Arts 11 - Digital Media: History & Foundations

Remember split 7"s? Where two bands would each record one side of a vinyl record? Taking inspiration from this form, Rhizome is offering a "Split 1-Inch" edition for those who contribute $250 to our community campaign. This limited edition flash drive contains two folders pairing artwork by artist and co-editor of VVORK Aleksandra Domanovic and curator of Art Since the Summer of 1969 co-director Hanne Mugaas. Rock out to your desktop, and pick up a Split 1-inch today!

The School of Art at CalArts have introduced a new two-year program MFA in Art and Technology. According to the press release, "The new program is designed to encourage students to investigate the critical and creative issues that arise in art practices that employ the use of new technologies and digital media. The students will also be encouraged to pursue work that crosses traditional mediums, enabling the integration of hybrid art forms with online strategies and performance...The Art and Technology Program in the School of Art will involve faculty and visiting artists whose work engages computer programming, web based systems, digital image making, digital sound design, immersive installation, digital video, interactive multimedia and hybrid performance. The curriculum will be integrated with studio based practices and open forums designed to foster dialogue between students and faculty." They are currently accepting applications for the Fall 2010 semester. Visit the link below for more information.

Eyebeam announced an open call for their Winter/Spring Residencies and 2010 Fellowships. Their residencies provide a 5-month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Their fellowships are an 11-month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time. Deadline for applications is December 14, 2009 and the start date for the next round of Residents and Fellows is March 1, 2010. Check the links below for more information and to apply.

FELLOWSHIP CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBF10

RESIDENCY CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBRWS10

On November 15, an unseasonably warm fall Sunday, a small crowd of artists and academics armed with pens, notebooks, and cell phone cameras, gathered on the second floor of the Bronx Museum. The afternoon began with a panel discussion on the topic of radio and Futurism followed by a sound installation presented by the artist Kabir Carter as part of Performa 09. As Sergio Bessa, Director of Programs, pointed out-- perhaps facetiously-- Futurism and the Bronx are temporally linked: Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the Grand Concourse are both celebrating their centennial this year.

The panel, featuring literary critics Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and poet Charles Bernstein, served as a precursor to Carter's Trap [originally titled Drifts and Traps], locating the sound piece within the historical context of the Futurist movement. The live presentation also served as a more complex complement to Carter's current installation at the BMA.

The panel centered on the opposition of the Russian futurists, portrayed as optimistic idealists by Perloff, and the Italian futurists, a group of dystopian thinkers enamored of fascism presented by Sieburth. Perloff began by reading Velimir Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future, an essay predicting the potential of radio to act as a vast concert hall and to disseminate news to the masses. Sieburth, on the other hand, explored Ezra Pound's role in Italian Futurism, focusing on Canto LXXII, a poem of discordant strife describing the author's fictitious meeting with Marinetti in radio hell. Transitioning neatly to Carter's installation, Bernstein then performed a dramatic reading of sections of Marinetti's manifesto, as well as poems by Russian Futurists and the speaker himself.

After a short break, Carter positioned himself at a table with an array of devices: radio scanners, analog synthesizer modules and audio mixers. Sounds subtly began to emanate from speakers located around the room, and the din of the audience ebbed as it became aurally engulfed by the powerful installation.

Muffled voices, sirens in the distance, fuzzy static and high-pitched beeps came together in a tangled whir, as Carter, poised like a DJ, concentrated on turning knobs and switching wires. Picked up by radio scanners, the source material derived from transmissions generated by police, car services, the MTA, and other radio users in the South Bronx. For the first time in his career, the artist chose to work with signal delays in order to "accurately represent the continuous lateral drift of acoustic energy and events along the Grand Concourse," in his own words.

After a few minutes, the composition reached a powerful crescendo, and as the late day sunbeams shone through a window onto the artist, a phrase from Radio of the Future, "a silver shower of sounds," described the moment perfectly. The intensification ended abruptly, and a lull drew attention to the silence in the room.

As time passed, the sounds became more legible and systems became identifiable-- the presentation had a fairly long duration for precisely this reason. While the radio signals may at first have appeared to be a chaotic jumble of noises, over time patterns began to emerge, and Trap became a fluid movement. As Sieburth reminded the audience earlier in the afternoon, Marinetti once declared that a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and for a few hours in the Bronx, the legacy of Futurism lived on in the cacophonous beauty of Trap.

Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.

