First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

For example, in his second project for "Traversees/Crossings," titled Anxious Utility Vehicles, 2001, Cantor plastered images of Eastern European automobiles--all shrouded by homemade car covers--on billboards throughout Paris. Cleverly playing on the formal vocabulary of advertising, these eye-catching images of cars under wraps (are they part of a campaign for road safety? or a tease for some new model soon to be unveiled?) take the very engine of urban acceleration out of circulation.

Working in a variety of media, Cantor is always looking for-and his interventions often trigger-new collaborations, not just with other artists but with practitioners of such diverse disciplines as philosophy, natural science, sociology, and music. This is best reflected in his cofounding of Version, a collectively fashioned, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational journal of culture. In Version no less than in his various investigations of and interventions in cities, Cantor maps out relationships among heterogeneous elements and practices, individuals, ways of life, cultural products in motion--traveling, mixing, colliding, struggling for expression.

Swiss-born, Paris-based curator HANS-ULRICH OBRIST heads the Programme Migrateurs at the Musee d'Art Mod. erne de la Ville de Paris, where he is currently co-organizing an exhibition titled "Urgent Painting." Over the past decade, Obrist has had a hand in such shows as "Cities on the Move," 1997-99, which traveled to venues in France, England, Finland, and Thailand after debuting at the Vienna Secession; "Le Jardin, la ville, la memoire," 1998-2000, at Villa Medici, Rome; and "Media_City Seoul," 2000, in South Korea. Obrist is currently collaborating with Molly Nesbit on a book about utopia.

Philip Nobel on BEN RUBIN

IN OUR DREAMS NEW YORK CITY IS A PLACE OF unbridled cultural ferment, a place where the habits of thought that would elsewhere be pigeonholed-- as art, science, design--are somewhere, all the time, colliding and remaking themselves, profiting from their propinquity to emerge as that signal product of urban life: something new. When we wake up we find that the lesser angels of the human ego have built a world in which adjacent practices are too often sundered by every sort of petty barrier--the academy, the narrow-gauge journal, the trainspotting curator-- all those institutions that would seem to defy the very point of congregating in cities: to bounce ideas off the people who hold the key to completing them and making them real.

Ben Rubin is one of those people. Quietly, he bridges fields as generally uninterested in one another as architecture, interface design, and Minimalist music. As an artist or designer--he does business as Electronic Arts Research (EAR) Studio--his ambit is anywhere digital information takes physical form.

To ask Rubin what he does is to invite equivocation. I've heard him describe himself as a video artist, a sound artist, a sound designer, a lonely champion of "sonics," a professor of physical computing at NYU, a developer of audio information systems. "Different people can think of me as one thing or another," he says in his understated way. Wearing one or another of his hats, he's collaborated with Laurie Anderson (most recently on Songs and Stories from Moby Dick), Diller Scofidio ("brain coats," robotic spiders), Donna Karan (a tuned-in, turned-on runway), Steve Reich and Beryl Korot (The Cave), Ann Hamilton (the 1999 Venice Biennale installation), and Arto Lindsay (surround-sound performances). He is an adept at the black arts of electronica (he studied at the MIT Media Lab), but he doesn't let that slow him down; in Rubin's work you get the brains without the box.