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]

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

Mike Patterson's "Commuter"

Commuter (1981), Mike Patterson

Commuter is the Student Academy Award winning animation by Mike Patterson. Patterson is the animator behind Ah-Ha's groundbreaking Take On Me music video.

If you haven't already seen it, the "literal" version of Take On Me is worth a few chuckles: "Band Montage!"

[via BBV]

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]

Mark Callahan's "24 Hour Miss South Carolina"

View the artwork

Mark writes:

In 2007, a teenage beauty pageant contestant made a thirty-second speech that became a media phenomenon, fueled by millions of views on the Internet and a brief but intense outpouring of parodies. 24 Hour Miss South Carolina appropriates directly from YouTube while paying homage to Douglas Gordon's seminal 1993 installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Slowed, stretched, and silenced, the work repositions an object of short-lived attention and mass ridicule to an epic progression of still images. As the resonance of the original performance diminishes, 24 Hour Miss South Carolina silently plays on, carried to an obsessive extreme that invites fresh readings on the nature of celebrity, voyeurism, and entertainment.

For even slower media, see my earlier post on a performance of John Cage's AsSLowASPossible.

[via Rhizome]

Oblivious

Olivia Robinson's Oblivious is a naked man on a table who reacts to touch.

Robinson described the work:

A naked man is sleeping on this table. As you touch the soft surface of the table, the man reacts physically. He wiggles, leans or rolls over in response to your pokes, prods, caresses, tickles and slaps. In response to the intensity and frequency of your touch, as if shrinking from this unbidden intimacy, his image fades away. Oblivious touches on issues of power, vulnerability, potential for abuse or intimacy, as well as our level of comfort with a naked male body.

The image of the man fades in the areas that have been touched the most. Over time, as more and more people interact with him, those areas will become rubbed or "touched" away. His evolving body becomes a record of people's hands and where they have chosen to touch him. At the beginning of an exhibition he will be completely opaque, present and oblivious of your existence; over time he will change in accordance with the collective interaction.

Is it just me, or does that guy look a bit like a young Jean Tinguely?


Inbed (2008) is a similar (perhaps derivatively so) project by ITP student Drew Burrows.




Burrow's describes the project:

In the piece a person climbs into an empty bed with a projected woman sleeping on it. Though the bed is empty, the projection gives the feeling of having someone there beside them. As the person climbs into the bed the projected woman moves close to cuddle and reacts accordingly as the person moves around on the bed. I wanted to give both the sensations of being alone and having someone in the bed with the viewer at the same time.

The aim of the piece was to speak on the feelings of loneliness, affection, and intimacy.

I'm also reminded of You Are Now Becoming Who You Are To Be (2004), a non-interactive work by Holly Andres. That work consists of a video of a young woman projected upon a bed. She shifts around on the bed and her silk chemise slowly changes from white to red.

Paul Chan's The 7 Lights Website

Paul Chan's First Light was my favorite work in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Above is documentation of that artwork which comes from a special website that the New Museum has put together to go with Paul Chan's new exhibition, The 7 Lights.

Here's what Ceci Moss wrote about the Paul Chan website on Rhizome:

The site presents elaborate documentation of the exhibition, in the form of video, text, audio, and drawings. In the spirit of Creative Commons, the source files for Chan's animations are also available for download and modification. This underlying feature inserts a unique interactive component to the website and, further, to the exhibition itself.