Published and Curated

Kunsthalle Lissabon | Mauro Cerqueira: Sua boca, aberta para gritar, estava cheia de terra

2009-09-19T20:36:00.009+01:00

Sua boca, aberta para gritar, estava cheia de terra from mauro cerqueira on Vimeo.

Press release for Mauro Cerqueira's Sua boca, aberta para gritar, estava cheia de terra:

Mauro Cerqueira is presenting, in what is Kunsthalle Lissabon's second exhibition, the project Sua boca, aberta para gritar, estava cheia de terra. The title of the show, a direct quote from the Portuguese translation of Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers. The Realist (Part III), refers to the artist's interest in developing a body of work that is anchored more to an ideosyncratic praxis than to the production of a verbal discursivity (or at least one that could be verbally translated). Split in two different, yet complementary moments, the show will open on September 10th in a Kunsthalle Lissabon completely altered in order to welcome a unique performative exercise by Mauro Cerqueira who will then leave the results, and the remains, of that performance accessible to Kunsthalle Lissabon's visitors. One week later, on September 18th, the final part of this project will be presented. Departing from the preassumptions, but mostly from the consequences of his initial performative action, the artist will develop a second body of work that will not only establish a dialog, but also will try to answer to the questions left unanswered by the initial episode.

Mauro Cerqueira was born in Guimarães in 1982. Having studied Artes/Desenho at Escola Superior Artística do Porto – Extensão de Guimarães, he now lives and works in Porto. Cerqueira has started his artistic activity recently, in second half of this decade and some of his solo shows include Lição nº 2, Espaço Campanhã, Porto, 2009; Desenhos do Sol, Round the Corner, Lisbon, 2009; Derrapagem, Galeria Reflexus, Porto, 2008 and A Festa do Fim do Mundo, A Sala, Porto, 2008. He also was part of the following group shows: Entroncamento, Espaço Avenida 211, Lisbon, 2009; Prémio EDP Novos Artistas, Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon, 2009; Part-ilha, Spike Island, Bristol, United Kingdom, 2008 and Pilot: 3, Venice, Italy and Chelsea College of Arts & Design, London, United Kingdom, 2007. He is also responsible, in partnership with André Sousa, for the curatorial project A Certain Lack of Coherence, in Porto. More recently, Cerqueira has been awarded an honorary mention at Prémio EDP Novos Artistas 2008. He is represented by Galeria Graça Brandão in Lisbon and by Galeria Reflexus in Porto.

O galerista deseja que o artista mantenha o anonimato

2009-09-19T20:30:00.002+01:00

(comissioned by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea for the project with the same name)

O que é que um nome esconde? Uma filiação, um contexto específico, uma idiossincracia auto legitimada? Tudo isto e provavelmente mais. Um nome age como marcador (um identificador, se preferirmos) que diferencia o individual do colectivo, o pessoal do comum. O nome delimita uma personalidade e, consequentemente, uma subjectividade. No caso de o nome referir um autor, a questão torna-se mais complexa. A marca autoral dá continuidade, e coerência, a uma prática, torna-a apreensível e explicável à luz da tal subjectividade que já mencionámos. Mas funciona também como garante de relevância cultural, e através da comodificação dessa mesma relevância, de valor económico. Um nome vale dinheiro.

O título deste projecto é auto explicativo; ele é, simplesmente, o que o título indica: o galerista deseja que o artista mantenha o anonimato. O mecanismo de comodificação da ficção autoral, de que a figura do galerista depende para sobreviver, é aqui aniquilada num jogo irónico e a prática comercial automaticamente posta em causa. Quem irá adquirir para a sua colecção privada (ou institucional) algo sobre cujo autor não se sabe absolutamente nada, identidade incluída? Como é que se prescreve a atribuição de um preço, quando o artista (o autor) não sendo anónimo (porque não o é) também não é revelado? E como, fazendo o percurso inverso, se poderá aferir da relevância cultural, que neste caso poderá, ou não prescrever o valor económico, se a continuidade autoral é absolutamente desconhecida?

Se o autor é uma ficção, o que serão estes projectos?

O galerista será o único que saberá responder...

Kunsthalle Lissabon | space opening and Nuno Sousa Vieira: X-Office for a Sculpture

2009-08-11T17:17:00.011+01:00

Curatorial statement for the overall project (Portuguese only):

Uma exposição pode ser pensada como um ponto fulcral onde convergem conceitos e convenções relacionados com a prática artística contemporânea. É também o local onde os objectos que têm origem nessa mesma prática são tornados acessíveis a uma audiência e, também, onde narrativas específicas são activadas. Além disso, toda a forma de apresentação de um conjunto de obras não só estabelece relações entre artista, arte, instituição e audiência, como dá origem a rotinas e rituais de consumo, apreciação e interacção específicos. É exactamente este poder de atribuição de significados, criação de contextos e posicionamento da audiência que sugere a relevância de um possível reequacionamento crítico e de uma eventual subversão de modelos expositivos tradicionais, das suas convenções de apresentação de obras e construção de significados. Estratégias mais contextuais de realização de exposições podem, e devem, desafiar as hierarquias e categorizações existentes, através das quais relações na arte contemporãnea e, de modo mais abrangente, na produção cultural actual, tendem a ser reproduzidas de forma automática e incessante.

Kunsthalle Lissabon é um projecto de João Mourão e Luís Silva

Press release for Nuno Sousa Vieira's X-Office for a Sculpture:

X-Office for a Sculpture is Kunsthalle Lissabon's first curatorial proposal and it is the direct result of an invitation done to artist Nuno Sousa Vieira to develop a context-responsive project.
Departing from the physical space Kunsthalle Lissabon occupies and using an architectural structure already existing there, Sousa Vieira presents a project that recontextualizes the characteristics or properties of that pre-existing structure, operating what can be called an architecural deviation and, by doing so, also reconfiguring and recontextualizing the space that contained the original structure.

Nuno Sousa Vieira was born in Leiria, Portugal in 1971. Having studied Visual Arts at ESTGAD, Caldas da Rainha, he lives and works in Leiria and Lisbon. Sousa Vieira has started his artistic activity in the first half of this decade and some of his solo shows include Chão Morto, Carpe Diem, Lisbon, 2009; To Draw An Escape Plan, Galeria Graça Brandão, Lisbon, 2009; Redesenhar, Empty Cube, Lisbon, 2008; SP(H)É(I), Galeria Graça Brandão, Porto, 2006; 1 Hour Later e Impossible Rectilinear Space (m/m# 1/6), CAV, Coimbra, 2005.

Kunsthalle Lissabon | Words Don't Come Easy: Nuno Sousa Vieira

2009-08-11T17:15:00.002+01:00

Conversa entre Nuno Sousa Vieira, João Mourão e Luís Silva, a propósito da exposição X-Office for a Sculpture, realizada na Kunsthalle Lissabon, em Julho de 2009.

(versão em PDF)

O X, replicado exaustivamente e consequentemente automatizado através de expressões como, por exemplo, "X marks the spot", representa uma incógnita, o desconhecido, mas também se constitui como o local onde duas linhas concorrentes, dois percursos, se preferirmos, se interceptam, criando um ponto, definido única e exclusivamente pela sua localização no espaço. O que é que o X no título deste projecto, X-Office for a Sculpture, sinaliza?

Sinaliza a incógnita de um ponto de partida. No contexto da minha produção artística, o espectador é constantemente convocado para um tempo que não é o que está a ser experienciado naquele momento. Em todas as obras existe um momento de aparição - o X tempo e lugar, onde a obra se dá a ver ao seu produtor e, para mim, esse é o lugar da obra, lugar esse que contém um tempo, que se inscreve vertiginosamente no passado. O meu desejo de revisitar esse lugar de criação e de o partilhar com o outro requer uma marcação.
No momento em que eu desenvolvo um projecto existe um grau de imprevisibilidade face ao que vai ser o resultado de determinado procedimento, já que não imagino os meus trabalhos dotados, à partida, de uma forma específica. No decurso da realização de uma peça surge uma acção, que resultará obrigatoriamente numa forma, mas essa só se tornará visível diante dos meus olhos após a sua materialização; facto que constitui o X como incógnita.
Por outro lado, o X de duas concorrentes é uma das três possibilidades de definição de um plano e o plano, bidimensional e não matérico, existente apenas no mundo das ideias, é a mais elementar parcela do meu trabalho, as minhas esculturas não são tridimensionais, são os procedimentos que sobre os planos desenvolvo que os tridimensionalizam.

Neste caso concreto, estás a convocar o espectador não só para um tempo diferente, o passado, como para um contexto diferente, um escritório. O material que usas nas duas esculturas não só tem origem, como define e delimita esse passado e esse contexto prévios; a tua intervenção parece então operar não só uma alteração formal e conceptual da estrutura que utilizas como, nesse processo re-articula e redefine as próprias premissas do espaço, de maneira a acompanhar e proporcionar um contexto coerente e significante para as tuas peças. Quando desenvolveste este projecto tiveste em mente as consequências dessa redefinição das premissas do espaço pela tua acção sobre o que lá existia, ou é uma espécie de subproduto que não te interessa particularmente? Ou dito de outra maneira, é de alguma forma diferente, apresentares este trabalho na Kunsthalle Lissabon de o fazeres num qualquer outro local (genérico)? Fazemos-te esta pergunta porque o convite para desenvolveres este projecto e seres o primeiro artista convidado não foi gratuito: resulta do interesse, quase subversivo, em ser o artista, pela sua prática, um dos agentes privilegiados de transformação (e sobretudo, legitimação) de um espaço qualquer num espaço expositivo, numa Kunsthalle, e não o oposto.

A convocação de um outro tempo acarreta sempre um novo contexto. O que me interessou neste projecto foi sentir e intuir as potencialidades do espaço e ter percebido de que forma é que seria possível articulá-lo com o trabalho que tenho vindo a desenvolver. Os meus últimos projectos convocam o espaço do meu ateliê como material e matéria de produção. Um outro espaço poderia ser perigoso: o facto de repetir alguns procedimentos poderia ser entendido como a aplicação do mesmo princípio num outro local. Os meus trabalhos não pretendem ser site-specific, mas a sua elaboração e produção contemplam algumas das premissas dessa tipologia de prática. O espaço da Kunsthalle não tem qualquer aproximação, do ponto de vista físico, com o espaço do meu ateliê; as dimensões são opostas, o tempo é diferente, a função de cada um dos espaços não é a mesma. O meu ateliê era uma antiga unidade fabril e a Kunsthalle está sediada num espaço que funcionava para a prestação de serviços mas, existe, no entanto, um ponto de aproximação entre eles, ambos estão desactivados e mantêm elementos que os conectam com as suas anteriores actividades. Estão desactivados e não degradados e em nenhum deles foi a deterioração da estrutura que motivou o seu abandono.
No meu trabalho existe um desejo de recolocar no patamar do visível elementos, objectos ou situações que estavam condenados ao abandono e ao desaparecimento. A arte tem essa capacidade de transformação e de recolocação e isso interessa-me bastante. No meu trabalho, no entanto, procuro manter características que permitam a identificação e o reconhecimento. O que está diante dos olhos do espectador convoca uma outra situação, dirige para um outro tempo, mas passa sempre pela possibilidade de identificação do que cada um daqueles elementos, objectos ou situações especiíficos foi ou ainda é.

Pode então dizer-se que há um trabalho de cristalização de uma memória específica? Uma estratégia de preservação, não descontextualizada, mas antes recontextualizada, de um passado recente? A metáfora da arqueologia acabou de nos aparecer como relevante no teu processo de trabalho...

Sim e não. Existe da minha parte um desejo de tentar perceber e conhecer ambos os lados e colocar um ao serviço do outro. O objecto, que confronta o olhar do observador é um pretexto, uma espécie de embuste, que fomenta e possibilita o confronto, por vezes desviante, entre o que a obra é, de facto, e o que é dado a ver.

Essa dialéctica embustiva, se assim a podemos chamar, entre aquilo que a obra é (que por si só já é algo problemático) e aquilo que é dado a ver, pode ser articulada também em termos de realidade e percepção, que é outra porta de entrada para o teu trabalho. Cortes, torções, desvios, rotações constituem, de alguma forma, elementos de uma gramática muito específica que visa deteriorar (ou pelo menos causar um efeito desestabilizador) a percepção e, consequentemente, a relevância dada à empiria como modo privilegiado de acesso ao real. Podemos encarar o teu trabalho como uma crítica da empiria?

De certa forma sim… nos meus trabalhos existe uma certa ironia, aparentemente e num primeiro momento, está tudo resolvido; o desconforto, o desvio, o embuste estão lá, e sempre estiveram, mas só se tornam evidentes quando o espectador começa a articular as diversas partes e elas não se interligam segundo os mesmos princípios, tornando-se necessário voltar atrás e começar tudo de novo, procurar novos caminhos e novas perspectivas. Não existe um só percurso para um fim, nem existe sempre a mesma lógica de percurso.

Mas a possibilidade dessa tal leitura crítica relativamente a um certo determinismo empírico deve ser algo que é recorrentemente apontado na tua prática... o legado da representação geométrica e as experiências de cariz formal que desenvolves em estruturas eminentemente arquitectónicas apontam nesse sentido...

Não me parece… é recorrente o facilitismo com que, por diversas vezes, assisto a posturas que reduzem a prática artística a conceptual ou formal, como se uma existisse sem a outra, como se alguma delas existisse em absoluto, como se não fosse uma utopia ou um desvio da realidade ou, menos interessante, como se não existisse mais nada. Isso seria bom, seria tudo mais fácil e muito mais simples; o reconhecimento e o entendimento saíam facilitados, mas por ventura tornar-se-ia menos interessante. No meu trabalho recorro ao legado da organização, conhecimento, reconhecimento e utilização do espaço. Nesse sentido, a arquitectura faz sentido, a representação geométrica faz sentido, a observação cósmica faz sentido, as acções fazem sentido...

Mas a ligar todos esses aspectos a que recorres, ou a dar-lhes sentido, se preferires, encontra-se a ideia do desvio, que nos faz voltar ao início desta conversa... existe uma pulsão recontextualizante associada ao desvio (de carácter eminentemente semântico) que pode ser considerado o fio condutor?

Existe. Não sei se poderá ser considerado fio condutor, mas sem dúvida que o embuste e o desvio são características do meu trabalho e, em última instância, a minha primeira abordagem a um plano metaforiza esse desvio. Ao tentar efectivar a marcação de um rebatimento do lado menor sobre o maior, o quadrado não se constrói, uma das linhas sai desviante e é um trapézio que se desenha, um trapézio rectângulo, ou melhor, um quadrado a dois tempos. Este pode ser o primeiro embuste ou engano, mas existem mais; não sei se se efectivam como fio condutor.

E neste projecto concreto, X-Office for a Sculpture, qual é o embuste?

Essa pergunta não se faz (risos). A sua resposta mataria o projecto…
Não existe um embuste no sentido de este projecto específico recorrer a um embuste específico, e o projecto anterior recorrer a outro. Não se trata de uma carteira de embustes a que eu recorro e da qual selecciono um para cada novo trabalho; o que existe é que, a determinada altura, a obra aponta para coisas que não se efectivam segundo os padrões definidos. Por exemplo, o meu trabalho é escultura, mas não é escultura, é uma superfície bidimensional que, por acção do tempo, se tridimensionalizou… assim sendo, aquelas esculturas são, na realidade, desenhos.

Tens razão... não falemos do embuste... falemos então dos títulos das peças e, mais especificamente, da referência que fazem a um buraco ou um furo (hole, em inglês). De onde vem esta referência (Hole for Wall, o título da peça principal, e The Hole of the Wall, a escultura feita a partir do material que removeste da peça principal para lhe conferir aquela inclinação) e qual a relação, se existente, com o título da exposição, X-Office for a Sculpture?

