A fantastic class of new materials is blurring the boundaries between computation and physical form, and as a result bringing computer science into the realms of a host of other disciplines, among them architecture, biology, chemistry, fashion design, and mechanical engineering. Responsive and computationally controllable materials — shape-changing polymers, e-textiles, and nano-scale electronics, just to name a few — are positioned to provide the underpinnings of truly ubiquitous interactivity that extends invisibly across body, architectural and urban scales.

This special issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing will focus on the use of such materials as the physical and computational bridge between form and function, body and environment, structures and membranes. Rather than focusing on approaches that employ sensors and actuators as discrete add-on components, this issue will emphasize technologies that blur the gap between computation and materiality, and between traditionally distinct disciplines.

We hope to spark a conversation between researchers and practitioners from a variety of scientific, engineering, and design disciplines (e.g. ubiquitous computing, materials science, architecture, biology, fashion, and HCI) in order to shed light on the possibilities and limitations of new material technologies, and to illustrate how we will build, interact and live with computers well into the future.

TOPICS

In addition to the issues already noted, topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Relevant developments in materials science, mechanical engineering, chemistry, biological engineering, nanotechnology, electrical engineering, textile engineering, and other fields, coupled with thoughtful speculation about applications
* Systems that integrate computation with new or unusual materials and composites
* Relationship between materials, form, and function in interaction design
* Needs served and possibilities exposed by responsive materials
* Long-term scenarios for ubiquitous applications built on responsive materials
* Relationship between membrane and structure in design
* Craft, collaborative development, and community knowledge
* Applications that span multiple fields and act as seeds for collaboration
* Relationship between new materials, manufacturing technologies, and computer aided design
* Sustainability issues exposed by the use of responsive material composites
* Biologically inspired design (e.g. biomimetics, self-assembly, morpho-functional design)
* Material driven multi-functionality, adaptability, and personalization
* Materials that function as the binding matter in the design of objects, garments, and spaces.
* Responsive Materials applied in an artistic or performative context
* Tangible interfaces
* Robotics
* Programmable matter
* Smart materials
* Electronic textiles, computational textiles, smart textiles
* Parametric design

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

All submissions should be sent to the guest editors at materialcomputing@media.mit.edu. Authors must submit abstracts and titles to the guest editors by October 1, 2008, and full papers by November 14, 2008.

Information about the format and style required for papers can be found here, and templates can be downloaded from here. More information about the Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing can be found here. However, all submissions and questions for the special issue should be sent to the guest editors, not the journal’s editor in chief.

All submissions will be anonymously reviewed by at least three reviewers and the selection for publication will be made on the basis of these reviews.

IMPORTANT DATES

Intention to submit (Abstract and Title): October 1, 2008
Submission deadline for full papers: November 14, 2008
Notification and reviews to authors: January 16, 2009
Camera ready submission deadline: February 6, 2009

GUEST EDITORS

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to the guest editors: materialcomputing [at] media.mit.edu

Leah Buechley
University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Computer Science
UCB 430
Boulder, CO 80309
Leah.Buechley [at] colorado.edu

Marcelo Coelho
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Media Lab | Ambient Intelligence Group
20 Ames St., E15-322
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
marcelo [at] media.mit.edu

‘You can’t use it without my permission … I’m gonna sue your ass!’ shouts Disney’s Little Mermaid with the angry voice of a copyright lawyer in the video Gimme the Mermaid (4:49 min., 2000). The video by Negativland and Tim Maloney is one of twenty eight works included in Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System: Art in the Age of Intellectual Property, an exhibition presented by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV). It is part of Work 2.0 – Copyright and Creative Work in the Digital Age. In the framework of Work 2.0, HMKV – together with the Berlin-based collaborative partner iRights.info/mikro e.V. – explores the relationships between creative work, intellectual property law, and technology.

