HANNE MUGAAS

IDA EKBLAD AND ANDERS NORDBY
SETH PRICE
808

Curated by Hanne Mugaas for Rhizome.org/ New Museum of Contemporary Art,
New York.

The Copy and Paste Show explores the evolution of copy-and-paste culture, through which the copying of digital material has become a major technique in the construction of online identity and style. As with any visual style, web aesthetics often rely on the appropriation of non-original media. In design, people often copy html codes from other websites in order to sample existing material. In constructing online profiles or personal websites, participants often call upon found images, video or graphics. In this context, software and tools gains importance, as they enable new kinds of sharing and distribution amongst cultural producers, and amateurs become empowered to create and distribute sophisticated and layered work. The artists in The Copy and Paste Show explore how technical and digital tools alter web aesthetics, music production, and online and offline relations through the use of copy and paste techniques.

ENTER EXHIBITION HERE

Also, visit the re-designed exhibition by Computerprincess here

Pictures: Seth Price: "Title Variable (2001- )" , Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby: "Space Lady", Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby: "R. Stevie Moore".

SETH PRICE
PAPER RAD
TAKESHI MURATA
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
THOMAS BARBEY
PAUL DAVIS (BEIGE)
JEAN BAPTISTE BAYLE


Curated by Hanne Mugaas
Vilma Gold, London, May 2006








Take it to the Net is an investigation into a new generation of artists who use the techniques, skills, and aesthetics of the internet as well as digital information transfer in their work. What is or is not conceived of as art is of less importance in an era where the amateur as producer has become the professional. The Internet has opened the floodgates for producers, and the emphasis now lies in the hands of those who access the information.

The exhibition includes works by New York and Paris based artists such as Michael Bell Smith, whose Chapters 1-12 of R.Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" Synced and Played Simultaneously features a manipulated version of R. Kelly's hip-hopera. Takeshi Murata employs an exacting frame-by-frame technique to turn B-movie footage into fragmented and abstracted digital imagery. Seth Price's Painting Sites is a slide show ensembling images from an Alta Vista search, completed with a fairytale narrative. The artist group Paper Rad reprograms extracts from television, video games and popular music, frequently doing performances and concerts as well as gallery shows. They have made a new work for this exhibition. Jean Baptiste Bayle has constructed a web site for downloading of hits played backwards to defeat copyright laws, as well as a site of compilations of every cover available of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson. Paul Davis is part of the programming ensemble Beige, and is showing a work comprised of cassette mix tapes along with their packaging design.

Ongoing project by myself and Cory Arcangel: Kick Out the Internet Jams
Also, see The Year in the Internet 2005!

TAKESHI MURATA
CORY ARCANGEL
MARIUS ENGH
FREDRIK SODERBERG
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
ANDERS NORDBY
PAPER RAD
IDA EKBLAD
FAYCAL BAGHRICHE
LARS LAUMANN
JEAN PAUL NEWMAN
MATTHIEU CLAINCHARD
LINA VISTE GROENLI
ARE MOKKELBOST
DANIEL JENSEN


Curated by Hanne Mugaas and Ida Ekblad, May 2006, Glassbox, Paris





For more info, see Le Commisariat

I have written a text for Dicksmith Gallery in London, upon Benjamin Alexander Huseby's exhibition, opening on 20th September. Gallery website here. More on Benjamin's work here. Pictured: Michael Olestad Nybraten as Ann Sofie Back, photographed by Benjamin Alexander Huseby.

Jean Baptiste Bayle, Michael Bell Smith, Lars Laumann, Lina Viste Groenli, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Nils Bech, Ida Ekblad, Anders Nordby, Dan Persson

Screening and lecture,
March 2006, MIACA/ Bank Art Yokohama and Tokyo

Artists include Seth Price, Cory Arcangel, Paper Rad, Beige Records, Michael Bell-Smith

The screening included young artists interpreting and mimicking through their choices of media and distribution. Conscious usage of technology, distribution channels, knowledge enabling and participation are major points in their production, inside or outside the art scene. The artists were talked about in the lecture in relation to issues of cultural production and distribution of information, and investigations of cultures generated and re-circulated by mass media technologies and information systems, through which they are questioning the production and dissemination of art and meaning itself.

Bad Beuys Entertainment, Klara Liden, Anders Bojen and Kristoffer Orum, Antonia Low, Kenneth Balfelt, Research and Development

Curated by Hanne Mugaas, Fotogalleriet, Oslo, May 2005

KLARA LIDEN

Klara Liden's work is taking the form of videos, performances or installations, which have in common the use of do-it-yourself strategies, an exuberant energy and a certain form of rebellion. A photographic self-portrait produced in 2004 presents the artist with her tool kit, including pliers, screwdrivers and a flashlight, that she carries in her trench coat. In her previous projects, Liden built a house with discarded materials on the bank of a river in Berlin, set up an alternative free postal service in Stockholm, and performed provocative dances in Stockholm's commuter trains.

BAD BEUYS ENTERTAINMENT

Founded in 1999, at Cergy-Pontoise, in the Parisian suburbs.
The work of Bad Beuys Entertainment stems from and speaks about the outskirts. To live in these outer-urban spaces is to inhabit a certain "culture", with specific reference points, represented by a whole spectrum of outsider activities. Bad Beuys Entertainment works with and around tags, rap, riots, insults, burning cars, suburban underworlds, urban legends, big architectural housing developments, popular culture,
the ubiquity of the television, urbanism, hip-hop and graffiti.

Bad Beuys Entertainment (etymology). The artistic program of the group can be seen through the multi-lingual play of words. BAD BOYS ENTERTAINMENT is the name of a major American hip-hop label. Sean Combs aka Puff Daddy is the founder and producer of this ethnocentric cultural company, which seeks worldwide distribution of a specific kind of music: black, urban and generated by subculture. In Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boys has been replaced by Beuys, the XXth century German artist, who had an original artistic program that he called "social sculpture", that is, he considered social fact as material for creation, a social material he wanted to model and transform by his "actions" and his artistic statements. He clearly aimed to change society.

