ZKM, photo © Uli Deck
This article comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online for free.
Peter Weibel is an artist, curator and media theorist. He started by exploring the art of performance before discovering the creative potential of media and technologies. In addition, whilst running ZKM in Karlsruhe, he was the artistic director of digital art events and the new media art curator.
Everyone knows your work as a theorist and curator, but it is first and foremost as an arti...
Telofossiles
This interview comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online, for free.
Whether it’s videos or online pieces, small applications or sound installations, the artworks of Grégory Chatonsky are committed to revealing what we don’t see, or what we no longer see, to capture the traces and dig out the rhizomes, all the while being anchored in reality, in urban and human geography… Image, still or animated, and flow (technological, corporal or physical)...
Robert Henke. Photo © Jimmy Mould
This article comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online for free.
Strange feeling when slipping between the black curtains that block the great hall of the Lieu Unique in Nantes: a mix of curiosity, excitement, but also anxiety… This is the first time we are faced with "Fragile Territories", a tentacular installation by Robert Henke.
How did you conceive "Fragile Territories"? On which technical and conceptual basis...
"Dream House" by La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela
This article comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online for free.
As far back as the early 1900’s, the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo foresaw sound as a medium by playing “noises” with the instrument he called an ‘Intonarumori’. Since then, numerous artists or sound artists have participated in what today is called Sound Art. Now art centres like ZKM in Karlsruhe, the MAC in Lyon and...
"Map" by Aram Bartholl
This article comes from the 12th Digitalarti Mag. Read it online for free.
New commissioners, 1% for art, direct commissions… Media art projects are increasingly being coupled with funding schemes that emphasize their durability in public space. But such progress should not distract us from the real problems posed by the concept of augmented sustainability.
That media art has its place in public space is no longer subject to debate. Its various forms...
Pioneer—this is the term most often used to describe Fred Forest in the playing field of media arts. Two more words form another refrain: “network” and “territory”, like the X and Y axes of his artistic activity. This practice is rooted in the last century, as he began by “trafficking” images and paper, and then progressively annexed every mode of communication, from video tapes to virtual worlds.
Born in the pre-television era (in 1933 in Mouaskar, A...
The speed of an Internet data exchange is measured in thousands of kilometers per millisecond. The distance that separates us from a source of digital information on a computer, wherever it may be, has vanished. Nevertheless, during a two-way exchange of information between humans instead of machines, each person’s biological clock influences her experience and her capacity to interpret the exchanged information. Now that synchronous (live) interactions are increasingly present in our di...
EMF Planétarium
This article comes from the Digitalarti Mag #11.
Segueing from the realm of virtuality and awaiting the fall of yet another ephemeral new "frontier of reality", telepresence is the latest incarnation of media art magic, as it bridges gaps between protocols and devices with various forms of interactivity.
If the collective unconscious imagines this faculty to be somewhat divine, notwithstanding its duplicitous connotation, the more down-to-earth definition o...
Will they save the world? It’s always difficult to redefine a trendy word, especially one that’s been so butchered by the media that we think “hacking” is bad, and that “the hacker” is a powerful bandit.
My definition of “hacker”, whenever I can give it, is closer to “exalted engineer”. The first hackers, and their culture, were born in a miniature model club at MIT. They were making electric trains, very far from the image of p...
Human bodies that are technologized, hybridized and connected have haunted imaginations and representations for decades. In novels, artworks, mangas and comics, film and advertising, these images have sensibly moved from the realm of pure fiction to projections of near futures. The phantasmagoria of these figurations of technological virtuality is now doubled by incarnated virtuality, currently brewing in the very real world of laboratories and enterprises.
Some artists tackle these issues ...
Access interactive online version, download free pdf version. Or order the print version today.
Free iPad version with free Magcloud or pdf lite apps.
EDITORIAL
CONNECTED BODIES, AUGMENTED BY THE SUN
This summer, you have several options to give your body a makeover: run it through the beachside skate parks on the U.S. West Coast, sublimate it into an online avatar, or implant it with various devices (robotics, chips, etc.) in order to increase its potential. T...
(credits photo : Olivier Ratsi)
Where are you…? The city is not just an economic network based on division of labor—it’s a network of emotional connections, a perpetual source of crossed lives, tragedies, love stories, intimate and public moments.
The city as a confluence of networks is nothing new. Cities have always followed the same logic as networks; they have always constituted a system of exchanges. In this sense, medieval cities, for example, whose spatial...
Paris, Frankfurt, Ghent, Berlin, Rennes and, since January, Lyon and Bordeaux, with Mexico, Toronto, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia on the horizon… The Processing Cities project—a series of regular and participatory workshops open to anyone interested in open source tools for visual arts and code-related creativity—pursues its territorial coverage. Mark Webster, president of the Free Art Bureau, initiated the project.
Mark, how does the Processing Cities project ...
How to instil a timeless dimension, intrinsic to art, into one’s own work, and question at the same time scientific advances of one’s era? How to seduce conquistador-collectors in the North Pole, investors in China or Europe, with a critical eye on the alienation of our ways of life tied to the development of new technologies? How to teach the art and science correlation at the Sorbonne and prepare an exhibition at the far ends of Ural and Siberia?
Olga Kisseleva’s artwork...
"There will be no web 3.0 after the web 2.0", explain Francis Pisani and Dominique Piotet in the second edition of their book, "Comment le Web change le monde?" (how is the Web changing the world?). Both authors, an analyst in Silicon Valley and an independent journalist based for a long time in California, favour the term "Web Métis" (Hybrid Web), a combination of technologies and new uses. On the occasion of the conference "Du web 2.0 au web mé...
Since my first visit to Linz, in Austria for the Ars Electronica festival in 2009, I have been trying to analyse the impact of the oldest festival (32 years old already) in the field of art and science on culture and the regional economy. How was a city like Linz, with its 190,000 inhabitants, (400,000 including the region), able to fund the festival and the associated centre that became models at a global level and what where the resulting influences?
For more than 30 years, the Ars Electr...
Proceedings of the symposium Quel Marché Pour L'art Numérique ? (What Market For Digital art?) organized by Digitalarti - featuring Drouot Formation and the teaching institute of the Hotel Drouot (French auction house)– as part of the Futur en Seine festival at the CentQuatre, in Paris, last June 22nd.
Summary of the three round tables with participating artists and digital and contemporary art professionals who outlined suggestions to open up the digital art market by try...
Whereas new media have largely invaded contemporary art manifestations, the nature of the digital artwork — the one that is primarily based on the play of a program and the automatic calculation of a computer — keeps on challenging the art market that necessitates the transaction of objects. Yet digital art — or at least if there is any practice that we would want to specify in such terms — isn’t limited to software and computer screens. Far from being immaterial,...
In emancipation from the traditional circuits of manufacturing and trade, fablabs and techshops are spreading around the world their free and open source techniques to build Internetready machines, the most famous being the 3D printer. This is where artists, DIY coders, hackers, engineers and neophytes learn and share knowledge. In October 2010, the first Plastic Hacker Space Fest took place in Vitry-Sur-Seine, near Paris.
The first Plastic Hacker Space Fest, organised by /tmp/lab was held ...
Borrowing journalistic postures they smash formats with humour or with poetry. Playing with oxymoron and manipulating images, they bend and move points of view reclaiming their subjectivity... What are the strategies of these contemporary artists who in gathering up information melt and remap the world?
At the Science PO conference in Paris[1], Valéry Grancher, a visual artist active in the digital sphere postulated the following: from the time an artist questions a world topic, hi...
