Hasta La Creative!

Group of Russians admiring the eclipse in the beach of Pervomaiskoje, Altai Krai, the locality where Tommi Taipale arrived on the eclipse day on his Journey to the Eclipse. Photo credit: Tommi Taipale

Last Summer, curatorial research group Capsula embarked on the first of its Curated Expeditions, demonstrating in the process that you don’t need an intergalactic spaceship to uncover new territories and make meaningful discoveries. This series of Curated Expeditions are research trips that engage with earthly phenomena through artistic investigation.

The 1st Expedition of Capsula invited 3 artists to observe a total solar eclipse which took place on August 1st over a vast area stretching from Canada, through to Russia, Mongolia and China. The observation location selected is the scientific Zoo in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia. Eclipse started in Novosibirsk at 17.45 pm.

The artists, German Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Catalan Mireia C. Saladrigues collaborated with the Zoo personnel and other experts to study the celestial phenomena and its impact on the animals and the visitors of the Zoo while Finnish photographer Tommi Taipale focused his work on the cultural and geographical distance between of Finland and Siberia.

Because Capsula’s latest focus is the relation between art and biology and environmental culture, the expeditions go hand in hand with a more leisurely and sometimes old-fashioned Philosophy of Voyage: walking, bob-sleighing, swimming, hitchhiking, rowing, sailing, trains and submarines. The travel from Finland to Novosibirsk took several days: While Tommi chose to hitch-hike, curator Ulla Taipale, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and Mireia C. Saladrigues spent three days to get there by train, taking the romantic-sounding Trans-Siberian Line.

With a background in Environmental Engineering and and Communications, Ulla Taipale is one of the founders and the current head of Capsula. I asked her to give us more details about this first curated expedition to Siberia:

Can you present us Capsula briefly? When and how it was born? What are its objectives?

Capsula was founded by Mónica Bello Bugallo and Ulla Taipale in 2005 in Barcelona. It is a platform that creates cultural content and curatorial projects dealing with art, science and nature. The first project of Capsula was Days of Bioart in 2006. The event was a combination of a bioart seminar and SymbioticA Tissue Engineering and Art – workshop and organized in Centro de Arte Santa Mónica and in a laboratory of faculty of biology of Universidad de Barcelona. The cross-disciplinary approach has been characteristic of Capsula`s work from the beginning. In recent years Capsula has collaborated with cultural institutions such as CCCB (Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) and Intermediae in El Matadero of Madrid, DRU-Digital Reserch Unit of Huddersfield, among others, and have brought to these events many of the leading creators and researchers in the field of art, science and/or technology, such as Critical Art Ensemble, Tissue Culture & Art Project, Andy Gracie, Natalie Jeremijenko, Vandana Shiva, Jens Hauser, Ramon Guardans and Eugene Thacker, to name a few. The objective is to create interdisciplinary projects related with art&science, with a special attention on the natural and artificial environments.

The last project of Capsula, called Curated Expeditions, was launched almost one year ago. The project is dedicated to observing and experiencing fascinating natural phenomena through the work of artists, scientists and other cultural agents. It also wants to revive leisurely traveling experiences, which have almost been cast aside by the frantic pace of modern day life. The first expedition was carried out last summer in Russia to explore and study the total solar eclipse and animal behaviour during this celestial phenomenon. This was realized through the proposals of German media artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis and Catalonian visual artist Mireia C. Saladrigues. On the other hand the expedition of Finnish photographer Tommi Taipale focused on the cultural and geographical distance between of Finland and Siberia during his journey to the eclipse by hitch-hiking. The project was done in collaboration with Novosibirsk Zoo in Siberia and with several other institutions, mentioned in the end of the interview.

Ulla Taipale wandering in the vast forest by the Novosibirsk Zoo. Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

Curated Expeditions is a long-term project. Can you explain what are its long-term goals?

The object is to make a series of expeditions dealing with earthly phenomena in remote and nearby destinations . The aim is to stimulate production and exhibition of multidisciplinary artistic creation related with nature’s spectacles. I have many ideas for new expeditions and for the targets of the artistic survey, but these plans are in an early stage and not ready to be published yet.

Through these projects I want to give the protagonism to the natural phenomenon and promote positive emotions that can be experienced in natural and artificial environments. The question is: Could the natural phenomenon and the spectacles of the nature still fascinate a major quantity of people in the modern world, saturated by entertainment like video games and action movies? And, could these splendid and thrilling emotions lived within the nature, shift the attitude of people to more respectful and caring direction concerning their environment? Generally speaking, conservationism and environmentalism seem to be related with obligations and rejections that limit the level of life causing bad conscience. Sustainable way of life is related with low quality life – without luxury. I expect that the outcome of the expeditions – singular artworks, exhibitions, public debates and writings address towards to the enriching experiences reducing a distant and unconcerned attitude when thinking about nature and our relationship with it.

So, to name some of the more tangible goals – maybe in five years and after several expeditions a publication will be made out of these projects. And the new artworks created are to be exhibited in traditional and non-conventional spaces. I would also like to gather interesting people, not necessarily experts, but persons with good ideas to discuss publicly the issues indicated by the expeditions. The idea is to break categorizations and frontiers between different disciplines.

Curated Expeditions explored a phenomenon which lasted 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Yet you deliberately traveled using relatively slow and old-fashioned ways. You, Agnes, and Mireia took an almost 3 day train ride from Helsinki to Novosibirsk, while it took Tommi a whole week to get there by hitch-hiking. Why was it so important to undertake a long journey when (apparently) you didn’t have to?

Curated Expeditions wants to revive leisurely traveling experiences that personify the Capsula Philosophy of Voyage. Walking, bob-sleighing, swimming, hitchhiking, rowing, sailing, trains and submarines, just to name a few, are means of transport that permit your soul to arrive to the destiny simultaneously with your body. No matter if the destiny for the artistic exploration of the natural phenomenon is near or far, the participants should be aware of the distance and the differences- cultural and geographical ones – between of the departure and arrival.

Tommi Taipale, Siiri Anttila, Selja Eskonen and Heikki Tuorila cycling in Russia. Photo credit: Tommi Taipale

We didn´t have to spend three days on the way and also it would have been less expensive and troublesome to take a direct flight to Novosibirsk. Many people warned us telling about uncomfortable and dangerous trains, we were asked several times why not to travel flying, that Russian people were noisy, in the summer the wagons would be hot and in general very inconvenient for three women with a lot of luggage. I have to admit, that I was questioning the decision many times. Also buying the tickets for exact days and routes was not easy at all because of Russian bureaucracy, holiday season and the mass movement of eclipse tourists. But, at the end we were in Helsinki railway-station with our huge luggage – Agnes was carrying 60 kilos on her – and the journey could start.

A break in a station on the Russian Trans-Siberian railway. Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

Russian train passanger selects fish, offered by “babuskas”, local grandmothers sell in railway-stations. Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

Once in the train, we did forget our doubts! During the three days between Helsinki and Novosibirsk we were able to learn some Russian, to know Russians, to know each other on a more personal level, converse, read books, watch the changing scenery from the window and while enabled and disconnected from the internet, got slowly into the mood of Capsula Expedition. And once we arrived, we were sad to leave our temporal itinerant home, the Russian co-travelers, the samovar and the rhythmic sound of the train.

Coming to Tommi, he spent two weeks on the road to get to Novosibirsk. As an experienced Russian traveler and wanderer, he could estimate roughly how long time it would take to get from place to another. During the first days he traveled with three friends using recycled bicycles and then alone towards to the tundra by hitch-hiking and using some river-boats. This extra round to the northern part of Russia was his attempt to escape the heat – the summer in Russia was hot, during July – August the daily temperatures rose up to 30ºC almost every day. However, even in Salehard it was sweaty!
Hitchhiking in Russia is a very common way to travel. To get a hitch is not difficult and a lonely Finn on the road wakens curiosity and hospitality in Russians – often he was offered also a place to sleep on the way.

Tommi Taipale in a hotel room in Nikolsk, on his way to the total eclipse. Photo credit: Tommi Taipale

Tommi´s photographs reflect his meetings with ordinary people that can be found traveling alone leisurely in a strange territory. He has a basic Russian knowledge that allows him to connect with people who coincide with his fortuitous way that doesn’t respect timetables. His pictures open doors to the everyday life of Russians showing what often remains behind of the topics of the country, such as the life habits of the of class of new rich, the alcoholism and poverty, and the country’s military and energy power. In these glimpses shown in Tommi´s pictures a grandmother offers a lonely traveler sweet tomatoes or cranberries, a mine worker invites him to take a bath in a banja, Russian sauna or a group of silent men waiting for a river-boat in the dawn.

Mireia C. Saladrigues studies Russian map with Kirgisian co-travellers in the Trans-Siberian wagon. Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

By the way, is a journey on the Trans-Siberia as romantic as it sounds?

To our surprise it was big pleasure, nicer than we could ever imagine. You can do it more comfortably with a bigger budget in a higher class, having a daily shower and your own toilet, but then you might miss the contact with the co-travelers and a part of the taste of adventure. And the official Russian time, that shows Moscow hour where ever the train is in Russia, makes your daily rhythm disappear – instead of looking at your watch to start eating and sleeping, you let your state of mind or energy levels decide what to do. Our public relations and Russian language rehearsals always got more interesting and intensive the nearer we got to Novosibirsk. During the last hours in the train, Mireia found the first volunteer, a Russian girl to work with her in the project in Novosibirsk. Something very characteristic for Mireia´s work, which is based on her interpersonal skills and communication with people.

Anyway, I have to admit that we three adapt well to tough conditions. Traveling in Russian trains is good as long as you don’t except too comfortable a life and are not too prejudiced.

The zoo of Novosibirsk in Siberia seems to be a very intriguing place. How did you get to know about its existence? How did the owners and workers of the zoo welcome a bunch of artists keen on mingling with their animals?

When the decision to start the Curated Expeditions project by investigating a solar eclipse was taken, I started a closer study of the zone of totality, that was a vast area from Alaska, Siberia and Mongolia to China.

In 1999 I experienced my first solar eclipse in Hungary, in a small village of Rapabatona by the Danube, where I cycled from Vienna. I was astonished by the reaction of animals, mostly birds and insects, during the eclipse. So, when I found out that the biggest and oldest Zoological Park of Russia was situated in Novosibirsk, just in the middle of the eclipse zone, I decided to focus the project on the animal behaviour during the eclipse. The negotiations with the Zoo started and after weeks of correspondence and phone calls they agreed to collaborate.

We were made very welcomed. Sveta, the secretary of the Zoo, came to pick us up from the railway-station, and took us to our new home. We were invited to stay in an apartment situated in the Zoo area that is normally used by foreign zoologists and researchers visiting the Zoo. Novosibirsk Zoo Park is huge. The area consists of 53 hectares of pine forest and it is a home for around 12 000 animals and 634 species. Bengal tigers and snow leopards are among the 120 endangered species represented in the Zoo that can be found in the Red Book. Our neighbours and their numerous different ways of sonic communication filled the air with roaring, yelling and howling, especially in the dusk and dawn. Our communication with zoo workers was possible thanks to Sveta and Maria, Siberian English literature students, who were the links between us, the zoo workers and the journalists. English is rarely spoken in Russia, but the young people start to be stronger in languages than their parents who did their studies during the Soviet time.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis and Mireia C. Saladrigues study notes from the year 1981´s annular eclipse animal behavior with the Zoo director Rostislaw Shilo.Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

We presented our intentions to the director Rostislaw Shilo, who runs the Zoo with 40 years of experience. Him and his wife, the scientific director Olga Shilo, are highly liked and respected personalities in Novosibirsk and people from taxi-drivers to biologists have positive things to say about them. In parallel with running the biggest Zoo in Russia and his scientific work, Rostislaw Shilo is also a Siberian eco politician, influencing environmental issues from the parliament of Siberia. Once we explained the goals of the expedition he didn’t hesitate in supporting the project. Not only did he offer us nice accommodation for nine days, but also helped us further in achieving rare moon geese for Agnes´ experiment and in gaining visibility in the Siberian media, among other things. We are very grateful for his and the all zoo personnel support, they were very generous and shared their knowledge with pleasure.

