Database imaginary

Steve Dietz
http://databaseimaginary.banff.org

Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition - which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area - deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity.
Work Artist Date
1 1:1 Interface: Every Lisa Jevbratt/C5 1999
2 Agonistics: A Language Game Warren Sack 2004
3 Data Diaries Cory Arcangel 2003
4 Data Mining the Amazon Angie Waller 2002
5 Databank of the Everyday Natalie Bookchin 1996
6 Encyclopædia Alan Currall 2000
7 Faculty of Taxonomy University of Ope... 2004
8 File Room, The Muntadas 1994-2004
9 Giver of Names, The David Rokeby 1990 - (in progress)
10 How I Learned (1-4) Jennifer and Kevi... 2002
11 Lungs-London.pl Harwood/Mongrel 2004
12 Memory Theater Pablo Helguera 2004
13 Mobile Scout: A Field Guide Julian Bleecker, ... 2004
14 Shelf Life / Drawing Conclusions Edward Poitras 2004
15 Slippery Traces George Legrady 1995
16 Soft Cinema: Mission to Earth Lev Manovich 2004
17 Status Project, The Heath Bunting and... 2004
18 Swipe Beatriz da Costa,... 2002
19 Template Cinema: Short Films About Flying Thomson & Craighe... 2002
20 Things Spoken Agnes Hegedus 1999
21 TreatyCard version 2 (tcv2) Cheryl L'Hirondel... 2002-2004
22 Unmovie Philip Pocock, on... 2002
23 Visitors' Profile, Directions 3: Eight Artists, Milwaukee Art Centre, June 19 through August 8, 1971 Hans Haacke 1971

Park Fiction

Documenta11 Installation
Hamburg St. Pauli, Reeperbahn 1
June 19 - July 6
open daily from 12 a.m to 10 p.m.
Free entry
Exhibition opening on June 19, 5 pm with Ute Meta Bauer (Co-Curator Documenta11, Berlin Biennale), Schwabinggrad Ballett, Gino and pupils of Friedrichstrasse school .
In the afternoon, guided tours through the exhibition and to the park area are offered.


The installation in the documenta-Halle 2002 (Picture: Werner Maschmann, Documenta11)

After an intensive seven-year process of wishing, planning and negotiating, culminating in its presentation at Documenta11, Park Fiction, a long-term planned park project in Hamburg-St. Pauli, with and from a collective of its residents, is in the midst of realization.

Just the right time to reflect on this successful process: One year after Documenta11, Park Fiction’s installation returns to Hamburg. The work will be shown for the first time in it’s place of origin, on the Reeperbahn in the district of St. Pauli, to give all people involved in the project the possibility to see the outcome. Also, the reception of the exhibition shall invite to discuss the question how interventionist projects can be presented in "art spaces" such as exhibition rooms. The Documenta11 installation faces this challenge in a formally precise and complex way, but a comprehensive reflection is still to be achieved.

The work consists of 5 workdesks adapting the design of "Sprachlabor" (speech laboratory) – tables from the late 60’s german "Bildungsaufbruch" (educational reform agenda)- times to remind of the abandoned promises of the recent past. As in all the Park Fiction Tools, the colouring quotes constructivist designs of the 20’s while while ironically employing the Corporate Design techniques of multinationals, and thus relating to society's real existing wealth.

The desks are assigned to central working-concepts. Drawings and products from the " production of desires" are shown in elegant registers, inviting to work with the material offered and providing a dignified presentation in contrast to bourgeois hanging traditions.

As an essential part of and supplement to the installation, Margit Czenki’s film "Park Fiction – the wishes will leave the house and hit the streets" (Hamburg 1999) shows the wide range of voices involved in the project. The film captures the moment where politics, arts and musical subcultures made each other more clever. This narrative line is combined with a fast-forward ride through the history of parks and politics, presented in rich colours, from the arabic gardens via Coney Island’s Luna Park to the much disputed parks of the 20th century.

5 assorted models from the production of wishes, presented in a skyscraper style, refer to possible worlds in the ruins of post-fordism.

The congress Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space will open up the view on the global horizon, and create direct connections between similarly laid-out projects in different countries.

CONTESTED SPACE

CONTESTED SPACE

A-1 53167 Anibal Lopez,
Cantieri Isola,
Gustavo Artigas,
Andrea Abati,
Marc Bijl,
Stefano Boccalini,
Bureau d'Etudes,
Paola Di Bello,
Meschac Gaba, Rainer Ganahl, Carlos Garaicoa, Jeroen Jongeleen, Armin Linke, Armando Lulja, Teresa Margolles, Gianni Motti,
Multiplicity, Giancarlo Norese, Ogi:noknauss, Park Fiction, Robert Pettena, Radek Community, Paula Roush (msdm), Santiago Sierra, Stalker, Superflex, Bert Theis, Enzo Umbaca, UnDo.Net, Alejandro Vidal e Wayruro.
Superflex.

Contested Space
curated by Marco Scotini

Contested Space has been promoted by Regione Toscana, Tra-Art Regional Network for Contemporary Art, and by the Municipalities of Florence, Leghorn, Monsummano Terme, Prato, Siena. It has been conceived as an 'urban action day' at the Stazione Leopolda in Firenze, as the closing event of the entire project ''Networking/ The cities of people'', curated by Marco Scotini.

''Networkingcity'', published by m&m Maschietto Editore, is the occasion through which Contested Space intends to convey and concentrate in the same place and at the same time a variety of experiences on an international level, on resistance, creation and activism. Contested Space is like a one day display in which a number of researches will be presented. Their aim is to analyse the relationship between art and social transformation departing from the ''Networking'' Lab. and side by side with international experiences of public or community-based projects. Networking first proposed itself as a territorial laboratory, organised in a number of events (conferences, debates, workshops, exhibitions, artistic participation). With this further stage ''Networking'' offers itself as a debating and contesting platform on which conflict is taken on as a privileged space of the portrayal of the current situation. Themes such as the daily negotiated space and the space of inequalities and contradictions will be dealt with through the works of 30 international artists and 70 young artists operating in Tuscany.

In addition to the ''NetworkingCity'' group, the following artists have been invited:

A-1 53167 Anibal Lopez, Gruppo A12, Cantieri Isola, Gustavo Artigas, Andrea Abati, Marc Bijl, Stefano Boccalini, Bureau d'Etudes, Paola Di Bello, Meschac Gaba, Rainer Ganahl, Carlos Garaicoa, Jeroen Jongeleen, Armin Linke, Armando Lulja, Teresa Margolles, Gianni Motti, Multiplicity, Giancarlo Norese, Ogi:noknauss, Park Fiction, Robert Pettena, Radek Community, Paula Roush (msdm), Santiago Sierra, Stalker, Superflex, Bert Theis, Enzo Umbaca, UnDo.Net, Alejandro Vidal, Wayruro.

On this occasion the Alcatraz space will be turned into an open and informal platform which foresees the dynamic succession of operative spaces and a simultaneous multiplication of events: projections, performing actions, meetings, alternative markets and workshops. Along with the exhibition and during the entire length of the event there will be an arena for debates where philosophers and/or theoreticians will follow critics, artists and representatives of popular activism.

From green guerrilla to hypotheses of counter-town planning, from homelessness to the violence of the suburbs, from power maps to hidden towns (still to be mapped), from parades to sit-ins, from hunger strikes to forms of popular activism, from illegal interventions in the town network to the activation of parallel or informal economies, from counter-information to hardcore aesthetics: these are some of the themes that will give life to the CONTESTED SPACE area through the work of 100 artists and intellectuals.

