and they all rolled over and

kittler optical media

2012-02-12T22:51:00.001-08:00

,.. “the more successfuloption for the painter was actually to differentiate between the artistic andtechnical medium, and thus to only paint images that could not be photographed,such a images that do not represent any objects at all, but rather the act ofpainting itself.” 137

robert thurman at occupy

2012-02-12T00:17:00.001-08:00

Ayn Rand: on self sacrifice and selflessness

2012-02-11T23:59:00.000-08:00

brendan cook

2012-02-05T23:44:00.001-08:00

http://www.picturedrift.com.au/#/projects/PICTUREDRIFT-REEL-2011

stanley cavell, Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy 1965

2012-02-05T22:43:00.000-08:00

The more one learns, so to speak, the hang of oneself, and mounts one's problems, the less one is able to say what one had learned; not because you have forgotten what it was, but because nothing you said would seem like an answer or a solution: there is no longer any question or problem which your words would match. You have reached conviction, but not about a proposition; and consistency, but not in a theory. You are different, what you recognize as problems is different....And this is the sense, the only sense,in which what a work of art means cannot be said. Believing it is seeing it." stanley cavell, Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy 1965

http://naudengels.blogspot.com/2008/11/it-is-very-understandable-that.html?gclid=CLuP7OPbiK4CFQ5ihwodYGN84g

2012-02-05T22:36:00.000-08:00

donderdag 27 november 2008

Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further

It is very understandable that reflexive managementauthors like Weick, Winograd and Flores look for inspiration towards Heidegger. If you want to stop the thinking about organizations in terms of schemes and diagrams, Heidegger offers a liberating perspective.

Heidegger holds that “knowledge lies in the being that situates us in the world”. That’s to say: we do not learn by taking a distance and by observing phenomena from the outside, but by being actively engaged in the world via work and relations. Heidegger prioritizes praxis and being in the world. By doing so he breaks through the deceit which originates from models and structures. Knowledge always is embedded in an acting way of being which precedes everything.

At the same time it is possible, in relation to the Heidegger oriented managementauthors, to identify two blind spots. The first concerns the unwillingness to communicate, which people - and not just in organizations - at times display. The authors seem not to be acquainted with this phenomenon. The spontaneous active being which they talk about in their writings, for them automatically coïncides with a permanent readiness to communicate.

The second blind spot concerns the difference one person can make with regard to another person. That people may disagree fundamentally about the direction and the goal of their acting is not a theme in the works of the above mentioned authors.

I tend so see a connection between those two blind spots. That connection, in my view, stems from the way in which Heidegger uses the concept of Mitsein. Namely, as a reference to a shared reality in which we humans collectively participate. We share Mitsein as a part of our active being-in-the-world. Communication arises from there almost automatically.

It is certainly true that Heidegger leaves room for individuals to conceive of primary being, where acting finds place, in their own, original way. But by the position he allocates to Mitsein there is a shift in the balance: the portion collectivity weighs much more heavily than the share individual originality. Being is foremost one and collective, even if there is a multitude of personal insights in being.

This explains why plurality of thinking and profound differences between people get so little attention from authors who orientate themselves towards Heidegger. It is as Safranski says: the true nature of political thinking will be exposed by Hannah Arendt – as part of her answer to Martin Heidegger. Such really political thought derives from living communally our differences.

I would like to add that, for an elaboration of the radical difference between the one human person and the other, we can fruitfully turn to Levinas.

rubberhousestudio.com

2012-02-03T23:24:00.001-08:00

Directed and animated by Greg Sharp and Ivan Dixon at Rubber House
(rubberhousestudio.com)

forcing brands to re-examine how they need to engage

2012-01-28T15:26:00.000-08:00

ATLANTA, Jan 27, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Full-service marketing agency Engauge ( www.engauge.com ) has hired digital marketing veteran Teresa Caro as Vice President of Social Marketing. Based in Atlanta, Teresa will have national responsibilities for leading and growing the agency's social marketing practice.

"Teresa will bring an all-important customer relationship lens to our social media practice," said Jeff Hilimire, President of Engauge. "Her experience represents a great blend of digital, social and CRM that will help us evolve and grow social at Engauge."

The agency already has a long track record of social marketing success for brands, including Cisco Systems, My Coke Rewards, Chick-fil-A, and Outback Steakhouse. Teresa will be responsible for helping to nurture a world-class social marketing team.

Prior to Engauge, Teresa was at Razorfish as their Social CRM lead. In this role, she provided thought leadership to marketing executives of leading brands on leveraging social and CRM in order to create stronger customer engagement channels. Most recently, Teresa was VP of Strategy at rDialogue, where she focused on extending traditional loyalty programs into the social space.

"Social is shining a spotlight on the customer experience and is forcing brands to re-examine how they need to engage with their customers," said Caro. "I'm thrilled to be a part of bringing this reality to Engauge's already exemplary social practice."

About Engauge ( www.engauge.com )

As one of the nation's largest independent full-service marketing agencies, Engauge leverages creativity and technology to connect brands and people in the social and digital age. The agency's client roster includes Nationwide Insurance, Cisco Systems, Coca-Cola, Chick-fil-A, Food Lion, The State of Georgia, and more. Engauge, which has offices in Atlanta, Columbus, Orlando and Pittsburgh, is a portfolio company of Halyard Capital.

www.engauge.com | Twitter: @engauge | Facebook: Engauge Page

SOURCE: Engauge

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/marketing-agency-engauge-appoints-teresa-caro-as-vice-president-of-social-marketing-2012-01-27

friedburg virtual window

2012-01-26T00:56:00.000-08:00

when the soul became film: kittler

2012-01-25T23:24:00.000-08:00

parallax montage

2012-01-21T19:31:00.001-08:00

unbroken interface

2012-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor.

There is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. its a very simple one, so simple that some have difficulty grasping it. it has to do with a certain archaic distinction we still tend to make, distinction between computing and "the world." Between, if you like, the virtual and the real.

I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is real and that which isn't. Or, to put it another way, they will not know "computers" as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, i the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect of a single unbroken interface. The idea of a device that 'only' computes will perhaps be the ultimate archaism in a world in which the fridge or the toothbrush are potentially as smart as any other object, including you. A world in which intelligent objects communicate, routinely and constantly, with each other and with us. In this world, there will be no need for physical augmentation of the human brain, as the most significant, ad quite unthinkably powerful, augmentation will already have taken place postgeographically, via distributed processing.

p215-6 "will we have computer chips in our brains", distrust that particular flavor, willim gibson g. p. putmams sons new york 2012, originaly published TIME june 19 2000.

mark fisher

2012-01-16T13:04:00.001-08:00

Social Practice Art, Abstraction

2012-01-14T00:26:00.001-08:00

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/after-ows-social-practice-art-abstraction-and-the-limits-of-the-social/
Gregory Sholette

After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social

In the third chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the novel’s protagonist, Ishmael, enters the Spouter Inn in search of passage onto a whaling ship. He soon encounters an age-darkened oil painting in the entranceway and becomes perplexed. The canvas is so covered in scratches and smoky residue that it’s all but impossible to make sense of. Throwing open a window to gain more light, Ishmael attempts to describe what he sees:

what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the center of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.¹

Ishmael renders the painting virtually abstract, or non-objective, as his act of interpretation comes to an impasse. But his comprehension of the image is not merely blocked by the marred, smoky surface. The materiality, or “thingness” of the work that simultaneously frustrates, and fascinates him by denying him access to its meaning. I think of this truculent, besmoked painting often, especially when contemplating the growing allure of socially engaged art among younger artists, including those students who, by dint of previous training, lean toward craft-based object making.

Doug Ashford, Six Moments in 1967 #3, 2008-2011.

Anyone who teaches visual art is familiar with the following problem. Two seemingly opposite pedagogical poles appear to be collapsing. On one side is the singularity of artistic vision expressed as a commitment to a particular material or medium. On the other is an ever-increasing pressure on students to work collaboratively through social and participatory formats, often in a public context outside the white cube. One of the most common catchall terms for the latter tendency is social practice art. Currently, there are about half a dozen college-level programs promoting its study. However, if you include the many instructors who regularly engage their students in political, interventionist, or participatory art projects, the tilt toward socially engaged art begins to look more like a full-blown pedagogical shift, at least in the United States.

The studio art classroom, as opposed to the lecture hall or seminar space, is where these contradictions are most apparent, and often most disarming. Any given cohort of entry-level students (graduate or undergraduate) includes both object makers and social practitioners. Similarly, the faculty at non-specialized art schools, and universities tend to express a range of aesthetic interests with varying degrees of engagement in art’s material production. But most significantly, the studio classroom is where art’s institutional socialization begins, and where the student encounters a very contemporary problem—let’s call it the ontological crisis of artistic subjecthood—the infinite regress of self-definitions and anti-definitions that have plagued every nascent artist since Marcel Duchamp and Moholy Nagy’s rejection of the “magic of the hand.”² If one can purchase plumbing equipment and successfully display it in a museum, or have an abstract artwork made to order over the telephone, then what exactly defines the artist today, at least in a professional sense? The assembly line studio practices of artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons serve to exacerbate this crisis. Uncertain about the fundaments of their profession, instructors (like me) perform a kind of ontological triage on identity-punctured art novices. (I will confess that this surgery is often also an act of self-healing.)

Stephen Wright may not be the first cultural theorist to link contemporary art’s object-anxiety with the definitional crisis of the contemporary artist herself, but Wright is distinguished by his view of this ontological precariousness as a potentially liberating moment, rather than as a problem to solve. He writes, “Envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship, and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible as such.”³ Without a visible “work,” sans artistic reception, there would appear to be no way in which Wright’s militantly discreet cultural labor could be framed as art, not even by the “art police.” Adopting philosopher Jacques Rancière’s definition of the aesthetics of politics, Wright rejects the manner in which critics, curators, and art historians delineate the category of art and amplify one cultural discourse over the noise of others.⁴By embracing, rather than avoiding invisibility, everyday occurrences, and noise, Wright elaborates a way for artists to leap out of prescribed aesthetic frames, past the policing of artistic borders, and move directly into a cultural “usership” within non-art social relations, including political activism.

