By classifying and then analyzing the elements of a square, I slowly began to realize that there is a similarity between the city and a living organism. We can treat cities as entities with collective intelligence and, with the same analogy, we can recognize a system by which the urban space communicates with us. the square, as a city’s “heart and soul”, has the most to say, so recently I concentrated my artistic exploration on the language of urban squares.

The vocabulary of urban squares is part of a complex language of art; it is a dialect with very specific characteristics. Elements have their individual meanings, but when combined create new messages. Architectural elements, signage systems, graffiti and many other forms of urban art follow each other in a continuous stream, they surround us and direct our movements, they are given to us in a form on which we, as individuals, have very little effect. Still, we are the only ones that can attempt to interpret them and use their messages in order to understand and try to create more sustainable and habitable cities.

The level on which squares communicate transcends every day life. Careful observation and a lot of passion are necessary in order to interpret / translate their messages. Many urban experts write and lecture on the topic of cities. in my work, I try to match those thoughts with my interpretation of the urban square.

This project is a hybrid between a scientific and an artistic approach to the subject. I am aware that this narrow path between them might be speculative and perhaps not 100% accurate, but the objective is to have more freedom in interpreting the facts, and then provoke action from interested and influential people…

The objective of Urban Squares is to explore visual and artistic aspect of public urban square as a nucleus of any neighbourhood. We are interpreting/translating language of urban squares, their urban morphology and fundamental values in the overall social integration and sustainability of the urban life. All of the squares in our collection are with a short description / comment and some with the combined structural profile and cross-section.

Over time we were inspired to start performing analysis of urban space and produce “psychogeographical portraits” as a mental reaction to the visited space. See the map of some of our psychogeographical performances.

Urbansquares project is “walking on a very narrow path” between art and science. intention is to have artistic freedom in interpreting the facts, and provoke reaction.

rediscover - renew - reuse is catchphrase we are trying to incorporate in all our research.

As a very important part of this project classification system of city squares is developed consisting of evaluation method and types of city squares.

Other even more important parts are our activities related to urban issues and psychogeography, urbansquares art projects and documentation.

“Speech and the ability for meta-reflection on one’s own language are inherent characteristics of human beings. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, language — whether written, spoken, or performed — has become more and more a part of the visual arts in various artistic practices and theoretical approaches, ultimately becoming a constitutive element and the “source” code of digital art. All the projects presented in the exhibition YOU OWN ME NOW UNTIL YOU FORGET ABOUT ME. were originally Internet-based artworks. But the main thing they have in common is that they take as their starting point an exploration of language, with its arbitrary structures and rules, its various functions within society, its absurdities and constraints on the individual. Open processes are inherent to digital artworks, both in their production and in the mnemonic activities that emerge in their reception. Rather than focusing on the isolated — literary / literal — artwork, the exhibition highlights general artistic tendencies toward a discursive process that originates on the Internet and finds its way back to the “virtualities of real life”. [...]

The “open work” (5) manifests itself through mediation and is created individually with each new reception of it. But what happens when the user closes the data file, when the speaking person stops talking? “In the end there is nothing of an object here, just a process, a set of rules that leads you to the point of questioning unicity, ownership, and the object-like nature of digital art works and what you can own is nothing more than the memory of it. (6)“” — Birgit Rinagl, Franz Thalmair / CONT3XT.NET, Curators.

Conceived and initiated by the Franco-American scientist and writer David Edwards, Le Laboratoire is a ONE YEAR OLD experimental art and design centre located in the heart of Paris. Here artists and designers conceive and develop ideas in collaboration with scientists working at the cutting edge of science today. These ‘experiments’ produce unconventional art and design exhibitions that reflect the work-in-progress nature of the creative process. Through exhibition we invite the public into this analytical and intuitive, deductive and inductive creative process that is shared by artists and scientists alike. We call this artscience, an institution-agnostic process underpinning cultural, industrial, humanitarian, and educational kinds of innovation

We are pleased to present the artistic program of the second season:

Ryoji Ikeda & Benedict Gross: V≠L (Oct 11 - Jan 12): Le Laboratoire is pleased to present, for the first time in Europe, a personal exhibition of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, a major figure of the sound and visual electronic scene. From his correspondence with the American mathematician Benedict Gross, he has conceived a work where the definition of the sublime blends with the immateriality of infinity. Welcome to a world of millimeter precision.