Os títulos são o que são, um caminho de entrada, mas não o único caminho permitido. Existe, da minha parte, uma evocação para o processo, a forma final é um pretexto que documenta uma acção e os títulos convocam precisamente para esse momento de génese criativa, onde a matéria prima, que era produto acabado, se transforma em objecto artístico.

Reviews: Kunsthalle Lissabon | space opening and Nuno Sousa Vieira

2009-08-11T17:13:00.002+01:00

Arte na Avenida - Celso Martins
Expresso/Actual: #1917 - July 25, 2009

Espaços Off - Rui Gonçalves Cepeda
Diário de Notícias/Notícias Sábado': #185 - July 25, 2009

Entrevista com João Mourão - Teresa Pizarro
"Molduras"/Antena 2/RTP: July 24, 2009

Uma casa de crítica e experimentação - Miguel Matos
Time Out Lisboa: July 8, 2009

Kunsthalle Lissabon abre com Nuno Sousa Vieira
Notícias Sábado': #183 - July 11, 2009

LX 2.0: carlos katastrofsky - vir.us.exe

2009-08-11T17:11:00.004+01:00

vir.us.exe is a windows program, communicated and spread by e-mail announcements, mailing lists and other networked (viral) press activities.
katastrofsky explains that a virus lives upon the reproduction of itself with the aim to survive as long as possible. However, the most dangerous parts of such an infection are not always the harmful cells a virus is based upon; it is the psychological concept of fear acting invisibly in the background. The project thus strips down the mechanisms of a viral infection and transfers its core principles into the digital realm. By avoiding everything a virus should do, only the virus itself will be left. This way it will become a meta-virus spreading not because it is an actual virus but because it is perceived as such.
vir.us.exe is commissioned by KURATOR and LX 2.0 for their INFECTED project, as part of the Anti-Bodies programme co-ordinated by Relational with support from Arts Council England, granted the London 2012 Inspire mark as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

vir.us.exe

2009-08-11T16:57:00.006+01:00

(originally published in SUTZL, W., & COX, G. Creating Insecurity: Art and Culture in the Age of Security, pp. 53-56. Autonomedia. Brooklin, 2009.)

Computer virus have long been considered our machines' most fearsome foes. Able to replicate themselves and spread uncontrollably throughout communication networks, they constitute a direct threat to all the information we keep in our disks and hold so dearly. But computer virus, like their organic counterparts, function, even if we tend to perceive it as one single effect, on two different levels. First of all, they INFECT, their rogue activity has consequences, damaging the hosting systems and spreading their reach; and secondly, they also THREAT, causing a generalized feeling of insecurity and fear, originated by the perception of the eventual infection's outcomes.

carlos katastrofsky's project vir.us.exe (2009), co-commisioned by Kurator and LX 2.0 for the Anti-Bodies programme, departs from and investigates this dual nature that defines viral activity. vir.us.exe is a windows program that once downloaded by the user and executed in her machine, will simply delete itself. Despite such a harmless and even self-destructive behavior (on the antipodes of a common viral infection), the program is defined and promoted as an actual virus, that one, if brave or careless enough, can install, risking her computer and in the process compromising her own security.

Reminiscent of Russian Roulette (2006), a p2p-related piece in which a call was launched inviting users to upload files of their choice that could later be randomly downloaded by other users who had no knowledge whatsoever of the content of those files, possibly threatening the integrity of their machines, vir.us.exe is, like so many other katastrofsky's projects, a silent project. One of two things can happen: either the user perceives vir.us.exe as an actual threat and doesn't engage with the application, maintaining her system safe; or she will download and run the application, leading to its self deletion, and as in the previous situation nothing much will happen. Or will it? The core of the project doesn't lie in running or not a piece of software in order to obtain a certain outcome. The application is simply an excuse, a set-up that is carefully created by the artist to trigger a response in the user, to confront her and investigate how the psychology of fear works (we're not far from the strategies and methodologies of early social pshychology experiments) and causes one to react. vir.us.exe isn't a virus because it infects a computer, it is a virus because it triggers the exact same responses every virus triggers, regardless of causing an actual infection. In that sense we can say it becomes a meta-virus, not threatning, but being perceived as a threat.

Curating a routine

2009-08-11T16:46:00.004+01:00

Forcing myself into visiting a contemporary art show every day (Monday to Friday, resting on weekends and holidays), how long will I endure? A matter of empirically-driven and self-imposed lack of reflexivity as a primary basis to a dis-ideologized curatorial practice or a simple affair of availability versus selection, chance versus choice?

(detailed documentation here)

Getting too close to art: An email conversation between Les Liens Invisibles and Luis Silva

2009-08-11T16:24:00.007+01:00

(originally published in networked_performance in 14.05.2009)

Luis Silva: So, how close did you get to Duchamp’s bicycle?

LLI: Too much I think. With the ambiguous title Too close to Duchamp’s bicycle — one of our last small pieces — we wanted to suggest our poetical proximity with Duchamp’s conceptual approach, but, at the same time, the necessity to find a way out of that complacent mannerism often abused in many contemporary art practices.

In what way is your work (for instance subvertr or A Fake is a Fake) close to Duchamp’s conceptual approach? And in a time where every artist proclaims his or her closeness to Duchamp, what is the relevance of such a statement?

Duchamp has influenced net art as well as all contemporary art, but I don’t think there is a strict connection between that kind of approach and the one ofsubvertr or A Fake is a Fake(FIAF). The detournement of popular web services like flickr or word press, is a practice that involves both a conceptual and a pop approach. Regarding your second question, I think that relevance is not so important in our statement. Words are like a funny playground: you can have a lot of fun with them, but, in times of semiotic saturation and media proliferation, you shouldn’t give words too much importance, especially if we are the ones who spoke them.

The conceptual approach is self evident, but I got really curious as to what you mean by a “pop approach” in works likesubvertr or fiaf. Is this notion of pop a reference to the pop culture as we know it in the early 21st century (a certain MTV generation, if you wish…) or to pop as the movement in the field of visual art, that to a certain extent reacted against more conceptual (and cryptic) approaches to art making? Can conceptual and pop coexist in one of your pieces?

As the Pop Art movement came out from the massification produced by rising visual commodities and the popular mass culture, we think that our approach to the newest media homologation sources like social networks and tagging process is quite similar: used to work with brands and style of the image society, we manipulate web 2.0 symbols and imagery isolated from their original context. This attitude is most evident insubvertr where we encourage our users to embrace this practice in first person.

Anyway, beyond this playful and glossy appearance our works want to be a vehicle for conceptual messages — this is what we mean when we talk about invisible links. Peking 2008 can be considered an example of the exact bipartition of these two components: behind the hijacking of the event’s popular brand and the rising mediatic context of the Tibetan repression, a pixel advertising system offer allowing everyone to buy visibility: a manifest criticism of the attention economy.

subvertr is a very interesting example, when you encourage users to interact with it (whatever that means…) you are encouraging them to do the exact same thing as if they were using flickr, so the process is exactly the same, it is the underlying concept of subversion that changes. Could one say that there’s no difference between flickr and subvertr? That they are one and the same thing and that it is the use one makes of it that makes the difference? To me, it seems like such a great wake-up call, you know, returning agency back into the hands of the user, the individual… which is in a way, the case of A fake is a fake…

Of course, using flickr is not different from using subvertr, from a strictly practical point of view. So if you already have used flickr before you can find a seeming familiarity with the application and its workflow.

Besides this undeniable advantage of usability copying, this kind of detournement makes self-evident the different goal behind: while many people still think that user generated contents are going to build up a huge global networked mind, with the practice subvertagging instead of usual tagging you can realize that this so-called global mind is not a sum of all human intelligence at all, but its least common multiple, a global flattening trend where an homologation needing prevails against individual imaginaries.

In the same way, A Fake is a Fake is born from the disillusion of the nano-publishing revolution. Detourning one of the most famous blogging platforms - the Word Press platform - AFIAF wants to be the ironical answer to the visibility needing of the small blogs, where independent contents have difficulty to come out.

Detournement is an expression you utilize very frequently. Is it a key element for defining and understanding your work? And can there be work by Les Liens Invisibles outside of such strategy?

Cut&Paste techniques are very common in digital/remix cultures. The reappropriation of logos, symbols, pictures and videos taken from the web (or from any other medium) is a funny and joyful activity. We often utilize the expression detournement just because we want to stress the political implication of the process of manipulation. I mean, it’s not just art for art’s sake but a kind of reaction against the violence of the hyper-representation of the real.

Of course, outside the detournement strategy there are many approaches and techniques we like to play with too, and that’s why, as you noticed, some of our works (Too close to Duchamp’s bicycle or Neverending Happy End) look very different from other ones.

One of the most obvious remarks one can make when paying attention to your work is that you can be easily affiliated to a critical/political discourse towards the medium you explore and from there to society in general. Do you consider yourselves activists? Why?

Well, it all depends on what you mean with activism: activism is a complex body of practices and, in recent times, due to the exponential pervasion of technology, there has been a lot of attention to its new forms of recombination with art and technology (e.g. artivism, hacktivism, media-activism). We like to cross the borderlines between art, politics and technologies but even if, as you say, in our works the critical/political component is fundamental, we generally don’t consider ourselves activists. We play with any kind of representation of the real taken from mainstream contexts in order to shift meanings and to ridicule the aura of media. People tend to give too much importance to media and their representations of the real. This is why we do not consider ourselves activists: we just work with reproductions of reality. I think activism today mainly needs the participation and the interaction of the body with other bodies and it’s quite strange to remark that in the era of self-organized social networks, what’s lacking is a new culture of body-based political participation.

But by making visible those “invisible links”, by simply working with mediated representations of reality, and bringing awareness to them, what do you expect to achieve? Why do you do it in the first place? For instance, going back to one of your recent projects, Google is not the map, what led you to get interested in Google Earth and Maps?

A peculiarity of all the mediated representations of reality - of which our life is oversaturated - is this drive to explain their particular truth in order to persuade people with their particular message.

On the opposite side, in each work we do, we look for those things that we usually call invisible links (les liens invisibles): an invisible link is like a hidden path toward a state of uncertainty and possibility. We are interested in throw a doubt in the spectator, as a starting point to reveal the ephemeral layer on which perception is based on, and to discover the importance of his own subjective reality against the imposed/suggested ones.

That’s why we got interested in Google Earth. Maps — and we’re not referring here only to Google Earth/Maps — are one of the most influencing medium for the perception of physical territories around us. Beyond its scientific appearance, a map, though it is supposed to neutrally reflect the physical space, imposes its particular point of view. But dots, lines areas and any other cartographic element exist only as will (of who detains the power to control and manipulate them) and representation. Think, just for instance, to maps’ boundary lines: boundaries are non-existent perimeters, invisible overlays over people’s mind which generates identitarianisms, struggles, conflicts and discriminations. The subversion of the conventional grammar of maps is the way we chose to refuse and subvert their implicit, dogmatic rules: maps become geoPoeMaps, absurd and poetical points of view in which any dot, any lines, any area becomes sign of a joyful abstraction.

You tend to call your video works small pieces (Too close to Duchamp’s bicycle and also Neverending Happy End). Is there a hierarchy of importance between video and your “bigger” pieces?

It’s not a matter of hierarchy and it’s not strictly referable to our video works, we love all our projects in the same way. We used to call them small against our other works just because their creation is not planned: their realization is more spontaneous and takes us less time than other long-term work likesubvertr.com or FIAF.

Being more spontaneous, they don’t seem to be as engaged in “linking the invisible” as your other work. They’re more cheerful, or playful, in a way. Would you say they are the opposite of your other projects?

We’d like to consider them not as opposing each other but coming from opposite sides and converging to the same point. Tracing new directions, we want to stress one more time that different ways of reaching the same goals are always practicable, and they might look funny too. This kind of approach is often useful even for ourselves: really, we don’t like to take us too seriously…

In your website you define yourselves as “an imaginary art-group from Italy”. If you’re imaginary whom am I talking to?

Well, this is quite simple. You’re talking to Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini two — among many others — human interfaces between you and the invisible.

And Guy The Bore? Who is he? A boring version of Debord? And why did you choose it, or how does it relate to Les Liens Invisibles?

Guy The Bore is just a name taken from a text of Luther Blissett. But this is not so important. There are many alias in les liens invisibles: Guy McMusker, Angela Merelli, Guido Segni, Guy The Bore, Rudolph Papier, etc. They are like dresses: we can have a funny and/or serious interface depending on the context of communication where we are acting.

Why do you need those interfaces?

The point is not about the need for interfaces. It’s the same as asking why we need clothes or names. The point is about needing identities when they are nothing but conventional labels. As artists working on the internet we think it is just too narrow, naive and frustrating having to replicate online the same identity games we play in the real world.

But choosing them isn’t without a purpose, or is it completely random? I mean, their existence serves a purpose, within the Les Liens Invisibles existence, or not?

We choose names for our aliases as a writer chooses the names for his characters. I mean, sometimes we choose a name just because of its sound, sometimes for its evocative power, sometimes for its symbolic meaning. So Guy The Bore, for instance, just evocates Debord but it is also a reference to Luther Blissett and it tastes ironical. Our attitude to handle and manipulate all these names depends on our point of view on mediated realities: identities, like other fiction-based media, are conventions, and a fake, in the end, is only a fake, anyway. Let’s just play with’em.

Kurator and LX 2.0: INFECTED - VIRAL CALL FOR VIRAL WORK

2009-02-01T13:38:00.006Z

KURATOR and LX 2.0 are looking for a new work to infect the Olympics.

We will commission two online projects that respond to the idea of the 'virus' for 'Anti-Bodies: Beyond The Body-Ideal', a series of projects that reflect on the ideal 'body-machine' of the Olympic athlete. By virus we mean to draw attention to any agent that is able to reproduce itself and spread over communications networks and infect the host body. For instance, a computer virus describes the self-reproducing activities of a program that can simply spread and affect other programs, and thereby reflects the structural properties of the computer and the network it operates through. Moreover, the cultural form of a virus embodies the principles of negation in keeping with the anti-bodies theme.

There are a number of precedents for artists dealing with the virus as metaphor in the broadest sense. An example is the 'biennale.py' virus that contaminated the Venice Biennale's web site (produced by 0100101110101101.org with epidemiC, for the Slovenian pavilion of 2000). For the programmer Jaromil, the source code of a virus is potential lyrical poetry. Related to this, the elegance of his Unix shell 'forkbomb' (2002) encapsulates this aesthetic approach in presenting only thirteen characters to dramatic effect. Once entered into the command line of a Unix shell and run, the program exhausts the system's resources, causing the computer to crash. It was also included in the exhibition 'I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker, Kultur' (held at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, in 2002), referring to the 'I Love You' virus (of 2000) that spread through the communities of the Internet. The destructive potential of a virus operates in the spirit of auto-destruction and Dadaist tactics to negate the destructive tendencies of the social world.

The commission fee is UK£1000. In addition, the artists will be offered a short residency (up to 10 days) to develop the work with the Art & Social Technologies Research group at the University of Plymouth in UK (http://www.art-social.net). Accommodation and travel will be covered (up to UK£500 /per commission).

Anti-Bodies is co-ordinated by Relational, supported by Arts Council England and has been granted the London 2012 Inspire mark as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

LX 2.0: Les Liens Invisibles - Google Is Not The Map

2008-11-15T13:15:00.011Z

"The world is my idea": this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness.

Arthur Schopenhauer from "The world as will and representation"

Since ancient times cartography has been used to describe the world as a geometric ensemble of measurable points, lines, areas and data-labels on a plane.
While the world slowly fades away in an increasingly multiplication of self-representations, the map making process - missing its real reference - becomes nothing more than an empty-meaning abstract practice: so, what do all those maps stand now for?
In order to disclose this contradiction - or just to give a paradoxical point of view about it - the imaginary art-group Les Liens Invisibles has explored the world along its self-referential techno-linguistic layers, moving through its hidden mechanisms and forcing the grammar of its public-released API code.
Commissioned by LX 2.0 - a project by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, Google Is Not The Map (GISNTM) is a collection of over35 GeoPoeMaps, a series of works in which ordinary maps become the unusual surfaces used to disarticulate perception of the world, to trace new routes across the boundaries and to draw new imaginary geometries of the possible.

Reviews: LX 2.0 - Les Liens Invisibles

2008-11-14T11:43:00.005Z

"Google Is Not The Map (GISNTM)" by Les Liens Invisibles by penelope.di.pixel

(originally published in Artsblog - January 2009)

Google is Not the Map by Frédérique Entrialgo

(originally published in Articule.net - December 2008)

Google is not the Map by Baudelot

(originally published in Digital Performances & Cultures - November 2008)

La subjectivisation des cartes by sumoto.iki

(originally published in fluctuat.net - November 2008)

Mandalas and Incense Holders: an email conversation with Aleksandra Mir

2008-11-13T12:55:00.000Z

(originally published by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea for Aleksandra Mir's solo show Mandalas and Incense Holders, from November 14 to December 31, 2008, Lisbon)

Mandalas are of Hindu origin, but their principles can be found in a few other religious systems. They may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tools, for establishing sacred spaces or as an aid to meditation and trance induction; Carl Jung saw them as representations of the unconscious self... what interested you in this subject?

Their universality, really. The Mandala can be seen as a scientific map of an expanding universe or of a tiny molecule, or as the very center of one's soul. It's graphic principle -- a central focal point around which other matter is revolving through an actual or seemingly gravitational pull -- is well represented in nature. Think of a flower's stigma, surrounded by petals; a star and it's planetary system. In our bodies, the iris of the eye and the nipple of the breast are designed in a way to draw in our attention and focus. Every culture through the ages has riffed on the theme through elaborate and decorative representations of the divine (Catholic stained glass rose windows stand next to the Tibetan ephemeral version made out of sand), but this heritage doesn't seem to make being serene and centered any easier today. My own kitchen-sink Mandalas are for the alcoholic in all of us. The first one I made was made up of Jack Daniel's Bottles.

Despite this poetic underlying tone, two things, constant throughout your body of work, come to mind when looking at the Mandalas, a certain political (or critical, if you prefer) position, and derivative or not from the previous, a humorous and playful (or ironical, perhaps) approach to the subject. Is this something you like to achieve in a conscious way or can it be considered a by-product of your artistic concerns? Do you consider yourself a skeptical?

The humor is central in my own work and to the art of other artists that I appreciate the most. The construction of a great joke makes for masterpiece in my mind. It is therefore not clear to me why we have chosen to banalize humor, or to see it as anti-intellectual, when we all agree that the best jokes contain the sharpest and quickest analysis of our societies and selves. And sure, skepticism or irony or at least an attempt to try things out, only to fail, but still be able to laugh, makes for a big part of my method.

How do the Incense Holders relate to the Mandalas series?

They are these little accessories I made, unique for this show, to accompany the Mandala drawings. They are basically these spontaneous paper sculptures in all shapes, with bends and folds that are held up by nothing but the memory of my drawing paper. Their function is to hold up a colorful incense stick. I thought it could be pretty and fragrant in the gallery.

Since you use all media available to you, why did you choose drawing for this project? The title "The Church of Sharpie" comes directly to my mind.

Drawing is the most immediate way for me to work out an idea and have it speak back to me. In art school we learn to associate drawing as a preparatory method for painting. I couldn't be further away from that idea. For me, drawing is an extension of writing and of performance, the physical trace of movement and the direct imprint of language.

Is there any connection between the spiritual aspects of Mandalas and the community (a certain togetherness) aspects explored in that project?

That is a little far fetched but OK. I often hire assistants to help in my work and we do form a type of community around the labor, the conversations we have while we work, the food and music that we consume, but this is not particularly unique to the Mandala project.
The 'Church of Sharpie' was a title born out of the recognition of a devoted community, but it is hardly spiritual in its impetus, simply kept together by a social (capitalist) contract of work between myself, my galleries and my assistants. The development of my concepts also precedes the collective work in the studio. I do most of the thinking alone, in front of the computer.

Sharpies became a signature mark of your work, despite the fact your work is so hard to categorize in terms of traditional artistic disciplines. You've written that they are the marker of your time and the trace of a frail act of performance. What is it that interests you in these marker pens?

Using a marker pen that is simply part of my daily environment is a handy way to make something contemporary and to demystify the artistic process. Art can be made with anything, anywhere at anytime. So "traditional media" seem quite limiting to me.

The demystification of the artistic process seems to be a very central aspect of your production. Departing from contextual social practices and personal histories and arriving to open systems that people can relate to, you undermine pre-established conventions of art-making.
Once a critic told me " walking with a big umbrella in the middle of the street isn't art". How come did this this become a concern and what would your answer to that critic be?

I have nothing to hide, nothing to lose, and I sleep well at night.

Sobe, sobe, balão sobe [Rise, rise, balloon rise],

2008-10-03T02:01:00.016+01:00

sang Manuela Bravo at the Eurovision Song Contest of 1979, the year of André Gonçalves' birth. The singer's performance can be easily found on YouTube and, on looking at it, we cannot avoid finding ourselves confronted with a certain temporal discrepancy, a nostalgic feeling, a refrence to a time that is no longer ours, that no longer exists, but which is still near enough to be present in our memory. The choice of this subject is no coincidence, as can easily be seen in the song's title and exhibited work, and is not gratuitous either. Most of André Gonçalves' works explore the feeling of discomfort resulting from the lack of adequacy of technological cultural artifacts to a contemporary context, due to their quick obsolescence. Thus, the use (recycling) of outmoded equipment and a work method that embodies autodidactism and the DIY ethics (and aesthetics) as its organising principle are fundamental to our understanding of Gonçalves' approach. The DIY logic is especially important here, not only as a fundamental modus operandi of contemporary culture and, more specifically, of what is termed "digital culture" by a certain academic discourse, but also as a strategy that runs through all the production of this artist, be it in musical or contemporary art terms.

Tape Loop, the piece which openes this edition of "7 artists on the 10th month" is the result of Gonçalves' interest in "dead media!, previously formulated in works like Pong (2008) or Untitled #06 (2007). Tape loop is, in simple terms, a message written on magnetic tape, that relic from an obsolete analogue past when cassettes provided a widely available means of storing information. "New media" states the tape, provocatively: the "old" (or "dead") as the prophet of the "new". However, this connection between obsolete and contemporary is not as clear as it seems: the latter's support is the former and, this being a loop, we expect the latter to unavodably become the former, "dying too". The loop's logic is, by definition, a circular one, acting here as the metaphor for a process that swiftly creates, uses and destroys new technologies/products.

In Of how we have to leave doubts, expectations and the unachieved, a piece created specifically for the exhibition, Gonçalves deals with another one of his recurring subjects: the technological control of natural phenomena on a personal scale; more specifically, the emulation of the natural dislocation of air, the wind. The use of computer fans, originally used for cooling the machine, preventing its possible damaging through overheating, has been a constant feature in his work (I thought some daisies might cheer you up, 2006 or You got me floating, 2007). In the version shown here, the fans are semi-industrial and the ballons remain, but instead of poetically hanging in the air, by means of a controlled air flux, or perpetually ascending, as in Manuela Bravo's ditty, they now move across a firing range, while camera-controlled paintball guns shoot to destroy them, splattering an amalgam of latex and paint across the installatio's space. This apparatus is apparently self-contained; interactivity, which is both a means of distinguishing the "new media" from the so-called traditional art forms and a utopian promise of a new kind of art, is here inexistent and undesired. The ballons' inconsequent lightness and the guns' automatic violence create a perfect dialectic, which needs no elements extraneous to its own condition. However, even though intractivity is out of the question, the same cannot be said of interference, since Gonçalves has conceived his system in such a way that some balloons can escape the guns'computerised aim and reach the end of the corridor untouched, where more uninhibited or curious viewers may, with some effort, take them and put them back into the system, thus disrupting the piece's apparently self-containedcondition, in which no outside intervention would seem possible.

In previous works, the ballons floated; now they are targets of robtised weapons. André Gonçalve's first piece for an institutional context is also his first piece to show a more violent side, in which the poetics of lightness and imponderability is replaced by the noisy roar of destruction. Have all doubts and expectations been abandoned once and for all?

Comissioned by Gulbenkian Foundation and published in 7/10, the catalogue documenting the exhibition 7 artists on the 10th month, held from October 3rd, 2008 to January 11th, 2009, at Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Translated from Portuguese by José Gabriel Flores.

LX 2.0: MTAA - Our Political Work

2008-09-19T17:35:00.002+01:00

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
-- George Orwell

Continuing a series of computer-driven self-portraits, MTAA's "Our Political Work" presents the artists in a never-ending state of screaming, yelling, waiting and sometimes laughing. Using 141 filmed moments, custom software randomly selects and joins video clips into a seemingly endless array of undignified action. Begun in 2007 and completed in 2008, "Our Political Work" creates an open-ended depiction of political discourse as Beckett-like action.

Reviews: LX 2.0 - MTAA

2008-09-19T17:05:00.015+01:00

MTAA's Our Political Work by Cody Trepte

(originally published in ...might be good #109 - October 2008)

Questions, comments, reactions? by Marisa Olson
(originally published in Rhizome - October 2008)

Un cri est politique by Troudair
(originally published in fluctuat.net - September 2008)

Interview with Marta de Menezes

2008-08-20T15:40:00.004+01:00

(originally published in Rhizome - August 2008)

Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist working at the intersection between art and biology. Last year, Menezes founded Ectopia, an experimental laboratory and artist residency housed at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal. The program fosters collaboration and discussion between the Institute's scientists and participating artists. In this interview, conducted by Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Luis Silva, Menezes discusses her experience with Ectopia and her larger body of work. - Ceci Moss

Luis Silva: Ectopia, the artistic laboratory within the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência that you founded in 2007 and currently run, is an unusual operation, as it allows artists to create and develop projects in close relation to scientists. Its name, "Ectopia", which is a term referring to the abnormal position of an organ or body part, roughly relates to a certain "out-of-placeness." I would like to start this conversation by asking if you think art is out of place, or misplaced, within a scientific research context.

Marta de Menezes: First let me tell you, you're the first to actually ask that question!

I don't think art is out of place in the field of science, and definitely not misplaced within a scientific research facility. If I did, I wouldn't be working in this area, or trying to implement my ideas in a laboratory space. Ectopia, a singular initiative in a "hard science" or a basic research environment like the Research Institute, exists to promote the collaborative research projects between artists and scientists, so that both the arena of art and science can gain, grow and flourish in a new interdisciplinary environment.

Why did you decide to approach the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência with the idea of Ectopia?

A lot of my Portuguese scientist friends had some connection to the IGC at some point in their lives. And even I had already been there, presenting a workshop some years ago with Joe Davis. So, I already knew who to talk to and I knew I could propose the director with the idea. It was not too difficult to arrange. But it also felt like an ideal place to create something like Ectopia. The Gulbenkian Foundation has always been one of the most active institutions to support the arts and sciences, so the IGC was the obvious perfect choice for an experimental art laboratory.

What do art projects and scientific research have to gain from an interdisciplinary environment? Or stated differently, is there a common ground of understanding between scientists and artists, one which would allow a real and fertile collaboration between them?

I feel these are two different questions, so I'll answer both. First, I'm not sure exactly how art benefits from collaborative science projects. It is not, in my opinion, a given fact that art can and will benefit automatically from one project in the broad area described as "art and science." It is my biased opinion that the truly collaborative projects will stand a better chance for real profit and growth from the interaction because of their collaborative nature -- not just because they are situated in the realm of art&science. The same can be said from the scientific perspective. If a project is interesting, and based on a quality interaction between the science, scientists, science technologies, artistic concepts and expression, then it is in a better position to be challenging and rewarding for the scientists, but, more importantly, for the broader field of scientific inquiry itself.

To answer the second question, based on personal experience, I've found that it's very likely for artists and scientists to find a common ground of understanding. All of my projects are very similar in some ways, but also very diverse in terms of the techniques, labs and, of course, the scientists involved. But, in every case, I found that they were very fertile and rewarding for both sides. I suppose that the fact that some of those labs, like the one in Leiden, Holland, still refers to me as "their" artist in residence after 7 years lets me think they are still very content with our collaboration.

Can you give me a couple of examples of such collaborative projects taking place right now, or that have happened recently, thanks to Ectopia?

Ectopia is new, only a year old, so not that many projects are happening right now, yet. All projects (lots of them) will start in the near future (I hope). I am currently one of the artists in residence at Ectopia, I have just finished (not really finished, but made the first exhibition of the piece) Decon. In this project, I used microbiology techniques and bacteria that degrade color from replicas (in agar) of Mondrian paintings. Find out more in www.wikibiotics.net. Also, I worked with a couple of artists to prepare exhibitions for the Polar Year Celebrations in 2008/09. The other artist in residence is Maria Manuela Lopes, who will begin soon. Manuela is starting her PhD project in the U.K. and she will use her residency to develop her work in science labs with different specifications.

In the future, Ectopia will be coordinating a European network of curators and cultural agencies that have been developing work on art, science and technology. It will strategically work for the development, research, production and exhibition of projects of art and science.

Also, we are expecting the participation of lots of international artists in the residency program over the next few years, groups such as Tissue Culture & Art (Australia), and Biotecnika (Canada), artists like Polona Tratnik (Slovenia) and Arcangel Constantini (Mexico).

How did you become interested in the artistic properties/characteristics of biotechnology, having a background and education in traditional fine arts?

It all happened on its own. When I was still in the fourth year of my Fine Arts Degree, I started dating an old friend of mine, Luis Grac, who was finishing his internship for a Medical Degree and was applying to a grant from the Gulbenkian Foudation for a Doctorate in Biomedical Sciences. He got it and started his first year in the IGC before going abroad. During this period, I met many of his teachers, many coming from all over the world to teach at ICG, and was very much immersed in that scientific environment. I guess this was crucial. Luis is now my husband and the connection between science and my thinking process is still very present. I have constant access to developments in basic scientific research, and it inspires me to think about possible art projects to develop.

What interests you most about working with biotechnologies?

The best part is that I can ask lots of questions, try to solve some of them and, in the meanwhile, try out some of the most amazing techniques to produce my work. I also think that we are now living in a time where a lot of our metaphors are of scientific and even biological origin. We use expressions like "it's genetic" without really knowing what it means. We, humans, are facing lots of challenges from our actions and their consequences for our planet, for our health, for our lives in general, and being knowledgeable about biology seems to be the best bet to find solutions.

So for me, both as a person and as an artist, it is very important that I strive to learn more, and working with biotechnology is very relevant!

What do you think is your most successful project so far? Why?

I have a few projects that I think of as accomplished projects, but in different ways.

I guess Nature? was, obviously, a very well received project. It was my first and people still find new things about it that surprise me. And I like doing it again every time I have an exhibition! It is about handling the whole organism. The butterflies are wonderful and every time I see them change into a pupa I get as excited and mesmerized as I did the first time! I worry still if they come out of the pupa well and can stretch their wings properly, and fly well, and if they look happy, etc.

But Tree of Knowledge was a project that also made me very proud due to the amount of work that I got out of it, and even the ethical challenges that it put me through. It was also my first experience doing an art and biology project affiliated to an experimental art laboratory. I did it at SymbioticA, and that was very enriching at so many levels! From the perspective of a residency program, that was probably the most accomplished of my projects.

But, also, you have my Proteic Portrait, which involved many years of work, such a big challenge and such a big leap of faith! I wanted to do it, I found the best scientists to do it with, but nobody knew if it was going to be possible to make, and then we made it! And it worked! And we were amazed! At one point in the project, I started working with a very special curator and friend of mine, Ines Moreira, for the exhibition, and the piece became a beautiful installation piece that made perfect sense as my portrait! I'll say that was a very well accomplished project!

