REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Burbano

Andrés Burbano: Opening Source

http://open-ing-source.net

Translated by: Aline Hernández

(Héctor Archundia Ibarra, Julieta Guzmán Gómez Aguado and Estefanía Piñón Escudero)

Andrés Burbano (1973) is a Colombian artist who´s practice focuses on digital-art. With an MA in Interactive Media Creation from MECAD, Spain, 2004, he has participated in residencies such as the artist-in-residence program at the Basic Research Institute at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany in 2005. Between 2007 and 2012, he was a PhD candidate of Media Arts and Technology at the University of California Santa Barbara. Burbano initially started as a documentalist, doing explorations related to video, sound-art and telecommunications and he was also a pioneer in the technology development of Stereoscopic Video Art and in internet-based art, which he has been using as a platform since 1996. He has also been crucial in his country for electronic art shows for emerging artists. He is now working and producing between California and Bogotá.

Open(ing) Source starts as a collaborative project where the artists gathered genetic/migratory information from three participants, information that was initially collected from The National Geographic Society from a project dedicated to tracing the human history of our ancestors and migration through the planet. The results where then sent via travelling-boxes around the world to some of the artists friends for them to interpret and contribute creatively to the project (songs, drawings, photography) regarding some of the information found in the boxes.

Burbano is focused in exploring the relationship between art, science and technology from different perspectives: as a researcher, an individual artist or through collaborating work with other artists, designers and engineers. His broad range work, emphasizes the importance and pervasiveness of his interdisciplinary and collaborative work in the digital art field.

Authors like José Luis Vaca signal that “within the Colombian artistic context artists like Andrés Burbano, approach their practice and Net.Art as a need for bonds, but also as the tuning of interpretation, study and interaction among agents”[1]

Finally, the importance of this project lies in its collaborative basis, in the genetic research entailed with art and in the future creation of an internet database that will enable the genetic/migratory information.

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[1] Vaca, Jose Luis, Arte Politica Net.Art Activismo

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Barragán

Hernando Barragán

Acumulated Transparency

http://barraganstudio.com/b/?p=83

By Iltze Bautista Castillo and Gabriela Cárdenas Ramírez

 Hernando Barragán is a Colombian artist and designer who divides his time between the Openwork studio in New York and the Department of Architecture and Design at the University of los Andes, Colombia. He studied Systems Engineering and Computing at the same university and a master in Interactive Design for the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea, Italy. 

His first exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogota, Colombia in 2002, with the piece Hipercubo/ok/. Since then his pieces have been shown in countries like Canada, Korea, Italy and Spain. He has received numerous prizes, like the Association of Sustainability and Architecture, Ars Electrónica and the Latin-American Biennial of Design. Generally his work focuses on the relations between public/users and the piece. 

The piece that we are interested in analyzing is en.light.en Interactives Lamps, which was realized in the Barragan Studio during 2009 and won the prize of design Pencil of Steel on the following year. It works with seven lamps controlled by the program Wiring. [1] This piece, seeks to re-accommodate the form in which we relate to the daily objects, working with the limits between the unique work and massive product. As well the idea of an original piece of art and design product. It is a set of eight lamps of simple appearance, which daily functions are inserted in a playful sense, but technologically complex.

NOTES

 [1] Program that combines hardware and opened software, which serves to illustrate in the physical world ideas and concepts. Barragán began the development of the project in the Interaction Design Institute and was continued by a small group of persons in the University of los Andes. 

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Solis

Hugo Solís García
Metaphoric sound in media-art.
http://hugosolis.net
By Karla Martínez García and José Enrique Olivera C.

Made in WordPress, without any obvious information regarding the date, the Mexican artist Hugo Solís García’s web page is employed only for the presentation of the artist and all his art works. In quotation, Word Press mission is “an advanced semantic platform for personal publications with an orientation towards the statics, web standards and usability; in addition to this, it is free and not charged.” Generally, it presents the artist following these parameters: Sound art, Interactive Art, Electronic art; it contains information such as his current work, named Axial. It’s content (presented in tabs) are the projects about his works, concerts, technology (where the relation between art and technology is being explained), his teachings, publications and contact.

