There is a bit less content with my name on on ArtSlant this month, but the fair alone was quite a mouthful to make sense of, considering I’m not really an expert in the field.
Here are the links:
(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.
(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…)
After last week's post about Demolition Man (1993) and the city of Los Angeles, today I'm writing about another action flick dealing with urban imagery, also come out the same year: Last Action Hero. Both movies are cop-tales, reterritorializing a way of dealing with crime and justice from one world to another. In Stallone's sci-fi exploit the change happens in time, while in the more sophisticated – and also more tongue-in-cheek – film starring future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger the jump is twofold: from reality to fiction and, quite significantly, from New York to Los Angeles. Before we go further about the retorritorialization I mentioned before, a short introduction to the movie's plot is necessary.
This is a rare example of food-related article for this site. I wrote it for Ymag.
One of the first things that struck me when I first came to Amsterdam – once I accumulated enough expertise to find my way beyond the deadly tourist triangle of Damrak/Kalverstraat/Red Light District – was the way the city is so open and globalized, but at the same time manages to keep its own relatively-homogeneous feel. Since one of the symptoms usually associated with globalization are fast food chains, I was also surprised to find several local reinterpretations of the standard McDonald's burger stand. Maybe I'm paying more attention to it because I come from Italy, where burger culture doesn't really exist, but I think Amsterdam burgers can be an interesting allegory of the way the city is allowing the world in, while keeping the door keys at hand. The following examples represent a partial depiction of Amsterdam through the greasy lenses of burger-eating. (more…)
Here’s another post previously published on yskira.com.
(All photos © Alex MacLean)
Photographer Alex MacLean has been flying around the United States in his plane for a while now, taking aerial pictures that little have in common with the cold-hearted omniscence of Google Earth. Instead, they provide a beautiful, poetic, and yet compelling view of the ecological risks of suburban sprawl, uncontrolled industrialism, and the scarcity of environment-friendly energy sources. MacLean’s eye selects visually-amazing targets, to which he also attaches a rich statistical documentation to better outline a risky scenario: toxic waste, pollution, global warming, but also housing speculation and social isolation.
This is an article I originally wrote for Ymag.
Ion Bitzan, Map (1978)
It's no surprise Polis has recently opened one of their articles with the same Jorge Luis Borges quote as Jean Baudrillard did in his introduction to "Simulacra and Simulation". The quote comes from a story about an insanely detailed 1:1 scale map of an empire, eventually shredding apart and leaving scattered remains on the very soil it used to discipline.
The reason why Borges' vision is so important today is not only the recent popularization of mapping, especially on the internet, but its evolution into a virtualized and pervasive layer overlapping with both our online and offline experiences. If Christopher Alexander's "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", although focused on architectural design and civil engineering, has also influenced software writers, augmented space and virtuality make the conceptual relationship between city design and network design intersecting rather than isomorphic.
