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LABoral, the art center we have come to associated with new media art, has recently opened an exhibition dedicated to new, audacious and thought-provoking forms of design. Curated by Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito), Nowhere/Now/Here aims to challenge the perception of design by questioning our relationship with the environment. Taking the viewpoint that our environment has become part of us rather than us being part of it, as its point of departure, Nowhere/Now/ Here encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process.
Nowhere/Now/Here features more than 60 works that challenge the conception we might have of design. Some by designers you may have met in these pages before (Dunne & Raby, Troika, Auger-Loizeau, Eelko Moorer, David Bowen, Pablo Valbuena, Marei Wollersberger, Yuri Suzuki, Noam Toran, etc. ) and in many other publications (Tord Boontje, Assa Ashuach, Paul Cocksedge, etc.)
The design of the exhibition itself reflects the explorative approach of Nowhere/Now/Here. Conceived like a 'mental adventure' and relying on colourful graphics on the floor that guide visitors through the space, it was created by Patricia Urquiola studio and the graphic image and vision of Fernando Gutierrez.
The catalogue of the the exhibition Nowhere/Now/Here, Investigating New Lines of Enquiry in Contemporary Design is gorgeous and its cast is stellar: there are interview with Ron Arad, Javier Mariscal and other important figures of design, essays by Marti Guixe, Santiago Cirugeda, Matt Ward, Dunne & Raby, a description of all the participating projects, loads of photos and beautiful graphics. Almost 300 pages, in both spanish and english for a mere 35 euros. The online shop of LABoral seems to be a bit under the water these days, so until the situation is fixed, the easiest way to get your hands on the precious volume is to write LABoral and ask if they can send you a copy.
The curators of the exhibition are Roberto Feo and Rosario Hurtado. Ever since they founded El Último Grito back in 1997, the designers have kept away from preconceived definitions and prescribed design paths. A perspective that didn't prevent them from teaching at the most prestigious colleges of design and working for renowned companies and institutions: Mathmos, Selfridges, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Lavazza, Budweiser, Style, Metalarte, Hugo Boss, Southwark Council, Arturo Alvarez, the Lighthouse, etc.
I caught up with the Berlin/London-based duo to discuss Nowhere/Now/Here:
How did El Último Grito land on the LABoral spaceship? How did two famous designers end up curating an exhibition 'that challenges the perception of design by questioning our relationship with the environment. Taking the viewpoint that our environment has become part of us rather than us being part of it, as its point of departure, Nowhere/Now/ Here encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process' ?
LABoral contacted us to curate and exhibition on 'experimental design' (what ever that means) so for us it was a question of trying to define what experimental meant to us.
We explored different areas of work and try to define a strategic approach for each of them, which lead designers to challenging design's status quo. We identify three basic areas with their accompanying strategies
Material_Intervention: projects that explore material innovation and new material applications, new production techniques, technology, genetic engineering, graffiti,...
Cultural_Resistance: Projects and designers that position themselves in confrontation with the dominant culture, both in terms of the design outcomes, but also in terms of practice within the culture of design.
Psychological_Exploration: projects that analyse the psychological and sensorial experience of the object or that act as triggers of emotions and sensations. And psychological objects that carry the essence of the psychological experience.
This worked for us as a starting point, which provided us a basic structure to classify the researched works. But for us it became apparent that were many other connections between the works, and that such a classification would not allow you to understand. When we started recombining the works in a more intuitive way, for us suggested conceptual connections between really different areas of work. We also felt that this allowed the viewer to find his or her own entry points into the exhibition.
Our intent was to present a collection of objects that would allow you to understand the thinking process of the artists behind them. Presenting them as thinkers who can not only reshape their own particular worlds but that show the potential to transform, re-interpret and re-think industries, production processes, communication strategies, political systems, etc. Challenging our preconceptions of what design can do.
What did this curatorial experience teach you?
It has been a very interesting experience. It has given us the chance (or luxury) to dedicate proper time to lo closely to the work of many other peoples, to understand their motivations and their intentions. And interpret them in relation to each other (including our own work). Creating a bigger pictured that talked about the fantastic potential and diversity of design approaches.
That it's why we treated the exhibition as a project itself, rather of plain review of design today. So in a way is not so much an exhibition on experimental design as much as an experimental exhibition on design. We wanted to create a moment where different aspects of design would collide in a space and something would come up from this experiment. Which in a way has already happened among the participating artists and designers, in terms of friendships and collaborations. But above all, the most incredible feeling is one of 'togetherness' and true interest in each others work, which has become unusual in such competitive world. This is very uplifting and makes us believe that something major is happening within the design world.
Also, it was very interesting to work on the edition of the catalogue, in which we collaborated intensively with Fernando Gutierrez who carried out its design. In a way the catalogue becomes almost more important than the exhibition itself, they have a life beyond the exhibition, so we wanted that the catalogue would be a space that you travel like the exhibition. It follows the same structure of the show, with the works presented according to the six groups created from word associations that connect to the works in an intuitive way:
The works, texts and interviews have been grouped in order to create moments. Images and stories for the visitor/reader to find their own point of access to the ideas around the works. Very much following the idea of a 'trafalmadorian' book, from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V:
"Billy couldn't read Trafalmadorian, of course, but he could al least see how the books were laid out- in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams. "Exactly", said the voice. "They are telegrams?" "There are no telegrams on Trafalmadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-describing a situation, a scene. We Trafalmadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time."
The catalogue is an assemblage of works, described by the designers and artists, essays from some of the participating artists, which although often linked to personal projects, are surprisingly useful to understand everyone else's work, and interviews to four of our all time heroes: Ron Arad, Javier Mariscal, Daniel Weil and Gaetano Pesce; which contextualise the work of this younger generation of designers.
You didn't seem to have selected any of your own works for the show. Why not? And if i asked you to point us to the work you developed that best reflects the theme of the exhibition, which one would it be?
Well, for us the exhibition itself is a piece of work, a project that is the result of the collaboration with everybody involved, from the LABoral team, to all the artists, writers and advisors.
There are two video projects that we feel worked well within the themes of NOWHERE/NOW/HERE.
One is 'LINE' which is a video consisting of a horizontal line where words appearing above and bellow. As the words change, your interpretation of what the line is also changes, and as you keep watching you find yourself adjusting your interpretation of the space and the way of seeing it. This is one of the three pieces, dealing with the idea of perception, which we have used as an introduction to the show. There other two are Grao by Pedrita, which reproduces a photographic image using traditional untreated ceramic tiles, to substitute the pixels of the image; and Marc Owens 'Avatar' film, which he reshot as a walkthrough the exhibition, the piece is fantastic as it is always playing with how you perceive reality.
The other video is 'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem'. This video is a new direction in terms of documenting our work. We started using video to try to document our installations, as we felt that just by keeping a photographic record of the event, did not reflect our ideas about the nature of the work that we call 'design performance, performing design'. But then we realised that the video itself could even had another narrative which would give it an identity of its own and not just being a document of the work. 'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem' was conceived as part of a public sitting commission during ARCO at IFEMA. The idea was to utilise all the packaging materials that are thrown away during the setting up of the fair. We came out with the idea of big bags in the shape of letters that would be filled up with all the waste materials. NOWASTEEUR are the ten letters that you need to write NO WASTE and RE-USE which was the main message that we wanted to put across. After that we elaborated a short poem using those letters (plus M which you get out of turning around the W), which you see forming in the video while all the action of the installation is being recorded:
'NOWASTEEUR, a laborious poem' is shown as part of the film program, which runs at the exhibition's design cinema (the cinema sitting is a commissioned piece by Nic Rysenbry)
David Bowen's Remote Sonar Drawing Device, and Pablo Valbuena's installation Augmented Sculpture Series, have been exhibited in the past in purely artistic contexts. What made you think that they fitted the exhibition's objective to 'encourages us to see design as an integral component of the world-shaping process'?
Design is an integral component of the world-shaping process. Only because design takes many forms, sometimes we 'can't see the forest from the trees'.
In NOWHERE/NOW/HERE we tried to investigate (like the sub title says) 'new lines of enquiry in contemporary design'. Showing a diversity of work, which presented the different ideas and directions that designers are exploring today.
In the case of David Bowen, we find really interesting his work, where both technological research, and robotics collide with the questioning of the nature of drawing. His design translates movement into drawing. He has deliberately chosen make his machine draw 'marks' (like young children when they start drawing and are just interested in leaving their mark) by translating the movement recorded into impulses, which connect with the idea of representation, so central to the idea of drawing. So in fact, is that drawing purely a mark or is it a representation of the circulation of people? Is that drawing artistic or scientific? Is it both? But it not only raises questions in the nature of drawing as a human activity but in the nature of technological research and its applications.
In the exhibition his piece is in conversation with by Javier Mariscal's hand made wooden drawing of a 'VESPA' (2007), one of the surprise little homage's to the 'maestros' object of the interviews in the catalogue.
With Pablo Valbuena, we saw his work at ARCO and we fell in love with it instantly. The way he uses light and video to transform the perception of space and the materiality of the build, it is simply fantastic. In his case, it is obvious that the content of his work comes directly from his training as an architect, and his research into the qualities of space. So his work is very much design, but its materialization and dissemination is through the art market.
These two pieces, like indeed many others within the exhibition are providing a different point of view on how thing are around us. This helps us understand that there is always more than one answer and that by no means we should accept what the market or the designer or the politician or religion or science tell us. There are always alternatives. Most things are not the way they are because of some force of nature that is beyond our control. Things are the way they are because someone decided at one moment that this or that was a good idea, or make them lots of money or be good for humanity or the environment or ... there are no ultimate truths, just proposals that became 'real' and these could and do change.
In the catalogue we refer to Martin Scorsese's film The Departed quoting Frank Costello, the mob boss, who while describing his neighbourhood says 'I do not want to be a product of my environment, I wasn't my environment to be a product of me'. For us this has a resonance within design and acts as a reminder that it is possible to change the rules of the game.
On the other hand some of the works selected openly dialog with the art world (for example The Macguffin Library and cinema). Which are the characteristics that indicate that these works belong strictly to the field of design and not art? And is the difference always strict anyway? Or is there a conscious desire to keep the boundaries as porous as befits the purpose?
We guess that the answer would be in how do you define each one of them. From our point of view everything is design.
A few weeks ago we read a short interview with Vito Acconci where he was asked a similar question regarding the design/art argument and he was saying that a big part of the problem came from the fact that 'art' is the only discipline that is defined by a qualitative appreciation. We share that point of view and we think that the word art would have to be left for any kind of work that excels in whatever area of human activity. Who is to say that the work of Ferran Adria is less art than that of Jeff Koons? Or that a Frank Lloyd Wright building is less or art than an Andreas Gurski photograph? Or that Leonardo's flying machines is less art than his Monalisa?... What are the grounds for comparison and how or why would you do it? This is the eternal argument, from our point of view is easier as we see no boundaries. Maybe this interpretation of design might be confusing or unacceptable for some people who do have a very clear idea of the boundaries of between the two.
The 'McGuffin Library Collection' by Noam Toran and Onkar Kular obviously lives in the edges of what is traditionally accepted as design, and I guess it raise questions in both directions. As they explain, McGuffin is a term invented by Alfred Hitchcock to define an object within a film, which somehow acts as a devise to carry the narrative of the story. In terms of the story, the design of this object becomes, so its conception is a design exercise on its own. For Onkar and Noam this works perfectly well to explore further their ideas around the use of design as a medium that is central to their work. In this case they wrote 14 synopsis for imaginary films for which they designed an object. These objects are primarily talking about the role of objects as mediators in our understanding of the world (in this case of the story). In a second layer, they are talking about the world of technology, production and design. The objects are produced in rapid form directly from 3D computer models. The objects are not unique necessarily unique as they are printed very much like you would do with a computer document. Is that a banal use of technology, design and engineering just because thy are not pursuing 'the grater good' or the commercial enterprise? Would that make it art? For us what makes them good design and good art is exactly the same thing, they are able to broaden and challenge our preconceived ideas of what things are, while being moving and engaging.
Most of the works exhibited in Nowhere/now/here come from Europe. Is that a curatorial choice or is it merely because this way to engage with objects is still confined to our continent?
It was not a particular curatorial choice. We tried to select people and works that we found interesting and that helped us illustrate the ideas behind NOWHERE/NOW/HERE. It is true though, that still Europe is the main centre for design in the world, with some of the most prestigious and influential design schools in the world (RCA, Eindhoven, Domus,...) so it is unavoidable that a lot of the designers (although not necessarily European themselves) who are doing interesting work would come from them.
Like with any other project there are many reasons that contribute to the final decisions and results (most of them are usually quite mundane)
For NOWHERE/NOW/HERE we tried to work with people with whom, despite working in very different areas, we found an affinity and a complicity in pushing the boundaries of what is accepted in design.
Why did you ask Patricia Urquiola to take care of the exhibition design? Why not do it yourself? Did you hand her a list of requirements or did you give her carte blanche? How much did you collaborate and how did her vision of the exhibition influence yours?
With Patricia Urquiola and Martino Berghinz we were very lucky that we could take advantage of their relationship with LABoral, and were very happy when they decided to participate in the project.
We always had the idea that whoever did the exhibition design we would like it to be or feel like one more piece in the exhibition. So our brief was very open, we showed them the six groups of works which we had assembled and asked them to give us six permeable spaces where you could experience the groups as a one thing and at the same time you would be aware or attracted to the works of the other groups, so that the visitor could break away from the structure and find their own way to navigate the show.
Their response was to create a laberynthic exhibition space that creates many small private moments. It broke our idea of being able to experience each group as a whole, but in the other hand, it work very well in the sense that allows you to find your own experience of the show. So we totally respected their proposal and change the concept and create smaller relationships within the pieces rather that the group encounter. For us was important not to step in and allow these and other inputs take their course
And how much do you feel that her intervention reflects the spirit of the exhibition, making it maybe another work in itself that does belong to the show?
We think that their idea of dividing the space from the top by hanging fabrics its a very spatial (and material efficient) solution that multiplies the space by creating a very atmospheric cloud of mini spaces which are all inter-connected.
You are both lecturers in London, Roberto teaches Design Product at the Royal College of Art and Rosario at the Design Department, Goldsmiths College. How much does your teaching practice reflect the concepts and ideas put forward in the exhibition? And more importantly which kind of career awaits students who might want to follow the paths of the designers you've invited to the exhibition? Will they end up working exclusively in the hope that their projects will be shown in art galleries and museums or does the industry realize there is a real need of such visions and will companies therefore welcome them with open arms?
As you mentioned, we have been lecturers at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmith University for the last 10 years, and we are also Research Fellows at Kingston University. For us this experience is central to the development of our own ideas and to understand the concerns and ambitions of new generations of designers.
We would like that the works in NW/N/H are viewed not as the object that you can see at the exhibition, but as the potential that these designers have to translate their knowledge and skill into different outcomes. How these objects are the products of inquisitive minds that give nothing for granted but are also responsible and very thorough in the development of their work.
Many of the designers invited to the exhibition are very successful and work across industries, what they have in common is a non-conformist approach to their practices. These designers are changing the scope of the design practice, elaborating new industries and opening new areas of work. Some of the younger designers are still starting to navigate their way but surly in years to come they will be some of the leading figures in art or design or design-art or art-design or science or film...
At the end the question of where some work lives is purely economical. Today there are more possibilities for designers to find means of commercialisation and dissemination of their work through galleries and exhibitions rather than through the mass market. We have to be aware of the changes to the market and to the industry that we have experience in the last years. And industry is falling behind in attracting talent because it is hard for them to react to new ideas.
We have always worked between the experimental and the commercial, the two running parallel and feeding from each other. This self-feeding process has always been part of our work and we think has enriched it (but we are 'old school' now) and the way we work (or even our drivers) are very different to how our students perceived design today or the kind of work they want to do.
We hope that industry reacts (what ever industry) and tries to be again a leading force in research and creativity. At the end of the day what will determine which avenue designers will follow, or where their work will be show cased is a question of market opportunities and ultimately their cultural influence. At the Design Museum tomorrow, at the V&A in a couple of decade or at the British Museum in a few centuries.
Do you see design meccas like the Salone del Mobile in Milan open up to this kind of discourse?
We do not see why not. There have been times where companies would champion new concepts and ideas. Seeing how markets are evolving industry will have to react and accept that cannot just be playing to an outdated lifestyle ideal.
In Milan you can see lots of the things that are going on right now, but it is hard to see with more than 300 exhibitions in the 'fuori salone'. How would we even know that its even there? In any case, for good or bad, there are many new ways of disseminating design much more economical and accessible.
Is El Ultimo Grito already working on new projects? Could you share them with us?
We are working in a book about our work, which we are looking to publish sometime in April. Apart of our usual combination of self initiated projects and commercial ones, some of which will be presented in Milan next April. A bit of everything, like always.
Thanks Roberto and Rosario!
Nowhere/Now/Here runs until Mon, April 20 , 2009 at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon, Spain.
Image on the homepage: Daniel Charny & Gabriel Klasmer. Sports Furniture.2008, based on a photo version from 2003 (photo Enrique G. Cardenas)
Related stories: If you can't travel to Gijon (there are direct flights from London), i would encourage you to visit Wouldn't It be Nice at Somerset House where some of the designers are exhibiting their works until December 14, 2008.
Daniel Canogar is a media artist living between Spain and Canada. He's also the Artistic Director of VIDA, an international competition on art & artificial life. Launched 10 years ago by Fundación Telefónica, the prize rewards works of art produced with and commenting on artificial life technologies.
