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This summer in Philadelphia, weird science isn't limited to the Mütter Museum: the Wood Street Gallery's exhibit "Out of This World" currently showcases artists who tinker with strange new ways to experience the cosmos. Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt's soothing interactive installation Orbiter lets viewers lie down on the ground and look up at a video approximation of the night sky, limned with faint concentric rings. By pointing their fingers at the ceiling, participants create new "stars" that circulate and generate looping tones. Jean-Pierre Aubé's Titan and beyond the infinite (2007) uses data recorded in 2005 by the Huygens probe from one of Saturn's moons to create 2001-inspired slit-scan video trip-outs; the show also includes a video version of his VLF.Natural Radio (2000-Ongoing) project, which uses the sounds of naturally-produced electromagnetic signals, a phenomenon increasingly blotted out by human-made telecommunications. Geekier frequencies can be heard in Maria Antelman's taH pagh taHbe (2006), a video composed of still images of NASA hanger interiors set to a Klingon translation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (no doubt using the preferred Klingon Language Institute version as her source.) Rounding out the astronomical theme, Gail Wight's Blow Out (2006) consists of forty-four photos of different smashed test tubes, white constellations of glass shards against black backgrounds, each looking like unique, exploding galaxies. - Ed Halter

http://www.woodstreetgalleries.org/home.html#currentshow

Jeremy Bailey is a video and performance artist whose work is often confidently self-depricating in offering hilarious parodies of new media vocabularies. In his Video Terraform Dance Party (2008), Bailey plays an enthusiastic nerd channeling Bob Ross as he dons a forehead-mounted VR controller to demonstrate a new modeling software that will allow him to bop his head around and "plan the ideal landscape." As he narrates, his bespectacled eyes rise and fall at the horizon of a CGI world (outlined by vague computer icons and a $100 sign) and his movements trigger topographic changes in the blobby green island growing before him. The piece trades on two themes common in Bailey's work: the infomercial and a kind of ridiculously subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) implosion of metaphors about the use of the body in video-based performance art. The artist translates these well-worn themes into his performance of the anything-goes chaos of dot-com era product demos in SOS (2008), a video that cheerleads a brand new operating system (with a "bold new interface!") of the same name. Designed by Bailey, SOS bids farewell to the world's most popular software platforms and says hello to artist-created masterpieces--inspiring viewers to wonder which is truly "better." In describing the unusual look of the interface, Bailey's deadpan character says, "We're artists, so we thought, let's do it visually." So the "canvas" usurps the "desktop" and "your computer is a painting and your files and folders have been replaced by shapes and colors" which fit into three categories: rectangles show you things, circles analyze things, and triangles edit things. (Clearly this is much more intuitive than Windows!) When Bailey finally manages to get the program to open a file, we see a clip of the artist carrying out what can only be described as a quintessentially clichéd parody of scatalogical performance, after which the circle analyzes the video and tells him that he is pathetic. Bailey's response? Sometimes computers tell us things we don't want to hear...It's a new world and "we've just got to get used to this." In the artist's next project, Your Ad Here, he'll be transmitting messages some people do want to hear...He's turning his body into a billboard and offering advertisers a spot on the scrolling virtual LEDs on his head and plasma gun-shaped arms (of course there's a demo--the caption: "This sh*t is real time ballers, mf'ing real time"), for broadcast on Toronto subway platform screens during the Toronto Urban Film Festival. Leave it to Bailey to take the human billboard trope to the next game level! More of his spot-on projects can be seen on his YouTube channel. You'll want to see his Transhuman Dance Recital (2007) in which he "freed [him]self of the imitative constraints of the natural world" in order to dance around like an octopus with a triangle-shaped buddy. - Marisa Olson

http://www.jeremybailey.net/

As I explained in my introduction page, one of the things that makes it a bit difficult to explain my work is that the better I do my job, the more imperceptible my work becomes. Yesterday I was thrilled to find myself completely invisible.

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hallo all, im very happy to be joining the furtherfielders + those reading, receiving + commenting on these feeds!