Initially, this program would appear to fulfill a certain early-twentieth-century avant-garde injunction that art must dissolve into life, while aligning itself with certain 1960s conceptual artists who sought to become autodidacts in collaboration with “citizen’s initiatives, amateur scientists’ projects, and so on.”⁵ Except that both of those efforts landed art back in private and museum collections. But let’s say that Wright’s un-framed usership is conceivably already taking place; just think of the explosion of informal, noisy cultural activity associated with Occupy Wall Street.

Doug Ashford, Six Moments in 1967 #5, 2008-2011.

In an unexpected move, OWS has not embraced invisibility or rejected an audience. Rather the movement instead has claimed its own cultural terrain, and has done so in full public view. OWS confronts the police, both literally, as well as figuratively, interweaving both short-term tactics, and longer-range strategies for returning privatized space to common use. It’s as though something long held back was streaming forth, suddenly animated, but bringing along with it a shadowy archive of other histories, and other attempts at self-realization, like a surge of long-silent dark matter spilling irrepressibly into the light. This emergent swarm-archive insists that the hazy, smoky residue of time become noisily present for all to see.⁶ In a rapidly gentrifying city like New York the materialization of the past is always a challenge. Meanwhile, Zuccotti Park and other OWS encampments revealed a mix of high-tech digital media and handmade signs, a mix of the archaic and the new as if beneath the internet there is cardboard.

All this complicates the classroom context. After all, instructors can hardly follow Wright’s prescription simply by refusing to engage with art’s institutional frame, at least not until before that glorious moment when all delimiting social divisions are swept away in the ecstasy of revolution.⁷ Prior to that day of liberation, any failure to reproduce one’s own academic field simply amounts to professional suicide. On the other hand, dissolving art into a corrupt world appears equally dishonest, and merely adds fuel to a neoliberal agenda that seeks to eliminate all economically “useless” areas of study as philosophy, poetry, classical languages, and all other non-commercial forms of “culture.”⁸

I teach at a school where a significant number of undergraduate and graduate students make paintings, sometimes in a traditional way, which is to say, in a realistically representational, mode, and other times they produce a variation of post-war abstraction. I do not claim that this necessarily excludes the realm of “the social” as a concrete presence, especially as it manifests itself nowadays in the omnipresence of portable electronic devices linked together through the internet. Digital images turn up as source material for student drawings and paintings; while working from photographic sources is hardly new, it seems that portraits of friends, family, pets, and self are more captivating when rendered in low resolution with acidy smart phone colors. Fast-paced paging through crowd-sourced databases such as Flickr or Google has also become second nature when researching new project ideas. But more to the point, a certain compulsory “connectivity” infests student art assignments, even those rooted in traditional media. One young student of mine made oil paintings of strangers she had image-grabbed from live video chat room encounters. At her final critique, she opened a laptop and an assortment of random online voyeurs dropped in to watch us. First, a duo of giggly women appeared, followed by a young man who stared blankly at us from the other side of a webcam, apparently masturbating just out of frame. Naturally, issues of privacy emerged (our privacy, as well as that of the online strangers), and this provided an opening for us to explore broader issues of what constitutes artistic subject matter nowadays. Nevertheless, until the laptop was at last snapped shut, the intrusion of “the social” into the classroom oscillated between diversion and disruption as the specificity of the student’s paintings faded further into the background of our discussion.

Granted, this example is somewhat superficial and represents only the outward collision between older, skill-based art traditions and portable electronics / social networks. Far more difficult to nail down is the place of “archaic” media such as drawing, painting, and sculpture in the sphere of social practice and performance art. No doubt some of you will think of street art, protest props, or papier-mâché puppets. Or perhaps what comes to mind are those climate-controlled layers of lard and honey and felt that once accompanied lectures by iconoclast Joseph Beuys, and that nowadays sit in some swanky kunsthalle, art center, or museum. Once again, to go beyond shallow assumptions of social media’s invasion of traditional art practices, let me put the question differently: Where does abstraction and the non-representational intersect with the social? Or, put the other way around: What is the limit of the social within the social itself? I wish to propose that one way to approach this question is through Jane Bennett’s concept of the agency of “thinghood,” the “material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts.”⁹

Group Material's “Democracy” exhibition at the Dia Art Center, 1990.

Bennett, a political scientist by training, wants to articulate a non-human materiality in much the same way that Michel Foucault explored culture as an objectified force of human affect and desire, most famously including institutional discipline. Bennett, however, introduces us to a world of vibrant matter, in which concrete forces sometimes appear as obstacles to overcome, and sometimes as obstacles that overcome us (consider Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the massive Japanese tsunami of several months ago). Ultimately, these extra-societal agencies must be understood as forces to be reckoned with, as well as engaged with¹⁰though always in a critical manner.¹¹

The recognition of a resistant thingness at work within the social, including those human-originated technologies that have gone on to operate virtually independent of us, may in fact mark a point of conceptual convergence for those contrary artistic poles discussed above: the immaterial, social practitioner and the studio-based artist. Note how artist, activist, and teacher Doug Ashford, who worked with the socially engaged artists’ collective Group Material for over fifteen years, grapples with the role of the abstract object in a series of paintings he has worked on over the past few years:

I’m wondering what it means these days to employ abstract images as a participant in social organizing efforts. For many years I was a collaborator in Group Material, an artistic process determined by the idea that social liberation could be created through the displacement of art into the world, and the world into the spaces of art.¹²

Ashford seems to suggest that his current interest in abstract art and object making was foreshadowed by Group Material’s collaborative installation practice. In 1990, he and other members of the collective organized the “Democracy” exhibition for the Dia Art Foundation’s short-lived exhibition space on Mercer Street in Manhattan. They transformed Dia’s gallery into a classroom, complete with rows of desks and chalkboards. Around the “classroom” hung a selection of artwork arranged “salon-style” overlapping against bright red walls, an anti-white cube gesture similar to a Group Material design “signature.” With “Democracy,” as with many of their installation projects, the collective sought to generate a different kind of space within the art gallery, a social arena in which learning could take place directly or indirectly through an art whose form and/or content focused on questions of inclusivity and participation:

Today I’m interested in how our exhibition designs assigned democracy’s unpredictability and inclusivity to an imaginable shape, a shape you could feel, a shape that is always irregular and fluctuating: an abstraction.¹³

Ashford takes his hunch a bit further, in the form of a challenge: “Is abstract painting a clue to the irregular shape I experienced at Group Material shows and our modeling of democracy?” Can something so abstract even be visualized? Or is the question really about the intersection of a certain aesthetic vocabulary with everyday social routines? After all, Group Material’s project is but one attempt by artists to make something ineffably abstract into a concrete force or agency, or to attempt the opposite by dematerializing the well-worn world of the social into an aesthetically informed spectacle through the strange agency of abstraction.

_{_{Painted board by UNOVIS on a street in Vitebsk.}}

Grainy images of large, suprematist shapes in the streets of 1920s Belarus flash up in my mind as I write this last sentence. Aimed at inspiring new ways of thinking and new forms of organizing during the early years of the revolution, these startling plastic forms were generated by Soviet Commissar of Art Kasimir Malevich and his colleagues at the Vitebsk School of Art. Suprematist pedagogy also took place inside the classroom. Students not only constructed three-dimensional geometric forms in a radical break with realist traditions, they also understood abstraction to be central to the realization of a new “creative collectivity.”¹⁴ This mental recollection is replaced by another black-and-white photograph, this time on the cover of The Los Angeles Times. It depicts Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s discerning 1977 media event In Mourning and in Rage, which was staged before news cameras on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall to call attention to the victims of the brutal Hillside Strangler. The performance begins with a troupe of preternaturally tall, veiled figures slowly emerging from a funeral hearse to silently protest a culture they believe promotes female victimhood.¹⁵ The concise geometry of the forms and staging is a quintessential Western artistic trope morphed into public spectacle in pursuit of social justice. But there is a reciprocal way to examine the agency of thingness and social practice, one that is less about abstract forms intervening in social content, and more about the social itself as a kind of abstraction, or perhaps more accurately, as a merging of biological agency with mechanical and mnemonic forces.

_{_{Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s media event In Mourning and in Rage as it appeared on the cover of the Los Angeles Times, 1977.}}

Operating the “people’s microphone,” or “human microphone,” is simple enough. Made famous by OWS as a response to a New York City ban on amplified sound at Zuccotti Park, a group of listeners broadcasts a speaker’s words by loudly repeated them in unison. For larger gatherings, a second wave of repetition is sometimes necessary. On one level, this cultural innovation appears to be a “flesh and blood” substitute for an electronic technology that large public meetings have come to depend upon. On another level, the people’s mic introduces mechanization directly into human-to-human interaction by alternating segments of speech with interruptions to generate gain, a series of discontinuous procedures that send physical ripples through a congregation transformed, one could say, into a temporary, self-regulating cybernetic community, an undulating cyberorganism. Likewise, the entire OWS panoply of hand-drawn or pirated imagery —made with thin-point or chisel-tipped markers, bits of torn masking tape, clipped newspaper, collaged laser prints, spray paint stencils, as well as charcoal and acrylic, and limitless pieces of recycled beige cardboard— exhibited the unmistakable qualities of an archive even before the encampment was power-scrubbed into history. Here I am approaching the idea of the archive not as a precise collection of thematic documents that uphold this or that school or historical interpretation, but instead envision it as a site of conceptual “objects,” as well as an unbounded material accumulation capable of becoming a force of spirited intervention in the present. In this sense, Zuccotti Park, along with all other OWS encampments, embodies an archive avant la lettre, that is to say, a collection of materials, biopolitical practices, and everyday concrete documents waiting to be recognized as an interpretable text. Sadly, in New York City, the moment of this “reading” began at 1 a.m. on November 15 when the NYPD began to clear the park.

