Vague Terrain

Culled from a press release that recently showed up in our inbox.

As we plan our 2012 Electricity is Magic season, we invite submissions from individual artists, collectives, or curators to submit proposals for the EiM Gallery. Our space is non-traditional, and as such, we have some unique parameters for artists to contend with. Our presentation spaces are as follows:

• The Blue Wall. appx. 5m x 2.5m, appropriate for any wall-based works. These works should probably look good on blue.
• The Scrim. appx. .7m x 1m, hole in a wall between two rooms, covered with a scrim. This space will be used primarily for video works. The Scrim is viewable from both sides, a fact which should be considered when proposing works.
• The Dining Room. our dining room comes completely empty, and is appx. 4m x 3m. This space can be used for a large sculptural work, installations, performances, audio work, etc.
• The Backyard. we have a small, unkempt, mostly concrete-covered backyard, which, legend has it, has a pond hidden somewhere underneath the concrete and planks of wood. There is a large brick wall at the back of the yard, and four steps leading down from the house. This space is appropriate for installations, performances, sculptures, etc.
• The Basement. We have a large, poorly-lit, unfinished basement. This space is appropriate for installations, performances, sculptures, audio work, etc.

When applying, please include:

• A description of the proposed piece(s), including proposed presentation space
• Bio/C.V.
• Appropriate links, including website, images, publications, etc.
• If the work you are proposing a new piece, any appropriate diagrams, etc.
• Dimensions, durations and technical requirements of the proposed piece.
• If the work has been presented previously, please include details as to where and when.

Submissions are ongoing. Please apply via email to submissions@electricityismagic.com.

Electric speed is curated by Kate Armstrong and Malcolm Levy for Revised Projects and the New Forms Media Society.

Our interest in working with the form of the urban screen for Electric Speed relates in one part to the catalyst of the McLuhan in Europe 2011 initiative¹ in which artists and curators have taken the centennial year of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s birth as an opportunity to consider the transformative impacts of his ideas specifically in the context of media art. The other component that spurred the development of this exhibition was an interest in partnering with the Surrey Art Gallery to present work specifically geared to the unique context of the Surrey Urban Screen, as it is the largest urban screen in Canada and the only one that is devoted to the presentation of art.²

The variegated ways of approaching speed as a subject, mode, effect or relation that we see in these artists’ projects provide entry points for considering the impact of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on the subject of accelerated culture. Most importantly, though, Electric Speed presents new works from a group of Canadian artists whose tactics and practices exist within and respond to the state of global media culture. Electric Speed will be exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery from December 2, 2011 through March 31, 2012, before travelling to other urban screen venues internationally. With this exhibition, we’ve tried to investigate these themes as well as enable the production of vibrant work that responds to the pervasive, variable form of the urban screen, itself an important defining feature of the series.

If urban screens are defined as the “various kinds of dynamic digital displays and interfaces in urban space such as LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals but also intelligent architectural surfaces”³, it becomes immediately clear how deeply they have infiltrated the urban environment, and it must be noted that the commercial aspects of this ubiquitous form are fundamental to their existence.

The urban screen as a form typically fluctuates, a bit uneasily, between two poles: Not purely commercial and rarely purely cultural, a common tactic of the urban screen is to deliver culture in interstitial spaces or timeslots, for example showing video or media art in the last minute of each hour or working with public transit authorities to show animation or experimental video on the television screens in trains or subways.

However variable or restricted these sites are, these tactics produce unique if not immense opportunities for delivering art in new ways and new spaces, for example allowing it to be shown simultaneously in 15 cities across the U.K.⁴, engaging huge audiences in major public squares⁵, reaching people such as commuters in situ, or allowing architectural surfaces to operate cinematically or socially so that groups of people can gather in public space to interact with a large-scale, shared image.

In response to these complex and multivalent conditions, an international network of artists, curators and theorists has emerged for the purpose of discussing and examining the role of the urban screen and to creating discourse among “artists, curators, cultural managers, architects, government institutions, screen operators as well as theoreticians” so as to rethink “the relationship between architecture and public space in the digital age”⁶ and to consider the implications of ongoing tensions between commercial and artistic concerns as well as the restrictions that arise from questions of ownership and control in relation to the public context. Whether through the cultural bureaucracy of a municipality⁷ or a multi-national corporation such as Clear Channel⁸, screens are regulated, and ultimately cause an examination of what is and is not public.

For us, the networked, global form of the public screen manifestly raises questions about simultaneity, relationships between public and private, issues of centralization and control, as well as causing an examination of the ways in which cultural and commercial spheres intersect - all issues that pierce through and overlay the theme of “electric speed”.

This project might be characterized as an invitation to the six artists - Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, Jeremy Bailey, Jillian Mcdonald, Jon Sasaki, and Will Gill - to test the formal qualities of the public screen as a medium, because on some level the urban screen implicitly suggests an investigation of the contemporary media environment itself. With all the opportunities and restrictions of the screen, and the attendant factors which are explored in these works as well as in these essays and interviews, it remains for us an active question: Do the formal and contextual constraints that lie at the heart of the urban screen prevent it from functioning as a meaningful cultural space? Or on the other hand, is it even possible to imagine a meaningful investigation of global urban culture or media that takes place anywhere but there?

Kate Armstrong & Malcolm Levy, Vancouver
January 2012

References

1. A primarily European project initiated by Stephen Kovats and Michelle Kasprzak to create “a conversation that spans art, communications, and technology.” http://www.mcluhan2011.eu
2. Architecturally the Surrey Urban Screen is in fact more of a façade than a screen, as it possesses a unique exterior with a set of illuminated, irregular windows that challenge it as a traditional projection surface.
3. Mirjam Struppek is the founder of the International Urban Screens Association, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
4. The BBC Big Screens initiative is a collaboration between the BBC, LOCOG and UK local authorities in which screens become focal points in the city for sports, news, events and content arising from partnerships with arts organizations.
5. Initiatives to present cultural projects operate in connection with sites such as New York’s Times Square, the large-scale urban screen in Federation Square in Melbourne, and the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin.
6. Mirjam Struppek, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
7. Where public art must be in dialogue with community and the specific requirements and constraints presented by the site in question.
8. Clear Channel is a global media and entertainment company that owns and operates approximately one million screens in 45 countries across 5 continents.

eContact! extends an open call for contributions to an issue focussing on the use of the body in electroacoustic performance practice, coordinated by guest editor Marco Donnarumma. Performers, composers and others are encouraged to contribute their perspectives on the role or position of the body in experimental practices of musical performance.

Suggestions for contributions include, but are not limited to the following ideas:

• Use of Mechanical Myography (MMG), Electromyography (EMG) and other similar biological signal measurements in performance
• Scoring / notation of body-related performance
• Sound Art dealing with the body and biological aspects of performance
• Development of DIY, biological-based, Interactive Musical Systems (IMS)
• The definition / augmentation of Self on stage by means of biotechnologies
• Cognitive aspects of embodied interaction between the biological body and computer
• Composer—Technology—Performer: definition of roles?
• Live electronics vs. fixed media in biotechnological performance practice
• Historical overviews and reflections
• Critical perspectives on gesture-based “human-computer interaction”
• The sound of fles…

We also welcome other contributions that engage in a discourse on the relation between biophysics and music. Feel free to propose other ideas!

Submission deadline: January 31st 2012
Publication: February 29th, 2012

Submission Guidelines can be found here. To state your interest in contributing or for further information, contact Guest Editor Marco Donnarumma via email.