The artists of the ''NetworkingCity'' group are:

Katia Alicante, Anonymous Art Studio, Michele Aquila, Arabeschi di latte, Giacomo Badiani, Gianni Barelli e Paola Baldassi, Filippo Basetti, Giacomo Bazzani, Eri Bezhani, Jary Biscardi, Sladzana Bogeska, Leonardo Bossio, Sandro Bottari, Andrea Bruscoli, Andras Calamandrei, Vittorio Cavallini, Barbara Ceccatelli, Dimitri Civilini, Cristiano Coppi, Vincenzo Ferrara, Giovanna Fezzi, Stefania Filizola, Ilaria Giaconi, Zoe Gruni, Michele Guidarini, Irene Jorgensen, Irena Kalodjera, Gruppo Koroo, Kata Kozlovic, Jonela Llaci, Paolo Lonzi, Luca Malgeri, Federica Mannella, Gabriele Manganiello, Filippo Manzini, Melanie Marxer, Marco Michelini, Ljljana Mihaljevic, Sandra Miranda, Domenico Montano, Agata Monti, Elisabetta Mori, Francesca Nesi, Giovanna Nicosia, Nguyen Nhu My Ngog, Valentina Pacini, Francesca Pisaneschi, Christian Posani, Tasos Protopsaltis, Niccolò Poggi, Giulia Giada Pucci, Salvator Qitaj, Giacomo Ricci, Michael Rotondi, Mauro Sanpaolesi, Angelo Sarleti, Gabriele Sedda, Anna Stankiewicz, Svarnet, Stefano Tondo, Tommaso Tancredi, Eugenia Vanni, Matteo Voliani, Ergin Zaloshnja, Catia Zizzi.

The Stazione Leopoda S.R.L., the Milano/Genova ARTRA art gallery and PROMETEO Associazione per l'Arte Contemporanea of Lucca generously collaborate for the making of the entire event.

(dica do Blog do Itaulab)

Gruppo A12

gruppo A12 is a collective of architects, founded in 1993 and active in the fields of architecture, art and new media. It has displayed its work at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; PS1 New York; Manifesta 3, Ljubljana. gruppo A12 won in 2000 the SonderPreis at the MedienKunstPreis at ZKM, Karlsruhe.

http://digilander.libero.it/gruppoa12/

The subversion of the sequential and logical succession of operations considered as characteristic of an architectural project has been an unconscious and recurring feature in our activity.

Even the most radical and revolutionary contemporary architecture seems to follow an unaltered recipe composed of a variable number of steps, which vary in formal and expressive terms, but not in their relational order. Simplifying, it can be said that the sequence would be the following: a series of visual products aimed to define a spatial configuration and mainly produced under the control of the architect, morph into a set of prescriptive rules to be transmitted to representatives of other professional activities in order, finally, to produce space.

This basic line might of course be complicated, in different moments, either at the beginning, in the middle or after the process, by a necessary concern with some sort of eloquence in respect of a public opinion represented by a client, a jury, the press, the architectural critique, the academy. Also, in several occasions, the sequence is deliberately interrupted in its initial stage, to use the graphic materials of the project as a discursive device.

The diffusion throughout different media of communication of single chunks of this line, at least since the Renaissance, permits architectural discourse to be considered as complete and round even in absence of a physical appearance of any object into the world of the real. For the history and theory of architecture there seems to be no substantial difference between projects and buildings, between the thought and the built.

Because of an accumulation of coincidences, often determined by the peculiarity of the contexts where we operated in the past, many of our works do not seem to proceed from the canonical processes of the architecture. In fact their same status appears to be blurred as the apparent lack of any immediate recognisable expressive concern, places them in an undefined space between art and architecture. But nevertheless, even if fragmented and almost impossible to be grasped by any stylistical critique, these works perform as spaces and are intended as such, rather than as sculptures or installations. Therefore, still, they might be considered as architectures.



