Marisa Writes Her Disseratation

Marisa Olson, performance-techno-artist/new-media-critic/curator, is writing her PhD dissertation as an online performance in 31 acts. From the project's website:

Veterans of web-based autobiographical performance, Olson and "Coach Mandiberg" have teamed-up to get Marisa through her dissertation by framing it as an act of endurance. Every day for the month of September, Olson will spend all day writing while webcam shots and screencaps of her desktop are automatically uploaded to the net every 60 seconds. This gesture of transparency is a continuation of Olson's research into the role of sousveillance in "The Art of Protest in Network Culture."

[via Networked_Performance]

Telemegaphone

Telemegaphone is a 23-foot loudspeaker of a Norwegian mountain. The loadspeaker receives phone calls and projects them out over the lovely and remote village of Dale.

The project (which just ended due to deer hunting season) powered the speakers using the wind--on calm days no calls received!

From the FAQ:

Some people complained that the volume was too loud for sleeping with open windows during calm, warm summer nights. After adjusting the volume slightly, others complained that the volume was now too weak.

One woman said: "This is great. I will sit on my porch with a cup of tea and listen to the world."

Another woman said: "We like things a little bit crazy here in Dale."

Expect many more opinions from Dale-ites to be published here in September.

Laurie Anderson interview

The Smithsonian has a short interview with artist/musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson.

From the interview:

What's the message in your work?
If I had a message, I would write it down and e-mail it to everybody. I would save a lot of paint that way. My work is more about trying to create images through words and pictures. I want to evoke a reaction more than explain anything clearly. I don't like things to be confused, but I like them to be multifaceted.

I recently posted about Anderson here.

[via BoingBoing]

Fake living statue

Living statues (where street performers pretend to be statues for tips) are hugely popular in Barcelona. A few weeks ago artist/prankster Mark Jenkins set up a real, non-kinetic sculpture that appears to be a "living sculpture."




[via BoingBoing]

Tristan Perich

Tristan Perich is musician, artist, & hacker. Marisa Olson posted about his work recently on Rhizome:

Unsurprisingly descended from Warhol-era conceptual artist Anton Perich, the younger Perich has become a fixture in the local avant garde scene, bringing his own brand of circuit-bent instruments to the contemporary music sphere. His band, The Loud Objects, have made a very well-received international magic-show of their singular work, which involves soldering musical chips together atop an overhead projector--clad in futuristic sunglasses, no less!

I have a copy of Perich's 1-Bit Music (2004-2005), pictured above. It is a clever bit of electronic hackery that is contained in a CD jewel case. Plug in headphones, flip a switch, and you have lo-fi electronic music that puts many 16-bit works (the bit-depth that compact discs are recorded at) to shame. I picked up the Whitney Museum store's last copy, so if you'd like a copy of 1-Bit Music your best bet is Perich's online store (which sells a variety electronic, musical goodies).

Tonight (Wednesday June 18th), Perich is premiering his untitled (Bernadette Mayer) 5 voices and 15-channel electronics at 8pm in the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

Here is Perich's Active Field, 10 violins, 10-channel 1-bit electronics (2007)

See The Village Voice for another profile of Perich.

Phyllis Chen & her toy pianos

The other night I heard a fantastic performance by Phyllis Chen at the Christopher Henry Gallery on Elizabeth Street (NYC). It's amazing to see & hear virtuoso piano playing on the tiny keyboards. Each different toy piano seems to have its own unique characteristics, but overall they are more percussive than regular pianos.

Here's a video from the performance:

MTAA's One Year Performance (aka samHsiehUpdate)

Last week I posted about Tehching "Sam" Hsieh's one year performances. The art collaborative MTAA did a web-based update of Hsieh's first performance ("The Cage Piece," 1978-1979). That performance consisted of Hsieh living in a cage he built in his Tribeca loft. He stayed in the cage for a year without reading, writing, watching tv, talking, etc. His meals were delivered and his excrement was taken out in a bucket. He had occasional (once or twice a month) scheduled days were the public could come and view the performance.

MTAA's introduction to their 1 year performance video commissioned & hosted by Turbulence.org:

We, M.River & T.Whid, ask that you view a 1 year performance video, to begin today, March 26, 2008.

We shall seal images of ourselves in images of our studio, seemingly in solitary confinement inside seemingly identical images of cell-like rooms measuring 10ft x 10ft x 10ft.

We seemingly shall not converse, listen to the radio or watch television, until — after you have viewed them for one year — we unseal our images.

We shall appear to have food every day.

Our friend the web site, www.turbulence.org, will facilitate this piece by serving our images to the World Wide Web.

Please login (upper right) to begin viewing.

MTAA's performance is a reversal... the artists are on a looped video that the viewer is asked to watch for a year. The project's introduction page has a "leader board" of top viewers:

1. sashamaslansky
   310 days, 12h 43m 0s
2. register
   294 days, 14h 26m 0s
3. sheeppower
   285 days, 22h 13m 0s
4. endtime34
   251 days, 6h 24m 0s
5. rickerby
   241 days, 0h 7m 0s

People who watch for an entire year receive a reward of the data associated with the project:

Once the piece is viewed for one year, you the viewer are eligible to receive a unique collection of “art data” contained in 2 separate XML documents. At this point you the viewer becomes you the collector.

