Sougwen Chung has always had an affinity for computers and digital technology. The artist had her first website at the age of ten—”an oddly personal site,” she recalls….
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Working out of Berlin and Vancouver, multimedia artist Jeremy Shaw is a busy man supplying both cities with his highly involved works. Currently, Shaw is exhibiting in Berlin alongside artists such as Yoko Ono and Geoffrey Farmer, in the conceptual group show, “One On One,” which is curiously designed…
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A social app mashes content into dynamic slideshows
A newcomer to the cutthroat world of social media backed by DreamWorks, Ptch sources content from popular services like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, giving users the chance to remix media to their heart’s delight. The idea is to create “snackable media” by mashing up text, video, images and audio into 60-second slideshows or videos. The personalized one-offs can then be broadcast across channels, a full composition taking mere minutes to complete. Rather than limiting the sharing to the user’s own content, all media aggregated from social feeds are fair game for users to “ptch” to their friends.
“We’re calling this living media,” explains Ptch CEO and DreamWorks veteran Ed Leonard. “The notion is that if you see something you like, you can very quickly express it and make it yours.” An interesting element of Ptch is that it occupies a interim between content creation and consumption. Since slideshows published by others are easily broken down into their original elements, all it take is a simple drag to add an image or video to your own pitch. This effect snowballs, making content created on Ptch “infinitely mashable,” says Leonard.
With the option to add text and background music, the program takes quality of content to the next level—essentially acting as an on-the-go movie suite. Preset styles—from “Classic” to “Vivid” and “Vintage”—determine the image filter, transitions and accompanying music. Social comments, title screens and captions are also displayed in a manner consistent with the chosen style. A small annoyance, choosing a style overrides previous music choices, although users can reselect music afterwards. There are currently eight styles, although the company plans to open source additional options.
With a few exceptions, Ptch pulls from any place where users share content on the web. As Leonard explains, “Ptch sits as a dashboard across all of your social media, so we’re not trying to compete or take the place of what you use today—we’re really trying to make that more powerful and more expressive.” After playing around with stills and video, we found that the mix of mediums adds a dynamic element that is unique to Ptch as a social tool.
Ptch is available free of charge from the iTunes app store.
Collective memories of China’s Great Famine reinterpreted for the stage
Two years after Memory I, famed documentarian Wu Wenguang and choreographer Wen Hui are back with a new performance that challenges the boundaries of art to reconnect people to a disappearing past.
In the summer of 2009, the pair began work on a documentary film project to chronicle the events that took place during the “Great Chinese Famine” between 1959-1961. By the summer of 2010, they had 21 people participating in the “Folk Memory Project”, and in the last two years they’ve recruited more than 40 participants—mainly film and dance students—for the second installment, Memory II: Hunger. They set out to visit the countryside and collect memories of living witnesses of the famine, one of the darkest periods of Chinese history that unfortunately has remained an empty page in modern history handbooks. More than 500 interviews recount the memories of grandparents and elders in 14 provinces and 67 villages and with the project Wu and Wen have created a visual encounter with ancestral roots and family recollections that has seldom been presented.
The five-hour multimedia stage performance spans recorded videos, photos, dance and acting. The stream of memory flows from the actors’ words and movement and the action on the screen, through the interviewers as firsthand witnesses to the audience. They pull onlookers into deep contact with memory, recalled feelings and experiences of the past.
During the rehearsals of Memory II, we had the chance to meet and talk to Wu Wenguang and Wen to learn more about the project.
At the very beginning, Wen Hui wanted to recall some memories of the time when she was young and she started dancing. Her first encounter with dance was during the Cultural Revolution: her very own experience and her growth is linked to that wave of red culture. The first and most well-known ballets were about revolutionary culture. At the beginning, it was more a reflection on personal memories. When we started doing interviews, we never limited our focus to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine.
The eldest we met were not necessarily talking about a specific topic or period, they were telling us about their more vivid experiences. These two phases of Chinese history became secondary topics that we present in our performance, the core of which is memory. That’s also a reason why Memory, or the Folk Memory Project, is an ongoing process that doesn’t end in a performance. We hope we can develop and shape the project through the difficulties we encounter.
Before we used to work on art pieces in which the performance was the ultimate goal, but Memory II is a social project. Dance, documentaries and other art forms simply became tools. This is something we didn’t plan. We involved so many young people and have been working with them. They go to their villages to seek history, to find an intimate link with the past, to discover their roots. The process of recalling is a process of self-discovery. We did art for so many years and we don’t think that art can change society. Now we probably can’t change the world but at least we can change ourselves. I used to think that I had nothing to do with the countryside, but in China if you go back five generations, everyone is from the countryside. Our approach aims to truly understand the place we all come from, to understand who we are, and this is the most important point.
