The 53rd Venice Art Biennale has just opened, a massive exhibition of contemporary art from around the world that takes over large parts of the city every two years from June to November and turns it into a showcase for the new, the experimental, the exciting and the just plain weird.

And I do mean weird.

There’s a semi-submerged Russian submarine in the Grand Canal, an Icelandic artist is going to spend the next six months painting a series of bad portraits of a cigarette-smoking model, and a group of Nordic artists are exhibiting a very life-like corpse floating face-down in a swimming pool while a group of naked men sit on deckchairs nearby.

Seventy-seven countries are taking part, many of them exhibiting their work in purpose built pavilions in the public gardens of the Giardini while others can be found in the former shipyard of the Arsenale or scattered across palaces and warehouses throughout the city.

As well as the national pavilions there are forty-four associated exhibitions and events, and nearly one hundred individual artists have been invited to show work in the central ‘Making Worlds’ exhibition.

The four days before the opening day are the vernissage, when entry is reserved for curators, artists, politicians, collectors – especially the wealthier ones – and, at the bottom of the pecking order, journalists.

And because so much contemporary art depends on digital technology for its creation or display, since 2005 I’ve been invited to go to Venice with the producer and presenter of the World Service radio programme Digital Planet to make a biennial special about the Biennale and the many ways technology is affecting artistic practice.

Four days is not nearly enough time to see everything, of course, but some careful reading of the catalogue and the press releases put out by the participating countries offers an initial sense of what is going on, and fortunately there are many opportunities to share insights and ideas with friends and colleagues over drinks in a bar or on a crowded vap0retto between venues.

While there was a lot of interesting art, I saw little that attempted to explore our use of or reliance on technology itself, and the only two pieces I encountered that seemed to have any connection to digital technology for its own sake were rather disappointing as neither was actually working when I visited.

The animatronic cat in the German pavilion didn’t move at all, while a movement sensor that was supposed to turn off the ultraviolet lights shining on Alexey Kallima’s mural ‘Rain Theorem’ in the Russian pavilion, making the sports crowd he has painted on the wall disappear as you walk towards it, didn’t seem to notice I was there.  I was left waving my hands in the air in a piece of impromptu performance art that clearly failed to impress the other people in the room.

I didn’t see any work that tried to engage with the internet, either. In 2007 Sophie Calle explored the power of communication through email, but this time I didn’t spot anything similar, and neither Dropstuff.org’s online art show or the grand ‘Internet Pavilion’ are part of the official festival.

One area where digital technology has had a massive impact on the art world is of course in film and video, where high definition video cameras and editing tools are being used by many artists to create moving image work, and it was here that I really felt the impact of the new technologies.  There seemed to be more screen-based work than in 2007, and in general I felt that the artists using video had chosen it because they had something to say, and not – as in the past – because it was a cool new toy to play with.

The Biennale isn’t all video, of course. Dave Moutrey, director of Manchester’s Cornerhouse arts centre, told me that he had seen a lot more painting than last time, so I’ve clearly been selecting work that might have a ‘digital’ theme  and missing the paintings and sculptures.

The high points included the artfully constructed short films of Canadian artist Mark Lewis, who uses back projection to induce a sense of perceptual dislocation in the viewer, and the the expertly constructed explorations of the nature of belief and evidence for psychic phenomena from Susan MacWilliam in the Northern Ireland pavilion, as well as Shaun Gladwell’s elegiac and touching depictions of the outback in the Australian Pavilion.

I was also taken aback by ‘Dark Days’,  John Cale’s astonishing, evocative and painfully honest attempt to explore his Welsh past, an audio-visual work that uses the cavernous space of a former brewery to amazing effect.

One reason the screen-based work is more impressive than 2007 is, I think, because the technology itself has improved so much. The cameras available to video-based artists today aren’t just high-definition, they also have much better image processing electronics built into them, so what they capture is richer and offers more to work with.

The editing tools are two or three generations on from those used last time, too, and of course the hardware has more than doubled in speed, meaning that editing is more fluid and large jobs like rendering a final version of a piece can be done much faster, encouraging more experimentation on the part of the artist.

And the actual presentation is enhanced by the high-intensity projectors that are now commercially available. As Mark Lewis explained, this meant he could show his work to an acceptable quality in the glass-fronted Canadian pavilion, while John Cale’s work was so clear you could see the rain falling across the valley in his slowly panning views of Wales.

The new technologies may offer exciting tools to work with and new ways of reaching audiences, but they can also have unexpected side effects when an artist wants to create an aura of mystery around their work.

Although Steve McQueen has tried to create an aura of mystery around his film ‘Giardini’, which is showing in the English pavilion, the beautifully shot sequences of life in the Biennale gardens when the show has left town lose some of their mystery when anyone who wants can search Flickr for similar photos taken by many other people, including a set I shot myself in December 2007.  In art, as in journalism and politics, the network brings down boundaries and encourages openness, and this poses a significant challenge to those who rely on mystery, obfuscation or secrecy in any sphere.

The Digital Planet Venice special wass broadcast on Tuesday 8th June. Details on the programme page. It is also podcast.

