|
 |
From EXINDEX |
|
| From
North
Adams Transcript July, 2004 Art On Wheels Exhibit Moves Audience by John E. Mitchell Mass MoCA's fun new Art
Trolley rattles its passengers with its insight as well as its motor.
|
|
| From
METAMUTE |
 |
From Libération February 04, 2004 Media-art. A Berlin, le CTM trouve un nouveau souffle. Chansons de gestes Par Marie LECHNER ÇSi le tourisme, c'est dŽcouvrir des endroits inexplorŽs de la ville, alors, oui, il s'agit en quelque sorte d'une promenade touristiqueÈ, s'amuse l'un des trois membres d'e-Xplo, groupe d'artistes international, spŽcialisŽ dans les excursions dŽviantes. Aprs une pause dans un terrain vague, battu par la pluie, les voyageurs remontent dans le bus amŽnagŽ pour poursuivre leur Žtrange balade nocturne ˆ travers Berlin : avenues rectilignes de bŽton ŽgayŽes par les nŽons des stations d'essence, zones industrielles immobiles, prison au coin d'une banlieue pavillonnaire... Le tout bercŽ par une composition Žlectroacoustique jouŽe en live, mŽlangŽe ˆ des textes, pomes ou chansons Žvoquant Berlin et les paysages urbains. La virŽe se transforme en un Žtrange cinŽma itinŽrant click here to continue |
 |
|
|
|
|
From the Village
Voice |
 |
|
Given the relentless noise, dirt and dilapidated sights presented by NYC's highways, you wouldn't think that anyone would choose to spend time on them especially with no destination in mind. But cruising those roads in a tour bus, with improvised, ambient electronic music replacing car horns and wind as the soundtrack, see ed like it just had to be a good idea. And that's exactly what the sound-art group e-Xplo had in store for us with 65 MPH: Exhilarated Voy ges into the Detours of Pure Chance, a bus tour and sound-art project in one. (Wolf) |
 |
|
|
 |
| From
Associated
Press:
May 16, 2001 "Sound-Art Performance Hits Road" by Miranda Leitsinger NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent chilly Saturday night, about 20 people wait to load a tour bus. Some joke around and sip Budweisers from brown bags, while others look serious and quiet. The bus takes off into the night for an hourlong exploration of the glamorous roads, thoroughfares and highways of New York City. click here to read the rest of the article |
|
| From
Artbyte
Magazine (March/April 2001 Vol 3 No. 6) The
bus moves slowly east, away from the galleries, cafés, and shops
that have sprung up along the streets of Williamsburg’s north side,
now a trendy artist and working-class enclave. Ten minutes into the
quiet trip—there is no narration—a symphony of groans, clangs,
and syncopated twitters, mixed live by two sound artists, issues from
the back of the vehicle. The tour meanders past car-part lots, warehouses,
and 24-hour delis to its promised land: blocks and blocks of waste-management
treatment facilities serving New York City. |
 |
| From
the New
York Times:
DILAPIDATED factories, sewage plants and garbage dumps are not your
usual tourist attractions. But in Williamsburg, where even the political
is expressed artistically, they are highlights of an unusual tour...
