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  Rhizome Commissions Rank Voting has started

  Posted: 12-June-2012, 1:58pm EDT by Rhizome

  Commissions Rank Voting has begun! All members can vote. Sign up for a Rhizome membership today!

   

   

  Rank Voting: Sunday June 10, 2012 - Saturday June 30, 2012

  In the second round, Rhizome members choose two Rhizome Commissions recipients from the pool of twenty-five or more finalists.

  The results are determined by single transferable vote, also known as instant runoff voting. Each voter ranks the proposals from most favorite to least favorite. If a proposal has more than 50% of first-place votes after the initial tally, it becomes the winner. If not, the lowest-ranking proposal is removed from the list, and the votes are automatically tallied again.

  Rhizome members are allowed to cast one vote per cycle, regardless of how many valid memberships they may have. We reserve the right to eliminate votes if we have reason to believe that they come from a member who is voting with more than one membership. Members who have submitted proposals are welcome to vote.

  This year, Rhizome is placing a specific focus on projects geared that address social issues and/or promote individual advancement through education or participation. Our focus is not restricted to this theme, but it is a priority.

  Rhizome will award ten grants: eight grants will be determined by a jury of experts in the field, and two will be determined by Rhizome?s membership through an open vote.

   

  

  
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  The Golden Age of Dutch Aerial Landscapes

  Posted: 12-June-2012, 4:00pm EDT by Giampaolo Bianconi

  

  Noordwijk aan Zee
  

  The English artist Mishka Henner has collected the images of the Dutch government's censorship of aerial images showing economic, political, or military locations. Previously, in 2009, the artist Greg Allen utilized these images as subjects for a series of paintings. While most nations take steps to protect sites of interest from being seen on technologies like Google Earth, the Dutch appear to do it with unique flair. The Dutch interventions deploy strategic pixelated abstractions, presumably to more easily blend into the digitally represented landscape. Though they destroy the presumed object of interest, they also create beautiful new impossible landscapes. Says Henner:

  Governments concerned about the sudden visibility of political, economic and military locations exerted considerable influence on suppliers of this imagery to censor sites deemed vital to national security. This form of censorship continues today and techniques vary from country to country with preferred methods generally including use of cloning, blurring, pixelization, and whitening out sites of interest.

  Surprisingly, one of the most vociferous of all governments to enforce this form of censorship were the Dutch, hiding hundreds of significant sites including royal palaces, fuel depots and army barracks throughout their relatively small country. The Dutch method of censorship is notable for its stylistic intervention compared to other countries; imposing bold, multi-coloured polygons over sites rather than the subtler and more standard techniques employed in other countries. The result is a landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.

  The technique is reminiscent of the "micropatterns" on military camouflage, which mimic poor-resolution digital photography. "Micropatterns" are not designed to hide soldiers from direct human eyesight. Instead, they allow soldiers to blend more easily into contemporary surveillance images. Yet the Dutch process of landscape camouglage carries other diverse implications. Henner also emphasizes that the digital alteration of the landscape comes head to head with the physically altered landscape, visible in many of the photographs. The Dutch landscape has been shaped since the 16th century by "dunes, dykes, pumps, and drainage networks" that have kept the nation above sea level. Those transformations protect the Netherlands from the menace of water, while the digital alterations protect the country from "an imaged human menace" looking to harm the country.

  

  Mauritskazerne, Ede

  These new landscapes serve as modern analogues to the genre of Dutch landscape painting, specifically the pre-Golden Age Neatherlandish paintings, which depicted landscapes from an impossibly high angle and eschewed slightly the later depiction of impressive cloud formations. Those artists have their own set of formal interventions to create visually new landscapes. Their strategy is one of scope and proportion, not superimposed polygons. These paintings also concern themselves with transformations in the physical landscape: the fist records a devastating flood (perhaps an impetus for later preventative changes to the terrain), while the second depicts a harvest that is the result of human cultivation of the land.

  

  Section from panel depicting the St. Elizabeth's Flood, 1421 by an unknown artist (c. 1500) 

  

  Willem Lodewijk van Nassau Kazerne

  

  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Corn Harvest (August) (1565)

  

  National Park Lauwersmeer

  Later Golden Age landscape paintings relished in the depiction of romantic ruins, as in the beneath painting by Jan Both. Those paintings fetishize the remains of a structure that has been devoured by history--in this case, a romantic, synthetic history. The depicted ruins needed not correspond to specific sites of historical relevance. Instead, they served as gateways to modes of life with historical significance and offered an experience of sublime contemplation.

  
  

  Jan Both, Ruins at the Sea (date unknown)

  

   Frederikkazerne, The Hague

   The fascination with contemporary Dutch landscape censorship creates new, synthetic ruins. The abstract forms hovering over aerial images are an information ruins: locations that have been swallowed by a paranoiac security state. They become new objects of contemplation, suggesting a magnitude of significance to the sights which necessitates their remaining unseen. The weight of history is replaced with the burden of surveillance, and physical alteration is replaced with digital concealment. Yet Henner's collection helps us recognize that all changes in visuality and technology birth both new ways of seeing and new things to be seen.

  All aerial images collected by Mishka Henner.

  

  
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  Assembled Texts by Harm van den Dorpel

  Posted: 12-June-2012, 8:00pm EDT by Brian Droitcour

  

   

  If rationality and consistent thought are the preferred distinguishing marks of man, then even if it is admitted that man, as a whole, also has passions, the supremacy of rational thought over them may well seem an unquestionable idea. This is all the more so, since it is quite obvious that gaining some such control is a basic condition of growing up, and even, at the extreme, of sanity. But to move from that into making such control into the ideal, rules out a priori most forms of spontaneity. And this seems to be absurd.
  
  I would suggest to find your deepest impulse, and follow that. The notion that there is something that is one's deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead?these, rather, are the point. The combination?discovery, trust, and risk?are central to my sort of outlook, as of course they are to the state of being in love.

   

  

   

  Although this is not print, I write in a manner that facilitates transmission in other forms such as print, spoken word, and via a screen reader. So terms such as "this article" are preferable to "this website," and I avoid terms like "click here," which makes no sense when using a screen reader, for instance. In determining what language is most suitable, it is helpful to imagine I'm writing the content for print. So my work is no longer a finished corpus, some content enclosed in an object or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces. The content in these traces is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny?very tiny, content. Unfortunately, it is still assumed that a work of art is its content, that it should refer to something beyond itself.

   

  Release early, release often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity.

   

  

   

  It's often surprising to see how certain things that seem completely obvious, aren't taken for granted by others. This could be indicative of a slight autistic tendency. However, while this used to frustrate me in the past, through time I've gradually grown more pleased about it. It comforts me to imagine that other people have this same experience. In the end, publishing and broadcasting are a social activity. In order to achieve progress, a reversed process is required: we have to take a step back.

   

  In order to gain deeper insights into the inner workings and logic of a system we are required to disassemble it, to break it down into parts and to apply reverse engineering. This is not a reactionary, but a progressive attitude. Fields such as software engineering and product design have effectively constructed strategies of description, but furthermore, aid in shaping reality. It's about solving an equation with too many variables. Every single parameter depends on all the others, and my interference amplifies as a feedback loop. Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution. It's ok. Just try to connect the personal with the universal; approach the general by being subjective. The most valuable moments emerge when the coincidental and the intuitive balance the rational?an irrationality without being esoteric.

   

  

  
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  Rhizome at the Reasons to be Creative Conference

  Posted: 12-June-2012, 9:32pm EDT by Rhizome

  

  This Thursday, June 14th, Rhizome's Nick Hasty and Ben Fino-Radin will be speaking about digital preservation and the ArtBase at the Reasons to be Creative Festival here in NYC. Featuring a wide variety of renowned speakers, such as John Maeda, Ken Perlin, Jer Thorp, Zach Lieberman, and Amit Pitaru, the two-day conference will be hosted at the School of Visual Arts. From the website:

  Reasons to be Creative is a festival for creative artists, designers and coders. The festival brings together some of the most respected and brilliant minds from the worlds of art, code, design and education to share their passion, knowledge, insights and work. Expect two days packed with talks, networking, inspiration and learning.

  Tickets are available here.