Image source: galibier design‘s quattro turntable

Text source: Serial Consign

Original post: September 24, 2007

One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.

How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?

It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.

I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art” and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.

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Image: Valéry Grancher: 24h00, 1999
interactive Web project sponsored by BAM

Image and text source: BAM/PFA

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA celebrates the cultural and artistic practice of remix, inviting guest artists to “rip, mix, and burn” elements from two digital-media works in the museum’s collection—Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000 and Valéry Grancher’s 24h00 (both 1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing from the open-source software tradition, with the permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the remix artists may alter or revise original code or media files from the source works, or they may choose to take a more conceptual route, remixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works. Ouija 2000 and 24h00 will be exhibited along with new works by Michael Joaquin Grey, Alison Sant, Jonathon Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik and Iris Piers. On view in BAM’s Bancroft lobby and stairwell gallery, the artworks will also be available via the exhibition website at bampfa.berkeley.edu/ripmixburn for the public to download and remix.
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Image and text source: Rhizome.org

The brainchild of artist Gursoy Dogtas, Matt Magazine bills itself as “a synthesis between a fanzine and a current affairs magazine,” but while it comments on contemporary political and social issues with a zine-style combination of appropriated material and original content, it has a more restrained take on the cut-and-paste aesthetic than the average D.I.Y. publication. Crossing subjects and historical moments, each story combines a previously published text–typically classics on subjects ranging from philosophy to natural science–from a single source with images from another origin to create telling pairings. Every issue also has a similarly two-part theme: the first issue focused on ‘Freizeit und Konsum’ (leisure and consumption), and the second, which was released on October 10th with an opening and short-running exhibition at Les Complices in Zurich, tackles ‘Mobility and Surveillance’ with a series of five stories. The issue opens with Duncan Campbell’s investigation of a global surveillance system, ‘Inside Echelon,’ accompanied by photos from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert. Other pieces branch out to include ‘Attacks on Civil Aviation’ by Ariel Merari set against stills from a video work by Natalie Jeremijenko in which she attempts to board a plane wearing rollerskates, and Carl Schmitt on ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ matched to images of the Surveillance Camera Players. Dogtas’s own photography is offset by both selections from Carl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War’ and an essay by geographic theorist Tim Cresswell. Every piece in the issue sketches the sometimes enabling, sometimes conflicting relationship between two phenomena that increasingly frame modern life.

Image and text source: Greg.org

Originally posted on September 14, 2007

Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg?

Yes they did, in 2004:

“It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Which is odd. The Italian company Raro Video has released several Warhol films on DVD over the last couple of years. Andy Warhol: 4 Silent Movies is listed as a 2005 release on Amazon, and there’s a Chelsea Girls DVD, too.Last year, Raro compiled 11 films and 8 discs into a box set, Andy Warhol Anthology, which–like all the films–is issued in region-free PAL format. There are extensive bilingual notes, interviews, and bonus material accompanying the discs, but there are also odd errors in formatting:

At least two of the silent films, Kiss and Blow Job, are mastered at the wrong speed [25fps instead of 16fps], and the once-randomly silent or audible soundtracks on the split-screen Chelsea Girls are provided in a single, seemingly arbitrary configuration which omits much well-documented dialogue.

Read the entire entry at Greg.org

Image and text source: New York Magazine

Published on November 22, 2004

At eight hours, Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire is something that one watches, as its creator said, “to see time go by.” Officially, the only way to see the artist’s epic stationary shot of the Empire State Building is to borrow a 16-millimeter print from MoMA or attend one of the museum’s infrequent screenings (there’s one on November 20). But a one-hour edit appears on a new Warhol-film DVD, Four Silent Movies, released by the Italian company Raro Video. “It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which owns the artist’s films. Raro says the disc is authorized; the museum disagrees and, says Huxley, may sue.

The qualities that make Empire a precursor to reality TV—no script, elevation of the mundane—would seem to encourage sampling. But defenders of the film (which Warhol slowed down; shot at 24 frames per second, it’s projected at 16) say it simply can’t be cut. “It’s conceptually important that it’s eight hours long,” says Callie Angell, director of the Whitney’s Warhol Film Project. “Some people show it at the regular sound speed to make it go by faster, and I just think that’s not the film.” Seeing the whole thing offers surprises, she adds. “[Warhol and Jonas Mekas] were shooting it from the office of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Time-Life building, and when they changed the reels they’d turn the lights on. In three reels, they started before they turned the lights back off, so you can see a reflection of Warhol and Mekas in the window. No one had ever mentioned that before. Probably no one ever had sat through the whole thing.”

Text and Image source: Rhizome.org

Published on September 5, 2007

To mark the occasion of what would be John Cage’s 95th birthday, WNYC has put together an amazing collection of audio and video from their archives. Video of seminal performances, interviews with the artist, as well as a few oddities including his appearance on the 1960s show ‘I’ve Got a Secret’ are posted along with writings by the composer. Cage collaborators including Joan LaBarbara, Meredith Monk, and Merce Cunningham also share their stories and insights into Cage as both a collaborator and friend. The festival airs on WNYC2 from September 5th at 12PM until 12:33PM September 6th, with video, audio, and textual documents available on their website.

http://www.wnyc.org/music/johncage.html

Online Project:
Chloë
(Six year old professional model)
February 2001

Note: This interview was originally published by Yto (Isabel Aranda) in the Magazine Escaner Cultural, August 2007, based in Santiago de Chile. It is currently only available in Spanish.

Image source: navasse.net/cloeyStart/

Text source: revista.escaner.cl/node/279

Eduardo Navas es artista, historiador y crítico especializado en nuevos medios; su obra y teorías han sido presentadas en varios lugares en Estados Unidos, Latino América y Europa. Ha sido jurado para ” Turbulence.org” en 2004, también fue jurado para las comisiones de “Rhizome.org” de 2006-07, en Nueva York.

Navas es fundador y editor contribuyente de “Net Art Review” (2003-2005), y co-fundador de “newmediaFIX” (desde 2005). Actualmente, Navas es docente de práctica de multimedia en la Universidad del Estado en San Diego (SDSU), y es candidato al doctorado en letras en el Departamento de Historia de Arte y Medios de Comunicación, Teoría y Crítica, en el programa de Bellas Artes en la Universidad de San Diego California (UCSD).

Cuéntame un poco sobre tu infancia, por favor…

Nací en 1969 en El Salvador, Centro América, y emigré a Los Estados Unidos en 1980, en donde he crecido como ciudadano naturalizado.

¿Cuándo descubriste que tu camino era el arte?

Siempre lo supe. Mis modelos fueron mis hermanos Max y Ricardo, quienes dibujaban mucho. Ellos coleccionaban paquines (historietas cómicas en forma de revista). Maximiliano, mi hermano mayor, había tenido un curso por correo para aprender a dibujar caricaturas. El nunca lo terminó, pero guardó todas las lecciones, las cuales yo terminé usando. Yo practicaba a dibujar los ejemplos en cada lección y después con los años comencé a copiar dibujos cómicos, más que todos de paquines de súper héroes. Mis favoritos eran del Hombre Araña, y los Cuatro Fantásticos. Pero en El Salvador más que todo se encontraban paquines de Superman y otros personajes de la compañía DC Comics. Así que cuando encontraba un paquin del Hombre Araña, publicado por Marvel, era prácticamente de oro para mí. Al llegar a los Estado Unidos me volví loco comprando paquines del Hombre Araña, Los Cuatro Fantásticos, entre otros. Era como un sueño poder ir a una tienda especializada de paquines y ver tantos de ellos ahí. Pero llegó un momento en el cual pude dibujar con facilidad y me pregunté que más se podría hacer con el arte, una vez que uno llega a dibujar más o menos bien. Creo que fue ahí donde mi interés en la práctica crítica comenzó.

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Image source: comunismodaforma.zip.net
text source: Rhizome.org

July 18, 2007

From this Friday until the beginning of August, Sao Paulo’s Galeria Vermelho hosts one of the most riveting exhibitions of the summer. Curated by local critics Fernando Oliva and Marcelo Rezende, ‘Communism of Form: Sound + Image + Time ? The Music Clip Strategy’ brings together works by 30 Brazilian and international artists that reflect, examine, or evoke the aesthetics of the music clip within contemporary visual culture. The show’s organizing principle takes on French critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s definition of ‘communism of form,’ an expression that identifies the current art practices based on an immense library of images, emotional states, and psychological experiences generated by post-Fordist societies that are shared both by the artists and the audience–as the music clip– that thus engage in a participatory relationship with the pieces. Many artists–such as Forsyth & Pollard (UK), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Nuevos Ricos (Mexico), Laibach (Slovenia), and Tetine (Brazil)–developed new works, addressing with different and surprising styles the fundamental elements of the music clip: sound, image, and time. As Oliva and Rezende say, ‘the music clip, with its absence of an hierarchy between the old and the new and the technological and the craft, puts in motion all the world�s repertoire.’ A blog comprising several posts–from film stills to YouTube videos–and a book with various commissioned essays and interviews discussing the theoretical frame of the show complements this project, expanding its original and very opportune features in unexpected ways and furthering the debate around this prominent cultural expression. – Miguel Amado

Dragon Boat, Installation by Huang Yong Ping (2003)

Image and text source: Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education

Spring 2004
Introduction

The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) is located in North Adams, a small city (pop. 15,000), in northwest Massachusetts that is a three-hour drive from New York City or Boston.  The museum is located in a former mill complex, built in the 1860’s.  During the American Civil War (1861-65), the mill housed a textile company, the Arnold Print Works, until 1931; the Sprague Electric Company occupied the complex with more than 4,000 employees until 1985.  Now that the museum is in place, the main factory with twenty-five adjoining buildings remains economically associated with this former New England mill town for over one hundred and forty years.  [paragraph 1]

Read the entire review at  Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education

Image source: Youtube

Text source: Look Smart: Find Articles

December 2005

Based on extensive fieldwork in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, this article explores the intersections of identity, modernity, desire, and marginality in the production, distribution, and transnational consumption of Nor-tec music. Tijuana musicians developed Nor-tec by combining sounds sampled from traditional music of the north of Mexico (conjunto norteno and banda) with compositional techniques borrowed from techno music. The resulting style reflects the current re-elaboration of tradition in relation to imaginary articulations of modernity that takes place in Tijuana’s youth border culture.

Read the entire text at Look Smart: Find Articles