Heike Wiermann, Holger Mader and Alexander Stublic focus on video art installations, media facades and art in the public sphere. Their latest projects cover for example the spectacular media facade design (”twists and turns”) of the Uniqua tower in Vienna, where they have managed to transform the structure of the architecture into an ever-changing, fluid state of transition. Furthermore, they co-initiated OSRAM’s new light platform Seven Screens, which they launched with their LED-piece Reprojected. This installation focuses on the shadows of computer-simulated people. The group engages in a site-specific and medium-specific way with visual perception.

Upgrade! Berlin is currently also involved in the development of the Media Facades Festival Berlin and is thus taking the opportunity to invite Alexander Stublic and Holger Mader for a public talk about their media facades and other collaborative works in the public sphere.

More infos on Mader | Stublic | Wiermann. More infos on the Media Facades Festival.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

The Travel Office is also planning the second phase of our consultation, which is being planned as an exhibition and series of discussions at the University of North Florida sometime between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. For more information about the Travel Office’s Not-In-Residence consultancy at the Preserve, go here.

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.

Renowned composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (Japan 1966) will create art projects for Dream Amsterdam. Ikeda’s hypnotic work plays with human perception through installations, performances, live concerts, recordings and album releases. Ikeda will use pure light as the material for his interventions in various secret locations across Amsterdam. Intensely bright light installations will appear mysteriously, connecting a constellation of points across the cityscape. The energy used for the light installations is generated from sustainable, recycled resources. The site-specific art projects can be viewed from June 6 until June 21, 2008 in the evening hours. A detailed map with the locations and a route can be found here from June 6.

His work has been exhibited and presented worldwide, including Tate Modern / Queen Elizabeth Hall (London) and Centre Pompidou / Museum of Modern Art (Paris). He has won important prizes, including the Ars Electronica Golden Nica (2001). Ikeda’s commission for Dream Amsterdam Foundation presents his first large-scale artworks for public spaces and marks a new direction in his artistic career.

On June 7, the SILENT NIGHT event presents a unique opportunity to experience the city as never before: Amsterdam switches off her lights. The darkness maximizes the contrast with the bright light of Ikeda’s installations spread over the city. Ryoji Ikeda and Dream Amsterdam Foundation invite residents of Amsterdam and visitors to actively participate in the SILENT NIGHT event and help contribute to the realization of Ikeda’s Dream, promising to deliver an extraordinary transformation of the city of Amsterdam for one night only.

A co-production by Dream Amsterdam and Forma Arts and Media

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

WORKSHOPS

Everyone - young, old and in-between is welcome to take part! First public workshop April 5, 2008 1 pm - 5pm FREE!* Bring your local newspaper, favorite story, images and anything you want to put on the Brentford map!

Further workshops will take place on:
Saturday, April 12 1-5pm
Wednesday, April 23, 6-9pm
Saturday, May 10 1-5pm
Wednesday May 14 6-9pm

Register online: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/join.htm

If you care about the Brentford area you are invited! Come with your own agenda and we will include it!

If you can’t attend a workshop we have arranged for you to be able to contributer online. For online contribution please log on: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/upload.htm.

During The Fifth Annual Visual Cultures Symposium at George Mason University’s Johnson Center Cinema on March 27, the viewers will determine the direction of his walk performance (wearing four video cameras harnessed to his person) through the streets based upon the roll of a dice; the dice indicates that he move forward, backward, right, left, spin, or stand in place. He will accept thirty dice rolls then proceed on his walk accordingly. When spin or stand in place are the command, he will complete each for one minute. The directional commands will take him to the next intersection, as he continues the walk for approximately forty-five minutes (the average amount of time that it takes to complete all thirty commands).

Just as in past performances, he will wear the mirrored suit to allow his presence on the street to be real and illusionary. Regarding his suit during the performance for the SoFA Gallery, Peter Haralovich in an interview with IDS News stated, “I think it is a pretty good look. It reminds me of (French artist) Marcel Duchamp.” Using the city as a fluid canvas, Derr will move through the streets in silence capturing the ephemeral characters that construct the ambiance of place and time. The videos record his physicality as he steps off of a curb, moves around geographical structures, traversing through the streets. The resulting video footage connects the second generation viewers back to Derr through this arrhythmic motion created from his physical presence with the cameras, as well as the viewers stand at the center of the video projections as he was at the center of the four video cameras. In an article for trAce Online Journal, Susan Sakash observed of the videos from the Void psychogeographical walk performances, “Derr’s footage is testament to this interplay of repetition and surprise…the sights and basic patterns of the traffic may be similar but it is the particulars that demand attention.” The videos mesmerize the viewers and physically engage them with his stride. Derr has noticed the viewers mimicking his walk and spinning in sync with the videos.

