24 January 2007

Professional Surfer

Some friends and I have started an internet surfing club, called Nasty Nets. It came out of a joy of sharing links with each other, but grew into a place where we post found and original/remixed material. It's been a nice place for me to follow thoughts I might otherwise censor or drop, and to make and post work I'd not likely post elsewhere... (Like my eBay search for my long-lost cool shirt, pictured above. Yeah, I was much hotter in those days...)

Anyways, Nasty Nets and some other cool peeps/ groups have been included in "a group exhibition that considers web browsing (aka 'surfing') as an art form," called Professional Surfer. It was organized by Rhizome (thanks, Lauren!) and is co-presented by the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Check it out.

18 January 2007

Tactical Media at NYU

Tonight I'm taking a red eye back from this conference so that tomorrow I can begin teaching my class in Tactical Media, at NYU's ITP program. Here's the currently-sparse course blog. We're going to have a pretty amazing lineup of guest speakers and I hope to post videos of their talks on the blog, for those of you who are interested and might want to check back. I'll probably post more about that, here, at some point...

13 January 2007

The Year In The Internet--2007 Edition

Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel asked me to send them my ten favorite internet links from 2006. I did the same in 2005. Somehow it was harder this year. I found myself more interested in politics and pop culture (and their intersections) than any specific art projects--with a few notable exceptions... Anyway, check out this year's page, which includes best-of lists by lotsa cool people.

10 January 2007

Archiving the Avant Garde Symposium

I'm headed to California, next week, to speak at the following symposium.



New Media and Social Memory
Jan. 18, 2007
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/ciao

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is proud to present New Media & Social Memory, a public symposium to discuss strategies for preserving digital art at a time when digital technologies are evolving and becoming obsolete at an astonishingly rapid pace. While focussing on digital art, the symposium will also address larger concerns about the long-term conservation of our increasingly digital culture, including how we decide what digital materials - from Web sites to video games - are worth saving. The full day of presentations and panel discussions by leading experts in the field of digital preservation, including Stewart Brand, Jon Ippolito, Michael Katchen, Kevin Kelly, Marisa Olson, Richard Rinehart, and Bruce Sterling, will be held in the museum theater on Thursday, Jan. 18.

This symposium is open to the public free of charge; however, due to limited space, online registration is required. See attached image for program. For more information or to register, visit http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/ciao

05 January 2007

Networked Nature at Foxy Production



I've curated a show for Rhizome, at Foxy Production. If you're in NYC, please come by the opening, on January 11. (The show also tours up to Syracuse's Warehouse Gallery, this summer.) The work is fantastic and we published a nice, small catalogue with the show. Details below...

Update: The show was included on Artinfo's advance list of the top ten exhibitions of 2007!

2nd Update: Foxy posted the reviews from the NY Times, Village Voice, Artnet, and others, on the show's archive page, along with high-res installation shots. (Click thumbnails to enlarge.) Thanks to everyone who came out for the opening & other events! Stay tuned for details on the tour to Syracuse.

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NETWORKED NATURE

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Organized by RHIZOME, an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art

January 11 - February 18, 2007 Opening reception: January 11, 6-8 PM

Foxy Production presents Networked Nature, a group exhibition that inventively explores the representation of 'nature' through the perspective of networked culture. The exhibition includes works by C5, Futurefarmers, Shih-Chieh Huang, Philip Ross, Stephen Vitiello, and Gail Wight, who provocatively combine art and politics with innovative technology, such as global positioning systems (GPS), robotics, and hydroponic environments.

In their work Perfect View, San Jose-based collective C5 reached out to the subculture of recreational GPS users, or geo-cachers, asking them for their recommendations of 'sublime locales.' The submitted latitudes and longitudes provided the guide points for a thirty-three state, thirteen-thousand mile motorcycle expedition by collective member Jack Toolin, who photographed the terrain at the given coordinates. The results, presented in triptychs, smartly subvert traditional representations of landscape and notions of the sublime.

San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers' Photosynthesis Robot is a three-dimensional model of a possible perpetual motion machine driven by phototropism - the movement of plants towards the direction of the sun. Their proposal that a group plants will very slowly propel a four wheel vehicle is a witty take on the pressing search for new forms of energy.

New York artist Shih-Chieh Huang's inflatable installation, Din-Don I, is inspired by everyday household electronic devices and his studies of physical computing and robotics. In this ingenious exploration of organic systems, he creates a dynamic circulation of electricity and air: a living micro-environment.

San Francisco-based Philip Ross' Juniors are self-contained survival capsules for living plants. Blown glass enclosures provide a controlled hydroponic environment, where plants' roots are submerged in nutrient-infused water, while LED lights supply the necessary illumination. The artist has drawn on two culturally divergent traditions - Chinese scholars' objects and Victorian glass conservatories – that share the belief that nature is best understood when seen through the lens of human artifice.

Virginia-based artist Stephen Vitiello's Hedera (BBB) unsettles our assumptions of what an appropriate soundtrack might be. The artist has constructed a sprawling vine installation with speakers hidden between the branches that quietly broadcast percussive sounds woven from the speeches and private conversations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Creep, by Oakland-based Gail Wight, is an hypnotic three screen time-lapse video of the growth of dyed slime mold. Separately edited sequences play alongside each other, cycling through a sequence of fluorescent color shifts. In her aestheticizing of the normally repellent, Wight creates an ode to the beauty of natural growth patterns.

Networked Nature is organized by Marisa Olson, Editor and Curator at Rhizome. The exhibition will tour to the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, New York. Networked Nature is supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The College Arts Association, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and The New York State Council on the Arts. A full-color catalogue will be published by Rhizome and available at the gallery.

Rhizome is a leading new media organization affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Its programs support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways. This exhibition is the final event in Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival of Art & Technology.

www.rhizome.org
www.newmuseum.org

For further information or high res images contact Chelsea Goodchild:

FOXY PRODUCTION
617 WEST 27TH ST. GROUND FLOOR,
NEW YORK NY 10001

t: 212 239 2758
f: 212 239 2759
foxyproduction.com