The ongoing US Presidential race is coming to such a head that even media stories about media coverage of the campaigns are flooding the wires. But how does this grand spectacle translate abroad? Given that America is so invested in branding itself as an exporter of democracy, the elections are a key opportunity to transmit this ideology. A new performance exchange project initiated by artist Elana Mann, entitled "Exchange Rate," invites artists from Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, Israel, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, Scotland, South Korea, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and, of course, the USA to collaborate on "producing, exchanging and interpreting performance directions related to the election campaign." Towing the choose or lose line, the participants will post instructions for creative acts that other artists will elect to perform. Part of the effort is to see how the further development of mass media has effected the evolution of collaborative artistic models borne in the Fluxus era, by strategically conflating artistic media, the communicative media by which the work is broadcast, and the news media through which the President is arguably elected. The resulting performances will be highlighted in partnership with the upcoming UnConvention project, with Trade & Row's "Campaign Trail" series, and in other online and offline events. Stay tuned to see if "Exchange Rate" can bring new meaning to the phrase "making change." - Marisa Olson
Jonathan Soderstrom's Ad Nauseam 2 is a space shooter game that provides an overwhelming synesthetic experience: start playing and you'll find yourself restarting over and over again as you learn to master its maneuvers and get drawn into its psychoactive swirl of color and sound. Your podlike ship shoots two kinds of energy blasts and can also emit a kind of gravity pulse that beautifully blows away debris around it; your enemies begin as a pair of crudely-drawn semi-happy-face blobs that grow into menacing starfishes, turn into ASCII robo-ships, then ramp up to a final boss battle. Ad Nauseam 2 is one of several indie games available on Soderstrom's Cactus Software site, including Burn the Trash and Shotgun Ninja, that work with ancient arcade and first-gen console forms like the shooter and platformer, ramping up their audio-visual intensity, twitchiness and formal ingenuity for a hungrier generation of gamers. But other Cactus games are more contemplative, playing with narrative structures and standard expectations: for that kind of head trip, try out the Lewis-Carroll-esque Psychosomnium, which presents a world in a dream, or the starkly existential explorations of Mondo Medicals. - Ed Halter
Image: Jonathan Soderstrom, Ad Nauseam 2 (Still)Over the weekend, Mobile Art Production's group exhibition, "Defence," occupied Stockholm's Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen. These islands formerly served as fortifications for the city but now primarily function as picnic grounds, a change that has led curator Magdalena Malm to consider both historical and contemporary defense systems, as well as the potential danger of forgetting or repressing a place's past entanglements with violence and military force. Such open reflection is further important, Malm claims, to curtail the type of profiling that has become one outgrowth of the shift, in our terroristic age, from external to personal, psychological defense: "If we previously held the belief that the armed forces would protect us, the responsibility has now been firmly placed on each and every one of us to be aware of empty bags and people behaving suspiciously." A stellar collection of artworks explored these variegated topics, including the video Testimony, Kutlug Ataman's study of Turkey's amnesia about its oppression of Armenians during World War I, manifest by his father's old wet-nurse's delusional, autobiographical recollection of that era. A composite of white sugar cubes turns black and melts beneath a stream of motor oil, in Kader Attia's video Oil and Sugar #2, a powerful, symbolic pairing of two materials that have each dictated East-West commerce. Henrik Andersson specifically addressed the exhibition's site with real-time recordings of the underwater area surrounding the islands, a reference to the alleged intrusion of Russian submarines, in the 1980s, into the Swedish territorial waters around the Stockholm archipelago. While political relations have shifted since this historical incident, Andersson's work acknowledges how the mere possibility of an external threat transforms listening into a process of detection, and every foreign, underwater sound into something suspicious. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Kader Attia, Oil and Sugar #2, 2007http://www.mobileartproduction.se/English/skal_projects.html
