Acid Graphic by Travess Smalley

“I would only believe in a God that knows how to dance.” — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885

E-VAPOR-8
curated by Francesca Gavin

May 5 – 18, 2012
Opening: Saturday May 5, 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Gallery hours:  Thursday – Sunday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

319 Scholes Street
Brooklyn, NY 11206 (map)
319scholes.org

“E-Vapor-8″, titled after a 1992 track by the rave band Altern 8, explores the influence and relationship between contemporary art and rave and electronic music culture. Here everything can be taken from ‘the archive’ and reworked – the surface glare of squeaky voice, the speed of imagery and sound, infantalist fashion, smiley faces, pirate radio, fractal imagery, hyper color fluorescents, sample-style editing processes, found footage of dancing and parties, Spiral Tribe’s politicization, and kiddie-rave pop songs. There are more serious ideas behind the visual and aural melting pot. Ideas around community, technology, intellectual and physical freedom, rebellion and myth-making all play into this wave of contemporary work.

Rave is now positioned, aesthetically and aurally, as a proto universe for contemporary, technology-infused art. House and rave provided some of the first examples of defunct technologies being co-opted and reused by a younger generation for creative purposes. Computer-made graphics once used as rave visuals are now considered precursors to online experimentation. The processes of cut and paste, sampling and looping that were the basis of DIY electronic music are echoed in video editing techniques and online footage amalgams. Early house and rave culture provided a model of democratization of culture, just as contemporary visual artists consider their use of the internet now. The hedonistic drug references of the period are gone. The moment of mass cultural upheaval has passed. We are left with a sense of DIY utopia and the desire to create work that is immediate, sensorial, and at times simply fun.

EVapor8 poster by Christian Petersen

Participating artists include:  Fatima Al Qadiri, Cory Arcangel and Frankie Martin, Rhys Coren, Petra Cortright, Jeremy Deller, Aleksandra Domanovic, Cecile B Evans, Jeffrey Gibson, Alexandra Gorczynski, Leslie Kulesh, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, Marisa Olson, Hannah Perry, Christian J. Petersen (Dumb Eyes), Travess Smalley, Lucy Stokton, and Daniel Swan.

Francesca Gavin is a writer, editor and curator based in London. She is the Visual Arts Editor of Dazed & Confused, the art editor of Twin and a Contributing Editor at AnOther and Sleek Magazine. Her books ‘100 New Artists’, ‘Creative Space’, ‘Hell Bound: New Gothic Art’ and ‘Street Renegades’ are all published by Laurence King. She has curated international exhibitions including ‘Responsive Eyes’ (Jacob’s Island, London 2012) ‘The New Psychdelica’ (MU, Eindhoven 2011) and ‘Syncopation’ (Grimmuseum, Berlin 2010). She has written for publications including Vogue, Wallpaper*, It’s Nice That, Nylon, Bon, icon, Oyster, Blueprint, Art Review and Sunday Times Style and is the curator of the Soho House group.

More:

http://319scholes.org/exhibition/e-vapor-8

Related posts:

1. 319 Scholes Presents: DUMP.FM IRL: October 22 – October 30, 2010
2. Notes on a New Nature at 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, Nov 10–Nov 20, 2011
3. BIG REALITY, March 15 – 29, 2012, at 319 Scholes, Brooklyn

“Window Series” by Sara Ludy

Notes on a New Nature
Curated by Nicholas O’Brien.
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
November 10 – November 20, 2011

@ 319 Scholes
319 Scholes St.
Brooklyn, NY 11206 (map)
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

If you’re in or around Brooklyn tonight, this is an event not to be missed.

For me the Internet has always been a physical space. Working as a sculptor, the first moment I started experimenting with HTML code and viewed the results in the browser, I witnessed a physical installation.
— Jan Robert Leegte talking to cont3xt.net

“Notes on a New Nature is a physical manifestation of an ongoing research project conducted by artist, writer, and curator Nicholas O’Brien. The research critically examines and compares the relationships that contemporary artists working with digital media have to practices started in Modernist Painting – specifically the pursuit of capturing the virtual qualities of what constitutes a landscape. How does an artist depict a space faithfully enough to show its affect on a subject? Can art capture the space between the viewer and the horizon, and where does that horizon reside now that we can digitally circumnavigate the globe? Can the digital reconcile the physical?

