Lars Fisk: Trashbags

Lars Fisk is showing Trashbags at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (in Ridgefield, CT) through February 15th.

From the museum's website:

For this project Fisk has transformed a single block of black marble into a sculpture inspired by a pile of seven heavy-duty twist-tie trash bags. The life-size sculpture, which stands 63 inches tall, references the visibility of garbage found on city streets and will be installed by the main Museum entrance.

The practice of defining the folds in the plastic began as an exercise in reductive classical sculpture and became a stonecutting preoccupation for the artist. The pile of bags represents a paradox of everlasting disposability, addressing the issue of waste and the underlying question of its permanence.

Fisk's work has caught my eye before. PS1's Greater New York show in 2005 included Fisk's VW Ball:



For more trash bag art, see these earlier posts:

• Susan Robb's "Warmth Giant Black Toobs"
• Subway ventilation bag art

Reuben Margolin's Magic Wave

Reuben Margolin's Magic Wave (installed at the Swiss Center for Technorama near Zurich) employs 450 suspended aluminum rods on 256 wires with 3,000 pulleys and sliding bars (and no computers or microcontrollers) to create a wave-like motion.



Margolin has an earlier & smaller version, The Wave (2005), that uses cams to achieve the motion:



Visit Margolin's website for videos of The Wave.

See my earlier posting about Tim Prentice for a sculpture that achieve similar motion using wind power.

Drunkard's Walk vs. PMU

When I was at PS1 the other day, I came across Simon Ingram's Drunkard's Walk (2008) as part of a group show by Minus Space in the Boiler Room:

Drunkard's Walk, 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (detail), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk (finished painting), 2008, Ingram

Drunkard's Walk seems to be a poor-man's version of Roxy Paine's PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit) 1999-2000:

PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit), 1999-2000, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

PMU, Roxy Paine

I take Drunkard's Walk to be a commentary of some sort (satire perhaps?) on Paine's work. However, when I watch an interview with Ingram (see below) he makes no reference to Paine's PMU. It would be interesting to hear Ingram's thoughts regarding Paine.

NYU's ITP Winter Showcase

The Interactive Telecommunications Program's showcase is on view today and tomorrow... Just seeing the sheer mass of techno-projects (about 200 the last year) makes the visit worthwhile.

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show <--- now dynamic listing all of the students' projects! Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists. This two-year graduate program gives 220 students the opportunity to explore the imaginative uses of communications technologies - how they augment, improve, and bring delight and creativity into people's lives. Housed in the studios of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, ITP takes a hands-on approach. Students learn to realize their ideas through a hands-on approach of building, prototyping, and testing with people. Interactive Telecommunications Program Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Tisch School of the Arts New York University 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators New York NY 10003 Take the left elevators to the 4th Floor This event is free and open to the public No need to RSVP For questions: 212-998-1880 email: itp.inquiries@nyu.edu http://itp.nyu.edu/show

Leandro Erlich: Swimming Pool

I stopped by PS1 yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool (2004).

Mona Lisa via genetic programming

[via Leisure Guy]

Roger Alsing writes on his blog:

I created a small program that keeps a string of DNA for polygon rendering.
The procedure of the program is quite simple:

0) Setup a random DNA string (application start)

1) Copy the current DNA sequence and mutate it slightly
2) Use the new DNA to render polygons onto a canvas
3) Compare the canvas to the source image
4) If the new painting looks more like the source image than the previous painting did, then overwrite the current DNA with the new DNA
5) repeat from 1

Now to the interesting part :-)

Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons?

That is the challenge I decided to put my application up to.

The image below is the result of that test:

star teachers

The December 15th issue of The New Yorker has a very interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about difficulty of determining who will be a good teacher (or football quarterback).

An excerpt from Most Likely to Succeed:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

Mark Callahan's "24 Hour Miss South Carolina"

View the artwork

Mark writes:

In 2007, a teenage beauty pageant contestant made a thirty-second speech that became a media phenomenon, fueled by millions of views on the Internet and a brief but intense outpouring of parodies. 24 Hour Miss South Carolina appropriates directly from YouTube while paying homage to Douglas Gordon's seminal 1993 installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Slowed, stretched, and silenced, the work repositions an object of short-lived attention and mass ridicule to an epic progression of still images. As the resonance of the original performance diminishes, 24 Hour Miss South Carolina silently plays on, carried to an obsessive extreme that invites fresh readings on the nature of celebrity, voyeurism, and entertainment.

For even slower media, see my earlier post on a performance of John Cage's AsSLowASPossible.

[via Rhizome]

122 for $122

PS122 Gallery's Annual benefit show starts on Saturday December 5th (5-7pm) and will remain on view until December 21st. All the artworks in the show can be purchased for $122--the proceeds going to the non-profit PS122 Gallery. I went last year and had a lot of fun--but sure to show up early, otherwise you'll find many of the works are already spoken for. After the opening on the 5th, the gallery hours are Thursday - Sunday, 12-6pm.

