“The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do’.
The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”
(Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1947)

Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web focus on the relations that photographic practice is establishing with the world of the Web: its culture, its language and its imagery. From animated.gifs to photos shot in virtual worlds; from the images of Google Street Views to snapshots that change in real time, with the data flows, and on to the camera that captures time instead of space.

Artists: Marco Cadioli, Harm van den Dorpel, Martijn Hendriks, Justin Kemp, Jaime Martinez, Filippo Minelli, Sascha Pohflepp, Jon Rafman, Phillip Toledano, Carlo Zanni

testo in catalogo (ita)
catalogue text (eng)

Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web
curated by Valentina Tanni
Fotografia Festival 2010
Rome, Macro Testaccio
23 September – 24 October
www.fotografiafestival.it

Jonathan Monk’s artistic work has its origins in the contemplation and alteration of previously existent creative concepts: forms of expression derived from pop art, minimalist and conceptual art appear equally as strategies and parodies in his pictures, collages, objects, installations and films. In the process of quotation and simultaneous modification of the quoted subject matter Monk’s work shifts between memory, imagination and a tangible condition. The artist attributes a distinct temporality to the individual piece, while raising the validity thereof to question – often in a humorous way.

In his current exhibition Jonathan Monk is showing fourteen different electronic devices from the area of home entertainment. Powered speakers, a flat-screen monitor, an iPod, a radio alarm clock or an interactive video game console – the new and functional brand name devices selected by Monk form a cross-section of the range of products to be found in an electronics retail store. However, the artist undermines their usability by presenting the individual devices in custom-fitted plexiglass showcases, therefore conserving them as objects.

Artist: Jonathan Monk
Venue: Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe
Exhibition Title: ..so different, so appealing?
Date: May 29 – July 17, 2010
http://www.meyer-riegger.de

[via contemporaryartdaily]

The Victoria and Albert Museum has commissioned the artist Karsten Schmidt to design a truly malleable, digital identity for the Decode exhibition by providing it as open source code. Anyone can recode Karsten’s work and create his own original artwork. The identity application is fully interactive and can be controlled via mouse, keyboard and a graphical user interface. A number of the recoded works submitted will be chosen by the V&A and CBS to appear on London Underground digital screens to promote the exhibition.

http://code.google.com/p/decode
http://postspectacular.com
http://www.vam.ac.uk/decode

Flying False Colors (The Sixth Day) is the new installation by Carlo Zanni, currently on view at Chelsea Art Museum. Presented by The Project Room for New Media at CAM from October 1 to October 31, this multimedia project loosely refers to the 1975 espionage film Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sydney Pollack, which was one of the first films to suggest a link between covert US military operations and the control of oil production in the Middle East.
Like many of Zanni’s past projects, Flying False Colors relies on the fluctuations of live digital information to affect the outcome of his artwork. Flying False Colors consists of a flag set in a wind-generating base that Zanni has programmed to blow at particular speeds and in certain directions based on online data streams that correlate to the number of oil barrels requested by a particular country and the current weather in that country’s capital. The flag is a replica of the universal Ecology Flag that was designed in 1969 and depicts the Greek symbol of Theta, which derives from thanatos, meaning death. However, Zanni’s flag is fabricated with a pigment that will flake off over time as it is blown, leaving a pure white flag by the end of the exhibition.

Flying False Colors (The Sixth Day) will travel to Marselleria, Milan in December 2009.

http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/exhibits/2009/zanni/index.html
http://www.zanni.org

My Lover the Server is an exhibition by the digital art duo Champagne Valentine (Anita Fontaine & Geoff Lillemon). The show explores the phenomenon of Internet romance which has exploded online in the last 5 years. Drawing on real digital communications with web stalkers, strangers and actual lovers and re-interpreting them for the Concrete gallery space (Amsterdam), the exhibition will feature a series of 4-6 digital flat-screens inside CNC-milled custom frames. Against a backdrop of dedicated wallpaper designed by the artists, the frames will feature looping animations and text-based works running continuously off memory cards, as well as 1-2 pieces that will be connected online to the outside world, inviting the public to remotely interact with the artwork. My Lover the Server transforms the artist’s canvas into a new form of cultural expression and offers an increasingly powerful interaction between viewer and artist.

http://www.champagnevalentine.com
http://www.concrete.nl
http://mylovertheserver.com/

Remembrancer, by Alberto Gaitán, is a unique, net-aware sculpture that observes and records data collected over the Internet and sensors within the gallery. Over the first six weeks of the exhibition, (currently on view at Taubam Museum of Art) for 6 hours every day, three networked, robotic painters will deposit dollops of paint on three panels, creating unique paintings in the process. The amount of paint placed at a given moment will be controlled by a computer program that interprets the incoming data. Along with the daily development of these paintings, a field of sound will be similarly generated in response to the same data. The completed panels–displaying an accretion of overlapping monochrome fields of color–will be exhibited over the final two weeks of the exhibition.

http://selforganizingsystem.org

“This piece is ultimately about loss,” explains Gaitán. “Nobody has the capacity for total information awareness so we relinquish big chunks of our understanding to black boxes of knowledge whose provenance we don’t fully understand. We make important decisions and base stacks of assumptions on these. Our memories are rife with inaccuracies, placed there by similar simplification processes that are part of how our minds work. Forgetting or ignoring becomes a significant aspect of remembering.”

Mybiennialisbetterthanyours an online exhibition curated by Tolga Taluy for the X Biennale de Lyon.

“The works displayed on mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com are not subversive because they are trying to deconstruct established systems of dot.capitalism. They are subversive because they are referring to these systems through the use of amateur “original” content production standards set up by meta-producers of online containers, which are radical in their mass popularity and ease of use.”

http://mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com/

AFK Sculpture Park is an exhibition organized in Berlin by Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas from art group Aids-3D (September 18th-October 18th).

“Bleary-eyed and disoriented, seven brave net-artists escape from the hypnotizing glow of their computer monitors, venturing forth boldly into the Material Realm. For this exhibition, curators Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas (Aids-3D), have decided to open the gardens of Atelierhof Kreuzberg to these cyber-refugees, so that they may fill them with their sculptural creations. To complete this odyssey across the mind/body divide, the sculpture park will be recorded in glorious ultra-accurate 3D point cloud data with state-of-the-art laser surveying equipment, so that the works remain eternally, online.”

http://www.afksculpturepark.com
http://ww.aids-3d.com
http://www.vvork.com/?page_id=17100

Donkijote.org, the winning entry of the open competition Digital_LAB 2009 (curated by Roberta Bosco and Stefano Caldana), is an analogue/digital project that will gather data using altogether innovative techniques during four journeys taken by the artist Cristian Bettini a.k.a. P.ankh and the donkey Minuto through different areas of Asturias.The donkey will operate as a living interface equipped with digital hardware such as a GPS, a mobile Internet connection, a computer, a camera and a video camera with which it will create a memory of Asturias, producing and collecting information, re-mapping the territory and geo-categorising knowledge. The rules of the journey are determined by the natural rhythm of the donkey’s pace, giving everything that enters into our perception a measure of human attention.
The people that cross their paths, as well as Internet users, will participate in the project by providing advice and suggestions, contributing to the evolution of the project and the enrichment of the audiovisual and anthropological patrimony of Asturias. The travellers will return to LABoral after each journey where they will carry out activities using the material they have collected. In this way, the exhibition, located in the gallery Platform 1 of LABoral, will evolve and grow throughout the length of the journey and the advancement of its digital representation, connecting virtuality to reality in an indissoluble way.

http://www.donkijote.org
http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org

Common Flowers, a project by Shiho Fukuhara & Georg Tremmel, is based on the first commercially available genetically modified flower, the blue “Moondust” GM carnation developed and marketed by japanese beer-brewing company Suntory. But although Suntory applied for and was awarded with permission to grows this GM plant in its key markets, it chooses not to. Instead the GM blue flowers are grown in Columbia, harvested, and shipped as cut-flowers to the worldwide markets.
With Common Flowers we reverse the plant growing process, by growing, multiplying and technically ‘cloning’ new plants from purchased cut-flowers using Plant Tissue Culture methods. The blue GM carnations are brought back to life using DIY biotech methods involving everyday kitchen utensils and easily purchasable and ready materials.
And because the plants are officially considered “not harmful” and therefore legally permitted to grow outside, we took the next logical step and released the blue GM carnation into the environment. This action should ask questions about the state of intellectual property, ownership and copyright issues surrounding the bio-hacking and bio-bending of plants.

Common Flowers received an Honorary Mention from Prix Ars Electronica 2009, in the Hybrid Art category and it’s currently installed in Linz (Cyberarts exhibition, OK Centrum. 3-09-09 / 4-10-09).

http://www.common-flowers.org

Der Überflieger – Wearable Interface, by Andreas Zingerle, are wearables for spy pigeons. The project deals with the design and implementation of a wearable technology for carrier pigeons. The experimental setup allows the user to follow the flight path of a pigeon (with GPS and digital photography from its place of release back to the loft. With the project and the use of standard technology, Der Überflieger is a tool for people to use surveillance as a counter-performance to reflect, mirror and disorient organisations that normally have the power to observe public and private life. The documentation shows the design process and the test flights that were carried out in April 2009 in the area of Graz, Austria.
Der Überflieger is currently installed in Linz for Ars Electronica 2009 (Interface Culture Exhibition. 4-8 september 2009).

http://www.derueberflieger.com

The Open Source Embroidery project includes workshops and exhibitions which investigate how the open source software development model has been incorporated into the language of cultural participation. This major exhibition at BildMuseet (Umea University, Sweden) brings together individual and collectively made artworks by artists, makers, computer programmers and html users that explore the relationship between craft and code through social and digital networks. The works experiment with interdisciplinary approaches to modifying patterns, the DIY culture of hacking and sampling in sound, GPS and mobile technologies.

http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk

At the 53rd Venice Biennial, a completely new pavilion will be presented – the Internet Pavilion. With the theme for this year’s biennial, “Making Worlds“, it is only logical that the Internet is represented, for the first time, by a pavilion of its own. The Internet is a new part of our world that has never been represented in Venice. It is a different territory from the existing pavilions. The Internet is not defined by physical or geographical borders, nationalities, or a specific language. The Net is still new and developed with such speed that its legislation, as well as its impact on our lives, is under constant redefinition. The Internet is transforming our lives and senses; it is transforming the way we behave, communicate, share information and develop ideas. As this is what we often say art does, it is of special interest to present the Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennial.

