White Nights Europe

White Nights Europe and around the world 2008

01 March – Montreal
02 May – Chicago
19 July – Santa Monica (US)
30 August – Riga
13 September – Madrid
20 September – Bucarest
04 October – Brussels, Toronto, Paris, Valletta, Gaza,
01 November – Miami Beach (US)
21 November – Tokyo

Today, in the framework of “European white nights”, two cooperation projects will take place. One of them implies artist exchange – each country invites at least one artist of another cooperation country to participate in its “White night”. The second joint project wil promote the identification of cooperation cities of the “European white nights”. This project is the creation of a common web page, which is commissioned as a separate project to a Greek artist, Miltos Manetas. He will create a common web page with links to all “Europen white night” cooperation cities.

Miltos Manetas / Six Trees (Digital Arts, Public Arts)

What if there was a tree with a hole somewhere in your city and what if you could write a message over a little ball, drop the ball inside the hole and send it to nother city? What if the ball would return back to you after a while, maybe with a reply to your message on it? According to the Internet artist Miltos Manetas, such tree can actually exist. He "planted" six of them himself on the websites of
Madrid, Paris, Valetta, Riga, Brussels and Bucharest. All of them make the net Noches Blancas Europa, and together they commissioned to Manetas an Internet artwork that celebrates their connection and is to be shared by all the participants of the six cities.

Manetas, (www.manetas.com), a London-based artist, known as one of the founders of the Neen Art Movement as well as the creator of the immensely popular Jacksonpollock.org, worked on the idea of communication between cities. His new creation, entitled www.Ching-I.com as a reference to the Chinese oracle book I Ching, is what the artist calls an ‘oracle in reverse’.
The visitor of the website can write messages on a set of balls that come out of a hole in a tree. As an oracle, the tree will respond to the visitor’s message with other messages written by other visitors who access the web page from other cities.

The mesmerizing music of the piece is written by the British composer Mark Tranmer, known as Gnac while the trees are designed by USA artist Joel Fox and the programming of the site is made by Christopher Pappas.

Miltos Manetas Biography (From Wikipedia)

Manetas was born in Athens in 1964 and moved to Milan Italy when he was 20 years old. In 1995, Manetas participated in the historical exhibition 'TRAFFIC" at the CAPC in Bordeaux, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.
In 1996; Manetas moved to New York. He took working heavily with video games, using Lara Croft and SuperMario as his Readymade characters. These works were exhibited at the London ICA in 1998 in the exhibition Made in Italy and in that occasion, London's THE GUARDIAN wrote a large article on Manetas calling him the El Greco of the Geeks.

The following years, Manetas had many exhibitions all over the World. One the most important was the Elysian Fields at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France curated by the Purple Institute. Manetas was preparing an important middle-carrier museum show in Europe when he found himself annoyed from the fact that everything had sadly become too professional for him. He interrupted the production of the show, ceased collaboration with the Postmasters Gallery in NY, stopped a catalogue that would collect his work up to that point and commissioned to a California Branding Agency a new term that could bring a radical change to his work but also to the works of others. In Spring 2000, he finally presented the new name (Neen) to an exhibition-performance held at the Gagosian Gallery ^[wiki] in New York.

After the presentation, he moved to Los Angeles where he started an enterprise called The Electronic Orphanage. He would hire young people with experience of contemporary art and/or design and he would ask them to abandon what they were doing and test very different ideas, exclusively build on the possibilities that the Internet is offering. In 2002, Manetas presented the Whitneybiennial.com, an exhibition on the Internet that was challenging the 2002 Whitney Biennial show.

In 2007, London's Hayward Gallery commissioned to Manetas a special project over the idea of "Existential Computing" which is the new term he recently introduced. That was when Manetas met impresario Malcolm McLaren ^[wiki] and they end up doing together a pivotal show that artist Stephan Bruggemann curated at the I-20 gallery in NY in Sept 07. Manetas' work for the show was a piece commissioned previously to him from the Baltic Art Center in Newcastle for the "Dazed&Confussed versus Andy Warhol" exhibbition: just a URL simply written on the walls of the gallery: http://www.ThankYouAndyWarhol.com

History of White Nights Europe

In all cities “White night” is a public event free of charge that invites to discover (again) and capture the city environment (again) with the help of contemporary culture.

When starting the cooperation on the organization of “White Nights Europe”, Brussels, Madrid, Riga and Rome have agreed that:

“White Night” is a cultural event open to all free of charge. It is organized each year in the end of summer / beginning of autumn.
“White Night” sets as a priority expression of contemporary creativity of culture in all its forms: art, projections, installations, music, stage arts, street performers and circus.
“White Night” gives a new sense to public spaces: places that have been abandoned or are usually closed to the public, peripheral places, places that form city’s prestige or are a part of its historic heritage, are discovered by artists in a completely new way.
“White Night” unites the organizing cities' joint comprehension about the contemporary development of urban environment at night promotes the development of other spheres (economy, disposition of signboards, lighting, and security).
“White Night” is the opportunity to promote “people-friendly” ways of getting around (pedestrian areas and bike routes, tram and river traffic).
“White Night” stimulates communication between city centres and their peripheral areas. In order to develop cooperation between themselves and between European artists and publics, the partner cities of “White Night Europe” decide that a common artistic project will be carried out each year.

The success of Nuit Blanche in Paris, since it took place for the first time in 2002, led other cities to organize their own “White Nights”. In 2006, Madrid, Riga and Toronto joined Paris, Brussels, Rome and Montreal, where “White Night” has been organized before. For its part, this year “White night” will take place for the first time in Bucharest.

In all cities “White night” is a public event free of charge that invites to discover (again) and capture the city environment (again) with the help of contemporary culture.