[photo: Adam Tinworth]
Our peers at Artengine are gearing up for the 2011 installment of their Electric Fields festival and this year the event is focusing on exploring the relationship between sound and space. Beginning next Wednesday, Electric Fields will repurpose a public pool, a basilica church, civil service buildings, the Grand Hall at the Museum of Civilization and downtown Ottawa as sites of performance and deep listening. Vague Terrain was invited to advise on one of these exciting projects and this dialogue helped set the stage for Swim Sound, a collaboration that will see media artist Rob Cruickshank team up with musican Jesse Stewart for a one-of-a-kind musical performance at the Champagne Bath (a historic public pool). Cruickshank & Stewart's performance will blend electronic and jazz tropes via a drum kit staged on a platform in the pool, a watergong, hydrophones and a custom built synthesiser to leverage the unique acoustic qualities of this space. Artengine/Vague Terrain critical blogging resident Jaenine Parker wrote a preview of the performance earlier this week and the below excerpt gives a good overview of the artists' plans:
'Stewart’s large transparent drum kit will be staged on a platform in the pool, to appear as if it is floating on water. Throughout the performance Stewart will switch from playing his drum kit to dipping other percussive instruments, like gongs, into the pool. “The addition of water, lowers the pitch” explains Stewart. People swimming underwater will hear these warped acoustic sounds, which will be picked up by underwater microphones, called hydrophones, floating below the surface of the pool. The hydrophones have been specially created by Cruickshank to transport the sound in the pool back through speakers into the space. Performing outside of the pool, Cruickshank, will be relaying and electronically processing the sounds he collects from the microphones, live. His performance will also blend in his own synthesized creations to the sampled sound he will process.'
This will most certainly be an engaging performance. Swim Sound takes place on Friday November 25th at 10PM – tickets are $10 and full details are available here. Be sure to check out the rest of the Electric Fields programming as it appears both adventurous and promising (the Polytectures soundwalk seems particularly compelling).
Call for Submissions: VIDEODROME 2012 at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Now accepting submissions of A/V works under 5 mins.
Deadline: April 1st 2012
VIDEODROME is Toronto's foremost event for Visual Music and A/V culture since 2004. Visual Music is video and audio composition made from video edits, simultaneously video AND music where picture matches sound, cut for cut, beat for beat, rhythmic media work where sound and image are equally dominant. See examples here.
Based on the Cronenberg concept, VIDEODROME is an exercise in televisionary excess and sensory overload, video screening as party and vice-versa, in the words of dropFRAMEvideo: “bridging the gaps between the sofa, the club, and the gallery.”
Works must be complete and received by April 1st by post at 193 Augusta, Toronto, ON, M5T 2L4 Or posted to a file-sharing service such as SENDSPACE. Proposals for live performances or installations will also be considered.
VIDEODROME is administrated by Jubal Brown, dropFRAMEvideo, and Apocalypse Tomorrow.
VIDEODROME 2012
Spring 2012, at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto
More info on last years event here.
'Every school-day for 3 weeks i got up and made a 3 minute recording of where i thought i would be in 4 years when i finish my degree. an attempt to create routine, an anchor/reference point for the present and stability and hope for the future. then i edited out everything that wasn't an adjective or an adverb' – Cam Matamoros
This is a piece I would like to one day take on as a proper curator; for years I’ve been wanting to programme works that deal with the role of the document within art, or more specifically how the video document becomes art. But since I’m not there yet, I’ve taken to writing about video and interviewing video artists who directly or indirectly have aspects of this ‘documentation’ in their work. I’ve written about Matamoros’s work before for my own pleasure (large bits of which I recycle in this intro), but this is the first time I’ve been able to ask Matamoros to elaborate on the work from a creator’s point of view.
I wanted to write about In Four Years (adjectives and adverbs) because it’s a video I saw a long time ago and one that has stayed with me since. This affective quality and its connection to memory (mine, the video’s, and the narrative’s) are simultaneously about formal choices and process, and the performance of process itself. This is what Matamoros executes perfectly without trying (and without trying to achieve any particular outcome it seems).
Ritualistically, Matamoros testifies to the camera, beginning with “in four years” followed by an intimate but mantra-like listing of potential future incarnations and possibilities. Facing if not confronting the camera with an unrehearsed vent forward – the authenticity may have proven to be increasingly difficult to sustain over the course of the three weeks the piece was shot, as the ritual itself settles into a pattern of confessions that are expected and, once assembled, constitute a conversation between then present but now past selves. Silences, yawns, hesitation and contemplation are key in marking the passage of time, adding to the lighting and outfits that suggest perpetual change.
My take on Matamoros’s video is that it is essentially about documenting anticipation, but always falling back into the moment of being recorded. The very process of imagining the future by recording one’s current ideas about the future makes more of a statement about present fears and hopes than it says about the potential for what might be or could be. And I think I get why Matamoros would “edit out” everything but adjectives and adverbs - these are the words that give meaning: they specify, qualify, and limit our judgments on things. Nothing else is needed. If I love this video it’s because it’s incredibly smart and gentle in its subtleties.
And with that, Matamoros and I begin our conversation…
Mél Hogan: How does editing (out everything but adjectives and adverbs) alter, enhance, thwart, or prevent the process of remembering?
Cam Matamoros: You ask about editing language and the effect that has on remembering, but to my mind, I was not engaged in a process of remembering, but rather trying to describe a future, to produce a better self through imagining what I would or could be like in four years. When I was shooting In Four Years (adjectives and adverbs), I was trying to produce a future and describe a present. I was trying to know where I was in that moment and how I would get somewhere better. In fact, this was a work that, at the outset, had for its only goal to be a work that was not about memory or about transience. It was meant to not be about aimless drifting or unknowability. I felt that all my past work had been about those subjects and that I would be forever caught in such ill-described, liminal space, if my work did not look (or especially act) toward the future. It was an attempt at doing something that I felt I had no idea how to do—establish stability and a deliberate trajectory for and within myself.
