implicit art

The Dublin Art and Technology Association, originally founded by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Nicky Gogan, was re-launched after a year-long hiatus, as as part of this year’s Darklight Festival, last night.

Featured works / artists included:

Paul Makepeace, a technologist who donates much of his income to artists, and encourages others who make decent cash to do the same (we love that); Blackletter.ie, self-publishing for Irish contemporary artists (has not yet reached its full potential, but already a fabulous resource, and I’ve watched it get better already in the short time I’ve been using it…); John Buckey and David Walker - The Kingdom, a 3D space akin to Second Life, but prettier and more art friendly; and Benjamin Gaulon, some of the coolest public art I’ve seen in a while, especially his de pong game, highly recommended by following the relevant links above.

Per usual, folks were invited to “bring your new videos, websites, works in progress!” but I had to jet home to help with the babe befre we got to that part… DATA is a great presentation, resource and discussion group - congrats to the organizers for breathing life into it again. Looking forward to more…

Of money, meaning and artists in residence is a lovely response to our artist talk and work by Tom Chance, while Paddy’s insightful review is slightly more critical (especially of my own work). It inspired a great conversation, actually, and I’m excited about where I might go with the next Wireframe, as I think through what happened, and what didn’t (with or without Paddy’s approval :).

And more from Joy. And, oh well, go here. That’s what technorati is for - I’m off to a planning meeting for next year’s Summit!

updated links (and again):

http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/2007/06/14/the-art-happens-here/#comment-39071
http://www.parthsuthar.com/derive/2007/06/15/the-art-happens-here/
http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/06/by_prokofy_neva.html#more
Why don’t artists use open source software?
Second Summit
http://www.ugotrade.com/2007/06/18/second-life-a-global-creative-context-of-the-future/
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/004417.html
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/06/icommons_keynot.html

Forgot to blog this, an interview I did with Paddy, and also hers with Kathryn. Awesome. Actually, as you would imagine, the iCommons site is booming right now, so I highly recommend the feed.

Hey All:

Been in Wales at this conference over the last 5 days or so, and lots has happened in the world since then, so this’ll be a kind of ranty catch-up of random and, depending on who you are and what you like, potentially unimportant things. Nicole and my presentations went pretty well, thanks for thinking of us - I’ll be posting a draft of the paper on implicitbody.net in the coming weeks; most important to me, got some great feedback on where to go from here with the dissertation. And I think Nicole is feeling good about the new directions in her own research. In no particular order:

New South African Art blogs: art matters and midnight kitchen. The former is anonymous and the latter is Rat Western - both are based in Joburg and both seem to be pretty good so far. I am ambiguous about anonymity, given I’m not sure what they are protecting themselves from and, at least with Robert Sloon, it feels like a faux humbleness (everyone knows who he is in “real life” - even tho no one knew who he was before the blog - and he’s more than willing to appear at exhibitions all over the world - mostly to exhibit himself…). What are the reasons, the real reasons, for anonymity in this case? All that said, glad to have more writing on SA art online, especially in joburg - go for it, “Jane” and Rat. Opposed to the former (or at least what she implied on her first post), I think we do need more “irreverent bloggers.” (Tho I question her judgment of “Art Heat’s … frank reportage sans pretension”; I appreciate Art Heat as much as the next guy  - and featured them on my site, and in Contempo, very early on - but until recently you had to wade through so much crap just to get any content at all; it was mostly/only about the Michaelis Clique and its inner-workings….) While I’m at it, SAartsEmerging features MTkidu this month.

Also new online: the networked music review blog, a new one by turbulence; nice piece on Red Burns and my alma mater, ITP, also known as the Harvard of Interactive (in the NY Times; the latter is an older piece from Newsweek)… New MTAA Commons Art Diagram for their iCommons Residence and also a 2-part interview on AFC (1 and 2). New Artthrob up - my fave articles include: thoughtful piece by Tavish McIntosh about Afterlife at Michael Stevenson; Sue Williamson on Gimberg/Nerf/Sacks/Young; Zachary Yorke reviews the companion book to this show, which sounds great and I hope to see it soon - I wonder if mine is the only artwork (as opposed to essay) in the book, or just the only one he mentioned; Michael Smith interviews Anthea Moys and Juliana Smith; finally, Ed Young reviews the Afterlife book, and as usual makes it more about himself than the “book,” but I think this may be the must read of this issue.

