A new version (2010) of Versions (2009), Oliver Laric‘s ongoing video essay and one of the most powerful statements on contemporary culture I stumbled upon in the last years.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan (2010) by Lance Wakeling is an amazing, Web 2.0-friendly version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Each word of the book, from the title on, can be searched on whichever search engine, shared on all the social platforms available up to now, advertised on Google Ads and adopted for 1 $. Definitely, language is not free anymore. What do you think, Mr. Joyce?

UBERMORGEN.COM, Deephorizon, 2010.

“The supreme discipline of art – oil painting – is back. It has been 13 days since a BP oil and gas exploration well blew out, setting fire to the drilling rig, which sank, killing 11 people.”

Iocose, NoTube Contest, 2010.

«The winner of the NoTube Contest is the participant who manages to find the most valueless video on YouTube.

A video uploaded on YouTube is generally oriented to a large audience, has a simple narrative and can be easily categorized.

A NoTube video, instead, fails in every promise and contradicts viewers’ expectations for a meaningful experience. A good NoTube video can not be summarized, does not offer any keyword for searching it, is not linked by any other web site, has not been discussed and can not be discussed».

This year, the NoTube contest had an all-star jury, including Franco Berardi Bifo, Konrad Becker and Patrick Lichty. The winning entry was effectively labelled by Bifo «the best expression of “nothing”».

Eva and Franco Mattes, No Fun, 2010. Video documentation of a suicide performance on Chatroulette. Soon at Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Artie Vierkant, Compression Photographs – Paris (2), 2009. Digital print.

Robert Voit, New Trees, 2003 – in progress.

On Friday, April 23 the Milan-based GLORIAMARIAgallery will open the first Italian solo show of Petra Cortright. Here is my text for the publication.

It Takes Strength to Be Gentle and Kind

by Domenico Quaranta

«It takes strength to be gentle and kind», the Smiths said in one of Petra Cortright’s favorite songs. It takes strength to take the usual, dumb, stereotyped, commodified imagery of prettiness and kindness and use it in a way that doesn’t look dumb or critical. It takes strength to adopt custom software effects, user friendly tools and vernacular genres and use them to make things that make you talk about art without apparently being anything more than what they are expected to be – a Youtube video or a Photoshop exercise. It takes strength to make art «about beauty and craft», as Ed Halter wrote.

Petra Cortright’s work has this peculiar strength. Take, for example, When You Walk Through the Storm (2009). In this video, a girl – the artist – is looking at you from the screen. Like you, she is sitting down in front of her computer. She looks sad – an impression enforced by the cold palette of the video. Slowly, she starts moving her hand up and down in front of her face. The movement activates a video effect that makes her appear underwater, fading her face in a myriad of pixels. At the same time, the intimacy created by the webcam gaze fades as well: she is close to you, on your computer screen, but the water effect makes the space in between you and her appear physical, and the sound – the song of the title – seems to come from the deep.

Most of Petra’s videos follow the same basic rules. In the diptych Sparkling I and II (2010) the artist wears sunglasses, walks through a garden and scrolls a tree, producing a beautiful rain of sparkling digital symbols; in Footvball/Faerie (2009) she plays football covered with a digitally-added pink cloud; in Das Hell(e) Modell (2009) she dances to the music of a Kraftwerk’s song, while a video filter alters our perception of time and makes her appear more angelic than usual; in Bunny Banana (2009) she eats a banana wearing bunny ears; and in Holy Tears (2009) she sheds digital tears ironically posing as a saint. All these videos are shot with a custom webcam, and use simple effects available to anyone. What makes them different from the amount of ego-clips we can find on Youtube? What gives them the power of a revelation? What makes them significant for the thousands of people that watched them online, but also for people that, for generational or other reasons, don’t share the internet and juvenile culture she refers to (in spare order, cyberpunk, psychedelia, kawaii, electronic music, sharing, exhibitionism)? Probably, the answer is: the way she is able to add all these levels, kindly and gently, to an object that doesn’t lose the authenticity of a teenager’s secret diary, or a student’s sketchbook.

Most of Petra’s gif animations and static images look like sketches, at first sight. They are, again, about beauty and craft. But beauty is unconventional and craft doesn’t mean that she uses image editing tools in the way a professional does. Quite the opposite. In her animated gifs, she either modifies vernacular material or explores animation effects and low-res aesthetics creating her own abstract gifs. In her still image pieces, she creates photo-collages where the complexity of the landscape is contradicted by the geometrical nature of the cuts; she employs different filters for different image layers; and she explores the liquid nature of the digital image literally liquifying found photographs of models, still lifes or landscapes. All this converges in The Infinite Sculpture Garden… (2010), her last and, up to now, most complex work: an abstract, suggestive landscape where geometrics, reflections, patterns, shadows and transparencies all conjure in the development of a hermetic, hyper-textual visual poem.

