Links for this Post:

Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties by by Alastair Gordon.

The Spaced Out Blog

Spaced Out Media: A Short Film about the Spaced Out book

While talking with a friend about Ramon Sender, who I was privilaged to have a chance to get to know as the result of this blog, I discovered a new book -- Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties by by Alastair Gordon. Ramon is featured in the blog that is part of the book's website. 

Here is an short film as YouTube video by Michael Inglesh about the Spaced Out book release party - June 16, 2008:

Wired Magazine, in their June 23, 2008 issue describes the book:

Through hundreds of groovy photos, Alastair Gordon's book explores the tripped-out buildings of the age of Aquarius. Spaced Out shows how ambitiously experimental, hallucinogenically colorful, and at times laughably impractical the designs were - from a waterbed prototype to a house that changed colors in response to human touch. Gordon, a New York Times contributor, highlights the technologies in use today that were pioneered during the era's kaleidoscopic revolution. Turn on, drop out, move in.

Here is an excerpt from the author commenting on his work:

There was an untethered sense of space: psychedelic, sexual, hallucinatory, and drifting, a feeling that you were everywhere yet nowhere at the same time. You could feel it at the rock concerts, love-ins, group gropes, and sensitivity-training sessions, chanting and dancing, drumming together as one mindless organism, when the flash of insight, acid premonition, group mind, and astral telegram were the operative modes of communication in place of today's electronic IM's or text messaging. The sudden flashes and revelations of personal experience were in many ways more subversive than the big-time revolution that everyone was waiting for. In fact, there were thousands of overlapping revolutions and mini uprisings happening at once, thousands of different storms rising and joining forces with other storms, massing themselves along separate fronts. Yes, drugs were a major part of it, but they were just a means to another place, another reality, not an end in themselves. When Huxley's "doors of perception" crashed open, they lead to the most extraordinary garden of possibilities.

The music and drugs have been well documented, but the fractured sense of space, the softened corners, the communal élan are less easily reclaimed. Where are the landmarks and monuments of the psychedelic revolution, and how do we go back if we don't even know where to begin? I started to write Spaced Out in response to the culture of control that arose after September 11, 2001. It seemed like a good time to invoke a period of unbridled experimentation. As one Haight-Ashbury hippie put it: "Hold on by letting go." The sixties legacy lingers on, influencing everything from the Internet and sustainable design to Freak Folk, anti-globalism, organic cuisine, alternative healing and rave clubs. Behind the liberated parks, communes, crash pads and painted busses, was the struggle for a certain mental space, a place without boundaries or divisions that would foster wildness, nurture new kinds of experience, and even change human consciousness. That dream never died but the story needs retelling.

The books's website has a lot of additional features to explore. Among them:

• Links to sites the author considers noteworthy
• A Bibliography for further inquiry and exploration
• More multimedia in YouTube format
• Events surrounding the release of the book including authors appearances
• Excerpts from the book
• The evolving Spaced Out blog which appears to have just begun to grow

Find out more that the links at the top of this post.

Link for this Post:We Can Be Together': American Countercultural Music, Film and the trappings of the mainstream Mike Leader on the Wild Tyme Blog

Here is an excerpt from Mike Leader's insighful essay:

The counterculture of the 1960s featured important innovations in the form and message of art. However, the means for production, promotion and wide distribution of such modes as music and film were in the hands of the major record labels or film production studios. This resulted in an intriguing, often conflicted, relationship between the necessarily provocative and inventive aspects of countercultural expression, and the ‘trappings’ of popular culture. Countercultural expression was often on a localised, individual, or minority scale, usually defined against the mainstream or dominant society; it was feared that actively courting with the mainstream, in the form of the music or film business, would result in compromising the message or expression itself. In the realm of music, the shift from performing as the primary avenue of dissemination, to record sales and marketing, presents a potential conflict in terms of the artist’s integrity as the ‘art’ shifts to ‘product’.

There was a similarly difficult situation in the film industry, where the dominance of the major film studios was seen to stifle the creativity of the medium. However, in the late 1960s, a series of films directed by younger directors, starring younger stars and about relevant issues, brought about a renaissance in Hollywood, and the old generation of studio bosses gave wave to a new group of producers more happy to grant freedom of expression to countercultural and visionary newcomers. This essay will primarily focus on the musical career of Bob Dylan, but, by way of comparison or contrast, further references will be drawn from both music and film.

Indeed, this complicated relationship between the popular and the countercultural is especially seen in Bob Dylan’s career. In fact, it can be argued that his shrewd and profitable courting with the mainstream has been subsumed by cult and myth. As one of the most influential artists in Western music of the 20th century, Dylan’s reputation in terms of furthering the form is secure; however, his public image is almost by nature conflicted. Wilfred Mellers displays this multi-layered image, introducing his study of Dylan by describing him as ‘a singing poet-composer, he is a quasi-folk musician, an artist and a commercial operator’ (1984, p.13). Dylan’s particular flashpoints of mythology and controversy have all involved the clash of the precious and the popular; the most prominent of these is his progression from acoustic, socially-minded folk music, to electrified rock with increasingly abstract, personal lyrics. The period between March 1965 and July 1966, during which time Dylan released the albums Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, and had landmark performances at the Newport Folk Festival and on tour in Europe, was one of the more controversial career moves in 20th century music. The hostilities that greeted the incorporation of electric guitars and rock-inspired arrangements were motivated by the apprehension that Dylan had abandoned ‘serious’ music, in favour of fame and fortune.

Continue reading and exploring this blog using the link at the top of this post.

As i mentioned a couple of days ago, the Heartland exhibition on view until January 25 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL) is one of the best shows i've visited this year.

Heartland roughly follows the Mississippi River, taking in an area from New Orleans up to Minneapolis in the north and including Omaha, Kansas City, Detroit and Chicago. The curatorial team, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, commissioned new pieces and selected existing works by contemporary artists who live in the region or have undertaken residencies there in order to produce new work. The programme includes musical events at the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips, debates, lectures, a photo exhibition, a magazine and publications.

Heartland is a precious exhibition. The U.S. are all over our (European) newspapers because of the upcoming presidential elections. Yet, most of us know very little of the art and culture of the area that lies between the East Coast and the West Coast. And what we think we might know can often be reduced to a bunch of cliches. One of the main objectives of the exhibition is to offer a more penetrating picture of the 'Heartland'. Indeed, each of the works on show engages dynamically with the city and area it comes from, rising issues peculiar to that place and the people who live there . Another aim of Heartland is, as the curators added in their press release, to questions traditional definitions of cultural centers and peripheries.

Alec Soth, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery

Alec Soth 's photo series Sleeping by the Mississippi brings you right into the heart of the subject. The result of several years of road trips along the legendary river, the photographic prints capture America's "third coast". While the area appears to be the essence and backbone of the whole country, its landscapes, people and interiors evoke a sense of neglect, loneliness and melancholy.

Marjetica Potrč , New Orleans: Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank, 2008

Marjetica Potrč has spent several months studying the changing landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans. With the help of FutureProof (a sustainable design consultancy), she focused her researches on issues of sustainability, water, and the emergence of new geographic and political territories based on changing ecology.

The 'Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank' builds upon two recent trends in New Orleans: the revival of the local architectural style known as the Shotgun House, and the move toward self-sustainability. Inhabitants have customized this local style by adding elements that allow them to harvest rainwater and solar power. These post-Katrina developments reflect the search for a new social contract for democracy. The two caryatids represent the citizens of New Orleans whom she sees as the 'supporting columns' of the reconstruction of the city.

Marjetica Potrč , Surviving in Pieces, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch Gallery

The drawings and prints that accompanied the installation echo the ways in which infrastructure is created from the bottom up by individuals either in response to political or ecological change or simply to improve their lives. The societies she examines, including New Orleans, have undergone political or climatic changes that have made Modernism's social contracts untenable.

Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Museum Benches, 2008

The exhibition presented also independent cultural organizations and artists' platforms whose activities are deeply rooted in their local environment. One of them is the Tree of Heaven Woodshop is a Detroit-based network of specialists, craftspeople, researchers, artists and enthusiasts who work exclusively with wood processed from what the Chinese call the Tree of Heaven. In the Detroit, the tree received also the nickname "ghetto palm" because of the way it populates abandoned lots and deserted factory sites all over the city. The tree survives, even in a polluted area, where there is poor or very little soil as it is often found climbing out of abandoned factories and houses, lamp posts and even sidewalks and concrete structures, make this tree the plant of post-industrial landscapes.

Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, Detroit Woodshop Burnt House Tree

The quantity and height of Tree of Heaven specimen indicate how long a place might have been abandoned. Interested in the ongoing effects of de-industrialisation on communities and environments, the Tree of Heaven Woodshop decided to take advantage of the tree ubiquity. By using existing infrastructure and supporting small local businesses, the Woodshop turn the tree into an agent of communication. Processing trees into raw material for sculptures or furniture might not be regarded as a very sophisticated concept. But in the light of this specific city and the qualities of this specific tree it becomes a demonstration of the possibilities of this place in time.

Kerry James Marshall, Dailies (Rhythm Mastr), 2007

A whole wall was covered with the comics (more images) of Kerry James Marshall. Marshall used to read a lot of superhero comics as a kid and one day, because all of a sudden the character of the Black Panther appeared in the Fantastic Four, he and many other with him realized that there were no black heroes in comics. Hence this ongoing project, Rythm Monstr, which explores black American culture through its own super heroes. They are the comic, swearing, talking (in both Chinese and english) and jumping version of archaic African sculptures. Each of them subtly summons issues of racial tensions, the civil rights movement, Afro-American traditions and communal solidarity in the 21st century.

The Wexner Center has a nice video interview of the artist.

If you can't make it to Eindhoven, internet comes to your rescue: the curators traveled the whole 'Heartland" to research the exhibition and posted their impressions and photos on the Heartland Research blog.

Heartland is on view until January 25 at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL) and will travel in a modified version to the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago next year.

Previously: Michael Rakowitz' Dull Roar at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (NL).

Link for this Post: Read the Free Online PDF Version of the New Tranhumanist Magazine h+ edited by Mondo 2000 founder Ken Gofmann AKA RU Sirius

Many of you remember Mondo 2000, the Berkeley based magazine published by Alison Kennedy and edited by RU Sirius. I got a note today from Ken about a new "print" magazine that he is editing. He says:

Are you ready to be fitted for your Ironman suit? Is it time to stop aging, upload your memories onto silicon and engineer your progeny to be happy geniuses? Can we get you a real hamburger that wasn't made from a slaughtered cow? (And do you want fries with that)? Well, roll over Anderson Cooper and tell Perez Hilton the news.

h+ magazine has arrived and the future already looks different.

Humanity Plus (formerly the World Transhumanist Association) – in collaboration with former Mondo 2000 editor RU Sirius -- is pleased to present h+. A web-based quarterly magazine, h+ covers the scientific, technological, and cultural developments that are challenging and overcoming human limitations. Recently, there has been a growing and evolving public discourse about new technological trends and possibilities. Scientists and edge thinkers are talking about– and working on  -- slowing or ending aging; body and brain enhancement; biological control of the genome and the evolutionary process; and the possibility of a technological singularity brought on by AI… to name just a few of the interests and obsessions of this new edge tech culture. h+ magazine is all over it.

Beautifully designed by virtual worlds artistic legend D.C. Spensley (AKA DanCoyote in Second Life), h+ is accessible, stylish, contemporary, and sometimes playful. h+ aims to provides an entry point for intelligent people to develop an awareness of this new technological paradigm, while also providing an outlet and a voice for those who are already hooked in to the "transhumanist" vision.

You can read the new issue online at the link at the top of this post.

The videos of Artur Żmijewski are screened in almost all the major collective exhibitions and biennales these days. I caught a glimpse of his video in one such events and thought 'looks interesting' but i passed my way. In front of art cornucopia, video is always the last on my list and it gets my attention only if there's a seat available for me to have nap in the dark.

But on Thursday i took the train to Utrecht to see the solo exhibition of the Polish artist at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst.

The exhibition presents "social studios," social experiments of sorts documented on film in an openly confrontational way. Think reality shows for art galleries. The artist confronts individuals to uncomfortable situations that explore complex moral issues. He then waits and films as the scenes unfold.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

In Repetition, 2005, Żmijewski revisits the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a two-week investigation to respond to the following question: "What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" At the time, 24 undergraduates were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison. After six days, Philip Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment. The guards took great pleasure in exercising violence, humiliating and torturing the prisoners; the prisoners, too, lost their ability to distinguish what was real and what was simulated.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

Żmijewski recreated the experiment despite the fact that contemporary science would regard it too dangerous--and effective--to carry out again. Whether you catch the film right from the beginning or arrive in the middle of it, the scenes of sadism, frustration, humiliation, anger, and especially fear look way too real and instinctual, to be just a game.

