[-empyre-] First Theme and Guests - the Thickness of the Screen

[Julian Oliver]

..on Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 09:24:09AM -0400, G.H. Hovagimyan wrote:
> 
> On Sep 2, 2009, at 5:48 AM, Julian Oliver wrote:
> > detected and substituted for art ('Artverts')
> 
> gh writes:
> 
> I like the your notion of creating the software for  multiple  
> devices. It speaks to the idea of re-configuring the Advertising  
> Cloud ala Minority Report. The latest tech has cellphone projectors  
> that cost $300 and project a 4x6 foot projection. It won't be long  
> before holographic projections will be commonplace.  Just imagine  
> SPAM being projected on every surface and floating in the air! You'll  
> have 11,000 choices for diet pills, refinancing your mortgage,  
> trimming your nose hair etc... The question  is whether substituting  
> fine art images for advertising images is any different? After all  
> the fine art images are just higher priced commodities that follows  
> the same basic visual techniques as advertising.

The project seeks to illustrate the relative contradiction of Public Space in
terms of what can be read and what can be written in and onto surfaces in
cities. How much of the city, from the perspective of a walking or driving
subject, is mere support for proprietary imagery? I have lived in a 13 story
apartment building that for one month had almost an entire side consumed by an
advertisement for women's underwear: it could've been worse, my apartment was
between the letter S and a rather lovely clavicle.. Nonetheless, I lived behind
her.

For upcoming exhibitions in town squares around Europe and Asia we're working
with artists that live near or otherwise with billboards - that they attest -
consume so much of their visual, cognate and even habitable surface area. These
artists develop works that remix and/or replace the billboards for handheld
devices, recording and uploading the result in turn, such that the altered site
can be remembered in distribution channels such as Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube.

In short, I agree that the replacing proprietary imagery (advertising) with
proprietary imagery (high commodity artwork) annuls the substitution. We are not
interested in this. Rather we are creating a temporary intersticial canvas
within the flow of photons as they are reflected from proprietary to cognate
surface.

> The conflation and analysis of the art image and the advertising  
> image is an interesting subject in and of itself.
> My first *internet art* work in 1994 called Terrorist Advertising  
> started to investigate these ideas. -- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/ 
> terror/index.html
> 
> Regis Debray, a French Philosopher/theorist is the major proponent of  
> Mediology, here's the quote from wikipedia;"Debray is the founder and  
> chief exponent of the discipline of médiologie or "mediology", which  
> attempts to scientifically study transmission of cultural meaning in  
> society, whether through language or images. Mediology is  
> characterized by its multi-disciplinary approach. It is expounded  
> best in the English-language book Transmitting Culture (Columbia  
> University Press, 2004). In Vie et mort de l'image (Life and Death of  
> Image, 1995), an attempted history of gaze, where he distinguished  
> three regimes of the images (icon, idol and vision), he explicitly  
> prevented misunderstandings by differentiating mediology from a  
> simple sociology of mass media. He also criticized the basic  
> assumptions of history of art which present art as an atemporal and  
> universal phenomenon. According to Debray, art is a product of the  
> Renaissance with the invention of the artist as productor of images,  
> in contrast with previous acheiropoieta icons or other types of so- 
> called "art," where these "works of art" did not fulfill an artistic  
> function but rather a religious one."
> 
> 
> I'd be interested in creating the "Artverts" it coincides with an  
> ongoing project of media critique and "rant performances"  2001 -  
> Palm Rants-- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/gallery14.html -- Rantapod  
> -- http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/gallery15.html -- and HD rants --  
> http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/hd_rants/index.html

Hehe. I quite like this direction. Cheers.

> 
> The notion is how to Re-Claim public space that is now taken over by  
> corporate interests.  Walking through Times Square, NYC one of the  
> most interesting visuals is the news crawl on 1 Times Square.  It  
> still claims a neutral discourse that engages public space. Jenny  
> Holzer of course makes brilliant use of that specific emotion of  
> pausing and receiving neutral information.
> 

'Pause' is an interesting action (or suspended action) to bring up here in the
context of screens: is paused video on a screen still a screen based work, any
more than a painting? 

Back to the original question of just how much of a Screen is the very enaction
of proported function.

Cheers,

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Madrid, Spain
currently: Madrid, Spain 
about: http://julianoliver.com