Russians are quite reserved and it is hard to know what the animal caretakers and other personnel really thought about our visit, but after breaking the ice they were more than cordial.

Some of the projects, in particular the one of Mireia C. Saladriques involved the participation of the public. How did it go? What happened?

Mireia´s project, called Zoolar Eclipse was fully realized within the installations of the zoo. Zoolar Eclipse investigated animal reactions when the darkness, caused by the total eclipse, suddenly fell into the Zoo. Not only the volunteer zoo visitors participated in her work, but she also got very connected with some of the animal caretakers despite the language barrier. During our stay in the Zoo she was following a daily program to observe and study through drawing the animals selected. The animals were selected following her own intuition and advice given by Dr. Sabater Pi, Catalonian ethologist and primatologist, and the director of the Zoo of Helsinki, Seppo Turunen. The final selection consisted of white-handed gibbon, eagle owl, liger, yellow-throated marten and polar bear. Liger, one of the main crowd-pullers of the Zoo, is a hybrid cross between of male African lion and a tigress. She also participated in animal´s feeding and daily routines with zoo personnel. Mireia woke up with the sun around five or six o´clock in the morning to realise her first walk by the animals with her pens and sketch book, then again between four and six o´clock (the eclipse hour) and the days were completed by the last round at sunset. Through these observations and interviews with the zoo personnel she wanted to learn the habitual behavior of the animals during the different positions of the sun.

MIreia C. Saladrigues drawing a polar bear in a semi dark Zoo Park. Photo credit: Ulla Taipale

At first we were worried about not finding enough people to take part in the survey. These concerns disappeared once in Novosibirsk. On a normal summer day the Zoo counted more than 10 000 visitors. The news about this special opportunity spread also through the seven biggest TV-news of Siberia that interviewed us and the invitation to participate in the project circulated around through television, radio, city forum in internet and by Mireia´s posters in the Zoo.

On the actual eclipse day, Mireia and ten Russian volunteers delivered and recollected the Zoolar Eclipse postcards for and from one hundred zoo visitors, interested in writing their impressions of the effects of the sudden disappearance of the sun. She herself decided to observe the gibbons. In the moment of eclipse, she says, the role of the one that in the zoo normally is observed – the gibbon – changed and these primates were the ones that observed the humans, totally excited, yelling and shouting as apes in a state of climax.

During the totalirity, Mireia C. Saladrigues chose the white-handed gibbons of Zoo as the object of her observation, due to their similarity with the humans. The drawings explain their activities during the eclipse. Image credit, Mireia C. Saladrigues

The texts by zoo visitors are now being translated from russian to finnish, english and to spanish and the contents seem to be quite touching and subjective. People have interpreted the behavior of animals in very different ways. The writings describe also strange physiological changes in the observers themselves, such as headache, dizziness, extreme feelings of happiness and even sudden hunger. The texts will be available on the website of Capsula Expeditions once they have been completed in english.

A postcard by Mireia C. Saladrigues and the written observations by a Novosibirsk Zoo visitor. Image credit, Mireia C. Saladrigues

While Mireia´s work took place in semi-artificial surroundings inhabited by wild animals, Agnes moved special Moon Geese to a natural setting to realise her bio-poetic investigation. The Moon Goose Experiment is based on a text by english bishop Francis Godwin and was published first in 1638 in the book called “The Man in the Moone”. The geese of Godwin`s novel fly to the Moon instead of heading to the South in autumn. Would that be something that could happen for some species of migrating birds soon, as an consequence of the search for more suitable habitats than a polluted planet Earth, facing the effects of climatic chaos?

Arrival on the Sacred Scarabeus island, where the Moon Goose Experiment was carried out. Agnes Meyer-Brandis and Alexandra Deribas unload the moon flight equipment. Photo credit, Ulla Taipale

To find the required thirteen suitable Moon Geese and a runway for a moon flight in beautiful natural surroundings was an adventure, and only the determination of Agnes made this possible. Despite the fact that geese are protagonists of her work, also here the local people were playing a very important role in helping to carry out the plan. With the collaboration of Novosibirsk assistants we experienced unforgettable moments in a russian datsa, a typical small farmhouse with all kind of domestic animals, and on a sand island that was chosen to be the experiment scenery. This datsa was situated near to the Academgorodok, the Soviet époque’s ambitious science city project.

Agnes Meyer Brandis and Alexandra Deribas during geese training in Moon Goose Home, “Datsa” (little farm) of Alexandra and Gennardy Deribas near Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk. Photo credit Agnes Meyer Brandis

The actual Experiment was brought to fruition on that small sandy island “Sacred Scarabeus” in Ob River, an hours´ drive away from Novosibirsk centre. The Moon Goose Experiment crew arrived there early in the morning, on the 1st of August, to prepare the flight equipment and do all the necessary preparations. At 17.45 local time, we had the chance to witness a historical takeoff by Ljuba, a young Russian astronaut, and her moon flight in the darkness, provoked by the total solar eclipse. You can find a detailed report of the day on Agnes´web page.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis is fixing pieces of the weather station in the Scarabeus island in SIberia. The sky was cloudy and and the wind was blowing almost 14 m/s just an hour before the total eclipse. Photo credit, Ulla Taipale

After the first touch, contact of moon and sun at 16.45, the geese stayed calm and Luba, the parachutist got ready for the Moon flight. Image: Agnes Meyer-Brandis

What can artists bring to the vision and experience of natural phenomenon which have already been widely studied by scientists?

A scientist follows his/hers paths of research and an artist his/hers, and both can achieve surprising findings in the same object of investigation. In the end, Curated Expeditions is not trying to gain results that would have scientific importance. The objective is to bring together artists and scientists to work at the intersection of different disciplines, but the results are art works and don’t have to contribute to scientific studies about natural phenomena. What I would like them to contribute is to the recognition of small and big miracles of nature and consciousness about its extraordinariness.

I like the way that Ian McKeever, the english artist, describes the work of scientific and artistic researcher in his text from “Ikijää – Permafrost” (edited by Marketta Seppälä and Yrjö Haila) :

At the moment all us “expeditioners” are “unzipping” the material gathered during the journey- photographs, drawings, videos, writings, and impressions that we lived during this cross-disciplinary expedition. Little by little the final artworks and the ways to present the fruits of the expedition are taking form, the reflections and ideas get processed in our minds. The three proposals were materialized and they are now in progress, the end is not determined.

Talking about visions, I would be very content, if, inspired by these and future proposals, the audience would let their imagination fly a bit further and travel along the migrating birds in the sky to new, surprising destinies, and, instead of purchasing a low cost flight to do shopping in a nearby European country someone would take his bicycle and see what adventures can be lived in the next village. These are some examples of different thinking that the artists could bring to our techno-scientific society where even natural phenomena is tried to be explained and reasoned.

Ulla Taipale in Siberian Scarabeus island, in the strange light during the moment of totality, that lasted 2 minutes 20 seconds, at 17.45 pm. Image Capsula, author unknown

Now that you are back from these adventures, which conclusions do you draw from the experience? What did you learn from the first curated expedition?

It is extremely hard to work with a tiny budget in a country where you don´t know the language and have to depend on many volunteers help. But it is really rewarding when suddenly you discover a bunch of people who are willing and motivated to help you and share the vision that has inspired you to go so far. We can´t thank enough of all the people who helped us in Novosibirsk and during the year to prepare everything. The success of the project was depending on their collaboration. The next expeditions hopefully have bigger budget, but, at the same time I would love to be able to collaborate with local people where ever these projects will happen. Sometimes big resources cause certain distance to the place where you go, the production is taken care of by a professional crew and personal contacts with ordinary people of the locality are lacking. That can be extremely called “cultural colonialism”. I wish to continue Curated Expeditions with the possibility to experience these real meetings with local people.

Despite certain difficulties during the preparation phase of the projects, the artists have shown big talent, imagination and capacity of improvisation to get everything ready for the 1st August when the solar total eclipse happened.

What are Capsula’s upcoming projects?

The Moon Goose Experiment, Zoolar Eclipse and The Journey to the Eclipse will be shown for the first time in Helsinki, Finland, in March 2009, in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. The show is called “Expedition to the Total Eclipse” and organised as a part of Pixelache09 Festival activities that will consist of an exhibition, (from 6th March until 7th June, 2009), a seminar and some extra activities in the astronomical observatory of URSA. I am invited to stay as a resident in HIAP production residency during February and live in a fortress island Suomenlinna, close to Helsinki centre.

The second Curated Expedition, that will be related to the Baltic Sea, is being maturated at the moment and Capsula is also involved in activities that the Finnish Society of Bioart is organising in Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland during 2009. Their focus is in arctic biology, climatic and environmental changes and their artistic exploration. The news of Capsula will be published on the website and through the blog.

The next total solar eclipse will occur in India and China in 22nd July, 2009.

Rare Moon Geese are getting close to the Moon during the total eclipse. Image credit: Agnes Meyer-Brandis

Capsula´s Curated Expedition has received support from:

Zoo of Novosibirsk, FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo), VR (Finnish Railways), Venäjän ja Itä-Euroopan Instituutti (The Institute for Russia and Eastern Europe), Finnish Embassy in Moscow, Generalkonsulat der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Nowosibirsk (General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Novosibirsk), A MINIMA magazine, Agrupación Astronómica de Sabadell (Spain), AirBerlin, Helsinki University – Kilpisjärvi Biological Station (Finland), University of Art & Design, Pori Department (Finland) , ARPI – professional photostore (Barcelona), NCCA Ekaterinburg (National Centre for Contemporanean Art, Russia), Colección Sabater Pi (Barcelona), Korkeasaari Zoo (Helsinki), SAS Royal Hotel (Helsinki), Sodexo Oy / Hostel Satakuntatalo (Helsinki), Antares Ltd (Barcelona), Fire Department Cologne, Tesimax (Germany), HMKV Dortmund

The exhibition “Expedition to the total eclipse” has received support from:
Pixelache09, Kiasma, HIAP (Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme), AVEK (The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture in Finland), Taiteen Keskustoimikunta (Finnish Art Council)

Special thanks for Anneli Ojala from The Institute for Russia and Eastern Europe for translating the Zoolar Eclipse postcards in Finnish!

Thanks Ulla!

Heidi Kumao‘s art pieces explore ordinary social interactions in order to reveal what lies beneath them: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, thinking patterns, and dreams. She is currently teaching animation, video, experimental television production, and electronic and conceptual art at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For 2007-08, she has been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.

A few years ago i discovered her set of female kinetic sculptures “Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out,” and classified her work under robotics and kinetics. Then i stumbled upon the performative techno-enhanced series of clothing she had developed and here i was trying to fit her work inside the “wearable” category. A closer look on her portfolio revealed household objects sabotaged to become cinema machines, overtly activist projects and the geekiest wedding cake i had ever seen. The experience taught me that any attempt to classify of her work would be pure folly unless i’d try to trick her into giving me a helping hand:

Resist, 2002

You first graduated in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. How did you come to work with kinetic installations, RFID activist projects and quirky wedding cakes? What made you broaden the scope of your artistic practice?

