Tag Archives: art

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Interesting stuff happens in the cracks: interstitial art festivals

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The Lost Horizon Night Market sounds like the sort of thing I’d love to see roll into my town: like some mad mash-up of the travelling free-party sound-system crews of nineties Europe with a half-squatted house full of installation art students, it’s a peripatetic mobile art festival housed in rental trucks and parked up for one night only in empty industrial lots. It’s…

… an ongoing participatory project with an elegantly simple idea: “Proprietors” rent a truck and do something creative in it, with public interactivity a central element.

There are no admission fees. Participants mainly provide enthusiasm (or homemade jam, or lap dances, or ukulele serenades), and get to soak in a hot tub or share a smoke in the Jesus Christ Hookah Bar. The proprietors exchange their time, money and artistic energy for the distinctive euphoria of seeing people interact with an environment of their own creation.

“For one night, we make an autonomous neighborhood,” said Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk, who enjoys spurring people to act on their creative desires. “I get a kick out of seeing people do stuff. I’ve got 40 people into the game … got people who’ve never done installation art before to do it.”

The Lost Horizon Night Market

Shades of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones, of course, and of the really weird things you could still see and do at Glastonbury festival before its Millennial gentrification. Breaking down the barriers between consumer and creator, between participant and artist, between art and activity… cool things temporarily inhabiting otherwise uncool spaces. Culture subverting geopgraphy, ideas on the move. (As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a serious sucker for this kind of stuff.)

Apparently the Night Market people would love to see other iterations of the same idea spring up elsewhere, like a vaguely-defined open-source museum franchise. And they may well get their wish… after all, it’s only taken Burning Man a decade to achieve metastasis, and ideas move much faster than they did ten years ago. [image credit: Michael Gwilliam; blagged from linked Wired article, please contact for takedown if required]

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Blue genes: poetry encoded in DNA

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Via Lauren Beukes comes the news that Canadian poet Christian Bök has thought of a way to transcend Keats’ epitaph of being “one whose name was writ on water”; he seeks a poetic immortality that could outlive the human species itself, by the expedient of encoding some of his work into the DNA of a hardy strain of bacteria.

… it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.

You can’t fault the guy’s ambition. Who knows – his work might be rediscovered in some nigh-unimaginable future where interest in poetry hasn’t withered away to nearly nothing.

Then again, maybe it’ll stage a comeback – Damien Walter argues that the social media era is ideally suited to poetry’s narrative and expressive concision. I’d very much like to see it happen… but I’ll not hold my breath just yet.

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The Hollywood Stock Exchange, and bands with shareholders

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If investment bankers can gamble on the success of big-money projects, why can’t the rest of us? Well, of course, we can – but those sort of big-money projects aren’t the sort of thing that get us normal folk excited, nor the sort of thing we understand (or think we understand) sufficiently to throw our money after.

But if you scratch a film buff, underneath you’ll find someone who thinks they can predict how well a movie will do once it gets released… and Hollywood reckons that’s an as-yet untapped source of funding for big-budget blockbusters. Hence HSX, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, is set to re-launch in April of this year as a real-money commodity exchange [via SlashDot]:

Since 1998, HSX has allowed just-for-fun traders to buy and sell valueless shares in Hollywood films based on forecasts of what the pics will ring up. Once launched, a new HSX site will list current and imminent movie releases with their projected four-week domestic grosses and allow exchange users to take long or short positions on the films.

A formal announcement about rules and guidelines for HSX users is expected closer to the launch. The exchange hopes to lure hobbyist investors as well as industry professionals, though the latter will be prohibited from improper insider activity.

For instance, distribution execs with access to early boxoffice data will be barred from making trades on the exchange after a film has opened. But film financiers will be allowed to invest in HSX an amount equal to a minority percentage of their total investment in a movie.

(Oh, man, you just know there’s gonna be some spectacular gaming of this system at some point, assuming it lasts long enough for gaming it to be worthwhile. It’s just too tempting, especially for such a historically desperate and greedy industry.)

Investors wishing to participate in the exchange will buy “contracts” priced at one one-millionth of a film’s projected boxoffice, with films to be listed on the exchange from the time productions are announced in the industry trade papers. Trading will begin six months before a movie’s anticipated wide release.

I make no claims to financial expertise of any kind, but I think I’d still assume that the safest way to gamble on the future of Hollywood properties would be to invest in something else entirely…

But a thought occurred to me while reading about HSX, namely that something like a stock purchasing model might act as a sort of bolt-on or extension to the crowdfunding models for creatives that we were discussing the other week. Say you’re in a band, you’ve done a few national tours, self-released an album, got some buzz going. How do you take things to the next step?

Systems like the newly-in-administration SellaBand are all well and good, but there’s still an intermediary middle-man involved, and the investment is conditional as well as project-specific; so why not just float your band (or your two-person animation studio, or yourself as a writer, or your guerrilla puppetry theatre mob or whatever) like a public company, offering shares to potential investors who tend to buy oil shares in exchange for their influence and input on what the band does? Product replaces dividends, tours and appearances are booked according to geographical distribution of fans, etc etc… it’s a bit like Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans idea, I guess, but much more formalised, with legally-binding obligations in both directions.

I’m pretty sure someone could knock up a software suite for managing all the paperwork necessary in order to make this happen, though I’ll confess that my knowledge of buisness law is sufficiently lacking that I have no idea whether or not it is legal (let alone practical, given the lack of a trusted and reliable micropayments platform and the morass if international business law). Can anyone in the audience shed a light on some of the details?

And more to the point, would anyone like to buy shares in Futurismic? We may not be profitable, but we’ve got a warehouse full of kudos… 😉

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Bruce Sterling on atemporality

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I’d be remiss in my fanboy duties if I didn’t repost this video of a keynote speech from Bruce Sterling at last week’s Transmediale Futurity Now! conference in Berlin.

Appropriately enough for a conference in Berlin, a city where history lays heavily in layers of physical and psychological flotsam and jetsam, Chairman Bruce is talking about atemporality – that curious and disorientating sense that modern media gives us of all times being somehow equal.

Atemporality is “a calm, pragmatic [and] serene skepticism about the historical narrative”; it’s “a philosophy of history with a built-in expiry date”; it’s the end of post-modernism, and the end of The End Of History. But enough with the sound-bite pull-quotes – it’s only 25 minutes long, so settle down comfortably and get your mind expanded.

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The artwork that sells itself

Consider, for a moment, the trials and tribulations of the plastic artist. You create your masterpiece, and – if you’re lucky – you sell it. And that’s your lot – not only is it beyond your control once it leaves your studio, but it can’t make you any further income.

Or can it? Caleb Larsen thinks he’s found a way to keep a persistent revenue stream flowing back from his latest piece, a featureless black plastic box entitled A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter; once it arrives at its new owner’s home or gallery and gets plugged in to power and ethernet sockets, it will wait for a handful of days before logging into eBay and putting itself up for auction again:

“Inside the black box is a micro controller and an Ethernet adapter that contacts a script running on server ever 10 minutes. The server script checks to see if box currently has an active auction, and if it doesn’t, it creates a new auction for the work. The script is hosted on a server to allow for updates and upgrades if and when the eBay API (the interface used for 3rd party programs to talk to eBay) changes.”

The technology is designed specifically so that the buying and selling process could carry on ad infinitum, suggests Larsen, who adds that, if eBay “dries up and disappears, then another platform, either propriety or public, can be used for the selling.”

However, the process is also reliant on purchasers agreeing to stringent rules. There are, in fact, 18 terms listed on the eBay auction site, although Larsen is confident that buyers will comply because they could make money by doing so.

Here’s how it works. The purchaser can set a new value for the artwork, which must be based on “current market expectations” of Larsen’s work, and which could be considerably more than the price they paid. When A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter decides it wants to be sold again, bidders will start their battle at the value set by the current owner.

This is where the art collector could make money. However they must first pay any fees to eBay and give Larsen 15 percent of any increase in value of the artwork.

I expect that once the novelty of the story has worn off, the income stream will dry up pretty fast; Larsen’s real gain here is notoriety and cultural kudos rather than cold hard cash. But his work is an interesting conceptual collision, and doubtless says something quite profound about the value we place on art, the ephemeral nature of that value, and the abstraction between the creator of a work and its existence independent of him or her – a metaphor for modern parenthood in a networked world?

Or something like that, anyway. [image lifted from linked article; please contact for takedown if required]