18 Juillet

Encore 2 semaines pour voir l'excellente installation vidéo Dawn Chorus de Marcus Coates à Picture This gallery, Bristol, UK.

Marcus Coates a enregistré une collection de chants d'oiseaux britanniques, qu'il a ensuite ralenti afin que les chants puissent être reproduits par une voix humaine.
Il a filmé 17 volontaires chantant les versions ralenties dans leur habitat "naturel". Les images et sons recueillis ont été accélérés afin de retrouver la hauteur du chant des oiseaux. Les chanteurs produisent un son très réaliste, et leurs mouvements accélérés évoquent clairement ceux d'oiseaux.
Les films sont présentés sur 7 écrans accrochés à différentes hauteurs dans le nouvel espace d'exposition de Picture This.

L'exposition est ouverte jusqu'au 4 Août.

Une vidéo du chanteur interprétant le chant du yellow hammer est disponible ici, ainsi que le mp3 non accéléré.

19 Juin

Enfin disponible, la version Française du site!

Les entrées du blog antérieures à aujourd'hui ne seront pas traduites, mais les prochaines, si.

June 10th

Finally got hold of the footage shot during Solid State No Logic perfomance in Cardiff Art in Time Festival, 14th march 2007.

The best part is the disco song and dance, check the video
(Lyrics and music © Patrick Hernandez)

May 17 th

On my way back from France where I presented Réflexions et constructions d'un pousseur de boutons at the Bandits-Mages Festival. Bandits-Mages was a key festival for video and new media art in the 1990's, but for various reasons almost disappeared. The 2007 edition is the first to be run by a new team, and it looks like the festival, now on a biennal rhythm, has found a new breath and energy.

I did not see much of the programme because of my gig. I was interested by the locustream tuner an innovative audio/event interface by Locus-Sonus, a research group led by Peter Sinclair, based in Aix-en-Provence and Nice. Moving a ball on two long metal wires, users could tune into audio streams from different locations. The same interface can be used to play samples, or anything plugged into MaxMSP.

Communication digital by Cécile Colle and Ralph Nuhn was another good installation, where 8 servo-controlled fingers scratch the surface of 8 3D postcards according to the activity of a chat room.

I also saw Petit pow pow noël, a video by Canadian film-maker Robert Morin, where the director attempts to get even with his elderly, crippled dad. Filmed mostly in the old people's home where his dad is finishing his life, the film is a strong, emotional, hard journey into Morin's family history, with a further reaching relevance.

As for my part, the performance was very well received by the mostly French public, although I did not manage to light a fire. I burnt my hand instead with the heat of the friction at the second attempt.

Two weeks before in Cambridge I produced a nice flame at the first try, audience went mad for 2 seconds.

April 19th

Enter Unknown Territories is a festival and conference on new technology arts taking place in Cambridge from 25th to 29th April in Cambridge, UK.
Programme includes, among many other events, a presentation by Active Ingredient, re-Collector, a generative CCTV film by James Coupe, Sally Jane Norman chairing a session on Open Technologies, Polar Produce premiere of Come Outside featuring a well deserved cup of zero carbon footprint tea. I will show my performance The Heart and the Chip on saturday evening.

The event concludes on sunday with Local Food, a potluck picnic organised by Rainer Prohaska. Register and you will be sent a shopping list of your contribution to the potluck.

If the weather stays as good as it's been for the past weeks, all festival goers will enjoy a laidback yet stimulating weekend on the green lawns of Cambridge.

April 16th

Home-made, contemporary Russian artefacts presents a collection of mostly utilitarian objects built in the ex USSR by people with little money but good practical skills and imagination, recombining parts scavenged from other found objects. The photographs of over 220 things such as tv antennas, exercise machine, boot hanger, hair grip,socks, teapot, harpoon, heat chamber,shelf, coat hanger, bicycle rack, toilet chair, drill brush, and many more, are accompanied by a potrait of the builder and a short comment on how and why the object was created.

A catching read, not least in the light of what can be found in our West European rubbish.

April 15th

Vilém Flusser was a Czech born media critic and philosoper who died in 1991.
The shape of things is a collection of short essays on various notions around design, and how things are used and made. Flusser talks about tents and walls, pots and wheels, and brings a peculiar light on his subjects.

In an essay called The factory, he describes the four periods of manufacturing that took the civilisation of homo faber (a nomination Flusser prefers to homo sapiens) to its present state: hands, tools, machines and robots. Homo faber's gradual alienation from his physical and natural environment started with the invention of tools and continued with the machine, where the operator became a disposable part of the mechanism. The age of robots could bring a more positive alternative, where human and robot will have to learn how to work with each other, in fact turning the factory into a school-like institution.

In The non-thing 1 and 2, Flusser develops his view on the demise of the object, where information rules and is used to generate cheap disposable goods that soon turn into waste. Homo faber turns into homo ludens, not needing hands anymore, just fingertips for interfacing with keyboards.

April 15th

Pics on the left are of a love cannon shooting love balloons in the sunny sky of Swansea, UK, last saturday. The action was part of Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich's action Siege weapons of love, the latest development of their Friendly frontier piece campaign.

The performance opened Locws3, Art across the city an exhibition taking place in several venues in Swansea, open until May 13th, except mondays.

March 21st

Cardiff art in Time (CAT) festival just finished. A unique opportunity to see in Wales a 4 days full programme of performance art by confirmed international practitioners, accompanied by work from emerging artists and students.
I liked Julie Andrée T's Not waterproof. She improvised with a large collection of red objects for almost an hour, repeatedly asking "What colour is this?" and answering "Red". Simple recipe carried through with brio by the Canadian performer, whom I heard singing for the first time.
Ointment, collective based in South Wales, created Scratch, an activated semi-rural space in the yard of the art college, with 300 hay bales and live hens.
In Happy Japan, Arai Shin Ichi manufactured (or should I say assufactured) an original version of the Japanese flag. There are pics of the festival on his website.
Richard Dedomenici's Superjumbo and Robin Deacon's Stuart Sherman provided quality entertainment with brains.
I presented a singing and dancing number titled Solid state no logic, ending with a cover of Born to be alive, a fast disco song by Patrick Hernandez. Davida Hewlett and Tom Hobson delivered beautifully synchronised dance moves while I did my best to communicate the message.

The whole festival, organised by Trace Gallery, was a very exciting and well attended event, we are looking forward to the next edition!

March 9 th

Only a few days left to go and see Simply Botiful, the awesome installation by Christoph Büchel at Hauser and Wirth gallery, Coppermill, 92 - 108 Cheshire Street, London E2 6EJ.

The installation occupies a large building, totally transformed to look like a shady warehouse and illegal immigrant hotel. The occupiers are gone and the visitors, after checking their bags in a dodgy lobby, are free to explore, and there is lots to see. There are several concealed entrances leading to hidden rooms and exhibits, all suggestive of a complex, claustrophobic, survivalist, plotting microcosm.

Completely recommended, closes on March 18th, open Thursday to Sunday 12 to 7pm.
if you can't make it you can take a photographic walkaround on Hauser and Wirth's website.