By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at
8:59 am
Video artist Pipilotti Rist's large scale multimedia installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) opened last night at MoMA. The space is designed to immerse and overwhelm the visitor -- a sensation captured by the work's title Pour Your Body Out. Twenty-five foot high projections surround an immense circular couch -- in an interview in one of the videos below MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach likens the perspective to the experience of looking up while laying at the bottom of a pool. Rist is also interviewed, and she discusses how she staged the project.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at
3:00 pm
Image: 386DX performance at Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2000. (Photo by Jenny Marketou)
Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugget of criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop", an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour
Your recent exhibition was called "CritiPop." Could you explain where this label came from, and what it means?
We spent a long time thinking about what to call the exhibition. Media Art 2.0 no longer fit. We had moved away from media art and no longer wanted to be associated with it. Eventually, we singled out the most important feature uniting the works: critical communication contained in a popular form, with shiny plastic, bright colors, primitive interactivity, a resemblance to consumer goods, glowing LED screens and so on. Thus, "CritiPop" was born. Its effect is akin to that of advertising or propaganda: vivid, universally recognizable images that conceal a subliminal message.
There is a striking amount of texts and manifestos accompanying "CritiPop." Are you concerned that the critical component of your work won't be read without them?
Almost all these texts were written in the years preceding "CritiPop," for exhibitions in our gallery. So, it was natural to include them. But basically you're right. We had to introduce the viewer to the context, because our works are easy to read on the superficial level of real-time, eye-candy effects, brightly polished plastic and impressive animation.
Image: Installation view at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (Photo by Anton Akimov)
Moscow critics often frame the history of Russian art after perestroika around artists like Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who worked with actions and other ephemeral forms of art during the chaotic 1990s and turned to object-based practice during the relative stability of the Putin administration. Your career follows a similar trajectory. Do you think this is a fairly accurate description of what happened? Why did you abandon net.art and begin to produce objects in collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev?
I think there are similarities here, but also significant differences. Unlike Kulik or Osmolovsky, who always worked on the territory of institutionalized contemporary art, I was working on the internet, which in the 1990s was an open zone for experimentation. I had become disgusted with the world of museums and galleries, where I spent quite some time in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, thanks to perestroika and the boom for Soviet art. I even decided to stop being an artist for a while.
The term net.art came later. In the mid-1990s you could make art on the internet without getting stuck in a particular context. The internet itself was the context. Eventually even net.art was institutionalized. But it did not create its own economy; only JODI could survive as internet artists, thanks to the generous grant system in the Netherlands. But net.art disappeared simply because the internet developed. As soon as a large number of people obtained access to the internet, net.art became meaningless. It dissolved in the mass of blogs and platforms. You could say that net.art invented and investigated methods and technologies used in Web 2.0.
Image: Alexei Shulgin, Natalie Bookchin, Blank+Jeron, Introduction to Net Art, 1994-1999
In the early 2000s I saw some creative potential in software art, which could be called the heir to net.art, and organized with Olga Goriunova four Read.me festivals, as well as the repository Runme.org (along with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean), which is active to this day. While working on Read.me, I noticed that software art was following the same path to demise as net.art -- it was gradually becoming absorbed by media culture and new IT products, by digital banality. That was when I began to work with Aristarkh Chernyshev. Our first project, in 2003, was Super-i Real Virtuality Goggles . But that wasn't my first material project after net.art. In 1998 I made 386 DX, the singing computer, and I've given 100 concerts around the world with it.
Web 2.0 marked the end of net.art, as it had to compete with the glut of ideas published on Livejournal and other sites like it, and thus introduced a crisis of originality. Moreover, the inability of political activism to affect policy -- the main shock here was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- cast doubts on its reasons for existence. That brings us to the mid-2000s. With the strategies of the 1990s facing a crisis, we created Electroboutique as a laboratory for studying new strategies in art. We wanted to create media works that were plug-and-play and zero-maintenance. Furthermore, we wanted to distance ourselves from media activism, which had hit a dead end. Since art equals consumption in the conditions of the unipolar capitalist world, we decided to make a commercial object. We put protest and critique in its body. That's how we arrived at our style, which we called commercial protest. Then we added exciting shapes and sound. And that's how we got CritiPop.
