Tobias Rehberger's "(Work in progress)"

I'm spending the week after Christmas in Denver and the mountains to its west... I'll be skiing for the first time in my life, so wish me luck!

While in Denver I stopped by the Denver Museum of Art, which is a quite nice museum chock full of all sorts of good arts. It's doing the regional art museum's job of attempting to cover the entire history of art, and is doing a pretty good job of it.

Among its current exhibitions is "Embrace This" which is a celebration of its new wing. Artists were invited to create installation works that react/interact with the new building's odd angles and nooks.

My favorite work in the museum is in this exhibition. It's Tobias Rehberger's (Work in progress), 2009. It's a room that has a grid of bungie cords that are strung from ceiling to floor. Visitors are welcome to force their way between the cords and walk through the room. It's a bit claustrophobic, but fun.

The photos came from Yo-Yo Ma Creations blog.

Von Bismarck & Maus's Perpetual Storytelling Machine

Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus have created an interesting work: The Perpetual Storytelling Machine.

From the project's website:

The "Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus" is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents -- linked by over 22 million references -- form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

The actual method is that the machine downloads the text for a recent best selling novel and then using the book's text as keywords for looking up patent drawings.

I have been playing around with similar ideas... My focus, however, was on generating a perpetual story using short stories posted to news groups as source material. The illustrations were going to be photos from Flickr found via keyword search (we did a similar thing in Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba project).

The use of patent drawings is brilliant... Much more satisfying than Flickr photos. However, it doesn't appear that the novel's text is presented along side the drawings... which seems too bad. More interesting, I think, then seeing semi-random connections between the drawings would be to have insight into how the drawings relate to the text.

Related: my earlier post in which I took issue with von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator

Blogging notice

I've been busy helping my students wrap up the semester, and my blogging has suffered. Regular blogging with resume next week!

Tumbarumba at Videomedeja

Tumbarumba, a literary / artistic collaboration between Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (and twelve contributing authors) is being shown in the Videomedeja Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.

From the festival's website:

The festival focuses on narrative or abstract art projects which combine image and sound, communications and networks, from video art works, documentaries and short films, digital animations, media installations, url and network projects, objects, interactive and robotized objects, open source applications, audiovisual performances, mobile technologies, electronic music, advanced technologies in art practice.

The festival runs December 11 - 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia.

Tumbarumba is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.