Saturday, March 17, 2018, posted by kvr.
‘Art Is unavoidably work,’ says Terre Thaemlitz, cover star of our deeply irritating issue #39, and this Saturday, it looks like s/he is going to put in some overtime: as part of Berlin’s annual maerzmusik festival hosted by Berliner Festspiele, Thaemlitz will perform live his/her 30 hour-opus Soullessness, timed after the maximum capacity of an MP3 album, in the atrium of the Gropius Bau. As if that were not enough, the concert is followed by one of his/her legendary Deeperama DJ sets, giving you a good day and half of Terre Thaemlitz in dolby surround. Highly recommended, as is of course, mono.kultur #39, still available at mono.konsum
Wednesday, March 7, 2018, posted by kvr.
Reading The Real Review is a little like listening in on a conversation of people more intelligent, witty and mannered than oneself, and this is meant as a compliment: intelligent conversation is always a joy. As is The Real Review, London’s impossibly smart architecture quarterly launched in 2016, and about to release their 6th issue.
But architecture only in the loosest sense, exploring space and its effects on people, and vice versa – the tagline is as broad as it is ambitious: ‘What it means to live today’. This might include online dating, the history of caffeine, fast fashion cycles or anything else you would not necessarily expect within an architecture magazine, dicussed with verve and humour and intellectual rigour that are equally surprising, entertaining, and sometimes irritating. In short, everything you’d hope for in a magazine, framed by the clever design of OK-RM around the ingenious idea of folding the magazine through the middle, and the many options of working with text and images this opens up to.
Saturday, February 17, 2018, posted by kvr.
‘You have to ask yourself fundamental questions about what rules you want to organize a society with, or what the legitimate functions of the state are. What kind of data should not be collected? What crimes should not be illegal? You get into this whole set of paradoxical questions, but they are important ones, too. On the surface, the basic idea of our legal system is simple: you jaywalk, you get a ticket, right? You do something wrong, you get a ticket. Now, let’s say we could have a world of 100% police efficiency: You could have a ‘smart city’ where every single person who jaywalks gets a ticket, every person who has sex in a public park gets locked up, etc… I don’t think that’s a good thing. I’m not sure anyone wants to live in that society. So you have to think about what extent you want to artificially create inefficiencies, because the places where power is inefficient are the places where we jaywalk, but also where we experiment with self-expression. And these are the kind of spaces that newer optimization technologies like AI can really banish from existence very easily. Human bodies have always placed limits on the exercise of power. But when that limitation goes away, we have to think about deliberately imposing constraints on technologies to optimize aspects of everyday life.’
– Trevor Paglen in our new issue mono.kultur #44, on Artificial Intelligence systems controlling the public sphere
Wednesday, February 7, 2018, posted by kvr.
Ivorypress in Madrid is one of those remarkable projects that grew from a small artist’s publishing project into an indie empire of publishing house, gallery, bookstore and arts consultancy. Needless to say, all done with plenty of energy, dedication, cojones and impeccable style. And a well-sorted arts bookstore, well, we’re all for it and isn’t good company always a pleasure.
Ivorypress
Comandante Zorita, 46-48
28020 Madrid
Spain
Monday, January 15, 2018, posted by kvr.
“Winona” by Trevor Paglen as part of the Eigenface series, where Paglen trained a facial recognition software to identify chosen characters in the ‘Wild Dataset’ of the Internet. It is a small part of his decade-long work in progress on computer vision. Hear all about it tomorrow evening at our mono.klub #52, where Paglen talks with the director of esteemed KW Institute for Contemporary Art,, Krist Gruijthuijsen, about the world of invisible images and our complex interdependency on machines.
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mono.klub #52
TREVOR PAGLEN
In Conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen
16. January 2017 / 19h30
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin
Wednesday, January 10, 2018, posted by kvr.
Dear Friends,
We will start into the new year with a little splash, or more precisely, with a glimpse into the future.
