This book accompanies a two-artist exhibition co-curated by Alessio Ascari and Shinji Nanzuka, bringing together for the very first time the work of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and Swiss artist HR Giger. Touring from PARCO Museum in Tokyo to PARCO Event Hall in Osaka between December 2020 and February 2021, the exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of Giger’s birth and features over 50 works ranging from the late 1960s to the present day.
The catalogue, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger, features a foreword by co-curator Alessio Ascari, a critical essay by Venus Lau, an interview with the late HR Giger by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrick Frey, and a recent interview with Sorayama by Ascari. It comes with a 50x70cm two-sided poster, and two 20cm die-cut stickers.
Born and trained at opposite ends of the world, Sorayama and Giger are apparently at odds—one’s bright colors are swallowed by the other’s dark chiaroscuro; one’s enthusiastic outlook on technology borders with the other’s nightmarish dystopia; one’s “super-realism” challenges the other’s surrealism—yet they share more than meets the eye. Both emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming acknowledged masters of airbrush painting and influential creators beyond the boundaries of the traditional art world, blurring the relationship between commercial and personal work. But more importantly, at the very core of their practice lies a similar concern: an obsessive investigation of AI, eternal life, and the fusion of organic and apparatus. Gynoids (female androids) are predominant subjects, conjuring the post-human and the apotheosis of the woman to reveal an underlying tension between life, death, power and desire.
Hajime Sorayama (b. 1947 in Imabari, Ehime prefecture) has established his position as a legendary artist, both within Japan and internationally, for his extensive oeuvre that centers upon an ongoing pursuit for beauty in the human body and the machine. Best known for his precisely detailed, hand-painted portrayals of voluptuous women, obtained through an astoundingly artful use of a wide array of realistic expressional techniques, most prominently airbrush painting, the artist’s international recognition is inextricably tied to his signature series titled “Sexy Robot” (1978-) featuring erotic android figures clad in shiny chrome metal, and to AIBO, the award-winning robotic pet he designed for SONY in 1999.
Hans Ruedi Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer known for his biomechanical creatures, extraterrestrial landscapes, and disturbing sexual machines. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he employed a staggering variety of media, including furniture, movie props, prints, paintings and sculptures, often creating exhibition displays and total environments with the immersive quality of a wunderkammer—including, most notably, the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères. In 1979, his concept design for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects and catapulted to fame his daunting vision of death and futurism.
Designed by Kasper-Florio
With texts by Alessio Ascari, Venus Lau, Hans Ulrich Obrist
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2nd edition – 100 numbered copies
A Manifesto for a fictional political movement that through satire and pop culture references shines a light on the sterotypes and prejudices within the gay male community.
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Entitled “Mixtape”, this catalogue brings together works by Dominique Hurth from 2008 to 2020. It comprises one text booklet with contributions by Daniela Cascella, Sonja Lau and the artist herself; one image booklet with 136 images from installation shots of Hurth’s work and one audio-tape (45-min each side) with recordings, music and sound material inherent to the research behind the works. The chosen format reflects on her interest in object-biography, technology and its history.
“We listened to historical recordings and futurist sounds, to tracks taking in everything from minimal wave and Detroit techno to hip-hop and chansons. We listened to the voices of the first speaking dolls that sounded like little monsters, to the voices of Sarah Bernhardt and Serge Gainsbourg as he burned a 500 Franc note on French TV. To Clarice Lispector as she lit a cigarette while being asked why she continued to write. We listened to music created in laboratories, music that was sent into outer space. We listened to lyrics and then languages and voices w couldn’t understand. Machine-generated sounds. Sounds created on celluloid. James Joyce reciting four pages of Finnegans Wake to Charles Ogden in the late 1920s. We listened to advertisements for vocoders and to music with vocoders as the primary transmitter of voice and the main musical instrument. We listened to France Gall singing — or rather, screaming — into the microphone at the Eurovisio Song Contest at the age of nineteen about being a doll made of wax and a doll made of sound. To a litany of okays sung by The Destroyer in a song by the Residents. To the breathing of Pauline Oliveros’s accordion. To the Holy Ghost in the Machine. To Minnie Riperton’s voice in the background, to atonal music, and to computer-generated hand claps. Electronic communication with the dead.
Jazz.
A countdown to zero. We listened to beats.
The several hours of sound that we listened to eventually became two side of forty-five minutes each — Side A and Side B. Condensed and edited in this way, this mixtape actually conceals and contains several other mixtapes, recalling all the other tracks that burst out of the edges of the magnetic band.” (”Mixtape(s)”, D. Hurth, 2020)
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KALEIDOSCOPE‘s new issue #38 (spring/summer 2021), coming with a set of six covers:
Designer Grace Wales Bonner talks to Rhea Dillon about elevating Blackness within fashion, looking back to her Caribbean heritage in search for beauty, nature, and spirituality. The inspirations behind her latest collections, a trilogy exploring Britain and the Caribbean as a diasporic journey, resonate beautifully in an extensive photo story shot by Marc Asekhame.
An extensive trend report titled Office Goals addresses the office intended both as a physical space and a powerful symbol of organized labor, providing an opportunity to question contemporary methodologies of working—from automation, neoliberal dystopias and the all-you-can-work freelance economy, to elevated ideas of “everywhere studio.” Within this frame, Alessio Ascari interviews Hans Ulrich Obrist, the epitome of the globetrotting curator, about how the pandemic affected his workflow, driving him to prioritize research and a decentralized approach. The report also comprises an essay by Alessandro Bava, a visual timeline by Jonathan Olivares, and a roundtable of architects and designers with ANY, Paul Cournet, Fredi Fischli & Niels Olsen, Josh Itiola, and Oana Stănescu.
Celebrated artist duo Gilbert & George, famously challenging taboos and moralism in the art world and society alike, are pictured by Chris Rhodes in the company of pro skater and multi-hyphenate Blondey McCoy—with whom they engage in an unapologetic chat about Britishness, religion, the monarchy, happiness, drugs, gentrification, and how to stay normal and weird.
In conversation with Isabel Flower, skateboarder, multimedia artist, videographer and photographer Adam Zhu discusses his commitment to safeguard his community’s powerful cultural alchemy, capturing a new generation of artists coming of age on Downtown Manhattan’s East Side.
Associated with Gulf Futurism, art collective DIS, fashion brand Telfar, and filmmaker Mati Diop, composer Fatima Al Qadiri (photographed by Charlie Engman) meets with Courtney Malick on the occasion of her newly-released solo album, which stems from an adolescent fantasy and chooses melancholy as a space for spiritual growth.
A special, limited-edition cover introduces a series of new drawings by LA artist Paul McCarthy (photographed by Daniel Regan, interview by Massimiliano Gioni), in which the scrapes the bottom of the barrel, conjuring up cheap psychology, mind-altering drugs, Trump, Hitler, and Hollywood populism, to expose the American pathology.
ABSTRACT, our text-only editorial segment dedicated to urgent research questions of our time, critically embraces the notion of counterculture, looking at it from different angles: the phenomenon of protests and the role of pleasure; the disintegration of civilized society and psycho-deflation; Detroit techno as a liberation technology. Through three essays by Michelle Lhooq, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and DeForrest Brown, Jr., the magazine becomes a Temporary Autonomous Zone in its own right—one in which “the only possible truth is change” (Timothy Leary).
Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test, a special supplement created in partnership with Red Bull Arts, traverses the slippages between memory, the archive, and history, excavating the personal photographs and videos entrusted to the artist over the past decade by various family members, friends, and pivotal figures of Kingston’s dancehall community.
Also featured in this issue: Ray Johnson (words by Lucas Mascatello); Nan Goldin (words by Nan Goldin); Valerio Olgiati (interview by Martti Kalliala); Michel Majerus (words by Sarah Johanna Theurer); Rachel Kushner (words by Whitney Mallett); Joshua Citarella (interview by New Models); and Slam Jam Archive (words by Katja Horvat).
