Black & White Gallery's call for artists

The B&W Gallery's Williamsburg project space has a call for project proposals. The deadline is May 31st.

Black and White Project Space seeks site-specific exhibition proposals of high artistic merit that use diverse mediums in innovative ways to be presented in our Williamsburg location in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009. All proposals will be reviewed by May of 2008, and artists will be notified by early summer of 2008.

Black & White Gallery's mission is to cultivate promising artists in the initial and more advanced phases of their careers exploring contemporary themes and concepts through multiple mediums. In addition to developing its core program in Chelsea, Black & White Project Space presents ambitious site-specific work at the Williamsburg location.

Award Criteria
Criteria used to select proposals include the following:
1) Intellectual and artistic merit in the proposed project
2) Extent of interplay between the indoor and outdoor spaces
3) Feasibility of the project under sponsorship of the Black & White Gallery
4) Extent of interdisciplinary activity
6) Presence of matching funds (indicate amount)

camouflaged people

Desiree Palmen is a Dutch artist who is doing interesting work with camouflage (see here and here).

In 2002 Arno van Roosmalen wrote about her work (translated by Laurie Halsey Brown):

Concern about the increasing use of identity based electronic information systems and the frequent use of surveillance cameras is one of the impulses for Desiree Palmen to create her work, which uses camouflage, as it's main focus. In photo works, videos and site-specific actions, she explores the possibilities of letting people 'dissolve' into their surroundings or to let them disapaer against the background. The manipulation of clothing plays a crucial role. A shirt covers the body and then extends to cover the tabletop, confusing the contour of the body of the person wearing the shirt with the table itself. In another work, a suit is painted in such a way that when the model is in a very specific position, he/she disappears into the background. Palmen then takes pictures of these situations she creates from the ideal viewing perspective for het audience. In the actual situation, if the viewer moved one step away from this ideal view, then the function of the camouflage seizes to exist.

[via Boing-Boing]

The story of Arthur the Rat

Check out this work by Christopher at supercentral.

[via Rhizome]

feelings

We Feel Fine is an interesting data visualizing project with a heart that comes by way of Harrell Fletcher.

From the We Feel Fine website:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Art In General: Call for new proposals

Art In General has an open call for new proposals from artists living within 50 miles of NYC. The deadline is March 31st, 11:59 EDT.

Details here

Absolut sound sculptures

Absolut Vodka has sponsored two sound art installations: Absolut Quartet in NYC and Absolut Choir in Stockholm. Both installation are interactive via the web.

I have mixed feelings about corporate sponsorship of art. It is helping artists create and promote their artworks (and corporate sponsorship of museum exhibits has certainly become common-place). But imposing the vodka's name on the artwork's titles seems too intrusive to me. At least it isn't as obnoxiously promotional as some corporate art events.

Absolut Quartet (see video above) is the more interesting of the two works. It seems inspired by the Animusic "Pipe Dream" computer animation (see below), which became an urban legend (claiming that "Pipe Dream" was a physical sculpture).

[Via Make]

Art:21 is looking for bloggers

Art:21 is looking for a couple of bloggers. It's a paid positions that starts with a contract to write five blogs a week for three months. Sounds like a great opportunity!

More details here

David Troy at the MoMA

David Troy's Twittervision and Flickrvision projects opened at the MoMA this week as part of an exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind.

From the show's website:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale.

Dave's projects maps in near-real-time people's Twitter announcements and uploads to the Flickr photo sharing site. (Anyone interested in art based upon Flickr should also check out my Self-Portrait, Anthroptic, and Mirror projects).

Vanity ring

Under the theory that Google hits count are more precious than gold in an information society, this ring allows you to show off your notabilty/nobility.

The artist, Markus Kison, has the ring's utility program do a simple Google search on the wearer's name. Unfortunately, this could give a false impression of the user's Internet reputation. For example, I'm not the only artist named Ethan Ham... there's also a photographer Ethan Ham who lives in Austin. I do occasionally wonder how often people looking for one of us finds the other.

Something like Career Distinction (thanks to my dad for that link) might work better when calculating the Google hits for the ring. My rating is 8.8 out of 10 (based on my goal of being "VP, Highly-regarded Consultant or Acknowledged Thought Leader"). What's your score?

Every possible random number

Recently I was kicking around the idea of calculating and storing every possible series of random numbers. Possessing every random number seems comforting... sort of the same feeling as having just done a load of laundry and every piece of your clothes is clean and folded in a dresser.

Isn't the number of random number series infinite? Not on computers. Computers use formulas to generate series of random numbers and those formulas have limitations (usually stemming from the default maximum integer value for the operating system).

Because the random numbers are created using formulas, they're more correctly referred to as pseudorandom.

When using a pseudorandom number generator, programmers prime the pump by providing it a seed value. The seed is an arbitrary number (most often the current time) and is the source of unpredictability for the number generator. A series of random numbers created by a pseudorandom number generator (using a particular seed value) will begin repeating within 2ⁿ-1 results (where n is the bit size of the seed number). A Sony PS3 console runs at 218 gigaFLOPS—i.e, 218 billion floating-point operations per second. Assuming a 32-bit seed value and 100 floating-point operations for each generated pseudorandom number, a PS3 could run through the entire series of random numbers associated with a particular seed in 1.97 seconds. A 32-bit number has 4,294,967,295 possible seeds values (again, 2ⁿ-1 where n is 32), so it would take 268 years for a single PS3 to go through every possible series of random numbers.

Still with me?

It occurred to me that using distributed computing (where many people allow me to use a bit of their computers' processing power) it would be possible to calculate every series of random numbers in a reasonable amount of time (perhaps a year or two, depending on how many people were participating in the project). However, there's the problem of storage.

Assuming the generated random numbers can have up to 5 digits, each number would require 17-bits of storage. So the storage space would be (using hard drive manufacturer's standard of expressing storage size in powers of 10 rather than powers of 2):

17 [bits] * 2³²-1 [seeds] * 2³²-1 [length of series]
/ (8 [bytes] * 1000 [KB] * 1000 [MB] * 1000 [GB] * 1000 [TB])

So, unfortunately, such a project would require 3.92 * 10⁷ terabytes... that's just not possible. I'm sure before too long that sort of storage will be possible & affordable, but by then 64-bit operating systems will be the standard, so the number of seeds and the length of the number series increase to 2⁶⁴-1.

Oh well.

Art reality show

A contemporary art reality show is in the works... it's a collaboration between the company that does Project Runway and Sarah Jessica Parker's production company. Though I've only seen a few episodes, I like Project Runway--I think there's a lot to be learned from the way Tim Gunn's critiques. But based on the Variety announcement, this contemporary art project sounds ill-conceived.

From Variety:

Potential skein would pit a dozen aspiring artists against one another, following the group as they attempt to produce various kinds of artwork -- from painting and photography to sculpting and industrial design. Pieces would be rated by a panel of judges, as well as by the contestants themselves.

Being a good contemporary artist has little to do with being able to bounce from medium to medium. I think the challenges should mainly focus on the artists addressing a particular topic in whatever medium they choose. It would be interesting, perhaps, to have one challenge which was required to be in 2D and one that must be sculptural (or maybe an installation). It would also be interesting to have a challenge where the artists have to do a public art proposal--with the winning one actually getting the commission. But to require sculptors to paint and painters makes videos? That's just silly.

I'm also concerned about this little tidbit to counter the point the viewers might not be interesting in contemporary art:

Lipsitz added that art is "something we consume every day... whether it's your favorite coffee mug, an ad in a magazine or a mural you drive by on the way to work."

Lipsitz's examples seem more about design than contemporary art (as does the fact industrial design is going to be one of the challenges). This seems to suggest not being in tune with what contemporary art is all about. I'd much rather hear an acknowledgment that is going to be challenging and that the audience's engagement will greatly depend on the judges and experts giving context.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend applying for this show (unless they revamp their approach). But if you must, keep your eye on Magic Elves Inc's webpage.

[via MTAA]

Click!

Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click!explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

The Brooklyn Museum's upcoming Click! exhibition sounds interesting. The museum has an open call for photo submissions with the theme of Changing Faces of Brooklyn. The general public will be asked to rate the photos (and their own knowledge of art). Finally the photos are installed in the museum based on their rankings with a breakdown of how different groups evaluated the same photo. The results will be analyzed and discussed by experts in the fields of art, online communities, and crowd theory.

One Million Random Digits

In my research I came across references to the Rand Corporation's A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. It's a 600 page tome of random numbers for use in scientific and mathematical research (for example, running a simulation might require rigorously random numbers). It's available for free online or as a paper back book (it was original published in hardback in 1955).

Out of idle curiosity, I checked Amazon to see if it's available as a reprint, and sure enough it is... and there are 97 reviews of it. For example:

Sloppy., July 27, 2005

By	B. MCGROARTY (United States) - See all my reviews

The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever algorithm they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly.

and

The most amazing book I have ever come across, January 16, 2005

By	Jamie R. Wilson (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews

A truly amazing genre-breaking work of art unlike any that has ever been or ever will. I was captivated from the moment I opened the cover until the extremely suspenseful moment I turned the last page. With that said, I was a little disappointed that 71602 was knocked off by 92937 just as the plot was unfolding, but the arrival of 96240 really got my blood pumping and I just couldn't put the book down from that moment on.

I am so glad that Amazon.com is offering the "Search Inside This Book" option for this book so that it can be enjoyed by countless other avid readers who otherwise may not have come across it. I wait, impatiently, for the audio CD version of this fine book.

A more serious review is available here.

Why I blog

I began blogging in November because I decided I was going to have my graduate sculpture class blog, and I thought I better have some experience in it before making it a class requirement.

The difference blogging has made in the daily average of visits to my website is quite striking. That dip in December corresponds to me slacking a bit (I only wrote 5 posts during that month) due to the distraction of the holidays.

