we’re at the dutch pavillon. aernout mik shows some recent works, where he reflects on the situation in a nationstate during ‘the age of paranoia’. multichannel video screens, severe police training, kids wearing uniforms, all in all overwhelmingly set up.
we are all confronted with the situation, that nations restrict the civil rights, homeland security and common mistrust. is there a real threat, or do nations only use this scenery to fundament their status quo? you decide..
… Repetitation. The swiss pavillon shows a hybrid between classical paintings and video art. On a huge wall, rotated app. 45 degrees towards the spectator, i see surrealistic paintings of faceless, naked women eating chickenwings, while overlayed by 3d renderings. I can definitely state the fact, that yves is a better painter than 3d modeller. But who cares
homo technologicous
Originally uploaded by tagr_tv
he wont tell me his name. all i found out was, that he is ‘homo technologicous’. walking giardini with some wireless equipment, cellular, gps, tablet pc and whatnot, he was a real eyecatcher. wished to meet him again, but we got this speech barrier since he only spoke italian. i WILL learn this language until biennale09. if the world still exists then..
Ruben ramos balsa, bowling
two tables, two monitors. Stereo sound that somehow interacts with a tube that does bubbles into a glass of water. weired, melodic sound, from a piano that is used in a cageous style. This is the first stop of our journey through giardini: the spanish pavillon
Ruben ramos balsa. Spain
here you see the installation from a different perspective. thru a tube, air is being pumped into the glass where it bubbles. on the video screen on the right, a boy blows into the other end of the tube. blowing halt..
this is another installation of ruben balsa. one the one side a camera attached to a glass. the other is a beamer, where the cam sends its picture to. if you blow on the surface of the water, the picture on the beamer shows some nice patterns. ruben really seems to be quite into ehrm blowing..
Giardini. We gather at the illy spot, where they serve free coffee, as much you can swallow. Love that, coffee makes my brain work faster..
we (julia staudach, peter scharmüller) arrived at biennale ’07. we are glad to work here, at the press room, where they provide us with free wifi and room to work, with desks and worksphere…
it is the first day of press previews, cameras everywhere. got a little video from youtube in german, where you can see the situation, which is interesting because one seldom sees a press
preview..
as journalistic n00bs we are excited to be let into the holy places, and prepare for the following day(s). julia staudach is studying the cataloge we got for a great discount of 50€.
welcome to the tagr coverage of biennale 07, stay tunded, get into arts together with us..
sorrowful we had to accept that we could not make it to the makeart festival, but we could still do our web 2.0 job and asked some people on flickr to join the makeart07 flickr group. it looks like there were not too many photographers at the festival who uploaded their stuff to flickr – but the ones who did are great. please enjoy some great pictures from portier, thanks to manuel braun (www.decept.org) and flickr user yesyesnono for sharing their photos!
Formed in 1996 by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, Exonemo is group devoted to the experimentation of new ways of interaction between art and public.
LUCA: Object B presents, compared to the consumer society, a different kind of immersion between real and virtual spaces. what do you think about the relationships of virtual and real spaces of contemporary world? And what do you want to communicate trough the hacked interactions of Object B?
EXO: When considering about the “real” and “virtual” space, we feel the border between them has been getting more ambiguous than before. It might be no longer an indivisible concept. But actually, not only “real space to virtual space” but also divided world such as “country to country”, “culture to culture” or “person to person” exist around us and make conflicts between them.
The Object B focuses on “communication” between divided worlds.
By multiple approach to the installation, for example, from the exhibit space (physically) or from the game space (as a nonphysical avatar), you will experience an obvious communication gap between two worlds.
We think that’s the interesting point on communication.
LUCA: Which seeds where the starting point to think this piece?
EXO: Maybe at the moment when I doubted if a person on the other side of the internet was a real human being…or not!?
LUCA: What do you think about game industry today?
EXO: Regading the Half-Life, the game company VALVE opens the developement environment partly to get the scene active and also let expert programmer join the company. It’s intersting that we can touch the structure of the game by modification. Game modification has a potential for expansion but we have a limited feeling about the distribution system STEAM because they tighten controls on license. Meanwhile, game industry in Japan seems different. Japanese game companies almost never open the developement environment to the public, but they activate the game scene by allowing re-creation of game characters such as cosplay, fan fiction and so on.
Each environment is open and closed at different point and we see an interesting difference of game culture there.
LUCA: Open source and free exchange are important vectors of innovation, don’t you think that with all this new and specialized hardware and software instrument, that are quite “closed”,that users will have a little range of creative possibilities?
EXO: Focusing on open source and free exchange in art creation, we think it is different from software development.
For the software development, “function” is absolutely imperative and we can share the function by getting source code. So we think the open source for software development is very important but for the art work, “function” is not important thing so there isn’t much point in sharing the source. To represent the concept through an art work might expect
next creativity like open source and free exchange on software development.
LUCA: Water, what makes you thinkin?
EXO: MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA
barcelona
is famous for a lot of things, for the lovely beaches, palmtree avenues, interior design shops on every corner, parties, pakistanis selling beer and samosas on every plaza all night long, its modernistic and contemporary architecture, its fashion victims and their bad taste for glasses, all those fucking “guiris” and last but no t least the great number of festivals (i daresay each weekend one)
one of them is the OFFF festival that features current movements in multimedia design. it takes place at the CCCB (curios all thes triple letter words for festivals and museums here).
but it seems to be a quite barcelonian problem that for locals its hard to manage to buy tickets on time because of the maniac number of foreigners who want to connect with all the lovely advantages that this city has to offer.
so it results that the tickets were sold out one whole month before the fesival actually took place. even our guest (erasmus paid holiday) university BAU didn’t manage to get tickets for their studens (us).
so the only thing that we ended up being able to do is stroll around the festival chillout area, which was outside, and find out when and how the people got their tickets and if there were any freebies.
how you might have figured out already this article not really treats the art that took place at the festival, no, its about the art of getting a ticket.
so find out for yourself how the people did it:
actually it was quite interesting to talk to all those people visiting the festival because we found out a few interesting things: first of all few people paid the tickets themselves. lesser people really are from barcelona [!?$], you better get up earlier to buy your tickets (or get your fabulous press acreditation), this is the best way to get in touch with the creative lot, and the feeling in this city is like a “piefkesaga” in disneyland with people who talk catalan instead of tyrolean.
in the end we felt like outcasts because we were the only ones without those shiny glowing neon unreachable bracelets.
we didnt catch OFFF here in barcelona but we just might make it half way round the globe to OFFF in mexico…
if you like to know more about offf, read some résumés:
*h2omagazine (spanisch)
*ntmy (english)
and some slasher:
*otro blog más (spanisch)
*tink (english)
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