Previous winners include projects as different as a robot that sweats, a table that follows you around, robotic dogs suffering from the mad cow disease, solar-powered devices which modify their own instruction code in response to environmental changes, autonomous non-violent protest agents, a mobile cemetery tank, a Universal Whistling Machine, etc. What these artworks have in common is that they engage with emerging behaviours, which evolve over time, react with their environment and seem to have a life of their own.
The dozens of projects which have received an award over the past ten years form a unique collection documenting the evolution of electronic art in one of its most significant aspects. The looming deadline to submit projects (6th of October 2008) is the excuse i took to interview Daniel Canogar about the competition.
Last year the VIDA competition celebrated its 10th anniversary. How did it evolve over the course of the years? Did it get more ambitious? Set itself new goals? Opened its scope to new territories? i'm thinking about last year's winner, NoArk by Symbiotica, which is not based on electronics but on biotechnology.
When VIDA began, A-Life as a discipline was still very recent, a little over 10 years old. So as usually happens with young disciplines, there has been an evolution in the field, which has been reflected in VIDA. A couple of years ago there was a heated discussion amongst jury members if VIDA should be open to biotechnology art projects. The origins of A-Life are in computer simulation, not biotech, so this was quite a controversial issue. In the end, we did decide to include biotechnology projects, as they are closely related to A-Life concerns. The important thing, in my view, is not to remain faithful to categories, but to keep VIDA alive with the kind of art projects that are relevant to our times.
I guess this will sound like a silly question but do you see trends in the entries the prize has received over the years? For example, artificial life of animals being abandoned at some point because the trend is more in artificial life at a nano-level? How closely do the entries reflect the changes occurring in our society and in research more particularly?
It's not art's mission to be a direct mirror of what is going on in research labs. A-Life art has taken some of the evolutionary concepts of the field, and in a sense created a totally new field that is much closer to the general public. But more importantly, these projects are not so concerned with specific technologies generated in research labs. They are extremely concerned with concepts, ideas, questions about how technology has changed the way we feel about ourselves, about notions of what it means to be alive, or dead, etc. It is exactly the kind of conceptual questioning that is often so lacking in research labs. VIDA submissions do not come out of A-Life lab research, though their contribution to the field is extremely valuable. In fact, I hope scientists working in the field of A-Life take note of VIDA art projects, and take some of the serious questioning that occurs at a sociological and cultural level back to the lab.
VIDA rewards works of art developed with artificial life technologies and related disciplines. How much of this artificial life has already moved away from research labs and artists workshops to crawl into our everyday life?
A-Life research is present in everyday consumer products, such as children's electronic pets (Tamagotchi, Dogz, Catz and many more), video games with characters that evolve over time, or in intelligent interfaces for mobile telephones and other electronic devices which "learn" about the user, including search engines. No doubt, in coming years such technologies will become a staple of our quotidian life.
Fundación Telefónica exhibited the winners of VIDA 10.0 at the ARCO art fair in Madrid last April. Has FT always done that? I found so far that very few art fairs actually give space to art practices engaged with technology. Why is the presence of VIDA in the commercial context of an art fair so important?
Fundación Telefónica has always exhibited VIDA winners at ARCO. First of all, it is important to give ARCO, Madrid's art fair, a little bit of context. ARCO is not like any other fair, it is a fundamental cultural phenomenon in Spain. It transcends contemporary art, arousing interest from every creative field, and people from all walks of live, young and old, rich and not so wealthy, high-school students and major art collectors. Every year about 200.000 people visit the fair. So VIDA's presence in ARCO is a fantastic way of getting the public to learn about the award.
But beyond visibility of VIDA, there is also the art market issue. New media artists need to find alternative ways of circulating and distributing their work beyond the rather small circuit of specialized festivals and conferences. Funding of technologically driven artwork is expensive, and artists need to find ways of financing their projects. There have actually been VIDA awarded projects that have sold at the fair, and of course, the sale goes directly to the artist.
This is very encouraging. It's a very daring thing for the Fundación Telefónica to present this kind of technological work in the context of the art fair, and through the years, Fundación Telefónica's booth has been one of the most successful at the fair.
VIDA is also involved in a series of workshops taking place in Latin America. Can you tell us something about these workshops? How do they go? What is their objective? What happens there?
Latin America is a region where artists have a hard time funding their new media projects. Fundación Telefónica has exhibition spaces and programs in Lima, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Mexico City, so VIDA's projects in Latin America grow out of this preexisting network. Certain places have a lively new media scene, such as Buenos Aires. In other cities, the scene is practically non-existant. Funding for VIDA workshops is conceived as seed money for potential VIDA award candidates. We want to tap into the tremendous creative talent that exists in Latin America, and also help create a context for the emergence of A-Life art. For this reason we ask VIDA award recipients to develop workshops for Fundación Telefónica's centers in Latin America. This year Gilberto Esparza, a fantastic Mexican artist that won a VIDA award last year, has directed workshops in Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago and Mexico City. It's a way of creating a community of artists helping other artists create new work. This is an exciting development for VIDA.
The Incentive for Iberoamerican productions award helps artistic projects that still have not been produced. How difficult is it to judge the validity of a work which doesn't really exist yet? How far must the artists be in the advancement of the project?
When the artist has a conceptually clear idea of what he/she wants to do with his/her art project, it usually comes through in the actual proposal. The technical description of how the work is going to get made is also important and very revealing. Many members of the jury are very savvy about both software and hardware and can usually figure out if the work can get built as described. Past work by the artist also gives the proposal more context, so we often look at dossiers or webpages. Its always really exciting to see these works actually materialized having seeing them in their infancy as proposals. And what really prides the jury members more than anything else is when we begin to see some of these art pieces circulate in exhibitions and festivals.
Were it not for VIDA and a few other initiatives i, and i'm sure many people in Europe, would know almost nothing about Iberoamerican art projects developed using artificial life technologies, electronics, robotics, etc. Do you have some advice for people curious about what is going on over there?
Well, for starters, it may be interesting to look at VIDA's webpage with documentation of selected past projects: many of them are from Latin America. Another fantastic source of new media art made in this region is the exhibition Emergentes. Curated by Jose Carlos Mariátegui, it is one of the first exhibitions focused on Latin American new media art. This is a traveling show which opened in Laboral, the center for new media art in Gijón, northern Spain. The catalogue is a good source for references, understanding of the cultural specificity and historical background of the emergence of new media art in Latin America.
Can you tell us something about the project of Fundación Telefónica Virtual Museum? When will it go live? What will web users find there?
It should be available early next year. The Virtual Museum wants to be a didactic tool, the best source for A Life Art on the web, where you will not only see documentation of VIDA awards, but you will actually be able to experience some pieces first hand with web-based projects. It will also document the history of A Life art, and show many landmark projects that have significantly contributed to the field. The interface will allow for a very intuitive and seamless navigation through all this documentation. It's a large project, one that will require constant updating to make it really alive, and hopefully become a significant reference in the new media art scene.
Over the years the competition has gained fame and visibility. How does it translate in terms of number of entries? And do you tend to receive more entries from Spain, Iberoamerica and Portugal?
Last year we received close to 200 entries from 25 different countries. There has been a steady increase of submitted projects through the years, a real accomplishment if you bear in mind how specialized the award is. Every year three projects get awards, plus 7 projects are selected as honorary mentions. That means that on VIDA's web page, you can study an archive of over 100 art works related to A Life. About 30% of submitted projects are from Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Contributions from the US and Canada form another 30%, European projects comprise approximately 30 % and the remaining 10% are submissions from Asian countries. One of our objectives for the close future is to reach out to Japan, Korea and China, where significant A Life art has taken place in the last few years. There is always room to improve! VIDA is a unique award, the only one in the world specialized in A Life and Robotic art. I am now hoping for another 10 years of growth, enabling more artists to realize their life-like creations all around the globe.
Thanks Daniel!
Riitta Ikonen is one very talented Finnish graduate from the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art in London. I discovered her work at the Summer show last June and fell in love with her costume projects. I wasn't the only one. She received an Helen Hamlyn Design for our Future Selves award for her project Commuter Thrival, a communication campaign that aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding public transport in London through posters visualising people's emotions with quirky costumes.
The description of her work is delightful: My work is concerned with the performance of images, through photography and costume design. Certain items, usually small and insignificant, excite me to the point where I have to wear them and then document that process. The super- garments I make open up new experiences. In my costumes tremendous things happen - to me and to the people I work with. Today I exploded an egg in the microwave. Next, I want to make an egg costume.
How could i not interview her?
Many of your works involve costumes, so one would hastily assume that you are a fashion graduate. In reality, you graduated in Communication Art and Design. Why didn't choose a career in fashion? And why do you often choose costume as a medium to transmit your messages, concerns and ideas?
There was a sewing machine in my bedroom when I grew up, and I learned to use it from a very early age. I still like the illusion that I can maintain and make ANYTHING with the skills from my hands. I'm by nature curious about this potential, and think my hands still hold the most decision making power in me.
