::: Soup :::

MoMA Courses Online Registration Open for Winter/Spring 2012

2011-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

PMNYS Fast-Forward Preview (Part 1) by Mab MacMoragh

Registration for Winter/Spring 2012 MoMA Courses Online is now open! Information and registration here.

PMNYS is an independent student project by the Post Millennium New York School painters, a group of artists who met virtually in the Spring 2011 MoMA Online Course, 'Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting' taught by Corey D'Augustine.

This is Part 1 of the project, which will eventually include a video of the paintings along with a narrative in a virtual setting.

PMNYS Painters are:

Betsy Ritz (Rhode Island USA)
Bobbie Friedman (Rhode Island USA)
Chris Jeffrey (Vermont USA)
Deborah Rhee (Melbourne, Australia; Dallas, Texas USA)
Doug Brannon (North Carolina USA)
Hilary (USA; Berlin, Germany)
Jackie Mintz (Maryland USA)
Kim Charlton (New York USA)
Mab MacMoragh (Georgia USA)
Mania Row (Essex and London, UK)
Maria Rosa Benso (Turin, Italy)
Marie Louise Eriksen (Denmark)
Maryse Wicker (France, Connecticut USA)
Monica Ridruejo (Spain)
Myriam Kassin (Bogota, Colombia)
Pauline Ginnety (Ireland, France)
Rose Golledge (Brazil, UK, Portugal)
Starr Davis (California USA)
toon den heijer (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Thank you to MoMA Courses Online!

Crossposted

Field Trip: Gerhard Richter

2011-10-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

interviewed by Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate

On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, Gerhard Richter talks about his life and work with Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Tate Modern 6 October 2011 - 8 January 2012

Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. (more)

via Deutsche Welle (Euromaxx)

Gerhard Richter is among Germany's most celebrated contemporary artists. Richter usually shuns the media spotlight, but he granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio and allowed her to film him at work. The resulting documentary provides a unique insight into the painter's creative process.

October 18 1977 - Baader-Meinhof via Opheliia

About Richter's Baader Meinhof Cycle
Museum of Modern Art

All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible. (Gerhard Richter)

Read at TATE ETC: Inescapable Truths John-Paul Stonard on Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter web site

Field Trip: Anthony McCall: solid light

2011-09-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

Anthony McCall Between You and I from creativetimenewyork

The spectator is now inside the film, no longer conceived as a circumscribed form within a predefined space but as the very field within which the experience takes shape.

...the point is not to produce the mechanical phenomenon of the shutter’s action but to dramatize it; it is not about the phenomenological reduction of the cinematic projection, but its reconstruction.

-- Philipe-Alain Michaud, "Line Light: The Geometric Cinema of Anthony McCall" October 137
Tr. Annette Michelson

Photograph: Hugo Glendinning; Anthony McCall, Between You and I, 2006, Installation view at Peer/The Round Chapel, London

In Warhol’s case, the idea was making a film of the Empire State Building where the time of watching it on the screen mirrors the time taken to film it. There was this one to one relationship between the shooting and the object. [Michael] Snow’s “Wavelength” was constructed in a single zoom, beginning with wide-angle and going to full close-up, taking half an hour to do it. That was the formal organizing principle… From the two examples, I knew that it was possible to make a film from a single organizing idea.

-- Anthony McCall, interview with Sylvie Lin (read more)

“What would a film be if it was only a film?” Carolee Schneemann and I sailed on the SS Canberra from Southampton to New York in 1973, and when we embarked, all I had was that question. When I disembarked I already had the plan for Line Describing a Cone fully-fledged in my notebook.

-- Anthony McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001, quoted in Shoot, Shoot, Shoot

McCall’s breakthrough occurred in the early Seventies. Frustrated by the limitations of video art, he decided to deconstruct film, and fashion something new. The result was Line Describing a Cone (1973), a juddering 16mm film projected onto the far side of the room. The film consisted of nothing but an animated white dot that slowly grew into a curving line and eventually became a circle.

This sounds a little dull — but the magic happened when light cast by the projector encountered ambient particles in the air, formed by the thick cigarette smoke that swirled around the era’s lofts and galleries. As light bounced off the motes of smoke and dust, an ethereal, ghostly cone, giving the impression of three dimensions, started to form and linger in the gloom. (read more by Alastair Sooke)

TateShots Issue 2 - Anthony McCall from tate

The thirty-minute Line Describing a Cone, made soon after I moved to New York from London in 1973, took the form of the gradual coming-into-being in midair of a complete, hollow cone of light. The proportions of this projection vary, but the scale is large. The base of the cone, an emerging circle of light projected onto the wall, is tall enough, at between eight and eleven feet, to fully incorporate several spectators, and the length of the beam may be anything from thirty to sixty feet. This three-dimensional object, like sculpture, calls for a mobile, participating spectator, and, like film, it takes time. To fully see the emerging form it is necessary to move around and through it, to look at it from the inside and from the outside.

-- Anthony McCall, quoted by Jeffrey Kastner in ArtForum, Summer 2004 (read more)

Photograph: Hank Graber; Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973, Installation view during the twenty-fourth minute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001

I have already decided that if anyone is going to make a digital version of Line Describing a Cone, it should be me. What I plan to do (it is not in my schedule yet, though) is to re-make the piece with digital scripting. It will be perfect, exactly as conceived. There will be no imperfections. It will be silent. It will be titled Line Describing a Cone 2.0, thus marking it not as a re-make at all, but as a second version. It would not replace the film version. It may be that over time, 2.0 gets looked at more than the film version. Or it may be that 2.0 drives people back to the film version. I have no idea. But I do like the idea of taking the law into my own hands.

-- Anthony McCall, on the move from celluloid to digital, interview with Mark Godfrey in Tate Papers, Autumn 2007 (read more)

Anthony McCall did go on to make a digital Line Describing a Cone 2.0 that was screened in 2011; Susie Pentelow describes her reaction to seeing it at Tate Modern here

Anthony McCall's Website

Anthony McCall at Sean Kelly Gallery

construct on Magoo

2011-06-12T11:52:00.000-07:00

I think in general when people say "I know," they don't know, they believe. I believe that art is the only form of activity in which man as man shows himself to be a true individual. Only in art is he capable of going beyond the animal state, because art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space. To live is to believe; that's my belief, at any rate.

-- Marcel Duchamp, interviewed by James Johnson Sweeney for NBC at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1956 (more)

'construct' by Selavy Oh, is now on Magoo (Teleport)

More on construct by Selavy Oh here

construct discussed on Arahan Claveau's Soup Radio here

video by Mab MacMoragh: rough draft for a final version of Selavy Oh's 'construct variations' to be finished later this year

---
'construct'
a project by Selavy Oh
May 1-18, 2011
curated by Goodwind Seiling / Sachiko Hayashi
space provided by HUMLAB / University of Umeå, Sweden

CONSTRUCT is a 75-day project performed during Selavy Oh's residency at Yoshikaze/HUMLAB. Selavy Oh was present every day adding one hollow cube representing one day to the installation. The resulting installation consists of 75 white cubes, most of them reacting in various ways to the presence of visitors, and can be conceived as collection of dynamic time capsules, as spatial blog or diary, that transforms time to space and thus breaks up the inevitable causality of its development by folding it to a multidimensional ensemble allowing for novel relations between its constituents. The single days continuously exchange their positions, resulting in an everchanging labyrinth of cubes - some days even becoming inaccessible - which allows the visitor to discover new connections and associations that go beyond formal or semantic similarity.
(Text by Selavy Oh)
~~~~~~~
Selavy Oh's installation "construct" was realised during her 75-day-long virtual residency between February and April 2011 at Yoshikaze "Up-In-The-Air" Humlab, Umeå University, Sweden. The residency was curated by Goodwind Seiling/Sachiko Hayashi in collaboration with the sim manager Didge Burroughs/Jim Barrett.
~~~~~~
See all Soup Blog posts on 'construct'
~~~~~~
See Mab's Flickr set for Selavy Oh's 'construct'

MoMA Online Courses- Online Registration now open!

2011-05-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Ticking by Mab MacMoragh

How do the online courses work?

These 10-week classes can be accessed at times that are convenient for you; there is no set time when participants are required to log in. Each week, starting with the first week of class and continuing for nine subsequent weeks, students participate in lively discussion forums with one another and the instructor. The courses provide unique videos, slide shows, and readings.

Read more and register

Artist Deborah Rhee looks back on her experience with MoMA Online Learning as part of the Materials and Techniques studio painting course taught by Corey d'Augustine and comes away with a thumbs-up!

Read Deborah's blog post

Soup Radio: May 2011 Programming

2011-05-07T05:17:00.000-07:00

Image: Carol's Classroom

Via Arahan Claveau:

Soup Radio new schedule begins Saturday May 7th 2011 (12pm PDT, 3pm EDT, 8pm BST)

Amy Freelunch has a conversation with art critic (and husband) Jeff Edwards, regarding the difficulties and rewards of organising artists and academics online.

Arahan Claveau talks to artist Selavy Oh about new work 'Construct' which opened on May 1st at the HUMlab sim in Second Life. Selavy talks about his experiences creating the project and how it will integrate with visitors in the physical gallery space in Sweden.

Raul Crimson and Treat Kanto discuss the new exhibition 'Walking Canvas' at SOMA in Second Life. They also talk about the reduced support for artistic initiatives by Linden Lab, the general lack of diversity on the Grid, and how Second Life has become closer to real life through this process.

Penumbra Carter returns next month.

Visit Soup Radio Blog for listening choices and information

May 2011 Show Notes

Selavy Oh's construct: opening today

2011-05-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

construct by Selavy Oh

a project by Selavy Oh

May 1-18, 2011

Teleport

curated by Goodwind Seiling / Sachiko Hayashi

space provided by HUMLAB / University of Umea, Sweden

informal opening: Sunday May 1st, 2011, 1pm SLT

CONSTRUCT is a 75-day project performed during Selavy Oh's residency at Yoshikaze/HUMLAB. Selavy Oh was present every day adding one hollow cube representing one day to the installation. The resulting installation consists of 75 white cubes, most of them reacting in various ways to the presence of visitors, and can be conceived as collection of dynamic time capsules, as spatial blog or diary, that transforms time to space and thus breaks up the inevitable causality of its development by folding it to a multidimensional ensemble allowing for novel relations between its constituents. The single days continuously exchange their positions, resulting in an everchanging labyrinth of cubes - some days even becoming inaccessible - which allows the visitor to discover new connections and associations that go beyond formal or semantic similarity.

(Text by Selavy Oh)

~~~~~~~

See all Soup Blog posts on construct

Selavy Oh's construct: a dream dialogue

2011-05-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

Mab explores day 75 in Selavy Oh's construct

Mab: Selavy Oh's construct is like a beehive. A dynamo hum. No, not that, but a honeycomb. No, it's exactly like seashells. No, it's more like crystallization.

Mab: (upon reflection) It's orthogonal geometry but it's not geometry, it's scaffolding in search of form…..

Mab: (still pondering) It is a mysterious continuous formation, a gathering emergence……

Mab: (back again after a break) It has the appearance of chaotic spontaneity but was built up methodically over the extended time period (and fleeting passage) of 75 days

Mab: (counting on fingers) Its inhabitants are time and events and us, to do with scripted striations, fractures, mirrors, miniatures, concurrences, confluences, whisperings, forces, pleatings, colors, flips ,and systolic soundwaves

(Mab falls asleep and dreams she is joined by others who continue the revery)

Morton Feldman: …we don't know where the passage begins, and where it ends; we don't know we are in a passage… The overall experience of the whole composition becomes the passage.

Mab: If you zoom out, Morton, you can see that the passages interchange

Robert Irwin: It's a psychic build-up, but it's also a pure energy build-up.

Mab: and a day build-up too

Robert Henri: ...not only in the pleasure it inspires, but in the comprehension of the new order of construction used in its making.

Evelyn Underhill: ...it is not strange that certain maps, artistic representations or symbolic schemes, should have come into being which describe or suggest the special experiences of the mystical consciousness…

Mab: I'm pretty sure that Selavy Oh would not say that about this construct

Carolyn Forché: ...language breaks, becomes tentative, interrogational, kaleidoscopic. The form of this language bears the trace of extremity, and may be composed of fragments: questions, aphorisms, broken passages of lyric prose or poetry, quotations, dialogue, brief and lucid passages that may or may not resemble what previously had been written.

Mab: That's more like it

Emmanuel Levinas: It is of the essence of art to signify only between the lines–in the intervals of time, between times–like a footprint that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.

Frank O'Hara: I assume you speak of the age in which great forms
appear, only to be taken apart ten years later…

Mab: Well that was a long time ago, Frank, relatively speaking. And backwards.

(Mab doesn't know of what she speaks, but this is her dream)

Odilon Redon: Each man should be the historian of his own heart.

Paul Valéry: the mollusk exudes its shell

Mab (nods at Odilon and Paul)

Paul Eluard: Quand les cimes de notre ciel se rejoindront
Ma maison aura un toit.

(When the peaks of our sky come together
My house will have a roof.)

~~~~~~

References:

Orthogonal geometry

Confluence

Systolic geometry

Morton Feldman "After Modernism" Art in America 1971

Robert Irwin, quoted in Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, by Lawrence Weschler 1982

Robert Henri The Art Spirit 1923

Evelyn Underhill Mysticism 1911

Carolyn Forché "Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art" Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature 2011

Emmanuel Levinas Ethics and Inifinity 1985

Frank O'Hara, "About Courbet" Art News 1958

Odilon Redon To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists 1916

Paul Valéry Les Merveilles De La Mer. Les coquillages 1936

Paul Eluard Dignes de vivre 1944

~~~~~~

More construct dialogue in the dreamer-sphere:

Oberon Onmura's great writeup of construct on New World Notes

~~~~~~

See all Soup Blog posts on construct

Selavy Oh's construct revisited

2011-04-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

This is a wonderful unfolding conceptual art piece in the virtual world of Second Life® growing and changing from day to day- with the passage of time its complexity comes to resemble neurons and is never the same experience from visitor to visitor- just as our perceptions of the real world can never be made to mirror one another's except in theory. Outside of theory, our connections are mysterious in nature.

As Horatio exclaims in Shakespeare's Hamlet: 'O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!'

remembering the future
imagining the past

day 62

day 49

day 39

day 32

day 31

day 29

day 14

day 12

day 10

day 9

day 8

(Videos include audio)

Read more at Yo=shi-kA+Ze

day after day

Read more at Selavy Oh

construct previously on Soup

Teleport

Selavy Oh's construct

2011-03-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

remembering the future
imagining the past

day 1

day 2

day 3

day 4

day 5

day 6

day 7

(Videos include audio)

Read more at Yo=shi-kA+Ze

day after day

Read more at Selavy Oh

Teleport

Field Trip: Tara Donovan

2011-02-14T02:36:00.000-08:00

Tara Donovan: Drawings (Pins)
The Pace Gallery 510 W 25th St, NYC
Feb 12, 2011 - Mar 19, 2011

See website for images from this current exhibition: The Pace Gallery

In her latest series, "Drawings (Pins)", on view this month at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, shimmering metallic "canvases" are composed of dressmaker pins — tens of thousands of them. The cumulative effect is almost painterly. While these works are two-dimensional, they deal with the same issues as her "site-responsive" sculptures, as she calls them: "It’s all about perceiving this material from a distance and close up and how the light interacts with it."

-- Julia Curtin amarcordian (more)

The new series, which in fact arose from a stretch of print-making, is a perceptual delight, with light striking the pins in such a way that some clusters appear as inky black, others as gray, still others as shimmery silver, like a lake glancing in the setting winter sun.

-- ARTINFO (more)

While the majority of the drawings on view are visual fields that radiate from different light sources (determined by the density of pins on the surface area), two of the earliest works in the show depict clusters of circular organic shapes evoking cellular or molecular forms.

-- The Pace Gallery | Pace Press Release (more- pdf)

Tara Donovan.mov (Video: PacePrints)

Tara Donovan builds large, labor-intensive, and site-specific installations out of everyday materials such as scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, roofing paper and Styrofoam cups. Donovan takes these materials and grows them through accumulation. The results are large-scale abstract floor and wall works suggestive of landscapes, clouds, cellular structures and even mold or fungus. In her words, "it is not like I'm trying to simulate nature. It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow."

-- Pace Prints Tara Donovan Artist Portfolio (more)

~~~~~~

What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception (and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art,” with none of the customary abstract limitations as to form, place, materials and so forth) – one which seeks to discover and value the potential for experiencing beauty in everything.

-- Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art

~~~~~~

A scattershot history of Tara Donovan's artwork:

Tara Donovan, Untitled (Toothpicks), 2004 (Image: Andrew Russeth)

In the mid-1990s, Tara Donovan was experimenting in her studio when serendipity struck. She knocked over a big box of toothpicks, picked it up, and then noticed that the spilled contents had latticed into a shape that echoed the perfect corner of their container.

-- Jen Mergel and Nicholas Baume, in Tara Donovan (more, including an excerpted interview from the book)

Tara Donovan .|. Toothpicks .|. 2004 (video: reel aesthete)

Donovan knows, too, when to manipulate illusions. It would be a mistake to ask her materials to mean something specific, to distinguish them from a model landscape in a science museum. They do not raise challenging associations with America's social fabric as process or wasteland… They do not reimagine a gallery opening at which the same opaque plastic would serve ecologically correct wine… Rather, their impulse is simultaneously domestic and formal, like the visual overflow of a dream.

-- John Haber (more)

Untitled (Styrofoam Cups) (Image: mike)

My notion of the “field” is essentially co-opted from discussions of high modernist abstract painting, in which the edge of the canvas is understood as the only delimiting factor in what would otherwise be an infinite plane extending in all directions. For me, the architecture of a space is the only delimiting factor of my work. I don’t really invest too much thought into making precise distinctions between what is a sculpture, installation, or landscape. I think that debate and the resulting collapse of such categories occurred in the ’60s and ’70s, and contemporary artists such as myself get to enjoy the fruits of that polemic.

-- Tara Donovan "Prelude: A Discussion with Tara Donovan" (Art:21) (more)

Tara Donovan, Lever House (Image: Peter Sealy)

The effect common to every installation–wrought in each instance out of workaday materials–is the protean appearance of its objects from afar. From across the gallery, Untitled (Mylar Tape) (2008) evokes not the frank banality of its medium, mentioned in the title, so much as a commingling of nacreous shellfish or a cluster of seaborne invertebrates, huddled and glinting against the gallery walls. Only on closer inspection do they reveal themselves to be mere loops of reflective tape.

-- Ara H. Merjian Frieze (more- pdf)

Tara Donovan at Lever House, NYC (May 2009) (video: ballenato63)

As the team gathered around to look at her handiwork, which remained contained in a neat rectangle by the wooden frame, the broken glass began to crackle and pop, like thousands of Rice Krispies.

-- Carol Kino, in "The Genius of Little Things" (New York Times) (more)

View New York Times slideshow

Preserving Art: Untitled (Plastic Cups) Indianapolis Museum of Art on ArtBabble

"Haze" 2003, a giant installation of clear drinking straws, came crashing down when installed at Ace Gallery in New York a few years back–a far cry from the danger of a looming Richard Serra lead prop, to be sure, though a way bigger mess to clean up. Still, the point isn't just about this particular moment of literal undoing, but rather the way Donovan's work courts demise, a death drive no less insistent for being rendered so exquisitely.

-- Suzanne Hudson ArtForum (more- pdf)

Tara Donovan on Wikipedia

Tara Donovan at The Pace Gallery

Tara Donovan at Stephen Friedman Gallery

Tara Donovan at the Met (past exhibition)

Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns

2011-01-30T22:37:00.000-08:00

Details here

Nicole/There's no bible in here?

2011-01-06T01:24:00.000-08:00

Virtual Art filmed in Second Life® at Soup:Magoo
Lovers Lane Studios

Best viewed full-screen, and with headphones to capture the environmental soundscape

There's no bible in here? Virtual Art Installation by Dekka Raymaker and Penumbra Carter (2010)

"Nicole" Music composed and performed by Norman Lamont

Machinima Cast: Amy Freelunch, Cinco Pizzicato, Mab MacMoragh, and Solo Mornington

Read more about There's no bible in here?

This "Nicole" is an alternate version of the song found on Norman Lamont's Romantic Fiction 2 (2007)

normanlamont.com

Soup Radio January 2011 Schedule

2011-01-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

Image:Soup Radio Blog

Soup Radio's new schedule begins on Saturday, January 1st 2011
(12pm PDT, 3pm EDT, 8pm GMT).

Soup Radio Blog

Arahan and Khamudy discuss what 2011 has in store for Second Life, the New Year resolutions people have been making regarding their online activities, the ongoing difficulties of funding for virtual arts and humanities projects, the arrival of Rod Humble from Electronic Arts as the new CEO of Second Life, the teengrid merger, the end of licensed Frank Lloyd Wright content in SL and the amusing developments of Xbox Kinect hacks.

Amy Freelunch talks about the real-life art market, and ways for artists to use the internet and crowd-sourcing to support their work. She also talks about a few different art sites and what works about them and what doesn't.

Penumbra Carter is joined by guest Chantal Harvey. Chantal talks about her past, present and future machinima and the role music has played in their production. Also discussed are their experiences with the 48 Hour Film Project and Chantal's participation within the Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA).

Soup Radio is an independent non-profit non-commercial collaborative sound art project.

Field Trip: Patti Smith and Michael Stipe celebrate Jean Genet's 100th birthday at MoMA

2010-12-28T18:37:00.000-08:00

The movies–among other games–teach the natural, a natural made up completely of artifices ...

-- Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers

On Sunday, December 19, MoMA visitors were treated to a “walk-in performance” by artist and musician Patti Smith, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of prominent and challenging French writer and political activist Jean Genet. The performance, in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, could not have been better. (more at MoMA Inside/Out)

Jean Genet

Soup Radio December 2010

2010-12-04T14:59:00.000-08:00

Today: Arahan Claveau presents new December 2010 programming Soup Radio (click for info)

Soup Radio November

2010-11-17T22:18:00.000-08:00

Mab's been sleeping a lot lately in between juggling projects, so some important blog balls have been dropped amongst the dust bunnies! Argh!

Arahan Claveau's fantastic Soup Radio returned with an all new programming lineup for November earlier this month, featuring shows by Arahan (Steve Millar) with Khamudy Mannonen, Jane Vippond, and Allan Stanley Taylor; Amy Freelunch; and Penumbra Carter with Molly Cybertar- see Soup Radio blog for full details and listen inworld at Soup sims (Eryri and Magoo), or in your media player.

November 2010 Show Notes

Soup Radio blog

Soup Radio stream

Thanks to New World Notes for blogging Soup Radio!

Grazie Roxelo for streaming Soup Radio at Museo del Metaverso on OpenSim world Craft!

Selavy Oh–spherical topography–Soup:Magoo

2010-10-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

Larger slideshow on black

Kila: Topattumi (Kila & Oki) (video: JADENEindia)

spherical topography by Selavy Oh

Soup:Magoo

Soup Radio launches Saturday 9 October 12PM SLT

2010-10-08T01:47:00.000-07:00

Soup and Lovers Lane Studios are excited to see the launch of Arahan Claveau's Soup Radio!

See Soup Radio Blog for details

Tune in with your media player (iTunes, VLC, Winamp etc.) via this link:

http://87.117.202.31:8206/listen.pls

or listen at the ::: Soup ::: Eryri and ArtNation Push sims in Second Life®.

Garrett Lynch: There, Now

2010-10-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

Garrett Lynch's There, Now at ArtNation on Push

27 September 2010

Push

More

Penumbra Carter's 'Nihilist'

2010-10-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

Penumbra Carter's Nihilist

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to try to use the same aesthetics as painting which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing, and most important, insisted on attention to metaphor. Since film is not painting–and not simply because one moves and the other doesn't–I wanted to explore their connections and differences–stretching the formal interests to questions of editing, pacing, studying the formal properties of time intervals, repetitions, variations on a theme, and so on.

-- Peter Greenaway, quoted in Peter Greenaway's Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

It is one of the most important formal qualities of film that every object that is reproduced appears simultaneously in two entirely different frames of reference, namely the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and that as one identical object it fulfills two different functions in the two contexts.

-- Rudolf Arnheim Film as Art

Congratulations to Lovers Lane Studios artist Penumbra Carter on winning First Runner Up for Best Film and tie for Best Use of Line of Dialogue in the 48Hour Film Project 2010! ¡Viva!

Avant-garde multimedia artist/filmmaker-trained-as-a-painter Peter Greenaway was one of the judges and his favorite was Penumbra's Nihilist! Of course it was Mab's favorite as well.....

Read more on Penumbra's Grey Matter

48Hour Film Project 2010

New World Notes

Peter Greenaway

Field Trip: Kit Webster Revisited: Enigmatica II

2010-09-29T01:03:00.000-07:00

Kit Webster's ENIGMATICA II at Illusion/Illusion exhibition, McClelland Gallery 11 July – 19 September 2010

Continued experimentation into new forms of synesthetic sculpture. -- Kit Webster

More images of this surface mapped projection installation

Kit Webster previously on Soup

Kit Webster

Roy Ascott's LPDT2

2010-09-04T01:34:00.000-07:00

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas–for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

-- Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text
Tr. Richard Miller

22 August 2010 (Preview)

Virtual Art filmed in Second Life® at Angewandte
Best viewed full-screen

LPDT2: Roy Ascott
Programming and Architecture: Selavy Oh
Architecture and Terrain: MosMax Hax (Max Moswitzer)
Avatars and Soundscape: Alpha Auer, Alpho Fullstop and alpha.tribe (Elif Ayiter)
Avatar Animations: Frigg Ragu (Heidi Dahlsveen)

i-DAT: University of Plymouth, UK
Simulator Host: University of Applied Fine Arts, Vienna

LPDT2 is being projected to Real Life throughout September 2010 in Incheon, South Korea during the Incheon International Digital Art Festival (INDAF) 2010 in Tomorrow City, Songdo.

Avatar appearances by Alex Arashi, Allegory Ordinary, Arahan Claveau, Category Silent, Erdbeermund Schnute, Eupalinos Ugajin, Fau Ferdinand, Hegemon Maximus, Mab MacMoragh, MosMax Hax, Sca Shilova, Selavy Oh, Solo Mornington, somerset Verne

'LPDT2 : The Second Life of La Plissure du Texte' is the Second Life® incarnation of Roy Ascott's groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte ('The Pleating of the Text'), created in 1983 and exhibited at the Musee de l'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

The title of the project, 'La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,' alludes to Roland Barthes's book 'Le Plaiser du Texte', a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first incarnation 'distributed authorship', a term coined by Ascott, has been the primary subject of investigation of LPDT2.

Read more here- text by Alpha Auer (Elif Ayiter)

Second Life® visitors teleport here

Second Life® 2.x viewer custom sky settings for this installation can be downloaded here

References:

LPDT2

Selavy Oh

Garrett Lynch

INDAF

more INDAF

Selavy Oh inside Roy Ascott's LPDT2

Nettrice Beattie's Alternate Futures

2010-08-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

Alternate Futures by Nettrice Beattie

17 August 2010

Alternate Futures: Afrofuturist Multiverses & Beyond

IBM A (now closed)

Larger view

Opening Today, Garrett Lynch on Soup Push 'There, Now'

2010-08-11T00:09:00.000-07:00

Image: Garrett Lynch

Image: Garrett Lynch

. . . in a world which lives by the truth of its simulation, that is by abstracting reality and virtualizing it until the map stands for the territory, there seems to be no reason to re-abstract the abstracted, for it would be an act without logic. It is here that artists, by being compelled to point out the opposites, arrive at new ways of showing the sublime (Doreet LeVitte Harten)

Wednesday, 11 August 2010 1PM SLT

You are invited to the opening of "There, Now" by Garrett Lynch:

__________ There, Now by Garrett Lynch __________

-----------------------

NOTE: The installation uses numerous media streams, please make sure you have audio and video enabled, turn your audio up high and be patient for the content to load.

-----------------------

There, Now, a mixed reality installation by Garrett Lynch, continues work on ideas of space/place initiated as part of the on going series of interventions at I AM Columbia:

Intervention #1
Intervention #2

On entering the installation at Push the visitor is presented with what resembles a vista of another space, a combined place that employs live imagery from four continents together with rudimentary Second Life primitives and dynamic effects such as simulated water and particles.

Similar to Intervention #2, the installation is a way and means of seeing out of the 'virtual' space that is Second Life however this time it is our global physical environment we see which has been cut and pasted together. Distance, time and place as experienced in 'real' life are folded together. On closer inspection however the installation is revealed to be designed to be seen from a single viewpoint. 'Real' mountains, forests and skies become flats on the 'virtual' stage of Second Life, moving around them reveals their true shape, their featureless sides and back and the props that supposedly support their ('virtual') physical weight.

More than a Second Life space, blacked off from the environment of Second Life within its own construction, it is almost completely isolated from the 'virtual' world yet acknowledges and underlines its falsehood. The space is visually analogous to pictorial representations of space within our culture. It is a representation layered within the representation of Second Life. Not 'real' and yet no longer just 'virtual', it mixes these together to create a third space, a meta metaverse that adds another layer to our experience of reality.

Only by entering this representational space within a representational space can we remove/distance ourselves from the first and look at it objectively.

Many thanks to all at Soup and Lovers Lane Studios for their support and kindly hosting this work.

Webcam locations within the installation are arranged as follows:

1) The sky over Shizuoka Prefecture in front of Mt.Fuji, Japan
2) The Grand Canyon, Arizona, America
3) The Rockies, Banff, Canada
4) The Black Forest, Todtmoos in Germany
5) The plains in front of Kilimanjaro, Kenya, Africa
6) The Pyramid of Cheops, Giza, Egypt

(Text by Garrett Lynch)

~~Viewer 2 is required to experience shared media in this installation.~~

Teleport to Push

Opening Today, Rod Mandel on Soup Magoo 'Your Assumption is Correct'

2010-07-19T03:13:00.000-07:00

in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them (Christian Wimen)

Monday, 19 July 2010 1PM SLT

You are invited to the opening of "Your Assumption is Correct" by Rod Mandel:

Rod Mandel
Your Assumption is Correct
July 19, 2010 – August 30, 2010

Lovers Lane Studios at ::: Soup ::: Magoo is proud to present “Your Assumption is Correct” a process-driven installation by Rod Mandel, curated by Mab MacMoragh. Mandel is an Artist and Founder of the Invisible Museum of Post Contemporary Art.

Influenced by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Mandel’s work often takes the form of ‘historical fiction’, offering the viewer the freedom to decide which aspects, if any, they believe. Part of Mandel’s fascination with History stems from a contextual idea that history does not exist. “Your Assumption is Correct” is a metaphor for the act of reflecting on an idea. The piece is a process-based examination of recent poignant events in American Culture. The scene, an offshore oil rig transformed into a contemporary art museum, alluding to the indecipherable line between fact and fiction, is the predetermined context. (Text by Rod Mandel)

Teleport to Magoo (SLurl)

Field Trip: Kit Webster

2010-07-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

ENIGMATICA by Kit Webster (link)

Kit Webster's ENIGMATICA II installation is part of the Illusion/Illusion group exhibition at McClelland Gallery, Victoria, Australia 11 July - 19 September 2010

In his video environment he projects syncopated patterns of coloured lines and shapes which form and dissolve over geometric forms, at times reinforcing the three dimensionality of the objects before running counter to the geometry and destroying our spatial readings. His video projection installation is an intricately composed synesthetic environment which plays with the coupling of light, sound and space. (more) -- McClelland Gallery

DATAFLUX by Kit Webster (link)

The installation merges mechanics, video object mapping, intelligent lighting and sonic triggers into one choreographed sequence . . . (more)

I'm also thinking about implementing camera tracking or some other form of input device to allow the observer to have some form of control as to how their environment is shifting. I would also like to implement the Perspective Anamorphosis [at the next level]. It's really my dream to be able to create a virtual environment that is indistinguishable from the real thing. I think its interesting that if you have complete control over one's environment, you can have it eloquently shift from the real to the imaginary.

These environments are not defined by natural characteristics but by one's imagination, allowing for the superimposition of a mindspace onto (or deep within) a physical domain. Awakening a space with life through the connection of the perceptual awareness of the observer and the creativity of the designer, based on the theory that the mind is essentially a tool [for] perceiving the enigma that is our surroundings and vice versa. It's based around the notion that we have only skimmed the surface when it comes to identifying and experiencing the complexities of a given space. Complete digital control has taken over the environment,allowing realities to shift from the actual to the imaginary. Real-world environments are augmented in such a way that perception cannot be defined as being under cerebral or environmental control and thus reality is undifferentiated from hallucination. I really feel that there could be an infinite number of experiences that we are not yet equipped to discover. We are really on a threshold of technological discovery. (more) -- Kit Webster

Kit Webster (link)

Second Lives Project : Ambrotypes of Avatars

2010-06-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

Sowa Mai Ambrotype by Susan E. Evans

Would you like to participate in an art project? Please send me a screen shot of your avatar(s) with their name, world or game and location “inworld.” I plan on making an ambrotype from the images as part of my project Second Lives. (Susan E. Evans)

Jimmy Branagh Ambrotype by Susan E. Evans

◦ What is needed: Full screen captures! Don't crop them as Susan will need to crop the images to fit the glass plates. If you crop them yourself she risks running out of image to cover the plate.

◦ How: Classic portrait style. Head shots, torso shots or full body shots are good. Don't send action captures. Static poses are best.

◦ When choosing your color palette, keep in mind that yellow hues will turn out black and fine white details will not show up if much of the image is light.

◦ Avatars in all virtual worlds welcome. This is an ongoing project. There is no deadline.

◦ Send your uncropped image and info (avatar name, world or game, and location inworld) to:
evans(at)oakland(dot)com

Dekka Raymaker Ambrotype by Susan E. Evans

The ambrotype (from Greek ambrotos, "immortal") or amphitype is a photograph that creates a positive image on a sheet of glass using the wet plate collodion process. (Wikipedia)

We live in a time where more people are using the digital frontier to entertain, escape and connect. It used to be that the ambrotypist would travel the frontier in their wagons and photograph those living on the fringes of civilization. Nearly 160 years later, I travel the new frontier of online communities, photographing those paving the way. While the inhabitants of these non-physical communities and games do not go there physically, they are often able to manipulate and control their online incarnation: creating an abject presence of themselves. This project creates both a tangibility and history to the 'lives' of these inhabitants who, by design, do not know or have either. The ambrotype images make a tangible manifestation of the intangible persona while simultaneously showing the death of that moment.

-- Susan E. Evans (more)

Here's a great look at the hands-on process of wet plate photography as practiced by fine art photographer Sally Mann:

To see more ambrotypes of avatars made by Susan E. Evans look here

Homology

2010-06-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

9 June 2010

Virtual Art Performance filmed in Second Life®

Live performance as part of the Companionship mini-series: Selavy Oh with qiezli Hixantapo (Jeremy Owen Turner) at the Museo del Metaverso, Uqbar

"qiezli as abstract avatar consisting of colored geometric shapes and Selavy. 'Undressing' the avatars reveals the underlying human shape of both avatars. After being completely undressed, both avatars swapped shape and appearance and slowly dressed using 'clothes' and attachments of the other, thus becoming the other" (Selavy Oh)

Music "Rainsong 1.1" by Mack Gecko, performed by Scratchdaisy Trio

More info:

http://ohselavy.blogspot.com/2010/06/homology.html

http://www.museodelmetaverso.it/profiles/blogs/un-grande-grazie-a-chi-ha

http://viareggioartproject.blogspot.com/2010/05/eventi-collaterali-in-sl.html

http://www.myspace.com/mackgecko

Reposted: Newark is Watching open to RL this Saturday

2010-06-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

This is the final week of Brooklyn is Watching before it hands over the prims to Newark is Watching. evonne has posted this notice on the Newark is Watching blog. I think there's going to be a tower takeover event then but I don't actually know any details! Gallery Aferro will be showing Newark is Watching to the public in their New Media Room (link for event). Come if you can and help inaugurate the new space! Will there be chaos? Probably. Will there be someone at a party in an art gallery watching? YES!

On June 19th, from 7-10 PM EST, the RL public attending Gallery Aferro’s 2nd annual benefit party will be able to operate Monet and look around. Not sure what to expect, but there will be more people in the gallery than at almost any other time of year.

So if you want to say hello or watch as Monet staggers a bit, please do visit.

Visit the Newark is Watching blog

(crossposted)

Brooklyn is Watching: The new Amy Freelunch show 3: Exploding Selavy

2010-06-14T01:35:00.000-07:00

Sunday 13 June 2010: Amy breaks Brooklyn is Watching's simulated physics with her endlessly gushing Selavy Oh/Mosmax Hax pipeline art piece combining big bang scripting with Whitenoise freebies, discusses the art movement called Virtualism and how it could relate to several big pictures (info & info), and examines nerdy-funny robot art assembled with found objects by Cheyenne Palisades (who, by the way, has announced her candidacy for CEO of Linden Lab® here). Mab, who is definitely a nerd, has not had time to be inworld since last week so is illustrating this great Amy Freelunch podcast with an itty bitty slideshow made previously (above) and also a nice image (below) of a water skiing robot made by Cheyenne so you can squint your eyes and imagine seeing the things that Amy describes so well at Brooklyn is Watching.

Listen to the podcast here, or go to the SoundCloud page. The new podcast is currently in rotation on Soup radio inworld on the Soup sims. The radio is reset most days at 1PM SLT, which means that Amy's podcast can be heard at that time, as well as intermittently the rest of the hours. After a few days off, podcasts 1 & 2 will rejoin the playlist inworld again.

'Who Says Robots Can't Water Ski?' by Cheyenne Palisades

The new Amy Freelunch show, ep 3: Exploding Selavy by Amy Freelunch

Visit Brooklyn is Watching in Second Life® SLurl

(crossposted)

Brooklyn is Watching : Chance-Imagery #5

2010-06-04T15:32:00.000-07:00

Chance-Imagery #5 by Mab MacMoragh

29 May 2010

Virtual Artwork filmed in Second Life® at Brooklyn is Watching

Artists: Betty Tureaud, Dancoyote Antonelli, Gleman Jun, Glyph Graves, Kicca Igaly, Monroe Jigsaw, nessuno Myoo, Oberon Onmura, Solo Mornington, Werner Kurosawa

Music: 'I'd Like That' by XTC

xtcidearecords.co.uk

brooklyniswatching.com/
newark.iswatching.com/

::: Soup ::: Push

slurl.com/secondlife/Push/121/51/22

crossposted

Bill Viola: The Night Journey

2010-05-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

The Night Journey by Bill Viola, USC Game Innovation Lab (link)

Video artist Bill Viola is developing an experimental video game with USC Game Innovation Lab. The project has been in the works since 2005 and will be completed sometime this year. It's unknown whether the immersive artwork will be made available for home use, or will only be experienced in art settings and churches (link) (link).

BILL VIOLA
Ocean Without a Shore, 2007
3-channel High Definition Video/Sound Installation
Production stills
Photo: Kira Perov

Bill Viola's An Ocean Without a Shore Church of San Gallo, Venice 2007 Venice Biennale (more info)

BILL VIOLA
The Fall into Paradise, 2005
Video/sound installation
Screen size: 10.5 ft. X 14 ft. (320 cm x 427 cm)
9 minutes and 58 seconds
Photo: Kira Perov

All works of art, though visible, represent invisible things.

-- Bill Viola

BILL VIOLA
Old Oak (Study), 2005
Color High-Definition video
on LCD flat panel mounted on wall
14 x 24.8 x 3.5 in (35.5 x 63 x 8.9 cm)
30:16 minutes

"At certain points in the game, the screen goes black and the remote can no longer be used. "The idea that you have to relinquish control comes up in most spiritual traditions," says Viola, who is interested in the commonalities between Eastern and Western religions. With their power to direct the game removed, players can then sit back and watch "dreams" based on how they have moved through the game’s world up to that point. These dreams are created through a search engine, which compiles clips from Viola's archive of video work from the past 25 years. The visuals may be disconcerting (a dog lunging out of the darkness, a child walking alone) or beautiful. "The core of this world is dreams—not just the scary dream of being chased but dreams of ancient cultures," says Viola, who counts among his inspirations the writings of the Islamic mystic Rumi and the Greek philosopher Plotinus.

If players continue the game for long enough, their dream sequences acquire color and eventually carry them, along with a group of virtual people, through streams and toward a lighted pavilion. "It's like the transmigration of souls," says Viola, who shot the footage for that sequence when he and his wife and collaborator, Kira Perov, were looking at a nocturnal volcanic eruption in Hawaii."

-- Hilarie M. Sheets "Click Here for Enlightenment" ARTnews April 2010 (link)

BILL VIOLA
Pneuma, 1994/2009
14 x 20 x 20 feet (4.3 x 6.7 x 8.3 meters) room dimensions
Three channels black-and-white High-Definition video
projected into three corners of a darkened,
square space; three channels amplified sound
Continuous running

"The Night Journey is a video game/art project based on the universal story of an individual mystic's journey toward enlightenment.

Visual inspiration for The Night Journey is drawn from the prior works of Bill Viola. Narrative inspiration comes from the lives and writings of great historical figures including: Rumi, the 13th century Islamic poet and mystic; Ryokan, the 18th century Zen Buddhist poet; St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish mystic and poet; and Plotinus, the 3rd century philosopher. The interactive design attempts to evoke in the player's mind a sense of the archetypal journey of enlightenment through the "mechanics" of the game experience - i.e. the choices and actions of the player during the game.

The player's voyage through The Night Journey takes them through a poetic landscape, a space that has more reflective and spiritual qualities than geographical ones. The core mechanic in the game is the act of traveling and reflecting rather than reaching certain destinations - the trip along a path of enlightenment.

The game is being developed with video game technologies, but attempts to stretch the boundaries of what game experiences may communicate with its unique visual design, content and mechanics. The team has created a set of custom post-processing techniques for the 3D environment that evoke the sense of "explorable video," integrating the imagery of Bill Viola's prior work into the game world at both a technical and creative level."

-- USC Game Innovation Lab (link)

BILL VIOLA
Four Hands, 2001
Black-and-white video polyptych
on four LCD flat panels mounted on shelf
9 x 51 x 8 in (22.9 x 129.5 x 20.3 cm)
Continuous running

Until that moment my measure of success in art resided within the confines of exhibiting in museums, galleries and alternative art spaces. In Japan it was beginning to sink in that perhaps art resided in life itself, that as a practice it derives primarily from the quality of experience, depth of thought and devotion of the maker. Everything else, virtuosity with the materials, novelty of the idea or approach, innovation in craft or technique, skill of presentation, historical significance, importance of the venue, in short, almost everything I learned to value in art school - was secondary.

-- Bill Viola, interviewed in "The Light Enters You" by Shambhala Sun (link)

Bill Viola Artist's Talk on the occasion of LOVE/DEATH: The Tristan Project Tate Channel (link)

MP3–Bill Viola on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer (link)

Bill Viola on Wikipedia (link)

Bill Viola Website (link)

The Night Journey (link)

BILL VIOLA
Passage Into Night, 2005
Color high-definition video installation
47.6 X 28.5 inches
50 minutes and 14 seconds
Photo: Kira Perov

All still images from James Cohan Gallery (link)

~~~~~~

◦ Update: Interview with Bill Viola ARTPULSE Magazine April 2011

The new Amy Freelunch show 2: Originality in SL Art

2010-05-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

Betty Tureaud's Mountain of Colouers

As Arahan notes in his comment under the previous post, there's a new podcast from Amy! This time she discusses works by Betty Tureaud and Oberon Onmura both onsite and offsite Brooklyn is Watching.

The new Amy Freelunch show, episode 2: Originality in SL Art (direct link for download)

The new Amy Freelunch show, ep 2 by Amy Freelunch

Both of Amy's new episodes are currently playing in rotation on Soup Radio which can be heard 24/7 on the Soup sims (Push, Eryri and Magoo). This month Amy's shows come round about every three hours starting at 1PM SLT most days (when the radio is reset).

'Transition Zone' by Oberon Onmura from Mab MacMoragh on Vimeo.
15 May 2010

Virtual Art Filmed in Second Life® at Two Fish Sim
Hosted by Rose Borchovski
Appearances by Jo Ellsmere, Mab MacMoragh, and Pixel Reanimator
Music: Threnos by John Tavener
Performed by Natalie Clein

Visit Brooklyn is Watching in Second Life® (SLurl)

(crossposted)

Recycling Art

2010-05-16T05:51:00.000-07:00

What you see here is a tote bag, which previously was part of an artwork.
Really?

Previously, that is a couple of weeks ago in NYC, Amy Wilson showed a large-scale public art installation made of digital prints on vinyl at the construction site of the West Thames Park project. The original watercolor drawings can now be seen at BravinLee programs in the exhibition It takes time to turn a space around...

But now comes the twist: instead of simply stowing away the vinyls, Amy decided to use them for a new purpose: to turn them into a limited edition of carefully hand-crafted tote bags!

That means: what you see here is not just a tote bag that was previously an artwork. Much better, it is an artwork on its own made of recycled vinyl, part of a limited edition, printed but hand-crafted, a multiple but unique.

And the best: you can get one at Amy's shop!

The new Amy Freelunch show!

2010-05-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

Amy Freelunch at There's no bible in here? by Dekka Raymaker & Penumbra Carter, Soup Magoo

Amy's back with her radio show! She skates through Brooklyn/Newark is Watching to think about Penumbra Carter's Lighthouse and Rod Mandel's Koons appropriation in between feeding her dog treats and playing music.

Listen daily streamed through Soup Radio on the Soup sims inworld at 1PM SLT (and in rotation the rest of the day) or in your media player (link)

(crossposted)

Soup: Last Weekend for 'There's no bible in here?'

2010-05-08T03:49:00.000-07:00

Dekka Raymaker & Penumbra Carter's There's no bible in here?

Fair Warning! This is the last weekend to see this fantastic sim-wide exhibition. By Tuesday it will have vanished. Mab is working on a machinima to document the installation so that will be another chance to see a wee version of it later on this blog. But nothing can take the place of experiencing it for yourself! Go now before it's too late! Best seen at sunset or midnight. Sounds are an integral part of the artwork, and should be turned on and up. How to describe it? That's a hard question but it's sort of like an organic industrial fifties-feeling modern working factory simscape driven by an efficient steampunk system, a littered church, freebies that cost $L, mythological ornithology, denizens of the deep, and sublimated eros.

Oh, and also it's like this.

Field Trip: Marina Abramović's The Artist is Present

2010-05-06T11:27:00.000-07:00

Watch Marina Abramović's durational performance at MoMA on live video (must refresh and reclick page when stream times out) link

via Art Fag City link

Also: Ten Notes on Marina Abramović’s ‘The Artist is Present’ by Dan Fox (Frieze Magazine) link

Portrait Island: doppelgänger/ Art and Connectivity Panel Forum

2010-04-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

17 April 2010 doppelgänger Virtual Artwork filmed by Mab MacMoragh in Second Life® on Portrait Island

This video is an abbreviated look at doppelgänger, the virtual exhibition held by the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, on Portrait Island in Second Life® from 23 October 2009 to 23 April 2010. There are lots of texts in it that go by quickly, so the viewer is urged to pause the video as needed to read the various signs, notecards, web pages, and words incorporated into the artwork.

Artists:
Cao Fei (China Tracy)- iMirror, 2007 (China) (See iMirror in its entirety part 1 part 2 part 3
Patrick Lichty (Man Michinaga)- CodePortraits, 2009 (USA) (See all 12 keepsake videos)
Gazira Babeli- iGods, 2009 (Italy) (see National Portrait Gallery's iGods video)
Adam Nash (Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (Christo Kayo), Justin Clemens (Jack Shoreland)- Autoscopia, 2009 (Australia) (See National Portrait Gallery's Autoscopia video)
Andrew Burrell (Nonnatus Korhonen)- temporary self portrait in preparation for the singularity, 2009 (Australia) (See National Portrait Gallery's temporary self portrait video)

National Portrait Gallery:
Online manager- Gill Raymond (Portrait Watanabe)
Senior Curator- Michael Desmond (Portrait John)
Architect/SIM Designer- Greg More (Dynamo Zanetti)

Podcasts of Gillian Raymond discussing this exhibition with Greg More, Patrick Lichty, Andrew Burrell, and the trio of Adam Nash, Christopher Dodds, and Justin Clemons can be listened to on iTunes

~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~

Art and Connectivity: Cyberforum

In association with the doppelgänger exhibition, the National Portrait Gallery hosted a panel forum on 23 March to discuss notions of identity in the digital realm, the possibilities of art in a connected world and the role cultural institutions may play in this environment.

The guest speakers for the discussion were:
Christiane Paul, Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School, New York.
Melinda Rackham, Adjunct Professor at RMIT University and Emerging Artforms Curator at Subtle Net, Melbourne, Australia.
Michael Desmond, Senior Curator, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia.
Andrew Burrell SL: Nonnatus Korhonen
Patrick Lichty SL: Man Michinaga

The one hour streaming video of this event can be viewed in its entirety on the National Portrait Gallery website (link). Mab transcribed the talk, abridging and adjusting it a bit for reading as text.

Read the transcript after the jump.

Gillian Raymond: Hi everyone and welcome to the National Portrait Gallery's first online forum. I'm Gill Raymond; I'm the online manager here at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. I'd like to welcome the audience that has come along to listen to us here in Second Life and also the audiences that are listening to us via the stream on the National Portrait Gallery's website. That address is portrait.gov.au.

Late last year the Portrait Gallery launched the doppelgänger exhibition which is currently on display here on Portrait Island. For that show we invited five international media artists to produce work for the exhibition that examined notions and concepts of identity in the online environment.

A lot of the artists examined the idea of data as a conduit of identity so, for this particular panel discussion and the reason we brought this selection of people together, we were hoping to situate the doppelgänger exhibition whilst it won't be the focus of the talk, to actually situate the exhibition in a broader context of the history of digital art, and examining the role that cultural institutions might play in this environment. So we're extremely lucky to have with us today several of the artists who produced work for the exhibition.

Gillian Raymond: We have Patrick Lichty otherwise known as Man Michinaga, sitting over on the left hand side of me; Andrew Burrell, Nonnatus Korhonen; and we have three guest speakers, who between them have many years of experience curating, critically examining, exhibiting art, and in particular digital art. Christiane Paul, on my left, is the director of the media studies and graduate programs and associated professor of media studies at the New School in New York, as well as the adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum. So welcome Christiane! Thank you for coming.

Christiane Paul: You're welcome.

Gillian Raymond: We also have Melinda Rackham, who's the adjunct professor at RMIT University and Emerging Artforms Curator at subtle.net in Melbourne Australia. Thanks for coming Melinda!

(Melinda Rackham bows from her seat)

Melinda's lost her head today so we have a pair of eyeballs.

Melinda Rackham: I can still speak, so hi, great to be here.

Gillian Raymond: And last but not least we have Michael Desmond, whose avatar's name is Portrait John, and Michael is our senior curator here at the National Portrait Gallery in Australia. Thanks for coming, Michael.

Michael Desmond: Good morning everybody.

Gillian Raymond: Just to kick off, Christiane, I'm wondering if we might be able to start with a little bit of background to this thing that we're calling digital art. It seems to have various titles that have appeared over the last twenty years, you know labels are always difficult and I guess they're always applied to art-forms posthumously but I'm wondering if you might be able to start the discussion by giving us a very brief summary of dominant trends you've observed in the use of technology as medium for art.

Christiane Paul: I'm always careful when it comes to the idea of trends in art because art is obviously very difficult to nail down and that's the interesting part of it in the first place. And obviously digital art has had a long long history starting in the sixties with the first use of computers by artists and you can even basically describe or outline a longer history. When it comes to recent trends, again using the word carefully, I would say that social media in general have definitely had an enormous impact on artistic practice within the digital field, and by that I do not only mean Facebook or social media platforms but new forms of connectivity. And I think what has been developing in parallel is the idea of virtuality, experimentation in virtual worlds such as Second Life®, and at the same time more of a focus on embodiment with ubiquitous computing and mobile and locative media and platforms that use the physical environment as a canvas for creating artworks that are distributed via mobile devices and establish connectivity that way. And I think both the virtual and physical aspects of digital art have always been there and always developed in parallel, but I think it's becoming a bit more pronounced right now. I see that as a major development of the past few years, or in this new century.

Gillian Raymond: I think something that seems to be coming out of our discussions around digital art is this notion of how it might be changing concepts of place, concepts of display, concepts of audience, and I'm just wondering if any members of our guest speakers may have some comments to say about any of the changes that they may see in regards to those kinds of things as opposed to the way we've traditionally thought of art display in museums and galleries on white walls. Does anyone want to pick up some of those things?

Melinda Rackham: I think that people have always gathered together in places to see art and particularly I'm thinking of examples from the last few centuries such as exhibitions, expos, public architecture, public space, and I see Second Life and virtual worlds as just an extension of these. It's another place where we can go to create an effect, a feeling, a sensation, a sense of being, a sense of place ...

Patrick Lichty: One of the things I've always been interested in with a lot of these (I think with Christiane I loathe to say new spaces, I think I'd say different spaces) is that as I was emerging in the field one of the things that I thought was really exciting was the possibility to work extra-institutionally, be able to be in all these places that one could be seen in all sorts of different modes and by all sorts of different people and all sorts of different audiences simultaneously. I sort of started with doing web-based curation, also small guerilla new-media projects and then I've kept going in to doing work in virtual worlds. I think these are alternate audiences that are less obvious than the traditional institutional ones that give amazing opportunities for engagement and different forms of interaction with all sorts of different audiences. I think it's really exciting.

Christiane Paul: Picking up on what Patrick said, I would add that while there has been a multiplication of different forms of display and venues for distributing and showing this type of art, the art world, the traditional art world, has been behind a little bit and is not exploring all of these possibilities from virtual worlds to the internet when it comes to the display of art so I see a separation in two different worlds still, largely.

Michael Desmond: I find the whole idea of place very interesting in the sense that we have every place but at the same time that's clearly no place, and the main thing about art, I guess, is trying to find the place where you can see it, that you are exposed to art. That kind of authority is still important, I think, in terms of art galleries, that you'd know where to go, whereas otherwise where do you go? Where are the street signs? I'm trying to work out that idea of place, how important it is. I look at all of you guys there in front of me and clearly place is important – we're on Portrait Island which the National Portrait Gallery has set up so that you can find us … where do you find anything? There's so much stuff now. Where are the filters?

Michael Desmond: It was really that idea of the long tail that people are talking about that there's clearly lots of niches for interesting art to be made in different ways, and you don't necessarily need the mainstream. There's lots of different audiences which is what we've all been talking about. Each audience can find a different place to go. It's really just the wayfinding, I guess, that's the issue for me. How do you get around? Who is drawing up the maps? Is it just simply congregations like this one, but we interact and we talk to each other– is that how it works?

Christiane Paul: I think both the physical world and the online world just have different filters and ways of finding the places. Some people might have problems finding the gallery where the panel discussion is happening tonight and within the virtual world I've seen multiple announcements of this panel.

Melinda Rackham: It's really interesting that in spaces like the initial web and virtual worlds like Second Life that you can just wander around and come across artwork, that you actually don't have to go through an institutional gateway to find them, and I see that the institutional gateway is a way to bring newer audiences in who may not be wandering around anyway so that there's that dual function, there's the element of surprise and there's the element of excitement to go and see something that you've been directed towards.

Gillian Raymond: That's an interesting point Melinda, actually, because when I was researching for the doppelgänger exhibition, it occurred to me (and I am new inworld) but it did occur to me that there is a great democratization of the media, the very natural media that we're working in is accessible by everyone so there's a lot of people producing a lot of amazingly creative works in various different virtual platforms.

But I did also get the sense that there was this feeling or this search or this desire for the authority or the filtering or the curatorial input which traditionally physical museums and galleries have provided to the art market so I did get a sense that there was the feeling that perhaps something like that was lacking at present in the digital environment.

Christiane Paul: I wouldn't necessarily agree with that since there have been online curators and curators in virtual worlds since the existence of the medium. Probably not that many, but I think the curatorial perspective and the online galleries and institutions have always been developing in tandem with the art. Perhaps they're not known enough or not widely publicized enough but they're definitely there, I think.

Gillian Raymond: Oh, absolutely, and I came across some amazingly inspirational examples of that. Maybe it's just those connections to the traditional art markets – it's that connection that seems to be somehow missing between what's traditionally seen as art and the amazing stuff that's blossoming in these environments.

Christiane Paul: Definitely

Melinda Rackham: It's not as if virtual practice fits easily into museum practice either. Is there something to sell? It's a democratized space. Anyone can wander in. You can't charge an entry fee. You can't say well there's only ten people can come to Portrait Island. Perhaps you can say only 75 can come at once, limited to how many people can come onto the sim. But there is a sense that it doesn't fit into those established regimes.

Michael Desmond: I find it interesting too that maybe that authority is retrospective anyway. It's always after the event. One of my favorite photographs is of Picasso and a group of his friends sitting at the Cafe de la Rotonde in 1916. It's always been my wish to sit down and have a coffee with them, and listen in and hear what they're talking about, to find out about how art is changing at that particular moment in time.

But now that I'm looking out at all of you guys I'm thinking I'm actually at the Cafe se la Rotonde, only it's not 1916, it's 2010. You don't need the curator there to listen in and record. You don't need the authority there. The rules are being made, and maybe that's what is happening right now. Maybe that filter, that authority is always trailing, it's after the event rather than now.

Patrick Lichty: I'd like to go off of what Christiane has said in regards to the idea of the world of patronage and the world of independent new media, because [what] I think is really interesting here is how Gill and some others have framed the idea of what is seen in terms of the art market, and those of us who have been involved in new media for a number of years, like myself, understand that, yes, there is the museum world, there is the museum and gallery media ecology, but also on the other hand this is just a very small subsection of a larger panoply of places like festivals and screenings, and all these other places where I think new media has really developed much more than in the museum. This is something that really should be foregrounded a little bit and I think this is what's been exciting about places like Second Life and the Web, that you have development of all these different genres that have become more institutionally recognized, but on the other hand is, that I think, only to say that the things that become legitimate are framed in terms of the art market, I think, is really sort of a misnomer– and I'll duck my head for flying tomatoes in saying that.

Gillian Raymond: I guess the next question that I was going to follow on with was this notion of future trends or what you're actually observing in the creation of art at the moment, and what seems to be moving forward for artists creating work in digital spaces. I think Christiane mentioned the multiplicity of platforms that artists are working across. Is there this trend to involve lots of different platforms? The works in the doppelgänger exhibition, for example: some of them actually look at or critically analyze the world of art from inside the parameters of the Second Life display program. But then others sort of slip around and move in and out, and there's various different mixed reality aspects to these. Does anyone want to talk about the idea of this kind of mixed platform display?

Christiane Paul: Just briefly picking up on that I think you're absolutely right with this observation, and artists are more and more working across platforms– on the web, in Second Life, moving out into physical space, and that is something that ultimately is new to some extent. I mean, not that artists haven't crossed platforms in the past, but I think it's getting much more diversified. If you look at traditional art, you still have the painter, the photographer, and some of them may cross boundaries but the boundary crossing you see between display platforms and digital media is actually much much more prevalent, I would say.

Melinda Rackham: I really like the term "medium agnostic" that's being discussed at the moment whereas artists just do not care what medium they're using as long as they can create a sensation, a feeling, a place, get a message across, immerse people in their work; so that might go from meeting to electronic works to virtual works to augmented reality coming in and out of Second Life. It's pretty exciting and I love to see those old silos of work sort of intertwining and disappearing.

Patrick Lichty: As part of the performance art group I'm part of called Second Front this is something we've been very conscious of in regards to even just trying to communicate with people. Someone was talking about maybe only having 75 people online at one time. We've kind of taken a nod from people like Fluxus and Dada and whatnot and all sorts of different areas. If we can only have 20 people seeing a Second Front performance at any one time, in any one load, well why not have the performance and then have a derivative piece of media as a machinima or a video, or why not have a literary style blog, or why not have all these in prints and paintings and sculptures and whatnot, and not necessarily have one be documentation of the other– but another one be just another part of the constellation of all these other things, because we have considered things like Higgins's idea of Intermedia, and this is in many ways really just an extension of that ongoing evolution of media.

Gillian Raymond: I think Patrick's just touched on another interesting (and we have mentioned it briefly) concern that traditional museums and galleries have about digital art, and that is the fact it's extremely difficult to fit into our traditional idea of collecting and display. By its very nature, most of the digital art that we have is quite ephemeral and Patrick, you talk about the performances where maybe only twenty people would see, which is reminiscent of the sixties performance art. How do you see artists considering it even important to record their work, or to somehow counteract this ephemerality that is the very essence of a lot of the works? What do you see the trends emerging in that kind of sphere?

