Messages for our Future: A Collaborative Digital Art Project about the Japanese Tsunami. http://www.secrettechnology.com/japan/
Archive for the ‘Art/Aesthetics’ Category
Female Trouble
March 11, 2012
Where Art Belongs, the title of Chris Kraus’s latest collection of essays, sounds corrective. As if, instead of in its proper place, art is elsewhere. It has been mislaid, like a cell phone. Or perhaps, like a vase, not so much lost as thoughtlessly positioned. Where is art, and who put it there?
Anyone who has read Kraus’s earlier work can guess who she’ll bring in for questioning. “Until recently,” Kraus wrote in her previous essay collection, 2004’s Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, “there was absolutely no chance of developing an art career in Los Angeles without attending one of several high-profile MFA studio programs,” including ones at institutions where Kraus herself has taught. (Since the late 1990s, she has held teaching positions at a number of schools in California, including UC San Diego, UC Irvine, and Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design.) The MFA is a “two-year hazing process” “essential to the development of value in the by-nature elusive parameters of neoconceptual art. Without it, who would know which cibachrome photos of urban signage, which videotapes of socks tossing around a dryer, which neominimalist monochrome paintings are negligible, and which are destined to be art?”
Duly initiated in sock videos, artists graduate to a handful of galleries, where their advanced degrees reassure collectors intending to get their money’s worth. The MFA is a quality assurance stamp, certifying that no matter what a piece looks like on the surface, it is guaranteed to be full of art-historical references. Alternative exhibition spaces are “dead-end ghettos, where no one, least of all ambitious students, from the art world goes.” While curators and professors consider the continuum between MFAs and galleries a “plus”—“what makes LA so great,” chirps one gallery owner, “is that the school program is actually a vital part of the community”—Kraus had her doubts. What “community” were these people talking about? “It is bizarre,” she observed, “that here, in America’s second largest city, contemporary art should have come to be so isolated and estranged from the experience of the city as a whole.”
This piece was originally published in N+1′s Issue 13, “Machine Politics.” Continue HERE
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Why is feminism out of fashion in contemporary art?
March 11, 2012
High-profile exhibitions on surrealism and abstract expressionism rarely resurrect debates about the validity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory or Clement Greenberg’s rejection of representation. So it might be germane to ask why the current resurgence of institutional, critical and media attention on feminist art has sparked impassioned discussions about the relevance of feminism in today’s allegedly “post-feminist” art world?
The answer is not only because women of all generations remain conflicted about feminism, but because art is arguably the most appropriate medium to represent feminism’s complex history, meaning and purpose. As the best of the recent feminist art survey shows demonstrate, “feminism” is far from a fixed term. Putting aside feminist theory’s distracting obsession with semantics, the term still encompasses too many and too varied ideological factions, political agendas, identities and histories to fit any single definition that is not troublingly essentialist, reductivist or vague.
One proof of gender equality might be that the feminist movement’s history has played out like other revolutions by splintering into a host of militant and mutually antagonistic subgroups. Yet in spite of divisiveness within the active feminism movement, the revolution’s salient principle – that women are intelligent, capable people – has saturated our culture at large to the point of being taken for granted.
Written by Ana Finel Honigman at The Guardian. Continue HERE
Image above: Art work by the Guerilla Girls. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi
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Rethinking Robert Smithson
March 8, 2012
In many ways, the artistic debates prevalent in the 1970s are recurring in our time: the relation between art and ecology, the position of the artist within a information and media society and the crisis of (neo)liberalism. Although the societal context and diameters of these discussions have changed profoundly, their basis can be found in the period from 1965 to 1975, considered a paradigmatic shift in art and society. But how well do we actually know our immediate past and what can we learn from it? Smithson’s artistic heritage provides an interesting and relevant case study in this respect. Rethinking Robert Smithson aims to open up a discussion about current concerns in art and theory at the intersection of art historical debate and contemporary art practice. Along the line of two thematic approaches related to Smithson’s work, Art and Ecology and The Cinematic Condition, topical concerns in artistic practice are reconsidered by internationally renowned theorists and artists.
