Categoriearchief: Anthropology

the study of humanity.

I, Librarian

waste of time
Josh Lesnick, 2006

Hilda Kruger
I, Librarian, 2005

‘The fast and continuous technological change that is characteristic of the information society we find ourselves in has demonstrable impact on the way librarians go about their business. This paper offers a scenario of technological changes already in the pipeline and yet to come, and how those changes will impact the role of librarians in the future. One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society.

Will brick-and-mortar libraries still be relevant fifty years from now?
Lees verder →

Stonehenge the Sequel

Jim Reinders
Carhenge, 1987

carhenge

carhenge tourist

“Carhenge, which replicates Stonehenge, consists of the circle of cars, 3 standing trilithons within the circle, the heel stone, slaughter stone, and 2 station stones, and the Aubrey circle….

The artist of this unique car sculpture, Jim Reinders, experimented with unusual and interesting artistic creations throughout his life. While living in England, he had the opportunity to study the design and purpose of Stonehenge. His desire to copy Stonehenge in physical size and placement came to fruition in the summer of 1987 with the help of many family members.

Thirty-eight automobiles were placed to assume the same proportions as Stonehenge with the circle measuring approximately 96 feet in diameter. Some autos are held upright in pits five feet deep, trunk end down, while those cars which are placed to form the arches have been welded in place. All are covered with gray spray paint. The honor of depicting the heel stone goes to a 1962 Caddy.”

Adam Horowitz
Stonefridge, 1997

stonefridge

Atop the flat landscape on the edge of Santa Fe, among tumbleweeds and trash and the beauty of northern New Mexico’s skyline, “Stonefridge” catches your eye and confuses your mind like a mirage.

Refrigerators of all colors and shapes stand 18-feet high, lined up in a 100-foot diameter circle, facing inward toward a cluster of taller fridge towers. It’s as if the outer ring of fridges is worshipping these inner towers, or perhaps protecting them from the outside dangers.

Like Stonehenge, which is aligned to solar and lunar astronomical events, “Stonefridge” is geographically aligned to its own kind of power source: Los Alamos National Laboratories. Adam Horowitz, a critic of the atomic bomb, purposefully built the monument in a place where visitors can see the labs in the distance. He calls it an “atomic alignment.”

Concrete Question?

Kristin Posehn
Replicant, 2005/2006

replicant

description: A remake of a graffiti-covered supporting column from the M25 motorway/freeway, using photography and plywood. The exceptionally detailed tromp l’oeil photograph are mounted on a plywood structure, which shows through at top and bottom. A play on reality and illusion, process and reproduction, simulacra and materiality. A synthesis of sculpture, photography and installation. This work was a commission for the Keith Talent Gallery and Year_06. It was installed in the lovely Dicken’s Library of the Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, London.

‘The physical construction of the work is the narrative; the movement required to view the work is the story and its unfolding. The structure of the work is a response to the journey that was its construction; it absorbs and reacts to all prior stages, such that the whole encompasses a larger time than any one moment. The passage through the work is interesting not in terms of a destination, but as a form for experience.’

more: Kristin Posehn
– blog
– research

To Fix the Image in Memory

Vija Celmins
To Fix the Image in Memory (1977-82)

Vija Celmins

To Fix the Image in Memory places eleven small stones and their duplicates, made of painted cast bronze, onto a surface, challenging the viewer to decipher the real from the manmade and to question the relevance of the distinctions between real object and copy, nature and art. Culled from the area around the Rio Grande near Taos, New Mexico, where Celmins went to recover from the breakup of a romance in 1977, the stones have a magical, talismanic quality. They are all different shapes, colors and textures, ranging from the craggy to the phallic to the fecal, with interesting markings and lines on each.

vija1

vija2

“I got the idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I’d bring them home and I kept the good ones. I noticed that I kept a lot that had galaxies on them. I carried them around in the trunk of my car. I put them on window sills. I lined them up. And, finally, they formed a set, a kind of constellation. I developed this desire to try and put them into an art context. Sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making: the act of looking and making as a primal act of art.” By having each original rock installed with its duplicate, Celmins invites the viewer to examine them closely: “Part of the experience of exhibiting them together with the real stones,” she has said, “was to create a challenge for your eyes. I wanted your eyes to open wider.”

