Föhnseher rises from the scrap heap of analog TV. Unlike other televisions, Föhnseher captures and displays images downloaded by people on surrounding local wireless networks.

Other people’s phones, laptops and tablet computers all become broadcast stations for this device, replacing the forgotten television towers of old.

The name föhnseher derives from fernseher, the German word for television, and the föhn, a strange warm wind known to the south of Germany. The words have a very similar pronunciation.

Föhnseher (Seer of Warm Winds) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Related project, using radio as metaphor, wifio.

The launch of East of Borneo marks the convergence of two very distinct lines of thought. What is the nature, and the future, of art magazines? And how might we give form to the sprawling history of art in Los Angeles, a form that can be generative and productive, not merely descriptive or fancifully speculative?

Launched in October 2010, East of Borneo is a collaborative online art journal and multimedia archive that offers a new way to research and present the various histories of contemporary art. Its hybrid form — which publishes newly commissioned art writing within a larger context of user generated material — reflects an editorial process of thinking through the delights and constraints of printed magazines, and fully considering the transcendent possibilities of online publishing today.

East of Borneo is a new model for art publishing that rethinks traditional editorial structures, using the power of networked collectivity to create depth and complexity. Articles incorporate web-savvy multimedia footnotes that offer readers immediate access to the primary materials — video, images, links and texts — that the writers have used in their research. Readers can upload additional items of their own, creating a growing archive of relevant content that activates and enriches the editorial material, highlighting unexpected connections and encouraging new lines of thought.

As you navigate the site today, you’ll find a range of content that reflects the sprawling, rhizomatic nature of Los Angeles as well as the broader international art world.

Recent articles include:

• Value Engineering: Roger Corman in His Own Context by Michael Ned Holte
• Mythology and the Remake: The Culture of Re-performance and Strategies of Simulation by Jenni Sorkin
• Character Development: Brody Condon’s Level5 and the Avant-LARP of Becoming Self by Jennifer Krasinski
• Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters by Quinn Latimer
• From a Waxy Yellow Build-Up to a Nervous Breakdown: The Fleeting Existence of Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman by Claire Barliant
• Do You Believe in Television? Chris Burden and TV by Nick Stillman
• Don Bachardy: Regarding Portraits by Susan Morgan

“As a writer,” notes Editor-in-Chief Thomas Lawson, “I have become accustomed to working in a way that allows skipping back and forth as a text builds, checking references and finding new evidence as a result of lateral moves across the internet. A few online publications allow readers a similarly multifaceted experience, although most quarantine reader participation in the shadow zone reserved for comments. Until now, no art publication has offered the kind of varied experiences provided by East of Borneo.”

East of Borneo is quickly becoming a substantial repository of information and interpretation from a multitude of perspectives. Visit us often to watch the site grow in both content and interactivity as we roll out further features. Visit us often to upload that telling image, indispensable text, incredible link. Join us on this journey.

Additional Resources:

• Read The Journey West, introductory essay by Thomas Lawson
• The Huffington Post calls us “A New Model for Online Magazines”
• Yes, We Pay Writers!
• Follow us on Facebook and Twitter

East of Borneo is published by the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts and is funded in part by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the J. Paul Getty Foundation.

East of Borneo
24700 McBean Parkway
Valencia, CA 91355
T: +1 661-253-7722
info [at] eastofborneo.org

Press Contact: Margaret Crane, mcrane [at] calarts.edu

Media artist, performance artist, composer and visionary, Nam June Paik (1932–2006) was one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century. Paik’s radical ideas on art and technology transformed what we now understand as video and media art. Renowned for his spectacular video installations and manipulated images of avant-garde performances, pop singers and television commercials, Paik paved the way for the sensibility of the MTV generation and YouTube phenomenon.

Tate Liverpool presents the first major retrospective since the artist’s death with museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf. The exhibition in Liverpool is the first UK exhibition of Paik’s work since 1988, and is presented in collaboration with FACT.

At Tate Liverpool, the first part of this dual-venue exhibition showcases around ninety works from all phases of Paik’s career, many shown in the UK for the first time, alongside documentary materials from his performances and early exhibitions. The show celebrates Paik as the pioneer of media art. At a time when television was still a novelty, Paik foresaw the future popularity of this new and exciting medium. Thought-provoking works such as TV Buddha series explore cultural clashes between East and West, old and new, while Video Fish 1979-92, which features live fish alongside television sets, juxtaposes the natural and the technological.

Ranging from his early music performances and his involvement in the Fluxus movement to TV works, robot sculptures and large-scale video installations, Tate Liverpool’s exhibition takes a definitive look at Paik’s oeuvre. Prepared Piano 1962-63 and Record Shishkebab (Random Access) 1963-79 demonstrate Paik’s close relationship with avant-garde music movements, while works like Magnet TV 1965 and One Candle 1989 show the diverse trajectory of his electronic experiments. Paik’s collaborations with cellist Charlotte Moorman and artist Joseph Beuys are also prominently presented in the exhibition, with a rich selection of photographs and ephemera related to their performances and exhibitions.

Paik continuously questioned existing notions of art and creativity, and tirelessly explored new and revolutionary ways of creating and appreciating art in a wider culture. Informed by profound knowledge and insight from Zen Buddhism to cybernetics theory, Paik created a uniquely non-hierarchical and inclusive vision of artistic creativity, and opened up the realm of art to the ever-changing world of cultural and technological innovations. Paik’s strong interests and involvements in electronic art and avant-garde movements can be found throughout the exhibition, representing all aspects of his experimental spirit that traverses his prolific career.

The exhibition continues at FACT. Focusing on Paik’s innovative use of technology, FACT showcase the major installation Laser Cone 2001-10, alongside sixteen single-channel video works, including Global Groove 1973 and groundbreaking satellite videos Good Morning, Mr. Orwell 1984 and Bye Bye Kipling 1986. Paik’s fascination with television stemmed from his idea of communication as a participatory ‘two-way’ system. In contrast with a widely accepted view of television at the time as an inherently voyeuristic medium, Paik focused on its democratic possibility of actively involving the public in the production of its contents. For Paik, communication across the globe was one of the most significant impetuses for deeper understanding of different cultures and societies, and eventually for the peaceful and harmonious world order. His experiments with laser were the continuation of his life-long exploration of newer technologies. Highly technological yet extremely spiritual, Paik’s laser works clearly indicate his uniquely humanist approach to technology.

Nam June Paik is initiated and developed by Tate Liverpool and museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf, curated by Sook-Kyung Lee and Susanne Rennert. The exhibition is presented in Liverpool by Tate Liverpool and FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology.

May 13-15, 2011 :: Massachusetts Institute for Technology :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 4, 2011.

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence.

For this seventh Media in Transition conference we want to focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition. Our first conference in 1999 considered this subject, of course. But that was before Facebook, iPhones, BitTorrent, IPTV and many other changes.

How are we coping with the instability of platforms? How are the classroom, the newsroom, the corporate office exploiting digital systems and responding to the imperative for constant upgrades. Our libraries and archives? Our public entertainments? Are new technologies changing the experience of reading? The experience of watching movies or television programs? How stable, how durable are current or emerging systems? How relevant are earlier periods of media change to our current experience of ongoing instability and transformation?

We welcome submissions from scholars and teachers in all fields as well as media-makers, producers, designers and industry professionals.

Possible topics include:

• Technologies of reading
• The future and fate of media studies
• Narrative across media
• Analog media in the connected era
• Emerging forms of journalism and community engagement
• New questions, new paradigms for media history
• Reappraising divides, digital, generational, and gendered
• Television: a medium of constant change?
• Rethinking access and restriction in the digital age
• The migration of print culture to digital form: promises and problems
• Oral cultures and digital cultures
• The advent of the book
• Corporate strategies for the digital age

Short abstracts of about 250 words for papers or panels can be sent via email to mit7@mit.edu no later than Friday, March 4, 2011.

While emailed submissions are preferred, abstracts can be snail-mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Mass. Ave.
Cambridge , MA 02139

Please include a short (75 words or less) biographical statement.

We invite submissions of full papers and proposals of full panels. Panel proposals should include a panel title and one-sentence description of the panel as well as separate abstracts and bios for each panel speaker.

Anyone submitting panel proposals should take it on themselves to identify and recruit a moderator.

Our expectation is that speakers will submit full versions of their presentations before the conference begins so that all conferees will have a chance to preview the materials.

We will be evaluating submissions on a rolling basis. The final deadline for submission will be Friday, March 4, 2011.

In collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf, dedicates a comprehensive retrospective to Nam June Paik (*Seoul 1932, +Miami 2006), founder of video and media art. With numerous loans drawn from both international public and private collections, the exhibition brings together German, Anglo-American and Korean research on Paik’s work for the first time and provides an extensive overview of the crucial developments of this extraordinary and influential artist of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The spectrum of this unique showcase ranges from music, (Fluxus-) actions and performance through to the media works: here the “materialised” works – such as the elaborate installations of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – are juxtaposed with video works as well as musical scores, (Fluxus-) concepts and manuscripts dating from the 1950s and 1960s as explosive intellectual charges.

Over thirty large sculptural works will be displayed, numbering among which is the installation Laser Cone, from 1998, to be shown in Germany for the first time, a work stemming from the last of Paik’s creative phases during which period he further developed and adopted laser technology into his work. Some of the other exhibition highlights are Egg Grows, 1984, One Candle, 1989, and Internet Dream, 1994. Similarly presented for the first time as part of an exhibition, is a large group of the famous TV Buddhas.

Sponsored by: Metro / UBS

*© Nam June Paik Estate, New York, 2010/ Kunststiftung NRW, Düsseldorf Photo by Sascha Dressler

The Nam June Paik Center is dedicated to the artistic and intellectual legacy of Nam June Paik, the renowned Korean-born artist who transformed visual art worldwide. In addition to its function as an exhibition space, the Nam June Paik Art Center developed a new publication, NJP Reader. The aim of the NJP Reader is to recontextualize Nam June Paik’s artistic thought and his ‘random access’ strategies in a topical discursive practice. Leading questions are: What is the meaning of Nam June Paik’s multi-medial experiments, performances, and sculpture for our current artistic practice and discourse? What new dimensions for re-imagining notions of technology, ubiquity, and human experience do Nam June Paik’s thinking and practice suggest? How does his practice potentiate paradigm shifts in broader understandings of the potentialities and characteristics of alternative processes of participation afforded by the introduction of media technology into artistic practice?

Obviously, Nam June Paik’s work requires a conceptual framework that goes beyond an art historical narrative. Therefore, for Issue #1, NJP Reader conducts an inquiry into the novel concept of artistic anthropology in art discourse as an invitation to produce new conceptual systems. The NJP Reader intends to be an open platform for generating novel ideas, connections and concepts (this intention is also reflected in choosing to use Nam June Paik’s initials for its title, rather than his full name). To this aim, the first edition of the NJP Reader is based on a questionnaire that as many artists and intellectuals as possible were invited to contribute responses to. Through this conceptual inquiry the NJP Reader hopes to help in creating novel lines of thought and conceptual schemes. For the questionnaire three questions were formulated:

1. Artistic anthropology intends to produce novel models of relationality and connectivity. Could – Nam June Paik’s legacy as a form of – artistic anthropology contribute to an artistic discourse going beyond the framework of relational aesthetics? Who are the artists in our day developing relevant examples of rethinking and recontextualizing an artistic anthropology?

2. What could artistic anthropology mean for a current artistic practice? How could it relate to medium-specific qualities? Is it a form of artistic communication defined by a post-medium condition? Or is it a practice that demands the concept of medium-specificity to change?

3. What could artistic anthropology - as a form of knowledge production - mean for the current classification system? Will it challenge the dominant paradigms of the established humanities and sciences? What type of new models might this trigger? How can artistic anthropology contribute to a better and more political understanding of the human condition? And what could artistic anthropology mean for the concept of art in general?

The NJP Reader #1

Editors: Youngchul Lee, Henk Slager

Contributions by: Ricardo Basbaum, Jean-Paul Fargier, Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania, Jeongwhan Jo, Clara Kim, Lev Manovich, Arjen Mulder, Simon O’Sullivan, Wongil Park, John Rajchman, Susanne Rennert, Szabolcs KissPál, Peter Weibel, Haegue Yang, Hiroshi Yoshioka, David Zerbib.

Final Editor: Annette W. Balkema

ABSTRACT: Although machinima has grown exponentially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss exemplary and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

在整个九十年代，数字计算和网络技术在很大程度上只应用于办公室工作，其文化影响仅限于个别专有领域的爱好者。如果说这十年的新媒体艺术形成了一种非常重要的艺术亚文化，它基本上还是孤立和自我参照的，部分原因是由于艺术家们对黑客文化的迷恋，由于长期以来格林伯格主义者 (Greenbergian) 的艺术审察, 还由于艺术机构将其边缘化. 在电脑离开有限的用户群体, 成为有广泛社会功能之前,瓦克﹒寇司克 (Vuk Cosic)，朱迪(Jodi)，阿列克谢﹒舒利金 (Alexei Shulgin)，和希思﹒班廷 (Heath Bunting) 等艺术家重演了二十世纪初的前卫战略，同时将图形与八十年代黑客文化的程序演示平等化[1].

今天，相比之下，数字技术，是日常生活中的明确无误的存在，并逐渐与地来自主流社会的需要和公约不可分割的. 网络文化是一个广泛的社会文化的转变，就像后现代性，并不限于科技发展或“新媒体” [2]. 正因为数字和网络技术的成熟与当代文化是不可分割的, 我们必须在更宽广的背景下理解其, 事实上, 这甚至比电视产生于后现代的现象更令人瞩目. 今天, 可以说, 所有的艺术都是网络艺术的一种延伸.

VIDEO SCREENING: Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s is a three-part screening program presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) that investigates the correspondence between the pioneering, and rarely seen, works of artists experimenting with video in both Japan and America.

• October 6 - The Language of Technology: Featuring works by James Byrne, Computer Technique Group (CTG), Gary Hill, Takahiko Iimura, Ando Kohei, Toshio Matsumoto, Nam June Paik, and Keigo Yamamoto.

• October 13 - Open Television: Featuring works by Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Saburo Muraoka, Nam June Paik, TVTV (Top Value Television), Keiji Uematsu, Video Hiroba, and Video Information Center.

• October 20 - Body Acts: Featuring works by John Baldessari, Mako Idemitsu, Norio Imai, Joan Jonas, Hakudo Kobayashi, and William Wegman.

EXHIBITION: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape :: October 25, 2009 - January 3, 2010: A restaging of the landmark 1975 exhibition that first presented ten photographers: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr. thus signaling a new photographic approach critically engaged with the consequences of man’s interaction with the land. Plus the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) presents California Oil Landscan. Commissioned by LACMA, this video projection installation serves as a contemporary response to the legacy of New Topographics.

Related Artist Talks & Book Signings:

• October 10 – Mitch Epstein, American Power
• October 25 - Frank Gohlke, Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews.

Related Exhibition Walkthroughs: Join six contemporary Los Angeles-based artists as they share their reflections on the exhibition New Topographics.

• November 1 – Mark Ruwedel
• November 8 – Amir Zaki
• November 15 – Peter Holzhauer
• November 22 – Shannon Ebner
• December 6 – Kim Stringfellow
• December 13 – Catherine Opie

Related Symposium:

November 7 - What’s At Stake? A day-long discussion addressing issues of curatorial re-staging and the legacy of New Topographics with regard to urban studies, ecology and architecture.

Speakers include: Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation), Douglas Crimp, Norman Klein, Miwon Kwon, Richard Meyer, Edward Robinson, Britt Salvesen and other special guests forthcoming. Followed by a sneak preview of Jim Venturi’s Learning from Bob and Denise, a documentary about his parents, the architecture team Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

This event is made possible through a collaboration with The Contemporary Project at USC. The Contemporary Project is a multi-year initiative to create new forms of dialogue between the academic community and the art world.

EXHIBITION: The Sum of Myself: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection :: October 25, 2009 - January 3, 2010: This exhibition presents the visually compelling and psychologically charged terrain covered within the enduring theme of self-portraiture. Spanning photo history, included are works by Edward Steichen, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Opie, Douglas Gordon, Walker Evans, Irving Penn, and Robert Heinecken. Concluding with Testament, an installation by LA-based artist Natalie Bookchin, a revealing edit of video blogs and diaries from the web that analyzes contemporary expressions of self.

Related Artist Talk:

• December 1 – Natalie Bookchin: The Collective Construction of Self in the Digital Age

PUBLICATIONS

WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES: One year of conversations about the most provocative and challenging issues facing contemporary photography. With over 90 contributors, the book features some of the most interesting and innovative practitioners and thinkers about photography today including: George Baker, Walead Beshty, Sarah Charlesworth, Harrell Fletcher, Paul Graham, Leslie Hewitt, Sharon Lockhart, Carter Mull, Allen Ruppersberg, James Welling, and many others.

The Sun as Error: Artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book. In collaboration with designers Dexter Sinister, The Sun as Error creates both an open-ended reading of her practice and a rethinking of the idea of an artist’s monograph.

Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA (available December 2009) :: December 5th - Book launch and reception: A comprehensive look at Machine Project’s take over of LACMA on November 15th, 2008. A field guide to over sixty performances, interventions and temporary additions to the museum. With essays by Charlotte Cotton, Mark Allen, Joshua Beckman, Jason Brown, Ken Ehrlich, Liz Glynn and more.

To order, visit: http://www.lacma.org/shop/onlinestore.aspx

All programs are organized by the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and are supported in part by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund.