Free museums

Last weekend I was in Baltimore and stopped by the Baltimore Museum of Art for lunch and to take peak at their Cone Collection (an amazing collection of Matisses, Cézannes, Gauguins, and Picassos).

I had forgotten that the BMA recently instituted a free-admission policy and amused the folks at the reception desk by presenting my Americian Association of Museums card and requesting free admission.

I was really struck by how nice it is that the BMA has free admission. In terms of cost to me, it makes little difference (with the AAM card I can get myself, and usually 2-4 guests, free admission to most museums)... even so, I found the experience all the more pleasant. Their entrance to the museum seems much more inviting--it's no longer intended to keep people from entering the museum (unless they pay).

When I first went to Europe, in my early twenties, I was surprised that their museums had an admission fee (at the time it seemed inexcusably rapacious to me). I had lived in D.C. off and on for many years and didn't realize that the Smithsonian's free admission was unusual.

I think that any museum that costs a family more than a movie matinée needs to rethink its mission.

One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

The Brooklyn Museum has a interesting online exhibit of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It features several ways to sort and browse through the images and the ability to magnify the images and really see the prints' details. Very nicely done!

MTAA's One Year Performance (aka samHsiehUpdate)

Last week I posted about Tehching "Sam" Hsieh's one year performances. The art collaborative MTAA did a web-based update of Hsieh's first performance ("The Cage Piece," 1978-1979). That performance consisted of Hsieh living in a cage he built in his Tribeca loft. He stayed in the cage for a year without reading, writing, watching tv, talking, etc. His meals were delivered and his excrement was taken out in a bucket. He had occasional (once or twice a month) scheduled days were the public could come and view the performance.

MTAA's introduction to their 1 year performance video commissioned & hosted by Turbulence.org:

We, M.River & T.Whid, ask that you view a 1 year performance video, to begin today, March 26, 2008.

We shall seal images of ourselves in images of our studio, seemingly in solitary confinement inside seemingly identical images of cell-like rooms measuring 10ft x 10ft x 10ft.

We seemingly shall not converse, listen to the radio or watch television, until -- after you have viewed them for one year -- we unseal our images.

We shall appear to have food every day.

Our friend the web site, www.turbulence.org, will facilitate this piece by serving our images to the World Wide Web.

Please login (upper right) to begin viewing.

MTAA's performance is a reversal... the artists are on a looped video that the viewer is asked to watch for a year. The project's introduction page has a "leader board" of top viewers:

1. sashamaslansky
   310 days, 12h 43m 0s
2. register
   294 days, 14h 26m 0s
3. sheeppower
   285 days, 22h 13m 0s
4. endtime34
   251 days, 6h 24m 0s
5. rickerby
   241 days, 0h 7m 0s

People who watch for an entire year receive a reward of the data associated with the project:

Once the piece is viewed for one year, you the viewer are eligible to receive a unique collection of "art data" contained in 2 separate XML documents. At this point you the viewer becomes you the collector.

New Yorker Abu Ghraib article

I'm delaying the second half of my last post until tomorrow because Exposure, a New Yorker article about Abu Ghraib, has been on my mind. The article was written by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch. Errol Morris came to prominence in the late 1980s when his documentary The Thin Blue Line (which stood out at the time for using docu-drama style recreations of events) resulted in a Texas death row prisoner being freed.

The article is interesting in several aspects. It humanizes the guards who perpetrated the abuses and took the photographs, while pointing out they were made scapegoats for practices that were widely known: "The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing."

The article concluded with a exploration of why the photograph above became the iconic image of Abu Ghraib:

Under the circumstances, Harman was baffled that the figure of Gilligan—hooded, caped, and wired on his box—had eventually become the icon of Abu Ghraib and possibly the most recognized emblem of the war on terror after the World Trade towers. The image had proliferated around the globe in uncountable reproductions and representations—in the press, but also on murals and placards, T-shirts and billboards, on mosque walls and in art galleries. Harman had even acquired a Gilligan tattoo on one arm, but she considered that a private souvenir. It was the public’s fascination with the photograph of Gilligan—of all the images from Abu Ghraib—that she couldn’t fathom. “There’s so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really,” she said. “I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn’t.”

Harman was right: there were worse pictures than Gilligan. But, leaving aside that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don’t get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death—or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?

The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.

In addition to its unresolved weirdness, evocation of KKK and executioner hoods, Christ-like pose, I think the power comes from the fact that "Gilligan" is made anonymous, yet distinct--we can picture ourselves or our loved ones under that hood.

One Year Performances

Tehching "Sam" Hsieh did six extraordinary one-year performances before retiring from art.

His second one-year piece, Time Piece (1980-81), was to punch a card in a time clock, every hour on the hour twenty-four hours a day for one year. This meant he couldn't ever sleep for more than an hour or be more than 30 minutes away from his studio. Out of the 8,760 required punches, Sam only missed 134. The time cards were signed by a witness each day.

