Event Blog 3

Event Blog 3 - Off the Grid        

 On April 21, 2008 our class attended a tour of the Off the Grid exhibition in the Neuberger Museum.  The tour began with a short presentation given by the museums curator.  She focused on the artists Trevor Padlen, Louis Hock, Nina Katchadourian, and Eteam.  The exhibition focused on the theme of things and people that are considered to be Off the Grid.  Being off the gird means being self-sufficient and not relying on public utilities (wikipedia for help).   Many of the pieces also focused on the environment.  Other works focused on paranoia, risks, environmental risks and the apocalypse.  I will talk about the artists that I remember because I lost my notebook which contained these notes.

 In the case of Trevor Paglen, he investigated black operations in the military.  Military operations are considered off the grid because the military relies on itself and keeps most of its information confidential.  He used GPS, photography, and telescopes to look at military installations and to track military planes.  He worked with other people to create a collective intelligence.  There was an online community of plane spotters.   The results of this project were attractive and almost distorted pictures.  This project required a lot of research, which was a common theme for all of the pieces in the exhibit.  (http://www.paglen.com/)

     

Other artists chose to take a different approach.  Louis Hock made public installations, documentary, video research, and public performances.  He is very much interested in boarder politics, especially between California and Mexico.  An interesting piece that was shown in the presentation was a water fountain that he had built to connect two groups of people that had been separated by a fence.  While people drank from the fountain they could look at a person on the other side of the fence.  He also had another project involving an art rebate to migrant farmers.  He gave farmers $10 as an art rebate.  He showed the people who received the money on a website.  I think it is funny that the people who gave the grant for the project demanded there money back because what Hock had done was not considered art. The following picture is a complex geometric design made out of baskets the hold strawberries.  The installation that was actually shown in the museum was called "Feral" 2004 and is a video a border patrol police officer signaling cars as he is pulling over suspicious cars (http://louishock.info/)

  

Other works that were pertinent to the Computers and Culture course were the pieces done by the eteam (that was shown in the presentation before the tour).  A piece that was shown in the curators presentation was the Second Life dumpster.  In this project people are able to dump whatever they do not want into a designated area in Second Life.  They purchased 4096 square meters of space in the game.  The artists said "We see “Second Life Dumpster” as a continuation of our interest in the value of property, possibilities of land use, (web) site specifity, ownership and investment. The project will be transported into “still life” in form of snap shots and text."  The piece that was actually shown in the museum was the "Internation Airport at Montello".  It was a video installation about how the residents on the rural town interacted with the land.

Nina Katchadourian's pieces utilized natural elements and systems to create her work.  She examines the natural systems of animals and tries to alter them.  In one project she corrected sloppy spider webs.  One of her featured projects was about caterpillars.  In another piece she magnified a video of an ant colony and put the image on a television monitor.  The result looked like TV snow (I really like this piece).  This piece showed the combination of the nature and technology in a strange way.

Other pieces were about environmental risk and emergency situations.  There was a series of pieces that were transistor radios made of found objects like first aid kits.  There was another piece that calculates the risk of things like food poisoning and natural disasters in the areas where the piece is located.  Even though some of the predictions that the system made seemed ridiculous, it still made me a little nervous.

http://www.meineigenheim.org/)

(http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/493)