And Decon-- it looked great on the wall!

Nature? is probably your best known work. Could you describe it?

Nature? is a project I did in 1999, that involves the manipulation of the wing pattern of live tropical butterflies. It is shown as a greenhouse, where the butterflies are housed, and manipulated. The installation includes plants, a microscope on a table and a monitor so that people visiting can see how I perform the manipulations. People are invited in the greenhouse so that they can fully experience the butterflies. It is a piece that makes you think about a few things that I find of extreme importance nowadays. I am manipulating the butterflies, which may or my not be very disturbing in itself, but most importantly I'm manipulating them one by one, with a technique that is at the same time so subtle and so low tech that it throws the public off balance. It is not genetic manipulation and the butterfly retains her own natural origin after the manipulation. The question becomes, is the butterfly natural or not? Even being manipulated doesn't satisfy me as a reason to call it man made, or even artificial. So I find myself, and the audience as well, struggling with the concept of natural, which is exactly the point I wanted to make.

Probably due to the modification of butterflies' wing patterns, Nature? has generated a lot of controversy, both from the audience and from the traditional art world. When I invited you to present at Upgrade! Lisbon I even received an angry email from someone with institutional affiliations saying that she was against any kind of genetic manipulation, especially if it had an artistic purpose solely. Care to comment?

Not sure. There are a few things in your question that I would like to discuss. Nature? has generated a lot of controversy, but usually because of texts that misunderstood my words or didn't care to fully consider my proposal. For instance, the butterflies are NOT genetically manipulated. The other thing I find intriguing (and unfortunately not that uncommon) is the idea of art in itself being not that important. I think you know what I mean. I see art as one of the most important areas of our culture. As such, it does not have a frivolous role as many people like to believe. Nature? is not decorative art. It does not exist just to be seen and for viewers to apathetically state "how interesting." It is to be thought about with a critical mind, and also to be made available to anybody, ANYBODY (not just art critics or culturally rich individuals). Its ethical challenges are to be engaging, and provocative, not passive and dismissive!

Is there an ethical dilemma when using biotechnology as an artistic tool? Or is that supposedly ethical dilemma a way of making a political statement? Do you consider your work political?

I think I've answered this question with the last reply, but I'd like to say that I do not consider my work political. The drive behind all of my works, the one to start the process, is very basic and simple. It develops dimensions as it grows and, also, complexity and depth. I find my work ideological, not political.

Also, because of this ideological mark, I find working with biotechnology ethically challenging and interesting, not necessarily a dilemma. There is a lot in biotechnology that is not an ethical problem at all!

What projects are you working on now?

I'm currently developing several new projects. I have an old one I want to make, which is to try and make the stripes on Zebra fish vertical instead of horizontal. I'm writing it down and trying to find a scientist who can help me with it. This project will most likely involve genetics and selection. Also, I'm getting very excited about the idea of trying to make an organism, or a perpetual motion machine. I found that it is possible to do something like a nanomotor that is propelled by bacteria. So I want to create a machine/organism that is symbiotic with the bacteria that propel it. This project will take some engineering skills and cutting edge nanotechnology research. I also found out that there is a lot to be said about sex. And that it is an issue that worries lots of scientists around the world. I found recently that one of my friends in science, that got the Gulbenkian Foundation grant the same year as my husband, is now working on sex with some very exciting organisms that have 7 sexes/genders?! So I plan on learning more and elaborate some sex theories of my own.

I've just started my Doctorate project! I'm working in Leiden, Holland in a department called The Arts and Genomics Center, from the University of Leiden, and they are an excellent group that has mostly worked in theory of art and science. I'm planning to research the variety of art and biology and applying a bioinformatics tool to try and understand the amount of manifestations that contemporary art and the new biological technologies have been throwing at us for the last ten years or so. The bioinformatics tool is systems biology and it is being generally used in biology and lots of other fields of human endeavor. Mostly to make some sense of grand amounts of information...

FW: Re: Re: a selection from Rhizome's ArtBase

2008-07-18T14:35:00.005+01:00

Predating the internet itself, email has become a mass communication tool as well as a pillar of contemporary computing culture. The artists featured in this exhibition consider the ways email has become an unquestioned part of our lives; and their diverse works push the traditionally prescribed uses of thie ubiquitous technology. All works are selected from Rhizome's ArtBase.

FW: Re: Re: takes the form of an email. The exhibition will exist solely in people's inboxes and will last until its moved to the trashed or filed and forgotten.

The artists assembled for this exhibition explore the ideologies and imagery associated with email and technologically mediated written communication. Several of the projects address email as a medium for curation. For example, New York-based artist and musician Jesse Aaron Cohen has organized email exhibitions since 2005, sending subscribers thematized collections of digital images taken from archives or found over the Internet. Other featured works expand categories of mail and email art. London-based artist Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow and Lauren Wright have recently curated DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): E-mail Art at NetBehaviour, an email art project on the NetBehaviour email list, that was also exhibited at the HTTP Gallery in London. In the spirit of early Mail Art, this project was completely open to all, as long as they were subscribers to the mailing list. The submission and selection of the works and subsequent curating of the show was done collectively (with others! ) through emailing. Together, the works in the exhibition look anew at a medium that has become so normal that its implications, form and possibilities are often overlooked.

If you would like to receive the show, please visit:

http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/fw_re_re/

LX 2.0 on NY ARTS

2008-05-28T17:39:00.011+01:00

(read full article)

LX 2.0: André Sier - Space Race #1

2008-03-07T16:13:00.010Z

(curatorial statement)

Space Race #1 is a 3d simulation in which teams of autonomous elements compete for a mysterious green fuel, that allows for a spaceship, the only possible way of escaping, to take them to another planet, the next level of the game.The team members are always organized and operating according to the team’s internal logic, either it being looking for the spaceship and running to it, gathering fuel and working either together or independently. Each member is characterized by unique features and each group is organized in swarms that perform the required tasks in order to achieve their goal, conquering the spaceship and traveling to another world. When they arrive to the new planet, they alert the local population that they are ready to compete with them in search of fuel for the next spaceship that will, once again, transport them to yet another planet.

Space race #1 follows and repeats this logic endlessly, taking on the structure of an abstract computer game, where accomplishing certain tasks and defeating the enemy allows the team to reach subsequent levels. But reaching another level never brings the teams closer to the end of their missions. This space race has no visible end or any kind of possible gameplay for us to interact with it. It is an abstract generative fantasy that explores the language, codes and strategies of contemporary computer gaming.

Reviews: LX 2.0 - André Sier

2008-03-06T17:09:00.001Z

Endless Race by Tyler Coburn
(originally published in Rhizome - March 2008)

LX 2.0: Carlos Katastrofsky - lastwishes

2007-11-02T13:34:00.000Z

(curatorial statement)

Carlos Katastrofsky (1975) has been creating net art pieces that question both the notion of what an art work is and the notion of ownership of these processual projects, not defined by physical properties. Projects such as internet art for poor people (2006), free interactive readymade (2005) or the original (2005) are just a few examples of Katastrofsky's interest in exploring alternative ways of distributing and owning net art, always within the institutional art world logic and always through a critical, yet playful approach. His projects are mostly conceptual, not defined by fancy visual effects or sophisticated programming. There is no "beautiful" or "poetic" things to be seen on the screen, just the critical use of massified online tools that he masters in order to achieve his own agenda.

lastwishes, the project the artist created specially for LX 2.0, is a great example of the lack of any visual aesthetics in his work. In a simplistic (yet pretty accurate) way, there is nothing to be seen in his new project. lastwishes deals solely with the principles of communication. Mailing lists are popular tools for the exchange of thoughts and opinions: they make multiple (written) dialogues possible as well as the archiving for future references. In this work the mailinglist-software "mailman" is modified to allow only one single posting from a sender. The user is able to subscribe and to receive messages endlessly but post only once and by this immediately get unsubscribed. The idea of "exchange" is thereby turned into something absurd: one can listen but only talk once. Sending a message thus requires meaningful content, "chatting" becomes impossible.

The ephemeral quality of this sending-process reminds of zen-qualities: be quiet and learn to listen but if you really have to say something meaningful then talk. Above that, the question arises: how is communication possible when there is a quiet, listening mass and no one dares to stand up and speak? According to an Austrian proverb, "talking is silver and being quiet is gold", but being quiet only makes sense within the process of communication.

Reviews: LX 2.0 - Carlos Katastrofsky

2007-11-01T16:01:00.001Z

One Message by Miguel Amado
(originally published in Rhizome - December 2007)

LX 2.0: On Contemporary Art Galleries and Internet Art

2007-10-19T16:23:00.000+01:00

(published in Curating Media/Net/Art by CONT3XT.NET, Vienna, 2007)

LX 2.0 is a curatorial project developed by "Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea", a commercial contemporary art gallery based in Lisbon. LX 2.0 is one of the direct consequences of the regular program presented by "The Upgrade! Lisbon", a monthly gathering of New Media artists, curators and interested people, was also held at Lisboa 20.

Extremely interested in the possibilities of the digital medium (and by its contemporary touch) the gallery’s director has shown great interest in creating the gallery’s New Media branch. Because of extreme physical constraints (only one room allocated for the regular exhibition program), it was decided to create an online platform through which Lisboa 20 would commission, display and archive online (Internet Art) projects. The first commissioned artists were Santiago Ortiz (with the project NeuroZappingFolks), Y0UNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (with the project Manhã dos Mongolóides--Morning of the Mongoloids) and Carlos Katastrofsky (with the project lastwishes). Besides commissioning new works created by artists who have been developing a relevant work in exploring the Internet as an artistic medium, LX 2.0 will also, gradually, create a database of links to different resources, like artists' sites, exhibitions, platforms, publications, and readings, in order to contextualise and allow for a theoretical background for these works and their underlying discourse.

Even though being a traditional concept in the New Media Art field, a feature clearly stated in the project definition, it constitutes a unique exercise in the Portuguese artistic landscape. It aims at achieving a double goal, on the one hand, to bringawareness to the online medium in the Portuguese "institutional" art scene (more than being a partnership with a gallery, LX 2.0 is as part of the gallery as one of its regular exhibitions), educating and informing the audience about New Media Art and its underlying discourse but also, at the same time, to become a relevant project from a global point of view--despite being a small-scale project, based in a peripheral country with little history in New Media Art.

If at a first glance LX 2.0 seems a traditional online project, featuring new art works and linking to various resources, a closer look brings awareness that it is everything but conventional. As it was already mentioned, it is a small peripheral project aiming at becoming a global reference for the international New Media community, but most importantly, it is an online curating exercise done by a traditional, commercial space, a contemporary art gallery. Common sense indicates that commercial, or simply more traditional spaces have an almost religious belief in the impossibility of dealing with New Media Art, especially its more extreme version, Internet Art. This situation occurs simply because traditional exhibition venues (either commercial, like galleries, or institutional, like museums and art centres) are running on the white cube ideology. This white cube model, a recent development in art history, dating to the 20th century, is nothing but a hegemonic ideology that prescribes the correct way of showing art within an institutional context. But being an ideology, and thus a social construct, it bears no absolute value in itself.

A commercial gallery mainly tends to show only artworks that fit into this exhibition paradigm, or into its more recent upgrade, the black box. The reason for this to happen is partly due to the fact that the gallery has to sell the works in order to function. These are the two main reasons for the lack of acknowledgement of New Media Art from the institutional art world. And these are the two main features that LX 2.0 is not only ignoring, but trying to oppose and demystify. It is a project created by a space that operates within the white cube ideology, a gallery, but a space that recognises that the white cube is nothing but an ideology and that process-driven, time-based artworks are calling for new exhibition paradigms. Each new project LX 2.0 commissions is launched at the gallery’s physical space, at the same time that a regular exhibition opens. Invitation cards state both the new opening and the online project launch. LX 2.0. is as much part of the gallery as the shows taking place in the physical space, but it exists only online.

LX 2.0 is also a non-commercial project belonging to a commercial space, a traditional contemporary art gallery. Commercial galleries need to sell, but they also have a cultural role to take. Having that in mind, it was defined, since the very beginning, that LX 2.0 wouldn’t be a commercial project. It didn’t make sense to try to sell online artworks, and it would also mean the failure of the project from the very beginning. Instead, it was decided that the project would be financed by the commercial side of the gallery, which was, to some extent, a conscious critical statement: it is the sale of traditional artworks, such as painting, sculpture, photography, installation, or the like, that finances LX 2.0 and allows it to commission new, unsaleable online works.

Hacked turntables: the world is still spinning at 33 RPMs

2007-08-21T15:45:00.000+01:00

(written for the solo show André Gonçalves had at Fabrica Features, in Lisbon, August-September 2007)

André Gonçalves (1979) is the opposite of a specialist, moving himself perfectly across an artistic field defined by the polymorphic and transdisciplinary features of the works stemming from it. The artistic practice commonly known as new media is the locus of reconfiguration of the empiric experience according to a digital logic, allowing everything to be processed in terms of zeros and ones, as information, and from there on into being reworked in an almost demiurgic way. Different sensory modalities, such as sight and audition, for the most part thought of as being ontologically different, and their corresponding artistic practices, visual arts and music, are blended together, fused, giving rise to a myriad of creative possibilities, either closer to the visual, musical or performative domains. It is in this endless possibility of reconfiguring all creative materials through the use of technology, not only as a tool but also, and primarily, as a medium, that we can place not only André Gonçalves’s work, but his own persona, which can be seen as the archetype of the digital artist, multitalented and forever separated from the traditional (and ideological) conventions that define and divide the fields of artistic creation.

Recurring both to the digital conversion of contemporary experience and to the transdisciplinary aspect of new media art when thinking of André Gonçalves’s work is not enough. Other phenomena, central to the debate around contemporary culture, are not only useful, but necessary in order to achieve a clear understanding of his body of work and of the project now being presented, Untitled #06.

Untitled #06 is part of a larger series, simply named Untitled Series, consisting in, according to the artist, the creation of micro-environments, computer controlled devices that explore several physical phenomena related to the act of hearing. These sound installations explore such physical phenomena through their sonic potential, connecting them to visual components that translate or interact with them. Untitled #06 is a device that converts analogical information, sound, into digital information and then back into analogical information again, but this time in a different output, a visual one. In this process Gonçalves uses two legendary audio instruments, the turntable and the microphone, the first being customized (hacked, to be more accurate) so it can register the data input coming from the later. Instead of holding the needle while reading sound from a vinyl disc, the turntable arm is attached to a motor servo that moves according to the impulses coming from an Arduino board that digitizes, handles and processes data coming from sound captured by the microphone. One Indian ink pen is attached where the needle used to be and draws in real-time the audio events taking place where the piece is installed. The circular drawings thus obtained can be seen as histograms of the audio activity of the installation space during a given moment in time. The present version of Untitled #06 relates directly to the artist’s working space, his studio. The records now occupying the walls of the exhibition space document, on a daily basis, André Gonçalves’s work; the drawings are full and dark when he is playing music, or empty and neutral when the activity he is carrying is silent and requires concentration.

Independently of the shape it may assume, usually related to the exhibition space, Untitled #06 gains in relevance when contextualized, and two central aspects of that subdivision of contemporary culture often termed as digital culture are necessary when discussing this piece. They are the DIY ethics (and aesthetics) and the modding sub-culture, a slang expression deriving from the words modify and modification and that refers to an unauthorized modification of hardware or software to perform an activity not intended by those that created the equipment and that have legal rights over it.

The DIY approach is, according to Wikipedia (and the choice of an encyclopaedia collectively created by millions of online users isn’t without a purpose here), “a term that focus on people creating things for themselves without the aid of paid professionals. Many DIY subcultures explicitly critique consumer culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase things, and instead encourage people to take technologies into their own hands”. Untitled #06 is such a clear example, and reflex, of the DIY culture. The piece reflects nothing but André Gonçalves’s curiosity about exploring, testing, defining creative/artistic uses for technological equipment and doing it only through his own means and abilities, without any kind of external help.