Hugo Solís was born in 1946, he was a musician student since his early age, but he began his sound experimentation after his masters in Media-Art and Science at the University of Popeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is a multidisciplinary artist whose works focus is principally towards the creation of interactive and multimedia sound installations, where the observers participation is fundamental to complete his artistic work, which is codified though instruments and technologic tools that go all the way from programming to mechanisms that act like sensors. The usage of the sound is an essential tool in his work, which goes hand by hand with the video, image and kinetics sculptures.     

Metaphors for dead pianos, is a set of sound sculptures constructed with dismembered acoustic pianos. The finality of the piece is bringing back to life the instruments using a contemporary sound perspective which is being modified by technological media. Using sensors and a small computer it registers and analyses the behavior of the public, generating data that’s being reproduced mechanically by the piano. The result is the modulation between the public’s interactions with the decoding of it with J. S. Bach’s “Well temperedes Clavier” book. He believes that J.S. Bach’s musical work suggest the subjective interpretation of who touches it.

Finally, we can understand that Hugo Solis’s work can be studied and appreciated from the media-art vision, based in José Luis Brea’s vision that is focused exclusively in those practices that not only produce objects “for” a given media, but they provide themselves with a mission and an object that’s precisely the specific and autonomist “production of media”, those art works in which the object is himself. This is what Hugo Solís proposed: that the art work itself is being constituted through its production, reconfiguring the artistic practices by the public presentations, generating a space for encounters for the spectators and a common dialogue.

Bibliography

http://hugosolis.net/

Christopher DeLaurenti, Live Dead Pianos, The score column, the stranger, Vol. 19, No. 27. (March, 17, 2013)

Interview with the artist in: http://www.jackstraw.org/programs/mediagallery/solis_10.shtml, (March 12, 2013)

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Bunting

Traspasser Allowed: Heath Bunting irational.org/heathbunting
http://irational.org/cgi-bin/cv2/temp.pl
by María Cano Chanez, Omar Echeverría Soza and José Raúl Sánchez Torres

Irational.org is a web page that of artists in which each one of them briefly resumes his/her biography and the work they have done. All the works on display have some relationship with problems of identity and privacy on the Web. All this kind of work has been inserted into what could be labeled as hacktivism. Within this page you will be able to find the work of the artist, Heath Bunting, who we decided to talk about. However, we had to make a choice of two pieces to analyze as he had a very long list of all the works he has done. The two proposals that were selected are Bordexing and The Status Project. In order to follow a chronological sequence we will begin by explaining the Bordexing Project. It began in 2001 and was terminated in 2011. The proposition of Boderxing is to make a detailed description of the illegal crossing of European borders. Alongside the description, people should take accurate photos of them crossing undetected. These pictures would be uploaded with the exact instructions for crossing that border, so that everyone had access to this information. The purpose of these actions is to transgress the limits that political systems have decided to create. The second project is The Status Project, which began in 2004 and ended in 2014.  It consisted in making  a mapping of the mobilizations that run on databases. This is made, through the data that people are forced to provide to both, government and private institutions to obtain services. The maps will be created of the mutations and movements made with this information by the users. Besides understanding how the user´s information moves and mutates, you could understand the mobilisation from the system itself. After being able to infer how the system operates by looking at the maps, the person will have the possibility of using other identities within the same system. Being able to decode the way the system moves, makes the users able to break the system and create another identity.  The reason for doing this is so people would not be limited to only one identity established by the system, because no one can be defined by just throwing some data.

In our opinion, the importance of the Bunting´s project is that even though you are creating a utopian illusion, it produces consciousness in people, to open their eyes to what is happening. Probably you can´t break the system entirely, however you can activate and set new rules of openness for free expression and privacy online. According to José Luis Brea, Bunting is completely immersed in the role of the activist as he produces “the fantasy of a specific potential ’resistance’ against the ’system’.” Both, Bordexing and the Status Proyect, have gotten people engaged electronically in breaking institutional establishments. It has created a community that is appalled by the way the system merely objectifies people by transforming them into measurable targets. The Net is intended to be a place of free passage or to put it in terms of Hakim Bey, an autonomous place. The system will find a way to legalize this temporary autonomous place, but the importance of this kind of work is that people find another way to crack the system to have a free passage and freedom, not only electronically speaking, but also physically.

