[spectre] MADE REAL. Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern Exhibition at Furtherfield.

[marc garrett]

Sorry for any cross posting...

Furtherfield presents

MADE REAL. An exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the 
founders of Wikipedia Art.

27 May – 25 June 2011 – 12-5pm
Private View: Thursday 26 May 2011, 6.30-9pm
Furtherfield, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

More information about the show & the artists:
http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibition/made-real

Networks – social, political, physical and digital – are a defining 
feature of contemporary life, yet their forms and operations often go 
unseen and unnoticed. For this exhibition Scott Kildall and Nathaniel 
Stern, artists and co-founders of Wikipedia Art take these networks as 
their artistic materials and play-spaces to create artworks about love, 
power-play and a new social reality.

Three works are shown for the first time in the UK: Wikipedia Art, a 
collaborative work “made” of dialogue and social activity; Given Time, 
an Internet artwork that creates a feedback loop across virtual and 
actual space; and Playing Duchamp, a one-on-one meeting and game between 
an absent artist and viewer/participant.

Wikipedia Art by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

‘if you claim something to be true and enough people agree with you, it 
becomes true.’ Steve Colbert on Wikiality

'I now pronounce Wikipedia Art ... It’s alive! Alive!' Kildall and Stern.

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern famously used Wikipedia as an artistic 
platform, creating a collaborative project that explores and challenges 
our understanding of how knowledge is formed and disseminated. For over 
a year they planned the initiation of Wikipedia Art, a socially 
generated artwork that exploits a feedback loop in Wikipedia’s citation 
mechanism. Here, a "word war" across blogs, interviews and the 
mainstream press, which involved Wikipedians, artists, journalists, 
lawyers and even the Wikimedia Foundation itself, continuously defined 
and transformed a work of art in much the same way that these categories 
define the discourses of the everyday. http://www.wikipediaart.org/

Also showing in this exhibition

Given Time by Nathaniel Stern.
Stern's polar projections of Second Life lovers. Second life is a 3D 
simulated and virtual world, inhabited daily by thousands of people 
around the globe. To access Second Life, you must embody an avatar (a 
virtual human representation of yourself), seeing what they see through 
a computer screen. Stern places us, and his lovers, in a feedback loop 
between virtual and actual space. In Given Time, two life-sized and 
hand-drawn avatars simultaneously stare longingly across their virtual 
pond, and the real world gallery floor. They hover in mid-air, almost 
completely still, supported by the gentle sounds of their breath, the 
wind blowing, and birds in the far off distance. The viewer is both the 
observer and participant of this reciprocal relationship. Through the 
bodies and eyes of another, we see, look and are seen. Stern says: 
"Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed 
into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and 
time’s inevitable flow."

Playing Duchamp by Scott Kildall.
The American artist Scott Kildall, exhibiting for the first time in the 
UK, has fused the two worlds of art and chess in an homage to Marcel 
Duchamp, chess master and artist recognised for shifting the paradigm of 
conceptual art. Using the recorded matches of Duchamp's 72 tournament 
games, Kildall has modified an open source chess engine to play chess as 
if it were Marcel Duchamp. By sitting down to this game of computer 
chess, visitors interact with the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, whose love 
for chess rivaled his attraction to art.

Furtherfield invites you to come and play because as Duchamp said: “The 
creative act is not performed by the artists alone”.

About Furtherfield.
http://www.furtherfield.org/content/about