Check into Vancouver’s New Forms Festival at the Waldorf Hotel 
This article by Alexander Varty appeared in both the online and print editions of Straight

*With wild installation rooms and outdoor light-painting, the interdisciplinary, border-bashing festival takes over the Waldorf*

It’s hard to stay on the cutting edge for more than an instant. In the fast-paced world of media art, ideas come and go literally at the speed of light; yesterday’s conceptual breakthrough is all too often today’s TV commercial. Yet for the past decade, Vancouver’s New Forms Festival has stayed at the forefront of all things interdisciplinary, reliably tapping into an international network of borderless creativity.

“This year, though,” says director and curator Malcolm Levy, “something really interesting has happened.”

Indeed it has. A multimedia festival that was once amorphous, although innovative, has found renewed focus—and an event that formerly relied on various low-rent venues around town has found a new home in an old hotel. This year, New Forms takes place in what’s rapidly becoming an East Van icon, the recently renovated and artist-friendly Waldorf. With everything in one place—artists’ accommodation upstairs, fine Lebanese dining downstairs, three live-music venues, and a bar for socializing—a certain synergy is starting to build.

“What we have is a location where we can have complete control of the venue,” says Levy, on the line from the New Forms office. “The hotel rooms, the music rooms, and the whole outside façade of the building are all being used as part of the festival. So, basically, the goal this year is to make the space itself almost an installation during the weekend.”

For an event that lasts only three days, New Forms has assembled a head-spinning array of audience options—everything from wildly danceable electronic pop to serious discussions about copyright law. With its emphasis on an immersive mix of sight and sound, the event should offer what the poet Arthur Rimbaud once termed “the rational derangement of the senses”: an easily accessible route out of ordinary reality. With multisensory delights that include nighttime light-painting on the Waldorf’s west wall, it also has clear and intentional echoes of ’60s-style happenings. Sometimes new forms are just old ones waiting to be rediscovered.

“There are definitely influences from the ’60s, and from other things like the Fluxus movement, within New Forms,” says Levy. “It’s temporal in nature. You know, it’s happening within the space over the weekend; it’s about coming and being part of that and involving yourself within it. It’s not necessarily a sensory overload, but there’s definitely a chance to take in a lot at one time.”

Levy is especially excited about how festival artists will get to change several Waldorf locations into intimate galleries for the presentation and dissemination of media art.

“There are, I think, a total of 18 rooms at the Waldorf,” he says. “Eight of them have never been renovated, and those are all being used for installations. And then we have artists staying in the other rooms.…That definitely changes the dynamic in a very positive way. It becomes like one big family, in a sense.”

Given that one of the major themes of this year’s festival is the control of information, it’s appropriate that the artists will be able to take part in informal exchanges of ideas—at breakfast, say, or over a late-night drink. And in the more structured environment of the installation rooms, they will also play with notions of who controls what we see and hear.

“One of the pieces I think is going to be fun to see is the Wikipedia Art room, and that’s being done by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern,” Levy notes. “What they’re going to be doing is creating a Wikipedia hotel room; the entire room will be set up with décor based around the concept of Wikipedia art.”

Kildall and Stern have already sparked controversy: intended to flag the ways in which content is controlled on Wikipedia, their original Wiki page was deleted by the popular information site’s administrators within 15 hours of its installation. Later on, Wikipedia Art’s appearance at the 2009 Venice Biennale was shut down by Italian police, apparently due to concerns over copyright violations, in an echo of the legal landslide California-based sound collagists and copyright activists Negativland provoked with their 1991 release of a sample-laden swipe at U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. Negativland founder Mark Hoskins will be contributing to New Forms’ more formal aspect, a conference on copyright issues called Art, Revolution and Ownership, and Wikipedia Art’s presence should also help kick-start the debate.

Organized in conjunction with the Artists’ Legal Outreach nonprofit, the symposium opens at SFU Woodward’s today (September 8), before moving to the Waldorf. It came out of Artists’ Legal Outreach lawyer Martha Rans’s concern that the creative sector was not adequately represented in Ottawa during the federal government’s recent overhaul of Canada’s copyright laws.

“I did my spiel and I sat there for two hours listening to however many speakers say what they had to say to the minister—and I thought what we really ought to be doing is talking to each other,” Rans explains in a separate telephone interview. “What the whole copyright issue often devolves into is industry versus user, and many artists have said to me, ‘What does that have to do with me? Neither argument resonates with me at all.’ And one thing that I do know is that in order to get artists to come and talk about these issues, you kind of have to make it about them. Hence the idea of an art exhibition.…I thought this would be a rather surreptitious way of teaching [artists] this stuff by getting them to talk about their work.”

Levy agrees. “You have this interesting two-fold dialectic happening,” he explains. “On one hand, you have people fighting for the opening of all content, this really strong push towards opening up the airwaves, so to speak. And then, on the other hand, you have the very important need for artists to be paid for their work, especially in a time when downloading and access to information is so ubiquitous.

“I don’t know if there is a resolution to that,” he adds, “but I think it’s a good discussion to be having.”

And if things get too heated? Well, there’s always the Tiki Bar.

The New Forms Festival takes place at the Waldorf Hotel from Friday to Sunday (September 9 to 11).

Deconstructing Wikipedia
This article by Mary Louise Schumacher appeared in both the online and print editions of the MJS, under different titles and with slightly edited content.

Two artists staged an art intervention within Wikipedia, turning the “free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” into an art medium.

