All posts by Isidora

MARAPHONE

MARAPHONE.
Android application, done with the open source environment PROCESSING. Maraphone mimics musical instrument. When the phone is shaked produces sound, also you can choose diferent icons and send it to people from your contact list.

Download Processing Android Code.

Inteface Culture LAB.

Michael Holzknecht.
Chistina Dellemeschnig.
César Escudero.
Isidora Ficovic.
Onat Polat.
Hyeonjin Kim.
David Gann.
Supervisor: Tiago Martins.

Maraphone.app.

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“Think Pink” by Isidora Ficovic at Ars Electronica 2013; “Use at your own risk”, Interface Culture exhibition

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at Brucknerhaus, Linz

This interactive video installation uses the qualitative research method of taking interviews in the streets of Linz. The public has been investigated about the question ‘Which tool would you use to destroy a desktop?’. The most common answer is the “hammer”.
The public decided the hammer to become nonverbal communication tool. By hitting with the hammer the visitor of the exhibition triggers videos which are showing the interviews.

Embedded sensors are randomly opening different videos and only one is the key to the “Think Pink” when the monitor becomes colored in pink.

link to the video documentation

link to the video documentation

link to the video documentation

link to the video documentation

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time-lapse, Stagebased Interaction with Chris Ziegler, The Gesture of Drawing Light with a Body Movement

Interactive performance 

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Idea of movement, physicality, image and sound. Body movement extends media into your own perception.

Storytelling by moving. The black stretchable suit with eight Ipods on it artist is using in transformation of physical space. Takes its own body and transform into art work.

Movement, light, sound, experience, the way how they are treated are all elements of this interactive performance that embed sound and movement. Interactive sounds reacts on movements. The values are calibrated for the artist own physicality, the  sound qualities are designed in system, program, by changing samples, you play when you’re entering the system.

The challenge to relate your body with technology differently. The artist is involved physically, presenting human/computer interaction on stage. It relies on idea something existing only when you are doing.

First is the artistic idea,  how can I play with new tool? In this case it’s the tool is the black suite with 8 Ipods that play sound and light and by the movement artist is controlling those features. For the sound artist has chosen  Mozart’s Sonata in G minor, divided it into eight different samples that are played on eight Ipods and it’s overlapped by the movements of the Tai Chi Form 24.

It’s negotiation of movement, yourself and other principle (the sound system) and to make the quality, you have to listen your movements.  Control system that works, translating physicality in space into image and samples, sound, light, motion.

Wearing the suite as an instrument includes the whole body, it’s sound/movement project about calibrating, experience level and comprehend thresholds light motion reacting on your energy; movements that make sense, designing and customizing it to deal with the energy of the move in the field. It’s on the level of sensational and experimental transform into art work.  Data base of poetry navigate with your own body.  Interesting is to see how people behave, if you do particular movement what is happening?Transforms the body, sound, space, something that you never do naturally.

The preparation of performance is based on brainstorming, design, production and rehearsal, embraces quality notations of dance system. Tai Chi’s Form 24 is used in this case for the movement and it is work with cognitive (memorize the movement) language system.

link to the video

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Sara Giannini text on “What is Contemporary?”, 2012

“What is Contemporary?”
A literal Re-Enactment

Sara Giannini, Isidora Ficovic, Sedimented wisdom

The proceeding of my fingertips on the keyboard renders the imperceptible flowing of time a discrete, partitioned rhythm. The clicks of typing, which gradually gather the letters into words, phrases and paragraphs, echo the rhythm of the clock, temple of time measure and life planning. Though the irregular, syncopated tic-tac of my word-clock discloses the paradox I am getting into: speculating on, hence crystallizing, the “now”. The linear continuum of a sentence mirrors the alphabetic and abstract rationality that manifests itself through sequential facts and thoughts. Yet the residual of the linear narrative is the only glimmer through which we can grasp the existence of a now-moment. By the time I had written this passage and you, my all-eyes and imagination counterpart had followed the textual extension, we left behind temporary worlds to embrace a new, perpetual state of time. By writing we seed signs of back-nows into the constant procession of presences (J. Derrida, 1977). Derrida spoke of the trace as an always-already absent present, as a sign carrying in itself the mark of otherness  (1967). The perennial a-contextual traces render the now past yet always re-enactable in the future, in one word, our word contemporary. They are inscriptions susceptible of being produced and re-actualized over the non-chronological figure of contemporary time.

