Your smartphone is broken – and it’s not just a cracked screen. The problem is in the apps, the operating system, the hardware, and it affects your privacy, your health, and the health of our planet. During Dutch Design Week, visit the Fix Your Phone Shop by Waag Futurelab and learn what to do to fix it!
Killyourphone.com workshop at Fix Your Phone Shop
2024 Future Media FEST-Singularity Embracing the Dawn of the Singularity
In the heart of the 21st century’s digital revolution, technological advancements are reshaping human existence—our lifestyles, thought processes, and societal structures. Underpinning this transformation is the captivating concept of the Singularity, a theory both alluring and profound.
The Technological Singularity, as envisioned by mathematician and computer scientist Vernor Vinge in 1993, designates a pivotal moment when machine intelligence eclipses human intellect. This event is predicted to trigger an exponential surge in technological progress, irrevocably altering the trajectory of civilization. The academic community further understands the Singularity as an inflection point where artificial intelligence reaches a certain threshold, catalyzing a cascade of technological disruptions and an “intelligence explosion.”
What is the Ruhr area? An exciting metropolitan region centred around the major cities of Dortmund, Essen and Duisburg? Or a collection of scattered towns and villages from Alpen to Xanten? Or both? Does it consist of tranquil river landscapes along the Ruhr, Emscher and Lippe or is it hopelessly damaged by the scars of heavy industry? Ruhrpott, example of transformation, poverty zone – how can art open up, change and enrich this diverse region?
Urbane Künste Ruhr wants to find out and is launching the Grand Snail Tour in autumn, an artistic-performative journey through all 53 cities in the Ruhr region. Because this is an ambitious endeavour and Urbane Künste Ruhr has set itself the goal of getting to know local players, forming bonds and establishing sustainable networks, this is a three-year project.
Kick-off Grand Snail Tour in Xanten
Urbane Künste Ruhr is launching the Grand Snail Tour in autumn, an artistic-performative journey through all 53 cities in the Ruhr area. The kick-off event will take place on 26.9. in Xanten.
Staged at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Völklingen Ironworks, the Urban Art Biennale is one of the world’s largest exhibitions of this anarchic form of art. Departing from a conventional white cube aesthetic, the entire site of the Völklingen Ironworks is given over to a fruitful dialogue with an art form that has evolved from street art or graffiti. Established in 2011, the 2024 edition will focus on participatory urban art projects as well as political works in situ.
The World in My Hand explores the smartphone as both object and aesthetic inspiration for artistic creation. It comments on public debates surrounding the many uses of smartphones: from always-on media consumption to digital detox, from swiping and matching to ghosting and blocking, from language atrophy to information overload, from resource depletion to status symbol.
The curators, Dr Jörg Garbrecht and Katharina Wenkler, have chosen a narrative approach to the exhibition. In eight chapters, they summarize various aspects and debates surrounding the smartphone, ranging from the launch date of our daily digital companion to its characteristic touchscreen and the contractions of time and space it enables. Deeply personal moments – such as Ai Weiwei’s selfie at the moment of his arrest or Sergey Melnitchenko’s photograph of his son during a blackout in Kyiv – appear alongside themes of perception and presentation of the self, as realized in the glass sculpture Stability by Julija Pociūtė. Other subjects include: looking for love online, as in Ariane Forkel’s Casanova’s Kabinett or John Yuyi’s Tinder Match; the complexities and pitfalls of digital communication, for example in the works of James Akers or Alejandra Seeber; and the smartphone as a means of staying in touch during pandemic lockdown isolation, for instance in the work of George McLeod. Edward Burtynsky’s photograph of lithium mines in the Atacama Desert calls attention to the topic of raw materials for electronic devices.
