… and Antony Gormley

We are taking a break - back in the new year - if you have any news, pictures,art etc just get in touch

Merry Christmas from all at

FAD 

Due to technical difficulties the planned gig in Second Life will take place tonight. Streamed live from Brighton with C6.org providing the visuals.

Long Range is playing live in Second Life on December 20th 2006.

The concert will take place on Sine Wave Island, inside Second Life http://www.secondlife.com.

Second Life is a virtual world with over a million residents. The concert will take place on a 16 acre island, designed specially for the event.

Music and video will be streamed live from the band\'s performance at The Metway in Brighton.

Admission is free, but tickets are limited. Only registered ticket holders will be allowed on the island.

To get your free ticket just give us your Second Life name at http://www.longrangeinsecondlife.com/

Tees Valley Arts on behalf of Middlesbrough Council with partners Halcrow are seeking expressions of interest from Landscape Architects, Designers, Artists and Architects for an ideas competition for 'roadscape'.

The project offers an opportunity to prototype an idea with a view to seeing its adoption in significant adjacent areas in both East and West Middlesbrough.

An initial brief is available at www.ribacompetitions.com take the link to 'new competitions'. A DVD of the site with interviews with the client group, maps aerial photography and background documents can be obtained from the Riba Competitions office at RIBA Competitions Office | 6 Melbourne Street | Leeds LS2 7PS | Tel: 0113 2341335 | Fax: 0113 2460744

In the first instance you are asked to submit an expression of interest by the 8th  January 2007. Details of how to do so are available from the initial brief that can be downloaded from www.ribacompetitions.com

Long-time FAD favourites Auriea Harvey (entropy8.com) and Michaël Samyn (zuper.com), working as Entropy8Zuper! , have at last released the final chapter in their Godlove Museum project, Deuteronomy. Like previous works in the series, Deuteronomy draws upon intensely personal aspects of the couple's relationship, but uses Biblical stories and metaphors to place those aspects within the context of contemporary global events.

At the same time, E8Z! have patched the damage caused by technological "progress", which has rendered their earlier .net art pieces inoperable, and they have released the entire Godlove Museum as a standalone application (available for PC or Mac). For just €20 you can own one of the earliest and most wonderfully baroque of interactive artworks. The original online Godlove Museum files have also been given a spectacular new interface, "the Entropy8Zuper! Retrospective", that puts each chapter in its historical context.

A press release concerning this launch can be found here.

In 2002, FAD published an article to celebrate the launch of the previous chapter in the Godlove series, Numbers. We have reprinted that article here , as it gives a fuller overview of the couple, their artistic partnership, and our particular obsession with their work.

This article appeared in the first ever edition of FAD Magazine, back in 2002. We are reprinting it here to celebrate the launch of Deuteronomy by Entropy8Zuper , and the newly repackaged Godlove Museum.

When FAD asked me to write a piece about web-art, at first I was stumped. You see, for one thing there’s not a lot of it out there. Oh sure, there are a lot of people who claim to be making art online, but more often than not all they have done is discovered a creative new use for Photoshop filters or a clever way of using Flash’s ActionScripting – you know the kind of thing “wow, just look at the way these spirals are following my mouse-pointer. Isn’t that artistic!”

And for that reason, the world (or at least that part of it which expresses a preference) seems to fall into two camps on this subject. There are those (often with backgrounds in “offline” art) who claim that no meaningful piece of art has ever been created with a computer, and pretty much sneer at the very idea. And there are those who think that the Internet is rife with artistic talent (usually the same people who get excited about screen-savers).

But in a small, well hidden corner of the Internet (rumoured to be somewhere in Belgium) a dynamic-html-duo have been busily working for 3 years now churning out stuff which could give Leonardo or Hirst a run for their money.

They style themselves Entropy8Zuper! - they being 2 artists formerly known as Entropy8 and Zuper! The Entropy8 part is Auriea Harvey, while Zuper! Is Michäel Samyn. Or perhaps “was” would be more appropriate. Because despite the double-barrelled name, Entropy8Zuper! (let’s just call them E8Z! shall we?) is more than a partnership of two halves. Their entire body of work explores the nature of their relationship, the creation of a whole. Their motto: “Information Technology is not the future. We are.”

Too engrossed in their work to actively seek out the limelight, they nonetheless won a Webby award (the Internet’s equivalent of the Oscars) for their art. The trophy now takes pride of place, on top of the couple’s toilet, and the $30,000 prize money allowed them to fulfil a long-held desire to pay for advanced 3d body-scans of themselves snogging (now seen in their work The Kiss) and to have their movements motion-captured (the raw materials for two Quake models of Michäel and Auriea playing Adam and Eve and the subsequent Eden.Garden1.0).

So what is it that makes their work “art” rather than computer-noodling?

It helps that both of them are very skilled and experienced, with a rare combination of design backgrounds and technical-mastery (they are at ease, or perhaps more accurately frustrated at the limitations of, a wide range of tools and languages from dynamic-HTML through Flash to Perl scripting). Shades of the old-school renaissance-person, apprenticeship under the belt, all the right moves at their command. But it’s the emotion and the intelligence with which they execute their work that makes it appeal to the heart as well as the mind.

Their first large-scale work was Genesis, a biblically inspired retelling of the origins of their relationship. And what a crazy one-of-a-kind relationship: they met and conducted their love affair online before leaving respective partners (Michäel in Belgium, Auriea in New York) to make the virtual real. Bitten by the bible-bug and the metaphors they found there, they continued their Godlove story with Exodus, Leviticus and, most recently, Numbers. Each chapter in their story is a compelling combination of elements. There is the intensely personal, your common-or-garden website confessional transformed with unrivalled panache: in Leviticus, as you pluck at flower-petals, you are given a line-by-line transcript of E8Z!’s former lovers’ parting sadness and rage. There is the tongue-in-cheek, biblical references become literal: in Leviticus, Auriea and Michäel are lambs of god, small fluffy toys which bleat and scream as you click on them. There are the gaming elements, essential for any interactive work to hold the viewers interest: in Exodus, you get to shoot down trans-atlantic planes using Michäel’s brain-power as a weapon, and in Numbers your targets are paratroopers, corporate logos emblazoned on their chutes (the corresponding company’s stock-quote decreases with each one that you down). And of course there are the common elements, flotsam and netsam carried over from one work to the next, symbolic references that hammer home the meaning of these pieces: hands, eyes, hearts, flowers.

With Numbers, and its accompanying pseudo-marketing the making of Numbers, their work has reached a higher symbolic and political level. Auriea being an exiled New Yorker, and their early work focusing on aeroplane flights to and from that city, the events of September 11^th took on great significance for the couple. They had already been planning Numbers for over a year when current affairs threw the whole thing into a new perspective: George Bush taking on God in a no-holds-barred incitement contest (compare and contrast the quotes below).

The resulting product is, hyperbole aside, an interactive masterpiece. Go see for yourself .

Those quotes in full:

God:

When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan

Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places:

And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. 

But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. 

Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them.

(Numbers 33, 51-53 & 55-56)

George Bush:

I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

we will find those who did it; we will smoke them out of their holes; we will get them running and we'll bring them to justice.

We’re fighting evil.

Your mission is defined, your objectives are clear, your goal is just.

Defeat the evildoers.

I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us.

(various speeches, September-October 2001)

Late listings for one and all but if you are in the East looking for christmas cheer then come here tomorrow Friday 15th December. Group exhibition called 'Real Xmas Tree this Way', featuring Jemima Brown, Rory McBeth, Liam Scully, David Burrows, many more in the attic of 94 Teesdale Street, London, E2 (above the old VTO gallery, remember, remember). I am in the show and will be performing at the opening from 6-9pm, I'll be under the tree, come let me know what you want me to be.

Calumx

FRIDAY 15th DECEMBER to SUNDAY 11th FEBRUARY
PRIVATE VIEW FRIDAY 15th DECEMBER, 6:30pm

Cubitt is proud to present ‘Paradise Now! (Limbo)’, the first European solo-exhibition by New York-based American artist Matthew Day Jackson (b. 1974, Panorama City, CA).

Exhibited at Cubitt alongside sculpture, video, drawings and text, Matthew Day Jackson’s The Lower 48 (2006) is a series of photographs of anthropomorphic rock formations, taken on a road trip through each of the continental United States. In these images, granite and moss appear to possess human features; in these images, geology wears a human face.

Why might America – its land, its silicone substance – choose to manifest itself this way? Perhaps it is to elicit sympathy from its parasite inhabitants – a human face, after, all, is just the thing to engage a human heart. But in Bush’s America the heart is either stony or sentimental - it has a fatal disregard for blood. Perhaps then, these craggy faces are antibodies, an immune system, ready to rise up from the rocks to defend the continent in the time of its greatest need (we’re reminded of the replica Statues of Liberty that stand guard over many small American towns, the apocalyptic prophesies of the Lakota Sioux Ghost Dancers and King Arthur’s sentinel slumber beneath Glastonbury Tor). So a body battles an infection, so a land battles its colonists. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Day Jackson’s drive across America in search of these landforms may be seen as an attempt to come to terms with his relationship with the continent’s colonial past and its environmentally rapacious present. We might read it as a carbon junkie’s last fix, or a four-wheeled walk of shame, or else a pilgrimage in search of new formal structures - of a new, redeeming faith. Absolution, however, is never easily won, and for the Survivors of the coming Apocalypse, there are brutal lessons to be learned.

Matthew Day Jackson’s ‘Paradise Now’, a prelude to his Cubitt exhibition, was held at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006. He has recently participated in the group exhibitions ‘USA Today: New American Art from the Saatchi Gallery’ (2006) at the Royal Academy, London,’Uncertain States of America’ (curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist) at The Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), and ‘Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial’ (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne).

Exhibition supported by Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, and Perry Rubenstein Gallery NYC.

For more information please contact Tom Morton or Bettina Brunner at info@cubittartists.org.uk or on +44 (0) 20 7278 8226.