Kempinski, 2007. Video installation. Artist : Neil Beloufa
Common Task (Mali), 2008. Photographic documentation of an action by Wieslaw Niedzwiecki. Artist : Pawel Althamer
The spaceship Icarus13, view from the Chicala Island, Luanda, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.
Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.
Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction surveys the recent tendency for artists and filmmakers to apply the forms and concerns of science fiction to narratives situated in the African continent. It considers the complex undercurrents for this occurrence in art today, and posits other and possible realities existing simultaneously, via careful re-orientations of tense; elevating the need for vigilance towards the present and future over a concern for the past.
Africa has had a rare yet distinct place in popular science-fiction, from the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting the mysterious appearance of a black monolith in the cradle of civilization, to the recent success of Neill Blomkamp’s debut movie District 9, a multi-layered allegory on South Africa’s recent internal and external tensions. Imagining a new space-time to the typical “third worldist” representations of the African continent, caught in a perpetual state of crisis, the works in Superpower project an alternative landscape of possibilities.
Trailer For PUMZI a Short film Produced By Inspired Minority and Writer/Director: Wanuri Kahui and Producers: Simon Hansen, Hannah Slezacek and Amira Quinlan.
Over the last few years, a wide range of new publishing initiatives have developed within the arts and design fields. New book fairs are emerging in major cities, small publishing houses and independent presses are frequently initiated and the alternative bookshop seems to recurrently be reborn in new forms. Something that seems to tie these activities together, is that they are run by practitioners themselves — photographers, artists, authors and graphic designers — often with a visionary idea of how to redefine the world of publishing.
On May 25th 2012, a few of these interesting and inspiring practitioners have been invited to Stockholm to take part in the seminar ‘Publishing as (part-time) Practice’. Confirmed participating publishers are: Elin Maria Olaussen / Karen Christine Tandberg from Torpedo Books and Press (NO), Georg Rutishauser from Edition Fink (CH), Matthew Stadler from Publication Studio (US), Anna Gerber / Britt Iversen from Visual Editions (UK), Nille Svensson from Nilleditions (SE), Jacob Grønbech Jensen / Rikard Heberling / Emi-Simone Zawall from Drucksache (SE) and more to be announced. Andrew Blauvelt from Walker Art Center (US) will introduce the event as well as provide a concluding reflection at the end of the evening.
The Institute domiciled in Zurich organizes an annual three-day silent film marathon with live music centered on a clearly defined theme, which will be treated extensively and in depth. Furthermore, the Institute organizes smaller events and film cycles in other Swiss cities and abroad, presenting the season’s highlights to a larger audience in various regions.
The live music performances take into consideration cultural and social variety and aim to consider musicians, sound artists, bands, ensembles and orchestras of various age groups and styles of music. This is, among others, intended to actively promote the exchange between the various genres.
The participating musicians largely hail from the Zurich region and to a smaller part from the rest of Switzerland as well as occasionally from abroad.
For the 2011/2012 seasons, events are intended in Zurich, Baden and Lausanne. For the following year events are foreseen in other Swiss cities as well as in Beijing and Shanghai.
Leonard Cohen’s 21 Oct 2011 “How I Got My Song” speech given at the Prince Of Asturias Awards. Of course, if this hybrid drives you crazy you might opt for no overdubbing below:
Birmingham’s international festival of live art returns again! Expect a distinctive cocktail of interventions, theater, parties, gigs, installations, talks, workshops and feasting. Since spring 2011 a few changes have been made. We’ve extended the festival to two weekends including the Easter; and we won’t be running alongside our close friends Flatpack Festival who now precede us by a couple of weeks. ‘Getting involved’ is at the heart of this festival. Mehmet Sander’s IMPACT, Ron Athey’s Gifts of The Spirit and Mette Edvardsen’s Time Has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine involve volunteer non-professional performers collaborating with international artists to create shows. On the 31st March 2012 the Dachshund UN will take place for the first time in the UK; sausage dogs from the West Midlands and beyond will represent the delegates of each country in the United Nations General Assembly.
Produced by Ollie Palmer, the Ant Ballet is a 2-year investigation into the parallels between human and ant communication which culminated in the world’s first ballet to exclusively feature ants. It is currently in Phase I of IV.
