SPEEDSHOW BRUSSELS

29 & 30 SEPTEMBER 2011 from 6.00 to 10.00 PM

LOCATION
Smart Tel
Rue de Fiennes 7
1070 Anderlecht, Brussels

Location Info

Smart Tel
Rue de Fiennes 7
1070 Anderlecht, Brussels
29 & 30 SEPTEMBER from 6.00 to 10.00 PM
Curated by:
Anne Roquigny (media art curator) and Yves Bernard (artistic director of  iMAL Brussels)

Participating artists:
Ben Baker-Smith (US), Brad Troemel & Jonathan Vingiano (US),  Chris Milk (US) & Arcade Fire (CA), Constant Dullaart (NL), Darren Solomon (US), Jennifer Terry & Raegan Kelly (US), JODI (BE/NL), Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamva (US), Jon Rafman (CA), Julien Levesque (F),  Les Liens Invisibles (Clemente Pestelli & Gionatan Quintini) (IT), Leonardo Solaas (AR) , Marika Dermineur (F), Mario Klingermann (DE),  Perry Bard (CA), Curating youtube (Robert Sakrowski & Ute Fisher) (DE), Suwud (BR), Systaime (F), Thomas Cheneseau (F), VideOdrome collective (F).

Desconstructing social networks & Web 2.0 landscapes Throughout the last years, social networks became ubiquitous and deeply changed our usage of Internet and the mental landscape we build about the online world. Social platforms such as Blogger, Youtube, Facebook, Google or Flickr are interfaces for people to produce and share content, they are new virtual interactive spaces for socialising, the new fields where our data interleave, weave, aggregate and collide, enabling us to interact daily with other millions users. The latest statistical data show how much more time we spend online and how the top 10 Web2.0 sites contribute 80% of the total Internet traffic.

Since the beginning of the Internet, net artists have developed sharp and critical attitudes, infiltrating its protocols and glitches, playing with its functionalities, reappropriating its usages, amplifying its processes to the extreme and absurd. Social networks are not a protected territory, and they inspire artists with projects exploring and questioning how we use them. With humor, irony, creativity and irrelevance, artists question our fascination and addiction of Web2.0 and confront us with its risks and deviances. The web is a medium and a creative space. For this SPEEDSHOW Brussels in the context of TodaysArt.be festival, we have selected recent artworks by international artists exploring and (mis)appropriating social networks and Web2.0 sites.

All pictures on picasa

1.
Lesoir.be
by Marika Dermineur (F)
http://www.lesoir.be.free.fr/
Lesoir.be Internet site diverts pages from Belgium’s newspaper of reference Le Soir. Thanks to a mirror site, the surfer can replace any word of the original site with another word. The piece investigates media vocabulary, and the impact of words, expressions and news trends. The artist Marika Dermineur, co-writer of Google House, is building a house in real time from images and rooms found on the Internet. She is a member of the Incident and Rybn collectives, leads Upgrade! Paris, and is a curator of different events like Politique 0 and Desert Numérique.

2.
The revolving Internet
by Constant Dullaart (NL)
http://constantdullaart.com/projects/therevolvinginternetcom/
In his ongoing series of the attributed Internet (thedisagreeinginternet.com or
thesleepinginternet.com etc.), Constant Dullaart raises the question of the personality of the Internet. Through minimal iframe interventions the Internet seems to be in a human condition and gains even emotions sometimes. Enter your website and the home page will start spinning A nice and smooth way to reconsider our expectations of the Internet and to get a bit dizzy.

3.
Geogoo Bruxelles
by JODI (BE/ NL)
http://globalmove.us/ge/bru-round.html
The artist duo JODI is very well known for their constant work in deconstructing software and online systems for the last two decades. The endless database and open API s from services like Google Maps/Earth bare an endless variety of unforeseeable visual expression. JODIs Geogoo series started with random Google Maps icon mash-ups scattered over the globe and now opened in a automated Google Maps journeys. A controlled machine, very mechanic tour of Brussels reinterprets the satellite images of roundabouts in an unexpected, micro-repetitive way.

