Hasta La Creative!

Vortex, by Christoph Hildebrand

More notes about Synthetic Times – Media Art China, an ambitious exhibition about media art running for a few more days at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. I can’t help but mention an interesting conversation which has just started on the spectre mailing list about whether exhibiting (and blogging about?) media art works in countries ruled by a “problematic” regime is suitable or not.

One of the last two themes, Here, There and Everywhere almost consoled me for all the misery i had to face (no access to either of my own blogs) while in Beijing courtesy of the Great Firewall of China. The works selected in this chapter envision the corollaries of the networked society: the realm where the public and the private sphere merge, the issues of control and anti-control, and the challenges of the Big Brother world.

naked bandit / here, not here / white sovereign, by Knowbotic Research, is a critique of the new power structure that global information technologies are bringing about in our world. They are producing new territorial principles of order and new logics of space, as well as constituting forms of transnational power and sovereignty.

An autonomous helium-filled blimp controls and attacks black balloons, the naked bandits, which are kept captive, floating in space. The silver zeppelin, fitted with an orientation camera, is scanning the room, looking for whichever balloon is furthest away.

Image knowbotic research

The harmless and tech-less black balloons are the targets of the sovereign robotic logics which role is to scan, filter, profile, detect and target. Visitors can symbolically intervene in the process. by constructing obstacles in space via their physical presence (serving as additional targets) and making the sovereign space more and more un-navigable.

Meanwhile, coming from above, a mechanical voice repeatedly utters the words “naked bandit / here, not here” in a tone of command that is followed by a another voice representing the “naked bandit”. The sound of the installation specifies the vague status of the prisoner stripped of all rights, who is languishing incarcerated – “here” – in a very real sense. But whose legal existence is suspended – “not here”.

The last chapter The Recombinant Reality presents artworks which embrace the way reality is processed and meditated, revealing new types of reality that reshape our notion of existence while posing questions of epistemological urgency that characterize contemporary experience, in which a Cartesian world view no longer ensures comfort, and syllogistic reasoning finds no suitable dwelling.

Most of Henrik Menné‘s dynamic sculptures are machines or installations are almost organic in the way they transform a material – plastic, wax, metal or stone – into objects.

56L, first created in 2004, consists of solid glue, a fan, iron, a heating element, and an engine.

56L produces a white web of glue. The machine heats up solid glue, which then flows down in thin threads in front of a fan that blows the strings in different directions and forms a surprisingly beautiful sculpture. Although the 56L machine remains the same no matter the gallery where it is displayed, the process of leading to the final glue sculpture is not only subject to change in the environment but is also relying on forces such as gravity and the peculiar qualities of the material chosen. Therefore, the exact dimensions and shape of the final work are almost impossible to control.

The work was probably the most low-tech (what is the correct expression? is it the lowest tech?) one in the show. It reminded me of Michel Blazy’s installations. The artist sets the parameters and the rest has to be left in the hands of a combination of elements.

On view until July 3, 2008 at the NAMOC in Beijing.

Back in November i was at Medialab Prado in Madrid to visit the Visualizar workshop and i had the pleasure to hear the talk that Juan Freire gave there. I was really looking forward to know better about the thoughts of someone whose keen observation on open knowledge, digital culture and everyware’d city i was following with interest for some time. Juan Freire is one of the very very few people who keep track of what is written in the field of ubiquitous computing, free software and technology but who would also hang around with media art curators and mingle with the hackers and the urbanists. And his everyday job doesn’t have much to do with all of the above. He has a PhD in Biology, he is Associate Professor and Coordinator research group at University of Corunna. As a leader of the research group in Marine Resources and Fisheries, he was involved in several R+D projects. He collaborates with businesses, public organizations and NGOs in topics related to sustainability and environmental management. He is CEO of Fismare, an environmental consulting firm. There’s more but i’m starting to be convinced that there are hyper-active clones of Freire all over Spain.

Exterior of Medialab Prado

His blogs are in spanish: there’s Piel digital (Digital skin), nomada and Ciudades enredadas (Networked cities). And obviously his talk was in spanish as well but i found it so inspiring that i’ve dutifully spent a few hours translating it. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we all enjoyed listening to it in Madrid.

That November evening in Madrid, Juan Freire shared with us his thoughts about public space, whether it is obsolescent or necessary, what is the meaning of the expression in the 21st century, and what could happen should public space as we know it disappear.

The video of his presentation is online and in spanish, and so are the slides of Juan’s talk. But the excerpt of his talk is here (and in english).

The issues he made us reflect upon that evening were:

Freire started with a tour of what the term Commons means today. The term sounds rather old-fashioned and probably most people wouldn’t feel comfortable defining it today. It’s something that comes right from Medieval Times but do the Commons still play a role in our life today? Is it limited to natural resources? Couldn’t internet be also part of the Commons? And digital knowledge? Public Spaces? What happens when we put side by side a series of elements which seem to be distinct but are getting increasingly connected such as internet, knowledge and public spaces? Juan Freire’s talk tried to explore some of those issues and bring a few answers.

What will the future bring? There are two scenarios, two alternatives of a possible future. Each of these scenarios will be more or less viable depending on many circumstances, one of them being the way we regard our role as citizens:

– we behave passively and accept the future as it comes.
– we decide that we can take an active role and grab the opportunity to participate to the shaping of our future.

Photo WWF

Besides the Commons, exists another key concept: the Tragedy of the commons. The concept was born in the context of natural resources. Years ago, you could fish many big species in the sea. Today, we have to face an over-exploitation of the resources of sea. Many people have explained that the problem lays in the fact that these resources are for everyone to use. That’s the Tragedy of the Commons. The expression was coined by a biologist whose work had a big impact on sociologists and economists (while biologists have just started now to discover his thoughts).

Some 40 years ago, Professor Garrett Hardin described the Tragedy of the commons using the hypothetical example of sheep in Scotland in the 19th century. Local herders share a pasture. The wool and meat from their sheep is selling well, they wish to increase their herd size and maximize their yield. More animals means more profit but each additional animal further degrades the pasture which is bad for all herders using the same pasture. However, the rational choice of an individual is selfish and stimulated by short-term gains, they won’t let themselves be worried by what is best for the whole herder community and their behaviour will eventually lead to the destruction of the resources on which they all depend.

The solution Hardin proposes to the drama of open access is to impose an external governing structure to manage the fields. What started with a few sheep in Scotland had a big impact on our vision of the world and on the way to manage the commons.

The story doesn’t stop there, the government having shown his lack of competence to manage the commons, the ideal solution would involve privatization of the Commons.

Cement-lined canal and cross-flow system in the Chiregad irrigation system in Nepal (image)

Fortunately, some people saw the glitches in Hardin’s stark statements and they started to analyze other systems. The case study of a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal proves the unreliability of Hardin’s view. Farmer-constructed canal which seem rather simple and primitive were actually much more efficient that the ones built for efficiency with a greater expense of money by the Nepal government. The traditional ones irrigated more crops than the newly constructed, government-owned ones. The infrastructure was old-fashioned but they were better managed. The problem didn’t lay in the engineering but in the way the canals were managed. The new infrastructure that came with government ownership had the effect of destroying the traditional rules established over generations to manage common resources.

The Nepal example and many other have shown that the Commons can also be managed efficiently using methods which do not have to involve privatization or government-ownership of the resources.

An excess of regulations actually leads to another tragedy, the Tragedy of the Anticommons. The term was coined in 1998 by Michael Heller, a professor at Columbia Law School. In his papers Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research and Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti-Commons Hypothesis, Heller argued that patents are an obstacle to innovation and sharing of knowledge in science. Biomedical research is one of the key areas where competing patent rights could prevent useful and affordable products from reaching the marketplace.

