Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
LinkThe Scream and Madonna were found in a "police action". "We are 100% certain they are the originals. The damage was much less than feared," police said.
Chelsea
Jeff Brouws, Superstore Under Construction On Former Farmland, Indiana, 2004
In Approaching Nowhere, Jeff Brouws surveys the evolving cultural landscapes of rural, urban and suburban America, from secondary highways to strip malls. Combining bleak beauty with an understated social commentary, he seeks a deeper meaning behind the cycle of construction, decline and renewal. Brouws' photographs go beyond mere description and gather layered meaning, often functioning as antipodal metaphors or asking sociological questions. When captured by his lens, deserted streets and freeways evoke the restlessness of an uncertain nation. Simultaneously, Brouws reminds us that roads are part of a vital infrastructure, central to a consumer society's dependency on the transportation of goods and services.
Ever fearful of a homogenized America, Brouws bears witness to new superstore construction that eradicates valuable farmland in the Midwest. Other photographs examine embattled landscapes of once vibrant, but now abandoned central business districts in rust-belt inner cities like Buffalo, New York or Gary, Indiana. As commercial ruins shuttered and victimized by suburbanization, white flight, and chronic poverty, these places represent a nowhere - a discarded zone - in the consciousness of most Americans. On Chicago's south side, high-rise towers of segregation based on Le Corbusier'sRadiant City concepts stand in silent testimony to the failure of public housing erected during the Great Society era of the 1960s. Manufacturing plants shuttered by two decades of outsourcing and deindustrialization lie fallow in Ohio. In upstate New York, a franchised landscape of corporate logos has replaced a view formerly revered by the Hudson River School painters. Once unique in its qualities, this place - like so many others across America that Jeff Brouws has documented - are being steadily replaced by a ubiquitous sense of conformity.
The photographs in Approaching Nowhere quietly ask us to re-examine the links between economics, consumerism, place, race, social class, housing, and urban planning. By subtle implication they suggest a deep underlying disparity throughout a country that purports economic equality and social justice for all.
Image from Robert Mann Gallery.
Originally from artificialeyes.tv reblog reBlogged on Aug 31, 2006, 2:03PM
Let's play find the server -PJ
Description via Blast Theory: Day Of The Figurines is set in a fictional town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. The game unfolds over a total of 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town that shifts from the mundane to the cataclysmic: the local vicar opens a summer fete, Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong and a gunship of arabic troops appears on the High Street. How players respond to these events and to each other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the town. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to the Rat Research Institute, up to 1,000 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions.
Day Of The Figurines continues Blast Theory's enquiry into the nature of public participation within artworks and within electronic spaces (here, through SMS). It uses emergent behaviour and social dynamics as a means of structuring a live event. It invites players to establish their own codes of behaviour and morality within a parallel world. It plays on the tension between the intimacy and anonymity of text messages, building on previous projects such as Uncle Roy All Around You, I Like Frank and the award-winning Can You See Me Now?
Can't get enough of Blast Theory? Website here -PJ
Featured on Rocketboom today. I'm not sure what to make of this site. -PJ
This was on the CNN hompage just now, linking to this article, titled "Bush begins new push to shore up fight on terrorism, Iraq."
There is a sub-headline of "Bush 3.0?"
I recommend perusing the site. Their work is excellent -PJ
Offbeat video day. 386dx, blogumentary, magnetic leviatation, light tracer, and more - PJ
Link here.
At Art Fag City last Friday I suggested that there was not enough dog art being exhibited. This link sent to eyebeam is concievably a response to that post. -PJ
bur.ble n.: 1. A gurgling or bubbling sound, as of running water. 2. A rapid, excited flow of speech. 3. A separation in the boundary layer of fluid about a moving streamlined body, such as the wing of an airplane, causing a breakdown in the smooth flow of fluid and resulting in turbulence.
In Open Burble, a crowd of participants designs and constructs a "burble" that rises towards the sky like a plume of smoke. The project came about because we wanted to find a way to use the technology developed for Sky Ear in a more intuitive way that enables people to engage directly with the tactile experience of flying the cloud.
