KRISTIN LUCAS: “Refresh”, and GROUP SHOW: “Before and After”

October 20 – November 24, 2007 at Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, New York, NY February 2 – March 1, 2008 at And/Or Gallery, 4221 Bryan St. Ste B, Dallas, TX October 10 – November 15, 2008 at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca, Austin, TX, Refresh only October 23 – 26, 2008 at Shift Electronic Arts Festival, Basel, Switzerland, Refresh and scaled down Before and After

On October 5, 2007 Kristin Lucas succeeded in legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas. In Alameda County Court, the presiding judge who granted the request said: “So you have changed your name to exactly what it was before in the spirit of refreshing yourself as though you were a web page.”

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

The “surface browser” is an internet browser developed to view images in an extraordinary way. It is a viewing machine which allows us to isolate the imagery that is suspended ‘out there’ in the Internet and contemplate it in a new way. The browser program, for those interested in the technology, is created with a mix of Java and OpenGLs.

The experience of looking at the web through the browser is like flying inside a swirling tunnel where images wrap, creating the sensation of being inside a digital snake that is infinite in length.

When a search word is typed into the program, the browser uses the Google search engine to pull up masses of pictures to process. For instance if “tropical fish” is entered, the search engine operates to link to the thousands of web pages on the internet with pictures of tropical fish. Then it lines them up and spits them out through the tunnel.

You might imagine the experience of being sucked into the internet and perhaps finally we have a visualisation that captures the philosophical and visual essence of what we might have imagined as ‘surfing the internet’.

Tim says, “ … surfing the Internet for me is not a very successful description of clicking from one page to the next. I’m not sure if the surface browser is the answer to really ‘surfing the internet’. You will always hit 404s (missing page message) … and we are once again reminded of the aesthetics of failure inherent in technology”.

This is not a case of creating independent virtual 3d worlds but about remapping the existing visual aspect of the internet into an environment that can be entered and traversed.

He says, “I am interested in the experience of browsing the internet, exploring ways of looking at the pages and images which give them depth … and a way to explore their surfaces. This is not a case of creating independent virtual 3d worlds but about remapping the existing visual aspect of the internet into an environment that can be entered and traversed. In this way, the solids representing pages can be seen as a way to give volume back to the millions of body images which make up so much of internet network traffic”.

The work is primarily designed for the internet though Tim also sees applications for this in a museum setting where a projection of the work would be generated from the person navigating. In a gallery situation he sees the experience being more about ‘play’ and is aware of the self consciousness it may create in people browsing in a public space.

You can find out more about the surface browser by visiting NESTA. Please note that the ABC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Feature written by Kim Machan
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/digital/stories/s870671.htm

Further Information:

Tim Plaisted’s site: www.boxc.net

MAAP: www.maap.org.au

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

While all interactive works reflect interactors back to themselves, in many works the idea of the mirror is explicitly invoked. The clearest examples are interactive video installations where the spectator’s image or silhouette becomes an active force in a computer-generated context. Examples include aspects of Myron Krueger’s Videoplace work, Ed Tannenbaum’s Recollections and Very Vivid’s Mandala. The spectator sees some representation of themselves on a video projection screen. This representation follows the movements of the interactor like a mirror-image or shadow, transformed by the potentials with which the artist has endowed the space. These transformations are realized by software running on a computer. In such work, the content is contained in this difference between the gesture and its transformed or recontextualized reflection.

David Rokeby: Transforming Mirrors : Transforming Mirrors

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Jim Campbell, Hallucination, 1988-1990

Digital Watch from 1991, carries on Campbell’s interest in memory and time. This interactive video installation, which was featured at the ICC Biennial in Japan in 1997, uses a clock as its central metaphor. Similar to the set-up of Hallucination, viewers could look at themselves in real time on the screen, but in this case only on the area of the screen that was not taken up by a real time image of a pocket watch. If viewers can glimpse themselves within the frame of the watch, they see an image from approximately five seconds earlier. Marita Sturken states that:

“It’s as if Campbell sets up an exhibition space as a means to both seduce and deter the viewer, and in the process he often forces viewers to examine the issue of desire – specifically our desire to see what we have been told we cannot see. What emerges is a carefully constructed electronic environment, or way of being, that is about surveillance and monitoring.” (3)

CONTINUED

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Concept and Definition

“String theory is a model of fundamental physics , whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings , rather than the zero-dimensional point particles that form the basis for the standard model of particle physics . The phrase is often used as shorthand for superstring theory , as well as related theories such as M-theory . By replacing the point-like particles with strings, an apparently consistent quantum theory of gravity emerges. Moreover, it may be possible to “unify” the known natural forces ( gravitational , electromagnetic , weak nuclear and strong nuclear ) by describing them with the same set of equations, as described in the theory of everything .

CONTINUED

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Project Title: Untitled
Project Type: Installation
Project Time: Open (looped video sequences approx. 4 min.)

The new work explores the notions of presence and identity. The work revolves around a semi-enclosed structure which incorporates Mylar screens, two video projectors, a web cam, pre-recorded video, TV monitor, and Max/Jitter software.

The intent of this new work is to explore ways in which technology records, invents, reproduces and intervenes on the notions of presence and identity.

CLICK ON IMAGE ABOVE FOR OTHERS IMAGES

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

CLICK ON IMAGE ABOVE FOR OTHERS IMAGES

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

photograph by Naccarato

Memetics as a theory of understanding post-modern pop-culture
Wed, 31 Dec 1969 15:59:59 -0800
NEWS IMAGE

By Chris Walts

A breif look into the study of memetics as an emerging post-modern theory in understanding cultural events

Meme (pronounced to rhyme with dream), was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. If genes are replicators of the body, then memes are replicators of the mind. “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 192). In short, a meme is a piece of information that exists as long as it is remembered and replicated. Dawkins then expands his theory by explaining how memes grow: “memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 192). Memes thus can be regarded as mind virus’s transferring from person to person via any method of possible transmission. This is where communication studies begin to pick up on meme theory. One of the primary areas of interest in communication is the idea of transmission of information. As James Carey says, “Our basic orientation to communication remains grounded at the deepest roots of our thinking, in the idea of transmission: communication is a process whereby messages are transmitted and distributed in space for the control of distance and people” (Carey, 1988, p. 15). Memes are the information being transmitted and distributed, and if you can control the spread of memes you can control what people think and how they think it. (full article)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This year, we will show the festival’s films in three different towns on three consecutive weekends in July 2008. And as every year, we’ll be trying to show those selected films and the whole program not only in Stuttgart, Heilbronn and Mainz, but in several European cities as well. After all, it’s an international festival, not to be happening at one place only.

Dieses Jahr wird das Festivalprogramm an drei Wochenenden hintereinander im Juli 08 in verschiedenen Städten gezeigt werden und Ihr seid natürlich wieder alle herzlich eingeladen hinzukommen. Meldet euch früh an, damit wir euch soweit dies uns möglich ist, einen Schlafplatz besorgen. Und wieder werden wir später ein Auswahlprogramm auf Tour schicken. Wir sehen die Aufgabe eines internationalen Festivals darin, nicht nur an wenige Orte wie Stuttgart, Heilbronn und Mainz gebunden zu sein.

04./05. July 08 Stuttgart, Merlin (www.merlin-kultur.de)

11./12. July 08 Heilbronn, Zigarre www.zigarre-heilbronn.de16.July 08 Mainz, KUZ (www.kuz.de)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

1. What is the relationship between presence and absence?
2. Is presence synonymous with ‘being in the moment’?
3. Can technology document presence?
4. Can technology produce presence?
5. What are the signifiers of presence?
6. Is there a relationship between presence and awareness? presence and consciousness?
7. What is co-presence?
8. What is co-relational presence?
9. Does presence imply distance – non presence?
10. What is the relationship between presence and aura?
11. Is presence a form of immersion?
12. What is a ‘break in presence’?

Questions used in the Presence Project at Stanford University. http://presence.Stanford.edu:3455/Colloboratory/493

CONTINUED: 

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

photograph by Naccarato

‘Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, or the Sea, Antoine, the Sea’

excerpt from John Conomos

Cinema auteurs who create new possibilities for the film medium as they write, direct and invent what they film. For Truffaut, the politique des auteurs meant a cinema of directors as authors who valued the experimental and personal awareness of cinema as a visual medium that was not tied up with the deadening limits of psychological realism, plot and dialogue.

But instead, not overlooking the excesses of the politique des auteurswith the real possibility (as Bazin himself cautioned his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma colleagues) of creating an “esthetic cult of personality”, Truffaut forged a highly personal cinema that owed a lot also to Bazin’s spatial realism and is crucially sympathetic to the fluid and ambiguous reality of the portrayed characters, their beauty, sadness, desire, timidity and loss. Consequently, French New Wave films (including Truffaut’s films) value a cinema that does not follow in the steps of an “old cinema”, but instead features the human sensibility of the director-writer creating an art that is noted for its spontaneity, improvisation and obsessions.

more…

John Conomos is a media artist, critic and writer who lectures in film and media studies at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Cinema has been his life-long passion.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

September 20 to December 9, 2007

Implant Matrix (detail)

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology (DLF), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will present works by ten artists from Canada and abroad who have received funding from the DLF. The exhibition e-art : New Technologies and Contemporary Art – 10 Years of Accomplishments of the Daniel Langlois Foundation will present an outstanding selection of spectacular works, some of which were specially commissioned for this event. They all demonstrate the part played by digital technology in the transformation of a work of art and the artists’ interest in the phenomena of language, encoding and the translation of one system and one reality into another.

Works by the following artists will be presented in the exhibition: Philip Beesley (Canada), Jim Campbell (USA), Marie Chouinard (Canada), Luc Courchesne (Canada), Jessica Field (Canada), Lynn Hershman Leeson (USA), Eduardo Kac (Brazil/USA), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico/Canada), Catherine Richards (Canada), and David Rokeby (Canada).

This exhibition is a co-production of the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Exhibition catalogue: www.fondation-langlois.org/e-art/e/

Free Free Admission
Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavilion
Level 3

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Susan Ryland is an artist who creates gallery-based and site-specific multimodal art that draws upon cognitive linguistic theories. Her PhD research examines artists’ utilization of ‘absurd literalism’ to release new meanings from old metaphors. She is currently working on a multi-video installation, Mind’s Eye (working title), that considers the notion of conceptual domains and the interplay between metaphoric and metonymic associations. She is preparing the exhibition – Social Fabrics: Wearables + Media + Interconnectivity – sponsored by the Leonardo Educational Forum, for the College Art Association, Dallas 2008. Susan is also working on a limited edition book, Exploded View that takes a diagrammatic approach to the cognitive themes in the art work.

The talk is this Friday, April 4, from 10h30 – 12h00 in the EV amphitheatre 1-605 on the Ground Floor
Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Building
1515 St-Catherine Ouest, Montréal

… email received by Dr. Ernestine Daubner

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

photograph by Naccarato

“Consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages presentely constituted in a more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, in so far as it is meaningful, is a systematic act of manipulation of signs.” Jean Baudrillard.

“(on interactivity) The apparatuses become more like pereable membranes. If there is a balance of flow back and forth across this membrane, then the interactive technology is an intermingling of self and enviroment” David Rokeby

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931
Le Conquete de l’ubiquite

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Postsexual Bodies. The Making of … Desire, Digital
Marie-Luise Angerer

Artists and Net users have taken possession of cyberspace as a new space for action and experience. It is being celebrated as a free, unrestricted space onto which no limits have been set. The body and its gender modalities are being discovered as central parameters of identification. With reference to this context, Angerer discusses artistic positions as well as theoretical, specifically psychoanalytical, metaphors by Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari and others. more (opens in new page)

Cyborg configurations as formations of (self-)creation in the fantasy space of technological creation (I): Old and new mythologies of ‹artificial humans›
Verena Kuni

This essay deals with current cyborg configurations in the field of tension between old and new phantasms of the creation of ‹artificial humans.› It introduces the mythologies of the ‹artificial human› one encounters in historical and contemporary texts and images from literature and the arts, all the way to popular science fiction. more (opens in new page)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Consider the appeal of an extra ear, a pig that can fly, or a meal of steak from a beast that has not died and not been harmed. These are futures proposed by Perth based bioartists, Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). Their work addresses the dilemmas of living in a world where science facts and fictions are being confused and we are gradually becoming blasé about the miracles generated by science.

Victimless steak being grown from a living frog

Tissue Culture and Art Project artists Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr and Guy Ben Ary have backgrounds in law, product design and media and are currently artists in residence at SymbioticA: the art and science collaborative research laboratory in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. They have recently returned from exhibiting in Europe and brought back, literally, an array of worries ranging from the inane dilemma of hair styles to the human compulsion to tamper with nature.

The inspiration for these worries are miniature sculptures created by seeding living tissue cells onto scaffolds in the shape of Guatemalan worry dolls. Traditionally, worry dolls are used to take away the worries of Guatemalan children but TC&A created seven dolls to represent their own worries about absolute truths, biotechnology, capitalism, demagogy, eugenics, fear itself, invisible genes, and the fear of hope.

A recent TC&A installation ‘Disembodied Cuisine’ removed some cells from a living frog to grow “victimless meat”

Confessing worries during BioFeel 2002

People are encouraged to add their own worries at TC&A exhibitions and post them to the TC&A website. So far, more than 1000 worries have been collected from across the world. TC&A refer to their sculptures as “semi-living” because they change from the artificial to the natural. The dolls are inanimate objects given life and the creation of more of them lets the artists give flesh to the worries of the audience.

Munch used bodily fluids in his paintings and Beuys explained art to a dead rabbit.

There is a long and varied history of biology being a part of artistic practice. Leonardo dissected the natural world and put scientific ideas in his artwork, Munch used bodily fluids in his paintings and Beuys explained art to a dead rabbit. But it is over 100 years since Darwin wrote The Theory of Evolution and 50 years since the discovery of DNA so why should bioart be emerging now? George Gessert, a bioartist working with selective breeding suggests that the implications of the “survival of the fittest” has relevance to parents in the 21st Century because people can now choose the genetic makeup of their children.

… in the process [they] address the potentials of a world where organs are made to order and pigs might fly.

Pig wings being cultured in a bioreactor

Pig Wings is a TC&A project which plays with the idea of science making the impossible possible. By cultivating pig bone marrow stem cells into miniature models of wings TC&A anticipate the horrific (bat wing), the angelic (bird wing) and obsolete (dinosaur wing), and in the process address the potentials of a world where organs are made to order and pigs might fly.

A recent TC&A installation Disembodied Cuisine removed some cells from a living frog to grow “victimless meat” over the course of the exhibition L’Art Biotech, in Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France. The artists fed, cared for and grew the steaks while the frogs in tanks continued their existence. On the last day of the exhibition, the frogs bore witness as the artists and the audience consumed their “progeny”. It is like all TC&A works – as Catts so eloquently says, “a benign confrontation” for the audience.

MEART is … a collaboration between computer scientists, kinetic artists, bioartists and the brain neurones of a dead rat.

The semi-living artiist at work – BioFeel 2002

MEART is the bioartist to leave all the others for dead. It is a fiction and yet a reality, a semi-living thing awoken from slumber by the SymbioticA Research Group (SARG), a collaboration between computer scientists, kinetic artists, bioartists and the brain neurones of a dead rat. A photograph relayed from Perth to the US stimulates the rat neurones to produce signals which are then sent back to Perth to drive elegant robotic arms which draw abstractions. To some it is an ideal artist – one without ego.

Currently in Slovenia, TC&A are collaborating with Stelarc on creating his third ear. Next year they allow Orlan to colonize someone else’s skin. The surreal, anarchic and monstrous extremes of yesterday are not so sensational anymore.

Credit:
Feature written by Jane Coakley

http://www.abc.net.au/arts/digital/stories/s877305.htm

Bookmark It

Hide Sites