stimulus | implicit art

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18 March 2008 by nathaniel

DATA 28: Charlie von Metzradt, Michael Szpakowski, Joan Healy and Sven Anderson

Last Thursday saw DATA – the Dublin Art and Technology Association – # 28 at our temporary venue, Dublin’s Science Gallery. It was a great and energetic night with a diverse crowd and lots of dialogue, plus a few beers afterwards just down the road. Thanks to everyone for coming! All photos by Ralph Borland unless otherwise noted.

ipod tiltphones

A recent graduate from DCU, Charlie von Metzradt is a software engineer by day and electronics tinkerer by night. He is irked by human-computer interface annoyances and any piece of technology that doesn’t read his mind. At DATA, Charlie presented a motion-sensitive iPod remote control, built into a set of headphones. The ‘Tiltphones’ measure what way your head is oriented and your iPod reacts accordingly. Charlie talked about his motivation for building it, how the system works and what you’d need to make your own. The audience tested them on various models, triggering music, video and photo iPods.

michael szpakowski

We flew in Michael Szpakowski – an artist, composer & educator â€“ from London, to talk about his practice over the last few years. His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. He is a composer & video artist for Tell Tale Hearts Theatre Company & a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog. At DATA Michael showed some recent & not so recent work and talked about how it has not always had apparent roots in technology and the web. Pictured, he is in classic Michael excitement style, alongside a snap of a lovely video work about his father.

dancing meat

Joan Healy’s work is a playful interpretation of interactive technology and the objectification of the body in performance art. Her most recent work attempts to grotesquely imitate current scientific trends in bio-mimetics, using human body hair as a instrument to uncannily create sound and creating performances that parody computer touch-screen interface technology. The technological commodification of the individual/body is examined in her performances using props made from low-tech, DIY and found materials. The performer’s body becomes a tool or automaton used by indiscriminate audience members to be touched and played with. This invasive form of interaction is a transgression of social norms of respecting personal space and it toys with the feeling of embarrassment that is inherent in any performative activity. Video documentation on: http://www.vimeo.com/724001
Pictured above is the most popular of what she presented at DATA: dancing meat (powered by servo motors and activated through music).

(images from ciaraomalley.com)

Sven Anderson has been working with installation and performance art in Dublin since 2002.Â His projects focus on integrating sound and video within specific architectural sites and public spaces.Â His work has been installed and performed in Ireland, England, Germany, and the US.

At DATA, he spoke about ‘Streets: Past, Present, and Future,’ a community artwork realized as a collaboration with artist Ciara O’Malley, Fire Station Artists’ Studios, RPA (Railway Procurement Agency), and a collection of individuals and community groups in North Inner City Dublin.Â Combining video, text, and sound within two large-scale video projections and a multi-channel sound system installed within the Luas terminus at Connolly station, this project explores the relationships that exist between specific communities and the changing urban space that surrounds them. The artwork is currently in its final stages of installation. Sven discussed its design and technical setup, his experiences working in the community, larger issues concerning the project’s themes, and obstacles encountered bringing the project to its completion.Â HeÂ also addressed the dynamics that the project creates between the communities that it represents, the institutions that support it, and the public space in which it is experienced.

Great night – thanks again to all who came and participated!

Archives

06 March 2008 by nathaniel

@ Nova Straaf Gallery on the SS Galaxy, Second Life

Ireland: Figure, Face, Home
Group show curated by Haydn Shaughnessy
Nova Straaf Gallery on the SS Galaxy, Second Life
opens Saturday 8th March 1- 3 pm SLT
til 31 March

For those not in the know: Nova Straaf Gallery is a gallery on a virtual cruise ship in SL!

Haydn Shaughnessy / traveler Auer views Nathaniel Stern’s work at the Nova Straaf Gallery

Ireland: Figure, Face, Home is a virtual exhibition of works on display at Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery based in Kinsale, Co Cork. (www.galleryica.com). This group show is running at the Nova Straaf Gallery on the SS Galaxy, one of the most highly trafficked areas of Second Life, from Saturday 8th March to the end of the month.

Clare Greene uses the software programme paintbox to capture the fine outlines of her nudes against the background of atonal colour typical of paint programmes. In the process she has created a particularly Irish pop art, focused on the country’s recent quite public rejection of repressed sexuality.

Nathaniel Stern is an interactive installation artist who has created these performance scans of the Irish landscape especially for our gallery. Here you have new technology, the desktop scanner, giving us access to new images of the most painted landscape on earth. Stern’s performative scans and prints are attracting growing attention from serious collectors in Ireland.

Home is the theme of Dearbhail Connon’s oil on canvas work. We normally don’t work artists whose metier is traditional media. Our reasoning is simply that other galleries cater well for this work. In Dearbhail’s case we wanted to exhibit her spiritual search for home. IT fits well with the diversity of work around her.

EJ Carr is an internationally renowned photographer who has been living in Ireland since 2007. His Avalon series is a provocative attempt to capture an important part of history, the Arthurian Legends. In EJ’s work you see the faces of everyday people in and around Bantry, set against the backdrop of mythical Avalon, here in Ireland.

Claire Keating plays tricks with your perceptions For her Illusion series she worked with make-up artists to paint the faces of six models in the style of well known artists. We know from visitors to our gallery that people are often confused over whether they are really paintings or photographs..

Paul La Rocque is our second Irish pop art artist. Paul trawls the Internet for iconic images from around the world and combines them with images he captures from the streets of Cork. This series of icons combines Irish emblems with iconography from China and the USA and signals the arrival of Ireland on the world economic and cultural stage.
– Show quoted text –

Archives

04 March 2008 by nathaniel

Turbulent Works

getawayexperiment.net, a work of mine with Marcus Neustetter, is part of the first net.art exhibit by Greylock Arts in Massachusetts, in collaboration with turbulence.org:

A group exhibition of net art commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence web site.

Turbulent Works features a selection of Turbulence commissions which represent the broad spectrum that is net art. In these works you will experience new interfaces for sound expression, art created within virtual worlds, art which is politically and socially motivated, video performances, photographic explorations, and websites re-interpreted through painting.

Now celebrating 12 years, Turbulence has commissioned over 150 works of net art and exhibited and promoted artistsâ€™ work through its Artists Studios, Guest Curator, and Spotlight sections. As networking technologies have developed wireless capabilities and become mobile, Turbulence has remained at the forefront of the field by commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving the new hybrid networked art forms that have emerged. Turbulence works have been included in the Whitney Museum of American Artâ€™s Biennial (â€˜00, â€™02, â€™04), and its Bit Streams and Data Dynamics exhibitions; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; C-Theory, Cornell University; Ars Electronica, Austria; International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, Montreal; European Media Arts Festival, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival, among others.

Archives

04 March 2008 by nathaniel

openframeworks: i am adopted

joel and dave playing with openframeworks and arduino

Joel and Dave playing with openframeworks and arduino

This weekend I went and took a 2-day workshop on openframeworks with Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson – the class was mostly a bunch of cool designers and artists from London – orgnanized by tinker.it at the Paddington Arts Center.

These are two great guys, trying to make Computer Vision and interactive art programming (and C++ more generally) easier to start with and use for everyday folks. openframeworks’ speed and open-source-ness make it an invaluable tool, potentially far superior to its non-free competitors. Zach and Theo are wonderful artists, astute thinkers and generous teachers and coders, and I consider the workshop to be a huge success – I will definitely be using openframeworks in the future, and I hope to be teaching it, too. I may even steal their line from the beginning of the class: “you are all officially adopted; we take teaching very seriously, and promise to help you in your work from here on out.”

Thanks everybody! Check out the openframeworks wiki if you want to read a bit more about it.

