to come from a third-party, an individual using the network.

Find out more about Jonah Bucker Cohen at coin-operated. There’s also a great interview with Jonah on we-make-money-not-art.

-claire_w -