Author Archives: Martin John Callanan

Ecocinema Theory and Practice (AFI Film Readers)

Data Soliloquies recived a brief mention in Ecocinema Theory and Practice by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt

Publication Date: 26 Sep 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0415899437

Ecocinema Theory and Practice is the first collection of its kind—an anthology that offers a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of eco-film criticism, a branch of critical scholarship that investigates cinema’s intersections with environmental understandings. It references seminal readings through cutting edge research and is designed as an introduction to the field as well as a sourcebook. It defines ecocinema studies, sketches its development over the past twenty years, provides theoretical frameworks for moving forward, and presents eloquent examples of the practice of eco-film criticism through essays written by the field’s leading and emerging scholars. From explicitly environmental films such as Werner Herzong’s Grizzly Man and Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow to less obvious examples like Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the pieces in this collection comprehensively interrogate the breadth of ecocinema. Ecocinema Theory and Practice also directs readers to further study through lists of recommended readings, professional organizations, and relevant periodicals.

WORDS / WORLDS: Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Practice

Date: 9 May 2013
Time: 1.30-5.30pm

9th May 2013 The Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University: Centre for Performance and Practice

Convened to mark the appointment of Tim Etchells as Professor of Performance and Practice at LICA, Words / Worlds is an afternoon symposium focused on approaches to writing in an interdisciplinary context. The event takes its title from a two-part neon work All We Have is Words / All We Have is Worlds by Etchells, which quotes and then repeats with modification, a line from Samuel Beckett.
Beginning with a keynote paper/performance from Etchells, which opens questions relating his to text-work in different media, WORDS / WORLDS proceeds with panels and presentations from visual artists Martin John Callanan and Penny McCarthy, from curator Mathieu Copeland, from the novelist Tony White and from the performance maker and scholar Andrew Quick. WORDS / WORLDS celebrates the possibilities of a cross-disciplinary conversation between and about text-based work and writing. A statement by William Burroughs – that the purpose of writing is to make things happen – provides one point of departure for the discussions, which will see each of the participants touch upon key works and ideas from their practise as they think around texts and inter-texts, texts as interventions in, and transformations of, the world, texts as tests or probes of reality, and text as a tool for fragile and temporary world-building.

Free to attend
Organising departments and research centres: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts

more info

(Im)material Labour, Art Exchange, Colchester

art exchange colchester

(IM)MATERIAL LABOUR
MONDAY 24 JUNE 2013 – SATURDAY 20 JULY 2013

(Im)material Labour explores our shifting position in an economically functioning society. From the systemisation of post-fordist labour through to the de-materialisation of the service sector, our patterns of working behaviour are constantly being reconfigured.

(Im)material Labour draws together the work of a number of artists who interrogate this phenomenon in light of the current economic climate. Seeking to decode and humanise the financial crisis through analytical ideas and research, the works on display often result in therapeutic and humorous outcomes.

The exhibition includes works by SUPERFLEX, Zachary Formwalt, Ignacio Uriarte, Martin John Callanan, Paul Westcombe and Arnaud Desjardin.

The exhibition will take place both onsite and offsite in a disused office block situated in Colchester Town. Curated by MA Critical Curating students Warren Harper, Matylda Taszycka and alumnus Jonathan Weston.

Curators Tour
Saturday 1 June, 1-2pm
Join the exhibition’s curators for a tour of (Im)material Labour at Art Exchange. To reserve your place, please email immaterial.labour@live.co.uk

The Fundamental Units by Photographer Martin John Callanan

e-junkie

Photographer Martin John Callanan, a Teaching Fellow at the University College (London), an intense researcher, Editor of Leonardo Electronic Almanac and Publisher at a online artworks site called Merkske. That’s the kind of informed background he comes from.

His work over the years has included translations of “active communication data into music; freezing in time the earth’s water system; writing thousands of letters; capturing newspapers from around the world as they are published; taming wind onto the internet and broadcasting his precise physical location live for over two years.”

With scores of published and displayed works in Europe, The Americas, Asia and Australia, we loved his absolutely tech savvy project – The Fundamental Units.

With the bitcoins being all the rage and global economies facing a currency crisis here and there, countries constantly revamp or abolish their lowest denominations time and again.

Categorized as “worthless coins” in the economic setup, Callanan initiated to save all such currencies from across 166 countries. Not by taking up a anti-wipeout campaign but capturing these lost coins with his lens.

The creative series was first kickstarted with the works of Horrach Moya Gallery. The artist teamed up with the National Physical Laboratory(NPL) in U.K, that boasts off having Europe’s best 3D microscope.

The coins are photographed with 4,000 individual exposures and processed over a span of three days to produce these marvellous single photogrraphs shown below. Each of them weighs approximately 400 megapixels and measures 1.2X1.2 meteres, a good 3.9 square feet.

Martin opines that the high defination photography reveals the the “material makeup of the coin, marks and traces from their use as tokens of exchange.”

An interesting tidbit about currencies before you can check out these beautiful reproduction of coins from Australia, Chile, The Euro, Mynamar, Kingdom Of Swaziland.

Every coin the US State Treasury mints to produce 1 cent coin costs them 2 cents. Its best to undesratnd the value of the metal and the human resources that go into producing a small denomination of the currency. With people dealing everyday in millions and billions, probably the value of a cent goes unrecognized.

Do have a look at Martin’s samples below.

see the full article

Russian press on Fundamental Units

Большой интерес к маленьким монеткам. Фотопроект Fundamental Units от Martin John Callanan

kulturologia

Как известно, копейка рубль бережет, а с 10 центов и того больше набежать может. Жаль только, что мелкие монеты постепенно выходят из оборота. Изготавливать такие деньги слишком дорого, ведь их себестоимость зачастую получается вдвое выше номинала, и потому в ряде зарубежных стран мелочь уже практически не используют. Дабы оставить потомкам память об этих исчезающих деньгах, фотограф Мартин Джон Калланан (Martin John Callanan) и задумал свой масштабный фотопроект Fundamental Units, посвященный монетам разных валют с самым низким номиналом.

В этом проекте Мартин Джон Калланан решил собрать монеты из 166 различных стран, чтобы сохранить их хотя бы на фотографиях. Причем сделать фотоснимки наивысшего качества, предоставив любопытным людям возможность рассмотреть монетки в мельчайших подробностях, до самой последней зазубринки. Так что фотограф работал не с фотокамерой, а с 3D микроскопом с фокусировкой на бесконечность, который ему предоставили для работы в Британской Национальной Физической Лаборатории. Это устройство дает изображение с рекордным разрешением в 400 мегапикселей.

Каждую монетку фотографировали с индивидуальной экспозицией, а затем собирали все получившиеся снимки в одно гигантское изображение, обработка которого занимала около трех дней. Размер готовых фотографий составлял 1.2 х 1.2 метра. Этого оказалось достаточно, чтобы показать истинное “лицо” каждой монетки из этой мегаподборки разнообразной мелочи. Фотографии продемонстрировали все неровности, царапины и другие механические повреждения монет, следы коррозии и частички грязи, – те “шрамы”, которые оставило на их боках время.

Арт-проект Мартина Джона Калланана включает в себя фотографии таких монеток как мьянманский кьят и шведская крона, британский пенни и чилийский песо, свазилендский пятицентовик и румынский бан, польский грош и латвийский сантим, а также американские и европейские центы и другие “копейки”. Выставка больших фотографий маленьких монеток стартовала в ноябре прошлого года в Испании, в арт-галерее Galeria Horrach Moya.

see the full article

and Kleinburd News

Kleinburd News

Daily Mail: Look after your pennies: microscopic pictures of world’s lowest value coins to save them for future generations

Daily Mail

Look after your pennies: Photographer takes microscopic pictures of world’s lowest value coins to save them for future generations

  • The Fundamental Units is a project by photographer Martin John Callanan
  • Used Europe’s best microscope’ to show each coin in all its worn charm
  • Comes as governments debate whether to do away with lowest value coins

    • With every battered line, scrape and knock, each coin has been rendered as individual as the many thousands of hands they have passed through.

    Now, as governments across the world debate whether to do away with their lowest value coins, one photographer is on a mission to save as many pennies as he can before they are consigned forever to history,

    Photographer Martin John Callanan is busy working on a photo project entitled The Fundamental Units – a series of extremely large prints showing the lowest value coins of countries around the world.

    He has teamed up with National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, to use ‘Europe’s best microscope’ to show each coin in all its worn charm.

    Each coin is photographed with 4,000 individual tiny exposures, and it takes three days of processing to turn the individual photos into a single composite photograph weighing 400 megapixels. Printed out, each photo measures 1.2 and 1.2 meters (~3.9 square feet).

    ‘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.’

    ‘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.’

    There are many precedents for scrapping small coins.

    In America, the half-cent was abolished in 1857, and in 1984 the UK’s halfpenny was withdrawn.

    New Zealand and Australia abandoned the one-cent and two-cent coin in the 1990s.

    Campaigners in the US and UK also want the penny and cent coins to be consigned to history, because nothing can be bought with a one-cent or one-penny coin.

    see the full article by Amanda Williams

    Reposted on Numismatica

    Small Change Writ Large: ‘The Fundamental Units’ by Martin John Callanan

    Core77

    Rain Noe at Core77 writes:

    What does that look like to you? The cave drawings at Lascaux, maybe?

    How about this one? A shield from an ancient civilization?

    Nope, these are the lowest of the world’s low-value coins, those forgotten bits of metal that keep lint company in our pockets or fill forgotten jars. Perhaps sensing that cents are on the way out, Martin John Callanan—self-described as “an artist researching an individual’s place within systems”—is photographically preserving them for posterity with his The Fundamental Units project.

    The kicker is that a regular camera wouldn’t do, not for what Callanan had in mind; so he teamed up with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, which is that country’s national measurement standards lab, to use their infinite focus 3D optical microscope. Callanan then captured some 4,000 exposures of each freaking coin, resulting in a series of 400 megapixel images that, blown up and hanging on a gallery wall, reveal details you’d never spot on the real deal. Every nick, scratch, dent, ding and discoloration are laid bare.

    So far he’s captured cents, pesos and pence from Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Lituania, Myanmar, Poland, Romania, Swaziland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, not to mention the Euro; but by the project’s end, Callanan plans to have captured “the lowest denomination coin from each of the world’s 166 active currencies.”

    see the full article

    Coins of the World Photographed Using Europe’s Best Microscope

    The Fundamental Units

    Michael Zhang writes about the Fundamental Units over on Peta Pixel with lots of images.

    Did you know that it costs the US Mint 2 cents to produce every 1 cent coin due to the cost of materials and production? Countries such as Canada have already done away with their lowest denomination coins due to their costs and lack of usefulness.

    As these “worthless” coins cause debates in their governments about whether or not they should be abolished, photographer Martin John Callanan is on a mission to save them… not as a currency, but rather in photographs.

    Read the full article

    Peta Pixel

    Article made it to the top of Digg.com

    digg.com

    and Complex

    Complex

    and the Baltic News Network

    Baltic News Network

    and DB.lv

    db.lv

    and Botanwang in China

    http://botanwang.com/node/9129

    and CNBCE in Turkey

    CNBCE

    and Cekin

    cekin

    and Wander Lust Mind

    Wanderlustmind

    Screen shot 2013-04-14 at 14.51.04

    Excerpt Magazine issue 5

    excerpt magazine

    It seemed strange to choose a 115 year old photo for the cover of what is for the most part a contemporary magazine. Yet the more I looked at the image the more necessary it became. The image just didn’t seem old, fixed or sorted out. Nostalgia hadn’t gotten in- for nostalgia isn’t simply the past in an image but the present being invited in by it to straighten it out and know better. In the image the guard still guards, the door and stairway still lead off somewhere and the moon, embedded like a wreckers ball, makes the wall appear unnervingly permeable. 115 year later and a few people have bounced across the moons surface and there are five hundred and two million photographs when you search the moon on the internet. Just as the internet voraciously slurps up images and text, the moon continues to try to pull at anything on the earth to bring it closer, causing the oceans to slosh back and forwards. Wanting everything. Wanting what it can’t get. These thoughts intertwine as Issue 5 develops; an issue that wanted the moon and the stars. Things begin to seem vast and cryptic, the surface of a coin becomes a landscape and the funereal become something to share not bury. Across this Issue the unexpected quietly coils around the familiar and I am faced with the tautological bind that the inexplicable is what it is.- Amy Marjoram

    Download issue #5 of Excerpt Magazine (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

    Data as Culture: Open Day 16 March

    Data as Culture: Open Day

     

    Your chance to get hold of issue #3 of Text Trends newspaper.

    The Open Data Institute (ODI) and MzTEK invite you to the Data as Culture Open Day.

    The Data as Culture collection is set in the offices of the ODI, and aims to bring tangible interventions into the
    mass accretion of data around us. This is an opportunity to see the artworks in the collection and speak to the curators and some of the artists.

    Informal presentations from 2.30pm – 4pm, refreshments provided.

    Find out more about the artists and the collection visit: theodi.org/culture/collection

    Data as Culture: Open Day
    16 March 2013, 12pm – 6pm.
    Open Data Institute, 3rd Floor, 65 Clifton Street, London, EC2A 4JE

    Along Some Sympathetic Lines, Or Gallery, Berlin

    Along Some Sympathetic Lines

    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.

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