remixed by enlarging, brightening
Spiegel is known best as a computer music pioneer (see this YouTube). The image above comes from a page on her site called Early Bell Labs Computer Arts Work. The original raster painting was made in 1974.
A screen shot of her playing music on a computer instrument that looks like an Apollo moon mission console (that I put up prior to the YouTube post of her performance) and more about her music here.
Paddy Johnson reviews Tino Seaghal's Guggenheim performance work at the L magazine.
Seaghal practices the "relational" style of artwork, which consists of social interactions structured or set in motion by the artist. Seaghal famously doesn't allow photos of his works, which forces oral and written storytelling as a means of transmission but also gins up controversy among professionals accustomed to communicating in part with their cameras.
In this case guides walk visitors up the winding ramp of the emptied-out Guggenheim, and talk to you about your ideas of "progress." The guide at the base of the ramp is a child, and the guides get progressively older as they hand you off from one to the next. The performers ask you questions and pass along your answers to the next guide, but they also interrupt you and give you canned answers to certain questions.
It all sounds terribly artificial, relational in the same way that certain science-based religions and government interrogators use interaction to break down subjects and make them pliable to suggestion. Without museum sanction it could make an intriguing story; with institutional backing it's a web of rules and consensual submissive behavior that is somehow "good for you."
I didn't experience the artwork firsthand: I am being Seaghal's camera and relaying it to you via the oral tradition method.
Speaking of lumpenfuturism (although this is from the past, and fairly elegant). More from Bill Schwarz.
A tune of mine ("Yog 2012") is used in a YouTube-documented sculpture work by Aron Namenwirth, titled I Can Hear You. An abandoned speaker is filled with soil, which is used to grow an oak tree seedling. The music emanates from the "tweeter" while the tree occupies the slot for the former "woofer."
Namenwirth is using cast-off furniture and other artifacts as soil cases for growing trees--in this case with a literal audio component. Back in the '70s there was much discussion and media buzz about talking to plants and playing music for them. That's somewhere in the cultural background of this electro-eco-botanical artwork. I like the lumpenfuturistic element--it works as an abject counterpoint to all the buff new media pieces that try to incorporate growing things, while still being straightforward in its urban environmentalism (Namenwirth plans to eventually plant the trees and let the casings rot in the ground).
