In the spirit of Raphaël Rozendaal's One Question Interviews, I conducted a "1-bit" interview with Rhizome-commissioned artist Tristan Perich. (I felt the idea was apropos given the artist's interest in the possibilities and constraints of basic forms.) Perich performed earlier this week at bitforms gallery in a benefit for his new album 1-Bit Symphony, which is a 45 minute long, five movement composition for a single microchip. 1-Bit Symphony is currently on display through November 7th at bitforms in New York City, along with Perich's Machine Drawings and his 1-Bit Video. Perich will also kick off a two month, cross-country tour with Lesley Flanigan beginning tomorrow, at the Stone in the East Village. He will be performing his composition for harpsichord and 4-channel 1-bit electronics titled "Dual Synthesis". (Full dates and details here.) I visited his bitforms show today (see photos below) where I had the opportunity to listen to 1-Bit Symphony, and it's truly extraordinary. I encourage readers to stop by. - Ceci Moss
What is your favorite unit of measurement and why?
The first unit of measurement to blow my mind was the parsec, which I came across in middle school in that amazing book, Powers of Ten. It described immensely vast distances, larger than a light year, which was really large. It quantified the universe. It was the first time I realized measurements could actually be cool, really cool. The book also went down to angstroms and fermis and pico fermis, accompanied by colorful illustrations of molecules and atoms. They're the only way we can relate to these huge and small places beyond our perception, essentially meaning, "bigger than you can possibly imagine" or "smaller than you can possibly imagine." A great book called Where Mathematics Comes From goes into how we can only understand mathematical abstractions through "grounding metaphors," like "number as distance." We seek recourse to our ineptitude by further refining our measure on the world, which Lorentz and Einstein proved will ultimately fail, our Icarus syndrome. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has some blocks on its campus that measure exactly 1 cubic inch, or weigh exactly one pound, creating the official word on measurement. They are free from inaccuracies since they define what an inch is in the first place: a physical embodiment of language.
But recently, I have settled to truly appreciate the millimeter. As a kid I always thought millimeters were too small to perceive, but they are actually pretty big. I've put them to work a lot recently to determine the precise wire lengths for 1-Bit Symphony, adding a mm here or subtracting a mm there. It's finally supplanted their intangibility with a new meaningfulness. Then Squires Wires, my wire company, blasphemously converts them to decimaled inches…
Variety Evening at the New Museum
Friday, October 30th @ 7pm
at the New Museum, New York, NY
$10 Members, $12 General Public
BUY TICKETS
Join us at the New Museum tomorrow night at 7pm for a variety show organized by Berlin-based collective, curatorial-project and website VVORK (Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer and Christoph Priglinger). For "Variety Evening at the New Museum" local performers will stage works by artists Wojciech Kosma, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas, ladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. Containing readings, video, performance, dance and music, Variety will present the acts together in a dramaturgy that can be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. When finished, the evening will be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future.
This event is part of Rhizome's New Silent Series at the New Museum."Contact," the most recent exhibition by the group Art Business Consulting, featured a rocket ship built from computer hardware, with a trio of yuppies floating weightlessly on a video screen inside. The trappings and denizens of the office have figured in ABC's work since Mikhail Kosoplapov, Maxim Ilyukhin, and Natalia Struchkova formed the group in 2001, and as in "Contact," they have always been subject to some sort of disfigurement. Early on, ABC established a pseudo-corporate identity by showing up at art openings in expensive cars and nice suits, performing the role of Russia's nascent upper-middle class while their colleagues in the Moscow boheme were riding public transport in sweaters and jeans. To solidify that image, ABC made good on their name's promise of "business"--in 2004, they became dealers, selling the work of artists they liked at ABC Gallery. Change happens quickly in Moscow; now that the market has dwarfed institutional influence in Russia's art world, linking the words "art" and "business" doesn't feel as novel as it did in 2001, and Western-style corporate culture has lost the cachet of an exotic interloper. ABC's symbolic launch of the office into space in "Contact" came on the heels of the loss of their own office space; at the end of May, the arts complex where ABC Gallery was located shut down to make room for a new development. While Ilyukhin, Kosolapov, and Struchkova continue to work as artists, businesspeople, and consultants, the events of last summer seem to mark a turning point, a time for reflecting on the future of a project initiated to document social change now that those changes are entrenched.
Image: Art Business Consulting, installation in the office of Prezentuar, 2004"The idea for ABC began with horror at the notion that I would have to work at an office," Ilyukhin, the group's de facto spokesperson, said in a conversation in Moscow last month. And though he did end up working in an office--for the Moscow branch of Halliburton, no less--the work of ABC always balanced horror with sympathy. Their use of the office's visual vocabulary was never dark or grotesque enough to be read as a critique of corporatism. The Yes Men impersonate companies to infiltrate media platforms, like news shows and conferences, where they use exaggeration and parody as tools to highlight corporations' socially ruinous practices. Goldin+Senneby engage actual companies as well as artists and thinkers in their mimicry of corporate language and behavior, all to create structures that demonstrate how theories of the virtual are embodied in the everyday operations of business. ABC's approach is looser, more ambiguous and playful. Their first intervention at a real company had nothing to do with criticality; a maker of installation equipment for business expos commissioned them to do a show in its office. It brought a lot of media attention to both the company and the artists, and as ABC told the Russian magazine Artchronika in a recent interview, they subsequently fended off a flood of requests for similar shows by making outrageous proposals to their corporate suitors (for example, they told one would-be client to build a living billboard, with employees working in a transparent enclosure above a highway). ABC flirts with the appearance of both branding agencies and activist projects; their art isolates the values and quirks of corporations by transposing them to incongruous settings.
Corporate culture has developed gradually over several decades in the Anglo-American world, but it's a sudden insertion in Russian life. Ilyukhin, Struchkova, and Kosolapov chose to ape a company because they couldn't ignore the rate at which new businesses were opening in 2001, as the country recovered from its economic default of 1998. It was just as dramatic as the rapid spread of computing technology, a story that statistics tell in broad strokes. The Levada Center estimated that 20% of Muscovites owned a personal computer in September 2001, a figure that rose to 33% by Sept. 2006. The rate of change was more drastic in the rest of Russia, where ownership grew from 5% to 22% over the same period (source). (By contrast, in the United States home internet usage rose from 50.4% in 2001 to 61.7% in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.) Changes in the public outlook and opinion are central to ABC's interests, and not only in their own work. Ilyukhin said that ABC Gallery represented artists whose work was about, as he put it, "post-computer consciousness" and "euroremont." He defines the former as a type of vision affected by computer use, "when a person sees an image through Photoshop." Euroremont is a common euphemism for renovations that emerged in the 1990s, when it became popular to refit Soviet buildings to conform to an abstract ideal of the un-Soviet, as summed up in the prefix "euro". ABC Gallery's exhibitions included Johannes Osterhoff's shields emblazoned with Windows icons and a display of a blog by Olia Lialina and Dragan Epenschied.
Image: ABC Gallery's stand at the Art Moscow art fair, 2007Ilyukhin insisted on separating the activity of ABC the art collective and ABC the gallery, but the group's exhibition practice often seems to deliberately blur that division. In 2007, for their first exhibition at XL Gallery, ABC chose to mix their own works with some by the artists their gallery represents. Last year, the procedure was amplified when Galerie Krinziger in Vienna invited XL to organize an exhibition in their space, XL picked ABC, and ABC curated a group show. This September ABC organized Universam, a festival where small galleries and artist collectives were allotted cubicles. Once again, ABC had been approached with an opportunity to produce a large-scale project, and in response they chose to facilitate the display of other artists' work.
Image: Art Business Consulting, video for the installation "Contact", 2009ABC's promiscuous mixture of art-making, curating, and dealing extends from an output centered on violating norms, whether that involves putting office furniture in the woods or eroding the clean discreteness of computer hardware by melting mouses in a vaguely zoomorphic pile. By tainting the office setting with extraneous elements, ABC foregrounds the corporate aspiration to purge contaminants from the "outside world" in a maximally efficient, artificial environment. "One must realize that life in a spaceship is like life in an office [...], where you not only work and relax but spend days at a time," ABC wrote in the statement accompanying their space project. "Training for life in space takes place on earth, in any office." Contact broke the order of the office by appropriating keyboards to build the carcass of a satellite. But any violation of a taboo implicitly attributes the source material with special value; by playing with the office, ABC affirms its position as a sacred space. "If just once in his life [Ilyukhin] had held a jackhammer, hardhat, or cement in his hands, he would realize how beautiful and noble the office truly is," Kosolapov said in ABC's Artchronika interview. "It's paradise! Sure, it's asexual and awful, oppressive and airless, but paradise nonetheless."
A proposal to remake Ed Ruscha’s classic bookwork, replacing the corporate lots with the private lots that spring up in my neighborhood once a year, during the Canadian National Exhibition. A folk-art archive of sorts.
Cars are a defining feature of the landscape and social space of Southern California. Especially in San Diego, where freeways weave like dangerous ribbons through a terrain of strip malls and tract housing, driving is an almost inescapable part of daily life...
On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.
I was going to write an artist statement about how I wanted to turn an oversized, macho, gas-guzzling vehicle into a technological ghost by shrouding it in a white, fuzzy cover, reminiscent of women's handwork from another time, another place.
What happened when I re-entered the US from Canada made me re-examine what my lowly art project could mean in a larger political sphere. And it gave me an idea for a title.
My worn-out passport set off the first alarm with the US Border Patrol. US citizen who have traveled to the places I've been over the past 9 years (Africa, Australia, Mexico, Central and South America, Turkey and Europe) need to be looked at more carefully.
A half hour at the computer gave the agent cause to put me into another suspicious category that merited a full car search. After going through my computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cads, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook in hand. I was taken to a room and told to sit on a bench with handcuffs at both ends.
"Just what were you doing in Canada? We think you're engaged in some kind of copyright infringement." The accusation was based on drawings of cars like this. After a lively discussion, my university faculty status and positive ID persuaded her to call of the dogs. Then she welcomed me back to the US.
Note: Zempel was also interviewed on the Colbert Report about this incident and project.
A used car is completely wrapped, inside and out, in an adhesive vinyl skin to make it look like a 2007 Porsche 911.
Need for Speed is a Lamborghini Countach from 1985 made in cast urethane branches. The original 3D model for the car was extracted from the popular racing simulation Need for Speed. The term “cargo cult” refers to the history of low tech, ritualized simulation of military aircraft by indigenous South Pacific tribes in the mid 20th century.
Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.