PAD.MA, a video archiving project we have been working on with friends and partners, is now online. This is the beginning: there are right now some 50 hours of footage... much more to come. Do go to pad.ma to have a look, a lot of thinking has gone into the technical and legal aspects of the archive, and as it enters somewhat unknown territory, conceptually and socially, it will be interesting to follow.

On friday we launched CAMP, our new group initiative around art, media and technology practices. The launch was in the form of a lecture /screening and went quite well we thought. About 100 people were attending, and a large number stayed for a discussion that went on till 11 pm.

Many thanks to Nancy A. and Ranjit H. for moderating. Notes from the opening and updates on projects soon on the CAMP page, here.

Last week at the Bangalore Space and Culture symposium, I gave a somewhat contrary presentation. In this context, and having been in the lion's den so to speak, I have new respect for Marko Peljhan's work. Some of the space scientists presentations and projections for human life were quite incredible, I will add a link when I find them.

Recently Shaina and I were at ars electronica, linz, where I gave this talk at the Prix Forums. This session on the Interactive Art category was moderated by Erkki Huhtamo. For more on the exhibition and other winners, see the OK centre website here. A distinguishing feature this year was a number of works in the new "Hybrid Art" category, including some mad stuff from Symbiotica. For a broad context of "bioart", see writing by claire pentecost.

Conducted a workshop at KRVIA recently, which involved speculations on the nature of online and offline space, and the thresholds of morality, property and friendship that come into play across this divide. The KRVIA staffroom was "digitized", and made public. Later, a number of material "gifts" were inserted back into the room, partly to compensate for the earlier violence and loss of privacy, but also to question the relationships between such an archive and "design", the process of producing something for someone else. See more here.

A description of venice, you can find here. The biennale itself, on my first visit ever, generated mixed feelings: a mixture complicated by having to experience and "judge" the art (mostly by judging what to see, in the short time available) within an omnipresent national framework. Its a bit like walking in a shopping mall trying to shop by the brands, and reminded me of the old World-Expo formats. The advantage is that sometimes this can be revealing, such as when the ultra-minimal work in the Brazil pavilion, the nostalgia in Japan, AIDS in America, even Tracey Emin in the British, can all be productively seen in relation to specific national/ institutional histories.

We came across the Taiwanese "pavilion" by chance... it is strategically located right on the tourist strip near San Marco (and not in the two main locations). There was a poster on the street with the image of an actor that Tsai Ming Liang always works with, and then we found the exibition upstairs, in what used to be a prison. The exhibition title "Atopia" posits (in its curatorial text) a condition distinct from Foucauldian utopias and heterotopias, other "non-spatialized spaces". Atopia is a term useful in understanding a "non-communal community, a non-national nation, and a non-cultural culture" but also "a margin that cannot be marginalized", that is within.

Tsai Ming Liang's work here, as often, exceeded any textual descriptions with a combination of economy and conceptual and visual intensity. Liang is a filmmaker, one of our favourites, and here he had a 30-minute film, "It's a Dream", playing in a room fitted with old cinema seats. These chairs are from the cinema in Malaysia where the film was shot, which has subsequently been torn down. The film moves, with the usual lack of dialogue, from scenes of cooking and eating in the empty cinema to the same few people watching films on the screen. It is a seemingly familial, intimate scene, but fractured along time and generations... a man, a much older woman (his wife), a boy (their child), and a dead woman (the man's mother) represented by a picture. In intervening "dream scenes" some of these aberrations in time are filled in. Somehow, this treatment avoids a staightforward nostalgic cinephilia or lament for the lost theatre through an expanded, thinly-laid cast of place, family, sexuality and cinema... a space with indistinct borders, a kind of atopia in itself.

Before you come to the film-room you pass through a space where Shih Chieh Huang displays a busy, green-led-lit collection of electronically-controlled kinetics and inflatables. The collection is fun, overbuilt but somehow removed from the "everyday objects" it claims to be detourning. If the garden itself is not (cyber)punk enough, some technical strategies in it are simple and effective... such as the light sensors attached to various parts of TV monitors, which switch circuits based on what happens on screen... when the giant on-screen eye moves from left to right, for example. Acts on video are thus "relayed" to material changes in the room: water being pumped, inflatable creatures being filled up... electrical life rises and ebbs.

At the Russian pavilion in Giardini are several peculiar cases of the use of technology in contemporary art. Which makes me very curious about the conditions of software art and media activism in the region. The building facade itself features a dubious screen work called "Click- I hope" on which people clicking on multi-lingual text links are told that 30,000 people have done this before. Around the corner though is a lovely moment as you encounter Andrey Bartenev's infinite field of "lost connections"... made from those rotating led-frequency toys that can render letters, images and so on. See his other work in fashion, etc for more.
The main hall contains a lengthy and inexplicable three-screen CG film, Last Riot, whose description I will let you read here . (about 2/3rds of the way down)
Elsewhere is a "video shower", supposedly a tribute to nam june paik, which is pointlessly excessive. Also here are a 10 metre-long water filled wave-machine, and five video screens that have actual windshield wipers! A drizzle of "video rain" falls over a collage of global news and advertising, to be wiped out every few minutes, revealing a peaceful panorama of the grand canal from giardini...

In Arsenale, a Second-Life-based work in an airconditioned inflatable structure dominates the somewhat casually-installed Chinese pavilion-garden. The SL machinima looked interesting enough, but was hard to watch with all the first-life sunlight filtering in. The soundtrack was more dominant, and seemed to refer to moments in real-world cities (with references to a turbid Delhi, etc.) in a kind of ambient/trip-hop style. On the whole it seemed to be an interesting online collaborative, some pictures are here , I wish I could tell you more. But this is also because the two online terminals were occupied with people checking email.

From tech to terror... Sophie Calle's work, of course, has been spoken about elsewhere... Ill leave it with the thought that if you can turn almost anything adverse into an advantage, as something productive, that must be a positive trait. My doubt is only that the general tendency of the vast amassing, organizing, aggrandizing of material, becomes a kind of unnecessary violence unto its subject. Here that was clearly the intention, but in other cases it might not be. The work here becomes a one-way street between a private and public life that I don't particularly care for.

Violence is represented, but not felt, in the numerous war-images in the Arsenale corridoor, in the central curated exhibition. This has been cricitized elsewhere, for example in an recent debate on nettime, as "war profiteering". But atleast a couple of works sufficiently complicated the idea for me, were connected to enough other things to make it worthwile.

Nedko Solakov's take on the crisis between Russia and Bulgaria over production rights to the Kalashnikov rifles, deals with questions of "war profiteering" head-on. He documents a post-Soviet situation in which Bulgaria was producing the AK-47 and other models of the Kalashnikov since the 60's, and now were asked by the Russians to stop, or pay royalties. The intellectual property battle heated up when the Bulgarian-built models became popular, and were ordered by the new Iraqi millitary, among other clients. A rambling wall-text describes his attempts to interview defense personnel in both countries. The investigation doesnt go anywhere, but in the end Solakov has a AK-47 on show (presumably for sale) and has commissioned bootleg paintings of 10 different guns (by "talented young Bulgarian painters") since he was not allowed to display any photographs of the guns due to permission problems.

War Frames by Zoran Naskovski deals with media presented to the public during the war in former Yugoslavia. We can see from a number of online "slide-shows", the ways in which TV audiences were lulled with sitcoms and false information, through those times. This material could make for an interesting comparison with Farocki and Ujica's film Videograms of a Revolution (not at the biennale), which documents demonstrators occupying the state TV station in 1989 in Bucharest for several days, resulting in incredible studio scenes and passions running high on national TV.

Ceausescu is back in CEAU, a collection of about 300 paintings and graphic works produced in communist Romania, all of which feature the dictator. This publication is part of the Romanian pavilion, which is attractively titled Low-Budget Monuments, and features a stark exhibition of ironic "monuments": bags of cement, photographs and scattered books, all of which propose a "degree-zero from which new monuments can be built". This may sound like well-worn territory, but the accompanying publication Memosphere revisits the ambition of public monumentality "based on the logic of counter-action", a ripe possibility that seems to have disappeared from contemporary discourse.

For several years now, since he presented his work at UCLA in 2001, I have followed Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's formulation of "relational architecture" and related works. To clarify, his concept of relationality precedes Bourriaud's relational aesthetics by several years, and refers to "technological actualizations" of the urban environment. Of course "architecture" here refers to these linking systems, as well as to the built environment. Hemmer's work received a lot of attention a few years ago from people I usually listen to, including Tim Druckery, Erkki Huhtamo and Geert Lovink . Reading through these texts and interviews now, it is clear to me that the relational architecture articulated in them and in early works (see for example also http://www.alzado.net/book.html), never actually "took place".

Still, I was looking forward to seeing this collection of several pieces, in the Mexican pavilion, a wonderful, tucked-away building in Canareggio that was being apparently being opened to the public after a long time. Despite this environment and some well-installed artworks, I came out of the exhibition a little alarmed, and I am trying to articulate here why. Descriptions and images of the works are here .
and other projects referred to here can be found at: http://lozano-hemmer.com

After spending about three hours among the six or so pieces I concluded that most of the works in this collection could be described, for the sake of argument atleast, as the connection of any input/sensing device to an arbitrary output format.
Schematically:

Shadow on wall= radio sounds.
Shadow on ground = images of other people.
Heart-rate sensor = pulsing lights.
Bodily presence = chairs moving up and down in waves.
Bodily presence = eye on video follows.

