Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.

Shirky takes a largely hands-off line - these are historical rapids, made turbulent by a Gutenberg-level of social transformation, in which the best we can do is to ’stay upright on our kayak’. Leadbeater believes that there are elements of mass collaboration - open source biology? ‘we-think’ between terrorists or criminal networks? - that politicians and citizens need to try and police, through some intervention in the enabling network infrastructures. (Lessig’s update of Code 2.0 - which I also reviewed in the Independent addresses this issue too.)

I’m no clearer from reading both of these powerful, comprehensive books what the right model for legal/political internet governance should be.

Any thoughts? On this, and on other issues that these books raise?

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. We-Think, by Charles Leadbeater
On the road to Wikitopia
Reviewed by Pat Kane, March 21, 2008

Have you noticed how much of a nethead you are these days? As one of these writers puts it, the internet gets socially interesting when it becomes technologically boring – when its tools become as banal to us as pen, paper, TV or telephone. Both these essential guides to web society could easily gather under the title (with a nod to Richard Hoggart), “the uses of techno-literacy”. But those uses turn out to be more important than serving the narcissism of the connected classes.

In Clay Shirky’s account, the power of the web is that its networks make it “ridiculously easy” to form groups. In the UK, this might sound familiar: the “little platoons” of civil society, as outlined by Smith, Ferguson and Burke in the 18th century. The cheaply printed and distributed pamphlet or journal drove “gentlemen of ideas” to coffee-houses in Edinburgh and London, as a blog forum can enable devotees of a cause to turn up in a front room in Hampstead or Halifax.

What Shirky is claiming as revolutionary is the combination of power and cheapness that social software offers – greatly amplifying our natural desire to create associations. If traditional organisations want to get large groups acting together, they usually need a costly hierarchy of management to orchestrate their thousands, or tens of thousands, of employees. And organisations, particularly commercial ones, will only do those (profitable) things that justify the expense of all that managerial structure.
What the fecund social chaos of the net reveals is that so much group activity can easily happen, if the “transactional costs” of organising it (as the jargon has it) are brought close to zero. Which is exactly what Web 2.0 does. Take the exemplar of this new world, Wikipedia. This extraordinary resource exists because the web allows it: those who have an idealism about education and knowledge (remember the Enlightenment?) can easily come together, mutually monitoring their contributions to a global encyclopedia. They can take their own time, too: when there are no institutional overheads, “you don’t have to be efficient, just effective”.

However, when the LA Times turned its op-eds into “wikitorials” in 2005 – open to emendation by all – it was an abuse-ridden disaster. Many suppressed voices finally got their chance to rail at editorial pomposity. Wikis work “when people are committed to the outcomes… when they augment community, not replace it”. Our social tools, says Shirky without a hint of a blush, “are turning love and care into a renewable building material”. If people stopped believing in the Wikipedian ideal, and used its tools for vandalism, “it’s unlikely the whole enterprise would survive a week”.

Shirky attempts to be as usable as the technology he writes about. He provides the clearest explanation I have yet read of why Microsoft is being challenged by open-source software communities like Linux. In an echo of Beckett’s “fail again, fail better”, it turns out that the costs of perpetual innovation in open-source are amazingly low. It might look an uneven and erratic process from a Microsoft manager’s perspective, but all this perpetual tinkering (”more like accreting a coral reef, than building a car”) is enough to produce an operating system immensely cheaper but just as robust as Bill Gates’s offering.

Here Comes Everybody has a refreshing interest in activism, rather than yet more digital pabulum for worried CEOs. Shirky is interested in how social software can help human-rights protesters in Belarus, the Philippines or Egypt raise a stink; how it can allow Catholics to protest against Church corruption, or help frequently-stranded flyers demand a bill of consumer rights from aviation behemoths.

He evinces a Tom-Paine-ish belief in the power of informed grassroots democracy, but effectively throws his hands up faced with the flipside of US politics – how these social tools can also “increase the resilience of networked terrorist groups”. The spread of the web is like “steering a kayak” in an unstoppable technological stream. “Our principle challenge is not to decide where we want to go but rather to stay upright as we go there.”

To Charles Leadbeater, who used to advise Tony Blair and quotes both the young Milibands in his acknowledgements, such a hands-off approach to steering social development is anathema. Covering many of the same case studies as Shirky, the tone of We-Think is more like a benign guardian looking over the playground of the web, hoping gently to encourage or discourage particular behaviours.

Leadbeater raises some useful questions. No one could object to sprawling processes of “mass innovation” creating public encyclopedias and seed banks for developing countries, turning cities into giant learning spaces and citizens into journalists. Leadbeater’s mantra “we are what we share” could conceivably become “an economy’s motive force”, particularly if consumerism begins to hit the limits of ecological sustainability hard. A vision of living as an active, creative player-with-others has inspired this particular reviewer for many years.

But, as he reminds us, some areas – such as care services – won’t be affected by We-Think: “you cannot change a wet nappy with a text message”. Nor harvest food, nor extract minerals, nor generate energy. Although the participatory structure of the web was founded by a singular mix of values (”the academic, the hippie, the peasant and the geek”), there’s no guarantee that happy ethos will guide all behaviour within its halls.

Are we ready for open-source biology, for example – a process of mass innovation based on our “sharing” of the genomic code? Do we want pro-ams in their garages fooling around with viruses and proteins, or accredited professionals? There are under-theorised questions of governance and control (and, maybe more importantly, self-control) in web culture. Leadbeater is right to alert us to them.

We-Think concludes, correctly, that the message about the developed world that web culture delivers – trust, collaboration and shared goods, in pursuit of better ideas, based on solid evidence – is much more attractive than the “Coke and carbines” that too much of the planet has been used to from the West. He holds out the tantalising prospect that these soft, pliable new tools from the master might be more enthusiastically grasped and applied by developing countries than by our own. If that happens, then the daily banality of the web may herald the most exciting of historical processes. There’s more than YouTube, Facebook and viagra spam to come down those wires yet.

Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic, and one half of Hue and Cry.

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This Wednesday night you are all invited to join us for an evening with Cesare Pietroiusti, Juraj Carný, Shelly Silver, Alex Villar to discuss and think together Evolution De L’Art. What is Evolution De L’Art? An idea, a gallery that Cesare and Juraj will talk about how it started; the kind of art projects that it presents and its relation with the artists. They will also introduce the idea of “immaterial” art in the age of the explosion of contemporary art fair on one side and the relevance of phenomena such as youtube or myspace as new media for art on the other.

And more artists (I, you, she, he, we) who are or would like to be involved, will present their contributions and will be part of the discussion. The list of names is below but it is incomplete and will be updated… . So think about it! We are looking forward to hear more from everyone.

Maybe we forgot to mention, that Cesare is in Rome, but he will discuss and present through Skype.

The gallery Evolution de l’Art arises from a collaboration between SPACE (Juraj Carny, Diana Majdakova and Lydia Pribisova) and Cesare Pietroiusti. Evolution de l’Art is a gallery for contemporary art which only sells artworks that are immaterial, with no physical residue, and it does not release certificates of authenticity, nor statements or receipts. EdlA will represent, on a non-exclusive basis, artists whose artwork is, at least in the case of some specific projects, alien from any physical-material component. Beyond this condition, there will not be any other limitation or requisite for represented artists in terms of medium or technique.

EdlA offers the possibility of becoming contemporary art collectors to the widest possible audience. Therefore the gallery will offer artworks at a range of very different prices, including some that can be purchased for a few Euros. Purchases can be made at the headquarters of the gallery (Stefanikova 21, Bratislava) or through the website.

Nowadays the gallery presents projects of about 100 artists from all over the world. All the projects can be seen online.

Evolution de l’Art recently opened a new branch of the gallery in Amsterdam, in collaboration with “The Blue House” project, promoted by the artist Jeanne Van Heeswijck and curated by Yasser Ballemans.

Some questions regarding immaterial art and the relation between art, money, and meaning
- How much of the essence of an artwork is in its material form, rather than in its meaning?
- What does it mean to “own” an artwork? what does it mean to “create meaning”?
- Is this production necessarily a process that involves individual authorship?
- Can we say that a buyer at an art fair really owns an artwork - having exchanged his money with it?
- Is the trade money vs. physical object the only way, or could we imagine something different, such as an artfair where artworks are accessible not to the ones who can exchange money but to those who can exchange meaning?

Open Call: Evolution de l’Art is open to new proposals by artists: artworks, either already existing or conceived for the occasion, can be put on sale through the gallery Evolution de l’Art. These artworks can be realised in whatever medium or technique, with the only condition that such work will be immaterial and no physical residue of it exists. Therefore their buyers will not receive any physical object in exchange for payment. Financial agreements with the artists who sell their work through EdlA can vary according to circumstances and the cost of production of the artwork. In general, the gallery and the artist will each share 50% of the purchase price.

Cesare Pietroiusti’s art practice focuses on problematic and paradoxical situations that are hidden in common relationships and in ordinary acts - thoughts that come to mind without a reason, small worries, quasi-obsessions that are usually considered too insignificant to become a matter of discussion, or of self-representation. The artist explores choices and intentions formulated by subjectivities other than his own, and the ways in which to make these choices become his own choices. He has been one of the coordinators of the “Oreste” projects (1997-2001), and co-founder of “Nomads & Residents” (New York, 2000). Since 2004 he has been teaching “Laboratorio di arti visive” at the IUAV University in Venice. Cesare lives in Roma

Juraj Carný is a curator, gallerist and art critic based in Bratislava, Slovakia, He iniciated SPACE Gallery, Billboart Gallery Europe, Crazycurators Biennale, Crazycurators award, SPACE Residency Lab, wandering gallery/nomadSPACE, projectSPACE and together with Cesare Pietroiusti Gallery Evolution de Lart. Since 2006 he is managing editor of Czech and Slovak edition of Flash Art.

Excerpts from Yves Klein’s conference “L’évolution de l’art vers l’immatériel”

“At Antwerp, barely two months ago. Invited to exhibit with a group of artists comprising Bury, Tinguely, Roth, Breer, Mack, Munari, Spoerri, Piene, and Soto, I travelled to Antwerp and, on the occasion of the opening, instead of installing a painting or whatever tangible and visible object in the space that had been reserved for me in the Hessenhuis exhibition hall, I loudly pronounced to the public these words borrowed from Gaston Bachelard: “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth”.

The Belgian organiser of this exhibition then asked me where my work might be. I replied: “There, there where I am speaking at this moment.” “And what is the price of this work?” “A kilo of gold, a kilo ingot of pure gold will suffice me”. Why these fanciful conditions instead of a normal price simply represented by a sum of money? Because, for pictorial sensibility in raw material state, in a space that I had specialized and stabilized by pronouncing these few words upon my arrival, which made the blood of this spatial sensibility flow, one cannot ask for money. “The blood of sensibility is blue,” says Shelley and that is exactly what I think. The price of blue blood cannot in any instance be measured in money. It must be measured in gold.

