I Spy: Surveillance and Security with Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Paul Shambroom :: until April 30, 2010 :: Sun Valley Center for the Arts, 191 5th Street East, Ketchum, Idaho.

I Spy: Surveillance and Security examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. At the same time that we are debating how to balance civil rights against our need for security, corporations use hidden cameras and track our internet use to sell us their products. Millions of us willingly (or unwittingly) give up our privacy to participate in social networking sites like Facebook.

How has increased governmental and corporate intrusion into our lives shaped our assumptions about what is private and what is public? How has our definition of civil liberties changed? What effect has the Internet and the boom in social networking sites had on our behavior? Are we safer now than we were before?

Between 2003 and 2005, Deborah Aschheim created six installations she called Neural Architecture (a smart building is a nervous building). “Nervous systems” for architecture, these sculptural projects reflect our tendency to think about buildings in human terms. They also convey our ambivalence toward surveillance; technologies that initially seem invasive or Orwellian eventually become simple conveniences. The sculpture Aschheim presents in this exhibition is a recreation of one neural column from her earlier projects.

Hasan Elahi has made his everyday life part of his artwork. Erroneously targeted as a suspected terrorist and interrogated by the FBI, Elahi decided that his best defense was to open up his life to public and governmental scrutiny. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is an online database that documents his travels, finances and even the meals he eats on airplanes. For I Spy, Elahi is creating a timely installation that considers security and surveillance in the world of aviation. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is a project of Creative Capital.

The work of artist, writer and geographer Trevor Paglen explores the relationship between surveillance and security in a post-September 11th world. His long-distance photographs of secret military installations, badges from classified military programs and photos of U.S. spy satellites in orbit expose a world of secret operations and surveillance that sometimes exists in plain sight.

From 2003 to 2007 Paul Shambroom photographed Homeland Security training environments like “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town” in New Mexico. His images of personnel in their disaster gear, training in simulated settings, get at the difficulty we sometimes have discerning between legitimate security threats and paranoid fear. Shambroom is a 2001 Creative Capital Visual Arts grantee.

Related Programs

Lecture: Living in a Wired World: Can Personal Privacy Survive in the 21st Century?
by Frederick Lane
Attorney, author and technology expert
March 10, 7pm

Lecture: The Role of Surveillance in National Security
by John Lehman
Former Secretary of the Navy and member of the 9/11 Commission
April 1, 7pm

A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice by Sabrina Raaf — Curated by Steve Dietz :: April 2 - June 4, 2010 :: Panel Discussion (Sabrina Raaf and Steve Dietz, moderated by Jordan Crandell): April 2; 6:00 - 7:00 pm and Opening Reception 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, First Floor, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture.

Dietz has selected five of Raaf’s electronic and responsive artworks to be included in this exhibition: Translator II: Grower, Icelandic Rift, Light Green Light, (n)Fold, and Meandering River.

Translator II Grower, a robotic sculpture, measures carbon dioxide levels inside the gallery as they are generated by visitors, and actively draws the measurements in green ink as a field of grass on the gallery walls. Examples of these ink drawings will be on display on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. The Icelandic Rift sculptures are electronically-powered works that include mechanical systems, representing far-future visions of agricultural production and mineral mining in zero-g environments. Prototypes and concept animations for Light Green Light, a lamp that unfolds into a netted tent for sleeping, and (n)Fold, a flat-fold design for dew harvesting and passive solar cooking, are also on view in the gallery. Meandering River is a sculptural installation made up of thermal screen material that has had its surface milled robotically with meandering river designs. Its installation form is derived from self-organizing and meandering river mathematics. This thermal screen installation is also designed to cascade vertically in order to create a climbing surface for vines and thus support the growth of a vertical garden. A cascading instance of the Meandering River sculpture is hung in the six-story window of the Atkinson Hall stairwell, and a second, river-type instance will be viewed in the hall area on the first floor.

Sabrina Raaf works in experimental sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpallo (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely (Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Artbots 2005 (Dublin), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), ISEA (Helsinki), the San Jose Museum of Art, and Klein Art Works (Chicago). The artist is the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Steve Dietz is Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996.

Marta Minujín: MINUCODEs — curated by: Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet:: March 2 – April 30, 2010 :: Opening Reception: March 2; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue on 68th Street, New York City.

Marta Minujin is a prominent voice of the Argentinean avant-garde art scene in the 1960s and 70s, with a brilliant international career that helped define the discussion about media, performance, and participation. Minujin is often mentioned as one of the pioneers of happenings.

MINUCODEs revisits an early project developed by the artist in 1968 at the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR), now Americas Society. For the Minucode, Minujin collected social data through a series of cocktail parties attended by readers who responded to questionnaires she posted in the press.

Drawing from strategies akin to the happening, and cinema verite, Minujin staged an immersive electronic environment in the gallery using footage from the parties, and set a series of “light and sound environments” created by selected guests in an adjacent room. The light environments were a collaboration between Minujin and artist Tony Martin.

Through original footage recently recovered and digitalized and archival documents, MINUCODEs illuminates this early work by a fundamental voice of the neo-avant-garde scene in Latin America in the 1960s. Additional documentation on Circuit (1967) and Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (1966), collaboration with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostel, will also be on display.

UPCOMING PUBLIC PROGRAMS

March 2. 6:00 pm :: Exhibition walk-through with the artist Marta Minujín and curators Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Blondet. Marta Minujín will provide a background and context for Minucode in this exclusive exhibition tour. The program will be introduced by Gabriela Rangel and Jose Luis Blondet who will discuss their curatorial vision and other relevant issues with the artist. This program will be followed by the exhibition opening reception.

March 22, 6:00 pm :: VIS-À-VIS SERIES: Javier Tellez and Doris Salcedo; Dialogues between artists, curators and critics from the Western Hemisphere: Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogota, Colombia; where she continues to live and work. Salcedo is one of the most internationally reputed contemporary artists, her work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including: Tate Gallery, London (2007); Museu Serralves, Porto (2006); 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999) and the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998) amongst many others. Salcedo received a grant from the Penny McCall Foundation in 1993, and a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1995.