His other documentation of the piece is a six minute 16mm stop-motion film made by taking one frame each time he punched the clock. Here is an excerpt from that film:

Hsieh's last performance was to stop making art for a year, after which he found he couldn't start up again and retired from art. A DVD documenting his performances is available--it looks very interesting and interactive, but is a bit expensive ($45). Not incomparable to the cost of art books, but the production cost of DVDs are so much lower... it would be nice to have the savings passed on.

The Brooklyn Rail has an interesting interview with Hsieh.

Next up, MTAA's "update" of one of Hsieh's performances. (I have an earlier posting about MTAA's updating of On Kawara).

The Ebb and Flow of Movies

The New York Times has a cool interactive graph of movie revenues since 1983. It very noticeable that revenue spikes become choppier as time progresses--the hits become higher, more individually defined peaks. That's probably related to inflation (as the movies become more expensive, the revenue differences become more extreme), but perhaps it also reflects a growing addiction to a hit-driven model.


[via Leisure Guy]

Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Ayiti has been called the most depressing game ever... it's a surprisingly addictive "serious game" (i.e., socially relevant) in which the player tries to improve the life of a Haitian family of five. The best I've done so far is the keep the family relatively healthy and to get them slight improvements in education, material goods, and jobs.

The concept was developed in a workshop with Brooklyn high school students.

True Names

Benjamin Rosenbaum (my collaborator on Anthroptic and on a work-in-progress) and Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow (who I coincidentally quoted in Wednesday's blog posting) have just announced the release (via Creative Commons) of a novella: Link, Podcast feed

Cory says about it:

I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe.

Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed -- Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial -- and the story itself will be published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.

I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flair for phrasing, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it! Link, Podcast feed

Ben's announcement:

Cory Doctorow and I just turned in our big, sprawling galactic-scale posthuman novella, "True Names", to Lou Anders of Pyr Books, who is going to publish it in the original anthology Fast Forward 2 this fall.

This story came out of a conversation at the Hugo Loser's party at Worldcon 2002 -- the part about "the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate party-spoiler in a transhuman utopia of self-spawning consciousness"; it acquired shades of Jane Austen, Voltaire, megamillion year ideological warfare, gender theory, coming-of-age story, and musical theater along the way.

We've pretty much been working on it for the past six years. It's been a delight to work on, and it's surprisingly exciting to have it done and ready for readers -- or first, in this case, listeners.

See, Cory, inexhaustible font of energy that he is (for those who don't know Cory and who think of me as energetic, talkative, and full of enthusiasm for various projects -- Cory is me cubed; he makes me look like a laconic hermit), has declared that we are podcasting it.

And so we are! I just have to hunt down a decent microphone so I can record the next installment....

(It's also under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license -- so feel free to reproduce, remix, and create your own Alonzo My Love! tchotchkes).

Rhizome Commission call for proposals

The deadline for the Rhizome commissions is March 31st:

Rhizome's 2009 Commissions cycle is now open. This year, Rhizome has expanded our scope to encompass a broad range of practices that fall under new media art, including online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects should creatively engage new and networked technologies as well as reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. The deadline for proposals is midnight on Monday, March 31, 2008.

The commissions range from $3-5k. Details here.

My Email Erosion project was commissioned by Rhizome a few years ago. I'm applying again this year with a proposal for a Webphone.

Question Box

Question Box is a very interesting, very cool project which allows people in an Indian village access to the Internet's wealth of information via a intercom that links up to a human researcher.

The spread of such access reminds me of how the Internet has changed the way that I think of (& access) knowledge and information--when I was a kid I would often wonder about a certain topic, but would know that the information was basically out of my reach. My town (population 7,000) didn't have a particularly comprehensive library--and even if it did, I couldn't spend hours in it to research a momentarily, idle curiosity. Now, I am constantly looking up information simply for the joy of it (e.g., "I wonder about Vanilla beans... are there vanilla trees? Oh, they come from orchids!").

Here's what Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote about the project:

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it's like those "executive assistant" telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).
...

But the net isn't binary (well, it is, but not in the way I mean): it isn't there or not-there. It can ooze in, over the period of years and decades.

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

[via Boing Boing]

Xia Xiaowan

[via Elena Sto's rebel pebble blog]

Xia Xiaowan using an interesting technique of layers of glass, each painted upon, to create a three dimensional image.

Elena wrote:

In Xia Xiaowan's show, "Painting From the Inside," "painting" is conceived of as both as a physical act and artistic outcome. Under such a pretext, Xia Xiaowan's works seek to investigate and question the essence of painting as well as the process of creation, sensual perception and our observation of reality.

PS122 Gallery call for propoals

The PS122 Gallery, a non-profit in the lower east side, has a call for proposals (April 20th is the deadline) for artists who would like to be one half of a two-person show.

Each year we invite artists and curators to apply for two-person or group exhibitions, which are juried by a panel of art professionals including a curator, a writer, an artist and a member of the PS122 Gallery Advisory Board.

