About xname

Posts by xname

man up

  • August 13, 2013 1:01 am

There is something particularly fascinating in certain female art, something that captures imagination and touches the senses in a peculiar manner. However, whereas on the one hand the number of women in the art world (and everywhere else) seems to be increasing, on the other hand, sadly, a lack of identity is still undermining their potential from within. Overall, two main categories seem to appear at the horizon, that of women who made it in a professional – yet male dominated – environment, and are happy to show solidarity and facilitate access to other akin spirits, and those who fundamentally hate every other woman but themselves, and manipulate with arrogance their minority, using it as a definitely not inclusive privilege.

Yet why are so many women behaving as chauvinist pigs?

ciccione

The seed of this plague seems to be deeply eradicated, and the time for a collective reflection becomes evermore desirable.

Woman up, competition is no fun.

Dusty Mariee, Digital Duchamp

  • May 31, 2013 2:03 pm

Dusty Mariee is a live, continuous, audio-video stream broadcasted to the Internet from my apartment on the 19th floor of the Balfron Tower, the iconic example of brutalist architecture designed by Ernő Goldfinger in 1963. The stream represents the large glass that separates my personal space from the external world, that is to say: private and public life. The camera focuses on the dust stratifying on the surface of the glass, while London and the artist inhabiting the flat appear as projections, phantom shadows over the much more stable, yet ever-changing, image of the dust (representing time and matter). Contact microphones on the surface of the window will transform the glass into a very powerful long distance zoom: at random, the construction captures and reproduces the sounds that the city of London emits through the Net, transforming the glass into a gigantic microphone, producing a ‘sounding’ of both audible and visible multi-scalar dimensions of an environment.

But who, or what, is La mariée?

//

 

…a brutalist kiss between
the Barbican and Balfron
with all the dust and air
and magnetism crushed
between them…

Audio-video live stream from May 14th to June 9th !!

This page is know to be better displayed in Chrome or Firefox.
Alternatively you can play this URL with Videolan:
http://xname.tv:8000/dusty_mariee.ogg

who_is_la_mariee

Picture of the dust on Duchamp's The Large Glass
Picture of the dust on Duchamp’s The Large Glass

Dusty Mariee uses a Large Glass, a contact microphone, a Gumstix, a Linux Kernel, a Debian server, Icecast, Gstreamer, Ogg/Theora, Git, Javascript, the Balfron tower, a mixer, and some derelict electronics.

Many thanks to Antonios Galanopoulos for technical support.

Would you like to know more?

Watch project context film is Who is La mariée realised in collaboration with film-maker Jen Fearley:

This shot film introduces the piece, constructing the myth of its creation and expanding the frame of vision, while a database of clips creates, interjecting the stream at random, unpredictable and ever-changing narratives.

This work, manipulating with technology the classical, yet twisted, ingredients of a fairy tale (the tower, the bride and the big city), and illustrating the transient and dystopian state of the surrounding area, finally identifies dust as the only representation of humanity that preserves a coherence of intent.

Dusty Mariee and Duchamp
This piece is a ready-made (a window becomes the subject of artistic inspection).
It refers to the Large Glass and its investigation of the fourth dimension.
It uses chance (in a contemporary, technological, real-time fashion).
Normal life and entropic matter (dust) become art.
This is, of course, provocative.

Dust
The image that the camera reproduces is intrinsically different when focussing on the dust stratifying over the glass, as the picture of the city becomes bleared, surreal, pictorial, as if coming from another world or a different time and dimension.

When the night comes, or the lights are turned on in the room, the dust becomes more visible, and the reflection of the internal space of the house overlays and mixes with that of London, offering a glimpse of Duchamp’s strongest obsession, the fourth dimension, the projection of a three dimensional reality over another three dimensional space.

Additionally, visit the project website and read the Barbican’s post or Metamute’s announcement.

Dusty Mariee features improvised live sets creating experimental electronic music on that interact with the microphone’s sounds. Musicians that participated so far are:
Alo Allik
Sick Nielson
Xname

Check the stream between sunset and dusk!

Talk to me
For questions related to this project, you can find me in IRC
server: irc.freenode.net
channel: dusty_mariee
(we use irssi)

If you have lot’s of friends,
check out the Social Network page.
You can contact me there and follow the live-sets announcements.

Dusty Mariee is a Net art work by Xname.

This piece was made possible thanks to a commission by the Barbican Centre as part of the Dancing Around Duchamp season, the Digital Duchamp series, bringing the work of Marcel Duchamp into the digital age.

Thanks to Media and Arts Technology Programme, Queen Mary University of London.

Post 635

  • April 13, 2011 4:51 pm


Camera and edit by Richard Bolam.

Residency video

  • April 9, 2011 3:04 pm

Video edited by Laurence Alexander at Access Space in Sheffield.

