I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World (Hardcover) by Trevor Paglen (Author)

2001 Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

Trevor Paglen

Limit-Telephoto
The Black Sites
Missing Persons graphy
Symbology

Applied Autonomy

pimpstar

The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise By Charles Babbage

Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wHFlxW606o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wHFlxW606o

omar fast

spiritsurfers

http://www.michaelbellsmith.com/

yesmen

http://dowethics.com/

emily jacir

Surveillance Camera Players: 1984

Jill Magid

vito acconci

george miller and janet cardiff

jenny holzer

Christian Jankowski

gamestuff...

http://giantsparrow.com/games/swan/

http://www.offworld.com/2009/01/beat-connection-gaijin-send-us.html

20 Questions

iGod

Joe McKay - Digital Art II

the evening class

Omar Fast “CNN”

Sean Uyehara

Came to talk to us! in Jonn Herschend's Video class!!!!

The Audible Past By Jonathan Sterne

The Aesthetics of Disappearance - Paul Virilio

A FOREST IN WINTER

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL FORGETFULNESS BILLY COLLINS

GEORGE GENDI

Orgesticulanismus

MAGNETIC MOVIE

scary...........................!!!

Janine Antoni

GNAW 1992

Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken
«Electric Earth»
In Doug Aitken’s cinemascope-like, walk-in, multi-sectioned, video installation «Electric Earth» [...] the public is transported into the atmosphere of an airport by night. A flaming car and an abandoned shopping cart compliment the eerie scenario while, in a parallel world, a noiseless, black rapper sashays through an urban landscape.[...] Here the world of the 20th century is described as though it concerns the remains of an unknown civilization. The role of the black protagonist in «Electric Earth» is so devised that it suggests a meeting of French existentialists with America’s big-city world. Why this and other productions by Doug Aitken continually capture the public’s attention from anew, and often seem to hypnotize them, is something that Aitken explains by knowing how to communicate with the public using here a moment perhaps borrowed from the area of Pop-culture: he says that he is uninterested in compromises of any kind and would refuse to produce intimate works that take time to unfold.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

shunyata

Moment to moment, and with every step, the Fool leaves the past behind. He carries nothing more than his purity, innocence and trust, symbolized by the white rose in his hand. The pattern on his waistcoat contains the colors of all four elements of the tarot, indicating that he is in harmony with all that surrounds him. His intuition is functioning at its peak. At this moment the Fool has the support of the universe to make this jump into the unknown. Adventures await him in the river of life.

The card indicates that if you trust your intuition right now, your feeling of the 'rightness' of things, you cannot go wrong. Your actions may appear 'foolish' to others, or even to yourself, if you try to analyze them with the rational mind. But the 'zero' place occupied by the Fool is the numberless number where trust and innocence are the guides, not skepticism and past experience.


The card shows a tower being burned, destroyed, blown apart. A man and a woman are leaping from it not because they want to, but because they have no choice. In the background is a transparent, meditating figure representing the witnessing consciousness.

You might be feeling pretty shaky right now, as if the earth is rocking beneath your feet. Your sense of security is being challenged, and the natural tendency is to try to hold on to whatever you can. But this inner earthquake is both necessary and tremendously important - if you allow it, you will emerge from the wreckage stronger and more available for new experiences.

After the fire, the earth is replenished; after the storm the air is clear. Try to watch the destruction with detachment, almost as if it were happening to somebody else. Say yes to the process by meeting it halfway.
The symbol in this card is an enormous wheel representing time, fate, karma. Galaxies spin around this constantly moving circle, and the twelve signs of the zodiac appear on its circumference. Just inside the circumference are the eight trigrams of the I Ching, and even closer to the center are the four directions, each illuminated by the energy of lightning. The spinning triangle is at this moment pointed upward, toward the divine, and the Chinese symbol of yin and yang, male and female, creative and receptive, lies at the center.

It has often been said that the only unchanging thing in the world is change itself. Life is continuously changing, evolving, dying and being reborn. All opposites play a part in this vast circular pattern. If you cling to the edge of the wheel you can get dizzy! Move toward the center of the cyclone and relax, knowing that this too will pass.
Being "in the gap" can be disorienting and even scary. Nothing to hold on to, no sense of direction, not even a hint of what choices and possibilities might lie ahead. But it was just this state of pure potential that existed before the universe was created.

All you can do now is to relax into this no-thingness...fall into this silence between the words...watch this gap between the outgoing and incoming breath. And treasure each empty moment of the experience. Something sacred is about to be born.

Your inner being, when it opens, first experiences two directions: the height, the depth. And then slowly, slowly, as this becomes your established situation, you start looking around, spreading into all other eight directions. And once you have attained to the point where your height and your depth meet, then you can look around to the very circumference of the universe. Then your consciousness starts unfolding in all ten directions, but the road has been one.

remember (about squares)

Happenings, Alan Kaprov, p 93 2nd paragraph (the shape of the art environment) p 97, 98 nonart
http://books.google.com/books?id=HMKyDQr4kHEC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=marta+minujin&source=web&ots=qYoc5wSOQA&sig=SiUay99DYqsgNXMhlMlxb4Ym6VY&hl=en#PPA93,M1

NICOLA L.

THE BLACK COAT 1996 - Performance
(9 Femmes Fatales in their own words)


A rectangle of black plastic skins, composed of 9 jackets and hoods. The lower part of the body is free. The faces are hidden by masks which bear the name of the woman they represent.
Madame Bovary, Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa, Billie Holiday, Cleopatra, Eva Hesse, Joan of Arc, and Ulrike Meinhof.



The Blue Cape of Cinema is an ephemeral monument inhabited by 12 persons
the time of each performance. Each action consists of a march parade
in a city and a place of a designated country.
During the processing of the parade, the inhabitants of the Cape will change masks and identities




Penetrables Performance:
-----------------------
The Dominatrix 2000
(vinyl 6 feet high)

These are 9 historical women.
Through the domination they exercised on men, they were able to control the power . (like sex, money, politics, etc.)
They are The Dominatrix and are represented here in a black plastic skin.
Each one inhabits the skin when penetrating it with her colored disk, a portrait revealing her identity.
This group is ephemeral. Therefore, the assemblage may changed at the next event.

PENTHESILEA, GEORGE SAND, SALOME, MATA HARI AGRIPPINA the Younger, CLEOPATRA, CI XI or TS’EU-HI ELISABETH I, CARMEN

The NIGHT THING
The idea is to be inside the canvas
Being five inside the canvas
The canvas is the night.
Playing with the letters of the night...
N I G H T ---- T H I N G




The White Cape Of Cinema




Performance Dinner For
Nine Historic Hysteric Women and their guests






1979 New York, Travelling Penetrable Nicola carrying
a suitcase with a body cut in pieces (made in 1970)
(case plexi, body in soft penetrable canvas, 6 ft. high)


The Red Coat "Same Skin for Everybody"

First Bath Performance - Ibiza 1969



Performance with Fernando Arrabal
New York 1992





THE PINK CYLINDAR




CINEMA PENETRABLE




"A Long Day’s Journey to
the End of the Skin"
Popular expressions draw a clear distinction between the container and its contents: “I’ve got you under my skin”, “Beauty is only skin deep”...This is the ultimate way in which the human territory defines its borders. The skin represents the physical frontier of psychology, of feeling, of sensitivity: the ego is in the bag.
Sometimes, the bag is a prison. Who has not wanted to get out of himself? By nature, certain mollusks are constantly in search of a protective shell: someone else’s armour. Nicola actually offers us a second skin, smooth and impregnable. Plastic in every sense of the word, in appearance and in reality. mounted on frames, extensions of the stretched canvas, the panoply of mutts, leggings and bonnets invite us on a journey. A journey that’s an organic ritual of penetration and osmosis.
This synthetic skin, the skin of everybody and nobody, absorbs the warmth of the flesh in its folds: after withdrawal, for a moment, it keeps the imprint of the former occupant, the immediate impression of its absence. Penetration of the interior, return to the womb, penis and vulva, finger and glove: we go back instantly to the very source of life, into the organic universe of all rebirth.
Nicola’s imagery borrows nothing from the folklore of modern nature. She doesn’t build up any imaginary structure. She cuts into the living flesh of our senses. She invites us to live, as she does, to the quick. We’re touched by Nicola’s work because it concerns us immediately. This woman who resembles no one, not even herself, restores the skin’s sensuality before our very eyes. It’s not true that appearances are deceiving: they’re the skin of things, and they’re there, period! You have to penetrate them to experience them, and life is no more than that.
Nicola’s work is like a lesson in the facts of life for sensitive and consenting adults. The experience is oddly enriching: the skin finds its tactile language, its supple gesturing, its overall expressiveness.

Pierre Restany
September 23, 1968


I'M NOT SURE I AGREE WITH THIS ENTIRELY. I'M NOT SURE THAT THE SURFACE IS ALL THERE IS, OR EVEN THAT SURFACE IS THE ONLY DISTANCE WE HAVE TO TRAVEL OR ENGAGE TO 'UNDERSTAND' OR 'EXPERIENCE'.

Fur Room
Gallery Appolinaire 1970
La Fenice, Venise
"Je/Nous" Ixelles Museum, Belgium 1975



the eye

albert camus

'art cannot be a monologue. contrary to the current presumption if there is any man who has no right to solitude it is the artist.'




The Stranger and Solidarity

Albert Camus characterizes his justification of the absurd through the experiences of a protagonist who simply does not conform to the system. His inherent honesty disturbs the status quo; Meursault’s inability to lie cannot seamlessly integrate him within society and in turn threatens the simple fabrics of human mannerisms expected of a structurally ordered society. Consequently, the punishment for his crime is not decided on the basis of murder, but rather for the startling indifference towards his mother’s recent demise. Even after a conflicting spiritual discussion with a pastor inciting Meursault to consider a possible path towards redemption, the latter still refuses to take upon salvation and symbolizes his ultimatum by embracing the “gentle indifference of the world;” an act which only furthers his solidarity with a society incapable of realizing his seemingly inhumane and misanthropic behavior.

aphrodite

saint teresa of avila

feathered walls?

Manfred Mohr

Manfred Mohr
«P-159-A»
Using the combinatorics of the elements of a cube which have been broken down into minute particles of lines, Mohr accomplishes a type of storyboard for an abstract animation. As a two-dimensional surface, however, it plots a gradual intensification of the lines in the centre. The reduction of the title to character combinations reflects Mohr's interest in aesthetic and semiotic questions and results, as opposed to the production of art-works in the traditional sense. What counts for Mohr is not the single graph, or line, but the complete ensemble of statistical relationships that manifest themselves in a series of aesthetic constructions and structures.

Paul Sermon >

Paul Sermon
«Telematic Dreaming»
«Telematic Dreaming» (1992) turns a bed into the support of high-resolution images that might show a partner, intimately alive although being thousand kilometers away. The light-intense projection of the other results in a remarkable suggestion which turns the touch of the projected body into an intimate action. Sermon aims at expanding the senses of the user, while it is obvious that the other cannot really be touched but that only swift, decisive, possibly tenderly reactive movements can experience the suggestion of touch—a moment of contemplation, as many users observed. The synaesthetical, sensual impression lets the hand and the eye fuse, and it is this effect that characterizes this work as well as the works to come in the following years, in collaboration with Andrea Zapp.
Oliver Grau

Dieter Schnebel

Dieter Schnebel
«Mo-No: Music to Read»
This reading-book and picture-book offers neither literature nor simply art for the eye, confined to the page. Rather 'mo-no' is music, a music to read; more precisely: music for a reader. The reading of the book is intended to stimulate music in the listeners head. In reading the music he is alone: mono; as such he becomes the performer of the music, makes music for himself.
This book contains in part texts intended to lead to the hearing and linking of passing external sounds. [...]
In parts the text describe sounds which are only to be imagined, to be produced in the readers mind [...]
In addition the book contains notes. Admittedly not of the kind one is accustomed to (that one could play) rather the notes are to be viewed, thus leading to the formation of 'imaginary landscapes'. [...]
So the book sets out to lead the reading hearer (the hearing reader) to the music sounds which surround us, but also to bring him into direct contact with that imaginary music which always arises within us, from sounds both real and unreal.

From: Dieter Schnebel: Mo-No: Music to Read, Köln 1969.

Baude Cordier

Baude Cordier
«Belle, bonne, sage: belle-bonne-sage»

nebula

Netochka Nezvanova
«nebula.m81: Autonomous»
Nebula.M81 is a web-based Macintosh user application and an aesthetic processor of html code retrieved from web sites, which it turns into animated text, graphics and sound displays that can partly be influenced by user-triggered parameters. Nebula.M81 ranked highest on the jury's scales of code as attitude.

Synaesthesia Alexander Skrjabin

Alexander Skrjabin
«Promethée. Le Poème du feu»
«Prometheus» is the last symphonic poem by the Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin. An exceptional quality of the work is Scriabin’s conceiving as an instrument a so-called «color piano». In his time, the composition was no longer performed with the «luce» voices or the two voices for color piano (which first occurred in 1916, in New York, a year after his death). At least in part Scriabin was an «authentic» synaesthete. These self-invented analogies were the starting point for his arrangements and the second phase of the compositional rendering of «Prometheus». With «luce,» Scriabin designated two voices for color piano in which each tone was assigned to a color within an octave, meaning in similar colorings of the neighboring fifth-measure tones. In doing so, he aligned his ordering alias arranging of color to «the system of functional tonality that he had just suspended in the case of Prometheus» (Gottfried Eberle, Mysterium und Lichttempel, in: Europäische Utopien seit 1800. Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk, Berlin Artists’ Program of the DAAD (eds.), 1984, p. 49). With respect to the colors, one of the two luce voices was aligned with the corresponding tonal-harmonic basic tones, derived in a marked elementary fashion from the systematic ordering. In the symphonic context, the second luce voice was then entrusted, formally and independently, with a different meaning regarding contents: the levels of light demonstrated the deeply psychological contents of the work’s narrative basis. It opens with a blue phase (in sharp) and – greatly intensified – returns to this tone color. Scriabin saw the blue in the beginning as «spiritual and etherizing,» as an original state of rest which finally develops to a phase of liberated human will (red-yellow) and culminates in ecstasy (an intense blue = a glowing sharp-major-tritone).
What is in part the uniting of the arts in «Prometheus» found its conceptual continuation in the unfinished sketches of Scriabin’s «Mystère». For the forthcoming generation, both concepts were deemed innovative as utopias for the merging of the senses in a universal artwork.

Julia Gerlach

Battus, Pascal; Maad, Kamel

Graham Harwood

Graham Harwood (Mongrel)
«Rehearsal of Memory»
The aim of this piece was to work with a group of people from Ashworth a high Security Mental Hospital to produce an interactive programme embodying the life experience of those involved. This is manifested in the form of an anonymous computer personality made up of the collective experience of the group. Ashworth Hospital is located in the north of England near Liverpool and is home and prison to people who are a danger to themselves or to people outside the hospital.
The group of patients I worked with ranged from serial killers to rapists, potential suicides and casualties of the excesses of society. The staff I worked with included psychiatric nurses of twenty years experience and orderlies.
This artwork is about the recording of the life experiences of the client group that are a mirror to ourselves (‹normal society›) and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that constructs misinformation and fear about insanity, violence and victims.
This mental space is occupied by the psycho, the nutter, the mad dog and Bedlam; this is the space where strong fictions lie and invisibly glue together the mirror from which we view our own sanity. This work is about people everywhere who are trying to remember the faces of the extras in the cinema of history. This artwork is a rehearsal of memories not quite forgotten. Evil, sleazy, dirty, dangerous, sick, immoral, crazy, or just plain normal.
Graham Harwood

Jean Dupuy

In a black rectangular box, a window at eye level opens onto a 24' cube which houses the sculpture. The form is created by thrusting dust up into a cone of light. The dust is Lithol Rubine, a brilliant red pigment chosen for its ability to remain suspended in air for long periods. The thrust is achieved by amplified heart-beats from an attached stethoscope or a continuous loop tape recording of heartbeats played on a speaker mounted directly under a tightly stretched rubber membrane upon which the dust sits.
Pontus Hulten

Ulrike Gabriel

By regulating their breathing, which is registered by sensors on the belt they wear, visitors can alter the dynamics of the sounds reproduced around them and of the images projected on a surface (or, in an expanded version, four surfaces) in front of them. Their breathing causes the polygons in the computer-generated image to oscillate. The more regular the breathing, the more complex and chaotic the visual and acoustic processes become. Events in ‘Breath' do not take place in an entirely random way, for the time structure is programmed to make the visitor's breathing affect images that have just passed. Gabriel here creates a complex system of biological feedback that goes beyond the simple relationship between action and reaction.

jitter selfportraits by botox

Stills from 'evolglove' by botox

Peter Campus

Peter Campus
«Three Transitions»

Nam June Paik

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.photo.gif

Dan Graham

Bruce Nauman

Nauman set two monitors above one another at the end of a corridor almost ten meters long and only 50 cm wide. The lower monitor features a videotape of the corridor. The uppermost monitor shows a closed-circuit tape recording of a camera at the entrance to the corridor, positioned at a height of about three meters. On entering the corridor and approaching the monitors, you quickly come under the area surveyed by the camera. But the closer you get to the monitor, the further you are from the camera, with the result that your image on the monitor becomes increasingly smaller. Another cause of irritation: you see yourself from behind. Moreover, the feeling of alienation induced by walking away from yourself is heightened by your being enclosed in a narrow corridor. Here, rational orientation and emotional insecurity clash with each other. A person thus monitored suddenly slips into the role of someone monitoring their own activities.