By
Marisa Olson
on
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at
1:00 pm
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are a married couple of New York-based artists whose collaborative work conveys a love of film and televised narratives. Their early projects embodied database aesthetics as they chopped shows like 8 is Enough, Kung Fu, and Starsky and Hutch into short clips, often inviting viewers to rearrange them according to what we'd now call metadata. For instance, one could choose from a bank of DVDs in their Every Shot, Every Episode to watch every occurrence of the color blue, or of extreme close-ups. More recent works have entailed building elaborate miniature film sets, complete with working cameras, to shoot microfilms. In the case of High Seas, the set is a sort of kinetic sculpture in its own right, mimicking its subject as it moves around to create shots of the famed Titanic loosing its footing on the ocean. The role of filmic media in mythologizing the ill-fated boat is of course implicit in the installation. While these projects have always been infused with a sense of subjectivity, as the artists perform their fandom through their selective decisions, lately their work has incorporated more explicitly autobiographical elements. Their piece, Our Second Date, for instance, is a miniature movie set which features the artists watching the film from their second date, Weekend, reenacted through a mobile sculpture and video streamed live to a tiny screen. The choice to position themselves as spectators within their own reality, and moreover to confess that their romance budded around screen pleasure opens up a number of interpretations of their ongoing work and paves the way to their newest project, which opens November 22nd at Postmasters Gallery. In I'll Replace You, the artists again place themselves at center stage, without stepping in front of the camera. Instead, a series of different actors (some of whom are quite miscast) play them in enacting a "day in the life" of the artists. Of course, this day is unfathomably long in that it includes every type of activity in which the artists, parents, lovers, and professors might possibly engage on a given day, thus exploring the roles and experiences that constitute our identities. Nonetheless, the fake McCoys manage to do it all, with the actors changing shift throughout the day, while engaging with the artists' real children, students, friends, and colleagues. The resultant video installation is accompanied by a series of photo portraits of the artists in which passersby and friends stand in for one or another member of the couple (raising questions about the deeper psychic or cosmic nature of compatibility and the implausibility of replacement) and a series of "artist talks" in which actors from outside of the art world discuss work by famous artists as if it was their own. Once again returning to the database form, the latter piece promises to shed light on the genre conventions of art-related discourse and critique with clips that are both humorous and poetic. Leave it to the McCoys to sketch out the formal boundaries of a practice and then show us how fun and beautiful it can be to color within those lines! - Marisa Olson
Image: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, I'll Replace You, 2008 (Photo courtesy of Postmasters Gallery)
Statement:Radio Astronomy is an art and science project which broadcasts sounds intercepted from space live on the internet and on the airwaves. Listeners will hear the acoustic output of radio telescopes live. The content of the live transmission will depend on the objects being observed by partner telescopes. On any given occasion listeners may hear the planet Jupiter and its interaction with its moons, radiation from the Sun, activity from far-off pulsars or other astronomical phenomena.
Statement: Stephen Vitiello's first solo project for the web, Tetrasomia presents intriguing web-based archives of sounds from the natural and physical world, including such sounds as a fruit fly courtship, an underwater volcano, and poison frogs, as the source for an interactive sound project. Tetrasomia also features four new sound compositions by Vitiello: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at
9:00 am
"Assembly Instructions" is a visual thought map, comprised of over 120 small framed black and white xeroxed collages, by Brooklyn-based artist Alexandre Singh. Each collage represents an idea, which the artist connects to other collages via a network of dotted lines. The city of San Francisco is the originating point for the series, and the visitor can follow Singh's train of thought related to this subject by following the intricate and tangential maze of images, which spread throughout the gallery. In a sense, this project is almost a tactile answer to the visual sequence of ideas encountered on sites such as FFFFOUND!, while also drawing on the older practice of free association. The exhibition is up at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco until the end of November.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at
2:40 pm
With the recession in full swing, the upcoming year will undoubtedly be a difficult one for the arts. Many crucial organizations are feeling the heat, such as New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Earlier this year their budget was cut $2.6 million or 6% and now they face major cut backs again. A special legislative session will convene this week on November 18th to discuss cuts, which includes an additional $7 million to NYSCA's current budget. If this proposal goes through, almost 400 grantees in the October cycle and a similar number in the December cycle will receive almost nothing. Arts Action for NY have set up a letter writing campaign to the governor to stop this proposal from passing, see link below.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at
12:28 pm
This past Sunday the New York Times Magazine profiled Lewis Hyde, a writer and poet whose 1983 book The Gift described the value of art and literature in a market system as "the commerce of the creative spirit." Now a fellow Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Hyde is at work on a book that attempts to define how the market of cultural property should be regulated. Excerpts below, see link at the bottom for the full article.
In the late 1990s, Hyde began extending his lifelong project of examining "the public life of the imagination" into what had become newly topical territory: the "cultural commons." The advent of Internet file-sharing services like Napster and Gnutella sparked urgent debates over how to strike a balance between public and private claims to creative work. For more than a decade, the so-called Copy Left -- a diverse group of lawyers, activists, artists and intellectuals -- has argued that new digital technologies are responsible for an unprecedented wave of innovation and that excessive legal restrictions should not be placed on, say, music remixes, image mashups or "read-write" sites like Wikipedia, where users create their own content. The Copy Left, or the "free culture movement," as it is sometimes known, has articulated this position in part by drawing on the tradition of the medieval agricultural commons, the collective right of villagers, vassals and serfs -- "commoners" -- to make use of a plot of land. This analogy is also central to Hyde's book in progress, which looks closely at how the tradition of the commons was transformed once it was brought from Europe to America.
...
Hyde posits that the history of the commons and of the creative self are, in fact, twin histories. "The citizen called into being by a republic of freehold farms," he writes, "is close cousin to the writer who built himself that cabin at Walden Pond. But along with such mainstream icons goes a shadow tradition, the one that made Jefferson skeptical of patents, the one that made even Thoreau argue late in life that every 'town should have ... a primitive forest ..., where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever,' the one that led the framers of the Constitution to balance 'exclusive right' with 'limited times.' It is a tradition worth recovering."
Rhizome staff writer Ed Halter posted a bootleg recording of Cory Arcangel's lecture/performance "Continual Partial Awareness" on Friday to his blog this morning. See above. For those so inclined, imeem also allows you to download it as a ringtone. We will post an entire video of the performance to Rhizome's Video and Vimeo pages soon.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
5:00 pm
Rhizome's Curator-at-Large and Staff Writer Marisa Olson recently curated the online segment of the exhibition "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding," which is currently on view in New York City at Parsons' Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. The exhibition, on a whole, looks at how democracy has become situated as a consumer brand in order to disseminate American values worldwide. The online portion of the show specifically examines subversive strategies emergent from network culture, and how these methods may produce and disseminate ideas that may work against the sway of branding. In light of the recent success of Barack Obama's campaign for presidency, largely due to Web-based grassroots organizing, the scope of "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding" seems to take on a whole new significance. Given this backdrop, I wanted to speak with Marisa about some of the fundamental questions asked by the exhibition. - Ceci Moss
Many of the projects in the online portion of "OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding" are a direct response to the troublesome policies of the Bush Administration, whether it be the divisive rhetoric of "Us" vs. "Them" as seen in Steve Lambert's WhyTheyHate.US or war propaganda as in Joseph DeLappe's Dead-In-Iraq. Now that Obama has been elected president, do you think the tone of politically minded art will change? Working on this show, do you have any sense of what that change might be?
It's funny, a lot of people have been asking me this. One person asked me if there's no longer a need for activist art. Of course there is! I think there's a sense of relief and excitement about Obama's election, but I think things will only gain momentum. What's interesting is that activism doesn't always have to be about saying no. Sometimes it can be about saying yes -- speaking in the affirmative, either to amplify the awfulness of the status quo or to point your target in the right direction. That would be the torque behind the "power of positive thinking." If anything, I believe that Obama has sold people on the fantasy that he will listen to them -- "especially when we disagree," as he so often said in his campaign speeches. A project like this week's NY Times Special Edition (while in the works for several months prior to his election) speaks to this belief and in fact I believe that's why they decided to release the paper after the election, rather than before it, as they'd originally planned. But now that someone in power seems to be listening, activists have all the more reason to speak up and ask for what we want. Truth be told, while the nightmare of the last eight years are coming to an end, it will take a long time to implement the changes we need. And we need to keep asking for these changes. But yes, it will be interesting to see how people's creative and rhetorical strategies shift in this new climate.
Can you flesh-out the way in which you are using the word "branding" in the show?
