searching for gold in some of my favorite artists...

Ouvroir d'Univers Potentiel

MULTIVERSE TABLE at First OuUnPo MEETING in Rome at MACRO 23.1.2010

OuUnPo: Meris Angioletti, Daniele Balit, Yane Calovski, Cecilia Canziani, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen, Adrienne Drake, Mark Geffriaud, Raimundas Malasauskas, Darius Miksys, Jacopo Miliani, Daniela Paes Leao, Samon Takahashi, Stephen Whitmarsh


Contributions of:
Alessio Ascari, Lorenzo Bruni, Antonia Ciani, Caroline Corbetta, Giulia di Lenarda, Piersandra di Matteo and Snejanka Mihaylova, George Henry Longly, Nazli Gurlek, Luigi Iandoli+Guest, Teresa Macrì, Federica Matelli, Marco Mazzoni, Francesca Pagliuca, Peep-Hole, Caterina Riva, Annalisa Rosso, Alessandra Sandrolini, Fatos Ustek, Veronica Valentini, Jonas Žakaitis



Dearest,
As may you know, this fall-winter I attended a workshop among Rome, Skopije and Paris with a group of curators and artists.
The workshop has the multiverse theory as conceptual framework.
You can find some details of the workshop in the attachments.

Now in January I decided to organize a small presentation/project, that is going to be shown for the final result of the workshop in Rome.
The idea is to ask to my working-network to submit a contribution at the idea of multiverse.
I did this kind of presentation for the introduction of a workshop that I organized myself in Istanbul.
Your submission is very free and open to your choice; the only restriction is the format (photocopy or something that can be photocopied).

Your contribution could be very free and spontaneous and as in the previous workshop could be:
_a text you wrote or you want to write
_an image
_ a text written by someone else
_a sentence or a quote
_a email
_a selection of books, films or artists
Or even better something else
Something that you might relate to the topic of the multiverse with a total personal approach.

Of course I am not asking you to go in the deep analysis of the topic, also the approach, that we decided to follow during the workshop, was very open to the influences and the suggestions coming out from the theory better than the theory itself.

If you are interested in to take part of the project with your simply but very precious contribution I would be extremely happy.

Please do not hesitate to contact me for further details and if you don't feel to participate there is no problem for me.

I am looking forward to hear from you

With all my best

Jacopo

EMPTY RESTAURANT IS PART OF THE BIBLIOTEQUE OF HALLE 14
http://www.halle14.org/bibliothek.html

HALLE 14 is a non-profit art centre. It is a place for the presentation of contemporary art and a space for reflection and communication.

The five-story, 20.000 m2 building HALLE 14 is situated in the area of the former Leipzig Cotton Spinning Mill. Since the beginning of the 1990ies, artists, gallerists and other creatives have built a productive and lively community which provides an inspiring set for HALLE 14 which now consists of about 100 artists and 12 galleries.

The restoration of HALLE 14 is part of developing it into an art centre with a wide variety of projects and activities connected to contemporary art. The most important object for 2008/2009 is the leaking roof. Its restoration is an essential step towards the goals of HALLE 14.

HALLE 14 is supported by the Federkiel Foundation and the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH. Individual projects are funded by friends and patrons of HALLE 14.

The genius and the boys

Carleton Gajdusek was one of the world´s greatest genius, and also a man who has been convicted for having sex with a foster-son.

Carleton Gajdusek discovered a completely new form of infection - the human mad cow disease among cannibal Papua New Guineans.
He is a scientist and a hero of other scientists. He is also someone whose friends and family are from a variety of cultures, different social classes, and from all over the world - subsistence farmers on Papua New Guinea, billionaires in New York, top thinkers in the Ukraine, Nobel-prize winners all around the globe, the young intelligentsia of China.

Carleton Gajdusek claims himself to be a pedophile on the same lines "as Jesus Christ". According to the FBI, he has adopted 57 children from Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and elsewhere, and brought them up at his home close to the National Institutes of Health, close to Washington DC.

