art positions & projects

CfPP : The Vogelsang Intervention

“How do we seize our own individual image building capacity as an “instrument” in depicting a new present or future?” 

Center for Public Practice-Vogelsang
Tues 19:00 h – 21:00 h colloquium
Wed 10:30 h – 13:30 h
Prof. Julia Scher, in collaboration with Marcel Odenbach, Susanna Schoenberg
Medienkunst
Location: room2 @ glas moog

VOGELSANG OFFSITE INTERVENTION / 3rd excursion

“In a public space make a work that reveals or draws attention to something overlooked, hidden, unseen, or absent, or which bears witness to a past event.”

CfPP supports research, discussion, and production regarding a new public space in Germany. The seminar participants are encouraged to critically engage the site’s evolving identity.
The topic and location, is the former National Socialist elite military leadership school, the NS “Ordensburg” Vogelsang.  “Vogelsang” is now part of the Nationalpark Eifel, and is currently being developed into a multi use public space and learning center.

The VOGELSANG INTERVENTION will take place october 15th – 19th 2009.

Next students’ project presentations is scheduled for  april 15th @ room2.

MidTerm ReView

MidTerm ReView

From december 5th to december 17th 2008

At room2 and exhibition space / filzengraben 2 / former Glas Moog / 50676 cologne

1st COMING TOGETHER : december 9th 5-8 pm with Ustinov, Egermann, Marre, Krause, Holling, Hahlbrock, Pelzer (& Tarcson)

2nd DATE : december 11th 5-7 pm with Reich, Sokolova, Konvensyrjä, Dhur, Zangeneh, Bibileishvili (& Tarcson) 

Perspective Drawing

Samstag, 11. November: public lecture des US-amerikanischen Künstlers Bradley Pitts  (18 Uhr, Aula, Filzengraben 2).

Bradley Pitts

Der US-Künstler Bradley Pitts präsentiert seine aktuellen Projekte, unter anderem seine Erfahrungen am Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in der Nähe von Moskau mit der Schwerelosigkeit. “Blind, taub und nackt ist der Weg der parabolischen Flugerfahrung”. Räumliche Symmetrien und Desorientierung sind wiederkehrende Elemente seiner ästhetischen Recherchen.
Bradley Pitts (geboren 1978) studierte am MIT aerospace engineering, Kunst und Artchitectur. Nach einem Master of Science in aeronautics und astronautics entschloss er sich für die künstlerische Karriere. Die letzten drei Jahre verbrachte er in Amsterdam, wo er zur Zeit an der Rijksakademie van beeldende kusten als Resident Researcher im Bereich Art/Science aktiv ist.
Am 12. November 2008 ab 10.30 Uhr wird Bradley Pitts im Rahmen des Seminars von Prof. Julia Scher einen Workshop für KHM Studierende geben.
Dokumentation zu seiner Arbeit unter www.bradleypitts.info

Earth Sounds

Returning for its third year, the Electronic Music Foundation’s acclaimed sound art, music and ecology festival Ear to the Earth will take place this month in locations all over New York City. Ear to the Earth is organized around the principle that sound’s distinct emotional impact makes it a significant medium in which to explore environmental concerns such as global warming, extinction and habitat destruction. Divided into two sections, “New York Soundscapes” and “Other Soundscapes,” this year’s events maintain a strong urban emphasis. Andrea Polli’s installation Cloud Car, takes the automobile, a key force within the development of American cities, as its locus. With the aide of special effects technician Chuck Varga, Polli will envelop a Ford Taurus station ! wagon entirely in mist. Visitors will be invited to sit in the car and listen to environmental sound compositions. Resembling a broken down vehicle on the side of a highway, the work is a poignant symbol for America’s current predicament in regards to oil dependency. Cloud Car will be on display at Eyebeam October 18th and will then move to the New York Hall of Science on October 25th. LoVid will also examine energy in their performance Sunification (for Sync Armonica & solar sound) on Thursday October 16th. Drawing from their 2007 Turbulence commission Bonding Energy, in which the duo positioned seven solar panels across New York State in order to collect and transmit solar energy information to a site that visualized this data, their performance will use this same solar data as a bas! is for live mixing and manipulation with a device known as the Sync Armonica. Other performances scheduled for the festival will foreground the experience of the city from a personal perspective. On October 17th, Marina Rosenfeld will debut Near Speakers, where she will use field recordings of the ‘bleed’ from cheap earbud headphones in spaces such as trains and elevators, an everyday experience for many, in a unique DJ set. Following Near Speakers, Miya Masaoka will present Quest for Minetta Creek, which looks at the mythology surrounding the underground streams of New York City. Departing from the idea that waterways will eventually go above ground and take over the streets in the event that humans were to depart, Masaoka interviewed residents living near the underground water source Minetta Creek about their knowledge of and interaction with the stream and pairs this with! field recordings of the Minetta itself. Imaginative and slightly dystopic, the work captures city dwellers’ common remove from environmental forces. – Ceci Moss
http://www.emfproductions.org/upcoming/overview.html

