Video Footages of Technology and Art

Hi, all.
I am sharing these video footages.
You might not be able to see these well yesterday, so for reference and for someone who might be interested in them, I will upload links here. Hope to enjoy them.

1. Bill Viola, Inverted Birth, 2014
https://pixpix.co/limsssa/0iEodLt9tG/

2. Viola's film(Inverted Birth) making
https://vimeo.com/82179558

3. Nam June Paik, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, 1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQLhyDIjtI

4. Hyun-ki Park1942-2000), Regarding 2015 Exhibition,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28F5VL3vPAM

5. Bill Viola, The Innocents, 2007
https://youtu.be/U5barhd90Yw

6. Bill Viola, Three Women, 2008
http://nyti.ms/1USTBBC

Uptool Events This Week

Expanded Art History for Plants #3: 

How Am I Not Myself? 

Wednesday, April 27th from 6-8 PM

UIC Greenhouse and Plant Research Lab (1020 South Union)

Episode 3 of EAHFP looks at performance: the kinds in which we willingly choose to step outside of ourselves and the kinds in which we don’t even realize we are performing. Discussed: Ghosts, re-performance, actors v. acting, Dick Wolfe, Elvis Presley, and the existential, playful, self-aware, and nonetheless entertaining condition of self curation.

EAHFP is a monthly pseudo-lecture series that imagines a premise in which Art History is designed for anyone: kids, animals, plants, scholars; the Pizza Hut waiter as much as the Frankfurt School lover. The presentations in this series are therefore "expanded" in the sense that they are not only made somewhat more art historically general, but also entered into arenas of playing with its form and limitations. Which is to lead to a pontification following this hyphen - how do we talk about art history without a powerpoint or a stack of papers in front of our face outside of a classroom or conference? Answers are not necessarily expected, powerpoints are not necessarily denied, and papers will most certainly be used. The provocation is simply: play with all these things to make a potentially generative mess.

ABOUT THIS MONTH'S PRESENTERS:

Hannah Higgins' research examines twentieth century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, performance art, food art and early computer art. Her books and articles argue for the humanistic value of multimodal aesthetic experiences. Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and co-editor of with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012).

Kelly Lloyd, was named a "Chicago Breakout Artist for 2015" and recent solo exhibitions include: Gift Baskets by Occasion at The Mission Gallery & Western Pole, a telephone pole located on Western & Iowa Street. Lloyd's is the author of writings and performative lectures with titles such as "Notes on Facebook and Self Preservation" and "Cute Camo."

Nellie Kluz is a Chicago based filmmaker who makes observational documentaries about visual processes, social dynamics and small pleasures. Kluz's films have screened at the Full Frame Film Festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, the Independent Film Festival Boston, the Maryland Film Festival and Rooftop Films.

​Urban Forage With Nance Klehm

Saturday, April 30th

​2-4 PM

Meet at 2 PM at the UIC Greenhouse 

Join us this Saturday, April 30th from 2-4 PM for an urban foraging walk with ecologist Nance Klehm. Nance's Urban Forages are two hour long, informally guided walks through the spontaneous and cultivated vegetation of the urban landscape. Along the walk, we will learn to identify forgageable plants and hear their botanical histories. All Urban Forages start with an herbal beverage and end with a simple food shared over a discussion generated by the walk.

Nance has led these walks since 2006 in and around Chicago, as well as Los Angeles, Montreal, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, New York, Mexico City, Warsaw, Berlin, Baltimore, Portland, Detroit and Pasadena.

Due to a size limitation, please let us know if you would like to participate. We still have a few open slots available. If you are interested, please email Aaron at aaron.walker63@gmail.com

Nance Klehm is a Chicago based ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and permacultural grower. Nance’s recent undertaking, The Ground Rules, is a unique earth-building initiative that involves creating community-run Soil Centers to gather organic waste from local businesses. She is the founder of Social Ecologies, an organization that acts as an umbrella for a variety of ongoing ecological and system-regenerating projects.

Radius Episode 73: Lindsey French

Sunday, May 1st at 5:30 AM (sunrise)

UIC Greenhouse and Plant Research Lab (1020 South Union)

Join Uptool and Radius us for the first broadcast and performance in the 2016 GROUND Series, featuring Episode 73: Lindsey French. This live radio broadcast and sound performance will be held at sunrise (5:30 AM) Sunday, May 1st on the grounds of University of Illinois at Chicago's Greenhouse and Plant Research Laboratory.