I'm sure that the writing has clarified my thoughts (the chapter I'm writing on "Randomness, Chance, & Art" has really deepened my thinking on the topic), but I think the greatest value in the blog is helping raise my artistic profile.

The Way Things Go

My earlier mention of art being co-opted for commercials made me think about the Honda's Cog commercial that borrowed heavily from Peter Fischli & David Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) (1987).

Here's an excerpt from Fischli & Weiss's 30 minute film:


And here's the car commercial which, according to Snopes, took 606 takes (and 6 million dollars) to make:

Musical tables

I'm gearing up to do a series of acoustic artworks and have been looking at what is out there. Golan Levin's Scrapple (2005) is quite cool:



Surprising similiar to Scrapple is the Reactable (see video below) which was developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. Since the two projects came out at almost the same time, it seems they the artist/developers simply came up with similar ideas independently, with a couple of notable differences.

Scrapple's table acts as a score and objects placed on it are interpreted into sound chronologically, whereas the Reactable is more amorphous in terms of how objects' sounds relate to time. Also, the Reactable has specific objects that are dedicated for generating or manipulating particular sounds, whereas Scrapple will interpret any object placed upon it (which seems particularly interesting to me). I suspect that the Reactable is more flexible in the sounds it can create, while Scrapple is more intuitive in its usage.

MFA Bloggers

I'm teaching a graduate sculpture course this term... I've asked my students to start and keep active a blog for the term as a way of building lines of communication to the greater art world. Here are their blogs... they're definitely worth checking out!

ArtLook (Seung Ae Kim)
JangSoonNation (Jang Soon)
Rachel Jobe
Rebel Pebble (Elena Stojanova)
REcord (Shani Peters)

Yukinori Yanagi's flags

I'm heading out to vote in Super-duper Tuesday's primary and am feeling a bit political... so today's posting are about Yukinori Yanagi's ant farm flags. Above is The World Flag Ant Farm (1990) which consists of 170 ant farms, each of which has its sand in the configuration of a nation's flag. Over the course of the exhibition, the ants shift the sand around and build a nest.

This Japanese flag is from Asia-Pacific Ant Farm (1990) in which provides the ants a tube pathway between the flags of Asian-Pacific countries.


This last image is Studies in American Art: Three Flags (2000). I imagine most of my readers recognize the homage to Jasper Johns's Three Flags.

frozen in grand central

This is a performance art by Improv Everywhere.

This kind of crowd happening has been co-opted for advertisements. For example, the anti-smoking Truth campaign and the more venal cel phone commercial where 20-somethings use their cel phones to coordinate invading a supermarket and taking slingshot rides down the aisles... a bastardization that changes the performances from something intended to give the accidental spectators a surreal experience into a destructive, self-centered joy-ride.

[via boingboing]

Help save Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty is in danger of being harmed by oil drilling development. Read more about it here.

Contact the state of Utah in protest of the development. The letters and calls they have received seems to be having an impact. Add your voice!

If you want to send a letter of protest to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling, the emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Please refer to Application # 8853. Every letter makes a big difference, they do take a lot of notice and know that publicity may follow. Since the Spiral Jetty has global significance, emails from foreign countries would be of special value.

[via Modern Art Notes]

Complexification

Complexification is an interesting (and well designed) site that I found via Make Magazine's blog. It is a gallery of generative artworks done in the Processing programming language by Jerry Tarbell. If you check it out, be sure you not only view the static images but also launch the applets so that you can trigger Tarbell's generative algorithms and see new artworks being formed.

A thought that has been in the back of my head lately is how New Media art often seems to be automatically considered Contemporary. But that isn't always the case... for example, generative art (such Tarbell's) is often focused on formal aesthetics in a way that I'd characterize as Modern.

I suppose the temporal names all these art categories have (new, contemporary, modern) does nothing to help clarify... Many, many people (including those who should know better) seem to think that Contemporary refers to a time period (i.e., art being made today is Contemporary because it is contemporary). But that's not really any more true than all art today is Modern because we're modern. Post-Modernism seems to confound as well... more than once it's been argued to me that there can never be another art movement because everything that comes after Modernism will be post-modern (I usually counter by pointing out by the same logic we're all making Post-Impressionist art). And of course the cherry on top is the Pre-Raphaelites who were founded 300 years after Raphael's death.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia currently has a particular bad definition of Contemporary Art. I spent a week or two discussing it with the folks who edit the entry... I managed to convince them to mention the idea that Contemporary doesn't not simply mean "art made today." But overall, the entry tries to describe the movement as a moment in time. For example:

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day.

The idea of outsider art always makes me a bit queasy. I find the category patronizing and overly focused on the human-interest aspect of the artists' lives (i.e., the artist is insane, has a low IQ, a murderer, etc.). Oddly, while I agree most "Outsider Art" isn't Contemporary Art (because the intention behind the art isn't really Contemporary), faux-Outsider Art (which is Contemporary) was a fad for a few years recently. If this seems wrong-headed, consider this... a child's scrawling might be reminiscent of of Picasso or a Pollock, but that doesn't mean the child is a Modern artist (because the child isn't trying to address Modern concerns).