NETMARES & NETDREAMS v 2.0, an online exhibit that launched on August 8, feels like the brooding step-sibling of Harm van den Dorpel's Club Internet. Whereas Club Internet does its best to simulate a gallery's clean white box, NETMARES & NETDREAMS projects its content into an alternating background of white or black, set beneath a ghostly, reverberating browser frame with links delineated via a somnolent parade of sibilants: z Z z Z z Z z. Each page presents a single work by one artist; the total curatorial effect is one of dark confusions, subterranean logic, and primal unease. Mark Brown's video Requiem for a Bogus Journey image-echoes Bill and Ted into a demonic wormhole, Damon Zucconi's Shining flickers a human figure in and out of its low-res existence, Kari Altmann's Soft 404 dissolves the error-message code into a blurring field, and Nathan Hauenstein's eldritch Pillars floats creepy icon totem poles through an expanse of galactic space. The show includes other work by James Whipple, Martijn Hendriks, Ryan Trecartin, Yannick Antoine, Harm van den Dorpel and others. The project's 1.0 iteration consisted of group blogs (one dreams, one 'mares), with respective channels on flickr and vimeo, initiated by Altmann and Brown with many other participants. The dream/nightmare continues next week, when a Netdreams 3.0 will coalesce in the waking world at Current Gallery in Baltimore on August 22. - Ed Halter
Image: John Holland, uralone, 2008Sigmund Freud had an interesting take on nightmares. He argued that not only were all dreams exercises in wish fulfillment, but that even nightmares showed us our desires....in reverse. Such a principle can be applied to looking at any number of creative gestures that approach meaning through forms and concepts presented in reverse or even in absentia. Through this lens, we might see artist Tino Sehgal's work as teaching us a lot about media by virtue of his employing what looks like no medium. The Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts (CCA) is now entering its second year of continuously presenting Sehgal's situational projects. In each, there is no physical object at which to gaze, but rather a human actor, instructed to enact an interpretation (of a newspaper headline, a press release about a concurrent show, etc), to sing, or to initiate an interaction with a gallery visitor. The Wattis's two-year presentation of Sehgal's work--simultaneous with other shows, thus directly contextualizing it in relation to institutional and spectatorial conventions--is a rare demonstration of commitment to studying a complicated and visionary artist's singular work. In this, it is apparent that the artist's relationship to media is a very specific one. He wants the experiences he creates to be seen as objects that can be bought and sold (albeit without printed receipts, instructions, photos, or other documentation), but their lack of physicality is at least partly a response to the earth's dwindling resources, and his primary medium is thus conversation--whether it's an initial one in the gallery or the oral narrative that perpetuates and historicizes his practice outside of the gallery. The translations and exchanges he programs are thus given a material weight by virtue of their ability to influence (as if by pushing on) others. - Marisa Olson
Image: Marisa Olson, GIS for Tino Sehgal, 2008 (Editor's Note: Tino Sehgal does not permit documentation of his work. Thus, for the above, Marisa took a screengrab of a blank image that appeared after conducting a Google image search for Tino Sehgal.)Einstein famously reflected that "the mysterious" was what stood "at the cradle of true art and true science." But considering the ensuing decades, marked by the increasing technological specialization of the sciences and perennially high-brow parameters of art world discourse, it is easy to now believe that the fields have all but separated. "Souls and Machines," the current exhibition at Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia, however, maintains that "art and science move along parallel paths" and offers up a handful of creative practices that exemplify the twenty-first century marriage of new media and empathetic production. While most of the participating artists work across media, a significant number are exhibiting works that connect older forms of image-making, like painting, with the latest in programming and design. Artist, graphic designer and university professor John Maeda presents seven "paintings in motion": digital animations generated by custom software, which find colorful, abstract patterns aggregating into naturalistic structures. These animations, titled Nature, are projected onto hanging, translucent screens, a strategy that moves them into the sculptural realm and seems in keeping with Maeda's declared interest in "post-digital" aesthetic renewal. Digital painting becomes an exercise in decentralized production in Evru's TECURA, an interactive application and image/sound archive open to a user's every creative whim. A printer and WAN network hookup feature in TECURA's exhibition installation, thereby underscoring Evru's role as facilitator (not author) of a broader community's experimentation with contemporary methods of image-making. - Tyler Coburn
