Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art presents contemporary art works under the fictional rubric of a museum collection conceived by and designed for extraterrestrials. This ambitious, playful and irreverent exhibition features over 100 artists and more than 175 works, primarily sculptures along with mixed media, video, photography and works on paper. Artists range from emerging to internationally recognised figures, including Joseph Beuys, Cai Guo-Qiang, Maurizio Cattelan, Jimmie Durham, Barbara Hepworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Damien Hirst, Brian Jungen, Sherrie Levine, Goshka Macuga, Bruce Nauman, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Daniel Spoerri, Haim Steinbach, Francis Upritchard, Jeffrey Vallance, Andy Warhol and Rebecca Warren.
This exhibition is partly inspired by the first chapter of Thierry de Duve”s Kant after Duchamp, in which an imaginary anthropologist from outer space sets out to inventory “all that is called art by humans”. Adopting a pseudo-anthropological approach, the Museum employs eccentric taxonomies and surprising juxtapositions. The fictitious Martian perspective opens up contemporary art to fresh interpretations and allows for its reassessment from an alien standpoint, thus mimicking the way that Western anthropologists historically interpreted non-Western cultures through foreign eyes. Looking at contemporary art as though from outer space offers the potential to make the familiar strange and to turn the dominant Euro-American art tradition into the “Other”. It also raises pertinent questions about the use and value of contemporary art in human culture.
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
Barbican Art Gallery
Silk Street
London
EC2Y 8DS
United Kingdom (Earth)
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
6 Mar-18 May/08

David Rokeby “Plots Against Time”

Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist David Rokeby.

Machine for Taking Time (boul. Saint-Laurent) (2007) is the second in an ongoing series of works in which video cameras on motorized mounts survey particular places over time, building up large image databases from which the final work is constructed. The original, commissioned by the Oakville Galleries, Canada, surveyed the Gairloch Gardens. In this new work, 2 high definition cameras observed the city of Montréal to the east and to the west from the top of a 5 story building over the course of one year. The computer now wanders through these databases, stitching together leisurely continuous pans around the city, staying true to the original spatial trajectory but shifting unpredictably through time.

Grand Theft Bicycle

In Grand Theft Bicycle the user sits on his or her heavily-armed Borgcycle™, faces a large projection screen, and rides his or her way to victory!

The player is given total control of his or her direction through the revolutionary Borgcycle™ interface: pedaling increases the player’s speed through the 3D environment; turning the steering wheel turns the player to the left or the right in the environment; squeezing the front brake shoots weapons; squeezing the back brake stops the bike and holding it down reverses the bike…..more here

Interactivity presentation

“live people as part of the collage“