official office
E.S.P. TV joins the participating artists in official office, a 24 hour rotating broadcast project between RECESS (NYC) and STORE (Dresden).
On July 1, 2014, S T O R E launched official office on two shelves in Recess’s Soho office space. Simultaneously, Recess will launch official office on two identical shelves in S T O R E’s Dresden office space. Over the course of the year, additional art spaces around the world will be invited to joinofficial office by installing the official shelves in their office space. The project’s proliferation will be documented on recessanalog.org, the site of Recess’s online residency program.
official office consists of two Ikea shelves. On the left shelf is a monitor with rotating video programming selected by invited official office participants. On the right shelf is a vase with a flower selected by official office participants and a clock set to local time. Photographs of each official office will be uploaded to recessanalog.org. Archives of video programming will also be available on the Recess Analog website.
Given the enforcement of prescribed start times, the video streams will run 24-hours a day, concurrently around the world, officially. This creates a bootleg broadcast experience, a simulacrum of the shared viewing event live TV offers. Like playing music for houseplants, playing videos in offices stimulates health and well-being.
From October 1 - December 31, 2014, E.S.P. TV presented, Twenty-Four Hour Technicolor Dream, a program of artists works, projects, and live events. In our true collaborative fashion, we are linking artists between Germany and our hometown in a dual broadcast-a-thon. In November 2014 official office welcomed a new participant, Konstanet a physical and online art space located in Tallinn, Estonia.
Contact info@recessactivities.org to purchase a set or for official office inquiries.
Video screenings and events will punctuate the course of official office. Check back for upcoming dates and details.
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About the Participants:
S T O R E is a non-profit art space in Dresden, Germany with a focus on young contemporary art and boundary-pushing projects across disciplines. S T O R E was founded in January 2010 and puts a diversity of local & international artist and art projects on display each month. The small unique shaped room with its big window screen formerly functioned as a real store is located right next to the old Jewish graveyard in the middle of Dresden’s cultural centre Neustadt. Monthly changing exhibitions and artist interventions make S T O R E a local outreach to contemporary tendencies in a larger discourse with a strong sense for community building.
Recess is a nonprofit artists’ workspace open to the public. At once a studio and exhibition space, Recess initiates lasting connections between artists and audiences, presenting ambitious projects that embrace experimentation and focus on process. Our signature program, Session, invites artists to use our storefront space to realize long-term projects that take advantage of our built-in public audience. Expanding upon Session’s goal to define contemporary art in collaboration with an active audience, Recess hosts performances and event series, a critical writing program, online programs, and enjoys meaningful partnerships with likeminded institutions.
Konstanet is a non-profit gallery founded in July 2013. Konstanet is made up of two spaces – the online space at konstanet.com and a scaled (1:5) physical space located in the centre of Tallinn, Estonia. Konstanet focuses mainly on international collaborations with young emerging artists interested in exploring the possibilities of exhibiting their work online, merging the online and offline realm.
Further participant information to be added over the course of the year.
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About the Curated Programs:
Recess: ‘Twenty-Four Hour Technicolor Dream’
On October 1, 2014, E.S.P. TV began Twenty-Four Hour Technicolor Dream, a program of artists works, projects, and live events. In their true collaborative fashion, E.S.P. TV are linking artists between Germany and our hometown in a dual broadcast -a-thon. This project will run thru Dec 31.
E.S.P. TV is dedicated to promoting the performing and media based arts through direct collaboration with artists via live television production.
The E.S.P. TV project acts as a live studio broadcast, expanded cinema, and a program on public access television. All events are taped live with a crew of cameramen, sound engineer, and video mixing team. Tapings are in front of an audience, using chroma key, signal manipulation and video mixing. The live mix is then edited for time and aired on Manhattan Neighborhood Network public television (MNN), every Tuesday night at 10PM. After airing, the episodes are posted online at www.esptv.com for later viewing. Our mission is threefold: to expand on the idea of an artist collaboration, to preserve public broadcast as a relevant outlet for transmission based art, and to develop new video and performance works with local artists.
E.S.P. TV works locally and internationally, with smaller venues as well as larger institutions and museums. Our goal is to track down and showcase the pulse of artistic activity, creative innovation, and action in each location we visit. E.S.P. TV has worked with various venues including: New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Printed Matter, Millennium Film Workshop as a part of INDEX Festival, Clemente Soto Velez Center (NYC); Interstate, Present Company, The Schoolhouse, La Sala, 285 Kent, Vaudeville Park, Spectacle Theater, Issue Project Room, Roulette (Brooklyn, NY), Franklin Street Works (Stamford, CT), Liminal Space (Oakland), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queens Nails Projects (San Francisco), General Public (Berlin), Kling and Bang (Reykjavik) and Pallas Projects (Dublin).
S T O R E: ‘window’
a window is a hole in the wall / a window marks a line of transition / a window is neither door nor wall / a window calls less for us to take a step into the other / a window is rather a permeable border that temporarily invites the outside in and the inside out / a window lets the mind travel / a window creates an illusion of space / a window can be a picture, a painting, a video, a screen, or photography in a book / a window can be a wall when veiled with curtains / a window will be a mirror when the outside falls dark / a window doesn’t seek coalescence of what walls can part / a window is satisfied with the temporary overlapping of what it shares on both sides / a window is a translucent boundary between two realities / a window frames the natural, the digital, the self or the other depending on the point of view
Konstanet: ‘digital peripheries’
You can get on this Internet and talk to people all over the place … It’s amazing!
(Angelina Jolie, 1994)
Who remembers internet optimism – the Internet as the great equaliser? It was supposed to be a new world – the Cold War is over, let’s start again, everyone is invited.Yes, ‘this Internet’ is still pretty amazing, but the magic has faded. Online not everyone is equal; online not everything is equal. The hierarchies and power struggles of the offline world seep into the digital sphere and online events have very real consequences offline. These two realms are caught in an infinite loop in which hierarchies of power are produced and reproduced.
Offering the concept of ‘digital peripheries’ as a starting point we invite artists to explore the various ways in which the digital realm – far from being merely a flatland – might provoke new ways of thinking about the meaning of notions like ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.
• The internet is proclaimed to be a tool of inquiry and communication, however not everything can be freely explored, so how to negotiate and peer through the unwanted blinders?
• Digital escapes – finding possibilities to wander into territories outside your own regular routes based on your habits and thought patterns.
• To what extent does the geographic location of a place determine the hierarchy of its occupiers/inhabitants within digital networks? Do offline places translate their peripheral/central position to digital networks and to what extent is it possible to overcome these distinctions?
• If digital networks can not be conceptualised through the same spatial metaphors as offline places and spaces – what can the periphery be understood in relation to? Is my internet too mainstream?
• What lies beyond? My internet/niche internet /internet of the fringes/ deserted internet/internet cemeteries? ‘Do gifs still animate if no one is around to watch them?’
• …
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The first edition of Digital Peripheries features two videos by Estonian and Lithuanian artists, both examining the relationship of the region’s digital and geographical localities.
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official office is an idea of Konstanze Schütze, Paul Barsch and Recess.
Download the press release for official office.