sur•ro•gate transitive verb: to put in the place of another: to appoint as successor, deputy, or substitute for oneself

On Friday April 11, 2008 as part of its monthly curatorial project, art collective MTAA premiered The Surrogates, a performance art piece exploring the nature of perceived identity and representation, credited to European-based art collective 0100101110101101.ORG (in absentia).

Presented at MTAA’s OTO art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the two-hour piece began at 7 p.m. with an open bar and velvet rope welcoming attendees in the hallway.

Inside the OTO space proper, two rows of two chairs (numbered 1-4) faced a low stage featuring a 4′x6′ projection screen (center) and a small television monitor (stage right). Attendees entered the darkened room four at a time, their assigned seats facing a slightly delayed projection of themselves. The monitor revealed hallway activity in real time.

The attendees (now participants) were given no explanation of the piece, though they were invited do as they pleased within the space and to leave at their leisure. Re-entry was not permitted however, and those exiting the piece were immediately replaced by those next behind the velvet rope.

“The Surrogates” reaches its 180-degree apex via this text. Please note that while the Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG.) are credited as the authors of this seminal performance, MTAA designed, built and executed this work in its entirety.

The Mattes graciously agreed to lend their identity to The Surrogates, and for their essential contribution, receive 50 percent authorship and financial stake in The Surrogates.

MTAA, 2008

http://mtaa.net
http://tinajil.com/over_the_opening
http://0100101110101101.ORG
http://www.mtaa.net/images/mtaaRR/the_surrogates.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2140/2346421886_cbe4183425_o.jpg

The festival kicks off with a performance by legendary culture jammers Negativland, returning to Houston for the first time in eight years. Animator and performer Brent Green takes over the second night with live narration and music (by Brent Green, Howe Gelb and Jeremy Gara) to accompany Green’s stop- animation films, and video and performance artists Tara Mateik and Shana Moulton round out the closing night of the festival.

Media Archeology Schedule

8 p.m. Thursday, April 17
It’s All in Your Head FM, Negativland
Herring Hall, Rice University, 6100 Main Street
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

During this live performance of an imaginary radio show, audience members wear blindfolds as they listen to samples of people discussing the various facets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other major religions, and the role of religion in society. The performance is narrated by the fictional radio host, Dr. Oslo Norway (inspired by Garrison Keillor).

Since 1980, the 4-6 members known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arranges these found bits and pieces to create new works.

8 p.m. Friday, April 18
A Million Moths Flurrying Around the Front Porch: Brent Green
The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art
2402 Munger
RAIN LOCATION: Aurora Picture Show
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

Brent Green will perform live narrations to his incredible handmade, animated films, accompanied by improvised soundtracks by Green, Jeremy Gara (Arcade Fire) and Howe Gelb (Giant Sand). It’ll be an hour spent on the verge of collapse: wobbly piano, musical saw, banjo, guitar, drums and cartoons! It’ll change your life. If you like your life the way it is, you should stay home.

Brent Green is a self-taught animator from Pennsylvania who has been exhibited at Sundance, the Getty Museum, Walker Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Wexner Center and festivals across the country. Green had a Hammer Project at the Hammer Museum, “An Evening with Brent Green” at the IFC Center and a one-person gallery show at Bellwether in New York. His work has been written about in the New York Times, Village Voice, Art Forum, ArtNews, the New Yorker and BOMB magazine.

8 p.m. Saturday, April 19
Cynthia’s Moment, Shana Moulton
DiverseWorks Art Space
1117 East Freeway
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door (includes both shows on Saturday)

Shana Moulton will play her character, Cynthia, the fictional protagonist in her Whispering Pines series of videos. Moulton will bring Cynthia and her strange world to life through an innovative use of sets, props, costume and projected video. Combining live-action and projected video, Moulton describes her performance as presenting “a series of home-made and found orthopedic devices, cosmetics and belief systems.” Moulton’s presentation will at different points approximate a personal growth workshop, dance recital, instructional video and fairytale.

Shana Moulton works in video and performance. Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew.

9 p.m. Saturday, April 19
Putting the Balls Away, Tara Mateik
DiverseWorks Art Space
1117 E. Freeway
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

In ‘Putting the Balls Away,’ Tara Mateik reenacts the legendary ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ Billie Jean King’s 1973 defeat of the former Wimbledon men’s champion, Bobby Riggs. By playing both roles in a video version of the match, and reviving remarks by sports commentators Howard Cosell and Rosie Casals, Mateik recalls the controversy sparked by the most watched televised sporting event of the era. This year also marks the 35th anniversary of the famous tennis match.

Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living in New York City. Through video, installation, and performance he explores issues of gender identity most recently through the subject of professional sports. In addition to his own work he has collaborated with collectives and artists, including Paper Tiger Television video collective, to produce short videos that demystify and democratize the media. Currently he teaches at CUNY Staten Island in the Media Culture Department and runs the Education Department at Art in General.

