Contemporary art is increasingly part of a wider network of cultural practices, related through a common set of references in cultural theory. Within Europe, relations between national theoretical traditions have become more fluid and dynamic, creating an increasingly transnational—or postnational—space for European cultural and art theory. This book offers a snapshot of recent influential work in contemporary art and political theory in France, Italy, and Germany, in the form of original writings by major representatives of each of the three overlapping national traditions.
In France, debates center on the status and possibilities of the image. Éric Alliez, Georges Didi-Huberman, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Jacques Rancière each adopt a distinctive approach to the making, undoing, and remaking of aesthetic images in contemporary art and their political significance. From Italy, Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, and Franco Berardi each address the “immaterial” situation of contemporary art. From Germany, Peter Sloterdijk, Peter Weibel, and Boris Groys reassess the contemporary legacy of postwar art, demonstrating appropriations of vitalism, structuralism, and deconstruction, respectively.
Bruno Latour’s forthcoming book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. We discuss his intellectual trajectory leading up to actor–network theory and the pluralistic philosophy underlying his new, ‘positive’ anthropology of modernity.
Bruno Latour’s work on actor–network theory (ANT) put him at the forefront of a wave of ethnographic research on scientists ‘in action’ in their laboratories and in the wider world. Starting with 1979’s Laboratory Life, his many books, written independently and in collaboration, have traced the chains of reference that connect instrumental inscriptions in labs to factual statements in journals and, eventually, to the laws of nature found in textbooks. Along the way, he has shown, facts take on increasing ontological weight, growing increasingly ‘universal’ through extensions of the scale and reach of networks and alliances between humans and nonhumans. His work has also contributed to rethinkings of modernity, leading scholars to study how scientists, engineers, and their heterogeneous allies have redefined and transformed both nature and society. Compelling, controversial, and constantly on the move, Latour’s arguments and collective projects have helped orient many research perspectives in Science and Technology Studies (STS) over the past three decades, creating bridges between science studies and anthropology, history, literary studies, art history, and environmental studies; philosophers have also increasingly engaged with his ideas (e.g. Bennett, 2010; Harman, 2009; Rouse, 1987; as well as Latour, 2010).
For the next round of discussion I’d like to shift the subject to the physical environment, posing the question, Is architecture rational?
Much of the newer work we see as we walk the streets of the city whether it’s New York, Seattle, Dubai, or the newer sections of Copenhagen, is more dramatic than architecture once was: taller, swoopier, twistier, less symmetrical. Architectural language, informed by the capabilities of parametric software and computerized fabrication tools, has become more fluid and less rectilinear.
From the onlooker’s perspective, it looks a lot like style. But when you talk to an architect, you often wind up having a conversation about how utterly pragmatic the building in question is.
For instance, the Seattle Central Library by OMA, completed in 2004. The lead architect on the project, Joshua Prince-Ramus, once told me: “Style freaks us out, the very word style.” He went on to explain the strange shape of the building—it looks like a monstrous mechanical jaw—by showing a diagram made by the library’s administrators of all the functions they required in the new building. Prince-Ramus claimed the architects translated the librarians’ chart directly into architectural form. He called this method “hyperrational.”
Book-ish Territory: A Manual of Alternative Library Tactics by architect NIkki O’Loughlin is an exciting and interesting way of conceptualizing the idea of libraries as a public space not just for the public but by the public. Read it HERE
Through an un-usual DNA collection method, American artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures from the analyses of genetic material collected in public places. From cigarette butts to hair samples, she works using random traces left behind from un-suspecting strangers. In a statement by Dewey-Hagborg, ‘Stranger Visions’ calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance. Using DNA facial modeling software and a 3D printer, physical models are conceived – reconstructed from ethnic profiles, eye color and hair color.
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, installation view (detail) the Bluecoat, Liverpool. 2013. Photo Jon Barraclough.
Francois Dallegret, Ted’s Opera Cosmic Space Suit, 1968, Courtesy the artist (c) the artist.
Space Dog Suit. Image courtesy the National Space Centre.
Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has curated an exhibition that explores the magical world of new technology, as well as tracing its connections to the beliefs of our distant past.
Historical and contemporary works of art, videos, machines, archaeological artefacts and iconic objects, like the giant inflatable cartoon figure of Felix the Cat – the first image ever transmitted on TV – inhabit an “enchanted landscape” created in Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, where objects seem to be communicating with each other and with us.
