HARDcoded :: Digital Punk Magicians – EN3MY, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. 3rd Floor, Chicago, IL, December 8, 2007, 1-9 PM
FREE + OPEN!
++ simultaneously streaming @
CentroMultiMedia + BORDER
Mexico City DF, Mexico
HARDcoded is an ongoing collaboration between newMedia artists in Chicago + Mexico City, that explore the cross-over between digital noise, punk, + magic. HARDcoded is a wordplay between embedded/non-mailable data sets in software development, like End User License Agreements (or EULA) or closed-source proprietary computer applications, + the xXxHARDCORExXx ethic of Punk culture. Our (artists + organizers alike) approach to reconstruct/disrupt the controlled environment of digital technology by breaking these social devices with wizardry. Here, wizardry is informed by Tolkien references in early moments of information technology + digital networking, as well as playfully applying narratives of spell casting, enchantment, + fantasy to the otherwise dull architecture of cyberspace. This wizardy of course would be nothing without “magic.” This “magic,” which serves as ironic term with a critical bent, can break the spell of traditional methods of cultural communication + sharing in an ever-growing oppressive state.
HARDcoded seeks to create a space where ruptures in our digital playing field (glitch, noise, + hacked/repurposed material/tools) can take precedence over the norms of our contemporary static digital landscape. The collaboration borrows from a Punk ethics/ethos + the necessity for a sustainable break away from the normative practices of commercial platforms. By invoking these ideologies/methodologies HARDcoded hopes to provide/facilitate a DIY/DIT network of subversion. In attempting to approach this task, HARDcoded wishes to provide a social platform of workshops, talks, + performances (and hybrids of these three) to enable these fissures to break through the veil of our closed-source expectations + reliance.
The Program consists of workshops/talks by:
[1PM – 2.30PM ] Alex Ignlizian + Mark Beasley + Cassandra Rosas (Hardware Hacking/Building)
[2.30 PM – 3 PM] Jake Elliot dai5ychain.net (Reprogramming Computer Literacy)
[3 PM – 3.30 PM] Marisa Plumb Working Engineer, Pathegon corp. (Lecture/Performance)
[3. 30 PM – 4.30 PM] Temporary Services temporaryservices.org (Lecture on Urban Hacktivism)
[4.30 PM – 5 PM] criticalartware criticalartware.net (Media Art Histories Lecture)
[5 PM – 7 PM] Installation By: Mark Beasley (DotMatrix Printer + Sound Installation) Paul Hertz collaboratory.nunet.net/phertz/ (Ignotus the Mage, Performance/Installation)
[7 PM – 9 PM]
Nightly Performances/screening by:
Valerie Brewer (Machinima Video)
Professor Pangaea (Machinima Video)
CHHO (The Chicago Hacked Hardware Orchestra, Performance from Workshop)
criticalartware w/ Morgan Higby Flowers criticalartware.net (Realtime Artware Development Performance)
I <3 Presets ilovepresets.com (Realtime Audio/Video performance) @ EN3MY in Chicago, IL, United States.
Simultaneously, in Mexico City the HARDcoded Program consists of an open invitation for completely horizontally organized discussion + reflection
@ CentroMultiMedia in Mexico City, Mexico
+ Performances/Screenings by Ezequiel Netri, Lalo Melendez, Jaime Villarreal, Eusebio Bañuelos
+ an open jam session @ the BORDER in Mexico City, Mexico!
Prisoners’ Inventions – Destroy Athens (Athens Biennial), Athens, Greece, September 10 – November 18, 2007
We are presenting Prisoners’ Inventions in its entirety including some brand new drawings and inventions that haven’t been shown before.
From the web site:
Destroy Athens is an attempt to challenge the ways in which identities and behaviours are determined through stereotypical descriptions. The notion of ‘Athens’ – as the archetypal city that has become emblematic in terms of stereotypes – is used as a metaphor for this feeling of extra-determination or entrapment that the stereotype inflicts upon the personal sense of identity and social behaviour. ‘Destruction’ is used as the term for the possibility of action against the stereotype, which however does not automatically offer a substitute in its place, something like an exploration of the violent reaction that someone has when they are trapped, without actually using this reaction strategically to replace something with something else. [More]
Booklets – Pedagogical Factory: Exploring Strategies for an Educated City, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, July 22 – September 23, 2007
We are providing an extensive selection of booklets for this.