Image: John Maeda, Nature, 2008As we hit the slower weeks of summer, take five minutes to play Jason Rohrer's Passage, a contemplative art game created for last year's Gamma 256 competition in Montreal, which challenged indie designers to create games with tiny, irregular aspect ratios of no more than 256x256 pixels. In its half-year of existence, Rohrer's entry has become a micro sensation on its own, garnering kudos in scads of the most widely read games blogs as well as mainstream press. In Passage, you play a character who travels across a narrow horizontal corridor representing nothing less than the passage of life itself, from childhood to old age. Since it's very much a game about exploration and discovery, to say any more about what happens would spoil the impact -- so with that in mind, don't read Rohrer's heartfelt statement on the game until after you've played it. Rather, prepare for ingeniously low-res visuals and minimal but meaningful interactivity that maximize a miniature platform in terms of the metaphoric potential for gameplay. After Passage, Rohrer created something of a sequel with Gravitation, a slightly more complex game about creative inspiration and a father's love for his daughter. Or, as Rohrer puts it, "explores how a particular corner of my life feels, as only a game can." - Ed Halter
In the late 1960s, the LACMA's ambitious Art and Technology project sought to bring together contemporary artists with the biggest high-tech corporations of the day. The pairing was inspired: at the time, the art world of Los Angeles played second fiddle to New York, but Southern California was in the midst of an enormous boom in the technology industry, partially aided by an influx of military contracts during the drawn-out war in Vietnam. This year, LACMA published an online resource dedicated to the project, centered on a 392-page pdf of A & T's long out-of-print catalog, along with a selection of press clippings (one major criticism of the day: no women or people of color were invited as artists.) Over 40 corporations participated, including Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Lockheed and Pan Am; of the 76 artists asked to submit proposals, 23 found productive matches with engineers and manufacturers. Fruitful combos included Andy Warhol and Cowles Communications (3-D printing), Robert Whitman and Philco-Ford (a massive mirror sculpture) and Claes Oldenberg and Disney (a giant hydraulic icebag), but many other projects were deemed technically or financially unfeasible. A & T's catalog makes for juicy reading, detailing the elaborate culture clash that occurred when suits and scientists had to work with cosmopolitan creative types and utopian longhairs. Perhaps the strangest marriage was that of John Chamberlain and the RAND Corporation, a military-aligned think-tank then largely seen as intellectual architects of nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War. For his project, Chamberlain arranged daily screenings in the RAND offices of his nudity-filled film The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez, starring Ultra Violet and Taylor Mead, and circulated a series of conceptual memos asking staffers to submit "answers." One reply simply read: "The answer is to terminate Chamberlain." - Ed Halter
http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/MWEB/archives/artandtechnology/at_home.asp
While the internet has enabled new, transnational collaborations in the form of participatory art projects, the challenge with these increasingly popular initiatives is to credit the contributions and individual ideas of artists who might otherwise float lost in the crowdsourced sea. Wooloo Productions has managed to excel at meeting this challenge, while building the logistics of web-based participation into the concept of their works. Wooloo's newest project is Rebranding Acts, "an investigation into cultural identity in an age of global migration." The initiative invites artists from around the world to consider the ways in which "nationality" is manufactured in their home country, and to "rebrand" these concepts, from their own perspective. While the open call is predicated on the argument that such hegemonic nationalist constructions often exclude identities that don't fit the mold, Rebranding Acts invites anyone to add their voice to the discussion by uploading videos of their own public interventions. The best of these videos will be curated into major exhibitions in Prague and New York, later this year. This is not the first of Wooloo Production's projects to deal with national identity. Co-founding artists Sixten Kai Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard gained worldwide notoriety when Defending Denmark, their "international campaign to rebrand the country of Denmark" which documented 18 months of membership in the ultra-right Danish People's Party, was covered on Al Jazeera TV, launching an international discussion about party lines and artist interventions. If you'd like to join the party of people bringing such important projects to life, visit Wooloo.org. - Marisa Olson
