We Want Change
02/21/08 Filed in: Ideas
Crowdsourcing video- "larger than any of us, made possible by all of us"
The collective video HOPE.ACT.CHANGE was created in support of Barack Obama's run for president & the video grows as participants upload their campaign photos onto Flickr and tag them with "hopeactchange".This is a smart project that lists Obama as the CEO of Inspiration- fantastic- it sounds like a line from a George Clinton/ P-Funk song.
Speaking of crowdsourcing- I am now running out to my first class at THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, an experimental school based on peer to peer learning that is taking place at the TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown, Los Angeles.
Journey into the basin of the Great Salt Lake
02/17/08 Filed in: Rambling
Slideshow
- I took a trip out to Wendover, UT with Matthew
Coolidge from the Center for Land Use
Interpretation and graduate students from the
Curatorial Practice Program
at the California College of Art. We were
talking about 'curating space' while exploring
the wide open basin of the Great Salt Lake and
the hidden military history of this region. We
also made treks to visit famous works of Land
Art; such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Holt's
Sun Tunnels and the CLUI's Wendover Complex. It was a
fantastic field trip & I cannot wait to see
the project this curatorial team will execute
out in Wendover next month.
You Are Here highlights
01/10/08 Filed in: Ideas
There are short
highlights from the YouAreHere conference
now online at Vimeo.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
Launch of An Atlas of Radical Cartography
12/03/07 Filed in: Ideas
I am so excited about this project/publication!
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
Thursday, December 6th @ 7PM - Free
Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen Street, New York City
between Stanton & Rivington (Near 2nd Ave- F/V)
Reading: Mogel & Bhagat "An Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Please join editors Lize Mogel and Lex Bhagat to celebrate the publication of "An Atlas of Radical Cartography," a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays exploring social issues from globalization to garbage. Cutting across the boundaries of art, literacy, and activism, radical cartography calls upon us to utilize maps as political agents for social change.
For more information & to order your own copy: An Atlas of Radical Cartography
We were here
12/02/07 Filed in: Ideas
Up: Matt Coolidge from The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Down: Rich Pell from The Institute for Applied Autonomy
Yesterday at The Aurora Picture Show
Matt McCormick's blog has great coverage of the weekend
Rock Gods
08/14/07 Filed in: Rambling
When we arrived in Baltimore this morning, I was surprised that it did not look like a set from a John Water’s film. The waterfront area where we are tonight looks more like Boston or Annapolis with mega-shops, restaurants, and sailboats. You know, nice but a little dull. So I found a bookstore and picked up Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery, which claims “Metallica is the “thinking man’s” metal band and the headbanger’s CNN”. Not sure if this Professor of Popular Culture will deliver on bringing me into the fold of Metallica’s music via theory, but I figured that if I was ever going to read this book, being on the road with a metal band was the right time to do it.
We leave the US tonight for Quebec City – Viva La Quebec!
Photo by Bill Worsham, my bus mate from the lighting team
The Delicacy of Rock and Roll
08/01/07 Filed in: Rambling
This morning I woke up and was unsure of what day of
the week it was and of what state I was in. I guess
the mentality of Rock and Roll tour has fully set in.
As we roll back into Texas, I feel welcomed home by
that familiar smell of summer rain.
I keep coming back to the scanned copy of Dave Hickey's essay The Delicacy of Rock and Roll from Air Guitar, that I saved to my desktop before leaving Houston. My favorite 2 paragraphs come at the end of the essay:
"Rock-and- Roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us- as damaged and anti-social as we are- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock- like "free" jazz- sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock- and-Roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising."
I keep coming back to the scanned copy of Dave Hickey's essay The Delicacy of Rock and Roll from Air Guitar, that I saved to my desktop before leaving Houston. My favorite 2 paragraphs come at the end of the essay:
"Rock-and- Roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us- as damaged and anti-social as we are- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whether we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.
And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock- like "free" jazz- sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock- and-Roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising."
blog time
05/30/07 Filed in: Ideas
Last night I was talking with a friend who innocently
asked "Who has TIME to read blogs?" Sheepishly I
thought ‘worse yet, who has TIME to post to a blog?’
Rather than sit around for too long feeling like I
lacked an action packed life, I starting to think
about how this blog, or blogging in general,
originated. Is there a link to connect the creation
of a blog to the tradition of committed
correspondence/ Pen Pals and Mail Art, perhaps by
taking a slight detour through public access/
community television?
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
The computer made it possible to make multiple copies of a letter, allowing the writer to create group letters and mini communities of receivers. The writer and mail artist Lex Bhagat brilliantly utilized the group letter, often to the chagrin of the recipients who wanted individually tailored missives. The CC of an email, the inclusive cousin of the BCC has replaced the printed group letter. The BCC is abused in the business world, often as a way to cover one’s own ass.
Mail Art made creative use of the Postal Service and was an "art movement" whose heyday was between the 1950s and the 1960s. This network of artists was subverting (or simply uninterested in) the commercial gallery system. These artists created a system of exchange that based on generosity, and to some degree totally self motivated and involved. The ephemera of Mail Art took the form of letters, illustrated envelopes, postcards, and friendship books amongst other forms. It could be anything, as long as you could put a stamp on it!
The group of artists most associated with Mail Art was the Fluxus movement and Ray Johnson is sometimes called the 'Father of Mail Art.' In the early 1970s the brave curator, Marcia Tucker, organized an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that was instigated by Ray Johnson. This exhibition and subsequent shows during the 70s helped create official sounding names like "The New York Correspondence School," to describe the group of mail artists communicating with Johnson.
Mail Art also created the sense of a ore interconnected "Global World" which corresponded with theories being espoused at that time by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Mail art also allowed many non-Western artists to develop lasting artistic relationships with artists based in New York and European.
This type of DIY spirited networking also trickled into the publishing industry and was embraced in the creation of the 'The Whole Earth Catalog' which was distribution between 1968 and 1972. This DIY catalog was intended to provide education and 'tools' that would enable the reader to "shape his/her own environment." While obviously utopian, this catalog was deeply influential on the 'Back to the land' movement and entire counterculture of the 1960s. Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur behind Apple Computers, said this networked catalog was the conceptual forerunner of a Web search engine. "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great ideas."
Last year the beautifully designed book 'Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century" was published and in New York Times Review of Books was called "The Whole Earth Catalog retooled for the iPod Generation." You can save some cash by just spending time on their website.
More to come... I have run out of TIME.
But for now we know just who has time to read blogs- You!
radical reference
05/19/07 Filed in: Ideas
In 1966 Richard
Brautigan wrote the novel The Abortion: An Historical
Romance.
The story takes place in an unusual library that
accepted books from anyone who wished to drop them
off. As an homage to this fictional place The
Brautigan Library was created and for many years
was housed within the Fletcher Free Library in
Burlington, Vermont. This library within a library
accepted only unpublished manuscripts.
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
Recently curator and founding director of the Aurora Picture Show, Andrea Grover (aka: Mistress of the Microcinema) brought a curious trend to my attention, artists making their personal libraries available to the public. A few great examples of this are recent projects by Martha Rosler, Steina & Woody Vasulka and Rick Prelinger.
Personal libraries are different from digitizing and making public archives, but interestingly related.
Digital archive Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library, started in 1971 by Michael Hart. The mission of PG is to digitize and share its extensive collection of public domain books with the public. Where as the vast online archive of industrial, instructional and ephemeral films at Archive.org are accessible to all, and free to many for use in education, commercial or artistic projects. YouTube is loaded with mash-ups created from these archived films.
VIDEO:This is the Prelinger Collection...
There are some provocative questions associated with the simple question of why this is happening? I hope that Andrea and I will tease out some of these ideas in the blog later this summer. But for now, I wanted you to know the Martha Rosler's Library is opening as a component of the ambitious Berlin-based project unitednationsplaza.
Martha Rosler Library is comprised of approximately 7,700 titles from the artist's personal collection and was opened to the public by e-flux in November 2005 as a storefront reading room on Ludlow street in New York City.
A personal library represents the private sphere of an individual, her way of acquiring and combining knowledge. Accumulation is the result of an intellectual inquiry that takes place in parallel with a more random search, which can lead us to unexpected textual, and therefore mental, spaces. Martha Rosler Library offers the visitor an opportunity to approach this open source of information with her or his own interests, and to create new affinities and connections between the elements of the library that add to more than the sum of knowledge contained in it.
A reading group will be assembled to use the library as the basis for a series of informal discussions around texts chosen by Martha Rosler and members of the group. The meetings were initiated in New York, and are continuing at all locations of the library as it travels. For each meeting, a guest reader will select a text from the library and lead the group.
(reblogged from e-flux)
Unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.
Radical Reference comes from a real sexy librarian movement, check them out here
fire fighting goats
05/16/07 Filed in: Ideas
The citizens of Los Angeles are deeply concerned after serious wildfires in the Griffith Park and Hollywood Hills have destroyed vast swaths of urban wilderness and killed or displaced thousands of animals during their breeding season.
These fires feed upon unchecked dry undergrowth, and endanger lives, homes, historic monuments and our enjoyment of the city. It will take decades before Griffith Park is restored to its pre-fire condition.
We the undersigned demand that the City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Department of Recreation and Parks respond to this continued threat by bringing in shepherds with herds of goats to graze on the dry hills, a plan previously implemented with great success by UC Berkeley in the aftermath of that community's devastating 1991 fire.
Goats are economical, ecological fire-fighting machines that produce fertilizer as they clear hills and canyons of weeds, poison oak and dry chaparral. Additionally, the animals are charming, newsworthy ambassadors for fire safety, a subject that needs to be more widely discussed.
We want to save our parks and mountains. We want goats! (Reblogged from 1947project.com)
WARNING We had a gaggle of urban goats in Albany, NY. Whenever they got out of their pen the goats would happily strip the bark off the fruit trees we were growing in our lot and eat everything in the garden. But if you are still looking to hire a herd of your own, you can go here.
machines for living
05/12/07 Filed in: Ideas
MACHINES FOR
LIVING: GETTING
STARTED
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.
Back in 1998 Lex Bhagat and I produced a series of ol' skool zines using Photoshop and a crappy old Zerox machine someone gave us. The zine was called FOLD, because each issue had a different folding configuration. This conceptual/ aesthetic decision made it difficult to get the pages back in the proper order once it was unfolded, but it expanded the notion of what a zine could look like. It would have been cool if we had discussed the endless possibilities for paper folding with an origami expert.
FOLD imagined futuristic cities in manifesto-like articles on Permaculture, urban gardening and citizen controlled urban spaces. FOLD also made visual comparisons between theoretical city planning and actual urban spaces. One of my favorite comparisons was between Le Corbusier’s plans for the Radiant City and the Empire State Plaza, in Albany New York.
Almost ten years later, now aided by this RapidWeaver blog software and my MacBook it is time for me to revisit these themes in a new series called MACHINES FOR LIVING, a term borrowed from the Le Corbusier book Towards a New Architecture.
My intention is that this series will mutate and takes over the blog with a web of loosely interconnected ideas, interviews, photos and videos.But for now, we are just at the edge of that... but today is yesterday’s tomorrow.