by Charlotte Anderson The recording studio on East 30th Street in Manhattan was once holy ground. Carved out of the abandoned remains of an old Armenian Church, it was a place where musicians shared in a mutual, perhaps now lost, struggle—to record that…
Fly a spaceship and melt your mind with Rob Lach’s experimental video game
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to shoot down bomber planes, race a Ferrari in a Volvo or fly a space ship while on acid, POP might offer the insight you need. The mind-bending experimental video game consists of what it calls “a series of erratic minigames” set to a steady stream of panic-inducing music. Designed by independent developer Rob Lach as an exploration in conventional game development, the purposefully disjointed experience was designed by creating the music first then running with the first game concept that came to mind. The lo-fi result feels at once nostalgic and unsettling.
Using various controls—mouse clicks, arrows keys, Z and X buttons—the player navigates through seven “interactive vignettes” of hand-drawn pixel art, often with little to no instructions. This purposeful lack of declared objectives leaves all understanding and interpretation up to the individual, a task only made more fun by intense tunes and floods of strobing colors. As a result “Launch” ends up looking like a reenactment of the Challenger disaster, while the more manageable “Air Raid”—curiously reminiscent of one of the more memorable Full Metal Jacket scenes—only became clear after multiple inflictions of keyboard abuse.
In “Highway” the player races a red Volvo wagon down a never-ending road in some nameless city. Coaxed on by a pounding beat, the faux chase scene feels like a lo-fi Cruising USA with a cheeky sense of juvenile design. Subsequently in “Gunner” the operator shoots down bombers with the click of a mouse as equally suspenseful beats play in the background. To add to the perfectly retro aesthetic, each “minigame” is flanked by pixelated snapshots and distorted movie clips from a bygone era.
Lach’s POP game is available through a pay-what-you-want (minimum $1) platform. For a better idea of what you’ll be getting yourself into check the teaser video or head directly over to POP online.
A data-driven display from Ryoji Ikeda explores the interior of an automobile
Derived from the data set of the latest Honda Civic model, the new sonic and visual installation by the Paris-based Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, “data.anatomy [civic]” was unveiled last week at the stunning post-industrial venue Kraftwerk Berlin.
Ikeda considers mathematicians to be artists, and specializes in work based on science and numbers—in this case he manipulates DNA data and astronomy to compose electronic sounds and a series of black-and-white dots and flurried lines.
Contacted last year by Honda to create something based on the CAD information of the re-designed five-door Civic, Ikeda started from the solid object to convert the material into intangible sounds and images of seemingly transparent waves in the air. With his art Ryoji aims to capture an unperceived dimension and succeeds once again in this particular project.
Honda chose an interesting approach in funding a concept they had actually conceived instead of simply supporting an existing project through a third-party foundation. Created in collaboration with Mitsuru Kariya, the Development Lead on the all-new Civic, the installation took four months for a team of five architects and computer programmers to build and process the data. The choice of venue was an important one, since Ryoji works to forge an intimate and intricate relationship between his pieces and the surrounding space. Data.anatomy[civic] is located in a huge, industrial concrete structure that formerly housed a power plant in the 1960s.
The beautifully poetic video projection creates three disruptive moments on three screens in a large 20m x 4m triptych. The moving images on the black horizontal screen, along with the minimal sound track composd of clear bells, a rapid timer and medical devices give the viewer a feeling of floating without gravity. Bursting from the center and spreading in waves to the borders of the frame, the images call to mind X-rays or distorted Rorshach tests. They bloom on the rhythm of submarine, sonar-like pulses, slipping and splitting on a screen fringed by a bar code frieze. Medical references and quotations call to mind the title’s reference to the anatomy of a car while experimenting with both sound and image on a large-scale display provides an immersion that Ryoji uses to play with visitors’ perception.
What follows is a jarring set of rapidly pulsed horizontal lines of graphics, codes and figures crossing the screen in opposite directions, resembling something like an animated contact sheet or a flat-lined EEG. While the sound mellows out, this moment seems to feature the silent computer calculation or some lonesome medical device’s overnight work. The bar code is once again referenced with a series of white bars extending from the top of the screen.