One way that we know how to understand the natural is through the domestic spaces of our daily lives. The interior shelter allows for reflection on what is “outside,” and as a result positions civilization away from the natural. However, as various digital and virtual landscape permeate the domestic space, our notion of what constitutes the natural has become more complicated than a simple inside/outside dichotomy. We use all forms of digital and analog technologies to simulate the natural world daily, and artists in this show point to how these tools affect the ways in which the “realness” of the natural is no longer as simple as locating it outside your window.

This newfound complication highlights the central argument of Notes on a New Nature: our varied notion of what constitutes the natural is shaped by technology, which is a narrative that can be traced all the way back to the advent of agriculture and the dawn of civilization. Through employment of various digital approaches, artists in this exhibition reference this long-standing problem we face when attempting to represent landscape and acknowledge the ways in which digital technology has forever changed our understanding of nature.”

Participating artists include:

Duncan Alexander
Mark Beasley
Chris Collins
Petra Cortright
Theo Darst
Marjolijn Dijkman
Paul Flannery
Joe Hamilton (aka Hypergeography)
Jan Robert Leegte
Sara Ludy
Garrett Lynch
Michael Ray-Von
Sherwin Rivera Tibayan
Nicolas Sassoon
Rick Silva
Pascual Sisto
Kate Steciw
Wes W Wilson
Krist Wood

RSVP on Facebook.

–> Live-streaming Notes on a New Nature Gallery Tour
Friday, November 11, 2011, 3:00pm EST

Mark your calendar for a live-streaming gallery tour of the Notes on a New Nature exhibition. This tour with curator Nicholas O’Brien offers visitors the opportunity to view and ask questions about the exhibition. Just tweet your questions with the hashtag #NoANN or email your questions in advance to info@319scholes.org.

Notes on a New Nature, an Introduction for 319 Scholes from Nicholas O’Brien on Vimeo.

A video introduction for “Notes on a New Nature” exhibition at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn, NY

November 10-20, 2011

Related posts:

1. 319 Scholes Presents: DUMP.FM IRL: October 22 – October 30, 2010
2. Art|Basel Most Wanted, Nov 30 – Dec 17, 2010, Amy Alonso Gallery, Miami
3. DINCAssociates in Brooklyn

Petra Cortright is a traveler, an internet artist who currently resides in California, whose work plies the territory of webcam performance, computer graphics and graphic art, animated .gifs, the webcam music video, other sortings of media that are bejeweled with web gems, and other videos that artfully hype the youtube-dance-video come what may.

Petra Cortright was born in 1986, in Santa Barbara, California, and has has resided in New York City, New York; Portland, Oregon; Toyko, Japan; and Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club, Loshadka Internet Surfing Club, and Computers Club. She has studied at Parsons School of Design in New York and California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Click here for Petra’s C/V and bio.

Her work has made its way ‘cross the interview and o’er the international scene, including the New Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, Adbusters Magazine (Nov/Dec ’08 issue), the sixth annual Stan Brakhage Symposium (2010, Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder), the (now defunct) New York Underground Film Festival, and  her Endless Pot of Gold CD-Rs installation (Nasty Nets collaboration) piece exhibited at the 2009 Sundance International Film Festival.

Petra and her work makes the internet splash, with her work snagging brickbats and inciting plaudits. In August 2007, Petra’s work stirred some dirt with a puzzled Patty Johnson, artfagcity.com founder and veteran art-blogger:

Four days ago Tom Moody posted Petra Cortright’s webcam video and since then I’ve been struggling to articulate why the aesthetics of this piece of [sic] go beyond taking a few clip images from the web and slapping them on a video. Unlike a David Shrigley piece, which uses humor so obvious its value requires no explanation, a cam featuring a still figure, dancing pizzas, and falling snow to an electronic beat may require a little more discussion.