And finally, “SEASON,” the magazine’s opening section, accounts for the best of this spring/summer with profiles and interviews: Tabboo! by Allan Gardner; Aria Dean by Hanna Girma; Memphis by Luis Ortega Govela; Pol Taburet by Rhea Dillon; Art Club2000 by Lola Kramer; Grant Levy-Lucero by Jesse Seegers; Priscavera by Irina Baconsky; Nancy Holt by Cat Kron; Klára Hosnedlová by Kate Brown; The Opioid Crisis Lookbook by Patrick McGraw; Ryūichi Sakamoto by Tom Mouna; Online Ceramics by Katja Horvat; Oko Ebombo by Conor McTernan; Issy Wood by Harry Burke; Public Access by Isabel Flower; D’heygere by Madeleine Holth.
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We are happy to announce Motto’s pop-up bookstore participation at the 58th October Salon – Belgrade Biennale curated by Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, Founding Directors and Editors in Chief of CURA.; Various Venues, June 25 – August 22, 2021.
Foreword by Bill Sherman
Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.
The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.
The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images.
Contributions from writers, philosophers and curators including: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, Eknath Easwaran, GPT-2, GPT-3, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Kite, Jason Edward Lewis, Catherine Malabou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Archer Pechawis, Noah Raford, Nisha Ramayya, Beth Singler and Hito Steyerl.
Artworks by: Anni Albers, Pablo Amaringo, Refik Anadol, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Federico Díaz, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Pierre Huyghe, C. G. Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Lucy Siyao Liu, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.
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With & about Sara de Chiara, Rafael Corcostegui, Moyra Davey, Pierre Dulieu, Guillaume Dustan, Jana Euler, Sylvie Fanchon, Jim Fletcher, Alexander García Düttmann, Jeanne Graff, Gary Haller, Alex Hay, Martin Laborde, Daniel Lentz, Mina Loy, Liz Magor, Nick Mauss, Nicolas Moufarrege, Baptiste Pinteaux, Richard Rezac, Clément Roussier, Edith Schloss, Albert Serra, Pierre Thévenin, Belén Uriel, Charles Veyron, Robin Waart, Emily Wardill, and Román Yñán.
octopus notes is an annual journal that gathers critical essays, academic writing, interviews, archival documents and artists’ projects since 2013. Each issue exists without a theme, but shapes echo through its content.
Dissent Without Modification (Bergen Kunsthall), written by Grace Ndiritu, is a research book composed of interviews with radical and progressive artists and thinkers, who started their education and careers in the 1990s. Some are well-known, some are not. They are African, European, and American women working as painters, photographers, performers, hackers, activists and educators, among other roles such as Lisha Sterling, Monster Chetwynd and Kathrin Böhm.
What connects these brilliant women together, now in their late thirties, mid forties, early fifties and sixties; is that the decade of the 1990s had a culturally significant impact on their politics, career and personal life choices. The decade represented a creative coming of age for them all and their lives changed forever. The consequences of those changes are still reflected in their distinctive thoughts and practices today.
The long format interviews that comprise Dissent Without Modification are casual, meandering, philosophical conversations with a wide ranging appeal. Each person’s character is slowly revealed within a backdrop of humour, while touching on many serious universal and global subjects. Topics include pedagogy, race relations, neo-paganism, sexual violence, class warfare, interracial marriage, ecological feminism, contemporary slavery, activism, extreme tourism, African politics, terrorist practice in Western democratic states, and much more.
Dissent Without Modification illuminates the 1990s in a new way, and regards it as a pivotal point in the lineage of today’s grass-roots politics and cultural ferment. on show. The book recalls the Seattle Riots against the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement; the recent televisual phenomenon Catfish recalling MTV’s Real World and the spread of the Occupy movement and the birth of Black Lives Matter through the recent Ferguson and Missouri uprisings. Dissent Without Modification offers first-hand perspectives on the 1990s as the decade “when shit went bad and which we never recovered from,” – to quote Hank Moody, the cantankerous main character of Californication, cult TV show.
At last in Dissent Without Modification Grace Ndiritu takes readers on a circular, revealing expedition into the recent past, sharing its impact with a new generation of readers.
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