For Internal Message Search: A Performative Installation, opening Friday, April 18th, pioneering video and internet artist Nina Sobell will install her Location One artist residency studio in the not-for-profit art center’s project space, where she will carry on her practice for the duration of the show. Visitors will be able to see Sobell’s recent wax sculptures and drawings, interact freely with the artist, and even accompany her for impromptu musical sessions (Sobell is a skilled improvisational guitarist and keyboardist). Continue reading

Sousveillance Culture Conference :: April 26, 2008; 12 - 5 pm :: The Change You Want to See Gallery, 84 Havemeyer @ Metropolitan, Brooklyn, NY.

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The presenters’ talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress. Continue reading

“Abstract: The text discusses cultural and political implications of the subjective aspects of software and the SVEN project. SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a public space software art project that uses custom computer vision software to detect pedestrians who in some way look like rock stars. The text introduces general audiences to SVEN’s approach to software subjectivity—in this case, concerning computer vision surveillance software. It also presents examples of software bias in contemporary culture and proposes software literacy as a public educational goal. Continue reading

The New Normal - works by Sophie Calle, Mohamed Camara, Hasan Elahi, Eyebeam R & D/Jonah Peretti & Michael Frumin, Kota Ezawa, Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher, Guthrie Lonergan, Jill Magid, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Trevor Paglen, Corinna Schnitt, Thomson & Craighead, Sharif Waked :: April 25 - June 21, 2008 :: Opening Reception: April 25, 6-8 pm :: Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY :: Curated by Michael Connor; Co-organized with iCI (Independent Curators International).

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. Continue reading

Marie Sester Interview: Access, Transparency and Visibility in “Exposure” by Eduardo Navas - Marie Sester is an artist born in France, currently living in Los Angeles. She was trained as an architect, but soon after receiving her degree realized that her real interest was in understanding the role of architecture as discourse in culture and politics. She found art an ideal space to develop her interdisciplinary projects. Sester sees her art practice as an ongoing process partly defined by a person’s desire to visualize certain things, while making others invisible. Throughout the 1990s, Sester explored how surveillance redefined our understanding of reality. In the following interview Marie Sester generously shares the story behind her three-channel installation, “Exposure,” explaining how her role as an artist allowed her access to information which she could not obtain today due to the security measures put in place after 9/11. Continue reading

How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates. Continue reading

“It’s the Transmediale at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Somewhere, something in this cavernous Marshall Plan edifice is flickering. Closer at hand in the exhibition hall, half-tilted black boxes on the floor solicit you to crawl under them and encounter others of your kind watching videos. The fauna underneath are warm and resistant, though you would expect to encounter something rather more cold and slimy when lifting a rock, which is what the black-box bivouac viewing situation feels like. Continue reading

Eva and Franco Mattes continue their investigations into power, authorship and identity with The Surrogates a new performance based video project. Combining elements of theater, video, surveillance, and social interaction, The Surrogates transforms Over The Opening (OTO) into an experimental social space questioning the distinction between the viewer and the viewed :: April 11, 2008; 7 - 10 pm :: Over The Opening (MTAA’s Studio), N6th St., Brooklyn, NY [map and directions].

Exposure by Marie Sester :: April 10 - June 6, 2008 :: Artist Lecture: April 10, 4:30-5:30 pm, Room 4004; Reception at 6 pm :: gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA [Map & Directions].

Exposure is a projection-based installation consisting of images of x-rayed vehicles juxtaposed with architecture. The installation was developed in 2001 as the fifth and last installment in a series of video-based work that explores how X-ray imagery was used for surveillance, pre-9/11. Marie Sester is interested in the evolving role of surveillance in culture. Her installations invite viewers to reconsider how reality changes as surveillance increasingly becomes a natural part of our everyday lives. Sester argues that our culture is obsessed with hyper-vigilance and control. Continue reading

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’ Continue reading