Patrick BERNATCHEZ: 13 | Experimental fiction | 16mm | color | 0:13:00 | Canada | 2009

"13" is the thrid part of the "Chrysalide trilogie", about the building Fashion Plaza – a awesome industrial building, located in the Mile End in Montreal. This building is a constant inspiration and a research place nourishing a thought on the economic structures that define our ways of life, the repercussion that are implied and its impacts on individual as well as on our society. This one is translated by an oneiric regard on an empire hegemony and its eventual decline. Bernatchez’s video opens with an aerial view of a large factory space. Accompanied by a mounting orchestral score, the camera slowly descends to and through the cement floor. It then continues through the building’s infrastructure to reveal new spaces-a shipping room, a woodwork shop and more - below it. The camera’s constant falling movement through the building in “13” reveals a series of commonplace rooms, such as a photo studio, a room full of heating pipes and a small office space, that would normally be unremarkable but for the increasingly bizarre scenarios that Bernatchez places in them. From Ronald McDonald being prepped in a makeup chair to an apparently unconscious security guard soaked in dripping water, “13” creates an absurdist collage of filmic narratives that is at once disturbingly disjointed and compellingly inventive. It is in this way that, at their most effective, Bernatchez’s videos mimic viewers’ unconscious dream worlds: combining the familiar and recognizable in intriguing ways to create an immersive environment that is miles away from reality.

Patrick Bernatchez lives and works in Montreal. His interest lies in the “chronicle of a death fortold”, through time immutable projection: the one of the living beings, of individuals, of societies. He deals with the traits of a kind of social schizophrenia. These traits are translated through pictural, photographic, filmic compositions as well as sculptural and sound installation. His work has been shown at the Musée d’art contemporain et de design in Hertogenbosch, Netherlands ; in Canada at the Musée d’art contemporain of Montreal, at l’Usine C, Montréal ; at the Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris (France), on the occasion of the Nuit Blanche 2009 ; at the Media Art Biennial de Melbourne, Australia.


Tony COKES: shrinking.criticism | Experimental video | dv | color | 0:12:33 | USA | 2009



One of the central ideas connecting Tony Cokes’ recent work is the view that working across multiple media is a strategy that can allow one to re-play and question the systemic features of cultural production under global capital.  Recently he had the opportunity to collaborate on a video / performance project looking at art criticism. To make the state of art practices, their criticism, and their capitalist context impact and resonate differently for viewers, a detour into the heavy dubstep sounds of Kromestar was required. “Shrinking.criticism” quotes extensively from an article, “The decline and fall of art criticism,” by the British writer Julian Stallabrass who argues cogently against the conflations of art, advertising, and business seen in the global art worlds of the last two decades.

Tony Cokes was born in 1956. He received a B.A. from Goddard College, Vermont, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and gained an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. In a series of videotapes and installations produced since the mid-1980s, Tony Cokes engages in cogent investigations of identity and opposition. His works question how origins influence the construction of subjectivities (personal, cultural and historical), and how origins, genders and class are perceived through what he terms the "representational regimes of image and sound", as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media and popular culture. Cokes' analytical strategy is one of reframing and repositioning. His critiques are informed by contemporary cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, and popular texts; he quotes from sources ranging from Louis Althusser, Malcolm X and Catherine Clement to Public Enemy and William Burroughs. His works are often assemblages of archival footage, images from Hollywood films, text commentary, voiceover, and popular music. He has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Cokes' video and multimedia installation works have been included in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum Soho, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and in Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. Cokes currently teaches at Brown University. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.


Eric CONVENTS: Office Baroque, a project by Gordon Matta Clark | Documentary | 16mm | black and white | 0:44:00 | USA | 1977



Matta-Clark made a cut in a five-story commercial building located in front of the Steen, a tourist spot in Antwerp. On Matta-Clark's death shortly after, an attempt was made to save the work as a future museum of contemporary art, but the building was demolished. This works includes an interview with the artist. More than simple documentations of his intervention, Matta-Clark's commentary on his works also provides a unique insight into his creative process..

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943 and died in 1978. He studied French literature at the Sorbonne and Architecture at Cornell University. From the early 1970s, as a founding member of the artist-run Food Restaurant in New York's SoHo neighborhood, Matta-Clark participated in numerous group exhibitions and projects. His work was presented in Documenta V, Kassel, Germany; and at exhibitions in Sao Paolo, Berlin, Zurich, and in the 9th Biennale de Paris. Major projects by Matta-Clark were staged in Aachen, Paris and Antwerp. Following his death, major retrospective exhibitions have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; and IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez, Valencia, Spain, among others. In 2007, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, honored him with a retrospective entitled "Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure".


Diego DEL POZO BARRIUSO: Pieza para orgía y fábrica | Animation | dv | black and white | 0:06:42 | Spain | 2006



This is a piece about loneliness, about the need for affection and about how a contemporary self is submerged in the strive for a fulfillment of these lacks in the context of the work and production system. The images represent a number of different individuals in two completely different situations, and some of them participate in both: some people have just taken part in an orgy, while others are at work, in different working environments (an office, a production line, a workshop, a school, a hospital). We witness the interior monologues of all these people. They are never alone in these situations, but they feel lonely. Their intimate thoughts come in succession, never simultaneously. In the images, the participants in the orgy appear as if under a spotlight in a darkened room, so there is an effect of a snap, when the light are turned on. The images of the working environments are more general, and there we do see other individuals in the visual field. People are presented very statically, moving and caressing their bodies very slightly, as for the people in the orgy, and moving and manipulating objects and machinery, in the case of the people at work, which emphasizes a loaded environment there. The purpose is to reveal the vulnerability of these people. It seems like humans have failed, in their collective project, to live up by themselves to their necessities, especially if we take into account the crisis of affection and loneliness which characterizes western societies, due to their process of individualization as a strategy of adoption and admiration of the system. The logic of the production system gets confused and intertwined with the logic of emotion - there is also an economy of affection.

Diego del Pozo Barriuso lives and works in Madrid. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Art in Salamanca and Madrid, and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Artist and cultural producer, he develops projects about the social production of the body and identity.

Citroën`s impressive, prototypical modernist interbellum garage at Place d’Yser in Brussels. The building, once threatened with demolition, will hopefully be there for some time to come, and Downsbrough pays homage to the building and its architects, Belgians Alexis Dumont and Marcel Van Goethem, who cooperated with French architect Maurice Ravazé.

The construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Chinese Yangtze River has been completed in 2009. In the context of a general research on the landscape as a bearer of meaning, Pieter Geenen explores the "sunken" universe of the flooded Three Gorges Reservoir behind the dam in his video "Atlantis".

Pieter Geenen (°1979) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. After his Master Photography he studied at Transmedia Postgraduate Program in Brussels. In his audio and video works he examines the landscape as a bearer of meaning, the way landscape and man relate to each other, and how we experience time and space via the landscape. His work has been presented, amongst others, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), Argos (Brussels, Belgium), MuHKA_media (Antwerp, Belgium), Azad Art Gallery (Tehran, Iran), Art Rotterdam, All Art Now International Video Art Festival (Damascus, Syria), Images Festival (Toronto, Canada), EMAF (Osnabrück, Germany), Media City Festival (Windsor, Canada) and at the Venice Biennial.


Chia-wei HSU: March 14, 2009, Hong Kong Coliseum | Video installation | dv | color | 0:07:43 | Taiwan | 2009



Narrated by Chinese Malaysian singer Fish Leong, the project “March 14, Hong Kong Coliseum” follows her tour through different cities in Asia, including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Malaysia, Beijing, Guangzhou, Kunming, and Chengdu. In Chinese world, almost everyone knows Fish Leong and her voice. As a huge pan-Asian entertainment industry, the singer moves from city to city. And the stage, lighting, and songs at each event were similar. And each concert scene is also a confrontation between globalization and local cultures. The video shows an empty concert scene neither with the singer nor audiences. The real event becomes an enormous and fictional scene.

Chia Wei Hsu lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. His method is a specific kind of “narrative”, a way of documenting that interferes with the reality of the text, by focusing on a site’s specific and peculiar characteristics, such as memory, imagination, or identification. With these characteristics in mind, he develops a narrative, and between the reality of the text and the fictional narrative, he constructs a myth or a legend. He is also one of the members of the Open-Contemporary Art Center in Taipei, Taiwan.


