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March 30, 2012 by admin

“Don’t use the internet as a f***ing condiment”: Net Art at Art Dubai

Alexander Provan (left) and Constant Dullaart (right), Art Dubai. (Photo courtesy Art Dubai)

Acquisitions of net art by the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, and other institutions have given institutional validation to the genre, but complicated curatorial debates rage over what exactly it includes: Can it be shown on a computer in a gallery? Can it only be viewed online? Can art not based on code count as net art?

At (It’s Not) Net Art 2: Emancipate the Medium!, one panel at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum, heated debates began over nearly every aspect of the medium, from its formal qualities to its politicization and the notion that it is inherently radical. This argumentativeness is perhaps unsurprising given that the medium lacks a strict definition.

“We say that net art is art that uses the internet as its medium, but the internet is not really a medium,” claims speaker Josephine Bosma, by way of opening the discussion. (Panelists and audience members would later challenge her on this point). Ms. Bosma understands net art to be the product of artists working within a certain space that is at once technical and creative. She recalls Robert Adrian X’s wonderment, articulated at the first online conference in 1979 at San Francisco MoMA, at “the space behind the computer” that allows one to “enter a new world.” To her, it serves as an “an ideal space for art to evolve in because art is also conceptual.”

“Why has it attracted so much counter-culture?” asks an audience member who professes an interest in the politics of net art. Another audience member replies that there is nothing inherently radical about the genre, but suggests it is often used subversively, or to inspire political activism.

The internet’s widespread accessibility facilitates this today, according to writer and editor Victoria Camblin. Yet, Ms. Bosma, who must be approximately two decades older than Ms. Camblin, refutes her claim that the younger generations are so at ease with the internet that it becomes a natural extension of themselves. “They are only at ease with the simplest of interfaces,” she insists, adding that most people’s daily internet activity only touches the tip of the iceberg.

Triple Canopy co-editor Alexander Provan steered the conversation back the art, dwelling on the discrepancy between art on the net and internet-inspired art shown in a gallery: “A lot of people don’t make use of the specificity of the medium, which is diluting the performance potential.”

Artist Constant Dullaart put it more bluntly: “Don’t use the internet as a fucking condiment.” He was not so much addressing anyone in the tent as venting about some artists’ tendency to embellish their work with a redundant internet component simply because they think it makes their art cooler.

Mr. Dullaart edits online forms of representation, and user’s access to it, to create on-and-offline installations and performances. As he warns about the colonization of the internet—corporations and states “divvying up the web and making decisions that influence us”—we watch the Google home page on his computer rotate 360 degrees. “I manipulate Google to show how they manipulate information they display,” he explains.

Ms. Camblin accepts Dullaart’s assertion that politics and economic incentives have undermined internet freedom. However, she refutes the implication that this is necessarily problematic, so long as everyone recognizes the mechanisms of control. “People are aware of [corporate and government control],” she exclaims, adding, “We make these structures apparent; it is conspicuously clear.”

Another audience member interjects (customary forum protocol having been abandoned during the first five minutes of discussion) to raise questions about how to preserve net art and what happens once it is taken offline. In response, Mr. Dullaart equates net art to performance art, referring to his own Facebook performances: “You can’t download Facebook in its entirety [in order preserve the performance he conducts by manipulating the code], just like you can’t freeze Marina Abramovic in the middle of a performance and unfreeze her in 50 years so she can reenact it”.

According to Ms. Camblin, once a net artwork is taken offline it becomes something else. What that something else is, however, eludes her: A book? A sculpture? She isn’t exactly sure. To account for this ambiguity, an audience member calls on museums and publishing platforms to open up their respective fields and embrace the genre, even as they struggle to understand it. “After all,” says Mr. Provan, “we have to assume that all new media will eventually become old media.

Published online by Art Fag City on March 30, 2012

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March 29, 2012 by admin

Art and Media, Guernica and Tahrir Square: Observations from Art Dubai

It isn’t exactly a surprise that this year’s Global Art Forum, an annual discourse on contemporary art under the aegis of Art Dubai, should explore the theme “the Medium of the Media”. The event takes place on the rough anniversary of uprisings that spread across the Middle East, making it inevitable that panelists focused on where art fits into a landscape marked by tweets from Tahrir Square and the real-time dissemination of images of Qaddafi’s corpse.
 
This proved fruitful. Media, by virtue of its dual contexts within the worlds of reportage and publishing on the one hand, and as the agent of artistic expression on the other, has enough ambiguity to spawn rich discussions on the nebulous boundaries between information, art, and activism. This week, we’ll be covering a few of the most interesting of those discussions.

Cairo-based historian and artist, Huda Lufti, delivers the second reflection on media’s powerful role in recent and current political upheavals. (Photo courtesy Art Dubai)

Concern over the brutal crackdown on Syrian revolutionaries and Egypt’s unpredictable political climate tempered the usual unabashed glamour at Art Dubai. At this stage of the game, many of the participants at Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum—the panel discussion contingent of the fair—preferred to pose questions rather than draw conclusions about the state of contemporary art in the Middle East.

“Is contemporary art up to the task of addressing complex social and political realities in the world around us? And should we demand this of art in the first place?” asks Negar Azimi, a journalist and Bidoun magazine editor, in a session entitled “Power less: Art vs Media.”

Underlying the discussion was the premise that media, particularly 24-hour news, has become the ultimate source of information on political change. In other words, has media eclipsed contemporary art as the zeitgeist? In the early part of the 20th Century, Ms. Azimi pointed out, art’s potential to inspire political agency was alive and well, the origin of both the anti-nationalist jeers of Dada and the propaganda of Guernica (a work commissioned by the Republican Spanish government). Has this now given way to official media coverage and citizen journalism?

And what of those innumerable images documenting every detail of the Arab street protests, captured and disseminated via personal devices from Manama to Tunis? Susan Sontag’s warning about the alienation and disengagement caused by the constant flux of horrifying photojournalistic images resonates with William Wells, director of Townhouse gallery in Cairo. He worries about the “volume of raw Youtube footage bombarding us every day.” But do any of these images rise to the level of art? Does labeling them as art alter their impact?

Yes, according to the Cairene artist and historian Huda Lutfi. She makes the case that the definition of what we consider art may be expanding so that some of what has been produced on the street does indeed constitute art, regardless of its formal qualities or the ‘artist’s’ background. In response to Ms. Azimi’s suggestion that these campaigns represent a new form of culture, Ms. Lutfi asks, “Why separate what these activists are doing from contemporary art?” Moreover, Ms. Lutfi believes art still has a potent role to play in spreading revolutionary messages and inspiring political activism. Fighting back tears at times, she credits the graffiti that popped up on police barricades throughout Cairo as instrumental in countering the government news agency’s anti-revolutionary propaganda.

Street art may be the most well-suited art form to communicate the spirit of the Egyptian revolution because, much like the nascent democratic movement, it faces the constant threat of being erased by the authorities. Moreover, street art is subject to taking on forms wildly different from what the artist intends, thanks to an added brush stroke here and there by an invisible hand in the middle of the night. Yet the very qualities that enable street art to embody the aspirations and challenges of the revolution also make it difficult to preserve. Ms. Azimi, for example, admits to losing interest in street art once it is brought within the walls of a gallery, though she acknowledges there are few other ways to document it. “It’s too early,” she says, “to make a coffee table book about the graffiti of the Egyptian revolution.”

As the discussion continues, the question of monetization comes into play. The notion that artists, gallerists, and even collectors might profit off the blood and tears of the Arab Spring is an uncomfortable thought. Nevertheless, the setting made it impossible to overlook: a mere stone’s throw away, at Art Dubai, a few enterprising galleries were already selling pieces marketed as “art of the revolution”. With moderate success, Ms. Lutfi tries to convince us that, as an artist herself, she does not consider it “problematic to produce works that express what I lived through the last year, as long as they are not monetized.” From her subsequent remarks, though, one surmises that she is still grappling with this idea: “But then, what do you do with the art if you can’t sell it?” she asks herself aloud. At issue, the panelists concur, is how to differentiate between artists who are opportunistic and those who are sincere.

Mr. Wells interjects, inferring it might not yet be time to worry about that. In face of “economic, political, and humanitarian crises across the globe,” he wonders: “What is art for? Does it matter? Is a painting more powerful than a photograph of a murder victim? Is it more truth-telling?” Neither the other panelists nor any audience member could offer a satisfying response.

