Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 16, 2012 - 5 comments

Style Like U features an exhaustive video archive of people talking about their clothes and history and what personal style means to them and the power of self transformation. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk on Aug 14, 2011 - 32 comments

"People have always had an ulterior or imaginative life," opines writer Will Self. "There's something about the act of will involved in believing in preposterous things that I believe is the very kind of muscle and key of having an imagination... here, you have an arena that is inherently psychotic." In a series of interviews about the nature of human imagination and violence as they are transformed by the Internet, Self muses on how primal human desires are being satisfied more efficiently and easily by the increasingly connected life, and wonders how this will change us as much as society.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Jun 16, 2011 - 10 comments

Why does Futura work here but Slanted Futura doesn't? Enter FONTS IN USE: A breakdown, explanation and appreciation of type design out in the real world.
posted by The Whelk on Jan 3, 2011 - 17 comments

Artist Georgia Sagri says she wasn't there and maybe performer Ann Liv Young wasn't either. [both links nsfw] [more inside]
posted by artof.mulata on Sep 1, 2010 - 70 comments

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.
posted by loquacious on May 30, 2009 - 74 comments

English newspaper Mail on Sunday claims to have uncovered the identity of artist Banksy claiming his name is Robin Gunningham: "People who know Gunningham are now unable to say what has become of him. His father Peter, who lives in Kingsdown, Bristol, denied that the man in the photograph was his son, and his mother Pamela was surprised by the picture, then denied she even had a son, let alone one called Robin." More information in a report from CBC. If you don't know who Banksy is visit a Flickr pool with over 7000 pictures of his work in situ or check out previous MetaFilter posts about Banksy.
posted by Kattullus on Jul 13, 2008 - 60 comments

A View In Your Mirror: Painter Jan Verhulst compiles self portraits made by artists in their preferred medium.
posted by fair_game on Feb 24, 2007 - 8 comments