The Pavilion is composed by two websites:

- PadiglioneInternet.com, hosts a collaboration by Miltos Manetas and Rafael Rozendaal. It will open on June 03 and similar to the physical buildings of the Biennial, it will close down in November.

- Biennale.net, holds the discussion and the history of the project and at the same time, it is the “entrance” for a number of collateral exhibitions and projects.

http://www.padiglioneinternet.com
http://www.Biennale.net

Reality is not the one we were used to anymore. Media infiltrate it more and more, and fill up our dreams, which usually come when our eyes are open. Wide open. In the frame of “Expanded Painting”, H Y P E R L U C I D is an exhibition collecting works born on the invisible edge between two different levels of reality (apparent reality and media reality), and documenting the continuous trespassing from one level to the other.
The exhibition, curated by Domenico Quaranta, includes works by Alterazioni Video; Gazira Babeli; Shane Hope; Miltos Manetas; Gerhard Mantz; Eva and Franco Mattes; UBERMORGEN.COM; Damon Zucconi.

http://www.praguebiennale.org
http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/hyperlucid.html

Postmasters Gallery in New York is hosting an exhibition of new works by new media art pioneer Wolfgang Staehle. “A Matter of Time” is comprised of four real time projections of time-lapse photographic sequences and a premier video work of a Yanomami Village in the Brazilian rain forest.
“A Matter of Time” draws upon mid-19th century painter Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire. Cole’s historically critical rumination views pastoralism as the ideal model for civilization, fearing that the ideal of Empire inevitably results in greed and decay.1 While “A Matter of Time” holds the mirror of this salient socio-political commentary up to our own time, it is one whose reflection is without indignation to the systems themselves. Perhaps, best encapsulated in the artist’s own 1989 work which avows, “Empires crumble, republics collapse, and idiots live on;” the posit follows that it is our own inordinate ability to destroy the sublimity of any civilization’s ideal that is put on the table.

http://www.postmastersart.com
http://www.wolfgangstaehle.info

Computer Baroque is an online exhibition, curated by Richard Wright and hosted by Animate Projects. The show includes a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image (featuring pioneers Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright). Rarely seen, they represent a period – the eighties and early nineties – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology.

Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had at last reached a stage where more than just a handful of insiders were able to harness the power of computers. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice was an illusion that disguised totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe. (Richard Wright)

http://www.animateprojects.org

“The Status Project” is the title of the first italian solo show by Heath Bunting, a british artist considered one of the founding fathers of the movement known as Net.art. The exhibition is hosted by Dispari&Dispari art gallery (Reggio Emilia), and features numerous artworks in the form of graphics, maps, photographs and diagrams. A big global framework, started by Bunting in 2004, that illustrates the complex system in which we live in.

http://www.dispariedispari.org
http://www.irational.org
http://status.irational.org

The online exhibition Tag ties & affective spies (organized by National Museum of Contemporary Art of Athens and curated by Daphne Dragona) is a critical approach on the social media of our times.
What happens when we are “tagging” , “posting” and “sharing” our experiences and opinions in platforms such as those of Facebook, YouTube, flickr or del.icio.us? Are we really connecting and interacting or are we also forming the content and the structure of the social web itself? The online works included, highlight the controversies of the web 2.0, commenting on the constant balancing between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy, exposure and exploitation that it presents.

http://nextnode.net/sites/emst/wp/

Project Gentili (Prato, Italy) is hosting the first italian solo exhibition by the artist duo JODI.
For their debut with Project Gentili, JODI have developed the outskirts of their computer-based practice to channel the dirt style animus of technological amateurism and participatory-media. JODI’s personal anthropology runs parallel to and thru the wealth of folk-practices on the world’s networks, from fax-phreaking and list-spamming to web-crashing and youtubing.
The opening of G33 CON will be accompanied by the presentation of a publication (including the Compact Disc, “Dance For Me Baby”) and a block party in front of the gallery, for which Jodi will perform “%Little_Internet_Street_Fighter_Remix.flv.” The artists will give a lecture preceding the inauguration at CCC Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi in Firenze, March 27.

http://www.projectgentili.com
http://www.jodi.org

The first UK retrospective exhibition of the pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott, curated in collaboration with i-DAT (Institute for Digital Art and Technology, University of Plymouth) is about to open in Plymouth (4 April – 24 May 2009).
Long before email and the internet, Roy Ascott started using online computer networks as an art medium and coined the term telematic art. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer of art, which brought together the science of cybernetics with elements of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Pop Art. Parallel to his artwork, Roy Ascott is a highly acclaimed teacher and theorist of art pedagogy.

http://www.plymouthartscentre.org
http://www.i-dat.org