This piece, loosely based on Vanishing Point – another project created by the same author, Colombian-born artist Maurizio Arrango – presents a cartography of victims as reported by several international online news media outlets. It consists of a world map showing the usage of the word “victim” in news from around the globe. Thus what the viewer sees is a map made by victims, and perhaps, one that is determined by their aggressors.
Mauricio Arango is a Colombian-born artist and educator who lives and works in New York. His art practice alludes to the current dynamics of media, temporality, memory and forgetting. His work is an attempt to examine dominant narratives and assess what is lost within them: i.e., the disregard for –and reshaping of – world cartographies; the exclusion of minorities from national subjectivities; and the elimination of peripheries from the making of history. Arango’s work has appeared at diverse venues, including: Artists Space in New York; Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; the Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia; the International Society for Electronic Art at the San Jose Museum of Art, US; The Sao Paolo Museum of Contemporary Art, Brazil; The Colombian Biennial of Electronic Art, Bogota, Colombia. He has also received grants and commissions from the Sao Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Forecast Public Artworks (Saint Paul, US), The Minnesota State Arts Board (US), the Kulturfonds der Stadt Salzburg (Salzburg, Austria), and from Low-Fi, The Net Art Locator (London, UK) among others. Recently he participated in the prestigious Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. http://www.mauricioarango.net/
Based on the aesthetics of the Russian artist Olia Lialina, particularly her piece entitled "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War", the premise of WDWTW? is the starting point that leads to an internet space bringing together what could be created with the stories behind the story. It is an interface that asks users, just as it asks the archive, for their story to generate another version in real time, one that perhaps takes us closer to what we call “truth” or leaves us in the midst of the tensions between conspiracy and paranoia.
With a background in video, Alejandro Duque is a Colombian artist who graduated from the school of fine arts of Medellin in Colombia in 1998. He is currently pursuing a PhD on philosophy of communication at the EGS (European Graduate School in Switzerland). His dissertation topic deals with finding ways for smuggling ideas across different networks, "trafficking" concepts crossing marginalised communities and western philosophies.
The project is focused on our relationship towards bad news as the media broadcasts it on a daily basis. It develops, in three phases, a short series of questions for users about the type of bad news that influences them (natural catastrophies, wars, animal attacks, traffic accidents, death, diseases…) and the type of news that does not affect them at all. In the second level of questions, the user finds their own bad news on the scale of frequency on the web and compares their findings with other users. Finally, there is an interactive cybertherapy aimed at users. This type of therapy raises awareness about our different relationship with the media, from creating trauma to triggering it or using it .
Andreja Kulunčić studied sculpture and graduated in 1992 from the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. From 1992 to 1994, she studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, under Professor Jovanovics Gyorgy. She currently lives in Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her exhibitions include Documenta 11 and Manifesta 2004, among others. http://www.andreja.org
The meta-archive "landscape 1995" examines the strategic and tactical situation on the battlegrounds and fronts of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 onwards, with a special focus on the final events around the declared United Nations Safe Areas of Srebrenica and Zepa. Documents produced by an array of technological observers, lawyers and analysts will be used in a structure that will examine the military drive and logic that led to genocide, using a comparatively similar set of tools and systems as the observed processes. For the completion of the project, two trips to Bosnia will be undertaken in early 2008, aimed at gathering documentary and witness material. We will also engage in setting up a remote sensing campaign in the zones of the known execution and burial fields around the Srebrenica municipality.
Marko Peljhan founded the arts organisation Projekt Atol in 1992 and its technological branch, PACT SYSTEMS, which was started by creating an online satellite navigation urban interface project, the UCOG-144. In 1995 he co-founded LJUDMILA (Ljubljana Digital Media Lab). In 1999 the Projekt Atol Flight Operations was founded, serving as the organisational branch for flight and spaceflight related projects. Since 1999, Peljhan works as the flight director of the parabolic art/science flights with the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Moscow and the MIR – Microgravity Interdisciplinary Research Consortium, which brings together artists and scientists to work within the aerospace field in an integrated way. From 2001 to 2004, he served in the Government of Slovenia’s Strategic Council for Information Society as a representative of new media based and technology development NGOs. He is also one of the most acclaimed Slovenian contemporary conceptual artists, working at the intersection of media, technology and arts. In 2006, the new initiative, which is the continuation of the Makrolab project, I-TASC, was endorsed by the International Polar Year. His work has appeared at major international exhibitions and venues such as Documenta X (Kassel, Germany); the Second Johannesburg Biennale (South Africa); Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria); Media City (Seoul, Korea), Gwangju Biennale (Korea); Manifesta; Venice Biennale (Italy); International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA); Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) (Rotterdam, the Netherlands); Transmediale (Berlin, Germany) and others. Among the prizes for his work, he received the Medienkunst prize at the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany) in 2000; in 2001, he received the Golden Nica, together with Carsten Nicolai for their work Polar; in 2004, he was given the UNESCO Digital Media Art Award for Makrolab, and in 2007, was awarded the Preseren Foundation Prize, also for Makrolab.
Martha Rosler’s Dust of the Office is a collection of HTML documents and supporting media focusing on the global biopolitics of control. The dominant themes are bodily confinement and surveillance in situations of highly rationalised, restricted office-cubicle life and battlefield terrain, and the concomitant internalisation of disciplinary strictures. Dust of the Office evokes the bodily experiences of vast numbers of people around the world without suggesting that these experiences are equivalent: on the one hand, office or ‘knowledge’ workers – white-collar professionals, pink-collar secretarial workers, and those who fly on business – and on the other hand, the combatants and detainees, the individual actors on global stages of international conflict.
Martha Rosler’s work is centred on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war, as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and several Whitney Biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. A retrospective of her work, “Positions in the Life World” (1998-2000) was shown in five European cities and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York). Her solo show, “London Garage Sale”, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in June 2005, revisiting a series of exhibitions she has held since 1973 that centre on the American garage sale. E-flux sponsored "The Martha Rosler Library", which made over 7,500 volumes from her private collection available as a public resource from November 2005; the collection then travelled to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany and to Antwerp's Muhka (Museum of Contemporary Art) in conjunction with NICC, an artist-run space. She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all in New York City).
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.