ARTBASE (1)
BIO
Michael Szpakowski is an artist, composer, writer and educator.
CV:
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/szpakowski_cv.pdf
Video work:
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi
Stills:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako
12 Remixes:
http://www.michaelszpakowski.org/mickiewicz/
CV:
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/szpakowski_cv.pdf
Video work:
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi
Stills:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/szpako
12 Remixes:
http://www.michaelszpakowski.org/mickiewicz/
Re: Lee Marvin Toolbox
This piece is tremendous!
The description-
<...stylistically ascribed
to the young British
design-school, ....Navigation on the
internet his subject...
.....counters them in an ironical way ....>
made me fear the worst.
The work is great, like a sort of multimedia Ben
Marcus.
Wonderful stuff!
Michael
--- "jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net"
<jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net> wrote:
> Lee Marvin Toolbox
> by
> Jorn Ebner
>
> is now available in English translation - at
> www.leemarvintoolbox.net
>
> Lee Marvin Toolbox was awarded the Kunstpreis 2001
> of Medienforum Munchen.
>
> The jury - Monika Fleischmann (GMD, St.
> Augustin/Bonn), Gerfried Stocker
> (Ars Electronica Center Linz), Tjark Ihmels (award
> holder 2000) as well KP
> Ludwig John and Ulrich Muller (both Medienforum
> Munchen) - decided
> unanimously for the project LEE MARVIN TOOLBOX of
> London based artist Jorn
> Ebner.
>
> Lee Marvin Toolbox is a filigree and elliptical work
> for the internet. With
> Flash animations which can be stylistically ascribed
> to the young British
> design-school, Jorn Ebner makes Navigation on the
> internet his subject
> matter and counters them in an ironical way with the
> famous cowboy song, "I
> was born under a wanderin star".
>
> The work is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.x
> and higher, and requires
> a Flash5Player Plugin.
>
>
> for further information contact:
> www.medienforum.org
> info@medienforum.org
> jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net
>
>
>
>
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The description-
<...stylistically ascribed
to the young British
design-school, ....Navigation on the
internet his subject...
.....counters them in an ironical way ....>
made me fear the worst.
The work is great, like a sort of multimedia Ben
Marcus.
Wonderful stuff!
Michael
--- "jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net"
<jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net> wrote:
> Lee Marvin Toolbox
> by
> Jorn Ebner
>
> is now available in English translation - at
> www.leemarvintoolbox.net
>
> Lee Marvin Toolbox was awarded the Kunstpreis 2001
> of Medienforum Munchen.
>
> The jury - Monika Fleischmann (GMD, St.
> Augustin/Bonn), Gerfried Stocker
> (Ars Electronica Center Linz), Tjark Ihmels (award
> holder 2000) as well KP
> Ludwig John and Ulrich Muller (both Medienforum
> Munchen) - decided
> unanimously for the project LEE MARVIN TOOLBOX of
> London based artist Jorn
> Ebner.
>
> Lee Marvin Toolbox is a filigree and elliptical work
> for the internet. With
> Flash animations which can be stylistically ascribed
> to the young British
> design-school, Jorn Ebner makes Navigation on the
> internet his subject
> matter and counters them in an ironical way with the
> famous cowboy song, "I
> was born under a wanderin star".
>
> The work is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.x
> and higher, and requires
> a Flash5Player Plugin.
>
>
> for further information contact:
> www.medienforum.org
> info@medienforum.org
> jorn.ebner@britishlibrary.net
>
>
>
>
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An Enemy of the People
'An Enemy of the People'
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/enemy/AnEnemyOfThePeople.html
Arrested on a trumped up charge in 1939 by Joseph Stalin's secret police the NKVD, Lukasz Szpakowski spent the next two years as a slave labourer in the giant Russian system of penal camps, the Gulag.
Two years ago, aged 87, he was interviewed at length by his son, the UK composer and net artist Michael Szpakowski.
From those interviews, from images of his father and the camps, from fragments of Ukrainian folk music integrated into an original musical score,Michael Szpakowski has made a piece for the net which almost entirely lacks those qualities which have come to define Net Art.
No interactivity, self referentiality or irony but simply a gripping story, straightforwardly told -
an ordinary person's moving testimony of 'midnight in the twentieth century'.
---------------------------------
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http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/enemy/AnEnemyOfThePeople.html
Arrested on a trumped up charge in 1939 by Joseph Stalin's secret police the NKVD, Lukasz Szpakowski spent the next two years as a slave labourer in the giant Russian system of penal camps, the Gulag.
Two years ago, aged 87, he was interviewed at length by his son, the UK composer and net artist Michael Szpakowski.
From those interviews, from images of his father and the camps, from fragments of Ukrainian folk music integrated into an original musical score,Michael Szpakowski has made a piece for the net which almost entirely lacks those qualities which have come to define Net Art.
No interactivity, self referentiality or irony but simply a gripping story, straightforwardly told -
an ordinary person's moving testimony of 'midnight in the twentieth century'.
---------------------------------
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new work - 'An Enemy of the People'
'An Enemy of the People'
A kind of documentary with music based on interviews
with Lukasz Szpakowski, a survivor of Stalin's gulag.
