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CURRENT PAST FUTURE 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 ART FAIRS		Venus 2.0 Mark Napier, USA Software objects, projection, prints Exhibition: 5th of December 2009 – 27th of January 2010 The exhibition ist open by appointment only from 21. December 2009 – 04. January 2010. Opening: Friday, 4th of December 2009, 7 – 9 pm The artist will be present at the opening. ‘Venus 2.0’ consists of software written by the artist that collects images of the body parts of Pamela Anderson, an erotic icon of our time, from the hundreds of pictures of her available on the Internet and recreates a mobile, three-dimensional figure out of these flat, fragmentary pictures. A sculpture of Venus composed of the “raw materials” of our time: data and information. In this way, Mark Napier reflects on our perceptions of images in this Internet age, on network structures and on the Internet’s influence on our lives. Mark Napier (b. 1961, USA) is one of the best-known Net artists and has created Net art works for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Foundation and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. His early works are regarded as Net art classics. Every era in history has produced its own portrayal of “Venus”, the symbol of feminine beauty, using the formal language and materials contemporary to it. The Internet, a new medium for boundless communication, defines our era and has already fundamentally transformed the way we live together. Pamela Anderson has ‘grown up’ along with the rapid growth of the Internet. Starting out as an amateur erotic actress before becoming a fixture in the sphere of modern sex icons, her career has progressed in parallel to the Net’s own explosive expansion. Her attitude towards the shaping of her body through cosmetic surgery is also symptomatic of our age. According to the Guinness Book of Records, she’s the most frequently mentioned woman on the Internet. Mark Napier chose Pamela Anderson as the focus of his new series precisely because of her celebrity on the Web and embodiment of a contemporary ideal of beauty. These works are about reproductions of images of the body in digital networks and their effect on our ideas of the aesthetic. Mark Napier regards the Net as a new space and his works frequently interrogate its nature and rules. In ‘Venus 2.0’ he recreates a body out of the medium itself. It’s the Internet‘s influence on the aesthetics of body image that interests him: cosmetic surgery plays only a secondary role. “Ultimately, media shapes our existence much more than surgery. This work is not about the specifics of plastic surgery, but the larger impact of media on our perception of and representation of our own bodies.“ Mark Napier in an interview with Susanne Massmann, 2009 At a formal level, a composition of superimposed, layered picture fragments emerges, referencing the flood of images existing on the Internet. As a trained painter, Mark Napier is also influenced by the history of painting in composing his works. The ‘Venus 2.0’ series contains references to Picasso‘s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” and portraits by Francis Bacon and is also in the tradition of the abstract formal language of Duchamp’s “Nude descending a staircase”. Mark Napier (1961, USA) lives in New York. He became inspired by software development soon after completing his training as a painter. He has been working on Net art since 1995 and was one of the first artists to deal thematically and formally with the Internet. His works explore terms such as “ownership” and “authority” in the Net and interrogate browser functions and Web design. He has been commissioned to create Net art works by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and took part in the Whitney Biennale in 2002. Institutions and festivals that have exhibited his works include the Centre Pompidou in Paris, P.S.1 New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz, The Kitchen, Künstlerhaus Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe, Transmediale, iMAL Brussels, Eyebeam, the Princeton Art Museum, and la Villette, Paris. He has also received awards from Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. ReVisioning the Virtual Wall T+T \| Tamiko Thiel – Teresa Reuter – Sabe Wunsch, GER Collages based on the 3D installation "Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall" Exhibition: 31 October - 28 November 2009 Preview: 30 October, 7 - 9 pm Gallery [DAM]Berlin shows on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Fall for the first time internationally the large format collages of the artist team which are based on the interactive 3D installation "Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall". The digital collages show scenographies of the Berlin Wall that are conceived by the artists as associative pieces of memories - by mixing temporal and geographical elements as well as "real" and "virtual" material. The exhibition takes place in completement to the presentation of the 3D installation at the Ephraim-Palais, Berlin. The artists use the computer as a medium to mix different time levels (before, during and after the Wall) and perspectives in one image in order to create the effect of "taking a look