Annika Eriksson

Work from “Now you see us now you don’t” at Krome Gallery, Berlin.

“Annika Eriksson is a Swedish artist living in Berlin. Over the years, she has produced a large number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Eriksson plays with the debates around the public realm and structures that regulate it, revealing the changes and how this is subject to unexpected appropriations and inversions.

The city, the camera, the dog. And what it saw. The city knows. It takes its time. It observes what’s happening. It recalls what’s been going on. It may even intuit what’s next. We can’t check because the city won’t talk to us humans directly. Still we get a sense that the places we cross every day may have a mind and memory of their own. In some places something is in the air that would suggest that much. And it’s not necessarily because these places were marked by monuments or otherwise charged with an aura of historical significance. On the contrary, it may precisely be those blank spaces in the urban fabric where a city’s consciousness would seem to linger, those spots where roads cross at strange angles, leaving sidewalks too wide and patches of ground without proper use, so that, helplessly, people may put a bench there, to hide how empty the pavement feels. It may also be fenced off pockets of the unbuilt or bombed and never rebuilt between houses or unkept bits in parks that people still visit not because there were actually nice but simply because, for whatever reason, they are still there. It is in these patches, bits and pockets that the peculiar time and tempo at which a city thinks and remembers might be sensed: Because these places are not crowed by interpretations (guided tours leave them uncommented and history looks elsewhere) the city is free to keep its senses alert and, as the planet turns slowly, accumulate awareness.

In her photo series “Reversed (Now you see us now you don’t)” and the video I am the dog that was always here (loop) Annika Eriksson taps into this particular state and temporality of urban consciousness. She addresses the non-anthropocentric dimension of the awareness a place may create of itself, at its own pace. She does so by letting different mediums channel this peculiar spatiotemporal experience: the camera, the dog and the poem. “Reversed (Now you see us now you don’t)” are black and white photo series, displayed in groups of three. They are pictures of precisely the somewhat blank, forlorn urban locales described above. More than pictures, they are testify to a camera’s automatic way of taking in the world, without composition, maybe not even entirely in focus. Crucially, all images are reversed. So what you see, quite literally is what the reflex camera saw in its internal mirror-eye, not what the person taking the picture perceived. Like the recording of a voice played backwards, the reversal adds a touch of the spooky. This is because reversed realities become eerily concrete, as this word does, when I spell it backwards: e-t-e-r-c-n-o-c, turning each letter back into itself, making an e an e, a t a t, an e an e, an r an r, a c a c, an n an n, an o and o, a c a c. What if this was how the city saw itself? Mirrored in itself, rendering space and time infinitely concrete, the literal consciousness of a place might leave words scrambled and permit itself to be uncrowded by false interpretations. We wouldn’t know. But the camera may. It is a thing, and hence partakes in the way the material world exists, by and for itself.

I am the dog that was always here (loop) summons a different set of witnesses. Live witnesses, yes, but non-human too. The video shows packs of dogs on a derelict ground in the countryside outside Istanbul. They roam around the space and do what dogs do. They keep busy, fighting, playing, sniffing each other and surveilling their surroundings. It’s lots and lots of them, big and small ones, of different mixed breeds, city street dogs, attuned to the needs of their survival and visibly in charge of this pocket of space that no one seems to own or want. On the voice-over, a speaker enunciates a text in Turkish in a smooth melodic tone, accompanied by English subtitles. It’s the dog speaking. Which dog? The dog that was always here. It says so. And you feel it too. Because what carries its speech and renders it sublimely poetic is a sense of time and place that exceeds the limits of any one living consciousness. This dog of dogs knows the city because it is the city. It has lived and died with the place, risen like its buildings, and perished with its disasters, always to return. Even though, the dog says, that it and its kin have been captured and moved out from the center to the periphery, it will persist and come back to those streets, after those who wield power over them will long have passed away. The city dog will fight back and survive the forces any police could put up. Its resilience is infinite. Because the time of the city dog knows no end. It goes in circles. Like its poem does, as it repeats and repeats, while the images change. The place of the dog? Place for the dog is a deep knowledge alive in its body like the energy pulsing through its veins that keep the dog watchful, playful and on the go. Would we know for sure that this is what the dog of dogs thinks. No, because, like the consciousness of places the dog of dogs wouldn’t use ordinary human language. But, like the camera partakes in the life of things, poetry may convey a touch of the not-altogether human, as its depth evokes more memories than an individual human could recollect. In its rhythm and melody one senses the echoes of more than one life lived, more than a single mind could contain: a collectivity of life experiences, perhaps even the living experience of a whole city. So the camera sees and the dog speaks as it roams around. As mediums they may very well be the ones to channel that peculiar collective consciousness a place might generate of itself in its very own proper time.” – Jan Verwoert

Aleksandra Domanović

Work from From yu to me

“Aleksandra Domanović used to own an international sampler of domain names: aleksandradomanovic.sk, aleksandradomanovic.rs, aleksandradomanovic.si, aleksandradomanovic.eu. It’s usually enough for an artist or other public figure to claim their name on .com, and Domanović did, but by staking out real estate in the top-level domains governed by Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, and the European Union she reminded herself, and anyone else paying attention, about the friction of states and networks, names, and domains. Domanović was born in Yugoslavia, and when it was gone her citizenship drifted. If for some of its users the World Wide Web appears boundlessly ephemeral in comparison to the permanence of statehood, in Domanović’s experience of recent history, states and domains alike are tools of control that can be surprisingly fragile and flexible.

The domains in Domanović’s personal collection, which have since expired, sketched an outline of those ideas. Her new video adds details. From yu to me is about the history of the internet in Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia.

It’s hard to talk about the internet and Yugoslavia together. The domain name assigned to it—.yu—is a curiosity, because the country that gave it its name coexisted with it only briefly, and in that time only a small population of specialists used it. What’s more, during the Balkan war of the early 1990s, the Serbian government that claimed Yugoslavia’s mantle was disconnected from the internet by UN sanctions, and .yu was administered by independent Slovenia. From yu to me—the title describes a distance, but not a linear one measured by the spatial or temporal coordinates of maps and timelines; rather, it covers a system of overlapping forking paths.

Here are some facts about .yu and .me: In 1989, .yu was registered by a Slovenian agency just as the country seceded from Yugoslavia. After several years’ delay, it was reassigned to the so-called “third Yugoslavia” (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1994. Montenegro was issued .me to go with its new UN membership after the nation voted for independence from Serbia in 2006. Through all of this, the .yu domain stayed under Serbian control until ICANN, the non-profit that coordinates the internet’s global domain system, finally abolished the domain it in 2010. (Meanwhile, .su—the top-level domain for the Soviet Union, which was registered 1990, fourteen months before the Soviet Union collapsed—continues to exist, as domain holders lobby ICANN to keep it alive.)

There’s not really much about .me in From yu to me, though it’s noted in passing that Montenegro is making quite a bit of money from it. Domanović’s main interest is .yu. She tells its story through interviews with two women—Borka Jerman-Blažič, who registered it, and Mirjana Tasić, who oversaw its transfer to Serbia and administered it until 2007—and ends on a conversation with a curator who acquired the domain for the collection of the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, following the model of the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of @. Jerman-Blažič and Tasić share anecdotes of connection and disconnection—how they implemented a closed, national network before Yugoslavia was connected to EARN (the European counterpart to ARPAnet in the United States), the collapse of email when Slovenia was bombed in 1991, the ensuing struggle over the ownership of .yu between Slovenia and the authorities in Belgrade, and email exchanges explaining the need for new domains to match new UN memberships with internet administrators in California and elsewhere who knew and understood nearly nothing about Balkan politics.

Maps barely appear in From yu to me, and though Domanović sets up her interviews with establishing shots that show her in unheard conversation with her subjects in courtyards and corridors, she doesn’t give datelines, so there’s no way of telling whether footage was filmed in Ljubljana or Belgrade or somewhere else. Geography flickers indistinctly but networks feel solid: they come in alive in the reminiscing of Tasić and Jerman-Blažič, who worked with the massive mainframes seen in the archival footage Domanović uses, and dealt with the daily bureaucracy that accrued around them.

