Breaking Conventions: Video Report-Back and Discussion- Talk organized at The Change You Want To See Gallery on Tuesday, September 16, 7-10pm. "Please join us for an evening of video clips and conversation with independent media activists who've recently returned from the national political conventions. Hear first-hand accounts from the convention floor to the protests in the streets to the insides of a Minneapolis jailhouse. With Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, I-Witness Video, Glassbead Collective, Big Noise Tactical, Indymedia"

Nobel Textiles: Marrying Design to Scientific Discovery- "Nobel Textiles is the result of a two year-long collaboration between Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and the Medical Research Council which paired 5 Nobel Prize winning scientists with 5 designers. The results of this innovative project will be showcased for the first time in Saint James's Park with design collections and site specific installations inspired by the discoveries of the Nobel Laureates."

Art Space Talk: Caroline Mak- Interview with artist Caroline Mak from myartspace > blog. "The systems that emerge in Caroline Mak's installations contain references to disciplines ranging from biology, topography and the decorative arts. She has stated that natural processes are translated, reflected and re-created in her installations. In the process of construction, systems become apparent in the spaces they are assigned to, each self-contained worlds with their own inherent logic."

Lisa Anne Auerbach If Nothing Changes, It Changes Nothing at Printed Matter- Solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Lisa Anne Auerbach opens tonight at Printed Matter. "Spanning 15 years of production, If Nothing Changes, It Changes Nothing features a broad spectrum of Lisa Anne Auerbach's publications, knitted works, and ephemera as well as a new knitted edition created by the artist specifically for the exhibition."

READ ON »

Conflux 2008: Podcasts- Conflux, which kicks off this week, recently launched a website featuring interviews with the festival's curators and collaborators.

The Adaptive City- Dan Hill from cityofsound posted an excellent essay, titled "The Adaptive City," which will appear in the exhibition catalog for "Urban Play":
"Urban information design emerges in a call-and-response relationship with informatics, filtering and describing these patterns for the benefit of citizens and machines...The invisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can be understood in real-time...The new technologies of urban informatics and city information modelling enable citizens to reflect on their city, engage in the design, adapt their behaviour and the city around them." Those interested in this subject are encouraged to check out videos of the New Silent Series panel Nextcity: Art of the Possible on Rhizome's Vimeo.

USA USB - American Flag USB Memorial- Artist Evan Roth creates a humorous and highly innovative American flag memorial in his USA USB- American Flag USB Memorial.

"Wikireuse" by Julia Christensen- The Turbulence commission "Wikireuse" by Julia Christensen is now live and seeking contributions! We covered Christensen's Big Box Reuse project in Rhizome News last week.

READ ON »

Amar Kanwar-- The Torn First Pages (Part I)- Artist Amar Kanwar discusses one of two video installations at the Stedelijk Museum. The Torn First Pages, which is now on view at the Amsterdam location, was inspired by an act of defiance by a Burmese shopkeeper, who tore the military's statements off the covers of books he sold. In the interview, Kanwar talks about the troubling political situation in Burma and his support for the country's democratic movement, which has been brutally suppressed.

César Chávez Video in Times Square MTV Screen- A five minute video from "Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible" will be displayed on MTV's screen in Times Square. The video is a reenactment of a 1971 Cesar Chavez speech given in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, CA. This project is part of Creative Time's 44 1/2 series.

Andrew Jeffrey Wright "Art for Corporations" at the Luggage Store in San Francisco- An exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright opens this week at the Luggage Store in San Francisco. "Several works in the exhibition will be created specifically for the ever growing art collecting entity known as the corporation. The exhibition will also feature collaborations with Barry McGee, Clare E. Rojas, Isaac Lin and Crystal Kovacs."

Pierre Obando, "Noise", Heskin Contemporary- "Noise, is a series of paintings and works on paper by Pierre Obando that exploits the idea of unwanted aural/visual information, like "snow" at the end of a pre-cable television transmission. This exhibition presents examples of visual noise, information too excessive to be sifted through or too separate to carry meaning."

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Tauba Auerbach in Artreview's Project Space - "Bay Area artist Tauba Auerbach uses her graphical skills in a conceptual pursuit of hidden confluences -- and glitches -- in our system of signs and symbols. For the Project Space, she looks into the porous border between the analogue and digital realms. "Recently I have been collecting various instances of randomness," Auerbach says. "Both applause and static are phenomena that can go either in the totally uniform white noise direction or phase in and out of patterns and sync up into something placeable.."
The work is accompanied by an interview with the artist, which you can read here.

internet, mon amour- Discussion and critique of a bill currently under review by the French Parliament entitled "Création et Internet" (Creation And the Internet) from abstractmachine. "The important thing to understand here is that the Internet is being construed, and will therefore be legislated as, nothing but a new form of artistic distribution, irrespective of its capacities as a new locus for artistic creation." This week, new media artists in France launched a petition against the bill.

Katy Siegel on a Globalizing Art World- Lecture this evening at 6:30pm by critic Katy Siegel at SVA in New York City. "Cultural producers, Groys goes on to suggest, are equally subject to the globalization of cultural flows, often compelled towards frequent international travel in pursuit of the facilitating institutional and economic support networks that make ambitious cultural work possible...critic Katy Siegel kicks off the Fall lecture series with a talk on a slightly narrower purview of the patterns Groys describes: the globalization of the playing fields of contemporary art, and its effect on emerging and would-be art producers."

Jeremy Bailey Interview on the Netbehaviour email list- Marc Garett/Furtherfield and subscribers to the Netbehaviour mailing ...

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Rirkrit Tiravanija, Demonstration Drawings- New exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija opens this week at the Drawing Center:
"For the Demonstration Drawings, Tiravanija has commissioned Thai artists, many of them former students, to create a series of photorealistic pencil drawings depicting multifarious responses to power, oppression, and global capital. Tiravanija's drawings translate photojournalist depictions of acts of political spontaneity into a medium itself characterized by immediacy--turning ephemeral images of strife and social conflict into documents of political aspiration."

TEMPORARY SERVICES - Finland- "Everything in Turku, Finland, as in most cities, is in its predictable and expected place. Bikes lean against walls, signs hang on stores, advertisements are pasted on poles, and every fixture has an obvious function. The public art is predictable too. It's made from durable materials; it looks like it has been around forever and will stay around forever....As a small but visible challenge to this tedious routine, the groups IC-98 (Turku) and Temporary Services (Chicago) have teamed up to build and circulate a series of 25 wooden sandwich board signs which carry phrases that advertise nothing and aren't always terribly positive. Many of the texts, written collaboratively by the two groups, point to our frustration with the monotony of city spaces and the high degree of political control that is exerted over them."

NADA VIDEO NIGHTS NYC, September 10, 2008- "In September we'll inaugurate a series of video nights in our new space on 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Each night will be programmed by a different guest curator. Popcorn and Grolsch beer will be served. You are encouraged to bring a lawn chair or blanket. We'll have Astroturf on the floor to give a sense of that "out-of-doors" experience."

Interview with Daniel Canogar- From We Make Money Not Art. "Daniel Canogar ...

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.