I consider myself a pretty avid traveler. I grew up traveling to many different places and my family opted to take our own routes as opposed to big group tours. I’m often embarrassed when I see other Americans in foreign cities looking loudly for the nearest hamburger, sporting t-shirts freshly bought from street vendors of the city we’re in, and laughing at different customs. I am proud in many ways of my American identity (although that pride seems to be diminishing in recent years) however I’ve also always been able to blend in to local customs. (Except in Asia perhaps where I am clearly an outsider, but could be from seen as from the majority of western countries.)

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This summer's Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition, held in Dutch city of Arnhem, takes on the theme of "Grandeur" for its 2008 edition, described on the festival's site as "the aspiration for human greatness" and "the urge, the dream, the conflict and the struggle that are linked to this aspiration." For American artist Brody Condon's contribution to this year's event, this conflict and struggle will be fought out in the woods, using home-made weapons and armor. Condon conceived of -- and is currently overseeing -- a site-specific live-action role-playing game entitled SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation, taking place in seven week-long games that began last month. Players gather in Arnhem's woody Sonsbeek Park to enact a retro-futuristic scenario set in a neo-medieval far future. Condon describes the visual style of the event as "think leather and plastic", and local builders have erected a temporary woodland-mod encampment tower for housing, complete with Japanese-style sleeping pods. The enacted narrative involves small bands composed of pre-determined character types -- Herald, Band Leader, Duel Master, and Ritual Master/Shaman and Archivist -- competing with one another inside the holy forest of Sonsbeek for the favors of the Immortals, godlike beings who grant humans the gifts of technology. SonsbeekLive continues Condon's longstanding interest in blurring games and life, and proposes a re-evaluation of LARPing from mere nerd kitsch to theatrical art. The games continue through September, and folks in the Netherlands can still sign up for upcoming weeks; those who can't attend can peek via player-generated media and the official Dutch weblog. - Ed Halter

http://www.sonsbeeklive.org/

in response to Aileen's latest post about Speed and Imaginary Futures

Last weekend I found this image in the ladies loos at the Solaris cafe in Linz. We were enjoying an excellent evening of conversation which touched on an observation (apposite to all present), that the media arts world is disproportionately composed of people with Catholic upbringings. It seems doubly worth bringing up here because, a couple of weeks ago, whilst chatting with the author of Imaginary Futures (recently awarded the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology) I discovered that Marshal McLuhan was also a devout Catholic. During this conversation we touched on how many approaches and practices of net art evoked early Christian Mysticism.

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Despite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter

http://www.ps1.org/ps1_site/content/view/324/102/

At the exhibit "Bobo's on 27th," currently on view at Foxy Production in Chelsea, wall-text printed onto a section of the ceiling reads REINTERPRETATION PROHIBITED; easy to miss amidst the jumble of the show itself, the two words are only visible once you've entered the gallery, walked through most of it, and turned to face the doors. Despite the dire warning, the farrago of plastic and styrofoam floor trash, aggressively colorful, punk-ugly sculptures and monstrously expressionist paintings does indeed call for certain readings. At first, the debris seems real and accidental-- like you've stumbled into someone else's art-party a few hours after the beer ran out -- but on closer inspection, each piece of apparent garbage is revealed as its own carefully placed objet: crushed water bottles covered in painted foil or laser-printed labels, a handful of flyers for a (conceptually faux) Philadelphia technical college, a set of lightly abused Colonial-dress souvenir dolls, a cloud of color-coordinated plastic deli bags with their logos meticulously removed. The seeming collapse of a young collective's studio into the gallery ultimately reveals itself as careful artifice: theatrical props for the staging of an image of a 21st century bohemia-echo, a fake fiesta that actually took a lot of work and planning by more than a dozen individual artists. Desire the real thing, then? The show includes a live if buggy webcam feed from the parallel exhibit Bobo's on 9th, which runs concurrently at the art-band's home space in Philly -- but viewers are likely to spy Boboites in their native habitat doing nothing more riotous than checking email. The total effect is that not so much of a playroom but a set of a playroom: no wonder so much of the exhibit resembles a warped memory of a children's TV show, as seen in Barkev Gulesserian's giant golden Dog-buddha, Jesse Greenberg's toy-box-like "touchables" sculptures, and Bobo's own crudely built, push-button jukebox, which twitches, exhales and bubbles bongwater when a song is requested. The myth of the crazy young art-gang rubs off to reveal some industrious chums mixing labor and fun—and in the process, perfecting the mixture's recipe to allow for an effective blend of determined madness. - Ed Halter

http://www.foxyproduction.com/exhibition/view/1191

As often as I mentioned things I have been thinking about writing when Ruth was here in Linz this past weekend, perhaps it is time to actually write something again and not just think about it. This afternoon I was surprised by an article that randomly showed up in my feed reader about what Silicon Valley start-up executives are using to be able to work twenty hours. That reminded me of one of the many wonderful conversations I had with Ruth.