This is a big question, so I’ll answer it in sections as a way to answer the larger issue of shifts in artistic practice. How I get from here to there to there to there…

Re: transition from photography to sculpture

The Art Institute had a very interdisciplinary photo department at the time and we were really encouraged to “go outside the box” of photography, to mix photography with other media, to be artists who USE photography rather than pure photographers. In the 80’s and 90’s, photography was exploding in 100 different directions and open to a variety of approaches. Everything was possible. Everything could be photographic in some way.

When I entered graduate school as a photographer I was already starting to work with sequential imagery. I was driven by a need to animate physical gestures and behaviors as indicators of psychological states. Simultaneously, I was collecting domestic objects and record players and researching pre-cinema devices and the 19th century creation of spectacle, Emile Reynaud‘s praxinoscope from the 1880’s, in particular. My first kinetic works were homemade-looking zoetropes that projected a sequential loop of 12 images: a child being spoon-fed, a woman’s legs curtseying, a woman frantically sweeping. Like a memory that can’t be repressed, each animated sequence repeated endlessly and mechanically. In this way, each object seemed to be speaking with its images, a visual and mechanical voice replacing text. Much like the girls’ legs I made much later, they were an artificial life form, a stand-in for a real person that I could construct and bring life to. These “cinema machines” (as I called them) allowed me to combine all of my interests (photography, performance, sculptural assemblage and the psychology of everyday life), into one art form. I loved working this way and continued to create cinema machines for several years.

Defense Mechanism

RE: Installation

While much of my work could be categorized as “kinetic installation,” a more accurate descriptor might be “animated tableau.” I tend to think of myself as a theater director, staging events for the viewer. A lot of my art practice is about creating a situation for something to unfold over time. This grew organically out of my experience staging photographs. It seems to be a mode of art making to which I am intuitively drawn.

Each tableau intentionally uses recognizable objects that suggest a possible scenario from everyday life. As I craft each piece, I am very conscious of the psychological experience that is created for the viewer. Can the space of each tableau imply both a physical site and a psychological state? How can I make the viewer re-examine seemingly ordinary events such as childhood play, family dynamics, television news or even the wearing of clothes?

Still from Zapped! video

RE: RFID Activist projects

I worked on Zapped! a multi-part project about the mass implementation of RFID technology with Preemptive Media in 2005. I met the members of Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa , Jamie Schulte, and Brooke Singer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA where I was a Microsoft Artist-in-Residence Fellowship for 1999-2000. Besides being a great school for robotics, computing, AI, engineering and art, Pittsburgh happened to be an amazing hub for art collectives, tactical media practitioners, and technological art at that time. I was surrounded by tons of brilliant people including folks from Critical Art Ensemble, Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Subrosa, to name a few. Just being in this environment made me rethink my artistic process completely, and motivated me to learn how to incorporate electronics, microprocessors, computing, and digital imagery into my work.

Before we ever did Zapped! a few of us had collaborated on a project (Nomadika) about data-veillance and wireless technologies for the 2001 Sculpture Conference in Pittsburgh. We educated and informed the public about the future of data mining by opening a storefront for our fake marketing firm. Researching data mining and privacy loss in our contemporary era later led Preemptive Media to the project on RFID, which seemed to be (at the time) yet another way in which corporations and the government would invade citizens’ privacy. As someone who creates and teaches animation and video, my primary role in the collaboration was to make the educational video from all of the research and information we had unearthed as a result of this project.

After working solo for so long, I relished the opportunity to collaborate with others on a project.

RE: quirky wedding cakes

The 6,000 volt wedding cake was a collaborative project with my husband, Michael Flynn, a high school physics teacher and science exhibit designer. As two mechanically minded people, we decided that our cake had to reflect our interests in machines and the project grew from there. It started with the idea to have two cakes cut to look like interlocking gears and progressed to two motorized cakes on gear-run platforms. Michael made two dolls that represented us in our wedding costumes. These dolls were going to stand on the top of each cake and would basically pass one another every time the cakes turned. Eventually, I thought we needed to incorporate an electric “spark” between the dolls, like the “spark” between us (cheesy, I know). This led to the idea of using a Jacob’s Ladder to generate a much larger spark. Michael purchased a neon sign transformer and wired the cakes and dolls with opposing charges. When powered on, the cakes turn, and once a turn, the dolls hands meet and a large flaming spark erupts from their meeting hands. It’s pretty funny. And like other collaborative projects I’ve done, it was loads of fun!. Our “how to” article appeared in Make Magazine.

What made you broaden the scope of your artistic practice?

When I look over the various transitions I have made with respect to media

(from photo to cinema machines to kinetic sculptures to animation to collaborative technological projects), I can map those changes onto personal and cultural moments of change. For many years, I made a life as an artistic nomad. I relocated every year or two for jobs, fellowships or other opportunities. This experience of having to re-contextualize and refocus myself in so many different places shaped my art practice in a deep way. Each time I moved, the new school, city or community raised new issues to consider. For example, (like I said earlier) as a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon, I was exposed to art practices that critically engaged technology rather than simply used technology. I had access to people, tools, and resources such as machine shops for the creation of custom parts, computer programmers, robotics labs, video editing equipment, etc. As a result of being at Carnegie Mellon, my work shifted away from more personal themes towards more political issues and cultural critique.

While I had been using technology for many years, my time at CMU caused me to rethink how I used it and why.

Exposure to such a large computing environment had other long-term effects on my art that didn’t show up until much later. Researchers in AI, computing, robotics and gaming exposed me to the possibilities of generative artwork, which was a complete paradigm shift from creating “fine art” objects for the art world. I was excited to think about making a dynamic system or a tool as an artwork rather than a fixed object. However, it took me awhile to decide on a project that would best be served by this approach.

Later, when I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, 9-11 and the proliferation of cable news caused me to analyze the visual and conceptual construction of the news broadcast more critically. CNNplusplus, an interactive and dynamic news broadcast, was born a few years later (in collaboration with Chip Jansen.

Video:

The short answer to your question is simply new places, new people and A.D.D. or the tendency to get bored easily…

You seem to navigate effortlessly from one discipline to another but are there particular issues or elements that you keep returning to?

Yes! I find that I return to an exploration of ordinary social interactions and their psychological undercurrents, institutional critique (mainstream media, traditional gender roles, others), and performance (creating theatrical spectacle, behaving/acting social roles, performing for a camera). I view performance as an integral part of everyday experience and define it very broadly: as a means to define our identity and sexuality, as an examination of roles we play as employees or family members, and as a tool for self-expression. Every piece has its origins in everyday life: an argument, a memory of childhood, the frustrations of watching television, the act of being a consumer–

My art making process is grounded in these types of experiences.

Combining these three things together has produced two main types of work that are pretty different (at least to me):

1) Work that emphasizes a visceral experience and tells a more personal story: the “cinema machines,” the girls’ legs, stop-motion animations, and my latest shadow theater pieces

and

2) interactive projects that are more overtly political and use technology to critique technology: CNNplusplus, Zapped!, Wired Wear

Monitor II: Audio-activated Dress, 2005

I find I am drawn to the more personal works because they provide an outlet for me to imply/suggest a critique of institutions of power without being so literal. Almost every piece starts with a personal story of some kind and the creation of a tableau is an opportunity to create a visual poem of images and objects together. By exposing the physical apparatus that drives the bodies into action, I draw a parallel between this machinery and the mechanisms of our unconscious: defense mechanisms, sex drives, thinking patterns, self control, dreams, impulses, instincts.

With the public/interactive projects, the emphasis is more educational and/or ironic. Working collaboratively removes the personal emphasis and creates opportunities to address larger cultural issues and their effects on the general public.

Misbehaving is a series of three female “performers” for intimate installations. What is the performative part of the work?

Misbehaving consists of three pairs of aluminum, mechanized legs fitted with girl’s shoes: Protest, Resist and Translator. The legs in Protest stomp loudly and unpredictably while standing on a coffee table. In Resist, a pair of girl’s legs squirms on the floor in a way that is both sexualized and challenging in response to viewers’ speech. The girl in Translator is trapped on a track between two “adult” chairs with video projectors for heads. As viewers hand crank her from one side to the other, she becomes like a child caught between two feuding parents, or a political mediator, whose body/screen reveals/exposes the real text of the conversation through non-verbal gestures.

With these pieces, I was thinking about the performance of gender, especially for little girls. We learn what is appropriate behavior so early that it becomes naturalized, we don’t realize that we perform it. In developing these pieces, I wanted to intentionally create girls that perform “badly”, act out, misbehave, or act against type. As machines and girls, these works operate in stark contrast to a culture obsessed with “increasing job performance,” high performance cars, and athletic performance. Their acts of defiance are small, yet powerful, signs of agency.

Videos:

The kinetic girls legs have also some feminist (may i use that word?) undertones. Why is it still important to propose a view on feminism today?

YES, you may (and SHOULD) use the word “feminist.” I consider myself a feminist and I think the stigma around the word (created by conservative males) has (unfortunately) had its prescribed effect of preventing people from self-identifying as feminists.

Those legs were born out of my experience at Carnegie Mellon where I was surrounded by really macho robots: machines that can fight fires or repair a nuclear reactor, robots for combat, robots for Mars, etc. At the same time, television programs were priming the mainstream public for what I call “performative robotics,” including BattleBots and Robo-wars, as vehicles for violent entertainment. With technological art and computing still so male dominated, and the research funding driven by the Defense Department, I do think it’s important to remind ourselves that robotics has a range of applications that are social, psychological, poetic, beautiful, and quirky. Are those feminist, or just alternatives to the mainstream?

I think it’s important to maintain a vigilant feminist critique of the world in the same way that it’s important to be vigilant about racism and economic justice.

A couple of years ago you developed Zapped! together with the other members of Preemptive Media. The work examines the mass deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and its effects on our everyday activities. At the time the website of the project said that “RFID is not yet a household name or a pervasive technology, but Preemptive Media predicts that everyday encounters with this technology (whether known or not) will soon be commonplace.” How much has changed ever since? How much is the public aware of the possible downsides of RFID technology?

In October 2006, the US started issuing passports with RFID chips that include a digital photo and all other information currently printed in passports. These passive tags in passports are only a small beginning of all-around use as they can be embedded into nearly everything you buy, wear, read, or drive. At the time we did the piece, there was a common fear of surveillance–that by carrying items with tags, you could be tracked, your personal data could be compromised, etc. The reality is that the tags need to be scanned at such a close proximity (a few millimeters) that it’s difficult for someone to scan your item without your knowledge. Plus, if all the tag has is a reference number (for another database) rather than concrete data, there isn’t much to gain by secretly scanning…In general, as with so many of these new technologies (GPS, for example), people choose convenience over privacy. In our current climate, you can’t have both. We all love the convenience of having a cell phone, even though they all have GPS chips. You don’t hear people complaining about the possibility of being located through triangulation of their cell phone chip. At least not yet. I think that data privacy is the new “civil rights” issue of our time–at least in the US where there aren’t many data privacy laws.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the roach release. I saw a brief mention of it a newspaper one day. Can you explain us what it was about and in which context it took place? But also, how did the public react to the idea?

The roach release was but one part of the Zapped! project. The multi-part project included the educational video, a school kit for “arming” yourself against RFID surveillance, the roach release station, and educational workshops. Each of these reached a different segment of the population with the goal of not only informing the public about the technology, but also providing them with means with which they might take action against it.