We accept applications from individual artists, 2-person groups or other small groups. Individual artists are encouraged to apply. They will be paired with another artist by the jury. Applications from students are not accepted.

Artists selected by the jury will be given the opportunity to exhibit their work for approximately three weeks, along with announcement postcards, press materials and guidance from the gallery director. While there are no geographical eligibility requirements, this opportunity is most appropriate for artists who live within commuting distance because artists are required to install their own exhibition and to gallery-sit on weekends.

I applied last year and was matched up for a show with Aaron Kreiswirth (a very talented photographer). My half of the show consisted of Mirror and the Anthroptic series I did in collaboration with author Benjamin Rosenbaum.

Sand painting

This comes via JangSoonNation.



The sand animation artist is Ferenc Cako

Assignment art

My graduate students and I investigated assignment art yesterday.

We started with Yoko Ono's instruction pieces, but none of her instructions (from Grapefruit) were practical to implement.

We then moved on to Erwin Wurm's One Minute Sculptures and Sculptures to Embarrass (circa 1997). The Red Hot Chili Peppers' Can't Stop music video incorporates several of Wurm's sculptural assignments.

Here are our implementations of Wurm's sculptures.

Shani:


Rachel:

Trotsky:

Seung Ae:


And myself:



What I find most interesting about his work is the decision of what aspects of his sketches are key and what aren't. It reminds me of when I was learning Japanese katakana and hiragana. It was often difficult to determine what is a key trait of a character and what is an eccentricity of the particular font. For example, here are two different renderings of the hiragana for "fu."


Finally, we took a look at Harrell Fletcher (who introduced me to Erwin Wurm when I was in grad school) and Miranda July's Learning to Love You More website.

We choose their Assignment #23 Recreate this snapshot. Here is the original photograph:


And here is our recreation:

Secret art exhibit on the moon

[via greg.org by way of Boing Boing]

It sounds like a hoax or conspiracy theory, but apparently there is a secret art show on the moon. Artist Forrest "Frosty" Myers managed to have a "Moon Museum" secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Apollo 12's Intrepid landing module. Myers had tried to arrange for the art through NASA, but when the project was rejected, he enlisted the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation and did it as guerrilla art (let's see you do that, Banksy!).

Myers arranged for Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg, Chamberlain, and David Novros to contribute drawings in addition to his own. The six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4" x 1/2" x 1/40", with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.

According to the Times via greg.org, the artworks are Rauschenberg's wavy line; Novros' black square bisected by thin white lines; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg; and a template pattern by Chamberlain. Warhol's contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature."Actually, it's a drawing of a penis.

For those of you with NY Times subscriptions, or a willingness to spend $3.95, the New York Times has a short article from November 22, 1969 about the exhibit.

The statue of the Fallen Astronaut is better known, institutionally approved moon art.

What's your blog worth?

My blog is worth $16,371.66.
How much is your blog worth?

Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog has a little tool for putting a monetary value on a blog (yeah, yeah... the experience is priceless ;) Here's how the calculation is done:

Inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I've created this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

To put it in context, I looked up the value of several other blogs that I regularly read. Art21's is worth $11,290.80. Edward Winkleman's is worth $92,020.02. And BoingBoing is worth a snazzy $10,504,395.78.

I'm dubious about how the value is estimated (for example, posting on other people's blogs with links back to your own would pump your blog's value). But still, it's kinda fun.

Update:
My dad's blog valuation is $6,209.94 when check the value for http://leisureguy.wordpress.com but $45,727.74 when I check http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/ (note the trailing slash). Hmm, I just checked again and now it says the latter URL is worth $134,925.06.

Don't take the valuation too seriously (I wouldn't suggest using it as loan collateral).

Reading clouds: Vihreä Pilvi

A some of my readers interpreted an earlier post as a general condemnation of data visualization art. It wasn't intended as such... my point was that data visualization art as an artistic practice needs to step up its game. It isn't enough to simply make a pretty graphic--if the goal is art, then there needs to be an intention beyond effective data communication.


Vihreä Pilvi is an interesting data visualization/manifestation artwork. It's a Finnish temporary art project that ran from February 22-29, 2008. Each night the Salmisaari power plant's vapor cloud was illuminated with a laser. The less power being consumed by Helsinki, the larger the cloud illumination, which seems counter-intuitive. I guess the idea was to reward conservation with a bigger light show, and perhaps the green color of the laser's light is considered to signify green in the environmental sense (though green is also the stereotypical color of toxic sludge in movies, comic books, etc.).

I love how Vihreä Pilvi combines aesthetics, an environmental agenda, and ostranenie. I do wish that it had equated higher energy consumption with a larger cloud, but maybe that is nitpicking.

Note, the videos below have a playback problem for first few seconds, but it quickly clears up:





[via Pall Thayer's post on Rhizome]


Not that it has anything to do with Vihreä Pilvi, but I highly recommend David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: A Novel.