Add-Art

From the Add-Art website:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

Reviewed in Magazine Ciel Variable

Magazine Ciel Variable is a Canadian magazine (that looks quite good) focusing on fine art photography. The most recent issue has an article on Web Photo Projects 3: Digital Photo Albums by Sylvie Parent that includes a review of my Self-Portrait project.

Unfortunately only the introduction to the article (and one of my "self-portraits") is available online, so I don't really know what it says.

Some People

Some People is Harrell Fletcher's new web-based project. Like Learning to Love You More, his earlier collaboration with Miranda July, the project is platform for others to publish their interpretation of an artistic-ish task. Whereas Learning to Love You More has a growing list of tasks to choose from, Some People focuses on people documenting others' lives.

From the website:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

Some People very neatly combines Fletcher's work that prompts others to take part in a social, creative act and his work that takes the form of documenting another's life/interests such as Boy (a 1999 show about a ten year old Seattle boy named Gregory).

[via Marisa Olson @ Rhizome]

Rube Goldberg chocolate crusher

This Rube Goldberg-like device seems unnecessarily abusive to chocolate, but it is cool.



And if you're not already familiar with Fischli & Weiss's The Way Things Go, check out this earlier post.

[via BoingBoing]

Prison Installation art opportunity

This is an interesting one... Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (which is now a museum, not an active prison) commissions installation art.

It funds up to $2500 for project development and up to $7500 for full realization of a project. Details here. Deadline is June 17th.

Wrapping up the term

Yikes! It's been a week since my last post. The semester is finishing up at City College (where I teach)... work distractions been actually slowing down, but the transition to summer has thrown me off my blogging pace. I'll pick it up!

Benjamin Rosenbaum, my collaborator on Anthroptic, and I are working on another project that will premiere in December. I've been busily working on it and am quite excited. Incidentally, ben has a short story collection that is coming out in a couple of months... now is the time to pre-order!

In memory of Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg passed away yesterday.

From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to "Monogram" and "Bed" in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg's reputation: "To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary -- as though I could just as well have selected anything at all -- and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

"So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she'd been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of 'The Blue Boy' on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand."

More Songs About Buildings...

David Byrne building-based musical instrument, Playing the Building, is being installed (in collaboration with Creative Time) at Battery Maritime Building, New York, NY (10 South Street at Whitehall Street).

Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure -- to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes -- and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

Visitors can play the building organ during the show's run (May 31 - August 10, 2008). I believe the show is only open on weekends, so double-check that before heading to visit it.

This is the installations second outing--it was installed in Stockholm several years ago. A photocam recording from the Stockholm show opening (9 October 2005):

Ewa Berglund playing the building (recorded by Emma Karlsson), Färgfabriken, 29 October 2005:

John Luther Adams's "The Place Where You Go to Listen"

Alex Roth has an article in the most recent New Yorker about John Luther Adams's generative music installation. In a nutshell:

"The Place" translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

From Roth's description it seems like Adams did a very good job of data visualization (or rather, data auralization). The listener has a sense of what the music represents:

The first day I was there, "The Place" was subdued, though it cast a hypnotic spell. Checking the Alaskan data stations on my laptop, I saw that geomagnetic activity was negligible. Some minor seismic activity in the region had set off the bass frequencies, but it was a rather opaque ripple of beats, suggestive of a dance party in an underground crypt. Clouds covered the sky, so the Day Choir was muted. After a few minutes, there was a noticeable change: the solar harmonies acquired extra radiance, with upper intervals oscillating in an almost melodic fashion. Certain that the sun had come out, I left "The Place," and looked out the windows of the lobby. The Alaska Range was glistening on the far side of the Tanana Valley.

When I arrived the next day, just before noon, "The Place" was jumping. A mild earthquake in the Alaska Range, measuring 2.99 on the Richter scale, was causing the Earth Drums to pound more loudly and go deeper in register. (If a major earthquake were to hit Fairbanks, "The Place," if it survived, would throb to the frequency 24.27Hz, an abyssal tone that Adams associates with the rotation of the earth.) Even more spectacular were the high sounds showering down from speakers on the ceiling.

"The Place" sounds like a very compelling work and a real accomplishment... however, Roth's article does seem a bit naive in regards to how the installation fits into the tradition of generative art. Roth writes:

["The Place"] is a forbiddingly complex creation that contains a probably unresolvable philosophical contradiction. On the one hand, it lacks a will of its own; it is at the mercy of its data streams, the humors of the earth. On the other hand, it is a deeply personal work, whose material reflects Adams's long-standing preoccupation with multiple systems of tuning, his fascination with slow-motion formal processes, his love of foggy masses of sound in which many events are unfolding at independent tempos.

Fair enough... but the same contradiction is inherent to almost every generative artwork. It's almost like waxing poetic over how a particular sculpture seems to be dealing with issues of form in space. Uh, yeah... that's what sculptures do.

