Meris Angioletti – “Night Shifts” (2005)
Curated by Matteo Balduzzi, produced in collaboration with INAF – Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica and UnDo.Net
http://web.freeundo.it/astro/www/home.htm
Everyday from May 7th until December 31st 2005, NIGHTSHIFTS uploaded astronomic photos shot during the previous night by the Italian telescope Galileo, located in the Canary Islands. The images were then assembled in one film [NIGHTMOVIE] presenting them in sequence, showing at the same time the technical parameters of the telescope collected at the moment of acquisition and saved as .fits files. All the images were then archived in a database [NIGHTSEARCH].
Alessio delli Castelli – “Marry! Marry!” (2008)
Black and white video and sound, 7:11 mins
http://www.ac-galerie.net/adc_pr.html
Marry! Marry! is a video about the survival of marriage in contemporary society. Based on Ezra Pound’s writing method, Marry! Marry! gathers extracts from books, songs, films and television series that have approached the subject in the ages and recomposes them in a new order in which historical hierarchy is abolished. Marry! Marry! is a sketch for a book and performance Alessio delli Castelli is currently writing.
Alessio delli Castelli was born n York, GB, in 1979. He lives and works in Berlin.
Condominium Produzioni – “U.S.O. unidentified submerged objects” TBC
http://www.condominiumfilm.com
Do you remember Amazon Women on the Moon (Joe Dante, 1987)?
In un segment called Bullshit or not? A tv reporter reveals at last the true identity of Jack the Ripper: it was none other that the Loch ness monster. The episodes exposes the bad habits of so many tv magazines bent on divulging, more or less seiously, the mysteries and enigmas of planet Earth. We tread the province of Charles Fort, the 19th century reporter from New York who compiled huge lists of natural anomalies, impossible animals, unexplained phenomena like frogs falling out of the sky, alien abductions and U.S.Os (Unidentified submerged objects). That the Deep are an obvious metaphore of our subconscious, a huge cistern where our fears swim free is hardly news.
In the past, countless personalities above suspicion have witnessed chilling presences: Alexander the Great lowered himself in a glass bell and saw mile long fishes. Babilonyan priests worshipped a Fish Thing that came from Sirius. Irish missionary San Columba(5th century ad.) spotted a sea monster and banished him forming the Sign of the Cross on the waters. Recently, new fantasies joined our basic terrors: alien undersea bases, phantom submarines, glowing discs sinking into the waters of our harbors. Impartially, USO heeds all voices, all the unfounded rumours concerning our lakes, rivers and seas. Every episode concentrates on the sighting of a strange creature: almost always the spotter gets spotted.It’s a hybrid, ambiguous format. USO deploys forbidden weapons from several arsenals of bad television.The hypocrisy of MONDO CANE, the investigation techniques of CRIMEWATCH, the graphic pyrotechnics of STARGATE, the biased reconstructions, the slandering. Quite uncorrectly, we tail the witnesses of the unlikely sightings, we creep into their lives and find out what moves them to see giant molluscs in council fountains.
Bill Dolson – “Storms” (2009 – ongoing)
Series of HD videos, 4:36 mins each
Processed animation of weather radar images
Bill Dolson’s artwork occupies a unique juncture of New Media and Land Art with conceptual components.
His current video works provide a continuity with his earlier work, turning his attention from the human figure to the natural landscape. Hybrid works combining photographic and video media explore possibilities for a contemporary sublime landscape.
Bill has worked in what is now known as New Media since the late 60s. He has until recently only rarely exhibited. He has supported himself as a computer engineering consultant. A specialist in computer vision, he is currently consultant to a NASA research project employing augmented reality for advanced cockpits.
Bill moved to New York City from Illinois in the early 70s and for the next 20 years produced abstract computer graphics and animations as well as a body of photography and numerous videos. He abandoned his art practice in the early 90s and involved himself in auto racing. He moved to New Mexico in 2000 and destroyed all of his work produced to that date. A pilot since his teens, he focused on aviation. In 2004 he decided to return to an art practice and began producing his current body of work, much of which is informed by his experience or the landscape as a pilot. Here some excerpts from the artist’s statement about the Storms project: «Normally weather forecasting images are highly ephemeral. There is an old saying about the limited value of yesterday’s weather report. But with the emergence of global climate change as a very real concern of climate scientists, increasing efforts are being made to archive historical weather data in order to provide a baseline for detecting climate change. I suspected that somewhere, someone had an archive of weather radar. I finally found such an archive at the Iowa State University Department of Agronomy.[…] Beginning in early 2009 I began to download US radar mosaic images from the archive and began making videos from them. The developers or the archive have taken an interest in my work and I have received valuable assistance from those scientists.[…]
The current Storms videos are still in progress and I will continue to make them as time passes and more data is made available in the archive. In these videos time is highly compressed, each frame of video (1/30 of a second) represents an hour of time, so an entire year is compressed into about four and a half minutes. The images available from the Iowa archive require a significant amount of computer processing to be presented in the form of these videos. Each video covers the span of one year and explores different visualization techniques.
These videos provide a sense of the temporal progression of weather patterns across the United States. The shapes and the transformations of these weather patterns I think expose an element of the sublime in the weather. Violent storms have been considered to belong to the realm of the Sublime since the first analyses of the sublime by Burke and Kant. Seeing them through the abstract lens of radar provides another perspective on these imposing forces of nature.»
[epidemiC] – “Loveletter.vbs reading” (Bologna, 24 maggio 2001)
DVD, 4:40 mins
On the occasion of the festival Digital Is Not Analog 01 (d-i-n-a), [epidemiC] asked the philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo to perform a public reading of the notorious computer virus Loveletter.vbs, also known as I LOVE YOU. The virus had spread out all around the world in a few days through email programs. Who could have resisted the temptation to open a message with a subject like “Loveletter for you”?
It was the first massive informatic infection, and it even entered the common language: “I can’t write you because I have I Love You”. Bifo’s intense intepretation has been compared to the Ursonate composed and performed by the German dadaist Kurt Schwitters.
[epidemiC] was an informal group of programmer-artists and artist-programmers, officially born in 2001 during the d-i-n-a festival in Bologna, with the release of a manifesto “on the beauty of the source code”.
They are co-authors together with 0100101110101101.ORG of the virus Biennale.py, spread out on the occasion of the 2001 Venice Biennial. In 2002 they are invited by the Applied Arts Museum in Frankfurt to present AntiMafia, a peer-to-peer software able to eliminate, by making it automatic, the figure of the leader in online protest actions. 2003 is the year of their last public appearance, during Ars Electronica festival in Linz, where the group present DoubleBlind, a software which sends official but totally random invitations to participate in the festival itself.
Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Like others Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970’s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. During the 1980’s he contributed to the magazines Semiotexte (New York), Chimerees (Paris), Metropoli (Rome) and Musica 80 (Milan). In the 1990’s he published Mutazione e Ciberpunk (Genoa, 1993), Cibernauti (Rome, 1994), and Felix (Rome, 2001). He is currently collaborating on the magazine Derive Approdi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and the telestreet phenomenon.
Jon Fawcett – “Common Star” (2005)
non-physical object, video (5 mins), text-work-handout
A giant amorphous entity exists above the seat of government in central London; an architectural form which dwarfs buildings such as the Houses of Parliament, the Ministry of Defence and the National Portrait Gallery. Mapped out in collaboration with a team of 3D modellers, and requiring a series of measuring actions involving regular dialogues with armed police, a walking tour of the object is given and a handout text-work-tour is made available – and can still be downloaded from the artist’s website.
«The inventory of materials used in Jon Fawcett’s work reads like a crossword puzzle made from the remixed narratives of JG Ballard and Philip K Dick. On closer inspection each work expands into a larger story which takes us beyond the gallery and into worlds informed by conspiracy theory and new age technology. Forming an obtuse patchwork of evidence and agenda, Fawcett’s work quietly explodes reductive, institutional definitions of what is real and what is possible.
Fawcett’s use of extensive research into tropes of conspiracy and media cults have allowed him to bring into focus the fuzzy logic of new age mysticism that is proliferating in the era of networked consciousness. His sculptures, video and performances exude a menacing technical precision and seduce with a spectrum of alluring colours but these are aesthetic camouflage to cloak ideas that question the nature of the mediated reality or as the artist says, ‘a fabric of contemporary mythologies.[…]» Mark Vaugh, Director, A Foundation
Kathrin Günter – “Cabinet for Thoughtography” (2008-ongoing)
“Thought is a radiant, creative, almost material power, the fiat lux of the bible. During the process of thinking, the soul turns the atoms of the brain into waves and makes its phosphor glow. With concentrating
ones thought onto any object with simple outlines, like a bottle for example, the fluidic thought image will be forced out through the eyes to expose itself through the power of its glow onto the photographic plate. The result is a photographic image.”
Louis Darget, 1911
A virtual fluidum, a magnetic power, a so called animal organic magnetism, discovered in the 18th century by Franz Anton Mesmer, acclaimed German medical and practitioner of hypnosis, is the starting point of a largely controversial field of research which, over centuries has occupied the work of many scientists, psychologists and mediums both skeptics and supporters.
According to Mesmer the entire atmosphere and consequently everything and every living being is inhabited and surrounded by this virtual, magnetic fluidum. Illnesses or diseases for example are signs of magnetic imbalance in the body. Medicals who are also educated in magnetising would be able to re-imbalance the missing fluid throughout magnetic brushings. Patients, under the influence of hypnosis, claim to have seen above mentioned invisible magnetic powers in different shining colours.
