[Nettime-bold] announcer/tenacity exhibit

[yvolkart@access.ch (Yvonne Volkart)]

For Immediate Release
February 2000







Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information and Biotechnology
March 24 to May 13, 2000
Ursula Biemann, Zürich; Bureau of Inverse Technology; Ricardo Dominguez, New York; Marina Gržinic and Aina Šmid, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Natalie Jeremijenko, NY, Kristin Lucas, NY; Diane Ludin, NY; Jenny Marketou, NY; Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, NY; Francesca da Rimini and Michael Grimm, Adelaide, Australia; ®™ark, USA; Cornelia Sollfrank, Hamburg.
Curated by Yvonne Volkart
Opening: Friday March 24, 6-8 pm with webcast, Involuntary Reception, by Kristin Lucas 7 pm
Curator's/artists' tour: Saturday March 25, 1 pm
Conference: Saturday March 25, 2 pm

Information, communication, and biotechnology play an increasingly important role in the globalizing society of the changing century. Beyond simplistic technodeterminism, there are good reasons to recognize that these technologies influence our ideas of subjectivity, agency and politics. This process is linked to the culturalization of economic interests — among other things. In this context, the arts, as a field of the visual, hold an important and active place in our increasingly visualized society, be it in an affirmative or a critical sense.
Tenacity wants to examine how art strategies and esthetics interfere in the universalism of technologies, asking how artists can be users while at the same time opposing the ideologies provided by these technologies. Beyond a simple criticism of hegemonic ideas of art and technologies, the Tenacity participants engage in producing alternative esthetics and omitted subject matters. They assert that digital media, new technologies and virtual realities don't abolish the embodiment of knowledge, criticism, and resistance. In so far as art is always an embodiment of ideas and a realization of imaginative and utopian moments, it has a crucial function in tenaciously insisting on the materiality of actual bodies and their contexts. Reflecting the importance of identity and agency in a networked context, many artists focus on the figuration of net personae with a wide range of psychic and political dimensions. Cyborgs, monsters, nomads, bots, lurkers and hackers cross the multi-layer!
ed space.
The Tenacity participants have been involved in an engaged digital media discourse for years and are among the best-regarded artists in the new media scene. The exhibition will establish a display specific to their critical reflections on new media and new technologies focusing beyond the visual into the acoustic. As an embodied virtual space, the gallery provides the temporary and symbolic location, where tenacious agents and images gather and move in a kind of high-speed, virtualized acoustic and visual space.
—Yvonne Volkart





Ursula Biemann (Zürich) perceives the Internet as a space of textualized desires, disembodied sexuality, and commercialized gender relationships. Biemann’s new video, Writing Desire, researches two related phenomena: listings for mail-order brides offered on the Internet, and the increasing number of people who develop on-line romantic relationships.

Bureau of Inverse Technology are self-described as an international bureaucracy for the Information Age. Their public profile emulates multinational corporations such as The Walt Disney Company, but to very different ends: with The HalfLife Ratio, part of the Bitsperm Bank ™, they compare the different market values of sperm and ovum to illustrate how traditional gender-based inequities are reproduced in the high-tech marketing of reproductive tissue.

Ricardo Dominguez (New York) is a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which invents playful and spectacular forms of virtual resistance, stemming from a concern for the relative autonomy of the subject in cultural, political, and social contexts. Through his performance, Mayan Technology for the People: A Zapatista haiku on the question of technology and the politics of intervention, Dominguez will provide a hacker’s glimpse into the military mindset.

Marina Gržinic and Aina Šmid (Ljubljana) produce videos and technology-based projects that examine the “Communist subject” and its representations. Gržinic and Šmid illustrate that new technologies are not ideologically neutral, but instead reflect Western concepts of “freedom.” They question what it means for people who have been shaped by Communist societies to appropriate these predefined new media.
http://www.ljudmila.org/quantum.east

Natalie Jeremijenko (New York) uses technological products to explore social imagery. In Touch synthesized human skin is employed as portraits of the idiomatic categories used in medical research tests, such as Non-Smoking, post menopausal, female. The material is synthetically biological and human, yet stripped of its body it is drawn into cultural, social, and political discussions of identity and representation.

Kristin Lucas (New York) will show her latest video in which she performs as a young woman who discharges an enormous electromagnetic pulse field. This E.P.F. prohibits her from watching television or using cellular telephones, as she jams the frequencies at which both radio and television signals are broadcast, meanwhile she can read minds and pick-up police radio transmissions. The CIA, FBI, FCC, and IRS all have her under constant surveillance, although they are unable to document her activities on tape. This fictional cyborg woman is the hybrid offspring of our data world.
At the Tenacity opening, Lucas will transmit Involuntary Reception, a pirate radio webcast.


