Category Archives: Art

Babble on

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In the Information Age, the flow of IP (Internet Protocol) data between locations is nearly ubiquitous. Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow.

A beautiful hyperreal depiction of telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world, visualized by the art project, New York Talk Exchange (produced by MIT’s Sensible City Lab). The project wants to know: “How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?”

Truth is, like a robin attracted to shiny objects, I was magnetized by the stunning imagery. But as I look at the project’s goals, it’s not clear to me what the benefit of this visualization is other than to reinforce the notion that NYC is the communications hub of the world and that people, ho-hum, make long distance calls. But there is this little tidbit:

As Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen, author of the book “Global Cities,” details in the NYTE project catalog, “The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally.”

PS Note the sponsor (AT&T). Hmmm, makes all that spying seem like an innocent mistake.

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Television delivers people

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One of the best things I like about watching this version of Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s “Television Delivers People” (1973) is the distortion of an old video tape from broadcast TV. This video inspired a show currently running at The Whitney:

Television Delivers People
on view December 12, 2007 – February 17, 2008

Television Delivers People brings together single-channel video works from the 1970s to the present that examine how an individual viewer is shaped by television’s structure and content. These videos also suggest the possibility of an active approach to viewing which remains relevant even as the physical experience of viewing changes. The exhibition takes its title from Richard Serra’s video Television Delivers People (1973), which pairs a Muzak soundtrack with a scrolling list of statements describing the manipulative strategies and motivations of corporate advertisers imbedded in television. Works from the late 1970s and early ’80s by Dara Birnbaum and Joan Braderman extend Serra’s media critique by using strategies of appropriation to deconstruct specific television genres and programs. Videos by Michael Smith and Alex Bag adopt a performative approach in responding to television, acting out characters whose lives are shaped by cable and its endless programming choices. The exhibition also includes videos by a number of young artists who have created experimental narratives reflective of a dense internet culture, where diverse content from television, film, and music is immediately accessible and available for manipulation and response. Curator: Gary Carrion-Murayari

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My Country of Illusion

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I have a side project, My Country of Illusion, which has been ongoing for about ten years with my music and artistic collaborator, Barnmaster Scud. Last summer T.Foley from the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM invited us to be guest artists for the day. Her students made this fun little video for the track, “Dreaming America,” from our album, American Dream Life.

Trust the art, not the artist

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Absolute-Times

Absolute Vodka is running a campaign about what a more perfect world might be like. In this version Times Square is filled with paintings instead of ads. It’s easy to pick on Absolute because the subtext of most alcohol ads is that in a perfect world you are an alcoholic and no one will judge you for it (alcoholics, though a minority of the population, buy the most alcohol, so they are the primary demographic). This ad illustrates this principle perfectly because it is the bottle of Absolute that delivers us to this Utopic place. (Bag News Notes has more links to the other versions of the campaign)

More interesting to me is how the misperception that art and advertising inhabit different worlds is represented in the ad. It’s true that they are products of different micro systems of production, but art and advertising are similar in that they simultaneously promote particular worldviews. They are both the “propaganda” of their times. When Benjamin argued that mass media art lacked an “aura,” he saw potential for good and bad, the good being that aesthetics would be available to a wider audience, bad because of the potential for aesthetics to be in the service of war, as was the case with the Nazis. In any case, art historically is part of system of production and economics, and if not, it is in dialog with those forces. The Absolute ad appeals to a false sense of idealism that we would be better served by art than ads. I would like to agree with this sentiment, but after spending considerable time in the Vatican Museums, my sense is that in the old system of patronage, art served the vision of the Church, which to my cynical mind is a kind of business, too. Anything that involves the public is going to take money, and those who control the purse strings often will have the say as to what does and doesn’t get seen. In non-European systems, the situation is much different. If there is no word for art, for example, there is no concept of it in the sense that we think of art being separate from daily activity. Where did we make a wrong turn?

Not to generalize, but I think there are some examples of art that transcend economics. The few that come to mind are graffiti and street art, but even in those cases they can be a kind of advertising and branding, albeit for a different audience.

I’m not trying to be a downer here, but trying to elucidate some of our contradictory beliefs concerning the difference between advertising and art. There is one huge distinction, though, and that is the intention behind the creation. If we want to get to the crux of the issue, I’d start there.

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Long live the Bagonuat!

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Bagonaut

Conscious Choice: The Anti-plastic, Super Fantastic Ecohero:

On the eighth of September, Egan Sanders — a self-proclaimed “Yankee Jew Intellectual” living in conservative West Texas — was dropped into the world’s largest reusable shopping bag, via crane. 24 hours later, “Bagonuat” — Sander’s canvas-space-suit-clad alter ego — emerged, having successfully shown the world (or at least the San Angelo Sam’s Club parking lot) that there’s a better answer to the paper or plastic question.

During the 24-hour lockdown in BigBag1, Bagonaut oversaw the distribution of over 1200 reusable shopping bags to San Angelo residents, who in turn donated 4,026 pounds of food for a local food-bank. CC caught up with Bagonaut on the tail of his victorious mission for a closer look at how the superhero plans to revitalize eco-activism.

Right-brained astronaut art

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Bean-Painting
Astronaut Alan Bean’s paintings make the moon look like New Mexico (link)

Cosmic Log : The right-brained astronaut:

“To do art well, you’ve got to be kind of holistic and look at everything at once,” Bean said. “It’s different. You don’t stay alive as an astronaut or a pilot looking at everything at once. You better be a serial kind of guy.”

If you have been following my previous posts about the right- and left-brain, then you’ll appreciate this article about Alan Bean, one of 12 earth beings to walk on the moon (that we know of, at least). In the interview he talks about his post-astronaut career as a painter and the different functions of the brain. In essence, you need your left-brain to operate a spacecraft, but the right-brain to paint it.

I’m not much of an art critic, but there is something intriguing about Bean’s paintings. If you click here you can see some of the work (though I warn you the Website is a huge, disorganized mess– so much for rocket science!). My mental map of the moon has always been through photography, so I find the paintings to have a psychological quality that is quite different and strangely religious, displaying both a love for the moon, but for science as well.

The painterly style is reminiscent of cowboy art, something as a punk rock youth I totally abhorred, but in my sunset years I have come to appreciate. Bean’s landscapes are like the New Mexico desert, extending the wild frontier myth to space. Like cowboy art, these images portray fairly mundane activities that are designed to foreground the environment. In the above image humans look rather small.

On his Website he states that acrylics are space age:

Bean prefers to paint his motifs with acrylics, because acrylics are as high tech as his subjects. Although developed in the 19th century, acrylics occurred first on the art scene during the beginning space age and are the most important innovation in artistic materials since the invention of oil paints.

Additionally, “the base layer of all of his paintings contain small pieces of his space suit and the command module and also very small amounts of Moon dust.”

He covers his painting surfaces with acrylic modeling paint so he can put a space boot print on the surface along with imprints of the geology hammer he used on his mission. So not only does he make representations of the moon, the paintings themselves become the moon and the record of his experience. Way cool!

Bean-Ourworldatmyfingertips

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A haunting tale of mental illness, video art and suicide

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On July 10 blogger and multimedia artist Theresa Duncan took her life. A few days later her soul mate Jeremy Blake stripped his clothes off and entered the ocean never to return. Both were video game designers, Blake was an established video artist, his video for Beck shown above. The Newsweek story below touches upon the link between technology and mental illness that sometimes manifests in disastrous ways. The more interesting angle is the creeping paranoia towards the end of their lives that they were being sabotaged by Scientologists, perhaps triggered by the project for Beck (who is a Scientologist).

I wouldn’t go so far as to blame the media for this sad story, though I’m sure many have considered it (there is a hint of the wagging finger in the Newsweek story), but am interested because the strangest part is how the couple lives on within the digital realm. This confirms what some (such as Mary Ann Doane) have written about concerning the subconscious motive of our civilization to create media: so we can capture death and contingency in order to escape life’s impermanence. Of this I’m certain: Duncan and Blake will be immortalized by film, for this story has the perfect intrigue of a noire script. But the screenwriter will most certainly have to omit Scientology from the script; otherwise it will never appear in a theater near you (or a small box on your computer screen for that matter). Maybe Twain was right when he said the only thing certain is death and taxes, but we can add to the list as well that our digital apparitions will be eternalized as long as we still have electricity.
Duncan’s digital remains: Wit of the Staircase

For a more literary take, read this article.

Art, Technology and Death: A Love Story – Newsweek Society – MSNBC.com:

For some, technology and mental illness have long been thought to exist in a kind of dark symbiosis. Blake and Duncan’s case follows a long history that began when the electric age upended daily life with baffling, complex innovations. The first victim is believed to have been James Tilley Matthews, an 18th-century British merchant who thought France planned to take over England with a mind-controlling magnetic machine using technology developed by Frank Mesmer—from whom the word “mesmerized” is derived. More recently, the introduction of television inflamed the minds of patients who believed that their TVs were watching them or broadcasting secrets about their lives. In this regard, the Web is especially powerful. “The condition of being super-social and super-isolated at the same time is an Internet-era kind of thing,” says Fred Turner, a media historian at Stanford University, who speculates that as Blake and Duncan withdrew from friends, “their only reality check left was the wisps of information on their computer screens. And unfortunately, that isn’t a very powerful check.”

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