Not only is Derr’s psychogeographical experience captured, but also the experience of the pedestrians on the street. The pedestrians become the actors in the videos, playing out their role in the daily life flow that is structured by the geographical environment in which they live. In his psychogeographical walk performances, he is interested in the chance encounter between pedestrians and himself. Through his self-induced spectacle walk performances, Derr raises awareness of the individual in society.
Each individual resident plays an important role in creating the fabric of place. Again Sakash’s keen observation of the video from his Void performances, “a graphic oral display by a woman leaning out a pub - it is the “other” who replaces the artist as the director and actor of the unfolding drama. This celebration of minor characters, and the coincidence of habit and chance, emerge as central concerns for the artist.” However in Chance not only is interface with pedestrians emphasized, but also interaction with the viewers is crucial for his progression. Subverting the traditional social structure of a performance that prefers the viewers to be quiet observers, Derr relies on the viewers to determine the cartography for his walk.

Moving through the streets in Fairfax by rational and irrational means, walking in silence through the crowd, letting his cameras record, he will capture an unedited glimpse of an unfolding drama. Just as Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed his decisive moments, Derr’s video cameras will record many decisive moments in the framework of linear time, capturing the banality of existence between these moments. The videos will present a visual record of the homogeneity of daily life, while none of daily experiences are completely uniform, the geographical environment renders them as a collective. Performing Chance in a variety of cities develops this ongoing project that creates a comparative body of video and photographic work that captures the essence of place at a certain moment in time through the unconventional cartographic mapping. In this infinite game of chance that Derr takes to cities throughout the world, the viewer in the gallery and the pedestrian on the street is affected by this peculiar means of video production that documents the particular time that he was there.

Each performance of Chance provides a contemporary document of each place using détournement to undermine conventional methods of walking through a city. Expanding on Guy Debord’s concept of détournement, Chance creates cartographies of each city by means of chance rather than by some rational directive method. The video installation demonstrates this détourne approach of map-making, which illustrates the city as a place for potential discovery rather than structured conformity. Considering Debord’s unconventional and influential map of Paris titled, The Naked City, 1957, Chance functions within a similar discourse by using today’s technology to remap the city with non-linear methods.

Derr will lecture about his Chance series on a panel beginning at 11:15 am in the Johnson Center Cinema at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus, and the dice rolls will take place at 12:30 pm outside of the cinema. The Johnson Center Cinema is located at 4400 University Drive; directions.

The following discussion, led by Jelena, considers the impact of the networked performance Radioballet and the ethics of collective action, not least with the absence of material and reciprocal relationships limiting expressions of solidarity. It was recorded 14/07/07 with the participants Rael Artel, Anna azar, Karol Sienkiewicz, Margus Tamm, Airi Triisberg and Andreas Trossek, in the workshop on ‘Collectives, Actions, Re-enactments’ held as part of the ‘Exercises on Adhocracy’ camp in Parnu, Estonia…” From Miraculous Mass-communication - Radioballet by LIGNA, Variant issue 31.

Radioballet gegen die Nato Sicherheitskonferenz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAr7_kcZE4k

The free radio group LIGNA exists since 1997. In several shows and performances they have been investigating the importance of dispersal in radio as well as of the radio. One of the main focuses is to refer to forgotten and remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new forms of interactive practices (Mental Radio Show). Another emphasis has been placed on the development of concepts and the production of performative audio plays (Labyrinthe und Interferenzen), in order to find out how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations (Radioballett: Übung in unnötigem Aufenthalt).

Radio Ballet Leipzig Main station Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpT-wb3TPXk

All the time in the World extends the conventional notion of a world clock, which commonly concentrates on capital cities in different time zones, by linking real time to places with exciting associations. It allows passengers to extend their imagination to the great natural wonders of the world, the highest mountains, the most beautiful lakes, the tallest buildings, the longest rivers, ancient cities, museums with untold treasures, dream islands and exotic deserts, thereby subverting the hard function of the traditional world clock into a poetic, fictional tool. GMT, London’s local time, forms the heart of the clock display, and any places west of London are situated to the left of the large clock, and equally, any places east of London are to its right.

For All the time in the world we developed a new typology of electroluminescent displays, called ‘Firefly’, which relies on a custom-designed segmented typeface (patent pending). Apart form its incredible thinness (less than a millimeter), our display boosts high aesthetic impact and an extreme versatility in the characters displayed (up to five different fonts can be shown in our arrangement). This modular approached also allowed us to animate the letters as if they were hand written onto the display, a feature that was at the very origin of our research.

The resulting display has unique properties: it doesn’t cast light and disturbing shadow on its surrounding, it can be curved, and is extremely competitive compared to other display technologies such as LED if text only is required. Based on a vectorial design, its advantages are all the more noticeable in large scale (like here) or very small. The technique is transferable to other emerging technology such as OLED, PLED or E-paper. This is the first time that a display system of this kind has been implemented worldwide.

All the Time in the World now stands with 100 Firefly character modules arranged in two rows, and 4 giant (1.6m high) modules for the large London GMT clock. Bespoke electronic drivers have been engineered to control its 7000 segments.