Ryoji IKEDA: data.matrix[nº1-10] | Multimedia installation | Production Forma. Concept, composition: Ryoji Ikeda - Computer graphics, programming: Shohei Matsukawa, Norimichi Hirakawa, Tomonaga Tokuyama | Japan / United Kingdom | 2006-2010



“data.matrix [n°1-10]” is a multi-screen installation featuring video sequences from Ikeda's audiovisual concert “datamatics [ver.2.0]”, in which he uses pure data as a source for sound and visuals. The visuals combine abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time and space.
Each of the video projections corresponds with the ten scenes represented in the concert and is labeled accordingly. Ikeda has carefully recomposed the scenes so that they are tightly synchronized with one another. For the first time the entire content of “datamatics [ver.2.0]”, renowned for its extremely fast frame rates and variable bit depths, can be viewed at one time.

Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist, Ryoji Ikeda, focuses on the minutiae of ultrasonics, frequencies and the essential characteristics of sound itself.  Fascinated by data, light and sound, he shapes music, time and space by mathematical methods and explores these phenomena as sensation, pulling apart their physical properties to reveal their relationships with human perception.
Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media.  Since 1995, he has been intensely active through concerts, installations, and recordings, integrating sound, acoustics and sublime imagery.  He has been hailed by critics as one of the most radical and innovative contemporary composers for his live performances, sound installations and album releases.  His albums +/- (Touch, 1996), 0°C (Touch, 1998) and matrix (Touch, 2000) pioneered a new minimal world of electronic music, employing sine waves, electronic sounds, and white noise.  Using computer and digital technologies to the utmost limit, his audiovisual concerts “datamatics” (2006 – present), C4I (2004 – 2007) and formula (2000 – 2006) suggest a unique orientation for our future multimedia environment and culture. 
His ongoing body of work, “datamatics”, is a long-term program of moving image, sculptural, sound and new media works that use data as their theme and material to explore the ways in which its abstracted view of reality is used to encode, understand and control the world. 
In Summer 2008, Ikeda produced a series of large-scale public realm works for Dream Amsterdam, lighting four cultural and civic spaces with intensely bright white light.  In Autumn, this concept - spectra - was adapted for Nuit Blanche, the all night arts festival in Paris.  In this version, Ikeda created a monumental sculpture with a grid of powerful beams of white light and pure sine sound waves next to Tour Montparnasse, France’s tallest skyscraper. 
He has staged solo exhibitions recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Yamaguchi Centre for Arts and Media; Le Laboratoire, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Surrey Art Gallery, Vanvouver.  His work has also been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne and Transmediale Festival, Berlin, among others.
The versatile range of Ikeda’s research is demonstrated by his collaborations with Carsten Nicolai on the project cyclo.  and with choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballett, artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, architect Toyo Ito and artist collective Dumb Type, among others.
In 2001, Ikeda was awarded the Ars Electronica Golden Nica prize in the digital music category and he was short-listed for a World Technology Award in 2003


Joan LEANDRE: Magic Line | Video | color | 0:25:00 | Spain | 2010



“In the Name of Kernel ! The Magic Line” is the third installation of the “In the Name of Kernel series”, introducing Leandre’s critical practice of media interpretation and reversing engineering to a new audience. “In the Name of Kernel ! ” gathers his last videos in an open cycle.  They offer to the viewer a complex narration in which he can decode the mechanisms of the fascination for technology to which we are usually subjected, such mechanisms, that will then condition our perception of the world. In that sense, the work of Joan Leandre is quite subversive. In this installation, the kernel, which is at the heart of most computer systems, becomes the myth around which a symbolic event coagulates. It combines travel literature, the alchemy tradition, science fiction, terrorism and conspiracy theories, computer programming, mountain climbing, 3-D modeling, satellite mapping, hallucinations and revelations. Joan Leandre explores the troubled imagination of a fundamental principle of computer science, without regard for its potential uses, be they military or dreamlike. The image itself, which is created by manipulating computers, changes its status. Along with the images, the blind power of the Kernel appears, the kernel in whose name all technological usages become possible.

