WORKSHOP: Ghillie Suit Construction - 2-5 pm: Ghillie suits are a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble heavy foliage. In our “How Not to Be Seen” Ghillie Suit Construction workshop, students will build their own ghillie suits at Machine Project. Materials will be provided, though if you already have foliage you’d like to work with, please let us know!

PERFORMANCE: Camouflage Kinesthetics - July 5; 5 pm to midnight: In this collaborative performance event, we will talk and think critically about self-concealment, move our bodies and fashion our forms so as to maximize possibilities for environmental immersion – all in relation to real or imagined video surveillance devices. Students from that afternoon’s ghillie suit construction workshop are invited to stay and use their new suits during this performance.

A round-table discussion mixed live to air on Resonance104.4 FM. Join Cecilia Wee and her three-dozen guests as they discuss surveillance, the art of seeing and the art of being seen. Eavesdrop on multiple fascinating conversations at once and, if a chair becomes free, direct the discussion yourself. Part conference, part absurdist theatre, SpeedDataRadio is the activity of minds travelling at the speed of sound.

Followed at 20.00 by the UK premiere of Manu Luksch’s Faceless (Austria / UK, 2007). Constructed entirely from CCTV images obtained under the Data Protection Act, Faceless draws us into a nightmarish vision of society under surveillance. Faceless features the voice of Tilda Swinton (best supporting actress Oscar 2008 for Michael Clayton).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living Room is a continuation of Flux Factory’s interest in the urban experience, in New York history, and in the overlap between private and public space. Being a live / work collective, we are fascinated by what it means to inhabit a space, to make it one’s own. We want to invite artists to play with the notion of belonging to a home, and claiming a space as one’s own. So we’re going to give artists the opportunity to go into someone else’s home and make it their own, aesthetically. The project will, literally, bring artists into domestic locations in New York City to create site specific works. Aside from satisfying a mild desire for voyeurism common to us all, this project will be an opportunity for the public to peek into private sites normally off limits; either eccentric private living rooms or other variations of private space.

The locations will range from volunteers’ living rooms to private, historical sites, which we will help facilitate access to along with openhousenewyork (OHNY), a non-profit organization celebrating New York City’s architecture, culminating in America’s largest architecture and design event, the Annual OHNY Weekend. A guidebook of their locations, along with an inset for “Living Room,” will be printed and distributed throughout the city. Last year, OHNY printed 370 000 guides and had 150 000 visitors throughout their 193 sites.

Installations will address the historical, personal and social particularities of the sites with which they engage. Artists will have carte-blanche and may incorporate both formal visual amendments to the space (e.g. filling it with colored balls) and conceptual ones (e.g. re-organizing a library according to subjective categories). We encourage artists to find an appropriate private place within the five boroughs. We will help artists secure access to these sites. We will also be inviting select people to open their homes (or offices) for the event. Artists may chose locations from ones included in OHNY’s roster. A list of the 2007 OHNY venues can be found here.

Works will be on view during OHNY Weekend on October 4-5, 2008. Depending on the site, they may be open throughout the weekend, or during business hours. A materials and artist fee of $500 will be provided to each artist. To apply, please send the following:

1. A 250-word proposal indicating your proposed site (especially if they are a new sites not previously included by OHNY) with a clear description of what you propose to do.
2. Your contact information (email and phone number)
3. Bio or CV
4. Any supporting images you would like to include

Proposals should be sent to Chen Tamir by email at dearcheny [at] gmail.com. The deadline for is May 10th, 2008.

Such thoughtful cues in the physical fabric of the exhibition mean it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the data cloud of this year’s festival: ‘Conspire’. This could at first be taken as a prim allusion to the still-unwieldy legacy of Stasi spookery in German social and political life, as well as contemporary control creep in our western security wings…” Continue reading Fear of Fear Itself by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rnttyFGAtI

Netacronyms by Marisa Olson (2007).

Employing a whole mix of attitudes, viewpoints and forms, the artists in Territorial Phantom respond to occupying and possessing space. In today’s culture, based around claiming and possession, organizations, businesses and countries appropriate ever more space, by privatizing public space or bringing ‘democracy’ to countries, and where necessary eliminating opponents.

Specific zones such as a city, a mountain range, or simply a piece of paper are central to the artworks in this exhibition. Territorial Phantom is about not only physical, but also virtual and symbolic spaces. Spaces can be shaped and changed in character by political, cultural or personal interventions. In addition, places are often linked to personal and collective memory. They involve boundaries, or perhaps to put it better, thresholds, which extend beyond physical barriers or time. Territorial Phantom examines the ways in which the significance of a place changes through acts, emotions, dreams and memories. Or is it perhaps only our perspective which shifts? How do we ourselves deal with space, with occupying space, and how do we define our own position in a country and in regard to various territories?