The Virtual State of Jefferson

The Virtual State of Jefferson (above) by Ethan Miller and myself is being included in an upcoming show at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art.

The State of Jefferson is a proposed 51st state that would be carved out of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Many residents of this region feel alienated from the rest of their state and see the movement either as a tongue-in-cheek protest or a serious libertarian movement towards self-determination.

The Virtual State of Jefferson is a wireless router. Laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries can connect to the internet through the router and browse the web. Whenever a webpage displays the address of a town that is in the proposed borders of the State of Jefferson, the router changes the state name to be "Jefferson." In this manner, the "City of Ashland, Oregon" website automatically becomes the "City of Ashland, Jefferson."

The Virtual State of Jefferson explores how the internet has become one of our primary windows for viewing the world and how the realities it presents can be authoritative, fictive, self-deluding, and enlightening.

Addendum:

Here is an example of how the router changes the web pages it servers. Immediately below is the results typically given when searching for "ashland, oregon" on Google.

click to enlarge

However, when using The Virtual State of Jefferson router to connect to the internet, these are the results that are returned:

click to enlarge

Matchbox's child warriors

Matchbox has an advertising campaign which pictures children as military personnel. A commenter on Boing Boing suggested contrasting these fantasy images with photos of real child soliders.



"Credit" for the Matchbox compaign goes to Ogilvy & Mather:

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore
Executive Creative Director: Todd McCracken
Art Director: Anthony Tham
Photographers: Shooting Gallery, Wishing Well
Producer: Iskandar Abdul Kader
Published: May 2009

The Art of Removal

Tourist Remover is an online app that can remove moving objects from your vacation snapshots. It does so by comparing several photos from the same angle and removing whatever isn't common to all photos (see above).

Removing unwanted folks from photos has a long tradition:



The tourist photo that jumped to my mind is Francis Alÿs's Turista (1996). So this morning I photoshopped No Turista (2009):


Here's a thumbnail animation of the alteration:


Andy Baio recently posted Meme Scenery on his blog in which he removes the people from 23 famous Internet photos/videos:


Baio points to Jon Haddock's Internet Sex Photos as inspiration:


An earlier work in the same vein is Naomi Uman's Removed (1999) in which she removed a writhing, naked woman from a soft-core porn film. Uman also create Touch My Body (De-Mariahed) in response to Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008).

Neils Bonde's Bad Days series involves painting out scenes of tragedy and pain from newspaper clippings. I admire the non-digital-ness of his process:


And of course mention must be made of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953):


Addendum, 7/23/09: To this round up I'd also add Desiree Palmen's camouflage work

China Channel Firefox Add-on

The China Channel Firefox add-on was developed by Aram Bartholl, Evan Roth and Tobias Leingruber. It allows users to browse the web as if in China--i.e., experience mainland China's internet censorship. The add-on's authors say:

Unlike many tools which enable Chinese people to freely surf the web via connections to computers outside of China, this plugin routes all internet traffic to computers on the inside of the Chinese firewall, allowing web surfers to experience an Internet identical to that of Chinese.

...

For the most part the Chinese web will feel a lot like home. You will, however, begin to notices differences if you start asking Google about sensitive issues (for example Tananmen Square protests, or Pro Tibetan issues).

Trevor Paglen's Spy Satallites

KEYHOLE/IMPROVED CRYSTAL Optical Reconnaissance Satellite (USA 129) near Scorpio, 2007

Lacrosse/Onyx IV Near Alfirk (USA 152), 2008

Wired Magazine has an article about photographer Trevor Paglen's show at the Berkeley Art Museum:

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

...

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.

[via Art Threat]

Grande Reportagem's "Meet the World"

Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine known for its photo-journalism and investigative reporting. Since January 2005 it has been running a series (developed for them by the ad agency FCB Publicidad) called "Meet the World" where national flags are used to graph a social/political issue specific to the particular country.

China

Somalia

Icaro Doria, a member of the concept team, said:

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

(quote via BrazilianArtists.net)

Brazil

I do wonder a bit if all the above details are correct... a cursory google search on "grande reportagem" didn't turn up the magazine's website, just blog postings about the flag project. Likewise, I saw references to FCB Publicidad, but didn't find their site (again, I didn't look too thoroughly). I did a check on snopes (the urban legend debunking site), but nothing came up.






Related: Yukinori Yanagi's flags

Jenny Holzer Twittering

If there was ever a technology that was ready-made for an artist, it is Twitter for Jenny Holzer.

View Holzer's twitter entries

Add-Art

From the Add-Art website:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

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



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]

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.

New Yorker Abu Ghraib article

I'm delaying the second half of my last post until tomorrow because Exposure, a New Yorker article about Abu Ghraib, has been on my mind. The article was written by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch. Errol Morris came to prominence in the late 1980s when his documentary The Thin Blue Line (which stood out at the time for using docu-drama style recreations of events) resulted in a Texas death row prisoner being freed.

The article is interesting in several aspects. It humanizes the guards who perpetrated the abuses and took the photographs, while pointing out they were made scapegoats for practices that were widely known: "The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing."

The article concluded with a exploration of why the photograph above became the iconic image of Abu Ghraib:

Under the circumstances, Harman was baffled that the figure of Gilligan—hooded, caped, and wired on his box—had eventually become the icon of Abu Ghraib and possibly the most recognized emblem of the war on terror after the World Trade towers. The image had proliferated around the globe in uncountable reproductions and representations—in the press, but also on murals and placards, T-shirts and billboards, on mosque walls and in art galleries. Harman had even acquired a Gilligan tattoo on one arm, but she considered that a private souvenir. It was the public’s fascination with the photograph of Gilligan—of all the images from Abu Ghraib—that she couldn’t fathom. “There’s so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really,” she said. “I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn’t.”

Harman was right: there were worse pictures than Gilligan. But, leaving aside that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don’t get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death—or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.

In addition to its unresolved weirdness, evocation of KKK and executioner hoods, Christ-like pose, I think the power comes from the fact that "Gilligan" is made anonymous, yet distinct--we can picture ourselves or our loved ones under that hood.

Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever... it's a surprisingly addictive "serious game" (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I've done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.

Yukinori Yanagi's flags

I'm heading out to vote in Super-duper Tuesday's primary and am feeling a bit political... so today's posting are about Yukinori Yanagi's ant farm flags. Above is The World Flag Ant Farm (1990) which consists of 170 ant farms, each of which has its sand in the configuration of a nation's flag. Over the course of the exhibition, the ants shift the sand around and build a nest.

This Japanese flag is from Asia-Pacific Ant Farm (1990) in which provides the ants a tube pathway between the flags of Asian-Pacific countries.


This last image is Studies in American Art: Three Flags (2000). I imagine most of my readers recognize the homage to Jasper Johns's Three Flags.

WWF's semi-guerilla art

That's the World Wildlife Federation, not the World Wrestling Federation!

My initial reaction to this to think it's a nice little bit of semi-guerrilla art... but then it occurred to me that it's a bit off. The rain forest isn't being chopped down for paper, it's being chopped down for grazing & crop land. Does misleading people about the problem really help?

More interesting (and perhaps more on-target) is their "ocean-levels rising" billboard:

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.