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Friday, September 29, 2006

Rhizome Ten Years


Rhizome celebrates Tenth Anniversary with Festival in New York and online

From August 2006 through February 2007, Rhizome will present a number of innovative exhibits, performances, discussions, and online projects throughout New York and elsewhere, in celebration of ten years of leadership in the new media arts field. This ambitious slate of programs will honor the vibrancy, diversity, and strength of this growing field and will provide an opportunity to connect with new media art both online and offline.

Rhizome was initiated in 1996 as an online platform for the global new media art community. At that time, the organization’s focus was primarily upon Internet art. Ten years later, Rhizome retains this focus and has also grown to support a wide range of art that engage emerging technologies—including sound art, locative media, digital video, software art, and modifications of video games. As the Internet and other computing technologies have come to play a more prevalent role in culture, Rhizome has supported artists’ expanded involvement with these tools and materials. The anniversary festival provides a touchstone moment to celebrate new media art and look forward to further advancements in the field.

FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS include collaborations with a number of organizations committed to supporting new media, including Rhizome’s affiliate, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and also the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Kitchen, the Vera List Center, ISEA, and Foxy Production.

Rhizome and the New Museum will co-present Time Shares, a series of nine Internet-based exhibitions on themes ranging from globalization to pop culture to site-specific works in the popular online game space, Second Life. An exhibition of the eleven compelling Internet-based art works commissioned by Rhizome in 06-07 will also be included.

This Fall, The Kitchen will host a night of Internet-related performances, the Vera List Center will host a discussion about open source issues, and the Guggenheim will be the venue for two media activists’ performative lectures. In February, an exhibition at Foxy Production gallery will look at the relationship between nature and technology. The international group of artists included in these programs includes some of today’s most engaged practitioners, such as Young Hae Chang/ Heavy Industries (Hong Kong), Olia Lialina (Moscow), JODI.org (Rotterdam), Jacob Ciocci (Pittsburgh), the Yes Men (Glasgow/ Paris), Ze Frank (NY), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (Mexico City/ NY), and the Raqs Media Collective (Delhi).

Considering Rhizome’s origin as an email list, Rhizome has always been a catalyst for discourse. During the festival, Rhizome and the New Museum of Contemporary Art will continue to collaborate on a new series of book releases, entitled Celebrating New Media Scholarship, three of which have already drawn very large audiences. Additionally, an online collaborative writing project, entitled Keylines, will provide a site for active discussion of issues relevant to new media and culture at large, including the environment, feminism, protest, and art historical questions. The site launches this week, with specially-commissioned essays by Raqs Media Collective, Bruce Sterling, David Ross, Lynn Hershman, and others.

For a full schedule, images, or more information, visit the website: http://rhizome.org/events/tenyear

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Supernatural Presents ... Digital Art Joe Letteri and the Making of King Kong Tate Modern 25.09 London

Visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri from Weta Digital discusses the creation of the Academy Award-winning visual effects for Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005), showing how Weta built 1933 New York City, grew the lush jungles of Skull Island and brought Kong to life.

Letteri has pioneered and developed many of the digital techniques that have become the standard in bringing photographic quality to high-end visual effects. As an artist, he has specialised in the creation of highly realistic imagery, from the dinosaurs of Jurassic ParkThe Lord of the Rings (2001–3) to the 25-foot gorilla in King Kong. Letteri is the winner of two Academy Awards and recipient of the Academy’s Technical Achievement Award for co-developing the subsurface scattering technique that was used to bring Gollum to life. (1993)

Tate Modern book online

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Digicult and Digimag

DIGICULT activity is constituted by different cultural and communication initiative, some of them are already in action, some other still at a projecting step, open to new input and new initiatives born from the joint from different entity involved but also from the propositive participation of external freelancers, public or private, even international.

Digimag

Editing activity is focused on the issued of a monthly published e-magazine about the themes of digital culture and electronic. A e-mag with the precise aim to inform and deepen all the themes connected to culture, arts and electronic technologies, pointing out the existence of different realities and the connections between them. A digital magazine that represent something virtual made by freelancers, communicators and artists representative of small or bigger net community.

