Tim Hawkinson's "Das Tannenboot"

Christmas tree, fabric, elastic, string, and metal
66 × 70 × 43 in., Whitney Museum

To kick off the Christmas season, here's Tim Hawkinson's Das Tannenboot (1994).

David Crawford (1970-2009)

Via Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog comes news of David Crawford's death:

David recently received a PhD in Digital Representation from the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at Göteborg University, Sweden. He studied film, video, and new media at the Massachusetts College of Art and received a BFA in 1997.

In 2000, his Light of Speed project was a finalist for the SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art. In 2003, Crawford’s Stop Motion Studies project received an Artport Gate Page Commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, an Award of Distinction in the Net Vision category at the Prix Ars Electronica, and became part of the public collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (SMS - Series 6). In 2004, he received an MSc from Chalmers University of Technology and taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. David’s artwork has been featured by the Guardian and Leonardo. His writing has been published by Princeton Architectural Press and SpringerWienNewYork.

Interviews with David and links to his work are available on Networked_Performance.

An unusual input device

This Japanese clock comes with games that are played by, well, sticking a finger into a hole. More information (including a movie of the clock in action) is available at Asovision.

[via Ludology]

Pixelstorm award

I'm a finalist for an award from Swiss art/design group... the ceremony is happening right now via video conference. Feel free to drop in, though unless you speak German (or perhaps more specifically Swiss German) you may be like me and only have a vague idea of the proceedings.

Video conference at:
http://tinychat.com/pixelstorm

Better sound at:
http://www.tv.dock18.ch/wp/

Pixelstorm website at:
http://www.pixelstorm-award.ch/

Axiom presents "Riders on the Train"

I have a little web-based animation (if you go to the animation, make sure your speakers are on) that's included in the Riders on the Train show curated by Nance Davies.

The opening reception is tonight (Friday November 13th, 2009) at 6:00 pm. I'm not able to make it to the openings, but if you're in Boston you might want to drop by.

From the press release:

'RIDERS on the TRAIN' is an interdisciplinary art exhibition exploring new relationships between artist, audience, site, and context. Drawn from an international call for submissions, these artists and writers explore 'the private within the public' experience of mass-transit in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, India, Switzerland, NYC, London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, DC, Portland, and Boston. The poetics of acceleration, compression, fragmentation and sensory immersion are explored as the artists record, collaborate, and devise small scale tactical interventions - juxtaposing high with low technology. 'Riding Artists' sample their 'ride' and generate an aggregate description of the mass-transit experience through a diversity of lenses and media including video, sound art, photography, web-based interactivity, performance, installation and writing.

Artists in the show include Manuel Vazquez, Sarah Rushford, Stephen Cady, Jeff Morris, Jesse Malmed, Nance Davies, Andrew Sempere, Denise Marika and Dana Moser, Henry Gwiazda, Francois de Costere, Ethan Ham, Colleen Alborough and Joao Orecchia, Scott Hall, Marc McNulty, Dylan Mortimer, Zehra Kahn, Erick Conrad, Ben Chaffee, Jason Nelson, Nita Sturiale, Ximena Alarcon, Sherry Karver, Marianne Fourie, Lia Chavez, Yuri Stone, Helene Zuckerbrod, Marian Berelowitz, Lisa McCarty, Katherin McInnis, Jamie Waelchli, Guy Telemaque, Gary Duehr, Susan Bregman, Carolyn Lewenberg, Yetti Frenkel, Harvey Loves Harvey, Alexia Mellor and Sarah Banasiak, Fred Wolflink, Jerel Dye, Jake Lee-High, Sean O’Brien and writer/poets Jeremy Hight, Kamarie Chapman Leora Silverman Fridman, Sarah Goodman, Gordon Fearey, Colette A. Shumate-Smith, and Jonathan Powell.

Gallery Hours: Tuesdays, 2-5 pm, Wednesdays 6-9 pm, Thursdays 2-9 pm, Saturdays 2-5 pm, alternative visiting hours can be arranged by appointment

Cost/// FREE and Open to the Public

Where/// AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media - 141 Green Street
located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line

Jack Daws's Golden Penny

A couple of years ago Jack Daws, a Seattle artist, made ten copies of a penny (each using about $100 worth of gold). Daws put a patina on the pennies, so their shiny gold color would be masked, and used one to buy a Hustler at LAX. Daws assumed this circulated penny would be lost forever. But Jessica Reed, a Brooklyn artist, found it.

As reported on the NY Times website:

Late this summer, when Ms. Reed was paying for groceries at the C-Town supermarket in Greenpoint, she noticed the penny because the gold color had started to peek through. A fan of unusual coins, she slipped it back into her change purse and tucked it into the recesses of her mind.

Then recently, while doing research about a 1924 Mercury-head dime, she remembered the penny and typed "gold penny" into Google, which returned information on science experiments to give a penny a gold color. She added "1970" and found an item about how Mr. Daws had put a 18-karat gold penny, dated 1970 with no mint mark, into circulation. It was heavier and smaller than a real penny.

In disbelief, she weighed the penny on a digital scale. It came in at three grams, one gram more than similar pennies from 1970. And it was slightly smaller than a normal penny, owing to the shrinking after the casting process.

She traced Mr. Daws's phone number through the gallery and left him the message. When he called back, he knew it had to be his penny as soon as she described it to him.

Ms. Reed will keep the coin. She is thinking of having it framed. It's was a curious way to display a sculpture, she said. "I can’t imagine being an artist who does something like this," she said. "It's the opposite of having your stuff shown in a gallery. It could be tossed."

Coincidentally the day before reading about this, I found myself contemplating a 1970 penny that I received as change. Hmm... I wonder where it went?

[via Jennifer Lee @ NY Times City Room blog]