back" like a sequence of a dream. The transparency of parts from the Wall or of border soldiers refer to the later disintegration of the GDR. The complex structures of the collages are the result of multiple manipulations of the original renderings from the virtual world. These renderings, taken from diverse viewpoints, have been multiplied, intermingled, layered and occasionally supplemented with photographs and archival documents, and then further altered by insertions, shiftings, and fragmentations of the images. In complement to the exhibition you can experiment the interactive installation Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall at the Ephraim-Palais, Nicolaiviertel in Berlin, in the context of the exhibition FALLMAUERFALL \| 61-89-09 from 6. November 2009 - 7. February 2010 (Link to the exhibition) Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall is a virtual reality installation that enables users to experience a section of the now vanished Berlin Wall and how its presence affected the surrounding neighborhoods in East and West Berlin. Time travel, animations & simulations involve users in events spanning the 1960s to the present time. Stations in 2009 of the project are: Seattle: 911 Media Arts Center, Boston: Goethe-Institut, Lübeck: Willy-Brandt-Haus, Wolfsburg: Kunstverein, Gijon: LABoral, Berlin: Ephraim-Palais, Washington DC: American University Museum, Los Angeles: Goethe-Institut, New Delhi: Goethe-Institut. The installation was first exhibited at the Museum for Communication, Berlin, in 2008 and was shown worldwide in museums and institutions since then. As part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival the artwork was awarded the Grand Prize for the IBM Innovation Awards. Website of the project: www.virtuelle-mauer-berlin.de Artist team: Tamiko Thiel: b. 1957 in Oakland, CA, USA, lives in Munich B.S. Stanford University, M.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Diploma Academy of Fine Arts, Munich Fellowships / awards include: Japan Foundation, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Nominations: Rockerfeller Fellowship, World Technology Award, German Video Art Prize of ZKM Numerous exhibits in the USA, Europe and Asia. Teaching positions included: Carnegie-Mellon University, Bauhaus-University/Weimar, UC/San Diego, MIT Teresa Reuter: b. 1963 in Munich, lives in Berlin 1994 Diploma in Architecture, TU Berlin Exhibits (Selection): metroClips NGbK (2001), IBA Lausitz (2005) Sabe Wunsch: b. 1964 in Stuttgart, lives in Berlin. 1994 Diplom in Architecture, TU Berlin Exhibits (Selection): Sandhandlung Installation, Temporäre Gärten, Berlin (2001) 'Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern', exhibition, memorial Ravensbrück and Seoul, Corea (2007) CHASING STILLNESS boredomresearch, UK Preview: 28 August, 7 - 9 pm introduction from Dr. Susanne Jaschko, indepedent curator, and artist talk Exhibition: 29 August - 24 Oktober 2009 You can persue your desire for slowing down your bustling everyday life in the new exhibition "Chasing Stillness" by boredomresearch. Discover the universe of the seldom songs of the whirligigs and observe the transmission of emails in real snail speed. With "Lost calls of cloud mountain whirligigs" we present new software objects of boredomresearch. You can observe the life of small creatures called whirligigs and, particularly, listen to their songs. Each whirligig has its own unique song that lasts for the duration of a lifetime and is lost afterwards. A whirligig sleeps in silence and, if you are lucky, will start to sing after waking up. So the stillness is charged with anticipation for a song. There are day- and night-time cycles – the light of the objects changes – and after the slow expiration of one generation a new one is created with their own songs. Speed is fantastic! This is at least what is permanently suggested by our environment. Saving time with faster cars, computers, printers, communication systems, so that we can use our lives in an even more “efficient” way. Certainly, speed is of great advantage, especially in communication, and I’m sure we wouldn’t like to deny ourselves the convenience of email as a mean of worldwide communication for free and in “real-time”. But haven’t you already put a curse on this usually beloved method of communication, in view of the sender's expectation of a prompt reaction from your part? Instead of using the letter-box once a day you are now receiving mail permanently! Don’t you sometimes wish you could get rid of that pressure? boredomresearch offers a mail service that meets your longing for a slowdown. With their project "Real Snail Mail" (snail mail is a term used in Internet jargon for normal mail) they reflect and satirise on the common expectation of rapidity and efficiency of today's communication. Via the mail server www.realsnailmail.netyou can send an email to a person of your choice. Eventually, this email is picked up by real snails equipped with an antenna on their shell. At one point of their enclosure they collect the email and carry it around as long as they chance to pass by the drop off point at the other side of the enclosure. Where the message is forwarded to the addressee including a log of its journey. The hard working snails can be observed and cheered in our gallery. boredomresearch create artworks, crossing boundaries between science, art and technology. They focus on producing software objects based on the exploration of natural systems that presents an alternative to our technologically fraught lives. Ornamental Bug Garden 001 was awarded an honorary mention in Transmediale.05, Berlin (2005) and VIDA 7.