by Rob Myers

Victoria And Albert Museum

7 December 2009 - 25 April 2010

(Illustration - Herbert W. Franke, Squares (Quadrate), screenprint, 1969/70)

Digital Pioneers is a deceptively modest exhibition hidden away in two rooms upstairs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It contains some of the earliest examples of art produced using electronic devices and computing machinery along with some creative later work.

The bulk of the art in the show was produced between the 1950s and the 1970s. This means that it was produced or recorded as photographs from cathode ray tubes or as print-outs from teletypes and pen plotters. Some of this work will be familiar to students of the history of art computing through reproductions but as with most art reproductions do not tell the whole story.

Seeing the actual work itself is as important for art made using the paraphernalia of early digital computing as it is for art made with linseed oil and cotton duck. What Digital Pioneers drives home is just how deeply and intentionally involved early computer artists were in manipulating the aesthetically limited but socially and ideologically key technology of computing machinery. This leaves both social art historians and code aesthetes with some explaining to do, or at least some catching up.

(Ben Laposky, Oscillon 520, 1960)

The show starts in the 1950s with the algorithmic and electronic but non-digital and non-computational photographs of oscilloscope patterns by Ben Laposky and screen-prints of photographs by Herbert W. Franke. Most of the works included in the show are prints of one kind or another, and these are no exception. They record the movement of a beam of light on a cathode ray tube as other prints in the show record the movement of a plotter pen or a laser in a laser printer.

If Constructivism was socially realistic for revolutionary Russia then these works are socially realistic against the backdrop of NATO’s military-industrial-educational complex. They turn the technology of that culture back on itself, using it not to produce weapons or market products but to produce aesthetics. This reclaims a space for perception and contemplation that is not simply militarily or economically exploited. The obsessively quantitative managerial culture of spreadsheets and inventories yields uncomfortably to the qualitative culture of aesthetics, productively so. These strategies continue through the show. Technology is pushed beyond its intended uses to address cultural tasks.

Many of the prints in the show have a similar number of stages of production to Franke’s process of screen, then photograph, then silkscreen prints. His later plotter-drawn work is also screen printed, as are Klee-inspired generative images by Frieder Nake, and Charles Csuri’s random montage of flies. I don’t know what to make of this. It feels like something should have been lost in the move from an original to a print but plotter drawings aren’t particularly originals, being already representations of data structures in the computer’s memory.

(Charles Csuri, Random War, 1967, detail)

Csuri’s lithograph of randomly placed vector outlines of toy soldiers was produced in 1967 during the Vietnam War, a war that ran as long as it did in no small part due to game theory and computer simulation. There are two armies, one plotted in red and one plotted in black. They meet and presumably battle inevitably but only by chance. There’s more of the outside world in art computing than is often assumed.

William Fetter’s wonderful three dimensional vector images of human figures produced for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, a lithograph from the Cybernetic Serendipity show of 1968, also deal with the human figure within the military-industrial complex. We should not be confused about the status of such images as art by the use and funding of computer graphics by corporations any more than we should be confused about the status of painting as art by the use and funding of oil painting by the Catholic church.

Ken Knowlton’s cheeky nudes and other typographic images of the 1960s and 1980s are an effective escape or release from the constraints of corporate information culture. I’d seen them many times in reproduction but again they are much richer visually as prints.

(Paul Brown, Untitled, Computer Assisted Drawing, 1975, detail)

More detailed systems-based patterns emerge in the 1970s in the work of artists such as Manfred Mohr, Paul Brown, and Vera Molnar. This era that epitomises the approach of rule based serendipity so beloved of later Generative artists. These images are pleasurable to look at but also contain visual or psychological complexity. They also continues to push the performance of computer systems outside of their intended use cases.

By the late 1980s the technical achievements of computerised mass media were exceeding those of art computing. Pen plotters, where they were still used, were no rival to laser printers. Rendered images had to compete with the earliest rumblings of Pixar and Adobe. The increasing availability of digitally designed fashion and entertainment meant that far from being the exception, digital elements in the lived visual environment were becoming the rule.

The reactions to this that art computing in general have made are the subject of the Decode show that is also running at the V&A. Digital Pioneers instead follows the printmaking thread of art computing into the present day where artists such as Roman Verostko, Mark Wilson and Paul Brown have continued with the systems art all-overness of print-based art computing.