I never rejected the chance of my work being fashion, but thought a fashion degree would have been too narrow for what I wanted to figure out. I wanted to embrace the vernacular through the carefully constructed images in which the outfits form only a part of the story. In a way I did choose fashion, the outfits are vital for the work, just not the pinnacle of it.
Communication Art and Design course didn't tie me down to anything too specific and offered seemingly boundaryless opportunities. (Before the RCA I did BA in Illustration in Brighton celebrating the invention of all things Nylon as my final project.) At the moment I do some live commission work, but I feel most at ease printed and mounted quietly on the wall.
Commuter Thrival is a 'communication campaign that aims to raise awareness of the issues surrounding public transport through a series of posters visualizing people's emotions with custom-made costumes'.
Did you work on this project with the sole aim to visualize the issues at stake or did you think that these costumes could actually have some therapeutic or cathartic quality on commuters seeing them?
As usual, the costumes were made to communicate the issue in the image and not as a live piece. I wanted to visualize the issue to an extent. Eliminating mental space harassment in the Underground is vital. The campaign is meant to be shown on a London Underground platform completely stripped from any extra information/ adverts etc. I wanted to leave enough space for people's own interpretation. In terms of how the posters are situated I tried to give people what they were lacking. The commuters are doing pretty well in the absurdity of the rush hour tunnels, so the campaign is an ode and appreciation to the performers of this daily operation.
Could you describe us which elements in the costumes you design correspond to the 3 issues you wanted to engage with?
I wanted the images to have a silent potential, giving people headspace in the lack of physical space/ mental cool in the heat of the moment morning rushing.
After some tests the heat costume kept the fiery hot colour and the stiff basic shape, but got much simpler cut and colouring. It is an abstract version of what it used to be- a winged slouch like structure with brightly multi coloured outside.
Daydreaming is solid place to seek solace from when your head is squished into a stranger's armpit in the tube. I thought this would not be a bad place to be instead. An image for fantasizing the journey away.
Most people I interviewed said they weren't keen on making contact with their fellow passengers, which is an awful waste of casual face to face socializing. I was looking into animal shields, scares, warning systems and colours for ways to attract and also repel (you wouldn't want to look too attractive waiting for the night bus in back end of Brixton). A frilled lizard has an excellent collar which I borrowed for this image. It can spread it out for scaring or keep flat for inconspicuous look. The slippery suit is for slick crowd movements (- how smooth it would be if everybody wore them!)
Your practice also involves photography. How much staging and preparation did the Commuter Thrival project require? Could you explain us how you selected the location, the model, the light and other elements which played an important role in your photos?
The project started with an in depth user research investigation with interviews and involvement all of which provided the starting point for the project.
As I'm usually in front of the camera (only for the heat image for this project though) I work with a trusted photographer, who has quite a strong say on the final images. Most things to do with the image happen before the shoot of course: research, material hunting, costume making, fittings, sketches and location scouting. I wanted the images for this campaign to have nothing to do with the tube, but anything outside it- life, nature etc. Altogether four leaves were sitting in the tree at one point of the shoot, (I had selected a colourful mix of men and women), once again, less was more, and Hitomi on her own in the tree spoke loudest for the lack of space. She is great in front of the camera -perfect stern look.
We were lucky on the day of the shoot, especially for the heat we managed to hit on a great sunset in Hyde Park. A lot depends on scheduling, weather and luck when working on low budget. Working on film we can't see the images on the spot, so if things are not right the whole team gets to travel back and forth. (I'm amazed I still have friends with all I've put them through...)
Apart from colour adjustments and cropping, I don't photoshop the costumes on the images, they need to be just right on film or we shoot again. For a project called Bird and Leaf we have been traveling to the same location for over a year now with the photographer to get the perfect image for the series... finally, earlier this year it snowed one day when we were all set:
Looking at your portfolio, i had the feeling that humour is important to you. What part does humour play in your work? How does it help communicating an issue?
Humour is vital. My work is quite telling of my character. A little humour is very compelling and has access to such a broad audience beyond language barriers. Perhaps humour with my work has a bit to do with being overseas and not quite part of this team here, I'm nearly seeing it like everybody else. Very almost. For more murky issues like global warming the message can cut through a lot of fluff if the humour is done well.
I read somewhere that you received an Helen Hamlyn award for Commuter Thrival. Is it true? Does it mean that you are going to push the project further or that you have other plans for it?
It is true, Anja Schaffner, Valerio Di Lucente and I received a Michael Peters award for interdisciplinary collaboration for Commuter Thrival. The project will go public hopefully soon, I'm in talks with the transport for London to get it to the tube in its full glory. It would be very exciting to see it go ahead.
Thanks Riitta!
All images courtesy of the artist.
A few months ago, i bought a lovely baby blue summer dress with the face of Karl Marx printed all over it. I was made slightly uncomfortable by the irony of acting like a victim of capitalism in the face of and to the detriment of the father of anti-capitalism. I also had the feeling that, somewhere, a bunch of cynical and astute artists were making fun of me. Because that's exactly what happened. The provocative brand has a slogan 'Be Like Us, Be Different', and a shop, located at the time in an art exhibition room, right inside LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon. Gallery visitors could buy jeans carrying the MARX® logo, boys short-sleeve shirts with the same pattern as the said blue dress and some very expensive MARX® shoes. The shop has now moved to another museum, the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain.
The artists/company who designed and market the dress are Berlin-based art collective PSJM, made up of Pablo San José and Cynthia Viera. PSJM acts as an trademark of happening art addressing issues of the artwork in the market, communication with consumers, or function as an artistic quality, using communication resources borrowed from capitalism of the spectacle to underscore the paradoxes produced by its unbridled development.
Having googled the name of the artists i found a series of interviews, statement texts and essays so interesting that i immediately thought that it would be foolish of me to stop my enthusiasm at the cuteness of a blue dress. Hence this interview (the original version of PSJM's answers is in spanish, i pasted it at the bottom of this post):
PSJM is made of artist Pablo San José and management graduate Cynthia Viera. Excuse the banality of my prejudice but how can people with such a different background manage to dialog? What brought you together? Did Cynthia's mindset and knowledge influence Pablo's artistic practice and view of the contemporary art landscape? And vice-versa, have Cynthia's management skills been "affected" by her collaboration with an artist?
In reality we do not have such different backgrounds. At some point during his artistic career, Pablo worked for some years as a creative for a big corporation of the advertisement sector, creating campaigns and brand images for international companies. In 1998, and in parallel to his work in publicity, Pablo decided that his artistic signature would become a brand. He was interested by the promotion processes of artistic brands and its parallelism with other commercial brands. He then started a work that continues today, a project that builds itself with each work realized. "The artist is the brand, the work is the product" became the slogan of the PSJM brand. In 2003, Cynthia, a graduate in Direction of International Commerce and Marketing, and until then working as the Head of Marketing Services for a major telecommunication company, joined the project. With her arrival, the theoretical objectives to work under the same structures as a company and to legally establish the team as a commercial brand became reality. We work as a team in which the point of view of each of us affects without a doubt the work of the other one. However, we both use the same language. Pablo doesn't correspond to the typical romantic idea of the artist more than Cynthia fits the usual profile of an executive who puts the quest for maximum benefits above social or aesthetic commitments.
One of the striking elements of the MARX® brand is the price. All the garments, be they jeans or dress, carry the same price tag (220,40 euros), while the one and only shoe available costs way more than most people could afford. What were the motivations behind the price tags?
While the main objective of marketing is to satisfy the client in exchange of economic benefits, we use marketing as a critical tool that enables us to provide consumers with an aesthetic or intellectual gratification. We use the "4 Ps" of the Marketing Mix (Product, Price, Promotion and Placement) to interweave a strategy of meaning where each of these
With MARX® we have used once again the price as a poetic license and vehicle of meaning. The fact that garments exhibited have a high price tag creates some kind of reflective impotence in the mind of the visitor who has finally the opportunity to act as a consumer in the museum space but is inhibited by the aspect of the aspect of exclusivity of the goods. In any case and in order to keep the work alive and continue creating meanings and mixing reality and fiction, and because the next exhibition of the garments will be at the CAAM in July, they will be on sale. Let's see what happens.
I don't know if you've read about the fight that the daughter of Che Guevara is putting to protect her father's image.
How did you deal with the thought that some people might come up and criticize you for using Marx' figure in a way that they consider to "be an affront to his dignity"? And did you at any moment think that you'd encounter a censorship similar to the one you experienced with one of your previous works, Project Asia?
The experimental aspect of our projects involves a certain dose of uncertainty once we are launching the work. Even if you try to direct the work towards a certain meaning you never know the kind of reaction you're going to encounter. All along our career we had to face anything from censorships from brands, complains from right-wing to passionate critiques, either negative or favorable.