Christiane Paul: Just talking about some of the organizations that have been working on this– first of all I would say that there's something very dangerous about just trying to take this work out of its ephemeral nature. It is inherently ephemeral and I think recording is fine but there's also an aspect of life-ness that shouldn't be destroyed, and groups such as the Variable Media Network and many organizations around the world have actually been working on mechanisms for preservation or for creating documentation of this kind of work, be it through actual emulation and migration to other platforms, or just strategies for recording and documenting. But very few of these fit in with the traditional museum structures of preservation, so a lot of work still needs to be done on that end.

Michael Desmond: I find it interesting too, that whole notion of ephemeral. For me it conjures up Newton's Second Law, which is the notion of an equal and opposite reaction. I'm seeing, obviously lots of incredible works being made in the digital realm, but equally I'm seeing Chuck Close or Adam Fuss turning to daguerrotypes, an absolutely antique technology. I'm wondering why, why would you use such a slow archaic medium, and I'm thinking it's because it actually delivers an object, something that has a quasi-permanency. That low-fi option I think is also very attractive to people at the same time. Does that make sense?

Christiane Paul: Absolutely. I think that always goes hand in hand.

Melinda Rackham: I absolutely agree with you. The move back to more viscous medium is really quite interesting. But there's the sense that with the early Web, say 15 years ago, or with early virtual worlds, say 10 years ago when I was working in this space, there's a different sense, and a different aesthetic, and a different rhythm of the world– that you got because of the lag, because of the bandwidth, because of the state of computers. That can never be really recreated because of its time. Like the original digital prints with big splashes of dots on them. They're so fine now you can't recreate that texture, that specific texture of the early prints.

Michael Desmond: I guess you can't escape your own time. I think of those sword and sandal movies that are recreating second century Rome but you always see the wristwatch or their haircut or whatever that tells you it's from this period. I don't think you can do a daguerrotype, for example, now that doesn't look like it was made now. But the point wasn't that you're being nostalgic, I think you're doing something that makes sense in terms of today.

Melinda Rackham: And I guess a lot of that work has been lost, and can't ever be recreated as it was. I love that idea that you always know when a fake was made, you know, if it was painted in the 50s or the 20s or the 70s because of the X-Y effects from that era.

Patrick Lichty: Something that I'm actually doing in what they call "RL," is a lot of work using old video equipment and things like slow scan television and whatnot. You're doing very old looking pixelated work but nevertheless I realize it's using old equipment with a contemporary context, and I think people who are using old equipment are trying to make work within an old context. They realize that there's this disconnect between/within times, a disjuncture between contexts, and really sort of a more reflective gesture than a retro gesture, maybe.

Michael Desmond: Does that in fact draw attention to the medium itself? The antique equipment or …

Patrick Lichty: For me there's a certain aesthetic that I like by using some of this old equipment. I love history. So in looking at that, maybe it's just a personal exploration of some aspects of that history that gives added depth to the work that I'm making using newer media, a deeper level of understanding by putting my work within a greater historical context.

Melinda Rackham: I think there's that lovely thirty year lag as well, it's like a new generation discovers video art or a new generation discovers all the computer art and it's like, Wow! It seems new and exciting, and I've even heard young people say "Oh, video art has no history," or "Isn't this great! We've got glitch and static! Isn't it beautiful!"

Michael Desmond: The same thing operates in fashion doesn't it? Where your grandma's clothes are incredibly suave but your mum's are hideously unfashionable. Or maybe that has all compressed, maybe it's a five year lag now.

Patrick Lichty: I think my difference, though, is that I'm still using the same Atari 800 that I was using.

Gillian Raymond: Just touching on these kind of topics (and perhaps I'm wrong because I have only been operating in Second Life for a short amount of time), it seems to me that there's a real interest in re-introducing the notion of the object or some viscerality of the human body, and perhaps this also falls out of the fact that people are moving in and out of various different platforms. But I seem to have noticed a trend for people to actually try and focus on the body a lot more in these environments, and it probably has been across the history of digital art as well– re-introducing the notion of physicality into digital environments. Does anyone have anything to say about that?

Christiane Paul: I think you're absolutely right, and that has a long tradition. There always has been the aspect of embodiment that has been explored in all the different manifestations of digital art be it the object of the algorithmic drawing or embodiment within virtual worlds which has become a huge topic and we see the same again when it comes to locative media as I mentioned before. And obviously worlds such as Second Life® offer a whole new set of options when it comes to these aspects of embodiments compared to the early graphic chat rooms and two dimensional displays. I think the development of the world itself is crucial to that and a lot of the success of Second Life® has had to do with its economics and economic structures that create a kind of placement and context for notions of embodiment, for better or worse I mean- there's a lot to be critiqued here. But I think embodiment and emphasis on physicality have been a narrative that has moved more to the foreground again right now.

Gillian Raymond: Concepts of identity along with that as well, so rather than just the embodiment but also the notion of how much we show or otherwise avow very diverse aspects of our personality, um, non-scented identities, and the fact that different aspects of those get to have different lives in the digital environment I think is something that was quite central to the idea of the doppelgänger exhibition.

Melinda Rackham: It's an area that was explored really well in the early days of chat-rooms, artists like vns matrix. There's a lot of cyber-feminist art done in the early nineties on the idea of identity: Sandy Stone was fluid identity. Then it sort of disappeared for a little while and it's coming back again. What I do find really interesting is that we portray ourselves in ways that are very familiar- that we have the opportunity in virtual worlds to be absolutely anything we want to be and yet we usually look somewhat similar to our physical bodies. And I know this is cultural, some cultures take it up more than others. But, yeah, we're very catholic in a way.

Michael Desmond: In that sense, is the digital world always simply an echo of the real world?

Andrew Burrell: I think it's not an echo of the real world, it is part of the real world, it is an extension of...

Michael Desmond: You're suggesting that notion of a mind-body dichotomy didn't ever really exist– it's simply a convenience and this might be similar.

Andrew Burrell: Yes.

Michael Desmond: Okay, that makes sense. I don't think they're exclusive. I was really just curious in terms of the familiarity. Is that simply then a communication device? That you need to know some of the language to understand it?

Andrew Burrell: Well, on the embodiment thing and the separation of the body– the avatar, for me, still has its own personal space. I feel uncomfortable if my avatar is encroached upon its physical space. So in saying what I just said, there's also the opposite way, the actual feelings still exist despite the fact that I know that they shouldn't, you know?

Gillian Raymond: I completely agree with you there, Andrew.

Melinda Rackham: I'm uncomfortable if someone touches my car as well. So I think it's just any sort of body extension in the world. It's like that lovely sense if I touch someone's avatar who I'm quite attracted to I can feel the hairs on my avatar's arm touch their hair.

Patrick Lichty: Nice. You know, two things– is that on one hand, I think in our exploration of performance art in Second Front– it is an entirely embodied art. The one thing that we really really found amazing was that when we went into virtual worlds we found that there was so much response yet. And this is the thing that we were really amazed at: that there was affect left when you took the body and removed the body from it, there was still an identification with the avatar. If you had cartoons of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, redoing Burden's Shoot, you'd still flinch when Bugs was going to shoot Daffy. And if it's just a straight semiotic relationship, there's still research that shows that we still identify with these representations. We do have real feelings. On the other hand, as to representation, one thing that I've always felt about going into virtual worlds, it isn't nevertheless a re-presentation, I think it's really more aptly put, maybe, a translation because as we've done all sorts of work in here I've found that there have been more or less subtle distortions of both… objective reality which I think are really some of the things that are quite interesting about working in these virtual worlds as ironies and distortions and wonderful things like that.

Christiane Paul: And the possibilities and aesthetics of the world also to a large extent determine what kind of identities are being created or embodiments for that matter. I think Second Life is actually far more conventional in its representation if we look at all of our avatars than previous graphic worlds have been where people would show up as objects, as weird symbolic representations, while Second Life is fairly close to the physicality of real life.

Michael Desmond: I think you'd almost expect that in the sense that 'why do people go to Second Life?' They do it to have a Second Life I guess. Sorry, that's a cliche. But you know what I mean. If you're going to World of Warcraft or something, you're fitted up for what you do there, namely killing, casting spells, whatever, whereas, in Second Life it is to talk to people, it's to have a relationship that you perhaps don't have in your ordinary life. So in that sense, it makes a lot of sense that there is such an emphasis on good looks, on charm, on being striking. The thing that surprises me about Second Life is how exclusively visual it is. And in fact, all the things you buy, the whole economy is based on visual things that you can buy – genitalia or clothes or land, they're all status symbols to make you look good, you know. It's quite fascinating. So it doesn't surprise me that we all look quite conventional. Who wants to look ugly, unless it's for a point?

Melinda Rackham: Oh, I rather like looking ugly on occasions. It actually makes you a renegade inworld.

Christiane Paul: There's a difference between interesting and ugly.

(laughter)

Patrick Lichty: Yeah, you're right, yeah.

Gillian Raymond: I'm wondering if, while we're on the topic of identity, if perhaps Andrew and Patrick might just like to reflect on the works that they produced for the doppelgänger exhibition? Andrew, would you like to just give us a little brief rundown on your work, which everyone can see over to the side, beside us?

Andrew Burrell: Without going over a lot of the stuff that you can read, in many respects it's looking at the idea of the notion of self as narrative that is created from fragments and the idea that we as individuals spend much of our time putting together our own personal narrative to create this sense of self from so many fragmentary parts. What it is that we use to choose these parts is sort of not so relevant in this particular work. It's something I'm very interested in but not coming across in this work as such. I'm looking at the notion of the real and the imagined in the case of memory, which is sort of what's going on in this work, a whole lot of stored memories, some of them made up, some of them imagined, some of them real that have actually happened to me in my life, and putting these together in new orders to create new ways of putting together this narrative that describes myself, which is pretty much what's going on up there. If you go and experience the narratives that are dropping out, all the little creatures, they are fragmentary and they are being recreated in this system outside myself.

Gillian Raymond: Thank you. And Patrick I think you touched on the fact that your work that you've created for this does actually have that affect element that you were talking about earlier in terms of what you feel about the engagement with other people in your work and your friendships in Second Life?

Patrick Lichty: Right, right, it's that the Code Portraits that I have here are almost sort of a little bit of a diary of some of the people that I've met through Second Life and built friendships with. The idea with it is that in real life I've done a lot of work that have had to do with codes as proxies for many other things, identity, subversion, many other things.

Gillian Raymond: That's great. Does any of the panel have anything else that they'd like to add to any of those topics before we throw open to questions from our lovely audience here?

Christiane Paul: I think we're ready to open for questions from the audience probably?

Gillian Raymond: Greg, does anyone have any questions that they'd like to ask of our experts?

Greg More: We're still waiting for our questions to come in so the panel might want to discuss things further and I'll get the questions across as soon as they come through.

Andrew Burrell: Maybe just going back to the point of the ephemerality of this work is something that's also quite interesting to me. Something that I wonder has all art in history been ephemeral and it's the cultural choices that curators, collectors, restorers, etc., make that stops art being ephemeral. The Sistine Chapel would be a crumbling mess if it wasn't for a cultural choice to keep it, which goes for so much, I mean, probably there's some bronzes that would still be here if they, whatever, but, is it something that's particularly new to this media?

Christiane Paul: I think it is. I think it is. You're absolutely right that all art is ephemeral and every conservator will point to the problems that any painting or object poses. But I think digital media in general are so modular and performative and generative, I mean, when it comes to a piece of software art you may not ever experience the piece the same way again. So what would be necessary here is really a documentation of process, and I think that goes for many digital artworks, and particularly the performative ones. Which raises the question, you know: Should we actually document every aspect of them or do we also need to let go at a certain point?

Michael Desmond: I think in a lot of ways letting go is a very good thing, in that sense. Let the future make its choices. Let's enjoy today and then if someone deems it worthy to save the Sistine Chapel they will. I guess the point being made is how vulnerable digital media is, that it doesn't last a hundred years, with neglect, and then someone revives it. It is hugely vulnerable. It can disappear overnight.

Christiane Paul: One of the problems I have with this is that, as we have noticed, traditional art institutions do not currently put a lot of effort into preserving this type of work and are not really committed to it. And I'm always wondering what does it mean for the history of art if the work that is currently being created in all those media we're talking about is ultimately dropping out. It's part of a history that is never recorded and that is never put in context and connection to other forms of media, and I think that would be rather sad.

Melinda Rackham: Absolutely, Christiane, and it's the really early pioneering work that's already disappeared. That's really disturbing.

Gillian Raymond: I find it interesting in the case of new media art for example, that traditional galleries and museums have sort of solved that problem by using video screens almost as though they're kind of framed paintings on a wall, for example. So those kind of solutions are obviously not going to work in this particular case, but it's been interesting to watch the ways in which the traditional art market and museums and galleries try to mold particular art forms. I'm also thinking of Australian indigenous artworks whereby they are displayed on walls rather than flat on the ground where they were traditionally created.

Greg More: I can jump in here. We've got a question/slash/observation from the audience, from Pyewacket, about there seems to be a kind of closed old school attitude to what an artist is, and it seems you need to have, I guess, a degree or a PhD to have status, and he was just wondering if the panel has any thoughts about that.

Michael Desmond: I think that that idea of a PhD or a qualification has disappeared with place, absolutely, that these days anybody can submit a work, anonymously if they choose, or you try to create your own effort – there's so many, the difficulty is not that you can't do it, it's just that there's so much competition. I mentioned before that the idea of the long tail and lots of niches means that anyone can make a work of art. The question is really one of quality. How can you separate the wheat from the chaff if there is so much out there? I think the PhD is irrelevant. The determiner is quality really, and maybe it's the consensus thing that determines quality these days. Maybe that's what's changed, that you don't have the single institution, you know MOMA doesn't decide any more, it's much more a group of bloggers or a consensual side of things. It's the social network kicking in to accept or decline.

Christiane Paul: I'm not so sure if that's actually true. I think those old structures still exist very much and are more important and developed than they should be. Obviously it's not the PhD that determines the quality of an artwork but I see it happening all the time when I commission work for the Whitney Artport website, for example, that artists are really keen on the name and having that kind of brand attached to their name, being able to put that kind of museum on their resume. To them it still counts a lot and unfortunately it still counts a lot in the art world. So I can't say that I believe we have switched to this democratic consensus model. Maybe within our own virtual world but definitely not in relation to the art world.

Melinda Rackham: And there's an issue of resources here as well in the way that we do fund and commission artworks in the world. Obviously somebody who is a better writer, is better at presenting a concept, is more likely to be commissioned to make the work rather than someone who's making fabulous work but is not a publicist. There aren't a lot of media art or virtual art gallerists out there going out selling their artists, doing that traditional work that was once done, that is done in other art arenas by professionals in the field.

Michael Desmond: I think in the real art world it's a consensual thing as well. I don't think that a particular artwork has a huge intrinsic value. It's simply that you get enough people to want it. It's based on, I guess, the number of people that want it that determines the value. If we all agree the Mona Lisa is fantastic, and we didn't until recently anyway, it has greater or lesser value depending on that. If we agree on this group of artists being the ones, then they are. And that can change. I know I mentioned the Mona Lisa – it was a very minor Renaissance painting until 1900, thereabouts, when it took on a certain celebrity that had to do with, well for a start, the theft, but other things as well. So things go in and out of fashion. Things accrue or lose value, and it is very much a consensual thing. It's simply that there's a lot more voters now and it's certainly easier to vote. So no need for a PhD. You just need to have a clique, a group, someone to advance your cause. You know, the writers were mentioned, a good writer makes a big difference, the endorsement of the gallery makes a difference. To be collected by MOMA or Versaces, or Charles Saatchi, makes a big difference, because then other people start to listen. It's not always the quality of the work itself, or the PhD or the artist, or. I think it's still consensual, simply a different system.