There are two recurrent features, which are identifiable in some of our work. The first is a tendency of absorbing, including and altering disparate materials that might be considered as abandoned, or simply as junk, into the spaces which are created. |H|U|M|B|O|T| was a collaborative web project by Daniel Burckhardt, Roberto Cabot, Elena Carmagnani, gruppo A12, Udo Noll, Philip Pocock, Wolfgang Staehle, and Florian Wenz presented within the exhibition net_condition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 1999. A vast raft made out of pallets, old furniture, scrap pieces of metal, rotten washing machines, blocks of polystirene was used as a site where the visitors of the exhibition were able to view videos, surf into the web-site, observe the ancient map and equipment of Alexander von Humboldt. The same project presented during the exhibition Voilà in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2000, became a platform of concrete covered with multicoloured tiles recuperated from demolition companies.

Our intention is not simply to search for the redemption of some objets-trouvées of the contemporary city through their dislocation within the neutral context of the museum, but to investigate the possibilities inscribed in a process of different reuse of already existing resources. The results of these investigations, which might appear to be deprived of any functional ability, instead proved to perform their tasks efficiently. What is modifying the process of definition of an architecture, is that the slow accumulation of these materials cannot be preceded by any visualisation or directed by any set of indications or rules, as the deployment of a spatial order is subjacent to the randomness of what has been found.



In our work is inscribed an attempt to follow a principle of realism and an economy of expression, tending to imagine that the use of an already existing structure, customised through a series of simple operations to fit new needs, can be seen as an architectural strategy. In the case of the exhibition "La ville, la memoire, le jardin", at Villa Medici in Rome in 2000, a pre-fabricated glasshouse, normally used for gardening, is enriched by a tree passing through the roof, a wooden platform that surrounds it and a series of neon-lights disposed in the structure. The glasshouse, considered as an architectural folly, hosted an archive and library.

A library was also the function inserted in a used container, presented at the exhibition "Strategies against architecture II" at the Fondazione Teseco in Pisa in 2001. The roof is cut out, the interior is painted in dark pink, and a steel floor is inserted. A metal shelf contains the books of the artists invited to the exhibition, while black pillows allow the visitors to lie lazily flipping trough the pages. In both cases the glass house and the container are taken as starting elements from which, throughout a series of manipulations, it becomes possible to articulate a space and give shape to a new function.

The process of accumulation and use of the material for the creation of our spaces implies that a second feature might be recognised as recurrent in our research. In fact these spaces are the result of a process of bricolage, of permanent manipulation of the constructive elements, where it is possible to test the different solutions in real time: before the configurations which appear as final are fixed, walls are moved, elements are destroyed or altered, floors are raised and then displaced, rooms are dismantled in a perpetual movement where the architecture evolves out of a process of "trial and error".

The spatial organisation results from a horizontal negotiation between the different subjects involved in the process of realisation, not just by us, but as well by workers, artists, firemen, craftsmen, curators, electricians, computer specialists. In the absence of a set of prescriptive documents to be transmitted for the realisation of the architecture, the project is shifted into a level of verbal communication, where the sequence of the work appears to be reverted: first comes a community, although transient and temporary, from which a space is progressively developed, using found material: there is a target which is not existing, there is no image to be imitated or to tend to. Afterwards, eventually, the pile of junk can be measured and drawn, according to the principles of the descriptive geometry.



"parole," a collaborative Internet project by gruppo A12, Udo Noll, and Peter Scupelli is conceived as a dynamic dictionary of the contemporary city. Although occupying an electronic space, the project is imagined according to the same principles: the theoretical research on the city is realised by providing a space for existing materials of any sort (texts, images, videos, links) and thus creating a temporary community of authors, users, subscribers. From our part there is no authorship, all the material contained in the web-site is the product of other subjects: again we are just collecting resources. The installed spaces where "parole" has been presented, work as laboratories where contamination and alteration are the constitutive elements of its developing: found furniture and graffiti are once again included into the process. Unexpected words and comments are constantly changing the contents.