Archive by Author
Grey Area – Centre for Creative Collaboration
July 30, 2010 by admin, under exhibitions.
Sarah Abu Bakr, Ric Carvalho and James Irwin, in partnership with the Centre for Creative Collaboration, London, invite you to Grey Area, an exhibition which re-thinks and re-mediates contemporary art practices in relation to new technologies. Jack Burnham (1970) predicted that our relationship with art in the Information Age would evolve from a ‘one-way’ process to a ‘two-way’ dialogue.* Taking this challenge as a starting point, the works exhibited within Grey Area operate in this dialogical space.
Sarah Abu Bakr’s work questions women’s traditional identities in Middle Eastern, Muslim cultures. It maps the processes of how women are producing new forms of identity. In the space between traditional and contemporary life women are reshaping their relationships between body, culture, and religion. How does she, as part of the post 1990 Gulf War generation, express these multiple experiences? How do new forms of selfhood and agency emerge out of previous cultural entrenchments? Her videos are concerned with such dilemmas. For example, five.five.five. is based on the daily practice of performing the five times a day prayers – Salat. In this work the ritual is abstracted and made in silence. The context is changed.
Ric Carvalho’s work is produced in transient spaces such as supermarkets, lobbies and street corners. These interventions and social happenings challenge how people interact with everyday activity and events. For Next Customer Bar, he has inserted a LED display into the handheld bars which are found at supermarket checkouts. Normally they are used to distinguish one customer’s groceries from another. When the scrolled text is based on cues prepared for television advertising, what kinds of
messages overwhelm the products purchased? What kinds of images and narratives are now made? Placed between production and consumption, do ‘we’ become active agents in creative processes and actions?
James Irwin’s sculptures break down and disrupt real-time technologies. He examines the relationship between contemporary art and technology from a critical perspective. For Grey Area he has partly closed off a room with an anechoic screen. Six square meters of RAM isolates the rest of his works from the wireless and social networks in the building. Carbon foam pyramids prevent electromagnetic and sound waves from entering the room. Here, we are presented with lo-tech sculptures that engage with minimalist and conceptual aesthetics. How do we respond to real-time communication within an architectural space that is staged for the reception of gallery based art?
* Burnham, J. W. 1970, The Aesthetic of Intelligent Systems. In: E. F. Fry ed: On the Future of Art. New York: Viking Press, 1970. p.1.
You are warmly invited to the private view on Friday 17th September 2010 from 6 – 9 pm.
This exhibition is the graduating show of the MFA Computational Studio Arts, Goldsmiths, University of London.
It runs from the Saturday 18th September until Thursday 23rd September.
When:
10am – 6pm, Saturday 18th – Thursday 23rd September 2010
Where:
16 Acton Street, London. WC1X 9NG
How to get there:
Nearest tube: King’s Cross St. Pancras.
Buses 17, 45 & 46 drop off on Gray’s Inn Road near the end of Acton St.
Due to health and safety reasons the space can hold no more than 105 people at any one time.
RSVP to: info@greyareaexhibition.com
For more information please visit: www.greyareaexhibition.com
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Liam Gillick’s presentation at the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, Oct 24, 2009
April 16, 2010 by admin, under thoughts.
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Marcel Duchamp clip from The Shock of the New (1982) The Mechanical Paradise
April 11, 2010 by admin, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, formal / structural / grids, inter-bodies / half-objects, mirrors / displays / frames, videos.
Here we can see Duchamp’s shift from linear thinking (Nude Descending Staircase) to something more circular (Bride Stripped Bare..), something he would later call “delay”, as Jerrold Segal notes, “suspended in a space it never traverses.”
The clip of course seems to reffer more to these movements in relation to asthetics, psychological and (male) sexual frustration. What is lacking in Robert Hughes analysis lies in relation to a social, political and economical shifts occuring at the time: a shift from a simplified modernist linear progression of technology moving towards a more lateral, circular and rhizomatic technological progression in a lumming post-modern era.
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3#
April 10, 2010 by admin, under artworks, film / photographic.
3#” uses a track “composed” by media artist Seth Price, its music based on the forms of 1980s electronic pop songs. Price uses music production software to copy the structure of popular music from the recent past. By editing out one element (in this case, the singer), he comments on the genre through an imperfect copy. The video uses text (some quoted from Morrissey’s lyrics) and graphic transitions to outline an argument about how and why pop music functions, pointing to its promises of unique, infamous, and sublime experiences through repetition and mass distribution.
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Jorge Pardo: Project – Design Process as outcome
March 31, 2010 by admin, under artworks, books, formal / structural / grids.
Jorge Pardo. Project, 2000. Volkswagen Full Scale Model, 1995.
Photo: Cathy Carver.
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I
March 30, 2010 by admin, under thoughts.
standing for I, Identity and Index
The mapping of emergent subject surfaces.
Map of rhizomes.
My existence is irreconcileable with itself. Nothing in me is singular. I am many. “Man’s soul is entities (plural)” -Aristotle.
