somatic SENSOR :: January 21-22, 2011; 8:30 pm :: Highways Performance Space, 18th Street Arts Center, 165118th Street; Santa Monica, CA + Attend in Second Life.

Highways Performance Space Artistic Director Leo Garcia presents somatic SENSOR, curated by Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, and Dino Dinco. Emerging out of queer experience, the works in somatic SENSOR move along lines of flight exploring desire, technology, the erotic and the viral. Rejecting control society to find new forms of relationality, somatic SENSOR includes performances, digital and networked media, drawing and soft sculpture to open borders between realities and bodies. Continue reading

Performing Participation #1 :: December 11, 2010; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: empty commercial storefront, 200 Schermerhorn Street (Hoyt-Schermerhron street: A/C/G Dekalb Ave: B,D,N,Q,R).

Performing Participation #1 is a live performance and video screening that question the conditions of participation in contemporary art practice. Performance documentation of Brody Condon’s ‘Level Five’, Nadja V. Marcin’s ‘Nadja by Breton’ and Jon Cohr’s ‘Spice Trade Expedition’ will be screened. Live performances of new works by Zachary Lieberman, David J. Merritt, Alan Bailey and Taeyoon Choi will be presented. Organized by Taeyoon Choi with the Public School New York.

Performing Participation #1 is inspired by the conditions of participation such as the following anecdotes. Continue reading

[Image: Navroze Contractor, "Street sweeper in Jodhpur," 2009. Photograph, dimensions variable] Raising Dust: Encounters in Relational Geography :: December 8, 2010 – February 20, 2011 :: Calvert 22, 22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP.

Curated by Richard Appignanesi, writer, theorist and editor Raising Dust is a provocative multimedia exhibition which explores contemporary notions of identity and relativity by inviting a group of predominantly Eastern European artists to respond to the poetry and politics of place.

Arguably, the very idea of Europe is in itself a dislocation, a ‘nomadic horizon’ which responds differently to the shifting perspectives and desires of its inhabitants. Each artist in Raising Dust has contributed work which addresses this proposition and foregrounds the urgency of creating an autonomous ’space for life’ that overrides dominant mainstream distinctions. Continue reading

Contractions of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective by Nato Thompson, e-flux journal #20: Rather than make normative claims regarding the display or function of these works, my intention is to clarify the emerging cultural landscape across which these aesthetic experiments function. The reenactment of these performance artworks of the past allowed the work to fit neatly into the current aesthetic needs of a public deprived of its own bodies, wherein any renewed interest in performance has to be reframed and displayed in a manner that accounts for the dematerialized and accelerated climate of today.

“[...] When Marina Abramović sat for hours at a time in the central gallery of MoMA, bright lights beaming down on her as she met visitor after visitor with her steady gaze, what shook the audience was her commitment. Continue reading

Catalytic: Communities/ Networks/Participation :: Call for Relational Work — Deadline: October 11/18, 2010.

We are interested in what is going on in art right now. As entertainment, critical resistance, or one more commodity fetish, art can provide an outlet for those of us who dream of revolutions and utopias. We want to track the diverse ways in which art is currently being produced with catalysis in mind.

We are looking for projects, proposals, propositions, participatory actions, performances, behaviors, street acts, acting out art, art acting out, politicized situations, situations that involve politics, and anything else considered or not considered under the heading of art. Continue reading

Counterconsciousness - Stephen Willats :: until November 21, 2010 :: Badischer Kunstverein, Waldstraße 3, D - 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany.

The Badischer Kunstverein is pleased to present the London artist Stephen Willats in an extensive solo exhibition. From the 1960s until today, Stephen Willats has developed a pioneering practice based on collaboration, interactivity and participation within the variables of social relationships and settings. Willats creates multi-sensory, multi-dimensional environments to encourage viewers to engage with their own creative and cognitive processes, to re-examine and transform the way they perceive existing reality.

The show, which comprises more than forty artworks, concentrates on Willats’ works on the wasteland–, night- and post-punk context of the late 1970s and 1980s. Several of these works have been shown rarely or never at all and were selected with the artist in a close process. Continue reading

4 Workshops — I. Cesare Pietroiusti: Museo dell’Arte Italiana, Esilio :: September 15-16, 2010 II. Tris Vonna-Michell: shoeboxes :: September 24-25, 2010 III. Dora García: Mad Marginal :: September 27-28, 2010 :: Alberto Garutti: Three Attempts for a Catalogue Raisonné :: September 29-30, 2010 :: Fondazione Galleria Civica-Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento, Via Cavour 19, 38122 Trento, Italy.

These 4 workshops will investigate the “hypothetical” and “real vs fictional” dimension of the contemporary cultural institution, a theme that will fully inform the programme of the Fondazione for 2011. Continue reading

Three Stages in the Art of Public Participation: The Relational, Social and Durational by Paul O’Neill, Eurozine:

“Participation is not only a form of co-production but also an end product in itself”. Curator, artist and theorist Paul O’Neill traces a development from the site-specific artwork to long-term participatory urban art projects.

“Participation is currently an all-inclusive term for art’s ability to engage with its publics as collaborators, co-producers or other active agents. Regardless of its ubiquity, the term remains contested territory in recent writing on art. This essay charts one possible reading of participation – as a flexible term for variant modes of engagement with art, through its relational, social and durational aspects. In the process, participation is considered not only as a form of co-production but also as an end product in itself, which provides art with its durational and public dimension.” Continue reading here or download PDF here.

Virtual Connection :: VASA Gallery :: Call for Artworks — Deadline: September 24, 2010.

Virtual Connection intends to highlight the relationships, associations, and interconnections unique to virtual communication platforms. Works should be developed for virtual worlds and have been showcased in the world prior to the reflective showing of the work in Virtual Connection.

Virtual Connection will display the work within the online gallery space in a retrospective manner. The exhibition hopes to bring together a number of suitable exemplifications that reveal virtual artworks’ unique characteristics. Continue reading

NJP Reader #1: Contributions to an Artistic Anthropology:

The Nam June Paik Center is dedicated to the artistic and intellectual legacy of Nam June Paik, the renowned Korean-born artist who transformed visual art worldwide. In addition to its function as an exhibition space, the Nam June Paik Art Center developed a new publication, NJP Reader. The aim of the NJP Reader is to recontextualize Nam June Paik’s artistic thought and his ‘random access’ strategies in a topical discursive practice. Leading questions are: What is the meaning of Nam June Paik’s multi-medial experiments, performances, and sculpture for our current artistic practice and discourse? What new dimensions for re-imagining notions of technology, ubiquity, and human experience do Nam June Paik’s thinking and practice suggest? How does his practice potentiate paradigm shifts in broader understandings of the potentialities and characteristics of alternative processes of participation afforded by the introduction of media technology into artistic practice? Continue reading