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• #99. Save Free TV
• #98. A Comparative Study of Apples & Oranges
• #64. Mind Control by Flashing Lights: An Internet Survey
• #20. In Ohio, In The Fall, You Were Young
• #25. Ten Digital Ready-Mades
• #44. Home Page for the Haphazard (AKA oopsdotcom)
• #68. Hardware, Software, Just-Rightware
• #17. Captain Kirk’s Chair: An Instructional Installation
• #100. The Light That Falls Across the Ceiling of the Room that Shows Us The End Of The Day As Night is Slowly Making Its Way Into Our Sight (AKA It’s Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer)
• #66. Pixel Bitch
• #53. Java My Ass
• #38. Close Your Eyes, Make a Wish, Hit Delete
• #04. Twenty-Five Concrete Examples of Why John Cage Is Not My Father
• #11. Auction Stand for Personal Hate
• #89. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained (Notes On Digital Art)
• #01. Random Access Mortality

MTAA propose to extend the exhibition space of star67 gallery, brooklyn, by the amount of 3 megabytes of disk space on the servers of yahoo.com.

• onKawaraUpdate
  Created with Alex Galloway as a splash page for Rhizome.org.
• vitoAcconciUpdate
  Commissioned by The Whitney for a gate page on their Artport web site.
• 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate)
  A 2004 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

The goal of the School of Conceptual Clay is to promote the study and practice of conceptual clay.

Conceptual Clay was invented by M.River & T.Whid as a metaphorical activity and an open-ended collaborative performance commenting on the digitization of former analog practices and techniques.

The MTAA Signature Series is an attempt to maximize mindshare in the online art market while maintaining the economics of scarcity on which the traditional art market depends.

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I feel compelled to ask (of him or anyone here who cares) what comprises this “fine line” between the two extremes of “good Pop Art and a sickening psychophantical [sic] homage to the dominant media culture”..? And must all art that appropriates the form and/or content of popular media fall into one or the other of these extreme categories?

Where does parody fit in, because to me, for something to be truly successful, on a parodic level, it has to be highly imitative—and, hence, to some degree, reverent, even if only in the sense of (let’s say) what Jameson calls “nostalgia films,” which are not necessarily acting in praise… To me, it is this act of shadowing (miming, resulting directly from, yet in contrast and however shape-shifted) that best affords the opportunity for critique. Admittedly, it is sort of an act of relinquishing some of the sense of “value” implied in models of authority (read: authorship), in order to sort of free one’s speech, ie to protest.

But anyway. I also wonder how TWhid (& MRiver) would situate their 1 year performance project re: reality tv—and if they see similarities, then have they given us “good Pop Art [or] a sickening psychophantical homage to the dominant media culture”? ;)

We bought a couple of Zywiec beers and some pirogi, then headed for the gilt-framed stage. Packed onto the honey-colored wood floor (polished by the polka?), hundreds of jeans-clad fans waited for the headlining act, Spoon. Touted as the next big thing for years, the Austin-based art rockers took the stage, all sharp drums and crisp guitar riffs, sounding like they’d finally arrived. This corner of Brooklyn felt like it had, too.

The results returned by the service are in XML which varies per service.

These rate limits are imposed independently for each service and are typically in the thousands-per-day per user range. See each service’s documentation for the individual limits.

At the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting in Chicago last Friday, protesters masquerading as a right-wing think tank took the stage and announced that in light of Bush’s shortcomings, they were nominating former Reagan Attorney-General Ed Meese for president.

The audience applauded for nearly ten seconds.

randWin 8or9 albat blue sxtunt rewnd xxxx3_ Narn_ secret security sirene theykee toon (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) pressent cmcstrp drugs maltese g-h.ref p4r4ch boxdogs poseid_ p_jack Robert paint_ vendetta wind (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) benicio hido inthestre j-m-He jodie error flight93 tiiiitprnt twcemrB x oopentry gundown_ N_C (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) john Michell plane pulp1 mywav TaxiDriver thegrey EE ttiiuhi phne MDasn mi4mi blank (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (d) (e) (f) (X)

[…]in the mold of Slate and Salon, with, get this, guest bloggers ranging from Sen. Jon Corzine, Larry David, Barry Diller, Tom Freston, David Geffen, Vernon Jordan, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Harry Evans and his wife, Tina Brown.

Her business partner is Ken Lerer, the head of AOL-TW’s corporate communications in the Bob Pittman era.

Along with the celebrity cred, these super-busy bloggers may not actually blog, but e-mail or phone in their posts: “We’re setting up a system wherein you’ll be able to e-mail or phone in your latest take, which our editorial team will fact-check and turn into a blog post.”

The site’s soft launch is apparently set for April.

I’d be interested to know why you made the decision to try and show in galleries. Do you feel you are having to find ways to “shoehorn” your stuff into a format that fits.

Wichita State University has announced that the Emily Jacir exhibition scheduled to run January 20 - March 6, 2005, at the Ulrich Museum of Art will do so without any conditions.

Elizabeth King, Vice President for University Advancement, released the following statement late this afternoon:

“Wichita State University is aware of the discussion generated by the scheduled exhibition of work by artist Emily Jacir at the Ulrich Museum of Art. The University is committed to going forward with the exhibition without conditions or limitations that could be considered to compromise the integrity of Ms. Jacir’s work as an artist. The University appreciates the widespread interest in the artist and the exhibition.”

via: From the Floor: Emily Jacir Exhibition to Proceed without Conditions

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.

The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.

[MTA spokesman] Mr. Kelly acknowledged that the random searches were without precedent, but added that he hoped riders would not consider the actions an inconvenience.

This exhibition, entitled Welcome to my Homepage Artshow, is the first solo show in New York by Arcangel, a founding member of the Beige Programming Ensemble. The show includes a number of new hacked Nintendo game cartridges - the work that Arcangel has become known for - and a number of new works in the medium of video. In the former group are a fully interactive Ipod® programmed for the Nintendo® system and an absurdly slowed down version of Tetris®. In the latter group are Sans Simon, a video of Simon and Garfunkel in which the artist uses his hand to hide Simon’s presence, and Geto Boys/Beach Boys in which videos by the two eponymous bands are played side by side creating an oddly harmonic synchronicity.

[…]

The show at Team […] marks the launch of dooogle.com, a search engine which only yields results about Doogie Howser, M.D. Also available is a new piece of software called T.A.C. (Total Asshole Compression), a program which increases the size of any file passed through it.

A group of established artists have been gathering for invitation-only figure drawing sessions, an exercise that had fallen out of fashion.

[…]

Only a few years ago, the idea of artists gathering to paint from a model would have seemed impossibly old-fashioned and hokey - and if the model was female and nude, sexist to boot. Yet for nearly three years now, a number of artists - not students putting charcoal to paper for the first time, but successful artists with established styles and audiences of their own - have flocked to Mr. Cotton’s weekly invitation-only sessions

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open-access XML format, alleviating concerns that commercial providers would continue to play a dominant role in how weather data gets to the public.

via: Wired News: Weather Data for the Masses

At this very moment, Rob Bohn is holding a red jacket in his hand and standing on the corner of 23rd and Broadway near the Flatiron Building.

He is excruciatingly cold for he cannot wear his jacket unless he is given an orange.

Simply find a way to get an orange to him and he will thankfully put on his red jacket.

He will be standing on the corner until the sun sets - wearing or not wearing his red jacket.

He is depending on you.

The Villette Numerique media arts festival opens tonite in Paris! Featured in this huge show includes “Listening Post” by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, “Bondage” by Atau Tanaka, an installation that turns still imagery into soundscapes, and “Unprepared Piano” by Thomson and Craighead - which presents a Yamaha MIDI grand piano connected to found mp3 files from across the web. Also, this show features the first ever install of “Carnivore” (by RSG) that includes all 16 clients installed in the same venue!

Desperate to find a quick solution, late last month officials from the State Department approached the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which owns the pavilion, about organizing the American exhibition at the 2005 Biennale

…

The State Department’s decision to ask a museum to organize the pavilion rather than let a committee decide is viewed by many in the art world as undemocratic and scandalous.

…

“If the Guggenheim does it,” [Robert Gober] said, “it will become an arm of the museum.”

EVEN now, four years later, people who know Simon Curtis still can’t believe the odd series of events that led him to spend the last year in jail. And although Mr. Curtis readily admits that he was living recklessly, drinking too much, taking drugs and spraying graffiti on the Lower East Side, he didn’t exactly see a state prison in his future when he went to an art opening on the night of July 14, 2001.

