[…] 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.