Loving Shapes and Colors
Closing performance for the exhibition “Moving Shapes and Colors”
179 Canal
January 17, 2010
Among other things, the exhibition “Moving Shapes and Colors” is about experiencing images through screen and networks. Short loops andalgorithms in the displayed works are reminders of the code behind pictures, reversing the old idea of geometric abstraction as a window to an invisible world. The show closes January 17 with “Loving Shapes and Colors,” an event conceived by the group BFFA3AE that gives the same idea a different spin. A live recording of a performance is chroma-keyed and broadcast simultaneously in different part of the gallery, embodying the split identity of the object of perception and its source. Systems of viewing are fluid and chameleon–puzzles to be solved collectively.
“BFFA3AE are standing at the east end of a road before a small brick building.
Around them is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and runs
south, down a gully. A wide path leads northwest.”
–BFFA3AE (Micaela Durand, Daniel Chew, Matthew Gaffney, and Maximiliano Ferro)
The Headless Conference
The New Museum
March 19, 2010
“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 Univeristy
“I have to say, the timing is good, if probably accidental, ’cause there will have to be a political engagement within offshore in the resolution of the financial crisis. So having Headless running parallel in the next couple of years to whatever effort governments will be making to try to address these things, will create some interesting parallels and crossovers.”
–Angus Cameron in an interview with curator Kim Einarsson
The Headless Conference is organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak.
We would like to thank the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies for their support of this event.
Moving Shapes and Colors
Moving Shapes and Colors
179 Canal
December 11, 2009 – January 17, 2010
Narratives, performances, personalities, and politics are fine for screenings, but who likes catching a sequence of events at a random point and watching from middle to middle, while standing up? The best videos to show in a gallery are impersonal (i.e. abstract), on short loops, and rooted in the equipment on which they are shown, to minimize the difference between following the movement of images over time and contemplating an object in space. Most of the works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” meet most of these criteria; if they all met all of them it would be dull.
A discussion of abstraction in contemporary video needs a vocabulary beyond Plato and Aristotle, Malevich and Tatlin, invisibility and objectivity. This work involves code and electron guns, things that trouble stale dichotomies of abstract and concrete, and are troubled in turn by fallacies about the immateriality of digital information. It sounds dry and wonky to talk about an animation as a manifestation of data. But the outcome, with bold lines and CMYK palettes, triggers associations with pyramids, pentacles, and glow sticks. It’s the legacy of nu rave, rest its soul. The selection of works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” is designed to aggravate these issues, not resolve them.
Works by Elna Frederick, Sabine Gruffat, Duncan Malashock, Kelli Miller, Ilia Ovechkin, Damon Zucconi
The World Is Flat
The World Is Flat
June 24 – 28, 2009
Rhizome is pleased to present “The World Is Flat,” an exhibition to be included in X Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. Featured artists and collectives include B’L'ing (Chris Moukarbel, Anne Eastman, Amy Yao), Anna Lundh, Oliver Laric, Lizzie Fitch, Alexandre Singh and David Horvitz. Two artist-centered publications, Private Circulation and Free Internet by AIDS-3D, will also be displayed. The exhibition takes the perceived flatness of culture, or the free availability and distribution of information enabled by the Internet, as its departure point. Works included celebrate this availability, such as Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008), a green screen template of Mariah Carey’s hit song which was remixed widely by YouTube users, or B’L'ing’s bootleg trading station and video RGB (2008), while others reveal paranoid fantasies that have emerged in response to increased accessibility of information, as in Anna Lundh’s Hollywood Internet (2008), a video installation that compiles footage from Hollywood films that represent the Internet as a threatening decentralized network. “The World Is Flat” includes installation, collage, sculpture, video as well as internet-based works along with a limited, reading library and a poster. Events include the HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER workshop/performance by Anna Lundh on Saturday June 27th from 2-3pm on the first floor, which will walk participants through the process of hexaflexagon construction and present a short history of the hexaflexagons in the form of a corporate seminar. The workshop is an extension of the artist’s HEXA_FLEXAGON_F_EVER (2008), which investigates the interconnected people and stories surrounding the hexaflexagon, in analog and digital contexts. The event is free.
Curated by Lauren Cornell, Brian Droitcour and Ceci Moss for Rhizome
Splashback
Splashback: Rhizome’s Splash Pages, 1998-2002
Launched April 2009
Splash art originated in the 1940s in comics, where the term referred to a full page of visuals at the front of a book. Pages were designed to engage the reader’s imagination along the lines of the comic’s broader concept, while standing independent from the narrative. In the late 1990s, when the widespread use of the application Flash opened up new possibilities for animation and interactive media, the idea of the splash page migrated to web design. Online splash art brought visual excitement to a webpage when low modem speeds made it impractical to post large or moving images amid a site’s textual content.
Rhizome introduced splash pages to its web site in 1998 in order to display artwork with greater immediacy. Splash art occupied the entire browser window, and the works were not indexed by prefaces, links, and thumbnails as art usually was on Rhizome and other sites. When the artwork appeared, the only clue to its authorship was in an extension of Rhizome’s URL, a structural necessity that also served a community-building function. Not only did the splash project create a more direct platform for showcasing work, it also defined a circle of artists by connecting their name to Rhizome’s in the location bar and forging a direct bond between their art and Rhizome’s home page.
In its early years, Rhizome’s activity was largely improvisatory, and the splash projects development was informal and irregular. Staff members would request a splash page from an artist as they became interested in his or her work; they also fielded unsolicited submissions. Commissioned artists were free to submit whatever they wanted, and the approaches varied widely. Some artists repurposed existing works, simply modifying the code to include a link to Rhizome’s home page. Others interpreted the task as an exercise in branding the organization, and they remixed Rhizome’s logo or otherwise played with the letters in its name. Some artists took the opportunity to further explore issues central to their work, while others riffed on the stereotypical role of the splash page as a quick-moving piece of eye candy. Design companies were solicited as well as artists, a fact that reflects the relatively small size of the community of people doing interesting visual work on the internet ten years ago. With the breadth of practices and interests it represents, “Splashback” is more than an institution’s navel-gazing look at its own history; it is a snapshot of online visual culture around the turn of the millennium.
Rhizome discontinued the use of splash pages in 2002. As the staff implemented a new design for the site, they decided the splash pages were an unnecessary obstacle to reaching the home page—a choice in tune with the zeitgeist as pop-up functionality plagued the web. But the recent move to organize and present this piece of Rhizome’s past in “Splashback” was made with the awareness that the original reason behind the splash project—the desire to put the art up front—is an impulse that continues to shape Rhizome’s presence online today.