3.4.06

 

Glowlab: Laboratorio Urbano en N.Y.

Entrada Múltiple:
Glowlab es un portal hacia la exploración urbana contemporánea. Los recorridos, intervenciones y derivas aqui convocadas tienen un particular sentido lúdico, creativo y crítico. En general es un acceso de lujo a asuntos de nomadología urbana y en particular destacan aqui una aplicación de recientes tecnologías al graffiti. Por favor ver estos dos videos:
Graffiti Research Labs;
LED Throwies I
LED Throwies II

"...Glowlab is an artist-run production and publishing lab engaging urban public space as the medium for contemporary art and technology projects. We track emerging approaches to psychogeography, the exploration of the physical and psychological landscape of cities. Our annual Conflux festival, exhibitions, events and our bi-monthly web-based magazine support a network of artists, researchers and technologists around the world..."

LED Throwies
The Graffiti Research Lab, a division of the Eyebeam OpenLab, is dedicated to outfitting graffiti writers and artist with open source technology for urban communication. Our goal is to enable parity between advertisers and individuals in the business of getting attention and expressing a perspective. G.R.L. agents are working in the lab and the field to develop hybrid graffiti technologies that combine traditional graf tools and techniques with contemporary materials research and embedded electronics. Each project or campaign is documented in the form of a video, images and a How-to page on Instructables dot com Graffiti campaigns and field tests have occurred throughout New York City, most recently on "The Cube" at St. Marks/Astor Place, where G.R.L. agents wrote "FREE BORF" and tossed over 425 throwies.

 

SOCIALFICTION.ORG


Socialfiction.org is a long-term research project that seeks to develop speculative knowledge that subverts ordinary ways to employ, experience and measure space, time and language.

The day to day reality of socialfiction.org is filled with projects. For most of them we encourage participation by persons known and unknown. Some of our projects are like whales, most are like plankton: the small ones feed the large ones.

Here are our whales:

Generative Psychogeography

Unlike what most people think psychogeography is really very simple: the moment you first step into a room you immediately, without conscious effort, have a heartfelt opinion about it. Psychogeography is the study of the 'stuff' that causes this mental reaction and the psychological and behavioural effects that are evoked by it.

Moving away from the automatism of surrealism and situationism, we used generative algorithms for our drifts in search for the psychogeographic. That is to say:

first left
second right
second left
repeat

or instructions to that effect. Perhaps to your surprise this actually works in generating strange unconventional routes and it is fun too. The next step was to open source these algorithms by calling for a "Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002", inviting, with success, people to try it for themselves with their own friends and share their ideas with the likeminded.

http://socialfiction.org

 

Diseño para el riesgo

A mitad de camino entre la concepción de productos y el arte, el encuentro fue una interesante excusa ideada por el arquitecto italiano residente en Brasilia Nicola Goretti, del Grupo A. G., con la consultoría de Paola Antonelli, curadora del Moma y responsable de la muestra Safe: Design Takes on Risk, para ponerlos a reflexionar sobre el papel del diseño en la búsqueda de seguridad y la protección doméstica.

“El término riesgo asume múltiples miradas en distintas culturas”, explica Goretti. “Safety Nest aborda esta obsesión imaginando escenarios, intentando definir límites y contradicciones. Brasil, sede de este primer panorama, asume un papel protagónico por su diversidad cultural y artística. Consciente de esta pluralidad, el objetivo está centrado en promover iniciativas que coloquen al diseño como generador conceptual y de producción, abriendo puertas para nuevos pensamientos y mercados”, detalla.
Confrontar, explorar, reflejar ideas, tabúes, estereotipos, miedos, miserias propias y ajenas. El diseño es futuro. Si una de las metáforas de este siglo es la inseguridad: ¿se podrá proyectar un mundo más justo?


Pasión latina
Si hay algo que quedó de manifiesto en este encuentro es que si bien hay sensaciones y sentimientos que nos igualan, la preocupación y procuración de seguridad es distinta según los países y sus contextos. Y en esto de dar cuenta de las necesidades propias, los brasileros nos llevan la delantera. Sobre todo porque tienen una escuela de programas donde el diseño asume un rol central en pos de comunidades vulnerables: “En Brasil y creo en toda América latina, la visión de la seguridad es muy diferente. Aquí, la comida asegura la protección de la vida. Si no hay qué comer no hay qué proteger. La preocupación para nosotros pasa por el pan nuestro de cada día”, explica la encantadora diseñadora brasilera Simone Mattar. (...)