Using synthesized pheromones (Z9:16Ald Hexadecanol) and highly invasive Linepthinema humile Argentine ants, a robotic arm lays pheromone powder trails that cause the ants to behave in a different way to their usual foraging. Performances in late 2012 will feature mass colony movement testing, and the first intercontinental ant ballet.
The machine is part of a larger study of paranoia, control systems, insects and architecture.
The Ant Ballet will be installed in ZSL London Zoo’s BUGS zone with simulated ants until June 2012, and at FutureEverything festival in Manchester from the 16th – 19th May. The first live Ant Ballet performance will take place as part of Pestival in Sao Paulo later in the year.
Pestival aims to initiate a cultural shift in the way people think, moving them towards a more integrated way of looking at the natural world. Pestival’s lasting legacy is to forge new working relationships between disciplines, communities and species. Pestival says “Insectes Sans Frontières”.
Pestival believes insects are critical to human life on Earth. With over a million insect species, they are the most diverse group of animals on Earth. And yet insects are frequently misunderstood, reviled or, at best, ignored by the majority of the human population.
Pestival has set out to challenge existing stereotypes about insects and to give them their rightful place, for good and bad (vectors and pollinators), in our collective cultural consciousness.
BMW Tate Live: Performance Room is an innovative series of performances broadcast viewable exclusively online around the globe, as they happen.
Five artists each present works for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room beginning with choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel on 22 March 2012 and continuing monthly with Pablo Bronstein, Harrell Fletcher, Joan Jonas and Emily Roysdon. Audiences can pose questions to the artist and curators, and interact with other viewers via social media.
You are invited to enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via Tate’s YouTube channel at 20.00 hrs in the UK and at exactly the same moment across the globe on the specified dates. So if you are on the East Coast of America, log on at 15.00 hrs for a mid-afternoon art break, if you are located in Europe then join us at 21.00 hrs for an evening performance and for those in Russia, needing some late night art at 23.00 hrs.
A second chance to watch Jerome Bell’s performance and see the conversation with the artist and curators captured live Thursday 22nd March 2012 at Tate Modern.
The Abramović Method was born from the artist’s reflections on three major performances from the last decade: The House With the Ocean View (2002), Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and The Artist is Present (2010). These performances left a deep imprint on Abramović’s perception of her work in relation to the public.
“In my experience, as developed in a career of over 40 years, I have arrived at the conclusion that the public plays a very important and indeed crucial role in performance,” she explains. “The performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said, it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performer are not only complementary but almost inseparable.”
The PAC in Milan is the venue chosen by Marina Abramović to host her eagerly awaited new body of work, entitled The Abramović Method. This is the first major museum exhibition premiering new works since her groundbreaking retrospective in 2010 at the MoMA, New York. The Abramović Method will be on view at the PAC from March 21 through June 10, 2012.
“America’s Got No Talent” is a web-based software project by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki that synthesizes and processes the steady stream of Twitter feeds for several American reality television shows such as “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent,” “America’s Next Top Model,” and “X Factor US” among others in this genre. The project highlights when and how these shows gain popularity through social media and followers. When tweets are sent, they are dynamically displayed along with the bias for each program which is based on retweets from followers as well as fans. The visualization takes the form of a horizontal bar graph in the shape of an American flag that updates dynamically. Each show’s virtual presence grows in size based on the amount of attention it receives from social media users worldwide, creating a measurement meter that ranks popular media on their social exposure, rather than their credit as viable media sources.
Commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 for Artport, with support provided by Jeremy Levine.
Radio Boredcast is a 744-hour continuous online radio project, curated by artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival. In response to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed.
With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”
You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, at www.avfestival.co.uk or www.thepixelpalace.org.
Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.
Look at the program and listen to Radio Boredcast HERE
Read Collateral Damage by Vicki Bennett at The WIRE
“In the early 2000s, increased bandwidth allowed recombinant artists to enter the gift economy. It’s a freedom we should defend at all costs, argues Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us.
In 1999 I bought my first fast computer – and although it was dying to do speedy things, I was on dial-up, reduced to a crawl when it came to information retrieval. Logged into file sharing communities, I’d sit in the chat and watch people posting files that would take me a day to download, so I’d just read about them. Then I’d go to the WFMU website and try to stream the station and just get blurts and gaping silences. Then I’d visit archive.org and look at all the wonderful synopses for Rick Prelinger’s films, which were too large to access. It wasn’t long, however, before affordable broadband reached my area of London. Then everything changed. Forever.”
