I have been running Curating.info as a free resource for curators of contemporary art since 2006. It was borne out of a “why not” attitude towards sharing and openness, since I was compiling research on curating anyway. I also thought it would help me make my research more rigorous, as writing on this blog during my Master’s thesis did. A few years later and Curating.info is getting fan mail and picking up a lot of attention. Today I’m able to easily recruit four fantastic interns to share the burden and we have nearly 5000 fans on Facebook. The question was what to do next with this great platform. With thousands of people paying attention, what can you do and what should you do?

I had a vague idea that I’d like to create a Curating.info Scholarship, part funded by donations from the Curating.info community (that I had, thus far, never directly asked for any money) and could think of several good curatorial Master’s programmes that would benefit from a scholarship in place. I went to the IKT Congress in Luxembourg this year, and in the cavernous and highly atmospheric basement of the Casino Luxembourg, ended up chatting with Sally Tallant, Head of Programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Sally, who as it turned out knew and loved the site, listened as I tipsily described the nascent plan for the Curating.info Scholarship. “But why not do even more?” was her response. “Make it an experience in a gallery you love and trust, something where people can get real experience. There are already loads of scholarships out there.” Immediately I saw how right she was, and changed course accordingly. My first thought was to partner with the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, in part because it’s a great institution and a fellowship would fit with its ethos, and in part because its Director, Francis McKee, is both a visionary and a highly trustworthy person. Francis was onboard, and so it was born: the Curating.info Fellowship in collaboration with the CCA in Glasgow.

The Fellowship is a chance for an individual to conduct curatorial research and produce an exhibition at the CCA. The Fellow will work at the CCA four days per week over the six month fellowship, developing a curatorial project or body of curatorial research. Fellows will be paid a flat fee of £8,000. Ideal candidates for the Fellowship are emerging or mid-career curators who can demonstrate passion and fresh thinking in curating and writing about contemporary art, and who have a vision for what the role of the curator means today.

The deadline for applications is October 21, 2011. Applications will be judged by Francis McKee, Sally Tallant, and myself.

We’re really excited about it. I hope you will spread the word, contribute to the crowdfunding campaign, and apply to be our first Fellow.

Contribute to the crowdfunding campaign here.
Apply for the Fellowship here.

 

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of launching the series I have been working on in my capacity as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

The name of the series, Blowup, was inspired not only by Antonioni’s film but by the notion that blowing an image up reveals detail; blowing an inflatable object up creates form; blowing something up explosively can be festive or threatening.

The first event in the series is entitled Wild Things, and is about art for animals to appreciate, inhabit, or interact with. Three incredible speakers: Amy Youngs (US), Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL), and Elio Caccavale (IT/UK), plus one cat: Barbie (NL), will be presenting over the course of the evening.

If you are anywhere in the Benelux region, you should rush to V2_ tomorrow night (July 7) and get there by 8 PM to enjoy the evening. For most readers, you are far enough away that I cordially invite you to tune in via webstream. V2_’s streams are really excellent, I would almost dare to say it’s even better than being there, because we use multiple cameras and the camera operators are so good. You will miss out on the custom cocktail, the “Wild Zebra”, but you can attempt to replicate this at home by making a White Russian and trying to make chocolate stripes on the side of your glass. Ya, I know — tricky. Just make White Russians and visualise the stripes. You can even participate in the online chatter by Tweeting about the programme using the hashtag #v2_!

So if you are nearby, see you there; and if not, get comfy in front of your computer, and tune in to: http://live.v2.nl tomorrow, July 7, at 8PM Central European Summer Time.

Also — every Blowup event will have an e-Book reader released with it. Keep an eye out, I will amend this post with the download URL for this, the first Blowup reader!

 

I’m delighted to announce the successful launch of Constellations, an exhibition co-curated by myself and Karen Gaskill, at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

Constellations presents four international artists working with sculpture and installation. Minimalist in their approach, all present ideas on remoteness, fragility, disintegration, melancholy, and transience, together creating a profound and almost palatable sadness.

Adopting its title from the patterns of celestial bodies, the exhibition considers the relationship between ideas and the formation of concept. Drawing on the historic usage of constellations as maps or event atlases of the celestial sphere, this exhibition presents a collection of ideas on ephemerality, impermanence and flux in contemporary art. At its very core is an organic grouping of works that when in relation to one another form new ideas and notions, new constellations, each as fluid and volatile as the other.

The works selected are concerned with the fragility and breakdown of content. This instability not only manifests as a dissolution or reduction, but also as a loss of content, a shift in form, or the temporality of an objects’ existence. Each metaphorically deals with the passage of time, creating its own duration, but ultimately brings the attention back to the present moment. The result is an exhibition that in structure and content is all at once timeless, durational and unstable.