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, Madrid (2004) and is now housed in the British Council Collection in London. Exhibitions (apart from gallery exhibtions): 2008 SIGGRAPH08; Holy Fire, iMal, Brussels; 2007 CAe Banff Centre of Arts, Alberta, Canada; 2005 Third Iteration, Melbourne; transmediale.05, Berlin; 2004 FILE04, São Paulo. HAMMERING THE VOID Gazira Babeli, Second Life Preview: Friday, 29 May 2009, 7-9 pm in the gallery [DAM]Berlin and in Second Life!!! Exhibition: 30 May 2009 - 31 July 2009 Installation, films, prints The artist does not attend the opening, she has at the same time the preview in Second Life: [DAM]Berlin-Location on Locusolus-Island - there will be an online-stream in the gallery with chat! The installation is shown for the first time. Reality and virtual world - the frontiers blur, the boundaries are fluid. Gazira Babeli is an avatar in Second Life since spring 2006 and an artist. She is like a tornado in Second Life - a disruptive element! She does performances in Second Life which deal with the 3D-enviroment in a critical and humorous way. Her performances are documented through films and prints. We show her new installation "Hammering the Void". Parallel to the preview at the gallery in Berlin the Hammering-Performance of Gazira is taking place in Second Life - in the virtual rooms of our gallery! In Hammering the Voidthere is not only one Gazira, no, there are 14 and they all fight against an inner void. 14 clones of an artifical person, they all have imaginative names of Virtues and Sins: Greed Petrovic, Sloth Swansong, Temperance Navarita, Courage Sparta, Envy Sixpence etc. Equipped with a hammer in their hands they descend from the socle in the gallery, they swarm to openings of exhibtions and public events. They stroke the other unsuspecting avatars with blows from their hammer appearing to say: "Wake up! Defend yourself! Act!" They force them to react. You love them or you hate them, but you cannot remain indifferent against this agression which can be understand as an attempt for an intellectual waking-up or simply as a malice. Domenico Quaranta, curator for New Media, writes in his essay on Hammering the Void: - The world we actually have does not meet my standards. - Philip K. Dick "In 1920, at the opening of a Dada exhibition in Köln, Max Ernst made an axe available for the audience. As far as I know, this gesture was never reenacted. That's a shame. An artwork should always come with an axe in attach. This would remind us that art must be loved, or hated. That it deserves more than an idiot gaze...Yet, even on a computer screen, people keep on loving the moonlight instead of killing it, and being charmed by everything is introduced to them as “art”. Thus Gazira created the fourteen sisters...This platoon in Wellington boots and suspender belt comes without any notice, and intervenes in social events – mostly exhibition openings – making a hell of a mess. Is this the usual, boring self-referential crap we are used to find in art? What Gazira likes is to intervene in the rituality of the real, and break up its continuity. The world she actually has does not meet her standards, and she hammers it. She works in this direction from the very beginning: just think to her earthquakes, her showers of pop bananas, her Campbell's Soup cans... If you need, Gazira's hammers are there for you. Use them, against her too. That's what she wants." With her artworks she does not remain at the surface of the animation, but she interferes with the program code of the software from Second Life. By changing the coding she evokes during her performances reactions on other avatars which they cannot control anymore. For her the virtual world is a zone for experiments, a stage... Patrick Lichty, artist and curator, philosophise in his "sermon" Gazira Babeli: Hammering at the Truth, The Four Elements of Virtuality on the symbol of the hammer and violence: "Complicity: The inseparability from the act, or the impossibility of total abstraction. The double sign of the hammer in the virtual and the physical and their similar functions illustrates our complicity with actions in either world. Through the hammer, argument of separation of subject and object through mere virtuality implodes, as the difference is far more complex. It is no longer the question of the effects of hitting someone with the hammer in the gallery or in the virtual, as both actions hold us complicit with the real issue of violence itself actual or implied, leaving the hammer itself transparent. Violence through cartoon or oak mallet differ little in terms of their being consistent with the same practice, and that is the gesture of the swing, and the effect of the impact. Gazira and her vices/virtues ask you to pick up the hammer and hit your friend over the head with it, but then say, “Funny, that doesn't happen here... Ahahahah....” through this doubling and the resultant difference