Feisal Ahmad
Since 2002
Works in New York, New York United States of America

BIO
Feisal Ahmad is the content coordinator for Rhizome. He has an M.A. in Communications Theory, focusing on propaganda and electronic mail, and enjoys the company of the good folk at the RZA.
Discussions (46) Opportunities (3) Events (0) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Interview with De Geuzen--Nat Muller


From: Nat Muller (nat@xs4all.nl)
Subject: Interview with De Geuzen

Renee Turner, Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting make up the Dutch
collective "De Geuzen", a foundation for multi-visual research
[www.geuzen.org]. They started working together while studying at the
Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (.nl) and have combined their various
skills and backgrounds in creative projects ever since. De Geuzen are
one of the few collectives who manage to infuse a very situated and
material practice with well-articulated theoretical and critical threads

DISCUSSION

Josephine Bosma: Review: 'written in stone, a net.art archeology' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo


Date: 4.01.03
From: Josephine Bosma (jesis@xs4all.nl)
Subject: review: 'written in stone, a net.art archeology' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo

Norway: it seems too far away sometimes. But now there is a nice reason to visit it. A week ago (March 23rd) a remarkable exhibition opened at the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art. Artist Per Platou has curated an exhibition on net.art which is an odd mixture of artistic installation and almost archeological introduction to what was probably the most infamous period in network art: net.art. The exhibition shows work of Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina and Vuk Cosic. The largest part of the exhibition is not about the art works though, which is what is so extraordinary, even strange if you will. Most of the exhibition is taken up by a trip through memory lane, by objects and paraphernalia which somehow reflect the atmosphere of net.art in the mid nineties. The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition is a small white pillar with a Perspex cube on it. It stands, all alone, in the middle of a high, nineteenth century space. In it we see a small golden marble or ball on a red velvet pillow. It represents the dot in net.art. It is the dot, the dot on a velvet pillow. If that is not
ironic enough, behind the golden dot are five more pillars, with objects representing the five (or six, since Jodi are two people) artists in the exhibition. There is for instance a knife, for Heath Bunting, who got into a lot of trouble for carrying a knife in Great Britain. (Later on in the exhibition you will find prints of the whole story behind the knife, copied from Bunting's web site.) There is also a dried bunch of roses, representing both the roses Vuk Cosic placed at the Jeffrey Shaw/Benjamin Weil installation at 'net_condition', the huge exhibition about net culture at the ZKM in 1999, to mark the death of net.art, and the roses Cornelia Sollfrank gave to Vuk Cosic at the opening of his net.art pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. The strangest objects at the exhibition however must be the little busts of every individual artist. They were created from photo's taken from the web, photo's of
Olia Lialina, Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans, Heath Bunting, Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin. The result is six oddly similar looking heads. Some with glasses, some with slightly longer hair then the rest. The title of the exhibition points at the ironic work by Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron (in collaboration with Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin) called 'introduction to net.art', which shows this well known text by Shulgin and Bookchin carved into stone tablets. The tablets are hanging behind the 'dot', opposite the entrance. Seeing them there, with the objects representing the artists (a typewriter with a sheet of paper full of gibberish to represent Jodi) in front of them, the little busts to the right and screenshots of well known web sites in heavy golden frames
(Jodi's '404', Lialina's 'Agatha Appears' and more) to the left of them, creates a feeling of romantic nostalgia and an almost painful sense of decay at the same time. This exhibition has little to do with any historical overviews or theme shows of net.art. This exhibition is almost all atmosphere and personal experience. Even if this is what makes it most vulnerable, this is also what makes it strong. I have seldom seen a net art exhibition that convinced me and I am beginning to think this is why: exhibiting net art is all about commitment, because it is simply not possible to avoid interpretation if you want to exhibit this art in a way that engages the audience in an exhibition space beyond the click of a mouse. What is interesting about this is that it brings the curator very close to a net art experience on line, the curator somehow reveals her or his individual approach and motivations, even more so then with creating an exhibition of existing material objects. The difference for the audience, between visiting such an exhibition and experiencing different projects and art web sites on line, is that the audience is at the mercy of (or rather: captured by) the approach of the curator. In this case the curator has chosen to pay
