Western Digital screening, Charleroi Belgium

LI-MA Presents: digital trees and talking machines
Saturday, 24 June, 2023 QUAI10 in Charleroi, Belgium
Programme: 20:30
Entrance: €6

https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/news/li-ma-presents-digital-trees-and-talking-machines-0

LI-MA has had the honor to curate a digital art program taking place at arts center Quai10 in Charleroi during the festival Canaux, Pays-Bas x Pays-Noir.

Thanks to communication technologies working at the speed of light, we are everywhere, all the time. We are in constant contact with each other, but what does that mean, and what are the consequences? In this video screening programme, artists ask themselves and us how we are connected to each other and the surrounding landscape in technological times. Curator Sanneke Huisman selected six video works made between 1970 and now, which are each from the LI-MA collection. Together they show a broad palette of new relationships between people, landscape and technology through the lens of video art. A colorful procession of analogy tricks and digital techniques breaks through existing boundaries of the natural and the artificial. Find yourself surprised by early experiments with the video camera, get lost in a dilapidated digitized primeval forest and become familiar with the strangest AI creations. With works by Steina, Broersen & Lukács and Emile Zile, and more!

This event is made possible with the support of ‘Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgium’.

Response to Metahaven exhibition Field Report for RMIT Design Hub

 

REFLECTING ON FIELD REPORT We have been reflecting on Metahaven: Field Report through the words and voices of contributors drawn from across Melbourne’s diverse creative community.

Metahaven: Field Report reflection series: Local Melbourne-based artist, filmmaker and performer Emile Zile recalls his experiences of the exhibition from the perspective of isolation.
Created as a response to Metahaven: Field Report (7 March – 9 May, 2020), exclusively developed for RMIT Design Hub Gallery, RMIT University and presented in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).

Field Report was conceived and designed by Metahaven, Netherlands.

Guest exhibition curators: Brad Haylock (RMIT) and Megan Patty (NGV).

designhub.rmit.edu.au/exhibitions-programs/metahaven-field-report/

Audience/Performer/Lens (after Dan Graham) performance at LIMA Amsterdam

https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/news/unfold-audienceperformermirror

On the 15th of January 2020 LIMA invites Keren Cytter, Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile to present their version of Dan Graham’s performance and video work Audience/Performer/Mirror. Reinterpretations by Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, and Judith Hopf will be exhibited as well.The works together show the possibilities of reinterpretation and give an artistic anthology, and criticism, of the work of Graham. Gabriella Giannachi (researcher & professor of Performance and New Media at the University of Exeter), Annet Dekker (curator & researcher, assistant Professor of Media Studies University of Amsterdam) and Willem van Weelden (curator & researcher, tutor media theory Gerrit Rietveld Academie,) will reflect upon reinterpretation as both an artistic as preservation strategy. Moderated by art historian & dramaturgist Suzanne Sanders.

New light on iconic work
LIMA presents a new edition of UNFOLD, focusing on reinterpretation and Dan Graham’s iconic work Audience/Performer/Mirror, 1977, De Appel, Amsterdam. During this performance, Graham describes his own actions and the reaction of the audience. The work is questioning who or what motivates who to act and respond and is a reflection on time and direct feedback. All of this happens largely through language: Graham’s flow of words is unceasing, and betrays his background in stand-up comedy. The gaze of the camera, in addition to that of Graham and the mirror, plays an important role in this. The work is effective and layered in all its simplicity and has become an iconic work. The analogy that Graham uses in the work, both at the level of technology and that of language and physicality, has invited many artists to make a homage or a new version of the work. What does Audience / Performer / Mirror stand for today? How is the work experienced; which part of the work is still relevant, what needs to be ‘updated’? LIMA invites Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile to translate the work to contemporary time and its digital techniques. Keren Cytter is invited to present her subtle feminist critique on the work. UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror offers the opportunity to think about reinterpretation and provides insight into both their working methods and the lasting (attraction) power of Dan Graham’s work. This core may be somewhere else for every artist, and each new work will highlight a different aspect of the ‘original’.

About UNFOLD
Reinterpretation is a core concept in music, dance and theater. Every re-performance is a translation into a new, often contemporary, context. Re-performing a work based on documentation, a script, memory or score is an essential part of artistic practice. For complex works in the field of media art and digital art, this is not common, but just as urgent. Reinterpretation of media art can contribute to the preservation and better understanding of the work. Since 2016, LIMA has put reinterpretation on the map as an artistic and conservation strategy. In the interdisciplinary and international UNFOLD project contextualizing, documenting, analyzing, understanding, embodiment and transferring digital culture are central. Relevant questions are: What is the core and production method of a work? Which techniques are used in which context? How do we translate this artistic legacy, practice and knowledge to the next generation? How do reflect and learn from different interdisciplinary practises?

 

Programme
5 pm Doors open
5.30 – 6.15 pm Presentation Rietveld Students (*free entrance)
6.30 pm Opening exhibition (in collaboration with De Appel): Dan Graham’s iconic work and documentation material of Audience/Performer/Mirror, 1977 De Appel, Amsterdam. Reinterpretations by Adad Hannah, Performer Audience Remake, 2008; Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Audience Performer Fuck Off, 2009, Judith Hopf, What Do You Look Like / A Crypto Demonic Mystery, 2006. (*free entrance)
6.30 – 9 pm Performances Keren Cytter (Performer/Audience/Mirror, 2012), Miron Galić reenacting Cursor, 2016 in Jan Robert Leegte’s Mirror (2020) and Emile Zile (Performer/Audience/Lens, 2018) + artist talks followed by a panel discussion with: Gabriella Giannachi, Annet Dekker and Willem van Weelden moderated by Suzanne Sanders (*a ticket is required for this part of the program).

Event
UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror
With works and contributions by Dan Graham, Keren Cytter, Emile Zile, Jan Robert Leegte, Gabriella Giannachi, Annet Dekker, Willem van Weelden, Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Judith Hopf and students from the Rietveld Academy.
Wednesday 15 January, 2020
5 pm Doors open
5.30 – 6.15 pm Presentation Rietveld Students (free entrance)
6.30 pm Opening exhibition (free entrance)
6.30 – 9 pm Performances & artist talks Keren Cytter, Jan Robert Leegte and Emile Zile, followed by panel discussion (a ticket is required for this part of the program)
Entrance: € 7,50 / 5,- /Free with Cineville
LIMA/LAB111, Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam
Language: English
Facebook event

Exhibition
UNFOLD: Audience/Performer/Mirror (in collaboration with De Appel)
With works by Dan Graham, Adad Hannah, Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Judith Hopf.
15 – 22 January 2020
Every day from 12 – 23 pm, entrance is free
LIMA/LAB111, Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam

Graphic design by Bin Koh.

UNFOLD Audience/Performer/Mirror is supported by De Appel, Rietveld Academie and the Mondrian Fund and is part of the collaborative research project Documenting Digital Art, supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Transformation Digital Art Amsterdam 2019

On March 21 2019 I was in Amsterdam to present my performances ‘I follow Yoko and Yoko Follows Me’ 2012 and ‘Audience / Performer / Lens (After Dan Graham)’ 2018 at Transformation Digital Art conference at LIMA Amsterdam. As it was a meeting of media archivists, museum workers, cultural shephards and technologists I spoke specifically around the idea of reinterpretation of historical performance art as a form of preservation, oral history and unrequited commentary. Alongside panelists Anne Marie Duguet (University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Adam Lockhart (University of Dundee) with moderation provided by Serena Cangiano (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland).

‘Wearing the Skin Suit: Interpretation and Reperformance of Historical Performance Art’
Transformation Digital Art 2019 LIMA media art platform.

Thanks to Gaby, Manique and all at LIMA. March 21 2019. Photos by Jose Miguel Biscaya.

Emile Zile and Sven Lütticken in conversation

Within the framework of the exhibition “Liquid Cooled: new works by Emile Zile”, LIMA organises a public screening and discussion night. The artist Emile Zile and art historian and critic Sven Lütticken will talk about Zile’s work within the context of the LIMA Collection – ranging from early gems from the seventies (Douglas Davis, Dan Graham) to Zile’s current body of work. Performance on television, social media and the performativity of the mass media will be recurrent themes.

Entrance: € 7,50 / 5,-
Free entrance with: Cineville pass
Language: English

LIMA
Arie Biemondstraat 111
1054 PD Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31(0)20 389 20 30
http://www.li-ma.nl

https://www.facebook.com/events/356797314716082

This programme is part of the exhibition Liquid Cooled: new works by Emile Zile
LIMA is proud to present its first exhibition of new works by the Australian artist Emile Zile. Liquid Cooled will present prints, video works and a performance by the artist who currently has a residency at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten.

Performance at Castrum Peregrini

Memory Machine II – A series of exhibitions, debates, performances & publications on cultural memory & identity, initiated by Castrum Peregrini Amsterdam.

Exhibition & public program

Things to Remember
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27 February – 25 March

With works by Mehraneh Atashi, Dayna Casey, Amie Dicke, Nickel van Duijvenboden, DNK Ensemble, Maria Guggenbichler with Margit de Sad, Romy A. More, Egbert Alejandro Martina and others, Jonas Lund, Antoine Viviani, Emile Zile. Curated by Radna Rumping

How are digital media, endless storage space and new ways of communicating shaping the way we capture, share and retrieve our personal memories? The things we want to remember, do they still fit in a shoebox or are they floating around somewhere in ‘the cloud’ amongst the thousands of e-mails and images that our external memory can contain nowadays?

Saturday 27 February 2016, 16.00 – 17.30

Free entrance. A conversation with Amie Dicke, Simultaneous/Synchronous (Song) Performance DNK Ensemble (Koen Nutters & Seamus Cater), Performance Emile Zile

Things-To-Remember-at-Castrum-Peregrini-23 Things-To-Remember-in-colour-at-Castrum-Peregrini-24 Things-To-Remember-in-colour-at-Castrum-Peregrini-25

FREE LUNCH

FREE LUNCH
Free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage
– Hunter S. Thompson

BLUEEARTH

The ‘Blue Marble’ image released from NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. The image was released after solicitation from Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue as well as The WELL, the first open digital community.

We live in an ecological period of history, our assumed model and image of the world is that of an ecosphere. Within this sphere everything matters, everything has the potential to be part of everything else. Each instance is imbued with the potential to affect, in a causal chain, everything else. There is no outside .

This could be described as the hell of the butterfly effect, a kind of contingency-overload. How is it possible to separate out the specific from the general within this milieu? What is a significant as opposed to an insignificant event? The question becomes epistemological; how do we know?

Emile Zile’s new video work Western Digital is set on and around the central thoroughfare of a northern Laotian city, Luan Prabang. A city on the confluence of Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, Luan Prabang was the royal seat of Laos until Pathet Lao communist took control in 1975.

Each morning a ritual known as Tak Bak takes place. Tak Bak is a giving of alms to the cities Theravada Buddhist monks. As is shown in Zile’s video, this event takes the form of a procession where monks receive alms in silence, without returning thanks to the giver. There is no giver and receiver in Tak Bak, only giving and receiving. Through Tak Bak the material and spiritual sustain each other without direct encounter; what is beneficial to the monks is meritorious for those giving. Tak Bak is not charitable in the Christian sense.

As Zile’s video shows, the daily procession is two simultaneous events, alms being given and the witnessing of the alms being given. Each morning TAK BAK has nearly as many witnesses, in the form of tourists, as participants.

The images we see being produced in Zile’s work, like the offerings made to the monks it features, have a double life. They’re are on the one hand a document of a specific time and place, and on the other user generated content being uploaded and distributed across a digital network. This freely produced ‘content’ is the one of the key aspects of the ‘third industrial revolution’ that is reshaping various economic, social and political relations; creating new forms of power relations and placing control in the hands of newly emerging organisations. This new economy is part of an experiential ambiance brought about by the advent of a widely deployed digital infrastructure. This is a new economy of free information, not of goods and services, a milieu of TED talks, not public libraries and of freelancing and internships, not jobs. This new milieu of free and ‘open’ information, content and entertainment is what Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi calls the ‘new techno-social framework of contemporary subjectivation”.

LAOS-002-2013-10-06

To the organisations and companies leading the capitalisation of this new techno-social framework the resource it produces, in the form of digital ‘content’, is an almost alchemical, infinite, resource. A ‘virgin’ resource, like the new world once was to Europe’s colonial powers. As Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, explained to Bill Clinton during his first term as president, the effects of the digital economy was like ‘finding a new planet’.

This new resource is the product of the labour executed by the same ‘class’ of consumer of it as a product, in a mediated feedback loop. The product in question, personal expressions has existed in various forms for decades, (home videos, diaries) however, it is only since the advent of web 2.0 that it has become a widely produced and consumed resource. Every Tweet, every Instagram of ‘info-commodity’ is what Berardi calls ‘Semio-capital’, an expression of the interaction between language and labour. Semio-capital is the production of cultural material that puts ‘neuro-psychic energies’ to work as labour. Expressing subjectivity, like the old times of keeping a diary, is now a form of work, of productive labour; the ‘self’ having attained the currency of a resource. Twitter, Facebook et al are in a constant battle for our self-expression.

However, this labour is not paid for in the conventional sense, what you receive in return for producing content for, say Twitter, is free access to the service as a consumer. For the consumer it is an entirely money free transaction, an economy of giving and receiving; not working and paying.

The companies that trade on the production of semio-capital are driving a new economy that could ultimately rewrite the entire concept of exchange value, labour and employment. In turn this new economy (which within the digital is already well established) could therefore go on to fundamentally determine the process of subjectivation of the individual as part of a 21st century economy.

In Zile’s film we see ‘content’ and ‘experience’ in mutual production as a site of subjective personal experience; experience being the critical site of content production. Furthermore we see the two bound together as an expression of an emerging social and economic reality where the site of production and consumption become blurred to the point of indiscernible difference. This indiscernible difference between labour and leisure, between work and life is an outcome of a specific period of social and technical developments that was influenced by the Buddist practices that feature in Zile’s film.

The ‘Californian Ideology’ is a catchall term for the mixture of post war systems theory, popular interpretations of Buddhism and an Ayn Rand style radical individualism that has driven much of the development of both the infrastructure, culture and business models that dominate the digital network today. The idea of a stable, free environment is at the very core of our networked paradigm.

An example of Buddhist inspiration can be found in one of the pivotal figures in both the counter culture of the 1960’s and the World Wide Web. Stewart Brand was the founder of Whole Earth Catalogue as well as the WELL, the first online community. Brand asserted during his counter culture days that the Tao Te Ching by Chinese sage Lao Tzu was in fact the ‘first systems theory book’. The systems theory that Brand refers to gave the Hippy generation a model for a lateral society of anti-Cartesian self-determining, self-organising individuals, free from what they perceived as the corrupt and war mongering institutions of politics and the state.

LAOS-007-2013-10-06

It was in Buddhism, that had already influenced the avant garde of the 50’s, that the counter culture found its mythology. The selfless, egoless, Buddhist, in the eyes of Brand and others, was equivalent to the cybernetic subject – where the Cartesian self that transcends the material world was reinscribed as a node in a total, planetary, system. As Jefferson Airplane assert in their seminal protest album of the period, Volunteers, ‘see how small your are…the human name doesn’t mean shit to a tree’, expressing the idea that ego of the modern subject is meaningless when culture (and the individuals that make it up) are seen inseparable from the material world as one, total, system.

