Other Arts Sites

last weekend i attended the ANAT "still/open" workshop. it was an intense 2 days that aimed to "introduce open source modes of thinking and resources for collaborative and distributed development; to provide hands on experience; and to initiate local networks and projects". the part about initiating local networks was the drawcard for me - being a temporary newcomer in brisbane i'm interested to find out who might be doing what in areas that are related to my work or interesting to me. some of the participants i already knew but there were others from various backgrounds engaged in interesting projects.

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One of the most striking works on view at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, is '9 Scripts from a Nation at War.' Resulting from the collaboration between artists David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes, and Andrea Geyer, the piece is a 10-channel video installation that examines the political, economical, and cultural issues surrounding the war in Iraq. In its current version, there are eight characters--a veteran, a student, a citizen, an actor, a blogger, a lawyer, a journalist, an interviewer--performed by actors and non-actors alike, that read to an audience a set of their own or other's words. As put by the artists in the project's website, these figures' cross narratives 'allow inquiry into the recording, reporting, learning, and understanding of the present moment, and to reflect upon how we account for ourselves within it.' The work is thus ‘structured around a central question: How does war construct specific positions for individuals to fill, enact, speak from, or resist?’ Some answers emerged last Monday during a panel with the artists promoted by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York. As they once said, '9 Scripts from a Nation at War considers the processes by which we are positioned as certain kinds of 'individuals' in relation to war.' So they presented their vision of the world, insightfully elaborating on the ethical dimension of art practice and asking for an engagement of all of us--fellow artists and audience--with contemporary society’s issues. - Miguel Amado

http://9scripts.info

'Autonomous Agents,' which opened on September 15th at Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery is the first major retrospective of American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson in the UK. Through new media and the moving image, Hershman Lesson has been creating and experimenting with non-linear narratives since the 1970s. Exploring themes of identity politics, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, her work occupies the spaces between the real and the virtual, the present and the archive--crossing these boundaries with a series of female characters who are highly adaptable to their surroundings (both 'Agent Ruby' and Roberta Breitmore have existed in multiple media over many years). Casting a critical eye on how women use technology and are viewed in relation to it, Hershman Leeson has recently shifted her critical gaze to broader issues of power and technology. Her recent feature film, Strange Culture, about the arrest and ongoing trial of artist Steve Kurtz, will also be a part of 'Autonomous Agents'--giving UK audiences a chance to appreciate the continuing relevance and breadth of this artist's remarkable practice. - Caitlin Jones

http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/exhibitions/future/autonomousagents/

Today, Montreal audiences have a chance to engage in an immersive sonic environment. As part of the program of four live events accompanying the exhibition 'espaceSONO::audio.lab,' currently presented at SAT [GALERIE], a 'deep.listening.session' will start at 8 PM, featuring works by artists such as Martijn Tellinga/BOCA RATON, o.blaat, and Mike Hansen & Martin Tetreault. This line-up of serious heavyweights will both maximize and minimize the use of volume pressure. These experimental performances will thus examine, alongside the works on view, the question posed by the projects's curator, Tobias c. van Veen: 'How does one exhibit the unseen? Can sound, too, be experienced as an art, or is it always submitted to the sign of music?' Van Veen has brought together pieces by 36 international artists that occupy the 2000 square-foot gallery, which is divided into stations with custom-designed DVD listening consoles featuring high-end headphones and full spectrum audio. The visitor will therefore encounter different soundscapes, from electro-acoustics to field recordings. According to van Veen, his aim was to 'put the listener into a new bodily space, designed to activate different senses and heighten the becoming-ear of the body,' which would allow the discovery of the many tones of this more and more significant field within contemporary art. - Miguel Amado

http://upgrademtl.org

I won't lie- my attendance at the recent Association for Learning Technology 2007 conference in Nottingham, subtitled Learning technology for the social network generation, made me grumpy. Before I can get to the things that were really useful and fun I have to work out why.

The centralised and top-down channels of traditional learning (which are mainly foreign to the practice-based learning culture of Ravensbourne, where I teach) were embedded in the architechure of the buildings in which the conference itself was housed; a huge, raked conference hall with a brightly lit stage, surrounded by smaller, satellite lecture rooms and a PC lab. Then its hierarchy of participants: keynote speakers, theme leaders, presenters-of-research, work-shoppers, poster pimps and then hundreds of passive/absorbent audience members (mainly learning technology administrators and academics). Admittedly participants at remote locations were able to access a live stream of keynote speeches which they commented and questioned in real-time. This was an interesting intervention into the traditional broadcast/lecture model- how interesting depended the ability and bravery of the moderator to filter and flag-up specific points. Parallel to these was an exhibition hall with many stands displaying corporate elearning products- a mix of VLE packages and tools and learning objects.

