Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category
Car Full of Gas
June 20, 2009
A mini cooper filled with cooking gas, the gas is release from 2 large tanks. in the window a small hole was drilled, letting the gas that is trapped inside escaping and burning as a small flame. An installation by Ariel Schlesinger.
Eleven Heavy Things
June 18, 2009
Eleven Heavy Things«, 2009, a series of eleven outdoor sculptures by Miranda July.
REAL TIME
May 22, 2009During the Milan Furniture Fair, Maarten Baas presented his latest project called “Real Time”. He made 3 clocks, actually he made 3 movies, which are each 12 hours long. For the first one “Grandfather Clock”, he filmed a man drawing the hands of clock during 12 hours. This is also the only clock for which he made an object: a standing clock with a screen displaying the video. It gives you the impression that there is someone inside. The second one, called “Sweeper Clock”, shows you 2 actors wiping garbage 12 hours long. The garbage forms the hands of the clock. In the third one, the “Digital Analoge Clock”, you can see an actor painting the segments of a digital clock black and wiping them clean again.
EYEBORG
March 13, 2009
The Eyeborg Project is the work of Rob Spence, a 36 year old filmmaker residing in Toronto, Canada and Kosta Grammatis – an unemployed engineer from San Francisco, California. Rob’s eye was badly damaged in an accident involving a shotgun at age of 13. Rob had his eye surgically removed and replaced with a prosthetic one after enduring ten years of pain. Now with the help of Kosta and a team of ocularists, inventors, engineering specialists, Rob is building a prosthesis that can capture and transmit video.
Watch out! I let you know that some images are a little too organic.
Sensing city
March 7, 2009
Sensing city was a live concert by an eleven-piece-ensemble which was occasionally influenced by urban rhythms, here the movement of cars outside the concert venue. As the passing cars triggered the rhythms that were being played, the city became audible through the musicians, even when the urban dwellers not knowingly were part of the composition
Taken from their website:
“A city has its own rhythm that affects the life of its people and is at the same time created by them. Bus schedules, traffic lights and the turn signals of cars are familiar patterns to the citizen. This interplay between creation and inspiration is also at the heart of all music. Making music means translating impression into sound, listening to music means transforming sound into impression.
So what happens if we allow these urban rhythms to occasionally have a direct influence on the musical performance of an eleven-piece-ensemble?
As the movement of cars outside the concert venue triggers the rhythms that are being played, the urban dwellers not knowingly become part of the composition, the city becomes audible through the musicians. This process happens in real-time and is guided by the framework of a video-installation that surrounds the ensemble during the performance of sensing city.”
Images of the concert are available here.
Tehching Hsieh
February 23, 2009
Art takes total commitment, but few artists maintain it around the clock. An exception is the Taiwanese-born performance artist Tehching Hsieh (pronounced dur-ching shay), specifically, the five, grueling one-year pieces he executed, mostly in New York, from 1978 to 1986. Their subject and material was time itself.
The Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small, gripping exhibition to the documentation of “Cage Piece” (1978-79), the first of Mr. Hsieh’s One Year Performances. It entailed spending a year in near-solitary confinement in a cell-like cage doing absolutely nothing. The show makes an altogether apt debut for the Modern’s new series of project exhibitions devoted to performance art. Few pieces communicate the medium’s potential and its demands in such a basic, resonant way. (text by NYTimes)
“Performance 1: Tehching Hsieh” is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, (212) 708-9400, moma.org, through May 18.
NY Times Article
Tehching Hsieh’s site
Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980–1981. Performance view, 1980. Tehching Hsieh. Photo: Michael Shen.
“Unspoken series” , 2005 by Shoot an Iraqi
December 10, 2008
photo: Chicago Tribune
Shoot An Iraqi, Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, is the name of the book by Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi born artist currently an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and author and journalist Kari Lydersen (Amazon UK and USA.)
