NEWSgrist: * * Vol

NEWSgrist: *AUTOPILOT, Carsten Nicolai* Vol.4, no.4 (Feb. 24, 2003)

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

http://newsgrist.net

{bi-weekly news digest}

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Vol. 4, no.4 (Feb. 24, 2003)

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* AUTOPILOT, Carsten Nicolai

- *Wrapt* Christo + the White House

- *Quote/s* Gooeyness and Politics

- *Url/s* Barney; Jenin; Servovalve; Data Diaries

- *Big Fat Online Wedding* Mirapaul gets Translocated

- *Anti-Protest* Christopher Knight gets mauled

- *Memorial Core* on Daniel Libeskind and the WTC

- *Met Life* that Albers mural

- *Book Grist* Autopilot, by Carsten Nicolai

- *Call For Papers* T h e S t a t e o f t h e R e a l

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

‘Autopilot’ by Carsten Nicolai

“Carsten Nicolai concocts minimalist, microscopic and complex

views of the creative processes at the interface of science, art

and music.” (see *Book Grist* below)

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Nicolai.html

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*Wrapt*

CHRISTO ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT

(Reuters [sic*])

World famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have today

announced a new project that is slated to be begin immediately.

Responding to U.S. Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge's call for

artists to rally the cause through anti-terrorist art, Christo has

received permission to wrap the White House in Washington

D.C., using duct tape and plastic sheeting. Much like the artist's

1995 project "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin, "Wrapped White

House" will, according to the artists' plan, seal the building and

those inside. Of the project the artists said, "We are very

excited to use our art making methods in the international fight

against terrorists. By wrapping the White House we hope to help

keep terrorism under wraps, so to speak." Unlike "Wrapped

Reichstag" which was a temporary project, "Wrapped White

House" will be the artists' first permanent work of public art.

100,000 square meters (1,076,000 square feet) of clear high-

strength polypropylene plastic, and 15,600 meters (51,181

feet) of silver duct tape, 13.2 cm (4 inch) wide, will be used for

the wrapping of the White House. The work will be completed in

as little as one week. The artist's have contacted other artists

across the U.S. who are now in-route to Washington D.C. in

order to finish this work in record time. Materials have been

provided without charge by the German Government. Recalling

the "Wrapped Reichstag," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

stated, "Wrapping the symbol of German Democracy was a

defining moment for the new Germany. Wrapping the White House

will likewise be a defining moment as democracy is restored in

America."

*[Note: the source of this spoof is unknown]

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*Quote/s*

“All art has a political dimension, and we ignore that fact to our

peril.”

-- Christopher Knight (see * * below)

”The subject of the review was an exhibition of antiwar art, and

therefore a degree of political background was appropriate. The

attack on the Bush policy, however, went beyond that legitimate

mission. It was, in our view, a gratuitous political statement and,

as such, a distraction from the legitimate substance of the

review. It should not have been published.”

--LATimes disclaimer re: Christopher Knight’s review (See * * below)

“This show is a work about a work whose subject includes the

work that took place where this work is seen.”

-- Michael Kimmelman, “Free To Play And Be Gooey”

NYTimes 2/21/03 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/arts/design/21KIMM.html

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*Url/s*

1) “MATTHEW BARNEY - Anything Can Happen”

http://www.hitentertainment.com/barney/index2.asp

2) LIVING ROOMS (Jenin), Gary Fabiano

http://www.pixelpress.org/contents/gary/index.html

3) SERVOVALVE

http://www.servovalve.org/2003/0104/0104.html

more works + notes: http://www.turbulence.org/curators/Paris/servovalveenglish.htm

4) DATA DIARIES by Cory Arcangel

http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/index.html

A New Commissioned Work on Turbulence

With an introduction by Alex Galloway (see INTRO below)

http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/alex.php

DATA DIARIES is 11 hours of video footage which was

generated by tricking Quicktime into thinking the RAM of a

home computer is video. This was done once for each day in

January 2003. Watch as Cory's emails, letters, webpages, DSL

data, songs, and anything else he worked on that day float by as

a totally-psyched attention deficit disorder 15 frames per

second video experience.