of effects, Gazira holds us responsible for the violence of signs, the affect of the impact, the effect of the hammer's extancy, the volition of the swing, and the complicity to the hammer and its function." Second Life is a commercial 3D-environment on the Internet, founded by the company Linden Labs and is based on an old human dream: you can invent youself as a new person, a different sex or even take over changing personalities, create a virtual living space. The real person stays anonymous, free from expectations of an every-day-surrounding. In average more than 60.000 residents at a time are online. For them Second Life is an area for retreat from life, more real than reality, but most of them fall back into the same patterns of behaviour than in their normal world... So, Gazira, swing your hammer! read the entire essaies Domenico Quaranta: Hammering the Void Patrick Lichty: Gazira Babeli: Hammering at the Truth 01 - Best of Digital Art Group exhibition on the occasion of the launch of the book Digital Art from Wolf Lieser including essays from Tilman Baumgärtel, Hans Dehlinger, Wulf Herzogenrath, Susanne Jaschko, Susanne Massmann, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Domenico Quaranta, Mark Tribe and Mitchell Whitelaw Exhibition: April 4th - May 23rd, 2009 Preview: Sa, April 4th, 2009, 4-6 p.m.!* Software, NetArt, prints, projections We show mostly works from artists who are represented in the book but have not been shown in Berlin yet - including amongst others Gazira Babeli (Second Life), Vuk Cosic (Slowenia), Eva und Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org (Italy), Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied (Russia, Germany), Jodi (Belgium, Netherlands) and Joseph Nechvatal (USA). Furthermore artworks of Frieder Nake (Germany), Mark Wilson (USA), Marius Watz (Norway) und James Faure Walker (United Kingdom). The exhibition gives you the possibility to inform yourself of the variety and the bandwith of Digital Art. The artworks range from NetArt over ASCII-Art and performances in Second Life to animations and prints. time ¦ emit LAb[au] LAboratory for Architecture and Urbanism (M.Abendroth, J.Decock, A.Plennevaux, E.Vermang) Exhibition: February 21st - March 28th, 2009 Preview: Friday, February 20th, 2009 7-9 pm The artist group LAb[au] from Brussels is known for its large-scale light-installations and kinetic objects in urban spaces (f. e. Dexia-Tower, Brussels, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEykA6Qd2L8). Their exhibition deals with the subject of time. On the basis of cybernetics and the theory of colours they transform time in light and colours. The local time of different time zones on earth will be shown as a perpetually changing colour installation on twelve consoles according to the principle of GMT. The code of the installation - the concept of the work - is visualised as a text on the walls of the gallery. In addition to that prints will be shown which represent each a period of two hours of a day. One half of the day is based on a white background to symbolise the reduction of all colours (decreasing light from noon to midnight), the other half on a black background as a result of the addition of all colours (increasing light during the morning hours). Apart from the installation time ¦ emit LAb[au] also presents their new sculpture SwarmDot, that deals with the subject of swarms. As the antecessor Pixflow it is not only an aesthetically coherent software piece but also includes the hardware intentionally as part of the sculpture. The column is entirely made of plexiglass and thereby the components are fully visible. SwarmDot consists of four vertically assembled screens, on which the software piece is shown. Non-Machines-Series Exhibition: January 27th - February 7th, 2009 Opening Reception: January 26th, 2009, 5-7 pm Christoph Korn, GER Interactive Installations The exhibition is based on a cooperation with transmediale 2009 - http://www.transmediale.de/ "In 1840 it was temporarily courteous to walk turtles on the pavement. The flâneur agreed that the turtles would dictate the speed. If it would be after him progress would have had to learn this pas. He did not succeed, but Taylor who gave out the slogan "Down with the flânerie". (Walter Benjamin) The NON machines by Christoph Korn are a draft to give priority to processes of withdrawal and non-functionality (opposed to systemise / utilisation / exploitation). Against the background of “criticism of progress” showing how an increasing explorative generation of knowledge, processes of indexing and systemisation create more subtle strategies of power, the NON machines can be seen as small, peculiar and in some cases humorous models of an alternative cognitive science. The NON machines are application programs which direct the attention to aspects like deceleration, disconnectivity, deprivation of knowledge, non-grammaticality and non-functionality. The machines are conceived as a series. Out of that 5 examples are shown: - a more complex machine without start button - machine, which counts up to 5 during 3 days - simple machine only consisting of an OFF button - simple eraser - simple machine, which turns off automatically after a duration of 11 days, without producing anything during that time

