Curator Robert Little discusses a project drawing for the House of Fascism, designed by Giuseppe Terragni in the early 1930s.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1970 article “Unpopular cinema” (Il cinema impopolare), now included in “Heretical Empiricism”, he articulates in detail the non-dialectical relationship between cinematic author and cinematic spectator in terms of liberty and liberation. He starts by abruptly suggesting that liberty is ultimately nothing else than “the liberty to choose to die”.

This oppository (oppositorio) conflict which takes place in the “unknowable depth of our soul”.

Boy with Toy Soldiers
c. 1876
Antonio Mancini (Italian, 1852–1930)
Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 24 3/4 inches
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vance N. Jordan Collection, 2004

As we have spent the last two weeks exploring A#7, it is very exciting to present the reflections of Kris Van Assche himself on creating an ‘A’. I asked Kris the following 10 questions this December, with over a year since his issue was released. His responses are intimate and thoughtful while remaining direct and informative – the words of a man with a clarity of vision and confidence in his work.

Dan The Scout

Read here as Kris discusses the trials and triumphs of this project!

People are used to the sound of skin played by percussion instruments. Most of them consist of at least one membrane (skin) that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with parts of a player’s body, or with some sort of implement, to produce sound. But what if the skin is human? Percussion denotes the collision of two bodies producing sound. Then what if both the two colliding bodies are human? This scenario is not a morbid fantasy but the core of the latest Daan Brinkmann‘s creation: Skinstrument. It’s a musical instrument that can be played by two or more people. It works using skin resistance as a parameter to generate sound. Perceiving a subtle, almost imperceptible flow of electricity players become part of a circuit, and touching each other’s skin the circuit starts to trigger a sound generation. It’s crucial then that the touching intensity determines the sound frequency. So the electric tension is not only translated into sound but also into sexual tension, ironically inspired by the shape of the instrument that resembles a breast and instinctively generated by the touch of other people’s skin. The result is an unpredictable choreography based on human interaction.

text by Valentina Culatti

Beautiful text writen for Sylvia’s place in NYC.

Listen to a podcast about Sylvia’s place.

What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you’ve long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you’re best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good.

Like Kenneth Goldsmith says: We’ve all got a folder full of things that would otherwise never see the light of day. Yes, we do!

Invited authors were invited to ponder to that question on UbuWeb.com. The works available online are their responses, ranging from an 1018-page manuscript (unpublishable due to its length) to a volume of romantic high school poems written by a now-respected innovative poet.

Publishing The Unpublishable
Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith
2007

order here!

Galić’s and Gredig’s project reverses for once the asymmetrical power relation between the image producers and the depicted. A very enlightening venture! Goran Galić (1977) studied photography at the School of Art and Design Zurich. Gian-Reto Gredig (1976) studied Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich. Both live and work in Zurich. “PIC” is their first publication with Kodoji Press.

The publication “Photographers in Conflict” reveals those faces to us that are normally behind the camera and, therefore, responsible for our image of the world — concerned photojournalists. Goran Galić and Gian-Reto Gredig photographed and interviewed 32 professionals during the renowned festival “Visa pour l’Image” that resembles each year the world’s best photojournalists in Perpignan, France. The two young artists portrayed the journalists in the style of historical portraits and asked them questions about keywords related to their métier. The answers accompany the pictures in the publication and are ordered by the given keywords: Camera down — My kind of picture — Banging on people’s heads — The man on the street — Publish or perish — Hours in the darkroom. They expose the diverse layers of the job and how every individual copes differently with its horrors, with self-reflection, and manipulation. By publishing “Photographers in Conflict” as a newspaper a reference is made to the medium in which a lot of the images shot by photojournalists appear. The publication contains 16 portraits and a selection of transcripts of the video interviews, which will was released online in 2008. This is not merely a contemporary solution, but it reflects also the area of tension of today’s photojournalistic industry: on the one hand the classic reportages published in magazines and papers and on the other hand — in order to be able to be competitive with the emerging “citizen journalists” —
reportages that more frequently are published online — often interactively and multimedia-based (e.g. with the commentary of the photographer).

PHOTOGRAPHERS IN CONFLICT – BY GORAN GALIC & GIAN–RETO GREDIG
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32 X 47 CM, 20 PAGES, 105 COLOR PLATES, NEWSPAPER,
BADEN, 2008, FIRST EDITION, 1.000 COPIES, ISBN 978–3–03747–011–4
EUR 12,– / USD 20,– / CHF 18,–

order here!