"...la arquitecta y especialista en mobiliario urbano Diana Cabeza, estuvo en la calle dando como resultado: “Una reinterpretación antropológica y experimental de refugios para el nómade urbano que, eyectado de la sociedad, resuelve su propio amparo a partir de la reutilización de los desechos que la misma sociedad genera”, cuenta. Así creó sus propios Nidos Urbanos, “contenedores a mitad de camino entre la bolsa de dormir y el recinto, especie de interfases entre el cuerpo y el espacio, posibilitando su uso desde adentro y desde afuera, que intentan indagar ‘el lugar en el no lugar’, ‘el calor en el desamparo’, ‘la privacidad en lo público’, ‘la ausencia en la transparencia’, ‘el cubrirse en la desnudez urbana’, ‘el alumbrarse sin luz’”, señala Cabeza..."

De más allá
El israelí Ezri Tarazi, quien durante su estadía en Río experimentó una sobredosis de latinidad (se fascinó con la comida, las playas, la música y obviamente las garotas) presentó su Mabool (diluvio en hebreo). Una sala de estar con muebles en metal oxidado colgados por cables de acero y un piso de espejos para representar un diluvio universal de nuestro tiempo. “Construimos arcas con el deseo de anticiparnos, como Noé, a algo que desconocemos, sin saber exactamente qué clase de objeto ejecutar, pero con la necesidad de construir, para el próximo Mabool. Todo es flotante, movedizo, inestable. Inseguro”, señala.
¿Su propuesta? “Hoy no hay que ser ni inteligente, ni fuerte. Sobrevivirán los que sepan adaptarse, los que estén abiertos al cambio. Cuando la gente piensa en su seguridad, piensa en cómo protegerse de cosas del pasado. Hoy se hace indispensable transformar el pensamiento. Yo no sé cuál será mi seguridad futura, pero estoy abierto al cambio.”


Lea el artículo completo en Pagina/12

 

Nociones de Refugio Urbano 1


CULTURA : LA OTRA CARA DEL DISEÑO EN UNA MUESTRA EN RIO DE JANEIRO
Modelos de hogar para una Latinoamérica a la intemperie
Carolina Muzi. RIO DE JANEIRO

"...Nada menos que en Río, un seleccionado internacional de diseñadores se dio cita para exponer sus visiones acerca de cómo cada cultura interpreta la noción de seguridad en el ámbito doméstico. Bajo el título "Nido seguro", con la curaduría de los arquitectos Nicola Goretti y Paola Antonelli —del MoMA de Nueva York—, el 1° Panorama de Diseño Internacional reúne hasta fin de mes el trabajo de profesionales de Israel, Canadá, Francia, Uruguay, Holanda, España, Brasil y Argentina.

Si bien las respuestas fueron disímiles en general, los representantes locales (la arquitecta Diana Cabeza y el diseñador industrial Alejandro Sarmiento, ambos con reconocidas trayectorias de dos décadas) se plantaron en arcos extremos de la noción de refugio. Sarmiento, embanderado con el diseño de artículos y la resolución de problemas a partir del reuso y la resignificación de objetos existentes, apuntó hacia el "interior del interior".

El nombre de su instalación recupera una bella palabra rural: Querencia. "En las casas de hoy, cada miembro de la familia va perdiendo espacios personales, eso intento recuperar", señaló el autor. Un cerco modular para desplegar dentro del espacio doméstico busca una demarcación territorial individual: ese lugar para aislarse cuando uno lo necesita, sin que nadie moleste.

El habitáculo, de confección artesanal pero de aspecto high tech, está realizado con pelotas inflables metidas en redes y conectadas a través de picos de botellas plásticas. Aunque el espacio es mullido y promueve al rélax, "tantos picos apuntando, también señalan cuánto nos invade el plástico que no reciclamos". Fiel a su ideología, que lo emparenta con los movimientos slow, Sarmiento entregó unos pequeños objetitos manuales para jugar con la leyenda "No tech, no stress". Es que la seguridad, al menos a nivel emocional, también pasa por "bajar un cambio"..."

Color desesperanza
Casi todas las respuestas desde el diseño al tema de la protección expresaron algo entre desesperante y esperanzado. "Es que para algunas regiones pasará por el confort, pero para otras reside en objetivos más primarios e instintivos. Mostrar y discutir esto en Sudamérica es imperioso y movilizador", señala el curador, Nicola Goretti. Hubo desde una cantada interpretación de lo uterino realizada a partir de un sillón de 1957 (del carioca Sergio Rodrigues) hasta un living colgante y oxidado, post diluviano, del israelí Ezri Tarazi. La paulista Simone Mattar presentó la instalación comestible "Luminofagia": una lámpara de gelatinas. "Es que —decía la diseñadora— la seguridad es tener qué comer, si no qué vamos a cuidar."


Tomado de un articulo aparecido en el diario el Clarín de Buenos Aires

 

Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica y el M.I.T.

Dos artistas plásticos brasileros en los años 50´s y 60´s quisieron ampliar las fronteras de sus profesiones, experimentaron con el tropicalismo, la corporalidad, el reciclaje de desechos y la resignificación del entorno y de la propia vida. Practicamente sin dinero, sin apoyo estatal, sin tecnología y sin conocimientos científicos especializados, se adelantaron decadas a su tiempo y hoy son reconocidos como pioneros del arte interactivo, la performance y la arte terapia. ¿Como lo lograron? Aún estamos descubriendolos: Por su autentica y libertaria actitud ante la vida, el arte y la sociedad. Aqui un reconocimiento tardío desde el Media Lab del M.I.T

Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica
A Legacy of Interactivity and Participationfor a Telematic Future
Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica:A Legacy of Interactivity and Participationfor a Telematic Future
Simone Osthoff


ABSTRACT
This essay discusses the artistic legacies of Brazilian artists Lygia Clark (1920-1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), focusing on the interactive vocabularies developed from their participatory creations of the 1960s and 1970s and pointing to the practical and conceptual relevance of these vocabularies for artists working with digital communications technology. The article also explores the critical and original way Clark and Oiticica, working at the margins of capitalism, reframed modernist aesthetic issues by translating them directly into life and the body. The author concludes with an examination of the artists' interactive non-electronic works, which share common conceptual ground with the works of Australian artist Stelarc, the New York-based X-Art Foundation and British artist Roy Ascott.

Lea el artículo completo aparecido en la revista Leonardo online del M.I.T.
Leonardo On-Line: Art, Science and Technology

2.4.06

 

Sandy Stone, Performance e Interactividad

Ciberartista:
Sandy Stone

Una de las pioneras en la investigación de la identidad en los ambientes virtuales dirige el ACTLAB en la Universidad de Texas, Austin.

Think of it as New Media production. But that's just a phrase, and not even a good one. Occasionally there are naming races among people who do similar things, and a gazillion names are springing up -- digital media, digital arts, intermedia, transmedia, convergent media, transvergent media, etc., etc. -- since the people who began this stuff (maybe I'm one of them, depending on who's counting) started doing it in the early XXth Century. You can call it whatever you want. For me it means doing new things with old (and new) tools.We use a lot of digital stuff, but I'm not head over heels in love with the catchword "digital", except as digital equipment enables new forms of creativity. Digital is lovely and highly seductive, like tulips in the 1600s. Creativity, on the other hand, is unruly by nature and unsettling while in progress. My focus is primarily on creativity and secondarily on technology, on circuit bending rather than using prepackaged devices, on ripping up technology, reassembling it in unfamiliar forms, and making it do unexpected things.

My research and scholarly interests
Primary areas of interest include:
New Media production, video production, performance, installation, gender and sexuality with emphasis on Transgender, and fantasy/science fiction. All my current work involves making stuff, though inevitably the stuff is theory-laden.

Secondary areas of interest include:
body, desire, technological prosthetics, performance and performance theory, phenomenology of interface and interactionvirtual systems, gender and sexuality, transgender studies, nonpredicate communication, the complex interplay of science fiction and fictions of science, and the traffic in the boundaries between art and technology

Sandy Stone
Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone's onlinesite for drive-by theory, performative-fu, New Media, and radical decontextualization

 

Laurie Anderson y el Arte Multimedia



Ciberartista:

Laurie Anderson

No borders on the planet are more rigid, more vacuum sealed than those around the rectangular screen. The females who clutter videos and films are airheads, baby dolls, bimbos, bitches, earth mothers, martyrs, madonnas, material girls, morons, shtickmeisterin, shrews, witches, wiseacres, whores, welfare queens, and n-factorial recombinations of those dreary roles. Any and all of them are interesting, apparently, only insofar as they relate to men - bearing and rearing men, loving them, helping or impeding them, above all sacrificing for them, and meanwhile laughing, crying, singing, and dancing about it.
Let a mature woman, reasonably serene in her person, relatively confident in her tastes - in any case self-sufficient - concerned about public issues and knotty puzzles of human existence, let such a woman penetrate those borders and she'd be unlikely to find any company.
So how is it that Laurie Anderson, nobody's mom or sweetheart, nobody's victim, nobody's predator - indeed, a disquieting undocumented alien among all those cliches - has broken through and made some of the most interesting art of the late 20th century within those borders, earning as she goes a reputation as one of the world's premiere performance artists? Her complex and multifaceted art crosses and mixes genres with witty grace (she is musician, singer, dancer, sculptor, poet, photographer, technology-freak) and renders these persistent subjects: her country - the United States - and what it means to be an American adult today.
For more than twenty years, Laurie Anderson has taken her art around the world. On stage, on records, CDs, videos, and in books, she has amused, provoked, charmed, and sometimes puzzled her viewers with an ensemble of the latest electronic instruments, effects, gadgets, and paraphernalia. Yet none of her work appears strained or studied, no razzle-dazzle for razzle-dazzle's sake; all of it serves to show and tell stories that we instantly recognize, though we hadn't seen it quite that way before.

Entrevista completa en la revista Wired

America's Multi-Mediatrix
With a new book, new show, and new album, Laurie Anderson reinvents herself - again.
By Pamela McCorduck


 

Brian Eno sobre la Interactividad



Ciberartista:
Brian Eno:
Artista intermedial, pionero de la música electrónica, padre del ambient, productor de U2 y profesor de arte en Londres y San Petersburgo.
Legendaria entrevista de Kevin Kelly para la revista
Wired Issue 3.05 - May 1995.

If anyone could be said to embody the spirit of the artist in the digital age, it's Brian Eno. The 47-year-old holds a degree in fine arts, is the father of a genre of pop music (ambient), produces albums for rock stars, and regularly exhibits multimedia artwork in tony museums. Underlying Eno's worldwide cultural prominence is a spectacularly unusual intelligence. The Brits call him Professor Eno: he was recently named Honorary Doctor of Technology at the University of Plymouth and appointed Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art in London. Although he shuns the term, Eno is a Renaissance man, an artist gracefully hacking the new media of LPs, TVs, PCs, CDs, MIDI, photos, and e-mail. He is as comfortable (and brilliant) collaborating on albums with David Bowie, U2, or Laurie Anderson as he is giving a lecture on perfume (he's an expert), haircuts, or "The Studio as a Compositional Tool."

Africa?
"...Africa is everything that something like classical music isn't. Classical - perhaps I should say "orchestral" - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. And the fact that orchestras play the same thing over and over bothers me. Classical music is music without Africa. It represents old-fashioned hierarchical structures, ranking, all the levels of control. Orchestral music represents everything I don't want from the Renaissance: extremely slow feedback loops.
If you're a composer writing that kind of music, you don't get to hear what your work sounds like for several years. Thus, the orchestral composer is open to all the problems and conceits of the architect, liable to be trapped in a form that is inherently nonimprovisational, nonempirical. I shouldn't be so absurdly doctrinaire, but I have to say that I wouldn't give a rat's ass if I never heard another piece of such music. It provides almost nothing useful for me.
But what is tremendously exciting to me is the collision of vernacular Western music with African music. So much that I love about music comes from that collision. African music underlies practically everything I do - even ambient, since it arose directly out of wanting to see what happened if you "unlocked" the sounds in a piece of music, gave them their freedom, and didn't tie them all to the same clock. That kind of free float - these peculiar mixtures of independence and interdependence, and the oscillation between them - is a characteristic of West African drumming patterns. I want to go into the future to see this sensibility I find in African culture, to see it freed from the catastrophic situation that Africa's in at the moment. I don't know how they're going to get freed from that, but I desperately want to see this next stage when African culture begins once again to strongly impact ours. .."

Lea la entrevista completa en el archivo de la
revista Wired en línea

Gossip is Philosophy
Kevin Kelly talks to the prototypical Renaissance 2.0 artist about why music has ceased to be the center of our cultural life, why art doesn't make any difference anymore, and why Brian Eno offers no resistance to seduction.
By Kevin Kelly

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