|
 |
From
the Village
Voice
Short List: Open City (Zimmerman)  DENCITY BUS TOUR Billed as "a kind of Huck Finn on land . . . a geographic event space," this sound-tracked nighttime ride through the ominous industrial zones and tangy creeks of northern Brooklyn and southern Queens bypasses urban shabby-chic for an introspective and physiographic view. Mixmasters Rene Gabri, Heimo Lattner, and Erin McGonigle provide a good loud score that cashes in melody for texture and site-related physicality (radio-static beats, car-service CBs, and lots of mysterious squelching and clanking), leaving soul and groove somehow intact. The cemetery summit is breathtaking, as is the drive past Greenpoint's massive sewage plant. 12/00 |
|
|
A trio of artists drive paying customers through the desolate streets of a decrepit Brooklyn neighborhood on a bus, accompanied by minimalist electronic music. 'Dencity' is art on wheels. (click link above for full article) 11/00 |
 |
|
This sounds fucking weird, but we are SO there. The basic premise is to drive around in a bus on a tour of Brooklyn at night, listen to electro-acoustic music and look at all the cool buildings. And yes, of course, Williamsburg residents came up with this. But do something different! Don't just rot in that same old stank club each week. Get your musical, architectural, and public-transportation groove on at the same time. Let the Dencity crew take you on a tour of "NYC's hideen urban landscapes." It will be a nice change for Flyer, as we are used to hanging out in the bathroom of the depot, as opposed to actually riding in the bus. Tour starts and ends at Parker's Box, Grand St. Williamsburg. |
|
|
Unter dem Titel "Dencity" fährt eine New Yorker Aktionsgruppe die Kunstszene in den Stadtteil Williamsburg. Mit Laptops und DJs begibt man sich auf die Suche nach verfallenen Fabrikgebäuden und Müllaufbereitungsanlagen Ankommen? Gibt es nicht. Keine Szene, die am Busfenster vorüberzieht, wird so bleiben, wie sie ist. Schon werden einige Etagen der rohen, verfallenen Fabrikgebäude umgebaut zu offenen Studioräumen, mit Holzböden, geweißelten Wänden und Heißluftgebläsen. Für 1.500 Dollar Mindestmiete im Monat reißen sich die New Yorker Jungkreativen darum, einziehen zu dürfen in dieses für lange Zeit vergessene Hinterland zwischen Brooklyn, Queens und Long Island City - fern von Supermärkten, Cafés und jeder Infrastruktur. Aber wen stört es schon, statt eines Waschsalons eine Müllaufbereitungsanlage ums Eck zu haben, wenn er sich endlich ein wenig so fühlen kann wie die ersten Pioniere, die vor fünf, sechs Jahren aus Manhattans East Village über den Fluss hinüberzogen nach Williamsburg. Heimo Lattner, Erin McGonnigle und René Gabri, die mit ihrer "Dencity"-Bustour die noch unentdeckten Gegenden der Stadt zum Beobachtungsgebiet machen, gehörten zu denen, die vor einigen Jahren auf der Suche nach billigem Wohnraum die Fabriken, Lagerhäuser und Arbeiterbuden Brooklyns entdeckten. Damals dachten sie nicht im Traum daran, dass "hier einmal die Leute mit Krokohandtaschen entlangschlendern und Williamsburg zum artifiziellen Konsumviertel wird". - "Es ist noch gar nicht so lange her, dass Williamsburg vor allem wegen seiner Verschmutzung, durch leer stehende Lagerhäuser und wegen der hohen Verbrechensrate bekannt war", schildert Lattner. Die Künstler ließen sich davon nicht stören. Sie zimmerten ihre Wohnräume und Studios aus Sperrmüll und billigen Materialien zusammen und begannen den rauhen Charme des Industrie- und Arbeiterviertels mit Boheme-Ambiente weichzuzeichnen. Lattner, derzeit Stipendiat am Whitney Museum of American Art, stellte