From the HPAC web site:
The Stockyard Institute will initiate an interactive exhibition titled Pedagogical Factory, using the Hyde Park Art Center as a site to critically explore the intersection between art, education, and the city. Working with other artists, collaboratives, and groups, such as The Center for Urban Pedagogy (New York), rum46 (Denmark), Think Tank (Philadelphia), Artlink (UK), and AREA Chicago Art, Research, Education and Activism (Chicago), to name a few, the Stockyard Institute will transform the gallery space into a temporary factory that will design and implement an extensive series of programs and events throughout the two month project. From this exciting, collaborative stage, Pedagogical Factory will interrogate the overlap between education, economics, art, and activism, creating a venue to explore alternatives to traditional notions of education and social art.[Continues here]
Group Work and “Group Therapy” – Two days of talking about groups – The Experimental Station, 6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago, Saturday, July 28, Sunday, July 29, 2007
Schedule and Basics: Saturday, July 28, 7-10 pm
Book release party for Group Work, edited by Temporary Services and published by Printed Matter.
Group Work is a collection of interviews conducted by Temporary Services, along with original writing and supplementary materials around the subject of people working together. Temporary Services talked with AA Bronson from the Canadian group General Idea, the Chicago group Haha, the dutch band The Ex, the Vienna-based group WochenKlausur, Croatian curatorial collective What, How and for Whom (WHW), artist and Funkadelic album designer Pedro Bell, and members of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D). These interviews are published alongside essays on The Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (better known as Jane) and the anarchist guerilla street theater group known as the Diggers. A massive collection of quotes about collaboration, a list of words used to describe group practices and a working list of hundreds of artist groups from the last four decades rounds out the publication.
Temporary Services will talk briefly about their work as a group and the process of creating Group Work.
Free to attend, feel free to bring food or drink to share. Copies of Group Work will be for sale. Local interviewees from the book will attend.
Group Work is also available directly through Printed Matter, the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists. You can order it for retail or wholesale through www.printedmatter.org or ask your favorite bookstore to carry it.
Sunday, July 29, 12:00 – 3:30 pm
“Group Therapy”
A day of talk sessions designed for those who are active in group work, as well as former group members. We will discuss working in groups! Moderated/ facilitated by members of Temporary Services and The Experimental Station.
Participants can come for one or both sessions. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to the slated session start time.
Session 1 (12:00 – 1:30 pm): Working in Groups
A discussion where participants can openly discuss the personal, emotional, social and political challenges of working in groups. Where has your group run into trouble? What happened when members left? How is the future looking? Is your group process a healthy one? How do you make decisions? Bring your questions and concerns to the table and let’s compare experiences and talk about what has and hasn’t worked for others.
Lunch/break/group
socializing (bring your own) 1:30-2:00 pm
Session 2 (2:00 – 3:30 pm): Recording Group Histories
Given that there are so few useful historical accounts and limited museum holdings devoted to artist groups, what are some successful strategies for presenting and preserving information about group work? How have defunct groups handled their archives? Who gets to tell the story of a group’s practice? What happens when people stop talking to each other, move away or die? How do groups document their own history? Let’s compare strategies.
Temporary Services is a group of three people: Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer. They collaborate on projects, publications, and websites, including Groups and Spaces, a linked list of group work practitioners available to view at www.groupsandspaces.net. Temporary Services members are part of a group of eleven keyholders that facilitate events at Mess Hall in Chicago.
Temporary Services thanks Sara Black (Material Exchange), Jamie Kalven (Invisible Institute), and Dan Peterman, all working in conjunction with the Experimental Station, for helping to make this weekend of events happen.
The Experimental Station is a not-for-profit (501c3) incubator of innovative cultural, educational, and environmental projects and small-scale enterprises. It’s located at 6100 S. Blackstone, south of the Midway Plaisance and the University of Chicago campus. Please go to www.experimentalstation.org for more information.
Temporary
Services
PO Box 121012
Chicago, IL 60612
(773) 562-1428
www.temporaryservices.org
Booklets – Loutec, Centro de documentación y actividades paralelas, Proyectos Valenzuela y Klenner, Bogotá, Colombia, July 14-17, 2007
We contributed a stack of booklets to this exhibition. Our friend Esteban Garcia, who co-designed the cover of our Group Work book, has co-organized the exhibition with Catalina Lozano who wrote:
The event… consists of a temporary and lo-tech documentation center, showing and making available independent publishing initiatives. The importance of this is to diffuse content and information in the local scene and foster independent initiatives as well. We will also have projection programme to show videos and films.
The Library Project – The Library Show, Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn, NY, June 12 – July 8, 2007
We are participating in Proteus Gowanus’s ambitious exhibition of library projects. We are including material from our own Library
Project, which has an overview of the project, related ephemera, recent developments, and free copies of reprints of the booklet.
Here is a PDF of the panels we made for this show: 
Group Work – Printed Matter, New York, March 30 – May 3, 2007
From the Printed Matter web site:
Printed Matter Inc. is happy to announce the opening of the exhibition Group Work, together with the launch of a publication by the same name by the Chicago-based artists’ collective Temporary Services. Please join us on Friday, March 30 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM for a reception celebrating this exhibition and publication. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue at 22nd Street in New York City.
Temporary Services presents their Aesthetic Analysis of Human Groupings, an installation consisting of words and symbols for human groupings, as well as hundreds of photos of social groupings appropriated from books and magazines, displayed throughout the exhibition space. Five booklet ‘pods’ showcase eleven of the collective’s publications. In addition, the group has chosen books by groups from Printed Matter’s inventory as an extension of the exhibition. A window installation completes the project: the collective’s vast array of publications dangles from strings for public perusal.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Printed Matter will launch Group Work, the latest book in Printed Matter’s Emerging Artist Publication Series. Based on a pamphlet published by Temporary Services in 2002 titled Group Work: A Compilation of Quotes About Collaboration from a Variety of Sources and Practices, this publication provides a multitude of perspectives on the theme of Group Work by practitioners of artistic group practice from 1960s to the present. The publication presents interviews with Canadian collective General Idea; Chicago collective Haha; the dutch punk band The Ex; the Vienna-based WochenKlausur; Croatian artist group What, How and for Whom (WHW); Funkadelic album designer Pedro Bell; and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D); along with essays on The Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (better known as Jane) and the anarchist Guerilla street theater group The Diggers. A list of words used to describe group practices and a working list of hundreds of collectives from the last four decades rounds out the publication.
In the Printed Matter storefront, we are presenting our Aesthetic Analysis of Human Groupings, a display of many of the words that can be used to describe human groupings, as well as hundreds of photos of groups. We’ll have some of our other booklets on display in booklet pods, as well as a display of other books and ephemera by and about groups that we found in Printed Matter’s vast inventory. In the window, we’re hanging an array of our booklets from string for anybody to stop in and read.
Thanks to AA Bronson and everyone at Printed Matter for all of their efforts and expertise!
Free Radicals – Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel, Opens February 24, 2007
Description from the web site:
The exhibition “Free Radicals” features contemporary and historical projects created by individual artists as well as by artist/activist collectives that breach the boundaries of art and cross into other fields. The exhibition embraces a wide range of work, striving to point in the general direction in which contemporary artistic autonomy is headed and wherein it is shaped, as well as the possibilities it opens up for art when it strives to operate within society. At the same time, the exhibition sets out to propose a historical reading of the various projects as part of a broader artistic phenomenon that forms an alternative to the bourgeois history of art. [Read more in the exhibition brochure.]
Israeli Center for Digital Art
2007 DePauw Biennial – Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN, February 14 – May 10, 2007
Biggest Temporary Gang Ever – AKA a collaborative project with Biggest Fags Ever and Ausgang. We have made a giant beer can that unpacks to make a table, grill, and giant balloon inflator. We have also made a 6000 pack of beer and soda cans. In addition, we published a newspaper – cover pictured above.
Download the BTGE Newspaper:
Pass It On! Connecting Contemporary Do-It-Yourself Culture – Art & Design Gallery of Columbia College, Chicago, March 1 – April 14, 2007
Exhibition Mission Statement:
“Do-It-Yourself” as an activity and as a concept has been fueling individual and collaborative creativity for centuries, not just within the US, where it became part of the social fabric under the umbrella of “yankee ingenuity”, but in a multitude of other political and cultural environments as well.
One can easily trace, throughout the history of humanity, a continuous desire to adapt and improve existing conventions, tools and practices, so that they may better fit each individual’s purposes. We share not only the need to learn from others’ experiences but also the desire to hand down instruction sets to others, so that they in turn may use and alter them in their own unique and creative ways.
Politically subversive in its inherent rejection of pre-formulated consumer culture, DIY philosophy has taken roots within many aspects of social and personal relationships, within the visual and applied arts, the sciences and within innumerable technological developments of the last decades. Many historically significant art movements such as Russian Futurism, Dada, Situationism, Fluxus, and Beuys’ vision of the social sculpture embody DIY characteristics and have led to contemporary manifestations in the works of Temporary Services, the Center for Applied Autonomy, or Critical Art Ensemble.
This exhibition will focus on the different aspects inherent in most successful DIY projects be they of historical, political, or artistic importance. We will examine the remarkable breadth of DIY in today’s culture and cover such diverse areas of activity as self-publishing, personal journalism, podcasting, amateur science, architecture and independent filmmaking. The show aims at leading visitors into active exploration of, and participation in, a variety of DIY projects, that we found to be exemplary and empowering, and discusses work that readily gives up any claim of proprietary and lasting authorship. In association with the physical installation this event will include a web project, a catalog, as well as lectures and workshops within the gallery space.
Here is a booklet with an interview of us by the exhibition curators:
Temporary Services Motherfuckers – Galerija Nova, Zagreb, Croatia, February 27, 2007
We are presenting several projects and collections of material: Ancient Order Flyers; Construction Site video; a large assortment of our booklets; Public Phenomena archive with many new entries from Chicago, Copenhagen, Berlin and Zagreb; a new project working with plastic bags called Personal Plastic; plus a new booklet to accompany the show.
We have put the following Public Phenomena slide shows online:
Block Club
Signs and Ghost Buildings
Basket Ball
Hoops, Parking Place Savers and Piles of Bikes
Cropped Trees and Homemade Barriers
Roadside Memorials, Antennas & Satellite Dishes and Personal Piles
Here is the booklet we made for this exhibition:
Audio Relay 2002 – Contemporary Art Initiative, Lafayette, Indiana, March 27, 2006 – 2007
Rosanne Altstatt, currently based at Purdue University, is hosting our Audio Relay (2002) in Indiana. She has curated a wide variety of work to broadcast throughout the AR’s stay in Lafayette, Indiana.
Some words from Rosanne:
The following days will feature non-commercial sounds by artists from Europe, North America and South America, broadcast intermittently from different parts of Greater Lafayette, always between 9 pm and 12 am. This is an attempt to widen the scope of Lafayette’s local radio, which is currently limited to classic rock, top ten pop charts, top ten classical music and plenty of religion.
Artists include: 0100101110101101.org, Dave Allen, anonymous, ArtLab Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, AZ, Luca Bertini, Candice Breitz, Hans Brändli, Andrew Bucksbarg, Charizma, Tony Cokes, Shawn Decker, Paul Dickinson, Dr. Muu, Barnaby Drabble, William Engelen, Alex Fahl, Jason Freeman, Kirsten Geisler, Jårg Geismar, Dani Gal, Eugenia Gortchakova and Wolfgang Wortmann, Gudrun Gut und monika enterprise, Hammermusik, Norbert Herber, Tim Jaeger, Mikael Jorgensen, Markus Kaiser, Kammerflimmer Kollektif, Keyboard + Nobara, Korpys/Löffler, Andreas Korte, Mischa Kuball, Stephen Lacy, Achim Lengerer, David McKenzie, Christian Marclay, Christoph Micklisch, Otto, Lisl Ponger, RAKEHILL, Honke Rambow, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Brandon Schakola, Rüdiger Schlömer, Jochen Schmidt, Hartwig Schwarz, Tim Sharp, spurse, Toliver, Sven Vieweg, Dennis Vriend, Detlef Weinrich, Scott Wolniak, Volker Zander, Georg Zeitblom, Philip von Zweck
More info at:
unocerodos.org/snebtor
radiochiguiro.unocerodos.org
Distribution Religion – The Art Gallery of Knoxville, January 1 – 27, 2007
From the great folks at AGoK:
“Distribution Religion” was developed in 1973 by Chicago artists Dan Sandin and Phil Morton as a text to describe the schematic plans for Sandin’s Image Processor, an analog computer optimized for video processing. The “Distribution Religion” expressed a determined belief in the idea of free and open copying, which is a central aspect of the Chicago School and a notion that has begun to become important to many contemporary artists.
From January 1 – 27, The Art Gallery of Knoxville will examine situations of sharing and exchange provided by three contemporary Chicago groups: criticalartware, People Powered , and Temporary Services. Each of these artists have developed interests in distribution and it’s role as an important social / cultural concern. Read rest of the text here.