Image and text source: gallery@calit2

The following interview with Sheldon Brown was commissioned by gallery@calit2 for the exhibition “Scalable City”. Exhibition dates: Thursday, Oct. 23, 2008 – Monday, Dec. 15, 2008

Sheldon Brown is an artist who works in new forms of culture that arise out of developments in computing technology. He is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UC San Diego, where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and an academic participant in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). During his early career, Brown experimented with emerging technologies to develop works that explore the possible meaning of “virtual reality.” His installations were often designed for immersive audience participation. Many of these works have been developed for the gallery, such as “MetaStasis” (1990), an art installation consisting of a room that visitors enter to experience what appears to be, as Brown himself has called it, a “zoetrope of TV images.” Brown took his interest in mediated reality to the public sphere in installations such as “Video Wind Chimes” (1994), which projects broadcast TV images on the street sidewalk – images selected according to how the wind blows. In both of these projects, as well as many others, Brown emphasizes how metaphysical experience is contingent upon our increasing dependency in immersive media of all forms. Brown’s longstanding interest in mediation is further explored in “Scalable City.” In the following interview, the artist reflects on how Scalable City connects his interests in emerging technologies as well as longstanding traditions of art practice.

[Eduardo Navas] Unlike many artists who claim to be interested primarily in expressing their ideas and not being bound to a specific medium, you have chosen to focus on the development of art that is involved with computing technology. Having said this, the computer makes possible metamedia – meaning it simulates other media, and in this sense it allows artists to focus on idea development. It appears, then, that you share the interest of exploring ideas in the tradition of modern art practice with artists who might play down their preference for a particular medium. With this in mind, could you reflect on the shifts that art practice may be taking based on the increasing role of computers in all aspects of our lives? How do you see your art practice in relation to previous practices which may have downplayed their preference for a particular medium?

[Sheldon Brown] It seems you attribute conflicting claims for my relationship to “medium”, but I don’t see computing as a medium in the 20th century sense. Probably even the idea of it as a meta-medium does not capture its character. It may be more useful to think about computing as creating certain cultural conditions, and I’m doing work which utilizes and responds to those conditions. It might then be more like the interest in speed as a condition for the futurists, but I wouldn’t want to make too much of any analogies to previous art movements and their concerns. The impact of computing on culture comes after the modernist, conceptualist and post-modernist engagements, and just as I have called it a meta-medium, I could also call it a meta-ism – it is able to simulate any and all of these previous attitudes. Not that my interests in this begin and end at simulation of previous forms; this is but one of the gestures possible in this condition, but when it performs any of these simulations, they become rapidly engaged in a new dynamic which doesn’t stop at borders of previous operations.
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Image source NYTimes: Batman, Dark Night, Warner Bros. “Supporters say Blu-ray had a breakout year, crowned by “The Dark Knight,” which sold 600,000 Blu-ray copies in one day.”

Normally, I’m not so concerned with reflections on the old year at the beginning of the new. However, the NY Times article “Blu-ray’s Fuzzy Future” exposed some of the tendencies that developed in 2008, which will become more pronounced in 2009.

The article entertains how Blu-ray, even after displacing HD DVD in the digital video market is currently struggling. Blu-ray’s competitor this time is not another DVD based technology, but rather a networked technology. The Internet is Blu-ray’s next competitor, as the article notes. The preoccupation of Blu-ray developers is that it is very likely that people will be moving towards machines that allow for movie downloads much in the format of On Demand services in cable networks across the United States. So, Blu-ray is introducing in the near future a feature that will allow people to download material from the Internet:

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Image source: Amazon.com

More information about Rebirth of a Nation: http://www.rebirthofanation.com/

DJ Spooky has performed live Rebirth of a Nation, a remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in various parts of the world. The multi-faceted media performance deconstructs Griffith’s historically important film to expose the politics of racism during and after 1915, the year when the original film was produced.

DJ Spooky is releasing a DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation on November 4 of 2008. The critically minded would not hesitate to think that the release date is not a coincidence, but rather a constructive move on Spooky’s part to remind people that the upcoming presidential election is historically important. The United States has come a long way since the days when Griffith released Birth of a Nation, and on November 4, the title Rebirth of a Nation will take on a new meaning, for no matter what happens after the fourth, the United states will certainly enter a definitive new stage in its history.

Information about the Film and DJ Spooky’s Biography follow below.

http://www.rebirthofanation.com/
http://www.djspooky.com/

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First released in 1915, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation ignited worldwide controversy with its graphic depictions of racism and white supremacy in the post-Civil War south. Nearly 100 years later, Paul D. MIller- also known as conceptual artist/musician/writer DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid- creates a daring ‘remix’ of Griffith’s epic to expose the film’s true meaning and relate it to the socio-political conflicts of America today. Originally commissioned as a live multimedia performance, Rebirth of a Nation- now featuring an original score by Miller performed by Kronos buy generic meds online Quartet- is ‘a DJ mix applied to cinema’ that challenges our legacy of revisionist history as it deconstructs one of the most influential and inflammatory movies of all time.

DJ Spooky (Paul D Miller, born 1970, Washington DC) is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum and Rapgun amongst other publications. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His work “New York Is Now” has been exhibited in the Africa Pavilion of the 52 Venice Biennial 2007, and the Miami/Art Basel fair of 2007. Miller’s first collection of essays, entitled “Rhythm Science” came out on MIT Press 2004, followed by “Sound Unbound,” an anthology of writings on elctronic music and digital media, published in 2008.

Miller’s deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label, Trojan Records. Other releases include Optometry (2002), a jazz project featuring some of the best players in the downtown NYC jazz scene, and Dubtometry (2003) featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor. Miller’s latest collaborative release, Drums of Death, features Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy among others. He also produced material on Yoko Ono’s new album “Yes, I’m a Witch.”

Video-still source: YouTube

“Obama Roll” is a video mashup that has been making the rounds these last few days before the U.S. Presidential election.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65I0HNvTDH4&feature=related

The video is clever and funny, with a critical edge. It opens with Obama and Ellen Degeneres dancing to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” When Rick Astley begins to sing, clips of Obama from a number of his rallies are carefully edited to show the presidential candidate singing along with Rick Astley.

This video has developed a discourse of its own, as it was mashed up in a video response in which Senator McCain is shown during the Republican Convention presenting to the Republican audience the very same clip of Obama dancing and singing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TiQCJXpbKg

This second mashup appears quite believable and one can argue is even more successful but only because the “Obama Roll” mashup is quite effective to begin with. If not sure why the term “Roll” is included as part of the title, check out the brief definition of rickrolling on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickroll

Image and text source: ReConstitution 2008

Text taken directly from the site:

ReConstitution is a live audiovisual remix of the 2008 Presidential debates. There will be three performances in three cities, each coinciding with a live broadcast of the debates.

We’ve designed software that allows us to sample and analyze the video, audio, and closed captioned text of the television broadcast. Through a series of visual and sonic transformations we reconstitute the material, revealing linguistic patterns, exposing content and structures, and fundamentally altering the way in which you watch the debates.

The transformed broadcast is projected onto a movie screen for a seated audience.

Join us in witnessing these historical television broadcasts and in reshaping the medium that has reshaped politics for the last half century.

The legibility of the underlying debate is maintained throughout the performance—we don’t want you to miss a word of it.

Sosolimited is a Cambridge based crew of audiovisual designers and artists. For more information on their work, visit.

Thanks to Greg Smith for directing me to this work.

Image and text source: Lulu’s

Description:

VJam Theory (collective writings on realtime visual performance) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/artist theory in which artist/practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. For more information visit www.vjtheory.net

Adriene Jenik lecturing at Calit2

Images and text source: gallery@calit2

Note: The following is an interview published for the exhibition SPECFLIC 2.6 and Particles of Interest: Installations by Adriene Jenik and *particle group* on view from August 6 to October 3, 2008 at gallery@calit2. In this Interview Jenik shares the creative process behind her ongoing multi-faceted installation SPECFLIC, which points to a future where books have become rare objects.

Adriene Jenik combines literature, cinema and performance to create works under the umbrella of Distributed Social Cinema. For Jenik, this term means that the language of cinema has been moving outside of the conventional movie screens on to different media devices, which today include, the portable computer, GPS locators, as well as cellphones. Earlier in her career, Jenik worked with video and performance, and eventually she produced CD-Roms, such as “Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation” (1992-1997). Jenik’s practice took a particular shift towards network culture when the Internet became a space in which she could bring together her interests in film, literature, and performance. “Desktop Theater: Internet Street Theater” (1997-2002) was a virtual performance which took place in an online space. It was based on Samuel Becket’s play Waiting for Godot. In line with these works, SPECFLIC 2.6 is the result of Jenik’s interest in the relation of networked culture to film, literature and performance. The installation, then, is also another shift in Jenik’s interest in the expanded field of storytelling. In the following interview, Jenik shares the influences and aesthetical concerns that inform SPECFLIC 2.6

[Eduardo Navas]: You describe your ongoing SPECFLIC project, currently in version 2.6, as “Distributed Social Cinema.” Given that your installation takes on so many aspects of contemporary media, could you elaborate on how you arrived at the parameters at play around this concept?

[Adriene Jenik]: SPECFLIC was initially inspired by the recognition that cinema was moving beyond a single fixed image at an expected scale to one of multiple co-existent screens with extreme shifts in scale. I was seeing video on miniature screens, as well as gigantic mega-screens, and seeing these screens move about in space and wondering what types of stories could take advantage of these formal and technological shifts. I’ve long been involved in thinking through layered story structures and at the beginning of SPECFLIC, I could “see” a diagram of the project imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. That original retinal image burn has since been honed and shaped in relation to the needs of the story and the responses of the audience and performers.

The SPECFLIC 2.6 installation takes excerpts from material that was created for SPECFLIC 2.0, and follows on the heels of SPECFLIC 2.5, which was commissioned by Betti-Sue Hertz and presented at the San Diego Museum of Art in Spring of 2008. For SPECFLIC 2.5, I stripped away all of the live, interactive aspects of the piece, and instead, emphasized aspects of the story that might have been more in the background of the live event. This type of “versioning” is something that is in evidence in software creation, but has also become a method for developing an art practice that can expand and embrace new research and technologies. Distributed Social Cinema is a form that takes into account the importance (for me) of the public audience for a film. As cinema-going practice becomes “home entertainment,” I’m interested in what is at stake in cinema as a public meeting space. At the same time, I’m playing with the intimacy of the very small screen, the ways in which having part of a story delivered into someone’s pocket adds a layer of meaning in its form of delivery. The SPECFLIC 2.5 installation was an attempt to consolidate some of these aspects of distributed attention and “voice.”

Granted the opportunity for networked interaction within the gallery@calit2, for SPECFLIC 2.6 I have rethought the installation to develop in concert with audience contributions. So the project is very much evolving in response to what I learn from each previous iteration as well as the opportunities afforded by the space, encounter with the audience, and technological framework.

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Image note: My partner, Annie, swiftly caught Gilberto Gil’s concert song list as this one was about to be thrown by one of the roadies at the end of the show.

I attended Gilberto Gil’s concert at the 4th & B in San Diego this past Monday. The turnout was quite impressive. I did not take my digital camera as I thought the audience was not allowed to take footage, but upon arriving, I noticed cameras everywhere; people were not hiding them and were using them freely, from cell-phones to small digital video-cams.

I later learned when reading an article in the Union Tribune that Gil actually promotes the recording of his concerts by the audience for later upload to video websites such as Youtube. Gil embraces new technologies as a way to communicate and spread his message, which as Brazil’s Minister of Culture includes a sense of responsibility for Brazil’s music history. It seems that Gil is fully in tune with Remix Culture.

Image taken by Annie Mendoza

He delivered a two hour strong set which included original material as well as covers. The songs that stood out are three of perhaps the most recognizable songs in the world: “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, “Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and “Something” by the Beatles. He did a little twist on these songs to show the complexity of current global culture. “Three Little Birds” was played in Bossa Nova Style, “Girl from Ipanema” in Reggae, and “Something” was a fusion of both music genres.

Image taken by Annie Mendoza

Below are a number of links to Gilberto Gil’s concert in San Diego, so you can judge for yourself what a great performer Brazil’s Minister of Culture is.

Three Little Birds:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vis6r-vil-Y
Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8UTrYbx09M4
Part 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hqzN7GWXnhc
Part 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1XCFKF5C9_Y

General links of San Diego concert:
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=
gilberto+gil+san+diego&search_type=&aq=f

Text source: Library of Congress

More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. The lecture will be available at a later date as a webcast at www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/.

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Still from second video sequence.

Image and text source: gallery.calit2.net

The following is an interview published for the exhibition “Exposure” A Video Installation, Pre-9/11, at gallery@calit2.net, on view from April 10 to June 6, 2008. In this interview Sester’s views on Surveillance expose how elements of appropriation vital to Remix are at play in culture publicly, and which since 2001, have redefined privacy for the average person. This interview was originally published in conjunction with the text “Exposure” Pre-9/11.

Marie Sester is an artist born in France, currently living in Los Angeles. She was trained as an architect, but soon after receiving her degree realized that her real interest was in understanding the role of architecture as discourse in culture and politics. She found art an ideal space to develop her interdisciplinary projects. Sester sees her art practice as an ongoing process partly defined by a person’s desire to visualize certain things, while making others invisible. Throughout the 1990s, Sester explored how surveillance redefined our understanding of reality. In the following interview Marie Sester generously shares the story behind her three-channel installation, “Exposure,” explaining how her role as an artist allowed her access to information which she could not obtain today due to the security measures put in place after 9/11.

[Eduardo Navas]: You explain that you are interested in the concepts of transparency, visibility and access. Can you explain how these came to shape your project “Exposure” and your interest in surveillance?

[Marie Sester]: The situation that became a reality in the U.S. after 9/11 had been developing in Europe for some time. Bombing attacks were part of my reality in France, hijacking planes and taking passengers as hostages was something we lived with day to day. This was often done to ask for money, or demand for political prisoners to be released. Such unfortunate events were not part of U.S. reality.

Terrorism was already present in Europe. There were many individuals from small groups using what today we call terrorist strategies; it was at this time that surveillance devices were introduced. I was intrigued by this shift, which was a bit disturbing. As surveillance technology started to be introduced at the airport, it became normal to have one’s luggage X-ray scanned. It became common to find scanners at the airport, as well as government buildings like City Hall. The unexpected beauty of surveillance technology fascinated me.

Suddenly, there was a new form of presence and reality defined by these new devices. And I wanted to work with the images they produced. I had already been working with pre-made objects and images for some time. At that time I forged and assembled the notions of transparency, visibility and access and they are still the basis of my work.
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