public – Page 2 – flawed art

Ps4

Ps4
2008 – 2011

“Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.” – Oona King, former member of the British Parliament.

For over a decade, war has ravaged the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Fueled, in part, by an intense demand for natural resources, the war has claimed over 5 million lives. Coltan (Columbite-tantalite), a metallic ore from which the element tantalum is extracted, is one of the DRC’s most sought after resources. Tantalum is widely used in common electronic devices such as cell phones, computers and video game consoles.

Ps4 is an interactive video mash-up that juxtaposes documentary video footage with live video gameplay. Though initially conceptualized in response to reports of Sony’s large stake in the DRC’s bloody coltan trade during the production of its Playstation 2, Ps4’s playlist has since expanded to look at a variety of issues. On a general level, Ps4 explores the potentially alienating effects of gaming by derailing the seamless gameplay experience and offering a problematic and politicized view of so-called “immersive” leisure activities.

Documentary footage,”Congo’s Bloody Coltan” Produced by, and used with permission from, thePulitzer Center.

Publications

PS4. Issue 6: Fetish. Katalog
PS4. Media Fields Journal

American Dreams: A Work in Progress

American Dreams: A Work in Progress
2000 – 2011

American Dreams is an interactive installation making use of common retail packaging and display aesthetics where gallery participants may self-reflectively play the role of consumers while uncovering unsettling relationships between free market globalization and military domination. The installation represents an ongoing meditation on the abuse of power and prevailing mythologies and ideologies of US culture.

[Show slideshow]

Review – Ryan Griffis, “American Dreams”, review, New Art Examiner, Vol. 29, No. 4, Dec.-Jan. 2000

In Search of Zea Mays

In Search of Zea Mays was created for the corn maze at Airlie Center in Warrenton VA, home of the Local Food Project (formerly directed by Pablo Elliot). A corn maze was created with the help of heirloom non-gmo corn seed, a tractor and gps system – and let’s not forget cooperative weather and lots of waiting. Within the maze, dead-end pathways invited maze-goers to rest and reflect on the history of industrial agriculture through a comfy strawbale seat and text / image investigations into the modern food system’s most prized plant – corn. The experience culminates in the “Cornference” room located in the center of the maze (& equipped with office furniture). The Cornference room hosted discussions among maze participants, meetings for members of The Local Food Project and at least one birthday bash. In Search of Zea Mays invited participants to explore our corn-based industrial food system by simultaneously superimposing the navigation of real space, data, and ideas in the familiar and freindly (if-not frustrating) form of the corn maze.

The Project was also displayed at the Green Festival in Washington DC as part of Airlie’s Local Food Project.

A Project by Mark Cooley in collaboration with farmer and local food advocate Pablo Elliot.

agriArt: Companion Planting for Social & Biological Systems

agriArt Website

agriART is an exhibition brings together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption. The exhibition features projects that represent where we are and what we can do to (re)create sustainable relationships with our sources of nourishment and the communities in which we live.

April 21 – May 15, 2009
Fine Arts Gallery. George Mason University
Public Reception – April 21, 5:00 – 7:00

Featuring: Fritz Haeg, Beehive Design Collective, Nance Klehm, Ted Purves & Susanne Cockrell, Critical Art Ensemble & Beatriz Da Costa & Claire Pentecost, Center for Urban Pedagogy with Amanda Matles, Deena Capparelli & Moisture, Lisa Tucker, Philip H. Howard, Amy Franceschini

With essays by: Claire Pentecost & Ron Graziani

Curated by: Mark Cooley & Ryan Griffis

E pluribus unum

E pluribus unum
2004 – 2008
online version

“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.” – Noam Chomsky

“In 1971, Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunal, cited the ‘Yamashita’ case as grounds for indicting (General) Westmoreland. Following the war, a US Army Commission had sentenced Japanese General Tomayuki Yamashita to be hung for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines. The Commission held that as the senior commander, Yamashita was responsible for not stopping the atrocities. The same ruling could of course apply to General Powell and General Schwarzkopf. Yamashita, in his defense, presented considerable evidence that he had lacked the communications to adequately control his troops; yet he was still hung. Taylor pointed out that with helicopters and modern communications, Westmoreland and his commanders didn’t have this problem.” – Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum, Common Courage Press, 2000.

The installation consists of reproductions of post-WWII presidential photographic portraits accompanied by faux engraved plaques listing, in abridged form, 60 years of presidential foreign policy accomplishments. Flagrant violations of international laws are par for the course. Efforts to build empire have always been marked by murder celebrated fanatically as “just and righteous,” and yet we have something that we call “International Law,” including the Charter of the United Nations, Nuremberg Principles, Geneva Conventions, Genocide convention, and many others. In the interest of law, accompanied with the facts of 60 years of US foreign policy, and while using the case of General Tomayuki Yamashita as precedence, we can speculate on how our presidents may have faired if accused of war crimes before an impartial jury.

http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exit_archive/history/2004.html

Dear Internet

Dear Internet
2007
project documentation
by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress.

Connection, dislocation, fear, communication, fragmentation, collectivity, intimacy, disembodiment are all possible and often simultaneously present in our attempts to interact with others online and off. Dear Internet is an experiment in collective publishing that attempts to investigate how networked technologies become platforms for the paradoxes of social relations in digital culture.

Dear Internet began in 2006 as a kind of inversion of the security and authoring conventions of blogs and blogging. Dear Internet was set up as an unmediated publishing platform where users were urged to address the Internet directly and indulge in their deepest thoughts, feelings and fantasies with the abandonment, comfort and protection that only online anonymity can provide. Initially, letters rendered some interesting aspects of the complex relationships, or lack thereof, we have with the humans of the world. Sadly, but perhaps fittingly, contributions waned and the automated publishing platform gave way to spam. The blog is now an archive of spam email and seems to be establishing a “purely” networked identity – blissfully free from the messy and complex emotive states of humanity.

2009 update: blogger detected and removed the Dear Internet blog for violating blogger’s terms of service agreement.

The first wave of human contributions to Dear Internet were presented at MAP in 2007. Installation Notes:

One or more webcam equipped computers are located throughout the installation space with internet browsers open.
Through an established email account, to which installation visitors are given user id and password, participants are invited to email a letter addressed directly to The internet at: dearest_internet.user@blogger.com.
All emails are inventoried and published at Dear Internet blog.
Submitted letters are gathered from Dear Internet blog, remixed and randomly projected as scrolling ticker texts in the installation space.
Accompanying scrolling texts are a series of image projections. Projections feature webcam images of letter-writing installation participants accompanied by images accessed from anonymous live IP surveillance and web cameras.
Installation audio consists of computer reading excerpts from submitted letters while being underscored and sometimes interrupted by cinematic scores and sound effects.

spacer.gif{ART}

spacer.gif{ART}
2005

launch site

Obsolescence meets timelessness in a new Art form.

What is a “spacer.gif”?
The spacer.gif is a means, employed by web designers, of keeping table-based layouts from collapsing in on themselves. The spacer.gif was once a valuable tool in a net world governed by the interdependence of content and layout. However, to the contemporary high-efficiency web designer, who employs css formatting and layout capabilities, spacer gifs are largely an obsolete and unnecessary tool. The independence of content from layout has come, and spacer gifs, as a concept and as digital objects, are disappearing.

What is spacer.gif{ART}?
As the digital culture industry forges on to virtual territories yet unseen, spacer.gif{ART} hopes to salvage small pieces of the wreckage left behind. spacer.gif{ART} produces and distributes limited edition archival prints of spacer.gif image files downloaded directly from the web by our highly skilled team of curators and techno-conservators. Our portfolio collections represent a dying breed of often unknown artists who utilize(d) the tools of a rapidly fading past to create extraordinary table-based web design experiences. Our curatorial staff hand picks the most extraordinary examples of the spacer.gif to offer to you, our patron, as handsome limited edition archival prints.

More than a parody of http://www.softwareartspace.com, spacer.gif{ART} is simultaneously a functioning ecommerce art site (disabled 2007) and meditation on the projection of artistic value in early and late capitalist society – how, in the digital age (the age of the nonexistent original), art marketers are still relying on analog value systems (based on the the logic of original / copy). It seems we’ve entered the postmodern digital age with much of our modernist baggage still in tow.

White Flag

White Flag | 2005

produced for Unfurled Estonia, curated by Pond

Unfurled Exhibition Catalog
Sirp (August 5, 2005)
Posttimes (August 5, 2005)
Terri Cohn. ‘Unfurled.’ /ArtWeek /(7/04)

White Flag is a U.S. flag spray-painted white. Depending on the cultural context a white flag may have various meanings. In the United States the predominant understanding is that a white flag signifies a surrendering – or at least a devious/heroic plan to ensnare the enemy in a deadly bluff. This White Flag is not a celebration of modernist values, or an example of witty iconic pop art. This is one flag become another. Disclaimer: White Flag will fade and crack while exposed to natural and human elements during exterior exhibition thereby, beginning a transformation back to the U.S. flag.

“A U.S. flag painted white, Mark Cooley’s White Flag plays on various cultural resonations. In the United States white flags signify a surrendering – but exposed to natural elements (sun, wind, rain, etc.), White Flag will crack and fade, eventually returning the artwork to its originary incarnation as a piece of cloth. We are left with an open ended question about the evanescent nature of art and the axiomatic character of symbols in the political imaginary. White Flag also alludes to various monochromatic paintings in 20th century Western art (Rodchenko, Robert Ryman, Malevich, Yves Klein, Rothko) that position themselves as the death of painting, a non-painting painting, a blank slate to which we impute meaning. In Cooley’s piece, an actual flag underlies the layers of paint – as if to expose the political and social underpinnings of a Modernist ‘neutral field’.” Press Release, Written by Marisa Jahn

Independent Media Series @ SMSU

Open site archive

The Independent Media Video Series @ SMSU was initiated at Missouri State University by mark cooley with sponsorship from the SMSU Film Society. The series ran from 2002 to 2004 in the aftermath of 9/11 with the goal of encouraging critical debate on the campus of SMSU (now MSU) and in surrounding communities. The series came at an important time and helped to bring together activists who soon after galvanized to form the Ozark Peace Network.

Dissention Convention

Dissention Convention.
2004
Networked performance and public projection

Live Mix Archive

Coinciding with the Republican Convention in New York, more than 20 international net artists and digital artists broadcast a new collaborative art-polemic with a focus on how Bush and the US Republicans negatively influence every locality around the world.

All multimedia performances were created live, online on Furtherfield’s VisitorsStudio. These were projected at Postmasters Gallery’s RNC NODE, a way-station, which served as a physical node of an ad hoc public broadcasting, a system of online, real-time protest performances and alternative news actions. All online streams were also output in local bars and projections from windows.

Participating Artists Included: Maya Kalogera, Marc Garrett and Patrick Lichty, Moport.org & Glowlab, Chris Webb, Concrete Myrth & Sim, Lewis Lacook & Alan Sondheim, Sheila Murphy, Helen Varley Jamieson, Karla Ptacek, Vicki Smith & Bea Gibson, Joseph and Donna McElroy, Neil Jenkins & Roger Mills, Digitofagia vs. Autolabs, Michael Szpakowski & Ruth Catlow, Ryan Griffis & Mark Cooley