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Diffstat (limited to 'frontend/site/projects')
| -rw-r--r-- | frontend/site/projects/museum/app/revisions.js | 6 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | frontend/site/projects/museum/constants.js | 72 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | frontend/site/projects/museum/export.js | 6 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | frontend/site/projects/museum/views/artists.css | 9 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js | 21 |
5 files changed, 79 insertions, 35 deletions
diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/app/revisions.js b/frontend/site/projects/museum/app/revisions.js index 648fd38..fcd8392 100644 --- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/app/revisions.js +++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/app/revisions.js @@ -8,11 +8,7 @@ export default function reviseSite (graph) { } graph.pages['/thelastmuseum/home'].tiles = ( graph.pages['/thelastmuseum/home'].tiles - .filter(tile => tile.type !== 'text') - ) - graph.pages['/thelastmuseum/home'].tiles = ( - graph.pages['/thelastmuseum/home'].tiles - .filter(tile => tile.type === 'image' || (tile.type === 'link' && !tile.type.match("stankievech"))) + .filter(tile => tile.type === 'video' || tile.type === 'image' || (tile.type === 'link' && tile.href.match("stankievech"))) ) Object.keys(graph.pages).forEach(path => { const page = graph.pages[path] diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/constants.js b/frontend/site/projects/museum/constants.js index 4cbf383..90256fc 100644 --- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/constants.js +++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/constants.js @@ -349,91 +349,105 @@ export const PROJECT_PAGE_SET = new Set(["essay", "artists", "credits"]) export const ESSAYS = { nadim: { title: "Curator's Essay", author: "Nadim Samman", }, statements: { title: "Artist Statements", author: "", }, + developer: { title: "Developer Notes", author: "Jules LaPlace", }, } export const ESSAY_ORDER = [ - "nadim", "statements", + "nadim", "statements", "developer", ] export const ESSAY_TEXTS = { nadim_intro: { "en": ` <p> - <i>The Last Museum</i> is an exhibition that explores productive tensions between the putative ‘anywhere’ of the digital and its relation to local particulars. Deploying a hybrid offline-online format, the project invites an international group of artists to reimagine site-specificity, through a sequence of interventions that cut across both real and virtual domains. The artists are <b>Nora Al-Badri</b> (Germany/Iraq), <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b> (Brazil), <b>Nicole Foreshew</b> (Wiradjuri Nation/Australia), <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b> (Thailand), <b>Zohra Opoku</b> (Ghana), and <b>Charles Stankievech</b> (Canada). + <i>The Last Museum</i> is an exhibition that explores tensions between the imagined ‘anywhere’ of digital space and its relation to concrete places and objects. Deploying a hybrid offline-online format, the project invites an international group of artists to reimagine site-specificity, through a sequence of interventions that cut across both real and virtual domains. The artists are <b>Nora Al-Badri</b> (Germany/Iraq), <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b> (Brazil), <b>Nicole Foreshew</b> (Wiradjuri Nation/Australia), <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b> (Thailand), <b>Zohra Opoku</b> (Ghana), and <b>Charles Stankievech</b> (Canada). </p> `, - "de": `<p></p>`, + "de": `<p>Eine Deutsche Übersetzung kommt bald.</p>`, }, nadim_essay: { "en": ` <p> - <i>The Last Museum</i> connects disparate sites, spanning six continents and the virtual sphere. It is an experiment that deploys a unique exhibition design—embracing the overlapping <i>analog</i> and <i>digital</i> dimensions of a given location while, additionally, exploiting the unique potentials of each for dramatic effect. Altogether, <i>The Last Museum</i> comprises an epic para-site that is most accessible through a web interface. + <i>The Last Museum</i> connects disparate sites, spanning six continents and the virtual sphere. It is an experiment that deploys a unique exhibition design—embracing the overlapping <i>analog</i> and <i>digital</i> dimensions of a given location while, additionally, exploiting the unique potentials of each for dramatic effect. Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at a location of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communication and connectivity. Final settings ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric forms of transmission—and included a notorious hacker hangout, ancestral land in rural Australia, an electronics mall in downtown Sao Paolo, a Cosmic Ray observatory in the Rocky Mountains, and more. </p> <p> - Each artist was commissioned to author a sculptural group, to be installed at an outdoor site of their own choosing. The choice was only limited by a request that it be associated with communication and connectivity. Final choices ended up highlighting both technical and more esoteric forms of transmission—and included a notorious hacker hangout, ancestral land in rural Australia, a down-at-heel electronics mall in downtown Sao Paolo, a Cosmic Ray observatory in the Rocky Mountains, and more. + Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists, and the resulting clips were handed over to the project’s web developer, Jules LaPlace, before being brought together through a unique way-finding