Artipedia - Arts News

Lyon 2007
There are now 103 biennials around the world, mapping news that is growing exponentially, apparently renewable at will, and interchangeable. Flux is prevailing over singularity. One hundred and three biennials, 103 lists of artists, 103 titles… a biennial opens roughly every three days, and they cover one another. Their mechanics inhabit and generate a perpetual present, stretching to infinity. How, then, can a biennial still have critical authority? In 2003 and 2005, we opened a debate on this new form of temporality – firstly on the programmed future, and then on duration.

And now the debate continues: starting with the conviction that there must surely be a history to news and an archaeology to the news of news (the undifferentiated present), I invited Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist to reflect upon this challenge and conceive the 2007 Lyon Biennial. Their ambition is clear: to open the century and name the decade, but with humour. The 2007 Biennial will thus be a game, played as it should be with the utmost seriousness; it will explore issues to do with players, of course, but also with polyphony and, especially, the essential place occupied by the artist.

Thierry Raspail
Artistic director, Lyon Biennial

The 21st century hasn’t yet begun, the century has to begin!
Alain Badiou

The next Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art will open on 17 September 2007. The project devised for this 9th edition by Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans Ulrich Obrist is a history book written by a number of people. The history of a decade yet to be named; of a present that is endlessly arriving.

The project is structured like a grand game, with rules for selecting and casting the roles; a game in which some 50 “players” from around the world are invited to invite an essential artist of this decade. The ultimate purpose of this game, in which invitation is the rule, is to produce together an original landscape, to rethink the format and grammar of contemporary art biennials, and to create living matter from the archaeology of now.

This history book, published on the occasion of the biennial, is both the project’s origin and its horizon. It is conceived as a space open to different voices and trajectories. It will comprise essays by philosophers, critics and historians, and the manifesto texts of each player, centred on a particular vision of the present and of what is happening on the contemporary creative scene. The dynamic system which develops through the formation of this community, enables us to reach beyond generational, geographical and thematic axes and to shift the hierarchies and conventions of knowledge into a feedback loop.

This year’s cycle of talks on the Public Domain continues on

Wednesday, November 29, 2006, 6:30 PM
Radio Communities: The Other Side of the Electronic Divide

Monday, December 4, 2006, 6:30 PM
Open Source: On the Line

The New School
55 West 13th Street
New York City
http://www.nsu.newschool.edu/vlc/

Wednesday, November 29, 2006, 6:30 PM
Radio Communities: The Other Side of the Electronic Divide
The New School
55 West 13th Street
New York City

Radio has reemerged as one of the most accessible media. Cheap, omnipresent, and now low-tech, it is transforming the way we think of geography and public place in locations as disparate as Oaxaca, Beirut, and the Lower East Side. Radio has gained additional prominence and validity in politically charged situations which demand anonymity of dissenting citizens. What political, cultural and humanitarian goals can be served exclusively by this medium? How does radio function as a tool for shared information? This panel will discuss the ability of airwaves to keep the world connected near and far when other technology fails.

Panelists:
Khin Phyu Htway, student, The New School; Voice of America, Burmese service
William H. Siemering, President, Developing Radio Partners
Pete Tridish, Prometheus Radio Project
Gregory Whitehead, artist

Moderator:
Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, Producer, Outer Voices

• Monday, December 4, 2006, 6:30 PM
Open Source: On the Line
The New School
55 West 13th Street
New York City

Artists and technologists mine the promising aesthetic and political possibilities afforded by different open source systems, a powerful concept that is revolutionizing human interaction. In the open source concept, something given for free becomes, thanks to its ubiquity and utility, valuable and even indispensable. Panelists examine sites like Wikipedia and Digg.com, as well as p2p networks and social networking sites. They also explore offline artwork, arts institutions and businesses that have sought to adopt open source models and current challenges to its continuation such as “net neutrality.”

Panelists:
Cory Arcangel, artist
Joy Garnett, artist
Daniel Mayer, Co-founder, Wikipedia
Laura Quilter, Founder, Fair Use Network

Moderator:
Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art

Co-sponsored by Rhizome.org.

For further information, contact kuonic@newschool.edu

Swiss Institute and Monkey Town invite you to

RELEASE PARTY
COMPILER*02. FROM HERE TO THE OCEAN
with LOS SUPER ELEGANTES & SERVICES

at MONKEY TOWN, Sunday, December 3rd / 8PM
admission: $10

Join the US launch of the DVD-magazine
COMPILER*02. FROM HERE TO THE OCEAN
with live-concerts featuring NY-locals, SERVICES,
and Los Angeles-based LOS SUPER ELEGANTES.

