Joy Garnett's Studio from Studio Visit

Long Island City's contemporary art center P.S.1 recently launched Studio Visit - a space for New York area artists to share a "virtual presentation" of their studio with a short artist's statement and bio. Imagine a DIY version of the Selby or Fecal Face's Studio Visits series. Like these sites, it taps into the reader's voyeuristic curiosity to see a side of the artist's process perhaps not immediately apparent in their output. The aim of Studio Visit is to promote visibility for these artists, cultivate a locally focused network and, one would assume, solicit offline studio visits as well. The initiative is in keeping with the institution's past "Greater New York" exhibition, which spotlighted work from emerging New York area artists with great breadth and success. However, like any new website, it looks like they're still sorting out the kinks. It would be helpful if they could add an RSS feed for recent submissions, so visitors don't need to check back to the site. I also noticed that quite a few artists ignored the fields in the submission form requesting photos of the interior and exterior of their studios -- it might be wise to require that as part of the process, especially if showcasing one's studio is a primary purpose of the site.

READ ON »

Brighton-based interactive media artists' group Blast Theory posted a call for both their residency and internship program. Interns will have an opportunity to work in Blast Theory's studios on specific projects while residents will be given space to research and develop new work in a supportive and collaborative environment. For the residency program, Blast Theory are looking for individuals working in:

- Pervasive & location based gaming & interactive media
- Mobile & portable devices in cultural & artistic practice
- Games design and theory
- Interdisciplinary and live art practice

The deadline for applications is January 31, 2010. More information can be found on Blast Theory's site.

READ ON »

Never mind that the decade really ends in a little over a year, it's time to take stock of it. Today's post looks back at the decade just past while tomorrow's will look at the decade to come.

As I observed before, this decade is marked by atemporality. The greatest symptom of this is our inability to name the decade and, although commentators have tried to dub it the naughties, the aughts, and the 00s (is that pronounced the ooze?), the decade remains, as Paul Krugman suggests, a Big Zero, and we are unable to periodize it. This is not just a matter of linguistic discomfort, its a reflection of the atemporality of network culture. Jean Baudrillard is proved right. History, it seems, came to an end with the millennium, which was a countdown not only to the end of a millennium but also to the end of meaning itself. Perhaps, the Daily Miltonian suggested, we didn't have a name for the decade because it was so bad.

-- EXCERPT FROM "A DECADE IN RETROSPECT" BY KAZYS VARNELIS

Link »

---

It's time for my promised set of predictions for the coming decade. It has been a transgression of disciplinary norms for historians to predict the future, but its also quite common among bloggers. So let's treat this as a blogosphere game, nothing more. It'll be interesting to see just how wildly wrong I am a decade from now.

In many respects, the next decade is likely to seem like a hangover after the party of the 2000s (yes, I said party). The good times of the boom were little more than a lie perpetrated by finance, utterly ungrounded in any economy reality, and were not based on any sustainable economic thought. Honestly, it's unclear ...

READ ON »

The Baltic Art Center is currently seeking applicants for their 2010 residency cycle, which occurs for periods of 4-8 weeks during the period April - June or September - December. Professional working artists, curators, or contemporary art writers from one of the Baltic or Nordic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Greenland or the Faroe Islands), or based professionally in one of these countries are invited to apply, and they will not accept applications from Sweden this year. Residents will receive a monthly stipend of 14 000 SEK, an allocated apartment, and desk space. Travel expenses to and from Visby will also be covered. Deadline is January 15, 2010. For more information about the residency and application instructions, visit the Baltic Art Center site.

READ ON »

One the works on display in the exhibition “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil - The Adolpho Leirner Collection” at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, Switzerland, is Abraham Palatnik’s Aparelho Cinecromático.

Abraham Palatnik is a pioneer of technological art. He was born in natal, Rio Grande do Norte, in 1928, to a family of Russian Jews that had settled there in 1919. When he was four years old, Abraham Palatnik went to Palestine, now Israel, with his family, where he went to school. He went on to take courses in mechanics and physics. Since his early childhood he had been drawing and he spent four years at an atelier studying drawing, painting, and aesthetics. Palatnik returned to Brazil in early 1948 and settled in Rio de Janeiro.

