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vertexList gallery is having a benefit raffle tonight: photos of the donated artwork are posted on its blog. The event lasts from 7-10 pm; raffle starts at 8.30 pm; tickets are $200--details here. jenghizkhan (aka John Parker) will perform a couple of new music pieces live at 7:30 pm; other attractions include limited edition t-shirts by Eteam, limited edition pins by Sakurako Shimizu and a sign-up sheet to reserve a copy of vertexChips, a compilation CD in a micro-edition of 50 that will be released next week, featuring Covox, Bubblyfish, Role Model, Herbert Weixelbaum, Receptors, Bit Shifter, jengizkhan, Nullsleep, Treewave, David Kristian, Glomag, Huoratron, and yours truly.
Be there, aloha. It would be nice if New York landlords would support the art community here but that's not what they do--they raise rent so they can live like Lords and say FU to the rest of us!
Updated with new info about the CD.
Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects, in the gallery's shipping container at the DiVa (Digital and Video Art) Fair this year in Miami. In the background is my DVD OptiDisc.
Update: The photo above is by Paddy Johnson, using Namenwirth's camera. Aron has posted more photos here.
"Hacker Fashion" [mp3 removed]
A kind of ongoing duet between a "warm, fluid" analog synth and a "cold, brittle" digital synth, mirrored underneath by the allotment of analog percussion to one channel and sampled digital beats to the other. I'm interested in similar oppositions and symmetries in visual art--a balance of "grains" and their accompanying "philosophies." Not to mention the binary use of scare quotes.
Update: I dropped the digital synth parts a semitone, muted some high notes, and raised the filter cutoff frequency so those parts are a tad more mellifluous.
Large Mill, 1995, acrylic, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 90" X 88" (Stage One)
Stage Two
Final Version
never exhibited--done right before I moved to NY and started working with a computer. the piece got more difficult to look at as it was completed--by the end it was impossible for very long without retinal strain and headaches--the early stages appear tasteful in the polaroid scans but the colors are pretty artificial and obnoxious in person--I contemplated stopping the process and calling it done at many stages but pressed on out of some innate sense of responsibility to the initial premise. the "disc" design was originally based on paintings of rolled-up silk seen end-on in a Russian constructivist-influenced painting, I think by Liubov Popova.
The vertexList blog has a report on the DiVa (Digital Art and Video) art fair in Miami and some pictures of the shipping container on the beach where my and some other New Yorkers' work was showing. One gathers from that blog and Paddy Johnson's that the event was...underpromoted. Fairs suck, and a few posts back I offered showing in a shipping container as one of the few things helping to prop up my self-image as an aloof avant gardist. A reader then jumped in and proceeded to demolish the very idea of showing in a container in a couple of unstinting, scorched earth comments. These went a long way towards knocking out my last strut of personal dignity. Seeing the vertexList pictures helped revive it, though--in that the images of the white metal boxes on the sand with palm trees in the background seemed kind of romantic to me. As I said in that comment thread, I am proud to have shown in Miami and appreciate my shot at the big time.
93 kilobytes of RAM (ha ha).
This is an excerpt from a Dec. 5 Salon piece by Cintra Wilson on presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani. Steve Gilliard has more of it, and discusses in detail Giuliani's penchant for publicly abusing his "loved ones":
There is something deranged about you ... this excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness ... you should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist with this excessive concern, how you are devoting your life to weasels. You need somebody to help you. There are people in this city and in this world that need a lot of help. Something has gone wrong with you.
-- New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on his radio show, to a ferret advocate, after imposing New York's 2001 ferret ban
The attack on the twin towers blew a hole in downtown Manhattan and in our collective memory. Osama bin Laden and company did a better P.R. job for Giuliani than spin ghouls Hill & Knowlton ever did for Dick Nixon. He made everyone but the most grouchy and resentful New Yorkers [like me --tm] forget that before planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Rudy was a hyper-authoritarian narcissist with a lust for overkill verging on the sociopathic.
And now, at a time when the machinations of another hubristic bully have brought an unprecedented expansion of the powers of the presidency, "America's Mayor" may be our next chief executive. He is neck and neck with John McCain when Americans are asked their preference for the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is alarming to think that the murky dealings and totalitarian tendencies that have marred the current administration could flourish even more under another control-junkie Republican. It is even more frightening to think what a commander in chief who already has a violent record of abusing authority could do with the unrestrained might of a geopolitical superpower. Given Giuliani's historic willingness to take Spanish Inquisition-style action against threats both real and imaginary, is anyone in doubt that it is every American's duty to keep Rudolph Giuliani as far from the White House as possible?
 Photo by Paddy Johnson of the inside of a Borg cube--I mean, Art Basel Miami. This is where artists are assimilated, er, discovered. Their difference adds to the perfection of the Hive Mind, that is, "provides a spiritual lift to the buyer for cash." In any case, resistance is futile. (You gotta love the irony--the owner class extracts capital from cube farm labor, then seeks personal fullfillment and the pressure release of excess money buildup through art purchases...in a cube farm.) |