4.
Google Street View Patchwork
by Julien Levesque (F)
http://www.julienlevesque.net/google/view1.html
Julien Levesque is a French netartist, also member of the collective Mircrotruc.
His art practice regularly uses the Internet as a medium. He invents and creates environments, devices, websites, objects which question in a critical and creative way actors of the Web such as the Web, Google, YouTube, MySpace or Facebook.
With his Street View Patchwork, he reconstructs new panoramas by superimposing fragments of landscapes he has collected during his various trips in the virtual world of Google Street View. The Street View Patchwork are made of a collage of different locations and times.
The result creates fictional and unique scenes that are endlessly reassembled in the flux that has generated them. Produced by an automated eye, these fragile and ephemeral pictures offer a multitude of perspectives on the world. They interrogate the act of shooting today. What does it mean to make a photo if it already pre-exists?

5.
Net icones
by Systaime (F)
http://www.neticones.com/
Michaël Borras a.k.a Systaime is a regular by-product of digital culture, the kind that re-shuffles our identity cards and our relationship to the world. An Internet trouble maker. He remixes the flows, lacerates the powerful and the impostors, highlighting our dependence to the media. One of his favourite playgrounds is Facebook with Net icons – he reproduces famous icons ( Elvis Presley, Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc. ) with Facebook icons.

6.
Blind Mist
by Brad Troemel & Jonathan Vingiano (US)
http://www.blindmist.com/
Blind Mist is a collaborative platform that relies on participants to submit their URL to an open database. The website scrapes every image off the URLs participants offer and adds those images to another archive. A stream of images from this archive is presented at random on the Blind Mist homepage. Each image functions as a link back to its original website, allowing users to continue exploring content they have found interesting.
Through Blind Mist, Brad Troemel & Jonathan Vingiano offer an alternative to the dominant blogging format of aggregated or self-selected digital media and open possibilities for new, unforeseen juxtapositions in visual content. They are also interested in promoting a platform that mixes ‘high’ and ‘low’ artworks, allowing any and all content to be viewed in the same, uniformly context-free space for further investigation– hence the name’s reference to a ‘blind draw’.
By allowing everyone to mutually benefit through exposure and contribution, Blind Mist is currently the beginning of an artistic commonwealth, fulfilling the artistic potential of a decentralized population feasible only in our digital age.

7.
Bit_Synthesis / I am a glitch bot
by Ben Baker-Smith (US)
http://bitsynthesis.com/glitchbot
http://bitsynthesis.com/
http://www.flickr.com/people/glitchbot/
GlitchBot is an imperfect machine built to create imperfections.
GlitchBot is an automated glitch creation / distribution program and persona.
GlitchBot maintains an active online presence with new images created and uploaded daily.
GlitchBot creates its images by glitching source images pulled from flickr users’ photostreams. Only source images with an appropriate Creative Commons license are used. In order to ensure compliance with license terms, the original creator is credited and linked to in the descriptions of the resulting glitched images.
The glitched images are then released under the same license as their source – ensuring compliance with share-alike licenses, and contributing to the pool of legally re-usable media that allows GlitchBot to avoid coming into conflict with copyright law.

8.
The nine eyes of Google
by Jon Rafman (CA)
http://9-eyes.com/
These last few years ago, Google sent out an army of hybrid electric automobiles, each one bearing nine cameras on a single pole. Armed with a GPS and three laser range scanners, these cars have been creating panoramic images of every highway and byway in the free world. To prevent identification of individuals and vehicles, faces and license plates are blurred.
Jon Rafman started exploring this new, virtual world and collecting screen captures of Google Street Views.This infinitely rich mine of material afforded his practice the extraordinary opportunity to explore, interpret, and curate a new world in a new way. The collections of Street Views both celebrate and critique the current world. The artist/curator, in reasserting the significance of the human gaze within Street View, recognizes the pain and disempowerment in being declared insignificant. The artist/curator challenges Google’s imperial claims and questions the company’s right to be the only one framing our cognitions and perceptions. (extracts from http://www.artfagcity.com)

