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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Yam Lau & Michael Yuen at The Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art (DICA), Beijing
From DICA Manifesto:
The Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art (DICA) is an initiative dedicated to supporting experimental contemporary art on the back of a donkey. Established in the Beijing summer of 2009, DICA demonstrates a donkey’s spirit of steadfast oblivion. The DICA and the donkey counter all forms of calculated intelligence, promotion and profit making within the market place of contemporary art. They do so with the slowest possible speed, the most idle tactics and wandering work ethics.
Obstinate, dumb and proceeding on blind faith, DICA meanders throughout cities to meet its potential audience, whoever that might be. Yet, DICA makes no claim or appeal for recognition in these encounters. The institute lives by the charm and rhythm that is unique to the donkey’s soul. In this sense, DICA is the most inhuman and radical fulfillment of the avant-garde. It posits an almost complete sort of “standing-still” that refuses to concede to anything.
Princess Hijab
The comment thread of a recent Art Fag City IMG MGMT essay on relational aesthetics and 4Chan has set me off on a tangent: I really think it's time to stop thinking of digital media as immaterial. The whole physical art/non-physical art distinction is a big red-herring. We are accustomed to thinking of vision as something external to our bodies, and therefore when we interact with something visually, we can think of it as "virtual" in a way that we would never ascribe to a sensation of touch or smell. But vision is just as much a physiological process as the other senses. And vision is unique in that many of the components of its sensory organ (the eye) are actually comprised of brain cells. It's like our eyes are little bits of brain, sitting in the front of our heads. It doesn't get much more visceral than that. The development of the eye, from Beyond The Zonules of Zinn by David Bainbridge (p.146) Here's something that David Bainbridge has to say about the iris in his brain anatomy book Beyond The Zonules of Zinn. ...when you are staring lovingly into somebody's eyes, you are actually staring at the perforated frontmost extension of his or her brain, which I admit does not seem quite so romantic. Yes, the iris is brain — the window on the soul after all. Admittedly the iris is an unusual part of the brain. Beautiful pigmentation led to its name, which means "rainbow." Also, it forms its own instrinsic muscles to open and close the pupil, and so it is the only part of the brain that can move itself. (p.147) Note: There are lots of other reasons besides eyes to drop the whole immateriality-of-digital-media idea. A simple one: the material effects of e-waste on the environment. A complicated one: the myth of immateriality fosters misleading utopic/distopic notions of imagery and content that are capable of propagating themselves, spontaneously reproducing in some kind of ether-type netherworld (so-called virtual space). It's very Cartesian, as if the internet is supposed to operate according to different physical laws from everything else. |
Songs referenced in the novel 'Chronic City' by Jonathan Lethem:
(VB via SM).
| Found Art: Model Predictions of Visible Distortion This is one funny project if you are used to looking at low-rez digital images from an aesthetic point of view. These computational neuroscientists from NYU are working on a model that can predict whether or not an image will appear distorted to the human eye. They don't talk much here about why this kind of modelling is valuable, but I can imagine there are a quite a range of possible uses, not the least of which being a step in the ongoing project of technologically simulating the human brain. But the surface logic of the demo (to a lay observer like me) is so back-asswards that it's extremely cute. There's a jpeg of Einstein, pretty good resolution. Then another that's somewhat compressed and a third that's super pixelated. These images are presented to the model, which simulates some of the neurological stages of vision but mashing different kinds of data sets. See a graph & explanation of the model. The results are blurry jpegs! Yay! And these blurry jpegs tell us whether the original jpegs will appear blurry or not. SO cute. It's totally not an art project, but if it was it would have all the self-reflexive tautology of 70s high-conceptual art combined with the artist/activist DIYtechnology-for-DIYtechnology's-sake aesthetic of online art in the 90s. See the results. |