Holzboxen, die seinem Loft-Zimmer nicht unähnlich sahen, in Londons ICA und dem Musée dArt contemporaine in Lyon aus. Ex-Whitney-Stipendiat Gabri nutzte die Industrielandschaften als Drehort für seine Videos. Und McGonnigles Soundperformances gewannen vor dem Hintergrund der verfallenen Fabrikgebäude noch an Nachdruck. Doch was vor fünf Jahren als echtes Abenteuer anfing, bereitete am Ende das perfekte Gelände für einen Yuppie-Abenteuerspielplatz vor. Den unabhängigen Off-off-Galerien folgten Cafés und Boutiquen. Williamsburg ist zum neuen Szeneviertel New Yorks geworden. Und wer von den ehemaligen Fabrikarbeitern nicht das Glück hat, ein Zimmer untervermieten zu können, musste längst in eines der Viertel ziehen, das weiter weg ist von der Subway und der tollen Sicht auf die Skyline von Manhattan. An Orte also, die für die neuen Williamsburger nicht wirklich von Interesse sind - zumindest noch. "Natürlich machen wir uns Gedanken darüber, ob wir mit unserer Bustour nicht den Leuten genau die Stadtteile zeigen, die zu den nächsten Szenevierteln werden könnten und damit die Abdrängung beschleunigen", meint Lattner. Aber aufhalten lässt sich der Prozess ohnehin nicht mehr. Das einzige, was die drei Gründer der Künstlergruppe e-xplo mit ihrer Performance bewirken können: dem Publikum die Augen öffnen für die Existenz der Hinterstadt, für die Unterwelt, für Daten und Fakten, Geschichten und Hintergründe, die längst verdrängt wurden aus dem Alltag der auf Party, Unterhaltung und Konsum fixierten Szenewelt. Gabri hofft zumindest, dass "die Leute gezwungen werden, sich und ihre Umwelt in Frage zu stellen". Schon der Begriff "Dencity" macht den weiten Rahmen kenntlich. Zusammengesetzt aus "dense" (dicht, gedrängt, beschränkt), "den" (Lager, Höhle, Bau) und "city" (Stadt) wird hier nicht nur mit den Worten gespielt: So führt die nächtliche Bustour heraus aus dem Teil Williamsburgs, wo sich die Szene so gemütlich eingenistet hat, damit klar wird, wie groß die Bedrängnis und Enge außerhalb der eigenen Grenzen ist. Wie Touristen werden die Performance-Teilnehmer in einem Luxusbus herumgefahren. Doch statt als Fremdenführer die vorbeiziehenden Sehens(un)würdigkeiten zu erläutern, mixen Lattner und McGonnigle auf ihren Laptops live Straßenaufnahmen, Geräusche und Klangversatzstücke zu Electronica. Mit diesem Sound untermalt, führt die Tour an verfallenen Fabrikgebäuden vorbei, durchs schäbige Hinterland von Manhattan, dessen Skyline sich hin und wieder als spektakuläres Panorama hinter einer Mauer, einem Stacheldrahtzaun oder einem alten Friedhof erhebt. Irgendwann passiert der Bus auch ein paar der insgesamt achtundzwanzig Müllaufbereitungsanlagen, die innerhalb eines Umkreises von knapp neun Kilometern in und um Williamsburg herum verteilt sind. Den Schwefelgeruch der mit Abgasen geschwängerten Luft, die sich über den Wasserbecken einer der Anlagen ansammelt, können nicht einmal die Lüftungsanlagen im Luxusbus wegfiltern. Williamsburg
ist eine der verseuchtesten Gegenden von New York City. Aus einem lecken
Tank flossen vor ein paar Jahren 75,7 Millionen Liter Öl und Benzin
in den Boden. Die Schadstoffkonzentration ist 60-mal so hoch wie der
Landesdurchschnitt für bewohnte Gegenden, und täglich kommen
46 Prozent aller Emissionen der Stadt dazu. Die Krebs- und Asthmaraten
sind hier mit am höchsten. "Ich kann gar nicht glauben, wie
jemand in Williamsburg seelenruhig mit dem Kinderwagen einen Schaufensterbummel
machen kann", meint Lattner. Eine junge Frau ist dagegen schlichtweg
begeistert vom spröden Reiz der Altlasten-Architektur: "Hier
würde ich gerne leben", sagt sie. "Das wäre cool."
