Playlist Exibition. Low-tech 8-bit art from VjVISUALOOP on Vimeo.

Domenico Quaranta (ed), Mediateca Expandida – Playlist, exhibition catalogue, Gijon (Asturias, Spain), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creaciòn Industrial, December 2009.

The second issue of “Mediateca Expandida”, the magazine published in conjunction with the exhibitions in LABoral’s mediateque, is out. It features texts by Matteo Bittanti, Ed Halter, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz and myself, plus about 30 artists and a music CD. You can download the full pdf from here.

Back from Gijon, I just uploaded my (bad as usual) photos on Flickr. Regine Debatty and Valentina Tanni posted something better on their own account. Soon the official pictures will be available as well!

On the last issue of Artpulse, a brand new art US-based contemporary art magazine, you can read an interview I had with Nicola Verlato about his interest in videogames and the way they are, or aren’t, influencing his work as a painter. You can read it online here.

PLAYLIST.  PLAYING GAMES, MUSIC, ART

CURATOR: Domenico Quaranta
DATES: 18.12.2009 – 17.05.2010
VENUE: Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación
Industrial (Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón – Asturias)
MORE INFOS: www.laboralcentrodearte.org

ARTISTS:

Paul B. Davis (UK), Jeff Donaldson / NoteNdo (DE), Dragan Espenschied (DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André Gonçalves (PT), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don Miller / No-carrier (US), Jeremiah Johnson / Nullsleep (US), Tristan Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmüller (AT), Alexei Shulgin (RU), Paul Slocum (USA), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT).

CATALOGUE:

Texts by Matteo Bittanti, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz, Ed Halter, Domenico Quaranta. Music CD included.

Along the Twentieth Century, music has often been the driving force behind crucial innovations in visual arts, and the starting point for many artists. Without forgetting the role played by music in the development of abstract art, it was mainly during the Sixties that music provided a fertile ground for new approaches, new theories, new art forms, new aesthetics. John Cage was a musician working with artists and engineers. The very first performance (the Untitled Event at Black Mountain College in 1952) was a musical event, such as many Fluxus events during the Sixties. Furthermore, Fluxus adopted music notation for its peculiar “scores”. It was thinking to music that Umberto Eco first introduced the concept of “opera aperta”. And at the very beginning of Video Art lies the manipulation of the electronic signal, first experimented by Nam June Paik in music.
PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes. It’s our feeling, on the one hand, that electronic music culture has been of great importance for the development of low-tech, home-based media art; and, on the other hand, that – such as for the early Video Art – the manipulation of the digital stream is mainly grounded in musical research.
The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show will demonstrate that the retrogaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time, retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools, softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies, platforms and communities. Thus, PLAYLIST will serve as a starting point for an archive / collection of materials produced by artists and musicians, and as a relational context where visitors can practice with tools produced by artists, and take part in workshops, lectures, improvised performances.
Furthermore, PLAYLIST will try to provide a context for this kind of research, not necessarily game related, selecting seminal projects and artists that helped forging the conceptual frame in which retro-gaming took place.

The 10th edition of the Pixxelpoint festival will open tomorrow evening, at 8 PM. In the meantime, the online section of the main exhibition is up and running, thanks to Padiglioneinternet.com and Clubinternet.org. CHECK IT OUT HERE!!!

Tom Jennings, Alan Turing Made Flat, 2000

D. Quaranta, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, in Pixxelpoint – Once Upon a Time in the West, exhibition catalogue, Nova Gorica 2009.

I

Although the term “new media” is one of today’s great buzzwords, in actual fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, more streamlined versions of technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which drew life from the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet while we have grown accustomed to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode ray tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone who, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means, is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university’s warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

II

I wrote this call for artists around the end of April 2009. I had just become the happy father of a wonderful child, and I was about to become the happy father of a weighty PHD thesis. While the first was all about the new, the latter was an effort to understand what went wrong with so called “New Media Art” in the last fifty years or so. The answer, of course, is complicated and took about 300 pages to discuss and formulate academically. The bottom line is that “the exploration of the artistic potential of the new media” mantra and the very notion of “new media”, while not the only factors, seem to have a lot of responsibility for the problems that “New Media Art” experienced in its efforts to become something more than a niche for geeks.

This notion offers an insight into my call for artists and the thinking behind it. When you have to organize an event based on an open call, time is a key factor. Eight months is a really long time, both for a child and for a show. In eight months, my child went from about 3 kilos to almost 10, got sick once, cut his first two teeth and produced an incredible quantity of… well, you know what I’m talking about. As for the show, in eight months you send the call for artists, you get feedback from friends, you read new articles and books, you see new projects, you start working on another exhibition on a similar subject, and finally you get the applications in and start reviewing them. Some of them fit perfectly into the framework you set up, others don’t fit at all, and a few force it to develop in directions that you never envisaged. And when you finally go back to the project, you see that it has grown up, that it has teeth, and that it’s different from what you expected.

At that point, you start writing a text for the catalogue – it’s late and you have to hurry. You dig into your hard disk and find the call for artists you wrote eight months previously. Reading it, you see just how far you now are from that point, how much the project differs from that first draft. But it wasn’t just a first draft, something that you shared with just your team and a few other people. It is out there, published on web sites and magazines, and has been read by at least the one hundred and thirty eight artists who sent in applications. It’s part of the story, like it or not. It’s like the picture that shows how fat you were as a teenager, hidden for years in the family album until some so-called former friend you almost forgot about uploads it on Facebook and tags you in it.

III

Actually, I’m not that unhappy with that text, but I wanted to make this story longer because I have to fill up these pages and because – no matter how much you think you’ve changed – you always end up bumping into someone from the past who delights in telling you that you’re exactly like you always were. Nevertheless, there are a couple of points I’d like to clarify, disavow, atone for. The first one is the feeling of nostalgia, which was at the core of the call for artists and also inspired the title of the exhibition. Nostalgia is a good feeling, I like it. But in the field of art, nostalgia is often a synonym of mannerism, academism, and decadence. Artists are often nostalgic about another conception of art, or of another way of making art. The kind of nostalgia you can experience in art made with obsolete technologies is rather different: it looks back in a new way to the past of a medium which wasn’t perceived as an art medium at the time, or to a set of aesthetics which were developed outside of the art field. An artist trying to remake jodi today is a nouveau Bouguereau; an artist working with animated gifs today is an innovator working with an obsolete medium.

Moreover, nostalgia is not the only feeling that takes you back, for instance, to your old GameBoy, and rarely is it the main one. Yet I still think that feelings play an important role in the process. In a way, an obsolete technology is more “human” than its newer counterparts, in the same way as, in Terminator II, Arnold Schwarzenegger is more human than the liquid metal T-1000, the latest output of the same technology. It carries the memory of the great times shared, but also the memory of its “initial promise”, as Walter Benjamin put it, and of its final failure. For all these reasons, it elicits an emotional involvement that is very different from that related to newer, still surprising and still successful, technologies. And this is true for both the creator and the audience. Look at what is happening with 3D animation, for instance. When you go to see Ice Age III, you expect it to be not just as entertaining as the previous two, but also more spectacular, with more advanced special effects, animated in a sleeker, more natural way. The people working on it are aware of this and do their best to dazzle us with top-level technology.

On the contrary, when we go to see Kirikù or Persepolis, for example, we are not expecting to be surprised by technology. But this doesn’t mean that we are necessarily driven by nostalgic feeling – that we are looking for something old, reassuring, retro, done in the good old way and recalling our childhood cartoons. That is just one option. What most of us are looking for is something new made with old means. The implicit belief is that an old technology doesn’t stop having something to say because it has been replaced by new tools. Quite the contrary.

