New York based artist Joseph Moore wrote the software “Permutations” for the currently running exhibition Brion Gysin: Dream Machine on display at The New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York. The Exhibition is a retrospective of the work of the painter, performer, poet, and writer Brion Gysin (born 1916, Taplow, UK–died 1986, Paris). Working simultaneously in a variety of mediums, Gysin was an irrepressible inventor, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit whose considerable innovations continue to influence musicians and writers, as well as visual and new media artists today.

The “Permutations” software by Joseph Moore is a “version” of the program developed by Ian Sommerville and Gysin in 1960 to permute poems. Moore has attempted to create a realization of the work that is sensitive to the original and its process. At the same time, it is a new version, a collaboration done in the spirit of an artist whose work provides a critique of conventional notions of authorship. Moore believes that it is also in the spirit of the work to share copies of it and made his “Permutations” Software avilable to download from Github. The concept and artistic process of this project is fascinating.

Software by Joseph Moore | Brion Gysin: Dream Machine

Quote on art and wearing fashion by Irish writer, poet and prominent aesthete: Oscar Wilde.

He produced a series of dialogues and essays that developed his ideas about the supremacy of art.
(1854 – 1900)

The work of the Belgian visual artist Ana Torfs consists of various installations with slide projections, photo series, a web project, a feature film and several publications. Torfs has dealt, among others, with questions such as perception, representation and the construction of images and identity. She has also focused on the tension between text and image, between reading and visualising and – in a larger sense – between the fabricated and the real. Above all her work creates a strong visual experience.

With five large-format slide projections, several photo series, and a song project for the Internet, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen K21 presents the first museum-based overview of the work of Ana Torfs. Representation and visualisation, reality and fiction form the cornerstones of Ana Torfs’ installations which consist of projected images (usually black and white slides) and texts. In precisely choreographed audiovisual constellations Torfs brings to life literary, historical and political material.

In these projects the artist works with actors who embody their roles in a demonstratively matter-of-fact and functional way. Documents on Joan d’Arc, a famous one act play by the symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck but also testimonies from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s murder trial serve as starting points for room-filling installations such as “Du mentir-faux” (About Lying Falsehood), 2000, “The Intruder”, 2004, or “Anatomy”, 2006. Ana Torfs has been practising and developing her method of subtly dissecting and superimposing places, people, voices and atmospheres for over fifteen years. In doing so, she draws from the repertoire of dramatic, photographic and cinematic techniques.

Apart from a selection of earlier works, the recently completed slide installation “Displacement” (2009) will be shown for the first time at K21.

In the below video by Ralph Goertz from the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie, Torfs introduces the work on her exhibition at K21.

The Exhibition called Album/Tracks A at the K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf will run until the 18Th of July, 2010.

Photos Ana Torfs | K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen | Video by Ralph Goertz, Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie

Quote on  style by the French Poet, Novelist, Actor, Film Director and Painter Jean Cocteau  (1889-1963)