Kenneth Anger | Dearraindrop | Marius Engh | Delia Gonzales and Gavin Russom | Lina Viste Groenli | Daniel Jensen |
Anders Nordby | Arild Tveito

Curated by Ida Ekblad and Hanne Mugaas for Torpedo Art Press and Bookstore, Oslo, June 2006.

"There are Two Paths", takes its starting point from the film "The Man We Want to Hang" by Kenneth Anger. The film is an evocation of the British occult master Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) showing drawings, paintings and objects by and about him. Anger has in his life and work been inspired by Crowley, who was a prolific writer, mystic, hedonist, and sexual revolutionary, best known for his occult writings, especially "The Book of the Law".

"The Man We Want to Hang" will be the central work in a screening and exhibition exploring works inspired by the same sources as the Anger/ Crowley connection or by them directly, further playing with their relation to popular and outsider cultures. The works exhibited have in common an exploration and illumination toward the dualism of man. Marius Engh is showing a work titled "Dyad Moon (Bones in Tomb, Flesh in Womb)". The sculpture is a fusion between an altar and a tombstone, referring to the rituals of the midsummer moon. Anders Nordby is contributing a drawing titled "A Night to Remember", inspired by The Illuminati secret society, as well as a musical piece exploring the possible presence of Mr. Crowley´s teachings hidden on Led Zeppelin´s "Stairways to Heaven". Lina Viste Groenli shows a collection of specially selected books which shape forms a sculpture. -The forced merging of titles and content, whilst making each book lose some of it's uniqueness and autonomy, creates new readings and connotations. Arild Tveito is showing a sculpture titled " Black Brick Road", consisting of twenty-one copies of plaster casted bricks, painted and placed on wood. The work explores the possibilities of obtaining valuable knowledge on the path of misfortune and destruction. Daniel Jensen is showing a photographic work titled "Altar", depicting a suburban milieu where a bridge covered in graffiti crosses a small stream. On the side of the bridge one can read: "God is Dead, Lucifer is The Leader". Dearraindrop will show a work on paper called "The Dino Hunters", as well as other works turning everyday garbage and remains into magic. The artist/ musician duo Delia Gonzales and Gavin Russom will show two films: "By a Waterfall" and "Day of Blood". Delia and Gavin are inspired by the occult and magical and have initiated projects such as "Black Leotard Front", "Fight Evil with Evil" , worked with "Magic shows" and recently released an album on DFA: "The Days of Mars".

Text written for Fotogalleriet in Oslo for the catalogue of the show of Benjamin Alexander Huseby called Nature and Youth.


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Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man's. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role. (Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933))

Looking at nature photographs demands a certain distance combined with a notion of nostalgia. The appearance of nature is alienating, suggesting that late-capitalist westerners can no longer be in it. To experience an "authentic encounter" with nature is today almost impossible. The idea of nature has become nothing more than a notion, on the verge of becoming a cliche. Some may say that the only proper and respected way to enter the wilderness is to take photographs and leave only footprints. The photograph is thus environmental friendly, and maintains the distance and lack of boundary between human and nature, leaving nature untouched. Animals thus exist only through pictures, refusing us to engage with them other than something hidden, forgotten or nostalgic. John Berger argues that capitalism’s reorganization of society has separated us from the animals with whom we used to live. The use of images of animals can be seen as a compensation for this disconnection by functioning as an ideal figure of freedom. However, nature photography is the figure of an ideal relation with nature; although it provides access it is leaving it untouched. The photographs offer us an image of nature which we at the same time are forbidden to occupy.

In the Victorian age one looked at nature as the picturesque; Nature had to be composed according to human feelings. It was supposed to function as a healing space outside of society. The Victorian landscape was an improved one as the Victorians wanted to see nature as composed and artificial, which is still the notion of today; to become completely absorbed by nature seems unnatural and uncivilized. When photographing nature, the Victorians used stuffed animals to get the perfect and "natural" look they intended, today perfection is enabled through technology. What is wild must be put into the system.

The limit between the civilized and the wild and further between fact and fiction is crossed in the case of the feral child, the most famous cases of the 19th century being Victor of Aveyron, made famous by Francois Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, and by Kaspar Hauser, main character of Werner Herzog’s haunting film with the same title. Children living in the woods, alone or among animals, have for centuries inspired awe, fascination and disbelief, whereas the notion of the innocent child is replaced by that of a wild beast. There is a double side to this as the reason wolves take care of babies has to do with their innocence and beauty. What is beautiful is scientifically proven to be universally corresponded, in this case there is actually a relation between human beings and animals. According to this, one would understand why Walt Disney pinned a note over each of his animators' desks, reminding them to "Keep it cute!" The attributes of beauty are vehicular and transferable from human to non-human creatures and to hybrid forms. It is precisely this so-called illusion that unites biological, commercial and emotional concerns. The uncivilized and frightening have either to be manipulated to fit within certain aesthetics, or to be hidden away to make us forget.

Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that mass culture in our times both stimulates and is predicated upon mimetic modes of perception in which spontaneity, animation of objects, and a language of the body combining thought with action and sensuousness with intellect, is paramount. The optical unconscious is opened up by the camera and its techniques such as enlargement and slow motion. To narrate and act, as well as constantly reinvent the image one projects, has become crucial. The eclecticism of modern life creates a history which is increasingly personal and differentiated as well as filled with expectations of micro- and macro- spectacles at every stage. Narration is created individually, by piecing together extracts and facts to create meaning in the story of ones own life. Further, the notion of memory becomes crucial; every time an image appears, connections and interferences spring up around it. Triggering moments out of time, refraction and flash, images reveal a network of further connections. Then, the question concerning who is appropriate to decide what is history becomes important. What is going to be remembered, what are the generations to come allowed to know? In a time of extensive image-production and distribution, this process is certainly chaotic but also a more democratic one. The responsibility to create an impression is transferred to the receiver and his or hers ability to choose and decide. New techniques are allowing us multiple views where a range of mediations are covering different fields of history. An example is the French Resistance which consisted of both men and women, and they all had lovers and sweethearts. But none of this was written about by historians, and consequently did not exist. Fifty years later, cinema comes along as the appropriate mediation, further displaying a time-gap which also has to be taken under consideration when interpreting it.

