"Cantata Park" by Metamatic Collective

Second Life has been attracting a lot of attention as a platform for media artists... some of the work isn't all that interesting (especially if it mainly depends on the aging novelty of avatars virtual spaces)... but some of it is quite interesting such as Eteam's Second Life Dumpster (Marisa Olson describes it here);

Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog reported on another intriguing Second Life project:

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] -- by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) -- is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant's movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a "cut-up narrative". By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950's-70's as a method to "break the linearity" of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs' The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life's construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2

Chinese paintings

There has been a lot of attention paid to Chinese art lately. Contemporary Chinese art is certainly hot, hot, hot... Cai Guo-Qiang's show at the Guggenheim, for example. We Make Money Not Art has a recent big post about Chinese contemporary art.

But today, I'm writing about Chinese art-in-bulk that's being pumped out by assembly-line painters.

Back in December, The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows wrote about his visit to the Dafen "art factory village" outside Shenzhen, in southern China. (The above photo is Fallow's).


YouTube has an (embeddable) tv news segment on the village.

A organization called Regional claims that 60% of the world's paintings come from Dafen. Boing Boing has a posting about an interesting project that Regional is doing in Dafen. (Unfortunately Regional's website is currently down, probably due to the traffic overload that often comes with a Boing Boing link).

Regional productively collaborated with the otherwise commoditized community in Dafen by asking selected individuals, some for the first time, to imagine themselves in their professional medium. The final works show the technical, creative, and professional facets of the artists identities subsumed by the styles and relationships they maintain with specific famous artists. The hybrid result of original subject with derivative style comments on originality, global cultural production and Regional's cooperation with emerging enterprise forms that are internationalizing the village

One of Edward Winkleman's recent postings (about when an artist and gallery goes separate ways) has a comment:

Anonymous said...

I love reading the comments on this blog.
I've never jumped in before but here goes…I show with several galleries. I sell maybe a dozen paintings a year. I was a little sick of the artist /gallery paradigm. So I rethought and reconstructed how I work. I still do the museum installations and participate in group and solo shows but I also manufacture a separate body of work in China. I have 10,000 paintings (one container) arriving in July and another in early Sept. They are all bought and I can relax for a bit.

4/18/2008 09:05:00 PM

Sousveillance Culture Conference

SOUSVEILLANCE CULTURE CONFERENCE
Saturday, April 26, 2008

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

The presenters' talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

Venue: The Change You Want to See Gallery
84 Havemeyer @ Metropolitan, Brooklyn, NY 11211
L to Bedford or Lorimer, G to Metropolitan, J/M/Z to Marcy
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org

Hours: 12-5 pm, Saturday, April 26, 2008

Program:

11:45 Open Seating
12:00 Welcome & Introduction, Marisa Olson

12:05-1:15 Voyeurism vs. Exhibitionism: Online and In the Streets
Panelists: Allistar Peters and Meng Li, Ana Maria Gutierrez, Heather Rasley

1:15-2:00 Watchful Intervening: From Scientologists to Spy Shops
Panelists: Amanda Bernsohn and Kacie Kinzer, Syed Salahuddin

2-3:30 Playtime: Games, Toys, and Entertainment
Panelists: Oscar Torres, Scott Hoffer, Shlomit Lehavi and Leah Gilliam

3:30-5 Looking at Control: From Candidate Self-Surveillance to
Wireless Subversion
Panelists: Michael Clemow and Tom Jenkins, Alberto Tafoya, Emery Martin


About the venue:
The Change You Want To See is the gallery and convergence stage run by
the activist arts collective Not An Alternative.
http://www.notanalternative.net



Beast in the basement

Fighting off a bad cold, so I'm limiting myself to a quick reblogging (via Make) today.

How to apply (and not apply) to an MFA program

For those of you who aren't regular readers of my blog, let me introduce myself. In addition to being an artist, I'm an art professor at The City College of New York. We have a very affordable and good quality MFA in studio art program that I certainly encourage artists to apply to... but first, I'd suggest reading the rest of this post.

When applying to an MFA program, here are issues to consider or address:

• Is the program right for you?
  
  Most MFA programs are geared towards contemporary art. If your interest (and portfolio) is mainly in traditional styles, then make sure you're applying to a program that will support that. For more traditional styles you might consider the New York Academy of Art or an MFA in Illustration (instead of Studio Arts).
  
  If you're uncertain about this, immerse yourself in contemporary art: go to museums and galleries, read art magazines, read contemporary art blogs, read art criticism. If you're at this research stage (i.e., not certain what contemporary art is and whether you want to make it), you should hold off applying to an MFA program.
  