The shift from one form to another is most apparent in the ice lamps of Kitty Kraus (pictured above), household lightbulbs are encased in ice infused with ink, resembling small frosty black cubes, which when plugged in cause the ice to melt haphazardly across the floor. The initial sculpture draws murky trails with inky stained water, leaving the often broken lightbulb and its cable trailing, a testament to its ultimate demise.

Surrounded by the slow dissolution of Kraus’s lonely systems, the delicate landscapes of Takahiro Iwasaki (pictured below) respond in their fragile yet resilient form. The mimicry of permanent geographies such as mountain ranges, using delicate and unstable materials such as cloth and pencil lead, create a contrasting, yet equally delicate infrastructure, reminding us quietly about the fleetingness of time and earth’s instability.

The reduction of form is mirrored in the takeaway poster stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (pictured below). Durational in nature, the work slowly diminishes, shifting in form as the audience remove the posters and the tangible aspect of the work disappears. The work is evocative of what once was, of death and passing, and the image of the sea on the posters also invokes a sense of timelessness and strength to contrast the melancholy of the diminishing pile.

Katie Paterson’s two works both deal with space and the universe, and our position as humans in the cosmos is revealed by the works. 100 Billion Suns is a daily colourful explosion of confetti, happening in different parts of the Cornerhouse building each day. Each piece of confetti bears the colour signature of the brightest explosions in the universe. She has shrunk massive events to human scale, and presented them in bursts that will land and be tracked throughout the gallery in unpredictable ways. Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) on the other hand, is a work that transforms Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata using radio waves (pictured below). By bouncing Morse code of the score off of the moon’s surface, errors are created that are reproduced in the version played by the piano in the gallery. The lost information in the score is as a result of some celestial interference, a chance intervention that is not unlike the chance vagaries of the room temperature and floor surface that will impact the final form of Kitty Kraus’ ice lamp works.

The works in this exhibition each work in different ways with form, material, and change. Katie Paterson’s confetti canons are an addition to the environment, while viewers slowly subtract Gonzalez-Torres’ work from the gallery. Kraus’ ice lamps physically transform from 3D to 2D, while Iwasaki’s work plays with scale and form by transforming the idea of a mountain into household materials. The radio waves that Paterson used to send the Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back echo the ocean waves represented on the Gonzalez-Torres poster. Natural materials such as ice, water, soil, and air are present in all the works in either representation or in physical form. The pieces here may be minimal in aesthetic, but they are not abstract, they represent real things, and changes in the real world.

When devising constellations in the sky, people created stories to help understand our natural world, to make sense of it. But these celestial drawings are ultimately arbitrary, fragile, and could be replaced by new mappings or new understandings at any time. The mutability of the works in this exhibition are like the fragile understanding enabled by a constellations’ path. We are drawing edges around materials that we wish to know and to contain, even if ultimately, we cannot. The works in this exhibition provide us with a new poetic template to think about our understanding of time and material.

More info on the show:
Cornerhouse
Sat 25 Jun 2011 – Sun 11 Sep 2011
Mon – Closed, Tue – Sat 12:00 – 20:00, Sun 12:00 – 18:00

 

In the wake of Cablegate (the release of numerous US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks), it seems there is a mini-boom in groups following their example: Brusselsleaks and Openleaks spring to mind, and surely there are others I don’t know about.

In a lighthearted way, Club Karlsson (Center for Counter Culture), the club that I co-founded here in Amsterdam, is having a Christmas party entitled “Karlssonleaks”. Guests who bring a USB stick with their choice of interesting liberated or leaked data to hang on our Christmas tree will get into our party for free. Non-leakers have to pay an entrance fee of 10 Euro (and will be given a chance to fill up a USB stick on site). After an evening of drinks, snacks, music and projections, every visitor can take a random USB stick from the tree as a little Christmas present, and discover the digital treats within.

We’ve asked people to use common sense when filling up their USB keys for sharing: we have all read the Wikileaks cables, seen goatse a million times, and don’t want to be Rickrolled. I’ll report back and let everyone know how it goes — I’m certain there will be some interesting data exchanged.

If I don’t get to blogging again before the end of 2010 — happy holidays!

 

At this point in time in the Netherlands and the wider EU, culture is undervalued and is being dropped as a priority of government, in order to keep up appearances of fiscal restraint.

Our reaction to “culturele kaalslag”** is to make things happen now. Our mission is to produce a programme of activity that will include exhibitions, screenings, networking meetings, parties, workshops, and more. We do not seek public subsidy, our intention is for our activities to fund themselves.