Javier Téllez was born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1969, and currently lives and works in New York. A key and respected figure in the contemporary art world, Téllez’s work has been shown at solo and group exhibitions including: Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Baltic Art Centre, Visby, Sweden (2007); Aspen Art Museum (2006); The Power Plant Gallery, Toronto (2005); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima, Peru (2002); and the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).

March 30. 6:00 pm :: Media a la Minujin: some notes; Lecture by Judi Rodenbeck (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College) and José Luis Blondet (Co-curator): The restaging of Marta Minujin’s Minucode provides the occasion to reconsider some of the ways in which media art and mediation have been thought through since the 1960s. Deeply engaged with thinking about exchange, whether through the light social tinkle of cocktail chatter or through the flutter and tweet of the satellite signal, the radical presentness of MINUCODEs in its contemporary relevance shows the artist also to have been something of a temporal medium, too.

April 13. 6:00 pm :: The World is so Boring: Panel Discussion with Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright Associate Professor of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University), Carolee Schneemann (artist), Jenni Sorkin (Faculty and Graduate Committee, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College). Moderated by Gabriela Rangel (Co-curator)

The Studio: 19 Years + The Power Tool by Jon Brunberg :: February 25 - March 21, 2010 :: Opening and Conversation (Jon Brunberg & Catrin Lundqvist @ 6:15): February 25; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Moderna Museet, Box 16382, 10327 Stockholm, Sweden.

The Power Tool is an internet-based art work that offers you the possibility to measure your individual power. The piece is process-based and in continuous progress. Jon Brunberg has sharpened the tool for this exhibition, for its visitors, and their decisions regarding their own power. What is power? How powerful are you? With the power tool you can measure and analyse your power and compare your ranking with other users. Issues of individual power are a relatively new phenomenon, connected to ideas about individuality versus collectivity that are representative of our time. Who decides who has power? Can power be quantified? Metaphysical issues emerge as you start to answer the tool’s questionnaire.

Jon Brunberg’s art revolves around individual, collective and political power. He uses digital media to produce video sequences and internet-based systems and images.

19 years shows collective manifestations from 1989 to 2007, as dots on a world map, in 30 seconds. The starting point of the art work coincides with the year when the Berlin Wall fell. Early that year, the Muslim world was shaken by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which caused widespread protests in many countries, including India and Pakistan, and in the early summer the Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the centre of the world’s attention. At a fast pace, 19 years presents one-day events in which thousands of people have participated in protest actions that were intended to be peaceful, although some of them escalated into riots or even led to coups d’état.

The Gothenburg Riots of 2001 are, of course, featured, along with the enormous demonstrations that took place on February 15, 2003, when the West was preparing to invade Iraq. The whole world protested on an unprecedented scale against the war plans, but to no avail. It may seem as though some of the events have gone unnoticed, although they were significant on a local level, for example when China put the lid on after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Although peaceful manifestations resumed after some time, few details reached the world and were rarely reported in the press, which has been Jon Brunberg’s main source. If you wish to learn more about his research methods and definitions, visit www.jonbrunberg.com/19y/.

Merry-go-around by Lily & Honglei [Video of Second Life Performance/ Installation; 3'3" with sound; 2009]

Merry-go-around reflects 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China, particularly in memory of thousands of students died in the devastating disaster. The background with school rumbles is composed with Honglei’s oil paintings based on pictures of the earthquake ruins. The merry-go-around is covered by 2008 Beijing Olympic swimming pool “water cube.” Underneath is the flooded city mimicing the condition at Three Gorge Dams. Above all, the national celebration is launched …

Merry-go-around part of Java Museum - 10 years netart “Celebration”.

Concrete Geometries: Spatial Form in Social and Aesthetic Processes — Exhibition, Symposium and Publication :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: April 12, 2010 :: The Architectural Association School of Architecture, 36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES,UK.

The Concrete Geometeries Research Cluster is seeking submissions of work from the fields of art, architecture, sciences and humanities that explore the intimate relationship between between spatial form and human processes — be they social or aesthetic — and the variety of new material entities this relationship might provoke.

The past decade has seen a revolution in design and fabrication tools. Digital design methods for form finding and implementing have produced an influential body of work, preoccupied with the development of novel, complex and heterogeneous spatial form.

This form, simply referred to as ‘geometry’, is often evaluated in relation to its environmental and structural performance. Yet, the emergence of new spatial forms, bear significance beyond advances in technology but in relation to what they offer to the human condition in terms of aesthetic and social processes.

The call wishes to address such questions as:

• How is spatial form socially and experientially relevant?
• How does it choreograph human processes?
• Can it stimulate emotional or behavioral responses or create particular aesthetic experiences?
• Can social cultures be pattered through formal configurations of space?
• How can the articulation of a space support acts of inhabitation, appropriation or other types of direct engagement?
• How do we perceive space visually and bodily?
• What social or aesthetic consequences does the formal articulation of space have for our everyday lives and the production of reality?
• What kind of associations emerge between spatial form and social actors?

10 Projects and 10 Texts will be selected by the curatorial board for inclusion in an exhibition, symposium and publication at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 2010.

Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms :: February 27 - March 19, 2010 :: Machina Speculatrix (A Machine that Watches) performance with Mira Calix, February 26, 7:30 :: Architectural Association, London.

The forthcoming exhibition Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms puts forward a series of questions: Can architecture facilitate new forms of communication? Can design enable? Can we construct models of interaction as forms of conversations? Using design as a mode of enquiry, the projects by experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms explore these questions with the aim of opening up the discussion. Founded in 2002 by brothers Stephen and Theodore Spyropoulos, Minimaforms explores ideas of social and material interaction. The exhibition shows recent work including the (War Veteran) Vehicle, a collaboration with Krzysztof Wodiczko; a pavilion developed with Stelarc; a contemporary redesign of Archigram member David Greene’s seminal Living Pod Project; and Memory Cloud, Minimaforms’ critically acclaimed light installation in London’s Trafalgar Square.

