Installation view of Hachiya Kazuhiko's Open Skies 2.0 exhibition at the NTT Intercommunication Centre, Tokyo. Hachiya is best known for his Air Board series of jet engine powered hoverboards based on the hoverboard from the Back To The Future.
This exhibition itself was a gallery based presentation of the process of planning, building and flying self built aircraft, but unlike the AirBoard you can't fly in a gallery so instead visitors were offered the chance to win a simulated ride by completing various tasks. I'm interested at the moment (as my MA show approaches) in approaches to presenting work which happens outside of the gallery in a gallery context and this impresses me wioth it's effective balancing of sculptural objects natural to a gallery space with process documentation which can come across sometimes as tedious and a bit overly precious if not handled properly. The obvious comparison (flying machines) is of course with Belgian artist Panamarenko except with the (not only) conceptual difference that these flying machines actually left the ground. Of course, me being me, I wondered did they actually fly, would it be better work if they didn't but the artist went to elaborate lengths to convince us that they did, or does it matter?
More images at my flickr page.
You may or may not have noticed that GoogleBono has been offline for the last few days, this was due to the Google Maps switchover to version 2 of the API which I had neglected to upgrade to. As the coding of the first version was such a terrible hack it was also an opportunity to do it properly but now I'm glad to say that the new and improved Bono Probability Positioning System V. 2.01 is now back online.
The Ars Virtua Gallery and New Media Center in Second Life has a call for proposals for their artist in residence (AVAIR)programme
Ars Virtua Artist-in-Residence (AVAIR) is an extended performance that examines what it means to reside in a place that has no physical location.
Ars Virtua presents artists with a radical alternative to “real life” galleries: 1) Since it does not physically exist artists are not limited by physics, material budgets, building codes or landlords. Their only constraints are social conventions and (malleable-extensible) software. 2) The gallery is accessible 24 hours a day to a potentially infinite number of people in every part of the world simultaneously. 3) Because of the ever evolving, flexible nature of Second Life the “audience” is a far less predictable variable than one might find a Real Life gallery. Residents will be encouraged to explore, experiment with and challenge traditional conventions of art making and distribution, value and the art market, artist and audience, space and place.
deadline is 21st of November and there is a stipend in real money.
via Rhizome
Conor McGarrigle @ Reno Interdisciplinary Festival of New Media
I'm exhibiting in the 1st Reno Interdisciplinary Festival of New Media at the University of Nevada, Reno until December 15th. RIFNM 06 highlights an international selection of work by graduate and Phd students working with new digital technologies for the creation of art. Artists working in and across disciplines were invited to submit works to be considered for five interrelated events/venues: exhibit, netart, perform, project(full-dome) and present. The resulting festival schedule of events presents a unique opportunity to directly experience innovative work being created by a diversity of emerging artists exploring digital systems for visual and experiential production.
Participating Artists/Affiliations:
-Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom
-Gudmundur S. Gunnarsson, Mills College
-Sabrina Berryman, University of Utah
-Margaret Noble and Edyta Stepien, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
-Jolanta A Lapiak, NSCAD, Nova Scotia, Canada
-Martin Machado, San Francisco Art Institute
-Suzanne Yo Martinsen, University of Central Florida
-Pete Froslie, Massachusetts College of Art
-Alejandro Duque, European Graduate School, Switzerland
-Jamie Timms, University of California, Santa Barbara
-Mike Godwin, University of California, Santa Barabara
-Conor McGarrigle, National College of Art & Design Dublin, Ireland
-Stephanie Jeanjean, Graduate Center of CUNY (City University of New York)
-Melissa Grey and Robert Kirkbride, The New School, New York City
-Pamela Kray, The New School, New York City
-So Jung Kwon, Otis School of Art and Design, Los Angeles
-Si Jae Byun, School of Visual Arts, New York City
-Walter Nelson, Griffith University, Australia
-Stephen Cady, University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Art and Design
-Jeanne Jo, Rhode Island School of Art and Design
-Jake Lee High, Massachusetts College of Art
From Rhizome every death in the Friday the 13th series, 7 minutes worth back to back in chronological order
Similar is Jamie Shovlin's printEvery Victim and Manner of Death in the Friday the 13th film Series
and of course the McCoys sublime Every Anvil which does a similar thing with Looney Tunes.
