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Tuesday, January 26. 2010Whole Earth Catalog Neoncampobase*You throw your bread on the water, and… well, you never can tell, ladies and gentlemen. WHOLE EARTH CATALOGUE Video selection for the series “Playlist”, Neoncampobase, Bologna (Italy) Founded by the American writer Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) was a catalogue of tools that was regarded as a bible by the counterculture generation – that is, by those who shaped the techno-cultural environment we are living in. Published regularly until 1972 and sporadically until 1998, it definitely died with the rise of the Web, of which it is considered a conceptual forerunner by people such as Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) and Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired). WEC was conceived as an “evaluation and access device” meant to bring power and knowledge to the people. It featured excellent reviews of books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes, along with objects of any kind, from gardening tools to computers. Everybody could submit a review for the catalogue. Like the WEC reviewers, the artists in this exhibition are contributing to a shared resource; like them, they love their tools and, like them, they are interested in understanding the world as a whole. What did change, in the meantime – and mostly thanks to the WEC generation – is the world itself. These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays. This peculiar realism can bring somebody to go back to when everything started. Notoriously, psychedelic drugs played an important rule in the beginning of digital culture. Without Sun, by Brody Condon, is a mesh-up of various found videos of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Why do people broadcast these materials? Do these “out of the body” experiences have any relationship with other now common forms of projection of the self, such as online videogaming? Some artists, such as Cory Arcangel or Oliver Laric, are interested in the conceptual consequences of technologies, and on the way they are updating fundamental concerns of our culture; others, such as the duo AIDS-3D, explore how technologies are increasingly affecting our spiritual life. In their own words, they want to make “the intangible magic of technology visible”. Not necessarily trough technologies themselves: Constant Dullart’s video, for example, turns Youtube’s “loading” animation into a suggestive, hypnotic object using light and styrofoam balls. This concern with magic and transcendence is shared by many of the artists on show, from Petra Cortright to Damon Zucconi, from Harm Van den Dorpel to Martin Kohout. In their hands, a video filter can become the best way to explore how consistent the outer world is, and how consistent we are. It can become the best way to get a better knowledge of the world we live in, whatever we may mean with this word. Lavori selezionati / Selected works: AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller & Nik Kosmas, US/DE), Motion Capture Dance, 2008. Video, 08.34 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://www.aids-3d.com/motioncapture.mov. Cory Arcangel (US), Drei Klavierstücke op. II – I, 2009. Video, 04.21 min. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York. Online at http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/DreiKlavierstucke. Brody Condon (US), Without Sun, 2008. Video, 15.12 min. Courtesy Virgil De Voldere, New York. Online at http://www.tmpspace.com/video/WithoutSun.mov (excerpt). Petra Cortright (US), Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009. Video, 03.41 min. Online at http://petracortright.com/das_helle_modell/das_helle_modell.html. Paul B. Davis (UK/US), Compression Study #4 (Barney), 2007. Video, 02.49 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWG5jqzYsEI. Constant Dullart (NL), Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009. Video, 00.33 min. Online at http://www.youtube.com/constantdullaart. Martijn Hendriks (NL), Untitled (12 glowing men), 2008. Video, 04.10 min. Online at http://www.12glowingmen.com/. Jodi (BE/NL), Mal Au Pixel, 2009. Video, 01.14 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE8VIKXnsQ0. Martin Kohout (CZ/DE), Close Up, 2009. Video loop, 03.11 min. Online at http://www.martinkohout.com/new/close-up/. Oliver Laric (DE), Aircondition, 2006. Video, 01.59 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London. Online at http://www.oliverlaric.com/airconditionvideo.htm. Les Liens Invisibles (IT), Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle, 2008. Video loop, 02.14 min. Online at http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org/too-close-to-duchamps-bicycle/. Miltos Manetas (GR/UK), King Kong After Peter Jackson, 2006. Video, 03.05 min. Online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMkjWpdC4c. Pascual Sisto (US), No strings attached, 2007. Video, 01.30 min. Online at http://www.pascualsisto.com/projects/no-strings-attached/. Paul Slocum (US), You’re Not My Father, 2007. Video, 04.05 min. Online at http://turbulence.org/Works/notmyfather/. Harm Van den Dorpel (NL), Resurrections, 2007. 3 animated found photos, 04.18 min. Online at http://www.harmvandendorpel.com/work/resurrections. Damon Zucconi (US), Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008. Video, 00.35. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin. Online at http://damonzucconi.com/uploads/Video/woodshed_w.mov. Related Links:Personal comment: I've only heard recently of this "Whole Earth Catalogue" (yet another origin of the web), while looking at the "Das Netz" movie from Lutz Dammbeck. Here it comes back in a video show. It looks interesting as it is deeply rooted into californian counter culture that could also be pinpointed as "yet another --60ies-- root" for the web!
Posted by Patrick Keller
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Thursday, October 22. 2009Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and CyberneticsBy Geeta Dayal on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other. Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.” “To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a “heuristic” to music.
Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at London's ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. "Cybernetic Serendipity" showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."
(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
Eno and Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards together in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios -- tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.
The work of Eno and Schmidt, and of many other artists who took inspiration from ideas in cybernetics and other ideas from the sciences, was never a literal interpretation of scientific principles. That was part of what made it interesting. "One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you"," remembered John Brockman in his book By the Late John Brockman, published in 1969. "Robert Rauschenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow." Rauschenbergian physics and Cagean cybernetics were not, perhaps, the genuine article. These garbled transmissions from the sciences, mixed in ad-hoc ways into the arts, allowed for strange mutations to take root in culture, taking a life all their own. Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack. ----- Via Rhizome.org Related Links:
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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