In Leckey’s exhibition “magic is literally in the air.” It reflects on a world where technology can bring inanimate “things” to life. Where websites predict what we want, we can ask our mobile phones for directions and smart fridges suggest recipes, count calories and even switch on the oven. By digitising objects, it can also make them “disappear” from the material world, re-emerging in any place or era.
Today, art is simple, direct and clear. No illusions. Today, art could not possibly function as l’art pour art, or ‘art as art’, or ‘art as idea as idea’. Unlike historicism, it does not aspire to exalted objectives (aesthetical or political), as it did during the epoch of historical modernism1, neither is it eclectically dispersed or decentered as pure pleasure like in the era of consumer post-modernism.(2) Today, art subjects are socially explicit(3), culturally referential(4) and artistically realistic(5). The relationship between art and reality(6) is ontological.
Art is not a mirror representation of the world, but it is a representative, or rather a probe of an ‘artistic action’ in the world that is a ‘new-or-other’ nature. Here the term ‘nature’ denotes polysemy of culture, or to be more precise, the multifold effects of the struggle for power inside culture and society. In the course of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, this was the ‘class struggle’ between capitalists and workers. In the second half of the 20th century the struggle was waged between politically opposed blocs (the East and the West) in the symmetrically split world (influential spheres). Today it is the struggle between the ‘center’ and ‘margins’:
- within individual (localized) societies,
- within culture as new nature,
- within private or public art of communication,
- within global politics,
- within local or global economy,
- within the distribution of power inside our everyday,
- within production, exchange and consumption of values (information, influence, pleasure).
When Michigan State University artist Adam Brown learned of a type of bacteria, Cupriavidus metallidurans, that can extract pure gold from the toxic solution gold chloride (a totally artificial salt), he hurried to an expert colleague, microbiologist Kazem Kashefi, with a question: “Is it possible to make enough gold to put in the palm of my hand?” Brown merely wanted to satisfy his intellectual and artistic curiosity, inspired by the gold-tinted roots of alchemy, the precursor of modern chemistry.
Soon thereafter, Kashefi and Brown set to work designing a half-experiment, half-art-exhibit that exposes C. metallidurans to gold chloride in a hydrogen-gas-rich atmosphere that serves as a source of food. Over the course of a week, the bacteria gradually strip-mined the toxic liquid, leaving flecks of pure 24-karat gold behind.
The inefficient technique won’t supplant traditional mining, but the idea of using microbes as production facilities for a range of rare and difficult-to-produce materials has been gaining traction over the past several years.
Excerpt from an article written by Gregory Mone at Discover. Continue HERE
Escherichia coli. Science Photo Library/Pennsylvania State University
Touring internationally since 2008, “Play Me, I’m Yours” is an artwork by British artist Luke Jerram. Reaching over two million people worldwide – more than 700 pianos have already been installed in 34 cities across the globe, from New York to London, bearing the simple instruction ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’.
Located in public parks, bus shelters and train stations, outside galleries and markets and even on bridges and ferries the pianos are available for any member of the public to play and enjoy. Who plays them and how long they remain on the streets is up to each community. Many pianos are personalised and decorated by artists or the local community. By creating a place of exchange ‘Play Me, I’m Yours’ invites the public to engage with, activate and take ownership of their urban environment.
Play Me, I’m Yours is currently taking place in Monterey in California until 24 March 2013. Watch out for Street Pianos coming to Munich, Cleveland OH, Omaha NE and Boston MA later in 2013! Watch this space as we will be announcing further new cities for 2013 over the coming months.
The Sky Orchestra is an artwork designed to deliver music to sleeping people from out of the sky. A form of provocative urban art, Sky Orchestra questions the boundaries of public artwork, private space and the ownership of the sky.
The Sky Orchestra is made up of seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, which take off (at dawn or dusk) and fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of a musical score, creating a massive audio landscape.
Many thousands of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. A form of provocative acoustic urban art, Sky Orchestra questions the boundaries of public artwork, private space and the ownership of the sky.
Blind Smell Stick P1 is the first working prototype. Inside P1 are some filters and mini ventilators working on 4 batteries. It’s easier to smell even if you’re not such a good smeller, depending of the place, the smell, humidity and heat the scents will be more intense. A smell concept by Peter De Cupere.