Most of what scientists know about the universe they have learned from images. The distant and alienating is studied through the representation of the camera lens, feeding unknown information to clarify fact and distinguish it from assumptions or fiction. Hollywood uses images to produce entertainment and parallel lives where the narrative demands rapidity and easy consumption. Images as illustration is another notion, either complimenting another form or depreciating its own value. Godard talked about an indirect form of illustration; "...not like showing a photo of Marilyn Monroe when you are talking about her, but showing a photo of something else to introduce another idea". Refusing an easy reading, art stands in opposition:. As quoted by Richard Prince; "uncertainty is the only thing I can be certain of just now". The large amount of image production makes it difficult to differentiate between art and non-art. To navigate within culture is a skill. Culture's theft of imagery and styles demands overview and research skills rather than specific knowledge. To arrange and rearrange images is to personally or administratively produce or document history. Either using real documents, close copies or absolute fakes, the images exist to create meaning and commentary within their context. Truth and evidence may be questioned, but the image is till there. Science may answer anything and everything but we still do not know the truth about why there is something instead of nothing.

We have entered a culture made up of images, a thickening circle of images; culture is the new Nature, where one escapes to when there is a desire to leave, when boredom becomes uneasy. The longing to depart and to travel has established itself as a norm, and the longing is always easily fulfilled. We have entered the culture of choice where the importance is to know what is available, and how to choose, arrange and use it. You no longer escape by thinking or imagining, what to perceive is already visualized for you.

I am curating an exhibition for LaVitrine in Paris. Updates to come.

http://www.artsince69.com/

hanne.mugaas@gmail.com

Everything I do (I do it for you) is a project carried out both in the form of an exhibition and as a one-night series of music based performances. The love song of Bryan Adams was one of the major number-one hit singles of the generation of the participating artists, in this context referring to their artistic practices including notions of sampling, imaging and media, copyright and hacking. Coming from or inhabiting these structures, by being present in or bringing the mediation into an art context, the participants move in- between by posing questions of art and context, means of distribution and art versus non-art. Everything I do (I do it for you) also includes a third point by acting as an introduction to the artists existent work in other mediations and contexts outside of art.

The typing of Everything I do (I do it for you) obtains 260 000 hits from Google, the majority containing the lyrics of the song, downloads and cover versions in the form of ring tones, midi and karaoke. Brandy did a cover. A rumour involving Bon Jovi exists. “How to-" hacks on how to modify the song is of course present. The song has been used and reused, and is made available in different forms, by different means, intentions and aesthetics throughout the web. These means of distribution changes the song and the memory of it through re-appropriations and sampling, but also through availability and the distribution itself. Everything I do (I do it for you) was originally a soundtrack. The movie was "Robin Hood- Prince of Thieves". In the case of the exhibition the interest lies in the give and take of culture and how it affects art, art context, as well as what is allowed into the definition of art.

Jean Baptiste Bayle is interested in this Robin Hood- component of the Internet: the notion of giving and receiving. As the web is based on exchange and distribution, when publishing files on the web one is automatically giving away for the sake of others, the reason being either to inform, shock or please. The giving-away is common language on the web, and contributions are affluent. Bayle is implicitly arguing for less of a rupture between artistic interventions and distributed media, his Internet interventions containing projects involving or being based on computer hacks, live streaming, sampling as well as programs such as Google and Friendster. Projects include a compilation of every existing cover version of Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, an Internet Popomat mixing extracts of hits generated by the user, and an Internet site offering hits played backwards for download.

Michael Bell-Smith is working in very similar means, when addressing subjects such as copyright and re-appropriation of popular culture. For the exhibition, Bell-Smith is showing "Full of Stars" (2005), an animation which casts space as a flowing mandala of techno detritus, spewing cosmic truths in the form of lotto numbers. Mixing the aesthetics and imagery of video games, science fiction, Eastern spirituality and drug culture, the piece draws parallels between the blissed-out spectatorship of these forms while critiquing the transcendence they promise.

Bell-Smith is in his work using the distribution channels of mass communication, thus making an impact outside of the art context. The New York Times was commenting upon his project "In the Closet" (2004), made by layering all the chapters of the R.Kelly music DVD. Projects also include a hit compilation mixing the originals of for instance "Survivor", "Thong Song", "No Scrubs" and "Crazy in Love" with their ring tone versions. Another project is "3 Notes and Runnin'" (2004- ), an online music compilation commemorating and protesting The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Case No. 01-00412, Michael Bell Smiths explanation follows:

"In the case, the court found that NWA violated copyright law when they sampled 3 notes of a guitar riff from Funkadelic's "Get off Your Ass and Jam" for their song "100 Miles and Runnin'". The ruling reversed a district court finding that because "no reasonable juror, even one familiar with the works of George Clinton, would recognize the source of the sample without having been told of its source", sampling clearance should not be required, that all samples, regardless of how heavily manipulated or unrecognizable they may be, are subject either to "clearance" (obtaining permission for use of the sample, usually in exchange for money), or litigation. In an instant, this act made the majority of sample based music illegal. To protest this decision, we were creating a forum for sample-based musicians and artists to share their own 30 second songs which have been created using only the sample in question. By doing so, we hope to showcase the potential and diversity of sample based music and sound art, and to call into question the relationship between a sample and its use. All entries is posted on an Internet site as they are received".

Themes of sampling and re-contextualization in music is brought into the exhibition by the solo singer Nils Bech and the former Death Metal performer Dan Persson, as well as Jean Baptiste Bayle and Michael Bell-Smith which all contribute music based performances.

Nils Bech is drawing on the romantic terms of the exhibition title. Performing a cappella, detached from any spectacle or artifact, he sings hit covers of the latest ten years, employing a notion of up-to-date nostalgia. Standing alone in the gallery, proposing nothing but himself and his own voice, the cover version on offer is stripping the musical components down to its most basic, directly confronting the listener/viewer. The notion of nostalgia is emphasized through the sublime of the situation, directing as well as questioning art and the art space itself.

Dan Persson has been a central character on the Scandinavian Black and Death Metal scenes, both as a member of several bands and producer on a number of projects. In his new project, electric guitar and vocal are the only elements. The result is deconstructed Metal, without the basic back lines, leaving a closer connection between the performer and the audience.

