This symposium and its topic are a continuation of BADco.’s artistic interest to relate performance and image. More concretely, it was motivated by our most recent work Responsibility for Things Seen that was presented in 2011 within the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us, in the absence of performers in the six-months exhibition, to pursue the idea of ‘theater by other means’ and to custom develop a database video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology.

Who can apply: If you are a scholar or practitioner working on the nexus of performance, image and technology, if you are working in or between any number of fields such as, but not exclusively: performing arts, visual arts, cinema and expanded cinema, human-machine interaction, technological performance, architecture, neuroscience, we are inviting you to present your research interests in form of a presentation and/or participate in the debates at our symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating.

When and where: The symposium will take place on 16-17 March 2011 in Zagreb, Croatia. The artistic programme will start on the 15th.

What is the topic: With “Actionable Image” we propose to explore the experimental encounters between the image and the body — two modalities of organized materiality, agency and receptivity affecting each other, two modes of expression whose encounters in our age are predominantly arranged, composed and mediated by means of visual technologies.

We tend to subscribe to the critique of the domination of image and the scopic regime: the unebbing repetition of hegemonic representations, the homogenization of mediatized social experience, the habituation of sensory apparatus to technological artifice. However, understanding the encounter of image and body as a field of performance allows us to explore this encounter beyond the adequation of sensory perception to technological apparatus, of social behaviors to reproduced images. A mis-encounter where incompatibilites between technology and habit, excess of agency on the side of image or on the side of spectators, interventions in the transmission process, strange situations of viewing emerge, that encounter becomes an indeterminate field of negotiation, slippage, misperformance, deterritorialization and reterritorialization… In short, a field of divergences that are themselves frequent subject to experimentation in art.

With this other scene of image in mind, we calls for contributions that will bring their analysis to bear on situations of problematic spectating, strange apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, agency of images, strategies of performing images and other issues relevant to the nexus of body, image and technology.

The symposium and attendant artistic programme will include a.o., contributions by artists and scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Maaike Bleeker, Vlatka Horvat, Stephen Zepke and BADco.

What are the keywords: performance and image, performed image, image in performance, image and corporeality, agency of image, actionable image, algorithmic cinema, image and interface, iconicity of image, apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, cinematic viewing vs theatrical viewing, image and presence/ absence…

How to apply and when is the deadline: We are looking for contributions of various formats, including but not limited to papers, short presentations, demonstrations and participation in the debate, up to 30 minutes in length. If you want to participate in the symposium, please send us a short note stating your topical interests, discussion points, format, etc. and a short description of your background. While we cannot cover your expenses, we can help you find convenient travel arrangement and affordable accommodation, and we will do our best to address your interests and provide an insightful debate.

All proposals should be sent in by 10 February 2012 to: tom at badco.hr.
You’ll be notified of our decision shortly thereafter.

Publication: A special issue of Frakcija Performing Arts Journal will accompany the symposium. We are looking for contributions of those taking part in the symposium, but also others who cannot join us in Zagreb but are researching the topic in academic or artistic formats. Articles, essays and artist’s page(s) proposals will be considered. The submission deadline is March 2, publication June 2012. All proposals (and any questions on submission) should be sent to: ivana at badco.hr

The symposium and attendant artistic program are organized in collaboration with Multimedia Institute/MAMA and the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW.

The symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating is part of LABO21 – European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, a partner project of BADco. (Zagreb), BUDA Arts Center (Kortrijk), Laboratorium (Antwerp) and University of Circus and Dance (Stockholm). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

An expedition to the banks of the Caspian landed Rufus Corporation in a dystopian “future-opolis” that became the location for their experimental film noir. Pushing the envelope of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom programmed computer they call the “serendipity machine.” whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir delivers a changing narrative - culled from 3,000 clips, 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music - that runs forever and never plays the same way twice. The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes. Driven by key words, the work seamlessly comes together as a movie – that is not a movie.

The film follows the observations and surveillance of the central protagonist, a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood), stuck in a 1970’s looking metropolis operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Voiceovers and dialogues (in English and Russian with English subtitles) forge the implied narrative – wire tapped telephone conversations, reel-to-reel tapes, snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his employer and a mysterious woman referred to simply as “Dispatch”. A narrator describes various impositions on the citizens including strangely manipulated time keeping, a language ration, lowered suicide statistics, the effects of lithium, and the workings of the water factory. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by the city and the factory he is working in, as the course of the story is controlled by the machine that edits the film.

whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir – inspired by the Suprematist quests for transcendence, pure space and artistic higher ground – was created with a small crew, one American actor and local actors hired en route. Filmed over two years, the artists journeyed through Central Asia ending up in a 50-year old utopian town. The fictional location is named – in a nod to Alphaville – City-A. The place is the result of the ironic marriage of the opposing forces of the twentieth century as pre-fab apartment blocks are gilded with mirrors and chrome. In actuality City-A is a conflation of many places from the mid-century modernist planned living systems of ex-soviet space to the Norman Foster sci-fi baubles requisite in every new rich metropolis.

Past exhibitions of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir have included the photo series by Simon Lee created during the production, When the future throws a shadow over the land, Wintergarden by Eve Sussman and Simon Lee and photographs from Yuri’s Office that Sussman shot with Monia Lippi.

whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival – Future Projections and at Cristin Tierney Gallery in NYC after previewing at Haunch of Venison–London.

An online excerpt of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was commissioned by Triple Canopy’s Internet as Material project.

Rufus Corporation worked with Joshua Noble to write an internet capable version of Jeff Garneau’s original algorithm.

A live edit preview of six excerpted episodes of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir can be seen here.

whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir is a project of Creative Capital with additional support from The Richard J Massey Foundation, Fundación La Caixa Sisita Soldevila/Amister Collection, Cristin Tierney + Jim Shapiro, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York Foundation for the Arts, CeCArtslink and Adam Audio.

Credits:
Directed by Eve Sussman
Mr.Holz Jeff Wood
Edit Kevin Messman
Algorithm Jeff Garneau
Produced by Catherine Mahoney
Camera Angela Christlieb Sergei Franklin Eve Sussman
Sound Supervisor Algis Kizys
Still Photography Simon Lee Monia Lippi
Assistant Director Misha Libman
Production Design Ioannis Savvidis Nicolas Locke
Production Coordinators Olga Mustach Vlad Rotmistroff
Cast Marina Fedorenko Olga Grislis Claudia de Serpa Soares Kenyen Akurpekov Gyul Ziyatova Meryambek Eralin
Voices Alexandra Lerman Valeriya Shondra Jim White Jeff Wood Misha Libman Konstantin Kudin
Music/Sounds Algis Kizys Colleen Burke + Matthew Smith Volkmar Klien Bradford Reed + Lumendog

Have you ever wanted to rob a bank? Blending secret missions and high adrenalin, you are in an interactive heist movie on the streets of the city, playing the lead.

A Machine To See With is a work for pedestrians and their mobile phones. On arrival at the venue, you enter your mobile phone number, then receive a phone call with instructions. A man’s voice leads you through the city and into a heist movie; you are the protagonist, as you move from hiding money to meeting up with a partner in crime and onwards to the bank, the tension rises. You must deal with a bank robbery and it’s aftermath.

A Machine To See With mixes thriller clichés with the reality of the urban environment and explores the tyranny of choice and the financial crisis.

A Machine To See With is presented in Edinburgh in association with Remarkable Arts as part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2011.

In conjunction with the exhibition The Talent Show (through August 21), The Henry Art Gallery invites you to join artist James Coupe for a screening and discussion of the artist’s recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ in (re)collector, Surveillance Suite, and the web-based work Today, too, I experienced something… I hope to understand in a few days.

James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. Educated in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Creative Technology at the University of Salford (England), his recent projects have included appropriative powerline networks, parasitical cellular phone agents, autonomous robot systems, self-organizing telephone call centres, and installations in which computers use spam to search for the meaning of the Internet. His recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ explores the witting and un-witting relationship between the artist/participant and the viewer/ participant. This method of ‘surveillance cinema’ utilizes computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage from a variety of sources including YouTube clips, studio footage, and surveillance camera feeds. The footage is then algorithmically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often using cinematic ‘templates’ such as Antonioni’s classic film Blow-Up.

(re)collector (2007) from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Day 3 from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Coupe has exhibited both nationally and internationally, receiving awards from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award, Creative Capital and Artist’s Trust.

Audiences in Manchester and Barcelona will be joined together on screen for the first time to create their own interactive generative cinema experience complete with sets, costumes and props. Employing the scenographic techniques of Alfred Hitchcock the artists have created a miniature film set in which the audience can act and direct their own movie, transporting participants into animated environments and sets where they will create their own unique narrative. Participants in Manchester will be transported into this telepresent experience via a blue-box studio to join the ‘players’ in Barcelona within the dramaturgy of the model set.

This immersive interactive installation pushes the boundaries of telematic art and generative cinema, combining the possibilities of telepresent performance with miniature scale-models and animated scenes for the development of audience participation that explores the way narratives can be revealed through a subtle interplay between artist, audience and environment.

With key references to the telematic stage, user generated performances and the dramaturgy of networked communication this project references Shakespeare’s infamous line ‘All the world’s a stage’ with the seven rooms of a model film set relating to the seven ages of man presented in ‘As You Like It’, providing a metaphysical backdrop to steer the unfolding plot.

All the world’s a screen is an interactive telematic project created by Charlotte Gould and Paul Sermon from the University of Salford, developed during their residency at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA Study Centre and their studio residency at Hangar.org, a visual arts production centre in Poblenou, Barcelona.

Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen creates works that are fields of concrete sensations. In association with Sydney Festival 2011, Artspace presents the first major exhibition of his work in Sydney, including two live sound score performances by Melbourne-based composer and musician Oren Ambarchi accompanying screenings of the title work.

Curated by Artspace Executive Director Blair French, the exhibition features three major video works – NEWTON (2009), ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE (2009/2010) and the centrepiece 42 minute work EARTH (2009/2010), a ‘videographic’ remix of primarily seventeenth and eighteenth century Italian and French paintings in which the human body is penetrated, fragmented and re-arranged.

Ho Tzu Nyen creates audio-visual artworks that translate and compress biographies, philosophical ideas and scientific anecdotes into highly staged and choreographed ‘text-less’ images and sounds that seek to communicate at the level of the nervous system. He makes projects that have been presented in cinemas, galleries and theatres, as well as on television. His work evidences a strong interest in the relationship between images and sound, as well as avant-garde music from different parts of the world, and he frequently collaborates with musicians to produce new and radically divergent versions of soundtracks for his works. Echoing his approach to video and film-making, he choreographs every element of his exhibition installations with precision, looking to create an experience of the exhibition itself that is actively relational and intensely durational, resonating conceptually and rhythmically with the moving imagery.

About Ho Tzu Nyen: Ho Tzu Nyen’s first feature film, HERE, premiered at the 41st Director’s Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival (2009). He has exhibited widely, including in the Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005), the Singapore Biennale (2006), and the Dojima River Biennale (2009). ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE, a doom-metal adaptation and ‘compression’ of Nietzsche’s philosophical novel, was made in collaboration with film, music, fine arts, acting and musical theatre students from a Singaporean arts college, for the Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009) in Queensland, Australia.

About Oren Ambarchi: Oren Ambarchi is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar, ‘re-routing the instrument into a zone of alien abstraction where it’s no longer easily identifiable as itself. Instead, it’s a laboratory for extended sonic investigation’. (The Wire, UK). Ambarchi works with simple constructs and parameters, exploring one idea over an extended duration and patiently teasing every nuance and implication from each texture; the phenomena of sum and difference tones; carefully tended arrangements that unravel gently; unprepossessing melodies that slowly work their way through various permutations; all resulting in an otherworldly, cumulative impact of patiently unfolding compositions.

Presented in association with Sydney Festival 2011.

Artspace is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Artspace is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Live Cinema/In the Round features the works of Ziad Antar, Inci Eviner, Hassan Khan, Gülsün Karamustafa, Maha Maamoun, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, artists from the East Mediterranean region who explore how cinema informs representations of reality through videos, installation and performance works. The title, In the Round takes its cue from theater-in-the-round, in which the audience surrounds the stage, allowing a more intimate experience for the viewer and a more realistic performance from the actors. Inspired by this theatrical technique, the works on view are not simply projected on a two-dimensional plane; they surround the audience and also migrate to other galleries within the museum. In each work, the actors (or sometimes the blatant absence of an actor) play out a specific role that invites the audience to imagine other possible narratives for the backdrops that host them. Live Cinema/In the Round is organized by Istanbul-based guest curator November Paynter.

The artists participating in this exhibition live in or are from countries located in the East Mediterranean, a region denoting the countries that are geographically located to the east of the Mediterranean Sea and happen to be linked by a continuous land mass. Over the course of the last decade the contemporary art institutions and initiatives in the countries of the East Mediterranean have created more opportunities for mutual cultural exchange and dialogue. A number of artistic residencies and funds now exist that encourage artists to travel between cities such as Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut and Nicosia. The artists selected for this exhibition often present their work in this region of the world and their inclusion in this exhibition was motivated primarily by their interest in performance-based practices and in particular the cinematic references found within their work.

Some of the works in the exhibition make use of found film footage or reconstruct known film scenes, whereas others create a dialogue with artefacts in the Museum’s collection.

Hassan Khan’ s work G.R.A.H.A.M. presents a portrait as both subject and audience in a continuously-shot real-time video of an individual asked to remain completely silent even while being interrogated off-camera by the artist. Gülsün Karamustafa’s Bekledigimiz Günler (The Days We Have Waited for) (2007), is the portrait of Istanbul at a specific moment in time. The work is comprised of footage taken from 1960s and 1970s newsreels that viewed now appears self-promotional and as such emphasizes the power of cinema as a social tool of communication. Building upon an earlier theme exploring the relationship between Egypt’s pyramids and its cinematic traditions, Maha Maamoun’s 9-minute film 2026 (2010) steps into the future to consider the pyramids and their relationship to Cairo’s city structure 16 years from now. (Untitled) Act I: The Departure (2007) and (Untitled) Act III: The Glorious Return (2008) by Christodoulos Panayiotou suggest scenes of introduction and finale for the exhibition. Panayiotou’s backdrop works present rolled theatre backdrops with a small reference photograph of their unfurled images as they would look when hung on stage. Infiltrating the historical galleries of the museum are three video works by Inci Eviner titled New Citizen (2009). Here, traditional decorative patterns are animated by moving female protagonists and their disconnected body parts in choreographies that deconstruct the surrounding motifs. In Ziad Antar’s La Souris (2009) a toy mouse is wound up by the artist and directed at a real mouse trap over and over again. The scene is a simple empty stage where the mouse is the only performer.

While Hassan Khan’s video G.R.A.H.A.M. acts as a steady, contemplative platform for the exhibition that harks back to the genre of portraiture, it is offset by the dense content and clear film references of Gülsün Karamustafa’s and Maha Maamoun’s works. Christodoulos Panayiotou’s backdrops appear to open and close a conversation between all the works in the exhibition while reminding the viewer of the defining role of the actor or narrator in a film, or the lack thereof. Inci Eviner’s videos seem to have escaped the borders of the official video gallery to virally spread throughout the Museum, while finally, Ziad Antar’s video La Souris is included as a hint for the audience to question what it is they respond to and then choose to see within an artwork.

Related Programs:

INCIDENCE
September 17, 2010 at 7 p.m.
Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia. Free to the general public.
INCIDENCE, a live concert with Hassan Khan, will be presented in collaboration with Slought Foundation. INCIDENCE is a seamless, continuous stream of improvisational pieces and music compositions by Khan accompanied by video sequences specially shot by the artist.

Live Cinema Live: An Afternoon of Conversations.
September 18, 2010, starting at 1 p.m.
Trabant University Center Theater, University of Delaware,
17 West Main Street, Newark, Delaware
November Paynter and Adelina Vlas, 1:00 p.m.
Nora Alter and René J. Marquez, 2:30 p.m.
Hassan Khan and Brian Kuan Wood, 4:00 p.m.

About the curator:

November Paynter has been based in Istanbul since 2002 where she worked as a Curator at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center until the end of 2006. She was one of two Assistant Curators of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005. In 2003 she was the recipient of the Premio Lorenza Bonaldi per L’arte – EnterPrize and the first curator under the age of 30 to be recognized with this award. In 2007, Paynter took the temporary position of Consultant Curator at Tate Modern for the exhibition Global Cities, before moving back to Istanbul the same year to work as Director of the Dubai Artist Pension Trust and as a freelance curator. In addition to writing texts for exhibition publications and artist monographies, she has written for art periodicals including Artreview, ArtAsiaPasific, Bidoun, and Artforum.

About Live Cinema:

Live Cinema is a series of programs in the Video Gallery of the Museum that explore the vast production of single-channel video and filmwork by a diverse group of local, national, and international artists. In the last decades an ever-increasing number of contemporary artists have appropriated these mediums as an artistic outlet, in a dialogue with the early video and Super 8 practices of the 60s and the tradition of experimental filmmaking. Each program of the Live Cinema series focuses on a specific aspect of this work, in order to both map and analyze this important facet of contemporary art production.

This exhibition is made possible by The Women’s Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Turkish Cultural Foundation. Public events are supported in part by the University of Delaware Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and by the Slought Foundation.

Iterating My Way Into Oblivion
by Carlo Zanni
July 2010 — 9′43” - 720p Video
Server side code / software, Film, Net Data

A Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.

When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.

The movies are always different while maintaining their narrative.

This project loosely refers to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”, speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.

This work follows two previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which Zanni coined the neologism “DATA Cinema”, suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live Net data, to create ever changing cinematic live environments.

Live video artist, Angie Eng, revives cinepoetry with miniature cameras, object manipulation and a light table with cellist Okkyung Lee and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi. A garden of digital improvisational delights, a cross between music for silent film, a surrealist appetizer and a magic act.

“The fundamental difference between cinema and video lies in their respective treatment of time. Video is real time. The video artist can relate more to happenings, chance operations, action theatre which made efforts to demolish boundaries between art forms and practices. Random Adventures/ Chance Operations (Duchamp, Cage) challenged the presumption that making art is active and viewing passive. Working in real time produces a chaos characteristic of nature which gives the artist an opportunity to create open ended structures.” — Angie Eng

This performance was partially funded by ETC presentation funds. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

The architectural overview involves four large canvas screens placed to make a 8 metre cube. Four projectors simultaneously run a combination of animation and film work and 2 performers act out various characters in front of the screens in real-time accentuating the narrative. Eight speakers are placed within the performance space to create a 3D sound environment using ambisonic technology allowing for precise spatial control of sound and music within the cube. Audiences are invited to stand between the four screens to experience the piece.

Ear Cinema - Late Noon Sun from Wajid Yaseen on Vimeo.