Being a documentarian means that you don’t get satisfied with the public and the official version. You look for details you usually don’t find. In our history handbooks—the one we use in our performance was published in 2002 but the new one has just changed a few words—30 years of history are told in a single page, in a few lines. We look for what is behind common knowledge, we try to understand how the people really lived.
Memory II: Hunger had its premiere at CCD Workstation in Beijing on 1 May 2012. The next performance is scheduled for 18-19 May during Wiener Festwochen Festival in Vienna.
“Paraconceptual” art in Susan Hiller’s new comprehensive book
Both intimate and cosmic in scope, as described by critic Lucy Lippard, Susan Hiller’s ruminative multimedia works are the result of a career change from anthropology to art forty years ago. The U.K.-based artist, thinking of her discipline as “value-free,” experiments with sculpture, photography, painting and more, letting the subject dictate media to give her abstract theories form.
A through-line in Hiller’s works is what she calls “paraconceptual”—combining conceptual underpinnings with paranormal studies. But the resulting mysticism, unlike many of her contemporaries, isn’t the point. Whether through hundreds of postcards or video installations, Hiller’s appeal comes from her studious, almost scientific, approach.
Often taking years to research a project, Hiller’s interrelated obsessions include themes ranging from cultural erosion (how Nazi street names were replaced with “Jew Street”) to looking at the suspension of disbelief through our reactions to supernatural phenomena. This broad conceptual scope was recently the subject of a survey at Tate Britain, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, now available stateside.
The book includes a thorough sampling of work, including the more intensive and thought-provoking pieces like “Homage to Joseph Beuys” and “Painting Blocks,” which were completed over the course of decades. Others—”From the Freud Museum” and “Enquiries/Inquiries“—similarly are the upshot of several years of closely observing her subject. One of the earlier artists (and at 71, one of the oldest) to incorporate the Internet in her practice, her use of current technology, like her overall approach to materials, is not just a medium but part of the message.
The exhaustive book explores the U.S.-born artist’s contemporary work through previously published essays, interviews, papers, lectures and images. “Susan Hiller” sells online from Amazon and Tate. U.K. customers can also go to Amazon U.K..
Checking in with the creative forces behind a bold multimedia production of Stravinsky’s post-WWI theater piece
Meant to be “played, danced and read,” one of Igor Stravinsky’s most ambitious pieces, “Histoire du Soldat”—penned in the frenzy of post-World War I reconstruction—delves into themes of chaos and absurdity. Tackling the powerful message and Stravinsky’s dissonant, pastiched style, director and choreographer Yara Travieso and illustrator Ryan Hartley recently adapted the difficult work for a multimedia spectacle opening tomorrow at NYC’s Lincoln Center.
To visually bring one of Stravinsky’s most complicated pieces to life more than a half-century after its inception required an intensive process. Hartley started sitting in on rehearsals early on to reverse-engineer around the motion of the bodies onstage. From there he pulled iconography from period source material and beyond. “As you watch,” Hartley explains, “there is a progression of influences in the images from Stalinist Russia to Nazi Propaganda to wartime American propaganda that passes into today’s war posters.”
The resulting cunning videos form a densely-layered set-piece as compelling as the story playing out in the foreground (performed by dancer Esme Boyce and actor Brendan Spieth). This seamless mix of elements stems from Travieso’s careful balance of theatricality and dance. “Multimedia is becoming a visual palette for a lot of audiences that are just used to dance or theatre.” she stated, emphasizing, “It is becoming something they are starting to understanding as the next level.”
Of course as much as trends in media influenced the director, as the Faustian tale (a Russian soldier makes a deal with the devil) unravels, the melodies’ surrealist proportions drive the production. “The music itself is a mash-up of different influences. From Tango to Russian Folk music, the meter is constantly changing,” says Travieso. Where some directors might feel stymied by the challenge, Travieso embraced it as a way to explore the multimedia aspects of the performance. Using disparate elements and technologies to create layers of information, Travieso’s staging of “Soldat” fully integrates attempt at realizing what can be possible when the digital and spacial world’s interact between each other and in front of an audience.
Showing as part of this year’s Beyond The Machine Festival, hosted by the Juilliard School and featuring electronic and interactive music programs, opens tomorrow 24 March 2011, runs through 27 March 2011 at the Meredith Wilson Theater, and is free to the public.
Collapsible speakers pack hi-fi sound in an ultra-portable body
Many portable speakers do little more in the way of design modifications than shrink a full-size speaker to a smaller, tinny version. The ultra-portable X-Mini Capsule Speaker, while still tiny, adds an expandable woofer that boasts immense sound for its size. Twisting the speaker opens an accordion-like patented bass enhancement to create even bigger resonance. A Red Dot award-winner, the speakers plug into laptops, mobile phones, gaming devices, and even link to each other for an on-the-go surround sound solution.
We’ve been using an X-Mini at CH headquarters and at presentations, and it’s impressed us all with its booming sound. For an all-in-one device, the newest addition to the range, Happy, features a built-in SD/SDHC card slot so that you can play music on it.
Rechargable through a USB cable, the super-useful range of five X-Mini speakers sell online for $20-80, depending on type.
Pioneers in fashion photography, it’s difficult to imagine that Brooklyn-based team Reed & Rader started shooting digital photographs just one year ago. The trailblazers “highly believe that technology and the augmented world is the future”—a concept they implement no matter the medium. Currently part of the group exhibition “Shoot The Messenger” at NYC’s APF Lab, they shot their creepy animated “notvideo” on a common point-and-shoot digital camera.
Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader met while in college and have spent the six years since then as the dynamic Reed & Rader team, now known for their cutting-edge convictions and discerning use of technology. Beginning with their augmented reality project “AR_YULIA,” (pictured below) they continuously create works that challenge current methods for both capturing and viewing reality. The pair look forward to the day when people aren’t restricted by fabrics, but rather, through the assistance of augmented reality it would seem like “you’re wearing amazing clothes, or even tentacles.”
With the future of print productions in constant question, Reed & Rader undoubtedly support online existence. Reed explains to CH that “As the medium of photography changes and images no longer need to be placed on paper—why is the medium still images—why can’t they move now? That is what excites us for the future.”
“Notvideo” is on view through 17 April 2010 at APF Lab.
For the past eight years ArtSite Projects curator Kara Walker-Tome has been transforming a section of West Palm Beach, FL’s Hotel Biba into an annual art event. Aptly named, Showtel turns hotel rooms into conceptual installations by challenging artists fill the spaces with everything from sculpture and performance art, without using the use of nails or adhesives. We recently had the chance to speak with Walker-Tome, who shed light on this clever exhibition.
When I moved to Florida after having lived in Los Angeles and New York, I was involved in the local art scenes of these metropolitan cities and I could not find an alternative art scene to speak of in Palm Beach County. I had been impressed and inspired many times in the past by installation shows in unique settings in LA and NY and I recognized that my new area was wide open for making a mark with an alternative art happening. So, I decided to put together a one-night show for local emerging cutting-edge artists in a hotel. Lucky for me the first one I approached said yes. That was eight years ago. So Showtel started as a small happening with a handful of artists and maybe a couple hundred people attended. Last year’s seventh annual show featured twenty-five artists and attracted 2,000 people in one night.
I think the strict rules in place for installing Showtel installations in a working hotel accounts for incredible ingenuity. Essentially they have to put up and then take down their work as if they had never been in the room in the first place. The amazing thing is that they manage to come up with clever solutions and create visually intense environments whereby the whole room is engaged.
Curating from ideas is an acquired skill. I am choosing work that has not been created yet so I have to be able to visualize their concept and plan. I believe that ability comes from my initial training as an artist myself. I received an MA in fine arts from CalArts and then also have spent years reading hundreds of proposals, working closely with artists in the development and creation of their work, and finally—a bit of intuition!
I am quite excited this year to be working with artists from all over the state of Florida and even one coming from out of state. Showtel has traditionally attracted artists living close to Palm Beach County, but now artists from Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa and Gainesville are applying and getting accepted into the show. I hope it continues to expand nationally.
I can give you a handful of teasers about the pieces planned for this year. There will be a mythical forest, a wormhole grow room, a lunar/meteor space, a scene from a world populated only by sloths and unicorns and five of the installations will involve performance. It is going to be a very intense and dynamic show!
This year Shotel runs from 8-10 April. Read more about some of Walker-Tome’s favorite Showtel installations she’s seen over the past eight years after the jump. (Pictured above in order of appearance.)
Photos by Jacek Gancarz
The overtly handmade quality of these soft sculpture monsters, existing in this faux natural world made for a great aesthetic that had humor in it too. One of the monsters actually was a costume for a person who was walking around the room interacting with people. The concept was about corporations turning into huge monsters that are taking over the environment, so it made a statement to think about as well.
This was such an effective piece both visually and psychologically and the artist was the first to make false walls (out of fabric) so he could create the uniform grid of string which was ingenious.
This installation was like stepping into a surreal dream and it smelled like bubble gum too! The graphics on the walls and floor reference the packaging of “Hubba Bubba” gum and the artists found a brand of gum that the pieces looked like tiny colorful square sculptures. There was a huge pile of gum on the bed that dwindled throughout the night as people were allowed to take and chew one! The installation truly engaged all of one’s senses.
This is an actual bedroom sunken in the pool, complete with a tray of food on the bed, an area rug, lights that worked and even a TV that appeared to be on. It was an amazing feat and one of the most memorable pieces in the history of Showtel.
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