At the time, WalMart was setting the standards for RFID implementation by requiring its top manufacturers to embed tags into the cases and pallets of merchandise. As the largest retailer in the world, its protocol affects the business practice of nearly everyone in merchandising. WalMart pushed for this change touting its increased inventory efficiency. At this point, we speculated that if a WalMart had RFID readers and a corresponding database, they would all be located in the loading dock/storage area of the store. We discussed different ways to use or subvert the signal of the WalMart RFID reader- for passive tags, it sends a small signal in order to read the information on the tag and puts that information into a database. As we went round and round with ideas for tricking/toying with this Goliath, the idea boiled down to creating a small interruption in/jamming the WalMart RFID database. If WE couldn’t gain access to the loading dock and the readers, perhaps we could send a robot, or, as Beatriz da Costa suggested, a rodent or insect in our place. The final solution was to send a cockroach (with an preprogrammed RFID tag glued to its back) into the store’s loading dock area. The RFID tag was programmed with a small text message of resistance–and would definitely cause a “hiccup” in a database that was accustomed to standardized product information. In the video, we gave instructions on how to do a “roach release,” and in Houston (at Diverseworks), we gave away all the Zapped! roaches. I am not at liberties to say anything about the actual release. The public loved the idea and the roach became the project’s mascot.

Video:

Any other Wal-Mart action?

Not with that piece.

What was the impetus for the audio-activated DRESS? How do you exhibit it (or any of your other wearable pieces for that matter)? As part of a performance? As a static piece in a gallery? As a garment you can lend to gallery-goers?

The wearables started as an idea for a fun Halloween costume. I was initially inspired by the humor that could result from providing visual feedback, especially on a woman’s body. The lights on the dress light up incrementally, starting at the bottom when the sound is softer, and lighting up the entire column when it becomes very loud. When I wear the dress, I become a walking audio-meter which is really an absurd (and poetic?) image. These pieces are custom made to fit my body, and I use them in humorous video performances. The project is less about the objects and more about what I can do with them. So far, I have exhibited them as objects on mannequins with a video that shows them in use. In the end, the final product is really the short videos. There are many more places I can take them…

Videos 1, 2 and 3.

You seem to be attracted by the idea of “intimacy”. Which one of your works expresses the idea better and why?

As an artist, I use machines, projected imagery, and animation because they offer me a visually compelling way to investigate what is unseen: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, neuroses, desires, dreams. I find that I naturally gravitate towards work that examines everyday behavior and personal issues. I’ve called my work “intimate installation” because of its scale (human sized objects), its content (domestic and interpersonal issues) and its viewer experience (dark or dimly-lit rooms). With a minimum of objects, each tableau recreates a private ritual or occurrence for the viewer. I use the word “intimate” to describe the spaces I create and to draw a distinction between my domestic theaters and other large-scale environments.

“Letter Never Sent” is a good example of this. In this piece, video footage captured under a dissection microscope is projected onto the space of the typewriter page. Sounds of a woman weeping, a doorbell ringing, and someone knocking on the door are juxtaposed with black ink creeping up the page and fading, and turbulent, dirty water which seems to spit out from the base of the typewriter. With this piece, I was trying to describe one woman’s difficult experience of writing a letter that is erased or never sent because it is too harsh, too truthful. Rather than use words, I used fluids, like emotions, to wash over the page like a wave. The page is filled and emptied again and again, similar to how one might write and edit oneself in pursuit of the perfect correspondence. Even though the work explores one person’s intimate experience, I think we can all relate to written communication, self-censorship and the strong emotions that result.

Yet another video:

You are also teaching at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. What are your courses about? Can you give us a few examples of your students’ projects?

At this University, I am mostly teaching animation, video and various conceptual classes (this fall, an introductory class on TIME!). The most enjoyable courses focus on creating material for “experimental television broadcasts,” and rethinking the space of the television as an art gallery for time-based work. I know it seems like an old idea since video art first emerged as an alternative to mainstream television, but here at the University of Michigan, we have a unique collaboration with our local PBS station, WFUM. PLAY is a “collaborative project from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design and Michigan Public Media, transforming the gallery space for time-based media.” This project features time-based work (video, animation, documentary, performance, other experimental forms) by faculty and students in the School of Art and Design. Selected pieces air on television as interstitials-in between programs at the top of the hour, say between “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and “Antique Roadshow,” while all submissions are viewable on the web. In my class, “Animation for Broadcast,” students get real-world experience producing fun promotional pieces as well as content (under 3 min.) for this gallery space we call a television. You can see some of their promo animations here. They were encouraged to think about the concept behind PLAY Gallery (an online, virtual place for art, television as gallery space) and play (the activity). They were given the PLAY logo and could do just about anything with it.

I think it’s a really great moment in history to reconsider what television and broadcast can be, do, say: with the YouTube-ization of the world, everyone’s a performer, everyone’s a filmmaker. How does that impact what we make and produce?

Any upcoming project you could tell us about?

I’m working on some totally new and different works. “Timed Release” is a series of performative portraits focusing on people who have developed a creative mental space to survive physical confinement. Paper cutouts and small kinetic sculptures contained in bell jars or other containers are brought to life through video projection to create illusionary shadow theater. It’s an engaging hybrid of image and object…

Thanks Heidi!

I discovered the work of Bart Hess just a year ago, at the Salone del Mobile 2007. The video of his graduation project A Hunt for Hightech was shown as part of Family of Form, the exhibition that the Design Academy Eindhoven had organized in Milan that year. Just one video on a small screen and several people glued to it, fascinated and sometimes slightly horrified. The images showed mutant skins, breathing shoes, living furs and metallic gloves. My vocabulary is actually even more limited than ever when it comes to describe the futuristic fabrics and textures that the young designer had imagined. As his website won’t give much details about him and his work, i decided to write Bart and pester him with my questions:

Hi Bart, i found little info about yourself online. Would you mind telling us who you are, what your background is and what you do right now?

I’m Bart Hess, I graduated a year ago from the Design Academy, Eindhoven in the Man and Identity department. This department looks at finding new materials, forecasting trends in fashion and culture. I have always had a fascination with photography, painting and fashion. Some people would say that I am shy and introvert, but when you see my work it reveals an opposite personality. I think I’m not so good at storytelling with words, but rather expressing myself with stories through images and visuals.

Right now I’m working for myself exploring several fields that straddle textile, fashion and animation, these fall within the commercial and art world.

In the description of A Hunt for Hightech you write that it is “more interesting to imitate an imaginary world”? Why is that?

With a Hunt for Hightech I made a collection of fake fur that touches on elements of fetishism, human instinct and new animal archetypes. With that collection I did not try to mimic real animal kingdoms but create a fantasy world of my own. The way this started was through the process of imagining fantasy animals; animals that could be genetically manipulated, part robot, part organic, how they would move in their environment and what they felt like to touch. I then took my (imagined) gun and ‘hunted’ them, looking for their extra ordinary, high tech furs. I thought about tactile qualities like reflection, the way the hair grows and three dimensionality and took these characteristics, magnified them, manipulated and exaggerated them.

Can you explain us which kind of materials you have designed for the project A Hunt for Hightech?

I used materials that were not organic or commonly seen in the fashion world, and blended plastics, metallic’s, silicon’s and technical foils. With these materials I tried to manipulate and re-create the same qualities and tactile feeling my fantasy animal kingdom has.

Which technological discoveries have inspired the whole project in general?

Prosthetic technology, where robot or machine meets with human nerve ending and flesh is definitely an inspiration but not an obvious link when you see the result of my project. Genetic manipulation has a clearer connection where it allows or dictates a new or changing evolution. This combination of nature, technology and evolution inspired me to create my own new animal archetypes. In my “Hunt for Hightech Animal Kingdom”, animals can change their prints to distract predators, or grow their hair meters longer to appear bigger.

Your work has been exhibited in many venues and magazines. How does the public react to it?

There seemed to be two reactions from the public, there were people who were not freaked out at all and found it very attractive. These were the people who investigated and were intrigued by the furs and discovered the fabrics were quite soft, even though they were made from needles and sharp metallic’s. The other type of people were scared and shocked with the idea of breathing shoes, these were the people who would get hurt touching the furs. One of my intentions was to communicate tactility and spire an emotion between the viewer and the furs, and this happened in both cases.

The models you present in A Hunt for Hightech are futuristic and fascinating. Do you see them more as sculptures or future pieces of clothing?

I really believe these are the fashion furs of the future. Why kill an animal and re-form the fur into a shape? Why not have the animal already shaped to your body, have it living and breathing around you, like the shoes. Whilst the technology is not there yet, in the meantime the animation is used as an inspiration for the fashion industry. At the moment I’m consulting at the Stijlinstituut in Amsterdam making animation and photographic collages to express and create future atmospheres. This gives me the opportunity to re-create ideas that really do have an impact on trends in the future, be it fashion, product or architecture.

Walter Van Beirendonck, Men’s collection Spring/Summer 2008 – SEXCLOWN

You also collaborated with my favourite fashion designer, Walter van Beirendonck. What was your role in the development of his collection? Can you tell us a few words about the collections you participated to?

I started working with Walter van Beirendonck for my internship. For six months I worked on the “Stop Terrorising our World” collection doing computer illustrations for prints. This was where it all started and I have been collaborating with Walter ever since. For the “Sex Clowns” collection, Walter had the idea to create avatars and he asked me to visualize his illustrations into 3d drawings. The Sex clowns collection combines new digital life-form, with an all time classic fascination of Walter, fetishism. Fantasising about new types of Fetishism, he created a group of self-conscious men, proudly presenting their masculinity and body diversity.

In some of your work it seems that the garment or shoe is almost part of the wearer’s body. How do you think new technologies could impact the body aesthetically and fashion-wise?

I think a good example of where technology and the body meet, is a project that `I have worked on with Philips Design Probes team, a provocation for an Electronic Tattoo. In this scenario a tattoo traverses across the landscape of the body moving and morphing with touch and gesture. In this case the tattoo becomes a fashion accessory using the body as canvas for moving image, where the technology opens up new forms of communication between two people.

The photographies you make together with Lucy McRae present alternative bodies or body accessories, cosmetic surgery, etc. Where does your inspiration come from?

I work with Lucy McRae in a primitive and limitless way. We work with our instinct and start by using a material on our body, exploring volumes and ways of re-shaping the human silhouette. We work fast, for one day at the end of the week expelling all our creative energy and stress, making a series of photos that capture an atmosphere. We share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression, but it is not our intention to communicate this. I think unconsciously our work touches upon these themes, we create future human shapes and new body form’s. LucyandBart is blindly discovering a low – tech prosthetic way for human enhancement.

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

I have an exhibition coming up in the Summer in Fort Asperen called ‘Closer to the Skin’. For this show I’m making large scale furs, approximately two metres square, I have developed a method for making the furs automatically that enables me to create the pieces much faster and bigger. I’m also starting a project now with the Textile Museum in Tilburg where I am designing my own collection of textiles using a 3d knitting machine, laser cutting and a loom. There are several other projects I am working on, but unfortunately I can’t mention them yet, they will be on my website when they are finished!

Thanks Bart!

Portrait of Bart Heiss

Related: Lucy McRae’s talk at NEXT.

Before meeting her, i had always imagined Marisa Olson to be an hyperactive blond girl running around the internet playground. She seemed to have so much fun online… surely that girl was made of pixels. And even now that we’ve met several times, i’m not totally sure that Marisa is real.

Marisa’s work combines performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology, as they effect the voice, power, and persona.