If the piece now on view is, on one side the result of the artist’s work and curiosity, of the will to test his own knowledge and the possibilities it allows, in the good old DIY style, it is, on the other side, the result of customizing a massified artefact, a commodified object coming from a consumerist culture. The turntable, whose original function of playing music was completely set aside, gained a new and idiosyncratic use, one that reflects and is the result of André Gonçalves’s artistic practice. The modding approach, not seldom defined as “you only own what you can modify”, is the reflection of a tendency that emphasizes the meaningful and critical use of technology. More than passive consumers, for whom the uses of technological equipment are defined a priori, users want to be proactive in the way they interact with the technology they possess, creating and developing new personal uses for technological materials

The turntable of Untitled #06 is precisely an example of what we just stated, a piece of equipment that was transformed and by that process gained a new function, meaningful to its owner. However, this isn’t a regular modding, like running Linux on an Xbox, for instance. This is not even a piece of software or hardware. This is obsolete, analogical equipment that was set aside and replaced when the world went gradually digital. Equipment with no place to call its own in our contemporary world, except for some small groups of enthusiasts. But this out-of-date turntable and its analogical sound were recycled and transformed into an instrument that analogically registers digital information. Ironical, isn’t it? A cyborg, prosthetic turntable, modified and covered with digital devices, programmed and programmable in order to survive. A turntable now inside a Plexiglas mausoleum, recording the daily activity of the space surrounding it, the record of a reality it doesn’t belong to anymore, but in which it can still find a place to call its own.

I tag you tag me: a folksonomy of internet art

2007-07-16T14:23:00.001+01:00

ongoing
TAGallery, Vienna

(curatorial statement)

Social bookmarking allows for users to easily store lists of resources (websites, for instance) and have them available to the public, allowing people with the same interests (or not) to share and have easy acess to relevant information on a specific subject. But the most important feature of social bookmarking lies in the categorization of these resources by the users themselves. Tagging is the word that comes to mind. Tagging consists basicly in the possibility these social bookmarking services have of allowing the users not only to bookmark something, but to informally assign tags (relevant keywords) to it, thus creating meta-data about the tagged resources in a collective way, rather than individually, something that can be seen as a second layer of meaning, but detremined by the users rather than the original producer of the contenn. This is what is called folksonomy, a user-generated taxonomy used to retrieve and categorize web content.

The departure idea for this project is thinking of tagging as curating. If tagging creates meta-data about pre-existing content, it can be seen as the creation of a discourse about it. And if that content happens to be an online artwork, tagging both allows for a subjective juxtaposition of art works and the elaboration of a critical discourse about it. Curating then. But this isn’t new. This is regular curating done in a schematic way, using a different tool to get the job done. But since tagging is a social activity in its essence, giving birth to folksonomies, it allows for social curating, with social selection of works and social production of discourse about them. This is what this project intends to be. Rather than traditionally curating a show through tagging the projects with the name of the show, we will be asking people to tag some of their favourite Internet art pieces with a few defined tags and some that they can choose freely. The idea is that this device will then create a folksonomic net art exhibition done collectively by a group of people. It can be seen as a social experiment, aiming at finding out what will that second layer of meaning be like, or if it will work at all. A challenge then. I tag you tag me, or a random folksonomy of Internet art. Let the tagging begin.

I would like to ask you to add content to the show. We're using a del.icio.us account, so log on to http://del.icio.us/ . the username is I_tag_you_tag_me and the password is ole166. And then tag as many net art pieces as you like, assigning them with tags you find useful or relevant in any way. I have already tagged a few works. You can use the same tagging system I did, or instead, you can use something different, meaningful to you. The choice is really up to you. You can add content or organize it as you consider best.
If a work you want to tag is already tagged, assign it with other tags so it reflects what you wanted in the first place.

Hope you have fun helping to create this ever evolving, ever changing, unfinished, unfinishable project.

A botanist for the web

2007-07-15T12:26:00.000+01:00

(originally published in Magazine Électronique du CIAC #27 - 2007)

Modernity: that forever-present shift in the way the world was seen and thought of, and through which major changes in Western societies came about. In the second half of the twentieth century, the urban space in European cities was restructured; Paris is one of the most important examples. Streets became wide and sidewalks allowed for walking to become a social activity. People strolled around to see and be seen; Proust describes it perfectly in his À la recherche du temps perdu. But before such a monument to time as that book had begun, a new dialectic with urban space was defined. Charles Baudelaire, the first and foremost "gentleman stroller of city streets", started using and theoretically elaborating the figure of the flâneur, a figure who can roughly be thought of as the person who walks the city in order to experience it. Not only Baudelaire, whose interest was from an artistic point of view, but several thinkers applied the concept to the economic, historic, and cultural fields, turning the flâneur into a significant referent for understanding modernity and urban life.

Besides elegantly walking around cities, Baudelaire thought of the flâneur as having an important part to play in understanding, participating in, and portraying the city as it was changing. A flâneur thus both played a role in city life and, in theory, remained an outside observer. A flâneur had to be simultaneously part of and apart from the metropolis' daily existence, and who else but the artist would be better to take on this role? Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic changes of modern life, and that social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, as Walter Benjamin described him, "a botanist of the sidewalk": an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric.

Later on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin looked carefully at the changes Paris had undergone in the past decades. As Baudelaire had foreseen, Benjamin noticed people strolling down the streets, in the iron and glass galleries and pavilions (arcades), seeing everywhere their reflections in the omnipresent glass. Tradition was forgotten and a new aesthetic experience developed. Having worked on the theoretical consequences of the mechanical reproduction of the work of art, and the role of cinema as a new medium, Benjamin saw the flâneur not only as a stroller of the streets, but as a stroller of images - of the new architectural forms reflecting and changing in unexpected ways the reality of those who were passing by.

The figure of the flâneur - forever lost in a nineteenth century metropolis of iron and glass, detached from old traditions, diving into the new, thinking of and experiencing life in new ways not previously possible - marked modernity. Only late in the twentieth century, with Lyotard and the concept of postmodernism, was the flâneur put aside, forever lost (along with other nineteenth century ideals, like the belief in progress, science's infallibility, and the dream of absolute freedom).

The world has changed dramatically, and if, in the nineteenth century, modernity caused a revolution in the ways the world was perceived, the twenty-first century is producing a new shift, one centered in the production and access to information. Web 2.0, as it was named, shifted the balance between producer and user of online materials; now we all are producers, we all are users of information. Information is social, and meta-layers of social meaning are as important as information itself. If the nineteenth century had a revolution in urban space, our century is witnessing a revolution in information space.

Mario Klingemann noticed these similarities; if the figure of the flâneur stands as a mythical symbol of the aforementioned shift, Klingemann now proposes his Flickeur as the legitimate heir to the flâneur's strolling activities, both inside and beyond the user-produced space of the internet. Flickeur, a non-interactive online project dating from 2006, and presented at Art Tech Media 06, in Spain, thus departs from the concept of the flâneur, but adapts it to the new reality of the twenty-first century.

Acording to the artist, Flickeur randomly retrieves images from the web repository of photos at Flickr and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timelapses are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape in which incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings' magnetic memory. The virtual tape will also play and record both forward and backward to create another layer of randomness. There is no input for the user to add; he or she is nothing but a spectator, or voyeur. A comparison to the figure of the voyeur isn't arbitrary: there is a direct reference to the voyeur in the text describing Flickeur, but it is noted only as a phonetic guideline for the correct pronunciation of the piece. What we are looking at, the results of Flickeur's stroll, aren't the intimate aspects of private lives. They are pieces of visual information socially determined and classified, available for the use of everyone.

We are thus confronted with the random paths this new automated stroller leads. Following the stroller, we follow the paths of those shaping the socially determined content available online. Flickeur elegantly, randomly strolls through this new space where traditions hold little or no value. The references to a traditional world, far from modernity, but also far from postmodernity, seem forever lost, and it is Flickeur's role, as it was for the flâneur, not only to experience, but to understand, participate in, and portray the shifts taking place. Not anymore "the botanist of the sidewalk," but rather the botanist of the web.

LX 2.0: Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries - Manhã dos Mongolóides

2007-07-14T12:25:00.000+01:00

(curatorial statement)

For LX 2.0 Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries created the Portuguese version of Morning of the Mongoloids, the laughable, yet tragic (and extremely ironic) story of a white men that wakes up after a night of “drunken partying” to find himself no longer who he used to be. Without any motive or underlying logic, the man wakes up and gradually realizes he is Korean. He looks Korean, he speaks Korean and he lives in Seoul, when just the night before he was a white man living in a western country. The piece is a delightful insight on the prejudiced views towards Asian cultures and specially, the Korean one. Not only are we faced with the main character’s stereotypes of Asian people, as he gradually comes to terms with the improbable change, we, westerners, are confronted with our own biased views of the rest of the world. It is us, not “china men” who are being ironically portrayed. It is a mirror-like device and it is returning us our own prejudiced image of ourselves.

Almost ten years ago, in 1999, in a net art workshop in Brisbane, Australia, Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, a Korean artist and an American poet, were learning how to work with Flash. Instead of fully mastering the digital tool, they concentrated in two of its basic operations, making text show up in the screen and setting an animation to music. These two features, which they came to master after a couple of days, would define Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries' artistic practice in the years to come.

Reacting against interactivity as a distinctive feature of new media art, and internet art in particular (the duo has openly stated their dislike for interactivity, comparing interactive art to a Skinner box, but without the reward given after the completion of the desired task), this Seoul-based duo has created fast paced Flash movies combining text and jazz music, drawing inspiration from concrete poetry and experimental film, and through which they have narrated stories in languages such as Korean, English, Spanish, German, Japanese or Portuguese.

Their net art projects (if you are willing to compromise enough to call them that) are stripped of everything usually associated with the field: first of all, no interactivity whatsoever, no hidden buttons, no hipertextual aesthetics, the narrative is as linear and closed as a traditional novel; no graphics, no colours (black rules with a few exceptions of blue and red), no photos, no gadgets at all. It is a textual aesthetic that imposes itself through a web browser window and in which viewers are immersed in strong stories that everyone understands and can relate to.

Reviews: LX 2.0 - Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

2007-07-13T12:24:00.003+01:00

Good Morning Mongoloids by Miguel Amado

(originally published in Rhizome - July 2007)

LX 2.0 is a new on line gallery, hosted by Lisbon's Galeria Lisboa 20 and directed by Portuguese curator Luis Silva. Lx 2.0 series of commissions to artists that have been making a name within the international new media art scene is already marking the field. After being inaugurated with Santiago Ortiz's 'NeuroZappingFolks,' the LX 2.0 program now hosts rising stars Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, who present 'Morning of the Mongoloids.' The piece embraces the aesthetics consistently pursued by YHCHI members Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, as distinguished by Flash-based animations comprised solely of text written in black on a white background, sometimes accompanied by voiceovers and jazz music. In this work, the duo narrates--both in Portuguese and English--the experience of a Western white man who, after a night of partying, wakes up in an unknown place, only to realize that he's in Seoul, Korea, speaking Korean, and has become Korean. Via this narrative, the artists portray the prejudices prevailing within the West regarding Eastern people. Revealing the biased visions of both populations towards each other, they thus examine the cultural conflict existing between these regions that is escalating due to the migratory fluxes from Eastern countries to Europe and the US. As with their previous work, 'Morning of the Mongoloids' addresses this heavy topic with a humorously light, yet ironic approach.

Morning of the Mongoloids by Régine
(originally published in We Make Money Not Art - May 2007)

Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea has just launched Manhã dos Mongolóides (Morning of the Mongoloids) commissioned to Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.
The work tells the tragic, compelling and quite hilarious story of a white man who wakes up after too many drinks and an office party to find himself in the skin of someone with another body, face and, oh! rage oh désespoir, another race!
I worship their work. Who else would make me smile and smile while throwing at my face two of my arch-enemies: Flash and jazz music.

Arte digital não-interactiva? by Fernanda
(originally published in LabCULT - May 2007)

Foi lançada esse mês em português, no projeto LX2.0 da Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, a narrativa virtual Manhã dos Mongolóides.
Os autores, a artista coreana Young-Hae Chang e o poeta americano Marc Voge, são conhecidos por suas obras digitais lineares e fechadas, fugindo de imagens, botões e outras tendências da narrativa digital contemporânea.
A dupla, que se opõe à interatividade como característica distintiva da nova mídia, promove uma literatura criada a partir de animações rápidas em Flash, tendo como inspiração a poesia concreta e o cinema experimental.
Manhã dos Mongolóides é uma narrativa sobre o preconceito e a separação Oriente/Ocidente, contando a história de um homem branco que após uma noite de bebedeira acorda confuso em Seul.
O trabalho de Chang e Voge, ao questionar a função da interatividade no meio digital, serve como exemplo da variedade de vertentes na área da arte/narrativa digital.
O projeto em si também é bem interessante e merece um acompanhamento!

Dial P for postnationalism

2007-07-13T12:24:00.001+01:00

(originally published in Furtherfield - 2007)

Jean-François Lyotard defined us in the 1970's. He started the "post" era. Since his ground-breaking proposal of Post-Modernism; a conceptual reaction to the Enlightenment, Modernism and its grand narratives and universal pretensions, nothing remained the same. Lyotard argued that Postmodern times were characterized by an incredulity towards meta-narratives. These meta-narratives - sometimes 'grand narratives' - are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world. The progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom are just a few examples. Lyotard argued that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason Post-modernity is characterised by an abundance of micro-narratives.

Post-Modernism opened the door for all kinds of movements and definitions that were trying to escape the powerful clutches of established Modernism. Post, trans, meta were useful prefixes in shifting theoretical discourse away from the long established occidental tradition of enlightened positivism.

If all grand narratives were doomed to uselessness in contemporary societies, those arising from the concept of nation-state (itself another grand narrative) were facing the same fate. In a time of post-colonialism, trans-national capitalism, globalized (not far from hegemonic) production of subjectivities, national identities were bound to change. And they did. Massified migrations, easy access to information, all these led to a gradual weakening of the mechanisms responsible for national identities. Or not. Postnational identities are conflicted in their essence. Once again, no more meta narratives explaining the world. Something can be (and is) its opposite and postnationalism encompasses the rise of local, or micro-national identities, nationalistic movements resurface. The assumption of living in undefined, unstable times seems pretty obvious, but wasn't that what Lyotard expected to happen in the first place? No more universal narratives holding together human action.

Post-nationalism became a trendy word, many have enjoyed using the term in mundane conversations so to impress nearby listeners, but this increase in use may imply a loss in meaning. Dan Phiffer, a computer hacker from California (now based in Brooklyn), interested in exploring the cultural dimension of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet, is committed to prevent this from happening. He created the Postnational Foundation, a website/series of public interventions, defined as "an ongoing series of brief, personal interventions, an open-ended question about personal agency and a starting point for doing something meaningful". Each of these three goals contains a very important concept, contextualizing Phiffer's practice (and discourse): interventive behaviour, personal agency and meaningfulness. In these three concepts we can anchor the importance of The Postnational Foundation, in the steps of Lyotard's views of the contemporary world. When all the holding pillars of the modernistic view of the world are shattered, when all the grand narratives that once guided us all towards a future, are gone, what is there to do? Phiffer is a committed pupil of Lyotard's: he proposes personal agency, through meaningful interventions.

This is a clear and direct example of a critical approach needed in a post-modern world. By asking questions and inviting people to call (the anonymity factor helps and there is a prank call feel to this project) and leave their thoughts about issues such as "How do people think about the issue of globalization?", "What is it that causes us to become involved in politics? What factors keep us from getting involved?" or "What does the word postnational mean exactly? Mainstream references have nothing to offer, so why not find our own definition?" Phiffer is not only creating his own micro-narrative, a language-game creating a critical thought on hegemonic ideologies, he is soliciting others to do as much, confronting people with the questions mentioned above and inviting them to respond and thus create their own narratives.

LX 2.0: project launch and Santiago Ortiz - Neurozappingfolks

2007-07-13T12:23:00.000+01:00

(LX 2.0 curatorial statement)

The recurrently described and quoted idea of contemporary experience’s growing technological mediation (and to some extent, determination) is no longer an unpredictable surprise. Instead, and similarly to the technologies behind its origin, this idea has been completely assimilated into our daily existence. Presently, digital technologies have become so ubiquitous and polymorphous that anyone in any part of the globe is placed in the centre of social and informational networks controlled simply by the move of a finger.

Given digital technologies’ central role in contemporary societies, their use as an artistic tool and, most importantly, as a medium of its own, comes with little or no surprise. Historically, artists have always been pioneers in using new resources and technological advances. One of the most recent examples, and by now perfectly assimilated and legitimized by institutional discourse, video, became an artistic discipline in the late 60’s of the 20th century, right after the commercial launch of Portapak, the first portable video camera.

The artistic experiments with digital technologies are contemporary to the use of video in visual arts. In 1968, at the ICA in London, the show Cybernetic Serendipity opened, trying to account for the use of cybernetics in contemporary art. Even though having appeared at a chronological moment very close to that of video, only some decades later, in the middle of the 90’s, with the generalized use and exponential growth of processing capabilities of the personal computer, and the commercial debut of the internet, a new artistic practice, characterized by extreme transdisciplinarity, processual immateriality and the assumption of interactivity as a distinctive feature, did develop.

If the hybrid and polymorphous aspects of what is now called new media art (and daring to ask, by the end of the first decade of the 21st century, what is there new about new media art) caused the resurfacing of the debate around the concepts of the work of art and of intellectual authority/ownership, its most radical discipline, net art, started questioning, thanks to its immateriality, ubiquity and free access imperatives, the modernist ideology of the white cube as the priveligied way of showing contemporary art, and also that of the museum as the legitimating instance for the contemporary artistic discourse.

Similarly to its more experienced relative, video, new media, and net art more specifically, had to deal in a first moment with the lack of acknowledgment as a legitimate artistic practice. But if video art, after being welcomed into the heart of the museum, created room for black boxes to appear inside the white cubes, net art, due to its specificities, required a different approach. What’s the point of showing inside a museum something that only exists online and that can be accessed from home or from the office, with a simple computer connected to the internet? This question is recurring when thinking about the most adequate way of showing online projects, and led to the first experiments in the online museology of net art, through the development of online platforms and where commissioned works were displayed and archived, becoming accessible everywhere at every time.

LX 2.0 presents itself as one of such projects. Even though a being a traditional concept in the new media art field, it is a unique exercise in the Portuguese artistic landscape. It will comission, display and archive online projects created by artists who have been developing a relevant work in exploring the Internet as an artistic medium. Besides comissioning new work, LX 2.0 will also, gradually, create a database of links to different resources, like artists, exhibitions, platfoms, publications and readings, in order to contextualize and allow for a theoretical background for these works and their underlying discourse.

(Neurozappingfolks curatorial statement)

NeuroZappingFolks is a digital piece for the Internet. The lack of interactivity of the work presents itself as a neurosis of the application itself, simulating a frantic navigation through the web, in search of something unknown. The nucleus is constituted by an algorythm gathering information from the popular website del.icio.us, where thousands of users keep (for themselves, but in a public way) urls from other pages in the Internet, associating them with specific tags, short words functioning as labels and giving the link they refer to some minimum amount of information. The same words (art, sex, Internet, anime…) are usually referred by different people, allowing for unexpected inter-relations between several sites.

NeuroZappingFolks is then a non-linear zapping through the web, a path leading to the inside of a web of relations, a web that can be explored from one tag to a site, to another tag, to another site... from word to image to word to image. NeuroZappingFolks is then the simulation of a brain lost in the web (lost between servers, but also lost in Internet's double identity: word and image).

Reviews: LX 2.0 - Santiago Ortiz

2007-07-13T12:22:00.000+01:00

net.worked_CURATING by Franz Thalmair
(originally published in Springerin - Summer 2007)

Net art chega às galerias portuguesas by Óscar Faria
(originally published in Público - March 2007)

A Portuguese Platform by Miguel Amado
(originally published in Rhizome News - March 2007)

LX 2.0, a project launched this week by Lisbon-based curator Luis Silva, will regularly commission new media pieces by artists that have been shaping the field in recent years. LX 2.0 is supported by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea, the private gallery where Silva is Assistant Director and at which he organizes Lisbon's monthly 'Upgrade' discussion series. As a project devoted to the promotion of new media in Portugal, LX 2.0 includes not only the commissioned pieces but also a resource page with links to the sites of other new media artists, venues, exhibitions, and critical essays. LX 2.0's first commission is Santiago Ortiz's 'NeuroZappingFolks,' which facilitates a non-linear 'zapping' through the web, as dictated by an algorithm gathering information from the popular social bookmarking website, http://del.icio.us. The next artists to be featured at LX 2.0 are Carlos Katastrofsky and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and given Silva's deep involvement in contemporary media production, the roster promises to expand nicely. This project is thus a valuable means of distributing online works, allowing the Portuguese public to familiarize itself with new media practices and a wider international audience to discover current trends in the field.

Mecenati in Rete by Elena Giulia Rossi
(originally published in l'Unità - March 2007)

Una nuova piattaforma on-line, LX20, apre i battenti per commissionare, conservare e diffondere opere new media, con particolare attenzione alla net art. Si apre un filo di speranza in questo settore da tempo rallentato dalla mancanza di sponsorizzazioni a causa dei venti di crisi economica.

La fine degli anni Novanta e l'inizio del Duemila hanno visto nascere diverse iniziative presso istituzioni come il Guggenheim Museum, il DIA Center for the Arts e il Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) che hanno addirittura aggiunto un settore curatoriale specifico per i new media (un trend americano, quello della specializzazione in settori, del tutto discutibile). Sono state lanciate diverse piattaforme on-line, di cui il sito "Ada´web" è stato pioniere, per sostenere artisti new media e per stimolare nuove sperimentazioni da parte di artisti che hanno lavorato con strumenti più tradizionali. In questo momento così critico per il mercato artistico, è´ naturale che un settore così nuovo e di così difficile ritorno economico quale è quello della net art sia il primo ad essere penalizzato. Il lancio di nuove iniziative come quella di LX20 fa sperare ad una, se pur lenta, ripresa.

Questo nuovo progetto, a cura di Luìs Silva, è supportato da Lisboa Arte Contemporanea, una galleria privata che ha dimostrato lungimiranza nel sostenere un progetto che di commerciale ha ben poco. Oltre all´impegno di sponsorizzare nuovi lavori, questa piattaforma "costituirà - come il curatore stesso annuncia nella presentazione del sito– un database di links a risorse differenti, come siti di artisti, mostre, piattaforme on-line, pubblicazioni e letture, con lo scopo di contestualizzare i lavori nel loro backrgound storico". Il progetto si inaugura con la commissione di NeuroZappingFolks di Santiago Ortiz.

Simulazione di una convulsa navigazione nel web, questo lavoro, non interattivo, è un´interpretazione tutta originale della visualizzazione della rete di links che formano la rete del net. Il nucleo dell´opera è un algoritmo che raccoglie informazioni da siti che sono a loro volta raccolti dai navigatori in bookmarks (letteralmente: segnalibro) dove sono associati a etichette (tags) specifiche, identificati da una serie di parole e descritti brevemente nel loro contenuto. Le stesse parole, utilizzate da utenti diversi, identificano links diversi. Si creano così interrelazioni inaspettate tra i diversi siti che vengono visitati in una forma di zapping non lineare del web. Il lavoro vuole essere "la simulazione di un cervello che si perde nel web (perso tra i siti, ma anche nella duplice identità di Internet: tra parola e immagine)". Future commissioni arricchiranno il sito di nuovi progetti scelti nel lavoro di artisti che nel tempo si sono dimostrati determinanti nel dare identità a questo settore artistico.

Il sito, semplice nella grafica e chiaro alla lettura, promette di essere anche un´importante risorsa per specializzati e non.

You are not here

2007-07-13T12:21:00.000+01:00

(originally published in Furtherfield - 2007)

From a strict physical, corporeal point of view, ubiquity is an ontological impossibility. For as much as one would like, being in two places at the same time, for instance, the city of New York and the city of Baghdad, is not possible to accomplish. Only electrons, netart and god have the uncanny ability to present themselves in several places in one given moment.

You Are Not Here departs from and builds itself from this inability. Developed by Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Andrew Schneider, Ran Tao and Mushon Zer-Aviv and inviting people to "explore Baghdad through the streets of New York", YANH presents itself as an urban tourism mash-up. Not only can you be in two places at the same time (the ubiquity concept we departed from), but also both places become interconnected in a psychological enactment of a meta-city. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: users (the so-called meta-tourists) are invited to download and print on one side of a sheet of paper a map of Baghdad and on the other side a reversed map of New York. As soon as that task is accomplished the exotic sightseeing can begin. Scattered around New York are YANH street-signs that provide warned explorers (those who printed the map) as well as random passers-by the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, where audio-guided tours of contemporary Baghdad destinations in NYC can be listened to.

New Yorkers get the opportunity to know Baghdad like their own city. This sentence is everything but a random consequence of YAHN. The idea behind such a phrase isn't without a purpose. but let's leave the more immediate, political (some would even say critical) agenda of this project for later. Let us first think of psychogeography not only as theoretical concept but also, and in this case, as a tool. A tool that allows people to appropriate their own cities and break the coded urban space imposed by the established power. Resistance is a key word in this project and the authors are the first to reclaim it as a main aspect. Mushon Zer-Aviv stated in an interview to We Make Money Not Art that "we were generally dissatisfied with the way mainstream media communicates terms like 'Baghdad' and 'Iraqis', we were feeling these terms have lost their human scale. YANH attempts to allow a one-to-one scaled experience of Baghdad".

So what does YANH allow? What does it do for the average New Yorker willing to take the proposed tour? It allows for a new layer of meaning to be added to the already accepted way that New York is perceived. The similarities with Shiftspace, another project by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, are to be noticed, but now, instead of adding layer after layer to online space, it is a physical space, that of New York City that is enhanced with additional layers. Yet, what is enhancing the glamorous city that never sleeps? And while asking this question the critical discourse mentioned earlier arises. Considering that it is not Lisbon or London cities being overlapped, and that we are exploring while going from one touristy spot to the other. It is a destroyed and plundered city. It is a rundown city. It is Baghdad. And in this lies the strength of the project. A New Yorker visiting Baghdad as a regular tourist, with a map in his or her hand and audio information of all the must-see monuments while walking around New York. Due to the contemporary tensions and conflicts existing in Iraq, and their connection to the USA, one cannot stop thinking of the irony stemming from the implicit dialectics between western tourism and (western) colonialism in a postcolonial world. More than overlapping two existing cities in order to create a subjective, psychologically driven experience of a meta-city, YAHN attempts to raise a politically engaged, irony driven portrait of the tensions of the conflict in Iraq by tying together in the same emotional web both capitals of the two empires. The one who is colonizing and the one being colonized.

A visit of Gaza through the streets of Tel-Aviv will be ready in April and one of P'yongyang through the streets of Seoul is being planned for a near future.

Spamming: from aesthetics to politics

2007-07-12T12:16:00.000+01:00

(originally published in networked performance - 28.06.2006)

Re: the VALtgUM
just for guys Bret
Any med for your girl to be happy!

These email subjects are everything but unfamiliar. Everyday our email boxes are packed with offers of mood elevators or sex drive enhancers, insane lottery prizes, great business offers and opportunities, just to name a few. The word coming to our mind is spamming, defined by wikipedia as the sending of unsolicited bulk email - that is, email that was not asked for (unsolicited) and received by multiple recipients (bulk). It has been restricted to unsolicited commercial e-mail, not considering non-commercial solicitations such as political or religious pitches, even if unsolicited, as spam. But the fact is spam refers to form rather than content. Commercial or not, it is spam and it’s hell!

What drives people to spam? Easy money is the first answer that comes to mind, but besides that, what other motivations lie behind non-commercial spamming? Art, of course. Spam art, one of the endless subdivisions of the ever elusive discipline once coined as net art, is probably the less identifiable as such. Disguised as warnings, cries for help, subversive money promises and the like, these projects flood the worldÂ’s inboxes, exploring bulk emailing as a primary source of creativity, in what can be thought of as a spamming aesthetics.
Recently, Sheet, a project by Portuguese artist Susana Mendes Silva has been circulating rather insistently through the new media art world. Being such an interested observer, Silva has been developing for some time now a body of work that revolves around the Internet user and how can he or she be an aware, perhaps critical, user of the medium. Either through emailing, chatting, or internet phoning, she asks questions that force us to think about what does Â“being onlineÂ” actually imply.

In Sheet, an email attachment sent by a fictional character (Ada Evollace from Hidden Agenda contemporary art editions), everything is ambiguous. If the project draws strength from the spam art paradigm, it is so only in a utilitarian way. Sheet preys on spam in order to achieve its own goals, a secret agenda (the name of the editions company is everything but a coincidence) dating back to 2001 and to the Publico (Centerfold) project (a two-page newspaper insert that mimics a gigantic information plaque one can regularly find next to a work of art, containing information about it, but in this case the plaque contained information about itself), and easily connected to the questioning of art not only as an object, but as a product, a commodified art, that is nothing more than a deluxe merchandise accessible only to a few enlightened connoisseurs. Sheet thus is spam in which it was sent through an unsolicited bulk email. It uses that spam aesthetics mentioned above to arrive to a spam politics, through which it aims to undermine, once again, the institutionalized art world and its logics. But once again ambiguity reins.

The project, a pdf file acting as an authenticity certificate of itself, assumes the role of an original work of art, but where is that original? Where lies the difference between the first document the artist created and all the ones she sent to the endless email accounts? None, and it is not possible to think of them as multiples either. They are the same, they are ubiquous. Yet Silva claims that each file is a unique (authentic) and signed (the file has a scanned signature of the artist) work of an unlimited edition. The nature of the work also adds to the ambiguity: it is a computer file, and more specifically, a pdf document, but is it meant to be printed? Or to exist solely as an open window on your computer screen? When you print it, what happens to it? Does it become a copy of the file you have on your machine or is it the original? But what was the original in the first place? Confusion arises and Silva actually wants it to happen. It is what drives this project, the thin line where it stands.

From aesthetics to politics, spamming is used to shed light into the ideologies running around unnoticed. “In case of public exhibition of the work the owner should contact the artist”. This is the last information the certificate bears. Even more ambiguity, irony even. How can she be taken seriously when she wants to be informed of the fate of a spam mail? She is criticizing the art world, through spamming an authenticity certificate, but at the same time she is claiming intellectual property over something that she sent (carelessly) to the world, her art work, acknowledging its right to be featured in a public art show. The questions once again arise. What is the difference between the “public" in spamming and the “public" in an art show? What property can she claim when she willingly gave away all control she had over the project? Is it still hers? If people resent it to others did they modified it and destroyed its essence? What if someone managed to alter the file? Is this modification the same kind as the previous one? What right does the artist have to ask to be informed about Sheet’s whereabouts? And is a spammed file subject to being shown in an art exhibition or does it loose its specific features, what made it “art”, when not being spammed?

All these questions are what drives the project. Silva is completely aware of that. She wants us to dwell on the intangible nature of Sheet. To think about its inconsistencies and realise they are the inconsistencies of information (and art) at the dawn of a new century. The paradigm is slowly shifting and not only is she aware of that, she wants us to be aware of it as well.