Vielleicht geht ihr Wunsch demnächst schon in Erfüllung. taz Nr. 6352 vom 22.1.2001, Seite 14, 193 Zeilen, TAZ-Bericht JOSEFINE KÖHN |
 |
| iMusicWeek,
PLAYER: Interactive Music On & Off the Web DENCITY - Check out this live performance of electro-acoustic music on a nightly bus tour through New York's hidden landscapes. The producers of the DENCITY project are interested in exploring the relations between our point of departure, Williamsburg and some of the surrounding neighborhoods that have remained on the periphery of most experiences of NYC. Navigate through these spaces with sound that is generated on the bus and sounds that have been collected "on site". Wired magazine's Diana Michele Yap says: "A new, nighttime bus tour, Dencity forces unsuspecting riders to see the shivery desolation of outlying industrial areas, while live minimalist electronic music clatters and blips from the fingertips of avant-garde artists." |
 |
| Flavorpill: Now this sounds interesting... a live performance of electro- acoustic music on a nightly bus tour through New York's hidden landscapes. Have we gotten your attention yet? The bus starts and ends at Parker's Box in Williamsburg (of course, only Brooklynites are this cool!) Self-described as "the contemporary urban equivalent of an explorer's notebook - a kind of Huck Finn on land." Sure, you can always watch Saturday Night Live re-runs, or maybe venture something new... |
|
| From Peek Reveiw: TESTIMONIALS 2000 - Baltimore Arts Community (and other special guests) Pick Personal Faves and Raves from the year 2000. Here are the responses to our community query per this past years top 5 favorite events, exhibitions, or any experience which shook the viewers boots. Some folks gave us the requested list of five, some less and some more. We have printed the testimonials in the exact order we received them. If you have not sent us your own personal fave-rave 2000 list and wish to be included E-mail it to us at: Peter Walsh: "Palace of Projects" - Ilya And Emilia Kabakov, Public Art Fund @ the 69th Regiment Armory, New York. An extraordinarily expansive installation of 65 "invented" projects inside a glowing white construction based on Vladimir Tatlin's "Monument to the Third International" (1928). Amazing. I went three times. "Yes" - Yoko Ono, Japan Society Gallery (till January 14, 2001) New York. I love Yoko Ono. Full of humor and elegance, this retrospective truly deserves to be called "generative" because it fills the mind with such a sense of possibility. "WAR IS OVER! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko" is one of my faves and a legendary work of public art. Pia Lindman's transplanted sauna @ PS1. Finnish artist Pia Lindman brought an altered version of her hometown vernacular culture right into the heart of the artworld - the outdoor sculpture area at New York City's PS1 Art Center. Baking yourself naked in a wooden box in the middle of a gallery space is something I'd recommend to everyone. "Playing Through" - Charles McGill @ Gallery M, New York. I spent a wonderful Saturday afternoon watching former Maryland Institute grad student and artist McGill as he golfed his way across Harlem dressed in hilarious black-and-white argyle attire. Funny, well executed and full of meaning. "DenCity" A nighttime artist-designed bus tour (with a full-sized tour bus!) across Brooklyn and Queens accompanied by a live electronic "soundtrack." The journey took participants past trash dumps, sewage plants and cemeteries - some with spectacular panoramas of Manhattan. The "other" view of how industry functions. |
 |
|
"It's the urban equivalent of an explorer's notebook," Ms. McGonigle said, "a kind of 'Huck Finn' on land." A dozen trips were offered on weekend evenings in November and December, in which more than 700 people (at $15 a person) were trundled through the neighborhood. The events proved so popular that advance reservations were required and an additional bus was added for the final outing of the year. (The tours are to resume in March.) To provide the soundtrack for the tour, the artists spent nearly three months recording sounds from Williamsburg's streets the rumble of the subway, the clatter from cars and factories. Then they mapped a route synchronized with the music. The hourlong trip begins and ends in front of Parker's Box Gallery on Grand Street, in the heart of the neighborhood. As the chartered bus winds through narrow, darkened streets, the only sound is the constant clattering of high-pitched electronic music, which mixes with the street sounds. There is no narrator. The stark images of recycling plants and waste management sites seen through the bus windows seem more suitable for the walls of a museum of photography than for a roster of tourist hot spots. "It's kind of an absurd anti-tour," Ms. McGonigle acknowledged. "We're showing places you wouldn't see on a tour." As the bus meanders around eerily desolate streets and junkyards, the soundtrack reinforces the atmosphere, alternating from the sound of jackhammering to the rush of running water. Near the end of the drive, as the bus passes a sprawling cemetery juxtaposed against a bright Manhattan skyline, the recorded sound of rattling subway cars drifts up the aisle. Mr. Gabri navigates from the front of the bus while Ms. McGonigle and Mr. Lattner synchronize the music on a laptop computer from the back of the bus. On each tour, the bus travels along different streets and the sound is mixed in different ways. The "tourists" include a mix of artists, Williamsburg residents, visitors from Manhattan and even some children. Some, like Patrick Barnhart, a policy analyst whose specialty is recycling, attend for professional reasons. "It's so interesting," said Carolyn Christov-Bakergiev, a curator at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, "because it blends fact and fiction in a cinematic way." MELISSA P. McNAMARA ----------------- As
we boarded t e plush Mercedes bus in front of Williamsburg's SouthFirst
gallery one recent evening, we were advised to "sit toward the middle"
by Erin McGonigle, one of e-Xplo's three artists. "The bus is wired
[for sound] in the front and back," she explained. Once
we got moving, the grit and grime of industrial Williamsburg gave way
to the high-risk, perpetual motion of the BQE, and the silence on the
darkened bus surrendered to sputtering electronic static, provided from
the back of the bus by McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, one of her e-Xplo
partners. The other, Rene Gabri, coordinated the route with the driver,
reacting to traffic and aiming to keep the bus at or close to 65mph.
