VIDEOGUD 2011

VIDEOGUD SPRING 2011
Kultur i länet
Uppsala, Sweden

A collaboration between the county councils of Gävleborg, Uppsala, and Dalarna to show video art in public places – for example in libraries, schools and hospitals.

Arts Gävleborg – Video Room
Theme

The theme for this spring’s movies is the human relationship with the city and countryside. Whether the works in the spring program takes place on the coast, in town or in front of a waterfall as they all have in common that they are asking questions about how humans project the feelings and sentiments of the phenomena in nature and in the city.

Common to the five works is that the artists relate to the province or city as the work takes place in. The city or the countryside is not given to the works but its influence is being investigated.

The program begins with Owen Mundy film “Through A Glass Darkly” in which what we normally see as the wings – the landscape now is the focus, Mundy works followed by Hanna Ljungh settlement and dialogue with a waterfall. In Ulu Braun’s film “Atlantic Garden” meet people, landscapes and nature, reality and fiction.

The program concludes with two films “Zwischen” and “The Perfect Hour” which takes place in cities, one in Berlin, the others in Stockholm. In both works, you can choose to see the city as a backdrop or motaktör the main character.

Still from Through A Glass Darkly
Through A Glass Darkly

(translated from Swedish)

Through A Glass Darkly is a remix of the landscape of popular films depicting war. Eerily quiet, but also beautiful, creates images at a contrast between stillness and chaos, between beauty and destruction.

The films are chronologically compiled, ie. first clip is from a film about American War of Independence followed landscapes and scenes from movies depicting war and conflicts in the world until today. Taken out of context becomes important landscapes charged in themselves, while they remind us of nature as a battleground. Examples of some films that used in the work are The Patriot, Gone with the Wind, The Thin Red Line and Apocalypse Now.

Through A Glass Darkly is originally an English translation of a verse in the Bible’s Korinterbrev, in Swedish reads: “Now we see in a dim way, such as in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face.” Stanza, Breakthrough A Glass Darkly, has been used in the English translation of Ingmar Bergman’s film “Through a Glass Darkly.”

—Andreas Bjersby
Kultur i länet
Projektledare konst

Poster

Program

3 Feb – 24 Feb
Through A Glass Darkly
Owen Mundy, USA

24 Feb – 17 Mar
How to Civilize A Waterfall
Hanna Ljungh, Sweden

17 Mar – 7 Apr
Atlantic Garden
Ulu Braun, Germany

7 Apr – 28 Apr
Zwischen
Diego Aguilló, Germany

28 Apr – 19 May
The Perfect Hour
Niclaz Erlingmark, Sweden

Display Stations

Gävleborg: Sandviken Public Libraries, Silvanum Gävle, Voxna Valley High School, Show Bilbliotek, Gävle Hospital, Hudiksvall Library, Workshops Port Hedland.

Uppsala: Uppsala University Hospital, Formation Center Jan Fridegård Bålsta, Enköping Hospital, Tierps clinic.

Dalarna County: Dalarna Museum, Falun Public Library, Old Meken Smederevo, Hedemora Public Library’s Cultural Right, Vansbro library.

inSCRIPTion: … text … image … action …

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

Curated by James MacDevitt.

The Difference Between Then and Now

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TINA-B Festival
Nostic Palace, Czech Ministry of Culture, Prague
October 7-24th, 2010

In the October 2010 TINA-B Contemporary Art Festival in Prague, Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick will re-stage their 2006 project The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn. Originally developed in York, Alabama, USA, Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick borrowed lamps from the residents and installed them in an abandoned grocery store. Each lamp was set to turn on every night, and because of the inexactitude of the timers chosen, did so in an organic fashion, one by one, reflecting not only the participants in the community, but also the history of Alabama’s social movements. In an area where a nearby hazardous waste landfill caused the water undrinkable, the artists and the community collectively revived the vacant commercial space, removing roomfuls of damaged post-Katrina FEMA water boxes and transforming the downtown with the lamps, pulsing at their own pace, human in the imperfections and variety, and more powerful as a collection.

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As if a scientific study with controls, the re-staging of the project in Prague and Venice studies the nature of site-specific and community-based art. Both cities provide unusual cross-cultural comparisons about domestic settings and the cultural, geographical and political structures that affect private space. The 2006 installation developed before the U.S. housing crisis, and these 2010 installations will develop as the global economy still recovers from the impact of the current economic downturn. In this context, the simple gesture of gathering of everyday objects and spaces can yield unusual insights into common assumptions about micro-macros shifts—the individual and the state, private spaces and public concerns, local and global.

More information

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Recent and ongoing projects

Howdy, it’s been awhile since I last shared news about recent and ongoing projects. Here goes.

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1. You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore

You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore is an installation that projects moving US Geological Survey (USGS) satellite images using handmade kinetic projection devices.

Each device hangs from the ceiling and uses electronic components to rotate strips of satellite images on transparency in front of an LED light source. They are constructed with found materials like camera lenses and consumer by-products and mimic remote sensing devices, bomb sights, and cameras in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

The installation includes altered images from various forms of lens-based analysis on a micro and macro scale; land masses, ice sheets, and images of retinas, printed on reflective silver film.

On display now until July 31 at AC Institute 547 W. 27th St, 5th Floor
Hours: Wed., Fri. & Sat.: 1-6pm, Thurs.: 1-8pm

New video by Asa Gauen and images
http://owenmundy.com/site/close_your_eyes

2. Images and video documentation of You Never Close Your Eyes Anymore will also be included in an upcoming Routledge publication and website:

Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice
by Rebekah Modrak, Bill Anthes
ISBN: 978-0-415-77920-3
Publish Date: November 16th 2010
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415779203/

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3. Give Me My Data launch

Give Me My Data is a Facebook application designed to give users the ability to export their data out of Facebook for any purpose they see fit. This could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats. Give Me My Data is currently in public-beta.

Website
http://givememydata.com/

Facebook application
http://apps.facebook.com/give_me_my_data/

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4. Give Me My Data was also covered recently by the New York Times, BBC, TechCrunch, and others:

Facebook App Brings Back Data by Riva Richmond, New York Times, May 1, 2010
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/facebook-app-brings-back-data/

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5. yourarthere.net launch

A major server and website upgrade to the yourarthere.net web-hosting co-op for artists and creatives. The new site allows members of the community to create profiles and post images, tags, biography, and events. In addition to the community aspect, yourarthere.net is still the best deal going for hosting your artist website.

Website
http://yourarthere.net

More images
http://owenmundy.com/site/design_yourarthere_net

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6. The Americans

The Americans is currently on view at the Northwest Florida State College in Niceville, FL. It features a new work with the same title.

More images
http://owenmundy.com/site/the-americans

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7. Your Art Here billboard hanger

I recently designed a new billboard hanging device and installed it in downtown Bloomington, IN with the help of my brother Reed, and wife Joelle Dietrick.

Stay tuned here for news about Your Art Here and the new billboard by Joelle Dietrick.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Art-Here/112561318756736

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8. Finally, moving to Berlin for a year on a DAAD fellowship to work on some ongoing projects, including Automata.

More images
https://owenmundy.com/blog/2010/07/new-automata-sitemaps/

I’ll be giving a paper about Automata at the upcoming ISEA2010 conference in Ruhr, Germany.
http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/conference/tuesday-24-august-2010-dortmund

Many thanks to Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of the Center for Future Civic Media http://civic.mit.edu/ , for inviting me to the MIT Media Lab last August to discuss the project with his Computing Culture Group: http://compcult.wordpress.com/