Social Practice

Displayed in the lobby of the Denver Art Museum during the addition of their new wing:

(via metacool)

(click for larger image)

This little postcard manifesto came to me by way of Alice and Clarke Thacher (thanks guys!). They picked it up while visiting the Bread & Puppet Museum in Vermont. Their description: “It’s in an old un-rehabbed (except for electricity) barn; unattended and somewhat spooky.” The museum houses artifacts from the 44 year history of the Bread & Puppet’s street theater and political actions.

The name derives from their practice of serving free home-made bread with aioli, because, as founder Peter Schumann explains, “theater and bread create community.”

Poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, wrote: “The Bread & Puppet Theater has been so long a part of America’s conscious struggle for our better selves, that it has become, paradoxically, a fixture of our subconscious.” (via wikipedia)

Scott Oliver wrote a nice little essay about the doings of Josh Greene. He describes looking at Greene’s work while on the Southern Exposure Curatorial Committee way “back in 2000. [Before ever hearing] the term ‘relational aesthetics,’ [when] CCA’s Social Practice program didn’t yet exist:”

It becomes immediately apparent to anyone reviewing artists’ submissions just how important the ability to effectively communicate one’s practice through a few images and some text can be to an artist’s success. This is especially true for artists like Greene, whose work is dependent on context and, for all practical purposes, unrepeatable. Documentation is the only way for this type of work to outlive the moment in which it was created and reach a larger audience. But Greene holds back, giving just enough information to get the imagination spinning. As with any good story we (the viewers) are required to do part of the work. In this way documentation and its presentation can be an art in itself—a balancing act between a compelling idea and the minutia that surrounds putting that idea into practice. Greene’s projects then, both make for good stories and are stories well told. Or, to put it another way, Greene is as much a raconteur as he is an artist.

(via Shotgun Review)

Google bought YouTube, but why?

The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you’re seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don’t often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it’s all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one’s own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content.

Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren’t social (they’re a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There’s always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film — room’s too dark. Social’s not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social…ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.).

The new generation doesn’t sit down to watch prime time tv together. It’s on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that’s mine, that’s mobile, that’s interactive, and that’s connected: the computer.

(Via this longer post by Adrian Chan from P2P Foundation)

Devices employing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) are poised to enter our lives in many public and commercial spheres. They can work passively and automatically, and are being included in some new US passports and all new UK passports. Many mass transit, product tracking, and animal ID systems use them extensively.

space.media.art presents five artists working with RFID in the public sphere this month in Tagged:

“In this exhibition, the artist collaborative Louis-Philippe Demers and Philippe Jean are working with local shop Hollywood Convenience electronically tagging their grocery items to produce the artwork iTag. Using a portable music device, available to pick up from the exhibition, shoppers can listen to music generated from the grocery aisles.

RealSnailMail is a project in development by boredomresearch, using RFID technology to enable real snails to carry and deliver electronic messages on their own time, despite growing expectations of instant communication.

Mute-Dialogue (Yasser Rashid and Yara El-Sherbini)have created the interactive installation Origins and Lemons. Arranged as an East End market stall the installation invites you to pick up RFID-tagged items and scan them to receive clues as to their history and origin.

In SWAPOId, evoLhypergrapHyCx (C6) implement RFID technology in the Antisystemic Distributed Library Project, an alternative library of shared books, videos, and music with venues in community centres and bedrooms worldwide, and through this acting as but one site of resistance against a de-humanising, de-dimensional agenda.

Arphield Recordings by Paula Roush records the sound of citizens scanning their Oyster cards in London Underground stations, and outputs them in live performance, installation and public intervention.”

(via Tagged press release)

Update: Regine at we-make-money-not-art also posted about the snails — and it looks like the snail mail website is actually running. Unfortunately, no snails are involved at this point, but you can still send a message to be delivered by snail that will help them test their tech.

Here’s a beautiful little application of technology– one that plays right into my obsession with proxies and surrogacy . . .

A camera that displays other people’s photographs taken at the same moment that you press the shutter release. It has no optical parts– it just acts as a search tool for photographs of a particular moment in time. It’s creator, Sascha Pohflepp, calls it a “Blind Camera.”

Julian Bleeker points out that the software running this device could just as easily reside on your home computer, but it would be much less captivating (and poetic).

International Airport Montello (Nevada), the latest project by Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger from eteam, features fictional terminals, transit lounges, and runway that occupy a ten-acre plot, purchased on eBay for less than five hundred dollars, and an abandoned airstrip.

Working with the residents of nearby Montello (population sixty-seven), they created an “airport” that includes the entire town. A number of local restaurants and businesses revamped their interior spaces to turn the town into a place “like any other” airport: its convenience store temporarily housing a gift shop of hand-decorated IAM merchandise, its two bars, and its plateaus, outfitted with folding chairs, doubling as cheap airport lounges. The artists also organise events that would create or revitalize a culture around the airstrip, and consequently help further developments in Montello.

Explaining the ephemeral nature of the installation, Moderegger spoke of a desire “to create something emerging temporarily—that is what a town is. There is nothing here, but in a way there is everything here.”

– via Regine @ we make money not art

Phantom Captain:
Art and Crowdsourcing
curated by Andrea Grover

October 18 - November 25, 2006

Artists: Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Jeff Howe, Davy Rothbart, Allison Wiese, and others

*This exhibition will feature several live performances and events, and we will post the schedule here as details are confirmed. Please check back for updates.

Phantom Captain explores art collaboration that involves amateur groups of individuals responding to “crowdsourcing” initiatives created by artists. The term crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson of Wired Magazine and describes “user-generated content,” or outsourcing labor to armies of amateurs. Crowdsourcing is the methodology behind websites like Wikipedia, Threadless, Ebay, Flickr, Youtube, Blogger, etc., where without the user, all that exists is the conduit for sharing media. User reviews and recommendations are the driving force behind websites like Netflix and Amazon. While crowdsourcing is becoming common practice in business (see Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs), its potential is also being harnessed by artists to create communal artworks.

Andrea Grover is the founding director of Aurora Picture Show, a 501(c)(3) non-profit center for film, video and new media housed in a former church building in Houston, Texas.

Apexart

291 Church Street
(between Walker and White)
New York, NY 10013 USA

tel. +212 431 5270

Image:
Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, Learning
to Love You More, Assignment #18: Recreate a
poster you had as a teenager, report submitted
by Danny Martin, Thorsby, Alabama USA.

So this is just another plug for Ze Frank’s “the show,” which I brought up at the work group the other day.

Things to know about the show:

• There’s a new one every weekday.
• Each show is filmed, produced and posted on the same day.
• He’s been “on air” since March 2006.
• There’s some news and then some other news.
• He has experimented with user-devised scripts, created collaboratively using a wiki.
• He is responsible for the earth sandwich.