In editing the video, I prioritized the goal of describing the present. To follow through in the most literal terms possible, I eliminated from my monologues any word that was not a descriptive one. So, I kept only adjectives, adverbs and moments where I did not speak. Part of what I think is the humour of this piece is that I so clearly and almost immediately fail at the goals I have intended (hope, betterment, achievement, stability).
MH: Part of the humour in In Four Years is also seemingly made manifest through the unrehearsed and visually unpolished aesthetic. It’s a testimonial. It’s a documentary. It’s raw and real. It ‘looks’ archival. So tell me about the aesthetics of failure, (or maybe the failure of aesthetics?) and how they appear to go against the goals set out in your piece.
CM: I am terrified by failure, but fascinated by it at the same time. I am also terrified of success, which leaves me in a very ambivalent place every time I embark on a new project.
I guess it’s true, the goals I set out in the video have, in a certain way, a lot to do with success and achieving a certain polish that is markedly absent from my “current” state (i.e. during the taping of the video). I think that has to do with the fact that what the video is really about the effort of moving toward goals—and how far away I am from those goals at the time of recording.
Everything was an effort for me at that time, especially waking up and getting out of bed. The video is a document of my desire to be something and somewhere other than what/who and where I was and as a document, it does much more to describe the actuality of that present self than it does anything to support or illustrate what I imagined those goals to look like once they were manifested.
Something that stands out to me now is how ill defined so much of my future successes were. The word “good” comes back a lot, which is utterly useless for telling anyone anything about what goodness would look like, or how it would be evaluated in all the different contexts I seem to be imagining myself achieving it. Some of my goals are absurd, some seem so small, but I think in some way, they all appear unattainable because of my physical state in the video. I think the humour comes partly from that; there’s something ridiculous about hoping and intending and appearing to strive (or not at all striving but just talking about striving at some later date) despite the fact that the odds may be stacked against you… Or even that you are stacking the odds against yourself while you are dreaming of overcoming them… Maybe it is about self-defeat.
One comment that someone made that struck me as relevant to all this is the fact that what I kept are descriptive words but no action words. There are no verbs other than “be,” And being is not a very clear action one can undertake to do. That comment made me feel a bit like a character in a Beckett play. These clowns who always talk about getting out of their nowhere but they never move.
It is definitely unrehearsed, and uses my own consumer-grade video camera and ambient light. It is a testimonial, a documentary, and a record of an effort. Aesthetically it is about the effort more than the finish. The video is a document of a process and was created through a set of rules designed to reflect, conceptually, the ideas I was interested in when I was making it. I wanted it to be only as mediated as the process required, and for the process to be as transparent as possible.
MH: Did this desire to be unrehearsed change as you progressed? In other words, did it become increasingly difficult to not ‘act’ for the camera once you got more comfortable in the testimonial process?
CM: I think there are moments where I forget myself and other moments where I am conscious that an audience will later watch what I am saying. I knew while I was recording that the footage would not be used raw and there was the possibility that it might not be used at all, so most of the time I really considered myself to be talking directly to myself through the camera, making video material. I can see moments when I am maybe ‘acting’ more, but there is a way in which acting is exactly part of the intention. Part of the plan is basically a “fake it ‘til you make it” strategy.
Since I do not know how to become or even what or who exactly I want to become, I am practicing listing accomplishments in some organized, routine way, so that they might manifest later by my simple concentration on them or so that a clear path toward them might appear by my regular recitation of them.
This is also part of the strategy in my later video, Undertone Undertone, where I try to become Vito Acconci by being exactly like him and exactly re-making his video Undertone. There are a lot of differences there, since I know exactly what I want to become and exactly how I am to go about it, so it is rehearsed and costumed, and is in part, also about “anxieties of influence” kinds of things, and about loving that video and wanting to redeploy it.
MH: At what point does the audience—their reaction, interpretation—factor in to your creative process, if at all? How is your awareness of being watched different before/during/after making work? And does knowing that your video has been watched more then a thousand times on YouTube change your idea of audience? Who was your intended audience?
CM: More than a thousand times? Wow. I originally put that video up on YouTube just as a way to show it to friends or family who were living far away from where I was and who would likely never go to an art gallery or film/video festival. I never expected it to circulate much beyond that.
My intended audience when I made the work was a gallery audience. Individuals or small groups engaged with a projection or small screen. However, the first venues I found for it were festivals where it was playing to cinema-seated audiences. The funny thing is, I’ve heard about people’s responses to it in these contexts, but for the longest time I had never been at one of my own screenings. I’ve been to one now, but still don’t have a sense really of how it is received. People tell me that audiences laugh and respond well to the humour. That feedback has made me realize that it works quite well as something to be seen by a large audience, seated in the dark, anonymously sharing the experience, rather than standing in a white cube.
As for a YouTube audience, I guess in many ways the gallery audience I originally imagined might be similar: Individuals or small groups… but rather than in the gallery, they are anonymously sharing the experience with a thousand others, dispersed across their personal gateways to the internet. Maybe it is effective as something based on YouTube? It might share something, I suppose with the sort of video blog confessional style that I think exists there.
The idea of audience was most important to me in the editing process. The recording process was basically a way to produce the material that I would then use to make the work. I needed to have something to work with, but I didn’t know what that was going to be or how I would use it. I knew, at the outset, that I wanted to make work that had something to do with creating stability and a future but I also knew that I had no idea how to do that, so I developed a formula and stuck to it.
