JODI: Street Digital
The latest issue of the Millennium Film Journal, MFJ No. 56, with a focus on “material practice” came out during Superstorm Sandy. It includes my review of JODI’s show at the Museum of the Moving Image, Street Digital, curated by Michael Connor. JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmansare) have been heroes of mine since I first encountered their net.art in the 1990s and I was so excited to experience a full museum show of their recent work in NYC. Here is a favorite recent project of theirs: Folksomy – a crowd-sourced collection of videos of “people doing strange things with computers.” “Folksomy” is a misspelling of the term “folksonomy” (which is a term that refers to a the process of tagging things on the Internet by a large cross section of people thereby creating a common denominator of semantic order). If you feel lost, CLICK HERE.
Color Studies / Body Radio
A couple weeks ago I visited Parson’s Hall Project Space in Holyoke, MA, a gallery in an old industrial building owned, renovated and occupied by Torsten Burns and Kari Gatske. The renovations are beautiful and there was a great turnout for the opening in the project space. I finally had an excuse to make a piece I’ve been mulling over for months: Color Studies (After Albers) for the show, Body Radio, which shares the space with the launch of the Strange Attractors compilation.
A few years ago a friend found a 40+ snapshots “in a dumpster” of a bunch of business men in a hotel suite, with a stripper in the 80s or early 90s. Following the logic of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square color studies I made formal paintings from the shapes in these images using gouache. I was attempting to organize a dual way of perceiving these images – the perceptual and formal color relationships (“chromatic interactions”) should merge with the curious social dynamics and power relations of the scene.
Machine Wilderness
How did I get here? This week Meredith Drum and I will be at ISEA 2012: Machine Wilderness. We’ll be giving an artist talk on Friday and have made an AR piece for the Block Party on Sunday – a satellite object related to Oyster City. Responding to the theme of transportation, our AR bubble addresses how oysters get to the desert. You can “go inside” and touch four objects to reveal their secrets.
The Territory of Images
Thanks to the Millennium Film Journal I have had the opportunity to write about another one of my heroes, Harun Farocki. In the latest issue, MFJ55 Structures and Spaces, is my essay/review “The Territory of Images: Harun Farocki, Images of War at a Distance” on his show at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA is collecting nearly all of his work, so one room had a video library that allowed visitors to watch many of his single channel works on demand. The rest of the space in the exhibition was devoted to installation work from the last ten years. This work addresses implications of newer perceptual apparatuses (video surveillance, automated remote warfare, virtual reality simulations) – forms that more explicitly articulate and complicate the politics of geography and space.
i-docs
Next week I will be at i-docs, a symposium “interrogating the field of interactive documentary” that will be held at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, UK. I’ll be giving a presentation on our (in progress) AR/walking tour project Oyster City. It looks like a great program.