Precision Guided Messages Digital Demagogues and Underground Empires
Precision Guided Messages
Digital Demagogues and Underground Empires
Artists include: Angela Washko, Gregory Greene, Khaled Jarrar, Marjan Moghaddam, Patrick Lichty, Randell Packer, and Stewart Home
Curated by Lee Wells
A video program of progressive, socially conscious artists which use technology to respond to current events and the ever deteriorating state of democracy in America, Europe and the Middle East.
Espacio Enter : International Festival of Creativity, Innovation & Digital Culture, 6 edition
Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
December 5th-7th, 2014
"At times of crisis, imagination is more important than knowledge.” Albert Einstein
Is it a bird…? A new planet…? A computer virus…? It is a vitamin that brings the nutrients needed to develop the imagination. Annual dose is recommended. International Meeting for all sectors related to art and digital culture, for ideas that will allow us to design the future of technological innovation.
ESPACIO ENTER is a project created and directed by ARTECHMEDIA, non-profit international cultural organization founded and directed by the artists Montse Arbelo and Joseba Franco. Its aims are the creation, organization, promotion and direction of different events for the development of the Arts and the Digital Culture, to prompt and to fortify the alliance among Art, Science, Technology, Innovation and the Society, the cross debate, the reflection and the elaboration of proposals and contents by means of the philosophy of open code, that impact positively in the creation of the Knowledge Society.
http://www.espacioenter.net/
ARTECHMEDIA is a Meeting Platform for all sectors linked to art and new media for reflecting upon, analysing and debating across disciplines for the preparation of proposals related to cultural policy, coordination and optimisation of resources, artistic production and research and their promotion at a global level. www.artechmedia.org
IFAC ARTS - The International Fine Arts Consortium is an independent curitorial platform founded by Lee Wells in 1996. A Duchampian extension of his art practice IFAC is a semi-nomadic project space functioning in the real and virtual worlds through a broad based international network of artists, curators, and advisors that seek to expand the dialogue in the arts and the avant garde. www.ifac-arts.com
The Tenerife Space of Arts (Tenerife Espacio de las Artes - TEA); is a building of approximately 20,622 square metres that houses the contemporary museum Óscar Domínguez Institute (Instituto Óscar Domínguez); the Alejandro Cioranescu Island Library (Biblioteca Insular Alejandro Cioranescu) and the Center for Photography Island of Tenerife (Centro de Fotografía Isla de Tenerife). www.teatenerife.es/
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Gregory Greene
Gregory Green speaks at the United Nations on The New Free State of Caroline's plans for territory claims.
http://vimeo.com/21200207
Gregory Green speaks at the United Nations on The New Free State of Caroline's plans for territory claims. This is the closing segment from "How to Start Your Own Country", directed by Jody Shapiro. It is a feature length political science documentary exploring the definition of the "Nation" and its relationship to the evolution of the individual and "State" power, currently and in the future. His work can be found at: www.gregory-green.com
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Angela Washko
Femi Nazi
https://vimeo.com/86067942
In early 2012 Angela Washko founded "The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft" as an intervention within World of Warcraft, the most popular massively multiplayer role playing game of all time. Instead of continuing to following the quest structure of the game - killing dragons, getting better equipment, joining more competitive guilds...while performing as "The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft," Washko facilitates discussions with players inside the game about the ways in which the communities therein addresses women and how players respond to the term "FEMINISM". Washko is interested in the impulse of the player-base to create an oppressive, misogynistic space for women within a physical environment that is otherwise accessible and inviting. Furthermore, WoW is a geographically, politically, economically, socially, and racially diverse community (a much more varied community to engage with than she has in physical public space). Consequently these discussions within the game space create a much larger picture of the American opinion of what women should and should not be today.
Angela Washko is a New York-based artist and facilitator devoted to mobilizing communities and creating new forums for discussions of feminism where they do not exist. These forums are created through actions, interventions, videos, and performances – sometimes in video games. Her projects provoke viewers into reconsidering ways in which images and ideas about women are presented throughout media. Washko's projects have been written about by The Guardian (UK), ARTnews, VICE, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, the New York Times, The Creator's Project, Digicult, Bad At Sports. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at the Biennial of the Americas (Denver), Moving Image Art Fair (NYC), K11 (Shanghai), Interaccess (Toronto), ICA Boston, and Momenta Art (NYC). Her work can be found at: www.angelawashko.com
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Patrick Lichty
1 Machinima and Me
http://vimeo.com/101735639
This video has been produced for the Machinima: Investigating Cultural Values project, part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council Cultural Values project. Recording is of selected comments from focus group interviews conducted by Dr Tracy Harwood, Principal Investigator and Mr Mike Uwins, Research Assistant, based at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Permissions have been granted by research participants - our thanks to Pooky Amsterdam, Russell Boyd, Tony Dyson, Bibbe Hansen, Chantal Harvey, Lynne Heller, Patrick Lichty, Ze Moo, Carol Rainbow and Crystel Schneider for their participation in the discussions.
Patrick is a conceptual artist, curator, and theorist exploring how media shape our perception of reality as well as the borders between the digital and the materal. He is best known for his work with the virtual reality performance art group Second Front, and the animator of the activist group, The Yes Men. He is a CalArts/Herb Alpert Fellow and Whitney Biennial exhibitor as part of the collective RTMark. He is a Lecturer of Digital Studio Practice at the Peck School of the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His website can be found at: www.voyd.org
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Khaled Jarrar
Journey
http://vimeo.com/28051296
The Journey of light is often described as an element of a near-death experience. People describe the experience as floating upwards peacefully through a long journey of the intense darkness of the tunnel and its very narrow entrance. One can barely squeeze through it. At the end of this journey is a beautiful demulcent light to be found. It remains to be determined whether this phenomenon is universal or not, and whether it is purely subjective or purely objective or the result of a physiological phenomenon. The journey of light is a well known leitmotif in film and television. As a plot device it is most commonly described as a passageway to heaven or "the other side" for dead or ghostly characters, while living characters urging ghostly characters to "cross over" or "go towards the light". Usually it is the passage through this 110 meters that distinguishes the ghosts from the angels.
Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar works with photography, video, and performance to interrogate the problematic situation in his native country, particularly the question of recognition of the State of Palestine and the militaristic discourse around this. He uses his artistic practice as a means of thinking about questions of conflict, nationhood, home and belonging. The notion of state authority is a recurring concern: his project Live and Work in Palestine (2011-ongoing) saw the artist design a seemingly official Palestinian passport stamp which was then offered to tourists arriving in Palestine.
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Stewart Home
Does Modern Art Give You A Headache?
https://vimeo.com/5230161
This piece takes as its starting point a dialectical inversion of Dario Escobar’s" 12 Minutes, 8 Seconds" (2008). "Does Modern Art Give You A Headache" was shot and edited in less than two hours on 16 June 2009. The film came about as a result of my having attended two evening screenings of Guatemalan art videos in London on 5 and 6 May 2009.
Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that pastiche the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art. Stewart Home was born in south London in 1963. When he was sixteen he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he'd never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, in the early eighties he switched his attention to the art world. Now Home writes novels as well as cultural commentary, and he continues to make films and exhibitions. His website can be found at: www.stewarthomesociety.org
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Marjan Moghaddam
Sometimes Up
https://vimeo.com/88411667
“Sometimes Up, Sometimes Down”, is a metaphysical discourse on the premise of collapse and recovery, built around a knockout punch. The figures are suggestive of Transformers and other forms of Post Millenial CGI figuration in Ms. Moghaddam's signature digital cubist style.
Ms. Moghaddam is primarily engaged in rethinking form for painting in the post millennial era, in a manner that reflects our hybrid digital and physical life. Working with still and animated projects that she describes as digital paintings, she defines a pictorial space that is CGI, cinematic, 3-dimensional and graphic, with text and special effects. In contrast to the over-commercialization of new media, her works insist on a deeper dialog in which global, personal, political, technological, and philosophical dimensions interact poetically and powerfully in sublime narratives. Her work can be found at: www.marjan.com
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Randell Packer
Post Reality Show
http://vimeo.com/102425766
Packer attempts to totally embrace post reality by becoming a super-participant, an echo chamber for appropriating, amplifying and redirecting information. Absorbing the endless stream of mass media and popular culture in order to reshape them, transform them, remix them, and re-broadcast them back out from wherever they came. http://www.postrealityshow.com
Randall Packer is a composer, artist, writer, educator, and former Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology and all around virus in the virtual realm. Working in his secret, underground, studio bunker in Washington, DC… its location cannot be divulged due to its highly sensitive nature. Yet, through the alchemical magic of media and disinformation, his studio is an open studio, where he conduct the daily ritual of making art in front of and for the camera. His work can be found at: www.randallpacker.com