Christiane Paul: Definitely. I'm not sure how we came up with the PhD in the first place but I don't think that counts for so much when it comes to the art world per se. Certainly in academia but not within museum culture.

Michael Desmond: It's important in getting a job, in an art school or university.

Christiane Paul: Definitely.

Patrick Lichty: That's exactly it. That's the reason why I went and I got an advanced degree – because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to get a tenure track position without it.

Gillian Raymond: I have a question from Glyph Graves in the audience who asks, does the panel have any ideas how to recreate the body/avatar identification experience that is so important in interactive immersive art. This is something that machinima can't convey and I think it's integral to virtual worlds. Does anyone want to take up any of those ideas?

Christiane Paul: Well, it's a very interesting question and that is actually something that in my opinion cannot be recreated and it's very hard to capture. The same would be true of any kind of performance and the relationships you build within a performance, with the audience, with the performer. Ultimately that's something that is impossible to capture, I think, but makes this work so intriguing.

Melinda Rackham: I think it's a matter of technology and technique. We've seen lots of films like Kathryn Bigelow's millenium film where you put on a headset and you are in the experience, um works like, there was a whole body machine at some point, where parts of your body were stimulated according to what was happening in the world, in the virtual space you were in, or communicating with another person. And I think a lot of people are working on this in areas of wearable art, and of course that will start to get plugged into virtual spaces quite soon.

Christiane Paul: Yeah, that's actually not what I meant. I completely agree with you. But when it comes to basically the recording of the personal experience, I mean the experience itself cannot be re-created for you. It still remains in the moment.

Michael Desmond: That's certainly true but equally I'm thinking of the world of literature where you can experience things, you could be told to experience things, and the technology is indescribably crude – it's simply the written word. Yet you can empathize. You can have that huge empathy with the author of various passions. We were talking about the other worlds being an extension of this world. It seems to me that the world of literature offers that opportunity. It's like a phantom limb. You can feel it even though it's clearly not real. You can be swayed by the spoken word, the written word, just as much and genuinely feel it. I find that quite astonishing.

Patrick Lichty: Maybe this is a simple point, but it's just the idea of saying that maybe there's something to the form that you take as an avatar. Maybe it's the reason why I take Cicciolina or whether I take the kind of the Byron-esque, sort of, character. It has a great deal to do with experience. I think it's really strange how much we really are impacted by the form of the avatar. You know, say for example I have a certain affect for Portrait's avatar you know, and for Nonnatus, and Pyewacket, and all these people. This is how I know them.

Melinda Rackham: Yeah, years ago I was making avatars that were biological machine constructions, so they were operating on a cellular level. And it was really quite interesting to watch how people chose these avatars and which avatars were more popular, and which ones people identified with the most. Mostly cuteness was a factor in that.

Gillian Raymond: We probably have time for one more question from the audience. Does anyone want to throw anything at our panel? Not rotten tomatoes either?

(laughter)

Patrick Lichty: Thank you

Gillian Raymond: No questions?

Melinda Rackham: Someone wanted to know what happened to my head. I logged in today and, um, I had a female body last night, and I did have a head last night but this morning I have just eyes, and a male body. So I'm not quite sure what happened, perhaps I picked up a disease yesterday. But I quite like the look so I'll keep it for a while.

Michael Desmond: I thought it was a very cool Anne Boleyn type of look. Great!

Gillian Raymond: Michael, we did have one question from Pyewacket asking will the Portrait Gallery become more interactive artistically. Did you want to mention your Present Tense exhibition that you're working on at the moment?

Michael Desmond: It seems indescribably retro after this conversation. The exhibition starts on the 21st of May. It's very much in the physical realm and that in part is because I am consciously catering to our audience. It has to be an exhibition that you can actually walk into and feel that the experience of the space it's in is just as important as the works themselves. This is a group of works, and when you're putting together an exhibition it's not just assembling a cast of stars or picking individual things that are strong. So I am in fact looking at a range of things. I mentioned Chuck Close daguerrotypes earlier simply because I have included those in the exhibition. And there's a lovely work by Stelarc of course, who's standing in front of us, that is also terrific, and in a sense quite the opposite in a lot of ways. The exhibition is really just scanning what's out there rather than trying to be an authority. So it's a nice thing. It will be on our web site pretty soon.

Melinda Rackham: How long will Portrait Island stay here or the doppelgänger exhibition stay available to the public?

Gillian Raymond: The doppelgänger Exhibition will come down on the 23rd of April and we have plans to keep Portrait Island as another display space for the Portrait Gallery and so to work with artists who are working with digital and virtual art, and concepts of identity. So we will hope to keep that display space going for as long as we can.

Melinda Rackham: Great!

Gillian Raymond: I would like to wrap by thanking the panel. I really appreciate the discussion that you guys have had and the time that you've given to us today! Everyone join me in a virtual clap for Melinda, Michael, Christiane, Patrick and Andrew! Thank you so much for that. And if anyone would like to have any more information about the doppelgänger exhibition, you can go to portrait.gov.au/doppelganger or you can contact me [Portrait Watanabe] inworld. Thank you everyone, for coming.

Christiane Paul: Thanks so much! Thanks for inviting us.

Audience: Applause!

View the video of this event on the National Portrait Gallery's website

'Entropy' by Glyph Graves

2010-04-24T00:52:00.000-07:00

17 April 2010

~~Sorry I don't have a SLurl to this yet, but I think it's part of the 'Through the Virtual Looking Glass' exhibition.~~ You can read about that and see a longer video made by Nettrice Gaskins of this installation (link)

Update: Apparently, although Nettrice says the installation is for 'Through the Virtual Looking Glass', it's actually a part of Bryn Oh's project for the World Expo Shanghai 2010 'Open This End'

brynoh.blogspot.com/2010/04/word-expo-shanghai-2010.html

The SLurl is:

slurl.com/secondlife/Utopia02/143/96/24

My apologies for the confusion!

Music: loop sourced from 'Where Bluebirds Fly' by Radiohead (link)

Dreams and Virtual Ability Inc: Opening Doors to New Worlds

2010-04-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

2010 Autism Experience 3, "Opening Doors to New Worlds"
Music Events and Art Auction benefitting Virtual Abilities Inc and the Dreams SIMs

EVENT LISTINGS:

______

MAIN EVENT:

SUNDAY APRIL 25 ART AUCTION AND MUSIC 11AM - 5PM SLT
Location: Fashionista Island, Ampitheatre

AUCTION OF 2D ART, SCULPTURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Donations from over 35 amazing SL artists
All proceeds to VAI and Dreams!

Celebration concerts:

3PM SLT .. Cylindrian Rutabaga
4PM SLT Somerset Oh & Rhode

Fashionista Auction site: (SLurl)

______

(1) CONCERT - Friday April 23, 5, 6 and 7AM SLT

Location: The Colour Factory
Benefit concert musicians:

5AM SLT - Dominick Manatiso
6AM SLT - Somerset Oh & Rhode aka SOAR
7AM SLT - Jon Bazar

Donation jars for VAI and Dreams near the stage during this concert event :)
Special opal jewelery by RebelMum Slade available during the event all proceeds to VAI and Dreams

Norwegian Forest (SLurl)

______

(2) ART PREVIEW - Friday - Sunday Morning

Location: Fashionista Island, Moslp and Ampitheatre

A preview of the art donated to the Autism Experience 3 auction - for your viewing pleasure -

Please note which pieces you may wish to bid on at Sunday's auction. A notecard to supplement this event card, noting the donating artists will be available at the preview; more details to come!

Museum of SL Photography (SLurl)

______

(3) CONCERTS: SUNDAY APRIL 25 - A SHOWCASE OF AUSTRALIAN MUSIC in tribute to ANZAC day

(tip jars for VAI and Dreams available for donations thru out the concerts)

LOCATION: The Gerswhin Room

Venue owners Benethar Fluffball and Bundy Zue have planned a concert in remembrance of ANZAC day. Anzac Day is a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand, and is commemorated by both countries on 25 April every year to honour members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) who fought at Gallipoli in Turkey during World War I.

They have graciously allowed the Autism Experience 3 to be a part of this event - donation jars available throughout the concerts

1:00AM SLT - OhMy Kidd
2:00AM SLT - Rara Destiny
3:00AM SLT - The Lohners
4:00AM SLT - Tpenta Vanalten
5:00AM SLT - Soar

B&B's Music Park (SLurl)

With many thanks to the artists and musicians and each of you who support compassion, understanding, information and acceptance and the work of VAI and Dreams.

With most sincere thanks,
Mariposa Upshaw, Curator

(crossposted)

art:21- Call + Response: Collaborative Art in Virtual 3D Worlds

2010-04-19T21:04:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn is Watching/Lovers Lane Studios and SLon des Refuses artists Misprint Thursday, Sowa Mai, Oberon Onmura, Cinco Pizzicato, Solo Mornington, Selavy Oh, and Azdel Slade (among other great SL® virtual artists) are featured by Nettrice Gaskins on today's art:21 blog. It's the third piece in two weeks to focus on virtual art!

Art production in virtual 3D worlds brings together people with different knowledge and skills.

First Podcast: Newark is Watching - Getting to Know You

2010-04-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

NIW getting put together: photo via Brooklyn is Watching on Flickr (link)

The inaugural Newark is Watching podcast from Gallery Aferro is here (link)

And now for something completely different*

2010-04-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

*with apologies to Monty Python

~~~~~~~

New Terms of Service? What do they mean to artists? Does anyone really know? No. Does anyone have a clue? Yes.

The new Second Life TOS (Terms of Service), to be effective 30 April 2010, were discussed at length by Robert Bloomfield and Joshua Fairfield (legal expert and virtual world analyst) on the 100th episode of Metanomics (14 April 2010). If you have any creative investment and future plans at all in Second Life®, it's well worth the time it takes to listen to them talk on the archived stream (about an hour). Snapshots and machinima are addressed roughly 1/3 of the way through (about 17:00 into the video) and on page 5 of the transcript.

Watch video: link

View transcript: link

Roland Legrand succinctly summarizes the show on MixedRealities: link

"The internet is not a typewriter and you will be a licensee rather than an owner."

Arahan Claveau has posted the new TOS in its entirety here: link

The Official Second Life® Blog does not seem to address the new TOS, but it can be found on their corporate page here, along with links to other policies and guidelines: link

Update: Mab couldn't find it but Ina Centaur has provided the location where M Linden summarizes the new TOS in the Community Blog, with links to the FAQ and the Discussion Thread (warning- it's like a sausage factory): link

(crossposted)

art:21-code as concept and responsive art

2010-04-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

Second guest blog-post by Nettrice Gaskins on virtual art this week on the fantastic art:21 blog! Viva!

Selavy Oh and Glyph Graves, both part of the Brooklyn is Watching 30 Best and Final Five last year (and both Lovers Lane Studios artists), are prominently featured in today's blog post by Nettrice Gaskins, along with Brooklyn is Watching SLon des Refuses (and Lovers Lane Studios artists) Sowa Mai and Banrion Constantine.

Second Life® virtual medium artists Wizard Gynoid, Opensource Obscure, AM Radio, and theorist Georg Janick (Gary Zabel) are also mentioned.

Using scripts, artists can transform objects into virtual robots inhabited by software agents that work behind the scenes while human-driven avatars interact or become immersed in the art.

art:21 blog- Nettrice Gaskins "Responsive Art & Evolving Artificiality in Virtual Worlds"

read more (link)

~~~~~~

About Art21:

Art21 was founded in 1997 with the mission to increase knowledge of contemporary art, ignite discussion, and inspire creative thinking by using diverse media to present contemporary artists at work and in their own words.

Art21 produces the Peabody-winning PBS series Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century, as well as books, internet-based resources, and public programs. What makes Art21 a bold new endeavor is not only the caliber of the artists featured, but the media in which they are presented. The accessibility of television and the Internet makes it possible to reach an extremely large audience.

read more (link)

~~~~~~

Full episodes of art:21 on PBS can be viewed here (link)

(crossposted)

art:21- Bridging worlds

2010-04-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

Virtual art in real life and virtual 3D worlds explores the parallel between visceral and mechanical systems.

art:21 blog- Nettrice Gaskins "Participatory Culture & Social Capital in Virtual Art" link

(crossposted)

7 April 2010 Brooklyn is Watching : with Monet Destiny

2010-04-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

7. Brooklyn is Watching: with Monet Destiny from Mab MacMoragh on Vimeo.
7 April 2010

Virtual Artwork filmed in Second Life® at Brooklyn is Watching

Featuring ménage à trois by Selavy Oh

Artworks shown by: Banrion Constantine, Betty Tureaud, Oberon Onmura, Selavy Oh, Sowa Mai

Avatar appearances by Allegory Ordinary (bot), Identity Absent (bot), Imaginary Difference (bot), Mab MacMoragh, Monet Destiny, Oberon Onmura, Solo Mornington

Brooklyn is Watching's Jay Newt (Jay Van Buren in Real Life) took part in a podpourri on the theme of 2.0 Digital Love at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn.

Galapagos Art Space

See previous post

Jay only had a few minutes to present the Second Life® SIM to the Real Life audience steering through the eyeball avatar of Monet Destiny. Afterwards Monet was left with the poetry-bots of Selavy Oh, reciting lines from Charles Baudelaire's volume of French poetry, Les Fleurs du mal. Their recitations were intermingled with an interventionist text-bot by Sowa Mai and Banrion Constantine, from which green lines of prepared chat appeared to come from and to be about locally identified avatars. All this text dialog was interspersed with the improvised natterings of Mab MacMoragh, Oberon Onmura, and Solo Mornington. If Mab had been using the new Second Life® Viewer 2 with its shared media capabilities, the machinima would have shown the chat text generated from these three sources scrolling in real time on the walls inside the white box.

Brooklyn is Watching

Visit Brooklyn is Watching in Second Life®: (SLurl)

(crossposted)

Nathaniel Stern: Given Time

2010-03-18T00:56:00.000-07:00

Given Time: a permanent, networked installation by Nathaniel Stern from nathaniel stern on Vimeo.

Given Time simultaneously activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, gazing into one another’s interface. Viewers encounter this networked partnership as a diptych of large-scale and facing video projections in a real world gallery, both exhibiting a live view of one avatar, as perceived by the other. To create a visceral aesthetic, these custom-designed and life-sized "bodies" are hand-drawn in subtly animated charcoal, graphite and pastel. The audience is invited to physically walk between them; they’re able to hear and see them breathing, witness their hair blowing in the wind, pick up faint sounds such as rushing water or birds crying out from the surrounding simulated environment. Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.

nathaniel stern (link)

Field trip: Whitney Biennial 2010 with Mark and James and Paddy

2010-03-07T20:25:00.000-08:00

A wander-through in fine company with Mark! His thoughts: (link)

Videos from James Kalm, part 1 of 3

James Kalm, part 2 of 3

James Kalm, part 3 of 3

~~~~~~

Paddy Johnson is a must-read in L Magazine:

This year, the stars finally aligned for The Whitney: this biennial is good. Spread over just three floors of the museum—the number of artists this year was reduced from 81 in 2008 to 55—the exhibition succeeds at least in part because it doesn't place impossible demands upon its viewers. (Read more)

Random related goodness: The Bruce High Quality Foundation (link)

Update: John Perreault looks back, looks ahead, looks around, goes on vacation, and comes up with six artworks worth looking at (link)

Sowa Mai: Field of Voices

2010-03-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

Lovers Lane Studios artist Sowa Mai has been developing an SL/RL project for Aequitas in collaboration with Caerleon. He needs your voice! Or a sound file from you (whistling? humming? musical instrument?)! Be creative! Be a part of the Field of Voices! It's easy! Do it today! Your voice will be heard in the virtual world of Second Life® as well as in 6 countries around the world! Exhibition opens April 2010!

More info here!

Field of Voices (link)

(crossposted)

Field Trip: Duchamp and taste (Discs and perfume)

2010-02-16T18:28:00.000-08:00

I consider taste–good or bad–the greatest enemy of art.

-- Marcel Duchamp

Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette [Beautiful Breath: Veil Water], 1921 (link)

Field trip: Erwin Wurm

2010-02-13T06:11:00.000-08:00

The artist as pickled cucumber. This self-portrait, shown in his recent solo-exhibition, says a lot about the artistic strategy of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. Whether his famous one-minute sculptures, almost immaterial work between sculpture and performance requiring the visitor to follow the artist's detailed instructions, or his deformed cars and bodies: everything's equipped with Wurm's acid sense of humour.
The show is travelling to Bonn, Vienna, Bejing, etc.

Picture: Anger bump, 2007, acrylic, cloth, 156x80x47 cm
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München
Foto: Erwin Wurm / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Brooklyn is Watching blog is down up!

2010-02-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

The official Brooklyn is Watching blog is undergoing renovation and repairs so it's currently down. It will come back all shiny and new. In the meantime, Jay Newt will be twittering updates on its status here. Big news coming in March!

Jay Newt on Twitter (link)

Update: It's back up!

http://brooklyniswatching.com/

(crossposted)

Brooklyn is Watching: Off Sim by Werner Kurosawa- machinima by Mab

2010-02-05T05:25:00.000-08:00

This is Mab's second attempt at Second Life® machinima (her first attempt, Selavy Oh's State of Formation, is still in bits and pieces).

Werner Kurosawa's Off Sim provides a way for Mab and Nebulosus Severine to sit together outside the SIM and contemplate the rotating ephemeral conceptual artscape created by artists on the Brooklyn is Watching SIM at Soup:Push, where anyone can build a temporary installation, art is in constant transformation, and the real art lies in the way the works appear and disappear as the artists collaborate (knowingly or unknowingly) changing the meaning of the immersive space over time much like the game Exquisite Corpse played by the early Surrealist artists.

Familiarities arise and themes emerge, growing and playing off each other as happens in the music used here, a fragment of Bach's Aria from the Goldberg Variations, performed by multimedia enthusiast and artist Glenn Gould in 1981.

www.glenngould.com
www.glenngould.ca

Brooklyn is Watching

(Teleport to Brooklyn is Watching at Soup:Push, walk to the platform in front of the big blue watchtower, sit on the seats you'll find there, and voila, you are orbiting the sim at 512 meters outside it! More than one person at a time can go!)

(crossposted)

Save Oz

2010-01-26T22:20:00.000-08:00

Adam Ramona, Christo Kayo & Jack Shoreland's Autoscopia National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, second Online Exhibition: doppelgänger on Portrait Island (Slurl) (link)

quadrapop Lane, Jayjay Zifanwe, & Mab in quadrapop lane's The Future at University of Western Australia in SL® (SLurl) (link)

Lovers Lane Studios artist Glyph Graves' Strangers Also Dance IBM2 (link)

Where would the fine arts be in new media without Australians?

Please take a look at Moggs Oceanlane's post on the Australian grassroots anti-censorship campaign and consider helping to spread the word, if you can. Thanks!

Support Aussies in the latest anti-censorship campaign - slow broad band and filtered content is coming… (link) (click the red x to close the blackout overlay page so you can see her blog, the overlay only appears once)

More news at the Australian-based Metaverse Journal (link)

A brilliant machinima by Sophia Yates of the University of Western Australia (UWA)'s presence in Second Life® (link)

The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow: I know that it's all a state of mind (live in SL)

2010-01-21T01:13:00.000-08:00

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG have been asked by Marina Abramović to take part in her project The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow, a live laboratory symposium with durational performance works. They will enact simultaneous Synthetic Performances in person and via their avatars in Second Life® at East of Odyssey (SLurl)

~~~~~~

via Helfe Ihnen:

"...Mattes perform 4 days in a row on East of Odyssey and live in Plymouth, GB with their program "I know that it's all a state of mind", a mixture from older and new performances. Jan 21 to 24, 2010." (see poster for schedule - link)

~~~~~~

Plymouth Arts Centre (U.K.):
The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow
Live Laboratory Symposium and Performances
The Slaughterhouse, Royal William Yard
21-24 January 2010
(Schedule, brochure and podcast - link)

~~~~~~

From the Brochure Introduction, Paula Orrell, Curator, Plymouth Arts Centre:

Plymouth Arts Centre presents The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow, a curatorial collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art. The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow will stage, document and discuss groundbreaking international performance art in order to examine and sustain the future of the medium. The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow takes place over three days at Royal William Yard with performances by six renowned artists and artist-collectives. It is the first in a series of major offsite projects by Plymouth Arts Centre and the first curatorial project of the Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art.

Marina Abramović has, over four decades and on an international scale, pioneered performance as a visual art form. In advance of Marina Abramović’s major retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in March 2010, these performances, live laboratory symposium, publication and parallel events ask: how can the presence of the performance, vital and transformative in the here and now, be communicated long after the event? How can live art have a legacy for younger generations if it can no longer be experienced? Most of all, it aims to support the growth and influence of one of our most provocative and radical art forms. The Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art can therefore be seen as the culmination of the artist’s growing interest in the legacy and permanency of the medium into the future, as a curator and educator as well as a practitioner. The nascent institute will open in a newly acquired former theatre in Hudson, New York State. For performance art, it marks perhaps the first truly institutional moment.

The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow is a translation of the title of a conceptual piece of writing by Georg Jappe published by KunstForum International in 1978 on the contemporary state of art practice in relation to global political agendas. In the article Jappe reflects on why the rise of capitalism in the West and of communism in the East might have created organisations in Germany such as the Baader Meinhof group and subsequently the Red Army Faction. The perceived repetition of historical mistakes by the state, which motivated the actions of many European Terrorist organizations, is, in Abramović's view, reflected in the current uncritical nature of much of today’s art practice. For Abramović radical thinking and action in the world of performance art are needed to avoid repetitions of the past, and make art relevant to today’s social and political realities.

For The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow Abramović is dedicated to an inventive curatorial approach, addressing the key shifts in live art with performances by six renowned artists and artist-collectives. These international artists illustrate the diversity of contemporary performance art. They demonstrate a range of techniques that are key to the medium, including long-durational work, story-telling, virtual worlds, audience participation, sound, the use of the body and hardcore performance predicated on endurance...

Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. www.0100101110101101.org) are pioneers in the Internet-based net.art movement. For the exhibition, the artists stage what they term Synthetic Performances in the virtual world of Second Life. Second Life is an online platform where participants create a parallel reality, with each user represented by an avatar, a digital figure that they can customise and control. Through their avatars, the Italian-born artists will ‘remix’ and freely reinterpret famous works from the performance-art canon, including Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960).

Marina Abramović and Ulay's Imponderabilia 1977 | Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG Reenactment 2007

In a selected space Naked we stand opposite each other in the museum entrance. The public entering the museum has to turn sideways to move through the limited space between us. Everyone wanting to get past has to choose one of us.

-- Marina Abramović, on Imponderabilia (more)

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG Reenactment of Marina Abramović and Ulay's Imponderabilia 2007

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG (link)

Marina Abramović Institute (link)

Opening at Magoo: "There's no bible in here?" Tues. 12 January 2009 2PM SLT

2010-01-09T03:50:00.000-08:00

Penumbra Carter and Dekka Raymaker

~~SLurl~~ (exhibition has ended)

This is a freeform art build. When we were given the homestead at Magoo to produce a piece for it we had no preconceived ideas for it, so we tackled it in a manner that we constructed our Burning Life 2009 collaboration, throw a plywood cube prim down and see where it took us. The resulting madness is what you see.

As the build developed, we wanted to include some avatar interaction, and we wanted the work to come alive around the spectator. We hope that in some way we have achieved that. The build encompasses sound, light and movement. The build is foremost about fun, nothing heavy, no deep meanings, just subconscious energy driving us to complete the build in the first 3 weeks of December (we actually extended into the first week of January too, taking a 8 day break over Christmas week).

While discussing where the build was going we often used words like 'mad', 'scribble', 'no idea', 'sketchbook' and 'wtf are we doing'. There is a visual remark about an upcoming Linden Lab policy to charge L$99 per month for listing 'freebies' on it's Xstreet marketplace (Joke: "when is a freebie not a freebie?" … "when it costs L$99") there seems to be religious overtones too, but there is no bible in here.

Dekka Raymaker

01.10.10 a wedding

2010-01-09T03:40:00.000-08:00

click image for details

SLurl

UPON ARRIVAL PLEASE TAKE THE TELEPORT TO THE CATHEDRAL

(Art:21) Performative Interventions: The Progression of 4D Art in a Virtual 3D World

2009-12-31T16:19:00.000-08:00

Eva & Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org Pseudo-Futurist Video Game Improvisation Extravaganza Odyssey 16 Nov 2009

Second Life artists are exploring how to captivate, or use the element of time to interact with an active audience. They have abandoned strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of art and embraced the virtual. In the past fifty years especially, ideas about time have shifted from passive to interactive and, currently, to perceptually immersive, via filmmaking and animation, the theatricality of performance, and virtual reality.

Nettrice Gaskins touches on Fluxus, Second Front, ZeroG Skydancers, RMB City, Bibbe Oh, Cao Fei, ColeMarie Soleil, DanCoyote Antonelli, Man Michinaga, Azdel Slade, echolalia Azalee, Stelarc, CARP, José den Burger, Velazquez Bonetto, Eva and Franco Mattes (among others!)

Read lots lots more on Art:21 (link)

Field Trip: Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present

2009-12-16T23:31:00.000-08:00

MoMA will show a retrospective of Marina Abramović's body of work March 14, 2010-May 31, 2010.

from Marina Abramović's Art Must Be Beautiful 1975, more info (link)

This performance retrospective traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslavian, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over three decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.

Read more at MoMA (link)

Marina Abramović Luminosity 1997, Marina Abramović Archive and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

"Marina Abramović’s performances, feats of endurance involving self-denial and even self-mutilation, are so influential that MoMA has asked 35 artists to re-create them for an upcoming retrospective—and so provocative that it is building a separate entrance for the show"

Read more at ARTnews (link)

"Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind."

Marina Abramović (Wikipedia) (link)

Also: Marina Abramović: Seven Easy Pieces performed at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2005 (link)

Brooklyn is Watching: Tuned to AM (Red)

2009-12-03T21:24:00.000-08:00

Penumbra Carter captures a slice of Brooklyn is Watching:Push

Dekka Raymaker: Misprint Thursday placed AM Radio's 'How Fast We Fly' shack, Penumbra Carter added a 'Sculptie Horse' by Nomasha Syaka in a doorway, Dekka Raymaker placed the thin red wedge, Oberon Onmura placed red toy taxis and road, Misprint Thursday then placed 'phonesplosion' Solo Mornington placed cannon and target

Update: Maya Paris (link) adds to the Scarlet Wave (you can see her Fillybot in the video above but why not come inworld and experience it for yourself? (SLurl):

Misprint Thursday- AM Radio's "How Fast We Fly" + her own "phonesplosion"
Penumbra Carter- wall + Sculptie horse by Nomasha Syaka
Dekka Raymaker-thin red wedge
Oberon Onmura- road + taxi toys by Arcadia Asylum
Dancoyote Antonelli- Sculptie horses (as above)
Solo Mornington- Tree-ornament-shooting cannon + target
Maya Paris- Fillybots made from same sculptie horses + my fembots
L1Aura Loire- Sizzling frying pans + "Butter's carrot" by Jacqueline Bancroft

Art21 Blog (Art 2.1: Creating on the Social Web)

2009-12-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

November 30, 2009: Art:21 Blog's Nettrice Gaskins draws a connection between the virtual in cave art and in Second Life®, going on to highlight interviews with Second Life® artists DanCoyote Antonelli, Bryn Oh, Maya Paris, Alizarin Goldflake, and Vu Sosa.

"... to truly experience immersive, virtual 3D art you have to go there."

Read more (link)

December 2, 2009: Today's column by Nicole Sansone on ETeam and their dumpster in Second Life®.

"... what struck me most about ETeam’s approach, and what always seems to strike me about art that deals with Second Life, is that ETeam was imbuing this utopian ideal with a small piece of dirty reality."

Read more (link)

Both columns are interesting reading, and the one by Nettrice Gaskins already has a ballpark of comments.

Also in this series:

On Virtual Worlds: An Interview with Filmmaker Victor Pineiro (Second Skin) By Jonathan Munar

Part 1 (link)
Part 2 (link)

The Temple of the Prim is closing

2009-11-30T01:19:00.000-08:00

soror Nishi's spectacular The Temple of the Prim is ending its stay on Soup:Magoo with the turning of the calendar to December- hurry to see it if you haven't! (SLurl)

Mab has not learned to make machinima but offers this spiffy slideshow of images of soror's work in combination with the original music of Mack Gecko (link)

To see these images in higher resolution in a plain slideshow, large on black, look here (link)

The following lovely machinimas were made by kumi kuhr (link)

More on The Temple of the Prim (link) (link) (link)

Field Trip: Michael Snow

2009-11-17T20:24:00.000-08:00

Michael Snow Place des peaux 1998, 34 wood frames with gelatin, lighting, 15,45 x 5,75 cm, Biennale de Montréal, 1998; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Photo: Guy L’Heureux (source)

Michael Snow Wavelength 1967, Ontario, 45 min.

The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events": a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead."). (read more)

On the soundtrack we hear (among many other things) an aural equivalent to the zoom lens shot(s), a sine wave which goes from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest note (12000 cycles per second). (read more)

Michael Snow (link)

Friday 13 Nov, 4-6PM SLT (7-9PM ET): You Are Invited: Brooklyn is Watching: Push!

2009-11-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

Where doors and walls are made of mirrors, there is no telling outside from in, with all the equivocal illumination.

-- Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project (link)

An Invitation

Who: You

What: Brooklyn is Watching Re-opening Party

When: Friday, 13 November 2009, 4-6 PM SLT (7-9 PM ET Brooklyn Time)

Where: Inworld @Soup:Push SIM, Second Life® (SLurl)

Where else: Jack the Pelican Presents Gallery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (link)

How: Dance to tunes spun by DJ Nostrum Forder and come prepared for PRIM (Possible Random Improv Mayhem)

6 November 2009: Thanks to the capable efforts and organization of Misprint Thursday, a meeting was held on Push during which many important things were accomplished relating to the move of BiW from its temporary home on University of Kansas:Impermanence to Soup:Push. As you can imagine, coordinating such a meeting is akin to herding cats. Shown are Dekka Raymaker, Mab MacMoragh, Maya Paris, Misprint Thursday, Monet Destiny, Penumbra Carter, Selavy Oh, and Solo Mornington (Short machinima by Penumbra Carter here)

11 November 2009: A screenshot sampling of artwork left on BiW at one frozen moment in time. The work changes continuously and unpredictably in an organically chaotic process and is experienced as it is meant to be experienced by actively participating in it using the Second Life® avatar movement and camera controls. Work shown is by Betty Tureaud, Cheen Pitney, Comet Morigi. Corcosman Voom, DanCoyote Antonelli, Dekka Raymaker, Kat2 Kit, L1Aura Loire, Luka Loorden, Magina Forcella, Marko Seurat, Misprint Thursday, Oberon Onmura, Pol Jarvinen, Rezago Kokorin, Solo Mornington, Sunn Thunders, Suzanne Graves, Werner Kurosawa, and Winry Carver

17 May 2009: Monet Destiny interviewed on Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe (link)

Soup and Lovers Lane Studios have held a warm relationship with Brooklyn is Watching (link) since inception, sharing a respect for artists and their choices and inspirations, as well as sharing a fascination with the frontier potential of the virtual environment and tools available in Second Life®. We both recognize that the challenges of working within evolving technologies and the enforced discipline of their limitations serve both to crystallize inherent forms and to incubate ideas and commentary not possible, not yet realizable, or not served so well in other mediums.

Along with the uncountable and inexpressible meanings that Art is invested with as reason for being, a basic mostly-agreed-upon-but-still-hotly-debated-in-pedantic-circles function is that someone experiences it with someone else as part of the shared human condition and thereby forms a mirrored perspective, a bit of a chance connection, ignition and flow. It is this reflected immersive experience/expression (not necessarily the SAME experience for each but one derived from relationship and time, such as found in intervals in music and not in fragmented notes by themselves) that elevates conceptual multiplicities–avatar created and driven worlds–to the level of fellowship, of engagement beyond proprietary platform. This is hard work. This is compelling. This is Art unfolding.

All of which is to say Soup and Lovers Lane Studios are thrilled to welcome Brooklyn is Watching to Soup:Push!

Brooklyn is Watching: Push SIM (Slurl)

Brooklyn is Watching Blog (link)

Jack the Pelican Presents, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (link)

More information about the genesis of Brooklyn is Watching by Bettina Tizzy at Not Possible IRL (link)

More information about Second Life® (link)

ColeMarie Soleil's vision of soror Nishi's Soup:Magoo

2009-11-03T00:11:00.000-08:00

ColeMarie Soleil created this amazing machinima of soror Nishi's The Temple of the Prim on Soup:Magoo, which will be closing 30 November 2009

More on The Temple of the Prim (link)

(slurl)

Art:21 Systems Episode tonight

2009-10-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

Art:21 tonight 10:00 PM ET "Systems" with Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Kimsooja, and Allan McCollum.

Synopsis: Whether through acts of appropriation, repetition, or accumulation, the artists in this episode realize projects both vast in scope and beyond comprehension. (link)

Julie Mehretu's Grey Area for the Deutsche Guggenheim (link)

John Baldessari at Sprueth Magers (link)

Kimsooja's website (link)

Allan McCollum The Shapes Project (link)

August Coppola: a great man who devoted his life to teaching

2009-10-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

image via the CRC Blog (link)

Dr. August F. Coppola (16 February 1934- 27 October 2009), Dean of Creative Arts at SFSU, professor of comparative literature, creator of the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium (Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception) in San Francisco, world traveler who celebrated other cultures and peoples. Son of Carmine and Italia Coppola, brother of Francis Coppola and Talia Shire, father of Christopher Coppola, Marc Coppola and Nicolas Cage, grandfather to six; teacher and inspiration to countless students. Farewell Sir.

The Yes Men Fix the World

2009-10-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

SurvivaBall! (shown at Warhol Museum 2007) image by 2Things@Once on Flickr (link)

Man Michinaga of Lovers Lane Studios and Second Front (Patrick Lichty) has work in the well-received (Sundance, Berlin) 2009 gadfly activist film The Yes Men Fix the World as animator. The Yes Men are Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.

“What we do is pass ourselves off as representatives of big corporations we don’t like,” Mr. Bonanno cheerfully explains at the beginning of the film. “We make fake Web sites, then wait for people to accidentally invite us to conferences.”

Read more at NYTimes.com (link)

The Yes Men Fix The World (2009) official trailer

The Yes Men Fix the World (link)

The film on IMDB (link)

SurvivaBall (link)

Yes Men Videos on Babelgum (link)

Burning Life

2009-10-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

Mab has been out sick, or traveling, or sick and traveling, for the past couple of months but did get inworld to juggle fire torches and watch the Burning Man in Burning Life burn down last night.

View large on black (link)

Burning Life (link)

Art:21 Fantasy Episode tonight

2009-10-14T00:41:00.000-07:00

Fantasy presents four artists whose works or personal stories transport viewers to imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness. With works that seem at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and sublime, each of these artists pursues a vision first held in the mind’s eye.

Art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century tonight on PBS 10:00 ET Fantasy episode with Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, Florian Maier-Aichen, and Cao Fei, who identifies herself as the avatar of SL artist China Tracy:

Through a blend of documentary and magical realism, the artist investigates various aspects of role play: costumed youth and their families, workers’ dreams come to life at a Siemens light factory, and the simulated romance between avatars. The segment culminates in the artist’s ongoing project, "RMB City," an artificial island built in the 3D virtual world of Second Life that resembles a postmodern collage of landmarks, urban over-development, and Chinese landscape painting.

Read more (link)

Cao Fei biography (link)

Field Trip: How It Is

2009-10-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

Tenth commission in The Unilever Series, Miroslaw Balka's new work opens today in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London and runs till 5 April 2010.

How it is, is only complete when you, the viewer, enter.

-- Curator's Introduction (Flash interactive exploration) (link)

The title, How It Is, is taken from Samuel Beckett's novel of the same name and Balka said the piece should be seen as being about everything and nothing. "There is no one single direct inspiration for the piece and the words of the artist are not so important. The work is important. It is good or bad. It works or it does not work."

-- Mark Brown, guardian.co.uk (link)

More information at Tate Modern (link)

Miroslaw Balka bio at White Cube (link)

eyebeam

2009-10-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

video via Alan Sondheim (link)

Last Friday (9 October 2009) was SL Performance Night at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York City. Artists/groups included Alan Sondheim with Foofwa d'Imobilité, Lily & Honglei, and Second Front members Patrick Lichty and Scott Kildall. The evening was also occasion to a formal launch party for Second Front's Second DVD of performance works, Avvie Road.

More:

Performing in Second Life (eyebeam.org) (link)

Lily & Honglei (Land of Illusion) (link)

Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (link)

Art:21

2009-10-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 5 begins tonight on PBS 10:00 ET with the episode Compassion (link)

Yoko Ono: Imagine Peace Tower

2009-10-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

Yoko Ono's Imagine Peace Tower practice lighting in Reykjavik, Iceland on left, and in SL on right- photos © Yoko Ono official (link)

Yoko Ono will unveil the Imagine Peace Tower in Second Life® Friday, 9 October 2009, soon after the real world lighting of the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland on John Lennon's 69th birthday.

Jura Shepherd writes in ROLE magazine:

The tower will replicate, as closely as possible, its real world counterpart which opened on October 9th, 2007 on Viðey Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland. The terrestrial version is made of fifteen powerful searchlights manipulated with mirrors to form a column of light that is tall enough to not only reach cloud cover, but has been seen to penetrate well beyond it. According to the University of Iceland, the light is so powerful that, if within the column itself, the light would still be visible with the naked eye from space and could be easily detected with instruments from much further away from our planet. The base of the tower is an elegant but austere cylindrical structure made of white stone that is meant to symbolically represent a well, specifically a wishing well. Circling the well are engravings of the phrase “IMAGINE PEACE” written in 24 different world languages.

More at ROLE Magazine (link)

Hamlet Au comments at New World Notes (link)

More photos and descriptions at Yoko Ono's IMAGINE PEACE TOWER Flickr set (link)

Information and schedules at Imagine Peace (link)

Imagine Peace Tower Island (open 9 October) (slurl)

soror Nishi on Magoo

2009-10-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

The Temple of the Prim

Magoo (slurl)

NPIRL Preview 2 October 2009, 12:30 PM SLT

Opening 3 October 2009, 1 PM SLT

From soror Nishi's blog:

Increatum

The Prim is the Prima Materia of Second Life, everything is made of this "stuff", and like alchemy (often called The Art) we can, through diligence, ritual and devotion turn this humble prim into pure gold. "Everything is made by prim and without prim is nothing made that was made." (more)

The Temple of the Prim, Beta v 1.0

The Prim is totally neutral, even more neutral than matter which has imbued feeling depending on whether it is wood, silver, etc. The Prim ONLY manifests its creator's psyche, nothing else.

It is the blankest of blank canvases.

It is, actually, nothing. Matter is actually an illusion too. Atomic physics teaches us that electrons are energy defined by their general relative positions, there's no 'stuff'. Solid is illusion. (more)

Update: See Bettina Tizzy's report on NPIRL (link)

Field Trip: John Baldessari

2009-09-29T17:12:00.000-07:00

John Baldessari's Six Colorful Inside Jobs 1971

Q To some degree would you say that Baldessari’s work is like an encyclopedia of maleness?

A Hard to say no to that question. I’d say that’s one of the bigger yeses in the history of answers.

Q To use or misuse the regularly bastardized word, does he deconstruct the male?  

A How could he not?

Q Does Baldessari’s gaze around and through the male gaze render a double-dude staredown?  

A Affirmative. There’s a German phrase for it.

Q Wissenschaftler der mannlichen Schwierigheit?

A Scholar of male complexity.

-- Benjamin Weissman on John Baldessari, in 'Men Swallowing Swords, Men Blowing Out Candles" frieze 126 (link)

John Baldessari talks to Jessica Morgan (curator of his upcoming retrospective at Tate Modern) in TATE ETC 17 (link)

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at Tate Modern 13 October 2009 till 10 January 2010 (link)

Baron Grayson on Magoo

2009-09-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

High Seas Pirate Ship, Sanctum Ruins (partial), Aghamora Irish Cottage

From the notecard: The first version of this ship was built as part of an inworld adventure headed by Keith Extraordinare in 2005 for Burning Life.

Mab rezzed these structures temporarily on Magoo while it was empty to see what they looked like and took the opportunity to wear a pirate lady's dress she had in her inventory but had never unboxed (RFL outfit from M'Lady's, jewelry by Sue Stonebender) . They're vanished now but will be back in some form eventually. In some of the pictures Eryri can be seen in the background. The great white whale floating in the sky was made by Soup artists Penumbra Carter and Dekka Raymaker for the closing party of the SLon des Refuses, and the trees in silhouette are made by Sue Stonebender, as is the big house.

Field Trip: Cindy Sherman

2009-09-18T07:15:00.000-07:00

Cindy Sherman's Doll Clothes 1975

One of the First Cindy Sherman's super-8 film,"Doll Clothes" has not been viewed since 1975, the year it was made. It comically crosses Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase with animated paper dolls in a sly, funny and clever precursor to the concerns that became signature elements in Sherman's remarkable body of photographic work.

More at UbuWeb (link)

Field Trip: Torbjørn Rødland

2009-09-17T02:03:00.000-07:00

Torbjørn Rødland ACV10 (2009) showing at Standard (Oslo) till 26 September 2009

Perverted photography doesn’t sell a product or communicate a message. It’s not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It’s layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic.

-- Torbjørn Rødland

More (link)

Torbjørn Rødland (link)

Field Trip: Robert Irwin

2009-09-13T05:05:00.000-07:00

Robert Irwin, Untitled @Hirshhorn Museum (Music: Sigur Ros)

I couldn't find an image to illustrate the story of the stairwell so am using this video of Untitled instead.

"Then I ran into a utility stairwell which presented a very interesting situation. There were a couple things that were very nice about it. One was that while the front stairwell was very formal, with floating steps and everything, and was the architect's attempt to be very 'designed,' very artistic, in a way–I didn't like it particularly–this utility stairwell was simply that, a utility stairwell. It had the minimum. It met all the legal requirements, period, and nothing else. How steep it was–I don't think it could have been any steeper. It had those kind of institutional railings. The corners had an angle on them. It was the simplest kind of concrete shaft; I mean, in terms of architecture, there was no attempt to modify or make that space interesting at all. Institutional light fixtures, the whole thing, just by the book.

"But there was one thing funny about it: the architect, in wanting to continue his illusions about the building from an architectural point of view, did not want the exterior facade of the building to stop at a certain point; so he continued it on to include this utility stairwell, which was very funny, in a way, because it had nothing to do with the stairwell at all; it had all to do with this idea about facade. In other words, he ran this series of windows the entire length of the building so as to fit his modular conception.

"But the unintended effect of all of that was that that utility stairwell was quite a nice place. One of the things that was very nice about it was that all the light in there was reflected light. Only in the morning was there a little slit of direct light, but most of the light was reflected. And interestingly enough, in this situation it was reflected off an awful lot of different kinds of surfaces–a very red building across the way, some very strong green grass; it depended on the time of day you were there as to the color the stairwell was. I mean, it was subtle. Most people would have probably said it was white all the time; but to me, you'd walk in there, and at a certain time of day it was violet, and another time of day it was green, and another time of day it was a subtle mixture of colors. It was a very loaded kind of situation.

"So I did a lot of things in that stairwell. I changed a lot of things. I neutralized things and blocked things and removed things. I fooled around with the covering of the baseboard; there was a situation in terms of one of the windows where I made it look as though it continued where in fact it didn't. I covered up one section of one window so that the far corner looked as if it were angled as all the other corners were angled. All sorts of things like that, which no one really saw–which, by the way, they weren't intended to see; it was just the presence of the situation which I liked.

"Then, I think, I probably made an error, and it probably had a little bit to do with my not being on top of the situation. I put a piece of scrim material up near the second floor, up high, and stretched it out flat. It did a nice thing; I mean, it did work in the room in a way. But in a way it also defeated me in the sense that the few people who did deal with the stairwell at all finally said, 'Oh that's it,' and pointed, dealt with the scrim as though it were the art; whereas it was simply a device that I had used hopefully to try and get the situation maybe a little more strongly identified. Without the scrim I don't know if anybody would have seen it–maybe one or two people. And a curious thing, when the show eventually came down, I went back there and found a number of the things which I had done had not been removed. For some reason they either didn't notice them or didn't know that I had put them there. But in a funny way, even with a lot of the things removed, that stairwell still was doing exactly what it did so well. It didn't need my scrim. And in a funny way, maybe it didn't need any of the details I added. What was really essential was going on there anyway."

-- Robert Irwin to Lawrence Weschler, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees by Lawrence Weschler

Robert Irwin (link)

Robert Irwin @Hirshhorn (link)

Untitled (a variation) @MoMA (link)

Field Trip: John Cage

2009-09-06T02:52:00.000-07:00

Changing Installation, 1991
Mattress Factory

More here (link)

Field Trip: In Brief

2009-08-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

Even more important to Duchamp, I believe, is the ambiguity of his presence, due to the fact he is neither entering nor exiting the room, but, in Foucault's words, "coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing."

-- Bradley Bailey, from "Once More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre"

More at kostis velonis (link)

Field Trip: Warhol TV

2009-08-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

La Maison Rouge (Paris) (link)

Via Walker Art Center (link)

SLon: Closing Gala DJ set by Arahan Claveau

2009-08-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

SLon des Refusés Closing Gala (2009) by SteveMillar

Listen and dance . . .

Set List (link)

Pink Narcissus (a blog by Arahan Claveau) (link)