technology | implicit art

MTAA @ WSOA

^{That’s M. River and T. Whid Art Associates, at Wits School of the Arts (University of the Witwatersrand).}

There was an awesome response to my MTAA presentation at Upgrade! Joburg yesterday – really interesting discussion followed, mostly about their continual throughline of accenting relationality, as well as their gamut from punk work (Pirated Movie), through community building (Reference Resource), and discussions with the history of contemporary art (1ypv). Below is more from Christo (great to hear a different perspective from that of the presenter!)…

Via atjoburg.net, and posted by Christo Doherty (photographs also by Christo):

The second Upgrade! Event featured the work of New York net artists, MTAA, in a presentation by Nathaniel Stern. Nathaniel began by playing an audio greeting to Johannesburg from T.Whid, one member of the MTAA duo and then launched into an eclectic overview of MTAA’s work, which emphasized the subversive intelligence and humour which is a common thread throughout their work.

MTAA - artists

For Nathaniel, MTAA – the artists T.Whid and M.River – embody a deliberately anti-academic, punkish attitude towards Net Art. Since the beginning of their collaboration in 1996, they have pushed the possibliities of Net Art and the limits of intellectual copyright in an impressive range of works.

The enthusiastic audience in the Wits Digital Arts seminar room were treated to glimpses of works such as Random Access Mortality from 2002, in which MTTA took a couple of hundred short samples from either side of the “Hello Operator” single by The White Stripes and built an interface which allows users to access these samples in a completely random fashion.

One theme that emerged strongly from Nathaniel’s presentation was MTAA’s strategy of "updating" classic pieces of performance art from the 1970s and 80s. These Updates are characterised by a wry retrospective irony towards the "classics" combined with a canny repurposing of the work using the interactive potential of the Internet. Perhaps the most striking example of this was MTAA’s 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) This piece, commissioned and hosted by Turbulence.org, reworked a classic piece of performance art, Sam Hsieh’s "One Year Performance, 1980 – 1981". The MTAA update, however, shifted the onus of the performance from the artist’s to the viewers. MTAA transformed the act of living in a cell for a year into over 160 video clips of themselves living in a cell. Viewers who logged onto the site were invited to watch the video clips for a year.

nathaniel_mtaa_presentation
Nathaniel Stern showing one of this favourite pieces by MTTA,
"Five Small Videos About Interruption and Disappearing".

Other works covered in Nathaniel’s presentation included Endnode (a.k.a Printer Tree) a networked sculpture created during their 2002 Residency at the Eyebeam Gallery in New York; Pirated_Movie in which MTAA screened a pirated version of Disney’s "Pirates of the Caribbean" with a new soundtrack improvised by DJs and musicians; and DC 9/11 – The Evildoers’ Remix a guerrilla edit of a pro-Bush propaganda film.

A clip from "Pirated Movie" – a participating DJ is visible in
silhouette on the right hand of the screen.

Archives

02 March 2006 by nathaniel

Beeldspraak

Beeldsprak: all 52 prints
^{Beeldsprak: Beeld "newspaper curated" (by Gordon Froud) exhibition at the University of Johannesburg gallery.}

I hit the University of Johannesburg Gallery last night – a beautiful new space with an interesting outside – for the Gordon Froud curated Beeldspraak. The exhibition is a culmination of 52 weeks worth of a "newspaper exhibition." Gordon proposed (first somewhere else, which rejected him – but he did not say where) to have 52 different artists each contribute one work over the course of a year, and every Tuesday it would be printed in the paper and catalyze discussion. It led to a beautifully diverse exhibition that really does capture the vibes of contemporary South African art, albeit in a 2D-only space. The most wonderful part – aside from the original works being donated towards a good cause and auctioned off over the next few weeks – is that each contributing artist receives one set of all 52 limited edition prints, now selling for R6000.

I’m glad I played a part! See it.

Archives

01 March 2006 by nathaniel

New Apple toys: Intel Mac Mini and iPod HiFi

We all thought the stack was coming first, but we were wrong. It’s, drum roll please – the Mac mini Intel Core Duo! Up to four times faster than it’s predecessor, and starting at, I sh!t you not, $599, this’ll be the fastest for cheapest Mac ever to hit the market. I’ve not been making interactive installations for the past year or so – my big one was meant for the Cancelled Kebbles (who killed Biggie?) – but this makes me reconsider…

And, also new from Apple, the iPod HiFi – a super hi-qual sound system you can plug your Pod into. I imagine, given the quality of my tiny Apple Pro speakers, this system packs more than a little punch. My birthday is in June, just so you know. Order of preference is the MacBook Pro, then down from the top up there….

