LOADBANG
Saturday July 10 7-11pm
Butcher Gallery
234 1/2 Queen Street East, third floor
"A program (patch) runs (load) on a computer and files of moving numbers are (bang) randomly played from one to twenty seconds"
LOADBANG is a one-night blast of subversive, emergent video and web-based art explored through presentation of a mashup, video installation, net art and performance. Questioning net art and Internet video as distinctly web-based media, this exhibition looks at how transgressive and experimental desires in the form and content of online video are translated into an exhibition environment. How do time-wasting interactions such as web-cam performance, gaming, format shifts, avatars and porn affect our appreciation of art and life?
Addressing the instabilty of authorship in new media art production, an intensified presentation of video in a mashup asks us to contemplate variable ways of watching and curating online video.
What is your erotic? What do you want to see in art and what do you expect to see online? How are vulgar uses of technology and appropriated images rearticulated as visual fetish?
Showing randomized video by: Artur Augustynowicz, Adam Cruces, Andrea Hitchman, Ann Hirsch, Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik, Nathaniel Sullivan, Jessica Vallentin, Ian MacTilstra, Mark Pellegrino, Lucas Soi
Related non-objects, events and actions:
Curated by Jennifer Chan, this event was planned in response to an open call for “sexy, trashy video made for-or inspired by- the Internet”. Included videos and related artwork was selected in consultation with the gallery and a jury of new media artists/students/curators consisting of Jeremy Bailey, David Frankovich, Cheryl Sourkes, Kaitlin Till-Landry and Stephen Stanford.
This event would not be irl without generous assistance from Jeremy Bailey’s bangloading patchwriting and Mark Pellegrino’s technical consultation.
More information via http://butchergallery.com or contact@butchergallery.com
'Contemporary appeals to the aesthetic of experience, then, always need to be leveraged by own demands to experiment. We are responsible for our own performativity and for the politics we make of “emancipated” experience. Best to enter these ludic contracts as both knowers and dupes - only then we might really manage to do things with art' - Caroline Jones
The quote above comes from a brilliant article on, among other things, performativity in the work of Maria Abramovic, Tino Seghal, and Vito Acconci and I’m particularly curious about the possible meanings of the last line in that article. What could it mean to “do things with art”? The critical contemplation of art would become an activity of art, a utility even, and the aesthetics of that utility would become the communicative medium of the work, the “reading” would be “using”, the artwork in and of itself would be the action it engenders. It’s a curious development and if the art world at-large, whatever that may be, is wondering what a utilitarian aesthetic practice might look like (I hesitate to say “art practice” to avoid complication) then they might look at how interactive practices approach the marriage of utility and aesthetics. Were I feeling brave I might even call it “utilitarian aesthetics” because there is nothing separating the aesthetics and utility. One is not a crutch for the other, in fact they are almost indivisible; the expression of one directly because of the other. For instance, Eyewriter:
'The Eyewriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies.' - Eyewriter.org
If one wants to learn about the Eyewriter project, most likely they would begin at the website, and with the video, which situates the projects in its conditions: Tony Quan, a graffiti writer, publisher and activist, paralyzed by Lou Gehrigs Disease or ALS, is approached with a proposal to create a tool for him with which he can draw. The situation of the project is foregrounded, it isn’t incidental, nor is it circumstantial: it is why. This is where interactive practices, socially informed practices, and politically informed practices converge: explicit situationality, explicit definition by conditions. Any art historian can point to any number of institutional critiques, from Duchamp, to Andrea Fraser, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, the list goes on, of artists who recognize explicitly the situation of their work, who incorporate that situationality into their working practices as contemplative element but it is a different proposition to begin from a situation and proceed towards a resolution, a solution. Indeed, one ends up looking at something that looks like “doing things with art”. It also looks very much like a design strategy. One wonders where they diverge.
Eyewriter is a tool for making art, an explicitly empowering object that is an art object as well: computer vision software, two small cameras, a stylish pair of glasses, and a series of projectors, dimensions indefinite. The medium of its art is both as an object and as the work that is created with it. This isn’t to say that there is a perfect balance between object and utility, that they are weighted with perfect equality. Utility wins out; nothing is added that doesn’t contribute directly to the use to which it is put, the design dictum “form follows function” is obeyed, and yet the purpose to which is it is put, it’s conditions, are explicitly art. I could just as easily make the argument that Eyewriter is simply what is called adaptive design, that is, design modified for the conditions of the impaired. The first sentence of this paragraph could read “Eyewriter is…a design object”, and it would still describe in the same way, save for the clumsy ambiguity of “design object”. Every instance of the word “art” could be replaced with “design” and the work, the conception of it, would lose none of its meaning, power, or beauty.
Aesthetic discourses are fundamentally one thing: a way of reading. The artist creates a way of reading an object and the viewer agrees to that way of reading and hence understands the intent of the artwork. The content of the object can be the reading itself or it can be another referent altogether, both are completely legible, but without the readability itself then an artwork doesn’t function as art, a sentence doesn’t function as a sentence, a faucet doesn’t function as a faucet. What happens then when the discourse of a discipline that requires a different sort of legibility intersects with an art practice, with one of the recognized artistic discourses? For instance, what happens when industrial design intersects with concerns that place them in discussion with artwork? We can see a curious functionality in the case of Natalie Jeremijenko for instance: her ideas are put to work. The Institute for Applied Autonomy presents a similar conceptual puzzle; their early motto stated simply: “our shit works”. It functioning is its legibility; the criticality, aestheticized content all are engendered by an the functioning of the object as it is intended, by it’s utilitarian legiblility. Contrast this with Donald Judds now-classic remarks on his furniture “I’m very touchy about it being considered art…I’m not sympathetic to in-between positions.” Eyewriter looks like nothing more than a cheerful bleeding over of design and engineering practices into artwork and an aesthetic discourse that takes as its content the activity, the action, the act; a functional, playful in-between position indeed. Inspired artwork, littoral practices, whatever we call it, for instance, adaptive design inspired artwork, engages our use of systems, our ability to recognize that as a content that can be read, that can have values attached to it. As with many interactive practices in the US and UK, the working practice seems to begin with problems, problematizing, and proceeds to a play with the notion of research, an aesthetics of experimentation. Perhaps it’s our shared history with the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy, Russell and Wittgenstein to Rorty and Nagel, or a consequence of working with code and hardware, practices which seem to engender an appreciation for elegant utilitarianism, or the backgrounds in design or film or architecture that so many practitioners share. Whatever causes one attributes, there is, a shared practice, a discourse of practices, in which this project participates and which lend legibility and coherence to it.
So, then, in Eyewriter, what do we read? When we look at it, how do we see it? At its core, as in so many digital practices, is a transform: the transform from an eye movement to a projected line. The aestheticized object is the transformed action, the opening of possibility through what might almost be called a computational trick: take this analog process out in the world, digitize, then statistically analyze, and present. And Eyewriter is art because that transform is aesthetic, in its conceptual condition, as an understanding of its process, in its mediums of documentation, photo and video, and as practice, not simply a single object, but a way of making, to build collaborations and communities around enabling creative practice:
'The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.' - Eyewriter.org
A, if not the, goal of critical artistic practice is to engage the material of our lives, of our situations, in our engagement with art: vision, commonplace materials. What could be more commonplace than our computational interaction: our expectations of what computation is and can be? We can create narratives of aesthetic around our actions, our uses, our commonplace actions. This is no longer purely the critical art of our expectation of our reliance on systems and interfaces; this is an art of shaping narratives from our action and acting, our patterns of use, our desires for functionality, not simply to subvert them, but to enable them, to create art from them, act from them. Utility is narrativity and using is story-telling; as such, they are both a content and medium of emergent aesthetic practices and that is as rich, complex, and challenging a terrain as we can elect to engage.
Eyewriteris a project and initiative by members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks and the Graffiti Resarch Lab: Tony Quan, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue, Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson and James Powderly. It is the winner of the 2010 Golden Nica award for Interactive Art from the Ars Electronica Foundation.
The Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF), the only festival of its kind in North America, is a 10-day long public film festival that reaches over 1.3 million subway commuters daily.
TUFF is looking for the best one-minute silent films from across Canada and around the world.
The festival runs from September 10 - 19, 2010, at the same time as TIFF. Films are presented on the Onestop Network of 270 subway platform screens inside the TTC, and featured on the new TUFF website.
Films are selected by a guest jury, with top awards selected by guest judge Deepa Mehta. The TUFF 2010 Jury: Chris Gehman, Min Sook Lee, Jorge Lozano, Kathleen Mullen, Sarah Robayo Sheridan, Haema Sivanesan, and Michael Zryd.
Filmmakers, animators and video artists are invited to submit one-minute silent films that speak to an urban audience. Programming themes this year are: Urban Encounters and Other Stories; Our Environment and Urban Growth; The Medium is the Message; Urban Ideas and Politics; Urban Journeys; The City is a Poem; After Night Falls.
Need some tips on the art of one-minute filmmaking? Check-out our TUFF Tips from past winners and jurors: http://www.torontourbanfilmfestival.com/tuff-tips
Submission Deadline: July 15th
Neil Wiernik: According to the world's largest collaborative tool Wikipedia: "Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources." Most recently, collaboration has taken a turn where virtual spaces have become a focal point of people coming together to engage in a variety of collaborative processes. New services are popping up all over the place most notably in the world of audio or music making these on line collaboration tools have been around for some time now and obviously have their roots in the collaborations that came out of the on line worlds of IRC channels, BBSs, mailing lists, message boards and other early forms of social media before Web 2.0. These ideas or tools are not exclusive to music makers but can be found popping up in other places as well – virtual spaces for thinkers, coders/programmers, photographers, designers, video makers and others, spaces where the denizens of the digital world can practice their crafts and collaborate on projects.
So Corina, you and I worked together remotely you in Montreal and myself in Toronto to put this issue together, we used some collaborative tools to do so. Keeping in the spirit of the issue theme, what's your opinion? Do you like the idea of working collaboratively completely online, or do you prefer to be face-to-face? Do you think online collaboration eventually will replace in-the-flesh sessions for culture makers?
Corina MacDonald: ‘Social media’ has become a ubiquitous term to describe the platforms and tools that enable interaction through digital networks. Although the term is fairly recent and generally used to refer to recent technological developments, the internet has been a social space since the beginning as evidenced by many of the older tools you mentioned. Of course today we’re moving at an exponentially faster pace and the collaborative spaces available are much more sophisticated. I think I see collaboration on a spectrum across physical and virtual space and synchronous and asynchronous communication, depending on the constraints of a particular project. We used a range of tools in putting together this issue, including email, Google Wave and Skype. So although we were never physically in the same space we were able to communicate in various ways to suit our needs. I wouldn’t wager to guess that online collaboration will replace face time entirely in the near future; whether the face time is ‘real’ or ’virtual’ I think that real-time communication is always going to be an important aspect of collaborative creative work.
Likewise in this issue I think we have an interesting cross section of work that reflects this spectrum of possibility. Kate Carr’s project Listening to the Weather uses the web as a collaborative medium and space of interaction between visitors and artists. Max Tanguay’skollab project also uses the network as a means of sharing source materials and diffusing the results of the creative process. The Artivistic collective explains the collaborative processes they put in place to organize the 4th edition of their international transdisciplinary three-day gathering, TURN*ON and some of the difficulties they encountered in translating online collaboration into physical space.
Neil, how do you think online collaboration will evolve alongside face-to-face work – do you think that the technology is moving in a direction to eventually allow us to emulate our physical practices or do you think that the technology itself might change our ideas of what collaboration is?
NW: I think digital space has really only created at this point and time, what I like to refer to as secondary spaces for collaborations to take place in. I believe that face to face or the actual presence of two artists together in a space still needs to happen on some level. The virtual space allows for the practice of work between two artists in different physical locations to occur in a collaborative manner but it does not replace the physical space, rather it acts as a mediator between the two physical spaces that the work is occuring in. For the most part, collaboration in the virtual sense to this point and time appears to be a common means for artists to exchange material or ideas and the concept of true real time virtual space seems to be a future possibility as Software as a service (SaaS) technology becomes more of a reality. Sure, there are tools being used for real time collaborations between artists and often these tools were not intended for these kinds of uses – for instance musicians in different cities might use Skype to work on music together. However, a purely digital space that allows— example—photographers to share a tool and edit a photo together in real time is still a thought and not a reality. It is there that I come to see digital collaborative space as a space that mediates between two artists, a place to exchange a material or ideas to then go back into the non virtual world to work on that collaboration.
This is most evident in the work of Morgan Packard and Josh Ott: they created their generative A/V iPhone app thicket using a chat client to talk through the programming process and to exchange the files as they worked on them. Herman Kolgen and Kenneth Kirschner are also working in different cities and exchange files of sample sources and ideas but then both return to their perspective studios to work on these audio collaborations based on their mutual love of sounds from toy instruments. Dehashis Sinha and Robert Lippok whom live on two different continents exchange ideas via email but when it comes to creating their body of work Sinha travels to Berlin, Germany to record these musical ideas in person with Lippok. Hemiptera a laptop music duo who live together within the close quarters of a mobile home. Unlike Lippok and Sinha they use the same computer to work on their music, so here we are moving towards a concept of a united digital space where the creative process is connected on a single hard drive using one software space, but the process of that collaboration is face to face and in person. All of my examples of artists (save this final exception) use digital collaborative spaces as a tool through which to conceive and mediate the work but not to execute it. I/O Media has been able to do both: as a media collective they not only work face to face, where they create multilayered live A/V performances but they have also worked in a real time virtual space to produce: Soundreach, A live improvised audiovisual performance between China and Canada, featuring Chinese sound artist Zen Lu.
Using live feeds between the two performance spaces in Canada and China I/O Media and Zen Lu were able to create a collaborative space that is uniquely digital in nature. The A/V results of both artists existed only in the virtual space, where they performed together in real time interaction.
What I am trying to say with all this is that yes, it is possible for a digital space to become a space for the creation of an artistic work but is natural for us to work in that manner? Is it intuitive enough at this point that we are willing to completely abandon our physical spaces to create an undefined space which we will use for creating art, or is our way of processing information grounded in using digital space as a place to mediate our practices? I think and feel like that is what we are hoping to understand a little bit better with exploring the concept of collaborative spaces for digital artists – do they even exist at this point or is it a manufactured idea and are "collaborative virtual tools" just a more advanced form of meditation than a landline telephone or a hand written letter?
Corina, you have mentioned some of the artists you worked with for this issue, but what about the other participants – how do you feel they relate to what I am stating above? How do they use their digital spaces to collaborate?
CM: It is interesting that you bring up the idea of software itself as a digital space. While somehow this seems an obvious metaphor we are not used to thinking about our use of software in this way. It is generally considered simply another tool alongside physical instruments, but I would argue that these kinds of digital spaces have a significant influence on our artistic practices at a broader level, even in our physical practices. As an example we can consider how the use of audio editing software has changed our work with sound from a primarily aural experience to an aural/visual one.
Looking beyond software to digital networks, these have had a huge influence in flattening our access to ideas, images and sounds from around the world, thereby again changing our physical and real time creative practices. Matt Shadetek, who works both solo and within a family of collaborators through his blog/label/production crew Dutty Artz, has some interesting thoughts on local and the global sources of inspiration and the role of the network in musical exploration across multiple contexts. The duo of Freida Abtan and Shane Turner (f.a.s.t.) work together both remotely and in proximity bridging physical and virtual spaces. Anne-Francoise Jacques and Nicolas Dion of Minibloc are more representative of the face to face end of the collaboration spectrum, experimenting with the sounds created by physical objects and devices that they create or find or manipulate. Their work deals with the physical properties of sound and in their live performances they work side by side to explore parallel or convergent sonic directions.
NW: It really feels like the idea of cloud computing (SaaS) has still not enveloped the world of creative practices yet, that the present day space for collaboration for artists still relies on electronic networking, communication and mediation tools, creating the means for mutual feedback to occur but not a collaboration in real time on a single piece of software. However that is not to say that the practice of collaboration is not accelerated and enhanced by digital technology, but the ways in which these networking and mediation/communication tools are used have not evolved beyond a rudimentary level. There is still much room for further exploration of these tools, and we can look forward to the emergence of new modes of working that truly embody the possibilities of digital collaborative space.
2011 marks the 10th anniversary of NAISA’s Deep Wireless and SOUNDplay festivals and so it is an opportunity for NAISA to both reflect on the past and look ahead to the future. With this in mind, New Adventures in Sound Art invites artists of all ages and nationalities to submit works on the theme ABOUT TIME for consideration in New Adventures in Sound Art’s 2011 programming for its annual Deep Wireless, Sound Travels, and SOUNDplay festivals presented in Toronto, Canada. Artists may submit works in one or all of the following four categories (Note: please send separate submissions for each entry).
Preference in programming will be given to works that respond in some way to the theme ABOUT TIME. Individual interpretations or variations on the theme are encouraged, but should be realized with sound as the primary component.
Artists may submit works in one or all of the following four categories
1) Radio Art (for Deep Wireless)
The Radio Art category is for works conceived for radio or that use radio and other wireless technology in their creation and that play with the medium. Special consideration will be given to 1 minute radio art pieces for broadcast as well as 1 page proposals for collaboration on translocal and network performances.
Pieces will be selected for broadcast within Canada and on several international radio stations in May 2011 as part of the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio and Transmission Art.
Both Canadian and International radio art submissions will be considered for inclusion in the following:
-The Deep Wireless 8 radio art compilation CD
-The Radio Art Interventions (1 minute pieces played guerilla-style on radio stations during the Deep Wireless festival)
-The Radio Art Salon - a listening gallery of radio art works exhibited for the month of May.
2) Electroacoustic Music & Sound Art (for Sound Travels & SOUNDplay)
The Electroacoustic Music & Sound Art category is for multi-channel and stereo works conceived for concert performance or presentation in the Sound Travels Festival of Sound Art and SOUNDplay festivals. Preferred formats for performance presentation include 5.1, octaphonic, 12 and 16-channel formats in both acousmatic (tape), live, and mixed formats. Please indicate in the notes the intended format of presentation and any required instrumentation or specialized equipment.
3) Videomusic (for SOUNDplay)
The Videomusic category is for works that explores non-narrative abstraction with equal emphasis on sound and image. Submitted works will be considered for video screenings with either stereo or multi-channel playback for screenings in either a performance venue or a small-size gallery alongside other works selected from this call for submissions.
4) Installation Art (for Deep Wireless, Sound Travels or SOUNDplay)
Installation proposals of previously realized works for site-specific and gallery installations will be considered for presentation as part of Deep Wireless, Sound Travels or SOUNDplay. Site-specific works can be for indoor or outdoor locations. Works can use multichannel or single channel playback and may incorporate any number of media, but must feature original sound as a primary element.
Preference will be given to small to medium scale interactive works that appeal to all ages. Please note that almost all of NAISA's exhibition locations are multi-use venues and often require works to be moved and re-positioned on non-exhibition days. Also attach a list of the necessary equipment required to mount the installation and which of these items can be supplied by the artist. Submissions should include audio, video or audio-video documentation of previously realized versions of the work.
Submission Guidelines
Please complete in full the online submission form by midnight on September 30, 2010 and submit your submission materials by post (postmarked September 30, 2010) to:
New Adventures in Sound Art
601 Christie Street #252,Toronto, ON, M6G 4C7, Canada.
The online submission can be found at https://www.naisa.ca/eshops/sub_call.php.
'Is anybody there?'
- posted two months ago in the comments on the Glitch Art flickr pool discussion page
--
I first discovered glitch art while digging for new live video processing techniques on Create Digital Motion. An article by Peter Kirn introduced me to datamoshing, and with my appetite whetted I soon stumbled on the flickr Glitch Art pool.
Here's a little history about the pool. Flickr was launched in February of 2004. A few months later the Glitch Art pool was founded by LiminalMike. The pool's description / statement of purpose reads as follows:
'Glitch is a short-lived fault or malfunction in a system. Whenever camera lenses erroneously save the data of what they see to it's recording device or whenever the binary code of an image file gets corrupted (intentionally or accidentally), the final result is a faulty image, which we call Glitch. Please only post images that have had authentic digital glitching through computer or digi-cam error. This includes databent images (eg. inserting randomness with a hex editor). Please DO NOT post images that have only been manipulated in image editing software (unless it's the software that has failed and glitched the data) or abstract images made up of authentic light - these will be removed from the group.'
The content spans a broad range of styles and techniques. There are text / hex editor hacks, images processed with audio editing software, broken ROMs, screenshots of browser glitches, hardware circuit bends, and datamoshes. In addition to the intentional works of art there are also plenty of serendipitous, accidental glitches posted both by regular and one-off submitters.
Members of Glitch Art and other similar flickr pools have had their art featured in Glitch: Designing Imperfection, and present their work at festivals and shows around the world. Dtemkin recently displayed his Sector series at the Bent Festival in NYC, and Rosa Menkman seems to always be busy with one public project or another.
The pool became an immediate source of inspiration for me. It introduced me to a wide range of techniques and artistic styles, and put me in contact with many artists that I would otherwise never have discovered. This potential for immediate one-to-one contact with other artists of various levels of ability was invaluable.
One particularly useful resource was longtime flickr user and Glitch Art pool member stallio, whose blog stAllio!'s way provides lots of great databending and glitch art related guides (highly recommended for aspiring glitch artists). Other users like Antonio Roberts, aka hellocatfood (and now myself) also host sites with instructional materials related to glitch art techniques and processes.
These connections, along with information presented in the image descriptions and comments of other users, got me started glitching jpegs using TextEdit and Audacity. I joined the pool and soon began uploading the results of my own experiments.
Despite the obvious interest shown by the thousands of members and posts that have accumulated over the last few years, some users have recently voiced concerns about the current and long-term health of the community. A few months back I was surprised to see the following post leading the pool's discussion page:
'Is anybody there?
Where has everybody gone…
there haven't been any new pix in ages…
tumbleweed'
Is activity in the flickr glitch community on the decline? What has kept some users involved for years, and what is gradually pushing others to alternative outlets?
I spoke with flickr users Dtemkin, Rosa Menkman, Stallio, Max Capacity, and Glitch-Irion regarding flickr and their artistic development. Here's some of what they had to say.
--
Ben Baker-Smith: Do you see flickr as a community, or simply a platform on which to display your work? / What are the pros and cons of displaying work on flickr?
Max Capacity: At first flickr was just a platform to display my work, and for me to refer back to from blogs and such. But I started hooking up with other people who are interested in or doing the same things I am. And holy shit, people actually like my work on there. So the community aspect is absolutely one of the main contributing factors to how much time I spend making stuff. I live for the anonymous praise.
Dtemkin: Flickr has a wonderful community of glitch artists who are very approachable. For artists starting out with databending, it is a fantastic resource. [But] there's definitely an 'instant gratification' aspect to flickr. If you simply post an image and send it to a bunch of different groups, you can get positive responses, but not necessarily the thought-provoking or instructive comments that will help you move forward.
Rosa Menkman: I used to be more active on flickr, but because my personal work revolves around video, I think I moved a lot of my attention to platforms like Vimeo. There I started a similar (video) pool, which I called noise artifacts. I think the community on flickr used to be more active, there used to be a little bit more discussion on there. Now it seems to have become more of a dumping pool … or platform.
[Rosa Menkman / rom glitch 3.2]
B B-S: What display environments and mediums would you like to explore in the future?
stallio: I've been trying to move away from purely abstract glitch to introduce more traditional illustration aspects, for example doing illustrations and using glitches for textures/fills.
Dtemkin: Most of the databending software I've written has been geared toward producing a final still image or set of images. I'm experimenting with writing software where the program itself is the final piece, rather than a tool to create an effect It's a different sort of challenge, but an approach I'm excited to explore.
Rosa Menkman: In May I will be doing a live audiovisual television show in Denmark [ed. This show has now passed]. Therefore I am getting deeper into composing and sound generation. I am also hoping that during the summer I will find some more time to play around with videomixers and other hardware.
[Dtemkin / mario 39.2]
B B-S: How do you first develop and explore an idea/concept?
Max Capacity: I've always been drawn to the aesthetics of degradation and decay. And I love obsolete media. ... Pixels themselves in old video games had to represent something much more epic in scope. Today's video games don't need to be symbolic or representative, they look like what they're supposed to look like. So the video games become a fun medium or subject matter to degrade, as there's still a certain level of basic recognition after the fact.
Stallio: Glitch projects are usually about solving some kind of puzzle: how to bend a certain type of file, how to get the effect I want, how to get it to glitch in the right place, how to get the best colors, etc.
Detemkin: It's the hands-on approach that appeals to me about databending, so usually experimentation comes first, and concepts develop from the work. I began Sector, the series much of my early databent work belongs to, by looking at different file formats as raw materials with their own qualities, and asking what JPEGs want to look like, vs. say, BMP files.
[glitch-irion / 32 dezembro glitch 11 2008]
B B-S: What are some of your influences? Where do you find inspiration?
Max Capacity: I can't help but think about Warhol or Lichtenstein when I look at pixels. Pop art and punk art are big influences. I eat up anything by Yves Klein or Jim Phillips. I'm a huge William Gibson fan, and all his books give me tons of inspiration. Science fiction movies, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Frank Miller, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, lots of anime. Looney Toons, I watch cartoons constantly. Kraftwerk and Atari Teenage Riot.
glitch-irion: Pop art, graphic design, flickr's glitch/databend galleries, urban snapshots, graffiti, abstract art, and classical art concepts such as form, composition balance, color composition, composition unity are very important for me.
Dtemkin: My Sector series was heavily inspired by Bauhaus-era work and Pop Art, both of which I see as natural companions for glitch art. Repetition of images is of course common in Warhol's work, and also occurs often in databent images. Iconic symbols work well with databending, since the images are still highly recognizable when bent. In this project, I used databending partly in response to Warhol's ideas of automation in art; it's what happens when the machine breaks.
Rosa Menkman: I think Goto80 has been a really big inspiration to me - his work has a lot of tension in it; it takes place within this vortex of randomness, brokenness and perfection, which keeps me interested. I am naturally a curious person so I ask a lot of questions and always search for these tensions in my own life and research. Besides music, I think my main influences and inspiration are in concerts and festivals, books and bad television. I think I find most inspiration between the cracks of whatever else I do in daily life.
[Max Capacity / Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back (1982) (Parker Bros)]
B B-S: What methods, mediums, and tools do you use?
stallio: I'll use any software I can figure out how to databend with. Mostly I use hex editors, wav editors, and notepad.
Max Capacity: My NES circuit bending is all hardware, so I actually have to go through the process of testing and bending the circuit to get desirable results. ... The rest of the glitches are perpetrated using emulators.
Rosa Menkman: I don't feel like I am stuck into using any particular hard or software, or within the distinction between analogue and digital or sound and image. I have my preferences, but my final choice of method really depends on the moment.
Dtemkin: Most of the software I write to glitch images begins with automating manual work I often do to the files, and then expands in complexity as I discover new effects. Some of it builds on bugs I've discovered accidentally when using various image editing software. Much of it comes from testing what would happen if I tried to process data of type A through system B and see how it is transformed.
[stallio / tvslib4]
--
How the community will evolve is yet to be seen. But with the Glitch Art pool alone claiming 3,142 members and 4,914 images (by far the largest concentration of glitch artists and enthusiasts I have come across), it is certain that it has already played a part in nuturing the development of the glitch aesthetic, and will continue to do so for a some time into the future.
Members of the flickr glitch pools have certainly helped me to develop my own work. However, over a relatively short amount of time (a year) I have become considerably less active. Like Rosa, I attribute this in part to having to split time between video and still image hosting sites. A proper combined audio/image/video hosting site is seriously missing.
Dtemkin's comment about the "instant gratification" quality of viewer feedback also ring true to me, and partly as a result of this I increasingly view the pools primarily as virtual display galleries and artist profile listings rather than places to seek meaningful feedback and ideas.
I admire the stalwart, longtime contributers for their tenacity and commitment to flickr as both a platform and a community; I think it has the potential to be both. And I hope that fresh faces continue to bring new energy and fresh approaches. There is tons to be learned already from the body of images and information, and it is increasing daily.
Partway down the "Is anybody there?" thread, hellocatfood contributes a note of cautious optimism, "You're right, things have slowed down. I think the interest in glitch art has fallen a bit. But I'm sure it'll come back soon."