With works by:
Tornike Abuladze, James Akers, Ai Weiwei, Kate Baker, Aram Bartholl, Tillie Burden, Edward Burtynsky, Yvon Chabrowski, Julia Chamberlain, Rachel Daeng Ngalle, Erwin Eisch, Ariane Forkel, Shige Fujishiro, Valentin Goppel, David Horvitz, Artem Humilevskyi, Gudrun Kemsa, Zsuzsanna Kóródi, Brigitte Kowanz, George McLeod, Sergey Melnitchenko, Jonas Noël Niedermann, Julian Opie, Cornelia Parker, Katie Paterson mit Zeller & Moye, Julija Pociūtė, Rebecca Ruchti, Karin Sander, Jeffrey Sarmiento, Alejandra Seeber, JanHein van Stiphout, Jolita Vaitkute, Sascha Weidner, John Yuyi, Jeff Zimmer
Die Stiftung Springhornhof wurde gegründet, um das Lebenswerk der 1998 verstorbenen Ruth Falazik weiterzuführen. Als Galeristin hat sie bereits in den 1960er Jahren aus dem historischen Spring hornhof einen Ort für zeitgenössische Kunst ge macht. Als spätere Kunstvereinsleiterin gelang es ihr, namhafte internationale Künstlerinnen und Künstler in das Heidedorf zu locken, um neue Werke im Dialog mit Natur und Landschaft zu entwickeln.
Die obere Etage gehört den Künstlerinnen und Künstlern des Ensembles von mittlerweile mehr als vierzig frei zugänglichen Skulpturen und Installa tionen, das vom Springhornhof stetig weiter ent wickelt wird. Großzügig haben sie Fotografien, Skulpturen und Objekte für den Verkauf zugunsten der Arbeit der Stiftung zur Verfügung gestellt. Die Schau führt eindrucksvoll vor Augen, welche Band breite künstlerischer Positionen die Neuenkirchener „KunstLandschaft“ mittlerweile umfasst:
Elmgreen & Dragset, Rupprecht Matthies, HAWOLI, Gabriela Albergaría, Hartmut Stielow, Mutter/Genth, Martin Reichmann, Kaori Tomita, Verena Issel, Aram Bartholl, Ulrich Eller, Harald Finke, Stefan Kern, Micha Ullman, Rolf Jörres, Timm Ulrichs, Christiane Möbus, Volker Lang, Carl Vetter, Anna Guðjónsdóttir, Will Beckers, Gisela von Bruchhausen und viele mehr.
ʟᴏ ᴀɴᴅ ʙᴇʜᴏʟᴅ, ɪᴛ’ꜱ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ꜰᴏʀ ʟᴏᴡ ʀᴇꜱᴏʟᴜᴛɪᴏɴ. Postmasters 5.0 and TRANSFER present a show within a show to celebrate the finissage of ‘High Resolution’ on October 19th, 6-9PM 🗓️
🎥 LOW RESOLUTION GIF SCREENING 🎥
Shiny renders, ‘poor images’, generative art, and everything in between – ‘Low Resolution’ features looped moving images from the internet and beyond, screening for one night only in SoHo.
Featured Artists: @pr_x_s @anamariacaballero @arambartholl @auriea.harvey.studio @danieltemkin_ @fabiolalariosm @asugarhigh @joemckay5 @mrkdrf @machewtops @mayaontheinternet @yoururgetobreatheisalie @moisesdsanabria @made.by.oona @rodellwarner @rothbergrothberg @sashastiles @fakeshamus @nihil_diamond @taramoves @travisleroysouthworth @pipizzy02 + more announced soon.
Join us for an evening of Animated GIFs from invited artists in the expanded community around ‘High Resolution’ to celebrate the close of the exhibition.
🎥 Sneak peek 👀 a special contribution from Auriea Harvey ‘Madame Archive’ 1996-1999 a sequential archive of the GIF the artist used online on Entropy8.com in the 90s
RSVP link in bio 🔗
https://lu.ma/q9mrjdnm
Postmasters 5.0 and TRANSFER
are excited to present a collaborative exhibition
It’s high time for High Resolution.
As the much needed antidote to a week of overwhelmingly static art at the fairs and the season opener shows, Postmasters 5.0 and TRANSFER will present a large-scale collaborative exhibition of digital art.
High Resolution will include several classics by pioneers of time-based media art shown along the hot-from-the-studio works by the new generation of digital artists. This high resolution, high energy, high bar exhibition will center around current ideas and technologies befitting 2024 and looking forward.
Tamas Banovich and Magda Sawon of Postmasters 5.0 and Kelani Nichole of TRANSFER are veterans who do not think like veterans.
with:
GRETCHEN ANDREW
VUK ĆOSIĆ
DAMJANSKI
CARLA GANNIS
HUNTREZZ JANOS
MARTA KUCSORA
LOVID
JENNIFER & KEVIN McCOY
ROSA MENKMAN
LORNA MILLS
EVA PAPAMARGARITI
FRANK WANG YEFENG
special appearance
ARAM BARTHOLL
For Berlin Art Week, the non-profit organisation Flussbad Berlin will be presenting the exhibition and auction “50 Für Bad Berlin” in the Red Salon of the Bauakademie. Fluss Bad Berlin is a civil society initiative for urban development committed to making swimming possible in the Spree Canal and, in the long run, in other sections of the Berlin Spree.
“50 Für Bad Berlin” will present works by mostly Berlin-based artists and architects who show solidarity with the objectives of the Fluss Bad Berlin project and the team behind it. They advocate a sustainable development of Berlin for the common good. They oppose the tendency to restrict for ideological reasons the debate on the future of the city (centre) to the historicising reconstruction of the Berlin of the early 20th century and the attempt to appropriate “art and culture” for that purpose. They want to emphasise instead that art and culture are closely linked to development initiatives such as Fluss Bad Berlin, which promote a more social, ecological, sustainable, and futureproof urban development.
While the works on display cover a wide range of types and techniques, they all relate to themes the Fluss Bad project addresses: for instance, in their interpretation of the essential significance of water for our world and for life, and the diverse relationships between humans and the element. They analyse the sensory, political and technical significance of water as a cultural asset, and the meaning of a free and equal access to it. They remind us that the river belongs to the city, that everyday culture belongs to high culture, and that the city is shaped by social values, which –at the same time– it is capable to mediate.
All of the pieces shown at the “50 Für Bad Berlin” exhibition will be auctioned on September 12.
List of participating artists:
Rosa Barba, Barkow Leibinger, Aram Bartholl, John Bock, Stefanie Bürkle, Thomas Demand, Oswald Egger, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, Estudio Herreros, Nina Fischer & Maroan El Sani, Simon Fujiwara, Filomeno Fusco & Victor Kégli, Graft, Katharina Grosse, Esra Gülmen, Asmund Hansteen-Mikkelsen, Annette Hauschild, Heide von Beckerath Alberts, Robert Hermann, Katharina Hinsberg, Moon Hoon, Bjarke Ingels, Inges Idee, Christian Jankowski, Peter K. Koch, Annette Kisling, Mischa Kuball, Götz Lemberg, Susanne Lorenz, Regula Lüscher, Maciej Markowicz, Maix Mayer, Jürgen Mayer H, Bjørn Mehlhus, Fernando Menis, Christian Möller, Olaf Nicolai, Lewis Pugh, Raumlabor, realities:united, Anselm Reyle, Shirin Sabahi, Michael Sailstorfer, Karin Sander, Tomás Saraceno, Sauerbruch Hutton, Erik Schmidt, Something Fantastic, Carlo Stanga, Wolfgang Tillmans, Clement Valla x Certain Measures, Michael Wesely, Haegue Yang, Tobias Zielony
14:00 – 16:00
Killyourphone is an open workshop format. Participants are invited to make their own signal blocking phone pouch. In the pouch the phone can’t send or receive any signals. It is dead! This workshop was run for the first time at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg end of 2013.
I agree on most of what he says and many of these questions were raised during the “Friends” workshop I ran at Futuresonic in 2008 . Unfortunately this won t reach my 359 ex-facebook friends any more… haha. I quit 2 days ago ….
