Presse: Lektoren-Vereinigung Korea

12.06.2009 – 04.10.2009
Bei der Ausstellung EXPosition of mythology – ELectronic technology des Nam June Paik Centers in Yongin ist unter anderem die Installation alan∂ zu sehen – eine kollaborative Installation unter Mitwirkung der HfG Karlsruhe und des ZKM. alan∂ ist eine Abkürzung für Al-Andalus, die Region Spaniens, die vor einem Jahrtausend das Vorbild für das einzigartige Zusammenleben unterschiedlicher Kulturen und Religionen war. alan∂ huldigt dieser Einzigartigkeit, indem es Andalusiern eine Plattform bietet, ihre Bilder über mehr als 22 recycelte Flachbildmonitore und 68 hochauflösende OLED mini-Displays zu präsentieren. Die Art der Zusammenstellung zeigt die Veränderung des Denkens im gegenwärtigen künstlerischen Schaffen, welches Begriffe wie vernetzte Zusammenarbeit, geistiges und gemeinsames Eigentum hinterfragt. Die Installation wurde entwickelt von Jayoung Bang, Daniel Burckhardt, Linus Stolz, Lorenz Schwarz, Alex Wenger, Yunjun Lee, Julian Finn, Philip Pocock. Ort: Exhibition Hall 2 of Nam June Paik Art Center

http://lvk-aktuell.blogspot.com/2008/10/veranstaltungen-und-termine.html

ƒlirp

ƒlirp, the title of this project produced for CAR, plays with quirky web2.0 naming conventions. In fact, ƒlirp is an acronym for exactly what it is – a ‘fast loop image recycling process’.

There are two sides to the ƒlirp coin: it is simultaneously a ‘cinema house’, it’s own interactive, mobile, green, micro movie house; and, ‘House’ cinema: the plot, rural homes for sale or in repossession due to the current mortage malaise in America; the ‘fabula’, a narrative conjured in the minds of audience members while interacting with ƒlirp’s solar-battery-driven Organic-LED responsive screens. It has been said of art cinema that the movie exists in the cut, the space between the frames. In ƒlirp, that could not be more apparent, extending this notion to include the interactive space between spectator and screen.

Creating and installing a tiny multi-screen cinema house for this event, not much larger than a few cell phones, ƒlirp senses the presence of spectators. In turn, their proximity edits the screen contents, a ‘House cinema’ story unfolds,  juxtaposing insides and outsides of homes on the New Depression Era skid,  encouraging the spectator to imagine or project human stories into these settings.

ƒlirp recycles user-generated real estate and home repossession images from the web, primarily homes and former homes on the American Prairies, harkening back to 1930s Dust Bowl Depression Era, which along with current blog and net news media, catalyzes story-creation in the mind of the observer in front of miniature responsive screens. ƒlirp also appeals to concerned media artists and culture producers to embrace sustainable and recyclable energy sources. For ƒlirp’s power needs, the sun is enough. Its light powers both ƒlirp’s ‘cinema house’ while empowering its ‘House cinema’ audience.

Alex Wenger | Jayoung Bang | Julian Finn | Philip Pocock | Yunjun Lee

Database Imaginary

 

database imaginary exhibition website screenshot
database imaginary exhibition website screenshot

‘Dataistic’ exhibition and symposium at Canada’s Banff Center for New Media some years ago, sets the stage for thinking about ‘dataism’.

DATABASE IMAGINARY:
Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition – which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area – deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity. Some ‘dataism’-related images from the exhibition and the process of setting it up.

One Database Imaginary curator Steve Dietz’ thought piece for the show: The Database Imaginary:Memory_Archive_Database v 4.0

Aland 2008 on the BIACS3 Bienale in Sevillia/Granada

biacs3youniverselogo

The title of our current collaborative installation at BIACS3 Seville Biannual, Aland, is an abbreviation for Al-Andalus, celebrating the exhibition site’s unique moment of cultural and religious conviviality a millenium ago. Aland is also ‘a land’, a Deleuzian ‘any place whatever‘, such as the consensual space of cyber-documentary pictures of contemporary Andalusians from which Aland draws the bulk of its visual content, montaged, more precisely, ‘mashed up’ over 22 repaired or recycled flatscreens and 68 brilliant, hi-res OLED Organic mini displays.

Aland consists of 3 interactive and interacting sculptures, portraits if you will of a Modern, Muslim, Jewish historically acclaimed literary figures, Fedrico García Lorca, Muhammad Ibn Tufail and Moses Maimonides. They interact by simulating a conversation, exchanging dialogue composed by algorithmical linguistics, consciously dadaistic in character, yet subconsciously, subtextually retaining an uncanny verisimilitude to each interlocutor. The Lorca-presenting character draws its replies from translations of his poetry; the Ibn Tufail digital mimic recombines into workable sentences phrases from his 11th C. philosophical novel Alive, Son of Awake; and Moses II as Maimonides is often nicknamed, playfully revises the rigorous logic in his Guide for the Perplexed.

It is the vocabulary uttered by these 3 so-called Chatbots that links their never-ending verbal exchange with pools of Andalusian user images that have been tagged by descriptive words online. The main screen in each sculpture is fed by these stream of visual consciousness pictures, arrayed in a freestyle mosaical manner. Visually scripted to reduce size on-the-fly, these picture streams become fair game for batteries of webcam-modified birdwatching scopes and various optical instruments surveilling close-ups and details of their visual presence on their respective target screen. It is not an individual but their image, not a person in public space but a screen space that is surveilled. These digital monoculars and spyglasses are scripted to capture screen images and feed them into vast pools of Andalusian cyberdocumentary pictures, on the look out for similar pictures. Pictures look at pictures according to pattern, light and color. Each pictures content diverges to generate implied narrative natural to the contents’ cohesive context, Andalusia, while being informatically abstract. According to scripted levels of picture similarity, numerous playlists of pictures are displayed rhythmically on numerous screens in real time in the installation.

The public interacts by sending any image to a sculpture via their cellphone camera or storage locally via Bluetooth, by mobile- and e-mail to alander@zkm.de, by upload from the aland website, or locally again by two webcams adorning the Moses and Federico sculptures, namely, the SmileCam which locates biannual visitors faces, zooms in, and if a smiling expression is identified, a picture is taken and fed into the database to generate its movie clip mash up of similar cyber-Andalusians; the other, Linecam, only records single pixel width lines of persons before its lens over time, its morphed slices of visitor-time scripted to capture and send at intervals an image to the database and screen its resulting mashup.

The 6 scripted Linux computers themselves form the bodies of the 3 sculptures. Lorca’s computer housings have been sculpted and worked as a birdhouse on which are perched 2 bronze figures Pointer and Sitter, and draped with a discreet grey silicon mandala. Muhammad has 4 supporting tripods piercing through its working computers, only centimeters from his motherboards. Adjunct to this are 3 tripods supporting a telescope, model fruit tree and screen, Gardencam, which uses visual feedback and subtle scripting to reproduce live the magnified model tree on screen in some magical weather conditions. Moses body is perched across the upper rungs of a tall ladder. Atop his Mooncam, a vignetted realtime stream of images spied on one of his screens as the base of the ladder.

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