Posted in Art or Commerce?, Authorship, Exhibition, Internet, New Media, Old Media, Photography, Popular Culture, tagged art world, artists, commerce, creativity, Design, Etsy, Etsy.com, galleries, Popular Culture, selling on December 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Happy news! Artists and the people who love them meet at last, on mutual ground. No more stark, unfriendly gallery spaces where some intern behind the front desk refuses to acknowledge your arrival. No more standing around at openings with a plastic cup of lousy wine in one hand and a gussied-up Ritz cracker in the other, hoping for a chance to speak with the artist. No more stratospheric prices that make you feel like a dwarf star in the vast art world universe. Really? Really! (more…)
Posted in Check out..., Design, e-art, Electronics, New Media, Old Media, tagged e-fabric, e-quilts, Mouna Andraos, quilting, soft circuits on December 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Some time ago I posted my enthusiasm for the Gees Bend quilts and their makers. Working with their families’ old work clothes, and influenced by their faith and surroundings, the Gees Bend quilters created astonishingly beautiful designs that rival the New York School artists celebrated in our art history books.
Now comes 21st century quilting, where technology meets sewing! I should have seen this coming: electronic quilts made from e-textiles. E-textiles are conductive, meaning they can carry an electrical current. When configured with “soft circuitry“, the textiles can respond to environmental changes—such as the presence of people—as well as to changes in light, temperature and wind. Textile artist Mouna Andreos has combined traditional sewing/quilting techniques with a contemporary design sensibility to create electronic quilts that represent and interact with Canada’s chilly climate: (more…)
Posted in Beyond Borders, Design, New Media, Old Media, tagged digital design, furniture design, Sebastian Brajkovic on May 7, 2009| 5 Comments »
The digital world and the actual world can bleed into each other in mind-bending ways. A recent example: the furniture sculpture of Sebastian Brajkovic. His chairs are planted solidly in the physical world yet appear to morph, at light speed, into virtual objects. In some ways this blurring / merging / mashing of staticness with motion can be traced back to the Futurists. They attempted to capture the mechanical speed of modern life in paintings and sculptures. Futurist artists were galvanized not only by first-hand experiences of speedy 20th century living, but also by its representation in movies and photographs. As a child of the 21st century, Brajkovic references computer-generated imagery. Though anchored in “meat space” by needle-stitched embroidery, fine fabrics and ponderous bronze frames, his chairs are transformed by our shared experience of the ephemeral digital trace. As to the usefulness of a Brajkovic chair for the purposes of sitting, who cares?
Photograph from Sebastian Brajkovic’s site.
Posted in Architecture, New Media, The News, tagged Beijing hutongs, information, invisible Chinese, journalism, Liu Bolin, Olympics, The Bird's Nest on January 16, 2009| 9 Comments »
I am reminded that what we “know” from day to day is truly known only through a glass darkly. Despite the digital information revolution and the development of more forms of information delivery than we can shake a stick at, we are no more enlightened by what we read and watch today than we were when life and ideas moved at a slower pace. In fact, we may understand less. If there is an art to journalism (and I do believe there is) it is in probing more deeply into the stories and “facts” made available to us through live feeds, blogs, cell phones, digital images and audio recordings; then turning that informative into a coherent whole that we can use for better decision making and action. Information, without thoughtful interpretation, is worse than no information at all. We might as well get our news over our neighbor’s backyard fence.
Posted in A Picture is Worth..., Design, Installation, New Media, Old Media, Photography, Popular Culture, tagged cupcakes, Obama, Obama Volunteers, pixelated art, politics, Polling Places, Upstate New York on November 11, 2008| Leave a Comment »
Not since Marie Antoinette uttered, “Let them eat cake!” (not!) have cake and politics been so closely related. Zilly Rosen, a cake maker and artist living in Buffalo, New York created a 1,240-pixel, er, cupcake portrait of Barack Obama to express her excitement and gratitude for the presidential election process. Interviewed by Cupcakes Take the Cake bloggers, Zilly explained the source of her genius idea:
“I knew I wanted to do something to be part of this moment in history. I wanted to send up my creative energy to the “ether” in the days preceding the election. I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, and they always have a bake sale on Election Day for the people voting at their polls. I first thought about making this installation for their bake sale, but then realized I couldn’t have an image of Barack within 100 feet of the polling place!” (more…)
Posted in Audio work, Authorship, Design, Multimedia, music, New Media, Performance, Popular Culture, Radio, tagged audio environments, Brian Eno, dada, John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, noise, sound 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…)
Posted in Internet, Mapping, Multimedia, New Media, Popular Culture, surveillance, tagged data, digital art, information aesthetics, information visualization, Internet art, Mapping, search engines 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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