Soapbox Event, by artist Pia Lindman

Dear friends, colleagues, citizens and non-citizens,
I am inviting you all to participate in Soapbox Event, my next performance and mass event. Physically, it will take place in April 2008 at the Federal Hall National Memorial in New York City. In preparation for the big shebang, I have started a soapbox blog to foment discussion and I will have open workshops at Cooper Union on Saturday afternoons in February and March.
You are all invited!
Check out the site/participate in the discussion and come and have fun in the workshops!
More information available on the site:
http://www.soapboxevent.blogspot.com/

Landscape Cinema – Ken Ehrlich – 2007

On Saturday, November 24, 2007 artist Erik Goengrich invites you for a Foto-Walk in the Passages of Downtown Sao Paulo.

The meeting point will be
in front of "cafe floresta"
in Copan (Av.Ipiranga 200)
at 10am

The walk will last around two hours.
The map and fotos here should give an impression of the walk.

To contact Erik send an e-mail to goengrich at gmx dot net

----------
mais informacao e en portugues:
www.goethe.de/saopaulo

Architecture and Documentary Practice: Writing, Imaging and Performance

Architecture &: Interdisciplinary Seminars
Bartlett School of Architecture, Tue 27 November 2007, 10 am–6 pm
Organised by Dr Robin Wilson
This is the third of a series of interdisciplinary, one-day conferences held at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Architecture &, initiated by Prof. Jane Rendell. It will explore current issues concerning the documentation of buildings, urban space and processes of architectural production. It will draw together architects, artists, editors and theorists to address issues of criticality, memory and performance in architectural documentation. One session will focus on existing practices of writing, editing and photography in the architectural profession. One will deal with concerns and techniques of documentation in theatre and performance studies. Further sessions will introduce the concerns of individual art and architecture practitioners, working across different media.
Contributors:_Session 1:_Professor Iain Borden (Architectural History and Theory, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL)_Dr Robin Wilson (Critic, curator and lecturer on art and architecture)_Isabel Allen (Design Director of Habhousing and former editor of The Architects’ Journal)
Session 2:_Professor Susan Melrose (Performance Arts, Middlesex University)Dr Juliet Rufford (Writer and lecturer on theatre and performance)_Professor Joe Kelleher (Theatre and Performance, Roehampton University)
Session 3:_Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley (Artist/architect)_Mike Marshall (Artist)
Session 4:_AMID [Cero 9] (Architects)
This event is free but please RSVP architectural.research@ucl.ac.uk _Rm G02, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB

inflating inflatables

I'm teaching a class this semester at CalArts called UnBuilt and FarOut. We're looking at experiments in architecture over the last fifty years with a particular focus on collaborative architectural practices whose work might have not been built or whose radical ideas functioned as cultural critique. Two weeks ago, after spending a class looking at the work of Ant Farm and discussing some of the more playful aspects of their work, some of my students proposed that we build inflatables. Inspired by their work, we built an inflatable that we could all fit in and it seems that more inflatables will be popping up around CalArts soon.

Learning from wolf

Last night Wolf Prix of the Austrian architecture firm Coop Himmelb(l)au gave a lecture at Sci-Arc entitled "Learning from Le Corbusier." He began by comparing Le Corbusier favorably to Mies van der Rohe, who he claimed was merely a designer, while the former was a 'sculptor' – therefore an architect. He showed some of Le Corbusier's poetic solutions to technical problems and spoke of the aim of architecture as overcoming gravity. He also evoked another sculptor – Brancusi – whom he claimed worked according to an "open system." Concentrating on the very recently completed headquarters for BMW in Munich, he showed a series of impressive images, the highlight being a four minute stop-motion animation detailing the four year construction process. The ambition on display did not stop with the gravity quote... he also explained how he convinced the board of directors of BMW to approve his design: namely, by claiming he could build something comparable to Acropolis. A national icon for Germany...
The strangest part of the evening was the fact that he took no questions...
I would have like to hear more about his thoughts on the relationship between sculpture and architecture given his seeming preoccupation with the formal language of sculpture. Also, Given that he described the BMW building as a new kind of public space, how does the project implicate and provoke our notions of what is public?

introduction to orange works

I recently became aware of the work of Brooklyn-based Orange Works. The group produces interventions in public places that play with and destabilize the visual language around construction sites. By re-contextualizing the lexicon of the bureaucratic demarcation of public spaces, Orange Works offers a variety of re-use opportunities in urban settings.

TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT

A contemporary art project that takes place in various locations on the streets of Downtown Cairo
5-15 November 2007
In the megalopolis that is present-day Cairo, public space is a scarce resource. 3ARRASIF: TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT is a contemporary art project exploring Downtown Cairo's existing public spaces where residents are allowed to gather and interact as a site in which the complex relationship between the city's dwellers and its various governing bodies is constantly negotiated and redefined. 8 artists, designers and architects are commissioned to produce new projects through which they subtly disrupt the urban landscape by reinventing some of the guerrilla-style tactics and survival strategies employed by city dwellers on a daily basis in the public sphere.
Curated by Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnar

TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT (CAIRO UNCLASSIFIED) is a project commissioned by MEETING POINTS 5 (MP5), a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival organized by the YOUNG ARAB THEATRE FUND taking place in the Middle East and North Africa in November 2007.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Marwan Fayed
Eklego Design
Mohamed Allam
Malak Helmy and Essam Abdallah
Mahmoud Hamdy
Kareem Lotfy
George Azmy

Weather Report: Art and Climate Change

SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard held at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. It is presented in collaboration with EcoArts.

This exhibit partners the art and scientific communities to create a visual dialogue surrounding climate change. Historically, visual arts play a central role in attracting, inspiring, educating and motivating audiences. "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" will exhibit artwork, in the museum and our partnering venues, and in outdoor site specific locations throughout Boulder, that will activate personal and public change.

Our collaborating partner EcoArts is a new effort bringing together scientists, environmentalists, and performing and visual artists - along with producers, presenters, scholars, spiritual leaders, policy makers, educators, businesses, and people from all walks of life - to use the arts to inspire new awareness of, discussion about, and action on environmental issues, with new possibilities for envisioning a sustainable future. Its programming principles are artistic excellence, scientific accuracy, environmental effectiveness, ethical practice, and whenever possible, presenting activities that strive to follow "the middle way" of being either non-partisan or bi-partisan to reach the widest audience possible.

Participating Artists:
Kim Abeles, Lillian Ball, Subhankar Banerjee, Iain Baxter&, Bobbe Besold, Cape Farewell, Mary Ellen Carroll (Precipice Alliance), CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation), Brian Collier, Xavier Cortada, Gayle Crites, Agnes Denes, Steven Deo, Rebecca DiDomenico, Future Farmers (Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine), Bill Gilbert, Isabella Gonzales, Green Fabrication (via Rick Sommerfeld, University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning), Newton & Helen Harrison, Judit Hersko, Lynne Hull, Pierre Huyghe, Basia Irland, Patricia Johanson, Chris Jordan, Marguerite Kahrl, Janet Koenig & Greg Sholette, Eve Andree Laramee, Learning Site (Cecilia Wendt and Rikke Luther), Ellen Levy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Patrick Marold, Natasha Mayers, Jane McMahan, Mary Miss, Joan Myers, Beverly Naidus, Chrissie Orr, Melanie Walker & George Peters, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrc, Aviva Rahmani, Rapid Response, Buster Simpson, Kristine Smock, Joel Sternfeld, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ruth Wallen, Sherry Wiggins, The Yes Men, Shai Zakai

PRIMARY EXHIBITION SITE:
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street, Boulder, 80302
bmoca.org
Tuesday?Friday, 11am to 5pm
Saturday during the Boulder County Farmers' Market (through October), 9am to 4pm
Saturday (beginning November), 11am to 5pm
Sunday, 12noon to 3pm

ADDITIONAL INDOOR GALLERY SITES:
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
University of Colorado, Norlin Library Galleries, 1720 Pleasant St.
University of Colorado, ATLAS (exhibit Sept. 13 Oct. 6, 10am to 2pm), 125 Regents Dr.
National Center for Atmospheric Research, (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.

OUTDOOR SITES:
Boulder Municipal Campus (Along the Boulder Creek to Boulder Public Library)
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
Central Park (park directly west from the museum)
Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut St.
Eben G. Fine Park, 101 Arapahoe Ave.
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.
Twenty Ninth Street (Canyon St. and Broadway)
17th and the Boulder Creek Path

Waiting for Gordon

the floor is a double floor, a surface upon a surface, a disjointed and amended space, a room within a room, dislocated and relocated, from Antwerp to Los Angeles, from 1975 to 2007, a floor without its building, and yet finding a building here, suggesting a link while skirting the connection, remaining out of bounds, and yet all the more considered, cared for, examined - scrutiny in the cracks, along the floorboards, amidst the dust - a question in the form of a splinter, poetry in the abandoned, the floor is but a piece, ripped off from its origin, torn from the whole and made a part: it plays its part in this performance of spatial imagination, of art historical surveying, a cataloguing and disseminating of floors... This is Gordon's calling card, in the form of a floor, yet one which I do not stand on, but which I stand back from, admire as a bystander, a participant once or twice or three times removed, like a distant cousin arriving too late for the party... It comes in the form of additions and subtractions, of locations and dislocations, of making do and cooking up more, of occupying and being occupied, and it leaves according to surprising exits, through sudden doors and new perspectives, rough edges and cut slivers: the alphabet of the built is given a boost on this floor, arriving at new dance steps that makes every background useful material for transformative constructions.

LA performance/sounding out

i you us them whose their mine
Brandon LaBelle
Audiometer aka Tommy Grenas / Michael Esther
Friday, October 26, 8:00--10:00 p.m.
Dangerous Curve
500 Molino Street #101
Los Angeles

casting glances at Smithson

James Benning's new film screened in Los Angeles tonite... it's an elegant, eighty-minute homage to Smithson's Spiral Jetty and takes the form of an extended series of one-minute shots of the jetty filmed over the course of a couple of years. Without presuming to have an easy answer, Benning seems interested in what happens when geologic time meets cinematic time?

Social Action: KunstMarkt

Kunstmarkt Am Schöpfwerk - Art Market in Vienna: using art to facilitate social exchanges across ethnic and economic lines
Samstag, 20. Oktober 2007, 14.00–19.00
Ort: Stadtteilzentrum Bassena Am Schöpfwerk 29/14, 1120 Wien (U6-Am Schöpfwerk), http://www.bassena.at
TeilnehmerInnen: ANRONVIAGDPIOVSA/2007, Brandon LaBelle, Dominique, GirlsOnHorses, Mai Gogishvilli, René H., Reni Hofmüller, Biggi Holzwarth, kampolerta, Maiken Kloser, KulturDrogerie, Thomas Northoff, Ferry Rodinger, SambAttac, Anna Witt
Kunstmarktspenden: Linda Bilda, Carla Cruz, Veronika Dirnhofer, Hilde Fuchs, Nina Höchtl, LILA, Cornelia Silli, Karin Sulimma, trans/gender, Mounty R. P. Zentara uvm.