For example, with the public intervention that took the shape of a promotional campaign for the MARX® brand in Gijón, we were expecting some forms of violent reaction to the association of the name of the father of communism with the aesthetic of fashion, especially if we take into account the revolutionary tradition of Asturias. But to our surprise the public is so used to the absurdity of the paradoxical messages emerging from the market that the work got totally diluted into the reality.
On the other hand, in this case, it would be difficult for any brand to censor us, as Adidas did with the Asia Project. The first conceptual and practical step of the MARX® project consisted in registering the brand MARX®, and it is this action which really supports the main axis of the artwork, the rest can only be seen as its natural development.
The MARX® project was accompanied with a promotional campaign in the streets of Gijon. The promo posters looked like any other posters designed by mainstream fashion brand. The general public, whether they wanted it or not, was thus in direct contact with your project. How much do you value their look and reaction to your work? Do you give it more credit and importance than you would give to an art critic or to anyone familiar with artistic discourses?
For us it is crucial that our proposals should not remain exclusively at the reach of the cultural elite. The commitment to open up our discourse to a broader public is at the basis of our work, we strive to create pieces which have two levels of lectures and try to unite experimentation and communication. We call this difficult operation " the dilemma of Mayakovsky", as it was a theme that kept the Russian poet awake at night. To achieve this we use the media and the strategies of mass culture. The broad public understands perfectly its language and this provides us with a space for experimenting while generating various meanings. However, we also have the objective of placing our proposals inside the theoretical discourse of contemporary art, all our projects involve a text which we write ourselves and which constitutes and additional element of the art piece. Our work can be situated between reality and the art institution, both spheres are important to us.
You obviously don't share Takashi Murakami's bulldozer and very mercantile approach. However, MARX® and other projects of yours evoke (to me at least and under certain aspects) the Japanese artist's exploration of the merging between consumer goods and artwork, art fetishism, the demythification of the concept of art work as a one-off, etc. Am i writing a total heresy or do you somehow see some similarities between his approach and yours?
Who are the other artists you feel close to?
There are indeed many aspects in Murakami's work which makes us feel quite close to his line of work but also many others which sets us apart from it. The ones that connect us to his way of producing art are the ones that you enumerated. Those that distance us from Murakami are his lack of critique and his ideological positioning regarding the establishment. Murakami follows the trail of Warhol and Koons, but he doesn't go further, let's say that it's a development of apolitical Pop. Murakami's main concern is to make money. His is a very nationalist position, and we find that totally outdated and dangerously conservative. However, our peculiarity is that we combine spheres which seem to be antagonistic and shortcircuit meanings. Our vision of artistic production, organized in the same way as a company where the creator is presented as professional with a defined social function, follows the tracks of thinkers such as Proudhon or Benjamin, who reject the figure of the 'artist as a genius' and propose the one of the 'artist as a worker', a position that the Russian Productivists made their best to put into practice all the while enjoying the support from the Party. Just as Modernity gave way to postmodernity and production lost its importance in the favour of consumption, the company became brand. This conversion of the company into brand recovered in a sense the mythologico-symbolical value of genius to give way to an apparently paradoxical artist-brand which behaviour is strategically planned, scientifically programmed. On the one hand the elitist and godlike figure of the romantic artist is de-mythified. On the other hand, a new myth is created, and this time it is coldly designed under the rules of marketing applied to the world of art. The paradox, the blending of antagonist and irreconcilable forces constantly underpins the way we make art.
We don't really find any artist whose line of work corresponds to ours, but if we had to give a couple of names it would be the Spanish group Democracia and the artistic corporation Etoy. We admire their work a lot.
Many of your works have a very strong provocative element to them which makes them very appealing for the media. How much is the "shock tactic" important in your practice?
Our work owes much to the Dadaist and Constructivist tradition and to its commitment to merge art with life. Today, reality is built by the media and if we want to be involved in reality we have to step into the media.
Any upcoming project you could share with us?
We are currently working on two projects which will be presented in 2009, in various galleries and institutions. Unfortunately we cannot reveal their content as we are still at the creative and production stage, but we can tell you that in one of the projects we will be using a traditional technique: painting. Our subject focuses on merchandise and painting is still the number one merchandise in the world of art.
The MARX® shop at LABoral has now closed. If people want to buy one of those shirts and jeans, is there any other gallery (or shop?) they should turn to?
The MARX® project was produced by LABoral in collaboration with CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands. That's where they will travel from July to October. We are also working on its international distribution, but it is still to early to reveal the name of the possible spaces.
Thanks Cynthia and Pablo!
The MARX® exhibition is running though October 12, 2008 at the CAAM in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain.
Spanish version of the interview:
PSJM is made of artist Pablo San José and management graduate Cynthia Viera. Excuse the banality of my prejudice but how can people with such a different background manage to dialog? What brought you together? Did Cynthia's mindset and knowledge influence Pablo's artistic practice and view of the contemporary art landscape? And vice-versa, have Cynthia's management skills been "affected" by her collaboration with an artist?
En realidad no tenemos backgrounds tan diferentes. En una etapa de su carrera artística Pablo trabajó bastantes años como creativo publicitario en una gran multinacional del sector creando anuncios e imagen de marca para empresas internacionales. Paralelamente a su labor como creativo publicitario, en 1998 Pablo decidió que su firma artística se convertiría en marca. Le interesaban los procesos de promoción de las firmas artísticas y su paralelismo con el resto de firmas comerciales y comenzó un trabajo que aún continúa, un proyecto que se construye con cada obra realizada. "El artista es la marca, la obra es el producto" pasó a ser el slogan de la marca PSJM. En 2003 Cynthia, licenciada en Dirección de Comercio Internacional y Marketing, y hasta esa fecha Responsable de Servicios de Marketing de una gran compañía de telecomunicaciones, se incorpora al proyecto haciendo realidad las intenciones teóricas de trabajar bajo las estructuras propias de la empresa y formalizar legalmente el equipo como una marca comercial. Desarrollamos un trabajo en equipo donde los puntos de vista de uno afectan sin lugar a dudas al trabajo del otro, pero ambos utilizamos el mismo lenguaje. Ni Pablo se corresponde con la imagen típica del artista romántico, ni Cynthia encaja con el perfil típico de una ejecutiva que persiga el máximo beneficio por encima de compromisos sociales o estéticos.
One of the striking element of the MARX® brand is the price. All the garments, be they jeans or dress, carry the same price tag (220,40 euros), while the one and only shoe available costs way more than most people could afford. What were the motivations behind the price tags?
Mientras que el marketing consiste en proporcionar satisfacción al cliente obteniendo un beneficio económico a cambio de ello como principal objetivo, nosotros utilizamos el marketing como una herramienta crítica que pueda proporcionar una satisfacción estética o intelectual al consumidor. Las "4 Ps" del Marketing Mix (product, price, promotion y placement) nos sirven para entretejer una estrategia de significación en la que cada una de estas "Ps" es tomada como una oportunidad creativa, cada "P" es utilizada como licencia poética. De este modo el producto constituye obra, el precio constituye obra, la promoción se presenta como obra y la distribución (placement) es también una parte integrante de la obra. Nos gusta llamar Marketing experimental a este proceso de experimentación de índole representacional.
Con MARX® una vez más hemos utilizado el precio como licencia poética y vehículo de significación, el hecho de que las prendas que se exhiben tengan un precio alto, crea una cierta sensación de impotencia reflexiva en el espectador, que por fin puede consumir en un museo pero se ve coartado por el carácter exclusivo de la mercancía. En todo caso y para mantener la pieza viva, seguir creando significado y entremezclando la realidad con la ficción, ya que la exposición en el CAAM comienza en julio, se harán rebajas. Veremos qué pasa.
I don't know if you've read about the fight that the daughter of Che Guevara is putting to protect her father's image.
How did you deal with the thought that some people might come up and criticize you for using Marx' figure in a way that they consider to "be an affront to his dignity"? And did you at any moment think that you'd encounter a censorship similar to the one you experienced with your Asia project?
El carácter experimental de nuestros proyectos conlleva también una cierta incertidumbre una vez que "lanzas" la obra, aunque intentes dirigirla hacia una significación determinada nunca sabes con qué tipo de reacción te vas a encontrar. A o largo de nuestra carrera hemos tenido desde censuras de marcas, pasando por quejas de vecinos derechistas a críticas fervorosas, tanto negativas como favorables. Por ejemplo, con la intervención pública en forma de campaña publicitaria de MARX® en Gijón, a priori esperábamos algún tipo de reacción violenta al ver asociado el nombre del padre del comunismo con la estética de la moda, tanto más si tenemos en cuenta la tradición revolucionaria de Asturias, pero para nuestra sorpresa el público ya está tan acostumbrado al absurdo de los mensajes paradójicos del mercado que la pieza se diluyó en la realidad al completo. Por otro lado, en este caso difícilmente una marca nos puede censurar, como sucedió con Adidas en Proyecto Asia, ya que el primer paso conceptual y práctico del proyecto MARX® consistió en registrar la marca MARX®, y es realmente esta acción lo que supone el eje primordial de la obra, el resto únicamente puede ser visto como su desarrollo natural.