Marisa lives between California and New York, where she shows one of her (half) serious faces: she is a “Curator at Large” at Rhizome. You can find her on her whatamidoingwithmylife blog, on the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club, on her website and 3 years ago she was writing about her preparation to audition for the popular reality TV show, American Idol on yet another blog

How does one become Marisa Olson? What is your background and how did you get involved in technology-based art making, reviewing and curating?

Hmm… That could be hard to answer quickly. I was always a geek. I programmed the heck out of my C64! I was also always obsessed with mediated communication in the form of pop culture (radio and tv) transmissions. Add to this the fact that my dad worked in intelligence, growing up (I grew up in Germany, where he worked until I was 10) and I was surrounded by scary military technologies all the time (isn’t the gun one of the most significant inventions ever?) and that all spells a strange fascination with technology. I always wanted to make art, but I’m actually related to one of the most famous French impressionists and I was raised thinking that’s what “real art” was. It turns out I wasn’t very good at that kind of art. So I stopped worrying about what was and wasn’t art and just focused on what I found interesting. I spent most of my undergrad and grad school years in the SF bay area, and lived through the surreal waxing and waning of the dot-com. I wrote for Wired, consulted a few start-ups, and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the area was overflowing with artists expressing themselves in work that engaged technology. And I really related. After that, the progression was natural and rapid. I threw myself into new media–as an artist and in terms of supporting the field, not entirely distinguishing between my writing, teaching, or curating. The more peculiar thing, for me, has been switching gears from being a musician (I’ve been a singer and lyricist in a few bands and grew up in choirs) to making work about music (most recently my Oh.Yeah.I.Love.You.Baby. remix album). There’s definitely an interest in the DIY there, but I guess this is also why I often organize my projects as “albums” (like my Break-Up Album (Demo) video project) and I tend to think of curating like making a mixtape.

In Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs, an online project for which the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned an Artport Gatepage, you and Abe Linkoln sing posts from your favorite blogs. What was the impetus for that project? There’s been several discussions of trying to turn blogs into an art form or an art project. What is you take on this issue? Could you name us other examples of successful “blogs-turned-art” projects?

Abe and I are both compulsive web surfers and love unusual blogs. We decided to pick our favorite posts from our favorite blogs and sing them, in a sort of concept album mixtape. His and mine are pretty different. They are all really funny. In our official description of the project, we say that blogs, like the blues, have been credited with channeling the “voice of the people” and we wondered if we could identify specific genre conventions on blogs. We were kind of interested in the blog as a stage for “site-specific” performance, which also carried over into our Universal Acid project. We’d both done blog-based projects before, which was how we met, online. We sent each other fan letters about his conversion of net artist Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War and my American Idol Audition Training Blog. I also loved Screenfull.net, Abe’s old blog with Jimpunk.

Our first collaboration was actually a blog called Blog Art, which was a curated blog listing blogs that are art projects. At the moment, I’m really into group blogs that ride the line between art practice and some other sort of internet fan culture. For instance, some friends and I founded an “internet surfing club” called Nasty Nets–in which we sort of simultaneously celebrated and critiqued the internet–and I love other group surf blogs like Supercentral, Spirit Surfers, Double Happiness, and Loshadka.

When you blogged your efforts to audition for “American Idol.” How did people around you react to that decision? What did the whole training teach you (i’m not only talking about sun beds and stilettos boot camps of course)?

Well, my family and grad school professors at the time certainly thought I was crazy. I made what was probably the mistake of announcing it by emailing people out of the blue with the subject line “I need your help” and inside I asked for help in picking what song I should sing. Even though I linked to a New York Times article about the blog, a lot of people told me later that they really thought I was seriously delusional about trying to get on the show! They didn’t recognize it as a parody, which is kind of awesome. I started the project wanting to critique the show (which I admittedly also loved) and the gender normative stereotypes it pushes. I was concerned about how artists rights to their own work & identity were violated by the producers, in my opinion. But the project took on a life of its own. The lead-up to my audition (in 2004) was the same as the build-up to the presidential election between Bush & Kerry. I started thinking of how the show is predicated on a model of democracy and voting but I kept hearing how my generation (the main demographic for the show) wasn’t showing up to polls. They would stand in line for 8 hours to audition, but not 15 minutes to vote. So the project became all about voting. I told readers how to register to vote, brought registration forms to the auditions, and I had readers vote on what I should wear & sing. Ultimately, I collected over 10,000 votes in the course of trying to get young people to think about the many ways in which they could use their “voice.”

You are also a curator, both independently and as part of your activities at Rhizome. Your curating often deals with new media art pieces. What are the challenges of curating and exhibiting works of new media art today?

I think that there is presently a very exciting turn happening in new media, with respect to both the art world and the context of “traditional media.” It used to be very important to carve out a separate space in which to show, discuss, and teach new media. Nowadays these spaces are sometimes seen as ghettos, but at the time, they were safe havens championing under-recognized forms. Things are more co-mingled now. Not everyone will agree with me about this, but I think it’s great that some people no longer even know new media when they see it. I know curators who turn their nose up at that phrase, but they love Cory Arcangel or Paul Pfeiffer. There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work–afterall, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I’ve called “Post-Internet” art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called “Internet Aware Art.” I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline. Of course, it’s an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art… If that really matters…

Your Media Change course at ITP/ NYU explored the “evolution” of technology. How does your teaching explore an area which is well… evolving so fast?

I feel like this is a great opportunity and a perfect class to teach at an amazing place like ITP, which evolves daily, with the technology. But I think the way to do it is to try to see media change as having a longer-tem trajectory. I have a background in media theory. I studied History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and am PhD Candidate in film studies and new media in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley, where my dissertation is on The Art of Protest in Network Culture. So I’ve read, loved, and taught the classic McLuhan, Benjamin, Kittler, Flusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, etc over and over again. The aim of this class was to consider the cultural and political forces behind the evolution of technology and the broader concept of “change” (which most certainly also incorporates social/ political change). So we read these classic historiographies but tried to read them from the present context as well as the original one. And we read them beside Alex Galloway, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, and other great contemporary writers. I mean, this stuff can never be pinned down long enough to be considered in an isolated temporal context, but it’s still important to consider the personal and political forces that compel media change–the desires and impetuses.

In your recent Golden Oldies performance/ video, you seem to give a very hard time to a bunch of electronic devices. What is your own relationship with technology?

Ha, well… It occurs to me now that you could probably say that my relationship to technology is a bit sado-masochistic. I don’t mean for that to sound weird or sensational. I think, in the true classical psychoanalytic sense, many people’s relationship with technology is very wrapped up in both their libidinal and death drives, as Freud would call them. I guess this video demonstrates that I enjoying abusing technology as much as I enjoy observing its abuse of me. I’ve always been a fetishist and could never try to hide that. My studio is littered with blinged-out headphones, radios, and cassette tapes. But the tapes I’ve been calling Time Capsules. I mean, they are moments of time that are disappearing but not really going away, so instead I try to prevent their burial (in a landfill) by taking them out of circulation and painting them gold, much like the symbolic bricks in Fort Knox. InGolden Oldies, I try unsuccessfully to instigate communication between media of various generations–tapes, vhs cassettes, records, cds…. And after drilling, hammering, and chiseling each one, I give up and wipe the garbage to the floor–where is becomes “out of sight, out of mind,” as we say in the US. I feel like this is what’s happening with all of our tv’s, walkmen, air hockey tables, nintendos, etc as we follow our drives to upgrade. They just get pushed into dumpsters and disregarded. And I’ve been trying to think about my own role in this cycle, because I certainly love my ipod as much as the next gal.

Any upcoming projects you could share with us?

Well, we just released a DVD of Nasty Nets members’ work (there are 25 of us, including some of my very favorite net artists), and that was generously funded by Rhizome. It includes videos as well as loads of data files and a type-in website by fellow Nasty Michael Bell-Smith. People can get the DVD online, and if they are in New York, they should definitely attend our premiere screening at the New York Underground Film Festival this Friday, April 4th, called Nasty As U Wanna Be.

Otherwise, as you can see, I’m really obsessed with the future, at the moment, which is kind of funny for someone who tends to say that her work is about the cultural history of technology. I’m just starting to work on a project called “Martha Stewart Assisted Living” and it’s a near-future version of Martha’s show (guess who I play!) aimed at an aging audience whose lives have been lengthened by new technologies, but who are also suffering side effects, like head goiters from their cell phones or Global Warming-Related Illnesses (GWI’s). I’m devising special recipes and craft projects for those 130-year-olds!

Thanks Marisa!

Previously: Sousveillance culture, a panel curated and moderated by Marisa Olson.

Antony Hall‘s projects explore the way we interface with technology, and how our interactions with it influence us creatively and socially. Often collaborating with scientists and technologists, Hall is currently focusing his talent on the investigation of biological and physical phenomenon. Some of his recent experiments involve communication with an electric fish, the creation of life through growing crystals electrically on volcanic stone, hunting for Moss bears and training Planarian worms.

He gained fame in the media and media art festivals with his electro-acoustic sound art devices and performances. Together with Simon Blackmore and more recently Steve Symons, Hall is a founding member of the Owl Project, a group which combines woodwork with electronics to create performances, musical instruments (iLog , and Log1k) and other physical computing projects.

Let’s start with one of your most popular projects: the iLog. How did you get the idea of making it?

The iLog was created as collaborative project with Simon Blackmore and Steve Symons, we are the Owl Project. We developed the Log1K in 2001 as a performance tool to attempt rival the laptop in electronic music, shortly after this apple started pushing the iPod and we had to make a response, something which related more to the trend for portable, mobile hand held technologies. We wanted our devices to be a synthesis of craft and technology, as well as functional instruments. The Log1ks were getting increasingly heavy, among other things they used nearly 30 AA batteries, short circuits and fires, and blown-out speakers were becoming common place. iLog 01 came out in 2003. After we started collaborating with Steve Symons, we reinvented the electronics inside the iLog and started pushing the whole project to a new level; the M-Log is out later this year.

There’s now a series of iLog models. Why do you think people buy the iLog? Mainly as a beautiful and quirky piece of art which they would not use too much fearing that it might be damaged (although you provide technical support.)? Or have you found that people use it extensively as any other kind of musical device? Were you expecting your project to have so much success?

I suppose people want the iLog for its quirkiness, something as an alternative to the mass produced items. We had no idea that it would become so popular – people blogged it like mad at the start and like a Chinese whisper it suddenly became what people wanted it to be; typically some kind of alternative to the ipod – But in reality its something quite different. It is intended to be an instrument for performance.

iLog signal

Our problem is that although there is demand; making them is still very difficult, and time consuming, so our focus is making them better rather than faster. At the moment we are looking at lending these to artists and working in collaboration to develop the iLog further. When we launched them for sale in London at DWB it was a real learning curve. Simple things like which way up it should be held, were completely un-obvious! We had to create extensive instructions regarding use, as well as repair and maintenance. The 24 hour support is most necessary! Its important that its more hands on than your average mass produced plastic device.

The iLog is something people can use, rather than living all its life in the art gallery. The new series, *M-Log, launching this year, looks like an iLog, and is a USB connective interface. So there is scope for programming your own sensor based instrument, which you can use with your own customized patch. The iLog is more of a stand alone sound generator. We are planning an event in Manchester during Futuresonic where other performers (including Leafcutter John) will be using the iLogs & M-Logs. *The M in M-Log stands for ‘muio’ as in “muio interface”, the chip based interface inside which Steve‘s invention in his words “The muio interface is a modular system for sensing and controlling the Real World”.

The wood is quite resilient and very repairable if damaged.

I love The Sound Lathe, a performance which explores the sonic properties of wood. Do you have any video of it?

