Lectures details
From Develop
[edit] Tao of P.O.O (Post-optimal Objects) / rootoftwo : Cezanne Charles + John Marshall [Detroit] / Lecture / 45 min. / European University
This lecture/discussion focuses on designed objects and their cultural contexts. The talk explores the territory between fine art and design and addresses approaches for developing the aesthetic and critical possibilities of objects outside a commercial context. The talk will also discuss various ways of creatively communicating ideas about objects; shown as prototypes or communicated via publication (online or print). Post-optimal objects are about thinking conceptually and critically about the role of contemporary objects and the space that they operate in at the intersection of new media, design and fine art. The talk will focus on the impact that digital 3D modeling, scanning, laser cutting, and rapid prototyping has had on hybrid art and design practices which are made possible through the use of these technology. Keywords: FabLabs, industrial revolution 2.0, critical design, digital 3D modeling, scanning, laser cutting, and rapid prototyping
[edit] KRIEGSPIEL LAN Party: playing Guy Debord's Game Of War / Mushon Zer Aviv [New York] / Lecture / 45 min. / European University
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War", Produced for computer by RSG In 1978 the French Situationist Guy Debord designed and fabricated a board game called "The Game of War." Thirty years later RSG is proud to release a new free online computer game inspired by Debord's largely forgotten work. We explore the contradiction between Debord, a symbol of radical politics and art in 1960s France, and the Napoleonic war game he created. In Debord's own words the game was the only thing in his entire body of work that had any value. Was it nostalgia, or a vision of things to come? Founded in 2000, RSG is a collective of programmers and artists working on experimental software products. The Kriegspiel team consists of: Alexander R. Galloway, producer and programming; Carolyn Kane, research; Adam Parrish, programming; Daniel Perlin, sound; DJ /rupture and Matt Shadetek, music; and Mushon Zer-Aviv (Shual.com), design. More detail at http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/
[edit] Antidatamining / RYbN [Paris] / Lecture / 45 min. / European University
ANTIDATAMINING is based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of web-extracted data. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in realtime. The goal of this project is to make emerge and to identify, using the Data Mining processing, several social and economic imbalance phenomenas. ADM seeks to visualize these phenomenas, and to tries to establish a global imbalance cartography. Forest shows the Capital Network Map, which tries to organize a network through more than 1200 referenced companies, searchnig the relationships between their capitalistic structure, and attempt to create links of ownership. In this talk RYbN will present the developments of the project. www.antidatamining.net
[edit] The Stone that the Builders Rejected: Computer Art and the Edifice of Art History / Paul Hertz [Chicago] / Lecture / 45 min. / European University
Although computer art in Europe and North America developed in contact with the artistic avant-garde, standard narratives of art history have largely ignored its development and influence. The distance that separates art history and scientific thought partly explains this oversight, as do the important role non-artists played in developing computer art and the difficulties of turning it into a commodity in the art market. The protean nature of the computer, a tool that can mimic any other tool, further complicates the situation. Computer art requires a new visual literacy. Computer art developed a body of ideas regarding the nature of form, language, and agency which seem increasingly valid in contemporary culture. Our very concepts of nature and mind are now represented as computational, constituting a “regime of computation” that is all pervasive and yet effectively invisible. Using works from a museum exhibition co-curated by the author as visual evidence, this lecture traces genealogies that connect concepts developed by pioneering computer artists to new media practices, the twentieth century avant-garde, art historical issues of knowledge and representation, and contemporary visual culture.