Review of Curating Immateriality

2007-07-11T10:30:00.000+01:00

(originally published in Rhizome in 23.06.2006)

Curating Immateriality: the work of the curator in the age of network systems is the third volume of Autonomedia's DATA browser series, after Economizing Culture and Engineering Culture. Edited by Joasia Krysa, co-editor of the book series, curator, and teacher at the Faculty of Technology, University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom, Curating Immateriality features texts that are to a large extent based on the papers presented at Curating, Immateriality, Systems, an event held at Tate Modern in June 2005, but re-edited for the purpose of publication. The book features articles by Joasia Krysa, Tiziana Terranova, Marina Vishmidt, Grzesiek Sedek, Geoff Cox, Christiane Paul, Eva Grubinger, Jacob, Lillemose, Josephine Berry Slater, 0100101110101101.org & [epidemiC], Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker, Franziska Nori, low-fi, Trebor Scholz, Beryl Graham, Piotr Krajewski, Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin and Matteo Pasquinelli.

At the Curating, Immateriality, Systems event, the debate was centered around how curators can respond to new forms of self-organizing and self-replicating systems, databases, programming, net art, software art and generative media, and in general to systems of immaterial cultural production and what new models of curatorial practice are needed to take account of shared, distributed, and collaborative objects and processes. Curating Immateriality not only follows this line of investigation, but also tries to go deeper in exploring some of the critical ideas that were central to the conference. As Krysa stated in her introduction to the book, "The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents including technological networks and software. This book reflects on these changes and asserts that the practice of curating cannot be dissociated from social and technological developments."

One of the ideas put forward in this volume, giving it its critical structure and theoretical framing, is one derived by Italian autonomists, linking immateriality—seen as a response to the changes undergone by labour in post-Fordist or networked societies, and curating. Immateriality (or immaterial labour) is a Marxist concept that redefines labour in the age of general intellect. Lazzarato and Negri identified how labour, control, and power relations have changed and are currently structured, due to the ever-growing importance of communication technologies and distributed production. Curating, seen through this perspective, cannot be dissociated from these changes and can be thought of as their reflection.

Besides investigating the notion of immateriality, the book also introduces the concept of a distributed curatorial practice, or put in other terms, the action of curation within the context of networked systems. This vast exercise addresses issues of what can be curated and what challenging new possibilities for curating itself may arise from such a systemic point of view. Once again the political context in which these changes occur is taken in consideration and control and power relations are examined. For instance, in Pasquinelli's article, the end chapter of the book, free software is seen as something other than simply liberating. It is seen, like other cultural products, as symptomatic of the new immaterial conditions discussed previously.

Practice is an important part of the book. If some very interesting articles constitute the theoretical backbone of this collection of contributions, examples are by no means reduced to a simple illustrating role. If different forms of curatorial practice are discussed, and Christiane Paul's text is a good overview of the multitude of possibilities within new media curating, the concept of distributed curating, presented and debated, is extended by the introduction of the idea of software curating—that is, online curatorial systems that incorporate software and networks in the curatorial process itself.

Two examples deserve a closer look, kurator and the better-known runme.org. The kurator project is a free software application programmed to curate source code. After being submitted the code is made available for further processing through a set of modules. It actively tries to reconfigure curatorial practice in line with the curatorial object. The interest lies in the fact that both the practices and their framing adhere to the same principles, the organization of data. It transforms curating into a generative experiment about social relations, distributing the curatorial activity over a network of people and thus breaking the domain of the curator as a single individual. Also, it deletes, to a certain extent, the issue of the importance of taste, by partially automating activities associated to the curator. According to Vishmidt's text, "kurator deploys opens source programming technology to distribute the function and de-privilege the figure of the curator as specialized subject of institutional power." She later writes, "By displacing the curatorial function from abstract subjective potential to binary code, it reproduces the singular curator as a collective executable. In this way it preserves the curator by exceeding the curator, the perfectly consistent paradox that any art practice grounding its critique (...) is structurally bound to enact."

Runme.org, the software repository emerged out from the Readme software art festival, is a system of dynamic data storage and a presentation tool. Its curatorial process is based on an open system, but with moderation and a database allowing for the self-submission of works. Not quite as radical as kurator, runme.org shifts the emphasis on the curatorial role in different ways. After the broad initial filtering caused by the moderated submission procedure, additional filtering happens in the classifying and labeling of work, through the project's "taxonomical" system. Software submitted may be classified according to a list of software art categories and a keyword cloud, describing the projects and allowing navigation. It is the interaction between the processes of filtering, categorizing, and labeling, with their imposition of boundaries and the democratic possibilities of an open repository and database, that makes this project curatorially interesting.

In these two examples, and all of the others presented throughout the book, there is a more general acknowledgment of software curating, which seems to place the strength and validity of Curating Immateriality in the context of politics of curating. This act is portrayed as both a critical and a creative practice and much connected to a wider socio-economical system beyond the traditional art system.

Sound Visions

2007-07-10T10:29:00.000+01:00

André Gonçalves and André Sier
16 June - 15 July 2006
Sala do Risco, Lisbon

(curatorial statement)

Sound is image is sound is image.

Contemporary experience’s conversion to the digital medium is undeniable, the nomadic aspect of (new) technologies has become complete ubiquity and today everything can be thought of as zeros and ones, as information in its most abstract and immaterial version. Having that in mind what happens to the apparently ontological difference between sound and image, audition and vision?

Sound Visions intends to show the crumbling down of the differences between these two distinct modes of acess to reality. André Gonçalves and André Sier work from that place where it is impossible to define where one starts and the other ends. They use each one of those modes to stimulate the other, causing a generalized undefinition, from which it is no longer possible to tell what is cause and what is effect, if it the sound generating the images or if it is the images that are causing the sounds. The spiral is endless, sound is generating images that generates sound that again generates new images. the system replicates itself, always in interaction with the audience, pulled into the vortex of events taking place.

Sound Visions is a project developed specifically by the Upgrade! Lisbon for the Village Festival.

Reviews: Sound Visions

2007-07-09T10:28:00.000+01:00

An age-old binary by Marisa Olson
(originally published in Rhizome - 23 June 2006)

The relationship between sound and image has been a ripe area of artistic practice for at least a century. The philosophical difference between the two 'objects' has often been debated, as have our processes for transmitting and perceiving them. The exhibition, Sound Visions, organized for the Willage Festival by the Upgrade branch in Lisbon, Portugal, carries these questions into the digital realm. They ask, in their statement, when 'everything can be thought of as zeros and ones, as information in its most abstract and immaterial version... what happens to the apparently ontological difference between sound and image?' Sound Visions makes a case for the conflation of these categories--and then presents work that reifies the distinctions. Artists Andre Gonsalves and Andre Sier create projects in which 'sound is generating images that generates sound that again generates new images.' Such audio/ visual feedback loops attest to the cycle of spectatorship by which we are all party to technological development. If you're in the area, you can see and hear the show for yourself, through July 15.

Feeling lucky? Downloading as a desired risk

2007-07-08T10:25:00.000+01:00

(originally published in networked_performance in 10.03.2006)

According to Wikipedia, a russian roulette is "the practice of placing one round in a revolver, spinning the cylinder and closing it into the firearm without looking, aiming the revolver at one's own head in a suicidal fashion, and pulling the trigger. The number of rounds placed in the revolver can vary. As a gambling game, toy guns are often used to simulate the practice. The number of deaths caused by this practice is unknown".

Carlos Katastrofksy used this concept in one of his latest netart projects, but replacing the shooting activity by the more zeitgeist behaviour of downloading. And if randomly shooting could easily take your life away "in a suicidal way", the random downloading of files with no safety guarantees whatsoever could easily take your computer's "life" as easy as the original roulette did. There is no possible ingenuity, "be aware!" the artist says. One can be about to download bad or dangerous data, but who can resist the thrill of risking your own beloved state-of-the art laptop?

But dangerous downloading isn't just the only important aspect here. like in any p2p application, downloading implies uploading, for a file to be downloaded by someone it has had to be generously uploaded by someone else. The files stored in Russian Roulette are the files people decided to share. We don't get to know who uploaded what, just their names (in a reminescence of The Original), a way of further combining the most important concepts of this project: file transfer (up and downloading), desire and risk.

Katastrofsky plays with something very interesting: the file sharing that takes place isn't utilitary (the information per se value), social (the relational value) or political (the free acces to information value). File sharing in this situation has only to do with desire, risk taking, by surprising or being surprised, by engaging in potentially dangerous behaviour or enabling others to do so... one yearns to engage in such activities. Risk taking is part of our contemporary society, no more an external threat, but an actual definig element of contemporary, western societies, Ulrich Beck said in his La Société du risque - Sur la voie d'une autre modernité (the french translation), and this project is such a good way of ilustrating that: desire and risk connected to the file sharing activity of our digital times.
Oh the thrill of downloading and opening an unknown file just for the sake of doing it... adrenaline rushes through the whole body...

Carlos Katastrofsky
russian roulette
call for contribution
2006

Upgrade! Lisbon

2007-07-07T10:24:00.000+01:00

Upgrade! Lisbon is one of the over 20 autonomous nodes forming the international network called Upgrade! International. This is an emergent, non-hierarchical network addressing the relations between art, culture and technology. It started as an informal series of gatherings in New York in 1999, by the hand of media artist Yael Kanarek, and now has nodes spread all over the world. Each node is completely autonomous to pursue their own goals (all nodes organizing a monthly meeting where an artist, curator, researcher is invited to present their work, concept or research), but they all share a common set of objectives stated in the Upgrade! International’s mission.

Upgrade! Lisbon started its regular activity in January 2006. It is hosted by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, one of the most interesting and dynamic contemporary art galleries in Portugal. Since its beginning, the Lisbon node has presented projects by artists such as Patrícia Gouveia e Nuno Correia, Susana Mendes Silva, André Sier, André Gonçalves, Manuel Lima, Santiago Ortiz, Herwig Turk, Marta de Menezes, Adriana Sá and Olivier Perriquet. In June 2006, the Upgrade! Lisbon curated Sound Visions, an exhibition featuring new projects by André Gonçalves and André Sier, specifically developed for the Village Festival, Europe’s first digital cinema festival and is now preparing a show featuring all the artists who have already presented at the monthly gatherings.

The strategic partnership with a top contemporary art gallery, allows for a high visibility of this new platform, and thus of the artists presenting monthly. The audience has been gradually increasing and besides those coming to specifically see a certain artist, some people have been present in most of the meetings. In November 2006, the Upgrade! Lisbon took to the annual meeting of the Upgrade! International, held in the USA, 3 installations, 1 performance, 1 workshop and 1 concert, all by artists who had already presented in Lisbon.

Besides being a venue for presenting and debating art projects and practices that engage with and explore digital technologies, the Upgrade! Lisbon has set as important local goals to help to establish an active new media art community and also to legitimate this artistic practice within a larger, institutional art scene. As a global goal, Lisbon wants to welcome artists that have already presented at other nodes as well as provide an opportunity for Portuguese artists to show their work in other nodes all over the world.

January 2006: Patrícia Gouveia and Nuno Correia
February 2006: André Sier
March 2006: Susana Mendes Silva
May 2006: André Gonçalves and Keja Ho Kramer
June 2006: Sofia Oliveira and Manuel Lima
July 2006: Sound Visions exhibition
September 2006: Upgrade! at Ars Electronica
October 2006: Santiago Ortiz
November 2006: Herwig Turk
November 2006: Upgrade! International: DIY
January 2007: Marta de Menezes
March 2007: Adriana Sá
April 2007: Olivier Perriquet
May 2007: Ivan Franco

I tag ---> I own - interactive readymade for free

2007-07-06T10:18:00.000+01:00

(originally published in networked_performance in 18.11.2005)

It all began a couple of weeks ago with the post “on blogging as curating“. Quickly the discussion about it turned into “tagging as curating”. Katastrofsky took it one step further, proposing in his personal blog (in accordance to what he had explored in his “the original” project) tagging as owning.

The idea is simple, and it would make Duchamp proud of this new pupil of his. In a set of three simple rules the artist asks us to choose one site whatsoever (the more you like it, the better), then to tag it as an “interactive readymade by Carlos Katastrofsky” and it’s done. You become the owner of an online readymade done by you and Katastrofsky himself.

The simple act of signing, so characteristic of readymade works of art (and from a conceptual point of view, the work itself) is replaced by a tag defined by the artist, the creator of this “performative” piece. The interesting thing here is that it is not the artist who signs (tags) the existing object. The artist only allows us to do it for him, and by doing so he completely looses control of what becomes one of his works of art. In the end it doesn’t matter if noone else recognises what you just did as a readymade done by both of you, but then again they might.

Using del.icio.us, and defining a priori the readymade-iser tag, Katastrofsky allows for a community, or a net of readymades of his authorship to exist. Tagging something as a Katastrofsky’s collaborative readymade opens the door to the club. You get to know what are his readymades, how many of them there are and who owns them (and most important of all, if yours is better than the rest).

By recurring to del.icio.us or the Flock browser he is creating a “one tag” network centred around the ideas of tagging as signing (he allows others to tag in his name) and tagging as owning (what you tag in his name becomes your own katastrofsky piece). If in “the original” it wasn’t possible to choose what you could own, the decision belonging solely to the artist, now it depends on you entirely. Now everyone can have whatever “interactive readymade by carlos katastrofsky” they desire.

free interactive readymade
2005
Carlos Katastrofsky
http://blog.subnet.at/carlos/stories/1814/

Go for the original, not the copies - owning netart for free

2007-07-05T10:12:00.000+01:00

(originally published in networked_performance in 09.11.2005)

The dichotomy between an original (authentic) work of art and its copies isn’t a new one. Walter Benjamin adressed it a long time ago and stated that the work’s aura (its distinctive characteristic) gets lost when technically reproducing it. This discussion became a bit obsolete when digital culture (and its artifacts) became common in our contemporary world. When looking at a net art piece, how can you conceptualize an original (and its copies) when the work is online, accessible to everyone at the same time? Ubiquity doesn’t go along with unicity, at least not at a first glance.
This debate has become old, so much has been said and written around the lost of “the original” (its death by means of the digital) that nobody is interested in it lately. Benjamin couldn’t expect this turn of events, but we solved the problem. No original, no copies, just information accessible to everyone.

But what if someone wanted to subvert this status quo? What if an artist missed a time when a work of art was a unique object that one could own? That is what Carlos Katastrofsky’s “the original” is all about. This netart project allows you to be the owner of a unique (one of a kind) netart piece. The confusion arises. How can one be the owner (in the traditional sense) of netart? The truth is one canÂ´t and in this lies the interest of “the original”. Katastrofsky allows you to be the owner of a unique, numbered, but not signed (the irony continues…) work of art; of something that isn’t an object and that will disapear from your screen as soon as you close the window. Your original work of art will forever be gone and the only memory of it will be a print (if you decided to take the artist’s advice and print it) and your name in a list of “owners of original artworks by carlos katastrofsky”.

This is an extremely ironic project. It allows you to traditionally own a net art piece, own it like any objectual art piece. But the irony lies in the fact it isn’t an object, and what you can own is nothing more than a copy (a print out) of that non existing object, another irony (what is a copy of a net art piece?)… In the end there is nothing of an object here, just a process, a set of rules that leads you to the point of questioning unicity, ownership and the object-like nature of a digital art work.

The Original
2005
Carlos Katastrofsky
http://aqua.subnet.at/carlos/projekte/netart/original/

T-shirts as software

2007-07-04T10:03:00.000+01:00

(originally published in networked_performance in 29.09.2005)

Susana Mendes Silva keeps creating interactive performances and by doing so continues to investigate the nature of social relations. After Artphone and art_room, two performances in which the spectator (user, to be more accurate) had to interact with the device created by the artist, a technologically mediated question-answer situation about contemporary art, Silva developed Live Art.