…………………………………………………………………………….

Probably the most amusing aspect of this work lies in the fact that it’s basically a documentation of a live performance, in which you watch someone concentrate on their computer screen for the duration of a song. I realize this comment tends to incite a host of responses most of which begin something to the effect of “So why am I looking at this?”, and while there’s no response to this if you don’t find the redundancies of web surfing that so many net artists like to highlight funny, there’s also a level of virtuosity in the live arrangement of gifs etc, that needs to be called to attention.

Patty seemingly warmed to Petra’s internet work with an near-end conclusion of, “Cortright’s webcam piece succeeds because her dancing pizzas are unexpected, and the snow and lightening seem almost delicately placed.”

Petra’s work speaks for itself, and Patty of artfagcity makes a peppery bullet point: love-it-or-hate-it, multiple viewing explicate. Her work verily is an internet new-media culture thing. Below is a seven question interview with Petra Cortright.

sparkling (2010)

(1) What corner of the Internet do you call home?
gmail/gchat/gtalk since i live in an “isolated” place so its where i talk to all my friends. fb/fb chat doesn’t feel very solid. the fb chat format is annoying and i really dislike being sent actual information in a fb message — i always forget to reply because they get buried so fast under some type of event invite messages

SYSTEM-LANDSCAPES-2007

(2) What is your inspiration soup?
bored + energy + my room is clean + NONJUDGMENTAL STANCE + WISE MIND

glow-drawings-2006

(3) What is your recipe for disaster?
living in filth & feeling lost

footvball /faerie (2009)

(4) How do you wish to expand your work, aesthetically, conceptually, and technically?
aesthetics come without thinking, “conceptually” is something i avoid, sincerity has greater value to me, technically trying to be better about not becoming nervous / intimidated / second guessing myself with commissioned work.

(5) Select an image of your liking and write a 7-line dadaist poem. (However you may interpret a Dadaist poem).
i wrote in 2007 inspired by the meeting of largest dog in the world with the smallest dog in the world:

TWO EYEEZ GOIN IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
ONE TOWARDS THE SUUUNNN
N ONE TOWARDS THE MOOONNN

YOU WERE BORN
KNOWIN A SECRETTTT
THE SECRETT TO LIFE
BUT UR NOT GONNNA TELL US
YOU WILL NEVVERR TELL USS
YOU WILL DIE WITH THE SECRETT

TWO EYEEZ GOIN IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
ONE TOWARDS THE SUUUNNN
N ONE TOWARDS THE MOOONNN

N IM PRAYING 2 U
CUZ GOD MUSTA MADE U
UR GOD URSELFFF
SOME SAY ITS TRUEE

TWO EYEEZ GOIN IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
ONE TOWARDS THE SUUUNNN
N ONE TOWARDS THE MOOONNN

THE KNOWLEDGE U HAD
UR KEEPING IT INSIDE
INSIDE YOUR BRAIN
ITS THERE IN YOUR GAZE
BUT ITS LEAKKING OUT
ITS FLOWIN OUT OF YOUR PIGTAILS
IT ONLY LOOKS LIKE U GOT EM
U DONT REALLY HAVE EM
BUT YOUR HAIRS
JUST SO LOOONG

TWO EYEEZ GOIN IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
ONE TOWARDS THE SUUUNNN
N ONE TOWARDS THE MOOONNN

Oh my God how we.. Increase. Oh my God, how we rise., 2010

(6) Your opinion: vimeo vs. youtube: your opinion, please expound.
youtube because always more comments/discussion and people get really real with hate/like and dont hold back. vimeo is like flickr where there are not many comments and the comments are always positive. its more interesting to hear about how much people hate what you do and also more fun to repsond back with rude goofy threat then thank the peasant for the +1 view

(7) Seven irrelevant questions:

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(A) Your favorite action movie.
lara croft 4-ever

(B) What is the best film you have seen this year of 2010?
“the comfort of strangers” it was made in 1990. so fucking creepy. i aven’t seen any movies in theatres actually now that i think of it. this year i mean. i like the harry potters i guess that is my answer for something released 2010.

