Archive for March, 2007
Seven Days Hotel
There’s a fantastic exhibition by Fabien Verschaere at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon until 29th April.
Born in 1975, Verschaeren has spent very long periods of his childhood in hospitals due to some mysterious disease. That’s where he started drawing his first pictures and developed a very poetic mental universe that allowed him to go beyond the daemons of his illness.
For the project Seven Days Hotel, Verschaere has transformed the first floor of the museum into a hotel. The reception is bathed in red light, monsters, ghosts and witches are painted on the walls… Welcome to a space where you’re going to constantly shift between dream and nightmare! The walls of the hotel 7 rooms are painted in black and red and the light is a bit dim. Each room is tracing the initiating journey taken by a sick child to face the world.
In room one, there’s a bearded man, sitting on his hospital bed, while a little train is turning on the floor; elsewhere dozens of little ceramic fairy creatures fligh above your head and the one of an angel who seems to be absorbed in prayers; here the curtains are moving and the big head of a devil is uttering words you cannot understand; the walls of another room are covered with bones, each of them “wearing” a watch, etc. Everywhere there are evil looking creatures (even Batman and Mickey Mouse look nasty), but also princesses and characters that look like the artist himself. You’re never sure whether these figures you meet are threatening you or just captive of the hotel (maybe both).
The soundtrack of this journey into horror and awe is by Liquid Architecture. The rock band has composed 7 tracks, they are played loud but not too much and complete the experience in an admirable way.
Once you’ve closed the door on the hotel, you might wonder whether you have dreamt or hallucinated. There are two more rooms, there’s no music there and the walls are white, they display the preparatory drawings of the exhibition. Some of them are black and white, others are illuminated like manuscripts from the Middle Age.
I made very few images. Can someone please explain me why you are allowed to make pictures of any exhibition during its opening and are treated like a dangerous criminal when you want to take a photography after the opening party?
More links about Fabien Verschaere: CIAC, Galerie Michel Rein, Parker’s Box and on myspace.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 3, 2007, 8:59AM
The Guatemala City Abyss
[Image: The abyss, courtesy of National Geographic News].
“After rumbling for weeks,” we read, “part of a poor Guatemala City neighborhood plummeted some 30 stories into the Earth on Friday.”
The gigantic sinkhole into which those homes plummeted is referred to as “the Guatemala City abyss.”
(Via gravestmor. But don’t miss The town at risk from cave-ins, earlier on BLDGBLOG).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM
Pixelated Pulse Art Fair
A prominent motif at the Pulse art fair in NYC last week, pixelation was evident in a number of works in various mediums. From afar, these works can be read as a whole, but close up, the image starts to break down and the individual elements of the composition become more dominant. Here are a selection of some of our favorites. Click on any of the images for a more detailed view.
The buzz around the Catherine Clark Gallery booth had a lot to do with “The Morning After Portraits” by Andy Diaz Hope. Made of gel-caps, the series shows images of people in front of their medicine cabinets or in their local pharmacies with hangovers, headaches and other illnesses self-inflicted or otherwise. (Pictured above right.) A more literal comment on our pill-popping culture than Damien Hirst’s similar work, Hope comments, “We are no longer a sum of our natural history, but a sum of our natural history plus our self selected recreational and medical regimes.”
At first glance, the installation by Devorah Sperber presented by the Marcia Wood Gallery, looks like randomly arranged different colored spools of thread. However, a clear acrylic sphere placed in front of the work shrinks and condenses the thread spool “pixels” into an easily-read image of a masterpiece—in this case Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”—and the convex shape flips the imagery 180 degrees. A mimicry of how the brain and eye process visual data, Sperber’s work plays with ideas about the past, craft, visual theories and art itself. Check out more of her work at the Brooklyn Museum until 6 May 2007.