Fortunately, I had a chance to visit Wafaa Bilal (who is a great human being) during his one-month experience as a paintball target at Flatfile Galleries. In this gallery he created an “unsettling interactive performancepiece” called “Domestic Tension.” For one month, Bilal lived alone in a replica of his bedroom in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers. On his website (Crude Oils), visitors from around the world were able to shoot at him 24 hours a day. After different news broadcasts released the information, the virtual audience grew by the thousands and became worldwide.
photo: Chicago Tribune
photo: Chicago Tribune
photo: Dimitris Michalaros
This book is published by City Lights
“Once I picked up this manuscript, I could not put it down. There is something so urgent and compelling about Bilal’s story, as though he is speaking to our time. His story is not just for those interested in the arts; it is a human story of the horror, frustration, and tragedies of war.”
—Mary Flanagan, artist and author of re:skin (MIT Press)
“This is an unsettling and gripping book. It poignantly recounts a dark and imaginative experiment inspired by an excruciating and ghastly reality. Its unsettling effects couldn’t be more welcome: we desperately need to be shocked out of our collective zombification, and this book does that by leading us through a wild labyrinth at once aesthetic, political, and existential. Potent stuff.”
—Danny Postel, author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran
post by Wanderlust
Facial Dancefloor with Daito Manabe
October 31, 2008Daito Manabe stimulates his facial muscles with small electric pulses, synced to music. The result is brilliant, he now has to figure out how the hide the cables, then it would be an premium video clip.
Born in 1976.B of Mathemati[k]s at Tokyo University of Science.
After working as a system engineer and a programmer, he graduated from IAMAS(International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences) in 2004.
Redefining the existent media and technologies from unique angles, I have been active in the various fields, such as art, design, and even research and development. I produce the output of sounds, images, and light through analyzing and transforming the numerical values gained from a various sensors and input devices.
And Internationally acting Turntablist and Sound Artist using surround/oscillation/super low frequency technology and pursuing sensual peculiarity, commonality and interaction. (text from his site)
post by Wanderlust
The Vertical Bed
October 19, 2008During the Conflux weekend, Jamie O’Shea was submitting his body to polyphasic sleep, the practice of sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period.
The Vertical Bed in action, at Broadway and 33rd St. in New York for a 40 minute nap at 2:00 pm. Naps where repeated at four hour intervals throughout the weekend for Conflux. Subject could smell the cologne of passersby, and dreamed of a subversive van. time-lapse video, a 40 minute nap compressed to 2 minutes.
Concealed harnesses ensure that Jamie didn’t fall over. He also wore noise canceling headphones and double-mirrored sunglasses, padded with little cushions to keep his eyelid closed. In case of bad weather, an umbrella clips in the infrastructure for shelter.
The project is designed for the visual performance of an alternate way of occupying urban space, born partly out of fantasies of minimal need and elegant futurism, and partly out of fears of the dehumanization of space. Occupants will absorb the vertical structure of urban architecture into their bodies. The vertical sleeper is in a constant state of readiness, never succumbing to collapse. Homelessness is most often marked by the forbidden act of lying down on the sidewalk, an act that the vertical bed circumvents. (thanks to WMMNA)
post by Wanderlust
Guy Ben-Ner’s Treehouse Kit
September 16, 2008
“In Treehouse Kit, Ben-Ner offers a hilarious new reading of the myth of Robinson Crusoe and our ready-to-assemble society. The installation consists of two components: a modular, wood sculpture—the tree—and a video in which the artist himself plays Crusoe, complete with his symbolic attributes: a long beard and… blue-flowered Bermuda shorts! Parodying “how-to” videos and the illusion of “building” from a kit, our latter-day Crusoe dismantles the tree and cleverly puts it back together in the form of furniture: a rocking chair, a table, a parasol, a bed. The simultaneous presentation of the two parts (video and sculpture) takes us on a circular journey in which the furniture made from the tree is actually the material from which the tree was created, and so forth.”
(text by MACM)
MORE ABOUT TREEHOUSE
post by WANDERLUST
imPOSTers
September 5, 2008
Tony Clifton
Ferdinand Demara
imposter – a person who makes deceitful pretenses
faker, impostor, pseud, pseudo, role player, sham, shammer, pretender, fraud, fake
beguiler, cheater, deceiver, trickster, slicker, cheat – someone who leads you to believe something that is not true
name dropper – someone who pretends that famous people are his/her friends
ringer – a contestant entered in a competition under false pretenses
Have a close look at these stamps. Recognize anybody? Tony Clifton (Andy Kaufman’s alter Ego), Frank Abagnale (Catch me if you can!), and John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) are just 3 of these famous historical imposters. So why are they on a postage stamp? Well, the stamps are fake, and thats the point!