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the brisbane writers' festival has begun & today i went to two events: first a talk by writer/illustrater shaun tan, and then a talk entitled "girls and islam".

shaun tan is best known (in australia) for his illustrations of children's books such as the rabbits (which featured in the 070707 UpStage festival) and his latest release, "The Arrival", a beautiful wordless graphic novel. his talk was really interesting - from his childhood in perth where he was known as "the good drawer" at school, to his development as an artist and a glimpse of his creative process. his work often addresses the theme of belonging, the migrant, finding a place in a strange/alien world.

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Two fall exhibitions opening this weekend at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, explore the foundations of perception in very different ways. As the first guest curator in a new biennial initiative to bring noted international exhibition-makers to the Aldrich, Austria-born Thomas Trummer has organized a show around the use of the human voice in visual art. Titled 'Voice & Void,' Trummer brings together works by roughly 15 artists--including John Cage, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Valie Export, and Julianne Swartz--who incorporate voice in the form of audio recordings or visual representations, and many of whom offer some kind of jarring perceptual shift between sight and sound. A panel discussion with the curator, several artists in the exhibition, and David Goldblatt, author of 'Art and Ventriloquism,' opens the show on September 16. While Trummer finds artists exploring sound and speech, a concurrent exhibition of Marti Cormand's paintings focuses on the visual, suggesting that the digital underpinnings of contemporary images have irrevocably colored our perceptions of the natural world. The winner of this year's Aldrich Prize for Emerging Artists, his forcefully romantic landscapes are interrupted by stray bands of abstraction calling to mind colorfully pixelated noise breaking up a digital photograph--or impossibly hard-edged angles interrupting otherwise organic-looking topographies. - William Hanley

http://www.aldrichart.org/exhibitions/future.php

The Salvadoran/Palestine photographer Gabriela Habnun lives in the Bay area, San Francisco, in the US. Her contribution to the exhibition "Imagining ourselves" is the serie of photographies of gorgeus fat women swimming, dancing and wearing high heels.
An interesting discussion about identities, bodies and the gaze of the others.
The exhibition have a broad range of participants, photographers, writers, visual artists and theorics trying to discuss how the women and the body of the women are constructed, how the social and cultural imaginary define the roles and the images of the women.

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'Psychogeography' was defined by situationist Guy Debord as the 'the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.' Glowlab's annual Conflux festival, taking place from September 13-16th in various locations throughout Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, is dedicated to this notion of psychogeography, and makes it far more fun than Debord's scholarly definition might suggest. Through performances, visual art, music, games, panel discussions, and hybrids of all of the above, participants will engage with the street and amongst themselves in this four-day intervention into New York's city spaces. The long weekend's spectacles will be documented in real time by a team of bloggers and will be accessible along with a full schedule of events, online. So whether you participate in person or on the web, there is ample opportunity to play. - Caitlin Jones

http://www.confluxfestival.org

A WOMAN AMONG WARLORDS, a program based on Eva Mulvad's award-winning
documentary, ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS, follows outspoken Afghani women's
rights activist Malalai Joya during the final weeks of her riveting
campaign for a seat in the newly formed democratic parliament of
Afghanistan.

Women Make Movies is proud to be distributing ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS
and we invite you to tune in on September 11th for the national

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Scottish artist Zoe Irvine's 'Dial-A-Diva' project has its historical roots in the Theatraphone, a medium that existed roughly from 1840 to 1920 that allowed those with the means to have a telephone in their home to patch in performances from theater and opera companies. Irvine has reincarnated the pre-radio transmission method as a day-long, globe-spanning series of short performances that will take place on September 8. Beginning at 7:00 p.m. local time in New Zealand and ending roughly 24 hours later with a performance in Hawaii, just before Saturday slips over the international date line, audiences around the world are invited to dial in to the continuous conference call. The roster of performers includes karaoke singers in Seoul, musicians 'The Anger Boys' in Ramallah, a carnival band from Poland, folk music from Burkina Faso, MCs and opera divas from Colombia, and a similarly far-flung list of other styles. A half-way celebration will take place in Stavanger, Norway, and a complete schedule of local performances times, phone numbers to call, and a link to a live web stream can be found on the project web site. Its Victorian roots aside, Dial-A-Diva has an appealing and even nostalgic quality that looks back to the more recent history of pre-Web connectivity, when land lines--humbly tied as they are to things like time zones--were at the forefront of networked communication. - William Hanley