Noise Jam

  • April 7, 2011 3:37 pm

Opening Night:

17:30 – Doors open
18:30 – Artist’s talk
19:00 – Video projection
19:30 – Drinks
20:00 – Phantasmata
20:15 – Noise Jam

The Noise Jam features xname with the participation of Sheffield locals and workshop’s attendants!!
More about Phantasmata here: http://xname.cc/phantasmata

All FREE/OPEN/WELCOME

You cannot miss it!!!

Insertion

  • April 7, 2011 2:33 pm


[Photos by Susanne Palzer]

Urban interventions…

From an email I received from one of the workshop’s participant, who has been monitoring the objects after Sunday’s insertions: “It was an interesting experience to be drawn back to them like a criminal to the site of the crime!“

Animation

  • April 7, 2011 2:26 pm

A moment of affection between creature and creator [Photo by Susanne Palzer].

From Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Philip K. Dick, 1968

“This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized.”
“Kipple-ized’?” She did not comprehend.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”
“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.
“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”
“So it has taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.”
“Your place, here,” he said, “this apartment you’ve picked – it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apts. But – ” He broke off.
“But what?”
Isidore said, “We can’t win.”
“Why not? The girl stepped into the hall, closing the door behind her; arms folded self-consciously before her small high breasts she faced him, eager to understand. Or so it appeared to him, anyhow. She was at least listening.
“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

Noise_Objects composition

  • April 7, 2011 1:30 pm


In abstract terms, the creation – or recognition – of a Noise_Object includes the following phases:
– transmutation: selecting and cleaning the source material, from refusal matter becomes precious material
– composition: different parts are connected in order to create something else, a new object/entity
– objectification: focus on identification: when is the piece complete? Think of a painting, less is more, never add too much.
– behaviour/function: what is the object/entity doing? Entity/behaviour versus object/function
– electronification: build the necessary simple electronics
– animation: insert the electronic soul in the skeleton/object, turn on and off the light and see what happens
– urban insertion: spatialisation of the object/entity in the city and beginning of its adaptation (evolution?)

Touching the urban skin

  • March 26, 2011 10:47 pm

Sheffield seems like the perfect place for Noise_Objects insertions: its red bricks and the industrial look-a-like call for interventions.

These objects, in fact, are also a reflection about technology and industrialisation: before that, pollution and garbage almost did not exist, whereas today their presence is massive and invasive.

Writer Philip Dick named it Kipple, and the idea that one day all this amount of (personal, technical, affective, abandoned) material will get back to life – and make a takeover – might be a sort of collective hallucination or a recurring nightmare of some sensitive grandchild, still the doubt whether this is happening is floating over the global world.

There are two types of interactions in Noise_Objects, one is activated by solar panels, the other is powered by the human brain.
The first one uses the well known phenomenon of electricity, the second implements that of illusion. Both these phenomena are very common, widely used over the last two centuries, and also mysterious.

The first type of interaction is allusive: it triggers imaginations, and questions…
What is this object doing here?

What happens moving that mouse sitting at the corner of that brick wall?
Will the entire building rotate, or zoom?
Can I drag something?

There is a network slot coming out of that wall, does that mean the whole car park is online?
Is it distributing dhcp?
Anyone has a network cable?

Or… That dead tree has jack-in and jack-out ports, must be an audio card!
Most likely, it is possible to listen to the sound of the dead tree, but probably you can also import sound from your ipod…

Well, somebody is calling, who’s speaking?

The second type of interaction happens according to meteorological events, pragmatic issues, and the laws of electronics…
In other words, it’s just because some electrons keep running around, and matter is not as solid as it may seem, if you look at it at an atomic level.

Thus things happen when there is enough flow in the circuit.

The juxtaposition of these two levels of interactions may generate semantic clash: please read carefully the included instructions, do not administer noise_objects in conjunction with psychedelics and other psychotropic substances: reality may augment indefinitely.

DISCLAIMER These objects are distributed in the hope that they will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The author is not responsible of any hallucinations the Objects may generate.
If you loose contact with reality, please call an immortal.

(use the old land-line telephones distributed around the city)

Workshop announcement

  • March 25, 2011 12:56 am

Collect your old toys and any other interesting scrap material which stimulates your imagination and join us at Access Space.

We will build a series of sculptures made of recycled material, simple electronic components and basic micro circuits. These objects, powered by solar panels, will be animated by the diy electronic devices we will embed in their bodies.

You will learn about electronics, art, green energy and the creative use of public space.
On Sunday the Noise_Objects prepared will be inserted as landmarks in the urban space during a collective walk throughout the city trying to discover – and reinvent – Sheffield’s identity.

Thu 31 March 12 noon-3pm

Fri 1st April 2pm-4.30pm

Sat 2nd April 12noon-5pm

Sun 3rd April 2pm-5pm

Meet at Access Space 1.45pm -all welcome