(C) What are your top 5 Kraftwerk songs (in order of preference, if possible)?
the modell song

(D) What two colors look best together?
black n white, i always have a thing for “defaults”

(E) What type of ‘creative stuff’ is most boring?
something that requires an essay to understand or something that is made just claim it because nobody has made it yet / ”art sport”

this work serves a purpose and i do not think it is bad per se i just personally donnt connect the way as i do with something that feels strong to me in aesthetics

(F) What is your #1 favorite website?
unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnghthist question. google images probably??

(G) What type of animal do you think of when you hear the word ‘DINCA.’
something sly and pointy, long haired, squinty
criminal by nature goofy @ heart

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More:

Petra Cortright Youtube Channel

portfolio: petracortright.com

“Petra Cortright’s Webcam Video,” artfagcity.com, 2007

computersclub.org

Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club

Loshadka Internet Surfing Club

Related posts:

1. Sparkling I & Sparkling II (2010) by Petra Cortright
2. Petra Cortright: New Landscapes
3. Alpine Ascend by Petra Cortright

Duncan Malashock is a Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker whose work we have featured before — that being his 2006 piece, Road, and Pyramid (2008). His work was featured in the recent REFRESH exhibit at the AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media. Duncan makes “analog videos that are concerned with the history of creative technology.” He also makes interactive websites and recently started making sculptural pieces using projections. Duncan was born 1982, San Diego, southern California, and graduated Bard College 2005, BA Integrated Arts.

(1) What do you make and what aesthetics do you pursue?
I’m interested in our relationship with technology, specifically within the context of the Internet as a day-to-day activity, and in light of the history of the use of technology as a way of representing ideals. I make analog videos that are concerned with the history of creative technology, and in exploring what I understand as the ideals of early computer art. I also make interactive websites as public artwork, and that work emphasizes exploring interaction and simulations as their own media. Lately I’ve also started making sculptural pieces using projections, either from laser light or digital projector, which explore both of these sets of ideas, with a focus on the interaction between the ”immaterial” content and physical spaces and objects.

Temple
Digital video, 2009

(2) Your thirst for inspiration: what is something you love, but can not get enough of? Does your thirst for this inspire and guide your art; how does your work correspond with its influences?
I think most of my interests come from my background. I’m from Southern California, so that’s probably why I’m obsessed with ideas like self-created identity, lifestyle marketing, and the possibilities of technology, our understanding of which has largely been shaped by the Californian intersection of phenomena like the Human Potential Movement and Silicon Valley. My dad is a modern dance choreographer, so that’s probably why I’m interested in the expressive qualities of motion and physical performance, both of which are involved a lot, both actively and latently in my work. Simulations come up a lot in my work as a way of exploring these interests. Sometimes an interactive or static simulation of an object or process will form the basis for a new piece. I’m always reading when I’m working on something, and often times that manifests itself in the form of subjects or titles for pieces.

Group Drawing
Digital video, 2010

(3) How do you use your hands to make stuff; how do you use your
computer to make stuff?
A lot of my work is made with systems or simulations, either by using or creating very rigid systems and attempting to be expressive within their constraints, or attempting to create interactive systems which respond expressively to a user’s actions. So the nature of a lot of the work is either in controlling parameters, usually by changing numbers by very small amounts, or interacting expressively with an interface, usually by dragging the mouse around.

http://www.pilewithpedestal.com
Animated interactive website in domain name, 2010

(4) Art and work; the work in art; the process of creating: what
parts of the process are laborious?
Sometimes a website piece will involve weeks of writing and debugging code; other times I’ll steal someone else’s code and change something minor. Sometimes I’ll work on a system for making work within, which may end up taking months to do, and the pieces I make using it will take a few hours or minutes to finish. Sometimes I’ll work with a very specific end result in mind, but at the last minute I’ll make a mistake and like it, and that will be what finishes the piece. The nature of the actual work involved goes back and forth between the head and hands; when it’s not architectural or design-oriented, it’s very physical and direct.

