Another lamentable creeping usage is not only pretentious, but it distorts and narrows what artists do. I refer to — rather than reference — the word practice, as in “Duchamp’s practice,” “Picasso’s studio practice” and worst of all, especially from the mouths of graduate students, “my practice.” Things were bad enough in the 1980s, when artists sometimes referred to their work as “production,” but at least that had a kind of grease-monkey grit to it.

The MTAA Reference Resource (MTAA-RR) attempts to archive most information regarding the art duo MTAA’s creative PRACTICE.

It turns the artist into an utterly conventional authority figure. (emphasis mine)

[…] there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice. (emphasis mine)

[…] the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. It depersonalizes the urgency of art making and gives it an aura of control, as if it is all planned out ahead of time.

It suggests that art making is a kind of white-collar activity whose practitioners don’t get their hands dirty, either physically or emotionally.

13. to exercise or pursue as a profession, art, or occupation: to practice law.

[…] Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood has in recent years become one of New York City’s hippest areas. And with its easy accessibility — just a short ride on the L train from Manhattan’s Union Square — Williamsburg also stands apart as an ideal destination for visitors looking to explore another side of the City.

“Williamsburg is a haven for the young and the hip,” said George Fertitta […]

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you’ve selected hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded—might just improve its chances. This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (“leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double “o” in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for “we owned the other team”—again stemming from the gaming community.

Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:

1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”

Word on the street tells me ArtNow won’t be the worst fair I see this week, which frankly frightens me. I made it through the first floor of galleries before I gave up on the chance of seeing anything moderately interesting, and walked next door to Flow. […] Consider yourself warned.

read more »

We need your support. If you:

— are one of the thousands of people who regularly visit Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review and/or New American Radio

and/or

— are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media/digital art courses

and/or

— are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked_Music_Review or New American Radio commission

and/or

— have presented at or attended Upgrade! Boston (Art Interactive or Massachusetts College of Art and Design), Floating Points (Emerson College), or Programmable Media (Pace Digital Gallery)

now is the time to give something back.

We cannot continue without your help. We MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007.

Tom Moody wrote: “Art about the art world inherently blows”

I can never understand why some folks think certain subjects are inherently bad. It’s obvious to me that no subject is inherently bad — even the art world.

If a certain piece is naval-gazing bullshit, fine. If you think a certain subject is being over-explored (like skulls perhaps?), then say it.

But, to declare one subject off-limits because it “inherently blows” makes no sense.

Actually, good art about the art world is perhaps even harder to pull off because of the risks of a) naval-gazing and b) subject over-exposure.

The iCommons Auction runs from 19 November to 14 December, 2007. This is an innovative auction of paraphernalia from some of the world’s leading Internet figures. From Internet activist and Stanford Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig’s coat that he wore in countries around the world that invited him to talk about free culture; to pre-prints from best-selling novelist, Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming, to-be-Creative Commons-licensed novel, Little Brother; and from #13 of only 20 plush toys of Firefox Japan’s mascot, Fox-keh that took the world by storm, to four of Indian intellectual property expert Lawrence Liang’s favorite Bollywood films: this auction is a celebration of free culture from around the world from those who make it and build it every day. All the proceeds of the auction will go to developing and sustaining iCommons’ global projects.

“NETworking” is the first Israeli museum exhibition devoted to Net Art. It presents 12 works from the Computer Fine Arts collection of Doron Golan. The works included in this show highlight a number of the fundamental qualities that characterize Net Art: the visualization of data; open-code access and connectivity; hacking and online voyeurism involving critiques of authorities and economic powers; the creation of online behavioral codes and the negotiation of cyberspace from various perspectives.