Rethinking Robert Smithson
Text via Alauda Publications
America’s Got No Talent
March 8, 2012
“America’s Got No Talent” is a web-based software project by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki that synthesizes and processes the steady stream of Twitter feeds for several American reality television shows such as “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent,” “America’s Next Top Model,” and “X Factor US” among others in this genre. The project highlights when and how these shows gain popularity through social media and followers. When tweets are sent, they are dynamically displayed along with the bias for each program which is based on retweets from followers as well as fans. The visualization takes the form of a horizontal bar graph in the shape of an American flag that updates dynamically. Each show’s virtual presence grows in size based on the amount of attention it receives from social media users worldwide, creating a measurement meter that ranks popular media on their social exposure, rather than their credit as viable media sources.
Commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 for Artport, with support provided by Jeremy Levine.
Beautiful Souls: What makes people good—sometimes
March 8, 2012
The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires?
In Beautiful Souls, Eyal Press takes on a different challenge, more suited to the twenty-first century: He suggests that the true mystery is not what impels ordinary people into the moral abyss, but rather how some people manage to avoid the abyss altogether, by refusing to participate in atrocities. For every horror, there are courageous, conscientious resisters: Germans who hid Jews, Hutus who saved Tutsis, Serbs who saved Muslims. Even the more quotidian forms of evil always generate some resistance: Consider the Enron scandal’s whistle-blowers.
But what enables some to resist while most go along? Beautiful Souls, Press writes, is about “nonconformists, about the mystery of what impels people to do something risky . . . when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist.”
Press is right to view this as an abiding mystery. Today, thanks to decades of meticulous research by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, our understanding of how ordinary people come to participate in—or turn a blind eye toward—atrocities and crimes has become fairly sophisticated. In contrast, our understanding of how and why some ordinary people turn into resisters remains mostly a matter of guesswork.
Excerpt of an article written by Rosa Brooks at Bookforum. Read it HERE
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The 24 Hours Horror Movie Experiment
March 7, 2012
Wherein a few brave souls watch entire horror-movie franchises in a twenty-four-hour period, risk their sanity, and suffer from total narrative dislocation, but maybe, too, remember what it’s like to be in love.
Discussed: The Failed Commodification of WASPy New England Recluses, Swarming Narrative Cosmoses, The Persistent Re-incubation of Evil, Resident Bad Shrinks, The Ominous Whisper-Creep, Final Girl Nancy, Talking to the Fourth Wall, Arguably Feminist Clown Suits, Gropings in the Dark.
The Method
Primary objective: to reexamine five representative horror-movie franchises released on the heels of horror cinema’s Golden Age (1968–1981), beginning with the first installments: Friday the 13th (released in 1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Halloween (released in 1978, dir. John Carpenter), Hellraiser (released in 1987, dir. Clive Barker), A Nightmare on Elm Street (released in 1984, dir. Wes Craven), and Night of the Living Dead (released in 1968, dir. George A. Romero).
By Adrian Van Young at The Believer
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Jen Bekman on Art and Artists
March 6, 2012
Listen to the full interview at Design Matters. Via Design Observer.
Image above: Screenshot by Wanderlust from the Design Observer environment. Thanks to Maria Popova from Explore
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Naturalistic Pantheism and Inspiring Diction
March 6, 2012What happens when mixing the well recorded voice of Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and music by the Cinematic Orchestra feat. Patrick Watson? Well, you get the video above. Indeed, this is probably one of the most astounding empowering facts about our existence. However, it is always important to address and thank the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Taoists, the Hindus, and the long list of philosophies and other disciplines that have allow us to revere the Universe, and therefore ourselves. Now, I should probably thank Wikipedia, and all its contributors.
Naturalistic Pantheism
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The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism
March 6, 2012
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .
—John Donne
LOVE AND THEFT
Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.
The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?