Abraham Palatnik dropped painting to adopt a different technique. He felt sure that using the latest technology, he could bring to “pictorial art the potential of light and motion in time and space”. He built his first two kinechromatic devices as experiments in 1949 and 1950.

In the catalog to the Abraham Palatnik retrospective exhibition at Itau Cultural Sao Paulo in the year 1999, Frederico Morais explains how Palatnik’s kinechromatic devices work: “On a plastic screen covering the front of his devices, he projected colors and forms driven by electric motors, creating a luminous effect with its own timing. Using motors and light bulbs, he replaced paint-as a material dimension-with refracted light. The timing of the lighting was controlled from a console with switches for each lamp. The viewer sees only the colored shapes projected onto the front of the kinechromatic device. Inside there were about 600 meters of electric wires in different colors, linking 101 lamps of varying voltages, rotating several cylinders at varying speeds. Light is projected through a set of ...

READ ON »

Thu Nov 06, 2014 18:30 - Sun Jan 11, 2015

Oakland, California
United States of America

New York-based artist Lucy Raven uncovers the diffuse, obscured systems that support contemporary life through a research-led practice that encompasses films, installations, illustrated lectures, and essays. Deeply attuned to the processes of production often unseen within visual culture in a networked, globalized world, Raven’s contemplative storytelling uncovers the economic, historical, geographic, and material complexities at play in technology through an exploration of topics such as the outsourcing of post-production work for the film industry from Hollywood to countries around the world, evolving technical standards in film projection, and the immense infrastructure behind the global copper mining industry.

For her solo presentation at YBCA, Raven stages a new anaglyph 3D video installation entitled Curtains (2014). The project emerges out of the artist’s ongoing research into the global network of post-production facilities that create the visual effects for Hollywood’s blockbuster films. Post-production is meticulous and labor intensive, involving hours of frame-by-frame detailing. Film studios seek the least expensive labor force worldwide to complete their work, outsourcing labor to studios that span Bombay, Beijing, Toronto, London, and Vancouver. Raven visited and documented some of these spaces through sound and image. The result is Curtains, a 3D video that creates a portrait of an otherwise invisible global assembly line, providing a glimpse into the quiet reality and human hands that lie behind the spectacle of fantastic computer-generated simulations found in today’s mainstream films.

A series of screenprints from Raven’s ongoing RPx project are also featured in the exhibition, as well as a new lenticular print. RPx emerged from research undertaken during a 2011 residency at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where Raven unearthed and archived motion picture test patterns used by projectionists to calibrate the quality of film projection. The “RP” in Raven’s project stands for “recommended practices,” a directive set by the standards-developing committee in Hollywood, the Society of Motion Pictures, and Television Engineers (SMPTE) to ensure continuity across viewing experiences. The test patterns featured in the RPx prints are images meant for machines and the technicians who maneuver them, a relic and a precursor to the standards that surround our current high definition images. Both RPx and Curtains point towards the careful engineering involved in the fabrication of illusion, including the construction of human vision within that process.

About the Series
Control: Technology in Culture is a new series of exhibitions in the YBCA Upstairs Galleries showcasing work by emerging and mid-career artists who examine the social, cultural, and experiential implications of technology. The exhibitions in this series seek to prompt timely questions about the profound and far-reaching influence of technology in our daily lives by focusing on artists whose work spans a multitude of disciplines and relates to a diverse set of issues, including architecture, acoustics, psychology, labor, consumerism, the environment, and the military.

The term “control” refers to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory that, as a result of the ever-increasing role of information technology, Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of the 20th century has given way to a “control society” in the 21st century. In contrast to discipline, which molds the individual through confinement in factories, prisons, and schools, control is diffuse, adaptable, and ubiquitous, modulating rather than molding the individual.

Control: Technology in Culture is curated by Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts.

Fri Mar 07, 2014 18:00 - Sun Jun 15, 2014

San Francisco, California
United States of America

Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon works in sound, installation, and sculpture. Her work is often devised around audio and spatial feedback systems that manipulate the visitor’s awareness of sound and space, incorporating the physical and sonic qualities of surrounding architecture to engage the viewer’s senses. Gordon investigates sonic and architectural applications of cybernetic systems in the 20th and 21st centuries to technological design, from anechoic chambers to the military’s use of Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) speakers. Reverse engineering those implements of social control, the dissonant spaces she creates uncover how such systems regulate human subjectivity, mobility, and perception.

