The Psychobotany collective has opened a self-named show at the Machine Project Gallery in Los Angeles. Promising documentation of collaborations between plants, dancers, and synthesizers in the 70s, a plant alerting its owner of underwatering via telephone, plants responsive to touch, and newsreporting by the Plant Media Network -- Psychobotany will no doubt challenge our assumptions about...um, plants, their intelligence, their moods, their place in the food chain, and art.
Rumour has it that corn is extremely pissed at the industrial food sector, and that a corn & soybean political bloc against the hegemony of monoculture has been formed in Brazil and Argentina, with talks underway with representatives of squash. Skirmishes have also been reported between police and a peacenik coalition of marijuana and Psilocybin mushrooms…Be sure to tune into the Plant Media Network for more details.
Psychobotany: Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Human/Plant Communication, curated by Aaron Gach, opened May 12. Runs to June 17th.
At Machine Project Gallery, 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
Posted by Michael Lithgow on May 14, 2007 in
When you stop and notice, we live in environments saturated with text and signage – store signs, building logos, street signs, traffic signs, billboards. Urban signage decorates our communities with a textual veil that masks complex economic, social and political relationships. Public signage occupies public space, but the public has few ways to participate. It is a cacophanous lecture rather than a conversation.
Enter Cityspeak. Artists Jason Lewis, Maroussia Lévesque, Lucie Bélanger and Lysanne Bellemare have created a way for citizens to exercise cultural citizenship through celluar phone networks. At various sites around the world, they have installed their interactive text-messaging billboards. Participants encounter an installation which gives a phone number. Using their SMS- and web-enabled cellphones or wireless PDAs to send text to a common server, text messages are processed by artist developed software called NextText and streamed back to the location in the form of large-scale projections. The projection captures commentary, stories, conversations or simply play as participants explore the dynamic ability to leave messages in public space.
Cityspeak is ephemeral graffiti, using private modes of communication to generate public displays of commentary about a particular location. It is an example p2P (private-to-public) communication which allows participants to use communication technologies we tend to think of as private--cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants--to create public displays.
Cityspeak’s most recent installation is at the VAV Gallery in Montreal (on until May 10) as part of the LogoCities Symposium.
Cityspeak is a partner in the Mobile Digital Commons Network, a group of artists, university and industry researchers and policy activists that is experimenting with ways in which to bring the ideas of a creative commons to the wireless environment in Canada.
Photo: Elida Arrizza
Posted by Michael Lithgow on May 6, 2007 in
Estonia isn't in the news much, but after the government decided to implement a controversial law to move a Soviet memorial to soldiers who died fighting the Nazis, and unearth the bodies of several soldiers buried near the monument--which is referred to in the Estonian press simply as pronkssõdur, or bronze soldier--an international furor has ensued, with German, US, Russian and other governments weighing in.
In response, hundreds of--one assumes--members of Estonia's sizable Russian community have rioted in the streets, "clashed," as they say, with police, and looted stores and kiosks downtown.
The most important thing to know about the riots is... apparently, how hilarious some Estonians find them, even as the Estonian Ambassador is attacked by a Putin-backing "youth movement" in Moscow and their country is receiving more international coverage than it has in years.
And that leads to the second most important thing, which is that everyone in Estonia born before, say, 1982, remembers the Soviet occupation. More than likely, they have family members or at least know of people who were shipped off to Siberia or Russia and didn't come back. In a country of 1.5 million, 42,000 is a lot of people to have shipped off, especially with a 60 per cent survival rate. I won't make a list of the other forms of oppression and suppression, but suffice to say that such lists exist.
In my view, Estonians are, at least in principle, entirely justified in removing such a symbol from the downtown of their capital city.
What makes the situation more complicated is the situation of the Russian-speakers who were brought in during the Soviet Era, and more recent Russian-speaking immigrants. Many of them don't have citizenship, and from what I can tell, form the bulk of Estonia's underclass. While the country has become relatively economically successful, inequality is also on the rise, and thousands of people live in third world conditions, in squats and (literally) crumbling apartments...
FULL STORY + COMMENTS
Posted by Dru Oja Jay on May 3, 2007 in
September 11 triggered many things, but one of the most pernicious is the rise of fear-based and paranoid cultural norms. This Spring, artist kanarinka will run the entire evacuation route in Boston and measure its distance in breaths. She will have recording and broadcasting equipment strapped to her body. The breaths will be amplified and broadcast into the public space around her.