Not a Cornfield publication

A somewhat mysterious package arrived in the mail recently, addressed to someone with a name close to mine if spelled quite creatively. Upon opening the elegant package I discovered a two volume boxed set of books documenting the Lauren Bon-spearheaded Not A Cornfield project, which transformed a historic downtown tract of land in L.A. over the course of a growing cycle from May 2005 - April 2006. The two volumes extend the project in the form of an elaborate archive. One volume consists of images shot over the course of the project documenting the massive effort to turn a brownfield into an earthwork in the form of an agricultural cycle of corn planting and harvest. The aerial photography included in the collection gives a sense of the scale of this monumental project. The slightly thicker second volume is a timeline of the project and a collection of essays that contextualize the site historically and aim to position the artwork culturally. Divided into five sections that mirror the sequence of the project - brown, green, gold, blue and clear - the "text" volume navigates through the complex terrain of an ecologically-minded, politically charged site-based project in an urban context. Of particuar interest are Michael Dear's assessment of the site in the historical (non)memory of the city, Michael Ned Holte's discussion of the work in relation to other site-based projects and especially in relation to Agnes Denes' "Wheatfield: A Confrontation," and Christine Wertheim's response to the charge that the project should not be considered art. Wertheim employs Duchamp to remind us that what constitutes art after modernity is no longer a matter of categorical inclusivity or exclusivity. I think the legacy of Duchamp is an interesting lens through which to view the project, but not in exactly the way Wertheim proposes. The lasting relevance of the Duchampian readymade is the potential for an artistic project (or act or gesture) to point to the context in which we are viewing the work. The fact that Fountain was deemed too offensive for the exhibition to which it was submitted is precisely why the work had resonance. If Not A Cornfield is read in a Duchampian light, it seems less important that we think of the project as art or non-art. Rather we might focus on the context out of which the project emerged. The context of this project proposed innumerable challenges: the logistical dynamics of a project of this scale, negotiations with the city, relations with a community of activists who worked for years to get the site designated as park land, the inevitable class and racial questions that emerge when doing public projects in an urban context, and the fact that the artist is a trustee to the Annenberg Foundation. This last challenge, which Bon herself reckons with in a forthright manner in the publication, is perhaps the most curious. It is not very often that we are forced to consider the challenges of an artist who, with the help of her family foundation, can receive funding in the millions of dollars to produce a civic-minded public project. While the fact that she herself is a trustee on the board of the foundation funding the project does not diminish the project, it gives the project a very specific valence. The discussion of the question of art or non-art might be more productively directed towards this unique set of circumstances and the very particular challenges that accompany this arrangement. That is to say, the question "Can we consider a corn field art?" is less interesting than "How is this project possible here and now?" Personally, I think one of the ways for Bon to confront the challenge of her position with the foundation would have been to refuse to take authorial credit for the project. This would have allowed the project to question the relation between artistic production and authorial subjectivity.
One of the most interesting aspects of Not a Cornfield was the vast and disparate groups that Bon brought together through a programming series at the site during the run of the project. I remember an evening watching films organized by the Echo Park Film Center and then dancing to cumbias by Very Be Careful amisdt corn stalks and stunning downtown views. Maybe Bon's strength as an artist has more in common with Warhol than Duchamp: She seems to be a master at bringing interesting people together to work on a project that bears her name. Although when I asked her, at one of the symposia at the edge of the cornfield, if she felt an affinity for Warhol during the Factory years, she seemed less than pleased.

notacornfielddotcom/
farmlabdotorg/

Rakett & the open archive

The Curating Degree Zero Archive arrives in Bergen, Norway. Housed in a truck developed by the organization Rakett, the archive presents books, videos, documents and other materials related to public art and critical art practices. During the next few weeks it will be parked in various locations in the city of Bergen, positioning the truck and archive to converse with given historical locations in the city. Screenings of selected videoworks and artists presentations will also take place in the truck, along with cooking actions. More information: http://www.rakett.biz/

Archinect interviews Nils Norman

I stumbled across this interview today and it seems to illuminate some of the challenges of working between art, architecture and urban design.

Just Spaces at LACE

Just Space(s)
September 26 – November 18, 2007
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
Organized by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown
justspacesdotorg

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, September 26, 7-9pm

======

/// INTRODUCTION ///

Everyday we confront spaces that don't work - from our neighborhoods and parks, to our prisons, pipelines and borders. In this exhibition and programming series, artists, scholars and activists reveal how these spaces function - and dysfunction - making way for thought and action to create just societies and spaces.

The projects in this exhibition reflect the renewed recognition that space matters to cutting edge activist practices and to artists and scholars whose work pursues similar goals of social justice. A spatial frame offers new insights into understanding not only how injustices are produced, but also how spatial consciousness can advance the pursuit of social justice, informing concrete claims and the practices that make these claims visible. Understanding that space - like justice - is never simply handed out or given, that both are socially produced, differentiated, experienced and contested on constantly shifting social, political, economic, and geographical terrains, means that justice - if it is to be concretely achieved, experienced, and reproduced - must be engaged on spatial as well as social terms.

By transforming LACE, in part, into an active learning environment, Just Space(s) seeks to provide visitors with tools to consider alternatives to reactionary and essentializing political discourse that tends to dominate and frame our conceptions of justice - and constrain our abilities to imagine and implement it. The exhibition presents some of the most innovative and efficacious contemporary artistic, activist, and scholarly work engaging social and spatial analyses. In addition, a library/infoshop and symposia and event series extend the scope and scale of the main exhibition. Taken in whole or in part, Just Space(s) aims not merely to show what is unjust about our world, but to inspire visitors to consider what the active production of just space(s) might look like. It asks a crucial question: How do we move from injustice to justice exactly where we stand - in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond? While much theorizing about - and active experimentation with - the role and potential of a spatial justice framework remains undone, this exhibition and its public programming contribute to the articulation of a powerful concept/tool that links critical theory and ethical practice.

justspacesdotorg

Experiments in vocal poet3

Selected by a city council grant program of the current year,
it will take place in Rio de Janeiro (MAC - Niterói) and Curiti-
ba, dates to be confirmed, as an alive event, action props in
the domain of sound art that is besides many other (re)sour-
ces planning to launch the concept of mpoet3, phonetic transmissions with the use of tools ranging from simple microphones to the almighty presence of the microship, as well as sound systems of different kinds, embodying to the verbivoco utterings new audiopossibilities of understanding media. Live broadcasting antipogroms programs will be held in the presentation of the various participants, with an accent in the particular investigation character of their propositions. Achievements as radioart, sound poetry, phantastic sound architectures, visual sonority, nonsensical emissions, etc.will be played along the activities, but the very concern/contend is to what extend this supports can modify the perceptions in sinergetic proceedings.
This apparently exquisite scenary will be, of course, occupied mostly by cultural producers and searchers of the two involved brazilian centers, but also by special guests from abroad that have been doing expressive interferences in the use of really innovative and throbbing action strategies.