I like that most of this post was dedicated to SA Art. I may have something to say about some of the papers in Wales later. Day off today. More soon.

I’ve just finished reading my friend Justine’s first trilogy, Magic or Madness - Young Adult Fiction - and it’s great. Mostly intended for teens (without condescending to them), and widely read by adults — her husband, an old friend of my wife’s, Scott, has been on the NYT bestseller list a few times - I’ve been enjoying YAF since the two of them introduced me to the genre.

spoiler warning

The basic premise is simple in that “clear and easy to understand, but I never would have thought of that and it’s so cool” kind of way. Here it is: magic (for those who have it), tho wondrous, drains your life any time you use it - most magic folk consider themselves extremely lucky if they reach the age of forty; but if you don’t use it, prolonging your life, you go mad. Oh, and you can steal magic from others, shortening their lives while making your own longer.
As you can imagine, this creates all kinds of interesting (and horrible) relationships, especially among magic friends and family, and we follow 15-year-old Reason Cansino over the course of (I think it’s about) 2 weeks, from her discovery of magic, her learning how to use it, her wielding of massive amounts of power, her unfolding of the lies and deceit in her family because of (and through) magic, and finally the destruction of magic (at least across the hundreds of living magic-wielders in her own family).

Aside from being well-written, surprising, suspenseful and fun, the final book left me in awe of just how much Justine trusts her readers - children and adults alike. Cory Doctorow (boing boing) called the ending very risky, “really disturbing and thought-provoking… a direction I hadn’t expected and that has me thinking about it still.” Magic becomes an allegory for money, power and greed, where a little is needed to live (once you enter the system - like capitalism, perhaps?), but the more you have the more you want, and of course, there is only one top dog: isolated, and without humanity.

But it’s also not so simple as it sounds - some of her characters are stripped of their magic without them wanting to be, others are left magical without knowledge or choice. And while Reason opts out of magic, one of her friends, Tom, does not; he keeps his magic, and his foreshortened life. Justine is careful in her writing of his justification (”magic is who he is”), and leaves us hanging as to how he will turn out (he is the only character in the book that is never selfish with his magic, has never attempted to steal anyone else’s, and has even given it away when others needed it — but then again, he’s still young). We as readers are not meant to judge, and we only hope he will walk the lines between need and greed, power and responsibility.

Nice, J. Recommended.

There’s the “Body in Quotes” panel at the Borders, Boundaries & Liminal States conference in Second Life. Sponsored by Ars Virtua New Media Center, and the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, and hosted at the Amphitheater on Learning (NMC Virtual Worlds). From stage left to stage right is Xerxes Druart (Stuart Bunt of SymbioticA) , Wirxli Flimflam (Jeremy Turner), Natberg Sternberg (me) and The Unknown (Carlos Castellanos - moderator). I think I’m cool cuz I know that Pling Ping, the avatar up front and on the left from the camera lense, is Jo Greene of Turbulence. We like her.

WIrxli has a fantastic summary of his talk and some images of the panel etc over at his blog. I had no idea he had so many avatars, and it was fun to have a bodyguard protecting the guy sitting next to me in SL. He also says my audio kept crashing, which sucks. I had no idea. Oh well. I’m not gonna paste my notes, like he did, cuz they are mostly disorganized, but I will say that a draft of the short paper where most of my ideas come from will be online in the next few weeks. It mostly looks at affect and body-environment coupling in and around the space of the computer, network, crying babies and spouses, all between RL self and avatar self, and how those might disperse and interfere with one another. Next time I try to use ventrilio and SL at the same time, I will go into the office rather than trying to use my home connection….

Stuart’s work blew me away - he is a bio-engineer that works on a team facilitating art and artists (the likes of Stelarc). Some of his recent work includes pigs with wings, and attaching a homegrown ear to Stelarc’s forearm; oh and, the one my veggie wife likes, they “grew” a leather jacket so as not to harm a cow!