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The sculptures and installations of Saâdane Afif's back catalog become departure points for the French artist's ambitious new show, "Technical Specifications," at Witte de With in Rotterdam. Maintaining his characteristic skepticism to self-enfranchisement, Afif has produced an exhibition colored by evasion and delegation, including a series of untitled works, each built of the same materials as previous pieces; wall texts of lyrics written, at Afif's request, in response to his artwork; and three radios, tuned to FM 107.5 Mhz, which, for the duration of the exhibition, will broadcast the songs incorporating these lyrics and the materials lists of the source artworks, as read in the style of popular radio DJs. Unlike an earlier movement of French conceptualists like Pierre Bismuth, who approached inter-media translation through a structuralist lens, Afif and contemporary Loris Gréaud cross-pollinate studio, exhibition and performance spaces with a beguiling energy that builds itself -- more associatively than analytically -- from the lesser defined realms of creative consciousness. Indeed, the parameters Afif has here set for "Technical Specifications" make their points without stifling the artist's inventive return to familiar materials. Ghost (Round bar of wood/ White Dufa, White Alpa, White Ace, White Email, 179 x 3.5 cm) (2005), an Andre Cadere-inspired modular stick, painted in four brands of white, is revisited as double-helix sculpture Untitled (Ghost, 2005 / White paint from four different brands, wood/ 185 x 3.5 cm diameter) (2008). A ghostly, black-and-white rendering of Bauhaus-esque architecture, Le fantôme (2003), becomes a series of five paintings, split along the diagonal to collectively form a monochromatic gradient. These untitled phantoms both channel and displace their source image, in a confrontation with personal and aesthetic histories that reveals the vitality of Afif's restless practice. - Tyler Coburn

http://www.wdw.nl/project.php?id=174

Only a few years ago, it would have been a stretch to claim that net art owed a substantial debt to the history of avant-garde filmmaking, but the advent of video sharing has in many ways converged two heretofore distinct traditions. Given the enormous popularity of video mash-ups and artistic remixing, we must therefore give note to the recent passing of filmmaker and artist Bruce Conner, who created mind-blowing re-edits of found-footage on 16mm way back when the Internet was but a mere twinkle in a Pentagon-subsidized computer engineer's eye. Conner was first known in Beat-era San Francisco for his collages, paintings and assemblages, but began making his mark on cinema in 1958 with A Movie, a stream-of-consciousness montage made from films purchased at a local camera store; its dreamlike structure, Conner later said, was influenced by TV channel-surfing. Later, Cosmic Ray (1961), an Atomic-bomb dance party set to Ray Charles's "What’d I Say", grooved to a Pop-political pulse and presaged the music video, while his powerfully minimalist Kennedy assassination study Report (1967) was one of the earliest artistic uses of serial looping and pure flicker, processes that became integral to structural filmmaking. Conner's later involvement with punk and New Wave resulted in one of his most famous works, a drop-dead brilliant film set to Devo's Mongoloid (1978), and collaborations elsewhere with David Byrne, Brian Eno and Toni Basil, among others. Conner left us earlier this week, following a long illness, but saw his legacy celebrated in a 2000 touring show, puckishly titled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. So the next time you get psyched over the latest online video concoction by Oliver Laric or John Michael Boling, take a moment and think of Conner, who might someday be considered one of the great forefathers of 21st century art. - Ed Halter