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Bloody Map

Bloody Map Project
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=212261269395391329707.0004921f02f43f6c4f07e&ll=35.317366,111.357422&spn=16.751302,43.286133&z=5
By Aline Hernández and María José Chávez

 Since 2007, China has reported countless cases of eviction in several regions of the country. This situation, which has been increasing ever since, is due to the pressure that the government, led by the Communist Party, has been persistently putting into the local governments, forcing them to generate a substantial economic growth which is hardly achievable. Hence, the local governments have been acquiring debts in order to be able fulfill the government’s expectations and consequently, they have resorted to bank loans which they are later incapable of paying. Local governments resort to random evictions that take place in poor zones of the country, giving in exchange to all those families a miserable payment that leaves them homeless in order for them  to be able to resell their lands to the real state agency’s and investors. Ultimately, the whole situation has turned into a vicious circle which is mainly affecting the citizens who have been deprived from their homes. These homes soon become into factories and highways.

 The Bloody Map Project arose from one of these evictions that took place on the 12th of October 2012 in Baihutou town located in Beihai, Guangxi. It was launched by an anonymous Chinese blogger who decided to activate an online denounce mechanism, through an interactive map set on Google maps, in which the people could upload their personal eviction cases, or rather the cases they have witnessed. All they needed was to prove what happened. Later the blogger would, verify the evidence and upload the cases into the definitive map, using specific symbols that showed the way in which these cases have occurred (the volcanos represent the evictions in which violence has been used, the beds represent the evictions in which deaths have been implicated and the flames represent the cases in which the inhabitants have killed themselves).

Finally, the activism project, seeks to function as a history archive of these evictions and also, endeavors to work as a starting point to disseminate all those cases that haven´t reach the news. The aim is also to get the potential buyers to think twice before acquiring one of those properties. Parting from a censure tantrum, Bloody Map prompts to spread an open call to the community to get involved in this cause and also pursuits to denounce, to critical effects and through a communicative action, the situation that has been taking place non-stop.

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Constantini

The Noise Pixeles. Atari Noise and Arcangel Constantini

http://www.atari-noise.com/ 

By Laura Cristina Urrutia Aldrete and Patricia Gabriela Díaz Suzarte

Arcangel Constantini was born in Mexico in 1970. He names himself a "Technology Hacker." Constantini is an artist, curator and promoter of new arts. His work is mainly audio-visual and tries to experiment with it in a ludic way. His starting point is the old iconography and the first digital systems to build an evolving an interactive audiovisual structure.[1] He has been curator of the Tamayo Museum and has been granted with the FONCA scholarship.

            Atari Noise is one of the most famous pieces of Arcangel Constantini. The idea is simple; he tries to recycle obsolete technology, in this specific case the Atari 2600, i.e. one of the gaming devices, which is now obsolete. Atari Noise is the "reflection of a media culture in which the necessary hardware is available today as scrap used in any home." [2]

            The artist hacked the "original programming"[3], so that the intervention resulted in the generation of video and audio standards. This piece was presented during the Bending and Hardware Hacking Happening Festival in Tokyo, Japan and Mexico City, simultaneously. Mario de Vega traveled to Japan and presented his project SPK ® Live and helped with the installation and communication between the two systems (operated by Ivan Abreu and Arcangel Constantini), who controlled it remotely via arduino, pd, flashserver and circuits. The result was a video of almost six minutes, which shows colored lines and anachronistic way to these, different sounds, elements that show, a manual intervention (hacking), and an intervention of video and sound.

Among the concepts proposed in the book The Postmedia Era by José Luis Brea, it is possible to apply the concept of Multimedia. This being defined as "a production that incorporates elements developed in different media." [4] While it is true that the main base of the experiment is the Atari console, it is also true that to perform the real-time activity at distance, many devices were indispensable.

