Rhizome Newsletter

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

http://comunismodaforma.zip.net/

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's work combines internet art, interactive installation, video, sound, and performance art. Born in Hong Kong, he studied art in San Francisco, where this blending of genres has become a genre of its own, and he now lives primarily in New York City. Overlapping and juxtaposition are, in fact, at the heart of Hung's work. His large-scale images are rich collages that represent elaborate tableaus. Like his humorous videos and often DIY installations, the images Hung constructs are allegorical in form and create semi-fictional relationships between political figures, corporations, and other mass media iconography. For instance, his recent video, 'Because Washington Is Hollywood For Ugly People,' merges internet imagery and original animation with 80s pop and psychedelic graphics to situate George W. Bush and the members of his cabinet in relationship to American pop cultural figures ranging from Britney Spears and the cast of the TV show Friends, to Terminator to Lord of the Rings. Ultimately, the work comments on the spectacle of political rhetoric--something Hung is clearly skilled at dissecting and reassembling. His website is a treasure trove of smart, funny work. - Marisa Olson

http://www.tinkin.com/

The new media organization Eyebeam is celebrating its tenth anniversary with three major exhibitions, the first of which is entitled Source Code. On view through August 11, at their massive Chelsea (NYC) space, are works by past and present fellowship holders, many of whom have given Eyebeam a name for blurring the lines between research and creativity, art-making and hacking. These include Cory Arcangel, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Carrie Dashow, Eteam, Alexander Galloway, Nina Katchadourian, Steve Lambert, Golan Levin, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, MediaShed, MTAA, Mark Napier, and neuroTransmitter. While each of these artists has enjoyed a certain level of celebrity within the new media community, Eyebeam supported many of them early in their careers, in an effort to bolster and explore the relationship between technology, our daily lives, and 'creative exploration.' - Marisa Olson

http://www.eyebeam.org/engage/engage.php?page=exhibitions&id=128

Minneapolis-based artist Abinadi Meza has been making a name for himself, both in the US and abroad, for his engaging new media art practice. Sound plays a significant role in his body of work, as demonstrated by one of his most acclaimed projects, 'The Burning Question' (2004). In a gallery setting, several computers were loaded with multiple tunes--contributed by other artists under a free license--that visitors were asked to burn onto a CD, thus forming playlists that were then transmitted over a 24 hour-Internet radio broadcast while the exhibition was on view. Meza also examines the intertwinement between sound and space, as revealed by '360 Degrees Concerts' (2006), in which he manipulated audio recordings of a show preparation at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center to create an immersive sonic environment presented in a 360-degree spatial pattern around a spiral-shaped Rirkrit Tiravanija installation. Using Ipods, Meza is now developing projects that maintain his exploration of sound properties while also addressing the pertinent issues of contemporary society. For example, in 'From the New War Offices,' featured last January at London's Fieldgate Gallery, he addresses England, in general, and the relation of the British and American peoples, in particular. Parodying propaganda-style imagery, Meza combined a silent film of the 1920s with an electronic soundtrack that 'attaches ominous techno-synth to this portrait of a fading Empire.' Continuing to surprise a growing audience with his elaborate, vibrant experiments, Meza is one of the best representatives of the new generation of artists for which sound is a preferred medium. - Miguel Amado

http://abinadimeza.net/

Lump Gallery/Projects in Raleigh, North Carolina is an artist-run space that has been presenting, since 1996, some of the most provocative projects in the region. Last year one of its members, Michael Salter, moved to Eugene, Oregon where he founded Lumpwest, which he calls 'the third and silent partner of Lump Gallery/Projects.' Operating with a DIY attitude, Lumpwest has been making a name both locally and nationally with a program of experimental exhibitions such as 'Particulate,' currently on view. For this show, artist Chris Coleman brought together eight other artists--Tom Bendtson, dNASAb, Colin Ives, Adrianne Little, Laleh Mehran, Alexander Renya, G.A. Rhodes, and Adam Weekley--who created videos that are showcased in MP4 micro players (iPods, etc) hung in single row on all the walls of the gallery. For example, Renya's work addresses the aesthetics of advertising with a surrealist touch and Weekley reflects on gender issues. Salter says of dNASAb's work, he 'displayed a dynamic, dimensional, gestural chaos of beauty from somewhere between nightmare and recognition.' Given these strong and diverse contributions, Particulate is thus a surprising exhibition of introspective, visual inspections of personal mythologies and the collective imaginary that offers an intimate yet psychologically engaging experience to the viewers. - Miguel Amado

http://lumpwest.blogspot.com/

Time-based art has a long history and its pulse continues to tick, as they say. As diverse as time-based media may now be, it tends to lack much mystery (afterall, time--like space--is something we humans have studied... forever), except in the occasional narrative reliance on 'mystery' as a structuring element, and as such the medium is ripe for problematizing. This is precisely the accomplishment of Time Travelers, an exhibition and major spectacle of a panel discussion curated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin at Polvo, a Chicago-based alternative space founded by the Polvo artist collective. Winger-Bearskin's curatorial statement stakes out the show's territory, in declaring, 'Time Travelers recognizes that NEW MEDIA has incorrectly been identified as the repository for all art technologies utilizing a video camera, a computer, and an electrical outlet, but insists that as artists, first and foremost, we can use any f*&%@!’n media we want!' Included in the exhibition are emerging artists Artur Augustynowicz, Christopher Borkowski, Dietmar Krumery, Donata Napoli, and others, including the curiously-named artist(s) Haircuts by Robots and Universe of Junk. Last week, the space hosted a discussion on the present themes, which paradoxically predetermined, 'Each time a loaded art word is used, two or more universes will be created in which differing ideas become the dominate paradigm.' [Sic.] The self-described 'ridiculous blend of word-salad artspeak' no doubt dribbles over into the Free Manifestos advertised on Polvo's website. Look into the exhibition any time between now and July 28. - James Petrie

http://www.polvo.org/july07.htm

Noema is the first Brazilian gallery within Second Life. Its managers are Sao Paulo-based scholar Abel Reis and artist and curator Giselle Beiguelman, whose show 'nowhere/anywhere/somewhere' inaugurated Noema's series of exhibitions last March. According to Beiguelman, Noema is a 'nomadic gallery,' existing mostly as a virtual entity but operating also in real spaces, as occurred with the public presentation of Marcus Bastos's short film 'Free Radicals.' The work was part of the cultural program of a party celebrating freedom that took place in April at the famous Sao Paulo club, Vegas. First scholar Lucia Santaella discussed the concept of freedom and then local VJs Spetto, Lucas Bambozzi, duVa, and Helga Stein performed live remixes of Bastus's piece, creating a new version of it that now stands side-by-side with the original. On view until July 15, 'Free Radicals' brings together the voice of different individuals, which meditate about free-will, today and in the past, with VJ-style sequences of images of the interviewees and urban landscapes. Bastos thus evokes the resistance to the Brazilian dictatorship that ended in the mid-1980s to examine the notion and practices of liberty in contemporary society, in general, and Brazil in particular. - Miguel Amado

http://www.noema.art.br/br/radicaislivres.htm

As with any vibrant art form, new media finds itself historicized in multiple and evolving ways. Significant attention has been paid to whether the field is alive, dead (date negotiable), or risen from the grave, and to defining its constituent elements. Automatic Update, an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art organized by Barbara London, argues that new forms of media art rose with the swell of the dot-com era and became mainstream in its wake. The five installations included, all drawn from the moment after the bubble burst, speak less to the internet or interactivity and more to a culture saturated with media of all kinds. As markers of this designated cultural moment, the works on view vary widely in their ideas and approaches. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy explore the interplay between the construction of cinematic genre and the development of personal history in Our Second Date (2004). Xu Bing ponders remote communication in Book from the Ground (2007, and in-progress) in which a dialogue between two individuals, separated by a mylar screen, is translated into a vocabulary of computer-like icons. Also featured are new and recent works by Cory Arcangel, Paul Pfeiffer, and Rafael Lozano-Hammer. It's arguable whether new media art has become mainstream, yet the assertion that the Internet has fundamentally changed contemporary culture and propelled new art forms is undeniable. This influence is explored in screenings organized by London with Hanne Mugaas that run concurrently with the exhibition, including signature works by film and video-makers such as Iara Lee, Kristin Lucas, Takeshi Murata, Miranda July and Marcin Ramocki, among others. Automatic Update is on view until September 10th. - Lauren Cornell

http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/automatic_update/index.html