No Lone Zone is a technical term that applies to a restricted area in which at least two individuals must be within visual reach overseeing a critically sensitive procedure.
No Lone Zone, at the Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, is an exhibition that brings together works by Teresa Margolles, Cinthia Marcelle, David Zink Yi and the collective Tercerunquinto to explore this concept in relation to the vulnerability of current social and economic structures. Comprising sculpture, video and installation, these works reflect on the sense of loss, danger and urgency that affect the realm of human actions and collective endeavors within this global scenario.
The No Lone Zone exhibition has been curated by Iria Candela and Taiyana Pimentel in association with Gasworks. However there is no trace of the show at the Level 2 Gallery. Perhaps another tactical act.
Image above: Screenshot of the Tate’s website
Image at top: “Score Settings 16″ by Teresa Margolles
This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century:
actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things
affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory
animal studies, as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism
the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others
new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence
new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis
the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism
varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism
and systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations
Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Invited speakers (to date) include:
Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)
Ian Bogost (Literature, Communication, Culture, Georgia Tech)
Wendy Chun (Media and Modern Culture, Brown)
Mark Hansen (Literature, Duke)
Erin Manning (Philosophy/Dance, Concordia University, Montreal)
Brian Massumi (Philosophy, University of Montreal)
Tim Morton (English, UC-Davis)
Steven Shaviro (English, Wayne State)
Over the course of three weekends in October, 2011, and February and May, 2012, Dia Art Foundation will present a series of Yvonne Rainer’s dance works at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Dia’s retrospective, entitled Yvonne Rainer, will celebrate the depth of Rainer’s contributions to dance and will feature early works of choreography from the 1960s—including both iconic and lesser-known pieces—as well as three compositions created within the last twelve years.
The term ‘para-academic’ captures the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all (para-, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek para-, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit para “beyond”). The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it. Following a series of classes organized through The Public School New York on the subject of “Para-Academia and Theory Fiction,” this event brings together a group of editors whose work in publishing falls within the para-academic, in one sense or another. Presenters will address the practice and theory of para-academic publishing, its relation to various areas of life (art, pedagogy, politics), and present some of their recent titles.
Panel Discussion on Para-Academic Publishing & Book Party
Observatory
543 Union St., Brooklyn, NY
April 17, 2012
7:00pm
The sonic environment is an indicator for the quality of life
One crucial aspect, however, remains open and leads to a multitude of questions: Is this, what our hearing is exposed to, satisfying and enhancing our individual, social, functional, biological, economical, aesthetic and existential needs and endeavors? If not, which concepts exist to “orchestrate” everyday life’s cacophony? Which methods exist to successfully evaluate the quality of soundscapes? Which criteria and values have to be developed, which practical constraints and habits to be dismissed in order to design the everyday as a “Hörenswürdigkeit”, which means: as something worth listening to?
How to improve the Global Composition to make the world more liveable?
Within this process: What role does media play and relation to its commodification of sound? Are there valid approaches to or even successful examples of shaping the soundscape in ways that are beneficial or at least acceptable for a majority? Are there strategies for overcoming the societal, political and economic hindrances that inhibit the inclusion of auditory considerations in the making of a sustainable society? What is the role of art in developing paradigms for auditory solutions applied to our living environments?
How to foster listening abilities within the concert of the senses?
Last but not least, what educational concepts and methods exist for integrating listening abilities into the concert of the senses, and develop auditory faculties as important tools for understanding, criticizing, shaping and designing the global environment? More infos on keynote speakers, conference fees and organisational details will be announced soon.
Proposals are invited for papers/posters, workshops, roundtable discussions, applied and artistic contributions, relating, but not limited to the conference’s main topics. (Please, load down the appropriate form from this page and fill it out.)
On March 23rd London will host a unique conference on the neuroscience, psychiatry and interpretation of revelatory visionary experiences.
