Chris Joseph Electronic writer and artist

‘HTML Color Codes’ curated by Carolyn Kane, reviewed by Susan Ballard

HTML Color Codes.

Reviewed by Susan Ballard.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=383

Curated by Carolyn Kane for Rhizome.org September, 2009, the HTML Color Codes exhibition features a selection of internet based artwork that address the topic of digital color. The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed. The rationale for this question stems from theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of light interacting with the retina and human nervous system.

Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer, curator, musician and artist who spends her time writing, thinking and teaching about contemporary digital and time-based installation art, sound and noise. Her current research investigates the contribution of artists to contemporary notions of utopia and the political and cultural implications of a materialist reading of media cultures in antipodean environments. Su is the Principal Lecturer in Electronic Arts at the Dunedin School of Art, in New Zealand. Her book The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader was published in 2008. She is a founding trustee of ADA (http://www.aotearoadigitalarts.org) New Zealand’s digital artists network. She tends to blog here: http://housesparrow.blogspot.com

Review of Digital Pioneers at V&A Museum London, by Rob Myers

Digital Pioneers.

Rob Myers reviews the exhibition Digital Pioneers, at the V & A Museum. An overview of the first decades of the computer’s history in art and design. including some of the earliest computer-generated works in the V&A’s collections, many of which have never been exhibited in the UK before.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=381

Digital Pioneers
Victoria And Albert Museum
7 December 2009 – 25 April 2010.

“The bulk of the art in the show was produced between the 1950s and the 1970s. This means that it was produced or recorded as photographs from cathode ray tubes or as print-outs from teletypes and pen plotters. Some of this work will be familiar to students of the history of art computing through reproductions but as with most art reproductions do not tell the whole story.

Seeing the actual work itself is as important for art made using the paraphernalia of early digital computing as it is for art made with linseed oil and cotton duck. What Digital Pioneers drives home is just how deeply and intentionally involved early computer artists were in manipulating the aesthetically limited but socially and ideologically key technology of computing machinery. This leaves both social art historians and code aesthetes with some explaining to do, or at least some catching up.”

Review of Transmediale.10 – Futurity Now! by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati.

Review of Transmediale.10 – Futurity Now!

By Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=380

The article features artworks, projects and conference highlights from individuals, groups and organisations. Honor Harger, Gebhard Sengmuller, Franz Buchinger, Ryoji Ikeda, Julian Oliver, Damian Stewart, Clara Boj, Diego Diaz, Ken Rinaldo, Michell Teran, Aaron Koblin, Daniel Massey, F.A.T, Warren Neidich, Kahaimzon Michel, Bruce Sterling, I-Wei Li, Steve Lambert Matteo Pasquinelli and more…

This year’s Transmediale.10 Festival explores the theme ‘future’ through connections between arts and technology. A part of the introduction reads “Futurity is a concept that examines what the ‘future’ as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. [...] what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates.”

2010 is a year that has often represented the future in Science Fiction literature, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, and now here we are. A good time to compare how we percieved the future, the past, and assess what is really happening, what we lost and what we have gained, and ‘perhaps’ find better ways to proceed. Art can offer different perspectives, ways of seeing and understanding, revealing our present states of being, sharing alternatives or even new meanings for our futures. This festival allows those visiting and taking part, an opportunity to explore, negotiate possible avenues in understanding together, what all this means.

Review of Mark Napier’s Venus 2.0 by Angela Ferraiolo

Review of Mark Napier’s Venus 2.0 by Angela Ferraiolo.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=379

Angela Ferraiolo meets Mark Napier in New York and asks him what’s behind the Venus 2.0 project.

Venus 2.0 was created from software written by the artist, collecting images of various body parts of Pamela Anderson, an erotic icon of our time. All images were scraped from the hundreds of pictures of Pamela Anderson available on the Internet, recreating mobile, three-dimensional figures out of these flat fragmentary pictures. Mark Napier reflects and redefines on our perceptions of images in this Internet age, on network structures and on the Internet’s influence on our lives.

“Now that I’m done’ I find the artwork disturbing. It freaks me out. Maybe I’ll do landscapes for a while to detox.” — Mark Napier

Mark Napier ( http://www.potatoland.org/ ), well-known for the net classics Shredder ( http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/ ) Riot ( http://www.potatoland.org/riot/ ) and Digital Landfill ( http://www.potatoland.org/landfill/ ) recently exhibited his latest work Venus 2.0 at
the DAM Gallery ( http://www.dam-berlin.de/ ) in Berlin.

Mark Napier (1961, USA) lives in New York. He became inspired by software development soon after completing his training as a painter. He has been working on Net art since 1995 and was one of the first artists to deal thematically and formally with the Internet. His works explore terms such as ‘ownership’ and ‘authority’ in the Net and interrogate browser functions and Web design. He has been commissioned to create Net art works by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and took part in the Whitney Biennale in 2002. Institutions and festivals that have exhibited his works include the Centre Pompidou in Paris, P.S.1 New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz, The Kitchen, Künstlerhaus Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe, Transmediale, iMAL Brussels, Eyebeam, the Princeton Art Museum, and la Villette, Paris. He has also received awards from Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Angela Ferraiolo is an interactive writer and filmmaker experimenting with text, video, and animation for the web, installation, and mobile applications. She is currently working on a new interactive movie titled “The Loop”. Her digital story “Map of a Future War” was published in the Fall 2008 issue of the New River Journal. Her plays have been produced at La Mama Galleria and Expanded Arts in New York City and at the Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia, USA. She is also the author of the RPG Aidyn Chronicles and the MMORPG Earth and Beyond. Angela teaches game programming and theories of game design in the Film and Media Department of Hunter College in New York.

Kinetica Art Fair 2010

Kinetica Art Fair ( http://www.kinetica-artfair.com ) takes place from 4-7 February 2010 at the Ambika P3 space in London and is the UK’s only art fair dedicated to kinetic, robotic, sound, light and time-based art. Thanks to Daniel Hirschmann, whose ‘Engine’ piece is showing there (up on the balcony – if you visit the fair, don’t miss it), I was invited to the opening event. I’ll include a few shots I took below (mouseover the image to see more), but this is really one show for which photos don’t suffice, as they fail to capture the motion, and the interactivity, of which there are numerous wonderful and varied examples.

[Update: see some video and interviews with artists on the BBC website]

There is also a feature exhibition at Kinetica this year, dedicated to the pioneers of kinetic art, including works by Jean Tinguely, Roger Vilder, Peter Logan, Yaacov Agam, Peter Sedgely, Liliane Lijn, Takis, David Medalla and Jesus Raphael Soto. Also on display are original interactive installations from the seminal 1968 exhibition of cybernetic art, ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’, including Bruce Lacey’s ‘Rosa the Robot’ and Edward Ihnatowicz’s ‘SAM (Sound Activated Mobile)’.

Alongside the V&A’s Decode exhibition, this is really a great time to see the best in worldwide digital arts in London.