(source: Dörte Zbikowski, in: Thomas Y. Levin (ed.), CTRL[SPACE]. rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to big brother, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe 2001)

Peter Weibel

Peter Weibel
«Observation of the Observation: Uncertainty»
The cameras and monitors are juxtaposed in such a way that the viewers are unable to see themselves from the front, no matter how much they twist and turn. The self-observers see different parts of their bodies, but never their faces. Shut inside a room, every point in the room is the observer’s jailer, perspective of their deathly fate.
This installation is part of the video sculpture «Kruzifikation der Identität» («Crucifixion of the Identity»), for both works have to do with crosses.

Peter Weibel

Gillette, Frank; Schneider, Ira, 1969

Gillette, Frank; Schneider, Ira
«Wipe Cycle»
With nine monitors and a live camera, «Wipe Cycle» transposes present-time demands as a way to disrupt television’s one-sided flow of information. In the exhibition «TV as a Creative Medium,» the installation was constructed before the elevator. So each visitor was immediately confronted with his or her own image. But the monitors also showed two video tapes and a television program. The installation, which made visitors a part of the information, was rigged in a highly complicated fashion: in four cycles, images wandered from one monitor to the other delayed by eight or sixteen seconds, while counter-clockwise a gray light impulse wiped out all the images every two seconds.

(Source: «Video-Skulptur retrospektiv und aktuell 1963–1989», Wulf Herzogenrath/Edith Decker (eds.), Cologne, 1989, p. 114.)

Andy Warhol

these things scar our memory

The Empire State Building filmed for 8 consecutive hours from dusk till dawn of the following day, shot on the night of the 25th of June 1964 from the 44th floor of the Time Life Building. «Empire» is an object-trouvé, a ready-made that prefigured today’s webcam images. It can also be considered a ‹structural film›: the obsessive repetition of the same image triggers our focus on the act of looking, on the value of the frame and most of all on the film duration. Time of reality and time of cinema are the same.
x He thus produces a synchronicity of filming time, represented time, and the time of reception, which, precisely due to the refusal of dramatic possibilities, moves the perception of time and the expectant posture of the audience—the product of media conventions—to the center of attention. Much more interesting than the question of what happens in the film is here the question of what happens in the audience.

Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon

Gordon attempts to translocate the myths, images, and projections of cinema to artistic realms. He usually incorporates original films in his video installation, which he estranges through the use of slow motion, fast forwarding, or double exposures, and in this way reactivates them. Raised in a Calvinistic environment, as much as by the «babysitter» of TV, Gordon consistently questions moralistic criteria such as good and bad.

Douglas Gordon
«24 Hour Psycho»
«Realistically, no one can watch the whole of «24 Hour Psycho», which consists of Alfred Hitchcock’s film «Psycho» (1960) slowed down so that a single, continuous viewing lasts for twenty-four hours. While we can experience narrative elements in it (largely through familiarity with the original), the crushing slowness of their unfolding constantly undercuts our expectations, even as it ratchets up the idea of suspense to a level approaching absurdity.»

(source: Russell Ferguson, «Trust Me,» in: Douglas Gordon, Cambridge/MA, 2001, p. 16.)

Account of the artist’s statement «He [Douglas Gordon] went on to imagine that this ‹someone› might suddenly remember what they had seen earlier that day, later that night; perhaps at around 10 o’clock, ordering drinks in a crowded bar with friends, or somewhere else in the city, perhaps very late at night, just as the ‹someone› is undressing to go to bed, they may turn their head to the pillow and start to think about what they had seen that day. He said he thought it would be interesting for that ‹someone› to imagine what was happening in the gallery right then, at that moment in time when they have no access to the work.»

(source: Douglas Gordon on a hypothetical viewer of «24 Hour Psycho» in: David Gordon, «...by way of a statement on the artist’s behalf», in: Douglas Gordon: Kidnapping, Eindhoven, 1998, p. 83.)