The music picked up tones pierced walls of static and flu noises took
flight as the bus eurged beneath us. Somehow, everything outside looked
different, as if we were seeing well-known landmarks and buildings for
the first time. Bridge overpasses, the glittering tip of lower Manhattan,
the waterfront's suddenly compelling buildings have these always been
here? Over the Verrazano we went, slicing through a posh and quite surreal
looking neighborhood of Staten Island the activity inside the houses
seemed to be two worlds away before rounding a block and going right
back the way we came. "It
isn't about taking people to a location," McGonigle explained later.
"The highway used to facilitate [the movement] of people from one place
to another is our destination. And because we aren't going anywhere,
we aren't leaving anywhere either." The event followed e-Xplo's first
bus-tour project, Dencity, which explored some of Brooklyn's desolate
industrial sites last December. Although e-Xplo has yet to plan another
NYC excursion, the three are hoping to conduct similar tours through
L.A.'s clogged arteries next February. Mike
Wolf ----------------- For four weekends this winter, the Dencity Bus Tour made its pilgrimages through the city’s trash and raw sewage. The ride, says Rene Gabri, one of the three artists who conceived and produced the tour, was meant “to interrogate the format of the tour itself, which relies on verbal information that is often incorrect anyway.” His collaborators, Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, produced the live soundtrack, largely made up of samples taken from the industrial area itself. According to Gabri, the tour evokes what wireless gadgetry promises to provide: “Moving through space, yet having a constant stream of information.” But all tours do that, or at least they try. Unique to Dencity is the detachment and illusory sense of privacy encouraged by the atmospheric music and darkness. On the bus that night, one couple made out, another gossiped, while others stared out the windows. Without the unifying element of a tour guide to produce a sense of community, Dencity has hit on, perhaps accidentally, a lonely vision of a supposedly hyperconnected world where each person has electronic access to all varieties of data, anytime, anywhere. The Dencity bus tour and several other art expeditions have recently been making the metaphor of mobility material. Mobility as lifestyle has become ever more common in the past half-dozen years as portable electronic inventions allow us to roam further, with greater frequency, for both work and play. At the same time, global tourism has taken hold as a major wage-earning sector for some and a regular pastime for others. Nomad-themed art plays with these two dominants of contemporary life: the international, wireless culture of businesspersons, artists, entrepreneurs, and writers shuttling between Los Angeles, London, and Lagos; and the booming tourist culture that at times seems infected with a case of “scopophilia,” as Gabri puts it‹pleasure in looking, particularly at others. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Culver City, CA, has also offered a series of on-the-road looks at waste-related scenery. The combination artists’ collective/rock-collecting club launched a self-guided tour in 1995 with their project “Suggested Photo Spot.” The “picture spot” was invented by Kodak, says CLUI director Matt Coolidge, “in order to put their logo up in national parks.” CLUI’s minimalist signs suggest tourists stop and notice more than the area’s inherent beauty. The project planted 50 signs across the country, from the Trojan Recreation Area and Nuclear Power Plant in St. Helens, Oregon, to the Kodak Waste Water Treatment Plant in Rochester, New York, where CLUI’s sign informs visitors that “Kodak’s industrial waste water is treated at this plant in the beautiful Genesee River” and that “local lore has it that film can be developed in this water.” The satire offers pointed instructions to look beyond the “beautiful river” into its history within the landscape, both corporate and natural. Like many of CLUI’s projects, “Suggested Photo Spot” transcends the limits of representational art to bring viewers to the actual site of confrontation, where myths of business and government neutrality, even beneficence, toward the environment are readily exposed. Most recently, CLUI contributed to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles’ Flight Patterns show, taking museum visitors on a bus two hours inland to their Desert Research Station. The Flight Patterns tours involved an official guide (although visitors could drive to the staffed station on their own), who