The stories of From yu to me are from a time when email was like the telegraph, a fast way of sending information that people used rarely because it required a visit to specialized facilities. The stories predate many of the utopian and dystopian network fantasies of the nineties—the Declaration of Cyberspace Independence, The Matrix—that imagine the web as an autonomous social space. Instead, the internet is discussed in highly pragmatic terms. There are scattered expressions of wonder at the possibilities of high-speed communications networks, but they look quaint and silly. A drowsy anchor in a beige turtleneck says: “Computers or better TV networks will soon enable us to connect with various databases from different computers,” and reads a weather report for England from an ASCII map of the United Kingdom that appears on a little blue screen.

Other than the news clips, all the archival footage in the video is fuzzy on either side and sharp in a square in the center, like a microscope slide, as if to represent the clarifying power of hindsight—a power that Domanovic is reluctant to exploit. From yu to me uses several of the standard documentary conventions—the interviews with experts, who sit in front of the camera and talk to someone sitting behind it and to the side, the use of old newsreels and other stock footage—but not its narrative form. The stories it includes don’t add up to a big, cohesive one. Facts about .yu and relationships between them can be more easily extracted from a publication accompanying the video. It has the full transcript of an interview with Jerman-Blažič, and documents such as her email requesting that YUNAC, the Yugoslav academic research network, be connected to the U.S. internet, and a heated exchange about disconnection of Serbia from the internet during civil war.

There are more details about the social spaces around states and domains in From yu to me than there are in Domanović’s collection of websites on international servers, but the video, too, is about conveying impressions of these relations rather than drawing some kind of conclusion about them. From yu to me gives a sense of the office politics and working life around an emerging technology, of the meetings and business trips to far-off places necessary to develop an instrument that connects people, that closes the distance between you and me. Those details flesh out a time before .yu was canceled, dead, preserved in a museum collection, and Domanović wants her account of that time to approximate the openness that people who lived then felt, the unfinished work on .yu when a Yugoslavia with internet still seemed possible.

To that end, perhaps, Domanović chose to feature another, unrelated achievement of Yugoslav technology in From yu to me, one that doesn’t have an immediate application to the internet, or anything else—the Belgrade Hand, a robotic arm developed in a lab at University of Belgrade in the 1960s. Domanović included both archival footage of the hand and an animated version that unexpectedly reaches into the screen, first testing the weight of an apple, then feeling its fingertips. A technology that fills the social space between bodies has become commonplace, but one that is a body still seems strange. The distance from you to me may be known but the one from us to it isn’t.” – Rhizome

Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken, and Oscar Tuazon.

Work from “Chez Perv” at Team Gallery, New York.

“Team is pleased to present a collaborative exhibition of work by Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken and Oscar Tuazon. The exhibition, entitled Chez Perv, will run from 17 April through 01 June 2014. The gallery is located at 47 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house an exhibition of sculptures by New York-based Daniel Turner.

Longtime friends and collaborators, Einarsson, Faldbakken and Tuazon share a fascination with industrial/architectural forms and materials, as well as the potentially harmful politics they can contain. Although their respective bodies of work are formally divergent, the artists are linked via their employment of various artistic acts of appropriation – of form, iconography and ideology – to ends that are at once academic and revolutionary. The exhibition’s title is culled from that of a New York Post cover story released at the height of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandal.

Although they now live on separate continents, the artists have, in a sense, grown up together, developing their individual practices alongside and in response to one another. Einarsson and Faldbakken first met in 1999, when the latter was working primarily as a novelist, still in the early stages of his career as a visual artist. The two worked together for three years as co-editors of the periodical UKS Forum. Included in a 2003 architecture-themed issue of the magazine were interviews with Clark Richert and Vito Acconci by Tuazon and Einarsson respectively, as well as an essay by Faldbakken. Tuazon and Einarsson would both work as studio assistants for Acconci while living in New York City, as well as overlapping in their completion of the Whitney Independent Study Program. The three have also continued their conversation and collaboration with one another via their mutual representation by the Norwegian gallery Standard [Oslo].” – Team Gallery

Steciw / de Joode

Work from Open for Business at Neumeister Bar-Am.