In this episode Lindsey French’s "non attachment to the ground" reaches down; a promiscuous transmission in an extended moment of transition and a cautious moment of optimism regarding the bedrock beneath Chicago. Think of a plant. Is it a tree? Or is it a houseplant? The ground is the basis of the terrestrial environment, where the normative plant is rooted. Without the ground there would be no sky, or without the sky we would know no ground. The ground is our grounds of habitation and habit. We habitually water our houseplants. Plants turn the air into ground. Plants disappear into the background. Plants are the background, but they transmit promiscuous signals and receive them, too. When the glaciers melted they deposited seeds.

Lindsey's broadcast will be available for streaming through the month of May on the Radius website.
Radius Episode 73 is produced in partnership with SoundCamp, a 24-hour radio broadcast that tracks the sunrise around the globe, and Uptool, a programming series that highlights the work of cultural producers who find themselves engaging the edges of anthropology, ecology, and the arts.

Radius GROUND is a three-part, site-specific, commissioned radio series that focuses on radio’s direct physical connection to the Earth.

Nature Communications

Exploring the biophysical option space for feeding the world without deforestation

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160419/ncomms11382/full/ncomms11382.html

MONOLITHIC DOME INSTITUTE

I talked earlier in the class about stumbling across “Morningside,” an intentional religious community and commercial endeavor just outside of Branson, MO, under the leadership of Jim Bakker, disgraced televangelist who had his heyday the 1980s. One of the community’s selling points is the plan to build concrete monolithic domes, where residents can feel safe from apocalypse and natural disaster. At optional extra cost, domebuyers can choose a hobbit build-out for a storybook feel to their bunker/house.

The supplier of the plans and materials for the domes is the Monolithic Dome Institute (http://www.monolithic.org/), based in Italy, TX, and founded by David South. The Institute builds domes, sells plans for domes, and runs dome-building workshops. South cites Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes as his direct inspiration for his fascination with domes, which began when he was a high school student in Idaho in the 1970s and began dome construction experiments with his brothers.

We’re usually most comfortable with what’s familiar. That applies to the structures we live in and use. It’s a self-learned process that begins at birth when we’re slapped on the butt and put in a crib with four corners. From then on, we live in a world of rectangles and squares. - David South

South’s contribution to the dome design was the Airform, “a huge balloon, molded into various shapes and sizes of a tough fabric, that’s attached to a dome’s concrete foundation and inflated.” It allows for huge structures, and the Monolithic Dome Institute has seen domes built all over the world as community centers, churches, homes, and public buildings.

Domes promoted by the institute can be adapted to fit any kind of aesthetic; adding whatever veneer is required:

I think it’s a really fascinating example of ideas being adapted for real-estate development and “man’s house is his castle” emphasis, keeping the emphasis on home ownership as one of the main forms of security and comfort in the US. The Monolithic Dome institute offers a pragmatic and problem-solving based approach that grapples with climate change/natural disaster fears and the high cost of energy and home building. It's a strange mixture - one the one hand it plays into survivalist ideas and fear-mongering like Jim Bakkers, but at the same time the domes are certainly energy-efficient and pretty cool.

The Institute even promotes studio-apartment sized domes for working people and single parents, and Italy, TX has its own development of these studios, which are run on a motel-style payment basis to avoid having to ask for security deposits. They’re offered as a creative solution to the shortage of affordable housing for service workers. Again, I'm not sure that we're getting at the root of that housing problem by suggesting everyone live in a dome motel in the middle of nowhere in Texas, but again, not a bad idea.

I’ve been pretty preoccupied with the co-opting of whole-earth ideas for corporations and advertizing etc., which we’ve talked a lot about, but I’m also interested in the way that the pragmatism of these ideas and shapes does actually move through various different groups in surprising ways that make the political spectrum seem kind of irrelevant. The monolithic dome can, according to David South, serve anyone from Jim Bakker to public high schools, single moms and the Turkish government.

Another strand of thinking has been about RV culture, which I think functions similarly - the nomadism of the type promoted by Whole-Earth-style thinking is welded together with a very American consumerism-influenced vision of a regular house on wheels.