http://www.letsmakesureeverythingisathing.com
Animated interactive website in domain name, 2010

(5) How do you wish to expand your work?
I started publicly interactive artwork on the Internet to make my work more accessible, but as I kept using it I started to appreciate the Internet as its own context, one with very interesting and problematic qualities, not only where presentation and distribution of artwork is concerned, but also with regard to the social aspect of making work online. How is culture evaluated after the Internet? How can an Internet-based artwork be shown effectively within a gallery setting? What is the nature of online work as a commodity? What is the nature of the online art “community”? All of these questions contain directions for expanding work that are all very interesting to me.

Computer-Generated Ballet by Michael Noll, 1963

(6) Is the internet really cool, or cool?
The Internet’s great. I used to be the only artsy computer geek I knew; now I’m a part of multiple groups of them. The Internet as an explosion of points of view seems like just what we needed to put the whole postmodern revolution into the global perspective it was asking for; but now what concerns me is the task of balancing all that cultural material with traditions, and not letting the speed of information obscure our history.

Always Time to Chill Forever by Duncan Malashock

(7) Is there something new you wish to pursue?
I started a project called chat.duncanmalashock.com, which is a kind of library of online chat transcripts as art writing. I think there are a lot of possibilities that open up when people become casual with their ideas and how they present them, and it was also about getting more involved with people in the online artwork community. My experiences with in online artwork got me interested in pursuing the possibilities of continuity in that group, possibilities which are difficult to achieve given how quickly information is consumed and replaced online. I’m interested in how that stream of information can transform into a culture, one that is perhaps more stable and aware of its history and community.

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|\     /|\     /|\     /|
| +---+ | +---+ | +---+ |
| |   | | |   | | |   | |
| |E  | | |N  | | |D  | |
| +---+ | +---+ | +---+ |
|/_____\|/_____\|/_____\|
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More:

Duncan Malashock Portfolio/website

Duncan Malashock on vimeo

chat.duncanmalashock.com

AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media

Related posts:

1. Road (2010) by Duncan Malashock
2. Smart Dust: Pyramid (2008) by Duncan Malashock
3. Seven Question Interview with Will Reed, Brooklyn-Based Painter

:’ |._ ~**~ _.:’ |._ ~**~ _.: (sparkling I & II) .*` .* ;`*,`., `, ,`.*.*. *.*` .* ;`*, Petra Cortright, 2010, Video

I have been following Petra Cortright for aeons. I see Sparkling I and Sparkling II as her best work thus far.

Click the above, or click heer, to watch Sparkling I & II. Be sure to Sychronize the videos.

Stay tuned for a dinca-petra interview. Great job, Pet!

Related posts:

1. Petra Cortright: New Landscapes
2. Alpine Ascend by Petra Cortright
3. Petra Cortright: Footvball Faerie (2009)

2010, 21 sec, video

By Petra Cortright. Fullscreen it.

Related posts:

1. Petra Cortright: New Landscapes
2. Petra Cortright: System Landscapes
3. Petra Cortright: Footvball Faerie (2009)

Petra Cortright, art-gem of the net, posts a lot of videos of herself dancing, and I admire how she posted this video of herself performing a potboiler of a dance to Kraftwerk’s “The Model.”

In the silent abstract piece of video-art (above) we observe Petra as she juggles das football in das hot-pink onezee. A synthetic pink cloud hovers. This is seductive.

Related posts:

1. Petra Cortright: New Landscapes
2. Petra Cortright: System Landscapes

Forest Range with Aqua Sky

Petra Cortright makes computer art, video art, and animated gifs.  Here are four images from her computer art series “New Landscapes 2009.”

Paintd Desert Rockx Mess

Color Rockx w Blue Sky

Feather Caves Thru Pastel Ice

More:

Visit Petra Cortright’s Website

Related posts:

1. Petra Cortright: System Landscapes

by Petra Cortright.

No related posts.