Rick Silva: The announcement for your retrospective in Greece (your third retrospective right?!) says "The exhibition will also include the European premiere of his most recent work, Immobilité, the first feature-length work released in his 'Foreign Film Series.' I really liked this quote you told me once, I think it was by Atom Egoyan, that "every film is a foreign film"... how does that quote resonate with this new work/series?

Mark Amerika: "UNREALTIME," the exhibition in Athens, is by far the most comprehensive of all of my prior "retrospectives." In 2001-2002, we were having some fun with the notion of "Internet time" and tried to play with the idea of a retro-spective in relation to a lot of the net art I had created in the 90s. Those shows were at the ICA in London and the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo. Two more followed in 2004, one in Bilbao and one in Sao Paulo, but just in terms of size, the way my work is distributed throughout the museum space, and the variety of work covered -- net art, digital video and surround sound installation, the new mobile phone works, and various language art pieces, going through the show in Athens feels like a very intense experience.

This is partly due to the inclusion of Immobilité. The work runs 75 minutes and is being projected as a wide screen cinematic installation in the big Project Room in the museum. As I was making Immobilité, I was intentionally modeling it after what in the past we have called art-house films or, for the purposes of my new body of work, foreign films. For me, all films are foreign because they take me into another world that defamiliarizes my own and, in the process, exiles me from myself so that I too can become foreign and enter that altered world I need to immerse myself in when creating.

Besides, I am especially attracted to some of the more experimental, visionary artworks composed by artists like Chris Marker and Agnes Varda as well as the work of Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, and Kar-Wai. There is something about the way that these other artists oscillate between interior and exterior landscapes that really speaks to me. I have also seen multi-media exhibitions by both Godard and Varda and have navigated through CD-ROMs by Marker, so it's not that odd to go in the other direction, i.e. from novel writing and net art and VJ performance into feature-length filmmaking-as-art. Although it should be said that my idea was not to make a film per se, but to literally remix the form of a feature-length foreign film so that it felt like something you would see in an art-house theater but that was clearly not a major motion picture and would be best experienced as a museum installation. To achieve this, I went very D-I-Y, and shot the work entirely on mobile phone and essentially mashed-up a more amateurish visual aesthetic with my over-the-top auteur-ish methods. For example, there are many of these "painterly" scenes that point back to the abstract expressionist roots of the art scene that has come out of the Cornwall region of the UK where the work was shot. These painterly images were made not in After-Effects, in fact there are no slick, Jeremy Blake-like composites in the work, but rather flickering color fields and character portraits created using experimental hand-held techniques, something that you can really play with once you get a feel for the mobile phone as capturing device. As odd as it may sound, I imagined the mobile phone as part image capturing device, part paintbrush, and part communications gadget during the entire production.

Of course, as with all of my prior work, Immobilité is an expansion of my creative writing practice too and consists of subtitles that also remix both philosophical and literary texts that have informed my own writing style for over 25 years. As with all foreign films, the only way to see Immobilité is to read it.

RS: This idea of 'remixing the form' goes all the way back to your first new media work GRAMMATRON, where you basically wrote a novel as a multimedia hypertext website. Do you think we are in a post remix era, as in post taking-content-directly-from-other-people's-works, and maybe more about remixing aesthetic or structural forms?

MA: My sense is that it's an "all of the above" situation that has been happening for awhile now and that, out of necessity, we find ourselves becoming not so much contemporary artists (i.e. "of" our time) but temporary artists, something much more fluid in the sense that we are continually caught in the post-production process which for me is the same thing as the creative process. Being creative is what it means to be an aesthetic creature, i.e. one who remixes forms and content as part of their ongoing quest for novelty. This is something that we can trace back to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead whose books, particularly Process and Reality, highlight how we quite naturally select useful source material, what he calls datum, and reconfigure it for our own creative needs. So yes, on a practical level, remix culture is about sampling content and manipulating it for temporary effect, but on a philosophical level it goes much deeper than that, where we are intersubjectively jamming with the cultural moment we are part of while at the same time sampling from cultural forms we have inherited. With GRAMMATRON, I am noticeably remixing the formal experiments we find in metafiction, hypertext, and conceptual art+language works while unknowingly helping usher in a new genre that we have since come to call Internet art. The buzz from the discoveries made during the making of GRAMMATRON is then integrated into PHON:E:ME, where I remix the form of the concept album with forms I associate with Conceptual Art while at the same time expanding the concept of peer-to-peer networking, and then with FILMTEXT I try to mash-up a lot of different forms including interactive cinema, games, cyberpunk fiction and what had by then become net art.