The project will include running performances in public space (2007), a web podcast of breaths (2007), and a gallery installation of the archive of breaths (2008). The performances and website are presented by iKatun for the 2007 Boston Cyberarts Festival. The project will be on view at the Cyberarts Gala on Fri, May 4, 2007, 6:30pm at the Hotel @ MIT, Cambridge, MA.
You can have a listen to kanarinka’s podcasts by going here.
kanarinka is a member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, who recently launched the New American Dictionary, the Fear and Security Edition. .
Posted by Michael Lithgow on May 2, 2007 in
Of the hundreds of extensions available for the open source browser Firefox, ad filters, software that replaces online advertising with blank space, are among the most popular. Seeing room for improvement Steve Lambert and Evan Harper of Eyebeam OpenLab have taken the hacktivist staple one step further. Their AddArt extension blocks unwanted ads and then fills the liberated space with artwork.
Although the software is only due to be completed this summer, you can get a glimpse of the work-in-progress at their website. Unfortunately, the sample artwork they selected—a cliched illustration of a bald eagle, wings outstretched, flying past a rippling American flag—is arguably more offensive to the majority of the world than the ads it replaces. (That the sample page features a FOX News piece about a 9/11 "terror confession" might hint at an attempt at creative irony, but I doubt it.)
According to the site, however, the final project will incorporate "shows" that will feature several artists over a given period of time. "The project will be supported by a small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each two weeks will include 5-8 artists selected by emerging and established curators."
If you're a programmer with some time to kill—or an artist with an aversion to eagles—Eyebeam Openlab could use your services.
Posted by Rob Maguire on May 1, 2007 in
ERIC KASTNER | 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 | This image is named after the HD-DVD processing key that allows you to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. It is made by software that gleans photographs from Flickr. Via Make.
The Popular Movement in Oaxaca has its own artist movement, the Oaxacan Assembly of Revolutionary Artists (ASAR-O). A new exhibition at ABC No Rio in NYC brings together woodblock prints and stencil street art created by ASAR-O during the Oaxaca uprising.
ASAR-O was formed during the popular uprising that occurred in Oaxaca during the Summer and Fall of 2006. When police failed to remove striking teachers from the town zocalo, an impromptu citizen’s assembly was formed, the Asamblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca (APPO). Artists took to the streets to communicate the demands of APPO and to help mobilize citizen support. Eyewitness accounts say that streets were covered in art and stencils supporting the uprising, much of which has now been removed and painted over by state officials trying to bury the memory of the popular revolt.
Show runs from April 26 to May 24.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 27, 2007 in
Around the Coyote is seeking submissions for group show, Gameplay: Video Games in Contemporary Art Practice. They are looking for artists who use video games to explore identity or place, whose game work results in art objects such as photographs, installations or performances, who engage in gameplay as a site of resistance, as a tool for interactivity or collaboration with other artists, or who see virtual worlds as significant sites of meaning production.
Deadline May 5, 2007
For more information go to Around the Coyote.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 27, 2007 in
The amazing folks at the Graffiti Research Lab have taken their laser graffiti technology on the road – with bicycles! Last Friday, the Mobile Broadcast Unit made its debut during the Critical Mass bike ride in Brooklyn. The MBU is a bicycle powered laser graffiti unit that can be tooled around the city, perched where convenient, and then turned on the nearest building for a grand display of instant laser light graffiti. To see a video of the MBU’s debut ride click here.
We first wrote about the GRL’s laser graffiti in February – a laser projector outfitted to respond to a moving laser pointer aimed at any surface. The result is that you can write messages with laser light on the sides of buildings. The technical specifications and software are freely available here.
GRL hopes to make the Mobile Broadcast Unit available this summer for anyone to wage their own private battle for citizen mindshare.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 25, 2007 in
How’s this for a storyline -- you do everything in your power to collect as many barrels of oil as you can, shoot at Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein whenever they appear, all the while keeping an eye out for weapons of mass destruction which, if you get them, let’s you win the game. Throughout, a clownish president dances around who doesn’t do anything, but is damned distracting. This describes in a nutshell the online interactive satirical game Texas Style Oil Shoot Out. This may come as a surprise, but the game is irritatingly simple. If you want to play, go here. Apparently, highscore earners are being recruited for senior positions in certain U.S. foreign conflicts…
Texas Style Oil Shoot Out was created by Chip Neville who teaches at the University of Tampa.
PS. If you find yourself playing for a while and not winning, the secret lies in knowing your headlines. Game rules based (kinda mostly) on historical fact.
Posted by Michael Lithgow on April 23, 2007 in
| Games |
