There is not much to add. Leipzig is called NEW BERLIN, right? Now WE ARE GOING TO AMERIKA.

That is not so difficult at all. Just follow the links …

[ AMERIKA.WORLD will become the server for the AMERIKA.ART, because the event is more than an art happening — AMERIKA is connecting worlds. ]

NERUVAL, the owl, has sent to rez Magazine a short story A SMALL STEP FOR (A) MAN that predicts the outcome of THE ELECTION. … but first, a picture of the Superspreader, so you get the tunes for it.

VIRAL. VIRAL. VIRAL.

I am in the news. My name got viral. I am viral, viral, viral, like Picasso. I made it to every talk show. I hold the German version of the Picasso collection of Museum Ludwig in hand, a book with the title “Ich und ich und ich” which stands in German for I and I and I. My bio is being presented. A faked one, what else. My agent gets calls from everywhere. I am the first participant in the upcoming Global Biennale, the name of it AMERIKA.ART. I proudly hold the domain ichundichundich.de which stands for Picasso. I out myself as the Superspreader who wasn’t one. I am living in an immersive world. I create my own reality: “I and I and I.”

If one asks me how I came to the number 26 that I have printed proudly on my shirt, yeah, boom … I bring my story in and say, that I am between a square (5² + 1) and a cube (3³ − 1) and that I have 26 faces like a Rhombicuboctahedron. That’s truly an artistic way to say that I am one of a kind, that I well deserve to be part in AMERIKA.ART and point to Wikipedia to push away any remaining doubts.

Do you know that Amerika is a tiny village in Saxony, a state competing in performance with Bavaria? Maybe the Minister-President of Saxony will do the opening speech and laying the foundation stone for the server. The American Ambassador visited Amerika already, so I am quite sure that Michael Kretschmer, the Head of State, will not want to miss it. It is election time, you know.

WIKIPEDIA

Only 30 seconds more and we are done. You know 30 seconds to Mars? You may know the group but you might not know how the group came to its name. You will seek in Wikipedia, right? Imagine a time when everyone looking in Wikipedia will find a different version, depending on age, religion, status and so on. You wonder on “30 seconds to Mars?” Why shall this page come different for different mindsets? I can ensure you, this page is not affected, but when you Google for Postal Voting the result change by the place you are living in and on what postings you gave a “Like” to on facebook. This reality is already happening. In case you want to know more, watch the documentary I have for you.

The documentary is called, The Social Dilemma and it is on Netflix. Check it out. It is worth 90 minutes of your time. Then vote. Here is the trailer on YouTube.

[ PUBLISHED ALSO IN GERMAN … ] When I say: “I’m a hairdresser,” I usually get to hear: “Who calls themselves that anymore? And after a pause: “Who goes to a barbershop anymore?” Well, I am one of them. I take a pair of scissors and finish the hair. Hair must be cut. Well, that doesn’t apply anymore. Once a prim, which is what a single hair is called in the technical terminology, has been set to length, width and height, all you need to do is turn and position it to give the hair its place.

There is no hair loss. Once set, it will remain in place as soon as the glue is applied. This is called linking, not gluing. Well, the shape still has to come, otherwise the whole thing remains a tousle-head. This is where the deform function comes in. That makes me a stylist. I am not the only one who sculpts hair. Sculpting is also a word from the stylist language, which stands for trimming and trimmed objects. Not everyone can afford sculpted prims, you have to fork out much money. Well, I can do more. There are different words for my profession. Hair Maestro, toupee builder, but also simple terms can be found. Haircutter, barber, tailor, shaper are just a few. I call myself a haircoder.

I have perfected the art of haircutting. I can put wind on any prim and create local wind. Each prim shaped as tube, cone, torus, twisted and pulled, and each sculpted prim, each hair, in haircutter language called primitive, gets its own push. And when it goes outside, where the wind is really blowing, I have the code swarm for alignment. Then the primitives form themselves into identities. Then the world looks at me, at what I have made out of the hair. Well, for some, it’s probably too late to put new ones in. The “Reaching Maximum-Link Limit” display is the ultimate MCA for every hair designer. Well, not for me. My mission is then to color, twist, fan, pull – just do whatever illusion you can get out of it.

Neo Scherengeber, Haircutter of the White House. That’s on my business card as of today, the trendy version in English for my international approach. From this you can see that I have to be really good at what I do. I have signed a non-disclosure agreement, a declaration of secrecy. This is against my code of honor, but wouldn’t you do everything for the White House? I insisted that it be limited in time until after the election, because I want to patent the haircut I developed. To be in the middle of the wind, to stand by your hair during the election campaign, but also to have everything in shape again with just one click, shows competence, is social-media of its finest, and is real unconventional thinking. To have everything in your hair can only be done by someone who has everything under control, me the scissor giver, the hair clipper. The modern form of hair art is political and queer. To prevent the hair code from becoming a hairstorm as a plagiarism and I have to hand in my scissors, I have declared it art and will submit it as a contribution to AMERIKA.ART. Let’s see if the calculation works out and everybody wants to have such a toupee?

Neo Scherengeber. Of course, that’s not my real name, I don’t care about that. I am a code crispr, I am an anagram. For me, cutting hair is just the beginning.

I stand in the middle of the coal excavation site in AMERIKA and shout, “IM NAMEN DER KOHLE” and the Annuntiator translates like in old Rome, “In the Name of Coal.” For a moment my heart stands still. I think “What hell of a glitch.” I speak in German, “Es ist Amerika.” [more in English …]

Ich stehe in AMERIKA in Mitten der Kohle und rufe, „Im Namen der Kohle“ und der Annuntiator ruft, „In the Name of Coal.“ Für einen Moment steht mein Herz still. Ich denke, „What hell of a glitch“ aber ich spreche in Deutsch, „Es ist Amerika. Dort bin ich Zuhause. Ich bewerbe die AMERIKA.ART und da geht es um Kohle, um Geld und Kohleausstieg. Es geht auch um Traffic, um den letzten Bus nach Amerika, aber “Traffic” ist ein Englisches Wort für Internet-Nutzung, für die Anbindung an einen Server mit dem Kohle gemacht wird. Im Amerikanischen gibt es kein Wort mit dieser Doppeldeutigkeit. Nun Amerika.Art ist ein Kunstevent und so ein glitch, so ein Ausrutscher einer Machine gehört eben dazu wenn es um Immersionskunst geht. „In the Name of Bucks. Does it sound better?“ frägt mich nun der Annuntiator. Bucks steht für Kohle und Hasen. Nun das passt schon besser. „Zuwenig Spirit,“ ist meine Anword. „In the Name of Amerkia!“ Nun das passt doch. Da ist alles drin News und Fake News, Geld, Kohle, Hasen und Hirsche. Und ein Typo, ein Tippfehler, Amerkia statt Amerika, das macht das Ganze zur Granz Großen Kunst — Präsident Trump hat das vorgemacht mit COVFEFE. Ein Typo und die Welt spielte verrückt. Nun es war nicht der erste, also wurde COVFEFE kurzerhand zu Kunst. Die kommerzielle Version des Versprechers, die domain covfefe.com wurde übrigens mehrfach verkauft. Spitzenpreis 80.000 Dollar, nun ist sie für 15.000 Dollar erneut zu haben. War wohl nichts mit dem Spekulieren. Immer weiter, höher, schneller. Bei Kunst ist man da schon besser dran. Zur Covfefe.Art fanden sich schließlich ein paar tausend Besucher ein und manche Künstler machten echt Kohle.

Kohle bedeutet Immersion, Inklusion, steht für Aufbruch, Abbruch und für Geld, viel Geld.

Nun hoffen die Amerikaner dass etwas von dem Geld nach Amerika fließt, denn der letzte Bus nach Amerika fuhr am 31. Juli 2020. Wir haben Hiltraud Furkmann eingeladen Amerika zu besuchen, das andere Amerika, das wozu man einen Avatar braucht. Dann kann Sie dort auch wieder einkaufen, nicht mit Euro sondern mit Gloebit – aber was ein echter Amerikaner ist, der kann mit Veränderungen umgehen, nicht wahr?

Über Amerika.Art

Die AMERIKA.ART ist das Resultat von über 5.000 Meldungen zu „I SEE YOU IN AMERKIA.“ AMERIKA ART ist die Interbiennale für Immersionskunst aus Sachsen die weltweit stattfindet. Ein Kunstprojekt der LEIPZIG.ART

Letzer Bus nach AMERIKA

AMERIKA.ART happens in AMERIKA. Historically the name AMERIKA comes from “crossing the river.” The art show, which has a teaching component in it “HOW TO CREATE IMMERSIVE ART”, is planned for 2022.

There is more to read about the idea at AMERIKA.ICU — And monthly in rez Magazine, the leading paper for Immersive Worlds.

Want to read one of the upcoming stories? Here it comes: THE HAIR CLIPPER.

Koyaanisqatsi – World out of Balance. Bayernmail.DE is sponsoring “WORLD OUT OF BALANCE” themed in ICU IN AMERIKA.

[TEXT in GERMAN …] The art year 2020 is about to collapse. When you look at the list of international art fairs which are still supposed to happen in 2020 then the list becomes shorter and shorter by the day. The latest victim is the Frieze Art Fair London which was cancelled a few days ago. Frieze London was supposed to happen from October 8 to 11. The Frieze Art Fair in New York has already been cancelled. Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters made it with over 60,000 visitors to one of the top art exhibitions in the world. The biggest art show, Art Basel, first moved the timeline to September 2020 and finally cancelled it; it is planned to restart in June 2021. MiArt Art Now in Milano, having its focus on photography and moving images, turned the negative message flow and announced to happen September 11 for three days with “an exclusive online” event and opening VIP day two days prior.

Right now, the homepage for MiArt presents an alphabetically sorted list of galleries where the partners of MiArt Art Now provide links to their webpages. It seems that much still has to happen to change MiArt to an immersive interactive art fair, giving MiArt not an extension, but more of a warp jump. Such a new term for art going online already exists. I would like the word MiaMerse and there is a reason. Italy is the home of “The Biennale.” We all know it is the Biennale di Venezia. What most people might not know how it started. The Venice show was compared to other art shows at this time, like The Salon de Paris, tiny, but it had its scandal which attracted the masses, a painting by Giacomo Grosso, Il supremo convegno, 1895.

Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who later became Pope Pius X, forbid priests to have a look at this sinful painting. Maybe it was pre-immersive?

IMMERSIVENESS

Immersiveness has become a mass noun, like information, so it needs a specification, it needs a pointer. Wikipedia specifies it with “uncountable” and asks users of the word to specify, “The quality or degree of being immersive” and also for “the immersiveness of virtual reality.”

Three steps have identified by the most successful Santorini Biennale creating the format IMMERSIVIA in pre-Corona times: Immersive, Interactive and Avatar Awareness. In 2016 the immersive art show occurred for the second time by showing the Surreal Cube and in 2018 the Biennale Institute developed the 1Biennale format joining Santorini Biennale on the Greek Island. Both Biennales were curated by myself with the assistance of Juliette Surreal-D. Nevertheless, when it comes to numbers THE WRONG Biennale has set the standard for going digital, by showing this year over 2,300 artists. It became the biggest art show in the world. But numbers aren’t everything, right?

What does immersive art mean? It means art that is embedded in our digital life. It means that the artists and the visitors interact inside the computer via art experiences. Computers are not only PCs with a screen. There are interactive apps, like THE FAKED in THE WRONG, there are Head-Mounted-Displays, there are educational pathways since Google set their cardboard system on opensource. There are walkable worlds where avatars explore the art. The list of these systems is long.

Museo del Metaverso Hearing the name Museo del Metaverso one’s mind instantly travels to Rome and when you dig deeper it travels to Constantinople, the city we know now as Istanbul. So, occident meets the museum that goes by the short form MdM was designed by Elif Ayiter in 2015 and is curated once it went online by Rosanna Galvani. Elif Ayiter is a professor of design at Sabanci University in Istanbul and a pioneer in immersive art. Rosanna Galvani is an Italian art curator whose mission is to present art at MdM. It is a search, a step into a new dimension.

Elif Ayiter was well aware when designing the MdM that it cannot have any boundaries, it must be made to be extended at any time. On the other hand, there shall be no heavy luggage needed for an artist to contribute. The MdM has to link to different kinds of artists to visitors also of different types in any manner you might think of. I remember the exhibition “In Search of Balkania” in 2002 in the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria where the curators Roger Conover, Eda Cufer and Peter Weibel wrote an introduction that is worth sharing:

“If on one level In Search of Balkania is a rendez-vous with a dented landscape full of used parts and accidental art, where the real still matters and storefront windows resemble surrealist displays, on another level it is a virtual encounter with a symbolic geography that will be the 21st century’s most important fold: where East meets West, where Occident becomes Orient, and where none of the old lines and myths about identity, self, nation, and other hold. Indeed, if this exhibition presents a picture different from any picture previously shown in Europe of the Balkans, it is that there is nothing in Europe but the Balkans. Balkania is not a world unto itself, but a mirror onto all selves. To recognize the Balkans is to recognize features and syndromes out of which cities, wars, experiments, ideas and visions are composed.”

Balkania does not exist. It was a proposed name for a state, a try to unite the later separated countries Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro.

Digital Anthropocene

Our world changes dramatically and Art is the motor, always has been and will always will be. There is no life outside of algorithms, outside of digital tools. This insight happens globally now and it is both breathtaking and scary. Are you positive or negative? We will inform you within 24 hours, keep your smart phone close. Stay at home until you know. Work digitally. This leads me to the question, “What art fair will be known as The Immersive Pioneer?”

MiArt Art Now has the chance, because there is a budget to turn the art world upside down. A wakeup call is needed. Such a call can come from any place at any time. Corona is not just a hurricane that passes over and then all goes back to normal.

Corona is Red, Amerika is Blue

Corona is red, not blue or green. It is an alert; it is a game changer. Many who see their home office as an intermission will learn otherwise, their life will become permanently digital. A digital mirror of life might be a fitting expression if one does not jump into Science Fiction and see Avatars as the sole identity makers. Space X promises to bring via Starlink at the end of 2020 internet with 1 GByte/sec and a latency of 25 Milliseconds to everyone in North America and one year later for everyone on earth. Thanks to Starlink the New Rural may become the New Smart. Stay Rural, find places, “… where life is running like a steady flow of bit coins running down the Crater Lake in Oregon.” That’s a quote from the Sand Bible, which deals with digital life and the role of the big players knowing everything, like the NGA. What we have learned by Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok is a call to be disruptive.

AMERIKA  I C U

I C U (I see you) in Amerika is such a call. It is an Art Call, it is surreal, it has to be, but it carries also a deeper message, like In Search of Balkania. Amerika is a village in Germany. Amerkia has a train station. What makes Amerika “so wunderbar” I will tell you right away. Amerika is the German name for the United States of America so things must be big if you get such a call. If you look closer to Amerika, the call to Amerika, then you see the train station is no longer in use. You see the power supply still there is labelled by the local provider with ZAS Hp. Amerika. Amerika has no town-hall, no mayor. How can Amerika send a call? A few days ago, a server was installed in Amerika. The villagers, due to the last census in 2018, says there is a 57 population, and these people have welcomed this upgrade. Now they have a server under the name amerika.icu where thousands of artists can be hosted by Blue. Bluehost is a top provider and number one in content hosting. The question will rise, if they have exascale supercomputers to host them all, to flood the message that Rammstein put together in a great video compilation airing the message: “We’re all living in Amerika. Amerika ist wunderbar.”