There is some video here:

It does look like a very physical performance. Did you have to master new skills in order to be able to do these performances? How does each performance go? Are they all different from each other? Does working with wood creates situations and results you wouldn’t have expected?

Yes its been really interesting – my self and Simon ended up sleeping in a kind of bivouac deep in the forrest as part or the “R&D” for the project, learning the skills of traditional “green woodwork”, (electricity free) with Mike Abbott, master crafts-person. Mike invented a competition for Bodgers (the name for people who use the ‘pole Lathe’) called ‘Log to Leg’ (as in chair leg) so this is the new format for our performance – I think the record is 9 mins; transforming a bit of tree stump, into two perfect chair legs! It takes us a couple hours, but then our lathe is connected to copious amounts of sensor interface technologies. Quite a distraction, if like for our last performance at Lovebytes, it rained torrentially for the whole thing. In the documentation you will see a tarpaulin underneath that are 3 laptops and Simon.

Image Lovebytes

I think for all of us it’s a welcome change from sitting behind a screen the whole time – these physical processes are a great compliment to programming and electronics; and they still require a similar kind of focus and discipline. It is quite exhausting, you need a lot a focus to keep the beat in time as well as make a good carving, in this way it becomes quite mediative. Sharpening the chisels and preparing the timber are all equally demanding skills to learn.

Can you tell us something about the wooden objects produced during the performances? Which kind of objects are there? And what do you do with them once the performance is over?

We have a box full of various objects; ranging in description from ‘chair leg’ to ‘fire wood’, or specialist ‘rolling pin’. Occasionally we have a look inside & discuss what we should do with them. We did make a chair with Mike about the only truly useful thing we ever made. The latest idea is to make some kind of flat pack, or player. Watch this space. You can see what we decide to do with them at The Piemonte Share Festival, 11 – 16 March 2008.

Documentation of first ENKI event at the Museum of Science and Industry Manchester, 7th October 2006

You are also interested in bio-digital medicine. That sounds very different from a project like iLog. Can you explain us what it is and how you started to be interested in this field?

Well this is my own personal project, although I have always working with biology or technological experimentation in some way; with ENKi I decide to humanize what I do. This was a decision to move into medicine and treatment technologies. Really its the same things that we work with in the owl project; looking at how technology is consumed and sold. The notion of bio-digital medicine is just one example in hundreds, of how science, or even the suggestion of science is used, and misused to sell ideas. Faceless corporations feed on our anxieties, our basic need to feel contentment or feel complete. I find it interesting that, just as some people turn to religion, others will look to technology or science to provide answers and solutions.

ENKI uses the bioelectric information from an Electric Fish to trigger human Brain-wave Entrainment. It generates sound and light pulses to induce a state of relaxation similar to the way traditional relaxation systems work, but the electric communication signal comes from an electric fish rather than a chip.

Did you test the system on other people? How do they react?

So far we have tested it on about 40 volunteers,most of them members of the public who had no prior knowledge of the project. We did this in the context of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry; people enjoy the experience generally. I was surprised at the range of people who were up for it!

By this point I had started working with Greg Byatt as a collaborator. He has experience of using this kind of technology and administering similar treatments professionally. Greg has equipment which can monitor your physiological state and a brain-wave visualiser (EEG); we were trying to measure results this way. We only really came to one solid conclusion. We had to do more tests.

Isn’t the idea of putting one’s “brain-wave entertainment” into the fins of an animal scary? Do you feel that people would trust any other electronic device more than a fish or any other type of animal?

That is a good question. It’s an exciting notion this whole idea of “wet-wear” interfacing – but not something that should be taken lightly. I don’t like to be on my own if i am doing a test run, and yes I find it very unnerving. I never quite got used to the idea of connecting strangers up to electrodes and the fish. I also worry about the fish. The fish needs to be content and ‘happy’ for this to work.

In my opinion that most of these commercial devices are made by various humans all of whom have different intentions and issues, namely cost efficiency; and so effectively using quite crude means; cheap microchips. The Black Ghost knife fish is the result of millions of years of evolutionary refinement; but you could still say the same of micro chips.

A Down poker

Is that project completely developed or is it still a work in progress?

It’s in progress. I started working with “electrogenic” fish in 2005; ENKI technology was the title I gave it in 2006 when I was in residence at ENSAD in Paris. This was the point I realized I could create a treatment technology that might actually be functional. I had a bit of pressure to actually finish something and so launched the basic concept of ENKI technology. The funny thing was that reflecting on it now – that just marked a new beginning. (It took a year just to convince the director of Pepiniere that it was in fact a real project and not some conjecture in science fiction!). Coming to think of it I have never really finished anything, I am much more excited by the notion of continued experimentation. I don’t want to finish discovering. The more I work on ENKI – the more things there are to do and try, it keeps opening up. There are always more questions.

What is there left to achieve? And how much have you learned about cross-species communication?

There is still a lot to achieve. The ‘treatment’ side is just one layer of the onion. I started the project with the aim of communicating with the fish, generating an electrical signal and transmitting this in the fish in the tank, to the fish. Then I watch the the fish, looking for behavioral ‘interactions’ with the electrodes – generally if there is an electrical (connective) change to the electrodes, the fish is aware of this and investigates the electrode by swimming near it and around it (motor-probing responses). I also listening for a ‘chirp’ response. The ‘chirp’ response is a subtle modulation of the Electric signal, a specific fluctuation in the wave. The ‘chirp’ is used during like species interaction and communication. This is closer to the idea of language we have.

Experimentally there are factors which make this difficult to measure – The fish learns to associate the vibrations created by me entering the studio & opening the tank with a food reward. So any approach to the tank needs to be made silently, and the fish needs to be ‘conditioned’ to learn this over a long time. As the project progressed I became more interested in communication as something closer to an idea of commune. For the fish I see the communication signal they make more as a deep expression of self; a projected physical extension of the fish body, rather than ‘language’ in an anthropological sense. This communication is happening at a more primal level. In terms of the ENKi project I am thinking about this as a biological, or physiological connection between living organisms.

I recently discovered that I might be having a problem with what is known as ‘superstitious’ behavior in the fish; if I was a scientist in the academic sense, this would be a serous flaw in the project; something to fix, but for me it was a fantastic turn, giving the project a new angle all together. Its now becoming an experiment into animal Psychology, not just electro physiology. I don’t want to say too much about this next phase but next year the project will look quite different.

You recently developed the Opto-acoustic modulator and used it for an interactive work at FACT and Liverpool John Moores University for the National Science and Engineering Week. Can you give us more details about this interactive piece? How does it work? What were you trying to achieve with this project?

The commission was to create and interactive art work that used something other than keyborad or mouse. I was determined not to use a video camera either. The the Opto-acoustic modulator basically turns sound-waves into light-waves. It can take 10 audio channels and convert these into “AM” transmissions through 10 Light Emitting Diode arrays. I am fascinated by the notion of ‘Amplitude Modulation’ sending data using light waves. The idea was to use ‘Hyalite’ salt crystals, to broadcast sound through their ‘ionizing’ ambient glow. You interact with the light and can detect the data as sound using wearable sensors. Additionally, using Steve’s ‘muio’ interface again, 8 light sensors detect movement around the crystals using a lens and light sensor (based on the idea a simple biological ‘camera eye’) these feed into MAX MSP controlling a soundscape.

I read on your statement page that you are currently “working on new experiments relating to the creation of life through growing crystals electrically on volcanic stone, hunting for Moss bears (Tardigrades; Fresh water extremophiles) and training Planarian worms. ” Could you already tell us a few words about these experiments?

Tardigrade

I have been researching the work of William Cross for quite a while, and finally decided that I needed to recreate his experiments (with a few modifications) It’s quite interesting trying to work out what he did – the only way to know is to recreate it. In 1837, he found these creatures “Acari electors” as he called them infesting an experiment, he believed that these things “spontaneously generated” within his experiment, several eminent scientists of the time recreated the experiment with the same results! My experiment is basically a recreation of this experiment, augmented with a little more technology – with the aim of capturing this phenomena of electrochemical abiogenesis. The only problem is the experiment has to run for many months.

I am interested in all sorts fresh water microscopic life; its a great 19h century tradition. With a decent microscope, you can take any roadside moss cluster and explore the interstitial oceans of liquids trapped between damp moss filaments. Here you might be lucky enough to find a Moss Bear ( “Tardigrade” ) an obscure form of extremophile that lives in moss. Believe it or not, it really does look like a bear! This in its self was a reason for laboring days over a microscope just to see if it was real! They don’t fit into the zoological classification system, and have been given a phylum of their own. It is believed it is able to survive space travel, and at this moment a small space capsule orbits the earth containing some “Tardinauts” (its hard to compete with that) I simply enjoy looking for them. I like to go looking for moss growing in all kinds of areas, from urban waste lands, to the Peak District. “Tardigrades” are able to survive about 120 years in a dehydrated state; I was sifting through very old moss samples from Manchester Museum to see if I could reanimate 100 year old dehydrated Moss Bears. apparently it is possible. I had a lot more luck looking for the living ones. Unfortunately my one Planarian worm recently went missing in the tank. It is 8mm long, and I dont have the heart to keep it in a petri dish. I am not sure where it is.

Is there any artist or researcher whose work has been particularly inspiring for you?

I don’t know where to start! Louis Bec for sure. I am really into what SymbioticA have been doing over the past few years, and what they are doing for the “Bio-art” movement. Otherwise, at the moment I am looking at the work of William Bebe. To be honest – I have been trying to read a lot more science fiction lately, particularly 19th century science fiction, and science writing. Often the science fiction tells you a lot about the popular understanding of science at the time. More importantly, its a good antidote ploughing through contemporary research papers.

Thanks Antony!

Related: El Niuton has a slideshow dedicated to the work of Simon Blackmore.

Meet one of the Godfathers of the Finnish media art mafia…

Juha Huuskonen is an artist, curator, VJ, software designer and he is also the organizer of the Pixelache electronic art festival.

Through a series of performances, exhibitions and club events, Pixelache brings together young creators from diverse disciplines who playfully and critically experiment with media and technology. The festival also features practical workshops and seminars addressing current issues in the development of digital media.

Pixelache is held each year in Helsinki has also traveled to other destinations including Medellin (Pixelazo), New York, Montreal, Paris (Mal Au Pixel) and Stockholm (PixelVÄRK).

Pixelache 2008 Helsinki will feature the first edition of Baltic Boxwars: Northern League

Juha is currently busy preparing the 7th edition of the festival Pixelache University, Exploring the Crossroads of Art, Science, Technology and Urban Culture, held in Helsinki on March 13 to 16.

Pixelache University will focus on education and ask questions such as Does the educational system have room for hackers, circuit benders, environmental activists and VJ artists? What would be a suitable curriculum for nurturing independent grassroot initiatives?

Furthermore, Pixelache has opened its very own educational programme with a curriculum which consists of monthly Pixelache events (presentations, workshops, concerts and parties).

Pixelazo Bailable at Parque de las Luces. Photo Juha Huuskonen

I met Juha for the first time at Belsay Hall, in the North of England. He had commissioned 3 media artists to get some inspiration from the 17th century manor house and inhabit it with their art installations (review here and here again). Then we saw each other again in Colombia where Juha had invited me (hey! lucky me!) to participate to Pixelazo. I had him sit down in a bar for an interview. That was back in June.

Transcript of our Medellin conversation.

How could I define Juha Huuskonen?

When people ask what I do I tend to answer that I am a software engineer (because that is my official education) who is lucky enough to make a living as an artist but in fact I put most of my efforts into organising events and developing organisations.