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/enemy/AnEnemyOfThePeople.html
make sure your sound is on.
michael
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A kind of documentary with music based on interviews
with Lukasz Szpakowski, a survivor of Stalin's gulag.
http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/enemy/AnEnemyOfThePeople.html
make sure your sound is on.
michael
__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: Eryk Salvaggio: September 11th, 2001
Ivan
I think you miss a number of connecting terms here.
A necessary but not sufficient condition for great art
seems to me a connection between the particular, the
concrete, and the general ,the big questions.
Actually many people ( statistically quite
unreasonably) probably now do have a deep seated fear
of being blown up in big buildings and actually if
you're Palestinian or Iraqi being blown up in smallish
buildings is unfortunately a fairly immediate concern.
The point is that the particular of Sept 11th connects
with the universal of the themes you list as
legitimate artistic 'big' subjects.
That's what makes good art concrete and living and not
schematic.
And indeed this connection between the universal and
particular is why we can still read Balzac and look at
Greek statues with profit.
The same with the names- I'm sure formally you're
absolutely correct- the point is that in lived human
experience names do matter.
Shakespeare- Stalin- Bush- Ivan Pope-Eryk Salvaggio-
Michael Szpakowski- Leon Trotsky-Frank Black-John Doe
these all carry to a greater or lesser extent whole
constellations of meaning and if you object that the
meanings are purely contingent then of course so is
all human meaning making.
Again there is a rigidity in your thinking over the
question of whether Eryk could have pulled the names
out of the telephone book.
You're right- nothing in the art work tells us he did
or didn't but the circumstances surrounding the
piece's creation and his ( in my view ) appropriately
nervous and tentative contexting of the piece lead me
to suppose very strongly that he did no such thing.
This increases the emotional force of the work for me-
we see that he *worked* to find the names and to make
the piece - he honoured the dead and their surviving
relatives by doing so.
But of course context is necessary for virtually any
artwork that is not immediately of our time - art
doesn't exist in some kind of ideal philosophical
vacuum but is the product of real people in history
working with the tools of human meaning making and if
the Mona Lisa and the nine Beethoven symphonies
diappeared for 100,000 years people would understand
some but not all of them on their rediscovery.
Things change continually and they're mucky and
awkward and hard to fit into neat theory -it's the
nature of things.
best
Michael
--- Ivan Pope <ivan@ivanpope.com> wrote:
> > The use of names is, contrary to what Ivan
> asserts,
> > the thing that make it the most personal, the most
> > connected - a name is of course not at all an
> > abstraction -in the world as we experience it, it
> > stands for everything we are
>
> I have to disagree, agreeably. My name, Ivan Pope,
> is simply a signifier. To
> my family it is intimately connected with me as
> family man. On this list it
> may signify mouthy arsehole. But to the wider world,
> it would signify
> nothing special. My point being that a list of names
> is just a list of
> names. Of course we can create within ourselves an
> emotional response, but
> this is to imagined people, not to the names. As far
> as I'm concerned, I
> have no way of knowing whether this is even a list
> of the people who lost
> their lives. Maybe its just a list from a telephone
> directory or something.
> And that would create exactly the same effect.
>
> > If the point you are making is that there are many
> > events in our world that require memorials and
> many
> > needless deaths then I couldn't agree more
>
> I'm not making that point. Obviously there may well
> be an infinite list of
> events that 'require' memorials. But that's nothing
> to do with this piece.
>
> > Because others have died does not
> > lessen the horror of what happened to perfectly
> > blameless people on September 11th .
> > I for one am pleased that there are artists around
> who
> > don't see art as simply a formal and self
> referential
> > game but as something that speaks to us about our
> > deepest concerns.
>
> I wonder here what our deepest concerns are here?
> That we may be blown up in
> an exploding building? That we may suddenly die?
> That our loved ones may
> die? That none of us are safe? All of these are
> valid subjects for art, of
> course. But the first one is totally specific to
> September 11 and thus
> hardly germane to the human condition. The rest are,
> of course, part of the
> stuff of art for time immemorial.
>
> My point about memorials is that a memorial implies
> an institutional
> response to an event. An artist can of course
> designate a work as a
> memorial, but that doesn't privelege it in any way,
> it just states the
> artists view of the work.
>
> Cheers,
> Ivan
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
I think you miss a number of connecting terms here.
A necessary but not sufficient condition for great art
seems to me a connection between the particular, the
concrete, and the general ,the big questions.
Actually many people ( statistically quite
unreasonably) probably now do have a deep seated fear
of being blown up in big buildings and actually if
you're Palestinian or Iraqi being blown up in smallish
buildings is unfortunately a fairly immediate concern.
The point is that the particular of Sept 11th connects
with the universal of the themes you list as
legitimate artistic 'big' subjects.
That's what makes good art concrete and living and not
schematic.
And indeed this connection between the universal and
particular is why we can still read Balzac and look at
Greek statues with profit.
The same with the names- I'm sure formally you're
absolutely correct- the point is that in lived human
experience names do matter.