About the Call

The Call “I C U in Amerika” comes from Leipzig Art. Leipzig is listed by NY Times under the best “52 places to go in 2020.” The distance from Leipzig to Amerika is less than 40 miles. Quite a jump for “The Kids Cool Town” (another name NY Times gave Leipzig) to have a server now in Amerika.

Applications for “I C U in Amerika” are open for 2022. They will be part of LEIPZIG.ART 2022.

AMERIKA.ART

In the meantime the name AMERIKA.ART could be successfully claimed.

“Your ticket has been roasted.” That’s the CORONA effect, right? Time to start something new. Together with our sales partners we are proud to announce THE INTERBIENNALE 2021 REAL and UNREAL at GALLERY N40, LEIPZIG. Tickets are given on a call. First calls from January 2021 on …

That’s the English version of our press information:

NOT <br>

Kunst Dot wins. The competition for the poster for the Leipzig Art has been chosen. A 42-member international jury awarded the work NOT <BR> by the California-based artist Kunst Dot. The concept was adopted from THE WRONG, the largest art event in the world. Originally, the jury, Paul Rouney, whose gallery in Manhattan stands for a multitude of innovations, was to present the award-winning work in Leipzig, but the Corona travel restrictions put a block in the plan. Even Lana Newstrom, who became the shooting star of New Media Art due to her invisible art, could not leave her home in Hollywood. “It doesn’t help if you live at 16 Mullholland Drive and a neighbour of Ray Linden,” joked Reiner Schneeberger from the organizer of Leipzig Art, who himself is the curator of the Santorini Biennale for immersive digital art and knows real and virtual art worlds very well. Kunst Dot does not appear by herself. The work encompasses traces of the Biennale di Venezia and the Leipzig music artist Paul Kalkbrenner. The reason of her non-appearance might be in the title, “NOT <br>,” which for Schneeberger stand in both “Not Binary” and “No pair tag.” Kunst Dot appears on the Internet as Dot and philosophically adopts her website, stating, “I am Lorem. I am ipsum. I am dolor. I am Kunst. I am a dot in the universe. “

Not Binary begins to establish itself as a collective term for a non-binary gender identity. <BR> is a tag in the HTML language that does not require a counterpart (not paired). The tag produces a line break. The HTML standards consortium says, “<BR> is particularly suitable for writing down addresses and poems.” Kunst Dot has submitted a poem entitled, “Not Paired” to her work. “This makes it clear to everyone what “NOT <BR>” stands for,” said Schneeberger, laughing at the press conference.

If one examines the layers of the art work, which is transformative art, one finds elements of strong social impact. Transformative Art “is the use of artistic activities, such as story-telling, painting, and music-making, to precipitate constructive individual and social change.” (Wikipedia)

Once you have recognized the red-black coloured image of Paul Kalkbrenner, the track is laid and one will look for the person in the background of the picture. Is it a musician too? The assumption that it is an African American becomes obvious. In order to clarify, Schneeberger arranged an appointment with his avatar Art Blue with Kunst Dot, who is currently preparing an exhibition of her work on the Italian art space Craft-Grid to talk about the award-winning motif. Kunst Dot said it was indeed a musician and the motif can be found on the signature track of Westbam feat. She wanted to honor Lil Wayne’s last album, Funeral.

When asked about her name, Kunst Dot said that she had received it from the artist collective of the New Slovenian Kunst (NSK) in Ljubljana and that name will now be on her passport. She has become a passionate advocate for NSK, which at the opening of the Pavilion of the Republic of Slovenia at the Venice Biennale 2017, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek described as “the uniqueness of NSK is this idea of the ‘stateless state’.”

“NOT <BR>” Not Binary. Not binär. A life as Kunst.

An exhibition by Kunst Dot. Opening in August 2020. Free tickets via VISIT e.V.

We like to share for our German readers an article published in LEIPZIGER ZEITUNG [also LEIPZIGER INTERNET ZEITUNG]. Just in case — here you find a backup …

This is a copy of the text, so non-German readers are able to translate the article easily:

Auch virtuelle Kunst muss auf Corona-Einschränkungen reagieren

Es hätte ja beinahe geklappt, und Leipzig hätte im September eine „Kunstausstellung“ erlebt, wie sie die Leipziger tatsächlich noch nicht gesehen haben. Aber auch hier sorgt die Corona-Pandemie für eine Verschiebung. Der Veranstalter der LEIPZIG.ART, die Arbeitsgemeinschaft Visit e. V., hat die 1. Interbiennale, die eine Lücke zwischen der 1Biennale und der Santorini Biennale mit einer Werkschau für immersive Konzeptkunst schließen sollte, von September 2020 auf Frühjahr 2021 verschoben. William-Gibson-Leser würden sich sofort angesprochen fühlen.
Denn hier wird so langsam jene Digitalkunst sichtbar, die der amerikanische Autor William Gibson 1986 in seinem zweiten Roman der Neuromancer-Trilogie „Count Zero“ (deutsche Ausgabe: „Biochips“) beschrieben hat. Eine digitale Kunst im virtuellen Raum, in dem auch die Geschichten Gibsons spielen, der mit Cyberpunk und Cyperspace schon weit vor der Etablierung des Internets jene virtuellen Welten erlebbar machte, wie sie heute so langsam wirklich Gestalt annehmen. Die Mittel, ganz ähnliche Kunstwerke zu schaffen, wie sie Gibson in „Biochips“ darstellt, mussten erst entwickelt werden.

Und mittlerweile widmen sich immer mehr Künstler/-innen diesen neuen Möglichkeiten, den virtuellen und den realen Raum zu verschmelzen.

Aufgrund der immer stärkeren Digitalisierung hat sich die Immersive Kunst, die William Gibson in seinem Roman „Count Zero“ als Katatonenkunst bezeichnet, zu einem Medienereignis von internationaler Dimension entwickelt. Der Veranstalter hat mit der Ausrichtung der Embassy THE FAKED im Rahmen der Biennale THE WRONG 2019 schon breite Erfahrungen in der Virtualisierung von Kunst gesammelt.

THE FAKED in THE WRONG — A Living Door

„So wurden die ersten immersiven Welten in eine Applikation für Oculus, einem der führenden Hersteller von VR-Brillen, umgesetzt. Auf der World Virtual Best Practice for Education (WVBPE 2020) Konferenz fand die Erstpräsentation in einer kombinierten Schau der Immersionswelt THE VAKED VR sowohl für Android als auch für iPhone in den Welten von Second Life und Opensimulator statt“, berichtet Reiner Schneeberger vom Leipziger Visit e.V.

„Über 20 US-Amerikanische Universitäten waren vertreten. Basierend auf dem millionenfach verkauften VR System Google Cardboard und Oculus Go, beste Voraussetzungen für den Erfolg der LEIPZIG.ART Immersivia.“

Aber leider machte der Coronavirus den Planungen der Leipziger, eine Real-Schau abzuhalten, einen Strich durch die Rechnung.

„Damit wird das Kunsterlebnis wohl bis auf weiteres auf den digitalen Raum beschränkt bleiben“, sagt Schneeberger. „Doch nicht alles, was geplant war, muss dem Virus weichen. Sobald die allgemeinen Ausgangsbeschränkungen in einer Form gelockert sind dass Kulturbetrieb wieder möglich ist soll eine Vorführung im LURU in der Spinnerei Leipzig erfolgen. Es ist der Beitrag der Italienischen Videographerin Alba Roca aka WizardOz Chrome aus Mailand.“

Der Titel: „Zima Blue – The Life of a Virus“, was natürlich direkt zum Coronazeitalter passt. Eine verkürzte Version findet man hier auf Youtube:

Zima Blue: The Life of a Virus