Almost nothing complicates these binaries... no contingencies, no particular fears or desires (except perhaps: what if I have no heartbeat?), no emergent conditions, no articulation between kinds of audiences or spaces, no inter-subjectivities. What kind of relations are being produced here? The ones between people and the computers are not challenging. The use of silhouette-tracking connected to various forms of actuation or imaging offers no antagonism to the software or hardware itself, (like in say JODI's work) only presenting smooth "applications" of these well-known parts, randomly connected. It is quite easy to imagine other combinations: heartrate=chairs moving, overhead tracking=radio waves, and so on. Are these then "open works" of some kind? This is not clear, if intended at all. My observation was that audiences just begin to expect one or the other form of benign media to appear, in response to their presence.
The intercourse between participants in works such as Body Movies is replaced here by a crowd all focused on their own "channel", as in the radio piece, and in other works. The idea of "alien memory" lies forgotten. What "subsculpture" means is not clear. The powerful evocations of "architecture" in Hemmer's early work appear to have receded to almost anything in a "space" (such as the radio piece, Frequency and Volume, relational architecture #10). The challenge to architecture as an actual urban, social or technological form is absent. The word "public" is used everywhere, for example in the title of a gallery work called "subtitled public" or in statements like "A human eye follows members of the public with Orwellian precision", from a description of the older work Surface Tension.

How does the work engage with these "publics", or take advantage of its "publicness"? What might it mean to find an image of someone from Nottingham in your shadow, in a public space? To me, in my experience of this work in Venice, it meant almost nothing. I mean, I could see those images on a monitor at home ( as I could in the back room, in a related work) and be perfectly happy. To be able to make out people I knew (if I was a Nottinghamian), and have "relations" with them.

The problem for me is that the work is ultimately celebratory of infinite cross-mapping: the ability to connect data from one physical system to another, anywhere. This is a kind of "freedom" that came attached to terms like "physical computing", or more recently "ubiquitous computing", seemingly liberatory concepts which to this day barely acknowledge their subservience to larger conditions of ownership, administration, and territory. This is a broader issue with many forms of technological practice, and I have encountered it in science labs, technology labs, media-art labs, in startups, and at moments in my own head, as a grad student. At the same time it remains difficult, and expensive, to execute some of these mappings, which leads to another problem:

Despite his own remark about "effect" effects in the Lovink interview, a lot of Hemmer's work could be seen as guilty of a form of "featuritis"... a tendency to reuse technical features, seemingly for their own sake. (David Rokeby warns of the dangers of this.) Such "featuritis" shows up in many works, for example in the use of video-controlled rotating arrays of: tubelights in Homographies, belts in Standards and Double Standards, bottles (minus the tracking) in Synaptic Caguamas. The video-tracked body is continually reappearing at one end of these arrangements, with various ephemeralities connected to the other.

Is this an artistic "language", could it be argued? To my reading, the recurrence of these features has nothing do to with a deeper exploration of ideas, even ideas surrounding, say video tracking itself. It is precisely the question of what is actually being investigated, or given form, in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's work that is becoming harder and harder to answer in recent years, without any corresponding gains in software that other people can use, interactive affect, or personal or political weight.

Much of the work, like the ceiling piece Homographies, remains visually and kinetically powerful, and new work like the Pulse Room suggests atleast the potential for other poetic databases, such as the wonderfully economical earlier work 33 Questions per Minute. But this is not enough, for an artist who is supposedly dealing with large questions of the instrumentation of the physical world. It is not enough anymore (if it ever was) to say "cellular automata" or "non-linear math" in lieu of a critical media practice. What may be ways out of this? It is a shared concern, echoing in all corners of the room called "interactive art".

Perhaps it is in articulating new, "post-relational" practices of threat, seduction and misuse, that there can be new life. Perhaps Rafael-Lozano Hemmer, and many of us in the "interactive arts", need to freshly occupy current spatial, machine and institutional orders, "real" estates, to make viable the challenge from our small assemblages to "architecture" or other large infrastructures and institutions.

At venice, the awareness that this is the Mexican pavilion remains a floating byline, unmoored and unacknowledged. (Hemmer is Mexican / Canadian, and has studios in montreal and madrid). The USA pavilion, in a reversal of this trajectory, manages to encourage a geo-political reading through the minimal work of the Cuban-born Felix Gonzales-Torres. Torres' work, despite its overexposure and over-instrumentation in the years since his death from AIDS, retains a generous "interactive" element, by which you also recognise biennale-goers in the streets of venice: their rolled-up (and empty) takeaway posters. But it is clear that this is not going to be enough either. What is required is a deeper re-investigation of how and which humans may enter various processes (including algorithmic ones), the broader institutional politics of machines, and what happens to the interactive "subject".

Some thoughts on the ongoing (lack of) debates around baroda are here.

quick update from baroda...
about two hours ago a large and succesful demonstration at MSU by students and staff and supporters from bombay and delhi ended. there were some tense moments as a local bjp/vhp unit tried to storm the faculty as the protest were taking place. They were stopped by police, but later as the both sides spread out onto the road, it was clear the police were favouring their moves, and there were some provocations aimed at starting a confrontation. A few people were roughed up, and many challenges were made across the road. In the end the police detained about 20 MSU students, and threatened to detain more, at which point the demonstration was moved elsewhere.
The detained students are expected to be released soon.

some short unedited clips are here.