“…We see a different means of freedom in the upper floor of the gallery space, where Kate Steciw and Rachel de Joode have set up studio for the day with the third installment of their performance and installation project Open for Business. In the attic-style studio we find the two artists –de Joode curled before the glowing screen of her computer,

Steciw floating across the studio in a state of arrangement. In the far corner rests a tripod with a camera fixed firmly in place, and on the opposite walls are the products of the day, now coming to a close. Trading roles, the two artists spent the day photographing objects, everything from clay moulds to close-ups of their hands holding various objects.

“Is that sushi?” I ask incredulously, leaning in to take a closer at one of the finished pieces displayed on the wall. “Yes,” Steciw answers matter-of-factly. “We had sushi for lunch.” The whole thing feels a bit silly and thrilling, and we all giggle, because, sushi.

Later, de Joode spins around in her chair to tell us that Open for Business is about the de-mystification of art more than anything else. That taking the process and opening it to the public acts as a means of connection, as a way to counter the insulation of artists within the cocoons of their industries.
We loop the small studio space a few more times, playing Paint By Numbers-style games with the various objects scattered across the studio, threading pieces of salmon to the disembodied fragments that span the wall, the clay mould to every echo of grey, the fingers of a hand directly back to Steciw’s own wrist.
It’s like the Internet itself, I say half-aloud, and Steciw jumps to agreement. Dynamic, hurried, leaving traces of its earlier self behind like shed skin, the studio space seems like the physical representation of the digital process…” – AQNB

images courtesy the artists and Neumeister Bar-Am

Rick Silva

Work from The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future with a short story by Claire L. Evans

In an old growth forest along the Oregon coast, an ornithologist is hiking across a loamy bed of pine needles. She is three weeks into a census, cataloguing birds in the deep woods. Every night, she’s pitched tent in damp boughs along the thundering, craggy sea. The spotted owls are up. The vesper sparrows are down. White-grey sky and the smell of cedar.

She stops. The woods are dense with moisture. She is alone with the music of the trees; far above, in the canopy, a gentle rain falls, the sound like papery chimes. The forest groans under the weight of itself. With binoculars, she scans the low-hanging branches until she spots a nest. It appears to have been built drunkenly, the weft of twigs at improbable angles, a deflated parallelogram. She looks again. Unusual. Perhaps it’s been tampered with. But she’s far off the public trailheads, alone in these woods.

The nest, she determines after hiking closer and half-scrambling up the tree, has not been tampered with. Its form is strange but natural, built with the focused precision of a roosting animal. It’s marvelous, though—like a sculpture. Against her better scientific judgement, she reaches for the nest. It’s nearly weightless, and as she is pulling it from the branches, the clouds above the canopy begin to clear, pouring sun through the leaves onto the forest floor. In the new light, she notices a kind of iridescent hum, shifting as she cradles the nest and turns it around in her hands. There is something inside.

That night, she tucks the nest near her pillow, wedged against the edge of the tent, wrapped in a blanket. The hum keeps her awake. She doesn’t know what to do. It seems insane to leave it behind, but carrying it with her feels like a kind of madness, too. Drinking gritty campfire coffee in the morning, she mutters to herself, weighing her options: she is afraid to open it, afraid to leave it behind, afraid of it.

Somehow, she continues the census, recording bird calls, counting terns, plovers, sandpipers and hawks, the mysterious nest growing heavier and heavier in her backpack each day until it’s impossible to carry and she must leave it in her tent, at the foot of a gnarled Sitka spruce, checking back every few hours like a mother hen.
Seven days later at dawn, the nest moves. She is already awake and she sees it happen distinctly. It shifts and crackles, brushing against the nylon tent wall. She pulls up close to the nest, sleeping bag up to her ears, frozen with horror and awe. She senses a metallic tang beneath the brine in the warming morning air. Slowly, the nest falls away, shedding its delicate architecture.
Coiled like a snake inside is a humming geometry. A warped, mechanical thing with opalescent planes where its wings should be. It undulates like a manta ray, and the planes shatter into shadows, ghosting trails of probability in spirals around its body. It seems to exist in several states at once. She sits up, and as she moves the thing blinks in and out of sight, like a one-sided coin, disappearing with a glint as it’s tossed. The forest and the roar of the ocean fall mute.

