a minima

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  Morel Thresholds. Some notes about influenza?s [1] work

  Posted: 24-March-2008, 6:52pm CET by aminima

  Cicero Inacio da Silva

  With the digital technologies, the issue of the frame, the border and the margin is being rewritten in a rather interesting way.

  The importance of the borders may be observed particularly in the visual arts and literature. In the history of art, as an unfolding of a visual historicity, the theme has generated a series of questions and positions.

  Several painters have pondered on the need of a frame, of a casing, of a temporal and spatial restriction which, according to them, would confine their work. Nevertheless, Degas affirmed: ?the frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting?s expense.? (Keim, J. A., Le tableau et son cadre, 1962). And Manet also stated that ?The frame is necessary? (…) ?Without the frame the printing loses one hundred per cent.? (Antonin Proust, Edouard Manet ? Souvenirs, 1913) 2.

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  Vladimir Bonacic - the early works, Zagreb 1968-197

  Posted: 24-March-2008, 6:17pm CET by aminima

  Darko Fritz

  Beginning in 1964, Vladimir Bonacic worked in the Croatian National Research Institute Ruder Boskovic in Zagreb, where he headed the Laboratory of Cybernetics from 1969 to 1973. He earned his Ph.D. in 1967 in the field of pattern recognition and hidden data structures. In 1968 he began his artistic career under the auspices of the international movement New Tendencies (NT), at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Zagreb (GCAZ), which had pushed for his inclusion. [1] The movement had been presenting different aspects of lumino-kinetic and neo-constructivist art since 1961. [2] The statement of the Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro that computer art had replaced constructivist art [3] found its proof in Bonacic?s work. Looking back at the crisis of neo-constructivist art that NT faced in 1965, GCAZ curator Radoslav Putar wrote in 1970, “many followers of NT have tried to give their work the habits of the machine or else they have based their procedures on the use of mechanical or electric devices; they have all dreamt of the machines - and now the machines have arrived. And they have arrived from a direction which was somewhat unexpected, and accompanied by people who were neither painters nor sculptors.” [4] From the start, Bonacic had a critical view on the use of the computer in art for the simulation of reality. For example, regarding Michael Noll’s Mondrian-like drawing generated by a computer simulation, in 1969 he proposed that:

  “The computer must not remain simply as a tool for the simulation of what exists in a new form. It should not be used to paint in the way Mondrian did or to compose music as Beethoven did. The computer gives us a new substance, it uncovers a new world before our eyes. In that world after so long a time scientists and artists will meet again on common ground stimulated by their common desire for knowledge”. [5]

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  Gordon Pask: Cybernetic Polymath

  Posted: 24-March-2008, 6:02pm CET by aminima

  by María Fernández

  Gordon Pask was unique in the intellectual landscape of the United Kingdom after World War II. He was one of the major figures in British cybernetics (along with Ashby, Beer, George, and Walter) and an active theatrical designer and producer. Pask was influential in various art-related fields including art installation, architecture and art theory. After fifteen years of cybernetic/cultural practice, he participated in the groundbreaking exhibition, Cybernetic Serendipity, curated by Jasia Reichardt in 1968 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and appeared prominently in the catalog and texts associated with that exhibition.1 Among a select group of individuals, he introduced cybernetic concepts to the world of cultural practice. Yet, unlike artist/theorists Jack Burnham and Roy Ascott and engineer Billy Klüver, he was more than a conduit between the worlds of technology and the arts.

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  The Reception and Rejection of Art and Technology:Exclusions and Revulsions

  Posted: 24-March-2008, 5:49pm CET by aminima

  by Edward A. Shanken
  Guest-editor

  The following essays are based on papers from the panel discussion, ?Media Art Histories: Times and Landscapes II? at REFRESH! First International Conference on Histories of Media Art, Science, and Technology, held at the Banff New Media Institute, September 28 ? October 1, 2005. Although conference participant Tim Druckery noted that over the last decade he?d attended several ?first conferences on the history of media art,? I know of no prior event that focused on art historical scholarship, so I consider REFRESH! a potentially significant turning-point. Many publications, including the ones presented here, will be generated from its panels and there are plans for REFRESH! redux in Berlin in 2007.

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  The Universal Machine

  Posted: 24-March-2008, 5:34pm CET by aminima

  Bits, Parasites and the Media Ecology of Network Culture
  Jussi Parikka

  “Organisms are adapted to their environments, and it has appeared adequate to say of them that their organization represents the ‘environment’ in which they live […].”[1]
  Humberto Maturana

  Prologue: The Biology of Digital Culture

  During the past few decades, biological creatures like viruses, worms, bugs and bacteria seem to have migrated from their natural habitats to ecologies of silicone and electricity. The media has also been eager to employ these figures of life and monstrosity in representing miniprograms, turning them into digital Godzillas and other mythical monsters. The anxiety these programs produce is largely due to their alleged status as near-living programs, as exemplified in this quote on the Internet worm of 1988:

  “The program kept pounding at Berkeley’s electronic doors. Worse, when Lapsley tried to control the break-in attempts, he found that they came faster than he could kill them. And by this point, Berkeley machines being attacked were slowing down as the demonic intruder devoured more and more computer processing time. They were being overwhelmed. Computers started to crash or become catatonic. They would just sit there stalled, accepting no input. And even though the workstations were programmed to start running again automatically after crashing, as soon as they were up and running they were invaded again. The university was under attack by a computer virus”.[2]

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  The Living Screen: The monstrous other

  Posted: 19-March-2008, 11:20am CET by aminima

  

  BioKino
  Tanja Visosevic
  Guy Ben-Ary
  Bruce Murphy

  A kino-parlour of microscopic Bio-Freak Wonderment
  (spanish)

  The Living Screen is a primitive Bio-Kino toy, designed to travel the side show alleys of art. Peer thru the Bio-Projector and experience the astounding 1/2 millimetre projection, as it transforms with the living canvas. Take savage pleasure in how the screen made from blood Splatters the dead back to life.
  Delight in primeval horror, as the Cellular Dentata lurches towards you for a bite. OR look awry, as the Monstrous Other, gazes back into your eye.

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  Miya Masaoka

  Posted: 5-March-2008, 5:29pm CET by aminima

  

  Miya Masaoka
  (spanish)

  Resides in New York City and is a classically trained musician, composer and sound artist. She has created works for koto, laser interfaces, laptop and video, installations and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestra and mixed choirs, and has led her own orchestra and numerous ensembles. In her performance pieces she has mapped the movement of insects whereby their movements trigger the sounds for the piece. These pieces investigate insect culture and behavior, extract various data as source material for sound and investigate the constructions of race, gender. In other works, she has monitored the physiological response of plants, the human brain and her own body as renderings for music and sound composition. In her plant pieces she explores the keen awareness of plants to their environment, and the plant’s ability to think and respond.

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  Flower Power Architecture

  Posted: 3-March-2008, 5:26pm CET by aminima

  

  Dennis Dollens
  (spanish)

  Introduction

  Applying techniques and methods learned from botany and appropriated from science I have been developing a generative architecture that relies on biomimetics from both direct experience and from software simulations (L-Systems & Xfrog). I do not propose a new architecture that looks like a tree or a flower but I do think it is time to apply new systems that function in natural-like manners in order to begin growing architecture in new directions.

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  Works

  Posted: 22-February-2008, 12:14pm CET by aminima

  Peter Horvath
  (spanish)

  In the frontier world of web technology I have found a medium that encompasses and expands the lush, pluralistic and multi-layered qualities of my previous dada-inspired photomontage work. Freed from the restricting two-dimensional context by technological advances,
  I engage in fragmented narratives and sub-narratives that form and reform as multiple windows open and close.

  I orchestrate layers of history, including journal entries, sketches, written records, video, photographs, music, voice and general sound loops, resulting in a atmospheric investigation into states of being.

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  I am a bio artist

  Posted: 21-February-2008, 1:19pm CET by aminima

  Cynthia Verspaget
  (spanish)

  I am a bio artist. My artistic practice encompasses the exploration of blurry borders, shady ethics and the domestication of scientific and electronic technologies. What interests me in particular about biological materials are their fragile locations within science which are always linked to cultural and political processes, perceptions and constructions. I like border creatures that have monstrous overtones which ?threaten to smash distinctions? as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen so eloquently expresses it. To me, monsters and science go hand in hand. Monsters are declared and categorised through scientific language and practices and simultaneously the monster and science charge against each other in glorious conflicts over these much cherished biological distinctions. It makes sense to consider them in bio art. The monster is essentially the name given to the inhabitant of the multiple zones of biology which is of interest to the humanities practitioner with a nose for a juicy scientific story.

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