Diane Ludin (New York) has collaborated with Francesca da Rimini (see below) and Agnese Trocchi (Rome) to develop a network installation entitled Identity Runners: Re-Flesh the Body, which is constructed from multiple scenes based on digital myths developed by each of the artists. Ludin, da Rimini, and Trocchi propose new forms of identity more appropriate to the ‘post-human’ age of information.
http://www2.sva.edu/~dianel/idrunr

Jenny Marketou (Greece/New York) developed a net-running bot software persona, an artificially intelligent agent, which gains unauthorized access to chat rooms and ‘CU SEE ME’ teleconferencing environment servers. Viewers are able to participate in a real-time ‘lurking’ experience as they identify with the intelligent agent, while at the same time the definition of their own identity, as well as the identity of the subjects they meet in virtual space, becomes unclear.
http://smellbytes.banff.org

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy (New York) present two pieces: a special high-speed acoustic environment, which is a real-time audio collage derived from the other artists’ pieces in the exhibition. In their second piece, they sample visual material from the Internet, which they detect as being representative of the increasing commercialization of the web.
http://www.airworld.net

Francesca da Rimini (Adelaide) was previously a member of VNS Matrix, a cyber-feminist group. In Tenacity, she will present dollspace, whose protagonist, doll yoko, is a murdered female body, a ghost with monstrous desires and dark fantasies. Da Rimini shows that the Internet is a space of phantasms where both positive and negative representations of female identity can be experienced.
Soundtrack for Dollspace, soundtrack for an empty dollspace, created by Michael Grimm (Adelaide).
http://www.thing.net/~dollyoko

®™ark (New York) proclaim, “As ordinary corporations are solely and entirely machines to increase their shareholders' wealth (often to the detriment of culture and life) so ®™ark is a machine to improve its shareholders' culture and life (sometimes to the detriment of corporate wealth).” Previously engaged in anti-World Trade Organization interventions, ®™ark seek to explore playful means of on-line resistance.
http://www.rtmark.com

Cornelia Sollfrank’s (Hamburg) contribution to the exhibition, Unauthorized Access, makes available her research on the topic of women hackers. The few known women hackers not only gain unauthorized access to restricted sectors of the Internet, but also intrude upon a male-dominated province. Included in this project will be Sollfrank’s videotaped interview with hacker Clara G. Sopht, who specializes in Distributed Denial of Service attacks, which is to remotely disable computers by flooding them with more information than they are able to handle.

Conference: Saturday March 25, 2000
“Stubborn Practices” in the Age of Information and Biotechnology
with the artists and invited guest speakers

2 pm:	Introduction: Yvonne Volkart, curator
• Performance: Mayan Technology for the People:
A Zapatista haiku on the question of technology and the politics of intervention,
by Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of Electronic Disturbance Theater

3 pm:	Ways and Weapons
• Lecture by Tim Griffin, Executive Editor of ArtByte magazine
• Statements by Ricardo Dominguez, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, ®™ark, and Cornelia Sollfrank
• Open discussion

4 pm:	cyber snack

4:30 pm:	Agents and Representations
• Lecture by Toni Dove, electronic media artist
• Statements by Ursula Biemann, Marina Gržinic, Kristin Lucas, Diane Ludin, and Jenny Marketou
• Open discussion

This exhibition was made possible in part by Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland, Swissair and Kulturbehörde der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg.

The Swiss Institute is an independent, not-for-profit cultural center founded in 1986 to promote artistic dialogue between Switzerland and the United States. Exploring both contemporary and historical avenues, it emphasizes both Switzerland’s cultural heritage as well as its place in the context of American arts and culture. In our SoHo gallery, the Swiss Institute holds art exhibitions, hosts lectures, concerts and dance performances, and sponsors film and video screenings throughout the year.

The Swiss Institute is located at 495 Broadway, third floor, New York, NY 10012.
Telephone: (212) 925-2035, Facsimile: (212) 925-2040
E-mail:	info@swissinstitute.net
Website:	www.swissinstitute.net
Exhibition website (launched March 24, 2000): www.thing.net/~tenacity
Tuesday through Saturday 11 am to 6 pm.
Subway-N, R to Prince Street, 6 to Spring Street
Wheelchair accessible.

For biographical information and photographic material please contact Jackie McAllister, Associate Curator, Swiss Institute, at (212) 925-2035.


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold