Mark Amerika: Unreal Time :: until January 3, 2010 :: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Building of the Athens Conservatory, Vas. Georgiou Β 17 -19 & Rigillis street, Athens.

The National Museum of Contemporary Art presents for the first time in Greece, a retrospective exhibition of the American artist and pioneer in the media arts field, Mark Amerika. The first presentation of his work in Greece took place in the framework of EMST’s online exhibition titlted e-critures (2008).

By emphasizing the construction of new digital identities and fictional personas, as well as the cross-correlation of new histories and mythologies in website, Amerika investigates the ways by which the somatic-sensory experience evolves into a new “Life Style Practice”. Continue reading

[Image: A real train compartment placed in the hallway of the newly built wing of a nursing home for demented elderly. A work by Lino Hellings and Yvonne Dröge Wendel Delft the Netherlands. Photo by Gert Jan van Rooij] Upgrade! São Paulo: P.A.P.A Participating Artists’ Press Agency: Lino Hellings :: November 18, 2009; 7:30 pm :: Ateliê Unicentro Belas Artes de São Paulo, R. Dr. Álvaro Alvim, 76 - Vila Mariana.

P.A.P.A. participating artists’ press agency will manufacture news by taking action. P.A.P.A. is in development. The Public process can be followed on www.papaplatform.com

Two years ago I had decided to transform my work as an artist into a press agency. It took some time but from summer 2008 I have started to develop the concept. My idea is to establish an international press agency with a word wide network of artist correspondents that makes news in the most literally sense of the word. Continue reading

Hand From Above — by Chris O’Shea — encourages us to question our normal routine when we often find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand from the BBC Big Screen. Passers by will be playfully transformed. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain?

Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.

Written using openFrameworks & openCV.
Sounds by Owen Lloyd. Continue reading

Happiness Hat (2009) by Lauren McCarthy: A wearable conditioning device that detects if you’re smiling and provides pain feedback if you’re not. Frowning creates intense pain but a full smile leaves you pain free! The first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting.

An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.

A smile is a simple action that has the power to make you and everyone around you feel better. Just using the muscles to smile can make you feel happier. Seeing someone else smiling triggers mirror neurons in your own brain, causing you to unconsciously smile yourself. Continue reading

Krzysztof Wodiczko - The Veterans Project :: November 4, 2009 - March 28, 2010 :: Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA.

For three decades, Krzysztof Wodiczko has addressed timely political, social, and psychological issues in his artwork, creating over 80 large-scale public projections around the world. In these works, he transforms the stories, voices, and gestures of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances by projecting them onto public monuments and landmarks.

In a new, projection-based work for the ICA, Polish artist Wodiczko will focus on veterans engaged in active combat in Iraq, as well as Iraqi civilians, looking at their shared experience of the chaos and confusion war brings. Continue reading

WHITE NOISE III: Pandora’s Sound Box curated by Lara Pan for PERFORMA 09 :: November 2 - 22, 2009 :: Opening: November 2, 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: White Box, 329 Broome St., New York City.

Pandora’s Sound Box is an interactive multimedia exhibition conceived to destabilize and reactivate our vision of the current global political landscape through performance, sound, video and site-specific installations. The exhibition demonstrates a kind of experiment of the associative imagination by which the viewer may explore other dimensions of experience while simultaneously becoming a performer. The title of the exhibition was inspired by Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s controversial 1929 film Pandora’s Box, which exposed and explored the fear of female sexuality. Continue reading

Expanded Mediatheque - ARCADIA: Games from a Culture of Innovation :: until December 7, 2009 :: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón (Asturias), Spain.

“Toys are not as innocent as they appear. Games and toys anticipate important ideas.” - Charles Eames

Initiatives have multiplied in the last ten years from the worlds of art, academic research and industry seeking to establish the videogame as a valid medium of expression and to proclaim the possibilities given by the ludic as a creative strategy. LABoral contributed to this process with the exhibition trilogy Gameworld, Playware and Homo Ludens Ludens, perhaps the most exhaustive treatment of the subject by any cultural institution. Continue reading

AVANT-GUIDE TO NYC: Discovering Absence :: November 4 - December 19, 2009 :: Opening: November 4, 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: 291 Church Street, New York City.

Including work by: Julieta Aranda, caraballo-farman, Kabir Carter, Dexter Sinister, Eckhard Etzold, Andrea Geyer, Pablo Helguera, Nancy Hwang, Pia Lindman, Anna Lundh, Nina Katchadourian, Carlos Motta, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Hatuey Ramos-Fermin, Katya Sander, Ward Shelley, Xaviera Simmons, and Alex Villar. Curated by Sandra Skurvida.

This exhibition is a viewfinder trained onto the specific sites of the cultural fabric of New York City. The past, represented by the memory imprint of an artistic activity that occurred at a certain site, is “covered” by a current artwork focused on the same site. Through this double take, the past and the present collapse onto each other on a city map. Continue reading

You Fade to Light, a responsive installation by rAndom International for Philips Lumiblade, with software by Chris O’Shea.

From Aaron Landsman’s “Appointment” by Andrea Kleine, NYFA Current:

Landsman devised these Appointment sessions as a series of repeatable 12-minute pieces that take place in actual office settings. Designed for a single audience member who is put in the precarious position of continually making choices about whether or not, or how, to participate with the actors, Appointment turns the expectation of being a passive performance-watcher on its head. Working with three playwright/director collaborators — Brent Green, Sibyl Kempson, and Daniel Alexander Jones, (who created the Blondell/Julia piece, performed by Julia Jarcho and Stacey Robinson) — Landsman provided each of them with a short set of requirements: every appointment should include a question, a prolonged silence, etc., but left the writing and directing up to them. Landsman will alter aspects of Appointment as it travels to different locales — Norway, Austin, and Philadelphia are in the works — thus developing one kind of model for sustainable theater. Read the whole article here.