Artur Zmijewski, Repetition, 2005

Repetition is more than just a mechanical representation of the 1971 undertaking. The artist removes the experiment from its scientific context and the conditions of the time and places it in today's world, to transform it into a "universal manifestation of weakness and moral failure." Besides the 7 inmates and 9 guards (all of them unemployed people without), participants included psychologists responsible of stopping everything if it turned dangerous, a former prison inmate, and a sociologist involved in prison system reforms. The experiment collapsed after only few days as the participants collectively decided to leave the prison. As Maria Hlavajova wrote in her essay for the exhibition, Can this moment of resistance be seen--in a time in which the world struggles to come to terms with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the like--as a humble indication that violence, cruelty, brutality, and terror can be expunged as accepted options for creating the conditions for how to live together after all? What is sure is that the artwork raised much controversy and discussion at the time in Poland.

Apart from Repetition, several other videos can be viewed at BAK. The one i found most moving is 80064. Its title is the camp number of a 92 years old Auschwitz survivor, Jozef Tarnawa. The tattoo has faded with the years and Zmijewski meets the old man in a tattoo parlor and tries to persuade him to have it 'refreshed'.

The old man is not to be convinced easily. He wants to be left in peace. He is worried that the renewed tattoo will not be 'original.' In the end, Zmijweski gets his way and the poor man submits his arm unwillingly to the tattoo artist. In Zmijweski's own words: 'When I undertook this film experiment with memory, I expected that under the effect of the tattooing the 'doors of memory' would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past. Yet that didn't happen. But another interesting thing happened. Asked whether, while in the camp, he had felt an impulse to revolt, to protest against the way he was treated, Tarnawa replied: 'Protest? What do you mean, protest? Adapt - try and survive.' In the film, suffering, power relationships, and subordination are repeated.

Artur Żmijewski: The Social Studio is on view from 28 September until 16 November 2008. n view until 16 November 2008 at BAK, Lange Nieuwstraat 4, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Related: History will repeat itself (part 1) and (part 2).

A couple days ago, Eyebeam in New York City opened what by some has been called their best show so far. It is titled Untethered, and was curated by visiting fellow Sarah Cook to be "a sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades". Many pieces are from Eyebeam's fellows, residents or affiliated artists while a few external people were invited to participate as well.

Dead Star

The show works well as the open-plan warehouse on Chelsea's 21st Street is being transformed in a wonderland of white plinths with obscure objects on them, many of which invite to be touched, looked at, and discussed about as in all cases, their traditional function has been tampered with in one way or the other.

As the range of modifications is wide, here's a few examples and favorite pieces.

Xerox Astronomy and the Nebulous Object-Image Archive

Joe Winter, an Eyebeam alumni, has created a beautiful solar system called Xerox Astronomy and the Nebulous Object-Image Archive, which centers around a photocopier. The piece consists of the machine, sitting in a sort of cubicle and several robotic light sources, moving around it. The machine keeps making copies which somewhat resemble a photo of a night sky. For Joe, "the sculpture at once models the movements of distant bodies and presents itself as the the primary object of observation, creating a self-reflexive, self-imaging media production system". A very interesting take on science as narrative and it's dependency on the frameworks that the production of what we consider to be factual knowledge is happening in.

Kelly Dobson of MIT Media Lab is showing her responsive hacked technologies, including Blendie, Toastie and a vacuum cleaner, all of which are part of her Machine Therapy series. It's a well-known project, but it's still incredibly strong in the way that it establishes a link between an arbitrary appliance and its users (and their bodies). Plus the videos are too hilarious not to be watched again:

Blendie

Germaine Koh from Vancouver presents a work from her from her Fair Weather Forces series. As Eyebeam is at the tip of 21st street and thus very to the Hudson River, she installed a sensor for the current water-level which is remotely linked to a velvet rope barrier in the gallery. As the water changes, the height of the barrier will almost unnoticeably change and act as an ambient display for the natural surroundings of the built environment. (Especially interesting to watch since there was flooding forecast on the night of the opening.)

Fair Weather Forces (water level)

Sascha Pohflepp's (disclosure: that's me) Buttons is a camera that, instead of taking a photo, takes a moment. It then connects to the web to find someone else's photo that happened to be taken in the very same instant and displays it. The project aims to comment on photography as an increasingly networked practice and uses our trail of data to to create a connection between two strangers on the basis that they did the same thing simultaneously: press a button.

Buttons

A highlight for me was Michel de Broin's work. His piece Great Encounters consisting of two refrigerators, joined by a single piece of acrylic, results in "their solitudes uniting, through a canal connecting their inside worlds." His work questions the roles that we attribute to everyday objects and in doing so gives them sort of a new personality. The way in which that happens reminded me a lot of Roger Ibars' concise Self-Made Objects. Another piece from the same series, which kind of became the eye-catcher of Untethered, is his piece Dead Star-a sculpture made from household batteries. All at the end of their life-cycle and previously used in all kinds of appliances, they slowly drain until there is no more energy in them. Although not on show in New York, his Shared Propulsion Car from 2005, a pedal-powered car, is great as well.

Great Encounters

And there's more. Jessica Banks created an interesting table as part of her Cubed series which is levitating on a magnetic field, there's Thomson & Craighead's Unprepared Piano that plays random MIDI from the web (and has the Star Wars theme as its Hello World), Paul DeMarinis' hacked metronomes Hypnica, JooYoun Paekʼs bicycle disguise made of garbage bags, a chandelier by Ayah Bdeir and again Jessica Banks, Hans-Christoph Steiner's hacked PDA's, Max Dean's self-erasing clock and Nor_/d's reactive architecture-photos of all of which you can find here.

Related: Interview with Sarah Cook

Long overdue.... A follow-up on media_city Seoul, a media art biennale hosted until November 5, 2008 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

The events aims to reflect on the place that media art has taken into contemporary art. Each in their own way, the works selected for the exhibitions bring a fragment of answer to fundamental questions such as: What is media art? What is different from the conventional art? What changes have been made by that in the field of art? and what influences could come from now?

In order to ensure a broader and more informed coverage of these issues, Park Il-ho, exhibition director, professor at Ewha Womans University and main curator of media_city Seoul surrounded himself with four international curators: Maarten Bertheux from the Stedelijk Museum, independent art curator and critic Raul Zamudio, curator of Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art Tohru Matsumoto and art historian and curator Andreas Broeckmann.

I had the opportunity to attend a talk in which Broeckmann shared with the audience his point of view on some of the questions raised by the media art biennale: What can be defined as media art today?

Most of you probably know Andreas Broeckmann as the artistic director of the transmediale festival (2000-2007) and the co-director of the media arts lab TESLA in Berlin (2005-2007). The curator and art historian recently co-chaired the re:place 2007 interdisciplinary science and art history conference and is currently working on the next edition of ISEA which will take place in the Ruhr area (Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, a. o.) in August 2010.

Below are my (fairly rough) notes from the talk.

Questions such as What does it mean to speak of media art today? or What is the territory of media art today? have given rise to many ongoing discussions and are even the core subject of a couple of exhibitions (such as media_city Seoul). One of these exhibitions closed yesterday at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture. Proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2008 was organized with the objective of getting a sample of contemporary media artists living in The Netherlands. The Stedelijk plans to select a few artworks from the sample and buy them for its permanent collection. The questions they museum asked right from the start was 'How can we bring this recent art, with its own aesthetics and thematics into the collection?'

Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács' Hinterland #2 series (exhibited at the Stedelijk)

Broeckmann's conviction is that in fact not much of it is really new for the Stedelijk. After all, they have been buying such artworks for 40 years now: Fluxus works, videos by Abramovic, Bill Viola, etc. Media art shouldn't be reduced to technology, some media art pieces are just good examples of conceptual art and have other strong connections with modern and post-modern art.

We are now living a historical time when digital technology is used everywhere everyday. We don't have to think about it anymore. It just became so natural. Only a tiny minority of people had a mobile phone 10 years ago. Today we all have one. Being connected is easy and that's the way we expect it to be. Yet people keep seeing media art as something different, a genre which puts a heavy emphasis on technology and when we speak about art, it mostly refers to art creation that uses analog media.

In the past, when technologies were news, artists were engaging with it in a free and often very explorative way. Now that they have mastered the technology the focus is mostly on making good art. Of course some artists are still developing complicated art pieces but we are seeing much more work using easy, hand-on technology.

An important question to raise is: What happens to art when it has reached the phase beyond digital technology novelty? We used to be fascinated by technology and now it is so much part of our life that we don't have to think about it anymore.

Many people have the feeling that we still describe something when we say 'media art'. Which role does media art has in contemporary art? Are there particular themes, ideas or fields that media art references?

One of the works shown at media_city Seoul illustrates a possible answers. At first look, Julien Maire's Exploding Camera is a heap of electronics on a table. The bits and pieces belong to a video camera which, although it was disassembled, is still perfectly functioning. The lens has been taken out. Instead, external light coupled with LEDs and laser produce video images by direct illumination of the camera's CCD (light sensor). A transparent disc containing photographic positives is placed between the lights and the CCD. The pictures are projected onto the CCD when a light is turned on. Because of the different position of the lights, movement in the same picture can be created. Large lights and the laser create explosions (they trigger a sound that overlays the backing soundtrack).

Exploding Camera Screenshots

The installation was inspired by the murder, two days before the 9/11, of the most credible opponent to the Taliban: Commander Massoud.

Two al-Qaida suicide bombers posing as journalists killed him with an exploding camera at his camp in Afghanistan's remote Panjshir Valley.

Although the murder is connected with 9/11, it has been almost completely forgotten because of the magnitude of the events a few days later.

The artist wrote: For me, it is as if the destroyed camera used in the attack against Massoud had continued to work and has been filming a war film for the last 6 years.
All of this, as well as the death of the almost mythic figure of Massoud, has lead me to develop the piece 'the exploding camera': a kind of destroyed medium able to produce live an experimental historical film reinterpreting the events of the war.

Just like Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács' Hinterland #2 series (exhibited at the Stedelijk but not in Seoul), the work deconstructs the technology of audiovisual media in order to better reflect on the way that it works. This theme is often explored in media art and could therefore constitute an element that contribute to its definition.

Marko Peljhan, Speckr, Linz

An other relevant figure to consider is Marko Peljhan, an artist interested in social and political context of technology. He develops works in the Russian constructivist tradition of the 1920. His art projects deal with with technology and offer the public the opportunity to engage with them and talk about technology, scientific research, military developments, etc. The aesthetics of his work is directly inspired by the aesthetics of science and technology while exposing its dark side, the esoteric and sometimes irrational aspects of modern science.

Hello World by Yunchul Kim

Hello, World!, offers an interesting dialog with mediality by showing the process of the translation from the digital to the analog through copper pipes. The installation, developed by Yunchul Kim, uses acoustic signals to store data. A codified auditory signal (feedback) circulates in a closed system consisting of a computer, a loudspeaker, 246 meters of copper tubing and a microphone. Due to the acoustic delay in the tubing system, it's possible to save data, whereby the rule is: the longer the copper tubing, the longer the time delay and the greater the memory capacity.

Where is the medium in this work? Is it the computer with the hardware which carries the data file? Or is it the software? The electrical signal?

Driessens & Verstappen, Breed

Erwin Driessens & Maria Verstappen's Breed (also included in the Stedelijk exhibition) is a fascinating take on the theme of the transition from digital to analog. A computer program uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed bronze sculptures that represent virtual mathematical models. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfills this "fitness" criterion and thus yields a workable form. The virtual designs become tangible artefacts through 3D printing techniques.

Driessens & Verstappen, Breed

The whole creation process is left in the 'hands' of the computer, there is no direct artistic decision. The final result is presented in a very traditional way: the print-out structures are cast in bronze and presented in a glass case.

Breed reflects on the relationship between virtuality and materiality but also the relationship human and machine creativity. Belonging both to the software art genre and the sculpture genre, Breed pushes the boundaries of mediality.

Pierre Bastien

The work of Pierre Bastien which engages mostly with mechanical age looks at the degree zero of media. He uses very basic (wind, voice, fans, etc.) media for human expression in a 'post-machinic age' scenario. It doesn't make much sense to talk about new media art in this context but his work is an artistic expression that uses the most ancient media possible. On the other hand, it can be regarded as media art because of the way it reflects on the mediality of its own materiality (and vice-versa?.)

Electroboutique

Ironic wink from Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev with their latest artistico-commercial adventure: Electroboutique, a conceptual project that playfully but intelligently reflects on the status of media art as another product of consumer culture. The Russian artists are exhibiting at media_city Seoul Super-i, a pair of goggles that allow visitors to reverse the virtual/real duality by transforming the "real" world around us into a pixelated one in real time.