Joan Leandre lives and works in Barcelona. He is media interpreter and member of the OVNI Archives (Observatoire de Vidéos Non Identifiées). since 1994. From 1994 to 1996 he worked on a series of media interruptions called “MAP” (Mega Assemble Project), “Fundación Zero” and “Serial Monuments”. From 1995-1997 he was involved in the Oigo Rom project, and later in 1998 in Brooklyn he was involved with the President Archives. In 1999, he began working again with mass entertainment software and started the projects “Retroyou (RC) and retroyou (nostalG)”, and continues to work on the series “Retroyou nostalg2” and the “Black Boot Project”. Other collective projects include Velvet Strike and the Archivos Babilonia. Since the begining of the 90ies, Joan Leandre is a media interpreter, an Internet archeologist. He make permanent excavations and collects data. He archives numerous datas that have been “forgotten”, on a corporate site for example, or, contrariwise, data that have very short apparition before becoming confidential or outdated in terms of technologies. Going further than the apparent usability of such or such interface, he tries to create a state of consciousness concerning what the machines are able to make us do because of our ignorance and the power of the ideological conditioning on our understanding of the real today due to the new images. Since 2006, the work of Joan Leandre lies essentially on the analysis and the deconstruction of games, simulation or military training softwares. His work has been shown at the Sonar festival, Barcelona, at Transmediale, Berlin ; at the Whitney Biennial in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, at the Laboral Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Gijon, at the Moscow Biennale, at the ZKM, Karlsruhe.


Anthony MCCALL: You and I, Horizontal (III) | Installation | USA | 2007


Image courtesy Sean Kelly, New York; Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne; Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris.

“What interests me about using a cinematic “wipe” as a transition is that you create two events in play at the same time; one of them is advancing and the other is retreating, with the proportion of one to the other constantly changing. This was suggestive, because I was searching for a way to maintain two opposing sculptural forms within the same three-dimensional space, to create the sculptural equivalent of “parallel action”. But I was aware that cutting back and forth between two events would be incomprehensible: even if the walls were only made of light, walls cannot just vanish or appear suddenly out of no-where. Then there was the related problem of speed. In the “elsewhere” of the moving image on a screen, your eyes and your imagination have no trouble in rapidly shifting time and place. But when things move fast in real space, your real body reacts by rooting itself to the spot – by ceasing to move. Since I was making a sculptural object, predicated on a mobile spectator, this would be self-defeating. But then I realized that if I radically extended the length of the Wipe I could create ‘parallel action’ in sculptural terms -- in effect, slowing the movement down to the point where observers could be sure of what was going to change, or at least be sure of the pace at which things would change, so that they would move around the space, at least to start with, as if they were looking at an object with consistent properties.”
-Anthony McCall, Adapted from an interview with Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone in Bomb Magazine, New York, Fall 2006.

Anthony McCall was born in St Paul’s Cray, England, in 1946. He lives and works in Manhattan. McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal “Line Describing a Cone,” in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space. Working in a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, his work’s historical importance has been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as “Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2), “The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies” at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4), “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection” at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7), The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image” at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008), and “The Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s”, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008). Solo exhibitions of McCall’s work have taken place at, amongst others, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004, Tate Britain, London, 2004, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France, (2006), Serpentine Gallery, London (2007-8), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009), and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009). McCall’s work is represented in numerous collections, including Tate, UK, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, SFMoMA, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Hirshhorn, Washington DC. McCall was recently awarded a large sculpture commission for 2012 by the Arts Council and the Cultural Olympiad, to realize his “Projected Column” in North-West England: a sinuous, spinning column of cloud that rises from the surface of the water into the sky


Francis NARANJO: Los colores de la libertad: Blanco | Video | dv | color | 0:10:26 | Spain | 2010



"Los colores de la libertad: Blanco" is a video piece produced during the year 2008, based on an excerpt form an interview Francis Naranjo did with Juan Manuel Godoy. The piece unfolds with a series of fades to white with the comments made by Juan Manuel Godoy regarding his genetic anomaly, his lack of melamine, and his albinism. His comments introduce us to models of reflection akin to patterns of behavior which are close to our contemporary world, from its negative aversion to being outdoors, including situations in which his condition, that of Albinism, locates him within a difference. Paradoxically this interview turns into a great metaphor in which light, an element related to the desire for freedom, becomes its castrating element.