Alex Hamburger

more at http://poeticasexperimentaisdavoz.wordpress.com/

street light museum berlin

Walking through the Tiergarten in Berlin and coming upon this collection of street lights taken from different cities in Germany, and from different time periods, struck me as a delightful way to construct a museum - situating the lights in a public site, allowing them to continue to function, while also displacing them so as to highlight their particular histories and aesthetic features.

art and anarchism

It seems that anarchism is in the air... or at least several recent books that address contemporary anarchist ideas. I just came accross Roopa Singh's review of Realizing The Impossible (AK Press), edited by Josh MacPhee and Eric Reuland. It made me want to rush out and buy it... I have been reading another AK press anthology called No Gods, No Masters which is a historical look at some of the (mostly european) theorists of Anarchism. And of course, there's David Graeber's short read Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology which I can't recommend highly enough... You can order or download that here.

Looking for Beuys

"Beuys's project 7000 Oaks began in 1982 at Documenta 7 in Kassel, which called for the planting of seven thousand trees, each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high above ground. The project took five years to complete, the last tree having been planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in 1987. Beuys intended the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change; locally, the action was a gesture towards urban renewal."

Ulay Babait [Maybe at Home]

Ulay Babait [Maybe at Home]
Brazilian artists showing in Pyramida
Participating artists: Luiz Rodolfo Annes, Adriana Barreto, Ricardo Basbaum Marcio Botner & Pedro Agilson, Alex Cabral, Avraham Eilat, Michel Groisman, Rubens Manom, Regina Melim, Jorge Menna Barreto, Vadim Nemirovskiy, Yiftah Peled, Marga Punte, Laercio Redondo, Marco Paulo Rolla, Yehuda Yatsiv.
Coordinated by Yiftah Peled
17.07.07 - 17.08.2007
http://www.pyramidart.org/exhibitions.html

The exhibition “Ulay Babait” (Maybe at Home) is composed of artists who work in experimental , often interactive ways to develop living relationships between artists and participant. Some works are even intended to reach out beyond the space of the exhibition, sometimes all the way to the visitor's home. This happens through instructions or suggestions of participation that allow the spectators to become active participants in the work.
Ulay Babait poses a question for the visitor: Who really inhabits the house? This is also a more general territorial question; in other words, Who really inhabits any space? With whom is this territory divided or shared? And what are the possible dynamics and sensations involved in the relationships among all the possible inhabitants of a space?
Ulay Babait can be an answer for these questions; however it is a fragile answer that recognizes the cracks and the structural mistakes, that notices the flow and the fragile balance of our assumptions about the self.
-- Yiftah Peled, Coordinator

Documenta poppies

Searching for Oz with Dorothy, through the fields of poppies, the project of Sanja Ivekovic, getting tired, sleepy...and being awoken, with the sounds of revolutionary songs emanating from the soil, like voices inside the flowers, singing through the red and the green, under the cloudy skies of Kassel, to stimulate the ears of visitors, to incite or refer to legacies of lost upheavals, and pointing to, or making aware of the horizon always there, of certain promises or potentials: the songs both come to index as well as embody, according to the logic of the voice and its musicalities, history's stirring. But when I am there, I don't hear anything...all silent, sleeping with Dorothy, the voices quieted by the gentle breeze of other thoughts...

Caputh, Germany

The summer house of Albert Einstein, built in 1929 by Konrad Wachsmann,
where Einstein spent most of days before emigrating to the US in 1932.
Initially, the city of Berlin had wanted to give the scientist a summer house
as a present upon his 50th birthday, but failed to agree on a location and
suitable dwelling. Albert politely told them to forget it, and he built his
own.

frozen pizza taste test

1. TARTE D'ALSACE (TJ'S)
thin crust. pastry almost like a cracker, but in a good way. carmelized onion provides sweetness. presentation is unappealing. salty. too hamy. buttery! ham=outrage.
RATINGS
e 7.5
a 8.0
mn 4.0
j 9.0
k 8.3
ma 6.0

2. DIGIORNO'S ULTIMATE SUPREME
too greasy. sauce too sweet. good body. pepperoni=yay. thick and chewy crust. very salty. good crust/bad sauce. good texture. "it's like when i was eating it, but i wan't eating it." somewhat bland.
RATINGS
e 7.0
a 6.5
mn 6.5
j 5.0
k 7.0
ma 8.0

3. PIZZA FORMAGGIO DI CAPRI (TJ'S)
looks dry. needs dressing - no flavor pack provided. decorative olives. crust seems dry. tomato saouce isn't bad, goat cheese o.k. crust stale. not a good experience. savory cheese good.
RATINGS
e 3.5
a 4.0
mn 3.0 (w/out tasting)
j 4.0
k 4.3
ma 4.5

4. CALIFORNIA PIZZA KITCHEN SICILIAN
looks overspiced. train wreck. maggie likes crust. snorts! made in a lab... poorly! garlic powder. very chemical! large pepperoni=celebrate! franken pizza.
RATINGS
e 2.5
a 4.0
mn 3.5
j 3.0
k 3.8
ma 3.5

5. RED BARON THIN CRUST PEPPERONI
looks good. salty good. anthony indifferent. sauce a little too sweet. MN - " pizza has a lot going for it!" stingy on cheese.
RATINGS
e 8.0
a 5.0
mn 6.5
j 6.0
k 7.3
ma 5.5

Urban Artscape Workshop

Urban Space as a work of art -
The workshop is made by Urban Artscape (Jan Hatt-Olsen, Ásta Olga Mágnúsdottir), art group from Copenhagen and Cape Town. As part of Metropolis Thinking, Copenhagen.
In the workshop participants work through performance installations and interventions to create 'catalysators', which can initiate processes to tranform Urban Space as a whole into works of art, examining what a work of art in reality is.