The two artists are working within two very different parts of the music industry, but the performances are acted out by the same means. Limited production was in Death Metal intentionally used as a statement against mainstream music. The performer's use of costumes and face paint is by intention hiding the wearers' identity. Although the Death Metal music scene is underground, it creates just as much a spectacle through its performances, offstage life and rumors ( as an example, the Scandinavian Death Metal scene is world famous because of murder and church fires). While Bech is focusing on the individual idol within popular music by stripping the performance down, Persson is using the same means, offering the basics of Black and Death Metal. Although frequently performing in art galleries, both Bech and Persson are professional musicians.

As the Internet only seems to be mobilized on request, it is certainly not existing otherwise. The users of the Internet make the Internet, not only through submissions, but by their demand for results, through search engines, or simply by typing in an URL address. As an example, Richard Posner' s book "Public Intellectuals- a Study of Decline" (2001), listing the top 100 public intellectuals, was based on internet searches. Similarly, the artist Seth Price has been using the same strategy when producing videos; for instance, asking the search engine Alta Vista for results for the term "painting", he saved all the images the search acquired, added a German Romantic fairy tale which was both relating and not relating to the images as narration on top, and that was the work.

Ida Ekblad employs Google as an instrument in her artistic practise, her art depending on results of specific image searches. By implicating the aesthetics of the Internet and results being available at the time of the search, the art is produced, the material being customised into sculptures or films. The particular search is carried out based on popularity research throughout the trends of the web. For Everything I do (I do it for you), her search basis has among others been cyber dog, alien dog, funky dog, circus dog, bizarre dog, costume dog and drag dog, all popular subjects of the web, which in the end will culminate into a sculpture.

Ekblad is in collaboration with Anders Nordby hosting the websites www.computerprincess.com and www.indexof.no where from they document their Internet-result based work, including drawings, collages, video and photographs as well as curated projects. Ekblad and Nordby considers the Internet a holy sacred place that constantly feeds them information and inspiration (those who are less enlightened do not understand this...). Anders Nordby looks to themes such as magic, kids, legends and strange phenomenons for inspiration. One of his current projects is the attempt to showcase his LSD blue ball-point pen drawings in the art/gallery sections in Internet pages such as www.erowid.org, although he has not yet been allowed into the website. The letter of rejection goes as follows: "The Art Vault jury process takes into consideration many factors when we decide not to add a submitted work to the collection. Though we have decided not to include your submission(s) at this time, we do appreciate your effort and we hope you won't take our declination as a comment on your talent or ability. It seems like you are on the right track, and we look forward to your future submissions. Till then... stay creative!"

Benjamin Alexander Huseby comes from another end of image production, being a fashion photographer, working for different well-known magazines such as Vogue and Another Magazine, but also exhibiting as an artist. For the exhibition he is showing a new project, a collection of images of boys, respectively Scallies and Skinheads. Having their roots in the English working class, both groups have become a fetish in the gay community. Several websites exist where people are posting pictures and discussing the boys by their style and cuteness. The project will show downloaded images from the websites, assembled into two posters. The pictures chosen are photographs where the object is not aware about his role as such, staying in opposition to the gay scene where objectification is a rule. The work further emphasizes the obsession of these particular subcultures as well as addressing how youth cultures get caught up by the mass media industry.

In a society of comprehensive image production and distribution, the distinction between art and non-art is blurred and could be difficult to tell. Placed inside the art context, framed by an institution or written about in an art magazine, supposedly your production is appropriate to obtain the label of art. The question of art versus non-art involves the discussion of distribution, and in art a fear of employment when it comes to applications of media or channels of distribution.To quote Andreas Kluge:

"When you make a picture you not only need a frame, but a house or a museum where you can hang the painting. First you have to organize open areas within the mass media, spaces where participation is still possible. (...) The central notion is that the arts alone, separate from the rest of society, are not capable of expression. They would somehow become purely academic. (...) You cannot limit yourself to one area of specialized craft. Instead, regardless of craft, you have to charge all forms of expression that lead to the community, to other people, with meaning. Basically, you have to venture forward again and again, to get in the midst of what people are interested in. You have to seek out the remote and wild places for art to renew itself". (1)

The reaching- out part of art has been widely discussed but too often by the wrong means. To reach out, but still stay in vogue with yourself and your project is the part where artists often fail. To go outside of the gallery is one thing, to choose your channels of distribution or inhabitation another. A new generation of artists is obviously at terms with their contemporary situation concerning possibilities of mass media, and further, how to use it. As an example, art students turn out to study Economics at the same time as getting their Fine Art degree. Michael Bell-Smith is participating in talks on copyright law. Jean Baptiste Bayle is lecturing on and giving workshops in computer techniques as well as hosting live streaming through the Internet.

The Internet contains media previously unavailable outside of controlled broadcasts or looked into consumer products such as records and videos. Through the web, accessibility, and most important; usage and mutability, becomes the main line. The information found on the Internet is not only to be passively consumed, it is material to be re-appropriated and re-circulated back on the web or brought out in new forms, through different media and context, for example to be used in the context of art. As Michael Bell Smith and Jean Baptiste Bayle are using found material, re- appropriating it before re- circulate it on the Internet, Ida Ekblad, Anders Nordby, Lars Laumann and Lina Viste Groenli use the found material to create work for the art context.

Lars Laumann draws inspiration from the outskirts of popular culture, using extracts from science and modern mythologies in the form of found texts, images and objects, so by reediting and sampling creating work that can take form as poetry, collages, installations, poster-books or videos. He is mixing different medias and techniques to create new idiosyncratically worlds that can be seen as absurd or unsettling. For Everything I do (I do it for you) the sentence "The World Wont Listen" is written in a font inspired by different popular subjects. Further, Laumann is working on the specific pop-cultural idolization of E.T., its story including subjects of discovery, rescue and escape, similar to the Peter Pan myth which is also included in the film. The story of E.T. is staying parallel to the Biblical story, and the promotion poster is recalling Michelangelo' s Creation of Man, its wide points of references staying typical for pop-cultural means of production.

