In Pictures: Tending Networks Symposium

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New work on Window: Pippin Barr and Xin Cheng

This month's Online artist at Window is a selection of work from Stimulus Response, "the sprawling web-based diary of Wellington artist, writer, and game theorist Pippin Barr. From comic strips to delicate pencil drawings, interactive video works and maps, Barr chronicles the bizarre, banal, and boring in the everyday."


I've also completed a range of 'additional data' for Xin Cheng's recent show: a massive repository of texts, theses, links, and streaming audio research that provided the basis for the work shown at Window. From green roofs to gannet calls, the psychology of blogging and motorcycles in galleries, there's an array of interesting articles.

Searching for the perfect image

Belgian artist Martijn Hendriks Untitled I (Google Sleep) consists of 10 Lambda prints which he handselected from an archive of 1000 images found through Google Image search. But why stop there?

The rise of broadband, cheap digital cameras, and social networks like Flickr, PhotoBucket, and Fotki built around tagging and sharing photos has meant there are millions of shots publicly available. And while stock imagery sites like Getty keep redesigning to make finding images easier, scientists like James Hays and Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University employ a new 'brute strength' visual approach.


Their paper, recently presented at Siggraph, describes how algorhythms can power their way through a database of millions of shots, returning a piece (actually lots of pieces) that could match the missing section of an image. Don't like those rooftops in the foreground? Highlight it and choose from alternatives that match the perspective, colour, and lighting in your photograph: trees, a calm bay scene, or a flotilla of ships blended into the original.

It's a small world sharing a large amount of data. In a test case, Hays selected some scaffolding on a European city monument he didn't like. Combing through the millions of possibles, the result came back. The same shot. From the same angle. Taken just prior to construction by another tourist.

Quicktake: Small Global and Never been to Tehran at MIC

Currently showing at MIC, this exhibition by renowned new media artists D-Fuse tackles globalisation and it's impact - both in terms of architecture/environments, and in business. The first room is an ambitious, multi-channel installation centreing around the viral growth of fast-food giant McDonalds. World maps chronicle the time and position of every franchise, from local California eatery in the 50s through to global domination towards the turn of the millenium. As usual, the curatorial staff at the Moving Image Centre 'hung' the show impeccably, even adding multiple translucent screens to create a triplicate projected effect (see images).

But what's problematic about the work is it's over the top slickness. The data could actually be displayed in any web browser - via Google Maps or Google Earth - but dfuse instead use a barrage of electronic looking tickers and LED interfaces. What could be a dynamic, intelligently networked piece hooked up to data sources worldwide is turned into static video because of a perceived need to seduce the viewer. Adding another layer of irony, this piece about globalisation is fundamentally localised due to it's media, although d-fuse plan to add more video content as the show makes it's way around the world.


Next door, the superficially simple, "Never been to Tehran" is a case in point. The ambitious worldwide photography project challenged artists to "take photographs (from their home base) of what they imagine Tehran to look like." Participants upload their shots to a Picasa Web Album, allowing a single hub for coordinating, as well as built in features like 'geotagging' to show origin of each image, and RSS feeds allowing blogs to incorporate it into their sites. This open framework means that curators worldwide can re-present the show in a variety of formats.

Quick Take: Stephen Foster at MIC

A spotlight appears on a screen to the left as a suited figure with Indian head dress steps into the frame, a clear reference to the iconic Bond opening sequences. Delayed by a few seconds, the right screen lights up as a second shooter strides across. The crack of gunshots sound as firearms on the left and right are drawn and triggered. The work, entitled Gunfight, is one of a series by Canadian artist Stephen Foster, currently showing at MIC.

What's interesting about the work is the tension deriving from the timing - it's not immediately clear who will shoot first. As writer Monika Gagnon elaborates, "The loops end, and replay endlessly, cowboy or Indian drawing first, depending on how the two digital videos align themselves to each other on each screening."

Unfortunately I found Gunfight to be the strongest piece in the show. Foster employs a number of graphic techniques consistently, resulting in compositions of high-resolution digital objects with glowing effects and obvious scan lines. The resulting style Gagnon describes as "hyper-real", a fitting aesthetic in some ways for work which deals with posturing and power struggles, historical and contemporary authenticity. But while it's an apt commentary for it's subject, the staged aesthetic asphyxiates it's medium as well, leaving behind a series of artificially slick digital compositions which ultimately fail to move or compel.

TradeMe eats itself: Auction sites reused by artists

William Boling is an accomplished photographer. He studied drawing and painting at Georgia State University and L'Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Rennes, France. Featured on both Rhizome and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boling's studies of time and place are restrained and rigorous. But for this latest series of work, he didn't travel or scout locations. He surfed.

Finding and pairing objects from both TradeMe and it's U.S. counterpart, eBay, Boling created a series of odd couples - dress shoes and deer hooves, paintings and princess diana posters. Through Window, he's printed these and auctioning them off over the next month. To complicate matters, he's then taking the screenshots, emails, and user feedback involved in the first phase, compiling them into 3 books, and auctioning these off at the end of the project.

And while this is new terrain for photography, subverting web services and highlighting art as commodity has cropped up in other places recently. Daniel Malone purchased space for himself to promote his recent Gambia Show, "Black market next to my name". An upcoming show at Te Tuhi will also utilise TradeMe extensively. Austrian artists Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant.

Update: Emil McAvoy's "Better Work Stories" series follows this pattern, confronting TradeMe buyers with disturbing history both old and new: 1981 Springbok riots and police rape allegations. His "Police Baton sculpture for sale" features 3 batons in red, white and blue, incorporating molds of the artist's penis. Current bid: $1,010.00.

Digital flipbook: Project lomo at Cross Street

"Shoot from the hip", state the originators, a couple who discovered a cheap, small Russian camera one day in an Austrian thrift shop. Cross Street featured a show based around the cult phenomenon known as lomography tonight. Sharing a common aesthetic of grainy, highly saturated, blurred shots, and a common philosophy of shooting everywhere and anywhere, lomography has spawned a number of imitators, organisations, and online photo groups.

Joshua Lynn digitized a dozen or so of his rapid-fire sequences of everyday events and screened them on an appropriately old skool computer system in the space. Masking tape on the floor reading "controls" pointed to the page down and up keys, which flicked to the next sequence. Making concrete the implied temporality of the rest of the photography, their motion was sometimes real (a stranger walking on the street) or hinted at (shifting focus and lens flares animating a sunset).