http://www.dialadiva.net/

I opened an account in Facebook, the latest shout in networking and Web 2.0 applications. In two days I got 14 friends, several notifications, invitations to join groups, to exchange cookbooks, favorite drinks, to rate movies, books, to nominate people as the most sexy, the most intelligent, the most friendly.
I have been challenged to a traveler quizz showing in a map the cities and countries I have visited. Why is Facebook so succesfull where other social communities as Orkut failed?

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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. - Caitlin Jones

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

Playwright Fights for Congolese Women
The Associated Press

Thursday 23 August 2007

New York - Eve Ensler has just returned from hell. That's how the author of "The Vagina Monologues" describes her trip to Congo, where thousands of women have been sexually attacked and mutilated in the African nation's civil war.
The 54-year-old playwright has joined with the United Nations in a campaign against what a U.N. expert called the worst violence against women in the world.

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Since its first appearance in 2002, Hektor has been exhibiting internationally on several occasions, drawing a lot of attention from both the contemporary art and technology worlds. Hektor, the brainchild of artist Jurg Lehni, is a portable spray-paint output device for laptop computers that brings together graphics and artificial intelligence. Although consisting only of two motors, toothed belts, and a can holder, Hektor replicates the motion of a graffiti artist's hand, producing formally engaging work. In Hektor's rare live actions, one notices the contrast between the low-tech dimension of the mechanism and the high aesthetics of its production, which grants a poetic quality to its existence. This can be witnessed next Thursday at the New York's Swiss Institute, which will host a 6-hour event in which Hektor meets Dexter Sinister, a duo known for their just-in-time workshop that collapses design and printing production into an anti-corporate activist process. Hektor will create a series of wall paintings in the Swiss Institute gallery and other areas informed by the 'Lissajous curves', a term mathematician Jules Antoine coined in 1857 to describe the graph of the equations that define complex harmonic motion. In an evening reuniting the ild trio of machines, humans, and mathematics, a re-imagining of the present visual culture will thus take place through the timely collaboration of Hektor and Dexter Sinister. - Miguel Amado

http://www.hektor.ch/

Seven Tunisian fishermen are detained in Italy because they saved the life of 44 migrants adrift on the sea near the island of Lampedusa. Where is the Europe of solidarity and enlightenment today? Are universal values as respect for every life and the obligation of support people in distress not longer valid?

FREE THEM !

Solidarity with the 7 Tunisian fishermen detained in Agrigento for having saved shipwrecked migrants

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WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Gone to graveyards every one.

When will they ever learn,

When will they ever learn?

We are a group of women who have stood vigil with our sisters in the Women in Black network around the world since shortly after September 11, 2001 to express our grief for the escalating violence in the Middle East and our conviction that violence is not an acceptable or effective tool for resolving conflict. We opposed the sanctions imposed on the Iraqi people that resulted in the deaths of over half a million children. We warned that devastation would follow the invasion of Iraq.

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It's been asked why Rhizome, and for that matter a lot of listservs for that matter, have dropped in the degree of content during the present decade. There are a few lists out there that still have a lot of content, traffic, but in general, Pall Thayer's observation that listserv traffic has dropped considerably, at first glance, appears to be true.

There is a real confluence of issues that has led to the issue at hand. Most of what Curt Cloninger has said is true, but it seems to be around a few key issues:

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a couple of months ago, the howard government in australia declared a state of emergency in northern territory aboriginal communities, claiming that widespread child abuse required nothing short of massive state intervention - including confiscation of land - to ensure the safety of aboriginal children. this is the same government that, since its election in 1996, has been steadily eroding state assistance to these remote indigenous communities, including passing an amendment to the aboriginal land rights (northern territory) act last year which explicitly states that "The principal objectives are to improve access to Aboriginal land for development, especially mining".

I participated in the international conference of Women in Black, www.womeninblack.org. It was held in Valencia, Spain, during four hot and intensive days. 400 women from more than forty countries discussed about the peace movement, the role of the lesbians in the feminist issues and the need of new strategies. The most interesting was to hear women from countries ravaged by war and misery, they were strong and kept great integrity. There were women from Afghanistan, Tjetchen and Irak, Colombia, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine.