RHIZOME DIGEST: 3.3.02

discussion

Posted March 2 2002 19:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 3.3.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: March 3, 2002 Content: +announcement+ 1. Ron Goldin: Rivets+Denizens–SWITCH_Journal, Issue 17 2. honor: programme announcement–Surveillance and Control +work+ 3. Mendi Lewis Obadike: The Sour Thunder Press Release 4. dsi: the doorman [passing] +report+ 5. Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Transmediale 2002 +feature+ 6. Jonah Peretti: The Engineer-As-Artist + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 3.3.02 From: Ron Goldin (tobiasblue@gmx.net) Subject: Rivets+Denizens–SWITCH_Journal, Issue 17 A curation of curating. A collaboration exploring collaboration. A collision of histories and personalities. SWITCH, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://switch.sjsu.edu">http://switch.sjsu.edu</a>, is pleased to announce 'Rivets+Denizens', a project which will be featured in the forthcoming issue(#17): Collaboration. 'Rivets+Denizens' concentrates on alternative curatorial models. The participants explore the issues surrounding collaboration as they pertain to both art practice and the curation of art– including identity, ephemerality, authorship, taxonomy, interactivity, group decision-making. New models of collaboration are discussed such as open source, public curation, and cross-disciplinary involvement in curating and new media art-production. The structure and context of the show itself is a study of group identity, and the emergence of ideas and knowledge in a collaborative environment, with collaboration from two distinct angles of a system: Rivet and Denizen. Initial participants include: Natalie Bookchin [CalArts, Action-Tank] Heath Bunting [irational.org] Beryl Graham [CRUMB] Patrick Lichty [voyd.com] Lev Manovich [UCSD, author of "The Language of New Media"] Mark Napier and Liza Sabater [potatoland.org] Christiane Paul [Whitney Museum of American Art] Joel Slayton [CADRE Laboratory, C5] Benjamin Weil [SFMOMA] Alena Williams [Rhizome.org] + + + "Even in the case of instable media, where the artwork is in perpetual flux, and the relationship of the institution with the artist ongoing, at least as long as the artist is willing and/or able, the artist remains the author. The curator remains a facilitator, a dialogist, and a translator. She or he is also the guarantor of the intellectual integrity in the process of preservation and interpretation: the moment one of these works enter a public art collection, the curator and the artist become the actors of a dialogue or collaboration" - Benjamin Weil "While some of the previously described models of "public curation" still consist of pre-defined archives, they blur the boundaries between public and curator, allowing for models that potentially could establish a more direct reflection of the demands, tastes and approaches of an audience." - Christiane Paul "Electronic music theory brings to the table analysis of mixing, sampling, and synthesis; academic literary theory can also make a contribution, with its theorizations of intertext, paratext, and hyperlinking; the scholars of visual culture can contribute their understanding of montage, collage and appropriation. Having a critical vocabulary that can be applied across media will help us to finally accept these operations as legitimate cases of authorship, rather than exceptions. " - Lev Manovich "Collaboration is a problematic word. It implies there are two minds working on the same level, to create an aesthetics that they agree upon. " - Liza Sabater <a rel="nofollow" href="http://switch.sjsu.edu">http://switch.sjsu.edu</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE ART ISSUE** Peter Fend 10 page special, Andrew Gellatly on selling art online, Benedict Seymour on the closure of London's Lux Centre, Michael Corris on Conceptual art, Hari Kunzru in Las Vegas. Reviews: Don't blow IT conference, Wizards of OS, Wolfgang Shaehle's 2001 Show <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/current/index.htm">http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/current/index.htm</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 2.28.02 From: honor (honor@va.com.au) Subject: programme announcement–Surveillance and Control SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL Saturday 9 March 1400 - 1830 [ GMT ] Starr Auditorium, Level 2, Tate Modern, London, UK Tickets: UK£10 / £5. Ph: 020 7887 8888 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/surveillance.htm">http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/surveillance.htm</a> + + + ABOUT THE EVENT Surveillance and Control is a half day conference which will consider widespread uses of electronic surveillance. It aims to analyse how recent social and political developments have impacted on discourses around surveillance, and to address how various surveillance technologies have influenced new media art practice. We are confronted by the troubling and expanding presence of surveillance in our daily life. Monitoring devices are used ever more to observe physical space, while electronic space has been proven to be likewise vulnerable to scrutiny, due to the operation of global data interception systems. The increasing ubiquity of surveillance has radically transformed the relation between public and private spheres, as well as the very nature of political and technological control. Surveillance has been a rich source of interest for artists for many years, and in recent times monitoring and tracking technologies have formed a major part of the arsenal of the contemporary artist. Exhibitions such as CTRL[SPACE] at the ZKM in Germany, reveal a growing interest in artistic surveillance tactics, drawing attention to new interpretations of the 18th Century concept of the panopticon as an ideal mechanism of observation and control. Our concept of a continually observed society has moved on since Michel Foucault seized on the panopticon as a metaphor for the oppressive use of information in modern society. Though Foucault's observation that control no longer requires physical domination over the body, but can be enacted through the constant possibility of observation, still holds true, the methods used to monitor individuals in space have changed considerably. Surveillance and Control will not only refer to the uses of conventional monitoring and tracking technologies, but also the operation of 'dataveillance' - the largely invisible practice of tracking and intercepting electronic data. The events of September 11 and their continuous re-enactment as media spectacle, have created a new psychological environment in which these issues can be considered. Since this time, new surveillance and communication interception powers for law enforcement agencies and intelligence authorities have been proposed and enacted in many countries. The war on terror has lead to what Goebbles once described as, the `optimum anxiety level' which is needed to mobilise a larger audience for a certain common cause - in this case the rehabilitation of the authoritarian state and the expansion of the military and policing. In this context, it becomes more problematic to speak about privacy and threats to freedom of information. Surveillance and Control will ask if there is a possibility to counter this meticulously maintained public anxiety, and re-engage dialogue about the limits of freedom versus the limits of systems of surveillance and control. This half day conference features artists Marko Peljhan (Slovenia), Kate Rich (Australia / UK) and Julia Scher (USA), investigative journalist, Duncan Campbell (UK), media theorist, Eric Kluitenberg (Netherlands), and Konrad Becker from Public Netbase (Austria). The event will also feature an info-booth by World-Information.org. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/surveillance.htm">http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting/surveillance.htm</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ STATE OF THE ARTS SYMPOSIUM * UCLA APRIL 4-6, 2002 * RHIZOME DISCOUNT * <<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.eliterature.org/state">http://www.eliterature.org/state</a>> ELO invites Rhizome subscribers to join leading web artists, writers, critics, theorists for the seminal e-lit event of 2002. Rhizome subscribers who register before FEB 15 2002 may register at ELO member rates ($25 discount). + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 2.25.02 From: Mendi Lewis Obadike (sourthunder@blacknetart.com) Subject: The Sour Thunder Press Release Keith+Mendi Obadike's net.opera The Sour Thunder will launch from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blacknetart.com/sour.html">http://blacknetart.com/sour.html</a> Thursday Feb 28th - Saturday March 2nd with live (real video) streams nightly from Yale Univeristy at 8:30pm and 11:00pm EST. Mp3s from the opera will be availible for downloading. The Sour Thunder tells a double-sided story blending autobiography and speculative fiction. Sesom travels from a land where scent is language to a land where language is spoken. Mendi travels from Atlanta (the US) to Santiago (the DR). The Sour Thunder explores the role of geography in identity and the idea of language as a technology. It will be simultaneously performed in and webcast from the Yale Cabaret and Afro American Cultural Center. This net.opera features the website design and flash art of John Vega and the hypertext eMixes of Houston Baker, Christian Campbell, Coco Fusco, Duriel E. Harris, Nalo Hopkinson, John Keene, Ferentz Lafargue, Wahneema Lubiano, Dawn Lundy Martin, Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, and Ronaldo V. Wilson. The live performance features Iona Brown, Marcus Gardley, Peter Macon, and Laurie Woodard with set design by Torkwase Dyson, lighting design by Tan Falkowski, costume design by Camille Assaf, choreography by Tim Acito, and scent design by Iona Brown. The Sour Thunder has been generously supported by Benjamin Slotznick, David Deitch and Yale Media Services, Yale Cabaret, the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale, and the Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts. For the most recent information on this project, please go to: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blacknetart.com/sour.html">http://blacknetart.com/sour.html</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ IT IS necessary to buy "Not Necessarily 'English Music,'" Leonardo Music Journal Volume 11. Not only is it curated by David Toop, but it includes a double CD. Tune in and turn on to the LMJ website at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 2.24.02 From: dsi (dsi@digitalsistersindeed.org) Subject: the doorman [passing] a new work is now online <a rel="nofollow" href="http://nonfinito.de/doorman/">http://nonfinito.de/doorman/</a> Al you need is: sound out loud 10 minutes of relax. enjoy. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://nonfinito.de/doorman/">http://nonfinito.de/doorman/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 3.3.02 From: Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah@coin-operated.com) Subject: Report from Transmediale 2002 Transmediale.02 Feb 5-24, 2002 Haus De Kulturen de Welt Berlin, Germany <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.transmediale.de">http://www.transmediale.de</a> On Tuesday, February 5th, Berlin's Haus De Kulturen de Welt (International House of Cultures) was transformed from a bland, concrete convention center to a scene from Kubrick's 2001. Day-Glo orange beanbags filled the "Media Lounge" along with multiple computers and screening stations for projects showing at the Transmediale 2002. Neon lights lit up the stretched nylon wrapper surrounding the lounge while cloth banners filled the entrance hall hanging like rubber flaps of a space-age car wash. The opening night began with introductions from the festival's two organizers and curators Susanne Jaschko and Andreas Broeckmann. Despite there being a simultaneous English translation available, I found out too late and missed most of their comments. Nevertheless, the evening led to a trailer of the featured digital animations and video pieces along with an introduction by Randall Packer, Secretary of the United States Department of Art and Technology. Mr. Packer, who started the USDAT to give international artists a voice in an increasingly defense-focused US government, gave his first European address modeled after Harry Truman's famous address to congress. His cornerstone idea rests on the value of Global Virtualization as a unifying force for arts working with technology and their integration into the betterment of society and technological understanding among the world population. After the proceedings, I (USA) along with the other Ambassadors of their respective countries ratified the Berlin Virtualization Charter by signing our names on a Palm Pilot and beaming them to Mr. Packer's master copy. Meanwhile downstairs, the Congress Hall of the building led into the exhibition floor where a wide variety of international media artists displayed their work. I was lucky enough to be included in the show with my personal bandwidth generating project, "Crank The Web" along with artists like Ohio State University's Ken Rinaldo with his organic reactive sculpture, Autopoeisis, Montreal's Luc Courchesne with his 360 degree immersive interactive panorama project, Masaki Fujihata's 3D GPS narrative, Seiko Mikami's eye tracking viewer, RobotLab's mechanized DJ and scratching "Juke Bots," and video/webcam installations such as Wolfgang Staehle's "Empire 24/7" and Dagmar Keller and Martin Wittwer's eerie video pan, "Say Hello to Pease and Tranquility." Included in the exhibition but outside the museum-like walls and on the sidewalk outside the Haus, was Alexei Shulgin's computer installation "Busking 386 DX." It's very uplifting to hear a 386 PC begging for money and singing "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" followed by a medley of Beatles songs. Although the festival award nominees were chosen before it opened, Transmediale commissioned artist Stuart Rosenberg to create a project for the audience to participate in the final tally. His work, "Public Bet/Public Vote" allowed audience members to bet Euros and vote on the projects they thought would win the awards. As the votes were tallied, the people closest to the correct winners would split the riches. As well as exhibition projects, there were plenty of online works in the show including the Carnivore project and a curious work called Tracenoizer where you input your name and it scours the web for your information eventually building a mock-website about you. Alongside the projects were numerous panels, discussions, workshops, and performances, and a nightly gathering called "Club Transmediale" consisting of DJs and live video mixing which took place in a local abandoned factory-turned-nightclub called E-Work. Courchesne, Fujihata, Rinaldo, Peter Frucht, RobotLab, and I began the panel proceedings with "Concepts of Interaction" moderated by Susanne Jaschko. Each of us got a chance to present our exhibited works along with past projects. Other workshops included an all day long seminar on "Hacker Techniques" as well as one on creating "Flash Comics." Thursdays panel included one on SMS (Short Message Service) as a medium for artistic expression. Overall it was a really good festival with a lot of work to see and many conferences/talks to attend. This year's fest benefitted from being