On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

defining works in the history of digital moving image – an online exhibition curated by Richard Wright

until 14 July 2009
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_project/computer_baroque/baroque

Computer Baroque is an exhibition of films by pioneers of computer animation: Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright.

Rarely seen, they represent a period – the late 1980s and early 1990s – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology. The films range from earlier works by Karl Sims and William Latham influenced by scientific ideas to the more ironic and satirical works by Shelley Lake and the Butler Brothers.

Films are accompanied by programme notes and an essay by curator Richard Wright.

“Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had reached a stage where the power of computers could finally be harnessed by more than a handful of insiders. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice heralded a world of totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe”.

Richard Wright

Exposition & Conférences / Exhibition & Conferences

Vernissage ce Jeudi 12 à 18h00 avec conférences de Geert Lovink et Florian Schneider dès 19h00
Opening on Thursday 12, 18:00 with Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider’s lectures at 19:00

Stock Overflow est une opération proposée par RYBN pour recontextualiser la crise et les stratégies politiques et médiatiques qui l’accompagnent, autour des thèmes de la catastrophe, de l’instabilité structurelle et des mythologies des marchés.

Stock Overflow is an operation proposed by RYBN to recontextualize the crisis, its mediatic and politic strategies, on the topics of disaster, structural instability and financial markets mythologies.

WITH / AVEC
RYBN, Geert Lovink (net activist and theoretician), Florian Schneider (writer, filmmaker, net activist), Brian Holmes (art critic), Late S. Horace Lawson-Hetchely (information systems consulting), Société Réaliste (artists), Bertrand Charles (journalist specialized in business intelligence).

EXHIBITION / EXPOSITION

ANTIDATAMINING, RYBN 2006-2009

http://www.antidatamining.net

Antidatamining est une série de représentations visuelles des données financières qui transitent sur internet. L’économie contemporaine y est incarnée par ses principaux acteurs – entreprises, place boursières, banques et fonds d’investissement, grands groupes – et par leurs interactions : liens capitalistiques entre les acteurs économiques, déploiements géographiques, articulation autour des places de marchés. Au-delà de la crise actuelle, de sa médiatisation et des leviers politiques qu’elle génère, Antidatamining est un dispositif de veille permanente qui tente de mettre en évidence la structure de l’économie mondiale, envisagée comme un système dynamique complexe.

Antidatamining is a series of visualizations of financial data extracted from the web. Economy is represented by its main agents – companies, groups and holdings, stock exchanges, banks and investment funds – and their interactions : capital relationships, geographic deployments, structuralization on market places. Beyond the current crisis, its mediatic and polictic levers, Antidatamining is a permanent monitoring device, which aims to highlight the structure of the contemporary economy, seen as a complex dynamic system.

CONFERENCES

GEERT LOVINK & FLORIAN SCHNEIDER
Net activism and tactical medias / Médias tactiques et net-activisme
Thursday 12 march – 19h / jeudi 12 mars – 19:00
(in english)

RYBN & HORACE LATE LAWSON
Financial Information systems / Systèmes d’informations financiers
Friday 20 march – 20h / vendredi 20 mars – 20:00

BRIAN HOLMES
Ecological domination of financial capitalism / Domination écologique du capitalisme financier
Wednesday 25 march – 19h / mercredi 25 mars – 19:00

SOCIETE RÉALISTE & BERTRAND CHARLES
Economics subversion / Détournement économique
Friday 27 march – 20h / vendredi 27 mars – 20:00

conferences streaming on
http://giss.tv:8000/iMAL_live.ogg
http://giss.tv/interface/?mp=iMAL_live.ogg

INFO

Opening Hours: Wednesday -> Sunday 14:00 – 19:00
Heures d’ouverture: Mercredi -> Dimanche 14:00 – 19:0
Vernissage Expo: jeudi 12 mars – 18:00 / Exhibition Opening: Thursday 12 march – 18:00
FEES/TARIFS : EXHIBITION/EXPOSITION 3 Euros, CONFERENCES free/gratuit

Avec le soutien de / With the support of : iMAL, Cimatics and Predict-market.biz leader in the field of financial prediction analysis.

More on/ Plus d’infos sur: http://www.imal.org/StockOverflow

From Rhizome News:

Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion of Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name.

Saturday, March 21st, at 3pm
$8 General/ $6 Members
the New Museum, New York, NY

A new Turbulence commission by Jeff Crouse, Andrew Mahon, and Steve Lambert.

http://turbulence.org/works/absml/

From Turbulence.org:

“ABSML is a new markup language that enables the creation of complex sentence formulas for 21st century automatic writing. ABSML tags replace parts of speech and sentence components using sophisticated semantic analysis, regular expressions, and web-based resources. In the right combination, the tags create prose that — while based on formulas and code — do not appear formulaic. ABSML is free and open for others to use, both through an online editor and an API (application programming interface).

“ABSML” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.”

BIOGRAPHIES

JEFF CROUSE creates software and installations that highlight the absurdity of technology in culture. Jeff’s previous works include YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot/puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been removed from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam. Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, an adjunct professor at the IMA program at Hunter College, and a freelance programmer.

STEVE LAMBERT recently made international news with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the war and other good news. A Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, Lambert also teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. While he never graduated from high school, Steve went on to study sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He founded the Budget Gallery, an outdoor guerilla art gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004 and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. Steve?s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recentl!
y collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

ANDREW MAHON is currently an undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Design + Technology. His interests lie in the architecture of virtual space. Andrew has worked on numerous projects at Eyebeam since 2007, many with Jeff Crouse, including Invisible Threads, a virtual sweatshop, and You3b, a YouTube Triptych maker. Andrew has also worked with Natalie Jeremijenko at the Environmental Health Clinic, creating visualizations of threatened ecosystems. Over the summer of 2008, Andrew participated in Interactivos@Eyebeam, where his interactive installation was later show. Andrew is currently working on algorithmic music visualizations, freelance web programming, and has recently started interning at Area/Code, helping to develop compelling game situations using GPS tracking.

On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.

The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.

Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.

We all use maps in our daily lives, as sources of information about places, routes, networks or boundaries. Fundamentally, they are simplified schematic diagrams that employ a universal visual language through which we codify and comprehend our world. They offer us means of describing and understanding the untangible too – This exhibition looks at ways artists have used the language and the iconography of maps to express their ideas and experiences of place.
Although mapping is a method for gathering, ordering and exploiting information, the show reminds us that all maps are to some extend the product of the imagination: no map is truly the objective description of a place that it purports to represent. Every map is shaped, coloured, framed by political and social conditions and by personal experience or imaginative projections of its maker.

Journeys made visible

Through his ‘GPS drawing’ practice, Jeremy Wood has over time amassed a considerable amount of data about his personal displacements. His work All London Tracks features all his journeys, by car, foot or air, in and over London. The tiny dark threads that represent these journeys go round buildings or through parks, along roads, to give shape to his practice of the city. The practice of walking as an image-making process is also found in Richard Long’s work A six hour run from Exmoor to Dartmoor (1975) where the artist’s footprints has marked the landscape of a continuous line.
Langland & Bell’s Air Routes of the World (2001) offers an alternative view of the world map, where land masses are omitted and instead air travel defines the important locations.
London’s Kerning (N:B Studio, 2006) is a map of the capital stripped of every line, fill and symbol, leaving only the text to represent the layout and crossings of streets (In the art of typography, kerning refers to the adjustment of space between pairs of letters).

Colours and lines

The show featured a collection of pocket tube maps commissioned by Platform for Art, playfully subverting the map itself which has become over time an icon for London.
John Dilnot’s Map draw together colours from paint charts, which often bear evocative names: Here, those colour names are arranged on a map of Britain around the places after which they are named.

Revisiting the history of map-making, exploring the mind

George Andre’s Draughtsman’s Handbook (1874) is a large volume with a very utilitarian purpose: it was aimed at encouraging best-practice in map drawing. Stephen Walter Similands humorously imitates the iconography of 16-17th century maps in his condensed sketches of the geography of Britain.

During her time as an artist-in-residence in the neuro-radiology department at the Royal London Hospital, Susan Aldworth has questioned the possibility of our inner geography, culminating in her work Birth of a thought (2007).
Michael Drucks’s Druckland Physical and Social (1974) is a self-portrait exploring personal and political identity using the idiom of mapping.

Richard Dadd, 'Sketch to Illustrate The Passions: Patriotism', 1857

Mapping the Imagination – Victoria and Albert Museum

This exhibition, running in April-June 2007, investigated the whole process of ‘mapping’, and showed how contemporary artists have abstracted it and expanded it into art. The show featured ‘maps’ – ranging from representations of a geographical territory to schematizations of thought processes embracing many other disciplines – into loose categories illustrating the themes or processes behind the production of such diagrams.

‘Landfill‘ by Paul Matosic is a monumental piece where spare computer parts are arranged onto a printed map matching the coastline of Britain, with an ironic title to comment on Western consumer society. The work exists in different versions, adapted to match various sizes and ‘territories’, while its construction (sometimes collaborative) can even be the purpose of a performance.

In ‘Berlin Map‘, Armelle Caron re-ordered blocks of the city by size and shape, thus creating a simili-alphabet where the blocks, loosing their functional constraints as separators of streets and avenues, display a stangely coordinated stylistic unity akin to a set of glyphs. This shuffling of parts of the city is somewhat reminiscent of Debord’s Illustration de l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes en Psychogéographique (The Naked City) published in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

Below: Satomi Matoba Utopia

« Un homme fait le projet de dessiner le Monde. Les années passent : il peuple une surface d’images de provinces, de royaumes, de montagnes, de golfes, de navires, d’îles, de poissons, de maisons, d’instruments, d’astres, de chevaux, de gens. Peu avant sa mort, il s’aperçoit que ce patient labyrinthe de formes n’est rien d’autres que son portrait. »

Jorge Luis Borges

Le propos de cette exposition thématique, qui a investi les sous-sols du Musée des Beaux Arts de Lille à l’occasion du festival Bombaysers de l’automne 2006, est de proposer un panorama des relations entre le corps humain et le paysage, apprécié à travers la vision d’artistes de la Renaissance à aujourd’hui, et qui soulève la question métaphysique de la place de l’homme dans l’univers.

La muséographie regroupe les oeuvres selon cinq sections: cabinets de curiosités et Paysage anatomique sont présentés dans un volet historique, Homme-Végétal, Homme-Minéral, et Paysage érotique sont présentés dans le volet contemporain.

« Car de même que l’homme est un composé de terre, eau, air et feu, il en est de même du corps de la terre. Si l’homme a les os, support et armature de la chair, le monde a les rochers comme supports de la terre ; si l’homme porte le lac du sang où le poumon se gonfle et dégonfle dans la respiration, le corps de la terre a son océan qui, lui, croît et décroît toutes les six heures en une respiration cosmique ; si les veines partent de ce lac de sang, en se ramifiant dans le corps humain, de même l’océan remplit le corps de la terre d’une infinité de veines d’eau »

Léonard de Vinci

Les “têtes composées” du contemporain Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1530-1593), méticuleux assemblages picturaux de fleurs, fruits ou objets, rappellent que de même que l’Homme n’est pas si distinct de son environnement et que la Nature fait partie de l’Homme, tandis qu’au XVIIIe siècle les premières planches anatomiques mettent en exergue le rapprochement entre les monde végétal, minéral et corps humain.

« Qui pourrait nombrer les merveilles qui appellent et se disputent l’attention du spectateur? Les routes du sang marquées par un fluide coloré, la lymphe remplacée par le mercure, des ramifications que l’on serait tenté de prendre pour les productions les plus déliées du règne végétal, le système nerveux, espèce d’arbre étonnant dont les racines occupent les parties supérieures et les branches la partie inférieure. »

J.J. Sue (chaire d’anatomie à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture)

C’est l’époque où, témoin de la pensée humaniste, l’artiste conçoit l’humain comme paradigme du monde. L’anatomie, l’espace intérieur du corps et ses réseaux sont étudiés; Les textures nerveuses, musculaires, sanguines, le tracé des organismes sont comparés analogiquement à la géologie, au tissu végétal et minéral, à la botanique et à l’entomologie. La nature est recomposée sur l’unité de la figure.

La curieuse tradition des paysages anthropomorphes apparaît quant à elle à la fin du XVIe siècle, et part d’une volonté de comprendre ou de domestiquer la nature, également présente dans l’Art des jardins.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi – Sans titre (Sexe d’une femme paysage)

Computer-Jam Lille – L’homme paysage

This one-off 10-day exhibition opened in December 2006 in Bargehouse (London’s South Bank) and was curated by the Light Surgeons.
The four-storey building – a dilapidated, raw warehouse – the ligthing and atmosphere of the space lent themselves marvelously to the purpose of the show, “a journey to examine how we move through, interact with, and share the built environment”.

Spanning the interconnected themes of travelling, inhabiting cities, private/public space, the event featured audio/video installations by the Light Surgeons, talks by Scanner, Iain Sinclair on his last book ‘London, City of disappearances’, and film screenings from Onedotzero’s own ‘Digital Terrains’ programme. A couple of film/video pieces by Lenka Clayton & James Price particularly grabbed my attention: ‘conversation’, where two TV monitors playback interviews of passers-by making a judgement upon each other on the basis of appearance, thus giving a peculiar insight – not least funny – of people’s untold perceptions of each other; In the series of films ‘People in Order’, the film-makers intentionally set filming ‘rules’ contained in the title: In ‘Age’ they shot 100 people in their home, telling their age, shown in order. This was followed by ‘Relationship’, ‘Wealth’… offering as many original and alternative ways to go about documenting people and their environment.

The show also explored the dimension of travel, with some very interesting works by the Light Surgeons – one travelogue video showing upstairs, and the installation ‘transit’ on the ground floor, featuring a full-scale airport terminal hall with its luggage carrousel and passengers’ voices listing the contents of their luggage.
As Chris Thomas Allen (from the Light Surgeons) puts it: “The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm.”

www.articulatedlondon.org

Rob White’s “IBIS la bicyclette interactive” (2001) (IBIS the interactive bicycle) is an interactive installation inspired by a piece of text written by the author’s grandfather in 1909, in which he related his journey from England to Spain, through France and the Pyrenees. IBIS enables the spectator to explore that text interactively, thanks to an antique bike fitted with sensors, which gives the possibility to navigate through the time and space of the book at the desired speed.