Lina Viste Groenli is concerned with common references and readings, as well as the distortion or rearranging of these. Her work focuses largely on the representation of objects and/or ideologies connected to contemporary lifestyle. In the exhibition she is showing a sculpture. The sculpture is a box of books, containing a compilation of the artists own personal library.

The titles of the books easily relates to popular themes of the Internet, which again relates to the notion of the popular archive. The storage of documentation and the sources of information has changed drastically. The traditional form of the archive draws on the question of who is appropriate to decide what is considered history. New media, and more important, the Internet, allows anyone to contribute, I am here quoting Seth Price:

"An archive like this allows for an experience of history that is quite personal. Consumer experience widens and flattens horizontally, following a slow shift from the old model of the pyramid to the new model of, say, the pancake. Media artifacts such as pop songs, furniture, logos and advertisements come to stand as headstones marking bygone eras, much like illuminated manuscripts or Victorian corsets". (2)

The Internet is giving a broader sense of history, containing everything from scientific reports and educational resources to people blogging every detail of their life, and, as Viste Groendal is pointing out, obscure stories of UFO sightings and Hollywood details of trash.

While popular mediations have been based upon the user as a solely receiver staying passive, Internet requires a certain level of engagement and action. Further, the Internet does not demand scheduled time, as with cinema, theater, concerts and talks. Culture has been under control, although art and galleries have stayed free to a certain extent, giving an alternative context where images can be experienced over a longer period of time and where films are looped. Within mass communication, at least with the introduction of the Internet as memory, knowledge as well as culture is inherited in new ways. A work does no longer need to be seen. One consumes the documentation by googling. The memory of a movie can be obtained by reviews, the trailer, user discussions and images, as well as the official website. One is consuming culture by extracts. This is not a new phenomenon although the Internet is making it so much easier. Andre Breton and Jacques Vache spent evenings wandering from one movie theater to the other; this was in the early days of cinema. Breton and Vache stayed until they had got enough and left for another movie. At this time, dropping in and leaving in the middle of movies was custom. This is a way of consuming culture which is appropriate when relating to the Internet and the way culture now is consumed through it. Information is gathered through appropriations. You do not need the whole, you neither have the time to acquire it. There is too much going on. Ludwig Wittgenstein said:

"It is as if one saw a screen with scattered colour- patches, and said: the way they are here, they are unintelligible; they only make sense when one completes them into a shape. - Whereas I want to say: Here is the whole. (If you complete it, you falsify it)". (3)

Hanne Mugaas

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Notes:

1) Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Andreas Kluge, www.nettime.org
2) Seth Price; Industrial Synth, distributed at Video Viewpoints of Modern Art, 2001 as supplement to the film Industrial Synth.
3) Quote taken from Victor Burgin; The Remembered Film, 2004.

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Lars Lauman, living and working in Oslo, initiated the gallery project Schaufenster, and was one of the editors of the compilation Nesten, gathering young emerging artists and writers from Norway. He will show his new video at White Columns in February 2007.

Michael Bell- Smith, based in New York, is developing projects both for the Internet and as an artist. He has participated in exhibitions in venues such as Tate Liverpool, Eyebeam, and [plug.in] Basel. He is currently showing with Foxy Production in New York.

Jean Baptiste Bayle, living and working in Paris, is developing projects for the Internet, but also showing in galleries as well as working with music.

Nils Bech, living in Oslo, is a solo singer, performing cover versions of hits from the last decade. Bech has been performing in different venues, ranging from the National Museum of Art and Design in Oslo to Curator Space in London.

Dan Persson, living in Berlin, has been a central character on the Scandinavian Black and Death Metal scene, both as member of several bands and producer on a number of projects.

Benjamin Alexander Huseby, based in London, is a fashion and art photographer, currently working with magazines such as Dazed and Confused, Another Magazine, Vogue and Self Service. He has participated in art shows in Curator Space in London and Kunstwerke in Berlin.

Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby, living and working in Oslo and Amsterdam, host the websites www.computerprincess.com and www.indexof.no. As Computerprincess, they have exhibited in various venues in Oslo, and will be part of future shows in Los Angeles and The General Store in Milwaukee.

Lina Viste Groenli held a solo show in UKS, the Young Artist Society in Oslo in Spring 2005. She is at present in residency at IASPIS in Stockholm.

Hanne Mugaas is an independent curator based in London.

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Links>

http://www.burncopy.com/
http://www.burncopy.com/cc/
http://www.downhillbattle.org/3notes/
http://www.foxyproduction.com/
http://1000ansdejazz.ath.cx/anthology/BJ6/
http://1000ansdejazz.ath.cx/intro.htm
http://popautomate.fr.nf/
http://palindrome.rec.free.fr/
http://gigabrother.online.fr/
http://bugnmix.free.fr/
http://borderphonics.samizdat.net/webradio/
http://streamlab.info/
http://copyright.rules.it/
http://computerprincess.com/
http://content.jengajam.com/birthdaytreat_cb.mov
http://www.ianhaig.net/men/index.html
http://itunes.stanford.edu/
http://www.monkeon.co.uk/swearadventure/
http://toshop.com/alien/

( A talk: )

Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel

Published in the catalogue for the exhibition With Us Against Reality or Against Us at Willy Wonka Inc. in Oslo, August 2005.

> Could you say something about Buffalo , it certainly must have had a huge effect on what you are doing now. I am also wondering about you and your sister, and your early collaborative projects.