Ever since, numerous scientists and parapsychologistsدhave devoted their life long researches to proof and capture this virtual fluidum on photographic plates. Especially after 1895, with the discovery of the invisible X Rays through C.G. Roentgen, a sheer beam of differently called rays came to light and sight to the public eye.
Kathrin Günters own thought-o-graphic researches and experiments are focusing on practise, examination and interpretation of above mentioned rather unknown or long forgotten experiments and researches of the 19th and 20th century, opening possibilities for a new, playful and artistic approach of thought-o-graphic phenomena in their widest sense.
Her infinite amount of experiments range from custom made thought-o-graphic capturing devices – the thought-o-graphic camera, direct-contact exposures through objects, plants and human bodies, up to
long distance telepathic exposures from Scotland to Germany.
Kathrin Günter, artist and photographer has been exploring extensively gossip, star behaviour and the phenomenon of paparazzi photography. Recent researches focus on thought-o-graphic theories, practises and
other invisible phenomena of the early twentieth century.
Jeff Mann – “Apparition Apparatus”
1999
Colour video and sound, 7:07 mins
http://jeffmann.com
Two studies for the manifestation of ghostly images in electronic signals. Produced at the Experimental Television Center using a collection of vintage 1970s analog audio and video synthesizer equipment, including the “Wobbulator”, a modified television set specially prepared by Nam June Paik. A modular sound synthesizer creates the soundtracks, and is also patched into the various inputs of the Wobbulator, which magnetically manipulates the electron beam that produces the video image. The modulations and transformations produce unexpected and eerily beautiful sound/image interactions that call forth an impression of phantom apparitions lurking in apparatuses of the modern technological age. These are not your grandfather’s ghosts, but a direct experience of the mysterious nature of the electronic apparatus.
Roy Menahem Markovich – “Untitled”
Digital video, 4:43 min
Several ‘Mini End of the World’ scenes are brought together into one piece.Disasters – small and annoying accidents – things that might happen to you during your vacation. Everything is made out of cheap materials. Things are built to collapse.Roy Menahem Markovich was born in 1979. He lives and works in Tel Aviv. His work was exhibited at Tate Modern in London, MACBA in Barcelona, Israel Museum of Contemporary Art in Herzliya and CCA in Tel Aviv among the others. He participated in video, cinema and music festivals in Barcelona, New York, Torino, Moscow, Thessaloniki and more. He won the Sharett Fund Scholarship (The Israel – America Cultural Fund) 2006/7 and the Haifa university Anonymous Exhibition scholarship.
Sandro Pizzichelli – “HG” (2008)
HD video, 4:04 mins
http://www.vimeo.com/sandropizzichelli
The video is based on the idea of synchronism between audio and video. The material chosen for the experiment is mercury (chemical symbol Hg), which is left moving on a plastic membrane placed on a loudspeaker. The music aesthetically refers to the metal both in sound and development: strokes and frequencies interact in synergy and empathy with Hg until the end, when the camera eye is reflects in the mercury bubble.
Sandro Pizzichelli graduated in classical music in 1997 and in electronic music composition in 2010. At the same time, he set out in the direction of video writing and production. His audio-video works are often strongly endowed with a personal interpretation of the sci-fi imagery and aesthetics, and they range from videoclips to documentaries, from Pure Data realtime animations to tv formats.
Marcel Türkowsky & Elise Florenty – “Pendulum Report” (2009-2011)
HD video, 10 mins
http://www.myspace.com/marceltuerkowsky
http://www.kunstaspekte.de/index.php?action=webpages&k=8828
The project of the film The Pendulum Report originates form the novel Empire of light by Kim Young-Ha (2005) which tells the story of a man caught up by his past of being a spy. The main character is a North Korean sleeping agent living in secret in South Korea for twenty years.
The narrative process of the short film is inspired by a report documenting different hypnosis sessions of a patient diving back into previous states of his life. Every time he undergoes the hypnosis, he falls again for a period of his life with an age, a memory, an expression and an attitude different. The main focus of the story underlines how the man forgot about his spy identity.
Told by a woman, a Korean storyteller, the introspection of the man is nevertheless presented to be understood and to reverberate in a collective way. The disorder of speech and a disharmonic suspended sound composition melt in order to connect different parts of history, which have been disconnected.
The film counterpoints three levels of not knowing something: you never heard about it, you are supposed not to know; you totally have forgotten.
The Film Pendulum Report is one element of the installation Lucid Sleep – 1st Time: Chance – 2nd Time: Coincidence – 3rd Time: Result of a plan a project by Marcel Türkowsky & Elise Florenty which was commissioned for the Exhibition Void of Memory, Platform in KIMUSA of Platform 2009 organised by Sunjung Kim from Artsonje Center At Kimusa, (The old Defense Security Command Site) – Seoul / Curated by Nathalie Viot
Voice and Chant : Marie Jung
Image and Editing : Marcel Türkowsky & Elise Florenty
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