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10 May 2009 by nathaniel

Night Work / Distill Life

Documentation of several pieces from Night Work, with printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, is now live.

Night Work, an exhibition featuring Milwaukee-based art professors and instructors at the artist-run Armoury Gallery, premiered my new body of collaborative works with printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. Playfully called “Distill Life,” this ongoing series of art objects combines hand-made works on paper with time-based video images looped on LCD screens.  We first capture and edit video from real and virtual worlds, and download these files onto hacked digital photo frames. The liberated screens from these frames are then placed behind or embedded within prints, drawings and sculptures. Sometimes, we use a Sharpie and draw directly on the screen. Our intention is to incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking – including Japanese woodblock and engraving circa the 1800s, present-day etching, stone lithography, photogravure etc – with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, in order to create new forms.

See Night Work for more images and video.

Archives

24 April 2009 by nathaniel

Wikipedia Art madness

You probably heard about the threat of a lawsuit from Wikimedia on Wikipedia Art by now, but just in case:

Here’s how we went public, on EFF:
Wikipedia Threatens Artists for Fair Use

Here’s the legal history on our site.

And it exploded, of course, when it got slashdotted.

I urge readers to make their own judgments via the legal history – especially the correspondence that followed their initial letter – rather than taking Wikimedia counsel at their word about the gentleness of their approach to us regarding this issue.

A few more reads on…

Ars Technica
Free Culture News
NeoSeeker
Geniosity
TechDirt

And there’s much more out there now. This piece was always meant to be formed by the public, made through writing and citation, activation and feedback. It’s turning out to be quite a performance.

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18 April 2009 by nathaniel

Milwaukee first Upgrade! Sunday APril 19th

Upgrade! Milwaukee presents Patrick Lichty and Christopher Burns!
Sunday April 19, 7 – 9 PM
MOCT, 240 E Pittsburgh Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53204

Please come to our first-ever Upgrade! Milwaukee, featuring Chicago-based Patrick Lichty and Milwaukee’s own Christopher Burns!

patrick lichty

patrick lichty

Patrick Lichty (b.1962)  is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He began showing technological media art in 1989, and deals with works and writing that explore the social relations between us and media. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney & Turin Biennials, Maribor & Yokohama Triennials, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, and the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow, a Smithsonian New Century/New Media Award recipient, and a multiple nominee for the Rockefeller New Media Fellowship.

He also works extensively with virtual worlds, including Second Life, and his work, both solo and with his performance art group, Second Front, has been featured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and ArtNews.  His latest work, a collaborative work with Gazira Babeli, entitled 7UP, will have a solo exhibition at SKUC gallery in Slovenia this Fall.

visualizations by Christopher Burns

visualizations by Christopher Burns

Christopher Burns is a laptop improviser and a composer of instrumental chamber music.  His works explore simultaneity and multiplicity: textures and materials are layered one on top of another, creating a dense and energetic polyphony.  Both electronic and acoustic music are influenced by Christopher’s work as a computer music researcher.  The gritty, rough-hewn sonic materials of his laptop instruments are produced through custom software designs, and the idiosyncratic pitch and rhythmic structures of his chamber music are typically created and transformed through algorithmic procedures.  His most recent projects emphasize multimedia and motion capture, integrating performance, sound, and animation into a unified experience.

A committed educator, Christopher teaches music composition and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Previously, he served as the Technical Director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, after completing a doctorate in composition there in 2003.  He has studied composition with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Jonathan Berger, Michael Tenzer, and Jan Radzynski.

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Announcing the launch of Upgrade! Milwaukee.

Upgrade!

Upgrade! Milwaukee is a regular gathering of digital creatives – artists, musicians, performers, writers, curators and the public – that fosters dialogue and creates opportunities for collaboration within the local new media community. It features 1-3 guest speakers at each event, held at a rotating venue: informal, free, and open to all. We welcome suggestions for speakers, panels or gatherings. Upgrade! Milwaukee will continue to grow as a local node within the global Upgrade! International (UI) network.

Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year. There are currently over 30 nodes in UI, across North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Second Life.

