MachineMachine /stream - tagged with new-media https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Presentation by Erica Scourti – Expose and Repurpose]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYPd-CTwrzA&feature=youtube_gdata

Expose and Repurpose: Opposing Self-Commodification

Moderator: Ben Vickers With Erica Scourti, Sebastian Schmieg

A discussion on how artistic practices outplay or disrupt processes of self-commodification.

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt Friday, 30 Jan 2015

Conference Stream: Work

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Tue, 21 Apr 2015 13:24:22 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYPd-CTwrzA&feature=youtube_gdata
<![CDATA['Ways of Something' curated by Lorna Mills]]> http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/waysofsomething/

I am privileged to be involved in Ways of Something: an incredible collaboration between artist Lorna Mills and (currently) 85 artists. Episode 3 will have its World Premiere at The Photographer’s Gallery, London, on February 12th 2015. 85 web-based artists remake John Berger’s historic documentary ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) one minute at a time. Originally commissioned by The One Minutes, at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the episodes present a sequence of 3D renderings, filmic remixes, videos and webcam performances which subvert the tropes of art history in an entertaining and overwhelming way. Followed by a Q&A between Julia van Mourik, director of The One Minutes and Lorna Mills via Skype.

Artists in Episode 1 1: Daniel Temkin, 2: Rollin Leonard, 3: Sara Ludy, 4: Rhett Jones, 5: Jaakko Pallasvuo, 6: Dafna Ganani, 7: Jennifer Chan, 8: Rea McNamara, 9: Theodore Darst, 10: Matthew Williamson, 11: Hector Llanquin, 12: Christina Entcheva, 13: V5MT, 14: Marisa Olson, 15: Joe McKay, 16: Carla Gannis, 17: Nicholas O’Brien, 18: Eva Papamargariti, 19: Rosa Menkman, 20: Kristin Lucas, 21: Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, 22: Giselle Zatonyl, 23: Paul Wong, 24: Alfredo Salazar-Caro, 25: Sally McKay, 26: RM Vaughan & Keith Cole, 27: Andrew Benson, 28: Christian Petersen, 29: Faith Holland, 30: Jennifer McMackon Artists in Episode 2 1: Kevin Heckart, 2: Geraldine Juarez, 3: Gaby Cepeda, 4: Angela Washko, 5: Emilie Gervais, 6: LaTurbo Avedon, 7: Lyla Rye, 8: Mattie Hillock, 9: Antonio Roberts, 10: Georges Jacotey, 11: Daniel Rourke, 12: Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, 13: Yoshi Sodeoka, 14: Alma Alloro, 15: LoVid, 16: Andrea Crespo, 17: Ad Minoliti, 18: Arjun Ram Srivatsa, 19: Carrie Gates, 20: Isabella Streffen, 21: Esteban Ottaso, 22: ZIL & ZOY, 23: Hyo Myoung Kim, 24: Jesse Darling, 25: Tristan Stevens, 26: Erica Lapadat-Janzen, 27: Claudia Hart, 28: Anthony Antonellis Artists in Episode 3 1: Carine Santi-Weil, 2: Nicolas Sassoon, 3: Tom Sherman, 4: Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, 5: Rafaela Kino, 6: Alex McLeod, 7: Kate Wilson and Lynne Slater, 8: Aleksandra Domanović, 9: Systaime, 10: Erik Zepka, 11: Adam Ferriss, 12: Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, 13: Debora Delmar, 14: Brenna Murphy, 15: Nick Briz, 16: Carlos Sáez, 17: Jenn E Norton, 18: Juliette Bonneviot, 19: Luis Nava, 20: Vince McKelvie; 21: Claudia Maté 22: Evan Roth, 23: Shana Moulton, 24: Sabrina Ratté, 25: Jordan Tannahill, 26: Vasily Zaitsev feat.MON3Y.us, 27: Ann Hirsch REVIEWS - Read an interview with Lorna Mills about Ways Of Something on The Creators Project. Read here. - Ben Davis wrote an essay looking at the first two episodes on artnet. Read here. - The project was also featured by Animal New York here.

Julia van Mourik is an independent curator and editor, based in Amsterdam. Since 1999, she has produced visual arts projects and has composed programmes and publications, exploring new possibilities for presenting the moving image. She is Director of The One Minutes, a place for artists to experiment, to produce and to present within the inexorable limit of 60 seconds, hosted by Sandberg Instituut, Masters of Art and Design in Amsterdam (NL). She is also director of the Lost & Found programme, where artists show material that doesn’t fit comfortably into regular gallery contexts, that seems out of place. And she is Adviser to the to the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, promoting the development and production of high-quality artistic programmes by the national public broadcasting corporations. Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the Sheroes performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event When Analog Was Periodical in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, :::Zip The Bright:::, that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto. In June 2013, Mills opened a solo exhibition ‘The Axis of Something’ at TRANSFER, her work was exhibited by the gallery at the Moving Image Art Fair NYC in March 2014, and her second solo show for TRANSFER is currently in development for 2015.  Her most recent solo project was Ungentrified a large GIF projection installation at OCADU in Toronto for Nuit Blanche. £7 / £4 concs Episodes 1 and 2 are produced by The One Minutes at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Episode 3 is produced by Lorna Mills.        

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Wed, 04 Feb 2015 14:47:38 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/portfolio/waysofsomething/
<![CDATA['Ways Of Something' Episode 2 Premiere at Transfer Gallery]]> http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/96536387174

Net Art collaborative project curated by Lorna Mills is a reinterpretation of the landmark British 1972 documentary on reading art, ‘Ways Of Seeing’.

The second episode (concerned with the woman in art) makes its debut at the Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn on September 6th. For each 28 minute episode, an artist was assigned one minute of the original narration to produce visuals for. All the work was organized online. Here is a sample clip put together by gabycepeda from the latest episode:

‘Ways of Something’, is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, “Ways of Seeing” (1972). Commissioned by The One Minutes, at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the project consists of one-minute videos by fifty eight web-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the internet.The screening at TRANSFER Gallery is based on the first two episodes of a four-part series of thirty-minute films created by art theorist John Berger and produced by Mike Dibb. In the original episode one, voice-of-God narration over iconic European paintings offer a careful dissection of traditional “fine art” media and the way society has come to understand them as art. The second episode is a contentious and sometimes maddening look at the female nude in the western tradition. The combined work is, in effect, art about art about television about the internet. “Ways Of Something,” Screening + Discussion, Episode 1: Daniel Temkin, Rollin Leonard, Sara Ludy, Rhett Jones, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Dafna Ganani, Jennifer Chan, Rea McNamara, Theodore Darst, Matthew Williamson, Hector Llanquin, Christina Entcheva, V5MT, Marisa Olson, Joe McKay, Carla Gannis, Nicholas O’Brien, Eva Papamargariti, Rosa Menkman, Kristin Lucas, Jeremy Bailey & Kristen D. Schaffer, Giselle Zatonyl, Paul Wong, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Sally McKay, RM Vaughan & Keith Cole, Andrew Benson, Christian Petersen, Faith Holland, Jennifer McMackon; Episode 2: Kevin Heckart, Geraldine Juarez, Gaby Cepeda, Angela Washko, Emilie Gervais, LaTurbo Avedon, Lyla Rye, Mattie Hillock, Antonio Roberts, Georges Jacotey, Daniel Rourke, Sandra Rechico & Annie Onyi Cheung, Yoshi Sodeoka, Alma Alloro, LoVid, Andrea Crespo, Ad Minoliti, Arjun Ram Srivatsa, Carrie Gates, Isabella Streffen, Esteban Ottaso, ZIL & ZOY, Hyo Myoung Kim, Jesse Darling, Tristan Stevens, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Claudia Hart, Anthony Antonellis, 7pm-10pm, TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn. (All Images Courtesy Lorna Mills)

Information about Transfer Gallery and the screening can be found here To view the original 4 part program (highly recommended if you haven’t) can be found at UBU Web here

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Wed, 03 Sep 2014 06:07:01 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/96536387174
<![CDATA[Tim Head: the space between things - Imperica - digital arts and culture magazine]]> http://www.imperica.com/en/in-conversation-with/tim-head-the-space-between-things

It would be far too simplistic to refer to Tim Head as a multimedia artist.

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Wed, 20 Nov 2013 05:12:54 -0800 http://www.imperica.com/en/in-conversation-with/tim-head-the-space-between-things
<![CDATA[Artist Profile: Erica Scourti]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/oct/8/artist-profile-erica-scourti

The latest in a series of interviews with artists who have developed a significant body of work engaged (in its process, or in the issues it raises) with technology. See the full list of Artist Profiles here.   Daniel Rourke: Your recent work, You Could've Said, is described as "a Google keyword confessional for radio." I've often considered your work as having elements of the confession, partly because of the deeply personal stance you perform—addressing we, the viewer or listener, in a one-on-one confluence, but also through the way your work hijacks and exposes the unseen, often algorithmic, functions of social and network media. You allow Google keywords to parasitize your identity and in turn you apparently "confess" on Google's behalf. Are you in search of redemption for your social-media self? Or is it the soul of the algorithm you wish to save? Erica Scourti: Or maybe the algorithm and social media soul is now so intertwined and interdependent that it makes little sense to even separate the two, in a unlikely fulfillment of Donna Haraway's cyborg? Instead of having machines built into/onto us (Google glasses notwithstanding), the algorithms which parse our email content, Facebook behaviours, Amazon spending habits, and so on, don't just read us, but shape us. I'm interested in where agency resides when our desires, intentions and behaviours are constantly being tracked and manipulated through the media and technology that we inhabit; how can we claim to have any "authentic" desires? Facebook's "About" section actually states, "You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self," and yet this is a self that must fit into the predetermined format and is mostly defined by its commercial choices (clothing brands, movies, ice cream, whatever). And those choices are increasingly influenced by the algorithms through the ambient, personalized advertising that surrounds us. So in You Could've Said, which is written entirely in an instrumentalised form of language, i.e. Google's AdWords tool, I'm relaying the impossibility of having an authentic feeling, or even a first-hand experience, despite the seemingly subjective, emotional content and tone. Google search stuff is often seen reflective of a kind of cute "collective self" (hey, we all want to kill our boyfriends sometimes!) but perhaps it's producing as much as reflecting us. It's not just that everything's already been said, and can be commodified but that the devices we share so much intimate time with are actively involved in shaping what we consider to be our "selves," our identities. And yet, despite being entirely mediated, my delivery is "sincere" and heartfelt; I'm really interested in the idea of sincere, but not authentic. I think it's the same reason spambots can have such unexpected pathos; they seem to "express" things in a sincere way, which suggests some kind of "soul" at work there, or some kind of agency,  and yet they totally lack interiority, or authenticity. In this and other work of mine (especially Life in AdWords) dissonance is produced by my apparent misrecognition of the algorithmically produced language as my own- mistaking the machine lingo as a true expression of my own subjectivity. Which is not to say that there is some separate, unmediated self that we could access if only we would disconnect our damn gadgets for a second, but the opposite—that autobiography, which my work clearly references, can no longer be seen as a narrative produced by some sort of autonomous subject, inseparable from the technology it interacts with. Also, autobiography often involves a confessional, affective mode, and I'm interested in how this relates to the self-exposure which the attention economy seems to encourage—TMI can secure visibility when there's not enough attention to go round. With the Google confessional, I'm enacting an exposure of my flaws and vulnerabilities and while it's potentially "bad" for me (i.e. my mediated self) since you might think I'm a loser, if you're watching, then it's worth it, since value is produced simply through attention-retention. Affective vitality doesn't so much resist commodification as actively participate within it…