«5 year drive-by»
«5 year drive-by» refers to the duration of the storyline of «The Searchers,» the Western by John Ford. With a guaranteed happy ending, John Wayne needs five years—therefore the installation’s title—to find a kidnapped child. The actual film lasts 113 minutes and the installation just under seven weeks. The rest is a matter of calculating: comparing the duration of the film’s storyline to the duration of the film, and having five years, seen in relationship to seven weeks as 113 minutes, yield roughly three minutes. Gordon stretches these three minutes to fill the entire 47 days of the exhibition. The projection moves single frame by single frame, so that a second of film time lasts approximately six hours. Viewers imagine a stationary shot, when what they see in reality is a sequence: before a picturesque Western landscape, a posse on horseback makes itself ready to ride down into the valley. With John Wayne most likely in the lead.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, «Theaters», 1978

Hiroshi Sugimoto
«Theaters»
Since the 1970s, Sugimoto has worked on his photo-series entitled «Theaters,» in which he photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of as a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.

«One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious.»
Hiroshi Sugimoto

(Source: Cat. Thomas Kellein, Hiroshi Sugimoto, «Time Exposed,» 1995,
p. 91)

Heike Helfert

ART+COM

art+COM
«Founded in 1988 by a group of artists, designers, scientists, and technicians, including Monika Fleischmann, Dirk Lüsebrink and Joachim Sauter. Art+Com realizes ambitious, custom-tailored applications in the field of information and communication technologies, commissioned by the industry as well as in the context of exhibitions.

A «framed» flatscreen displays the painting. Behind this screen we installed an eyetracker (camera and PC). The camera is pointing at the viewers eyes. The camera-images are sent to the PC where they are digitized. The PC analyses the videosignal and locates the reflections of an infrared-lightsource in the viewers eyes. With this it can calculate exactly on which part of the painting the viewer is looking at. These positions are then sent to a graphic workstation where an algorithm is distorting the picture exactly at these coordinates. This means that as soon as a viewer looks at a particular part of the picture this part is distorted.
If no one looks at the picture for more than 30 seconds the picture is regenerated to its original condition.
In the past an old master might leave an impression in the mind of the passive onlooker - now the onlooker can leave an impression on the old master.

Jochem Hendricks - Eye Drawings

«The technical process is as follows. In order to draw I wear a special helmet which is equipped with two infra-red sensors, which are in turn linked to two small video cameras. Via the reflexes of the retina the infra-red sensors follow the movements of my left and right eyes simultaneously and this input is recorded separately by the video cameras. These recordings can then be digitalized, for each point on which the eye rests for at least a hundredth of a second can be located in terms of coordinates on the X and Y axes. These coordinates can then be evaluated by a computer – in my case, by all points being plotted in terms of the temporal sequence in which they arose and then connected by an unbroken line, whereby the left and right eyes are treated separately.» Jochem Hendricks (source: Jochem Hendricks, Augenzeichnungen, Vexer Verlag St. Gallen and author, 1993; publ. on the occasion of the exposition »Zeichnung« in the Kunsthalle St. Gallen, 1993.)

Tamás Waliczky

Alfons Schilling, «Random Pattern Stereo», 1973

Ivan Sutherland, «Head-Mounted-Display», 1968

Kleinefenn, Florian; Rahmann, Fritz Watteau» Camerafahrten mit Automobil, 1987

John Cage

Arndt, Olaf; Moonen, Rob, «Camera Silens», 1994

An installation for one user at a time in an anechoic chamber equipped with a medical chair and a closed-circuit surveillance system.

«A piece of conceptual art, an environment, an installation, an interactive work of art and media, or a scenario for a media theater.«Camera Silens» does not fit easily within the common categories of art criticism, due to its complex and ambiguous use of media. Merely listing the material components of the project, going through the array of obscure archival material used to research the concept, or describing the spatial installation will not lead to an interpretive understanding of the project. However, it becomes immediately obvious that the environment not only possesses a formal sense of its own, but makes reference to a larger meaning beyond the bounds of its existence as an artwork. [...]
The reports of those who have experienced the work reveal that, in it, a form of low-tech cyberspace exists: a cybernetic room, pre-programmed to perfection with total control, which suggests escape as the only possible reaction.»

(Source: Hans-Peter Schwarz (ed.), Media Art History, ZKM Medienmuseum, Prestel: Munich 1997)

James Turrell, «Perceptual Cell», 1991

Jeffrey Shaw - Movie Movie

This makes me happy - it brings back memories of the first Cabaret shows i used to create, composing songs, including bandmembers (band Nothing) - Adriaan Peltzer, Kotie Geldenhuis, Simon Kruger, Gerrie Roos, director Elmarie van der Lith, and we build CRAZY CRAZY INFLATABLE SETS, the one starting with me folded and rolled in a huge weather balloon, and only the sound of reversed vacuum cleaners blowing it up, so that it pops open and i emerge, sitting on top of the balloon, lighted in bright reds and pinks, with a huge white balloon skirt and corset top. a friend of mine lost the only video copy we had of the entire production. not a single photo, tho.