Shakespeare- Stalin- Bush- Ivan Pope-Eryk Salvaggio-
Michael Szpakowski- Leon Trotsky-Frank Black-John Doe
these all carry to a greater or lesser extent whole
constellations of meaning and if you object that the
meanings are purely contingent then of course so is
all human meaning making.
Again there is a rigidity in your thinking over the
question of whether Eryk could have pulled the names
out of the telephone book.
You're right- nothing in the art work tells us he did
or didn't but the circumstances surrounding the
piece's creation and his ( in my view ) appropriately
nervous and tentative contexting of the piece lead me
to suppose very strongly that he did no such thing.
This increases the emotional force of the work for me-
we see that he *worked* to find the names and to make
the piece - he honoured the dead and their surviving
relatives by doing so.
But of course context is necessary for virtually any
artwork that is not immediately of our time - art
doesn't exist in some kind of ideal philosophical
vacuum but is the product of real people in history
working with the tools of human meaning making and if
the Mona Lisa and the nine Beethoven symphonies
diappeared for 100,000 years people would understand
some but not all of them on their rediscovery.
Things change continually and they're mucky and
awkward and hard to fit into neat theory -it's the
nature of things.
best
Michael
--- Ivan Pope <ivan@ivanpope.com> wrote:
> > The use of names is, contrary to what Ivan
> asserts,
> > the thing that make it the most personal, the most
> > connected - a name is of course not at all an
> > abstraction -in the world as we experience it, it
> > stands for everything we are
>
> I have to disagree, agreeably. My name, Ivan Pope,
> is simply a signifier. To
> my family it is intimately connected with me as
> family man. On this list it
> may signify mouthy arsehole. But to the wider world,
> it would signify
> nothing special. My point being that a list of names
> is just a list of
> names. Of course we can create within ourselves an
> emotional response, but
> this is to imagined people, not to the names. As far
> as I'm concerned, I
> have no way of knowing whether this is even a list
> of the people who lost
> their lives. Maybe its just a list from a telephone
> directory or something.
> And that would create exactly the same effect.
>
> > If the point you are making is that there are many
> > events in our world that require memorials and
> many
> > needless deaths then I couldn't agree more
>
> I'm not making that point. Obviously there may well
> be an infinite list of
> events that 'require' memorials. But that's nothing
> to do with this piece.
>
> > Because others have died does not
> > lessen the horror of what happened to perfectly
> > blameless people on September 11th .
> > I for one am pleased that there are artists around
> who
> > don't see art as simply a formal and self
> referential
> > game but as something that speaks to us about our
> > deepest concerns.
>
> I wonder here what our deepest concerns are here?
> That we may be blown up in
> an exploding building? That we may suddenly die?
> That our loved ones may
> die? That none of us are safe? All of these are
> valid subjects for art, of
> course. But the first one is totally specific to
> September 11 and thus
> hardly germane to the human condition. The rest are,
> of course, part of the
> stuff of art for time immemorial.
>
> My point about memorials is that a memorial implies
> an institutional
> response to an event. An artist can of course
> designate a work as a
> memorial, but that doesn't privelege it in any way,
> it just states the
> artists view of the work.
>
> Cheers,
> Ivan
>
__________________________________________________
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Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: Eryk Salvaggio: September 11th, 2001
<I am considering
removing the introduction page.>
hmm....well of course it's your piece but I'm not
convinced you should...its tone is very much of a
piece with the work as a whole and in a strange way I
think adds to it...or *prepares* us for the work in a
quite proper way.
Showing us your nervousness is a human and a warm
thing which in my view adds to the complexity and
reach of the work.
Of all the Six Rules ,although I absolutely understand
why it's there, the no introduction page one is the
one I feel most ambivalent about, for the reasons
outlined in my posts directed to Ivan's response.. of
course it's a massively abused thing ( and not just in
net art- sometimes as I wander about galleries in
particular the over contexting, often tendentious, of
work in the little wall panels makes me want to
scream)..but to touch on a larger issue again the
enormous merit of the Six Rules for me is not in the
specifics but in the gesture, in the idea of adopting
a rather fertile self restriction and also of choosing
to reject or downplay the simply fashionable.
regards
michael
__________________________________________________
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removing the introduction page.>
hmm....well of course it's your piece but I'm not
convinced you should...its tone is very much of a
piece with the work as a whole and in a strange way I
think adds to it...or *prepares* us for the work in a
quite proper way.
Showing us your nervousness is a human and a warm
thing which in my view adds to the complexity and
reach of the work.
Of all the Six Rules ,although I absolutely understand
why it's there, the no introduction page one is the
one I feel most ambivalent about, for the reasons
outlined in my posts directed to Ivan's response.. of
course it's a massively abused thing ( and not just in
net art- sometimes as I wander about galleries in
particular the over contexting, often tendentious, of
work in the little wall panels makes me want to
scream)..but to touch on a larger issue again the
enormous merit of the Six Rules for me is not in the
specifics but in the gesture, in the idea of adopting
a rather fertile self restriction and also of choosing
to reject or downplay the simply fashionable.
regards
michael
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com