The second exhibition of ambitious online gallery Club Internet, "Oracle" explores the spiritual qualities of cyberspace. Travess Smalley, tntet and Damon Zucconi are among the participating artists who tease otherworldly properties out of our disembodied relationship to the products of virtual navigation. Club Internet's unusual design bolsters the exhibition theme: its main page is stripped of all but a small toolbar and magic wand, and the artworks are presented, as much as possible, outside of their original contexts. Clicking the magic wand or refreshing the page will load another artwork, but because this process is random, each path through "Oracle" is different from the last. This navigational opacity and generative randomness imbues the online gallery with the qualities of an oracle, and gives the virtual realm, which we are accustomed to exploring voluntarily, a strange agency over us. The standout artworks from the exhibition follow suit, exposing users to images and processes either predetermined or outside of the scope of their control. Jeff Carey's block series 2, PERL (2008) finds the browser bar automatically descending, in the process panning over a crude mosaic of geometric triangles (the work concludes when the bar reaches the bottom). Another standout, Rafael Rozendaal's The Long Cigarette (2008) uses formal simplicity to great conceptual effect, presenting an animated cigarette, spread over three adjacent YouTube videos, which gradually burns across the length of the separate screens. As with Carey's work, The Long Cigarette transparently plays with the parameters of virtual display, yet somehow still enchants with its elementary magic. - Tyler Coburn

http://clubinternet.org/

Science fiction provides the thesis for "The Future as Disruption," the latest show at The Kitchen in New York, but not the kind of escapist space-opera kid stuff of embossed-cover paperbacks and Lucasfilm productions. Rather, the authors explicitly referenced here could be found in the New York Review of Books or a college syllabus: George Orwell, Samuel Delaney, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. Notably, all these sci-fi titans are known for linguistic (or indeed meta-linguistic) dexterity, undermining the normal use of language so as to propel the reader if not forward in time than sideways in reality; likewise, this isn't a show so much about tomorrows as speculative todays. In homage, many of the works in the exhibit refer heavily to text: Sean Dack's Future Songs, a book of musical arrangements for predictions penned by Dick in 1981 (one: "The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus soon to [be] followed by an American ship."), Adam Pendleton's flat duochrome paintings reproducing excerpts from Delaney's 1975 novel Dhalgren and phrases written by artist Liam Gillick, Olalekan B. Jeyifous and Matty Vaz's Adverspeak, a set of pseudo-corporate diagrams, flowcharts and maps that could have been lifted off the set of Idiocracy, Mungo Thomson self-explanatory audio work "Bloody Hell: An Oral History of the Making of Blade Runner," by Dave Gardetta, Los Angeles Magazine, February 2007, Read by a Cast of Computer Voices, and, most startlingly, Julieta Aranda's A Machine of Perpetual Possibility, a Perspex cube containing the dust of pulverized science fiction novels, occasionally whirled by spurts of an air jet. Aranda's accompanying photographs of book-dust resemble alien environments, another theme here, also seen in Mungo Thomson's cunningly narrative Einstein #1, a comic book of found images from other comics, shorn of words and people, Ann Lislegaard's Ballard-inspired digital photomontages, and Jonah Freeman's impossible skyscraper-lattice cityscapes. A more subdued thread connecting some of the works is Afrofuturism, signaled by Simone Leigh's Uhura, in which the Star Trek character stutters between two moments, her hand on a switchboard, waiting to communicate. - Ed Halter

http://thekitchen.org/

Understated, conceptual gestures predominate in "Quiet Politics," a timely group exhibition currently on display at New York's Zwirner & Wirth. Felix Gonzalez-Torres' single string of lights "Untitled" (for New York) (1992) hangs from the ceiling of the front room and ends, in a tangle, on the floor: an arrangement, at once elegant and casual, that the artist relinquishes to the person installing the work. Lining the gallery hallway are photograms from Lisa Oppenheim's series Multicultural Crayon Displacement (2008), in which the artist employs a vintage, additive color process to generate deceptively straightforward geometric abstractions. Color rectangles overlap in arrays of hybrid tones and, at their center, a fleshy pigment corresponds to one of the crayons in Crayola Company's 'multicultural' set. Oppenheim's additive production of multicultural colors thus parallels the way race is constructed and categorized in social discourse. A similar disjunction between representation and narrative is evident in Christopher Williams' eerie photographs of Harvard University Botanical Museum's collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life-size, glass flowers. The species the artist chose were particular to twenty-seven countries flagged in a 1986 Commission on International Humanitarian Issues report for human rights abuses. As with Oppenheim's series, Williams' titles signal the conceptual envelope for these beguiling still-lives, listing the names of their origin countries and genus. While other strategies also enter the exhibition, this marriage of formal sophistication and social and political inquiry characterizes the most resonant works, underscoring a point recently made by Francis Alÿs, during his last exhibition at David Zwirner: "sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic." - Tyler Coburn