Bill’s Links

Biennale home page:
Digital Planet’s take in 2005:
Review of Giardini:
Bill’s Flickr set:
Mark Lewis:
Susan MacWilliam:
Shaun Gladwell:
John Cale:
Alexey Kallima:

This afternoon my son and I drove from Cambridge to Lode, a small village just north of the city. When we got there we made our way to the old watermill and I lobbed half a brick across a river while Max filmed me.

Earlier in the weekend my friend Matt Jones, co-founder of the social network site Dopplr, had made a significantly more strenuous expedition to Knowle Park in Hildenborough to leave a rock shaped rather like a flint axe-head in a field.

Matt and I weren’t just randomly littering the countryside, but making our individual contributions to the ‘Britglyph’, a project that will eventually be the most extensive work of public art ever seen in Britain, one that follows in the tradition of the White Horse of Uffington and the Cerne Abbas giant.

It is a geoglyph, a drawing on the ground created by arranging stones or cutting the turf, but this one is spread over the whole country instead of just a field. The people behind it have made a drawing of a time-piece inspired by the chronometer made by John Harrison, the Lincolnshire joiner who solved the problem of how to determine longitude onboard ship, and overlaid it on a map of the UK so that it  stretches from Aberdeen to Southampton.

Each dot marks a precise latitude and longitude where contributors are asked to place a pebble, stone or rock, depending on your enthusiasm and strength. The photographs Matt and I uploaded to the Britglyph website created an online record of our quests and marked out two more dots in this nation-wide artwork, bringing the final piece nearer to completion.

Britglyph was created by the team behind moblog.net working with HomeMade Digital and with support from Shozu, a company that makes it easy to access social media sites from your mobile phone and who therefore have a clear interest in getting more people to upload photos from their phones.

It is a fascinating example of what is possible when you work with the grain of the internet, building something around the things the network makes possible instead of coming up with an idea and then trying to make it work online.

Britglyph relies on mobile phones with cameras and network connectivity, online maps, GPS and of course the connected community who make the whole thing ‘real’ by their actions. And the artwork is unique because it only exists in that strange liminal space that we have created between the internet and the physical universe.

It occupies the zone where offline and online existence blur into one, the space where cultural explorers Proboscis located ‘Urban Tapestries’, their experiment in tagging locations with messages that could be read on smartphones.

This is the territory in which analogue and digital existences collide like particles at CERN, creating strange and short-lived forms of experience rather than new sorts of matter, helping us to discover more about what is means to be human in the networked age. It’s the place where Facebook ‘friends’ get to know each other, and it only exists when online and offline are equally important.

Although Britglyph presents itself as a moblogging project it is really about finding ways to use the internet to turn engagement into action, and I was drawn in despite myself. I’ve got a mobile phone with a camera, but I’m not a regular mobile blogger, mostly because I like to look at my photos and consider which ones to upload rather than throw everything online and see what happens.

Yet I dragged my son across the fens today just so I could drop a stone in a location chosen almost at random to make a dot on an online drawing, taking part in a work of art that only exists in the most abstract sense.

I did so because of Britglyph’s presence on Facebook and of course the microblogging tool Twitter, which kept me aware of what has been happening with the project and showed me who was adding their stones to the work.

That constant awareness, combined with a general interest in the space where technology, society and art intersect, meant that I was pushed to make the leap from online observation to real-world activity.

It’s the sort of leap that politicians are constantly trying to provoke, and we saw how successful it can be earlier this year when Barack Obama’s campaign managed to mobilise hundreds of thousands of US supporters to do more than click on an online petition,  join a Facebook group or send money.

They got people come to rallies, download lists of potential voters and phone them up and even get out and offer practical help on election day, and they did so using the same methods as the Britglyph team, although on a larger scale and with a lot more at stake.

The same sort of nagging may work in other areas. Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office Minister for Digital Engagement, has been making really good use of Twitter and other social tools for a while now, engaging in a serious online debate about issues like the importance of computer games to the UK economy or ways government can enhance its work in the digital realm.

And he has done so by talking to people in the places they already go to on the net, instead of launching more and more unwieldy online consultations to be neglected by the online masses.

Tom, and Obama, manage to find a way to reach people in the places they already hang out, like community organisers going to local schools, churches and cafes, and Britglyph is doing the same.

I’m pleased to have been part of this massive work of art, and more pleased that an online activity managed to get me to Lode on a Sunday afternoon, even if the mill was closed to visitors.

Bill’s Links

Britglyph:

My stone:

Matt Jones’ expedition:

White Horses:

John Harrison:

Geoglyph:

HomeMade Digital

• iPhone problems – how carphone warehouse took my iphone & ruined my credit rating
• Mac vs PC – YouTube – Mac vs. PC – Halo Style
• Android – Google’s Android platform: not so open after all
• Schneier on Security: Man-in-the-Middle Attacks – We need a firefox extension to display certificate details in the address bar
• The fake-space race: Design and the future of travel – Excellent reflection on the failures of telepresence and what we could do instead
• EXTRA LIVES: INTERSECTIONS OF VIDEO GAMES AND FILM | AAIFF08 – Interesting event – planning something similar for the Cambridge Film Festival in September