[…]

A good-size crowd had turned out, and a loose, partylike atmosphere prevailed. As the evening wound down, Mr. Curtis, then 31, found himself nearly alone inside the gallery and eyeing his favorite photo, a self-portrait of Ms. Cortez that showed her topless and wearing ripped stockings. He was feeling contented and mischievous and also a little drunk. It suddenly occurred to him that it would be funny to show up with the photo at Max Fish, a Lower East Side bar where Ms. Cortez had gone with friends. As a group of people stood outside smoking cigarettes in the sticky air, he reached up, plucked the photo from the wall and shuffled out.

(via)

“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”.

Here goes nothing: The Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition, removed from eBay last December due to Apple’s objections, is now available for auction here on my own site. Bidding is open until March 14, 2005. This auction period is quite a bit more than what would be offered on eBay, because bid handling will be much less automated. Get your bids in now!

Via: U2 vs. Negativland vs. Apple vs. eBay vs. me, take 2

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Turbulence Juried International Net Art Competition

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. is pleased to announce that with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 5 net art projects will be commissioned for the Turbulence web site in a juried international (open to everyone) competition. Each commission will be $5,000 (US).

DEADLINE: March 31, 2005

GUIDELINES: http://turbulence.org/comp_05/guidelines.htm

JURORS: Wayne Ashley (US), Arcangel Constantini (Mexico), Sara Diamond (Canada), Melinda Rackham (Australia), and Helen Thorington (US).

On April 7, the New York Public Library and Wired Magazine will present musician, songwriter and author Jeff Tweedy and Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig in a discussion moderated by Wired Magazine contributing editor Steven Johnson. The engagement Who Owns Culture? will explore the artistic, commercial and legal issues that surround the Internet-enabled freeing of culture. It is part of the new series Live From the NYPL.

Despite the expansion of our projects and the acceleration of our support for net artists over the past two-and-a-half years, Turbulence has not seen a parallel increase in its operating support. The situation has become critical during the past month because two recently launched projects—ASCII BUSH and 1 Year Performance Video—have made greater demands on our server than ever before. Both projects have exceeded the limits of our monthly bandwidth; ASCII BUSH will re-launch soon after having been taken down for three weeks. [The piece had received close to 20,000 visits.] 1 Year Performance Video, by MTAA, is also a huge success. However, if we don’t find immediate support—either in the form of server co-hosts or financial contributions—this piece, too, will have to be taken down.

Please consider helping Turbulence keep 1 Year Performance Video alive! Send the artists an email (twhid@mteww.com) if you can co-host the project, or go to http://turbulence.org and click on the PayPal button.

December 1, 2005 New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc./Turbulence Fundraiser http://turbulence.org/fundraiser_05/index.html

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) will be 25 years old in 2006; Turbulence will be 10 years old. Despite the expansion of our projects, the acceleration of our support for net artists, and the valuable resources we provide in our networked_performance blog and New American Radio archive, NRPA has seen a decline in its operating support. As a result, much of our hard work forgoes compensation. Of equal concern is the dual role our server is forced to perform: archiving work produced since 1996 and supporting new commissions that require cutting edge technologies and later versions of its current software. It s time for a new server.

We need your support. Please help us preserve our archives and support emerging artists and technologies. Numerous Turbulence artists have generously donated DVDs, CDs, archival prints, T-Shirts and more. Choose from this impressive array or simply make a donation today. http://turbulence.org/fundraiser_05/index.html

Art work donated by Cory Arcangel, Kate Armstrong, Andy Deck, Jason Freeman, Mariam Ghani, Peter Horvath, Yael Kanarek, Michael Takeo Magruder, Michael Mandiberg, MTAA, Yoshi Sodeoka, Helen Thorington and Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga

Tom Moody:
Pieces that refer so specifically to known, past artworks, satirically or otherwise, are problematic—more on this below—but there’s much to think about here. Unlike the Globe and Mail, I’d discuss the work in terms of voyeurism, and artist recuperation of the part-guileless, part-sleazy home webcam phenomenon. In real (Internet) life, the only reason a surfer would stay with a site like this for hours was in the hope that the subjects might do something kinky. I know there are people watching this for art, but why? Perhaps the presence of white plastic buckets in the rooms creates some morbid curiosity about how the artists handle basic elimination needs, but frankly I didn’t stick around to find out.

Like Penn and Teller explaining a magic trick, the artists reveal—on a related web page—quite a bit about the scripting and webserving mechanics behind their simulation. This geeks-only backstory actually makes for fairly fascinating reading. [snip]

For sure the technology changes the Hsieh piece quite a bit, which did allow observers, but only at specified times, like a prison visit. Ultimately the MTAA work’s relationship to current tech-shaped behavior patterns and pop culture tropes feels more compelling than its parody of the Hsieh performance, which is almost by definition an art world in-joke, with a singular interpretation: that when computer-age art revisits the physically demanding, emotionally wrenching work of yesteryear, an insincere, fast-food facsimile inevitably results. Sorry to leach the humor out of it, but there it is.

Continuing with our insistence that FEAR IS BACK, today’s Transom has a downright disturbing item about Brooklyn artist Chris Hackett […], who is constructing a fully-functional suitcase bomb. The piece is courtesy of the Madagascar Institute, a radical art organization which is organizing an exhibition to be shown at either Cooper Union or South Street Seaport the week of September 11. Here’s to the power of perfect timing:

[Hackett] said the strength of the bomb would be equivalent to “about four pounds of TNT. It doesn’t sound like much,” he allowed, “but it’s enough to kill everyone in the gallery.”

Mr. Hackett was the victim of one of his own art works early last year. The graphic description in a New York Post story on Jan. 25, 2004, was that Mr. Hackett “blew up part of his face” while rigging a propane tank to fire a confetti cannon. Mr. Hackett’s jaw was broken in the explosion.

[…] people have to login as guest then go to “threads” to find it.

Identity Theft:
Small-time criminals impersonate honest people in order to steal their money. Targets are ordinary folks whose ID numbers fell into the wrong hands.

Identity Correction:
Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

The Yes Men:
The Yes Men have impersonated some of the world’s most powerful criminals at conferences, on the web, and on television, in order to correct their identities. They currently have hundreds of thousands of job openings.

MTAA’s 1 year performance video (aka samHsiehUpdate) One of the smartest, most interesting, art historically important works of internet art ever. Honestly.

MoMA will raise the basic price of admission an eye-opening 67 percent, to $20, making the Modern the most expensive major art museum in the United States.

Edvard Munch’s paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” were stolen from an art museum Sunday while armed men threatened the staff at gunpoint.

[…] two men hanging off the side of the building on ropes, with tons of police cars below. So I go into my building (which is directly across the street, the FAO Schwartz building) and up to the 10th floor where I work and tell everyone what is going on. We all run to the window and watch as these two men are dangling outside the Plaza trying to hang an anti-Bush sign. The cops were reaching out the window after them, it was quite a scene!

Do you enjoy Rumors on the Internets, Mr. Pibb + Red Vines, and brilliant political strategy? Do you have what it takes to create the next JibJab, Numa Numa Dance, Detroit Project or Black People Love Us?

The Huffington Post Contagious Festival is a unique opportunity for talented designers, political activists of any persuasion, filmmakers and comics to reach millions of people with creative, viral online work. The contestants that create the best projects get Internet fame and the chance to meet with friends of Huffington Post from the worlds of entertainment and politics to discuss future projects and opportunities.

ENTER THE FESTIVAL NOW

The first round of entries will go live starting February 1, but you should Enter Now to reserve a spot on the official Contagious Festival server. You simply create an account, build your project on the server and launch your site. Then you can watch the live rankings to see if your entry is being forwarded, linked, and IMed around the Internet. At the end of the month, we award two prizes:

The People’s Choice Award for the contestant that creates the entry that gets the most total traffic during the month. The winner dines with Arianna Huffington and receives $2,500.

The Jury Prize for the favorite entry of our jury is a meeting with the judge most interested in their work and receives $2,500. Judges will vote based on creativity, originality and social commentary.

Tax the Rich is an online political campaign hosted by the The Huffington Post. It stars the adorable, animated “Baby Liberty”, an innocent talking head who dreams of a better future. Baby Liberty wants “Tax the Rich” to become part of our common vernacular, believing in her heart of hearts that this will positively change the world for rich and poor alike.