Community as Artificialia, AHA, Basebog, Otolab, Invideo, Arcnaut, 48ore are going to look after the contents of the 8 section: Webart, Netart-Netactivism, VideoArt-Audiovideo, Electronic Music, Interaction Design, Robotics e A.I., NewMedia e Technology&Society.


Thursday, September 14, 2006

Drunken Boat Announces Issue#8

Announcing the premiere of Drunken Boat, the international online journal of the arts, Issue #8. A special triple issue dedicated to the inaugural PanLiterary Awards Winners in seven genres; the spreading potentiality of the Oulipo; and the very strangest of current Canadian Arts and Letters.

Featuring over 125 contributors, including a radio play by Mark Rudman and Martha Plimpton, ambigrams by Doug Hofstadter, archival material from Raymond Queneau and Marcel Duchamp, translations by Cole Swenson and Keith
and Rosemarie Waldrop, video from Adeena Karasick, photos by Allyson Clay and Gabor Szilasi, among many others.

Including new work from the PanLiterary Judges: PEN/Faulkner Award winner Sabina Murray, conceptual artist and musician DJ Spooky, poet, translator and librettist, Annie Finch, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, Alexandra Tolstoy, trace/Alt-X New Media Award winner Talan Memmott, and video art pioneer and TV interventionist David Hall.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

September 2006 in Artforum

September 2006 in Artforum

In Artforum’s September 2006 issue: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait. Artists have long navigated the visual territory shared by art and cinema, but few have brought these spheres together as grandly as this filmic collaboration, which debuted at Cannes in May before its presentation this past summer at Art Basel. Art historian Michael Fried and Artforum editor Tim Griffin provide two views of a project that--by following the soccer player Zidane for the duration of a single ninety-minute match--reaches back to eighteenth-century portraiture and forward to contemporary spectacle culture.

“Zidane’s dazzling and unerring footwork, his astonishing control of the ball, his instantaneous decision making all exemplify his seemingly unremitting focus on the game even as they combine to keep the viewer perceptually on edge. [But] a major part of the conceptual brilliance of Zidane consists in the fact that its protagonist’s sustained feat of absorption is depicted as taking place before an audience of eighty thousand spectators, with millions more watching via TV.” --Michael Fried on Zidane

Also in September: Hal Foster pens the first in a series of occasional essays for Artforum, “New Fields of Architecture.” Beginning this month with a discussion of Zaha Hadid’s retrospective (currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York), Foster considers the ways in which architecture today, more than art, might focus urgent questions about new kinds of representations and media, materials and technologies--affording us the best opportunity to grasp the look of modernity.

“As much as any architect, Hadid has responded to the Futurist call for an opening of structure onto space, an interpenetration of interior and exterior, an intensification of ‘figure’ and ‘environment’ alike.” --Hal Foster on Zaha Hadid

And: Artforum looks ahead to the coming season with a survey of more than fifty shows opening worldwide. Get a first glimpse of Fischli & Weiss at Tate Modern, London; Brice Marden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; General Idea at the Kunsthalle Zürich; Neo Rauch at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsberg, Germany; the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; the Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; and many more.

Plus: Mel Bochner reveals all the secrets behind “The Domain of the Great Bear,” his subversive collaboration with Robert Smithson concerning the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s Museum of Natural History, on the fortieth anniversary of its original publication; Helen Molesworth finds Lee Lozano anything but prudish at the Kunsthalle Basel; James Quandt and John Kelsey consider the guerrilla poetics of Jean-Luc Godard’s “cut-and-paste” multimedia installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Martin Herbert finds a “complex ethics of framing” in the art of Marine Hugonnier; T. J. Demos introduces the Otolith Group; Christoph Cox eavesdrops on “Sonambiente” in Berlin; and David Joselit assesses Jenny Holzer’s recent work and “Consider This . . . ” at LACMALab, Los Angeles.
And: Liam Gillick reviews the circumstances around curator Chris Gilbert’s recent resignation from his post at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive; Jeffrey Kastner reinvestigates the cancellation of Manifesta 6; Thomas Lawson finds a home away from home in “Los Angeles 1955–1985” at the Centre Pompidou; Mark Godfrey revisits the roles of sculpture and photography in Thomas Demand’s work at the Serpentine Gallery, London; and Matias Faldbakken runs down his Top Ten.

Visit Artforum online at http://www.artforum.com