Structural Patterns

portables, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mall Plaza Vespucio

I received images from Ignacio Nieto, curator of the exhibition “portables” at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mall Plaza Vespucio in Santiago, Chile. The gallery is a satellite gallery of the National Museum and it’s located inside a luxury mall. According to the statistics, this gallery of the Museum is well attended due to its location… Brilliant, if the people will not attend the museum, bring the museum to the people. As mentioned in an earlier post, the exhibition includes Michelle Teran, Chimbalab, Alejandra Perez, Carolina Pino, GraphTech, Otto Von Busch, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Kurt Olmstead.

Ignacio selected a group of artists that are using electronics as a creative medium, specifically, creating portable electronics (hand-held or worn on the body). Above are details of works by noise artist, Alejandra Perez who created a sound mask, GraphTech who presented an over the limit alcohol device that calls a phone number in the U.S. when high alcohol levels are detected from a person’s breath and Chimbalab who created a mobile, potato-powered radio station.

GraphTech, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Kurt Olmstead

Miracle of Chile

The image above is my collaborative contribution. I worked with my old friend Kurt Olmstead to realize a project specific to Chile – “Miracle of Chile” which I’ve previously posted about. Our portion of the exhibition includes a virtual labyrinth that presents images taken by participants of what the “Miracle of Chile” is to them as reflected on the streets of Santiago, and three circuit boards with LCDs mounted onto tiles of the Santiago sidewalks.

Last November I received an invitation from Ignacio Nieto to participate in an exhibition titled “portables” at the Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago. Last Friday I returned from Santiago, following two weeks of production.

Early this year, I contacted my old friend Kurt Olmstead to work with me on a project that I knew would be beyond the scope of anything that I could do alone within a period of several months. Kurt was on board and we started discussing the premise of the project – Chile as the laboratory for neoliberal economic philosophy of the Milton Friedman flavor. Kurt and I grew up in the midst of Reaganomics. In the 80s, Reagan and Thatcher embraced Friedman’s neoliberalism and Chile was framed as the example of what privatization, deregulation of the markets and cuts to social spending will do to control inflation and allow a nation’s economy to prosper. In 1981, Friedman declared the phrase “Miracle of Chile” to reflect the transformation of Chile’s economy through his neoliberal philosophy as implemented by the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who studied under Friedman.

It is now 2010, we live in the midst of a global economic crisis and are now questioning the neoliberal economic formula. The art project consists of a workshop, public discussion, bus intervention and a virtual labyrinth. Each element asks participants in Chile to identify the Miracle of Chile in the scope of their city and personal lives. A documentation site is available at www.miracleofchile.com

Two workshops were held as part of the project, one with middle school kids and a second at Matucana100 Cultural Center asked participants to document the Miracle of Chile in their public space.

Street situations, an interactive sidewalk tile invites pedestrians to ask one another “What is the Miracle of Chile?”

As an example of privatization of public space, a small bus intervention was executed on bus rider handles sold for advertisement.

La apertura para la exposicion portables es el sabado, 14 de agosto a las 18:00 horas en Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mall Plaza Vespucio, Santiago, Chile y permanecera hasta el 19 de septiembre. Curada por Ignacio Nieto, el tema de la exposicion es artistas que usan y crean dispositivos como medio creativo. Portables presenta las obras de Michelle Teran, Chimbalab, Alejandra Perez, Carolina Pino, GraphTech, Otto Von Busch, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Kurt Olmstead (fotos abajo).

Yo estoy estrenando El Milagro de Chile, obra colaborativa con Kurt Olsmtead.

The exhibition “portables” opens August 14th at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mall Plaza Vespucio and will run through September 19th. The show presents an array of artists using portable electronics as a creative medium and is curated by Ignacio Nieto. The show includes Michelle Teran, Chimbalab, Alejandra Perez, Carolina Pino, GraphTech, Otto Von Busch, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Kurt Olmstead.

Chimba Lab takes their portable radio transmission through the market

Beautifully encased CCTV viewer – a portable Panopticon

Pedestrians are questioned through a piece of sidewalk as electronic portable… What is the Miracle of Chile?

If in Santiago, check it out, if not, try the links in this entry…

“Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” by Carolyn Kane (May 27th, 2009) presents a thoughtful perspective on private performance for public consumption. The interview revolves around Bookchin’s latest installation consisting of edited YouTube footage of people dancing in their homes.  As Bookchin puts it:

…the YouTube dance, with its emphasis on the individual, the home, and individuated and internalized production, embodies key characteristics of our economic situation of post-Fordism. If Fordism once described a social and economic system that focused on large-scale factory production, post-Fordism describes a shift away from the masses of workers in the same space, to smaller scale production by workers scattered around the world. These workers are linked by technology rather than an assembly line, and there are more temporary or contract workers, often working from home, producing more specialized, less standardized goods.