‘For me my works are almost like what a star is to a constellation. They are points or particulates within a larger story,’ says American artist Trevor Paglen in our current issue mono.kultur #44. And indeed, there are few artists whose work is as deeply embedded in current matters of concern, questioning the impact of technology, economy, military or politics on the human condition. Trevor Paglen likes talking about those larger stories, and we certainly love to listen.
So please join us for an evening of conversation between Trevor Paglen and Krist Gruijthuijsen, director of the venerable KW Institute for Contemporary Art, discussing Paglen’s latest cycle of works and research into the hidden worlds of machine vision. For almost ten years, Paglen has been studying computer recognition programs and how machines are learning to ’see’, and how these developments interact with our daily lives. His research has led to a new body of what he calls ‘invisible images’, generated entirely by Artifical Intelligence systems – but of course, those are only particulates within a larger story.
As ever, we look forward to seeing you there.
mono.kultur
Join the event on Facebook
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mono.klub #52
TREVOR PAGLEN
In Conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen
Celebrating
mono.kultur #44
Trevor Paglen:
The Edge of Tomorrow
16. January 2017 / 19h30
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
10117 Berlin
www.kw-berlin.de
www.paglen.com
www.mono-kultur.com
Monday, January 8, 2018, posted by kvr.
Let us talk about your Last Pictures project, which is set against the backdrop of cosmic time and space. There is a quote from it where you’re talking about the Anthropocene: ‘The Anthropocene is a period of temporal contradictions, a period in which Marx’s space-time annihilation chafes against the deep time of the earth.’
For me, Last Pictures is a project about how social and political relationships become fixed temporally – even inscribed into the earth itself for potentially millions of billions of years. For instance, the rise of industrial capitalism meant rearranging the chemical composition of the atmosphere through burning coal. The effects of that environmental alteration will play out over hundreds of thousands of years. But the human ability to have an ethical relationship to the interventions we make on the planet is constrained by the length of our lifetime, or what we can imagine the limit to a family might be. It could also be the temporal constraints built into an economic or political system, such as term limits or capitalist turnover cycles. What we think of as banal ways of organizing time have put profound constraints on how we act conscientiously. Climate change is a perfect example of this. Political institutions are not up to the task of being able to deal with it, because there is very little to be gained by working on a project that might only be realized 20 years from now. With the current political cycles, you’d have to give something up. You pay a price for something you will never benefit from. The time scales humans are intervening on are out of sync with the time scales we are organizing our societies from. We are not even able to imagine the time scales we are interfering with. We produce something like nuclear waste that basically marks a place on the Earth as a place of death hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Humans haven’t even been around for hundreds of thousands of years, right, so what is that?
So Last Pictures was about presenting this contradiction. And this is a topic a lot of people have been thinking about lately, but that’s a contradiction in itself because by nature it is impossible to think through. With Last Pictures, you can only have notional points of entry of trying to grasp these kinds of questions. It was a really intense process for us. I actually think we ended up in a really weird place at the end of it, like the exact opposite of where I expected to go…
– Trevor Paglen in our new issue mono.kultur #44
Monday, January 1, 2018, posted by kvr.
Hello 2018 & nice to meet you!
Sunday, December 31, 2017, posted by kvr.
Goodbye 2017 – it was fun & what a year. Let’s do it all again! Have a good start into 2018 & guten Rutsch!
Monday, December 11, 2017, posted by kvr.
‘For my work it’s important to build this armature around images that is outside of the images. It helps them to be read in a deeper way. When I was in school there was the notion that if something was going to be good art, it had to be self-contained; that artwork always had to be placed within a frame. I’ve always felt that nothing can contain itself, that things are constantly being defined outside of a frame and are inevitably part of a larger system. Now, what would happen if you build out that aspect as part of a ‘meta-art’ project? It would mean writing books, and creating a whole constellation from other media to try to give people pathways into the art. For instance, I’ll do a big show on spy satellites, and then I’ll give a lecture explaining how to track spy satellites and what it is they do. In an ideal world I want to create an extended vocabulary people can use to navigate the different themes of an artwork. So I guess I’m the opposite of the artist that tries to hide something away – I’ll just go on and on about it…’
– Trevor Paglen in our new issue mono.kultur #44
