Two Cheers For Capitalism
Citigroup has faced off against the artists' collective Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, claiming that the group's recent satirical Webwork based on the financial giant's online site constitutes copyright infringement and must be removed. TWCDC copied the home pages of Citigroup.com and Citibank.com (a subsidiary) and placed them online, altering only a few of the sites' links and re-posting the sites under the domain names Citibank-global-domination.com and Citigroup-global-domination.com. The sites' original host company Hostpro quickly shut down TWCDC's account after being served notice by Citigroup, but the satire pages have been relaunched with a new host. "Citigroup's action shows how big corporations can stamp out free speech because they can afford expensive lawyers," a TWCDC spokesman observed. Despite its much-vaunted championing of free expression, The New York Times titled an April 17 biz-section article on the TWCDC culture jamming — in its national, not New York edition — "Cyber Prank Against Citigroup Fails" and characterized the group's work as "antics" rather than art. According to the group's recent press release: "TWCDC is bracing itself for further assaults from Citigroup's lawyers and is considering a counter-suit." From Together We Can Defeat Capitalism
|
|
|
Enmeshed In The Planet
Mesh is a lively, online journal published by Experimenta, an Australian media arts organization. Its current issue is devoted to globalism and includes a provocative interview by artist Molly Hankowitz with longtime media-arts activist Geert Lovink. He not only imagines the possibility of "a lively and diverse third culture, a public sphere not owned or ruled by either state or corporations," but understands the specific technical impediments to realizing such a vision. (The devil is always in such details, and Lovink's latest concern is that streaming media for independent news production may be a current panacea for independents but is, in fact, "entering [its] short summer — a temporary autonomous zone," given recent corporate-friendly pushes for copyright regulation in places like Australia.) The bottom line: has the online revolution of the past decade ameliorated or worsened social and cultural conditions? "Geek culture as we know it has an amazing ability to replicate without mutating. ... I wonder what would happen if people would proclaim a moratorium on the further development of computer hard- and software. We would see much more recycling, not just of hardware but also of brilliant software, which is now disappearing without further note ... Not such a utopian idea if you think of the [fundamentally unchanging] automobile and television set." Lovink, like the best Utopian thinkers/activists, always has at least one foot on the ground. From Experimenta
|
|
|
|
No Berets, Please
Artists have always been a filmmaker's dream subject, often embodying melodrama, romance and conflicted, culturally-specific attitudes about art's social role. It's still hard to believe that Montreal's Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) has been around for 19 years and continues to expand. This year's festival, in March, featured 180 films. Trends, according to jury president David D'Arcy, included an abundance of films on architecture (Brazilian modernist Oscar Niemeyer was the subject of the grand prize winner's film) and only a few "reportorial" or investigative films. Most interesting-sounding among them is "Meisterspiel," a documentary of filmmaker Lutz Dambeck's search for the vandal who wrote Nazi slogans on the paintings of Arnulf Rainer, who had himself vandalized other artists' work. As the Viennese filmmaker began to close in on the crime's prime suspect, the suspect committed suicide. Needless to say, more of these films are likely to be seen on television than at local multiplexes. From The Art Newspaper
|
|
|
|
Toll Plaza
Spanish artist Daniel Garcia Andujar was an artist in residence in 1998 at Technologies to the People, a London-based, international culture-jamming group with serious concerns about technological access for those on the wrong side of the digital divide. One of his works, "Trademarks: Remember, language is not free"TM, has begun to assume classic status as the commercialization of the Web accelerates. The Orwellian work consists of
chilling phrases and links to their registered owners. They include: 'Because it's your stuff"TM; "Video reality"TM; "Working together"TM and too many more. As
Andujar reminds us, "take care with your language." Technologies to the People Foundation
|
|
|
|
Cough, Cough
Folks used to debate the ethics of accepting Philip Morris' big-bucks, arts advertising-cum-sponsorship , but nary a peep has been heard about this for years. (I know of no museum and only a few artists or groups — Visual AIDS and the dancer Tricia Brown among them — that have ever rejected the cigarette maker's money.) Until now. Digital artist Paul Kaiser has raised the issue again in the current Whitney Museum show, "BitStreams," where his evocative art masquerades as the work of Paul Mutt (a tip of the hat to Marcel Duchamp as R. Mutt.) He accepted no money from the tobacco company for his installation and has posted a statement of his concerns on his Web site, noting that Philip Morris' art support actually comes from the company's marketing budget.
|
|
|
|
The Other Side Of The (Wailing) Wall
The Al Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem is devoted to the work of Palestinian artists and to building bridges for them beyond the Middle East. The center has gone online, and its bilingual (English-Arabic) site features the work of more than 300 artists. Although much of the art assumes traditional formats and conventional approaches to its subjects, there are some out-of-the-ordinary images: Rula Halawi's photographs of children in front of murals of gun-toting men and Mohammad Al-Awow's painted portrait of Yasir Arafat holding the white dove of peace. It's a glimpse of Palestinian cultural life we're unlikely to consider while the Intifada rages. From Al Wasiti Art Center
|
|
|
|
Digital India
Artist Nina Czegledy's account of the opening of "Sarai: The New Media Initiative" in Delhi is heartening. Funded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Dutch government, Sarai's New Media Lab debuted in February with an international conference about the public domain and the publication of 'The Sarai Reader 01," an anthology of Indian and global texts on everything from global media and media art, to access and telecommunications technology. The projects in development by the Dutch-Indian team include programs that focus on Hindi language and urban social justice, reflecting unusual sensitivity to local concerns and progressive politics. As Czegledy notes, sarai means a traveller's shelter or place of refuge in several Asian languages. In Delhi, it could mean a more open society. From Year Zero One
|
|
|
|
Masochists Please
"Desk Topping: A Collection of Disasters on the Desktop" is an aptly named meditation on that most taken-for-granted media design "space," our computer desktop. In many of the works in this five-artist show, curated by Iris Hoppe, windows pop open, navigation becomes impossible, images scroll, the digital horrific seems to comes alive. By far the best piece in "Desktop" is the stunningly beautiful "Wrong Browser" by the Dutch-Belgian duo Jodi. After clicking on what appears to be a link, software starts downloading on your desktop, and an announcement appears indicating it will take "2 hours, 10 minutes," though it actually downloads almost immediately. Double click on the desktop icon and your entire screen is commandeered by skeins of images that resemble an eye-popping Mondrian, incorporating material from Web pages in downright Frankensteinian fashion. You'll have to restart your computer to regain your desktop, but it's well worth it. From Smart Project Space
|
|
|
|
|
AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
|
|
News & Reviews
ARCHIVE:
• April 25
• March 28
• February 13
• January 17
• December 13
• September 13
• August 16
• July 26
• June 28
• May 31
• April 26
• March 29
|
MINIS:
DIGITAL DISCRIMINATION
"Race in Digital Space" is a conference on digital divisions at MIT on April 27-29.
SUBMIT
Cast 01 (Conference of Communication of Art, Science and Technology) will be held on September 21-22 in Bonn, Germany. Deadline for proposed contributions is May 31.
MOVIES AND MASSES
The Lake Placid Film Forum asks "Do Filmmakers Have Social Responsibility?" A stellar cast of director and critic participants will answer at this June 6-10 confab in Upstate New York.
CELLULOID MEETS DV
The Moscow International Film Festival will host its second "Media Forum," June 22-27, to focus on new media within the context of the long-running film festival.
NEA REDUX
"The NEA Tapes" is a documentary about the beleaguered U.S. arts agency from Eidiahouse. Now it's online and will be joined by additional archival footage.
DREAM TIME
Yapa is a central Australian word for "indigenous people," and "Dream Trackers: Yapa Art and Knowledge of the Australian Desert" is a CD-ROM featuring 51 Warlpiri artists and storytellers. Soon to be released by UNESCO.
PROPOSITION
The "Perte de Signal Anima" project features digital video works by emerging women artists, to be showcased in Montreal this fall. Submissions due by June 1. |
|