  
• Does your portfolio include classroom assignments?
  
  Having a BA or BFA in art doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for graduate school. Look at your portfolio... does it include classroom exercises or is it all self-initiated projects? Believe me, the people reviewing your portfolio can spot the classroom assignments. The fact that you haven't done enough of your own work to fill out 20 slides means you're not ready. Wait a year to apply and spend it developing (and showing) new work.
  
  
• Is your work mainly focused on developing technique?
  
  If you're at a point where you're mainly focused on building your technical chops, then you're probably not ready for grad school. Of course every artist is always striving to be better, but grad school is a place where the focus shifts from "how?" to "why?" Your portfolio should demonstrate that you're grappling with more than just technique.
  
  
• Does your portfolio have cohesion?
  
  Your portfolio shouldn't consist of 20 unrelated works... ideally it would show 2-4 series of works, each series exploring some particular concern.
  
  
• Did you think about the ordering of your slides?
  
  Lead with your strongest work. Your first image or two is particular critical. If you wait until the middle of your portfolio to bring out the good stuff, you may have already lost the admission committee's attention.
  
  
• Are your slides good?
  
  Make sure your slides look good. They should be well framed, well lit, and in focus. They will probably be projected, so it's a good idea to try them out on a video projector (or slide projector if they're actually slides) and see how they look at larger sizes.
  
  
• Do you provide context?
  
  The admissions committee will only have a few minutes with your work and they may need a little help understanding your work. It's a good idea to explain the issues you're exploring so that the committee isn't left wondering what's the intention. You can include it in the essay/statement or possibly include a little blurb for each entry on the slide list.
  
  
• Does your artist's statement/essay indicate that you want to make art?
  
  When writing about why you want to enter an MFA program, write about wanting to be an artist. Wanting to start an arts non-profit may be a very altruistic goal, but an MFA is not the right place to pursue it (instead, check out degrees in Arts Administration, like Goucher's MA program).
  
  You might want the MFA so that you can teach at the college level, but it's best to leave that off the essay. The admissions committee wants to admit ambitious artists, not people who see an MFA as a kind of teaching certificate.
  
  If you see an MFA as simply a hurdle towards teaching rather than an opportunity to deepen your artistic practice, then you really should rethink going to graduate school. You'll probably be frustrated by the program's expectations and challenges regarding your art... also, you should ask yourself why you want to teach if you think so little of the education.
  
  This isn't to say that the MFA program won't support students' desires to teach--just that the admissions essay isn't the place to discuss it.

Related post: Yale MFA Student Kicked Out

Paul Chan's The 7 Lights Website

Paul Chan's First Light was my favorite work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Above is documentation of that artwork which comes from a special website that the New Museum has put together to go with Paul Chan's new exhibition, The 7 Lights.

Here's what Ceci Moss wrote about the Paul Chan website on Rhizome:

The site presents elaborate documentation of the exhibition, in the form of video, text, audio, and drawings. In the spirit of Creative Commons, the source files for Chan's animations are also available for download and modification. This underlying feature inserts a unique interactive component to the website and, further, to the exhibition itself.

Living Room call for proposals

This sounds like an interesting opportunity:
[via Networked_Performance]

Living Room :: Flux Factory in collaboration with openhousenewyork :: October 4-5, 2008 :: Deadline: May 10, 2008.

Living Room is a continuation of Flux Factory's interest in the urban experience, in New York history, and in the overlap between private and public space. Being a live / work collective, we are fascinated by what it means to inhabit a space, to make it one's own. We want to invite artists to play with the notion of belonging to a home, and claiming a space as one's own. So we're going to give artists the opportunity to go into someone else's home and make it their own, aesthetically. The project will, literally, bring artists into domestic locations in New York City to create site specific works. Aside from satisfying a mild desire for voyeurism common to us all, this project will be an opportunity for the public to peek into private sites normally off limits; either eccentric private living rooms or other variations of private space.

The locations will range from volunteers' living rooms to private, historical sites, which we will help facilitate access to along with openhousenewyork (OHNY), a non-profit organization celebrating New York City's architecture, culminating in America's largest architecture and design event, the Annual OHNY Weekend. A guidebook of their locations, along with an inset for "Living Room," will be printed and distributed throughout the city. Last year, OHNY printed 370 000 guides and had 150 000 visitors throughout their 193 sites.

