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Colaboran en este número / Contributors:
Peter Weibel, Jesús Carrillo, Rosa Pera, Juan S. Cárdenas, Luís Francisco Pérez, Daniel Villegas, Pablo España, Manuel Olveira, Vicente Carretón Cano, Uta M. Reindl, Alejandra Aguado, Alicia Murría, Eva Grinstein, Jonathan Goodman, David Liss, Bárbara Perea, Santiago B. Olmo, Pedro Medina, Peio Aguirre. Especial agradecimiento / Special thanks:
Horacio Lefèvre, Dominika Szope, Ulrike Havemann, Ben Rubin.
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ARTECONTEXTO reúne diversos puntos de vista para activar el debate y no se identifica forzosamente con todas las opiniones de sus autores.
5
SUMARIO ContEntS
Primera página / Page One ALICÍA MURRÍA
DOSSIER: HI-TECH 6
La condición posmedial / The post-medial condition PETER WEIBEL
16
La red: un sitio inespecífico / The Internet: a Non-Specific Site JESÚS CARRILLO
26
Flujos desapercibidos, un escáner sobre Transmediale’05 Unnotice Flows, Transmediale’05 through a Scanner ROSA PERA
36
Lo inaudible en lo corpóreo, una entrevista con Ben Rubin The Inaudible in The Corporeal, An interview with Ben Rubin JUAN SEBASTIÁN CÁRDENAS
46
Reajustes en el orden del discurso de la representación (Algunas claves en canal*gitano de Antoni Abad) Re-adjustments on the Framework of the Discourse of Representation (Some keys to the understanding of Antoni Abad’s work canal*gitano) LUÍS FRANCISCO PÉREZ
56
El lugar de la producción. Madrid: Los Centros de Recursos a debate The Place of Production. Madrid: Resource Center Debated DANIEL VILLEGAS / PABLO ESPAÑA
67
De Shangai a Montreal: dos modelos culturales From Shangai to Montreal: Two Opposing Cultural Models MANUEL OLVEIRA
76
Cibercontexto: ARS ROBÓTICA VICENTE CARRETÓN
84
Info
100
Libros / Books
104
Críticas de exposiciones / Reviews
6 Fotografía de cubierta/Cover Photo:
BEN RUBIN DARK SOURCE, 2005. Cortesía del artista
PAGE ONE PAGE ONE
It looks like a turbulent spring is upon us. One the one hand the government, with hardly a year in office, is doing things that makeus happy, and on the other, is leaving us rather non-plussed, especially as regards cultural affairs in general and art in particular. On 21 April, the Congress of Deputies passed the amendment to the civil code legalising marriage between people of the same sex; it must still be approved by the Senate and returned to the lower house, but it is likely that at the end of June we will be able to celebrate a measure that puts Spain in the vanguard of a social change of the first magnitude. However, concern is mounting over the directions other policies seem to be taking. An example is the government’s education bill introduced on 30 March which would drastically reduce Art and Music classes for secondary students aged 12 to 16. These subjects would be lumped together in a single, one-year course (today they are separate and given over three years). Philosophy would be cut to a single year, and Ethics dropped altogether. In an equally regressive development, related to interEuropean university harmonisation, Art History would disappear as a degree course, to become a subdivision of History. Humanities studies would be downgraded in general, and Philosophy in particular. Today’s 14 philology specialities would be reduced to four. Equally perplexing is the reorganisation –with great fanfare– of the Prado Museum and its collections, and the change of role of its annex, the Casón del Buen Retiro –which has been closed for repairs for the past eight years. Despite the large budget and huge overruns, the building is no longer to house 19thcentury art, but instead will be the site of the Prado’s administrative offices. The official announcement says that as of now the Prado’s collections will be shown “within a complete historical discourse from antiquity to the 19th century” but fails to explain clearly or with scientific arguments what the museum project really consists of.