Participants will divide into groups in order to assemble about 140 hexagonal "clouds" into a complete Burble, built to such a scale that, when inflated with helium, it will soar upwards like Jack's beanstalk. Just as the participants are the generators of the Burble's 60m tall form, so too are they the ones to control it. They hold on to it using handles with which they may position the Burble as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd's desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.
The Burble will move, rustle, tangle, fold in on itself and create turbulence as the wind catches it like a sail. Suddenly, the entire construction will ignite with colour, sparkling in the evening sky. As people on the ground shake and pump the handle bars of the Burble, they will see their movements echoed as colours through the entire system. They will see their own individual fragments, perhaps even identifying design choices they have made. Their invididual contributions will become an integral part of a spectacular, ephemeral experience many times their size that they have come together to produce. [via Interactive Architecture dot Org]
Also reblogged at Rhizome - PJ
Lise Autogena's Sound Mirrors Project is inspired by the derelict acousic mirrors at Denge, England, it aims to create two new sound mirrors on the coast of England and France which will enable people on either side of the Channel to speak to each other.
The Channel Communication Amplifier incorporates the latest technology to transmit sound but has at its heart a device first developed before to World War II and the invention of radar: the acoustic mirrors built as early warning devices around the coasts of Britain to detect airborne invasions. These giant concrete dishes also existed in mobile and even wearable versions btw.
Autogena plans to build two acoustic mirrors. One will be placed in Folkestone, the other will be sited on the coast of France, 25 miles across the Channel.
Visitors will be able to climb up to a listening platform in front of the mirror and listen to the sounds of the sea, as well as for voices speaking to them from across the Channel. Standing at the focus point the person will hear a complete holographic binaural sound image which will appear to be coming from the air all around them.
Via Mountain7. More info on the project in The Telegraph, Creative Partnerships.
Lise Autogena also worked together with Joshua Portway on the beautiful Stock Market Planetarium, a planetarium of stars, each one representing a company and its relative value on the stock market. [blogged by Regine on We-Make-Money-Not-Art]
I suppose it goes without saying that this is text heavy -PJ
Above: ZeFrank says funny things about the Internet for 20 minutes. Worth the time to watch if you've got it. All sorts of other videos also on the site. -PJ
Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Handhelds, Laptops
Sadly, Apple is an evil corporation - PJ
Via: Code Z
New media and installation artist Stan Woodard is into numbers. When he describes his upcoming installation at Atlanta's Spruill Gallery, his speech is littered with figures: 100 images of famous and not-so-famous black people projected in the gallery space, 25 black citizens killed in the Atlanta race riots of 1906, 13% of the US population carrying out a disproportionately large impact on popular culture.
Stan's new exhibition, titled "I see no one, no one sees me" consists of two separate works in two separate rooms of the gallery. In the first room, images as selected by visitors are projected in a dark space. Visitors can choose from 100 images ranging from Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey to Willie Horton and O.J. Simpson. The artist hopes the selection process will cause viewers to be conscious about whom they literally choose to see and choose not to see. Stan told us he wanted to deal with the phenomenon of people who would cross the street to avoid an unknown black man, but trip over themselves to get close to Michael Jordan. Although the piece is not a direct reaction to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, it was partly inspired by the event and its upcoming 100-year anniversary commemoration. Wherever possible the images in the front-room piece are taken from web downloads, yet another way of interacting in and with public space in Stan's view.
The second room draws on Stan's archeological approach to found materials, amalgamating fabric, concrete, and rusted metal with light and audio elements to suggest personal impulses of simultaneously hiding and showing off in the context of a fatalistic world of materialism and materiality. The show opens on 21 September and runs until 4 November.
Above: "I see no one, no one sees me," installation view
Remember Bagadada Bagagaga Bop? Creator Fishsywa has a myspace page with more where that come from. Two words for gamers: Nerd. heaven.
Reuters - Software giant Microsoft Corp. said on
Tuesday it was investigating how two in-house training videos
made by comedian Ricky Gervais, creator of "The Office"
television series, appeared on two Web sites.
