Archives by Category · art

1. Sad In Country

2. "In Bits" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Dave Harper and I curated “In Bits”, a project screening on BAM’s sign in Brooklyn. See below for video documentation of Joe Merrell’s piece “Green Language.”

3. Lydia Moyer- Mountain Loop (remix) at East Village Radio July 2008

For the month of July, I screened Mountain Loop (remix) by video artist Lydia Moyer at East Village Radio. See below for documentation. Mountain Loop (remix) is a response to the prevalence of strip mining in the Appalachian region of Virginia, an environmentally damaging practice in which mountains are leveled in order to access and remove resources. In the video, spectral blue lights overlay flickering silhouettes of mountains and surrounding clouds, suggesting their imminent destruction.

4. Rua Studio

Here are some photos I took over the weekend of Donna Huanca’s open studio from her LMCC residency. It included a sound installation I made. On Sunday, we played music and I recorded the performance on a handheld cassette player- it’s really rugged and messy sounding, I like it. The original was almost an hour long, so I edited it down to 20 minutes.

5. Glacial Sounds

Artist Katie Paterson uses the sound recordings of melting glaciers to document and bring attention to environmental devastation. For vatnajökull (the sound of) Paterson set up a hydrophone in the rapidly growing lagoon of the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajökull.

6. White Noise II


Eva Sjuve, Go Karamazov

7. Phillip Stearns- Burlap I II III IV (2006)

8. Lina Selander- 14th of February to 24th of June, 2003 (2003)

9. Udo Wid- A Synergy of Disciplines, BrainPrints (1999)

10. Carolina Caycedo- Local Motion (2006)

11. Ear to the Earth Festival

This week, the Electronic Music Foundation kicks off their second annual environmentally-conscious sound art festival Ear to the Earth Festival at Judson Church.

12. Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher- Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery

Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher’s show Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery closes on Saturday and I strongly encourage those in the NY to catch it before it comes down. For Reel to Reel, Shore and Fisher adhered a network of mechanical instruments on the walls of the gallery space. Once activated, the instruments play a 10 minute composition accompanied by live video sequences captured from tiny surveillance cameras in the space. During each performance, a dark blue light saturates the gallery, giving the piece a dream-like and eerie ambience.

13. NY Art Book Fair Recap

14. Julien Previeux- A la recherche du miracle économique (2007)

15. Ghost Station by Kristen Roos


Kristen Roos, The Ghost Station, 2007, conceptual photo

16. Voice and Void Lecture at the Austrian Cultural Forum


Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller , Opera for a small room, 2005

17. Candice Breitz- Babel Series (1999)

I came across this project yesterday, and it’s quite incisive and brilliant. I wish I lived in New York when it screened here in 2000 at the New Museum. See below for the full text explaining the piece and stills.

18. The Reanimation Library opens up a new space! /// "Play" at Proteus Gowanus


Image above from the Reanimation Library’s collection

19. Response to Sexual Onslaught /// Form Grows Rampant

20. Extended Animation: Digital Effects, Corporate Logos and Style

This looks really good:

21. Jacqueline Gordon Studio Visit

While I was in San Francisco I met up with Jacqueline Gordon and visited her studio. We ended up talking for a few hours and she showed me some of her projects. Jackie works in a variety of mediums- sound, installation, photography and traditional crafts such as quiltmaking and cross-stitching.

22. My first 24 hrs in California

I am back in the Bay Area for the next week and a half. Expect reports of burritos, thrifting, and redwoods.

23. Nothing is real, everything is possible.

The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirearchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio’s patrons, or the Medicis’ Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside, and that, more than anything else I can perceive, is why the bourgeois apartment houses of Damascus and the villas of Beirut begin to look the way they do.

24. ALL YOU CAN EAT POPCORN JESUS $8.99

I found this flickrset yesterday of a killer culture jamming project by Chad from Zom Zoms and Zoloscope and some of his friends. See below for a few choice examples.

25. 1990s

26. New Romantics


Caspar David Freidrich, The wanderer above the sea of fog

Michael Bell Smith, Continue 2000

Read this tidbit from things magazine, one of my favorite blogs, this morning:

27. An Outsider's Perspective on the World of Doll Collecting by Lanie Fletcher

Lanie sent me a copy of this zine along with her other zines the Ripper and Me & My Knife awhile back. Both are awesome but the doll collecting zine is particularly awesome. Her humor reminds me of an even darker Darren Bader (who’s a fave). See below for excerpts.

28. Industrial Archeology by Jeffrey Milstein

Read an interview today with photographer Jeffrey Milstein in CR blog and came across this ongoing photo project by Jeffrey Milstein exploring the declining industrial areas along the Hudson. His photographs capture the physical deterioriation and economic downslide of these once prosperous manufacturing sites. They also touch upon the concept of failure as discussed in the Informal Architectures exhibition.

29. Informal Architectures

30. La Fondation/C.Naturel

31. Vidya Gastaldon- Ovorama Terrasanta

I came across this series of prints by Vidya Gastaldon at the 2006 Armory Show at the booth for Gallery Art:Concept.

32. documenta 12/some thoughts

I picked up the first installment of the three proposed magazines for documenta 12 and read it over the weekend. Three overarching questions guide this documenta- Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and What is to be done?- and each magazine explores one of these leitmotifs in depth. The first issue asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” and it begins with an essay by the same title written by artist Mark Lewis. His essay had a few revelatory morsels that fit in well with the Gillick article I reposted and some other thoughts I’ve been kicking around.

33. Repost: Is there anything for art to say about Iraq?

34. Avant Gardener

Courtesy of Vvork, I discovered the handmade electronic musical instruments of Brian and Leon Dewan today. The cousins create sleek analog sculpture-instruments, reminiscent of 1950s appliances, which they call “Dewanatrons”.

35. The Waiting Room

Some Time Waiting, a show presently on view at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, brings together works from over 15 international artists. Curated by the foundation’s current resident, the London-based Adam Carr, the exhibition centers on the subject of waiting. The inaction captured in the works, far from being boring or burdensome on the viewer, is inherently imbued with a political charge. Take, for example, the subjects of Johanna Billing’s Project for a Revolution (2000). The film documents a group of similarly aged people tensely waiting together in silence in a room. The facial expressions of the participants imply that they were driven by a combined sense of anger and disillusion to apathy. The underlying suspense of the film emerges from the distinct possibility that its subjects could continue waiting in silence forever or leap into action at any moment.