Time Mutations II poster

TIME MUTATIONS ANA ALENSO (Germany/Venezuela) ULYSSES ATWHEN (USA) KATARINA BOEMIG (USA) MATTHIAS BREUER (Germany) BRIAN CLARK (USA) LAURA CURRY (USA) SOFIA DONA (Greece) JORDAN GEIGER (USA) CARRIE KASER (USA) JACOB KASSAY (USA) BEOM KIM (S. Korea) ADAM LASKOWITZ (USA)

CAYDEN MAK (USA) TOMMY NEUWIRTH (Germany) STEPHEN NOLAN (Germany/Ireland) ANGELICA PIEDRAHITA (USA/Colombia) SCOTT RIES (USA) STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG (USA) ANNA SCIME (USA) TIM SCAFFIDI (USA) GABRIEL SHALOM (USA/Germany) MARK SHEPARD (USA) NEIL TERRY (USA) CURATED BY LIZ FLYNTZ AND MAX NEUPERT

JANUARY 24 — MAY 4, 2013 UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO ART GALLERY CENTER FOR THE ARTS

TIME MUTATIONS

Time Mutations (Buffalo) is the second in a two-part series of exhibitions of new artworks collaboratively curated between the Media Art & Design Program at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.

The initiating exhibition took place in August of 2011 in Weimar, Germany.

The exhibition explores the concepts, challenges, and potentials of the “broken timeline”—the linear and apportioned perception of time that electronic communications, digital editing, and global travel continually dismantles. In each of these works the concept of time as linear or location as static is challenged, manipulated or collapsed, giving way to alternative experiences and constructions of time, space, and place. Uneasy navigations of technologically mediated time, in which the subject feels adrift between the shores of absolute and relative space-time, are particularly germane to an interaction between institutions separated by language, nationality, and time zones, but connected by a deep historical investment in experimental media practice.

PERIPHERAL PROGRAMMING CALENDAR

SELECTED EXCERPTS

JANUARY 24, 2013

JANUARY 29, 2013

Excerpt from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Liz Flyntz

UB ART GALLERY, CFA

UB ART GALLERY, CFA

Exhibition opening reception

Curator walkthrough with Arts Management students and Katja Preznik

In reading the travelogues of the 19th century one is struck by the constant struggle against the cumbersome physicality of the body. The experience of travel was essentially one of transporting, as carefully as possible (and usually at great risk and expense), the sensory apparatus of the body in order to make and preserve impressions.

5:00-7:00pm

Curator talk Max Neupert & Liz Flyntz

3:00-4:00pm

6:00pm

JANUARY 31, 2013 SCREENING ROOM 112, CFA Screening of short works 6:00-8:00pm

Matthias Breuer Reconstructing the Truth (2011) Two movies dealing about the question of what is real, The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski brothers and World on a Wire (1973, orig. title Welt am Draht) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, are left to the electronic brain of a computer to create, with its countless circuits instructed by a programmer, a reality partly constructed partly real to explore reality and its constructed nature.

The outcome is a formal critique of (mass) media’s reality.

Sofia Dona Twinning Towns: Leipzig – Detroit (2010) The idea of the project was based on the concept of town twinning (sister cities) whereby towns or cities in geographically and politically distinct areas are paired. The town twinning concept was applied in the cities of Leipzig and Detroit by focusing on the issue of shrinkage and abandonment. Three examples of that connection were realised. For the first connection a split video was created, with two trombonists playing in two abandoned swimming pools, one in Leipzig and one in Detroit, in a way that the music of both trombonists creates a composition.

Gabriel Shalom wash choose peel chop rinse (2009) In the five movements which make up wash choose peel chop rinse, different stages of the process of making vegetable soup stock are examined in microcinematic detail. Rhythmic audiovisual compositions are revealed in the most mundane and subtle aspects of the preparation of various different vegetables. This video was premiered at the opening ceremony of Transmediale 2011, Berlin.

Timothy Scaffidi Dynamism of a Dog in a Wheelchair (2012) Dynamism of a Dog in a Wheelchair is a video homage to Giacomo Balla’s 1912 painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash. Balla’s painting is a prime example of the futurist movement’s “dynamisms”, which attempts to show the action and motion of reality as constant and all at once.

FEBRUARY 1, 2013 UB ART GALLERY, CFA The Agreement: A participatory performance/installation

by Laura Curry and Lori Dillon 3:00-5:00pm In a digital culture of dropped connections, sound bite relationships, and words left unspoken, Curry and Dillon engage the audience with performance that welcomes vulnerability, and responds with personalized commitment.

For more information, visit www.currydillon.com.

FEBRUARY 6, 2013 MEDIA STUDY DEPARTMENT GRADUATE STUDIO, CFA “Skype Portal” informal artist chat between Buffalo and Weimar 3:00-4:00pm (21:00-22:00 CET) Bauhaus University guests will include curator Max Neupert and artists Tommy Neuwirth, Matthias Breuer, Ana Alenso, and Stephan Nolan. UB-based artists and guests will also attend.

FEBRUARY 7, 2013 SCREENING ROOM 232, CFA Screening 7:00–9:00pm

Jacob Kassay Untitled (2013) 27 min Jacob Kassay premiers a new prepared 16mm film.

Scott Ries Aceeeh ino rrssstUv (2011) 7:07:33 Scott Ries premiers a selection from “Aceeeh ino rrssstUv”–an algorithmic video, an original and complete reordering of bootlegs of some famous digital audio samples and video frames, each sliced just beyond the point of recognition. Patterns of paratext form as distinguishing features diminish.

FEBRUARY 12, 2013 UB ART GALLERY, CFA “Video Red” demo and performance by Angelica Piedrahita 4:00–5:00pm Media Study MFA student Angelica Piedrahita presents VideoRed, a collaborative platform for “exquisite corpse” style online video sharing. New inclusions in VideoRed will be presented from Bogota, Colombia, Buffalo, NY, and Weimar, Germany.

MAY 5, 2013 UB ART GALLERY, CFA Media Cities Conference event 10:00am A curator guided tour of the exhibition for participants in the Media City conference.

The ability of contemporary technologically-equipped humans to engage in both time-zone collapsing physical travel and disembodied near-instantaneous data retrieval, messaging, and real-time video streaming is nothing less than a mutation of the evolved animal perception of time as diurnal, local, and corporeal. Our current perception of the ease of remote communication and accessibility of physically distant experiences hinges upon a deeply altered conception of the sensory, requiring a willingness to allow the formerly individual and embodied subjective experience to be relentlessly networked and compartmentalized for ease of exchange. What Paul Virilio calls the “globalized expansion of the present” [1] results in a “sudden qualitative leap, a profound mutation in the relationship between man and his surroundings.” [2] The body may be left to do its animal functioning in mediated comfort, while sensory impressions can be cheaply and easily imported or visited.

We obviously enjoy and grow increasingly reliant on this seemingly utopian access to the instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) transmission of data and access to sensory content, but in the meantime sort of unease with the confounding proliferation of potential time-experiences steadily increases. Virilio’s “globalized present” encroaches upon both the future and the past, insisting upon the constant sensory witness of human consciousness.

Time Mutations is a selection of artworks that explore “mutations” (changes in structure, resulting in a variant form that may be transmitted to subsequent generations) in representations of time-as-arrow from past to future, as well as the effect of these technologically mediated changes on our own human perceptions. In each of these works the concept of time as linear or local is challenged, manipulated, or collapsed, giving way to alternative experiences and constructions of time, space, and place. Interpretations vary from an ideal vision of simultaneity in Jordan Geiger’s “Day for Night” to the dystopian gamification of wage-slavery in Stephanie Rothenberg’s “School of Perpetual Training”.

[1] Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997), 134.

[2] Virilio, Open Sky, 13.

Excerpt from Breaking the Timeline by Max Neupert Time naturally is one of the essential ingredients in New Media, if not the essence of it. When “New Media” became the concern of conservation-restoration specialists and later as the term started to sound awkward because of its aging newness, quite a few institutions preferred to name it differently. In The Netherlands for instance, the Association of Video Artists founded Time Based Arts, a distributor of video art in 1983. V2_, an artists collective in Rotterdam issued their Manifesto for Unstable Media in 1987. In 2005, I noticed a guy with an ironic pin: New New Media at the transmediale in Berlin, which is something like the obligatory annual meeting of artists and theorists of the field.

Apparently there is a need to distinguish the contemporary from the new – even if it is a tongue-incheek commentary on the problematic designation of such works.

Time and its manifold aspects in time-based-media were interests of mine when I started my studies and have since come to form the core of my research today. In summer 2010 I taught a class called “Breaking the Timeline” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar where I focused on time as a principal matter in the process of creation.

Film editing places clips of footage into a linear flow. As we manipulate the timeline we break it.

But what is a broken timeline? In storytelling, there is seldom a real-time flow of time, especially in movies. You would not want to watch the characters of a movie sleep just to wait for the plot to continue. Screenwriting is the art of condensing a story into theatrical-time. Editing is its counterpart, in post-production, where sequencing shots makes the strongest possible impact on the viewer. But has our exposure to such condensing of time may have affected our attention span which arguably has become shorter since the dawn of the moving image. Peter Zorn, a filmmaker, producer, and media art curator, writes that “the average shot length of a Hollywood feature film in 1940 was nine minutes; today it is around four”.

It’s not only in films that our attention has been segmented into smaller chunks. Time itself has become elastic. Researchers at the Intel Labs coined the phenomenon plastic time [2]. When tracing people’s computer usage they found that through computers and mobile devices “even the busiest of us still manage to surf the Internet”. We have dozens of tabs open in our webbrowser and at the same time answering our phone, text, email, instant messages, Skype calls, Facebook chats and what-not-else apps, we seemingly have perfected multitasking and parallel processing in our daily life. „There are many aspects of our day, such as computer usage, that fly under the radar, that can be done not just in a rushed manner but at the right time, and be bent and stretched in such a way as to enable people to interweave the multiple activities going on in their lives, in both relaxed and high-pressure moments. This bending and stretching we are calling plastic time, and it is one of the key ways people engage with the constraints and opportunities of modern life. These social conditions mean that people use technologies to create more distractions for themselves, not less.“ Some might call this procrastination.

In our show Time Mutations we are representing the aspects of the manipulated, infinite, simultaneous, parallel and the augmented time in one exhibition.

See full texts by scanning QR codes or visiting timemutations.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST LABELS This exhibition uses an expanded labeling system—each work in the gallery has a scannable QR code on the informational label. Scanning these codes with your smartphone allows you to access additional information about the work and the artist. This additional information is different for every piece, but examples include images, video, links, and artist biographies. All of the label content, information about Time Mutations related events and more can also be found on the exhibition website at timemutations.com

FISCAL SPONSORS Generous support provided by the SUNY Buffalo Graduate Student Association, Media Study GSA, Visual Studies GSA, Architecture GSA, the departments of Media Study, Architecture, and Visual Studies, and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

timemutations.com DESIGN: Frank Napolski | www.nplsk.info