Baby Love [Sydney]

Baby Love by Shu Lea Cheang :: October 1 - November 2, 2007 | Mon - Sat | 10am - 12pm & 2pm - 5pm :: Free :: Carriageworks, Sydney.

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM

“Homeland” by Laurie Anderson [Melbourne]

Homeland by Laurie Anderson @ Melbourne International Arts Festival: Laurie Anderson’s latest work Homeland is her next major production, following in the footsteps of United States, The Nerve Bible and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick. Somewhere between epic poem and music concert, this Festival co-commission looks at 21st-century American obsessions with security, distance, information, the relationship of fear and freedom, the increasing acceptance of violence and the persistent new language of war. Using the synthetic language of technology and the sensuous language of song writing and poetry, Homeland explores American-style totalitarianism, shifting images of empire and reality shows through a powerful combination of visual design and experimental music.

The music of Homeland, performed live, is built on the foundation of groove electronics, and features many new melodic forms with which Anderson has been experimenting. This brand new work from one of today’s premier performance artists promises to be a highlight of this year’s Festival program. [Videos] To listen to ABC’s DIG, digital radio’s interview with Laurie Anderson click here.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 11:05AM

Turning museums into places where people interact

Print Magazine is reporting on Local Projects, a company that is turning museums into places where people interact with information—and each other. When Jake Barton, the 34-year-old principal of the interactive design firm Local Projects, thinks about what an exhibition can do, he often considers the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The museum documents the forced removal of more than 60,000 residents from a mixed-race neighborhood declared a whites-only zone in 1966, and tells the stories of those displaced. In the early ’90s, when reclaiming that land was still not an option, the museum kept the issue in the public eye through exhibitions and debate; subsequently, the museum’s sister organization helped residents apply to have their land returned. Transforming and healing a community through inclusive storytelling is, in Barton’s eyes, the mandate for museums of the 21st century. These days, he has ample reason to meditate on it: In April, he and his seven-person firm received the commission to codesign the permanent exhibition for the World Trade Center Memorial Museum.” By choosing Local Projects, the memorial’s directors cast their lot with a new kind of museum that prizes interactivity over top-down presentation. Local Projects insists on a plurality of voices—the exhibitions it creates function as a kind of conversation rather than as repositories of authoritative fact. “Museums are starting to evolve into agents of social change,” Barton says. “That’s being reflected in the numbers of people who are going to museums and the ways museums are functioning as spaces for community dialogue. We [are] trying to make diverse people visible to each other through a storytelling space.” Read full story

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 7:25AM

The spime arrives

Bruce Sterling is now living in Torino, Italy and will stay here, together with his wife, Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tesanovic, until the end of March 2008. He is here at the invitation of the Regional Government of Piedmont to be the guest curator of the Piemonte Share Festival (11-16 March 2008). Last night he presented the Italian translation of his book “Shaping Things” in a public lecture and discussion. He also showed the audience a highly entertaining video of what he images the world of “spimes” to be like. Discussants were Andrea Bairati (Regione Piemonte Councillor), Luca De Biase (Chief editor Nòva 24 /Il Sole 24Ore) and Claudio Germak (Politecnico di Torino - Word Design Capital Torino 2008) . The conference was moderated by Simona Lodi and Chiara Garibaldi (Share Festival). Though many topics were addressed, I think the most relevant one is a challenge — for us, for this region and for Bruce too: if Bruce is right in his thinking about spimes and the entire change of thinking and doing it will entail, then what could be a typical Italian positioning in this new social, economic and cultural paradigm? I hope that in the next six months, the people here in Torino, with the input and ideas of Bruce, can start outlining some initial answers to that question. To be continued.

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:04AM