Carin Kuoni first came up with the idea for the show and then asked if I'd like to curate an online component. I agreed because I thought it was important to address the branding of democracy, particularly during election cycles. I once made a video comparing presidential elections to the "Pepsi Challenge." They tend to feel like a non-choice: one's red, one's blue, but they both taste about the same, and they're both pretty bad for you. Their only difference is that they are branded differently. In prior elections, the concept of democracy had seemed more like a fantasy that one buys into, rather than a reality. For this reason, I particularly liked the first word in the show's title: "Ours." For me, it raises this question of the possibility of voters having ownership over the democratic process (of "having a purchase" on it), vs. the sensation that votes can be bought, or the constant state of slippage in which consumption and investment move from something you do to keep yourself healthy to something you're lured into doing in alignment with an ideological fantasy.
By
Brian Droitcour
on
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at
2:28 pm
Artist's Statement: A video demonstration of a classic Experimental Philosophy experiment on "The Concept of Intentional Action" (AKA the "Knobe Effect"). Comedian Eugene Mirman narrates.
Please make a donation to Rhizome now during our annual Community
Campaign! Our goal is to raise $30,000 by 12/31/08, a figure that is
completely vital to sustain us this year.
Rhizome ($25 level): Rhizome Membership
Rhizome membership comes with full access to our archives, ability to use special site features and discounts to art merchandise online. See our individual membership page for a full list!
Sprout ($50 level): Rhizome Ringtones by YACHT, Rainbro, Taigaa and Ben Coonley In return for a donation of $50, you can choose one of four ringtones
by artist bands Rainbro (a.k.a. Ben
Fino-Radin), Taigaa, YACHT (Jona Bechtolt and Claire
Evans), or Ben
Coonley, who will record a dialogue with his internationally
beloved pony, just for your phone.
Seedling ($100): Nasty Nets DVD, Nasty Nets collective
Nasty Nets is an international ensemble representing some of the most
active artists working online today. Identifying themselves as a "web
surfing club," together the work they post on the nastynets.com blog
both celebrates and critiques the internet. Their collections of
animated gifs, YouTube hacks, html cheat codes, and other found and
edited material offer a poignant and humorous take on contemporary
digital visual culture. On a DVD player, the Nasty Nets DVD offers a
handful of funny, visually playful videos and remixes from the
treasure trove of internet pop culture. On a computer, users can also
access a multitude of file folders jam-packed with a collection
gif-mashups, videos, and other appropriated material that has made the
site so popular, online.
Shoot ($200): Floor Warp, Guthrie Lonergan, 2008
Members will get a screensaver (for Mac or PC) by Guthrie Lonergan. For
members only, Guthrie has converted his video loop Floor Warp
2 into a work of art for your computer. Veteran PC users will
remember the old Warp screensaver for Windows, which inspired this new
loop.
Bud ($300): Member, 2009, Steve Lambert, 2008, edition of five Steve Lambert is going to make a
brand-new business-card-sized drawing edition that states simply
"Member, 2009."
Stolon ($500): Rhizome Balaclava, Cat Mazza, 2008, edition of five
In a variation on her Stitch
For Senate project, Cat
Mazza will use her microRevolt knitPro application to create a
balaclava with the Rhizome logo, to keep you warm in style.
Craft Hackers
Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting
techniques to explore high tech culture and the relationship between
needlework and computer programming.
Friday, December 12 at 7:30pm
at the New Museum
$8 General/ $6 Members BUY TICKETS HERE
Every year, Rhizome awards commissions to a group of international artists for the creation of new work. Read about the nine projects commissioned in our 2009 cycle!
ART & ABSINTHE
Art & Absinthe is a new blog following the ins and outs, hits and misses of the New York City contemporary art scene. Find Art & Absinthe at events in Manhattan and Williamsburg, and check out the website for insider info, details on upcoming events, party photos, and more.
In addition to art attractions open to the general public, Art & Absinthe has teamed up with select galleries and non-profit organizations like Deitch Projects, Rhizome, James Fuentes, Like the Spice, and Leo Kesting
Gallery through the website's sponsor, Pernod Absinthe. (Google readers can grab the RSS feed here: www.artandabsinthe.com/feed
In return for a donation of $50, you can choose one of four ringtones
by artist bands 
Nasty Nets is an international ensemble representing some of the most
active artists working online today. Identifying themselves as a "web
surfing club," together the work they post on the 
Members will get a screensaver (for Mac or PC) by 
In a variation on her 