The pictorial space that I have already managed to stabilize before and around my monochrome paintings of earlier years will now be well established in the gallery space. My active presence in the given space will create the climate and the radiant pictorial ambiance that usually reigns in the studio of any artist gifted with real power. A sensible density that is abstract yet real will exist and will live by and for itself in places that are empty in appearance only.” (Excerpts from Yves Klein’s conference “L’évolution de l’art vers l’immatériel”, Paris, La Sorbonne, June 3, 1959, as published in: Ives Klein, Vers l’immatériel, Editions Dilecta, Paris 2006, pagg. 118 and 126. Translation Charles Penwarden)

I mention all of these events not just as an excuse for my slow response, but also to give you all a sense of my current framework / mindset and to contextualize something that I have witnessed in the U.S. Over time, there have been more restrictions put into place, an erosion of freedoms, and citizens in this country take fewer risks particularly apt when thinking about new art practices such as “bioart”. Akos just mentioned issues of fear and doubt around exhibition of bioart and I think that this is real here, because it is also being conflated with things such as “bioterrorism” and “biowarfare” which of course Steve Kurtz and CAE speak to so well. I know many exhibiting venues that have had a difficult time raising funding for this area. So I think we are living in a particular moment of caution that makes this kind of practice even more difficult to show.

I am currently working with some colleagues, Rich Pell and Daniela Kostova, on a project we call the Bioart Initiative at my university. The name came about because of the collaboration between the Arts Dept and the Biotech Center so it was used as a simple identification of the collaborating parties. (I would love to see other terms used as I, too, am frustrated with this too broad nomenclature.) This is a multi-pronged project that has been funded for 15 months to bring in speakers, have exhibitions and sponsor residencies of artists working in the laboratory. The goals are to encourage more exchange between artists and the scientists who work in the building, the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS).

One of the recent projects was “Sentimental Objects In Attempt to befriend a Virus” by Caitlin Berrigan. Berrigan occupied the lobby area at CBIS with her geodesic domes resembling the hepatitis C virus, and held a series of “tea parties” offering dandelion tea and viral shaped chocolates to discuss the basis for the work. Berrigan has Hep C and uses this work to explore her relationship to the virus, build public awareness about transmission and more. One sculptural object almost closed the show down: along with the geodesic viral domes on exhibit were three potted dandelions. Berrigan claimed that she had fed her own blood to the dandelions and had a poster to this effect on the wall. This fact was picked up by the biosafety people on campus, and they freaked. Exposed blood, particularly infected blood was not allowed in the lobby of the building and was a grave bio-hazard. Besides the fact that this artist did not in fact feed the plants her blood, this potential risk was potentially enough to have the entire program shut down.

After we calmed them down, we did get to have some valuable discussions about the transmission potential - or not - for four day old blood, and the actual realities about Hep C transmission. http://www.metroland.net/back_issues/vol30_no45/art.html

And while I do not consider myself an expert in bioart exhibition, I am concerned with curation and exhibition and issues such as the caretaking needs of live things in the gallery or museum. When I exhibited “Embracing Animal“, a 10 month exhibition with live transgenic rats, I was amazed with the response of the museum staff. They not only gave public tours and lecture about the work, but the night-watchman also adopted the rats and would tend to them and play with them all night. They become the “keepers” and observers of these small lives, a role very different from their usual curatorial duties. They had to not only feed, water, change litter, but also watch and smell the rats to make sure they didn’t get ill; oversee the public and make sure they weren’t harassing the rats; and also make time to play with the rats. This was a complete reversal of their usual schedule. And while I am not advocating turning galleries / museums into zoos, this is a shift in the approach to exhibition that involves a different kind of different attention and care. I think we need some of these encounters in these spaces to broaden how we see ourselves to science / research subjects and what was once “nature”.

I will sign off now and add more later, thanks, Kathy High

Posted on Synapse Discussion List

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 computer and Fisher Price loom to be defining objects of her childhood. Using knitting and sweets she creates physical representations of digital information and computation and is currently researching the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body. Egenhoefer is supported by the Textile Futures Research Group at the University of the Arts as part of the Distributed South initiative. Her residency will showcase the development of software that provides motion tracking for knitting needles. Egenhoefer explains: “Visually the piece will reflect our bodily interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to our body’s give and take of working at a machine.”

Dr Barbara Rauch, research fellow at the Chelsea College of Art, combines consciousness studies with digital art theories and practices. She explores evolutionary aspects of human and animal facial expression to reveal conscious and subconscious experience. Rauch is currently the co-investigator of a two-year AHRC project The Personalised Surface Within Fine Art Digital Printmaking. Much of her work uses data capture technologies, digital print technology, visualisation of digital 3D work, animation, sound, drawings and performance.

Nicola Naismith, lecturer at Norwich School of Art and Design, explores the ordinary qualities in everyday items, for example the white shirt and the sewing needle, using a combination of digital and analogue processes. Simple objects are subject to complex questions concerning production, labour, value and the human-machine. Naismith represents these ideas through works that unravel operations between hand, eye, brain, body and machine.

Following presentations, Dr Jane Harris, Director of TFRG, Helen Sloan, Director of SCAN and Jess Laccetti, Institute of Creative Technologies, will conduct a panel discussion with the artists.

Media Art: challenge or cheat?: Take part in our discussion & have your say on art that comes out of a computer. Is art art, whatever tools you use to make it? Or does the use of digital technology constitute a kind cheating? For three days in March, The ICA, responsible for one of the earliest exhibitions of computer-generated art, Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968, plays host to a series of discussions on the state of Media Art today.

Truncated, repetitive, coin-operated nihilism. To a point. The ‘insufferable philosophy of our time’ is not a single object or symbol, but the array of signs and symbols placed at odds with each other, made to wage a type of war we aren’t told how to engage with. We were told that play would desensitise, depoliticise and disconnect us, and now games are presented by the museum as the latest historical and contemporary cultural artefacts.

Whether we play or not, whether we live in the moneyed west or not, games occur. Using the rubric of ‘game off’, our stellar guests will tease out intertwining threads of play culture, game art, game theory in multi-streamed dialogues moderated by Christian McCrea and Melinda Rackham – interrogating the frictions and fissions of experiential pleasure, avatar uprisings, the game engine medium, collection and archiving, futility and joy.

Please welcome the players who will appear throughout the month:

Marguerite Charmante is a tagged game figure. She reflects ludically on futility as resistance, toys and game fashion. 2005 she and MosMaxHax co-founded the international association LUDIC SOCIETY to provoke a new discipline on play and cultures. The affiliations club-magazine appears regularly in print.