Kicking off an idiosyncratic series of reports of what caught my eye at the Frieze Art Fair in London which I caught on Saturday. The image is of Alexei Shulgin (of easylife, 386dx fame) & Aristarkh Chernyshov's Medamirror an interactive work with a camera pointing at the viewer and software which then scrambles the image in a variety of ways. It wasn't clear if the software was contained within the frame or whether there was an external computer - though the only visible external cable was for power- all contained in a very slick acrylic/plexiglass type frame. I counted 15 red dots.
More images at my Flickr Frieze Set
Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. It also has lots of very cool projects and is well worth checking out.
The Fringefest Vending Machine Project launches tomorrow at Crawdaddy 6pm, all are imnvited. The machines will be in the Project Arts Centre, Crawdaddy and Connolly Station and there's a full list of all the works available. Some pretty good stuff there and all for a fiver! Methinks you'll have to move fast to get your hands on some of those. I must mention that my work whereismyart.com - a limited edition of 12 - will be for sale in the Project Arts Centre machine.
In the 1950s in eastern Europe nightclubs made pirate copies of western records which were cut onto recycled x-ray films, digibodies has a gallery of them.
Thge 2006 edition of FILE Electronic Language International Festival opens today in Galeria de Arte do SESI São Paulo, Brazil. I'll be showing the Bono Probability Positioning System version 2 AKA Google Bono. The exhibition continues until September 3rd.
Don't miss James Coleman's slide-tape installationI N I T I A L S (which I'm glad to say is beautifully installed) at IMMA until the 3rd September. James Coleman is probably the most important and certainly the most influential contemporary living Irish artist whose work is bizarrely rarely seen in the country.
I N I T I A L S Coleman uses a slide-tape format (multiple transparencies projected with synchronised audio tape) in his continuing investigation of the psychological, social and historic conditioning of perception. We see an unusual assortment of people in what could be a hospital setting, but might, with equal relevance, refer to a TV drama studio, with the attendant preparatory rituals for both settings. As the piece progresses, the voice of what appears to be a child spells out words or utters disparate statements, diverging more and more from the sequence of events depicted visually, calling into question photography’s traditional claim to documentary authenticity.
A further element of uncertainty is introduced through the variety of different genres in which the artist chooses to present the images, from popular television soap opera style to the serenity of a 17th-century Dutch portrait. Cocooned in a darkened and carpeted space, the work challenges the viewer to move through the space and find their own vantage point, thereby becoming part of the core experience of deconstruction and reconstruction. Lynne Cooke in a recent essay on Coleman’s work describes the process whereby “weaving references drawn from film, from drama and from painting, Coleman situates his trilogy in a hybrid realm, one that allows him to comment obliquely on these canonical art forms and their traditions without, however, fully subscribing to any.”
While I was gone Eimear McKeith interviewed me about the Net Art Open for The Sunday Tribune and the article (which was excellent) appeared last Sunday (23rd July. I'll scan it and put on the site shortly. The Net Art Open also featured in Italian paper L'Unita and on two of my daily reads Rhizome and Random Magazine. Needless to say traffic to the Net Art Open has been pretty crazy since.
I'm going to be taking a break from blogging until August.
I won't be completely offline though as I'm participating as a guest in the - empyre - soft-skinned space discussion on 'Bare Life' as part of the Document 12 magazine project, maybe you can join me there. Full details below
Please join guests Jordan Crandall (US), Tina Gonsalves (AU), GH
Hovagimyan (US), Conor McGarrigle (IR), Susana Mendes Silva (PT), and
Michele White (US) as we address
a question posed by the upcoming Documenta 12:
"What is bare life?"
This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political
dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration
camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension
to it – a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human
relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what does that mean for its audiences?"
I'm pleased to announce that the Stunned Net Art Open 2006 launched today. Now in it's fourth edition the Net Art Open takes a different approach to the curation of Net Art online. Rather then present a single event based exhibition selected by a curator or panel of selectors the Net Art Open is an ongoing blog based process which will unfold over the next six months. Curatorial bias has been removed by accepting all work which meets the criteria. The result is a true reflection of the state of Net Art now.
The emphasis in this edition will be bringing the exhibition to the audience, taking account of the changing way people access the net. With so much new work being produced all the time even with the best will in the world it's difficult to keep up so the Net Art Open will be blogged one work at a time with RSS feeds for newsfeed readers and blog aggregators, each entry will be tagged for technorati and del.icio.us and a flickr pool will be created. In addition each entry will feature on the front page of Stunned.
The net art open was started in 2002 by Conor McGarrigle and Arthur X. Doyle as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.com intervention, subsequent editions were in 2003 and 2004-5..
