One of the authors participating in this monograph is Pau Waelder, independent art critic and curator, who looks at Pain Games and describes various works of digital art which use pain as a form of interaction in the context of a two-player game.

Other articles include Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis, by Espen Aarseth, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. The author explains how the study of game aesthetics is a very recent practice, spanning less than two decades. Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular.

Digital Allegories (on The Sims), by McKenzie Wark, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Eugene Lang College and Sociology at the New School for Social Research, talks about how we are all now players. “You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in this gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it. No wonder digital games are the emergent cultural form of the times.”

Alexander R. Galloway, author and programmer who gives classes at New York University, has written the article entitled Gamic Action, Four Moments. This essay proposes a new hermeneutic for understanding the formal qualities of video games given the action-based nature of the medium and the interplay between diegetic and nondiegetic space.

Finally, Erkki Huhtamo, Associate Professor at UCLA, has written an article entitled Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble. This article is a contribution to the cultural and historical mapping of electronic gaming. Its basic premise is at least seemingly simple: electronic games did not appear out of nowhere; they have a cultural background that needs to be excavated.

As well as the monograph, Artnodes 7 also includes, in the Miscellany section, an article on graffiti: The Screen on the Street: Convergence and Agonic Coincidences between Graffiti and New Media Objects. The author is Noelia Quintero, filmmaker, researcher and professor in the Faculty of Social Communication at the University of Puerto Rico.

Rumsey started collecting maps about 20 years ago. In 1997, he began digitizing his maps, many of which now appear on his website. Launched in 1999 with 2,000 maps, the website now features more than 17,500 maps.

The island features a gallery in the center where visitors can view maps and receive free maps and other digital souvenirs. Surrounding the gallery is a topographical rendering of an 1883 map of Yosemite Valley; users can toggle between two-dimensional and 3-D displays. Along the skyline, two great globes, one terrestrial and the other celestial, turn, animated by an enormous clockwork that can provide front-row seats for avatars who fly inside. Visitors can also travel through an 1836 map of Old New York by J. H. Coton.

It’s this map that Rumsey says is his favorite place on the island. “There’s something about walking on it that is just fantastic,” he says. “I love walking from Battery up to Harlem and feeling the history.” …” Continue reading Historical Maps in Second Life - David Rumsey’s antique maps feature in an innovative build in the virtual world by Erica Naone, Technology Review.

The Solent Centre for Architecture + Design, in partnership with London based media art innovators Hive Networks and artist Armin Medosch, have been working with Southampton City Council’s Oral History Unit on Hidden Histories, a unique project that turns the city itself into a giant outdoor gallery.

Hidden Histories makes accessible some of the highs and lows of Southampton’s 20th Century history, the glory of great ships and journeys as well as the disasters and long forgotten tales. Hidden Histories will uncover those treasures through a revolutionary new concept of Street Radio. This is a totally new way of experiencing the city. The system utilises wireless communication technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth in combination with FM radio to create a public interface to the city’s heritage. A selection of stories from the Oral History Unit will be broadcast from 10 nodal points linked together to form a media rich walk that transports people through the changing life of the city. Following the success of the pilot scheme it is hoped that the project can be extended further not only in Southampton but to other towns and cities as well.

Read more research notes by Armin Medosch.

Press contact: Rosie Danby 023 8028 3053 rosie [at] solentcentre.org.uk
The Solent Centre for Architecture and Design, 30a High Street, Lyndhurst Hampshire SO43 7BG

“Upon hearing that some of the stars of the post-autonomist scene – Maurizzio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, Franco Beradi aka Bifo and Antonio Negri – were to give presentations at a conference examining the conjunction of ‘immaterial labour’ and art, my initial reaction was fairly sceptical. The concept of immaterial labour has always showed signs of strain at the sheer weight of revolutionary expectation placed upon it – a carrier of a subversive charge so immanent to Capital that it is almost already here. This conclusion has been subjected to an incisive critique by more sober analysts within autonomist Marxism such as George Caffentzis, Steve Wright and Sergio Bologna, amongst others. Given the pre-eminence of symbolic production inherent to immaterial labour, that Lazzarato and Negri, both intimately connected with the theorisation of immaterial labour, should now be addressing the role of contemporary art did seem oddly appropriate. However, it was also a source of potential disquiet. From the mass worker of operaismo (workerism) to the socialized worker of Autonomia to cognitive labour – would the cycle of struggles end in the self-valorisation of the knowledge worker and ultimately the artist? Such a schema is an easy caricature of this variegated discourse around the possibilities of resistance in postfordism. Indeed, immaterial labour has lent itself to an uncritical optimism regarding its potentiality to give rise to the subversive subjectivities of the multitude…” Continue reading Art Stripped Bare by Post-Autonomists by John Cunningham, Mute Magazine.