To continue in this way marks such work out as something different from the all-pervasive presence of digital imagery in the visual environment. The work has to look different from graphic design and new media rather than from CAD plots or teletype reports, and it does. These works remind us of the history and of the wiring under the board of digital culture. They successfully resist any attempt to reduce them to digital mass media images comparable to the output of the design software that they exist in the same era as.

This switch away from early adoption is necessary to maintain a figure/ground relationship (or a critical distance, or a constructive difference) between the general level of technology in society and the level of technology in art computing. It is not the only solution to this problem, as the Decode show demonstrates, but it is not a retreat.

(Harold Cohen’s AARON, 030508, 2003)

As a long time fan of Harold Cohen, I found the show’s inclusion of computer generated works from his very earliest 1960s felt-tip-on-teletype-print experiments with generating figure and ground relationships computationally to a recent large-scale full-colour inkjet abstract was a real treat. Plotter drawings of abstract shapes from the 1970s and of human and plant forms from the 1980s show the progress that Cohen made in using computers to rigorously explore how art and images are created and function. Being able to study this work close-up reveals details such as debugging information in the teletype prints and the operation of the collision-detection algorithm in the 1980s images. And it provides the pleasure of seeing detailed, well-composed drawings.

This is a recurring experience in Digital Pioneers. Despite the uniformly dismissive attitude of both popular and academic criticism towards art computing the fact is that when you actually see the work in the flesh it rewards sustained attention. Not as historical or technical curiosities, but as images with cultural and aesthetic content and resonance. To ignore this and to continue to claim that this art is less than the sum of its parts would ironically be to fall prey to a particularly extreme attitude of technological determinism.

The show also contains displays of ephemera including magazines and books such as back issues of the Computer Arts Society’s “PAGE” and William Gibson’s supposedly self-erasing story on a floppy disk “Agrippa”. I’d not seen an actual copy of “Agrippa” before. PAGE back-issues are available online, but their presence here flags an important point.

The revived Computer Arts Society has been key in promoting and deepening understanding of the history of art computing in the UK. The Digital Pioneers show and its excellent accompanying book are a good example of how CAS’s project has spread out into more traditional cultural institutions, and many of the images and exhibits in the show come from the archives that CAS has donated to the V&A.

The “Digital Pioneers” book (by Honor Beddard and Douglas Dodds, V & A Publishing, 2009) serves as a catalogue for the show . It contains an informative introductory essay and printed images of many of the works on display as well as a CD-ROM with 200dpi scans of them. These scans are high-resolution enough to be able to examine the images in some detail, although they are no substitute for seeing the images in the gallery. A slightly excessive copyright licencing notice is the only indication that the book has in fact been produced as one in a series of pattern books from the V&A. It’s a must-have if you enjoy the show or have any interest in early art computing.

Digital Pioneers is an opportunity to really look at the work of early computer artists and to evaluate that work directly rather than through the medium of poor reproductions or through the fog of received critical opinion. As a slice of artistic history that just so happens to have been produced on computer it contains much to reward both the eye and the mind.

Digital Pioneers at the V&A

Digital Pioneers book

PAGE Back Issues

via furtherfield review - Digital Pioneers.

The future is no longer just that part of time that has yet to take place, but a cultural projection onto our present. This is how Bruce Sterling opened his keynote address at the transmediale Festival in Berlin, which closed last Sunday, focused this year on the Future.
The festival was opened under the auspices of a snow storm that, however, scared no one away, as visitors remained heads held steadfastly high to watch the stage performance “Tintinnabulations For Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Charlemagne Palestine and the lighting of the laser installation “From One to Many”, a futuristic rainbow by Yvette Mattern.

The performance was accompanied by the ringing of the bells in the Tiergarten, near the House of World Cultures, which had the effect of marking the rhythm and time of this year’s festival, dedicated to the Future. In the words of Stephen Kovats, artistic director for this year and next, “FUTURITY NOW! is not about what will come, but how we have to re-consider our past futures. The future has caught up with us, and now it is our task to define it.”

The festival itself began as a discussion around cacophonic systems and volatility in the wake of the meltdown of global financial systems – the world’s first digital storm. The paths of technological progress, the ‘truth systems’ that mark our digital culture, can no longer be set on autopilot, and the conditions for another form of future need to be laid out.