Why make files smaller, when you can TAC them?™

TAC* is the best compression format available for the web today! By using revolutionary scientific methods, research teams at RSG and the Beige Programming ensemble were able to a compose a complex software tool that expels many of the myths that surround modern file compression techniques. The secret of TAC compression is not that it makes files smaller, but that it makes files bigger, much bigger.** This provides the end user with a compression tool to meet almost any need in today’s bandwidth and gig overloaded computing world.

“The Mario Movie,” Deitch Projects, New York City, January 2005

Cory Arcangel (Beige) and Paper Rad

This is a group effort, so let me first introduce the principle actors. Paper Rad: Benjamin Jones, Jacob Ciocci, and Jessica Ciocci. Beige: Cory Arcangel, Paul B. Davis, Joe Bonn, and Joe Beuckman. They work in collectives for the same reason that punks play in bands: it’s funner that way, and it’s easier to make more noise. There is the Lennon/McCartney question of who is responsible for what, and I can’t make head nor tails of it. But from what I know Ben and the Paper Rad kids have a shameless affection for dirt-style, fan fiction comics about Garfield and Howard the Duck. And then there’s Paul who I am told once entered the DMC turntable competition under the DJ name “Spin Laden.” (He advanced through the opening heats, a challenge in itself, before being thrown off for scratching in the Notorious B.I.G. lyric “Time to get paid / blow up like the World Trade.”) The clothes that the Paper Rad kids wear they sew themselves. Cory wears them too, I think, when he’s not wearing pizza-shaped animal pullovers knit at home with his other chums. And on more than one occasion, I’ve been present when, sauntering past a stray guitar, in a Kmart aisle or friend’s house party it doesn’t matter which, Cory has spontaneously tapped out the full arpeggios of Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” with ten fingers at full frills. Then there was the music performance in Brooklyn when the Paper Rad three sat cross-legged on the floor performing a pretend recital on some Sony “My First Laptops,” while the music was droning on prerecorded throughout. I thought electronic music was the one thing you didn’t have to lip-sync? Oh well. Here’s how I understand it: I’ve done way more ecstasy than Beige and Paper Rad put together, but they’ve done way more acid. And that makes all the difference. As Ben scribbled in a comic once, “Can one be tanned at night by stars?”

But it gets weirder: “The Mario Movie,” Deitch Projects, New York City, January 2005. There is not much a rational person can say about a psychedelic rave fantasy, with messed up graphics, with castles floating on rainbow colored clouds, with dance parties and raves in underwater dungeons, all starring Mario the plumber who does little more than weep through the tumult. And the whole thing plays live off a hand-soldered video game cartridge. Gosh. But if I may observe one thing it would be merely the following: this is the real deal. Which is to say that it’s not the real deal. This is computer code. But what you see is not what you get. To watch the code itself would bore to distraction. Instead this code runs on a video game console that converts it into sound and image. The game console is the Nintendo Entertainment System, known affectionately as “the NES” to every youngster lucky enough to receive one for Christmas in 1985. (Raised by hippies in Oregon, we were not so fortunate.) The NES is a magical device, for given the proper code it can synthesize any sort of video signal from scratch. This is not the sort of video made with a camera and edited on a computer, mind you. How do we know? First, the compiled Mario Movie is 32 kilobytes in size, or about twice as long as the few paragraphs you are reading now. Even compressed, a ten minute video is roughly a thousand times larger. Second, the movie runs directly off the customized game cartridge pushed into the socket of the NES console—without, Cory is keen to observe, altering the factory-soldered graphics chip shipped on the original ’80s cartridges. “Yo sound the bells / school is in sucker,” MC Hammer would come to say a few years later. “U can’t touch this.” This is the real deal.

Because of this, computer art is more like sculpture than like painting or video. In making the work computer artists actually fabricate the substrate of the medium, they don’t apply things to surfaces or use prefab tools to move images on a screen. The code is the medium. So in writing code, and running it, the computer artist builds the work from the ground up. It’s all math and electricity. To engineer the soundtrack, Cory pokes the audio registers on the NES’s chip in specific frequencies. When he does they chirp. To get the video, he writes hundreds of lines of code, code like “lda $2002” (translation: load the value from memory position 2002 into the “a” register in the processor), or like “jsr vwait” (translation: jump ahead to the subroutine called “vwait” to stall for a few milliseconds while the television’s electron beam repositions itself). What appears on the screen is the image of pure data. It is, in a manner of speaking, what numbers look like (if they could). Translation: this is not video art. Maybe call it math art, geek art, whatever. The Mario Movie makes tedium profound, and the other way around.

They say everything becomes interesting in the long run. Super Mario Bros might be nostalgia to you. But it’s not to them. All media is dead media, that’s what Paper Rad and Cory understand. It’s all garbage from the beginning—so don’t yearn for a time when it was otherwise. When you understand media as trash then there is no nostalgia. If there is any shred of longing that remains in the work, it’s not for our childhood friend Mario. It’s for an acid high, for a simulated hiatus in a far off land that no one has ever been to. It’s for watching a cartoon schmuck trip rather than you. It’s nostalgia for raves sucked from the fevered brains of raver-haters. Everything is as new as it is old. Everything is as sucky as it is good. This is the movie.

— Alex Galloway, January 12, 2005 3:08:50 PM EST

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey pulled the permit on an art exhibit at Kennedy Airport after an opening-night party left a landmark terminal strewn with cigarette butts, broken glass and empty liquor bottles.

The exhibit in the 42-year-old former TWA terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen, featured the work of 20 contemporary artists, including Kendell Geers, Jenny Holzer and Tom Sachs.

Port Authority spokesman Pasquale DiFulco said guests at Friday’s opening-night party had been illegally smoking inside the terminal, and that liquor had been sold without a permit. He said a door had been broken, walls were covered with graffiti and vomit was found on the floor.

This important message is to make you aware of an opportunity you have to influence the way your art is treated in the tax code.  There is a bill just passed in the Senate that would expand the deductible amount of donated artwork to its full value.  Currently the only allowed deduction is cost of materials.  However, THIS BILL HAS NOT PASSED THE HOUSE.  That’s where you come in.  The bill will be hashed out in a House/Senate committee that begins to meet soon.  Here’s how you can help:

Living writers, musicians, artists and scholars who donate their work to a museum or other charitable cause would earn a tax deduction based on full fair market value under a bill just passed by the Senate.

via: Senate Bill Lets Artists Claim Price for Gifts - New York Times

Automated trains will run this month on a 22-mile line that intersects Manhattan and Brooklyn. L-line trains with no conductors will move at preordained speeds and stop at preset stations, but some worry about safety.

via: NYC Subway Gets Computer Facelift

First, we changed the title of ‘Superusers’ (those who filter messages from RAW onto the front page and to the mailing list RARE) to ‘Site Editors.’ This decision came out of a conversation with (those formerly known as) the Superusers in which we decided that the title Site Editor more accurately and clearly described the work they do.

We also changed the ‘Community Directory’ to the ‘Member Directory’. Under the new membership policy, Rhizome’s community — defined here as people who participate in email discussions and our various programs — is now made up of Members and non-Members. So, again, we thought Member Directory was more accurate.

We also introduced the idea of RhizPaper which refers to the background image on the site. We’d like to turn this image over periodically with a new image by a different artist. The starting image is a rendition of root by our designer, Sarah. I should credit Marisa here: She came up with this idea as a way to have artists participate in the design..

Also, we didn’t switch over the title for Net Art News as we are still mulling over feedback and there are a couple of related technical issues we need to address that that got laid to the wayside as we headed towards the launch. So, stay tuned for that.

This winger, for instance, wants the US to expell the Blue States:

Yet, there are 38 states today that may be inclined to adopt, let us call it, a “Declaration of Expulsion,” that is, a specific constitutional amendment to kick out the systemically troublesome states and those trending rapidly toward anti-American, if not outright subversive, behavior. The 12 states that must go: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. Only the remaining 38 states would retain the name, “United States of America.” The 12 expelled mobs could call themselves the “Dirty Dozen,” or individually keep their identity and go their separate ways, probably straight to Hell

The goal is for the front page to become a quick, easy filter for the entire field of new media arts online—both for our current Rhizome users and Members, and for anybody else who might be interested in the field but not know where to start looking.

Rhizome.org, a non-profit organization focused on new media art, is currently seeking a Director of Technology.

One of Rhizome’s goals is to connect the worlds of contemporary art and online discourse. The Director of Technology plays a major role in meeting this goal, by taking part in the organization’s strategic decision-making and implementing the technology behind new initiatives. The position also involves helping manage partnerships with other arts and technical organizations, and may include curatorial, critical, and artistic opportunities.

The ideal candidate will be a self-motivated, highly organized individual with strong technical, analytical, and communication skills. Familiarity with both social software trends and the field of new media arts is vital.

This salaried position with benefits is approximately 30 hours/week.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
* Set strategy for overall technology development
* Support current web site features and services, which are written using Ruby, PHP, and Perl on MySQL, Apache, and Linux.
* Develop new web site features and services.
* Manage technical interns, vendors, and software consultants.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
* Experience in software engineering, particularly with object-oriented design, agile methodologies, and dynamic languages.
* Demonstrated interest in new media art.
* Experience with Linux system administration.

START DATE:
February 1, 2006

LOCATION:
Chelsea, New York City

COMPENSATION:
Commensurate with experience

TO APPLY:
Please email a detailed cover letter and resume to Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, at laurencornell@rhizome.org. The deadline for application is January 1, 2006.

ABOUT RHIZOME:
Established in 1996, Rhizome.org is an online platform for the global new media arts community. We support this community through a number of programs, including: online discussions, publications, an events calendar, opportunity listings, archiving of new media art, commissioning of new artwork, and offline and online exhibits. Since 2003, we have been affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

just gone through the submissions for this years commissions. I would be interested to know what proportion of the submissions people approve….??

I must have approved about 6

does that make me discerning or arch-bitch - (rhetorical - I know:).

I tried to look at as much and be as fair as possible but I admit after the first 15 anything with the word “mapping” or whose abstract looked like it had been written by curt’s “market-o-matic” went into auto-no. *yawn*

I ‘saw’ them all too and had the same kind of reaction

finally said ‘yes’ to 6 propositions , same as you.

Under our new policy, anyone, regardless of whether they have donated to Rhizome or not, will be able to post or access Rhizome content from the last year simply by signing up. It’s completely free to sign up - all you have to do is register an email address and password.

Artworks and texts that are *more than one year old* will reside in the Rhizome Archives. Only Rhizome Members will be able to access the Archives. Members will also be able to maintain a Member Page in the Community Directory, create Member-Curated Exhibits, and use special features such as Advanced Search. In the coming months, we will roll out innovative features to keep our membership program dynamic and worthwhile.

All current Members will retain their membership status under the new policy. When your membership expires, you will still be able to subscribe to Rhizome lists and browse the site. But, in order to retain member benefits, you will be asked to renew your membership at an annual level of $25. I hope you will consider continuing your membership at this level. Rhizome is just as reliant on our base of Members for financial support now as ever before.

Rhizome ArtBase 101

Forty Selections From Rhizome ArtBase Demonstrate Scope of a Decade of New Media

June 23 - September 10, 2005

[…]

The Rhizome ArtBase is a respected online archive of new media art containing some 1,500 works. Founded in 1999, the ArtBase is unique because of the wide variety of new media art forms that it includes, such as software art, games and moving image, and also for its international scope. The 40 works selected for the New Museum exhibition are outstanding examples culled from the ArtBase and grouped by ten unifying themes: Dirt Style, Net Cinema, Games, E-Commerce, Data Visualization and Databases, Online Celebrity, Public Space, Software Art, Cyberfeminism and Early Net.Art. Rhizome ArtBase 101 includes seminal pieces by early practitioners such as Alexei Shulgin’s Desktop Is (1997) and Heath Bunting’s _readme (1998), as well as projects by more of the most pioneering emerging talents working in the field today, such as Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad.

[…]

Data Visualization and Databases create unexpected relationships between informational entities. Mark Dagget’s Carnivore Is Sorry (2001), for example, uses RSG’s network surveillance program Carnivore (2001-2003) to track individual users as they navigate the web. The resulting web data is compressed into a jpeg resembling an abstract artwork, and then e-mailed to the user to offer them an alternative look at the information that recently passed along their browser. One Year Performance Video (akasamhsiehupdate) (2004) sources prerecorded clips of Brooklyn-based collaborative MTAA into a streaming video diptych that simulates a fictional narrative of the artists living in adjacent, identical white cells for the duration of a year.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday June 6, 2005

CONTACT
Lauren Cornell, Rhizome.org
Phone: 212.219.1288 X208
Email: laurencornell@rhizome.org

NEW YORK, NY - Rhizome.org is pleased to announce that eleven artists/groups have been awarded commissions to assist them in creating original works of net art. Each will receive awards ranging from $2000 - $900. The selected artists for the 2005-2006 commissioning cycle are Hans Bernhard, Annie Brissenden, Dave Burns, Jason Corace, Andy Deck, Victoria Fang, Jason Freeman, Ethan Ham, Peter Horvath, Sean Kerr, Thomas Laureyssens, Alessandro Ludovico, MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates), Tony Muilenburg, Adriaan Stellingwerff, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young.

[…] the book does have a specific position worth deconstructing. To begin, it imposes a post-conceptual narrative on many of the works discussed, as Greene states, “I relate the ways in which internet art is indebted to conceptual art through its emphasis on audience interaction, transfer of information and use of networks, simultaneously by passing the autonomous status traditionally ascribed to art objects.” (10) This can mean one of two things, either that all the artists who make internet art have an implicit relation to conceptual art or that only those artists who have such connection are included in the book. The problem behind this statement goes further if we consider the possibility that some of the artists included in the book may not actually have any relation to conceptual art; this would mean that an ideological imposition is at work.

[…] the strain of the performance is on the viewer now, not the artist; but this strain is a virtual one, one that is no longer concerned with the body but with the dematerialization of such into a new type of action—a meta-action— in art making, and art viewing. In a way, this not only updates the passive demand that a work of art has always had on the viewer: that it be completed by the viewer’s gaze, but it also makes obvious the interactive demand of any art object since minimal art emerged.

I meant to post awhile back to say how much I’d liked the MTAA “Five Small Videos About Interruption and Disappearing.”

Like them very much I do; but they also intrigue me. The blurb says they are inspired by early performance videos - a genre and a period which I enjoy a lot. There was a marvellous exhibition at the ICA here about a year ago of single channel video works - lots of Acconci, Baldessari and also early Nauman -wonderful stuff.

One thing that occurs to me about the MTAA response is firstly how *elegant* it is - & this is a quality of all their work - elegance and thoroughness, or perhaps elegance due to thoroughness - one could never accuse them of a lack of craft. This is in stark contrast to the sheer edginess and sense of ( often literal!) danger in much of that early video work. Doing my sums I can’t put this down to the newness of video as a medium - actually I suspect that the technologies used by MTAA are newer relative to them.

There’s a temptation to see this piece ( and others such as the one year performance piece) as a sort of conceptual post modernist whimsy, beautifully made but essentially a clever formal exercise.

I think this would be wrong - actually there seems to me to be a feel of “classicism” about this work - the elegance seems not a symptom or a bolt on but a very much integral part of the work.

I see this happening quite a lot -its as if in the shadow of high modernism it wasn’t quite respectable to use the methods and the language of the past without being *ironic* or having a high concept. Now all those barriers have long been broken we can simply move on to using a good move no matter when or where we saw it.

SO specifically here it’s as if the artists of the seventies having blazed a trail, created edgy stuff in a kind of white heat, MTAA are examining the language and the practice with the benefit of a couple of decades of hindsight and appropriating *what fits*, *what works* into their own practice.

And the resultant work for me isn’t simply clever or knowing but actually quite touching - I’m quite moved by these two characters in the videos ( and there are longer backward shadows cast here - Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the *comic film duo* , spring to mind).

Certainly the piece feels to me to have many resonances that go beyond the intellectual, the clever, the knowing and enter the world of the affective.

Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco’s designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.

via: Art, Money and Power

The Chanel show avoids mentioning her activities during the war, when she maintained a life in Paris as the lover of an SS officer and, according to her biographer, Janet Wallach, tried to exploit Nazi laws to wrest control of her perfume business from her Jewish partners.

Public Program:
Blogging and the Arts
Tuesday, November 23, 6:30PM - 8:00PM

Location:
New Museum of Contemporary Art / Chelsea
556 West 22nd Street

Rhizome.org Director of Technology Francis Hwang will lead a panel discussion entitled Blogging and the Arts. The panel includes artist Kabir Carter, photoblogger and journalist David Gallagher, artist and critic Tom Moody, and artist T.Whid. The discussion will address questions such as whether blogs will change the nature of discourse in the fine arts field, and ways that artists and critics are integrating this new form of communications into their own work.