Club Karlsson is Ine Poppe, Sam Nemeth, Mart Van Bree, Menno Grootveld, and myself. We are having our first event open to the public in our big, beautiful space on the top floor of Keizersgracht 264 during Museumnacht in Amsterdam on Saturday November 6, from about 10pm onwards. Subscribe to our Twitter feed and become our fan on Facebook to be in the loop about our programme. Hope to see you during Museumnacht, I’ll be there at the end, after midnight.

* — What, or who, is Karlsson? A mischievous character with a propeller on his back, as good a mascot as any!

** — “culturele kaalslag” is a term being used to describe the current climate for arts support in the Netherlands. “Kaalslag” literally translates as “deforestation” or “clearcutting”.

 

2011 is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Canadian media and communications visionary Marshall McLuhan. McLuhanites all over the world will be marking the anniversary in one way or another, and here in Europe transmediale festival and the Marshall McLuhan Salon of the Canadian Embassy in Berlin are producing a year-long programme of activity. The cultural network project McLuhan in Europe 2011 will explore, critique and celebrate McLuhan’s impact on European art and culture through a series of manifestations to occur in various locations, contexts and timeframes across Europe. While embracing and celebrating the relatively unwritten history of McLuhan in Europe, the events will also look at the development of contemporary media, tactile and mobile cultures, the politics of media culture in the context of the divided Europe and other themes that emerged out of McLuhan’s primary period of intellectual production.

The McLuhan in Europe 2011 project is seeking partnership proposals from organisations across Europe that wish to host and organise activities — download the Call for Partnership Proposals here.

The project has already produced the inaugural lecture, by Darren Wershler, Assistant Professor at Concordia University, and presented by FutureEverything in cooperation with transmediale. Many of McLuhan’s most powerful insights came from his deep engagement with the artistic and literary avant-gardes of the early 20th century. The inaugural McLuhan in Europe 2011 lecture illuminated McLuhan’s creative influences and described the fascinating connections between McLuhan’s predictions and declarations, and contemporary poetry, artwork, and thought. Watch it below:

 

An sample of Jeremy Bailey's artwork for In-Site Toronto.

In-Site Toronto is a series of newly commissioned work that will be presented on the portal pages of several wireless internet hotspots in the Wireless Toronto network until the end of 2010. Artists Dave Dyment, Swintak, Jeremy Bailey, Fedora Romita, Willy Le Maitre and Brian Joseph Davis have created works that will be automatically displayed when users log in to their Wireless Toronto user account at designated hotspots. The project was launched on March 31, 2010 in partnership with Spacing Magazine. The project was produced by media arts organisation Year Zero One, was curated by myself, and was produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The downloadable, printable, shareable e-catalogues that are available at each hotspot were produced using bookleteer by Proboscis.

Now, go out, use your free Wireless Toronto account, and discover some art that relates to the place where you are and our contemporary digital age.

View In-Site Toronto in a larger map

 

powerof8.org.uk

On October 12, the third This happened Edinburgh event will take place at the Wee Red Bar. Our exciting line up includes: Peter Pratt, Michael Salmond, Sarah Drummond & Lauren Currie, and Paul Rodgers & Euan Winton, and Anab Jain.

Tickets are available now at this site. Be fast — last time tickets sold out in under an hour! The event is sold out! If you want to follow all the This happened Edinburgh news, become a fan on Facebook, use the #thedi hashtag on twitter, or just keep an eye on the This happened website.

 

The Banff Centre for the Arts in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Canada is world-renowned as a place where artists retreat to create and think. For over 70 years this very special place has been catalysing creativity and developing leaders in the arts — a track record few places in the world can lay claim to.

I’ve been invited to be a peer advisor for the upcoming Liminal Screen co-production residency at the Banff Centre, within the Banff New Media Institute. I wanted to post the opportunity here to entice ambitious artists from around the world who are engaged with screen-based practices to apply.

This residency will “…focus its inquiry on the transitions between screen and life, as the screen reinforces its central position as an ubiquitous communications portal, data visualization surface, and frame on an ever more meditated world. Practitioners from all walks of screen-based practice are encouraged to apply to the program. We are particularly interested in practice that extends its investigation of the screen out into other media or networks (biological, philosophical, social, and other systems) and explores the spaces and relationships between screen, mind, and hard reality.”

Scholarships and financial aid are available. Apply via the Banff Centre website, deadline September 25, 2009.

 

Hop, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (tinker.it)

On May 4, the second This happened Edinburgh event will take place, in our swanky new digs at the Voodoo Rooms. The speakers are great: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Jen Southern, Andrew Spitz, and Ben Dembroski.

The event sold out in under an hour! However, we’ll soon be posting videos of the talks, from this event and from the previous event, so stay tuned. If you want to follow all the This happened Edinburgh news, become a fan on Facebook, use the #thedi hashtag on twitter, or just keep an eye on the This happened website.