An excerpt form an essay written by Jonathan Lethem at Harper’s Magazine. Read it HERE
Via Exlore
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Radio Boredcast: A 744-hour Continuous Online Radio Project
March 5, 2012
Radio Boredcast is a 744-hour continuous online radio project, curated by artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) with AV Festival. In response to our ambiguous relationship with time – do we have too much or not enough? – Radio Boredcast celebrates the detail, complexity and depth of experience lost through our obsession with speed.
With over 100 participants Radio Boredcast includes new and unpublished works, freeform radio shows, field recordings, interviews, monologues and much, much more. Thematic playlists will run throughout from “Acconci” to “Zzz…”
You can listen continuously for a month, or for hours, minutes or seconds. Online 24 hours each day, at www.avfestival.co.uk or www.thepixelpalace.org.
Co-commissioned by AV Festival and Pixel Palace, hosted by BASIC.fm.
Look at the program and listen to Radio Boredcast HERE
Read Collateral Damage by Vicki Bennett at The WIRE
“In the early 2000s, increased bandwidth allowed recombinant artists to enter the gift economy. It’s a freedom we should defend at all costs, argues Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us.
In 1999 I bought my first fast computer – and although it was dying to do speedy things, I was on dial-up, reduced to a crawl when it came to information retrieval. Logged into file sharing communities, I’d sit in the chat and watch people posting files that would take me a day to download, so I’d just read about them. Then I’d go to the WFMU website and try to stream the station and just get blurts and gaping silences. Then I’d visit archive.org and look at all the wonderful synopses for Rick Prelinger’s films, which were too large to access. It wasn’t long, however, before affordable broadband reached my area of London. Then everything changed. Forever.”
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Redesigning Reality: How 3-D Printing Is Shaping the Future of Art, Engineering, and Everything Else
March 5, 2012
Hailing from the 1980s, the technology isn’t exactly new, but it has been making inroads lately in both art and engineering, being used to manufacture prosthetic limbs, car parts, furniture, and jewelry. It’s also subject of “Print/3D,” an exhibition of objects at New York’s Material ConneXion that opened this week. “3-D Printing breaks away barriers in design that are challenged by the constraints of standard manufacturing or manual production,” show curator Susan Towers told ARTINFO. While the process still has some definite kinks to be worked out, it’s already being put to revolutionary use.
Excerpt from an article written by Janelle Zara on ArtInfo
19 questions answered by John Cage
March 5, 2012John Cage answers 19 questions on a variety of subjects using chance operations to determine the duration of his answers. From the film ‘From zero’, by Frank Scheffer.
New Dystopia by Mark von Schlegell
March 4, 2012
Sternberg Press: 2011. A kulturnaut, a squid, a Shakespeare, a dog, an artist abstract, a chrononaut, a washerwoman, Tom Ripley and his bones all pass through New Dystopia. Their sped-up speculations lead to new models of deterritorialized life. Visionary and hallucinatory models. Through them, Mark von Schlegell “displays” some of the facets of the invisible catastrophe breaking up our world, which artists in particular are responding to.
Put together in the wings of the “Dystopia” exhibition at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, acting as a resonance chamber, this illustrated novel raises the issue of possible futures in the form of a critical fiction, and involves the outposts of the novel to come. About New Dystopia, the city in which the novel’s protagonists live, the narrator states: “As an American … one only came to New Dystopia City to become an artist. That only there was it a way of life.” According to von Schlegell, we are living in that new metropolis. He states, “Dystopia is today.”
After Venusia (2005) and Mercury Station (2009), both published by Semiotext(e), New Dystopia is Mark von Schlegell’s third novel.
Artists: Wallace Berman, Cosima von Bonin, Brian Calvin, Tony Carter, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Peter Coffin, Simon Denny, Andreas Dobler, Roe Ethridge, Keith Farquhar, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Aurélien Froment, Cyprien Gaillard, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Roger Hiorns, Ull Hohn, Des Hughes, Peter Hutchinson, Eugene Isabey, Sergej Jensen, On Kawara, Michael Krebber, Jesus Mari Lazkano, Rita McBride, John Miller, Pathetic Sympathy Seekers, Manfred Pernice, Stephen G. Rhodes, Glen Rubsamen, Sterling Ruby, Julia Scher, Frances Scholz, Michael Scott, Markus Selg, Reena Spaulings, Michael Stevenson, Tommy Støckel, Josef Strau, Blair Thurman, Mathieu Tonetti, Oscar Tuazon, Franz West, Jordan Wolfson
Via Sternberg Press
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Transcendenz: Metaphysical Immersion
March 4, 2012
Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes cant’ see. By bringing together the concepts of augmented/altered reality, Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and social networks, Transcendenz offers to live immersive philosophical experiences.
Transcendenz is the outcome of Michaël Harboun’s thesis project at Strate College. He started from a single, inspirational word: Invisible. He says: “After analysing what was invisible to our eyes and our minds, I realized there was something tending to disappear in our fast-paced, information-saturated societies…”
“The idea of Transcendenz came from a personal “design reaction” to the world in which we are living. By observing our modern societies, a certain paradox caught my interest. This paradox concerns the way we behave in time.
On one hand we are constantly trying to be efficient, organized and quick. As time is money, no time should be lost unnecessarily. We try to save every single minute and be as productive as possible, which makes us busy people.
On the other hand, in our free time, we suddenly have so much time for ourselves that we don’t know what to do with it anymore. Not knowing where to invest our time, most of us will consume it throughout technological mediums. Social networks, TV or videogames are some perfect examples. These information technologies put us in a time of connection, interaction and distraction, hence separating us from the empty time.”
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Aromapoetry
March 3, 2012
Eduardo Kac: Aromapoetry is a new kind of poetry in which the compositional unit (the poem) is made up of smells. The poet “writes” the smells by conceiving the poem as an olfactory experience and then employing multiple chemical procedures to achieve his poetic goals. It goes without saying that, as in any kind of poetry, the reader is an active participant that interprets and thus ascribes his or her own meanings to the poem beyond the writer’s original motivations.
In my book Aromapoetry, the first book ever written exclusively with smells, readers find twelve aromapoems that range widely in their material structure and semantic resonance. While I composed some of my aromapoems with only one or two molecules, most of them are composed of dozens of molecules each. In some cases, a single poem has distinct olfactory zones on the page—each comprised of dozens of molecules each. In other words, the level of molecular intricacy of the works in Aromapoetry varies from the very simple to the extremely complex.
I composed the twelve poems in Aromapoetry so as to provide the reader with a broad field of aromatic experiences. The titles simultaneously delineate and open up the semantic sphere of each work. Each poem is a distinct and self-contained composition. At the same time, the book has a dynamic internal rhythm produced through the alternation of different or contrasting smells.
Every poem in the book Aromapoetry employs nanotechnology by binding an extremely thin layer of porous glass (200 nanometers thick) to every page, trapping the odorants (i.e. the volatile molecules) and releasing them very slowly. Without this nanotechnology, the fragrances would quickly dissipate and the smells would no longer be experienced after a few days. To ensure even greater longevity, a set of small bottles is integrated into the book, allowing the reader to recharge every individual page. With an eye to the distant future, the book’s summary presents key molecules used in the production of each poem.
Aromapoetry is a book to be read with the nose.
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Where is the “No Lone Zone” exhibition? I cannot find it
March 2, 2012
No Lone Zone is a technical term that applies to a restricted area in which at least two individuals must be within visual reach overseeing a critically sensitive procedure.
No Lone Zone, at the Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, is an exhibition that brings together works by Teresa Margolles, Cinthia Marcelle, David Zink Yi and the collective Tercerunquinto to explore this concept in relation to the vulnerability of current social and economic structures. Comprising sculpture, video and installation, these works reflect on the sense of loss, danger and urgency that affect the realm of human actions and collective endeavors within this global scenario.