The most anticipated conference scheduled was the Futurity Long Conversation, a nine-hour long uninterrupted dialogue. It was introduced by Alexander Rose, director of the Long Now Foundation, who gave a very Californian-style introduction of little significance. The conference itself was a relay of one-to-one conversations, bringing twenty-two leading artists, designers, theorists, journalists and media interventionists together to discuss, contextualise and explore the abstract and qualitative elements defining what we conceive of the future today.

This Long Conversation was inspired by the work of The Long Now Foundation, an organisation I really like for its way of observing the future and the present (one of the founders was Brian Eno). This international organisation crafts ways with which to perceive time and durational process in radically different and perhaps media-technologically appropriate ways.

The different dimensions of past, present and future flow into each other, creating a state of atemporality. The speed of our society is constantly increasing in terms of processes, logistics and media, causing the present to “shrink”. In the conference Atemporality – A Cultural Speed Control? - keynote speaker Bruce Sterling spoke about the structure of the future and how it has changed, and with it our sense of time. We are running out of the future as a resource for growth, progress and stability. Our cultural is switched on cruise control and has become defective.

The conference examined the limits, gaps and dysfunctions of the future as a cultural object of projection and sought to delineate possibilities and strategies to analyse our present (and its media). Today it is the media that defines how we judge our reality as it is.

Of rather less interest was the exhibition FUTURE OBSCURA, curated by Honor Harger, although I was very impressed with the curatorial framework, as it took its cue from a quote by Thomas Pynchon in Against the Day: “We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel?”
Artists always give us a vision of the world that is in some before its time. It is in this way that their artists have something in common with science fiction writers; taking their cue from the same visionary assumptions, the former express themselves through visual media, while the latter speak to us through the word.
The vision of the future that visual artists express was continued in the thematic exhibition of the festival. As the curator Honor Harger puts it, “the curatorial departure point explores the camera obscura, the historical apparatus in whose interior the image of an exterior scene can be projected. Future Obscura explores how the machines and materials of moving-image making capture, retain and reproduce our reality and so alter our sense of temporality.”
What I really appreciated, for aesthetic reasons, was the tendency to involve artists that make original re-use of low-fi technologies, offering an implicit critique of technology itself.

One of my favourite works was “The Space Beyond Me” (2010), a new work by Julius von Bismarck (Germany) which, much like his last work “Image Fulgurator”, turns the functions of things on their head.
This new work uses the materials and devices of filmmaking to create an uncanny experience of space and time. “The Space Beyond Me” recreates a process in the human brain in which virtual three-dimensional images are reconstructed from two-dimensional information; this takes the form of an immersive installation, where a 16mm camera, which has been converted into a projector, beams a film onto a circular screen that is painted with phosphorescent paint. In this work historical instruments and contemporary digital and robotic technology combine to create a transient experience of futurity.

I also found “The Optofonica Capsule” quite interesting. It creates a futuristic context for experiencing moving image and sound. It is both a visionary design object and an immersive environment in which a visitor can select from a programme of audiovisual works made by international artists and curated by TeZ. The shell-like shape of the capsule enfolds the body of the visitor to optimise the experience of surround and tactile sound. This highly technologically-augmented audiovisual space suggests a future whereby our existing passive tropes of experiencing moving image and sound, have been upgraded substantially.

As concerns the transmediale Award itself, I thought it should have gone to the F.A.T. Lab collective, which Christine Sugrue (winner of the Share Prize 2008) is a part of. The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) was founded in 2007 by Evan Roth and James Powderly. Over the last two years it has grown to nineteen members, working in more than three continents connected through the internet. The entire F.A.T. network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians is committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents.

I found the Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots quite funny, though also tremendously cruel – especially the Coffee Table Robot by Auger-Loizeau & Zivanovic.
The Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots prototypes power themselves with special fuel cells that are able to produce electricity by processing the bodies of flies, and in one case, yes, mice. The future conversation around this table could possibly sound something like “Hi! Want a cup of this coffee made with mice power? It’s still warm.”

Somewhat questionable were the co-operative aspects were of the so-called Art 2.0 (another definition of art and Internet) work “Bicycle Built for Two Thousand” by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, because the people contributing to the initiative did not actually work with each other but only with the authors, so in reality the approach was hardly co-operative at all.
The online work is comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were asked to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result is a reconstructed version of the song Daisy Bell - the first song to implement musical speech synthesis in 1962.

