“Imagine a virtual reality mapping environment designed to perfectly replicate a city’s streets and buildings. It could be powered by the data from a team of cars driving around with roof-mounted cameras pointing in every direction, whose images can then be manipulated into a map-based wireframe grid to fully immerse users. OK, so you’re thinking this is old hat, right? I mean, Google Street View has been doing this for years now. Thing is, the idea was around long before Google. In fact, M.I.T. students were doing the same thing on the rich streets of Aspen as far back as 1978…” More here. (Read Naimark’s comments for clarification)

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Whether trusted employee, civil servant or concerned citizen, greater openness was never so close at hand.

The Transparency Grenade was created in January 2012 by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.

The body is made of Tusk2700T, a highly resilient translucent resin, printed from a stereo-lithography model made by CAD designer Ralph Witthuhn based on a replica Soviet F1 Hand Grenade. Metal parts were hand-crafted from 925/1000 sterling silver by Susanne Stauch, complete with operational trigger mechanism, screw-on locking caps and engraving. More here.

We have reached Peak Oil – the maximum capacity of global crude oil extraction and production. After Peak Oil, the total global oil production cannot be increased. In the future, demand will always exceed supply. The global struggle for resources will intensify. Despite this our dependency on oil is growing further. We cannot, or do not seem to want to do without oil. We are seriously dependent.

The works in the exhibition deal with our dependency on oil and the economic, political, and social entanglements and consequences of this growing dependency.

The exhibition analyses the effects of globalisation by following the trail of the Baku-Tiflis-Ceyhan pipeline, a huge construction project begun in 2005 and completed in 2006 which leads the oil mined on the shores of the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea (Ursula Biemann). It comments on the planned construction of the Gazprom Tower in Saint Petersburg in a Brechtian singspiel (Chto Delat?) and investigates the financial structure of The World in Dubai, an artificial archipelago in the shape of a map of the world (Christian von Borries). It travels to the Niger Delta, into the “Heart of Darkness”, where a ‘fierce war for oil’ (Die Zeit) has been raging for nearly forty years (Mark Boulos, George Osodi), but also to the Japanese island of Hashima, the Egyptian oasis Al Qasr and the Texan town of Electra – places whose natural resources (coal, water, oil) have been depleted (Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Thomas Nordanstad). Werner Herzog in turn visits the battle ground of the first war that was solely fought for oil, documenting the burning oil wells in Kuwait set on fire by Iraqi troops who had occupied the country in August 1990.

Several artists in the exhibition make use of cartography. In “Petropol”, for instance, the French Bureau d’Etudes charts the history of the global oil trade from the end of the Victorian age to the year 2002 via the First and Second World Wars. Their diagram resembles an absurd road map whose trails are traced by the geopolitical and economic interests of major countries and their oil companies. In “George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens, c.1979–1990″, Mark Lombardi maps with mathematical precision the political and financial connections between various actors which are generally held to be antagonists (some having even declared war on each other), and by doing so reveals the nexus of global politics and terrorism.

Heath Bunting in turn makes a succinct intervention in everyday life by “updating” protest placards from 1989 still found on British motorways asking to ‘BAN MOTOR CARS’, next to which in 2003 he placed posters stating ‘GLOBAL WARMING IS YOUR FAULT’. The Californian Center for Land Use Interpretation explores invisible oil production sites in urban areas of Los Angeles, one of the oldest and still largest oil fields in the United States, and while doing so discovers unexpected camouflage techniques and oil rigs in unlikely neighbourhoods. Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s “…deeply__to the notion that the___world is___to the observer… (commited) (real) (external)” merges the artist’s personal memories of the first ‘Car-Free Sundays’ in the German Federal Republic in 1973/74, implemented in the wake of the Oil Crisis, with the political implications of this crisis and the simultaneous development of conceptual art practices. Michael Mandiberg’s “Oil Standard” consists of a plug-in for different web browsers which translates all US dollar prices on E-commerce websites into barrels of crude oil. A range of computer games in the exhibition – Oil Imperium (DE, 1989), Oligarchy (IT, 2008) and Oil Rush (RU, 2011) – provide players with the possibility to construct their own (albeit virtual) oil empires and learn a great deal about the oil business in the process. Last but not least artists are also launching an advertisement campaign for the rare resource (DOTOILDOT) and transforming the Dortmunder U, the former Union Brewery, into a gigantic oil refinery (UBERMORGEN).

Curated by Dr. Inke Arns

With works by: Ursula Biemann (CH), Christian von Borries (DE), Mark Boulos (US/NL), Heath Bunting (UK), Bureau d’Etudes (FR), The Center for Land Use Interpretation (US), Chto Delat? (RU), Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Thomas Nordanstad (SE), Werner Herzog (DE), Mark Lombardi (US), Michael Mandiberg (US), George Osodi (NG), Natascha Sadr Haghighian (IR/DE), UBERMORGEN.COM (AT/CH) and others.

In recent years there has been increased attention to so-called ‘socially engaged art practices’. Equipped with a sense of urgency and intent, artists and curators develop work with the support of communities or groups to tackle political and social issues. While the success of these projects are not easily measurable, they often reiterate the role of artist/ curator as protagonists of specific forms of social change, which posits a direct contrast to recent activism which carefully distances itself from any leader-based political organizational categories.

Pascal Gielen, co-editor of the recently published volume Community Art, will draw out a critical cartography of community art and will speak about the power and impotencies of this phenomenon. Since modernity, art and community, artist and social work have had an ambivalent relationship. Can art have a role in building communities? What is the political potency of forms of art that strive to integrate individuals and social groups?

In the book Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing (Paul De Bruyne, Pascal Gielen, eds.; Valiz, 2011) the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri states ‘Every kind of change belongs to a form of community art’. This is the inverse of the premise that community art can be an integral component of desired social changes. Negri confronts community art, its supporters and critics with a challenging responsibility, and extends this to include everyone who wants to bring about change in social, political, economic, technological or ecological arenas. Communal and artistic go hand in hand.

In Community Art, visual and performing artists and theorists employ diverse modes of thinking and writing to explore the practices and concepts of the phenomenon of community art in western and non-western societies. The book does not offer a cut-and-dried theoretical model, but presents a new critical reformulation of community art in society.

Community Art is part of the Arts in Society series / Antennae by Valiz

Editors: Paul De Bruyne, Pascal Gielen; Authors: Tilde Björfors, Bertus Borgers, Paul De Bruyne, Luigi Coppola, An De bisschop, Miguel Escobar, Varela, Jan Fabre, Alison M., Friedman, Pascal Gielen, Sonja Lavaert, Carol Martin, Antonio Negri, Alida Neslo, Tessa Overbeek, Lionel Popkin, Richard Schechner, Hein Schoer, Ricky Seabra, Jonas Staal, Klaas Tindemans, Luk Van den Dries, Quirijn Lennert van den Hoogen, Hans van Maanen, Bart van Nuffelen, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Zhang Changcheng; Design: Metahaven; 374 pages, sewn paperback, 21 x 13,5 (hxw), Eng; Supported by Fontys College for the Arts; ISBN 978-90-78088-50-9, $ 28,95, published by Valiz Amsterdam, distributed in the US by D.A.P. New York

Pascal Gielen is professor of sociology of the arts and director of the research centre Arts in Society at Groningen University (NL), and also director of the research group and book series ‘Arts in Society’, Fontys College for the Arts, Tilburg (NL).

Publications series Arts in Society:

Gielen, De Bruyne (eds.), Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times (NAi Publishers, Rotterdam 2009)
Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz, Amsterdam 2009)
De Bruyne, Gielen (eds.), Community Art (Valiz, Amsterdam 2010)
Forthcoming spring 2012: Gielen, De Bruyne (eds.), Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm: Realism versus Cynicism (Valiz, Amsterdam 2012).

Thanks to Anne Barlow, Executive Director, Art in General and Vera Zolberg, Professor of Sociology, New School for Social Research.

Mapping the Local presents an overview of the major phenomena, trends and issues of contemporary art based on various subjects in each semester; a special emphasis will be placed on the East European region, in the form of seminars, presentations held by invited lecturers, field trips to museums, institutions and artist studios. The course is primarily directed towards Erasmus students as well as local students of the Intermedia and Fine Art Theory and Curatorial Studies departments.

While offering an insight into the Hungarian contemporary art scene, one of the course’s main intentions is to develop personal contacts and cultural interactions between local and foreign students fostering an emerging intercultural dialogue. It combines both theoretical and practical methods and is led by Zoltán Kékesi and Szabolcs KissPál, a scholar and an artist.

Site Specific Interventions in Public Space is a survey of the evolution of the different art practices relating to site specific and other public art projects or interventions which take place outside of the traditional museum environment, including sculpture, installations, graffiti and performances specifically conceived of as forms of artistic discourse situated in public spaces and/or within the routines of everyday life.

The class is taught by artist and author Allan Siegel and includes a discussion of selected theoretical works well as an analysis of significant specific projects and art work. Additionally, drawing upon the discussions and readings, students will apply their ideas to situations and locations throughout the city.

Invited speakers for the classes include:

Andreas Fogarasi - Golden Lion Award 52nd Venice Biennial; solo shows among others at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Grazer Kunstverein; Georg Kargl - Fine Arts, Vienna; Lombard Freid Projects, New York; Ludwig Museum, Aachen; Ernst Museum, Budapest. Tamás Kaszás - Recipient of Smohay Prize 2010 and Studio of Young Artists Association; exhibitions at W139, Amsterdam; NBK, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Istambul Biennial 2011. Eszter Lázár - art historian and curator of many international group exhibitions with a focus on Contemporary Central and Eastern European Art, lecturer on the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, former curator of kArton Contemporary Art Gallery. Little Warsaw - Collective name for artists András Gálik and Bálint Havas. The duo exhibited at the Venice Biennial; the Berlin Biennial; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; GfZK, Leipzig; ApexArt Gallery, New York; and the 7th Manifesta. Their work is featured in Art After Conceptual Art published by MIT Press. Ilona Németh - Munkácsy-prize beholder, exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford; Kunsthalle Budapest; 49th Venice Biennial; Expo Hannover 2000; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; etc. Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Intermedia Dpt. Bratislava. János Sugár - Exhibitions among others at Annely Juda Fine Arts, London; Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Exit Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Anthology Film Archive, New York; Documenta IX, Kassel; etc. professor at the Intermedia Dept. of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. János Szoboszlai - art historian and curator, adjunct lecturer and head of the Dept. for Art Theory and Curatorial Studies, chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros (ICA-D), former director of acb Contemporary Art Gallery. Tibor Szemző - graduate of the Hungarian Music Academy, musician, composer and filmmaker, founder of the acclaimed Hungarian ensemble Group 180 and The Gordian Knot Company.

The Hungarian University of Fine Arts joined the Erasmus Program in 1998. Over the past thirteen years the number of our partner institutions has grown to 48. Each year 40 students are selected to travel abroad on scholarship and nearly as many international Erasmus students arrive to study at the HUFA. Students studying at the HUFA, besides course work in areas such as sculpture, painting, Intermedia or photography, participate in, and organize, projects and exhibitions on an off campus.

Contact information for the International Office of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts: Zsófia Rudnay / International Coordinator / Hungarian University of Fine Arts / email: foreign [at] mke.hu / tel: +36 1 478 0980 / web: www.mke.hu

With most demonstrations and street protests it’s hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated can be very empowering. In the ever-congealing, international abyss of the iPhone (the networks, the users and the apparatus itself) anonymity in this perceived collective is curbed by a registered phone number and GPS coordinate tracking. Social networking-enthused developers have been finding more and more ways to implement existing social network platforms to enhance the usage and appeal of their applications.

The iPhone applications which engage in content and experience sharing, which no doubt offer a number of benefits, require new or pre-existing usernames, email addresses or often involve third-party requests for sharing through pre-registered accounts on social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. One of the key features of the application TinyRiot, which provides a cathartic soundtrack while its users shake out ‘tiny’ bouts of frustration, is that it does not require users to sign in or register to share.

As users record, title and approve videos, they are auto-uploaded to a shared YouTube account which acts as a sub-platform where users can share and watch each other’s videos in real time. In turn, videos appear embedded on the application’s homepage which also shows the GPS coordinates via a modified GoogleMap API, with lightning bolt icons showing where TinyRiots have occurred around the world.

Aside from location, what makes each video unique is how the iPhone’s audio and visual functions are exploited. With shaking as the guiding praxis, the application’s major functions benefit from two facets of the iPhone’s design — namely the relative positions of the camera and flash as well as the microphone and speaker. With the speaker only a few centimetres away, a howling, reverberating feedback is triggered as the internal microphone begins recording audio.

At the same time, as users shake their iPhones while taking video footage, the pulse of the camera flash is synced and since the lens is a few millimetres to the side, nanoseconds of blinding flashes and visual feedback appear on the user’s screen-cum-viewfinder. Aesthetically, what would be a normal video takes on a disorienting effect that is equal parts entertaining and blinding. The accompanying soundtrack draws on a number of pre-loaded samples and as users shake, a randomized assortment of heavy metal sounds emit.

A simplified, 8-beat format of guitar and drums was chosen for simplicity as the developers saw a similarity in the way teenagers once picked up their instruments and regardless of skill, started playing loud. TinyRiot is to apps what teenagers were to rock - just playing loud and shaking it all out. In doing so, the gesture-based method of sampling and remixing takes another step towards becoming its own platform. Seeing potential in the format, TinyRiot’s main developers Sembo Kensuke of media-art unit Exonemo and Taeji Sawai, who has worked extensively on music-enabling technologies with The Boredoms, teamed up with Atari Teenage Riot frontman Alec Empire and recently released Atari Tiny Riot as an application.

Users are able to play with loaded samples of the artists’ beats and rhythmic arrangements. Banner lyrics such as “Anonymous Teenage Riot” blare through the cacophony and align with a spirit the developers’ and the band champion. In terms of participation it’s in the tradition of mass movements and as a collaboration, the anonymous user videos are uploaded on the TinyRiot page where fans watching each others’ ‘riots’ has an infectious property. With uploading remaining anonymous, the application creates an international, anonymous collective.

As social networking itself no longer wrestles, but rather develops and intensifies its own imperative of increasingly constant and closer connectivity, the parameters of sharing and privacy have manifested themselves in the form of contentious issues for users. Users of TinyRiot find themselves no longer, or less, restrained by the (inadvertently) associated pressures or assumed embarrassment from the “friend” connections maintained on the social networks in which they participate. TinyRiot users can sidestep electing usernames or avatars, however, once a video is uploaded to the mutual YouTube account, the application’s developers have included a prompt for inclined users to further share their videos on existing social platforms.

The model of sharing anonymously or recording video publicly has re-emerged in recent years as an issue entwined with both privacy and ethics. Both have been highlighted in the media-wide coverage of Wikileaks and its submission policy and procedures, as well as in recent legislation in some states of the United States where it has become illegal to record video of law enforcement. Indeed, these issues will remain a nuisance as social networking developers move forward on an increasingly user-generated content and information-dominated superhighway.” — Vicente Gutierrez, Neural.

In September 2011 citizens began to gather and then occupy Liberty Plaza near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. American Plutocracy seeks to mark occupation sites across the U.S. Wall Street is everywhere. Find an occupation site near you. Learn how here.

Mountain Ghosts is a site-specific sound art installation that infuses the entire University of Colorado / Colorado Springs campus with a location-based layer of audio created collectively by the artist and participants. Building on Burgund’s interest in systems, collected voices, and participation, Mountain Ghosts explores sound as fundamental to our experiences of space, place and history. Participants use a custom smartphone app to make audio recordings that the Mountain Ghosts system then codes by location and immediately assimilates into a collective databank for other visitors to access.

As participants walk through the UCCS campus listening to location-based music and participant commentary, they can respond to prompts on the Mountain Ghosts interface that invite them to reflect on their surroundings and contribute recordings of their thoughts and experiences. Participants are, in effect, creating “ghosts” from the past that are permanently attached to specific locations. For the duration of the project from September 8th to mid-November, 2011, Mountain Ghosts folds individual voices into a collective archive that creatively documents a unique sonic record of actions within the landscape.

It is in our movement that we give ourselves away. Our trails reveal a course that, when mapped, indicates our design. So we are tracked and our presence logged.

Tracing Mobility sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how its hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.

WE ARE OPEN: Trampoline opens a platform to anyone who has something to say about mobility and migration in the networked space. Tracing Mobility is particularly open to projects which explore participation in network activity where they intersect with the freedom of movement of individuals, their freedom of self expression and their freedom of conducting economic activity.

In the expectation that many interesting projects and developments on the theme exist already, the curators are inviting artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, NGO’s and the interested public to contribute to the Tracing Mobility – Open Platform.

YOU ARE OPEN: You connect to one of the following statements:

• you have an idea on the how, why and where of ‘tracing mobility’
• an interest in, a technique or a project developed for exploring mobility in music, visual arts, performance or business
• a mind to show, perform or present your work in “mobile formats” whether film, music, talk or speech or publication
• a need to comment on artists’ former and contemporary works that reflect the theme
• and you plan to be, stay or pass by in Berlin on the 26th and 27th of November 2011

JOIN TRACING MOBILITY…. Tracing Mobility Open Platform offers you:

• space at the HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), in its renowned open-space architecture
• an extremely vibrant and well established venue for the visual and performing arts
• a dialogue with an audience of your contemporaries in culture and the arts
• professional technical support
• the chance to take part in the culmination of the Tracing Mobility series of events, the final act.

To join us, please email a half-page description of what you want to contribute (idea, title, format, length) or any questions you may have, either in English or German as soon as possible to tank [at] trampoline-berlin.de

Deadline is October 17th 2011!

Tracing Mobility is a project by Trampoline – Agency for Art & Media, in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Radiator Festival Nottingham

Funded by:
Hauptstadtkulturfond
European Cultural Foundation
Botschaft des Königreichs der Niederlande