Impressum

Venus 2.0

Mark Napier, USA

Software objects, projection, prints

Exhibition: 5th of December 2009 – 27th of January 2010
The exhibition ist open by appointment only from 21. December 2009 – 04. January 2010.

Opening: Friday, 4th of December 2009, 7 – 9 pm
The artist will be present at the opening.

‘Venus 2.0’ consists of software written by the artist that collects images of the body parts of Pamela Anderson, an erotic icon of our time, from the hundreds of pictures of her available on the Internet and recreates a mobile, three-dimensional figure out of these flat, fragmentary pictures. A sculpture of Venus composed of the “raw materials” of our time: data and information. In this way, Mark Napier reflects on our perceptions of images in this Internet age, on network structures and on the Internet’s influence on our lives.
Mark Napier (b. 1961, USA) is one of the best-known Net artists and has created Net art works for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Foundation and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. His early works are regarded as Net art classics.

Every era in history has produced its own portrayal of “Venus”, the symbol of feminine beauty, using the formal language and materials contemporary to it. The Internet, a new medium for boundless communication, defines our era and has already fundamentally transformed the way we live together. Pamela Anderson has ‘grown up’ along with the rapid growth of the Internet. Starting out as an amateur erotic actress before becoming a fixture in the sphere of modern sex icons, her career has progressed in parallel to the Net’s own explosive expansion. Her attitude towards the shaping of her body through cosmetic surgery is also symptomatic of our age. According to the Guinness Book of Records, she’s the most frequently mentioned woman on the Internet.

Mark Napier chose Pamela Anderson as the focus of his new series precisely because of her celebrity on the Web and embodiment of a contemporary ideal of beauty. These works are about reproductions of images of the body in digital networks and their effect on our ideas of the aesthetic. Mark Napier regards the Net as a new space and his works frequently interrogate its nature and rules. In ‘Venus 2.0’ he recreates a body out of the medium itself. It’s the Internet‘s influence on the aesthetics of body image that interests him: cosmetic surgery plays only a secondary role.
“Ultimately, media shapes our existence much more than surgery. This work is not about the
specifics of plastic surgery, but the larger impact of media on our perception of and representation of our own bodies.“
Mark Napier in an interview with Susanne Massmann, 2009

At a formal level, a composition of superimposed, layered picture fragments emerges, referencing the flood of images existing on the Internet. As a trained painter, Mark Napier is also influenced by the history of painting in composing his works. The ‘Venus 2.0’ series contains references to Picasso‘s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” and portraits by Francis Bacon and is also in the tradition of the abstract formal language of Duchamp’s “Nude descending a staircase”.

Mark Napier (*1961, USA) lives in New York. He became inspired by software development soon after completing his training as a painter. He has been working on Net art since 1995 and was one of the first artists to deal thematically and formally with the Internet. His works explore terms such as “ownership” and “authority” in the Net and interrogate browser functions and Web design. He has been commissioned to create Net art works by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and took part in the Whitney Biennale in 2002. Institutions and festivals that have exhibited his works include the Centre Pompidou in Paris, P.S.1 New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Ars Electronica in Linz, The Kitchen, Künstlerhaus Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe, Transmediale, iMAL Brussels, Eyebeam, the Princeton Art Museum, and la Villette, Paris. He has also received awards from Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

ReVisioning the Virtual Wall

T+T | Tamiko Thiel – Teresa Reuter – Sabe Wunsch, GER

Collages based on the 3D installation "Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall"

Exhibition: 31 October - 28 November 2009

Preview: 30 October, 7 - 9 pm

Gallery [DAM]Berlin shows on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Fall for the first time internationally the large format collages of the artist team which are based on the interactive 3D installation "Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall". The digital collages show scenographies of the Berlin Wall that are conceived by the artists as associative pieces of memories - by mixing temporal and geographical elements as well as "real" and "virtual" material. The exhibition takes place in completement to the presentation of the 3D installation at the Ephraim-Palais, Berlin.

The artists use the computer as a medium to mix different time levels (before, during and after the Wall) and perspectives in one image in order to create the effect of "taking a look back" like a sequence of a dream. The transparency of parts from the Wall or of border soldiers refer to the later disintegration of the GDR. The complex structures of the collages are the
result of multiple manipulations of the original renderings from the virtual world. These renderings, taken from diverse viewpoints, have been multiplied, intermingled, layered and occasionally supplemented with photographs and archival documents, and then further altered by insertions, shiftings, and fragmentations of the images.

