The increased accessibility and affordability of contemporary media technologies has greatly expanded possibilities for the dissemination of independent and grassroots information. At the same time, these developments have also greatly increased the opportunities for (mis)use of media technologies as powerful and effective tools for political and commercial propaganda. Although many theorists, artists, and activists have addressed the latter perspective on contemporary media technologies, critical debates have rarely relied on concrete demonstrations to prove their point. This edition of Test_Lab will therefore investigate the face of propaganda in the digital age by means of live artistic demonstrations, and will allow the audience to test hands-on how new media technologies can be applied as effective tools for propaganda.

How does Google determine which website shows up first and which one on page 2.480.133 of a search? Does a photograph only represent its own reality? How does social tagging affect the meaning of an online image? Why is spam persuasive and profitable? Is Uncyclopedia perhaps the true Wikipedia? What would the world look like if all advertisements were covered with artworks? And can Google’s Street View be a stage for artistic intervention?

Test_Lab: Tools for Propaganda allows you to experience and test for yourself how new media technologies can be (mis)used to direct, divert, distract and manipulate your gaze on the world.

Subvertr.com and streetwithaview.com are screened with kind permission of the artists, Les Liens Invisibles, and Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, respectively.

This event will be streamed live

Watch the video here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApZ73JmBEMo

Il 5 marzo a Roma a partire dalle 18.30

presso i locali del FLEXI libreria-cafè, Via Clementina 9 (rione Monti)

AOS (Art is Open Source)

in collaborazione con
FHF Italia e ass. The Hub Roma

Presenta
“Angel_F. Diario di un Intelligenza Artificiale” (Castelvecchi 2009)
di Salvatore Iaconesi (xDxD.vs.xDxD) e Oriana Persico (penelope.di.pixel)

Introduce il volume:

Derrick de Kerckhove (il padre)

Ne discutono con gli autori:

Arturo di Corinto, Monica Mazzitelli, Luigi Pagliarini, Gionatan Quintini, Marco Scialdone, Valentina Tanni

Special Guest:

Les Liens Invisibles con Seppukoo.com

Performance & installation:

“Nephogram+Angel_F” (Nephogram and Angel_F)

“Seppukoo.com” (Les Liens Invisibles)

“Listening” (Salvatore Iaconesi)

Opening: January 27, 2010

Curated by: Domenico Quaranta.

Founded by the American writer Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) was a catalogue of tools that was regarded as a bible by the counterculture generation – that is, by those who shaped the techno-cultural environment we are living in. Published regularly until 1972 and sporadically until 1998, it definitely died with the rise of the Web, of which it is considered a conceptual forerunner by people such as Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) and Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired). WEC was conceived as an “evaluation and access device” meant to bring power and knowledge to the people. It featured excellent reviews of books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes, along with objects of any kind, from gardening tools to computers. Everybody could submit a review for the catalogue.

Like the WEC reviewers, the artists in this exhibition are contributing to a shared resource; like them, they love their tools and, like them, they are interested in understanding the world as a whole. What did change, in the meantime – and mostly thanks to the WEC generation – is the world itself.

These artists – WE – live in a world in which media don’t just reproduce reality, nor just simulate it, in Baudrillardian terms: they shape reality, improve it, sometimes they build parallel worlds in which we can spend our time. They redesign our way to live, to think, to make and enjoy culture, to eat, to sleep, to die. And to think about God.

These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays.

This peculiar realism can bring somebody to go back to when everything started. Notoriously, psychedelic drugs played an important rule in the beginning of digital culture. Without Sun, by Brody Condon, is a mesh-up of various found videos of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Why do people broadcast these materials? Do these “out of the body” experiences have any relationship with other now common forms of projection of the self, such as online videogaming? Some artists, such as Cory Arcangel or Oliver Laric, are interested in the conceptual consequences of technologies, and on the way they are updating fundamental concerns of our culture; others, such as the duo AIDS-3D, explore how technologies are increasingly affecting our spiritual life. In their own words, they want to make “the intangible magic of technology visible”. Not necessarily trough technologies themselves: Constant Dullart’s video, for example, turns Youtube’s “loading” animation into a suggestive, hypnotic object using light and styrofoam balls.