All these references to layers, effects and tools do not mean that Petra Cortright’s work is formalistic and medium-related. Petra belongs to the first generation of digital natives. For her, referring to internet culture and desktop metaphors is as natural as, for any aboriginal, referring to her traditions. She lives online. Let’s spend half a day on Google searching for her and we will know almost everything about her: that she loves pets and trees, that she hates New York, that her father died of Melanoma, that she had a wonderful love story and that she broke up. Her life is a continuous online performance taking place every day on her Twitter, her Facebook, her Flickr account. Her work is not about the medium: it’s about Petra Cortright. And it takes strength to be Petra Cortright.

Lance Wakeling, Untitled (Vandalized Paintings), 2009.

Lance is the guy who runs Private Circulation, a monthly PDF bulletin and a great editorial project.

Aleksandra Domanovic‘s paper sculpures at the Surfing Club exhibition at [plug.in], Basel.

Here a video documentation of the show.

AIDS-3D, World Community Grid Water Features, 2010. Soon at Gentili Apri, Berlin

Domenico Quaranta, “Reality is Overrated. When Media Go Beyond Simulation”, in Artpulse Magazine, Issue 3, March – May 2010.

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.

[ITALIAN VERSION BELOW]

Video selection for the series “Playlist”, Neoncampobase, Bologna (Italy)

Opening: January 27, 2010

Curated by: Domenico Quaranta.

Founded by the American writer Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) was a catalogue of tools that was regarded as a bible by the counterculture generation – that is, by those who shaped the techno-cultural environment we are living in. Published regularly until 1972 and sporadically until 1998, it definitely died with the rise of the Web, of which it is considered a conceptual forerunner by people such as Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) and Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired). WEC was conceived as an “evaluation and access device” meant to bring power and knowledge to the people. It featured excellent reviews of books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes, along with objects of any kind, from gardening tools to computers. Everybody could submit a review for the catalogue.

Like the WEC reviewers, the artists in this exhibition are contributing to a shared resource; like them, they love their tools and, like them, they are interested in understanding the world as a whole. What did change, in the meantime – and mostly thanks to the WEC generation – is the world itself.

These artists – WE – live in a world in which media don’t just reproduce reality, nor just simulate it, in Baudrillardian terms: they shape reality, improve it, sometimes they build parallel worlds in which we can spend our time. They redesign our way to live, to think, to make and enjoy culture, to eat, to sleep, to die. And to think about God.

These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays.

This peculiar realism can bring somebody to go back to when everything started. Notoriously, psychedelic drugs played an important rule in the beginning of digital culture. Without Sun, by Brody Condon, is a mesh-up of various found videos of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Why do people broadcast these materials? Do these “out of the body” experiences have any relationship with other now common forms of projection of the self, such as online videogaming? Some artists, such as Cory Arcangel or Oliver Laric, are interested in the conceptual consequences of technologies, and on the way they are updating fundamental concerns of our culture; others, such as the duo AIDS-3D, explore how technologies are increasingly affecting our spiritual life. In their own words, they want to make “the intangible magic of technology visible”. Not necessarily trough technologies themselves: Constant Dullaart’s video, for example, turns Youtube’s “loading” animation into a suggestive, hypnotic object using light and styrofoam balls.

This concern with magic and transcendence is shared by many of the artists on show, from Petra Cortright to Damon Zucconi, from Harm Van den Dorpel to Martin Kohout. In their hands, a video filter can become the best way to explore how consistent the outer world is, and how consistent we are. It can become the best way to get a better knowledge of the world we live in, whatever we may mean with this word.

Selected works:

AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller & Nik Kosmas, US/DE), Motion Capture Dance, 2008. Video, 08.34 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Cory Arcangel (US), Drei Klavierstücke op. II – I, 2009. Video, 04.21 min. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York.

Brody Condon (US), Without Sun, 2008. Video, 15.12 min. Courtesy Virgil De Voldere, New York. (Online excerpt).

Petra Cortright (US), Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009. Video, 03.41 min.

Paul B. Davis (UK/US), Compression Study #4 (Barney), 2007. Video, 02.49 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.

Constant Dullaart (NL), Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009. Video, 00.33 min.

Martijn Hendriks (NL), Untitled (12 glowing men), 2008. Video, 04.10 min.

Jodi (BE/NL), Mal Au Pixel, 2009. Video, 01.14 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Martin Kohout (CZ/DE), Close Up, 2009. Video loop, 03.11 min.

Oliver Laric (DE), Aircondition, 2006. Video, 01.59 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.

Les Liens Invisibles (IT), Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle, 2008. Video loop, 02.14 min.

Miltos Manetas (GR/UK), King Kong After Peter Jackson, 2006. Video, 03.05 min.