It’s funny cause I was just talking to a friend of mine about growing up in Buffalo. We were laughing cause in New York when you tell someone you grew up in Buffalo, they look at you with this expression of deep pity like you grew up on Mars. But 4 people in Norway who are not familiar with Buffalo, it’s a city in the northern US on the border of Canada. Even in the US most people don’t know anything about it except that it is famous for its oddly severe winter snow storms (its geography makes it such that there are insane snow storms that come out of nowhere), and that it is a classic rust belt city which means it is filled with abandoned factories and whatever. 100 years ago it was one of the wealthiest cities in America, and around the 60’s it lost all of its industry and now it has basically been forgotten. As for my art and stuff, it has had a big influence. First of all there was never ANYTHING to do, so I had to make my own fun, and t!his is how I ended up making videos with my sister when we were young. This I guess it quite common though, but more specifically Buffalo, has this really strange video art culture. In the 70’s all these insane video art people from New York moved there to teach at the University. These people included Stan and Woody Vasulka (amazing early video and video synth stuff), and Tony Conrad (helped kick start the minimal music thing with La Monte Young, and went on to make ground breaking flicker films and video art). So the work of these artists really shaped the artistic identity of the city. I remember watching TV when I was younger and seeing these weirdo minimal color field videos late at night. It is hard to put into words, but by growing up there I never thought it was weird to make a 15 minute slow motion video. No one ever told me this was strange, …I would see such strange stuff on the public TV all the time, that it wasn’t until I moved away that! I learned that these were “art videos”. At the time when I was 12 years old, I just thought there was another MTV. So really my early collaborations with my sister were just normal home videos, but since I was exposed to the work of many 70’s and 80’s video artists really young without ever knowing it, they ended up looking like art video. Ha ha ha ha. Oops!

>You did not go to art school, you studied music at Oberlin, NY. We dont often see artists who has not graduated from some art school, which I think is actually quite strange, at least when you see where art is situated right now. Why did you get into visual art? And why do you think there is a lack of people "from the outside" doing art? (Lazy curators??). Im also asking because I like your approach to it, your strategy is to be very laid back about it, which could be a following up of you not beeing into the system through art school. You show your work wherever whenever; in Cartier, MOMA, Guggenheim, but also in film screenings, in hacker conventions, and in an exhibition curated by artists in Norway.....

Yeah, well, Visual Art. Hmmmm……Like I mentioned in the above answer, I was of course always making videos since I was younger. My “formal” introduction to visual art though wasn’t until I moved to New York. I know it sounds insane, but I didn’t really know about galleries and curators or whatever. So wandering around on my lunch break one day I walked into a contemporary art gallery….I pretty much was like “I can do this, why don’t I see if one of these places would show MY VIDEOS”. Yeah, so I spent the next few years figuring that stuff out. But, at the same time as this, I also learned about film festivals, hacker festivals, and of course was getting more and more interested in using the internet for distribution. So I think cause I didn’t go to art school, galleries never seemed any different then any other outlet for work. They are all cool for different things. I am not sure why there !aren’t more outsiders in the arts. Probably cause there are too many art school insiders out there for an outsider to have much of a chance edge wise! Plus since so many kids went to art school the art that galleries show has a kinda art school look.

>Im impressed about how much you are doing all the time; not only your own ideas and projects, but also collaborations; you are doing concerts with Paper rad, Cribbs with Lauren (Cornell), teaching kids about computers, fashion project with Aya, doing collaborations with Seth (Price)... seems also like people are very interested in doing projects with you... and that you yourself like to be involved in and have the possibility to work on a lot at the same time, so that you can switch from one to the other....

Yeah, I am a classic multi-tasker. When I was younger, I used to do my homework while watching TV. Now when I watch TV, I surf the web. It never ends. I just like to be busy. Maybe its obsessive compulsive disorder. I don’t know. But yeah, maybe I should explain some of the projects I am working on that you have described. I recently did a show at the Albright Knox Gallery with Paper Rad. It was a one night performance that featured our bands, and various performances. Basically when we perform each time we do something different. This time, I decided I would build a website during the show, about the company that Paper Rad and I have thought about starting called “American Multimedia Group”. We will be a company specializing in interactive CR-ROM’s. Cribbs is a project I am doing with my friend Lauren Cornell where we go around and film our friends in the places where they live. It is based on the MTV show, but instead of rapp!ers in million dollar homes, it is our artist friends in New York. I also teach kids how to modify games at Harvestworks Digital Media as part of a summer camp there. Also I am working on a fashion website with my friend Aya Kanai who is a stylist. Basically it will be a fashion blog with new clothes to buy updated every day. Hopefully it will be successful! I am at the same time working on my art stuff too. So yeah, I can get pretty busy if I want to.

>So,: tell people about your work! You are that nintendo guy, you even look like Mario, or really more Luigi, but you did not even like playing Super Mario Brothers. How did you come up with the idea? Or maybe we willl do it like this: how do you normally work ; like; your "how little can one do to come up with an idea and then producing a work". What your critics have called your one-liners...

Ok, well, usually I will have 1 million ideas floating around in my head. It is all a constant scrambling of ideas about process and ideas about culture until I find something that fits together. I will use my Super Mario Clouds project as an example. This is a project where I hacked the game Mario brothers to show only the clouds. So at the time I knew I wanted to hack a video game but use the original graphics somehow to create the artwork. This is cause in terms of hacking this was a pretty interesting technical hack. So I knew I wanted to do this. The other thing I wanted to do was come up with a “meme” ish idea. This means I knew I wanted the work to be an idea that was small and cute enough that people could hear about the project by word of mouth and never even have 2 see the work. So yeah, I just kept on thinking of ideas, sifting through ideas about culture and video games, until I thought of one that fit these 2 requirements. I knew I !had to use Mario brothers cause it was the most famous video game. Then the clouds just seemed obvious. Like “why hadn’t anyone done this before”???? It sounds boring actually, but yeah, I usually know what I want to do technically and process wise before I ever think of the idea or the culture end of the work. As for my inspiration in terms of culture and whatever, I don’t know. This I cant explain. How do I know that clouds are cool? Or in more recent work, the Beach Boys, gooogle, Simon and Garfunkel? I have no idea. It just is like a second language.

>What other ideas are you working on at the moment?

Besides what I mentioned above, I am working on a series of War Game modifications which are basically going to be landscape video installations featuring clouds and old war planes. Also, I am getting into maybe composing music again, but I think talking about that might jinx it! Ha ha ha. Also “Magic Eye” stuff which is those posters you can stare at and then a 3d image pops out.

>You are a computer maniac, but also a charming entertainer. This is supposed to be quite a contradicition. You seem to feel comfortable in every situation.When did you start doing the performances? Is it a natural follow- up on your music performing background? Your performances are also kind of messy; you have a concert and then you stop and tell about how you made the Nintendo Cartridges, like you told you did in the Albright Knox gallery performance in Buffalo. And you invite friends with you to do stuff. Is there ever a plan?