protocol; the exhibition’s ‘hang’. The public outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. Visitors may have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts. </p> <p> - Each sculptural intervention was videoed by the artists, and the resulting clips (from all over the world) were handed over to a digital artist, Jules LaPlace, before being brought together through a bespoke way-finding protocol; the exhibition’s ‘hang’. The public outcome, debuting as a pop-up window on the KW start page, is a website experience that unfolds as an interactive sequence of objects and places, navigable using bespoke tools. At times, these tools amount to additional (digital) artworks. Visitors will have a sense that that the exhibition is a wormhole, of sorts. + <i>The Last Museum</i> is a <i>web-site-specific</i> project—in the sense that both its artistic content and exhibition design re-imagines the stakes of ‘site-specificity’ for digital times. What this means is that <i>The Last Museum</i>’s ‘site’ is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘stack’. Our exhibition-stack encompasses material facts on the ground, digital code, and softer site specificities—including those previously outlined by the art historian Miwon Kwon, such as ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire’. Each artwork in <i>The Last Museum</i> is a kind of a vector that intersects with all of the stack’s layers. </p> <p> - Some of the featured locations are associated with infrastructure and the World Wide Web, others include waterways and climate. Uniting these seemingly disparate aspects, a conceptual leitmotif of visually grounding planetary networks and other globe-spanning systems will be evident. Call it a web-site-specific project—in the sense that both art and exhibition design re-imagines the stakes of ‘site-specificity’ for digital times. What this means is that <i>The Last Museum</i>’s ‘site’ is a layered reality or (to borrow a term from computational engineering) a ‘Stack’. Our exhibition-stack encompasses material facts on the ground, digital code, and softer site specificities—including those previously outlined by the art historian Miwon Kwon, such as ‘cultural debates, a theoretical concept, a historical condition, even particular formations of desire’. Each artwork in <i>The Last Museum</i> is a kind of a vector that intersects with all of the stack’s layers. + For visitors, <i>The Last Museum</i> offers a blurring between cinematic experience and website interactivity. The ability to stay with a moving image for as long as you want, pushing the edit along at your own pace, is not normally available as a filmic experience. In fact, it is more a province of gaming. Additional interactions include accessing texts, manipulating digital sculptures, soundtrack variations and more. All of these are artist directed, and thus in no way ‘secondary’ materials. </p> <p> - For visitors, <i>The Last Museum</i> will offer a blurring between cinema and website interactivity. The ability to stay with a moving image for as long as you want, pushing the edit along at your own pace, is not normally available as a filmic experience. In fact, it is more a province of gaming. Other interactions will include releasing files for download, accessing texts, switching soundtrack variations and more. All of these things will be artist directed and thus in no way interpretive or secondary materials. + At its core, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores how tangibility and distance interact, how things that seem fixed in place might (or do) escape in various forms. In a sense, then, it it clear that we are dealing with an issue as old as art itself, but while employing contemporary tools. </p> <p> - Rather than being a one-off exhibition, <i>The Last Museum</i> will ‘tour’ as a pop-up window on the start pages of partner institutions for fixed periods. In line with the project’s rejection of an ‘anywhere, anytime’ web imaginary, each touring iteration will acquire a new chapter—with an additional artist/site from the host institution’s country added to the navigable chain. As long as our colleagues’ are interested, it is possible that <i>The Last Museum</i> may tour and grow indefinitely—like the content of the web itself. + The exhibition opens with <i>The Glass Key</i> by Canadian artist <b>Charles Stankievech</b>. Its interactive sequence features original footage, found video, and textual fragments drawn from various literary sources. The scenes were captured at a cosmic ray research station, situated on top of a snowy peak in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It was here that the artist installed a number of stones—variously half-buried in ice, lodged in a cliff-side fissure, and balanced on a summit. As the exhibition visitor browses Stankievech’s sequence, they also hear a complex soundtrack—a harmonic drone in deep spatial reverb; high pitched crackles created by solar radiation; and a heartbeat that spells out the texts in the rhythms of Morse code. </p> <p> - This project was conceived during the first wave of COVID-19, amid heightened tensions between the conditions of physical lockdown and globe-spanning telecommunication. Although utterly international, its production required no travel for persons or artworks. When the exhibition opens, audiences will not have to travel to view it. While the development of such a format is not supposed to replace gallery experience, it is at least suggestive for how to approach a growing question in the museum sector: namely, how do analog