WANT, a collaboration between MTAA and Radical Software Group, uses 900 video clips of actors to illustrate search-engine requests. It’s as goofy and perplexing and overwhelming and sad as the Internet itself. The next time you use a search engine with one of those “Other users are currently searching for . . .” features, you won’t be able to resist picturing the forlorn, chubby face that goes with the query for “SALMA HAYEK EATING COOKIES.”

Tonight (May 7)
The Colbert Report
Comedy Central
11:30 (Eastern and Pacific)/10:30 (Central and Mountaln)

I’m going to be on The Colbert Report discussing my project, “Tracking Transience” and how do deal with being on a terrorist watchlist. Stephen Colbert is supposedly doing a little story on Nelson Mandela still being on the terrorist watchlist…I guess Mandela was unavailable, so they called me.

Yale University said on Monday that it would not allow a senior to participate in a campus art exhibition unless she made a written statement that her “performance,” in which she repeatedly inseminated herself and then induced miscarriages, was a fiction that she had concocted. In an article on Thursday in The Yale Daily News, the student, Aliza Shvarts, right, was quoted as saying that she had inseminated herself “as often as possible” over several months while taking herbal drugs to induce miscarriages, which she recorded on video to display for her senior-year art project at a show beginning on campus on Tuesday. Her claim drew intense criticism. Yale said last week that Ms. Shvarts had told three university officials that she had not inseminated herself or induced abortions but had made up the story as part of the project. On Friday, however, Ms. Shvarts insisted she had really experienced “repeated, self-induced miscarriages,” although she said that she had not known if she was actually pregnant. Yale officials said the denials were part of the continuing art performance, and on Monday demanded that it end. Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, and Robert Storr, dean of the School of Art, also said that they had found “serious errors of judgment” on the part of Ms. Shvarts’s adviser and an art instructor who knew of the project. They did not identify the adviser or instructor, though Ms. Shvarts has said that her adviser was Pia Lindman. Mr. Salovey said that “appropriate action” had been taken against the two teachers, but did not elaborate. Neither Ms. Shvarts nor Ms. Lindman could be reached for comment.

Eva and Franco Mattes continue their investigations into power, authorship and identity with “The Surrogates” a new performance based video project. Combining elements of theater, video, surveillance, and social interaction, “The Surrogates” transforms OTO into an experimental social space questioning the distinction between the viewer and the viewed.

BRIEF OVERVIEW
What is the meaning of “live” in today’s virtual world? The Beall Center for Art and Technology is pleased to present LIVE, an exhibit which features nine artists who sample and transform data, photographs and video from the Internet and incorporate it into their sculptures and installations. The LIVE exhibit will be open to viewers April 3 – June 7, 2008.

[…]

CURATOR’S STATEMENT
The title of this exhibition poses a question—how do we define and experience what is live when the majority of our daily interactions are increasingly mediated and reconfigured by various technologies? And how does this change our perception of what is considered real or actual versus what is virtual? Līve features nine artists who sample and transform data, photographs and video from the Internet and incorporate it into their sculptures and installations. Either extracting live footage or transmitting data in real time, they cull from diverse sources including Congressional speeches from C-Span, websites with Iraqi war casualties, a critique of consumerism from a peer-to-peer network and on-line video surveillance. As the artists isolate ideas and images from the steady stream of unrelenting data, they produce thought-provoking, aesthetic and “līve” works of art that also challenge our ideas of real and virtual experience.

In 1889 in Time and Free Will, the philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that the “real” and the “unreal” do not exist, there is only the actual and virtual — the actual is that which science describes and quantifies, while the virtual is what we process in our minds. As we take in the input of the actual world through our senses and process a series of physical and quantifiable information, it is transformed into conscious and unconscious responses, as our minds become a repository of virtual experiences.

As communication technologies such as telegraph and telephone were invented, there was suddenly a great physical distance between the sender and the receiver. The innovation of radio and television broadcast media increased this spatial displacement even further, transforming one-to-one personal communication into live events experienced by masses of people. The advent of recording technology increased displacement not just the spatially but also temporally: recordings became like memories fixed in both form and time, just as writing allowed speech to be fixed as text. As Plato noted in his famous account of conversations between Socrates and Phaedrus, throughout history the direct experience and dialogical nature of live speech has always been privileged over recorded text.

Even today it is always emphasized and privileged when any event—a breaking news story, a natural disaster, a sports match or a performance is presented “live.” Since the 1990s with the omnipresence of the Internet and more recently, Web 2.0 technologies such as You Tube, Flicker and social net-working sites, the notion of live experiences has become more spontaneous and democratized. Artists noticed these changes in the mid-1990s in the first generation of web-based artworks.

The artists in Live build upon this early work, but expand that vocabulary, extending their art from the web page into the gallery. Their wide range of approaches, forms and methods explore the space/time displacements of mediated events and how those events are both transmitted and remediated.

EcoArtTech will be demonstrating their Environmental Risk Assessment Rover-­AT at Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY each evening at dusk on 3/27, 3/28, and 3/29, 2008.

