Date Archives → September 2010

Off

Off is a photo series by Johan Rosenmunthe:

“In ’Off’ the persons are only visible through a digital representation, while the surroundings are as analog as possible. These pixelated persons are isolated from the rest of the world and often find themselves in foggy, strange milieus.”


Maps and Legends: photos and texts

“The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do’.
The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”
(Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1947)

Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web focus on the relations that photographic practice is establishing with the world of the Web: its culture, its language and its imagery. From animated.gifs to photos shot in virtual worlds; from the images of Google Street Views to snapshots that change in real time, with the data flows, and on to the camera that captures time instead of space.

testo in catalogo (ita)
catalogue text (eng)

Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web
curated by Valentina Tanni
Fotografia Festival 2010
Rome, Macro Testaccio
23 September – 24 October
www.fotografiafestival.it

FotoGrafia Festival is coming soon!

I’m working really hard on the setting of the art show I curated here in Rome. The exhibition is called “Maps and Legends. When Photography Met the Web” and of course it’s about the relationship between photography and internet culture.
The show is part of FotoGrafia Festival 2010, the ninth edition of the International Rome Photo Festival (the website will be live in a couple of days… in the meantime, you can find some info and press material here and here).

I’m posting below the Festival’s invitation, in the animated version made by Jaime Martinez, one of the artists in my show (thanks Jaime!).

If any of you is in Rome or is planning to come before 24th of October, please consider visiting the show :-)
The opening is on Thursday night (23rd September), from 7 to 11 p.m. at Macro Testaccio (Ex Mattatoio), Piazza Orazio Giustiani, Rome.

Anyway, I will post photos and videos very soon :-)

Long exposure photographs of videogames

Long exposure photographs of videogames by Rosemarie Fiore:

“These photographs are long exposures taken while playing video war games of the 80’s created by Atari, Centuri and Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while I played the games. By recording each second of an entire game on one frame of film, I captured complex patterns not normally seen by the eye.”

[via kottke]

Plan C

Ryan Doyle, Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Jeff Stark, Todd Chandler, Tod Seelie, and Steve Valdez went on a secret mission. For now, we have just one clue: the Zone…

“In the Summer 2010 a group of six artists who barely knew each other embarked on a journey to Chernobyl, to develop a secretive Plan C. The story is not clear at all, and it will probably never be.

They came from different parts of Europe and the US, and they had an appointment. Nobody knew about their final destination, nobody knew about Plan C. They told friends vague stories about “entering The Zone” and “throwing metal nuts”. They had one thing in common: an obsession for Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie Stalker.

What happened after is still a secret.

Follow http://www.PlanC.cc It will be as close as you’’ll ever get to the truth behind Plan C.”

Totems

Totems is a photo project by Alain Delorme:

“Alain Delorme offers a very singular vision of China in the days leading to the World Expo in his new Totems series. This work is the result of two residencies in Shanghai, supported by the Ailing Foundation. It shows the photographer’s fascination for migrants’ pressures. Piles of products labeled “Made in China” are stacked up to produce quite unusual sculptures, symbols of the Chineses’ a ever increasing fetish withobjects.”

Com-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-puter

Mi-Sex‘s (New Zealand/Australian new wave rock band) promo-video for the hit single ‘Computer Games’. October 1979. I’m fascinated…

Jammed up tight by red traffic lights
Advance one level on green
These opportune commuters
They’re blasting on thier hooters
I fidget with the digit dots
Frustration rules out there
As the XU-1 connects the spot
But the matrix grid don’t care

[via 990000.tumblr.com]

You, the World and I

You, the World and I: new video work by Jon Rafman. A voice over essay about love, memory, photography, technology, and our experience of the world.

“In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love.  Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.” (full statement here).

[p.s. this is another work that will be shown in Maps and Legends, my forthcoming exhibition during FotoGrafia Festival. Come and have a look if you’re in Rome from September 23th to October 24th]