Camera / Chimera's catalog is (almost) available

A Photograph Confused With the Original Inspiration, or Dumb and Dumber II
Timothy Hutchings, 2009, 4" x 3"

Untitled (220 East 117th Street, 2009)
Patterson Beckwith, 2009, 10" x 8"

untitled
Becca Albee, 2009, 11" x 14.5"

Camera / Chimera is an upcoming show that I curated. The show is a series of photographs, each by a different artist. The artists are asked to replicate the previous artist's photograph. The result is a visual game of "Telephone" in which the image slowly (and sometimes abruptly) mutates through the process of recreation.

Camera / Chimera's sixty-six page catalog should be available for $10 in the next day or two.

Artists included in the show:

Becca Albee, Holly Andres, Patterson Beckwith, Chase Browder, xtine burrough, Cassandra C. Jones, Adrianne Davis, Stephanie Dean, Dennis Delgado, Joel Fisher, Harrell Fletcher, Joy Garnett, Greta Ham, Tim Hutchings, Steve Lambert, Gus Meisner, Robin Michals, Hajoe Moderegger, MTAA, Shani Peters, Anne Schiffer, Christian Marc Schmidt, Tom Thayer, Mariana Tres, Angie Waller.

Writers included in the show:

Sarah Kate Baie, Michael Betancourt, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Sharon L. Butler, Andrei Codrescu, Greg Cook, Evonne M. Davis, Laurel Gitlen, Ethan Ham, Ellen Handy, N. Katherine Hayles, Paddy Johnson, Lisa Kjaer, Jonathan Martin, Carolina A. Miranda, Ceci Moss, Jack Murnighan, Laura Napier, Tim Maul, Catherine Spaeth, Hrag Vartanian, James Wagner, Emma Wilcox

The show is at Gallery Aferro at 73 Market St, Newark, NJ 07102 September 12 - October 3
Opening Reception September 12, 7-10 PM

Cassandra C. Jones

Cassandra C. Jones, Lightning Drawing 1, 2009

I'm loving Cassandra C. Jones's artwork. The internet is spurring a lot of artists (myself included) to create works that draw on its vast repository of images. Jones's work, however, really stands out. I particularly like her Eventide (2004) which is a sunset patched together from 1,391 found photos.

I'd like the work even if it was built of out images pulled from a "sunset" search on Flickr.com... but it's even nicer that the images were collected from "friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers, image banks, photo exchanges, thrift stores, libraries, private collections, want adds, eBay and the public domain archives of the US Army, NOAA and NASA."

The YouTube video comes from an interview with BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin and is synced to jump to the Eventide excerpt.







[via BoingBoing]

Matchbox's child warriors

Matchbox has an advertising campaign which pictures children as military personnel. A commenter on Boing Boing suggested contrasting these fantasy images with photos of real child soliders.



"Credit" for the Matchbox compaign goes to Ogilvy & Mather:

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore
Executive Creative Director: Todd McCracken
Art Director: Anthony Tham
Photographers: Shooting Gallery, Wishing Well
Producer: Iskandar Abdul Kader
Published: May 2009

Andy Freeberg's "Guardians"

Andy Freeberg's Guardians is a wonderful series of photographs that capture the ladies who guard the art galleries of Russian art museums.




Freeberg says:

In the art museums of Russia, women sit in the galleries and guard the collections. When you look at the paintings and sculptures, the presence of the women becomes an inherent part of viewing the artwork itself. I found the guards as intriguing to observe as the pieces they watch over. In conversation they told me how much they like being among Russia’s great art. A woman in Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery Museum said she often returns there on her day off to sit in front of a painting that reminds her of her childhood home. Another guard travels three hours each way to work, since at home she would just sit on her porch and complain about her illnesses, "as old women do." She would rather be at the museum enjoying the people watching, surrounded by the history of her country.

[via Boing Boing]

The Art of Removal

Tourist Remover is an online app that can remove moving objects from your vacation snapshots. It does so by comparing several photos from the same angle and removing whatever isn't common to all photos (see above).