IV

Obsolescence is the other face of the race towards the new. Focusing on nostalgia, we implicitly accept planned obsolescence, the marketing strategy developed to force us to buy the last release of something we already have. Saying that we like the obsolete because it’s obsolete is like saying: “new is better, but we are old and prefer old things”. For many artists working with obsolete media, their art is not a nostalgic tribute to the past, but an act of cultural resistance against the present and this marketing strategy. Choosing lo-fi instead of wi-fi, lo-res instead of hi-res, the amateurish instead of the professional, the old instead of the new, can thus become a political act. The very fact that nobody will employ you today on the basis of being a GIF virtuoso, a great Assembly coder or a passionate manipulator of your old Commodore 64 is meaningful in itself. Working with obsolete technologies is necessarily an amateurish practice. And, as the Critical Art Ensemble wrote in Digital Resistance, «[…] tactical media practitioners support and value amateur practice – both their own and that of others. Amateurs have the ability to see through the dominant paradigms, are freer to recombine elements of paradigms thought long dead, and can apply everyday life experience to their deliberations. Most important, however, amateurs are not invested in institutionalized systems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their process such as maintaining a place in the funding hierarchy, or maintaining prestige capital.»[1]

Moreover, dealing with obsolete media is political because it often entails a refusal to work with proprietary software and hardware. Writing about the current use of animated GIFs, Sally McCay explains that «their use is also somewhat political and can indicate a commitment to the long-standing open source, anti-copyright activism of online producers»[2]. Finally, we have to consider that the more complicated a computer is, the more we are delegating to those who are responsible for the software; and, as the collective I/O/D taught us, “software is mind control”: a cultural artifact which brings with it the culture and ideas of those who built it. Thus, working with older machines that can only be programmed in machine language enables you to dialogue directly with the machine itself, bypassing any attempt to take control of what you are doing. In this regard, Seb Franklin quotes Cory Arcangel, who wrote: «I tend to prefer assembly because it gives me control over the machine and assures me that the aesthetic choices are based on the hardware of the machine, and not, say, some dupe at Macromedia.»[3]

V

Furthermore, if we start viewing media obsolescence as a phase in the life of a medium and a vibrant stage in our cultural history, rather than the unhappy ending of the same story, we discover that we can make stunningly new things with obsolete media. Working with a medium that can’t evolve any further has tremendous potential: you can delve deeply into it, and gain increasing awareness of what you can and you can’t do; you can use it in ways that were never envisioned by those who created it, and lastly, being a child of your time (and not of the past, when the medium in question was new) you can use it in a pretty contemporary way. Both Chuck Close in his daguerreotypes and William Kentridge in his hand-drawing based animations are using old means in unprecedented ways, and doing so to effectively talk about their own time. Close uses the daguerrotype in a way that contains an awareness of the whole history of photography, of the digital shift of the last decade and the contemporary attitude toward the large format; but the precision, depth and energy of these images could never be achieved with a digital camera. When using a 386dx or playing with a Gameboy, nobody would ever have thought about turning the former into a rockstar, and the latter into a musical instrument; but this is exactly what happened to these devices at the end of the Nineties, with Alexei Shulgin and the chiptune community.

What’s more, working within a defined set of constraints can, paradoxically, be more exciting than working with a tool that seems to grant an apparently total freedom. The fathers of contemporary culture, such as Raymond Russell and Marcel Duchamp, knew this well, even though they did not manage to convey it to their descendents, who often got drunk on total freedom. When you work with a limited tool, such as an animated GIF, you know that there are some things you can do and some things you can’t; the idea of using these to get results that you would only think possible with later technologies is one of the reasons that drives many artists to use these instead of Shockwave or Flash.

VI

Lastly, the decision to use obsolete media reveals a complex attitude toward the past, which cannot be described only in terms of nostalgia. In some cases, it is the juicy fruit of a steampunk imagination, which attempts to rewrite the past according to a different evolution of its premises. In these terms Vinylvideo described its activity, based on the storage of video (moving image plus sound) on analog long-play records, as a “fake archeology of media”.[4] And, after talking about the era of the birth of the computer, this is how Tom Jennings talks about his project World Power Systems: «World Power Systems is an entity that produces artifacts and written ideas to create a sort of portal between the early Cold War era and today; to illuminate the beauty and horror, at once alien and familiar, and thereby reflect today’s beauty and horror back into visibility. […] Sleek futuristic technologies of the past; entire branches of science and industry utterly forgotten, whose once-experts are now cranks; solutions to problems impossible to recall; the solutions now problems themselves.»[5]

In other cases, looking back to the history of the media goes hand in hand with looking back to your own personal history. This is almost obvious, but it became clear to me when I discovered the project Childhood Games, by Eugenio Tisselli. In 1984, when he was 12 years old, Tisselli created some computer games without access to a computer, writing the code in a notebook. In 2008, the artist finally released these games on the Net. Yet the futuristic dream of a child did not translate into the nostalgic reminiscences of an adult white male: «I wanted to re-connect with the mind of my childhood, and try to understand its creative processes. This work is not about nostalgia; it is about remembering that imagination (that is, the act of creating images) can also be a central element of game play. Thus, the graphics are simple on purpose, to the point of being primitive. I didn’t want to re-create the then-current state of technology, but to dream again of other worlds, armed only with a handful of basic symbols.»[6]

VII

In the end, Once Upon a Time in the West, the title chosen for this Pixxelpoint festival, is not that bad. Indeed in spaghetti westerns, as in this show, nostalgia is just a minimal part of the whole thing. Firstly, Sergio Leone’s movies were one of the best things to come out of an age of political conflicts, which are often addressed in his work. Secondly, the spaghetti western was the unexpected development of a dead medium (western movies), which introduced some extraordinary variations into a highly codified genre, and enabled it to survive to the present day. And lastly, it turned that past into a literary place, breathing new life into it and giving it a bright future.

NOTES:

[1] Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, Autonomedia, New York 2001, pp. 8 – 9. Available online at the URL http://www.critical-art.net/books/digital/ (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[2] Sally McCay, “The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)”, in Art and Education, 2009, available online at the URL http://www.artandeducation.net/papers/view/14 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[3] Seb Franklin, “On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: ‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ Nonexistence”, in Ctheory, June 2009, available online at the URL http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=609 (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[4] [About Vinylvideo], available online at the URL http://www.vinylvideo.com/press/02_text/02_vv_about.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[5] Tom Jennings, “World Power Systems”, available online at the URL http://wps.com/about-WPS/WPS/index.html (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

[6] Eugenio Tisselli, “Childhood Games”, available online at the URL http://www.motorhueso.net/childhoodgames/english/index.htm (last retrieved 19.11.2009).

Once Upon a Time in the West

December 4 – 11, 2009

Nova Gorica (SI) – Gorizia (IT)

Curator: Domenico Quaranta

Organization: Kulturni dom Nova Gorica

Kulturni Dom Nova Gorica (Slovenia) is proud to announce the 10th edition of the International New Media Art Festival Pixxelpoint, that will open at the Mestna galerija Nova Gorica on December 4, 2009, at 8.00 PM. The festival will take place from December 4 to December 11, 2009, and will have two venues: the Mestna Galerija Nova Gorica, every day from 9.00 AM to 7.00 PM; and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Gorizia (Via Carducci 2, Gorizia), every day from 2.00 to 7.00 PM. Furthermore, Web based works have been collected in an online gallery designed in collaboration with Club Internet (www.clubinternet.org) and proudly hosted by Padiglione Internet (www.padiglioneinternet.com) – a project by Miltos Manetas for the Venice Biennale. The online exhibition, open every day, 24/24, will be screened in the two venues of the festival as well.
Pixxelpoint, now celebrating its 10th birthday, has become an internationally established New Media Art festival, well known in Slovenia and abroad. Its primary interest is to bring information technologies and New Media Art to a broader audience, and to help new generations in developing an alternative, more “mature” use of the computer.