How does the changing notion of (creative) work relate to ‚intellectual property’? Today we live in a post-industrial society where the goods being produced are no longer material (like steel, coal, etc.), but immaterial. The Ruhr Area, with its vast deindustrialised landscape, paradigmatically stands for this transition from the Industrial Age to the information or knowledge society. However, there is a significant difference: Immaterial goods such as knowledge and information can be reproduced without loss. Therefore, in order to function in a value-added chain, the distribution of these immaterial goods has to be restricted. This is effectuated with the aid of intellectual property (IP) law, namely copyrighting, patenting, and trademarking.

David Rice’s perfidious short story ‘Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System’ – from which curators Inke Arns and Francis Hunger have borrowed the exhibition title – deals with the concept of intellectual property: In 2067 stars – such as ex-tennis player Anna Kournikova – have their ‘brand’ protected by a satellite-based system that identifies unlicensed look-alikes and eliminates them via a strong laser beam. During a trip to the Pacific Rim, not officially cleared, the ‘real’ Anna Kournikova is identified as an imitation of herself and is consequently eliminated by the system.

The exhibition in the PHOENIX Halle, measuring 2,200 square metres and located on the grounds of the former steelworks Phoenix-West, puts forward the thesis that the increasingly strict application of intellectual property law hampers the development of culture as a whole. It proves increasingly difficult to impart this culture by employing images, logos, or soundbites of this very culture.

The artists represented in this exhibition explore the question of art in the age of mechanical reproduction positioning itself differently in a post-Fordist era permeated with digital networks than in Fordist, analogue times to which Walter Benjamin has referred. Artistic techniques like cut-up, sampling, détournement, appropriation, copying, remixing, plagiarism, and repetition are employed.

Participating artists:
AGENCY (BE)
Daniel Garcia Andújar (ES)
Walter Benjamin (US)
Christian von Borries (DE)
Christophe Bruno (FR)
Claire Chanel & Scary Sherman (US)
Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ)
Ramon & Pedro (CH)
Fred Froehlich (DE)
Nate Harrison (US)
John Heartfield (DE)
Michael Iber (DE)
Laibach/Novi kolektivizem (SI)
Kembrew McLeod (US)
Sebastian Luetgert (DE)
Monochrom (AT)
Negativland and Tim Maloney (US)
Der Plan (DE)
David Rice (US)
Ines Schaber (DE)
Alexei Shulgin & Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique) (RU)
Cornelia Sollfrank (DE)
Stay Free (US)
Jason Torchinsky (US)
Lizvlx & Hans Bernhard (UBERMORGEN.COM)
& Alessandro Ludovico
& Paolo Cirio (CH/AT/IT)

Curated by:
Inke Arns
Francis Hunger

Turning the machine inside out - Creating Worlds as Interface by Eric Kluitenberg: It is always a good thing for artists who work with technology and technological media to study the inner life of the machines. Break open the box and look what is inside. This helps to foreclose an overly naive relationship to the medium. Obviously, it also seems a good thing for artists to simply know their material, understand their medium. This is hardly any different today for media-artists than it was, for instance, for Fresco painters in the grand hall of Sienna’s Palazzo Publico in the thirteenth century. Still there might be more at stake in the case of digital machines, something that moves beyond the usual questions about the artist’s material.

That something might be the creation of Worlds as Interface. This speculative idea was suggested in the proposal for a new physics by the physicist Otto E. Rossler. An approach he named Endophysics. The main problem for Rossler was the apparently insolvable question of how to define an explicit model of the world in its entirety, in which the implicit role of the observer was accounted for, given that the observer is always inextricably implicated in what can be observed of the world in the first place. It would require an explicit model that includes the observer. Such a model would, however only be possible to construct from an ‘exophysical’ location, a position outside of the world (in its entirety), which is by definition impossible.

The world according to Rossler is defined by that what transfers between the observer and the ‘real’ world at the interface. It is the interface to the world that defines what can be observed about the ‘real’ world. This interface constitutes a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ which remains in itself inaccessible, as it is the very implication of the observer in the observed. The riddle of the necessary but impossible inclusion of the observer and the interface in the picture of the world would appear as a problem without solution. But Rossler suggest there might just be a little escape hatch from this unresolvable implication. He describes it as the construction of model worlds that include the model-observer and their interface with that model world, which allows us, by deferral, from our meta-position outside the model world, to study explicitly the implicit implication of the observer into the microscopic phenomena that transpire in the model world, and their influence on macroscopic phenomena in that model world.

Through this deferral it is possible to make explicit the relationships between the observer, the interface, and the ‘real’ world. While the true nature of the ‘real’ world remains as such unknowable, since all knowledge is a product of an interface whose structure and effect cannot be determined as there is no external position to the ‘real’ world from where this could be judged, this deferred study suggests next steps to bring the analysis closer to our own world. First of all Endophysics recognises the necessity to include the study of the human brain, the biological material substructure that structures the interface to the ‘real’ world. It attempts to bridge the gap between physics, neurophysiology and the subjective, the object of psychological study and psycho-analysis. Endophysics understands the world as something specific to each observer, defined and constituted by the specific structure of the observers’ brain and experience, but still attempts through this deferred study and return to the original observer to come closer to an explicit understanding of the interface that defines the world this observer inhabits and escape ‘mere subjectivism’, even if the interface itself remains ultimately inaccessible for external scrutiny.

It cannot be a coincidence that Rossler chooses his terminology of the interface as a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ that we know so well from Lacanian psycho-analytical theory. In a Lacanian understanding it is the symbolic order that ‘cuts’ across the ‘real’, which is always in its place but is itself unknowable. The symbolic order, language par excellence, but also the wider objects of semiotic study, open the real as in a cut, without a sense of where or how this cut is applied. The subject is thus stumbling in the dark of that what cannot be known - the ‘real’ itself.

What the interface creates, both in Rossler’s conception as well as in Lacan’s, is not an access to the world, but the world itself. As such we can never study the world in its entirety as it s structured by the interface that exists prior to this world, but escapes its own detection by the observer - us as human subjects - being nothing more than the effect of an unknown interface that links us to a an equally unknown ‘real’. We continue to stumble in the dark, playing around whit the effects of the interface and delimited by its structural limitations, the structuring principles of which are unknown to us. When we try to observe them at their microscopic (fundamental) level they change as a result of our action. When we want to see place we cannot see time, when we want to see moment we cannot see space. The state of the fundamental building blocks of ‘reality’ is unknown to us until we look inside Shrodinger’s box, but when we look inside we produce the reality we observe. Outside the box the state of that reality remains undecidable, it can be one or zero, we just cannot know. Rossler also refers to Kurt Godel’s undecidability theorem that shows the limits of formal (explicit) reasoning in a thus far undisputed mathematical expos?.

What to do then, if we cannot extricate ourselves from the world to study the interface that produces our world as an ‘effect’? Should we give up trying to understand hat world, our world, our relationship to that world, as we are entangled in a senseless circulatory motion that will never get us closer to the ‘real”, closer to understanding, to ‘enlightenment’? Or is this all just a formal game, a puzzle, a fancy at best? Surely there are still ‘real’ passions, joys, pains, beauty and sublime suffering to engage with?

Rossler suggests one possible trajectory: the construction of model worlds. He sees them embodied in our times in virtual worlds, in simulations that can run on digital brains, in finite schemes of explicit description.

Well…, perhaps. But over the years (as a personal note on this) I have become increasingly disaffected with the sterile aesthetics and anaemic experience of virtual worlds. They simply do not capture my soul, or haunt my dreams. They do not stir my passions, as the dramatic foreshorthenings in a grand Caravaggio painting do. So I am wondering, can there be another way in which we can build a deferred reality that includes the observer and the implicit interface, suitable for explicit study? Such an undertaking would not simply be the construction of formal model worlds in finite schemes of explicit description, but much rather a more visceral experimental practice. Its object would have to be the construction and simultaneous deconstruction of the interface; the conscious explication of an interface with the aim to study the interfaces that implicitly structure our world - not just our experience of the world, but notably the world itself.