E ancora magnaven e semper beveven Barbera: SQUATTING SUPERMARKETS

* Evento speciale

Inizio:

Domenica, 24 Gennaio, 2010 - 21:00 - 23:30

share2-002620-2_3_4_tonemapped-400×266.jpg

SQUATTING SUPERMARKETS performance di Salvatore Iaconesi e Oriana Persico

Mangiare. Scegliere prodotti, verdure, spezie. Gesti semplici e antichi che nel contemporaneo diventano porte di accesso verso una complessità che di rado ci viene comunicata. Agrumi che viaggiano per migliaia di chilometri. Persone dalle schiene ricurve a raccogliere riso, the, caffè. Catene di montaggio in cui prodotti della natura e della chimica diventano scatole e confezioni che, dopo un po’, riempiono i nostri frigoriferi e le nostre dispense.

E’ un processo opaco, raccontato poco e in modo parziale. Cosa mangiamo? Da dove viene? Chi lo produce? Che impatto ha sull’ambiente e sulle persone? E, soprattutto, chi sono queste persone?

Squatting Supermarkets inizia da lì, da dove finisce l’etichetta. Lo spazio del supermercato, così codificato e controllato, si apre, diventa Open Source. Una azione di squat concettuale: occupare la realtà quotidiana con strati aggiuntivi di informazione, comunicazione, espressione.

Squatting Supermarkets offre una nuova scrittura, per riscrivere il reale: gli oggetti, i prodotti, le cose che mangiamo diventano vivi, e possono raccontare storie.

Già realizzato più volte dentro gli spazi commerciali di supermercati e centri commerciali, Squatting Supermarkets alla Scighera assumerà un ruolo più conviviale.

Un Buffet, pieno di pietanze gustose, permetterà agli intervenuti di aprire dialoghi, di farsi raccontare storie, viaggi ed emozioni. Prendere in mano una tartina, un piatto di insalata o un bicchiere di the diventerà un gesto di apertura al dialogo, alla voglia di essere presenti nel mondo in modo attivo.

Interfacce naturali, computer vision, riconoscimento di gestualità e interaction design da tavola: una realtà aumentata tutta da gustare per reinventare il presente.

Squatting Supermarkets è una idea/performance di Art is Open Source ed un prodotto editoriale Open Source di FakePress.

Presentato per la prima volta come special project del Piemonte Share Festival 2009, ha vinto il Green Prize offerto da Environment Park di Torino.

http://www.artisopensource.net

http://www.fakepress.net

http://www.toshare.it

LA RASSEGNA: Ancora due documentari e una performance intorno al cibo; al centro dell’attenzione il percorso che il cibo compie prima di arrivare in tavola: le dinamiche economiche, commerciali e linguistiche che regolano questo processo, e le umanità che ne sono protagoniste.

Ingresso libero con tessera Arci

viaE ancora magnaven e semper beveven Barbera: SQUATTING SUPERMARKETS | La Scighera.

Alan Shapiro - Star guest of the next Transmediale at the Futurity Long Conversation- inteviewed by Tom Mustroph on new computers,  1968 and anarchism.
Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper “Neues Deutschland,” January  5, 2010
”
As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital  world on a new footing. As a philosopher, he wants to introduce new  thinking into the world.  And as an “anarchist reader of Marx” (self- description), he not only steers Marx’s critique of capitalism in a  new direction, he also believes that alienation and exploitation can  be dragged and dropped to the trash of history. Shapiro, who at one  time worked at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology  (MIT), has been active for 20 years as a software developer and media  studies scholar, especially in Germany. In February, he will be a  signature speaker at the Berlin Transmediale media and art festival.

Neues Deutschland: You want to develop a completely new kind of  computer, and found a New Computer Science. How are we to understand  that?

Existing computers are based on the scientific norms of the 17th  century. They go back to the mechanistic philosophy of Ren? Descartes.  Their goal is to reduce complexity. A problem is broken down into  smaller, more manageable units. This works for a kind of machine-like  software. There is no holistic relationship between the parts and the  whole. The parts and the whole are related to each other like the  parts of a car. In 20th and 21st century philosophy, by contrast, a  lot of emphasis is placed on an integral perspective. I am thinking  above all of the French thinkers like Deleuze, Baudrillard and  Foucault. The New Medicine and the New Biology are also characterized  by an integral approach.