THE FESTIVAL THEME
Once Upon a Time in the West

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

Indeed in spaghetti westerns, as in this show, nostalgia is just a minimal part of the whole thing. The decision to use obsolete media reveals can be act of cultural resistance against the present and this marketing strategy, as well as proprietary software and hardware; a way to make something new with old means; the resiult of the choice to work withing a defined set of constraints. In some cases, it is the juicy fruit of a steampunk imagination; iIn other cases, looking back to the history of the media goes hand in hand with looking back to your own personal history.

Domenico Quaranta

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:

AIDS-3D (Germany): Forever Heath Death, 2009

Mats Andren & Anders Carlsson (Sweden): HT Gold, 2008

Michael Bell Smith (USA): Grid Panic, 2006

David Blackmore (UK): Cracked LCDs, 2009

Ian Bogost (USA): Guru meditation, 2009

BridA / Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango, Jurij Pavlica (Slovenia): Nanoplot, 2009

Wayne Clements (UK): The Best and Worst of Possible Worlds, 2009

Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia): ASCII sculpture, 2009

Chris Coy (USA): Chariots of Mortal Combat Fire, 2007

Florian Cramer (The Netherlands): Floppy Films, 2009

Olle Essvik (Sweden): Devices, 2007 – 2008

Vladimir Frelih (Croatia): Katalogue, 1998 – 2000

Darko Fritz (Croatia): Home, 2002 – 2009

James Houston (UK): Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any), 2008

IOcose (Italy): Floppytrip, 2009

Tom Jennings (USA): Alan Turing made flat, 2000

Oliver Larić (Germany): 787 Cliparts, 2006

Les Liens Invisibles (Italy): Never Ending Happy End, 2008

Olia Lialina (Germany): Animated Gif Model, 2005

Paul Matosic (UK): Deconstructed New Technology, 1995 – ongoing

Eilis McDonald (Ireland): Lo-fi Wi-fi, 2008

Rosa Menkman (The Netherlands): Happy Birthday Goto80, 2009

Rafael Rozendaal (The Netherlands): RGB, 2002

Thatisaworkaround (Greece): The Enemy Agent and You II, 2009

Thisgasthing (Italy): CABOTRONIUM, 2009

Eugenio Tisselli (Spain): Childhood Games, 1984 – 2009

Tonylight (Italy): Space LED, 2009

UBERMORGEN.COM (Austria): Black ‘n white, 2000 – 2009

Harm Van Den Dorpel (The Netherlands): Bison.gif, 2008

Windows Media Players (UK): Graphic Interchange Series: Victorian Device, 2009

Math Wrath: While Playing Astro Grover in 1989

FOR THE FULL PROGRAM, CHECK OUT:

http://www.pixxelpoint.org

MORE INFOS:

http://www.pixxelmusic.com

http://domenicoquaranta.com

PRESS:

IMAGES 1 (zip, 8.1 MB) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/PX09_press_pack1.zip

IMAGES 2 (zip, 8.2 MB) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/PX09_press_pack2.zip

PRESS RELEASE (pdf) – http://domenicoquaranta.com/public/PRESS/Pixxelpoint09_PR_ENG.pdf

Below you can find some links (reviews, documentation, etc.) regarding the show Gazira Babeli – Acting as Aliens (Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana) and the related seminar.

About the seminar:

- Images by Frieda Korda, Roxelo Babenco, Helfe Ihnen on Flickr.

- An ongoing discussion on the Odyssey Ning.

- A video by Helfe Ihnen on Youtube.

About the show:

- Gazira Babeli‘s archive page

- A video interview on VEST.SI (Italian, sub Slovenian)

- A TV feature on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 47.06)

- The opening performance on TVSLO.SI (Slovenian, starting from min. 04.45)

- “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”. A review by Flaminio Gualdoni.

- “Aliena e maga l’artista di oggi“. A review by Agnese Trocchi in Stile.it, 27.10.09.

- “Umetnost v virtualnosti“. A review by Ida Hiršenfelder, published in Dnevnik, 04.11.09.

- My set on Flickr.

- Some pics of the performance from the natives’ point of view on the Second Front blog.

- And some raw footage by me on my Youtube account:

Seppukoo is – no kidding – the killer app in terms of social networking. I got in love with it the very first time I heard wispers about it. Now I’m really proud to announce my brand new memorial page.

Seppukoo is a project by the imaginary art-group Les Liens invisibles (www.lesliensinvisibles.org). It helps you to suicide your virtual identity, apparently deleting your account on Facebook. While doing it, it spreads the suicide virus among your friends. In the meantime, it creates a memorial page – an account – for you on Seppukoo.com, which is nothing more than a social network of wannabe self-murderers. Yet, when you go back to Facebook, you’ll discover that your suicide was merely simbolic, because you can reactivate your Facebook account just logging in again. Through parody, parasitism and viral distribution, Seppukoo shows how difficult it is to regain control on your identity, data and information when you gifted them to a social network. Life never ends – at least, on Facebook!

On Tuesday, the legendary Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana will host Acting as Aliens, a new exhibition by Gazira Babeli. The core of the exhibition will be a performance, revolving around the issue of communication between people and avatars, homo sapiens and homo virtualis. This text by Patrick Lichty, Gazira’s friend, comrade and collaborator, is a smart take on the upcoming performance.

Talking to Gazira Babeli: Can We Understand Avatars, or One Another, for That Matter?

Patrick Lichty

An avatar sits in a room, alone. The walls are charcoal gray, the floors ashen cypress plank. She sits before a screen, with people appearing on it, gesticulating, drawing pictures, and mumbling through the window. In return, the avatar, in this case, one without an operator, tries to respond. One could almost imagine the huge sound / light array from Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the background, and the only thing missing is the sign language. But in this case, one might be led to ask who is the interpreter, and who is the alien, and whether there is any hope for understanding…

For Gazira Babeli’s Acting as Aliens, native “code artist” Babeli isolates herself in a cubicle, with the only link to the outside world being a video window connected to a webcam into a gallery in Slovenia. Both the subject and object are placed out of context, and are left across the table from one another, left to try to make a connection with one another. What we are left with is the primordial reflection of the Other in each other’s eyes, and forced to resolve the matter, what emerges from the dialogue?

Talking with an alien requires untold layers of translation through endless social protocols, representations, and local grammars (tools, gestures) as well as metastructures like written languages. For this installation, one might be inclined to give up hope, as Gazira is as opaque as any character on any screen.

There are concessions that Gazira has that make the situation hopeful. She will talk to you; she will try to reach out to you. But will you understand one another, or is the entire exercise like trying to understand the idioglossia (secret language) between twins from the outside? Is it like trying to determine whether Schroedinger’s Cat [1] is still alive without opening the box? There are come concessions to this in that all con-versants possess a more or less human form, use anthropomorphized, and share a written language using a latin character set. There are already a myriad of commonalities between you and Gazira that it seems that one may not need a Rosetta Stone. If you draw a cat, she might know it is a cat. If you wave, she may wave back. There is already some groundwork in place when one includes the similarity of language devices, embodied form, and so on. But recent discoveries in animal cognition reveal that the gulf between us is wider than we ever imagined.

