Internet as Public Art

Please pick up the Emergence article from my office (NS 3004). The other reading, Tipping Point, is on ERES.

Also, your proposals for the final are due next week too. See the docs section of the blog for the handouts if you missed class.

Although the service, called TXTmob, was widely used by demonstrators, reporters and possibly even police officers, little was known about its inventors. Last month, however, the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created TXTmob.

Full Article

1973 WGBH Boston Public Television program exploring the relatively new area of video art. The program highlights several video artists exploring the video medium and pushing its boundries, with a focus on artists working with video synthesizers.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=vLgVGYmOg5o&feature=related

though i appreciate SL’s great contribution as a platform for
collaborative creation of art, i have reservations about it being touted
as public-space.

rather, i take it as private space that, while liberal about its use,
inevitably has implications over the relative independence of art
practices based therein. has this conversation come up on Empyre or
elsewhere?

an analogy:

a wealthy businessman buys an island and names it an Art Park. if
you can fly yourself there and pay a little rent, he will supply all
the materials you need to build your art – seemingly having an
endless store. there is just one condition however: the art is never
allowed to leave the island. you’re allowed to take photos of it,
even make derivative works, but the island itself will always be the
fixed home of the original.

you and he both recognise artists are a valuable part of his
business. by making the place more interesting – adding cultural
value – more and more people will pay to stay in his plush
accommodation. for the moment it seems to be working.

some of the artists wonder what will happen if global warming raises
the water level so high that the island disappears, taking all the
art with it. others worry what will happen if tourism is bad one
year and the park can not afford to stay open. most however choose
not to think about it, imagining that it will be just as it is
forever, their art along with it..

cheers!

–
julian oliver
http://julianoliver.com
http://selectparks.net

http://www.soapboxevent.blogspot.com/

GROUND RULES FOR SOAPBOX EVENT

The Soapbox Event resembles a workshop in rhetoric or a laboratory of democracy.  At Federal Hall, soapboxes will be distributed to the participating audience, one box for each participant. Each participant holding a soapbox has the opportunity to step up on it and give a speech, the maximum length of which is one minute. Participants may form coalitions and stack their boxes together to obtain greater height. The spokesperson of a coalition may speak for as many minutes as the stacked boxes. We will not be using microphones or any amplifiers. Obtaining greater height serves to elevate a speaker and have their voice project better into the space.

http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html

Frozen in Grand Central Station

This is a prank on a “grand” scale.  Over 200 people gathered at Grand Central Station in New York to pull off a ‘frozen in place’ act.  The onlooking travelers who weren’t part of the act were mystified as to what was going on.

Links from class today:

http://www.irational.org/cybercafe/xrel.html

http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/hybrids/hybrids.html#

http://www.thefileroom.org/

http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ZapTact.html

http://history.etoy.com/stories/entries/11/

http://toywar.etoy.com/

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/

http://bookchin.net/intruder/

http://www.allmylifeforsale.com/

http://bowlingalley.walkerart.org/cgi-bin/feedtitle.cgi

http://brandon.guggenheim.org/shuleaWORKS/brandon.html

http://www.easylife.org/desktop/

http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/

http://text.jodi.org/210.html

http://www.theyrule.net

http://pdc.walkerart.org/

http://www.mouchette.org/

Seminar schedule:
Thursday, February 28, 7:30 p.m.
Friday, February 29, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 1, 3 p.m.
Sunday, March 2, 3 p.m.

Martha Rosler
Art & Social Life; The Case of Video Art

The early history of autonomous video art is a pivotal point in the internal culture wars of the art world. Starting in the late 1960s through the early 1970s, artists with quite diverse practices experimented with the new (but not yet widely available) portable video apparatuses.

Film had by mid-century superseded both architecture and music as the queen of the arts. But by the 1950s the broadcast television industry and its structures of celebrity were challenging the social status of high art. Television was a problem…and then the Portapak was invented. Video suggested varieties of freedom to artists restive about or dismissive of traditional studio practices. Video promised a sort of gesamtkunstwerk on the ruins of a high modernism that had demanded a strict separation between forms. Video offered not just the experience of time married to the illusion of space accompanied by sound; because of poor image quality, video also offered relative freedom even from the concerns of cinema, art film, and movies. It provided the opportunity to sketch or to perform, to record a gesture or a narrative, to sing in the shower or dance in the studio, abetted by simple in-camera edits. Artists could, without commitment, break free of the studio if they chose, an d, in the political ferment and upheavals of the era, take a look around, report, raise a voice, show a face, register anger, offer an opinion, analyze social structures and events, tell a joke, join with friends, and yell back at the mind-melting products of broadcast television while nevertheless making use of television’s capacity for instantaneous, unrecorded transmission and endless flow, or they could take advantage of a recorded format that was easily reproducible and could be widely disseminated. The international potentials of this form were immediately obvious to artists and even museum administrators, to judge by the range of international “video opens” of the mid-1970s.

The wide-open field of early video may arguably be the typical condition of a medium at birth (compare the Internet, on its way from being a utopian arena of activity to a gated compound locked down by corporate toll takers, if they get their way). Despite the competition of sites like YouTube, video as an art form has become, by definition, an expensive captive of the gallery and museum, the black box inside the white box. But the transformative impulses that drove utopian hopes in the earliest days have not completely evaporated. It is absolutely vital to revisit early video works and their context (including the texts of the era), to provide a deep slice into the moment of origin and see what may be refurbished and adapted for the present-beyond the stylish appropriations of the 1970s “look.” In the face of the Society of the Spectacle, taking back/talking back to the media was a watchword of the era, offering the hope of social transformation through art, activism, and co mmunity interventions. This hope animates many today, in whatever form and medium it may be furthered.

Video screenings related to this seminar will occur during the week of the seminar and the following week. A complete schedule of screenings will be available at http://www.newmuseum.org/events starting Monday, February 25.

Look at the line up — several names from our screening yesterday. Worth checking out!

Thursday the 7th, February: KS invites John Miller and Matt Keegan to do a show at Orchard.

Sunday the 10th, February: Opening. John Miller and Matt Keegan meet with KS, from 6 to 9 pm at Orchard to discuss what to do.

“11 Sessions”

The gallery will be open on the dates below from 3 to 6pm.

Friday the 15th, February: Jamie Isenstein

Saturday the 16th, February: Nicolás Guagnini & Ei Arakawa

Sunday the 17th, February: Stefan Tcherepnin

Friday the 22nd, February: Piper Marshall & Lawrence Weiner

Saturday the 23rd, February: Dan Graham & Bob Nickas & Josh Tonsfeldt

Sunday the 24th, February: Ann Craven

Friday the 29th, February: Dara Birnbaum

Saturday the 1st, March: Fia Backström

Sunday the 2nd, March: John Kelsey

Friday the 7th, March: Joan Jonas

Saturday the 8th, March: Aura Rosenberg & John Miller & Dan Walworth & Perry Hoberman

Sunday the 9th, March: Finessage. On the last date of the show we will present the eleven sessions. The duration of the piece is still to be determined. The gallery will be open from 10 am. It will close at the end of the piece.

Karin Schneider, Harlem, February 13h, 2007.

Here is information about the “camera wars” and your right to photograph/film in public space:

Picture New York

Also, the useful Bill of Photographer’s Rights.