in the Haus De Kulturen de Welt since it's a bigger venue and allowed for more people and more attention spent on individual works. Hopefully, next year it will be even a bigger success! <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.transmediale.de">http://www.transmediale.de</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 2.22.2002 From: Jonah Peretti (jonah@eyebeam.org) Subject: The Engineer-As-Artist Keywords: exhibition, engineering, design, art world A Conversation between Jonah Peretti, Director of R&D and Post-Graduate Studies at Eyebeam, and design engineer and technoartist Natalie Jeremijenko Part I: The Engineer-As-Artist Eyebeam (www.eyebeam.org) is a not-for-profit organization established in 1996 to provide access, education, and support for artists, students, and the general public in the field of art and technology. Eyebeam is in the process of creating a research and development division, and I recently had an extended conversation with the newest member of our R&D advisory committee, design engineer and technoartist, Natalie Jeremijenko (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/">http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/</a>). She is in a unique position to reflect on the role of technical innovation in the context of the art world. Her work has been exhibited at major art institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. She has also developed technology projects at leading research labs, including Xerox PARC, Stanford's design engineering program, and the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University. She currently has an appointment at NYU's Center for Advanced Technologies and at Yale University, where she is creating a Product Design Studio and an exhibition incubation lab. + + + JP: What is the focus of the new lab you are building at Yale? NJ: I am calling my new initiative at Yale the Product Design Lab precisely because I don't want to call it "digital media" or "information technology and society" or "art and technology" or any of that because of course ALL information technology involves social design whether explicitly or implicitly, and the projects may or may not involve the institutions of art. In this understanding, art is another form of material culture with it's own norms of production, forms of ownership, etc. My program focuses on the transformative potential of new technology, and on understanding how technology works. We are in the field of engineering dealing with material culture in the very pragmatic realm of making things work. I am making a centrist claim by calling this "product design." JP: But isn't critical theory very important to your work? NJ: Yes, it is still integral to my approach. But critical social theory and ethnographic or technographic modes of analysis are really generative of new designs, new technologies. By contrast, the way that product design is taught in this country usually starts with making a "bug list." You spend very little time generating an interesting problem, and then talk about these designers as "problem solvers." You design to pre-existing needs but there is very little understanding about whether you are solving the right problem or that criticism is generative of possibilities, ideas, and products. I am interested in technology which is always and already complicit with social change. That is obviously why most of us work with technology or are interested in the field. It is the front where things are changing in predictable and unpredictable ways. I want to make the designs accountable for the type of change they promote. JP: In addition to the Product Design Lab, you also mentioned that you were creating an "exhibition incubation" lab? NJ: The thing about exhibitions is that they need to be incubated a bit. By incubating exhibitions at my lab in Yale I can get interdisciplinary people, political theorists, historians, critics, even engineers to comment, to generate the discourse before the exhibits move to real exhibition spaces in New York. The exhibition incubation lab is both storage and display. It is one thing to show students a picture of something once in a lecture, but it is another thing to live with it for three months, to have it there, to reference, to look at, to examine it. I am creating a culture of stuff at my lab, a material culture. JP: What are some of the exhibits you are currently incubating? NJ: One of them is a project called Scale, which is about curating or commissioning a series of works that can fit within a couple of square centimeters - but not scale models of art but pieces actually designed for that scale. For instance Paul Di Marinis does a lot of amplitude mapping. He has got a wonderful and excruciatingly small piece called Edison's pubic hair. It looks like a hair but it is actually the width modulated amplitude map of his voice during one of the first recordings. JP: You also mentioned an exhibition on street weapons. NJ: Right. There is an exhibition called Street Weapons which is looking at the material culture for inhabiting public space. This includes everything from skateboards, to cell phones, to designs for bicycle wheels that print