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.

Artists include:

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
Kiluanji Kia Henda
Luis Dourado
Mark Aerial Waller
Neïl Beloufa
Neill Blomkamp
Omer Fast
Pawel Althamer
The ARPANET Dialogues
Wanuri Kahiu

Text via Arnolfini. More Info HERE. Images via This is Tomorrow

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.

Text via Konst & Teknik

The Institute of Incoherent Cinematography promotes the image of silent film and its representation in the form of live setting to music.

Activities

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.

WE ARE FIERCE

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.

Via WIRED

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.

Text via TATE

See Pablo Bronstein on 26 April, Emily Roysdon on 31 May, Harrell Fletcher on 28 June and Joan Jonas later in the year.

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.

Text taken from
The Abramović Method

“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.

Via Whitney Museum of American Art

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)

More Info HERE

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.

Via Dia:Beacon

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

More Info HERE

Via Progressive Geographies

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.)

Call for Proposals HERE