The gallery is located at:

150 First Avenue
(Entrance on 9th Street between First Ave. and Ave. A.)
New York, NY 10009

The Participating Artists:

Katie Archer, Jae-Hi Ahn, Liz Ainslie, Christopher Albert, Fanny Allie, Blanka Amezkua, Markos Andennerbrine, Mary Begley, Nathan Bennet, Gail Biederman, Hanna Bluhm, Vincent Bolognini, Chakaia Booker, Chris Bors, Aileen Boyce, Susan Breitsch, Robert Brush, Pam Butler, Linda Byrne, Karlos Carcamo, Diane Carr, Christine Catsifas, Colin Chase, Eun Young Choi, Vincent Ciniglio, Nancy Cohen, Heather Courtney, Catherine Cox, John Craig, Adam Cruces, Page Davidson, Willie Davis, Tom DeLaney, Eduardo DiFarnecio, Kate Dodd, Brian Michael Dunn, Robert Dupree, Linn Edwards, Rady Elbasna, Chris Fennell, Amy Finkbeiner, Allen Frame, Christopher Frederick, Linda Ganjian, Adres Garcia-Pena, Bonnie Geller,Geld, Alice Gibson, Abby Goodman, John Goras, Linda Gottesfeld, Sara Greene, Linda Griggs, Lenio Grohmann, Dominick Guida, Ethan Ham, Yoni Hamburger, Johnathan Hamburger, James Harmon, Patty Harris, Erica Hauser, Susan Havens, Kylie Heidenheimer, Linda Herritt, Corin Hewitt, Carolyn Hopkins, Jane Hsu, Scott Wayne Indiana, Ketta Ioannidou, Hong Seon Jang, Wyatt Kahn, Judy Kashman, Tomoko Kawanaka, Gideon Kendall, Seung Ae Kim, Katy Krantz, Mark Krunsey, Leila, Elisa Lendvay, Christopher Lesnewski, Colleen Longo, Jason Losh, Barbara Lubliner, Tony Luib, Rita MacDonald, Hilary Maslon, Summer McCorckle, Grady McFerrin, Tricia McLaughlin, Meryl Meisler, Christina E. Miles, Carlos Motta (The Center for Book Arts), Miroyoki Nakamia, Laura Napier, Christopher Silas Neal, Margie Neuhaus, Sarah Nichols (The Center of Book Arts), Paul Nowell, Patrict O'Hara, Leah Oates, Lee Young Ok, Ann Oren, Min Ha Park, Young Park, Will Pappenheimer, Julie Peppito, Tony Phillips, Nicole Poko, Heidi Pollard, Praxis, Judith Rapheal, Laurie Robinson, Jorge Rojas, Zevan Rosser, Rocco Scary, Ellen Schiff, Norman Shapiro, Paul Shima, Erin Siegal, Brad Silk, Judy Simonian, Gregory Slick, Johanna Bystron Sms, Aimee Stern, Melissa Stern, Amy Stienbarger, Ryan Sullivan, Anner Svaner, Amy Talluto, Joanna Tam, Jeremiah Teipen, Robin Tewes, Tom Thayer, Sarah Trigg, Joe Tully, Sarah Vogwell, Joy Whalen, Eleanor White, Jenny Wilson, Nina Yankowitz, Brahna Yassky, Chih-Hua Yeh, Liz Zanis, Aaron Zimmerman, Bryan Zimmerman and others.

interview with Golan Levin

On Turbulence.org's Networked Music Review has an interview by Peter Traub with Golan Levin.

The interview focuses on Golan's Dialtones (A Telesymphony), 2001, which was a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones. Golan did the project in collaboration with in collaboration with Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner.

Go here to read the interview and hear the concert.

CCNY graduate show: The Box

The talented MFA students at The City College of New York (where I teach) are having a group show in mid-December.

For the show, which is titled "The Box," the artists are limited to working in or on a corrugated cardboard box.

The exhibition will open 12/8 and run through 12/19. The opening reception is 12/11 5pm-8pm.

The participating students are: Dennis Delgado, Scherezade Garcia, Rachel Reese, Seung Ae Kim, Christopher Lea, Luciana Maiorana, Nancy Palubniak, Shani Peters, Marcie Revens, Patricia Riebesehl, Elena Stojanova, Priska Wenger.


Directions to the gallery:

City College Art Department
Compton-Goethals Hall
The City College of New York
Convent Avenue at 138th Street
New York, New York 10031
212.650.7420 tel

Compton-Goethals Hall is a neo-gothic building located between 139th and 140th Streets, and between Amsterdam Avenue and Convent Avenue. The building is to the left (if you're facing the campus from Amsterdam Ave) of the very large, modern building know as the NAC (North Academic Center.


If you're coming by subway:

The campus may be reached either by the #1 train to 137th Street, or by the A or D lines to 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. As it is one of the few New York City colleges with an actual campus, providing directions can sometimes be confusing. Here are the options:

• Take the #1 local to 137th Street and Broadway; when you come out of the 137th street station, you will be in a small triangular park. Walk through it up hill, and then one more block uphill (east) on 138th St. At the top of the hill is Amsterdam, and the main gate of the campus. Continue through the gate and walk down hill and make your very first left down a pathway between two buildings. Walk straight down this path until the end (the path ends in a building called Baskerville). At your immediate left will be Compton Goethals Hall. Inside the doors and up the stairs of the entrance to C-G hall stands a security guard. If you indicate that you have an appointment in the art department they should be able to direct you to the office which is room 109.
  