And there was much w00ting across the land (stolen phrase from Scott Westerfeld).

Archives

28 February 2006 by nathaniel

The Upgrade! Johannesburg and Wits Digital Soiree present: MTAA

From the Upgrade! Joburg site:

At their permission, Nathaniel Stern will be presenting the work of MTAA, a Brooklyn based digital art duo, most famous for their extremely provocative and quirky networked art:

Artists M. River and T. Whid formed MTAA in 1996 and soon after began to explore the internet as a medium for public art. The duo’s exhibition history includes group shows and screenings at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Postmasters Gallery and Artists Space, all in New York City, and at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. International exhibitions include the Seoul Net & Film Festival in Korea and Videozone2 – The 2nd International Video Art Biennial in Israel. In the forthcoming New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), authors Mark Tribe and Reena Jana describe MTAA’s 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) as “a deftly transparent demonstration of new media’s ability to manipulate our perceptions of time.” The collaboration has also earned grants and awards from Rhizome.org, Eyebeam, New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc. and The Whitney Museum’s Artport web site.

~~And Christo’s cool poster:~~
UPDATE: this awesome poster was made by Arlene Murphy:

Archives

27 February 2006 by nathaniel

Orpheus and other artists @ Spier

So I was at Spier last night with some really cool artists. Not all of them made it on the same night, but amongst the ten finalists selected for their hotel art project are myself, Kim Lieberman, Mustafa Maluka, Matt Hindley, Usha Seejarim, Dorothee Kreutzfeld, Jo O’Connor and Nicolas Hlobo. Had a nice dinner among new friends, great conversation, perhaps some future help and collaborations. I’ll probably propose some Compressionist images for the project – got some great scans on site before my scanner finally died (another one on the way – thank you, ebay!).

James Webb also joined up for dinner, and managed to sneak the two of us into Brett Bailey’s Orpheus, for which he sound designed. We had to drive over the bridge at right. Yes, that’s the best I could do for an image – desperate times….

Sometimes over the top and obvious where unnecessary, and a few of the scenes could have been shorter to get their points across better, but Orpheus was undoubtedly a brilliant piece. The lead narrator, portrayed by Sibongile Khumalo, was an amazing presence with heart-wrenching physical character, and Orpheus (I cannot find the actor’s name) had the haunting singing voice of a dying angel (he did not once speak out of song). The set, the silence, the sound, the politics, even most of the parts that may have been OTT (over-the-top) worked seamlessly. A devastatingly beautiful rendition by all of the artists involved — see it if you can.

Archives

24 February 2006 by nathaniel

robot clothes

^{LED throwies in the streets of NYC}

James Powderly is currently a Research & Development fellow at Eyebeam in Chelsea, NYC – a fantastic gallery-space-like residency program for art-geeks that work in new media, "etc". On a more personal note, when we were grad students, James was a huge friend and resource in helping to set up my first-ever group exhibition (Johnson Museum, upstate New York); he "gave" me the term Compressionism – something he came up with for a series of his own interactive videos about five years ago, but is letting me have for my prints right now; and he videotaped my and Nicole’s wedding (tho I still have not edited that) – just to name a few niceties. So yes, I am biased, but he was also a director at Honeybee Robotics for a number of years, so we know he is ‘wicked smaht.’ One of his many current goings-on:

Robot Clothes is an art and commercial research and development partnership, specializing in robotic systems, interaction design and product prototyping. This partnership, formed in 2002 by Michelle Kempner and James Powderly, utilizes a hybrid fine art and commercial design and engineering approach to support innovative science and technology development efforts for clients including fortune 100 companies, NASA and internationally renowned artists, such as Diller + Scofidio and Miranda July. In addition to contracted research and development efforts, Robot Clothes internally supports fine art projects ranging from a robotic public sculpture for Central Park to an animatronic opera about Crohn’s Disease.

Dude.

Also, James’ Eyebeam crew recently teamed up with the Graffiti Research Lab to produce the above Electro-Graf – a "graffiti piece or throw-up that uses conductive and magnetic paint to embed LED display electronics." Check out the link for an awesome ‘LED Throwies’ video – hit the streets, throw little trinkets at the walls that stick and light up, and so ‘write’ with live LEDs on the sides of buildings!