artworks and digital space can come together a meaningful way? In fact, this is only half of the question: We must also explore how digital artworks can relate to analog space. <i>The Last Museum</i> attempts to work on both problems at the same time, creatively, playing with the issue of translation and re-representation in a bi-directional manner. + <i>The Glass Key</i> highlights an oscillation between macro-cosmic perception (looking outwards on a grand scale, towards stars and galaxies) and the contemplation of epic depths in the sub-atomic domain. One of the work’s pop-up videos is 3D scan of the interior of SNO Lab—a Canadian neutrino observatory located 2km underground. While linking one of the world’s deepest facilities with a high-altitude observatory, Stankievech trains viewers’ sights on universe(s) that can only be sensed by super-computers. Within these post-digital universes, the spatial logic governs everyday life is all scrambled, and paradoxes rule the day. By way of example, the fact of quantum ‘super positionality’ means that an atom is both here and there. </p> <p> - At its core, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores how tangibility and distance interact, how things that seem fixed in place might (or do) escape in various forms. In a sense, then, it it clear that we are dealing with an issue as old as art itself (albeit, employing contemporary tools). + It is through paradoxes of scale that contemporary cosmology retains a link to the ancient conflation of macrocosm and microcosm. Stankievech deploys a historical symbol for this in a HyperCard software animation—the figure of a triangle within a triangle. This icon was the subject of a discourse by the early esoterist Rene Guenon (quoted in <i>The Glass Key</i>). Guenon claims that this icon represents a cave within a mountain: Whereas the outer triangle’s only corner on a vertical axis symbolically corresponds to a visible summit, the inner triangle’s peak is inverted, facing downwards, indicating a second hidden peak whose magnitude is of no less import for the spirit. Stankievech’s contribution continues in this fashion of dense intertextuality. While the work presents an somewhat overwhelming series of intellectual hyperlinks, they are linked by an underlying focus on the fact that super-positionality is a paradoxical side-effect of bunkering, digging in, and locking down. </p> <p> - The exhibition opens with <i>The Glass Key</i> by Canadian artist <b>Charles Stankievech</b>. Its interactive sequence features original footage, found video, and textual fragments drawn from various literary sources. The scenes were captured at a cosmic ray research station, situated on top of a snowy peak in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. It was here that the artist installed a number of stones—variously half-buried in ice, lodged in a cliff-side fissure, and balanced on a summit. As the exhibition visitor browses Stankievech’s moving-image documentation of these situations (sometimes overlaid with pop-up videos), they also hear a complex soundtrack—a harmonic drone in deep spatial reverb; high pitched crackles created by solar radiation; and a heartbeat that spells out the texts in the rhythms of Morse code. + <b>Nora Al-Badri</b>’s <i>AFU. This is Not A Hacker Space</i> pictures 3D printed sculptures installed in two of Berlin’s legendary hacker hangouts—the Chaos Computer Club, and the c-base ‘spaceship’. The items are based on scans of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian idols from various museum collections whose source files were recovered (from their digital storerooms) by unauthorized techniques. Al-Badri has altered some of their forms and transformed them to all female gendered spirits. Best known among this collection of liberated archaeological data idols is a bust of Nefertiti, which the artist famously expropriated from Berlin’s Neues Museum by surreptitiously scanning it, only to release the file into the online wilds—initiating a public debate about free use of information relating to cultural patrimony. </p> <p> - In light of the mountain site’s dedication to cosmic searching (and sensing) as well as related references in the pop-up videos, <i>The Glass Key</i> would appear to dramatize a telescoping spatial perspective: That is to say, it seems to explore an oscillation between macro-cosmic perception (looking outwards on a grand scale, towards stars and galaxies) and, conversely, the contemplation of epic depths in the micro-cosmic domain (of quarks and so on). One of the pop-ups is a 3D scan of the interior of SNO Lab—a Canadian neutrino observatory located 2km underground. By linking one of the world’s deepest human facilities (for exploring the sub-atomic realm) with a high-altitude observatory, Stankievech trains viewers’ sights on post-digital image-culture concerned with the cosmos. This is an image-culture whose universe(s) can only be sensed by super-computers. (Visitors may recall the World Wide Web’s origins at CERN, another subterranean facility, as they contemplate the emerging tech being developed at SNO Lab.) And yet, as the artist’s contribution implies, this is an imaging-culture that is no less given to paradox than archaic traditions—despite its technological sophistication: + Within these hacker spaces, Al-Badri’s all-female deities speak to the visitor–of their agendas for hacker culture. As, in the artist’s own words, ‘coloured cyber-feminist’ queens and goddesses, they have come to claim sovereignty over making and data activism; over museal and computer