Alicia Murría
Meanwhile, there are rumours –plausible ones– of plans to place the Prado and the Reina Sofía Art Centre under the control of a single agency, for reasons we ignore, but distrust. The Reina Sofía would lose its status as art centre, to become a mere museum of modern art. This would be a sad development indeed. It is true that this museum, repeatedly termed “the flagship of our modernity”, has never acted as an engine driving art production; the loss of its status as such would thus come as an acknowledgement of an unhappy fact. An art centre is supposed to be a place linked to art not only through exhibitions and acquisitions, but through many other activities reflecting a commitment o the present, a place to discuss contemporary artistic practices, a steadfast advocacy of domestic artistic production, pitting it against foreign work, etc. And the Reina Sofía has fulfilled these functions only exceptionally, though some of its directors have been less derelict than others in this regard. The plans for the Reina Sofia of the team that took command a year ago are still unknown, but it seems clear that today’s art is not a priority. If the rumours turn out to be true, and things move in the direction they are pointing to, then what will happen with the art of the present? Once again it is being overlooked that the virtue of the Prado –one of the most important museums in the world, if not the most– lies in the fact that its collections were assembled in “the present”. Will the Reina Sofía keep trying to fill the “gaps” in its holdings historical avant-garde? Will it continue to buy second-rate works from the early decades of the 20th century, at premium prices, and neglect everything else? It is a mystery that this government, which enjoys the overwhelming and explicit support of the world of culture, should show so little interest in holding a serious discussion of the country’s real needs with respect to culture in general, and art in particular. Suddenly I recall the plea that someone expressed just after the elections: “Zapatero, don’t let us down!”
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The Internet: The Internet:
A Non-Specific Site
A Non-Specific Site By Jesús Carrillo* Art that has been made specifically for the Internet since the mid-
Green pointed out in her widely-circulated essay entitled “A History of
1990s may never attain the prominent place within the history of the
Internet Art” (http://alepharts.org/pens/greene_history.html), net.art
artistic creation of our time that it has insistently claimed for itself
viewed itself as the latest link in the history of avant-garde
since its first encounters and collective manifestos. The very coining
movements, ignoring the fact that the rest of the art world had long
of the term net.art, which was disseminated by Vuc Cosic in 1995,
abandoned the ghosts of its historicity and was looking elsewhere for
based on a stray piece of poorly decoded email, was intended, with
its rightful context.
its Dadaist echoes, to enact the emergence of the last avant-garde
What are the causes of the palpable anachronism of a
movement of the 20th century. In spite of the ironic spirit and self-
phenomenon which, curiously, conceived itself as the spirit of a new
consciousness of its originators, and the circumstances that
era? We could list here some of the particular circumstances which
combined to bring about such a birth, for some years net.art turned
propitiated the upsurge of these processes in the art world in the
out to be able to sustain the modernist notion of an art specifically
mid-1990s: the enthusiasm of many artists of the former Communist
linked to a given medium and endowed with a particular aesthetics
nations, eager to become visible in the new global context, the crisis
that was derived from research into the medium itself. Such a claim
of the art market in the 1980s, and with it that of the artists and the
to autonomy and reflexiveness was accompanied by disquisitions, no
material art work itself; the awakening of the networks of mail art
less avant-garde, about the dissolving of art as object, the demise of
that had survived in a latent state since the previous decade; the
the artistic institution, the triumph of collective production, and the
demand for novelty by the art exhibition industry, etc. But the sum of
fusion of art and life in the parallel universe of the Internet. In
these coincidences would not have given rise to the resurrection of
addition, net.art was touted as the heir to and culmination of the
the avant-garde spirit without the concurrent mirage of a revolution
diverse traditions of artistic experimentation with the new media of
spearheaded by technology, a notion that affected not only the world
communications technology, from Futurism and Constructivism
of artistic production, but, also the sphere of thought, and even of
1
between the two world wars, to the Fluxus movement. As Rachel
22 ARTECONTEXTO · DOSSIER
finance, as was shown with the dotcom boom and the creation of the
NASDAQ market index and its later collapse in 1999. In the years when the postulates of an art conceived from and for the Internet were being formulated, it appeared that the Internet and its logic contained the keys to the future of society. The mirage of technological “revolution” and the calls to the pioneering spirit and the opening of new frontiers was cheering on by a capitalism seeking new fields for expansion in the telecommunications business, and it was also backed, from closer proximity, by theories and discourses of critical analysis which had a direct impact on art circles. Although these came mainly from positions with an eschatological bent, such as those of Jean Baudrillard or Paul Virilio, these theoretical constructions nourished a notion of the present as a period of dizzying transition to a new era of communications and technology which brought with it the overcoming of territorial and temporal barriers, the overflowing of the modern disciplined subjectivities due to the intensifying of the flows, and the replacement of the individual –generically marked by the patriarchal system– by a reticulated an protean collective agency. The trap set by this mirage was that this conviction, despite its cogency, was not based on an empirical verification of ongoing social processes. As we are told by the sociologist and geographer Nigel Thrift, such constructions were based on mythical projections and on the intuition of a parallel reality which would not complement, but rather replace the outdated structure of contemporary reality.2 The net.artists could do nothing more than enact the subversion of a system over which they had no power, via the theatricalisation of the rebellious spirit of the “hacker”, since they did not exercise it de facto. This was to be the theme of some of
TeCHNOLOGY TO THe peOpLe, Daniel García Andújar. the iSAM™
the most representative works in the history of net.art, as demonstrated by the Jodi duo, formed by Dirk Paesmans and Joan
work of the renowned net.artist Mark Napier attests, in dwelling on
Heemskerk (www.jodi.org), in which the user momentarily loses
the ruined, left-over, and cacophonic nature of the web as a venue for
control of his or her computer, and is overwhelmed by a torrential
human action. The Digital Landfill (http://potatoland.com/landfill) and
series of screens. Web Stalker (http://www.backspace.org/iod/), by
The Shredder (http://potatoland.com/pl.htm), made in 1998 , and his
the Londoners I/O/D, one of the most celebrated projects of the
2002 work Riot (http://potatoland.com/riot) are good examples.
