Rhizome 2010 Commissions

My Bloglines tells me that Rhizome's commissions for 2010 have just been announced. Pricking up as they do now at anything remotely altermodern, my ears and eyes settled on two in particular.

Heba Amin's work, Fragmented City, will "research and locate abandoned buildings in Cairo and then populate Google Earth with sketch-up models of these structures to “counteract the skewed understanding of the city’s experience online where only models of historic monuments exist.”" This will be followed by setting up a "tourism bureau in Cairo in order to give tours of these forgotten areas to provide a new view of the city." You can read her essay on Fragmented City on her website.

This layering of city landscapes is familiar through psychogeography. Personally, this sort of project is always likely to excite my interest, proposing as it does a subversion of the experience of a city. Michel de Certeau talks about these sorts of battles between a dominant city mapped out by planners, architects and institutions and inhabitants; he calls them strategies and tactics. The Wikipedia entry on de Certeau has this definition: "Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies."

Amin's work is interesting from an altermodern point of view because it drags the past, the present and the future into contact with one another, creating sparks like those of conflicting ideas in a debate. Google Earth skews the viewer's understanding of Cairo by presenting only certain monuments. Will Amin's work result in a welcome evening out of this authoritarian impulse, or will be another instance of it? There are many criterias for choosing the buildings - how, where, why - are how these are regulated will be interesting to see. What access does she have? What knowledge?

The second work that caught my eye was Red76's YouTube School For Social Politics. As Rhizome write: "scattered throughout YouTube lie countless points of view, scattered moments of histories, both personal and collective. By arranging these video segments - documentaries, personal missives and old family films, newsreels, music videos - new light can be shed on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present. The YouTube School for Social Politics (YTSSP) invites guest historians, artists, and theorists to construct passages of historical inquiry through the assemblage of clips found on YouTube."

The Wikipedia page on Red76 is small but gives a starting point: "Red76 is a multi-artist collective started in Portland, Oregon ... Red 76's work centers around the practice of grassroots publishing (both zines, small newspapers and online), conversation, and alternative economies which center around a larger theme of the American Revolution and a general revolutionary spirit.

Projects like Ghosttown and Taking Place sought to charge space and create an atmosphere wherein the public may become highly aware of their immediate surroundings, and their day to day activities, is an often recurring element within many of the groups activities."

Red76, then, are also interested in space, with a communal twist. This Youtube project appears primarily to be concerned with the space of public record, public memory. In shedding "new light [...] on the sociopolitical landscape of history past, and history present" Red76 are performing an altermodern process, spreading their practice into all aspects of history (past and present, and, missed by Rhizome's description but surely implicit - future) and collating it in the present. As Bourriaud described back in his exhibition catalogue, they are "tracing lines in all directions of time and space".

Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, Edgard Varèse - Poème électronique

Browsing Rhizome today, I found this.



It appears to be an attempt at creating an audio-visual environment that accompanies the Philips Pavilion. Rhizome linked to Media Art Net who described it as "the first, electronic-spatial environment to combine architecture, film, light and music to a total experience made to functions in time and space."



Dated 1958 - before the similar audio-visual-environmental light-shows of late 60s Gustav Metzger and Cream - it's an interesting embrace of new technologies and collaboration between different art forms; a spirit we can perhaps see in the new media art that Rhizome produces, initiates and exhibits. It's possible that the early, faltering steps of electronic visual manipulation seen in the Poème électronique are replicated in the collaborations between web designers, artists, musicians and architects seen on Rhizome's website, Turbulence, BLDGBLOG and others.

A study could be done of the "childhood" periods of art movements and techniques, charting the early, more carefree stages. I've often thought - most likely others have too - that the best time to be a rock music fan would've been between, say, 1958 and 1968. Likewise hip-hop, which I still think is sufficiently teenage to be interesting, was probably most exciting in the 80s. I find it difficult to make a comparison for the 2000s.