Removing unwanted folks from photos has a long tradition:



The tourist photo that jumped to my mind is Francis Alÿs's Turista (1996). So this morning I photoshopped No Turista (2009):


Here's a thumbnail animation of the alteration:


Andy Baio recently posted Meme Scenery on his blog in which he removes the people from 23 famous Internet photos/videos:


Baio points to Jon Haddock's Internet Sex Photos as inspiration:


An earlier work in the same vein is Naomi Uman's Removed (1999) in which she removed a writhing, naked woman from a soft-core porn film. Uman also create Touch My Body (De-Mariahed) in response to Oliver Laric’s Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) (2008).

Neils Bonde's Bad Days series involves painting out scenes of tragedy and pain from newspaper clippings. I admire the non-digital-ness of his process:


And of course mention must be made of Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953):


Addendum, 7/23/09: To this round up I'd also add Desiree Palmen's camouflage work

TPG: Stephanie Dean's "Still Life with Strawberries"

Still Life with Strawberries (edition of 50) by Stephanie Dean is the latest offering by The Present Group.

The Present Group is an art subscription service--subscribers receive 4 contemporary artworks per year. Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Anthroptic was TPG's premiere issue.

Stephanie on the Modern Groceries Series:

I am creating a series of still life photographs focusing on the way our purchased food is packaged and consumed. By setting common foods in their packaging and labeling direct from the grocery store into traditional nature mort compositions, our most common and necessary items of life -- food -- are jolted into historical focus. The viewers’ various degrees of knowledge of Dutch still life paintings will be the measure by which the photographs will either found or further the perceived rift between ourselves and nature, and ourselves and our food sources.

R. Luke DuBois's "More Perfect Union"

R. Luke DuBois has an interesting Rhizome Commission proposal. His More Perfect Union creates averaged photos of online dating participants as categorized by congressional district.



DuBois writes:

According to a 2006 Pew Research Report, 20 million Americans make use of online dating services, and nearly a third of Americans know someone who has used one to find a partner. In the three years since this report was published, this number has surely only increased, and represents a significant trend in how people find romantic connection in the Internet age. As a specialized form of social networking, online dating is a well-established and well-studied phenomenon in the United States, dating back to computer dating services in the late 1970s. A significant part of the ritual of online dating consists of preparing a profile, in which you describe yourself, your personality, habits, hobbies, tastes, and, on most services, include an image of yourself. You also use the service's API to describe (either in narrative or using multiple-choice fields) what you feel your want in a romantic partner. Online dating forces us to engage in a vulnerable act of articulating our self-identity in a semi-public forum for the express purpose of being wanted, and to read a thoughtful dating profile is to read the precarious expression of someone else's desires.

A More Perfect Union consists of a large hybrid artwork based around the information found on online dating sites in the United States. I've already begun studying this data, downloading 16.7 million online dating profiles this summer and studying the information for artistic inspiration. The project takes the form of a census, where the profiles are sorted by zip code and placed into the appropriate U.S. Congressional District. The profiles from these districts are then analyzed for trends and will incorporate text, statistics, maps, and imagery drawing from the photos people include in their dating profiles, derived in inspiration from the gestalt image work current in computer graphics (image morphing), but dating all the way back to Francis Galton's composite portraits, made in the 19th Century.

Incidentally, you can see my own Rhizome Commission proposal here.

Peter Funch's "Babel Tales"

I love these composited photographs by Peter Funch.






See the entire Babel Tales series.

[via BoingBoing]

Anthropomorph

Occasionally the facial recognition software used in my Self-Portrait project will find a face in an inanimate object. This became the basis of Anthroptic, my collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum.

I noticed this one (the photo above) the other day and particularly liked it. Sometimes I cannot see what the facial recognition software is finding, but in this case it's pretty clear.

ASDF

ASDF is the art-making duo Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz. Their projects are usually involves collaborations with other artists to make work that is free and digitally-based.

For example, their For a Brief Time Only at a Location Near You:

For a Brief Time Only... is a purchasable exhibition of 24 artists available at a photo developer near you. You can find it at any store that allows file uploading via the internet (including most major US drug-stores). The image files will be sent to the closest location near you, and within minutes you will be able to walk in and pick them up as prints.

This exhibition contains 24 small 4x6 photographic prints contained within the packaging provided by each store. Also included are a contact sheet with all the artists' information, and a letter to the store employee reassuring that there is nothing wrong with the order.

No money is being made by us in this exhibition. You will purchase the show directly from the store (unless you can acquire it another way), which will probably cost around $5. We would like to make it clear that we have no intentions in promoting sales in these places, which will mostly include major US drug-stores. We think of it more as infiltrating these spaces with our games.

That "show" has closed, but the photos are still available in pdf form.

Read my earlier posting about ASDF's 100 $1 grants

"Untethered" at Eyebeam

The Untethered show at Eyebeam ended on October 25th, but you can still see a nice round-up it at wmmna.

Dead Star, Michel de Broin, 2008

Buttons, Sascha Pohflepp, 2006

Buttons is a camera without optical parts. When the camera’s button is pressed, the camera does not record an image, instead it records the time. It then wirelessly searches the Internet for photographs that were taken by someone else at the very moment of the button press. Pohflepp says:

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the [camera’s] screen... In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.

Blendie, Kelly Dobson, 2003-2004

From Dobson's statement on Blendie:

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950's Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

Photographers' movies lists

Untitled, Winter 2005 by Gregory Crewdson (left)
and a scene from Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (right)

Film In Focus has an ongoing series which lists various luminaries' favorite 5 films.

Their set of photographer lists includes Gregory Crewdson, who's work often looks very much like a single frame of major motion picture. Crewdson's list of movies that influenced him the most includes Blue Velvet (which somehow I would have guessed) and Vertigo.

More Crewdson:






[via Modern Art Notes]

Trevor Paglen's Spy Satallites

KEYHOLE/IMPROVED CRYSTAL Optical Reconnaissance Satellite (USA 129) near Scorpio, 2007

Lacrosse/Onyx IV Near Alfirk (USA 152), 2008

Wired Magazine has an article about photographer Trevor Paglen's show at the Berkeley Art Museum:

His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit -- despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don't exist. The Other Night Sky, on display at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum through September 14, is only a small selection from the 1,500 astrophotographs Paglen has taken thus far.

...

"What would it mean to find these secret moons in orbit around the earth in the same way that Galileo found these moons that shouldn't exist in orbit around Jupiter?" Paglen says.

Satellites are just the latest in Paglen's photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he's snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, "torture taxis" (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.

[via Art Threat]

Portrait of the artist

Arcy Douglass has posted a great set of photos with comments (almost a slide lecture) on Port: click here to see.

Arcy says:

The reason that I chose these images in the post is that they all convey a story. They seem to be closer to conveying an idea about a person or work rather than simply documenting an experience. The ideas in these photographs seem to me to be essentially about place.

Most of the images are of artists and architects at work (or in the buildings they created). I noticed that there are no images of a woman in the role of creator, only as a subject. So let me add one of Louise Bourgeois:

Souveniers

Michael Hughes has an amusing on-going project, he buys souvenirs of landmark and use them to mask the real thing. More photos here.

Thanks to Leisure Guy for pointing this project out.

Interventions with The Image Fulgurator

Julius von Bismarck's The Image Fulgurator is a reverse camera... instead of capturing images, it projects images. More specifically, it briefly projects an image when its light-detector senses the flash from another camera. The idea is that the artist can lurk around tourist sites and secretly overlay his own images onto the photographed subjects so that when the tourists look at their photos they'll find them manipulated.

From von Bismarck's site:

People's great trust in their photographic reproductions of reality was what motivated me to develop the image Fulgurator. A camera can be used as a personal memory tool, since people do not doubt the veracity of their own photographs. Hence, photos can reproduce the reality of an individual environment or public space. At sacred or popular locations, or those having a political connotation, an intervention with the Fulgurator can be particularly effective. Especially objects with a special aura or great symbolic power are good targets for this kind of manipulation. In other words, with the Fulgurator it is possible to have a lasting effect on those kinds of individual moments and events that become accessible to the masses only because they are preserved photographically.

This video below shows an intervention at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The manipulation is intended to make connections between the former East Germany/West Germany border and the US/Mexico border today.


A compelling & interesting project, but I wonder about the gun-fetish aesthetic. Not only does the camera have a pistol grip, but von Bismarck's video has him assembling the camera ala sniper-gun movie cliche. The pistol grip seems particularly notable since it is counter to the (presumed) desire to have the fulgurator be as innocuous as possible.

His logo (above) references the Red Army Faction's (below). I honestly wonder if he's really thinking through and taking responsibility for using this kind of imagery (or if it is just easy dramatics).



The Image Fulgurator won this year's ARS Electronica Prix's "Golden Nica" for Interactive Art.

[via Make]

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.