Thanks to all on the panel, and to Carlos…

The ‘Remains’ panel discussion @ Borders, Boundaries & Liminal States, from letft to right: Rubaiyat Shatner (James Morgan, Ars Virtua), JOE Languish (Laura Jones, anthropologist and archaeologist), Chloe Mahfouz (Renée Ridgway, artist & curator), Kliger Dinkin (Brad Kligerman, artist & architect).

Yesterday marked my own first interaction with other avatars in SL, and, unfortunately for the organizers, it was kind of like how most skeptics might’ve imagined it. To quote James Morgan via Rhizome:

If you haven’t been in Second Life then you cannot understand the lengths to which something can go wrong. It was certainly odd for the world to be offline at the beginning of our conference yesterday [and they didn’t get the sound working - imagine giving a prepped 15-min presentation by typing just the important bits in real time!], but I have to say that Laura Jones, Brad Kligerman, and Renée Ridgway managed to maintain composure and have an interesting session on remains.

Yes, the second part of his statement is dead on - despite technical problems. It was admittedly more like a chat, where other things interrupt (BRB!), than like being at a physical conference, where that is the sole thing you are doing (and I think audio might have helped there), but that is the nature of SL, I imagine, and I think the generosity and interest of everyone I spoke to actually showed an enjoyment in navigating that space. There were continual slippages between SL and “RL” names and activities, my favorite part being when Brad / Kliger’s beautiful but dopey-looking avatar (which had just finished giving a pretty intense “talk” about his work) said he was “fried.”

SL means never looking bad or having morning breath, no matter what happened the night before.

Hopefully I’ll ’see’ some of you at today’s sessions - I’m on the second one, “Body in Quotes” - program here and instructions on participating here.

My title for this blog not as clever as I think it is, but I did have a great time in London over the last few days. I’ll leave out the bits about how great my family is, and just illuminate some art highlights:

Wednesday. That was the art highlight.

It began by meeting up with Michael Szpakowski of DVblog and Scenes of Provincial Life (I did a great interview with Michael on Rhizome a while back) at the Tate, where we oooh-ed and aaah-ed at their permanent collection whilst getting to know each other more in person - we can both talk up a storm, mind you. Of course, there were pauses in front of many works, including (but not limited to) some by Beuys, Giacometti, Rothko and Bacon. Yum. We were thoroughly unimpressed by the Gilbert & George exhibition; we instead threw a few compliments at each other, and talked about upcoming and exciting work. He is one of my new Favorite People Ever. That’s him below.

Michael Szpakowski

We then hit up BFI Southbank (not sure what that stands for, but it used to be the National Film Theatre) to see the McCoys’ new exhibition, Tiny, Funny Big and Sad. The commission on the outside of the gallery, a piece called The Constant World, uses

a giant plasma screen and 36 live video cameras. A miniature film set on a many-armed mobile is suspended from the ceiling. It depicts a film noir-style story set in an imaginary city based on New Babylon, the unrealised brainchild of Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys.

So you have all these mini sets in a mobile, and lots of cameras giving live feeds of them to the screen, which show the sets in a randomized sequence. This piece was admittedly more than a little disappointing - the sculptures were beautiful, but you could not see the mini sets because they were suspended too far away / high up; the video was lame because nothing was moving in it (might as well have had some beautiful stills of the film sets instead, maybe in a grid, than waste that plasma screen), and the text that they put in between each image added nothing. I almost left at this point, not realizing there was another room until Michael pointed it out, and we were both really glad he did.

The Traffic series (2004), installed in the Gallery, recreates the artists’ personal memories, each telling the story of a particular time, place or event that has become linked to the memory of viewing a specific film. One work in the series depicts the McCoys’ second date, when they went to see Godard’s film Week End at a cinema in Paris. Another recreates a more sombre evening spent in the cardiac ward, watching American Graffiti on a standard-issue hospital TV set.