Francis Naranjo is a Spanish artist born in Santa María de Guia, in the Canary Islands, in 1961. He has produced videos and installation pieces. He has been object to a solo exhibition in Santiago de Chile in 2006. His work has also been presented in ARCO, Madrid. His work develops problem areas pertaining to the society of information, highly technological, in which we are being controlled or in which we control, as well as globalization and the general use of new technologies. Among other places, his work has been exhibited in the AFA gallery, Santiago de Chile; at the Instituto Cervantes, Paris; at the Ecoteca, Pescara, Italia; at Arte Contemporáneo 108, Miami; in MAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo), Santiago de Chile; in the Vanguardia gallery, Bilbao; at Casa de América, Madrid; at the CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo), Seville; at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; at Kunstverein Panitzsch, Leipzig; in the Dakar Biennial and at the Círculo de Bellas Arte, Madrid. “Los colores de la libertad: Blanco” “has been produced in an installation format, for the ““Libertad, Igualdad, Fraternidad”” exhibition. Curated by IsabelDurán and Bernard Marcadé, the exhibition is currently traveling through a number of Spanish autonomous communities, and its next opening will be on April 9th at CAAM, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.


Natacha NISIC: Le textile est mort mais les gens vivent encore | Exp. documentary | super16 | color | 0:10:47 | France | 2008



Desurmond factory of Tourcoing closed in 2004. It was the last spinning factory of this area. The workers set up in an association to assert their rights and to create a community, beyond the loss of the work. The men then the women reproduced the chaine and the work gestures in this textile mill. Some of them have worked there as night team during 35 years.

Natacha Nisic was born in 1967. At first student of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, she pursues being student in the Deutsche Film und Fernseh Akademie of Berlin and in the Femis in Paris for scenario courses. She made numerous exhibitions and movies where she put in question of the image status. She uses for it various mediums: Super 8, 16 mm, video, photography. Stills or images in movement work as substratum of the memory, wich is stretched out between its value of proof and its loss. These works were shown in numerous countries, Germany, Spain, Japan, Korea, Canada, Argentina... Her movies are broadcasted on Arte and at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She was resident of the Villa Kujoyama ( 2001 ) and the Villa Medicis (2007).



Hans OP DE BEECK: Staging Silence | Video | dv | black and white | 0:22:00 | Belgium | 2009



“Staging Silence” is based on abstract, archetypal settings that lingered in the memory of the artist as the common denominator of the many similar public places he has experienced. The video images themselves are both ridiculous and serious, just like the eclectic mix of pictures in our minds. The decision to film in black and white heightens this ambiguity: the amateurish quality of the video invokes the legacy of slapstick, as well as the insidious suspense and latent derailment of film noir. The title refers to the staging of such dormant decors where, in the absence of people, the spectator can project himself as the lone protagonist. Memory images are disproportionate mixtures of concrete information and fantasies, and in this film they materialize before the spectator's eyes through anonymous tinkering and improvising hands. Arms appear and disappear at random, manipulating banal objects, scale representations and artificial lighting into alienating yet recognizable locations. These places are no more or less than animated decors for possible stories, evocative visual propositions to the spectator. The film is accompanied by a score which, inspired by the images themselves, has been composed and performed by composer-musician Serge Lacroix.

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck lives and works in Brussels, where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. His work consists of sculptures, installations, video work, photography, animated films, drawings, paintings and writing (short stories). It is his quest for the most effective way of presenting the concrete contents of each work that determines the medium that the artist ultimately selects. The scale can vary from the size of a small watercolor to a large, three-dimensional installation of 300m2. The artist not only uses a very wide variety of media, but also deliberately employs a diversity of aesthetic forms, ranging from an economical, minimalist visual language to overloaded, exaggerated designs, always with the aim of articulating the content of the work as precisely as possible. Thematically, the work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space and each other. Op de Beeck shows the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments and characters that appear to have been taken from contemporary everyday life, aiming thereby to capture in his images the tragicomic absurdity of our postmodern existence. Key themes are the disappearance of distances, the disembodiment of the individual and the abstraction of time that have resulted from globalization and the changes to our living environment that developments in media, automation and technology have brought about. Hans Op de Beeck sometimes calls his works "proposals"; they are irrefutably fictional, constructed and staged, leaving it up to the viewer whether to take the work seriously, as a sort of parallel reality, or immediately to put it into perspective, as no more than a visual construct. His work is nourished by a keen interest in social and cultural reflection. The artist also questions the difficult relationship between reality and representation, between what we see and what we want to believe, between what is and what we create for ourselves in order to make it easier to deal with our own insignificance and lack of identity. The visual output of that investigation often produces slumbering, insidious, melancholy and astonishing images.