“The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz
There has been a lot of discussion on how we can reclaim, revive and engage Public Space in Europe/West. It was very interesting to see how Public Space is still naturally used in Shanghai, China. The picture shows a kind of public marriage market wich takes place once a week (month?) in the very centre of Shanghai on People’s Square. Parents advertise their grown up kids by short notes and try to find a good match for them. A very classic offline social network, serious dating platform. 🙂
I’ll be be part of the workshop “Urban Space. Time to Play” 19th – 22th Oct. next week at eARTS Shanghai. I am looking forward to it and I am curious to test China for some paper based realtime urban adventure action. Stay tuned! More info
Thanks to Theo Honohan who did write an interesting essay on my latest project “Friends“.
Aram Bartholl’s workshop Friends actualizes the processes of abstraction and distancing which are involved in the construction of contemporary social networking websites. By turning these immaterial processes into physical action and representations, the work offers a critical model of current software practice on the web.
Under the general name of Web 2.0, social networking sites provide various facilities for publishing content on the web. In the case of Flickr, the content is images; in the case of Delicious, bookmarks; Last.fm, music playlists; Facebook and myspace, general personal information. The material published on these sites is often not particularly interesting to a general viewer. Its value consists primarily in the availability of information to friends. The ability to explicitly create links of friendship between users is therefore the central feature of these sites, and the feature from which the name “Social Networking” is derived.
Bartholl’s work, which could have been titled Friends?, calls into question the value and meaning of these explicit declarations of friendship. For one thing, the mechanical nature of the process gives it a simplistic quality. Two people are either friends or they are not, according to the system. This binary coding of relationships leaves no room for gradations of familiarity from intimacy to acquaintance. This initial observation is enriched by the level of detail into which the piece goes in representing the internal abstractions of a site such as Facebook. Each level of abstraction can be seen as a distancing from reality and the site of a possible slippage between image and actuality.
The process of creating a personal profile in the system begins with a digital photograph. This image of the user is transformed digitally into a black and white stencil. Affixing a printout of the stencil to a rubber stamp, the user cuts out the white areas to create a reusable stamp of their own image. In creating a reusable stamp, the work captures the infinitely reproduceable nature of a digital image. The image can appear over and over within the “site”, rather than existing just as a single original.
The creation of a profile continues with the preparation of a blank booklet for use as a register of friends. The booklet gains structure entirely through a series of rubber stamps which mimic the process of formatting a blank computer database. Data slots are created for name, email address and website, and a further grid of spaces is prepared to hold references to the user’s details on other social networking sites. The process of registering friends involves stamping, carbon-paper transfers, and the gluing of pre-prepared adhesive stamps into the “data slots”. The complexity of this process parallels the degree of indirection and formality involved in the software behind a social networking site, if not the experience of creating friends on Facebook. Bartholl, by calling attention to this complexity, illustrates the degree to which the information we share fits into an elaborate structure.
The process of adding friends to one’s personal profile is a reciprocal one; each of you ends up with a new page in the booklet showing the details of your new friend. The piece has another component, however, a central volume which includes a page for each user which records their friends (affixed as stamps) and pending friend requests (unglued stamps are held in a plastic pouch.) The analogy here is with a central database on a system such as Facebook. The whole graph of relationships is held in one place, rather than being stored in private, personall relations between profiles/booklets. This central volume is of course the way social networking systems are actually implemented, while the “peer-to-peer” architecture of the booklets, while offering potential advantages in security and privacy, has not been pursued (except, to a degree, in the case of Skype.)
The presence of a central database is a reminder of the industrial scale and automation of the process. Bartholls’ work problematizes the mass production of social contacts. While the concrete formal techniques of the workshop (sheets of repeated portraits) evoke images of an artistic practice such as that of Andy Warhol’s “Factory”, the abstract structure revealed by the development of a profile and network of friends shows the potentially dehumanizing nature of social networks. The choice of black and white for all representations produces an impression of direct simplicity but also unyielding control. The idea of a computerized social network, in the end, is a formalism, while social relationships are blurry, vital and inevitably exceed the terms of any fixed representation.
23 September 2008
I just finished the documentation for my latest project “Friends” which has been premiered at Futuresonic 2008 a month ago. It was a lot of fun and it came out really well. Friends will be shown again during Futuresonic-Leeds and Futuresonic-London sometime 2008/2009. Don’t miss to become part of the Friends network. 😉
Credits:
– Thanks to Veronika Becker and Holger Lindmüller for advice, design and production assistance during preparation phase in Berlin.
– Thanks to Kit Turner (Futuresonic art production assistance) and Ben Harding (Futuresonic tech. and exhibition architecture) for the production in Manchester.
– Thanks to my exellent Friends workshop assistance Charlotte Barnes and to the volunteers: Josephine, Dan, Sofia, Maya … among others.
– Thanks to the whole Futuresonic 2008 team for support!
New project “Friends” started today at Futuresonic. Finally the workshop is up and running. If you are in Manchester drop by CUBE gallery and get your own Friends book.
All recent posts on “Friends”.
Friends
The project Friends is a workshop which translates the so-called social web – online services such as Facebook, Myspace, etc. – into a paper-based form in physical space.All workshop participants contribute a profile page to the big Friends Book and make their own personal friends booklet in which to collect as many friends as possible. With their own hand-made profile photo stamp and a large amount of prefabricated web 2.0 service stamps, users trade among each other information about their favorite online services and web activities. In order to be recognized as Friends workshop participants, users can wear a button with their own profile photo or display their Web 2.0 preferences on Friends Tattoos.
Social networks in the internet, which have become hugely popular over the last few years, have given the term “friend” a completely new meaning. In contrast to the usually restricted and time-consuming circle of friends in everyday life, in the internet it is possible to find a large number of friends quickly with just a few clicks.And only a few of these friends are actually personally known by the user. Without a great deal of effort it is possible to have hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of friends in the Internet. Who has the most friends? Who is the best-known and the most often to be seen? The development of the internet in recent years enables the individual to gratify his/her desire for recognition and attention in quite a new way.
With reference to the classic German poetry album or the friendship book in the USA, the Friends workshop takes this development as the central theme and opens a debate over the many-layered types from friendship. The time-honored paper-based technology and tools used in the workshop as well as the handicraft skills of its participants contrast with the screen-limited but highly efficient online world of the social networks. In contrast to the obvious open contact with private information in the social web, the classic paper document conceals a high degree of obligation and protects privacy.The data from the web services documented on paper during the Friends workshop pose anew the question of the private and public nature of web identities.
Who is my friend? How well do we know each other? Where do we meet?
How does the Social Web effect inter-personal relationships?
Aram Bartholl 2008
Stamps for “Friends” workshop at Futuresonic arrived. 🙂
(more than 30)
Join the Friends network at
Futuresonic 2008!
Get to know cool new friends and hook up. Find out which online social networks they belong to. Extend your list of friends and let new people discover you. Get ready and take offline networking to the next level!
Join the Friends workshop to create your own paper profile page in the ground breaking big Friends network book. And take away your personal Friends booklet, to carry on collecting new friends around the city. Create your handmade profile picture and leave your mark with special stamps and ink on all your friends’ booklets. A wide range of tools and materials are provided. Show off your Web 2.0 identity in paper mode!
Instructions:
1. Sample your personal Friends booklet from high end manufactured paper sheets to start your unforgettable collection of new friends!
2. Use your hands! Cut a stamp with your web profile picture. This personal tool plays a central role in all Friends communication. Leave your traces in real life!
3. Connect! Coin your basic profile data by using Dymo label tape. All your friends can get an easy carbon copy of your basic contact info!
4. What Social Web services are you on? Stamp and customize your personal Web 2.0 info. Create a collection of Web 2.0 stamps to distribute and inform all your friends about your online activities.
5. Contribute to the big, public and constantly growing Friends book. All users of the Friends network have a profile page here! Take a look at who is already part of it! Create your personal profile page and share your digital life!
6. Find new friends! Place friend requests on user profile pages and exchange info directly via carbon copy and Web2.0 stamps. Collect and share your online identity in your Friends booklet.
7. “Yes, I am using Friends and it is great!” Create your personal button badge to find other Friends users and extend your network during Futuresonic 2008.
8. Customize and wear Friends tattoos. Wear Web2.0 on your skin! Inhale Social Web!