Jeffrey Shaw
«Movie Movie»
«This expanded cinema performance was specifically created for the Experimental Film Festival in Knokke-le-Zoute (Belgium 1997). It took place in the foyer of the festival building, with the audience sitting on the stairs and balcony. Three performers (Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuijver, Sean Wellesley-Miller) dressed in white overalls first brought in the inflatable structure and unrolled it on the floor. Then it was gradually inflated while film slides and liquid-light show effects were projected onto its surface. The architectural form of this inflatable structure was a cone with an outer transparent membrane and an inner white surface. [...] In the intermediate space between transparent and white membrane various material actions were performed to materialize the projected images. This included the inflation of white balloons and tubes, and the injection of smoke.
The intention of this work was to transform the conventional flat cinema projection screen into a three-dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of visualization. The multiple projection surfaces allowed the images to materialize in many layers, and the bodies of the performers and then of the audience (many of whom spontaneously jumped in naked) became part of the cinematic spectacle.[...]
«MovieMovie» was also a complex and innovative acoustic eventstructure. The Musica Elettronica Viva was closeley involved in its scenography, creating an intense and loud density of electronic sounds that were interactively modulated by the musicians via a spatially distributed sound amplification system placed both outside and inside the inflatable structure.»

(source: Jeffrey Shaw – a user’s manual. From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality, Anne Marie Duguet/Heinrich Klotz/Peter Weibel (eds.), Ostfildern 1997, pp. 70f.)

Jan-Peter Sonntag 'Modern Minimal Disco'

Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag
«Modern Minimal Disco»
«With ‹modern minimal disco 4› the visitor has to step onto a steel pedestal placed centrally in the exhibition space in order to be able to put on the headphones. As an exposed viewer of the exhibition in the midst of the exhibition he acoustically dives into a paradoxical space of experience – a space that is continually and endlessly speeding up. Here the sub-frequency parts of the accellerating pulse, perceptible only as shock waves, are directly transmitted as vibrations via special headphones and pedestals to the listener. Who – now separated – becomes part of the work and as such is himself exhibited while observing.»

Michael Snow «Wavelenght»

With his film «Wavelength,» Michael Snow revolutionized the international Avant-garde film scene like no other production. Viewed from its basic concept, this is a purely «formal» film: it consists of a single, 45-minute-long tracking shot through the length of a room, accompanied by slowly-increasing sine tones.[...] As the camera moves forward through the room’s space (when carefully studied the movement is not continuous, but made up of individual passages edited together), one registers the passing of several nights and days. The camera is ultimately moving toward a spot between two windows at the back of the room, where a photograph on the wall shows the unsettled surface of the sea; in the end, the camera comes so close to it that only the waves fill the screen.
The fascination of this film can be explained through the application of the formal principle of the tracking shot, which seems to determine the entire film, with stray elements of reality: people occasionally appear in the frame; the telephone rings; apparently someone is even murdered in this space. Even what one can recognize of the street through the windowpane constitutes a counter-element to a purely «abstract» form.
«Wavelength ranks among those films which force viewers, regardless of how they react, to carefully consider the essence of the medium and, just as unavoidably, reality,» wrote the critic Amos Vogel.

(Source: Ulrich Gregor, Geschichte des Films ab 1960, Reinbek, 1983.)

Tony Conrad, «The Flicker», 1965 – 1966

Tony Conrad
«The Flicker»
A film consisting of only alternating black-and-white film images. During the projection, light and dark sequences alternate to changing rhythms and produce stroboscopic and flickering effects; and while viewing these, they cause optic impressions which simulate colors and forms. In the process, the film also stimulates physiological in place of psychological impressions, by not addressing the senses as such, but rather triggering direct neural reactions. Tony Conrad, who has devoted himself to an intensive study of the physiology of the nervous system, created with «The Flicker» an icon of the structural film, which succeeds without a narrative or reproducible imagery. Since the seen is not captured through the eyes, but rather first produced in the brain.

Heike Helfert

Walter Ruttmann, «Berlin, Symphony of a City», 1927

During the many years of my movement studies drawn from abstract means, I have never been able to escape the urge to create from living materials, from the millions of movement-related energies that actually exist in the organism of the big city, a film symphony,» writes Ruttmann. For this project, Ruttmann works together with scriptwriter Carl Mayer, whose shares his exasperation with the artificiality and limitations of studio work. Carl Mayer writes a film treatment aimed at achieving a symphonic film structure, excluding both actors and a story. It concentrates on what really exists, and on a form that uses the inherent means of film. (...) (Ruttman) intends for the viewer to experience the energies, dynamics and movements of the big city, with original cinematographic means. For this end, the filmed shots function as the starting point for a montage whose rhythm hypnotizes the viewer by conveying an experience in velocities, and also produce a new awareness regarding the objectivity of filmed shots.

(Source: Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF, Frankfurt/M, visit: www.deutsches-filminstitut.de, based on: Jean-Paul Goergen, Walter Ruttmann, «Eine Dokumentation», Berlin, 1989.)

Viking Eggeling

Viking Eggeling
Diagonal-Symphonie, 1923

Hans Richter

Man Ray -- Return to Reason

He sprinkled salt and pepper on one piece of film, pins on another, illuminated the film for a few seconds, then developed the film. The resulting images resemble a seriously weird drugs trip.
Man Ray added additional sequences to make the film of sufficient length to have an impact. These include night shots of lights at a fairground and a section in which a paper mobile appears to dance with its shadow.

More a work in experimental Dadaism than a film, «Le Retour à la raison» was the first film to be made by the celebrated surrealist artist, Man Ray. The American-born artist made the film soon after he moved to Paris in the early 1920s to found the Dada movement.

Schmelzdahin

The basis of this film by Jochen Müller, Jochen Lempert and Jürgen Reble is found footage from the French-Canadian feature film ‘Ville en flamme'. Before the pictures and soundtrack were reworked, the original footage was buried in the garden, deliberately exposed to bacteria and microbes, and copied when the emulsion began to liquefy. The dissolution of the images – that is, the visible decomposition of the layer of film bearing the pictures – provides a visual equivalent to the disaster that forms the subject of the original film. The broad outline of the plot is still recognizable – it clearly involves a relationship between a man and a woman, for example – but the action is reduced to fragments of images and patches of colour that blend organically with one another on the course-grained film.

Thomas Demand 'Tunnel'

Granular Synthesis, «Pole», 1998

Granular Synthesis
«Pole»
Ulf Langheinrich and Kurt Hentschlager have worked together as an artistic duo since 1991 on the ‘Granular Synthesis' project. Their obsessive visual language, developed from the performance art tradition of direct physical perception, has consistently evolved towards an audio-visual live experience, whose most recent state of aggregation, with the name of 'Pole', was seen in Germany in 1998. Mixing live with the aid of software they developed themselves, the two artists sample, shift, loop and amplify tiny synthetic units of image and sound – which they call 'grains' – of the singer Diamanda Galas to produce a condensed, invasive stimulation of the senses. A frontal projection onto five or seven parallel screens, stroboscopic effects, rapidly repetitive hypnotic or numbing visual patterns and sound frequencies with bass tones as low as -40 db, which the audience physiologically 'hears' through the body, combine to create an effect of conscious polarization and the removal of all perceptive distance from this stream of audio-visual data.

Rudolf Frieling

Andy Eveland - Lightfaktor

Fault Room

my work for Stanford MFA 1st year show

leaving

lab-au http://www.lab-au.com

LAboratory for Architecture and urbanism

Manuel Abendroth
Jérôme Decock
Alexandre Plennevaux
Els Vermang

Founded in 1997 and based in Brussels, LAb[au] mainly creates interactive artworks, audiovisual performances and scenographies.

Centerbeam

By Otto Piene
, Elizabeth Goldring

Otto Piene, project director for "Centerbeam" and director of MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, continues to explore the many interfaces of art, technology, and the environment.
Elizabeth Goldring, one of "Centerbeam's" contributing artists, is a research fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

steam projections

i encountered this wonderful piece at ogaki biennale 2004

Moony, by Akio Kamisato, Satoshi Shibata and Takehisa Mashimo from IAMAS in Japan, uses steam as both a screen and an interactive interface. If you touch one of the virtual butterflies projected into the vapor, it will fly away and disappear. But hold your hand into the steam for a while and butterflies will flock around and play. This merging of the virtual and the real worlds is further enhanced by the fact that the humid temperature of the steam evokes the warmth of living beings.

Although the butterflies reflected on the steam are imaginary, the shadow reflected on the columns (between which the creatures move) is actual. This work wants to assert that all existing thing are in fact ambiguous.

(http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/augmented_reality/index.php?page=10)