58" on center

HENRY DREYFUSS

Dreyfuss was an industrial designer whose designs defined the twentieth century. Some of his most iconic designs are below:

Bell Telephone Model 302, 1937. (image from cooperhewitt.org)

Honeywell T86-Round, 1956. (image from cooperhewitt.org)

Polaroid SX-70, 1972. (image from cooperhewitt.org)

Dreyfuss' influence perpetuates to this day because of his user-centered philosophy. He notes his experience in theater as a set designer forced him to be hyper aware of the actors on stage and the ease in which they must move through the spaces. Beginning in the 1950s, Dreyfuss began publishing his methods and principles, first with Designing for People (1955) followed by The Measure of Man (1960). The Measure of Man was a series of charts that mapped the ranges of motion and proportional relationships for the "average" human. Better products would be the result of understanding natural tendencies.

I have been visiting various art museums to survey the seating practices of each institution considering the location within each exhibition, size, materiality and accessibility as part of an investigation into "museum fatigue." In the least creepy way, I also began observing museum visitors and how they view art. I thought it would be interesting, but it wasn't. It made me think back to Dreyfuss' work and if visitors mostly resume the same pose while looking at something hung on a wall because it is a natural posture to fall into, or if it is a reaction to the conventional way of displaying art. 

Below are some of my initial investigations.

THE REARVIEW MIRROR

OJOBOCA, Samuel Delgado & Helena Girón, Ben Rivers, Ralitsa Doncheva, Josh Gibson

The Nightingale Cinema, 1084 N. Milwaukee
Saturday, May 7, 7 pm, $7-10

http://nightingalecinema.org/the-rearview-mirror/

"I then took another look into the rearview mirror, on my own, and I discovered somewhat to my surprise that when you look in the rearview mirror you do not see what has gone passed. You see what is coming. And the rearview mirror is the foreseeable future. It is not the past at all. The title, the phrase “rearview mirror” appears to distort the situation. Most people think of it instinctively from the sound of the phrase, “It must be the past.” In terms of media, of course, the thing that occupies the foreground in terms of the rearview mirror is nostalgia. Nostalgia is the name of the game in every part of our world today. Nostalgia is a kind of rearview mirror if you like, but it’s also the shape of things to come." – Marshall McLuhan

The Nightingale is pleased to present this program of short films that have their own particular ways with looking back, while simultaneously sharing in the projection of what lies ahead. Guided by voices via archival recordings, literary renditions, oral histories and personal testimonies, these modern mythologies strive toward utopian fulfillment but also present the threats of shifting ecologies that all too often accompany such palpable yet fragile states of being. Please join us for an evening of Chicago premieres as we journey to the small town of Hüllen-Hüllen, the isolated community of Ye on the island of Lanzarote, the remote volcanic Republic of Vanuatu, the Zelenikovsky Monastery in Bulgaria, and the backwaters of North Carolina.

Programmed by Lorenzo Gattorna

George Orwell's 1984 and David Bowie

Hello, all.
I am sharing this article which is related to what we discussed ealier regarding David Bowie and his artistic legacy from a counter cultural perspective for reference.

https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeOrwellAuthor/posts/547434415418596

Steve Reich "Come out"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50

Come Out is a 1966 piece by American composer Steve Reich. He was asked to write this piece to be performed at a benefit for the retrial of the Harlem Six, six black youths arrested for committing a murder during the Harlem Riot of 1964 for which only one of the six was responsible. Truman Nelson, a civil rights activist and the person who had asked Reich to compose the piece, gave him a collection of tapes with recorded voices to use as source material. Nelson, who chose Reich on the basis of his earlier work It's Gonna Rain, agreed to give him creative freedom for the project.

Reich eventually used the voice of Daniel Hamm, one of the boys involved in the riots but not responsible for the murder; he was nineteen at the time of the recording. At the beginning of the piece, he says, "I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them" (alluding to how Hamm had punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police that he had been beaten). The police had not previously wanted to deal with Hamm's injuries, since he did not appear seriously wounded.
Reich re-recorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which initially play in unison. They quickly slip out of sync to produce a phase shifting effect, characteristic of Reich's early works. Gradually, the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation and, later, almost a canon. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, until the actual words are unintelligible. The listener is left with only the rhythmic and tonal patterns of the spoken words. Reich says in the liner notes of his album Early Works of using recorded speech as source material that "by not altering its pitch or timbre, one keeps the original emotional power that speech has while intensifying its melody and meaning through repetition and rhythm." The piece is a prime example of process music.
In dance, the piece was used in 1982 by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker as part of one of her seminal works, Fase, which became a cornerstone of contemporary dance.  (excerpt from Wikipedia)

BIOSPHERE

Dates:

Ikea Run: Weekend of April 16-17.

