Departure of All, Noshowspace, Bethnal Green, London

noshowspace, Departure of All

27 September – 26 October 2013, noshowspace, 13 Gibraltar Walk, Bethnal Green, London

noshowspace is pleased to present Departure of All, Martin John Callanan’s first solo exhibition in London.

Callanan is intrigued by systems present in society that shape our lives yet remain largely unobserved. In a process of research he makes simple and direct requests to international organisations and authorities, including open data sources. Through collating and presenting the often excessive results his work becomes an all inclusive, all embracing reflection of our wider world. In Departure of All Callanan will be showing Wars During My Lifetime, Grounds and a new work titled Departure of All.

Departure of All is a flight departure board displaying flight information for every departure happening from all international airports around the world. The familiar wait in front of the departure board is replaced with an accelerated stream of flight departure times, given poignancy by the fact they are real flights that can be mapped to real places in real time. The world as one airport.

In Grounds, a work of long term research started in 2003, Callanan seeks to negotiate permission to take a single photograph in buildings important to society but where photography is not permitted. His ongoing photographic archive currently contains about 2000 locations from across the world, a selection of which are on show.

Wars During My Lifetime is a newspaper, listing every war fought during the course of the artist’s life. It is an evolving work first published in 2012, a third edition is published on the occasion of this exhibition.

Martin John Callanan (b. 1982) lives and works between London and Berlin. Recent exhibitions include ‘Open Cube’, White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London (2013); ‘Along Some Sympathetic Lines’, Or Gallery, Berlin (2013); Whitstable Biennale (2012); Harrach Moya Gallery, Palma (2012) and ‘Deed Poll’, a performance at Whitechapel Gallery London (2012). Callanan graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2005 and is currently a Teaching Fellow in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

A publication accompanies the exhibition with contributions from Pau Waelder and Domenico Quaranta.

Part of Art Licks Weekend

Press Release (PDF)

Directory Of Fictitious Telephone Numbers – Impossible Transmissions

An aseptic space. One white table and on it a printed directory, accompanied by an apparently normal looking telephone. It would seem the right environment to make a call. And calls are, in fact, made. The phone operates automatically, dialling random numbers from the many listed in the phone book . The diffused audio allows visitors to listen to the classic dialling sounds, followed by a precise dead tone or a message saying, in varying languages, ‘the number you dialled does not exist’. The process repeats itself tirelessly; another number, another country, another language. A loop of sounds and dead time; a form of a dance, a ritual. A monologue or perhaps a soliloquy. No matter which of the many available numbers are dialled, it is certain that no calls will ever be answered because the list of numbers is officially exposed as The International Directory of Fictitious Telephone Numbers – an extensive list of numbers certified as non-existent and neatly divided into geographic areas of the world. The compilation of this phone book includes official requests from telecommunication regulators in different countries. The artwork, resulting from research by the British artist John Martin Callanan and presented first in Spain and then at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, is indefinitely offered as a resource for use in drama or film productions so that unsuspecting people aren’t disturbed by inquisitive viewers. Art in defence of privacy?

Benedetta Sabatini

Along Some Sympathetic Lines, Or Gallery, Berlin

Along Some Sympathetic Lines

Along Some Sympathetic Lines

Along Some Sympathetic Lines

Along Some Sympathetic Lines

23 February – 27 April 2013
Opening 7pm, 22 February 2013

Or Gallery, Oranienstr 37, Berlin 10999, Germany

Or Gallery is pleased to present Along Some Sympathetic Lines, an exhibition of artwork by London-based artist Martin John Callanan, and an archive project by curator Liz Bruchet. The exhibition considers the poetic possibilities of data and its documentation, and the tenuous process of making meaning.

Martin John Callanan is an artist researching an individual’s place within systems. Callanan generates and reworks photographs, letters and electronic data into evidence of exchanges – between the individual, the institution and the networks of power that intertwine them. The exhibition presents four of the artist’s series: The Fundamental Units, the result of amassing millions of pixels of data, to photographs, in microscopic detail far beyond the capacity of the human eye, the lowest monetary unit of each of the 166 active currencies of world, only to enlarge and print them to vast scale; Wars During My Lifetime, an evolving newspaper listing of every war fought during the course of the artist’s life; Grounds, an ongoing photographic archive which charts ‘important places’ in the world where security restrictions limit the image to the carpeted, tiled or concrete floors; and Letters 2004-2006, Callanan’s correspondence with various heads of states and religious leaders which implicate them in conversations that question their very rationale of their authority. These acts of excavating, accumulating and visualising data draw out the sympathetic aspects within documentation and in so doing, mark and disrupt the underlying power dynamics.

A second gallery features an archive project by London-based curator Liz Bruchet. The display of ephemera from the personal archive of the curator’s grandfather, a Canadian insurance salesman and aspiring radio presenter, takes its inspiration from a found audio recording – part monologue, part autobiography, and part radio show – made in 1974. Harnessing the impulses of the collector, archivist and biographer, the curator reasserts her role as custodian and caretaker to nurture narratives and give weight to the subjective remnants of one man’s life.

This exhibition is curated by Liz Bruchet.

The exhibition is possible with the generous support of Or Gallery, the National Physical Laboratory, and UCL European Institute.

With thanks to Galeria Horrach Moya, (Hiper)vincles, Whitechapel Gallery, Book Works, David Karl, and Pau Waelder.

Martin John Callanan: On Systems and Processes (de sistemas y procesos)

art.es arte_contemporáneo_internacional a

Article and interview with Pau Waelder in the forthcoming issue of Art.es #53

Press release

art.es international_contemporary_art announces the publication of its issue #53, with the following contents:

• art.es Project #44: Marina Núñez, Necrosis. (2013), digital image.
Cover and 22 inside pages. As always, an exclusive for the magazine (the originals belong to the art.es Collection).
Introductory text: Susana Cendán: Marina Núñez: “Everything has to do with the monsters”.

• Reflections:
– China’s Long March (4/10) (Zhang Fang).
– Meschac Gaba: Trying to change African society (Abdellah Karroum).
– A quantum reflection of Bakalhau (Cod Fish) (Fernando Galán).

• Media Art:
– Martin John Callanan: On Systems and Processes (Pau Waelder).

• Interview:
– Rafa Macarrón: “the solitude of man before the universe inmensity” (Fernando Galán).

• Film:
– Lipsett: a personal dilemma (Jorge D. González).

• Work_and_Word:
– Marco Ayres (Portugal)
– Simón Vega (El Salvador)
– Luis Gordillo (Spain)
– Pipo Hernández (Spain)
– Natxo Frisuelos (Spain)

• Exhibitions:
– The sublimation of detail: José Ferrero (Madrid) (Terry Berne).
– Bunga: beyond space: Carlos Bunga (Santa Mónica, California, USA) (Béatrice Chassepot).
– The descent into Marina Núñez’s hells (Valladolid, España) (Alfonso León).
– Reinterpreting art’s recent history: Roger Gustafsson (Madrid) (Fernando Galán).
– If you like small things: group show (A Coruña, España) (Nilo Casares).

• Museums
– Critical museology (2/2): On the limits of institutional art criticism (and critical museology as established discourse (Jesús Pedro Lorente)

• What’s going on in… Toronto? (John K. Grande).

• Books:
– “La Movida”, counterculture and normalization (La Movida, au nom du Père, des fils et du Todo Vale) (Juan Albarrán).

art.es is a 100 % bilingual magazine (English/Spanish) with contributions from the world over, and aimed at the entire world of genuinely contemporary art.

art.es focuses on established art as well as the latest creative iniciatives emerging from every corner of the planet. It informs and reflects on topics of interest, but with a fresh language and crisp design which are comprehensible to both specialists and amateurs. It has over 90 specialized collaborators and correspondents covering each and every geographical and thematic area of the contemporary art world.

Art and the Internet, Joanne McNeill and Domenico Quaranta

art and the internet Joanne McNeill   Domenico Quaranta

 

Martin John Callanan’s artworks Location of I and I Wanted to See All the News From Today featured in the forthcoming book Art and the Internet by Joanne McNeill and Domenico Quaranta.

Art and the Internet is a much-needed visual survey of art influenced by, situated on and taking the subject of the internet over the last two and a half decades. From the early 1990s the internet has had multiple roles in art, not least in defining several new genres of practitioners, from early networked art to new forms of interactive and participatory works, but also because it is the great aggregator of all art, past and present. Art and the Internet examines the legacy of the internet on art, and, importantly, illuminates how artists and institutions are using it and why.

Black Dog Publishing, August 2013
Paperback, 240 pages, 300 b/w and colour ills, 280 x 230 mm
ISBN 9781907317989

Big photos of little coins: National Physical Laboratory

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) wrote:

Martin John Callanan of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London contacted the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) as he wanted to put together an exhibition featuring large images of the lowest denomination coins from around the world.

Petra Mildeova from NPL’s Advanced Engineered Materials Group demonstrated that full colour images could be taken using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope. Five coins were imaged (containing over 400 megapixels), allowing coins of less than 20 mm diameter to be printed as 1.2 m diameter images.

 

Martin John Callanan described the images as “really stunning” and is exhibiting them at the Galleria Horrach Moyà in Mallorca, Spain, in an exhibition entitled ‘The Fundamental Units‘ (referring to the smallest denomination of coins on display and not as a result of working with NPL, the home of fundamental constants in the UK). He now hopes to enhance his exhibition by imaging a further 161 coins, one from each of the other countries around the world that use them.

 

The images have attracted interest from the British Museum and were featured by New Scientist as their image of the day on 4 December 2012.

 

The mapping of large areas at very high resolution is becoming a more regular requirement. In fact, the capabilities of the microscope used to produce the images of the coins were barely stretched, as they were only in 2D. Using the Alicona Infinite Focus optical microscope NPL is able to acquire 3D datasets from large areas, which can be used to study worn surfaces on a gear, drill bit or metal punch and hence produce a detailed measurement of the volume of material lost by wear of the component. Such quantified volume measurements can then be used to determine the best material or operating practice for a given material grade.

 

MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN: Martin John Callanan










MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN: Martin John Callanan
Horrach Moyà, Palma de Mallorca
29 November 2012 – 17 January 2013
Opening, 8pm, 29 November 2012

On May 16, 2008, Martin John Callanan changed his name to Martin John Callanan, by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed at the City of London Magistrate’s Court. On July 5, 2012, Martin John Callanan assumed the name of Martin John Callanan by Deed Poll, sworn and sealed by a Comissioner for Oath, and enrolled in the Supreme Court of Judicature. Through this action, at once absurd and totally in keeping with the laws of the United Kingdom, the artist Martin John Callanan (formerly Martin John Callanan) turns an administrative process into a reflexion on his own identity and the systems that validate the laws and institutions that govern our society.

We live in a multitude of systems: natural systems that affect our environment, social systems that define the possible actions in the framework of an established community, computer systems that enable and control the transmission and storage of data with which we create our memory and the image of our world. They shape our everyday reality, but we tend to ignore their existence or assume it as an indisputable fact: as the clouds floating overhead, these systems respond to a logic that is largely out of reach of the average citizen.

Through methodical and precise processes, Martin John Callanan explores the notion of citizenship in a globally connected world. The relationship between the individual and the systems that surround and affect our lives take shape in a series of works in which both the structures and the fragility of these systems are shown, sometimes by resorting to the absurd and the excess of information. The atworks in this exhibition at Horrach Moyà Gallery venture into the dynamics of natural, economic, administrative and mass media systems by means of an observation both on the cosmic and the microscopic level.

Inspired by the forms of scientific data visualization, the artist made in A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) a globe that only shows the position of the clouds during a second in February 2, 2009. This ephemeral map, made from hundreds of photographs from NASA satellites, is embodied in a sculpture created with a 3D printer and shown as an unattended object, an ignored finding, a fragile piece containing an unusual vision of our environment .

The economic system, which has raised to such notorious prominence in recent years because of its obvious impact on our lives, is a complex structure whose functioning is increasingly necessary to understand and, as much as possible, to predict or even control. In this sense, and in response to the dominance of macroeconomics in the discourse of the media, the artist chooses a microscopic view of the world economy. The Fundamental Units, a series that begins with the works produced by Horrach Moyà Gallery for this exhibition, is an exploration of the lowest denomination coins from the world’s currencies using an infinite focus 3D optical microscope at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (UK). The images obtained with the microscope have been combined to form an extremely detailed large scale reproduction of the least valuable coins from Australia, Chile, the Euro, Myanmar and the Kingdom of Swaziland. In these images the humble metal acquires a planetary dimension and is displayed as the atoms that shape the global economy.

The reality shown by the media consists in turn of its own units, the news covering the front pages of newspapers and circulated by television and radio, websites, blogs and social networks. The speed and density of the information flow that is generated in every corner of the planet and invades all communication channels exposes us to a saturation that paradoxically makes data illegible. I Wanted to See All of the News From Today deals with this excess of information by means of a web site that automatically collects the front pages of hundreds of newspapers around the world and displays them in a grid. From these data, the artist has produced a series of prints in which the pages of newspapers form a totemic picture of everyday life in the information society.

Martin John Callanan completes this exhibition with Deed Poll, which is both the action taken in the process of change (or recovery) of his name on July 5, 2012 and the legal documents, canceled passport, letters and responses, official notice in the newspaper and other items related to this administrative procedure. Callanan thus adds to his analysis of the systems that determine the conditions of life in the societies and the planet we inhabit an action on a personal level, as an individual and citizen that participates (voluntarily and involuntarily) in the dynamics generated by these systems.

Pau Waelder, Curator

Text Trends newspaper series for the launch of The Open Data Institute

November 2012 – May 2013

To celebrate the launch of The Open Data Institute, a new series of Text Trends in newspaper form will be available for the next six months from the ODI HQ in London.

ISSN 2051-6126

Artists :
Fabio Lattanzi Antinori
Phil Archer
Martin John Callanan
Ben Garrod
Benedikt Gross and Bertrand Clerc
Ellie Harrison
Semiconductor
La Société Anonyme
Stanza

The Present is a Point Just Passed

The Present is a Point Just Passed
14 June 2012 – 18 July 2012

In the lead up to an event where records will be broken and races won and lost in a fraction of a second, The Present is a Point Just Passed brings together art and artefacts that give a tangible presence to defined moments of time.

While some carefully reposition empirical data and look at incidents of historical significance, others use banal observations and puerile gestures to render forever noteworthy otherwise unremarkable passing moments.

The exhibition will include works by Martin John Callanan, Jan Dibbets, Lizzie Hughes and Jonty Semper alongside seismograms from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and images from the Lick Galaxy Catalogue.

Curated by Lizzie Hughes

For further information please visit: http://www.gre.ac.uk/pr/slg

The Stephen Lawrence Gallery: Queen Anne Court, University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, Park Row, Greenwich, SE10 9LS.

Opening hours: Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm, Saturday 11am to 4pm, closed Sundays and public holidays.

March 2012, Time-Lapse

I Wanted to See All the News from Today included in March 2012, an 0nline exhibition presented as part of Time-Lapse

In 1969, Seth Siegelaub, pioneering supporter of conceptual art, organized March
1969 a.k.a One Month, an exhibition that existed only in catalogue form. Siegelaub
invited thirty-one artists to contribute a work; one for each day of the month.
Time-Lapse curators Irene Hofmann and Janet Dees have conceived of a project that
is an homage to Siegelaub’s ground-breaking “exhibition,” updated for today’s virtual,
technological world. March 2012 will be hosted on the homepage of SITE’s website.
Each day during March one work by a different artist will be featured. The participating
artists are an international and intergenerational group currently working with
conceptual, time-based and media-oriented practices.

Artists include:
Axle Contemporary, Daniel Bejar, Martin John Callanan, Beth Coleman + Howard Goldkrand,
Ron Cooper, Matthew Cusick, Faith Denham, Brent Green, Hillerbrand + Magsamen, Jennie
C. Jones, Tellervo Kalleinen + Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, susan pui san lok, Conor
McGarrigle,  Linda Montano, neuroTransmitter, Huong Ngo (in collaboration with
George Monteleone and Or Zubalsky), Paul Notzold, Geof Oppenheimer, Ben Patterson,
Dawit L. Petros, Adrian Piper, Liliana Porter, Postcommodity, Mark Tribe, Claudia
X. Valdes, and Donald Woodman.

Transactions, Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, La Ciudad de Guatemala

Transactions, Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, La Ciudad de Guatemala

Participan: A-153167 (Anibal Lopez), David Brooks, Martin John Callanan, Nemanja Cvijanovic, Detext, Caleb Larsen, Liz Magic Laser, Julien Previeux, Daniel Seiple & Kunst Re-Publik, Katarina Sevic, Santiago Sierra, Nedko Solakov, Nikola Uzunovski y otros.
Curaduría: Raúl Martínez y Marco Antonini

Entendiendo el arte como otra forma de intercambio, esta exposición explora los procesos invisibles, errores de cálculo deliberados y verdades encubiertas del modelo de producción capitalista. En un momento en que este discurso parece incuestionable, Transacciones ahonda precisamente en las contradicciones y fisuras de nuestro modelo económico, convirtiéndolas en un espacio de trabajo y lucha política.

Los artistas incluidos en esta muestra cuestionan la “lógica” que gobierna los procesos económicos, exponiendo los límites legales y éticos del actual modelo neoliberal a través de lagunas legales y vacíos institucionales. Conscientes de las dificultades de evadir las estructuras económicas, muchos de ellos las adoptan como su hábitat natural y campo de batalla.

Transactions, Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, La Ciudad de Guatemala

Text Trends book out now with Merkske

Merkske, Text Trends, Martin John Callanan

Though Text Trends, Martin John Callanan deals with the spectacularization of information. Using Google data he explores the vast search data of its users. An animation takes the content generated by search queries and reduces this process to its essential elements: search terms vs. frequency searched for over time, presented in the form of a line graph, 16 of which are reproduced in this book.

Büro BDP & the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts

Broken Dimanche Press are delighted to announce that Büro BDP will be inaugurated with Martin John Callanan and the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts.

Since 2007, Callanan has linked his status updates across social networking sites to display messages in unison. The updates always read “Martin John Callanan is okay“, with corresponding dates to show when they were published.

For the first exhibition at Büro BDP, Callanan has printed all the status updates on a single table sized sheet of roll paper. Using the obsolete technology of a pen plotter, which marks the text onto the paper with a standard writing pen, the text characters have been reproduced with machine precision. After the opening night, the table will gradually revert to it’s everyday use as an office desk.

The 209 updates are displayed sequentially in reserve chronological order on the MINI Museum of XXI Century Art which occupies the window on Emserstraße.

Vernissage & BBQ: Thursday 21 April 2011, 7-11pm.
Show: 22 April – 5 May 2011

Büro BDP
Emserstraße 43 / 12051-Berlin

Extimacy: the intimate is Other

EXTIMACY
ART, INTIMACY AND TECHNOLOGY
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma
29.01.2011 – 01.05.2011

GAZIRA BABELI, CLARA BOJ, MARTIN JOHN CALLANAN, GRÉGORY CHATONSKY, DIEGO DÍAZ, RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER, LAURENT MIGNONNEAU, PAUL SERMON, CHRISTA SOMMERER, CARLO ZANNI.

Inside the immense flow of data exchange, the new technologies have facilitated an interdependency between the spheres of what is private and what is public, between interior and exterior, leading us to reveal, in an increasingly natural manner, our experiences, thoughts and feelings, enlarging the circle of intimacy to the point of sharing our inner life with the invisible, abstract audience of Internet users. Things personal become collective, things belonging to others become our own and intimacy is no longer something that is preserved and kept in our innermost circles, but something that is projected in all directions in an eccentric movement. Thus intimacy turns into extimacy, to use the term created by Jacques Lacan to define the existence, within the most intimate sphere of the I, of a “foreign body”, that which is external to the individual and with which one identifies.

We need to share our intimacy because what we are is defined both by our subjectivity and by what surrounds us. In the realm of digital art, several artists have worked with the new parameters of subject, body, interpersonal relationship and intimacy introduced by the new technologies. Their works enable us to initiate a reflection on the ways in which the mobile phone, e-mails, chats, social networks and instant messaging systems modify, increase or condition our communication with others. They also allow us to consider where the boundaries of our personal space lie, where our “I” ends and that of others begins.

Extimacy. Art, intimacy and technology” is a group digital art exhibition which puts forward a proposal that spectators reflect on these concepts through the presentation of works by recognised artists from the international scene. Interactive installations, mainly, that involve spectators in what is active participation with the work, which never ceases to be a piece with its own identity, the fruit of the firm artistic background of creators who combine art and technology in their work. In an era in which the user adopts an active role in the diffusion and manipulation of information on the global network (known as web 2.0), in art, too, a change in roles between spectator and work is taking place, with interactive art as the best expression of this new paradigm. The works of some great names from this sphere, such as Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer or Paul Sermon, for instance, are combined with the creations of promising artists like Gazira Babeli, Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Gregory Chatonsky, Carlo Zanni or Martin John Callanan. All of them exhibit the multiple facets a concept as complex and at the same time as simple as extimacy can present, from different angles and with diverse intentions.

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