Daphne Dragona is a new media arts curator and organiser based in Athens. Recently she has been focusing on game arts and currently she is a co – curator of Homo Ludens Ludens, an exhibition opening in April 08 in Laboral Centro de Arte y Industrial, Gjion Spain.

Margarete Jahrmann is professor at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and a Ph.D. student of Caiia, School of Computer Sciences and Communications, University of Plymouth. 2003 Jahrmann / Moswitzer received an award of distinction at Prix Ars Electronica and in 2004 at transmediale Berlin.

Christian McCrea is a writer and theorist from Melbourne, Australia. His work describes the non-virtual aspects of games under the rubric of materialism, namely nostalgia, euphoria, the proscenium of gaming actions and explosive body aesthetics. He works as Lecturer in Games and Interactivity at Swinburne University of Technology.

Max Moswitzer specializes in 3D simulations and artistic server design, Dozent at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and the University for Applied Arts in Vienna. Moswitzer co-founded Konsum.net in 1995 and regularly produces interactive applications, online installations, videos and telematic performances.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealand born artist, free-software developer, teacher and writer based in Madrid, Spain. Julian has given numerous workshops, exhibitions and papers worldwide. In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective, Select Parks.

Melinda Rackham is Director of ANAT, Australia’s leading cultural organisation generating new creativities which bridge science, research, art, industry and culture. She dabbled extensively in multi-user online environments and has an abiding interest in playfulness.

Melanie Swalwell is currently developing a suite of projects on the history of digital games in New Zealand, with essays published in the Journal of Visual Culture and Vectors, and forthcoming in Ludologica Retro and Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader.

David Surman is Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design in the green hills of Wales. He blogs about technology, sexuality, gaming and popular culture at http://www.gaygamer.net.

Join the conversation on -empyre-

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

MC: Over the years, you’ve had experiences with various authorities that have tried in one way or another to censor your work. I’m interested if you could identify and comment on particular sites of censorship that exist in and around Art institutions and identify some the taboos that tend to generate negative responses from potential censors (curators, board members, sponsors, politicians, and other interested parties).

GH: The most blatant example was a piece called, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture. It was a text piece. I was going to put it in the windows of 112 Workshop (the first alternative space in New York City & the US) in 1974. Since 112 depended on grants from NYSCA and National Endowment for the Arts I was told I couldn’t do the piece because it would jeopardize their funding. I did do the piece later for another exhibition called the Manifesto Show for COLAB (an artists group I was a member of). When I first started working on the internet twenty years later in 1994 I put the piece up as a hypertext work. I have also updated it from a manifesto to an interactive textual maze. The piece is not cute. It deals with the dark side of the American psyche. It is a meditation on the psychological states that would bring one to be an anarchist. It is a New York Punk Art piece. Punk was a rebellion against the fake hippy utopian art that was being produced at the time. That type of art is still being produced. It gets a lot of funding because it uncontroversial.

There are of course several ways to censor artists for example the simplest is to not include the work in an exhibition or ask the artists to alter the work to make it more acceptable. This happens to me a lot in the US. Several of my artworks in particular my net.art works have sexual content. One of my first internet pieces Art Direct / Sex Violence and Politics was always raising hackles because of the sexual content. It was not included in several major internet shows because the museums were afraid that children would come upon the images and they would be liable. In this case both the government and the institution censored the work. In France the same work was featured in a centerfold of Art Press magazine in a special issue on techno art.

People who censor are often corporations flexing their muscle. One of the pieces in Art Direct … called BKPC, used Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls. At some point the isp host, *the thing* received a letter from Mattel toys demanding that the site be removed for violation of copyright. I had to get a lawyer and send them a letter saying it was fair use and for them to back off. Luckily the people at the thing were not intimidated by Mattel so the site stayed up. By the way BKPC is about interracial sex so it makes people uncomfortable or it’s titillating. When I showed the physical work in a Christmas showed called Toys / Art / Us , I was asked by the curators to make sure that children could not view the art work. I did this by mounting the works in glassine sleeves on a podium that could only be seen by standing adults. I was lucky the curator wanted to show the work and was willing to work through the problem with me. In other cases the curator would not be that imaginative and simply shy away from showing anything that was vaguely controversial.

Another case of censorship was the Whitney Art Port an online new media projects gallery. I did a piece called Cocktail Party that featured synthetic voices in conversations as if they were drunk and at a cocktail party. I was asked to remove three sequences because of their sexual content. I wanted so much to be included in this project and the curator was a friend that I altered the piece, removing the offensive parts. The curator was afraid that the corporation would stop funding the project if I offended them with my overt content.

This happens all the time to every artist and it’s quite a dilemma. If you do the work unaltered it often means that you are not ever selected again for exhibitions. But then again Michelangelo had to paint a fig leave on the Sistine Chapel.

MC: The funding issue is interesting to me and seems to come up in many of your experiences. Censorship stories, as rarely as they are covered in the news, seem to focus heavily on the ideological component of censorship and whether public money should be used to fund controversial art. I’m interested to hear more about how anxieties regarding funding (public or private) influence curatorial decisions inside art institutions. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this sort of economically determined censorship and its effects on art and public discourse around art. I’m also interested to know if these funding anxieties have worsened or changed as art institutions have switched over to the Arts management model and have made themselves so dependent on corporate sponsorship for programming?

GH: I did a large billboard piece called Hey Bozo… Use Mass Transit. It was five large billboards scattered around New York City to convince people to use mass transit. It was part of a competition put on every year by the MTA and Creative Time. I received an Honorarium of $500 and they produced the billboards. The piece caused such a stir that it was in the papers for a week straight and I was on TV on all the networks. One of the upshots was that conservatives wanted to know why public money was used to produce an artwork that insulted motorists and the other thing that happened was that Bozo the Clown tried to sue me for trademark infringement because I used the word Bozo. These are symptoms or indications of a deeper issue albeit a populist one. One the one hand you have a media figure (bozo the clown) who tries to sue anyone who uses the word Bozo. He’s got a sort of cottage industry. This is the way that corporations deal with the avant garde they can’t control. On the other hand you have mass media that tries to produce outrage in order to keep the attention of the population. This is also called delivering eyeballs and is a way to sell advertising. As you can see the main tool to attack an artist is money. either cut off funding or sue them. This is a way to stop them from getting their message out whatever that message might be. But there’s a flip side to this coin. We live in an information environment. There really is no way to stop information from coming out. It will be presented in a different venue for example the internet or in the case of art, alternative festivals, galleries etc.. So the idea of censorship is media specific or venue specific. It becomes a power game that is about who controls the venue and therefore controls the message. In this case it’s a reflection of the capitalist marketing system and art is a part of that system. But I see art as something beyond that system.

There are essentially two economies for art. One is the market for objects this includes galleries, museums, magazines and all the ancillary services of art fairs etc.. The other is the academic economy, which trains artists, curators and all the people interested in art. These systems shape what art is seen and what the content and style of the work is about. Both systems have self perpetuating mechanisms. In the market it is about the object. If you don’t make art that has a physical object you can’t be in the market. There is a component that has to do with entertainment and ticket sales in museums. This allows for installation and performance art as well as digital art and screen based art. Indeed, the economies of temporary museum spaces are a reflection of corporate manager style art.

The academic system on the other hand allows for artists who don’t necessarily fit the market to have some financial patronage by teaching. The problem is that the artist’s work and creativity is all about getting students to attend the university and their own class. This is another form of marketing.

I believe in a different type of art, an experimental, anarchic art that shakes things up and operates outside the existing art economies. In many instances this has been confused with the idea of an alternative life style that is a sort of well of inspiration for entrepreneurs looking for new products, ideas and people to sell to. Anarchic art is about something different it’s about challenging and critiquing the existing systems. Why? because I believe that art is about seeing things clearly and is one of the few areas that has freedom. That form of art becomes dangerous because it is uncontrollable. It can’t be packaged and marketed. That is why there is always a move towards censorship of radical art works.

There is also fake censorship or more precisely using outrage as a way to manipulate the art market. This is used successfully by people like Maurice Saatchi who had a show of his Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum. This show was also shown in England and there was outrage in London as well. The outrage in the US was about Cris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in a virgin mary painting. A nice piece of art that was about his African roots. The outrage in London was about a photograph that portrayed a famous criminal child murderer in England. The public and the press demanded the works be “censored.” The works themselves went up in monetary value because of the outrage. The position is that of an artist that uses an epatez de bourgeois position in their art. This reinforces the patron’s sense of being better than the masses. It is an elitist position. I happen to like the art works but the content of the pieces are standard for the art world. The Ofili piece is multiculturalism and the other work is punk. Both styles were first presented in the late 1970’s and I view these latest pieces as stylistically conservative.

As you can see the notion of censorship is more of an unfulfilled demand by an outraged person in the street than any sort of actuality when it comes to the marketing of objects. Those works that are actually censored one never sees or hears about.

MC: I’m interested in what you call “fake censorship” or the use of public and media outrage as a marketing tactic. I’m reminded of an article - http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html - by Jackie Stevens concerning “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a 2000 Exit Art show concerning biotechnology. The article points out that, though the show included some very hard hitting criticisms of the biotech industry, it was nevertheless sponsored by biotech companies - companies that would have much to lose if consumers in the U.S. had the same sorts of concerns about biotechnology as some of the artists in the show. The obvious question of why would the biotech industry sponsor exhibitions that are openly critical of the industry’s practices is answered with the help of interviews with the chief biotech investor behind the show. Stevens writes, “The reason is simple: art about biotechnology, especially with a critical edge, serves to reassure viewers that serious concerns are being addressed. Even more importantly, biotech-themed art implicitly conveys the sense that gene manipulation is a “fact on the ground,” something that serious artists are considering because it is here to stay. Grotesque and perverse visuals only help to acclimate the public to this new reality.” I am also reminded of a transcript I used in a piece once in which a Sara Lee Corporation executive, speaking of the corporation’s “gifts” of impressionist art to the Art Institute of Chicago, stated, “Sara Lee’s art collection has made a statement - a quality statement - about our company. Art is all about excellence and vision and striving for perfection - the same standards that we uphold for our portfolio of leading brands. We are quite certain that the “brand names” of Monet, Renoir and Degas have been a great complement to Sara Lee and have become icons of excellence that reflect our approach to doing business.” It seems that the mythology of fine art or the aura produced around fine art itself (namely, mythologies concerning artists being prophetic or ahead of their time, that art is about transcendence, universals, timelessness and so on) is a very useful context for the deployment of marketing schemes. Cases like these I’ve mentioned could almost make one nostalgic for old school censorship - the kind in which an authority comes down on an artist for producing work that is perceived as being offensive. At least in these scenarios the content is working - the work is having an effect. All this raises a couple of questions that I’d like to know your thoughts on. Firstly, do you agree with Stevens’ assessment that the content of an artwork as intended by the artist can be eclipsed (effectively censored) by the curator, sponsors and institutional framework surrounding the show and fine art itself, and if so, should artists be trained (in academia and elsewhere) to be able to anticipate how their work is being used in a larger context and be prepared to engage in content production beyond the frame (so to speak)? What are the lessons you have learned over the years in these regards?

GH: This goes back to Wittgenstein’s Dictum, “the meaning of a word is its meaning,” and “The meaning of a word is its use.”