Commissioned by YBCA, Gordon’s new installation—part of her solo exhibition It Only Happens All of the Time—is an immersive sonic experience that emphasizes the primacy of the embodied experience; one that encourages the visitor to navigate the space through a mode of listening that is both felt and heard. Gordon explores sound’s ability to establish different levels of intimacy, and the exhibition’s title points towards the ubiquitous presence of sound in that process, whether it exists at the periphery or center of our awareness. The installation’s sound-absorbing walls reference the design of anechoic chambers found in military and scientific testing facilities, which insulate and absorb sound reflections. In contrast to the walls of the installation, which gestures towards a calculated experience, the sculpture Love Seat situated within this contained environment suggests another, more emancipated, arrangement. Surrounded by a multichannel speaker system distributed throughout the gallery, Love Seat encourages visitors to sit and share in a listening experience with others, while maintaining a physical separation. Fostering an exchange between visitors that wavers between proximity and distance, Love Seat parallels how we listen together.

Gordon’s other works for the exhibition echo a similar concept—sound as experienced within the body becomes a way to feel with others, and to experience the mechanisms of built space through non-visual means. Her film Everyone Will Be Here Now But Me documents a site-specific sound environment created within the empty offices of the Los Angeles Food Center. It follows visitors as they explore sound installations distributed throughout the building, with the option to listen through binaural microphones that captured the 3D stereo sound of the space. The suspended figures in Gordon’s new series of drawings and watercolors Filter Resonance B more subtly signal the body; wire-like lines protrude and drift through these organ-like forms, a reference to the potential for connectivity. Gordon imagines that the drawings represent actual filters, which isolate information, and their presentation is meant to evoke the interfaces of audio filters in music software, which allow the user to directly regulate reverb, equalization, and so on by manipulating graphic elements. Much like the show itself, these strange configurations invite reflection on the many ways the body is instrumentalized through technology.

About Control: Technology in Culture

Control: Technology in Culture, curated by Ceci Moss, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, is YBCA’s new series of exhibitions showcasing work by emerging and mid-career artists who examine the social, cultural, and experiential implications of technology. The series seeks to prompt timely questions about the profound and far-reaching influence of technology in our daily lives by focusing on artists whose work spans a multitude of disciplines and relates to a diverse set of issues, including architecture, acoustics, psychology, labor, consumerism, the environment, and the military.

The term “control” refers to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory that, as a result of the ever-increasing role of information technology, Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of the 20th century has given way to a “control society” in the 21st century. In contrast to discipline, which molds the individual through confinement in factories, prisons, and schools, control is diffuse, adaptable, and ubiquitous, modulating rather than molding the individual.

Fri Jul 19, 2013 18:30 - Sun Sep 08, 2013

San Francisco, California
United States of America

Working in sculpture, game design, installation, performance, sound and the internet, Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy is interested in digital technology’s capacity to connect and expand human consciousness. For Murphy, digital tools act as an electronic prosthesis that deepens awareness and cognition, rather than as an alien entity outside human experience. The labyrinth is an ongoing theme in Murphy’s practice. Her installations, websites, and virtual environments are set up as a series of interlocking spaces that encourage wandering, displacement and discovery. Like the naturally occurring geometric forms referenced in her work, they organically branch out from each other as a dense array of unfolding structures. The title for her exhibition at YBCA, Liquid Vehicle Transmitter, alludes to the fluid property found in much of Murphy’s output.

For her new installation, emergent entity chant array, Murphy has designed a type of fractal involving self-similar patterns at varying scales. Constructed out of a precisely configured assemblage of 3D printed sculptures, LED lights, light boxes, and wood cut forms, the installation resembles a real life version of her complex and dizzying internet-based works. Like Murphy’s virtual video game environments, emergent entity chant array plays upon the visitor’s perception of both space and dimension, encouraging the exploration of elevated states of consciousness.

Deeply post-humanist in her approach, Murphy views her creative process as a form of meditation in which she seeks an intuitive, harmonious relation with the tools used to produce her work. Her intricate arrangement of forms focuses her own energy and that of the viewer, drawing them in. This sense of an attuned connection with an audience is also an active element in the art collectives of which she is a member, MSHR and Oregon Painting Society.

