www.bazzinkki.org

“The point is not good art — fulfillment in fantasy — but a new mode of life which allows fulfillment in actual life.

Sensibility which is not supported by the mode of life is mere escape”.

Henry Flint

Operation Bazzinkki by Monica Assari

Operation Bazzinkki by Giacomo Verde

Operation Bazzinkki by Petter Karlsson

]]> http://networkingart.eu/2010/07/operation-bazzinkki-26-06-10/feed/ 0 http://networkingart.eu/2010/06/event-signal-affect/ http://networkingart.eu/2010/06/event-signal-affect/#comments Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:51:00 +0000 tbazz http://networkingart.eu/?p=813 Conference-Colloquium, Aarhus University, June 12 &14, 2010, ADA building, room 333.

Crowd in Italy during a strike, 2008, from the book Sono Anna Adamolo (ed. 2009)

This conference-colloquium at the Humanistic Faculty, Aarhus University, will relate to the widespread use of the concepts event and/or affect in contemporary research of media, art, philosophy, politics and culture. It is the aim to qualify, explore and investigate the scope of the terms event and affect in different analytical fields. We assume that the renewed focus on event and affect is partly due to the impact of new (electronic and digital) media and the new forms of immediacy created by real-time control and transmission.
The conference will therefore investigate two key issues: 1) How can we describe event and affect on philosophical, artistic, political and cultural levels? 2) Has a new paradigm of the signal – related to the bypassing of representation in real-time transmissions – superseded the sign? What characterizes the signal?

By combining these questions the conference wants to initiate a broader discussion on a paradigmatic transformation from sign to signal in relation to the concepts of event and affect and their use and scope in art, politics and culture.

[The text above is an extract of the Conference's call. The arrangement team consists of: Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Carsten Stage, Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Jonas Fritsch].

Download the program.

Keynotes:
Nigel Thrift, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.
Speakers:
Niels Albertsen, Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Christian Borch, Christoph Brunner, Merete Carlson, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Leila Dawney, Carsten Friberg, Jonas Fritsch, Jan Ifversen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Christoffer Kølvrå, Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, Thomas Jellis, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Thomas Markussen, Casper Høeg Radil, Carsten Stage, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Anne Marit Waade.
Participants:
Lise Nygaard Christensen, Lise Dilling, Jette Geil, Lars Bo Løfgreen, Kirsten Marie Pedersen, Rebecca Parbo.

My paper is about networked events as political and social practices of criticism in grassroots communities. Title is: The Network Events. Networked art as a challenge for sociopolitical transformation. I will address some artistic and activist projects as an example of fertile zones of rewriting and experimentation of cultural and political codes. In particular, I will describe the Italian case of Anna Adamolo (2008-2009).

The Network Events
Networked art as a challenge for social transformation

by Tatiana Bazzichelli
In the artistic context of the past twenty years, networking art was referring to the ability of creating a map of connections in progress, and nets of relations among individuals. Since the 80s, platforms of networking have been an important tool for sharing knowledge and experience. Inspired by the early artistic practices and events of the Fluxus movement, the art of networking was based on the figure of the artist as networker: a creator of sharing platforms and of contexts for connecting and exchanging. It was not based on objects, nor solely on digital or analogical instruments, but on the relationships and processes in progress between individuals. Individuals who could in turn create other contexts of sharing.

The concept of Do-It-Yourself (self-production) was the starting point for the development of networked art, such as mail art, but also of punk culture and hacker ethic. The same Do It Yourself hands-on practice was used to describe subsequent phenomena of networking and hacktivism; from Neoism to Plagiarism, up until the 1990s, when the network dynamics were affirmed on a broader level through the use of computers and the Internet. The ‘hacktivist attitude’ referred to an acknowledgement of the net as a political space, with the possibility of decentralized, autonomous and grassroots participation. In these contexts of interaction and artistic experimentation, artists and activists worked in a critical space-in-between, a fluid territory in which to play with the structure of representation, hacking the codes of self-representation, and recombining them into something unpredictable.

In these free, active, experimental spaces, which anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983) dubbed liminal states, new cultural elements and new combined rules can be introduced. It is in these instances that technology is used with artistic, cultural and political goals, the joint action of different subjectivities which show how it is possible to create a first step in redefining powers and hierarchies, in terms of dismantling and opening social, cultural and artistic categories. In my talk I will present some artistic and activist projects in which the practice of creating “network events” might be seen as a challenge for cultural, political and social transformation. In particular, I will address the Italian case of Anna Adamolo.

Lynn Hershmann Leeson. Photo by Tatiana Bazzichelli

I met Lynn Hershman Leeson in her studio in California Street for an interview for my PhD research during my visiting scholarship in San Francisco / Stanford. I got to know her through Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. She invited me at the San Francisco Art Institute to attend a preview-screening of her upcoming film: Women Art Revolution, which is currently in post-production. After the screening we got a questionnaire, to give her our first impressions on the film. The film, coming out in the Fall of this year, is about the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States. I was very impressed by the comprehensive works of Lynn, by the amount of interviews with women artists she did in the course of the past thirty years,  and how, already in the Seventies, she managed to develop one of the first experiments in the  creation of multiple identities, transforming her own life in the one of her alter ego: Roberta Breitmore.

My interview with Lynn is going to be published in the upcoming summer issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Here is an excerpt of it:

“Lynn artistic work starting in the Sixties investigated the transformation of the social itself. Through her artificially constructed alter-egos, active both in real and virtual life, cultural symbols are recomposed according to unedited modalities. Gender power structures, the representation of subjectivity, or the artificial construction of identities – all these have found perfect balance in her works.
Lynn Hershman Leeson has created a critical reflection, putting her body on the performance stage through more than thirty years, starting in the seventies with the creation of the multiple personality Roberta Breitmore, and continuing through her works into this day with her upcoming film about the Women Art Revolution. They stress the cultural implication of gender in daily life, rewriting the codes of art and technology. Dynamics of interaction, dialogue and collective exchange acquire a particular relevance in her works”.

More info about Lynn’s work are here: www.lynnhershman.com

Check the film website: womenartrevolution.com ]]> http://networkingart.eu/2010/03/women-art-revolution-a-film-by-lynn-hershman-leeson/feed/ 0 http://networkingart.eu/2010/01/presentation-of-sirikata/ http://networkingart.eu/2010/01/presentation-of-sirikata/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:31:28 +0000 tbazz http://networkingart.eu/?p=497 Presentation of Sirikata, open source platform for games and virtual worlds
with: Henrik Bennetsen, Stanford Humanities Lab
Friday, January 15th, 13.15-15.00. Room T014, Turing building, Åbogade 34, Aarhus University.

Promoted by DUL: Digital Urban Living and DARC: Digital Aesthetics Research Center.
Presented by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Sirikata (www.sirikata.com) is a BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. The platform has grown out of a several years of research at Stanford University, initiated by Media X, and the current ambition is to expand into a fully community run open source project. At the Stanford Humanities Lab we have built practical projects that explores potential futures of collaboration, cultural institutions and musical performance. Bennetsen will demonstrate and discuss this work in context of new technological possibilities offered by Sirikata.

Bio:

In his role as associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab Henrik Bennetsen maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. He is heading the Speed Limits research project, a collaboration with the Danish Bornholm’s Kunstmuseum on how 3D collaborative technologies may augment traditional cultural institutions. As part of this, he is deeply involved in the development of the open source Sirkata platform for the deployment of games and virtual worlds. Previously Henrik lead the Lifesquared research project that explored animating traditional archives using new technology. In 2007 he co-founded the Stanford Open Source Lab that has since grown to about 60 members from across the Stanford community. Henrik is Danish and has a MSc. In Media Technology and games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc. in Medialogy from Aalborg University. Before his return to the world of academia Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.

Arse Elektronika 2009

October is coming in San Francisco, and together with the breezy fog, we have a new occasion to re-fresh our minds: Arse Elektronika 2009, October 1-4, San Francisco.
This year sex and technology meet the future at Arse Elektronika, as reported in the LA Times.
The Arse Elektronika Festival, which is not the one about media art organized in Linz every year – even if it sounds the same :) – also comes from Austria: founded by the experimental art group monochrom and managed by Johannes Grenzfurthner it is at its third edition (the first was in 2007).

CUM2CUT, the Indie-Porn-Short-Film Festival which I founded (together with Gaia Novati) in Berlin in 2006, is among the Festival partners. Some CUM2CUT movies will be shown at the Prixxx Arse Elektronika on October 1 at 6 PM, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission district.

Beside this, I will be involved in the festival program, taking part in the final panel,  Of Hypercrotch and Nanobot, together with Rose White, Violet Blue, Saul Albert, Eleanor Saitta and Johannes Grenzfurthner: Saturday, October 3, 8 PM @ PariSoMa

Here is the official press release. Spread the word!

==cut==
monochrom’s
ARSE ELEKTRONIKA 2009
“OF INTERCOURSE AND INTRACOURSE”

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Conference, film festival, DIY workshops, performances.
Oct 1-4, 2009. San Francisco.

With talks, machines and performances by Allen Stein, R. U. Sirius, Noah Weinstein, Randy Sarafan, Uncle Abdul, Jonathon Keats, Ani Niow, Jason Scott, Annalee Newitz, Rainer Prohaska, Douglas Spink, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Violet Blue, Eleanor Saitta, Reesa Brown, Saul Albert, Monika Kribusz, Kim De Vries, Pepper Mint, Micha Cárdenas, Rose White, Elle Mehrmand and many more…
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Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called ‘Culture’ in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the ‘Culture’ are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete – on command – mood- and sensory-appreciationaltering compounds into the person’s bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs – and control over the associated nerves – to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established. Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that’s why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough.

“Bizarre enough for what?” — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don’t you think, replicants?

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Festival Schedule:

October 1 (6 PM-midnight): Film festival, opening
ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika Gala @ Roxie Theater
October 2 (8 PM-midnight): Art, pixels,
interactive performance @ Center for Sex and Culture
October 3 (11:30 AM-9 PM): Talks and discourse @ PariSoMa
October 3 (after 10 PM): Party and performance night @ Femina Potens Gallery
October 4 (12 noon-10 PM): DIY workshops @ Noisebridge

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Up-to-date info on festival site:
http://www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

Tickets:
http://bit.ly/arse2009-tickets

From August 20 until December 20, 2009, I am hosted as Visiting Scholar at the Human Sciences & Technologies Advanced Research Institute at Stanford University, California H-STAR, working within the Stanford Humanities Lab.

Thanks to a partnership agreement between the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI) and H-STAR at Stanford University, it has been possible to apply for a research grant at Stanford University, being involved in programs that connect Stanford resources in human sciences with research and innovation about information technology. This semester (fall 2oo9) six PhD Scholars, including myself, are hosted by HSTAR (see here for more details). Aim of my research at Stanford is to investigate how networking practices are able to change the model of production of Internet contents and artistic creations, connecting the development of hacker ethics and current digital artistic practices with the creation of Web 2.0 social networking platforms. Fred Turner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, is my research co-supervisor.

The Stanford Humanities Lab is a loosely structured, self-supporting research collaboratory built around the work of its faculty leaders. It serves as a platform for transdiciplinary/post-disciplinary study dedicated to exploring innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge production and reproduction in the arts and humanities. Their research focus is about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences, and humanities; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere. The people behind the Lab are: Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Founder and Director), Henry Lowood, Michael Shanks and John Willinsky (Directors); Henrik Bennetsen (Associate Director), Matteo Bittanti (Associate Member); Core Collaborators are: Dena DeBry, Brandon Jones, Gordon Knox, Susan J. Rojo and Galen Davis (read more here).

Among the current projects at the SHL are: Speed Limits and the developing of Sirikata, a BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds. On September 12 and 13, a Mixed Reality Performance: An Evening on Sirikata took place. A performance at the MiTo International festival of Music in Milan, Italy, presented by the Stanford Humanities Lab [SHL] and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics [CCRMA], Stanford University).

Stay tuned!