Enchanted features works that lure the viewer in with a teasing game, arousing irresistible fascination like the snare of a trap. They subvert the order of the reality they are a part of by mimicking, exceeding or inverting the appearance of the so-called real world. The artworks trap us within their restricted structures by imposing their own rules and their own logic. Through this trickery they lead the audience out of the universal system of meaning and value. This sudden break in reality creates the effect of enchantment.

We live today the promotion of good material nature — truer than true ; the process each artwork uses is the artifice of seduction — falser than false. They somehow gain an irony towards the true nature and reveal that “real” in-depth space is always potentially reversible.

We do not believe that the truth remains true once the veil has been lifted —Nietzsche in Nietzsche Contra Wagner

Aids-3d (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas)
Lorenzo Bernet and Till Forrer
Juliette Bonneviot
Peter Coffin
Harm van den Dorpel
Matias Faldbakken
Lara Favaretto
Yngve Holen
Alicja Kwade
Stephen Lichty (performance)
Darri Lorenzen
Rodney McMillian
Marlie Mul
Aude Pariset
Jon Rafman
Timur Si-Qin
Hayley Silverman
Maxwell Simmer
Damon Zucconi

curated by Juliette Bonneviot

Deriving inspiration from the extensive experimental wave, the information society, the DIY and hacking culture of the mid-20th century, we acknowledge that historical continuity runs through contemporary ideas and actions. Examples, such as the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system Memex, the periodical publication Whole Earth Catalog, the instructional manuals for nomadic constructions related to the ideas of “Comprehensive Design”, the demonstration The Mother of all Demos and the pursuit for the personal computer technology, contributed to the shaping and promotion of the “personal empowerment tools” in different aspects of culture.

Half a century later, scientific, technological and social developments, such as the Internet, transformed the vision of empowerment through access to knowledge, in a common place that realized the demand of information distribution at an everyday level.

Collecting works that represent different approaches and intentions, Full/Operational/Toolbox doesn’t start from a given ideological incitement or fixed point of reference. It intends to communicate and highlight those artistic practices that reassess the relations between the expert and the amateur, functioning in a inspirational and educative manner that opens up to comprehensive and dynamic creative processes and possibilities. The works to be presented in Full/Operational/Toolbox highlight and realize, each one in its own way and using its own codes, ideas and creative strategies that concern the management of the artistic work mainly as “information”. The works, thus, set out new conditions for the access and distribution of culture and of the viewer’s participation in it.
Exploring the dynamics and the status of these creative activities, Full/Operational/Toolbox, aims at functioning as a platform of debate on the ways of management of the cultural product in terms of directness and immediacy, as well as on the reconsideration of material and institutional processes and limitations.

Full/Operational/Toolbox is curated by KERNEL

Artists: Otto von Busch, Forms of Melancholy curated by Chris Coy, Aleksandra Domanovic, Seth Price, Let’s Remake, Dexter Sinister, Damon Zucconi

Participants in the workshop for the partial reproduction of the project Self Passage Methods
by Otto von Busch: Olga Evagelidou, Lia Mori, Irene Ragusini, Stella Tselepi

14 May – 30 May 2010
Wednesday – Sunday, 16:00 – 22:00 (and by appointment)
Miltiadou 21 (4th froor)
Athens 10560, Greece

With work by Matthew Brett, Andrew Laumann, Jason Lazarus, Peter Sutherland, Ann Woo, Damon Zucconi

