HANDS-ON / MUSEU NACIONAL DE HISTÓRIA NATURAL E DA CIÊNCIA
Opening the 9th of November, 21:00
Exhibiting 9th ─ 30 November
EXHIBITION
Curatorship from António Cerveira Pinto, Brian Mackern, Gustavo Romano and Nilo Casares, with the special collaboration from MEIAC.
Material and immaterial artworks, sensorial, mental and especially interactive, with more than 50 artists that have relevant roles in the emergence and development of technological-based art. In this exhibition, The New Art Fest ’18 celebrates 25 years of a technological revolution in which the art was always present, by experimenting, innovating and consolidating a new media of communication and shared creation. This type of art penetrates the art museums, becoming part of online databases through which we can navigate and meet hundreds of artists and artworks, and where we can speak of art, science, and technology.
Selection from António Cerveira Pinto
Ana Fonseca approaches the polemic themes in a audacious – yet subtle – way. Her imaginations, supported by long investigations, are the basis for her work with multiple cultural and historical references, guiding the audience through a journey in her personal universe.
Brian Mackern (Uruguay) is a new media artist, developer and designer of digital and hybrid net based art projects since 1995. Musician, composer, and developer of auto-generative and reactive sound visual structures and environments. His art practice delves into areas defined by memories and remembrance, urban geographies and affective cartographies, noise, remix, glitch, and data bending. His work, mainly concerned with processes and structures which go across digital and real environments, explore interface design, sound toy creations, real-time video-data animations, net art and sound art.
War or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees was the first movie existing on the internet. It has become an independent cult movie released in 1991.
David Blair is a BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning film and television director.
Traces of a Presence to Come, is a reflection about the im/possibilities of creating and telling: being unable to tell things as they are, I tell you a fable about the evolution of another species, I paint a metaphor of another universe being created. Questioning the very nature of creation, identity and language, the video evokes our imag(e)ination of the future. This piece is presented with an original soundtrack by Stuart Jones.
Irit Batsry is an artist working mainly in video and installations. Her work has been shown extensively in 35 different countries. Batsry’s work displays ephemeral transitory images that are difficult to process rationally.
Museu dos [corpos] invisíveis (Museum of invisible [bodies]) is a series of mini-docs about the city of São Paulo, thought trough marginality situations visibility. Created in collaboration, the series shows five different approaches: women, homosexuals, trans people, black people, periphery residents/homeless and the biopolitical power in the city. The discussion revolves around sexuality, gender policies, feminism, racial segregation, periphery, vigilance, emergency, queer tribes and life on the streets. It includes the participation of artists, activists, and thinkers.
Giselle Beiguelman is a Brazilian artist, curator, and professor. Pioneer in the digital art field and in the internet and mobile networks use in artistic interventions, she finds the basis for her practice in a critical and intellectual approach to digital media and its information systems.
Lucas Bambozzi is a Brazilian filmmaker, visual artist, and investigator in new media. His works focus mostly in fields of informative space conceptualization and the peculiarness of an urban-based art.
The strategy for recording and composing Air Raid was derived from sound rather than image. This produced some unusual juxtapositions between images found in the everyday: a lawnmower, the wrapping of fruit with tin foil, a cement mixer, record player, television, and among others, the eerie image of an air raid siren. A negative double of the image horizontally slides away every so often as if ruptured by the violence of the sound. The last image shows a butterfly opening and closing its wings as if it were tuning the only silent segment of the work.
Gary Hill has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.
Jeremy Bailey is a Toronto based Famous New Media Artist. Recent projects include performances for Rhizome’s Seven on Seven in New York, The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Tate Liverpool.
The Great Game consists of a topographical map of Afghanistan. Though initially clear, the region gradually fills with icons evoking the West’s military strategies aimed at toppling the Taliban regime.
John Klima is an American new media artist, who uses hand-built electronics, computer hardware and software to create online and in gallery artworks.
iClock consists of daily ‘divination drawings’ created by John F. Simon Jr. They are used as a form of meditation, but also as a source material for larger works. The drawings are shared daily throught the website www.iclock.com.
John F. Simon Jr. is a new media artist who works with LCD screens and computer programming. He currently lives and works in New York City. In the 1990s, Simon began writing digital software to create visual imagery. His screen works display abstractions that vary infinitely due to random sequencing. The visual elements of each piece are generated in real time by his software. More recently, Simon has made a series of large-scale compositions that incorporate laser-cut Formica and LCD screens with perpetually changing software.
The Continuous War Train, 2018 is a 3D animation by Ken Rinaldo of a never-ending American freight train, pulling military Humvees, helicopters, tanks, jets, rockets, missiles and future space and robotic military technologies.
