EXHIBITION AND ARTIST TALK CHRIS RAINIER, PAUL D. MILLER (AKA DJ SPOOKY), ANDREW SENIOR
October 28 (opening reception 6-8pm) - December 31, 2010
EXHIBITION AND ARTIST TALKS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, 5:30 - 7:30pm PAUL D. MILLER (aka DJ Spooky) - November 11 CHRIS RAINIER - December 9
RSVP REQUIRED: rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org School groups can request opportunities to visit
LOCATION:
Google, Inc.
75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor
New York City
New York, NY – Digital Art @Google, an exhibition program launched in June by Google and The Project Room for New Media (CAM), announces the opening of Ancient Stories with Modern Technology, opening October 28 at Google NYC. The exhibition includes National Geographic explorer and photographer Chris Rainier, media artist and author Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and media artist and speech recognition researcher at Google, Andrew Senior.
Most of the world’s nearly seven thousand languages are oral and within this century, forty to fifty percent of them will no longer exist. As they vanish, we lose entire universes of the conceptual thought, practical knowledge and technologies that they contain. Preservation efforts align with Google’s mission to take all the world’s information and make it accessible and useful to everyone.
Ancient Stories with Modern Technology features the celebrated photographs and videos of Chris Rainier. Rainier is the noted National Geographic explorer and photographer who works with the Enduring Voices Project team, including eminent ethnolinguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson who direct the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The Enduring Voices Project uses technology to document and revitalize endangered cultures and their repositories of knowledge in areas of science, medicine, technology, and the natural world that are crucial to humankind.
Both Chris Rainier and Paul D. Miller use advanced digital and web technology to honor and aid threatened cultures.
artTEKtech Tanna is an installation by media artist Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) presenting the first works inspired by his vision for the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation. With this new artists residency initiative launching on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu’s South Pacific archipelago, Miller asks, “Can 21st Century technology support Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in ways that enrich village life and Contemporary Art?” Miller’s active interest explores indigenous-digital connections, modernization’s current impacts on South Pacific micro-cultures and how island & urban artistic encounters might inform Contemporary Art. Sustainability Consultant, Janna Olson, is the Curator and Project Director of artTEKtech Tanna.
Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation’s residency-in-context program – developed in response to the request of a Naihné Tribal Chief – is designed to address the artist’s role in nurturing systems that feed rich cultural expression.
Ancient Stories with Modern Technology presents two works by Andrew Senior, media artist and speech recognition researcher at Google. Senior investigates cultural nuance and interpretation of language in Machine Translation and linguistic traits that betray a speaker’s origins in Shibboleths named after a word used to distinguish friend from foe in biblical times.
Digital Art @Google was initiated with the intention of engaging Googlers with the art world and promoting creativity with digital technology. The exhibitions and artist talks, which take place at Google, Inc, are open to guests at times indicated on the website.
The first exhibition, Data Poetics on view June 11 through August 13 included data-based work by pioneer digital artists. We Write This To You From The Distant Future, August 20 – October 22, a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences, focused on a future world imagined and possible to build.
Digital Art @Google is curated by Nina Colosi, Curator of The Project Room for New Media at CAM and founder of its public art program, Streaming Museum, which presents exhibitions in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents. The program was inspired by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik who in the 1970s envisioned the Internet, predicting an “information superhighway” as an open and free medium for imagination and exchange of cultures.
According to Colosi, “A natural synergy exists with Google in this partnership. The Project Room for New Media’s program showcases artworks and educational programs which incorporate technology and the Internet in the creative process.”
Digital Art @Google emphasizes the correlation of Google’s mission in organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, with the ability of artists to reflect and synthesize information in the creation of artwork that expresses the contemporary world. The exhibitions and speaker programs will inspire, entertain, and help envision the world in new ways.
The exhibition program was initiated at Google by Josh Mittleman, User Interface Software Engineer, and supported by the Google Community Affairs committee at Google New York City. Mittleman described the motivation of the exhibit, “Art is one of many tools that can help to organize and make sense of the world’s information. Digital Art @Google NYC is the first step toward introducing the digital arts community to Google, and to starting a conversation that will lead to a rich, ongoing collaboration.”
Information on the current and past exhibitions and artist talks: TheProjectRoom.org
About Google, Inc. Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Support for Digital Art @Google provided by the Google, Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation
Image 1: Gibe & Pipe, Huli wigmen, in Southern Highlands, Papua New Guinea. Traditional ceremonial paint colors: Mali-ambua-hare, Waterfall: Iba-Fugu.
Image 2: Papua New Guinea. The Enduring Voices team interviews Koo Yandabage and Sam Ako, both Ipili speakers, at Tari. Thomas Nokondi (far left) observes. Photographs: Chris Rainier
Images 3,4: Putting digital and web technologies to use connecting with Tanna’s youth: Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) lectures on literacy to a packed school house at Tafea College, a rural Secondary School of 350 students.