By making a sort of readymade art object from a Wikipedia page, Nathaniel Stern, of Milwaukee, and Scott Kildall, of San Francisco, have challenged the conventions of art in a way that doesn’t happen everyday.

The wikiwar that’s erupted is not unlike the outrage inspired by Marcel Duchamp‘s urinal or Andy Warhol‘s Brillo Boxes.

“Wikipedia Art” was, to the artists’ minds, both an artwork and a legitimate Wikipedia page.

After seven months of preparations, it was spiked 15 hours after launch by an 18-year-old Wikipedia administrator and software developer named “Werdna.” And now, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has threatened the artists with legal action, demanding that they fork over the web address where they moved the art project.

That Wikipedia, an organization that prides itself on open critique, radical transparency and the advancement of human knowledge, would get heavy handed with these artists is galling.

Did “Wikipedia Art’ deserve a permanent home on the site? I don’t know. But in reading the voluminous debates it seems a main source of agitation was the fact that artists would dare to ask in the first place.

Here’s how it worked.

The project was a standard page on Wikipedia that, like all entries, anyone could alter, as long as Wikipedia’s standards of quality and verifyability were adhered to. Within those constraints, the artists invited “performative utterances” from the public and from other artists, in order to create an ongoing composition.

It is an artwork and an article, a deconstruction and a construction of Wikipedia. It is the scrupulous and lively debate that the original piece inspired and the web site where the project now lives.

The artwork — and yes, it is art — is certainly relevant. Like good art sometimes does, it makes us look at things differently. It critiqued the way human knowledge is organized by one of the most important sources of information on the planet.

And, more than that, it revealed a common response to contemporary art — particularly the cerebral sort — that’s common in our culture. We’ve seen other manifestations of this of late in the Emily Thomas dialogue, the debate over Janet Zweig’s public art and now the consensus that Stern and Kildall have revealed within the Wikipedia community.

Here’s how it all went down.

Within an hour of the page’s posting at noon on Valentine’s Day, the “deletionists,” volunteer editors who scour for inappropriate content, swooped in and marked the page as lacking sufficient “notable” sources, among other things. Moments later, the artists’ own pages were marked as suspicious, too.

The artists had cited online essays and art blogs, creating what they believed met the Wikipedia standards.

The editor who first panned the page and opened the floodgates of debate had some second thoughts. The 30-something IT specialist from the London area made a cry for help at a wiki-water cooler of sorts.

The debate was “turning into some sort of art intervention which might be worse than the ‘article,'” wrote Daniel Rigal (emphasis mine).

“I am just getting worried that…..the postmodernists are going to hold an exhibition of ‘Look how we made the encyclopaedists dance’ with me as the star attraction,” Rigal wrote.

Fervency for a “speedy delete” of the page grew. According to Stern, one editor wanted to apply the “snowball clause,” a polite way of suggesting the project didn’t have a snowball’s chance, and could everyone just dispense with the mind-numbing dialogue, please.

What emerged was a telling portrait of the way Wikipedians view themselves and exercise their authority. When Wikimedia’s lawyers started throwing their weight around, too, Stern and Kildall talked about dropping the project. Stern, an assistant professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, shelled out half a month’s salary for a lawyer’s retainer.

Thankfully, Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen, the group founded by Ralph Nader, volunteered to defend the artists pro bono out of conviction that the supposedly egalitarian-minded foundation was legally and morally out of bounds. Wikimedia has since gone quiet, perhaps backing down.

In truth, I can see why this project might prompt some to bristle, why it comes off as academic antics. But these artists, devotees of Wikipedia themselves, are serious artists who have been interested in the intersection of art, virtual space and collaborations for years.

And, they do have a point.

Wikipedia admits on its own site that its administrators, who rise through the ranks by being sufficiently devoted to their task, are more prone to be young, male and affluent. Is it possible some of these lads who service Wikipedia’s 9.5 million registered users tend to dismiss arts sources?

Could that be why a search for “Superman” yields volumes of pages on Wikipedia, while content related to contemporary art is not only scant but routinely questioned?

The entry for Cory Arcangel, an artist recently featured on the cover of Artforum, for instance, is topped by a giant question mark and a warning that the “sources remain unclear” and “insufficient.”

The sources? The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Columbia University, among others.

Stern and Kildall’s work is of art historical significance, picking up on many threads, such as the Surrealists and their exquisite corpse. It challenges the very definitions of art, media and knowledge, and it taps into a real truth about the distrust many have toward art.

By writing these things I suppose I am creating a citable reference in just the kind of “mainstream media” venue that Wikipedia goes for, potentially bolstering “Wikipedia Art” itself or, at least, a page about the event and its controversy. These are interesting times in which we live, yes?

read the entire online article
view the print version

The Wikipedia Art project is an ongoing intervention and performance that sheds light on the inner workings of one of the Internet’s most powerful sources of information – its editors, its founders, and its board of directors. It began as an article and debate on the pages of Wikipedia itself, moved to the art blogosphere as a critical discussion, and finally exploded all over the web after an  Electronic Frontier Foundation story (and Slashdot feature) about how the Wikimedia Foundation was threatening litigation around potential trademark infringement. Although this issue is still officially unresolved, Wikimedia have publicly stated that they are happy with the disclaimer now on the front of the Wikipedia Art site, which basically says, “This is not Wikipedia.” Original stories about the work – including the domain dispute – have appeared on over 75 web sites, and in at least six languages, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, De Telegraaf, Ars Technica,Digital Journal, PBS.org, Wall Street Journal, TechDirt and The Guardian, among many others. For an almost complete list, see the Wikipedia Art Press Page.