The reason why I am going into all this is that some of these thoughts were triggered by one work in particular I had the privilege of seeing ‘under construction’ (always the most exciting phase of a technologically invested art work, in preparation for the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design MA graduation show of 2008. An installation work by Danja Vassiliev. The monstrous machine he created felt like a psychoanalytically ambiguous tunnel that allowed a view into the very belly of the beast, as if we are looking at the inner life of the machines themselves. It looked a bit like the wonderfully kitschy culmination scene of the Matrix trilogy, where the story’s protagonist Neo visits the heart of the machine empire to negotiate a truce between men and machines.

Vassiliev constructed a patently absurd machine, called m/e/m/e/2.0[1], and finds himself (inadvertently or not) in the best company of a long tradition of ‘avant-garde’ artists who created various sorts of absurd, ironic, impossible, sadistic, insane or ridiculous machines. His likes are the creators of ominous bachelor machines (Duchamp, Lautreamont, Picabia, Roussel, Kafka), self-destructing machines of the Tinguely type, right down to the magically autistic robotic anti-sculptures of Allan Rath.

In his comments Vassiliev showed himself sceptical of the current infatuation with disembodied information, especially the world-wide web with its inapt page metaphors that suggest a stability where only flux and impermanence are the rule. To counter the loss of materiality in the info- interface, Vassiliev constructed an elaborate machine that allows us to look, through the tunnel in the installation an via a web cam on the web (yes the object of criticism is part of the work) at a stunningly analogue ‘interface’. The information is printed or drawn on half transparent sheets of circuit board material and becomes visible by a light that shines through the sheet from behind, like an electrical viewing box. To make the whole thing ‘interactive’, Vassiliev constructed a tunnel of surgically removed and reinserted cd/dvd computer drives, mounted at 45 degrees angle relative to each other, and hollowed out their sliders. The sheets are now covering the slide and the drive places a different sheet in front of the light - at the click of a mouse!

“My main problem was to get the camera to focus automatically”, said Vassiliev, as the slides of the drives necessarily had to be placed at different distances from both the source of light as well as the relative position of the observer/camera. So here some complex algorithmic manipulation had to be put in place to give us a readable ‘in-focus’ web cam image on the website - what would the point of the whole web-interface otherwise be if the image be systematically out of focus…?!

The interesting point of Vassiliev’s machine is that we can witness it in two forms at once, as a physical interface to a limited universe, five or eight half translucent sheets (depending on the number of drives mounted in the machine) containing some printed information, or maybe one or two hand- drawn images, whatever might be stored on those few lowly sheets, illuminated by the artists’ light from behind. Captured for us lower mortals by a cheap mass-consumption web cam and made visible again in an indirect exposure emanating from the computer screen in the from of a web page containing the webcam feed.

We need this double perspective to understand the nature of the interface, as a principle. We can witness it simultaneously from within the model world constructed by the artist (the feed on the web page), and from the outside as a materialised structure (in the installation). Obviously here the ‘content’ is not the point of the work. Neither is the medium the thing under scrutiny. Much more it is the interface: The way in which our relationship to whatever it is that is mediated is structured by this interface. By extension we can understand our relationship to the ‘real’ world as a question of interface and mediation through this deferred but still visceral model world.

One word of caution, though: The analogy of the biological brain to the electronic machine should not be taken too literally. We have witnessed over many century’s of scientific and engineering discourse a recurrent recourse to mechanistic models of the mind. Most recently within Hard A.I. research. According to this latter doctrine a symbol processing machine such as an electronic digital computer, should, if it is able to perform ‘typically’ human tasks (of symbolic processing) offer us a possibility, by analogy, to understand the mechanisms of the human mind and the workings of the human brain as a biological symbol processor. However, leaving the obvious contestations of scale and complexity aside (the complexity of the human brain outranks that of current computers by an enormous magnitude), these models offer very little insight, quite likely none whatsoever, into the workings of the human mind and brain. For the simple reason that human minds do not only process symbols, but also many other sensations. The brain itself is not independent of the rest of the body, most notably the nervous system. The biological brain is not silicon-based, and therefore essentially (physically, quantum-mechanically) different from electronic digital machines. And finally, humans are part of living cultures that transform with and through them, while the electronic digital machines are little more than a mere product of the same, without any significant immanent transcendent potential[2].

So the central issue in these experimental practices is not to create a literal analogy to the biological brain as such, but much rather to explore the question of the interface in a visceral manner. In fact virtually all works represented in the Media Design graduation show exemplify and embody this central point. They investigate, externalise, and manifest the interface to the domain of information, which lies at the heart of the digital machine.

In the case of Michael van Schaik’s Archus Browser[3] project he investigates simultaneously the (so far) never delivered promised of the semantic web, an information structure based on ordering by association of meaning and semantic properties, rather than syntactical and physical (and therefore often arbitrary) links, and the emerging practice of social tagging. Van Schaik’s project is the most purely informational of the group, but through its emphasis on extra-medial structuring and social praxis it clearly explores the interface as problem and suggests alternative approaches to the information interface.

Maria Karagianni’s project “Notations under Provisions” creates a linkage between the informational and embodied realm by creating a system in which Laban dance notations can be interactively performed with the help of a digital machine. But the linkage then exceeds the relationship of notation and performance by capturing this instant performance and putting it under copyright, utilising legal provisions that enable the copyrighting of a first-time performance of a dance score. The interface between the informational and embodied realm is thus extended into the social, institutional and legal realm. Copyright itself, of course, is a purely informational construct, and deeply contested one for that matter. The interesting transformation is the movement from the informational (a digital rendition of Laban notation) through the corporeal (the performance) back to the informational domain (the legal regime). Here again we can be both inside and outside the system to witness how the interface between these domains produces new realities as an ‘effect’.

In Gordan Savcic’s project “PlaySureVeillance”, similarly the interface between a physical game console, a game, and a hidden profiling system creates a play of entertainment and security politics. Player’s of hacked version of Nintendo’s Terror Toad are recorded, profiled and automatically presented and tracked on Facebook. In the course of the game more and more information is gathered of the participant and stored in a public record. The sinister politics of social coercion in the revered social web are revealed as a problem of unwarranted interfacing.

During my studio visit Ivan Monroy Lopez showed me a version of his algorithmic typography generator, where the typeface could be dynamically generated using a midi controller to influence seed parameters for the system. While the final version should be implemented in a web interface, this haptic interface seemed all the more prescient to the interrogation of the interface-problem, so it seemed to me.

Linda Hoffling’s “Remote Control / Democracy Player” fits in a series of projects that have attempted to deregulate the tight editorial control of mass-media channels - the ultimate tool for social normalisation. Here she proposes a series of participatory tools to influence the content and programming of a local Copenhagen TV station, subverting the logic of tight top-down control of the mass-brainwash-medium TV - it should include the on/off switch, which might have a devastatingly stroboscopic effect on the TCV transmission…

Salvador d’Souza’s Traditional Ritual Information System (TRIS)[4] explores the abyss of post-colonial transcultural misunderstanding. Investigating how to build web-based tools to support the study of symbolic and visual anthropology. In this case d’Souza is looking at the representation of Ghanaian Chieftaincy rituals and their relationship to world cultures. While these rituals are regularly and often erroneously framed as exotic and authentic (in the sense of untainted by external cultures), d’Souza reflects on the complex interrelations between Colonial history, migration and translocal linkages, as for instance in the Libation Pouring ritual, which as a local Ghanaian phenomenon is entirely dependent on De Kuyper’s Schnapps from Schiedam, another local but distinctively not Ghanaian product. The question is how the essential translocal and borderless nature of the world wide web relates to such local/translocal practices and linkages.