@ Reference

Selected works:
AIDS-3D (Daniel Keller & Nik Kosmas, US/DE), Motion Capture Dance, 2008. Video, 08.34 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.
Cory Arcangel (US), Drei Klavierstücke op. II – I, 2009. Video, 04.21 min. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York.
Brody Condon (US), Without Sun, 2008. Video, 15.12 min. Courtesy Virgil De Voldere, New York. (Online excerpt).
Petra Cortright (US), Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009. Video, 03.41 min.
Paul B. Davis (UK/US), Compression Study #4 (Barney), 2007. Video, 02.49 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.
Constant Dullart (NL), Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009. Video, 00.33 min.
Martijn Hendriks (NL), Untitled (12 glowing men), 2008. Video, 04.10 min.
Jodi (BE/NL), Mal Au Pixel, 2009. Video, 01.14 min. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.
Martin Kohout (CZ/DE), Close Up, 2009. Video loop, 03.11 min.
Oliver Laric (DE), Aircondition, 2006. Video, 01.59 min. Courtesy Seventeen Gallery, London.
Les Liens Invisibles (IT), Too Close to Duchamp’s Bicycle, 2008. Video loop, 02.14 min.
Miltos Manetas (GR/UK), King Kong After Peter Jackson, 2006. Video, 03.05 min.
Pascual Sisto (US), No strings attached, 2007. Video, 01.30 min.
Paul Slocum (US), You’re Not My Father, 2007. Video, 04.05 min.
Harm Van den Dorpel (NL), Resurrections, 2007. 3 animated found photos, 04.18 min.
Damon Zucconi (US), Colors Preceding Photographs (woodshed), 2008. Video, 00.35. Courtesy Gentili Apri, Berlin.

Founded by the American writer Stewart Brand in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) was a catalogue of tools that was regarded as a bible by the counterculture generation – that is, by those who shaped the techno-cultural environment we are living in. Published regularly until 1972 and sporadically until 1998, it definitely died with the rise of the Web, of which it is considered a conceptual forerunner by people such as Steve Jobs (founder of Apple) and Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired). WEC was conceived as an “evaluation and access device” meant to bring power and knowledge to the people. It featured excellent reviews of books, maps, professional journals, courses, and classes, along with objects of any kind, from gardening tools to computers. Everybody could submit a review for the catalogue.

Like the WEC reviewers, the artists in this exhibition are contributing to a shared resource; like them, they love their tools and, like them, they are interested in understanding the world as a whole. What did change, in the meantime – and mostly thanks to the WEC generation – is the world itself.

These artists – WE – live in a world in which media don’t just reproduce reality, nor just simulate it, in Baudrillardian terms: they shape reality, improve it, sometimes they build parallel worlds in which we can spend our time. They redesign our way to live, to think, to make and enjoy culture, to eat, to sleep, to die. [...]

These artists use simple tools and editing tricks in order to comment on the current status of the image, to talk about themselves, to edit found material and to improve its meaning; they explore cultures and habits in order to sample, remix and comment them; they use and abuse technologies; they export metaphors, practices, aesthetics and narratives to other situations. This may sound weird if you are not living in their same time slice, but please – don’t call them formalists. They are not working within a medium: they are working within a media-implemented reality. They are realists, in the only way that realism makes sense nowadays.

This peculiar realism can bring somebody to go back to when everything started. Notoriously, psychedelic drugs played an important rule in the beginning of digital culture. Without Sun, by Brody Condon, is a mesh-up of various found videos of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Why do people broadcast these materials? Do these “out of the body” experiences have any relationship with other now common forms of projection of the self, such as online videogaming? Some artists, such as Cory Arcangel or Oliver Laric, are interested in the conceptual consequences of technologies, and on the way they are updating fundamental concerns of our culture; others, such as the duo AIDS-3D, explore how technologies are increasingly affecting our spiritual life. In their own words, they want to make “the intangible magic of technology visible”. Not necessarily trough technologies themselves: Constant Dullart’s video, for example, turns Youtube’s “loading” animation into a suggestive, hypnotic object using light and Styrofoam balls.