To watch the video click here. - PJ
For all the money the tech business is generating it amazes me that so much of seems to get funneled back into making web services better. This illustrates the point nominally, but still... -PJ
The FBI is investigating allegations that self-styled “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade and some of his top executives fraudulently induced investors to open galleries and then ruined them financially, former dealers contacted by federal agents said.
[…]
“It was a program of lies and deception, predicated on Christian values that weren’t there,” said Joseph Ejbeh, the Michigan attorney who tried the arbitration case.
Clearly this person has followed the advice of Mike Davidson. -PJ
Link via barryhoggard
The perfect companion to viral media: Venereal punk music. The review is hilarious, and of course, the mp3 is on the same site as the review. Paper Thin Walls does Dirty Mondays. -PJ
The 2006 edition of FILE Electronic Language International Festival opens today in Galeria de Arte do SESI São Paulo, Brazil. I'll be showing the Bono Probability Positioning System version 2 AKA Google Bono. The exhibition continues until September 3rd.
Here's a shocker, Canada has placed a prohibition on price-fixing. Who knew Sotheby's clients wouldn't thrilled with that business practice? -PJ
Matt Swann built himself a flash trigger for high-speed photography. Matt says, "My first project after assembling an electronic design lab was to build a flash trigger that I could use for high-speed photography. I thought it would be useful to share not only the finished product but also the reasoning that went into its design in the hopes that others will learn from and improve upon it." Link.
Via: Edward Winkleman
Edward Winkleman discusses The Stuckists, artists who claim that New Media, along with any other medium that isn't painting is not art. This brings to mind the manifestos of artists like Ad Reinhardt, who wrote similarily exclusive statements (in the case of Ad Reinhardt, that only black painting is painting.) - PJ
One of the side effects of artists openly and very publically criticizing others' artwork is that one sets him/herself up for a much harsher counter-critique then might otherwise fall when exhibiting one's own work. There's a bit of a "don't-throw-stones-if-you-live-in-a-glass-house" unspoken rule. Not that artists don't criticize others all the time, but it just makes sense to ensure you've got the goods to back up your controversial rhetoric. Take for example the Stuckists. I'd never heard of them, when I first read a blurb on Arts Journal, so I looked them up on Wikipedia:
Stuckism is an art movement that was founded in 1999 in Britain by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art. The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art). The original group of thirteen artists has since expanded to over 120 groups around the world. Childish left the group in 2001.
They have staged many shows, but have gained more attention for outspoken media comments and demonstrations, particularly outside Tate Britain against the Turner Prize, sometimes dressed in clown costume. After exhibiting mainly in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, they were given their first show in a major public museum in 2004, The Walker Art Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial.
Other campaigns mounted by the group include official avenues, such as standing for parliament, reporting Saatchi to the Office of Fair Trading to complain about his power in the art world, and applying under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for Tate Gallery trustee minutes, which started a media scandal about the purchase of Chris Ofili's work, The Upper Room (which led to an official rebuke of the Tate by the Charity Commission).
Tending to favor the underdog struggling to change the system in any fight, my first inclination upon reading about the Stuckists was to consider their movement and their artwork with an open mind. That is, until I read the statement in their manifesto that clarified my doing so would represent a willingness on my part not likely to be met in kind: From Wikipedia: "The most contentious statement in their manifesto is: 'Artists who don't paint aren't artists'". Such statements constitute what I can only describe as arguing for one's own irrelevance.
But, as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword. The Arts Journal blurb links to an article in The Guardian (which has been giving the movement a good deal of attention lately) that invites its readers to browse an online gallery of Stuckist works and decide if they're "art."
I don't wish to pile on too much. I don't have enough information to have any grudge against the Stuckists, and for all I know the work they champion might be not only very good but important (a cursory glance suggests otherwise, but I'm not weighing in with any final sweeping generalizations at this point). I am turned off by the their anti-conceptual stance, not to mention the inanity of their statement about painting, but I'm more than a bit interested in the democratization their movement represents. Other than having one of its two founding members leave (read an interview here where Childish explains his departure [and he's only one of 6 original members, out of 13, to have left or stopped exhibiting with the group), the organization has grown considerably (143 groups in 35 countries), suggesting it's meeting a need. Then again, that need might simply be to feed their collective egos. With exhibition with titles like "The Triumph of Stuckism," they do seem to be trying awfully hard to talk themselves into their own superiority, or they're totally deluded. Which might be unfair of me, I realize, so I'll stop here and ask 1) have you heard of the Stuckists and 2) what's your opinion of their work, their movement, their manifesto?