Installations will address the historical, personal and social particularities of the sites with which they engage. Artists will have carte-blanche and may incorporate both formal visual amendments to the space (e.g. filling it with colored balls) and conceptual ones (e.g. re-organizing a library according to subjective categories). We encourage artists to find an appropriate private place within the five boroughs. We will help artists secure access to these sites. We will also be inviting select people to open their homes (or offices) for the event. Artists may chose locations from ones included in OHNY's roster. A list of the 2007 OHNY venues can be found here.

Works will be on view during OHNY Weekend on October 4-5, 2008. Depending on the site, they may be open throughout the weekend, or during business hours. A materials and artist fee of $500 will be provided to each artist. To apply, please send the following:

1. A 250-word proposal indicating your proposed site (especially if they are a new sites not previously included by OHNY) with a clear description of what you propose to do.
2. Your contact information (email and phone number)
3. Bio or CV
4. Any supporting images you would like to include

Proposals should be sent to Chen Tamir by email at dearcheny [at] gmail.com. The deadline for is May 10th, 2008.

What it is without the hand that wields it

Riley Harmon's What it is without the hand that wields it is connected to a game of Counter-Strike (see image below for an idea of what the game is like).

Here's what Riley says about the artwork:

Violence is an inevitable, mechanical function of the human brain, hard-coded down through time by culture, genetics, and evolution. Mediated experiences of killing change our perception of violence and death. As players die in a public video game server for Counter-strike, a popular online first person shooter, the electronic solenoid valves spray a small amount of fake blood. The trails left down the wall create a physical manifestation of nebulous kills.

In simple terms it is about manifesting experiences that are purely virtual, or only ‘real’ in a psychological sense, into the physical world - physical computing.

During the show's run (April, 2008?) people who have a copy of Counter-Strike can join the game and cause the sculpture to active:

To connect and play on the server while it is being exhibited during the week, launch Counter-Strike Source and type this command in your console:
“connect 129.15.76.103:27015″

[via Make]

fog harvesting

Here's an interesting entry to this year's eVolo Skyscraper Design Competition.

Inhabitat writes:

Standing 400 meters tall, Fernández and Ortega’s seaside spire is a cloud catching marvel that stands to harvest airborne water molecules in the Huasco River valley. Its construction as a stacked weave serves to trap and wick moisture into the tower, while its spiraling structure provides a large surface area that funnels water into the basement. Here, trace minerals from the sea are filtered out via a reverse osmosis system, which is much more efficient than processing sea water into potable water via desalination plants. The end result is a water distribution system with a planned performance of 2-20 liters per square meter of vertical surface, producing from 20,000 to 200,000 liters of water per day.

Fog catching technology on a more modest scale has already been deployed in Chile. This area of Chile has no rainfall, but is still rich in vegetation. The fog catchers follow the plant world's lead and take moisture from the air.

[via Inhabitat by way of Leisure Guy]

Jingoism redux

The Boston Globe's Braniac blog has a posting that explores whether Black Sabbath's classic "Iron Man" was inspired by the Marvel superhero of that name.

What strikes me most about the upcoming Iron Man movie is that it recycles a Vietnam-era story of capitalism, individualism, and military might (in the face of an ill-fated war) and sets it in the present-day Afghanistan.

Braniac describes Iron Man's origin:

Marvel Comics introduced Tony Stark in the March 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense. Stark is a brilliant, wealthy inventor of high-tech weaponry who, while doing some field testing with US military advisers in South Vietnam, gets critically wounded by a booby-trap and is forced into the service of Wong-Chu, a "red guerrilla tyrant." Making do with low-tech materials, and with the help of a captured Vietnamese physicist, Stark inters himself in a gadget-laden suit of iron armor whose electrified chestplate keeps his shrapnel-damaged heart beating.

Barely able to operate his new legs, Stark nevertheless confronts his nemesis: "Have you never seen an iron man before?" he taunts. Wong-Chu (a stand-in for Ho Chi Minh, not to mention the Viet Minh insurgency in South Vietnam generally) stammers, "You -- you are not human! You are machine!" Pow! The "metallic hulk who once was Anthony Stark,” as the comic's scriptwriter, Larry Lieber, has Stark put it in the origin story's final panel, knocks Asian communism for a loop.

The new film looks to be a pretty little confection of propaganda. Not to say I won't watch it, but I will be a little disgusted with myself. Note the Black Sabbath guitar riffs towards the end of the trailer.

Controversial fence in Baltimore

A busy week, so let me just point you to this article from the Baltimore Sun. It's about a Maryland Institute College of Art student who (with city permission) blocked access to a park as a temporary art installation.

There has also a number of letters to the editor regarding the matter.