Security By Julia : documentation online

SBJ XVII Biennale di Venezia 1993

The SBJ series goes from I to XLVI (01 to 46). Already online pictures documentate following editions:

II installation, video and live feeds / 1989
IV installation, video, performance and live feeds / 1989
IX installation / 1990-91
XVII installation, video and live feeds (Biennale di Venezia) / 1993
XLIII Pussybooth / 2001
XLV installation / 2002
XLVI installation, performance live cctv & computer feeds / 2002, 2004

"A Cultural History of Surveillance" : working on a TimeLine

1608 The earliest known working telescopes appeared, credited to Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen, spectacle-makers in Middelburg, and Jacob Metius.

1609 Galileo used a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons. The name telescope was coined for Galileo’s instrument by a mathematician, Giovanni Demisiani, in 1611. The name was derived from the Greek tele = ‘far’ and skopein = ‘to look or see’.

1642 Pascal constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal’s calculator or the Pascaline

1785 Plan for Hotel-Dieu, Drawing by Bernard Poyet (Fonte: FERMAND, C.. Les hôpitaux et les cliniques: architectures de la santé, Paris, Le Moniteur, 1999, p. 20)

Bernard Poyet
1786 Plan for a Hospital, Drawing by Bernard Poyet

1791 General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon, Drawing by Willey Reveley after Jeremy Bentham

1791 Reveley after Bentham

1796-98 Alois Senefelder developed lithography

1837 Charles Babbage designed a fully programmable mechanical computer he called The Analytical Engine

1837 1st telegraph by Samuel F. B. Morse

1840 Projet de pénitencier, Drawing by Harou Romain

1840 Romain

1878 1st phonograph, patented by T.A.Edison, invented by Charles Cros

1887 Emil Berliner invented and patented the grammophone

1889 Herman Hollerith developed and patented a punched card data processing technology for 1890 US Census and founded the Tabulating Machine Company,  one of the three companies that merged to form Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, later renamed IBM

1900 Reginald Fessenden successfully transmitted his speech over a distance of about one mile, which appears to have been the 1st audio radio transmission.

1927 Russian inventor Léon Theremin developed a mirror drum-based television system which used interlacing to achieve an image resolution of 100 lines.

1927 Herbert E. Ives of Bell Labs transmitted moving images from a 50-aperture disk producing 16 frames per minute over a cable from Washington, DC to New York City. Ives used viewing screens as large as 24 by 30 inches.

1927 Fritz Lang directed Metropolis (screenplay written 1924)

1929 Dziga Vertov edited the movie Man with a Movie Camera

1929 Vertov

1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World

1935-1944 On air period of the German TV Station Paul Nipkow. Its headquarters were in Berlin. It was named after Paul Nipkow, the inventor of the Nipkow disk

1936 Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

1939 John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1

1941 Konrad Zuse developed Z3, the first working machine featuring binary arithmetic, including floating point arithmetic and a measure of programmability. In 1998 the Z3 was proved to be Turing complete, therefore being the world’s first operational computer.

1942 Siemens installed first CCTV for the monitoring Test Stand VII of A4-skyrockets (in Peenemünde)

1945 Vannevar Bush published in Journal The Atlantic Monthly the article  As We May Think. He is thinking about a system called Memex (for Memory Extender) as an electronic exstention of human memory and knowledge. A prototype both of PC and hypertext.

1946 Peter Goldmark (CBS) demonstrated his color television system. His system produced color pictures by having a red-blue-green wheel spin in front of a cathode ray tube.

1949 This mechanical means of producing a color picture (by Peter Goldmark) was used to broadcast medical procedures from Pennsylvania and Atlantic City hospitals. In Atlantic City, viewers could come to the convention center to see broadcasts of operations. Reports from the time noted that the realism of seeing surgery in color caused more than a few viewers to faint.

1951 The first video tape recorder (VTR) captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses and saving the information onto magnetic tape1956 Ampex sold the first VTR for $50,000

1957 Sputnik launch, 1st artificial satellite

1958-1980 Developement and activity of SAGE, Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SAGE_control_room.png (This image is a work of a U.S. Air Force Airman or employee, taken or made during the course of the person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is)

1950-80ies US SAGE

1961 first meteorological satellites launched by the USA

1963 Philips presented first audio cassette recorder

1963 Nam Jun Paik exhibit 13 TV monitors at EXPosition of Music ELetronic television at Galerie Parnass Wuppertal

1964 Marshall McLuhan published Understanding Media

1963-65 Ted Nelson (Projekt Xanadu) coined and published the term hypertext

1969 Vito Acconci produced Following Piece in New York

1969 Following Piece

1969 US Defence and its Advanced Research Project Agency developed ARPANET

1969 Sony introduced a prototype for the first widespread video cassette, the 3/4″ composite U-matic system, which Sony introduced commercially in 1971 after working out industry standards with other manufacturers. Sony later refined it to Broadcast Video U-matic or BVU