“As an artist/composer, my intention is always polarized by concepts of “the beautiful and the sublime”. To me, beauty is crystal; rationality, precision, simplicity, elegance, delicacy. The sublime is infinity; infinitesimal, immensity, indescribable, ineffable. The purest beauty is the world of mathematics. Its perfect assemblage amongst numbers, magnitudes and forms persist despite us. The aesthetic experience of the sublime in mathematics is awe-inspiring. It is similar to the experience we have when we confront the vast magnitude of the universe, which always leaves us openmouthed. The aim of this project is to engage in dialogue with the mathematician Benedict Gross and other number theorists to find a common language on aesthetics.” Ryoji Ikeda

In partnership with Festival d’Automne à Paris, with the support of Nomura, Fondation Franco-Japonaise Sasakawa and Fondation pour l’étude de la langue et de la civilisation japonaises acting under the aegis of la Fondation de France. Within the framework of 150th anniversary of French-Japanese relationships

Shilpa Gupta & Pamela Sklar: Is fear genetic? (February - April, 2009) - Shilpa Gupta (an Indian artist currently living in Mumbai) investigates the power of images in terms of how they affect the way we think. Are images so influential that they can change how we perceive reality? The work of Pamela Sklar (neuroscientist, geneticist, psychiatrist and professor at Harvard) echoes Gupta’s investigations.

Through her research, the scientist Sklar has developed the hypothesis that certain psychiatric illnesses are hereditary. What if fear, depression, and other mental issues had genetic origins? Shilpa Gupta and Pamela Sklar are launching an interactive experiment and invite visitors to Le Laboratoire to participate. This project is realized in the context of an annual conference at Le Laboratoire on global health, supported by the non-governmental organization Medicine in Need (MEND), based in South Africa, France, and the United States.

R&Sie(n) & François Jouve: Architecture of Moods (May - July, 2009) - The architecture studio R&Sie(n) unveils the research it has undertaken with the mathematician François Jouve (Professor at the University of Paris VII and Lecturer at école Polytechnique). Together they explore new modes of structuring architecture.

Until now, housing criteria has relied on obvious visible data (area, lifestyle, number of rooms…); R&Sie(n) are establishing a new set of criteria, one that is invisible, based on the neurobiological signals of each visitor to the exhibit. An urban structure, created in real time using robotic machines, has great potential for variability and indeterminability as it aggregates and materializes the detected desires of these “future homebuyers”.

An interview is used to understand fluctuations of emotional state, which are translated into algorithmic data to generate a “neuropsychological” architecture, an architecture of moods.

A sales desk allows the “visitor/client” to place an order for his/her bio-architecture to be implemented as part of the collective structure.

“This is randomness, and that is altogether different. If absolutely necessary, you can count the stars. A catalogue has been kept of them since Antiquity. But if you ask for a catalogue of the clouds, people laugh at you. There is no such term as cloud, defined as permanent, defined by its borders, by its terms or its terminations. [?] Clouds, whirlwinds, flows, noises, all primary masses without qualities.” — M. Serres.

Chaos theories, as they have emerged in strength since the 1960s, with their focus on complexity, were in fact an answer to the monstrous and misshapen nature of certain phenomena that were revealed to be resistant to determinist equations or to the laws of causality. Atmospheric phenomena such as clouds have always been seen as an image of the inability to submit certain realities to precise measurement. To all intents and purposes, clouds appeared to be a perfect example of irreducibility, instability and unpredictability. Clouds, in their apparent causal disjunction, like a whirlwind or vortex, represented the principles of error, exception and monstrosity.

Perhaps this is why there have never been dreams of an individual cloud catalogue, since it would be so absurd. If we ask anybody for something similar, we risk being ridiculed, as Michel Serres recalls. Clouds are instantly fleeting and have no number or stable form. They exist now and no longer exist a moment later. We can classify the clouds approximately, order them by type or try to understand their signs but we have no way of archiving them.

The exponential growth of Web files, particularly with the participative forms that Web 2.0 has made common, has finally brought us an embryo for these absurd archives, and not only for clouds. Everything that has always been firmly uncataloguable seems to have found its place in the distributed digital archives.

At the same time, curiously, we have an increasing popularity in recent years for terms such as Cloud Computing, Cloud Architecture, Data Clouds, Text Clouds or Tag Clouds, in what represents the attribution of a new semantic power to our idea of a cloud. Particularly on the web, with the explosion of social networks, it has become common to use similar devices to organise meta-information generated by users.

Clouds of clouds is a random generator of cloud images. Each new cloud is unique and indexed to a particular time (GMT) on a particular day. Its clouds were made on similar dates and at similar times, not necessarily the same year, and are linked to the original web pages.

The basis of the archives are all images indexed with the tags or on Flickr.

These are not clouds in the atmospheric meaning of the word, but instead entities with which they share a complexity that can be confused with instability, unpredictability and irreducibility. That this is based on a relatively simple visualisation arrangement is another way of indicating that this complexity depends less on what we see on the surface than on the networks of relationships established from it.

The clouds generated by the users are kept in searchable archives. These archives will grow with the project and are intended to become, over time, veritable daily, monthly, yearly archives of clouds. Clouds of clouds also works as a type of infinite nesting doll: clouds within clouds, archives within archives.

Murray McKeich is a New Zealander currently resident in Melbourne Australia who has established himself as a leading practitioner of digital media in Australasian contemporary art. Working with digital photo-media, his exhibition projects include printed imagery and animation. Described as both macabre and darkly seductive, Mckeich’s art weaves visions of surreal fantasy and magic from the tiny pieces of every-day debris found in urban and domestic environments. His recent practice uses generative software to autonomously breed art-works.

McKeich believes that computational tools are about to become more intimately integrated with human creativity. Artists and designers will take on the role of creative directors while their personalised software will work for them in the capacity of highly trained, trusted and autonomous studio assistants, capable of producing finished artworks without direct supervision. McKeich demonstrates that this form of practice is possible with current off-the-shelf software and minimal programming skill. More difficult is the psychological challenge of breaking with culturally ingrained biological models of creative process and forming new ones that are natural and native to computational agency.

MURRAY MCKEICH is a visiting fellow in the digital studios throughout September. He is a practicing artist and course co-ordinator in media arts at RMIT University, School of Creative Media, Melbourne, Australia. He is currently completing a PhD in Art/Digital Media at Monash University, Australia.

The phrase “pro surfer” originated with the founding in 2006 of Nasty Nets, an “internet surfing club” whose members were internet artists, offline artists, and web enthusiasts who were invited by the group’s co-founders (of which I was one) to join them in posting to their website materials they had found online, many of which were then remixed or arranged into larger compositions or “lists” of images bearing commonality. Soon a number of group “surf blogs” appeared around the net, including Supercentral, Double Happiness, Loshadka, and Spirit Surfers, each of which share some number of common members, social bonds, or stylistic affinities. There are also a number of “indie surfers” making similar work, some of whom will be mentioned here…” Continue reading Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture by Marisa Olson.

The Order of Things is an exhibition on the uses of archival images, image archives and image banks (and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse) in contemporary art. It takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages.

In The Order of Things, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably present than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the worldwide: the conceptual horizon of the Internet figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own The World as Will and Representation in the exhibition, hence also the inclusion of one of Thoma s Ruff’s emblematic “jpeg” photographs, or of Joachim Schmid’s exploration of the aesthetic of the ordered everyday in the depths of Flickr. In some sense, The Order of Things views the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a vernacular photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ordering interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary digitized condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that seeks to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the ironies implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. It is an irony that is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art – and art’s desire to see everything and show everything – also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.

