"The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated. " -
Triple Canopy magazine on why do artists' statments and press releases sound so utterly odd and confusing.
posted by The Whelk
on Apr 26, 2013 -
45 comments
Does anyone here speak art and
tech? "Indeed, for a certain sort of hoodie-wearing entrepreneur more keen on trips to Tahoe than the Tate, the rules of the art world can seem especially opaque." No, they are two different
cultures. "The traditional art world appears to be recognizing that it is going to need to collect some of this money to continue operating in the manner it has grown accustomed to. What it doesn’t seem to recognize is that it may be selling the wrong thing, a brand of social status that the technology culture is not interested in buying."
posted by Xurando
on Apr 12, 2013 -
37 comments
The five scholars explored the question, “What is the meaning of food?” and debated its role in ethnic and religious tensions. They also examined the possibility that “food, which is something that all of us share, albeit in different ways, can be used to bring people together instead of differentiating between us.” According to Goldstein, one of the most important ideas to come out of the group was that food is a social process rather than a commodity and thus is central to multicultural understanding: “[Food] has to do with how we live and it’s not just an object that we ingest.”
Food: History & Culture in the West [PDF], was a 2010 UC Berkley Symposium exploring multiple links between food and culture:
[more inside]
posted by byanyothername
on Jan 7, 2013 -
14 comments
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (a collaborative book by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost (previously, previously, previously), Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas (of Facade), Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter) uses a
single line of code as a basis for pontificating on
creative computing and the impact of software in popular culture. 10 PRINT's content is available as a
PDF (50 MB).
Pictures via Casey Reas' Flickr.
posted by mrgrimm
on Nov 29, 2012 -
47 comments
Ephemeral New York 'chronicles an ever-changing, constantly reinvented city through photos, newspaper archives, and other scraps and artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.'
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 11, 2012 -
5 comments
The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History uses the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection as the starting point for a deeply informative, chronologically arranged exploration of world art history, with maps, timelines, art images, thematic essays, and more.
posted by Miko
on Sep 19, 2012 -
7 comments
A decade on, the Coen brothers' woefully underrated
O Brother, Where Art Thou? [alt] is remembered for
a lot of things: its sun-drenched, sepia-rich
cinematography (a pioneer of
digital color grading), its
whimsical humor,
fluid vernacular, and
many subtle references to Homer's
Odyssey. But one part of its legacy truly stands out:
the music.
Assembled by
T-Bone Burnett, the soundtrack is a cornucopia of American folk music, exhibiting everything from
cheery ballads and
angelic hymns to
wistful blues and
chain-gang anthems. Woven into the plot of the film through radio and live performances, the songs lent the story a
heartfelt, homespun feel that echoed its cultural heritage,
a paean and uchronia of the Old South.
Though the multiplatinum album was recently
reissued, the movie's medley is best heard via famed documentarian
D. A. Pennebaker's
Down from the Mountain, an
extraordinary yet
intimate concert film focused on a night of live music by the soundtrack's stars (among them
Gillian Welch,
Emmylou Harris,
Chris Thomas King, bluegrass legend
Dr. Ralph Stanley) and wryly hosted by
John Hartford, an accomplished
fiddler,
riverboat captain, and
raconteur whose struggle with terminal cancer made this his last major performance. The film is free in its entirety on
Hulu and
YouTube -- click inside for individual clips, song links, and breakdowns of
the set list's fascinating history.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 22, 2011 -
107 comments
Dutch state secretary for culture Halbe Zijlstra
published a letter stating that €200 million would be cut from the arts and culture budget, starting as early as 1 January 2013.
[more inside]
posted by palbo
on Jun 27, 2011 -
11 comments
Larry Gonick is a veteran American cartoonist best known for his delightful comic-book guides to science and history, many of which have previews online. Chief among them is his long-running
Cartoon History of the Universe (later
The Cartoon History of the Modern World), a sprawling multi-volume opus documenting everything from the Big Bang to the Bush administration. Published over the course of three decades, it takes a truly global view -- its time-traveling Professor thoroughly explores not only familiar topics like Rome and World War II but the oft-neglected stories of Asia and Africa, blending caricature and myth with careful scholarship (cited by
fun illustrated bibliographies) and tackling even the most obscure events
with intelligence and wit. This savvy satire carried over to Gonick's
Zinn-by-way-of-
Pogo chronicle
The Cartoon History of the United States, along with a bevy of
Cartoon Guides to other topics, including
Genetics, Computer Science, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, The Environment, and (yes!)
Sex. Gonick has also maintained a few sideprojects, such as
a webcomic look at Chinese invention,
assorted math comics (
previously), the
Muse magazine mainstay
Kokopelli & Co. (featuring the shenanigans of his
"New Muses"), and
more. See also
these lengthy interview snippets, linked
previously. Want more? Amazon links to the complete oeuvre inside!
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Jun 6, 2011 -
29 comments
HUH. Magazine is a media platform with the latest, most relevant news from the worlds of art, fashion, design, music and film. Recent features include:
Harvest by Haroshi: Skate and Destroy, artworks created with old worn, or snapped, skateboard decks |
Disassembly, capturing relics of our past in a unique, dismantled and exposed form |
Murakami at Versailles, knee-deep in controversy since its inception | and
Darren's Great Big Camera, a
short documentary about a camera that shoots on 14" x 36" negatives and measures 6ft. in length.
posted by netbros
on Jun 1, 2011 -
8 comments
Jane Graham in the Guardian on the
new wave of fan films, with links to notable examples. "... fan films have come a long way from two fat blokes with beards running through a forest waving pound-shop light sabres."
posted by nthdegx
on May 14, 2010 -
12 comments
The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is an organization dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. You may know them from such projects as
How to build a fake Google Street View car,
public domain donor stickers,
internet famous class, the
first rap video to end with a download source code link, or their numerous
firefox add-ons (such as
China Channel,
Tourettes Machine, or
Back to the future). FAT members have been hard at work standardizing various open source graffiti-related software packages, including
Graffiti Analysis,
Laser Tag,
Fat Tag Deluxe and
EyeWriter [previously] to be
GML (Graffiti Markup Language) compliant.
Fuck Google.
Fuck Twitter.
FuckFlickr.
Fuck SXSW.
Fuck 3D. FAT Lab is
Kanye shades for the open source movement.
posted by finite
on Mar 13, 2010 -
8 comments
Veteran Australian pop satirist
New Waver, best known for covers of pop songs rewritten from a pessimistically neo-Darwinian point of view, has a new album out. Titled
Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody, it looks at the subjects of gentrification, the explosion of revivalist styles in "hip" music, contemporary white-collar culture, the ideology of the "creative class" in the post-industrial age and the resulting oversupply of cultural products, through the medium of cover songs and musical montage. The album is free for dowloading from
New Waver's web site; there is a more detailed explanation
here, and a video for the song "Hey Dude" (which explains the dynamics of gentrification through the medium of a Beatles cover)
here.
posted by acb
on Feb 28, 2010 -
14 comments
Corey Arcangel is perhaps the internet's most
infamous hack,
masher-upper,
digi/net artist.
His work stands for a
growing culture of artists who
run wildly through
animated GIF landscapes populated with corrupted
data-compressed bunny rabbits and tinny, MIDI
renditions of Savage Garden ballads. As the
Lisson Gallery, London, opens its archives to Arcangel's curatorial eye, could digi/net
art be set to
infect the real,
fleshy world, like a rampant
Conficker Worm? Has
YouTube become the truest reflection of our
anthropological selves? Are we destined to roam the int3erw£bs like the
mythic beasts of yore, hoping,
in time, that
digi art can free us from the confines of this fleshy void?
[...
previously]
posted by 0bvious
on Dec 8, 2009 -
20 comments
Following the death of his sister to brain cancer,
Motoi Yamamoto adopted salt as his primary artistic medium. In Japanese culture salt is not only a necessary element to sustain human life, but it is also a
symbol of purification. He uses salt in loose form to create
intricate labyrinth patterns on the gallery floor or in
baked brick form to construct large interior structures. As with the labyrinths and unnavigable passageways,
Motoi Yamamoto views his installations as exercises which are at once futile yet necessary to his healing.
posted by netbros
on Mar 20, 2009 -
25 comments
Vague Terrain is a web based digital arts publication that showcases the creative practice of a variety of artists, musicians and scholars.
Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE is their freshly launched project on urban representation that catalogs how cartography, infrastructure and locative media shape perception in the contemporary city. An example is
Joyce Walks, a Google maps mashup which remaps routes from James Joyce's Ulysses to any city in the world, generating walking maps. [via
mefi projects]
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Mar 17, 2009 -
2 comments
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