Exhibition opening 5 October

From the opening of places / traces / stories, Friday 5 October, Rom 8, KHIB,  Vaskerelven, Bergen. Documentation images of the work in the show will follow soon....

places / traces / stories

Open Lecture Programme Friday 12th October

Re:place  Open lecture programme. 

Friday 12 October 10.00 - 15.00Lecture room, 4th. floor, C. Sundtsgt 53, Nordnes

Bill Rankin 

Invisible Landscapes

Most maps present a two-tiered vision of the world; there is the topographic “base map” that shows the solid, neutral, physical world, and then there is “thematic” content overlaid on top. This simple act of laying makes a powerful ontological claim: it creates a dichotomy of primary and secondary, permanent and temporary, visible and invisible. What happens when we discard this hierarchy and take the temporary, invisible, or statistical as our solid ground? Focusing on these “invisible landscapes” creates a new sense of place that is simultaneously disorienting and liberating. Space itself is likewise no longer an empty container waiting to be filled; it is instead an active construction of identity, law, political economy, and historical memory.

Bill Rankin is a historian and cartographer. His mapping activity is focused on reimaging everyday urban and territorial geographies as complex landscapes of statistics, law, and history. His maps have appeared in publications and exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including articles in Perspecta, Harvard Design Magazine, and National Geographic and shows at Harvard University, Pratt Institute, the Cartographic Bienalle in Lausanne, the Triennalle di Milano, and the Toronto Images Festival; his maps also traveled for several years with ICI’s “Experimental Geographies” exhibit. His historical research is about the politics of cartography and navigation in the twentieth century. He teaches at Yale University, where he is an assistant professor of the history of science.

www.radicalcartography.net

Inger Lise Hansen

Travelling Fields

Inger Lise Hansen’s recent works focus on particular phenomena occurring through a change of perspective and animated camera movements, as a way of redefining a place and its geography. These films document landscape and architectural elements across a series of diverse locations from a shopping centre in Linz to the deserted landscapes of the Kola Peninsula in north-

western Russia.

Inger Lise Hansen will present some earlier works and new films.

Inger Lise Hansen studied Fine Art at University of East London and Central-St.Martins College of Art & Design and Filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute. Her films have been screened and exhibited in international institutions such as OK Center Contemporary Art 

in Linz, Austria, Rotterdam Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, National Gallery, 

London  (“Truth or Dare” Film Season), Académie Lebanese des Beaux-arts, Sin el Fil, 

Lebanon, Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris  (Rencontre International), Gasworks Gallery, London (“Blink” artists’ animation exhibition). Tate Modern, London (Architecture Week; “Housing Problems”).

www.ingerlisehansen.com

Clement Valla

The Universial Texture

I collect Google Earth images. I discovered strange snapshots where the
illusion of a seamless and accurate representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer, I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They are seams which reveal a new model of seeing and of representing our world – as dynamic, ever-changing data from a myriad of different sources – endlessly combined, constantly updated, creating a seamless illusion.

Clement Valla (Brooklyn, NY) is an artist working with algorithmic systems. He pushes problem-solving logic to irrational ends. His recent work examines copies, repetition and reproduction in Chinese ‘Oil-Painting Factories’ and corwdsourced online drawing tools. Valla wonders about the blurring boundary between human creativity and computational interpretation.
Valla received a BA from Columbia University in 2001, where he studied architecture. After working for architects in the USA, France, and China, Valla began using computers and digital technologies in his own work. He received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital+Media.

www.clementvalla.com

Scott Rettberg & Jeremy Welsh exhibition Rom 8

Friday 5 October 6.00 pm, Rom 8, Vaskerelven, Bergen

In connection with the Re:place startup seminar, Jeremy Welsh and Scott Rettberg wil be opening an exhibition featuring a range of works in video, sound,  photography and text.

Scott Rettberg shows several collaborative projects, made together with Roderick Coover and Nick Montford. Jeremy Welsh shows Spatial Traces, a video work with sound by Robert Worby, and Places/Traces, a selection of works-in-progress from an ongoing series of investigations of place in video, photography, sound and text. The project consists of several parts, including "SMS Bamboo Forest", an ongoing work combining digital photographs, video and sound, started in 2009 in a Chinese garden in Sydney.  Image below from the series Places/Traces (2010 - 2012) a collection of photographs recording traces and remnants, marks, scarrings, abandoned or discarded items and neglected spaces in the urban environment.

"Katastrofetrilogien"  (2010-2011), co-produced by Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg

Katastrofetrilogien is a trilogy centered on themes of how stories of historic disasters impact contemporary conversations and relationships. Collaboratively and organically constructed, these three films call upon histories of deadly volcanic ash, great floods, and the plague to tell stories of present day longing, anxiety, and environmental change.

"The Last Volcano / Det siste utbruddet"

A story of a catastrophic volcanic eruption and its aftermath is retold by a woman to a man before the slowly turning image of contemporary urban landscape. Though the story seems to reference events of the distant past, its setting and telling raise anxieties related to cycles of memory and forgetting.

Direction: Roderick Coover

Writing: Scott Rettberg 

Translation by: Daniel Apollon, Gro Jørstad Nilsen, and Jill Walker Rettberg

Voices: Gro Jørstad Nilsen and Jan Arild Breistein

"Cats and Rats / Rotter og katter"

A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman takes place on a transatlantic Skype call. In trying to impress his potential paramour, the American steers the conversation terribly wrong, toward a discussion of the Plague and all the devastating historical memories it entails.