Apparently, Brea has no term that could classify an artistic expression of this type, that is, one that transforms obsolete technologies in one way or another.  “We could exclusively call media art to those practices that rather than producing objects 'for' a given media, have the task of production ‘of a specific media', autonomous. Those works in which the object is itself the medium.” [5]

In addition to this approach, we can understand Atari Noise as a universal language, because it speaks to the whole society, the images and sounds can be interpreted consistently regardless of the geographical location of the person. In words of Brea: “Imagine a world in which objects talk to each other, like elements or cogs in a global machine. The language spoken is technical.  Precisely what is required is fidelity in the exchange code. The technique is the Esperanto of the objects system.” [6]

References

Tecniarts, Arcangel Constantini: Consideration About Digital Culture (Arcángel Constantini: reflexiones sobre la cultura digital). Date: March 12, 2013,. http://tecniarts.com/cultura-digital-arcangel-constantini/

Escribano Serrano, José, Art and Videogame. The Videogame as an Artistic Tool. An Approach to the new Cybernetic Language and Its Influence in the Beauty Arts (Arte y videojuego.El videojuego como herramienta artística. Una aproximación al nuevo lenguaje cibernético y su influencia en las Bellas Artes), Spain, 2007.

Brea, José Luis, The Postmedia Era (La era postmedia), Creative Commons, 2009.

Constantini, Arcángel, Arc Data. Date: March 10, 2013, http://www.arc-data.net/ 
Constantini, Arcángel, Atari Noise. Date: March 10, 2013, http://www.atari-noise.com/ 

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[1] Tecniarts, Arcangel Constantini: Consideration About Digital Culture (Arcángel Constantini: reflexiones sobre la cultura digital). Date: March 12, 2013,. http://tecniarts.com/cultura-digital-arcangel-constantini/

[2] Idem.

[3] Escribano Serrano, José, Art and Videogame. The Videogame as an Artistic Tool. An Approach to the new Cybernetic Language and Its Influence in the Beauty Arts (Arte y videojuego.El videojuego como herramienta artística. Una aproximación al nuevo lenguaje cibernético y su influencia en las Bellas Artes), Spain, 2007, p.83

[4]    Brea, José Luis, The Postmedia Era, Creative Commons, 2009, p.7.

[5]    Íbid., p.16

[6]    Ibid, p. 121.

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Thompson

Jeffrey Thompson: Every possible photograph in a Post-Media Era
http://www.jeffreythompson.org/EveryPossiblePhotograph.php

by Jimena Aguirre Durán and Jorge Andrés Reyes Rodríguez

Jeffrey Thompson is a Nebraskan artist and musician. The dominant aesthetic in his works such as Wikipedia Loops and 42,607,656 Pixels Of Sky - Sorted by RGB Value, let us think about the assimilation and overflowing of new technologies for the artistic development in the Post-Media Era. Such is the case of Every Possible Photograph, a piece made in 2012 through a customized software with a digital projection. Thompson sought to generate every possible image set algorithmically from any feasible number combination in the pixels that give the gradation from white to black. From a random mathematical algorithm, the piece rhythmically configures every single pixel in a series of photographs that we could finally "see" concluded a trillions years from now.

            This raises the following questions; Every Possible Photograph (EPP) is a work of art or a post-artistic work? And, can it be classified as Media-art or Post-Media-art? According to Jose Luis Brea and his Postmedia Era's text (2002) "the greatest event of our era [regarding the image issue] is the emergence of the movement-image, and image-time". However, how does this apply to a work that may exceed all human eras? These questions suggest that EPP is a paradoxical case. First, as the present and contemporary part, it is a clear example of "time based art". Category described by Brea that refers to the visual issue and concerns the author's idea according to which the images produced technically have a particular internal time , which makes it a clear example of a the post-photograph concept. That is, the technological expansion of the internal time of photography that takes further the narratives of the same event and goes into the representation. However, on the other hand, considering Brea’s conceptions about art and technology, and the way it defines the time when it appears, how can we analyze a work that has a clearly defined beginning, but will exist in all times to come? Definitely Every Possible Photograph can generate a series of paradoxical questions that highlight the debate over the recognition of technology and new media in art.

Bibliography

BREA José Luis, La era Post-Media; Acción comunicativa, prácticas (post)artísitcas y dispositivos neomediales, [Libro en línea], Editorial Casa, España, 2007.