Of all the startups that launched last year, Fuzz is certainly one of the most intriguing and the most overlooked. Describing itself as a “people-powered radio” that is completely “robot-free,” Fuzz bucks the trend toward ever greater reliance on algorithms in discovering new music. Fuzz celebrates the role played by human DJs—regular users who are invited to upload their own music to the site in order to create and share their own “radio stations.”
The idea—or, perhaps, hope—behind Fuzz is that human curators can still deliver something that algorithms cannot; it aspires to be the opposite of Pandora, in which the algorithms do all the heavy lifting. As its founder, Jeff Yasuda, told Bloomberg News last September, “there’s a big need for a curated type of experience and just getting back to the belief that the most compelling recommendations come from a human being.”
But while Fuzz’s launch attracted little attention, the growing role of algorithms in all stages of artistic production is becoming impossible to ignore. Most recently, this role was highlighted by Andrew Leonard, the technology critic for Salon, in an intriguing article about House of Cards, Netflix’s first foray into original programming. The series’ origin myth is by now well-known: Having studied its user logs, Netflix discovered that a remake of the British series of the same name could be a huge hit, especially if it also featured Kevin Spacey and was directed by David Fincher.
Excerpt from an article written by Evgeny Morozov at Slate. Continue THERE
Special effects…are coup de théatres, thunderclaps that shock you: a burst; an eruption; something small, like an insect down your back; a wall dissolving suddenly.—from The Vatican to Vegas
A richly illustrated journey through five centuries of optical illusions and other wonders. A guided tour through special-effects environments from 1550 to the present, Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects demonstrates how Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered interactive, cinematic, and even digital environments. As in our era, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illusion serviced a global culture and even relied on “software” of a kind: solid geometry for architecture, optics, sculpture, painting and theater. As if from a cryonic thaw, these forms have reemerged very clearly in recent decades. And to manage all this friendly disaster, modern special effects have evolved a unique grammar as precise as the rules of film, theater, and music. Klein reviews this syntax and demonstrates how special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity and economic relations, but an instructive parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.
During the early nineties, Lucinda Devlin systematically took photographs of gas chambers, injection rooms, electric chairs and death cells in rural towns and cities in the United States. She entitled the series “Omega Suites” — alluding to the final letter of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor for the end. Seemingly an examination of the death penalty, her austere, haunting images are actually metaphors that question the culture in America, where 70 percent of citizens support the death penalty. More than 3000 Americans have been sentenced to death and are in final holding cells, where they wait an average of 10 years before being executed.
In Lucinda Devlin’s photographs, the death cell represents aspects of American society and its accompanying mentality. One image shows an electric chair in the bright yellow color of American school buses which prison officers named “Yellow Mama”. Wooden paneling and carpets lend an almost cozy atmosphere to the setting. Another electric chair placed in the center of a room represents the character of a throne amid emptiness and clinical sterility. Elsewhere, the somber cross-like stretcher used for lethal injections suggests that executions are religious rituals, replete with a celebratory audience (seated on chairs opposite).
Icy and compelling, the photographs present a clearly defined and hermetically sealed concept of the world which is characterized by taking extreme measures against the ominous — instead of attempting integration. They do so in a precise, exquisite and seductive way while intellectually repelling us.
“Commercial speech – advertising – makes up most of what we share as a culture…As the language of commercialism has become louder, the language of high culture has become quieter.” – James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World
Throughout the modern period, advertising and consumer culture have dominated everyday life; moreover, the trappings of commercialism permeate much of supposed ‘high culture’. Commodities clutter the pages of novels from Dickens and Zola to Bret Easton Ellis; works by Joyce and DeLillo are enlivened by advertising jingles and slogans; brands and trademarks pervade the practice of artists from Picasso to Warhol and the visualisation of consumer desire is appropriated and challenged in the work of Richard Hamilton and Martha Rosler.
Whether celebrating or critiquing advertising and consumer culture, art reflects our enduring fascination with them, despite research into the psychological effects of advertising, concerns over the evils of consumerism, and the often sinister nature of market research. The recent television show Mad Men, for instance, has revivified interest and scholarly debate surrounding the power of advertising and the consumer, as well as restaging debates around sexism, truth and the heteronormative ideal. Meanwhile, sociology in the wake of Erving Goffman continues to explore advertising’s uses and abuses of gender, identity and desire. Countervailing against consumerism and advertising’s many critics, theorists such as Michel de Certeau and the critical movement Thing Theory have endeavoured to examine advertising and consumer culture from a standpoint that goes beyond the model of the ‘passive consumer’ or Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.