Direction: Roderick Coover

Writing: Scott Rettberg 

Translation by: Jill Walker Rettberg,

Voices: Jill Walker Rettberg and Rob Wittig

"Norwegian Tsunami/ Norsk flodbølge"

During a cigarette break on an oil platform in the North sea, a Scottish geologist and a Norwegian chef consider a certain strangeness in the waves, their changing spirits, and the last time a tsunami devastated the nearby shores.

Direction: Roderick Coover

Writing: Scott Rettberg 

Translation by: Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg,

Voices: Gillian Carson and Kristian A. Bjørkelo 

“Three Rails Live” (2011-2012) by Roderick Coover, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg 

"Three Rails Live" is an experiment in combinatory poetics, a generative system that results in the production of short narrative videos, stories with a moral to them. The three collaborators put the system together at some remove from each other. Coover sent a selection of short video clips and images to Rettberg and Montfort. Rettberg viewed the clips and sorted them arbitrarily into themes (Landscape and Fate, Tourists, Death by Snake, Industrial Sites, Trains, Flood, Toxic, Flight, Stripped, and Third Rail), wrote three short narratives for each theme, and then recorded readings of each of these narratives. Together the narrative segments fit into an overall first-person story of a man considering his memories and his relation to others and his environment late in his life. Montfort selected particular images, and, borrowing a technique from Harry Mathews, wrote “perverbs”—remixes of two different proverbs that subvert the original—for each of the texts paired to an image. Montfort also produced a title generator that arbitrarily creates a title for each run of the work. The system the authors constructed selects two videos and two of the narrative recordings from a constrained random selection. A preverb with a moral to the story is then assigned and the process begins anew. The system thus results in short narrative videos with new juxtapositions of  images, texts, and preverbs each time it runs. All of the texts and images emerge from this aleotory but thematically determined method.

Voices: Scott Rettberg (stories), Nick Montfort, Judd Morrissey, and Davin Heckman (perverbs)

"Implementation" by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg (2004 & 2012)

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Some of these placements of stickers were photographed by participants, and the photographs were sent back to be archived on the Implementation website.

Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In the 2012 book version, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces. It is a book to be read in photographs.

Implementation is about four main characters: Frank, Samantha, Kilroy, and Roxanne, who live in a Midwestern town. The action of the novel begins in September 2001 and runs through the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. One of the characters, Kilroy, is a reservist who is called up and then sent to Iraq, but the other characters are affected in much more oblique ways by the attack on the World Trade Center and the changes that follow. They continue to dine at restaurants, drink at bars, work, worry about their jobs and careers, have flings and relationships, and go to celebrations and funerals. While even a bombing in town changes little on the surface of these lives, the effects of the war can be read in shifts in their gestures, longings, and language. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral, everyday, psychological toll of the war on terror.

Re: place lectures

The Re: place project will be hosting a number of guest lectures in coming months, taking place at KHIB. In addition to the guest speakers participating in the inaugural seminar on 12th. October, the following lectures are scheduled:

Friday 19 October 10.00, lecture room, 4th. floor, C. Sundtsgt 53

Helen Petts

Artist & film-maker, presenting her recent project "Throw Them Up and Let Them Sing" in which she tracks the journey of Kurt Schwitters through Norway to Ambleside in Cumbria, England, where he constructed his last Merzbau.

Monday 12 November 14.30, lecture room, 4th. floor, C. Sundtsgt 53

Esther Leslie

Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birbeck College, London, whose research interests include Walter Benjamin and radical philosophy. She is also co-author - originator of the website Militant Esthetix. Esther Leslie contributed to the anthology Restless Cities, a reader on contemporary urban conditions.

Re: place introductory seminar

From 11th. - 13th. October the Re: place project will be launched in Bergen with a three day seminar that will include workshop sessions where project participants discuss works in progress; a day of open lectures at KHIB (Bergen Academy of Art and Design); a day trip to the town of Odda in Hardanger, where the exhibition "Odds" curated and arranged by current and former MA students from KHIB is taking place.

Thursday 11th. October: workshop/seminar; invited participants only.
Place - Re: place: artistic forms and strategies.

Workshop participants include:

Anne Helen Mydland & Neil Brownsword
Duncan Higgins & Johan Sandborg
Synne Bull & Dragan Miletic
Chloe Lewis & Andrew Taggart
Signe Lidén
Ellen Røed
Trond Lossius
Scott Rettberg
Eamon O'Kane
Richard Launder
Jeremy Welsh

Connected to the seminar and workshop is an an exhibition with Scott Rettberg and Jeremy Welsh, taking place in the KHIB gallery Rom 8, opening on 4th. October and running until 14th. October.

Friday 12th. October: open lecture series.
Invited speakers include:

Bill Rankin (Yale University)  Radical Cartography
Clement Valla (Rhode Island School of Design) Universal Texture
Inger Lise Hansen (Oslo) artist & experimental filmmaker
Steven Bode, curator & director, The Film & Video Umbrella, London.

Lectures take place in the 4th. floor lecture room, KHIB, C. Sundtsgt 53, Nordnes, Bergen


The day trip to Odda, on Saturday 13th. October, will focus on the exhibition Odds, as well as the place itself, a former industrial town sited within a dramatic natural landscape of fjord, mountains and glacier. Other places of interest en route include the Art Museum Kabuso in the village of Øystese, where Bergen-based artist Kurt Johanessen will be exhibiting n October.