One Year Performances

Tehching "Sam" Hsieh did six extraordinary one-year performances before retiring from art.

His second one-year piece, Time Piece (1980-81), was to punch a card in a time clock, every hour on the hour twenty-four hours a day for one year. This meant he couldn't ever sleep for more than an hour or be more than 30 minutes away from his studio. Out of the 8,760 required punches, Sam only missed 134. The time cards were signed by a witness each day.

His other documentation of the piece is a six minute 16mm stop-motion film made by taking one frame each time he punched the clock. Here is an excerpt from that film:

Hsieh's last performance was to stop making art for a year, after which he found he couldn't start up again and retired from art. A DVD documenting his performances is available--it looks very interesting and interactive, but is a bit expensive ($45). Not incomparable to the cost of art books, but the production cost of DVDs are so much lower... it would be nice to have the savings passed on.

The Brooklyn Rail has an interesting interview with Hsieh.

Next up, MTAA's "update" of one of Hsieh's performances. (I have an earlier posting about MTAA's updating of On Kawara).

Sand painting

This comes via JangSoonNation.



The sand animation artist is Ferenc Cako

Assignment art

My graduate students and I investigated assignment art yesterday.

We started with Yoko Ono's instruction pieces, but none of her instructions (from Grapefruit) were practical to implement.

We then moved on to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures and Sculptures to Embarrass (circa 1997). The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Can't Stop music video incorporates several of Wurm's sculptural assignments.

Here are our implementations of Wurm's sculptures.

Shani:


Rachel:

Trotsky:

Seung Ae:


And myself:



What I find most interesting about his work is the decision of what aspects of his sketches are key and what aren't. It reminds me of when I was learning Japanese katakana and hiragana. It was often difficult to determine what is a key trait of a character and what is an eccentricity of the particular font. For example, here are two different renderings of the hiragana for "fu."


Finally, we took a look at Harrell Fletcher (who introduced me to Erwin Wurm when I was in grad school) and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More website.

We choose their Assignment #23 Recreate this snapshot. Here is the original photograph:


And here is our recreation:

frozen in grand central

This is a performance art by Improv Everywhere.

This kind of crowd happening has been co-opted for advertisements. For example, the anti-smoking Truth campaign and the more venal cel phone commercial where 20-somethings use their cel phones to coordinate invading a supermarket and taking slingshot rides down the aisles... a bastardization that changes the performances from something intended to give the accidental spectators a surreal experience into a destructive, self-centered joy-ride.

[via boingboing]

Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker

This comes by way of Greg Cook's excellent The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research blog. The description of the work from the Saatchi Gallery.

Echoing the minimalist works of Dan Flavin, Ivan Navarro's light sculptures subvert the cool detachment of florescent bulbs with their arrangement into recognisable objects. In Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker Navarro builds a grocery cart from electric tubing. Featured in a video of a 5 hour performance, Navarro has activated the sculpture on the streets of New York's Chelsea District. In the video, two men break into a municipal power outlet, hi-jacking city energy to feed the power-sucking shopping trolley. Edited to 4 minutes, the action is set to a Mexican revolutionary song from 1905 titled Juan The Landless. As an icon of both consumerism and vagrancy, Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker sets a stage where the dichotomies between wealth and poverty convene as a literal and allegorical emblem of power, waste, transience, and opportunistic survival. Basking in an artificial glow, Navarro's Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker exudes a religious aura based in consumption, corruption, and errancy.

In case you didn't know, George Foreman Grills connected to light post outlets can serve as makeshift cookers for homeless people. NPR had a piece on this a while back:

...many immigrants, homeless people and others of limited means living in single-room occupancies (SROs) have no kitchens, no legal or official place to cook. To get a hot meal, or eat traditional foods from the countries they've left behind, they have to sneak a kind of kitchen into their places. Crock pots, hot plates, microwaves and toaster ovens hidden under the bed. And now, the latest and safest appliance, the appliance that comes in so many colors it looks like a modern piece of furniture: the George Foreman Grill. It is, quite literally, a hidden kitchen...

...Jeffry learned to cook from his grandmother. He feels an urge to cook, especially for other people -- under the overpass on Chicago's Wacker Drive; on a George Foreman Grill plugged into a power pole; with a hot clothing iron to toast a grilled cheese sandwich.

I haven't seen Navarro’s video or the sculpture in-person, but I do like the idea of the cart being lit up in the city streets and passerbys unexpectedly coming upon it.

AsSLowASPossible

In 1985 John Cage composed ASLSP, a work for the organ whose directions are to play it as slow as possible. It's first performance lasted 29 minutes... a more recent performance was 71 minutes. But is that really as slow as possible? No!

Since September 5, 2001 there is an ongoing performance of the piece in Halberstadt, Germany that is intended to last 639 years. The significance of the date, location, & duration is that September 5th was the 89th anniversary of John Cage (and the year of the start of the millenium), the organ is located in the birthplace church of the modern organ, and the performance started on the 639th anniversary of the modern organ.

The computer-controlled performance began with 1-1/2 years of silence (due to the work's first initial notes being rests).

http://www.npr.org/programs/pt/features/2003/sep/aslsp.html
http://www.john-cage.halberstadt.de/new/index.php?l=e