The project “imPOSTer” was created by by Chicago designer TEWZ to honor and remember the most deceitful imposters throughout history by creating fake stamps, and then sending them through the United States postal system. The portraits of DAVID HAMPTON, FERDINAND DEMARA, FRANK ABAGNALE, JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN, TONY CLIFTON, WILHELM VOIGHT, were all good enough to fool the United States Postal System. (for more information check TEWZ 1)
David Hampton
Frank Abagnale
Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (born April 27, 1948) is an American former check confidence trickster, forger and impostor who, for five years in the 1960s, passed bad checks worth about $2.5 million in 26 countries. During this time, he used at least eight aliases to cash bad checks. Currently he runs Abagnale and Associates, a financial fraud consultancy company. His life story provided the inspiration for the feature film Catch Me if You Can, based on his ghostwritten biography of the same name. (wiki)
http://www.tewz1.com/
Thousands of faces
August 13, 2008
If you ever run out of options on how to dress for work, school, or any other crowded place, take a look to and learn from the advice of Rusell Higgs.
Russell Higgs was born in 1960, in Oswestry army camp, Shropshire, England. He currently lives in East London. Russell is an artist, transhumanist, and civil disobedience activist. At the end of 2000 Russell was remanded in prison segregation for choosing not to wear clothing in a public space. He was motivated by a commitment to a simple statement of fact: the visible human appearance is not a crime. He remained continuously unclothed for a month, imprisoned on non-imprisonable charges until he was eventually released and the charges were quietly dropped. Russell is currently an unwaged citizen, because 9-to-5 existence does not accommodate a person whose priority is experimental inquiry. (source)
His Statement
” I pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora, fauna, human and posthuman life that it supports. One planet, indivisible, with safe air, water & soil, economic justice, equal rights and peace for all.”
Visit his site for a daily shot…HERE!
I’m too sad to tell you
June 23, 2008Oh Bas Jan Ader…where did you go?
Dutch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader was last seen in 1975 when he took off in what would have been the smallest sailboat ever to cross the Atlantic. He left behind a small oeuvre, often using gravity as a medium, which more than 30 years after his disappearance at sea is more influential than ever before.
Ader once wrote, “The sea, the land, the artist has with great sadness known they too will be no more.”
………………………………………………………………BAS JAN ADER
Tim Knowles follows nature
June 17, 2008
Tim Knowles, Windwalk #1, 10.08.07, The final work is comprised of the GPS plot as a 4metre long graphite wall drawing, a video of the walk, a C-type print, an inkjet printed text, and the wind vane.
Part of Tim Knowles statement says:
“The exploration of Chance and Process is core to my artistic practice. Akin to scientific experimentation and investigation, the results of my projects [although operating within carefully developed controls and parameters] are unpredictable and outside my control. It is the wind, postmen, the motion of a vehicle, or players of a game that unwittingly determine the outcome. These drawings produced by the wind or in a vehicle, have a very unique and un-human quality and aesthetic. The viewer may try to decipher these varying marks, lines and patterns, in order to make certain conclusions, eg. the best courier, the weather conditions or the type of sport played.”
Tree drawings ” 4 panel Weeping Wellow, 2006, 50 pens suspended from the branches of a Weeping Willow tree create a drawing on 4 panels placed horizontally beneath the tree. The drawing is accompanied by a looped video of its production.
400 Electric Guitars
June 12, 2008
All guitarists go join Rhys Chatham in his next performance (August 15) at the Lincoln Center in New York.
In 2005, the New York composer Rhys Chatham was commissioned by the city of Paris to write a piece of music. The result was A Crimson Grail, a work for 400 electric guitars, which premiered at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur for La Nuit Blanche, an all-night arts festival. For its first U.S. performance, the work has been extensively revised by the composer for an outdoor performance at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park, to suit the dynamics of the park’s outdoor acoustic. A Crimson Grail will call on the talents of 200 guitarists (including 16 electric bassists), who will be selected from an applicant pool drawing on the many talents of musicians in New York City and beyond.
Guitar strings generously provided by D’Addario
