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A symposium with Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Carroll, Teddy Cruz, Helga Tawil Souri, Laila el Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv.
Radars and Fences 2010 explores the production of the Israel/Palestine and Mexico/US borders, examining how they engage affects, bodies, and spatial scales. Read More »
I have recently published an article on Repubblica.it (in Italian) on the work of Aaron Koblin, a young, brilliant Californian artist who has been crowdsourcing his art projects through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
By collecting the contributions of thousands of MTurk’s providers Koblin realized a version of Daisy Bell sung by two thousand voices, a $100 bill drawn by 10,000 contributors (paid 1 cent each), and a very large flock of sheep all facing left.
In this video interview Koblin explains what inspired him to ask 10,000+ MTurkers to draw a sheep for 2 cents a piece:
After watching the video I emailed him a couple of questions. In particular I asked him whether aside from assigning the Mturks an unusual and aesthetic task such as drawing a sheep he had tried to involve them on a different level, for instance whether he tried to involve them in a discussion on possible future developments of the project. His first answer was:
Eva and Franco Mattes aka0100101110101101.org have just released a book (Charta, 2009) about their precocious art career.
The book recapitulates the couple’s memorable exploits, including their participation in the multiple-use nameLuther Blissett, the fake Nikeground campaign in Vienna, the poster ad for United We Stand, a fictitious film on the power dreams of the European Union, and their recent Synthetic Performances in Second Life.
The book also reveals the couple’s very first (and until now undisclosed) work: Stolen Pieces. From 1995 to 1997, the Matteses toured the world’s most important museums and stole dozens of fragments from well-known works by artists such as Duchamp, Kandinsky, Beuys and Rauschenberg. This work, which has remained a secret for 14 years, is revealed and discussed here for the very first time.
Texts by Domenico Quaranta, Bruce Sterling, RoseLee Goldberg, Wu Ming, Fabio Cavallucci, Maurizio Cattelan, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, Tilman Baumgärtel, Marco Deseriis and Matthew Mirapaul.
The last day Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1 was touring New York City’s colleges and bookstores to present the English translation of Manituana (Verso, 2009), Ashley Dawson, Gabriella Coleman, and I came together to interview him in Biella’s office on the 7th floor of the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.
Roberto was in a good mood, as he had just learned that Altai, the latest effort of the Wu Ming collective (Einaudi 2009), is selling extremely well in Italy. The conversation touched upon a number of stimulating topics including Wu Ming’s process of collective writing, the relationship between the four Wu Mings and their community of readers, the collective’s authoring and communicative strategies, Manituana as an allegory of American exceptionalism, the difference between ‘technified myths’ and genuine myths, and the different apprehension of the notion of “popular culture” in Italy and the United States.
Ashley Dawson, whose work focuses on literature written in places once colonized by the British and is Associate Professor of English at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and at the College of Staten Island, has published the interview on the blog of Social Text.
This Friday I will be introducing Wu Ming @ BlueStockings!
Date:
Friday, November 20, 2009
7:00pm
Location:
BlueStockings
172 Allen St
New York, NY
Wu Ming is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors, “a band of guerrilla novelists” whom have collaboratively written several novels, including 54 (2002), Manituana (2009), and, under the pseudonym of Luther Blissett, Q (1999).
Co-created by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, “Invisible Threads – Double Happiness Jeans” is a mixed reality performance-installation, which explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life that manufacturers real world, wearable jeans on-demand.
The project has been commissioned by Turbulence.org, and implemented in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book in 2008. After an international committee selected five chapters, the editors, Jo Anne Greene, Helen Thorington (Turbulence) and Eduardo Navas, invited new authors, including myself, to contribute new chapters to the book.
At the moment seven authors and three editors are holding a stimulating conversation on the potentialities of collaborative writing and networked editing on the empire mailing list, with the goal of collecting feedback from potential readers and inviting new contributors to participate.
Everyone can post comments on any of the existing chapters. Mine, titled “No End In Sight: Networked Art as a Participatory form of Storytelling” is available at http://deseriis.networkedbook.org.
I have begun teaching a new class called Introduction to Digital Media, and I have to say I am amazed by the quality of my students and their interest in the class. The class is running a collaborative Wordpress blog, which can be found here .
Eva and Franco Mattes aka 
I have recently published a chapter of 