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Buchtipp: “Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism”

Mein erstes Buch erscheint im April: “Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism” (Gestalten Verlag, 24 x 30 cm, 288 pages, full color, hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-89955-342-0, 44 Euro)! Zusammen mit Robert Klanten, Pedro Alonzo und Matthias Hübner wurden die Künstler für das Buch ausgewählt – und soviel kann ich schon mal verraten: Es ist definitiv das härteste Buch, dass der Gestalten Verlag je veröffentlicht hat! Mit dabei sind radikale Arbeiten von Künstlern wie Ai Weiwei, Fernando Bryce, Gregor Schneider, Hank Willis Thomas, Jennifer Karady, Jota Castro, Marina Abramovic, Maurizio Cattelan, Milica Tomic, Paul McCarthy, Santiago Sierra, William Kentridge, Zhang Huan, Aram Bartholl, Brad Downey, Elmgreen & Dragset, JR, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Voina Group, YesMen, The Wa, Ztohoven etc. etc. “Life has become significantly more political in the new millennium, especially in the aftermath of worldwide financial crisis. Art is both driving and documenting this upheaval. Increasingly, new visual concepts and commentaries are being used to represent and communicate emotionally charged topics, thereby bringing them onto local political and social agendas in a way far more powerful than words alone. Art & Agenda explores the current interrelationship between politics, art, and activism. The book introduces a variety of artists who are advocating political and social reform on a local or a global scale. The personalities and approaches of the featured artists are as diverse as their subject matter—the artists’ goals, techniques, and degrees of radicalness depend on the cultures to which they belong as well as the social and political circles in which they move. Some of the younger artists featured in the book are fighting against poverty and for women’s rights. Others are working to rebuild Haitian communities in the wake of that country’s devastating earthquake. Still others are using mass communication to criticize transnational oil companies. While Latin American artists are expressing their powerlessness in the face of totalitarian governments, Chinese artists are commenting on the radical changes taking place in their country, calling for human rights and freedom, and an end to cronyism and environmental destruction. The book looks at how art is not only reflecting and setting agendas, but also how it is influencing political reaction. Consequently, Art & Agenda is not only a perceptive documentation of current urban interventions, installations, performances, sculptures, and paintings, but also points to future forms of political discourse. In addition to presenting the diverse work of more than 100 artists, the book features comprehensive and insightful texts by curators Pedro Alonzo, Alain Bieber, and Silke Krohn as well as by Gregor Jansen, the director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.”

Mobmov: Guerrilla Drive-in

Läuft schon seit einigen Jahren – erst jetzt entdeckt: Das Autokino ist zurück – als Guerilla-Version (Tutorial!). “A “mobile movie” or mobmov for short, is quite simply a drive-in that drives-in. Participating in a mobmov is very similar to attending a drive-in from the days of old, except now the projector is located inside and powered by a car, and the audio is piped in stereo over the FM band to the attendees’ cars. As a mobmov driver, you assemble the kit, decide on the movies, and announce your showings to friends and the community at large. Then everyone assembles in a dark place with a big wall, and you watch a movie. It’s a new technological twist to a nostalgic idea.” Via

The Hacking Monopolism Trilogie: Face to Facebook

Face to Facebook, der dritte Teil der The Hacking Monopolism Trilogie von Paolo Cirio und Alessandro Ludovico, thematisiert Fragen zur Privatsphäre in Online-Kontexten anhand der Ikone aller Plattformen: Facebook. In Anlehnung an das Prinzip Facebook haben die Künstler eine Singlebörse gebaut, in die sie mittels einer speziellen Software aus einer Million Facebook-Profilen 250.000 solcher Profile importiert haben. Mit einem neu entwickelten Gesichtserkennungsalgorithmus haben sie die Profile dann – wie als einen ironischen Kommentar zu den Urteilen, die wir täglich über Leute fällen, die wir aus der Ferne betrachten – je nach Gesichtsausdruck und Eigenschaften in Kategorien eingeordnet.

“Face to Facebook is a project by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico, who wrote special software to steal 1 million public profiles from Facebook, filtering them through face-recognition software and posting the resulting 250,000 profiles (categorized by facial expression) on a dating website called Lovely-Faces.com. The project was launched at Transmediale, the annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, on February 2nd, in the form of installation displaying a selection of 1,716 pictures of unaware Facebook users, an explanatory video and a diagram detailing the whole process.

* The Global Mass Media Hack Performance: On February 3rd a global media performance started with a few epicenters that after a few days had involved Wired, Fox News, CNN, Msnbc, Time, MSN, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, Yahoo News, WSB Atlanta TV, San Francisco Chronicle, The Globe and Mail, La Prensa, AFP, The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Independent, Spiegel Online, Tagesschau TV News, Sueddeutsche, Der Standard, Liberation, Le Soir, One India News, Bangkok Post, Taipei Times, News24, The Age, Brisbane Times and dozens of others. It was a “perfect news” for the hectic online world: it was about a service used by 500.000.000 users and it potentially affected all of them. Even more importantly, it boosted our inherent fear of not being able to control what we do through our connected screens. Exquisitely put by Time: “you might be signed up for Lovely-Faces.com’s dating services and not even know it.” At the end of the day Cirio’s and Ludovico’s Facebook accounts were disabled and a “cease and desist” letter from Perkins Coie LLP (Facebook lawyers) landed in their inboxes, including a request to give back to Facebook “their data”. We can properly define it as a performance since it happened in a short time span, involved the audience in a trasformation, and evolved into a thrilling story. The frenzied pace of these digital events was almost bearable.

* The Social Experiment: In the subsequent days the media performance continued at a very fast pace and what we still define as a “social experiment” was actually quite successful. Starting on February 4th the news went spontaneously viral: thousands of tweets and retweets pointed to the Lovely-Faces.com website or to articles and blog posts, often urging people to check if they (and their loved ones) were on the website or not. In a few days Lovely-faces.com received 964.477 page views from 195 different countries. Reactions varied from asking to be removed (which we diligently did) to asking to be included, from anonymous death threats to proposals of commercial partnerships.

* Back to Facebook: We approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation about legal counsel, but after a second warning by Perkins Coie, we temporarily put up a notice that Lovely-Faces.com is under maintenance. But they are not ok with that. They want Lovely-Faces.com not to be reachable. And they even want the same for Face-to-Facebook.net, the website where we explain the project. So basically their current aim is to completely remove the web presence of this artistic project and social experiment.
They missed out on Face-to-Facebook also being meant as a homage to FaceMash, the system Mark Zuckerberg established by scraping the names and photos of fellow classmates off school servers, which was the very first Facebook. Furthermore, it’s a bit funny hearing Facebook complain about the scraping of personal data that are quasi-public and doubtfully owned exclusively by Facebook (as a Stanford Law School Scholar wondered analyzing Lovely-Faces.com). We obtained them through a script that never even logged in their servers, but only very rapidly “viewed” (and recorded) the profiles. Finally, and paradoxically enough, Facebook has blocked us from accessing our Facebook profiles, but all the data we posted in the last years is still there. This proves once more that they care much more about the data you post than your online identity.

We’re going to reclaim the access to our Facebook accounts, and the right to express and document our work on our own websites. And even if we are forced to go offline, Lovely-Faces.com will never go offline in the minds of involved people.

Face to Facebook data:
People who asked to be removed from the database: 56
People who asked to be included in the database: 14

Commercial dating website partnership proposals: 4
Other partnership proposals: 9

Cease and desist letters by Perkins Coie LLP (Facebook lawyers): 1
Other threatened lawsuits or class actions: 11

Anonymous email death threat: 5

TV reports: 3
Online news about Lovely-Faces.com (source: Google News): 427

Number of times “lovely faces” introductory video has been viewed on you tube: 31,089
Unique users on Lovely-Faces.com: 211.714″ Via: Mail, danke Oliver!

UBERMORGEN.COM: “WOPPOW”

Die neue Rockumentary von UBERMORGEN.COM @ ARTE Creative: “Woppow” ist eine Fashion-Linie, inspiriert von Somalischen Piraten. “A French fashion designer who calls himself “woppow” travels to his homeland of Kenya and gets incredibly inspired by Somali pirates for his next “Art Couture” collection. He creates the new lines “MZUNGU by woppow” (pret-a-porter) and a kids collection called “woppow SHIFTAZ”. Influenced by the superficiality of media reports on the mysterious Somali pirates he starts to copy the mitumba pirate-style and the local fishermen wear. He photoshoots kids in Kibera in his new stylish streetcar, his scouts invade Eastleigh in order to access kenyan/somali trend-mixes.” Via

Kim Asendorf: “100.000.000 stolen pixels”

Kim Asendorf: Custom Java software crawls the internet for images and steals a square of 100 pixels per image. The cut-offs of 1.000.000 images get merged to a single image. Four different versions, partially sorted, are available: http://kaubonschen.com/100000000. Via

Aram Bartholl: “Dead Drops”

Das neue Projekt von Aram Bartholl: “Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities.”

Watchlist: Mathieu Tremblin / UPDATE


“Tag Clouds”, 2010, Nantes


“Tag Clouds”, 2010, Berlin


“Tennis Wall”, 2010, Berlin (DE): “Sometime graffiti goes over tennis training wall, sometime tennis training wall takes its revenge and goes over graffiti”.


