Thursday, February 17. 2011
Via Rhizome
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By Joshua Noble on Wednesday Feb 16th, 2011
Zach Gage, Hit Counter, 2009
”Between the ubiquity of Internet access and the fact that data has no objective tangible form, internet users have long been plagued with the problem of determining the value of the content they are ingesting.” - Zach Gage
Seen in a certain light, the core of technological mediation has always been presence, absence, and distance. Writing established the possibility of presence during absence, arrows and gunpowder created force at a distance, the telephone created presence at distance, and network computing fundamentally altered the nature of being “absent” or “present” to an almost unrecognizable degree. No small surprise then that contemporary “media art” practice seems to return to these questions as being fundamental investigations. The question of what “presence” could be was explored and expanded throughout the dawn of the internet age: Ken Goldberg’s TeleGarden, Eduardo Kac’s concept of Telepresence, Sven Bauer, Heath Bunting, to grab but a few names. Each possibility of a new field of entry, a new method of retaining, mapping, signifying, and storing, opened a rich possibility. Now fast forward fifteen years and ever-presence is exhausting, a nuisance that forever asks and returns only the vague rewards of a slot-machine and seems to fray our sense of privacy, meaningfulness, boundary, and perhaps even self. So how then to artistically respond to this? Exhibit: Zach Gage.
His works are at once sophisticated and remarkably simple, both in presentation and concept in a way that might be recognizable to Joseph Kosuth or Lawrence Weiner, rather than the Baroque conceptual complexity on display in much media art in the 90’s. Computational art or interactive art has generally taken two tacks in dealing with the complexities of technology itself -- unabashed celebration and dystopian anxiety. At either extreme is the grandiose challenge of prediction: this possible or actual relationship to technology will lead to this consequence or benefit. The reality of living with technology is not only simpler but is often much more banal. The most refreshing element of Gage’s work is how it asks us to do nothing more than consider what is. Working with the instantly familiar data sources, Twitter, Google, chat servers, at their simplest, his work often resembles a refreshingly sharp Occam’s Razor taken to notions of the richness of data and networked experience.
His thesis show, “Data”, is an extremely visually and thematically understated installation comprised of several pieces. Small wooden boxes, wires, and simple placards: none of the forced estrangement, hand-waving interactivity, or spectacle that one associates with computer arts. In particular, one of the pieces in the show, Hit Counter stands out as particularly poignant: a simple measurement of the number of times someone has stood in front of the work. Face recognition software is used to keep track of the actual viewers and the number is displayed on an old-fashioned mechanical counter. Gage states “with no other means to judge it, Hit Counter demands to be assigned a worth based solely on its popularity.” But then, Hit Counter is not merely asking to be judged on popularity. It, like so many things in our media culture, is popularity. It’s nothing else, and it’s not any kind of popularity other than actual physical presence; a sharp reminder of the relationship between presence and popularity. No matter how many people hear about it online, what is written about it, what buzz is generated, it’s a simple box that generates a number based on how many unique people have stood in front of it. I’m not sure whether I’m more struck by the concept itself or that I am so struck by the concept as an ontological exercise: something that simply is actual physical presence. It’s odd that it is odd and, in that oddness, it is a stance closer to Sol Lewitt “Sentences on Conceptual Art” than many other re-interpretations of his legacy and ideas. Reformulating the simplest data object imaginable in the simplest terms has a markedly clarifying effect and in clarification is a rare kind of beauty. I spoke with Zach Gage about Hit Counter, as well as his larger practice.
More about it HERE.
Wednesday, February 16. 2011
Via TreeHugger
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Photo: No Fish Left The prospect of drilling for oil in Arctic waters has long made Americans and Canadians queasy (if not their oil companies), and for good reason: the frigid cold, dangerous waters, and difficult-to-navigate coastal terrain. An offshore spill in the Arctic would be devastating, and exceedingly tough to contain. But faced with dwindling onshore supplies, Russia has made a concerted push to begin drilling in the Arctic, and in a highly publicized move, tapped none other than BP to help lead the ...
Read the full story on TreeHugger
Personal comment:
Predictable, but bad & sad news nonetheless ...
Via GOOD
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(...) -- Taken out from a longer post about food and architecture by Nicola Twilley --
This vertical greenhouse from 1966 was apparently "a space-saving sensation," with a built-in automatic elevator to rotate crops. Eat your heart out, Dickson Despommier!
(...)
Personal comment:
I just saw this picture in an article from Nicola Twilley that makes me think of a project we did back in 2008, Tower of Atmospheric Relations (and that in some other ways retro-confirm the project's hypothesis of a vertical greenhouse building / climate exhibition and clock).
Via Eye blog
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by Eye contributor
An astonishing collection of images of great beauty from the natural sciences went on show at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam last Saturday. Prof. Dr Hans Galjaard, curator of the exhibition, sought out examples from the following fields: physics, chemistry, geology, microbiology, marine biology, botany, fungal diversity, cell biology of higher organisms, human reproduction and astronomy.
He asked practitioners in more than 30 institutions if they had experienced what he calls a ‘Stendhal moment’, an instance of overwhelming beauty, during their research.
There are no physical artworks; scientific films and images will be projected on the walls and ceilings.
Top: Marble, Verde D’Arno, polished surface 7×9 cm. Photograph: Dirk Wiersma, Utrecht.
Above: Crystalline mixture including dextrin and potassium bicarbonate. Photograph: Loes Modderman.
Below: Crystalline mixture of paracetamol and dextrin. Photograph: Loes Modderman.
Above: Diatoms. Photograph: Wim van Egmond / Micropolitan Museum.
Below: A carbon nanotube (green) over two electrodes. Photograph: Cees Dekker, Nanotechnology Institute, Delft University of Technology.
Above: Star moss. Photograph: Ruth van Crevel from Plantenparade (2001).
Below: Pollen grain. Photograph: Jan Muller, National Herbarium of the Netherlands.
Below: Inside the Eagle Nebula. Photograph: T. A. Rector & B. A. Wolpa, National Optical Astronomy Observatory/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy / National Science Foundation.
12 February > 5 June 2011
Beauty in Science
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Museumpark
18 3015 CX Rotterdam
Netherlands
www.boijmans.nl
Tuesday, February 15. 2011
At the Architectural Association, 11 writers and 11 literary places are the subject of an immaterial translation – via the voice
The walls of latest exhibition at London's Architectural Association gallery are painted a muted grey. There are 11 large-ish white numbers placed carefully around the room and small postcards next to the numbers. There seem to be various kinds of chairs or seats everywhere. But, as someone hands over the props of the standard exhibition audio tour, a heavy-duty pair of headphones and what looks like an audio guide, it becomes clear that the exhibition doesn't take place in this room. It is not a visual experience at all.
The show is a kind of audio mix-tape of fictional and real places written by eleven international authors, including Douglas Coupland, Rana Dasgupta, Hu Fang, Julien Gracq, Tom McCarthy, Guy Mannes Abbott, Sophia Al Maria, Hisham Matar and Neal Stephenson. These vivid short stories or extracts are spoken by actors and last around ten minutes, variously traversing landscapes from Ramallah to turn-of-the-century Sofia, a cold, dead Vancouver to a dusty checkpoint in Palestine. Each of the authors sent a small picture postcard – a trigger image – which holds the listeners' attention.
The exhibition doesn't happen in the room or on the seats – it takes place between the spongy cushion of the headphone and the visitor's ear. Next to the bar at London's Architectural Association, the show's curators Shumon Basar and Charles Arsène Henry discuss the concepts and processes that went into making a show, without a show.
(...)
More about it HERE.
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