BIOGRAPHY

Cory Arcangel is a computer artist who lives and works in

Manhattan. He is a founding member of BEIGE [aka the Beige

programming crew/Beige Records], a loose knit crew of like-

minded computer programmers, and enthusiasts. Their work has

been called "genius" by XLR8R magazine, and they were recently

named in the New York Times noteworthy art moments of 2002

poll. Together they have pioneered the practice of recycling

obsolete 8bit computers and video game systems to make art.

INTRODUCTION TO DATA DIARIES

Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost

nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional

expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops. What did

Cory Arcangel do in this piece? Next to nothing. The computer

did the work, and he just gave it a form. His discovery was this:

take a huge data file--in this case his computer's memory file—

and fool Quicktime into thinking it's a video file. Then press

play. Your computer's memory is now video art. Quicktime

plays right through, not knowing that the squiggles and shards

on the screen are actually the bits and bytes of the computer's

own brain. The data was always right in front of your nose. Now

you can watch it.

In college Cory used to slip into the public computer clusters,

saddle up to a machine and pull what's called a "core dump." In

every computer's memory there are countless pieces of left-

over information just sitting there waiting for their turn to vanish

as new memory is allocated. The email you just wrote is there,

so is that Word file that was on your screen an hour ago. The

binary data from Photoshop that you left running in the back-

ground is there too. A core dump simply writes all that data into

a file and saves it on the hard drive. A born hacker, Cory would

sift through this tangle of undifferentiated code, line by line,

looking for interesting morsels. Maybe he would find a forgotten

love letter here and there, maybe someone's term paper, or

maybe just nothing. But it was always a rewarding hunt. For this

piece, Cory has simply taken his hacker mentality one step

further and converted the hidden world of computer memory into

the time-based medium of video.

Data conversions are part of computer art. This is the crux (and

also the crutch) of RSG's "Carnivore" project. Dictionary words

are converted into three dimensional spaces in Marek Walczak

and Martin Wattenberg's "The Apartment." Mark Napier did pure

data conversion with "Feed." What sets Cory's RAM videos apart

is that they don't pretend to hinge on the craftiness of the

conversion. Conversion is not what they are about. The con-

versions here are incidental, a trivial detail coming ages

before the real fun takes place. And because of this, he eschews

the A-to-B instrumentalism of these other conversion-based

works.

Lots of artists talk about memory. But for artists working with

computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If

ever computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it

as "watching your computer suffocate and yell at the same

time." They look like digital dreams—the pure shapes and tones

of real computer memory. Each video documents a new day, and

each day the computer offers us a new set of memories.

But the greatest thing about Cory's net art is that he's not a net

artist. He never was and never will be. If net art was cinema,

then Jodi would be Godard--fresh, formalist and punk-rock to the

core. Entropy8zuper! would be Tarkovsky--lush, magical and

complex. Etoy would be Verhoeven—hyper modern, sexy and a

tad fascistic. And this leaves Cory, playing in the rec room with

his Pixelvision camcorder--all dirt-style, geekcore, and what we

like.

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*Big Fat Online Wedding*

NYTimes ARTS ONLINE

Cross-Cultural Ventures With Digital Artworks

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/arts/design/17MIRA.html

The best work in "Translocations," an online exhibition of nine

new Internet-based artworks presented by the Walker Art

Center in Minneapolis, succeeds aesthetically because it is

destined to fail electronically. "Translation Map," one of the

works, allows viewers to write and send e-mail to any of 250

countries. There is just one small problem: the Internet is

considered a global village that inspires free-flowing con-

versations, but few of these messages will ever be received.

"Translation Map," by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks, argues

against the Internet's utopian promise. The work's achievement

is to show just how disconnected parts of the online world still

are. Before universal communication can occur, Mr. Sack said,

"there are various fractures that have to be bridged."

Despite the shimmering image of the earth that introduces it,

"Translation Map" is primarily a conceptual artwork designed

to reveal those fractures. Here's how it works: Before each

message can be delivered, its text must be translated into the

language of its recipient. There are 6,000 choices, from

Algonquin to Zulu. Once the message has been converted, it

will also be published on the work's Web site.

Don't expect the "Translation Map" site to fill up soon with

messages in different languages. The work does not use a

computer program to translate a message from one language

into another. Instead it finds online forums in which both might

be spoken, then ships the message there with a request for

human help. Whether through incomprehension or apathy, the

likelihood seems that most messages will be ignored, as has

been the case so far.

Given that all of the newly commissioned works in the Walker

exhibition involve some form of cross-cultural collaboration in

cyberspace, "Translation Map" provides a backhanded reminder

that such virtual ventures are more easily imagined than

realized. As Mr. Sack, who teaches media theory at the

University of California at Santa Cruz, said, "The borders are

still there."

Most works in "Translocations," which went online on Feb. 8 at

http://translocations.walkerart.org try to break through those

borders rather than explicitly expose their presence.

For instance, Fran Ilich, a new-media artist in Mexico, asked

artists from eight countries to contribute daily comments to a

bilingual Web log, an online journal known in geek-speak as a

blog. The Raqs Media Collective from New Delhi created an

online space where anyone could post a story, photograph or

music file, which other international visitors could alter at will.

Boundary crossing has suddenly emerged as a hot topic in new-

media circles. Earlier this month the Transmediale festival in

Berlin was built around a Play Global theme. And Paris Connec-

tion, a site with commentary in four languages about French

online artworks, opens today at http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists

For Steve Dietz, the Walker's new-media curator and the

organizer of "Translocations," it is a timely notion. With govern-

ments closely monitoring who is traversing their geographical

boundaries, he said, "it seems valuable to look at the Internet

for its ability to cross those borders and get alternate points of

view."

"Translocations" is running concurrently with "How Latitudes

Become Forms: Art in a Global Age," an exhibition in the

Walker's regular galleries. Like "Latitudes," the virtual exhibition

asks how art has been affected in a world where there is a

Starbucks on every sand dune and the country-pop singer

Shania Twain slaps sitars and tablas on her songs to boost their

overseas appeal.

So, as the world gets even smaller via the Internet, will Western

art traditions vanquish all others or will they become more open

to other perspectives? The question gets even more interesting

in the digital domain. On the Internet one can skip quickly from

digital art in one city to art in another. As artists rapidly assim-

ilate one another's work, this could lead, at least in theory, to a

drab homogeneity. Is it possible that cyberspace will lose its

sense of place?

As the work by Mr. Sack and Mr. Brooks suggests, there are still

too many impediments for this to be an urgent concern. Yet the

other works in "Translocations," with their riot of foreign sounds

and images, indicate that the question is worth asking. If any-

thing, the exhibition resembles the international-arrivals area at

an American airport. The site teems with people and their artistic

baggage. Art, texts and video clips collide chaotically, and more

pour in continually. But while the site looks like a big, fat multi-

cultural wedding of artistic sensibilities, everyone's final

destination seems to be disappointingly domestic.

For instance, "Translocal Mixer," by the Brazil-based arts group

Re:combo, is an interactive audio-control panel that allows

listeners to combine sounds gathered in Recife, Bucharest and

other cities. But except for the exotic sonic content, the project

is no different from countless online music-mixing toys.

The upshot is that, at least for the moment, voices from other

latitudes are not creating new forms for online art. But if the

Internet truly becomes a global medium, will local characterist-

ics survive in online work?

Jim Andrews, a co-producer of the Paris Connection site, thinks

so. He developed the site because of its strong French accent.

"The French art has an lan and sensorial richness, an exper-

iential focus that would seem to have something to do with

French culture," he said. "I don't see this sort of art coming

much" from English-speaking countries.

New works are to be added to "Translocations," and online

viewers from around the world can augment some works with

their contributions. But if the exhibition is intended to demon-

strate that the Internet can be a global medium while retaining

its local color, that message is lost in the translation.

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*Anti-Protest*

ASK THE CRITIC

Ask Christopher Knight

Knight responds to critics of his comment about Bush's

"imbecilic plan for war."

LATimes, Jan 22, 2003

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ask-knight012203,0,5291317.story?coll=cl%2Dart%2Dfeatures

"In Graphic Protest": LATimes, Jan 15, 2003

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-knight15jan15.story

((I'm sure you've received lots of mail about the first sentence

in your anti-war art review entitled "In Graphic Protest," which

started, "The imbecilic plan for war with Iraq currently on offer

from the Bush administration has yet to register much support

from the American public." My question is what the heck does

your anti-Bush or anti-war hatred have ANYTHING to do with

art reviewing? I'm sure you don't want to hear some uninformed

politician give their opinion of the art world. You should be able

to be objective. I'm a political conservative who believes that

sometimes war IS the answer, but I'm also a major art enthus-

iast, friend of artists and gallerists, etc. and was quite offended

by your comments.

--N.W., Los Angeles))

Christopher Knight: What short memories we have! Perhaps you

were away, but I vividly recall spending much of the late 1980s

and early 1990s listening to many an "uninformed politician give

their opinion of the art world."

All art has a political dimension, and we ignore that fact to our

peril. Some art, such as anti-war posters, also has political

subject matter. Given the grave and unusual context within

which "The Anti-War Show: The Price of Intervention from Korea

to Iraq" is being mounted, it seemed sensible to state my

position on that subject matter right up front.

((Dear Mr. Knight, I found it extremely exciting and brilliant that

you opened your Track16 review with such a blatantly opinion-

ated political statement. That's why I read you--for the incisive

bold way you express your own views. Your review was such an

extension of the feeling at the show that it could be framed and

stand along side the art.

--Nancy Larson Richler, Santa Monica))

CK: French poet and journalistic art critic Charles Baudelaire

(1821-1867) is one of my heroes, and he asserted that good

criticism needed to be passionate, partisan and political. That

said: Rare is the occasion when "a blatantly opinionated political

statement" is appropriate to an exhibition review, but this

seemed to be one of them.

((I'm a Beliefs editor and general assignment reporter for a

Gannett daily in Wisconsin ... "imbecilic war plan" -- because

you're called an art critic, are we to assume that when you talk

about news developments and foreign policy, they are your

opinions, as opposed to reporting facts? What are the differ-

ences in ethical standards for separating fact vs. opinion for

you as opposed to a reporter on the city/national/foreign desks?

--Charlie Mathews, Manitowoc, Wis.))

CK: There seems to have been virtually no reader confusion, on

the part of detractors or supporters (see above), that my opening

sentence was a statement of opinion. Like any reporter, whether

on the culture desk or the city/national/foreign desk, I have an

obligation to report facts accurately; however, by definition, as a

critic I write a column of opinion, based on my interpretation of

the facts. That is why a review ("a critical report and evalua-

tion") is labeled as such.

((Is a place for real artistic talent in this world disappearing, or

is my mind warped by the growing number of midwest craft fairs

and reality television shows? I would like to know your take on

where art stands in the minds of US citizens. As an artist I have

barely begun to step over the threshold into a new and exciting

world of visual expression. Only, I fear that by the time I reach

my destination I will have no foundation to stand on. I feel like I

live in a bubble, because in Cape Girardeau, a small city in the

boot heel of Missouri, the only good art is "pretty" art, eye-

appealing and mediocre.

--Courtney Bonney, Cape Girardeau, Mo.))

CK: Far be it from me to speak for others, but I suspect art

doesn't stand much of anywhere in the minds of US citizens,

taken as a whole. If it did, the nation would experience robust

public-sector support for art, from the regular commissioning of

significant architecture by enthusiastic federal, state and local

governments to direct subsidy of art museums and performing

arts venues, large and small. Obviously we don't--but don't

despair. Lots of Americans are crazy for the stuff, and they

expend a good deal of energy making, looking at and talking

about it. I don't know how many of them live in Missouri's boot

heel--but then, how many people who can't thrive without seeing

the jungle choose to live in the desert?

[NEWSgrist NOTE: The LATimes keeps the article in question

archived and accessible on their website, but they include the

following disclaimer near the top of the page:

“The first sentence of an art review in Calendar on Jan. 15

characterized the Bush administration's plan for war on Iraq as

"imbecilic." The article went on to state that the administration

lacked a "coherent argument." It was an unusually harsh

political judgment, particularly in the context of a work of

cultural criticism.

”The subject of the review was an exhibition of antiwar art, and

therefore a degree of political background was appropriate. The

attack on the Bush policy, however, went beyond that legitimate

mission. It was, in our view, a gratuitous political statement and,

as such, a distraction from the legitimate substance of the

review. It should not have been published.” ]