Para nosotros es primordial que nuestras propuestas no se queden exclusivamente en el terreno de la elite cultural, en la base de nuestro trabajo subyace el empeño de ampliar el discurso a un público más amplio, nos afanamos en crear obras con dos niveles de lectura intentando hermanar experimentación y comunicación. A esta difícil empresa la llamamos "el dilema de Maiakovski", ya que este tema le quitaba el sueño al poeta ruso. Para conseguir esto nos servimos de los medios y estrategias de la cultura de masas, el público medio comprende este lenguaje a la perfección y nos brinda un campo con el que poder experimentar generando significados distintos. Sin embargo también tenemos como objetivo instalar nuestras propuestas en el seno del discurso teórico del arte contemporáneo, todos nuestros proyectos incluyen un texto redactado por nosotros que consideramos un elemento más de la obra total. Ciertamente nuestro trabajo se mueve entre la realidad y la institución arte, ambas esferas son importantes para nosotros.
You obviously don't share Takashi Murakami' bulldozer and very mercantile approach. However, MARX® and other projects of yours evoke (to me at least and under certain aspects) the Japanese artist's exploration of the merging between consumer goods and artwork, art fetishism, the demythification of the concept of art work as a one-off, etc. Am i writing a total heresy or do you somehow see some similarities between his approach and yours?
Who are the other artists you feel close to?
Efectivamente hay muchos aspectos de la obra de Murakami que nos acercan a su línea de trabajo y muchos otros que nos separan de él. Los que nos vinculan a su modo de producir arte tú misma los has expuesto. Lo que nos distancia de Murakami es su falta de crítica y su posicionamiento ideológico cercano al stablishment. Murakami sigue la estela de Warhol y Koons, pero no va más allá, digamos que es un desarrollo del Pop apolítico. A Murakami le interesa hacer dinero como principal objetivo. Él tiene además un fuerte posicionamiento nacionalista, algo que a nosotros nos resulta totalmente desfasado y peligrosamente conservador. Sin embargo nuestra singularidad es que combinamos mundos aparentemente irreconciliables para crear cortocircuitos de sentido. Nuestra visión de la producción artística organizada al modo de una empresa, en la que el creador aparece como un profesional con una función social definida, sigue la estela trazada por pensadores como Proudhon o Benjamin, que rechazan la figura del artista-genio y proponen aquella otra del artista-obrero, postura que también los productivistas rusos se encargaron de llevar a la práctica mientras gozaron del apoyo del aparato del Partido. Sin embargo, del mismo modo que la modernidad dejó paso a la postmodernidad y la producción cedió su importancia al consumo, la empresa devino marca. Con lo que esta conversión de la empresa en marca recupera de algún modo el valor mitológico-simbólico del genio para configurar un aparentemente contradictorio artista-marca cuyo comportamiento es estratégicamente planificado, científicamente programado. Así que mientras por un lado se desmitifica la imagen elitista y endiosada del artista romántico, por otro se genera un nuevo mito, esta vez fríamente diseñado bajo los presupuestos de la mercadotecnia aplicada al mundo del arte. Lo paradójico, la conjunción de fuerzas opuestas e irreconciliables sobrevuela constantemente nuestro modo de hacer arte.
Realmente no encontramos ningún artista que coincida con esta línea de trabajo, pero si tuviéramos que apuntar un par de nombres serían el grupo español Democracia y la corporación artística Etoy. El trabajo de ambos grupos nos interesa y nos produce una gran admiración.
Many of your works have a very strong provocative element to them which makes them very appealing for the media. How much is the "shock tactic" important in your practice?
Nuestro trabajo está en deuda con la tradición dadaista y constructivista y su compromiso de fundir arte y vida. Hoy la realidad la construyen los medios de comunicación, si queremos intervenir en la realidad debemos introducirnos en los medios.
Any upcoming project you could share with us?
Estamos ahora preparando dos proyectos que se presentarán en el 2009, en diferentes galerías e instituciones. Por desgracia no podemos desvelar su contenido ya que aún nos encontramos en proceso de creación y producción, pero sí te podemos adelantar que en uno de ellos se utilizará la técnica tradicional de pintura. Nuestro discurso está centrado en la mercancía y la pintura sigue siendo la mercancía reina en el mundo del arte.
The MARX® shop at LABoral has now closed. If people want to buy one of those shirts and jeans, is there any other gallery (or shop?) they should turn to?
El proyecto MARX® ha sido producido por la LABoral en colaboración con el CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria en la Isla Canarias. Allí viajará en julio y permanecerá hasta octubre. También estamos trabajando en su difusión internacional aunque aún es pronto para adelantar el nombre de los posibles espacios.
I've been covering a few editions of the Interactivos? workshops so far and have usually focused on a couple of my favourite projects. Today however, i thought i'd ask two of the workshop leaders/teachers to give us a broader overview of the workshops, how they evolve, why certain directions are being taken, what the mood is like over these two intense weeks of work, etc.
The teachers tend to change according to the theme of the workshop. This time i met Simone Jones and Alvaro Cassinelli.
Simone Jones is currently an Assistant Dean and Associate Professor of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto where she teaches in the Integrated Media Department. Her work includes kinetic sculpture, film, video and performance.
One of her recent works, Perfect Vehicle is a three wheeled vehicle that is approximately 11 feet long. The machine has sensors that monitor her breathing. Breathing (the rate of the rise and fall of her chest) controls the speed of the vehicle. This machine and the driving performance were filmed on the Bonneville Salt Flats (near Salt Lake City, Utah) in 2006. 'The idea is to create a "science fiction" type of environment where the body is displayed tethered to a vehicle against the surreal backdrop of the Salt Flats;' explained Simone. 'This is the third machine that I have built that is made specifically for my body and is worn in a performance that is filmed.'
Alvaro Cassinelli is Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo, where he is involved in the development of the Meta-Perception Group. Alvaro gained fame with the Khronos Projector and when i saw him at the Medialab Prado in Madrid, he was not only co-heading the workshop but also developing a new project for Sonarmatica in Barcelona. The theme of the exhibition this year, Future Past Cinema, attempted to create links between the past and the future of Cinema under a single vision. boxedEgo embodied perfectly that concept by the way the installation combine several pre-cinematographic techniques in order to create a new magical, "out-of-body" experience (stereoscope, diorama, peep-show box and pepper ghost effect).
Here we go now:
The Interactivos?'08: Vision Play workshop took place from May 30 to June
Simone Jones:
Alvaro Cassinelli:
Then, I'd like to stress the fundamental role of the contributors. This is a great formula. Everybody is motivated from the start (artists want of course their projects to succeed, and contributors come to the Medialab willing to learn, but also with a very generous, selfless attitude. With a little bit of luck the teams work quite autonomously. Now, of course, now and then there were some problems: one has to consider for instance that many contributors are also artists in real life, and that the leading role of the "artist" during the workshop may be a little artificial; Plus, individual approaches and interests may conflict: some contributors may push the technical side (because they want to try and improve their skills), while others may rather enjoy doing the concept/artistic critique.
Interesting as those approaches may be, the problem is that there is a very limited time for developing the project, so it is important that somehow the roles stabilize at a certain point, and people choose very concrete responsibilities. To ensure that this would happens, this is perhaps the role that was given to Simone and me, but I have to say that we were quite lucky because most teams worked very efficiently from the start. That being said, Simone and me put a lot of accent on the "critique sessions" (at least one serious meeting with the artists and collaborators for each project), which not only helped clarify the ideas but sometimes threw a completely new light on the project.
The third reason I can think of that may explain the "trick" is of course the Medialab people! there were there for us all the time, always available and with a very positive attitude.
How do you work as a teaching team? Do you divide projects between Simone, Alvaro, Julian and the rest of the Medialab team? Or are your skill so complementary that everyone has to be everywhere?
Why this focus on "Vision play" when, as Alvaro puts it "The "magic of the cinema" no longer amazes us because we have become totally accustomed to it." What are the paths which should still be explored? Beyond higher resolution? Flatter screen? or more realistic 3D experience?
In any case, "vision play" was clearly not imagined as a workshop to develop "flatter screens" or "more realistic 3D experiences"; among the project proposals (totaling 98!), there were some that pointed in that direction and I think we consensually rejected them easily on the basis that this workshop was for exploring unknown territories, not an R&D laboratory...
I find the dynamics, open-ness and spirit of the Interactivos? workshops very unique. What is your opinion about it?
The participants of the workshop are asked to use open hardware and open code tools. Apart from the lower cost factor, what makes these open tools really worth working with? Are they already as sophisticated, efficient and reliable as other tools?
Thanks Simone and Alvaro!
Heidi Kumao's art pieces explore ordinary social interactions in order to reveal what lies beneath them: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, thinking patterns, and dreams. She is currently teaching animation, video, experimental television production, and electronic and conceptual art at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For 2007-08, she has been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.