Somehow she knows what the thing is—not here, but somewhere. She reaches over the shattered nest and slowly unzips the tent. She throws open the flap, letting in a whiff of salt and pine, light, the world. The thing makes an alien screech and flies away into the forest; each wing flap lasting a century. For a long time she watches it. In her tent, by her pillow, it had been the size of an apple; now it aged as it flew, molting and transforming around an invisible mold. By the time it’s only a few feet away, it has the wingspan of an albatross, an airplane, the universe wrapped around a feathered heartbeat.

At the exact same moment, elsewhere, a robin’s egg cracks open. A new life flutters into existence, dewy, feathers matted from birth. It peers above the edges of its nest. It’s not a nest at all. The egg has been laid into a non-Euclidean world, where clouds whorl in ribbons, without origin, without end. Quantum sound waves ebb on the horizon, growing smaller as they approach, larger as they recede. There is a glow in the air; it tastes metallic. A forest of quivering forms bend like fractals in the hot Möbius wind.

The robin knows nothing of the difference. It rustles and unfolds its wings. It perches on the sloping edge of a Penrose triangle and sings.

B. Ingrid Olson

Work from her oeuvre.

“If it should be a novel, we’d hope for it to be one written in verse. Said novel would be for two sisters, a secret life and a normal life. Their ground is unstable ground, but usable nonetheless. Between the verses, as the peripheries start their blur, we find our limits – the edges of our attention and the areas not yet seen. Neither one likes what they are reading, so, each sister models for the opposite; one draws the other, the other photographs the one. These two are a coming of age; together, their normal and secret lives: maybe a perfect life. The secret sister and the normal sister each have recurrent dreams. We do not know if these are the same dream – they’re neither repetitious nor episodic. In this poem, we wait in the refrain – from these grounds we look to the face of our experience, the combinations of verses recurrent. Such moments mark the ending and beginning but neither distinctly.

This is the place where we should want to be relaxed by our memories, when what we saw as the cutting room floor now stays present. That foot again, twice.
The circular mirrors again. Also again: Three ways of looking (2013) but this time different – (and should it be three ways of looking, does it benefit us to ask what those three may be? And once determined, how are they ranked? 1) eye 2) mirror 3) camera or 1) eye 2) mirror 3) viewer? That was an easier question before this image here: mirror, mirror, eye, camera, viewer, or halfway through: “mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror eye? camera viewer”) – It’s less easy to take these photographs one by one, they spill into each other; they are each already somewhat an adjacency, or, per J.D.: “…an arrow cannot / be said to have parts because the parts are all / something else until purpose connects them.”” – Cura Magazine

Clement Valla

Work from Surface Survey

“Surface Survey is comprised of digital prints and 3D printed sculptures, structured around concepts of archaeology, computer software, meaning-making, and images that are not meant for human consumption.

To explore these themes, Valla collects digital artifacts produced by software that turns photographs into 3D Models. The arranged fragments are left untouched, exhibiting the software’s process as-is. The work is comprised of both 2D images meant to be processed by the computer (but never seen by humans) and 3D printed fragments that indicate how the software pieces the shapes together.

Valla’s subjects are varied: from sculptural antiquities he photographed in the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, to contemporary ephemera, to 19th Century inventions. The work uncovers subtle shapes and textures that illustrate these objects in unexpected ways and cast a new light the algorithms that digitized them.

Valla’s work reflects on the human potential of meaning-making in unfamiliar, software-created images. He is interested in the relationship between how what a computer reads is so distant from what a human will understand. This interest extends into the language of computer image-making, suggesting an archaeology of computer software, whose extractions reveal the computer’s systematic logic.” – Transfer 

Dan Holdsworth

Work from Mirrors FTP.

“The mirror as a tool for the receptacle of representation has been utilised ever since the early progressions of the camera obscura and of course its traces are left within the very process of film-based photography, in regards to the imprint of light and time onto the negative and the subsequent process of chemical reversal. Within ‘Mirrors ftp’ Dan Holdsworth utilises the motif of the diagonal incision and an inversion of one half of the photographic image, creating a mirror effect where cascading boulders and winding ravines begin at either end and begin to centrally converge. Following ‘Forms ftp’ this newest series of images contain the photographs recorded in crater glacier in Washington (USA) but present a further scrutinising of imagery, a collision of glacial mass within a single solitary frame.