1969-70 Bruce Nauman developed the installation Live-Taped Video Corridor (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/live-taped-video-corridor/)

1969-70 Bruce Nauman produced Video Surveillance Piece / Public Room, Private Room

1969-70 Bruce Nauman’s Video Surveillance Piece

1970 William S. Burroughs published The Electronic Revolution (In both The Electronic Revolution and The Job (1970), Burroughs mapped strategies for the use of tape recorders as instruments of psychic terrorism); (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electronic_Revolution)

1970 Dan Graham staged TV Camera / Monitor Performance at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax

1971 The first Video Cassette Recorder were sold by Sony

1971 Jochen Gerz presented IBM Colour Ribbon: Unlike the videotape, the typewriter ribbon directly and visibly shows the information transferred to it. As a waste product, it embodies mechanical text production as a process in time (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/ibm-farbband/)

1971 Gerz

1973 Peter Weibel installed Observation of the Observation: Uncertainty

1973 GPS program Joint Program Office is started

1974 Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie The Conversation

1974 Coppola

1975 Michel Foucault published Surveiller et punir

1976 Dara Birnbaum edited Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman

1976 Wonder Woman

1976 VHS video format introduced by JVC

1977 Dan Graham staged Performer/Audience/Mirror

1978 1st GPS satellite launched

1978 Antonio Muntadas produced the video On Subjectivity (About TV)

1978 Antonio Muntadas

1979 Sony and Philips developed toghether the Compact Disk CD

1979 first edition of ars electronica festival, Linz, austria

1981 Sophie Calle acted The Shadow : «In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detetctive agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to proviede photographic evidence of my existence.» In The Shadow she sets the detective’s photographic account against her own observations: the observer becomes the observed. The viewer is the third witness. This search for her own identity fails to reveal a clear picture here, too. Sophie Calle’s face does not appear in any of the pictures: her figure emerges like a shadow throughout the detective’s photographs. (http://www.hausderkunst.de/englisch/aus/daten_pages/0008.html)

1981 Sophie Calle’s The Shadow

1982 Ridley Scott directed Blude Runner

1982 David Rokeby started to develope Very Nervous System, his first major interactive work using video cameras, image processors, computers, synthesizers and a sound system to create a space in which the movements of one’s body create sound and/or music.

1983 Michael Klier directed/edited the movie Der Riese, an unconventionally constructed essay video on video surveillance in public space

1983 Der Riese

1984 1st Macintosh 128k presented

1985 Julia Scher‘s 1st reference to surveillance Hardley Feel It Going In (painting with surveillance system)

1986 Julia Scher‘s 1st Bubble Memory device by Hitachi Softly Tapping The Wires (interactive installation)

1991 Julia Scher presenting DDD (Danger Dirty Data)

1998 Surveillance Camera Players staged George Orwell’s 1984. Excerpt of the storyboard of Art Toad’s adaptation of George Orwell’s famous anti-utopian play 1984 took place on the platform of a New York subway station in November 1998. www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/george-orwells-1984

1998 Surveillance Camera Players

2007 Nino Leitner directed Every Step You Take, a CCTV surveillance documentary (everystepyoutake.org)

** to add:

* deutsche Romantik / Landschaften

* Humanismus

* datafiles and computer science

* practies of social authority : examples from asia, south america

* CCTV 1st references in USA and Sowiet Union

* the past happening in the present (show the shift) -> explosion of media -> tube-technology

* shift from tape to hard-drive

* capture & control

* unframed (before Acconci)

*all the things send to space (library)

* Irit Batsy

* Apocalypse (result of no watching) -> look for a work or position dealing with apocalypse (Lars von Trier? Michael Haneke?)

* seeing not seeing: millions of art works: which subcategory for explosiotion? A list of places where art is shown! (after date with Jason Simon)

* data desaster

* timeline compiled by arte-e-parte, 2008

Buero fuer Unabwaegbarkeiten at ars electronica, Linz, austria

The MobileLab is a wagon moved by hand; it contains various tools and devices as well as an electrical supply. Recording & playback devices will be used to initiate a dialog
between the Linz cityscape and what’s transpiring at the festival. Current measurements taken in Linz as well as documentation and results of previously-conducted
investigations will flow into the Bureau’s ever-growing pool of data, which will be accessible via a Web-based archive displayed as a wiki. This structure enables users
not only to access the Bureau’s data but also to revise it any way they want, use it for other purposes, or develop it further.

Please join the wiki

http://www.khm.de/~bfu