Multitasking

“Right now a torrent of moments is rushing past you that you will never, ever experience again. Isn’t it time that you reach out your arms and grab them before they slip away? As connectivity evolves into a human right, what you wear could affect how you see the past, what will happen in your future, and most crucially: how immediately you’re seizing the present. A global trend is in effect: read, record, repeat, plug in, log on, text up, tune in, drop out.”

on DIS magazine

Beck’s Record Club

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “I’ll Be Your Mirror” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. The songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happened over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering. There is no intention to ‘add to’ the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.

on Beck’s website

Trailblazers

‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’
Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, 1945

TRAILBLAZERS is a live web surf event where you can show off your PRO surfing skills. No keyboard, no google, just pure links! At the event, the participants use a prepared computer with a modified browser: the address bar is removed and each click on a link is tracked by a counter. The goal is to get from one website to an other one by just clicking on links.

[via today and tomorrow]

Archives: Netizens and L’oading

I took advantage of these calm midsummer days to dig into my analog archive and reverse some material that otherwise would be lost. I’m very proud to show you what I found!
Here are some videos that document my first two exhibitions, both organized between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. They’re television reviews, so sometimes the voice over tells naive or even wrong stuff, and they’re available only in italian, but nonetheless…
I was younger, slimmer and full of enthusiasm :-)

The first two videos are about “Netizens. Cittadini della rete” (december 2002), a small show I curated in a private gallery in Rome. The show was not just about net art, but about making art in the age of the Internet, and more precisely, it tried to demostrate how important was for this new community of young artists to share a citizenship: the web citizenship.
Artists: Cory Arcangel/BEIGE, Elout De Kok, Jodi.org, Limiteazero, Carlo Zanni
more info: http://www.netizensonline.it/2002

The third video is a review of “L’oading. Videogiochi Geneticamente Modificati” (Genetically Modified Videogames). This show was open from January to March 2003 at the Siracusa City Museum, in Sicily and it was, as the title suggests, about artistic modifications of videogames.
I’m particularly happy that this video exists because this exhibition didn’t have a catalogue, so there’s no documentation around, and I think it was a great project.
Artists: Mauro Ceolin, Brody Condon, Arcangel Costantini, Corby&Baily, Delire, Victor Liu See-Lee, Nullpointer, Chiara Passa, Retroyou, Gentian Skhurti
more info: http://www.valentinatanni.com/2008/07/2003-loading-videogiochi-geneticamente-modificati/

Enjoy the jump in the past :-)

The Longest Photographic Exposures in History

“The German photography artist Michael Wesely has created these long exposures photos using a self-built pinhole camera. He captured the light of his objects for up to 3 years.
In 2001 he was invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to use his unique technique to record the re-development of their building. He set up four cameras in four different corners and photographed the destruction and re-building of the MoMa until 2004 – leaving the shutter (the holes) open for up to 34 months.

[via neatorama and the iphone photo blog]

Iterating my way into oblivion

Carlo Zanni just published his last work, a new experiment in Data Cinema:
A Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.
When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.

Rurality 2.0

I’m in Bisaccia (Avellino, Italy) for Interferenze, a great new media art festival that this year takes place in an ancient castle. The location is breathtaking and the program looks amazing also. I curated the Software Art and the Video sections. Here’s some links to the works:

Andrè Goncalves, “The Bird Watcher”, 2010
www.andregoncalves.info

Alessandro Capozzo, “Talea”, 2007-2010
www.abstract-codex.net

Corby, Baily & Mackenzie, “Southern Ocean Studies”, 2009-2010
www.reconnoitre.net/bas

Rick Silva, “A Rough Mix”, 2007, 8 min.
http://www.ricksilva.net

Bruno Muzzolini, “One step forward, two steps back”, 2007, 2.33 min.
http://www.fabioparisartgallery.com/muzzo/opere/asen/asen.html

Anders Weberg & Robert Willim, “Domestic Safari”, 2008, 10.32 min
http://www.weberg.se
http://www.robertwillim.com

Davide Sebastian, Oryza sativa, 2009, 3.46 min.
http://www.davidesebastian.com

Nicholas O’Brien, The Natural, 2008, 6 min.
http://www.doubleunderscore.net

Paintfx

PAINT FX is a painting collective/ club/ company/ brand/ website/ blog/ party consisting of Jon RafmanMicah Schippa and Parker Ito.

“We’re kinda like Jogging meets Poster Company meets shiny stuff, but we’re way juicier.  Each work featured on the site is intended to belong to the brand PAINT FX as opposed to the individual who created the work.  Maybe we’ll outsource some work too.  We started the project because we were popping huge boners off of juicy gestural marks and we thought it would be fun and easy to make a lot of those.  But PAINT FX doesn’t favor styles or themes, but favors shiny computer screens.  In that way we’re like the “Cool School” (Finish Fetish) or maybe we are the “Too Kewl School”.  We don’t all live in California, but we can be categorized geographically (the Internet, duhhhhhhhhhh!).   It should also be noted that PAINT FX favors quantity over quality. The content of these paintings is mostly determined by the software’s capabilities – Art Rage, Photoshop, Corel Painter etc.  I think we’re very interested in “materials and materiality”, but we slip in some painting references every once and a while (Josh Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol?).  In order to fully appreciate this project one must consider the site, the software, and the potential for these paintings to be transformed into objects (hint, hint).(Note: The statement for PAINT FX was written by Parker Ito, and may not necessarily reflect the perspectives of other participating members.)”