Pencil carvings

There's a collection of carved pencils at Infofreako. I particularly like how many of the carvings take advantage of the pencils' graphite core.

Ball-joint (variation of "chain"), Mizuta Tasogare, 1997

From p.125 of "Gyakusetsu Ronrigaku"
Conceived by Annno Mitsumasa, carved by Mizuta Tasogare
1991

Sidewards expansion, Mizuta Tasogare, 1997

These works remind me of Tom Friedman's obsessive sculptures. In particular his Untitled (1995) which is one continuous "loop" of pencils:



(And while we're on the subject of pencils, how about Tara Donovan's Colony (2006):


)


Also along the lines of the carved pencils are crayon carvings by Pete Goldust. The image below was featured on the cover of the Art Institute of Chicago's catalog circa 2001.

Art Olympics

[via Modern Art Notes]

David Colker at the LA Times has an article about when there were fine arts competitions in the Olympics:

The arts competition debuted at the 1912 Games in Stockholm where an American, Walter Winans, won the gold for sculpture. But he didn't stop there.

Winans also took silver in the 100-meter team running single shots competition, thus becoming the only Olympian in history to win both for sculpture and shooting.

. . .

At the 1932 L.A. Games, the arts component had 540 entries from 24 countries. No chants of "USA" accompanied the competition. Teams of judges quietly evaluated the works, all of which had to have a sports theme.

. . .

The arts competitions lasted until the 1948 Olympics in London. After that, there were arts festivals held in conjunction with the Games, but no Olympic medals were given.

The demise of the competitions came under the administration of the iron-fisted Avery Brundage, who became president of the International Olympic Committee in 1952. He championed amateurism and expressed doubts that many of the artists who had participated in the Games were pure nonprofessionals.

Stanton, an amateur historian from Aptos, Calif., who self-published his extensive history of the subject, said Brundage might have had an ulterior motive -- resentment.

"He had entered in the literature category twice," said Stanton, 65. "The best he got was an honorable mention."

Semi-related, an earlier posting about an art reality show competition.

Musician's "Friend"

This isn't the posting I was planning for today, so tune in again tomorrow and we'll be back on our regularly scheduled program of technology-based art.

Today, I'm sharing a letter I sent to a company called Musician's Friend:

To: comments@musiciansfriend.com, management@musiciansfriend.com

Hi, I'm a customer of musician's friend (in fact I have an order that I placed just the other day). I had a generally good impression of your company until this morning when I found that you had spammed my blog:

http://www.ethanham.com/blog/2008/08/dennis-havlenas-musical-instruments.html

Anyone who reads spams like these will question your company's integrity... It puts you into the same category as the folks who send out email spam about Viagra, Diploma Mills, & Nigerian Bank Embezzlement opportunities.

Sincerely,

Ethan Ham

I wasn't making it up about being a customer of theirs. If they were some random sleazy company I would have simply deleted their spam & cursed them silently... but the fact they're a company I do business with made me all the more disgusted.

It's important for our sanity that we make it clear that spam is not profitable. If you're so inclined, I'd suggest sending a quick email to the management and marketing of Musician's Friend letting them know how spamming sullies their reputation. Feel free to reference this blog.

Sachiko Kodama's ferrofluid sculptures

Sachiko Kodama's odd magnetic sculptures are included in a group kinetic sculpture show at Atlantic Botanical Gardens.

Morpho Tower, 2008, 18" x 23" x 23", steel, marble, ferrofluid and electronics

[via LeisureGuy]

Grand Theft Auto / Whoopi Goldberg mashup

On the way home from the subway today I saw this inadvertent(?) mashup of an old Grand Theft Auto mural advertisement with a new Whoopi Goldberg PSA billboard:

Cai Guo-Qiang Responds

Earlier, I wrote a short post about about the faked Olympic fireworks. Cai Guo-Qiang responds to the controversy in a letter on Artnet (prefaced by Artnet's summary of the events):

Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.

The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.

Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:

The explosion event Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games consisted of a series of 29 giant footprint fireworks -- one for each Olympiad -- over the Beijing skyline, leading to the National Olympic Stadium. The 29 footprints were fired in succession, traveling a total distance of 15 kilometers, or 9.3 miles, within a period of 63 seconds.

It is quite customary to prepare a backup reel for major televised events of this scale, and this has been true of the opening and closing ceremonies of previous Olympic Games. We were aware of this and thus created our own reel from dress rehearsal footage of the footprint fireworks. The sequence was then created using computer graphics.

From my own perspective as an artist, there are two separate realms in which this artwork exists, as two very different mediums have been utilized. First, there is the artwork that exists in the material realm: the ephemeral sculpture. This was viewed by people attending the ceremonies inside the stadium and standing outside on the streets of Beijing. This artwork was documented from various vantage points on video, which has been broadcast by many international media outlets.

Second, there is a creative digital rendering of the artwork in the medium of video. It is a single version of the event viewed by a large broadcast audience. Such a conceptual work can exist simultaneously in these two separate realms. And perhaps to also take Footprints of History into this second realm was necessary because in many of my explosion events, such as Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, the very best vantage point is not the human one.

CAI GUO-QIANG was director of visual and special effects at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

[via NEWSgrist]

Joe McKay's mapped vehicles

Joe McKay has created collaged images (ala David Hockney) of the the Google "steet view" van (top) and MapJack (a company that's emulating Google) from reflections of the vehicles in store windows.

Not familiar with Street View? Here a view of The New Museum being built. (Hint, click on the street arrows to move, click & drag to rotate).


View Larger Map

[via Rhizome]