RYBN: Antidatamining V | Multimedia installation | France | 2010



Since the end of the Eighties, the Data Mining technologies have been used in order to increase the profit of commercial and financial activities. Nowadays, they are used by many other activities, such as humanitarian missions, research, intelligence and security agencies, etc... But their always growing use has generated a new opacity, making them far less readable. “Antidatamining” is both an artistic research, a socio-economic and a geopolitical investigation, as well as a real-time archaeology process focusing on the data flows which compose a part of our contemporary society “Antidatamining” is an research project, based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of web-extracted data. It aims at creating various audiovisual and digital works – mainly installations and websites – written, fed and updated in real time. The goal of this project is to make emerge, by using the Data Mining processing, several social and economic imbalance “phenomenas”. ADM seeks to identify and visualize these phenomenas; and to tries to establish a global imbalance cartography. The project also tries to bring a critical glance on these technologies, by diverting economic improvement and digital surveillance high-tech tools uses. The work is based exclusively on Internet recoverable data. Internet is then compared to a gigantic database, a “datawarehouse”. The type of recovered data are : geographical, ecological, social, economic, financial and geopolitical. Data are stored in a large database, then processed using DM genetic algorithms. This method allows to establish several “meaningful” – or particularly important – cross correlations.

RYbN is a an artistic multidisciplinary collective, specialized in realizing installations, happenings and interfaces referring to the codified systems of the artistic representation (painting, architecture, countercultures) as well as to human and physical phenomenas (geopolitics, socioeconomy, sensory perception, cognitive systems). Their research goals are : the construction of a “converging semantic”, via the coupling, the diversion and the perversion of the writing and formalizing means related to the communications technologies, of the information and sensory – net, data flux, olfaction, capitation, surveillance, audiovisual, interaction, real time. Since March 2006, the RYBN collective has undertaken a Data Mining based research project, in order to create several artistic pieces of work. Diverted from their original goals, Data Mining tools and Digital Monitoring technologies are used in order to create a series of images of our society, pictured through its data flows. The resulting digital visualizations are based on cartographic principles, and are real-time updated. Their work has been shown in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou, at Ars Longa, at the Goethe institut in Dakar ; at Creanumerica à Beyrouth, at Elektra (Montréal), at Imal, Bruxelles ; in Spain at the Laboral in Gijon and at Hangar, Barcelona.


Manuel SAIZ: Sic Transit | Video | dv | color | 0:05:00 | Spain | 2009



“Sic Transit” is a short film in which several people run towards the camera to deliver sequentially some phrases, in a high moment of panting and emotional intensity. The text is only complete by the recite of all the participants and then it forms a poetical recount of the encounter of the artists with the load of centuries of Art and Culture. The video has been shot at the riverside in Rome, with the collaboration of foreign artists living in the city.

Born in Logrono (La Rioja) in Spain, Manuel Saiz is a London based artist. He started working as an artist in the 1980’s in Spain, creating paintings, sculptures, photography and installations. Since then, he has been regularly exhibiting his work in public and commercial galleries worldwide. In 1989 he showed a group of installations at the Sao Paulo Biennale and in 1990 he took part in “Artificial Nature” curated by Jeffrey Deitch at the Deste Foundation in Athens. Since 1995 he works mainly in video art and media installations. In 1998 he moved to London where he produced “Video Hacking”, a work that received an honorable mention in Hamburg Film Festival. In 2005 he produced “Specialized Technicians Tequired: Being Luis Porcar”, which was shown widely and got the first Prize in the Winterthur Kurtztfilm Festival and an honorable mention in Transmediale 06. His installations have been shown in Intercommunication Center (Tokyo), Transmediale (Berlin), Whitechappel gallery (London), ICA (London), among others. His video productions have been shown at Impakt Festival (Utrecht), EMAF(Osnabruck), London Film Festival, Reina Sofia Art Centre(Madrid), Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Madrid, Berlin), VideoFormes (Clermont-Ferrand), World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), among many others. He has curated artist projects as Art Summer University (Tate Modern London), Communicating Vessels (Hara Museum Tokyo), 25hrs (El Raval Barcelona) or videoDictionary (multiple venues), involving internationally known media artists. Last year he had a 9 months fellowship at the Spanish Academy in Rome. He has published several books, as the 2009 “101 Excuses. How Art Legitimizes Itself”. His video work is distributed by Montevideo in Amsterdam and Vtape in Toronto. He is represented by Galeria Moriarty (Madrid).