Referencing cubists like Picasso and other early 20th-century painters, Isidro Blasco, recently exhibited at DCKT Contemporary, turns the 2-dimensional media of photography into a 3-dimensional experience by piecing together multiple photos. Using board-mounted photographs, he combines multiple angles and architecture to explore perception in relation to physical experience. Blasco’s sculptures draw the observer into the piece, so that the experience of it feels new rather than a straight portrayal of the scene. The photographic sculpture pictured (right), “Side Building,” measures 107 x 120 x 72 inches . See more of his work here.
More of a dot-matrix than pixels, William Betts of the Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, re-creates surveillance camera images by carefully dripping acrylic paint onto canvas. Using digital information, he creates work that is abstract, organic and realistic. Again, a macro view (above right) becomes an abstraction but a step back (above left) reveals a realistic surveillance camera shot. Also on Cool Hunting, Betts’ work from last years Scope art fair uses digital information (and in this case techniques) to create graphics. See more from this series of work here.
Carlos Estrada-Vega, presented by Margaret Thatcher Projects, exhibited sculptural works made of small canvas-covered blocks. Estrada-Vega considers each square as its own distinct painting, hence show titles like, “4000 Paintings/14 Compositions.” Given the modularity of the pixel-like pieces (they’re attached with magnets), the mini-paintings have the potential to be rearranged infinitely into new compositions. The colors, inspired by the artist’s Mexican heritage, look somewhat monochromatic from afar. Only up close do the ultra-saturated colors reveal themselves, an aspect further accentuated by the topographic nature of the blocks. Maceo (far left) is composed of wax, oleopasto, oil, limestone and pigment on canvas and measures 18 x 18 inches. More effective in person, these photos do not do the works much justice.
Originally from Cool Hunting by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 1, 2007, 9:07PM
Tobecontinued
Myspace as an interactive platform
Tobecontinued is a group exhibition in progress that starts with some students of the Fine Arts Academy of Rome. Using Myspace as an interactive platform, Tobecontinued is based on the concepts of open art-work, cause and/vs effect, and free association of ideas; where the last art-work is always inspired to the previous one, in order to generate an open art-work in continuous evolution that never completes itself…
The process is constituted by the single works as video, animations, photos, music, net projects, and shows details, nuances and ideas of the whole art-work’s project. Let’s continue, joining with us and sending your art-work (max. 3 mb per email) at tobecontinued.tobecontinued[at]gmail.com” Random
Originally from networked_performance by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 2, 2007, 4:22PM
Ning: cultural implications of the new social networking
Ning is a website designed to help us to build our own social
networks. It launches officially next week. It’s the work of Marc
Andreessen (pictured) and Gina Bianchini.
Ning looks promising on three dimensions:
1) the business model
Ning
allows for "revenue access," let’s call it. If we have basic
membership, Ning will place ads on our sites and keep the revenue. For
a fee, we can run ads of our own and keep their revenue. (MySpace has
no revenue access opportunity.)
Revenue access and revenue
sharing are pressing issues, and this is the clearest leverage point
that will supplant first generation social networks with subsequent
ones.
YouTube makes clear that consumers are happy to supply
content for nothing. They consider themselves well paid by the
opportunity for exposure and the intrinsic pleasure of content
creation.
But this will not endure. Eventually, the internet
mediators are going to have to pay the content provider just as surely
as the old mediators now do.
Ning may eventually be obliged
to compensate even those who use the basic package, but that remains to
be seen. We shall see where the YouTube experiment ends up on this
one.
The anthropological angle: when content providers have
access to revenue, how will they use it? There’s a good chance that
some providers will hew to the middle of the market, in order to
increase their revenues. This will narrow the world that the internet
represents. But it is also true that some content providers will use
the revenue to free themselves from their "day jobs" and pursue their
innovations with new enthusiasm. As a result, the internet will become
more innovative and more various.
2) the user model
The
user model looks right as well. Ning will allow user customization and
control. (And there is of course a powerful anthropological impulse at
work here. The DIY movement is one of the great transformative trends
of our times.)
Other social
network sites ask you to join their world. We are about people creating
their own worlds. (Gina Bianchini, Ning CEO)
But
Ning doesn’t merely allow customization and control, it has the good
sense to allow us to scale up into this customization and control.
True there are some internet users like Steve Rubel who are just all
over the technology and the opportunities this technology opens up.
But most of us are more like me, poor schlups who are just one new
feature or one fat manual away from a terrible headache and long term
memory loss.
For these people, "keeping it simple, stupid" is
the order of the day. Google gets this. Marissa Mayer is the high
priestess of simplicity and one of the reasons the Google search engine
is a thing of beauty while Yahoo and eBay websites leave me with the
strong feeling that a bomb must have just exploded in my dog’s
breakfast.
Ning has taken a page from the Google handbook:
The
whole point of providing customization and freedom is that you want to
give people something super simple at first but then, as they get more
sophisticated, you want to give them the ability to get more creative.
(Andreessen)
There is another way to put this. All of
us want all of the expressive and pragmatic advantages that come with
all of the new technologies, but none of us has an additional ounce of
intellectual processing power to spend on them. It’s not actually that
we’re stupid. We’re are overextended.
Starting simple removes every piece of extraneous intellectual effort.
And scaling up allows us to recoup that effort over and over. Now we
may use what we know to acquire new knowledge. Most of the wayfaring,
the pondering, the "how does this work, again?" has been removed. The
"fog of technology" has been made to lift.
And once schlubs like me have access to the expressive potentialities of
the new technology, we may expand the internet and the worlds now suspended from this internet to expand extraordinarily. Once civilians can be as
inventive as the experts…wow. And this is what the the new technology does
so well. It creates solutions for one generation which it then learns to automate for the
next generation. Second Life has yet to make it easier for the novice
to build on line. Once it does so, that little world, already so stuffed with design experiment, will expand remarkably.
So there is an anthropological angle here too. Once Ning and other sites
help to empower the ordinary user, the web will become still more fecund. Andreessen
has contemplated this future.
To get philosophical for a minute, I
believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There
are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are
no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can
create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how
much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new
ideas?
3) the cultural model
As
it stands, social networking doesn’t actually sort very well. And this means social networks on the web don’t make
social connections very well. (I have met lots of people through the
web. Some of them are now my friends. But I have yet to make a friend
thanks to a social network site. How bout you?)
This has got to be a temporary problem. If there is something that the web
should be good at, it is helping me to find all but only the people I
find really interesting. But really good networks, networks with very high "friend potential," are small networks, and
small networks have hitherto failed to attract the resources to make them go. Ning appears to change all that and we
may now expect to see online networking take on new significance. .
There is one further anthropological note to offer here. When there is
a network for each of my enthusiasms, what happens to those enthusiasms?
I think it is probably true that each of them will broaden and deepen, and I think
this tells us that each enthusiasm will make an even greater claim upon the self.
Or, let’s put this another way. Let’s say my self now consists of
several quite distinct creatures. At a minimum, there’s a blogger, the
ethnographer, the consultant, the person interested in Elizabethan
England, the anthropologist, movie buff, and so on. Once there is a network for
each of these selves, and once each of these selves becomes as a result
more robust, I think the diversity of my selfhood multiplies and the
absolute space of this selfhood expands. We may expect better social
networks to create cloudier selves.
Welcome, Ning.
References
Anonymous Reuters. 2007. Ning allows DIY social networks. PC Magazine. February 27, 2007. here.
McCracken,
Grant. 2006. France after France. This Blog Sits At The Intersection
of Anthropology and Economics. March 28, 2006. here.
Tischler,
Linda. 2005. The beauty of simplicity. Fast Company.com. Issue
100. here.
Steve Rubel here.
Webb, Cynthia. An interview with Marc Andreessen. Washington Post. June 10, 2004. here.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2007, 10:17PM