culture at large. Placed within the underground temples of digital politics, these new idols propose a revaluation of women’s role in our information society. In some respects, they serve to (symbolically) exorcise the familiar spirts of misogyny from this realm. It is an occupation; a takeover. </p> <p> - Indeed, <i>The Glass Key</i> asserts that contemporary cosmology retains a link to the ancient conflation of macrocosm and microcosm. He deploys a historical icon for this conceptual inversion – a triangle within a triangle - in a HyperCard software animation. The symbol itself was the subject of a discourse by the early Twentieth Century esoterist Rene Guenon (author of The Glass Key’s inaugural textual fragment), specifically concerning a putative ‘cave within a mountain’: Whereas the outer triangle’s only corner on a vertical axis symbolically corresponds to a visible summit, the inner triangle’s peak is inverted, facing downwards, indicating a second hidden peak—whose magnitude is of no less import for the spirit. + Of course, the analog being of such ancient sculptures is resolutely unique. In reverence for this irreplaceable originality, museums pursue an active <i>care-for</i> that parallels mummification. If the museum liberated the funerary object from its tomb, it did so only to re-entomb it within a display case and conservation system. However, as Al-Badri’s work seems to imply, the release of these objects’ digital doubles into the world effectively re-animates them: The doubling of the icons recharges their god-like stature, perhaps, because of their spatio-temporal superpositionality: They are here and there; static, mummified, and simultaneously active. They transcend binary definition. And this may be the reason that their ‘cyber-feminist’ being overcomes masculine (gendered) computation. </p> <p> - While showing a LIDAR scan of a Mayan pyramid that he captured in the Yucatan, Stankievech pairs a statement by Robert Smithson from <i>Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan</i> (1969). The text addresses the creative perspective afforded to caterpillars (by virtue of their scale, one presumes), the double or <i>mirrored</i> aspect of certain stars, and the entrance to abyss. Stankievech’s contribution continues in this fashion of dense intertextuality. While, to some degree his piece presents an overwhelming series of intellectual hyperlinks (rabbit holes that lead one far from an initial starting point) there is an underlying meditation on the fact that connectivity is a paradoxical technical (if not mystical) side-effect of bunkering, digging in, and locking down. + <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b>’s objects were installed in an electronics retail neighborhood in downtown Sao Paulo. Made of plaster, they are fragmented, repeating casts from the artists own body—principally her mouth and hands. Set amid cables, screens, and piles of hardware, they bring a tactile counterpoint to the ostensible transparency of the screens on sale. This effect is compounded by the replacement of the website cursor with the artist’s own finger, dipped in plaster (a motif that gives another sense to the <i>digit</i> within the digital). Over such imagery, pop-up videos comprising found footage add a degree of visual and sonic cacophony. These clips variously relate to the production and repair of electronics components, global shipping routes, and 3D printed human organs. In addition, each scene features a disembodied mouth (the artist’s own), yammering a stream of conscious monologue. Echoing the performance in Samuel Beckett’s <i>Not I</i> (1972) this mouth/voice is, in turns, hectoring, pleading, reactive/afraid. It is a compulsive speaker. </p> <p> - <b>Nora Al-Badri</b>’s <i>AFU. This is Not A Hacker Space</i> pictures 3D printed sculptures installed in two of Berlin’s legendary hacker hangouts—the Chaos Computer Club, and the c-base ‘spaceship’. The items are based on scans of ancient Egyptian and Babylonian idols from various museum collections whose source files were recovered (from their digital storerooms) by unauthorized techniques. Al-Badri has altered some of their forms and transformed them to all female gendered spirits. Best known among this collection of liberated archaeological data idols is a bust of Nefertiti, which the artist famously expropriated from Berlin’s Neues Museum by surreptitiously scanning it, only to release the file into the online wilds—initiating a public debate about free use of information relating to cultural patrimony. + Overall, Leite’s contribution explores the question of boundaries between bodies and the techno-prostheses through which they access the digital sphere. Her work conveys the impression of a body broken up, distributed, reproduced, soldered onto others; a recombinant body, with some parts that operate autonomously. Foregrounding the abject quality of techno-embodiment, and the compulsions that attend screen-mediated life, Leite’s mood pushes back against cyborg fantasies. </p> <p> - Within these hacker spaces, Al-Badri’s all-female deities speak to the visitor–of their agendas for hacker culture. As, in the artist’s own words, ‘coloured cyber-feminist’ queens and goddesses, they have come to claim sovereignty over making and data activism; over museal and computer culture at large. Placed within the underground temples of digital politics, these new idols propose a revaluation of women’s past, present and future role in our information society. In some respects, they serve to (symbolically) exorcise the familiar spirts