This concern with magic and transcendence is shared by many of the artists on show, from Petra Cortright to Damon Zucconi, from Harm Van den Dorpel to Martin Kohout. In their hands, a video filter can become the best way to explore how consistent the outer world is, and how consistent we are. It can become the best way to get a better knowledge of the world we live in, whatever we may mean with this word.

Selected works:

AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller & Nik Kosmas, US/DE), Motion Capture Dance, 2008. Video, 08.34 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Cory Arcangel (US), Drei Klavierstücke op. II – I, 2009. Video, 04.21 min. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York.

Brody Condon (US), Without Sun, 2008. Video, 15.12 min. Courtesy Virgil De Voldere, New York. (Online excerpt).

Petra Cortright (US), Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009. Video, 03.41 min.

Paul B. Davis (UK/US), Compression Study #4 (Barney), 2007. Video, 02.49 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.

Constant Dullart (NL), Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009. Video, 00.33 min.

Martijn Hendriks (NL), Untitled (12 glowing men), 2008. Video, 04.10 min.

Jodi (BE/NL), Mal Au Pixel, 2009. Video, 01.14 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Martin Kohout (CZ/DE), Close Up, 2009. Video loop, 03.11 min.

Oliver Laric (DE), Aircondition, 2006. Video, 01.59 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.

Les Liens Invisibles (IT), Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle, 2008. Video loop, 02.14 min.

Miltos Manetas (GR/UK), King Kong After Peter Jackson, 2006. Video, 03.05 min.

Pascual Sisto (US), No strings attached, 2007. Video, 01.30 min.

Paul Slocum (US), You’re Not My Father, 2007. Video, 04.05 min.

Harm Van den Dorpel (NL), Resurrections, 2007. 3 animated found photos, 04.18 min.

Damon Zucconi (US), Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008. Video, 00.35. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

You can find more info on neural website

Curated by Domenico Quaranta

Participating artists
AIDS-3D
Mats Andren & Anders Carlsson
Michael Bell Smith
David Blackmore
Ian Bogost
BridA / Jurij Pavlica, Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango
Wayne Clements
Vuk ?osi?
Chris Coy
Florian Cramer
Olle Essvik
Vladimir Frelih
Darko Fritz
James Huston
IOcose
Tom Jennings
Oliver Lari?
Les Liens Invisibles
Olia Lialina
Paul Matosic
Eilis McDonald
Rosa Menkman
Rafael Rozendaal
Thatisaworkaround
Thisgasthing
Eugenio Tisselli
Tonylight
UBERMORGEN.COM
Harm Van Der Dorpel
Lisa Vanovitch
Windows Media Player
Math Wrath

Una discussione tra artisti e teorici che hanno riflettuto sull’evoluzione/rivoluzione di internet nel web 2.0, o che si sono serviti della rete come spunto o mezzo per la realizzazione delle loro opere. Questo si propone il convegno Arte 2.0, organizzato a Genova dal Museo d’arte contemporanea di Villa Croce. Un focus su un fenomeno che ha cambiato radicalmente il mondo virtuale, consentendo il passaggio da un modello statico di relazione col web ad uno dinamico, rendendo la rete modificabile dall’utente in un rapporto interattivo. A parlarne arrivano dunque Raffaele Mastrolonardo di Totem, il critico d’arte ed esperto di new media Domenico Quaranta, e gli artisti Useless idea, Drop drop, Les liens invisibles e Alterazioni Video.

Mercoledì 17 giugno 2009 – ore 10.00
Via Jacopo Ruffini 3 - Genova
Info: 010585772 – museocroce@comune.genova.it
Web: www.arteduepuntozero.blogspot.com