Caleb Larsen: Blog

Lapse of Time

2008-10-08T23:49:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks, I am in a show at the new Chace Center at RISD. It is a beautiful new gallery and certainly worth a look if you are around. This show should be really nice. I have a new video in it.

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Lapse of Time
Curated by Elizabeth Skadden
Openning Reception this Thursday October 9th 6-8pm
Gelman Gallery at Chace Center
20 Main St. 02903

“Life without editing, it seems, is just not that interesting.”–Bill Viola

Time in our lives flows unchecked. Art uses our memory and five senses to distill life down to the essentials. Memory within our lives condenses time for our consciousness. What we don’t remember is thrown away. What we do remember becomes all the more important. Within art, time lapse decides for the artist what they choose to show. The easiest sort of time-lapse to see is that associated with video or film. But other art methods can show a span of time as well through slow building processes and the display of a process of time. Lapse of Time includes work from several different artists in a wide range of departments. Through slow processes and broad temporal concepts, these artists collapse time, fold it over itself, and re-create new timelines that result in the following art pieces.

Work by these artists:
Alexander Field
Alison Roberts
Ted Yoon
Caleb Larsen
Emma Hogarth
Steve Silber
Kelley Goff
Nora Rabins
Evan Chamberlain
Noel O'Connell
Peter Wilson
Korakrit Arunanondcha
Johnny Adimando
Cooper Holoweski
Annabeth Marks
Dionne Yang

Recoded Catalog Available!

2008-10-01T16:31:00.000-07:00

The catalog from the Recoded exhibition I was in this spring in Aberdeen, Scotland is now available. I haven't got my hands on one yet (they are in the post I am told), but if you want you can get the catalog at Amazon.

Also,
Thanks to Marisa Olson for the nice write up on Rhizome on my exhibition currently up at the Ester M Klein Gallery in Philadelphia.

The Interval Separating

2008-08-12T23:48:00.000-07:00

The Interval Separating
I am having a show this September in Philadelphia at the Esther M Klein Gallery. If you are around, you should check it out. There will be some new work, some old work, and some reworked work. I think it will look really nice and be very interesting.

Here is the text from the Press Release:

AUGUST 12, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Dan Schimmel or David Clayton at 215.966.6188, kleinart@sciencecenter.org

THE INTERVAL SEPARATING

EXHIBITION DATES: SEPTEMBER 12 – NOVEMBER 1, 2008
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, FROM 5:00PM TO 8:00PM

The Interval Separating features work by artist, Caleb Larsen. The exhibition utilizes logic-based systems to explore the intersection and divide between digital and physical space.

Larsen approaches this topic obliquely through employment of installation, print, electronics, sculpture and multimedia. His work leverages the effects of language and mapping to translate life, media, and culture into transmedia experience. It is through distortion, reduction, and manipulation that Larsen is able to navigate this space. The diversity, interest and research reflected in his artwork seemingly make Larsen, as much engineer, geographer, or anthropologist as he is an artist.

"The wild toolbox of Caleb Larsen’s activities reveals a spirit much like that of an explorer looking for the unknown. … By extracting information from found sources, whether art, movies, or the web, Larsen is clueing us in to other things we should be noticing and be ready for." –Ian Berry

Larsen’s recent work has been exhibited at the Peacock Visual Arts in Scotland, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Detroit International Video Festival, Flux Factory in New York, 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle, and Tjaden Gallery at Cornell University. The artist lives and works in Seattle and Rhode Island.

The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at the Science Center is a nonprofit exhibition venue that explores the intersection between art, science, and technology. The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery is located at 3600 Market Street. The gallery is opened Monday through Saturday from 9am to 5pm. For more information and exhibit updates, visit www.kleinartgallery.org

Download the PDF press release!
Press Release.pdf

Work Update

2008-08-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

I decided to post some pictures of my recent work. It has been a while and I keep promising to switch to a new website system. I will do that some day, but for now I will content myself with a blog post with images every once in a while.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare(2007)
44"x160"

(Detail)

Programmatically generated print from the complete works of William Shakespeare on Somerset Velvet.