Mic check at OWS. Photo: AP

_{_{Painted board by UNOVIS on a street in Vitebsk.}}

Embracing Bennett’s material vibrancy within social practice means recognizing not only the role of extra-human technologies and abstract concepts like democracy, but also the corporeal presence of “nature,” not in some sugary, universal form, but as a negation that radically confronts human culture with alterity. This line of thinking might, for instance, nudge a project focused on the interaction of human and natural ecologies within a downtown waterfront or inner-city park—to cite a couple of examples I am familiar with—into a reflection about what the river might demand from society, as opposed to what it offers city residents.¹⁶

Likewise, if we think of putting “art” to work explaining or engaging participants in an abstract notion like democracy, as Group Material sought to do, we could, with more effort, turn this procedure around and consider how an abstraction like democracy might manifest itself in physical, even aesthetic forms. At the same time that art’s previously hidden sociality materialized within OWS, or the internet, or via the steady stream of collective practices that have blossomed over the past fifteen years, there is a danger that a range of techniques, non-discursive ways of thinking, and material forces will be rendered obsolete, regressive, or invisible. Such an approach might also help terminate endless debates about artistic deskilling whose concrete art-world manifestations have less to do with theoretical niceties like immaterial labor than they do with the unspoken hierarchy between a class of idea-artists and a lower class whose skills are called upon to fabricate projects.

Returning to the darkness of the Spouter Inn, Ishmael eventually believes he can recognize what the obscure mass at the center of the half-lit painting represents. In a reading foreshadowing the impending drama, he offers

a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

Perhaps, rather than thinking of social practice art as a strategy for unlikely survival against the forces of neoliberal enterprise culture and its strip-mining of creativity, we could inscribe this still-emerging narrative with a stubborn sense of materiality and a vibrantitness, that if nothing else would challenge unspoken hierarchies, and divisions of labor, because a critical, social practice should above all acknowledge the limits of the social within the social itself.

Noisebridge

2012-01-08T16:14:00.001-08:00

Noisebridge is located on the 3rd floor of 2169 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110-1219, (37.76717 N, 122.418423 W) between 17th and 18th street, 1.5 blocks blocks south of 16th Street Mission BART station. Use the intercom to ask to be buzzed into the space. An elevator with manually-operated doors is available, and here is some basic accessibility information.

bio of contemporary "artist"

2012-01-08T15:37:00.001-08:00

http://blueink.com/jenlewin.htm

Joseph Herscher

2012-01-08T12:56:00.001-08:00

Who Says Machines Must Be Useful?

Brooklyn's Rube Goldberg: Joseph Herscher builds Rube Goldberg machines in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In this video he constructs his newest contraption, called “Page Turner.”

By HUGH RYAN

Published: January 6, 2012

REPRINTS

ON the roof of a small row house in Brooklyn, a black powder fuse flared brightly against the gray sky. Hissing and sparking, it burned through a platform installed inside a repurposed Ikea bookshelf, sending four colored balls into action, lighting camp stoves, swinging fly swatters and knocking over books in a frenetic burst of organized chaos. In less than a minute, the final ball had dropped to the ground and was pocketed by Joseph Herscher, 26, the kinetic artist behind this real-world Rube Goldberg machine.

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Mr. Herscher in his Williamsburg, Brooklyn apartment.

“That’s it for now,” Mr. Herscher, a slim, dark-haired New Zealand native, said. Highly energetic, he resembled one of his own devices as he ran around grabbing the other balls before they bounced into the construction site next door. The wind was picking up, and he wanted to get everything inside before the November storm hit. Since his workroom doubles as his kitchen, he also hoped to get things put away before his roommates returned with groceries. Mr. Herscher shares his small apartment/laboratory with two friends and a hamster named Chester, who is in training for a lead role in Mr. Herscher’s latest creation.

“I’m trying to make it as absurd and useless as possible,” Mr. Herscher said of the contraption, which will turn off the lights behind him when he leaves the room. It is the first in a series he calls Ecomachines, which will perform simple, energy-saving tasks in elaborately wasteful ways.

“You hear that it’s good to recycle everything,” Mr. Herscher said, “and then you hear it takes more energy to recycle paper than it does to cut it down. It’s really hard to know what the right thing to do is. This is a way to express my own frustrations.”

The project is also an attempt to inject larger meaning into a form he already loves. Four years ago, with no particular training in sculpture or mechanical engineering, Mr. Herscher built his first Rube Goldberg machine in the living room of the large house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he lived. Like his current projects, it was constructed mainly out of recycled materials and dollar-store finds, like Solo cups and paper-towel tubes. The result was a massively complex installation with an elementary school mad-genius aesthetic: balls rolled through tubes, bounced and dropped from one platform to another. A teakettle filled a plastic cup with water until it tripped a lever. Whirling sledgehammers slapped the balls forward until a final hammer swung down and smashed a Cadbury Creme Egg into a satisfying splat of chocolate ooze.

“I spent seven months on the thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t know why. I didn’t have a plan. In the back of my head, I was thinking it would be really cool when my friends came over.”

Indeed, his friends were amazed — as were the more than 2.3 million YouTube viewers who watched the resulting video, “Creme That Egg.” His landlords, however, were not. Two weeks after the machine was completed, Mr. Herscher and his roommates were evicted.

“We pulled it all down and left about 500 pinholes in the wall,” he said, laughing. But the video had already become popular. Soon Mr. Herscher was appearing on talk shows, leading workshops for children and designing machines for corporate functions. Much of that ended, however, when he moved to New York in 2009.

“I wanted to save some money for a change,” he said. He spent his first two years here working full time as a computer programmer (which he still continues part time today) while living in a crowded duplex apartment that sometimes boasted upward of 15 roommates. “My parents are musicians,” he said, “so I really avoided going down the path of the struggling artist. That’s my biggest fear in life.”

At first, he tried to create a machine that would peck out Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano piece “The Entertainer” in rudimentary percussion, but space constraints made it impossible. He continued leading occasional youth workshops around the world. During the 2011 Venice Biennale, he organized 40 children to create a Goldbergian plant-watering device in the shade of the Greenhouse at the Venice Giardini. He had been invited by the Italian arts organization Microclima, whose members had seen his work on YouTube. Mr. Herscher, however, had to find private investors to finance the event, which he did by appealing to the national pride of his fellow New Zealanders. While these workshops were fun, he said, he missed having the freedom to create things by himself and on his own time. So he decided to find an apartment that would let him build again. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t an easy search.

“Joseph had quite specific requirements,” said Mr. Herscher’s roommate Olivia Lynch, 25, a communications coordinator at the British Broadcasting Corporation who is an old friend from New Zealand. These included private roof access, ample common space and — perhaps most important — roommates who would put up with an inventor’s workbench next to the kitchen sink and the possibility of something out of the children’s game Mouse Trap taking over the living room.

After looking at more than 20 apartments, Mr. Herscher called Ms. Lynch at work to explain that he’d found the perfect place. There was just one small problem: two other people had already put down deposits, and if they didn’t sign the lease in the next 20 minutes, the apartment would be gone.

“I said, ‘Joseph, tell them we’ll pay six months in advance,’ ” Ms. Lynch recalled. “So he jumped on his bike and wrote a check for $17,000.” By June, they had moved in. After a few trips to Ikea (where most of Mr. Herscher’s supplies came from), he was back in the Rube Goldberg business. But one issue remains: what to do with the machines when they are finished. As of now, Mr. Herscher has no idea; he has no gallery representation and has never sold a machine.

“It’s going to be hard to find a place that will show them,” he said, looking down at a ceramic bowl that had shattered in two during a test of the fuses. His planned devices will incorporate things like hot irons, chemical reactions and live animals, and he worries they will be a difficult sell. But he’s not letting that stop him. “I hope that New York’s such a complicated place that there might be somewhere that’s interested.”

mr gods galloping mountain variety show

2011-12-20T22:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.sharedheritage.info/past/mr-gods-galloping-mountain-variety-show/

October 12, 2011

Mr. God's Galloping Mountain Variety Show

The Cyberpunk Apocalypse

Galloping Mountain Book Launch Stand-up Comedy by Gunner Fictional Histories of Pittsburgh by famed hotdog reconstructionist and dog food millionaire Todd Faltin Heartfelt ballads & melancholic croonings by a soft-spoken New England gent Sci-Fi role playing by CpA founder DannyMacQuiet Noise Interludes by Ken Kaminski

Doors open at 6pm.

The Cyberpunk Apocalypse is a writers' cooperative work & event space, residency program, and publication based out of Pittsburgh.

Facebook Event

Videos

Photos

Prev | Next 1/6

2011-12-19T02:05:00.001-08:00

René Descartes's illustration of dualism. Inputs are passed on by the sensory organs to the epiphysis in the brain and from there to the immaterial spirit.

Alva Noe

2011-12-17T04:33:00.001-08:00

theft techniques

2011-12-15T22:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.bikeoff.org/design_resource/ABT_problem_theft_techniques.shtml

life in a day

2011-12-07T19:09:00.001-08:00

Cartesian Anxiety

2011-12-07T14:19:00.001-08:00

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since René Descartes promulgated his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing forontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchangingknowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".

