The Trap is a kaleidoscopic BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that examines the perilously flawed evolution of social theory underpinning Western foreign policy since the 1950’s. Curtis’ amazing use of archival footage– reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine paintings– blend with carefully organized narrative and interviews with key players to make highly instructive viewing. The 3-hour journey moves through game theory, nuclear deterrence, market incentivization, R.D. Laing’s theories of family repression and on to genetic determinism, meritocracy, Prozac and finally neo-conservative interpretations of positive and negative liberty.
The program makes a compelling case that these flawed theories have been consistently embraced by both liberal and conservative ideologies and stand in the way of moving beyond our current state of peril.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the World Expo organized in Brussels in 1958. Focusing on internationalism and the brotherhood of men, the Expo expressed unlimited self-consciousness and progressive optimism. Mostly a trade fair and a platform for obvious clichés, it was at the same time a rare occasion were the subversive ideas of the modernist avant-garde and the hopeful beliefs of an open-minded post war generation went hand in hand.
My two all time favorites are the now still standing Atomium and the long gone Philips Pavilion. The Atomium (see image above), designed by Belgian architect André Waterkeyn, is 335-feet tall and consists of nine steel spheres that are connected. It represents the molecule of iron magnified 165 billion times. Being a large-scale mind blowing atom, it has exhibition spaces inside. On my recent trip to Belgium, I was confronted with numerous publications on Expo 58, which inspired me to visit the Atomium and experience its weird architecture once again.
The Philips Pavilion was more than a building at the fair; it was a multimedia experience displaying the technological skills of the Philips Company by combining light, sound and color. Le Corbusier is often credited as the main architect of the building, but his involvement is slightly overestimated. In reality, his collaborator Iannis Xenakis, a Greek architect and experimental music composer was responsible for the design. Le Corbusier, however, commissioned electro-acoustic composer Edgard Varèse to create an immersive sound installation, Le Poème Electronique (The Electronic Poem). Visitors to the Pavilion were treated to an impressive multimedia performance: 400 loudspeakers moving Varèse’s composition through 3D space, projections of images, and text by Le Corbusier.
“Le Poeme Electronique proposes to show, within a distressing tumult, our civilization on her way to conquest modern times”, Le Corbusier would say. Here is the video:
Although the World Expo of 1958 clearly reflected societal and political tensions of its time (Cold War competition and displaced colonial superiority), it is difficult to avoid a feeling of nostalgia when considering the various modernist attitudes that it temporarily materialized.
“My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge.” (Edward Said, Orientalism)
Recent political developments have once again shed light on the question of East/West relationships. Framing the Other: 30 Years After Orientalism, is a symposium that looks at the 30th anniversary of Edward Said’s Orientalism as a suitable opportunity to re-examine the impact and currency of Said’s key arguments. Famously suggesting that discourse about other cultures is always inherently ideological, Said developed a highly controversial postcolonial critique of cultural representation. The symposium will focus on his legacy to analyze visual culture and its construction of the ‘Other’.
Organized by the Courtauld Institute of Art in London on April 26, lecture topics will range from 19th Century visual culture to contemporary Islamic art.
Planet of the Arabs is a trailer-esque montage of Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims by artist Jacqueline Salloum. Descending from Palestinian immigrants in the US, Salloum felt “forever the foreigner, and with the constant exposure to only negative images of Arabs in the news and Hollywood films, […] grew up feeling ashamed of being an Arab. […] her feelings soon reversed in her teens… with a twist of candy-coated vengeance.” Inspired by the book Reel Bad Arabs by Dr. Jack Shaheen.
Here for Framing the Other: 30 Years After Orientalism.
This short film was written, produced and directed by Charles and Rae Eames for the IBM Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Animated by John Whitney and scored by Elmer Bernstein, this cartoon animation traces the history of storing and analyzing information from the days of the cavemen up until 1958, placing the computer in the context of human development.
Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács produced the first installment of his Private Hungary (Privát Magyarország) series roughly two decades ago.
In these films, he reconstructs personal family histories, predominantly through home movies and photographs (shot roughly between the 1930s and 1950s), presenting ordinary lives shattered by historic social and political upheavals of the 20th century, which are significantly missing from these amateur visual records of private histories.
“Amateur films are human stories, which have more or less happened to everyone: we are born, we toddle, we bathe, we laugh, we celebrate, we’re surrounded by family. There are virtually no deaths, divorces, abuses, aggressions to be found in them. This is why, a home movie is essentially the representation of our pursuit of happiness. And happiness is nothing else than an attempt to flee death in all of its representations, all signs of perishability.” (Péter Forgács)
Here is a fragment of Forgács’ latest work, the 15th installment of Private History:
I can’t help but feeling retro today; blame it on the rainy weather or strange electromagnetic connections in the air. I’m listening to the sounds of the weird Theremin, one of the first fully electronic instruments, invented in 1919 by Leon Theremin. I wanted to share this remarkable video of the late great Clara Rockmore performing Rachmaninov’s Song of Grusia. Both Russian émigrés in the United States, Rockmore worked closely with professor Theremin on the development of his invention. Trained as a classical musician, she had an astonishing mastery over the instrument, defined by a rarely achieved accuracy and elegance.
The instrument is played without being touched. Two antennas stick out from the Theremin - one controlling pitch, and the other controlling volume. As a hand approaches the vertical antenna, the pitch gets higher, approaching the horizontal antenna makes the volume softer. Because there is no physical contact with the instrument, playing it requires precise skill and perfect pitch.
I’ve always been interested in the way in which the Theremin has pushed boundaries and set standards concerning the interaction between man and machine, how its history is closely connected to the social, aesthetic and scientific dimension of technology. From the early days on, its design tried to maximize social cohesion and human creativity.
The instrument is not an odd artifact from a long forgotten past, its tradition and innovative nature is still kept alive today, most notably by the Theremin Center in Moscow where Andrei Smirnov has developed many contemporary interpretations of the instrument. At this moment he’s organizing a workshop at Berlin’s electronic media festival Transmediale, teaching people how to convert your laptop into a digital Theremin.
Here for the interesting life story of Leon Theremin. Here for ‘how to build your own Theremin’. Here for the work of Andrei Smirnov.
“Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.
He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Modest beginnings, but look at us now.
Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists around the world. Each year the network evolves to include new partners - working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.
Artists have celebrated Art’s Birthday with lavish parties and gatherings, correspondence and mailart, and through Telematic networks using SloScan TV, Videophones, music composed for telephone lines, modem-to-modem MIDI connections, early bulletin board and chat systems, and (starting in the mid 1990’s) the Internet.
DJ Spooky’s new project Terra Nova – The Antarctica Suite, will premier at the Sundance Film Festival on January 22nd. After last year’s much acclaimed Rebirth of a Nation, a remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation that explored the film’s inherent racist character as a necessary American fiction, his Spookiness will now deliver a multimedia portrait of a rapidly changing and even vanishing environment – Antarctica. He has set up his portable studio to capture the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms: “Coupled with visual material from Getty Images’ vast collection, The Antarctic Suite is a seventy minute performance, creating a unique and powerful moment around man’s relationship with nature.”
Other recent art projects have also focused their attention on the harsh nature of Antarctica and the Arctic regions, most notably Pierre Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t (see image above), a search for a mythical white creature – the albino penguin, and Isaac Julien’s True North, a remapping of the journey of Mathew Henson, the African American explorer who was the first man to the North Pole.
Here for DJ Spooky’s project. Here for an interview.
A few days ago, I blogged a video on MAKE, a 17-minute piece done by a French amateur radio hobbyist. It shows him creating triodes, an early type of vacuum tube used for amplification, from scratch. The “performance” on the video is virtuosic, the artisan showing such ease and panache in doing fabrications by hand that are unheard of these days, such as creating the glass bulbs that he uses. He even does little flourishes between each step, like a close-up magician accenting a complicated card trick. The whole thing, even the old-school Gershwin soundtrack and the little placards between “scenes,” is utterly charming. The builder apparently also built many of the machines he uses to create his tubes.
The video has become something of a darling of the Tech/DIY blogosphere, now showing up all over cyberspace. It’s amazing how resonant this kind of lost artistry and handywork has become for so many of us. So many people have posted on the blogs and emailed me saying how inspired they are by the piece. I’d love to think it’ll get more people into their garages, their basements, and at their kitchen tables, trying a new craft or building something cool and/or useful. There’s something about making physical objects, with your hands, learning new skills, and pushing the limits of your talent and creativity that is unmatched. And in this video, we see someone in a league by himself. But hopefully, not for long.
(Unfortunately, we can’t display the movie format in-line. You can view it on the Make: Blog link below.)
Art Threat did a great post this morning about the Czech art group Ztohoven. On June 17, 2007 they were able to broadcast a nuclear explosion on Czech National Television. A mountain resort in the Krkonose region appeared to go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke. The video was a hoax pulled of by Ztohoven who released a statement on their MySpace page claiming responsibility: “We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group, our aim is not to intimidate the society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on daily basis both in the real world and in the world created by the media…We hope our action will become an appeal for the future and remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth.”
The performance, entitled Media Reality sparked controversy throughout the country. The Czech National Gallery awarded the group with the newly created NG 333 prize for their work. ”This piece—alongside all of the art the group Ztohoven is making - is crossing the border from art into something more social. The artists are trying to escape from the cage of art, and into real life. They would like to influence their own lives, and other people’s lives.” The cash prize totaled approximately 333,000 KOR, or US$18,350.
Unfortunately, six of the artists involved with Ztohoven have been charged with scaremongering and spreading false information. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison.