pointed out land uses of the region, from the freeway to Fontana’s steel industry. “We’re talking about erosion, flood control, industrial development,” says Coolidge. “Heading out into the desert, we try to read the physical vestiges of contemporary history on the landscape.” CLUI’s bus ride was more didactic than Dencity’s, but, says Coolidge, they didn’t “spoon feed” people. “It’s important to initiate an interpretative process,” he says. Additional CLUI tours have been “taken to ridiculous extremes,” says Coolidge. “We’ve taken tours that cover over 500 miles in a day and kind of wear people out. It’s kind of an adventure, an odyssey.” The voyeurism of the tourist on these buses, traveling past unglamorous, often desolate areas, can turn self-reflective. As the Dencity bus passes through neighborhoods where nearly as many people live as tons of waste are transferred on a daily basis, “you feel suddenly uninvited,” says Erin McGonigle, the sound artist who recorded most of the samples for the electronic mix. “We were cautious about fetishizing the spaces,” says Gabri. “There’s a lot of power being able to be in this bus. Mobility is a privilege, people pay for it.” Of course, the inverse of the empowered, self-propelled tourist is the refugee, the person involuntarily displaced. Gabri himself is originally from Iran; his family fled the country during the 1979 revolution. A bus project directly addressing the difference between choosing to move and having to move was proposed by artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock in 1995 for Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial Competition. Bus Stop: The Non-Monument engendered controversy even though it was never produced. In the proposal, buses would pull up to the vast, empty space under the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin. There, a waiting hall would offer digitally displayed histories of the destinations, the names of which would also flicker across the buses: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, the death camps of Nazi Germany. A requirement for the competition was the inclusion of the official project name, which was “The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” As Schnock has pointed out, placing this phrase on the buses would make it a memorial in perpetual motion. In effect, tourists would replicate the constant state of transit that the Jews endured during the Holocaust, as they either fled the Nazis or were shipped to camps. Although their proposal placed 11th out of 528 in the memorial competition (with Peter Eisenman’s “real” monument chosen for construction), it was a public favorite. In 1996, the artists published a 128-page bus timetable that listed the sites that could be reached on current public transportation. Stih and Schnock are known for antimemorials, or nonmonuments, an idea which latches on to the inevitable change of time and context as our most fundamental reality. Many have argued these structures don’t remember events but bury them in myth. Writers and artists in Germany, still sensitive to the memory of Albert Speer and the Nazi fixation with grand gestures, are particularly aware of the loaded meaning colossal monuments can contain. The traditional concept of a monument only encourages people to contemplate a hulking stone building and an abstracted past; nonmonuments instead create the memorial as process. Rather than distance the viewer, Bus Stop invites participation in that process which, like the Dencity bus tour or CLUI’s ride to the desert, makes travel and the passage of time essential to the art. Tracking the hours, minutes, and seconds in a world where the pace of change seems to compress time itself is the theme of Darren Almond’s Mean Time (2000), a shipping container with a digital display continually ticking off Greenwich Mean Time. The artist rode with the container, linked to a Global Tracking Satellite, from London to New York for his show at Matthew Marks Gallery last fall, documenting the journey with photographs, as well as drawings of the night sky. Almond’s drawings allude to an older tradition of triangulating distance at sea by observing the sun and stars; after the 18th century, longitude was determined by calculating the time difference relative to Greenwich. Only in the past few years have mariners been able to rely on GPS. While Almond’s outsized clock mechanically ticked off the time in England, he was honoring an ancient system of navigation, by taking notations on the sky. Also journeying to New York City in a freight container was the art collective etoy, best known for the “Toy War” waged when an American online toy store tried to take the European