The formula was something like this:
Legend:
Stability: S
Knowing where you are now: KN
Knowing where you want to be after a measurable and concrete amount of time: KT
Routine movement toward that future: R
S= (KN+KT)R
(RxKT)+self reflection=KN
So first I had to find the value of KN through the second formula in order to solve the first.
That approach is as absurd and abstract as so many of my goals, but it set up a way for me to act toward something, which was by making the recordings I made. I knew that the recordings on their own could not possibly be interesting or engaging for an audience, so after I had made them, the next challenge was to make something of that fodder, to distil some kind of essence from it. I wanted to be able to make rules that were not at all about the aesthetic but rather about the effort of trying to know something about myself. Words hold the promise of telling us something but they also, always, inevitably fail at communicating quite what we mean. I think what I wanted to do for an audience besides describe something about myself, was engage in the questions of what it means to want and especially to say what one wants. What is the action of wanting and how can it ever be possible to name what one wants? Doesn’t language always fail us? But don’t we always look to it for an anchor, for a way to know what was intended? Can I always know what I intended? Is language always a betrayal? Can it ever offer something concrete? What I maybe didn’t realize was that I thought I was framing wanting as an active, practical thing, but ultimately I defeated my own purpose, creating a video where my performance of intending to be something or someone just deteriorates and is exposed as non-action when it stays in the realm of strictly description.
I think I am getting off-track here. I’m going to stop there.
MH: You made this video in 2007, projecting, as the title suggest, where you’d be in four years. It’s been four years, so the question is: did you fare up to your expectations?
CM: This is the first question everyone asks. Everyone is curious about how well I met or missed my expectations. Of course this is a natural question, given the format of the work. It sets up suspense in a way. I’m not sure about how important it is to answer it though. Actually, I wonder if answering it closes down something in the work that otherwise makes it durable in the memory of the audience? What do you think? I’m curious, too, to know what people remember of my goals and projections. It’s been a while since I watched the video, so I myself don’t remember what I anticipated, wanted, or tried to manifest. Truthfully, quite a few things in my life are “good, really good, good enough, or pretty good” fewer things now are “messy, a mess, really messy,” but some things still are. I didn’t know what graduating “with honours” meant at the time that I shot the video so I didn’t know that I couldn’t achieve that since I didn’t do a programme that had an honours option. I did however graduate in April “with great distinction” which I think is about what I was aiming for with that statement. I think there are goals in the video that I’m still working on. I would still like to be able to describe some part of my practice or recognition in terms of “all over the world,” for sure.
MH: What role does video as a medium play for you personally and as an artist in terms of recording, remembering, and facing yourself in the future?
CM: Video is something I think about as a kind of space, as another kind of embodiment, as an interface. I think of video as a very physical medium. Maybe, I mean that I think of video-performance as a very physical medium. I think that, for me, to interact with the camera in one moment and project the results to an audience in a later moment feels much more intimate to me than to be present in the same room. There is a closeness that is possible through the way that video can frame and enlarge (on a big screen) or contain (on a small one) that is not possible when we are all on the same scale. Also, I think maybe all of my video performances are about being and becoming through time, about projection into the future. Time and projection are obviously two fundamental technological factors of the video medium… and there is so much time and technology between the moment when I physically interact with the camera and the one where the video is played in public, but I am interested in how the screen can feel like thin skin, how video can create haptic experiences.
As an artist, I really like video that is about what video is and does. It can reorganize time and it can ask questions about how we interact with screens. I’m still really hung up on video art from the 70s, like that of Lisa Steele and Vito Acconci, where you have a very intimate set-up of the artist in front of the camera asking you in some way or another to touch them. These works are loaded with questions of intimacy, of truth and believability, of whether it is the audience or the artwork that is captive… There are some really important critiques of screen-based culture embedded in these tender and seemingly personal works and I feel like those works are still some of the most well articulated and nuanced critiques of screen-based communications/consumption that have been made.
Untitled Landscapes, still
MH: What are you working on and what are some of the common threads that tie your work together, such as in Untitled Landscapes? What’s next?
CM: I’m working on a couple of projects right now. I’m continuing to develop Untitled Landscapes. I’ve edited the images and changed how they will be displayed, and, of course, there are always more and more of them. I’m also working on a video exploring the video projection surface (tv screen or projection screen) as a kind of skin between my audience and myself. Video is for me a very tactile and intimate medium, and I’m working through that along with language and culturally constructed ideas about intimacy, love, and co-dependence. Finally, I’m trying to finish a project I started with my family a few years ago where each of my parents and 3 brothers created a document where they in some way perform their impression of me. These projects are all in some way related to the idea that a subject is produced and becomes a self not in a void or under any pure circumstances, but in ways that are inextricably defined by linguistic, social, cultural and geographic environments. We become ourselves through being like or unlike other people and things around us. We do our best to express ourselves by using words that are enough like or enough unlike other words available to us. Being and saying are always approximate and temporary. I think this is a thing I am constantly expressing.
My videos are partly about becoming a knowable self through language, through media, and through social situatedness. They are also about desire, which I think is an implicit vehicle in any process of becoming. I ask myself who or what I want to be and then I try to show how I am/not, or might/not be like that. I struggle with simultaneous and equal terror of and desperation for both success and failure. I think my video works really grow out of that ambivalence.
Another thought is that through all my work there is an interest in the surface (screen or print or frame) as an interface between the image and the viewer and an interest in the process of looking and what looking does to an artwork and to a viewer who looks at it. I think that there is perhaps more of a link within my video works than between those works and others. For example, the works that I would consider more as ‘drawing,’ for lack of a better word, I think deal with different approaches and interests than I do in video work.