  
• Take the "A" or "D" express, or the "B" or "C" local to 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. Stay on the back of the train. Exit the station from the exit which states "W. 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, SW exit." Walk west one block uphill on 145th Street to reach Convent Avenue. Walk straight down (towards the south) to 139th Street. You will pass a gated entranceway to CCNY (a security guard is usually standing there). Once you pass this entrance, Compton-Goethals Hall is on the right hand side. There will be an entrance to a building immediately after the gate (this is an entrance to Baskerville). Immediately past this building, there is a flight of stairs that open up onto a quad. Walk up these stairs and straight ahead of you. Immediately in front of you will be Compton-Goethals Hall with the tower looming above. Follow directions as above.
  

Mel Chin's Safehouse

Natalie Sciortino on ArtForum wrote:

New Orleans is one of the most lead-polluted cities in the US. Nearly eighty-six thousand regional properties don't meet EPA lead standards. Addressing this environmental hazard is Mel Chin's Safehouse, 2008, a residence painted completely white, on a once-abandoned lot in the neighborhood of St. Roch. An enormous, circular portion of this tabula rasa-cum-house facade has been cut out and mounted on a massive hinge, to form a mammoth bank-vault-like door that opens onto a mostly barren front yard sprinkled with jagged green shrubbery. In an elaborate performance piece enacted during the opening weekend of the Prospect.1 biennial, five participants dressed as security guards pulled up to the front of the house and ordered the audience to stand back as they ceremoniously opened the vault to reveal Chin and his team sitting amid thousands of fake hundred-dollar bills created by locals.

As part of Operation Paydirt, 2008, viewers are invited to contribute to the growing stash of "fundreds" in the Safehouse, until it attains a symbolic three hundred million dollars--the estimated cost of treating New Orleans's soil for lead contamination. For the next stage of the project, an armored truck will collect these bills on a cross-country tour, arriving at the steps of Congress with a request for an even exchange with valid US currency. This type of work is a natural progression from Chin's environmentally remedial projects such as S.P.A.W.N., 2001-2003, in Detroit, and Revival Field, 1990-1993, in Minnesota. By gathering work from individuals nationwide, Chin metaphorically reverses the post-Katrina diaspora, while fighting to provide suitable land--eventually encouraging residents to return home. Safehouse becomes a sculptural signifier for far-reaching and monumental political engagement that has the potential to truly transform a polluted land, while immediately calling attention to what is most valuable in our society. Among some of the most dynamic work found within the biennial, Chin's venture creates an effective synergy between aesthetics and activism.

[via Art21 Blog and NEWSgrist]

Last Tumbarumba First Lines, #11 and 12: Tim and Heather

Just in time for the launch of our Tumbarumba add-on, my collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum wrapped up his list of the first lines of the twelve stories included in the project:

The first lines of Tim Pratt's Tumbarumba story, "A Steadfast Tin Soldier":

The first thing the dead man spoke to was big rock. Big rock wasn't so big in absolute terms, but it was the biggest rock in that little copse of pines, and understandably proud of its place. "Hello?" the dead man said, in the soundless way of unliving things. "Hello, hello?"

"Yes, hello," big rock said. "How nice to hear from you! Such a pleasure to have new company!"

Tim writes, "I've always been fascinated by stories where inanimate objects have secret lives, from the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams to the Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson to Thomas Disch's Brave Little Toaster and the painted stick, can of beans, dessert spoon, and dirty sock from Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. But one day it occurred to me: dead bodies are inanimate objects, too, aren't they? What if they had secret lives?"

And here are the first lines of Heather Shaw's story, "Little M@tch Girl":

A new shipment of Tweak must have hit the Mission over the weekend. Em kept her eye on the woman in front of her who was shaking and staggering across the sidewalk. At a distance, the woman almost looked as if she were listening to some experimental music, her erratic movements accompanied by unheard notes, brilliantly interpreting the difficult tonalities. But as Em got closer, the absence of headphones and the glazed eyes shattered the illusion.

For those who don't know it, Heather and Tim are co-creators of Flytrap, the illustrious "little zine with teeth". Flytrap, in which Tim and Heather published my story "Night Waking", is issuing its last just in time to advertise Tumbarumba: it has been crowded out of the nest by another of their co-creations (and as much as I loved Flytrap, I am forced to approve).

Tim and Heather claim that it is entirely coincidence that their Tumbarumba stories are both Hans-Christian-Andersen-themed.

Next entry: Tumbarumba!

Tumbarumba goes live!

After quite a few months of development, Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba Firefox extension has launched! Please take a moment and install it on to your browser.

Thanks to Ben, all of our participating writers (Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Step0hen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, & Jeff Spock), and Jo-Anne & Helen at Turbulence.org for commissioning the project.

Incidentally, Turbulence is having an end-of-the-year fundraiser right now, so why not send them a donation?