Two types of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the labyrinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices have been isolated, such as “appropriation”, “archives”, “collage & bricolage,” and “typology”.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the democracy of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, The Order of Things would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.

Participating artists & artworks by: Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Daniel Faust (US), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), ROMA Publications (Mark Manders & Roger Willems) (NL), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Vanden Meersch (B), Christopher Williams(US)

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

Trope promotes new writing within virtual space, and launched as an imagetext gallery within Second Life that coincided with the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May 2008. Trope creatively intervenes in the ways that readers engage with literary texts and aims to expand writing networks and to further develop virtual literary community. Trope features short fiction and poetry in curated exhibitions. Texts are repositioned in a spatialised visual format designed so that users experience texts in a three dimensional world. Avatars are able to move through the imagetext gallery, interacting with texts and sound, and are provided with a visitors’ book to respond to the experience.

The panel features Trope’s creators alongside the Melbourne-based writers selected for the first iteration, discussing the dynamics of this intersection between literature and new media and the poetic possibilities of virtual spaces. The panelists are: Chair: Bel Schenk :: Participants: Cristyn Davies, Elena Knox, Sarah Waterson, Matt Hetherington and Alicia Sometimes.

This panel is sponsored by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

The piece was designed to privileged calmness in the viewer, using motion sensing to disrupt the image. However, unlike a game, interactivity here was not intended to be indexical.

Conceptually the piece concerned the tension between order and chaos and the mind’s desire to seek out form in the abstract.

Creativity can be thought of as spiritual in that it draws from an autonomous and alien intelligence. I see this process as immanent rather than transcendent.

The title of the work references the Gnostic idea of the divine light that seeks to pierce through the iron cage of simulation in which humanity has been trapped by the Archons that govern the material world.

S[t]imulation: an interactive painting from Marc Tuters on Vimeo.

[posted by Marc here]

We have always contemplated the night sky with awe, envisioning ties to mythic pasts or space-bound futures. The night sky of the present is pregnant with these associations. At the same time, it cloaks in plain sight constellations of technology employed by the United States government’s “black world” of covert military and intelligence activities. Trevor Paglen, trained as both an artist and a geographer, deploys an array of tactics—from data analysis and on-the-ground exploration to long-distance photography and astronomy—to map this shadowy world of secret bases, unspecified budget allocations, stealth planes, assumed identities, and secret satellites on land and in the heavens.

For his MATRIX project, Paglen works with data compiled by amateur astronomers and hobbyist “satellite observers,” cross-referenced through his own research, to track and present what he calls “the other night sky.” In the vastness of the cosmos, this physical manifestation of the black world hides in plain sight, visible even with the naked eye. He photographs barely perceptible traces of these vessels amidst familiar star fields, inserting a layer of human intervention into familiar visualizations of
the cosmos.

The multimedia installation at the center of the exhibition The Other Night Sky gestures toward the popular presentation of scientific knowledge in space centers and natural history museums by offering a large-scale globe animated with 189 currently orbiting satellites. But the evidentiary function of the work is thwarted; although photographs are named for depicted satellites, faint streaks verify their existence, and the projections track their real-time movements, there is no information to glean from the images about the satellites themselves or their particular roles. And so he points us to the physical manifestations of the black world, while the images themselves embody the impossibility of translating such an act of seeing into an act of understanding. With this project, Paglen looks upwards to the night sky, one of the oldest laboratories of rational thought, in order to visualize and document certain facts, looking for answers about truth, secrecy, and democracy in the present moment. The Other Night Sky is Paglen’s first solo museum exhibition.

Support:

Produced with the support of Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York.

The MATRIX Program at the UC Berkeley Art Museum is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis.

Additional donors to the MATRIX Program include the UAM Council MATRIX Endowment, Joachim and Nancy Bechtle, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, Noel and Penny Nellis, Roselyne C. Swig, Paul L. Wattis III, Paul Rickert, Iris Shimada, and Jane and Jeff Green.