The third section presents a totally different atmosphere with the negative images of motors and tubes made of thin white threads. Bursting red spots move more slowly, like spaceships through the blackness of outer space. Each screen works separately as occasional images cross them on various trajectories of different speeds, their collisions echoed by bell tones while a timer persists in the background.
This minimal yet highly precise piece of work takes the viewer on a captivating 12-minute journey into the guts of a car to illustrate Ryoji’s search for the intersection between reality and unexplored dimensions. See “data.anatomy [civic]” in action by checking out the video.
Now in its 76th year, the bi-annual compendium has gathered a new group of 51 contemporary artists to take over the museum through 27 May. While the focus on performance has become a central one in 2012, we found a group of four artists across different mediums—from sculpture, painting, film and living installation—each dynamic in their own right. Here, just a small selection of highlights from our walk through the Whitney Biennial.
K8 Hardy
The multi-faceted multi-media artist behind the lesbian zine FashionFashion and the “feminist queer artists’ collective” LTTR presents a set of characteristically contemplative wall-mounted sculptures. The conversation around gender identity can grow noisy, but Hardy manages to cut through the chatter with a genuine, thoughtful perspective addressing fashion advertising. Besides her installations, which combine flashy and everyday products, and accessories like hair extensions oddly plucked out of context, Hardy will stage a runway show 20 May.
Dawn Kasper
Turn a corner on the third floor and Dawn Kasper’s lilting voice—along with the whirring of a spinning tennis racket on a motorized stand—carries through the hushed gallery. In the spirit of Marina Abramovic‘s seemingly hot-again performance stylings, the LA-based artist brings her Nomadic Studio Practice Experiment to the Whitney for the duration of the Biennial. Living, working and interacting with museum-goers for three months turns her creative process into a real-time, interactive installation.
George Kuchar
The venerable underground filmmaker passed away in September 2011, and the Biennial pays tribute with a series of screenings of his lauded Weather Diaries. In characteristic revelatory fashion, Kuchar’s Hi-8 films document the mundanity and anticipation of his yearly trips to the El Reno motel in “tornado-alley” Oklahoma.
Nicole Eisenman
Nicole Eisenman’s installation dominates almost an entire room. The artist’s powerful and introspective portraits are deeply striking, instantly drawing the viewer in for a closer look. The work, which at times appears crude, instead offers deep insight into the human experience through shifting lines, wild expressive characters and a feeling of general chaos combined with melancholy detachment.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s immersive video installations captured in their first monograph
“A glorious mess;” “manic and often overwhelming;” a “tumult of video, furniture, music, extreme makeup and insistent jabberwocky”—reading reviews of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s touring show “Any Ever” might make the printed page seem like an impossible format (if not totally antithetical) for showcasing their work. While there’s nothing quite like watching the spastic films unfold as you sit in a room decorated with the excesses of suburban culture, through a feat of design, the new book manages to capture the essence of the emerging art stars’ aesthetic.
Using a variety of layouts and experimenting with text, the experience of thumbing through the monograph’s pages evokes a similar sense of today’s information chaos, as equally fraught with aggressive optimism as with streaks of dark humor. Playing with fonts and punctuation makes the publication look more conversational, accomplishing the tricky feat of giving a sense of which imaginative character is saying what, and the characteristically Trecartin way in which they say it.
A heavy use of black backgrounds similarly evokes what it’s like to see the frenetic scenes unfold onscreen. As a supplement to seeing the show, the book nicely functions as if you’ve hit pause, recording some of the best dialog—”i totally cry’real tears, ijust haven’t Designed them YET:” and “Watching the Gift Economy tie Strings, 2my NECK!”—for those who didn’t take notes.
The clever design, coupled with commentary by some of Trecartin’s supporters (including Rhizome director Lauren Cornell and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s Jeffrey Deitch) as well as an interview with Cindy Sherman, helps position the young artist and his work at the forefront of the contemporary art scene—not that the upstart is having any trouble.
“Any Ever” opens at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on 18 October 2011 and runs through 8 January 2011. If you can’t make it, Trecartin’s Vimeo page has Any Ever in its entirety, along with the genius piece that put him on the map, “A Family Finds Entertainment.”
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