The workshop will take place from the 30.7 – 3.8. The results of the workshops (made in Metropolis Thinking Lab) will be presented and evaluated by four international architects on 4.8 and 5.8.

In addition, nightly actions will be undertaken between Àsta and Jan -
We will walk around in the Copenhagen night with laptop, microphones, small loud speakers and sounds broadcast to people's mobile phones, like some 21 century alchemist to re-enchant urban spaces, so that the urban space as a whole and everyone, everything in it, will transform to the works of art and the artists they in fact already are.

As part of the Metropolis Biennial from the 27.7 – 30.8, focusing on the cross-over between art-architecture-urban planning – and urban research.
www.urbanartscape.org

support an atlas of radical cartography

Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat are putting together a project that looks intriguing. They're hoping to help fund the publication of a book and a series of artistic mapping projects around social issues through donations. If you donate $35 or more you'll get a copy of the book and the maps.

For more information, check out www.an-atlas.com.

used music

dirty soundscapes
ringing in the ears
the ghettoblaster as a sonic machine for the distribution of a social music
a kind of stimulator
a kind of oppositional stance
a kind of melody in the grass

event at UCLA for SPATIAL JUSTICE

Launch event celebrating the release of
Critical Planning Volume 14: SPATIAL JUSTICE
UCLA Journal of Urban Planning:

Thursday, June 7th 2007
12-2pm
UCLA Public Policy Building
Westwood Campus
(#2 Sunset Bus to Hilgard and Sunset / campus parking $8)
3rd floor lounge
Food will be served; Copies of the journal will be available
RSVP by June 5: avab(at)ucla.edu

Welcome: Ava Bromberg, co-editor of Critical Planning
Discussion: Edward W. Soja, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA
Gilda Haas, Executive Director, SAJE (Strategic Actions for Just Economy)
and UCLA Urban Planning faculty


Edward W. Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. He is the author of Postmodern Geographies (1989), Thirdspace (1996), and Postmetropolis (2000) and numerous articles. His current research involves the new labor-community coalitions that have been developing in Los Angeles "seeking spatial justice," and innovative approaches to regional governance and planning in Catalonia.

Gilda Haas is Executive Director and founder of SAJE, an economic justice, community development, and popular education center that has been building economic power for working class people in Los Angeles since 1996. Haas is an initiator of the burgeoning national movement on the “Right to the City” and serves as the representative for Los Angeles. She teaches community economic development in UCLA’s Urban Planning Department.

This volume serves as a companion / catalogue for the exhibit and public programming series: Spatial Justice at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) September 19 – November 18, 2007
co-curated by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown

UCLA Journal of Urban Planning on line

opening of The Manual Archives

I'm very excited about the upcoming premier from the Manual Archives. This is my friend Susan Simpson's new space and is bound to produce some exciting work. I've seen a reading of the upcoming performance and have watched the new venue come alive over the last few months, (I'm also on the board of Automata) and am convinced that this addition to Silver Lake will be a very welcome one indeed!

Come one! Come all!

THE MANUAL ARCHIVES opens June 8th on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake
with the puppet play LEAD FEET AND NOTHING UPSTAIRS: A History of the Lifelike.
Written and directed by Susan Simpson
With live music by Emily Lacy and Eric Lindley
Costume design by Sarah Brown
Lighting design by Kristy Baltezore
Scenic desgin by Alison Heimstead and Susan Simpson
Performed by Marsian De Lellis, Jackie Kay, Katie Shook, Kendra Ware
and Anne Yatco


THE MANUAL ARCHIVES is a micro performance and exhibition space conducting narrative experiments with decoys, dummies, puppets, avatars, scale replicas, animated devices, apparitional bodies and live human beings.

The Manual Archives dot org

LEAD FEET AND NOTHING UPSTAIRS: A History of the Lifelike is an
experimental marionette play that tells the story of The Ditto
Sisters, identical triplets who set off a rash of architectural and
perhaps human replication in the City of Los Angeles. Throughout the
performance buildings and characters multiply and contract, as many
generations of artificial bodies mimic and interact with one another.

The first in a series of works at The Manual Archives devoted to a newly
invented folklore of Los Angeles.

Please visit the website for calendar and ticket information.

The Manual Archives dot org

THE MANUAL ARCHIVES is a project of AUTOMATA, a nonprofit organization
devoted to the creation, presentation and preservation of puppet
theater, experimental film, pre-cinematic attractions, and other lost
and neglected forms.

forgetting how to read/finding the thread

messages on the street
exploded narratives
games of interpretation
walking on words
place-names/written and erased
overwritten and emplaced
I follow the signs / I meet strangers - O, you just go around the corner, and past the post office, it'll be there on the right side
I forget how to read...and then, I start:

supporting structures, or developing public dependencies

searching for support
using existing surfaces
locating points of contact
finding other usages
performing in public
reinventing the wheel
attaching oneself
relaxing within government
building without building

L´Épique aux Tropiques

performance of iliadahomero in the 1st art biennale of thessaloniki
posted by mathieu at hackeando catatau
www.organismo.art.br/blog


LA GLOIRE D´AGAMEMNON
Statue du Baron du Rio Branco, Place Generoso Marques, Curitiba, Brésil, 2006.

L´Iliade d´Homère, Chant I.
Traduction d´Odorico Mendes (Brésil, 1799-1864).

Tournée européenne de la compagnie de théatre Iliadahomero, en mai-juin 2007. Avec Claudete Pereira JORGE et direction d´Octavio CAMARGO.

