Today I’m in “trailer” mood…

Alterazioni Video, All My Friends Are Dead, 2010

B.O.B. – CHAPTER ONE from Invernomuto on Vimeo.

A trailer for an exhibition I won’t miss.

Sometimes I’m so happy NOT to have an iPhone…

Jon Rafman, Sleeping Shepherd Boy (.com), 2009.

The whole album here.

Jodi, Thumbing Youtube, 2009 – ongoing.

The Cartoonist Manifesto: Performance Art for the Fin de Millennium.

For the past three or four years, there have been a number of artists, interveners, performers, (or whatever you want to call them), who are performing in virtual worlds. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Active Worlds, OpenSim – all these places are merely meaningless names that stand for the fact that there is a portion of the world that is embracing a “New Flesh” of pixels and nothingness. There are communities of “bodies without organs” writhing in a Tron-like fog of shapes and colors in imaginary spaces. But still, here we are – revisiting performance art, Happenings, interventions and the like, dragging the shadows of Dada, the Surrealists, Fluxus, the Situationists, Abramovic, Anderson, Barney, Burden, Export, Gilbert and George, Wiebel, and all the rest into the Virtual on our backs. It is again, like the seminal scene of Tron, where the hacker Flynn’s flesh is ripped apart by the laser of virtualization and pulled into the computer world, upgraded with new, luminous bodies.

But wait! Wasn’t performance art supposed to be the last bastion of authenticity in art? Wasn’t the viscera supposed to be the final resting place of immediacy and affect? This is probably the truth. But with the coming of the 21st Century, it’s obvious that humanity has become cynical about its own flesh; the body has become desensitized to its own suffering; simulations truly have supplanted the physical, whether in the form of games, virtual worlds, or CNN. As Marina Abramovic herself has said, the shift from the body to the avatar reduces performance to the gesture of the Cartoon, and she wished she had thought of it first… And rightly so! That is exactly what we are; As Nitsch, Weibel, Export et al were Actionists, perhaps we are “Lack of” Actionists, or Cartoonists!

We are:

Cartoons for those who hate cartoons.

Performance art for a post-embodied era.

Visceral art after the discard of the body.

Endurance for the mouse-enabled.

What exactly is this, then? It is Bugs Bunny shooting Daffy Duck, reenacting Burden’s “Shoot”, Betty Boop submitting herself to Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”, or Olive Oyl standing fiercely with the Red Star cut into her belly as in Abramovic’ “Lips of Thomas”. It is Mickey Mouse holding the skull of Yorick, pondering his existential state. It is the cat and mouse, Itchy and Scratchy, eviscerating one another, whacking each other with mallets, holding you accountable for your gaze. It is the culmination of a society that has become exhausted with itself, with its own cruelty, with its own desensitization; an ironic stance armed with the arrow of its own cynicism, bow taut, aimed at its own heart.

This is the point of Cartoon Performance, though. Is this to say that the virtual gesture is abject of meaning, of affect? No. As children cry when playing with dolls, boo the amoral Punchinello at puppet shows, laugh at Donald Duck’s fits of rage, we identify with the avatar; the reality of the simulated body. While we know that regardless of how many times Daffy gets shot in the arm, there is still the residual connection to the blood and sinew that creates the momentary flinch before the pull of the trigger before the flash of the barrel and the crack of bone. There is still the question of whether to face the nude Eva or Franco Mattes avatar when passing through the door, the urge to run when the fourteen Gaziras rush at you with the giant wooden mallets, or the vertigo of virtual Ciccciolina atop the simulated Empire State Building in the grasp of the digital Kong. The immediacy of the flesh is gone; but the feeling still remains.

We are Cartoons, and we bleed, scream, fuck, laugh and sing.

Or at least we remind you what that was like.

Patrick Lichty, 2010

Signatories:

Patrick Lichty

Gazira Babeli

Bibbe Hansen

Scott Kildall

Eva and Franco Mattes

Second Front

LABoral just uploaded on Youtube a short video interview with me about Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art.