Look at it another way Steve Kurtz was creating some bio-art that was also political when he was arrested. The event caused the USGOV to come down hard claiming he’s a bio-terrorist. The art world has rallied around Steve and is doing what it can to stop his persecution. Steve’s artwork was in process and never exhibited so you can’t say that it was censored and yet the USGOV is trying to pin a terrorist label on him. The context here is fluid between a media occurrence, freedom of speech, and forces of unreasonable paranoia. Steve and the people around him now have an ongoing performance work that is a cause celebre about free speech. In the end it doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees the actual work, the censorship and repressive activity of the USGOV is the key factor. When realpolitik comes up against art, art always loses. On another level both sides of the Steve Kurtz dilemma are winning because they are using the event to create meaning for their separate actions.

Back to your initial question which is the context created by the venue and the funders. There is always a deal struck between the funders / patrons / venues and the artists that show in the venues or accept support from the patrons. The patrons are seen as progressive and open because of their support of the arts. The artists are seen as giving their support/approval of the patron and the gallery system by participating in it. That’s the simple deal. The complex deal has to do with the content of the artwork. When the church is your patron you do religious paintings. When the Dutch merchants are your patrons you do domestic scenes. When the government is your patron you do heroic art that glorifies the government and its programs. In America the market has become the patron or more correctly corporate marketing capitalism and its? technocratic bureaucrats/ managers are the patrons. The content of art reflects that reality.

However, there are many forms of art that operate outside these realities. The notion of experimental art is an art that doesn’t function in established arenas. Maybe we can call this theoretical art because it posits an art that can function outside of the normal venues set up for art.

In terms of censorship it may be more of a case of power and control. If one chooses to work in theoretical art one can expect no support from the existing patrons of the arts. This is a very fundamental struggle about who controls the meaning of art (content). Who controls the how, when and where of art? That is one of the reasons that I choose to work with the internet and digital art. The venues are much freer. There is little or no market action attached to this type of artwork. Indeed, this very interview is an artwork that uses the internet as its vehicle. I can state that it is an information/meditation that comes from the use of the networks. In this case it is an outgrowth of all the other communication artists that have come before me such as Fred Forest or, Joseph Bueys or Allan Kaprow.

MC: Earlier, you spoke of an anarchistic art practice that would function in opposition to the status quo. I’m assuming that this art practice would take on the political economic structure of an anarchist community. What might this look like? Are there examples of art subcultures that operate on anarchistic principles like anti-authoritarianism, free association, nonhierarchical organization, consensus decision making, egalitarianism, etc? I’m also interested in your estimation of online communities and new media art portals (like Rhizome.org for instance) who seem to reference some of these concepts in their mission statements yet seem to fall short in their editorial structure and policies. Perhaps, the concepts that sites like Rhizome imagine - decentralized and nonhierarchical - and indeed the internet itself seems to offer - would work in such stark contrast with what the dominant values of the fine art establishment (and our dominant political economic systems) that it becomes impossible to maintain funding, affiliations etc. Do you think the openness and opportunity for alternative systems and practices that electronic networks offer(ed) is now closing up, or do you see as much opportunity now as in the mid-to-late 90’s when it comes to networked art practice?

GH: There are many artists groups that are functioning at the moment. There is always a struggle and a dynamic where groups are involved. Rhizome has set up a sort of blog/news reporting website that has a brand name and a loose community around it. They have a mailist than functions somewhat as a place for critical discussion but the fundamental question is how does one move from discussion to action. The answer for rhizome is to be techno-centric and highlight emerging artists and technologies. They also spend a lot of time fundraising. The original project of rhizome by Mark Tribe was a simple anarchic mailist. This was also happening with nettime and thingist lists. There is one functioning now that is called [empyre] that comes out of Australia. Empyre was one of several list/communities that was featured during the documenta 6 in Kassel. I was actually involved in the discourse. My position was that I wanted to have my thoughts presented at the documenta.

There’s a back and forth flux on the internet that has some onerous aspects of fake digital democracy and fake creative freedom. This is web 2.0 where everyone can be creative and be content providers ala blogs and youTube etc.. This is the corporate bullshit of Facebook and Second Life. There?s an interesting piece in the Guardian about facebook that has be re-published here.

In any case, I am involved with three very vital digital art groups that have online/offline communities. One is called [PAM] - this is a video-artists community that has a physical kiosk presentation mode that is very much about non-hierarchical presentation. Another is locus sonus in France - that is an experimental sound art lab. I’ve also organized an artists group called Artists Meeting that is just beginning to pick up steam. Part of what these groups are about is using the technology to create a media space for group interactions to occur. The funding model is pooling resources. I maintain the server nujus.net that Artists Meeting and locus Sonus use. The sysadmin is an engineering student in Split Croatia who is donating his services. Locus Sonus is funded by the French Cultural Ministry as an experimental lab. [PAM] got its’ start by being included in the SCOPE art fair and artists Meeting is bootstrapping it at the moment.

What these groups have in common is the notion of doing projects together rather than having an individual artists? voice. I like to engage in both positions, that is, I do individual pieces and I do group works. Two previous projects are accessible on the web right now. One is called rantapod and is a series of performance/meditations that is downloadable to ipod. The other is called Art Dirt Redux, which is a podcast/sound art piece. These all challenge the art market in some way because they exist and are seen by large numbers of net audiences without any artworld support whatsoever. So I can say that the internet does still function as a good venue for experimental anti-hierarchical art.

ADDENDUM

MC: In preparing this conversation for publication I noticed that in one of your initial emails to me - before we actually started the interview - you stated that you’d been censored for not using particular software or hardware in the production or display of your work. I think this ties in nicely with our discussion concerning corporate funding, but something that seems more of an issue in new media art then anything else (I can’t imagine a paint company sponsoring a show and requiring the artists to only use their brand of paint). Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.

