Super Phat, Super Fine

A few weeks back, I went to a show at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, New York to see an exhibit called Super Phat. It was a multimedia art presentation featuring the work of over 40 of SVA’s Japanese alumni and alumni living in Japan. Among them were two large and gorgeous drawings by my friend and studio-mate, Yuko Shimizu. Her work never fails to astound me. Yuko’s pieces entitled The Wild Wild Chase and The Rodeo Drive transplants her striped swim-suited characters into a Western inspired realm where they are met by horned and furry hooved monsters. Magnificent. [read an interview with Yuko Shimizu and check out the posts she has written for Lost At E Minor]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Marcos Chin
reBlogged by michael on Oct 8, 2007, 8:08PM

The Art of Sampling at MCASD, CA

SOUNDWAVES: THE ART OF SAMPLING :: MCASD LA JOLLA :: SEPTEMBER 23 – DECEMBER 30, 2007 :: Selections on view through May 4, 2008.

Sound has played a significant role in the development of modern and contemporary art, from the visual references of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian in the early 20th-century to the aural experimentations of Nam June Paik and John Cage in the 1960s. Soundwaves: The Art of Sampling looks at a specifically late 20th-century manifestation of the conjunction of art and sound, and features artists in MCASD’s collection, such as Tim Bavington, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Sean Duffy, Julio Cesar Morales, Dario Robleto, and Steve Roden, who appropriate the musical process of sampling in their work, either through the incorporation of found sound or through visual and material references.

Download and listen to the Soundwaves audio tour on your MP3 player.

Image: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Untitled (series #3), 2001, set of 3 inflatable plastic pools, 3 pumps, water, 93 assorted bowls, water, 21 stem glasses, 3 immersion heaters, Clorox. Museum purchase, International and Contemporary Collectors Funds.

Thanks to Rhizome and William Hanley.

Originally from Networked Music Review by helen
reBlogged by michael on Oct 8, 2007, 5:10PM

Baby Love [Sydney]

Baby Love by Shu Lea Cheang :: October 1 – November 2, 2007 | Mon – Sat | 10am – 12pm & 2pm – 5pm :: Free :: Carriageworks, Sydney.

Baby Love is art that moves you and your imagination…. Climb aboard a giant teacup and glide into a futuristic fantasy with a dummy-sucking baby doll clone to your favourite love song at Sydney’s new home for contemporary arts, CarriageWorks. Its cathedral-scale foyer will play home to 6 giant teacups, each with a larger-than-life baby doll clone. Baby Love is a wi-fi mobile installation by New York based Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, who calls cyber-space ‘home’. Shu Lea is a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production.

Baby Love is an embracing interactive, kinetic and sonic experience, alluding to both past and future as the teacups evoke the nostalgia of amusement park rides and clash with the futuristic vision of cloned babies. The public can contribute to the joyride soundtrack by uploading songs via the web which go directly to the installation. The songs are transmitted wirelessly via Memory-Emotion data to the babies. When the rider selects their love song of choice to begin their teacup ride, the ME data is retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashes.

The cloned babies of Baby Love are an updated version of the central figures in Ryu Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies. In the novel, twins born from lockers at a Yokohama Station spend their lives haunted by the sound of their mother’s heartbeat. Cheang’s clones were inspired by scientific research into the development of biobots and artificial life forms. It is an installation which fuses nostalgia for a seemingly simpler age without boggling interactive technology and our contemporary obsessive immersion in the virtual life of the internet. Cheang seems to be asking where will the ever new frontiers of the web take us?

Presented by CarriageWorks, Experimenta and Awesome Arts Baby Love is an umbrella event of Art and About 2007, presented by City of Sydney.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 8:11AM

“Homeland” by Laurie Anderson [Melbourne]

Homeland by Laurie Anderson @ Melbourne International Arts Festival: Laurie Anderson’s latest work Homeland is her next major production, following in the footsteps of United States, The Nerve Bible and Songs and Stories for Moby Dick. Somewhere between epic poem and music concert, this Festival co-commission looks at 21st-century American obsessions with security, distance, information, the relationship of fear and freedom, the increasing acceptance of violence and the persistent new language of war. Using the synthetic language of technology and the sensuous language of song writing and poetry, Homeland explores American-style totalitarianism, shifting images of empire and reality shows through a powerful combination of visual design and experimental music.

