Locative Art

A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading:

“We are currently experiencing difficulties tracking your position: please wave you network device in the air.”

Loca is low cost, grass roots, pervasive surveillance; an exercise in everyday tracking. What happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be effected by consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point?

Loca aims to lightly touch large numbers of people. The aim is not complex interaction, but subtle affect. It will be like a picture glanced at sideways, a message caught in the corner of the eye, or a mosquito swatted on the arm.

Loca deploys a cluster of interconnected Bluetooth nodes within inner city urban environments, each one is built using readily available, cheap parts, and is encased in concrete.

Loca enables anyone with any device that has Bluetooth set to discoverable to be tracked. Bluetooth is the first ‘everyday’ network technology that enables people to be tracked, and to track each other, within the physical environment.With all these technologies the only way to opt-out of surveillance is to switch off.

We are not asking people in advance. We dont want their permission. Then it would not be surveillance, but a performance by them for us. One principle of the project is that people should be able to participate through their own mobile phone without being given any additional technology, and without their own device needing to be modified in any way, either through installing software or by altering settings.

Pervasive surveillance has the potential to be both sinister and positive, at the same time. The intent is to equip people to deal with the ambiguity and find their own conclusions.

Loca is an artist-led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance by Drew Hemment, John Evans, Mika Raento and Theo Humphries.

Loca first appeared on Pixelache, the Finnish Festival of Electronic Art and Subcultures.
Drew Hemment, one of the authors, wrote an insightful essay telling the fascinating story of "Locative Arts", published here (below the text you will find a dozen addresses excellent locative art projects published on the nt). I have never expected this to be such a blooming field of art. You can also find more at locative.org, with all sorts of new and on-going projects.

Biting reality

See two projects by photographer Matt Siber.

The first one is called Floating Logos, and I think the above picture is pretty self-explanatory.
The second has a name which at first seems innocent: The Untitled Project. Then, you see the images. And then, read the texts. And then, you get it.

Siber reminds us that artists, at least conceptual artists, view the photograph as a flat field of information rather than a window. He accomplishes this by re-posting the removed words on a blank sheet next to the expurgated original. They pop to the surface of the sheet turning it into a page. Like the painter with a blank canvass, and writer with a blank sheet, the photographer starts with an invisible idea and collects visual facts to support it.

(from the curatorial note of The Untitled Project)

Both projects have a fresh feel to them: they are smart and well-made, entertaining - yet they go beyond the pretty surface. They have a very strong conceptual side to them - but Siber doesn't forget the aesthetic part of the game. "Game" goes particularly well with The Untitled Project, as we try and fill in the spaces, guessing what goes where- and why. And then, we might think about all this information we take for granted, its quantity and quality, and maybe, just maybe, think about how to deal with it. In an entertaining, yet smart, way.

Acting unfair: when art gets personal

there's no Getting used to Art.
changing the World is an impossibility.
In a World in wich EVerythinG Happens By chanCE, The Artist can at Best Win a Chance Victory Over chance. Every Artist/Animal For HimSelf, Like ShipwrecKed Sailors.

Jan Emiel Constant Fabre, Lyon 2001

The above words are written by Jan Fabre, theater and visual artist, during the performance Sanguis/Mantis (a book was created out of it, but it's not available in the usual internet stores), using his own blood extracted throughout the 8-hour event.
These are very powerful, scary thoughts. Every artist/animal for himself. Fabre writes this dressed in an armour created by him for this event: he is a knight turned insect, a strange, lonely creature trying to execute whatever he thought out for himself, making it difficult for himself, fighting his own weakness while underscoring it.

Is this sort of art fair?
It seems to go exactly the opposite way to what I wrote about in a previous post: here, the story is so dramatic, so full of meaning and painful narrative, it seems impossible to turn away, to consider it anything less than powerful. Do we have a choice as spectators?
This reminds me of another story, with another artist that uses his pain on stage - the dancer Bill T. Jones. Here is a description of the attack by the New Yorker's dance critic Arlene Critic against what she characterized as "victim art" (the controversy took place in 1995):

Refusing either to see or to review the production Still/Here by Bill T. Jones, one of the leading experimental and politically engaged dancers of the decade, Croce charged that as a black man and a victim of AIDS, Jones's use of autobiographical material made objective criticism impossible.

In her "anti-review", Croce asks the rhetorical question:

"If an artist paints a picture in his own blood, what does it matter if I think it's not a good picture?" Croce, (...) the most powerful dance critic in America, inevitably created a firestorm of controversy, and focused attention once again upon the conservative suspicion of contemporary autobiographically based performance, especially that created by members of racial or sexual minorities.