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28 March 2009 by nathaniel

Public Lectures and Exhibitions in Milwaukee and Johannesburg

Last night saw the opening of Night Work at The Armoury Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Some great responses, surprise guests, new show offers, decent sales – a really great Milwaukee debut for both me and Jessica (my collaborator). Thanks to everyone who helped, came out, etc. For those who didn’t make it, the show was a kind of “weekend pick” over at Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel (where one of the gallerists also pitched the show), and it’ll be up for more than a month (including Milwaukee’s gallery night, on April 17th!). If you can’t make it, it’s brand spanking new work, so we still need to document it – I’m hoping to have some images and/or video online in the next few weeks. We’re really excited about the progression, so watch this space….

I will also be giving public lectures about my work this week, twice. First, I will take over a spot on Wednesday, April 1st, 7pm (in ACL 120) for the Artist Now! series in the Visual Art department, Peck School of the Arts, at UWM:

Artists Now! is a Wednesday evening lecture series designed for a broad audience with an interest in contemporary visual art. The series presents a diverse group of artists working across traditional, hybrid and emergent disciplines. Join these nationally and internationally recognized practitioners as they explore and expand the boundaries of creative visual practice today.

All lectures take place on Wednesdays at 7 pm in the Arts Center Lecture Hall, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd. on the UWM campus. The lectures are free and open to the public.

I’ll give an hour’s worth of overview of my practice, some works, and a couple of the trajectories I’m aware of in them. But if you can’t make that, don’t worry! The very next day I will be giving a very similar talk (pretty much the same one, with perhaps slightly more on the tech side, and with the general variability that comes with my “performances”) as part of the Computation and Craft lecture series in the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP) – Thursday, April 2nd at noon in AUP 110, also UWM. See the flyer below (click for larger).

interactions, interventions and implications: computation and craft lecture at UWM

interactions, interventions and implications: computation and craft lecture at UWM

Finally, I’ll kind of be all over the Johannesburg Art Fair, in South Africa – well, my art will. I personally can’t attend, but I am: (twice) in the Internet Art in the Global South net.art exhibition, curated by Tegan Bristow; on Bad Form, an interesting show over at Blank Projects, curated by Christian Nerf and Kathryn Smith; featured in a talk by Wilhelm van Rensburg on contemporary printmaking (Gallery AOP); and will mostly likely also feature at the David Krut table. Should be an awesome fair – sad to miss it.

Hope to see some of you around these great events!

Archives

18 February 2009 by nathaniel

What is important

Although I’ve been keeping a low profile in the public debates about Wikipedia Art, I have had a few ongoing and private discussions with its critics and supporters. With his OK, the below is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Tom Moody yesterday.

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The main issue for me is not whether I (or others) like or dislike … the Wiki [(I actually think it an extremely valuable resource)], to game or not game the systems that contribute to it, and certainly not to canonize myself – you’ll note that other than our own page and my own blog, I have not at all participated in any of the discussions about the project (not on wikipedia, not on rhizome [another rhizome thread here], not on Paddy’s blog, etc). I care not about the rejection of the page, really; or even if you call it “art,” as Paddy suggests. I think the debates still have contextual value, even outside of the art space. People care about this: about art, about Wikipedia, about the blogosphere, about the conceptual frames and important people (whether of self-import or otherwise) that “control” these spaces through their online voices or backend deletions. The idea that this page got any less or more fairness or discussion than any other Wiki page is not my own – I’ve seen many debates just like this one spearheaded by just as many folks at the Wiki  – I feel lucky that [Wikipedia Art] got this much attention; a real failure would have been a speedy delete, and then nothing, which we always knew was a possible outcome. The point is, most people don’t see how arbitrarily many of these decisions are made, or where biases lie, despite the fact that, as you say, in the “post Gallery [post academy?] world Wikipedia is the new Academy, because it has the ability to control the discourse of who is an important artist (or art blogger)” [and more!]. A bunch of volunteers, of their own free will, cared enough to do all this, a bunch of artists and theorists care enough to carry on the debate. Paddy is right, perhaps “the discussion is my art” means I always “win” – but this project, art or not, is not about winning for me. And nor is Wikipedia, and nor is the art blogosphere.

I’m glad the [debate] carries on, because even if Wikipedia Art is not at all important, it has provoked a discussion around what is.

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