implicit art

Last night’s DATA, featuring Karl Klomp, Wolf Lieser and Jane Tynan, and part of the Darklight Festival (organized by Caroline Campbell and hosted by yours truly) was extremely rad. Ben’s photos will be up soon, and in the interim, I highly recommend doing a little googling on these three - especially interesting to me were Wolf and his gallery, curatorial projects, online digital art museum and, most of all, his lifetime digital art achievement award. Two amazing winners thus far….  Karl is a hot video circuit bender offering workshops over the weekend, and Jane spoke about some fascinating surveillance art goings-on in London. Great group, nice crowd, good questions.

Uber bonus was to have my good friend and talented South African artist Franci Cronje with me for the whole evening (and most of the week). We got to meet and chat with all three of the above, and the bonus highlight was to spend an after-evening pint of Guinness with NYU Computer Science rock star and Techy Academy Award winner, Ken Perlin. (My supervisor and department would kill me if I did not mention here that our own Anil C. Kokaram has also won one such award…)

Ken blogged about our conversation (more like a debate), and we’ve been emailing a bit about it, too. My RSS reader and blog links list has been updated to include his dailies - recommended!

I’m hoping to chat with Ken more in the near future. Nice to meet ya, and looking forward to more at Darklight over the weekend…

Implicit Art friend Daniel Hirschmann shows in his first South African and first print-based exhibition, opening early next month at Resolution Gallery (and I’ll even get to see it while I’m in Joburg! I’m excited to visit the first/only “gallery of digital art” in South Africa, which opened only recently….). Born and raised in Joburg, studied at Wits and ITP / NYU, now a resident artist and designer in London, Daniel is an art and techno geek of monumental proportions; a glimpse of the kind of generatively produced and lovely work he’ll be premiering at RG can be seen in this flickr set. These are made through live camera captures that are then run through custom Macromedia Freehand scripts, if memory serves correctly….

Invite to the show, which also features work by Nils Eichberg and Olivier Schildt, below.

Quirky art world hijack and intervention by some Cape Town cats:

http://southafricannationalgallery.blogspot.com/

You can tell I’m uber uber busy (who isn’t? But I still used to make time for blogging…) when I am not only posting very infrequently, but also mostly / only in response to comments left here (and it’s not as if my comments section is very forthcoming). Last week it was something on my Northern Ireland holiday in response to Laine. And now, artthrob editor Michael Smith asks - after chiding me about MWEB / artthrob down time - for some news. And he called me Sterny. Which is frakkin hilarious, on so many levels.

Admittedly, most news these days is dissertation-related, and / or not yet announcement-ready. There are a handful of exciting shows potentially forthcoming for me, but the operative word is potentially, and so I don’t want to make them public just yet. I am 5 weeks from a too short visit to Joburg and Cape Town - just a holiday, which I’m thrilled over - and then, after a 2-day stop in NYC to see family and hit galleries for a day, I start my new job at UWM’s Peck School of the Arts. See more on that here. I’m actually on track to have a draft of said dissertation in before I leave Dublin, which is startling for most people, myself included (I’ve been working on it less than two years). The original proposal is here, and we’re lookin at 230 or so pages of academic text and case studies (5 chapters, intro, conclusion; this doesn’t include the bibliography or any of that extraneous stuff yet).

Confirmed shows include a group one in Pretoria with some older prints, and a new commission for Carine Zaayman’s NRF-funded project at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT, Jozi and the (M)other City. The latter show features work by myself, Ralph Borland, Nicola Grobler, Stephen Hobbs, Svea Josephy, Marcus Neustetter, Johan Thom and James Webb, creative writing by Sean O’Toole, and a catalogue with an essay by Zaayman herself. I’m very excited about the work I’m doing, as it’s a huge departure for me both conceptually and aesthetically - more of a performative and sociopolitical intervention than anything else - and is specific to a South African context and art world. The exhibition and catalogue and web site will all see documentation-as-art, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but the title may clue you in a bit: Doin’ my part to lighten the load… I will post upcoming international stuff when it’s confirmed.

In press news, there’ll be a full feature on me in the Winter issue of Printmaking Today, which is pretty exciting, and it also looks like I’ll be one of the featured artists in the sequel to Richard Noyce’s Printmaking at the Edge, by the same author and tentatively titled Printmaking Beyond the Edge, due for release in early 2010.

On a final note, I wanted to mention that I went to see Ralph Borland (fellow South African artist and Trinity grad student) and Julian Jonker’s Song of Solomon at the Project Arts Centre here in Dublin last week.

 A computer program samples many versions of the song ‘Mbube’ (the source of the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.

Although the original work was intended as a looped installation, this version was a 20-minute performance that did not disappoint. I have to say that the above statement reads like it could potentially be interesting, but might be better in concept than in practice. NOT TRUE. And the work was exceptionally potent as a performance, in the dark, sitting centered between the speakers, and as a common experience between all those present. It was a moving tribute and memorial which I’d sit through several more times, given the opportunity.

That’s all I got for now.

DATA @ Darklight Special Event!

Event: DATA 2.0 No. 31
Speakers: Karl Klomp, Wolf Lieser, Jane Tynan, Aileen Corkery
Date: Thursday June 26, 2008, 8-10pm
Venue: Filmbase, Curved Street Building, Temple Bar, Dublin 2
Admission: FREE!!!

The Dublin Arts and Technology Association is proud to present DATA 2.0 No. 31 in collaboration with the Darklight Festival. It will be, as usual, an informal gathering of interested parties, open to the public, where a group of invited speakers will present their art/technology practice and work-in progress.