Ken Rinaldo is internationally recognized for interactive art installations that develop hybrid ecologies with human, plant, and animal. These serve as model and experiment for thinking about complex social, biological and machine symbionts that are arising. Exploring critical interface designs allows interrogation of technology as an emergent form with evolutionary survival instincts and self-aware software agents.
Tania Libre is a documentary film about internationally renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera by Lynn Hershman Leeson, narrated by Tilda Swinton.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker. Her work combines art with social commentary, particularly on the relationship between people and technology. Leeson’s work in media-based technology helped legitimize digital art forms.
[borders] is video documentation of a series of such walks, conducted virtually in popular, shared online multi-user worlds. The rendered landscape is beautiful and hypnotic and we are transported directly into Thoreau’s walking shoes, “glimps(ing) Elysium, but only as he walked along, surveying the boundaries and divisions…”
Mary Flanagan is an American artist, author, educator, and designer.
A riveting polyphonic documentary, NOW HE’S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE presents a fractured narrative about an unnamed man whose racial identity is continually redrawn and contested by clusters of impassioned narrators. This intricately-edited and deeply political essay film by artist Natalie Bookchin is composed of fragments of found online video diaries made in the early days of the Obama era, a period many believed would be “post-racial” but instead ushered in a new era of racial discord.
Natalie Bookchin is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is well known for her work in media. Her works are in a variety of forms – from online computer games, collaborative performances and “hacktivist” interventions, to interactive websites and widely distributed texts and manifestos. In her work, she explores some of the far-reaching consequences of Internet and digital technologies on a range of spheres, including aesthetics, labor, leisure, and politics.
iLAND tapestry features landscapes that reflect the most important environmental issues. In the center, a 3D printed sculpture, made from biodegradable eco friendly plastic, produced from corn with the support of 3Dlife. Leaving the sculpture without the usual finishing the printing process becomes evident like a body landscape in sediment layered stone juxtaposing the soft cotton textile.
Regina Frank is a German artist mainly working with text and textile installation and performance. Since 1989, she has been one of the pioneers of combining performance art with technology, integrating the Internet and interactive social software installations.
«This C++ program maps its own code structure to sounds that I recorded using only the built-in microphone in my iMac. I recorded samples of myself singing, typing, pushing on my desk and computer, and breathing. The program goes through its own code line by line (displayed on screen) using the characters, whitespace, punctuation, and line length to generate the music. Strong programming is elegant and concise, and, like a poem, it makes good use of whitespace. This piece translates how programmers describe their work, strangely poetic, into sound, but it unexpectedly does so with a female voice.» – Sophia Brueckner
Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist, designer, and engineer. Her objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to create technologies that inspire a more positive future.
Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist, designer, and engineer. Her objective is to combine her background in design and engineering with the perspective of an artist to create technologies that inspire a more positive future.
Recording of an anti-Vietnam-war rally in Bryant Park, Manhattan (1969) made by Tony Conrad through his open window, sounds coming muffled and delayed. At the same time, the TV is on with the instant broadcast of the same rally.
From 1976 to 1982, Tony Conrad created “Music and the Mind of the World,” a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. During this time everything Conrad played on the piano was recorded for this piece.
Tony Katai is an American photographer, cinematographer, and director. He is perhaps best known for directing some episodes of Computer Show, as well as the shorts “Everybody Wants it All” and “AMANITA” that used to be on his YouTube channel, XVTVI (KATAI).
Tony Katai is an American photographer, cinematographer, and director. He is perhaps best known for directing some episodes of Computer Show, as well as the shorts “Everybody Wants it All” and “AMANITA” that used to be on his YouTube channel, XVTVI (KATAI).
Noise Aquarium utilizes 3D-scans of oceanic micro creatures obtained with unique scientific imaging techniques and immerses the audience in the 3D “aquarium” of diverse planktons projected as large as whales. With their presence alone, participants create destructive visual and audio noises, demonstrating how we are all implicated by our inaction.
Bodies, Inc.: Initially, the participant is invited to construct a virtual body out of predefined body-parts, textures, and sounds, and gain membership to the larger body-owner community.
Victoria Vesna is a professor and digital media artist. She is known for her feminist video, computer and internet art and has been active since the early 1980s. Along with collaborators, she is thought to have created one of the first interactive artworks related to nanotechnology (sometimes called nanoart).
World of Awe is an ongoing multi-platform project by artist Yael Kanarek. Centering around three chapters created between 2000 and 2006, the work follows an unnamed Traveler through a desolate virtual world, Sunset/Sunrise, which is accessed through a portal in New York’s East Village.
Yael Kanarek is an Israeli American artist based in New York City that is known for pioneering use of the Internet and of multilingualism in works of art.
Emotions Go to Work
is an investigation into how technology is used to turn our feelings into valuable assets. One might call it the transformation of emotion into capital. It asks what is at stake in our relationship with the companions we call smart objects? What does the future hold in store for a world where people are treated more and more like things, while the billions of gadgets that make up the Internet of Things are increasingly anthropomorphized, granted agency?
Glass House
A moving image installation based on Sergei Eisenstein’s notes and drawings for a science-fiction movie he pitched to Paramount in 1930. Its prophetic theme is the architecture of surveillance. Inspired by the extensive use of glass by Bauhaus architects, Eisenstein leaves only the doors solid – symbols of conventional privacy.
Zoe Beloff is an artist residing in New York who works primarily in installation, film, and drawing. Beloff’s work is heavily involved with history, and she is sometimes considered to be working in the field of media archaeology.
Selection from Gustavo Romano
Antonio Mendoza’s work presents a vertigo-inducing meta-collage of images and sounds that obscenely mix political, corporative, pornographic, religious and marginalized icons. Mendoza presents a contemporary instance with a narcotic effect of the digital element in its pure form: velocity.
Tony Mendoza was born in Miami and grew up in Madrid. He graduated in Semiotics and his work was featured in international exhibitions. He is also a writer and a musician in the collective Mr. Tamale.
Since the beginning, Interferencias Chamánicas is a network-based project. It started in 2001 when Brian Mackern decided to open his soundtoys to other musician’s sound drawings. Project connection, sound, and visual architectonic ideas and music hybridization.
Brian Mackern (Uruguay) is a new media artist, developer and designer of digital and hybrid net based art projects since 1995. Musician, composer and developer of auto generative and reactive sound visual structures and environments. His art practice delves into areas defined by memories and remembrance, urban geographies and affective cartographies, noise, remix, glitch and data bending. His work, mainly concerned with processes and structures which go across digital and real environments, explore interface design, sound toy creations, real-time video-data animations, net art and soundart.
This work consists of recordings of radiostatics [electrical interferences on radiofrequencies] caused by the proximity/presence of the ‘Tormenta de Santa Rosa’, carried out between the 20th of August and the 8th of September 2002, in Montevideo-Uruguay. The presence of the storm is thus unveiled by the ‘noise’ present within the signal. Paradoxically, this ‘noise’ is the ‘signal’ which defines the information to us: The existence of the storm itself.
Brian Mackern (Uruguay) is a new media artist, developer and designer of digital and hybrid net based art projects since 1995. Musician, composer and developer of auto generative and reactive sound visual structures and environments. His art practice delves into areas defined by memories and remembrance, urban geographies and affective cartographies, noise, remix, glitch and data bending. His work, mainly concerned with processes and structures which go across digital and real environments, explore interface design, sound toy creations, real-time video-data animations, net art and soundart.
YesWeAre is a work of netart. An interactive installation where the user/spectator is invited to complete the sentence “Yes, we are_________.”. The new sentence becomes a part of the work that explores visually the dynamic movement and rythm of aesthetics HTML. YesWeAre has been built as an informative space based upon affirmative sentances and sutrctures that mix and overlap, generating noise, as well as communicating or not. The reader/spectator minifies the use of different codes for different readings. Ambiguity in the network is constant, as well as the bombardment of information.
Ciro Múseres is a digital UX/UI designer, creative director and artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Working between the fields of art, design and technology his works include different media, internet art projects, object, video and installation. His work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, conferences, and publications related to contemporary art, design and technology.
Flag is about borders, globalization and territory. The flag, as much as a gun or an ID card, is a form of labeling. A taxonomy, a stamp that separates equal from different. Then, the digital works as a deconstructive element. The RGB colors are the result of different light proportions – ephemeral, unstable and mutable. In this work we find a scenario in which the flags mix through code, allowing new transnational connections.
Christian Oyarzún is an artist, musician, and programmer. His current work deals with graphic and narrative cyberpunk, opening a reflection space towards our daily relationship with our technical tools, our techno-political schemes and how this relates to our experience and life consciousness.
Lara Croft was probably the first 3D model to compete with flesh and bone ones. She is the protagonist of the game Tomb Raider, in which adventure mixes with archeological occult treasures. In order to create Tomb Gallery, García used the Tomb Raider Level Editor to draw the different spaces and rewriting the game plot but simultaneously keeping the general mood of the series. García transforms the protagonist into an avatar through which the user can find a series of paintings made by García himself. By doing so, the author appropriates a virtual space, turning it into a gallery – Tomb Gallery.
Daniel Garcia is a professional illustrator/designer with a strong fondness for political, social and human issues.
With more than 10 years experience collaborating with several publications and companies across three continents, his aim is to make you forget the colorful yet numb overflow of images, feelings and information with which you are exposed from the morning until evening and make you address some very important questions.
