Fudge the Facts

The Global Anxiety Monitor by De Geuzen

ON GAPS AND SILENT DOCUMENTS
9 > 14 February 2010
STUK arts centre Leuven
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In On Gaps and Silent Documents international artists question the absence of documents and data in archives, data banks and memory. What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used? Archives and data banks are primarily determined by these gaps and silent documents. As Sven Spieker notes, “Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate.” Creating archives is continual selection. As such, it reveals the priorities and blind spots of the keeper of the archives, his world and his time.

Since the beginning of time, ‘forgetting’ was always the norm. ‘Remembering’ was the exception. In this age of continuously transforming technology and worldwide networks, this balance seems to be shifting. Is it true that in our time, with its excessive storage capacity, everything is obsessively being saved? More and more, we face the question of whether we have the right to create our own gaps, to silence documents and erase our own traces. Privacy, intellectual property and censorship in our digital networked society require different and complex solutions.

On Gaps and Silent Documents uses ‘new’ and ‘old’ media and technologies, such as the Internet, websites, Google, newspapers, texts, books, film and video, photography, music scores, sound, telephones, Twitter, online newsgroups, printers, microfilm, light, computers, etc., to approach this theme from different (sometimes paradoxical) perspectives and question it in spatial installations, presentations and performances.

Artists: Alfredo Jaar - Sharon Daniel - Mariana Castillo Deball - Manfred Werder - Yann Sérandour - Haris Epaminonda & Daniel Gustav Cramer - Daniel Knorr - Anita Di Bianco - Sebastian Romo - Lisa Oppenheim - Joseph Cornell - Jonas Mekas - deepblue - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer - Elmgreen & Dragset- Christian Andersson - Yunchul Kim - Carlos katastrofsky - Jens Wunderling - de Geuzen - Hasan Elahi - Ben Rubin - Antoni Muntadas - | performance |Ellen Fullman & Konrad Sprenger - Luis Recoder / Sandra Gibson / Ben Owen - Martin Nachbar - deepblue - William Hooke

What a loss. She was simply an amazing conceptual sound artist. For me, definitely a female icon. Here is an article about her in The Wire, Expressway to Your Skull.

Wearable Resistance is an ongoing research thread within De Geuzen’s practice. It started off as an impossible proposal, a desire to transform the body into a billboard made of lights. Read more…

Now at HTTP Gallery:
Do It With Others (DIWO)
at the Dark Mountain
A Mail-Art project across physical and digital networks

I have a mix within the mix and it can be found online here. Although the experience was too short, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it with others!

This is the brief presentation I made of De Geuzen’s ‘Feed to Read’ . Femke Snelting and Michael Murtaugh collaboratively developed the script for this image/text feeder and Martin Arvebro documented the talk.

Modifying Feed, we’re currently testing a new layout and researching how to integrate RSS. The latter has not yet been mastered ;-)

In Exhibition Rhetorics, an essay written in the mid-nineties, Bruce Ferguson tries to think through the exhibition as a medium and rhetorical form. Exploring various mechanisms and interests at work, he notes:

Exhibitions are publicly sanctioned representations of identity, principally, but not exclusively, of the institutions which present them. They are narratives which use art objects as elements in institutionalized stories that are promoted to an audience. *

While Ferguson is speaking about exhibitions in general, it’s interesting to consider what this might mean in relation to the rhetorics of biennials and publicly sanctioned representations of identity. Next to displaying curatorial intentions and individual art works, biennials have always reflected on the nation-state, host city and facilitating art institutions which promote and house them. Through them, the local and international are brought into juxtaposition. Perhaps the most classic example is the Venice Biennale with its interface much like that of a grand world fair. Borders are reinstated by jewel-like pavilions housing each country’s selected artist or artists. However, most contemporary biennials with relatively new infrastructures are less explicitly zoned. Much like today’s complex geopolitics, lines between the local and global are more subtle and blurred, but nonetheless distinct identities are asserted. To understand how a biennial functions as a rhetorical form, it’s key to acknowledge the stakeholders and the stories about identity which they wish to tell. Of course not all agendas are conscious, but by entering into an open debate and attempting to unmask and map various motives in advance, counter-images and narratives might be given space to emerge.

*download full text with references