of misogyny from this realm. It is an occupation; a takeover. + <b>Zohra Opoku</b>’s contribution was shot in a half-built mortuary in Accra, Ghana. The ruin’s rough walls set the stage for her installation of various printed fabric artworks, whose pictorial motifs were inspired by the Ancient Egyptian <i>Book of the Dead</i>—a corpus of spells concerning the deceased’s passage into and through the afterlife. The textiles hang shroud-like over concrete and iron rebar, as distant voices and street noise are heard echoing through the structure. Lightly moving, they depict branches, faces, masks, hands, and eyes, often riffing on hieroglyphics. Once again, <i>The Last Museum</i> returns to the funerary. In this instance, to a location where a body is prepared for entombment. And yet this location is itself unfinished—and will remain so. </p> <p> - Of course, the analog being of such ancient sculptures (the original bust of Nefertiti, for instance) is resolutely unique. In reverence for this uniqueness, or irreplaceable originality, museums pursue an active care-for that parallels mummification. Indeed, if the museum liberated the funerary object from its tomb, it did so only to re-entomb it within a display case and conservation system—while developing proprietary directions for interpreting and accessing the scope of its powers. However, as Al-Badri’s work seems to imply, the release of these objects’ digital doubles into the world beyond the purview of the historical museum effectively re-animates them—as beings with new potential: The digital doubling of the icons recharges their god-like stature, perhaps, because of their spatio-temporal superpositionality: They are here <i>and</i> there; static, mummified, <i>and</i> simultaneously active. They transcend binary definition. And this may be the reason that their ‘cyber-feminist’ being overcomes masculine (gendered) computation. + With respect to such limbo, we must note that <i>The Last Museum</i> shares its title with a semi-fictional memoir written by the cult author and artist Brion Gysin. His late text <i>The Last Museum</i> (1985) paid tribute to the famous Beat Hotel in Paris. It was a place he knew well. Gysin’s literary experiment was a leap into the grey area between documentation and poetic license, before reality TV and fake news. Perhaps indicating the significance of this in-between status, the story was metaphysically set in the bardo—the Tibetan Buddhist state of <i>intermediate</i> existence between two lives (death and rebirth). The book’s plot also circled around the theme of displacement. In it an American investor plans to buy the hotel and transport it across the Atlantic to be re-built in the vicinity of the San Andreas fault. A suggestive allegory for how personal memories, past lives, and documentation intersect on the plane of individual psychology, Gysin’s Last Museum could not have anticipated the spatial and temporal bardo that is the World Wide Web. It is this planetary infrastructure that constitutes, perhaps, the final break with a spatial imaginary first shaken by the telegraph. Throughout our Last Museum, states of being between life and nonlife (first broached in ancient religious texts) are staged as live issues in the digital era. Indeed, the works in this exhibition talk about the space between a life recorded by digital technology and the digital afterlife or archive (Nefertiti on the move). But can one die in the digital realm? Does the digital museum not encompass everything? Beyond a museum without walls, is it not a museum of every possible wall? </p> <p> - <b>Juliana Cerqueira Leite</b>’s objects were installed in an electronics retail neighborhood in downtown Sao Paulo. Made of plaster, they are fragmented, repeating casts from the artists own body—principally her mouth and hands. Set amid cables, screens, and piles of hardware, they bring a tactile counterpoint to the ostensible transparency of the screens on sale. This effect is compounded by the replacement of the website cursor with the artist’s own finger, dipped in plaster (a motif that gives another sense to the <i>digit</i> within the digital). Over such imagery, pop-up videos comprising found footage add a degree of visual and sonic cacophony. These clips variously relate to the production and repair of electronics components, global shipping routes, and 3D printed human organs. In addition, each scene features a disembodied mouth (the artist’s own), yammering a stream of conscious monologue. Echoing the performance in Samuel Beckett’s <i>Not I</i> (1972) this mouth/voice is, in turns, hectoring, pleading, reactive/afraid. It is a compulsive speaker. + <b>Nicole Foreshew</b>’s contribution features ‘message sticks’, installed in a riverbed on her ancestral land. The objects are an indigenous method of communication mostly legible to members of her people, otherwise resistant to easy outside reading. Her <i>message song of running water</i> foregrounds a method of site-specific communication that is as old as any memory of the land. Indeed, it is one that predates the modern ‘invention’ of Land Art. Site is about so much more than material. It is about meaning, a fact that Foreshew’s work highlights. In some respects her objects resist the logic of all-seeing accumulation of information. Even though these message sticks are shown, they escape the colonial gaze. Foreshew’s work asks what a digital archive <i>really</i> comprehends. </p> <p> - Overall, Leite’s contribution explores the question of boundaries between bodies and the techno-prostheses through which they access the digital sphere—how they blur into it, functionally, or, at times, awkwardly. Her work conveys the impression of a body broken up, distributed, reproduced, soldered onto others; a recombinant body, with some parts that operate autonomously. Foregrounding a certain abjection within this techno-embodiment, the work’s mood runs contrary to the valorization of the cyborg in recent theory. The Santa Ifigênia neighborhood where the video was shot is situated close to the main area in Sao Paulo where crack cocaine is sold and consumed. It is not a coincidence, Leite claims in her artist statement, that the tech industry refers to everyone as users. If there is something speedy, compulsive, and monstrous in the video’s affect, it arises from our—the user’s—all too familiar compulsions. + <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b>’s contribution is set in Thailand’s northern mountainous region near Chiang Mai, a site recently devastated by annual wildfires which envelop the area in a choking haze. Set among burning fields, his interventions reconstruct the type of time-release release burners built by arsonists, whose purposes in setting the blazes are heavily contested and politicized. Scenes of fire creeping up the mountainside transition automatically in step with a numeric real-time count of world population shown at the edge of the video. Speculatively linking the fires to global population growth, Nilthamrong indicts the ecological and economic pressures impinging on local actors—farmers, foragers, and residents. Mesmerizing images of fire onscreen offer a smokeless encounter with the incendiary contradictions of a contemporary social-economic order that pits basic human subsistence against environmental sustainability on a planetary scale. What is emphasized here through the modest figure of a clothes peg clipped to a tangle of wires is the technological mediation of these tensions. </p> <p> - <b>Zohra Opoku</b>’s contribution was shot in a half-built mortuary in Accra, Ghana. The ruin’s rough walls set the stage for her installation of various printed fabric artworks, whose pictorial motifs were inspired by the Ancient Egyptian <i>Book of the Dead</i>—a corpus of spells concerning the deceased’s passage into and through the afterlife. The textiles hang shroud-like over concrete and iron rebar, as distant voices and street noise are heard echoing through the structure. Lightly moving in a draft, they depict branches, faces, masks, hands, and eyes, often riffing on hieroglyphics. Once again, <i>The Last Museum</i> returns to the funerary. In this instance, to a location where a body is prepared for entombment. And yet this location is itself unfinished—and will remain so. + This project was conceived during the first wave of COVID-19, amid heightened tensions between the conditions of physical lockdown and globe-spanning telecommunication. Although utterly international, its production required no travel for persons or artworks. Through the artistic positions and interactive staging, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores the drama of site-specificity in light of <i>the digitization of place and its re-presentation online.</i> Rather than being a one-off exhibition, <i>The Last Museum</i> will ‘tour’ as a pop-up window on the start pages of partner institutions for fixed periods. In line with the project’s rejection of an ‘anywhere, anytime’ web imaginary, each touring iteration will acquire a new chapter—with an additional artist/site from the host institution’s country added to the navigable chain. As long as our colleagues’ are interested, it is possible that <i>The Last Museum</i> may tour and grow indefinitely—like the content of the web itself. </p> + `, + "de": `<p></p>`, + }, + jules_essay: { + "en": ` <p> - With respect to such limbo, we must note that <i>The Last Museum</i> shares its title with a semi-fictional memoir written by the cult author and artist Brion Gysin—a sometime collaborator of William Burroughs, perhaps best known for his psychedelic light-sculpture the <i>Dreamachine</i> (1962). His late text <i>The Last Museum</i> (1985) paid tribute to the famous Beat Hotel in Paris—the haunt for an artistic community who were committed to exploring both geographical and inner space. It was a place he knew well. Gysin’s literary experiment was a pioneering leap into the grey area between documentation and poetic license, before reality TV and fake news. Perhaps indicating the significance of this in-between status, the story was (metaphysically) set in the <i>bardo</i>—the Tibetan Buddhist state of <i>intermediate</i> existence between two lives (death and rebirth). Circling again, at the level of plot, around the theme of displacement (or ungrounding)—an American investor plans to buy the hotel and transport it across the Atlantic to be re-built in the vicinity of the San Andreas fault. A suggestive allegory for how personal memories, past lives, and documentation intersect on the plane of individual psychology, Gysin’s Last Museum could not have anticipated the spatial and temporal bardo that is the World Wide Web. It is this planetary infrastructure that constitutes, perhaps, the final break with a spatial imaginary already shaken by the telegraph, telephone, and so on in the preceding century and a half. Throughout our Last Museum, states of being between life and nonlife (first broached in ancient religious texts) are staged as live issues in the digital era. Indeed, the works in this exhibition talk about the space between a life recorded by digital technology and the digital afterlife or archive (Nefertiti on the move). But can one die in the digital realm? Does the digital museum not encompass everything? Beyond a museum without walls, is it not a museum of every possible wall? + The software underlying <i>The Last Museum</i> has its roots in the hypertext art websites of the late 1990s. The sudden rise of the web gave way to an artistic landscape that was more than a mere constellation of networked texts. Online artists built new digital spaces, where each link might lead to another world with its own sense of place. This was something beyond the infinite library imagined by Borges. Here a single page could contain not just words, but any sort of media - even basic interactive content that, at the time, felt all the more abstract through its simplicity. Inhabiting this space was a virtual author who could dissolve and dissemble at will, speaking through typical navigation elements with a postmodern flair that rivaled the sprawling footnotes and elegiac colophon of an experimental twentieth-century novel. </p> <p> - <b>Nicole Foreshew</b>’s contribution features ‘message sticks’, installed in a riverbed on her ancestral land in rural Australia. The objects are an indigenous method of communication mostly legible to members of her people, otherwise resistant to easy exogenous reading. Work stages, then, a method of site-specific communication that is as old as any memory of the land—and which predates the modern ‘invention’ of Land Art. Site is about so much more than material. It is about meaning, a fact that Foreshew’s work foregrounds. In some respects her sculptural objects resist the logic of all-seeing accumulation of information. Even though these message sticks are shown, they escape the colonial gaze, somewhat. Through her work, perhaps, Foreshew ask what a digital archive <i>really</i> comprehends. While re-presented through online, her objects resist. + The fatal flaw of the 1990s web was that it was extremely manual and thus difficult to maintain. Many of the first art websites did not survive into the new century, and the web of the 2000s - the blog era - was decidedly less experimental. Once linked to a database, the web became increasingly formulaic, as the information one could offer was confined to a rigid set of boxes, their input sanitized and freed from the unkempt formatting and self-invented organizational style of the past. This period also marked a loss of trust with the users, who had too much power in the old days, it seems. A single broken tag could ruin an entire website; new scripting powers meant software worms could be lurking anywhere, waiting to come alive. For programmers who remember fighting with aging versions of unsupported browsers, the development environment itself was rude and often hostile. </p> <p> - <b>Jakrawal Nilthamrong</b>’s contribution is set in Thailand’s northern mountainous region near Chiang Mai, a site recently devastated by annual wildfires which envelop the area in a choking haze. Set among burning fields, his sculptural interventions are reconstructions of the type of time-release release burners built by arsonists, whose purposes in setting the blazes are heavily contested and politicized. Scenes of fire creeping up the mountainside transition automatically in step with a numeric real-time count of world population shown at the edge of the video. Speculatively linking the fires to global population growth, Nilthamrong indicts the ecological and economic pressures impinging on local actors—farmers, foragers, and residents with competing relations to the land and air. Mesmerizing images of fire onscreen offer a smokeless encounter with the incendiary contradictions of a contemporary social-economic order that pits basic human subsistence against environmental sustainability on a planetary scale. What is emphasized here through the modest figure of a clothes peg clipped to a tangle of wires is the technological mediation of these tensions—indeed the material condition of our social interconnections. + The last decade, in turn, has seen both the synthesis and destruction of the old web, and the kindling of the online world of today. A decade ago, imagistic discourse was just beginning to take place online with the same speed as conversation. It seemed that anything possible in software was now possible in the browser, within the context of one's own garden, taking care not to bump against its invisible walls. Yet the database world was still stronger than ever. We tend social media accounts instead of web rings, and the old <a href="http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/" target="_blank">vernacular web</a> is now quite remote. Now if you want to achieve some freedom online, you have to program it yourself, and the same applies if you want to give your friends the same pleasure. </p> <p> - Through the artistic positions and interactive staging, <i>The Last Museum</i> explores the drama of site-specificity in light of <i>the digitization of place and its re-presentation online.