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Hasan Elahi ran into some trouble with the FBI in 2002 (they thought he was a terrorist) and ever since, he’s been voluntarily tracking his movements and putting the whole thing online: photos of meals, photos of toilets used, airports flown out of, credit card receipts, etc. His goal is to flood the market with information, so it devalues the information that the authorities have on him.
The Brian Eno/Will Wright session kicked things off quite well at PopTech. Lots of interesting stuff to say about this one, but I quickly wanted to highlight two things that Eno and Wright said independently in their presentations. Eno:
Art is created by artists so that the viewer has the opportunity to create something.
Later, Wright said in relation to games:
The real game is constructed in the player’s head.
Eno started his presentation by wondering about a overall system for describing culture, from high to low. He and Wright may be onto something here in that respect.
77 Million Paintings, a generative artwork by Brian Eno. “Work that continues to create itself in your absence.”
Netlag: infovisualization of the world made of exterior web cams over time. So as the day goes on, you can see Europe light up, then the eastern seaboard of the US, then the western US, and so on.
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich’s piece showed him that:
1. You don’t need much.
2. The composer’s role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener’s brain.
I’d never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I’d seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel’s show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich’s concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses’ track Sweet Child O’Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song’s music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He’s veered away from video games, but Cory’s new work is looking really interesting these days.
Thoughtful review of the Picasso and American Art show currently on at the Whitney.
Update: Nora Ephron was present at the accidental violation of Ms. Marie-Therese Walter by Wynn and tells her story on Huffington Post. (via zach)
A collection of artists each picked a page from The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book and “colored” them in. (thx, gk)
Painting and painting and repainting art works on a wall for a week. (Make your own timelapse movies with Gawker.)
Facadeprinter is a paint gun that prints images on the wall from 20 feet away. See also the opening credits of the A-Team.
Photographs of female anatomy for artists, just in case you don’t have the resources to hire live nude models. Male anatomy photos available here. NSFW.
Museum camouflage photographs by Harvey Opgenorth. (via nick baum)
Chris Spurgeon reports on an “astonishing art installation” going on right now in London called Bridge by Michael Cross. It’s a flooded church with carefully placed stones that let you walk on water across the room.
“From September 27th - October 21 the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators will host ‘30 Years of Fantagraphics,’ a retrospective art exhibition of over 100 pieces of original art published by the Seattle underground giant.” Artists in the exhibition include Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Robert Crumb.
If you asked me today to choose a medium in which to focus my future artistic energies, I’d have to go with the photo can. After finding this great Photojojo tutorial yesterday on using tin cans and glass jars as photo frames, I selected three recent pictures I’d taken and made this can triptych:
So cool! And simple too. I didn’t follow Photojojo’s directions exactly and I have a few observations to offer for those looking to play around with this:
Good luck!
Barnaby Furnas’ “flood” paintings are quite impressive in person…check them out at the Boesky Gallery in Chelsea through Oct 18. Their sheer size and the degree to which their creation must have been out of the artist’s control is intriguing.
Tough art history quiz: who did ths painting…an elephant, an artist, or a preschooler? I play a similar game when I go to contemporary art museums: art or fire extinguisher? (via cyn-c)
Photos of a piece by artist Sharon Baker, a full-sized replica of herself made of dough and then baked. At the show she cut it up and served herself to guests. (An obvious move with a name like Baker.)
On TV tonight: Ric Burns documentary on Andy Warhol. Part 2 tomorrow night.
Update: NY Times piece on the Warhol documentary.
Update: The Nation has some thoughts on the doc as well.
Profile of Michel Gondry, director of the upcoming The Science of Sleep. An exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Manhattan accompanies the film’s opening. View some of Gondry’s short work (commercials, music videos) on YouTube.
Old news, but the copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen two years ago from an Oslo museum has been recovered. M&M’s will honor their offer of 2 million M&M’s for the safe recovery of the painting. No word on whether the reward was responsible for the recovery.
Stolen mobile phone + automatic upload of the thief’s photos to Flickr = art project. (thx, stewart)
Mars, Inc. is offering a reward of 2 million dark chocolate M&M’s for the safe return of The Scream, the Edvard Munch painting stolen from a museum in Norway in 2004. Mmmm….Munch. (via girlhacker)
BMW commercial featuring the beautiful kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen, who I covered previously on kottke.org. (via poptech)
The web site for the Marianne Boesky Gallery is a bit behind the times, so it doesn’t yet have the information for Barnaby Furnas’ upcoming show of his work from September 15 to October 14. The show will include his recent “flood” paintings; here’s a representative piece from the Saatchi Gallery:
Furnas’ huge flood paintings are created using a technique called “the pour”, detailed in a New Yorker article from earlier this year:
Furnas started at the high end of the canvas, not pouring but slathering on water-based Mars Black with sweeps of a wide brush. He switched to a dark red, laying it down quickly, and sometimes flinging it out in Pollock-like arcs. Sarah and Jared went into action with plastic spritz bottles, spraying water on the paint to make it spread and flow down the inclined plane. Boesky, equipped with a bottle of her own, followed their lead. The canvas began to look like a river of blood, dark and murky at the bottom, shading to a brighter and more lurid red in the middle. It was happening very fast, and changing from one second to the next-streaks of different red combining and separating, and running down to the lower end, where they dripped off the canvas into pails and other receptacles. After fifteen minutes, the whole midsection of the canvas was covered.
His Hamburger Hill piece at the 2004 Whitney Biennial was one of my favorites there, so I’ll definitely be checking out this new show.
One of the three statues on the top of the Washburn Lofts in Minneapolis unwittingly represents the period in the city’s history when it led the world in the production of prosthetic limbs. See also The Mill City Museum. (thx, paul)
Sketchbook of every piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art. $20.
A collection of posters and promotional art from the films of Stanley Kubrick. This Clockwork Orange poster is one of my favorites; I have a copy hanging in my apartment.
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