Alexander SCHELLOW: Fragment/ Vienna | Animation | dv | black and white | 0:10:10 | Germany | 2009



“fragment” is a documentary animation of around ten minutes divided into six sequences. The reconstructed and silent views of a video surveillance room of a Viennese metro station alternate systematically with a black screen on which are superimposed the samples of actual sounds analog to the moments of corresponding visual extracts. The fragmented noises, recorded on site, have served in the process of drawing as a sound explanation, a kind of « score » for the replay. The separation and the visual and sound elements tend to activate fields of possible association and combination in the eye of the observer. “fragment” digs inside the found visual surface, and in a way sets freely an archeological prospect which now and then elicits nearly surreal images. Each of these three parts accomplishes it by focusing in another way of the optical analysis, in such a way that in the course of further viewing an ever more complex structure of visual regimes begins to arise.

Alexander Schellow was born in Berlin in1974. Studied visual Arts in Berlin and Glasgow and Latin/Greek Philology and Sanskrit in Berlin. He continues drawing-practice since 1996. Drawing-series, installations, animations. He has had different collaborations in the field of performance/choreography, architecture, urban research, sociology. Since 1999, he has had solo and groupshows, and worked on screenings works for performance theater and lectures. Publications include  the book-project Storyboard  at Merz/Solitude (Stuttgart) and the DVD still lives by  Filmarmalade (London). Most recent projects are for example “Out take Bozen/Bolzano” (for the opening-exhibition Museion – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano 2008), “Miniature” (with David Weber-Krebs“) at deAppel, Amsterdam 2009 and 2010, “TiranaNorth – trajectories” for Tirana International Contemporary Art Biannual, Albania 2009 and 2481 “Desaster zone” (spatial conception) with theatercombinat, Vienna 2009. In 2006 and 2007, he has been fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart). In 2008, he has been Pechstein-fellow. He has been working on “Bambiland” (theatercombinat, Vienna, 2009), to which Schellow contributed with spatial conception and a series of animation-films. This project won the Nestroy (best Off-Production, 2009). In 2010, he has been artist in residence at Zukunftskolleg (University of Konstanz, Germany). And he teaches spatial research practices at Metropolitan-University London and in the frame of workshops, for example at APT (Advanced Performance Training, Antwerp).


Antoine SCHMITT: Facade Life | Multimedia installation | France | 2010



The installations "Facade Life" are in situ and always unique. An abstract light figure runs infinitely on a façade, a wall, in relation with its architectural elements. It slides on the edges, bangs on the windows frames, bounces on the doors panels, flows into the free spaces… It inhabits the spaces. Artificial life algorithms and physics equations recreate the behavior of an abstract feline in cage : a nervous body but an imprisoned one. "Façade Life" stems from an artistic principle in which existing façades are reinterpreted by dynamic programmed forces, in order to set up a dialectic between physical reality and a level of parallel reality.

Antoine Schmitt lives and work in Paris. Visual artist, programmer engineer, and designer, Antoine Schmitt has developed a singular artistic multidisciplinary practice concentrated on the creation of programmatic forms.  His minimal abstract and efficient artworks approach contemporary or atemporal themes such as the condition of free being, the reality systems or even the forces and their forms. Using technics out of physics, intelligence and artificial life, combining constraint and random, Antoine Schmitt makes objects or situations, physical, visual or sound systems, generative or interactive, that questions the modalities of free human in a complex world. He considers programming as being the heart of his artworks, as it is radically new regarding its active dimension. His work has been granted in many international festivals : medi@terra (Athènes 1999), Interférences (Belfort, France 2000), transmediale.01 (Berlin 2001), festival international de vidéo-danse (Paris 2002), Vida 5.0 (Madrid 2002), machinista (Perm, Russie 2003), CYNETArt (Dresdes, Germany, 2004), transmediale.07 (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz, 2009) and has been exhibited among others at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2002, 2004), at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999), at Sonar in Barcelona (2002, 2004, 2005), at Ars Electronica (2003), at the Centre d’Art Contemporain of Sienne (2004), at the Musee d’Art Contemporain of Lyon (1997), at Villette Numérique (Paris, 02004) and at Slick (Paris, 2006, 2007). As theorist, lecturer, jury member and editor of the internet site gratin.org, Antoine Schmitt explores the field of the programmed work of art.