– iconoclasm and closed minds A thoughtful piece in the New York Times today by Roberta Smith Critic’s Notebook: Why Attack Art? Its Role Is to Be Helpful (Thanks to Tom Seligman for the link) In 2001 an international outcry met the Taliban’s destruction of two colossal Buddhas at Bamian in Afghanistan. The Buddhas were…
contemporary art
collecting culture and the new art museum
Saturday – a fine afternoon at the Cantor Arts Center, celebrating 50 years of membership (currently at 3500). [Link] A tent on the lawn by the Rodins and the Oldenberg pink thing (which I far prefer to the Rodins – never mind the lovely chilled sherry and Sam Smith’s in the “Cool Cafe”). It is…
responsive media – improvisation, neosemy, and synaesthesia
Sha Xin Wei visited our New Media group (Mellon funding) yesterday – Wednesday. He is an old friend of many of the group – did his PhD at Stanford. Is now a part of the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech. He was talking about his work on “responsive media”. Particularly with the performance group…
archaeology and photography – splinters in the eye
Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography – The Book of Probes and Trek. Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution – abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in…
telemediated mythology
Dial M For Manchester – community art project – (area) code – a project in material monumentality and the (archaeological) layering of social time and memory tied to new media technologies … [Link to (area) code] If this comes off it will be fascinating.
recycled body parts
An art student has sparked outrage with a show of puppets made with dentures and glass eyes from dead people. Karah Benford, 20, is exhibiting the dolls, entitled Death Threads, at The Ultraviolet Contemporary Art Gallery in Southsea, Portsmouth. A vicar at Portsmouth Cathedral has branded the show “gratuitous”, while a local councillor called it…