But at a certain point, around 2001-2002, I realized that it was time to expand out of net art into other forms. What I noticed was that the more visual and interactive the work became, the more it begged for performance, so I began taking source material from FILMTEXT and started remixing it in live performances, what we were then referring to as VJ-ing which plays with the idea of "live cinema" or "live A/V." These are all just ways of advancing creativity as part of an aesthetically-induced, temporal achievement. Although, seeing a solid sample of the work I have created over the last twelve years distributed in the large museum space in Athens, brings home the idea that what my body of work is really investigating over time is the way digital media facilitates the remixing of persona.

RS: How do the audio/visual elements of FILMTEXT play to the different audiences you distribute the work to via say, a live, physical audience as opposed to a more distributed, online network?

MA: The audiences are changing so it's very tricky to try and anticipate what kind of art experience one can deliver to an imaginary other. For example, some of my live performances are also simultaneously distributed over the net and then archived for future research or remix purposes. One is tempted to say that these changes are almost all technologically induced. But then again, I am the one pulling the trigger. Although once I am performing a live set or enable my online presence to get distributed 24/7 over the matrix, then I start feeling like a network distributed "other" more than I feel like anything I might want to call "me" ("me" who?). This might have something to do with the way we now "play ourselves" as we live out the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote "I am another."

Don't forget, in the old days, say 10-12 years ago, a lot of the pioneering net artists were both making net art in total isolation yet connecting with their audience via the web and email while at the same time actively circulating in the international media arts festival scene. Once that happens, the audience becomes this imaginary hybrid i.e. a mesh of flesh and avatar-others, one that is constantly shape-shifting into new configurations. For example, take "Open-X" at Ars Electronic in 1997. Look at who was there and you see the core group of international artists who were beginning to define what we now think of as Internet art. "Open-X" was an interesting if slightly odd experience. The work was on the net, but the Pure Net Art Animal was now on display as a kind of novelty item to be observed for its playful tendencies. We weren't really sectioned off into a ghetto; it was more like we or our work process was on visual display in kind of techno-zoo, which made perfect sense since we were becoming part of art history which treats its artists and artworks like a precious species to be preserved in controlled environments.

Since the start, though, I have tried to tie a performance element to my various art projects. With GRAMMATRON, you would have thought the audience was primarily oriented toward experimental electronic literature. Sure, there was some of that, but it was what we call the "art world" that really embraced it when it first launched. When I went on the GRAMMATRON WORLD TOUR in 1997-1998, I was playing the work like a multi-media literary reading, something I picked up from my book tour days with my underground novels like The Kafka Chronicles, the difference being that these so-called readings now had sound art, animated images, and multi-linear narrative routes to navigate through while performing the work live. These were the days when my work was being reviewed by magazines like MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL who at the time put out books like "Book Your Own Fucking Life." The early net art scene was a very DIY scene and that was what attracted me to the idea of pushing it as far as it would go back then. There were no MFA programs dealing with net art in a serious way, that's for sure.

So it was not a big leap for me to then take FILMTEXT on the road as part of a live A/V or DJ/VJ performance act. The work opened at my solo exhibition at the ICA in London 2001-2002, and was presented as a cluster of projects that could be interacted with or activated over the Internet: the main digital narrative / Flash interface, a downloadable artist e-book, and an mp3 concept album. But then ten months later started the performances. The main difference between the GRAMMATRON readings-cum-performances and the FILMTEXT performances was that the source material became more translocal because we would supplement the source material from the net art version of FILMTEXT with new source material from wherever we were in the world performing our live A/V gigs. Whether we were in Basel or Tokyo we would record local video and sound data and integrate it into the gig later that night, which then led to all kinds of wildstyle philosophical tripping. This all fed into what I know think of the VJ Persona tour. I remember being in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and the Canary Islands all in a five-week period -- I was even teaching two new media art seminars as part of my professorial duties -- and realizing that the "jet-lag consciousness" as I call it, i.e. the time-tripping through international time zones while recording and remixing my memories, imaginary experiences, and translocal source material, created a more immersive net art practice than I had previously imagined. Since I am addicted to writing (Cocteau: "Writing is a sickness." / Bataille: "I write not to be mad."), I have documented these experiences in META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press) in both theoretical and fictional forms. Cf. "The Random Life of VJ Persona (A Mobile Medium in the Form of a Fiction)". In the book, VJ Persona is a nomadic net artist whose digital personae operates in asynchronous realtime, which is a kind of UNREALTIME, thus the connection to the title of the exhibition in Athens right now.

RS: When I look across your various works, some major themes that rise to the surface for me are; the future slipping into the past, the virtual slipping into the real, and the self/artist and the body as it negotiates these slippages. Other themes just below the surface are language, sex, politics, and place. Do you see that as fair reading of the work? Am I missing a big aesthetic or philosophical concern in there?

MA: As I look at my body of work to date, starting with the novels and working through the net art, the multi-media museum installations, the live A/V performances and now the feature-length films, the thing that stands out is how much my methodologies depend on what I call remixological inhabitation -- something that artists of all stripes have been doing in a visible form forever (think of Chaucer referring to himself as "The Compiler"). One can see the residue of "play-giarists," appropriation artists, and cut-up practitioners like Lautréamont, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Raymond Federman all throughout my work. This may be why I enjoyed hanging out with Acker and Federman and was attracted to Burroughs as well, especially the way they fucked up language with their political forms of sexuality and experimented with their bodies.

All of the talk of hactivism, the gift economy, surf-sample-manipulate, etc, was easy for me to connect with because, in fact, when I look at the real early stuff I was doing even in my teens and early twenties, before I was aware of any the historical lineage of those who stole before me, I can see in my notes that I was seriously mashing up discourses from a lot of different sources. So when you say that you see the virtual slipping into the real, for me the virtual is the Source Material Everywhere and it was made "real" via whatever temporary remix I happened to perform with the material in asynchronous realtime. If I happened to have recorded that performative act then that recording too becomes more source material that can be revised, remixed, or otherwise reconfigured into a composed work of art no matter what medium or genre I am working in and, by the way, the mediums and genres begin to blur in my work too because of all of the transcoding that takes place within these ongoing remixological performances. Immobilité can be read as a film, a video art work, a philosophical treatise, or even a kind of visual novel/installation (loaded terms all, I know). For me it basically comes down to maintaining a "cut-and-paste-as-you-go" open source lifestyle practice where the remnants that you leave behind reveal your formal or stylistic tendencies. Some of these remnants are left on the net, some in institutional or commercial spaces, some are left in the club, and some are left on my computer. The important thing for me is that when I am making a work, I am, to use a sports analogy, "leaving everything on the field" because for me making art is an intense experience where the aesthetic, i.e. the artist-medium performing, meets the prosthetic, i.e. the technological crutch, meets the athletic, i.e. the body losing itself in unconscious creative projection. Producing -- or what I really mean is perpetually postproducing -- one's aesthetic trajectory through history is a durational achievement that challenges our sense of time. It's like what Borges says, "Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

The reason I keep going back to language, play, sex and politics is because that's all that really matters in the end. Of course, since I am postproducing the kind of art that grows out of a literary sensibility, let's not forget death too. Language, play, sex, politics and death all resonate with my core aesthetic principles which, I was reminded of again last year, are intimately connected to Whitehead's process theory. In Process and Reality, Whitehead declares that "Creativity is the principle of novelty." The word novelty is, for Whitehead, uncharacteristically placed in italics for emphasis. If you read through Whitehead's process theory, especially as it applies to aesthetics, you will see that he not only literally introduces us to the concept of creativity, but that he anticipates the coming of the postproduction artist as creative medium. Remixing, it ends up, is a biological process that feeds into what I am now calling the renewable tradition. How each individual negotiates the Source Material Everywhere is, as you suggest, a slippery process, and informs the development of their remixological style which then can be applied to the making of customized aesthetic experiences.

RS: So, what in the Source Material Everywhere is filtering itself into your upcoming projects?

MA:

Mark Amerika's comprehensive retrospective ""UNREALTIME" curated by Daphne Dragona runs at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, from October 22, 2009 until January 3, 2010.

Rick Silva is a former student and sometimes collaborator of Mark Amerika. The interview was conducted via email.

The current exhibition at Art in General is “Erratic Anthropologies", which features Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, Rancourt/Yatsuk, and Hong-An Truong, who construct narratives through video and performance that investigate a host of social subcultures (from hippie crafters to failed south Florida housing developers). In collaboration with Performa 09, a special series of performances have been organized to accompany the show. Last Wednesday, November 10, Benfield, Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk performed in temporary environments in the gallery space. They will perform again tonight at 7pm. Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Jenny Jaskey writes about Shana Moulton’s "The Undiscovered Antique."

In a crowded room on Wednesday night, video and performance artist Shana Moulton presented the ninth installment of Whispering Pines, a series in which her alter ego Cynthia relishes the life-changing potential of home décor, beauty routines, and self-help mantras. Cynthia’s obsession in this episode, entitled The Undiscovered Antique, focuses on her journey to confirm the value of personally meaningful domestic artifacts á la The Antiques Roadshow. Moulton’s work is a layering of video, performance, and prop staging that is, in its more effective moments, abstract and dreamlike. In the spirit of Sara Goldfarb minus the amphetamines, Cynthia fantasizes about the transcendental payoff of her kitsch consumer fetishes, which include a head massager and footbath. Moulton achieves this sense of escapism by fully integrating her character into a two-dimensional digital landscape: projected objects move in choreographed syncopation with Cynthia’s body, sometimes appearing to control its movement or color its surface.

Moulton’s work makes us particularly attuned to the social structure surrounding its protagonist through its exaggerated and fragmented representation of Cynthia’s environment. It uses this fiction as a means for creating a kind of framed anthropological analysis (in one interview I read, the artist says she began as an anthropology major and switched to art later in college). What became striking through this latest performance was not only the extent to which mass produced objects take on spiritual or healing significance for Cynthia, but how consumerism itself functions as a kind of religious outlet for her: the collection of “ritual” products, the pilgrimage to Roadshow, the promise of transformation through the practice of domestic consumption. If Moulton the anthropologist is showing us something, it is perhaps how our appetite for worship finds itself both in and outside of religious structures; organized consumption holds as much promise for accessing power and healing in Moulton’s scenario as organized religion might in other contexts.

Moulton’s practice uses the strategy of embodiment shared by artists across a wide swath of practices – Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tamy Ben-Tor, Yasumasa Morimura – to name a few, but the work finds its singular voice and appeal in Moulton’s personal and diaristic attachment to her character. It is the artist’s close affiliation with Cynthia (she views the character as connected to her own psyche) that keeps the work from spiraling into irony.

Scheduled for its New York premiere this Sunday, November 22, Case is an experimental adaptation of the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Considered a classic work of the literary genre cyberpunk, Neuromancer tells the story of Case, a fallen super hacker whose glory days have long since ended, leaving him in a drug-addled, regret-ridden state that lifts when a mysterious entity offers him a second chance. Charged, kaleidoscopic, and prescient, Neuromancer dilates on virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a globalized world through the intricacies of Case’s story. Case (2009), conceived and produced by artist Brody Condon, will be a day-long installation and performance that, in the artist’s words combines “Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with faux ‘virtual reality’ scenes that will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.” I asked Condon a few questions in advance of the New York premiere so readers, near and far, could get a sense of how this ambitious work will unfold on Sunday.

Case is commissioned and presented by Rhizome and Performa 2009: the New York Biennial of performance art, whose theme this year is futurism. It will take place at the New Museum on November 22 from 1-6pm. Viewers may come and go; there is no set time required to stay. Advance tickets are available here: http://www.newmuseum.org/events/384.

Lauren Cornell: Why were you inspired to adopt Case's story in 2009?

Brody Condon: One core theme of Gibson's novel is addiction and transcendence, and is embodied by the hacker Case. The performance will feature Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, an infamous Midwestern hell-raiser and activist, reading as the main character. This work started as a series of interviews with Ray, which I mashed with Neuromancer. Not only did he give me this book in the late 1980's, but many of his anecdotes concerning a life lived on the fringes of society blend seamlessly with those of Case.

I'm actually not so interested in the specifics of Gibson's narrative, for me the book is a reference to a situation that surrounded me in the 1980's when "new age" spiritual culture combined with a technological fetishism that promised a now dated "virtual reality" that would finally release us from the confines of our bodies.

LC: Right, when characters interface with the internet in Neuromancer, it is like they are stepping into virtual reality. This is not the first time you've dealt with alternate realities -- a fascination with them runs through your work, as with Twentyfivefold Manifestation (2008) in which 80 players enacted live action fantasy role-playing in a sculpture park over the course of a few months, and KarmaPhysics (2004) which features animated Elvis’ falling through an unbounded, pink-hued space. How will this feeling of virtual reality be conveyed in the performance at the New Museum?

BC: I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I am still interested in this notion of projection of self into other spaces via religious experience, drugs, role-playing, or immersive screen spaces, but I never imagined Case interfacing with the actual internets, he is immersing himself in Gibson's idea of what he thought this future screen space could be - the most lucid take I've heard recently on this issue is Bruce Sterling's talk in Germany, "the idea that the virtual is somehow philosophically seperate from the actual, it's a period notion. It's done."

The piece at the New Museum is a parody of this idea of a space where we would fly through information. When the main character, Case, "jacks in", he will face away from the audience, the Gamelan ensemble will kick in, and the other readers will pick up the geometric props and move around him, like he is flying through the virtual objects as described in the novel. At the same moment, the props are similar to objects used in Oscar Schlemmer Bauhaus performances, a key moment in early twentieth century techno-fetishist art.

LC: The performance combines sensationalism and deadpan readings. The narrative itself is thrilling and wild--reading it today, one can't help think about how its future predictions have borne out. And you've selected a truly diverse cast from much-loved Williamsburg gallery owner Sto of Cinders Gallery to actress and actress/ pornstar Sasha Grey. Can you describe what visitors will see when they come to the event on Sunday? And more practical choices: how did you do the casting? And why did you choose to have the reading be deadpan?

BC: I don't find the performance so sensational, or at least I didn't begin with that intention. Viewers can come and go as the please throughout the day. The event will be fairly random and casual, like a rehearsal, with the Gamelan ensemble interrupting the monotonous reading at various cycles throughout the day during the scenes where Case is in other spaces outside his body like hallucinations or VR. I have made a set of geometric shapes inspired by video documentation of a 80's Oskar Schlemmer remake where two dancers interact with a stack of cubes. Made in collaboration with the printmaker Breanne Trammell, the shapes will be picked up and moved around Case as a low-fi VR simulation.

LC: Via his Twitter account, we found out that William Gibson approves the performance and has no issue with the fact that you didn't seek his permission in advance of the production. This isn't the first work in the public domain you've dealt with, what is your usual approach to ascertaining permission?

BC: Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved... and it's an honor that Gibson is into the project.

LC: Agreed. Last question: Where will Case go next?

BC: From the beginning the idea was to stage the reading at a small outdoor theatre in the rural Midwest where I originally began shooting interviews with the main character Ray a few years ago. That is currently planned for 2010. I am re-staging it primarily to shoot a video piece, as this was logistically a problem at the New Museum. My current performative projects operate this way, me setting up temporary communes based on a world I organize based on a simple set of rules, then I collect footage.

This gallery-installation/internet-art hybrid automatically created sculptures using spam and e-mail to trigger the sculpting process. It consisted of a steel frame surrounding a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam. Attached to the frame is the Eroder: a mobile sprayer that squirted colored water on to the foam. Done in collaboration with Tony Muilenburg and commissioned by Rhizome.org.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

"website which adds a yellow pixel to itself for every visitor." (Yellow as of 3/9/08)

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Lisi Raskin, an artist known for her whimsical military command centers and her cross-country information gathering van (official title: Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station), has produced a new project for Dia's ongoing Artists' Web Projects series. Titled Warning Warum, the website is a nuclear control panel that allows visitors to "bomb" locations of their choosing. The playful interface recalls Raskin's signature childlike style, complete with construction paper collages and handwritten buttons. The accompanying audio of the artist also reminds one of a kid at play, with Raskin chirping "beep beep" to replicate the sound of morse code or "oooeeewwwww" for the missile launch. Raskin's style of interface aesthetics emerges from her own upbringing in 1980s America, where the Cold War and the fear of a nuclear blast were in the air. Her low-fi reconstructions can be understood as an intentionally imprecise attempt to come to terms with the threat of nuclear disaster, an event so horrific and overwhelming as to be almost outside the realm of human comprehension.

An ongoing project by artists Michael Smith and Joshua White, Open House was commissioned by the New Museum, and presented in its lower level public gallery in 1999 when the institution still resided on Broadway. In this version, Open House was a large-scale installation of a Soho artist’s loft belonging to the fictional artist “Mike Smith,” who is created and played by the artist Michael Smith and who, viewers learned through a video-taped sales pitch playing in the entrance to the installation, has lived in the loft for over twenty years, and is now looking to sell it. According to the pitch, the new owner will inherit the loft and, in a gesture that lies somewhere in between personal erasure and a Buddhist-like surrendering of material possessions, the past twenty years of Mike Smith’s art, all made while he lived in Soho. This dual sale—of art and life—turns the Open House installation into both a marketing pitch and a memoir. It presents the artist’s two-decade trajectory in Soho: video-taped documentation of the rigorous building of the loft, which in itself resembles a durational performance art piece of the 1970s, his multi-faceted, multi-media art, his activism, and his personal evolution, all with a price-tag. Presented at a critical juncture in the fictional artist’s life, Mike’s story with Soho ends where Open House begins, with the desire to leave the neighborhood, or what it has become, for some place more affordable and less pretentious.

This interview with Michael Smith took place in anticipation of the launch of an online version of Open House —a project that was realized thanks to my colleague John Michael Boling, who worked with Smith to transfer the work from DVD to the web.

LAUREN CORNELL: Open House is the story of an artist literally selling out. But the process isn’t corrupt, Mike just seems like he needs change. It’s a big story that unfolds in little parts: fragments of his life and early days in the loft, key works he made, and glimpses of New York living in the 70s and 80s-- all told through a sales pitch. Can you talk about the origins for Open House, how you and Joshua began the project?

MICHAEL SMITH: Open House was developed for the New Museum's Public Gallery Space back in 1999. Then Senior Curator Dan Cameron asked me to come up with a project after seeing Musco: 1969-1994, an elaborate installation at the Lauren Wittels Gallery in Soho I made in collaboration with Joshua White. Musco was developed by taking information from Josh's history and experiences with the Joshua Light Show and integrating it with a fictional story of my performance persona, Mike. The piece was all about failure and struggle to adjust to changes in one’s life and culture. The context for that show was also SoHo, so I assume Dan was hoping we could develop a project that might be able to respond to the neighborhood or ethos of the community with a project for the museum's public gallery.

We transformed the lower floor gallery into a loft live-work space. Josh was very careful to make it seem like a real loft separate from the museum space, and designed it so that one had to pass through scaffolding in order to enter the installation. He modeled the space after my storefront studio on Elizabeth and Spring St and many of the typical large SoHo loft spaces we were both familiar with.

LC: After its incarnation at the New Museum, Open House was made available as an interactive work that encompassed documentation of the installation and the art being sold, which included Interstitial, a public access television show Mike produced, and documentation of his activism with the Sohoods—a collective determined to “protect the avant-garde of Soho” and “keep the wine bars out.” One video is dedicated to the construction of the loft; entitled Sweat Equity, it features you and the artist Guy Smit (playing Larry Seiben) in the laborious throes of erecting walls and painting. There is music, overalls, sweat and a lot, a lot of building—all appearing in black-and-white which seems to signal that the process took place a long time ago. Is this sweat equity reflective of your time in SoHo? Is Open House autobiographical in a way?

MS: Open House was autobiographical only insofar that Mike and I happen to be looking for more security and stability in our lives at the same time. The story was based on my experiences I witnessed while living and working on the edge of SoHo for over 20 years. Much of the outline for the show and the trajectory of Mike’s career in Open House was loosely modeled after different types of artists, some of whom confused their new independent lives with thinking of NYC as a new frontier, where ambitions were put to the test. Some needed lots of space to start making their process pieces, whether they were hanging work on a wall or scattering things all over the floor. They needed to stake a claim and acquire real estate. One good thing that came from people building out their lofts was that they learned skills and how to make money with a particular trade, like carpentry or plumbing. Many artists today work on a desktop and support themselves doing computer work. I figured out early on that I did not need a lot of space, and so I pared down and lived and worked with less. I also never learned how to do anything.

LC: The size of an artist’s studio can reflect their practice and also influence it. Many artists in NYC today couldn’t even consider getting a studio, so the idea of making large-scale sculpture or scattering things on a floor with a lot of square feet may not feel like an option, where a performance, video or website might. Open House also raises the role that artists play in gentrification. The period of time that the artist Mike Smith of Open House lived in is romanticized; in fact, the freedom and community of that time, the large Soho loft space, has created a certain kind of picture of what an artist looks like and inspired people to move to New York. That aura around Soho is, partly what drove real estate prices up and pushed artists out. It seems that Open House—a kind of fictitious documentary and real estate parable in one—speaks to that cycle of gentrification, with Mike ultimately putting the loft up for sale.

MS: Definitely, but I think the prices of Soho were determined by many factors besides the aura created by the bohemian occupants. Artists and loft living helped to develop the allure of the area but also to initiate the rezoning from light industry to residential, opening up the mixed zoning potential of SoHo. Unfortunately, many of them did not write themselves into the story. The struggle over property that many waged and lost consumed their energies and diverted attention away from the prime reason many artists moved to NYC, making art. I am certain there are artists who still come to NYC to be with other artists and others who come to reinvent themselves. There are also those who do not want to deal with the harsh economic realities of NYC. Today there’s other cities, like Philadelphia, Berlin or even Milwaukee; all good places to be and to find a community. Artists lived in Soho because of the inexpensive space. But it also was the area to live in if you called yourself an artist. It’s also in close proximity to the West Village, a historic Bohemian neighborhood that was prohibitive in cost by the time I moved to New York.

