February 2012
2 posts
RIP Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley is dead after an apparent suicide. I am sad to see him go.
I interacted with Kelley’s work during my undergrad, presenting on him and writing a short paper to go with it. If you’ve been through art school presentations, then you can probably guess, I had no idea what I was talking about. As time has gone on I’ve gained more insight into his work, but as to his...
“Year of the storm 2012 is the year of the storm. The Pirate Bay will reach an...”
– The Pirate Bay - The galaxy’s most resilient bittorrent site (via lukesimcoe)
January 2012
5 posts
Deleuze in Space
To be said like the Muppet/Pig Sketch
RIP MegaUpload... →
lukesimcoe:
Who knows exactly why the site was shut down… But it doesn’t change a thing IRT file-sharing. As evidence, here is a list of alternative storage locker sites which essentially provide the exact same service:
Rapidshare
Hotfile
FileSonic
Wupload
Uploaded
Letitbit
Extabit
FileServe
…
Dagmara Genda at KWT
Dagmara Genda has work up at KWT Contemporary,In Toronto. I highly recommend checking it out. I blogged about Dagmara’s work a little over a year ago when it was at Modern Fuel in Kingston. I wrote then about the state of flux depicted in Genda’s work, coming from a place of cultural identity. This remains as relevant as ever, especially this morning as I look through these...
December 2011
4 posts
Take Cover!
For our MFA Group show at Loop Gallery my drawing became a blanket fort. (My Thanks to Raffy, Thea, and Jon for there contributions in making this fort. ) My drawings take their cue from retro future images and other works that proclaim a world view. These source images, while originally a form of propaganda, are now disconnected from their original context. They exists as islands of lost...
Paul Noble Gagosian
BE AWARE there are new Paul Noble images online!
Loop Gallery Group Show
Our Second Year MFA class has a show opening at Loop Gallery, Saturday Dec 10th, come by the opening from 2pm-5pm. My drawing as a blanket will be there. More at the Facebook Event Page
November 2011
7 posts
Renee Lear: Lost Signal Saturdays
Last night I went to the Art & Drinks, a temporary video art space/bistro for a performance by Renee Lear. Lear put on chance based video piece in which dice determined the selection of video camera and treatment of the footage.The event being recorded is a little more difficult to describe. it is a video work that is contingent on the live experience.
the man pictured above sits in front...
Chalk Marks The Spot
Chalk messages mark the spot where non-violent protestors were pepper-sprayed by police at an “Occupy UCD” rally on campus in Davis, California. (Max Whittaker/Reuters)
via
Spray all of the Pictures
His casual repression of every image cannot be stopped.
Via BoingBoing
Update: Xeni wrote an op ed about the meme here
Thank Goodness For the Internet
This Image of UC Davis students being pepper sprayed struck me right in the lizard brain. I was angry. Not the good kind of anger that can be focused, but the unproductive rage that festers like a sore in your mouth that you keep hitting with your tongue. The event is/was disgusting, and the image makes it even worse. It takes the disgusting and ratchets it up to the level of a late 90s Al...
Brad Troemel
What you haven’t read it yet? well why not?
October 2011
3 posts
Steven Holl's Sliced Porosity Block in Progress
I saw the model for Steven Holl’s Sliced Porosity Block some time in 2009 and was delighted. A rigid structure that conforms to organic influence (i believe in this case its light that is carving the block) feels twenty-first century, adaptive. I also find something comical about the way Holl is rendering skyscraper like structures. The horizontal and parallel lines that frame the sky...
September 2011
5 posts
MMOCCA (The Extra M is not a Typo)
Construction has ended. Tonight Braden Labonte is opening the inaugural show at MMOCCA Mo’ Art Mo’Problems at York university in The Goldfarb Building, room 338 from 4:00pm-6:00pm. Come Check it out.
Braden Labonte Made a Shirt
I stopped by Leo Kamen Gallery a couple of nights ago to see Braden’s work in the I level show. It’s part mandala, part teen spirit and all sand. Just on the left you can see how at least one person wasn’t watching where they were going.
I Had That Dream Again
“These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been photoshopped into every image he encountered.” -William Gibson, Spook Country-
There has been a lot of remembering this week. As Americans honor the 10th anniversary of 9/11, images, archives and collections have appeared on various site, magazines...
Atelier Van Lieshout: Joep Van Lieshout
Yesterday Andreas put a book in my hands; Atelier Van Lieshout.
As I flipped through the pages I was greeted with by an orgiastic combination of architectural based renderings and bodily process sculptures which culminated in the project, Slave City.
Slave City is a dystopian vision that recaptures troubled futures from the 20th century that warned of social control, state socialism, and...
August 2011
2 posts
Euphemisms & The Internet
I enjoyed this article on The New Inquiry by Willie Osterweil concerning Euphemisms and the Internet. There Are numerous terms that we use that not only simplify the reality of the network we use, but give power and human qualities to the machine and devalue the human or physical aspects of that network. Osterweil points out how the term “smart phone” expands what we think of as...
July 2011
1 post
Simparch: Exhausted
I couldn’t help but post a link to the Exhausted project by SIMPARCH It pretty much speaks for itself.
June 2011
3 posts
Getting "Out of Book"
I recently read Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human, in which Christian uses his experience as a “confederate” in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition to see what machine intelligence can teach us about our own human intelligence.
In one particular section, Christian examines the famous 1997 chess match between Grand Master Gary Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue, to...
May 2011
4 posts
Alex Kisilevich: Kallima
Once, while at a busy shopping mall, My shoelace got caught in the escalator. As the steps gradually rose to the top, the shoelace stayed persistently lodged in the machine. I had to step to the side (while being pulled toward the ground) and let people jostle past me before finally wrenching my shoe from the escalator’s grasp. In this moment the daily patterns that I use to avoid scrutiny...
Drawing:It's All But Done...
…a few adjustments here and there and some good documentation and it’s finished! Click here for a larger image.
Ummm..
Surprise. Visualized
April 2011
1 post
The Pirate Box
The Pirate Box is the creation of NYU art professor David Darts. In the tradition of pirate radio and the Free Culture movement, the Pirate Box is a self-contained mobile communication and file sharing device that allows users to chat and share files anonymously. When in range, the Pirate Box can be accessed with any WiFi enabled device. The Box keeps no logs of any kind and is not connected to...
March 2011
1 post
Realities United
Jan Edler, from Realities United, gave a talk at York University on Thursday, concerning the outward communicative capacity of architecture. Realities United is a studio art, architecture and technology group who, as their name suggests, seek ways to merge advances in the digital technologies with those in architecture. They are perhaps most famous for their display skin(pictured above) on the...
February 2011
2 posts
The Jazz
Olaf Breuning, Smoke Bombs 2008
The Jazz is a term my classmate, Rafael Ochoa, came up with to describe a quality in art that grabs your attention by mixing a state of disarray, with an apt articulation of the culture around you. He sent me this OED level definition via text message.
The Jazz: Unsettling elegance. The appearance of articulating a zeitgeist with ease, a distillation and...
Alex
I recently realized, a little later than I should have, that the subject of a former blog post of mine, is now a classmate at York, Small World. I walked by Alex’s studio the other day and found him rearranging for a photo shot. He was kind enough to let me play with one of his props.
January 2011
1 post
Conceptual Entropy, Spiral Jetty
I’ve been exploring early Conceptual Art lately. As I’ve gone through articles,statements and lectures, I can’t get over the sense that I’m in a lab trying, against all odds, to make entropy decrease. The way these early artists are written about, their opposition to a Greenbergian formalism becomes the be all and end all of their work. The value is not found in 2010 but...
December 2010
4 posts
Mark Zuckerberg is TIME's Person of the Year 2010 →
lukesimcoe:
He’s kind of like Julian Assange… if you remove any threat to the state or capital.
Lukesiem:
Time almost goes out of their way to compare Zuckerberg to Assange. It’s like they think they picked him too.
Time: Well we would have pick Assange for this meaningless distinction, but Zuckerberg has a movie.
Cao Fei: RMB City Part 2
When the the virtual space of RMB City is talked about, terms like “exploration” “people” and “interaction” frequently occur (See Art 21 Season 5 Fantasy Episode). Here we may draw on Claire Bishop’s critique of Relational aesthetics to question the user experience of RMB City. In many ways Cao Fei’s project fits the criteria for Relational Aesthetics. It...
Cao Fei: RMB City Part 1
Cao Fei’s RMB City is a multifaceted virtual world project that takes the form of a fantasy city. I find myself attracted to the aesthetic, but I’m skeptical of the works success. Second Life as a game, or community is an intriguing notion, but as a critical space, it is perhaps not the most relevant area of the web to look at when examining our relationship to our virtual selves. This...
Jonas Loh, Anti Syn Nation
Apparently I’m not the only one looking back at the Maunsell Towers. This is part of Jonas Loh’s Anti Syn Nation, found via BLDGBLOG. I must agree with the blogger there, someone should make a Maunsell Towers chess set.
November 2010
3 posts
Alice Leonards vs Second Life
Yesterday I went to A Space Gallery to see Cao Fei’s RMB City project. There is a lot going on in the work and I haven’t quite unpacked it all yet, So I reserve judgement on it for now. However the project is based in Second Life, which I find problematic. To me Second Life is a metaphor on top of a metaphor. It is a 1980s version of a digital space. It is a place you go to, where as...
Flying Frog
When talking about his flying machine, Carsten Holler described himself as an “Orthopaedist” making artificial limbs for parts of your body that you didn’t know you lost. Mia Kalnitskaya & Micha Maslennikov took on a similar role with their 2003-2005 project Frog Can Fly making limbs for desires we didn’t know frogs had.
“The jump of the frog symbolizes thirst...
Kim Adams
Transportation figures heavily in Kim Adams work. Tractors, trucks, farm equipment, and VW vans gets transmogrified into new forms that work both as visual gags (Cheese truck, or Dragon Wagon) and as new methods for “how to get there.” Transportation technology changes our relationship to time and space. The world becomes much larger when on foot than when driving in a car. A twenty...
October 2010
4 posts
Maunsell Towers
The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to provide anti-aircraft fire in defence of the UK. If there is a more visually pleasing fort in existence, I have not seen it yet. The nodal, networked, sci-fi like pattern Each fort forms, falls right into my aesthetic sensibility.They simultaneously look like the tripods from War of The Worlds and like an industrial neuron. In truth this...
Dagmara Genda/Marigold Santos
The success of our system of memory is the ease in which it can slowly be renegotiated over time, but hold onto things we’ve learned. We are able to function because we don’t have to learn to walk everyday. Every step is simply an adjustment to the initial calibration. This extends to the way we shape our identity
The cultural codes that we grow up with can be renegotiated to accommodate things...