The history of computer-based arts has not yet been adequately described, and is only rarely reflected on in conjunction with the other arts. This area of the arts is hereby denied the development of a diverse discourse and the generation of a competent and critical audience, which is a basic condition for other media, i.e., painting, sculpture, and even film and video. In a series of exhibitions, the ZKM has taken on this task, for example, with Algorithmischen Revolution. In the exhibition bit international. [Nove] tendencije: Computer and Visual Research. Zagreb 1961-1973, the ZKM | Karlsruhe turns its attention to one of the most important artistic movements of the 1960s, which was of enormous influence in its day, but has sunk into near oblivion today: New Tendencies.

Beginning with an exhibition of concrete and constructive art in Zagreb in 1961, New Tendencies quickly developed to a dynamic movement triggering an international Op-Art boom. Art became visual research (GRAV; Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visual / Group for Research in Visual Art). They continued to stake their avant-garde claim by including the computer in the program as a medium of artistic research in 1968. During that same summer, parallel to Cybernetic Serendipity, the legendary computer art exhibition at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, the program tendencije 4 - Computer and Visual Research began in Zagreb.

The Gallery of Contemporary Art Zagreb, known today as the Museum of Contemporary Art, addressed the theme of computer and visual research with a series of exhibitions, symposia, and publications on the theme of computer and visual research from 1968 to 1978. They thereby established a unique platform for the exchange of ideas and knowledge from the areas of art, the natural sciences, and engineering. During the height of the cold war, artists and scientists from around the world presented their works and attended symposia in Zagreb. They came from Brazil, West Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, the Soviet Union, Spain, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the US. The gallery’s multilingual magazine Bit International established Zagreb as an initiator for aesthetic and media-theoretical reflection that was unknown anywhere else in the world at the time.

Tendencije 4 (1968/69) established a relationship between the computer-generated works and constructive and kinetic art, Tendencije 5 (1973) set them in a context together with the conceptual art of the time. The organizers of the Zagreb Tendencies attempted to consciously accompany and form the historical transition in which the computer, the symbol processing machine, was first perceived as a machine of artistic creation. The arts of electronic media are not seen as isolated phenomena, but rather, are included in the history and in the discourse of the fine and performing arts.

In collaboration with the MSU | Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and an international network of collectors and private archives, this exhibition offers the first overview of the [New] Tendencies and their program Computer and Visual Research: For the first time in nearly forty years, graphics, paintings, films, sculptures, as well as computer-generated lyrics and literature are once again available for a broader audience. The project allows an expansion of media-theoretical and historical discussion and sensitizes our awareness of the historical centers of art and culture in eastern Europe.

Curated by Darko Fritz. Scientific support Margit Rosen, Peter Weibel.

Our Literal Speed manifests the imperatives that materialize the theoretical and the pedagogical. No longer can we interpret forms of academic and artistic professionalism as neutral, abstract backgrounds to the aesthetic and performative. These activities have produced their own distinctive surfaces and materials: the aesthetic has become discursive and discourse has become aesthetic. Rather than a series of academic lectures, Our Literal Speed is imagined as a kind of media pop opera or a pedagogical concept album, implying fluid and/or jagged transitions among scholarly presentations, panel discussions, artist’s talks, performances, and an art exhibition within an academic conference. These emerging, hybrid forms demand a synthesis of collective activity (OUR), a self-reflexive examination of art history and its constitutive technologies (LITERAL), and an intense concern for the pace and texture of our movement through institutional mediation (SPEED). The project offers a temporary discursive laboratory in which artists and curators, art historians and media theorists can investigate non-formulaic, experientially vibrant and theoretically precise responses to the modes of distribution, consumption and circulation that drive contemporary art.

With: Art & Language, Walter Benjamin, John Bock, Tania Bruguera & The Weather Underground, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Anthony Cokes, Darby English, Andrea Fraser, Rainer Ganahl, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Sharon Hayes, Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Jackson Pollock Bar, David Joselit, Juliet Koss, Miwon Kwon, Porter McCray, WJT Mitchell, Hila Peleg, Andrew Perchuk, The Project for the New American Century, Tino Sehgal, The Size Queens, Anton Vidokle, Anne M. Wagner, Peter Weibel.