Like receding feedback waves on the screen of a broken analog television set, I too think that it has fallen only to begin another inevitable climb.
[Openlab Night - Fave Dave Alex Live Coding / photo: Openlab Flickr Pool]
Openlab is a loose collective of artists centred around London, UK, who use and develop open source software and technology for music, art, noise, performances, and just about anything else they feel like doing with it. Openlab organizes performances, talks, workshops, events, and beer-y meetings across the UK for like-minded individuals to share and exchange ideas and let loose their creative inner daemons.
Marco Donnarumma: What is Openlab?
Evan Raskob: The beauty of Openlab is that people who are motivated and willing can come into it and "hijack" it for their own events and purposes, without some fear of pushing against the status quo. Of course, there are limits, and it needs to stay "open" to still be Openlab, but as I've discussed with other members, the emphasis on open source software is there but also includes open process and transparency of thought - it isn't constrained to a single medium such as code. There are plenty of organizations out there, such as MakeArt, that explicitly enter into the politics of open source, and that's great that they are there fighting a worthy fight for access to important tools and opportunity to learn and the shared culture of international software design, but Openlab has taken a more apolitical and anarchic stance or just doing what we do without worrying too much about it, more of a social club and meeting place for like minds than an organization with a political agenda.
Robert Munro: I think Openlab is more about community, anyone can join just by signing up to the mailing list. Openlab is more about enabling artists to use all these free resources, and using it to make stuff. Different people organize things and Openlab is just a good communication medium to collaborate and find others who are willing to join in.
[Openlab Workshop 8 - Make Some Noise / photo: Openlab Flickr Pool]
MD: Media-labs and artistic platforms play an essential role in the cultural development of the cities in which they are based, even though they are not always properly supported logistically or financially. What does Openlab aim to offer to London and what do you think the city is lacking? How does the city support Openlab's activities?
Evan Raskob: Certainly, things have sprung out of Openlab and yet maintained an association with it, which is great – personally, I'd love to see Openlab keep its role as anarchic incubator of open ideas, but I know that others feel differently and would even go so far as to explicitly disagree with that, which I also, in a strange intellectual-judo move enjoy them doing.
Openlab doesn't aim to offer London anything. Openlab simply exists, and sometimes wonders exactly what it is that London offers it. Often times, bits of Openlab decide that London doesn't really offer them anything (except the occasional squat party, and the soon-to-be-demolished pub and performance space The Foundry) and break off and leave for other pastures.
S. Jagannathan: I find London has many programmers (I would wager a lot more than many other cities in the world) that write free software that makes music especially and through Openlab I have been able to meet many of them and share and learn from them. From my perspective, the logistics appear fine but maybe paid gigs would benefit…a travel card + a meal + a drink would be a humble start.
Robert Munro: Venue support has been a challenge at times as we most want Openlab to remain free or low cost. In fact the place where Openlab's first event was, the foundry is under threat for a planning proposal (to be replaced with an "art" hotel). I think there is a bit of a lack of public space for groups of people to just get together and jam or hack.
MD: Nowadays we see an increasing number of cross-disciplinary artistic tools and works developed using free or open source frameworks which challenge our perception of art and technology, I think of Graffiti Markup Language (GML), ARToolkit (a library for augmented reality) or the latest monumental mapping project by Telenoika. How would you define the present distribution of open source technology? Do you think the demand of new artistic open source tools is expanding? Specifically I'd like to address FLOSS distribution as an independent process and possibly outline its characteristics.
S. Jagannathan: This question implies this is about free software vs proprietary technologies to make art or music and who is winning that battle. However, it is important to understand that there is no battle at all. Free software is a dark, dingy, leaking and long tunnel but many of us see light at the end of it. Proprietary software though is like the attractive trap of a carnivorous plant - death definitely awaits at the very end and when its too late to do anything about it.
Robert Munro: One of the biggest advantages of FLOSS it that it is very malleable, you can just roll your sleeves up and mash it together in lots of different ways. The good thing about having all these fragments of technology is that you can build something original and not just have something shoved down your throat. So it's not really about competition, or this being better than that … its about the philosophy of open source, the fact that people give it all away for free to enable others, and more and more will be built on open source going ahead. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of open source stuff in windows nowadays, though they would never admit it anyway. Pure Data, Supercollider and Processing are great applications but open source is about tinkering and playing around with stuff and I think as people get more computer literate, open-source just make more sense, which is pretty well why I like it ;).
Chris McCormick: For me, Free Software is evolution whilst proprietary software is intelligent design. Free Software is massively parallel, whilst proprietary software is serial. As you say, proprietary software leads to death (companies collapse, people die, source is lost) whilst Free Software at least has a chance at survival through change, maintenance, modification. I believe that evolution is sustainable and that intelligent design isn't (because it's too expensive), and that evolution can afford to make mistakes, whilst intelligent design can't. Free Software is moral, whilst proprietary software is immoral, because Free Software gives it's users freedom, whilst proprietary software takes that freedom away on purpose. That's why I release everything I can as Free Software.
Alias: I'd take issue with that statement - free software isn't moral or immoral, it's just software. Open source is amoral. From the original GPL licence:
'THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY. SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.'
Freedom is not by default good, it simply represents a lack of constraints. Some open source software is very, very bad, if viewed from certain moralistic perspectives - some is amazingly good. Some is created with the express intent of changing the world, some is created with the intention of establishing the developers as experts in their field. Like a lot of creative endeavours, a large proportion of open source software never gets finished.
In my experience, Openlab does not generally seem to concern itself with ongoing and largely simplistic, unwinnable "x versus y" arguments, as most of us are simply concerned with making art, exploring technology, and/or drinking beer.
Chris McCormick: Yeah, I definitely take your point. I think that the decision to license something as Free Software should be a moral decision though, not a technical one. I was convinced of this by this article "Taking a Principled Position on Software Freedom". This is tough for me personally as my day job often involves writing proprietary software for other people, which I now see as an immoral, but unfortunately necessary, act. I guess I am not the only person on this list in that position though. On the other hand, Mako argues "Most people won't demand evidence for someone's commitment to non-violence or an adherence to the Golden Rule" in that article, but I think it can still be useful to explore objective reasons for a subjective choice. For example, I believe that altruistic behaviour, quite apart from being morally "the right thing to do", can be objectively justified as an optimal way to behave in human culture for the benefit of everyone.
Andy Farnell: It's not just dynamics and parallelism, for me the lure is in diversity and difference. Openlab (its culture) and open source (freedom) software is about finding something different.
Dave Griffiths: I think this is a good time to have this discussion. When Chun and I started Openlab the intention was simply to promote the use of free software for artistic uses - at that time this was unusual, and people only thought free software was for running servers with. I remember some of the reactions at Openlab#1 were fairly incredulous at what we were trying to do.
Nowadays it seems very different - free software has gained a lot of ground, and although my view is completely biased, I don't really see much interesting going on with proprietary software now. All the energy seems to be surrounding free software.
I guess there is a problem now that free software is so pervasive that it's easy to forget where it came from and why its possible - i.e. all the hype about crippled apple hardware. But largely it seems that the role that Openlab has played over the last year or so is providing workshops - seeing as the free software 'stack' has found its way into so many academic institutions, but seem to lack people who actually use it to teach it.
Chun: Over the last year, it also occurred to me about free software is, or its primary benefit, the ability to change the relationship between technology users in a more positive way. and that, for me, is Openlab. I mean, because of its diversity and openness (technological), we as the users are encouraged to, well, make friends and work together (cultural), than otherwise. I have also experienced this when working with Openlab.taipei gangs. If this "change the relationships between people for the better" stuff has some truth in it, then I would like to think this could be the purpose (if there is any) for what we do in the grand scale of the society.
S. Jagannathan: Yes! This is indeed a deep but subtle point and has the potential to revolutionize the way society itself is organized. So far its been about inventing technology which is inevitably not shared and thus becomes a weapon to use against someone who hasn't invented it. The inventor makes money (a non-violent result on the surface) and that has become a self-obvious virtue. A quantifiable virtue – understandable to all. What free software brings back and that which money making displaces and that which I've experienced myself is a kind of "love" among the practitioners. Help your neighbour as he is your brother kind of love. Now, that word love might have sounded cheesy cos its not quantifiable. Its not objective. Its personal. When you are creating and you benefit from others creation you feel that love. I do almost every time I call a function in PortAudio or SDL or liblo :D
Dan Stowell: On this very topic see this thesis just published: Geeks and Global Justice: Another (Cyber)World is Possible [PDF link] From the abstract:
'I analyze how tech activists consciously design technology that embodies values of equality, freedom and justice. Their creation and appropriation of free software indicates a more general argument for open knowledge production as the basis for a new mode of work, and indeed, a new set of social relations. In reconstructing the Internet along a democratic model and through a democratic process, I argue, tech activists are creating a model of social organization that is radically transformative, refusing the reductive limits of the neoliberal world order, and enacting the possibility of a better world now.'
Martin Klang: In terms of the free software ethos providing a social model for the future, I can't help but feel some apprehension for a couple of reasons. The first is to do with the inherent elitism of the open source/free software 'movement', or whatever you want to call it. There's often an implicit assumption that meritocracy somehow equals democracy, and people tend to overlook how they came by their extraordinary skills in the first place. So there are actually two points here, or two questions: one is to determine exactly what model of democratic decision making is being proposed, the other is to do with recognizing what function, in a capitalist society, that technology specialists fill. Specialization and centralization tend to be inherently anti-democratic societal tendencies. The other main misgiving I have when I see writing such as Geeks and Global Justice is the following - though I have to admit I've so far not read much more than the abstract - when speaking as the author does of political engagement, it is clear that this involves a completely virtual sense of activism. Virtual as in something that happens on the web, and virtual as in not real. The author Kate Milberry states:
'I argue, tech activists are creating a model of social organization that is radically transformative, refusing the reductive limits of the neoliberal world order, and enacting the possibility of a better world now.'
A better internet, perhaps, though even that is stretching it a bit far if all we do is sit at our computers. The risk is that we retreat from the real world to the virtual, and take our battle with us. How then the neoliberal world order will be overthrown - with its wars, famines and injustice - is a mystery to me. But maybe these questions are answered later on in the text.
Live sound and music performance is like no other medium for expression and frequently yields interesting sonic results, both on, and off stage. Sound checks, sound failures, the miss assigned patch, FX overloads/calibrations and pinnacles of performative exploration can all yield potential for eclectic new material.
Furthernoise.org is calling for works which are a bi-product of live performance for our next compilation "Explorations in Sound Vol 4' . Works can be raw audio of, tuning up, happy accidents, sound check experiments, improvisations, studio out takes, or any other means in which new source material was generated by performative chance
Submissions can be electro/acoustic or both, and between 60 seconds and 7 minutes in length.
Please send ftp links of 44.1 k WAV or AIF files to roger [at] furthernoise [DOT] org. Include details of process, event or place, inspirations and permission to use the track for the compilation licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. Please also attach a short 100 word bio of contributors.
For more information see http://www.furthernoise.org
Live sound and music performance is like no other medium for expression and frequently yields interesting sonic results, both on, and off stage. Sound checks, sound failures, the miss assigned patch, FX overloads/calibrations and pinnacles of performative exploration can all yield potential for eclectic new material.
Furthernoise.org is calling for works which are a bi-product of live performance for our next compilation "Explorations in Sound Vol 4' . Works can be raw audio of, tuning up, happy accidents, sound check experiments, improvisations, studio out takes, or any other means in which new source material was generated by performative chance
Submissions can be electro/acoustic or both, and between 60 seconds and 7 minutes in length.
Please send ftp links of 44.1 k WAV or AIF files to roger [at] furthernoise [DOT] org. Include details of process, event or place, inspirations and permission to use the track for the compilation licensed under Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. Please also attach a short 100 word bio of contributors.
For more information see http://www.furthernoise.org
The sixth edition of make art—"in-between design: rediscovering collaboration in digital art"—will take place in Poitiers (FR), from the 4th to the 7th of November 2010.
Make art is an international festival dedicated to the integration of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) in digital art. make art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focusing on the encounter between digital art and free software.
Today's market production accelerates the spread of non-critical and standardized aesthetics, by means of locked top-down distribution mechanisms and a series of tools that enforce it. At the same time new forms of methodologies inspired or powered by free software, participatory practices and peer-to-peer networks are fueling many Internet subcultures. Some of these emerging practices will lead to competitive social productions, while other will remain as pure artistic experiments.
By adopting production and distribution methods based on free software and open standards and by sharing the sources of one's work with others, the collective knowledge base and aesthetic sensibilities can freely interact to explore uncharted, hybrid directions which no longer reflect the supremacy of a single idea.
We're currently seeking new, innovative media art and design works and projects focusing on the above theme and questions:
We're also seeking audiovisual performances that will take place during the festival evenings.
The submitted projects must fit this focus and be made in a free/libre and open source environment, this includes both its optional dependencies or production tools and the operating system. We are asking you to publish the sources of your project under a free culture license of your choice or release it into the public domain. Projects that do not meet these criteria will not be considered.
Submission form and a list of additional requirements are available at:
http://makeart.goto10.org/call
Submission deadline: Saturday July 31st, 2010
The Fogo Island Arts Corporation is a new contemporary art venue on the east coast of Canada. The Arts Corporation runs two distinct yet complementary programs, the Residency program and the Production program. Both programs encourage dialogue between visiting artists and local people to share experiences and perceptions.
The Fogo Island Arts Corporation's mission to bring together local communities and the international art scene is reflected in the accommodations and work space provided to Residency Program participants. Striking new studios are being built at locations across the island. They are designed by acclaimed architect Todd Saunders. The first of these studios—The Long Studio—opened on June 2 2010.
Living spaces are provided in refurbished traditional homes located in nearby communities on the island.
How to Apply: Visual artists, curators and filmmakers can apply for residencies on Fogo Island in 2011. Residencies are 3 – 6 months. Visiting artists/curators/filmmakers are provided with a studio space and a house to live in.
Application deadline: July 31 2010.
Applications are reviewed by an international Selection Committee. For complete guidelines and applications forms please visit this page.
The Fogo Island Arts Corporation is a new contemporary art venue on the east coast of Canada. The Arts Corporation runs two distinct yet complementary programs, the Residency program and the Production program. Both programs encourage dialogue between visiting artists and local people to share experiences and perceptions.
The Fogo Island Arts Corporation's mission to bring together local communities and the international art scene is reflected in the accommodations and work space provided to Residency Program participants. Striking new studios are being built at locations across the island. They are designed by acclaimed architect Todd Saunders. The first of these studios—The Long Studio—opened on June 2 2010.
Living spaces are provided in refurbished traditional homes located in nearby communities on the island.
How to Apply: Visual artists, curators and filmmakers can apply for residencies on Fogo Island in 2011. Residencies are 3 – 6 months. Visiting artists/curators/filmmakers are provided with a studio space and a house to live in.
Application deadline: July 31 2010.
Applications are reviewed by an international Selection Committee. For complete guidelines and applications forms please visit this page.
The sixth edition of make art—"in-between design: rediscovering collaboration in digital art"—will take place in Poitiers (FR), from the 4th to the 7th of November 2010.
Make art is an international festival dedicated to the integration of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) in digital art. make art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focusing on the encounter between digital art and free software.
Today's market production accelerates the spread of non-critical and standardized aesthetics, by means of locked top-down distribution mechanisms and a series of tools that enforce it. At the same time new forms of methodologies inspired or powered by free software, participatory practices and peer-to-peer networks are fueling many Internet subcultures. Some of these emerging practices will lead to competitive social productions, while other will remain as pure artistic experiments.
By adopting production and distribution methods based on free software and open standards and by sharing the sources of one's work with others, the collective knowledge base and aesthetic sensibilities can freely interact to explore uncharted, hybrid directions which no longer reflect the supremacy of a single idea.
We're currently seeking new, innovative media art and design works and projects focusing on the above theme and questions:
We're also seeking audiovisual performances that will take place during the festival evenings.
The submitted projects must fit this focus and be made in a free/libre and open source environment, this includes both its optional dependencies or production tools and the operating system. We are asking you to publish the sources of your project under a free culture license of your choice or release it into the public domain. Projects that do not meet these criteria will not be considered.
Submission form and a list of additional requirements are available at:
http://makeart.goto10.org/call
Submission deadline: Saturday July 31st, 2010
The Architectural League is seeking individuals or teams of artists and designers to create light installation and projection mapping projects for our annual Beaux Arts Ball. The Ball will take place on September 25, 2010, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights. Last year, the event drew over 1000 architects, designers and artists at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. Up to ten proposals will be selected for display for the duration of the event, from roughly 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Teams may submit one or more proposals for review.
The site, Audubon Terrace, is a landmark complex of approximately eight early 20th Century Beaux Arts buildings in New York City. Home to the Academy, the Hispanic Society and Boricua College, the various architecturally complementary buildings, which take up most of a city block, are arranged in two parallel rows facing each other across an east/west pedestrian plaza. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Images of the terrace and floor plans of the Academy’s buildings can be found at http://archleague.org/bab2010images
Three of the Academy’s buildings and the terrace will house various projection mapping projects and lighting installations. There are almost ZERO New York City based projection mapping projects on Vimeo. Let’s change that. Examples of types of projects we would like to see include:
If selected, all team members will receive free admission to the Ball. Additionally, projects and teams will be featured on the Ball web page on www.archleague.org and will be given credit in the printed program for the Ball. We would also like to host a presentation of each team’s piece and/or prior work at the League’s office which we may turn into a podcast and be featured on our blog. During the event we will have a tour of the installations introducing the design teams to architects and designers.
For more information please visit http://archleague.org/2010/09/beaux-arts-ball-2010
The Architectural League is seeking individuals or teams of artists and designers to create light installation and projection mapping projects for our annual Beaux Arts Ball. The Ball will take place on September 25, 2010, at the American Academy of Arts and Letters at Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights. Last year, the event drew over 1000 architects, designers and artists at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. Up to ten proposals will be selected for display for the duration of the event, from roughly 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Teams may submit one or more proposals for review.
The site, Audubon Terrace, is a landmark complex of approximately eight early 20th Century Beaux Arts buildings in New York City. Home to the Academy, the Hispanic Society and Boricua College, the various architecturally complementary buildings, which take up most of a city block, are arranged in two parallel rows facing each other across an east/west pedestrian plaza. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Images of the terrace and floor plans of the Academy’s buildings can be found at http://archleague.org/bab2010images
Three of the Academy’s buildings and the terrace will house various projection mapping projects and lighting installations. There are almost ZERO New York City based projection mapping projects on Vimeo. Let’s change that. Examples of types of projects we would like to see include:
If selected, all team members will receive free admission to the Ball. Additionally, projects and teams will be featured on the Ball web page on www.archleague.org and will be given credit in the printed program for the Ball. We would also like to host a presentation of each team’s piece and/or prior work at the League’s office which we may turn into a podcast and be featured on our blog. During the event we will have a tour of the installations introducing the design teams to architects and designers.
For more information please visit http://archleague.org/2010/09/beaux-arts-ball-2010
GLI.TC/H is an international gathering of noise & new media practitioners in Chicago from September 29 thru October 03, 2010.
GLI.TC/H is a physical and virtual assembly of artists, hackers,moshers, dirty mediators, noise makers, circuit benders, p/h/i/l/o/s/o/p/h/e/r/s, and those who find wonder in that which others call broken.
GLI.TC/H seeks: Realtime + time-based performances (audio/video), utilizing broken/bent technologies/strategies. Workshops, sharingknowledge of hardware/software hacking, cracking, breaking, kludging,piracy, & tool building. Artworks and Projects, artware, videos,games, films, tapes, code, interventions, screen-captures, systems,websites & installations. Texts, lectures, essays, code, articles and hypermedia.
Submission Deadline: 2010.08.20
Send an email to glitch@gli.tc link to your work, abstract, or other documentation. Please include a short explanation and your bio, let us know your geolocation and if you want to physically (or electronically) attend the conference. If applicable, send spatial, technical or temporal requirements for the project.
More info available at http://gli.tc/h
[Jeremy Bailey / Public Sculpture / 2009]
doing it for the lulz: The internet is bigger than ever. With consumption and production pushed into such close proximity, XPACE has asked Jeremy Bailey, ginger coons, and Jon Rafman to talk about the problems and possibilities of the internet.
More information at http://xpace.info/events_archive/doing-it-for-the-lulz
August 6th, 7pm
XPACE Cultural Centre
58 Ossington Avenue (north of Queen Street West)
Toronto
This is the Meaford I know. Nestled quaintly on the Southern shore of Georgian Bay, Meaford for me means farming, it means my grandparents homestead, rolling hillsides, markets and lazy summer afternoons. It hadn’t (until recently) meant anything related to new media or electronic arts. That is, however, until I discovered Electric Eclectics (EE); festival of experimental music and sound art that has been taking place for the past five years over the August Long Weekend on a farm (The Funny Farm, owned by festival director Gordon Monahan) that overlooks Beaver Valley. Juxtaposing this bucolic rural scenery with a line up of avant-garde artists and crossover musicians that includes HEALTH, AIDS Wolf, DD/MM/YYYY, Let’s Paint TV; a midnight presentation of Tommy Wiseau’s film, “The Room” as well as installations by Andrew Harwood,Cinecycle,Marla Hlady and Christof Migone, EE seems like it will be an amazing mix of sounds and sights, a space to truly emerse yourself in the art and the outdoors.
There is something I really love about events like this that take place in smaller, less central locations. There is also something more to be said for festival organizers who take it upon themselves to start something new, to decide that instead of always venturing afar to experience the avant-garde that they will bring (or at least attempt to bring) these artists to them, in this case to their very own back yard, as Monahan decided to do for the first EE in 2006. This d-i-y approach may cost the event some of the slick production quality of other electronic arts extravaganzas, but with the philosophy of not only supporting artists who are adept at bending, crossing or completely redefining musical and artistic categories, but also exposing new communities to these types of artists, it is festivals like EE that seem like fresh pockets of creativity.
Both Monahan and EE co-director Chris Worden was in town last week for Bluesfest, where they had arranged, for the third year in a row, to co-present Electric Ecelctics satellite concerts, as previews for the festival proper. Certainly again, if you want to find an example of a festival attempting to expose new communities to electronic arts, I would label the EE performances at Bluesfest this year as nothing short of shear courageousness on the part of both festivals’ organizers. (They are in fact brothers…)
On the first Saturday of BF, I spent what I think was the hottest afternoon of the year watching Let’s Paint TV (who will perform in Meaford on Saturday night) play between musical sets on the Subway Stage. An internationally renowned YouTube phenomena, HIS NAME is probably the farthest thing away from the balls-to-the-wall, face melting, fifteen minute guitar solos that can tend to typify headliners at BF since it moved to Lebreton Flats. Let’s Paint TV’s act is fairly straight forward – accompanied by the sounds of a theramine, synth, drums and various percussive instruments – he runs on a treadmill, while making fresh blended drinks and painting. Yep, running, blending and painting! For the performance I saw, he attempted to capture the beauty of the Ottawa River stretching out beyond the festival site, while mixing a cocktail of bananas, apples and mangos. Spouting words of encouragement and inspiration on how to the audience could achieve their physical and creative potential – a Jimmy Stewart for the arts – Let’s Paint TV sweat it out three times that afternoon, to crowds that grew increasingly perplexed, if not down-right obnoxious. Of course, there were some die-hard fans who actually came to see him perform, but for the most part, he was met with gawks, guffaws and even jeering, especially from the lawn-chair crowd, who had arrived early to see WHO. I later found out that this was the first time EE had presented any of its performers on the outdoor stages. Admittedly, Let’s Paint TV is gimmicky; it is kitchy, random and at times, a bit of a gong show, which didn’t entirely translate onto such a large stage. It was, however, amazing to see a balding, suited man jog, juice and channel Jackson Pollock in 32º. I can see why Let’s Paint TV has garnered such a cult following, and if Ottawa wasn’t ready for it, maybe Meaford will be next weekend.
The second performance presented by EE at Bluesfest was a set by Nicolas Collins in the Barney Danson Theatre, the space where all the past EE presentations have taken place in. Cloistered away from the rest of the festival, the theatre is the ideal space for EE to present artists – most obviously for the fact that it can support the various types of electronics and audio-visual presentations that would not fair well on any of the outdoor stages. For better or for worse, it also shelters these performances from unassuming, potential audiences; anyone who wants to see these shows will seek them out, but few people happen upon them accidentally, which is a shame.
Collins, who will also be performing at EE on Saturday night, is the antithesis of Let’s Paint TV. A professor in the Department of Sound at the Art Institute of Chicago, the editor of Leonardo Music Journal and author of several books including Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardward Hacking (now in its second edition), he is an icon of the genre and an academic through and through. Taking the stage in loafers, and a beige blazer, he spent his first song seated nonchalantly behind his laptop, studying the screen as though reading or editing an article, thoughtfully and purposefully tapping a key or two at select intervals. His music is quite classic in the electronic sense, and includes song written entirely for skipping CDs, custom circuit compositions, electromagnetically manipulated instruments, as well as spoken word and orchestrations for musicians who imitate these digital noises. Coming from a generation of composers that includes Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor, Collins is entirely old-school, and watching him in the air conditioned comfort of the Barney Danson Theatre felt very much like seeing a lecture in a university classroom, one, of course, accompanied by a wall of sound and feedback!
The strength in these two performances was that they represented both sides of the spectrum of performances that will be showcased this weekend at Eletric Ecelctics. It was unfortunate that neither performance was very well attended, or altogether all that well received by the Bluesfest audience. It is also unfortunate that neither was ultimately as dynamic as what the rest of the EE line-up seems to be; however, I still hold out hope for the events this weekend, up on that rolling hillside in the Beaver Valley.
Trinity Square Video announces the next TSV Commission trilogy, LEFT, RIGHT, CENTER, a project that asks artists to create 5- to 7-minute videos using audio as a primary source material for the examination of contemporary political issues. Celebrating TSV’s 40-year history as a centre for the production and commissioning of art, we are looking for five successful proposals to the first portion of this trilogy: LEFT.
Videomakers chosen for LEFT must begin their projects from existing or previously self-created audio sources. These sources must be described in the project proposal and can include: audio interviews, self-recorded sounds, archival/historical audio material, music or appropriated sounds. (Music videos are NOT eligible for TSV Commissions.)
For LEFT, we are seeking proposals for the creation of work that considers the idea of “left” from various positions: from the egalitarian leftist or the undecided left-leaning; from a place of possible difference on the left-side or in leftfield; or from those remainders that haunt us–what is leftover, what is left unsaid or what has been left hanging.
This is a commission for the production of video art. TSV is seeking submissions that propose to explore pertinent issues related, but not limited, to representation, identity, geography and space, economics, justice, divisions of labour and power, science, history and philosophy. These works can be impassioned, critical or humorously self-effacing.
Proposed artworks can employ video through a variety of strategies, including narrative and documentary form, formalist or materialist practices, animation or compositing, and for the first time in TSV’s commissioning history, through a limited number of selected video installations.
Selected artists receive:
While each project is created separately, the artists participate in group-critiques of works-in-progress, where they can receive peer-support and feedback.
Submissions will be reviewed by a panel of artist-peers and the TSV Programming Committee who will make selections based on the proposed project’s exploration of the theme, LEFT, as well as its intended examination, experimentation and expansion of video as an art medium.
All Toronto-based emerging and established visual artists, video artists, media artists, sound artists and filmmakers are welcome to submit proposals to LEFT. Proposals from those living outside Toronto and surrounding area must ensure that the artist will attend all LEFT related activities at their own expense.
Deadline: October 15, 2010
Proposals must include an application form available at www.trinitysquarevideo.com
Our peer Markus Heckmann (aka Wüstenarchitekten) tipped me off about a recent project that I couldn't resist sharing. Markus describes his experiment (Wandler, embedded above) as: "a single frame of an animation captured on slidefilm with a generative animation running behind the slides." It is certainly hard to argue with the simplicity of the piece, which, like the underlying score (Monolake's "void") is both restrained and nuanced. If you like the 'hall of mirrors' feel of the piece, be sure to tune into Markus' Vimeo channel to view more of his work.