9.
The wilderness down town
by Chris Milk / Arcade Fire (US/ CA)
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/
The famous Canadian band Arcade Fire has created with film director Chris Milk
one of the most innovating online clip.
The fully customized video for the song “We Used to Wait” (made entirely in HTML 5) changes each time according to the address of your childhood you will provide on the home page.
The result is a personal montage of running figures, multiple windows of Google Maps, Street Views of the location you put in and birds flying…At the end of this unique experience you are given the opportunity to write a postcard that will be mixed live during Arcade Fire’s Tour.

10.
We feel fine
by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar (US)
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar co-creators of We Feel Fine, are artists, writers and researchers interested in how humans relate to technology and to each other.
We Feel Fine is a project which is continuously measuring the emotional temperature of the human world and harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). The interface with all the data collected is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains.

11.
CuratingYouTube presents Anonymous: Shared Identity in the era of a global networked Society
by Robert Sakrowski with support from Ute Fisher (DE)
http://www.curatingyoutube.net/anonymous/index.html
The exhibition attempts to give an overview of the movement of the Internet-activists “Anonymous” through a comparative and aesthetic investigation in the form of a series of video-grids including videos that were made by the activists in the course of their protests activities. “Anonymous” is applying the medium “web video” in order to announce its activities taking place on the Internet and in real space, as well as call for others to participate. Thus, the videos should be seen as an important interface between the Internet and the so-called real world. Due to their specific aesthetics, the videos have constituted a kind of “corporate identity” related to “Anonymous”. Their film language, their aesthetic appearance and their style were therefore constitutive of the entire movement.
The “Anonymous – videos” make use of an arsenal of characters and methods, which can be critically considered. Nevertheless, the exhibition wants to convey the productive tension built by the friction of the different propagandistic funds, brand strategies and artistic methods that “Anonymous” uses in order to constitute a collective or shared identity via a dynamic aesthetic and to provoke grassroots protests.

12.
Bb 2.0
by Darren Solomon (US)
http://www.inbflat.net/
Darren Solomon is a composer, producer, bassist and keyboard player currently living in New Jersey. “Bb 2.0” is a collaborative music and spoken word online project developed with contributions from Youtube users. The videos can be played simultaneously – the soundtracks will work together, and the mix can be adjusted with the individual volume sliders.
You are invited to participate to this crowdsourcing initiative or just to create your own piece by launching the different videos and mixing the sounds of guitar, clarinet, singing, piano, violin together.

13.
Google Variations
Leonardo Solaas (AR)
http://turbulence.org/Works/google/
Leonardo Solaas is an Argentinian programmer, designer, professor and new media artist.
He works with generative systems, data visualization and social networks.
For him, Google is the main hub of an emerging data-driven world. It is a beast with many faces, impossible to grasp all at once, and growing new limbs every day. It is also the name of many contradictions : A centralized traffic control in the (supposedly) horizontal and distributed Internet. A supporter of data openness and accessibility that relies on secret algorithms. A ranking technology that is based on finding out popularity but at the same time creates it.
These variations are an open series of approximations to diverse aspects of Google. They use multiple strategies to de-naturalise our relationship with the brand, corporation and technology. It is a collection of formal and conceptual micro-experiments, a fly-eyed view on an entity so pervasive that tends to become invisible while it radically changes our everyday lives.