I discovered Daniel Zeller’s amazing drawings in Arco, in the booth of the Michel Soskine Gallery. As it often happens, looking for him on the web brought me to a couple of other interesting discoveries, the magazine Beautiful Decay (which I subscribed immediately) and the Pierogi Gallery, New York (also representing Mark Lombardi).

3 hours in 1 second is an amazing online show in which artists such as Constant Dullaart, Exonemo, Igor Stromajer, Jodi and Cory Arcangel have been invited to curate Youtube grid shows.

This is my Flickr set for the Expanded Box selection at ARCO Madrid 2010. As a photographer, I was lamer than usual, but I hope you’ll enjoy it as well.

This is Marius Watz’s Flickr set.

Below you can find some press about the section and the related projects (the panel “Expanding the field” and the ARCO BEEP Award):

- Roberta Bosco, “Espacios para la experimentacion“, in El Pais / Babelia, 13/02/2010, p. 11. (Spanish, PDF)

- Roberta Bosco, Stefano Caldana, “Las relaciones entre vida orgánica y artificial protagonizan Arco“, in El Pais / Cyberpais, 18/02/2010. (Spanish)

- ABCDARCO, “Expanding the Field“, in ABCDARCO, 20/02/2010, p. 7. (English / Spanish, PDF)

- Amanda Cuesta, “Art claiming impulse“, in ABCDARCO, 21/02/2010, pp. 2 – 3. (English / Spanish, PDF)

- ABCDARCO, “Profiles“, in ABCDARCO, 21/02/2010, p. 14. (English / Spanish, PDF)

An here is a couple of video interviews:

- in RTVE.ES, “Zoom Net”, 22/02/2010 (Spanish);

- in CTV, Festival Arte Contemporanea, 23/02/2010 (Italian).

The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus, by the German artists Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus, is the winning entry for the Arco BEEP Award 2010. The work has been presented in the Expanded Box by the Berlin based gallery Art Claims Impulse. The artwork will become part of the BEEP – Datalogic corporate collection.

«The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings. The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext. New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.»

A video demonstration of the work is available on Youtube.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Pseudo-Futurist Video Game Improvisation Extravaganza, 2009. Synthetic Performance (extract). More performances’ documentation on Eva and Franco Mattes’ Youtube account.

Samuel Bianchini, All Over, 2009.

All Over is a beautiful internet piece currently on show in the brand new “virtual space” of the Jeu de Paume, Paris. From the press release: “‘All Over‘ is a piece of Internet art involving a series of images formed exclusively out of typographic characters, in the manner of ASCII art, made by using the display techniques of the first computers. Here, however, the figures and letters composing the images are dynamic and keep changing: they are generated in real time by the financial flows on stock exchanges around the world. Originating in fixed photographs, these transformed images are thus dependent on financial movements, which both feed and disrupt them at the same time. Destabilised by their system of representation, their meaning too becomes unstable. These pictures without captions seem to be constantly struggling for their visibility and their uncertain reality: demonstration, traders, supporters, a religious or political rally?”

EXPANDING THE FIELD. Or, 8 good reasons to talk about new media (in an art fair)

Director: Domenico Quaranta

Lecturers: UBERMORGEN.COM, Marius Watz, Trevor Paglen, Oron Catts, Auriea Harvey & Michael Samyn, Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky

ARCO Art Fair, Forum Auditorium 2, Hall 6.

February 18, 2010, from 12.30 to 2.30 p.m. and from 4 to 8 p.m.

Download the complete program.

Something is happening in the field of art. Postmodernism seems to have been replaced, but nobody is really able to say by what. Art critics such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev explained this change looking backwards to Modernism, but Modernism itself is many things, and it’s still not clear if this new modern, or Altermodern, is rooted in a new utopianism, as argued by Christov-Bakargiev, or in creolisation, globalisation and travelling, as suggested by Bourriaud.