The contemporary is the one who, dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to cite it according to a necessity. (G. Agamben 2009)

The aporia of being present of the absent melts in the contemporary dimension, where histories converge temporarily yet forever. For the contemporary, in its intimate essence, is a place of encounters, a place of heterotopias and polyphonic dialogues. Cum-Tempora, “with time”: where past, present, and future meet and fuse in an ever-lasting duration.

The after-meetings between different now-moments, caught dancing in asynchronous stills of contemporaneity, find themselves re-proposed in Isidora Ficovic’s practice. What is Contemporary? (2006 – 2008 – 2010) is an ongoing dialogical investigation on the contemporary. It takes the form of interviews, where the artist asks “what is contemporary?” to artists, curators, art lovers and other professionals of the so-called contemporary art world. The first of the series, What is Contemporary? (2006), involves the Istanbul art community and has been produced over a residency at Platform Contemporary Art Center. The video has been then followed by an epistolary exchange where the same participants have been asked to answer the same question two years later in What is Contemporary? (2008). Finally, the video What is Contemporary? (2010) addresses the same enquire to the Belgrade art population.

The artist traps the floating of time into a series of time-based objects, which bear specific dates in history. Although belonging to a past chronology, they reiterate and provoke renewed “experiences of now”. The sense of What is Contemporary? should be framed within a meta-critical perspective, since the films’ contents are performed by the repetition in time of the artist-viewer’s inter-related agencies and experiences.


Isidora Ficovic’s work on the contemporary makes the encounter the explicit and fundamental cell subsuming and linking the contemporary to the now-experience(s) of art The dialogue is the first medium she employs in order to incorporate the encounter, which once recorded and replayed, recreates original moments of confrontation with the viewer at successive stages.

Repetition unveils the universality of the singular. As a conduct and as a point of view it concerns non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities. (G. Deleuze, 1968). At each recurrence repetition states difference and not similarity because it is part of the order of time, rather than space. One of the characteristics of repetition lies in giving access to a different temporality in such a way that things are defined but without destiny.


“Endings are suspended by repetitions!”  In Greek mythology we can find one of the greatest things man are striving for: the eternity, how to accomplish the eternity… “Art objects can never be properly used, because they exist forever, and forever is always after us.”


The video repeating in a loop is thus a “fountain of life” through time travel, like reading and re-reading a text. In its recursive process, the video is a trace inscribed to emanate difference and in this respect it obeys to the coherence paradox. Through different encounters in different timeframes it changes the other and itself. The observer finds himself actor of a relationship, which reproduces (and not represent) the original one.

Repetitions do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ’nth’ power. (G. Deleuze, 1968)

The experience of contemporary collisions of temporalities and subjectivities can be repeated and experienced also in this very moment, as you meet the text and the temporality of the writer HERE AND NOW:

The future-orientation of the past in the always-contemporary encounter led us eventually to a poking sense of lack, a silence full of lost memories, of past presence, of oblivion and impossibility. The experience of pure time.

“What is Contemporary?” shows aspects of the un-known and therefore offers what we don’t know that we are, who we aren’t, including the notion of the world outside  us.


Bibliography
Giorgio Agamben, 2008, Che Cos’è il Contemporaneo?, Roma: Nottetempo. Trans. D. Kishik, S. Pedatella, 2009, “What Is The Contemporary?” in What is Apparatus and Other Essays, Stanford: Stanford, p. 53.
Gilles Deleuze, 1968, Différence et répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Trans. Patton, P., 1994, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, p. 1-2;
Jacques Derrida, 1972, Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,  p. 377;
Jacques Derrida, 1967, De la grammatologie, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967;

recent work – Book X

click here – Book X (2007 – 2012)

It’s about urban life and transformations we have locally as well globally in last few years,
turmoil of economical crises that have infected countries all over the world and new ways we are all looking for. In the “Book X” works are made during 2007-2012 on different places; started in Salzburg, Austria, in 2007, continued in Istanbul, Lipovac and Belgrade in following years till 2012. The last pages in the book are drawing-collages made of bills and relies on the shopping fever; spending money on daily bases in supermarkets, but as well in shops as are Stradivarius or Zara and other fancy places for fashion look and appearance that is important these days. Of course we could question all this and revise what is the Point. That’s why this material would be followed by David Bowie song call “LOve Song” (1968) –
Listen carefully and think about it! – it’s the title.

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Interview of the month with Isidora Ficovic, February 2012/Art FAMA/by Mara Prohaska Marković

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MPM: In the past few months you’ve been participated in several international group exhibitions. What are the shows and could you tell us more about the works that you’ve exhibited?
IF: I have exhibited in group exhibitions within the gallery Primo Piano LivinGallery in Lecce, Italy and in the international art event that is a nonprofit initiative of curator Kisito Assangni under the title ‘Time is Love’, whose fifth edition is being implemented in 2012 . in various countries around the world, Italy, Germany, America, Britain, Cyprus, France, Ukraine, Romania and Norway.
The works that I exhibit are the works of various media and content. The videos shown are “Stop smoking”, “Love Parade” or “Sex, Lies and Video Tapes”, which have arisen as a reaction to current events in Belgrade 2009. and are accompanied by rock and roll music and with music from the TV series ‘Otpisani (written off)’ in the work “Stop smoking”; where a parallel event represented a small group of people protest in Republic Square in front of the flag with an inscription Stop NATO Fascism and with my action, such action by which the protest is placed in parallel relationship with subtraction of cigarettes out of the hands and mouths of people who sit around in cafes, which happened quickly in the rhythm of musical themes, and in the spirit of a hidden camera. It is shown a surreal situation through humor and irony.
Cooperation with the gallery Primo Piano LivinGallery for me is personally interesting because of their themes of exhibitions and titles as Inside / Outside, Language is a virus, Eye of the Storm, The Merchant of Dreams, Patterns and Password and Geoforms. The exhibition Password example allowed the viewer to reconsider the endless imaginable possibilities of relationship between words and pictures. Through the interpretation of several words in alphabetical order from artists were asked to represent them in the form of postcards, designed as a Dadaist game in which the creativity of each artist comes as fantastic visual vocabulary of the human condition of 21st century. A-Actions, B-Biodiversity, C-Censure, D-Disenchantment, E-Emergence, F-Faith, G-Globalization, H-Human, I-Innocence/Identity, J-justice, K-killers, L-Love, M-Memory, N-Nostalgia, O-Otherness , P-Power, Q-Quality, R-Relation, S-Skin, T-Transcendence,U-United, V-Virtuality, W-War, X-generation X, Y-Yin/yang, Z-Zoo. For this occasion I made digital images of prints with the emphasis on achromatic colors, black and white, and they are a response to the word Action, Nostalgia, Emergence, Virtuality, Quality.
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MPM: How did the cooperation with Kisito Assangni and Dores Sacquegna start? Why do you think the two videos draw special interests, “Stop Smoking” and “Sex, Lies and Videotapes”?
IF: With Kisito Assangni I started co-operation in 2010th with participation on the third part of ‘Time is love’ in Berlin. On an open invitation I sent the work “Love Parade” that was included in the selection. With “Sex, Lies and Video Tapes” I participate in the fifth edition of ‘Time is love’ that is realized during the 2012th
The work has several layers of meaning, deals with the appearance, not reality through a digital image, but raises questions of interpretation of an nude as one of the most common motif in the art history, gender issues and their relationships in representative forms of appearance, the potentiality of sexual energy, and manipulation through the mass media as well as development of digital technology.
Dores Sacquegna is the curator of Primo Piano LivinGallery from which I was invited to exhibit in December 2010. year for the exhibition Inside / Outside, dealing with the transformation of the urban landscape, where landscape design archives relating to the new culture of places, understood as a context of strong and clear specific networks within the meaning of where actions of people become cultural factors, a value that reflects the “exchange value” in social action, public phenomenon, therefore, not an individual but the subjective meaning of action in everyday life, work, relationships and life. Inside / Outside the exhibition deals with the landscape that is not just the glance of landscape as a place or daily environment, but also as an interior landscape, the state of visibility and invisibility of things in life.
The content of the video work “Stop smoking” which is shown in gallery is appropriate to the context, outlines the landscape, urban and social change, interaction of author in public space with people, as well social performance in the same public space, and the subjective perception of the environment, atmosphere, exterior, urban landscape, the reconstruction of that landscape in 2009th on the main square in Belgrade, surreal landscape that reflects the character of a state of change.
MPM: You have a rich video production, especially in recent years. Tell us more
about your relationship with the camera? Why video?
IF: I use different media in the expression, interpretation, content and design of ideas that I want to introduce, and it’s interesting for me the connection between drawings and paintings with digital media, the relationship between manual and digital media, which I embody in some of installations. The camera may be the quickest way to catch interesting moments around me, often using handhold digital camera, so it could be felt in works the presence of those who work behind the camera, the one who takes a direct way, and during editing I choose and freely combine video sequences in the making certain forms and contexts of work, unforeseen and unexpected compounds in which I often use music which with its content follows the idea of the video.
Often, those are rock an ‘roll songs that evoke the period of the sixties of the 20th century, and bring them in connection with the present and the time of ‘now’. In relation to camera it is important to me to make video work using different approaches as opposed to the idea that the work involve, sometimes it’s the form of interview dealing with issue of time, but also the broader context of the question “What is Contemporary?”, where the emphasis is on the concept that involves a huge number of participants, artists, curators and art historians, members of international and local art scene, and sometimes those are the real short form video works focusing on the editing of video sequences, where the color, rhythm, composition, time, length of frames, their repetition, acceleration or deceleration, the tools  that I use to play an discover interesting solution to the digital image in editing process, which is an experimental approach to recorded images and formatting the digital picture.
MPM: Also, your experience of the residence program gave you the insight into the art scene in other cities abroad. Would you point out some of the models of functioning of the scenes in the areas where you have stayed, as a good example? Even as the curator in Istanbul you’ve organized an exhibition at which our artists were presented.
IF: I stayed at several residential programs in Istanbul, Salzburg, New York,
where I had the opportunity to meet other international artists, exchange the experience, gain a broader picture of international contemporary art production and create new works…
Since 2003 I participated in the organization to create a serial of workshops and exhibitions in the realm of Border Disorder project that was initiated as collaboration between artists of Nordic and Balkan region.
There were held events in Helsinki and Denmark in 2004, in Belgrade in 2005, in Kraljevo 2007th, in Istanbul 2009th as the fifth part of the project with artists from Switzerland, Great Britain, Finland, Germany, Serbia, Turkey, Egypt and Syria.
Project was organized in Depo (the space for critical debate and cultural exchange in the center of Istanbul and the first initiative in Turkey, which focuses on regional cooperation between Turkey and the countries of the Caucasus, the Middle East and the Balkans) and included a workshop during which the artists reacted to the city with works production at spot of the place and the exhibition as a product of workshop where these works are placed in the Depot space.
In addition to works produced in Istanbul have been exposed and has done videos that are answered on the subject of potential identities (Contingent Identities). It was a collaborative project aimed at creating an open platform for research, with special focus on social change and cultural development caused by European integration process in the Balkans (including Turkey).
Additional module of collaboration within the project sought to understand the ways in which transformation can communicate or correspond with the Nordic region-region which is seen as a similar place on the outskirts of artistic life. ‘Contingent Identities’ explored the concept of identity in relation to socio-economic and social developments relating to the “New Europe”, a review of gender identity, affinities within a social or professional group, national or ethnic heritage, as well as measures that require certain behaviors from a citizen-subject .
Some of the produced works are: “Solidarity” by Darinka Pop-Mitic, “Motivator” and “Thanks for convincing lies” by Michael Wojnar, “Kathy Stoiljkovic travel with Pipilotti Rist,” “Shoot the silent” by Kathy Stoiljkovic, “Veil” by Nisrine Boukhari, ” Tunç Ali Çam Museum,” Isabel Schmiga with “Police” and the portrait of “Ataturk”, “Amazing encounters” by Suat Ogut, “Untitled” the photography by Goran Micevski concerning the relationship between male and female bodies, the relationship between western and eastern representation of the body; participated also Kukka Pavilainen, Leona Dodig, Mark Brogan, Isidora Ficovic, Elmas Deniz, Dr Protic, Mohamed Abdel Karim, Erinç Seymen, Jelena Radic / Eduard Freudmann.
MPM: Few months ago you have presented in Belgrade and Berlin the new phase of your project “What is Contemporary?” How did the project develop?
IF: The project has involved local artists, curators and art scene, who participated in the work with its response to the question “What is Contemporary?”, the shooting was happening during year 2010, and despite the answer to the question which is dealing with, video work is recording and atmosphere of the city, the ambience where was recorded, interiors of restaurants as well as artists’ studios. On the increasing number of artists, art historians and curators, those were relevant in creation of the spirit of the capital and beyond, both today and in the twenty and thirty years before. With Era Milivojevic, Rasa Todosijevic, Zoran Popovic, Jovan Cekic, there appears also a generation of younger group of local contemporary art scene, the presence in the work of their individuality and subjective responses are making the contemporary moment itself captured by digital recordings. The work gives the viewer a glimpse into who are the members of contemporary art scene in Belgrade, uniting them through their answers to the question “” What is Contemporary?” in the space of digital video and offers a continuous reviewing of the time ‘now’.
The work is made for the curatorial project of Mara Prohaska Markovic and Maida Gruden,
Time packages, held in Berlin 2011th which premiered in the group exhibition that presented the Serbian artists in this town, in the space of 91 mq (Landsberger Allee 54). That same year, in the space call Magacin, Kraljevica Marko 4, the work was presented to Belgrade audience.
MPM: What is Contemporary? What is Contemporary for you?
IF: The space for research in the broader sense that reflects variety of contents, ideas, meanings through current moment..

ON PRODUCTION 2011 Girls just want to have fun!

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Why NON PRODUCTION?
It’s a strong expression statement of the whole situation combining economical, socio-political atmosphere of country and it’s capital and positions of the artist’s existential and professional needs within that atmosphere *Serbia, where the production is literally the water, a basic need to keep these kind of shows rolling. It’s the basic need of art. NON PRODUCTION is the statement for rising awareness that should not be just thought about it, but take it in consideration to bringing it into action. It says LETS DO!
NON PRODUCTION simply says LET’S DO!!!
I hope you can and you will enjoy the show.
Girls just want to have fun!

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What’s Contemporary Belgrade 2011, ambient/video installation Magacin/Dom omladine. Cultural Center DOM OMLADINE is organization of City Council of Belgrade. Arts Programme Manager Anja Obradović. Photo by Aleksandrija Ajduković

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The video work in Magacin Belgrade is exposed in the ambient installation as the first half of gallery space is filled with still frame photos of participants in video sorted into a film strip on one wall and the opposite wall of that space is marked with the words NON PRODUCTION.
Why NON PRODUCTION? It’s a strong expression statement of the whole situation combining economical, social, political atmosphere of country and it’s capital and positions of the artist’s existential and professional needs within that atmosphere where the production is literally the water, a basic need to keep these kind of shows rolling. It’s the basic need of art.  NON PRODUCTION is a statement for rising awareness that should not be just thought about it, but take it in consideration to bringing it into action.
It says LETS DO!
NON PRODUCTION simply says LET’S DO!!! here.
I hope you can and you will enjoy the show.

More about the video here.

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