[spectre] Faith in Exposure - Montevideo/Amsterdam

[Jon Thomson]

Hello once more,

We are also in this show opening next week at Montevideo in  
Amsterdam.  We will be showing the gallery version of, 'Decorative  
Newsfeeds'

http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/decnews.html

thanks and best wishes,

Jon & Alison


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Faith in Exposure

Exhibition and Seminar
24 February – 17 March
Opening 23 February, 17.00 – 19.00 hour

Beirut Letters,
De Geuzen,
Govcom.org,
Lynn Hershman,
Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied,
Avi Mograbi,
Sean Snyder,
Thomson & Craighead,
Jody Zellen

Nanette Hoogslag / Oog (Volkskrant):Jimpunk,
Graham Harwood,
Micheal Magruder,
Laure Ghorayeb,
Rob Hamelinck & Nienke Terpsma,
Kessels Kramer,
Jeroen Kooijmans,
Jochem Niemandsverdriet,
Max Kisman,
Tjebbe van Tijen,
Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs,
Lust: Thomas Castro,
Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen,
Jeroen Barendse,
Willem van den Hoed,
Han Hoogerbrugge,
Occulart: Geoff Lillemon,
Jody Zellen,
Motomishi Nakamura,
Jonas Ohllson

Curated by David Garcia

This exhibition and seminar addresses the central narrative of  
western democracy our 'faith in exposure', the unquestioning belief  
that the circulation of knowledge through news media (and other  
means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world  
where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure  
is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still  
tenable believe the central myth of the information age; that knowing  
the truth shall make us free.

Seminar
Saturday 24th of February
13.30 – 16.30 hours
With Jodi Dean, Noortje Marres, Richard Rogers, moderated by David  
Garcia

The seminar accompanying the exhibition Faith in Exposure will take  
place on the 24th of  February. It will begin with a key-note  
presentation by leading US political and media theorist Jodi Dean.  
Dean’s book “Publicity’s Secret“ approaches (according to Slavoj  
Zizek), the key issue of critical theory: “how are we to subtract the  
authentic democratic impulse from its perversion in the media  
manipulated notion of public and public support”. Part of Dean's book  
involved looking for sites of resistance even in odd places like UFO  
and conspiracy theories.

For the seminar Dean has prepared a talk which deepens her  
interrogation of the ways in which conspiracy theories operate in the  
public domain. Entitled Popular Credibility, the presentation will  
address matters of certainty and conspiracy theory around 9/11 and  
will involve showing and analysing portions of a video that has been  
circulating the Internet called Loose Change.

Also present at the seminar and acting as respondents to Dean’s  
presentation will be Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, two important  
Amsterdam based theorists who have both, in different ways,  
challenged dominant notions of the ‘public’ and rethought our  
conceptions of how democracy has changed since its fate became  
entwined in the Internet.

Reservations: info at montevideo.nl, +31 (0)20 6237101
Entrance 10,- ( students 8,-)

Exhibition Faith in Exposure

Our goal with this exhibition is to temporarily transform the  
Netherlands Media Art Institute into a center for what the artists  
collective De Geuzen call “multi-visual research”. Not only a gallery  
space alone but an “art and knowledge workshop”.

This is why the Amsterdam University research network Govcom.org have  
occupied the Netherlands Media Art Institute recently on the basis of  
a temporary residency. During these weeks they have been working with  
their specially developed web-crawler application to investigate  
fluctuating alliances between political issues and celebrity  
endorsements. Govcom.org’s installation will focus on the case study  
of the Heather Mills and Paul McCartney saga and uses this instance  
to ask whether the link between celebrities and issues can be  
dismissed as the ‘politics of distraction’ alone.

The installation Global Anxiety Monitor, the artists collective, De  
Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) deploys Google’s  
multi-lingual image search functions to look at the way different key  
words raise the anxiety temperature of different cultures including  
Arabic, English, Hebrew and Dutch, monitoring the ebb and flow of  
global anxiety.