Using the famous game Pong as a starting point, Mellado develops a paradoxal non-interactive game. What happens then is an abstract staging of the daily confrontations of a border.
Mellado is a Chilean artist, based in Barcelona since 2007. Painter by formation, digital artist and programmer by deformation. His work deals with the exact relationship between digital and analog, political and social systems.
Net Art World is a ‘time specific’ artwork that comes from the intent of mapping the artistic production of netart artists around the world since 2003. The result is a screen collage, where an artist is presented with a flag, a map and random images of a country – each one randomly selected, with no relation whatsoever. The piece works as a generative sense machine, bringing together the world of net art and the artist in its own fragmentation logic, questioning different strategies of cataloging, classification, and artistic canon creation.
Eduardo Navas implements methodologies of cultural analytics and digital humanities to research the crossover of art and media in culture. His production includes art & media projects, critical texts, and curatorial projects. He has presented and lectured about his work and research internationally. Navas collaborates with artists and institutions in various countries to organize events and develop new forms of publication and creative production.
Desertesejo is an artistic project by Gilbertto Prado Developed at Program New Media Directions – Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil in 2000. The project is a networked virtual web-based environment, that allows 50 participants simultaneously on-line. Desertesejo is a poetical exploration of geographical extension, the temporary ruptures, the loneliness, the constant re-invention and the proliferation of points of meeting and sharing. On entering the virtual environment, the traveler comes across a cave which has rocks falling gently from the ceiling. Any of these rocks can be clicked on.
Gilbertto Prado is a multimedia artist, professor and coordinator to the Digital Poetics Group. His work consists of network art and interactive installations.
For this work, Abreu takes sound material from the anthems of Mexico and the USA and processes them through software developed by himself, comparing them and obtaining as a result of their similarities and differences a sound piece and a visual piece. Through this operation, Abreu manages to make us reflect on the limits and territorial and, on the other hand, on how to deactivate the martial and other atavisms characteristic of national anthems, converting the fusion of melodies into an inoffensive song, a (post) romantic composition with a touch of decadence and melancholy.
Iván Abreu is an artist and programmer who works and lives in Mexico city. He explores the veracity and instrumental capacity of science and technology in art contexts, and the possible poetic and/or political value of the findings that emerge from these crossings, as a consequence through processes like visualization, interaction design, industrial design , software and web development, engineering and electronics, expanding the possibilities of drawing, graphics, digital media, photography, sound art, video, sculpture, and architectural and urban installation.
A very small rock turns on itself, in the immensity of space, slowly, with no witnesses, in the silence of emptiness. Abreu turns this stone – the planet Earth- into a virtual music box, which with its melancholic and minimal sound, gives an account of the presence of the spectators themselves and their place in the world.
Iván Abreu is an artist and programmer who works and lives in Mexico City. He explores the veracity and instrumental capacity of science and technology in art contexts, and the possible poetic and/or political value of the findings that emerge from these crossings, as a consequence through processes like visualization, interaction design, industrial design , software and web development, engineering and electronics, expanding the possibilities of drawing, graphics, digital media, photography, sound art, video, sculpture, and architectural and urban installation.
Quetzalcoatl was commissioned by the Los Angeles Art Museum in 2012, the year in which the Mayan calendar came to an end. This work compiles a series of reflections on the theme of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl and its relationship with contemporary culture. In it the artist resorted to various programming techniques and languages of the web 2.0, using both historical iconographic sources and circulating material on the Internet extracted from CNN, Google or Twitter.
Yucef Merhi is a Venezuelan artist, poet and computer programmer, based in New York. He is the pioneer of Digital Art in Venezuela.
PERFORMANCES
Temporal de Santa Rosa
by Brian Mackern
9th November, 22:00
String Practice 2.3
by Adriana de Sá and John Klima
17th November, 22:00
MOTION PICTURES
Video and animation cinema sessions
MONSTRA – Lisbon Animation Festival:
Bill Plympton Short Films: Love, Sex and Drugs
14th November, 18:00
CalArts – California Institute of the Arts: Student’s Films
21st November, 18:00
FUSO – Anual de Videoarte Internacional de Lisboa
Foreign America: Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka
16th and 23rd de November, 17:30
Programmed for FUSO by Irit Batsry / Thanks to HEURE EXQUISE ! Centre International pour les Arts Vidéo
NITROPORTUGAL
Art, technology and environment.
A VR project by Instituto Superior de Agronomia da Universidade de Lisboa and Cultivamos Cultura, with UE support
WORKSHOP
NOISE AND INTERFERENCES
by Brian Mackern
12th & 13th November, 20:00 – 22:00
CONFERENCE
American Century
17th November, 16:00
Moderator: António Cerveira Pinto
Speakers: David Blair, Jeremy Bailey, Sophia Brueckner, Tony Katai, Zoe Beloff