Opening next Thursday in New York is a show titled Notes on a New Nature where I’ll be exhibiting Netscapes (image above) for the first time. This all happened very quickly about a week after the work was completed and if I had set out to target an exhibition or festival with Netscapes I couldn’t have matched the work more appropriately than Nicholas, the curator, did.

The exhibition is not a new media exhibition per se, it’s a post-new media exhibition – new media is no longer a defining characteristic but artists and works are informed by it. The exhibition bridges the transition from analogue to digital media and uses a very traditional subject, the landscape, to understand how the digital changes/reconfigures that subject. All the artists works participating in the show do this in different ways, for my part it is how a network (collapsing time and space) has a knock on effect on what a landscape can be, how networks allow us to see other places in combination from a distance.

Above: Depth Mapping (The Mountain) by Kate Steciw

The exhibition forms part of the ongoing research of the curator Nicholas O’Brien. It:

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.

Above: Antlers Wifi by Rick Silva

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-Vaughn, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.

319 Scholes Brooklyn, NY
November 10 – November 20, 2011
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment

Above: Hypergeography by Joe Hamilton

Above: Strange Situation by Chris Collins

In response to Artreviews community announcement of user content censorship on the 6th of September I have created an online petition to gauge interest in how the community (and generally artists who use the internet) feel about this. To read the full details of the announcement email and sign the petition point your browser to:

Please forward this announcement to lists, family, friends, colleagues etc.

A protest forum thread has also started on the Artreview site called AUTHORIZED NAKED where users are being encouraged to add images of their own art which includes nakedness. Ownership of the work and it’s rights is crucial authorising artists to be naked as personal choice and effectively giving Artreview more content to censor.

The digital decomposition of 10 Ruston Close, an installation and online work by John Wild opens on Thursday, September 1st at the Gallery & Project Space, Great Western Studios, London. The online part of the work is already online and can be viewed at http//:10-ruston-close.com/ (note a Java enabled browser is required).

The work, titled after the former residence of mass murderer John Christie:

explores the relationships between trauma, memory and architecture within the digital age. A photograph of 10 Ruston Close, formally 10 Rillington Place, will be both projected within the gallery…Each time the image is viewed, either online or within the space, a single pixel will be removed from the image. Over the period of the exhibition the image will decompose directly in response to the number of views it receives.

There are some interesting ideas about online work here. The use of a network and the activity around the work (in a sense looking at the work) leads to the works destruction or erasure. This emphasises through process (as well as through the visual) the works subject matter, a location/site which has itself has been destroyed/erased over time.

To read more about the work and it’s subject matter, see the gallery site here.

I’ll be presenting my Second Life work tonight, 14/07/11, at Dorkbot Cardiff which takes place at Milgi’s bar (top floor room), 213 City Road, Cardiff CF243JD. Doors open at 7.30 and is free to all so if your in the area pop along. I’ll also have catalogs of my Yoshikaze “Up-in-the-air” Second Life Residency for sale at a reduced price.

Your Name in Lights by John Baldessari is currently showing at the Museumplein in Amsterdam and via Livestream on the web. The work, presented by the Holland Festival and the Stedelijk Museum, which runs from the 1st to the 26th of June 2011:

gives people the opportunity to experience a glittering 15 seconds of fame by having their names on a giant illuminated sign. Inspired by traditional markers of celebrity, such as the neon lights on Broadway and the marquees of Hollywood cinemas, John Baldessari’s work offers spectators from Amsterdam and all over the world the opportunity for what he has called “entry-level celebrity.” Each registered name will be illuminated for 15 seconds on the 30-meter long L.E.D. sign that will be on view twenty-four hours a day during the exhibition period…Your Name in Lights playfully and provocatively reflects the fixation with celebrity in contemporary culture and recalls Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted statement from 1968, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”. “Warhol is so yesterday,” says John Baldessari. “Be a celebrity for 15 seconds! Be a celebrity, a living legend and an idol. Experience the thrill of seeing your name in lights!”

Plagued by problems since it’s debut (weather and now mal-functioning led panels, see images below) the work is as you would expect interesting in concept but for me seems a little gimmicky.

To see Your Name in Lights, register on the website.