I ran into Mikael Vojinovic the other night at a Black Book party.

Burlesques Contemporains at the Jeu de Paume – June 6th – September 6th, 2005
Art Dirt Redux - mp3
This show is the brainchild of Christophe Kihm who is a managing editor at Art Press (the French equivalent of Artforum). Each year Art Press does a special edition on a critical point of view. In 2003, Kihm did the special edition and the theme was le burlesque. For the Jeu De Paume exhibition the other contemporary French art magazine Beaux Arts did a special edition catalog. “… burlesque is linked to action. Originally, it was a practice that involved an entire array of physical techniques and action. Its’ range is fairly broad, in that a body’s response to space is determined by constantly changing contexts and situations. Burlesque can even be expanded to include artistic gestures and ideas when a process of reversal similar to that exerted on a body (by means of force, competence. Gravity, etc.) is applied. A definition of seeing always includes the act of setting a distance, which always has something to do with morality. On the other hand, I think that there is something amoral about burlesque.” Christophe Kihm, Burlesques Contemporains catalog, page 25.

An Interview with Ricardo Dominguez by Hans Peter Kartenberg

Ricardo Dominguez on virtual sit-in's and the upcoming trial against on-line activists in Germany. Hans Peter Kartenberg e-mailed the co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) on 2005-6-12.

> On your website at thing.net there was a call for a virtual sit-in on the website minutemanproject.com from May 27th to May 29th 2005. Who are the minutemen and what was the idea of that action?

Swarm The Minutemen was an e-action developed by a group of activists in the San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico border along with Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), in order to call attention to The Minutemen. The Minutemen are a non-governmental group of people vowing to patrol the US/Mexico border with guns in order to stop migrant people from crossing the border. They represent an intensification of the trend of violence towards migrant people and people of color that has increased since 9/11. They have received right wing state government support from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and from anti-immigrant media. EDT called for a three day virtual sit-in in solidarity with Swarm who had called for a number of e-actions to take place: a 24/7 telephone call campaign, a fax action, an e-mail action and sound pollution actions on the border. Since the Minuteman say they love the silence of the desert - because they can hear the dirty rats (the people trying to cross the border) making noise - by creating lots of loud sounds it would keep the Minutemen from finding, stopping and harassing these people. These on/off line actions took place on the same days the Minutemen were holding a convention in Las Vegas.

[...] J8~g#|\;Net. Art{-^s1 [...]

After a few months Cosic sent the mysterious message to Igor Markovic, the publisher of a Zagreb-based journal, Arkzin, who was eventually able to decrypt it. It was a manifesto that heaped all kinds of reproaches on traditional art institutions and in contrast claimed that artists on the Internet had independence and freedom. The correctly converted excerpt, from which the 'net.art' fragment originated, is: "All this will become possible with the arrival of the Net. Art as a concept will become superfluous...", etc. Unfortunately, according to Shulgin, this manifesto no longer exists, because it was lost, together with other valuable data, in the summer of 1996 after Igor's hard drive crashed. A crazy story, one after Alexei Shulgin's own heart: "I like this strange story, because it perfectly illustrates the fact that the world in which we live is much more complex than all of the ideas that we have of it". The birth of net.art stems from an accident. So much for the myth.

The Birth of net.art Stems from an Accident

PS: According to Alessandro Ludovico, "few days ago, Cosic in Venice publicly stated that this story was completely invented."

So much for the myth...

Waterways is a collective effort, action, ecovention and exhibition created and self-produced by 5 curators and 33 international artists to be installed on a public Vaporetto. The exhibition will take place alongside the Venice Biennale, at St. Elena, for the opening weekend - June 10th and June 11th.

Participating artists include Christoph Draeger and Peter Fend who have work available through thing.editions.

waterways2005

via dks.thing.net

A screaming comes across the sky. . . .

Bookforum has an essay in its summer issue from book publisher Gerald Howard about the publication of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow plus appreciations by Don DeLillo, Richard Powers and others:

One Friday in summer 2004, I spent a memorable afternoon in the half-deserted offices of Viking Penguin going through the thick editorial file for Gravity's Rainbow. There was in this experience the poignance of office technologies past (carbons, telegrams, memos typed on manual typewriters) and the names of the distinguished departed—from Malcolm Cowley, Viking's longtime literary adviser, to other colleagues, mentors, and friends. But there was also the sheer fascination of peering behind the curtain like Dorothy to discover how the levers had been pulled to launch one of the most consequential novels of the twentieth century.

*b.a.n.g* Micro_Gestures at the Edge of Invisibility will be an On/Off line space for MFA artists in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD to explore and present works at the edge of invisibility, at the edge of the digital and biological, at the edge of micro-robotics and nano-art, from in-virtu to in-vivo works and back.

8 june 2005

about 750 words

d a f f o d i l f o r t y - t h r e e

monthly news of experiments in public writing at
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk

w h a t ' s n e w ?

There were 12 new items in May and 2 so far in June.

The new items can be seen at
http://www.softopia.demon.co.uk/2.2/whats_new.html

Over the past six months, a consortium of artist service organizations and unions - including NYFA, Dance/NYC, and Dance Theatre Workshop — and Brooklyn's Woodhull Medical Center, have developed an artist-specific healthcare initiative based at Woodhull as a pilot project. Currently hosted by Woodhull, ArtistAccess may eventually be offered by many of NYC's public hospitals. The program offers affordable healthcare for all NYC-based artists and arts workers, and offers the unique option of artists exchanging creative services for medical care. Woodhull Medical Center is committed to bringing quality healthcare to all patients, regardless of income or immigration status.