(quoted from Performance, a critical introduction, by Marvin Carlson, available at Amazon)

This is not as much about autobiography, as it is about showing the subject in a specific perspective, an unglorified one, or rather one that glorifies by creating a martyr. Interestingly, the word martyr originally meant "witness". Indeed, the suffering artist can be seen as a witness to a truth beyond the reality of the work of art. As spectators, we can accept it as a direct testimony to this truth (however ambiguous or esoteric this truth may be), or reject it, not as much because it isn't true, but because we feel it is a "private truth", one that hasn't got its place on the stage of an artwork.

But this mechanism goes far beyond body art or "victim art". It concerns any artist and spectator, because it is really about the role of intimacy and the non-public in the public event that is a work of art. It is about our definitions of art, form, and public space. It is about what we find important to share, and what are the possible/acceptable ways we find to do it. It can be the artist's blood on paper, or a photo of someone's cat, or a painting of a white square on a white background, but the question for me remains: does it impress me - touch me, as art. And why would it matter if it touched me as something different? Would it really be unfair? I wouldn't say so, as long as I have the possibility of saying: "Thank you for the moving performance, Mr.Fabre. Unfortunately, as a show, I found it boring."

It might seem like we are in some extremely modern, yet unchartered territory here. On the contrary. In Aristophanes' play The Frogs, considered to be the first theoretical comment about theater (405 BC), two famous playwrights, Aeschylus and Euripides, argue over who's dramatic writing is better:

Aeschylus: You wrapped [the heroes] in rags from old beggarmen's bags, to express their heroical woe, and reduce the spectator to tears of compassion.
Euripides: Well, what is the harm if I did?

Classy art/ Artsy class

Here is a small blog-game about class, by Richard Rinehart, wittily called Reading Class.

ReadingClass is what Joseph Beuys called "social sculpture"- engagement with the intangible elements that shape our lives. ReadingClass uses social software to explore the social question of class. Specifically, ReadingClass is a multimedia game built inside an Internet blog; a blog being a set of standards and software used for online personal journals or conversation.

(...) if ReadingClass seems at times didactic; it is unapologetically so. ReadingClass strives to be journal and discussion forum - a cultural engine for revealing, exploring and critiquing social class.

The element of the game itself that I found really interesting is called Display, and here is a fragment of its description:

Stories seem very important to the lowest and highest classes. Lower class homes often display representation of family members (photos) or artistic productions of family members (junior's clay pot, etc). The homes of rich people I've been in rarely display family portraits, painted or otherwise despite the stereotype, but the stories remain, only now they are attached to photos and objets d'art obtained on trips abroad or from galleries. An object on display is worth only half it's potential class value if it is not accompanied by some sort of interesting story that is personally relevant to the owner. With display, the middle class is the odd man out. In their insecure efforts to achieve or hang onto their class status, they sometimes display objects or images that have no real relevance to their own lives, but rather to the lives they aspire to.

In my opinion this "class caracteristic" is really a question of what are the things important for you (to put it more dramatically: what are your values). The people who need a story behind the object want an insight into the world. Those who only need a kind-of-nice-picture seemingly have no need for that insight. Maybe they'd rather go off zapping to another channel, or their aesthetic needs are not so closely related to their need for narrative (there is a great contemporary philosopher, Charles Taylor -here are some of his books - , who talks a lot about the need for narrative and for values). What's even more interesting is that contemporary artists, too, could be analysed among these lines. And the distinction would not be between the "abstract" and "figurative" artists, but rather, between those who associate their work with some narrative(s) and those who don't feel the work needs a story. My personal affinities lie closer to the first group, but I can see where the second comes from. The bottom line is: can't one appreciate something for just being beautiful? Do we really always need more?

(via Rhizome.org)

More dada, andada, andada

If you think dada netart makes sense and is a never-drying creek of creativity, check out Grafik Dynamo.
Here, the pictures are chosen from the net at random, and then combine with texts (randomly chosen, of course) from a comic book.

Personally, I am now getting a little tired of all these "chance operations" and the supposedely wonderful things I am to arrive at while looking at accidents. Hazard is a dangerous things - it makes you believe in luck, and makes you associate luck with meaning, with sense, and it all just starts to fit too nicely.
At least it's funny.

Retro Net Art

The beginning of something old-fashioned and stylishly attractive, by Olia Lialina, net artist and archaeologist (though she describes herself as "Net Artist. Animated Gif Model. Wife of Rockstar"). You can also explore her charmingly crazy gallery site, art.teleportacia.org.

Universal faces

Have you ever seen a work that corresponds exactly to an idea you had? Well, here is something I had wanted to make (in a slightly different way) a few years ago with my partner. We ended up not doing it, as we had no experience and didn't know how to go about it. Now, the photographer Mike Mike has got there in his way. It's a bittersweet feeling: yes, sweet, because at least someobody did it, and one can move on and empty the cache memory - and hopefully use it elsewhere.