With just one month to go until the Republican National Convention at which John McCain will accept his party's nomination for presidential candidate, residents of Minnesota's Twin Cities are bracing themselves for a red, white, and blue tide. A consortium of organizations in the area have organized what they call the UnConvention, an umbrella for the art projects, interventions, and alternative media outlets raining through the region whose four-word mission is simply: "Unscripting the political process." An event like the RNC is a well-oiled machine and efforts by authorities to keep voices of dissent or other visual distractions at bay abound even in mainstream press coverage of this quadrennial event. The UnConvention is a shelter for ideas that veer from this predictable narrative and it uses its website to galvanize collaboration. The Projects page lists information on artist's initiatives--many of which bring street art and situationist theater techniques to new media forms--ranging from the very DIY to the beautiful and highly-choreographed, including Ligorano/Reese's, The State of Things, 2003/2008, an ice sculpture of the word "democracy" intended to melt within 24-hours of its installation; and Sharon Hayes's ambitious Revolutionary Love 2: I am Your Best Fantasy, in which 100 citizens in the cities of both the Republican and Democratic conventions will collaborate with her to "recite in unison a text chosen by Hayes that exemplifies the intersection of history and the construction of the 'queer figure' in the political terrain." The UnConvention also harnesses the web as a platform for participatory democracy. Its site is a bulletin board for spontaneous actions and a headquarters for creative convergence, calling on readers close and far from the Great Lakes to speak their voice. Taking its title from the obligatory statement uttered by candidates at the end of campaign ads, the consortium's project, I Approve This Message gives the public a chance to address delegates at both conventions. Touted as "a community generated media response" giving people "a voice and an opportunity to promote thinking about what participating in democracy looks like," I Approve This Message revolves around a a website in which users' two-minute videos are posted to paint a collective picture of what this (newly unscripted) process means to them. - Marisa Olson
This past Saturday at General Public, in Berlin, e+l staged Media Plate, their latest investigation of the micro- and macro-forces at play in the consumption of food and production of waste. These have been central topics over recent years for e+l, a collaboration between Ken Ehrlich and Brandon LaBelle. For their 2003 residency at Hull Time Based Arts, in the United Kingdom, the non-English artists cooked "foreign" cuisine (fish tacos) for a "performance-picnic," played music from the origin countries of ingredients, and incorporated placemats that mapped the journey of each ingredient from its origin-point to Hull (Active Ingredient, 2003). Through the seemingly innocuous social convention of the picnic, Ehrlich and LaBelle highlighted the various structural and economic tiers of food distribution and made participants aware of their localized position in these networks. Shifting focus to the far end of food consumption, the artists laid ginger and compost at various urban development and waste sites throughout Berlin as an open invitation for ginger plant cultivation (Active Refuse, 2005). They concluded the project with a discussion and cooking-presentation of ginger-carrot soup. The cycles of development characteristic of a contemporary metropolis were here given analogous, naturalistic form in Ehrlich and LaBelle's urban gardens, while their placement on waste sites equally drew attention to the often hidden side of a city's maintenance. As with their broader body of collaborations, Active Refuse builds upon Ehrlich and LaBelle's extensive research into waste management in Berlin, including visits to local plants and centers and interviews with waste-management officials. Lyrical conceptualism and deep inquiry thus come together, somewhat uncommonly, in this and other of e+l's projects, and always end up staying for dinner. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Ginger-carrot soup ingredients for Active Refuse
Contrary to what its title might suggest to the bawdier of readers, CANADA's "Journey to the Center of Uranus" is not actually an exhibition's worth of butt jokes. Instead, Uranus becomes a multivalent center to this spirited but uneven group show: the divine manifestation of the heavens, in Greek mythology, and the name later given to the seventh planet from the sun. Each of the artists (or "cosmonauts," a term the press release lovingly ascribes) reaches beyond the immanent realm and into the mysteries of the cosmos, cyberspace and biology, yet offset the loftiness of their subjects with ingenious, often handmade objects and artifacts. Eunice Kim's Untitled (2008) is a standout, its string zig-zagging throughout both rooms of the gallery and accumulating, on its route, Calder-esque wire mobiles, cloth sculptures, a brown paper bag man, a disco ball and other bits and bobs. Suspended a few feet below the gallery ceiling, Kim's work turns small, everyday gestures into a magically inventive constellation. Other notables include Willy Le Maitre's stereographic take on the Ediacaran geological period (After the Edia caran, 2008), which looks like the love-child of Nam June Paik's Global Groove and the work of Takeshi Murata; and Paul Slocum's Baldessari-for-the-new-millenium piece, One frame of a GIF animation printed and hung about a videoprojection of the same animation scaled to approximately 66% (2008), which follows its title to a tee, but is no less elegant for that fact. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Paul Slocum, One frame of a GIF animation printed and hung about a videoprojection of the same animation scaled to approximately 66%, 2008This summer in Pittsburgh, the Wood Street Galleries' exhibit "Out of This World" currently showcases artists who tinker with strange new ways to experience the cosmos. Vera-Maria Glahn and Marcus Wendt's soothing interactive installation Orbiter lets viewers lie down on the ground and look up at a video approximation of the night sky, limned with faint concentric rings. By pointing their fingers at the ceiling, participants create new "stars" that circulate and generate looping tones. Jean-Pierre Aubé's Titan and beyond the infinite (2007) uses data recorded in 2005 by the Huygens probe from one of Saturn's moons to create 2001-inspired slit-scan video trip-outs; the show also includes a video version of his VLF.Natural Radio (2000-Ongoing) project, which uses the sounds of naturally-produced electromagnetic signals, a phenomenon increasingly blotted out by human-made telecommunications. Geekier frequencies can be heard in Maria Antelman's taH pagh taHbe (2006), a video composed of still images of NASA hanger interiors set to a Klingon translation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy (no doubt using the preferred Klingon Language Institute version as her source.) Rounding out the astronomical theme, Gail Wight's Blow Out (2006) consists of forty-four photos of different smashed test tubes, white constellations of glass shards against black backgrounds, each looking like unique, exploding galaxies. - Ed Halter
Image: Jean-Pierre Aube, Titan and beyond the infinite, 2007Jeremy Bailey is a video and performance artist whose work is often confidently self-depricating in offering hilarious parodies of new media vocabularies. In his Video Terraform Dance Party (2008), Bailey plays an enthusiastic nerd channeling Bob Ross as he dons a forehead-mounted VR controller to demonstrate a new modeling software that will allow him to bop his head around and "plan the ideal landscape." As he narrates, his bespectacled eyes rise and fall at the horizon of a CGI world (outlined by vague computer icons and a $100 sign) and his movements trigger topographic changes in the blobby green island growing before him. The piece trades on two themes common in Bailey's work: the infomercial and a kind of ridiculously subtle (or perhaps not-so-subtle) implosion of metaphors about the use of the body in video-based performance art. The artist translates these well-worn themes into his performance of the anything-goes chaos of dot-com era product demos in SOS (2008), a video that cheerleads a brand new operating system (with a "bold new interface!") of the same name. Designed by Bailey, SOS bids farewell to the world's most popular software platforms and says hello to artist-created masterpieces--inspiring viewers to wonder which is truly "better." In describing the unusual look of the interface, Bailey's deadpan character says, "We're artists, so we thought, let's do it visually." So the "canvas" usurps the "desktop" and "your computer is a painting and your files and folders have been replaced by shapes and colors" which fit into three categories: rectangles show you things, circles analyze things, and triangles edit things. (Clearly this is much more intuitive than Windows!) When Bailey finally manages to get the program to open a file, we see a clip of the artist carrying out what can only be described as a quintessentially clichéd parody of scatalogical performance, after which the circle analyzes the video and tells him that he is pathetic. Bailey's response? Sometimes computers tell us things we don't want to hear...It's a new world and "we've just got to get used to this." In the artist's next project, Your Ad Here, he'll be transmitting messages some people do want to hear...He's turning his body into a billboard and offering advertisers a spot on the scrolling virtual LEDs on his head and plasma gun-shaped arms (of course there's a demo--the caption: "This sh*t is real time ballers, mf'ing real time"), for broadcast on Toronto subway platform screens during the Toronto Urban Film Festival. Leave it to Bailey to take the human billboard trope to the next game level! More of his spot-on projects can be seen on his YouTube channel. You'll want to see his Transhuman Dance Recital (2007) in which he "freed [him]self of the imitative constraints of the natural world" in order to dance around like an octopus with a triangle-shaped buddy. - Marisa Olson