The No Lone Zone exhibition has been curated by Iria Candela and Taiyana Pimentel in association with Gasworks. However there is no trace of the show at the Level 2 Gallery. Perhaps another tactical act.
Image above: Screenshot of the Tate’s website
Image at top: “Score Settings 16″ by Teresa Margolles
INTERRUPTIONS by Radio Web Macba
March 1, 2012
CURATORIAL > INTERRUPTIONS
This section explores the complex map of sound art from a variety of points of view, structured into different series and curated programs. VARIATIONS, led by Jon Leidecker reconstructs the history of sound appropriationism by looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and commercial media, and the convergence of all these trends today. Meanwhile, LINES OF SIGHT, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà, explores different ideas linked to transmission as a means of creative expression and in PARASOL ELEKTRONICZNY. RUMOURS FROM THE EASTERN UNDERGROUND, Felix Kubin leads us on a tour of underground sound production in Eastern Europe. Finally, INTERRUPTIONS intermittently “interrupts”” the Curatorial series in order to explore the many possibilities of music-on-demand and mix formats.
Click for more INTERRUPTIONS
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PROSTHETIC AESTHETICS at SCIENCE GALLERY DUBLIN
February 29, 2012
PROSTHETIC AESTHETICS: WITH STELARC, BERTOLT MEYER, LIZBETH GOODMAN AND RACHEL ARMSTRONG
Will people equipped with prosthetic technologies soon outperform “natural” abilities? How are we blurring the boundaries between human enhancement and body augmentation? How does the realm of prosthetics merge aesthetics and technology, in transforming the form and capabilities of the human body? How are artists, designers and scientists joining forces to push the boundaries of prosthetic technologies?
Join us for a panel discussion where we hope to address many issues raised in Science Gallery’s HUMAN+ exhibition with legendary Australian performance artist Stelarc (who has had a lab-grown “third ear” implanted in his left arm), medic and TED fellow Rachel Armstrong and SmartLab Founder Lizbeth Goodman, hosted by Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman
Also joining the panel will be Dr. Bertolt Meyer of Universität Zürich, equipped with a state-of-the-art i-Limb Pulse bionic hand.
Text via SCIENCE GALLERY
Image above: Prosthetic aesthetics arm by spiraltwist on flickr.jpg
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The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies
February 29, 2012
This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century:
actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things
affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory
animal studies, as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism
the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others
new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence
new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis
the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism
varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism
and systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations
Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Invited speakers (to date) include:
Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)
Ian Bogost (Literature, Communication, Culture, Georgia Tech)
Wendy Chun (Media and Modern Culture, Brown)
Mark Hansen (Literature, Duke)
Erin Manning (Philosophy/Dance, Concordia University, Montreal)
Brian Massumi (Philosophy, University of Montreal)
Tim Morton (English, UC-Davis)
Steven Shaviro (English, Wayne State)
More Info HERE
Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings
February 29, 2012
As much-admired photographs of decayed Detroit go on show in London, Brian Dillon charts the history of a literary and artistic obsession with ruins, from Marlowe to The Waste Land to Tacita Dean.
Brian Dillon: Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: “I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.”
The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: “I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books.” But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.
Continue article at The Guardian
The Unspeakable Pleasure of Ruins via Design Observer
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Art in Our Lives: Native Women Artists in Dialogue
February 27, 2012
In 2007 the School for Advanced Research (SAR) received funding from the Anne Ray Charitable Trust Foundation in order to bring together a group of Native women artists from all walks of life to confer on three topics considered to be the central dogma of their lives. These seminars were originally titled Art, Gender, and Ceremony; however, after much debate, they were renamed Art, Gender and Community due to the conflicting view of the word “ceremony” and how it may look to the public. In a series of non-fiction essays written by the women of these SAR summits Art, Gender, and Community, Art In Our Lives Native Women Artists In Dialogue was compiled to address gender, home/crossing, and art as healing/art as struggle. These pieces are ordered thematically as each woman voices her struggles and successes in the three realms discussed at the seminars.
