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Sunday, January 28, 2007

The Girlfriend Experience until 09.03 Mediamatic, Amsterdam (NL)


The avatars of The Girlfriend Experience will be available every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 20:00- 23:00. They can also be observed live in the Analog Villa, the Mediamatic Exhibition space.

The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft has enabled the creation of a personal online social and economic existence. Simultaneously this triggers inherent questions about this existence, as it questions what the consequences will be for first life, or reality.

When you use virtual avatars you can do as you please. In The Girlfriend Experience you will have to get to know each other first. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and how far the avatar wants to go to execute specific desires. It is ambiguous who is really controlling the situation. You have ten minutes to figure out what you can do with your avatar. After that, your time is up and another player can take your place.

The title of the project, The Girlfriend Experience, denotes the paradoxical character that online social interaction has. On one hand, the safe anonymity by using the avatar, on the other the intimate releases and projections that can spread easily. For Martin Butler is this the merging of two apparent extremes, anonymity and intimacy, which characterizes an important part of contemporary social traffic. The best paid prostitutes are the ones with whom the client feels as though he is with his girlfriend, or with whom he has a Girlfriend Experience.

Monday, January 22, 2007

art_clips until 25.03. ZKM | Media Museum, Karlsruhe (D)


"art_clips are the subject-centered answer of art to the end of industrially produced music videos for television. They are a guarantee of an individual view of the world, which opens the horizon of the possible. Searching for a contemporary visual language for short and meaningful messages, art_clips move within a gigantic field of optical investigations, free from mass-media taboos that would forbid a playful treatment of image, text and sound. Alongside and after all previously established artistic genres, they represent an art form corresponding to the acceleration of life, its hecticness and diversity. art_clips are of such a density of design, such a cunning and enigmaticness, such a stylistic sovereignty and personal yet general validity, that one may say they are a shot that hits the mark - us. Following the DVD production and preview events in Innsbruck and Bern, the ZKM now presents the first comprehensive compilation of this new art form. Presented will be 90 art_clips from Switzerland, Austria and Germany produced between 2000 and today."

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Unfinish Transmediale.07 31.01- 4.02, Berlin (D)


Festival for art and digital culture 2007

The 20th transmediale festival again explores how art and society are changing under the influence of media and technologies which become more and more dominant in our everyday lives. In contemporary art, digital media like video and electronic networks are now so wide-spread that a strict definition of what constitutes ‘media art’ seems no longer possible. We have therefore decided to alter the subtitle of the festival: transmediale is no longer called ‘international media art festival’, but ‘festival for art and digital culture’. This name is supposed to demonstrate the step away from the niche of ‘media art’, yet still points to the field of tension between culture and digital technologies, which continues to form the main driving force of the festival.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Networked Nature until 18.02 Foxy Production


Foxy Production presents Networked Nature, a group exhibition that inventively explores the representation of “nature” through the perspective of networked culture. The exhibition includes works by C5, FutureFarmers, Shih-Chieh Huang, Philip Ross,Stephen Vitiello, and Gail Wight, who provocatively combine art and politics with innovative technology, such as global positioning systems (GPS), robotics, and hydroponic environments.

In their work Perfect View, San Jose-based collective C5 reached out to the subculture of recreational GPS users, or geo-cachers, asking them for their recommendations of “sublime locales.” The submitted latitudes and longitudes provided the guide points for a thirty-three state, thirteen-thousand mile motorcycle expedition by collective member Jack Toolin, who photographed the terrain at the given coordinates. The results, presented in triptychs, smartly subvert traditional representations of landscape and notions of the sublime.

San Francisco-based collective FutureFarmers’ Photosynthesis Robot is a three-dimensional model of a possible perpetual motion machine driven by phototropism - the movement of plants towards the direction of the sun. Their proposal that a group plants will very slowly propel a four wheel vehicle is a witty take on the pressing search for new forms of energy.

New York artist Shih-Chieh Huang’s inflatable installation, EX-S-S-TW, is inspired by everyday household electronic devices and his studies of physical computing and robotics. In this ingenious exploration of organic systems, he creates a dynamic circulation of electricity and air: a living micro-environment.

San Francisco-based Philip Ross’ Juniors are self-contained survival capsules for living plants. Blown glass enclosures provide a controlled hydroponic environment, where plants’ roots are submerged in nutrient-infused water, while LED lights supply the necessary illumination. The artist has drawn on two culturally divergent traditions - Chinese scholars’ objects and Victorian glass conservatories – that share the belief that nature is best understood when seen through the lens of human artifice.

Virginia-based artist Stephen Vitiello’s Hedera (BBB) unsettles our assumptions of what an appropriate soundtrack might be. The artist has constructed a sprawling vine installation with speakers hidden between the branches that quietly broadcast percussive sounds woven from the speeches and private conversations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Creep, by Oakland-based Gail Wight, is an hypnotic three screen time-lapse video of the growth of dyed slime mold. Separately edited sequences play alongside each other, cycling through a sequence of fluorescent color shifts. In her aestheticizing of the normally repellent, Wight creates an ode to the beauty of natural growth patterns.

Networked Nature will run in conjunction with the College Art Association's annual conference in New York, February 14-17, 2007. A reception for CAA will be held on Friday February 16th at Foxy Production. www.collegeart.org

Networked Nature is organized by Marisa Olson, Editor and Curator, for Rhizome. The exhibition will tour to the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, New York.

Networked Nature is supported, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the College Art Association, the New York City Department for Cultural Affairs, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. A full-color catalogue will be published by Rhizome and available at the gallery.

Rhizome is a leading new media organization affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Its programs support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways - www.rhizome.org; www.newmuseum.org

Sunday, January 07, 2007

ALIEN PRODUCTIONS & MACHFELD - "XT"


ALIEN PRODUCTIONS & MACHFELD - "XT"
Performance and Live-Webcast
as part of the exhibition
CROSSOVER III - photography and media art

Thursday, Jan 11th 2007, 7 pm (CET)
F O T O G A L E R I E W I E N
Währinger Straße 59/WUK, A - 1090 Wien

The process of crosstalking (XT) is the point of departure for the conjoint performance of the artists' collectives alien productions (Martin Breindl, Norbert Math, Andrea Sodomka) and Machfeld (aka Sabine Maier und Michael Mastrototaro).

In telecommunication and telephony, crosstalk is often distinguishable as pieces of speech or leaking from other people's connections - hence the name. The artists will use this - normally unwanted - effect and base their performance exclusively on spoken word. They use their voice to trigger technical devices like sythesizer, vocoder, stylus printers or granular synthesis programs which themselves start to "crosstalk". The original signal will be gated out for listeners and also for the communicating artists. What remains are the sound events, processed in real time.

The performance will be webcasted live on . It also will be used as material for a reworked radio-art version which will be broadcasted on ORF Oe1, Kunstradio-Radiokunst on Jan. 28th, 2007, 11.05 pm (CET)