About the Curators

Curator Andrea Grover is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Aurora Picture Show, a 501(c)(3) non-profit center for film, video and new media housed in a former church building in Houston, Texas She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University, and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2006 she curated the exhibition, “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing,” exhibited at apexart, New York, and received praise from both Frieze Magazine and The New York Times. In March 2007, she and the artist Jon Rubin curated “Never Been to Houston” for Lawndale Art Center. Grover was one of 60 international curators invited to select artists for e- Flux’s Video Rental. She recently served as Lead Consultant in Film and Video for Creative Capital Foundation, New York.

Nick Hallett is a musician and curator working in the intersections of sound, moving image, and live performance. His projects encompass performing various genres of new music-from opera to cabaret to pop, composing for film and theater, developing audiovisual installations, DJing, writing, and filmmaking. He originated the band PLANTAINS, which from 2000 until 2003 operated as a live multimedia act, incorporating electronic music and video. In 2005, Nick started Harkness Audiovisual, an initiative devoted to creating innovative contexts for new media. This has resulted in a series of immersive salons, film screenings, and live a/v performances, including multiple presentations with pioneering live cinema artist, Josh White. He will direct a concert version of avant-rock band Oneida’s album, The Wedding, at The Kitchen this June.

Ticket Information: Tickets to each individual show are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. Festival passes are $20. Aurora Picture Show members can purchase all tickets for $8 and passes for $15. Tickets and passes are available online or by contacting Aurora at 713.868.2101.

About Aurora Picture Show: Founded in 1998, the Aurora Picture Show is the only facility of its kind in the Southwest. Art in America has called it “one of the most interesting and unusual new spaces in Houston.” Housed in a 1924 converted church building in the Heights this 100 seat theater is part of the micro-cinema movement that began in the mid-1990’s. Aurora supports non-commercial independent and artist-made film, video and new media artists through fifty programs a year. Aurora’s human scale promotes a meaningful and community-oriented exchange between artists and audiences.

Aurora Picture Show is funded by its stellar membership, Houston Endowment, Inc, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Brown Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Nightingale Code Foundation, the Oshman Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Aurora Picture Show is a proud member of Fresh Arts Coalition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on Synapse Discussion List

What is the meaning of “live” when the majority of our day-to-day interactions are so mediated? LIVE features seven artists who sample and transform data, photographs and video from the Internet and incorporate it into their sculptures and installations. Either extracting live footage or transmitting data in real time, they cull from diverse sources including Congressional speeches from C-Span, websites with Iraqi war casualties, a critique of consumerism from a peer-to-peer network and on-line video surveillance. As the artists isolate ideas and images from the steady stream of unrelenting data, they produce thought-provoking, aesthetic and “live” works of art.

Over the course of 26 days, using a treadmill customized for cyberspace, Joseph DeLappe, recipient of Eyebeam’s 2008 Commission for Resident Artists, will reenact Mahatma Gandhi’s famous 1930s Salt March. The original 240-mile walk was made in protest of the British salt tax.

For this performance, DeLappe will walk the entire 240 miles of the original march. His steps on the treadmill will control the forward movement of his online avatar, enabling the live and virtual reenactment of the historic march.

Join the walk online in Second Life, or visit Eyebeam for the real thing. Visit DeLappe’s blog for daily start locations, updates and information regarding the project.

New technologies constantly emerge as mediums for artistic practice and thus, bring forth a reconsideration of terms and redrawing of territories. RFID, WiFi, WiMAX, networked objects, reactive spaces, distributed actions, and psycho-geographic interventions are amongst a few contemporary artistic strategies and technologies that touch the borders of what once encompassed free103point9’s scope for Transmission Arts. Furthermore, there is always room for stretching non-technological conceptual definitions of Transmission Arts.

In light of such ongoing developments, free103point9 recognizes the need to engage a practice of inquiry that reaches beyond it’s own organizational limits of understanding. We are inviting practitioners and supporters involved with transmission ideas and activities to expand or challenge our articulation of Transmission Arts. Please help us expand our practices and galvanize our community by taking a few minutes to share your experience with us.

To submit your work for inclusion in free103point9’s archive of Transmission Arts (contemporary artist and works), please submit the following text to archive [at] free103point9.org with a subject header (Transmission Works) by the deadline March 15, 2008:
• Artist statement and links/documentation to specific works with titles and description of works. (500 word max)
• A response to, or definition of, the term “Transmission Arts.” (500 word max) Historical works and artist cited as influences. (500 word max)

2. The second tier of this archive will seek contributions from artist, curators, writers, and researchers to reflect, critique, consider, and respond to specific issues and topics related to transmission. We are inviting artists, scholars or curators working with New Media, Sound, Performance, Inter-media, Conceptual Art, Video, Installation, Social Activism, or Collective Strategies to identify artists (historical or contemporary) relevant to a discussion of Transmission Arts and to interject and engage in a larger discussion on Transmission Arts as a genre.