“Ouvert 24H/24″, 2010 – an einem verlassenen Kaufhaus in Toulouse


“27 Stars”, 2010 in Lille – mit Philémon


Kaugummi-Typo: “Mon style te colle aux basques” (“Mein Style klebt an Deinen Schuhen”), 2009, Metz


Kaugummi-Typo: “Les proverbes de vieux font mourir de faim les jeunes” (“Die Sprüche der Alten lassen die Jungen verhungern”), Rennes, 2008 - Zitat aus dem SI-Text “Unity and pragmatism or art”, 1959


Kaugummi-Karte inkl. “Tattoos”: “Malabart Tattoos Collection”, 2010, Rennes


“Pisse de tagueurs”, 2010 – Graffiti-Writer-Urin


“Un coup de pouce aux RG”, 2010 – Fingerabdruck eines Sprühers


“DIY_button.gif”, 2009 – statt dem “Buy” von Paypal

Bisher kannte ich nur die “Tag Clouds” von Mathieu Tremblin, gerade habe ich sein Portfolio entdeckt - sind wirklich geniale Projekte dabei! Ganz dickes WOW! UPDATE: Mathieu hat mir gleich noch ein Update mit neuen, bisher unveröffentlichten Arbeiten aus Berlin gemailt, merci!

Buchtipp: “N.O. Cantsin – Neoist Research Project”

Noch nicht gelesen, aber sofort bestellt: A Neoist Research Project – und es sieht so aus, als würde Florian Cramer hinter diesem ersten umfassenden Sammelband zum Neoismus, “an international collective network of mostly anonymous and pseudonymous subcultural actionists and speculative experimenters” stecken. Der Inhalt klingt vielversprechend – und sobald ich es gelesen habe, gibt’s noch einmal ein Update: “It collects more than one hundred Neoist texts and two hundred images, documenting – among others – Neoist interventions, the Neoist Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments and Neoist concepts and memes such asthe shared identity Monty Cantsin. Here’s a fistful of titles from the content: ‘What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival??????’, ‘Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing’, ‘Impractical Seriousness’, ‘Krononautic Divector Field Didaction’, ‘Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the So-Called Millionth Apartment Festival’, ’3 part action’, ‘Neoist haircut’, ‘non-participation’, ‘Philosopher’s Union soapbox stand’, ‘anything is anything’, ‘language constructions’, ‘Dyslexia’, ‘Continuity Poem (cinematic version)’, ‘A note from the editors of SMILE’, ‘Street performance actions against false infinity ‘, ‘Neoist Parking Meter Action: Pay Me to Go Away’, ‘Neoism 101: Thought Projection’, ‘Our Tactics against Stockhausen’, ‘Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity’.” Via

Digital Communities: “Tele-Internet” in Linz

Am 2. September beginnt das Ars Electronica Festival in Linz – und Aram Bartholl hat für die Kategorie “Digital Communities” die Konferenz/Ausstellung/Performance “Tele-Internet” kuratiert: “*TELE-INTERNET* is an organically growing structure, a hacker space, a conference, a stage, an exhibition, a BarCamp, Commune 0/1, and a site for anyone who’s interested in discussing the development of the internet, exchanging ideas, and presenting their own projects. Ars Electronica festivalgoers are invited to take the plunge and join the fun, to contribute to the discussion of the social web, or to chill out on the couch with a clubmate and a notebook.” Via: Mail

Pizzas for the People: Die Pizza-Revolution

Nordkorea meets USA – heute gibt’s subversive Pizza-Themen im Doppelpack: Memefest-Oliver hat sich mit der US-Fastfoodkultur beschäftigt – und dabei den Pizzahacker aus San Francisco entdeckt. Seit einigen Jahren ist der Pizzahacker mit seinem umgebauten Ofen unterwegs, bäckt Pizza illegal im Straßenraum und gibt DIY-Tipps. Sein Ziel: “Democratization. I want to enable anybody to make world-class pizza on their deck or in their backyard, cheaply, quickly, and efficiently. It’s fun, veggie-friendly and 100 times easier than people think. We need an alternative to regular old grilling, and everybody loves pizza – don’t trust anybody who doesn’t.” (*).

Und für Nordkorea hat Hwang Kim eine Pizza-Propaganda-DVD hergestellt und diese dann von chinesischen Schmugglern ins Land bringen lassen. Kim schreibt über sein Projekt “Pizzas for the People“: “In the course of a long running ideological conflict North Korea is one of the most culturally isolated countries in the world, which reject any foreign influences through a tight control of media and communication equipment. To protect the NK identity from potential damaging western influences, short wave radios for example are banned while TV receiver are locked to tune only to the 3 official channels. Paradoxically, with the support of pizza loving leader Kim Jong-il the first-ever Pizzeria was recently opened to provide an authentic Italian experience for a minority of wealthy political elite. With the aim off challenging current cultural obstacles in North Korea, I have contacted a number of Chinese smugglers in China to distribute illegal propaganda over the border to North Korea, through the popular DVD format, which players are widely found in NK homes.” Das Projekt wird gerade im Royal College of Art in London ausgestellt. Via/Via