1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art - Film/Art between Experiment and Archive :: Curators: Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Leire Vergara :: December 20, 2007 - March 30, 2008 :: sala rekalde, Alameda Recalde 30, Bilbao 48009, Bizkaia (Spain).

1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art is the next stage of an exhibition and research project that explores the “continuous” history of experimentation in film and art and the interaction of both fields. Grounded in the extensive Polish experimental film output of the 1970s, 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes will offer a selection of films mostly produced by Polish artists from that period, whilst including contemporary international artistic proposals that constitute a challenge for the interpretation of the history of experimental cinema. Continue reading

Video Vortex.2 - Johan Grimonprez & Charlotte L’ouzon, Martijn Hendriks, Jaap de Jonge, Meta.Live.Nu presents DFM RTV INC, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Oog Volkskrant Online, Park 4DTV, Rabotnik, Sonic()bject, Martin Takken, Thomson & Craighead :: December 8, 2007 - February 3, 2008 :: Opening: December 7, 5:00 p.m. :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam.

Video Vortex.2 is a sequel to the Video Vortex exhibition that responded to the Web2.0 phenomenon. Continue reading

“The ‘World Wide Web’ has an omnipresent ring to it, but when it first began, it didn’t carry with it the weighty significance, the reigning long-term quality of royal blood, that it now holds in all its ubiquitous glory. We don’t question its appearance and critique it with the quick-to-judge enthusiasm we once did. These days, in a somewhat arrogant fashion, we feel enough distance from the primitive web world that first embarked in the early 1990s when it underwent its awkward years, reflected in its uncertain design and organization, and limited navigation.

It was a time when the web design profession hadn’t quite taken shape. Creation was a free-for-all of experimentation and trial and error by amateur experimenters. But through all of this unsupervised exploration emerged patterns and forces of habit. Continue reading

Annual General Meeting (AGM) and Knstlerhaus Bchsenhausen present the 5th edition of AGM: AGM07: Doc.Art on November 16, 2007; 7:00 pm - Weiherburggasse 13/12, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria. The symposium analyses the interaction between journalism and art. It presents and discusses artistic projects produced through journalistic and documentary means, and conversely journalistic investigations which use artistic platforms to reach the public.

AGM07: Doc.Art focuses particularly on the following topics: Aesthetic Journalism, the use of realism in documentary video art, and the artistic / journalistic exposing of territorial control. Continue reading

[Also see Presence Aesthetics and the Media Arts - First Thoughts and Technology, Presence Aesthetics and the Frame (more Gumbrecht)]

Jens Hauser, curator of the Still, Living show at BEAP, pointed me to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s formulation of “presence culture” vs “meaning culture.” Hauser used those ideas in his framing of that exhibition, proposing an understanding of bio-art through an aesthetics of presence. This got my attention, to say the least, and seemed to connect with my own attempts to theorise audiovisual, generative and data practices. How does “presence culture” manifest in the new media arts? Continue reading

nocinema.org: Travelling without Moving :: Oboro Center, Montreal (CAN - QC) :: curated by Suzanne Jaschko :: November 3 - December 8, 2007 :: Works by Heman Chong (SP), Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain (BR), Jérôme Joy (FR), radioqualia (NZ/GB), Sascha Pohflepp / Jakob Schillinger (DE), Marius Watz (NO).

Nocinema.org (1999-2007) is an automatic process, drawing upon strings of live streaming webcams across the world, transmitting live scenes collected from different locations with added panoramic movements and temporized on-line editing, into which some black shots are inserted (listening without visual). The sound, each time offering a different sequenced overlay, comes from a shared sound files database which is fed and updated by a team of sound artists / partners, including Continue reading

Frontier Bodies: Aesthetics and Politics in Post-Modernism :: Directed by Jaime del Val, REVERSO with seminars, presentations and performances by: Stelarc, Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone, Daniel Schorno (STEIM), Donald Glowinski (InfoMus Lab), Rudolfo Quintas (Swap Project) & André Gonçalves, Roberta Bosco, Laura Cañete, Juan Carlos Olmos & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Jaime del Val & Olinto (REVERSO) :: December 17-23, 2007 :: La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain :: Call for Applications: Deadline: December 10, 2007. Continue reading

Reading Review - Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud; with additional resources: [1] Flash In Japan: Brian Massumi on Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Amodal Suspension 2003; [2] Public Warning in the Networked Age: Open Standards to the Rescue? by Art Botterell and Ronja Addams-Moring March 2007; [3] Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics and the Art of Meaning by Edward A. Shanken 2000.

The writings of Nicolas Bourriaud on the subject of Relational Form takes a broader look upon the structures of art in contemporary society. Bourriaud’s main focus is on the relationship between the artwork and the cultural space in which it was created. Continue reading

“Gordon Pask’s The Colloquy of Mobiles: The English cyberneticist Gordon Pask conceived the Colloquy of Mobiles for the 1968 exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity held at the ICA in London. It was a reactive, educable, computer-based system composed of five mobiles. By way of light and sound, the rotating elements suspended from the ceiling communicated with each other, independent of external influences.

Using flashlights and mirrors, the people at the exhibition could nevertheless take part in the conversation between the machines. With this installation, Pask brought to a conclusion his idea for an «aesthetic potential environment».To give significance to the communication between the machines, Park designed the Colloquy of Mobiles as a social system. At the same time, the form of communication that he conceived referred unmistakably to a sexual analogy: Continue reading

Western Front Performance Art is pleased to present Participatory Dissent: Debates in Performance (October 18-22, 2007, Vancouver), an encounter between traditional forms of performance art (endurance/duration) and new forms of social practice and intervention. Produced in conjunction with the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, the program looks to the overlaps between practices, modes of thinking, and opinions about contemporary performance. Continue reading