Image from Cali2’s Flickr stream. From left to right: Mark Amerika, Giselle Beiguelman, Elisa Kreisinger, Arcangel Constantini, Trish Stone, and Eduardo Navas
The opening at Calit2 on January 17 was a complete success. Many thanks to Jordan Crandall and the gallery committee for their support in the realization of the exhibition. A special thanks to Trish Stone and Hector Bracho and the entire Calit2 team for all their help. It was truly a great experience. The discussion panel, which took place just an hour before the official opening will be online very soon, in the meantime I want to point out that there are lots of great pictures on Flickr for anyone interested to view.
This text was commissioned by mooove.com. Excerpt follows below. For the full text please visit mooove.com:
Mobile applications became quite popular when Apple’s smartphone, the iPhone, was introduced in 2007; reciprocally, apps are one of the reasons (if not the main reason) why the iPhone itself became so popular. Later, the popularity of its follow-up, the iPad tablet, cemented an emerging market’s strong interest in software development for mobile devices. Artists and designers began to experiment with app technology almost as soon as it was introduced, and the result has been the emerging aesthetics of mobility, which at the moment shows great potential for creative exploration in the arts in direct relation to diverse areas of information-based research.
This essay is a critical overview of the New Aesthetic in the context of what I define as The Framework of Culture. The New Aesthetic relies heavily on principles of remixing, and for this reason it is not so much a movement, but arguably more of an attitude towards media production that is overtly aware of computing processes that are embedded in every aspect of daily life. Material considered part of The New Aesthetic often, though not always, consists of pixilated designs that make reference to digital manipulation of contemporary media.
One of the The New Aesthetic’s resonating issues is that by using the word “new” it appears invested in the recontextualization of cultural production that is aware of its materialization through the use of digital technology. At the same time, it also appears to be revisiting much of what new media already examined during the early stages of networked communication beginning in the mid-nineties. [1] The subject of interest in this text is not whether The New Aesthetic may be something actually “new,” or simply a trend revisiting cultural variables already well defined by previous stages of media production. Rather, what is relevant is that The New Aesthetic makes evident how recycling of concepts and materials is at play in ways that differ from previous forms of production.
‘Depletion Design’ suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. Soenke Zehle and Carolin Wiedemann discuss Depletion Design with Marie-Luise Angerer, Jennifer Gabrys and David M. Berry, inviting tm13 participants into a collaborative reflection on the necessity to understand human beings as one species among others – constituted by interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights and bacterial exchanges (Angerer); on the material leftovers of electronics as provocations to think through and rework practices of material politics that may be less exploitative within our natural-cultural relationships (Gabrys); and on lines of flight from and through the computational – about expanding them into new ways of living beyond current limitations and towards new means of judgment and politics (Berry).
Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies
Ed. Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle
Theory on Demand#8
Amsterdam: INC, 2012
We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the horizon of depletion, to ask what it means to sustain ourselves, each other, again. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps.
Contributors: Marie-Luise Angerer (Cyborg), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Exhaustion, Soul Work), David M. Berry (On Terminality), Zach Blas (Queer Darkness), Drew S. Burk (Grey Ecology), Gabriella Coleman (Anonymous), Heidi Rae Cooley (Ecologies of Practice), Sebastian Deterding (Playful Technologies, Persuasive Design), Jennifer Gabrys (Natural History, Salvage), Johannes Grenzfurthner & Frank A. Schneider (Hackerspace), Eric Kluitenberg (Sustainable Immobility), Boyan Manchev (Disorganisation, Persistence), Lev Manovich (Software), Sonia Matos (Wicked Problems), Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature), Jason W. Moore (Crisis), Anna Munster (Digital Embodiment), Eduardo Navas (Remix[ing] Re/Appropriations), Brett Neilson (Fracking), Sebastian Olma (Biopolitics, Creative Industries, Vitalism), Luciana Parisi (Algorithmic Architecture), Jussi Parikka (Dust Matter), Judith Revel (Common), Ned Rossiter (Dirt Research), Sean Smith (Information Bomb), Hito Steyerl (Spam of the Earth)
This text was commissioned for the publication Future Exhibitions, Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, published in 2010. It is released as the third and last in a series of texts that were written during and after my residency for The Swedish Traveling Exhibitions.