The DATA @ Darklight Special Event sees presentations by three international curators and cultural commentators followed by a talk and vj performance by Dutch media artist Karl Klomp.

Karl Klomp (Netherlands) is a media-artist, vj and theater technician with a research focus on live audiovisual expressions and interfacing. He has a fascination for glitch-art, visual glitch, video interruption or hyperkinetic audio visuals, dealing with video circuit bending, frame grabbing, hardware interfacing and max programming. He is also doing commissioned video hardware tools together with Tom Verbruggen (Toktek); they play live av performance mnk_toktek across the country. As part of Darklight, Klomp will give one of his audio/video circuit bending workshops, which often in collaboration with Gijs Gieskes via AllesLos.. In 2005 Klomp collaborated with dePonk collective, international holding company of artists.

Wolf Lieser (Germany) is the director of the Gallery [DAM] in Berlin. Since 2003 the gallery has exhibited both early pioneers in digital art and contemporary practitioners. He is also the founder of the Digital Art Museum which aims to become “the worlds leading resource for the history and practice of digital fine art”. The online archive features artists working in the field from as far back as 1956.

Jane Tynan (UK) is a cultural studies lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London. She has taught and published on contemporary art and design, cultural history and art and design education. She has contributed to exhibition catalogues, Film West, Circa, The Irish Times and Time Out (London).

Aileen Corkery (UK / Ireland) is a curator, commissioner/producer and arts consultant currently based in London. She has worked extensively with artists including Matthew Barney, Richard Billingham, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, TJ Wilcox, Roni Horn, McDermott & McGough, Phil Collins and Gerard Byrne.  She has worked in both the private and public art worlds for Hauser & Wirth Zurich London and Artangel.

http://data.ie/
http://www.darklight.ie

It’s back now. That was just weird. Wasn’t working / was forwarding for about 24 hours…

Has anyone else noticed that the leading site on contemporary South African art - and it’s nearly 15 years of archives - is now forwarding to the default (and kinda sucky) arts section of the Mail & Guardian, with no trace of its former self? If anyone knows anything, let me know - I’m concerned.

Artthrob no more?

In the comments, Laine asks, “I was wondering how the trip in Belfast was?”

Thanks for that, Laine! My wife actually planned this whole trip without my knowledge, as my birthday gift (and for our anniversary), so my not worrying and enjoying it all was part of the fun. It was a completely tourist-based holiday, and it turns out we didn’t just do Belfast - we drove around much of the northern part of the island. It was just lovely.

We started by driving up the coast through Newry and Newcastle, with stops at lovely Norman castles and sea views along the way. I had oysters: yummy. After arriving in Belfast, we took a drive through the city, then hit up this fantastic puppet show as part of the children’s festival for Sid.

The next day was our “black taxi” tour of Belfast. Our guide, Bram, lived through the struggles of the late sixties and early 70s (his mother was actually shot - but survived - at the time). I think our chats and walks with him were the highlight of the trip. This really was the first time that the history of Ireland felt alive to me. And, having lived in… well, having lived, I could also appreciate all the contradictions and efforts he had and made with regards to that history, current events, discrimination and activist rights. I love that Irish activists looked to Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass for their inspiration… And, of course, there were the murals, the odd and wonderful and mythical (but mostly mythic) murals. (And check out the more recent mural below.)

We went to more of the children’s festival later in the day; it’s weird how the Irish love gay-ish acting sportsmen with 70s styles that make fools of themselves as their performing clowns, don’t you think?

After driving through and having lunch at the magnificent Giant’s Causeway (mussels!), we wound up in Derry, the walled city. The hotel sucked, but again, the walking (and chatty) tour of the wall, which provided a fascinating history and context for things like Bloody Sunday, etc., was a highlight. This tour has apparently won “best tour in Ireland” for several years now, and I can see why. It moved a bit fast, but there was a lot to get through.

Did I mention Sid had ice cream every day?

Lastly, we drove through Armagh, and did the Lilliput museum (Gulliver’s travels). Sid didn’t get that Gulliver peed on the city, and she was a bit scared by it all, but mostly liked the little people (babies!), and we got to wear crowns, which was cool….

See a whole photoset from our holiday on flickr

Nice 2-part feature on Haydn Shaugnessy and Fragments on Dream Not of Today coming out, with the first installment now live. A snippet and link:

South of Cork near the very southern tip of Ireland rests the physical storefront of the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery. The corporeal manifestation of this collection of contemporary art would be deceivingly small even were it the size of a Wal-Mart, as the gallery’s reach extends far beyond IRL. Helmed by a collector whose technological savvy is unparalleled in the modern world of art collection, Haydn Shaughnessy also maintains a critically acclaimed space in Second Life called Ten Cubed, an active blog, and the requisite Facebook page rendering a digital footprint nearly without rival in this space.

In this 21st century, art collection remains an offline game for the wealthy; a status quo Haydn Shaughnessy aims to upheave. While the gallery offers works by artists internationally known for their work in bending technology into new forms of expression, the various online manifestations of the effort aim to make that work break through the fish tank of the art collection world to reach the masses. Both online and offline, the Shaughnessy Gallery features contemporary names such as the well-known Second Life limit-pusher Scott Kildall, interactive artist Nathaniel Stern, and Oakland’s own HTML painter Chris Ashley…

Read more.

UPDATE: and now read part 2!