genre, sought to invert the intrinsic blindness of the web by means of
Viewed with the scanty perspective afforded by its proximity in
a search engine that automatically generated the image of the
time, the episodes that accompanied the birth and development of
hypertextual structure of the currently loaded web page, but it did not
the net.art scene until its gradual dissolution at the beginning of the
so much furnish a real alternative as it did a reflection upon the
new millennium seem like a pallid imitation of the birth of the real
definitive loss of the mirage of the modern perspective. Pessimism
avant-garde a century before. The fragility of a phenomenon whose
and melancholy, which tend to be the reverse side of technophile
rise and development were linked to a momentary state of collective
thought, were to become another recurrent theme of net.art, as the
excitement was evident in the short lives of such private initiatives as
DOSSIER · ARTECONTEXTO 23
here as net.art was never restricted to artistic experimentation on the Internet, but rather it coincided with the proliferation of groups and projects remote from meta-mediatic experimentation, although desks, web sites, and wires were shared. These groups and their modus operandi had emerged from the American and European cells of autonomous activists which had been working with local radio and television in the previous decade. The “autonomediaticians”, as they might be called, supplied continuation to the Left’s reflections on the significance of the new technological media in contemporary society, the Medienverbund as analysed by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt,4 and posed their possible re-use in the configuring of means of production in the construction of self-managed platforms of collective activism, availing themselves of the possibilities of cheap communications and the network structure of the new media. Such possibilities nourished the idea of using the Internet to implement situationist theses of subversion and detournament in a real Mark Napier The digital landfill, 1998
“communications guerrilla war”.5 The anti-corporation activism of the
Olia Lialina’s Teleportacia, founded in 1998, in the disappearance of
Andujar’s parodical projects in Technologies to the People®
California collective ®™ark (www.rtmark.com), Daniel García such specialised sites as Aleph, in Spain, or their gravitation towards
(www.irational.org/tttp) exemplified the merger of activism and
traditional museums, as occurred first with the virtual gallery Äda’web
aesthetic production in the defence of a critical and subversive
with respect to the Walter Art Center of Minneapolis, and, more
attitude to the media.6
recently, with the Alex Galloway’s web portal Rhizome.org in relation
This libertarian and anti-system core was spontaneously joined by
to the New Museum of New York. This failure was not exclusive to
another group that had emerged from the very ranks of the
net.art, but extended also to more avowedly social projects of the
“inventors” of the new medium: those who were rebelling against the
same period such as Howard Rheingold’s virtual community The
gradual privatisation and commercialisation of an instrument that had
Well, of the digital city of Amsterdam whose demise was explained
been conceived as a tool of cooperation and collaborative production.
by Geert Lovink, one of its founders.3 In both instances the idealised
The GNU project, originated by the hacker Richard Stallman in 1984
notion of the operations of the new communication society blinded
to liberalise the circulation of open-source software, became a
the organisers to the real society’s specific demands and conflicts.
movement on a global scale with the advent of the Internet. The
It would be very short-sighted, however, to regard the creativity
definitive encounter between the two vectors took place in 1999 in
undertaken on the Internet in the past decade as a homogeneous
Seattle, the birthplace of Microsoft, during the protests of the global
phenomenon or as a common front, event though, for strategic
resistance movement against the meeting of the World Trade
reasons, groups and projects that were quite divergent from each
Organisation. The demonstrators, who had used e-mail and web sites
other appeared to dwell together in institutions, festivals, portals, or
to organise, found they had the firm support of the large local hacker
so-called “media labs” –academic centres such as ZKM or MIT–, art
community. From that union was born indymedia.org, the
events like Documenta X and Ars Electronica, and discussion forums
Independent Media Center site that remains the node of reference for
like Nettime. The extension of the use of e-mail and the geometric
global activists.
expansion of the World Wide Web from the early 1990s led to the
As Maurizio Lazzarato noted 7, any proposal for transforming
multiplication of the categories of expertise and activities that took up
society requires a radical rethinking of the artistic dimension, to the
the Internet as platform and vehicle, while not confining their focus
extent that the operations of unconfined capitalism are based on the
exclusively to the medium itself. Indeed, the phenomenon described
infinite stimulation of desire and the expansion of the consumer’s field
24 ARTECONTEXTO · DOSSIER
of imagination. Thus we should not be surprised that a reflection on
Notes
the means of aesthetic production and the function in the production
1. For the avant-garde’s interest in communications technologies, described in a
of new political subjectivities and worlds of alternate lifestyles has
retrospective view of net.art, see: Tilman Baumgärtel, “Net.art. On the history of
become one of the pillars of new antagonistic thought. Brian Holmes
artistic work with telecommunications media”, Net_condition. Art and Global Media, eds. Peter Weibel y Timothy Drukery, Cambridge Mass.; MIT, 2001,
recently mooted the notion of “direct representation”, in which he
Peter Lunenfeld, “En busca de la ópera telefónica”, Ars Telemática.
proposes a reactivation of politics through the generation of spaces
Telecomunicación, Internet y ciberespacio, Barcelona; ACC L’Angelot, 1998.
for equality through collective artistic production.8 The Internet would
For a more general view, see Edward A., Shanken, “Art in the Information Age.
be one of the scenarios for such “occupation”, and not because of its
Technology and Conceptual Art”, Invisible College: Reconsidering Conceptual
neo-mediatic specificity, as the Internet pioneers imagined, but, on
Art, ed. Michael Corris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, and the
the contrary, because it is one of the priority places in which the
encyclopaedic Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology, by Stephen Wilson, Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 2002.
processes of invasion by the imaginary take place, along with the
2. Nigel Thrift, “Cities without Modernity, Cities with Magic”, Scottish
disciplining of bodies and the exploitation of work.
Geographical Magazine, 113 (3), 138-149.
However, neither does it seem likely that the Internet at the dawn
3. Geert Lovink, Fibra Oscura, Tecnos, Madrid, 2004.
of the 21st century is going to be modelled by the subversive
4. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience. Towards
interventions of small groups of “artivists”. In combination with many
an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, University of
other communications devices, such as cell phones, laptops, and
Minnesota Press, 1993 (originally published as Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung, Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit,
MP3 and digital video players, the Internet has become a general
Frankfurt, 1972).
cultural phenomenon in all social spheres. If, in less than ten years,
5. Grupo Autónomo A.F.R.I.K.A, Luther Blisset and Sonja Bruenzels, Manual de
the Internet has become a central element of economic, political, and
Guerrilla de la Comunicación, Barcelona: Virus ensayo, 2000. With regard to
cultural life, this has not been due to the radicalism of its proposals,
the possibilities and limits of activism on the Internet and so-called “artivism”,
but rather to the speed with which it has been absorbed within the
see chiefly the abundant work of Laura Baigorri:
horizon of everyday activities. The destabilisation of the sacred
http://www.interzona.org/baigorri/cv.htm 6. See Laura Baigorri, “Technologies to the People. Aproximaciones artivistas al
principle of intellectual property by the massive sharing of files, the
tratamiento de la información online,” Zehar, no. 50.
proliferation of new forms of intersubjective relations (chats, sms), and
http://www.gipuzkoa.net/%7Earteleku/zehar50/c/Baigorri.pdf.
the overwhelming of the classic mechanisms of political
7. Maurizio Lazzarato, “New forms of production”, Readme. ASCII Culture and
representation by flows of opinion and protest are not happening on
the Revenge of Knowledge, Amsterdam: Autonomedia, 1999, pp. 159-167.
some giddy cultural level. The Internet is not the “site” for utopian,
8. Brian Holmes (conversation with Marcelo Expósito), “Estéticas de la igualdad,
futurist, apocalyptic, or revolutionary imaginings; it has shifted to a
jeroglíficos del futuro”, www.desacuerdos.org.
state of almost absolute non-specificity, becoming linked to the prosaic affairs of everyday life. It is on that immanent and continuous surface, within the sphere of social behaviour and daily life, that any future aesthetic proposals for the Internet must be inscribed. *Jesús Carrillo teaches History of Art in Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma.
BriaN HOLMes, Carnival Against Capital City of Quebec, April 20-22, 2001
DOSSIER · ARTECONTEXTO 25
CIBERCONTEXTO
ARS ROBOTICA The development of robotics as a discipline and artistic domain owes less today to mythological, literary or industrial notions of the robot than to a select handful of modern neo-avantgardists (Schöffer, Paik, Shannon, Ihnatowicz and Seawright) who steered it down the artistic path, toward the topics of remote controls, cybernetic entities and autonomous behavior (Kac dixit). All in all, it’s the university departments, business laboratories, the techie culture in garages and the circuit of electronic festivals and
By Vicente Carretón Cano
science museums that serve as the breeding ground for the new tendencies of ars robotica. Without a doubt, the robot, as one of the technological and cultural archetypes of our time, concerns not just prosthetic, vehicular or motor engineering, intelligence and artificial life, the cognitive sciences or the glimpsed molecular prototypes of nanotechnology, but also the territories of art, given that all technology carries with it the evil shadow of an accident (Virilio) that art could foresee.
ACADEMIC ROBOTS Rodney Brooks, http://people.csail.mit.edu/u/b/brooks/public_html/, directs the artificial intelligence department at M.I.T. (founded by the dangerous Marvin Minsky, a retrograde, engineering-obsessed mind that only admits ingenuity in programming and detests artists as much as Plato did) and is also the founder of the Humanoid Robotics Group at the same university, http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/, creators of Cog, Kismet and other artificial creatures that have stopped with their evolutionary airs in order to traverse a whole new synthetic ontology of the real, bottom up and not top down, just as Chris Langton, the pope of artificial life, proposed.
PERFORMANCE ROBOTS Stelarc, http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/, is the artist who has most extensively and intensely reflected on the symbiotic relationship between the biological and the technological in the current evolutionary stage of the species. Industrial robots and extra prosthetic extremities, exoskeletons and robo-endoscopic sculptures to adorn the stomach cavity are some of the resources of this Australian’s performances to make patent the difference in velocity between life and technology. The indestructible Catalonian Marceli Antúnez, http://www.marceliantunez.com/, has also forayed this domain, with his sculpture JoAn l’homme de carn (1993) and interactive performances Epizoo, Afasia and Pol having contained metatronics and exoskeletons. With Eduardo Kac, who pioneered telepresence (hybridization of robotics and telecommunications) with his project Ornitorrinco, and who authored a minute chronology of artistic robots http://www.ekac.org/robotichronology.html, Antúnez went so far as to sign a Robotics
Jim Whitin, http://www.leipzig-online.de/bimbotown/whiting-e.htm, a British pioneer of European robotics, got popular with the animatronic figures of Herbie Hancock’s video for Rock It. He toured the continent with his Bimbotown, a conglomerate of tableaux robotiques, until finally parking the exhibit in Leipzig. Along with the amorphic robots of American Chico McMurtrie, http://www.cronos.net/~bk/amorphic/index.html, he represents the android, mechanic and self hydraulics strain of a robotic theater interested, respectively, in urban epiphanies and vital and evolutionary cycles; for his part, Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories, http://www.srl.org/, puts together epic robotic confrontations teleguided in the self-destructive, terminal and extreme line of Jean Tinguely in Homage to New York (1960), in a collision of technologies that end up out of control.
AUTONOMOUS ROBOTICS Norman T. White, http://www.normill.ca/, the dean of Canadian autonomous robotics, has spent 30 years investigating the creation of “logic machines,” like Helpless Robot, that express complex behaviors through sound, light and movement. His Australian colleague Simon Penny, http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/, is another of those who have pursued the chimera of a living, sentient machine with his vision of the robot as a cultural agent embodied by the intersection of art, robotic engineering, artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences, something that he tried to nail down in his elegant and eccentric Petit Mal. He has not managed to study the artificial social intelligence of such a group of autonomous robots, as he promised with his project Caucus, but Ken Rinaldo, http://accad.osu.edu/~rinaldo/, in turn, has in fact investigated the gregarious conscience of a swarm of robotic arms in the installations The Flock and Autopoesis, which are sensible to the presence of the observer. Rinaldo is interested in communication among biological species, robotics and system technologies.