Au départ: Thessaloniki (pendant la Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art), Skopje, Istambul, Sofia, München, Lisbonne, Porto...

D´autres villes d´Europe peuvent contacter la compagnie (pour le séjour de mai 2007 ou de futures tournées), pour vérifier la possibilité d´une présentation. Pour cela, écrire au directeur Mr. Octávio CAMARGO ou directement à la compagnie.

Le fichier pdf qui suit au dessous est un court essai a propos du travail et de la tournée de la compagnie Iliadahomero (illustré avec les photos de la dernière présentation de Me. JORGE à Curitiba avant le départ de la compagnie). Ces images sont en domaine public et disponibles pour impression 20cm x 30cm ici.

Le fichier pdf contient aussi un court éssai photographique de la ville de Curitiba (qui héberge Iliadahomero depuis 1999) inspiré dans la thématique d´Homére. Les photos de cet essai sont sous licence Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 2.0, ainsi que le texte de l´éssai proprement dit. Veuillez consulter l´auteur pour d´autres usages.

Dave Bowman: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Download this pdf directly here.


L´ABANDON D´ACHILLE
Statue de l´Homme Nu, 2007
Erbo STENZEL (Centénaire de l´État du Paraná, 1853-1953)

ExlibriS (v.0.41)

Sequence of videos edited by orquestra organismo in "conSerto"
Curitiba, Brazil. April 2007
http://conserto.organismo.art.br

Posted by glerm at hackenado catatau
www.organismo.art.br/blog

Berlin event and new Errant Bodies release

Radio Territories

Derek Holzer (US/NL)
Jason Kahn (US/CH)
Brandon LaBelle (US/DK)
Friday, June 1st, 18:00 to 23:00 (works performed simultaneously throughout the building)
Ballhaus Naunynstrasse
Naunynstrasse 27
Berlin
www.ballhausnaunyn.de


While changes in live streaming and digital networks have transformed the use and understanding of radio, the notion and act of live transmission through the air continues to inspire and haunt the auditory imagination. From the potential of spreading information undercover of legal borders to filling the airwaves with fugitive sound, radio may remain at the core of what it means to communicate through circuits.

Inspired by the radiophonic excesses and marginal acts, an evening of performative installations by sound artists working with and around radio and its medial aesthetics will be staged. Using the building of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, the works will aim for the intimate, tactile, and personal, bending radio toward the micro-narratives of place. The event is also organized in celebration of the release of the new publication, Radio Territories (see below), containing essays, articles, documents and audio works by authors and artists on the subject of radio culture.


Errant Bodies Press in collaboration with Ground Fault - announces the release of
RADIO TERRITORIES
Edited by Erik Granly Jensen and Brandon LaBelle
Book + CD (264 pages) / ISBN: 978-0-9772594-1-0 / ¤25
To order contact: admin at errantbodies dot org / www.errantbodies.org

The legacy of radio and the arts has spawned forms of radical culture, from early Modernist notions of the "Wireless Imagination" and its subsequent vernacular tongues to Acoustic Ecology's call for "Radical Radio" based on removing the DJ, transmission and broadcast media upsets and redistributes understandings of place, corporeality, social exchange, and the politics of information. Such instances of radicality find their current expression in radio networking and streaming, which seek to counter or supplement forms of public broadcasting through creating unique forms of collectivity. In response to these current initiatives, Radio Territories seeks to open the book on radio's historical, medial, and aesthetical status.

Critical and creative essays by historians, media theorists, and radio producers, including Steve Goodman, Heidi Grundmann, Douglas Kahn, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, and Ellen Waterman, are coupled with artistic and activist projects, from such practitioners as Anna Friz, LIGNA, and apo33, with a view toward locating the expanding and deepening reach of radio. Presupposing an intrinsic relation between transmission and place, Radio Territories aims to examine in what ways physical and cultural geographies become both defined and unsettled by the powers of broadcast. While radio through the Modern period stitched together an electronic network by expanding outward, current radio may fulfill Marshall McLuhan's global idea of the "extended nervous system" by networking individual lives on a cellular level. Radio is not only out there in the ether, but also totally inside, as signals that intensify the stratifications of culture.

Including additional contributions by Kabir Carter, Sophie Gosselin/apo33, Erik Granly Jensen, Brandon LaBelle, Sophea Lerner, elpueblodechina a.k.a. Alejandra Pérez Núnez, Kate Sieper, James Sey, neuroTransmitter, Marie Wennersten / SR c, and Achim Wollscheid.

With audio works by apo33, Joe Banks, Steve Bradley, John Hudak & Joe Resinsel, elpueblodechina, Anna Friz, Jason Kahn, Kode9, Kristen Roos / Jackson 2Bears, SR c, Ellen Waterman, and James Sey / James Webb.

in Berlin

HUIT
ERIK GÖNGRICH und PAULINE KRANEIS
The exhibition opens on thursday 24.5., 19:00-22:00.
Erik will be leading a bicycle tour through Berlin with his drawings projected onto passing buildings!
The bike-projection-tour is friday 25.5., 20:30.

ESPACE SURPLUS
Knaackstrasse 7, 10405 Berlin

www.espace-surplus.com

just in from HOMEWORK

Dear Friend,

How do you re-enact Paulo Freire's pedagogy today?

HOMEWORK invites you to participate in a project for an exhibition titled "Everyone is Friends With Paulo Freire," at PS122 Gallery in NYC, June 2-24th.

We are creating an archive of responses to Paulo Freire's pedagogical project, which linked education to social change through strategies such as dialogical action, developing transformative consciousness, praxis, and the rejection of the traditional "banking" model of education with the aim to "liberate the oppressed".

This research-based exhibition aims at understanding the influence of Freire's theories in contemporary cultural and pedagogical production in a pressing time characterized by global, dominant, neo-liberal policies that prioritize markets over individuals. It also explores our role as artists and educators in creating alternatives and counter-knowledge.