To learn more about this conversation, please submit a short bio (300 word max) with a general inquiry to archive@free103point9.org subject heading (Transmission Arts Discussion) by March 15, 2008.

free103point9 is a non-profit arts organization focused on establishing and cultivating the genre Transmission Arts. free103point9 activities support and promote artists exploring transmission mediums for creative expression.

Designing for the 21st Century: Using Web 2.0 Technologies for Social Action :: March 11; 1 pm - March 12, 4 pm :: SPACE Studios, 129-131 Mare St, Hackney, E8 3RH - Social networking tools and Web 2.0 are this year’s talking points. But the chatter hides their growing history as means to contact, link and engage a broad range of friends, strangers, existing and emergent groups in forms of work and play that build (or challenge) civil society. Their effect has been seen in charity fundraising, community decision-making and political mobilisation. Their use has created shadows that altered the strategy of organisations and changed the shape of projects to include greater and wider participation.

But tools alone don’t make things happen. So this is an opportunity to explore the practices that lead to change and share ideas about the use of these tools to democratise consultation processes, win hearts and minds and the rest. Please bring your experience of working in this way and the potential - and challenges - you see in the new forms of social organisation supported by these developments. We welcome informal and unorthodox contributions as well as more formal talks. Emphasis will be upon reflection and practice, rather than grand research objectives. There will be full wifi connectivity.

body>data>space Open In Process #1 :: March 12, 6:30 - 9:30 pm :: bodydataspace, 2nd Floor, 17–25 Cremer Street, Horeditch, London E2 8HD :: featuring “Festival of Computer Based Art CYNETart_08 (Dresden)” :: “Presentation of Second Life Projects by Michael Takeo Magruder” - Open In Process events take place as a series of live presentation events followed by open debates, focusing on collaborative making processes for interdisciplinary interactive arts.

Hurry Up Please IT’S TIME :: April 14-20, Big Chill House, 257-259 Pentonville Road, King’s Cross, London
N1 9NL - The installation explores the drinker’s eternal concern for questions of TIME. A wide-angle mounted above the bar orthogonally scans the surface of the bar and its neighbouring space for activity. Computer vision scans the scene, comparing pixels adjacent in time, calculating the geography of activity. A co-located overhead projection then projects back downwards, precisely mapping an abstracted video of the scene with a composite temporal image – showing real-time spaces of intense activity blending with a gradient of older archival footage where no activity has taken place. Continual excitement of the pixels over-exposes them towards white-out, theatrically illuminating the most active zones.

And much more …

Feed Lack Loop arose out of experiments with the idea of Feedback. Using a live performer and an Avatar in the Online World Second Life, Micheál O’Connell inquires whether the concept of interactivity, so lauded in contemporary culture, is about Empowerment or possibly leads to its opposite: Control. Also the liveliness, or lack of it, in virtual space is brought into question. The event will be situated in two spaces simultaneously, Ars Virtua Gallery in Second Life and as a live projection and performance at Lighthouse. Other relevant pieces by the same artist may be incorporated or displayed.

Collaborators on the project are:

- Ars Virtua Director: Rubaiyat Shatner (a.k.a. James Morgan)
- Artist and Grey Area Curator: Daniel Pryde-Jarman
- Film Director and Script Writer: Partho Sen-Gupta
- Performer: Naughty the Clown (a.k.a. Dave Thompson)
- Lighthouse Head of Media Arts: Jamie Wyld

Supported by: University of Brighton, City College Brighton and Hove, Grey Area, Lighthouse.

“AVAIR” is a 2006-2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

This travelling exhibition, which now visits Montreal for its Canadian première, is an exciting overview of avant-garde art in Chile. It shows the great wealth of themes and styles that currently inspire the imaginations of Chilean artists. The mixed-media digital artworks of this exhibition are installations that invite the audience to reflect on and experiment with the sometimes inscrutable, often complex behavior of human beings.

Digital Chile_08 proposes an exciting overview of avant-garde art in Chile : Web art and micro-animation, public and media art, audiovisual creations, digital photography, immersive video and bio-art. All serve as a powerful means of translating physical signals into sound and image.

The arena of Massive Change - since environmental tipping points are interconnected with other spheres that may have ramifications beyond the environment, into social and political systems - we open up that dialogue with you to interpret and make a proposal.

The intent is to seek permission to upload to C-M.TV for broadcasting around the world. We either link back to your web sites where work is already uploaded or have you upload to our server. The artists have total IP / ownership over their own work on C-M.TV. We act as a curated site, as another venue for the access, as a networking membrane and a collective with a similar context. Go here to the play archive of previously launched cities: New York, Paris, London.

Specs: 5mb - 320 x 240 Quicktime; ‘live’ data or generative content (self contained root folders); Flash; any other media that is sustainable on play. We review your proposals online or via DVD format. Send us links to review proposals via email: info [at] critical-mas.tv or send DVD’s to:

Marcia Lyons
Producer: C-M.TV
Programme Director
Digital Media Design
School of Design
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand