Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest

Slow Rave (last moments of Trance Energy 2006) (2006) - Damon Zucconi

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-19T17:00:00+01:00

Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) - Mark Leckey

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-19T15:00:00+01:00

Reminder: The Headless Conference This Friday

Rhizome — 2010-03-18T20:00:00+01:00

Join us for the Headless Conference this Friday March 19th at 7pm in the New Museum's Theater. Tickets are $6 members, $8 general, and they can be purchased here. Description of the event below, for additional reading please check out Ginny Kollak's "Putting the capital in decapitation" as well as Brian Droitcour's "Interview with Goldin+Senneby" from Rhizome News. Ginny Kollak and Brian Droitcour are the co-organizers of the Headless Conference.

“I was still living in Gibraltar, working through my notice at Sovereign Trust, an offshore management company. [...] One of thousands of companies that Sovereign manages is called Headless. It was incorporated (i.e. registered) on the Bahamas through our Gibraltar office. Headless is a strange name, and it got me thinking. Then we got a call from Goldin and Senneby, two Swedish artists. They said they were looking into Headless Ltd. This definitely was strange. Companies like Headless are not really ‘open to investigation,’ so I didn't really understand Goldin and Senneby's angle here.”

—In Search of Story: A journal in eight parts by K.D.

Goldin+Senneby are Swedish artists. They are also characters in Looking for Headless, a novel they commissioned, a detective story involving a murder (by decapitation, of course) that has been published serially since 2007. In it, Goldin+Senneby appear as shadowy figures, remotely controlling the action as it unfolds in exotic locales like the Bahamas and Gibraltar—glamorous but bureaucratic hubs of the offshore finance industry.

“While they implicate art institutions in the narrative they enact, G+S are ultimately interested in how the virtual world of global finances performs a sleight of hand to fictionalize the boundaries between public and private interests, in order to make them disappear.”

—Gregory Burke, director of the Power Plant, Toronto

The lectures, documentaries, and didactic displays that have accompanied the presentation of Headless at art institutions share little of the heady cloak-and-dagger suspense found in the fictional texts that the project spawns. The Headless Conference is no exception to this rule. Co-organized by Rhizome and the Office for Parafictional Research, the event will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby's work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby's chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State University.

The Headless Conference
Friday, March 19, 2010
7:00 pm
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery, New York
$6 Members/ $8 General Public
BUY TICKETS

The Headless Conference is co-organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series at the New Museum, and is supported in part by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Call for Proposals: V16: Lo-tech and V17: Hi-tech Issues of ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-18T19:00:00+01:00

ASPECT, a DVD publication dedicated to new media art, is currently seeking work for their next two issues, one on "lo-tech" (v. 16) and the other on "hi-tech" (v. 17). More on this from the original call below:

Artists have historically co-opted emerging technology, adapting and expanding complex developments to suit their own goals. Conversely, there is nostalgia for obsolete technology. We seek work that exploits antiquated or sophisticated technology, either as an aesthetic or technical choice. We will review installation, video, performance, sound, and any other work best documented in time-based format.

The deadline for the "lo-tech" issue is May 1, 2010 and the deadline for the "hi-tech" issue is August 1, 2010. For more information about the application process, visit the call for proposals here.

t+7 (2009) - Daniel Jones

John Michael Boling — 2010-03-18T17:00:00+01:00

t+7 is a Twitter adaptation of the classic n+7 text procedure concocted by the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) group. Each substantive noun in a text is systematically substituted for the noun found 7 places after it in a dictionary, creating peculiar mutations of the original prose.

Phasing Dancing Stand Sculptures (2009-) - Cory Arcangel

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-18T15:00:00+01:00

These sculptures are made from 2 over the counter 'Dancing Stands' (the tacky kinetic product display stands you can often see in down market stores) which have been modified to spin at slightly different speeds. When my modified stands are placed next to each other they go in and out of phase slowly.

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT

A Studio Visit with LoVid

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-17T18:00:00+01:00

LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) wearing Coat of Embrace, a wearable A/V synthesizer

I had the opportunity to drop by LoVid's (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) studio at Smack Mellon in DUMBO this week, where they were awarded space for the 2009 cycle of their Artist Studio Program. In their work, LoVid hack and manipulate video in a myriad of ways -- sewing it into quilts, melding it with resin and foam core to make 3D sculptures, integrating live video feeds into the body of other sculptures, altering it in live performance, or weaving the electric wires that transmit video signals into large textiles. Their practice brings the elemental technologies behind video to the fore, while also emphasizing the interactive systems that trigger them. The below photo essay provides a small preview to some of their recent and older works. To see everything they've been up to, be sure to stop by Smack Mellon's Open Studios on Saturday March 20th from 12-6pm, when LoVid will open up their workspace to the public.

Valleys and Temporary Light on the left, LoVid block print on right
Freedom Confined
LoVid's desk area
Crowdsourced woven wire sculpture created as part of NetWork, a Wirefull Interventions Installation at Urbis, Manchester UK
LoVid's handmade A/V synthesizer, the Sync Armonica
Deep Blue Tube, chess videos sourced from YouTube displayed on a hacked CRT computer monitor emitting only blue light
Tinge Set, a collage of video stills on transparency film
Still from the 486 Shorts DVD on Analogous Projects
Family Ties, sculpture made from video fabric, resin, foam core

Room (2009) - Brenna Murphy

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-17T15:00:00+01:00

Free, Bird

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-16T18:00:00+01:00

Former Rhizome Fellow Tracky Birthday (aka Dennis Knopf) of netlabel Upitup has teamed up with sister net denizens Ego Twister, Peppermill, Proot, WM Recordings, and Cock Rock Disco to produce the compilation Greatest It, downloadable for FREE here. Each label selected a few choice tracks from their catalog to contribute to the comp, so you get a feel for the artists they support and work with. Netlabels have been carrying the torch for the copyleft cause for awhile, and Greatest It is a concise sampling of what a few of those labels have been up to recently. Check it here.

bronzino1.jpg (2009) - Hexagram

John Michael Boling — 2010-03-16T17:00:00+01:00

Rhizome at SXSW Interactive

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-16T15:00:00+01:00

Rhizome's Director of Technology, Nick Hasty, is in Austin this week, attending SXSW Interactive. He's tweeting during the festival, you can catch it here.

Stay tuned, as Nick will contribute a longer report about the panels, special events and other technology-related goodness from his time down there soon.

Drone Machines

Brian Droitcour — 2010-03-15T17:30:00+01:00

The ambient noise of common machines and the unexpected sounds that come from familiar objects have been a part of music for some time, but over the last fifteen years French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been joining the two, using instruments and objects to construct complex, apparently self-sufficient systems that play music without any beginnings, endings, or performers. Videodrones (2001) isolates and amplifies the hum that all video signals make when hooked into audio systems. From Here to Ear (1999) now showing at the Barbican in London, is an aviary that resonates when its finches alight on electric guitars. In Harmonichaos, which was on view at Paula Cooper Gallery until this weekend, Boursier-Mougenot affixes the grooves of harmonicas to the mouths of vacuum cleaners, and the staggered grid of thirteen pairs produces an undulating, reedy drone.

The set-up of Harmonichaos could only be the product of a playful mind, even though its appearance deflects suggestions of human involvement. Both the vacuums and harmonicas have an assembly-line sameness, and while they perform according to design, their functions have been diverted away from the needs for clean homes and entertaining song that they were intended to meet. As a viewer and listener, you're made to feel like a confused outsider: a system of switches modulates the intensity of the air flow, as well as the sound emanating from the vacuum cleaners, but it's nearly impossible to identify the source of these fluctuations. False clues are sent by a randomized blinking of bulbs on the vacuums' bodies. As usual, Boursier-Mougenot brings a sense of humor to his work, from the irony of the hokey harmonica becoming eerie when forced to drone (like the accordion in the music of Pauline Oliveros) to the punning title. He finds both harmony and chaos in the harmonica's name, and the unlikely pairing of the vacuums and harmonicas mirrors the forcible verbal junction of two incongruous elements. While the vacuum is missing from the title, this, too could be seen to figure in the artist's wordplay, given the vacuum's double meaning as both a void and a device that operates by creating a partial one. Bouriser-Mougenot's combination of domestic and folksy objects is an eccentric, room-sized model of the universe--one that exaggerates the invisible friction of matter and its absence by making it more plaintively and strangely audible.

Home of the Brave (1986) - Laurie Anderson

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-15T16:00:00+01:00

Home of the Brave is a 1986 American concert film featuring the music of Laurie Anderson, who also directed the movie. The film's full on-screen title is Home of the Brave: A Film by Laurie Anderson. The performances were filmed in Brooklyn during the summer of 1985.

-- FROM THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY FOR "HOME OF THE BRAVE"

Call for Applications: UdK Award for Interdisciplinary Art and Science

Ceci Moss — 2010-03-15T15:00:00+01:00

The Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) is offering an award to artists (fine art, media, architecture, design, music, theatre, visual communication etc.) and scientists who work between the arts and sciences. Prize-winners will receive 7,500 euros which can be used in the realization of projects, or projects that are already underway. For more information or to apply, visit the original call here.

Putting the capital in decapitation

Ginny Kollak — 2010-03-12T17:00:00+01:00

Goldin+Senneby, Headless, 2007– (Photo: John Barlow)

As a lead-up to the Headless Conference, co-organizer Ginny Kollak shares her essay “Putting the capital in decapitation” which is excerpted from the brochure accompanying the exhibition “The Office for Parafictional Research Presents Headless: Work by Goldin+Senneby” on view through March 21 at CCS Bard. The Headless Conference is a mini-symposium for this exhibition.

Goldin+Senneby is the identity-resistant “framework for collaboration” established by Stockholm-based artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in 2004. An interest in capitalist logic and networked culture guides their investigative practice, which explores juridical, financial, and spatial infrastructures through performance and role-playing, invented (and often virtual) realities, writing and publishing, and public interventions.

Headless (2007–) is the artists’ ongoing analysis of the shadowy realm of offshore finance. The subject represents a nearly perfect encapsulation of Goldin+Senneby’s many preoccupations, but perhaps its most relevant feature is its provocative and strategic use of masking, secrecy, and withdrawal. The system is evasive by definition: its procedures allow a company’s assets to be protected from taxation or other bureaucratic regulation, and the identities of its owners and their true business practices can be concealed. In spatial terms, examining an offshore company can be thought of as encountering a space that shifts readily from an impenetrable barrier to an empty void—like a hologram, it appears and disappears according to the perspective from which it is viewed. From a moral standpoint, offshore’s slippery visage is just as apt to inspire bored yawns as righteous indignation: one man’s exploitation is another’s tedious paperwork. Still, like most unknown territories, offshore triggers mainly sinister readings. A more anthropomorphic understanding might conceive the offshore company as something monstrous—a decentralized, elusive body that moves without any visible means of control—a headless organization.

Headless Ltd is a real company registered in the Bahamas, one of a number of sun-soaked former British colonies in which the offshore financial industry flourishes. The company is the focal point for Goldin+Senneby’s multivalent inquiry, whose numerous manifestations—texts, performances, interventions, and illustrations—take place in the open and behind closed doors.

Goldin+Senneby, Headless, 2007– (Photo: John Barlow)

All of these actions are accounted for in one way or another through the project’s ghostwritten novel. Called Looking for Headless, its plot hits on all the major conventions of mass-market thrillers—surveillance, double agents, paranoia, and so forth—while tracing the actions of artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby as they enlist a group of co-conspirators (some of them unwitting) to help investigate Headless Ltd. But the whole thing, it seems, may also be the brainchild of a “fictional author” known as K.D., formerly an employee of Sovereign Trust, the real-life corporation that handles the day-to-day administration of countless offshore companies, including—at least until very recently—Headless Ltd.

And yet there is another writer at work here, competing with K.D. for narrative authority. One of Goldin+Senneby’s collaborators is the novelist John Barlow, who has been contracted by the artists to help them uncover any concrete information about the company. Their pursuit is fictionalized in a detective story written by Barlow. This “work of documentary fiction” is based on raw material sent by the artists—correspondence, dossiers, surveillance tapes, and the like—along with what he unearths in his own investigations, which for Barlow included an all-expenses-paid sojourn in the Bahamas.

Among the hypotheses that the artists mean to test is the rather far-fetched notion that Headless Ltd represents a contemporary incarnation of the political group and secret society Acéphale, whose name comes from the Greek word for “headless.” Founded in the 1930s by author Georges Bataille and his friends from earlier ex-surrealist and communist confederations, Acéphale retained the revolutionary political edge of previous groups while pursuing an unconventional vision of the sacred. Legend has it that its members took an oath indicating their willingness to be decapitated for their cause; none, however, would volunteer to be the executioner. The connections between Acéphale and Headless Ltd are clearly tenuous, yet still tantalizing—especially when considered in light of Bataille’s later writings on alternative economic structures. Such speculation, though unlikely, is not idle: the novel describes a brutal case of kidnapping and decapitation that may be linked to Goldin+Senneby’s interest in the offshore company. Perhaps, then, there is more than mere coincidence at stake here.

Such secretive organizations are not the only aspects of Headless that remain obscure. Even the artists’ role in their ongoing investigation is difficult to pin down. Mimicking the corporate structures that they critique, Goldin+Senneby have outsourced many of the project’s various components to independent practitioners. These writers, filmmakers, curators, designers, and theorists become spokespeople for the artists, while also bringing their own voices into play. It might make sense, then, to think of Goldin+Senneby as investors: they have backed particular contributors in the hopes that they will pay out unexpected dividends. There’s risk involved, of course, but Goldin+Senneby ask those who follow them—readers included—to take on some of that risk as well.

Yet like the alienating perspectives of globalization, these practices can also be frustrating—even for people who are fully invested in Headless. Take curator Kim Einarsson, for example, who has contributed to the project in numerous ways, even lending her personage to a character in the novel. In spite of her intimacy with the work, she is clearly exasperated when she writes about it in the Swedish magazine Geist: “It’s all very confusing. Who is actually the person holding the pen?”

Headless operates in this grey area between truth and fiction, toying with narrative genres, political and economic structures, and theoretical critiques of authorship, identity, and visibility. All the while, its novel manages to toe the line between escapist fiction and uncomfortable reality, prompting some fundamental questions: Is the story really just a trashy airport thriller, or does it have something more substantial to say? And what if Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby really have embroiled themselves in some kind of murderous plot? Ultimately one must ask of each aspect of the story, what does it mean if this part is fiction and, also, what does it mean if it is not?