Originally Posted: Ed Winkleman, August 28, 8:10 am
An Animutation flash video. Do as I say and follow this link! PJ
The Star reports on animutation - a genre of video art typically found on the web, that combines mutated celebrity faces and Japanese music. PJ
an art installation that represent the casualties in news reports as an ever-increasing random constellation of bright yellow candy. a computer program continuously scans the headlines of 4,500 English-language news sources around the world, looking for people who have been reported killed. the algorithm determines the number of deaths, & instructs a specially designed ceiling-mounted mechanism built with Lego NXT parts to drop one yellow BB per person. as a result, BBs will accumulate on the floor, ultimately forming a sort of aesthetic monument.
see also the federal budget as cookies & San Francisco in jell-o & 1000 death icons & wifi-sm news pain installation.
[caleblarsen.com|thnkx Caleb]
Editor's note: Since there are no feeds to a site like this and I think this article is particularly valuable, I have reblogged the entire text rather than simply providing a my del.icio.us link. PJ
Via: The Tate
by Lev Manovich, February 12 2006
Consider the following paradox. The same few decades of the nineteenth century that gave us the most detailed artistic representations of human emotions and inner feelings, including romantic love, also saw the rise of statistical and sociological imagination. While Flaubert and Tolstoy were putting the emotions of their heroines under the artistic microscope of their prose, a different paradigm was emerging in which the individuals were nothing but dots contributing to a social law, a pattern, or a distribution. In 1838 August Compte coined the term 'sociology' for the new discipline that was to study the laws governing the life of society. (He also proposed the term 'social physics'). According to another founder of the discipline, Emile Durkheim, sociology is the science concerned with 'social facts' - phenomena that have an independent and objective existence separate from the actions of the individuals. In his major work Suicide (1897) Durkheim set out to demonstrate how such seemingly individual acts as suicides in fact follow general statistical patterns and can be explained in terms of structural forces that operate in society at large. Compare this to Anna Karenina (1877) where Tolstoy meticulously follows the last hours and minutes of Anna's life with a kind of anti-sociological gaze - looking at her not from the outside as a social scientist, but on the contrary, depicting how the outside world appears as seen by her.
In general, representational art has depicted individuals rather than social groups, classes, and institutions. Even in the case of modern realist literature and painting, including socialist realism, which consciously aimed to represent social types and classes, what the writers and painters actually show us are individual human beings. In other words, regardless of whether a painting or a sculpture is named 'worker', 'farmer', 'miner', etc., it shows a single concrete individual. And when artists have tried visually to represent really big groups, the typical result has been a crowd in which individual differences are hard to read. The same relationships between the zoom function and the level of detail holds today - consider the individual figures in Mathew Barney's The Cremaster Cycle versus the groups of veiled women in the films by Shirin Neshat, or the panoramic views of Andreas Gursky which reduce individuals to swirling dots.
It appears that we may be dealing with some essential characteristic of art. Or maybe this limitation is simply a general characteristic of all images in general - their inability to represent abstract concepts and logical relationships. After all, if in the course of evolution human species developed two different representations systems - one linguistic and one image-based - it would make sense that they should complement each other, and that images would not do what language does best.
But what if this limitation is simply a result of the representational techniques that artists had at their disposal? Consider, for instance, how the techniques of films invented in the first two decades of the twentieth century - editing and different types of shots - have allowed film directors to alternate between close-ups showing individuals and long shots showing the groups to which these individuals belong. Given this example, what can we expect from computers? Can computer media be used to create artistic representations that link the individual and the social without subsuming one in the other, i.e. the particular in the general? If we consider the range of computer techniques available for organising and viewing data, things look quite encouraging. We can switch between multiple views of the same data, traverse the data at different scales, and move between multiple media linked together. And we can do this in near or close to real time. We can also instruct software to search through and mine very large amounts of data - such as the data produced by the millions of real people who engage in online chat, write blogs, send emails, upload their photos on Flickr and so on. What types of representation can be created if we combine these computer techniques and new ways of gathering data as well as of structuring and displaying it?