Throughout the 1990′s Irene Pepperberg [2] has been doing groundbreaking work in the area of animal cognition with her gray parrot Alex. She learned that Alex was able to understand the concept of zero, which is hard for some children, and express fear of predators outside the house even with the blinds closed, which reveals abstract thought. In addition, Temple Grandin’s work [3] with animal consciousness and autism in her design of more humane slaughterhouses proves how little human beings understand about the consciousness of other beings, or one another, for that matter. You know, when I look into my little Siamese cat’s eyes, I know there’s a thought process there. I have learned her clicks and trills, and although we are of a common culture, but have different languages and different types of consciousness, we have learned to translate, and we have an understanding. But the fact that after tens of thousands of years of civilized development, we have only now begun to learn that other beings on our earth think and feel is nothing less than the realization that African natives were indeed human, and their art entered art museums rather than natural history museums. As a species, humanity has a long way to go. And when confronting an obviously advanced species as Gazira (Homo Virtualis), will she consider you human? I know her well enough to think that she will.

Returning to the black room, the negotiation continues. Gazira shows a stick figure drawing of a boy under a sun, the person on the other side of the screen, shows a picture of a cat. An anvil falls from the sky inside the room. What was that? Nothing? Don’t worry… Let’s keep talking.

Footnotes

[1] From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat (last visited October 26, 2009): “Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, often described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The thought experiment presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. In the course of developing this experiment, he coined the term Verschränkung ― literally, entanglement. […] A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.”

[2] For more infos, cfr. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg (last visited October 26, 2009).

[3] For more infos, cfr. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin (last visited October 26, 2009).

Text written for the exhibition Gazira Babeli: “ACTING AS ALIENS”, Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 3 – 15, 2009. Curated by Domenico Quaranta.

Text written for the book Brice Coniglio (ed), Coniglioviola. Sono un pirata / Sono un signore, exhibition catalogue, Silvana Editoriale, October 2009. If you wish, you can buy the book (bilingual Italian / English) on the publisher’s website.

Alice makes Yoga

When Alice meets the white rabbit for the first time she is getting bored on a river bank with her sister. She follows the rabbit under the hedge, then down a deep hole into a room full of doors, bottles and cakes, and from there into a wonderland that with the help of Lewis Carroll, she ends up sharing with us.

When Alice meets ConiglioViola she is getting bored in front of a computer. Idly clicking here and there, like her namesake she is pondering what use “a book without pictures and dialogue” can have. It was 2001 and the internet was pretty much similar to a book without pictures and dialogue, a place devoted to serendipity but at the same time fairly devoid of surprises.

ConiglioViola pulls Alice into the vortex of a surreal experience, an online “meditation”. What appears is Yolanda, a strange robot sitting in the lotus position, with seven flashing chakras. Alice is invited to undertake a personal process of meditation using Yolanda’s chakras. Clicking on each chakra activates a series of hypnotic animations designed to aid meditation. When she encounters Yolanda Alice is unable to recognise Maria, the robot woman in Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1927). Her film culture is limited to teen films and Dawson’s Creek, a TV series which was all the rage at the time. She doesn’t think the site’s aesthetics kitsch, or ponder the suitability of a computer screen for yoga meditation. And in any case Alice does yoga, or at least has taken a few lessons. She immediately forwards the link to her classmates and on the Saturday shows her instructor the site.

So was it that in 2001, ConiglioViola’s project acquired a cult following among devotees of New Age philosophies. La meditazione di Yolanda was used both in private and during lessons. ConiglioViola was not that surprised, having enough familiarity with the web to know that works online can meet with entirely unpredictable fates. Parodies can get mistaken for originals, and extreme provocations taken on board as practical suggestions that might just be good business ideas. In this context there is nothing strange about a discreet reflection on the computer screen as mirror for the self, a projection of its user and a place of life rather than a device for work, becoming a tool for meditation, and nothing strange about a subtle mockery of New Age philosophies actually eliciting identification from those seriously engaged in those philosophies.

In 2001, in any case, the identity of ConiglioViola itself was still in the process of forming. Established with the aim of creating multimedia works and reaching the widest audience possible, it did not take for granted that art would represent the best channel for this activity. In the meantime the internet appeared to respond to both of these expectations, and ConiglioViola enthusiastically embraced its promise. In 2003 Yolanda’s Meditation expanded to include a “temple”, a new, unsettling and surreal dimension that users can access after meditating on the seven chakras, and that enables them to contribute personal thoughts to a kind of online collective unconscious. In the meantime the group’s considerations on theatre and the idea of using the internet as a performative space led to the creation of another work on the web: The Secret Room (2004). The project sprang from a partnership with the Italo-Australian theatre company IRAA Theatre. The show The Secret Room was an experiment in interactive theatre divided into two parts. In the first part ten people are invited to the home of Roberta, the main character. Roberta and her guests get chatting, in a relaxed, intimate atmosphere. The guests are then invited into Roberta’s “secret room” to reveal their secret, distressing stories in private.

ConiglioViola’s web project is also structured in two parts. When you open the site a disquieting animation informs you that “the computer is your secret room” and “the browser is your director”. You are then bombarded with a barrage of pop-ups, each of which contains a video. The unexpected behaviour of the site (which recalls the spamming strategies adopted by porn sites), together with the size of the video clips, is a trial both for you – comprehensibly dismayed – and your computer, which may have problems dealing with all this material. If you both make it through, and if you have the patience to wade through around 50 pop-ups crowding the screen, you might come across a pop-up containing a gate with a bell. You ring the bell. If Roberta decides to let you in, you will be asked to leave an email address. A few hours or days later you will receive an email from Roberta, setting an appointment. If you still haven’t tired of it all, and if circumstances do not prevent you from visiting the website at that particular time on that particular day, you will finally gain access to the secret room.

Before revealing its contents, let us consider for a moment the subtle game staged by ConiglioViola. Intent on translating a theatre show into a “net.drama”, ConiglioViola carefully avoids the path of “augmented reality”, namely taking part in the real event via the internet. The group prefers to use the web to create a situation which reflects the original version of the show, but at the same time is closely bound to the language and dynamics of the web. In place of the concept of interactivity, which on the net means little more than clicking here and there in search of links, comes that of participation: suffered, sought after and obtained by the user amid delays and surprises. The real scene, filmed by ConiglioViola during its visit to Roberta’s “secret room”, is present in the video clips which appear in entirely random and ever variable order, making it impossible to reconstruct with clarity. The appointment mechanism generates expectations, but at the same time violates one of the web’s unwritten rules, that a visitor forced to return in order to gain access to content is a visitor lost. Everything is engineered so as not to grant us access to the secret room, or to ensure that visitors undergo a strict selection process (another violation of the web’s unwritten rules).

Those who were undaunted by the flood of pop-ups, and patiently sought out the way into the “secret room”, turning up on time at the appointed hour, will not be surprised to discover that the secret room is nothing more than the site’s root, the page in which the project shows not its interface, but its structure. As happened to Neo, the lead character in The Matrix (1999), the sight of the code, a routine vision for all those who programme the net, becomes a cathartic experience for common users, destined to render them immune to the allure of the web.

Neo brings us back to the White Rabbit, and in turn to Alice. In the following years the net remained ConiglioViola’s creative platform, the venue where the collective worked much of its magic: the legends surrounding the departure of the pirate attack on the Biennale, an inexhaustible source of imagination and post-production work on images. Other works on the web occasionally came into being, like Un’estate al mare (a vj-set in the form of a Flash game which acts as a teaser for the project Recuperate le Vostre Radici Quadrate) and Bertepolis, a glaringly camp Flash movie dedicated to Loredana Berté. But after being present for so many years, what now strikes us is the collective’s absence: in an era when sites long outlive their creators, the ‘interval’ message which now limits access to the ConiglioViola website spells more than just a break to mull things over, representing yet another theatricalization of the collective’s existence.

—

Quando Alice incontra per la prima volta il Coniglio Bianco si sta annoiando, con sua sorella, sulla riva del fiume. Lo insegue sotto la siepe, poi giù per un profondissimo pozzo, fino a una stanza piena di porte, bottiglie e dolcetti, e da lì a un mondo delle meraviglie che, con l’aiuto di Lewis Carroll, finirà per condividere con noi.

Quando Alice incontra per la prima volta il Coniglioviola si sta annoiando, da sola, davanti al computer. Procede svogliata da un link all’altro, pensando, come la sua omonima: “a che pro un libro senza le figure e i dialoghi”? È il 2001, e Internet, è, in buona parte, molto simile a un libro senza figure e senza dialoghi, un luogo votato alla serendipity ma al contempo piuttosto parco di sorprese.

Il Coniglioviola trascina Alice nel vortice di una esperienza surreale, una “meditazione” in rete. Davanti ai suoi occhi compare Yolanda, uno strano robot atteggiato in posizione di meditazione. Sul suo corpo lampeggiano i 7 chakra della tradizione Yoga. Alice è invitata a intraprendere con Yolanda un personale percorso di meditazione sui chakra. Cliccando su di essi, si attivano delle animazioni ipnotiche che facilitano la meditazione. In Yolanda, Alice non può riconoscere Maria, la donna-robot di Metropolis (1927), di Fritz Lang. La sua cultura cinematografica si limita ai film per teenager e a Dawson’s Creek, una serie TV molto in voga ai tempi. Non giudica kitsch l’estetica del sito, né si interroga sull’opportunità di portare la meditazione Yoga sullo schermo di un computer. Oltretutto, Alice fa Yoga, o quantomeno ha preso qualche lezione. Subito gira il link alle sue compagne di corso, e il sabato mostra il sito alla maestra.

Succede così che, nel 2001, il progetto di Coniglioviola diventa un oggetto di culto per centinaia di seguaci delle filosofie New Age. La meditazione di Yolanda viene usata, in privato o durante le lezioni. Coniglioviola non si stupisce più di tanto: conosce la rete quanto basta per sapere che lì, un’opera d’arte può avere un destino del tutto imprevisto. Le parodie vengono confuse con gli originali, le provocazioni estreme accolte come proposte concrete, su cui è possibile fondare un nuovo business. In questo contesto, non c’è nulla di strano se una discreta riflessione sullo schermo del computer come specchio del sé, proiezione del suo utente, luogo di vita più che strumento di lavoro diviene uno strumento di meditazione; o se una sottile presa in giro delle filosofie New Age sollecita l’identificazione di chi queste filosofie le pratica in tutta serietà.

Nel 2001, del resto, lo stesso Coniglioviola è ancora un’identità in corso di definizione. Nato con l’intenzione di dare vita a una attività multimediale e di rivolgersi al pubblico più vasto possibile, non dà per scontato che l’arte costituisca lo sbocco privilegiato di questa attività. Nel frattempo, Internet sembra dare una risposta a entrambe queste aspettative, e Coniglioviola abbraccia questa promessa con entusiasmo. Nel 2003, La Meditazione di Yolanda si arricchisce del “tempio”, una nuova dimensione inquietante e surreale, a cui l’utente accede dopo aver meditato sui 7 chakra e che gli consente di contribuire, con i suoi pensieri, a una sorta di inconscio collettivo online. Nel frattempo, la sua riflessione sul teatro e sulla possibilità di usare Internet come spazio performativo produce un altro lavoro in rete: The Secret Room (2004). Il lavoro nasce dalla collaborazione con la compagnia italo-australiana IRAA Theatre. Lo spettacolo The Secret Room è un esperimento di teatro interattivo che si compone di due momenti: nel primo, dieci persone vengono invitate sul palco, che ricostruisce la casa di Roberta, la protagonista. Roberta e i suoi invitati chiacchierano, in una atmosfera di intimità e rilassatezza. Quindi, gli invitati vengono invitati nella “stanza segreta” di Roberta, lontano dal palco, a condividere in privato i suoi segreti.

Anche il progetto in rete di Coniglioviola si compone di due momenti. Una volta aperto il sito, un’animazione al cardiopalma ti avvisa che “il computer è la tua stanza segreta”, e che “il browser è il tuo regista”. Quindi sei aggredito da una valanga di finestre pop-up, ciascuna dei quali contiene un video. Il comportamento inconsueto del sito (che ricorda le strategie di spamming adottate dai siti pornografici), unito al peso dei frammenti video, può mettere a dura prova sia te, comprensibilmente spaventato, che la tua macchina, che può far fatica a gestire tutto questo materiale. Se entrambi resistete, e se passi in rassegna con pazienza la cinquantina di finestre che ti si è aperta davanti, ti può capitare di trovare, in una di queste, un cancello con un campanello. Suoni. Se Roberta decide di lasciarti entrare, verrai inviato a lasciare un indirizzo e-mail. Ore o giorni dopo, troverai nella tua casella di posta un messaggio di Roberta, che ti fissa un appuntamento. Se non ti sei ancora stancato, e se i casi della vita non ti impediscono di recarti sul sito alla tal ora del tal giorno, avrai finalmente accesso alla stanza dei segreti.

Prima di svelarne i contenuti, può essere utile soffermarsi un attimo sul gioco sottile messo in scena da Coniglioviola. Interessato a tradurre uno spettacolo teatrale in un “net drama”, Coniglioviola evita accuratamente la strada della “realtà aumentata”, della partecipazione all’evento reale attraverso la rete. Preferisce, invece, usare il Web per creare una situazione analoga a quella reale, ma al contempo fortemente radicata nei linguaggi e nelle dinamiche della rete. Al concetto di interattività, che in rete significa poco più che cliccare qua e la in cerca di un link, subentra quello di partecipazione: una partecipazione sofferta, cercata e ottenuta dal visitatore tra attese e sorprese. La scena reale, ripresa da Coniglioviola durante la sua visita alla “secret room” di Roberta, si ripresenta nei frammenti video in ordine assolutamente casuale e sempre variabile, togliendoci ogni possibilità di ricostruirla con chiarezza. Il meccanismo dell’appuntamento crea aspettativa, ma al contempo vìola una delle leggi non scritte della rete, secondo cui un visitatore costretto a ritornare per fruire un contenuto è un visitatore perso. Tutto è congegnato per non farci entrare nella “secret room”, o per effettuare una severa selezione dei visitatori (altra violazione delle regole non scritte della rete).

Chi, senza farsi spaventare dai pop-up, ha cercato pazientemente la via per la “secret room”, ripresentandosi puntuale all’appuntamento, non sarà stupito nello scoprire che la stanza dei segreti non è altro che la root del sito, la pagina in cui il progetto non mostra la propria interfaccia, ma la propria struttura. Come per Neo, il protagonista di The Matrix (1999), la visione dei codici, di routine per chi la rete la programma, diventa per l’utente comune un evento catartico, destinato a renderlo immune alle fascinazioni della rete.