[edit] The Presence of Displacement: The Surfacing of the Internet Café in Johannesburg’s Inner City / Tegan Bristow [Johannesburg] / Lecture / 45 min. / European University
This is a lecture that expands culturally on research done by myself Tegan Bristow and Information Architect, Jason Hobbs at the end of 2006. The Johannesburg inner city, during Apartheid, was a haven for big business. In the early 1990's, towards the end of the Apartheid regime, the influx of both legal and illegal immigrants into the city lead to a growing 'unstable' population seeking refuge in the inner city. The area was then deemed 'unsafe' for an urban middle and upper class (mostly white) and an exodus of big business and surrounding residential areas to 'safer regions' was witnessed. This left an urban infrastructure that has been appropriated by the new inhabitants. Despite current development initiatives by government, these areas are over populated and run down, resulting in an environment in which residents have begun to create a culture of informal trade. Anybody visiting this area will quickly notice that it is dominated by various groups of African foreign nationals. These groups have come to Johannesburg in search of a safe-haven from their own conflict-ridden countries. For these groups the Internet, which is still largely expensive and under-developed in South Africa, is vital to extend communications and business links with their countries of origin. The above circumstance resulted in a situation in which literally hundreds of 'informal' Internet Café's surfaced in and around the inner city. These spaces follow a pattern of multi-national African trade traditions in an effort to satisfy community needs; this trade structure is un-common in what is seen as normal South African (western influenced) trade structures. The café's become gatherings nodes for familiar faces, learning, business and more often than not include commonly unrelated services such as hairdressing. In my lecture I will unpack this emergent form of Internet café culture, its context and relevance. I will be reviewing past research; including a new arts/community developmental project located on the Internet to service these communities as well as addressing new interviews. Tegan Bristow (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)
[edit] Object of Desire / Yael Kanarek [New York] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
Yael Kanarek has developed a unique vocabulary of artistic networked interfaces that combine photography, graphics, hypertext, sculpture, and performance. Kanarek generates complex networked "story spaces" that combine multiple media forms with multiple languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Online visitors move through and explore charged issues of land, space, and language. Recognizing that languages shape space by defining cultural territory and sovereignty, Kanarek explores the question of space on the Internet. Kanarek will present several of her award-winning net art projects, including her most recent net art project, Object of Desire, and gallery installations, where a dynamic physical space is constructed with formalistic tools of configuration, shape, and shadow.
[edit] Actions with Film as a Tool of Survey and Integration at Local Society / Krzysztof Żwirblis [Warsaw] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
Krzysztof Żwirblis discusses his actions with film within local society. These actions were inspired by some ideas cultural theoreticians had in the mid of 70. – they thought that tv, especially cable tv, could be one of the important tools of changing our society towards being more democratic and open. The contemporary situation is completely different. Actually TV is only a tool at the hands of the big corporations, serving mainly as an earning machine. His first action in 2005 was a response to this situation. It included searching for ways to integrate public dialog and discovering the commentaries of the public about contemporary issues (political, social, existential). He did this with the belief that watching fellow citizens speaking freely inspires others to do the same. The actions usually took 5-6 days and, as in regular TV, he tried to edit the raw materials very quickly, presenting the results the same evening in a public space. When viewers of this work realize that the projections of familiar people speaking freely directly address them, they often are inspired to participate in the news, talking through this means to their local society. Regular program guests are also local "artists" often presented in live presentations at the closing of the project.
[edit] Networks and Artistic Spaces of Intervention / Gilbertto Prado [São Paulo] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
In the last three decades the experimentations in art and telecommunications were multiplied with the use, by the artists, of several production means, distribution and exchange, increasing possibilities with the introduction of Web and the multi-user virtual environments. This work is about accomplishments with the new poetics of the dynamic universe of the telematic art, expressed in the contemporary artistic production. The purpose of this presentation is to bring a brief panorama pointing out some artists, most focusing on the Brazilian production, as well as to present some recent personal artistic works.
[edit] Voice in Electronic Art - from Whistle to Speech Recognition / Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel [São Paulo] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
In this paper we present a brief panorama of electronic artworks that have used voice in several forms -- from whistles and blows to the state of the art in using speech synthesis and recognition technologies. Although the first experience with voice technologies was in the 18th century, only since the beginning of the 20th century has their commercial use really started and it was not until the end of the century, in the 1980s, that the first electronic art experiments with voice technologies were developed. Since then many electronic artworks have used voice in several creative forms, showing interesting human-computer interactions. From the first voice experimentations in electronic art to the use of speech synthesis and voice recognition on the web -- as we have nowadays -- it has been a long journey. The intention here is to register this journey in art focusing more specifically on works that use vocal-input. Therefore, we will point out some key artworks ending with the Voice Mosaic ( www.voicemosaic.com.br) – piece that allows voice interactions on the web through the telephone, dissolving borders and amplifying the pervasiveness.