THE DUTCH CASE The Hollander Felix Hess has spent two decades building small, semiautonomous audio machines, and like the German Ulrike Gabriel in her Terrain 01, he presents them in the shape of interactive robot colonies, but the Dutch robotics debate goes between the lowtech inventiveness of Theo Jansen, http://www.strandbeest.com/, who feeds his fantasy beasts combinations of PVC pipe, electric and plastic valves, slithering down the beach, moved by the wind, and the sophisticated complexity of the giant flamethrowers of Erik Hobijn, http://www.buitenland.org/erik_hobijn/Erik_Hobijn.html, whose works Dante Organ and Delusion of Self Immolation are machines that literally put us at the gates of Hell. Driessen and Verstappen, http://wx4all.nl/~notnot/, have created robotic interfaces for tenderness and Fred Abels, http://www.fabels.org/fred.html, has returned to the drawing board to invent cinematic machines of unlikely functionality.
ROBOTIC LIGHTS Bill Vorn, http://digital.concordia.ca/billyorn/menuall.thml, and Louis Phillip Demers, http://www.hfg-karlsruhe.de%7Eldemers/frames.html, are two outstanding Canadian robot builders who worked together on the interactive robot installation La Corte de los Milagros. And while apart both have continued to investigate the aesthetics of artificial behaviors, Vorn has centered on nerve-wracking hysterical machines while Demers is determined to integrate robotics in public spaces and in dance. Their interest for robotic lights runs parallel to that of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh, who has used them in the telepresence interventions The Trace and Vectorial Elevation, whose designs on Z贸calo Plaza in Mexico City were traced and teleoperated through the Internet. Another classic of telerobotics is Ken Goldberg, http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~golberg/, and his legendary Telegarden.
SPRAYCAN ROBOTS The Institute of Applied Autonomy (IAA), http://www.appliedautonomy.com/, is a North American collective that with humor and irony took Steven Kurtz up on his challenge to conceive contestational robots. Conflating robotics and political activism, they’ve built a pamphleteer, Little Brother, and a graffitist, both of a robotic nature, appropriate for high-surveillance areas or eventually to write slogans on highways. In this line of robot painters are: Hektor, http://www.hektor.ch/, the graffiti emitter mechanism capable of painting large murals with choreographed gestures and the brainchild of Jürg Leni and Uli Franke; Sabrina Raaf’s Rower, a vehicle sensitive to carbon dioxide that travels the perimeter of a room painting a sort of graphic frieze of each second’s CO? levels; and Leonel Moura, http://www.lxxl.pt/, who has used a combination of all these robots to paint giant canvases that evidence the creativity shared between man and machine and the emergence of certain patterns of order in the morass of chaos.
ROBOT-EUROPE Nicolas Baginsky, http://www.baginsky.de/, is a performer, installer, sculptor and designer of robots. This Hamburg-residing German is also the creator of the Three Sirens, an ensemble of machines based on neuronal nets: half autonomous robots and half musical instruments, autodidacts on their path toward virtuosity. Nowadays, due to the growing hybridization of the discipline, multidisciplinary collectives like Time’s Up, http://www.timesup.org/, predominate. Based on the Danube near Linz, Baginsky is interested in the relations between the body and the media. His Sensory Circus is a whole perceptive extravaganza in which robotics, virtual reality, video projections and audio art integrate to make the man-machine interface a playful and social experience; or BBM, http://bbm-ww.de/index.html, a group of six trans-European artists located in Lower Saxony, who define themselves as Observers of Machine Operators and who are bent –among other things– on showing the microscopic behaviors of nanobots on a Newtonian scale.
Win Delvoye, the Belgian cyber-Manzoni, has conceived, constructed and marketed in the art institution a gastrointestinal bio-mechanism that’s totally anthropomorphic. When exposed to the public, Sewer, http://www.lacan.com/frameXIX7.htm, the heir to Vaucanson’s automated duck, defecates daily before the stunned gaze of the audience, thanks to metabolizing debris from surrounding restaurants and a gamut of bacteria, salt, juices and gasses. That shit is gold is something that Dominique Laporte already tried to elucidate in that essay about its history, but the robot creators continue to view the museum-like institutionalization of their discipline as something scatological and prefer to circulate and socialize in contests like Artificial Life, http://www.isys.dia.fi.upm.ex/PaCo, the Automatic Street Poet Online that Carlos Corpa imitated in ARCO 2005, or the European festivals Robodock, http://www.robodock.org/, and Artbots, http://artbots.org/2005/.
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