serial consign

Like many digital arts netizens I've spent a good portion of the summer reading about festivals, exhibitions and events that I cannot actually attend. For the most part, this is fine as awareness of what is going on is usually enough to keep me placated. However, there are two exhibitions taking place right now on different sides of the planet that I would kill to get to. They are: Zone_V2_Unstable Media: Act-Interact and Project to Surface taking place in Taipei and New York City respectively. These shows explore database culture and the reconciliation of 2D representation with 3D fabrication, two topics that I expect will command a lot of my attention in the coming years.

Zone_V2_Unstable Media: Act-Interact is curated by Alex Adriaansens of the Rotterdam based V2_Organization. The V2_Organization has been on my radar for about a decade due to their broad research into all aspects of new media; from curation and publishing to running the minimal techno label Audio.nl, they've really covered all the bases. This diversity carries through with this current exhibition, a group show that features work from David Rokeby, George Legrady, Chris Cunningham, Ryoji Ikeda (a still from his data.tron is pictured above) and several other artists. The show brings together a wide variety of video and installation that explores the nature of time, perception and information in the contemporary era. The exhibit opened this past weekend at the MOCA in Taipei and runs through October 7th.

[via neural.it]

Much closer to home, the NYC based m127 building is hosting Project to Surface. The show's namesake is a tongue in cheek reference to a Rhino command which effectively communicates the mandate of exhibition; expressing 2D artwork as 3D artifacts through digital fabrication. Visual artists like David Diao, Kenji Hirata, and Leah Raintree have been teamed up with architect Ben Krone and Associated Fabrication. I like the idea of this show as it forces both camps out of their comfort zones; the participating illustrators and painters have to address the 3D implications of their 2D artwork, and the fabricators have to deal with abstraction that doesn't necessarily lend itself to straightforward translation into shop drawings. Aside from the exhibition site, there is a good synopsis of the show by Marius Watz at Generator.x. In addition to tipping us off about the show, Marius has tagged a flickr photoset which you can take a look at to get a better sense of the work. Project to Surface runs through August 28th.

My friend and peer Liav Koren recently launched a project dedicated to exploring the emerging discourse around rapid prototyping and emerging open source technologies. The project, which he is running from beige-box, entails a mailing list called "tools-discuss" which will serve as a platform for sharing information and ideas related to emerging technologies. The plan is that the site will eventually evolve into a clearing house for discussion about all manner of open source software and hardware related to art and design.

A brief blurb from his mission statement:

The idea of "open source" has already been pushed itself outside the world of software. How far can it be taken? Collage work from the early 20th century and sampling/appropriation in music both seem to be significant precedents for a kind of open methodology... How do people join communities of practice based around various tools, and how can connections be made between different communities? Some resources, like Processing, for example, have very healthy and active communities. How does something like this evolve?

Liav has been diligently networking to bring a range of practitioners and theorists into the mix and this project has the potential to facilitate some amazing cross disciplinary discussion. If this is of interest to you, please subscribe to the list.

[images: darwin the self-replicating rapid prototyping machine]