That in virtually all these projects the information interface and the inner life of the machine are at the heart of the works produced here is certainly no coincidence. Under the leadership of the Media design MFA, first by Matthew Fuller and now Florian Cramer, there has been a deliberate attempt to question the structure of the machine and the construction of the interface from its inception. Both Fuller and Cramer understand this necessity to dive into the machine, to turn its bowels inside out, to make explicit the implicit interface, to deconstruct and reconstruct it in visceral examinations. Some of the projects presented this year take this objective quite literally, while others imply the interface as a border and as a problem; a locus of activity even if the interface is ultimately a non- locality (because of its essential inaccessibility).

We could maybe even call this approach a ’style’, though both Fuller and Cramer would probably abhor such a notion. It is certainly significant, however, that the machine is turned inside out here to reveal that the interface is a permeable border which can be reconfigured through such visceral, sometimes haptic acts.

Eric Kluitenberg,
Amsterdam, June 2008.

[1] http://k0a1a.net/meme20/
[2] Granting some transcendent potential to self-programming machines - but only very little and limited…
[3] http://archusproject.org/
[4] http://tris.ofamfa.org/

[This essay was commissioned for the graduation catalogue of the Media Design M.A. of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, and will appear in the graduation catalogue designed by Open Source Publishing, Brussels. For more information on the graduation show YOU ARE PWNED at WORM Rotterdam, 4-6 July.]

The symposium Imaginary Property, introducing the research project by the same name, explores new potentials for design practices across various registers at the intersections of design-theory and image-production. What challenges emerge from the paradoxes that research into ‘imaginary property’ has given rise to? How could these potentially generate new rules of production, bearing in mind that property relations are constantly exchanging meaning? Do we have to rethink and re-evaluate the notion of ‘design’ against this background?

Programme

16:00 Welcome
16:10 Florian Schneider
16:55 Franco Berardi Bifo
17:40 Anselm Franke
18:25 Break
18:45 round-table discussion

Florian Schneider: “Imaginary Property”

What was formerly known as “information society” has turned into an image economy based on the techniques of imaging information or turning information into images. Images act as storage units for framed portions of psychic realities that can be duplicated without significant loss and can be distributed almost in real time. Consequently, the image turns out as both subjected to processes of design and as designing processes of subjectivacation.

Franco Berardi Bifo: “After the Future”

In the 20th century Futurism, in its Italian and Russian variant, has become the leading force of “Imagination” and “Project”, giving rise to the language of commercial advertising and the language of political agit propaganda. Cyberculture as the last utopia ended in a clash and it has left behind a growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war. Ever since, the artistic imagination has seemed unable to do away with fear and despair. How can we find a
path beyond the limits of the “Dystopian Kingdom”?

Anselm Franke: “Animism”

Anselm Franke’s presentation is based on research for two exhibition projects that deal with the notions of ‘Soul’ and ‘Animism’ – terms that have figured as the Other in rationalizing modernity, signifying an ambiguous history in which the relation between the psyche, imagination and modernity is at stake.

Franco Berardi Bifo is writer, media theorist and media activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like others involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980s he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome), Musica 80 (Milan) and Archipielago (Barcelona). In the 1990s he published Mutazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa 1993), Cibernauti (Rome 1994), Felix (Rome, 2001) and Generacion Postalfa (Buenos Aires). He is currently collaborating on the magazine Derive Approdi and teaches the social history of communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and of the telestreet network.

Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Antwerp. He is currently director of Extra City Center for Contemporary Art in Antwerp, and co-curator of Manifesta 7 in Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy, taking place in the Summer of 2008. Recent projects include Mimetisme at Extra City, No Matter How Bright the Light, the Crossing Occurs at Night at Extra City and KW Berlin (2006, with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Judith Hopf). He was the curator of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin until 2006, where he curated exhibitions such as Territories. Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (2003); Image Archives (2001/2002); The Imaginary Number (2005, together with Hila Peleg) and B-Zone – Becoming Europe and Beyond. He has edited and published publications with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and others and is a contributor to various magazines. Anselm Franke is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College London, and the co-curator of the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale/International Film Festival Berlin.

Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, based in Munich. He was one of the initiators of the campaign Kein Mensch ist illegal (No one is illegal) at HybridWorkspace/Documenta X (1997) and subsequent projects such as the Noborder network and the online-platform Kein.org He has published widely about subjects at the crossing between mainstream and independent media, art and activism, theory and technology. As a filmmaker he directed several award-winning documentaries as well as two theme evenings for the German-French TV station Arte on the topics of migration and activism. He developed and co-organized events such as Makeworld (Munich 2001), Neuro-Networking Europe (Munich 2004),
Borderline Academy (Tarifa 2005) and various smaller conferences, workshops, gatherings. He has been developing and curating the multimedia performance project Dictionary of War (Frankfurt, Munich, Graz, Berlin, Novi Sad) and Summit – non-aligned initiatives in education culture (with Irit Rogoff). Currently he is working on Imaginary Property, a series of texts, films and video installations researching the question, “What does it mean to own an image?” He has lectured at museums, galleries, art academies, conferences worldwide. Since 2006 he is part of the PhD programme Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. He teaches art theory at the art academy KIT
of NTNU Trondheim and is advising researcher Design at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Application

Candidates interested in this project can apply by submitting a research proposal. Selected candidates gain the position of researcher at the Design department of the Jan van Eyck Academie. For more information on the practical side of your application, financial questions, and other matters, please consult the website or contact the academy via
Leon Westenberg
leon.westenberg@janvaneyck.nl,
telephone +31 (0)43 350 37 24.

The project will start as of 1 September 2008.

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“

[...] many artists who, for economic reasons, work on a small scale, use consumable materials, attempt alternative distribution strategies, or move to marginal locales have fallen prey to an insidious strain of art criticism that can see their production only in negative terms, that is, as a critique of the mainstream commodity makers and of money in general—the pursuit of it, and the capitulations to both consumption and spectacle that invariably follow. From this point of view, all portable, ephemeral, or otherwise modest artworks, by the likes of Rashawn Griffin and Mitzi Pederson or Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal, are to be understood solely in relation to the big commodity makers and only as a reaction against them, as de rigueur dematerialization. Of the original generation of critical revolutionaries, only Lucy Lippard has recanted (and thirty years ago, at that), writing, “Some of the blame for this situation must fall on those who, like myself, had exaggerated illusions about the ability of a ‘dematerialization of the art object’ to subvert the commodity status and political uses to which successful American art has been subjected since the late 1950s. It has become obvious over the last few years that temporary, cheap, invisible or reproducible art has made little difference in the way art and artists are economically and ideologically exploited and that it can hardly be distinguished in that sense from Cor-Ten steel sculptures and twenty-foot canvases.”[...] ” From Modest Proposals by Joe Scanlan, Artforum. [via]

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will be presenting work in progress from her residency that explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the Nintendo Wii and others. She describes the interactive virtual knitting as demonstrating the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and translated into a visualization of knit code displayed on screen (and eventually on the web). The action of engaging or knitting with the piece naturally produces a physical cloth, while it also shows that code is constructed from the same types of patterns to create a type of virtual cloth (or software). 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. Cloth is often seen as an element of comfort and protection. Machines are perceived to assist us with advancing technology and communication while they are also harming our bodies with carpel tunnel syndrome, back pain, sore eyes, and other strain as we interact with them. This piece explores that delicate space in-between.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently exploring the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body in contemporary art practice. Rachel Beth is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton, and Furtherfield London as part of the Arts Council England Initiative, commissioned by Distributed South and curated by SCAN and Space Media.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 and others. She formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture.