Ecoarttech’s ERAR-AT is part of the Neuberger Museum of Art’s “Off the Grid” Exhibition, March 30 - June 1, 2008. “Off the Grid” features works that subvert and circumvent conventional infrastructures. Co-presented by the Neuberger Museum of Art and free103point9 and curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Galen Joseph-Hunter, Tianna Kennedy, and Tom Roe.
http://www.free103point9.org/events/1678

Participating artists: Benjamin Cohen, Dylan Gauthier, and Stephan von Muehlen, EcoArtTech, eteam, Max Goldfarb, Louis Hock, Nina, Katchadourian, Kristin Lucas, Joe McKay, Trevor Paglen, Temporary Services, Seth Weiner, Bart Woodstrup

CREATIVE CAPITAL RECEIVES GRANT FROM THE TOBY FUND TO SUPPORT EMERGING FIELDS ARTISTS

$540,000 to benefit artists working in alternative gaming, internet-based activism, new media installations, robotics, and more

NEW YORK, NY (March 20, 2008) — Creative Capital, the premier national artist support organization, is the recipient of a major, three-year gift from The TOBY Fund, established by collector, philanthropist, and former curator Toby Devan Lewis. This $540,000 gift specifically supports the production costs of Creative Capital emerging fields artists, a category that encompasses artists whose work includes imaginative uses of new technologies, as well as genre-blurring applications of familiar creative practices.

“From our very first grant round in 1999, Creative Capital was committed to artists whose work doesn’t neatly fit the usual discipline categories,” said Creative Capital’s president Ruby Lerner, “While the sometimes indefinable nature of these projects is tremendously exciting, it also creates a handicap, as this kind of work often lacks the support infrastructure of more traditionally defined disciplines. Ms. Lewis has always had a similar passion for artists who boldly cross all sorts of boundaries — discipline, aesthetic, thematic — and we’re thrilled that The TOBY Fund for Emerging Fields at Creative Capital will draw more attention to how these artists challenge the very landscape of the contemporary arts.”

The TOBY Fund grant will allow Creative Capital to support more of its emerging fields grantees at the $50,000 level, the organization’s maximum award. These artists will also benefit from the organization’s trademark program of artist services, which is valued at an additional $25,000 per artist. To date, Creative Capital has funded 48 emerging fields projects representing 65 artists, with $1.1 million in direct funding and more than $1 million in artist services. Artists previously supported through this category include Cory Arcangel, Luca Buvoli, Hasan Elahi, Marie Sester and art collectives such as The Yes Men and SubRosa. The organization is currently conducting a grant round that will result in another class of emerging fields grantees being announced in early 2009.

When I was DJing, playing Can, Liquid Liquid, ESG, all that kind of stuff, I became kind of cool for a moment, which was a total anomaly. And when I heard other DJs playing similar music I was like: ‘Fuck! I’m out of a job! These are my records!’ But it was like someone had crept into my brain and said all these words that I hate. Did I make the records? Did I fuck! So, I started becoming horrified by my own attitude. I had this moment of glory though. People would use me to DJ just to get them cool. They’d be like ‘It’s the cool rock disco guy’ and this was really weird. And to be honest I was afraid that this new found coolness was going to go away and that’s where ‘Losing My Edge’ comes from. It is about being horrified by my own silliness. And then it became a wider thing about people who grip onto other people’s creations like they are their own. There is a lot of pathos in that character though because it’s born out of inadequacy and love.

We support: New Media Art, by which we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and also works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned projects can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, or the web.

As far as I can remember red has always looked good to me—on cars, on Detroit Redwing uniforms.

“Who is going to decide what art is?” he wrote in an e-mail message. “For sure it is not the art institution if the authors are still alive and can speak.”

“The Blazing World,” a screening to be held on March 25, marks the beginning of Light Industry, a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project will begin as a series of weekly events this spring and summer, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator, including Peggy Ahwesh, Cory Arcangel, Rebecca Cleman, Ben Coonley and Michael Smith, Bradley Eros and Brian Frye, eteam, Kendra Gaeta and Laris Kreslins, David Gatten, Lia Gangitano, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Nick Hallett, William E. Jones, Andrew Lampert, Dennis Lim, Mark McElhatten, MTAA, Marisa Olson, Jacob Perlin, Seth Price, Jennifer Reeves, Eddo Stern, and Dan Streible, among others.

Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media. Bringing together the worlds of contemporary art, experimental cinema, new media, documentary film, and the academy, to name only a few, Light Industry looks to foster a complex dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.

For its opening seasons, all events will take a place on Tuesdays at 8PM in Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that’s home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of rent-stabilized studios for artists in need of low-cost rental space. This program was conceived in response to the lack of affordable workspace for artists in New York City and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial redevelopment—one that does not displace artists, workers, local residents or industry but instead builds a sustainable community in a context that integrates cultural and industrial production.

[…] It is an excerpt from a film made in 1981 by the Danish documentary film director and author Jørgen Leth called “66 Scenes from America”.

I remember seeing the excerpt at some time on Danish TV with Leth explaining the story - the point was quite simply to film Andy Warhol (an American icon) eating a hamburger (another American icon). Unfortunately, the film crew forgot to buy a soft drink along with the hamburger, but Warhol took — or rather ate —it in its stride.

10 performers outfitted in medieval/space/fantasy armor re-create Bruce Nauman’s 1973 work “Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down”. Performed in slow motion and combined with movements based on computer game death animations, this piece is accompanied by a high volume binaural beats reputed to induce out of body experiences.