Chapter One (essay I) “Introduction: The Art, Gender, and Community Seminars” Cynthia Chavez Lamar
Chapter Two (essay II) “Art as Healing, Art as Struggle” Gloria J. Emerson
Chapter Three (essay III) “‘This Fierce Love:’ Gender, Women, and Art Making.” Sherry Farrell Racette
Chapter Four (essay IV) “Space, Memory, Landscape: Women in native Art History.” Elysia Poon
Chapter Five (essay V) “Crossing the Boundaries of Home and Art.” Lara Evans
Chapter Six (essay VI) “The Artists of the Art, Gender, and Community Seminars.”
Text via Native Wiki
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See it Again, Say it Again: The Artist as Researcher
February 24, 2012
“See it Again, Say it Again: The Artist as Researcher”, edited by Janneke Wesseling and published by Valiz.
“See it Again, Say it Again” sheds light on the phenomenon of research in the visual arts. In ‘artistic research’, practical acts (the making) and theoretical reflection (the thinking) go hand in hand, in a manner similar to creating and thinking being inextricably linked with artistic practice. This volume has been written from the perspective of art as practice.
DOWNLOAD Excerpt PDF HERE
Via Corner College
Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities
February 24, 2012
From the publisher’s description:
In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ‘insurgent public spaces’ challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighborhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities.
With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco.
Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.
Slought Foundation (‘Sl-aw-t’)
February 20, 2012
Slought Foundation (‘Sl-aw-t’) is a non-profit organization based in Philadelphia that engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change. We collaborate with a range of partners including artists, communities, universities, and governments to encourage cultural inclusiveness and social activism. Culture means more than preservation or presentation to us; it means the exchange of ideas, the creation of concepts.
From Kwame Anthony Appiah to Helene Cixous, Werner Herzog to Kazuyo Sejima, our programs feature today’s visionaries in conversation about the role of the artist in society, and the potential transformation of social and political structures. In 2010, 450+ hours of recordings from these programs, available online, were downloaded over 125,000 times by visitors from 100 countries.
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Yvonne Rainer. Performance Series at Dia:Beacon
February 20, 2012
Over the course of three weekends in October, 2011, and February and May, 2012, Dia Art Foundation will present a series of Yvonne Rainer’s dance works at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Dia’s retrospective, entitled Yvonne Rainer, will celebrate the depth of Rainer’s contributions to dance and will feature early works of choreography from the 1960s—including both iconic and lesser-known pieces—as well as three compositions created within the last twelve years.
Via Dia:Beacon
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Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts
February 19, 2012
Half a century into the digital era, the profound impact of information technology on intellectual and cultural life is universally acknowledged but still poorly understood. The sheer complexity of the technology coupled with the rapid pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to establish common ground and to promote thoughtful discussion.
Responding to this challenge, Switching Codes brings together leading American and European scholars, scientists, and artists—including Charles Bernstein, Ian Foster, Bruno Latour, Alan Liu, and Richard Powers—to consider how the precipitous growth of digital information and its associated technologies are transforming the ways we think and act. Employing a wide range of forms, including essay, dialogue, short fiction, and game design, this book aims to model and foster discussion between IT specialists, who typically have scant training in the humanities or traditional arts, and scholars and artists, who often understand little about the technologies that are so radically transforming their fields. Switching Codes will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including scientists, educators, policymakers, and artists, alike.
Edited by Thomas Bartscherer and Roderick Coover. 448 pages | 40 halftones, 4 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2011
Text and Image via The University of Chicago Press Books
Color and 10 Bullets by Tom Sachs
February 18, 2012KULTIVATOR
February 18, 2012
KULTIVATOR is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the island Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden.
By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provide a meeting and working space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival.
Kultivator initiates and executes meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperation’s should take form.
Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
February 17, 2012
Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition. This reinterpretation showcases Kraftwerk’s historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture.
More Info via MOMA
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