Likewise, humans have long sought escape from the physical world through both stories and invention, creating “imaginary objects”, which embody the tension between the ideal and the real. These shared cultural artifacts surface in mythology (Holy Grail, Trojan Horse), literature (Tell-Tale Heart), film (Maltese Falcon), thought experiments (Schrodinger’s Cat) and impossible inventions (Time Machine). Second Life, an online social environment, offers similar possibilities of the imaginary. With 3D-simulated space combined with a virtual currency and social interaction, this is a fully functioning economy of the immaterial.

NO MATTER reflects this tension between the imaginary and real economics by (1) commissioning 25 builders and artists to produce 40 cultural artifacts in Second Life space; (2) paying them in Linden dollars at an equivalent scale of $1.50 to $12.00 per object; (3) extracting the objects from Second Life — a closed system where 3D models cannot be exported; (4) inviting volunteers to reconstruct these as 3D paper replicas in physical space and paying them the equivalent wages in Linden dollars.

NO MATTER is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Mixed Realities exhibition. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Teleport to the Ars Virtua Gallery in Second Life.

BIOGRAPHIES

Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He has a B.A. in Political Philosophy from Brown University. In 2006, he received a M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain and Romania. In the fall of 2006, he finished a conceptual art residency called The Future of Idea Art at The Banff Centre for the Arts. He followed this with a six-month fellowship at the Kala Art Institute focusing on remembrance in simulated worlds. He also works with Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Victoria Scott is a visual artist who works with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, both materially and as conceptual metaphor. For over a decade she has researched and created large-scale installations, objects, digital prints and audio works. Her ongoing projects include the material depiction of personal simulations and psychological spaces within online environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by emotional energy and microorganisms. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Victoria graduated from the New Media/Photo Electric Arts Dept., at The Ontario College of Art & Design. In 2003, she was awarded the full Trustees Scholarship to attend at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago within the Art and Technology Department. Scott completed her MFA in 2005. She has exhibited in Sweden, Mexico City, Toronto, Berlin, Boston, Miami and Chicago and is the recipient of grants from both the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils.

Though matter itself has always found its expressions through nonlinear organizations, architecture’s modes of intervention in the life of matter have been linear and willful. As architecture continues its age-old struggles against material realities, the future holds astonishing possibilities as we slowly discern the nuances of complex material organizations and cultivate new regimes of expression. Rather than superimposing design on the inscrutable patterns of a complex material history, the most optimistic cases in material practices today are characterized by a shift towards a collaboration with the material world.

Though digital fabrication technologies have been celebrated as ever more efficient ways to conduct business as usual, the convergence of computation, life sciences, and radical new experiments in material research points to a far less predictable future for design culture. 3d printing a building, manufacturing without tooling, weaving and braiding composite materials to form a structural system, designing building components with intelligent agents, are some of the astonishing projects being investigated today. This year’s conference evaluates the NSO’s ongoing research into Nonlinear Fabrication and opens the discussion to the frontiers of material practice.

Nonlinear Fabrication begins 6:30pm, April 3 with Manuel DeLanda’s keynote lecture at the Wu & Chen auditorium (Levine Hall, UPenn). Panel discussions begin Friday morning at 9am in the Upper Gallery (Meyerson Hall, UPenn).

In addition to the NSO team (Cecil Balmond, David Ruy, Detlef Mertins, Ferda Kolatan, Jenny Sabin, and Peter Jones) visiting participants include: William Braham, Winka Dubbeldam, Behrokh Khoshnevis, Anne Plant, Roland Snooks, Andrew Snow, Marcelo Spina, Theo Spyropoulos, Peter Testa, Chris Tuck, and Tom Wiscombe.

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)