Topics for discussion may include but are by no means limited to:
- The ways in which advertising and consumer culture intersect with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity
- Psychological/psychoanalytic perspectives on advertising and consumer behaviour; how identity is created and reflected through participation in consumer culture; the legacy of Freud and Bernays.
- How artists have appropriated the techniques of advertising, or have been co-opted by advertising and commodity culture (Koons, Rosler, Murakami, Kusama and Hirst) -Theorists who have engaged with advertising and consumer culture (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Certeau, Fukuyama, Goffman, Klein, Marx, McLuhan).
- The use of music in advertisements.
- The formal innovations literature has adopted to create a poetics of advertising/consumer culture.
- Shopping, the rise of the department store, brand names, and their representation in culture.
- Histories of advertising agencies or ‘ad-men’.
- How the importance of advertising in art may challenge the boundaries between high and low culture and/or modernism and postmodernism.
- Anti-consumerist movements (the Situationist International, Adbusters) and strategies (détournement, culture jamming).
- The recent transformations advertising has undergone as a result of social media -The advert as spectacle or ‘event’ (celebrity endorsements, Christmas advertising, product placement, Pawel Althamer’s Real Time Movie).
- Figures who have worked in advertising, either before or during their artistic careers (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, DeLillo, Warhol, Lynch).
- Political advertising and the roles of politics in advertising.
Submissions are now open for the Advertising and Consumer Culture symposium. More info HERE
While he may shelter behind a concealed identity, he advocates a direct connection between an artist and his constituency. “There’s a whole new audience out there, and it’s never been easier to sell [one’s art],” Banksy has maintained. “You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful, all you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.”
Excerpt from an article written by Will Ellsworth-Jones. Continue HERE
WHEN TWO OF THE GREATEST artistic talents of all time, living in the same urban hothouse, are enticed into intense rivalry by leaders and patrons of their community, the consequence is a consummate competition exacerbated by the politics of pride and instability. The ego-driven desire to surpass a rival can uncover suns of genius casting long-term shadows. In this particular instance, the artists happen to be the middle-aged Leonardo da Vinci and the zealous, energetic Michelangelo, a generation younger.
The place is republican Florence; the focal time is 1503 to 1506, with many implications far beyond, when the Medici family, tossed from power late in the 15th century, successfully schemed to regain firm control (they ultimately did in 1530). By then Leonardo had died in France as a self-imposed exile and court painter to the king, and Michelangelo had gone to Rome, first to build a mausoleum for the Pope and later to labor on his masterwork, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Court painter to the Pope and hardly alone, he was one of the architects who figured out the math needed to raise Bramante’s immense dome over St. Peter’s.
Excerpt from a review by Michael Kammen on The Lost Battles. Continue HERE
Crafting Life is a symposium accompanying the opening of the exhibition Transformism at the John Hansard Gallery, enabling an exploration of some of the ideas suggested by the artists’ works and exploring how crafted life forms create an interplay between art, design, science and technology.
The cultivation and crafting of biological life has existed for centuries, both for aesthetic and practical purposes. Today, with the advancement of bioscientific tools, techniques and materials, these new forms are now not only produced by farms and individuals, but in laboratories and factories, with ‘crafting’ taking place on the molecular level.
In this symposium, we will begin to examine, from different disciplinary perspectives, some of the implications of applying new scientific and technological tools to the manipulation of living forms and systems, what this means for our relationship with non-human life, and the new realm of aesthetic and forms it opens up.
At the moment, we are bound to the americans military GPS and network companies. As we are using digital maps empowered with GPS, which are curated and therefor have impact on our navigation and experience of our environment, we also have to think about the given technology. The technology is closed at the moment and can be curated or shut down at any time.
This navigation system is open. Which means it is not run by companies nor control. The goal is to gather interested people on the web platform openps.org to develop the necessary software, hardware and testing processes. Anybody who is interested, from beginner to professionals can participate and contribute their knowledge to the community and this system.
To use given things in cities and reuse them for the projects needs is one aim of this project.
The idea is to use seismic frequencies, produced by generators in power plants, turbines in pumping stations or other large machines running in factories. These generators, machines etc. are producing seismic activity, distributed over the ground.
The sensor prototype can detect seismic waves on the ground, walls or anything with enough contact to the ground. At the current stage of this project the sensor can detect and collect different frequencies.
To calculate the noise in a city out of the received signals from the ground, the sensor has to be tuned into a specific frequency. To get a specific frequency from one machine, turbine etc. the sensor has to be as close as possible to the seismic source to receive a clean and strong signal at least once.
When at least three signals and their positions on a map are known, one can calculate the position within these three signals.
In this early stage, the project will still rely on GPS and maps. With the process of expanding the new network of seismic sources, it can be possible to build an own positioning system.
Last month, 100 students attending the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design (NSCAD) interrupted a board meeting to read their manifesto.
“Our manifesto was collectively written by the student faculty and staff to reaffirm what is essentially to NSCAD as a university.”
“The meeting was pretty much immediately adjourned once the students entered the room,” she says. “Half the board members left, but some stayed and had a conversation with students.”
By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.
Ms. Stephens is a hairdo archaeologist.
Her amateur scholarship is sticking a pin in the long-held assumptions among historians about the complicated, gravity-defying styles of ancient times. Basically, she has set out to prove that the ancients probably weren’t wearing wigs after all.
“This is my hairdresserly grudge match with historical representations of hairstyles,” says Ms. Stephens, who works at Studio 921 Salon & Day Spa, which offers circa 21st-century haircuts.
Excerpt from an article written by ABIGAIL PESTA at the WSJ. Continue HERE
Analysis and recreation (upon a live model) of the “seni crines” hairstyle of ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgin priestesses. Research based on ancient artifacts and primary sources. An amplificaton of the poster presented at the Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting, January 3-6, 2013.
Janet Stephens’ recreation of a possible tutulus hairstyle, ca. 40 BC using period appropriate tools and techniques. Based on a sculpture in the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Bibliography included.
The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.
Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.
Frans Evers’s The Academy of the Senses is a book wanting to be three books at once. A study of the scientific approaches to synesthesia, related to the psycho-physical research conducted by Evers during his studies at the university; an alternative art history of the twentieth century based on the double paradigm of Castel’s clavecin oculaire and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk; and a full account of the genesis of the Interfaculty Image & Sound. To encompass this entire range of subject, Evers coined a new term, “synesthetics,” to denote the experience, creative force, and study of synesthesia.
Throughout his career, Evers has profiled himself as an educational reformer. Together with electronic music pioneer Dick Raaijmakers, he started a series of projects and lectures exploring the interaction of music and fine arts, which culminated in the establishment of the first multimedia department in the Netherlands, the Interfaculty Image & Sound at the University of the Arts in The Hague, which Evers headed from 1989 until 2007. This book maps out the theoretical and artistic foundations of this educational reform project, as well as its synesthetic output: large multi-media performances such as a reworking of Anton Schoenberg’s Die Glückliche Hand, Mondrian’s Promenoir, and Scheuer im Haag.
The Academy of the Senses is a “source book,” a work of inspiration, rather than a rigid account of historical facts. It provides anyone with an interest in the wondrous realm of multimedia arts and synesthesia as a creative force, whether student or professional, an introduction into the foundations and extensions of seeing sound and hearing colors throughout the centuries.
“The future of” is a participatory book project initiated by Crap is good which tries to provide an insight into the future role of architecture. Realizing the problematic nature of the simple question ‘What is the future of Architecture?’ we feel it is still somehow relevant in describing the architectural practice of today.
Every architectural attempt starts by making a representation of an imaginative situation or design, which will happen, or could happen in the future. In many cases an architectural design remains a future plan, and in times of economical and political crisis, the question of what comes next, gains relevance. So, while architects shape the future, this book is concerning about the future of architecture.
“Do not sit on the art!” is something you don’t hear very often at contemporary art shows, making Ina Weber’s new solo exhibition Architectures, Memories, Utopias at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee an exception. The confusion of some attendees (at least three on Sunday afternoon) is understandable: Weber makes sly, playful sculptures that mimic the ordinary objects and mundane buildings of the modern city. Consequently the red bench, one of a cluster of objects that make up the show’s first work Fußgängerzone (“Pedestrian Zone”), could easily be mistaken for, well – a red bench. Upon a closer look the artifice becomes apparent, but the object-imitations hew close enough to the originals to provoke our normal reactions to such objects, confounding in their similarity.
Weber is adroit in small acts of deception (a skill she might have picked up from the Martin Kippenberger, who taught her at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel). In one room of the exhibition, 13 small sculptures of ceramic and concrete depict unassuming buildings in Berlin and beyond: a Chinese restaurant, a department store, a Mietskaserne, a post-war apartment block. Sitting in two rows directly on the floor, at the mercy of wandering toddlers, the diminutive models cut a sharp contrast to the oversized and ungainly sculptures on display elsewhere in the show. These distortions of scale and proportion in Weber’s work are disconcerting. Something is off here, but what exactly, is hard to say.
It is like the message above Dante’s Gates of Hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Except that we are not entering hell, we are entering an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The message at the Gates of MoMA is in the form of a question. It asks, “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” The writer of the message is neither God nor Satan. He was a human being, and from Russia. His name was Wassily Kandinsky.
The attempt to answer Kandinsky’s question led to a transformation in painting the implications of which are still being felt today. The transformation was Abstraction. Painters, just a few years prior to Kandinsky, happily portrayed human beings and animals and landscapes and historical events. After Kandinsky, pure forms and shapes and colors took over the canvas. This was a shocking and more or less unprecedented development. It took the art world by storm and carried the oft-bewildered public along with it.
Excerpt from an article written by Morgan Meis at The Smart Set. Continue HERE
If humans were able to hear light and parse the poetry of the spectrum, then perhaps there would be no need for Brian Eno, who seems to do it effortlessly. While the rest of us are generally content to hear sound, Eno can clearly see it. How else to explain the elaborate sonic color fields and glowing soundscapes that he creates, which feel as much like floating shapes and waves of light as they do music? And how else to make sense of a body of work that has been by turns challenging and definitive and spread across an expanse of disparate worlds and genres, from his early work with Roxy Music, to his ever-evolving solo oeuvre, to the colossal swoosh of his frequent collaborations with U2, to his numerous art projects, compositional gambits, and multimedia installations—not to mention the three ambient-music-generating apps, Scape, Bloom, and Trope, that he has created with musician and software designer Peter Chilvers.
ANDERSON: You know, when we were working in New York, we had this thing about, “If it goes with the river, then it goes on the record.” I always think of that. How would you describe your criteria for that? I could think of mine, but when you looked at the river, what would you say the music had to do or not do?
ENO: Well, for me, it was something to do with stillness and non-chaoticness—some sort of belonging, rather than something contrived that just appeared last night and will disappear this evening. It was the sense of wanting to make something that felt like it had a place in the world, rather than something that you just kind of stuck on for a little while to see how it works. The feeling of something that felt rooted and properly positioned in that sense, I suppose. That was what the river was for—to remind me of that link.
Text and Interview by Laurie Anderson. Photography Sølve Sundsbø. Continue HERE
TAAK is an international platform that develops innovative art projects and educational programmes relating to social issues such as ecology, urbanisation, social design and human rights. TAAK places topics of public interest on the agenda and develops innovative strategies and perspectives for a changing world. Art and culture shape and express values that can unite different groups in society. By using art to mobilise artists, commissioners, citizens and organisations around specific themes, TAAK investigates how new types of social initiatives and citizenship may arise.
For five years now Open is a cahier that reflects upon contemporary public domain from a cultural perspective. Through a thematic investigation into the changing conditions of public domain and through new ideas relating to this space, Open aims to make a structural contribution to the development of theories about these subjects and to function as a platform for reflection on socio-cultural and artistic practices. Among the international authors writing for Open are philosophers of culture, sociologists, media theorists, architecture and art critics and political scientists.
Open also works together with artists and designers, often in the form of special supplements, and occasionally invites guest editors to produce issues. The cahier is aimed at a diverse public that is interested in critical discourses and discussions about the relationship between cultural production and the public domain, and in the implications for this of processes such as globalization and mediatisation. Open wants to thus create and stimulate autonomous and experimental ideas concerning art and the public domain.
In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.
Wellcome’s winter exhibition showcases some 300 works from a unique collection devoted to the iconography of death and our complex and contradictory attitudes towards it. Assembled by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer based in Chicago, the collection is spectacularly diverse, including art works, historical artefacts, scientific specimens and ephemera from across the world. Rare prints by Rembrandt, Dürer and Goya will be displayed alongside anatomical drawings, war art and antique metamorphic postcards; human remains will be juxtaposed with Renaissance vanitas paintings and twentieth century installations celebrating Mexico’s Day of the Dead. From a group of ancient Incan skulls, to a spectacular chandelier made of 3000 plaster-cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey, this singular collection, by turns disturbing, macabre and moving, opens a window upon our enduring desire to make peace with death.
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