Mental health professionals frequently encounter people who report experiences of God or supernatural beings speaking or acting through them to reveal important truths. In some cases it is difficult to know to what extent such experiences are best explained as ‘illness’, or represent experiences which are accepted and valued within a person’s religious or cultural context. Indeed, revelatory experiences form a key part of the formation and development of major world religions through figures such as prophets, visionaries, and yogins, as well as in the religious practice of shamans and others in traditional smaller scale societies. Why are revelatory experiences and related altered states of consciousness so common across cultures and history? What neural and other processes cause them? When should they be thought of as due to mental illness, as opposed to culturally accepted religious experience? And what value should or can be placed upon them? In this one day conference leading scholars from neuroscience, psychiatry, theology and religious studies, history and anthropology gather to present recent findings, and debate with each other and the audience about these fundamental aspects of human experience.
Who should attend: This one day interdisciplinary conference will be useful to academic psychologists, neuroscientists and humanities scholars interested in understanding the possibilities for interdisciplinary understanding of complex human behavior; as well as psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses and any professionals whose work requires them to make sense of the relations between culture, religion, and mental health.
Confirmed Speakers
Dr Quinton Deeley, Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry Kings College London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, SLAM
Professor Stephen Pattison, Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Practice at the University of Birmingham
Dr Mitul Mehta, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London
Dr Eamonn Walsh, Post doctoral Researcher, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London
Professor Chris Rowland, Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture from Oxford
Professor Roland Littlewood, Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at University College London
Professor David Oakley, University College London
The Very Rev Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral San Fransisco
Dr Piers Vitebsky, Head of Anthropology and Russian Arctic Studies, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Professor Geoffrey Samuel, Religious Studies, University of Cardiff
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Hospitality begins at home — but it also describes our relation to each other as peoples, territories and nations. In his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” which is the basis for the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights, Kant argues that the stranger’s right to hospitality is a universal right, and that it is derived both from the right to self preservation, which emerges from the law of nature (gesellschaft), and from the right of association, which is part of the law of society (gemeinshaft). For Kant, society might not be natural, pleasant or desirable; but it is a real condition of a populated world. Humans by nature are strangers who travel from an original solitary or familial place and are confronted by association. The only alternative to hospitality or exchange is aggression or war.
This right of hospitality exists only between equals; for the stranger must be capable of returning to his own house, where he would then preside as host. How then does the rule of hospitality extend to those who cannot claim their reciprocal right, such as the refugee, who is not a guest because he is not also a host? Without the wherewithal to reciprocate as a citizen of a nation, the refugee must present himself as merely human, or rely on a third party, such as the United Nations, to demand the rights of hospitality for him. How does the rule of hospitality extend to a stranger who is not a guest because he harbors aggression in relation to his lacking the status of host? It is tempting to recast Jerusalem as a new, singular space of hospitality, where inhabitants are simultaneously strangers and hosts in a continual state of reciprocity. Giorgio Agamben similarly describes a variation on the two-state solution whereby Jerusalem is an extra-national and simultaneous capital of both Arab and Jew — a new topological space, like a Mobius strip singular and dual at once. And beyond the intractable divisions of Jerusalem, perhaps hospitality offers us language with which to describe our emerging geo-political spaces and the aspirations we have for them.
Unknown Fields is a nomadic studio that throws open the doors of the A A and sets off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. Each year we navigate a different global cross-section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science-fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.
This year the Division will be heading off on a reconnaissance road trip to chronicle a series of extraterrestrial encounters from the borderlands, black sites, military outposts and folkloric landscapes of the United States. From the ‘illegal aliens’ of the New Mexico border towns we will head north exploring territories of negotiation and conflict, zones of transgression, suspicion and speculation. We will rumble along the UFO highway, past the mythic territories of Area 51, listening to tall tales from conspiracy theorists amidst the sonic booms crackling in the quiet desert air. We will visit covert military test sites and the alien technologies of the aeronautics industry as we shape our own experimental craft to launch in the skies above the psychedelic community of the Burning Man Festival, where our journey ends. By the bonfires we will examine the mysteries and conspiracies that surround what lies off the map, off-grid and below the radar as we propose new truths and expose alternative fictions.
Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators from the worlds of technology, science and fiction. Together we will form a traveling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions and impromptu tutorials that will be chronicled in an annual publication and traveling exhibition. Throughout our journey the Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention as we examine the unknown fields between truth and fiction.
