You, the World and I

You, the World and I: new video work by Jon Rafman. A voice over essay about love, memory, photography, technology, and our experience of the world.

“In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love.  Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.” (full statement here).

[p.s. this is another work that will be shown in Maps and Legends, my forthcoming exhibition during FotoGrafia Festival. Come and have a look if you’re in Rome from September 23th to October 24th]

Augmented City

Augmented City, by Keiichi Matsuda (best vied with 3D glasses)
keiichimatsuda.com

“The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.
Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology defined by its ability to overlay physical space with information. It is part of a paradigm shift that succeeds Virtual Reality; instead of disembodied occupation of virtual worlds, the physical and virtual are seen together as a contiguous, layered and dynamic whole. It may lead to a world where media is indistinguishable from ‘reality’. The spatial organisation of data has important implications for architecture, as we re-evaluate the city as an immersive human-computer interface.”

Adventures in Barbieland

Royksopp surreal promo video for the new album (out in September).

“We had a vision, and in this vision we saw ourselves as a sleeping hobo and an old man respectively. The following is a vivid depiction of some of the events that occurred during an intended stay in Barbieland. And remember, It’s a true story…”

[via no fat clips]

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: https://www.valentinatanni.com/2008/07/2003-loading-videogiochi-geneticamente-modificati/

Enjoy the jump in the past :-)

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

Avatar Days

Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ‘4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit.

Guggenheim & Youtube

YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video aims to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. This global online initiative is not a search for what’s “now,” but a search for what’s next. Visit youtube.com/play to learn more and submit a video.