Owen Mundy

I am tele-participating in a one-week online performance of Google queries at Transmediale 2012 in Berlin. The project, plainly titled, “Google,” is organized by Johannes P. Osterhoff and will run from Jan 30 to Feb 5, 2012. Each participant edits the search method for their browser search bar so that everything they type in this box, from the personal to the mundane, becomes instantly visible at google-performance.org.

The project (“manifesto” below) makes public what Facebook, Google, and any online search engine, crowdsourcing website, or social network already does by harvesting searches from users, and re-representing that data in a new context. While Google uses these queries to build and sell condensed user demographic data to advertisers, Osterhoff’s project asks, who actually owns your search data?

We shall do an one-week performance piece.

The piece is called “Google” and documents all searches we perform withthe search engine of the same name.

The performance shall take place during transmediale 2012 and shall start on Monday, January 30 and shall end on Sunday, February 5, 2012.

We shall not use undocumented ways to use the search engine Google during this time.

Each of our search queries shall create a web page that is indexed by this search engine and thus makes our searches publicly available as search results for everybody.

Finally finding time to edit documentation from A Single Composite exhibition this summer in Berlin.

A Single Composite is a series of kinetic installations and projection apparatuses that stretch, twist, and loop film strips containing declassified and other found reconnaissance footage. Using reconstituted digital printer chassis, this cinematic enterprise is projected on walls, ceilings, and floors, to form a series of individual moments of surveillance and implied violence.

I am happy to announce the launch of the new website for Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture and the corresponding release of issue #11 POWER, which I co-organized with Avantika Bawa.

POWER, issue #11

This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet, at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects?

Necropolis by Roi Kuper

If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?

GWOTEM by J.M. Badoud

This issue of Drain presents artworks, essays, and other creative works to actualize answers to these questions and re-channel them into different connectivities, ways of becoming and conceptual production.

The Gift of Giving by Oscar Perez

We are pleased to present Ian Buchanan and Roi Kuper as our feature writer and featured artist. This issue also includes essays by Emma Cocker and Chris Revelle, as well as interviews by Alexander Stewart with artist Andy Roache and Bertha Husband with Blazo Kovacevic. In our Creative Writing section, we present works by Camille Meyer, BT Shaw & Elizabeth Lopeman, Vanessa Norton, Emma Cocker and Morgan Campbell. Art projects works by Jamie Badoud, Diana Heise, Cyrico Lopes, Bob Paris and Oscar Perez.

Past issues

A semantic network visualization and detail using tags generated from the hierarchical tagging system I created with Thomas Evan Lecklider as part of my Camp La Jolla Military Park project.

For example this item, Defense Contractors recruit at UCSD Job Fair, in the park is filed under: business » arms industry » spending » recruiting

Just received files from the portraits taken during The Americans exhibition in Niceville, FL. See more images on my website.

Many thanks to K.C. Williams, Director of the Holzhauer Gallery at Northwest Florida State College for her help in coordinating this project.

If you are in Los Angeles / Long Beach check out Keyword Intervention at this group show:

inSCRIPTion: … text … image … action …
November 8th – December 9th
Opening Reception: November 9, 2010 (3-7 pm)

Cerritos College Art Gallery
11110 Alondra Blvd
Norwalk, CA

The current ubiquity of transmediated and telepresential dialogues, most notably via the casual and partially-inscriptive technologies of computer-aided chat programs and cell-phone text messaging, certainly complicates the age-old distinction between written and oral communication, and between langue and parole. In part, this conceptual convergence is predicated on the collapsing of linguistic signifiers into the immanent patterns of (un)becomings inherent to computational code. In such an (intra-)active environment, the living fluidity of dialogue is often actualized by digits (a technophenomenological fusion of finger movement and binary language) and the lifeless permanence of inscription can manifest as a dynamic system of inSCRIPTion.

Reveling in the physical and conceptual opacity of words, the fourteen contemporary artists participating in inSCRIPTion at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, in aiming for a field of matrixial encounters, produce materialized event-scores that hover somewhere between notation and realization and which play games with language through transplantation into various deviant contexts. Some of the diverse multi-media works in the exhibition demand that the artist and/or viewer perform an action, while others emphasize the creative and performative act of reading itself. Still others contain moving, as opposed to static, text and/or process found language through a scripted algorithm. The end results of these (re)visualized schemas include readymade actions, speaking objects, and literal semiotic machines that nevertheless remain discursively framed, which is not to say trapped, by the nationalist, racial, gendered, and sexed, political/philosophical structures in which they are embedded.

Participating Artists: Lisa Anne Auerbach, John Divola, Jonmarc Edwards, Mark Steven Greenfield, Jim Jenkins, Sherry Karver, Jason Manley, Katja Mater, Anna Mayer, Owen Mundy, Christina Ondrus, Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Cody Trepte, and Penny Young

TINA B. in VENICE
at Claudio Buzziol Gallery and in the Church of St. Leonardo, Venice, Italy.

Artists:

Ludovico Bomben
Enoc Armengol
Pedro Valdez Cardoso
Daniel Gonzalez
Daniel Hanzlík / Pavel Mrkus
Jenny Marketou
Katharina Lackner
Santi Moix
hNkD
Owen Mundy / Joelle Dietrick
Norman Leto

Thanks to TINA-B and Exchange Radical Moments!.

I’m speaking about new work at the upcoming Art Clinic #3 in Neuköln, Berlin.

ART CLINIC # 3 @ WERKSTADT e. V
1.11.2010
MONTAG 20-22UHR

Owen Mundy (USA)
Boris Duhm (DE)
Enda O’Donoghue (IRL)

Werkstadt Kunstverein Berlin e.V.
Emser Straße 124
12051 Berlin Neuköln
www.werkstadt-berlin.com

I launched Keyword Intervention in January 2007 and for almost four years now it has been scraping topical search terms and attracting random traffic. Today I moved the project to its own domain, keywordintervention.com and also updated the documentation on the site. Below is a sample of the last 500 search terms by users all around the world. The full list is here.

New project posted here