DR: You mention agency. When it comes to the algorithms that drive the current attention economy I tend to think we have very little. Active participation is all well and good, but the opposite—an opting out, rather than a passivity—feels increasingly impossible. I am thinking about those reCaptcha questions we spend all our time filling in. If I want to access my account and check the recommendations it has this week, I'm required to take part in this omnipresent, undeniably clever, piece of crowd-sourcing. Alan Turing's predictions of a world filled with apparently intelligent machines has come true, except, its the machines now deciding whether we are human or not. ES: Except of course—stating the obvious here—it's just carrying out the orders another human instructed it to, a mediated form of gatekeeping that delegates responsibility to the machine, creating a distance from the entirely human, social, political etc structure that has deemed it necessary (a bit like drones then?). I'm very interested also in the notion of participation as compulsory—what Zizek calls the "You must, because you can" moral imperative of consumerism—especially online, not just at the banal level (missing out on events, job opportunities, interesting articles and so on if you're not on Facebook) but because your actions necessarily feed back into the algorithms tracking and parsing our behaviours. And even opting out becomes a choice that positions you within a particular demographic (more likely to be vegetarian, apparently). Also, this question of opting out seems to recur in conversations around art made online, in a way it doesn't for artists working with traditional media—like, if you're being critical of it, why not go make your own Facebook, why not opt out? My reasoning is that I like to work with widely used technology, out of an idea that the proximity of these media to mainstream, domestic and wider social contexts makes the work more able to reflect on its sociopolitical implications, just as some video artists working in the 80s specifically engaged with TV as the main mediator of public consciousness. Of course some say this is interpassiviity, just feebly participating in the platforms without making any real change, and I can understand that criticism. Now that coded spaces and ubiquitous computing are a reality of the world—and power structures—we inhabit, I do appreciate artists who can work with code and software (in a way that I can't) and use their deeper understanding of digital infrastructure to reflect critically on it. DR: You've been engaged in a commision for Colm Cille's Spiral, sending personal video postcards to anyone who makes a request. Your interpretation of the "confessional" mode seems in this piece to become very human-centric again, since the work is addressed specifically at one particular individual. How has this work been disseminated, and what does your approach have to do with "intimacy"? ES: I've always liked Walter Benjamin's take on the ability of mediating technologies to traverse spatial distances, bringing previously inaccessible events within touching distance. With this project, I wanted to heighten this disembodied intimacy by sending unedited videos shot on my iPhone, a device that's physically on me at all times, directly to the recipients' inbox. So it's not just "sharing" but actually "giving" them a unique video file gift, which only they see,  positioning the recipient as a captive audience of one, unlike on social media where you have no idea who is watching or who cares. But also, I asked them to "complete" the video by adding its metadata, which puts them on the spot—they have to respond, instead of having the option to ignore me—and also extracting some labor in return, which is exactly what social media does: extracting our affective and attentive labor, supposedly optionally, in exchange for the gift of the free service. The metadata—tags, title and optionally a caption—became the only viewable part of the exchange, since I used it to annotate a corresponding black, "empty" video on Instagram, also shared on Twitter and Facebook, so the original content remains private. These blank videos record the creative output of the recipient, while acting as proof of the transaction (i.e. that I sent them a video). They also act as performative objects which will continue to operate online due to their tagging, which connects them to other groups of media and renders them visible—i.e. searchable—online, since search bots cannot as yet "see" video content. I wanted to make a work which foregrounds its own connectedness, both to other images via the hashtags but also to the author-recipients through tagging them on social media. So the process of constantly producing and updating oneself within the restrictive and pre-determined formats of social media platforms, i.e. their desired user behaviours, becomes almost the content of the piece. I also like the idea that hashtag searches on all these platforms, for (let's say) Greece, will bring up these blank/ black videos (which by the way, involved a little hack, as Instagram will not allow you to upload pre-recorded content and it's impossible to record a black and silent video...). It's a tiny intervention into the regime of carefully filtered and cropped life-style depictions that Instagram is best known for. It's also a gesture of submitting oneself to the panoptical imperative to share one's experience no matter how private or banal, hence using Instagram for its associations with a certain solipsistic self-display; by willingly enacting the production of mediated self on social media I'm exploring a kind of masochistic humour which has some affinities with what Benjamin Noys identified as an accelerationist attitude of "the worse the better." And yet, by remaining hidden, and not publicly viewable, the public performance of a mediated self is denied.

DR: An accelerationist Social Media artwork would have to be loaded with sincerity, firstly, on the part of the human (artist/performer), but also, in an authentic attempt to utilise the network completely on its terms. Is there something, then, about abundance and saturation in your work? An attempt to overload the panopticon? ES: That's a very interesting way of putting it. I sometimes relate that oversaturation to the horror vacui of art that springs from a self-therapeutic need, which my work addresses, though it's less obsessive scribbles, more endless connection, output and flow and semi-ritualistic and repetitive working processes. And in terms of utilizing the network on its own terms, Geert Lovink's notion of the "natural language hack" (rather than the "deep level" hack) is one I've thought about—where your understanding of the social, rather than technical, operation of online platforms gets your work disseminated. For example my project Woman Nature Alone, where I re-enacted stock video which is freely available on my Youtube channel—some of those videos are high on the Google ranking page, so Google is effectively "marketing" my work without me doing anything.  Whether it overloads the panopticon, or just contributes more to the babble, is a pertinent question (as Jodi Dean's work around communicative capitalism has shown), since if the work is disseminated on commercial platforms like YouTube or Facebook, it operates within a system of value generation which benefits the corporation, involving, as is by now well known, a Faustian pact of personal data in exchange for "free" service. And going back to agency—the mutability of the platforms means that if the work makes use of particular features (suchas YouTube annotations) its existence is contingent on them being continued; since the content and the context are inextricable in situations like this, it would become impossible to display the original work exactly as it was first made and seen. Even then, as with Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, it would become an archive, which preserves documents from a specific point in the web's history but cannot replicate the original viewing conditions because all the infrastructure around it has changed completely. So if the platforms—the corporations—control the context and viewing conditions, then artists working within them are arguably at their mercy- and keeping the endless flow alive by adding to it. I'm more interested in working within the flows rather than, as some artists prefer, rejecting the dissemination of their work online. Particularly with moving image work,  I'm torn between feeling that artists' insistence on certain very specific, usually high quality, viewing conditions for their work bolsters, as Sven Lütticken has argued, the notion of the rarefied auratic art object whose appreciation requires a kind of hushed awe and reverence, while being aware that the opposite—the image ripped from its original location and circulated in crap-res iPhone pics/ videos—is an example of what David Joselit would call image neoliberalism, which sees images as site-less and like any other commodity, to be traded across borders and contexts with no respect for the artist's intentions. However, I also think that this circulation is becoming an inevitability and no matter how much you insist your video is viewed on zillion lumens projector (or whatever), it will most likely end up being seen by the majority of viewers on YouTube or on a phone screen; I'm interested in how artists (like Hito Steyerl) address, rather than avoid, the fact of this image velocity and spread. DR: Lastly, what have you been working on recently? What's next? ES: I recently did a series of live, improvised performance series called Other People's Problems direct to people's desktops, with Field Broadcast, where I read out streams of tags and captions off Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook, randomly jumping to other tags as I went. I'm fascinated by tags—they're often highly idiosyncratic and personal, as well as acting as connective tissue between dispersed users; but also I liked the improvisation, where something can go wrong and the awkwardness it creates. (I love awkwardness!) Future projects are going to explore some of the ideas this work generated: how to improvise online (when things can always be deleted/ rejigged afterwards), how to embrace the relinquishing of authorial control which I see as integral to the online (or at least social media) experience, and how to work with hashtags/ metadata both as text in its own right and as a tool.   Age: 33 Location: London, Athens when I can manage it How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? 14, 15 maybe, when I started mucking around with Photoshop—I remember scanning a drawing I'd made of a skunk from a Disney tale and making it into a horrendous composition featuring a rasta flag background... I was young. And I've always been obsessed with documenting things; growing up I was usually the one in our gang who had the camera—showing my age here, imagine there being one person with a camera—which has given me plenty of blackmail leverage and a big box of tastefully weathered photos that, despite my general frustration with analogue nostalgia, I know I will be carrying around with me for life. Where did you go to school? What did you study? After doing Physics, Chemistry and Maths at school, I did one year of a Chemistry BA, until I realized I wasn't cut out for lab work (too much like cooking) or what seemed like the black-and-white nature of scientific enquiry. I then did an art and design foundation at a fashion college, followed by one year of Fine Art Textiles BA—a nonsensical course whose only redeeming feature was its grounding in feminist theory—before finally entering the second year of a Fine Art BA. For a while this patchy trajectory through art school made me paranoid, until I realised it probably made me sound more interesting than I am. And in my attempt to alleviate the suspicion that there was some vital piece of information I was missing, I also did loads of philosophy diploma courses, which actually did come in handy when back at Uni last year: I recently finished a Masters of Research in moving image art. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? At the moment I'm just about surviving as an artist and I've always been freelance apart from time done in bar, kitchen, shop (Londoners, remember Cyberdog?) cleaning and nightclub jobs, some of which the passage of time has rendered as amusingly risqué rather than borderline exploitative. After my B.A., I set up in business with the Prince's Trust, running projects with what are euphemistically known as hard-to-reach young people, making videos, digital art pieces and music videos until government funding was pulled from the sector. I mostly loved this work and it definitely fed into and reflects my working with members of loose groups, like the meditation community around the Insight Time app, or Freecycle, or Facebook friends. I've also been assisting artist and writer Caroline Bergvall on and off for a few years, which has been very helpful in terms of observing how an artist makes a life/ living. What does your desktop or workspace look like? I'm just settling into a new space at the moment but invariably, a bit of a mess, a cup of tea, piles of books, and both desktop and workspace are are covered in neon post-it notes. Generally I am a paradigmatic post-Fordist flexi worker though: I can and do work pretty much anywhere—to the occasional frustration of friends and family. 