Applications
The deadline for applications is 6 August 2012. All participants traveling from abroad are responsible for securing any visa required. After payment of fees, the AA can provide a letter confirming participation in the workshop. A portfolio or CV is not required, only the online application form and payment.
Fees
The AA Visiting School requires a fee of £695 per participant, which includes a £50 Visiting Membership. If you are already a member, the total fee will be reduced automatically by £50 by the online payment system.
Eligibility
The workshop is open to architecture and design students and professionals worldwide.
Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic aims to explore the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the exhibition, acquisition and preservation of feminist artwork by Ontario’s public art galleries. In December 2008, the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG), in collaboration with Carla Garnet, organized a symposium that invited women curators, museum professionals and artists to bring attention to this topic, “Art Institutions and the Feminist Dialectic.” Nine Canadian women visual art professionals were invited to speak at the symposium.
An additional presentation from Carmen Mörsch, an international arts educator and researcher, is also included, presented in February 2010. The purpose of this website is to publish the transcripts, video and audio recordings of this symposium online, making them publicly available to engage a wider audience. We encourage visitors to engage with these critical practices and important presentations, as well as the additional resources and links provided by the presenters.
For the next 306090 book, guest editor David L. Hays wants to know, “What is essential knowledge for architecture?”What is essential knowledge for architecture?
This frequently posed question targets fundamental principles of design, those basic criteria and priorities through which disciplinary stability is ensured. Yet, insofar as relevance is a core value of architecture, in both theory and practice, the contingent nature of the future guarantees that some forms of knowledge not presently considered essential will eventually become indispensable.
With that condition in mind, the editors of 306090 15, (Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture, seek contributions that envision possible futures for architecture through speculations about new disciplinary knowledge. What specific methods, materials, or understandings—tools, ratios, formulas, properties, principles, guidelines, definitions, rules, practices, techniques, reference points, histories, and more—not presently considered essential to architecture could, or should, define its future? Pertinent knowledge might be previously forgotten, currently undervalued, generally misunderstood, or not yet recognized. Architects have long looked both to the outmoded traditions of their discipline and to other fields altogether when imagining possible directions for their work. In blurring the boundary between essential and non-essential knowledge, this inquiry seeks not to codify the contemporary state of the art for architecture, nor to assert the value of multidisciplinarity, but to envision, and potentially catalyze, new disciplinary approaches.
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture will serve as both a gauge of contemporary concerns and a manual for emergent theory and practice. Submissions are sought from practitioners, theorists, historians, critics, artists, activists, and anyone else with direct or indirect interest in the future of architecture.
Click HERE to submit and for more information.
Deadline: Friday, March 30, 2012
In recent weeks it has become public in Argentina, the project initiated by two artists from Buenos Aires, Guillermo Faivovich and Nicholas Goldberg, consisting of a loan moving the meteorite “El Chaco” to Kassel, Germany, during the international art contemporary art exhibition Documenta 13.
“In Argentina, a rich and complex debate has recently arisen about the loan of this object. dOCUMENTA (13) therefore suspended its loan request on January 16 in respect of the positions stated by experts and local communities. Furthermore, dOCUMENTA (13) would like to state that no loan of the El Chaco meteorite will be further requested without a full endorsement by the peoples of the land of Chaco, by the local community as a whole, and in careful consideration of the beliefs and principles of the traditional custodians today. The artists are currently meeting with all concerned parties to discuss the matter together.”
Could this be one of those tactical, post-colonial, and anti-paradigmatic works of conceptual art banning?
Cultural astronomer Alejandro López, among his colleagues, promoted the opposition to this project, which seriously violates the rights of Aboriginal Chaco. The writings of ancient chroniclers and investigations carried up from the Aboriginal worldview, clearly show that for these people meteors scattered on Campo del Cielo, are very important milestones in its territory.
Since the project was announced to move the meteorite Chaco aborigines have voiced opposition to it and want to work to make their voices heard. Click HERE to read and sign the petition. The petition is written in Spanish. However, you don’t read Spanish to sign it.
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
Click HERE to read the statement written by Documenta 13 suspending their request for the exhibition.
Interview with Guillermo Faivovich in La Voz, an Argentine publication.
Synopsis: This conference aims to reflect on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architectural practice today. Although dissidence has been primarily associated with architectural practices in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War period, contemporary architectural and other aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence asks how we can conceive of the contemporary political problems and paradoxes of architecture in relation to their precedents? Devoid of the agency of action, Cold War dissidents articulated their positions in drawings of fantasy-like paper architecture, while contemporary forms of architectural practice seem to gravitate towards activism and direct-action in the world. The political issues – from interventions in charged areas worldwide to research in conflict zones and areas undergoing transformations – currently stimulate a field of abundant invention in contemporary architecture. Both, Cold War dissidents and contemporary activists encounter problems and paradoxes and must navigate complex political force fields within which possible complicities are inherent risks.
New forms of critical practice, and political and spatial dissent are manifold, appearing in stark contrast to contemporary architectural practice in which professional courage seems to have been translated into structural “virtuosity” of surfaces. This conference seeks to map out and expand on the methodologies of architectural action and reinvigorate the concept of dissent within the architectural/spatial field of the possible. A more historical thread that runs through the programme will seek to weave the genealogy of political/spatial practices from the Cold War dissidents of the Soviet Bloc to the activists of South American favelas.
Dissidents in the former communist countries used a specific set of codes to question the ideological doctrine of the state party. Architects who were otherwise employed in state run architectural collectives, or as staff in architecture schools met to produce writings, private lectures, secret installations and architectural articulations of allegories and legends – activities that challenged the ’stifling’ standardized language of Soviet architecture. Many of these ‘paper architects’ questioned the relationship between art, architecture and politics, but also, and significantly so, the ideological, and thus also ethical function of various forms of ‘creative practices’. The political melt-down of the Soviet Bloc reconfigured this complex field of political codes, architectural gestures and references. The withdrawal of the architect from large ideological concepts regarding social utopias mirrored that fragmentation and dissemination of (neo)liberal market structures. Large ideological battles were replaced with a multiplicity of local, or issue-specific conflicts within which forms of activism have been integrated. Dissent against large integrated and complex networks is no longer possible. All that is left is to navigate the complex fields of forces in a reflective and innovative manner. But can the assemblage of gestures and techniques of past struggles and ‘dilemmas’ of working in politically suppressive regimes help to inform those of today?
The conference thus seeks to attract contemporary spatial practitioners, architects, urbanists, journalists, activists, filmmakers and curators, asking them to reflect upon contemporary forms and conditions of dissent and their potential problems and inevitable paradoxes. It welcomes, too, the reflections of architects and architectural historians to reflect upon previous articulations of political dissent through architectural practice.
The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Political Equator 3 was a 2-day cross-border mobile conference held on the 3rd and 4th of June 2011. This event was co-organized by the Center for Urban Ecologies at the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, and two community-based, non-profit organizations on both sides of the border, Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, California and Alter Terra in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.
The third program in a the series of bi-national conferences, PE3 continues to engage pressing regional socio-economic, urban and environmental conditions across the San Diego –Tijuana border. These meetings have been focusing on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to re-evaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics, across geo-political boundaries, natural resources and marginal communities.
RC: Eve Sussman and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation are touring their latest film project whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, to the Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, and Site Santa Fe in January and February 2012.
An expedition to the banks of the Caspian landed Rufus Corporation in a dystopian “future-opolis” that became the location for their experimental film noir. Pushing the envelope of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom programmed computer they call the “serendipity machine.” whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir delivers a changing narrative – culled from 3,000 clips, 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music – that runs forever and never plays the same way twice. The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes. Driven by key words, the work seamlessly comes together as a movie – that is not a movie.
The film follows the observations and surveillance of the central protagonist, a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood), stuck in a 1970’s looking metropolis operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Voiceovers and dialogues (in English and Russian with English subtitles) forge the implied narrative – wire tapped telephone conversations, reel-to-reel tapes, snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his employer and a mysterious woman referred to simply as “Dispatch”. A narrator describes various impositions on the citizens including strangely manipulated time keeping, a language ration, lowered suicide statistics, the effects of lithium, and the workings of the water factory. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by the city and the factory he is working in, as the course of the story is controlled by the machine that edits the film.
Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with Watermans and Goldsmiths College in occasion of the Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012 announces a special issue titled: Touch and Go.
The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. This year long project is showcasing the work of six international artists and collectives and initiates discussions around the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, possibilities and issues around human interaction and engagement inviting responses from artists, academics, students, art professionals and the public. The project will include a series of seminars in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and a publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.