This concern with magic and transcendence is shared by many of the artists on show, from Petra Cortright to Damon Zucconi, from Harm Van den Dorpel to Martin Kohout. In their hands, a video filter can become the best way to explore how consistent the outer world is, and how consistent we are. It can become the best way to get a better knowledge of the world we live in, whatever we may mean with this word.

curated by Brian Droitcour

Opening reception – Friday – December 11, 2009 – 7-9pm
Closing Performance by BFFA3AE – January 17, 2010 – 6pm

Narratives, performances, personalities, and politics are fine for screenings, but who likes catching a sequence of events at a random point and watching from middle to middle, while standing up? The best videos to show in a gallery are impersonal (i.e. abstract), on short loops, and rooted in the equipment on which they are shown, to minimize the difference between following the movement of images over time and contemplating an object in space. Most of the works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” meet most of these criteria; if they all met all of them it would be dull.

A discussion of abstraction in contemporary video needs a vocabulary beyond Plato and Aristotle, Malevich and Tatlin, invisibility and objectivity. This work involves code and electron guns, things that trouble stale dichotomies of abstract and concrete, and are troubled in turn by fallacies about the immateriality of digital information. It sounds dry and wonky to talk about an animation as a manifestation of data. But the outcome, with bold lines and CMYK palettes, triggers associations with pyramids, pentacles, and glow sticks. It’s the legacy of nu rave, rest its soul. The selection of works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” is designed to aggravate these issues, not resolve them.

Duncan Malashock, Temple: The artist draws and plots an electronic signal in Max/MSP to produce a dynamic stack of fluted lines. Their movement throbs with a cutting drone, the audio component of the same signal.

Sabine Gruffat, Video Synth #1:Gruffat also works with digital pulses, but unlike Malashock she forgoes external references. The image on screen is offered directly as an electronic signal, and her colored monitors focus attention to the hardware. By putting a synthesizer in the gallery, Gruffat allows viewers to take part in the manipulation of the image’s parameters.

Damon Zucconi, From Black to Blue: A few lines of code increase a color’s opacity to the maximum, reduce it to nothing, and repeat the process in a loop. At each end of the function the totally black and totally blue screens look like two kinds of a monitor’s blankness, on and off, but the movement between them realizes the entire range from zero to one.

Elna Frederick, Asymptote: An evocation rather than a textbook illustration of the mathematic function named in the title, Frederick’s .png file sends a field of yellowish pixels bouncing against a pink counterpart, reaching variable heights in unresolved, perpetual motion.

Ilia Ovechkin, FX 1: Slideshow software and Photoshop’s gradient tool are two devices for creating illusions of depth on a two-dimensional screen. Ovechkin’s study in flatness and space combines those two tools, so that each one exposes and augments the other. The monitor is laid horizontally, and the eggs arranged across its top are a foil to the simulated volumes on the screen’s other side.

Kelli Miller, The True Believer: The only work here with words and people. Miller’s subject is the cottage industry of magic crystals, whose consumers have faith in shape and color as agents for the delivery of abstractions–happiness, health, prosperity–into real life.

Brian Droitcour is a staff writer for Rhizome at the New Museum and a contributor to Artforum.

Posters by Tim Lokiec, Maxwell Pitegoff, Travess Smalley and Stewart Uoo.

179 Canal Street has been functioning as a venue for emerging art and curatorial projects since May 2009 with the intention of continuing indefinitely or at least till May 2010. For more information, please contact Margaret Lee at 179canal@gmail.com.

Opening Hours: Friday/Saturday/Sunday 12-6pm and by appointment.

ClubInternet.org

Just Add Water is a collection of videos from an international group of artists that utilize similar techniques and processes for completely different outcomes. With sources originating from digital readymades or appropriated video, each artist modifies, redirects and redistributes the footage using a wide array of alterations, from simple editing to more detailed and complex reconstructions.

The digital realm casts a dark shadow over the initial intent of images and our preconceptions of their meaning and usage into a new alternative mode of existence where the source becomes either a catalyst or an added layer of a whole new work.

Works by: AIDS-3D, Chris Collins, Aleksandra Domanovic, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Jasper Elings, Martijn Hendriks, Oliver Laric, Guthrie Lonergan, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, Fernando Sanchez, and Damon Zucconi.