PLAN*B FOR ARKADIANMÄKI by Juha Huuskonen, Tuomo Tammenpää, Aura Seikkula & co (2005). Photo: Juha Huuskonen

How was Pixelache born?

The first Pixelache festival in 2002 was put together in an improvised manner, with a tiny budget of a couple of hudred euros. The purpose was to bring local active people together to discuss and present experimental work that fell between the categories – not art, not design, not research, but kind of all of these at the same time. This type of work is of course shown in all kinds of international festivals (today even more than a few years ago) but the other special thing about Pixelache has been that we’ve focused on showing work by young, emerging creators and taking risks by showing work that is still in the concept or prototyping stage. This is something that we are still trying to stick to, even though the festival has grown quite a bit and involves more established artists as well. Education – all kinds of seminars, workshops and presentations – has also been a very important part of Pixelache from the beginning.

IMAchannel performance by katastro.fi, 1998 . Photo: Pirje Mykkänen

The longer history of Pixelache can be traced back to katastro.fi, a loosely organised media art collective that started in 1998. During its heydays, katastro.fi had around 50 members and worked on rather large scale projects, such as eko.katastro.fi and 2000.katastro.fi. The founders of katastro.fi were involved in demoscene, a subculture that evolved around software piracy and creative experimentation with early home computers (Commodore, Atari, etc). Katastro.fi brought together some of the most successful Finnish demo groups (Komplex, Orange, CNCD, Sonic, Virtual Dreams, etc) which had been active already since late 80s/early 90s. In the demo scene, people would get together in parties (events that nowadays can attract up to thousands of young people) and show the stuff they were working on. The way demoscene functioned as an informally organised, highly social network focused on developing new work and ideas has influenced my own practise a lot.

‘Assembly‘ demoscene event in Helsinki, Finland . Photo:Pekka Aakko

Where does the name Pixelache come from?

I found the word Pixelache sometime in 2001, in an article that was predicting new words that would be used in the future. The word was supposed to describe an “overdose of digital media.” I knew myself how that feels, for me the feeling of overdose comes from seeing too much of the same, how all media and technologies become standardized, closed, stiff and boring systems over time. I googled for the word “pixelache” and got zero results, so it was a word waiting to be grabbed. So, we first had a nice sounding name, the concept of the event evolved afterwards. Pixelache festival actually tries to act as an antidote for ‘pixelache’, presenting projects that challenge the standardizations.

Light Surgeons at Pixelache 2003, Helsinki. Photo: Antti Ahonen

How did Pixelache end up spreading to other countries?

Our international events started in 2003, when we organised Pixelache festival in New York and Montreal. Both festivals were organised on a shoestring budget, with a lot of effort and enthusiasm from both organisers and artists. We carried most of the necessary gear and artworks as luggage, organised free/very cheap accommodation and traveled on a Greyhound bus between New York and Montreal.

The events in New York and Montreal brought together a quite unusual combination of local organisations that all had a lot of influence in planning the festival program. In addition to international guests, both events featured a lot of local artists, many of whom were later invited to Helsinki. We have maintained this way of working ever since. The model is sort of opposite to ISEA: instead of a separate international jury, the local organisations are in charge of the program, they never have to present projects that they don’t consider relevant for the local context. The program decisions are aided by an on-going discussion between various partners within the Pixelache network.

Pixelache NYC on top of Gershwin Hotel, 2003. Photo: Antti Ahonen

I think the reason why organisations want to work with Pixelache, or start their own Pixelache edition, is that Pixelache takes seriously the work done by emerging authors but does it without trying to be pompous. Another thing that makes Pixelache interesting is that we work at lot with international networks and subcultures, such as VJ scene, hacker and activist communities, etc. The current active nodes in the Pixelache network are Pixelache Helsinki, Mal au Pixel Paris, Pixelvärk Stockholm and Pixelazo Medellin. Pikslaverk is about to start in Reykjavik and we’ve been actively collaborating with piksel.no in Bergen, RIXC in Riga (Locative Media Workshop), Plektrum in Tallinn, Mediawala festival and Doors of Perception in New Delhi, Interferenze in San Martino Valle Caudina and several other events.

What’s the story of the creation of Pixelazo?

Pixelazo started with a random encounter – Vanessa Gocksch from Colombia contacted us in response to our open call for proposals, and eventually came over to Helsinki in spring 2005. Vanessa is running an organisation called Intermundos which works with marginalized communities in Colombia (for example kids from the ghettoes and indigenous Colombian tribes) and facilitates them to get involved in using media and technologies, focusing on free / cheap / DIY tools that are available to them. Vanessa and Intermundos have been a fantastic partner to work with, they are one of the rare organisations in Colombia who have the credibility to work with both grassroot organisations as well as established cultural institutions. It took two years to get to the first Pixelazo event, meanwhile we did some test runs by organising workshops with events like Salon Internacional del Autor Audiovisual in Barranquilla and Bogotrax in Bogota.

VJ workshop for Kogi & Arhuaco tribes, 2005. Photo: Juha Huuskonen

Pixelazo has been a great source for inspiration and ideas for future Pixelache events, Colombians are not so overwhelmed with gadgets and technology as we in the Western world are, but they can take the time to develop their own DIY solutions. Colombia is also immensely rich in culture, even though much of it is hiding in the slums or deep in the jungle, not easily reachable by random tourists. In this sense the bad reputation given to Colombia in the international media has actually been a blessing, the fact that there has not been much tourism has preserved a lot of the culture that would have otherwise been commercialized and/or destroyed already a long time ago. But this seems to be rapidly changing, more and more tourists are coming to Colombia and Uribe has made the country a lot safer, but unfortunately in a building-high-walls-around-gated-communities kind of way, copied from the United States.

Pixelazo music & VJ workshops in barrio Santa Cruz la Rosa, Summer 2007. Photo: Juha Huuskonen

The future goal of Pixelazo & Pixelache is to bring more ideas and cultural influence from the South to North. For example at the first Pixelazo event we had some guest from the Nasa tribe, the way they see their life is that they are constanly weaving a web of people and knowledge, spreading it around the mountain range where they live in. This is documented in their traditional handcraft, weaved bags that contain information that looks like digital data. When they started using radio, they used radio cicleta, radio bicycles to act as mobile transmission units. This way radio technology can be made transparent, the transmission station is always moving inside within the network of the tribe, it does not become a hidden black box, a top-down authoritative tool like we have adopted it. They have now started using web and internet tools as well, all based on open source, it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Pixelazo music & VJ workshops in barrio Santa Cruz la Rosa, Summer 2007. Photo: Juha Huuskonen

What happens if I want to set up a Pixelache in another country? Is there a strict receipt to follow?

I guess step number one would be to get in touch with us, with Pixelache Helsinki or some of the other nodes in the network. Rest of the process has so far been informal, we’ve built collaborations slowly and by starting with smaller events. Right now there is a kind of pressure to make the process more formal and easier, so that more Pixelache events could be established since quite many people have contacted us about this during the past couple of years. We’ve been working on a Pixelache manifesto, a sort of ‘constitution’ for Pixelache events (not in EU style though :), something we can agree on and use a reference to develop the events in future. It’s still under work, but it will probably contain at least following statements:

Multidisciplinarity: it’s an event that brings together hackers, artists, architects, activists, but also people from the commercial new media / tech world.
We focus on working with emergening artists, rather than established ones.
We show prototypes, concepts, things in developments, projects which are not perfectly ready.

We try to bring together, support and try to understand how different sub-cultures can function, it’s not just art, it’s also hackers, community networks, VJs, etc.

There are also some themes that seem to appear in different ways in various Pixelache events: public space/locative media/borderline between physical and virtual space, do-it-yourself/hacking/missusing technologies, organisational strategies/collaboration/democracy, etc. VJ community and audiovisual performances have had a prominent role in all Pixelache events.

Association for Experimental Electronics, Mal au Pixel 2006, Paris. Photo: Antti Ahonen

Over the years we have developed working methods that makes it easier to organise this type of events, there are some of the tricks that new Pixelache festival nodes can adopt if they want. This has mostly been about treating the organiser team and the artists as one big team that can help the event to happen, by using e-mail lists, wikis, etc. For example one little innovation, asking the artists to put info about their travels online in a wiki themselves, took away a massive travel agency type of work from the organisers (there are often around 100 international artist/contributors arriving to Pixelache). The other great effort used to be the publication, but we have managed to cut down the work effort by using a simple design template and a wiki to put it together, we also make it in A4 size so that we can print it at a photocopy place on the last minute and later on anyone can download and print it at home as well. All these methods help us to remain an independent, grassroot initiative even though the festival has been growing in scale quite a bit.

Orgsmobile at Mal au Pixel 2006, Paris. Photo: Johan Sandsjö

When you talk about Pixelazo you usually say *we made” ” we were invited”, etc. Who is behind that “we”?

‘We’ is most often the bunch of people involved in organising Pixelache Helsinki, there is a core crew of 5-10 people who have been involved for a longer time, and a larger group of people who get involved occasionally. The larger ‘we’ includes the international Pixelache network and our local collaborators.

But the question ‘who is we?’ is actually very important for us, after all these years we are still trying to figure out what it means to be an independent, grassroot organisation. This is something we’ve been exploring also in previous Pixelache festivals, with the ‘Dot Org Boom’ theme in 2005 & 2006 and ‘Architectures for Participation’ seminar in 2007. With the emergence of all the ‘Web 2.0’ tools and networks, the role of the diy / independent / experimental / alternative media and tech organisations in changing. The revolution of ‘citizen media’ eventually has happened, via myspace, youtube and facebook… But in quite a different way than ‘we’ were expecting.

When I interviewed you, we were both in Medellin, a few days after you left the city and flew to Leticia which to me (I’ve never been) looks a lot like the jungle. Can you gives an overview of the Leticia chapter? How did it go? If you look back at what happened there, do you think it might have any influence on the next Pixelazo?

Pixelazo / Selvatorium 2007, Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia. Photo: Juha Huuskonen

The purpose of the visit to Leticia (a town in Amazonia, in the border area of Colombia, Brazil and Peru) was to prepare ‘Selvatorium’, an artist residency and other activities out in the nature, with indigenous tribes involved. Vanessa has been working with the indians for a longer time and has documented some of their practises at Intermundos website… So we don’t need to start from zero, but it’s still a great challenge to figure out the ‘right’ way to try to bridge the gap between North and South. I don’t think there is an easy solution available, with such a huge gap between the cultures. As I said before, I think we have a lot to learn from South, but we should also try to make a positive contribution to the local life, without imposing our own values and systems on them. Also it’s kind of ridiculous to work on projects dealing with nature, and to burn a great amount of kerosene when people fly over the Atlantic to get there. Hopefully someone will donate us a big sailing boat soon….

Thanks Juha!

Pixelazo / Selvatorium 2007, Leticia, Amazonas, Colombia. Photo Juha Huuskonen

Next Pixelache appointments:
Pixelache Helsinki 2008: Pixelache University, 13-16 March 2008

Mal au Pixel 2008, Paris, 17-25 May 2008

Forays is a low profile (that’s their words) artist group strung somewhere between New York and Montreal whose work focuses on the research and creation of open-source minor architectures and low-tech modifications of everyday life.

Forays is Adam Bobette and Geraldine Juárez.

Geraldine Juarez is a self-taught designer and an artist from Mexico City based in Brooklyn, New York where she is a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam and play around the city with Forays. She is a drop out of Communication and Graphic Design of a university in Mexico City and worked in advertising for several years doing visual effects in Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles. Her current interests are low-tech crafts and artifacts. Most of the time she obtains her supplies in trash bags, by freecycling or by hacking public sites.

Adam Bobbette is a writer, researcher and artist based in Montréal.

What started as an innocent conversation between Geraldine and i about the Postal Gown she was modeling around Williamsburg during the Conflux festival escalated into a fully-fledged interview about her, and mostly the works she’s currently working on together with Adam. Here we go:

Postal Cocoon

Hey Geraldine, you write that you find your supplies in trash bags, freecycling or by hacking public sites. Sounds interesting but we’d like to get more details. How does one hack a public site? can you give us examples too? And what is freecycling?

G:. I read once that hacking is the creative adaptation to immediate circumstances. I switched not so long ago from purely digital work to more analog and tangible object production and I had to learn electronics from scratch, a bit of code and a whole lot about materials. I started hacking the city accidentally. I was working a lot with paper and electronics and I needed something that I couldn’t afford. Looking online for alternatives I found it freely available in the public infrastructure of the city: the postal office. Not paying for my source material was a complete delight and I pushed it forward. Picking stuff from the street in New York is nothing new, everybody does it. There is a royal amount of quality waste all around the city. However there is an easier and more social way to get specific things that you need. Freecyle is a simple yahoo list that let’s you ask and offer things for reuse. Most of the time the craft materials are just surplus so you get perfectly good stuff for free. Often I found just what I needed and it was an opening to start wandering around the city to get what I need and most important, interacting with the moneyless layer of New York City.

Together with Adam Bobbette, you work on the Forays projects. How did you get to meet and work together? Does each of you have his or her own skills and knowledge that complete the other?

AB. Like yin and yang? Like milk and tea? Like diamonds and roughness?

G:. it’s actually not like that at all, we don’t really like each other. We met in Eyebeam. I knew he wanted to work with steam and I thought that was wicked but he was too cocky so I didn’t want to talk to him. One day I stole a little kaleidoscope from his desk. I confessed to it and then we found out that we both were into folding stuff, trash and useless things. He is a luddite and I’m more geeky. He speaks French and I speak Spanish, so it helps to create confusion.

AB. We always have experiences to share about crossing the American border, which is a strong bond.

G. Also, we really work hard to keep it low and that’s really encouraging. Adam has trouble with authority while i have it with sustainability and environmentalism. He likes space and i like materials. We both find waste inspiring. We like the idea of creating pieces that make you realize your space and environment in a more beautiful and accidental way. Since we come from different worlds we are constantly questioning what it really means to step into these arenas like activism, art, architecture. We are also really afraid of how art goes, and we don’t know how to slip in and come out clean. And yeah we don’t like each other.

AB. Which makes for this great productive confusion. Collaborative work is mostly frustrating.

G. And there are others we work with too, wonderful, distant others.

AB. And some of them like you, Jerry.

G. Sure.

AB. We do a lot of our own stuff and sometimes just fall into each other’s projects mid-way, towards the end or drop out from the beginning. But it’s definitely important that we are surprised by what we work on individually. Or, it’s great to be surprised by how differences end up overlapping.

Beach Mat Cocoon

One of your pieces Field Notes addresses the ways in which the delineation of interior and exterior or private and public space can be used towards political ends. Using cocoons, you and Adam propose open source architecture and hacked materials as forms of grassroots activism. Can you give us more details on that? Which materials you use? And how the cocoon can be turned into OS architecture?

A— G: The basic nature of the cocoon is to turn the structures and infrastructures of the city into a vehicle for experimentation. It might need space, it might need a certain material, it might need a certain action to hang it. When a cocoon needed certain materials, it made us go and find it around, explore sites and slip into and through cracks to get it. This gives us the chance to hack infrastructures. When the cocoon needs to be used you have to look for space: a scaffold, a tree, a fire escape, which enables reclaiming some lost space. Also, the cocoon is meant to be a tool for tactical occupation, like in the case of More Gardens —

AB. A kick ass New York City community garden advocacy group that saves community gardens from being destroyed by the city

G. — Either for tree sitting or for creating a temporary squat, when you slip into a cocoon you slip into a tool riddled with the potential of continually evolving.

AB. With the cocoons we weren’t really so interested in focusing on the objects but on the whole network, the whole approach that building and thieving, freecycling, skill sharing and trespassing gets you into. I mean, we personally really cared about the objects but that was not what we wanted to show to the public. That stuff is personal. What we do care about is pointing in a direction; towards techniques of trespass, of building, of acquiring materials. It was important to provide entry points into the very material circumstances and consequences of art making.

The kind of materials we were using were things like construction netting hacked from construction sites. To get them you climb up inside scaffolding and cut out some chunks. We also used modified Tyvek postal envelopes grabbed for free from post offices around New York. And, 1 dollar beach mats. These are the main materials, but there is tones of other stuff, mostly culled from construction sites, hardware shops, outdoors shops and the street.

Open source architecture refers to the way that we hoped to distribute a process of building, not instructions on how to build a particular thing. We had to break codes and hack systems to build the cocoons and what we are interested in distributing are the techniques we used. We don’t think any body would be really all that interested in reproducing the objects we produced, but the techniques could help people build their own stuff or at least take an adventurous approach to buildings. We are just hoping to pass on a very basic program for experimental architecture.

Postal Cocoon

What does one of these cocoons look like exactly? Can you sleep in it?

A— AB. People have said they look like many things. Some people think they look like body bags, which I kind of like. Some people think they look like jewels, some say they are just hammocks, some don’t really know what to make of them.

Yes, you can sleep in them. We have and will continue to. There is this whole experiential side, as you can imagine, to sleeping in trees and hanging up against scaffolding, strapped to some edifice under construction like you were, well, a little larvae grafted to structures. Which you are already, with or without some cocoon.

G. They are really a simple hammock. However the material and the way in which they are built, make them what you want them or need them to be.

And how about the Craigslist chapter of the project? How did it go and did it encounter the kind of response you were hoping to get?

A— G. Well, Adam got all those emails. Actually the Craiglist chapter are the origin of the cocoon. He was trying to advertise free space for people to occupy as well as describing this kind of poetics of squatting. Squatting not only as a political strategy but also a creative architectural endeavour.

AB. Craigslist is a funny place. It was really a way for us to talk to an audience that would otherwise have little relation to this kind of work (though maybe we’re making bogus assumptions). And, yeah we had great responses ranging from sincere interest to total confusion to pick-up lines.

I like the “swing actions” a lot. How did the public react to the swings? Do you know if the idea has spread around?

A— AB. It’s pretty hard not to love swings even when they are set in places they shouldn’t be; they are pretty benign objects. Everybody loved them, from construction workers who would tell us we ‘gotta patent that shit’, to passersby, and of course, kids. But this is why they can be a decent introduction or gateway to more intense experiences of disruption, or of bending and twisting space.

G. I was just the trooper. I had to wait in line to use the freaking swing. The pictures I took are beautiful though.

Did you ever get into trouble for installing swings and portable squats?

A—G. Not a real problem. Some building porters that double as mini-cops…

AB: So many people in New York city are mini cops…

G. Some have come to us to ask what the hell we are doing, but often people give us a break to finish or even let us keep going. You would be surprised by how many public servants are tamed by the word “art”. It’s really the best antidote or word you can use to dissolve confusion and tension. We just published recently ‘How to Unload bags and Practice Failure’, a description of getting busted and the function of the “artist”. Why don’t you read it. It’s my favorite project.

I want to know more about 100% Local Irradiated Food. And that TV set that you turned into an Edible Excess Machine. What was the impetus for that project? How does the EXM work?

A— G. Oh! The EXM doesn’t work.

AB. It is a symbolic machine. We have been inspired by freeganism for quite some time and wanted to build a machine that spoke to the very interesting contradictions of freeganism, the same contradictions that underlie so much of our own work. I was excited about the machine because of the way that it spoke to all of these interesting problems of the excess/consumption, host/parasite relationship.

Basically, parasitic activity requires the very consumer society it deplores in order for it to survive. Freegans would be impossible without the excess generated by consumer society. Their activism, their scavenging, which is a totally justified protest against this consumption at the same time depends on it. So, in their own ideal world they would not exist. In a way they are fighting for their own disappearance as a group. That’s interesting.

What the machine is supposed to do is allow you to turn absolutely anything (garbage, bricks, old tires) into edible waste by irradiating it and swallowing a laxative. A perfect circle. A perfect impossibility. If it were true, at a certain point, you would end up turning your own self into edible waste.

We built it as a workshop at Eyebeam. Jerry and some excellent workshop folks built a commercial around the EXM. We hope to eventually get a feature in Martha Stewart’s magazine.

G. I have a crush on garbage bags so I really wanted to do something directly with them. The idea came up actually because someone told us that you can actually create x-rays out of a tv.

So the project is meant to raise attention to the enormous amount of waste we produce everyday, right?

G. We are trying to make clear the fact that while everybody goes green, local and organic our waste will remain there. It’s about excessive consumption. If everyone is really really interested in being sustainable, how about eating your own waste? THE EXM is as retarded as green capitalism.

There’s a strange little device on your website. It’s called Bucky and seems to implode. Can you tell us something about it?

A— AB. This is Jerry’s killer project and she thinks more clearly about it than I but we do share this distrust of Mr. Bucky Fuller. He is still someone that we have to contend with, maybe one of the most important idols that we have yet to destroy. He is really this figure head of all of this naïve technological optimism that threatens to murder anything that was once dangerous and/or interesting about sustainability.

AB: Isn’t it just the same as the present except that people will feel guiltless about their consumption, about their excesses? You know, I feel like sustainability even has enough room in it’s future for things like solar powered tanning salons and ways to power your television set by the energy emitted by burning your own calories. And all sorts of other “neat” stuff.

JG. For me, a sustainable future based on consuming “with the earth in mind” is the ultimate social disaster. I prefer to stop preparing for the upcoming natural disasters and start acting on the social disaster around me, like consumer capitalism.

The Bucky’s are based on Fuller‘s Geoscope: This globe that allows you to see the big picture and help humanity somehow to “anticipate and cope with inexorable events”. Bucky I is a forest made of money that explodes. Pure illusion. My Bucky is meant to mimic the actual fragility of ‘Space Ship Earth’. Green or not. I really want to destroy this illusion of “saving” the world going “green”. I don’t think we are going to “save” it. But i do believe we have to go more dark in order to learn how to live on it from now on.

During the last edition of Conflux, I saw you walking around with your friends wearing some pretty Postal Gowns. How can I make one? Can you give us a little step-by-step?

A—AB. Regine, haven’t you heard how damn stubborn Jerry is with instructions these days? She avoids them like she had a nut allergy or something.

JG. Uff. Don’t even get my started. What’s with this obsession for systematization? Yeah i don’t like instructions, but actually some people really dig instruction sets and they even think they allow you to show how instructions for anything always rely on some impossibility and the unthinkability of chance.
p.s.

Well my allergy to instructions is that i don’t think there is a possible way to break down into steps things that are not technical, and maybe i really want to move over the technical. I like to share information yes, but i think we have to subvert the way we share it some how too. Instructablism is getting a little boring to me. To make a Postal Gown first you need to get some material for free by any means. And this can be as broad as you want. Hacking, thieving, freecycling. You have to make an effort to avoid money exchange. You have to learn how to step into strangers homes (it’s really weird sometimes as well as interesting), receive something and take responsability of it.

Once you got your material:

(You need a pattern and a sewing machine)

1. Cut your pattern

2. Sew both parts together,

Thanks Geraldine and Adam!

All images courtesy of the artists.