a very personal tribute to a period of net art he loves, showing the art works from this period from three different perspectives. I have already described the main room of the exhibition, but there are three more. Two of these are filled with small paraphernalia, leftovers and 'souvenirs'. Here we find anything from the original workspace poster and the Polish CD-Rom that was created from Vuk Cosic's hijack of the Documenta X web site to small material works created by other artists then those who are represented in the main room. Here we find for instance the paper shopping bag by Mouchette, with the image of the woman sticking her tongue to a glass plate. There is also a photo of Cornelia Sollfrank hugging a keyboard and of the performance group she used to be part of:
Innen. Etoy is represented by a Lego truck which one can order from their web site. Thomson and Craighead have their tea towels with images from the 'E-Poltergeist' project hanging on the wall. RTMark's cheap watch in a golden cardboard box with the text "Time isn't money" is also in one of the displays. Watercolors from Hakim Bey's office, a Superman T-shirt worn by Vuk Cosic and a vest worn by Olia Lialina are mixed with prints from mailing list texts by Netochka Nezvanova, Tilman Baumgaertel or the (fake) books on the history of net.art by Vuk Cosic. Especially the room with Lialina's vest is a trip down memory lane. Then the third
room is where the audience can experience net art closest to its
original form. This is a video room, in which a video of somebody
browsing the web sites of the artists is shown. The computer has simply been connected to a VCR, so we see what happens on the screen of a computer. Showing net art with a beamer is always dangerous. Some works become much stronger, especially those that are mostly dependent on simple or abstract visuals. It is harder to show more complex works this way though, especially work in which the audience is asked to participate somehow. Choosing to record a personal journey through some
artists' sites is, like this entire exhibition, a way to reveal aspects
of the works in question which an exhibition audience often would miss, because it is too inexperienced or uncomfortable to explore something on a computer in a public setting. To me this room felt a bit odd though. Maybe here the experience of someone else browsing for you becomes too close to ones own experiences, threatening it somehow. Funny is that the rest of the exhibition did not have this effect on me. I remember seeing 'Net Affects', an exhibition in which five beamers showed the work of twenty artists. There the works had been taken off the web too and played from stand alone computers. Whereas the video in 'written in stone' shows the works in the pace of one person browsing, at 'Net
Affects' the artists had been asked to create 'self-refreshing' html
pages which jumped from one web page to another, without any further human interference, creating a film or video like experience as well. It was very impressive, and some works really stood out, making me appreciate browser based art more then I did before. I am not saying I did not like the video set up in Oslo, it just somehow made me feel uncomfortable. Yet the entire exhibition is on the edge of the acceptable, but in this case (comparing it to for instance net_condition) the edge is not an unpleasant place to be. For instance: net_condition was 'unbrowsable' and impersonal. It in some ways exhibited an overkill on correctness, in avoiding the horrible A-word (art) by talking about 'exhibiting net culture', and it tried to show everything at the same time, erasing the possibility to pay respect to individual works. 'Written in Stone' is humorous and personal. It is an extraordinary exhibition, even if I am tempted to call a large part of it an art installation by the curator. One interesting detail to it is that the audience can create its own catalogue on site, but also on line. On site, at the museum, two computers which are on line, a printer, a copy machine and the possibility to bind the pages you have selected create something highly unusual: different, individual catalogues which all have the same ISBN number. Unfortunately the ISBN number is something the on line audience has to do without.

exhibition web site (all in Norwegian, but still browsable):
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/

articles on the web from which a catalogue can be compiled:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/artikler.htm

works represented in browsing video:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/videofilm.htm

dot on velvet pillow:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/bilde21.htm

Jodi in golden frame:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/bilde11.htm

Net Affects http://www.pavu.com/netaffects/

net-condition http://www.zkm.de/net
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DISCUSSION

ubu Editions :: Launch + Winter 2003 Titles


From: "Brian Stefans [arras.net]" <bstefans@earthlink.net>

Subject: /ubu Editions :: Launch + Winter 2003 Titles

__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com

UbuWeb is pleased to announce the launch of our new E-Book series, /ubu
Editions (pronounced "slash ubu"). The Winter 2003 series, featuring 13
titles, is edited by Brian Kim Stefans and features a mix of reprints and
new material presented in book-length PDF files. Each title is beautifully
designed and features images from the UbuWeb site.