Drawing, like the Untitled Landscapes series and some other things I’ve been playing with using folded, reflective mylar shapes or paper cutting, or papier maché, is a very new medium for me and it is very consistently and clearly about exploring landscape and what it means to represent landscape. There is a side of it that is interested in sparse, simple, straight-up beauty, the kind of romantic, dreamy feeling I have sometimes had while looking out the window of a late-winter train at 5pm. The lavender-tinged sky over Ontario farmland is wide and streaked with sun-tinted clouds. The long yellow-brown grass shows in strips through the bright snow, which is white, but also reflects the colour of the sky. I think seeing a length of unbroken horizon does something special to the eyes and triggers something in the imagination. I am interested in how representing this on a small scale might stimulate a larger-scale feeling in one’s imagination. Sown in this imagination stimulus is also a critical question for me. I do love that dreamy, romantic feeling, but I also feel wary of it. There is nothing simple about Ontario farmland at any time of day. The same is true of any landscape. I think of Don Delillo’s “most photographed barn in America” from white noise. We learn to look and read images just like we learn to read words. Sight and understanding are shaped by habit, by precedent, and by anticipation.
In a comment reflecting on the making of Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler said she was concerned with “something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.” I think a lot of video art from that time is concerned with how the mechanisms of television constitute a language that is capable of starting to “speak the subject.” I relate to this concern. The magic that I find in work by Lisa Steele and Vito Acconci, and even Rosler, though she is more heavy-handed, is the creation of this intimate context through the video screen. There is a feeling of a private conversation between the artist and the viewer while at the same time, there is always the clear and present knowledge on the part of the viewer that they really are engaged with a series of machines. A television and vcr, for example, but also the machines of verbal language, body language, gendered expectations for behaviour, camera framing and angles. In fact what is emphasized is the invisible social apparatuses that make up what we think of as the content of the more visible, technological apparatus.
I am interested in this kind of simile as a critical strategy. I wouldn’t claim to be there yet, but it’s something I strive toward. And I don’t think its somewhere you can get just by thinking it through. I think you have to feel your way there, partly. It’s instinct and it’s careful consideration, mood, impulse and criticism. It’s in the joke. I hope the work I make is funny.
The Art Gallery of Hamilton invites artists to apply to create an interactive digital media work using new technologies, with the assistance of technical experts in the fields of software and video gaming. This project is made possible with the support of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture's Museums and Technology Fund grant, and partners at McMaster University and Silicon Knights.
We are seeking proposals that articulate an idea for an interactive digital artwork. Proposals will be evaluated for artistic merit and technical feasibility according to the skills of our partners in software engineering and gaming. Three selected artists will work with these experts and the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton during the artwork creation stage.
The artwork creation will take place in Hamilton using available equipment (see below) over approximately three months in early 2012. The resulting artworks will be presented in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in winter 2013. Artists will be compensated with a project fee as well as exhibition fee in accordance with CARFAC recommendations. This opportunity is open to emerging, mid-career and senior artists who live in Ontario.
A key goal for this project is to provide technical skills training in these areas to artists who might normally hire a technician in order to realize a project. Artists with ideas, but not the technical skills or equipment to achieve them, are encouraged to apply.
Examples of artworks include, but are by no means limited to:
the creation of a navigable 3D digital world that allows a gallery visitor to move through a virtual space constructed by the artist;
a time-based artwork that uses multiple projectors to surround the viewer, and surround-sound technologies, to immerse a gallery visitor in an emotionally engaging story;
an artwork that incorporates video gaming strategies to engage viewers beyond exploration of 2D digital scenery;
an artwork whose main platform for dissemination and exhibition is an iPhone or other hand-held device;
an artwork that encourages multiple users to connect in an online environment.
Proposals must include the following:
Artists will have access to the following material resources for the creation and presentation of the project: iMac computers with upgraded RAM, iPads, external hard drives and network attached storage, Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, Wacom tablet, Mac minis, HD projectors, possibly 3D projectors.
Expertise from the fields of software engineers and gaming (programming, design or content) will be available to artists in the form of several consultations.
Please submit the materials listed in 1 through 7 above by email with the subject heading "Interactive Digital Media Art Incubator application" to the email address below in digital form (word document, pdf, jpg). Maximum image size: 100 kB each. Video files should be Quicktime, maximum 10 minutes total. Sound files should be MP3, maximum 10 minutes total.
Note: Image, video and sound files may be submitted on a CD or DVD by mail, but only if this is necessary due to large file sizes. Materials will not be returned unless a self-addressed stamped envelope is enclosed. Large digital files can also be sent via a program such as transferbigfiles.com to the email address below, along with a separate email that identifies the application contents. Email is the preferred submission method. Any mailed materials must be received by the deadline.
Deadline for proposals: Thursday, January 19th, 2012.
Successful applicants will be notified by February 8th, 2012.
Send applications and any questions about proposals to:
Melissa Bennett
Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton
melissa@artgalleryofhamilton.com
eContact! extends an open call for contributions to an issue focussing on the use of the body in electroacoustic performance practice, coordinated by guest editor Marco Donnarumma. Performers, composers and others are encouraged to contribute their perspectives on the role or position of the body in experimental practices of musical performance.
Suggestions for contributions include, but are not limited to the following ideas:
We also welcome other contributions that engage in a discourse on the relation between biophysics and music. Feel free to propose other ideas!
Submission deadline: January 31st 2012
Publication: February 29th, 2012
Submission Guidelines can be found here. To state your interest in contributing or for further information, contact Guest Editor Marco Donnarumma via email.
Electric speed is curated by Kate Armstrong and Malcolm Levy for Revised Projects and the New Forms Media Society.
Our interest in working with the form of the urban screen for Electric Speed relates in one part to the catalyst of the McLuhan in Europe 2011 initiative1 in which artists and curators have taken the centennial year of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s birth as an opportunity to consider the transformative impacts of his ideas specifically in the context of media art. The other component that spurred the development of this exhibition was an interest in partnering with the Surrey Art Gallery to present work specifically geared to the unique context of the Surrey Urban Screen, as it is the largest urban screen in Canada and the only one that is devoted to the presentation of art.2
The variegated ways of approaching speed as a subject, mode, effect or relation that we see in these artists’ projects provide entry points for considering the impact of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on the subject of accelerated culture. Most importantly, though, Electric Speed presents new works from a group of Canadian artists whose tactics and practices exist within and respond to the state of global media culture. Electric Speed will be exhibited at the Electric Speed Art Gallery from December 2, 2011 through March 31, 2012, before travelling to other urban screen venues internationally. With this exhibition, we’ve tried to investigate these themes as well as enable the production of vibrant work that responds to the pervasive, variable form of the urban screen, itself an important defining feature of the series.
If urban screens are defined as the “various kinds of dynamic digital displays and interfaces in urban space such as LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals but also intelligent architectural surfaces”3, it becomes immediately clear how deeply they have infiltrated the urban environment, and it must be noted that the commercial aspects of this ubiquitous form are fundamental to their existence.
The urban screen as a form typically fluctuates, a bit uneasily, between two poles: Not purely commercial and rarely purely cultural, a common tactic of the urban screen is to deliver culture in interstitial spaces or timeslots, for example showing video or media art in the last minute of each hour or working with public transit authorities to show animation or experimental video on the television screens in trains or subways.
However variable or restricted these sites are, these tactics produce unique if not immense opportunities for delivering art in new ways and new spaces, for example allowing it to be shown simultaneously in 15 cities across the U.K.4, engaging huge audiences in major public squares5, reaching people such as commuters in situ, or allowing architectural surfaces to operate cinematically or socially so that groups of people can gather in public space to interact with a large-scale, shared image.
In response to these complex and multivalent conditions, an international network of artists, curators and theorists has emerged for the purpose of discussing and examining the role of the urban screen and to creating discourse among “artists, curators, cultural managers, architects, government institutions, screen operators as well as theoreticians” so as to rethink “the relationship between architecture and public space in the digital age”6 and to consider the implications of ongoing tensions between commercial and artistic concerns as well as the restrictions that arise from questions of ownership and control in relation to the public context. Whether through the cultural bureaucracy of a municipality7 or a multi-national corporation such as Clear Channel8, screens are regulated, and ultimately cause an examination of what is and is not public.
For us, the networked, global form of the public screen manifestly raises questions about simultaneity, relationships between public and private, issues of centralization and control, as well as causing an examination of the ways in which cultural and commercial spheres intersect - all issues that pierce through and overlay the theme of “electric speed”.
This project might be characterized as an invitation to the six artists - Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, Jeremy Bailey, Jillian Mcdonald, Jon Sasaki, and Will Gill - to test the formal qualities of the public screen as a medium, because on some level the urban screen implicitly suggests an investigation of the contemporary media environment itself. With all the opportunities and restrictions of the screen, and the attendant factors which are explored in these works as well as in these essays and interviews, it remains for us an active question: Do the formal and contextual constraints that lie at the heart of the urban screen prevent it from functioning as a meaningful cultural space? Or on the other hand, is it even possible to imagine a meaningful investigation of global urban culture or media that takes place anywhere but there?
Kate Armstrong & Malcolm Levy, Vancouver
January 2012
References
1. A primarily European project initiated by Stephen Kovats and Michelle Kasprzak to create “a conversation that spans art, communications, and technology.” http://www.mcluhan2011.eu
2. Architecturally the Surrey Urban Screen is in fact more of a façade than a screen, as it possesses a unique exterior with a set of illuminated, irregular windows that challenge it as a traditional projection surface.
3. Mirjam Struppek is the founder of the International Urban Screens Association, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
4. The BBC Big Screens initiative is a collaboration between the BBC, LOCOG and UK local authorities in which screens become focal points in the city for sports, news, events and content arising from partnerships with arts organizations.
5. Initiatives to present cultural projects operate in connection with sites such as New York’s Times Square, the large-scale urban screen in Federation Square in Melbourne, and the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin.
6. Mirjam Struppek, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
7. Where public art must be in dialogue with community and the specific requirements and constraints presented by the site in question.
8. Clear Channel is a global media and entertainment company that owns and operates approximately one million screens in 45 countries across 5 continents.
Culled from a press release that recently showed up in our inbox.
As we plan our 2012 Electricity is Magic season, we invite submissions from individual artists, collectives, or curators to submit proposals for the EiM Gallery. Our space is non-traditional, and as such, we have some unique parameters for artists to contend with. Our presentation spaces are as follows:
When applying, please include:
Submissions are ongoing. Please apply via email to submissions@electricityismagic.com.
[Mark Amerika / Immobilite, still]
This edition of VagueTerrain showcases an intimate and phenomenological mobile art aesthetic unfolding in networked mobile performance and media art projects that utilise the potential of the latest smartphones, transforming and repurposing the device into a new collaborative medium for expression.
Many mobile cinematic projects in the past valued poor image quality and low-resolution video on their phones for its immediacy, blurriness and pixelated imperfection – with low resolution holding its own beauty, value, and unique aesthetic. The aesthetic of this emerging mobile moving image medium, as with the early video cameras, has been one of rapidly improving image quality and developing photo and video editing applications. Yet in exchange what is gained is an immediacy and empowerment through the simplicity of use of the device. Due to its portability and close relationship to the body, the videophone has an inherent embodied expressivity. Observing users of multimedia phones, there is an inversion of what is considered ‘quality’ image construction or filmmaking taking place: the limitations of the tool and pixelated resolution become an asset rather than a hindrance to image-making. It is the very messiness of the medium that makes it visceral; the tension of imperfection of image quality that lends a rawness and gives it an authenticity or ‘liveness’.
Several artists and filmmakers, following from Lev Manovich, are now finding new ways to create generative narrative using databases, custom software or apps that take advantage of mobile media - the field is expanding exponentially. Conceptual aspects of the ‘database’, along with visual methods for tagging and categorising media in the network fuel ambient narrative constructions and performance projects. Generative elements are incorporated through custom iPhone and iPad tools, made by artists using specialised programming environments and open source or other artistic technologies. New forms of narrative are being explored, such as that experienced through the work of Mark Amerika, made by structured improvisational mobile cinema activities as in Mobile Phone Video Art Classics (2008) or Immobilité (2009), or Dean Terry’s mo.vid.1 (2005), Steve Hawley’s Speech Marks (2004) and Giselle Beiguelman’s sometimes always, sometimes never (2005). These works have set the tone for newly evolving projects. Amerika, Terry, Kozel and my own media art research, MINDtouch, point to the increasing use of gesture which is becoming a key aspect of the mobile video modality. The mobile device encourages movement, often resulting in blurry, abstracted patterns, and a ‘splattering’ effect from gesture. It inspires a playful, expressive, performative exploration.
BBC Screens commissions large interactive screens projects, for example artist Kasia Molga’s project for Glastonbury 2010 which takes mobile sms' from the audience to create an interactive mobile / digital painting; the V+A had a weekend of open source creativity as part of their digital art exhibition Decode in 2010/2011 which showcased artists who made innovative performative or interactive projects with Nokia's open source platform the N900. Others like Mark Amerika have made structured improvisational mobile cinema works like Immobilité , and still others are now taking over the iPhone platform and making art apps. One artist last year showed work supported by Nokia and elementary schools, where he taught students drawing and animation using the iPhone touch and now the iPad. Last year the artist David Hockney exhibited work made entirely on the iPhone touch and the iPad; visitors could watch him create in real time. In the summer of 2010 in London a project called Media Sandbox provided a workshop that taught theatre directors and actors how to make new creative and participatory theatre using mobile and pervasive devices.
As the curator of this journal issue, I also want to mention my own recently completed PhD project, MINDtouch was a participatory media art work that was designed for "Social Mobile VJing" using for media phones. MINDtouch explored embodied, non-verbal interaction using wearable biosensing devices and mobile phones as the ‘interfaces’ to connect bodies, in a weave of layered media during social events. It sought to uncover how bodily sensations, perceptions, and interactions could be meaningfully utilised and expressed visually. Participatory, mobile media social events enabled telematic presence and liveness, aided by the embodied physiological sensors, to intensify the interaction and engagement. Presence of participants was transformed into a digital video collage, allowing them to ‘touch’ and ‘play’ with others, remotely, through the network.
This edition of Vague Terrain will present these and other ground-breaking projects that are taking mobile art and mobile media into new directions. In this issue the focus is then new artworks that use either mobile video or other mobile applications in performance or other performative pieces, or have a performative aspect in their mobile video art, with the exception of one artist. Featured here are many diverse artists, including the London-based artist Kasia Molga mentioned above, who uses interactive live data feeds and SMS to create digital paintings and other interactive digital works. Filmmaker Max Schleser developed his own new, artistic approach to mobile documentary making called 'mobile-metary' and the resulting projects made this way. A dancer/choreographer team made of of Susan Kozel, Mia Keinanen, Leena Rouhiainen, Samu Mielonen, and Anne Koutonen with many others, made two main projects exploring Twitter and choreography called Inutweet, and we will focus on their most recent project called alone or not.
I interviewed well-known VJ and video artist Mark Amerika about his work and Immobilité in particular. I talked to Whit MacLaughlin who is the Artistic Director of the theatre group New Paradise Laboratories, who make theatre using mobile devices and web interactivity, especially in its production Extremely Public Displays of Privacy?. Another interesting piece was the result of the emobile-art European Art residency - The Third Woman mobile art project; I spoke to two of the artists who were involved in the mobile film and site-specific performance aspects of the project, Martin Rieser and Anna Dumitriu. In my recent travels, I met Dutch artist/coder Sander Veenhof, who makes mobile Augmented Reality works that are highly engaging and participatory, I felt his work was so exciting and cutting edge that he needed to be featured here too. Another filmmaker, Pete Gomes, who started making films using traditional celluloid and still works on more traditional film projects in collaborations, but has moved much of his of own abstract and personal projects to the mobile format, experimenting with the latest mobile film apps to emulate the old celluloid look. Through my MobileFest contacts in Brazil I was referred to the work of Giuliano Chiaradia, who collaborated with several dancer/actors to co-create unique mobile performance video pieces for a project called 5#Calls. Lastly, I have always been interested in the research by Will Pearson who has been developing mobile comics and developed a mobile visual narrative project and downloadable iPhone app called Sobras.
Finally, I've also included an overview of my own recent works, such as MINDtouch, using mobile video and sensing devices in performance and participatory installation.
Camille Baker, London
June 2012
[photo: Medialab-Prado]
Deadline for entries: February 15, 2009
Call for collaborators: March 6, 2009
Medialab-Prado and the Cultural Center of Spain in Lima (Peru) issue a call for the presentation of projects to be developed within the INTERACTIVOS?' Lima'09: Magic and Technology workshop, to be carried out in Lima from April 13 through 28, 2009.
Led By: Julian Oliver (New Zeland/Spain) Clara Boj (Spain) Diego Díaz (Spain) Kiko Mayorga (Peru)
The aim is the selection of a maximum of 8 proposals for the development of software pieces and interactive installations that propose a rethinking of the usual scenario in magic tricks. The workshop proposes to explore the use of open hardware and software tools in a collective and interdisciplinary manner in order to create technological prototypes with success in the Media from different perspectives: playful, creative and critical. The call is aimed at artists, magicians, engineers, musicians, programmers, designers, architects, hackers, psychologists, etc.
Contact: interactivos (at) medialab-prado.es / more information
Organizers: Cultural Center of Spain in Lima (AECID) and Medialab-Prado (Madrid City Council)
Although a little late in passing along the news, I'd like to point out that Michelle Kasprzak's essay For What and For Whom? (from our Curediting issue) was recently republished in prss release #22. An "independent blog aggregator", prss release compiles interesting blog posts into "issues" ready for online viewing or PDF download. Editors Marten Dashorst and Edwin Gardner have a knack for sniffing out great art, design and technology content and the publication is worth subscribing to - especially if you are not a RSS addict.
Although quite overdue, we've finally started adding our past issues to the VT archives. We're going to work reverse chronologically so the first addition is Vague Terrain 08: Process which contains interviews with Chris Messina, Daniel Shiffman, McKenzie Wark, Peter Mettler, Tara Rodgers, and Thomson & Craighead. These were conducted by some of our closest peers and collaborators who included Malcolm Levy, Jeremy Rotsztain, Noir, Corina MacDonald and Martin John Callanan. The issue was originally published in November 2007. Next up is our epic sample culture issue, hopefully we can attend to that in January.
It is most definitely fundraising season and Rhizome is in the midst of their annual community campaign. The new media portal has set out to raise $30,000 by midnight on December 31st and they are about 80% of the way there. Rhizome are an utterly essential online arts organization whose importance was recently described by Steve Deitz as capturing "the memory of what has been and the possibility of what can be". Contributing to Rhizome awards participants the following benefits: The opportunity to vote and help determine which artists will receive support through their commissions program, full access to the ArtBase archive of digital art and continually updated listings of residencies and opportunities.
Rhizome is also offering a bunch of goodies for donations of more than $25. Please consider supporting this pivotal ongoing project in nurturing and preserving technology-based art.
If you weren't already aware, our friends at Turbulence are conducting their annual fundraising campaign. This organization if fundamental to online arts promotion and in addition to commissioning a lot of new (and vital) work, they are active as event and symposia presenters. A quick recap of their impressive 2008 actions:
Having launched 30 COMMISSIONED WORKS on Turbulence.org and Networked_Music_Review; co-presented two exhibitions – MIXED REALITIES (with Ars Virtua and Huret & Spector Gallery) and LUMENS (with Greylock Arts and MCLA Gallery 51); co-presented two symposia – FLOATING POINTS 5: MIXED REALITIES (with Emerson College) and PROGRAMMABLE MEDIA II: NETWORKED_MUSIC (with Pace Digital Gallery); co-presented UPGRADE! BOSTON (with Massachusetts College of Art and Design); and participated in Upgrade! International: CHAIN REACTION (Skopje Macedonia).
Please consider supporting Turbulence and keep in mind the fact that when it comes to arts promotion, no donation is too small. You can find out more information about their campaign (and 2009 plans) here and donate via this link.
[Adrian Holovaty / Everyblock]
In the 1980s architect Bernard Tschumi posed the following question: "If writers could manipulate the structure of stories in the same way as they twist vocabulary and grammar, couldn't architects do the same, organizing an architectural program in a similarly objective, detached, or imaginative way?" While Tschumi was speculating the foundation for a new type of architectural practice, his thinking can be applied to problematizing our current, informatized cityscapes. Ubiquitous computing, home-brew geospatial analysis and open source culture are rapidly changing our conception and experience of urban space. If "event" could be used as a catalyst in architecture, what paradigms might we employ to recontextualize the city?
Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE is dedicated to exploring urban representation. The issue will serve as a global index of strategies for abstracting, quantifying and documenting urban life. Subjective cartographies, architectural mashups, urban informatics, augmented reality gaming and field recording based work are all examples of research that we are interested in. What is important is that the work is ambitious and innovative.
We are seeking submissions in all formats - audio, video, photographic documentation and text. If you are interested in submitting work to be considered for inclusion in Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE please note the deadlines below and contact the issue curator, Greg J. Smith at greg@vagueterrain.net.
Additional Information
Format: Please see http://vagueterrain.net/content/journal/submission-guidelines for full submission guidelines. Please consult this document as it is very important to read when considering the scope and deliverables of a submission. All of these criteria will have to be met in order for work to be included in the issue.
Copyright: Vague Terrain publishes material under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons License. Potential contributors are welcome to propose alternative licenses for their work - but we prefer the flexibility and open nature of CC.
Submission Deadline: Potential contributors should establish contact and provide links/information about a proposed submission before January 24th. Selected participants will be contacted by February 1st and all submission material and supporting documentation will need to be uploaded by February 15th. The tentative publication date for the issue is March 1st.
Curator Information: Greg J. Smith is a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. His work is invested in exploring how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. These dynamics have been explored in a range of mediums including drawing, visualization, writing and editing. Greg co-curates and edits the digital arts publication Vague Terrain and is a contributor to Rhizome and Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1. Greg has presented work at venues and institutions which include Medialab-Prado (Madrid), the Annenberg Center for Communication (Los Angeles), the Public Memories Project (Syracuse), soundaXis (Toronto), Université de Montréal and TAGallery (online). He has taught digital humanities at the Department of Communications Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University and been a guest reviewer at the University of Toronto, Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Ryerson University and the Los Angeles Institute of Architecture and Design (LAIAD).
"Open Source Video is a project of Constant, a Brussels based organisation for Arts and Media. This weblog is a collective testsite for producing and distributing open source video. Here we keep traces of experiments with software for sharing and editing video, and report on what we found to be effective hardware, good linux distributions and helpful configurations. Also: tips and hints on where to find manuals, practical info on using software etc. This blog contains posts on annotating, tracing, collectively editing and sharing video online. We are interested in finding ways to make archived video material accessible, to make it searchible and keep video archives alive by allowing the content to be re-interpreted." - posted to videovortex by Seth Keen on earlier today.
TRANZAC / RAT-DRIFTINGISH / HEALING POWER PRESENTS
BIRD SHOW (Ben Vida)
SUN CIRCLE (Greg Davis and Zach Wallace)
Martin Arnold, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver
with charming Stage Décor by
Heavy Water
THURSDAY DECEMBER 11TH 9:30 PM START
TRANZAC MAIN HALL
292 BRUNSWICK AVENUE
Toronto, Canada
416.923.8137
$10
BIRDSHOW. Ben Vida has been writing, recording and releasing records for over
ten years, both with such bands as Town and Country, Singer and DRMWPN as well
as solo under the name Bird Show. He has released records with many labels
including Thrill Jockey, Drag City and Kranky and has toured extensively
throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.
"...a primal drone that unites Vida's obsessions - electronic hum, acoustic
ambience and woodsy buzz - into one massive sound." —Marc Masters, The Wire
SUN CIRCLE is the newish psychoacoustic, high volume drone music from the
wonderful Greg Davis and Zach Wallace.
“Sun Circle's important debut is psychoacoustic minimalism meets psychedelic
maximalism. ecstatic high volume drones, long form trance musics and peace
noise. bowed strings, voices, organs, percussion and world instruments.” --
Kieth Fullerton Whitman
MARTIN ARNOLD / ERIC CHENAUX / RYAN DRIVER have been playing psychedelic lounge
music together for over eight years. This nights sprawl and slump will include
electric autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, electric guitar, analog synth, melodica, and
thumb-reeds.
HEAVY WATER is the audio-visual collaboration of Toronto-based filmmaker
Victoria Cheong and sound artist Wolfgang Nessel. With an interest in
experimentation, they have performed live, recorded videos and created
installations together.
This week Median Contemporary, a new Toronto arts venue, will open its doors to the public. This gallery is the brainchild of Kal Mansur and Rui Pimenta and the programming will be directed at providing artists with as much control as possible in the exhibition of their work. The mission statement for the gallery describes their goal as "showcasing artwork that exhibits a current and forward thinking display of new materials, light and sound based art, kinetic art, as well as, new media such as video installation".
This Thursday (Dec. 4th) the gallery will be hosting a launch event featuring work from Matt Durant, Markus Heckmann and Peter Todd (whose work is pictured above). Median is located at 1142 Queen St. West in Parkdale [map]. More info is available on the Median event page.
NAISA Toronto Presents: Artist Soirée with Neil Wiernik and Jason Stanford November 30th 1-5pm SOIRÉE - an evening gathering, typically in a private house, for conversation or music. Although it's in the afternoon, the intent is the same: a time for artists to talk about their works, listen to other people's works and network. Featured artists Neil Wiernik and Jason Stanford will be performing and discussing their recent works. Neil Wiernik will give a general over view of his work as an audio artist and how its led him towards his current interest and ongoing research into site specific generative soundtrack composition as it relates to acoustic ecology composition. He will talk about how these soundtracks or aural landscapes, even when created by a digital mediator are natural, organic occurrences, much like walking down the street or driving down a highway we piece together the sounds around us to create a soundtrack of our environment. Wiernik's music was recently described in "The Wire" as having "...the kind of sharpness and clarity usually lost amid the murk and decay of clicks and cuts and digital delays." His his online HQ is http://www.phoniq.net
Jason Stanford will discuss what excites him about EA (ElectroAcoustic) and composing for spatialized sound which includes the virtually unlimited resources you can draw upon to fill your sonic palate, defining your musical language. EA allows for the creation of very immediate and visceral juxtapositions of interesting and unexpected musical metaphors between sounds, through the composition and counterpoint of complex abstract sonic spectra and the mixture of referential real-world sounds. A unique perspective on sound comes with the added dimension of space, one has to be sensitive to the kinetic natures of each particular sound, and give it a choreograph trajectories that suit each character. Jason Stanford is a Toronto-based composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music. Through his work he seeks to explore evocative, visceral, and at times highly disparate stylistic and musical/sound elements and to distill them into a unified and meaningful whole.
This event is PWYC
NAISA Artscape
Wychwood Barns
601 Christie Street, Studio #252 Toronto
for more information http://www.naisa.ca
[PostSpectacular / Print Magazine - cover design / 2008]
David Crow just published Magic Box: Craft and the Computer, a thoughtful essay on digital craft in a recent edition of Eye Magazine. This text situates the production of contemporary, generative digital art in relation to William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement (industry is a "beast without hands") and Michael Mateas' notion of Procedural Literacy. The article includes discussion of work by PostSpectacular, Flight 404 and LettError.
If the comment buzz in his recent??Create Digital Motion post??is any indicator, Peter Kirn is on to something in his identification of 2009 as the year to learn??Processing. While the open source software has been ubiquitous for several years, and has now moved beyond beta, perhaps this is the year we'll see a critical mass of user from the broader arts community dive headlong into this programming environment. To that end Kirn will be posting a series of tutorials on??Create Digital Motion??in the coming weeks and months. Processing/programming newbs take note!