In complement to the exhibition you can experiment the interactive installation Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall at the Ephraim-Palais, Nicolaiviertel in Berlin, in the context of the exhibition FALLMAUERFALL | 61-89-09 from 6. November 2009 - 7. February 2010 (Link to the exhibition)

Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall is a virtual reality installation that enables users to experience a section of the now vanished Berlin Wall and how its presence affected the surrounding neighborhoods in East and West Berlin. Time travel, animations & simulations involve users in events spanning the 1960s to the present time.

Stations in 2009 of the project are:
Seattle: 911 Media Arts Center, Boston: Goethe-Institut, Lübeck: Willy-Brandt-Haus, Wolfsburg: Kunstverein, Gijon: LABoral, Berlin: Ephraim-Palais, Washington DC: American University Museum, Los Angeles: Goethe-Institut, New Delhi: Goethe-Institut.
The installation was first exhibited at the Museum for Communication, Berlin, in 2008 and was shown worldwide in museums and institutions since then.
As part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival the artwork was awarded the Grand Prize for the IBM Innovation Awards.
Website of the project: www.virtuelle-mauer-berlin.de

Artist team:

Tamiko Thiel: b. 1957 in Oakland, CA, USA, lives in Munich
B.S. Stanford University, M.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Diploma Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
Fellowships / awards include: Japan Foundation, MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Nominations: Rockerfeller Fellowship, World Technology Award, German Video Art Prize of ZKM
Numerous exhibits in the USA, Europe and Asia. Teaching positions included: Carnegie-Mellon University, Bauhaus-University/Weimar, UC/San Diego, MIT

Teresa Reuter: b. 1963 in Munich, lives in Berlin
1994 Diploma in Architecture, TU Berlin
Exhibits (Selection): metroClips NGbK (2001), IBA Lausitz (2005)

Sabe Wunsch: b. 1964 in Stuttgart, lives in Berlin.
1994 Diplom in Architecture, TU Berlin
Exhibits (Selection): Sandhandlung Installation, Temporäre Gärten, Berlin (2001)
'Sex-Zwangsarbeit in NS-Konzentrationslagern', exhibition, memorial Ravensbrück and Seoul, Corea (2007)

CHASING STILLNESS

boredomresearch, UK

Preview: 28 August, 7 - 9 pm
introduction from Dr. Susanne Jaschko, indepedent curator, and artist talk

Exhibition: 29 August - 24 Oktober 2009

You can persue your desire for slowing down your bustling everyday life in the new exhibition "Chasing Stillness" by boredomresearch. Discover the universe of the seldom songs of the whirligigs and observe the transmission of emails in real snail speed.

With "Lost calls of cloud mountain whirligigs" we present new software objects of boredomresearch. You can observe the life of small creatures called whirligigs and, particularly, listen to their songs. Each whirligig has its own unique song that lasts for the duration of a lifetime and is lost afterwards. A whirligig sleeps in silence and, if you are lucky, will start to sing after waking up. So the stillness is charged with anticipation for a song.
There are day- and night-time cycles – the light of the objects changes – and after the slow expiration of one generation a new one is created with their own songs.

Speed is fantastic! This is at least what is permanently suggested by our environment. Saving time with faster cars, computers, printers, communication systems, so that we can use our lives in an even more “efficient” way. Certainly, speed is of great advantage, especially in communication, and I’m sure we wouldn’t like to deny ourselves the convenience of email as a mean of worldwide communication for free and in “real-time”. But haven’t you already put a curse on this usually beloved method of communication, in view of the sender's expectation of a prompt reaction from your part? Instead of using the letter-box once a day you are now receiving mail permanently! Don’t you sometimes wish you could get rid of that pressure?
boredomresearch offers a mail service that meets your longing for a slowdown. With their project "Real Snail Mail" (snail mail is a term used in Internet jargon for normal mail) they reflect and satirise on the common expectation of rapidity and efficiency of today's communication.
Via the mail server www.realsnailmail.netyou can send an email to a person of your choice. Eventually, this email is picked up by real snails equipped with an antenna on their shell. At one point of their enclosure they collect the email and carry it around as long as they chance to pass by the drop off point at the other side of the enclosure. Where the message is forwarded to the addressee including a log of its journey. The hard working snails can be observed and cheered in our gallery.

boredomresearch create artworks, crossing boundaries between science, art and technology. They focus on producing software objects based on the exploration of natural systems that presents an alternative to our technologically fraught lives. Ornamental Bug Garden 001 was awarded an honorary mention in Transmediale.05, Berlin (2005) and VIDA 7.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, Madrid (2004) and is now housed in the British Council Collection in London.
Exhibitions (apart from gallery exhibtions): 2008 SIGGRAPH08; Holy Fire, iMal, Brussels; 2007 CAe Banff Centre of Arts, Alberta, Canada; 2005 Third Iteration, Melbourne; transmediale.05, Berlin; 2004 FILE04, São Paulo.

HAMMERING THE VOID

Gazira Babeli, Second Life

Preview: Friday, 29 May 2009, 7-9 pm in the gallery [DAM]Berlin and in Second Life!!!
Exhibition: 30 May 2009 - 31 July 2009

Installation, films, prints
The artist does not attend the opening, she has at the same time the preview in Second Life: [DAM]Berlin-Location on Locusolus-Island - there will be an online-stream in the gallery with chat! The installation is shown for the first time.

Reality and virtual world - the frontiers blur, the boundaries are fluid. Gazira Babeli is an avatar in Second Life since spring 2006 and an artist. She is like a tornado in Second Life - a disruptive element! She does performances in Second Life which deal with the 3D-enviroment in a critical and humorous way. Her performances are documented through films and prints. We show her new installation "Hammering the Void". Parallel to the preview at the gallery in Berlin the Hammering-Performance of Gazira is taking place in Second Life - in the virtual rooms of our gallery!

In Hammering the Voidthere is not only one Gazira, no, there are 14 and they all fight against an inner void. 14 clones of an artifical person, they all have imaginative names of Virtues and Sins: Greed Petrovic, Sloth Swansong, Temperance Navarita, Courage Sparta, Envy Sixpence etc. Equipped with a hammer in their hands they descend from the socle in the gallery, they swarm to openings of exhibtions and public events. They stroke the other unsuspecting avatars with blows from their hammer appearing to say: "Wake up! Defend yourself! Act!" They force them to react. You love them or you hate them, but you cannot remain indifferent against this agression which can be understand as an attempt for an intellectual waking-up or simply as a malice.

Domenico Quaranta, curator for New Media, writes in his essay on Hammering the Void:
- The world we actually have does not meet my standards. - Philip K. Dick
"In 1920, at the opening of a Dada exhibition in Köln, Max Ernst made an axe available for the audience. As far as I know, this gesture was never reenacted. That's a shame. An artwork should always come with an axe in attach. This would remind us that art must be loved, or hated. That it deserves more than an idiot gaze...Yet, even on a computer screen, people keep on loving the moonlight instead of killing it, and being charmed by everything is introduced to them as “art”. Thus Gazira created the fourteen sisters...This platoon in Wellington boots and suspender belt comes without any notice, and intervenes in social events – mostly exhibition openings – making a hell of a mess. Is this the usual, boring self-referential crap we are used to find in art? What Gazira likes is to intervene in the rituality of the real, and break up its continuity. The world she actually has does not meet her standards, and she hammers it. She works in this direction from the very beginning: just think to her earthquakes, her showers of pop bananas, her Campbell's Soup cans... If you need, Gazira's hammers are there for you. Use them, against her too. That's what she wants."

With her artworks she does not remain at the surface of the animation, but she interferes with the program code of the software from Second Life. By changing the coding she evokes during her performances reactions on other avatars which they cannot control anymore. For her the virtual world is a zone for experiments, a stage...

Patrick Lichty, artist and curator, philosophise in his "sermon" Gazira Babeli: Hammering at the Truth, The Four Elements of Virtuality on the symbol of the hammer and violence:
"Complicity: The inseparability from the act, or the impossibility of total abstraction. The double sign of the hammer in the virtual and the physical and their similar functions illustrates our complicity with actions in either world. Through the hammer, argument of separation of subject and object through mere virtuality implodes, as the difference is far more complex. It is no longer the question of the effects of hitting someone with the hammer in the gallery or in the virtual, as both actions hold us complicit with the real issue of violence itself actual or implied, leaving the hammer itself transparent. Violence through cartoon or oak mallet differ little in terms of their being consistent with the same practice, and that is the gesture of the swing, and the effect of the impact. Gazira and her vices/virtues ask you to pick up the hammer and hit your friend over the head with it, but then say, “Funny, that doesn't happen here... Ahahahah....” through this doubling and the resultant difference of effects, Gazira holds us responsible for the violence of signs, the affect of the impact, the effect of the hammer's extancy, the volition of the swing, and the complicity to the hammer and its function."

Second Life is a commercial 3D-environment on the Internet, founded by the company Linden Labs and is based on an old human dream: you can invent youself as a new person, a different sex or even take over changing personalities, create a virtual living space. The real person stays anonymous, free from expectations of an every-day-surrounding. In average more than 60.000 residents at a time are online. For them Second Life is an area for retreat from life, more real than reality, but most of them fall back into the same patterns of behaviour than in their normal world...

So, Gazira, swing your hammer!

read the entire essaies
Domenico Quaranta: Hammering the Void
Patrick Lichty: Gazira Babeli: Hammering at the Truth

01 - Best of Digital Art

Group exhibition on the occasion of the launch of the book Digital Art from Wolf Lieser including essays from Tilman Baumgärtel, Hans Dehlinger, Wulf Herzogenrath, Susanne Jaschko, Susanne Massmann, Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Domenico Quaranta, Mark Tribe and Mitchell Whitelaw

Exhibition: April 4th - May 23rd, 2009

Preview: Sa, April 4th, 2009, 4-6 p.m.!

Software, NetArt, prints, projections

We show mostly works from artists who are represented in the book but have not been shown in Berlin yet - including amongst others Gazira Babeli (Second Life), Vuk Cosic (Slowenia), Eva und Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org (Italy), Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied (Russia, Germany), Jodi (Belgium, Netherlands) and Joseph Nechvatal (USA). Furthermore artworks of Frieder Nake (Germany), Mark Wilson (USA), Marius Watz (Norway) und James Faure Walker (United Kingdom).

The exhibition gives you the possibility to inform yourself of the variety and the bandwith of Digital Art.
The artworks range from NetArt over ASCII-Art and performances in Second Life to animations and prints.

time ¦ emit

LAb[au] LAboratory for Architecture and Urbanism

(M.Abendroth, J.Decock, A.Plennevaux, E.Vermang)

Exhibition: February 21st - March 28th, 2009
Preview: Friday, February 20th, 2009 7-9 pm

The artist group LAb[au] from Brussels is known for its large-scale light-installations and kinetic objects in urban spaces (f. e. Dexia-Tower, Brussels, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEykA6Qd2L8).

Their exhibition deals with the subject of time. On the basis of cybernetics and the theory of colours they transform time in light and colours. The local time of different time zones on earth will be shown as a perpetually changing colour installation on twelve consoles according to the principle of GMT.
The code of the installation - the concept of the work - is visualised as a text on the walls of the gallery.

In addition to that prints will be shown which represent each a period of two hours of a day. One half of the day is based on a white background to symbolise the reduction of all colours (decreasing light from noon to midnight), the other half on a black background as a result of the addition of all colours (increasing light during the morning hours).

Apart from the installation time ¦ emit LAb[au] also presents their new sculpture SwarmDot, that deals with the subject of swarms. As the antecessor Pixflow it is not only an aesthetically coherent software piece but also includes the hardware intentionally as part of the sculpture. The column is entirely made of plexiglass and thereby the components are fully visible. SwarmDot consists of four vertically assembled screens, on which the software piece is shown.

Non-Machines-Series

Exhibition: January 27th - February 7th, 2009
Opening Reception: January 26th, 2009, 5-7 pm

Christoph Korn, GER

Interactive Installations

The exhibition is based on a cooperation with transmediale 2009 - http://www.transmediale.de/

"In 1840 it was temporarily courteous to walk turtles on the pavement. The flâneur agreed that the turtles would dictate the speed. If it would be after him progress would have had to learn this pas. He did not succeed, but Taylor who gave out the slogan "Down with the flânerie". (Walter Benjamin)

The NON machines by Christoph Korn are a draft to give priority to processes of withdrawal and non-functionality (opposed to systemise / utilisation / exploitation).

Against the background of “criticism of progress” showing how an increasing explorative generation of knowledge, processes of indexing and systemisation create more subtle strategies of power, the NON machines can be seen as small, peculiar and in some cases humorous models of an alternative cognitive science.
The NON machines are application programs which direct the attention to aspects like deceleration, disconnectivity, deprivation of knowledge, non-grammaticality and non-functionality.

The machines are conceived as a series. Out of that 5 examples are shown:

- a more complex machine without start button
- machine, which counts up to 5 during 3 days
- simple machine only consisting of an OFF button
- simple eraser
- simple machine, which turns off automatically after a duration of 11 days, without producing anything during that time

Impressum