http://www.zwirnerandwirth.com/exhibitions/2008/0608QP/index.html

Understated, conceptual gestures predominate in "Quiet Politics," a timely group exhibition currently on display at New York's Zwirner & Wirth. Felix Gonzalez-Torres' single string of lights "Untitled" (for New York) (1992) hangs from the ceiling of the front room and ends, in a tangle, on the floor: an arrangement, at once elegant and casual, that the artist relinquishes to the person installing the work. Lining the gallery hallway are photograms from Lisa Oppenheim's series Multicultural Crayon Displacement (2008), in which the artist employs a vintage, additive color process to generate deceptively straightforward geometric abstractions. Color rectangles overlap in arrays of hybrid tones and, at their center, a fleshy pigment corresponds to one of the crayons in Crayola Company's 'multicultural' set. Oppenheim's additive production of multicultural colors thus parallels the way race is constructed and categorized in social discourse. A similar disjunction between representation and narrative is evident in Christopher Williams' eerie photographs of Harvard University Botanical Museum's collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life-size, glass flowers. The species the artist chose were particular to twenty-seven countries flagged in a 1986 Commission on International Humanitarian Issues report for human rights abuses. As with Oppenheim's series, Williams' titles signal the conceptual envelope for these beguiling still-lives, listing the names of their origin countries and genus. While other strategies also enter the exhibition, this marriage of formal sophistication and social and political inquiry characterizes the most resonant works, underscoring a point recently made by Francis Alÿs, during his last exhibition at David Zwirner: "sometimes doing something poetic can become political, and sometimes doing something political can become poetic." - Tyler Coburn

http://www.zwirnerandwirth.com/exhibitions/2008/0608QP/index.html

i should finish my thesis in about three weeks. at the moment, my main concern is that i'm not stressed out. shouldn't i be a complete nervous wreck? i'm certainly working hard, but i'm not burning the midnight oil, and it feels like i'm on track. there must be something important that i forgot about. i've made such a concerted effort to turn down the volume on the multifarious projects i normally have fingers in that my email has slowed to a trickle. maybe there's something wrong with my email server???

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Why are new media artists so cool? Because they get to play with toys like spectroheliostats. What's a spectroheliostat? Google won't say, but it's probably some color spectrum device related to the heliostat, which uses a giant mirror to track the motion of the sun. Talk about painting with light... On July 5th, this device will be used in Solar Hills, a collaborative installation by British artist Liliane Lijn and Berkeley-based astrophysicist John Vallerga. Stationing themselves in the Marin Headlands' Hawk Peak, they'll follow the sun and create a light show viewable from San Francisco's Crissy Field, initiating a sunkissed marriage between earth works and lambent performance. And what better place to carry out this experiment than in California's Bay Area, an historic epicenter for digital media, environmental research, and beach activities like this one. The project is supported by the DMAX new media program at the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive. More information, including up-to-the-minute weather-related updates, can be found on the program's blog. - Marisa Olson

http://dmax.bampfa.berkeley.edu/blog/2008/07/solar-hills-berkeley-ca-070508/

Why are new media artists so cool? Because they get to play with toys like spectroheliostats. What's a spectroheliostat? Google won't say, but it's probably some color spectrum device related to the heliostat, which uses a giant mirror to track the motion of the sun. Talk about painting with light... On July 5th, this device will be used in Solar Hills, a collaborative installation by British artist Liliane Lijn and Berkeley-based astrophysicist John Vallerga. Stationing themselves in the Marin Headlands' Hawk Peak, they'll follow the sun and create a light show viewable from San Francisco's Crissy Field, initiating a sunkissed marriage between earth works and lambent performance. And what better place to carry out this experiment than in California's Bay Area, an historic epicenter for digital media, environmental research, and beach activities like this one. The project is supported by the DMAX new media program at the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive. More information, including up-to-the-minute weather-related updates, can be found on the program's blog. - Marisa Olson

http://dmax.bampfa.berkeley.edu/blog/2008/07/solar-hills-berkeley-ca-070508/