Today, many electrical and digital technologies are available to artists, they are free to choose which one best fits their work. That didn't use to be the case. There was a time when these technologies were expensive and not available to the hoi polloi. Nowadays, these technologies have been 'liberated'. In the past, computers would limit what an artist could do, they were 'imprisoned'. Today, an artist can decide freely whether it is software or wood that best correspond to their project. This also constitutes a liberation from the idea that the essence of media art is technology.

The Cage, by Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez, tries to re-create the experience of being incarcerated. The projection shows an image of a tiger kept prisoner in a zoo. The image is always the same, yet the tiger moves around his cage. The artist explains that the movement is in fact determined by the relative sizes of tiger and cage, such that his movements are optimized to the only possible path given the tight space available. Given that both the duration and the distance are repeated, one can imagine that in the tiger's brain there exists a double incarceration, both spatial and temporal. Moreover, the tiger's path traces over and over the sign of infinity. I would like to make visible the passing of a suspended time and give this installation both a reflexive and hypnotic character.

Pneuma Monoxyd, by Thomas Köner, is a visual metaphor of how time and memory intersect into our mind. The video installation merges in a dark blur surveillance images of a German shopping street and a Balkan marketplace.

These last works show how media art offer us new possibilities to look at the world in a different way.

Mark Hansen's 2 channel video Other People's Feelings Are Also My Own No.3 shows the artist in a similar outfit and facial expression as those of the man, woman or child in the picture next to his. The work explores notions of ego, subjectivity and identity but it also looks into the mediality of the human face and how much it can be used as a screen.

Herwig Weiser's sound sculpture Death Before Disko is a self-absorbed machine, it is a medium that could be qualified as 'autistic'. It appears to be busy with itself and communicates as little as possible to the outside. 'Death Before Disko' uses an online data stream from space observation and translates it into sound and light events. With the proliferation of digital technologies, users have become more and more distant from the physical hardware of their laptop or hi-fi units. 'Death Before Disko' aims to return to the foundations of the hardware, and shows how our relationship towards technology is more often emotional than rational.

Broeckmann's view is that it is getting less and less important to have specific media biennales and festivals. If a 'media art' piece is a good art piece it will survive as contemporary art.

Further reading: Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture. An Introduction by Andreas Broeckmann.

I got an email tonight with this:

Hi Bruce,
Here's a link (to some photos) of the art installation I did at Burning Man last week:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/actualcontact/

Includes photos of Sasha & Ann, and Erik Davis speaking in the dome.

Enjoy!

The columns were skinned with mahogany veneer and lit from the inside w/ daylight fluorescent - a pure white light!

I'm still tired from the whole experience of putting it together.  We had a crew of about 5-6 people going at all times for about 3 weeks.

I love your blog and figured I'd share! :-)

Best,
Jason

Link for this PostL THADDEUS GOLAS -- The Official Thaddeus Golas Café In Cyberspace:

I've posted about Thaddeus Golas previously in two posts. One post was called The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment is a link to a book which most of you reading this post will not remember but which was read by a lot of us older members of the psychedelic movement cognoscenti.. The other was Perspectives on LSD by Thaddeus Golas, a contribution to a publication called Blotter which I was honored to be the editor of some twenty years ago.

Thaddeus Golas passed away 11 years ago but I am glad that someone decided to take the time to tell his story and tell it well. This site has more than enough to get you up to speed on Golas and the enlightenment shortcuts he was famous for.

More than just a tribute, the folks who put together the site are keeping Golas's ideas alive with a publication called the Cosmic Aerodrome, a newsletter.

Link for this Post: Burning Man 2008 -- "The American Dream" Offical Site

The theme of this year's Burning Man is the American Dream, which is appropriate since many at the Democratic convention noted that the American Dream seems to be slipping away.

The image on the post is from the Burning Man 2008 Offical site linked at the top. Here is how they describe the man's current incarnation:

This year Burning Man will stand atop an obelisk. This imposing monument, emblazoned with the images of flags, will represent the countries of the world. Ranging from Canada to Chad, from Brazil to Burundi, from Vatican City to the Republic of China, these emblems will shine brightly in the night, gleaming like illuminated gems that stud a giant jewel box. A double-helix, like a strand of DNA, will form a staircase. Twining around the axis of this tower, it will spiral through a series of viewing platforms. The topmost tier will stand directly underneath the Burning Man.

I'm not going to Burning Man this year. Those of you who read my reports from Burning Man in 2006 know that I have a hard time with dust. For those of you going this year, I'd love to hear some reports.