What does that mean when transferred to Computer Science?

New computers should come closer to this integral approach. Biology  teaches us that each individual member of a species, in every second  of its existence, is reading its genetic code.  From this body of  knowledge that belongs to its species, the singular individual decodes  information in real-time for its own existence. Transferred to computer science, this means that we must develop a new relationship  between the executable program and the database elements.

Will that lead to better, faster, and more powerful computers?

Computers will themselves become more complex rather than being  engineered as tools for the reduction of complexity. Let us face this  fact: with existing software, nothing surprising can happen. There can  be no surprises and no emergence. Only what the software developer has  pre-programmed can occur. New computers will be more flexible.

What we intend to do can be described as a new relationship of  patterns and similarities. It?s like in music, where, for example,  each single note in a symphony has resonance with the entire symphony.

You take your examples from science and art. Do you believe that  artistic approaches are helpful in technology development?

Absolutely! I am very influenced by the cultural revolution of 1968,  by the student rebellions, the liberation movements in all areas of  society, also New Age and Buddhism, the whole panorama of holistic  ideas for happiness.

I published a book about the technologies of Star Trek. It has been  recognized as an important work of sociology. I believe that we are  very close to a new paradigmatic breakthrough where art, science, and  philosophy will be unified. Then we will be able to develop the Star  Trek technologies. In the middle term, in about 20 years, time travel  will also be possible. The first step towards that is the New Computer  Science.

At the present time, almost everyone who believes himself to be in  touch with the times wants to bring art, science, and philosophy into  harmony with each other. What is different about what you are doing?

We unify theory and practice. That?s what Karl Marx said. I have done  an anarchistic reading of Marx. We will replace work with play,  enjoyment, friendship, creativity, and diversity of activities.

This is a new anarchistic Marxism that we will first try out at  Shapiro Technologies as a radical-pragmatic utopian experiment.

What will Shapiro Technologies develop?

We will be active in technology, media, futuristic design, and  ecology. The basis of our advanced technology is a new mathematics  that has been developed by the Irish mathematician Alexis Clancy. He  is a genius, a new Einstein.

The individual products can be very diverse. We are trying at the  present time to get contracts at the Deutsche Bahn in the area of  logistics, at Volkswagen or another automobile manufacturer in the  areas of Spoken Dialogue Technology and the Car of the Future, with  Computer Games developers working on emotions and storytelling/ narrative, in Japan with interactive talking comic books, and at Pixar/ Disney in America with Artificial Life characters at theme parks.

In February, you are going to present a new car at the Transmediale.  Can you tell us something about that?

The car should no longer be reduced to the transport function of  getting from Point A to Point B. Here it is also about taking an  integral approach. Speech capabilities should be integrated. The car  will become a new game platform. Video projections can be made on all  the car’s windows with a new glass technology. The car becomes a cockpit for all kinds of virtual reality simulations which are at the  same time experienced physically. The car becomes a vehicle for  traveling into cyberspace. Additionally, the car should be turned on  its side, be transformable into a vertical car, its width should be  decreased by 45%. As they are now, cars take up much too much space in the urban environment.

”
via RedRom

The non-profit association organising the CYNETART-festival named TMA Hellerau hosts an international competition of CYNETART, inviting artists and art groups to present their projects every two years. They can apply with projects that fully utilise digital technologies in their conceptual, creative and performing processes, thereby opening up opportunities for digital performance and their relationship to factors such as time, space, physical presence and social encounters.

An international jury with representatives from well-established media culture institutions and experienced scientists with a background in media art history will decide about the winners of the CYNETART-awards, sponsored by commercial enterprises in the ammount of 10.000 Euros  and will also decide on an sponorship award as well as on the artist-in-residence-scholarship both funded by the Saxon State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Fine Arts.

Partecipate to CYNEART 2010.
Deadline for submission is february 28th 2010.
The CYNETART 2010 is held from November 11th to 21st 2010.

After seppukoo.com another Suicide Machine…is the Web 2.0 finish ?

s.

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Facebook fights back, disallows the Suicide Machine

Websuicide Like the computer in the movie “2001,” Facebook is struggling to keep its profiles from virtual extinction at the hands of its arch enemy - the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

The Suicide Machine is a clever Web site out of the Netherlands that was designed to free users from their social network lives on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. You just pick one of the networks, start up the machine, and it graphically shows you unfriending your contacts, one by one, and eliminating all your other contacts with your profile. Forever.