Does thought confer identity? Does interaction with the other confer identity? Perhaps the answer to these question depends on what “thought” and “interaction” mean? Thinking and interacting always belong to Being (as what makes it possible) but it does not always (indeed it hardly ever) correspond to Being. It is not always faithful to Being. When it is so faithful, “Being and thinking are the Same”. But it is never the case that thinking can be without Being, whereas Being can certainly be without thinking or interacting, though without being realized, i.e. without being “in truth”.
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Re-distribution of the Sensible
March 30, 2010 by admin, under books, thoughts.
The following bit of text is from Re-distribution of the Sensible catalogue, text by Warren Neidich:
“The logics of perception and experience are no longer materialistically defined only by contours of geometric and linear time and space arranged hierarchically in a rigid lattice but rather follow curved, non-linear Rheimannian paradigms that are expressed in complicated, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic shifting patterns. Consider for a moment the way commodities are now linked together as branded networks that intensify their desire quotient or how people communicate on chat rooms or move in and out of blog sites. Sovereignty, utilizing these methods and those of the global market place with the help of the continuing scientific research on perception and cognition, has conspired in creating powerful complex networks of attention which allow for the manufacture of explicit “connectiveness” that today defines the distribution of the sensible. Phatic Stimuli, as Paul Virilio refers to them, have evolved into highly attention grabbing conglomerates of stimuli that act as multiplicities and operate beyond the sensorium reaching into the folded gyri and sulci of the brain itself. These networks form a hegemonic cultural syntax which is inscribed en mass on the society as a whole producing new forms of subjectivity and in the case of a world tuned into global media, a bounded multitude. When these networks are internalized and become part of the automatic operation of the body’s or mind’s habitual relationships they form a Society of Control rather then the Disciplinary Society. Self-Censorship is a perfect example of the Society of Control and how insidiously this process becomes self-evident. These images together produce the “Institutional Understanding”. This “institutional understanding” is the framework through which most of us operate in the real world of material things.
But artists also create their own distribution of the sensible. They use their own historical referents, materials, processes, apparati, spaces, performances, to create complex assemblages that together compete with institutional arrangements for the attention of the brain and mind. [...]
They inhabit the same spaces and temporalities as the institutional arrangements that characterize the institutional understanding. Their presence however acts to bend and contort it, in the end, altering its static and rigid arrangements in significant ways. Works like installation art, performative sculpture and urban geographies act to redistribute the facts of this distribution of the sensible while conceptually-based works, relational aesthetics and the institutional critique operate on more metaphysical levels superimposing meaning, contexts and critiques upon it in order to change the way those distributions are read and understood and processed for instance as memories.” The Re-destribution of the Sensible – Warren Neidich.
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Human figure in public art
March 30, 2010 by admin, under inter-bodies / half-objects, public art, thoughts.
The human cannot be seen anymore through the figure of the body in its tradition sense. In order to engage with the human body is a question of ignoring, forgetting it, and replacing it with what ever we have leanrt it not to be. From here let the unexpected forms which we originally thought to be unrepresentable of the human a chance to develop and embody human manifestations. The paradox of this thinking follows the paradoxes which emerge with defining the human in the digital age.
The human figure has already gone a transgression embodying everything else but itself.
I want my audience to feel this flow from displacement to a “new” re-embodiment (Mark Hansen explains quite neatly the definition of “new” in new media). This is what I believe to be at the core of anti-monument public art. Anti in the sense of responding to the traditional and narcissistic attitude of engaging with the human figure and understanding what might be. Of course I’m in no way presenting a solution but a redefinition of the problem which I think is at heart in public art. (and public art which relates to its history and respondes to it in a constructive yet marginal way).
The first step I believe is to create a complete rupture from any narcissistic tendecies in the construction of any discourse related to identifying where ‘is’ the human and the self (if any definition of that still survives) inside the art in question. And focus on things that might have been disgarded and neglected in order to create this conventional perspective in the first place.
To understand the problem at stake we need to revisit the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in which the act of creating the world is partly through forgetting to insert the human in it. Their desparate solution to fix this problem was to give the human “fire” to compensate his lack of qualities. This act of forgetting I believe comes very much in play when considering new media and new media art: flows from disembodiment and reembodiment experienced through such systems requires us to rethink the origins of the human “figure” and human “essense”.
Yes, I do hate Anthony Gormley.
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Research Diagram
March 23, 2010 by admin, under Uncategorized, books, thoughts.
Stated using gliffy to create diagrams for organizing thoughts and the content for my current writtings. Here is a link to research diagram
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A Self Burial by the Sea
March 15, 2010 by admin, under artworks, public art.
The Glue Society has unveiled its latest installation at the Sculpture by the Sea festival in Aarhus in Denmark. The piece, entitled “It wasn’t meant to end like this”, is a huge mechanical digger that seems to have buried itself under 300 tonnes of rubble…
As the Glue Society’s James Dive says, “[the work] has a subdued, still quality, despite its physical size.” It certainly gives the impression that this 25 tonne digger is attemtping to hide itself away.
“It wasn’t meant to end like this” follows previous artistic explorations via a sculpture of a miniature man defecating on a ten foot pigeon (shown in New York) and their infamous God’s Eye View project, which attracted hundreds of comments on the CR blog.
Sculpture by the Sea, the Australian sculpture festival, has recently added Aarhus to its roster of visiting cities. Other work by the Glue Society collective can be viewed at gluesociety.com.