Pascual Sisto (US), No strings attached, 2007. Video, 01.30 min.

Paul Slocum (US), You’re Not My Father, 2007. Video, 04.05 min.

Harm Van den Dorpel (NL), Resurrections, 2007. 3 animated found photos, 04.18 min.

Damon Zucconi (US), Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008. Video, 00.35. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

—

Fondato dallo scrittore americano Stewart Brand nel 1968, Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) è stato un catalogo di “strumenti” rispettato come una bibbia dalla generazione della controcultura – vale a dire, da coloro che hanno plasmato il contesto tecno-culturale in cui ci troviamo a vivere. Pubblicato regolarmente fino al 1972 e irregolarmente fino al 1998, è stato “ucciso” dal successo del World Wide Web, di cui persone come Steve Jobs (fondatore di Apple) e Kevin Kelly (fondatore di Wired) vedono in esso un anticipatore. WEC era concepito come “uno strumento di valutazione e di accesso” che intendeva portare potere e conoscenza alle persone. Proponeva eccellenti recensioni di libri, mappe, riviste di settore, corsi e lezioni, insieme a oggetti di ogni tipo, dagli attrezzi da giardinaggio ai computer. Chiunque poteva contribuire.

Come i recensori del Whole Earth Catalogue, gli artisti di questa mostra contribuiscono regolarmente a una risorsa condivisa; come loro, amano i loro strumenti e, come loro, sono interessati a capire il mondo nel suo complesso. Ciò che è cambiato, nel frattempo – e in gran parte grazie alla generazione del World Earth Catalogue – è il mondo stesso. Gli artisti – e noi con loro – vivono in un mondo in cui i media non si limitano a riprodurre o a simulare, come dice Baudrillard, il reale: lo plasmano, gli danno forma, contribuiscono ad esso, a volte costruiscono mondi paralleli in cui possiamo trascorrere il nostro tempo. Riprogrammano il modo in cui viviamo, pensiamo, produciamo e fruiamo cultura, mangiamo, dormiamo, moriamo. E in cui pensiamo a dio.

Questi artisti usano semplici strumenti e trucchi di editing per commentare lo stato attuale dell’immagine, per parlare di se stessi, per modificare materiale trovato e arricchirne il significato; esplorano culture e pratiche per campionarle, remixarle e commentarle; abusano delle tecnologie che usano; esportano metafore, pratiche, estetiche e narrazioni in altre situazioni. Questo può suonare strano per chi non viva nella loro stessa fetta temporale – ma, per favore, non chiamateli formalisti. Non lavorano con un medium: lavorano in una realtà ampliata dai media. Sono realisti, nel solo modo in cui il termine realismo può avere un senso oggi.

Questo peculiare realismo può portare alcuni di loro a ritornare a quando tutto è iniziato. Come è noto, le droghe psichedeliche hanno avuto un ruolo importante agli inizi della cultura digitale. Without Sun, di Brody Condon, è un mesh-up di video reperibili in rete che hanno come protagonisti individui affetti da una sostanza psichedelica. Perché mettono in rete questo materiale? Non hanno, queste esperienze extracorporee, una relazione con altre forme oggi comuni di proiezione identitaria, come i videogiochi online? Alcuni artisti, come Cory Arcangel e Oliver Laric, sono interessati alle conseguenze concettuali delle tecnologie, al modo in cui riprendono e attualizzano alcune preoccupazione centrali della nostra cultura; altri, come il duo AIDS-3D, guardano a come le tecnologie stanno influenzando in maniera crescente la nostra vita spirituale. Vogliono, come dicono loro, “rendere visibile la magia intangibile della tecnologia”. Non necessariamente attraverso di essa: il video di Constant Dullart, ad esempio, traduce l’animazione di caricamento di Youtube in una suggestiva, ipnotica scultura usando la luce e palle di styrofoam.

Questo interesse per la magia e la trascendenza è condiviso da diversi altri artisti in mostra, da Petra Cortright a Damon Zucconi, da Harm Van den Dorpel a Martin Kohout. Nelle loro mani, un filtro video può diventare il modo migliore per esplorare la consistenza del mondo esterno, e di noi stessi. Può diventare il modo migliore per conoscere meglio il mondo in cui viviamo, qualsiasi senso diamo a questa parola.

Joan Leandre, In the Name of Kernel ! Lonely Record Session, Version I, 2009. HD video, 00:17:56. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 – I, 2009. Visit the project page to see episodes II and III.

Harm Van Den Dorpel, Sleepwalkers, 2007.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Bagless Canister Cyclonic Vacuum, 2009. Outdoor billboard, 238 x 504 cm, Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Martijn Hendriks, Untitled (12 Glowing Men), 2008. Single channel video, color and black and white, sound, 4 min 10 sec.

Damon Zucconi, Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008.