Memory Cloud, named one of the top ten public art projects by the Daily Telegraph, was a transient light environment that transformed Trafalgar Square over three nights in October 2008. Based on one of the oldest forms of visual communication – smoke signals – Memory Cloud invited the public to participate by sending text messages that were grafted onto plumes of smoke. The (War Veteran) Vehicle is a mobile environment that becomes a communication vehicle, projecting the testimonies of the veterans who engage with it. The vehicle creates a public space of conversation as it ‘opens up’ its shielded envelope to stimulate engagement between the veteran and the immediate public.

A full-colour publication documenting the projects will be launched at the exhibition opening. Also titled Enabling: The Work of Minimaforms, it includes contributions from Stelarc, David Greene, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Brett Steele, Bronac Ferran, Andrew Benjamin, Marie-Ange Brayer and Roger F Malina.

Minimaforms will collaborate with composer and Warp recording artist Mira Calix on an opening night performance titled Machina Speculatrix (A Machine that Watches). Theodore Spyropoulos is Co-Director of the AA Design Research Lab and a visiting Research Fellow at MIT. Stephen Spyropoulos is Design Director for the online fashion house Gilt Groupe. Work by Minimaforms has been acquired by the FRAC Centre (France), Signum Foundation (Poland) and the Archigram Archive (UK). They have exhibited internationally.

Dada South? Exploring Dada legacies in South African art 1960 – the present :: until February 28, 2010 :: Symposium: February 18-19 :: Iziko South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company’s Garden, Cape Town, South Africa.

The critically acclaimed exhibition Dada South? is one of the first locally-produced, independently curated museum exhibitions in South Africa that focuses on a major international art movement of the 20th century, but from the perspective of recent South African art.

Curators Roger van Wyk and Kathryn Smith present a special programme in the last two weeks of the exhibition, including a two-day public symposium and closing weekend talks featuring South African and visiting scholars, curators and artists.

Drawing together the first collection of historical Dada works ever seen in South Africa, as well as an eclectic range of works by South African artists representing an assortment of experimental and underground positions, the exhibition proposes a review of the ambivalent relationship between cultural creation and political resistance, as well as how art historical ideas are received and interpreted in response to specific, local conditions.

Dada South? also invites consideration of another set of questions: What significance did African art hold for Dada and how do we understand their ideas about Africa? How are their counter-rational, collaborative and interdisciplinary strategies, dating back nearly 100 years now, still so resonant in contemporary art today? In particular, what does a Dada attitude to the political and spiritual reveal about individualism, collectivism and ethics in art today? As Marcel Duchamp said, “When you tap something, you don’t always recognize the sound. That’s apt to come later.” Could Dada be the only 20th century movement that still exists?

As a movement founded by exiles and migrants, Dada challenged notions of territoriality, nationality, ownership and prescribed identity. Dada’s lack of allegiance to any style or ideology, as well as its political and aesthetic contrariness offers an alternative lens through which to view creative tactics and tendencies in contexts which have experienced radical political change.

Whether we ask ‘What is Dada?’ or ‘What is not-Dada?’ (which is a rather Dada question), some of the topics covered include the relationship between Dada and Africa; the cultural underground and related periodicals; art practice as a tactics of action; relationships between forms of art and political agency; the tensions between institutions and experimentation; and counter-rational strategies (absurdism, chaos and chance) as methods for innovation.

Keynote speakers include renowned Dada scholar Marc Dachy (Paris, FR); curator Susan Hapgood (New York, USA); performance theorist Jean Johnson-Jones (Surrey, UK) and artist and social provocateur Nina Romm (Johannesburg, ZA). Other speakers include Belinda Blignaut, Willem Boshoff, Fred de Vries, Kendell Geers, Thembinkosi Goniwe, the Gugulective, Stacy Hardy, Ashraf Jamal and James Sey, among many others.

Adrian Notz (Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich), Lia Perjovschi (artist, Romania) and John Nankin (artist, South Africa) will present talks and performances at the closing weekend.

PARTNERS

Dada South? is presented by the Goethe-Institut, the National Arts Council of South Africa, Pro Helvetia, Mondriaan Foundation, Embassy of France in South Africa, Institut Francaise d’Afrique du Sud, University of Stellenbosch, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; BHP Billiton, and the generous support of private donors.

The Dada South? symposium and closing weekend is made possible through the additional generosity of Vivien Cohen, Culturesfrance, Pro Helvetia, Goodman Gallery, Iziko Museums of Cape Town and the Romanian Cultural Institute, Bucharest.

LENDERS

Lenders to the exhibition include the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; Berlin Gallery, Landes Museum Berlin; John Heartfield Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin; Goethe-Institut Collection, Munich; Kunsthaus Zürich; Bellerive Museum, Zürich Museum of Design; Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne collections, Paris; De Stijl Archives, Netherlands Institute for Art History, Den Haag; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Iziko South African National Gallery; Gauteng Legislature; Sasol Museum, University of Stellenbosch; BHP Billiton; Wits Art Galleries and private lenders.

RHA Presents Critique of Archival Reason featuring Herman Asselberghs, Jeremiah Day, Cecilia Gronberg (in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson), Shoji Kato, Irene Kopelman, and Sean Snyder :: Curated by Henk Slager :: February 19 - March 13, 2010 :: Opening: February 18, 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: GradCAM, Royal HIbernian Academy, 15 Ely Place, Dublin 2, Ireland.

The concept of archive naturally seems to evoke an image of control and survey. For example, in The Order of Things, Foucault has described the archive as a system introducing order, meaning, boundaries, coherence and reason into what is disparate, confused, and contingent. The archive is a product of the will to represent, the desire for surveyability and transparency while emerging in modernity as a rigid scopic regime where multiformity and diversity have been reduced to levels of equivalence.

Starting with Duchamp, visual artists have engaged in the epistemology of the archival order. Artists appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured and interrogated archival structures and archival materials aiming at deconstructing them as compulsive, taxonomic knowledge systems. Para-archives were developed as a demonstration of the impossibility of categorizing the contingent for the sake of representation and to demand attention for a non-hierarchic heterogeneity and an anomic form of knowledge production. Hal Foster argues that by focusing on unacknowledged and repressed qualities, artistic archives show the essence of the archive as ‘found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.