GH: There’s a lot of net.art and digital curators who set up defining parameters for new media shows. These often focus on a piece of hardware or a type of coding as an organizing principal. This plays into or is a symptom of the computer/technology scene where there are *platform* wars such as internet explorer vs. netscape or mac vs pc. There are software wars such as Dreamweaver vs GoLive. These competitions are about dominating a market. This also happens in digital art where a group of artists insist that for example they are the only net.art artists that exist and try to corner the market with the willing help of a number of curators. Often artists working in new media believe that you must write your own code in order to be a digital artist or you must use JAVA or you must use open source software or …. You get the idea. I remember once speaking at a panel where there was a net artist who was using perl and php and Peter Sinclair and I were using Max MSP. The other artist talked only about the coding structure. Our piece used custom built software as well but we were interested in the content and the user interactions. This happens all the time where a person mistakes writing code for art or insist that digital art is only code. It’s a rather boring discussion about hardware and software.

About the artists

G.H. Hovagimyan is an experimental digital artist working in a variety of forms. He was one of the first artists in New York to start working with the Internet in the early nineties. His work ranges from hypertext works to digital performance art and installations. His streamed video talk shows, Art Dirt and Collider explore and document the artists of the digital art scene at the time circa 1995-2000.

In 1996 he began collaborating with Peter Sinclair a British artist who lives in Marseilles, France. Their collaborative works have been shown internationally in Europe and the US. In 1998 their work, A SoaPOPera for Laptops received a prize in the Computer Music category at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Recent awards include: 2003 fellowship from Experimental Television Center, 2003 TAM Digital Media Commissions, 2002 Artists Fellowship from Franklin Furnace, 2002 pilot artist in residence program from Eyebeam, NYC.

He lives in New York City but is often in France, which has become a second home.

Mark Cooley is a new genre artist interested in visual rhetoric, forgotten histories and political economy. His work has been exhibited in many international venues - online and off. Mark is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University.

In 1845, Karl Marx, in his short fragments published posthumously as the “Theses on Feuerbach,” wrote the following oft quoted statement: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” These were working notes for Marx and in some way represented a call, an appeal, a reminder, a hope, a provocation to himself. What is the relation between what we understand about the world, the questions we can formulate, and what we can do to change our reality?

And when we initiated Continental Drift with Brian Holmes and our rag-tag bunch of activist-artist-thinkers, we felt that interpreting the world and changing it went hand in hand. That in order to change the world, we also needed to embark on the challenging task of understanding the immense shifts that have been transpiring since 1989. We also needed to create a more structured possibility for bringing together a growing number of individuals whose work does not quite fit in any prescribed competence (i.e., activist, artist, researcher).

If there has been one consistent response for us, it has NOT been to make our self-organized conversations AN END in themselves, but a constituent part of our political being and our steady assumption of a power for collective utterances.

This year is another opportunity to take this collective project forward, as we not only initiate this session in New York, but take our Drift to Zagreb in May and the Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor hopefully this summer.

We are seeking anyone and everyone who may be interested in joining us. We have been attempting for some years to foster a space that will open more dialogues between artists, activists, and intellectuals. And we would like ours to become one of a multiplicity of spaces in which these three necessary figures of resistance can begin to touch and inform one another’s practices/thinking.

We sincerely hope you will join these discussions. Please forward to friends who you think may be interested.

2. Something like a Summary

We will begin Friday evening with a talk and discussion with Henry C K Liu. It is a rare opportunity to exchange thoughts with someone who has very extensive insights into economic dynamics with a particular focus on Asia. Henry is a regular contributor for Asia Times and wrote a widely influential text about Dollar Hegemony. The evening’s talk is entitled:
“The Case Against Market Fundamentalism.”

For this entire session and particularly Saturday, we will consider the different resonances of “from the ground” “on the ground” or simply “ground.”

Ground as the contradiction and tragic failure of capitalism right now: –ground rent, for everything that concerns housing –ground to the bone, for flexible labor –ground as the earth itself, overheating and poisoned –ground zero wherever a bomb goes off and people die

We will begin with a discussion of a text entitled about Neoliberal Urbanism and then be joined by Andy from the Yes Men, who will be discussing their work in New Orleans. Claire Pentecost who will address how the growing environmental /climate change/water preciousness/ food consciousness is effecting urban organizing. We will (hopefully) be joined by a group attempting to resist the Columbia University’s plan for Harlem. We will conclude the day with a talk by Neil Smith entitled “Mega Gentrification.” Neil as most of you might know, is someone we have for some time been wanting to invite, and we felt this was a great context.

Sunday, will be an attempt to cross many terrains from Malawi and Anatolia to East Jerusalem and East Baltimore. It will include presentations by Hakan Topal, Marty Lucas, a video with Jeff Halper, Scott-Dane-Nick, and will conclude with Brian’s talk entitled: “Escape the Overcode: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics.”

3. Introduction by Brian Holmes (2008)

A continent is a name for immensity without reserve: a mass of land so large you can never imagine the end of it, the ground of everything. Yet the questions we want to raise are intimate ones, which over the course of recent decades have crept their way into the thoughts and feelings of individuals, associations, cultural groups, professional or political formations and even nations, when they are faced with the emergence of a society beyond all borders, a non-place where the continents themselves begin to loose their moorings.

How to conceive of a world society? When and why do people begin to speak of it? Where to locate it, how to perceive it? For whom does it appear, whose interests does it serve or threaten? What are its origins, its laws and regularities, its chances of lasting till next year? Does it have a taste or a color, a wavelength or a rhythm? Above all, should I be part of it? Should we be part of it? How to take that decision – or assert that refusal?

In 1997, Ulrich Beck published a book in the form of a question: What is globalization? His answer: it is a world society without a world government, where outdated national institutions tend to dissolve between the twin extremes of transnational capital and hyperindividualism. Yet Beck is not a fatalist. Rejecting the belief in globalism as a fait accompli whose only agents are giant corporations, he suggested an examination of the transformational processes affecting communications, culture, economics, labor organization, civil associations and the ecology. He conceived world society as a “multiplicity without unity,” and believed its emergence could be measured by the degree to which distinct social groups become aware of and debate these transformations: their origins, causes, spatial distributions, effects and susceptibility to change and redirection. The political question would be this: “how, and to what extent, people and cultures around the world relate to one another in their differences, and to what extent this self-perception of world society is relevant to how they behave.”

