David Horvitz’s "For 2009, Idea Subscription__"

David Horvitz's For 2009, Idea Subscription__ is a nice participatory project. Horvitz writes:

For all of 2009 I will send out small texts of simple instructional ideas through the mailing list below. I will also post screenshots of them on this tumblr page. These will not be done everyday, only when i feel like it and have access to the internet. But the attempt will be to do them everyday. You can also receive these in the postal mail.

One such instruction is to take a photo of your head in a freezer and post it online and tag it with 241543903:

Image: 241543903 from flickr user .y.a.r.a.

Image: 241543903 from flickr user hugotsantos

Image: 241543903 from flickr user hubs

There certainly been work like this before (see my earlier post on Yono Oko, Erwin Wurm, and Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher), but there's certainly room for more.

Oddly, my graduate sculpture class's recreation of a recreation of an Erwin Wurm "Sculpture to Embarrass" looks strikingly like the image above (below left is from an Erwin Wurm monography, below right from my class):


[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

My Rhizome commission proposal

Every year Rhizome selects several proposed networked artwork proposal to commission. This year, seven commissions will be selected by a jury and two commissions will be selected by Rhizome members.

Here is my proposal.

Peter Funch's "Babel Tales"

I love these composited photographs by Peter Funch.






See the entire Babel Tales series.

[via BoingBoing]

Californian Solipsism

This is an old Paramount Studios' map showing how California can be used for location shooting.

[via Lee Moyer]

Paddy Johnson on Jenny Holtzer

Paddy Johnson has an interesting essay on Jenny Holtzer in L Magazine. The essay begins:

"Jenny Holzer is the patron saint of Twitter", at least according to the latest web meme. I assume we're all obliquely referencing Holzer's survey exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at the Whitney -- bloggers include the show’s link with the quip -- but in doing so, we lump four decades worth of work into the few Truisms that fit into Twitter's 140-character limit. Certainly, the artist fails to benefit from this description.

Read the rest of the essay

Read my earlier (very brief) post about Jenny Holzer's alleged (a commenter said that it isn't really Holzer) twittering.

Mungo Thomson: The Varieties Of Experience

From the description at John Connelly Presents:

Thomson’s 16mm film, The Varieties Of Experience, was made by using Nam Jun Paik’s Zen For Film (1962-64) as a negative. Zen for Film consists of a length of clear 16mm film leader projecting a rectangle of pure white. Over time, the celluloid collects dust from the space of its exhibition; this dust is projected as brown and black smudges on the otherwise white image. Dust is largely composed of human cells, and in this way the audience of Paik's work has literally become embedded in it over several decades. Thomson worked with the NJP estate to procure a "dirty" copy of the film and to use it as a negative from which to make a new print. The new film is an inversion of the original: a black film with the dust printed as white specks and clouds--a moving starscape, where the stars are composed of dust (and people) instead of the other way around.

Visit my earlier posting to see Nam Jun Paik's Zen For Film


[via John Michael Boling at Rhizome]