CompSpeak 2050

William Crossman is a philosopher, futurist, and professor involved with issues of education, media and technology, language and culture, and human rights. He is Founder/Director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures

‘The prospect of escalating conflicts and tensions around the world, together with the ongoing search for global peace, demand that we create technologies which allow everyone to communicate with everyone else. Voice-in/voice-out (VIVO) talking computers, using online voice-recognition technology, will allow all people to access the world’s storehouse of information merely by speaking, listening, and viewing graphics. We live in a world in which 80% of the population is nonliterate or functionally so, thousands of different native languages block or deter easy communication amongst people, and millions suffer from disabilities that prevent them from reading and/or writing. However, using a VIVO, a person won’t need to know how to read or write text in order to store and retrieve information. VIVO’s instantaneous language translation function will enable that person, while speaking only in their own native language, to converse with all of humanity. And if they had a disability that barred them from accessing text, they could speak, listen, or sign via their VIVO. By lowering these historic barriers to global communication, VIVOs hold the potential for democratizing information flow worldwide–one key step in creating democratic nations that support human and civil rights, freedom, justice, and equality as the necessary bases for world peace. Without our being able to hear–literally–the voices of the world’s disenfranchised, world peace will remain an illusory goal. Over the next decades, as VIVOs enable more and more of those voices to be heard, and as written language/text shrinks as our technology of choice for accessing information, the electronically-developed countries will evolve into oral cultures. By mid-21st Century, written language/text–which is essentially an ancient technology for storing and retrieving information–will be a thing of the past, and by mid-22nd Century, all nations and communities, including those we build in space, will be informationally united in a worldwide, yet diverse, oral culture.’

Mission Statement

The Institute’s mission is to study, learn, speak, consult, promote dialogue, and write about:

1. The social, cultural, and philosophical implications of talking computers and voice recognition technology–that is, the ways that talking computers will affect every area of human activity.

2. The replacement of writing, reading, and written language itself by talking computers and other speech-based and non-text visual technologies–a process that began in the 19th Century and will reach completion in the 21st Century.

3. The parallels that exist/will exist between today’s oral cultures around the world and the oral cultures that the United States and the other electronically-developed countries are becoming.

4. The ongoing school literacy crisis, its causes and its solution. The impact that talking computers will have on education in the 2lst Century.

5. The nature, history, uses, and effects of written language as a technology specifically developed to store and retrieve information under the specific conditions of the agricultural revolution 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

6.The role that human evolution plays/will play in the development of information technology (including talking computers), and vice versa.

7. How to make sure that the human right of all people, nonliterate or literate, with disabilities or without, to access the stored information of our world via talking computers is realized in the 21st Century.

‘By enabling us to access stored information orally-aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for us to replace all written language with spoken language. We will be able to store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we´re about to recreate oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological foundation’ -William Crossman-

The Future of Writing

Vilém Flusser

… ‘Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called “historical consciousness.” History began with the invention of writing, not for the banal reason often advanced that written texts permit us to reconstruct the past, but for the more pertinent reason that the world is not perceived as a process, “historically,” unless one signifies it by successive symbols, by writing. The difference between prehistory an history is not that we have written documents that permit us to read the latter, but that during history there are literate men who experience, understand, and evaluate the world as “becomming,” whereas in prehistory no such existential attitude is possible. If the art of writing were to fall into oblivion, or if it were to become subservient to picture making (as in the “scriptwriting” in films), history in the strict sense of that term would be over.’

‘If one examines certain Mesopotamian tiles, one can see that the original purpose of writing was to facilitate the deciphering of images. Those tiles contain images impressed upon them with cylindrical seals and “cuneiform” symbols scratched into them with a stylus. The “cuneiform” symbols form lines, and they obviously mean the image they accompany. They “explain;” “recount;” “tell” it. They do so by unrolling the surface of the image into lines, by unwinding the tissue of the image into the threads of a text, by rendering “explicit” what was “implicit” within the image. It may be shown through text analysis that the original purpose of writing, namely, the transcoding of two-dimensional codes into a single dimension, is still there: every text, even a very abstract one, means, in the last analysis, an image.’ …

Nice Indians!

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Nice Indians, 2007

Maarten Vanden Eynde nice-indians

Most of the ‘Native Americans’ are situated in the state of California, 627.562 to be precise. More than twice as much as in number two, Arizona. It’s the last refuge corner of the United States, the bottleneck towards South America. While driving through the Grand Canyon you are confronted with many native Indian shops next to the road. In the most desolate environment they sell original Indian jewelry and other souvenirs to passing tourists. They usually make themselves noticed by putting hand painted signs NICE INDIANS AHEAD fifty meters before the little store, followed by NICE INDIANS when you pass the store and about another fifty meters further they remind you or call you back by saying NICE INDIANS BEHIND! TURN AROUND…
In a way, this sums up the whole history of the United States, starting from Columbus to the present day. From the day the Europeans went to America (NICE INDIANS AHEAD), followed by the period in which ground was traded for pearl necklaces and new cities were build (NICE INDIANS), up to the present day where the tourist industry is profiting from the ancient wild west image and mass producing genuine Indian props (NICE INDIANS BEHIND). I want to copy/paste this time line into the contemporary topography of LA by replacing the signs into the city of Los Angeles.

Maarten Vanden Eynde nice-indians ahead

Location:

Interstate 5 (abbreviated I-5) is the westernmost interstate highway in the continental United States. Its odd number indicates that it is a north-south highway. Its southern terminus is at the international border between the United States and Mexico in the San Diego community of San Ysidro, California. Its northern terminus is at the international border between the United States and Canada at the Peace Arch in Blaine, Washington. An extensive section of this highway (over 600 miles or 965 km), from approximately Stockton, California to Vancouver, Washington, follows very closely the track of the Siskiyou Trail. The Siskiyou Trail was based on an ancient network of Native American footpaths connecting the Pacific Northwest with California’s Central Valley. By the 1820s, trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company were the first non-Native Americans to use the route of today’s I-5 to move between today’s Washington State and California. During the second half of the 19th Century, mule trains, stagecoaches, and the Central Pacific railroad also followed the route of the Siskiyou Trail. It runs straight through Los Angeles which makes it the perfect road to place the time line.
The signs have to bridge the highway, so by driving on the Interstate 5 in the city you will pass through time and be confronted with the unspoken and forgotten reality of colonial history. NICE INDIANS AHEAD – NICE INDIANS – NICE INDIANS BEHIND.

Cetology

Brian Jungen
Cetology, 2002

cetology

Brian Jungen (b. British Columbia, Canada, 1970) is part of a generation of Vancouver-based artists currently bursting onto the international stage. Born to a Swiss-Canadian father and First Nations mother and raised in the Dane-zaa nation, his drawings, sculptures and installations explore elements of his own hybrid cultural identity. Yet, his approach transcends questions of ethnicity to explore the complex exchanges of goods and ideas in our globalized world.

Jungen’s reputation was secured by his magnificent whale ‘skeletons’, large suspended sculptures made from cheap plastic deckchairs. His rendering of rare and endangered whale species in non-biodegradable mass-produced objects also refers to current debates about whaling practices in Canada. Representing the postmodern, postcolonial world with a wry sense of humor, Jungen collapses stereotypes and embraces change, flux and instability. Offering new ways of thinking about multiculturalism at a time when the famous model of Dutch ‘tolerance’ is under close scrutiny, his practice approaches cultural difference as an unstable, reciprocal notion, using it as a starting point for creativity and critical reflection.

Study for the Evening Redness in the West (detail), 2006

scul

National History Burial

Paul McCarthy and Raivo Puusemp
Burial, 2006

mccarthy

Paul McCarthy, curating and working on a concept developed by Raivo Puusemp, buried a favorite sculpture of his own making on the grounds of the Naturalis. The resulting work, Burial, reverses the process of unearthing practiced by paleontologists and archaeologists. McCarthy’s with Puusemp’s work was performed on the day of the exhibition opening and documented on film for display in the exhibition. The buried sculpture resides underground as an artifact for future discovery.

The event, if we consider it in reverse, raises a number of questions for natural history museums. While specimens and objects are still buried, do they really exist? Before they’re dug up, do they have any value? When they are recovered, can some sort of price be placed on them?

Homo Cyklopicus

Admiral and Minister Pedro of the selfproclaimed freestate Ladonia has made an amazing discovery during his excavations. He has found a cranium which, no doubt, belongs to the hitherto unknown Homo Cyklopicus.

The scientists are developing two theories. King Ladon can have been Cyklops. It is also possible that cyclops lived in Ladonia long before and that Ulysseus during his travels visited Ladonia.

cyclop

Admiral Pedro’s sensational discovery the Ladonian Cyklops.

Ladonia is a micronation, proclaimed in 1996 as the result of a years-long court battle between artist Lars Vilks and local authorities over two sculptures, ”Nimis” (Latin – ”too much”) and Arx (Latin – ”fortress”). These two colossal sculptures are erected without permit on a remote part of a nature reserve on Kullabergs northeast stony shores of southern Sweden. The battle about Arx and Nimis has rolled through the court system of Sweden during 20 years and has gone through the District Court and the Court of Civil and Criminal Appeal.
Ladonia is not recognized by any other accredited state, and acknowledging international law, there is no legal basis for calling it a state.
Ladonia acquires a colony in Norway (Telemark) acclaimed in 1997 on May 17th (National Day in Norway). An embassy was built in Falkenberg where the first official state visit also takes place.

San Fernando Galaxy

Piero Golia

San Fernando Galaxy, 2006
photo 30×40 inches

galaxy

Night vision of San Fernando Valley, California, USA

‘America is nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles’ ubiquitous acres. One gets the impression that people came to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless world of an adult child. One knows that if the cities of the world were destroyed by a new war, the architecture of the rebuilding would create a landscape which looked, subject to specification of climate, exactly and entirely like the San Fernando Valley’.

(Norman Mailer, from Superman comes to the supermarket, 1963)

 

 

EUTOPIA

Europe is facing it’s most difficult challenge: how to create a united Europe? After the referenda on the new European Constitutional Law and the following disappointment about the French and Dutch NO, Europe is further away from unification than ever. But as a result inertia about Europa was replaced by genuine interest. What does it mean to be European? What do we represent? How much personal identity do we want to hand over to become a unity? The project is about the European Union as a whole and wants to raise questions about Europe in the past, the present and the future. Is Europe a new country with new borders or a concept for freedom and equality?

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Europe2006, 2006
Spun-poly silkscreen (155 gr/m2 polyester cloth), 100 x 150 cm

europe

On the 9th of May, the official Europe Day, the new flag was presented throughout the whole European Union.

Participating Cultural institutions include:

The Vienna Künstlerhaus and State of Sabotage in Austria, The Latvian National Museum of Art and Gallery Noass in Latvia, Lokaal 01 in Belgium, Pantheon Gallery in Cyprus, The DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art and Booze Cooperativa in Greece, Stanica Cultural Centre in Slovakia, SCCA/Center for Contemporary Arts-Ljubljana in Slovenia, Galleria Rubin, Viafarini, PAN/Pallazo della Arti Napoli and ILOYOLI Lab in Italy, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Galerie Frank Gerlitzki espace ApART and ON25 societé civile in Luxembourg, Galeria Bielska BWA and Wyspa Institute of Art in Poland, CCB/Centro Cultural de Belem in Portugal, Kulturcenter HUSET and Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall in Denmark, Sally Stuudio and Tartu Kunstmuuseum in Estland, The Korjaamo culture factory in Finland, FAUX MOUVEMENT – centre d’art contemporain in France, Kunstverein KISS, Temporäres Museum, Untergröningen in Germany, The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) and Vartai Gallery in Lithuania, St James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity in Malta, Artpool in Hongary, Four, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and Pallas Studios in Ireland, Tranzit Social Platform in Czech Republic, The Tapper-Popermajer Art Gallery in Sweden, La Mekanica in Spain, Hidde van Seggelen Contemporay Art and Ben Janssens Oriental Art in London UK, Smart Project Space, Kunstruimte Wagemans, Expodium, Lokaal 01, Sign, Peninsula, STROOM Den Haag and CBK Rotterdam in The Netherlands….

‘I left the ten last newcomers out, not because I don’t think they aren’t part of the EU, but because they are still not accepted as full members by the old EU countries. People coming from one of these countries don’t have the same freedom of movement through Europe as the rest of the Europeans. Although this is one of the basic rights as a European citizen. Europe is a concept for freedom, not a new country with new borders.

I think Europe should present itself as a variety of countries not as a unity. It is not a homogeneous circle of stars and it will never be one, so I put every star back on it’s original position, as the capital of the different countries. Like this an ‘abstract’ sky full of stars appears. The borders are opening…’

Maarten Vanden Eynde

‘The Revolution Is Just Around The Corner’

Marjolijn Dijkman

The Revolution is Just Around The Corner, 2006

tekening

new1 old1

new2 old2

exchange1

During my stay in Tbilisi I conducted research on the transition of the street kiosk and the way people developed and fabricated displays to sell their goods on the street. The inventive and autonomous way of constructing the displays is part of the economic history of Georgia. There is an evolution of the displays from one piece of paper, a stick, a small table, self designed and developed inventive constructions into a standardized Coca-Cola kiosk. When the economy and regulations for selling goods are developing at the current speed, all the improvised and handmade displays will disappear out of the city within the next years. I decided to collect and preserve some examples of displays. Besides the sculptural quality of the objects, the displays might help in the future to understand how Georgia’s rebuilding has developed and where it all began. Like in most democracies, it literary started with a piece of paper and a stick…

After I visualized the evolution of the display in a series of drawing and photographs I decided to make a collection of the authentic displays. I encountered people with interesting and special displays to question whether it was possible to make a exact copy of their display if they would like to exchange their display for my copy. The exchange itself is an important moment in the process. The two exchanged displays and satisfied owners reveal bits about the complicated situation between the West and the rebuilding of Georgia at that moment. The owners from Tbilisi were amazed by the new standardized copy, and I from the Netherlands who’s totally fascinated by the character and authenticity of the old ones. There is a strong longing for the ‘West’ in Georgia and ‘the West’ is curious and fascinated by the Eastern countries. This exchange of ideologies and the aims of the rebuilding Georgia was an important point for discussion. These exchanged displays and a series of photographs of the actual exchange resulted in a presentation of ‘The revolution is just around the corner’.

exchange4

exchange2

exchange3

Preservation of the Future II

After the Independence of Georgia in 1991, many things have changed. The Lari, for instance, became the new currency in 1993. The western economy was introduced and brought many new products, which made others disappear. To ensure the remembrance of this period in Georgian history, some artifacts representing Georgia at the present moment were collected and put in the ground, for future archaeologists to discover.

Maarten Vanden Eynde Georgian Lari

In October 2006, in the frame-work of Art Caucasus, many more object will be preserved for the future and put in the ground of the Ethnographic Museum in Tbilisi. Reversing the vision on any science towards the future is of major importance in Georgia and the rest of the world. The new generation should know about the project to tell their children, so they can tell their children, and so on… so the modern history of Georgia is preserved for future generations.

Maarten Vanden Eynde

Preservation of the Future, 2006

Maarten Vanden Eynde Museum

Maarten Vanden Eynde Borjomi

On Wednesday the 15th of March 2006 a set of Lari coins (50, 20, 10 and 5 tetri) were buried in the garden of the NAC/National Art Center in Tbilisi, Georgia, right in front of the Parliament.

Preservation of Georgian Lari, 2006

Maarten Vanden Eynde preservation

Preservation of the Future

Preserving information and ensuring the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another is an ancient cultural activity. As a field within library and archival science, preservation is only a few decades old. It began primarily as item-level repair and conservation, deriving its original professional traditions and physical techniques in large part from the museum world. To the importance in that world of the repair and conservation of individual pieces deemed to be of special value as artifacts, preservation in libraries has added the significance of the archival value of the object as bearer of historical evidence. In a very short time, preservation has developed into a critically important part of managing library’s and museums most precious assets, its collection. Paradoxically, dedicated as it is to mitigating the deleterious effects of aging, preservation has rapidly become, along with computer applications, one of the most forward-looking fields in the library and archival profession. One step further is the predetermined preservation of all possible things representing the present. What do we preserve for the future?

Based on a text by Abby Smith.

Biosphere II in Arizona (funded by billionaire Ed Bass)

biosphere 2

Biosphere 2 is a 3.15-acre (12,700 m2) structure originally built to be an artificial closed ecological system in Oracle, Arizona (USA). Constructed between 1987 and 1991, it was used to explore the complex web of interactions within life systems. It also explored the possible use of closed biospheres in space colonization, and allowed the study and manipulation of a biosphere without harming Earth’s. The name comes from the idea that it is modeled on the first biosphere, which is the life system on Earth. The first closed mission lasted from September 26, 1991 to September 26, 1993. The crew were: medical doctor and researcher Roy Walford, Jane Poynter, Taber MacCallum, Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Abigail Alling (a late replacement for Silke Schneider), Mark Van Thillo and Linda Leigh. At a size comparable to two and a half football fields, it was the largest closed system ever created. The sealed nature of the structure allowed scientists to monitor the ever-changing chemistry of the air, water and soil contained within. The health of the human crew was continuously monitored by a medical team. After several month extra oxygen was needed from the outside world. Several animal species died and food was scarce. No mission was ever succesfull in the sense that Biosphere II proved to be a functional alternative to Biosphere I.


Mark Dion

Mobile Wilderness Unit, 2001 (290 x 170 x 380 cm)

Mark Dion Mobile Wilderniss Unit

Damien Hirst

Away from the Flock, 1994

Damien Hirst