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REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Cirio

Artist: Paolo Cirio

Project: Street Ghosts

streetghosts.net

by Marianna Stephania Hernández Aguilar and Ileana Muñoz Rodríguez

Paolo Cirio is an Italian artist, born in 1979. He has done several projects in the disciplines of street-art, net-art, software-art and video-art. His work revolves around subjects such as the construction of identities through the new media, the problem of copyright and ownership, and the conflict between the notions of private and public in the contemporary world.

                For example, in 2012 he stole the information from Twitter and rated the political affiliation of people (Persecuting US). One year before he stole one million profiles from Facebook and republished them in a fake dating website (Face to Facebook Project). He also stole 3,000 books from Amazon and redistributed them for free in his webpage (Amazon Noir).

                The project which we want to analyze is Street Ghosts. It started in 2012, with the initiative of Paolo Cirio. It consists in printing real size photographs of people found on Google Street View, and placing them on the same spot where they were initially taken. The project tries, not only to problematize our notions of what is private and what is not in the context of new media, but it also questions the power of Google as a corporation which has the freedom to use the identities of people on the street, and then, claim the copyright to those images.

                The artist said in his website (http://paolocirio.net) that: “The obscure figures fixed to the walls are the murky intersection of two overlain worlds: the real world of things and people, from which these images were originally captured, and the virtual afterlife of data and copyrights, from which these images were retaken.”

                The project has been done in cities such as Berlin, New York and London; and continues to this day.

REVIEWS BY STUDENTS: Chunky Move

Chunky Move
http://chunkymove.com.au

by Ana Sofía Sordo Molina, Alma Delia Vega Valentín and Estefanía Elizabeth Ruíz Escobedo.

Founded in 1995 by Gideon Obarzanek, they began working like a collective with the purpose to only make dance performances. Ever since they own a theatre (2002), which the Australian government gave to them, they started experimenting with multimedia and new technologies in some of their pieces. In 2011 their artistic director Obarzanek resigned and since July 2012, Anouk Van Dijk, a famous choreographer took his place.

There are two pieces that evidence the relations between technology and humans, these are: Glow (2006) and Mortal Engine (2008). The relevance of these pieces is that they were developed before video mapping[1] became important and commercial, so they were a total innovation in the field of art.

Glow and Mortal Engine use a software created by Frieder Weiss who defines himself as an " arts engineer"[2], when Obarzanek and Weiss met at the Monaco Dance Forum (2004) they began to discuss about using a data projector for lighting a moving body. After testing the software they created Glow in which movement and video landscapes mix and generate a total transformation in the dancers[3].

Mortal Engine was the next piece in which Obarzanek and Weiss worked together. With more knowledge of the things the software can do they decided to go further, not only using the video projector but also using a laser at the time music and dancers perform. In Glow they were looking a human body transformation, in Mortal Engine for a new vision of the limits of the human body reflecting in the utilization of lasers as an extension of the dancer’s body.  

Technology has permitted man develop capacities that before seemed impossible, from crossing the ocean up to flying. Technology has permitted not only human evolution, but also his ways of thinking and seeing all that surrounds him. Technology offers the possibility to experiment more with the body, making it feel freer as always wanted.

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[1] The video mapping takes more importance since 2005 and the fact is that these two pieces were the “beginners” in the utilization of video projector in real time perform is happening.

[2] He developed his software while he was living in Berlin and Nürnberg; the only function of this software is working with artists in performance or installations[2].

 Frieder Weiss website: http://www.frieder-weiss.de/ 20-03-13 (5:00pm).

[3] “With a better understanding of the system’s capabilities, its possible applications and further potential, the dancers and I have attempted in the movement to create a type of “biotech fiction”, shifting the body into other imaginary sensual and grotesque creature states. The relationship of the digital pixel environment to the performer varies from being an illustrative extended motion of their movement, a visual expression of internal states, and also a self-contained animated habitat”. Glow Obarzanek’s opinion.

http://chunkymove.com.au/Our-Works/Current-Productions/Glow.aspx 18-03-13.