This fold-like nature also appears characteristic for the manner in which currently, topical, research-based art practice relates to the concept of archive. In line with Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, one could speak of transforming a noun into a verb, i.e. of a processual pleasure of archiving. Such an archiving is a rhizomatic activity and a ‘becoming archive’ where ultimately the will to connect what cannot be connected is decisive. New forms of display will emerge in connective mutations of entirely diverse registers. No longer is an archiving consciousness placed in the supportive narrative of a contextualizing infolab developed parallel to the exhibition. Rather a research-based practice knows how to present both constitutive segments in a fluent and integral manner. Such integral practices are the departure points for the exhibition Critique of Archival Reason.This is also a critique in the Kantian sense of an activity not determining apriori its criteria, but apostiori in a form of experimental and immanent research into decisive and separate faculties.

Exhibiting a book - inherently connotative of organization and order - appears to be one of the possible forms of presenting a critique of archival reason. A book functions as a montage table of imagination, and as a thinking machine, Cecilia Gronberg claims. Her telephone directory type work (in collaboration with Jonas (J) Magnusson) Reconnections: Transcription, Lists, Documents, Archives investigates the archive of the first Swedish telephone factory and interconnects conceptual art, Perec, archival aesthetics, French Maoism, record photography and Midsommarkransen’s local history. Irene Kopelman’s work Drawing Archive adopts a sculptural approach. The work shows that drawing - guaranteeing categorical, scientific knowledge in 19th-century archives - functions as an important method for artistic thinking in an artistic archive through a process of drawing differences. Installation work could engineer an exchange between the semiotic structure of the traditional archive and the imaginary connotation of the artistic archive, says Shoji Kato. Kato deploys literally the arthistorical opposition horizontal versus vertical. On the floor there is a scale-model-type representation of the economic infrastructure of a city; on the wall there is its painted, cartographic representation called Tie: Place and Symbols. Kato describes the emerging artistic process of thought fluctuating between the two pieces as an ‘embodied potentiality of plurality’.

A critical focus on mass media’s archival reason is demonstrated in various works. Mass media develop authentic forms of narrativity and fiction sometimes even based on an absolutely empty archive as Jeremiah Day’s work Fred Hampton’s Apartment shows. The singularity of the artist is absent in much documentary work. Therefore, in the form of narrative performances, Day pushes the artist back into the center. How should an artist relate to the role that ubiquitous digitization plays in producing a documentary practice? Sean Snyder’s work Index addresses that question through various formats of storage-media-images from his physical archive. The images have been destroyed and digitized, thus outlining a selective topology of the materials of artistic research. Herman Asselberghs delves into the question of what would happen with archiving the first decade of the 21st century if the mass media would omit 9/11 as icon for that period. His i-pod presentation Black Box shows 2/15 - the day when 30 million people demonstrated against starting a preventive war in Iraq - as an iconomic reassessment of 9/11.

This exhibition accompanies the conference Arts Research: Publics and Purposes. GradCAM-Dublin, 15.2-19.2. Keynote Speakers: Anton Vidokle (17/2/10) and Ute Meta Bauer (19/2/10). More information: www.gradcam.ie

This project is co-organised by the European Arts Research Network and GradCAM-Dublin with Centrifugal. This project is in part funded by the EC-EACEA Culture 2000–2007: ‘Artist as Citizen’ project. The project has been generously supported by the Mondriaan Foundation.

Arrested Time by Nathaniel Stern with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger — An exhibition of works combining contemporary technologies with traditional drawing and printmaking methods curated by Jo-Anne Green :: February 26 - April 3, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 26; 5:30 - 8:30 pm :: Greylock Arts, 93 Summer Street, Adams MA.

Nathaniel Stern’s Given Time simultaneously activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, gazing into one another’s interface. Viewers encounter this networked partnership as a diptych of large-scale (8 feet tall) and facing video projections in a real world gallery, both exhibiting a live view of one avatar, as perceived by the other. To create a visceral aesthetic, these custom-designed and life-sized “bodies” are hand-drawn in subtly animated graphite and charcoal. The audience is invited to physically walk between them; they’re able to hear and see them breathing, witness their hair blowing in the wind, pick up faint sounds such as rushing water or birds crying out from the surrounding simulated environment. Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.

In Distill Life, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approach both old and new media as form. They permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content - print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

With Arrested Time, Green curates an exhibition of Stern’s solo and collaborative work that explores the juxtaposition of old and new media, and illuminates the possibilities and limitations of both. The works hover between stasis and motion, texture and light, line and pixel, past and present, paper and screen, surface and depth, one artist and another.

http://nathanielstern.com
http://jessicameuninck.com

Lovebytes - A Festival of Digital Creativity and Culture :: Opening: February 12, 2010; 6:30 - 10:00 pm @ Sheffield Winter Garden and Millennium Gallery :: Lovebytes, Workstation, Sheffield, S1 2BX, United Kingdom.

Lovebytes is a cultural festival for the digital age. A season of extraordinary events taking place at some of Sheffield’s landmark venues and public spaces, from February to June 2010. The festival opening night features a late night opening of the digital art exhibition Code:Craft along with with live performances by Francisco Lopez, Russell Haswell and Mark Fell.

Lovebytes is an annual international festival of digital art, established in 1994, which explores the creative impact of computers, new technology and digital culture. The theme for 2010 is ‘digital craft’; looking at creative digital culture in the context of traditional art and craft. Exhibitions include Code:Craft at the Museums Sheffield:Millennium Gallery which forms the hub for a programme of special events between January and June.

Code:Craft is a new exhibition, curated by Lovebytes in collaboration with Museums:Sheffield, which looks at the creative impact of computer programming and how artists are utilising ‘open source software’ to produce everything from interactive installations to sculpture. With new work by world leaders in this field including C E B Reas, Mehmet Akten and Golan Levin, William Ngan, David Dessens, Daniel Widrig and Daniel Brown, Code:Craft represents a growing, international community of artists who are exploring the fundamental systems of nature, the limitations of computers and, perhaps, the future of art and design.

Code:Craft :: January 27 – June 16, 2010 :: Millennium Gallery. Arundel Gate, Sheffield. S1 2PP.

Lovebytes is supported by Arts Council England.

iraqimemorial.org Exhibition: February 16, 2010 - March 12, 2010 :: Symposium: March 4, 2010 :: Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, Church Fine Arts Building, North Virginia Street, University of Nevada, Reno.

Iraqimemorial.org is an online project launched in 2007 by media artist/activist Joseph DeLappe. This ongoing project invites artists and architects to propose memorials to commemorate the untold thousands of civilian deaths in the war in Iraq. A total of 174 proposals are featured on the iraqimemorial.org website which is available in both English and Arabic translations. An international slate of curators, scholars, artists and architects were invited in 2008 and 2009 respectively, each to select their top ten entries (there is no “winner” of this competition). The Sheppard Gallery exhibition features 59 of these proposals that were selected through the two jurors’ review processes. Selected artists were invited to recreate their online proposals as 30×40? vertical layouts that have been realized as large format prints for the exhibition. The exhibition features selected artifacts and videos related individual works. In the center of the space, computer stations will be available for visitors to view the entirety of the iraqimemorial.org project online. A gallery walk-through and symposium featuring artists, jurors and scholars involved with the project is scheduled for March 4, 2010, followed by an evening reception.

Proposals - Artists

Joseph DeLappe, Director, iraqimemorial.org, University of Nevada, Reno
Tony Allard “and counting”, California State University, San Marcos
Amro Hamzai, “Iraqis Today”, Independent filmmaker/photographer, Los Angeles
Patrick Lichty, “Arbiter of Fate”, Columbia College, Chicago
Cat Soergel Marshall,”Light Trails”, Louisiana State University

Jurors/Scholars - Context

Dr. Marjorie Vecchio Moderator, Director Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery
Dr. Bernadette Buckley, Goldsmiths, University of London, researcher/writer on art and war and/or art and terrorism, including chapters for Art in the Age of Terrorism and Iraq and the Destruction of Heritage, HMP, London, 2008
Dr. Ann Keniston, University of Nevada, Reno, specialty in American Poetry, co-editor of Literature after 9/11, Routledge, 2008
Dr. David Simpson, UC Davis, literary theorist and author of 9/11 The Culture of Commemoration, University of Chicago Press, 2008
Raul Zamudio, NY-based independent curator and critic; contributing editor, Art Nexus; US correspondent, Flash Art.

Iraqimemorial.org Exhibition Participating Artists:

Tyler Adams
Vincent Akuin & Michael Manalo
Jorge Aldea
Tony Allard
Mehedi Amin
kenAR AEC & Team
Nadia Awad
Stephen Bailey
Bill Balaskas
Alexandra Ben Simon
Joshua Berger
Matthijs Boer
Carolyn Brown
Christina Calbari
Chuck Chaney
Joseph Choma
Ivan Contreras Rubio
Ryan Crooks
NaJa & deOstos
Peter Di Salvo
Rodrigo Donoso
Carla Drago
Maureen Drdak
Rob Duarte
Hakki Erol
Al Fadhil
Elizabeth Filardi & Erik Burke
Sara Fiore
Nestor Armando Gil
Amro Hamzawi
Linda Hesh
Jona Hoier & Andreas Zingerle
Peter Janssen & Ward Janssen
Suzanne Kanatsiz
Athanasia Karaioannoglou
Matt Kenyon & Doug Easterly
Lynn Marie Kirby
Erik Krikortz
Simon Kuntze-Fechner & Eddie Pinaud
Patrick Lichty
Michael Magrath
Megan Mailloux
Alban Mannisi & Philippe Nys
Cat Soergel Marshall
Stephan Mundwiler
Yaniv Ophir & Gila Fakterman
Farid Rakun
Julio Ramirez
Bekim Ramku
Rashad Salim
Andrea Stanislav
Erin Finch Stevens
Ehren Tool
Jack Toolin
Werryson Wijaya
Geri Wittig
Holly Wong
Alyssa Wright
Sayoko Yoshida

On Gaps and Silent Documents :: February 9-14, 2010 :: STUK arts centre, Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.

In On Gaps and Silent Documents international artists question the absence of documents and data in archives, data banks and memory. What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used? Archives and data banks are primarily determined by these gaps and silent documents. As Sven Spieker notes, ‘Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate.’ Creating archives is continual selection. As such, it reveals the priorities and blind spots of the keeper of the archives, his world and his time.

Since the beginning of time, ‘forgetting’ was always the norm. ‘Remembering’ was the exception. In this age of continuously transforming technology and worldwide networks, this balance seems to be shifting. Is it true that in our time, with its excessive storage capacity, everything is obsessively being saved? More and more, we face the question of whether we have the right to create our own gaps, to silence documents and erase our own traces. Privacy, intellectual property and censorship in our digital networked society require different and complex solutions.

On Gaps and Silent Documents uses ‘new’ and ‘old’ media and technologies, such as the Internet, websites, Google, newspapers, texts, books, film and video, photography, music scores, sound, telephones, Twitter, online newsgroups, printers, microfilm, light, computers, etc., to approach this theme from different (sometimes paradoxical) perspectives and question it in spatial installations, presentations and performances.

Artefact is initiated by provincie Vlaams-Brabant and STUK arts centre.

Special thanks to the participating artists, Wolfgang Ernst, Sven Spieker, Charles Merewether, Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger and Rony Vissers for their inspiring texts and ideas.

Aion Experiments — with the Morris/Trasov Archive, Sam Keogh, Pádraic E. Moore, Takeshi Murata, Ulf Rollof, Ciarán Walsh, Robin Watkins and the Foundation for Aion Research :: February 12 – April 10, 2010 :: Closing Event: The Luminiferous Aether :: April 9; 7:00 pm :: Project Arts Centre, 39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Ireland.

This experiment differs from some of the more intensive previous Aion Experiments in which volunteers remained under close observation for prolonged periods. Throughout the duration of this exhibition several devices will be installed in the exhibition space, which will in turn become highly charged with energy that fosters cell regeneration and cerebral stimulation. The organisers request that all members of the public who plan to attend this experiment prepare physically and mentally in advance, as the Gallery will be charged with biofield energy. The organisers also wish to notify visitors that effects of this Aion Experiment may only become apparent in the weeks following the event.

To mark the closing of Aion Experiments an event will take place at 7:00 pm on April 9. Entitled The Luminiferous Aether, it comprises of documentation made by Robin Watkins of low frequency audio signals which originate from the streams of charged particles that reach the Earth’s atmosphere through the Solar Wind, giving rise to the Aurora Borealis and other magnetic storms. With temperatures dropping to minus 50° C, the field recordings of Solar radiation were made during three consecutive days and nights outside of a small village in the remote Yukon-Koyukuk region (the Arctic Circle, Alaska). For the Project Arts Centre sound screening, listeners will collectively experience the work through individual radio headphones and receivers, grouped in front of a central transmitter.

The first Aion Experiment took place in Northern Europe in the 1930s, instigated by a team of practitioners from diverse disciplines including physics, chemistry, psychology and sociology. Since its inception the Foundation has stated that one central aim unifying its diverse members and affiliates is the desire to develop a greater understanding of the phenomena of body-oriented energy. To this end, numerous experiments have been undertaken, involving countless participants. In an attempt to heighten the results of the experiments, they often take place in temporary laboratories, erected upon sites identified – at some point in history – as charged with naturally occurring biofield energy.

One of the many motives driving the ongoing work of the organisation is a conviction that the human species is unaware of its own true potential. Another unifying belief is that humans have, for the most part, become detached from certain fundamental truths and blind instinctive necessities. Statements issued by the Foundation propose that unless the current situation is rectified radically and promptly, the human species is headed inexorably toward untimely self-destruction.

Like the Aion Experiments themselves – which can assume limitless permutations – the international foundation is distinguished by its quiet public profile. Although numerous respected and admired scientists and practitioners – including Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Wilhem Reich and Alfred Kinsey – openly associated with Aion Experiments for a time all information pertaining to work carried out by, and individuals involved with, the Foundation, has become strictly confidential in the past decade. It is known that practitioners working in the realm of visual artists have, on several occasions, been invited to contribute in an advisory capacity to Aion investigation. This is perhaps an indication that the visual arts remain a potent source of untapped potential in terms of maximising human capabilities. The practitioner whose involvement with the Foundation is most renowned is the Swiss artist Emma Kunz (1892 - 1963) who collaborated with the foundation in the momentous discovery of Aion A, a rock crystal with potent healing potential.

Aion Experiments has been organised by Pádraic E. Moore, who wishes to acknowledge the research and production of Morris/Trasov Archive (Canada), Sam Keogh (Ireland), Takeshi Murata (U.S.A.), Ulf Rollof (Sweden) Ciarán Walsh (Ireland) and of course the Foundation for Aion Research, without whom this project could never have taken place

Project Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre, with a gallery and two theatre spaces, located at the heart of artistic activity in Dublin. For the archive of exhibition and events from the visual arts programme, go here.

Digital Incarnate: The Body, Identity and Interactive Media :: February 8 - April 2, 2010 :: Reception: February 11; 6:00 - 9:00 pm :: The Arcade, Columbia College, 618 S Michigan Avenue, 2nd floor, Chicago, IL.

Whether through motion capture, live processing, animation or other means of data visualization, the body is the referent and inspiration for many digital media artists working with interactive technologies. Digital Incarnate: The Body, Identity, and Interactive Media is an investigation into this confluence, gazing through multiple lenses to explore the body and identity as they are transformed and represented through technological evolution. As the body is digitally reflected and reborn, are we looking towards technology to experience ourselves in a redeemed form outside of human societal constructs? When technology captures kinetic energy, is our essence embodied in the pixilation, or is our “self” lost in the process?

Through dynamic works by Luftwerk, OpenEnded Group, and Troika Ranch, as well as the Synchronous Objects web kiosk created by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi, and Norah Zuniga Shaw, we hope to bring forward exploratory ideas that push and pull our perceptions of the body and impulses to move beyond it into uncharted cyber territory. This exhibition is co-curated by Alycia Scott and Sara Slawnik.

Digital Incarnate is presented by Columbia College Chicago’s Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces, The Dance Center, the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media and the Interactive Arts and Media Department.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: Gallery Talks with Exhibition Artists :: The Arcade, 618 S. Michigan, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60605 :: Free and open to the public.

•    OpenEnded Group, February 12, 12:15 pm
•    Synchronous Objects, March 2, 12:15 pm
•    Troika Ranch, March 4, 12:15 pm
•    Luftwerk, March 25, 12:15 pm

Panel Discussion: “Corporeality and the Digital Gaze” :: Monday, March 1, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. ::
Stage 2, 618 S Michigan Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60605 :: Free and open to the public

This panel discussion will investigate “the body” when explored through collaborative possibilities of performance and technology. It will feature a conversation among pioneering artists whose work engages the body and digital media, specifically interrogating the ever-increasing digitized gaze, the transcription of the body through data visualization, and the impact it has on the body’s cultural contexts. Panelists will include:

•    Grisha Coleman: composer, performer and choreographer; Assistant Professor in Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University.
•    Marianne Kim: artist and educator working in dance, theatre and video art; Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies Department.
•    Maria Palazzi: co-creative director of Synchronous Objects; Director of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, and Associate Professor of Design at The Ohio State University.
•    Dawn Stoppiello: choreographer and dancer; Executive Director and Artistic Co-Director of Troika Ranch.
•    Moderated by Raquel Monroe: Assistant Professor at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
http://www.colum.edu/deps&lt
http://www.colum.edu/engage
http://www.colum.edu/institutewomengender

CONTACT:
Alycia Scott, Co-Curator, 312-369-8341, ascott [at] colum.edu
Sara Slawnik, Co-Curator, 312-369-8845, sslawnik [at] colum.edu

The Public School presents Ambivalence as part of Actions, Conversations, Intersections an exhibition of participatory projects :: Sundays in February 2010, 3:00 - 5:00 pm.

Our course on Ambivalence will be meeting simultaneously in two places - the Municipal Art Gallery (the site of the Actions, Conversations, and Intersections exhibition until April 18, 2010) and Telic Arts Exchange (where The Public School regularly holds classes). Each group will be able to see and hear the other through a commonplace video conference call (Skype, iChat, etc.). Teachers, speakers, and other guest presenters will go to whichever location seems more appealing that day and no one will be informed of their decision until the last minute.

We often wonder what happens when participatory art projects are brought into the gallery, particularly when they already regularly function without an exhibition space. This question is amplified when the project and exhibition are in the same city. Does the project migrate to the exhibition, leaving its “normal” site closed? Does it announce itself as nomadic, settling temporarily in exhibition space after residency after biennial? Does it produce an exhibitable double of itself to accommodate the requirements of the gallery? Does it refuse any mutation or compromise in order to preserve its singular authenticity?

ambivalence:

This course will (maybe) explore different concepts and theories of ambivalence, typically defined as “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action;” “continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite);” and “uncertainty as to which approach to follow.”

In addition to researching and reading what various contemporary thinkers have to say about ambivalence, we will also attempt to debate the relative pros and cons of ambivalence as a state/ position/ strategy. What is dangerous, or, alternately, enchanting, about ambivalence? How might we theorize an ethics of uncertainty?

Readings will include excerpts from USC professor Karen Pinkus’ new book on alchemy and ambivalence, as well as selections from psychoanalytic, queer, trans and other works relevant to the topic. Suggestions encouraged!

This class will be led by Sarah Kessler and others.

the first class:

- How might we define ambivalence (what does ambivalence seem to signify)?
- Is ambivalence an affect? An intellectual state? An ambiance? A process?
- In what ways is ambivalence represented?

Reading: Karen Pinkus, “Excursus: Ambivalence,” from Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence. Possible second reading: Judith Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” in The Turn to Ethics.

Also: Please, if you like, bring various definitions/representations of ambivalence to class (textual excerpts, images, video clips, etc.) for group discussion.

http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1765
http://www.actionsconversationsintersections.com/
http://la.thepublicschool.org/node/1765/aaaarg

Telic Arts Exchange
951 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
http://telic.info
tel: 213.229.8907

Para/Site Art Space is honored to present two exhibitions in its Hong Kong Venue: FAX & Move On Asia: The End of Video Art. These exhibitions are the result of collaborations between Para/Site Art Space and iCI/The Drawing Center (New York) and LOOP Alternative Space (Seoul).

FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Faxes by nearly 100 artists sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of the exhibition, including seminal examples of early telecommunications art. Each institution on the tour will invite up to twenty additional artists to submit works, which will be presented at all successive venues. These works may be transmitted to each participating institution’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The active accumulation of information-received in real time, in the exhibition space-will include drawings and texts, and even the inevitable junk faxes from telemarketers and local businesses as well. All the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result-an ongoing cumulative project-is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Here, reproducible yet erratic production via the fax machine displaces traditional notions of the hand‚ still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and foregrounds the role of drawing as a generative process. The 18 artists added to the Hong Kong touring are: Nadim Abbas, Huang Xiaopeng, Rem Koolhaas, Lam Hoi Sin, MAP Office, Sanna Marander, Erkka Nissinen, Prachya Phinthong, The Propeller Group, Qiu Anxiong, Pedro Reyes, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Nestor Torrens , Wan Qingli, Adrian Wong, Doris Wong, Magdalen Wong , Morgan Wong Wing-Fat.

Curator: João Ribas
Curator in Hong Kong: Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya

The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were made possible, in part, by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions in The Drawing Center’s project gallery; and by support to iCI from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and iCI Benefactor members Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.

Move on Asia: The End of Video Art
Main curator: Jinsuk SUH (Director of Alternative Space LOOP in Korea)
Organized by: Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul) in collaboration with Para/Site Art Space

Move on Asia is one of Korea’s leading videoart initiatives. It started 2004 in Seoul, arranged by Asian curator networks. Each year, the Asian curator networks nominate experimental artists and opens single channel video exhibition. The selection includes artists from Korea, Japan, China, Australia and Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong joined this last edition for the first time in 2009, with the participation of Para/Site Art Space in the programme. Representing Hong Kong are local artist Hung Keung and curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya.

The exhibition gathers some of the most exciting videoart from Asia, under a new theme every year. In 2009 the general theme confronts us the idea of the end of Video Art and the appropriation of genres that are connected to the filmic and documentary fields. Have the boundaries of video art vanished? What is left from the changes that videoart has undergone over the last decade? The exhibition includes 19 curators and almost 30 artists from the region.

If not you not me - Annie Abrahams :: February 12 - March 20, 2010 :: Opening: February 12; 6:30 - 9:00 pm :: HTTP Gallery, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY.

Annie Abrahams (b. NL 1954 , lives and works FR) is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. ‘If not you not me’ at HTTP Gallery in London is the first exhibition of her work in the UK. Where social networking sites make us think of communication as clean and transparent, Annie Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling– of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension. Working with simple interfaces, carefully crafted instructions and disruptions in data-flow, Abrahams sensitises participants and audiences to glitches in communication and invites them to experience and reflect on different ways of being together in a machine-mediated world. The exhibition asks how we deal with the tensions of collaboration and physical separation as we negotiate relationships through video imagery, computer software and digital networks.

Abrahams has created three new works for ‘If not you not me’ at HTTP Gallery, inviting collaboration from visitors to the gallery and others around the world. Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée, a telematic still life for mixed media and LED message board, asks visitors to HTTP Gallery and Kawenga - territoires numériques in Montpellier, Franceto communicate with one another by arranging objects in the still life and sending messages to one another, with the results visible in a projection in both galleries.

