Via neural.it

Neural #42 extra, VIDA Awards 13.2 DVD, an introduction and contextualization about VIDA Awards 13.2 edition and its winners, made by Artistic Director Monica Bello (only for subscribers)

artists: Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths (Holland, France, UK), Paul Vanouse (USA), Cesar Harada (Japan-France), Verena Friedrich (Germany)
This DVD contains an introduction and contextualization about VIDA Awards 13.2 edition and its winners, made by Artistic Director Monica Bello, plus every winner presenting his own work. In fact, the first prize was awarded to Naked on Pluto, by Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux, and Dave Griffiths, all from the Netherlands, an online game that mocks the deceitfully invasive nature of most “social software” platforms. Ocular Revision, the Second Prize, by Paul Vanouse, from the US, is the third one in a series of Biological/Genomic works that use DNA and a gel-based electrophoresis system as medium and subject. With this live installation, Vanouse addresses the idea of a “genetic mapping” and reflects on the ever changing focus/object in “life” studies within scientific disciplines. Protei by César Harada, from France, took the Third Prize. Protei is a self-governing unmanned wind-powered sail-robot, which drags a long petrol-sucking boom, using the power of nature to solve a problem caused by man. Furthermore there’s also the Honorary Mention Transducers – 2010-2012 by Verena Friedrich from Germany which is an installation consisting of a number of laboratory glassware vessels containing just one biological element: a single human hair. Every one of the glass vessels also contains a set of mechanical devices and electronic components with theresources required to produce an audible vibrating response based on the reading of the DNA in the hair. In this way, the biological samples generate a soundscape in which we hear exclusive and personal vibrations, combining to create of polyphony of human hair.

In the last days Dave and the whole VIDA team are putting together the final bits of the installations. Come and check the result from the 16th of the 19th of this month.

Naked on Pluto will be part of the fifth edition of the Speed Show series! This new release, titled ‘Open Internet’, will be happening in Paris the 13th of January. The event is curated and produced by Aram Bartholl, Marie Lechner & Anne Roquigny. Unfortunately the NOP crew is held hostage by EVr14’s cleaning bots at the moment and won’t make it in time! Please drop by for a chat, an energy drink and some browser based love brought to you by:

Anonymous, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Christophe Bruno & Samuel Tronçon, Claude Closky, Marika Dermineur, Caroline Delieutraz, Constant Dullaart, JODI, Jérôme Joy, Tobias Leingruber, Aymeric Mansoux & Dave Griffiths & Marloes de Valk, Albertine Meunier, Geraldine Juarez feat. M.I.A., Evan Roth, Systaime, VideOdrome mailing list, La Quadrature du Net (Jérémie Zimmermann).

SPEED SHOW vol.5: ‘Open Internet’
Welat Internetcafe
12 Rue d’Enghien, Paris
13th January  2011
7:00-11:00 PM

More information here: http://fffff.at/speed-show-5/

Last friday the exhibition Funware opened at MU in Eindhoven. It is well worth a visit! No mindless clicking followed by a brief moment of entertainment, but a few thoughtful clicks rewarded with a fresh take on software. The exhibition is curated by Olga Goriunova.

The opening of an exhibition is not exactly the ideal place to play a game that requires a quiet read and a login on Facebook, luckily there were focussed and brave people present! Lots of thanks to Annet Dekker and Annette Wolfsberger (aaaan.net) for the realization of the exhibition!

Funware – playing with software art

Adrian Ward, Amy Alexander, Annina Ruest, Bob Zimbinski, Carmen Weisskopf, Domagoj Smoljo, Roger Wigger, Christoph Haag, Franziska Windisch, Ludwig Zeller, Martin Rumori, Colin Green, Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope, Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk, David Link, Electroboutique, Gazira Babeli, Joan Leandre, JODI, Jon Satrom, Ben Syverson, RTmark, Runme.org.

Making and using software can be experimental, humorous and aesthetically rich. Alongside today’s rather dull omnipresence of databases and content management systems, elements of fun have actually informed and guided the development of software from its beginnings. Fun is the energy of curiosity and inappropriateness, exploring what is not yet known in art, culture, computer science, design, math and the site of their encounter: software. Here, software art, a joke of a mathematical genius and amateur tinkering of software stand side by side.

Freaks run the world. It is through fun that they invent what becomes our reality, even if their jokes are later updated to guide matters in unappetizing ways. Our society is built and managed by software. To understand how we can act in relation to such systems and how they are made, we need to get a sense of the energy that drives software, the energy based on fun. We can come closer to these practices through the territories that are in-between geeky humour, digital folklore, cultures of using conventional software, artistic software and history of computation. It is in the fact that exploration takes place through fun and the bizarre territories always exist that there is a hope for an open horizon.

The exhibition Funware questions, tangles and experiments with the materiality of software, the backbone of contemporary society. Letting us deal with the glitchy nature of human-machine ensembles, it offers a way of understanding something that is normally hidden and serious. Fun is far from detaching software from political or social interrogability, it is rather a force and a method that works on complicating the normal, the serious and the dominant.

Starting off with the reconstruction of an algorithm from the 1950-s, Funware references home scripting of the 1980-s, early fascination with ASCII, geeky humour, deconstructed games, classic software art and goes on to include an i-Phone sculpture and an i-Pad application.

Performed by amateurs, artists, alternative coders or professional programmers for “fun”, enquiries into software as aesthetic and political practice let us see the uncertainty and seamfullness of software in times when the dominant tendencies is to hide its operation behind security systems, impenetrable interfaces and shiny entertainment.

Fun in software is a way to construct and recognize the complexity of software as embedded in between art, folklore, industry, and university. It is about breaking from systems of constraints in ways that produce richness and abundance of kinds. Funware offers a way to re-address software, as an invisible universal culture, in its aesthetics, history, and power.

Curator: Olga Goriunova
Executive producers: aaaan.net
Supported by: VSBfonds, SNS Reaal, London Metropolitan University & STRP Festival