I am not that interested in the story about the heroic artist or the artist who supposedly goes against the grain, trailblazing a path for others to follow and the critics to acknowledge. What I find compelling are the stories about the people who have ambition and understand the models for success but somehow cannot get the ingredients right for a winning recipe.

LC: Mike Smith is exactly that kind of artist—he is in a constant state of struggling and by the time he sells his loft he doesn’t seem to have reached that kind of resolve. Can you describe his body of work?

MS: Well, like with any artist it is not easy to do justice to a body of work in a few words. His work is representative of a time and a place, but one thing that’s important to remember is that Mike is not a very good artist. His best work is probably Interstitial. Like many artists of his generation he considered the work he did for public access TV to be his art and in a sense it was the work that best served the community and satisfied his political inclinations. It is the highlight of the installation as it was the highpoint of Mike’s career. Interstitial was much more effective than the actions of the SoHoods, who protested the gentrification of Soho, years after that process was already entrenched. The work of the SoHoods was self-important and always seemed to miss its target. They did some tagging and clandestine actions like putting up signs, but their best moments are probably when they were having fun. The footage reflects this: it’s lively but hardly compelling art.

LC: Well, the end result of activism (if not the achievement of goals) can often be simply to build values or community, which the SoHoods seem to have to done, although the Mike of the sales pitch video certainly seems removed from the heat of their original manifesto. One final question: why, as someone who has worked primarily with video, performance and installation, have you chosen to turn Open House into a web-based work?

MS: Josh felt the perfect container for the show was a DVD and he was correct. A linear reel hardly could contain all the diversions and tangential characters and connections. The maze-like menu suits the complexity of the piece.

LC: Thank you Michael.

The DVD produced by Michael Smith and Joshua White in 1998-1999 in conjunction with the site-specific installation piece Open House is now available online, click here to view.

Rhizome's Associate Editor and Special Projects Manager John Michael Boling worked with Smith to clone the DVD to an online format and to preserve it through Rhizome's online archive, the ArtBase.

For one art, Gallaccio will fell and disassemble a tree and then reconstruct it with all the engineering required to support it visible. The tree, a weeping cherry killed when contractors erroneously cut its root system, will reach into SculptureCenter's fifty-foot-high clerestory, virtually filling the space with its branches. Viewers will enter the space under its branches and will only be able to apprehend the full tree when standing at the far end of the gallery fifty feet away.

The title of the work is borrowed from an Elizabeth Bishop poem whose subject is loss and the unlikely possibility that we might master it through artful practice. one art is a tree as assisted ready-made, building on the art historical tradition of landscape and grappling with our desire to believe in an untamed nature.

In one art, Gallaccio's aesthetic act is to move the tree from its normal outdoor environment to an urban industrial building adapted as an exhibition space. Yet the process of disassembling and rebuilding the tree transforms it - drawing attention to the extraordinary formal and structural properties of the tree.

-- FROM THE DESCRIPTION FOR THE EXHIBITION OF "ONE ART" AT SCULPTURE CENTER (JANUARY 8- APRIL 3, 2006)

Dervish consists of four high definition projections of individual trees with twirling branches. This was inspired by a ritual practiced by the priests, or dervishes, of the Mevlavi sect of Islam. In the midst of a trance, the dervishes whirl in a motion symbolizing the soul's release from earthly ties and communication with the divine. The movement of the branches contains elements of both control and lawlessness -- while the whirling motion of the trees is fanciful and seemingly enchanted, the movement is limited by the roots of the trees.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Consisting of 17 vibrant hornbeam trees formally planted in a grid pattern, at the heart of this landscape three trees will slowly rotate. In place of the familiar movement of shade according to the rotation of the earth around the sun, here shade migrates at an artificial speed, transforming the familiar patterns of the natural world into artificial creations.

-- FROM THE PROJECT DESCRIPTION FOR THE 2008 LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL

Created by artist Peter Baldes's Electronic Strategies Class at Virginia Commonwealth University, nonmonument.com is a collection of 3D models tagged with geolocation data and viewed in Google Earth. The project uses Google Earth to introduce impossible and possible interventions and objects in that space, and it plays with the program's claim to represent reality. In a communication with me, Baldes stated that these nonmonuments be thought of "...as real, at their own resolution." He sees the works as a unique form of public art and/or graffiti that "exist in a different layer of our reality." His class has opened up the forum to submissions as well, and visitors are invited to submit their own nonmonument.