A few years ago i discovered her set of female kinetic sculptures "Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out," and classified her work under robotics and kinetics. Then i stumbled upon the performative techno-enhanced series of clothing she had developed and here i was trying to fit her work inside the "wearable" category. A closer look on her portfolio revealed household objects sabotaged to become cinema machines, overtly activist projects and the geekiest wedding cake i had ever seen. The experience taught me that any attempt to classify of her work would be pure folly unless i'd try to trick her into giving me a helping hand:
You first graduated in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. How did you come to work with kinetic installations, RFID activist projects and quirky wedding cakes? What made you broaden the scope of your artistic practice?
This is a big question, so I'll answer it in sections as a way to answer the larger issue of shifts in artistic practice. How I get from here to there to there to there...
Re: transition from photography to sculpture
The Art Institute had a very interdisciplinary photo department at the time and we were really encouraged to "go outside the box" of photography, to mix photography with other media, to be artists who USE photography rather than pure photographers. In the 80's and 90's, photography was exploding in 100 different directions and open to a variety of approaches. Everything was possible. Everything could be photographic in some way.
When I entered graduate school as a photographer I was already starting to work with sequential imagery. I was driven by a need to animate physical gestures and behaviors as indicators of psychological states. Simultaneously, I was collecting domestic objects and record players and researching pre-cinema devices and the 19th century creation of spectacle, Emile Reynaud's praxinoscope from the 1880's, in particular. My first kinetic works were homemade-looking zoetropes that projected a sequential loop of 12 images: a child being spoon-fed, a woman's legs curtseying, a woman frantically sweeping. Like a memory that can't be repressed, each animated sequence repeated endlessly and mechanically. In this way, each object seemed to be speaking with its images, a visual and mechanical voice replacing text. Much like the girls' legs I made much later, they were an artificial life form, a stand-in for a real person that I could construct and bring life to. These "cinema machines" (as I called them) allowed me to combine all of my interests (photography, performance, sculptural assemblage and the psychology of everyday life), into one art form. I loved working this way and continued to create cinema machines for several years.
RE: Installation
While much of my work could be categorized as "kinetic installation," a more accurate descriptor might be "animated tableau." I tend to think of myself as a theater director, staging events for the viewer. A lot of my art practice is about creating a situation for something to unfold over time. This grew organically out of my experience staging photographs. It seems to be a mode of art making to which I am intuitively drawn.
Each tableau intentionally uses recognizable objects that suggest a possible scenario from everyday life. As I craft each piece, I am very conscious of the psychological experience that is created for the viewer. Can the space of each tableau imply both a physical site and a psychological state? How can I make the viewer re-examine seemingly ordinary events such as childhood play, family dynamics, television news or even the wearing of clothes?
RE: RFID Activist projects
I worked on Zapped! a multi-part project about the mass implementation of RFID technology with Preemptive Media in 2005. I met the members of Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa , Jamie Schulte, and Brooke Singer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA where I was a Microsoft Artist-in-Residence Fellowship for 1999-2000. Besides being a great school for robotics, computing, AI, engineering and art, Pittsburgh happened to be an amazing hub for art collectives, tactical media practitioners, and technological art at that time. I was surrounded by tons of brilliant people including folks from Critical Art Ensemble, Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Subrosa, to name a few. Just being in this environment made me rethink my artistic process completely, and motivated me to learn how to incorporate electronics, microprocessors, computing, and digital imagery into my work.
Before we ever did Zapped! a few of us had collaborated on a project (Nomadika) about data-veillance and wireless technologies for the 2001 Sculpture Conference in Pittsburgh. We educated and informed the public about the future of data mining by opening a storefront for our fake marketing firm. Researching data mining and privacy loss in our contemporary era later led Preemptive Media to the project on RFID, which seemed to be (at the time) yet another way in which corporations and the government would invade citizens' privacy. As someone who creates and teaches animation and video, my primary role in the collaboration was to make the educational video from all of the research and information we had unearthed as a result of this project.
After working solo for so long, I relished the opportunity to collaborate with others on a project.
RE: quirky wedding cakes
The 6,000 volt wedding cake was a collaborative project with my husband, Michael Flynn, a high school physics teacher and science exhibit designer. As two mechanically minded people, we decided that our cake had to reflect our interests in machines and the project grew from there. It started with the idea to have two cakes cut to look like interlocking gears and progressed to two motorized cakes on gear-run platforms. Michael made two dolls that represented us in our wedding costumes. These dolls were going to stand on the top of each cake and would basically pass one another every time the cakes turned. Eventually, I thought we needed to incorporate an electric "spark" between the dolls, like the "spark" between us (cheesy, I know). This led to the idea of using a Jacob's Ladder to generate a much larger spark. Michael purchased a neon sign transformer and wired the cakes and dolls with opposing charges. When powered on, the cakes turn, and once a turn, the dolls hands meet and a large flaming spark erupts from their meeting hands. It's pretty funny. And like other collaborative projects I've done, it was loads of fun!. Our "how to" article appeared in Make Magazine.
What made you broaden the scope of your artistic practice?
When I look over the various transitions I have made with respect to media
(from photo to cinema machines to kinetic sculptures to animation to collaborative technological projects), I can map those changes onto personal and cultural moments of change. For many years, I made a life as an artistic nomad. I relocated every year or two for jobs, fellowships or other opportunities. This experience of having to re-contextualize and refocus myself in so many different places shaped my art practice in a deep way. Each time I moved, the new school, city or community raised new issues to consider. For example, (like I said earlier) as a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon, I was exposed to art practices that critically engaged technology rather than simply used technology. I had access to people, tools, and resources such as machine shops for the creation of custom parts, computer programmers, robotics labs, video editing equipment, etc. As a result of being at Carnegie Mellon, my work shifted away from more personal themes towards more political issues and cultural critique.
While I had been using technology for many years, my time at CMU caused me to rethink how I used it and why.
Exposure to such a large computing environment had other long-term effects on my art that didn't show up until much later. Researchers in AI, computing, robotics and gaming exposed me to the possibilities of generative artwork, which was a complete paradigm shift from creating "fine art" objects for the art world. I was excited to think about making a dynamic system or a tool as an artwork rather than a fixed object. However, it took me awhile to decide on a project that would best be served by this approach.
Later, when I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, 9-11 and the proliferation of cable news caused me to analyze the visual and conceptual construction of the news broadcast more critically. CNNplusplus, an interactive and dynamic news broadcast, was born a few years later (in collaboration with Chip Jansen.
The short answer to your question is simply new places, new people and A.D.D. or the tendency to get bored easily...
You seem to navigate effortlessly from one discipline to another but are there particular issues or elements that you keep returning to?
Yes! I find that I return to an exploration of ordinary social interactions and their psychological undercurrents, institutional critique (mainstream media, traditional gender roles, others), and performance (creating theatrical spectacle, behaving/acting social roles, performing for a camera). I view performance as an integral part of everyday experience and define it very broadly: as a means to define our identity and sexuality, as an examination of roles we play as employees or family members, and as a tool for self-expression. Every piece has its origins in everyday life: an argument, a memory of childhood, the frustrations of watching television, the act of being a consumer--
My art making process is grounded in these types of experiences.
Combining these three things together has produced two main types of work that are pretty different (at least to me):
1) Work that emphasizes a visceral experience and tells a more personal story: the "cinema machines," the girls' legs, stop-motion animations, and my latest shadow theater pieces
2) interactive projects that are more overtly political and use technology to critique technology: CNNplusplus, Zapped!, Wired Wear
I find I am drawn to the more personal works because they provide an outlet for me to imply/suggest a critique of institutions of power without being so literal. Almost every piece starts with a personal story of some kind and the creation of a tableau is an opportunity to create a visual poem of images and objects together. By exposing the physical apparatus that drives the bodies into action, I draw a parallel between this machinery and the mechanisms of our unconscious: defense mechanisms, sex drives, thinking patterns, self control, dreams, impulses, instincts.
With the public/interactive projects, the emphasis is more educational and/or ironic. Working collaboratively removes the personal emphasis and creates opportunities to address larger cultural issues and their effects on the general public.
Misbehaving is a series of three female "performers" for intimate installations. What is the performative part of the work?
Misbehaving consists of three pairs of aluminum, mechanized legs fitted with girl's shoes: Protest, Resist and Translator. The legs in Protest stomp loudly and unpredictably while standing on a coffee table. In Resist, a pair of girl's legs squirms on the floor in a way that is both sexualized and challenging in response to viewers' speech. The girl in Translator is trapped on a track between two "adult" chairs with video projectors for heads. As viewers hand crank her from one side to the other, she becomes like a child caught between two feuding parents, or a political mediator, whose body/screen reveals/exposes the real text of the conversation through non-verbal gestures.