Touch and Go, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Sound is ubiquitous and permanent, and embraces us as an envelope. Therefore, the experience of the auditory can be considered an environmental experience par excellence. The term and concept of soundscape reflects this idea. It implies, that sounds do not exist in isolation, and have to be understood as being embedded in and interacting with other sounds and perceptions coining the perceptional abilities of individuals and societies and their social relations: soundscape is a system in which all elements are interdependent.
No sound exists on its own: The Global Composition
Considering the world’s objects as instruments, its inhabitants as their players and all sounds on the globe taking place simultaneously, leads to the imagination of a global composition. Any audible phenomenon is part of this huge ongoing concert which includes all living beings and unites them in – mostly unintentional and uncoordinated – collaboration. Soundmakers, listeners and those, requesting sounds as a commodity, are part of a system and often one and the same person.
The Global Composition
Myths of Rape , by Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Performed for Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977.
The history of postwar art in Los Angeles is punctuated by dramatic examples of public artworks, large-scale spectacles, expansive performances, and small-scale interventions in the public sphere. The Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival celebrates this history through a contemporary lens, with a series of adaptations, re-inventions, and commissions that are inspired by the installation and performance artists working in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1980.
Throughout the 11-day festival, a group of new public artworks will be on view throughout the city. In addition, new performances will premiere every day, including outdoor visual spectacles, experimental theater and sound art, social and political interventions, and media art. A nightly after-party, Black Box, will provide a space for socializing, and include surprise performances each evening.
The festival is presented as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-80, an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. As the festival moves throughout the city, visitors will also be surrounded by dozens of groundbreaking exhibitions about the history of art in Southern California. The festival calendar has been designed to allow time to attend both the performances and nearby exhibitions on each day.
Bracket 3 invites the submission of critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate the potentials when situations extend beyond norms – into the extremities. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive?
Ulrick Beck, in “Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment” suggests that being at risk is the human condition at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While risk produces inequality and destabilization, he argues, it can be the catalyst for the construction of new institutions. The term extreme is defined as outermost, utmost, farthest, last or frontier. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?
Bracket [at Extremes] will examine architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. In such conditions, the status quo is no longer possible; systems must extend performance and accommodate unpredictability. As new protocols emerge, new opportunities present themselves. Bracket [at Extremes] seeks innovative contributions interrogating extreme processes (technologies, operations) and extreme contexts (cultural, climatic). What is the breaking point of architecture at extremes?
Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with The Samek Art Gallery and with Kasa Gallery announces a special issue titled: Not Here Not There. This issue arises out of the territory between two cultural streams.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these themes with Senior Editors Lanfranco Aceti, Director of Kasa Gallery, Sabanci University and Richard Rinehart, Director of the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University. Artists that work with AR technology and curators and writers that work on issues related to AR, sited art in relation to new media, or site-specific interventions are particularly welcome to submit proposals for consideration.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.
Proposals:
a) Subject heading: Not Here Not There
b) 500 hundred word abstract for articles – submission of full articles preferred for this special issue by proposal deadline January 31, 2012
c) Deadline for proposal submission: January 31, 2012
d) Deadline for submission of full article: March 1, 2012
e) 2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 700pixels width for artists
f) Links to previous work, videos or personal sites
Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)
• For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.
• For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.
• Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.
• In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)
Pumzi, 2010, Wanuri Kahiu 
Kempinski, 2007. Video installation. Artist : Neil Beloufa
Common Task (Mali), 2008. Photographic documentation of an action by Wieslaw Niedzwiecki. Artist : Pawel Althamer
The spaceship Icarus13, view from the Chicala Island, Luanda, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.
Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.
In-House Festival, Jerusalem Season of Culture, 2011. [Photo via Jerusalem Season of Culture]
Maya Zack: Living Room, 3D computer generated anaglyph. [Courtesy of the artist and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv]
El Chaco meteorite, Campo del Cielo, near Gancedo, Chaco, Argentina
Suguru Goto, Cymatics
Myths of Rape , by Leslie Labowitz-Starus, Performed for Three Weeks in May, Suzanne Lacy, 1977.
Ed Bereal and members of The Bodacious Buggerrilla performing Miss America Piece, ca. 1969-70
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