The assumptions are the same. Even the name of this new performance reminds us of the previous ones and how much she enjoys questioning the boundaries of traditional art, or at least of a commodified, object driven art. In this project there is again a device the artist created, but not a digital one, or at least not one at first sight. It is a t-shirt with information concerning the performance. The information, the technical details of the work of art, functions as the instructions manual for the performance, defining how it is supposed to work.

The user, he or she who buys the t-shirt, will have to perform a determined action, wear it (or not), thus making the device work, interact with it. This performance consists in a set of rules materially formalized in an inexplicit manner in a t-shirt, . The course of action is unpredictable and is completely out of the artist’s control. Once again, through such a procedure, Silva questions how spectator and contemporary art interact, playing with concepts as artistic phenomenon or authorship.

A t-shirt, a simple, implicit set of rules. An open, modifiable, autonomous device. If we look at the user’s role as secondary, if we look at the device, and how it works and changes, the concept of generative art isn’t that far away. Thinking of it as “any kind of artistic practice in which the artist uses a system and makes it function with a certain degree of autonomy in order to create complete work of art”. Live art is put in motion and the outcome is unpredictable (as was art_room’s) being the result of chance and the limitations of the set of rules defined.

But how accurate, how realistic is comparing the human system here described with the procedures of autonomous systems responsible for generative art? What of meaning? Part of this system is made of a user to whom this whole situation in which he sees himself has a meaning and that guides his action. Not only is he influenced by what is written on the t-shirt, but also by his interpretation of the event and that has to be accounted for.

There is usefulness in another comparison. If the focus in the spectator-user’s expectations and in his reaction to the piece, in how the action unfolds and meaning is created from the interaction with the set of rules defining the performance, if the focus is in the procedures rather than in the outcome, we are clearly facing what can be called software art. Even though not recurring to digital tools or the like, Silva is, ideologically, walking through digital art’s grounds, for she is exploring communication procedures, processes over objects, relations over subjects. She is doing analogically immaterial works of art and her tools are concepts such as interactivity, software or self-organization.

Susana Mendes Silva
live art, 2005
performance
person with t-shirt

for the exhibition
private t'shirt
30.09 to 27.10
a loja do lopes
lisbon

An artist in the chat room

2007-07-03T09:51:00.000+01:00

(originally published in Source Code in 13.07.2005)

In 2002, Susana Mendes Silva (1972) put up, for Free Manifesta, the Artphone project, a cell phone mediated performance in which everyone could contact the artist, through her personal cell phone number, and discuss contemporary art related subjects. The slogan she used when advertising the project was revealing of what her purpose was: “Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art”. Everything one has always wanted to know about contemporary art was available, only one phone call away. The artist exposed herself. Not only was she completely available for anyone who called but also assumed she could answer any question addressed to her.

In 2005, three years later, the cell phone was replaced. Instead of just being available, of waiting a phone call, the artist became more dynamic, active. She replaced the cell phone by an online video chat room and created Art_room, an online performance where anyone could meet the artist and, once again, ask her everything they wanted to now about contemporary art. Besides the notorious change of environment and, consequently, the kind of relationships established, the artist also worked the engagement of those assisting or participating in the performance. It was mandatory to have an internet connection, to know the implicit rules of online chatting and to download different plug-ins that allowed the access and interaction in such an environment.

The performance was announced by email and happened in predefined schedules during the month of June. The goal was to put together, in the same place, the typical users of such chat rooms and people more familiarized with the contemporary art discourse. The development of the action taking place was let to chance and it would be completely dependent on the public and the artist’s interactions. Only one person other than the usual chatters of the chosen room showed up. The performance started and the artist introduced herself and told people to ask her questions about art. People in the chat room didn’t quite understand the objective of her behaviour and started to act aggressively towards her. As she repeatedly stated she was doing a performance and she wanted people to ask her questions about art, aggressiveness escalated and she was invited to leave the chat room, since her presence wasn’t welcome there.

The following day the artist repeated the performance in the same chat room. Everyone in the room were regular users and they were mostly present at the previous day actions. The artist continued her activity, seen as unwelcome and undesirable by some of the members of the room. Later on, the room monitor shut down her webcam and finally banned her from the monitored area, known as friends and family.

The Art_room project thus exceeded the artist’s initial expectations. Even though largely depending on the establishment of social relations, and on the contingencies that rule them, such reactions were never planned or accounted as a possibility. Yet, a closer look at the processes explored and undermined by the artist let us see how predictable the reactions obtained during the two days of performance are.

Silva, with this project, is working in two different areas, both able to induce attitudes and behaviors similar to those witnessed. The notion of community is central to Art_room. There is a group of individuals sharing the same interests and gathered in a specific online space, considered by themselves their reunion space. It’s by sharing that space with each other that they feel as part of that community. The artist, by introducing herself in that chat room has crossed the community’s border separating the outside world from that group of people. Not only has she crossed the border, thus invading that space and assuming herself as an outsider, she also acted in a way that made that difference even more visible, by showing the impossibility of conversion, of becoming part of the community and sharing a common discourse. She acted in a disruptive manner, disturbing the regular functioning of the social structure crystallized in that video chat room.

But besides assuming her otherness, and thus being irreducible to the group, Silva was questioning the group’s beliefs about what art is. Assuming her behaviour as an artistic project not only is she clashing against a traditional, objectual, almost commodified vision of the artistic object, she is also affirming that a disturbing, parasitic, undesirable activity, may be considered art. She confronts them with something they don’t see as such, and never will. The debate wasn’t centered in what were the artist’s initial plans, but in justifying and legitimizing her behavior, inappropriate to the community as a valid artistic practice. The artist will never become a member of this community so as its elements will never share with her the same vision of the artistic phenomenon.

We have here two events, that can be thought as the ever present dichotomy between the self and the other and that, in this particular case, will inexorably result in a difference without any possibility of being resolved. There is only one possible way. The community regains the state of equilibrium, by eliminating the destabilizing element, the artist and her behaviour.

A technologically mediated performance working as a human relations laboratory. An extremely interesting exercise that happened live, in front of our eyes. What is the difference between online and off-line? Is the online world a public space open to dialogue and to equal participation for all? Where is the emancipating utopia of cyberspace? The artist knows how to answer to those questions.

Online - Portuguese net art 1997-2004

2007-07-02T09:49:00.000+01:00

(invitation card - front and back)

(curatorial statement)

The expression net art surges in the middle of the decade of the nineties, having immediately spread to various online communities and being used to describe a varied collection of practices, constituting, in its essence, an exchange of ideas, resorting to a constant dialogue between artists, enthusiasts and critics of the techno culture. It is, consequently, in its origin, defined more as a communicative practice and criticism, of a global nature, than as any type of visual esthetic. In this manner, and since the beginning, the artists who found themselves exploring the possibilities of the Internet as a means of expression, possessed a grand ambition, showing objectives and collective ideas through publications of innumerous manifestos, where they proposed to explore the specific characteristics of the Internet, such as for example the immediacy and the immateriality. The e-mail , a form of privileged communication, allowed for an egalitarian communication, at any one moment and independently of geographical frontiers, which revealed as crucial for the development of communities that were related to the then recent phenomenon of net art. It became thus a common aim for the development of the communities of which art was found in the present daily activities.

It entails a recent artistic practice, with origin in the exponential development of the Internet and the consciousness of its possibilities both communicative and expressive. But also in a contesting, subversive context that is characteristic of the generation that surged in the artistic panorama of the decade of the nineties. These practices, independently of the specificity of the method to which they resort to, and their consequent marginality, are characterized by an extremely generalized reactivity and virulence. Activism, subversion and cultural terrorism are the words in order of who reacts to a commercialized and media run civilization with its logics of domination and destitution.

Artworks that distort the basic functions of navigation on the Internet, through the manipulation of interfaces considered reliable by the users, aim at shaking our confidence in the friendly nature of the online world. Artworks that put in question the notion of interactivity subordinating the autonomy of the user to the device. Artworks that resort to the possibilities created by the Internet for establishing a generalized communication, easily accessible and cost effective, allowing the artists the development of highly politicized practices, challenging a capitalist and globalized system. Artworks that seek to establish new communities without referring to the local order. But these are also artworks that are extremely poetic, or of the merely ludic nature. Net art constitutes itself this way as a field of experimentation and expression that is extremely polysemous, heterogeneous in its discourse and in the forms it adopts, summarizing in itself a grouping of formulations that are characteristic of the contemporary.

The Portuguese case

If, internationally, these types of practices appear simultaneously with the development of e-commerce, in Portugal , the first experiences appear only a few years after. The oldest artwork found, and introduced in the present project, dated from 1997. Talking about a Portuguese net art implies, in this way, demonstrating some specificities. Not so much in what respects its forms and contents, but rather in how it relates with the form of organization of the intervenients, artists and institutions of this practice. If, internationally, the aspect of counter culture assumes a key role in the development of the practice, in Portugal, there being still subversive pieces or extremely critical ones, we cannot talk about organized groups or minimally structured, whose objective has consisted or consists in undermining, discrediting, or placing the system at flaw. In 1997 the Virose platform surged, directed by Miguel Leal and Francisco José Pereira, but dedicated mostly to the transmission and the theoretical debate about the possible relationships between art and technology in a contemporary artistic context.

Therefore one cannot speak of a subversive logic, organized and equivalent to its international congener. But one cannot speak either of the surfacing of communities, new diasporas even, whose centre of activity would be the debate and the artistic experimentation of this type of support. The peripheral nature, on the one hand, and the need for technological capital on the other seem to have placed the Portuguese artists at the margin of an artistic discourse centered on the creative possibilities of the Internet. Missing the oriented communities for the discussion and criticism of net art, missing the subversive side of those communities, the flourishing of a Portuguese net art was difficult, very limited, even if the approached themes and the way of doing it was, in its essence, similar to what was being explored internationally.

In 2001, Interact appeared, a digital publication edited by the Centre of Communication and Language Studies of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa , with the objective of leading into a “reflection and discussion involving the important themes of contemporary thought, the critical assistance of events, cultural and artistic practices and the incentive to working in experimentation with digital technologies and the networks of information. Diminishing the gap still existent between culture and cyberculture is still one of its main motivations, searching for that reason the encounter (and the confrontation) between more traditional practices in the field of culture (such as the essay, the criticism and critical appreciations of literary works), practices of expression, reflection and creativity which are specific to digital culture, such as the hypertextuality and hypermedia, interactivity and connectivity”. It contains a section, Laboratório , where some artistic projects that were specifically developed for the Internet are presented, allowing for a bigger visibility, as well as an increased debate about theory revolved around not only net art, but also the digital as a means of expression.

The Atmosferas project, in 2003, came to change the status quo of net art in Portugal . Assuming itself as a platform for support and distribution of digital creation, has produced, among other activities, innumerous net art projects and created in 2004 the Atmosferas Prize in Digital Creation, a key instrument in the visibility, acknowledgement and legitimization of these types of practices and which counts with in 2005 its second edition.

Another specificity is related to the legitimization of net art with the grandest insistence of legitimization, the museum. If, internationally, net art has been the target of a gradual process of integration in that which can be considered a multifaceted discourse of contemporary art, with big international institutions ordaining it an increasing distinction and visibility, in Portugal, and perhaps as a consequence of its tardy emergence, that acknowledgement as a legitimate artistic practice is still practically inexistent. Let's highlight, however, the exception of the Museu do Chiado ( Chiado Museum ) – National Museum of Contemporary Art which in 2000, at its new site, created a specific area for online projects which it called “site-specific”.

The project

The project of an online exposition of Portuguese net art emerges in the following of an investigative study and is the final result of the mapping and analysis of a triangle constituted by artists, artworks and institutions and respectively their authorial conceptions, codes, discourses and trajectories of legitimization.

The selection of pieces presented here is essentially subjective. It was constituted with a gaze, and not the only one, over the artistic practice of recent development, dependent upon a technological support to which it refers to, the Internet. Five groups were created, five unities of sense, which attempt to delimitate specific themes of artistic experimentation in this area. They are not tight zones, mutually exclusive, being more about areas, at times overlapping, that solicit each other mutually. Pieces included in one category could be connected to another or others. However, each piece was merely inserted into one of these areas of sense, having as reference, what was considered the characteristic or central theme that it approaches. The selected artworks are, in this manner, associated to the themes of (h)activism, interactivity, narrative, World Wide Web and geography.

The result aspires to recognize the diversity of forms and discourses in an artistic practice that is of a rather recent development, which occupies, in the discourse of the visual arts, a residual place without which it would be less important, rather the contrary, closing in itself a collection of formulations and experimentations significantly characteristic of the contemporary.

Reviews: Online - Portuguese net art 1997-2004

2007-07-01T11:30:00.000+01:00

Lisbon Story by Flavia De Sanctis Mangelli
(originally published in l'Unità - May 2005)

Un'antologia di lavori di net art portoghese, tutti realizzati tra il 1997 e il 2004 è il tema della mostra on line promossa da Atmosferas, un’organizzazione culturale volta allo studio delle intersezioni tra arte, tecnologia e scienza. L’esposizione si sviluppa attorno a tre tematiche principali: l’hactivism, l’interattività e la narrativa,

Privilegiata una presentazione delle opere molto semplice, quasi “minimalista”: un elenco di links colorati, l’uno accanto all’altro, collocati su uno sfondo nero. Nessuno sforzo anche per contestualizzare i lavori perché la mostra intende sottolineare la natura frammentaria della net art.

Ma l’esposizione è anche un modo per presentare una vasta selezione di opere che vanno dal 1997, quando la net art era ancora agli albori e si basava su mezzi tecnici molto primitivi, agli ultimi lavori ipertecnologici del 2004.

Nell’ambito dell’hactivism, che raccoglie lavori che utilizzano la rete per creare disturbo e per sovvertire le regole, interessante l’opera di Miguel Leal, Museum of Modern Strategy (1997). Nato dalla critica nei confronti del concetto stesso di museo, il Museum of Modern Strategy, è pensato come un bunker asfittico che mette l’arte in gabbia racchiudendola dentro rigide categorie estetiche e inutili principi classificatori.

Basata sul concetto di interattività è invece l’opera di Sergio Garcez, LNK2 (2004). Muovendo il mouse, il visitatore può infatti creare nuove combinazioni visive e sonore. Nonostante il movimento caotico delle figure sullo schermo dipenda dal visitatore stesso, l’impressione è quella di un disordine e di una fastidiosa confusione a cui è difficile opporsi.

Un’altra tematica è quella della narrativa, perché internet può essere anche un mezzo efficace per presentare delle storie, per raccontare. Si tratta di narrazioni che spesso non hanno un andamento lineare, che si sovrappongono l’una all’altra, creando un andamento a volte difficile da seguire.

Nel caso di The Song Sisters (2001) di Patricia Gouveiaal, centro della narrazione è la vita di tre sorelle che hanno vissuto in Cina all’inizio del ‘900. Le foto in bianco e nero delle tre protagoniste sono accompagnate dalla descrizione dei loro caratteri e da una musica tradizionale che ricorda una Cina che non c’è più. Sono figure forti che hanno avuto un ruolo di primo piano nella società di allora e attraverso le loro storie si riafferma la centralità del ruolo delle donne.

Retrospettiva portoghese by Valentina Tanni
(originally published in Random Magazine - July 2005)

L'organizzazione Atmosferas, progetto culturale dedicato alle intersezioni tra arte, scienza e tecnologia, ha lanciato una mostra online dedicata alla net art portoghese. L'esposizione si configura come una retrospettiva che parte dal 1997, anno del boom dell'arte online, e arriva a comprendere tutto il 2004...

I progetti selezionati dal curatore Luis Silva vengono presentati attraverso un'interfaccia molto semplice, fatta di scarni link su fondo nero. Le categorie che li racchiudono sono: Hactivism, Interactivity, Narrative, World Wide Web e Geography. Il lavoro più "antico" è il Museum of Modern Strategy di Miguel Leal (1997), un'ironica e pungente critica all'istituzione museale.