I started doing those performances cause when I started in New York, I couldn’t get any gallery shows. But I did discover it was easy to get asked to perform. So I decided it would be fun to show my work as a performance. This way people could see the work, and also I could show people how the work was made which is one of my main interests. I guess it could be seen as a follow up to my music performance career. I never even thought of it like that. But some performances I do have plans, and others don’t. Performing is my favorite thing to do. Now I tend to develop work with performance in mind.

>You have a huge interest in learning; you always give away the codes to your work, and you make whole instructions for ex. how to hack the nintendo cartridges. In addition, you teach kids about computers; how to make computer games and internet sites. As I understand, the giving away as well as access is important parts of your work. ..

Yes, it is true. Giving away the knowledge of how to create my work is very important. I love computers, and I really love teaching people about them. This is why I am obsessed with making tutorials all the time. Also, I mean, half of the time I am trying to make something. I am surfing the web too; all these home made “tutorial” help pages, therefore considering I spend so much time on these pages learning how to program, I would feel silly not returning the favor. Also, my projects are equally as valid in this world as they are in the art world. For example my Super Mario Clouds gets just as much interest from internet geeks, as art people. My “pizza party’ project (a hack of the dominos website) has no interest online for art people, but is always being linked to from hacker websites.

>Does the teaching have any effect? I know that you get a crazy amount of emails every day; what do people write you?

Oh yes, people email me ALL THE TIME. They ask me questions on how to install my software, or why it doesn’t work, or how to play it. It is funny cause I am basically a teacher / technical help person. Other times they will just ask me for the work. Which is funny. Working with computers is different from sculpting. People don’t go knocking on sculptor’s studios asking for work, but in computer culture this is normal. Ha ha ha…

>I would like to talk about the internet, as we are both obsessed with it. When people have asked you lately about which of your own art projects is your favorite, your answer has been your page of links, which is available for everyone online at your web site. Is this because it is distributed on the internet and is easy to access; and that you want people to see the importance of the internet and computers as media? Or just that it actually is an interesting exhibition of links? ;)

Good question. I think because it is actually an interesting exhibition of links. Also I see it as a good barometer of my interest in culture and technology. The things I link to are things who’s aesthetic I am interested in, and which will prolly be an influence to me. Much of my more well known work is really an example of curating. For example my Super Mario Clouds is really me just curating the clouds out of the game. Or my Simon and Garfunkel video where I am simply reducing the duo down to one performer. So I think of these links in a similar way. I am surfing the internet for hours a day, and these links are 2 or 3 out of the 100’s I see every day that I think are worthwhile.

>We have discussed classical music, and how it is not used in any interesting way anymore. Composers of today are maybe missing the "reaching out"- part of it. Or, if you go on to the internet, it actually exists interesting projects, but it is outside of the classical music scene, and also outside the art scene. Here I am thinking about the Prelude in 303 Major by Ceephax Acid Crew , and I also found this guy doing a "digital needle" project with Vivaldis Four Seasons. In my opinion, internet is a more interesting gallery than any art gallery, which is also one of the reasons why we made the project Kick Out the Internet Jams, which consists of curated links, and the whole thing is offcourse made exclusively out of and for the internet. .......

Yes, I agree. I am really obsessed with the internet. Daily, I see work on the internet which is mind blowing, but I rarely see anything in the galleries that I find of any interest. The Gallery world only talks to itself much of the time, and this is unfortunate.

>Could you agree upon that there is a lack of humour in the art world?

Yes, it is unfortunate. I don’t understand why everything always has to be so serious. The internet is the opposite. Most of the stuff that gets popular has a sense of humor. For me it is hard working between the two cause often I forget there is a difference between the gallery and the net and this gets met in trouble cause some work belongs on the net and other work belongs in the gallery…

>Back to your projects: I would like you to tell about some of the projects that do not get that much attention, at least not at this moment: Im thinking about the video Dollars, your and your sisters band Jamie Arcangel and the Arcangels, and also your collaboration Low Level All-stars with Alex Galloway of the Radical Software Group.

Oh yeah, well, Dollars was a music video made for a band I’m in called the 8bit Construction Set, … the video went straight to the net, and is lesser known cause it was basically a music video done on blue screen for a DJ battle record. So at the time, and even today there really is no outlet for a video like that except the internet. And the band only made one record. My sister and I also have a band, but I think we are lesser known cause we gave up playing a year ago. This was a weird story cause we gave up playing cause I had this fantasy we would dress all in black and white and play in front of a green screen with black and white patterns. Anyway, this idea ended up morphing into “The Infinite Fill Show” which was an art show Jamie and I curated where anyone could be in the show as long as they submitted something that was black and white and had patterns. So in the end we had 93 different artist in a group show and the walls were cov!ered from floor to ceiling with black and white patterns. This show was exhibited at Foxy Production Gallery like a year ago in New York. And Low Level All Stars was a DVD I made with Alex Galloway. It was a research project about early Commodore 64 hacker tags. What would happen is that these kids would crack commodore 64 games (crack means remove the copyright protection), and to show off their skills they would add these really elaborate video introductions to these games. So 4 this project Alex and I looked through 1000’s of these videos and picked the best 10. So it was kinda a research project. The goal was to show people that there was this kinda odd parallel to street graffiti that happened in the 80’s on computers.

>Could you tell a bit more about Beige and the 8bit Construction Set.. and relating to that: your friends in Bodenstandig 2000 which you invited for your Deitch Projects event this year. Its interesting, because you are a band, but you live in different countries.......and Bodenstandig 2000, you discovered them through the internet, right?

Yeah, Beige is a crew I have been in and helped start in the late 90’s. We are a “hacker” crew. We all live in different cities. Our biggest project was the 8bit Construction Set, which was a DJ battle record where we made one of the sides on the Commodore64, and the other side on the Atari. We sold a few 1000 and they still sell. It has become quite a well known battle record. This record was released on Beige Records. Beige started as a record label. Anyway, the 8bit Construction Set is considered chip music. Which is music made with old computers. We were doing this quite early, and we heard about Bodenstandig 2000 over the net because they were the only other people doing that kinda music at the time (1998-9). So yeah, we became good friends!!! And this year I curated this event called “Low Level All Stars” at Deitch Projects gallery where I invited Bodenstandig2000 and Treewave to perform.

