Articles

Pain Is Not The Game. Virtual And Real In Videogame Art

When the German artists Volker Morawe and Tilman Reiff were young they used to play games that deal with punishment in some ways. The most popular was probably Folter-Mau-Mau Tilma Reiff explains. A simple card game where the looser would be punished according to the cards that remains in his hand. We remembered the special tension that arose from the threat of possible punishment and the excitement that came with it. The relief if you came away unpunished. It simply adds a lot of feelings to the experience.... READ MORE...

The Machine That Makes Art. Form+code In Art, Design And Architecture

A perfect candidate for this role is FORM + CODE, a book by Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams and LUST, recently published by Princeton Architectural Press. Contents are clearly expressed through an historical overview on the code development in electronic art, and in some of its conceptual art natural language programming forerunners(based on instructions series set up not for the machines but for the public). The graphic layout is a well-kept and an inseparable part of the publishing project, including a selection of pieces of work and breathtaking images (at a very reasonable price, it must be said).... READ MORE...

The Lost Cemetery Of Images.a Conversation With Carlos Casas

The use of archive material is a tendency which has established itself in the last few years as a common practice in audiovisual contaminations. It is an ongoing search which paves the road to countless approaches to the work, as well as involving the individuality of the artist in the reprocessing of traces and memories in an imagination which is set on the present. With Cemetery (Archive Works), inaugurated on 28 October and ongoing until 14 January at the Marslleria in Milan, Carlos Casas steps onto this path at its edges, balancing between visual anthropology and rethinking images as a form of trans-cultural memory.... READ MORE...

Gob Squad. Neverending Live Cinema

On their website, just after the welcome messages, it says: Gob Squad make performances, videos, installations and weird happenings, mixing performance, theater, film and real life. Apart from the huge variety of artistic practices mentioned, the focus rests immediately on the weird. The term, difficult to translate alludes to different meanings such as strange, eccentric or curious. Indeed, after having had the opportunity to take part in a work of the Anglo-German group, it becomes much easier to understand the reason for that adjective.... READ MORE...

Order Number Two. Majakovskij And The Culture Of Machine

Vladimir Vladimirovič Majakovskij's works (1893-1930) contain traces of a new aesthetics. In some specific verses of his poems one can individuate the roots of a renewed conception of art and its relation with technique, serial production and reproducibility procedures. These matters have been immediately faced by the rising European and East-European design culture, expressed by heterogeneous experiences ranging from visual art, architecture, graphics, industry, in constant search of a balance between arts and trades, that played a key role in design.... READ MORE...

The Rules Of Improvisation. Ruth Barberan And The Catalan Scenario

Maybe not everybody knows that Barcelona and Catalonia in general, more than everywhere else in Europe, is hosting a rich panorama of improvisers, forced to play a secondary role and work in very little amounts of time. Among them we chose to interview Ruth Barberˆn, for she is a clear example of musician with a academic education passed to research, and she is involved in the organization of little events and concerts contributing to enrich scenarios and ideas of local sound and music experimentation. We chose her because she is a woman, but it is better not to say it loud for she does not like discrimination, no matter if even good one, although she admits the need of filling a still existing gap.... READ MORE...

To Feel Like Voices. Vocal Expression: Sound Of The Subject

Voice is our means of communication. Voices inform us about what it happens in the flat next to ours, in the streets or in the car. A weeping baby explains a need, the low pitch of a conference invites to listen carefully, the cries of Diamanda Galas take convey us all the pain she want to express. Different worlds of expression sharing the same common idea: they are expression of the voice.... READ MORE...

Manifest Dynasty Media Arts in China

It is said that a new Gallery or Museum opens in China every 3 days; Ai Weiwei installs another monumental sculpture across the globe and 70 million visitors trudge through the World Expo in Shanghai. Three or so centuries after Chinoiserie entered the Western Art Vocabulary, and despite some recent market deflation, China is definitely still IT.... READ MORE...

Piemonte Share Festival Smart Mistakes

Piemonte Share Festival is featuring a series of exhibitions, conferences, dialogues, workshops, screenings and performances focused on the topic of SMART MISTAKES – to help broaden our minds, sharpen our skills, and inspire creative expression. Smart mistakes, mutation, failure, dysfunction, discrepancy, accident, unexpected change, chance discovery, the aesthetics of error, mass waste, project failure, abandoned projects, disaster, flaws, imperfections, glitches, misappropriation, side-effects, slip-ups, flops.... READ MORE...

The digital oblivion International Symposium

As part of the broader research project digital art conservation this intermational symposium aims to investigate the future of our digital cultural memory, focusing in particular on the preservation of computer-based art. For millennia, transmission systems with long-term stability shaped our sense of time and of history, helping form our image of ourselves and of the world. The ever-present threat to cultural heritage from external factors - whether war, deliberate destruction or processes of natural decomposition - meant that cultural memory was arranged with longevity and reliability in mind.... READ MORE...

Laboral SummerLab 2010

For the third year running, LABoral has organised SummerLAB, an annual event conceived to bring young digital creators and developers together with the purpose of working on collaborative projects. After an open international call, eight projects were chosen to be developed over a period of ten days during the month of July at Plataforma 0_LABoral Centro de Producción.... READ MORE...

Mapping Time Exhibition

This fall, the gallery@calit2 presents "Mapping Time," an exhibition by Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com). The lab is directed by Lev Manovich, UCSD Professor of Visual Arts and Calit2 researcher; its core participants are Jeremy Douglass (Calit2 post-doctoral researcher) and William Huber (PhD student in Visual Arts). In addition, undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Communication, Visual Arts, and Calit2 participate in the lab's work.... READ MORE...

STRP Festival

STRP Festival (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) is one of the largest art & technology (e-culture) festivals in Europe, that fuses music, art and technology. At STRP there are projects of young game designers next to major works from the international art circuit and experimental live cinema next to successful pop artists and DJs. During the next edition, STRP will experiment on a large scale with the use of RFID- and cognitive technologies to enhance the festival experience of the visitors by adding an extra technological layer. With this experiment, STRP Festival aims to explore new ways of organizing and experiencing art.... READ MORE...

Are You ready for TV?

Just when it seems that television as we have known it is over, we are asked if we are ready for more. The MACBA presents a television defined by the experiments of artists, thinkers and media professionals in order to show what happens when a relationship is established between such different languages. It is not an exhibition about television, but one conceived from the place of television. Its aim is to study how the diverse ways of grasping images and the life of concepts contribute to tracing the horizon of our cultural present.... READ MORE...

Contemporary Istanbul

In less than a decade Contemporary Istanbul (CI) has become the premier contemporary art fair in Turkey and the region. With a vocation to become one of the leading global art fairs in the near future CI strives to attract art from all over the world and in particular from its surrounding geography.... READ MORE...