About Rhizome.org
Founded in 1996, Rhizome.org is an internet-based platform for the global new media arts community. Through programs such as publications, online discussion, art commissions, and archiving, it supports the creation, presentation, discussion, and preservation of contemporary art using new technologies. Since 2003, Rhizome.org has been affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Blogging and the Arts is presented with the sponsorship of PubSub Concepts Inc., a free, real-time search subscription service spanning weblogs, newsgroups, wire services, and other information sources.

Speaking of extremes, “public.ex: Public Execution” at Exit Art represents one of them, at least in terms of format. The show is all but invisible in the gallery, where another, long-running exhibition takes up most of the space.

In fact, “public.ex” has just two works on the premises. One, by Siebren Veersteeg, is a screen with a live feed of Associated Press news scrolling across a Coca-Cola logo to demonstrate the pervasiveness of American monoculture. The other, titled “What an Art Gallery Should Actually Look Like (Large Glass),” by the Turkish artist Serkan Ozkaya, is made up of thousands of slides of artworks submitted in response to an open call on the Internet. Deliberately abnegating curatorial control, Mr. Ozkaya displays all the submissions edge to edge, in random order, across several of Exit Art’s windows.

There’s also art in the form of handouts. The collective called Paper Rad contributes a funky cartoon newspaper with a cool, righteous election-year editorial. And Kelley Walker, one of the more promising young artists around, offers a CD of a poster he has designed. For $10 you can have the disk and as many copies of the poster as you care to print. So much for the sanctity of the art object.

The rest of the show is made up of Web sites (for the collective xurban.net, for example); screenings of videos (by the hacker activist collectives BEIGE and Radical Software Group); and live events. Will Kwan is organizing flash mobs to protest the city’s plans to build a stadium near Hell’s Kitchen. Brendan and Patrick FitzGerald, brothers, will lead walking tours of misused public and private urban space. Ricardo Miranda Zuniga will push a shopping cart equipped with radio broadcast hardware through the streets, inviting passers-by to program their own on-air shows.

All of this will be archived on Exit Art’s Web site, further dematerializing an exhibition composed of ephemera, gestures and pixels. And such a disembodied show is precisely what the curators — Anne Ellegood and Michele Thursz, with Defne Ayas — are after: one that as far as possible sidesteps the authority of the art institution, with its conventions of display and critical categories. Instead “public.ex” is dispersed into the everyday world, where art and life, silly and serious, seem to interact on the random, nonlinear model of the Internet, that most potent and exasperating of cultural resources.

Does one have to write code to make art or music with digital tools? Two proponents of code are designer/MIT Media Lab professor John Maeda (on the hi-fi end of the digital spectrum) and the BEIGE crew […snip]

The beef about using consumer software is that an engineer makes aesthetic choices for you.[…snip]

[…] An analogy I’ve used is the purist artist who thinks you have to grind your own pigment to paint, either because store bought colors aren’t good enough or out of some strict truth-to-materials dictate. I think that applies to John Maeda—his “if you aren’t programming you aren’t using the computer” rap has a whiff of the purist ascetic about it.[…snip]

Canada offers protection to people in Canada who are afraid of returning to their home country. A claim for protection can be made at a port of entry or at a Canada Immigration Centre (CIC) office in Canada. Once a CIC officer decides that a refugee protection claimant is eligible to be referred, the claim is sent to the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) for a decision on the risk on return.

Eric Doeringer […] has been selling his copies of works by contemporary artists for four years on West 24th Street in Manhattan. Last Saturday, the police asked him to stop.

via: Little Artist Versus Big Dealer in Sidewalk Showdown

The brilliant strategists at Bush-Cheney HQ allow you to customize a campaign poster with a slogan of your choosing. And, yes, we tried the obvious ones but someone thought to block those. You can’t make a poster that says “Penis,” or “Poo-Poo,” or “Prince of Darkness.”

People soon will be able to carry guns and other dangerous weapons onto the grounds and parking lots of Reagan National and Dulles International airports, after officials yesterday eased what they said were overly restrictive rules.

Without debate, the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority unanimously agreed to permit passengers and other airport visitors to carry guns, knives and other weapons as long as they keep them out of terminals and other buildings that access airfields. Passengers who are taking guns with them on flights still will be allowed to carry them into the terminal but are supposed to make arrangements with airlines in advance, officials said.

The action comes after pressure from an increasingly high-profile Virginia gun rights group whose members have taken to wearing firearms on their hips in public places to make their case.

“Most people here from what I’m hearing have never voted before in their lives,” says Michael Bonner, a 34-year-old police officer who was waiting for a friend in the hallway of Harry David Jr. High School, a polling place in a predominantly black section of the city full of boarded-up buildings and vacant lots.

“Even the drug dealers came out and voted today!” says Dan Lawson, a hulking 27-year-old electrician. An older man standing nearby nodded in agreement, saying, “That’s right. Even the drug men.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Lawson says, “and I may never see anything like this again.”

In his first public address since leaving PBS six months ago, journalist Bill Moyers responds to charges by Kenneth Tomlinson - the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - of liberal bias and revelations that Tomlinson hired a consultant to monitor the political content of Moyers’ PBS show “Now.”

Shaula Evans, over at Tsure Dzure Gusa has a horde of links and information to help make sure you get your vote out. Intimidation stands no chance against the well armed voter.

Know your rights. If you’re an eligible voter, you have the following rights:

If your name is not on the official voter list but you believe you are eligible to vote in that precinct, even if an election official challenges your vote, you have the right to cast a “provisional ballot.”

If you’re in line when the polls close, you should stay in line because you’re entitled to vote.

In many states, your employer must allow you time to vote at some point during the day. You can’t be fired for being late due to long polling lines.

You have the right to vote without being intimidated by anyone.

MoveOn.org (opens .pdf) has a cut out wallet card as well.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a U.S. official called the threat “serious” and “credible” and said it involves threats to financial institutions in New York and elsewhere.

…

New intelligence that the al-Qaida terrorist network plans to attack financial or international institutions in New York has led police to urge extra security precautions at various city buildings.

As George W. Bush moves to the podium in New York City, we will send him a message about his bid for reelection: we will yell, “fuggedaboudit!”

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What’s the difference? We just didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terror plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

An animal rights group has called on one of the largest aquariums in the United States to stop serving fish to its visitors, likening the practice to grilling up “poodle burgers at a dog show.”

“It’s easy to think of fish as swimming vegetables but of all the places in the country where fish should get a fair shake it’s an aquarium,” said Karin Robertson, manager of the Fish Empathy Project for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.

via: Quran Splashed with Urine at Guantanamo

The President’s shocking admission that he authorized the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens, without going to a court and in violation of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress, further demonstrates the urgent need for these protections. The President believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed. This is not how our democratic system of government works. The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king.” (emphasis mine)

TUCKER CARLSON: OK, up next, Jon Stewart goes one on one with his fans…

[CROSSTALK]

STEWART: You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.

[LAUGHTER]

CARLSON: Now, you’re getting into it. I like that

According to an audio recording, [Lt. Gen. James Mattis] had said, “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. … It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling.”

He added, “You go into Afghanistan (news - web sites), you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

via: Yahoo! News - Marine General Counseled Over Comments

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

[…]

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

[…]

But worst of all from the right’s point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign’s media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of “global test” moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that’s very bad news for Mr. Bush.

My view is FOX News is a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and I don’t comment on FOX News […]

The Vice President called me unfit for office last night. Well, I’ll leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty.

Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi Royal Family control our energy costs makes you unfit. Handing out billions of government contracts to Halliburton while you’re still on their payroll makes you unfit. That’s the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney.  And that only scratches the surface.

Karl Rove said today that the president views a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage as essential to a “decent” society.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

“Cues from chatter” gathered around the world are raising concerns that terrorists might try to attack the domestic food and drug supply, particularly illegally imported prescription drugs…

Hitting hard on an issue of deep concern to older voters, Senator John Kerry on Wednesday promised an overhaul of the Medicare prescription drug law, saying President Bush had personally “stood in the way” of importing drugs from Canada…

We will know who the next president is on election day, and though I’m not happy about it — it’s reality — it will be Kerry by 2 points. It’s not good for the nation that Kerry wins, but it will be good that there is a clear winner.

Mr. CARLSON: […] I think there’s going to be a definitive win by two points. I have to say I think it’s going to be Kerry. I’m not for that, but I think that’s—I think that’s reality.

President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.’

ROMANS: Lou, Macy’s is adamant it’s not trying to offend anyone, just the opposite. It’s doing just what other businesses do, retail and otherwise. It’s trying very hard not to exclude anyone. That’s why “Season’s Greetings, Happy Holidays” is better.

DOBBS: Well, they’ve just excluded everyone who is celebrating Christmas, which is, after all, the foundation of the so-called season in which they make most of their profits.

ROMANS: Moving definitely toward not offending anyone.

DOBBS: You know, when you think about it, “Happy Holidays” — what other holidays are we celebrating right now? We’re celebrating Christmas, right?

ROMANS: And they say Hanukkah, Kwanzaa —

DOBBS: Kwanzaa?

ROMANS: — also the end of Ramadan and a host of other holidays between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

DOBBS: But as we celebrate each one of those — and each of us in this very diverse society does celebrate — my Jewish friends say to me “Happy Hanukkah,” I say to them “Merry Christmas,” none of us is offended. I don’t understand the reluctance to use Christmas.

ROMANS: They say “Happy Holidays” covers it all.

DOBBS: They do? Well, they’re wrong. And merry Christmas. Thanks, Christine.

From the White House’s advocates we hear logic puzzles about appeasement in which the fall-out from the president’s screw ups become the prime argument for continuing to support them.
[…]
[Bush] has no plan. And will without policy just equals death.

The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone.

Either would allow for individuals other than the owner of the Dominos Pizza account to order arbitrary pizzas (with random toppings even) via the DominosQuikOrder web server and have them delivered — resulting in chaos, anarchy and confusion.

Face it, the quiet/loud dynamic that’s dominated alternative radio for the last 14 years can be attributed to one and only one band, the Pixies. Undoubtedly one of the most influential groups of the new rock generation, they are back on tour to reclaim their status as the coolest American band since, well, possibly ever. In the 12 years since the band broke up, we’ve been blessed with some incredible solo albums from the singer and guitarist Frank Black; the bassist Kim Deal has graced us with the Breeders and the Amps; the drummer David Lovering has become a magician; and the guitarist Joey Santiago, he’s just bad (as in good). There is a new greatest-hits CD, a two-and-a-half-hour DVD (both on 4AD) and an 11-city tour kicking off next month. Not to be missed, the Pixies are a live band like no other. Be prepared for an over-capacity sing-along, night after night.

Every president gets tucked away into a cocoon to some degree. But President Bush does notoriously few press conferences or serious interviews. His townhall meetings are screened so that only supporters show up. And, of course, he hasn’t debated anyone since almost exactly four years ago.

Frankly, I think it showed. It irked him to have to stand there and be criticized and not be able to repeat his talking points without contradiction.

After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, “clearly designed to frighten people off,” the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, “like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs”.

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous,” the spokesman said.

“The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there.”

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: “Do not,” it said, “try to find us.”

Cheap, paper-thin TV screens that can be used in newspapers and magazines have been unveiled by German electronics giant Siemens. The firm says the low production costs could see the

via: MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | Paper view technology

We’ll store your video, podcasts or digital photo collection for free — forever. No catches.

The works in these archives have been selected around various themes and a single purpose: to encourage a Critique of Contemporary Culture (in the language which best represents it) using different strategies such as video art, independent documentaries, and mass media archaeology, among other…

Since January 2004, artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl — known collectively as Glowlab — have been examining the block on which the New Museum’s new building will rise (Bowery to Chrystie Streets on the East-West axis and Stanton to Rivington Streets on the North-South axis).

Rhizome.org Announces Marisa S. Olson as Editor and Curator at Large

via: Rhizome Announces Marisa S. Olson as Editor and Curator at Large

Liberty, Fraternity, Community
A series of historical paintings in the neo-classical style depicting great moments in Smurf history. These ‘paintings’ could be done in oil or as digital images.

So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90’s and when did it end?

To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous…or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.

Until now, both the television and film industries have been built on a model that requires producers to appeal to millions of people or be considered failures. If Amanda Congdon at one end of the spectrum and Charlene Rule at the other continue to add viewers at the rate they’re going, they and the best of the other vloggers might just provide a viable alternative to that lowest-common-denominator business model.

In other words, the revolution may just be vloggerized.

It was a relief to hear that the Pixies still sounded utterly and gloriously like themselves on Saturday at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

via: Once Upon a Time, There Was This Really Loud Band

A New York painter, Steve Mumford, has been embedded with military units in Iraq on and off since April 2003.

An online game fusing Pac-Man with Mondrian's painting "Broadway Boogie Woogie" has caught the attention of Internet gamers and even some art critics.

via: Chomp if You Like Art

Deitch Projects, a gallery in Soho, is bringing reality television to the art world with a show called “Artstar.”

For the show “Greater New York,” museum directors and curators will choose the work of 175 artists who they say best capture the city’s contemporary art scene.

via: Talent Call: Hot New Artists Wanted

But because the Drawing Center has been chosen to be part of the projected International Freedom Center at ground zero, it has come under some critical scrutiny. The Daily News reported yesterday that the gallery has, since 2001, shown political art critical of the current Bush administration. How much political art? Four pieces, including one on view now, is what The Daily News came up with, out of many dozens, maybe hundreds of works the Drawing Center has exhibited in the last four years.

via New York Times

thing.net communications LLC is a partnership that runs the hosting and dial up business.

THE THING, Inc. is a 501 (c) 3 not-for-profit arts organization and runs the arts program and the BBS.

Two different entities with different missions.

thing.net sometimes supports THE THING by providing free tech support and inkind donations like paying the rent when TT is broke or donating a used server. This arrangement gives us the flexibility to survive in an increasingly hostile climate. The support provided to MTAA is coming from THE THING and the videos will be hosted on THE THING servers.

Hope this explains the setup.
Greetings,

Wolfgang

NET ART DEAD!

Mark Tribe has called it in the press release for inSite_05:

Although artists continue to work online in ever greater numbers, net art as a movement is now over. But to say that the net is just another medium along with video, painting, installation, etc. would be misleading. The net is both a medium and a platform, a set of tools for art-making and a distribution channel for reaching people. The net can still enable artists to reach a global audience without the assistance of art world institutions. Equally important, it can enable artists to reach audiences that never set foot in a gallery, museum or performance space.

(via)

A MAKER profile of Natalie Jeremijenko, building toxic sensing robot dogs from discarded toys, as read by Dale Dougherty, MAKE publisher. This is an enhanced podcast, it will play audio -and- show the actual pages of MAKE Magazine from volume 02 when you click on them. We hope to do more of these, please let us know what you think. iTunes: Click this link and click SUBSCRIBE.

Nam June Paik, 73, Dies; Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: January 31, 2006

Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer, performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art, died Sunday at his winter home in Miami Beach. He was 73 and also lived in Manhattan.

Nam June Paik in 2004 with one of his installations at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.

Mr. Paik suffered a stroke in 1996 and had been in declining health for some time, said his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, who manages his uncle’s studio in New York.

Mr. Paik’s career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of expression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited.

At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive. In recent years, Mr. Paik’s enormous American flags, made from dozens of sleek monitors whose synchronized patterns mixed everything from pinups to apple pie at high, almost subliminal velocity, could be found in museums and corporate lobbies.

Mr. Paik was affiliated in the 1960’s with the anti-art movement Fluxus, and also deserves to be seen as an aesthetic innovator on a par with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. Yet in many ways he was simply the most Pop of the Pop artists. His work borrowed directly from the culture at large, reworked its most pervasive medium and gave back something that was both familiar and otherworldly.

He was a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity. A lifelong Buddhist, Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelming: a writer once compared his New York studio to a television repair shop three months behind schedule.

Mr. Paik is survived by his wife, the video artist Shigeko Kubota.

Mr. Paik got to television by way of avant-garde music. He was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, into a wealthy manufacturing family. Growing up, he studied classical piano and musical composition and was drawn to 20th-century music; he once said it took him three years to find an Arnold Schoenberg record in Korea. In 1949, with the Korean War threatening, the family fled to Hong Kong, and then settled in Tokyo. Mr. Paik attended the University of Tokyo, earning a degree in aesthetics and the history of music in 1956 with a thesis on Schoenberg’s work.

He then studied music at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Freiburg and threw himself into the avant-garde music scene swirling around Cologne. He also met John Cage, whose emphasis on chance and randomness dovetailed with Mr. Paik’s sensibility.

Over the next few years, Mr. Paik arrived at an early version of performance art, combining cryptic musical elements — usually spliced audiotapes of music, screams, radio news and sound effects — with startling events. In an unusually Oedipal act during a 1960 performance in Cologne, Mr. Paik jumped from the stage and cut off Cage’s necktie, an event that prompted George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, to invite Mr. Paik to join the movement. At the 1962 Fluxus International Festival for Very New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr. Paik performed “Zen for Head,” which involved dipping his head, hair and hands in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and dragging them over a scroll-like sheet of paper to create a dark, jagged streak.

In 1963, seeking a visual equivalent for electronic music and inspired by Cage’s performances on prepared pianos, Mr. Paik bought 13 used television sets in Cologne and reworked them until their screens jumped with strong optical patterns. In 1963, he exhibited the first art known to involve television sets at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.

In 1965 he made his New York debut at the New School for Social Research: Charlotte Moorman, a cellist who became his longtime collaborator, played his “Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only,” performing bared to the waist. A similar work performed in 1967 at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in Manhattan resulted in the brief arrest of Ms. Moorman and Mr. Paik. Mr. Paik retaliated with his iconic “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” two tiny television screens that covered Ms. Moorman’s breasts.

Mr. Paik bought one of the first portable video cameras on the market, in 1965, and the same year he exhibited the first installation involving a video recorder, at the Galeria Bonino in New York. Although he continued to perform, his interests shifted increasingly to the sculptural, technological and environmental possibilities of video.

In 1969, Mr. Paik started showing pieces using multiple monitors. He created bulky wood robotlike figures using old monitors and retrofitted consoles, and constructed archways, spirals and towers, including one 60-feet tall that used 1,003 monitors. By the 1980’s he was working with lasers, mixing colors and forms in space, without the silvery cathode-ray screen.

For his 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Mr. Paik arranged monitors faceup on the rotunda’s floor, creating a pondlike effect of light and images. Overhead, one of the artist’s most opulent laser pieces cascaded from the dome in lightninglike zigzags — an apt metaphor for a career that never stopped surging forward.

Show dates: october 22 - november 26 2005
Opening reception: saturday october 22, 6-8 pm

Bitforms Gallery
529 W 20th St, NY, NY

Eyebeam
Thursday, October 27, 7:30 PM
540-548 west 21st street (bet 10 & 11 Ave)

I’m pleased to announce that my latest work in High Definition videos are on display at Sara Tecchia Gallery (529 west 20th street, 2nd floor) in Chelsea. The videos are random select from an HDV database that are played one after another in a seamless playlist. This is a preview for a larger installation of 3 flat screens at Sara Tecchia’s in March. Come by and have a look and let me know what you think.

TVTonic allows you to subscribe to most video podcasts on the web.

Download RSS 2.0 video enclosures in the background.

Museums are putting everything up for sale, from their artwork to their authority. And it’s going cheap.

via: What Price Love? Museums Sell Out

With faith goes the delicate ecosystem of charitable contributions and tax-free privileges. Why, the public will ask, do institutions like these reap the benefits of nonprofit status if they service private interests who shape the content of what’s on view and/or reap cash rewards?

Want – A six-channel video installation using Internet peer-to-peer networks and actors portraying the obsessive desires of six types of common Internet users.

dJ phuturecybersonique writes “Netcraft reports that ‘Comment spam attacks on Movable Type weblogs are straining servers at web hosting companies, leading some providers to disable comments on the popular blogging tool. The issues are caused by bugs in MT, forcing publisher Six Apart to recommend configuration changes while it prepares fixes.’ More…”

via: Comment Spams Straining Servers Running MT

Just wanted to tell you that I showed a few of your works in class, today, and my students loved it. You’re one of the very few artists/ collectives to actually make them laugh, this semester, and I think that’s a high compliment. They especially enjoyed the 5 small videos and we had a very long conversation about 1YPV, in light of the ideas of Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, WJT Mitchell, and Roland Barthes.

Oh, and we also talked about “real life.” It was nice!

I can’t wait for all those MTAA PhD dissertations to come out—starting with Avi Rosen, of course… :)

Now I don’t want to personally attack Sarah Boxer (though she is very much worth taking the time to Google!), but I know that she has a background in psychoanalytic theory and I find it unfortunate that her reading in a science of interpretation has not parlayed into interpretations of art. As is true of her other articles recently discussed here, I think that this was, ultimately, a missive rather than a review. (Again, Palli said it all.) She doesn’t adequately discuss the experience of the pieces, though the intended experiences were, in many senses, constitutive of the works. She says, simply, that she doesn’t have time for them.

On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about “two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff,” as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at “SNL,” using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.

Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday’s show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone’s girlfriend’s sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night - and morning - editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards. Finally, at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 17, the four learned from Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “SNL,” that “Lazy Sunday” would be shown on that night’s show.

Hi Tim,
You ask: things now in Iraq are better than what - all-out war and constant bombings?

It’s a fair question, and highlights the psychological divide between Americans and Iraqis. I think it’s very difficult for us to really understand what life under Saddam was like. The problem is made more difficult because it’s impossible to frame without a political subtext, ie., if you say things were worse under Saddam you can sound like a propagandist for Bush, with his hall-of-mirrors justifications for going to war. When I say that things were indescribably worse under Saddam, I’m not justifying our going to war in Iraq, just explaining how it’s possible for an Iraqi to be more hopeful for their future now than in the last 30 years.

When you get to know Iraqis well and personally you begin to see the scars from Saddam. It’s not enough to catalog the bizarre and horrific crimes, the Caligula-like escapades through Baghdad, the arbitrary arrests and beatings, the sense of complete irrationality and injustice that marked these years. It’s the feeling of residual fear, frustration and hopelessness that I sometimes see in my friends. It’s a country suffering from post-traumatic stress, where ambition and courage are thwarted and even the lives of the living have, in a sense, been lost.

My friend Esam Pasha told me about a conversation he had with Naseer Hasan, the poet, back in the 90s. He was describing his anger at the Baathist regime, his having to live in fear, not being able to talk openly in public about anything related to politics (almost everything, you had to talk in kind of bland code), the abuses of his military service. Naseer is 15 years older. As a communist party member, he spent 5 years on the run, hiding with relatives, after a colleague was captured and he feared that under torture he’d give his name up.

Naseer said, “Look, you can’t think of it like that. You can’t wish for things to get better, because you’ll become obsessed. You must think of the regime as an unwelcome house guest that you can never ask to leave; instead you have to get used to them in your house, and all your daily life things are just done knowing that they are around you.” Esam says this helped him a lot.

Naseer feels he lost the best years of his life to this regime, the years we take for granted in the West, when you’re young, energetic, and the world seems new.

Another artist, one of Baghdad’s bright lights in painting, often suffers from depression. He says his military service still haunts him. And he wasn’t in any wars - just having to serve in an army where cruelty and arbitrariness marked each day. He often stood up to the abusive officers, yet he’s haunted by his failures, and the fear of those days which are often vividly recalled in his dreams.

Perhaps I can’t convince you that this is worse than war - but it is. I’ve seen a little of the war out here, though not much. I’ve found that I’m not greatly affected, on a psychological level, because these events are over relatively quickly and I have a relatively healthy ego. But imagine a trauma which is not as great, but goes on for years, with no end in sight, each hope dashed, each avenue of escape cut off, each slip of the tongue a cause for paranoia. This, your life since birth.

The only analogy that I can come up with for this is Stalinist Russia. In this sense the Bush administration got it wrong: they imagined that they were liberating the French from the Nazis. It’s obviously more complicated when we invade a country with a homegrown tyranny, and we’ve compounded the problem with inadequate resources and bad decisions. But even so, I think that many Iraqis feel they are better off now, and most look to the future as having real potential for positive change.

It will be just a bunch of desperate artists doing their best to suck-up to the art world honchos as they watch their dignity being stabbed out like a stale cigarette.

And how is that different from the real art world? I mean on the Deitch plane of existence, of course.

I think the show is brilliant, and I very much look forward to it. It’s obviously not targeted at artists with dignity, so you shouldn’t try to imagine yourself as a contestant on the show. Instead, you should think about the great entertainment that will result from watching all of the art world “types” that you probably hate humiliate themselves on television. Savor it.

This ninety-minute screening surveys sixteen artist who incorporate the experience, memory, or anticipation of time’s passage into their single-channel video works. This screening is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Marking Time, currently on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).

The screening and exhibition is organized by Glenn R. Phillips, research associate and consulting curator, Department of Contemporary Programs and Research at the Getty Research Institute, in association with the Getty Research Institute’s 2004-2005 research theme “Duration.”

Wednesday evening artist Christian Marclay will screen and discuss his work as part of the Focal Point lecture series from Eyebeam’s Moving Image Studios. Marclay’s talk will include the seminal pieces Telephones and Record Players as well as his more recent work including The Bell and the Glass.

Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: LOW LEVEL ALL STARS—Weds and Thurs at Deitch Projects
Date: February 21, 2005 9:17:41 PM EST
To: list@rhizome.org


DEITCH PROJECTS AND THE NEW YORK UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL PRESENT:
LOW LEVEL ALL STARS
CURATED BY CORY ARCANGEL and RADICAL SOFTWARE GROUP

FEBRUARY 23 + FEBRUARY 24, 7-10PM
76 GRAND STREET, NEW YORK CITY
FREE!! PLUS FREE RED STRIPE


Deitch Projects is please to present a two-night music and video event, LOW LEVEL ALL STARS, in conjunction with the New York Underground Film Festival. Cory Arcangel of the BEIGE programming ensemble and the Radical Software Group have put together two nights celebrating the best in contemporary home hobbyist hacker aesthetics. Featuring musical performances each night by:

BODENSTANDIG 2000- who released Maxi German Rave Blast Hits 3 on Aphex Twins label Rephlex, definitively a CULT LEGEND ALBUM, made the first chip tune record out of old Ataris. FIRST NYC APPEARANCE! http://bodenstandig.de

TREEWAVE- Atari supergenius Paul Slocum and Laura Grey will be performing as Treewave, using hacked home electronics, dot-matrix printers and more to make music and videos. www.treewave.com/about.html

NULLSLEEP- 8bitpeoples member and Nintendo uber-nerd will be performing music and showing demo videos all programmed in assembly for the NES. Awesome!!!!! http://www.8bitpeoples.com/

Videos and other performances (including NES demos, ASCII movies, Atari break movies, C64 intros + more!!) will be featured, as well as interactive and explanatory portions familiarizing the audience with whats going on…in Corys words: THESE GUYS ARE THE REAL DEAL

The Seattle PI has an article about Lucasfilms sending a cease and desist letter to a local Seattle-based theater company. The company had been planning to do a live parody of Star Wars in which they would turn off the sound and redub it live. This brings up the question are parodies fair use? And if so, should copyright holders be allowed to order people not to parody their work?

Mr. David Butler,

I’m writing to express my outrage that you are allowing a special interest group to post brochures and a sign in the gallery to express their views on Middle Eastern politics in conjunction with Ms. Jacir’s exhibition “Where We Come From.”

I agree with Ms. Jacir:

“This is a complete infringement on my right to free speech, not to mention an insult to me as an artist. It is intolerable that I have to go through this just because of my background. I am sure no other artist would accept to work under such conditions. They are placing a huge unnecessary burden on my exhibit with the presence of the brochures which are intended to silence or censor my work. I am shocked that they would place such conditions in a the space of a museum.”

You are treading on a very slippery slope. If you were to exhibit work of a gay artist would you allow right-wing christians to display brochures and posters beside the exhibition explaining how gays are abominations? If it was an exhibition of Jewish artists would you allow neo-nazis or the KKK to express their views? These may sound like ridiculous speculations, but that is where this twisted logic leads.

I urge you to resist this pressure and allow artists’ voices to be heard in a neutral context. Do not allow special interest groups to take over your museum in their wrong-headed pursuit of “balance.”

A suburban American school board found itself in court Monday after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution was “a theory, not a fact.”

Atlanta’s Cobb County School Board, the second largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2,300-strong petition attacked the presentation of “Darwinism unchallenged.” Some parents wanted creationism — the theory that God created humans as related in the Bible — to be taught alongside evolution.

The status and significance of the image changes in postmodern digital art: the image becomes a secondary manifestation — a material epiphenomen, as it were — of the abstract code, which becomes the primary vehicle of creativity. Before, the creation of material images was the primary goal of visual art, and the immaterial code that guided the process was regarded as secondary. Now, the creation of the code — more broadly, the concept — becomes the primary creative act. The image no longer exists in its own right, but now exists only to make the invisible code visible, whatever the material medium. It makes no difference to the code whether it appears as a two-dimensional or three-dimensional image.

n.
Sentimentality or vulgar, often pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts: “When money tries to buy beauty it tends to purchase a kind of courteous kitsch” (William H. Gass).

adj.
Of, being, or characterized by kitsch: “The kitsch kitchen… has aqua-and-white gingham curtains and rubber duck-yellow walls painted in a fried-egg motif” (Suzanne Cassidy).

We made a request to the University, and we are under the impression at this point that this was not an appropriate request […] We did not realize that this was considered inappropriate or infringing on the artist’s rights. We need to not ask for that if it is not appropriate.

It’s time for all newspapers, and all nations, everyone who has a media outlet, to make themselves a common target of those who would threaten the freedoms which support liberal societies.

Muslims are not, as you will be told, the only community that is touchy about attacks on its holy figures or even just ordinary heros. Thousands of Muslims were killed in the early 1990s by enraged Hindus in India over the Ayodhya Mosque, which Hindus insisted was built on the site of a shrine to a Hindu holy figure. No one accuses Hindus in general of being unusually narrowminded and aggressive as a result. Or, the Likudniks in Israel protested the withdrawal from Gaza, and there were dark mutterings about what happened to Rabin recurring in the case of Sharon. The “sacred” principle at stake there is just not one most people in the outsider world would agree with the Likudniks about.

A WELSH rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate his team’s defeat of old enemy England in Cardiff on Saturday.

Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win the Six Nations opener that he told fellow drinkers at a social club, “If Wales win I’ll cut my balls off”, it was reported yesterday.

via: Rugby fan carries out threat to cut off testicles after Wales win

Subject: Cloud Gate copyright
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 13:50:05 -0500

Hello Ivy Crewdson,

I’m writing to urge you to council Anish Kapoor to consider adopting a less restrictive copyright concerning his work ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago.

Non-commercial images of this art work should be allowed to be taken by the general public. I’m sure you would agree that the public good is served by allowing citizens to take photos and video of this beautiful art work. The piece is destined to become one of the major landmarks of Chicago but only if the public is allowed to enjoy it fully.

Perhaps using a Creative Commons [http://www.creativecommons.org] license would help you solve this matter. I suggest using a license entitled the “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License”. This license protects the work from commercial uses and derivative works.

There is a bit of online direct protest happening regarding this matter. See this web site for more information: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/07/¬
please_add_photos_of.html

The technology behind Internet2 *breaks* anything remotely resembling a broadcast business model, which is why the MPAA will do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights Management directly in its routers to stop interesting content from ever getting into the pipeline.

Intervals explores a series of characters whose investigation of self and identity unfold and elide through a sequence of cinematic interludes.

[…]

Horvath’s innovative use of pop-up windows create a virtual collage that posit identity as a series of random ‘memory acts’ but whose inquiry accumulate into a slowly revealing narrative of the human condition.

The only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution’s way of modifying something or else it’s just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student.

Columbia University School of the Arts
presents
A Lecture by Jon Ippolito:

“How To Hack Copyright for Fun and Profit”
Thursday, December 2
6:00 PM
702 Hamilton Hall
Columbia University
116th and Broadway
New York City

Jon Ippolito is an artist, a curator at the Guggenheim museum, and co-founder of the Still Water program for network art and culture at the University of Maine where he is an Assistant Professor of new media.

Mr. Ippolito’s lecture, “How to Hack Copyright for Fun and Profit,” will examine alternative approaches to intellectual property and creativity.

Here’s Jon’s abstract:
Now that the music labels have sued 6,000 college kids and universities are spending more on anti-plagiarism software than on student art exhibitions, you’d think young people would finally grok the message that sharing is bad. But as this presentation aims to demonstrate, a cadre of dedicated artists, musicians, and activists are offering digital creators an end-run around broadcast flags and RIAA summonses—from tools for embedding open licenses in music files to an online environment for sharing art and code to a semantic search engine for remixable art and video. In conclusion, this presentation will examine the question of whether such innovations are sufficient to prevent the lockdown of creative culture.

Lifted your mail lately? Counted the number of ostentatious announcement cards printed on stock that approaches, and sometimes exceeds, the thickness of cardboard?

It is one more sign that some New York art galleries of the contemporary kind have more money than they know what to do with, and that the competition for attention-getting frivolities in the overpopulated art scene is on the rise.

Each day’s mail seems to deliver a series of challenges and counter-challenges from the galleries that consider themselves in the upper echelon of the upper echelon.

via Art Promoted Heavily (Even in Your Mailbox)