Image: Jeremy Bailey, SOS, 2008This summer's Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition, held in Dutch city of Arnhem, takes on the theme of "Grandeur" for its 2008 edition, described on the festival's site as "the aspiration for human greatness" and "the urge, the dream, the conflict and the struggle that are linked to this aspiration." For American artist Brody Condon's contribution to this year's event, this conflict and struggle will be fought out in the woods, using home-made weapons and armor. Condon conceived of -- and is currently overseeing -- a site-specific live-action role-playing game entitled SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation, taking place in seven week-long games that began last month. Players gather in Arnhem's woody Sonsbeek Park to enact a retro-futuristic scenario set in a neo-medieval far future. Condon describes the visual style of the event as "think leather and plastic", and local builders have erected a temporary woodland-mod encampment tower for housing, complete with Japanese-style sleeping pods. The enacted narrative involves small bands composed of pre-determined character types -- Herald, Band Leader, Duel Master, and Ritual Master/Shaman and Archivist -- competing with one another inside the holy forest of Sonsbeek for the favors of the Immortals, godlike beings who grant humans the gifts of technology. SonsbeekLive continues Condon's longstanding interest in blurring games and life, and proposes a re-evaluation of LARPing from mere nerd kitsch to theatrical art. The games continue through September, and folks in the Netherlands can still sign up for upcoming weeks; those who can't attend can peek via player-generated media and the official Dutch weblog. - Ed Halter
Image: Players in SonsbeekLive: The Twentfivefold Manifestation, from the official weblogDespite its title, P.S.1's current survey of Finnish art Arctic Hysteria leans towards the cool and calculated, with moments of dotty humor. In keeping with a culture known for both outdoor saunas and Linus Torvalds, much of the work deals with nature, technology or both; the two themes come together with another Finnish national icon in Tea Mäkipää's video My Life as a Reindeer, created from antler-mounted footage obtained in a manner reminiscent of Sam Easterson. Even more heroically silly are two pieces by electronic music and media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, resurrected in conjunction with a documentary on the artist: Master Chaynjis, a meandering mechanical head billed as a "swearing robot," and DIMI-S, a.k.a. the Sexophone, an early electronic instrument that generates sounds through interpersonal body contact. Another historic visionary revived in this largely contemporary show is architect Matti Suuronen, whose UFO-style Futuro House provides the inspiration for a site-specific "Futuro Lounge," which serves as an unfortunately impractical screening pod and reading room. Elsewhere, the exhibit is video-heavy, with two notable standouts. Dancer Reijo Kela provides a very rare object -- a dance video that doesn't suck -- with 365 Days-Reijo Kela's Video Diary of 1999, in which the artist propels himself by various, often comical means from one side of the frame to another: skiing, skipping, crawling, running nude. Audio-visual band Pink Twins present four of their neo-image-processing videos in one room, creating an overwhelming environment of digital rainbow cascades, melting satellite maps, and looping explosions. Atypical of the rest of Arctic Hysteria's relatively detached sensibility, Markus Copper's Kursk feels like walking into the set of a truly scary horror film: a room stuffed with sporadically clanking, mechanized black deep-sea diving suits, it elicits claustrophobic unease and a far more directly emotional response than the rest of this otherwise fore-brainy selection. - Ed Halter
Image: Huutajat, The Screaming Men, 2003 (Still image from video, 76 min., Directed by Mika Ronkainen) Courtesy the artist Photo by Matthew Septimus.At the exhibit "Bobo's on 27th," currently on view at Foxy Production in Chelsea, wall-text printed onto a section of the ceiling reads REINTERPRETATION PROHIBITED; easy to miss amidst the jumble of the show itself, the two words are only visible once you've entered the gallery, walked through most of it, and turned to face the doors. Despite the dire warning, the farrago of plastic and styrofoam floor trash, aggressively colorful, punk-ugly sculptures and monstrously expressionist paintings does indeed call for certain readings. At first, the debris seems real and accidental-- like you've stumbled into someone else's art-party a few hours after the beer ran out -- but on closer inspection, each piece of apparent garbage is revealed as its own carefully placed objet: crushed water bottles covered in painted foil or laser-printed labels, a handful of flyers for a (conceptually faux) Philadelphia technical college, a set of lightly abused Colonial-dress souvenir dolls, a cloud of color-coordinated plastic deli bags with their logos meticulously removed. The seeming collapse of a young collective's studio into the gallery ultimately reveals itself as careful artifice: theatrical props for the staging of an image of a 21st century bohemia-echo, a fake fiesta that actually took a lot of work and planning by more than a dozen individual artists. Desire the real thing, then? The show includes a live if buggy webcam feed from the parallel exhibit Bobo's on 9th, which runs concurrently at the art-band's home space in Philly -- but viewers are likely to spy Boboites in their native habitat doing nothing more riotous than checking email. The total effect is that not so much of a playroom but a set of a playroom: no wonder so much of the exhibit resembles a warped memory of a children's TV show, as seen in Barkev Gulesserian's giant golden Dog-buddha, Jesse Greenberg's toy-box-like "touchables" sculptures, and Bobo's own crudely built, push-button jukebox, which twitches, exhales and bubbles bongwater when a song is requested. The myth of the crazy young art-gang rubs off to reveal some industrious chums mixing labor and fun—and in the process, perfecting the mixture's recipe to allow for an effective blend of determined madness. - Ed Halter
The sculptures and installations of Saâdane Afif's back catalog become departure points for the French artist's ambitious new show, "Technical Specifications," at Witte de With in Rotterdam. Maintaining his characteristic skepticism to self-enfranchisement, Afif has produced an exhibition colored by evasion and delegation, including a series of untitled works, each built of the same materials as previous pieces; wall texts of lyrics written, at Afif's request, in response to his artwork; and three radios, tuned to FM 107.5 Mhz, which, for the duration of the exhibition, will broadcast the songs incorporating these lyrics and the materials lists of the source artworks, as read in the style of popular radio DJs. Unlike an earlier movement of French conceptualists like Pierre Bismuth, who approached inter-media translation through a structuralist lens, Afif and contemporary Loris Gréaud cross-pollinate studio, exhibition and performance spaces with a beguiling energy that builds itself -- more associatively than analytically -- from the lesser defined realms of creative consciousness. Indeed, the parameters Afif has here set for "Technical Specifications" make their points without stifling the artist's inventive return to familiar materials. Ghost (Round bar of wood/ White Dufa, White Alpa, White Ace, White Email, 179 x 3.5 cm) (2005), an Andre Cadere-inspired modular stick, painted in four brands of white, is revisited as double-helix sculpture Untitled (Ghost, 2005 / White paint from four different brands, wood/ 185 x 3.5 cm diameter) (2008). A ghostly, black-and-white rendering of Bauhaus-esque architecture, Le fantôme (2003), becomes a series of five paintings, split along the diagonal to collectively form a monochromatic gradient. These untitled phantoms both channel and displace their source image, in a confrontation with personal and aesthetic histories that reveals the vitality of Afif's restless practice. - Tyler Coburn
Constant Dullaart's series "YouTube as Subject" plays with the image of the arrow-in-a-square button that appears in an embedded YouTube video. When clicked, Dullaart's videos retain their initial black backgrounds, but the arrow-buttons remain, plummeting, strobing, trembling, or turning into a mini-disco light show. In true YouTube spirit, Ben Coonley recently posted his own series as response, this time appropriating the spinning wheel of dots that eager viewers need to sit through as a video loads—in keeping with his longstanding interest in media breakdowns and frustrations. Coonley's dot-wheel now drifts off into the distance, accelerates rotation, and (betraying Coonley's Providence-scene roots) expands into a psychedelic black-and-white OpArt swirl. Better not put off watching Dullaart and Coonley's 'tubed conversation, however. Cory Arcangel's Blue Tube, made only last year, has quickly become near-obsolete. Back then, YouTube embedded a logo bug in the corner of its videos, and Blue Tube simply turned that logo blue. Now, however, after its host site's redesign, it doesn't always function in quite the right way. Who knows how long our friends arrow-button and spinning-wheel-thingy will last? - Ed Halter
Image: Constant Dullaart, "YouTube Disco" from the series "YouTube as Subject", 2008The second exhibition of ambitious online gallery Club Internet, "Oracle" explores the spiritual qualities of cyberspace. Travess Smalley, tntet and Damon Zucconi are among the participating artists who tease otherworldly properties out of our disembodied relationship to the products of virtual navigation. Club Internet's unusual design bolsters the exhibition theme: its main page is stripped of all but a small toolbar and magic wand, and the artworks are presented, as much as possible, outside of their original contexts. Clicking the magic wand or refreshing the page will load another artwork, but because this process is random, each path through "Oracle" is different from the last. This navigational opacity and generative randomness imbues the online gallery with the qualities of an oracle, and gives the virtual realm, which we are accustomed to exploring voluntarily, a strange agency over us. The standout artworks from the exhibition follow suit, exposing users to images and processes either predetermined or outside of the scope of their control. Jeff Carey's block series 2, PERL (2008) finds the browser bar automatically descending, in the process panning over a crude mosaic of geometric triangles (the work concludes when the bar reaches the bottom). Another standout, Rafael Rozendaal's The Long Cigarette (2008) uses formal simplicity to great conceptual effect, presenting an animated cigarette, spread over three adjacent YouTube videos, which gradually burns across the length of the separate screens. As with Carey's work, The Long Cigarette transparently plays with the parameters of virtual display, yet somehow still enchants with its elementary magic. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Harm van den Dorpel, Dematerialized Candle, 2008