So far, so good. Become aware of social change, and find the languages that can express it! But Beck still refers to self-perception “as staged by the national media.” We’re looking for something different: the consciousness of the present as expressed by artistic inventions, on “stages” ranging from museums, universities and theaters to social centers, hacklabs and cabarets, the Internet and the streets. Rather than relying on studies and scientific procedures, let’s see how these expressions of the present are debated in the forums, circuits, institutions, self-organized meetings and counter-public spheres that have proliferated across the planet in recent years. What’s elusive are ways to sound out multiplicity, solidarity and resistance, all of which don’t only arise in words. Form, image, concept, rhythm, experiment, intervention, rupture: these are aesthetic devices for touching the world, and taking part in a world conversation.

Throughout the twentieth century the visual languages of modernism offered a means of communication, culminating more recently in a massive overflow of biennials, traveling shows, exchange programs and markets – contested from below by an explosion of autonomous interventions, self-organized circuits and alternative modes of production. Since the end of hegemonic modernism in the 1960s the definition and value of art has been a subject of intense dispute, resulting in a focus on process rather than object, a shift towards activism and group experimentation. This questioning of frames and contexts has led to the inclusion of sociological, philosophical, economic, political and psychological concepts within the very contours of the works. But this whole development is deeply ambiguous. Even as artistic circles have extended their geographic and discursive reach and tended to morph into sites of generalized experimentation, public consciousness has retained the twentieth-century definition of art as the signifier of individualism, legitimating an endless range of formal innovations, of cultural and individual eccentricities. This proliferation of choices is exactly what allows for the increasingly deep integration of art to the market, not only as a luxury object or attribute of personal distinction, but also as the prime example of innovative, value-adding production processes in the risky environment of the information economy. The upshot being that art seems to mirror and internalize the global transformations, in their mix of multifarious complexity and one-dimensional standardization.

to continue reading introduction please visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/intro2008.htm#email

4. Working Schedule

The idea for the schedule is that it should be subjected to change based on our needs and desires over the course of the event.

FRIDAY EVENING 02.15.08

18:00 - 18:30 Informal Introductions
19:00 - 20:20 Henry C K Liu: The Case Against Market Fundamentalism
20:20 - 21:30 Question + Answer + Conversation
21:30 - 23:00 Dinner & Drinks

SATURDAY 02.16.08

12:00 - 12:30 Tea, Coffee
12:30 - 13:30 Open Session / Discussion of Reading Neoliberal Urbanism: Cities And the Rule of Markets (Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore)
13:30 - 14:00 Andy Bichlbaum: Yes Men in New Orleans.
14:00 - 14:30 Coalition of Groups Fighting Columbia Gentrification of Harlem (To be confirmed)
14:30 - 15:00 Claire Pentecost: How the growing environmental /climate change/water preciousness/ food consciousness is effecting urban organizing.
15:00 - 17:30 Neil Smith: Mega Gentrification

SUNDAY 02.17.08

12:00 - 12:30 Tea, Coffee
13:00 - 13:30 Hakan Topal: Possibility of Justice and Justification of Artistic Production
13:30 - 14:00 Marty Lucas: Cyber-Urbanism in Southern African
14:00 - 14:30 Video interview with Jeff Halper -Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions Good Architecture
14:30 - 15:00 Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, Nicholas Wisniewski Practicing Ecosophy in East Baltimore
15:00 - 16:00 Break
16:00 - 18:00 Brian Holmes: Escape the Overcode: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics.
19:00 - 21:30 Final Discussion: “Prospects” for upcoming Continental Drift in Zagreb and the Radical Midwest Cultural Corridor
+ thinking about further NYC prospects (over dinner)

For full details on all presentations here.

5. How to participate

There are two possible ways of joining us:
a. to physically attend in NYC
b. to participate via webcast

We will provide more details about the webcast online as the event approaches. For those who will be attending the events in New York City, please write to cdrift {the at sign} 16beavergroup.org to enroll.

Friday February 15 — 6:00 PM - 11:55 PM
Saturday February 16– 12:00 AM — 6:00 PM
Sunday February 17– 12:00 AM - 11:55PM

All events unless otherwise announced will take place at 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor - NY, NY. The participation fee is 10-30$ (sliding scale). We will waive the fee for anyone who has great difficulty in paying but has a strong desire to participate. As we did last year, we will also have some collective dinners at the space. The entire program is organized with our efforts and is not affiliated with or funded from any organizations or institutions.

Are emotions infectious? Why can one person make a previously upbeat group feel glum? How does empathy work? Experience emotional contagion yourselves and chat to artist, Tina Gonsalves and the neuroscientists behind the interactive video and sound art installation Chameleon. Physiologist Harry Witchell, (commentator for “On the Couch With Big Brother”) will reveal the elements of non- verbal communication as the audience take part in a live art event that demonstrates emotional contagion. Neuroscientist, Neil Harrison will discuss the biological mechanisms of how we infect each other with our emotions.

Over the event, we will also discuss the beginnings of the Chameleon Project, a two year collaboration between artist Tina Gonsalves, social neuroscientist Chris Frith, emotion neuroscientist Hugo Critchley, and computer scientists from the affective computing group at the Media Lab, MIT. Chameleon will become an interactive, audio-visual installation driven by emotional expression. It will tap into the dynamics of ever-changing social encounters that shape and share emotions.

The project has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Australian Network for Art and Technology Synapse Residency and the Banff New Media Institute. The project is managed by SCAN and the final prototype will be exhibited in late 2009.