Although The Dumpster by Golan Levin (working with Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg) can be related to traditional genres such as portraiture or documentary, as well as established new media genres such as visualization and database art, it is something new and different. I would like to call it a 'social data browser'. It allows you to navigate between the intimate details of people's experiences and the larger social groupings. The particular and the general are presented simultaneously, without one being sacrificed to the other.
The Dumpster application window shows a large 'crowd' of circles at the same time. While in a typical painting individual differences would be lost at this scale, here you can click on any circle and read the corresponding blog fragment. And this is just a beginning. Consider the way in which Levin structures the navigation. In typical hypermedia you move horizontally between pages or scenes connected by links. In typical information visualisation you 'move upward', so to speak - from the level of individual data to larger patterns that become visible when the numerous data points are turned into a single image or a shape. But in Levin's group portrait, you are encouraged to navigate both horizontally, vertically, and diagonally between the particular and the general. You can, for example, simply click on different circles, jumping from one breakup case to another and randomly explore the overall data space. Or you can explore the circles that are similar in color - which means that the corresponding postings are similar in some ways. Or you can explore the circles that have an opposite color and thus belong to a different grouping. In short, the seemingly incompatible points of view of Tolstoy and Durkheim - the subjective experience and the social facts - are brought together via the particular information architecture and navigation design of The Dumpster.
But if we simply limit ourselves to describing the work as it appears visually, we will miss the crucial characteristics of the social data browser constructed by Levin. We need to consider how the data presented in The Dumpster was obtained and processed before it was presented to us. Using a variety of methods, Levin and his collaborators have filtered the huge data space of online blogs isolating the postings from 2005 where teenagers narrated their breakups. The result was 20,000 postings describing 'confirmed' breakups. These postings were subjected to further analysis in order to derive various metadata about them: reasons for the break-up, who broke up with whom, the age and sex of the author, as well as their emotional state. Most of this metadata was not explicitly contained in the postings but is inferred with a high degree of probability by the project's authors.
The result is a group portrait appropriate for the age of data mining, large databases, and global surveillance programs such as Echelon. The group 'painted' by The Dumpster did not commission this portrait itself but rather was created by the artist by searching though the digital traces that people leave online. The ordering of individual members within this very large group of 20,000 people is the result of mathematical analysis. As a result, each individual breakup experience becomes a point in a multi-dimensional space that we are invited to explore. In short, we are invited to mine the data prepared by the project's authors who used sophisticated computer methods.
More than two decades ago, William Gibson accurately predicted the cyberculture of the 1990s with its idea of virtual navigation through data. By naming his recent novel Pattern Recognition, Gibson points to the new period we are living in now. It is a period when more prosaic but ultimately more consequential ways of exploring data have come to the forefront, including search engines available to the masses and data mining as used by companies and government agencies. The Dumpster uses industrial strength data gathering and data analysis strategies that normally are not easily accessible for single individuals to show how they result in new kinds of social representations.
Lev Manovich is a Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He is the author of 'Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database' (The MIT Press, 2005), and 'The Language of New Media' (The MIT Press, 2001).
Net Art
Now here's a film for Internet geeks...
There is a questionable amount of art or tech content in this piece to be reblogging it, but since we've been reblogging film all day that only loosely meets these requirements, I'm making an exception.
A submission in a UK based film contest titled Straight 8. Title unknown. PJ
Originally via Fabrica 25-08-06:
Before YouTube starlets began using the internet to peddle their personalities, before British back-talkers redefined self esteem for millions of Idol-izing spectators, somewhere around the era of the notorious Gong Show, a group of New Yorkers produced a cable access TV program called Stairway to Stardom. The 1980s talent show featured a rotating cast reminiscent of Warhol's factory stars and is believed to have been an influence on the very popular Star Search program. Twenty-five years later, artist-curators, Mitch Friedman and Ryan Junell have scavenged the show's archives and produced a best-of reel to be screened at Brooklyn venue Monkeytown in an evening that will feature special guests and other surprises, Saturday August 26th. The organizers call it 'a must-see for anyone fascinated with notions of fame and archival footage' but it's also an opportunity to recontextualize the tradition of using popular broadcast media to craft an identity and communicate with a wider audience. As the televisual gets pushed out by the computer monitor, direct your nostalgia here. - James Petrie
Additional Resources:
Ryan Junell recent work: Slomo Video
Art Fag City pinch hits for The Reeler (Slowmo review)
Ryan Junell's website
The Soft Pink Truth, Promofunk, A great animated video by Ryan Junell - PJ
Pulsewave is a monthly event at downtown space The Tank, showcasing "low-bit, video game influenced musicians and video artists" and "people getting down to the sounds of some rockstar jamming away on nintendos, gameboys, and ataris."
The performers will be:
Saturday, August 26 @ 10pm sharp - $6
The Tank, 279 Church Street, between Franklin and White
If you schedule yourself well, you can start that evening in the East Village for the Smitten show at Giant Robot and then head downtown for The Tank.
[photo of Anamanaguchi performance from The Tank's website]
Other online exhibitions of note:
*Sloan Science Cinematique: A website about filmmakers, science, scientists, Science Cinematique is a forum for short films, interviews, and articles that enhance the public understanding of science and technology. (Text directly from website)
Editors recommendation, Student film, the disappearance of Andy Waxman, by Tim Osterland -PJ
By: Jessica Helfand
Via: Design Observer
As a graduate student at Yale in the late 1980s, I studied with many of the great, late European masters who preached (among other things) the virtues of geometry. Back in those days, our projects were quite literally framed by formal constraints — square constraints. It was believed that the square was unbiased and pure, that it did not privilege one side over another, and that a student was likely to derive a deeper and more lasting understanding of design principles by being held to this standard.
While I could intellectually appreciate the rigor of such limitations, something inside me refused, categorically, to accept this as a defining rule. So I wrote my thesis on the square — its meaning, its history, its identity as something more than just a formal armature for design education. The pursuit of this project enabled me to widen my understanding of the power of geometry to such a degree that a dozen years later, I wrote a book on the circle. I thought I was done.
But then I started seeing ovals. Everywhere.
We live in a world of beveled edges, slanted and softened and practical and user-friendly. If a bevel is defined as meeting another angle at anything but 90°, it is easy to see the slippage that's likely to occur once you start to deviate from pure geometry. So first you slant, and then you curve, and before you know it, everything's a blob. (Future historians may want to note that in today's world, blobs happily co-exist in a state of mutual admiration with thornament.) But blobs are only blobs because they don't subscribe to the universal standards of hard-and-fast geometric principle. And here, it's perhaps worth remembering that in the natural world, geometry has its own formal constraints, which we tend to see as pure because they replicate so flawlessly. (Consider the bilateral symmetry of flower petals, leaves or butterfly wings.)
Which brings us back to ovals, the most human of geometric forms. Scientific visualizations like the DNA blood sample pictured here embrace an ovalesque vocabulary, because DNA would, after all, look ridiculous rendered as crisp, bubbly circles. But how about those multiple-choice tests? Standardized forms requiring sharp, No. 2 pencils use ovals to correspond to highly automated computerized systems that "read" the data input from each oval: called "bubble-in" tests, they're the same whether you're eight or eighty. There's something oddly arcane about a system that hasn't changed since I was a child. (And it's easy to picture that oval-by-oval alphabetic information being fed into some giant, Eniac-sized mainframe, gobbling up each letter one at a time.) With data-reading software seemingly stuck in the 1960s, it is any surprise that educational testing is such a mess?
So, ovals appear to be the preferred form for hardware, too. Push-button everything — from remote controllers to mobile phones to workout equipment — seems predisposed to ovalize everything we touch. One can imagine buttons being scaled to the oval circumference of an average adult fingertip, but recently it seems that the propensity for ovals has resulted in a morphologically compromised landscape of soft shapes and rounded edges. And nowhere is this more noticeable than in cars, which (with a few exceptions) have enthusiastically embraced everything rounded: fenders, dashboards, you name it. While I'm not advocating a market for squared-off odometers, it is difficult to find a car these days that doesn't look like a cartoon. The glory days of the square sedan are long over, and with SUV's ruling the road, one is hard put to see a straight line anywhere: even Jeep Liberty ("now with flipper glass") and Honda Element ("all about good times") look like someone took a curved vegetable peeler and slivered off the corners. Are such curvatures cosmetically desirable? Aerodynamically sanctioned? Economically prudent? Environmentally preferred?
Such vehicles summon the streamlined aspirations of mid-century modernists — those one-time visionaries whose prognostications always seemed, somehow, to be chanelling Sputnik. In contemporary western culture we thrive on a much more pluralistic sense of identity, which is at once more forgiving (anything goes) and more expansive (really, anything goes). Ovals — emancipated from circular restriction, freed of rectangular rigidity — are a perfect metaphor for the way we live now. They're out of shape and flabby, non-committal and generic — like sensible shoes, practical and monotonous and dull. (I've refrained from mentioning the Oval Office or its oval rug, but we all know there's room for improvement there.) I'm fine with oval-imaged DNA, even with ovals designating alien rain on India. But the oval as a glorious, desirable form — one worth replicating ad infinitum? Far be it for me to preach better living through geometry, but there must be a better way.
Direct link to post here.
I know, I know, could there be more rivoting news than a database designed for artists? Totally useful. (tip via: bloggy) - PJ
[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. David Schwartz is chief curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.]
Summer is quickly winding down, which means the busy fall film season is upon us. While S.T. VanAirsdale is squeezing in a few more vacation days burnishing his bronze tan, I’m pleased to have the chance to look ahead to late autumn and tell you about the Museum’s upcoming Jacques Rivette retrospective.
Rivette (right) is probably the greatest director to emerge during the French New Wave who has never had a complete retrospective in New York. His films, including Celine and Julie go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and Up, Down, Sideways, are playful, engaging works that express Rivette’s fascination with artifice and theatricality. Yet the movies are also famously long and multilayered. In fact, Rivette’s most famously long film, Out One: Noli me tangere, runs nearly 13 hours and has never been shown in the United States.
Amazingly, only three of Rivette’s 20 films are in theatrical distribution in this country. Now, with the enormous assistance of the National Film Theatre in London (which created laser-subtitles for Out One: Noli me tangere and five other films) and the French Embassy (which has negotiated with international archives and distributors to arrange screenings of 10 films), we have been able to put together a complete retrospective. New York audiences will have their first chance to see all of Rivette’s films in a theatrical setting.
The fun begins on November 10, and continues every weekend day through December 24. Cinephiles be prepared: Out One: Noli me tangere will be shown one time only, on December 9 and 10. If you’re interested in attending, send an email to info@movingimage.us and you’ll be notified when tickets are available. If your summer tans aren’t gone by Labor Day, they definitely will fade away after two solid months of weekends in the Riklis Theater.
While we’re at it, a quick sneak peek: on Sunday, September 17, we’ll be presenting a preview screening of The Last King of Scotland and a discussion with stars Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy and cinephile-turned-director Kevin Macdonald. Go to the Museum's Web site and sign up for our weekly email, and you won’t miss a thing. Terry Gilliam (Tideland) and the Quay Brothers (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) will also stop by in the fall.
(Photo: Photofest/Museum of the Moving Image)
Via: The Reeler, Direct post link here.
Update:
The Full Story here via The Globe and Mail:
Doctored billboards make a statement
Artist's covert work turns urban ads into something to talk about
BERT ARCHER
If you were at Dundas West subway station this week, you might have noticed a billboard making a stronger-than-average statement about George W. Bush.
Instead of an unflattering picture of the U.S. President beside the words "Don't read enough?" -- part of an ad campaign for an audiobook company -- a picture of outspoken Bush opponent, rapper Kanye West, appeared next to him with the line: "Isn't Kanye an A-Rab name?"
Working under the alias fauxreel, which is also the name of his "photo-based creative studio," the man responsible for these and seven other billboard manipulations over the past year is Dan Bergeron. He believes it is unfair that only people with money get to have their say on billboards
