Superflex's "Today We Don't Use the Word Dollars"

Today We Don't Use the Word Dollars is one project from a series of One Day Sculptures--temporary public artworks that were commissioned in New Zealand over the last year.

Superflex's project involved the employees of Auckland's Karangahape Road branch of the ANZ bank. On Wednesday May 27th, 2009 all the employees of the bank were not to say or use the word 'DOLLARS.' The staff used other words of their own choice to explain themselves to customers and co-workers. When they accidentally broke the rule, they paid a $1 fine into a staff social fund.

[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

The Altruist

The Altruist (above) is a short documentary about artist Laurie Munn's adventure in found portraiture. Following a project where she painted portraits of all the Presidents of the United States, Munn began painting portraits of all 220 members of the graduating class from a 1965 yearbook she found in the trash.

One of her professors (at the time of the documentary's making, Munn was pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree) suggested she visit the school that the yearbook is from. At the school she runs into one of the 1965 graduates which sends her on a journey to track more of them down.

It's a fun documentary (though a bit ham-handed in its use of soundtrack)... and I enjoy seeing the artist's work expand from a fairly thin practice of painting portraits to a deeper, more interesting social-practice of seeking out the humanity behind the portraits.

Steve Lambert: YouTube Commentary

Steve Lambert's Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 - YouTube Comments overlays a performance of the symphony with the YouTube commentary as ready aloud by actors.


Steve says:

As much as I like it, more than any other site the commenters on YouTube can be surprisingly, well, horrible. In my research I found this was true even on videos of the highest-of-high culture. Operas and symphonies had the same hostile, petty, and juvenile comments as nearly any other video on the site.

The commentary track I made for this video is literally the commentary from the original Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 video, read aloud by actors.

Created for the Artists' Space WebCast for January 2009. Thanks to Joseph Del Pesco, Scott Vermeire, Cynthia Yardley, Jeff Crouse, and Christina Kral.

See other videos in the YouTube Commentary Project

[via Art Fag City]

Andy Baio's "Faces of Mechanical Turk"

Mechanical Turk is Amazon's new service where you can post a task you want completed, along with the amount you'll pay for it, and folks will do it--Amazon calls it "artificial artificial intelligence." The service is named after an 18th century chess machine hoax.

Andy Baio decided to post a task for the mechanical turkers to reveal their faces. Here's his request:

Upload a photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign that says "I Turk for ...", filling out why you turk. For example, "I Turk for Cash," "I Turk for My Kids," "I Turk to Kill Time," or whatever else you like. Be honest, be funny, be whatever you like.

As a good faith gesture, here's my photo.

If you have a webcam, you can simply go to Cameroid to snap a photo from your web browser, download the JPG, and upload it below. (Don't worry if the text is backwards, I can fix that myself.) DON'T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that's a violation of MTurk policy.

The result will be used in a collage that can be found on my personal weblog, http://waxy.org. By uploading your image and accepting payment for the image, you give permission to me, Andy Baio, to use your image in all forms and media for any lawful purposes. (That's just cover-my-ass language. I'm almost certainly only going to restrict it to this one project.) The collage will show up there shortly after the HIT is complete. Thanks, everybody!

Baio originally offered $0.05, but then raised it to $0.25 and finally to $0.50.

Click here to read what Baio says about the project.

Grande Reportagem's "Meet the World"

Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine known for its photo-journalism and investigative reporting. Since January 2005 it has been running a series (developed for them by the ad agency FCB Publicidad) called "Meet the World" where national flags are used to graph a social/political issue specific to the particular country.

China

Somalia

Icaro Doria, a member of the concept team, said:

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

(quote via BrazilianArtists.net)

Brazil

I do wonder a bit if all the above details are correct... a cursory google search on "grande reportagem" didn't turn up the magazine's website, just blog postings about the flag project. Likewise, I saw references to FCB Publicidad, but didn't find their site (again, I didn't look too thoroughly). I did a check on snopes (the urban legend debunking site), but nothing came up.






Related: Yukinori Yanagi's flags

Jenny Holzer Twittering

If there was ever a technology that was ready-made for an artist, it is Twitter for Jenny Holzer.

View Holzer's twitter entries

Some People

Some People is Harrell Fletcher's new web-based project. Like Learning to Love You More, his earlier collaboration with Miranda July, the project is platform for others to publish their interpretation of an artistic-ish task. Whereas Learning to Love You More has a growing list of tasks to choose from, Some People focuses on people documenting others' lives.

From the website:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

Some People very neatly combines Fletcher's work that prompts others to take part in a social, creative act and his work that takes the form of documenting another's life/interests such as Boy (a 1999 show about a ten year old Seattle boy named Gregory).

[via Marisa Olson @ Rhizome]

A day without the mobile-phone

Recordings of the sculpture made by Andrew McKenzie, h3o

Eve Arpo & Riin Kranna-Rõõs coordinated "a day without the mobile-phone" last September in Tallinn, Estonia. The project is a an installation made up of cell phones collected from the people in the city. The phones are hung on a tree where they create a light- and sound-installation. Through out the night the phones light up, ring, & vibrate as they receive phone calls--some inadvertent and some specifically to trigger the sculpture.

The artists are organizing a second installation for June 2008 in Edmonton, Canada as part of of The Works Art & Design Festival.



Part 1: TV coverage in top evening news, Reporter, Kanal2.
Part 2: documentation from the installation, recorded by Üllar Luup, Reporter, Kanal2

Question Box

Question Box is a very interesting, very cool project which allows people in an Indian village access to the Internet's wealth of information via a intercom that links up to a human researcher.

The spread of such access reminds me of how the Internet has changed the way that I think of (& access) knowledge and information--when I was a kid I would often wonder about a certain topic, but would know that the information was basically out of my reach. My town (population 7,000) didn't have a particularly comprehensive library--and even if it did, I couldn't spend hours in it to research a momentarily, idle curiosity. Now, I am constantly looking up information simply for the joy of it (e.g., "I wonder about Vanilla beans... are there vanilla trees? Oh, they come from orchids!").

Here's what Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote about the project:

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it's like those "executive assistant" telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).
...

But the net isn't binary (well, it is, but not in the way I mean): it isn't there or not-there. It can ooze in, over the period of years and decades.

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

[via Boing Boing]

David Troy at the MoMA

David Troy's Twittervision and Flickrvision projects opened at the MoMA this week as part of an exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind.

From the show's website:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale.

Dave's projects maps in near-real-time people's Twitter announcements and uploads to the Flickr photo sharing site. (Anyone interested in art based upon Flickr should also check out my Self-Portrait, Anthroptic, and Mirror projects).