Sk-interfaces in Liverpool a great succes — two more weeks to go

Just want to remind all our readers about Jens Hauser’s skin-exhibition in Liverpool (see earlier post here) which is breaking the visitor records at FACT/Liverpool and ends with a special closing event on 29 March. Furthermore, the conference that went with the exhibition is now on record; and finally, the book (sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders–Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society) is out.
See much more details below (unedited material for connoisseurs):sk-interfaces exhibition: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society, FACT, 1.2.-30.3.2008, curated by Jens Hauser
The current sk-interfaces exhibition at the Foundation for Art And Creative Technologies has already received over 14.000 visitors in its first month, putting it on course to be the organisation’s most popular ever. The exhibition is the largest in FACT’s history, featuring work by 17 international artists, and launches FACT’s Human Futures programme in Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture.
sk-interfaces is a multi-disciplinary exhibition of contemporary art works which reflect the progressive feeling of uncertainty and ‘inbetween-ness’ which we encounter in the age of technological extensions. Much like a generalized rite of passage, the 17 international artists translate this emotionally uncomfortable ‘betwixt and between’ period. They make use of today’s sensation of being ‘neither here nor there’ to engage us into moments of enhanced self-reflexivity. Skin represents a place where art, science, biopolitics, philosophy and social culture inter-face. Materially and metaphorically, artists replace borders that tend to separate by membranes that need to be negotiated; between spaces, species, gender, senses, disciplines and genres.
http://www.fact.co.uk/news/?id=143
Works by:
Tissue Culture and Art Project – Victimless Leather
Orlan – Harlequin Coat
Wim Delvoye – Sybille II
Stelarc – Extra Ear: Ear on Arm
Art Orienté objet – Artists’ Skin Culture, Roadkill Coat, Trans-species Aura Photography
Critical Art Ensemble – Immolation
Eduardo Kac – Telepresence Garment
Zbigniew Oksiuta – Biological Habitat, Spatium Gelatum, Cosmic Garden
Jun Takita  – Light only Light
Julia Reodica – hymNext Hymen Project
Maurice Benayoun with Jean-Baptiste Barrière – World Skin
The Office of Experiments – Truth Serum
Zane Berzina – Touch Me Wall
Jill Scott –  e-skin: Somatic Interaction
Olivier Goulet – SkinFlags,  SkinBag Corps.EXT
Yann Marussich – Bleu Remix
Kira O’Reilly – Inthewrongplaceness (at the Bluecoat)
FACT – Foundation for Art and Creative Technology
88 Wood Street, Liverpool L1 4DQ, UK
www.fact.co.uk
Exhibition supported by the American Center Foundation, Casino Luxembourg Forum d’Art Contemporain, Institut Français du Royaume-Uni, UKCTE University of Liverpool, SymbioticA/University of Western Australia.
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Call for Self-experimenters and participants by the Office of Experiments
29 March 2008, Off-Site Project in Liverpool, as part of the sk-interfaces project at FACT, commissioned by The Arts Catalyst
An as a response to the work Truth Serum displayed in the exhibition at FACT,  this is a call to join the Office of Experiments in an artwork that is a cultural experiment in consensual self-experimentation. Volunteers will attend a secret venue in Liverpool (to be disclosed just prior to the experiment) and take part in a psychological experiment based on substantiating “Truth” lasting around 10 minutes. The whole experience should take no longer than 30 minutes in total and participants can choose to opt out at any time. Enquirers will be given more information about the experiment prior to confirming their participation. Volunteers should be fit and mentally healthy.
The Office of Experiments was established by artist Neal White in 2005. The project seeks to highlight the case of artists such as Steve Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble, and their persecution in the USA, which marks an ever-increasing creep of the security state into the nervous system of culture.  An essay for the catalogue of the exhibition sk-interfaces, ‘The Psychopharmacology of Truthfulness’ by Nicolas Langlitz of the Anthropology Research Collaboratory, Berkeley, sets the historical context and is available to volunteers upon request.
For more information or to take part:
http://www.o-o-e.org/
http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/biotech/truthserum.html
The Office of Experiments is a temporary institution whose aim is to facilitate and explore event-based work in a context of research and experimentation, as well as archives of visual artists and media. The institution was formed following a series of projects by its initiator Neal White in which self-experimentation and self-instituted methods reflect an impulse to develop forms  of conceptual forms of institutional critique.  The Office of Experiments has conducted experiments at The National Institute for Medical Research, International3, Manchester, Barbican Gallery, London, Max-Planck Institute, Berlin and Sherborne House, Dorset. In 2006 it exhibited with Danish Art group N55, Space On Earth Station at Camden Roundhouse, London.
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“Stitched-Up” – sk-interfaces closing events
29 March at FACT, The Box
Morning events 11.00am – 1.00pm Free entry
Artist presentations 2.00pm – 4.00pm £4.00 / £3.00 FACT Members and concessions
Performance £9.00/£8.00 (FACT Members and concessions)
All day ticket £10.00/ £9.00 (FACT Members and concessions)
All tickets to be purchased from: http://www.facttrading.co.uk
The day before sk-interfaces closes, FACT is hosting a series of special “stitched-up” events:
Paul Thomas will stage his Midas-project at FACT, which explores the transition phase between skin and gold at nano level. Dr Paul Thomas, is the coordinator of the Studio Electronic Arts (SEA) at Curtin University of Technology and was the founding Director of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth.
http://www.visiblespace.com
Eduardo Kac, whose functional Telepresence Garment is displayed in FACT’s Atrium will be in Liverpool to demonstrate and talk about his telepresence and biological art projects. Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, Eduardo Kac emerged in the early ’90s with his radical telepresence and biotelematic works.
http://www.ekac.org/TelepGarm.html
The event will close with a special performance from trio S. S. S. (Sensors, Sonic, Sights): artists Atau Tanaka, Cécile Babiole and Laurent Dailleau will turn movement into music and colour in a three-way audio and visual conversation.
http://www.xmira.com/sss/
Cecile Babiole (FR) is a visual artist who has been awarded prizes at festivals such as Imagina and Transmediale for her work in computer graphics and public space installations, television broadcasts on Canal+, and releases on VinylVideo.
Laurent Dailleau (FR) is a unique virtuoso of the Theremin, active in the international scenes of electro-acoustic and improvised music.
Atau Tanaka (JP/ US) is an innovator in music technology, whose work has been presented at venues such as ZKM, Ars Electronica, and ICC, and released on Caipirinha, Bip-hop, Touch/Ash, Sirr-ecords, Subrosa.
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sk-interfaces conference
FACT, 8. & 9.2.2008
This international conference examined the aesthetic, philosophical and biomedical issues raised in the exhibition. Specialists from a wide range of disciplines and artists of international renown discussed past and future roles of skin, shifts in the concept of interfaces, the emergence of ‘biofacts’ in philosophy, as well as the most contemporary practices of artists using new technologies, biomedia and their own bodies.
The conference can now be viewed via the FACT archive: http://www.fact.co.uk/archive
Part 1:   http://archive.fact.co.uk/index.php/objectui/type,vra.vrawork/id,448
Part 2:   http://archive.fact.co.uk/index.php/objectui/type,vra.vrawork/id,435
Part 3:   http://archive.fact.co.uk/index.php/objectui/type,vra.vrawork/id,449
Part 4:   http://archive.fact.co.uk/index.php/objectui/type,vra.vrawork/id,452
The archive also includes footage of the performance Bleu Remix by Yann Marussich, recorded on the opening night of sk-interfaces:
http://archive.fact.co.uk/index.php/objectui/type,vra.vrawork/id,445
Videos are encoded in H.264 format – you need a recent Flash player
The four parts are encoded in the order of the conference schedule:
DAY ONE: 08 FEBRUARY, 7.00 PM – 9.00 PM
Amanda McDonald Crowley, introduced by Mike Stubbs
Why sk-interfaces at FACT?
    
Jens Hauser
Inbetweenness and Liminality
                     
Claudia Benthien
Skin – On the Cultural Border Between Self and World
Stelarc
Extra Ear, Partial Head and Walking Head.
DAY TWO: 09 FEBRUARY, 9.00AM – 5.30 PM
Siân Ede
Welcome address
Stéphane Dumas
Creative Skin: The Return of Marsyas
Maurice Benayoun
Memory Skin & Eraser Gaze
Jill Scott
e-Skin: Research into wearable interfaces, cross-modal perception and communication for the visually impaired on the mediated stage
Richard Cavell
McLuhan and the Body as Medium
Denis Noble
The Music of Life
Oron Catts
The Techno-scientific Body – A Body Without Skin
Kira O’Reilly
Skinned from the macro to the micro: Fleshy interventions within, without and beside the epithelium
Orlan
Le Manteau d’Arlequin (Harlequin Coat)
Nicole Karafyllis
Towards a Philosophy of Biofacts and Hybrids
Marion Laval-Jeantet (Art Orienté objet)
Fusional Haptics and Artist’s Skin Cultures
Neal White & Nicolas Langlitz
The Office of Experiments’ Truth Serum Threat:
Notes on the Psychopharmacology of Truthfulness
            
Amanda McDonald Crowley
Wrap Up
Supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Goethe Institut.
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sk-interfaces book
To coincide with the exhibition, a publication in collaboration with Liverpool University Press is available:
sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society. Edited by Jens Hauser. An art and text book published by Liverpool University Press. Contributions from 25 major international artists, scholars and critics, thermochromic cover design by Zane Berzina.
Liverpool Unversity Press
164 pages, 70 color illustrations
http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3823
Press Inquieries:
Simon Bell
Tel. (44) 151 794 2234
Email: sbell@liv.ac.uk
CONTENTS:
Welcoming sk-interfaces to FACT
Mike Stubbs
Culturing Change
Marta Rupérez
THEORETICAL APPROACHES
Who’s Afraid of the In-Between?
Jens Hauser
The Return of Marsyas: Creative Skin
Stéphane Dumas
McLuhan and the Body as Medium
Richard Cavell
Endogenous Design of Biofacts: Tissues and Networks in Bio Art and Life Science
Nicole C. Karafyllis
Fitter, Better, Stronger, Faster
John A. Hunt
e-skin: Research into Wearable Interfaces, Cross-modal Perception
and Communication for the  Visually Impaired on the Mediated Stage
Jill Scott
ARTISTIC WORKS
Feel Me, Touch Me: The hymNext Project
Julia Reodica
In the Face of the Victim: Confronting the Other in the Tissue Culture and Art Project
Adele Senior
Harlequin Coat
Orlan
Secularisme, Preface from Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge
The Fusional Haptics of Art Orienté objet
Marion Laval-Jeantet
Marsyas – besides myself
Kira O’Reilly
Extra Ear: Ear on Arm
Stelarc
The Telepresence Garment
Eduardo Kac
World Skin: A photo safari in a land of war
Maurice Benayoun
Why Immolation
Critical Art Ensemble
The Office of Experiments’ Truth Serum Threat: Notes on the Psychopharmacology of Truthfulness
Nicolas Langlitz
Wim Delvoye’s Sybille II
Ralf Kotschka
Immobile, Bleu… Remix!
Yann Marussich
Biological Habitat: Developing Living Spaces
Zbigniew Oksiuta
Light, only light
Jun Takita
The Midas Project
Paul Thomas
Re-thinking Touch
Zane Berzina
Olivier Goulet’s Skinbag Corps.EXT
Fabienne Stahl