Listing entries tagged with art

artist as blogger   01.31.2006, 11:50 AM

last spring we invited Alex Itin to be our first artist-in-residence at the institute. i first met Alex in the fall of 2000, during an art festival in Dumbo. he was set-up in a gallery painting portraits on pages of used books. i quite liked the paintings and got the perverse idea that it would be interesting to encourage someone who was using books in this way to work on an electronic book. i was working at Night Kitchen at the time. we had just released the beta version of TK3, the software we made for authoring and reading media rich electronic books. we lent Alex a Mac and he made his first electronic piece, Zoodoo - a series of paintings done on paperback pages which accompanied a beautiful Amiri Baraka poem. (if you first install the free TK3 Reader you can download Zoodoo from this page.) Alex kept experimenting and over time began animating the surface of his scanned-in paintings. while there has been a long history of filmmakers who painted on the surface of film, Alex was perhaps one of the first painters to integrate video into his paintings.

From "Self Portait" by Alex Itin

as a condition of his artist-in-residency we asked Alex to keep a blog in which we hoped he would write about his work as he did it. we were amazed after a few days to realize that alex was beginning to use the blog not as a way to talk about his work, but rather it was just another venue for his work. at first Alex posted paintings, drawings and photos sometimes with a text commentary. after a while he started to include animated gifs and sound. although the artist-in-residency ended almost a year ago, alex has been keeping up the blog. in fact, he's been on a creative tear the past few weeks. check out the last two entries -- the "thousand year crane" (be sure to start the music track) and the Chinese new year tree.

(disclaimer: i've been collecting Alex's work for six years now, so my interest in his success is not purely altruistic)

Posted by bob stein at 11:50 AM | Comments (6)
tags: Blogosphere , GIF , animation , art , blogging , brakhage , film , multimedia , net_art , painting

X_Reloaded.   01.24.2006, 4:43 PM

This is a bilingual (English/Spanish) post. Spanish version can be found lower down.

Santofile, uses "meme" to allude to creative freedom in the digital world. Meme is mimesis and is self-generating. It refers to mediation in the sense of remix and appropriation, to the mixing of works that circulate in the Internet in order to produce an original piece. Among Santofile's projects is X_Reloaded, an interpretation of the first chapter of Don Quixote, compiled from disparate works inspired by the fourth centennial of its publication.

They put together such diverse creators as William Burroughs and Adbusters, whose common context is precisely the idea of busting. Busting decontextualizes a piece (work of art, advertisement, text) causing it to lose its character as a static icon by giving it a new life inside a new context.

To choose Don Quixote as the text for X_Reloaded, is an allusion to the concept of remix per excellence. Cervantes appropriated chivalry novels with the intention to subvert the genre, and his final remix, decontextualized, is a unique and original work. Printing itself in Cervantes' times required a highly legible copy, which wasn't necessarily the original manuscript. Thus, the "original" was a copy made by one or more amanuenses. And from this "original" corrected by the author, a sort of predecessor of proofreading, the book was put together by the typesetter, with its consequent errata. It is interesting to note that the Spanish Royal Academy's edition of Don Quixote, that celebrates its fourth centennial, claims to be based on about a hundred editions, old and new. If this is not remix, what is?

Cervantes himself is absolutely aware of what he is doing, and of the subversive character of his action. When Don Quixote reads, we don't know who is the madman, him or the one who wrote this:

The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.

Don Quixote changed forever the way novels were written, and three centuries later, Borges' "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" would change forever the way one reads. Pierre Menard writes Don Quixote without ceasing to be Pierre Menard, demonstrating how it is possible to transform a text without altering a single word. Decontextualization was inaugurated.

Following that tradition, X_Loaded presents us jodi's map, images like, Olia Lialina's, the conceptual text of Jennny Holzer, or Rosa Llop's windmills.

With her windmills we have to say with Don Quixote, they are indeed giants.

X_Reloaded en español.

Santofile, usa el concepto de meme para aludir a libertad de creación en el mundo digital. Meme es mimesis y es autogenerador. Se refiere a mediación, en el sentido de remix, de mezclar apropiándose de trabajos de otros, generalmente trabajo digital que circula por la red, para a la vez producir una nueva obra original. Entre sus proyectos está X_Reloaded una interpretación del capítulo primero de El Quijote, que recoge obras dispares inspiradas por el cuarto centenario de su publicación.,

Se reúnen creadores tan disímiles como William Burroughs y Adbusters, cuyo contexto común sería precisamente la idea de romper, de volver trizas, que está en el seno mismo del verbo "to bust". Al descontextualizar lo que se quiere romper, se le roba permanencia como ícono estático y se le confiere nueva vida dentro de un nuevo contexto.

El escoger precisamente El Quijote como texto para X_Reloaded, es aludir al remix por excelencia. Cervantes se apropia de las novelas de caballería para subvertir el génro, y su remix final, al descontextualizarlas, es una obra única y original. La impresión misma del texto en tiempos de Cervantes, requería de una copia altamente legible, lo que no necesariamente era el manuscrito original. De ahí que el "original" eran una copia hecha por uno o más amanuenses. Y de ese "original"corregido por el autor, salía el libro, armado por el cajista, con sus consiguientes errores. Es interesante notar que la edición de la Real Academia Española, con motivo del cuarto centenario de El Quijote, es un "texto crítico de la obra constituido sobre la consulta de cerca de un centenar de ediciones antiguas y modernas". Si esto no es remix, ¿qué es?

Cervantes mismo es absolutamente consciente de lo que está haciendo, y del carácter subversivo de su acción. Cuando Don Qujiote lee no sabemos si es él el loco, o el que escribió esto:

La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura

El Quijote va a cambiar para siempre la manera como se escribe y tres siglos más tarde, "Pierre Menard autor del Quijote" de Borges, va a cambiar la manera como se lee. Pierre Menard escribe El Quijote sin dejar de ser Pierre Menard, demostrando cómo se transforma un texto sin cambiarlo, inaugurando la descontextualización.

Siguiendo esta tradición, X_Loaded nos presenta el mapa de jodi, imágenes como la de, Olia Lialina', el texto conceptual de Jennny Holzer, o los molinos de viento de Rosa Llop'. Y con ellos, tenemos que decir con Don Quijote, los molinos son en verdad gigantes. Rosa Llop. Y con ellos, tenemos que decir con Don Quijote, los molinos son en verdad gigantes.

Posted by sol gaitan at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Remix , art , bilingual , books , cervantes , decontextualization , don_quixote , literature , logo , net_art , spanish , windmill

IT IN place: muybridge meets typographic man   12.04.2005, 12:45 PM

Alex Itin, friend and former institute artist-in-residence, continues to reinvent the blog as an art form over at IT IN place. Lately, Alex has been experimenting with that much-maligned motif of the early web, the animated GIF. Above: "My Bridge of Words."

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Blogosphere , GIF , animation , art , blog , blogging , multimedia , net_art , painting , typography

electronic literature collection - call for works   11.03.2005, 12:35 PM

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the first Electronic Literature Collection. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted until January 31, 2006. Up to three works per author will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2006, is:

N. Katherine Hayles
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland

Go here for full submission guidelines.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
tags: art , digital_literature , e-literature , eliterature , fiction , hypertext , literature , multimedia , poetry , writing

google dystopia   10.10.2005, 10:06 AM

Google as big brother -- the paranoia certainly seems to be creeping into the mainstream. "Op-Art" by Randy Siegel from today's NY Times:

Posted by ben vershbow at 10:06 AM | Comments (0)
tags: 1984 , 2084 , Libraries, Search and the Web , NYTimes , Online , algorithm , art , cartoon , dystopia , editorial , google , information , internet , newspaper , orwell , paranoia , privacy , satire , search , technology , web

hacking nature   10.05.2005, 7:19 AM

Slate is trying something new with its art criticism: a new "gallery" feature where each month an important artist will be discussed alongside a rich media presentation of their work.

...we're hoping to emphasize exciting new video and digital art—the kind of art that is hard to reproduce in print magazines.

For their first subject, they don't push the print envelope terribly far (just a simple slideshow), but they do draw attention to some stunning work by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who (happily for us New Yorkers) has shows coming this week to the Brooklyn Museum and the Charles Cowles Gallery in Manhattan. Burtynsky documents landscapes bearing the mark of extreme human exploitation - the infernal streams flowing from nickel mines, junked ocean liners rusting in chunks on the beach, abandoned quarries ripe with algae in their cubic trenches, and an arresting series from recent travels through China's industrial belt.

These photographs carry startling information through the image-surplussed web. But Burtynsky disappoints in one vital, perhaps deciding, respect:

...his position on the moral and political implications of his work is studiously neutral. He doesn't point fingers or call for change; instead, he accepts industry's exploitation of the land as the inevitable result of modern progress. "We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet," he said in an interview in the exhibition catalog. "The entire 20th century has been a revving up of this large consumptive engine. It's not a question of whether we are going to stop consuming. It's not going to happen…"

As someone who believes that struggling to prevent (or at least mitigate) global ecological disaster should be the transcending narrative of our times, I find Burtynsky's detachment deeply depressing and self-defeating. His images glory in the sick beauty of these ravaged scenes, and the cultural consumers that will no doubt pay large sums for these photographs at his upcoming Chelsea show only compound the cynicism.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:19 AM | Comments (1)
tags: Burtynsky , Online , art , beautiful , brooklyn , china , crit , criticism , environment , exhibit , gallery , images , internet , journalism , magazine , museum , new_york , nickel , photo , photography , quarry , slate , web

making visible the invisible: george legrady installation at seattle central library   09.16.2005, 6:37 PM

A nice companion piece to the "database of intentions" is George Legrady's new installation, "Making Visible the Invisible," at the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library. Six large LED display panels suspended above the "mixing chamber" on the library's fifth floor display a series of visualizations depicting the circulation of library books and other media across time and classification area, providing "a real-time living picture of what the community is thinking."

KeyWord Map Attack

Legrady described the project at the Transliteracies conference this past June in Santa Barbara. At that time, Bob blogged:

the pinpoint accuracy of computer-searches, leaves those of us lucky enough to have spent time in library stacks, nostalgic for the unexpected discovery of something we didn't know we were looking for but which just happened, serendipitously, to be on a nearby shelf. George Legrady, artist and prof at UC Santa Barbara, just showed a project he is working on for the new public library in Seattle that gave the first glimpse of serendipity in online library searching which lets you see all the books that have recently been checked out on a particular subject. Beautiful and Exciting.

Vital Statistics

Floating Titles

Dot Matrix Rain

Other observations:

"New piece for Central Library pushes art to the technical edge" in Seattle Post Intelligencer

Information Aesthetics profile

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , architecture , art , book , books , circulation , datavisualization , georgelegrady , infovis , infoviz , installation , koolhaas , legrady , library , public , reading , remkoolhaas , sculpture , seattle , visualization

light reading   12.17.2004, 3:49 PM

"The Book as Object and Performance exhibition (through January 22 @ Gigantic Art Space in New York, curated by Sara Reisman) presents work by over 20 artists, each using the book as a point of departure to explore the physical, sensual or conceptual dimension of reading and the written word.

But despite lofty ambitions, the exhibit provides little more than light reading. Though several works are visually arresting, few do more than glide over the potentially bottomless themes at hand. Most stick to playful reorganization of materials: a pile of wooden hoops culling newspaper headlines from around the globe; a precarious tower of books with a gaping acid-chewed hole at the top; a doorway filled with crumpled sheets of paper; a dictionary with words dislocated from their definitions. A collection of small, easily forgotten pleasures.

An exception to this is a mysterious piece titled "Perseverance" by Jenny Perlin consisting of a small, worn book in a glass case, above which plays a strange film of man battling anxiety, chewing his nails to the quick. Also memorable was a one-night-only "reading" of the ten commandments by Polish-born artist Maciej Toporowicz, a piece first performed in communist Poland in 1980, and part of small program of live explorations last night, filling out the "performance" part of the equation. The gallery lights are extinguished and Toporowicz takes his place in front of an illuminated glass bowl of water, perched atop an open Bible. He places his face in the water, as though reading through the aqueous medium, and remains there long enough for the audience to start imagining.. what? That he is drowning in this sacred, much-abused text? That he is drawing impossible sustenance from its power? He begins to twitch and tremble. Finally his head rips up out of the water, gasping.

The photo above shows bottles containing philosophical texts that have been literally chewed up and spit out. Click below to see more pictures from the exhibition...

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
tags: The Performing Book , art , book , book_craft , books , conferences_and_excursions , exhibition , gallery , manhattan , new_york

the book as object and performance - exhibit in New york   12.15.2004, 5:59 PM

"The Book as Object and Performance is an exhibition of artworks that takes the format of the book as a point of departure to deconstruct that which is bound up in text, image and the physicality of books."

Through January 22 @ Gigantic Art Space

*Plus: tomorrow night, in conjunction with the exhibition!
Thursday, December 16, 6-8pm: an evening of performances by AUX (Reynard Loki and Christopher Shores), Joseph A. Fish, Jesal Kapadia, Pia Lindman, and Maciej Toporowicz..

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:59 PM | Comments (0)
tags: The Performing Book , art , book , book_craft , conferences_and_excursions , exhibition , gallery , history_of_the_book , manhattan , new_york