art group’s domain name. The etoy.TANK, one of four bright orange containers sent for a spring show at Postmasters Gallery, is “the office, studio, hotel, storage, and webserver at the same time,” according to the group’s Agent Zai. Members of the group, spread across Switzerland, Germany, and California, reside in these “walk-in webservers” when participating in exhibitions. While the tank provides a physical manifestation of the group’s nomadic nature, the website hosts etoy. TIMEZONE, an online Twilight Zone where minutes count 100 UNIX seconds and a midday time embargo halts the clock for an etoy hour. “TIMEZONE,” writes the group, “is the solution to the insanity of the continuous physical travelling through international time zones, for time shifts in international markets and to the problem of getting older.” Through the eyes of artists like etoy, Dencity, CLUI, and Almond, nomadism today is as much about keeping up with a vision of ourselves and the time we’re constantly losing as it once was about tracking basic things‹food, weather, water‹across the land. One
need not be a member of etoy, however, to travel with attention to one’s
creature comforts. With the global traveler in mind, New York’s
OPENOFFICE and Denmark’s cOPENhagenOFFICE / Tanja Jordan created
the NorthousEastWest (NhEW). The NhEW is a portable dwelling unit, custom-designed
for around $7,000, that makes almost as much sense in crowded Manhattan
as on the cold expanses of Greenland, where it got its inspiration from
Inuit dwellings. Made of an aluminum frame, wood base, aluminum and
plastic paneling, with a sealskin rug optional, the entire house can
be packed up quickly into a crate. Inside her NhEW, the mobile citizen
is at home in the world, no longer a tourist moving through someone
else’s garbage-strewn, contaminated community ----------------- VILLAGE
VOICE The idea of "Picnolepsy"
appears to be a "tour" whose soundtrack mystifies rather than demystifies
its route, and on that level, it's not much more than a novelty. Questioning
the assumptions of the tourist-bus medium is a clever idea, but that
requires more than occasionally announcing, "And, on your left . . .
" without a follow-up or referent. An anonymous voice talked obliquely
about "events" and "surprise," followed by the sound of an immense explosion,
as we drove past the ruins of the World Trade CenterÑyes, we get it
already. Other than some spoken text, drawn-out timbres of no obvious provenance wriggled slowly out of the speakers for most of the trip; for the first hour or so, the sounds didn't seem to have much to do with the particular things we were seeing, and the rattle of the bus's frame occasionally passed for an interesting detail. Maybe the performers ran out of text half an hour before the end of the tour, or maybe it was planned that way. In any case, as the distraction of language receded and the soundtrack's drones and rumbles immersed the accidental ambient noise, the piece finally clicked, and every building and pedestrian became part of a long tracking shot. By the end, the view from the bus was something like the unreal city e-Xplo hinted at: an animation, a hallucination, part of the grand show. (Douglas Wolk) ----------------- The
three guides are all visual and sound artists. Two, Erin McGonigle and
Heimo Lattner, sit in the rear surrounded by a laptop, CD players and
mixers. Rene Gabri, the third guide, is in front studying road maps.
He has listened to traffic reports and has told the bus driver the route
— which is never the same. ----------------- TORINO
L«APPUNTAMENTO ,
verso le 10 di sera, in piazza Castello. Si aspetta un pullman da turismo
bianco e nero con la scritta Valsusa Tour. Si sale e un artista spiega
che vedremo una Torino che non conosciamo. Il pullman parte e ci si
ritrova per le strade della periferia operaia, si va verso via Livorno:
dove c«erano le ferriere Fiat ora c« l«enviroment park, cumuli di terra
e scavatrici sotto la luna (sembrano allegre al contrario di quelle
pasoliniane), insegne di McDonald«s e carceri delle Vallette, lo stadio
delle Alpi che somiglia a un«astronave e prostitute nere lungo i viali,
nuovi capannoni industriali e vecchie fabbriche dismesse, tralicci dell«alta
tensione, benzinai self-24 ore e atmosfere tra Ghirri e Hopper (Edward
o Dennis a scelta). Ad accompagnare l«emozione del viaggio musiche elettroniche
e spezzoni di sonoro di film come Rocco Moliterni
----------------- Art On Wheels Exhibit
Moves Audience ...
----------------- Levente
Polyák
Click here to send an e-mail to e-xplo |
Form
theVillage
Voice Short
List: Open City 
From
Wired:
Culture
From
Flyer,
No. 29: December
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |