Archive for the ‘2005’ Category
INTERVIEW WITH ERIC DOERINGER
INTERVIEW WITH ERIC DOERINGER
by Domenico Quaranta
DQ. Let’s start from Bootlegs. When did you start to make them? What’s your manufacturing process?
ED. I started making the Bootlegs during the fall of 2001 and held my first “sale” on West 24th Street in Manhattan in October 2001.
Most of the Bootlegs are made through a combination of painting and collage. I paint the background, collage on a print of the main image, and cover the entire canvas with clear acrylic to create a “brushstroke” texture. However, the process varies for each piece. The “Damien Hirst” and “Christopher Wool” Bootlegs are entirely hand-painted and I use a different acrylic coating for paintings where the original has a slicker finish like “Gary Hume” or “Inka Essenhigh”.
The photo pieces are all my own creations. For “Vik Muniz” the original is a photograph of a portrait of Sigmund Freud drawn with chocolate syrup. I traced a picture of Muniz’s piece with chocolate syrup and then photographed my chocolate drawing. For “Cindy Sherman” I replaced Ms. Sherman’s face with my own self-portrait using Photoshop. For “Barbara Kruger” I found an image from the 50’s similar to the type of picture that she would use and overlaid the words “Who’s the fairest of them all” using her trademark white-on-red lettering.
ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
ART AND POLITICS IN THE INTERNET AGE
By Domenico Quaranta
© Arte e Critica. All rights reserved
“Counter communication is more global than ever… the days of off-line activists, condemned to street demonstrations and fighting to be listened to and have their arguments recognized with the press, are numbered.” Geert Lovink [1]
May 1999. In the middle of the electoral campaign George W. Bush, governor of Texas and running for the presidential elections, snapped: “there ought to be limits – there ought to be limits, to, uh, to freedom”. The blunder did not go by unnoticed, and this unhappy remark gave some of the most important American newspapers this result: an internet site, gwbush.com, created by a group of famous American pranksters, that looked like the Official Bush website but with the contents controversially modified.
This date can be taken as a symbol of a new historic phase of political activism. With the skilled use of the Web and the similarly skilled manipulation of information, the authors of the site, the collective ®™ark, have managed, at no cost, to give their operation global visibility, and to make their controversial objective the victim of his own words.
An interview with Davide Grassi (2005)
The central point of everything is not man, but rather the survival of the system. An interview with Davide Grassi
Published in I. Ivkovic, D. Grassi (eds), Demokino. Virtual Biopolitical Agora, Aksioma – Maska, 2006 [Transformacije Series, n° 19].
Dziga Vertov (the theoretician of kino-glazo) was certain that film could be used for political goals, that it can be changed into a means for a “communist decodification of the world”.
It’s hard to tell whether with the title of his last project – DemoKino – Davide Grassi wished to pay tribute to one of the fathers of film or to make fun of his unrealized ambitions.
The project is a narrative divided into 8 film clips based on a screenplay by Antonio Caronia. It unwinds live, with a streaming technique, allowing viewers to edit the film interactively. The main character is one Kolja, a Slovene youth with an average education and an average interest in current events, facing a serious of varied dilemmas through the day, a sort of contemporary Hamlet. For example, two Mormons ring his doorbell, and he begins to ponder sects, Raelites and cloning. Or: he’s surfing the net and suddenly begins to question copyright. In this manner, while engaging in every day activity, on the toilet or on the phone, Kolja starts thinking about abortion, euthanasia, genetically modified organisms, therapeutic cloning, homosexual marriage, water privatization. He discusses all the pros and contras and then tries to decide: which is where the user steps in, voting in his name; the majority vote then leads onto the next room, the next question. And the next dilemma. From one vote to the next, we come to the final clip of the film, followed by, without interaction by clicking, a final short clip. The now-familiar face of Kolja is substituted by a smiling clown: “What about if I tell you that everything was defined in advance?”. A silly melody and a sarcastic smile thereby destroy any illusions brought about by the “virtual parliament” of DemoKino. Concepts like (inter)active collaboration, direct democracy, a virtual agora and freedom of choice, collapse alongside the clown’s red nose, just as Italian democracy did alongside pianists’ musical performances. As with Kafka, the clarity of law is disfigured in the muddle of a process that remains invisible to the end. But the question of the virtuality of contemporary democracy is only one of the questions put forth by DemoKino: it also discusses the effectiveness of the much praised interactivity of the web and the transformation of politics into biopolitics, or rather, the recent tendency to try to make the private public, and transform life itself into a political question. This complexity is common to all works of Grassi, an Italian artist who moved to Ljubljana in 1995, where he founded the non-profit organization Aksioma, producing works which use new media to investigate social, political, ethical and aesthetic questions. Because life is politics, theatre is terrorism and problems produce profit…
GameScenes / Videoludic Scenaries (2005)
Nullsleep, New York Romscapes
GameScenes / Videoludic Scenaries
curated by Domenico Quaranta
as a section of Piemonte Share Festival 2005, Turin (Italy), Palazzo Cavour, February 24 febbraio – March 1, 2005.
Featured artists: Mauro Ceolin (ITA), Jeremiah Johnson aka nullsleep (USA), John Klima (USA), Martin Le Chevallier (FRA), Gonzalo Frasca – Newsgaming (URY), Selectparks (AU), Antonio Riello (ITA), Josh On (USA), Carlo Zanni (ITA), Brody Condon (USA), JODI (NLD), Kinematic Collective (USA), RETROYOU (ESP), Eddo Stern (USA), Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski (AUS), TWCDC (USA), 8bitpeople (nullsleep’s selection); Micropupazzo (ITA – DE); Role Model (Johan Kotlinski, SWE); Tonylight (ITA); Oliver Wittchow (DE); Gameboyzz Orchestra (POL).
Lev Manovich 5 questions about the digital culture
My replies in call for answers organized by SINTESI. Festival delle arti elettroniche, Napoli, April 2005. Curated by Vito Campanelli
LM. We live in ‘remix’ culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?
DQ. Non credo che ci siano, né che ci debbano essere, dei limiti al remixaggio che non siano quelli, superabili, imposti dalle ancora imperfette tecnologie utilizzate. E non credo ci debba essere un’etica del remixaggio, perché non credo che l’etica debba interferire in alcun modo con la nostra libertà di appropriarci – nel senso letterale di “fare proprio” – di qualsiasi artefatto cultu(r)ale. Quello che ha scritto Guy Debord nel 1956 è ancora valido: “Ogni elemento, non importa la provenienza, può servire a creare nuove combinazioni… Tutto può servire”.
Imporre dei limiti al remixaggio vorrebbe dire imporre dei limiti al pensiero. Piuttosto, sono convinto che il missaggio – termine a cui preferisco quello, proposto da Bourriaud, di postproduzione – abbia bisogno di sviluppare una propria estetica.
