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17 April 2006 by nathaniel

in transit

As seems to be becoming routine as of late, I am yet again stealing Colleen Alborough’s bandwidth – this time her MWEB wireless at the Joburg airport, on my way down to Cape Town. Ralph Borland and I will be giving an extended workshop on Interactive Art at Stellenbosh University, him focusing on physical computing while I concentrate my efforts on various uses of interactive video. We’ll be mostly using Max/MSP+Jitter for my side, the BS2 for his.

I’ll see how my access down there is, but in the meanwhile and for your viewing pleasure, Bronwyn Lace has tossed me some images from her two recent solo shows at Outlet and KZNSA (below, installation entitled 1.618)…

Bronwyn Lace, 1.618 @ KZNSA

See more images here.

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13 April 2006 by nathaniel

SAartsEmerging is Artthrob website of the month

Carine Zaayman says, on A R T T H R O B _ W E B S I T E S:

 ‘Providing a free South African alternative to the gallery-driven, Cape Town-based, and mainstream media, 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.’ (http://saartsemerging.org/about-saartsemerging/). Even though ArtThrob might be one of the media entities against which they position themselves, I believe that they are doing good work and provide an important alternative platform that many young artists could and should be making use of.

Go us. Thanks, Zaayman!

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12 April 2006 by nathaniel

Compressionist printmaking: a 500 year old digital performance and analog archive

Here’s one of the printmaking experiments I’ve been working on over at the David Krut Workshop (fun space; and cool to brag to my overseas friends that it’s who William Kentridge has always worked with for most of his prints). It’s a detail from this image (the Emmarentia Lilies triptych, originally printed on metallic paper), which I’ve then engraved by hand, and Jill (the awesome printer I am working with) went ahead and, after inking it up, added two layers of thin glued paper before pressing it. That process is called Chine-collé, and is what resulted in the varying colors behind the black ink. For more images, see Compressionism on my flickr. There’s also a lithograph / spit bite combo test I’ve been working on ("nude descension") posted to my kagablog page.

Compressionism is a digital performance and analog archive. In the current studies, I compress bodies, spaces and objects by traversing their surfaces with an image scanner, along varying 3-dimensional paths – literally, I glide, run, hover and swoop across windows, trees, or lilies while the scanner head is in motion. The resulting digital images, which are transfigured down to the size of a small piece of paper, are then re-stretched to their original size, sometimes cropped or colorized. The final prints ask us to ‘look again’ at the relations between subjects, objects, actions and perceptions. At present, I’m taking selections from a series of about 25 Compressionist lambda prints, and iteratively producing traditional (old’s cool!) prints in the form of lithographs, engravings, etchings, silk screens, spit bites, aquatints, and possibly more.

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08 April 2006 by nathaniel

Turbulence and Gavin Jantjes

helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: Shape of Song by Martin Wattenberg (that's Jo Green on the far right, too)
helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: Shape of Song by Martin Wattenberg (that’s Jo Green on the far right, too)

Yesterday was probably the most crowded and exciting, diverse and collaborative, Soiree / Upgrade! event Johannesburg has ever seen. There to hear a kind of biased history of net.art from turbulence, and to briefly learn about Gavin Jantjes’ plans for Trans Cape, the audience ranged from WSOA and Digital Arts students, to top-notch and rising-star artists; we had a full house! Most pleasing was the engaging and intellectual/curious dialogue that progressed, including potential collaborative links made between, not only our two presenters(!), but also most orgs and artists who wanted to be involved in future. Turb’s talk went through, among others, the following works (in chronological order, both historically and in their talk – from 1996 – 2006!):

helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: SMS-Tokyo (Stop Motion Studies) by David Crawford
helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: SMS-Tokyo (Stop Motion Studies) by David Crawford

