Saturday, November 14, 2009

arte.mov

The Immobilité remixes are featured in the arte.mov festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil this week. Although I was sorry that, just like with Cimatics in Brussels this month, I had to decline a generous invitation to attend the event in Brazil, the festival producers have a nice blurb in Portuguese right off the home page that also (on page two) includes a translation of my interview with Ana Finel Honigman in Interview magazine. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Ana: So far, the most famous cell-phone films are the "Happy Slapping" evidence movies of kids performing acts of violence. Were you hoping that the beauty of your film would redeem the medium from its associations with "Happy Slapping," amateur porn and DIY recordings of other anit-social behaviour?

MA: Yes. Having lived through both postmodernism and poststructuralism, I think it's safe to say that we are on the verge of something that feels much more intense and requires a new attitude about our approach to life in an age of aesthetics. Instead of feeling jaded by everything there is now this feeling that we need to tap into this enormous creative potential that we're just beginning to connect to via the network. One word that people keep using to describe both Immobilité and my role as the artist who made it is "romantic." At first, I was suspicious of that term, but now I embrace it. We are definitely living in a pre-romantic era and the "pre" is disappearing quickly. The election of Obama has totally verified that.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

TV Time for Unrealtime


Techne TV


The art program on Greek national TV opened their recent show with a long segment on my UNREALTIME exhibition in Athens. Even if you don't speak Greek (I sure don't), you can begin to get a slight feel for the exhibition by watching the video.


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Sunday, November 08, 2009

Sub/Version/ing

If I were in Europe this month, what would I be doing?

First I would go to Athens and check out the exhibition. But I would also be attending Cimatics in Brussels, of course. It's a great scene and I would have loved to accept their invitation to attend this year (especially as a follow-up to the intense experiences I had there and in Ghent last year as part of my afternoon of mini-lectures with Geert Lovink entitled Mediakunst 2.0).

What's Cimatics?
For this 7th edition of the Cimatics festival, it goes at full throttle again with today's image culture. As an audiovisual festival Cimatics puts the focus on art, media, design and music. Cimatics invites you for a mix of concerts, film-screenings, exhibitions, workshops, conferences, public interventions and parties.

Cimatics is spread out all over the city of Brussels. For 10 days and nights it will be hosted at 17 venues, both underground and above. It intends to be a citywide international festival for advanced creativity, a node where underground, pop and art become mixed in an exciting cultural mash-up.

10 days, 14 venues, more then 100 artists: Video Vortex conference, Vladislav Delay, Mika Vainio, AGF, Telcosystems, Herman Kolgen, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Johan Grimonprez, Kurt D'Haeseleer, Constant Dullaart, Lawrence Malstaf, Locus Sonus, TVestroy, Felix Luque, Max Hattler, Function, closing party at the Fuse with Donato Dozzy and many many more...
The organizers, including live A/V artist Bram Crevits whose Roots of VJing playlist on YouTube is a must see, present the festival as an experimental cultural networking space whose roots can be found in the more playful aspects of the modernist avant-garde (think of Hans Richter films or Luigi Russolo's art of noise) but with a proactive attitude toward inventing the avant-pop future. Cimatics may have started off as a festival for VJing, and soon after for live audio/visual art, but according to Bram it has now become "a celebration focusing on 'advanced creativity'."

Had I gone, I would have screened some of the Immobilité remixes and participated in the Video Vortex program with a particular focus on what the festival calls "SubVersioning." What's attractive about the concept of SubVersioning is how it indicates a philosophical mash-up of Situationist détournement and ITS software upgrading/updating but also the way live A/V performance, like so many other art forms before it (think Fluxus, happenings, underground cinema / structuralist film, etc.) have resisted i.e. subverted the commercial version of art world commodification.

Which is not to say that these live A/V experiments cannot lead to the making of artworks that take on some kind of commercial or art market value (The Light Surgeons are successfully straddling the live A/V performance, film/video/DVD, and art commission scenes and I have sold digital video and surround sound installations made with VJ software to major museums).

But commodification is not the goal. If anything, there is no goal per se for most live A/V artists. Think of it more as a passion for experimentation in applied aesthetics, social networking, nomadic wanderlust, and what can only be called (open) field research. I write about all of this in the opening "Spontaneous Theories" section of META/DATA.

For me, events like Cimatics are ongoing after-parties with after-effects that feed into the autohallucinatory framework of my variable postproduction (i.e. metamediumistic) becomings (what in the "gig world" we might call sets). The most important part of live A/V events is the live function or, if you will, life function. It's bio-social networking conducted within a technologically savvy framework. And besides, it's great fun.


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