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Tue, 08 Oct 2013 07:30:18 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/oct/8/artist-profile-erica-scourti
<![CDATA[Artist Profile: Émilie Gervais]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/18/artist-profile-emilie-gervais

Animated GIF from the website Parked Domain Girl Tombstone (2013) DR: On first inspection, a lot of your work appears to be rooted in the 90s, drawing on the low bandwidth aesthetics inherent in GIFs, midi plugins, embedded frames, ASCII art, and forgotten webring hyperlinks. But the 90s comes out in other ways, too. Pop-cultural undercurrents include Nintendo and Leisure Suit Larry; mixtapes and a particular flavor of Europop. How/why do these things speak to you as a contemporary (Web) artist? EG: The origin of the meaning of most collected n found elements i use in my work is rooted in the 90s. My work itself isn't rooted in the 90s. I've been dragged to use that type of stuff mostly bc i like it n its accurate w the topics im interested in rn. Still tho the source material or what it evokes isn't really important. It jst adds semantic layer/s for some people n so does the aesthetics. Everything linked to that part of my work is treated as game elements (to be inserted) in different contexts of reception w diff codes of conduct. Its about notebooks. All that content is accessory to my work. You could really jst take the whole structure/s n insert totally diff content. It'd still make sense. Maybe Im already doing that but its not linked anywhere rn. Its kinda like people who enjoy playing Canabalt but hate playing Robot Unicorn. The gameplay is literally the same. Jst the content n aesthetic is different. That changes the whole experience. Whats a contemporary web artist?

Blinking Girls Cave (2012) DR: I love the idea of interchangeable (aesthetic) content, as if Andy Warhol could have changed the contents of a "textures" subfolder and suddenly transformed a Campbell's Soup painting into a Heinz. How is play more than a structural component to your work? I'm thinking about rulemaking and breaking, especially your collaboration with Sarah Weis, Blinking Girls Cave, which the park authorities took a disliking to while it was in progress. [Ed. – Blinking Girls Cave (2012) was a part of Apache Project, a series of artworks installed at Mother Neff State Park in Moody, Texas, in a cave that was once used by the Tonkawa Indians as a shelter as well as a burial site. After an initial proposal for an installation in the cave was rejected by park management (despite having been initially approved), the project ultimately took the form of a photo shoot, in which GIFs—some of them drawn from the imagery in seduction-based adventure game Leisure Suit Larry—were displayed on tablets, smartphones and laptops that were placed within the cave and documented. This scaled-back version also proved unacceptable to park management.] EG: I think play is a structural component of life. It's related to how i conceptualize, process n think stuff. It opens space for experimentation. To me, its more related to what sociologists do than anything performance art; like how-to approach different types of social dynamics from diff point of view per example. Also, like that Andy Warhol eating a hamburger video; a partly exhibited learning process. Breaking rules wasn't really a thing in ♡ ♥ Blinking Girls ♥ ♡. What happened at Mother Neff is that our first intended installation, which involved light effects n bubble machines, was disapproved at the last minute bc of the damage it could cause to the cave walls. Blinking Girls Cave thus became about hardwares n gifs. During the documentation - that being the installation - Nate Hitchcock, the director n curator n everything at Apache Project, was interrupted by a park ranger who requested him to leave the park because taking pictures n or making videos in the cave wasn't appropriate. DR: There’s a real sense of a partly exhibited learning process in your URL works: an ever growing array of Web 1.0 motifs, exhibited as unique URLs. For me these works expose the Internet as a spatial, material thing, still begging to be explored. You spoke of sociology, is there perhaps something archaeological in your practice? EG: The internet is def abt spatiality and materiality. One can relate to these notions differently. To me, its really more abt physicality. I wasn't really thinking abt them topics when i made these. It's jst kinda there in all websites. Thats the internet. I wouldnt say that these r really web 1.0. The user in both cases isnt primarily a content consumer. Backdoor trojan girl was exhibited at Domain Gallery in a way that highlighted the urls. Under other circumstances, it'd prob be different. The archaeological in my practice is kinda superficial rn. DR: Your URL artworks, http://backdoortrojangirl.net (2012) and http://w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r.net (2013), both flicker between female and male signifiers. Do you think the Web is gendered? How would you approach gender differently in work produced for a gallery context? EG: I don't think the web is gendered. Culture is n adds gendered filter/s to it in some cases. I don't know if i would approach it; maybe i'd dig a hole for feminists/feminism or i'd do a show about postpostpostpostpostpostpost-transexualism. It'd be really fun. DR: For your ongoing collaborative online exhibition Art Object Culture (2011-), you and Lucy Chinen bring together two artists each month to create a new work based on trinkets that were purchased online. These readily available objects accrue value as they pass through the project. I could ask you about the long shadow cast by Duchamp’s readymades, about ownership, exhibition value and artistic identity as they relate to the Web. Instead, I’d really like it if you shared some AOC secrets with us. What criteria do you use to select the artists? Which is your favorite submission so far and why? EM: Art Object Culture offers a website template for artists to explore art making within one rule: create new art objects from items pre-existing in various online stores. We mainly seek artists that have the ability to bend that rule. I don't really have a favorite submission. I like some more than others but my opinion on this is not important. There is no secret. The current format is a translation of our ideas on AOC related topics from 2011. It might eventually mutate. Hopefully we'll sell all the artworks that were made for it before that n or have a show; some kinda showcase for all of them together w everyone that made stuff for it n other people too.

