Leading figures from around the world are converging on Manchester for Use Your Imagination, a unique one-day event presented by Imagination@Lancaster, Lancaster University's new interdisciplinary research institute, as a part of the Social Technologies Summit and Futuresonic 2007 Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas.
The event sets out to :
Inspire people with the possibilities of interdisciplinary collaboration /
Show artists what engineers get excited about, and vice versa /
Enable people to meet in structured and informal ways /
The topic is charged, "untimely deaths at MIT 1980-2007," but the question Leonardo Bonanni is also asking is "how can you make information public?" This is part of the question asked in the Bruno Latour / Peter Weibel exhibtion Making Things Public: Atmospherics of Democracy. Bonanni's answer is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe'sThe Purloined Letter - you put it in plain sight - only Bonnani's goal is to be discovered, not to remain hidden.
See also Bureau of Inverse Technology, Suicide Box
Sol Lewitt and the art formerly known as new media.
This from Michael Kimmelman'sobit in The New York Times.
Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction "not straight" was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others -- their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever -- remained part of the art.
This apparently clear distinction between art and documentation of an artistic event begins to fray a bit, however, when the art is instruction-based. For instance, Sol Lewitt'sFour Geometric Figures in a Room was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 1984. Technically, the artwork is the following set of instructions:
Four geometric figures (circle, square, trapezoid, parallelogram) drawn with four-inch (10 cm) wide band of yellow color ink wash. The areas inside the figures are blue color ink wash, and the areas outside the figures are red color ink wash. On each side of the walls are bands of India ink wash.
As the contextual information states, Lewitt's instructions are something that "anyone may execute, in any location, any number of times." The parallels to new media art are striking. In a sense, the input is the room's dimensions. The algorithms are Lewitt's instructions, and the output is the drawings on the walls.
Lisa Jevbratt'sThe Stillman Project (1998), was also commissioned for the Walker Art Center but for a virtual "room"--the online Gallery 9. Jevbratt wrote a set of instructions, only they were in a computer language known as javascript. These instructions were placed on every page of the Walker website (in the source code, not visible to the visitor) and caused a number of things to happen when a visitor viewed the website, including, on the first viewed page only, a set of simple questions (each in a different color). Based on how someone answered, they were "tagged," and as they viewed different pages throughout the website, those pages were also tagged with the color of whichever answer the viewer selected. Over time, pages of the website acquired a profile, based on who was looking at them: 30% of the people looking at this page believe the Internet is primarily informational. Etc.
The point is that with all net art and significant aspects of all new media art, as with the Lewitt, the artwork that is collected is the instruction set, and the artwork that is experienced is its execution.
In 1997, John Simon created one of his signature works, Every Icon. The idea is simple enough. Taking a 32 x 32 grid - the standard size for a Mac icon according to Apple's vaunted human-computer interface guidelines - Simon created a Java applet - an algorithm coded in a particular software language or, in other words, a Turing Machine - that causes each square of the grid, serially, to be colored black or white. It progresses by counting. Hence, over time, every single, possible icon will be imaged. You will note, however, that the icon linnked here has been running since 1 minute after midnight on April 9, 1998, and it has only made it to the 36th square. There are approximately 4.3 billion combinations possible along the top row alone. The second row will take roughly 5.85 billion years to compute - your results may vary, depending on the speed of your computer. Simon has calculated that for the icon to turn completely black, its final state, will take several hundred trillion years or, as he puts it, "a very, very long time."
"A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience."
Sol Lewitt
Louise Bourgeois,Eyes (nine elements)
Williams College Museum of Art
Patrick Dougherty, Untitled
Brown University
Jenny Holzer, "granite ode to Elizabeth Bishop"
Vassar College
Sol Lewitt,Wavy color bands within a gray, red, yellow and blue border
Colby College Museum of Art
Richard Serra, 4-5-6
Colby College Museum of Art
Tony Smith, Smog
Middlebury College
Responding to Kahn
Posted by Steve Dietz on April 4, 2007 10:23 PM
Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation
Yale University Art Gallery
Timothy Applebee, Sonali Chakravati, Sharon N. Foshe, Kate Howe, Harriet Salmon, Catherine Sellers, Sydney Skelton
Through July 8, 2007
http://artgallery.yale.edu/pages/collection/exhibitions/ex_onview.html
Yale students celebrate the reopening of the Gallery's main building, designed in 1953 by American architect Louis Kahn and restored in 2004-6, with this special exhibition of works from the collection. Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation highlights the restored building and the relationship between modern art and architecture, with particular emphasis on postwar sculpture. The curatorial team of students, who represent a range of disciplines, organized all aspects of the exhibition, from the selection of objects to the installation design, interpretive materials, and accompanying catalogue.
Vito Acconci, Sound/Body/Weapon, 1984
Sound/Body/Weapon evokes memories of the Second World War, in which gas masks were common and readily available in the event of a poison-gas attack. Suspended in space, this multipart suit emphasizes the absent body that would have once filled it, and the cassette tapes, all blank, commnet on the inability to retrieve such personal histories. The work is one of Vito Acconci's explorations involving clothing that an imagined person could wear.
In spite of the Kahn building's completion in 1953, it is often forgotten that it is a product of postwar America; the timeless quietude of the building belies the tumultuous environment that it arose from. Sound/Body/Weapon references this past. As if recycling fear, the work is relevant even today, evoking the threat of biological and chemical weapons in the age of yet another war.
Catherine Sellers, gallery handout
Ebune: Procession of the Ram
Posted by Steve Dietz on April 1, 2007 11:59 AM
We didn't see Ebune: Procession of the Ram in Portland, ME, but we did see students milling about outside the Maine College of Art in costume. Happily, we lucked our way to Becky's for the best blueberry pancakes ever - except for the ones Cory makes while camping in the Quetico during blueberry season, of course. And be sure to check out Green Design Furniture, also along the waterfront.