turbulence.org – the net.art commissioning hub
networked_performance blog – Millions of visitors monthly, one of the best new media art blogs around
Grimm Tale: Chapter 7 and Grimm Tale: Chapter 10 – their first ever commissioned net.art, by my grad supervisor at ITP, Marianne Petit!
Snuff – early interactive java art that pulled content from live sites
FT2K – quirky "promise of a greater tomorrow" type net.art
Radio Stare – Beautiful, linear, non-narrative piece that pulled from live police frequency streams for its soundtrack; note that some technology on this piece is obsolete and therefore no longer working
Solitaire – random narrative constructions
Culture Map – clever mapping of how we surfed aol and yahoo! back in the day
Imprimatur – make a poster through the web, and print it offline
Shape of Song – beautiful and clever look at visualizations of popular and historical music
Secret Lives of Numbers – Golan Levin’s infamous work that charts the popularity/use of all numbers online – from zero to one million
Data Diaries – Cory Arcangel converts his RAM into video
SMS-Tokyo [1] [2] – gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous stop motion studies on subway trains in Tokyo
1 Year Performance Video – MTAA’s brilliant Sam Hsieh update that I have written about extensively on this site
<event> – slowed down and mediated news to "look at"
Tap Evol-The Setup – interactive, evolutionary visual applet that pulls from a database of tiny movies to produce odd moving imagery on the fly
IN Network – long distance relationship via a blog and podcast
Grafik Dynamo – live blog feeds creating a dynamic Lichtenstein-like panel comic strip; the images and text are a web zeitgeist!

And the list goes on… Discussion ranged from interrogations of performance, art and activism, to questions about access, influence, and surfing habits.

Gavin Jantjes presenting Trans Cape
Gavin Jantjes presenting Trans Cape

This was actually a great transition into Gavin’s presentation of his plans for what has come to be known as the kind of new mega-exhibition of South Africa, due up this September.  From the sound of it, he’s very interested in focusing on the African diaspora, contemporary African art, education and involvement of local communities, and empowerment through knowledge and creativity. Keep up to date, here. More to come….

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04 April 2006 by nathaniel

The Upgrade! Johannesburg proudly presents: Turbulence.org + Gavin Jantjes

Turbulence.org at Wits Digital Arts
Hosted by Wits Digital Arts, University of the Witwatersrand

Please circulate widely! This is an amazing opportunity for South Africans to learn about online contemporary art from two of its ongoing pioneers and most noteworthy supporters of commissioned work. Live and in person!

The Upgrade! Johannesburg and Wits Digital Arts proudly present: Turbulence.org + Gavin Jantjes
Friday 7 April, 3-5PM at the Digital Convent, WSOA
supported by The Trinity Session

Visiting from the US, Turbulence.org is an internationally renowned net.art commissioning organization – a continuing pioneer in funding contemporary conceptual artists working with networked media. For years, Turbulence.org has been commissioning international online art, including Johannesburg artists Nathaniel Stern and Marcus Neustetter in 2005.

Turbulence is co-directed by Helen Thorington (founder of New Radio and Performing Arts, Turbulence’s mother organization) and Jo-Anne Green (a Wits alumnus!). The two will be presenting a very biased history of web-based artwork, showing projects they have commissioned as well as some of their own, and will then be taking questions.

No knowledge of web technology necessary!
Open to all!

more information:
http://atjoburg.net/upgrade/
http://turbulence.org/
http://new-radio.org/helen
http://new-radio.org/jo

Convent Seminar Room, WSOA, University of the Witwatersrand Free parking available in front of the Convent at WSOA. For directions go to http://www.wits.ac.za/artworks/contact/map.htm

BONUS:
Gavin Jantjes will also be briefly presenting TRANS CAPE at The Upgrade! in order to court interested artists!
TRANS CAPE: South Africa’s first ever large-scale contemporary African Art Exhibition.
 
The city of Cape Town is set to host TRANS CAPE, the first ever large-scale exhibition of African contemporary art to be staged in South Africa. TRANS CAPE opens on September 23 and runs for four weeks, filling the city with the work of approximately 70 contemporary artists from across Africa and the Diaspora. It is the first in a series of bi annual contemporary African art exhibitions presented by the CAPE Africa Platform.

This year’s exhibition breaks boundaries in several new ways. As counterpoint to the tribal image of Africa that exists in the imagination of the west, TRANS CAPE will show the work of a new generation of African artists.

“A new generation of artists across the continent are creating remarkable contemporary responses to the unique realities of present-day Africa, contemporary African art is on the move,” says CAPE Africa Platform CEO Susan Glanville-Zini. 

TRANS CAPE’s artistic director, South African born and internationally acclaimed curator and artist Gavin Jantjes and curators, Gabi Ngcobo from Iziko National Gallery and Khwezi Gule from the Johannesburg Art Gallery aim to capture this energy and movement.

Jantjes explains the title of the exhibition as a metaphor for this sense of movement. “Movement is signalled by the prefix TRANS – transform, translate, transgress, transmit, transfigure, trans-national, transport, transsexual, trans-national, transient are all words that connect processes of exchange and interaction to the exhibition.”