Published by Art Fag City on March 29, 2012

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February 8, 2012 by admin

Maurice Benayoun Occupies Wall Screens

NEW YORK – Enigmatic and in constant flux, human emotions are not easily grasped, let alone quantified. Yet, the French new-media artist Maurice Benayoun endeavors to do precisely that for the sake of opening new ways of thinking about the world. He tracks worldwide emotional trends and catapults them into the spotlight, juxtaposing real human feelings with the monster known as the global financial system. It results in two related artworks, Occupy Wall Screens and Emotion Forecast, presented by Streaming Museum at Big Screen Plaza, a public space located at 851 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan (on view at Big Screen Plaza through February 29th and permanently at StreamingMuseum.org).

Think of these artworks as the visual embodiment of everything the recent global economic crisis has taught us: unfettered pursuit of financial gain by elite members of society often comes at the expense of human suffering borne disproportionately by the majority with little responsibility for creating the mess. Now we can actually see the emotions this phenomenon is stirring, expressed by Mr. Benayoun as colorful world maps and tickers flashing across a giant LED screen.

“It is my way of offering another perspective, to help people understand what is going on,” explains Mr. Benayoun.

If this sounds familiar in light of the Occupy Movement, you are following Mr. Benayoun’s line of thinking. Inspired by the movement, his Occupy Wall Screens displays in real time the stock valuation readouts of major financial institutions next to emotional currents emanating from Occupy sites around the world. Playing on familiar visual symbols from the financial world such as stock tickers and Bloomberg-style news programs, Occupy Wall Screens portrays the quotidian in a new light.

“For me,” explains Mr. Benayoun, “this is the beginning of something that can extend the actual Occupy Movement to other realms. I encourage people to think more about how to occupy not only this wall screen, but the global media because that is how we can really start to change the world.”

In the same vein, the related artwork Emotion Forecasts relies on a free software program to accumulate data from the web using algorithm searches for sixty-four emotions from 3,213 cities. In other words, it counts how many times people in a certain geographic area use words like “happy” or “fear” on Facebook etc. At the same time every day, the software analyzes a snapshot of the collected data and calculates predictions about how the world will feel over the next two days. Reminiscent of weather forecasts, the data is presented visually by superimposing the emotions, written out in words, and their corresponding figures, over a world map.

While Mr. Benayoun makes no pretense about his works being scientifically accurate, he believes that “the internet is the world’s nervous system and we are the nerve endings.” As such, these exhibitions constitute “symbolic attempts to take the human factor into account.”

These exhibitions present the latest incarnations of the Mechanics of Emotion, Mr. Benayoun’s ongoing series comprising over twenty multimedia artworks that render statistics on human emotions into visual art.

Underlying Mechanics of Emotion is Mr. Benayoun’s notion of critical fusion: blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality in order to “see the world in a more creative way, but also in a more critical way.” In Occupy Wall Screens and Emotions Forecast it is achieved by “juxtaposing quantified emotions with stock values, placing them face to face in one work, which for me is the key to the whole series Mechanics of Emotion. He believes that inserting doses of fiction into reality has the potential to make society more understandable.

 

Technology is a crucial component of critical fusion, but to Mr. Benayoun it is merely a means to reach a higher plane of understanding rather than an end in itself. He explains, “I rely on technology as a tool that shares images and sounds, putting people in touch. It helps me connect with others and to understand and deal with the world.”

 

Mr. Benayoun likes to say that if he had the power to dictate changes to the financial system, he would impose a twenty-four hour delay on all trades to allow time for passions to cool enough to let reason dictate the appropriate move. “What is the harm of waiting a little bit to give people time to consider the consequences?” he asks rhetorically. Alas, his influence is unlikely to extend over Wall Street so directly. Nevertheless, his critical fusion – inserting a dose of fiction into a very real social movement stirring new debates on income inequality – has activist undertones.

Does Mr. Benayoun consider himself an activist? “I am an artist using art to act on the world, maybe to help changing it, at least a little bit,” he says, hesitating to use the term “activist” because it can mean just about anything these days. Still, he clearly believes art plays a role in shaping society: “If it is also unconventional, not only in the shape it takes but also in its intention, then art can come close to achieving what the historical activism set out to do.”

Published online by Artlog Magazine February 10, 2012