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From E. Worthy, Early 21st Century Art (New York: Kramer Publishing 2035):
"The death of so-called site specific art came in 2004, at a talked-about show most people never saw. The concept was that artists would 'respond' to Eero Saarinen's somewhat overwhelming 1962 terminal building at Kennedy Airport (considered high Modernist kitsch by some architects), an activity with roughly the same significance as small lice-eating birds 'responding' to a rhinoceros. It consisted of such obvious and expected gestures as running political slogans on the defunct terminal's arrivals and departures board, piping sound art through the intercom, and so forth. Once admitted to this vast playground from their usual physically constraining warrens in Chelsea and Williamsburg, and perhaps because the art was so familiar as not to hold anyone's attention, the artists went berserk at an opening night party and trashed the terminal."New York Times report
Installation shots of a Vanity Fair party two nights before "amok night"--thanks to Bill for the pics and timeline
Last night at Dorkbot NY, the informal monthly gathering subtitled "People Doing Strange Things with Electricity," three people gave presentations. Left is my accidental .GIF (I thought I was making an MPEG movie) of James Clar's 3D Display Cube, a device that uses a hideous amount of computing power to render charmingly lowtech 3-D moving sculptures on 1000 LED lights in a 2 foot cube. Think 3D Jim Campbell. Mary Flanagan projected complex abstract patterns generated from the phonemes and word choices of a several month run of
emails between her collaborator Andrew Gerngross and his ex-girlfriend. It was unclear whether the, um, relationship between the data and the display was purely aesthetic, or if there were other connections or conclusions to be drawn. Fang-Yu (Frank) Lin gave a crisp power point talk on "channeling the internet though a robotic typewriter." His artwork was exactly as described: a clunky hybrid of an old manual keyboard and a teletype machine, which acts a kind of spirit medium, bringing you messages from "the internet," a quasi-mystical entity. You type in a question or statement, and hidden hardware and software search for words (in chatboards, blogs, news stories) that might logically or literally follow from what you wrote. Of course, the result--lines of text or ASCII pictures spit out of the teletype--are usually tangential (at best) to your request. Lin uses a hybrid search engine to pull up content, but casts a narrow net, apparently grabbing the first thing remotely connected to your search. The piece was almost aggressively dumb, and retro, and pseudoscientific, a kind of satirical antidote to the globalist, futurist slogans routinely bandied about by tech companies and new media visionaries (cf. Maciej Wisniewski's netomat). I immediately thought of Scott Bukatman's essay "Gibson's Typewriter," which considers the global information sea change through the metaphor of William Gibson banging out Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. Lin's presentation echoed one of Bukatman's themes--that mechanical writing was an earlier and no less earth-shaking "information revolution." The fixation on the typewriter is also in sync with current trends such as whipping out giant old cell phones purchased on Ebay to impress potential dates. 
Acid Lullabye [mp3 removed]"The bankroll [for Gold Diggers of 1937] went to the one big Berkeley number at the end--'All Is Fair In Love and War.' It's a simple piece, lines of chorus girls dressed in white against a shiny black floor, but it is simply astonishing (the song is pretty catchy too)." I agree with the IMDb commenter--that the musical number is astonishing. A stop motion Magrittean exploding chair turns into a cannon; the cannon shoots white balls at the viewer that dissolve into chorus girls' faces; giant flags make twin inverted intersecting corkscrews--my jaw bobbled watching the intricate geometries of film genius Busby Berkeley on Turner Classic Movies just now.
Last night's debate goes to Edwards for staying on message and all-round joi de vivre, even though his message on Iraq is some scary BS. Cheney looked haggard, and by not responding to the frequent charges of corruption, incompetence, and lying it looked like he didn't care, either out of arrogance or just weariness. In the debates so far, both Edwards and Kerry have been like the savior one rarely gets who steps in to tell an alcoholic parent, spouse, or boss that "no, in fact you're wrong, and you can't just give people that evil look and get your way." A real drink of clean water after almost four years of arsenic-tinged sludge.