/ubu Editions can be accessed at:

http://ubu.com/ubu

--------------------------------------
/ubu Editions :: Winter 2003 Titles
--------------------------------------

Kevin Davies _ Pause Button _

Davies writing takes the social critique of the Language Poets and the
crushing ear of the best Projective versifiers and sets it all in
cyclotronic motion with his rapier's wit and caffeinated melancholy, making
him the Zorro of poets associated with Vancouver's Kootenay School of
Writing and the anthemist of choice for a disowned intelligentsia. Davies,
who now lives in New York, published his second book, _Comp._, in 2000 to
much acclaim, but the quasi-legendary _Pause Button_, first published in
1992 by Vancouver's Tsunami Editions, has long been unavailable to those not
in the vicinity of Canada's choice used bookstores.

Deanna Ferguson _The Relative Minor_

Ferguson's first book of poems is at once frenetically impatient with
anything that could be called a lyrical subjectivity yet speaks, through the
sliced rubrics of its many "postmodern" poses, from a perspective singularly
angry, disaffected, vulnerable, eloquent, political and brash. The Relative
Minor takes the project of the Language poets to the next level of public
address, the scale tipping from (though not forgetting) the lexicons of
theory and falling toward the pure, dystopic clamor of punk aspiration.
Ferguson, who lives and works in Vancouver, has not published a book since
this 1993 volume, one of the major contributions by the poets associated
with the Kootenay School of Writing.

Richard Foreman _Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty!_

For years, Foreman has been staging his plays at St. Mark's Ontological
Theater with the regularity of the great Avant-Pop-in-the-Sky's
postmodernist pacemaker, tooling his "reverberation machines" into a
pristine state of subversive whimsy. Though the reader of this text will
miss the virtuoso performances of Tony Torn and Jay Smith as bathetic
superheroes dueling over the fallen Iron Curtain in the play's New York run,
the paranoiac frenzy and epistemological funboxes of Foreman's high style
are alive and flinching in _Now That Communism is Dead_.

Madeline Gins _What the President Will Say and Do!!_

Madeline Gins has mostly been known for her collaborative works with the
architect/philosopher Arakawa, releasing _Mechanism of Meaning_, an
illustrated series of playful epistemological vignettes, in 1979, and
devoting most of the last two decades exploring Reversible Destiny, a
radical philosophy of architecture in which one "refuses to die." _What the
President_ is Gins in a more light-hearted, accessible vein, her creative
assaults on mundane thinking arousing both laughter and caustic impatience
with the status quo. Rarely has a book appeared as prescient and poignant
twenty years after its initial publication.

Jessica Grim _Vexed_

Grim's style masterly evokes the simplicities of poetry in the "New
American" vein, with its fragments of candid observation just shimmering on
the surface of the poem, but she allies it with a "post-Language"
sensibility that balks before the prospect of a too-fluid Romanticism, thus
spicing sensual reverie with documentary relevance. The musicality of Grim's
poems is understated, the words delicately gathered, such that the poems
occasionally seem given over to indeterminacy and chance, but in fact each
one has a formal perfection that illustrates an underlying lyrical
integrity.

Peter Manson _Adjunct: An Undigest_

Adjunct _forms a teetering, overloaded bridge between practitioners of
subjectively-deodorized "conceptual literature" such as Kenneth Goldsmith
and Craig Dworkin and writers working in a "new sentence" vein such as
Language poets Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, all with a nod to novelist
David Markson's _Reader's Block_. But _Adjunct _is far from an organized
literary venture; rather, it is a sprawling, subconsciously assembled
stockpile of casual phrases, trivial ideas, worthless statistics, obituary
notices, self-reflexive misgivings, and numberless, numbing et ceteras that
make it an electric anthem to cultural (and personal) entropy.

Michael Scharf _Verite_

Scharf's poems are at once vulnerable to, and defiant of, the impositions of
civic society, as the strands of global and historical implication wafting
through the air that strike most of us as attenuated notes of "otherness"
are transformed, for this poet, into the throbbing heart of community. The
roving eye of _Verite_ takes in quantities of data that would sink writers
with a less fluid and agile lyric touch, and the mixture of journalism,
sonnets, "lieder" and manifesto-like prose poetry make this a compelling,
multi-faceted collection, the second by this New York author.