OUR LITERAL SPEED will be continued with further conference-events at the University of Chicago (2009), and at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2010).

Layered Histories represents an innovative approach to the use of new media as a means to engage the viewer in a personal investigation of a non-linear narrative. Cascading animations and a diffusion of sound gestures are triggered and guided by a visitor’s reading pointer movements around the surface of what appears to be an illuminated manuscript. Active gestures on the surface are mapped to a software interface, designed with Max / MSP / Jitter. As in a public reading, all visitors to the space share in the experience of collectively viewing and listening.

Layered Histories tells the imaginary story of an actual 13th century Spanish illuminated Hebrew Bible. Fleeing Spain with the 1492 Expulsion, the Bible was known to be in Safed until the mid 16th century, but then apparently disappeared until it was discovered around 1888 in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Marseilles. The story of Layered Histories is drawn from the imaginary wanderings of the Marseilles Bible, reflecting on the experience of culture as a phenomenon evolving from influences of place and cross-cultural contact.

The linear version of Layered Histories is a through-composed work. Like the interactive installation, the rhythmic display of imagery glides us seamlessly from past to present, from identifiable locations and decorative motifs of the Bible to more universal references of landscape and seascape. As in the interactive version, the sounds reveal an aesthetic parallel to that of the visuals, of veiled sources and more distinctive sounds, with each media emerging and changing independently. The linear work is available on a DVD, which can be projected in a theater or gallery, or on a home computer or DVD player.

As a collaborative work, Layered Histories reflects the differing layers of vision of its authors in describing the experience of a timeless object which has seen history, much of the world, and has many stories to tell. Music and image are melded together in the viewer’s experience, but each follows a separate course of interactivity, coming together in the moment. Evolved from real world photographs and recorded sounds, both music and image were manipulated to reflect the aesthetic experience of place, movement, and change, rather than direct documentation.

Brasilian artist Alice Miceli is currently based in Berlin, where she works on the “Chernobyl project”. Over the last years, Alice has been working on new approaches to re-visualise the memory of places which have an extreme history, such as the former prison of Phnom Penh / Cambodia or Chernobyl. According to Giselle Beiguelman, author of the Essay on Miceli’s work, she deals with poetics that lies in the realm of the “unportrayable” and rethinks our strategies for dealing with memory. Her work has been shown at exhibitions and festivals around the world. During the Upgrade! talk, Alice will give an overview of her work, with a focus on her current project in Chernobyl.

More infos on Alice Miceli here: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Our host for this Upgrade! talk is REDESIGN DEUTSCHLAND / aka System Lüftung - the association for the collective decimalisation of Germany. You will find the video interview with the curators of this place soon on this site!

Alex Zivanovic, a Visiting Scholar at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, has been researching the work of Edward Ihnatowicz and building an excellent archive which is available online. I am so pleased that Alex is taking the time to research thoroughly how Ihnatowicz not just built the Senster but developed its behaviours. It was a truely ground breaking piece of work that is still a source of inspiration for artists and roboticists today.

Photo Gallery | System Details including Original Code | Structural Design

Ihnatowicz’s interest in the kinetics stemmed from his conviction that the behaviour of something tells us far more about it than its appearance. This led him to build the Senster, one of the most influential kinetic sculptures ever made. It consisted of a fifteen-foot-long steel frame articulated in six different places, with the joints all powered by hydraulics. On the Senster’s ‘head’ were an array of microphones and a Doppler radar system.

The Honeywell mini-computer controlling the mechanism was programmed to make it react to three things: moderate and low sounds, loud sounds, and fast motion. Moderate sounds the head would move towards, loud sounds it would pull back from, and fast motion it would track. The result was an uncanny resemblance to a living thing, and the crowds at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, Holland, where it was on show reacted with enormous excitement. Children would shout and wave at it, call it names, and even throw things. Ihnatowicz explains that its movements seemed to stem from situations that people recognized.

In the quiet of the early morning the machine would be found with its head down, listening to the faint noise of its own hydraulic pumps. Then if a girl walked by the head would follow her, looking at her legs. Ihnatowicz described his own first stomach-turning experience of the machine when he had just got it working: he unconsciously cleared his throat, and the head came right up to him as if to ask, ‘Are you all right?’ He also noticed a curious aspect of the effect the Senster had on people. When he was testing it he gave it various random patterns of motion to go through.