8 PM: doors open; cocktails hour / sponsored bar
9-10.45 PM: US launch of FROM HERE TO THE OCEAN
11 PM: live concert

COMPILER*02 FROM HERE TO THE OCEAN is curated by Daniel Baumann, Switzerland, and Champion Zero, Los Angeles, who have gathered a line of internationally acclaimed artists to participate in the project that is this time focused on ’the sea’ as a place of nostalgia for a pure experience of a perfect nature: a paradise for youth subculture, an abyss for numerous cliches and a space for absolute beauty.
FROM HERE TO THE OCEAN is an homage to George Greenough, a key figure of surf history and its most consequent outsider.

Compiler*02 is made possible by Scheidegger-Thommen-Stiftung, Swiss Federal Office of Culture/Sitemapping, Tweaklab and is co-produced by the Swiss Institute.

The participating artists are: OLAF BREUNING, TRISHA DONNELLY, DREW HEITZLER, EMILIE HALPERN, HANSPETER HOFMANN, MARIE JAGER, SHAUN GLADWELL, LOS SUPER ELEGANTES, HANS WEIGAND/HEIMO ZOBERNIG.

LOS SUPER ELEGANTES, who are also featuring on the DVD, will be giving one of their spectacular live performances. Due to their incredible ability to mix original music with theatrical stage improvisations, LOS SUPER ELEGANTES are among the most sought after live bands in the US.

“Globe-trotting emissaries of trash in translation, a refreshing brand of cross-cultural misprision… Talk about a surprise vantage on the touchy elisions of imperialist modernism!” ARTFORUM

SERVICES is a brand new project from two veterans of the NYC underground and “non” personality superstars of their own right, brought to you from A TOUCH OF CLASS USA that introduced bands such as Scissor Sisters, The Ones and Waldorf.

The party will take place at the Monkey town, Williamsburg that has become known for its unique mix of video art, live performance and experimental cuisine.

With generous support from SWATCH and BELEZA PURA

MONKEY TOWN
58 N 3RD ST (BTW. KENT & WYTHE)
WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN 11211
www.monkeytownhq.com

A SWISS INSTITUTE / CONTEMPORARY ART PRODUCTION
Info at: www.swissinstitute.net

Piles & Globes, Likes & Loves
Dave Muller
December 2, 2006 – January 13, 2007
Opening Reception: Saturday, December 2, 6 – 8 pm

Poor, poor pitiful Paranthropus. The genus of hominin lost out to the Homo genus, and in evolution, “losing out” usually means becoming extinct. Which is what happened to Paranthropus, roughly a million years ago.

Paranthropus robustus and other members of the genus were small, with small brains, but they had large jaws and big, flat molars. Those features have led scientists to assume that Paranthropus had a specialized diet, largely of grasses (which they could chew much like cattle chew grass). This specialization, the thinking goes, led to their downfall: unlike Homo species, which dined on a variety of foods including fruits and nuts, P. robustus could not adapt when a drying climate made grasses less prevalent.

“There’s long been this idea that Paranthropus is a specialist, whereas Homo is a generalist, and that this was somehow crucial to surviving through climatic changes,” said Matt Sponheimer, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “It’s a seductive idea, but there have been chinks in the armor.”

Now Dr. Sponheimer and colleagues present what may be the biggest chink of all. P. robustus, they report in Science, actually had a varied diet, eating grasses as well as fruits, nuts and leaves. The researchers used a laser to ablate small layers of enamel from the fossilized teeth of a 1.8-million-year-old P. robustus specimen. By analyzing the concentrations of carbon isotopes in the enamel they were able to determine whether P. robustus was eating grasses or the fruits and leaves of trees and bushes. Grasses use a different photosynthetic pathway than trees and bushes and have a higher concentration of carbon-13, which gets incorporated in animal tissue when the foods are eaten.

Dr. Sponheimer said they discovered that P. robustus’ diet varied seasonally, or at least between years, perhaps as drought made certain foods unavailable. The research shows that “just because the morphology is specialized for just one thing, that doesn’t mean it can’t do other things,” he said.

And what does this new scientific discovery have to do with ‘Piles & Globes, Likes & Loves’, Dave Muller’s installation of new work at Blum & Poe?

Much like Dr. Sponheimer’s laser using researchers or a Mittyesque chemist whose job is to separate a substance into its constituent elements to determine either its nature or its proportions and then state these findings, Muller extracts, studies and mixes seemingly disparate random bits into open ended yet cohesive wholes. Piero Scaruffi’s A History of Rock Music, a mathematical proof, the US Postal Service, his daughter’s favorites, a moment from a wedding, all gather to be considered.

Mingling these moments with an archive of over 90,000 songs and counting, the artist extracts from his mine, tosses it toward a disco ball, takes note of the reflections that gleam from the pile, lovingly sets them down on paper and then blasts the gallery walls with the results of his investigation