thingist December 2010

thingist@mailman.thing.net

2 participants
3 discussions

What about a subjective, evolving, archive?
by Justin Berry 18 Feb '12

18 Feb '12

I am new to THE THING, having only become involved in the last year or so, working with W and Christoph on The.Thing.Net and the White Slab screenings. I became involved almost by accident--I was recently out of graduate school and making non-salable and non-exhibitable work, mostly web stuff, and feeling a bit chagrined about the art world and its various camps of ideology. I was randomly surfing the web and sending out feeler emails to every organization I could find that was involved in New Media. Wolfgang was the one who answered back. I had no idea what THE THING actually was. I went to look it up online and struggled to find information, only coming up with numerous references to someTHING but never an actual history or a literal description. The most glaring example of THE THING online was the Post, and I think enough has been said about that. It took a long time of being involved, listening in conversation, and attending talks by Wolfgang, etc. in order to really arrive at a sense of what THE THING was and what it represented. If it were not so tragic it would be humorously ironic that an organization that did so much to galvanize thinking about the internet as an artistic and political medium has no functioning legacy online. I think that a proper and academic archive could potentially happen, but it will take a long time and a great deal of work. The nature of academia is to quest after a kind of perfection, to create a source of objective authority. Great! That would be awesome. In a few years it will be something we can all be proud of. I think something different needs to be planned in the interim. What about creating a subjective archive? What about creating a nexus for the stories and narratives of THE THING. It could be a relatively simple interface, something like a data or tag cloud full of links to various stories, where the only hierarchy might be determined by font size. People with a story to tell or an event to document could create their own HTML page, with the only standard requirement being a ‘back to home’ button of some kind. The advantage is that this would allow each person’s ‘history’ to be acknowledged without necessarily privileging one or the other. One link might be called ‘eToy war’ and could be an account of those events while another might be called ‘Justin Berry’ and include simply my own experiences. These pages don’t even have to share styling, though we could certainly provide a CSS sheet for people to use if they chose. One person’s page might be a video, while another person could choose to simply write an essay; an event might be documented with only a series of contextless pictures. Something like this embraces the history of THE THING as a forum and a platform. This does not have to exist in opposition to a formal archive; it can be an accompaniment to that project. It also requires less energy to happen. Once a stable and functioning interface is set up it can be left to individuals to create pages as they wish. Each contribution can be considered on its own terms. It does not have to be ‘finished’, it can be an ever evolving project as new pages are added. Perhaps this is only a selfish wish. I would like to hear the stories and see the history and I would like to have that kind of experience sooner than later. There should be an online presence of THE THING’s legacy. In my experience every time people attempt to create an authoritative history of something there are a whole lot of histories on the table and it takes a long time to negotiate which ones stick around. Justin Berry -- Justin Berry (713) 302 9599 www.waymakergallery.com JustinBerryArt(a)gmail.com Waymaker(a)WaymakerGallery.com

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UM.Wire: Whitney Museum & Centre Pompidou
by UBERMORGEN.COM 05 Dec '10