>What was the Summer of HTML tour about? I really liked the part where you got the used material from the Matthew Barney exhibition in Guggenheim to make the big wooden HTML letters...and you brought them with you on the tour! You often go touring, fex with Paper rad...

In the Summer of 2003, Paper Rad and I went on tour across the States on this tour called “The Summer of HTML”. Paper Rad is 3-4 people and they have a few bands. Including Extreme Animals, Dr Doo, and Troll band. So we went on tour across the States, and I taught people how to code HTML as my performance. Paper Rad tours every summer, and if I have the time I go with them!!

>You have been traveling a lot this summer. How was Paris ?

Yes, in Paris I performed at the Cartier Foundation. It sucked cause they lost my luggage, but my performance went Great!!! Everyone warned me that my stuff would bomb there cause people don’t like English. And of course my performance was mostly English. My new performance is a 45 minute lecture about Simon and Garfunkel. I just bring DVD’s and a laser pointer and talk about my experience with them. It is hard to explain without seeing it, but it is quite entertaining. It is a follow up on my current obsession with the idea of not actually modifying source material. Like , as a hacker, usually I am breaking into systems and changing little things. So I was like, why cant I do the same for DVDs. Then I was like, why do I even have to change anything? Why cant I just go to a performance with a DVD and talk about it? Anyway, people in Paris didn’t mind the English, and understood my humor, so it was awesome.

>You have said before that most of your inspiration is found in music, but you also use celebrities in your work. I know that you are very interested in them. While I was in New York, you found at least one new idea while reading InTouch and Star Magazine....

Yeah, it is better expressed by the idea that I am a pop artist and all pop culture to me is fair game! I love it all. I don’t have a TV now, cause if I did I would watch it all the TIME!!!

>I know that you dont have a TV, but you watch films and television series on DVDs, so is there anything you want to recommend for inspiration or relaxation? Also, I want to put this quote by you which I really like, for the end of the interview: " I would love to say there was some contemporary artist who's work really got me thinking, but lately I have just been trying to sort out 20 years of garbage TV culture that is filling my brain."

Good question! I watch The Sopranos, Arrested Development, The Chappelle Show, The Office, Entourage (just got into this), any mobster film, but sorry to be a weirdo, but if I want to be truthful to relax, I surf the internet. I don’t really watch so much TV anymore. Ha ha ha ha ha…..

LINKS:

Corys webpage: http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/
Beige Records: http://www.beigerecords.com
Buffalo: http://www.buffalo.com/
Kick out the internet jams: http://del.icio.us/kick_out_the_internet_jams
Paper rad : http://www.paperrad.org/
Paper rad Animalz Tour summer of 2005: http://www.paperrad.org/extreme/2005.html
Low Level All Stars: http://rhizome.org/LLAS/
Star Magazine: http://www.starmagazine.com/
Bodenstandig 2000: http://www.bodenstaendig.de/2000/
The summer of HTML tour pics: http://www.twhid.com/photos/summer_of_html/index.html
Arrested Development: http://www.fox.com/arresteddev/
Team Gallery: http://www.teamgal.com/arcangel/

With us Against Reality or Against Us was curated by Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby. Artists included Bjarne Melgaard•Dearraindrop•Jonas Ohlsson•Erik van Lieshout•Chris Johanson•Jocelyn Shipley•Cory Arcangel Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny•Terence Koh•Scott Hug•Michael Magnan•Amy Sarkisian•Brian Belott•Paper Rad Scott Reeder•Tyson Reeder •Mike Kelley & Paul McCarthy•Jim Drain•Justin Samson•Hanna Liden Anna Sew Hoy•Oskar Nilsson•Matti Kallioinen•Takeshi Murata•Dash Snow•Francine Spiegel•Mike Paré Ryan McGinley•Glynnis McDaris•Michael Velliquette•Olaf Breuning•Robert Gutierrez•Frankie Martin•Michael Mahalchick

Updates to come.

Artists and Friends

Willy Wonka Inc.
Ida Ekblad
Cory Arcangel
Lars Laumann
Michael On
Matthieu Clainchard
Marius Engh
Nils Bech
Bad Beuys Entertainment
Supercentral
Benjamin Alexander Huseby
Acne Paper (Thomas)
Michael Bell Smith
Seth Price
Le Commissariat (Matthieu)
MIACA (Hitomi)
Foxy Production
La Vitrine
Charles Broskoski

Art

MoMA
Projekt 0047
OCA
Vilma Gold

Other

Magic Company
Billie Liar
Yokoland

I am curating the 10 Year Anniversary of Art in General's Video Marathon, to take place during the weekend of January 11, 2008. There will be screenings, events and lectures with very interesting people, and lots of videos from young European artists, so you should save the date! More details to come. Image: Ida Ekblad: National Treasure, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.


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The Artist and the Computer at the MoMA.

I have put together a screening entitled 'The Artist and the Computer', which is part of the MoMA Automatic Update screening series, organized by Associate Curator Barbara London. The screening includes videos and films by Daria Martin, Mark Leckey, Pierre Huyghe, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, among others. It will be screened in the MoMA Titus Theaters on July 7 and August 30. Info on the screening here.

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Cory Arcangel and I have our top ten in The Year in the Internet 2006!

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Cory Arcangel and I are doing a project together that will be coming up in March 2007 in New York. Check back for details.

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I will in January start working as a research assistant with Associate Curator Barbara London at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

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Lars Laumann will be showing his excellent new film involving Lady Diana and Morrissey at White Collumns in February 2007. Check their website for upcoming details.

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The Copy and Paste Show was written about in the French newspaper Liberation.
You can read the text here

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I wrote a text for the MyCreativity Conference taking place in Amsterdam 16-18 November. The text will be published in a publication following the conference.
More information here

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The Copy and Paste Show which I curated for Rhizome and the New Museum of Contemporary Art is up!