What is clear to both is that new technologies, in the broader meaning of the term, are having a central role in this change. Starting from here, and appropriating Ippolito and Blais’ idea that the change will come from artists operating “at the edge of art” – Expanding the Field will involve artists and researchers that address, with different approaches, various new technologies – from the Internet to videogames and biotechnology – and issues and practices of the digital culture, from media hacking to data mining and surveillance. Some of them developed groundbreaking tools now used worldwide by artists operating in different fields; others – such as Tale of Tales – dropped out from the traditional art world in order to bring their idea of art to a different, possibly wider audience. Some feel more comfortable in labs than in museums, and most of them are strongly connected to online communities. Along the panel, they will be invited to introduce their work, addressing their relationship with technology and digital culture, and explaining how the fields they explore are affecting our culture and our concept of art.

Back in 1997, Arthur C. Danto wrote After the End of Art, asserting that, after the Seventies, art entered a “post historical” condition, leaving behind the usual art historical narrative – based on a linear idea of progress – of which Modernism was the swansong; and opening a new era in which “everything can be art”.

This position has been questioned, in recent years, by art critics who claim that Postmodernism is dead, replaced by an art which insistently sets out to explore some of the forgotten dreams of the Modernist project in the light of recent developments in the current socio-cultural landscape.

In 2003, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev made a first attempt with the exhibition “I Moderni / The Moderns”; and in 2009, Nicolas Bourriaud took up the cause with the exhibition “Altermodern”. While Christov-Bakargiev talked about project-based practices and utopianism, Bourriaud underlined creolisation, globalisation and travelling.

While their discourse is slightly different, both Christov-Bakargiev and Bourriaud seem to agree that new technologies and digital culture play a central role in this change. Christov-Bakargiev wrote: “The digital world is internationalist, as were the modernists (…). The digital mind is a project-based mind, encouraging a sense of ‘agency’, an ability to make choices and act.” And while the Altermodern Manifesto basically describes what Castells called “the information age”, Bourriaud’s previous critical statement explicitly indicates the programmer, the DJ and the web surfer as the cultural figures engaged in reshaping contemporary art practices.

On the other hand other critics are arguing that today innovation in art is taking place out of the fascinating yet limited box that we usually call “the art world”: in science labs, institutes of technology, as well as in public spaces and on the Internet.

If we compare these two different points of view, it is quite easy to see what they have in common: the idea that new technologies are consistently modifying the way we make art and our very notion of art.

This is quite obvious: Modernism itself can be described as the side effect of a revolution in the means of cultural production. At the time, some enthusiastically embraced the new media, some others had to reconsider the way they worked with old media, and some did both these things. Art changed dramatically.

The same is happening today, only amplified to a scale that is difficult to reduce to a theory. It is possible, and highly likely, that the digital revolution had a hand not only in the recent shift toward Modernism, but also in the end of that narrative that Danto identifies with modern art.

Having supported and shown art made with new media and technologies for more than ten years, the Expanded Box makes a seminal contribution to this process. Granted, we can’t be sure that the change will come from New Media Art. Maybe in the end traditional media will react to the challenges of the digital revolution in a way that more tech-savvy artists, too heavily focused on technology, would never imagine. In the meantime, however, we have to acknowledge that New Media Art is the best mirror of the world we live in. At least, I have yet to come across another form of art able to reflect the contradictions of our daily lives on the screen with the effectiveness of the Mattes’ performances; or show how language and narration reacts to the translation processes taking place in a computer as von Bismarck and Maus’ machine does. The other works look at advanced research (Gabrans), talk about chaos and complexity (Nepraš), explore artificial life (Boredomresearch), social use of technologies (Lozano-Hemmer), their appropriation and subversion (Jodi), the magic they can create (Vassileva). Isn’t it “so contemporary”?