05 Dec '10

hello & gruezi wohl! we know y'all are all about the w'leaks at the moment, and so be it - free mr. manning, way to go ++ snd some €$ 2 th leakers // http://www.wikileaks.ch/support.html ! but we also got some of our stuff to share - it's all new content and it is even hosted on an u.s. of a server and we censored it a bit so it would not get taken down & stuff, you know what i mean....we just wanna share before we take off for another production trip to africa (i.e. more as always to come) so, without further ado - here it comes, 2 new chunks of UBERMORGEN.COM work.. one on display at your disposal at the Centre Pompidou (scroll way down for more) && one commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art: . . : CLICKISTAN : . . http://www.whitney.org/clickistan/ Clickistan resides between the 7th and 8th bit of every byte it is ruled by generosity and playful curiosity its inhabitants are honest and filled with life they had been living poorly in an analog diaspora for many years they took some of their remains with them back home to CLICKISTAN. and now.. let's share a few notes from the curator Christiane Paul (thank u mrs. paul!): <cite> CLICKISTAN by the artist team UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard) is a work of game art and an homage to the net art of the mid-90s: it invents its own territory—ruled by the click—and celebrates the pixel in imaginative variations. UBERMORGEN.COM are the new masters of Minimalist pixel painting. Transparent pixels are blown out of proportion in order to create graphic shapes and abstractions, while copied-and-pasted scripts are resampled and recombined in order to—in UBERMORGEN.COM’s words—use as many pre-existing pixels and produce as few originals as possible. This latter strategy is a nod to early net art, in which recycling and reproduction of existing information were the artistic method of choice. Likewise, in the spirit of early net art—such as the Form Art Competition organized by Russian net art pioneer Alexei Shulgin in 1997—CLICKISTAN plays with the formal elements of the Web, enticing its players to click away on canvases of radio buttons and flying scroll bars. Players also encounter elements of net culture, such as a reference to the famous 2000-2002 Internet meme “All your base are belong to us,” a broken-English phrase originating from the opening scene of the video game Zero Wing, poorly translated from Japanese. CLICKISTAN’s visual style and playful typography—such as the mixing of upper and lower case—allude to the “dirt style” design of net art before the dot com gold rush—the degraded aesthetic of the hobbyist, amateur, and geek. The work’s title references both early net art’s exploration of the Web territory—in its resistance to traditional notions of ownership, authority, and the nation state—and the arrival of the click as the main paradigm of interaction, overruling previously established norms of dragging and dropping. CLICKISTAN is also indebted to early computer games, particularly the coin-operated arcade games of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980), and Donkey Kong (1981), whose pixellated characters were created with great economy of means. The new musical form inspired by early computer games—known as 8-bit or chiptune music and consisting of sound textures synthesized by the computer or video game console’s sound chip—is referenced in CLICKISTAN’s soundtrack supplied by the 8-bit music website micromusic.net. As with other game art projects, CLICKISTAN does not simply create an environment for play that follows established conventions, but instead engages, questions, and undermines them. UBERMORGEN.COM takes a decisively “userunfriendly” approach to many gaming routines: players’ actions do not yield the expected results; some choices are impossible to make, some actions redundant, but, as in “real life,” they all lead to the next level or sometimes even have the same consequences; scores do not necessarily relate to the performed actions in any rational way. Players become aware of their expectations and are challenged to ask who or what created them in the first place. UBERMORGEN.COM’s mode of operation has always been playfully subversive, and many of their projects have addressed the intersections of Internet culture, money, and branding. Their Ekmrz Trilogy (2005-2009) took critical approaches to Google and Amazon. Their Generatorseries included tools such as the Injunction Generator (2001), which allowed users to automatically generate a standard court order—in .pdf or .rtf format—claiming that a website of their choice was operating on an illegal basis. CLICKISTAN’s use of visuals, text, and language reflects the overall tone of Ubermorgen’s work, referencing their website’s home pages (from 2000-2005) as well as the generators. CLICKISTAN is a territory that lies somewhere at the core of Ubermorgen’s work: a game that plays with art and commerce, celebrates the early days of net art and computer games, has an anarchic sense of humor, and only delivers the expected when it is time to pay. http://www.whitney.org/clickistan/ IMAGE: http://ubermorgen.com/UM.Wire/images/CLICKISTAN_UBERMORGEN.jpg </cite> and here comes the other half of the letter of interest to you! (btw the 123th replier/retweeter to this email will win a trip to the nigerian ministery of finance!)... ;; . : : . : Centre Georges Pompidou "RE:MADE" Black n White http://www.ubermorgen.com/BlacknWhite/ "Notre intention est de travailler exclusivement avec le pixel comme idée et comme matériel brut. Le pixel est notre peinture, notre bois ou notre pierre, le langage html notre pinceau ou notre tournevis et le navigateur à la fois la toile et le musée. Nous puisons dans les objets artistiques conceptuels bien connus de Judd, Lewitt, Graham, Haacke, IRWIN, etc. pour en extraire des remakes numériques qui nous servent de règles visuelles." L'exposition "RE:MADE" présente neuf installations – vidéo, multimédia, net art – autour des notions de relecture et de réinterprétation. Neuf réponses distinctes et autonomes laissant apparaitre une géographie des médias et leur capillarité profonde avec notre quotidien. Les oeuvres choisies déplacent, détournent et réinterprètent un matériaux visuel et numérique pré-existant pour mettre en réflexion notre culture visuelle contemporaine et nos représentations. Le Centre Pompidou et Le Palais de Tokyo, avant de migrer ensuite pour Madrid en avril 2011 et Berlin en juillet 2011. Les artistes exposés sont : Christophe Bruno (France), Tony Cokes (USA), Ryoji Ikeda (Japon), Jodi (Pays-bas), Joan Leandre (Espagne), UBERMORGEN.COM (Suisse/Autriche/USA), Manuel Saiz (Espagne), Alexander Schellow (Allemagne) et Antoine Schmitt (France). IMAGE: http://ubermorgen.com/UM.Wire/images/UM_BlacknWhite.jpg http://ubermorgen.com/UM.Wire UBERMORGEN.COM officeR(a)ubermorgen.com Studio +4312361985 http://www.ubermorgen.com http://dotoildot.com http://tortureclassics.com http://ubermorgen.com/DEEPHORIZON http://www.asylabwehramt.at http://woppow.net http://ugi-heal.me

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Monday, December 6: Caspar Stracke: Collaborations
by w 03 Dec '10

03 Dec '10

Caspar Stracke: Collaborations || Alterations a program of collaborative video works plus radical re-edits of some of my works by fellow artists as well as my own re-edits of works by others GATEWAY (2010) clipped from a short documentary on the annual taxidermists convention in Springfield, Illinois, originally produced by Dominique Gradenwitz for German TV Sat 1, re-edited. THREADS (2001) collaboration with Mike Hoolboom, portrait of Tom Chomont, later finshed as TOM by Hoolboom and NO DAMAGE by myself) CED Trilogy (2002) a collaboration with a broken vinyl disk player (pre-laser disk) re-edits excerpts of TRON and SHINING. ELECTRIC SPEECH (1998/2010) re-edit by Jim Supanick of my Avital Ronell episode from Circle's Short Circuit, premiere) PROXIMITY (bubble version) (2010) a re-edit of my installation work Proximity conceived site-specifically for the THE THINGS office in Chelsea 2002 "ETC, etc" (2007) Re-enactment of an instructional video by Dave Jones for Experimental TV Center (part of ETC: 1969-2009 distributed by EAI) December 6, 2010, 8 PM The Thing @ White Slab Palace 77 Delancey Street, 10002 New York, NY (SE corner of Delancey/Allen)

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thingist December 2010