44"x160"

Land Grab (2008)

Digital Photographic Print Diptych, each 20"x30"

The Safest Place on Earth (2008)
Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley, Andorra
(East 2.222156, North: 42.387712)
Geotagged Image, Digital Print
30"x37"

It is best to be prepared(2008)

FEMA emergency posters, 3 day survival kit

Over Protection(2008)
1,000 Condoms on wooden armature

Burn Out (2007)

Moped tire burnout on panel, series of 5, each 18"x22"

So there is really no good excuse

2008-08-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

So i have been a big out of touch lately.
I have been in Seattle for the summer, visiting friends, going to weddings, working on projects, and preparing for an exhibition in September. It has been fun and full.
I have been working on several projects and I will post documentation soon.
I am also hopping to transition to a new, more awesome, website that will make updates more frequent. My lack of activity on this blog is only because I have been too busy in the studio to post updates!

I will post the press release and info for the show soon.

Award of Excellence Video

2008-04-28T10:11:00.000-07:00

So this is the video that I submitted for the awards of excellence at RISD. It is about 2 minutes long and does a good job summing up the work that I have done, most of it from the first semester.

Click the image to see the full sized video.

Award of Excellence

2008-04-19T18:17:00.001-07:00

This year's Awards of Excellence at RISD heavily favored our Digital Media department, Lucas Roy, Nathaniel Katz, Jeanne Jo, Elizabeth Skadden, and I all got one. Yay!

The juror, Ian Berry said this about my work:
"The wild toolbox of Caleb Larsen’s activities reveals a spirit much like that of an explorer looking for the unknown. As he tries to fix problems of safety and security through exaggerated levels of preparedness, he helps us step back and see what is really going on around us. By extracting information from found sources, whether art, movies, or the web, Larsen is clueing us in to other things we should be noticing and be ready for. "

Recoded. Landscapes and Politics of New Media

2008-04-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

This month I will be in a an exhibition in Aberdeen, Scotland. The show is called Recoded: Landscapes and Politics of New Media. Here is some text from the website:

Recoded

Preview Thursday 24 April 6 - 8pm / with performance 'Antidatamining' by RyBN

Digital technologies have become an integral part of how we work and communicate, understand ourselves and the world. Transforming information and representation, digital media recode communication and representation and alter our experiences. Focusing on re-presentations, exchange and translation between embodied, spatial experience and coded information, the project aims to raise questions about the effects and meanings produced by contemporary digital landscapes.

The exhibition and series of events were developed by Peacock Visual Arts in collaboration with the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen.

Artists in the exhibition: Alexander Egger, skúta, Anna Jermolaewa, Caleb Larsen, Manu Luksch, MediaShed, Trevor Paglen, plan b, RYbN, Jens Strandberg

If you are around the Aberdeen, swing by and check it out.

Down Time

2008-02-11T06:37:00.000-08:00

While I certainly have not experienced it, my website had a little bit of down time over the last few days. My apologies. A little snafu with my domain name host, but all is resolved and taken care of for the next three years.

Mircomediations

2008-01-24T06:56:00.001-08:00

January 24 - February 17
Opening Jan 24 7pm
Sol Koffler Gallery
169 Weybosset St
Providence, RI

I have two pieces in this show, so swing by and take a look if you are in the area.

Also, I have not updated my site in a while. It is not that I haven't been productive, on the contrary. I have been quite productive in fact. However, I am working on a redesign that will make my life easier so it may be a while before new projects show up. But there are quite a few!

Update: more to come

2007-12-05T22:13:00.000-08:00

With perhaps the least compelling title, I am writing to say that there are lots of exciting things in the works for me, and that I will post details on them later once things have been cemented.

I will also be posting new work in the next few weeks. This period has been productive in spurts and I have something to show for it.

Help me out, fill this out.

2007-10-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

I am working on a project (which I will discuss later). It would be a HUGE help if everyone who visits would fill this out. What this poll collects will dramatically influence the processes of my project.
The poll software seems a bit unreliable (it is my first time using it). If it appears to not behave properly (like it is displaying giant text and you can't see the submit button) follow this link to the the poll.