Install Friday April 22

~Hangout April 22, 23, 24~

Programming Sunday April 24

Proposed Elements/Projects - ADD YOURS HERE

Sprouted floor - Roni

Yarn stations - Mike! Grace

Video Confessional Booth - Nellie

Materials to Volunteer - ADD YOURS HERE

Real Oriental Food (hopefully real sprouted oriental food) - Roni

Yogurt - Mike!

Rope thing - Dan

hidden in plain sight - The Nightingale - May 2016

"Imagine a picture. Imagine a picture of a place. Imagine this place is a landscape. Imagine the light in this landscape. Imagine the warmth that radiates from this landscape. Imagine the well-being that comes from this warmth. Imagine trying to hold on to this feeling. Imagine not managing to hold on to this feeling. Imagine it fading from your memory. Imagine wanting to return to this landscape. Imagine the pain of not being able to return to this landscape. Not being able to feel that warmth. Imagine losing this landscape and the pain that it causes. Imagine living with the pain of this lost landscape forever. Imagine this is the landscape of pain. Now imagine being able to shatter this pain. Imagine a place that gives you the power to destroy this landscape of pain. This was that place." - Anonymous, 1984

Programmed by Lorenzo Gattorna

Wolkenschatten

Anja Dornieden & Juan David Gonzalez Monroy, 2014, 16mm, color, sound, 16:37

In 1984, for three weeks in May, what appeared to be a giant cloud shrouded the small town of Hüllen-Hüllen in darkness. Before the end of the month the cloud had dispersed and life seemed to return to normal. One month later, however, the town was hastily abandoned and its residents were nowhere to be found. They left most of their belongings behind in such a way as to make one think they would return at any moment.

The search that followed led investigators to a cave on the outskirts of town. Inside the cave a number of homemade contraptions were discovered. Connected by a variety of mirrors and fitted with a wide array of lenses, they were found to form a large projection device. Even though at first sight it appeared to be either unfinished or broken, it was eventually determined to be in working order. When it was turned on it projected a series of images over every surface of the cave. Initially the source of the images could not be established, yet upon further examination it was found that the images were engraved directly on the lenses of the machine.

Along with the machine a sheet of paper covered in handwritten text was also found. It was titled “Cloud Shadow”. Beyond the uncertain clues provided by the images and the text, no verifiable explanation for the disappearance of the town’s residents has ever been given. For the sake of preservation the engraved images were transferred onto 35mm slide film. Copies of the text and images were made and archived together. We have been lucky enough to obtain one of these sets. For the benefit of those interested in examining this strange occurrence, we’ve put them together as a narrated slideshow.

Neither God nor Santa María

Samuel M. Delgado & Helena Girón, 2015, 16mm, color, sound, 11:45

https://vimeo.com/121120648

Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn. In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.

There is a Happy Land Further Awaay

Ben Rivers, 2015, S16mm, color & b/w, sound, 20:10

There Is A Happy Land Further Awaay (2015), captures the landscapes of the remote volcanic Republic of Vanuatu archipelago, before they were devastated by Cyclone Pam in early 2015, the footage becoming a ghostly document of an ecosystem now irrevocably altered. 

A hesitant female voice reads a poem by Henri Michaux, recounting a life lived in a distant land, full of faltering and mistakes. Island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island, made on the opposite side of the world. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding film, a lone figure on a boat drifts at sea.

Baba Dana Talks to the Wolves

Ralitsa Doncheva, 2015, 16mm, color, sound, 10:38

https://vimeo.com/150172995

Baba Dana Talks To The Wolves is an intimate, impressionistic portrait of Baba Dana, an 85 year-old Bulgarian woman who has chosen to spend her life in the mountains, away from people and cities. She lives in one of the oldest monasteries in Bulgaria, Zelenikovsky Monastery. Once known as a favorite place of repose for Bulgaria’s last Tzar, the place is now known as Baba Dana’s home. There are no wolves in this film. There are no wolves left in Bulgaria.

Journey to the Sea

Josh Gibson, 2015, 35mm, color, sound, 14:23

https://vimeo.com/135366693

In Journey to the Sea, an elderly woman floats down a river of elusive memories and fragmented artifacts from cinema‘s history, straining to recall the places that she has been. Passing through childhood creeks and riverside views of great cities, she also struggles to remember the impulse of travel itself. Her fading and fluid memories of touristic desire merge into an unreliable account of a great river teeming with duck-billed platypuses, disappearing Native Americans, fellow tourists and intimate hair washes.