Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Institute of Critical Zoologists

August 28, 2010

The Blind, Taiheiyo Evergreen Forests, 2008. Institute of Critical Zoologists.

Behold the Institute of Critical Zoologists! The ICZ aims to develop a critical approach to the zoological gaze, or how humans view animals.
They say:

“Urban societies live in relative isolation from animals; however, our demand and gaze upon them have grown significantly over the last century. It is undeniable that looking at animals is considered both desirable and pleasurable in societies. Animals convey meaning and values that are culture-specific, and in viewing the animal, we cannot escape the cultural context, political climate and social values in which that observation takes place. We seek to develop a Critical Zoological Gaze that pursues creative, interdisciplinary research that includes perspectives typically ignored by animal studies, such as aesthetics; and to advance unconventional, even radical, means of understanding human and animal relations.”

Simulation of mountain top, The Real World development laboratory, Mr Toyo, 2008.

The white whale swimming in the ocean depths off the coast of Omishima, circa 1985.

Institute of Critical Zoologists

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IRENE CAESAR

August 20, 2010

…………. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .“Self portrait with a fur collar fragment” – Irene Caesar

Responses is presented to you by Sebastian Alvarez (Wanderlustmind.) Using the internet and this flat rectangular box that stores binary numbers and manipulates data, the objective of Responses is to establish a dialogue with remarkable individuals and collectives by posing them with a series of questions that allows them to describe their creative work, their lives, and the questions they are asking themselves. Contributors to Responses own the copyright to their original writing posted on this site and their posting is in effect an authorization permitting Wanderlustmind the electronic use of this material. In the event Wanderlustmind wishes to use the work in a print medium it will it will seek writen consent of the author.
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The first questionnaire/interview in the series is with Irene Caesar, a conceptual artist, philosopher, poet and provocateur who puts to the test major concepts of the human civilization by creating absurd performances documented by photography. Irene has generously contributed her substantial knowledge (in subjects such as the New World Order, the catastrophe-model, The Skull and The Joker, Luciferianism and Christian Fundamentalism in the US, The Matrix, nano-chipping of the population, the DNA Phantom effect phenomeon, and much more) and some images from her most recent work, “People of Art as Objects of Art.”

Irene Caesar participated in the decedent movement against the communist regime, was invited to make a speech at the founding conference of the Free Democratic Party of Russia in the days of the 1991 Putsch, and, finally, after 10 years as an artist in Russia, she emigrated to the US in 1994 with a visa O of extraordinary ability on the invitation of Chuck Levitan Gallery in SoHo, NYC.

In the US, Irene Caesar transitioned from the traditional media to the digital media, and refined her conceptualist vision of art by getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2009 from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her book ‘Why we should not be unhappy about happiness via Aristotle’ was published in 2010 by the Lambert Academic Publishing in Germany. She is also the author of the book of poetry ‘Confined Verse’ (St. Petersburg University Press, 2004). Irene Caesar lives in New York. To know and see more about Irene Caesar click HERE.

“Self-portrait as The Three Graces” – Irene Caesar.

Vitaly Komar contributes to Transhumanism” – Irene Caesar

Questions:

1. What place does wrongness occupy in rightness?

The wrong and the right are the opposites. By asking me “what place does wrongness occupy in rightness,” you essentially ask me whether I accept dialectics, i.e., the unity of opposites within one and the same thing, which goes all the way back to Heraclitus of Ephesus with his notion of inner strife. I do accept dialectics, and I believe that its understanding is crucial, because the secret globalist power uses “controlled conflict” as a specific application of dialectics. Now we come to the point in human history when the question about dialectics becomes the question: should the historical dialectics remain under the secretive control of oligarchy, or should it become the democratic process? Essentially, it is a question: can it become a democratic process in principle?
The present point in history consists in the final realization of globalization, with one-world government, one-world money, and one-world socio-economical structure and ideology. The question is not simply whether each country can in principle deal with global problems locally; the question is whether humankind can make a global techno-logical break-through, for example, to venture beyond its earthly limits on a mass scale, without becoming one unified whole. Indeed, the approaching singularity, and the technological revolution of nano and biotechnology that we are going through right now makes globalization its necessary condition and inevitable consequence. The unfolding of globalization will be precisely the dialectical process of bringing together the different and even opposite national cultures into some one-world synthesis. The ultimate question is: will this synthesis happen as a democratic free and open discussion to establish a new constitution and financial one-world money structure, or will it happen as the staged catastrophe claiming millions and millions of lives? Will the end-result of globalization be oligarchy or democracy? Will it be the democratic confederation of diverse national entities, or will it be a Third Reich, the ultimate fascist totalitarianism, with the rejection of family, former national allegiance, and individual freedom, and based on the superiority of the white race? Or will it be a continuation of the present political paradigm – with a democratic facade hiding the secretive oligarchic one-world power-center? Can democracy in its present form handle the historical dialectics of globalization in principle? And does the ruling oligarchy understand the historical dialectics correctly, though it already uses it for centuries? As of today, how much wrongness ought we to accept in the rightness of the controlled conflict, secretively staged by the oligarchy?

Arthur Danto with Wise Puffy Cheese Doodles” – Irene Caesar

2. Can you define socio-political dialectics in more detail?

Here is the brief outline of dialectics in relation to human life, as I understand it. If you accept the necessity and inevitability of the inner strife, then you rise above the simple negation and rejection, as well as the primitive concept of progress, either personal or historical. You become aware that there are some fundamental features of human nature, and these features are ever opposed to each other, and are in the state of strife, either on the personal or socio-political level – objectively, notwithstanding subjective beliefs. You are forced to think of human life as the necessity of both finding a peaceful compromise between opposites at some times (so-called synthesis), and, at other times, aggravating the inner strife. Importantly, dialectics is the only way to become or to create a systematic whole: the systematic whole (sustēma) emerges only out of the unity of its constituting parts, with each part becoming determinate in its opposition to or differentiation from the other part. This is the role of wrongness in relation to rightness – the wrong does not exist without the right within one and the same thing. The compromise between the opposites is precisely the admission of some wrong within the right. That is, dialectics is not simply the strife, diversity and opposition – it is the synthesis which starts with the internalization of the extrinsic opposites, the acceptance of them into one’s own inner strife and, then, finding one’s own inner compromise via accepting the wrong within the right.
For the society as a sustēma, these opposites are elite / masses, capitalism / social-ism, libertarianism / egalitarianism, individualism / collectivism, left / right, conservatism / liberalism, globalism / nationalism, democracy / oligarchy, anarchism / totalitarianism, democrats / republicans among others. There can be only two prerogatives in the inner strife either on the personal or social level — not to allow the strife to become destructive, and not to allow the synthesis to become the enforced totalitarian unity of fascism, which suppresses democratic diversity (that is, the opposites and the strife as such – the very dialectics itself). As a recent example, the crush of the rigid Soviet socialism was surely followed by the crush of the rigid American capitalism, and the Chinese model alongside with Keynesian model became an attractive promise to unite the entrepreneurial initiative with the centralized planning, even of such intimate undertakings of human life as giving birth to children. It is clear that the society is a systematic whole if and only if all the above opposites are in the state of healthy non-destructive strife, and there is some geo-political body of power, which rules the society via arriving at the synthesis of all these opposites. It is truly ridiculous that, at the present moment, this geo-political body of power is kept a big secret, and is marginalized and even demonized for the wide masses by such mythologists as Alex Jones and David Icke. The latter undermine the dialectical vision of the masses, and, so, their ability of self-rule. At the same time, it is troublesome that, at the present moment, the globalist power-center demonstrates destructive tendencies towards authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Paradoxically, because both authoritarianism and totalitarianism suppress the dialectical strife within the society, they undermine the very ability of the globalist power-center to rule via separating.

3. How will you describe the interrelation between the dialectics on the personal level and the dialectics on the societal level?