Note: This text is a brief analysis of the way exhibitions and art works were being redefined in 2010 and before by the growing ubiquity of interactive technology in art production and its presentation in art centers as well as public spaces. Even though culture has experienced quite a few changes in social media and other forms of communication since this essay was originally written, the text is released online as a complement to its other forms of publication because it holds a critical position that is not contingent upon specific trends, but on long standing questions of art production.
Exhibitions at the beginning of the twenty-first century are becoming spaces of flux. The usual static exhibition and installation with labels and proper cues for visitors to keep a safe distance—which is likely the default image that comes to mind when one thinks of museums and other public institutions—is being replaced by displays and installations that encourage some form of visitor interaction. Interactivity can take place directly with the object, an online resource, or downloadable virtual tours, often with the aim not only to have an aesthetic experience but also to inform visitors on some issue. While this new approach is certainly exciting, it also places real challenges for institutions in the arts and other fields on how to organize exhibitions that resonate with the contemporary audience. In this regard, exhibitions tend to borrow from new forms of interaction often linked to artistic expression to highlight and bring audience’s attention to relevant information. In what follows some of the variables that make exhibitions spaces of flux that increasingly rely on creative and even artistic solutions for engaging the audience will be discussed primarily in relation to art but will extend to other fields such as architecture, design, and the public space.
”Wall Drawing #51”, June 1970
All architectural points connected by straight lines. Blue snap lines.
Courtesy LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT
First installation in Sperone Gallery, Turin, Italy and Museo di Torino, Turin, Italy
First drawn by: P. Giacchi, A. Giamasco, G. Mosca
Written for Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, December 2009/January 2010
Also published in R U International?, a yearly publication also by the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, edited by Marten Janson and Sanna Svanberg, pages 90-105.
Note: The following text is the second of two originally published in the magazine Spana!, a publication for the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions (now called Swedish Exhibition Agency). I never got around to releasing the English version of the text until now. It reflects on the roles of artists and curators switching roles, influenced by conceptual art. It then relates such account to the overall experience I had when I visited the exhibition spaces and museums throughout Sweden.
During my travels as Correspondent in Residence for The Swedish Traveling Exhibitions during October and November of 2009, I visited museums and public institutions in Gothenburg and Stockholm that, in varying degrees, approach exhibitions as tools of communication. It became evident to me that their curatorial methods are sensitive to emerging trends in networked communication linked to the tradition of appropriation in the fine arts. In what follows, I examine how the use of appropriation as a tool of selection is part of curatorial and art practice, as well as exhibitions at large.
The Artist as Medium
Lucy Lippard, in her essay, “Escape Attempts,” reflects on her role as curator during the heyday of conceptual art in the 1970s. She quotes Peter Plagens’s review of her exhibition “557,087,” written for Artforum: “There is a total style to the show, a style so pervasive as to suggest that Lucy Lippard is in fact the artist and that her medium is other artists.” Lippard adds her own comment and elaborates, “of course a critic’s medium is always artists.”[1] It should be explained that Lippard was both critic and curator.
The RE/Mixed Media Festival, now in it’s 3rd year, is an annual celebration of collaborative art-making and creative appropriation. It’s the artists’ contribution to the ongoing conversation about remixing, mashups, copyright law, fair use, and the freedom of artists to access their culture in order to add to and build upon it.
The festival – which this year will take place at the Brooklyn Lyceum – a 3-floor 10,000 sq. ft. venue on the border of the Park Slope and Gowanus neighborhoods of Brooklyn – will feature performances, panel discussions, live musical collaborations, hip-hop, sampling, film & video, DIY, food and drink, DJs, technology, interactive installations, painting, sculpture, software, hacking, and much more!
The book should be available in the coming weeks in Europe, and soon after in the United States. For more information, also see the main entry about the book.
Note: Previously this entry read “book print.” This was a mistake on my part. It should be “book sprint.”
I recently read the “book sprint” New Aesthetic, New Anxieties by a group of media researchers, theorists and curators, who got together for three and a half days from June 17–21, 2012, at V2, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The concept of coming together for just a few days to brainstorm a book is certainly something worth considering as an act of creative critical practice. The book from this standpoint functions surprisingly well, especially because its premise is delivered to match the speed of change that its subject (The New Aesthetic) experiences in the daily flow of information throughout the global network. I personally find amazing that a book of this sort can be put together with some cohesion.