Although the now-friendless profile actually survives, the Suicide Machine is designed not to allow you ever to sign on to it again.

You don’t want to fool around with it unless you’re serious. Like taking that first step off the Golden Gate Bridge, once you click to start the process on the Suicide Machine, you can’t stop it.

See video, below, on how the machine works and a tongue-in-cheek look at life in the real world after freedom from social-networking sites.

Except that Facebook is now fighting back. The Suicide Machine is reporting that Facebook has banned its IP address, thus foiling suicides. You can almost hear the machine singing “Daisy.”

But this is not the end, swears the Web version of Dr. Kevorkian. The Suicide Machine posted a friendly message on its site: “We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service! Thanks for your understanding.”

– David Colker

via Facebook fights back, disallows the Suicide Machine | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

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via BBC news

Facebook blocks social network profile removal service

Once users opt for “web suicide” the process cannot be halted.

Social network giant Facebook has blocked a website from accessing people’s profiles in order to delete their online presence.

The site, Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, offers to remove users from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace.

It does not delete their accounts but changes the passwords and removes “friend” connections.

Seppukoo.com, which offers a similar service, was issued with a “cease and desist” letter by Facebook in 2009.

Netherlands-based moddr, behind Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, says it believes that “everyone should have the right to disconnect”.

However Facebook says that by collecting login credentials, the site violates its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (SRR).

“Facebook provides the ability for people who no longer want to use the site to either deactivate their account or delete it completely,” the company said. “We’re currently investigating and considering whether to take further action.”

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine claims that it only stores the name, profile picture and “last words” of its clients, who can choose to watch their friend/follower connections disappear in real time as their profiles unlink from others.

“Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web 2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom,” says a statement on its website.

Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web 2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom.
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

The machine operates on an adjusted Linux server which runs open source software Apache 2.

Seppukoo.com, which offers to remove people from Facebook, received a letter from the social network site’s lawyers in December 2009.

Once they have deleted their friends Seppukoo clients can choose an image instead of their profile picture to remain as a “memorial” .

The site is run by a group called Les Liens Invisibles, and describes itself as an artistic project. The name Seppukoo is taken from a Japanese ritual form of suicide known as Seppuku.

In November 2009 the group orchestrated the “virtual suicide” of a group of fictitious Facebook profiles set up in the names of deceased well-known figures including Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison and Virginia Woolf.
via BBC News - Facebook blocks social network profile removal service

Spazio Elastico

Gianni Colombo Exhibition
Castello di Rivoli – Contemporary Art Museum

The Castello di Rivoli recently closed its retrospective dedicated to the artist Gianni Colombo.

For all of those dear artists among you that use interactive space as their artistic medium, you’d go ga-ga in the “Elastic Space” installation set up in the Manica Lunga wing of the museum. This perceptual dream-like space is extraordinarily designed to disorientate the viewer. Here, fluorescent elastic strings are illuminated by black light, creating a perceptual environment that triggers an emotional response and makes a statement.

This is without a doubt Colombo’s most famous work, winning him first prize at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Unlike much of the conceptual art produced in those years, this work has not been tarnished by time, holding its own in today’s digital art world, though without the need for digital apparatus or sensors. How’s that you ask?

Because Colombo sought to involve the viewer, building his work on the concept of a participatory artistic space, which viewers could enter and not just observe. Colombo focused on creating synaesthetic art, anticipating many current schools of thought that have flourished in the Internet age.

The space in which a work unfolds is its environment, coming to life through the interaction of viewers. In this way, an art work is a space for action.

As the curator of the exhibition Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (who is already sorely missed, but let’s not delve into the controversy of her successor for the top spot at the museum) says, Colombo wouldn’t have been too happy to see his work written-off as kinetic art, the movement developed over the 1950s and 1960s.

We too agree that such a categorisation does not do Colombo justice. His work goes well beyond the exploration of mechanical movement which characterised kinetic art, focusing instead on the relationship with time that is built through participation in the work – anticipating the co-operative aspects that digital languages and the Internet have enabled us to explore forty years on. Hence art becomes participation, inspired by an ideal point of contact between technology and science, which here is expressed as an artistic language (a theme that environmental art has also developed, as for instance by Christo and Jeanne-Claude).

In 1959 Colombo founded Gruppo T together with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi and Grazia Varisco. Here T stands for TIME, understood in an impersonal and scientific sense, which is what gives rhythm to an art work, which in turn should evoke a psychological response in the audience.

Colombo’s “Alveolar Acentric Structures” are another example of a work that, thanks to its characteristic unpredictability, anticipates contemporary generative art (whose value is rooted in the shapes self-generated by the code that gives the work its shape).

Unveiling the process is the aim of this aesthetic, where the idea is the random, statistical process itself. These were the years when Umberto Eco wrote his “Open Work” and the Gruppo T artists were exhibiting their work in Olivetti’s Milan store, earning themselves the title of “maniacs of the mathematizing programme.”

These were also the heady years of the economic boom in what was a fundamentally bourgeois era that has long been left behind and whose legacy of conflict bequeathed to future generations has made sure that it is in no way missed.

Everyone likes to start the new year with a new dream to realize…..but Molleindustria (software house), the super funny authors of radical and activist games against the dictatorship of entertainment, remind us
that we play the same game every day: the routine.

Every day the same dream

Molleindustria

Music by Jesse Stiles

The game, except for the music, is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Tender and irresistible new year cart built with processing by Golan Levin and friends.

thanks!

di Simone Arcagni

Ho incontrato Giacomo Verde al convegno “Cinema italiano e culture europee” organizzato da Giorgio De Vincenti e Marco Maria Gazzano (Roma 13-16 dicembre). Aspettando di postarvi un’intervista che sto organizzando, vi voglio segnalare il suo sito dove potrete trovare video, dichiarazioni, informazioni di e su questo artista che fa del video un attivismo artistico, sociale e politico, una militanza visiva (penso a Solo Limoni sul G8 di Genova). Tra i primi e più convincenti artisti italiani ad occuparsi di tecnologie e a progettare opere interattive, Verde attraversa il teatro e il video, le arti visive, le nuove tecnologie e i media alla ricerca di forme nuove di espressione e di racconto. Ama definirsi “technoartista”… vi lascio una sua intervista del 2006:

via Postcinema: Giacomo Verde.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcznN1hdVSo

Ramon Moro

In solo trumpet, fluegelhorn, effects, loops

You are free to share,

to copy,  distribuite  and  transmit  the  work

_______________________________________________________

Ramon Moro

Magma

Born in Turin in1975, he started to study trumpet at 11 years old. Sergio Bongiovanni was his teacher: first he set up classic studies, then he turned to a musical research closer to jazz. He attended for two years the Laboratorio Permanente di Ricerca Musicale in the Fondazione Siena Jazz with the pianist Stefano Battaglia.

His actual projects are:

in solo – Magma;

3quietmen;

3quietmen & Stefano Battaglia.

« [npg008]Bloodythings & Mornings _ Live @ Madame Claude

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http://www.seppukoo.com/

By Jasmina Tesanovic - Posted on December 27th, 2009

Facebook Threatens Artists with Lawsuit

It all started as Net.Art — an act of Net Hacktivism. “Les Liens Invisibles” are the Invisible Connections, Italians famous for creating disruption with fake websites. Their motto is “Don’t Blame the Fake, Become the Fake.”

A Catholic politician once censored an net.art site which denounced priests as pedophiles. Les Liens Invisibles counterstruck by creating a fake website for the politician.

Next they tried a fatter target: Facebook, the biggest, bossist and most intrusive of the major social networks. They creating an “antisocial network,”

Seppukoo.com,

which uses the same social techniques as Facebook, but to opposite effect.

This Seppukoo site offers a glorious Japanese-style exit to the swarming hundreds of millions of Facebook users. Seppukoo will swiftly erase your profile and create a memorial page, while the news of your demise will be sent off to all your Facebook contacts.

“Impress you friends and disconnect yourself.” This is the slogan which the site uses to present the formal escape from Facebook captivity.

“Rather than fall in the hands of their enemies, the old Japanese samurai preferred to commit suicide honorably and willingly with a sword in their abdomen”, says the site’s helpful explanation.

The goal of this site is to unite all of Facebook’s disappointed users in one massive, viral, ecstatic wave of virtual suicide.

You just register, choose your model of eternal peace, click and your Facebook profile will be dis-activated. Seppuko will send the news of your virtual death to all your friends of the dead and they will be able to comment on a memorial page.

If you decide after that your death was a mistake, or just a stunt to register your growing discontent with a site that treats your privacy as their blank check then you can easily return to Facebook life with a single click.

This intervention premiered during the Share festival / Digital Art in Turin Italy, and was part of the exhibition “Market Forces”. Seppukoo was net.art as viral marketing. The effort started on November 3 2009 but very soon 300 000 users swarmed by. It caught the eye of the world press. Share art director Simona Lodi, thanks to her numerous Facebook contacts, rapidly became the world’s most famous Facebook suicide victim.

Even CNN reported puzzled on the nature of the issue. That is exactly what the activist wanted: to question the authority and legality of a social network, who clearly makes up its own rules as it goes.

However, they didn’t plan or expect a direct legal counterattack from Facebook. Facebook through its legal representative — a firm which works for Google, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, as well as President Obama himself , gave them an ultimatum to disappear by 22 December. The legal grounds of their threat is based, rather oddly, on the “protection of the privacy” of Facebook users.

The answer of the internet performers is that Seppukoo is a nonprofit, non commercial, artistic website. They further state that the data in question belongs to Facebook users and never belonged to the Facebook management. This is the core of the matter: Facebook users have voluntarily forwarded their data to Seppukoo and anti- networked on their own.

Surely every individual should have the right to disconnect from his/her own virtual life. But by whose rules?

“The “Les liens invisibles” group will cheerfully delete all of the information on the www.seppukoo.com website — but only if the owners of such information request it. Facebook has not yet committed suicide, so why should it wipe out this data through a legal threat?

Simona Lodi claims that this artwork clarifies the role of the individuals in a social network. When hidden economic interests pop out, individual users can swiftly see themselves in a surprising new role: as valuable mass commercial property for enterprises studying their every move.

The Italian avant-garde has not yet lost its long tradition of audacity. Net.artists, don’t get arrested without a photographer around

Jasmina Tesanovic’s blog • Login or register to post comments

viahttp://www.seppukoo.com/ | zokster.

Suicidio digitale: Facebook non ci sta e attacca Seppukoo

Suicidio digitale: Facebook non ci sta e attacca SeppukooQualche tempo fa vi avevamo parlato di Seppukoo, sito che consentiva a chi volesse privarsi di Facebook di farlo in modo plateale e coreografico, ovvero inscenando un vero e proprio suicidio digitale, con tanto di messaggio d’addio e memorial page.

Bastava inserire indirizzo mail e password di Facebook, seguire le istruzioni ed eccovi in pochi passi liberi dal vostro amato/odiato Social Network.

Il progetto è italiano ma ha avuto subito visibilità globale, tanto che ne ha parlato anche la CNN:

qui

Ebbene, sembra che l’iniziativa sia arrivata anche davanti agli occhi di Marck Zuckerberg, che non deve averla presa proprio benissimo. Pare infatti che il Team di Facebook abbia inviato, tramite i suoi legali, una lettera ai responsabili di Seppukoo.

Un lettera non proprio amichevole,

visto che contiene un preciso ultimatum: Seppukoo deve sparire non solo da Facebook (dove l’applicazione è già stata censurata) ma anche dall’intera Rete entro il 22 dicembre.

La principale motivazione dell’azione sarebbe la salvaguardia della privacy degli utenti a cui – stando alla lettera – Facebook terrebbe più di ogni altra cosa. Ma questo sembra un eufemismo per nascondere i veri motivi dell’attacco, probabilmente commerciali.ù

Al di là di ciò, che ci sia stata una reazione è piuttosto comprensibile. Facebook è prima di tutto un’azienda, e come tale si è sentita minacciata da un sito che invitava gli utenti a rompere il rapporto con essa. Certo, vista così rimane fuori il lato scherzoso – quasi goliardico – del Seppukoo che oltretutto è pienamente reversibile. Sarebbe interessante sapere quanti dei suicidi digitali facciano poi ritorno in realtà su Facebook.

I ragazzi di Seppukoo per ora hanno risposto con un piccolo comunicato in homepage e si stanno mobilitando per decidere il da farsi, valutando ovviamente tutte le possibilità.

Vedremo come si evolverà la faccenda, a partire dalla scadenza dell’ultimatum il 22 Dicembre…vi terremo aggiornati!

via

Suicidio digitale: Facebook non ci sta e attacca Seppukoo | Marketing Non Convenzionale - Ninja Marketing.