Ideas that Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg’s virtual sweatshop piece “Double Happiness Jeans”.  An installation and performative work that has real people using their Second Life avatars making jeans for gallery visitors.

Resident Voting Cart Documentation is also on YouTube:

VOTEMOS.US an online initiative that questions how the 2008 United States Presidential Election would differ if all residents of the United States could vote, takes to the streets in the form of a voting cart by which participants may take the voice of either McCain or Obama as they make public a hypothetical vote for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections.

Catch the cart at Eyebeam during Open Studios on Saturday, October 18th, 3-6pm. Watch video of the cart traveling from Not an Alternative through Williamsburg to McCarren Park.

Special thanks to Jason Jones (cart fabrication), Charles Rittman (bust chiseling) and Not An Alternative for helping me realize the project.

On Wednesday April 9th, I was fortunate to be invited by curator Karla Jasso to a small presentation by a group of Mexican artists at el Laboratrio Arte Alameda, the beautiful colonial church converted into a new media center in the Historic Center of Mexico City.

I had met a few of the people present at the meeting during my stay in Mexico City for Transitio_MX02 last fall, but I had only seen one or two works by the artist presenting that afternoon. I came away from the meeting impressed and excited by the work that I had seen. Some of the work reminded me of projects I saw coming out of Carnegie Mellon University in the 90s, but entirely re-contextualized by the environment and culture of Mexico.

For example Gilberto Esparza’s robotic urban parasite series recalled the work of Simon Penny, particularly projects such as Petit Mal or Sympathetic Sentience. As Simon puts it: “robotic artwork which is truly autonomous; which is nimble and has ‘charm’; that senses and explores architectural space and that pursues and reacts to people…” However Gilberto Esparza’s creations are the rougher, tougher, streetwise cousins of Penny’s works.

Inspired by the street vendors (ambulantes) of Mexico City, who set up a sidewalk shop and will take electricity from a near by electrical post to establish a cozy store with light, television and radio, Esparaza’s “Parasitos Urbanos” (Urban Parasites) use the electric cables for power and as a means of movement. Pictured below are mrñ (maraña), dblt (diablito – little devil), “clgd” (colgado – hanging). Each of these creatures feeds from the electric cables that they use as a mode of transportation, they emit sound and through a series of sensors react to their surroundings. Watch the linked videos to see them in action. As much as I like the hanging species, I think that my creatures exist with the trash – ppndr-s (pepenadores) live near the gutters amongst the trash, playing, moving objects about.

Ivan Puig also presented his work. I was most intrigued by a current collaborative project in which he is creating a vehicle that will drive along abandoned railroads throughout Mexico. The vehicle will document these regions that were once vital economic hubs, but have been left abandoned as the railroads are no longer in use. People will be able to virtually ride along these abandoned tracks in real time by login to the site that will present live streams from the vehicle. Ivan also presented a large scale sound installation that recycles old technology to create a series of instruments that people may interact with.

Also amongst the presenters was Laboratorio Curatorial 060, a curatorial collaborative group that addresses various social issues by programming thematic exhibitions that commission new works from artists.

Artist Ivan Abreu presented his poetic combination of conceptual and new media art. Amongst my favorite of Ivan’s recent works is a sound performance using a record made from ice with Mexico’s National Anthem pressed onto it. He plays the anthem on a record player, but as it plays the ice begins to crack and melt, the record breaks and the artist struggles to keep it together so that it will continue to play.

In the midst of globalization, real-time communication networks, and the structuring of artistic production into a market-based system from education to the museums and galleries, it’s difficult to find artistic production that isn’t influenced by 20th century Western avant garde movements. What I find striking and exciting are the regional nuances that contemporary art production incorporates or that the most creative element by the artist is the manner that ideas and production are transformed according to the reality at hand.

We live in a cultural collage, that is to say, that the world is an assemblage of histories, people, products that traverse the globe. Through the sharing of information and knowledge, once distinct lineages of production are no longer distinct to a particular time or place, so it’s interesting to see how this information is hybridized in different locales. I’m not saying that this is anything new, it’s just fun to see it in the new media landscape and to pay witness to it (perhaps it just means that I’m getting old).

Following my opening at Vox Populi on Friday, one person commented that sequences of my animation reminded her of the animations of Harry Smith. Not being familiar with Harry Smith, I searched for his work and discovered the animation above on YouTube, where several others are available.

Although technically I appreciate Smith’s strictly geometric abstractions, I’m much more drawn to this particular animation that presents figurative characters set against the geometric lights and shapes. It seems that his interest in anthropology presented Smith with a wide array of characters to draw from such as Buddhist deities. Considering the animation tools of the period, Smith’s films are inspiring in so far as the work of one man who was also a folk music archavist, sound artist and mystic.