Con Neo torniamo al Coniglio Bianco, e con lui ad Alice. Negli anni seguenti, la rete resterà la piattaforma creativa di Coniglioviola, il luogo in cui si originano molti dei suoi incantesimi: la mitologia di partenza dell’attacco pirata alla Biennale, la fonte inesauribile del suo immaginario e del suo lavoro di postproduzione sull’immagine. Occasionalmente, nasceranno altri lavori in rete, come Un’estate al mare (un vj-set in forma di gioco in Flash che fa da teaser al progetto Recuperate le Vostre Radici Quadrate) e Bertepolis, un Flash movie smaccatamente camp dedicato a Loredana Berté. Ma, dopo tanti anni di presenza, è soprattutto la sua assenza a farsi sentire: in un’epoca in cui i siti sopravvivono di gran lunga alla scomparsa dei loro autori, quel “fine primo tempo” che da qualche mese chiude l’accesso al suo sito web non si limita a replicare online una fase di pausa e di ripensamento del suo lavoro, ma diventa l’ennesima teatralizzazione della propria esistenza.

]]> http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/10/alice-fa-yoga/feed/ 0 http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/10/gazira-babeli-acting-as-aliens/ http://domenicoquaranta.com/2009/10/gazira-babeli-acting-as-aliens/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:57:38 +0000 Domenico Quaranta http://domenicoquaranta.com/?p=784

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Gazira Babeli: ACTING AS ALIENS

Exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta
Galerija Kapelica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
November 3 – 15, 2009
Opening and performance: November 3, 9.00 PM (CET)

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art and Kapelica gallery are proud to announce “Gazira Babeli: Acting as Aliens”, the first solo exhibition of the avatar artist Gazira Babeli in Slovenia. Internationally renowned for her activity in the digital reality of Second Life, Gazira Babeli is born there in spring 2006. She is a character in the Matrix, something in between the Oracle and Neo. What she does has been either dubbed as bug, virus, performance or art; what we can say about it is that it subverts the traditional notions of space, time, body, identity and behavior we inherited from our daily experience.
The show borrows its name from the opening performance, in which Gazira and the audience will share the same space and will play through material means, in an unprecedented overlap between digital reality and physical reality. The remains of the performance will be put on show after the event.
The exhibition will also feature a consistent video documentation of Gazira’s previous performances, including 7UP (2008), a clockwork orange of twelve micro-performances made in complicity with Patrick Lichty, in a compulsive mix between slapstick comedy and Fluxus scores. Also on show two brand new works in which a self standing doll house – be it a desert or a prison – is built around some characters performing a singular, repetitive, sometimes destructive action.

In the occasion of the show in Ljubljana, the Cultural and Congress Center Cankarjev dom and Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator, Second Life, will host the round table “ACTING AS ALIENS. The ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities” in the frame of the Reflection on Contemporary Art / Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts IX, organized by Maska, Institute for Publishing, Production and Education and the Cankarjev dom.

—

Gazira Babeli and Patrick Lichty
ACTING AS ALIENS
the ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities

Round table moderated by Domenico Quaranta

Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia, hall M3/M4
and Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Odyssey/122/45/25/
November 2, 2009 at 7 PM (CET), 10 AM (PDT & SLT)

What happens to performance when the place is a computer screen and time is better described as the timelessness you experience in front of it, as both a performer and a spectator? When reality fades into the background to be replaced by a simulated scenario where physical laws are disregarded and almost anything is possible? When the body itself becomes a software (and cultural) construction? On the occasion of the exhibition of Second Life performer Gazira Babeli hosted by Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, this panel will try to answer these questions involving some of the most important practitioners and theoreticians in the field.

From the seminar room, curator Domenico Quaranta will moderate a round table that will alternate theoretical discourse and performances, involving:

- Helfe Inhen, Manager of Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator, the place where the most active community of art practitioners in Second Life gathers. Odyssey will host the panel in Second Life, too;

Join the lecture in Second life HERE

How to create an account on Second Life: HERE

- Patrick Lichty, artist, theoretician, curator and (as Man Michinaga) founding member of the performing art collective Second Front;

- Gazira Babeli;

- and other members of the Odyssey community.

PRESS

Download high resolution image HERE
Gazira Babeli, Self-portrait – Russian Roulette, Courtesy the artist

Gazira Babeli (http://gazirababeli.com/) has been living and working as an artist, performer and film-maker in Second Life since spring 2006. In September 2006 she published records of a number of “non authorized performances” on the web, capturing the attention of art critics and artists. Artists above all. She then became part of Second Front, an international group of artists/performers dedicated to the formal, aesthetic, cultural and social exploration of a reality dubbed “virtual”. She was involved in the launch of the first native artistic community in Second Life: Odyssey. In April 2007, after filming the movie/performance Gaz of The Desert, she staged an exhibition entitled [Collateral Damage]. Gazira Babeli has taken part in various festivals and events outside Second Life, including: Peam2006 (Pescara), DEAF07 (Rotterdam), Fabio Paris Art Gallery (Brescia), iMAL (Brussels), PERFORMA 07 NYC (with Second Front), DAM Gallery (Berlin). Most of Gazira Babeli’s works are currently archived in the Locusolus region of Second Life.

Patrick Lichty (http://www.patricklichty.com/) is a conceptually-based artist, writer, curator, and activist. He has been exhibiting internationally since 1990, and is best known for his 3D animations with the activist group, The Yes Men, and as Editor in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine in NYC. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney & Turin Biennials, Maribor Triennial, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, and the International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA). He is currently a member of the faculty of the Interactive Art & Media Department of Columbia College, Chicago.

Domenico Quaranta (http://domenicoquaranta.com) is a contemporary art critic and curator based in Italy. PHD, he lectures internationally and teaches at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. With a specific interest in digital culture, Domenico regularly writes for Flash Art magazine. His first book titled, NET ART 1994-1998: La vicenda di Äda’web was published in 2004; he also co-edited, with Matteo Bittanti, GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan, October 2006) and edited or contributed to many other books. As a curator, he organized several exhibitions in Europe, including: Connessioni Leggendarie. Net.art 1995-2005 (Milan 2005); GameScenes (Turin 2005); Radical Software (Turin 2006); Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (Bruxelles 2008); For God’s Sake! (Nova Gorica, 2008); RE:akt! | Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting (Bucharest – Ljubljana – Rijeka, 2009); Expanded Box 2009 (ARCO Art Fair, Madrid 2009); Hyperlucid (Prague Biennal, Prague 2009).

Credits:

Gazira Babeli
ACTING AS ALIENS
(Exhibition and performance)

Curated by Domenico Quaranta
Produced by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana
Co-produced by Kapelica gallery

Gazira Babeli and Patrick Lichty
ACTING AS ALIENS – the ways of Performance Art in Digital Realities
(Lecture)

Moderated by Domenico Quaranta
Produced by Aksioma in the frame of the Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts organized by Maska and Cankarjev dom
Co-produced by Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator

These activities are part of Aksioma’s international program 2007-09 supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana.

Executive producers: Marcela Okretič and Janez Janša

Special thanks: Fabio Paris Art Gallery, Helfe Ihnen, Jansmina Založnik, Bojana Kunst

Contacts:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art
Neubergerjeva 25, SI – 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tel. +386-(0)41-250 669
aksioma@aksioma.org
www.aksioma.org

Links:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana | www.aksioma.org
Kapelica gallery | www.kapelica.org
Odyssey Art and Performance Simulator | http://odysseyart.ning.com
Maska, Institute for Publishing, Production and Education | www.maska.si
Cankarjev dom – Cultural and Congress Centre | www.cd-cc.si
The Seminar of Contemporary Performing Arts | www.maska.si/en/symposium/seminar_of_contemporary_performing_arts

Photo Yves Bernard

KIOSK. Artefacts of a Post-Digital Age

Curated by: Yves Bernard (Belgium) and Domenico Quaranta (Italy)

For: STRP Festival, Eindhoven
2 – 13 April 2009
Clokgebouw, Eindhoven, Netherlands

Many people collect art while others collect technology. Then there are the pioneering types who look for a combination of art and technology. They collect art objects that are continually changing, or as Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta put it: “They love screens. They love bits with atoms. They love things that move and change, because they live in a world that moves and changes.” They love the process, not necessarily static finished products. “They wouldn’t mind a Mona Lisa, provided it alternates between smiling and crying. For these art lovers KIOSK is bound to be a dream come true.”

