SPEED SHOW vol.2: who the fuck do you think you are talking to? in Vienna last Thursday was great fun! Kaukas Handy (mobile) Shop is a great place, check it out if you happen to visit Vienna. Thanks to everyone for showing up, thx to all artists and thx to Superbertram for support! Stay tuned for more SPEED SHOWs!

Participating artists:

QR-Nymphae // Game Fashion 2.0, QUICK-READ-Code Camouflage Collection // The Naked City voyeur surveillance!
Margarete Jahrmann, Renate Christian (AT)
2009
“Coded Fashion is readable with mobile phones. It shows secret messages on silk and linen. The song Mediology of the band “Who Killed Bambi?” refers to the thinking of Regis Debray. Especially the song’s one word message – Iconology – equals graphical patterns, encoded in Quickread codes. These are the game fashion patterns, the urban camouflage dresses worn by the band. On mobile screens of fans the dress coded woman appears as Venus, replacing each pattern by a segment of Botticelli’s icon of beauty[…]” Sound-Art-Performance with “Who Killed Bambi?” at Volkstheater, Vienna December 2010.

You talking to me?
JODI (NL/BE)
2010
In a very minimalistic approach JODI addresses the phenomenon of the slow extinction of the URL as the main tool to navigate the Internet. The address field in the browser is slowly taken over by the search form to its right (Chrome) and the app culture introduced by Apple totally neglects the address and page structure of the web. In a hysterical manner five different URLs ‘reenact’ the famous dialog of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver screaming heavily schizophrenic to himself in the mirror before running amok at the end of the movie.

16 Attempts to Draw a Straight Line on a Scanner
JK Keller (US)
2010
In his work JK Keller often plays with the relation of computer accuracy and the pixel based digital image. In his work ’16 Attempts to Draw a Straight Line on a Scanner’ Keller is competing with the accuracy of the scanner. While trying to follow the scan head as precisely as possible by hand it seems the pen strokes enter a multi layered space between scanner, screen and analog image. The combination of light, pen, color and the pen itself which melts to a bar in the background combine into a pixel chain of frozen moments. .

Shaved Bieber
Greg Leuch (US)
2010
In the series of artistic browser add-ons Greg Leuch developed a plug-in which enables the user to locally censor the US teen star Justin Bieber from any web page by blacking out his picture and name. Due to the popularity of Justin Bieber this Firefox add-on attracted enormous attention on the web and in the US main stream media but first of all was consequently hated by Justin Bieber fans. A very important part of this piece is the almost endless tumblr-log collection of hate mails and raging comments by teenagers against Greg Leuch.

HOW I USED YOUR CREDIT CARD TO PAY FOR THIS BOOK ONLINE
Michael Marcovici (AT)
2008/9
“In September 2008, I started working on the book “HOW I USED YOUR CREDIT CARD TO PAY FOR THIS BOOK ONLINE”. I wrote it together with a colleague who prefers to stay anonymous; it is basically an essay about what is already being suggested in the title. The book was paid for and sent to one hundred people in three European countries in late January 2009. Each copy I numbered and signed personally, and since I will not produce any more of them, you will need to find one of the people that still have the book if you wish to learn more about its content[…]”

openbook
Will Moffat, Peter Burns, design: James Home (US)
2010
“Openbook lets you search public Facebook updates using Facebook’s own search service. Facebook’s bait-and-switch on privacy and their overly complex settings cause many users to post messages intended for their friends to ‘everybody’. That’s the entire planet, for all time. This privacy-malfunction could have serious consequences if you’re looking for a job, applying for college, or trying to get medical insurance. What do we want Facebook to do? Make it easy to control and understand your privacy settings. Promise that they won’t change them behind your back. Make new accounts private by default. It wouldn’t be hard to provide simple, clear groups of privacy settings.”

BP, listen up!
monochrom (AT)
2010
The artist collective monochrom is well known for its widespread provocative and often political performances, interventions and net activism. With a very high output and in a long history of pieces (serially numbered) they generate a unique mix of large scale real life events combined with a consequent sarcastic blog and single page web based projects. The simple combination of picture and appellation in BP, listen up! refers to image macro based meme culture and takes the performance to a digital posture on the web level.

Blogger Trainer Gym
Evan Roth (US)
2009
Well know for his unique oevre to combine pop culture with digital life style Evan Roth strikes again
with high precision and proposes the blogger gym. Famous blogger are pop stars! They need to be fast. The web requests high output and constant production. To stay in shape and to keep pace with the velocity of the web blogger need to go to the gym. Have you published today? Go Rocky!

Curating Youtube
Robert Sakrowski (DE)
2010
Curating Youtube is an exhibition project by itself initiated and curated by Robert Sakrowski. It was premiered at Basso Berlin in February 2010. The participating artist were requested to select and arrange Youtube videos in grids of various sizes. Each tableau of 2×2, 3×3, 4×4 (etc) videos starts as a collage of video stills. The typical Youtube play button stills are arranged as an image. In the next step the user breaks the frozen moment by mouse interaction into independently looping video clips.

8bitmachinima
Gordan Savicic (AT)
2007
A cliff jump captured from the computer game ‘California Games’ is stretched in time to match the 2:01 min song Frente! by Bizarre Love Trinagle. In super slow motion the C64 game graphics animation from the 80’s unfolds its poesy in every single frame of the jump. The extra slow already minimalistic pixel image is combined with 300% painful audio to a video in typical Youtube quality. With his piece Gordan Savicic kontakariert the endless production of high resolution, exaggerated and action-overloaded machinima movies. “Is he really dead?”

Monkeyfy
Michael Schieben (DE)
2010
“Monkeyfy is a public webservice for face-detection based image manipulation. A small bookmarklet allows you to select an image on every website to have it modified by monkeyfy.com. The image manipulation utility detects faces in the images and replaces the them with monkeys. The manipulated images (and a link to the original source) are saved on the twitpic gallery.”

Superbertram
Georg Schütz (AT)
2007-2010
“I am streaming out of both eyes, since August 2007, night and day 24/7. I posted all pictures to Flickr until they erased my brain, they kicked me! You can control my view! Just click into my eyes and I look where you want. I Smile instead of having concerns about privacy issues, which i have, deep inside my frosty heart.”

Delicate Boundaries
Chris Sugrue (US)
2007
“[…]Small bugs made of light crawl out of a computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them, often surprising their audience as they try to abandon a virtual existence. The magic of the illusion takes shape as the audience lets them explore their bodies, crawling from one person to the next in a strangely intimate way. As digital technologies have become embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries playfully explores our expectations and understanding of interfaces and interactivity.“

FUCK YOU Cookie Performance
Philipp Teister & Kim Asendorf (DE)
2009
“[…]We have transported the browser cookie to the real world, to find out how the recipients of cookies respond. Through a subtle invasion into privacy, the symbolic placement of a cookie in a strange case, the recipients were inadvertently exposed to our mercy. It`s an intrusion into other peoples pockets though we would like to express how virtual and real world are linked.”

Asylabwehramt / Asylum Defence Agency
UBERMORGEN.COM (AT/CH)
2010
The Asylum Defence Agency (Asylabwehramt, AAbA) is superordinated to the Defence Office (Abwehramt, AbwA) as well as the Federal Asylum Office and subordinated to the Federal Ministry of National Defence and Sports. This semi-anonymous and semi-autonomic Agency is responsible for anonymization of asylum proceedings, stopping human trafficking, immigration diversion, and for defending against surplus refugees and asylum seekers. The Agency also takes action in the fields of imigration pre-selection (economic refugees, naturalization), secret deportation, migration analysis for national protection as well as in prevention of re-traumatization and the expansion of bureaucratic barriers.”

Google Alarm (unreleased)
Jamie Wilkinson (US)
2010
https://fffff.at/google-alarm
“Google Search, Gmail, Docs, YouTube are all daily essentials. Additionally, almost every website you visit uses Google Analytics to track their stats, Google AdSense to make cash, or even javascript libraries served from Google’s servers for speed. Google Alarm is a Firefox browser addon that alerts you when you’re sending identifying information to the GOOG.”

curated by Aram Bartholl

More pictures here!

The SPEED SHOW exhibition format:
Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)

SPEED SHOW manifest by Aram Bartholl 2010

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