Émilie Gervais  Age: my age range is 7 to 77. Location: Paca/FR. How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start? Since forever. I started by playing games on some used pc and recontextualizing movies, game related stuff as improvised play based on the characters n plot/s with friends at school. I've always spent a lot of time randomly surfing the internet while chatting on microsoft comic chat, mIRC, the palace n was really into customizing anything that was customizable ie. winamp skins, mirc themes, etc... Beside that, my fav drawing thing is Lite Bright n i've been deleting, moving, opening files since ive been typing on a keyboard. I've crashed the home computer a couple of times. Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? Where did you go to school? What did you study? Experimentation n play! My main tool is the internet or jst even information. In college, ive done a dble cursus in literature n social studies. Then, I dropped out of art school in Mtl n went to Paris. In 2010/2011, i did a dnap/bfa in 1yr at the Ecole d'Art Superieure d'Aix-en-Provence where I'm currently finishing a dnsep/master w a focus in hypermedia. My thesis text thing's title is Fuck Privacy Demo Game Over. What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? I'm not media based. The traditional/non traditional dichotomy makes no sense to me. I jst use whatever depending on the project im working on. It's more about ideas n processes. Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)? I tweet n play music on my iphone everyday. Before that, i played ice hockey n have done some cycling as a summer training thing. I love dancing. Also, health related stuff; superfoods n other stuff, but i mostly eat pizza n candies. Thats creative. I'm involved with adrenaline, gaming, immersive as non immersive n fun everyday. I'm really concerned about open source n how it affects education/academics. But im not seriously implicated in anything, im jst personally into it rn. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way? I worked at HMV Megastore n Liquid Nutrition in Montreal while being in college. I spent one summer selling autoportraits on the Pont Saint-Louis in Paris w a friend. I worked at some pizza place on bd de Belleville. The boss never slept, ate one fried egg a day and gave us free pizza n drinks everyday. Clients ordered one expresso and remained seated for hrs jst talking abt whatever. Total Belleville cliche. Everything influences the way i process stuff. RN im an art student. Who are your key artistic influences? Toru Iwatani, Kassia Meador, Gustav Klimt n the internet. Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what? I collaborate w Lucy Chinen on Art Object Culture n conducted the Blinking Girls project w Sarah Weis. I work/ed w friends that are mostly into painting n music. I ghostpost alot n collaborate w lots of people actively n passively everyday on everything. Its mostly passive networked collaboration/s. Do you actively study art history? Im surrounded by it. I've been into it for as long as i can remember. My dad always brought the family to museums. When i was living in San Francisco, we went to Los Angeles one time mostly jst to go n visit the Getty museum. My college art history teacher was totally awesome. Art history entertains me. Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you? I have phases in which i read alot and others in which i dont at all. Most of the time, i try not to remember the authors so it remains jst about the ideas. RN im reading Critical Play by Mary Flanagan. Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about? Yes, but no at the same time. It really depends on the whole concept of a project. I kinda hate almst everything that is JUST about representation when it comes to new media related art tho, so i'd say im concerned about that. This conversation took place between 22 March and 1 April on a Google Drive document.

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Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:00:05 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/18/artist-profile-emilie-gervais
<![CDATA[Artifacts: A Conversation Between Hito Steyerl and Daniel Rourke at Rhizome.org]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/28/artifacts

“But even if the internet is dead this doesnt mean it’s over. It is all over.”

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Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:12:00 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/28/artifacts
<![CDATA[My response to Claire Bishop’s article “Digital Divide” « MEDIA, NEW MEDIA, POSTMEDIA]]> http://medianewmediapostmedia.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/claire-bishop/

This is my response to Claire Bishop‘s essay “Digital Divide“, published in Artforum in September 2012 (also posted in the comments section of the article): Reading this article was a pleasure, and a pain. Some of the points made here are really good, and I also felt a lot of empathy for many of the

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Sat, 08 Sep 2012 07:01:00 -0700 http://medianewmediapostmedia.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/claire-bishop/
<![CDATA[Why contemporary art fails to come to grips with digital. A response to Claire Bishop. « honor harger]]> http://honorharger.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/why-contemporary-art-fails-to-come-to-grips-with-digital-a-response-to-claire-bishop/

This month, Art Forum published a very timely, and beautifully written essay by Claire Bishop entitled, Digital Divide: on contemporary Art and New Media“. In it, Bishop analyses the contemporary art-world’s reluctance to conceptually engage with the changes which have been wrought by the proliferati

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Tue, 04 Sep 2012 05:30:00 -0700 http://honorharger.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/why-contemporary-art-fails-to-come-to-grips-with-digital-a-response-to-claire-bishop/
<![CDATA[Is New Media Accepted in the Art World? Domenico Quaranta’s Media, New Media, PostMedia]]> http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/

Do institutions and galleries have a growing interest in New Media? Two weeks ago, I identified the art “internet bubble” at The L Magazine, a trend that’s currently giving new media the spot light. Not everyone sees new media the same way though. Domenico Quaranta, an Italian writer and curator previously best known to this blog for “Holy Fire“, a dubiously themed new media exhibition in Brussels that included only “collectible” work, being one such example. Quaranta’s followed up the 2008 exhibition by writing a whole book on the subject of New Media — “Media, New Media, PostMedia” — one core theme being that the field isn’t accepted in the contemporary art world. ”New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines,” he writes in his abstract, ”and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.”

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Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:07:15 -0700 http://www.artfagcity.com/2011/08/30/is-new-media-accepted-in-the-art-world-domenico-quarantas-media-new-media-postmedia/
<![CDATA[The Art of the Accident : Institute for the Unstable Media]]> http://www.v2.nl/publishing/the-art-of-the-accident

Failure and malfunction are inherent in all technological products. In The Art of the Accident, the concept of “accident” contains not just the idea that each machine brings with it its own form of disaster but also the suggestion that in a world of network technologies the old distinction between timeless form and time-dependent processes is becoming increasingly unclear.

Ars accidentalis recognizes the creative potential of the accident, the fall, and the instability of digital media. The book maps the transformation of space, time bodies, machines and architectures through the conceptual and noninstrumental use of the computer.

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Sun, 15 May 2011 06:04:52 -0700 http://www.v2.nl/publishing/the-art-of-the-accident
<![CDATA[The Digital Humanities: Beyond Computing]]> http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23

The field of the digital humanities embraces various scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology as well as being engaged in digital media production. Perhaps most notably, in what some are describing as a ‘computational turn’, it has seen techniques and methods drawn from computer science being used to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts. But just as interesting as what computer science has to offer the humanities is the question of what the humanities have to offer computer science. Do the humanities really need to draw so heavily on computer science to develop their sense of what the digital humanities might be? These are just some of the issues that are explored in this special issue of Culture Machine.

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Wed, 02 Mar 2011 06:36:29 -0800 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23
<![CDATA[Errors in Things and “The Friendly Medium”]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. This presentation was designed and delivered as part of Coventry University, Media and Communication Department’s ‘Open Media‘ lecture series. Please browse the Open-Media /stream and related tags (in left column) for more material

(Audio recording of talk coming very soon)

Many thanks to Janneke Adema for inviting me to present this talk and for all her hard work with the series and podcast.

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Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:39:59 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium
<![CDATA[Open Media (lecture series schedule)]]> http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/schedule/

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting.

This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

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Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:54:36 -0800 http://coventryopenmedia.wordpress.com/schedule/
<![CDATA[The Postmedia Perspective]]> http://rhizome.org/editorial/3964

The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually is – as a simple medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of art – whether based on technology or not – is usually classed as New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific “art world,” the world of New Media Art. This art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world in the Eighties and Nineties, developing its own means of production and distribution, and cultivating an idea of “art” that is completely different from that entertained by the contemporary art world. If you are familiar with Lev Manovich's distinction between “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land” (1996), you already get the point. According to Manovich, Duchamp Land (the contemporary art world) requires art objects that are “oriented towards the 'content'”, “complicated” 

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Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:44:34 -0800 http://rhizome.org/editorial/3964
<![CDATA[Lev manovich: software culture. the common grammar of media]]> http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1794

Professor of New Media Art at the University of California, both artist and graphic designer, Lev Manovich does not need further presentation. His first book “The language of New Media” (it came out in Italy in 2002 in the Olivares Edition) was one of the main reference points for many theorists, artists, communicators and designers, that were already well settled down in the “new technology” sector. Ten years later, thanks to the digital diffusion, grammar was already consolidated in the capitalism era and Lev Manovich decided to analyze and study that which today is seen as our “interface with the world”(1): software.

From the so called pioneers in the sixties and eighties to the revolution of social media in the last five years, “Software Culture” (2010, Olivares Edition) zooms in on technology and on what differentiates media, giving life to what is called “metamedium”(2), or in other words,the computer. Something to which we confide our memories, our imagination, our wishes, des