The music of Homeland, performed live, is built on the foundation of groove electronics, and features many new melodic forms with which Anderson has been experimenting. This brand new work from one of today’s premier performance artists promises to be a highlight of this year’s Festival program. [Videos] To listen to ABC’s DIG, digital radio’s interview with Laurie Anderson click here.

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 11:05AM

Turning museums into places where people interact

Print Magazine is reporting on Local Projects, a company that is turning museums into places where people interact with information—and each other. When Jake Barton, the 34-year-old principal of the interactive design firm Local Projects, thinks about what an exhibition can do, he often considers the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The museum documents the forced removal of more than 60,000 residents from a mixed-race neighborhood declared a whites-only zone in 1966, and tells the stories of those displaced. In the early ’90s, when reclaiming that land was still not an option, the museum kept the issue in the public eye through exhibitions and debate; subsequently, the museum’s sister organization helped residents apply to have their land returned. Transforming and healing a community through inclusive storytelling is, in Barton’s eyes, the mandate for museums of the 21st century. These days, he has ample reason to meditate on it: In April, he and his seven-person firm received the commission to codesign the permanent exhibition for the World Trade Center Memorial Museum.” By choosing Local Projects, the memorial’s directors cast their lot with a new kind of museum that prizes interactivity over top-down presentation. Local Projects insists on a plurality of voices—the exhibitions it creates function as a kind of conversation rather than as repositories of authoritative fact. “Museums are starting to evolve into agents of social change,” Barton says. “That’s being reflected in the numbers of people who are going to museums and the ways museums are functioning as spaces for community dialogue. We [are] trying to make diverse people visible to each other through a storytelling space.” Read full story

Originally from Putting people first by Experientia
reBlogged by michael on Sep 28, 2007, 7:25AM

Jenny Holzer at the Venice Biennale

I knew Jenny Holzer as the artist whose light light projections sex up the facade of the Palazzo Madama or Palazzo Carignano each Winter in Turin. I was therefore quite surprised to see how different and politically–charged her contribution to the Biennale is.

Protect, Protect, 2007

Her work in Venice is one of the many that the artistic director of the Biennale, American critic and curator Robert Storr, had selected to remind us of the values that his country has always stood for but has also more than once betrayed in the past few years.

Holzer’s Redaction works (redaction in this case means to edit and or black out text before publication) are enlarged, painted version of declassified government and military material obtained from the American National Security Archive, including issues of prisoner/detainee abuse in Guantánamo Bay and other detention camps, and the ongoing tragedies of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can rest your eyes on cold autopsy reports (the “manner of death” of some prisoners being disturbingly registered by doctors from the Armed Services Institute of Pathology, as “Homicide.”) and witness statements given to the FBI.

Homicide

As the title of the series suggests, parts of the texts are censored. But all those dark or blank rectangles that hide words have the effect of grabbing your attention. The documents let understand that the treatment reserved to some prisoners included heads wrapped in duct tape, whacked with phone books, low voltage electrocution, hooding, the use of drugs, suspensions, shackling and gagging, ligature injuries and pierced lungs (via.)

And suddenly small painted words remind you of those awful images that you had almost forgotten about because they are not making the headlines anymore…

More about the series of paintings in The Phoenix and Big, Red & Shiny. My pictures and better ones from the Cheim & Read Gallery and Sprueth & Magers gallery.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Aug 8, 2007, 11:49AM

Ray Caesar

I love the detail and the sense of escapism in Ray Caesar’s digitally rendered artworks. His work reminds me a little of Mark Ryden’s, without the slabs of meat and the lofty price tags. [see also Mark Ryden]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Casper Johansson
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 2:01AM

Erin Elizabeth Bardwell

Working out of New York, Erin Elizabeth Bardwell captures those moments of guilty vulnerability where the subjects look as surprised by the sudden attention as they’re excited by it. Her portfolio is a gritty, urban diary cataloging the constant sense of flux which overwhelms the city. [see also B Marie Lavioiette]

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Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by Zolton
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 2:44PM

Ars Virtua Presents: We are the Strange

Ars Virtua is proud to present the Second Life premier of We are the Strange :: June 29 at 6:00 pm SLT [SLURL].

M dot Strange takes us into the new realm of video game structured and inspired storytelling with his character’s harrowing quest for ice cream. The variety of animation styles, game and cultural references and distopian beauty of this work make it important to modern filmmaking. Add to this that m dot strange created this virtually single handedly and had it selected for Sundance based on his YouTube audience and you end up with a very powerful piece of contemporary media.

We are the Strange is an animated feature film in which two diametrically opposed outcasts fight for survival in a sinister fantasy world. After meeting in the somber Forest of Still Life, an abused young woman (Blue) reluctantly follows a care free dollboy (Emmm) to Stopmo City on his unreasonable quest for ice cream. They’re lives are constantly in jeopardy after they’re caught in the middle of a deadly battle between bizarre monsters on their way to the ice cream shop. A flamboyant ultraviolent hero(Rain) appears and effortlessly dispatches all the horrible monsters in his path. Blue meets Rain before he partakes in an impossible battle against the source of all that is evil in Stopmo City. When it seems as if darkness will have the last laugh a gleaming fist made of aluminum foil bursts through the ground thus starting the final showdown
between mega_good and hyper_evil.

We Are the Strange is its own imaginative and immersive universe. M dot Strange spent three years painstakingly creating this film, using a range of animation techniques: traditional, stop-motion, computer, and his own unique blend of 8-bit graphics and anime, dubbed “Str8nime.” The stunning visuals are complemented by a soundtrack that is both beautiful and harrowing. The end result is a freaky technocarnival ride that climaxes with a momentous battle between innocence and darkness.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Jun 26, 2007, 11:17AM

Lucy and Jorge Orta

Antarctic Village

From February-March 2007, Antarctic Village – No Borders, was installed in Antarctica by the artists. They travelled from Buenos Aires aboard the Hercules KC130 flight on an incredible journey lasting several weeks. Taking place during the Austral summer, the ephemeral installation coincided with the last of the scientific expeditions before the winter months, before the ice mass becomes too thick to traverse. Aided by the logisitical crew and scientists stationed at the Marambio Antarctic Base situated on the Seymour-Marambio Island, (64°14Â’S 56°37Â’W), Jorge Orta scouted Antarctica by helicopter, searching for different locations for the temporary encampment of their 50 dome-shaped dwellings.

Antarctic Village is a symbol of the plight of those struggling to transverse borders and to gain the freedom of movement necessary to escape political and social conflict. Dotted along the ice, the tents formed a settlement reminiscent of the images of refugee camps we see so often reported about on our television screens and newspapers (official figures estimate that 141 foreigners have died trying to reach Spain in 2004, Human Rights claim the death toll was 289. 58 Chinese people discovered dead through dehydration by customs officers in the back of an articulated lorry in Dover UK in June 2000, etc., etc.)

Physically the installation Antarctic Village in Antarctica is emblematic of OrtasÂ’ body of work, composed of what could be termed modular architecture and reflecting qualities of nomadic shelters and campsites. The dwellings themselves are hand stitched together by a traditional tent maker with sections of flags from countries around the world, along with extensions of clothes and gloves, symbolising the multiplicity and diversity of people. Here the arm of face-less whitecollar workerÂ’s shirt hangs, there the sleeve of a childrenÂ’s sweater. Together the flags and dissected clothes emblazened with silkscreen motifs referencing the UN Declartion for Human Rights, make for a physical embodiment of a ‘Global Village’.

Antarctic Village – Metisse Flag: By way of calling the Orta Antarctic expedition to an end, the artists staged the first in a series of symbolic football games, ‘Heads or Tails, Tails or HeadsÂ’. Meteorologists, paleontologists and geologists from the Marambio Antarctic Base joined the Orta team to play a symbolic ‘All NationÂ’ match. The Metisse Flag and the Antarctic football shirts, created by the artists make it difficult to identify the adversary. The front and back of the players’ shirts are stitched together with different countriesÂ’ football team colours. The match mirrors human behaviour. Appearances are often deceiving. Someone we think is a friend may actually be playing against us, while a total stranger can surprise us with an act of solidarity. It is not appearances that count, but rather decisive actions in critical moments.

Also see:

Antarctic Village – No Borders, Expedition Tarpaulin
Antarctic Village – Dome Dwelling 5005 and more.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on May 23, 2007, 5:46PM