Strange clouds B.O.B

2011-12-06T17:34:00.001-08:00

Well, if you guessin’ it’s me, you guessed correctly
I just stay with a stallion, you would swear I was an equestrian
I hit her with that pipe, call that Nancy Kerrigan
Stay on the greenest greens, call us vegetarians
You be on that minor league, but we smoke professionally
I do my job exceptionally, on point like a decimal is
The way I ride on the beat man I be in the street it’s done so effortlessly
Yeah, so these niggas can’t sleep on me, there’s no Inception in this bitch
I’m top chef, you top ramen, I’m top shelf
No last call, to the bartender, what you got left?
Pour it up, don’t stop there, hold your cup, take a shot, yeah
All night we celebrate, cause we everywhere and you not there
Ha,

All we do is pour it up
All night, drinks out
(That’s how we do it)
(That’s how we do it)
And all we do it light it up
All night, all you see is strange clouds
Strange clouds, strange clouds

All we do is pour it up
All night, drinks out
(That’s how we do it)
(That’s how we do it)
And all we do it light it up
All night, all you see is strange clouds
Strange clouds, strange clouds

Blue jeans, I’m faded, mindin’ my own data
Smokin’ on that strong, that Arnold Schwarzenegger
It’s Tunechi Lee you bitch you, you hot as an igloo
Kick back on that glock, call that Ju Jitsu
Hello World, I’m with a yellow girl, number 2 pent?
These rappers is washed up, spin cycle, rinse you
My nigga, all day, all night, half pipe
I dive in that p-ssy, yeah I belly flop, I jackknife and shit
And tell my homies that I say its a party
Got that tech for technical difficulties
I’m top dog, you top ramen, I’m top dog

Piru, gangsters, outlaws
(Young mula Baby)

All we do is pour it up
All night, drinks out
(That’s how we do it)
(That’s how we do it)
And all we do it light it up
All night, all you see is strange clouds
Strange clouds, strange clouds

All we do is pour it up
All night, drinks out
(That’s how we do it)
(That’s how we do it)
And all we do it light it up
All night, all you see is strange clouds
Strange clouds, strange clouds

Well aint no question, yes, it’s B.o.B yes definitely
Up in the studio, I got on my necessities
If you want that real shit, you made the right selection
I’m Decatur til I die, yes, I rep that definitely
They say I’m a celebrity, what the f-cks a celebrity?
I guess I must invest in the proper form of protection
And I, say its a curse but it’s emotionally a blessing
To a nigga from the hood tryna aim for the top
But I don’t even need no directions
I just wake up and then I roll up the purp
These niggas wake up on my dick
At least have some breakfast first
Nigga keep your nourishment first and your mind on my lyrics
Cause what you hoping to accomplish I already did it bitch

All we do is pour it up
All night, drinks out
(That’s how we do it)
(That’s how we do it)
And all we do it light it up
All night, all you see is strange clouds
Strange clouds, strange clouds

Architecture and Violence: 2011

2011-12-05T16:03:00.001-08:00

from

Architecture and Violence

Edited Bechir Kenzari

ArtHistory.viz

2011-12-05T13:14:00.001-08:00

ArtHistory.viz | Mining 20,000,000+ Images of Art

ArtHistory.viz explores the applications of cultural analytics to art history.

Gu, Jia. Art Objects as Data Points.
Presentation at Calit2 Summer Researchers Poster Session. 2008 (pdf)

Testing cultural analytics approach using a sample data set of 35 canonical art history images - from Courbet (1849) to Malevich (1914).

Sample image set:

Method:
1) automatically measure images to extract various statistics and features.
2) make graphs: points represents images, Y = time, X = values on one or more dimensions.

In this sample graph, we plot reverse skew value for each painting vs. the year the painting was made.

Art history and other cultural disciplines conceptualize history of culture in terms of small sets of categories: movements, national schools, historical periods, -isms, etc.
Graphs: superimposing standard art historical categories on the data.

But why force contiuous cultural developments and dynamics into small sets of categorical boxes? Using numbers to represent cultural atifacts allows us to visualize cultural developments as continuos curves.
Graph: the movement from 19th century realism to early 20th century modernism.

We can compare the patterns in different cultural data sets both visually and quantitatively.
Graph: comparing the changes in paintings before 1900 vs. the paintings after 1900 using linear trendlines.

We may find the differences between cultural sets which at first sight appear to be identical.
We may find the similarities between the sets which are thought to be very different.
Graph: comparing the change in median values of "realist" paintings vs. "modernist" paintings.

Images can be analyzed on hundreds of different visual dimensions.
Graph: the movement from 19th century realism to early 20th century modernism - using "shape count" value. (Procedure: automatically count the number of shapes in each image disregarding very small shapes.)

It is important to keep in mind that depending on the dimensions we chose to analyze, the resulting pictures of cultural patterns will be also different.
Graph: comparison of 6 different summaries of image statistics.

We can use standard statistical techniques to discover cultural patterns - or to confirm the patterns we may see if we visualize the data.
Graph: correlation between the changes in binary histogram length and median values.

Visualizing cultural data can reveal the relative statistical dispersion of different cultural data sets in relation to each other.
Graph: comparing dispersion in two data sets (post-impressionism and 1910-1915 abstraction).

Quantitative automatic analysis can potentially allow us to develop quantitative measures for "cultural innovation," "cultural openess" (openness to adopting elements from other cultures), "the speed of cultural change," and other cultural dimensions. The following is a very early experiment (not to be taken too seriously.
Which artists were "ahead of their time"?
Graph: a diagonal line shows the general tendency in the movement from realism to modernism from 1849 to 1914. The paintings which are above the trend line are "ahead" of the general trend.

Multiple graphs can be combined to study the individual artifacts within the context of larger data sets.
Graph: top: the image set; right: a single image and its analysis ( Pissaro, 1898); left: the graphs which show the data for the whole image set, with the Pissaro's painting indicated in red.

Visual cultural data can be also clustered into new classes - thus allowing us to describe cultural dynamics in more precise way than the use of verbal labels allows. (Practical examples are coming up soon...)

ALVA NOË:Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

2011-12-05T12:33:00.001-08:00

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/art-and-the-limits-of-neuroscience/?emc=eta1
December 4, 2011, 5:30 PM

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

By ALVA NOË

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

TAGS:

ART, NEUROAESTHETICS,NEUROSCIENCE,PHILOSOPHY

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.

“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art tocollaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals.

Semir Zeki, a neuroscientist at University College London, likes to say that art is governed by the laws of the brain. It is brains, he says, that see art and it is brains that make art. Champions of the new brain-based approach to art sometimes think of themselves as fighting a battle with scholars in the humanities who may lack the courage (in the words of the art historian John Onians) to acknowledge the ways in which biology constrains cultural activity. Strikingly, it hasn’t been much of a battle. Students of culture, like so many of us, seem all too glad to join in the general enthusiasm for neural approaches to just about everything.

Leif Parsons

What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed. What stands in the way of success in this new field is, first, the fact that neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness.

The idea that a person is a functioning assembly of brain cells and associated molecules is not something neuroscience has discovered. It is, rather, something it takes for granted. You are your brain. Francis Crick once called this “the astonishing hypothesis,” because, as he claimed, it is so remote from the way most people alive today think about themselves. But what is really astonishing about this supposedly astonishing hypothesis is how astonishing it is not! The idea that there is a thing inside us that thinks and feels — and that weare that thing — is an old one. Descartes thought that the thinking thing inside had to be immaterial; he couldn’t conceive how flesh could perform the job. Scientists today suppose that it is the brain that is the thing inside us that thinks and feels. But the basic idea is the same. And this is not an idle point. However surprising it may seem, the fact is we don’t actually have a better understanding how the brain might produce consciousness than Descartes did of how the immaterial soul would accomplish this feat; after all, at the present time we lack even the rudimentary outlines of a neural theory of consciousness.

Leif Parsons

What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. We also need the presence and availability of other people if we are to have anything like the sorts of lives that we know and value. So we really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it ispeople, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being.

We need finally to break with the dogma that you are something inside of you — whether we think of this as the brain or an immaterial soul — and we need finally take seriously the possibility that the conscious mind is achieved by persons and other animals thanks to their dynamic exchange with the world around them (a dynamic exchange that no doubt depends on the brain, among other things). Importantly, to break with the Cartesian dogmas of contemporary neuroscience would not be to cave in and give up on a commitment to understanding ourselves as natural. It would be rather to rethink what a biologically adequate conception of our nature would be.

But there is a second obstacle to progress in neuroaesthetics. Neural approaches to art have not yet been able to find a way to bring artinto focus in the laboratory. As mentioned, theorists in this field like to say that art is constrained by the laws of the brain. But in practice what this is usually taken to come down to is the humble fact that the brain constrains the experience of art because it constrains allexperience. Visual artists, for example, don’t work with ultraviolet light, as Zeki reminds us, because we can’t see ultraviolet light. They do work with shape and form and color because we can see them.

Leif Parsons

Now it is doubtless correct that visual artists confine themselves to materials and effects that are, well, visible. And likewise, it seems right that our perception of works of art, like our perception of anything, depends on the nature of our perceptual capacities, capacities which, in their turn, are constrained by the brain.

But there is a problem with this: An account of how the brain constrains our ability to perceive has no greater claim to being an account of our ability to perceive art than it has to being an account of how we perceive sports, or how we perceive the man across from us on the subway. In works about neuroaesthetics, art is discussed in the prefaces and touted on the book jackets, but never really manages to show up in the body of the works themselves!

Some of us might wonder whether the relevant question is how weperceive works of art, anyway. What we ought to be asking is: Why do we value some works as art? Why do they move us? Why does art matter? And here again, the closest neural scientists or psychologists come to saying anything about this kind of aesthetic evaluation is to say something about preference. But the class of things we like, or that we prefer as compared to other things, is much wider than the class of things we value as art. And the sorts of reasons we have for valuing one art work over another are not the same kind of reasons we would give for liking one person more than another, or one flavor more than another. And it is no help to appeal to beauty here. Beauty is both too wide and too narrow. Not all art works are beautiful (or pleasing for that matter, even if many are), and not everything we find beautiful (a person, say, or a sunset) is a work of art.

Again we find not that neuroaesthetics takes aim at our target and misses, but that it fails even to bring the target into focus.

Yet it’s early. Neuroaesthetics, like the neuroscience of consciousness itself, is still in its infancy. Is there any reason to doubt that progresswill be made? Is there any principled reason to be skeptical that there can be a valuable study of art making use of the methods and tools of neuroscience? I think the answer to these questions must be yes, but not because there is no value in bringing art and empirical science into contact, and not because art does not reflect our human biology.

To begin to see this, consider: engagement with a work of art is a bit like engagement with another person in conversation; and a work of art itself can be usefully compared with a humorous gesture or a joke. Just as getting a joke requires sensitivity to a whole background context, to presuppositions and intended as well as unintended meanings, so “getting” a work of art requires an attunement to problems, questions, attitudes and expectations; it requires an engagement with the context in which the work of art has work to do. We might say that works of art pose questions and encountering a work of art meaningfully requires understanding the relevant questions and getting why they matter, or maybe even, why they don’t matter, or don’t matter any more, or why they would matter in one context but not another. In short, the work of art, whatever its local subject matter or specific concerns ― God, life, death, politics, the beautiful, art itself, perceptual consciousness ― and whatever its medium, is doing something like philosophical work.

One consequence of this is that it may belong to the very nature of art, as it belongs to the nature of philosophy, that there can be nothing like a settled, once-and-for-all account of what art is, just as there can be no all-purpose account of what happens when people communicate or when they laugh together. Art, even for those who make it and love it, is always a question, a problem for itself. What is art? The question must arise, but it allows no definitive answer.

For these reasons, neuroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.

Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.

Alva Noë is a philosopher at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He is the author of “Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness.” He is now writing a book on art and human nature. Noë writes a weekly column for NPR’s science and culture blog. You can follow him on Twitter andFacebook.

School of Life : holiday ed

2011-12-05T12:32:00.001-08:00

Mili-tent 006

2011-12-01T17:59:00.001-08:00

Mili-tent 006, a photo by notanalternative on Flickr.

The Revolutionary (Trailer)

2011-11-30T18:45:00.001-08:00

The Revolutionary (Trailer)
http://vimeo.com/stourwater/revoluti...

About this video:
"During China's Cultural Revolution, Sidney Rittenberg, an American citizen, became the most important foreigner in China since Marco Polo. Arriving as a GI interpreter at the end of World War II, he was the only American citizen to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and was an active participant in the Chinese communist revolution and its aftermath. An intimate of the Party's leadership, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, he gained prominence at the Broadcast Administration, one of the most important agencies of government. But in the convulsions of a giant country constantly reinventing itself, he twice ran afoul of the leadership, and served a total of 16 years in solitary confinement. He returned to the United States in 1980.

Rittenberg’s story would be just a footnote of history, except for his exceptional intellect, uncompromising honesty, and engaging personality. Over a five-year period, award-winning former-CBS journalist and China specialist, Irv Drasnin, interviewed Rittenberg to produce a compelling, complex and unique understanding of the 20th century's biggest revolution. From Sid first meeting Mao in the caves of Yan’an, to his becoming famous and powerful during the Cultural Revolution, to his battling insanity in solitary, his journey and his profound insight illuminate a much greater history. Mao’s rule over China included both extraordinary progress and complete chaos. As China rises in the world, it is important to understand this past. It’s a history few Chinese are aware of, let alone many Americans, told by an American who was there."

katharinemorling

2011-11-30T06:43:00.001-08:00

http://www.katharinemorling.co.uk/newwork/newwork.htm

post idea world:kalle lasn

2011-11-29T16:02:00.001-08:00

For millennia, human civilization has been flush with a succession of paradigm shifting, big ideas. Modernity's Hegelian world spirit, Nietzschean death of God and Heideggerian Being gave way in postmodernity to Foucault's dispositif, Fukuyama's end of history, Derrida's deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome. And yet, while we all assumed that big ideas would keep flowing hard and fast forever, in the last few years it seems that the wells of inspiration are running dry. There is a dawning realization that truly novel, creative ideas have suddenly stopped coming. Nobody knows why.
The conceptual drought couldn't be happening at a more inopportune moment. Seven billion of us are struggling through the most severe ecological, financial, political and spiritual crisis in our history. This time the catastrophe we face doesn't affect a single nation or region or continent … it is all the more terrifying because it is global and simultaneous. Odds are that if we can't pull ourselves out of this decline then we just might descend into a horrifying thousand year long dark age … an age of scorched earth authoritarian-capitalism, brutalism and mayhem which will make the genocides and holocausts of the previous century feel like foreplay. We've not only run out of ideas; we're running out of time.
Now more than ever we need the creative breakthroughs and outlier brainstorms that can shift the terrain of thought, revealing exits, opening possibilities, potentially saving us all. We need mavericks of indie media who can kill the commercial virus that infects our information flows. We need a brilliant new crop of economics students who can stand up to their professors, topple the neoclassical paradigm and replace it with a new, true cost model. We need potent new ways of dismantling corporate rule and killing corporate personhood. And then there is the biggest challenge of them all: how to spark a social revolution, an insurrection of everyday life that sweeps across the globe just in time to avert the final catastrophe?
It may be that our abandonment of the natural world and wholesale migration into cyberspace has cut our roots and scrambled our neurons beyond repair. We may be in the midst of an irreversible mental breakdown of the human race that parallels the irreversible collapse of our planet's ecosystems. This eco-psycho spiral may do us in. Maybe it is already too late?
But BLANK's not about despair, it is about hope and revolution and living without dead time … it's about testing the waters and discerning whether we can muster the psychic energy for an almighty turnaround.
for the wild,
Kalle Lasn and Micah White

triple candy history

2011-11-27T23:31:00.001-08:00

http://triplecandie.org/About%20History.html

Presenting Not Producing, 2001-2002

Triple Candie was conceived -- before 9/11 -- as a presenting rather than a producing venue. The idea was that the gallery would curate none of its own shows. Instead, it would invite outside organizations (primarily nonprofits, but occasionally commercial galleries) to produce or curate exhibitions for its facility, which Triple Candie would then promote, staff, and organize programs around. The post-9/11 recession made such a strategy untenable. In fact, a month before Triple Candie was to open with a performance-installation by Josiah McElheny, the Public Art Fund, which was producing it, canceled the show citing economic distress. Triple Candie opened nontheless, with two projects by outside organizations -- The Jacob Lawrence Foundation hired Franklin Sirmans to curate an exhibition and Pace Wildenstein Gallery organized a show by Kiki Smith. The strategy was abandoned after the second exhibition.

The Early Inter-generational Group Shows, 2002-2004

For the next two years, Triple Candie curated and presented group exhibitions inspired by its Harlem location that mixed the work of emerging and established artists. This ran counter to the prevailing tendency among nonprofit spaces of the time to promote the work of young artists. These exhibitions included "Sugar & Cream: Large, Contemporary Wall Hangings" (including work by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jim Hodges, Rosie Le Tompkins, and others), "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (After Paul Laurence Dunbar)" (including videos by Vito Acconci, Chris Marker, and Sara Sun), "The Reality of Things" (Robert Gober, Daniel Guzman, Sherrie Levine, Shinique Smith, et al), and "Living Units" (Ricco Gatson, Jessica Stockholder, Andrea Zittel, others). Though many of these shows required colloboration with commercial galleries and other nonprofits, Triple Candie began maintaining an arm's length connection to its colleagues. Triple Candie was a founding member of NADA (the New Art Dealers Alliance) , in 2002, for example, but withdrew its membership within a year when it found the organization's non-competitive and non-commercial rhetoric disengenuous.

Solo Projects, 2004-2005

As Triple Candie increasingly saw other New York-based, nonprofit "alternative" spaces (Artists Space, White Columns) abandon their age-old focus on emerging artists, it changed its programming model again. For the next two years, the gallery focused almost exclusively on producing ambitious solo projects -- often New York-debuts. These included projects with Sanford Biggers, Taylor Davis, Rashawn Griffin, David Humphrey, Brian Jungen, Mark Lewis, Rodney McMillian, Halsey Rodman, Lara Schnitger, Kiki Smith, Jennifer Stillwell, Heeseop Yoon, and others. It also presented a fifteen-year survey of the work of the influential Cal Arts professor Charles Gaines, for which it commissioned a major new, large-scale sculpture. When it could, Triple Candie provided the artists with stipends (up to $10,000), volunteer assistants, and as much as five weeks for installation.

Slide Shows, 2002-2005

During these first four years, Triple Candie also curated an annual series of artist talks (collectively titled "Slide Shows" and presented as exhibitions) that explored the various forms of rhetoric artists use to describe their practices. Participating artists included Laylah Ali, Tony Feher, Jon Kessler, Dana Schutz, James Siena, Amy Sillman, Phoebe Washburn, Kehinde Wiley, and others.

The Anonymous Artist Projects, 2004-2005

In the summer of 2004, and again the following summer, Triple Candie produced The Anonymous Artist Project I and The Anonymous Project II. For each exhibition, Triple Candie invited a well known New York artist to create a new work/installation that differed substantially from her/his other work, with the understanding that both the artist and Triple Candie would rigorously guard the artists' identities in perpetuity. For artists, the shows provided a risk-free opportunity to experiment, on a large-scale, in a beautiful space. For visitors, however, they prompted an understandable frustration; many felt unable to judge the work without information about the artists' backgrounds, though most assumed that the artists were of African descent, given the gallery's location. Visiting the second project, Philippe Vergne, then still at the Walker Art Center, noted: "Either the artist is highly accomplished or completely naive. I can't tell." Since then, other organizations have curated anonymous artist projects -- i.e. Vienna Succession (2007) -- but in most, if not all, cases the condition of artistic anonymity has been breached at the end of the show. The two artists who did these projects at Triple Candie remain, to this day, unknown.

Art-less Exhibitions, late 2005 - 2008

In late 2005, with the art market booming, Triple Candie started finding that it was having an increasingly difficult time competing with commercial galleries and museums for artists time and attention. Responding to its institutional limitations (i.e. a relative lack of power, money, and social connections) and inability to lure artists simply with its gorgeous space, Triple Candie developed a program model that wasn't dependent on artists or their galleries. It began producing exhibitions about art without the involvement of artists, and rarely containing art.

The first of these shows was a comprehensive retrospective on the art of David Hammons, realized with photocopies and computer print-outs and without the artist's approval (David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective). Though the exhibition was described as "arrogant" by a critic who visited it on assignment and then refused to write about it (David Cohen, The New York Observer), it received positve reviews in the New York Times, and just about every art magazine. David Hammons himself never came to see it in person. on the morning of the first day of the show, howeever, upon opening the gallery, staff members found a clown, bean-bag toss game board leaning against the front door. When later asked by the New York Times for a response to the exhibition, Hammons replyed by email "no comment."

Triple Candie's second art-less show was conceived at the same time as the Hammons show but realized several months later. The first survey ever of Cady Noland's art, it consisted of thirteen sculptural surrogates built by Triple Candie and four artists using incomplete information gleaned from the internet (C ady No land Approximately: Sculptures and Editions, 1984-2000). All of the objects were therefore wrong, and the show as a whole presented a plausible charicature of an oeuvre. The press response to this show contrasted sharply with that of the Hammons show. Jerry Saltz, then writing for the Village Voicesaid that Cady Noland should hire a lawyer and "get medieval" on Triple Candie. Others wrote that the show raised interesting questions but told viewers nothing about Cady Noland's art. The artist herself never saw the exhibition.

For the next two and a half years, Triple Candie continued to make exhibitions in this vein. Many were retrospectives or surveys -- such as Lester Hayes: Selected Work, 1962-1975, which focused on the work of a bi-racial post-minimailist artist (the artist was fictional,), and Limelight: Gallery and Coffeehouse, 1954-1961, a retrospective of an art gallery.Other shows focused the misrepresentation of art by art museums -- such as Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of the Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence and Flip Viola and the Blurs (Misrepresenting an artwork can create a non-art experience of comparable value). Still others presented objects scrounged from Harlem neighbors or the streets outside the gallery -- Unwitting Accomplices: 36 Objects Thrown in Violent Incidents and The Social History of Objects (After Spoerri and Nabokov).

Nine-Month Displacement, 2008-2009

In December 2007, Triple Candie's landlord began extensive renovations of its building, beginning with the replacement of its facade. When noise, construction dust, and flooding made it impossible to program, Triple Candie exercised a 3-month escape clause in its newly negotiated five-year lease. Its parting show was an exhibition titled Thank You For Coming: Triple Candie, 2001-2008, a survey of the gallery's first seven years, realized entirely through surrogates, reproductions, recreations, artifacts, and props. The New York Times cited Triple Candie's closing as one of the most significant "art" events of the year, along with the Philippe de Montebello's retirement and the explosion of the Chinese contemorary art market.

Triple Candie vacated its facility on May 1, 2008 not knowing if it would reopen again. Five months later, restless to continue experimenting with its newly developed exhibition model, Triple Candie signed a lease on a space in a residential neighborhood on Harlem's upper westside and spent more than 1,000 volunteer hours renovating it -- installing a new ceiling, facade, floor, bathroom, lighting, and office area. Triple Candie reopened on February 15, 2009.

Two More Years in Harlem, 2009-2010

During Triple Candie's last two years in Harlem, it presented several dozen exhibitions about art but without it. The shows varied considerably, though often many of the objects that comprised them remained the same. (Objects exhibited at Triple Candie generally have three fates when a show is deinstalled: they are discarded, they were given away to people from the neighborhood, or they are taken apart and their component parts were recycled and used in future exhibitions.) Some of the shows made use, again, of the survey or retrospective trope -- Maurizio Cattelan is Dead: Life & Work, 1960-2009 being the best example. Some were fictious creations, such as The Calais Guild: Prayer Blankets, an exhibition proportedly about the work of a tiny textile group in Southeast Maine, but which was instead a forthright concoction of Triple Candie. And many of the shows either intentionally mis-represented, "improved upon," or commented on existing works by artists such as Lewis Baltz, Dexter Sinister, or Ryan Gander. Triple Candie also curated several shows that were self-referential: The Glass Menagerie (after Tennessee Williams), Two Character Play (after Tennessee Williams), and Beavers as Weavers, and Non-Believers.

Leaving Town

For nine years, Triple Candie operated as a completely volunteer-run enterprise, its board of directors consisting of the two co-directors and a close friend. Funding for the gallery's activities came from outside employment, as well as grants and contributions. Ninety-percent of the budget was used for rent.

On December 31, 2010, desirous of change and cheaper rent, the co-directors of Triple Candie decided to close its Harlem space and leave New York City. They are now in Philadelphia where plans for a new iteration of Triple Candie is in the works.

2011-11-27T21:50:00.001-08:00

DRAKE: It’s crazy man. Here’s the thing: I haven’t been able to write any love songs because I haven’t been in a relationship in like three years. When I hear, even going back to Ocean, like girls are so endearing and charming … I’m like, damn I can’t write like that right now! My songs are like, I’m the man, bitch, I made it. I made you who you are now take a shot for me! That’s a song on my album. I can tell you were practicing, that all those other men were practice for me. Those are the types of songs I’m making. This music with sex-driven chauvinistic undertone to it.

tune-yards directed by

2011-11-23T16:22:00.001-08:00

Xiang Cao

2011-11-23T07:19:00.001-08:00

Imagine having a projector inside your cell phone or PDA, what can you do with it? Researchers from University of Toronto made a demo. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~caox/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/xiangc/

water drop medley

2011-11-22T16:33:00.001-08:00

water drop medley, a photo by theilr on Flickr.

so nice

nexus

2011-11-21T18:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.google.com/nexus/#/features

sparkfun

2011-11-21T16:54:00.001-08:00

http://www.sparkfun.com/

http://singularityhub.com/2010/05/04/new-api-takes-facial-recognition-from-facebook-and-puts-it-everywhere/

karla black

2011-11-20T21:50:00.001-08:00

Nothing is A Must

Nothing Is A MustNothing is a must

2009
Sugar paper, chalk, ribbon, lipstick, glitter hairspray

312 x 300 x 182 cm

Preventable Within

Preventable Within

2009
Sugar paper, chalk, thread

149 x 144 x 25 cm

Can epigenetics underlie the enduring effects of a mother’s love?

2011-11-20T20:32:00.001-08:00

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/74845460/buchen.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1290373169000

After dropping a pair of male and female

adult rats into a rectangular Plexiglas

container, Frances Champagne can

expect one of a few scenarios to ensue.

The male will definitely try to mate with the

female — but the female is less predictable. She

might approach him, appraise his scents and

arch her back to allow him to mount her. Should

a second male enter the cage after she’s mated

with the first, she may be similarly hospitable.

Some females play it coy, however, evading

the male, requiring more courtship and, if mating

does occur, avoiding another go. A number

of factors can influence what the female does,

but to Champagne, a behavioural scientist at

Columbia University in New York, one is particularly

beguiling: how often the female rat’s

mother licked and groomed her during her

first week of life1. Doting mothers have prudish

daughters, whereas the daughters of inattentive

rats cavort around like mini Mae Wests. At the

heart of these differences lies the sex hormone

oestrogen, which drives female sexual behaviour.

Champagne says that neglected rats might

respond to it more strongly than those raised

by attentive mums.

The phenomenon is just one example of how

experiences early in life can shape behaviour,

and it may apply to humans. It is known, for

example, that children who grow up in poverty

are at greater risk as adults for problems such as

drug addiction and depression than those with

more comfortable upbringings, regardless of

their socioeconomic situation later in life. But

what is it about early experiences that has such

a lasting effect? For Champagne and many of

her colleagues, the answer has been apparent

for nearly a decade. Life experiences alter DNA;

not necessarily its sequence but rather its form

and structure, including the chemicals that

decorate it and how tightly it winds and packs

around proteins inside the cell. These changes,

often referred to as epigenetic modifications,

make genes easier or more difficult for the cell’s

sarah small

2011-11-20T01:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.sarahsmall.com/

united colors of benetton

2011-11-20T01:38:00.001-08:00

http://blog.benetton.com/blog/dont-hate-unhate/

Mocked-up: Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel in a clinch with French president Nicolas Sarkozy

Friendly: This image of Palestian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu kissing will no doubt upset some people in the Middle East

Combating hatred: Benetton hope the controversial images will help create tolerance around the world. This picture shows China's leader Hu Jintao and Barack Obama

Enemies: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Lee Myung-bak, President of South Korea, are unlikely

sf moma

2011-11-20T01:25:00.001-08:00

We are artists and art workers of the 99%. We are struggling to survive and sustain our creative practice in an economy that does not value us as workers, that privatizes cultural institutions and that continuously defunds art programs–from public education to government grants. We are putting our creative efforts towards this movement and considering our role in the fight for economic and social justice.

Join us for the Artists Bloc day at Occupy San Francisco for hands-on workshops, participatory projects, discussions and speakers. The day will include screen-printing, crocheting, banner-making workshops, a speaker’s booth, pirate radio station, and conversations facilitated by local artists about arts funding, education and the systems of oppression that affect artists economic sustainability and more.

The event will include speakers, Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Jeff Chang author of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, a History of the Hip Hop Generationwho–along with local artist–Favianna Rodriguez, organized Culture Strike in opposition to Arizona’s SB 1070 law, and artist, print-maker and political organizerm Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde.

This is a family friendly event an will include art-making workshops for kids.

Occupy SF/Justin Herman Plaza is accessible by BART (Embarcadero Station), Muni lines: J, K, L, M, N, and F Market.

annoying

2011-11-20T01:20:00.001-08:00

http://www.jeremyhutchison.com/index.html

Limerick

2011-11-20T00:23:00.001-08:00

A source of water and life for a community

Kilkenny artist Pauline O Connell s short video Drawing the Water is being shown at an event in County Kerry next week.

Published on Wednesday 16 November 2011 07:19

A SHORT high-definition video by a Kilkenny artist is being screened outdoors in Kerry next week in a culmination of a year-long public art commission.

Drawing the Water is the work in question by artist Pauline O’Connell, and it will be shown on November 26 from 5pm until midnight at Spout Lane, Milltown, County Kerry.

Four minutes and 30 seconds long, the video centres on a social water scheme that dates from 1860 and known locally as The Spout. The video was commissioned by Kerry County Council for Milltown under the Per Cent for Art Scheme with funding from the Department of the Environment.

This year-long project focused its attention on the imagined, historic and living memory concerning aspects of community gathering, time and memory in relation to The Spout. Working with local primary and secondary schools and consulting with members of the community, Ms O’Connell researched the Victorian model of benevolence as an instrumental part of its creation.

“The function of this inconspicuous public water source became more than its obvious function. It operated as a multi-scaled device whereby the individual not only drew the physical water, it was the receptacle for sharing information located in the local/ global nexus – at a time when emigration was strong,” the artist explains.

Ms O’Connell’s fascination with local knowledge since her own “blow-back” to her native Kilkenny eight years ago examines local cultures, politics of place and place construction alongside modes of social relating. She is therefore culminating the project screening with a free céilí event that evening in the Community Hall in Milltown.

“The event itself will be filmed and the final document to be archived will consist of the HDV (high-definition video), the HDV document of the screening of the event and a written text following a discussion with a historian, sociologist, environmentalist and myself around the topic of community, benevolence, urban design on the rural, and current issues relating to water quality,” she says.

A native of Kilkenny, Ms O’Connell studied Fine Art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art Design and Technology and is now undertaking her MA in Social Practice and the Creative Environment at Limerick School of Art and Design She has been involved in public art projects in Waterford, Sligo, Kilkenny and Vienna, teaching at primary and third level, curating master-classes for the Fire Station Artists Studios, Dublin and critical reviewing for Circa magazine.

something small

2011-11-19T18:56:00.001-08:00

2011-11-18T22:56:00.001-08:00

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

2011-11-18T20:48:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22; Co-Founded Social Network

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: November 15, 2011

REPRINTS

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a co-founder of the start-up social network Diaspora*, which has been described as the “anti-Facebook” for its emphasis on personal privacy and decentralized data collection, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 22.

Enlarge This Image

David Goldman for The New York Times

Ilya Zhitomirskiy, left, and the other founders of Diaspora*, Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer.

The San Francisco police, in confirming his death, did not give the cause. Friends and associates of Mr. Zhitomirskiy said there were indications of suicide.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy was a student at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 2010 when he and three fellow undergraduates conceived the idea for a Web-based community that would give users, rather than the Web site itself, control of the information they shared.

Instead of creating a central database like Facebook’s, where information about hundreds of millions of members is stored and mined for advertising and marketing purposes, their idea was to develop freely shared software that would allow every member of the network to “own” his or her personal information.

Mr. Zhitomirskiy, an impish self-styled radical, unicyclist and competitive ballroom dancer, was a member of the nascent liberation technology movement, which views the conglomeration of personal information by large corporate and government bodies as a threat to civil liberties and human rights.

He and his partners were inspired to start their project after attending a lecture in February 2010 by Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law School professor and an advocate of liberation technology, about the threat to privacy and social justice in Internet commerce.

Professor Moglen, who became acquainted with the Diaspora* founders, said Mr. Zhitomirskiy was the most idealistic of the group.

“He was an immensely talented and intent young mathematician,” Mr. Moglen said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had a choice between graduate school and this project, and he chose to do the project because he wanted to do something with his time that would make freedom.”

Ilya Alekseevich Zhitomirskiy was born on Oct. 12, 1989, in Moscow to Alexei and Inna Zhitomirskiy. His father and his grandfather Garri Zhitomirskiy are mathematicians. After the family moved to the United States in 2000, Mr. Zhitomirskiy attended public schools in Massachusetts, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, where his father found work teaching and later in business.

In addition to his parents and grandfather, Mr. Zhitomirskiy is survived by his grandmother Galina Fillippuk Zhitomirskiy, and a sister, Maria.

He attended college at Tulane University, the University of Maryland and N.Y.U. He was a semester shy of graduation when he and three friends at N.Y.U. — Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi and Raphael Sofaer — floated their idea for what they called a “personally controlled, do-it-all, open-source social network” on an Internet fund-raising platform called Kickstarter.

The concept for Diaspora* (the asterisk represents a seed from a dandelion seed head) struck a chord. Though they had originally intended to raise a modest sum, the partners received a flood of contributions, eventually totaling $200,000, from about 6,000 donors.

They moved to San Francisco, starting a prototype of the site (diasporafoundation.org) in the summer of 2010. The site was scheduled to become fully operational in the next few weeks.

In a September 2010 interview in New York magazine, Mr. Zhitomirskiy said the open platform model for Diaspora* would not make him and his partners rich.

“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” he said. “Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”

www.zoemccloskey.net
917-327-8730

http://machineproject.com

2011-11-18T20:31:00.001-08:00

http://machineproject.com

katerina seda

2011-11-16T00:59:00.001-08:00

Watch live streaming video from creativetime at livestream.com

elysemallouk

2011-11-15T23:58:00.001-08:00

http://www.elysemallouk.com/

Scores for the City documents interventions that temporarily altered public space in Los Angeles, and proposes scores for future actions.

The Last day of Magic was a one-day closed ritual ceremony that took place on March 28, 2009. It was designed and performed by a group of twelve artists:

Sung-Hee Chang, Emily Hoover, Amy Keefer, Dustin Kelly, Christine Kesler, Stephanie Lagarde, Elyse Mallouk, Amy Martin, Josh Martinez, Lynne McCabe, Piero Passacantando, and Brindalyn Webster.

Instructions for the reperformance of the ceremony were subsequently created. A reenactment based on these instructions was performed by a new group of twelve volunteers at Orange Alley Projects on April 25, 2009. The original performance was documented in video form, and the film was screened at Gallery Extrana in Berkeley and as part of the Markers project at the 53 Venice Biennale.

The Last day of Magic is a project curated by Jan Van Woensel: www.last--day--of--magic.blogspot.com

TIMOTHY MORTON

2011-11-15T23:52:00.001-08:00

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/

Innerspacing the City

2011-11-15T23:47:00.001-08:00

http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/portfolios/innerspacing-the-city/

Innerspacing the City

November 17 – December 10, 2011
Mezzanine Floor
Curated by Denise Carvalho, Ph.D.
Innerspacing the City explores the ambivalence of experiencing city life in the performative body, within human relationships, and through language. This theme is examined through the work of seven young Korean artists and their perception of the utopian society as an abstract, distant, inaccessible entity that is beyond their control. Throughout the exhibition, the city is personalized, limited to their emotional and critical response to it. However, all of the ideals represented in their works share a duality: between Seoul and New York City, South and North, local and global, space and time – and between the past and future.
The exhibition uses the city as the focal point to explore the dialogue between reality and the ideal. Our perception of what we call “real” has gone a long way, from the Cartesian split between mind and body – overlooking the Kantian transcendental approach through reason – toward the phenomenological perception of space via the body in motion. This multi-faceted concept steers away from the idea that all is constructed in language, to finally return its focus on the collective body, which aims at losing subjectivity by gaining collective consciousness. The question remains: Is what we call “real,” or its lack-thereof, merely symbolic and ideological? Or is the “real” the fragmentary and the personal actions that allow us to dream with something beyond itself?

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Jungju An | Charlie Hahn | JaeWook Lee | Na-Hyun
HeeJin Park | Kwan Taeck Park | Gyung Jin Shin
This exhibition could not have been realized without the support of:
Korea Art Council, art flux, KUXart, and
The Chelsea Art Museum | Home of the Miotte Foundation.

2011-11-07T18:56:00.001-08:00

http://www.florianschaerfer.com/projekte.html

bed sheet

2011-11-07T18:43:00.001-08:00

Such a Pleasure

“Show me your skin and I’ll tell you who you are” or better still what you did last night. Rise and Sigh is a collection of bed sheets that plays with incidents that usually take place behind closed doors, in bedrooms.

The sheets are embroidered with captions that leave an imprint on the sleepers’ body. The embroidery is strategically placed, so that different sleeping positions leave different imprints on the body. Not only do these imprints give a hint about the past night’s atmosphere, they suggest you what to do and tell things about you.

Martina CarpelanCreated by Martina Carpelan, who has worked as a Junior Designer at Frostprodukt, these sheets manage to create temporary body art.

The words on the sheet are emblazoned in reverse so that they're printed legibly on the skin. The Rise and sigh series of bed sheets are available in three sets, for the bachelor, for the love affair and for the one night stand. Intriguing and innovative, the sheets should create a stir once they are available off the shelf.

