Ben Schumacher, Rebirth of the Bath House, 2014 Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal. Installation view
This spring, we're looking ahead to next year's 20th anniversary, and renewing our consideration of what it means to be a born-digital arts organization.
Above: Lance Wakeling, still from Field Visits for Chelsea Manning (work in progress).
This Fall/Winter, Rhizome presents events, commissions, and exhibitions that offer considered illumination of contemporary digital culture, provide support for artists, and elaborate our vision for the born digital arts institution.
A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable (2011)
Your videos seem to borrow aspects from narrative filmmaking, the documentary format, amateur travelogues, and even at times experimental cinema. What genre(s) of filmmaking do you see yourself following or challenging?
Well, I don’t really see my videos as being film. One time I tweeted that as an artist I would never let my video work get transferred to film because too much would be lost. It was a joke, but I’m also serious. I mean, it’s hard not to be suspicious of a discipline that has a genre called “experimental.”
From the perspective of how the work is displayed, I feel my videos are not for the cinema. The movie theater flattens space and immobilizes the viewer. I like that people have to stand in a gallery, that they enter and leave the video at random times.
This is quite hypothetical, however, because in practice, most of my work is viewed online, where the artist has even less control.
In your videos you pull images and clips from a variety of sources including Google Street View, web-based image searches, and your own self-shot footage. Your videos range from twenty to thirty minutes in length. How do you structure this footage with the essays that make up your screenplay? How long does it take you to finish a video?
For Christmas my sister gave me an image from a brain scan she took of a human hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for short- and long-term memory and spatial navigation. The hippocampus looks like a sea horse and its etymology reflects this. The functions of the hippocampus intrigue me.
During the making of A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable I researched each location extensively ...
Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin, Installation view at the Center for Curatorial Studies: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
I'm going to imagine a time in which post-internet megabucks are really rolling in, and I'm equipped with a private Rhizome Vistajet. If that time happened to be this week, I’d be sure to hit up these exhibitions and events, ranging from Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin's upstate New York exhibition to Robin Peckham's new art fair excursions in Hong Kong. Check out the upcoming exhibitions listed below, with a couple outstanding shows not to be missed.
“Bcc 9: Das Ei ohne Schale.” at Oslo10, Basel, Switzerland
Opening Thursday, May 10th at 7PM.
Is Bcc the new BYOB? Oslo10, a new exhibition space in Kunstfreilager/Dreispitz, just outside of Basel, Switzerland, will host the ninth edition of Bcc. Originated by Aurélia Defrance, Julie Grosche and Aude Pariset, who have also curated this edition, the exhibition format mandates that all artists submit their work digitally, rather than physically. Artists in this round include Harm van den Dorpel, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Stephen Lichty, Sara Ludy, Mélodie Mousset.
Kate Steciw, “Live Laugh Love” at The Green Room, London
Opening Friday May 11th at 6:00pm, runs through June 17
Surprisingly, this is Kate Steciw’s (much belated) first exhibition in Europe. Green Room programmer Ché Zara Blomfield seems to be aggressively bringing the work of American “internet-related” artists to London, her last exhibition mounting the work of Artie Vierkant, and previously showing Petra Cortright.
Rhizome Benefit – New York, NY
May 9th at 7pm, VIP Cocktails with a silent auction and DJ set by Venus X, 9PM, Afterparty with LE1F and Extreme Animals
Alright, this is a shoo-in, but come party with us! Support Rhizome, drink some drinks, and enjoy ...
I start by looking for images of parking lots. I’m thinking about finding the perfect image, or making one. I have to see an image of a parking lot with over-layed text that reads “Social Network.”
Then I move on to looking at images under the term crash. There are cartoon characters, crash dummies, airplanes in pieces, bodies, stills from the movie, cymbals, explosions. I open a new tab: Wikipedia – Crash. I’m redirected to collision.
A collision is an isolated event in which two or more moving bodies exert relatively strong forces on each other for a relatively short time. ¶ Collisions can be elastic, meaning they conserve energy and momentum, inelastic, meaning they conserve momentum but not energy, or totally inelastic (or plastic), meaning they conserve momentum and the two objects stick together.
It’s this last type of collision that interests me most, the totally inelastic one—when the two colliding objects merge into one and conserve momentum.
While cruising through the images I’m collecting, I think of Jean Baudrillard and then J.G. Ballard, retracing steps that I took three years ago, all in perfect recall. I make a new folder called parking-lots and drop in images with filenames like 5781586-aerial-view-of-an-empty-parking-lot, grantham-parking-lot-0951, Lot, Tel_Aviv_parking_lot, and zoo_lot2-750149.
It’s getting dark outside and my terminal is bathing this corner of the room and the front side of my knuckles in bluish light. My fingernails dimly reflect the screen. All the tiny parallel ridges reflect light in opposing directions, causing the reflection to appear matte.
I get up from my desk, look out the window, decide not to close the drapes, turn around and glance at the cat, then sit back down. My fingernails are long and hit the keys before the pads of my fingers. I ...
Yamil Orlando