I was also struck by this quote of Adams's:

"Actually, my original conception for 'The Place' was truly grandiose. I thought that it might be a piece that could be realized at any location on the earth, and that each location would have its unique sonic signature. That idea--tuning the whole world--stayed with me for a long time. But at some point I realized that I was tuning it so that this place, this room, on this hill, looking out over the Alaska Range, was the sweetest-sounding spot on earth."

I spent part of last summer doing investigations with generative music and sound (and I hope this summer to bring this work to fruition). I discovered that it is fairly easy to create a process for making reasonably convincing (if not wholly compelling) music. What is much more difficult is having that artwork capable of generating a variety of distinct pieces.

I think Adams is being very upfront about how the installation is tuned to the Alaskan environmental variables in particular. If he had done a more generic tuning--one that would work in any given place--he probably wouldn't have been able to achieve his "unique sonic signature" idea. Each place would probably end up sounding very much like all the other locations.

Golan Levin, in an interview with Carlos Zanni, argued that interactive and generative art is about "creating an illusion of control: the sense that the 'artist' has relinquished authorship to the user, or to some clever algorithm. In fact, this is a myth."

What Levin is saying, I think, is that the artist/composer has complete control over how the triggering data is framed. Often the truly defining characteristics of generative artworks are the elements over which the artist maintains control rather than the aspects determined by the stochastic input. For example, Adams said he tuned the installation to that place in particular. He determined that earthquakes trigger the Earth Drums and he undoubtedly adjusted it so that the average level of tremors generally sounds good. This is very much like when I saw guitarist Elvin Bishop at a blues festival--at one point in the set he had an audience member strum the guitar while Bishop continued to finger the chord changes. It was fun and a neat trick, but the strumming no more determined the direction of Bishop's song than the tremors determines Adam's.

These issues of illusion and control remind me of my childhood interest in stage magic. I used to learn tricks and read up on magicians until I eventually realized that stage magic would always be unsatisfying to me because I'm not interested in the illusion of magic, what I really wanted was real magic. I have similar feelings about generative art... I play around the edges of it, but I'm not interested in presenting the illusion of machine creativity.

It is a step in the direction for generative art to be based upon chance--that is based on something unpredictable yet representational such as the brightness of light, the amount of carbon dioxide in the room, etc. Ideally the originating chance occurrence can be sensed by the viewer (in the same way that Roth deduced the change in light based upon the shift in the music's mood). It's hard to say what level of illusion is in "The Place," but it does seem there is a reasonable transparency between the sounds and the real-world input that triggered them.

Noah K Everyday

Noah Kalina has been taking his photo daily since January 11, 2000. His project has caught popular imagination and often inspires imitators & homages (via Shoot! The Blog):

Homer Everyday



Microsoft Istanbul



Dunkin' Donuts Commercial



FSN Baseball Commercial



Melbourne Film Festival Trailer



Noah isn't the first to use this technique, as he readily admits. From his site's FAQ:

Does anybody else do this?
Of course. It was definitely an original idea in my head, and I was doing the project for over 3 years until I found out somebody else was up to it too… and for longer! Check out Jonathan Keller. He has a great website and a wonderful compilation of daily photo projects as well as other truly awesome obsessive photography projects.

Do you mind if I do this?
No of course not! It's an awesome project and you will impress all of your friends. Send me a link if you make it longer than a year.

Jonathan Keller has been doing it since 1998:




And I'm reminded of Sam Hsieh's even earlier (1980-81) Time Piece One Year Performance.

Apply for the West Prize

If you're an emerging artist you should apply for the West Prize. Applications are entered into a kind of slide library, even those who don't win will receive exposure.

Feeling a bit busy today, so I'm shamelessly reposting Edward Winkleman's blog posting:

Launched at the Next Art Fair this past weekend, The West Prize is a generous example of a major collection giving back to the artist community. If that sounds like a sales pitch, that's because it is. If you're an artist, you should apply today. Here's the skinny about the prize:

The West Prize will be awarded to ten international emerging artists in 2008. The prize will award $100,000 in acquisitions between the finalists and host a finalist TEN exhibition with accompanying publication. A grand prize winner will be chosen from among the finalists to receive a $25,000 cash prize in addition to a West Collection acquisition.

As Paige West (yes, of the West Collection, as well as founder of Mixed Greens and fellow blogger [check out the top photo on Paige's blog]) noted in the comments on Art Fag City:

One thing that it doesn’t mention in the fine print of the Prize details is that I plan on sending dealer and collector friends (and anyone else who I think would appreciate seeing some new art) to specific artists throughout the submission timeline. So, hopefully some artists will feel the benefit of submitting long before the winners are announced.

Knowing the West Collection and Paige and [director] Lee Stoetzel in particular to be true champions in the cause of promoting emerging artists, I can wholeheartedly endorse this opportunity to have your work seen via the prize's website and possibly acquired by the collection or others who'll visit it. Have I mentioned you should apply today?