Please respond to this letter in any form you want (text, image, video, audio, etc.) and help to further the dialogue by forwarding it to anyone you think might want to engage in this project.

INSTRUCTIONS:
1) Remove any files already attached to this email.
2) Attach your response to this email/project/question in a file of up to 1MB.
3) Forward this invitation email and your attachment to 5 people, and cc homework_project@yahoogroups.com so that we can include it in the exhibition.
**Please send us all contributions between now and May 30, 2007.

We look forward to your contribution!
Sincerely,

HOMEWORK// Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Jeuno J.E Kim, Carlos Motta, Lize Mogel

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
HOMEWORK is a year long collaboration between artists Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Jeuno J.E Kim, Carlos Motta and Lize Mogel, which investigates the relationships between art, politics and pedagogy in a series of artwurl.org issues, and programs at PS122 Gallery and in the Contemporary Art Center in Aarhus, DK. HOMEWORK is funded by the Danish Arts Council's DaNY Arts Grant with support from PS122 Gallery.

JOAP at SOEX

Our friends at the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest will be in San Francisco this weekend for a series of events.

MOVE! ACTIVATE! REMEMBER!
A Weekend of Projects, Publications and Performances by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
Friday, May 18 - Saturday May 19, 2007
Locations: Southern Exposure and locations throughout the neighborhood
Join the Los Angeles based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest for a weekend of activity, dialogue and production at Southern Exposure. The Journal's aim is to activate culture with smart, anti-authoritarian discussions, publications, and events to help build good things and stop bad things in the world. Founded in 2001, the Journal is co-edited by Cara Baldwin, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst, and Christina Ulke. www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org
www.soex.org

Invisible Culture call for submissions

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROJECTS

Invisible Culture, Issue 11, Fall 2007

Deadline for Papers: June 10, 2007

Issue 11: Curator and Context

In his 1965 book Museum Without Walls , André Malraux critiques museum conventions of display that deaden art of the past. In fact, over time the artworks have morphed, affected by their surroundings, and taken on new lives as different kinds of aesthetic objects. Three years later, Roland Barthes would identify the death of the author and the emergence of the reader in the making of meaning. These writers' prescient articulations of the fusions - and confusions - of art object, context, artist, and viewer foresaw today's hyper-interaction of art media and the overlapping of roles in the museum and beyond.

What these texts leave out is the seemingly unmarked presence of an intermediary between the artwork and the viewer – the curator – and the world she has traditionally inhabited – the museum. “The gallery space is no longer ‘neutral,'” wrote Brian O'Doherty in 1976, at a time when artistic practice turned the ideology of the gallery space upon its head. While underlining the pertinence of the museum's physical and contextual impact on the reception of art, he too neglects the curator. Douglas Crimp's seminal text On the Museum's Ruins laid bare the changing state of the museum by examining shifts in art practice and the rising significance of photography as challenges to the institution. To continue rethinking the museum as a site for art display and the interlinked roles of the artist, artwork, curator, and viewer follows in the steps of these theorists and their peers, to say the least of the decades of artists who have interrupted conventional modes of display in museums through strategic creative applications. As globalization gives way to new cosmopolitanisms, and new media art transforms the site of the museum into the virtual realm, what has become of the curator? By some accounts the role of the curator may be in decline as alternative art spaces, tactical art interventions, and virtual museums refute her role and the institutional power it implies. The other side might see instead a curatorial practice that takes on a multiplicity of roles – as artist, as architect, as nation - and has increased significance in the frenzied world of the international art fair.

Invisible Culture invites papers and projects concerned with contemporary (post-1960s) curatorial and museum practice. Submissions in the form of 2,500-6,000 word papers from all disciplines, as well as digital projects (virtual museums, online art exhibitions, and internet-based endeavors, for example) are welcome. Entries may include but are not limited to investigations of the following topics:

• the relevance and changing role of the curator
• artist as curator
• curator as translator
• criticism and interpretation of exhibitions
• models of curating and display
• new media projects, the virtual museum
• ethics of display
• histories of curating
• visual anthropology
• sense studies, anthropologies of the senses
• changes in culture and science museums, museums of natural history
• curator as mediator of cultural exchange
• architecture and context
• global visual culture
• problems of cultural translation
• alternative exhibition sites
• challenges to exhibition display: performance, video and installation art
• the interactive exhibit
• hybrid art forms and multimedia displays
• museum studies
• communication/audience studies
• cultivation of art audiences
• curating and the expansion of global art markets
• collections, collectors and curators
• curating the biennial/international art fair
• cosmopolitanism, diasporas of artists and curators at home and abroad
• display and the politics of identity
• authorship
• emerging area and regional curatorial networks
• developments in institutional critique
• the location of the frame

Submissions and inquiries should be directed to guest editor Mara Gladstone, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester via email (mgladstone[at]gmail[dot]com).

Deadline for submission is June 10, 2007 .

High Desert Non-Sites

I spent part of the weekend trying to make sense of the lastest installment of the High Desert Test Sites. For the most part, the entire weekend seemed rather uneventful. I unfortunately missed the Ann Magnuson performance. Liz Larner performed some strange plant experiment and David Shrigley's flag waved around Gamma Gulch.