Systems theory found a home on both sides of the establishment. Jay Forrester at MIT, among others, developed a vision of the world as a total unified ecology of natural and industrial systems. Both the researchers into systems theory at MIT, the wider military-industrial complex and the counter culture movement became strongly attached to the idea of sustainability as the ultimate end of a systems theory view of both nature and culture. This sustainable ecological vision of the world proposes to overcome politics by way of the efficiency and strength of its design as a system, a system designed to bring about harmony and stability. It was and is a project with a utopian dimension directed towards an implicit ultimate end, that of a harmonious world.

However, with the widespread failing of the self-sufficiency and back to the land movement its key proponents were looking for ways to reintegrate their ethos into the mainstream. As Stewart Brand has said of this period ‘self sufficiency didn’t work, so now it’s time to collaborate’, and so the first online community, The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) was born out of the same self-sufficiency ethos where every voice is equal, the dawn of user-generated content had come. It was with four ex-members of the largest back to the land commune, The Farm, that Brand started The WELL.

The cyber-utopian narrative that came out of the California Ideology of an egalitarian society, ecological sustainability and a boundless life world enhanced by the digital network may have entered a new phase after the 2000 dot com crash and the 2001 attack on the twin towers. What was considered a tool of mass emancipation has become, in a surprisingly quick period of time, dominated by very few corporations and has become a tool for mass surveillance. However, the idea of giving persists as a new economic model, the idea of free information of digital ‘commons’ is a major part of the global network. Producers-consumers give their ‘neuro-psychic’ labours to companies and corporations that provide ‘free’ services. Contrary to the wishes opined in counter culture author Richard Brautigan for a cybernetic infrastructure that would make us ‘free of our labours’, the cybernetic ‘meadow’ we have instead has made old practices into new types of labour, performed for free.

Life in a new world without boundaries (paid/free, employed/unemployed) has to establish and active resistance to the network, or find its psyche colonized and commoditised. The strangest, and most pernicious, aspect of this new regime is that both colonisation and commoditisation are voluntary but irresistible. The spirit of voluntary labour, a benign act of egoless community merit is warped by the digital network into the entry box at the top of any facebook page, requesting the user to enter ‘what is on your mind?’ As one of the first critiques of peer to peer media, made during its early days of the 1990’s wrote ‘Cyberspace is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and represents it as an emotional spectacle.’

And this is where we find the nexus of Zile’s film. Within its constellation of ancient Buddhist ritual and networked image production we see a dialectical image, in the sense of Benjamin, emerge.

The location of Zile’s film appropriately makes up its title; the work is literally set in a spatial and temporal location of northern Laos, a much-marginalised nation and forgotten part of the world. However, as Zile’s film makes us aware, everywhere is significant to the ecological vision of the world; there is no outside of the system. Furthermore, Zile’s work shows us that within this milieu of significance substance based value becomes secondary to the psychic, labour is not just about the execution of products and services but also psychic and emotional output. Like the ceremony in documentation shown, a mediated economy of voluntarily giving is taking place whinin our new digital economy of the mind. For the Buddhists involved in the ceremony, the economic exchange is mediated by a belief system, for the tourist, the exchange is mediated by Facebook or Instagram, who, unlike the consumer, make a traditional monetary profit from the meta data of the users.

Just as Walter Benjamin elucidated the reflective energy of the iron windows and mannequins of Paris arcades to talk about the 19th Century, Zile uses the Tak Bak ceremony in Luang Prabang to make recognisable the boundaries and practices that inhabit our ecological, 21st century, milieu. Further to this, Zile’s film shows how the two conceptual schemes of the ‘self’ found in Buddhism and free market capitalism have synthesised into the digital economy, the new planet on which we now must live.

– Matthew Shannon

EmileZile-Laos2013