The subject of the book is The New Aesthetic, a term /concept that has been making the rounds on the Internet for a bit over a year and a few months, but which really took off when Bruce Sterling wrote about it for Wired on April 2, 2012. Since then many have written about it; the latest manifestation is the book sprint.
With all respect to the authors, I will state that the text is not fully cohesive, as it becomes obvious that much of the content consists of copy/paste material that was clearly worked over to somewhat match a book format in just three and a half days. Clearly some stuff had to be written on the spot, but many of the references in the footnotes could not be gathered so quickly–or at least everyone had to come prepared with some strong references to use well before the writing sessions would begin. What the book sprint does accomplish is provide a good sense of the initial stages of The New Aesthetic in order to reposition the concept in terms of a more critical practice. The New Aesthetic, based on what I have been reading about it for a few months now, is not a term initially invested in criticality, but rather it befriends trending strategies of the design world which more often than not is primarily invested in landing major corporate contracts.
I won’t dwell on my own views on The New Aesthetic in this case. For now, I prefer to share some links that also complement The New Aesthetic, New Anxieties Book sprint. They appear below. I did not include the authors’ names, but you can certainly find them once you click on the links.
Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling can now be pre-ordered. You can place your order on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Powell’sl Books, or another major online bookseller in your region, anywhere in the world. The book is scheduled to be available in Europe in July, 2012 and in the U.S. in September/October of 2012.
The book will also be available electronically through university libraries that have subscriptions with Springer’s online service, Springerlink. I encourage educators who find the book as a whole, or in part, of use for classes to consider the latter option to make the material available to students at an affordable price.
Anyone should be able to preview book chapters on Springerlink once the book is released everywhere. If you would like a print copy for review, please send me, Eduardo Navas, an e-mail with your information and motivation for requesting a print version.
For all questions, please feel free to contact me at eduardo_at_navasse_dot_net.
Also, see the main entry on this book for the table of content and more information.
Below are selected excerpts from the book:
From Chapter One, Remix[ing] Sampling, page 11:
Before Remix is defined specifically in the late 1960s and ‘70s, it is necessary to trace its cultural development, which will clarify how Remix is informed by modernism and postmodernism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For this reason, my aim in this chapter is to contextualize Remix’s theoretical framework. This will be done in two parts. The first consists of the three stages of mechanical reproduction, which set the ground for sampling to rise as a meta-activity in the second half of the twentieth century. The three stages are presented with the aim to understand how people engage with mechanical reproduction as media becomes more accessible for manipulation. […]The three stages are then linked to four stages of Remix, which overlap the second and third stage of mechanical reproduction.
From Chapter two, Remix[ing] Music, page 61:
To remix is to compose, and dub was the first stage where this possibility was seen not as an act that promoted genius, but as an act that questioned authorship, creativity, originality, and the economics that supported the discourse behind these terms as stable cultural forms. […] Repetition becomes the privileged mode of production, in which preexisting material is recycled towards new forms of representation. The potential behind this paradigm shift would not become evident until the second stage of Remix in New York City, where the principles explored in dub were further explored in what today is known as turntablism: the looping of small sections of records to create new beats—instrumental loops, on top of which MCs and rappers would freestyle, improvising rhymes. […]
From Chapter Three, Remix[ing] Theory, page 125:
Once the concept of sampling, as understood in music during the ‘70s and ‘80s, was introduced as an activity directly linked to remixing different elements beyond music (and eventually evolved into an influential discourse), appropriation and recycling as concepts changed at the beginning of the twenty-first century; they cannot be considered on the same terms prior to the development of machines specifically design for remixing. This would be equivalent to trying to understand the world in terms of representation prior to the photo camera. Once a specific technology is introduced it eventually develops a discourse that helps to shape cultural anxieties. Remix has done and is currently doing this to concepts of appropriation. Remix has changed how we look at the production of material in terms of combinations. This is what enables Remix to become an aesthetic, a discourse that, like a virus, can move through any cultural area and be progressive and regressive depending on the intentions of the people implementing its principles.
More excerpts available once the book is available.