Archives

20 February 2008 by nathaniel

Contemporary Irish Art Society and a Birthday Blog (updated below)

Haydn and I gave very brief talks to the the Contemporary Irish Art Society last night, about my recent print work for Art on Paper Gallery (South Africa) and Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery (Ireland and in Second Life). It was really fun to be with an audience who knew nothing of the technologies I normally use (they were so curious and interested when I showed them one of my interactive installations, stuttering, for example), but who could completely appreciate the trajectory coming from that work, and leading into my performative printmaking process. The most buzz from them came out of the art historical referential pieces, such as nude descension and nude descension II, or Joburg Boogie Woogie and Joburg’s Ghost, as well as the locally made works. The Society itself wound up buying sirens’ dillisk (shown right, and a detail is in the header of this blog), a piece produced in West Cork in the middle of last year. They often purchase Irish works that are later donated to museums, galleries, hospitals and other official bodies, so I’m curious to see where it winds up.

Tangentially, today is my blog’s 5th birthday. It’s gone through many refigurings, so I appreciate any and all who have been “with” me for any length of time, as well as newcomers to my work and occasional rants. This means MTAA also had a recent blog birthday – Tim, here’s your yearly reminder.

update: Haydn on his talk last night

Archives

09 February 2008 by nathaniel

Joy Garnett, New Paintings. Winkleman Gallery, Feb 15-Mar 15

A fantastic artist and friend, with a real sense of community, someone who knows her way around – and helps to drive art on – the internet as well as the studio (not to mention kitchen: Joy and I were on residence in Croatia together for iCommons last year, and she made some fantastic meals), Joy Garnett has her first solo exhibition with Ed Winkleman gallery next week. Wish I could be there, Joy – good luck, the work looks great!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2008

Joy Garnett
New Paintings

February 15 â€“ March 15, 2008
Opening: Thursday, February 21, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tues â€“ Sat, 11 6 pm

Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Joy Garnett. In four large canvases Garnett continues her groundbreaking exploration of the malleability of instantly globalized images and how they have begun to replace written language as the markers of mankind’s collective memory or consciousness.

Unlike her last three New York exhibitions, which centered on specific themes of conflict or violence, this grouping is united only by the loose suggestion of images possibly taken at precisely the same moment in very different locations around the world. Garnett circles the planet to underscore perhaps the unstoppable imperative of this new lingua franca. The images Garnett paints are culled from digital mass media outlets and then archived for sometimes months at a time, permitting their context to evaporate. Returning to the image with a fuzzy at best memory of what it reportedly documented, Garnett’s process highlights the role misremembering plays in this new dubious “reality.”

The optimistic rising sun in Morning in China references the economic ascent of the Asian giant, even as its smoggy landscape hints at the potential environmental disaster such rapid expanse can bring. The explosion and chaos suggested in the bright daylight of Noon points to the inescapably volatile nature that defines the seemingly ubiquitous power grabs taking place around the globe or simply the natural consequences of so much movement all at once. The South American seascape at moonlit dusk seen in Harbor (2) belies a calm similar to the Chinese morning, even as the blood red reflections hint at something sinister. And the overwhelmingly dark and massive destruction conveyed in the rubble of the World Trade Center in Night reminds us that there remains the potential for as-yet unimaginable nightmares. The first painting Garnett has been able to paint of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (despite it being the single most photographed event in human history), Night is a tour-de-force of expressionistic recollection visited upon its ubiquitous source image. It is also the only incident that’s clearly identifiable among the exhibition’s paintings, but as the event that only served to speed up an already insanely speedy world it has already taken on legendary status and become the central catalyst of the enhanced and panicked race to globalize.

Joy Garnett received her MFA from The City College of New York and studied painting at L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her notable exhibitions include, Strange Weather at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; Image War, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006); When Artists Say We, Artists Space (2006); Visionary Anatomies, Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition (2004-2007); and Without Fear or Reproach, De Witte Zaal, Ghent, Belgium (2003).

For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com