The ‘ftp’ of the title refers to what is known to scientists and astronomers as false topographic perception. Cited as a defect of long-distance cartographic techniques and remote sensor imaging, it is said that the recorded topographies of the moon and of mars have rendered aspects to be indistinguishably concave or convex, thus resulting in a lack of classification of mountainous and cavernous terrain. In turn this caused a multiplicity of issues with astronomical expeditions, as the photographic phenomenon has been a technical stumbling block ever since the topographic mapping of planetary landscapes began. Dan Holdsworth’s consideration of this phenomenon however, isn’t with an emphasis on the anecdotal of such occurrences, nor the formal aesthetics of this estranged scientific delineation; instead the artist explores a re-configured model of its affect.

It is the sentiment of ‘ftp’ that reveals itself within the photographic series – a sentiment that raises questions around certain empirical truths and how they are affixed to the mediated photographic form. What surfaces is the action of viewing and viewing again, or the suspended and contested perceiving of ‘realities’ within each photograph. In each ‘mirror’ a dualism appears; the preliminary doubting gaze is met with the secondary assertive glance – one to the other in a perplexing binary, it is perceived and persists anon.

It transpires that the consequence of a sudden inversion of the flow of visual matter can effect how we as the viewer categorize particular empirical details within an image. The ‘mirror’ of the work is thus conjured aesthetically, formally, but also reflexively as an awareness of one’s own perception of reading the work. The French 19th century philosopher Milan de Biran once coined the term ‘coenesthese’ to express ‘one’s immediate awareness of the presence of the body in perception’. Here, each fractured photograph begins to warrant a corporeal reading, a bodily reception, or a mind’s eye grasp on the looping rhythms contained within each pulsating dialogue of geological movement. ‘Mirrors ftp’ is thus embedded with undulating patterns that at once protrude and extrude, as if the very complexities of concave and convex forms are captured within the centre of each coloured plane.
It is clear that the diagonal motif of ‘Mirrors ftp’ is exemplary of a simple and refreshing intervention that represents that playful artist tactility with the photographic image: when a rotation and an incision render an experiential perspective entirely anew. The cut also represents the simplest of disruptions to the formal photographic plane, creating an image that essentially falls inwards – splintering perspective and stretching content into a renewed composition of rhythm and form.” – Joshua Wilson

Marc Horowitz

Work from his oeuvre

Marc Horowitz graduated from USC with an MFA in 2012. Currently, his projects are in dialogue with a diverse range of subjects, including entertainment, advertising, the built environment, commerce and the quest for daily meaning. “In my own day-to-day, I am constantly making lists of potential inventions, neologisms, moneymaking schemes, jokes, drawings, websites, characters and impromptu videos. It is my hope that these projects speak to “the moment”: that they reflect and critique American idealism and expansionism – and parody pop culture so successfully as to become reappropriated by it.”

 
Avery K. Singer

Work from her oeuvre.

“If one views the past, be it in glances through old magazines, in movies of lost eras, or in visions of what was to come, the stream of history is laid bare, flowing forward to the present day. If one stops at a certain point and ignores what has followed, the stream opens up and the flow is forced to take whatever path we fancy.

The Artists presents a romanticized and slapstick vision of how we are or are not living. Staged figures occupy the realm of unrealized buildings or monuments, their geometric stylization skewing human forms into architectural plottings. The eyes of the dreamer rest upon both a forgotten vestige and a future transpired, with a sense of sentimentality overshadowed by a cold and uncanny pallor. These opposing viewpoints converge to produce glimpses of alternate timelines, where idealized visions of contemporary life and bohemia are filtered through past conventions. The mythologized status of the artist as a social being is examined as it exists and as it has been fantasized.

The works’ colorless palette and constructivist aesthetic hint at records of nonexistent times, commemorating absurd regimes that never came to fruition. Noirish shadows spread under expressionistic backlighting; the breezy theatricality of a performance piece freezing into history painting, a communion between artist friends becomes enshrined in neoclassical simplicity. Contemporary media, meshing with bygone trends of the historical avant- garde, produces a perspective of aesthetics that falters to find a foothold on the accepted timeline of art history.” – Avery K. Singer