published in DATA browser 07 FABRICATING PUBLICS: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era, edited by Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito Published in 2021 by Open Humanities Press
Lichsicht Triennial, Bad Rothenfelde, Germany
Join us on PCC’s front lawn to view Natalie Bookchin’s ‘the act of changing something’s position”. The video projection will be on a 34 foot billboard and will be on exhibition this Friday, October 8th, 2021 from sundown-10pm. Parking is accessible in Lot 7, accessible off of Bonnie Ave or drive by Pasadena City College on Colorado Ave in Los Angeles drive by and see it on the front lawn!
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!!!!!!!
in German/ in Spanish / in Farsi
Participate in an upcoming video and sound installation with artist Natalie Bookchin for Urbane Künste Ruhr by making and sharing some (or even just one!) videos from your phone.
Ghost Games*
What does the global pandemic sound and look like from home? With people spending more time at home, and streets and cities emptier, the landscapes and soundscapes of everyday life has changed. So has our attention to the ordinary sounds that surround us. What are the altered states of being and doing that emerge in this strange space of semi-solitude and separation from the public and from public space? What are the sounds people are making and hearing in this changed environment? What stories do they tell? What sounds are soothing and which evoke the catastrophe of Covid-19?
We are inviting people who are in this altered situation at home to record short videos of a sound or a collection of sounds they notice and listen to and/or make from their homes, as well as what they see when they hear or make those sounds (see instructions below).
I will use the videos you share to construct a sonic and visual portrait of the collective experience of people isolated alone together, behind masks and at a distance. The portrait will depict a time and places when one way to come together as a society is to be apart, a paradoxical situation where confining yourself to private space becomes, for those who are not “essential workers” or on the street protesting against systemic racism and police brutality against black people, a caring public action, where the closest we come to everyday exteriority, is in the sounds that we make with our bodies and the sounds that we hear from others.
Instructions for shooting
1. Record the sounds and silences you hear and make in your home, ordinary sounds and silences that you hear from the outside, the street, the yard and your neighbors. You can point the camera at the sound as it is being made or point it outward at something else as you listen.
2. Make as many videos as you like, the more the better! Also, no matter what else you shoot, please make one video recording out your window, holding the camera still for at least 30 seconds as you record. The videos you make can be between around 30 seconds and up to 3 minutes (or more if necessary)
3. Think of these recordings as documents of your encounters with the world at home in a time of a global pandemic. The sounds can be the most ordinary—from a sounds of receiving a text message to the sounds of your own or others exercising, chopping food, locking or slamming doors, mixing a drink, uncorking a bottle, to dogs barking, the sounds of your family in the other room, or electronics beeping. You can record a single isolated sound like a ball dropping or a bottle opening, or sounds that last longer, like the chatter of birds, the sounds of protests on the streets, of helicopters, footsteps overhead, the neighbors, music , radio, or TV heard out your window or in the other room. Record silences as well, the ambient sound and silences of your home, or out your window, or in your front or back yard.
4. Very important—please shoot in landscape mode, holding the phone horizontally. Hold the camera steady and still unless it needs to move to follow something you are recording. You can prop your phone against something to keep it still while you record.
5. Videos can be between around 30 seconds and 3 minutes, or slightly longer if necessary. Record longer than you think you need to, holding the camera on whatever you are recording even after the sound has been made and before if it is possible. Take your time recording ambient sounds and silences, more is better than less!
6. Send the videos to me by WhatsApp, dropbox, or email
🌏 Dropbox: drop videos into the folder here
🌏 or email me at ghostgamesmedia@gmail.com
7. If you include your name with your submission, I will add it to the credits on the website once the project is completed (unless you prefer anonymity). The work will first be shown as a public installation with Urbane Künste Ruhr and later will be viewable online.
*Ghost Games (or Geisterspiele) is a German term used for soccer games that are played behind closed doors where there are no viewers in the stadium.
Watch the Ghost Games Teaser here:
Please share this call among your networks.
Thank you for participating!
Walkthrough of exhibition
Kunstraum Kreuzberg presents JOURNEY INTO A LIVING BEING, a group exhibition featuring 32 artists and a discursive program which reflects on the methods used by companies such as YouTube, Google, Fiverr or Amazon Mechanical Turk, whose business model rests on the exploitation of their users’ creative potential. Around half of the featured artistic works originate from the current age of platform capitalism. A selection of older works traces the concept of collective creativity back to emancipatory ideas from the internet’s infancy, such as crowd sourcing and ultimately to Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture.
In 1977, Joseph Beuys presented his installation Honey Machine at the Workplace at documenta 6, in which tubes ran into the exhibition rooms, through which honey was pumped. The work symbolized Beuys’ idea of the “expanded concept of art” and of “social sculpture.” “Everyone is an artist” is his famous motto – not because everyone can paint, dance or make music, but because we all contribute through our productivity to a collective creativity that can be weighed as real capital and societal potential, to which Beuys ascribed the formula “art = capital.” Honey as the “spiritual nutrition of the cosmos” (Beuys) is the embodiment of this collective creativity.
These days, we deliver our creative “honey” voluntarily to internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok or Amazon. Computers and smartphones, online speakers and fitness wristbands upload a large portion of our data to these companies’ servers. Even rental bikes and e-scooters collect our location data. Our every click, every Like, every photo posted and every online comment is fuel for the companies of “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff). They use our data to sell advertising, predict our behavior, optimize their algorithms and AI, and to keep competing companies out of the market as much as possible.
The exhibition JOURNEY INTO A LIVING BEING takes its name from a lecture Beuys gave on social sculpture at documenta in 1977. It traces the conceptual trajectory to the present, in which the internet and social media are replete with offers of creative services, but where only few reap the financial rewards. It brings together artworks spanning forty years with the aim of deciphering what has come to pass between the development of social sculpture and the rise of platform capitalism and the gig economy, and how this process is reflected in art. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of events.
#journeyintoalivingbeing
Participating artists:
CORY ARCANGEL | JOSEPH BEUYS | ARAM BARTHOLL | NATALIE BOOKCHIN | IRENE CHABR | JAMES COUPE | ANDY DECK | CONSTANT DULLAART | MARK FLOOD | JOHN D. FREYER | JODI | MIRANDA JULY & HARRELL FLETCHER | AARON KOBLIN & DANIEL MASSEY | STEFFEN KÖHN | OLIA LIALINA | JONAS LUND | JUDY MALLOY | MICHAEL MANDIBERG | NEOZOON | OMSK SOCIAL CLUB | NAM JUNE PAIK | MARK SALVATUS | SEBASTIAN SCHMIEG & SILVIO LORUSSO | RALPH SCHULZ | GUIDO SEGNI | JOHANNES STÜTTGEN | ALEX TEW | AMALIA ULMAN | VAN GOGH TV