Image BBC news

Heller also observed public spaces as his paper The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets demonstrates. His essay wonders why many storefronts in Moscow are empty, while street kiosks are full of goods? Heller observed that in post-Communism Moscow there were a lot of open air kiosks, but also a lot of empty stores. He concluded that in the transition from Marxism to capitalism, those commercial spaces had been over-regulated making it difficult for a startup retailer to successfully negotiate for the use of that space.

Lawrence Lessig mentioned and commented on Heller’s paper and even transfered the discussion about the commons from biomedicine and public space to internet and knowledge. The concepts of Commons and Anticommons are thus far from obsolete and internet has revived their relevance.

We often wonder why people attend a particular space rather than another one and how they use that space. Public spaces are often designed from top down with little attention on how citizens will eventually use them which will obviously lead to yet another example of the tragedy of the anticommons.

The first image Juan Freire used to illustrate his point was made by Nicolas Nova in Amsterdam. It shows a street that “defends itself” with elements that prevent people from using the street. This is a case of anticommons.

Photo Nicolas Nova who has more images and thoughts

On the picture below, congested traffic in the streets of Bangkok. This looks like an example of the Tragedy of the Commons. The excessive use of a road that everyone is free to ride makes the road useless, annihilates the public space.

Image source

The problem is that we haven’t progressed much since the 19th century, which is when an article published in the magazine of the Franklin Institute showed up. Titled On the Best Arrangement of City Streets, the publication(image) gave an example of excessive planning which forgets the role and needs of the citizen. A drawing and two pages of text describe a mathematical formula, an urban science, that ensures the “right” agency of the streets. Such magical formula can lead to an under-used public space. Unfortunately, on a certain number of aspects, we haven’t found a method that improves the 1877 drawing.

There’s another problem:

Why is that so? Despite the fact that we live in a capitalist system, there are antagonistic concepts of capitalism but there are also models of capitalism which, although they are very antagonistic, coexist in the same space: the oligarchic model, the State model, the bureaucratic model. They don’t really follow the rules of the market. There’s a whole structure that prevents the market economy to function properly or that allows it to function only for a few entities.

But there is now another form of understanding the market and it’s brought to us by internet. “Markets are conversations.” The market here is seen as a deliberate form of aggregation of information, debate, decision making, deliberation between individuals. This is of course an ideal vision of how the market should function and it takes life when a series of barriers of access disappear or when a system enables information to flow freely and be accessed by everyone.

See Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, by William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm.

The solution is not only to eliminate “bad” capitalism but the alternative is “good” capitalism, the one that envisions market as a conversation. That’s where internet plays a key role, it eliminates those barriers and when it functions properly, it enables this idea of perfect markets with information that goes both way. This model is hypothetical but we are getting closer to it.

The public spaces we inherited from the 19th century can be called modernist. They were designed from top down, by an elite that cared for the wellbeing of the citizens yet, they have failed under several points of view. Those public space have given way in the 20th century to what we can call the Post-Modernist Public Spaces (even if the expression is questionable). They emerge as an answer to the obsolescence of the previous ones. If people are not going to the public spaces anymore, new -and this time private- opportunities are created for them: the shopping malls, the perfect example of post-modernist public space.

Las Vegas

Many people believe that cathedrals have been substituted by shopping malls. For many they are only simulacra of the city. The acme of this idea is Las Vegas. A project of creating a new Las Vegas in Los Monegros (Aragón, SP) could turn out to be an interesting experiment. The shopping mall is the mirror of the society of spectacle. Shopping malls are the new public spaces but not all evil comes from them: in many cases we use them because we don’t have alternative or because they represent the best alternative at our disposal. Private initiative, in some cases, has managed to provide us with what public spaces designed by the State have not offered us.

The next question is therefore: How can we take back those old public space and update them? What is left of them?

Berkley University urbanist Christopher Alexander has written: For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for “going through,” not for “staying in.

The traditional public space, made of squares and streets, have become what anthropologist Marc Augé calls the “Non-Places”. Rem Koolhaas goes further by christening them as Junkspace. In the post-modern vision, we move from private space we have to pay for and, as they are often located outside city centers, we have to drive through junkspace, non-places, spaces which have no immediate utility. The problem in the scenario is that interaction seem to have vanished. Social networks have shrunk to our own family circle or to shopping malls. A huge part of social interaction is missing. Are we ready to loose it? If we translate the scenario to the internet we have to imagine an internet where we can only find a commercial space and all the rest will just be junkspace.

Image by Tony de Marco

To put the finishing touch to the panorama we cannot leave aside the issue of publicity. The spaces between the private spaces we shop to, those junkspaces, are getting filled with advertisement. The vision about publicity is usually very critical and negative. When the Mayor of Sao Paulo in Brazil decided to eradicate any kind of advertisement in the city, his move has been welcome with not only wonder but also praise. Sao Paulo is the third city in the world. It counts almost 11 million inhabitants. Citizens, foreign observers, the press applauded the measure. Those who live from the revenues of publicity were less enthusiastic about it. But to which extent isn’t publicity part of our genome, of our ADN today? If you look at photos and videos of Sao Paulo without its billboards and advertising posters you get a slightly deshumanized vision. The structures that supported advertising are still there but they are empty, switched off. The buildings do not seem to be complete anymore. It seems that a crucial part of the city has been lost in the process. Maybe this effect is only transitory.

Image Tony de Marco

The following question is:

The answer is not clear of course.

Do public spaces still exist? Or are we left with only post-modernist spaces, connected between themselves by non-spaces or junkspaces?

Image city of sound

Freire illustrated the point by making an exercise of inverse engineering. The case study is the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit which took place last year in Sydney. It shows clearly what remains of a city when access to all public spaces is prohibited. All the security measures were taken to ensure that the event, the most impressive gathering of Heads of State the city had ever witnessed, would unfold without any glitch. Two blogs such as Subtopia (Fenceland and Subverting “Military IKEA”) and City of Sound (The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown) documented and analyzed quite shrewdly what happened in a city where access to public space was negated to its inhabitants, where extreme measures of security bring a whole city to a standstill with, for example, a 5km fence surrounding the Opera House area and Google Earth/Maps images of the area (and others) being blanked out or blurred. Important zones of public use where most of the city life was usually concentrated were militarized, closed down or saw their access strictly restricted.

Image city of sound

Streets, bike lanes, jogging tracks were closed, spaces where people would go to meet and chat were unaccessible. Fences had taken over the city. What is interesting is what you cannot see in the pictures collected by the bloggers: a way of living in the city being destroyed. When the public space and even the junkspace are eliminated from urban life, the city changes radically. Although we tend to be very critical of the way public space is deteriorating, is becoming useless, etc. reality is that public space is still a fundamental part of the city and not only as place of transit from one shopping mall to our house. By making this forced exercise of inverse engineering, we discover the value of places and things we have stopped to pay attention to.

Image subtopia

What is a public space? It depends on the capacity of auto-organization but also on market and community management

Public space depends on the capacity of auto-organization that we have. We must see further the concept of public space designed by the government for the citizen. The space cannot really be public if it doesn’t come with a certain capacity of self-management. Public spaces are hybrid, they combine market with community processes. The Common is much more sophisticated than we might think.

Image Google earth Burning Man

A fascinating exploration of public space is Burning Man. An outsider who attended the Fallas in Spain compared them with the Nevada-based festival. The former is organized by the State. Just after the party, the streets are filthy, there are traces of chaos all over the city. Burning Man instead is built and de-constructed by the community of participants without any top down supervision. After the party, the desert is left to its pristine state. No trash is left, the space is clean. The process is totally self-organized. The Burning Man community is able to create a public space which is not only dynamic but also ordered.

Burning Man is a public space that lives at the margins of Hardin’s theories.
Burning Man Time Lapse video

Image polar inertia

Another example is Quartzsite (Arizona) which functioning and dynamics have been described in Kazys Varnelis and Robert Sumrell’s book Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (i’ll join Juan Freire in his enthusiasm about the book, it’s a gem.)

Quartzsite is a desert town of some 3,000 people that every Winter swells to over a million residents (making it the 15th-largest city in the USA) as a horde of modern nomads descends upon it in their motorhome. With very little planning, they create a city which works perfectly, it has its own dynamics, its own market (unlike Burning Man, there is a money-based economy), exchanges of goods and services, etc. It is spontaneous, yet very efficient.

Image polar inertia

As Freire added, this is not the future of our cities but, making once again some exercises in reverse engineering, there are a few lessons that can be learnt from the Quartzsite experience. People as a group have far more intelligence than most would suspect. Sumrell and Varnelis call it ‘swarm intelligence’ – a human version of the behaviour often seen in ant colonies and the like.

Juan Freire then illustrated how hybrid a public space can be by showing us the main square of his city, A Coruña (Spain)

Public space functions quite well, it’s a very active area of the city. The secret to its success is the mix of private, community and public initiatives which take place on the Square. To be lively a square needs bars and there are plenty of bars here. There is also some space for people to self-organize and develop freely their own activities in a way that neither a bar nor a shopping mall can provide. The other requirement is some entity to think and design the whole experience and to create some urban furniture and other elements susceptible to foster all those activities.

Internet is the element missing from today’s equation. We cannot leave the internet aside anymore when we discuss public space. We live in a networked society. Many people say that we live both a physical life and a virtual life but Freire thinks that these two realities are getting more intertwined every day.

The networked society opens a new Commons. People don’t call it this way but the digital element is nevertheless essential. Internet was designed to be free and the knowledge that comes with it should be free as well. Although there is a huge amount of effort from above (copy right) to prevent knowledge from being free, it is nevertheless freeing itself.

We should see beyond the modernist vision of a traditional, well-planned public space. Today we are living a reality which is quite complex, hybrid and multi-faceted. Freire calls it an hyper-reality (in the “hyper-link” sense). Our public space today is hybrid in two ways:
– its environment is both physical and virtual,
– its management which is public, private and community-based at the same time.

A few words about Free Knowledge, starting with a quote from Stephen Downes: The greatest non-technical issue is the mindset. We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. It’s like electricity or water. It’s there, it’s available and it flows. It’s not stuff you collect….

Many people are horrified by the fact that knowledge flows continuously. They wouldn’t have any qualms about electricity flowing around us freely but they find the idea of a never stopping flow of information highly disturbing. They would like to be able to control it, to store it on the shelves of a library. But that’s a lost battle because information is going to increase more and more every day. An you know what? That’s a good thing. Especially if we manage to become curators of information. “We”, the users, not the so-called experts. We must become “digital chefs” and cook delicious dishes of information. The ingredients are out there on the web, the kitchen is packed with instruments which are free, or very cheap even when they come from some private or commercial initiative like Yahoo! or Google.

Reclaim the Spectrum

The second element we need is what Jose Luis de Vicente calls the “free spectrum“, we need to reclaim the use of the electromagnetic space. We need these electromagnetic infrastructures, no matter how intangible they are. As JL de Vicente wrote: “The radio spectrum – the electromagnetic space through which radio and TV broadcasts, mobile phone and GPS signals and WiFi networks circulate – is the real estate of the information society.” We can’t guarantee the freedom of information if we can’t control the structure that gives us access to it.

Reina Sofia Museum Extension, Madrid. Photo: Philippe Ruault (via arkhitekton)

Thirdly, we need those architects whom Freire calls the “post-spectacular architects”. Sure, we like the architects of the “spectacular”, we like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, Moneo’s addition to the Prado, Jean Nouvel’s extension of the Reina Sofia, etc. But these spaces have not been designed for physical nor digital interaction. We need architects who think from the perspective of the people who will “use” the spaces, not just the tourists. But how should we design with a perspective of participation? The focus should be less on the aesthetics and more on the efficiency and on the functionality (what are we building for?) These ideas won’t lead to an anti-aesthetics but to a new form of aesthetics. This aesthetics will not only be better suited to our requirements but it will also start adopting something of the open source philosophy, by sharing designs, methods, etc.

Besides, this architecture will be cheaper and faster. The main problem is that cities change very slowly. We live in the same Madrid as centuries ago, even if society is not the same as centuries ago. Physical changes are way slower than intangible changes. We’ll never manage to keep pace with society’s changes but we can do something about it.

Freire gave a few examples of the kind of projects that he would like to see bloom over the cities, adding that some of them start to get out of the “workshops ghetto” and appear in glossy magazines:

– Ecoboulevard of Vallecas near Madrid, designed by [ecosistema urbano]. Fast architecture that solves several problems while proposing an innovative and appealing aesthetics.

Ecoboulevard

– Santiago Cirugeda‘s Recetas Urbanas (Urban Prescriptions). Cirugeda hacks the legal code. Because his home town would not authorize him to build a playground, Santiago Cirugeda obtained a dumpster permit and installed a playground that looked like a dumpster. He also built and occupied a rooftop crane that passersby believed was there only to move building materials. There used to be a video on you tube where the architect used Playmobil toys to demonstrate how to build a temporary flat in your rooftop. The solutions Cirugeda proposes are cheap, fast, accessible to everyone and the key ingredient is to find out the gaps in administrative structure and official procedures, to intervene where the law falls short.

Is Cirugeda doing art, architecture or activism? Probably the three of them but does it really matter?

Inside Cirugeda’s insect house

– Vicente Guallart whose work is more often found in museums than in the streets, probably because his vision is still too futuristic. His Sociopolis project is a neighbourhood designed with a mind set on efficiency, functionality, digital networks,

Sociopolis

– Jose Perez de Lama, a member of the Sevilla-based collective hackitectura, believes that we need to build layers of digital information over physical spaces. Architecture, in its traditional definition, is relevant but not central. The space is built using mostly intangible elements: electronic flux, interfaces, audio, projections, words, bodies, landscapes, etc. We need to combine the tectonic with the electronic.

Hackitectura has illustrated their concepts with a series of interventions in public space. The most famous of which being the wikiplaza project in Sevilla which regards public space as multi-layered: there are bars, grass, cements and tarmac but there’s also the digital space.

Finally a bit of futuristic speculation. Future is in the hyperlocal networks. Paradoxically, internet has allowed us to be globally connected but it doesn’t help us enough when we want to be connected with what is in our own neighbourhood. That’s mobile telephony that we use (intensely) for local connections. The development of hyperlocal networks is a big opportunity, a double opportunity: both from the commercial and the citizen point of view.

Last July, Bruce Sterling wrote an inspiring article, Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future. A protagonist narrates his life in 2017 and how he moves in those hyperlocal networks.

In the 20th century appeared the Situationists. Among their ideas was the Dérive, an invitation to use the city in a new way. The Situationists failed in their attempt to radically change the world but they manage to predict what the future would bring. We use more and more the city like they said we ought to. This concept of the city as a space for exploration is getting more and more appealing.

The hyperlocal networks are made of elements which are already existing around us but they still have to be connected one to another. However, every day new initiatives appear that tell us that the situation is about to change. Here’s a rapid list of projects which Freire find as thought-provoking as inspiring. They might seem to be disconnected but if you put them together in a broader picture, you’ll see glimpses of a new reality emerge.

– hyperlinks with physical space, like google maps.

Aram Bartholl‘s project The Map

– the concept of ubiquitous computing which highlight the upcoming urbanism 2.0, cf. Adam Greenfield‘s essay Everyware.

– mobile internet, ubiquitous connectivity (ex. urban tapestries).

– the internet of things, of objects, what Bruce Sterling defined Spimes back in 2004. More in his book Shaping Things.

Image Bruce Sterling

– new initiatives like Semapedia to hyperlink the whole world.

– new possibilities to visualize people and the flux of information in urban space. One of the most famous example is Real Time Rome, the MIT SENSEable City Lab‘s contribution to the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.

– collaborative cartography. Geographical information is still private and is often submitted to copyrights. People can view the database but they are not allowed to take the data and use them as they wish. Fortunately some initiative are attempting to put an end to the geo-monopoly. E.g. the open and collaborative OpenStreetMap.

– the mash-ups which use google tools to propose more personal visions of space. Besides, these mashups enable users to monitor what is happening in physical space right here and right now (to track fires in California for example).

All these initiatives demonstrates that we have the opportunity to layer a digital skin over the city. The skin is not just a fad, it will make the urban experience more meaningful and useful. E.g. Urban Tapestries, a research project born in 2003, Dodgeball, Outside.in which aggregates, tags and structures local information available online, using thus individual activities to build instruments useful for everyone.

G. Orwell place, Barcelona

Freire, being the astute and realistic observer he is, also pointed out the darker face of public spaces by quoting Stephen Graham who wrote in Subtopia:

The real architectures of control already are algorithms, software, databases and microelectronic tracking systems, satellites and sensors, linked intimately to physical spaces, infrastructures and bodies, rather than the obvious architectonic brute force of walls and ramparts.

The future might be of the Orwellian type or it can be the one that Freire described in his presentation. It’s in the hands of citizens and whether they will adopt an active or passive role. Today we have the opportunity not only to protest but also to take things in our hands and push changes.

However, there’s another danger: the one created by people who do not understand internet. German philosopher and sociologist Juergen Habermas wrote that … in the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions of fragmented chat room across the world tend instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.

Freire believes that instead of just creating fragmentation, internet enable us to go beyond fragmentations.

Facebook, for example, counts many advantages but also many downsides. It’s a network you can close and keep for your friends exclusively

LifeAt creates private online communities for residential properties. It’s closed and “secure” with control over who has the right to use it and what can be published or not. There’s an absolute control over people and content. The model can be interesting for commercial companies or for facebook but in the context of public space, it would do more harm than good, it would mean applying post-modern concepts to new hybrid space.

As a conclusion, Freire quoted an article that urbanist José María Ezquiaga wrote for national newspaper El Pais. He adopted the Mai 68 moto “Sous les pavés la plage” (Under the cobblestones lies the beach) to tell us that we have to see beyond the ugliness of cobblestones and uncover the beaches that exist beneath them. Freire added, this time quoting Jose Pérez de Lama, that above the tarmac there is a digital layer. Although that layer is neither tangible nor visible, it set to fulfill a crucial role. If we use this additional layer intelligently and openly, then the future might indeed be appealing.

The Q&A which followed was almost as fascinating as the presentation itself but i’m done with the translation.

Just back from Frankfurt where i participated to the marvelously organized and well-attended Node08 Forum for Digital Art conference. As i was in town for two days, i visited All-Inclusive. A Tourist World at the Schirn Kunsthalle.

Ho-Yeol Ryu, Airport, 2005. Courtesy Ho-Yeol Ryu

All-Inclusive. A Tourist World presents works from 30 artists depicting and commenting on various phenomena influenced by the continually growing tourist industry.

Vladimir Raitz pioneered modern package tourism when in 1950 his company, Horizon, provided arrangements for a two-week holiday in Corsica. For an all inclusive price of £32.10s.-, holiday makers could sleep under canvas, sample local wines and eat a meal containing meat twice a day. Within ten years, his company had started mass tourism to Palma, Lourdes, Costa Brava, Sardinia, Minorca, Porto, Costa Blanca and Costa del Sol.

Jonathan Monk, #129, MALTA £189, (From the series: Holiday Paintings, 1992-2000). Photo: Anders Sune Berg, Copenhagen

An increase in the standard of living, affordable air travel and the development of the package tour enabled international mass tourism to thrive. For someone living in greater London, Venice today is almost as accessible as Brighton was 100 years ago.

The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) forecasts that international tourism will continue growing at the average annual rate of 4 % (at least in places where global warming won’t totally destroy the sector.) As a result international arrivals are expected to reach over 1.56 billion by the year 2020.

Ayse Erkmen, Safety Doors, 1996-2008. Photo: Norbert Miguletz

The All-Inclusive exhibition opens with 2 artworks which both evokes two of the most unpleasant moments that pave the tourist’s journey: the passage through security with AyÅŸe Erkmen‘s Safety Doors which will inevitably ring as you go through, and the wait for your suitcase with a baggage conveyor belt turning around its own axis by the Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset .

Uncollected (Baggage reclaim) (2005)

Further away, you’re met with another tourist staple: Tensa-barriers that control more than they guide your way along the long long queues. Eva Grubinger‘s Crowd, 2007 is separating one room of the exhibition to another one. There’s no alternative: you have to go through it and feel as foolish as ever.

Eva Grubinger, Crowd, 2007. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2007, Foto: Markus Hawlik

The mood is set, you’re not here to dream and get an overview of the most charming aspects of tourism. And you might exit the show feeling guilty to contribute to the phenomenon. Not that this will stop you from booking a Summer holiday next week.

Santiago Sierra, Banner suspended in front of a cove, Cala San Vicente, Mallorca, Spain. August 2001. Photo: Santiago Sierra

One of the most symbolic artworks show in Frankfurt is Santiago Sierra‘s 2001 action on a Spanish beach. In August, the peak of touristic period, he had a huge banner hung from a rock wall overseeing a beach in Mallorca that read “Inländer Raus” (“Natives, go away”), targeting the tension on the resort island between the Spanish residents and the German tourists. out). The work not only inverts the classic xenophobic motto “Auslander Raus” (Foreigners get the hell out), but it also overtly refers to German retirees and celebrities who have virtually displaced the Spanish natives in Majorca.

Responding to complains, the town council immediately ordered the banner torn down, then had it re-installed, and finally it mysteriously disappeared. Soon after the announcement that Sierra had been selected for the Venice Biennale, a series of articles in Spain’s mainstream press attacked the decision, probably because people were afraid the artist might destroy the Biennale pavilion.

The work evokes also the tremendous impact that tourism can have on an entire area. Think of Benidorm, that village turned “the Manhattan of the Costa Blanca”, or of that forgotten city in the Basque city which has become a tourists magnet since its Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997.

Martin Parr, The Matterhorn, 1990

The number one favourite activity of the tourist is taking picture. There are plenty of those in the show. Not by tourists but by renown photographers. Martin Parr’s (more in Martin Parr retrospective: from fish & chips to mass tourism) depict tourist patterns of behavior frozen to clichés in a Swiss mountain resort.

Reiner Riedler, Schilift, 2005

Reiner Riedler‘s lens focuses on artificial tourist landscapes. His photo series Artificial Holidays show people sunbathing on an indoor tropical island in Berlin, skying in Dubai, having dinner at the bottom of Florida’s very own Mexican pyramid are based on similar stereotypes. They confirm the theory that tourist photography mainly serves the purpose of confirmation and not of discovery.

Reiner Rieder, Indoor Pool “Tropical Islands” in Berlin Brandenburg

Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs show tourists in shorts, jeans and t-shirts with their cameras and guidebooks as they wander around museums with a look on their face that says that no matter how interested they might or might not be in the paintings hung on the walls, they just “have to” be there and be seen contemplating the works. You look at them and find it a bit repulsive then you realize you’re just one of them, no matter how educated and refined you might be. Last year, for example, art travel packets -including flights, car rental, entry tickets and hotel- enabled the enlightened to tour the most distinguished event of the European art Summer: the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, documenta in Kassel, and Skulptur. Projekte in Münster.

Thomas Struth, Audience 8 (Galleria dell’Accademia) Firenze, 2004

Thomas Struth, Audience 1, Firenze, 2004

NL Architects‘s futuristic scenarios do not forecast a brighter future. In their manipulated images, tourism is used as a weapon by invaders coming to your shores with amusement parks erected on the decks of aircraft carriers.

NL Architects, Cruise City, 2003. Courtesy: NL Architects, Amsterdam

NL Architects, Plugin City, 2007. Courtesy: NL Architects, Amsterdam

Tourism and travels are not just about cultural city trips and long afternoons at the beach, it can also be grounded in political and economic circumstances. The Moroccan artist Yto Barrada has captured this fact in A Life Full of Holes: The Straits Project, her photo series about Tangier and the Straits of Gibraltar. The narrow channel that divides Europe and Africa is a sea basin just 14 km across in some places. It is one of the most traveled waterways in the world, but few Africans are able to cross it. The photos examine the hope of migration, its influence on the Tangier cityscape and the temptations of leaving to begin a new life in the other side of the sea.

Yto Barrada, Women at Window, 2002. Foto © MUMOK

Yto Barrada, Bay of Tangier, 2002 (From the series: The straight project, 1999-2003)

All-Inclusive reminds us that tourism is one of the most powerful economic forces in the world and as such it is one of the hottest topics in the debate over globalization. Tourism doesn’t just bring mouthwatering economic perspectives, it comes with ecological and political aspects: migration, terrorism, pollution of the environment, prostitution, etc.

Both Stern and FAZ have slideshows.
“All-Inclusive. A Tourist World” is on show at the Schirn in Frankfurt from 30 January to 4 May 2008,

Today people will look down on you if your art space doesn’t have an exhibition dedicated to ecological issues on its agenda. Unsurprisingly, Milan still hasn’t organized anything worth mentioning but her little neighbour, the enlightened and chilly Turin, did. The show is called Greenwashing. Environment, Perils, Promises and Perplexities and is on view at the Fondazione Rebaudengo until May 11, 2008.

Here’s the premise: The diverse practices represented in the exhibition do not just point the finger at the degradation of our planet, they also make more tangible the contradictions and responsibilities that we encounter personally and as a society. Art here does not necessarily proclaim a ‘correct’ ethical or green choice, but allows the possibility for broadening and analysing our perceptions and actions.

Ettore Favini, Green is the Color of Money, 2007

The 25 artists and groups selected not only engage with emissions’ offsetting, food miles, environmental marketing, ecological footprints, and other eco-conscious issues but they also bring attention to their political and social consequences. Many of the works selected are extremely good at making environmental issues less abstract and remote from our daily reach. I’m glad i had the opportunity to see all these pieces in one go. That’s what thematic exhibitions are for, right? However, i couldn’t see much past the simple gathering of works, they have this environmental streak to keep them together but there is something missing in the curatorial vision. I don’t know the secret to curating an exhibition with a scope and breath which will go beyond the sum of all the works it gangs around but it sure is puzzling when the multiplier symbol is missing.

Still, this exhibition provides enough food for thought for people who are naive enough to believe that they can sleep soundly in their organic cotton bed linen just because they recycle glass, never print any paper unless they have no other choice and always bring their own bags to the supermarket.

I, for one, can say proudly that i only drive bikes (i don’t have a driving license anyway) but when i saw the posters of RAF / Reduce Art Flights i could only laugh out loud at my own candor. I might not own a Hummer but i take an awful lot of planes for my work.

Initiated by Gustav Metzger, the RAF campaign upholds that the art world – artists, curators, critics, gallerists, collectors, museum directors, and art bloggers too i guess – could or should swap planes for less carbon dioxide-emitting transports.

The RAF acronym deliberately echoes the Royal Air Force – the aerial warfare branch of the British military – as well as the militant left-wing group known as the Red Army Faction. The message is communicated by mass-produced leaflets first distributed during Sculpture Projects M??nster last Summer. The Turin version of the leaflet is available in art galleries and inserted into international mailings in connection with the exhibition.

View of Beyond Pastoral (Shroud of Turin) at the Rebaudengo

BP’s environmental record is pretty appalling. In 2000, British Petroleum changed its name to BP (Beyond Petroleum) and chose a yellow and green sunflower-like as its logo in a bid to highlight its interest in alternative and environmentally friendly fuels. Nevertheless BP was named one of the “ten worst corporations” in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation‘s installation Beyond Pastoral (Shroud of Turin) grows out of a project that the BHQF initiated for an exhibition in New York in 2007, which consisted of a 1/5 scale model of the BP petrol station located opposite the gallery, underneath which thousands of lemons and limes were arranged in the form of the BP logo.

Installation in New York. Photo Oto Gillen

Each fruit was wired with electrodes and together they generated enough electrical current to illuminate the model. The irony of this seemingly earnest demonstration of an alternative energy source lies in the fact that the citruses quickly started to rot, posing a health hazard. Besides, transporting the fruit had required hundreds of liters of fuel. The Turin version of the work presented only the beautifully parched carpet of lemons and videos documenting the New York installation.

A few weeks ago, i was in a museum bar in New York and almost fell of my chair when i was served a bottle of San Pellegrino, a water that (i think) comes from Lombardy in Italy. Minerva Cuevas‘s installation in Turin echoes our absurd and eco-damaging fetishism for “exotic” waters.

??galit?? (2003) also involves the sabotaging of a corporate graphic identity. Owned by the Danone group, Evian is probably the world’s best-known bottled water. Considering that the global market for bottled water multiplied more than 1000 times in the last decade – its average price is more than that of petrol – Cuevas has kept the shape and design of the bottle intact. Bar one detail: she replaced the familiar brand’s lettering by ??galit??, as in France’s motto, ‘Libert??, ??galit??, fraternit??’ (Liberty, equality, fraternity), subtly pointing out political issues linked to water throughout the world nowadays.

There is little equality as far as access to water is concerned, and those who have a seemingly unlimited access to it would rather pay ridiculous prices for something that comes almost freely from a tap.

Wilfredo Prieto‘s Estanque installation is a congregation of crude oil barrels choreographed to look like an idyllic lily pond habitat complete with water puddles and a live frog (which had left the building when i visited the show).

I’m the little frog on the oil pond!

Petroleum oil, which is itself an organic substance, is converted by the sheer iconic power of its container into a symbol of all of the ills of our fossil-fuel dependency. Yet the sculpture inevitably suggests the prospect of eco-advertising, as if its graphic visual summary of apparent amphibian-petroleum harmony could perfectly lend itself to an audacious company marketing department in a bid to demonstrate their ‘green’ industrial principles.

Simon Starling‘s ironic C.A.M. Crassulacean Acid Metabolism belongs to the artist’s fascinating series of “cactus works.” This installation is made of functioning cast iron radiators shaped like cacti and connected to a boiler with copper piping. The title of the work comes from a biochemical pathway that is a complex variation of photosynthesis, whereby some plants acquire carbon dioxide during the hours of darkness, minimizing thus eco-physiological stress and water loss from their leaves by avoiding gas exchange during the hot part of the day. C.A.M. opposes the supremely efficient and economical cactus strategy with the slightly ludicrous man-made radiators that expel heat into the exhibition space.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, whose life-sized clay hippopotamus had charmed me so much at the Venice Biennale in 2005, presented photos that document a participatory performance event they staged on the island of Vieques in March 2003 together with local residents and activist groups protesting against the U.S Military occupation of the island. The U.S had bought the land from the Puerto Rican government and had been using it for military exercises, and as a firing range and testing ground for bombs, missiles, and other weapons. The military experiments brought together with them severe ecological damage.

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot prints) #2, Set II, 2001-2004

Allora & Calzadilla designed rubber shoe soles to be worn during actions of protest. When activists illegally entered the bombing range, they left behind indented messages for the US military staff. The imprints were a way of reclaiming the disputed territory, giving new power to the term “landmark.”

Today the contested territory, though still contaminated and debated, is a wildlife reserve under the protection of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Verdict: Greenwashing is a moving exhibition worth taking the train for if you ever come to Milan this month for the Salone del Mobile. I’m sure there will be some inspiring projects and gadgets presented this year at the international furniture fair. I wonder if any of them will have the strength of most of the artworks i discovered at the Fondazione Rebaudengo the other day.

I went camera-crazy again.

GREENWASHING will run at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo centre for contemporary art in Turin, Italy through 11 May 2008.

Related: Book review: Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century; Ecological Strategies in Today’s Art (part 1 and 2).

Previously at the Fondazione Re Rebaudengo: Murakami exhibition in Turin.

Image on the homepage: Amy Balkin, Public Smog, 2004.

Nice, nice. I’ve lost my connecting flight and now i’m stuck in Madrid Barajas waiting for the next flight to Sevilla. It’s an 8 hour wait but i’m on my way to ZEMOS98 so i am still cheerful.

Anyway, gives me plenty of time to catch up with the emails and the long overdue posts. So back to New York where i was a few days ago and the Exit Art gallery. I’m still wondering how this place managed to escape my radar so far.

Until April 19 they are running a fascinating exhibition on artistic explorations of the current advancements in neurological research. The works shown in BRAINWAVE: Common Senses encourage visitors to consider the brain not only as the center of human activity but as a site for interpretation, for scientific and philosophical debates, for examining our relationship to the world – and for questioning our common sense.

I am usually not very excited by media art works which engage with the little grey cells. Blame it on the BrainBar, when i discovered it i somehow felt that had seen it all. Well, maybe not… I went to Exit Art to see Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns’ robot that “plays back dreams” which was twice as fantastic as i expected but i also discovered 2 or 3 outstanding works.

Suzanne Anker‘s fascinating and elegant The Butterfly in the Brain uses three-dimensional Rorschach inkblot tests, brain scans and images of butterfly wings to explores the imagery of the symmetrical (or virtually symmetrical) structures of butterflies, the brain, and chromosomes.

I somehow can’t get the black hovering butterfly bat she painted on the wall out of my mind. “By taking the butterfly bat image out of a textbook, scaling it up to a large size, and putting it in a site-specific environment, one turns the image into an entirely new and other kind of affective entity,” she explained.

Suzanne Anker, The Sum of All Fears (detail). Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Although the use of Rorschach inkblots is controversial in psychology, the images are widely recognized among the public.

Crab, 2005

Anker used a computer program to convert an inkblot into 3D structure so intricate they could probably not be re-created using traditional sculpture. After which a machine produces the object using plaster and resin. “Looking in 3-D,” Anker argued, “one begins to assess new meanings: bones, sea creatures, body parts. These are surrogates for the imagination itself, opening up a dialog between the mind and body. What happens when you can pick up a psychology test in your hand? The mind essentially has been embodied.”

Gossipers, 2005 (more images)

She also transposed butterfly wings onto MRI scans, drawing a parallel between genetic patterns in nature and advanced imaging technologies. Like constellations in the sky, butterfly shapes may be found in neurological maps as well as charts of urban sprawl.

Suzanne Anker, MRI Butterfly (detail). Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Another work i found really moving and riveting was a video installation by Phil Buehler, a photographer, fascinated by “haunted ruins” of abandoned Psychiatric Hospitals.

Buehler, Windows of the Soul. Image courtesy of the Exit Art gallery

Windows of the Soul, asks whether or not one can read madness in another’s eyes. 300 b&w mug shot photographs of mental patients, taken in the ’50s when they were admitted in the hospital. The eyes of the individuals are projected on a canvas hanging from the ceiling. The rest of the face lays on the floor. Every 5 seconds, another pair of eyes and a face take their place on the split screen. Riveting and disturbing.

Dustin Wenzel‘s brass sculptures are brain-cavity castings of Great Whales from the New Brunswick Museum collection.

Dustin Wenzel, (front) Sperm Whale Endocranial Cast, (back) Right Whale Endocranial Cast. Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

It has recently been discovered that some humpback whales have spindle neurons, a type of brain cell previously considered to exist only in dolphins, humans and other primates, which may indicate a high capacity for intelligence. Although white males possess the largest physical brain of any animals (Wenzel’s castings were indeed impressively big), there is no scientific consensus about the nature, magnitude or even existence of cetacean intelligence.

And now for the gizmos:

Jamie O’Shea, Alvin (image courtesy of Exit Art gallery)

Artificial neural networks are often used in voice recognition systems and IA research. They consist in mathematical computations that mimic the neural network patterns of the nervous system. Jamie O’Shea‘s Alvin is a realization of an interactive and electronic neural network constructed with physical hardware. When left alone Alvin is dormant, but if you the lay your hand on the interface provided, you will set an electronic neural-like network in motion.

Alvin is a cellular automaton organized around eight cells which produce sound. The sound one cell produces is determined by what sound the other cells are making. This interrelated input and output scheme is an artificial neural network; a simulation of a brain. The imitation of life goes even further, because Alvin’s sound circuits are built and destroyed by one another, rather than just turned on or off.

Swarm, by David Bowen (whom i interviewed a year ago), is an autonomous roaming device whose movements are determined by houseflies housed inside the device itself.

David Bowen, Swarm (detail). Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

The chamber where they live contains food, water and light to keep them warm but also sensors that detect the changing light patterns produced by their movements. The sensors send the light data to an on-board microcontroller, which in turn activate the motors moving the device in relation to the movements of the flies.

David Bowen, Swarm. Image courtesy of Exit Art Gallery

Oh, look! i took all those little images.

BRAINWAVE: Common Senses is on view until April 19, 2008 at Exit Art Gallery in New York. This exhibition is part of Exit Art’s Unknown Territories series of exhibitions that explore the impact of scientific advances on contemporary culture and examine in particular how contemporary artists interpret and interact with the new knowledge and possibilities created by technological innovation in the 21st century.

Last week i flew to one of my favourite cities, Liverpool, to visit the Sk-interfaces exhibition at the FACT art center. The show, curated by Jens Hauser, explores, materially and metaphorically, the concept of skin as a technological interface.

A controversial new exhibition on display in Liverpool showcases real skin tissue in sculptures wrote the BBC news website. Yet every single person i spoke with during the 2 days i spent in the city didn’t seem to find the show controversial. Interesting, surprising, fascinating, challenging, thought-provoking, worth bringing my mum, etc. That’s what i heard but no one i talked to seemed overly shocked nor disturbed.

There is material to cause quite a stir in sk-interfaces but Liverpudlians seemed to be more concerned by the issues brought to light by the artists than by the potentially seditious or “freaky” character of the works on show.

I’ll start the blog visit of this multi-disciplinary exhibition by walking to the second floor of FACT.

Critical Art Ensemble, Immolation. Image courtesy of the artists

Immolation is a video installation concerned with the subject of the use of incendiary weapons on civilians after the Geneva Convention and the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons of 1980. The USA have refused to sign the convention and they make regular use of firebombs in the Middle East. Not because these bombs are the most efficient (they are not), but because they act as moral crushers, tapping on people’s visceral fear of being burned alive.

This video chronicles the major war crimes of the United States involving these weapons on a ( macro) landscape level, and contrasts it with the damage done to the body on the (micro) cellular level.

To accomplish this task, the Critical Art Ensemble (a collective of tactical media practitioners who explore the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism) grew human tissue at SymbioticA last year, and using high-end microscopy shot the micro footage of skin cells dying by either exploding or imploding. In parallel, CAE shows film footage of present and past wars that have used immolation against civilian targets as a strategic choice for the sole purpose of terrorizing entire populations.

Critical Art Ensemble, Immolation

The result is a video where war crime are shown at both the micro and macro level but which skips the human level. Yet you still manage to view your own body in the narrative. The video is made even more unsettling by the absence of sound, it’s just silence and destruction.

The goal is to provide a different way of imaging, viewing, and interpreting the human costs of these war crimes, in contrast to the barrage of media imagery to which we have become so desensitised. The video portrays what CAE calls an “ecology of crime.”

CAE felt that as long as warfare would be at the center of the Bush agenda, they had to come up with new connections and find venues to show their work (since the arrest of Steve Kurtz some US administrations are feeling the pressure).

Right next to Immolation, is Truth Serum, a work that responds to the lawsuit against Steve Kurtz and their persecution of Critical Art Ensemble in the USA, which marks an ever-increasing creep of the security state into the nervous system of culture.

For Truth Serum, The Office of Experiments, initiated by Neal White, follows research on serums used historically by official authorities in interrogation processes as a means to obtain information without using torture. The effects of truth drugs were first examined in the 1920’s, and heavily used by the CIA during the Cold War. The present artwork echoes the debate around art’s freedom in the fear and increasing security regime that has emerged after 9/11, while drawing on the cultural history of so-called truth drugs and recent discussions about their use in the interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Scopolamine, an ingredient used in truth serums (image courtesy of Neil White)

The use of truth serums is actually illegal but after 9/11 there have been talks (mostly in the press) of using the method again during interrogations by the FBI and the CIA, even though truth serums are more an art than a science.

The installation at FACT combines a space concealed behind a white door and a series of video works that reflect on the aesthetics of terrorist messages, using a dark clown as an anonymous spokesman who reflects on the possibility of carrying out mass self-experimentation with truth drugs as a form of self-defence.

On 29 March 2008, volunteers will be able to participate to the performative part of the Truth Serum installation in support of freedom from artistic censorship.

In a central (and still secret) Liverpool location, participants will willingly submit themselves to a short psychological experiment based on substantiating Truth lasting around 10 minutes. The aim is to probe an atmosphere of paranoia spreading since 9/11.

More information to participate.

My pictures and FACT pictures.

sk-interfaces is on view until March 30 and launches FACT’s Human Futures programme which includes 3 sections – My Body (SK-Interfaces), My Mind and My World, each one hosting a major exhibition, conference and research focus. You can follow its development through Human Futures blog.

Related: They make art not bioterrorism, Jens Hauser’s presentation in Aix en Provence (part 1 and 2.)

Last month, i went to Florence to visit Emotional Systems, the inaugural exhibition of the brand new Strozzina.

You’re going to hear about the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS) in the coming months i’m sure. The space was created as platform for the different approaches and practices that characterise the production of contemporary art and culture. That doesn’t seem much but in a city like Florence which lives and breathes Renaissance there was very little space left for contemporary art so far. Its Project Director Franziska Nori is a curator of new media art (she co-produced and curated produced exhibitions such as I Love You exploring the worlds of hackers and viruses, adonnaM.mp3 devoted to p2p and file-sharing, Digital Origami about the demo scene.) CCCS is not a digital art center though but its mission is to highlight all forms of contemporary culture and this includes media art.

Just to wet your appetite, CCCS’s next exhibition CINA CINA CINA !!! will present the work of 15 contemporary Chinese artists whose artistic practice searches for an independent cultural identity free of the restrictive rules of the global market. It opens on March 21 and closes on May 4.

Palazzo Strozzi (image)

The exhibition space is located in the recently restored spaces under the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, an impressive don’t-mess-with-me palace in Florence. Its construction begun in 1489 by Benedetto da Maiano, for banker and statesman Filippo Strozzi the Elder, a rival of the Medici who wanted the most magnificent palace as a political statement of his own status. Filippo Strozzi died in 1491, long before the construction’s completion in 1538. Duke Cosimo I de Medici confiscated it in the same year, not returning it to the Strozzi family until thirty years later.

The exhibition that launched the center was Emotional Systems – Contemporary Art between Emotion and Reason. Curated by Franziska Nori and phenomenologist Martin Steinhoff, the show invited the audience to reflect on the relationship between the contemporary artist, the artwork and the viewer, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions.

Christian Nold, Emotional Mapping Greenwich, 2005

Each room of the Strozzina is devoted to one artist, each focusing on different aspect of emotion and empathy with the public. All of them are perfectly documented on the exhibition website, but here’s a selection:

Teresa Margolles, Aire, 2003

Teresa Margolles‘ installation takes you by the guts. The strategy of Air/Aire is as minimalistic as it is powerful, it calls for the immediate reality of experience rather than the power of representation, the whole experience is paradoxicaly triggered not by an image but an absence.

You enter the installation room through a transparent plastic curtain, the kind that you’d expect to find in the workshop of a butcher. The room is completely white and apparently empty apart from a working air-conditioning unit. The air is slightly humidified.

That’s it, so you either pass your way thinking that it is just an empty room or spot the exhibition label and start to read the elements used in making the installation: the conditioning system and vaporised water.

Image from an other work of the artist: Muerte sin fin

As a visceral motor reaction, disgust is included together with fear and pain among the primary emotions pinpointed by Italian neuroscientist Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti as underlying the so-called “mirror mechanism”.

The active agents of this mechanism are the mirror neurons in the brain, a particular class of neurons characterized by the property of firing not only when the individual performs a particular action but also when he or she sees or simply hears someone else perform it. In short, when someone observes a work of art, this triggers a sort of re-creation in the sense that the viewer does not remain passive but projects his or her ‘inner state’ onto it.

A good example of this emotional transfer is Bill Viola‘s video series The Passions in which everyday people perform scenes from the classic Christian iconography. The figures are extrapolated from religious symbology and re-contextualized in a timeless and universally poetic dimension as a metaphor of the essence of the human condition.

Bill Viola, Observance, 2002. Photo credit Kira Perov

Observance draws inspiration from Albrecht Dürer‘s The Four Apostles (1526), a pair of altar wings depicting the grief shared by the four apostles over the death of Christ. It has sometimes been said that the work can be taken partly as a response to September 11. Actors enter and exit the performance space with their eyes fixed on a set point that remains hidden but seem to be located in the spectator’s space.

Although we are not permitted to see the cause of the performers grief, we can guess that death and loss are the reason for their emotion. It’s hard not to think of 9/11. The entire action unfolds in silence and extreme slow motion.

The third work i’d like to highlight is Nomadic Time, an installation, devised by Andrea Ferrara, a.k.a. Ongakuaw, which involves the connecting of a performer to a machine that detects her brainwaves.

The device monitors four types of waves generated by the human brain:

alpha waves which come from the subconscious mind and are generated primarily by the region of the memory, upon which the subconscious is based; beta waves which are born in the conscious mind, and are related to all activities during the awake state when the person is concentrated on external stimuli; theta waves which constitute waves of psychical power together with delta waves; gamma waves which are those of the deep psychical powers, like those of a medium in a trance.

While the performer is closed in the cage like a laboratory animal. She is made to watch a video,while her emotional response in the form of waves emitted by the brain is recorded, codified and digitally sampled by computer.

The video sequence shows 257 still shots of a tree by the River Arno, photographed by the artist in the course of the year.

The number of these shots corresponds to the number of days that Ferrara was actually on the spot to photograph the tree. The days when he could not make it are symbolized by single black image that appears for a fraction of a second on the screen and have only a subliminal impact on the spectator. This absence is also represented by the absence of the performer in the moments when the performance is suspended, leaving just the objects in an empty cage.

The coding is used as a control for an algorithmic compositional strategy of acoustic data. A custom-built software translates the waves recorded into musical sounds broadcast in the exhibition space, and the sound thus generated represents a real-time mapping of the emotions felt by the performer.

I’d also like to recommend the catalog that accompanies the exhibition as a way to explore the subject. It’s in fact a carefully selection of essays by neurologists, philosophers, anthropologists, art historian, and the curators who present with the peculiar perspective of their own discipline the rationality of emotions and, in David Freedberg’s words, the “relations between the formal aspects of an image and the emotional responses” of the user.

More images on flickr and CCCS.

Yves Netzhammer, The Subjectivisation of Repetition, 2007

Christian Nold, Emotional Mapping San Francisco, 2007

Last week (or was it two weeks ago already?) i was in beautiful Stockholm to visit the Man Machine 2 exhibition, produced at the Interactive Institute and curated by Björn Norberg.

What makes the show particularly interesting was the whole production process. It all started from scratch, only a few months before the opening of the exhibition, with a brainstorming where contemporary artists Matti Kallioinen, Ebba Matz and Christian Partos shared views and experience with engineers. The questions the discussion focused on revolved around the way we use the machine and how the human mind and body have interplayed with the machine historically and how man and machine will interact in the future.

After that the artists got the opportunity to have a peak inside the National Museum of Science and Technology‘s storage facility (usually closed to the public). Going from shelf to shelf the artists got to know the story of some of the artefacts belonging to the Museum’s collection and were invited to position this technological cultural heritage in relation to their own artistic expression. Throughout the process the artists were in constant dialog with engineers, the Interacting Institute and the curators from the National Museum of Science and Technology.

Which brings me to another peculiarity of the show: it takes place inside a museum of technology. Not an art gallery, nor a contemporary art museum. This situation reflects one of the Interactive Institute’s missions: to bring media art and interactive pieces outside of its usual territory and give it a broader audience.

Photo Truls Nord

The artists were asked to choose one artefact each out of the collection. Partos chose a pacemaker, Kallioinen a wooden bellows and Matz a perpetuum mobile.

What i also found worth noting is that. if Christian Partos is used to work with technology Kallioinen and Matz were less familiar with it.

“One important thing with the “Man Machine concept” has been to create a platform where artist and engineer meet, exchange ideas and solve problem together,” Björn Norberg, the curator of Man Machine 2, told me. “There’s a lot of inspiration from E.A.T. and Billy Klüver, the pool that matches engineers and artists. When I was given the chance for both Man Machine and Man Machine 2 and decided to take the opportunity to work with artists that I hadn’t been working with before but also to create a mix in between them, both as artists and in the knowledge about technology and the age of them.”

“If the artists are just open minded, are used to work in different materials and have a lot of ideas there will always be interesting to let them play around with technology and let them meet engineers. The knowledge about technology is then less important.”

The first clinical implantation into a human of a fully implantable pacemaker was in 1958 in Solna, Sweden, using a pacemaker designed by dr Rune Elmqvist . Christian Partos’ installation has the same role as the pacemaker: it keeps a heart beating.

The griffins were created for the roof of the building of the national telegraph board that was located in central Stockholm but had somehow found their way to the museum’s back yard. Partos rescued them and trusted them with a display case filled with shiny objects taken from the museum’s collections. Each creature is holding a plate with a glass bell jar, one containing an ancient clock and one containing what appears to be a beating human heart. When the heart beats, is squirts out a red liquid from a tube. The liquid pours down into a small plastic funnel and from there back into the heart.

The accompanying soundscape evokes slow heart beats. It is actually made by picking up the sounds from the room and looping them back.

Video of the installation.

Photo Erik Sjödin

Matti Kallioinen had an idea of working with air in some way. He liked the idea that air needs to be enclosed before you can use it as a power. His choice was a wooden bellows of the type used in the old iron factories.

In his installation The Food chain and Dream World of the Organism the audience and a sophisticated sensor controlled fan construction function as bellows. Erik Sjödin has some amazing images from the installation and a performance.

Photo Truls Nord

Visitors can pick up their own tube of plastic and use it to blow up a whole landscape of shapes in just a few seconds (ventilation fans are there to make it much easier and swifter). The landscape acts like an organism, it respond to breath by shifting in color, emitting sounds and by growing in size. After a few seconds, eerie ghost-like figures appear on the surface of the structure.

Erik Sjödin, who has worked on the installation together with the artist explains how it works:

The sound scape that surround the installation, the color of the bodies and the rate at which the colors shifts is determined by the growth of the installation and the airflow measured in the tube. The growth of the installation is monitored by five ultrasonic range sensors, its color is set by sixteen green and red lamps who illuminate the bodies from their insides. A video projection with accompanying sound fades in and out on the center sphere as it is inflated and deflated. When no one is interacting with the installation it emits ambient sounds and slowly shifts color while occasionally inflating itself slightly. A spotlight illuminates the umbilical cord so as to invite people to grab it and start interacting with the installation.

Photo Truls Nord

The performance and costumes of the ghosts were created specifically for the installation (videos from the event which took place in New York 1 and 2.)

Photo Truls Nord

Swedish inventor P J Hoffring built perpetuum mobile and called it “Paradox”, alas! it hardly ever worked. His struggle to fight against the laws of nature inspired Ebba Matz’ dome in the exhibition.

Matz’ dome takes you to a journey inside a kaleidoscope. The inside is covered of mirrors and when you move inside you are surrounded by images of yourself in an endless repeat.

But the mirrors are not just mirrors. Images leaks in from the outside and are mixed with the reflection of the mirror. The mirror is not just a reflecting surface but also the boundary between outside and inside and the connection between what happens inside and what is projected from the outside.

Image by Ingvar Sjöberg

Right after the pendulum, the artist`s inspiration was the Pepsi Pavilion created for the Expo ’70 in Osaka. The Pavilion’s interior dome immersed visitors in 3D images generated by mirror reflections and in spatialized electronic music.

The original structure of the pavilion consisted of a Buckminster Fuller-style geodesic dome. With some of his projects, and in particular his Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller was dreaming of solving the energy and housing problems for ever. Hoffring´s pendulum was also looking for the eternal solution, the one of never-ending movement.

E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology, «Pepsi Pavilion for the Expo ’70», 1970
Photograph: Fujiko Nakaya | ©

All the works were built in few weeks using open source technology: Processing, Arduino, Open Framework.

My images.
The Physical Interaction Lab has some more info and videos.

Until April 28, at the Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. Man Machine is a part of the node.stockholm festival which runs until February 15 throughout the city.