Sue, Richard and Nick – three of the Digital Arts MA students, from left – pretend to be working on their final exhibition (February, 2005), between actually working on it, and lunch.
It’s, no doubt, going to be a great show. The piece we’re looking at is a prototype for an installation that will use the sweat from participants’ palms in order to trigger waves in a beautiful, multiply displayed, tank of water.
An email sent from turbulence:
Dear Friends,
During 2004, its best year since its founding in 1996, Turbulence commissioned 18 new works, spotlighted 8 projects, and began hosting 6 new artists’ studios. We also launched our networked_performance blog and co-organized a lecture series with Emerson College, Boston. Our plans for 2005 include as many commissions, a second lecture series, a panel discussion, and the launch of Upgrade! Boston. to be hosted by Art Interactive.
Despite the expansion of our projects and the acceleration of our support for net artists over the past two-and-a-half years, Turbulence has not seen a parallel increase in its operating support. As a result, much of our hard work forgoes compensation. And because of the enormous rise in traffic, we’ve witnessed the need for increased server storage and co-location fees; the situation became critical during October because two recently launched projects, ASCII BUSH and 1 Year Performance Video, far exceeded the limits of our monthly bandwidth.
We need your support. Please help Turbulence stay alive by going to http://turbulence.org and clicking on the PayPal button.
Thanks.
Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington
These guys are great and need your help! Please support!
OK, so, admittedly, I’ve been waiting to get some pix from my opening afore blogging – truth be told, I forgot to bring my camera, and have been struggling for digital donations for this “publication”. Anyhow, there was a fairly good turnout (somewhere between 150-175), and I was really happy with all the work before it opened. The response seemed to be positive, and I’m looking forward to getting some critical feedback from wherever it may originate (let’s hope!). Robyn Sassen has already spent some time chatting with me, so we might see something on artthrob and/or the jewish report. Anybody else? Criticism welcome!
It’s actually a very big week for the JAG. Wednesday the 3rd will see an opening of a huge show of works from SABC’s stunning collection, and Saturday will be the final show of the negotiate series (see this, this and this blog). I’ll see ya there.
OK. Back to working and catching up (after the last few weeks) for me!
First up, Nicole (my better 2/3rds) picked up a hot-off-the-press copy of Time Out, Johannesburg yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, Time Out, New York is this great NYC mag with listings of restaurants, shows, exhibitions, spaces, the works – and a few good articles and must sees – for NYC; I think it comes out once a month. How cool is it that there is now a Time Out, Joburg and (yes, even a) Time Out, Cape Town (including a visitor’s guide)?
In other news, for interactive video producers out there, a new version (free upgrade) of jitter has been released. And those keen to work with text should check out the latest batch of free objects from jasch, just ported to windows and made cross-platform. I’ve been working on using these for live XML news feed downloads, to control real-time video effects, and they are brilliant!
And how I could I forget my own self-promotion (this is http://nathanielstern.com after all)? My first solo show opens at the Johannesburg Art Gallery this Saturday at 18h00. More info here: the storytellers
Yesterday afternoon saw a fantastic double event at the WSOA Digital Arts friday soiree. First, Cobi Van Tonder facilitated successive performances in her award-winning, interactive gumboot project. Analog sensors in the soles and on the sides of these boots trigger and control live samples of electronic music. Her collaborative performances went from fairly simple – where we could mostly see exactly how our performer controlled the music – to very complex. There were all kinds of ideas thrown around with the kinds of samples one could remap to her boots, the kinds of people we’d like to see using them, and how to make the interaction more or less transparent – as well as what this might do to the conceptual framework, and audience, of the work.
Next up, Aryan Kaganof overheated the projector (literally) with 5 video shorts from the past year. The series, entitled collaborations was made up of dialogues with other artists, where contributions, edits, and suggestions went between parties in several iterations before each work was completed. The Q&A session was the weirdest I’ve ever been to, and also the most entertaining. AK managed to sell a handful of his poetry books, and gave me one of his SMS (Sanctuary Mental Space) books from this show. Admittedly, I’ve been eyeing this book for a while. Besides some extremely provocative poetry, the intricate detail of his beautiful text art puts anything ASCII I’ve seen in the Digital Space to shame. Often, I find myself mesmerized by the amazing patterns, and completely forget that these are also legible poems. It’s a stunning publication, highly recommended to digi-geeks, poets and Colin Richards fans, alike.
Finally, about 20 cats from the soiree went over to the Wits post-graduate club for drinks. Attendees included Wits crew, Wits Tech, Bag Factory, even Tuks – it’s really amazing to see the Digital Arts community growing in this way. There are plans, I say, there are plans under way to foster this even more….
When I was in Dublin a couple of months ago, Jonah tossed me a DVD of his work. Last night, I presented that, as well as some more recent stuff from his web site to a nicely-sized South African audience of artists (with a running commentary on the work, the person, the environments, etc – Christo Doherty helped with the crit and witticisms, of course).
It went down a hoot! We also launched the concept of at.joburg (Art & Technology, Johannesburg); the web site will go live in about 2 weeks – watch this space for more info! at.joburg is loosely based on Jonah B-C and Nicky Gogan’s (of The Digital Hub) group, DATA (the Dublin Art and Technology Association), where people crossing these boundaries take to the streets and show their stuff!