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Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:12:00 -0800 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1794
<![CDATA[On (Text and) Exaptation]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus) ‘Text’ originates from the Latin word texere, to weave. A material craft enabled by a human ingenuity for loops, knots and pattern. Whereas a single thread may collapse under its own weight, looped and intertwined threads originate their strength and texture as a network. The textile speaks of repetition and multiplicity, yet it is only once we back away from the tapestry that the larger picture comes into focus. At an industrial scale textile looms expanded beyond the frame of their human operators. Reducing a textile design to a system of coded instructions, the complex web of a decorative rug could be fixed into the gears and pulleys that drove the clattering apparatus. In later machines long reels of card, punched through with holes, told a machine how, or what, to weave. Not only could carpets and textiles themselves be repeated, with less chance of error, but the punch-cards that ordered them were now equally capable of being mass-produced for a homogenous market. From one industrial loom an infinite number of textile variations could be derived. All one needed to do was feed more punch-card into the greedy, demanding reels of the automated system. The material origins of film may also have been inspired by weaving. Transparent reels of celluloid were pulled through mechanisms resembling the steam-driven contraptions of the industrial revolution. The holes running down its edges delimit a reel’s flow. Just as the circular motion of a mechanical loom is translated into a network of threads, so the material specificity of the film-stock and projector weave the illusion of cinematic time. Some of the more archaic, out-moded types of film are known to shrink slightly as they decay, affording us – the viewer – a juddering, inconsistent vision of the world captured in the early 20th century. In 1936, the year that Alan Turing wrote his iconic paper “On Computable Numbers”, a German engineer by the name of Konrad Zuse built the first working digital computer. Like its industrial predecessors, Zuse’s computer was designed to function via a series of holes encoding its program. Born as much out of convenience as financial necessity, Zuse punched his programs directly into discarded reels of 35mm film-stock. Fused together by the technologies of weaving and cinema, Zuse’s digital computer announced the birth of an entirely new mode of textuality. As Lev Manovich suggests: “The pretence of modern media to create simulations of sensible reality is… cancelled; media are reduced to their original condition as information carrier, nothing less, nothing more… The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favour of the more efficient binary one. Cinema becomes a slave to the computer.” Rather than Manovich’s ‘slave’ / ‘master’ relationship, I want to suggest a kind of lateral pollination of media traits. As technologies develop, specificities from one media are co-opted by another. Reverting to biological metaphor, we see genetic traits jumping between media species. From a recent essay by Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern Mirror: “Exaptation is described in biology as an example of “lateral adaptation,” which consists in a cooption of a feature for its present role from some other origin… Exaptation is not the opposite of adaptation; neither is it merely an accident, a human error or lack of scientific data that would in the end support the concept of adaptation. Exaptation questions the very process of assigning meaning and function in hindsight, the process of assigning the prefix “post” and thus containing a complex phenomenon within the grid of familiar interpretation.” Media history is littered with exaptations. Features specific to certain media are exapted – co-opted – as matters of convenience, technical necessity or even aesthetics. Fashion has a role to play also, for instance, many of the early models of mobile phone sported huge, extendible aerials which the manufacturers now admit had no impact whatsoever on the workings of the technology. Lev Manovich’s suggestion is that as the computer has grown in its capacities, able to re-present all other forms of media on a single computer apparatus, the material traits that define a media have been co-opted by the computer at the level of software and interface. A strip of celluloid has a definite weight, chemistry and shelf-life – a material history with origins in the mechanisms of the loom. Once we encode the movie into the binary workings of a digital computer, each media-specific – material – trait can be reduced to an informational equivalent. If I want to increase the frames per second of a celluloid film I have to physically wind the reel faster. For the computer encoded, digital equivalent, a code that re-presents each frame can be introduced via my desktop video editing software. Computer code determines the content as king. In the 1960s and 70s Roland Barthes named ‘The Text’ as a network of production and exchange. Whereas ‘the work’ was concrete, final – analogous to a material – ‘the text’ was more like a flow, a field or event – open ended. Perhaps even infinite. In, From Work to Text, Barthes wrote: “The metaphor of the Text is that of the network…” This semiotic approach to discourse, by initiating the move from print culture to ‘text’ culture, also helped lay the ground for a contemporary politics of content-driven media. Skipping backwards through From Work to Text, we find this statement: “The text must not be understood as a computable object. It would be futile to attempt a material separation of works from texts.” I am struck here by Barthes’ use of the phrase ‘computable object’, as well as his attention to the ‘material’. Katherine Hayles in her essay, Text is Flat, Code is Deep, teases out the statement for us: “computable” here mean[s] to be limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned. Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the ubiquitous “text” has all but driven out the media-specific term book. Hayles notes that the ‘ubiquity’ of Barthes’ term ‘Text’ allowed – in its wake – an erasure of media-specific terms, such as ‘book’. In moving from, The Work to The Text, we move not just between different politics of exchange and dissemination, we also move between different forms and materialities of mediation. To echo (and subvert) the words of Marshall Mcluhan, not only is The Medium the Message, The Message is also the Medium. …media are only a subspecies of communications which includes all forms of communication. For example, at first people did not call the internet a medium, but now it has clearly become one… We can no longer understand any medium without language and interaction – without multimodal processing… We are now clearly moving towards an integration of all kinds of media and communications, which are deeply interconnected. Extract from a 2005 interview with Manuel Castells, Global Media and Communication Journal

(This post was written as a kind of ‘prequel’ to a previous essay, Rancière’s Ignoramus)

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Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:41:24 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/on-text-and-exaptation
<![CDATA[In Praise of Copying: Get Your Free Copy]]> http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html

Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying, which makes the case that “copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.” Boon is a writer, journalist and Associate Professor in the English Literature department at York University, Toronto. You can download a free copy of his book in PDF format straight from this link. (Note that the text is formally released under a Creative Commons license.) Or you can always purchase a printed copy online.

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Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:26:00 -0700 http://www.openculture.com/2010/11/in_praise_of_copying_grab_a_free_copy.html
<![CDATA[In Defense of the Poor Image]]> http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94

by Hito Steyerl

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

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Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:27:00 -0700 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/94
<![CDATA[Error in apparatus as aesthetic value]]> http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=402

by Alejandro Schianchi

An error seems to be that which gets between the ideal being and the real being; the error appears to be a singularity, a Non-being that transforms and distorts the Being. Audiovisual techniques, technologies, devices and media try to suppress errors; however, an ideological and aesthetic possibility hides behind the use of errors.

  1. Introduction

An error, a failure, or an accident connotes something that is bad, wrong and inappropriate. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the positive aspect of errors that take place in the artistic production achieved with audiovisual machines.

We will start by giving a more precise meaning to what we usually call “error”. In order to do so, we will resort to its scientific definition, particularly in the fields of physics and mathematics: “difference between the measured or calculated value and the real value”. This means there is a difference between the real obtained result and the prevision we had made and had

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Tue, 26 Oct 2010 02:52:00 -0700 http://gli.tc/h/blog/?p=402