With these pieces, I was thinking about the performance of gender, especially for little girls. We learn what is appropriate behavior so early that it becomes naturalized, we don't realize that we perform it. In developing these pieces, I wanted to intentionally create girls that perform "badly", act out, misbehave, or act against type. As machines and girls, these works operate in stark contrast to a culture obsessed with "increasing job performance," high performance cars, and athletic performance. Their acts of defiance are small, yet powerful, signs of agency.
The kinetic girls legs have also some feminist (may i use that word?) undertones. Why is it still important to propose a view on feminism today?
YES, you may (and SHOULD) use the word "feminist." I consider myself a feminist and I think the stigma around the word (created by conservative males) has (unfortunately) had its prescribed effect of preventing people from self-identifying as feminists.
Those legs were born out of my experience at Carnegie Mellon where I was surrounded by really macho robots: machines that can fight fires or repair a nuclear reactor, robots for combat, robots for Mars, etc. At the same time, television programs were priming the mainstream public for what I call "performative robotics," including BattleBots and Robo-wars, as vehicles for violent entertainment. With technological art and computing still so male dominated, and the research funding driven by the Defense Department, I do think it's important to remind ourselves that robotics has a range of applications that are social, psychological, poetic, beautiful, and quirky. Are those feminist, or just alternatives to the mainstream?
I think it's important to maintain a vigilant feminist critique of the world in the same way that it's important to be vigilant about racism and economic justice.
Sometimes people forget that feminism has benefited EVERYONE, not just women. Civil Rights legislation in the US has benefited everyone, not just African-Americans. In the developed world, we have this idea that everything has been "accomplished" when really, it's just a way to keep people complacent and apathetic.
A couple of years ago you developed Zapped! together with the other members of Preemptive Media. The work examines the mass deployment of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and its effects on our everyday activities. At the time the website of the project said that "RFID is not yet a household name or a pervasive technology, but Preemptive Media predicts that everyday encounters with this technology (whether known or not) will soon be commonplace." How much has changed ever since? How much is the public aware of the possible downsides of RFID technology?
In October 2006, the US started issuing passports with RFID chips that include a digital photo and all other information currently printed in passports. These passive tags in passports are only a small beginning of all-around use as they can be embedded into nearly everything you buy, wear, read, or drive. At the time we did the piece, there was a common fear of surveillance--that by carrying items with tags, you could be tracked, your personal data could be compromised, etc. The reality is that the tags need to be scanned at such a close proximity (a few millimeters) that it's difficult for someone to scan your item without your knowledge. Plus, if all the tag has is a reference number (for another database) rather than concrete data, there isn't much to gain by secretly scanning...In general, as with so many of these new technologies (GPS, for example), people choose convenience over privacy. In our current climate, you can't have both. We all love the convenience of having a cell phone, even though they all have GPS chips. You don't hear people complaining about the possibility of being located through triangulation of their cell phone chip. At least not yet. I think that data privacy is the new "civil rights" issue of our time--at least in the US where there aren't many data privacy laws.
I've always been fascinated by the story of the roach release. I saw a brief mention of it a newspaper one day. Can you explain us what it was about and in which context it took place? But also, how did the public react to the idea?
The roach release was but one part of the Zapped! project. The multi-part project included the educational video, a school kit for "arming" yourself against RFID surveillance, the roach release station, and educational workshops. Each of these reached a different segment of the population with the goal of not only informing the public about the technology, but also providing them with means with which they might take action against it.
At the time, WalMart was setting the standards for RFID implementation by requiring its top manufacturers to embed tags into the cases and pallets of merchandise. As the largest retailer in the world, its protocol affects the business practice of nearly everyone in merchandising. WalMart pushed for this change touting its increased inventory efficiency. At this point, we speculated that if a WalMart had RFID readers and a corresponding database, they would all be located in the loading dock/storage area of the store. We discussed different ways to use or subvert the signal of the WalMart RFID reader- for passive tags, it sends a small signal in order to read the information on the tag and puts that information into a database. As we went round and round with ideas for tricking/toying with this Goliath, the idea boiled down to creating a small interruption in/jamming the WalMart RFID database. If WE couldn't gain access to the loading dock and the readers, perhaps we could send a robot, or, as Beatriz da Costa suggested, a rodent or insect in our place. The final solution was to send a cockroach (with an preprogrammed RFID tag glued to its back) into the store's loading dock area. The RFID tag was programmed with a small text message of resistance--and would definitely cause a "hiccup" in a database that was accustomed to standardized product information. In the video, we gave instructions on how to do a "roach release," and in Houston (at Diverseworks), we gave away all the Zapped! roaches. I am not at liberties to say anything about the actual release. The public loved the idea and the roach became the project's mascot.
Any other Wal-Mart action?
Not with that piece.
What was the impetus for the audio-activated DRESS? How do you exhibit it (or any of your other wearable pieces for that matter)? As part of a performance? As a static piece in a gallery? As a garment you can lend to gallery-goers?
The wearables started as an idea for a fun Halloween costume. I was initially inspired by the humor that could result from providing visual feedback, especially on a woman's body. The lights on the dress light up incrementally, starting at the bottom when the sound is softer, and lighting up the entire column when it becomes very loud. When I wear the dress, I become a walking audio-meter which is really an absurd (and poetic?) image. These pieces are custom made to fit my body, and I use them in humorous video performances. The project is less about the objects and more about what I can do with them. So far, I have exhibited them as objects on mannequins with a video that shows them in use. In the end, the final product is really the short videos. There are many more places I can take them...
You seem to be attracted by the idea of "intimacy". Which one of your works expresses the idea better and why?
As an artist, I use machines, projected imagery, and animation because they offer me a visually compelling way to investigate what is unseen: psychological states, emotions, compulsions, neuroses, desires, dreams. I find that I naturally gravitate towards work that examines everyday behavior and personal issues. I've called my work "intimate installation" because of its scale (human sized objects), its content (domestic and interpersonal issues) and its viewer experience (dark or dimly-lit rooms). With a minimum of objects, each tableau recreates a private ritual or occurrence for the viewer. I use the word "intimate" to describe the spaces I create and to draw a distinction between my domestic theaters and other large-scale environments.
"Letter Never Sent" is a good example of this. In this piece, video footage captured under a dissection microscope is projected onto the space of the typewriter page. Sounds of a woman weeping, a doorbell ringing, and someone knocking on the door are juxtaposed with black ink creeping up the page and fading, and turbulent, dirty water which seems to spit out from the base of the typewriter. With this piece, I was trying to describe one woman's difficult experience of writing a letter that is erased or never sent because it is too harsh, too truthful. Rather than use words, I used fluids, like emotions, to wash over the page like a wave. The page is filled and emptied again and again, similar to how one might write and edit oneself in pursuit of the perfect correspondence. Even though the work explores one person's intimate experience, I think we can all relate to written communication, self-censorship and the strong emotions that result.
Yet another video:
You are also teaching at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. What are your courses about? Can you give us a few examples of your students' projects?
At this University, I am mostly teaching animation, video and various conceptual classes (this fall, an introductory class on TIME!). The most enjoyable courses focus on creating material for "experimental television broadcasts," and rethinking the space of the television as an art gallery for time-based work. I know it seems like an old idea since video art first emerged as an alternative to mainstream television, but here at the University of Michigan, we have a unique collaboration with our local PBS station, WFUM. PLAY is a "collaborative project from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design and Michigan Public Media, transforming the gallery space for time-based media." This project features time-based work (video, animation, documentary, performance, other experimental forms) by faculty and students in the School of Art and Design. Selected pieces air on television as interstitials-in between programs at the top of the hour, say between "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and "Antique Roadshow," while all submissions are viewable on the web. In my class, "Animation for Broadcast," students get real-world experience producing fun promotional pieces as well as content (under 3 min.) for this gallery space we call a television. You can see some of their promo animations here. They were encouraged to think about the concept behind PLAY Gallery (an online, virtual place for art, television as gallery space) and play (the activity). They were given the PLAY logo and could do just about anything with it.
I think it's a really great moment in history to reconsider what television and broadcast can be, do, say: with the YouTube-ization of the world, everyone's a performer, everyone's a filmmaker. How does that impact what we make and produce?
Any upcoming project you could tell us about?
I'm working on some totally new and different works. "Timed Release" is a series of performative portraits focusing on people who have developed a creative mental space to survive physical confinement. Paper cutouts and small kinetic sculptures contained in bell jars or other containers are brought to life through video projection to create illusionary shadow theater. It's an engaging hybrid of image and object...


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Cast member Justin Timberlake attends the premiere of "Trouble With the Curve" at the Westwood Village Theater on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)
Updated: October 25, 2012 6:17AM
Now that Justin Timberlake has hosted his bachelor party in Las Vegas last Thursday, could his marriage to fiancée Jessica Biel be far behind? Joined by 20 pals, Us Weekly reports the star (wearing a fedora and bow tie) celebrated at the Wynn resort's Tryst nightclub.
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