Children who saw it operating in this mode found it very frightening, but no one was ever frightened when it was working in the museum with its proper software, responding to sounds and movement. Although the Senster was dismantled some years ago, many people who saw it still remember vividly what a strong impression it made on them. Edward Ihnatowicz died in 1988. Alex Zivanovic currently continues to build on the archive as well as running science and technology education events and his own firm AZ Consultants, supporting the development of mechatronics projects for medical and industrial applications.

Edward Ihnatowicz Archive [blogged by Ruairi Glynn on Interactive Architecture dot org]

New-media artists might like to think they have set the paradigm for nonsites. They could even have the copyright, give or take open source code. One speaks of a Web page as a site, but as traces of elsewhere, distributed across many networks. An elsewhere that leaves cookies on one’s “home” computer makes an even better model for a nonsite. Like Christina in her own videos and digital prints, artists have used also geologic and other data to represent landscape — both online and in the interior of a gallery. In this way, the facticity of real time becomes a potent metaphor for the representation of real space.

Even now, however, there is no escaping another generation entirely. When MOMA reopened in 2004, it displayed the film of Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” When the Met added a small gallery for contemporary photography in 2007, it included Matta-Clark. Worse for those who insist on sites as open communities, their Whitney retrospectives came with a sense of closure. A pier that Matta-Clark illegally helped dismantle is giving way to more space for salmon and a park along the Hudson. The “Floating Island” that Smithson planned, a barge of still more rubble, circled Manhattan.

More to the point, their influence is everywhere. I want to start my next post with their visibility today. For now, though, let me leave you with a quote. I shall come back to it in due course, but it has to be the one thing about new media that Smithson would have understood. It is from Sartre, in a late interview with Simone de Beauvoir: “But what’s weird is how I started to think about chance. . . . I had just seen movies that left nothing to chance, and when I went out I had found contingency. It was the necessity of film that made me feel that there is no necessity on the street.”

Nonsite as rupture:

Let me pick up where I left off, with apologies for not understanding that Christina was posting a start for me. Of course, you have to live with my version, because writers are more self-involved than artists, who have to live with nonsite and displacement. Anyhow I said I wanted to begin with a point of rediscovery, with Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, some retrospectives, and some definitions.

Smithson liked deductive logic and formal systems well enough, so long as others took care of them. His spiral of earth, slowly sinking into the Great Salt Lake, could almost parody a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. But had he foreseen a digital universe, would he ever have entered the gallery?

Smithson did enter the gallery, of course, where his work has a notably low-tech and strikingly physical presence — even in the mirror. His “Enantiomorphic Chambers,” like his arrays of mirrors amid salt and rubble, could almost make a mockery of conceptual art. As for fancier algorithms underlying digital art now, better bury them with an old-fashioned steam shovel before they get out of hand.

It takes chance, in the collision of millions upon millions of molecules, to produce his beloved entropy and the arrow of time. It takes a serious rupture of gallery and museum walls to create earthworks, the mark of the creative artist on the landscape. It takes a more subtle breach to invent nonsites, the presence of the landscape within a gallery. It takes a certain permeability between artist, object, nature, and human history to suffer either then to take its course. “Spiral Jetty” now makes its reappearance from time to time after many years underwater, and I hardly know whether to thank happenstance, patterns of water use, or global warming.

For those more attached to round numbers, however, Smithson would have turned seventy with the new year — or, more exactly, January 2. (The law of large numbers means some slippage.) He will have died thirty-five years ago this July. Matta-Clark, another site-specific artist who labored hard to destroy a site, was born and died precisely five years after him. Both also had retrospectives in the last three years, at the very same New York museum, and it might disappoint them both to spot a trend, rather than mere coincidence. Sites and nonsites are where the action is.

Why the sudden revival of two late artists devoted to site and nonsite? Why the interest in a couple of fragmentary careers devoted to leaving fragmentary evidence? In the posts to follow, I plan to explore just that, recognizing but not privileging information technology and new media. I shall focus on what has changed since their time, in order to get at reasonable criticism of site and nonsite for art today. I shall argue that it helps pinpoint additional reasons for the terms’ relevance.

Nonsite as influence:

First off, apologies for the redundancies in my posts yesterday. I simply worked too quickly. That and a bad cold. There I started with Smithson and Matta-Clark as paradigms of site and nonsite. But why worry about them in the first place — other than as a deliberate affront to the artists contributing to Empyre?

For starters, their influence extends well beyond virtual reality, to an increasing range of options subsumed under site and nonsite. In this post, I want to run those down quickly, to see just what beyond those terms amount to today. Is the litany all too familiar? It should already get one asking what has changed in the conditions surrounding the making of art. Consider the scope of big shows from 2007 alone.

Their influence includes art that restages the outdoors indoors — invariably in a state of incompletion, fragmentation, or deterioration. Museum-scale group exhibitions suggest a culture-wide obsession, as with “Undone” at the Whitney at Altria, followed in no time by “Unmonumental” at the New Museum. Their influence also includes semi-fictional recreations of an artist’s private environment in the space of a gallery, such as Pipilotti Rist in a group show at the Guggenheim last summer, Friedrich Kunath at Andrea Rosen, Rirkrit Tiravanija dishing out curry (yes, yet again) at David Zwirner, a cordoned-off memorial there to Jason Rhoades’s living room soon after, and Beth Campbell right now at the Whitney.

It includes any number of artists dedicated to trashing the joint big time. Ironically, any record of the disastrous run-in with Christoph Buchel has vanished from MASS MoCA’s Web site. At the same time, galleries and museums have shown more willingness to sponsor off-site transformations, as when Roxy Paine blends his steel trees into New York City parks.

In all these works, one should not see site and nonsite as an opposition of the human hand and nature’s, because the landscape under deconstruction is a human one, too — just as with Smithson’s “Buried Woodshed” or Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts.” When Urs Fischer broke right through a gallery floor this fall, he discovered a Manhattan built more on sand and thus probably landfill than on bedrock. When Mike Nelson staged an abandoned Essex Street food market as “A Psychic Vacuum,” he competed with an active market across the street, but he brought his own tools and some of his own dust.

Arthur C. Danto called his essay on Peter Fischli and David Weiss “The Artist as Prime Mover.” He thus pointed to their dual role as omnipotent creators and as absent from the creation. One does not usually think of their fabulous Rube Goldberg contraption on film as a site or nonsite, but their work’s ambiguity underlies every use of the terms.

One reason, then, for a continued influence is how productive it has proved to be. Later today, I shall offer a couple more reasons, even closer to platitudes. One had better get the good news out of the way fast.

Nonsite as recovery:

At the very least, I argued last time, no one is getting rid of surprisingly nostalgic, even trashy conceptions of site and nonsite, not even by going online. It may not have much to do with the under-the-radar approach of Smithson and Matta-Clark, but it bears their obvious traces all the same. Besides, people who buried buildings or blasted through the roof made some pretty bold gestures, too.

What accounts, then, for the resurgent interest in two artists and two entangled ideas? Most obviously, it amounts to the usual generational swings, as yet another age cohort enters the museum. After Neo-Expressionism and irony, it has become safe to return to the past — provided it comes without the old narratives of formalism and theater. In 2007, too, for example, David Reed curated a view of the late 1960s and early 1970s as “High Times, Hard Times.” While it focused on painting, there, too, art spilled over into space. A year earlier, MOMA devoted the atrium to Jennifer Bartlett’s “Rhapsody” as another study in how painting refused to die. Minimalism is fine now, honest, so long as comes with a warm narrative of survival-and reasonably warm, fluid work to match.

Conversely, the themes never really began with Smithson and Matta-Clark, and they never went away. One can see their presence in the litany of recent exhibitions, or one can look back in time instead. Postmodernism has seen disruptions of art as self-contained cultural artifact in everything from Dada to Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project. Even the idealism of Le Corbusier’s buildings surrounded by park, like Olmstead’s Central Park, invites human habits and landscape to fight it out for themselves. Besides, if Modernism sounds too utopian these days, one should not overlook the late-1960s optimism in Smithson and Matta-Clark, both recovering contested sites for artists and others on the economic margins.

For all that, something has changed. One can see it in the almost ridiculous explosion I have noted in 2007. Another purported use of real-time data, by the Brooklyn duo Fame Theory, displays career prospects numerically on LED, like a pretend stock ticker. One can see it, too, from my own attempt at a hitsory. Note how fixed notions of temporal continuity and discontinuity have entered an account of site and nonsite. One recovers nonsites in installations today as if recovering the past. In the process, one recovers conceptual boundaries all over again, even when one thought one had broken through the walls.

I want therefore to consider alternatives to art history as blissfully marching on or in need of recovery. Museums sometimes like it that way, and the scenario has real power. Tomorrow I shall take up challenges to so optimistic a view. Maybe the ruptures that nonsites and earthworks thought they earned have lost some of their ability to disrupt. [via]