This documentary film explores an extraordinary 20th century life, full of contradiction. How is it that humans can switch within milliseconds, between total intelligence, and total self-delusion? What is the nature of true exploration?

Reviews after the BBC broadcast June 2009

The Times:
What was impressive about the film, however, was that its knee did not jerk in easy outrage. The boys came from a society where paedophilia was a rite of passage. Only very few of them have, apparently, anything but loving memories of Gajdusek. Was it, Lindquist´s wise commentary implied, worse to import another country´s mores to America than to impose American standards on foreigners? For most of Gajdusek´s peers - including the sinologist Judith Farquhar, the neurologist Oliver Sacks, and Robert Gallo, who discovered HIV - what Gajdusek did in bed seemed largely irrelevant. But Gajdusek cannot be let off.

The Independent
...Carleton Gajdusek was a name unfamiliar to me before I watched Bosse Lindquist´s engrossing Storyville documentary, The Genius and the Boys. I learnt that Gajdusek was a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning scientist, born in New York in 1923, who discovered the particles that cause mad cow disease. ....a conviction for the sexual abuse of children having wrecked his once-illustrious reputation....


Original Title: Gadjusek - the genius and the Boys
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 84'
Year of Production:2009
Producer: Bosse Lindquist
Produced by: Eight Millimeters AB and SVT

SPECIAL THANKS TO allen grubesic that told me about the documentary.

WET

What Was WET?

The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was published in Venice and Santa Monica between 1976 and 1981 by Leonard Koren. An invaluable brief introduction by Bedford McIntosh seems to be the only online resource celebrating WET, hence the creation of this survey, a repository of cover thumbnails and indices of each issue.

Reoccurring WET features included Dribble; Places; Non-Human Life Forms; Food; Architecture; Fashion; the Last or Back Page; and of course, Gourmet Bathing. Frequent contributors to the magazine, among many others, were Matt Groening (text, hardly ever cartoons), Kristine McKenna (interviews), Philip Garner (drawings of implausible inventions) and Bob & Bob.

Regular advertisers included KROQ; the 9:30 music club in DC; LA restaurants like Nucleus Nuance and the China Club; various Melrose boutiques like Cowboys & Poodles, Industrial Revolution, Neo 80, Camp Beverly Hills, and the Soap Plant; plus Trash & Vaudeville in NYC.

http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2009/08/07/dont-you-forget-about-me-a-documentary-about-john-hughes/

from Mirror Phase blog

http://mirrorphase.tumblr.com/

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Milan-based filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned for their accomplished work with archival footage derived principally from the 1910s and 1920s. Thoughtfully juxtaposing images through editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi also invariably re-photograph their material, adjusting the film's speed, adding tinted color and spare soundtracks, and reframing the image to focus on key details. Such meticulous manipulation encourages spectators to read the selected footage, instead of simply watching it, so as to consider not only what the images mean, but how. Much of the work is explicitly political, and grounded in the idea of the cinematic apparatus as a detached observer of modernity's vast upheavals: Colonialism, World War One, statelessness. To what extent, the films ask, is this dispassionate gaze able to critique modernity, and to what extent is it complicit in the upheavals, or at least complacent?

Such questions about the function and resonance of the cinematic image are given particular force by the physical decay of the aging footage preferred by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. Often foregrounding the incomplete or distorted parts of the image, the filmmakers point to the contrast between the apparently implacable gaze of the camera and the vulnerability of its material support, a disparity that, in turn, reveals the gap between the compulsive force of political power and ideology on the one hand, and the bodies of the workers, soldiers and colonized submitted to it, on the other. The seeming imperviousness of the cinematic apparatus and the ideologies that deploy it—colonialist powers, authoritarian states—all depend nevertheless on a mutable material base, and on the contingencies of history.

The spare and intense films of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi wring both irony and a strange, mournful beauty from the bodies on display in the images they select, bearing witness to the ravages of time and the destructive power of the European nations and their armies.