The 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival ran officially from the 31/07/10 until last Tuesday the 10/08/10. This has however been extended with a few more events today (12/08/10) including Ceci n est pas une voiture by Ze Moo at 2 PM SLT (10pm GMT), the performance takes place here, and on Saturday (14/08/10) at 3 PM SLT (11pm GMT) with Flesh Meat – With Coastal Avatars by Alan Dojoji/Alan Sondheim and Sandy Baldwin (exact location on Odyssey to be announced).
The last ten days have seen some really interesting performances including the following.
Night Gardening (images above) by lizsolo Mathilde/Liz Solo and Fau Ferdinand/Yael Gilks was a mixed reality performance happening in Second Life (first image) and at Liz’s east coast backyard (second image) where several other artists joined her to contribute. I quite liked the two windowed online approach to this which required spectators to use the Second Life viewer and have livestream.com open at the same time to see the ‘real’ garden. Lots to be explored in this type of combination but I left wanting to ask the artists about it.
Piano Drop (image above) by Man Michinaga/Patrick Lichty was without a doubt the conceptual performance of the festival. Stripped right down to just the essential, pianos, the thumping noise and the resulting chaos amount the in world audience, the performance consisted of numerous pianos falling from the sky over Odyssey.
Leap of Doom! (image above) by DanCoyote Antonelli was hilariously enjoyable. The audience arrived to an Evil Knievel style event, a bus jump on motorbikes, but rather than simply watch the artist do it were themselves invited to jump in a provided motorbike or any vehicle of their choice. This of course played irreverently with the idea of a daredevil stunt and it emptyness when you risk no physical harm in a virtual space.
A Space to Chat (images above) by Selavy Oh was the work (so far) which I was the most impressed by. The work was interactive in a very clever way which took advantage of how audiences talk at performance events in Second Life. The artist introduced the event explaining it lasted as long as we, the audience, participated, started the performance and then watched it unfold. As the audience chatted wondering what was going to happen we noticed that constructed letters were being created overhead in a series of archs. Zooming out from this the letters were clearly legible as parts of the discussion that was taking place so this was a performance which only occurred a) if there was an audience and b) if the audience participated – risky but spectacularly rewarding. At the end of the performance the letters floated away and this allowed the audience the possibility to hop on and fly above Odyssey.
Over the next month I’ll be involved in quite a few things Second Life related. The first of these is happening next Wednesday (04/08/10) at 9:30pm GMT (1:30pm Second Life Time) as part of the 2010 Odyssey Performance Art Festival running from today (31/07/10) until the 10/08/10.
Bendix makes a few very good points about quite a few art events (SL or otherwise) these days taking advantage of artists in a number of ways, often simply as a profile raising mechanism for the curator, and how the intention here was to promote the artists doing what they do best with no imposed interpretations etc. The event places these art forms generated by a ‘virtual’ community of artists from all over the world within a ‘real’ community in Switzerland which would have limited knowledge or exposure to it previously. Highly commendable objectives, which remind me of some of the idealism of early net.art. Congratulations to Bendix on a very successful event which was a joy to be a part of.
Culmination is a month-Long project by Kristen Althoff, Mary Ayling, Katie Hogan, Whitney Larson, & Kelly Tucker in collaboration with Caro d’Offay & Laura Gilmore running at the Fill in the Blank Gallery in Chicago, America. Its creation, its process, which here is as much the work as whatever it will produce, is being broadcast live throughout the month of January on Justin.tv and will culminate on January 30th.
We are building something. We don’t know what it is. Each week we will be given a new set of instructions on how to build this mystery object. We’re dusting off our rulers, rolling up our sleeves, and interacting with our space as we never have before. The process will become the exhibit as we flex our ability to interpret instructions and collaborate on a single vision.
The work is part of some fascinating ongoing conceptual research by Caro d’Offay called Textaport which the artist defines as follows.
Textaport is a publicly generated TELEPORTING game in which a descriptive text is made available for participants. This text has all information necessary to interpret a mystery item back into reality from any location out of free materials (those found in the participants environemnt [sic]). Working to manifest a mysterious form or painting back into its original form, Textaport offers participants and observers the experience of perceiving something familiar as unfamiliar, (as if one had amnesia) to overcome possible ideological limitations that may be cramping our views.
As you would expect the research has nods to Exquisite Corpse and the Cutup where authorship becomes a shared collaborative process. However in this latest instance of the research the use of networked forms potentially distributes that authorship globally as Art by Telephone attempted to in 1968; ironically (or perhaps not) conceived by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Below is a live feed of the work in progress in the gallery (keep in mind after 30/01/10 this will no longer be live).
Tantalum Memorial (image above of Tantalum Memorial – Residue) by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji is a series of telephony-based installations created as a memorial to the casaulties of the ‘coltan wars’ in the Congo. Built of electromagnetic ‘Strowger’ telephone switches, the basis of the first automatic telephone exchange invented in 1888 and referring to the metal tantalum, an essential component of mobile phones, in it’s title, the installation:
serves not only as a memorial, but functions also as a center of a social telephone network that is used by Congolese immigrants living in the UK. The network ‘Telephone Trottoire’ builds on the traditional Congolese communication practice of passing around news and gossip from pedestrian to pedestrian on the street to avoid state censorship. In cooperation with a London based radio program it calls Congolese listeners and plays messages, which can be commented and forwarded. The project, which classifies as a mean of communication between tradition and modernity, can note so far about 1.800 users.
The precisely poised movements and sounds of the switches create a sculptural presence for this otherwise intangible network of circulating conversations. In “Tantalum Memorial”, Harwood, Wright, and Yokoji weave together the ambiguities of globalisation, transnational migration and our addiction to constant communication.
This is a QR Code, it's a printed link to this webpage on Network Research!
Using a web-enabled mobile phone with built-in camera and QR Code reader software you can photograph this printed page to display the original webpage. For more information on how to do this please see the short article here:
