Entry form (PDF): click here; rules and conditions
Deadline: September 30th 2009, arrival date.
Website: Pixxellpoint
"Once Upon a Time in the West
We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.
Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there's no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.
Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don't look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.
But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.
On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university's warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!
Domenico Quaranta, curator"
Robert Allen + Antoinette LaFarge, "Playing the Rapture 2008", performance, 2008 (image courtesy of the artist)
Antoinette LaFarge (script, visual design) is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of California, Irvine. An artist and writer with a special interest in games and virtual realities, her recent work includes the intermedia performance project Reading Frankenstein (2003, Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA ) and the curatorship of two groundbreaking exhibitions on computer games and art: ALT+CTRL (2004, Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA) and SHIFT-CTRL (2000, Beall Center for Art + Technology).
Her latest project, directed by Robert All is titled Playing the Rapture and is currently on display at Wow: Emergent Media Phenomenonat the Laguna Art Musum, in California. Here's an excerpt from the project description:
"Playing the Rapture revolves around two characters who are playing a computer game set in a post-Rapture world. Designed by one of them, the game posits a choice for those who have been left on earth between conversion to Christianity and joining the Antichrist. As the two gamers beta-test this new creation, they engage in an intense struggle over everything from the rules of the game to the problem of belief. In striving to win their apocalyptic showdown, they must also come to terms with how Rapture theology offers hope and a promise of escape while fueling their sense of alienation and despair.
In bringing the worlds of religion and computer games into collision, Playing the Rapture raises questions about the assumptions that govern each field. Are games really as trivial as they are often made out to be? Can religion be understood as the world's most serious game? At what point does "just playing" turn into "playing for keeps"?
In Playing the Rapture, the audience enters the gamers' imaginary world via large-scale projections within the performance space. Many of these projections are machinima videos, created from an actual computer game set in a post-Rapture world. Thus, the real world, the game world, and the stage world are inextricably entwined from start to finish. In their struggle for dominance, the protagonists discover that while they are playing the game, they are also part of the game."
Link: Playing the Rapture
What: Wow. Emergent Media Phenomenon
Where: Laguna Art Museum
When: June 14 - October 4 2009
Website: official website
The exhibition is curated by Grace Kook-Anderson and is accompanied by a booklet published by Laguna Art Museum. As part of the exhibition, you'll receive a booklet featuring essays by the curator; participating artist, Eddo Stern; and the curator at Blizzard Entertainment, Tim Campbell. This booklet is published by Laguna Art Museum.
Participating artists: selected artists from Blizzard Entertainment, including Chris Metzen, Sam Didier (a.k.a., Samwise), Chris Robinson, Justin Thavirat, and Roman Kenney (all from Irvine); Aram Bartholl (Berlin); Jorg Dubin (Laguna Beach); Alexander Galloway (New York); Jacqueline Goss (New York); Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales (Ghent, Belgium); John Klima (Lisbon, Portugal); Cyril Kuhn (Los Angeles); Antoinette LaFarge (Irvine); Mashallah Design and Linda Kostowski (Berlin); Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto (Irvine); Airyka Rockefeller (San Francisco); Anne-Marie Schleiner (Singapore); Eddo Stern (Los Angeles); The Third Faction (Azeroth); and Zeng Han (Guangzhou)
PROGRAMMING TO DATE
Sunday, June 14 at 1:00 PM
Zeng Han is a photographer based in Guangzhou, China who has just completed a semester at School of Visual Arts in New York. Zeng will be discussing the concept of "soulstealers" in his work.Saturday, July 11 at 1:00 PM
Aram Bartholl's WoW workshop will be held the day before his lecture. Bartholl will extend the project shown in the exhibition out onto the streets of Laguna Beach. Everyone is welcome to participate and enjoy an afternoon of art making and have the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative performance. The workshop and performance will be documented on video, and the edited version will be shown in the exhibition.
Sunday, July 12 at 1:00 PM
Aram Bartholl, based in Berlin, is interested in the way network data manifests into the everyday world. Bartholl investigates this in the physical space through performance, installation, and video. With World of Warcraft, Bartholl investigates this manifestation through the one of the most popular online role-playing games.
Sunday, July 26 at 1:00 PM
Jacqueline Goss, based in New York, creates film and video in order to explore the ways we think about ourselves through systemic machines, like politics, culture, and science. Goss will talk about her work in game space, animation, and the documentary form.
Sunday, August 16 at 1:00 PM
Robert Nideffer, "Playing with Bosch"
Robert Nideffer, based in Irvine, will compare the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch that illustrate fantasy with religious narratives with the images in World of Warcraft.
Sunday, September 13 at 1:00 PM
Antoinette LaFarge, based in Long Beach, questions the mode of fiction through performance, digital media, games, and writing. In this way, LaFarge looks at World of Warcraft and other role-playing games as one way of constructing a fictional narrative.
Thursday, October 1, UC Irvine, TBA
This forum will include artists Antoinette LaFarge, Robert Nideffer, Eddo Stern, and Jeff Chamberlain, the cinematics project lead at Blizzard Entertainment. The forum will be moderated by the associate director at UCI's Beall Center for Art and Technology, David Familian.
Link: official website
"Reality is not the one we were used to anymore. Media infiltrate it more and more, and fill up our dreams, which usually come when our eyes are open. Wide open. In the frame of “Expanded Painting”, H Y P E R L U C I D is an exhibition collecting works born on the invisible edge between two different levels of reality (apparent reality and media reality), and documenting the continuous trespassing from one level to the other. The walls in between are more and more porous, and sometimes even the more lucid gaze can’t help but wonder which level of reality it is looking at in a particular moment. All of us had this feeling, in front of 9/11 pictures. Media don’t produce simulacra anymore: they produce events, history, life. They overwhelm us with icons, brands, pixellated images of tortures, wars, outrages. The hardest fight happens there. They help us to construct new levels of reality, both abstract and hyperreal, and to get used to them. Finally, videogames are the places of our training: there, through more and more complex social and narrative dynamics, and through a photorealism which even overcomes our playing needs, we forget how to recognize simulation, and we exercise our brain for the next step: the one in which, between tangible reality, simulated reality and media reality there are no barriers anymore, but only the sheets, translucent and easy to pass through, of a chinese shadows theater. We took the last train to the world of Perky Pat, and there is no way to come back. H Y P E R L U C I D doesn’t collects paintings. Here, painting is not a medium, but a cultural frame, a context of reference for the new generation of the image makers. Alterazioni Video, Gazira Babeli, Shane Hope, Miltos Manetas, Gerhard Mantz, Eva and Franco Mattes, UBERMORGEN.COM and Damon Zucconi, no longer paint: they shoot, they manipulate, they code, they make scripts, sometimes they fight with other virtual characters. Yet, in the end, they produce images. For more information & downloadable images, click here" (Domenico Quaranta)
"The multi-channel video installation HalfLife juxtaposes surveillance footage of video gamers in cyber-cafés playing the popular video game, ‘Counter-Strike’, with a live video feed of the game they are playing. The surveillance channel shows their expressions from the cross-hairs’ point-of-view while the game engine channel captures their virtual actions inside the game-world. The virtual world of ‘Counter-Strike’ is re-photographed from a live video feed from each player’s point of view as they play against each other in the same environment or “map”. The gamers’ actions are recorded as they engage each other in various missions: when a character is killed off in the game, the corresponding surveillance footage of the real player disappears. The third channel films the players in a cyber-café in Garden Grove, California, where video surveillance systems were implemented by the City Council in 2004 in order to monitor the increase in gang violence." (Marco Brambilla)
"This survey exhibition features work produced by Bay Area-based or Bay Area-rooted artists using new media—defined in the context of this exhibition as electronic, digital, or web-based. Organized into accessible thematic sections, the work in this exhibition explores the ways that technology has shaped our sense of selves, our vision, our bodies, and our world. The exhibition examines our cultural fascination with technology (including our continued faith in its benefits), our myriad uses of the internet, as well as the potentially troubling applications of technology in simulation and surveillance.
While the work in the exhibition features a broad range of conceptual and artistic approaches, all of it is unified by its multidisciplinary content. As a result, the exhibition has been organized around thematic areas that highlight the works’ connections to contemporary cultural and social phenomena: Biomorph, Identity, Web Repurposing, New Light, Hope and Promise, Surveillance, and Simulation.
Stephanie Syjuco, Everything Must Go (Grey Market), 2006, digital prints, foamboard, and mixed media, variable dimensions, courtesy of the artist and James Harris Gallery, Seattle
Throughout history, artists have taken advantage of technological innovations, employing new developments as tools in their artistic production. Examples range from the discovery of photographic processes to the lost-wax casting process for large-scale sculpture. More recently, Ivan Sutherland’s 1963 invention of “Sketchpad,” a computer aided drawing program, is the ancestor of current image making applications such as Flash and Illustrator. The organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was founded in 1966 to match artists and engineers for collaborative projects, which utilized electronic equipment and new materials such as mylar. With the refinement of raster graphics on the computer in the seventies, painting with pixels became another production tool in the artist’s toolbox.
The new media artists in this exhibition adopt current technologies such as online colonies and marketplaces, digital video cameras, and security x-ray machines to achieve their artwork. Some artists in the exhibition comment on technology with low-tech presentations, while others use sophisticated equipment solely to achieve their conceptual goals. As technology becomes more pervasive in our lives, the artists respond in kind – either as users of the technology, or as commentators.
Scott Kildall, America, 2006, digital print, 20 x 30 in., courtesy of the artist
Artists in the exhibition include John Pierre Bruneau, Jim Campbell,Anthony Discenza, Rodney Ewing, Martha Gorzycki, Lynn Hershman, Sherry Karver, Nina Katchadourian, Scott Kildall,Andrew Kleindolph, Jill Miller, James Morgan, Deborah Oropallo,Trevor Paglen, Alan Rath, Jackie Sumell, Stephanie Syjuco, Gail Wight, and Christine Wong Yap.
This exhibition is co-curated by the de Saisset Museum and SCU Assistant Professor Kathy Aoki. Santa Clara University art history major Lauren Baines played an important role by writing all of the identification and interpretive labels for Tech Tools of the Trade. Guide by Cell interpretive content for the exhibition was developed by students in Aoki’s Art in the Computer Age course. Students in the course include: Jill Blake, Ashley Cook, Peter Dziuba, Katherine Fiedelman, Christina Flores, Whitney Fung, Molly Geisler, Millicent Jenkins, Katrina Liebl, Justine Macauley, Kelsey Maher, Kaitlin McKee, Morgan Michaels, Lila Miyamoto, Carolyn Nickell, Memori Otsuka, Kenneth Solis, and John Wrixton.
This exhibition is funded in part by the de Saisset Museum, a SCU Technology Innovation grant, and a grant from Arts Council Silicon Valley, in partnership with the County of Santa Clara and the National Endowment for the Arts." (images and text @ de Saisset Museum)
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