Ron Sillman _2197_

Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and
_Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he
coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of
Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation,
despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal
experimentation and mastery. "2197" is the second half of the book, and
anticipates, with its stock of phrases morphing and reappearing in different
acrobatic poses throughout its pages, the preoccupation with dataflows,
rhizomes and digital recurrence that has characterized much literature in
the age of the internet.

Ron Sillman _Sunset Debris_

Silliman is known for several seminal long poems such as _Tjanting _and
_Ketjak_, and he has been involved in writing the long "new sentence" (he
coined the phrase) poem _The Alphabet_ for over twenty years. _The Age of
Huts_, published by Roof Books in 1986, has had a quieter reputation,
despite its relatively concise display of Silliman's wide formal
experimentation and mastery. "Sunset Debris" is, structurally, a collection
of questions, but the cumulative affect of the queries is both giddily
intoxicating and, subterraneously, melancholic, as the voice of personal
entreaty become subsumed under the ceaseless rhythms of its literary method
and, by extension, time and memory.

Juliana Spahr _Response_

Spahr's deceptively simple language conveys a serious and complex assessment
of civic duty and the potential for political agency in a time when
selfhood -- one's sense of uniqueness and of the _permanence _of one's
personality -- has been severely compromised. Under fire by a mass media
that trivializes all values for the sake of ratings and shunned by the
opaque workings of a State that ignores, for the sake of control, the eye of
the radical democrat, the individual is, in Spahr's poetry, revived to take
center stage, floodlit by possiblity. _Response_, Spahr's first book (_Fuck
You-Aloha-I Love You_ appeared in 2001), was the winner of the National
Poetry Series in 1996, and demands of the reader a new sense of
participation in the social world.

Hannah Weiner _Little Books / Indians_

Weiner, who died in 1997, culled from what she considered a psychic
ability -- she literally saw words on the foreheads of her many New York
friends and transcribed them like extrasensory conversations -- to create
her typographically distinctive books of poetry. But there is nothing
na&iuml;ve about what Weiner was doing: she was a self-conscious,
sophisticated artist, a close friend of the great innovator Carolee
Schneemann, and has long been considered a central figure in Language
poetry. Weiner's oeuvre reflects a complex, totalizing investment in the
properties of words as they permeate and conflict with the self and the
imagined "other," and _Little Books/Indians_, long out of print, is both a
visual treat and an engaging read.

Mac Wellman _The Lesser Magoo_

The final of the four plays of Wellman's Crowtet, Magoo follows the
adventures of Curran and Candle -- an expert on "Crowe's Dark Space" -- and
their motley assemblage of peers, some of them categorically "unusualist,"
in the parallel, decidedly unsettled, universe that is distinctly Wellman's.
Magoo is chockfull of alternative histories, comprehensive pseudo-sciences,
eerily relevant, off-the-map absurdist politics and soft-spoken contacts
between humans all vying for attention in the seemingly self-propelled
linguistics of Wellman's versification, which at turns recalls Beckett, at
others the polymath Pynchon or the more childlike landscapes of Ashbery (in
Girls on the Run). The music for The Lesser Magoo, scored for voices, toy
piano, ukulele, and violin, was composed by Michael Roth, for both the Los
Angeles and the New York productions.

Darren Wershler-Henry _ The Tapeworm Foundry _

Toronto-based Wershler-Henry's last book of poems, _Nicholodeon_, was a
seemingly exhaustive survey of the possibilities of concrete and
process-based poetry in the Nineties, organized like a paper database with
icons to guide the wary reader toward conceptual handles. _The Tapeworm
Foundry_ is, in some ways, the opposite: a single unpunctuated sentence of
pro-Situ proposals that resembles a social virus more than a functioning
data-organism, its litany of avant-garde projects linked only by the
seemingly innocuous, but progressively more imperative-sounding, "andor."

--------------------------------------
/ubu Editons :: Winter 2003 Titles
-----------------------------------

/ubu Editions can be accessed at:
http://ubu.com/ubu

__ U B U W E B __
http://ubu.com

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