The exhibition ‘My [public] space’ is a follow-up to the exhibition ‘Territorial Phantom’. In the previous exhibition the occupation of and claims to space by corporations, organizations or countries was central. My [public] space goes more deeply into the blurring of private and public information and spaces.

The copious use of digital, network and mobile technologies has had an enormous influence on our concept of public and private space, and calls up new questions about the conditions for these environments. Public space is not longer something that we can leave or exclude. Through wireless technologies – chat, mail, GSM – the public is everywhere: in our homes, our beds and even our bodies. What is private any more? What consequences does this muddying of the public and exposure to the public gaze have? Public space has become a ‘hybrid’: an entanglement of the public and private spheres.

The phenomenon of the changing concept of private and public space is twofold: on the one side there is a growing wish to express ourselves publicly via the media; on the other, public space is becoming more controlled and limited than ever. With their t-shirts, animations, games, installations and websites the artists in this exhibition throw light on this phenomenon in diverse ways.

For instance, in their work Hasan Elahi and Jill Magid employ mechanisms and technologies of control in public spaces for their own private stories, and with an enormous camera Martijn Engelbregt asks passers-by on the Museumplein what they think of being filmed. The works by Eduardo Navas and Marisa Olson respond in various ways to taking private information into the public domain of the internet. Guy Ben-Ner really is doing the same thing, but in the publicly accessible (though private property) model rooms at IKEA.

With her game Dora García responds in an abstract manner to the gray areas around the borders between the public and private, with a quiz with unanswerable personal questions which nonetheless must be answered yes or no. Eva and Franco Mattes aka 01001011101011101.org respond in an abstract, synthetic way to the phenomenon by taking a performance that was all about impinging on someone’s private space by forcing them to squeeze past naked bodies in order to enter some place, and re-enacting it in Second Life.

Susan Härtig’s tent makes a really private and mobile space possible, somewhere that no mobile telephone or other device using radio waves can
find. And finally, by revealing what is normally invisible on internet or via RFID technology, the t-shirts by Susan Härtig and Aram Bartholl address today’s hybrid space.

Open: Tuesday through Saturday and the first Sunday of the month from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. Admission 2,50 (1,50 with discount)
For more information: Marieke Istha, communication istha@nimk.nl
Website: www.nimk.nl

Join us for Berkeley Big Bang 08, three days of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media, timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, a new media art biennial taking place June 4-8 in San Jose. Occurring together for the first time, these two events combine to create one of the nation’s largest gatherings of new media art, a week-long “big bang” of innovation and creativity. The Berkeley Big Bang program will include a two-day symposium on new media, art, science, and the body in partnership with Berkeley Center for New Media and Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; campus media lab demonstrations; and an alternate reality game. Berkeley Big Bang is presented in tandem with BAM/PFA exhibitions of work by media artists Trevor Paglen, Jim Campbell, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Scott Snibbe.

For gallery exhibitions, see: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/events/education/bigbang/EN0169

– Richard Rinehart
Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
bampfa.berkeley.edu
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University of California, Berkeley
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2625 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA, 94720-2250
ph.510.642.5240
fx.510.642.5269

This year’s b.TWEEN forum has a range of creative and commercial opportunities on offer. To win a grand prize of £10,000, industry specialist development workshops and have your work screened in the Interactive Gallery, at the ICA, FACT and on Big Screens across Manchester: get involved. Submissions to be uploaded on the forum’s website.

EXPLODING NARRATIVE: Propose an original, exciting idea for an mscape and you could win one of five £1,000 development grants, a £10,000 grand prize and the chance to see your idea become reality. mscapes are location based mobile games, stories and educational journeys. They are experienced on GPS-enabled PDAs and based on easy to use software developed by HP Labs. We are looking for:

- ideas that engage with location-based collaborative gaming, learning or stories
- from artists, film makers, games designers, e-learning experts and creatives

INTERACTIVE GALLERY: Exhibit your engaging, interactive installation at b.TWEEN08. We are looking for Technology-enabled, life-enriching, glee-inducing works that will engage young and old alike. Every year at b.TWEEN we have a gallery of interactive installations that delegates and museum visitors can play with and be inspired by. Exhibits in the b.TWEEN08 Interactive Gallery will also be screened at the ICA, FACT and on Big Screens across Manchester. Past galleries have included Igloo, Squidsoup, Alexei Shulgin, Soda and Transmute Collective.

b.TWEEN08: Nowhere else will you find such a diverse mix of ideas-rich indies and ideas-hungry big industry players meeting on a level playing field to explore and exploit the creative and commercial potential of digital technologies. Book tickets. Supported by: Channel 4, BBC, New Media Age, HP Labs, NWDA, Technology Strategy Board, Museum of Science and Industry, Ambient Worlds, ICA, FACT, Creative Partnerships and the Arts Council of England.

Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and! systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions ? or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

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.

In keeping with Sobell’s interest in extra-institutional viewing communities, the entire exhibition will also be webcast at all hours of the day, allowing online users access to the conventionally closed-off realm of the artist studio, in a fashion that constructively challenges existing divisions of public and private space, while also placing her web audience in the ambivalent role of surveillants. Sobell and multimedia artist Emily Hartzell realized a similar project in 1994, also using real-time webcasting to transform their studio at NYU Center for Advanced Technology into one of the internet’s first time-based installations. Reflecting on the experience, they described moments when “our actions were heightened by our awareness of unseen Web visitors,” and others when “we felt ourselves dissolved in…ubiquitous surveillance.” Given her open invitation for musical collaboration for the duration of her forthcoming exhibition, it seems Sobell is presently aiming to produce an installation that both foregrounds the “artist-in-studio as spectacle” and facilitates a new type of community-centric performance space, accessible to viewers near and far. - Tyler Coburn, Rhizome.

Participating artists: Johanna Billing, Jennifer Bornstein, Andrea Bowers, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Harrell Fletcher, Josh Greene, Cameron Jamie, Alan Kane, Long March Project, Yoshua Okon, Michele O’Marah, Hirsch Perlman, Jim Shaw, Simon Starling, Javier Téllez, Jeffrey Vallance, and Eric Wesley :: Curator: Ralph Rugoff.

Amateurs surveys a terrain of artistic practice that departs from the hyperprofessionalization characterizing so much cultural production today. Whether working as amateurs in disciplines beyond the art world or collaborating with amateur practitioners, the artists featured in this exhibition refuse to let the experts have the last word. They are committed instead to a democratization of artistic production—one that often invites us, the viewers, to reflect upon our own roles and question our basic assumptions about authorship and expertise.

Bringing together work from the past 25 years, the exhibition explores the role of the amateur in investigating areas that are ignored by professional practitioners, and also in developing a modus operandi that departs from established technical, formal, and conceptual standards. Many of the featured artists celebrate amateur cultural practices for their “impurity”—their accidental or indifferent mixing of genres, aesthetics, and symbolic codes. They embrace “professional amateurism” (no matter how paradoxical it might sound) as a critical strategy and look askance at the narrow limits defining mainstream contemporary art.

The New Normal brings together thirteen recent artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter. The concept of privacy, though widely invoked, is difficult to define. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, bodies, thoughts, communications, and behaviors—contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries. The practices that demarcate the private sphere are so much a part of the fabric of everyday life—wearing clothing, politely pretending not to overhear a cell-phone conversation— that they only become noticeable when they shift, making the private sphere visible to the public eye. Privacy, to put it bluntly, captures our attention only when it is under threat.

In the wake of 9/11, the specter of terrorism was used to justify increased collection and sharing of personal data by governments around the world. This time of heightened surveillance, characterized by luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps, was dubbed “the new normal” by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

The spread of social technology has affected privacy no less profoundly. With the rise of online commerce, many banks and retailers have developed sophisticated methods of tracking and studying the behavior of consumers, while increased use of the Internet has created new platforms for voluntary self-disclosure, from blogs to MySpace. Private information has never been less private, as evinced by Kota Ezawa’s Home Video II, made from “leaked” video files of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon,widely available on the Web. Each of the works in The New Normal—video, Web sites, sculpture, artist’s books, found objects, and photographs—grants access to the private sphere of the artists themselves, of strangers, and of public officials. Overall, the exhibition creates a sense that access to private information is a kind of currency, the exchange of which is growing and evolving in bewildering ways. We may find it frightening or fascinating, but we are all inescapably complicit in it.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Independent Curators International, with essays by Michael Connor, Clay Shirky and Marisa Olson.

EOD 02 is an installation by Frederik De Wilde created in collaboration with LAb[au]. EOD 02 is a new-media installation exploring the capacity of special species of living blind fishes to perceive (electrosense) their environment and communicate with each other by emitting electric signals, either in pulses or waves. The installation is based on four aquariums of taintless mirror, each presenting a specific composition of fish producing different electric signals. In each aquarium antennas capture the electric communication between the fishes and render these signals into sound. Under each aquarium a matrix of leds is placed pulsing according to the intensity and rhythm of the emitted signals. In this manner the electrical impulses of the fishes drive sound, light and an entire audiovisual space. More info.

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. The artwork is a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.

[Image: left to right: Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman)]

BabelSwarm, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, uses voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental / user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets. According to Justin Clemens, Second Life is an already burgeoning platform for today’s art. ‘Every era has a form that exemplifies it: in Shakespeare’s time, it was the theatre; today, it’s Second Life. It’s a question of trying to meet the new challenges of a new time - and the new spaces that it generates, ”Second Life epitomises the innovations of contemporary technology and culture: an entirely virtual world that has entirely real effects,” Justin said.

According to artist Christopher Dodds, Second Life is a step in the right direction for Australia contemporary arts practice. “It is encouraging to see the Australia Council recognising virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artistic practice, and while we thought our idea was solid, we knew the grant would receive a lot of attention and some pretty spectacular applications,” Christopher said.

Read more here [PDF] and here.

To gain access to Babelswarm you need to register an avatar name, download the Second Life application software, and then log-in to see the virtual world. This can be done in three easy steps:
1. Go to http://secondlife.com/ and follow the “Get Started” link. This will allow you to register an avatar name, download the application and then log into Second Life.
2. New users go to an instructional island where they can learn to walk, fly talk etc.
3. When ready, click on (or paste into a web browser) the following link: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ACVA/119/180/295/ Follow the instructions and your avatar will arrive in the Babelswarm foyer.

Read Bettina Tizzy’s interview with Adam Nash here.