I just posted the comment below on Gomp /arts, Will Gompertz’s blog on the BBC website. Three days ago Mr. Gompertz, currently the BBC arts editor, posted an article where he claims that he “can’t find any net-based art of note”. No surprise that this article produced a lot of rumor on new media art magazines and mailing lists…

I had some funny time reading this article and all the reactions it produced, on this blog and around the Web (check out, among other things, Lauren Cornell’s contribution on Rhizome and the CRUMB thread). Personally, as an art critic strongly interested in Net Art, I don’t think that Mr. Will Gompertz just needs some links to “hot” web projects, neither informations of any kind. He doesn’t write “I can’t find any net-based art”, but “I can’t find any net-based art of note”. As the following statement suggests, Mr. Gompertz knows very well what Net Art is: “Duchamp and the Dadaists would have had hours of artistic amusement creating spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.” Well, at least 50% of the best Net Art is “spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.”

So, if I see a problem here, it isn’t a problem of ignorance, but of critical judgement. What we have here is a mid-career art critic – one who wrote for the Times and the Guardian and who ran Tate Online before joining the BBC as arts editor – who claims that, among the many net art projects he came in touch with along his brilliant career, he didn’t find anything that can be described as “a significant artwork”. This may mean either that Net Art, along the last 15 years, didn’t produced anything noteworthy or that Net Art, after roughly 15 years of existence, still challenges the evaluation criteria and critical tools available for a mid-career, traditionally trained contemporary art critic.

Both the options above can be right of course. My little experience in the field makes me believe in the last one. It may help us to understand why, among other things, important art critics not strictly connected with the art market (and thus potentially interested in critical practices), such as Hal Foster or Rosalind Krauss, were never able to get it. And I think that, if we’ll be able to focus the discussion on these topics – how Net Art challenges traditional criticism? do we really need “other criteria” in order to understand it and its positioning in the contemporary art field? – Mr. Gompertz’s remarks will turn out to be really useful.

Out of the amount of press the exhibition Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art (LABoral, Gijon, 18.12.09 – 17.05.10) is generating, I’d like to point to a few nice articles:

Marie Lechner, «Playlist» secoue les puces, in Liberation, 04.02.10, available online at the URL http://www.liberation.fr/culture/0101617292-playlist-secoue-les-puces (fr).

Valentina Tanni, Old new media asturiani, in Exibart, February 9, 2010, available online at the URL http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp/IDNotizia/30414/IDCategoria/1 (ita).

Greg J. Smith, 8-bit Rockers, in Serial Consign, 04.02.10, available online at the URL http://serialconsign.com/2010/02/8-bit-rockers (eng).

Regine Debatty, Playlist – Playing Games, Music, Art, in we-make-money-not-art, 10.01.10, available online at the URL http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/01/laboral-playlist.php (eng).

Regine Debatty, Playlist, it’s not (just) about nostalgia, in we-make-money-not-art, 15.01.10, available online at the URL http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/01/previously-playlist-playing-ga.php (eng).

Regine Debatty, Playlist – the physical dimension, in we-make-money-not-art, 18.01.10, available online at the URL http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/01/playlist-when-video-game-gets.php.

Yéssica Alonso, Reciclaje tecnologico como arma creativa, in I like magazine, Issue 4, February 2010. Downloadable pdf (spanish).

Anders Carlsson, Playlist Exhibition: Materialism vs Symbolics, Music vs Visuals, in Chipflip, December 22, 2009, available online at the URL http://chipflip.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/playlist-exhibition-materialism-vs-symbolics-music-vs-visuals/ (eng).

Yves Bernard, PlayList à Laboral: 8-bit / chiptune, in ArtNumeur, January 2010, available online at the URL http://www.erg.be/blogs/artNumeur/?p=162 (fr).

Marco Rossari, “Se non sai cos’è, è net art”, in Wired, issue 11, January 2010, p. 103. Downloadable pdf (ita, 2.6 MB).

A late, but nice, review of Gamescenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, the book I edited in 2006 together with Matteo Bittanti. On Nextgame.it, by Lorenzo Antonelli (via Gamescenes.org).

Ed Halter’s contribution for Playlist’s catalogue (full pdf here) has been featured on the web magazine Vague Terrain.