[…] then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

Without further ado: In art school, I learned:

• How to champion and defend my ideas.
• How to distinguish between personal and professional critique.
• How to respectfully and constructively critique my peers. How to attack the ideas of my colleagues and still have drinks with them that same night (and maybe even sleep with them — hey, it is art school)
• How to test drive a hundred different ideas through sketching, cobbling, and envisioning them, before finally settling on which one to go ahead and build.
• How to tell when I am done a project that could just as easily be improved endlessly.
• How to tell when an idea that is precious to me is actually holding me back. And then to feel good about throwing it away.
• How to have the confidence to present my ideas in public without fearing that they will be stolen. And how to take it in stride when they inevitably are.
• How to distinguish between taste, technical skill, and empirical efficiency.
• How to detect bullshit, and to avoid generating it myself (note that not all art school grads learn this).
• How to go the extra mile to make something high-quality.
• How to recognize talent in my peers.
• How to collaborate with my colleagues effectively to reach a common goal.
• How to be deeply competitive without being a dick.
• How to make something new just for the sake of being new.
• How to build off of, and give credit to, the ideas of my predecessors both contemporary and in history.
• How to save ideas that I’m not ready for and keep them for future use (usually in sketchbooks).
• How to start all over again from the beginning.
• How to teach all of the above.

The artist Steve Mumford originally went to Baghdad in 2003 to work as a war artist, embedded with the U.S. military, both writing a journal and making drawings and watercolors of what he saw there. In early 2007 he returned to Iraq for approximately a month, where he worked at an army hospital. This is the second of three reports on that trip. The first, “With Good Company into Iraq,” was posted on Mar. 8, 2007. The archive for Mumford’s original “Baghdad Journal” can be found here.

gumbo@dumbo
Art Under the Bridge Festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn
September 28, 29, 30th, 7pm to 11pm
Front Street & Adams Street, Brooklyn
Video Projection on the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage

I’ve been working with a group of artists over the summer. We have been finding ways to collaborate with each other through an open dialogue and discussion about art and group praxis. The name of the group is Artists Meeting;

Participating Artists include Leesa Abahuni, Nicole Abahuni, James Andrews, Daniel Blochwitz, Chris Borkowski, Ursula Endlicher, G.H. Hovagimyan, Thomas Hutchison, Lara Star Martini, Nsumi Group, [PAM], Joao Salema, Raphaele Shirley, Jason Wee, Lee Wells.

We will present our first public collaborative video installation this weekend at the Art Under the Bridge Festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We will project two 30 foot by 40 foot videos onto the south side of the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage from the loading dock just off the corner of Front and Adams.

[Songtag] mentions how one of the Fenton photographs was posed or staged. That we’re always disappointed when we learn that a photograph has been posed. Then she goes on to talk about the difference between fake paintings and fake photographs. Namely, a fake painting is a painting with faulty provenance — say, a painting that is purportedly by Vermeer, but turns out to be painted by somebody else. But according to Sontag, a fake photograph is a photograph that’s been posed.

Camp out with pro net surfers and net surfing clubs as we talk shop, play games, pitch tents, and make a hypertext mess big enough for mom to clean up in the morning.

Will it be possible to place H.264 streams into the traditional FLV file structure? It will, but we strongly encourage everyone to embrace the new standard file format. There are functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264 which we could not overcome without a redesign of the file format. This is one reason we are moving away from the traditional FLV file structure. Specifically dealing with sequence headers and enders is tricky with FLV streams.

San Jose Semaphore, by artist Ben Rubin, is a permanent public artwork commissioned by Adobe Systems Incorporated in collaboration with the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affair’s Public Art Program.

Located within the top floors of Adobe’s Almaden Tower headquarters in San Jose, California, San Jose Semaphore is a multi-sensory kinetic artwork that illuminates the San Jose skyline with the transmission of a coded message. The content of the San Jose Semaphore’s message is a mystery; cracking the encryption technique and deciphering the message is posed as a challenge for the public.  To the first person or group to successfully crack the code, Adobe will award bragging rights and acknowledgment on both the Adobe website (www.adobe.com) and the San Jose Semaphore website.

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. Skip to next paragraph Viktor Koen

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This year marks the seventh Lucelia Artist Award, an annual award in which the Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes an artist under age 50 for his or her contribution to contemporary art. Funded by the New York–based Lucelia Foundation, the $25,000 prize is awarded to the winner by a distinguished panel of five jurors, who also nominate the finalists.

WASHINGTON, July 26 — It’s not an unfamiliar tableau these days: people gathered on a grassy expanse of the National Mall here, listening to someone deliver an impassioned antiwar speech with phrases like “aggressive, activist foreign policy,” “the war we are creating,” “vigorous governmental efforts to control information” and “distorted or downright dishonest documents.” At some point, the crowd breaks into applause and a young woman yells out, “That’s right!”

She shouts this, however, just after the speaker behind the lectern refers to men with last names like Johnson, Rusk and Bundy and to the destinies of the Vietnamese people. And at its high point, the crowd numbers only about 30 people, many of them involved in videotaping, recording and photographing the event as flags snap majestically in the wind around the Washington Monument.

In other words, if you had wandered into this spectacle on Thursday evening, you would have found yourself not exactly in the midst of an actual protest but somewhere slightly removed, in the disorienting territory where art meets political engagement.

Rhizome is proud to announce its integration of Creative Commons licenses into its online archive of art, the Artbase. As of today, artists have the option to license their work under Creative Commons Licenses. This suite of licenses allows creators to shift the terms of copyright from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved,” therefore enabling authors, scientists, educators and artists, amongst others, to mark their creative works with the cultural freedoms they abide by. Rhizome’s hope is that through the use of these licenses, artists will have greater access to each others’ work in furtherance of their goals.

Rhizome would like to thank Wendy Seltzer, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, for her guidance and Fred Benenson, Creative Commons Cultural Fellow and student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, for his coordination of the project. “By implementing Creative Commons, Rhizome aligns itself with sites like Blip.tv, Flickr and Digg, who nurture not only a community of free creativity, but of free culture,” says Benenson. Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, adds that “It’s in the spirit of Rhizome to foster collaboration amongst artists. I’m happy that Rhizome is able to make these licenses available, and to support the practice of sharing cultural material within the arts.”

About Rhizome
Rhizome is an online platform for the global new media art community. Our programs support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of contemporary art that uses new technologies in significant ways.
http://www.rhizome.org

About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works—whether owned or in the public domain. Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the “all rights reserved” concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary “some rights reserved” approach.
http://creativecommons.org/

More alarming is MASS MoCA’s argument that they are the lawful owners of the materials which are the subject matter of this dispute, and thus allowed to display them publicly.

But this isn’t the end of this wonderful yarn of fiction. MASS MoCA further argues that Büchel’s work is not even art, but simply a compilation of materials which, if accepted by the Court, would not be granted protection under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA). If in fact the Court decides that VARA does apply, MASS MoCA argues that any modification to the “materials” which may have happened is allowed by VARA under the “conservation or placement” exception, and/or that the doctrine of “fair use” would allow MASS MoCA to display Büchel’s project without infringing the Copyright or VARA Acts.

Some 30 billion pounds of steam every year flow beneath the streets of Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. While it is unknown to most New Yorkers, Con Edison’s subterranean steam system is the biggest steam district in the world. There are 7 plants in NYC — five in Manhattan and one each in Queens and Brooklyn. On a cold winter day, nearly 10 million pounds of steam at 350 degrees Fahrenheit flow each hour through 105 miles of underground mains. Steam is efficient and cost effective for high-rise buildings and most of it is used for heating and cooling.

The city’s infrastructure is old, with much of it being built 50 to 100 years ago. Just maintaining this system, which cracks and breaks every day, is a monumental task.

[…] a place for enthusiasts with a passion for technology. Through a world-wide network of contributors, Channel 10 covers the latest news in music, mobility, photography, videography, gaming, and new PC hardware and software.

Until the pranks turned ugly, it was heartening to follow the dust-up between a bunch of street artists and their nemesis or nemeses, identity unknown. As The New York Times reported this week, for some time works of stenciled graffiti art and wheat-pasted posters slapped onto walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan have been splashed with paint and scrawled with messages of protest.

An eight-hour, booze-fueled karaoke face-off. In other words, Saturday night in Chinatown.

Postmasters Gallery is pleased to present our final, not to be missed, show of this season:

Not Your Parents’ MTV: Music Videos from Hell

June 28 - July 28, 2007
opening reception Thursday, June 28 6-8 pm

- a group exhibition featuring unorthodox music videos and related projects by the following artists:

MICHAEL PAUL BRITTO
I’m a Slave 4U
The Super N Word

KENNETH TIN KIN HUNG
Because Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People

KATARZYNA KOZYRA
Cheerleader
Diva Reincarnation

CHRIS LARSON
Shotgun Piano

ABE LINCOLN & MARISA OLSON
Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs

MTAA (M.RIVER & T.WHID ART ASSOCIATES)
Karaoke Death Match 100
25 Concrete Examples Why John Cage Is Not Our Father

Under the measure, kimchi will be labeled as mild, slightly hot, moderately hot, very hot or extremely hot to indicate spiciness. The index is based on the amount of capsaicin and other substances contained in the chili peppers added to the cabbage to make kimchi.

read more »

[…] according to [T.Whid], no work of art is made better for having a CC license applied to it. Now, this point is clearly debatable, and having observed just yesterday that I liked his work On Kawara Update better for the license I tend to think there are exceptions to this statement, as did a member of the audience who cited the same work. That said, I still suspect most artists would generally agree with his statement.

boat for Joy

After a crushing defeat in the Karaoke Death Match 100, T.Whid has fled the country to represent MTAA at the iCommons Summit 07 June 15 to June 17 in Dubrovnik, Croatia

As well as participating in the summit, MTAA and a group of fellow artist will be mounting an exhibition in Dubrovnik and in Second Life. More details soon.

Yes, some artist will be going to Venice , Münster or Basel this summer to show art to the artworld. MTAA will be in Dubrovnik trying, in some small way, to change the way the artworld works.

“Blogged” is an interactive installation artwork and one day net event dealing with the concept of being ‘blogged’. It attempts to pop 6 feet in diameter red balloon by using traffic from blogs linking to this page.

The first in a series of three retrospective exhibitions celebrating Eyebeam’s contributions to the art and tech field

Eyebeam is pleased to announce a special exhibition of 14 projects from 10 years of residencies, fellowships and commissions in Eyebeam’s labs. The pieces featured have developed since their life at Eyebeam and/or will be reactivated with events, performances, and workshops demonstrating and sharing the process of their creation.

[…]

The noteworthy lineup of artists, technologists, hackers and programmers in Source Code demonstrates diverse and vibrant genres of creative exploration that defy easy categorization. The artists and collectives participating in the exhibition are: Cory Arcangel, Carrie Dashow, eteam, Nina Katchadourian, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, MediaShed, neuroTransmitter, Steve Lambert, Alex Galloway and artists using Galloway’s Carnivore client — a surveillance tool for data network that serves that data to various creative interfaces called “clients” to make their work: Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Golan Levin, MTAA and Mark Napier.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

But there is a catch, one that seems in keeping with the surreal nature of the artwork itself. Because of concerns about legal action by Mr. Buchel, the museum will shield all the huge objects in the warehouse from view with tall plastic tarps, as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude had intervened at the last minute. Viewers will be allowed to wend their way through the cavernous hall but they will have to rely on their imaginations, mostly, to appreciate the show.

The decision is intended as an artistic and provocative solution to a difficult situation […]

Year, they are in front of the camera. […] They are not actors, the only real show for his life in the cabin. […] Never left our sight. […] Who are they? Why sacrificed privacy 24H watch from being the world?

[..] this just gets better & better, & we should be grateful for the scientific precision afforded us here by the simultaneous rendtion of the same song.

T.Whid had it for me, but only by a whisker.

I did love M River’s upstaging hand jive & the advanced catatonia/maddened elephant polarity which seems to get more marked, the more alchohol consumed. The same circumstance, as AnnieA observes, makes T Whid kind of puppy doggish, but of course a puppy dog who has stared straight into the heart of darkness & lived to tell the tale.

Oh & don’t get me started on timing/phrasing: - people would kill for what T Whid is doing here…it’s like we have been hard wired into his soul. Splendid. Splendid & uplifting.

[…] a very tattooed blogger, artist, musician and bartender who once ran for mayor of Seattle and writes for something called the Northern Nevada Newswire. He shows off his latest tattoo: a dotted line around his neck, with the inscription “cut here” (also in Arabic, helpfully, on the back) […]

Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.

Karaoke Or Die
Have you already subscribed to the video feeds of ‘Karaoke Deathmatch 100’? If not, do it now, as you don’t know what you are missing. ‘Karaoke Deathmatch 100’ is perhaps the most significant project ever from MTAA (artists M. River and T. Whid). Well-regarded within the new media community for works such as ‘1 year performance video (aka Sam Hsieh Update),’ it is with ‘Karaoke Deathmatch 100’ that they reach an audience beyond this field. Unfolding over 50 days, the ‘Karaoke Deathmatch 100’ features both artists in an ‘alcohol-fueled blood feud […] 50 rounds of sing-along fury,’ to use their own words. Taped live over an 8-hour period, these sessions are screened everyday at midnight (New York time). One sees both artists—one singing, the other seated in the back of the studio—both in front of typically cheesy karaoke videos. Viewers can post comments on the performances and vote on the best performer. T. Whid won the first round (with 21 votes) after singing Guns N’ Roses’ Welcome To The Jungle. One reader commented, ‘It’s like American Idol, only different. I feel like my vote counts here.’ Another noted, ‘You suck and so does Guns N’ Roses.’ The current score is tied at M. River: 6/T. Whid: 6, but the contest is just beginning. The artists, themselves, beg the question,’Who will emerge victorious?,’ decrying, ‘Only YOU can decide.’ So don’t miss any other face-off. Log-on today and participate in ‘the most brutal performance art smack down of the new millennium.’

- Miguel Amado

I’ve organized a conference for my grad students, which is taking place this Saturday, in Williamsburg. These are some of the best students I’ve ever taught and this is certainly the best class ever. In a word, it’s been *legendary* and this conference will be a fun, provocative way to end the semester. It’s my hope that you can join us to participate in lively discussions, offer feedback on artists’ works in progress, and perhaps consume a few bagels and coffees.

TACTICAL MEDIA CONFERENCE
Saturday, April 28, 2007

Presentations on the theory & practice of tactical media and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the arts.

The presenters’ talks will be grouped into three panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Editor & Curator, Rhizome), on the topics of Play & Consumption; Fear, Spectacle, and the Media; and the Interfaces and Architecture of Control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and analytical essays and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

Venue:
The Change You want to See Gallery
84 Havemeyer @ Metropolitan, Brooklyn, NY 11211
L to Bedford o Lorimer, G to Metropolitan, J/M/Z to Marcy
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org

Hours: 12-5 pm, Saturday, April 28, 2007

The TS1000 sold for $99.95 in the US when it debuted, making it the cheapest home computer to date at the time of its launch. The black and white display showed 32 columns and 24 lines (22 of which were normally accessible for display and 2 reserved for data entry and error messages). The limited graphics were based on geometric shapes contained within the operating system’s non-ASCII character set. The only form of long-term storage was to plug into an often unreliable home tape cassette recorder.

What is apparent is that none of these artists are doing exact copies of the works they are referencing. They are however playing with the signature style and brand names in varying degrees. The discussion is not however a blatant crowbar tactic of prying out and smashing property rights. It is an understanding that intellectual property has different degrees of meaning and use. While Tribes’ Port Huron project seems to be a desire to get at the emotional heart of a signifier, Kulik’s re-staging of the Beuys work is an escalation. In Kulik’s piece the animal and the human combine. MTAA seems to be researching the banal in Conceptual Art, updating it and presenting it on the networks as a pointer to the earlier works and yet the meaning is lost in a language game. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley are doing what can only be called remixing by taking Acconci and porno and mixing them together.

From the bastard progeny of Marcel Duchamp & the Marx Brothers, the splendid & singular MTAA, comes Karaoke Death Match 100.

[…]

It’s great stuff & clearly one to follow closely — we’ll be returning to them here ‘ere close of play in 50 days. Just want to sneak in, though, that actually I found this quite ahem…er… moving: — the sheer effort invoked in the act of singing; T.Whid’s strange shambling captive bear dance & M River’s weird but somehow totally appropriate sudden & violent changes of dynamics. A bit like Bas Jan Ader falling over, there’s something more here than originally meets the eye & ear, & it’s a lot human & a bit wonderful.

The audio works of TRACEPLACESPACE were formed loosely in response to ever-accelerating technological developments, passing time, urgent ecological issues, and remarkable events of our globally connected system in process long before but brought to the forefront since the latter part of the year 2001. The works of TRACEPLACESPACE are components of a digital, multi-media, network-infused performance of the same title.

I like to perform this work in small community venues, outdoor gatherings, art-spaces, and galleries where everyone is welcome and can sit on the floor, talk to one another, and drink green tea. However I will perform TRACEPLACESPACE approximately anywhere.

1. curse go back.mp3 - 5.4mb : a utopian template
2. uncanny situation.mp3 - 10.1mb : for Jean Baudrillard, 1929 - 2007
3. mary gone deep.mp3 - 6.4mb : because “we cannot fall out of the world”
4. unreasonable things.mp3 - 3.7mb : democracy containment
5. technics and time.mp3 - 7mb : let it take you as far as you can ride it
6. big.mp3 - 4.2mb : exciting times / exciting life
7. six years.mp3 - 7.8mb : …the dematerialization of… - Lucy Lippard

This open-source wiki book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. It is based on the manuscript of New Media Art, a book written by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana and published by Taschen in 2006. The Taschen book is available in French, German, Italian and Spanish in addition to English. This wiki book is not intended as a substitute or replacement for the Taschen book, but rather as an expandable educational resource to which artists, curators, students and others may contribute.

April 12 - May 19, 2007 bitforms gallery nyc

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a third solo exhibition with Mark Napier, April 12 – May 19. This exhibit marks the New York debut of his new software art and print work.

One of the select few artists whose Internet art has been collected and commissioned by prominent art institutions, Mark Napier is known for creating work that challenges traditional rules of ownership, authority, and permanence. Over the past decade he has developed custom software as an art medium, and this exhibition features virtual objects that hover between the material and immaterial.

“Increasingly we live and navigate in a world composed of energy: electrical, magnetic and light,” says Napier. “Digital media infuse our lives as never before. In this media environment, power is no longer associated with physical objects, but with the persistence of ideas in the collective consciousness of the media.”

[lots more at the gallerie’s web site]

Setting Grand Theft Auto in the safest big city in America would be like setting Halo in Disneyland.

[Marclay] says he looked into legal action but was assured by his lawyer “there’s nothing I can do about it. They have the right to get inspired.” Of course, in other cases, such obvious “inspiration” might be called copyright infringement. In this instance, however, Marclay’s rights may be limited as his own film consisted of copyrighted works by other artists.

Here’s the complete definition of mtaa in Swahili:
[link to definition]

Here’s how to pronounce it:
[link to pronunciation guide]

Cheers,
Martin

________________________
Dr. Martin Benjamin
Yale Council on African Studies

http://www.yale.edu/swahili

The Artist Tax Deduction Bill is finally up for action. Please take the time to support this important bill as its passage will impact all individual artists. Go to the link below to send a message to your representatives and senators. Please forward this information to your mailing list!

Artist Deduction Bill Introduced in the House

03-19-2007: After announcing at the Congressional Arts Breakfast on Arts Advocacy Day that he would be the lead sponsor for the Artist Deduction Bill, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) introduced the bill on March 14, 2007, joined by Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN). Identical to a Senate bill introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT), the bill supports individual artists by allowing them to take a fair-market value tax deduction for tangible works they donate to nonprofit collecting and educational organizations, and it benefits the public by giving them access to more art.

Send a message to your members of Congress asking them to be a co-sponsor of this important bill, H.R. 1524 (House) and S. 548 (Senate).

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.

A wall of luxury glass towers is rising for 25 blocks along the “East River Riviera.” Wander inland and check out the needle condo towers with three-bedroom places retailing at $1,135,000.

[Boston mayor] Menino is going on TV and insisting he’s going to send a 27-year old artist to jail for not breaking any law, because his police department overreacted and wasted a million dollars feeding a media frenzy and terrorizing the population of his own city. That’s a cowardly act of self-preservation, and were he not threatening the life of an innocent young man it would be laughable.

9. CONTENT SUBMITTED OR MADE AVAILABLE FOR INCLUSION ON THE SERVICE

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:

[…]

With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service. (emphasis mine)

[…] three texts about works from the Turbulence.org archive. The texts—published in English, Italian and Spanish—were written and translated by members and affiliates of New Media Fix. They include “The Body in Turbulence” by Josephine Bosma; “Narrating with New Media: What Happened with Whatever has Happened?” by Belén Gache; and “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats” by Eduardo Navas. The translations are by Lucrezia Cippitelli, Francesca De Nicolò, Raquel Herrera, and Brenda Banda Corona & Ignacio Nieto. Ludmil Trenkov designed the PDF and HTML documents.

“We see the world not through a lens anymore but through a monitor screen,” said Marisa Olson, a curator of Rhizome.org, a Web platform that has archived 2,500 digital artworks online.

“Museums have to start paying attention,” said Jon Ippolito, former associate curator at the Guggenheim. “They risk not preserving the most relevant aspects of 21st century culture and, thus, their own relevance.”

[..] I would say in all seriousness that if a work of art is that harmful to society (in a practical rather than a symbolic way), destroying it is the less harmful option for art itself.

they might to be holding poses for some future dystopian hologram ID gone all glitchy due to budget cuts in the security ministry

[…] the myth of Paik’s first work of video art appears to pre-date its own possibility. While Paik undoubtedly was a pioneer user of portable video equipment, he probably shared the original moments of video art with other artists, including Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, Les Levine, and Juan Downey. The mythic story of Nam June Paik shooting the first Portapak-generated video art out of the back of a taxi in 1965 is apparently just that, a myth.

I […] welcome information that supports or undermines this challenge of the myth of the birth of video art.

In court papers, lawyers for Verizon/MCI said the state Public Service Commission directed them in 2003 to charge a tariff that includes the “jurisdictional” rate plus the “DOCS commission.” That included a flat rate of $3 per call and 16 cents a minute thereafter.

That meant collect calls have been charged at a rate of 630 percent more than consumer rates, of which 57.5 percent is “kicked back” to [the Dept. of Correctional Services] for operating expenses such as health care that should come out of general tax dollars, [Center for Constitutional Rights] officials said.

[via]

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, seeking to avert a repeat of last year’s furor over counter-terrorism grants to U.S. cities, announced Friday that New York, Washington and four other “highest-risk” metro areas will receive $411 million to subsidize their efforts to guard against terrorist attacks.

Character Reference
January 19 - February 24 2007
Opening Reception: January 18, 6-8pm


The Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present “Character Reference”” a group show featuring an international group of contemporary artists.

The portrait as a genre has enjoyed an enduring popularity throughout the history of art. As depictions of power and wealth, or socialist realist studies, through its current pervasiveness in contemporary photography, the portrait has long played a key role in creating and questioning identity. Through the works in “Character Reference” the artists Oliver Laric, MTAA, Julian Opie, Lee Walton and Marina Zurkow all mine this rich genre. These artists do not simply employ the portrait as a means to depict specific individuals but rather use the form to represent broader cultural types.

Oliver Laric’s “787 Cliparts” uses as building blocks the “clip art” which can be found embedded in Microsoft Word documents and Power Point presentations world over. These prepackaged images are seamlessly streamed together in a continuous dance to convey and question how diverse cultures and activities are stereotyped in the name of convenient communication.

MTAA’s “Infinite Smile” is a video portrait in which the artists’ faces hold a smile in an infinitely repeating loop. Their expressions, appear to change from glee to agony and back, highlighting the artifice of the smile and its function as a seller of goods and ideology, an indicator of happiness, and how we project our own assumptions on to the ubiquitous happy face.

In Julian Opie’s “Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt” and “Sarah Walking in Bra, Pants and Boots”, female characters are rendered in the artist’s signature generic, minimalist style. These sexually charged portraits of women in underwear and short skirts conveys a connection to the specific subjects while simultaneously representing the stereotypical and loaded symbols of female sexuality.

To create Lee Walton’s “The Serial Conversationalist”, Walton targeted park benches throughout New York City on specific dates and times and initiated conversation with whoever happened to sit down. Often awkward and pained, Walton’s recordings of these conversations with random strangers about kids, dogs and other New York wildlife help inform a portrait of a city and how it establishes and solidifies our understanding of the characters around us.

Likewise, Marina Zurkow’s animated “Boom!Darling” looks at the formation of character against the backdrop of a hyper-active urban environment. Through this short animation we see a girl on the edge of puberty exploring her own identity in the booming metropolis of current day Shanghai - a city which is similarly experiencing “growing pains” in the current global economy.

Seen as a whole the works in “Character Reference” represent a broadened view of the portrait genre. Using this historically rich convention in new ways the artists are able to portray their subjects as much more than they appear.