Automation

2007-10-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

ART MACHINES
MACHINE ART

In general we presume that artists make art, but what happens when machines produce art? Do artists then become engineers? What does the apparent withdrawal of the artist from the creative act mean, and what consequences for the originality and the uniqueness of the work of art result from it? What is a work of art in the first place in such cases: the machine, the product, or the act of production? What role is granted the viewer in the course of production: interaction or exclusion? Beginning with Jean Tinguely’s drawing machines of the 1950s, an exhibition conceived jointly by the Schirn and the Museum Tinguely in Basel will present art machines from various contexts right up to the present – such as works by Michael Beutler and Roxy Paine. The exhibition space becomes a production space.
Curators: Katharina Dohm (Schirn) and Dr. des. Heinz Stahlhut (Museum Tinguely, Basel)

link

So lately I have been thinking about the automation of various elements of life. It started when I was playing Angband, a text based hack-n-slash style roleplaying game. I used to play this game for hours and hours as a teenager. Nothing much happens in it except you run around and kill monsters and get treasure. Everything in the game is represented by ASCII characters. All of the maps are randomly generated each time you access a level. A couple of weeks ago I dug the game out and started playing it because I wanted to grab the maps and start making some prints from them. I did not want to have to loose hours and hours playing the game again so I found a "borg," a AI program that will play the game for me. It was absolutely fascinating. Instead of playing the game for hours and hours, I watched the computer play the game. Essentially I had found a program that would play my computer game for me so I could go about doing different things. This lead me to thinking about other areas of our leisure culture that we automate...

Recently I Rhizome.org there was a post about the show mentioned above, about artists' machines that make art.

Book that influence thought

2007-10-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about it today and realized that the book that has most influenced my artistic thought and production has not been anything big and fancy or erudite, instead it has been Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
It just so happens that there is a new radio play being made of the book available via podcast here: http://dirkgently.podomatic.com/

Perhaps I will elaborate more, but for now I wanted to share that. It is fantastic book, on par with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It really seemed like a vehicle for Adams to express some ideas that he had instead simply of weaving a narrative.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the podcast radio play that I linked above...is...pretty bad. If you are interested in this book, don't listen too it via that podcast just buy it and read it.

Theo Jansen

2007-10-10T09:58:00.001-07:00

Say what you will about kinetic sculpture, there are moments when it really is fascinatingly beautiful.

Christian Marclay's Video Quartet

2007-10-06T21:41:00.001-07:00

Following the theme of the last post, another piece that makes me want to make work. You really need to see this in person, but it doesn't get out much Western Bridge in Seattle has one of the editions and it was on display for several months last winter. It is amazing.

Mark Bradford

2007-10-06T19:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I find work that gets me excited about being an artist and making work. While reading Ed Winkleman's Blog (if you care about the art world you should read it too) I found Mark Bradford, a painter/collagist who's work I think is brilliant and beautiful.

From Paul Pfeiffer in Conversation with John Baldessari

2007-10-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

So in reading a catalog of Paul Pfeiffer (the purchase of which was a result of the fabulous Symposium Books in Providence) I came across this quote:

"I've often thought of making artwork in terms of providing an entry point for the viewer. How to draw the viewer into a dialogue? That's the challenge every creative person has to face: that there are things you want to say and do, and you have to find a way to say them in the idiom of your time and place. The work can't exist outside a given context. So there's a labor involved to make sense of your relationship to the conditions and constraints you live in . It seems to me to be a labor of translation, or mediation."

This is a constant challenge, especially in Digital Media/New Media. Work that can be so technical and so wrapped up in its own technicalness that it pushes the viewer out.
This lead me to think about Interactivity in Art. Interactivity in art is something that I have a very hard time with, and yes all art is interactive in some way, but I am talking about the stuff that asks you to play with to make it do something. And it might be in that relationship that I have a problem. As a viewer I have a hard time engaging an interactive work with the same sobriety that I tend to approach non-interactive objects or installation. As soon a person is asked to do something with a work of art a whole slew of problems can (and do) come up. The user interface begins to take a front row to the content. Since that is a person's primary level of communication with work of art, it will be the thing that makes the first impact, and thus the most significant one. Now, I think an interactive work can be successful when the method of interaction is so smooth and seamless that it manages to disappear. But then the temptation is to create something so slick and seamless that everybody stands around and says "Gee Whiz, that is slick" and again the attention is drawn away from the actual work of art.

I suppose then the challenge is to find something that treads a middle ground. A solution perhaps is to employ methods that are extremely familiar and are part of our social context. On a small scale, putting on headphones. While a very low level of interactivity, and perhaps it isn't even a from of interactivity, it requires the viewer to perform an action. Headphones can be used quite fluidly, they are not gimmicky, they are not intrusive, and they are very familiar.
A method that follows a similar model has a greater chance of succeeding.

Another problem I think I have with interactivity in Art is that the viewer is now positioned with a set of options. With a painting, you have very few options 1) Look At it, 2) Don't Look at it. With an interactive piece the viewer now has to choose what to do. Since there is that choice, the authority of the author and the intent of the author come into question.

There are many other problems that I have with interactive art, and I am sure my opinions will continue to develop over time. It may be that I simply have too narrow of a vision of what interactivity in art is. We shall see.

Permanence of Digital Culture

2007-09-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

In George Fifield's class we talked about the the cultural record that we as a predominantly digital culture will leave. Sure, the great thing about digital information is that it, on its own, does not degrade, you can make an infinite number of copies and backup. You can disseminate it to all ends of the earth and every copy is identical to the first. However, by the very nature of technology, it is rapidly and constantly changing, thus unless this infinitely copied data is migrated from one generation of technology to the next, it becomes not only inaccessible, but also invisible. At least with untranslatable ancient records we can see what we can't read, but in 500 years, try knowing about, opening, and reading a Microsoft Word document.
As we talked about in the class, we are a culture with absolutely no mind of the future. We may talk about the future, but what we really mean is simply some fuzzy point in time that is later than now. We consider time in decades, not millenniums (or even centuries).

Julian's

2007-09-12T05:20:00.001-07:00

Last night a local bar showed R.Kelly's Trapped in the Closet. I do not know if he is brilliant with a great sense of humor or simply a lunatic. Either way it is one of the strangest and most complelling works of cinema I have seen in a while.

Settling in.

2007-09-07T04:14:00.001-07:00

I live in Providence now. Things are going reasonably well. The coffee is bad, the weather is great.
As it turns out I found out that Gabriella Salazar is a first year painting grad at risd. She and I were at the Yale Norfolk summer program together about 5 years ago. It is nice to have some one that you know. I have met a couple of my classmates. So far so good. It seems that we are coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. It will be fun to see how this all plays out.

I'm here.

2007-09-03T14:47:00.001-07:00

I live next to a castle.

2007-09-03T07:35:00.001-07:00

Who would have thought that there was a castle in rhode island. This is a huge, for real castle. Not just a big house.
Due to some great wisdom, this magnificant building is now a fire marshall training facility, complete with ADA approved access ramp replacing the once grand entrance and chain link fence protecting it from curious passer-bys.
So all 165,300 square feet of this great building are now inaccessible to public. I guess at one opint there were plans to make it into a Hollywood style sound stage and once was a public center.
But then again I don't know much about it. I just walked past it for the first time this morning.

GWB

2007-08-31T12:13:00.001-07:00

It has taken more than an hour to get across the George washington bridge.
Traffic is moving now. Sort of.

The ability to blog.

2007-08-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

So a few months ago a got a blackberry pearl. I do not know how I lived without it. I would very much like an iPhone, but I find it most prudent to wait until the next revision. So amazon have me a pearl for free so I took it!

So I most recently found an easy way to blog via my telephone. Which is completely ridiculous, but awesome. I am hoping that it will help me to blog more.

-Caleb