slogans, or pvc piping with arm holds that can create barriers of people that police can't break. This particular show is focused on activism and the arms race between activists and the state, an arms race for the public imagination that one side is fighting with increasingly militarized strategies, and the other is countering with playful and irreverent mediagenic tactics. JP: What else is being incubated? NJ: The Network Modeling exhibit will look at interdisciplinary ways that complexity is envisioned and imagined. There are a lot of different takes on how you represent complexity. There are software networks models and social theory network models. Putting these side-by-side is one of the ways to examine what aspects different disciplines privilege. Particularly when we juxtapose representations of exactly the same networks, tracing where the important nodes, vertices, and connections match and diverge. JP: Will any of your research on toy design end up in an exhibit? NJ: Yes. For part of the Toy Design research, I have embedded little cameras and mikes in interactive toys. What happens is the camera turns on and captures a couple seconds of video every time the child interacts with the toy. This is in contrast to user studies, where you put a kid and a toy in a lab for an hour or two and look at what they are doing. I am able to put these toys in real homes to capture weeks and months of interaction. That is what I argue is the time frame of learning. So I am incubating an exhibition that would include footage that I have collected from the point of view of toys, which is really quite interesting and amusing to watch. You can see from Furby's point-of-view or Arthur's point-of-view. JP: Are there any other exhibitions under development that you want to mention? NJ: Sure. The Mechanics of Information exhibition will address the mechanical interface to information, including everything from LPs to scratch culture. There are many fascinating mechanisms that make the delusion of "immaterial" information possible, and artists have also reissued these. For example, Bernie Lubell made a computer, all the logic gates, etc., out of large wooden 2x4s! JP: So it sounds like you are spinning off exhibitions from your work as an engineer. You are working on toy design or street weapon design as engineering problems but also as a form of art production. In your professional life, are you encountering a growing number of people who straddle these two identities and don't know whether to call themselves artists or engineers? NJ: This confused identity is really very interesting. At research labs, I actually avoid the word artist because it means you are flaky and marginal. If someone calls me creative I know it is usually an insult. It means, your work doesn't matter, it is not important. JP: Chris Csikszentmihalyi at MIT had the opposite problem. When he said he was the only artist at the Media Lab, many of the other professors were offended. They think of themselves as artists. NJ: Well, actually, Interval had this same problem: engineers and designers wore a lot of black and had long hair and called themselves artists but didn't exhibit artwork. They were funded by different institutions, such as venture capitalists, and exhibited in very different contexts, mainly to patent attorneys. Calling themselves artists was primarily a way of not being accountable to the [other] engineers. JP: And meanwhile you are exhibiting and not calling yourself an artist. NJ: Well, it is a weird thing. We all tend to use whatever title is useful. JP: The worst is when the same person presents himself as an artist when he is talking to engineers and an engineer when he is talking to artists. That way the person does not have to be accountable to either group. Many of us played this game at the MIT Media Lab. But the best work, which is rare, makes real contributions to multiple communities of practice in art, science, and technology. + + + [In the next exciting installment find out about why empiricism belongs in galleries, how artists can help establish matters of fact, and why artist collectives are as real as it gets.] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.eyebeam.org">http://www.eyebeam.org</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/">http://cat.nyu.edu/natalie/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means. We accept online credit card contributions at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Or call us at +1.212.625.3191. Contributors are gratefully acknowledged on our web site at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3</a>. Rhizome Digest is supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Alex Galloway (alex@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 7, number 9. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. To unsubscribe from this list, visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/subscribe.rhiz">http://rhizome.org/subscribe.rhiz</a>. Subscribers to Rhizome Digest are subject to the terms set out in the Member Agreement available online at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/29.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/29.php3</a>.