Odd that their newer work felt like a step backwards, but The Traffic series was stunning, and did everything that The Constant World didn’t. We spent a good hour chatting about it, walking around it, feeling the relationship between the kinetic sculptures, the videos, and the live feeds in the kinetic sculptures that showed portions of the video. We then spent a good deal of time talking to the security guard, an actor named Matt, about how great it was that BFI’s gallery was starting off with work that engaged the space between Big Film and Fine Art, rather than just propping up their ongoing movie programs. Matt was impressed that, even before we realized these were actual films being depicted on each screen, Michael figured out the Godard; OK, so was I. He also said Kevin McCoy seemed nice when he came in, a major plus. I think, unless performing something, artist niceness should be mandatory.

jennifer and kevin mccoy at BFI: tiny funny, big and sad. Top left corner shows The Constant World sculptures (I spared a pic of the video), and the rest are stills of The Traffic series video and moving parts, taken on my crappy mobile.

After this, we stopped in to the Courtauld Institute of Art for more ohs and ahs, this mostly over Manet and Cezanne.

Then we walked around London a bit, shared more thoughts, and head on over to HTTP gallery (House of Technologically Termed Praxis), the Furtherfield project space. Like my buddies at turbulence, these guys (Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett) are doing, and have been not so quietly doing, amazing stuff for a very very long time - supporting edgy and odd networked art and performance. Their gallery is a great experimental space on the edge of London, where they’ll be starting offline residencies soon (they’ve been doing online ones for years). Joburgers may remember the VisitorsStudio performance we did between London, Derby and the Premises. They are very clevah and fun. Marc and Ruth are also on my New Favorite People list.

http gallery and projects

Other than my New Friends, who I hope to be working with and hanging with soon again, I also saw the Surreal Things exhibit at the Victoria and Albert the next day. Oh, I love the Surrealists. They make me so happy….

Pics of family will be up on Sid’s site soon. That’s all I got for now.

Do you like my loaded gun pun?

On this month’s artthrob, Rat Western responds to Michael Smith about art criticism in Johannesburg. First, I must agree with Rat that this debate is getting really boring. But I’ve never backed down from depositing 2 pennies on the web…

Admittedly, I have to eat my words from last month a bit - “Michael also responds to Rat Western in the feedback section (a fair and funny and well-informed response all considered…”

Western’s response illuminates the contexts of her arguments, left out last month. Her point (tho tangential at times) is this: Smith denies an underground in Joburg and yet skips out on the Drill Hall, the Parking Gallery, the Bag Factory (etc). It’s not necessarily his responsibility to go to every show, but Rat’s final argument is, how can you dismiss these spaces when writing about exactly what they do (or, at minimum, try to do)? Not even mention them so as to publicly dismiss them, in fact, but rather, ignore them? This, she says, is “lazy” when writing about the power of critical writing vs the underground.

Although I mightn’t use her strong language, I could further Rat’s argument. Smith went so far, in his first article, as to praise Art Heat, a blog on art in Cape Town, whilst implicitly asking for a speaking back to power-like site in Joburg. This is a direct insult to SAartsEmerging, run by the same people who do the above spaces (including her, and founded along with me, Bronwyn Lace and Simon Gush), a site with a very specific purpose:

“Providing a free South African alternative to the gallery-driven and mainstream media platforms, SAartsEmerging.org is dedicated to featuring emerging South African artists, curators and arts personalities who are not generally, or have not yet been, written about - but who should be. SAartsEmerging aims to ‘discover’ and profile a variety of early-career non-stars working conceptually, and across disciplines.”

SAarts also avowedly gives preference to Gautengers. It, along with the above spaces, was ignored.

I think Michael Smith is smart; I like his writing, his thinking, his excitement; and I like the great article he did on my AOP show in last month’s artthrob. I’m also not comfortable with some of Rat’s insults (nor am I that fond of his) in this debate, and can see why her “fighting words” might be taken on. But she also offered to get involved, asked Michael to be involved in the spaces he didn’t write about (with the “power” of artthrob and/or Art SA behind him). We have to remember that these two publications are mostly the only potential connection the rest of the world’s art elite have to some of SA’s newer artists; to say “there is no underground in joburg” is to make it true for anyone who isn’t already involved in Joburg’s, actually existent, and thriving, emerging arts scene (I prefer that term, cuz I don’t know WTF underground means). He seems to have declined her offer.

read Rat’s response