Movement will also be registered through the presentation of artworks and the manner that visitors experience the exhibition. TRANS CAPE will be choreographed across Cape Town, inviting visitors to actively engage and re-read the cities geography; as represented through artistic intervention in the urban fabric, histories and everyday life of the city.

TRANSCAPE will include specially commissioned artworks that deal directly with the urban realities of Cape Town, as well as existing works that address the shifts, alterations, disruptions and re-locations of people across Africa.

The exhibition is conceived as a journey that uses public spaces and locates new site-specific spaces along a route that links the Cape Town city centre, to Khayelithsa, Muizenberg and Stellenbosch.

Moving TRANS CAPE’s audience along this route is an essential part of the curatorial concept. Alongside the traditional public transport system (buses, trains, and taxis.), TRANS CAPE will use vehicles transformed into art projects to transport viewers between locations.

Through these journeys TRANS CAPE will create meeting points for cross cultural exchange and multidisciplinary art experiences that include music events, performances, interventions and film screenings.

For artists who are interested in receiving more information about the exhibition; Gavin Jantjes will be presenting TRANS CAPE at UPGRADE in Johannesburg on Friday 07 April at the Wits Digital Arts School from 15:00 – 17:00.
 
The curatorial team will select artists and artworks for the exhibition based on an intensive research process and not by open submissions. They are however open to receiving information about artists they do not know and artists are invited to visit the CAPE website at www.capeafrica.org or to phone +27 21 488 3064 for further information.

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03 April 2006 by nathaniel

The Daily Chronicles

OK, so it’s about day 6 of no phone or internet (re: telkom sucks… Given my lifestyle, I feel like my legs have been cut off), and the Gods of Good Fortune have decided that to make up for those losses, they should also cut off my electricity.

I sh!t you not.

Sigh.

The life of a mediocre blogger can sometimes be Oh So Difficult. I’m taking an hour (or so) out of my morning now to do a bit of blog n’ surf catch-up from Colleen Alborough’s house (she’s away, but I can steal her wireless bandwidth). Thanks, Coll.

Jeff Koons and The New Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons and The New Jeff Koons

Like most of the Joburg art scene, I hit up the Jeff Koons talk last Thursday (tho I had to leave early to see the OBGYN about the B-A-B-Y – 7 more weeks til my life changes forever!). A very inspired talk, with its high and low points and tidbits that made us all laugh or feel uncomfortable or just want to pick the artist’s brain. I think the most amazing part was just how calculated everything he said and did was. Here’s this super sweet ex-pornstar-art King of Kitsch wavering between being about acceptance and tolerance and asking the world for change, and talking about Golden Showers and Ass Pimples. His presentation was more like subversive performance art on a platter for a jaded art world that thinks it "knows him." Very clever chap, that Jeff.

Me and Jill Ross working on a Compressionist engraving and lithograph, respectively, at David Krut
Me and Jill Ross working on a Compressionist engraving and lithograph, respectively, at David Krut

I spent most of Saturday morning, afternoon and night at David Krut, working with Richard Kilpert and Jill Ross on the next iteration of Compressionism. We’re taking some of the works I had printed as lambdas from the series, and turning them into more traditional prints. We started with a polyester plate to make line drawing versions of one of the works (Wet Calla Leaves, drawing here), and ‘that’s me in the corner’ working on a hand engraving of a detail from Emmarentia Lilies (part of a triptych). I’ll be sure to post some stuff to flickr and Rhizome when I have more than one edition done…

Bronwyn Lace in front of about 4000 origami for her Outlet exhibition in Pretoria
Bronwyn Lace in front of about 4000 origami for her Outlet exhibition in Pretoria

Took a break from Krut in the late afternoon / early evening and head out to Pretoria to see Bronwyn Lace’s work at Outlet. A simple and beautiful exhibition that makes you feel small, I recommend hitting up that link there for some info on her work; we still await a guest blog from Bron on her show at KZNSA last month. Hint, Bron.

James Webb, Marcus Neustetter, Mikhael Subotzky
James Webb, Marcus Neustetter, Mikhael Subotzky

I took most of Sunday off (worked on a proposal for Rhizome for a bit), but did hang out with Marcus Neustetter for an ice cream at Zoo Lake (plus ran a few art errands with him), so got to see James Webb and meet Mikhael Subotzky briefly, while they’re here. It made me feel like a super cool uber artist for about a minute. Mikhael agreed that his prints need frames.

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