Fri Nov 09, 2012 18:00 - Fri Nov 09, 2012

New York, New York
United States of America

Join us on November 9th at 6PM for "Architecture and Computation" with speakers Keller Easterling (Architecture, Yale) and Erica Robles (MCC, NYU). This will be the first event in this year's PROGRAM: Media and Literature lecture series.

Architecture and Computation

19 University Place, Great Room
New York, NY 10003
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/f2ad3

http://www.programseries.com

Free and Open to the Public

"PROGRAM" is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Media, Culture and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature Departments. Intentionally broad in scope, the series will present talks that explore the cultural, historical, aesthetic and political impact of software and programming logic.

This first event in our year-long lecture series explores the intersection of architecture and the logic of computation. How does computation structure our physical world, and in what ways has the function of computational media been applied to the spaces we inhabit?



Keller Easterling (Yale University, Architecture)

Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts
Repeatable formulas and spatial products make most of the space in the world. Now, not only buildings but also entire cities have become spatial products that typically reproduce free zone world cities like Shenzhen or Dubai. Space has become a mobile, monetized, almost infrastructural, technology, where infrastructure is not only the urban substructure, but also the urban structure itself. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this matrix space. Massive global infrastructure systems, administered by mixtures of public and private cohorts and driven by profound irrationalities, generate de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them—a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which we have studied political response. Infrastructure space is one crucible within which multiple fields of analysis encounter ample complexity, and it tutors special approaches to both form making and political arts.


Keller Easterling is is an architect, urbanist, writer, and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her latest project is titled Extrastatecraft.

Erica Robles (New York University, MCC)

Mediated Congregation: The Crystal Cathedral and God’s Place in a Networked WorldThis talk focuses on an often-overlooked institution that has helped produce and legitimate transformations in 20th century social life: the church. Through an analysis of the Crystal Cathedral Robles situates Protestant spatial production within a broader project of cultural re-formation whereby collective life became conducted via increasingly mediated, mobile, and distributed arrangements. For more than half a century, this influential Southern California ministry helped reshape the style and material conditions for worship. At its height, the Crystal Cathedral was perhaps the most visible Protestant church in the world.

Robles will render three distinctive and successive portraits of the church as a drive-in theater (1955-1957), an indoor-outdoor/television church (1962-1970), and then a globally-broadcast, glass and steel cathedral (1980 – 2012). Each site was a re-imagining of the socio-technical conditions for communion. Together, these portraits will trace a trajectory from the post-war to the present whereby the church helped determine technological and architectural meanings. By designing for mediated congregation, ministries like the Crystal Cathedral inscribed the production of broadcast and then networked geographies with spiritual significance. In so doing, they also translated Christian cosmology into a new technological regime.

Erica Robles is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.


Upcoming 2012-2013 PROGRAM events

Media Archaeology with Matthew Kirschenbaum and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, March 1st, 2013

Values in Technological Design with Geoffrey Bowker and Sara Hendren, April 12th, 2013

http://www.programseries.com/

The series is sponsored by NYU's Information Futures, the Humanities Initiative, and the Departments of Media Culture, and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature.

Fri Dec 10, 2010 00:00 - Wed Dec 08, 2010

Music, Language, Thought V

Friday, December 10th 2010 / 3:00 - 7:00pm

Myles Jackson (History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, NYU): “The Role of Physicists in Measuring and Defining Nineteenth-Century Musical Aesthetics”

Kevin Bell (English, SUNY Albany): “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Sound as Break in Christopher Harris’s “Still/Here"”

Ana María Ochoa (Music, Columbia University): “Orality and Orthography in Nineteenth-Century Colombia”"

Gary Tomlinson (Music, University of Pennsylvania): “Paleolithic Formalism”

Reception to follow

http://musiclanguagethought.wordpress.com

New York University / Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220, 2nd floor

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

Music, Language, Thought” is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Music and Comparative Literature Departments. Broadly speaking, the series focuses on the relationship between music and language, and our speakers will examine its theoretical ramifications for politics, aesthetics and historiography. The project stems from ongoing conversation and collaboration between graduate students within these two departments, and will continue on an annual basis.