Political art is at times ironic, not as often it is also useful. Golan Levin‘s Infoviz Graffiti kit manages to be a perfect balance of DIY aesthetics, street smarts, and media critique. Check out the brief interview I had with its creator at OWNI.
(Originally posted on Ymag)
It’s not a surprise. After information, street maps, and books, Google is at it again. This time the Mountain View giant has chosen art, and recently launched Google Art Project, an innovative platform that offers both a – still not perfect – pseudo-3D navigation of the world’s biggest art institutions and an impressively detailed view of some of the main pieces in their collection. So far the list features the MoMA, the Tate Britain, the Uffizi, the Van Gogh, and several others, but we can expect it to grow in the future.
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(Originally posted on Ymag)
Marjetica Potrč’s work stems from contemporary art in two directions. First of all, in context: the Slovenian artist is also an architect, and her art often takes place in form of building.
Her museum installations are case studies in world architecture, concerned with issues of community and sustainability. If these pieces bring diverse aesthetic styles from the urban fabric where the were born to the sanitized gallery space, her site-specific interventions transcend contemporary art’s fascination with the place, carving deeper into ground and participation.
New Orleans: Shotgun House with Rainwater-Harvesting Tank, 2008
Potrč doesn’t engage public space with big scale installations for people to behold (and maybe to socialize around), she tries to create infrastructures tapping into local natural resources, like water. Rooftop rice fields, community gardens, wind turbines. The artist wants to leave a mark deeper than a memory, actual tools activating virtuous circles in their contexts.
(This is the second part of a two-part interview. Go read the first!)
NB: One thing I’m really interested about is also the fact that, after creating the Bijlmer Euro, you also want to expand the project to other nations that are involved with the Bijlmer, like Suriname. I was wondering if you were thinking of another type of money exchange that doesn’t involve the physical exchange of bills, to create a more global kind of banking system.
CN: Yeah, totally. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Having a semi-digital object that has this weird thing attached. Now telephone company are starting to become banks, right? So people are sending minutes to Suriname, to their relatives. When sending money via something like Western Union, you get a little percentage cut. When you send 100, the person on the other end gets 97. There is no taxing paid to governments on telephone minutes. It’s a big growth area, but also the possibility for a diasporic banking system. I’d like to become a bank.
There are 20 different nationalities living in this kind of post-colonial context, and those communities have really strong connections. There are family members, but there are also business relationships. There is a real possibility to have a whole socialist banking, a diasporic banking system. In terms of monetary value, they are much higher than global aid, and that has such a profound effect on how the world will develop. So I think developing a system that either cuts a lower percentage or is totally free, depending on what kind of model we go for, it could be super powerful. We can essentially put Western Union out of business. It’s possible, I mean.
There’s a really interesting change happening in banks. People talk about micro-finance, something that really helps a local area. Like the Bijlmer Euro, but there is no global transaction. Because a place like the Bijlmer, geographically, has routes to so many different places. If you really try to map the Bijlmer, it looks like an octopus, with lots of fingers. We should try and find a way to present it as a strength, and not a weakness. Here in Holland there is a lot of discourse, you know, about foreigners, and people are coming and seeing that kind of global context as a real strength, and I think it’s really powerful. The Bijlmer is normally seen as the Dutch Bronx, but I like to see it as the Dutch Nasdaq, which is a different, more complex identity for the neighborhood. (more…)
Christian Nold has been working with mapping crowds for a long time now, but what really interested me about the project he realized in Amsterdam, the Bijlmer Euro, is its very materialistic root in the traffic of money.
Nold played on the notion of local currency and combined it with an information visualization tool that allowed him to track the special money he created for the Bijlmer, by using RFID tags and special readers imported from China. By creating this trade circuit in the neighborhood, the artist wanted to encourage investment in the local economy and the representation of the area’s identity.
Despite the project’s success has been limited by its own complexity (maybe the visualization aspect was a bit too high-tech for everybody to figure out) and funding (unluckily it was tested for a few months only), the Bijlmer Euro is an interesting experiment and Nold’s intention is to further develop it in the future.
What follows is an interview I had with him some time ago. Since the recording I took was not very good, a few portions are missing. Still, I believe the juice is all there and I thank him very much for being available to do it. (more…)
(Originally posted on Ymag)
It was not the first time I visited the town of Utrecht for the Impakt festival, and I found this edition much better than last year’s. Maybe I just got to explore it a little better, but generally I had the feeling of a more consistent experience, also involving the city on a deeper level.
Impakt’s Matrix City is a layered urban environment, where new media art augments the average living experience and video-games school us on the mechanisms of globalization and finance. As playful and didactic activities intertwine through the artworks and projects on show (also discussed in the festival’s conferences), an underlying concern with the future of cities leads us to reflect on emerging and controversial utopias.
When me and fellow movie-addict Vuk Radic met Lloyd Kaufman at the Tromathon, the retrospective Eye organized at Amsterdam’s Filmmuseum last March, to begin with he interviewed us. He grabs that mini-DV cam he carries all over the world – when he was in Syria a sand grain got stuck in the lens and now it doesn’t work that good anymore – and points it to your face. Then he asks you questions, such as: Why are you in Amsterdam? And of course you have to answer you came for the Tromathon.
As you can guess by its title, the retrospective was about Troma, the cult production company which Kaufman and his partner in crime Michael Hertz founded more than 3 decades ago. I say partner in crime because the duo is mostly famous for (very) low-budget horror-splatter comedies, many of which have now become classics – most of all the Toxic Avenger, which you might also known by its nickname “Toxie”, Troma’s mascotte.
Despite being an over 60-year-old with a wife and grown up daughters, Lloyd is still touring the world to sell DVDs, spread some DIY wisdom in his workshops, and carry on his institutional struggle against media moguls. Even with such a tight schedule, he also manages to find the time to whip out his Toxie mask and pose for embarassing pictures with his more or less shaved interviewers (which you can appreciate in this page).
Me and Vuk, whose Twitter skills and Troma savviness got us the interview in the first place, had come up with a lot of questions, but Lloyd answered them all in his own straight-forward way, mixing cultural references to musical and movie classics with harsh remarks about the star system that excludes him. To somebody who has done sort of everything (adult movie director under pseudonym, location manager for Saturday Night Fever, even guide for the Peace Corps in Ciad) you could ask anything, but in our long talk we discussed piracy, South Park, John Waters, Rupert Murdoch, Uwe Boll, the Oscars, and musicals, with a few unexpected interruptions from the animal world. (more…)
(Interview originally published on Ymag. Go read the first and the second part.)
Nicola: A couple more questions about the Zuidas. You work with urban issues a lot, and – when it comes to Amsterdam – two things come to mind: housing shortage and the myth of the “Creative City”. Given the “business district” profile of the Zuidas, how does the artist, most stereotypically associated with a bohemian lifestyle, relate to such an environment? After information aesthetics, can we talk about business aesthetics?
Tom: As more and more business districts pop up, they form a kind of global grid of financial activity and influence. In a sense this is a new form or territoriality – in a topological space. As the power of multinational companies grows beyond that of states or cities, the networked space they consume can potentially one day declare itself a sovereign nation. (more…)
(Interview originally published on Ymag. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim unless specified otherwise. You can also read the beginning and the end of the interview.)
Two skyscrapers in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi
Nicola: I liked your video because it is visually simple and engaging, but at the same time dense with actuality. Both the Israeli military practices, which you also mention in your video, and the World Trade Center in Manhattan, from which the Zuidas are inspired, remind of a complex global scenario (as described by urban theorists like Saskia Sassen) where the urban sites of business and war’s battlegrounds are increasingly overlapping.As an Israeli artist, how do you feel this global dimension is affecting your work and what do you think is the best way to critically investigate it?
Tom: I often feel humbled by the flow of information in the 21st century. I used to look for an absolute truth while I was growing up in Israel, but now I don’t anymore. I accept the fact that media reality is increasingly overlapping and networked in all fields, including conflict. It becomes much more difficult to trace a clear reality in the flurry cauldron of opinions and stories. So I prefer to treat both quantitative and qualitative information as rumors or stories. But arguably politics finance and the military have always been cross-linked. In the book Lords of Finance as one example, Liaquat Ahmed describes how in 1694 a group of protestant city merchants got permission to form the Bank of England – with exclusive rights to service the government, in return for lending the government £1.2 million which saved the country from bankruptcy over a war with France. This happens throughout history. It’s just that with the volume of media flow today, the public experiences all of these complex networks as they are formed, in real time. So the data attack becomes as overwhelming as any powerful weapon. (more…)
(The interview was originally published on Ymag, where you can still read it. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim, unless specified otherwise.)
In occasion of The Smooth and The Striated, a Gilles Deleuze-inspired art exhibition which took place at the Nieuwe Dakota and Huize Frankendael venues in Amsterdam, I had the chance to meet Israeli artist Tom Tlalim. Tlalim has been living in the Netherlands for a decade now, and recently he has been in the new business district of De Zuidas in South Amsterdam for a five months residency at the Virtueel Museum Zuidas. The works he exhibited dealt with contemporary themes of conflict, politics, war, finance, and urbanization, while maintaining simple yet technologically-layered aesthetics. The long interview that follows (and which will be published in three parts) covers a variety of issues, ranging from the intersections of art and science to public ground privatization, from the contemporary role of the artist to the Palestine/Israel conflict. All with the urban landscape of the developing business district of De Zuidas as a background.
De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi
Nicola: First of all, before being an installation artist or a video-maker, you are a musician. While visiting the Zuidas myself, I noticed the landscape is quite desolated and dispersed and, apart from a few bars – for example near the metro stop, next to the Accenture building – the area is very quiet. How did the sound of the Zuidas inspire you?
Tom: It’s interesting that you indicate the location of the bars by their proximity to a multinational company building. This happens a lot at the Zuidas. For me it was essential to keep a critical view of the place in my work, and not to use readymades such as brand names or PR materials. I wanted to experience this environment for what it is and let my opinion on it form gradually. In such a politically charged environment, the info, news and views, however impartial they may seem, often do tend to reaffirm the brand by placing it on the map. (more…)