Tuesday, May 31, 2011

50 minutes of porn





Alan Smithee´s latest work will be on display at the contemporary art ruhr (C.A.R.) media art fair, this weekend, 3th-5th of June. Alan Smithee, best known for his cooperations with Julia Murakami,  is represented by A&O gallery/Directors Lounge.


Alan Smithee, 50 min. of porn, 2011
from the series Reality Scans


Alu-Dibond, Lambda print, behind acrylic glass, 60 cm x 75 cm, 23.6” x 29.5” , ed. of 5/1 AP

Friday, May 27, 2011

DIE: Dice Portrait Emphasizing on the Randomness of Life

DIE:  Dice Portrait Emphasizing on the Randomness of Life




13,138 days. 13,138 die. One die for every day he lived. Frederick McSwain remembers his friend Tobias Wong as, “one of the funniest people who ever lived. Every day with him was a monumental occasion. He had this big presence. There was something about the way he saw the world, the way he reacted was like the butterfly effect.” In his tribute piece for the  BrokenOff BrokenOff exhibition, McSwain chose to create a composite portrait of Wong using dice.




McSwain explains:
The idea of a die itself was appropriate—the randomness of life. It felt like [a medium] he would use. Because [Tobias] was a very street-level force, I thought it was appropriate [to install] the portrait on the floor. Its not something I wanted to suspend on the wall; I wanted it to be right there on the floor where you almost interact with it. The idea of every decision you make and everything you’ve done in your life, defines who you are. All of those days symbolically makes up the image of Tobi.
Core77 was there for the installation at Gallery R’Pure and created a stunning time lapse video of the making of DIE

"DIE" Frederick McSwain Installation Time Lapse from stephen dirkes on Vimeo.




(via the art resort)

Thursday, May 26, 2011

From Paris with Love

Looks like Invader is safely back in Paris with new work and possibly a subtle message for the LAPD. (Photo: Lionel/Flickr)
(via Parting Shot - trends)

Looks like Invader is safely back in Paris with new work and possibly a subtle message for the LAPD. (Photo: Lionel/Flickr)

(via ultra look)

Monday, May 23, 2011

Ai Weiwei Projected on Chinese Consulate in NYC



Cuban artist Geandy Pavon projected a giant image of Ai Weiwei on the Consulate General of China in Manhattan on Friday night. Since the diplomatic mission’s security always runs protesters off their sidewalk and into a designated patch of concrete across the street, this was appropriate.
Protest project Nemesis Ai Weiwei: The Elusiveness of Being had a rippling Ai portrait tower over Twelfth Avenue, haunting the building with a public shaming. This video’s scenes of New Yorkers recognizing Ai’s face are heartwarming, but the action is only symbolic. Too many of Ai’s friends and associates are still missing and the reported details on Ai’s brief visit with his wife seem suspicious. Support from the international art community is growing steadily, but the Chinese government has not wavered in their demonstrative persecution of the artist.
by Marina Galperina

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Tthe Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi going Dolce Vita

The Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi World Tour: The Tour Must Go On - JGP disregarding the Piazza Garibaldi
read more about the project: sometimes they shoot back
The Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi World Tour: The Tour Must Go On - JGP disregarding the Piazza Garibaldi


Our little friends, The Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi just popped up in and around Rome, doing what they do best, ignoring the landmarks around them.  It was only pure chance that the enchanting Nadya Cazan was around, able to shoot back, capturing the hunters. You know what they say: When in Rome do as the Romans do but it is hard to imagine that The Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi will ever change their cameras for a mobile, (but wait, ... when they come with a build in camera...)

read more about the project: sometimes they shoot back

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Cement eclipses

electoral campaign Gendarmenmarkt. Berlin. April. 2011


T he Cement Eclipses by Isaac Cordal, "small interventions in the big city" as he  calls them are clever placed little sculptures that pop up in several European cities. His sculptures take the form of little people sculpted from concrete in ’real’ situations. Cordal manages to capture a lot of emotion in his vignettes, in spite of their lack of detail or colour. He is sympathetic toward his little people and we empathise with their situations, their leisure time, their waiting for buses and their more tragic moments such as accidental death, suicide or family funerals. His sculptures can be found in gutters, on top of buildings, on top of bus sheltersLast year, London bases street art magazine LSD published an interview with Isaac. Excerpt:
Where and when did the Cement Eclipse campaign begin? 
I started making sculptures out of cement when I was at School of Art in 2002, but it was not until 2006 when I started to use them on the streets. The first place I left a Cement eclipses sculpture was in the city of Vigo


What’s the concept behind these small street pieces? 
Cement Eclipses is a critic/definition of our behavior as a social mass. This project intends to catch the attention on our devalued relation with the nature through a critical look to the collateral effects of our evolution. These scenes zoom in the routine tasks of the contemporary human being. They present fragments in which the nature, still present, maintains encouraging symptoms of survival. The precariousness of these anonymous statuettes, at the height of the sole of the passers, represents the nomadic remainders of an imperfect construction of our society. These small sculptures contemplate the demolition and reconstruction of everything around us. They catch the attention of the absurdity of our existence. more

 A book about the Cement eclipses will be presented Thursday 26th May 2011 6.00pm at The Pure Evil Gallery, London 

Friday, May 13, 2011

GO HUG YOURSELF



It was about time for the Sense-Roid. Unpoked on Facebook, unfollowed on tumblr? There´s always still you, and thanks to Sense-Roid you can enjoy an emotional haptic communication with yourself. A needful gadget from the Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications.
via

Thursday, May 05, 2011

AS MANY EYES AS A MAN CAN HAVE


NYMan With A Movie Camera is a 64-minute, shot-for-shot remake of Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera with a live score played by the Michael Nyman Band. Nyman has been heavily involved in cinema for most of his working life, creating the Oscar-winning score for Jane Campion’s The Piano and numerous other features including Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.
Conceived and directed by Nyman, Nyman With A Movie Camera painstakingly reconstructs Vertov’s iconic silent picture of 1929 using footage from Nyman’s own film archives shot over the last two decades.  
I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Nyman at the 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge and he is "what the title says", a man with a movie camera, constantly shooting, a pictophag, in his own words "greedy for information" trying to devour the whole world through the lense of the camera.  In that sense the film is also a very personal self-portrait. The following is a review by Kenton Turk, first published at the art resort.
AS MANY EYES AS A MAN CAN HAVE
NYMan With A Movie Camera respins a classic

Dziga Vertov's legendary and highly influential 1929 wordless documentary Man With A Camera receives a tribute and update at once with Michael Nyman's attempt at “a truly international absolute language”, the original's stated intention. Where Vertov's camera captured life in Soviet cities only, Nyman is able to take the aim one step further, reflecting our modern world: here, the locales themselves give evidence of today's accepted international interaction. 26 countries and territories are listed in the credits, and Nyman's camera moves as freely between continents as it does between social classes, activities and cinematic devices. What appears at times to be haphazard collage shows abundant evidence of clever segues that imply plays-on-words or various views of a single subject.

The title's tongue-in-cheek take on the original foreshadows the sly playfulness Nyman displays throughout. The film leads with the original's Russian credits, faithfully translating its aims and veering only when names of original collaborators are to be replaced with those contributing to this work. The opening scene is a filmic tribute to the original, with Vertov's cameraman atop a seemingly huge camera in split screen with a modern boom-mounted camera regarding a phalanx of press photographers. The latter camera will resurface like a symphonic theme, at times intrusively, at others as a ghostly superimposition. From here, we are treated to his vision without losing sight of the kudos due the original. In a series of further split screen shots scattered about the film displaying Vertov's work to the left, we are continually reminded of the film's comparative nature: Vertov's track sweeper sidles up beside Nyman's bullring track, someone feeling eggs is seen next to someone feeling fruit, black and white film frames are shown beside a digital photo album, people rushing to cross a street next to an old man struggling to do the same, a telephone switchboard edges up to a Nokia delivery truck, in each instance, the monochromatic contrasting with full colour. The device does not lean on the original, but rather includes it as a part of the sum of what we witness today.

Utilizing his own 2002 BFI-commissioned soundtrack to the original throughout, Nyman proceeds to lead us through a world of personal imagery, showing a predilection for recurring signposts. Most notably, dolls appear throughout, in all forms and in various frames of reference, from baby dolls wrapped in plastic following bridal portraits to Barbie dolls dressed for airline service preceding a still of a stewardess's legs behind a “Safety on board” warning. Industrial processes and workspaces, sport disciplines and means of transport, particularly trams, also abound.

Tragic scenes married to less tragic ones, such as a car bombing and its victims juxtaposed against examinations of a collection of miniature emergency vehicles only to jump back to actual crises, imply an ability to reference a situation from varying perspectives as well as a certain dark humour. The straightforward variety is also employed. We note with amusement when subjects are unsure of being watched, and are allowed guiltless voyeurism as we spy on a man picking his nose. The unnoticed is sometimes revisited for comic effect: a full shot of plastic- covered automobiles is later re-examined in close-up, with the protuberance of a car mirror so wrapped bearing stark resemblance to a condom-sheathed bulge.

Nyman's best sequences are those showing wit in making connections. Here he demonstrates awareness of the rapid associations our brains make. An electronic billboard with the name of Mexican soccer star “Israel Castro” is followed by a picture of an imam and an Iranian sport team. A shot of a man plugging his ears precedes various scenes of “playing”: first piano, then backgammon, then a toy xylophone followed by a full-sized one. A scene of a barber at work leads to a drawing of bald heads, then a bald androgynous couple, razors and scissors being sharpened, photo session preparation, and finally hedge clippers and a little girl observing the hedge-trimming while fondling her own tresses. In one of the best, scenes filmed at Ground Zero in New York are followed by barbed wire barriers and (in perhaps the film's best visual association) a bird apparently flying “into” Berlin's Fernsehturm in a shot that is eerily reminiscent of “9/11” footage.

A concerted effort is made throughout to include Vertov's many cinematic innovations and employed techniques, culminating in the final scenes, the film's most frenetic. In a Koyaanisqatsi-style escalation, we are taken through many of these in dizzyingly fast succession, all paraded out for a last look: simultaneously focused and unfocused frames, multiple images, time lapse photography, split screen, Dutch (or tilted) angles, superimposition, extreme close-ups, diagonally split images, jump cuts and more, the various techniques concentrated on performers and performing spaces, cameras and spectators. In the final shot, the red carpet press photographers of the opening are inserted into a camera's lens, turning the tables, as it were. Observers become the observed.

Nyman references not only Vertov's, but also his own forays into film. The shadowed drapery of his Witness I makes an early appearance, to be followed later in the film by the same film's haunting faces. Sequences from other Nyman offerings will also later vie for attention: the inept but unperturbed passenger of Tieman can be seen; the “Wanted” poster of Searching For Bacon briefly appears. Nyman himself, not to be forgotten, shows up Hitchcock-like in a few scenes. Vertov's shot of a Russian-language “Gorky” banner spanning a street shares the screen with a “Nyman” banner doing the same; later, electronic ribbon text announces his appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival. We see him from behind early on, later as a reflection, a man with a camera. About halfway through the film, we spy a poster with the slogan “Your sight is precious”; over it is Nyman's own reflection in glass while he brings the shot in with a slow zoom. An appropriate way to sum up the film, one thinks..


NYMan with a Movie Camera will be screened in NewYork Premiere at the MoMA,
introduced by  Michael Nyman, Sunday, May 8, 2011, 5:00 p.m.
This screening will also occur on:
Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 6:00 p.m.


Wednesday, May 04, 2011

habits make us blind

‘habits make us blind’  1/4
 Spanish architecture studio espai MGR’s ‘habits make us blind’ is a photographic series of work which addresses the vacant lots in downtown valencia, which they pass everyday.
habits make us blind
‘habits make us blind’  1/4


 Spanish architecture studio espai MGR’s ‘habits make us blind’ is a photographic series of work which addresses the vacant lots in downtown valencia, which they pass everyday.
‘…like an invisible metastasis generated in the heart of the city and extending to all its arteries. neighborhoods that, although having huge potential, lay unused, not promoting a good means of sustainable development. We recognize this as a typical theme in the central neighborhoods in valencia. sometimes, the tourists are the city’s
inhabitants pay attention to the issue at hand for a moment because secondary problems stemming from those spaces implied affect us directly. however, in most cases, they are only a part of daily way of life. this photographic body of work aims to call people’s attention to these neglected spaces. it demands the recreational use of these vacant lots as seen through the eyes of a child, by filling them with impossible constructions, surrealistic installations in line with the problem. (…)’
architecture studio espai MGR
‘habits make us blind’  2/4

‘…like an invisible metastasis generated in the heart of the city and extending to all its arteries. neighborhoods that, although having huge potential, lay unused, not promoting a good means of sustainable development. We recognize this as a typical theme in the central neighborhoods in valencia. sometimes, the tourists are the city’s  inhabitants pay attention to the issue at hand for a moment because secondary problems stemming from those spaces implied affect us directly. however, in most cases, they are only a part of daily way of life. this photographic body of work aims to call people’s attention to these neglected spaces. it demands the recreational use of these vacant lots as seen through the eyes of a child, by filling them with impossible constructions, surrealistic installations in line with the problem. (…)’
architecture studio espai MGR

(via habits make us blind)
‘habits make us blind’  4/4
(via habits make us blind)