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Archive for the ‘Multimedia’ Category

Pat Buchanan, Framed.

Posted in A Picture is Worth..., border conflicts, Corporate Media, Documentary, Multimedia, Popular Culture, Television, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 2, 2008| 1 Comment »

Photo by Robin Locke Monda

Pat Buchanan’s recurring role on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” has got to be some kind of border violation. And I mean that in the best possible way! It’s great to watch Buchanan trying to apply nuance to his irrational, nativist positions in the face of thinking, intelligent people from both the left and the right. The “Morning Joe” show is proof that, (1) not all Republicans are nut jobs, and (2) not all Democrats shoot themselves in the foot.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” models Democrats and Republicans communicating with intelligence, humor and a willingness to listen. Think what could be accomplished in a truly cooperative congressional environment! We could disarm the big mouths of the radical right while repairing America’s foundation and its vision for the future. (more…)

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Sounds like 2008

Posted in Audio work, Authorship, Design, Multimedia, music, New Media, Performance, Popular Culture, Radio, tagged , , , , , , on October 8, 2008| 1 Comment »

"The Hat Makes the Man" (1920) Max Ernst

I’m taking my first sound environment course at Hunter College with professor Andrea Polli. Our major text is Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. Featured readings come from interviews, essays, magazine articles and manifestos written by theorists, musicians and sound artists like Pierre Schaeffer, Theodor Adorno, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould and Chris Cutler. The readings have been a real eye-opener—or should I say “ear opener”?

I’m a visual specialist. My music knowledge is as shallow as my art background is deep. Sure, I took piano lessons as a kid. But after I learned to play Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” well enough to impress my father, I lost interest. Like a lot of people, I’ve accumulated a “personal soundtrack” based on haphazard exposure to radio stations, TV, advertising jingles, movies and live performances. Unlike most, my personal soundtrack hasn’t been transferred to an MP3 player. It resides solely between my ears, where snippets of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” bubble up through layers of B. B. King, the “Dr. Zhivago” soundtrack and Alka Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” jingle.  (more…)

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Notorious Design

Posted in Border Violations, Conflicts of Interest, Design, Exhibition, Installation, Multimedia, Popular Culture, surveillance, Theater, tagged , , , , , , on August 14, 2008| 1 Comment »

Roland Emmerich. He’s the big-budget director of “Independence Day,” “Universal Soldier” and “Eight-Legged Freaks.” I came across an article on Emmerich and his design aesthetic in the New York Times’ August 7, 2008 Home section.

The Times devoted two whole pages and thirteen photos to the redesign of Emmerich’s townhouse in the “buttoned-up” Knightsbridge section of London. Apparently he redesigned the place primarily to shock his neighbors. It’s not a townhouse anymore; it’s a fun house of cultural and pop-cultural references: Mao Tse-Tung, Pope John Paul II, pseudo Renaissance paintings, Barbie dolls and Philippe Starck chairs… If it shocks the neighbors, he’s happy. Whatever…

But what about the miniaturized diorama tables in the living room? The ones that Emmerich commissioned from his movie prop department. The ones that depict, in the Times’ words, “notorious events”? (more…)

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Information visualization: can you digg it?

Posted in Internet, Mapping, Multimedia, New Media, Popular Culture, surveillance, tagged , , , , , , on May 11, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The Internet is information — your information, my information — everyone’s information. Remember the regrettable words emailed to your sister four years ago? They’re still in cyberspace, along with the resumé you posted on Monster.com, your mortgage applications, the searches you did on “prostate cancer,” the old Facebook photos, your tax returns, buying habits and medical records. Your information floats around in the digital ether, like snow in a snow globe, until someone (corporations, retailers, health insurers, employers, lenders) shakes it into data-drifts that reveal who you are, what you buy, what you dream. The border between the private and pubic has been breached, big time. (more…)

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My Trip to 32nd Street

Posted in Games, Multimedia, Performance, Popular Culture, Theater, tagged , on May 3, 2008| 1 Comment »

32nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues has become the most exciting block in Manhattan. Known as Koreatown, or Korea Way, the street consists of elegant turn-of-the-century buildings done in the style of the French renaissance. Elaborate, gray facades are now almost hidden behind bright signage in Korean and English. The life of the block extends inside the buildings: restaurants, bars, galleries, and karaoke joints are not only on the street level but also on multiple floors inside the structures: the karaoke studio I went to was on the fifth floor.

The studio served no food—it consisted of a series of soundproof rooms that groups rent by the hour. Customers bring in their own food and beverage. The karaoke menu is in many languages—the English one seemed to consist of every hit song that reached the top five in the American charts since the early days of Frank Sinatra. (more…)

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Competing Relationships: Art, Money and the Power of Time and Space

Posted in Art or Commerce?, Exhibition, Installation, Multimedia, tagged , , , , , , on April 23, 2008| 2 Comments »

Earlier this spring, as we stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the Whitney Biennial, my company at the museum made the rather amusing but to my mind also very accurate observation that it all looked like “an open studio at an MFA program”. My friend was reacting against the lack of space to move around any one piece, to truly see it and attempt to take it in, without bumping into either people or other works of art. In all, visiting this biennial (as well as the 5 or 6 I’ve seen before this, I should add) is a rather stressful and uncomfortable experience; perhaps especially so for those of us who have the luxury to visit Chelsea weekly and often find ourselves to be the only visitor in a gallery at a time. What’s most annoying to me is that with all the clutter, movement and distracting chatter, it is impossible to establish a new relationship to an artist’s work that I have never seen before. That, it seems, should be one of the biennial’s most important purposes. As it is, it resembles a big, well-attended art fair, both in aesthetics and function, with the exception that sales staff is really hard to come by.

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