Artists

Adel Abidin (Iraq / Finland / Jordan ), G Douglas Barrett (USA), Sari Carel (Israel / USA), Emma Dusong (France), Dora Economou ( Greece), Francesco Gagliardi (Italy / Canada), Giorgos Koumendakis (Greece), Alyssa Moxley (USA / Greece), Melody Nixon (New Zealand / USA), Lena Platonos (Greece), Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Slovenia / Netherlands), Raphael Sbrzesny (Germany), Petros Touloudis (Greece), Hong-Kai Wang (Taiwan), Samson Young (Hong Kong)

Designer
wearestillbb.com →

Curated by
G Douglas Barrett, Petros Touloudis

Organized by
Tinos Quarry Platform in collaboration with the Cultural Foundation of Tinos

Venue
Cultural Foundation of Tinos, Tinos, Cyclades, Greece

Duration
July 5 – October 31, 2017

The free movement of bodies and objects once considered critical for the smooth functioning of contemporary art now appears increasingly uncertain in an era marked by new forms of nationalism, xenophobia, and economic isolationism. Indeed, many artists working in this environment have found it difficult or impossible to cross once unquestionably open borders, or to ship works to and from exhibitions held across a requisitely international stage. Responding to this crisis, Reassembly brings the work of artists from four continents to the Greek island of Tinos through a collaboration between artist, composer, and theorist G Douglas Barrett, artist Petros Touloudis, the Tinos Quarry Platform, and the Cultural Foundation of Tinos.

The artists included in this exhibition incorporate themes of transnationalism and globality in works made through a variety of digitally portable media (video, photography, sound, text) and through practices of scoring, notating, and scripting that formally relate to the musical score. Deracinated from music, the score nevertheless suggests, in this instance, an ability to cross spatial and temporal boundaries through its virtual or immaterial status. Other precedents for these intermedial scripts and instructions can be found in the “event scores” that emerged alongside conceptual art and the “dematerialized” practices of the 1960s and 70s. Here these forms point not only to a formal fluidity between media, but also broadly reflect a contemporary state of hyperconnected global isolation.

The artists featured in Reassembly draw upon music and various digital (and electronic and analog) media in projects that traverse and transgress national borders, cultural boundaries, linguistic delimitations, temporal markers, and other lines of demarcation. Yet rather than converging on stable definitions of terms like music and media, formally these artworks share with their content a sense of openness and fluidity. Nevertheless these artists engage a number of distinct yet interrelated fields: art and music history, ethnomusicology, urban studies, cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies, and continental philosophy. Together their work speaks to the issues of immigration, spatial mobility, national identity, political economy, gender, sexuality, and cultural hybridity through a range of artistic methodologies.

G Douglas Barrett

 Raphael Sbrzesny, Castel Volturno (2010), video, 4:25 min

German artist Raphael Sbrzesny’s Castel Volturno (2010) stages an homage to those who have tried and failed in their efforts to cross borders, focusing on the economically depressed eponymous Italian township located just north of Naples. The single channel video depicts the artist wading into the sea while repeatedly striking a drum. This drumming, according to Sbrzesny, represents “the manifold voices of migrants who, year by year, try to make their passage across the sea to start a new life in Italy.” Entering by the shore, the drummer marches out to sea until fully submerged.

Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Reading Stanley Brouwn (2015-16), book, modified metronome, table

Another form of ambulatory musicality is found in Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec‘s Reading Stanley Brouwn (2015-16), an installation that reinterprets a book publication by Dutch conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn (1935-2017) entitled my steps 12.12.2005 – 1.1.2006 (2014). Brouwn’s book consists of twenty-one pages, each containing a date and the number of steps the artist walked that day, covering a total of twenty-one days. In Sambolec’s re-reading, the artist recorded each step of a similar series of walks (in a different location) in real time using a digital tracking device. In his installation Sambolec re-encodes each step as a single tick emitted by an electronically modified analog metronome that operates on a matching timeline. That is, the twenty-one days of Sambolec’s walks correspond directly to the work as one experiences it during the exhibition. Ultimately, the viewer witnesses a kind of cybernetic reincarnation of Brouwn, digitally retranslated as the artist’s own metronome-marked footsteps.

Francesco Gagliardi, Translation #6: Shuang Shuang Yan (2009), video, 48:34 min

Translation is also a theme in Italian-Canadian artist Francesco Gagliardi’s single-channel video Translation #6: Shuang Shuang Yan (2009). The work documents an event in which the artist invited an extended Chinese-Canadian family in Toronto to a dinner party in order to collaboratively translate into English a popular Chinese song from the 1930s. The song plays on a loop in the background as large plates of Chinese food are served. Meanwhile, the family converse with Gagliardi and with each other over the song’s potential meanings as the camera slowly revolves around a large circular table. But Gagliardi, who is himself an immigrant and a non-native English speaker, deliberately eschews any sense of a cultural or linguistic center. Through a series of negotiations, hesitations, slippages, and shared uncertainties, he reveals translation as a contingent process that recalls, perhaps, what anthropologist Georgina Born has termed “social improvisation.”

Adel Abidin, Three Love Songs (2010),
We Still Have the Patience, Father of Two Lions, Enter It! (video, 9:48)

Artist Adel Abidin uses the vernacular song to subversively retranslate Iraqi history and its cultural representations through the idioms of Western popular music. In Three Love Songs (2010) Abidin created music videos for propaganda songs commissioned by Saddam Hussein during his time as president of Iraq. The songs are arranged in three different musical styles: 1960s lounge, 1920s jazz, and contemporary pop. Each of the three corresponding videos features a young female singer staged in an atmosphere characteristic of the respective era. The songs are sung in an Iraqi dialect of Arabic. Yet while the video is subtitled in English, the performers, who do not speak Arabic, were instructed to perform the songs as though they were traditional love songs. Abidin thus highlights asymmetries between linguistic access and regimes of representation through the act of musical retranslation.

Samson Young, Muted Situations (2014), text score (not shown), performance, two videos,
Muted Classical Quartet, video, 17:10 min. Muted Lion Dance, video, 7:21 min

Hong Kong artist Samson Young’s Muted Situations (2014) similarly challenge notions of cultural interiority and authority in a postcolonial context. The series consists of twenty “text scores” that, according to Young, “re-prioritize certain sound layers” of performances, actions, and events. Included here are Muted Classical Quartet 消音弦樂四重奏 —a string quartet from the classical era (composed, according to Young’s instructions, “by a European male composer”)—and Muted Lion Dance 消音舞獅 —the artist’s variation of the traditional Chinese custom wherein performers mimic the movements of a lion in sync with percussive drumming. On the one hand, the classical string quartet is defamiliarized by uncovering incidental (“non-musical”) sounds and choreographical gestures often unique to each string player’s sense of musicality. On the other, Young contrasts the collectively produced lion dance with a reference to the musical tradition that has historically consolidated authorship almost exclusively to European men.

Hong-Kai Wang, The Broken Orchestra (2007), multi-channel sound installation

http://www.w-h-k.net/broken.html

Continuing a similar thread, Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang, in her sound installation The Broken Orchestra (2007), asked nine musicians to individually recreate a twentythree year old cassette tape recording of her brother and herself performing French composer Charles Gounod’s 1853 Méditation sur le Premier Prélude de Piano de S. Bach, well-known setting of the Latin text Ave Maria. Ironically, Gounod’s work is itself a transcription of the melodic improvisation the composer performed while his future father-in-law played a modified version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major (1722). In Wang’s multichannel sound work, each of the nine professional musicians was asked to adhere as closely as possible to her cassette tape, attending to the various imperfections of the duet recorded with her brother. Through her iterative recording and transcription process, Wang thus highlights the kind of familial intimacy—at once intergenerational and transcultural—that often inheres through musical processes of pedagogical transmission.

Emma Dusong, Ta Voix (2013), pillows, headphones, ipod, photos

A different sense of intimacy can be found in Emma Dusong’s Ta voix (2013), a work that consists of two large white pillows containing implanted headphone speakers. The viewer is invited to hold each pillow on either side of her/his head, as illustrated in the accompanying photographs, such that the speakers are heard in stereo. The sound transmitted via the speakers is the artist’s own voice, which describes another voice that belonged to a person who has passed away. The voice, Dusong says, “carries its own disappearance.” Dusong’s work begins with the ostensibly solipsistic gesture of covering one’s head with pillows, perhaps as a way of blocking out the world during a time of mourning. Yet the viewer receives not comfort from silence but a sense of disquiet as one voice solemnly points to another’s passing.

Alyssa Moxley, Sound Entangled Spaces (2017), performance, sound installation

In Alyssa Moxley‘s Sound Entangled Spaces (2017), the artist exhibits another kind of passing, here focusing on sound’s potential to communicate across geographically separated spaces. Moxley, an American artist who travels extensively, will be stationed in Athens during the opening of Reassembly. She will begin her performance in Athens by playing back sounds she has collected from some of her many border crossings, island visits, and locations that signify transitional movement. That sound will be transmitted to Tinos where it will combine with room ambience before returning to Athens. Moxley’s telepresent feedback loop may also invoke the work of experimental composers like Maryanne Amacher, who beginning in 1968 used sound to connect different spaces in her City Links series. Here Moxley appends further lines of transversal to her network of aurally entangled spaces.

Melody Nixon, Alien #059 ☐☐☐ (2017), performance, text, installation

Exploring a related form of spatial biography, author and artist Melody Nixon ’s Alien #059 ☐☐☐ (2017) consists of a prompt instructing viewers to redact portions of the US “Immigration and Nationality Act” and the “Rights and Responsibilities of a Green Card Holder” as displayed on two overhead projectors. Nixon, who often works with American immigrant populations in her pedagogical practice, is herself a New Zealand-born immigrant to the US. Her work encodes literary and artistic forms through a rubric of political engagement. Here Nixon’s prompt recalls the text score compositions of experimental music, while her redacted text refers to the literary practice of erasure poetry. By displaying and inviting public revisions to these documents, with which customs and immigrations officers routinely confront immigrants upon arrival in the US, Nixon domesticates and reworks tools otherwise used for the domination and control of already marginalized migrant populations.

Sari Carel, Migration: Earth and Sky, (2017)
Brief no. 8 (Sitting Mat); Brief no. 9 (An Instrument for Cleaning); Brief no. 12 (External Wall),
Oil on wood, photograph, watercolor, pigment, and pencil on paper, handmade rope

With a different perspective on a similar thread, Israeli-American artist Sari Carel uses zoology and ornithology as tools for excavating the endangered and sometimes extinct histories of human migration. Carel’s Migration: Earth and Sky (2017) is a multifaceted intermedia project that unites disparate bodies of artistic, anthropological, and scientific research around the Hula Valley region of northern Israel. These include data analyses of bird migration patterns, an accompanying audio diary, and a series of “research sculptures” that provide partial reconstructions of the craft work found in the pre-Zionist Bedouin villages of the Ghawaraneh tribe. But since no artifacts were left to conserve following the forced depopulation of the Ghawaraneh villages, Carel’s sculptures—included here are Earth and Sky, Brief nos. 8 (Sitting Mat) 9 (An Instrument for Cleaning), and 12 (External Wall) —provide only a speculative reconstruction of a body of cultural knowledge forced into extinction.

Lena Platonos, Gallop (1985), electronic music album, video, 33:16 min

In her electronic music compositions, Greek musician Lena Platonos unites political concerns for contemporary urban issues, including migration, with personal narratives of love and loss. Her watershed 1985 LP, Gallop, for example, includes vocalized commentary on “Rumanian Immigrants” set against her characteristic synth pop textures and electronic dance beats. The album, Platonos notes, was composed in the wake of a painful breakup, an event the composer channelled into broader social and political commentary. According to Platonos, Gallop stands as “a study in the mythology of urban population of the contemporary metropolis and also a gaze into the future life of it.” Such a study ultimately represents only a fraction of Platonos’s monumental output as an electronic musician, which has been largely overlooked outside of a Greek context.

Dora Economou, Her Greatest Misses (2017), paper (variable dimensions)

The work of Greek artist Dora Economou speaks to culturally and geographically specific representations of gender and feminism. Economou broadly combines modernist European sculptural practices with influences ranging from the “women’s work” movement of the 1970s to the kinds of paper folding found in Japanese origami. In Her Greatest Misses (2017) Economou points to competing layers of cerebral and somatic labor involved in paper folding practices through references to gendered embodiment. Economou stages a series of large-scale folded paper works stretching across the floor of the gallery, which, according to the artist, “takes up almost as much space as the spread out surface of my skin would.” Economou describes the process of learning origami techniques by watching YouTube tutorials, noting that such videos typically isolate the tutor’s hands thus obscuring gender. In the context of Reassembly’s focus on musicality, Economou’s work recalls Fluxus artist and composer Ben Patterson whose paper-based performances invoked issues around race within a highly Eurocentric artistic movement. Here Economou similarly reinscribes the (gendered) body through the geometric folds of her contoured white surfaces.

G Douglas Barrett, What is the Sound of One Flag Burning? (2017),
performance, video (4:09 min.), vinyl record

G Douglas Barrett‘s What is the Sound of One Flag Burning? (2017) is a collaborative vinyl record project that combines political demonstration with philosophical reflection on sound recording technology. In 2016 the artist created an audio recording of a public flag burning in response to rising neonational sentiment in the US and in light of then president-elect’s threat to imprison those responsible for a similar event. The project suggests a double homage: firstly, to American artist Dread Scott’s 1988 What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?, a work that invited participants to step on an American flag and which prompted President Bush Senior’s support of legislation that subsequently prohibited such acts. Secondly, the project alludes to Iannis Xenakis’s 1958 work Concrete PH, a musique concrète composition that consists entirely of the sound of a single burning ember. Invoking musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of acousmatics —wherein recordings are imagined as capable of removing all reference to a sound’s source—the project asks: to what extent sound can reliably evidence acts of transgression? Side A features Barrett’s original flag-burning recording while Side B consists of two original works (Tobacco and Oil ) by Reassembly artist Samson Young.

Giorgos Koumendakis, Two Poems (1980), graphic score

Greek composer Giorgos Koumendakis draws from the legacy of twentieth century graphic notation practices in his Two Poems (1980), a set of two graphic scores for orchestra displayed here as eight framed excerpts. Like works by Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, and Sylvano Bussotti, Koumendakis’s score defines not precise pitches and durations as with traditionally notated music but allows for a range of possible musical interpretations. With each performance such a score receives a new sounding life. In Two Poems, although instruments are defined, Koumendakis provides no instructions or legend for reading the various forms of indeterminate notation. Given only a visual representation of the music, here the spectator alone becomes responsible for imagining the sounding result. The poetry of Two Poems is thus found not in literary meaning but in the suggestive aurality of the page and its musical markings.

Petros Touloudis, A Study for “Mediterranean Desert” (2012), video, 10:50 min

Reassembly co-curator Petros Touloudis‘s A Study for “Mediterranean Desert” (2012) layers the artificial and the natural by reflecting upon the Mediterranean and the long history of cultures shaped by its ebb and flow. Responding to Koumendakis’s Mediterranean Desert (1998-2000), a piano cycle meditation on the flora and fauna specific to the Mediterranean, Touloudis attempts to capture a sense of movement and time endemic to the region through the repetitive movement of a wave. Yet what appears initially as a naturalistic image of the ocean is later shown to be pure artifice. Beginning with a close up of a slowly undulating tide, the camera gradually zooms out over the course of the eleven minute video to reveal a small aquatic set Touloudis constructed in a courtyard. The Mediterranean, Touloudis’s mise-en-scène suggests, flows both in and through its representations.

Texts G Douglas Barrett

Photos by TQP Images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Cultural Foundation of Tinos

********** PDF **********

This project is sponsored by

Artists</h4

Giorgos Agallou, Douglas Barrett, Franck Bragigand, Anastasia Douka, Antonín Jirát, Eleni Kamma, Katerina Kana, Ioannis Koliopoulos, Vasiliki Konstantinopoulou, Charalambos Kourkoulis (Photoharrie), Melody Nixon, Paola Palavidi, Dimitris Papadatos, Ilias Papailiakis, Socratis Socratous, Iris Touliatou, Petros Touloudis, Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Curated by
Alexios Papazacharias

Assistant Curator
Stefanos Giannoulis

Organized by
Tinos Quarry Platform artist-in-residency program in collaboration with the Cultural Foundation of Tinos

Venue
Cultural Foundation of Tinos, Tinos, Cyclades, Greece

Date:
July 2 – October 31, 2016

Photos by
Photoharrie and collective, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Cultural Foundation of Tinos

Curiosity*1 is influencing numerous processes. To name a few of them: discovery, innovation, gossiping, research, experimentation and the death*2 of some unfortunate yet certain*3 cats*4. Curiosity and the invitation by Tinos Quarry Platform arrived at the same time*5. Tinos*6 is an island I had never been to before. After giving it a second thought, a third, even a forth and so on, curiosity stayed with me.
Curiosity’s effects seem unlimited and rather chaotic*6 to narrow down. Google provides an image of it. Curiosity (Περιέργεια)*8 looks like a vehicle, a rover rolling its wheels on planet Mars. Google doesn’t lie*9.

Unlike its predecessors looking for specific answers, Curiosity’s mission is to produce a clearer image of Mars by collecting a broad variety of data*10. In a similar tone the residency and exhibition are developing around curiosity as a vehicle for broader exploration, thus providing the artists with the complete freedom to create their own methods of approach to the theme.

Tinos is to be explored by invited artists, sharing different familiarity levels with the island. Some live abroad, some are Greek, some have been in Greece, some have never visited before, some reside on the island, others visit on an annual basis. Levels of familiarity function for curiosity like different settings on a microscope or a telescope, depending on what one is planning to study.

*1 If the knowledge of ill can reward the industrious search with so much delight and pleasure, turn the point of thy curiosity upon thyself and thine own affairs, and thou shalt within doors find matter enough for the most laborious enquiries, plentiful as
Water in Aliso’s stream, or leaves about the oak.

As found here ›

*2 “Curiosity killed the cat” is a proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. A less frequently-seen rejoinder to “curiosity killed the cat” is “but satisfaction brought it back”.
The original form of the proverb, now little used, was “Care killed the cat”. In this instance, “care” was defined as “worry” or “sorrow.”

As defined below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_killed_the_cat

*3 Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement) in the course of developing the thought experiment.

Schrödinger’s cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e., a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

*4 According to a myth in many cultures, cats have multiple lives. In many countries, they are believed to have nine lives, but in Italy, Germany, Greece, Brazil and some Spanish-speaking regions, they are said to have seven lives, while in Turkish and Arabic traditions, the number of lives is six. The myth is attributed to the natural suppleness and swiftness cats exhibit to escape life-threatening situations. Also lending credence to this myth is the fact that falling cats often land on their feet, using an instinctive righting reflex to twist their bodies around. Nonetheless, cats can still be injured or killed by a high fall.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#History_and_mythology
*5 What time is now?

7:49 PM
Wednesday, June 29, 2016 (GMT+3)
Time in Mesaria

As found below
google.gr/search?q=cat+lifes

*6 Tinos (Greek: Τήνος [ˈtinos]) is a Greek island situated in the Aegean Sea. It is located in the Cyclades archipelago. In antiquity, Tinos was also known as Ophiussa (from ophis, Greek for snake) and Hydroessa (from hydor, Greek for water). The closest islands are Andros, Delos, and Mykonos. It has a land area of approximately 194 square kilometres (75sq m) and a 2011 census population of 8,636 inhabitants.

Tinos is famous amongst Greeks for the Church of Panagia Evangelistria, its 80 or so windmills, about 1000 artistic dovecotes, 50 active villages and its Venetian fortifications at the mountain, Exomvourgo. On Tinos, both Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic populations co-exist, and the island is also well known for its famous sculptors and painters, such as Nikolaos Gysis, Yannoulis Chalepas and Nikiforos Lytras.
The island is located near the geographical center of the Cyclades island complex, and because of the Panagia Evangelistria church, with its reputedly miraculous icon of Virgin Mary that it holds, Tinos is also the center of a yearly pilgrimage that takes place on the date of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (15 August, “Dekapentavgoustos” in Greek). This is perhaps the most notable and still active yearly pilgrimage in the region of the eastern Mediterranean. Many pilgrims make their way the 800 metres (2,600 feet) from the ferry wharf to the church on their hands and knees as sign of devotion.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinos

*7 Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as:

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future

As discussed below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

*8 Curiosity is a car-sized robotic rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL).

As of June 29, 2016, Curiosity has been on the planet Mars for 1385 sols (1423 total days; 3 years, 328 days) since landing on August 6, 2012. Since September 11, 2014, Curiosity has been exploring the slopes of Mount Sharp, where more information about the history of Mars is expected to be found. As of February 4, 2016, the rover has traveled over 7.4 km (4.6 mi) to, and around, the mountain base since leaving its “start” point in Yellowknife Bay on July 4, 2013.
Curiosity’s design will serve as the basis for the planned Mars 2020 rover. In December 2012, Curiosity’s two-year mission was extended indefinitely.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)

Περιέργεια is the greek word for curiosity. It derives from the words πέρι and έργον that mean about and work respectively.

*9 A lie is a statement that the stating party believes to be false and that is made with the intention to deceive. The practice of communicating lies is called lying, and a person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar. Lies may be employed to serve a variety of instrumental, interpersonal, or psychological functions for the individuals who use them. Generally, the term “lie” carries a negative connotation, and depending on the context a person who communicates a lie may be subject to social, legal, religious, or criminal sanctions. In certain situations, however, lying is permitted, expected, or even encouraged. Believing and acting on false information can have serious consequences.

As found below
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

For a typical query, there are thousands, if not millions, of webpages with helpful information. Algorithms are the computer processes and formulas that take your questions and turn them into answers. Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to guess what you might really be looking for. These signals include things like the terms on websites, the freshness of content, your region and PageRank.

As found below
google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/algorithms.html

*10 Objectives
Mars Science Laboratory: Mission Objectives
To contribute to the four science goals and meet its specific goal of determining Mars’ habitability, Mars Science Laboratory has the following science objectives.

Biological objectives:
Determine the nature and inventory of organic carbon compounds
Inventory the chemical building blocks of life (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur)
Identify features that may represent the effects of biological processes.

Geological and geochemical objectives:
Investigate the chemical, isotopic, and mineralogical composition of the martian surface and near-surface geological materials. Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils.

Planetary process objectives:
Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) atmospheric evolution processes
Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide.

Surface radiation objective:
Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic cosmic radiation, solar proton events, and secondary neutrons

As found below
mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/science/objectives

Goals
Mars Science Laboratory: Mission Goals

1. Determine whether life ever arose on Mars
2. Characterize the climate of Mars
3. Characterize the geology of Mars
4. Prepare for human exploration

As found below
mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/science/goals/

Anastasia Douka, How to Hide, 2016, plaster, clay

Anastasia Douka, How to Hide, clay and plaster, 2016 (detail)

Giorgos Agallou, Untitled, marble,  2016

Charalambos Kourkoulis (photoharrie), NSA Tinos 2016, marble, 2016

Frank Bragigand, Cenotaph of History, photograph, 2016

Frank Bragigand, The End of History, wall drawing, 2016

Socratis Socratous, Auction Lots, 2016, exact copies in marble of ballistic projectiles used in the recent conflicts in Middle East, that have a second life in Cyprus as auction lots, regarding the market of recycling of metals, 2016 Courtesy The Breeder, Athens

Ilias Papailiakis, The Field (Study For a Wound), graphite on paper, 2016

Eleni Kamma, Regarding that moment when I didn’t speak the truth (although I could), eleven framed photos, taken in Tinos between 25 May and 5 June 2016 after a series of confessions concerning personal insincerity. The artist asked the individuals that confessed to visualize the reason of their insincerity in the manner of a self-portrait. These portraits were realized instantly at the local photographer’s studio in the typical size and format of a passport photo, 2016

Katerina Kana, Desktop (2438 NGC), marble, 2016

Antonín Jirát, Black Sizes, cardboard, 2016

Antonín Jirát, Black Sizes, cardboard, 2016 (detail)

G Douglas Barrett, Two Transcriptions/ Ode to Schoenberg, vinyl record, 2013

The work frames questions around artistic authorship through different historical contexts for considering gender and identity. In response to Arnold Schoenberg’s scolding letter protesting the female voice contained on a 1950 vinyl record of the composer’s Ode to Napoleon (1942), this record presents two “transcriptions” of the work for transgender performers.

Duo for the world end by Melody Nixon

Melody Nixon, Duo for the World End explores questions of agency in our atomized world of precarity, instability, and advancing climate change. What relationships can we draw between present and future climate refugees and present-day war refugees? What is the role of technology in our declining Capitalocene? And how can we construct narratives of continuity amid a reality of isolation and change?

Ioannis Koliopoulos & Paola Palavidi, Untitled, from the George Poniros archives, mixed media, 2016

Petros Touloudis, Secular properties, marble, 2016

Secular Properties is a project that initially started in 2015. The project is about a proposal of the artist to the municipality of Tinos island, regarding the construction of an amphitheater at the court yard of the former primary school of Isternia village. This project grasps the idea of a theater as a public sculpture in the location and it is organically connected to the TQP, as an open invitation to a “collaborative” sculpture.

Iris Touliatou, Emotional Infinity (the sound of him coming back home amplified and looped), electric fans, metal wire, reproduced door keys, 2016

Alexios Papazacharias, Shirt of Distinction, double clothes hook, shirt placed on either hook, none or both, 2016

Dimitris Papadatos, Reverse Ariadne, Composition on ten acts for voices, piano, modular synthesizer and various objects, 2016

Vasiliki Konstantinopoulou, Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning (William Arthur Ward), ceramic, rock, edition 1/3, 2016

Filippos Tsitsopoulos, Filippos Tsitsopoulos with Alexios Papazacharias Lecture on Shakespeare and the refusal of being useful, video, 22:26:17, 2016

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AoI-nIfaMUEhggwJ3fP5yWBURG6-

Filippos Tsitsopoulos, screening on green marble quarry, 2016 Tinos island

CURIOSITY pdf →

Artists

Lorenzo Cirrincione, Dorota Gaweda, Pakui Hardware, Eglė Kulbokaitė, Mikko Kuorinki, Carl Palm, Jennifer Teets

Curated by
Valentinas Klimašauskas

Organized by
Tinos Quarry Platform residency program in collaboration with the Cultural Foundation of Tinos

Venue
Cultural Foundation of Tinos, Tinos, Cyclades, Greece

Date
July 27 – October 31, 2015

Photos by
Natasha Papadopoulou, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Cultural Foundation of Tinos

Negotiations (on climate change, the Greek debt, Mediterranean migrant crisis, you name it) are running out of time. Time was once measured by running water, sand, and, besides flying like an arrow, it was running like a river; possibly, as a river of sand. Your tablet’s touchscreen, the one that shows, but also waists our time, may be produced from the same sand.

After he became blind, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges visited the pyramids in Cairo. There he scooped up a handful of sand and sifted it through his fingers. When asked what he was doing he replied, “I am rearranging the Sahara.” Like the internet or any other vast amount of information or material, the desert and the ocean have no beginning or end, and may be called hyperobjects as coined by Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects are so massivel distributed in time and space that they transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, Styrofoam, or radioactive plutonium. Living with, between, or even inside the aforementioned hyperobjects — like how plankton lives in the ocean, or how sand runs in the desert and in one’s palm, we also rearrange the real and metaphorical Sahara and oceans, don’t we?

If you prefer, another example comes to mind the weather. In physics and other sciences, a nonlinear system is a system where the output is not directly proportional to the input. In a similar manner, the exhibition was curated by non-linear dynamics: algae, yeast, calendar, the moon, Venus and Jupiter, making a perfect triangle in the sky just before the opening, showering in marble quarries, a referendum, goat’s mating season, the wind, and many more objects and factors to come.

“To ask a human being to account for time is not very different from asking a floating fragment of plankton to account for the ocean. How does the plankton bank the ocean?™” asks Raqs Media Collective while being concerned about the qualities of time but also making an eco-poetical connection between plankton and humans. They continue:

What is time?
What is the time?
The time is of your choosing.
The time is not of your choosing.
The time is out of joint.
The time has come.
The time needs changing.
The time has gone.
The time has come and gone.
The time has flown.
The time is not convenient.
The time is at hand.
The time has been spent well.
The time has been wasted.
The time is awkward.
The time is ripe.
The time has passed so swiftly.
The time is now.
What is the time?

Looking from the perspective of the New York Stock Exchange, which is trading and crashing in nanoseconds, a month spent on a Cycladic Island, Tinos, may be compared to a significantly longer period than a month somewhere else. Similarly, from the perspective of a fragment of plankton, a month for the artists on Tinos Island might disappear as soon (or as long) as a nanosecond on Wall Street.

The residency and exhibition does not ask the artists or the audience to be accounted for the time spent, but seeks to create artistic and poetic links between the organic and the non-organic, a part and the whole (as in plankton and the ocean), and constructs distinct perspectives to look at ourselves, not to mention the time and space from the point of view of an ophidian, a voting ballot from the last referendum, or an immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, just to cite another example.

Dorota Gaweda, Turritopsis dohrnii, 2015

Dorota Gaweda, Ophidians, 2015

Pakui Hardware, Toop Toop Toop.ppt, 2015

Pakui Hardware, Mei Piech Chi, 2015

Egle Kulbokaite, Hypersea I // To escape the banal – terrestrial like angels, 2015

Lorenzo Cirrincione, Heures sans soleil, 2015

Carl Palm, I CAN’T SEE WHY NOT SAID THE SNOWBLIND SHISHA CHAIN-CHOKING SEASHELL SHELLY SCHUMACHER & CHILLELY SHIVERED HER SHOESHINED SCHOTTISCH SHOULDERS SHABBYCHICLY IN A CHILLAXED SHANGHAIAN CHIMICHURI SHELTER, 2015

Mikko Kuorinki, Objects described with words to a marble carver, a potter and a weaver, 2015

Jennifer Teets, The contingency of cheese (Tinos), 2015

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana pdf →

Valentinas Klimašauskas presents his text (with humans/machines Petros Touloudis and Salomeja Marcinkeviciute) “How to Clone a Mammoth” and Jennifer Teets presents fragments from Dewey’s “Art as Experience” at Dio Choria Contemporary Art Platform, on Mykonos island at the opening of Rallou Panagiotou on 24.07.

New logo, a contribution to the platform, by Neringa Cerniauskaite, designed by Petros Touloudis

Third part of the project for the Museum of Post Digital Cultures titled She wanders through the cities of deserted islands and a simultaneous reading group coming on Sunday 31 May, 7pm on Tinos island, together with Tinos Quarry Platform, reading Silvia Federici The Caliban and the Witch. More at postdigitalcultures.ch ›

Second part of the project “She wanders through the cities of deserted islands”, YGRG coming on this Sunday 7 pm with a simultaneous reading of Sadie Plant’s zeros+ones in Platanos Square, Isternia, Tinos Island. More at postdigitalcultures.ch ›

First part of the project, “She wanders through the cities of deserted islands”, Young Girl Reading Group with Egle Kulbokaite and Dorota Gaweda. Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness  by Donna Haraway. In the courtyard of the Aghia Paraskevi cathedral of Isternia, Tinos at 19:00 on Sunday 17 MAY. More at postdigitalcultures.ch ›

The open call for the working year 2014/15 is now closed.