</i> + This software, then, is inspired by two things. First we have this idealized vision of the 1990s web, via art websites like the somehow-still-existing, Webby-award-winning <a href="http://superbad.com/" target="_blank">superbad.com</a> - a site that still inspires with its abstract meanderings, which seem to fold into a vague, unresolved narrative. Cross this with the imagistic potential of the 2010s, exemplified by Tim Baker's <a href="https://asdf.us/tile/" target="_blank">image layering tool</a>. Here the user is encouraged to break the rules of digital ownership and "bandwidth theft," and tile and collage any image links one might find ready-to-hand. + </p> + <p> + During Summer 2020, I finally had the time to combine these two ideas into the <i>Swimmer</i>, a tool where one can make several collages and then link them together, creating a network that can tell stories from another world through imagistic hypertext. The first project that used it was by my friend Ernst Markus Stein, for his exhibition <a href="https://km-galerie.com/swimmer/frontside/" target="_blank">geschichte von jemand, wo nachts das hobby geklaut wird</a> at KM in Kreuzberg. His physical works performed a sculptural exchange between the real and the virtual, turning digital paintings into tapestry and embroidery. Our parallel online vernissage ran the tape in reverse, meaning our friends, stuck at home, could still come out and visit during lockdown. + </p> + <p> + We can still open a window into some new space, and it is in this frame that <i>The Last Museum</i> inserts itself, with six artists placing their sculptures out in the real world, where we must be assured that time is still passing and the air always moves. This virtual recreation of physical space is an offering of hope, and a promise of future reunion.</i> </p> `, - "de": `<p></p>`, + "de": ` + <p>Eine deutsche Übersetzung kommt bald.</p> + ` } } @@ -547,6 +561,9 @@ export const CREDITS_STRINGS = { Fieldwork Recording Assistant: Ala Roushan<br/> VR Capture thanks to Sudbury Neutrino Laboratory (SNO).<br/> <br/> + <i>The Glass Key</i> becomes a temporary sound installation at Hacienda Ochil in Yucatán, on 8 May 2021. Realised in collaboration with <a href="http://www.taefoundation.org/" target="_blank">TAE Foundation.</a> + <br/> + <br/> <b>Nora Al-Badri</b><br/> <i>This Is Not A Hacker Space</i><br/> Location: C-Base, Berlin, Germany<br/> @@ -567,6 +584,9 @@ export const CREDITS_STRINGS = { Assistent für Feldaufnahmen: Ala Roushan<br/> VR-Aufnahme dank des Sudbury Neutrino Laboratory (SNO).<br/> <br/> + <i>The Glass Key</i> wird am 8. Mai 2021 zu einer temporären Klanginstallation in Hacienda Ochil, Yucatán. Realisiert in Zusammenarbeit mit der <a href="http://www.taefoundation.org/" target="_blank">TAE Foundation.</a> + <br/> + <br/> <b>Nora Al-Badri</b><br/> <i>This Is Not A Hacker Space</i><br/> Location: C-Base, Berlin, Germany<br/> diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/export.js b/frontend/site/projects/museum/export.js index 8724978..7116ceb 100644 --- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/export.js +++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/export.js @@ -32,6 +32,12 @@ strings = strings.concat([ `<h4>Deutsch</h4>`, ESSAY_TEXTS.nadim_intro.de, ESSAY_TEXTS.nadim_essay.de, + `<h2>Developer Notes</h2>`, + `<h3>Jules Laplace</h3>`, + `<h4>English</h4>`, + ESSAY_TEXTS.jules_essay.en, + `<h4>Deutsch</h4>`, + ESSAY_TEXTS.jules_essay.de, `<h2>Credits</h2>`, `<h3>Site Credits</h3>`, CREDITS_STRINGS.site_credits.en, diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/artists.css b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/artists.css index 66c7005..fb20fb7 100644 --- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/artists.css +++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/artists.css @@ -28,10 +28,11 @@ } .page-artists .artist-big-name { font-size: 17.4vh; + text-shadow: 0 0 10px #FF790D; + transition: text-shadow 0.2s; } .page-artists .artist-big-name:hover { - /*color: white;*/ - text-shadow: 0 0 5px #FF790D; + text-shadow: 0 0 0px #FF790D; } .page-artists .artist-list { display: flex; @@ -96,7 +97,7 @@ fill: #FF790D; } -.page-artists .artist-close { +.artist-close { position: fixed; top: 0; right: 0; @@ -104,7 +105,7 @@ cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none; } -.page-artists .artist-close img { +.artist-close img { width: 2rem; } diff --git a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js index 90439fe..f9b9058 100644 --- a/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js +++ b/frontend/site/projects/museum/views/essay.js @@ -131,6 +131,8 @@ const EssayDetail = props => { return <NadimEssay {...props} /> case 'statements': return <ArtistStatements {...props} /> + case 'developer': + return <DeveloperNotes {...props} /> } } @@ -146,6 +148,9 @@ const ArtistStatements = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, language, onClose }) => ( </div> ) })} + <div onClick={onClose} className="artist-close"> + <img src="/thelastmuseum/static/img/close-black.png" /> + </div> </div> ) @@ -158,6 +163,9 @@ const NadimEssay = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, language, onClose }) => ( <ArtistGlobe /> <span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: ESSAY_TEXTS.nadim_essay[language] }} /> </div> + <div onClick={onClose} className="artist-close"> + <img src="/thelastmuseum/static/img/close-black.png" /> + </div> </div> ) @@ -176,3 +184,16 @@ const ArtistGlobe = () => ( </div> </div> ) + +const DeveloperNotes = ({ essayId, index, isCurrent, language, onClose }) => ( + <div className={isCurrent ? "artist-detail visible" : "artist-detail"}> + <div className="page-title" onClick={onClose}>Developer Notes</div> + <div className="page-subtitle">By Jules LaPlace</div> + <div className="page-content"> + <span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: ESSAY_TEXTS.jules_essay[language] }} /> + </div> + <div onClick={onClose} className="artist-close"> + <img src="/thelastmuseum/static/img/close-black.png" /> + </div> + </div> +) |