Can a noncommercial critical website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

Yep, they used the term “wikipedia” in their domain name. “Wikipedia” is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. And now the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by (legal) force.

April 16 - May 16, 2009

WOLFGANG STAEHLE
A Matter of Time

Postmasters is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Wolfgang Staehle.

A Matter of Time is comprised of four real time projections of time-lapse photographic sequences and a premier video work of a Yanomami Village in the Brazilian rain forest. The show will be on view from April 16 until May 16, 2009. An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, April 16, between 6 and 8 pm.

A Matter of Time draws upon mid-19th century painter Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire. Cole’s historically critical rumination views pastoralism as the ideal model for civilization, fearing that the ideal of Empire inevitably results in greed and decay. While A Matter of Time holds the mirror of this salient socio-political commentary up to our own time, it is one whose reflection is without indignation to the systems themselves. Perhaps, best encapsulated in the artist’s own 1989 work which avows, “Empires crumble, republics collapse, and idiots live on;” the posit follows that it is our own inordinate ability to destroy the sublimity of any civilization’s ideal that is put on the table.

However, Staehle’s work in no way relies upon homage to Cole’s series, a foray to pastoralism or political satire. Evident in his body of work, the form is always central; and previous works have underscored time-a one-to-one, linear time, a simulative “real time” or the contrivance of frozen time. In this exhibition, A Matter of Time broadly refers to the time lapse photographic sequences (approximately 15,000 photographs per day at 10 frames per minute) but presented here in real time-a rate so methodical that it denudes the image of its cinematographic aspect, while accentuating it pictorially. By allowing us to exact the machinations of nature, through figuratively arresting time, a perceptual shift is created that video does not pose, and thereby realigns our relationship with the real. Each contiguous moment pre-empts the prior, switching out the obsolete image for a perpetually updated “now.” Is it that the representation of an object’s stasis recalls the full force of its movement? Because ultimately, it is this indeterminate relation with time that drives our experience with these quietly unsettling works.

[…]solo exhibition of new work from artist Mark Amerika, opens Wednesday, April 8th, in The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum and remains on view through May 9, 2009. […]

Amerika describes Immobilité as “a feature-length foreign film shot entirely on a mobile phone in Cornwall, UK.” The work includes an original soundtrack by renowned sound artist Chad Mossholder and introduces Camille Lacadee and Magda Tyzlik-Carver as on-screen personas that drift in and out of the film’s otherworldly landscapes and ghostly narrative sequences.