Though the mythologies of Jones and Icke are regressive (in the Christian fundamentalism of the first, and the reptilian mythology of the second), their rhetoric has a grain of truth in it. Essentially, the synthesis of the socio-political opposites is possible if and only if men of power understand the correlation between the society and the individual. Both the society and the individual are inter-dependent systematic wholes: the macrocosm of a society is reflected in the microcosm of a man and viceversa. The societal opposites between the elite and the masses, etc., reflect the strife of the opposites on the personal level between strength / weakness, introversion / extroversion, independence / dependency, interconnection / self-sufficiency, profit / sacrifice, entrepreneurial interest / altruistic disinterestedness, etc. The populist resentment is simply the realization that when power loses this understanding, it becomes authoritarian, even fascist, and, as a result – inhuman and self-destructive. A good example is Friedrich Nietzsche, this exalted ideologist of oligarchy. He scorned weakness, dependency, illness, insufficiency, dysfunction on the societal level as the manifestation of Judaic values of resentment without any anticipation that one day he, Friedrich, would find himself completely deranged and cared for, first, by his mother, and, after her death, by his sister for 10 years. I guess that his mother and sister in their love were better dialectics than Friedrich himself. And I refuse to call their love of him simply “Christian Pity”.
I believe that those politicians, who refuse to sufficiently provide for their tribes-men in need, simply repeat the syndrome of Nietzsche. Even if most of them avoid the scenario of Nietzsche in their personal lives, they surely fail in arriving at the vision of their society as the systematic whole, and so, their personal success is a form of historical blindness – a primitive form of consciousness, almost on the level of a wolves’ pack. They do not understand that, as the individual life necessarily includes weakness, illness and death, so does the life of the society necessarily include dysfunction and failure. People ought to constitute a systematic whole of mutual support not only on the level of family or business partnership, but also on the higher level of national community, and, ultimately, on the global geo-political level. Those in power, who fail to understand this basic truth, fail the historical dialectics, and, so, have no part in history.

4. How does the oligarchy use dialectics in your opinion?

It is a big secret that only people who have dialectical vision can undertake an impartial analysis of each opposite within a given duality, and, then, proceed to the manipulation of each opposite, and of a given socio-political duality as a whole. Unmistakably, the understanding of dialectics, money and power always go together, being a prerogative of oligarchy from time immemorial. Oligarchy became notorious for its secretive financing of every opposite within a socio-political duality. For example, the same financial center financed and controlled both Lenin with his dictatorship of the proletariat and red terror, and the surviving Russian imperial bloodline; or, the contemporary example, both the fundamental Christianity and Luceferianism in the US.
Machiavelli summed up this dialectical vision and manipulation in one sentence: atheism is needed where the church becomes too powerful, and the church is needed where atheism becomes too powerful. Oligarchs with the dialectical vision look at the panorama of the human life as if from the height of the birds’ flight – above the opposites, and above the dualities. That is why they can control both the strife and the synthesis. Their ultimate purpose is to become capable of manipulating and balancing in this way the entire geo-political structure of the world. Nonetheless, it is a really good question whether the laudable purpose of balancing the world strife systematically is in principle achievable in secret. Oligarchs claim that they possess the universal global human values and use them to balance the dualities. The universal global values are precisely the ability to see, accept and balance all the opposites within the global system. And it is another really good question whether the universal global human values can in principle be esoteric, available only through initiation and only to a few initiates. To what degree are we willing to accept the transformation of billions of people into stupefied tools of the initiated, who love humankind rapturously, but in secret? But it is a unfortunate fact that at the other extreme are people who do not understand historical dialectics at all. They simply belong to some opposite within this or that socio-political duality. Unfortunately, this is the majority of all the people in the Western world.



“What does it really mean to be homeless, dude? (portrait of Jay Oliver Sax; triptych)” – Irene Caesar

5. How would you define people who do not understand and accept dialectics?

People with no clue about dialectics are either willing or unwilling instruments or victims of the manipulation behind the scenes. Or they are simply the “cattle”, which oligarchs literally call “peasants”. Ironically, the contemporary Anglo-American philosophy with its law of excluded middle, and the Western culture, in general, are not simply indifferent to dialectics – they are aggressively opposed to it. And, most ironically, the very opposition to the secretive manipulation of the society by the oligarchs manifests itself as the opposition to dialectics, e.g., when nationalists reject globalization without understanding that globalization is the creation of the systematic whole for the entire planet, and not the destruction of the local communities. This shows the degree of how much “masses” and even the “non-initiated” intellectuals are incapable of the dialectical thinking, and, hence, of self-rule.
The rigid division into alienated political parties, fixed sexual orientations, rigid religious affiliations and incompatible art styles are some examples for the rejection of dialectics. The novel should belong to a specific genre to sell: biography, dark romance, fantasy, etc. Each opposite within the duality is a negation to its counterpart as being wrong or incompatible. People who do not transcend dualities think of identity only in terms of one’s opposition to one’s enemy. Their “right” should never get mixed with “the wrong” of their opponent. It is clear that dialectics remains the esoteric knowledge not open to the general public – a secret jealously guarded by the various esoteric schools of the elite, most importantly by Freemasonry. And it is clear that, in its present form, democracy is incapable of the dialectical geo-political thinking and acting. Modern democracy institutionalized opposition into parties (like democrats and republicans), which forcefully narrow the freedom of the individual self-determination, and so undermine democracy itself. Evidently, only a senator who calls himself “independent” can approach the flexibility of the secret geo-political power center in his/her compromises in between the political opposites.
The shocking truth consists in the fact that the secretive world-power is, by its nature, neither left nor right, neither radical nor conservative, neither elitist nor populist, neither socialist nor capitalist. People who do not understand its nature, for example, Alex Jones, call it both socialist and elitist, what is a true oxymoron. In his point-and-shoot conservatism and Christian Fundamentalism, Alex Jones is nothing else than the bait to make his fellow Christian Fundamentalists a more defined group for the purposes of early and easy detection and elimination, if they happen to constitute a hindrance to the progression towards the one-world polity. It is truly grotesque that the masses justify their opposition to the secretive rule of oligarchy by the most regressive forms of ideology, while the globalist oligarchy does evidently sponsor and control this opposition in its own attempt to further the progressivist creation of a systematic whole for the planet.

Carter Ratcliff contributes to Deconstruction” – Irene Caesar

Read the rest of this entry ?

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John Cage: Some Rules For Students and Teachers

July 25, 2010

John Cage, reading at Harvard University, 1990. Courtesy of the John Cage Trust. Photo by Betty Freeman.

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student – pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher – pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR:
Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE:
be self-disciplined – this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.”

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything – it might come in handy later.

Thanks to Benjamin Thorp.

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MAYA DEREN | At Land (1944)

July 20, 2010

Marcel Duchamp and Maya Deren

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PERFECT LIVES (excerpts)

July 19, 2010

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Goethe’s Color Theory

July 19, 2010


Until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came along, no one had questioned the validity of Newton’s ideas about light and color.
Goethe was both a writer and a scientist. His 1,400-page treatise on color was published in 1810. According to Goethe:
“That I am the only person in this century who has the right insight into the difficult science of colors, that is what I am rather proud of, and that is what gives me the feeling that I have outstripped many.”
Because Goethe misinterprets some experiments, he incorrectly thinks that these experiments show Newton to be wrong.


Goethe reformulates the topic of color in an entirely new way. Newton had viewed color as a physical problem, involving light striking objects and entering our eyes. Goethe realizes that the sensations of color reaching our brain are also shaped by our perception — by the mechanics of human vision and by the way our brains process information. Therefore, according to Goethe, what we see of an object depends upon the object, the lighting and our perception.

Goethe seeks to derive laws of color harmony, ways of characterizing physiological colors (how colors affect us) and subjective visual phenomena in general. Goethe studies after-images, colored shadows and complementary colors. And he anticipates Hering’s “opponent-color” theory, which is one basis of our understanding of color vision today. Above all, Goethe appreciates that the sensation of complementary colors does not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes but perceptually from the actions of our visual system. Text taken from COLOR VISION & ART.

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MAICgregator

June 18, 2010

MAICgregator is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC). It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. This is a necessary activity in light of the contemporary financial “crisis”.

You can download MAICgregator at maicgregator.org

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On Art, Action and Meaning

June 15, 2010

“Arthur Danto contributes to Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings” by Irene Caesar

In a comment on Arthur C. Danto’s post, “Sitting With Marina,” a reader, TM Shier, wrote: “This article is a disappointment. It is descriptive, not explanatory. It answers none of the really interesting questions raised.” Those questions, as posed by the reader, and Mr. Danto’s answers, are below:

Q. Is performance art really art at all?

A. We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.

This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place — the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. And yet the Greeks wanted to build their curriculum on mere poetry – on “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”! I treat this in my essay “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. ”

It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato’s dialogues stress the inferiority of art — for example “Ion,” “The Statesman” and “The Laws.” The political message of “The Republic” is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don’t even belong in the Republic!

Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his “Poetics,” characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. Ion the rhapsode tells stories from the epics, moving his audience to tears. There are no records of ancient performances, which might have been ordeals, demonstrating the performer’s stamina or strength.

But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.

Read the rest of this entry ?

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Terunobu Fujimori

June 15, 2010







“Terunobu Fujimori
, a leading historian of modern Japanese architecture, began to design his own architecture in 1990. Since then, he has created a number of original buildings unbound by previous forms or styles, offering continual surprises to the world of architecture. The exhibition, “Architecture of Terunobu Fujimori and ROJO: Unknown Japanese Architecture and Cities,” was presented last year as part of the “Venice Biennale: 10th International Architecture Exhibition 2006.” It was acclaimed for offering a glimpse of an unknown aspect of contemporary Japanese architecture, which enjoys a high international reputation.” Text from UIA

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Death’s Showcase. The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy

June 13, 2010


“This is a book about the public display of death in contemporary culture. It consists of a series of essays on specific cases in which death is displayed in museums and in photography. The essays focus mainly on representations of violence and death in events in recent Israeli history, including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Intifada, and on the visual presence of traumatic events in Israeli culture throughout the twentieth century. They show how images of these events both shape and aestheticize the viewer’s experience of death.

The book offers a new reading of the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Engaging the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy, art history, cultural studies, and photographic theory, the book also draws upon the work of such writers as Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy.” AMAZON

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June 12, 2010

[Art] is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us.
(Guy Debord)



seb…

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Willy Verginer

June 12, 2010
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Bulletin. Etant Donnés: 1 la chute d’eau 2 le gaz d’éclairage. Reflections on a new work by Marcel Duchamp.

June 9, 2010

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Zimoun : Sound Sculptures & Installations

June 3, 2010

Zimoun : Sound Sculptures & InstallationsCompilation Video V1.8

Zimoun’s sound sculptures and installations are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic».

He is interested in the artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviours in sound and motion. He creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.” (text from Vimeo)

http://www.zimoun.ch/

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White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

May 30, 2010


Helene Cixous is professor of literature at the Universite de Paris VIII. She is the author of Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (both published by Columbia University Press), and other works of fiction, essays, and plays. Susan Sellers is professor of English and related literature at the University of St. Andrews. She is the editor of The Helene Cixous Reader and author of Helene Cixous: Authorship, Autobiography, and Love and Helene Cixous: Live Theory.” AMAZON

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Sergei Borisov

May 29, 2010

Dialogue, 1983.

“Летит. Вокруг мегаломанские металлоконструкции, разламывающие перспективу и рвущие облака, а человек летит, и ржавь гравитации только распаляет его азарт. Люди с фотографий Сергея Борисова знают, что такое «очередь», «талоны», «дефицит» за пределами их личного космоса скорее конец советских 80-х, равноунизительный в столицах и провинциях, но они упрямо мыслят категориями аэронавтики…..” (text HERE)

http://sergeiborisov.com/

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At a Distance. Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

May 28, 2010


“Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the Internet. In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance—geographical, temporal, or emotional—theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and 1980s. By providing a context for this work—showing that it was shaped by varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies, and political and aesthetic concerns—At a Distance effectively refutes the widely accepted idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today’s practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities inherent in networked practice.

At a Distance traces the history and theory of such experimental art projects as Mail Art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings, and Fluxus. Although the projects differed, a conceptual questioning of the “art object,” combined with a political undermining of dominant art institutional practices, animated most distance art. After a section that sets this work in historical and critical perspective, the book presents artists and others involved in this art “re-viewing” their work—including experiments in “mini-FM,” telerobotics, networked psychoanalysis, and interactive book construction. Finally, the book recasts the history of networks from the perspectives of politics, aesthetics, economics, and cross-cultural analysis.” AMAZON

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Making Things Public

May 27, 2010



Making Things Public

Atmospheres of Democracy
Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.

In this groundbreaking editorial and curatorial project, more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers rethink what politics is about. In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of things. Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a res publica, a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things—scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of Making Things Public—and the ZKM show that the book accompanies—ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions—technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation—in politics, science, and art—of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part.

The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an “object-oriented democracy.”

About the Editors

Bruno Latour is a philosopher and anthropologist working in Paris. His many books on science and culture include Pandora’s Box: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies, Science in Action, The Pasteurization of France, and Laboratory Life. He was curator of the ZKM exhibit ICONOCLASH and co-edited the accompanying MIT Press book ICONOCLASH: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art.

Peter Weibel is Director of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, and coeditor of other ZKM books, including Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT Press). AMAZON

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On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias

May 23, 2010


“After years of attacking from the margins, LUIS CAMNITZER is now, ironically, a bona fide “international artist,” whose work has appeared in the Venice Biennial, Documenta 11, the Whitney Biennial, and several Havana Biennials. A professor emeritus at SUNY College at Old Westbury, Camnitzer presently is the pedagogical curator for the Iberé Camargo Foundation in Brazil. He is the author of several books, including Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation. He lives in Great Neck, New York.

RACHEL WEISS is Professor of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including To Build the Sky: To and From Utopia in the New Cuban Art.”

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Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema

May 18, 2010

Marcel Duchamp, Anémic Cinéma, 1926

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The Wanderer above the Mists

May 17, 2010


Artist: Caspar David Friedrich
[German painter, 1774-1840]

Title: The Wanderer above the Mists

Date: 1817-18
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 37 x 29 inches (95 x 75 cm)
Location: Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Image size: 1100 x 1399 pixels, 169 Kbytes
Image source: Web Gallery of Art

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Mr. Fluxus: a Collective Portrait of George Maciunas 1931-1978

May 14, 2010


“As a phenomenon, Fluxus was neither a part of the contemporaneous Pop Art movement nor a form of Neo-Dada. Spawned in the 1960s through the collaborative efforts of such artists as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, and Yoko Ono, Fluxus has had a big impact on art produced ever since. In many ways, it was a lifestyle, and no one lived it more completely than George Maciunas, founder and prime mover. Born in Lithuania, he possessed a great capacity for organizing materials as well as people. He hated waste and suffered much of his life from respiratory difficulties, accomplishing much with very few resources and a lot of ingenuity. As an individual, he was the quintessential artist with a mission, someone who passionately practiced what he preached. Until this biography, few sources could begin to pin down this complex and eccentric man. In keeping with the Fluxus spirit, it is an international collective work, written by the people who knew Maciunas. Above and beyond the biographical material, this book is loaded with insightful anecdotes about the art world of the 1960s.” AMAZON

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BBC – The beauty of maps – Seeing The Art In Cartography

May 11, 2010



BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartograpy
is a BBC television series which focuses on matters concerning data visualization and how is becoming an interesting feature in popular press.

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MY FOOD MY POOP

May 11, 2010



According to Hugh Pocock:
“I am weighing all of my food and drink and all of my urine and shit. The difference between the two weights is approximately what has been transformed into Energy. This energy is what moves my body,mind and many interactions. During this period of time I am finding that I am able to more closely observe the passage of energy as it moves from the food that I eat, through my body and then, out into the world.”

http://myfoodmypoop.com/

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The Senses in Performance (Worlds of Performance)

May 6, 2010


“An edited collection of essays on the role of the senses in performance. Sight is the only sense to have been investigated in any great depth in relation to performance so far. This volume is spearheading a growing movement to start examining the other senses and their role in performance. The book covers a lot of ground: all the sense are discussed in relation to Western and non-Western performance, including performance art, opera, dance and drama.” AMAZON