Sean Snyder is a self confessed news addict. A shortwave radio  
enthusiast who grew up with cable television, a remote control, and a  
computer. He works with basic consumer computer applications, Final  
Cut, QuickTime, Photoshop, enabling him to re-watch, slow down, and  
enlarge images. With a high-speed Internet connection, a satellite  
television receiver, and accounts with the Associated Press, Reuters,  
and the BBC Snyder has slightly enhanced access to events and  
reports. Since Sept 2001 he has used these resources to pursue his  
preoccupation with the way media events are subject to different  
forms of reconstruction, both textually and through images. “I am not  
so much interested in the politics (although I have my opinions) and/ 
or the “truth” behind the reporting of events, but more the question,  
to what degree can visual art approach and potentially provide a  
different perspective on reading such events?...Maybe my question is,  
hasn’t news become entertainment? By definition, entertainment is  
contrary to so called “reality,” which is supposed to be represented  
in the news. If entertainment is something that feeds on our  
unconscious, does this mean that we increasingly see our own  
fantasies projected on screens (in this case, through globalized  
consumer items) with the appearance of objectivity? Finally, what do  
these images reveal?

Oog is a remarkable experiment in which the major Dutch national  
newspaper De Volkskrant has opened a space in its on-line edition in  
which each week an artist is commissioned to make visual commentary  
on the news. The project has existed for 18 months and is one of the  
most visited pages on the site, outside the news-pages. From the  
extensive archive Oog’s initiator and curator Nanette Hoogslag has  
made a small selection of pieces to resonate with the Faith in  
Exposure theme. The contents are made accessible though a specially  
created interface by Joes Koppers and Bente van Bourgondiën.

The Beirut Papers is an soul scorching video distributed freely on  
the net during the Israeli incursion into the Lebanon in 2006. A  
powerful example of how the subjects of the news can take control of  
the instruments of representation and dissemination.
Avi Mograbi is an internationally acclaimed documentary film maker.  
An Israeli himself he goes into areas of conflict in Palestine and  
uses his camera and the journalistic role not only to record events  
but occasionally to provoke them. He frequently confronts highly  
charged political and emotional issues head on. His work is an  
eloquent repudiation of the idea of news gathering must be cool and  
‘objective’.

Jody Zellen is an artist of remarkable sensitivity who mobilizes a  
range of visualization tools to engage with highly charged news  
material in ways that allow for new spaces of subtle reflection and  
engagement.

Thomson & Craighead’s installations take to an extreme the notion  
that the news has become little more than a narcotic. They take the  
notion of a visual narcosis to an extreme by deploying the visual  
paradigm of the ticker-tape news feeds that run along the bottom of  
the screen on 24 hour news channels and transforming them to an  
extravagant baroque spirals.

Lynn Hershman's latest heroine is DiNA, an artificial intelligent  
robot. DiNA is candidate for 'tele-president'; a virtual presidential  
candidate with a brain as big as the Internet, and growing smarter as  
she processes information. DiNA responds to the concerns of her  
constituents; her 'mind' shifts through tidal waves of information on  
the web to form concise opinions on issues ranging from abortion to  
gun control. DiNA is a socially intelligent and aware agent capable  
of evaluating news events and relaying them immediately to users.

Olia Lialina was one of the earliest exponents of net-art a practice  
in which the contextual and aesthetic possibilities of the Internet  
were explored in a series of remarkable pieces. Lialina is also a  
both keen historian and an amused commentator on the evolution of the  
web. In the pieces shown in Faith in Exposure she exploits, together  
with Dragan Espenschied, the paradoxes of the news paper cover as an  
interface in the era of screens and networks.


Netherlands Media Art Institute
Montevideo/Time Based Arts
Keizersgracht 254
1016 EV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T +31 (0)20 6237101
www.montevideo.nl
info at montevideo.nl


For more information and visual materials: Marieke Istha,  
Communications, 020 6237101 / 06 41635002, istha at montevideo.nl

The exhibition Faith in Exposure is open Tuesday through Saturday  
from 1:00 - 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month.  
Entry: € 2,50 (1,50 with discount)