14.
Google is not the Map
by Les Liens Invisibles (Clemente Pestelli and Gionatan Quintini.) (IT)
http://google.isnotthemap.net
Google Is Not The Map (GISNTM) is a collection of 35+ GeoPoeMaps, a series of works in which ordinary maps become the unusual surfaces used to disarticulate the perception of the world, to trace new routes across the boundaries and to draw new imaginary geometries of the possible. While the world slowly fades away in an increasingly multiplication of self-representations, the map making process – missing its real reference – becomes nothing more than an empty-meaning abstract practice: so, what do all those maps stand now for?
In order to disclose this contradiction – or just to give a paradoxical point of view about it – the imaginary art-group Les Liens Invisibles explore the world along its self-referential techno-linguistic layers, moving through its hidden mechanisms and forcing the grammar of its public-released API code.

15.
Man with the Movie Camera
by Perry Bard (CA)
http://dziga.perrybard.net
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them on this site. The software developed specialy for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film, instance of a new database cinema. Anyone can upload a footage. When the work is streamed, your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.
This website contains every shot in Vertov’s 1929 film along with thumbnails representing the beginning, the middle and the end of each shot. The participants are invited to interpret Vertov and upload their footage to this site to become part of the database. They contribute to an entire scene, a shot or multiple shots from different scenes.

16.
Killer Entertainments
by Jennifer Terry & Raegan Kelly (US)
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/projects/index.php?project=86
Jennifer Terry’s Killer Entertainments is a very rare example proposing a remix of Web2.0 contributions from soldiers engaged in war conflicts. The project is challenging both for designers and users on many levels. How to critically address videos shot by soldiers engaged in combat without sensationalising, decontextualising or trivialising them? How to provide access to such a diverse and extensive range of work? How to insert a commentary, a context and background information while preserving the raw power of the original videos? The source material presented here all comes from “the Internet,” but what does that mean? What can it mean? Which of the sites hosting these materials are “real” and which are run by counter-intelligence agencies hoping to track usage patterns among potential dissidents via IP addresses?

17.
VideOdrome
by VideOdrome Collective (F)
http://vide0dr0me.tumblr.com/
« Shh, not a word, videospam only ». VideOdrome is a mailing list whose participants communicate exclusively using videos picked up from the web. Once you’ve signed up to the mysterious list (http://lists.machineaecrire.com/mailman/listinfo/videodrome), VideOdrome unleashes an endless flow of seditious images into your inbox to seize your pupils and fill your available brain time with the stunning video vortex spectacle that is YouTube and its shoot’em down grandmas, its Tourette’s karaoke, its porn Olympics, its wood fires and other oddities…

18.
FacebookFeedback
by Thomas Cheneseau (F)
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.64680209543.67693.538654543&type=1
Thomas Cheneseau explores throughout his projects new territories of artistic expression: the web 2.0, virtual worlds and social networks – with which he creates interactive environments. His project FacebookFeedback is an original visual expression which examines the limits of the interface of this social network and deconstructs the temporal space of the website. Facebook is diverted and used both as media and medium, as a medium for dissemination and exposure, but mainly as a space of creation and existence of an artwork. This artistic research consists of a series of screenshots (pictures and videos) which appropriate plastic material such as codes of Facebook, as well as a series of progressive visual feedback, which makes possible towards the end to break down the timeline imposed by the social network.

19.
Flickeur – Every Picture tells a Story
by Mario Klingermann (DE)
http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/flickeur.php
Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com – the photo sharing social platform, and creates an infinite film whose style can vary from stream-of-consciousness, to documentary or to video clip. Flickeur works like a magnetic tape in the loop where new images merge with older materials and are influenced by the magnetic memory of older recordings.

20.
Googorama
by Suwud (BR)
http://www.suwud.com/googorama/
Suwud is a collective of Brazilian young artists who in 2007 produced the online photo gallery Googorama, one of the first Google StreetView photo projects. Googorama is an example of the natural and cold attitude towards Internet and the art world which characterises native digital artists. When Suwud proposed Googorama to one of the most famous photography competition in Brazil at the end of 2007(of course they were rejected), this provocative act of submitting photos captured from a webservice, proposing automatically produced photos was probably the starting point of a whole evolution of photography and contemporary art in the information age.