public art

Conference ›EVERY STEP YOU TAKE‹, 12.-15. November 2015, Dortmund

Posted by Christian

Opening this Thursday! (12th November 2015, 18:00, Dortmunder U, Cinema, free admission) Welcome addresses, opening lecture (de) by Hans Ulrich Reck (Academy of Media Arts Cologne), film programme, part I: “Living Data” with works by Walter Koch, Ridley Scott, Norman Cowie, Emma Charles, Steffen Köhn, Jen Liu, introduction: Florian Wüst.

And this is just day one. Programme booklet (Programmheft): www.medienwerk-nrw.de/news/everystepyoutake

I’m on a panel with someone from the fantastic Peng!Collective on Sunday Nov 15, from 17.30-18.30, talking about my Hop 3 project currently on show here in Cologne, and how art & activism can go together.

On Saturday Nov 14, Holly Herndron will perform together with Mat Dryhurst in the context of the medienwerk.nrw conference “Every Step You Take” – Art and Society in the Data Age” , at Dortmunder U – Centre for Art and Creativity. Admission is free! Please RSVP here: tickets [at] medienwerk-nrw [dot] de

Video: Holly Herndon/Metahaven (already a classic)

understanding computers?

Posted by Christian

“…our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.”

James Bridle

“Again it comes back to infrastructure and how our inability to describe and understand reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.

Opacity is an important word here too, as is the term ‘black box’. Most of our engineered communications infrastructure is not just extraordinarily abstract for people to come to grips with but is actively kept hidden. There are some valid reasons, of course, for keeping infrastructure hidden but the fact is it out of sight is being increasingly exploited in and out of supposedly democratic contexts, largely by surveillance initiatives we were never told about.

Engendering a healthy paranoia here, along with making work that ruptures the featureless skin of these black boxes – providing points of entry – is important to me currently. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer – and take advantage of – ignorance.”

Julian Oliver

[VIRTUAL_GROUP] Vision Quest – exchanging artifacts, streaming ideas

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vision quest at boutique ebertplatz

virtual_group (cologne) and School of intermedia art (hangzhou) present Vision Quest, an event of some (art) exchange and data-Streaming about how being looking forward to seeing (more).With the participation of art Institute of Basic Visual, Johannes AmoroSa, Malgorzata Calusinska, Chen Si, Vera Drebusch, Theresa Krause, Li Ming, Karin Lingnau, Henning Frederik Malz, Ou Wenting, Evelina Rajca, Zhang Jianyun, Zhang YiShen.
coordinated By Deng Yuedream and Susanna Schoenberg.

Juli 3rd 2011, 10 am – 10 pm
Boutique am Ebertplatz 50668 cologne germany
and madein Space 18 wuwei road putuo district Shanghai 200331 china
www.liveStream.com/virtual_group

YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS

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YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS

John Baldessari is looking for people who want their name in lights, but just for 15 glittering seconds.

Your Name in Lights reflects the changing cult of celebrity in modern society and recalls Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame. Drawing on imagery from Broadway theatre displays and Hollywood films, this ambitious new work will involve more than 100,000 participants.

Register your name and watch it appear in lights on the Australian Museum’s William Street façade.

For more information, and to submit your name, please visit the Sydney Festival 2011 Website.

Exhibition: Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010

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Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010
October 23, 2010-February 20, 2011

Over the last ten years, “land” and “space” have become pressing subjects for artistic investigation, so much so that we can now speak of a new generation of environmental artists.  Nobody’s Property will explore this development and probe the reasons for its appearance at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  The exhibition features the work of seven artists and two artist-teams: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Andrea Geyer, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra.  Using media that range from video and photography to digital animation, performance, and assemblage, these artists parse the economic, geopolitical, and phantasmatic conditions of land and space.  Their methods are as varied as their media, but they tend to coalesce around one of four approaches: the investigatory, the parafictional, the interrogative, and the interruptive.  While some of the artists in the exhibition explore historical configurations of space, gauging its symbolic import for specific actors at specific moments in time, others consider concrete land-sites—sites, that is, with a particular geographical correlate.  Among these land-sites are the cities of Jerusalem and Beirut, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, the Navajo Nation, and the industrial center of Tongling.  Each one crystallizes a larger debate around issues such as war, globalization, cultural patrimony, civil rights, and national sovereignty.

http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/events/Extended_Pages/LSAT/

Biennale: Figures of Interactivity

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At the beginning of the 21st Century those changes which were ushered in by cybernetics half a century ago have started significantly to affect man’s sense of his place on the planet. Space and the distances between entities and our human counterparts have shrunken, without however allowing things and people to become better acquainted nor interrelate through heightened closeness of contact.

Media, data programming, progress in understanding, communicating the here and now and the very place of human presence have undergone major transformations giving direction to the future of society. Today therefore it is relevant to query the “figures” cross-linking and alienating human groups, these historic “figures” in social bonding which are today distorted by development in technologies and in digital technology.

European school of visual arts (ÉESI) fulfills its role as overseer and as a higher education academic institution, in analysis, research, educational method and in that artistic creativity best able to lead the way forward on the path to addressing these basic issues.

Together with the University of Poitiers and the Université du Québec à Montréal, the ÉESI and the Espace Mendès-France have devised the launch of a two yearly international multidisciplinary series of meetings from the Fall of 2008, in the form of a think-tank focusing on the “Figures of Interactivity”.

The title of this second Biennial is Memory(Memories). What happens to memory when, after the book, its place seems to be taken by the computer? Is this really so important, after all, and does not the computer free the memory of its obligations to learn “by heart” and to restore the function it had in Antiquity and the Middle ages, that of being a “matrix of cogitation in which memories are moved and gathered in a scheme with random access, a memorial architecture, a library where man spends his time building with the express intention of using it inventively” (Mary Carruthers, Machina memorialis, Gallimard, 2002).

programme online

HotHouse Symposium: 27-28 July 2010 at the Sydney Opera House

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HotHouse Symposium HotHouse is an initiative of the National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney, a think-tank that brings together leading artists, designers, curators and creative thinkers to develop visions and practical solutions for urban transformation.

HotHouse brings together artists, designers, curators and creative thinkers in a quest to develop models for sustainable environmental change. This “collective experiment” calls upon art and design to offer practical means of transforming spaces, environments, and even cities in ways that are enduring and energising, and that, most importantly, engage all sectors of the community.
The HotHouse think-tank project will be launched by a two-day symposium during which speakers who are experts in their various disciplines will focus on urgent environmental concerns and present cutting edge projects from around the world and generate ideas for sustainable city living.

HotHouse at the Sydney Opera House, 27-28 July 2010, is a “collective experiment” initiated and led by the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at UNSW in association with Object: Australian Centre for Craft and Design and the City of Sydney.

With Michaela Crimmin, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jill Bennett, Tony Fry, Bruce Mau ++++

http://hothouse.unsw.edu.au/