The exhibition’s private view also includes two new collaborative performances to be documented and shown in the exhibition. On Collaboration Graffiti Wall, a collective text and speech performance, draws on reflections around the nature and problems of online collaboration collected via a website.
Huis Clos / No Exit - Jam involves four women artists sitting before webcams in different locations around the world. They will try to organise a unified sound performance, working with and around the inevitable delays that result from the international live feed. In addition to the new works, the exhibition presents documentation of recent networked performances created and curated by Abrahams.

If not you not me is co-produced by Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery, London, and bram.org and Kawenga - territoires numériques, Montpellier, France. Furtherfield.org supports experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change. This exhibition was conceived in connection with Furtherfield.org’s Rich Networking project interrogating the transparency of communication, artistic collaboration and sociability through digital networks. This is the fourth event in Furtherfield.org’s three-year Media Art Ecologies programme which foregrounds practices sharing an ecological approach - an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns.

Events

Private view and performances: Friday, 12 February 2010, 6:30-9pm, HTTP Gallery

7pm: On Collaboration Graffiti Wall - Collective text and speechperformance at gallery.
To contribute or view texts to be used during the performance visit http://bram.org/collaboration/index.php.

8pm: Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée goes live - telematic still Life installation at HTTP Gallery and Kawenga - territoires numériques, Montpellier, France.

8:30pm: Huis Clos / No Exit - Jam - Telematic performance projected at HTTP Gallery, featuring Anteye Greie (Hailuoto, FI), Pascale Gustin (Paris, FR), Helen Varley Jamieson (Wellington, NZ), and Maja Kalogera (Madrid, ES).

For Nothing by Pedro Torres :: January 7-17, 2010 :: AntiFrame - Independent Curating Project, Apartado 108, 2736-180 Cacem, Portugal.

Pedro Torres presents at Round Corner, the sound-installation For Nothing, based on the work by Samuel Beckett Texts For Nothing.

Pedro Torres entices us to hear voices that plunge into the emptiness. Murmured vocal blows. Spoken murmurs, whispered, hard to save. Like the sound. Like every other voices we hear and don’t want to hear, the inner voices that usually chase us and betray us too often. Is there infinitude of muted sounds that elude us: either because we don’t pay them the due attention or just because our hearing ability is formatted between the 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz? And it is this formatting when inconsciently unformatted anguishes us. Then we hear what we don’t want to, what we didn’t ask to, what we, now, try to forget. Does Memory have a voice? Is music audible in the pauses? Does Trauma have to be silenced?

Texts For Nothing by Samuel Beckett emerges in a pos-war context. Both the historical expansions and contractions are dangerous. All the time architecture has in its present state what it was in the past, obviously not in its original form but in one gained along numerous incorporations in formed later analysis. Maybe because of that Theodor Adorno hasn’t defended so much « (…) the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past. » (in Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.)

The past appears invisible therefore untouchable – like the voices we hear. But they both exist and will always exist here and there. Regardless of each others’ past, particularly of the visitor’s, Pedro Torres asks you to try to listen the inaudible because:

«Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.» (Samuel Beckett, Texts For Nothing).

Claudia Camacho

Pedro Torres | (Glória de Dourados, Brazil, 1982) works with video, sound, installation and photography. Graduated by the São Paulo University (ECA-USP), he participated in solo and group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, France and Germany. He spent five months in an artistic residence in Berlin (2007/08) after receiving a visual arts scholarship for an artistic production at the Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, Spain) in 2006/07. He is represented in the Fundación Marcelino Botín and MadridAbierto (sound-art) collections. Nowadays he lives and works in Barcelona. For Nothing is his first exhibition in Portugal (www.pedrotorres.net).

Curated by: AntiFrame –Independent Curating Project presents itself in the international artistic panorama as an ambitious and conscientious initiative for curating and promotion of artistic projects.

One Part Human :: January 9 - February 13, 2010 :: Opening: January 9; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer Street, New York City.

One Part Human brings together artists who explore the tension between human and technological capabilities in today’s scientific society. The exhibition includes two remarkable motorized sculptures by Canadian artists who have not exhibited previously in New York: Perfect Vehicle by Simone Jones and Robotic Chair conceived by visual artist Max Dean and realized in collaboration with Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan. Brian Knep, an artist in residence at Harvard Medical School, will exhibit photography and high definition video related to the microscopic worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most studied multi-cellular organisms in the world

Simone Jones’ Perfect Vehicle (2003-2006) is a three-wheeled machine, eleven-feet long, that contains sensors which monitor the breathing of its occupant to control its speed. A video of a filmed performance depicts its journey across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Pathos surrounds the work as the vehicle inches its way across the surrealistic landscape, an anti-heroic and absurd gesture. Jones, who has been making kinetic sculpture since 1989, is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

The Robotic Chair (1984-2006) by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan is a generic wooden chair that has the capacity to totally fall apart, collapsing with great force, and put itself back together with seemingly persistence and determination without human intervention. As a stand in for the human body, the chair, and its cycle of falling and recovery, evokes existential themes relating to fragility and resilience. Exhibited internationally at art institutions and technological gatherings, the chair was aired on the Discovery Channel and on YouTube, inspiring impassioned responses. Dean, who has created more than thirty-five years of significant work, has said of his invention: “I thought I was making a sculpture, and I realize that we have created a performer.”

Brian Knep challenges the limits of science to retain the sublime awe of the unknown. His new series of digital images depicts microscopic worms, created in the laboratory and unseen by the naked eye, as they negotiate fabricated environments – labyrinths and other meditative structures, buildings that suggest futuristic intergalactic worlds, and the outline of a male and female figure lifted from the plaque attached to the Pilgrim spacecraft to communicate with other forms of life. The male figure gestures with a Namaste greeting that means “the divine in me greets the divine in you.” Images of hair are also evidence of a human presence that both grace and spoil the C. elegans micro-cosmos. Knep exhibited installations of video projections that require audience participation in his first exhibition at the Feldman Gallery in 2007.