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ART EXHIBITED AND ARTIST BIOS
CHRIS RAINIER
Enduring Voices Project
Ancient Stories with Modern Technology is inspired by numerous stories of how technology is creating cross culture communication - and exploration. Please see examples of Cultural Revitalization at the National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project.
We live at a crucial crossroads in human history. On one hand we have state of the art levels of global communication and technology that reach into the most isolated parts of the planet, from the jungles of the Amazon to the cyber cafes of Timbuktu, Mali. We have put a man on the moon, and solved some of the most daunting medical challenges that have plagued the human species since the dawn of mankind. We have split the atom and have created the world’s smallest computer on the head of a pin. We can search Google from anywhere on the planet and read license plates from space.
Yet, sadly, we are destroying the planet at unprecedented levels. At present rates the glaciers of Greenland will all be melted within thirty years, the last untouched rain forests on the planet will be gone by 2050, and over half of the world’s population today live in city dwellings. What will happen to the last ancient peoples that live just beyond the chainsaws that destroy those sacred forests, or the nomads that drift across the shifting sands of the Sahara? They too, are disappearing at catastrophic rates. Most of the world’s nearly seven thousand languages are oral and within this century, forty to fifty percent of them will no longer exist. With them will go a rich tapestry of knowledge, wisdom, and deep understanding of their world - our world - that is simply passed on from generation to generation in the ancient stories as told around the campfire of tradition. So within several generations a vast amount of the world’s knowledge could simply die away with the passing of that elder who traditionally was the wisdom keeper of the culture.
Facing this daunting fact, cultures around the planet are taking a stand and using modern technology: still and video cameras, computers and the internet in amazing and innovative ways to tell their ancient stories to the world for future generations. Modern technology is impacting ancient traditional cultures in very powerful and innovative ways - providing platforms and technology to empower, promote, archive, and revitalize struggling cultures. Connections to the Internet and technology allows communication between ancient and modern, East to West - indeed the South to the North and back. Traditional cultures to modernity, and the modern world to the ancient world. Let us all gather around the virtual fireplace of Ethernet - and share the stories of what it means to be human. --Chris Rainier, Colorado, October 2010
IMAGES ABOVE: (Top) Felix Andi, Yokoim community leader of Kundiman village, consults with Greg Anderson (left) and David Harrison (center) to translate a Yokoim song. (Bottom) Dr. Ganesh Murmu, and Gregory Anderson interviewing woman from Aka tribal group, Kichang Village, Arunachal Pradesh, India. Photographs: Chris Rainier
Ancient Marks: The Sacred Origins of Tattoos and Body Marking, 2005 (11:00) Photographs: Chris Rainier, Video Director / Editor: Ethan Boehme Music: Anoushka Shankar
This video explores the intrinsic connection between mankind’s culture and the old tradition of marking the human body dating back two thousand years, with tattoos and scarification as a form of initiation, beauty, and highly ritualized ornamentation. This tradition continues in today’s modern Culture. The Ancient Marks project, through photography and text, communicates man’s need to adorn the sacred geography of the human body.
If the skin of the average human body was laid flat as a map, a sheet of parchment, it would spread over twenty square feet. The human form, whether isolated in the forests of the Amazon, swept clean by the bitter winds of the Arctic, or soothed by sunset rains of Polynesia became through the brilliance of inspired artistry a map of culture and myth, a sacred geography of the soul, all expressed by the simplicity of forms painted, carved, incised, or etched upon the canvas of the body.
Images of photographs from the book, Ancient Marks by Chris Rainier
ancientmarks.com
Sacred: Angkor Wat, 2007 (6:00
National Geographic photographer Chris Rainier and filmmaker Ethan Boehme bring the sacred temples and Buddhist monks of Angkor Wat poetically to film, with music by Anoushka Shankar.
Angkor Wat is one of more than a dozen magnificent temples in the vast metropolis of Angkor, Cambodia, the capital of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries. It was built for the king, Suryavarman II, in the early 12th century as his state temple and part of his capital city. As the best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious centre since its foundation — first Hindu, dedicated to the god Vishnu, then Buddhist. The temple is at the top of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. It has become a symbol of Cambodia, appearing on its national flag, and it is the country’s prime attraction for visitors. Within Angkor Wat, carved bas-reliefs illustrate scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—epic poems that are also sacred Hindu texts.
Biography
Chris Rainier is considered one of the leading documentary photographers working today. His life’s mission is to film the remaining natural wilderness and indigenous cultures around the globe and to use images to create social change. Rainier co-directs the National Geographic Society’s Cultural Ethnosphere and All Roads Photography Programs. He is a contributing editor for National Geographic Traveler magazine, contributing photographer for National Geographic Adventure magazine; a correspondent on photography for NPR’s Day to Day radio show. Rainier heads National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project, which is documenting the world’s most endangered languages.
Rainier has traveled to seven continents, making extensive expeditions throughout Africa, Antarctica, and New Guinea. His photography has been seen in Time, Life, Smithsonian, the New York Times, Outside and publications of the National Geographic Society. Rainier has photographed global culture and conflict, famine, and war in such places as Somalia, Sarajevo/Bosnia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Iraq. He has won awards for his photography, including the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award given by the Explorers Club for adventure stories. Rainier’s photography has been shown and collected by museums around the world, including the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York, the George Eastman House International Museum in Rochester, New York, and the United Nations. His books include: Keepers Of The Spirit, Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea, Ancient Marks. From 1980 to 1985, Rainier was photographic assistant to Ansel Adams - the noted landscape photographer. chrisrainier.com
Endangered Languages on YouTube
Many of the world’s smallest and most endangered languages have no written form and have never been recorded or scientifically documented. The National Geographic Enduring Voices YouTube channel allows many of these tongues to have a presence in the internet for the very first time. Through the work of Linguists Dr. K. David Harrison and Dr. Gregory Anderson from the Living Tongues Institute, a small and endangered language that may have previously never been heard outside of a remote village can now reach a global audience. Using YouTube as a platform, scientists, visual artists and communities can now collaborate more effectively on promoting language revitalization.
The YouTube channel features videos such as Rudolf Raward reading the first book written in Matukar-Panau, a language spoken by about 500 people in the Matukar village in Papau New Guinea and songs by Aydyng Byrtan-ool, a talented young Tuvan singer and epic storyteller in Southern Siberia, hip-hop performed by Songe Nimasow in the Aka language of India, and videos demonstrating how the Foe language of Papua New Guinea uses body parts to count from 1 to 37.
The launch of the channel comes on the heels of a New York Times announcement by Harrison and Anderson of a “hidden” language of India known locally as Koro, that is new to science and had never been documented outside of its rural community. Koro is one of half of the world’s languages likely to vanish in the next 100 years.
In the midst of a language extinction crisis, we are also seeing a global grassroots movement for language revitalization. Speakers are leveraging new technologies, such as social networking and YouTube, to sustain small languages. As Harrison describes in his book The Last Speakers, we are all impoverished when a language dies, and all enriched by the human knowledge base found in the world’s smallest tongues.
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PAUL D. MILLER (aka DJ SPOOKY)
artTEKtech Tanna, 2010
Curator & Project Director: Janna Olson, Sustainability Consultant
“[Art] is a matter of trying to create an atmosphere and context so conversation can flow back and forth and we can be influenced by each other.” - W.E.B DuBois, American Civil Rights Activist
DJ Spooky offers a digital arts workshop at Tafea College, Tanna, Vanuatu. Aug. 2010
artTEKtech Tanna is an installation by media artist Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) presenting the first works inspired by his vision for the Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation. With this new artists residency initiative launching on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu’s South Pacific archipelago, Miller asks, “Can 21st Century technology (tech) support Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in ways that enrich village life and Contemporary Art?” Miller’s active interest explores indigenous-digital connections, modernization’s current impacts on South Pacific micro-cultures and how island & urban artistic encounters might inform Contemporary Art.
Cargo Culture, 2010
burlap coffee sacks 60" x 70"
Hideaway, #1-4, 2010
ink on paper 36" x 48"
Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation’s residency-in-context program – developed in response to the request of a Naihné Tribal Chief – is designed to address the artist’s role in nurturing systems that feed rich cultural expression.
This isolated island is roughly ten times larger than Manhattan but is home to only 21,000 inhabitants.
Departing Youth Erodes Village Culture
Tanna Island’s verdant land and rich, non-monetary subsistence economies are suffering mainland agricultural, mining and logging techniques with no electricity, water or sewage infrastructure. Increased population and tourism are pushing ecological systems to their threshold. The source of this distress is not evident to all and many contemporary Tannese welcome more of the mainland’s approach. They are eager to bring industry to retain communities currently experiencing an exodus of their youth, who leave seeking jobs and more - returning rarely, if at all.
In addition to digital literacy skills, Tanna Center for The Arts seeks to offer training island-generative trades.
Art and a Vital Local Economy
Working in this contemporary context, Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation aims to model an economy as art endeavor through island-restorative trades education and the residencies-in-context program. VPF’s Tanna Center for The Arts seeks a balance of retreat, outreach and self-sustaining operations to experiment with digital and indigenous contemporary art-making.
Invited by Naihné tribal leadership, DJ Spooky took his urban digital arts lab to the South Pacific to explore ideas of Art, Paradise, cultural wealth and, particularly, “sustainable development” as a shared creative process rather than a suspect policy goal.
Miller sees Art as an opportunity hidden in globalization’s threat to island societies. He’s using technology as a fulcrum – connecting the Tannese to a world community of contemporary artists in an era where Tanna-Man Esso Kapum says, “The planes are landing every day. I cannot stop them.”
His Tanna Center for The Arts, nicknamed artTEKtech Tanna, is being developed with input and land provided by the Nahiné tribe. It will afford respite to international contemporary artists and aim to address the request of Nahiné Chief Jack Kapum to “Give our youth a reason to stay.”
Artists Residencies
In Tanna, “…[the] people feel they belong less to a social order than to a place,” states French Ethnographer Joël Bonnemaison’s “The Tree and the Canoe.” This statement from his 400+ page documentation of the mythical history shaping Tannese cultures is the empirical basis for extended Residencies-In-Context at VPF’s Tanna Center for The Arts.
Artists arrive to weeks of solitary acclimation time in humble bungalows on the Coral Sea. Following this they will be afforded “Place Menus” with options that root the balance of a five week to two month stay in solitude or in peaceful, communal quarters among local and visiting artists, academic teams and others. This enables a deeper engagement with Place and the value of collaborative thinking and process. Finally, artists are returned to bungalow life or may opt to complete a collaborative project that fulfills their personal aims.
Modernization’s impacts are felt even in Tanna’s remote eastern tribal villages on this 25 mile long island known for centuries of fierce resistance to outside influence.
Self-Sustaining Operations and Youth Outreach
Both low tech & high tech ed will be engaged to correspond to each phase of the project’s development: The construction stage will introduce bamboo curing and sustainable forestry. During early operations, programming ranges from training in chemically benign water & waste management to biofuels made from local coconut harvests to replace the use of polluting benzene and other petroleum diesel currently used in generators. Over time, solar lantern, PV and composting thermal hot water classes can be initiated to provide education that is of value at home and across the archipelago.
In May 2011, a small group of artists, designers, composers and thinkers from across the island and the globe will unite at Tanna’s Center for The Arts, to make Contemporary Art from within the region’s creative society amid current demands of climate, cultural and economic change.
Biography
Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in New York. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine, and a host of other periodicals. Miller’s first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was published by MIT Press in April 2004, and was included in several year-end lists of the best books of 2004, including the Guardian (UK) and Publishers Weekly. In 2005, Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media by contemporary cultural theorists will follow Rhythm Science.
Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture (year 2000); the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His 2004 solo show at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Path Is Prologue, echoed his live music/theater/film performance, “DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of A Nation, which ran simultaneously at the Lincoln Center Festival after premieres in Vienna and at Spoleto USA in Charleston, SC and continues to tour globally.
But even with all this, Miller is most well known under the moniker of his “constructed persona” as “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid”. Miller has recorded a huge volume of music and has collaborated a wide variety of musicians and composers such as Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth among many others. He also composed and recorded the music score for the Cannes and Sundance Award winning film Slam, starring critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams.
DJ Spooky: djspooky.com
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ANDREW SENIOR
Machine Translation
Machine Translation is an investigation into the inexactitude of translation and the corruptibility of transmitted texts, particularly oral literature. Machine Translation takes as its starting point an English text (in each case the translation of a work that was originally orally transmitted) and repeatedly translates parts of that text into a foreign language, displaying the translation momentarily, and then back into English. Inevitably, the double translation is not the same as the original text and the document is changed, just as an oral message in the children’s game “Telephone” or “Chinese Whispers” is changed. Translations are carried out automatically using Google’s machine translation API. The intermediate language is selected randomly among German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Turkish. The project has been realized in the following texts: The Odyssey, Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Volsunga saga.
Shibboleths
Founded on the idea of biblical origin, shibboleth has come into the English language to mean any word of phrase that is used to identify a particular group because of their different pronunciation, whether this is by habit or inability to pronounce certain sounds. Shibboleths have been used throughout history to distinguish friends from enemies and to place strangers. In this work you are invited to listen to a selection of shibboleths, and in the interactive version add your own pronunciations to the collection.
Biography
Andrew Senior is a British artist working in New York in sculpture and electronic art. He has exhibited internationally, including an honorable mention in the Prix Vida 8.0, Blind Art foundation prize (UK) and Madrid Abierto 2008. He studied art at SUNY Purchase and Art Students League, NY. He has co-chaired ACM Multimedia Conference Art Track (2005) and continues to serve as a program committee member. He has curated exhibitions in New York and Singapore and published several articles about electronic art. Senior’s art is informed by his technical research in human-computer interaction, multimedia and computer vision, for which he holds several patents and has published extensively. He currently works on speech recognition in the Research group at Google, New York.