Talk by Gregory Sholette

"Interventionist Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture"
Talk by Gregory Sholette (New York)

Place: Overgaden - Institut for Samtidskunst, Copenhagen
Time: Saturday the 12 of May at 15.00
The talk wil be in English it is free and open to all

"Many key assumptions held by an earlier generation of politically engaged artists and activists about what oppositional culture is and what it is not, are being challenged today by a new wave of interventionist practitioners who are less concerned with demystifying ideology than with 'creatively disrupting' it. Unlike most of the critical art practices of the 1970s and1980s in which dominant representational forms were systematically analyzed through a variety of methods ranging from Semiotics to Marxism to Psychoanalysis, the new approach plows directly, some would say even gleefully, into what Guy Debord described as the Society of the Spectacle. Groups such as RTmark, The Yes Men, Yomango, and the Critical Art Ensemble take full advantage of increasingly widespread and affordable digital technologies in order to practice what they call Tactical Media, a concept inspired as much by the Zapatista rebellion as it is by the Situationists. What is unique to these more recent, antagonistic practices is the way they mobilize flexible organizational structures, communicative networks, and economies of giving in order to produce a critical disruption of everyday life. At the same time, the new interventionist art reveals some definite similarities to the entrepreneurial spirit of the neo-liberal economy, including a highly plastic sense of collective identity, and a romantic distrust of comprehensive administrative structures. In the late 1970s Adorno cautioned that culture was becoming increasingly similar to the realm of administration. Ironically, in the 1990s it was the world of administration that moved closer to that of culture as private business interests extolled the non-linear thinking and flexible working habits of creative laborers. The aim of this presentation is to trace the effects of neo-liberalization upon politically committed artists in the United States by focusing on the shift from a post-war culture of administration to that of a post cold-war culture entrepreneurship. It concludes by asking what type of critical, artistic response is possible under the conditions of the new, homeland security state apparatus that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 2001?"

Gregory Sholette er en New York baseret kunstner og teoretiker. Sammen med Nato Thompson har han redigeret bogen The Interventionists: A User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT Press 2004). Hans seneste publikation, Collectivism After Modernism, er redigeret i samarbejde med Blake Stimson. Sholette bidrager desuden jævnligt til tidsskrifter som Third Text, CAA Art Journal, Afterimage, MUTE, CIRCA, samt The Oxford Art Journal. Han underviser i øjeblikket på New York University’s Visual Culture Program.

Organized by publik.dk

Publicly Assaulted

Last week's immigrant right's march met a brutal end as L.A.P.D. officers fired rubber bullets and beat civilians and journalists covering the event. This L.A. Times article examines the ongoing response to this event. Here is an interview with two people injured in the melee.

You can also check out the L.A. indy media site for first hand accounts, images and video.

Rate changes?

For those of us at Errant Bodies Press, new postal regulation changes could have a significant negative impact on our publishing adventure...

Save Small and Independent Publishers!

Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan unfairly burdens smaller publishers with higher postage rates while locking in special privileges for bigger media companies.
In establishing the U.S. postal system, the nation's founders wanted to ensure that a diversity of viewpoints were available to "the whole mass of the people." Time Warner's rate increase reverses this egalitarian ideal and threatens the marketplace of ideas on which our democracy depends.

It's time stand up for independent media. Demand that Congress step in to stop the unfair rate hikes. Sign the letter below to alert Congress and put the Postal Board of Governors on notice.

http://action.freepress.net/campaign/postal?rk=Lps4kzs1FEXDW

The Situational Drive Conference

The Situational Drive

Free Weekend Conference
May 12 and 13, 2007
May 12, 10am – 7pm
May 13, 10:45am – 6:15pm
Cooper Union, The Great Hall
7th Street, btw 3rd and 4th Ave, NYC

Organized by Joshua Decter

A partnership between
inSite/ San Diego-Tijuana and Creative Time, New York
in collaboration with
The Cooper Union School of Art

In the network society everyone puts together their own city. Naturally this touches on the essence of the concept of public domain…Public domain experiences occur at the boundary between friction and freedom.
--Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain

inSite/ San Diego-Tijuana and Creative Time, New York are pleased to present The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement, a two-day multidisciplinary sequence of panel discussions, conversations, and art projects rethinking the challenges of artistic, curatorial, architectural and theoretical engagement in urban and other public spheres.

What is at stake today in terms of public domain experiences? How do we know the impact of cultural projects upon the imaginations of citizens? Do we believe in the possibility of transforming publics? What is the nature of our situational drive?

Participants: Dennis Adams, Doug Aitken, Doug Ashford, Judith Barry, Ute Meta Bauer, Mark Beasley, Bulbo, Teddy Cruz, CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy), Tom Eccles, Peter Eleey, Hamish Fulton, Gelitin, Joseph Grima, Maarten Hajer, David Harvey, Mary Jane Jacob, Nina Katchadourian, Vasif Kortun, Laura Kurgan, Rick Lowe, Markus Miessen, France Morin, Antoni Muntadas, Kyong Park, Anne Pasternak, Vong Phaophanit, Michael Rakowitz, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Osvaldo Sanchez, Saskia Sassen, Allan Sekula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Michael Sorkin, Javier Tellez, Nato Thompson, Anthony Vidler, Anton Vidokle, Judi Werthein, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Mans Wrange.

For a full program of events: http://www.inSite05.org or http://www.Creativetime.org.
Tickets are Free! No reservation necessary.

Surface Tension_Copenhagen

Surface Tension_Copenhagen
April 14 - May 6
Opening reception: Saturday, April 14
Plex 13:00 Kronprinsensgade 7 Kbh K
YNKB 17:00 Baldersgade 70 st tv Kbh N

Performance: Sunday, April 15, 20:00
at LiteraturHaus Møllegade 7 Kbh N
Octávio Camargo, Ken Ehrlich, Brandon LaBelle
Curated by Brandon LaBelle and Nis Rømer


Artists: Yvette Brackman (Denmark), Octávio Camargo (Brazil), Ken Ehrlich (USA)
Robin Wilson & Nigel Green (England), Brandon LaBelle (Denmark), RACA (Denmark)
Nis Rømer (Denmark)

Surface Tension_Copenhagen brings together practitioners from varied disciplines and geographies to undertake projects that seek to engage the city of Copenhagen. Focusing on aspects of the built environment, the exhibition aims to underscore the active systems, structures, and local productions at work in and around the city. From historical traces to urban infrastructures, the specifics and modulations of language to communities and their rituals, these investigations unfurl embedded features that inform and define the city and our place in it.