[edit] Digital poetry - A narrow relation between poetic and the codes of the computational logic / Silvia Laurentiz [São Paulo] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
Cybernetics realized a big conceptual leap in the 1960s, emphasizing information and organization processes. It meant that the focus would also be on questions of language that would allow communication between different systems, for it was a science of communication and control in human beings and machines. Since then, the definition of cybernetics has broadened until it became what it is today: the study of systems -- or organisms --complex and adaptive. The idea of programs, models, mathematic calculations and formulations, mobility, chance, networks, emergent patterns, multiple perspectives, generative structures, procedure authorship, semantic events and labyrinths, has begun to become a part of artistic propositions. This lecture will present artworks that use some mechanisms introduced by cybernetics and the notion of systems of digital poetry that demonstrate the close relationship of poetics and codes of computational logic.
[edit] Second Landscapes – Or Let’s go non-locative / Giselle Beiguelman [São Paulo] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
The unfoldings of new mapping and locating systems are undeniable. The popularization of GPS devices and the accessibility of online maps are indicative of a new perception of space. Nevertheless, all those issues also point to new geopolitical dynamics and to a repetitive aesthetic redundancy which seems to pursue the utopia of a map in a 1:1 scale like a sad Borgean character pictured in “On Exactitude in Science”. Through the analysis of artistic projects by this author and other people's works which critically dialog with locative media and related themes, and exploring experiences in metauniverses like Second Life, this lecture aims to discuss Locative Media phenomena beyond the hype.
[edit] About Site Specific Art and Its Preservation / Pance Velkov [Skopje] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
Site specific art is often built in historical places. Once introduced in the site, the future of the work of the artist(s) remains uncertain. What happens with site specific art when the historic place, which means the context, is subjected to change following modern preservation standards? The modern preservation movement does not talk much about art and the artistic. Modern and contemporary art are more ephemeral then durable, which per se hardly complifies with standard preservation criteria... Questioning current preservation theory, the lecture examines the cultural significance and the future of site specific art.
[edit] CCCK "Soros launched a machine, he launched the process – but he didn't get this process integrated." / Ingela Johansson and Inga Zimprich [Sofia] / Lecture / 45 min. / Cultural Center Tocka
CCCK "Soros launched a machine, he launched the process – but he didn't get this process integrated."(* Quotation from: Jerzy Onuch, director Polish Institute, Kyiv, former director of SCCA Kyiv. In: Try to find another cow, CCCK round table discussion at CCA Kyiv June 2007) In the frame of Chain Reaction and their EMARE residency at InterSpace, Sofia, Ingela Johansson and Inga Zimprich will present the project CCCK – Center for Communication and Context Kyiv, which researched the institutional development of SCCA Kyiv and SCCA Odessa, two of the twenty Soros Art Centers, which were established during the 1990's central and eastern Europe and central Asia. What chain reactions did a network of contemporary art centers cause in different local artistic contexts in relation to – the usage of new media? – the development of the NGO landscape? – the implementation of concepts of contemporality? – the proposition of institutional formats? Has that chain reaction succeeded/come to a halt/remained unaccomplished? Which possibilities of re-reading does the Soros network invite for today? Ingela Johansson (artist, SE), Inga Zimprich (artist, DE) and changing members work since 2006 in the artistic research project CCCK - Center for Communication and Context Kyiv. Firstly focussing on the recent art institutional developments in Ukraine, CCCK expands its research towards investigating aspects of the former network of Soros Art Centers (SCCA), including the former SCCA's in Sofia, Chisinau and Bucharest in 2008. EMARE residencies are realized in the framework of EMAN project and with the support of Culture 2007 programme of the European Commision. http://www.ccc-k.net