Aditi Simlai Tiwari
Innovative Fashions Writer
InventorSpot.com

banksy/damien hirst/nytimes

2011-11-05T18:28:00.001-07:00

saving child prostitutes

2011-11-05T18:16:00.001-07:00

FROM http://www.seattleweekly.com/2011-11-02/news/lost-boys-demolishing-the-underage-prostitute-stereotype/2/

• Nearly half the kids—about 45 percent—were boys.

• Only 10 percent were involved with a "market facilitator" (e.g., a pimp).

• More than 90 percent were U.S.-born (56 percent were New York City natives).• About 45 percent got into the "business" through friends.

• On average, they started hooking at age 15.

• Most serviced men—preferably white and wealthy.

• Most deals were struck on the street.

• Almost 70 percent of the kids said they'd sought assistance at a youth-service agency at least once.

• Nearly all the youths—95 percent—said they exchanged sex for money because it was the surest way to support themselves.

In other words, the typical kid who is commercially exploited for sex in New York City is not a tween girl, has not been sold into sexual slavery, and is not held captive by a pimp.

Nearly all the boys and girls involved in the city's sex trade are going it alone.

Curtis and Dank were amazed by what their research had revealed. But they were completely unprepared for the way law-enforcement officials and child-advocacy groups reacted to John Jay's groundbreaking study.The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the only agency that keeps track of how many children the legal system rescues from pimps nationwide. The count, which began in June 2003, now exceeds 1,600 as of April of this year, according to the FBI's Innocence Lost website—an average of about 200 each year.

Through interviews and analysis of public records, Village Voice Media has found that the federal government spends about $20 million a year on public awareness, victims' services, and police work related to domestic human trafficking, with a considerable focus on combating the pimping of children. An additional $50 million-plus is spent annually on youth homeless shelters, and since 1996 taxpayers have contributed a total of $186 million to fund a separate program that provides street outreach to kids who may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation. That's at least $80 million doled out annually for law enforcement and social services that combine to rescue approximately 200 child prostitutes every year.

These agencies might improve upon their $400,000-per-rescued-child average if they joined the effort to develop a clearer picture of the population they aim to aid. But there's no incentive for them to do so when they stand to rake in even more public money simply by staying the course.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2011-11-02/news/lost-boys-demolishing-the-underage-prostitute-stereotype/2/

Ed Panar

2011-11-05T17:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.edpanar.com/

Bill Viola

2011-11-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Mat Gleason

2011-11-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Pacific Standard Time: Too Big To Fail?" Follow Mat Gleason on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CoagulaMagazine
Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mat-gleason/pacific-standard-time-getty_b_1029897.html?ref=email_share

A friend sent me her Bank of America ATM receipt with its upbeat encouragement to explore the Pacific Standard Time website. Could there be a crueler indictment of an art world that is convinced of its moral superiority to mainstream culture than to be subsidized by one of the criminal financial forces that has brought our culture to its very knees?

I was seriously considering a boycott of the entire Pacific Standard Time when I saw an entity sponsoring a cultural event after basically destroying the culture via the economy. For BofA to celebrate the very pulse that it now has contributed to killing is disgusting. But the era of the boycott seems to have vanished -- instead of the boycott's zero attention, the "occupy" era challenges power by giving perpetrators 100 percent attention. While there is a call for people to remove their money from large financial institutions on November 5 and open accounts at a local credit union, how do we as a region remove the art that defines our city and our times from the large art institutions? I suppose you don't need an answer to begin your occupation of the art institution of your choice. And if you cannot choose one, don't forget that the big banks collaborate with art educational institutions to profit mightily off of student loan debt. Curricula in the hallowed halls of these capitalist MFA casinos mimic the self-impressed non-engagement aesthetic as much or more than most PST exhibits. The anxiety is erased into the conceptual ether. Prozac is to art creation what the Getty is to art curation.

Of course the blandest artists of the era dominate in the Getty's sober SoCal narrative -- maybe they're also too big to fail. Instead of a critical examination about how the imbalance of American wealth was mirrored in an imbalance of a few plain-Jane artists getting a disproportionate share of the sales and attention, we get ad agency commercials. PST contents itself with insisting some trendy actor go to the museum like your mom crabbing for you go to mass on Easter Sunday—and implying that art is like Lourdes drinking water and can make local rock stars suddenly erudite.

So who else wants to jump into bed with these perfect bedfellows? Bank of America is a "too-big-to-fail"institution that is under populist attack. The Getty is a "too-big-to-fail" institution that does more harm than good when it waters down an anarchic era into "gosh, golly, gee we're so inclusive this time!" A soul searching of the artists at the top of the Pacific Standard Time food chain is much more in order than for those laggards that history forgot and who are being thrown a bone with inclusion in a little exhibit here or a solo show at a dinky institution there.

Let's hold out hope that there is a great Pacific Standard Time art exhibit awaiting us beyond these usual two suspects. PST is supposed to deliver "the era that continues to inspire the world" (said with a straight face without any reference to Hollywood). What inspires the world? Apparently lots of text, lots of claims that other art is the only thing that influences other art. The Getty should swap places with Taschen. Every time I pick up a Taschen book, I wish I were walking through each page in some oversized museum. Every time I walk into an exhibit associated with the Getty I look out for the staples binding it together, it so resembles a walk-through term paper with occasional illustrations.

But Taschen would be a blessing. Europeans actually get Los Angeles. New Yorkers are just embarrassed to be here and try to network the most of their stay to pad their job history for the inevitable move back to Queens. This expansive survey of postwar Los Angeles contemporary art is the brainchild of tired New York academics. In sports, they call this East Coast Bias. The history of the Los Angeles art scene is getting the "gee whiz" media glance that Joe Torre got when he left managing the Yankees for the Dodgers. The clucking of the blizzard and brownstone crowd goes something like this: We just can't believe that everything does not happen in New York and that any person who matters doesn't live in New York, but if you are going to commit suicide (the term New Yorkers use for leaving New York) you may as well enjoy exile in nice weather.

Of course, stupider Angelenos are so infatuated with New York that they roll over and take whatever Big Apple expatriates are serving, not that there has been a single innovation in art in New York since Jackson Pollock (and don't remind them that he did so on Long Island). A gaping hole in PST is the reminder that Andy Warhol's soup can paintings debuted in Los Angeles in 1962. But the goal of PST's tiring parade of factotum art shows is for New York curatorial prowess to contain the greatness of Los Angeles instead of celebrating the near century of the west coast's inarguable cultural superiority to New York.

Will anyone else stand up to this cliquish coagulation of tourists showing up to tell us natives that our city matters because a few L.A. artists are so great that their names are known in New York? Like Leona Helmsley feeding filet mignon to her dog, the Getty has claimed ownership of the wildest days and nights of this town's lore and has fed them to the least deserving: academics and advocates of the international style with no allegiance to the region. No matter how radical the artist or the artworks, the only reason not to bring children to Pacific Standard Time shows is the absolute boredom they will evince. They will point out the Emperor Getty isn't wearing any clothes and what is dangling there on display is tiny and dull.

Like Bank of America, the Getty measures greatness in the current price tag of the objects from the recent past. The more money that something you touched in 1974 is worth now, the higher up you are on the Pacific Standard Time food chain. What the Getty is really banking on is your compliance with occupying the past instead of the present to enable their control of the future.

Daniel Kahneman

2011-11-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

from Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

http://www.makingthings.com/

2011-10-31T18:58:00.001-07:00

http://www.makingthings.com/

and they all rolled over and

kittler optical media

robert thurman at occupy

Ayn Rand: on self sacrifice and selflessness

brendan cook

stanley cavell, Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy 1965

http://naudengels.blogspot.com/2008/11/it-is-very-understandable-that.html?gclid=CLuP7OPbiK4CFQ5ihwodYGN84g

donderdag 27 november 2008

Why Heidegger doesn't bring us any further

rubberhousestudio.com

forcing brands to re-examine how they need to engage

friedburg virtual window

when the soul became film: kittler

parallax montage

unbroken interface

mark fisher

Social Practice Art, Abstraction

After OWS: Social Practice Art, Abstraction, and the Limits of the Social

Noisebridge

bio of contemporary "artist"

Joseph Herscher

Who Says Machines Must Be Useful?

By HUGH RYAN

Published: January 6, 2012

Multimedia

Turning a Page, the Joseph Herscher Way

Follow @NYTMetro

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

mr gods galloping mountain variety show

Mr. God's Galloping Mountain Variety Show

The Cyberpunk Apocalypse

Alva Noe

theft techniques

life in a day

Cartesian Anxiety

Strange clouds B.O.B

Architecture and Violence: 2011

Architecture and Violence

ArtHistory.viz

ArtHistory.viz | Mining 20,000,000+ Images of Art

ALVA NOË:Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

TAGS:

School of Life : holiday ed

Mili-tent 006

The Revolutionary (Trailer)

katharinemorling

post idea world:kalle lasn

triple candy history

tune-yards directed by

Xiang Cao

water drop medley

nexus

sparkfun

karla black

Nothing Is A MustNothing is a must

2009Sugar paper, chalk, ribbon, lipstick, glitter hairspray

312 x 300 x 182 cm

Preventable Within

2009Sugar paper, chalk, thread

149 x 144 x 25 cm

Can epigenetics underlie the enduring effects of a mother’s love?

sarah small

united colors of benetton

sf moma

annoying

Limerick

A source of water and life for a community

something small

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Ilya Zhitomirskiy Dies at 22; Co-Founded Social Network

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: November 15, 2011

David Goldman for The New York Times

http://machineproject.com

katerina seda

elysemallouk

TIMOTHY MORTON

Innerspacing the City

http://www.chelseaartmuseum.org/portfolios/innerspacing-the-city/

2009
Sugar paper, chalk, ribbon, lipstick, glitter hairspray

2009
Sugar paper, chalk, thread