Earlier this year we participated in the NODE Forum for Digital Arts. Congratulations to the festival and the documentation team on this beautiful glimpse of what happened that week in Frankfurt.

How could we have been so arrogant? To have thought that we understood the subtleties of time. Those sadly quaint little mechanisms we wore on our wrists or carried in our pockets. The artifice could only last so long. Our elegant math was bound to expire. Like every other logical system, time too had its limits.

At first it was a quiet revolution, born in the minds of the most unlikely of saboteurs. Due to the private nature of these encounters the rip in the seam of time they created was barely noticeable. After all, only the most privileged could afford the first generation of the technology. It made its appearances at society parties, country clubs and upscale casinos. But eventually the word got out. Rumors of distortions and accelerations.

Despite the fearful descriptions heard in wisps of gossip, the technology spread. Almost as if its destructive power made it more alluring – never mind the stated benefits of what it supposedly enabled you to do. Who could have known that a device designed to enable us to communicate wordlessly would be capable of taking a person’s world apart, if even just for an afternoon. Some found it thrilling; others, terrifying. The critical design flaw had been our inability to take tempo into account. It would seem bogglingly obvious in retrospect, but it was already too late.

While the internal clock was undeniably ticking in each of us, we were wholly unprepared for the wild differences in the speed of the tick.

—

See also my dear friend Sam Wilson’s fragment Bad Bishop – and just for good measure, soundtrack for your reading pleasure, a track I made years ago called Everybody’s Bishop, the name of which Sam supplied me before I started composing.

we’re tired of impossible visions of the distant future
we want graspable, tangible stories of the near future

people crave stories they can identify with
they want to see characters they can identify with

companies are fictions
they are VENTURE fictions
they come into existence because of their founders abilities to weave a convincing near-future fiction about themselves and their business viability

storytelling makes the economy
it makes products come into existence

kickstarter is a prototype of the future
the demand economy will not only require new forms of storytelling – it will enable us to envision the future we want to live in and manifest that future into reality.

we believe in the power of media to manifest reality

media as a collective vision of the subconscious will
the societal drive towards a better tomorrow
a vision of a yet-to-be experienced daydream that could become a reality if we all just decide we want it enough

science fiction is dead because it fetishizes the past visions of the future
we’re in 2013. The world hasn’t ended, there’s no monolith, and we haven’t been invaded by extra terrestrials.

GET OVER IT.

our generation is not going to be satisfied with the visions of the future from the 60s any longer
the clean white seamless Kubrick fantasy is over

we call for a cinema of resourcefulness
a cinema of hyperrealism which depicts a near-future reality based on a fundament of the known with a twist of the yet-to-be-but-likely-to-occur.

this new wave of emotion rises like an intuitive grasp at a different economy
an economy in which our ability to project our desires into reality is what has become seamless and perfected
not the plasticine-white-alabaster smoothness of a space golf lounge,
but rather the mental-psycho-spiritual-mediated continuum of thought-media-action-object
it won’t be long before we’ll be able to go to sleep
and wake up with a series of sculptures printed by our bedsides
artifacts extracted from our dreams and extruded in resin.

the near future is more subtle than you expect and more shocking than you think.
the disruption is a disruption of the fundaments of time and space.
the inner space
the inner space is the frontier where the most interesting things will be occurring
this will happen on a physical level with nanotechnology, a biological level too
but the arena we’re interested in on this level of the inner space
is the inner space of the mind
the mind is the frontier of the story
and the story our cultures will be telling in the near future will be the reality of the near future thereafter

it has always been the case that the human animal has a relationship with media
in which the externalization of the human thought into artifact
is the progenitor of the subsequent reality into which the human consciousness pours itself.
like the Salingeresque young girl pouring god into god.

—

This entry was re-blogged by Bruce Sterling on his Beyond the Beyond blog on Wired.com

Since the presentation of An Introduction to Hypercubism at the NODE Forum for Digital Arts in Frankfurt (video coming soon, hopefully!), the little leaflet containing this text has been travelling quickly. Last week I had the honor of presenting the leaflet to a class of art students at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in the new Volume department headed up by Caspar Stracke. In my lecture I presented a couple pieces of my videomusic, as well as some new print screen imagery I am developing. I also surveyed hypercubist aesthetics in film, video, photography and physical objects.

The following day I had a series of engaging studio visits with the Volume students. Highlights included: seeing a work in progress which contained found video footage – literally video material found on a misplaced USB stick; hearing a student’s aspirations to direct a short film dark comedy involving the mistaking of tragic death for sexual perversion; seeing work in progress of drawn self-portraits created in an essentially frameless manner; getting a synopsis of a student’s enthusiastic review of Holy Motors (which I still need to see!) in which the limousine is seen to represent the last vestige of the mechanical filmmaking apparatus; and having a student quote James Joyce and reference dance moves from a Grimes music video in the same project about seduction.

This week I’m off to Birmingham, UK for the Flatpack Festival, an eclectic celebration of the moving image. I will be speaking on Thursday in the Unpacked conference program UPDATE: Unpacked unfortunately got cancelled at the last minute, however I’ll be giving a talk titled Making Music with Objects on Sunday at noon in the Custard Factory Theatre, and wash choose peel chop rinse is included in the short film competition. I’ll be in Birmingham through the weekend and I’m looking forward to exploring the city, watching films, and getting to know the Brummie art scene.

We got older. And as we got older we realized we had rules. Not the rules of our parents. Not the rules of some big corporation or government. Rules of interaction, of engagement, etiquette even. We had grown up in a world of magical objects – things with attributes, properties, menus and options. And slowly we introduced this magic back out into the world – at least on the surface of things. In our desperation for control in a world more and more out of control, we began expressing these rules about objects in our aesthetics. Guided by visions of a near future in which the real and the virtual would be seamlessly blended, we created prototypes and simulations with increasingly higher fidelity. Yet the tyranny of the frame prevailed. Our rules collided with systems of another dimension. Stubbornly, we carried on building the simulacrum. We gritted our teeth, we dug in our heels, and we fought to stay lucid as our dreams shimmered across legions of rectangles.

Directed & Edited by Gabriel Shalom
Art Director and Production Designer: Patrizia Kommerell
Produced by KS12 as artists in residence in the Deutsche Boerse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein
Commissioned by NODE Forum for Digital Arts
Curated by Eno Henze
Festival Director: David Brüll
Assistant Curator: Jeanne Charlotte Vogt

Featuring (in order of appearance):
Dmitry Paranyushkin
Onyx Ashanti
Gabriel Shalom
Protey Temen

Guest Appearances by:
Diego Agúllo
Jessica Cooke
Tom Plümmer

I’ve been enjoying using Instagram lately as a way to share updates about our current artist’s residency in the Deutsche Börse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. We’re creating a new video essay called Another Dimension featuring the artists Dmitry Paranyushkin, Onyx Ashanti and Protey Temen and myself.

The premiere will be on February 11, 2013 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein during the NODE Forum for Digital Arts and the video will also be a part of the ongoing festival exhibition.

On February 13 I will be delivering a talk during the NODE symposium about videomusic and hypercubism.

A year ago today was the opening of The Tosso Variations at MU Eindhoven. It was my first solo exhibition and the largest videomusical work I’d ever exhibited in a museum context. I am now very pleased to finally release the material publicly. Here’s looking forward to a new year where this work will find its friends and audience in the world of experimental audiovisual composition.

Last week my piece wash choose peel chop rinse appeared in the cool new Japanese TV show called “TECHNE: The Visual Workshop” – a new experiential creative education TV show for NHK. Every show focuses on one visual technique and challenges people to create a new film using that technique. I was contacted by one of the show’s creators Masashi Kawamura to contribute my work to their episode about remix.

Masashi happens to be one of the creative geniuses behind one of my favorite (hypercubist) music videos, Sour’s song Hibi no Neiro.

I am very pleased to announce that my videomusical suite in five movements The Tosso Variations will have its first exhibition since its premiere at MU Eindhoven at the FILE: Electronic Language International Festival in São Paulo, Brazil this summer! You can take a look at the entire Media Art program on the FILE website.

On the occasion of the opening of The Tosso Variations I did an interview with Digimag. Now, many months since the original Italian was posted, I am happy to report the English version of the interview is finally online! Many thanks to Alessandra Saviotti for the provocative questions and congratulations to Marco Mancuso and the whole Digimag team on the new site relaunch! Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

Alessandra Saviotti: Gabriel. Let’s begin our conversation by starting from this statement of yours. What is hypercubism?

Gabriel Shalom: Hypercubism is a theory I have been developing for the last six years to try and explain what I see as a unique set of characteristic aesthetics of the contemporary moving image. I also call it a theory for object-oriented moving images. My approach is inspired by both a historical understanding of the conditions which gave rise to cubism as well as a desire to differentiate a certain set of aesthetics as being beyond the postmodern/poststructural. I am interested in the unique compositional compromises caused by the dimensional collapse inherent in moving images which contain multiple timelines. Film was a medium in which time was a constant imposed by the framerate of the physical constraints of celluloid. Although video inherited this celluloid-inspired time paradigm, digital media such as video games, web pages, and operating systems transcend this simplistic time-construct, allowing us to create and navigate multiple timelines within the same “frame”. Video however lacks this sense of simulated depth, forcing video artists to make compromises to achieve the illusion of this dimensional complexity. These set of compromises constitute hypercubist aesthetics. I have a pecha kucha manifesto for those who are interested, which gives some very accessible examples of hypercubist aesthetics. Of course this theory is a work in progress and I am always eager to get more input and critique.

Read the entire interview on the new Digimag website.