Bernard and Quaranta are the joint curators of KIOSK, which is one of the possible outcomes of the exhibit “Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age” at iMAL in Brussels in 2008. Holy Fire was an attempt to organise a New Media Art show in cooperation with galleries and collectors, who are far and few in between in the field of New Media Art. KIOSK collects works of art related to digital art and technology that are not “afraid” of becoming objects.

KIOSK refers to the small vending stalls where you can buy lighters, newspapers, magazines and scratch cards. The name plays with the fleeting “collectible” nature of the works on display. KIOSK is about technology, screens and the changing nature of information. While the line between art and everyday consumer items sometimes can be very hard to define, the work nevertheless has that special something. And that is why we call it art. Come be amazed!

- www.imal.org
- www.domenicoquaranta.net

Artists featured in the KIOSK space:

Boredomresearch (UK)

Jim Campbell (USA)

Alessandro Capozzo and Katja Noppes (IT/USA)

Driessens & Verstappen (NL)

LAb[au] (BE)

Golan Levin (USA)

Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied (RU+DE)

Manfred Mohr (DE)

Mark Napier (USA)

Bjön Schülke (DE)

Yacine Sebti (BE)

Sakurako Shimizu (USA)

Alexei Shulgin & Aristarkh Chernyshev (RU)

Tonylight (Antonio Cavadini, IT)

Siebren Versteeg (USA)

Peter Vogel (DE)

Marius Watz (NO)

Exhibition Images:

- Yves Bernard’s Flickr Account

- My Picasa (Photos courtesy Alessandro Capozzo)

Kiosk. Artfefacts of a post-digital age

- A video by Yves Bernard on Youtube:

Julian Oliver, LevelHead, 2008

Published in L’Unità, 18.01.2009, p. 43

Quante stanze ha un cubo?
L’artista Julian Oliver ha progettato un rompicapo alla Escher che unisce divertimento, architettura e arte

Non cercatelo sugli scaffali dei negozi: non lo trovereste. In rete potreste imbattervi in qualche video di presentazione, e nelle istruzioni per fabbricarvelo da voi, se avete le competenze necessarie (è open source). Per ora, se avete voglia di giocarci, non potete far altro che inseguirlo nei numerosi festival di arte elettronica in cui, da qualche mese, ha fatto impazzire migliaia di visitatori. Assicurato: ne vale la pena.
LevelHead è un rompicapo escheriano in forma di installazione, progettato dall’artista e ricercatore neozelandese Julian Oliver. I modi della sua circolazione non devono stupire: anche se non tutti sono disposti a riconoscere lo statuto artistico dei videogiochi, è indiscutibile che la ricerca videoludica di frontiera sconfini spesso nel campo dell’arte.
Julian Oliver è uno a cui piace esplorare i confini tra contesti culturali diversi. Nel suo curriculum, vanta la partecipazione a progetti come acmipark (2001-2003), un gioco multiplayer commissionato dall’Australian Center for Moving Image (ACMI); e Escape from Woomera (2002-2003), un first person shooter in cui il giocatore è un immigrato irregolare che deve fuggire da uno dei campi di internamento più tristemente celebri dell’Australia (ottimo esempio di ribaltamento della tradizionale impostazione ideologica degli FPS con i loro stessi mezzi); e lavori come Fijuu2 (2006), che si appropria dell’interfaccia di gioco per creare un innovativo strumento di performance audiovisiva, e 2ndPS2 (2007), uno studio in cui il giocatore adotta la prospettiva visuale del suo nemico.

Architetture della memoria
LevelHead, invece, è un gioco di memoria in cui il gamepad è sostituito da un cubo bianco di plastica. Ogni faccia del cubo, come in un dado, è stampata con pattern diversi, che vengono riconosciuti da un computer nascosto nel piedistallo e associati a una scena del gioco. Ciò che, alla fine, vediamo proiettato sullo schermo è un’architettura virtuale in cui ogni faccia del cubo è diventata una stanza, collegata alle altre stanze da un’unica porta. Dentro una di queste stanze troviamo un personaggio, che dobbiamo far camminare di stanza in stanza finché non troviamo l’uscita, che corrisponde al passaggio al livello successivo. Tutto ciò, semplicemente ruotando il cubo. Solo apparentemente semplice, LevelHead è in realtà un attentato continuo alla nostra pazienza, e un raffinato recupero delle teorie della mnemotecnica e della loro applicazione nelle cosiddette “architetture della memoria” (di cui la biblioteca del Nome della rosa offre uno splendido esempio). Ma tornano in mente anche i cubi di Rubik, i destini incrociati di Calvino, i racconti di Borges. Tutto ciò, senza che il gioco smetta di fare quello che ci si aspetta da un gioco: divertire.

http://julianoliver.com/

http://www.unita.it/

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG – I’m Not Here

EXHIBITION OPENING – Saturday 3 October, 6 pm – midnight

3 October – 15 November 2009

Fabio Paris Art Gallery

Spazio Contemporanea,  Corsetto Sant’Agata 22 – Brescia

The opening of the exhibition will also see the presentation of the first monograph on the artists, published by Charta, and including, among others, contributions by Domenico Quaranta, Fabio Cavallucci, RoseLee Goldberg, Bruce Sterling, Wu Ming and Maurizio Cattelan.

Among the pioneers of the Net Art movement, Eva and Franco Mattes are renowned for their masterful subversion of the media, constantly shifting between real and virtual space. After snagging the website Vaticano.org (1998) they launched a Jubilee dedicated to the free spirit, diverting worshippers to rather more unorthodox views. They convinced the art world of the existence of a fictitious artist, who was even featured in the Venice Biennale (Darko Maver, 1999), then, when they themselves were invited to the Biennale, they used the event to roll out a computer virus (Biennale.py, 2001). They have copied, remixed and redistributed the works of other artists, challenging the notions of uniqueness and ownership of works of art. They staged a fake advertising campaign convincing the inhabitants of Vienna that Nike was about to get its hands on one of the city’s most famous squares (Nike Ground, 2003), and they promoted a non-existent “Eurollywood” blockbuster, revealing the spurious nature of the notion of European unity (United We Stand, 2005).  They have restaged the performances of Marina Abramovic and other artists in a videogame (Synthetic Performances, 2007), transformed the avatars of Second Life into pop stars (Portraits, 2006), forced Mickey Mouse to live out the ultimate head trip (It’s Always Six O’Clock, 2008) and routed out Edward Hopper in a shoot ‘em up videogame (Traveling by Telephone, 2009).
Their art has garnered them various lawsuits, but it has also taken them to events and venues such as the Venice Biennale (2001), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt (2002), the New Museum in New York (2005), Collection Lambert in Avignon (2006) and Performa, New York (2007 and 2009).
“I’m Not Here” highlights the constants that run through their varied and apparently disconnected oeuvre: appropriation (of the works and identities of others); falsification and simulation; orchestrating performances in which the artist is absent, hidden behind an interface; and their desire to use art to infiltrate our collective imagination.

UBERMORGEN.COM Superenhanced

OPENING & PERFORMANCE: Saturday, January 17, 2009 at 6.00 PM

From January 17 to March 7, 2009
3.00 – 7.00 PM, closed on Sunday

Fabio Paris Art Gallery is proud to announce the second solo exhibition by the Austrian artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM, presenting the world preview of the project “Superenhanced”, which is dedicated to the pressing issue of torture. Though torture is banned almost everywhere, it has re-emerged under a new set of names with the neutral, tidy, functional language of marketing and branding.

Kidnapping is now called “extraordinary rendition”, and torture is “enhanced interrogation”: “an efficient way to extract valuable information from unwilling detainees” that uses so-called “soft” techniques such as the Attention Grab (the interrogator forcefully grabs the prisoner’s shirt front and shakes them) and the Attention Slap (an open-handed slap to the face); the Belly Slap (a hard open-handed slap to the abdomen, able to cause pain, but not internal injury); this then continues into “harsh techniques” like then Long Time Standing, with prisoners forced to stand, handcuffed, for more than 40 hours; the Cold Cell, where the prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 10 degrees Celsius; Waterboarding, a controlled form of drowning, and Sleep Deprivation, where they are not allowed to sleep for several days. These are mostly psychological techniques, which do not leave marks on the detainee’s body, and have been used for years (since the Reagan administration) in America’s Supermax prisons (but also in places like Kandahar, Bagram Airbase and Guantanamo Bay) to prepare ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ (including numerous children) for interrogation. The final set of methods used by authorities are the classic extremely brutal ones: Hanging prisoners by their wrists for days, beating prisoners, breaking bones, amputation of limbs, starving prisoners and killing prisoners.

UBERMORGEN.COM gets to grips with this sinister subject matter, but rather than condemning a human rights outrage that is there for all to see, appears to be more interested, on one hand, in exploring the hypocrisies of the language that renders it acceptable, and on the other the moral position of the spectator when exposed to ambiguous questions and disturbing images. The point of departure is the Superenhanced Generator, a web project (displayed in installation form) that contains a smart interrogation engine, basically capable of comprehending the spectator’s responses, and that generates a fake legal document (a foriginal), modelled on rendition orders and interrogation protocols.
The installation is accompanied by a series of photographic prints and a
video which adopt the ascetic aesthetic of maximum security prisons representing child prisoners undergoing intimidation and torture: the photos are staged poses of a reality that no-one wants to believe in – a reality that is conveyed to the public eye as a form “collateral damage” in a “necessary” fight against terror. The images are nicely lit and professionally produced, but they are profoundly unsettling due to the truths that lie beneath their patina of glamour.

On the evening of the opening, the installation will be accompanied by a performance.

UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx & Hans Bernhard, www.ubermorgen.com) is an artist duo based in Vienna, Austria. Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclast – of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixelpainting, computer installations, net.art, sculpture and digital activism (media hacking) transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk.

In February 2009, FPEditions (www.fpeditions.com) will publish the monograph UBERMORGEN.COM (edited by Domenico Quaranta, with contributions by Inke Arns and Jodi.org).

fabioparisartgallery
via Alessandro Monti 13 – 25121 Brescia – tel. 030 3756139 – Skype: fabioparisbs
www.fabioparisartgallery.com

A talk I had in Brescia (Italy) on April 22, 2009, in the series “Art and the City. Sguardi sul contemporaneo” curated by Enrico de Pascale. Presentation on Google Docs.

Expanded Box – Caring for an Expanded Conception of Art

In the vast, variegated panorama of contemporary artistic experimentation there are various practices germinating that find it difficult to carve a niche for themselves in the official discourse and channels, despite the undeniable appeal they possess. The thing that makes them so precious, and as delicate as a flower growing under the snow, is not the fact that they use the “new media”, because everyone uses the media – and now they are anything but new. What makes them so special is the fact that like the aforementioned flower, they contain a new strength, and a new promise. The strength is that of those who go about their lives without a thought for the rules that govern the world they live in, and who create the conditions that enable them to live, successfully, in a radically altered context; the promise regards this radical transformation.

Everyone in the contemporary art field knows perfectly well that the context in which artists operate today was by and large established during the 20th century by Marcel Duchamp, and given structure and supported by a renewed museum and market system. According to this model, art no longer consists in the masterful implementation of a technique (painting, sculpture, music or writing) to present a world (the so-called “real” world, the unconscious world of the Surrealists, etc.). Anything can be art, if given a specific discourse and a specific conception, and if conveyed by means of a specific context. The aura of a work of art, which may be lost and found time and again, is now attributed by means of a precise process of consecration, which takes place on the market and in the museums. Without venturing into value judgements, it will suffice to consider the duration of this model to understand that what comes into being within it now is pure academicism. Murakami is to Duchamp and Warhol as Bouguerau is to Poussin and David. The gradual, unstoppable transition to the information society has radically challenged this model, nurtured in the bosom of the industrial society, but has not succeeded in destroying it altogether. It lives on as an act of faith, a consensual hallucination, a superstition boosted by the fear of what is to come. It survives, and continues to produce masterpieces, basking in the splendour which characterizes all periods of decadence.

The new world is there, just round the corner – or, to return to the cutesy flower metaphor – under the snow. It is in the art that exists outside the confines of the art world, rejecting the “contextual definition” of Duchampian origin which seems to persist, as Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito wrote in their book At the Edge of Art, purely by inertia; it is in the art that seeks out public space, media space, biotechnology labs and the world of information, communications and e-commerce as its operative environment; it is in the art that draws on other practices and other specific fields of knowledge, to a point where at times it has problems seeing itself (and being seen) as art; it is in the art that enthusiastically embraces technological reproducibility, the variability of data and the fluidity of information, abandoning – and radically challenging – the status of precious fetish, and it is in the art that is open to interaction with the spectator, that forges and develops relationships, that breaks down the wall which interrupts and conditions our mental and physical dialogue with a work.

This art exists, and it is at once strong and delicate, timid and aggressive, marginal and supreme. It is entrenched in the contradictions of all revolutions: it rebels against a world, but needs the cares of that world to resist. It has tried to escape, to open up new channels, but in the end it will succeed in changing our idea of art, defeating the academicism and opening the way to the future by means of dialogue and mediation. A future, which as the novelist William Gibson said, is already here, just badly distributed.

The historic function of Expanded Box, the last embodiment of an enduring attention Arco devoted to new media and languages, is precisely that of cultivating and redistributing the future, and supporting an ?expanded? definition of art. In the last ten years, and through different programs, Arco has done exactly that, hosting and offering market opportunities to a growing number of galleries that take up this challenge, at their own risk. When you see this compact block of eight galleries that offer their space to monographic projects – often decidedly ambitious – you could be forgiven for thinking that Expanded Box is one of those typical cultural initiatives increasingly staged on occasion of contemporary art fairs, with the idea of accompanying the dialogue and exchanges between galleries and collectors, but without attempting to compete with them. This is not the case.

Expanded Box, today, is the place where Leo Castelli would go to sell and Alfred H. Barr would go to buy. I am aware that this might sound rhetorical, and possibly a little ingenuous, but I cannot find a non-rhetorical way to say that there, more than anywhere else, the seeds of an evolution are germinating. They rest, well protected, in the machines of Lawrence Malstaf and the interactive environmental installations by Pors & Rao; in the sound installations by Manas and Moori and Thomson & Craighead; in the exploration of the dividing line between matter and the dematerialization of the media undertaken by the Korean Kim Jongku, and in John Gerrard’s 3D animations. They reproduce at the speed of a virus in the works of Joan Leandre, who upends the hyperreal interfaces that filter our rapport with reality, while they lurk in UBERMORGEN.COM’s media hacking activities, which uses low-tech tools to bring the giants of e-commerce to their knees.

For ten years Expanded Box has invested in this new current, the novelty of which, we should reiterate, lies not so much in the media that these works use, but in the culture they reflect and in the idea of art that they open the way for.