Sophianotloren

water surface

Installation by David Bowen represents realtime water surface data using a depth camera with an array of LED strips:

This installation displays water surface movements collected by a 3D camera. The camera captures a grid of points from the surface as it waves and ripples. The movements are scaled and sent to a corresponding matrix of 1,215 LEDs installed in the gallery space. The color of the LEDs shifts from purple to blue based on the relative peak and trough of the waves according to the distance from the camera. Through the installation the dynamic and fluid movement of the surface of the water is simulated in three dimensions by artificial light in the gallery.

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Anna Glantz‘s Horse in the Road features five large-scale, astutely rendered paintings. They are displayed in the stripped-down beach house gallery, Topless, in the Rockaways. Each painting references a different stylistic language, but presents what may be the same traveling character visiting various worlds, often only carrying a sack over her shoulder with an oppressive moon in tow. The remote location of the sparse gallery space makes it seem as though the paintings were found interred, long unseen. This body of work carries a symbolic narrative throughout, but the viewer isn’t given a key. Instead we’re left attempting to read what is discarded, the afterimages of a story.

“Saturnino X” recalls the illustrator Edward Gorey’s thin line work, but instead of a fine-nibbed pen, Glantz uses layers of paint that give the surface depth and tension not present in Gorey’s illustrations. Here the traveller seems inert, obstructed by treelike barriers and enclosed in a watery pattern. A calligraphic mark diagonally placed across the traveller’s torso carries a double meaning, acknowledging the pen-and-ink reference while also visually stopping the viewer. Here comes to mind the title of the show; a horse found in the road could provide an escape or could become a barrier.

Another painting, “These Are Pearls That Were Your Eyes,” could be a crop of a still from an older Sally Cruikshank animation. The delicate, stylized fingers of two reaching hands are evocative of this, their thin outlines and swooped forms begging to animate. Here the diagonal arms grasping and touching move the entire composition. The solitary, yellow traveller seems to be making a connection with another person on her journey. However, there’s something about the soft, frail gesture that gives it a feeling of hesitation and possible mistrust. Isn’t the stranger’s arm the same mirrored arm that is reaching to it, only rendered a different color? This is the only painting of the five that features another character, and it is unsettling. The solipsism may not be broken by this hallucination on the road.

The moon acts as another character and is featured prominently in two of the five paintings (and two more are set in a starry twilight). Both times the moon looms over the shoulder of the traveller and also breaks the painting, creating a space of pure, blinding white. In “Blood on the Tongue” it’s shaped more like an egg. The traveller here is jutting out of the canvas, the forced perspective and cropping causing her to fall forward. A red aura traces her shape. The large hat she wears covers all but the suggestion of eyes. They still stare. Here the feeling is ominous and it reminds us that the reason for escapist travel isn’t always freedom, but to leave behind a dark past.

“The Infinite, the Gold, and the Deathless West” can be considered to sum up all five paintings. The traveller is again obstructed, but isn’t stationary this time. She seems captured as if in a snapshot, about to exit the scene for good. Between the traveller and the viewer is a mound of blooming flowers. Paradoxically, orange autumnal leaves fall in front of the mound. Both spring and fall are referenced here. The traveller is in a lightly starry sky that could be dawn or dusk. This painting seems to condense time into one image, the traveller eternally journeying.

Overall, Glantz shows a proficiency for paint handling. Edges move from sharpness to open scumbling. There is a range of flatness and depth in all the pieces. Some use the language of cross-hatching to shade, while expressing a seamless tonal shading elsewhere. These are paintings that appear to have been worked over several times, never hiding their histories in the final piece.

The complex surfaces impede the work from becoming a thin quotation of various styles. Instead of being an easy, one-note gimmick, the genre hopping mirrors the potentiality of our world. As multiple realities unfurl, each with different rules and styles, the traveller remains the consistent symbol in all five paintings. She is a stand-in character, unknown enough to allow projection. There’s a reason “the road” is such a common metaphor in visual art, music, and even conversation. Personal reinvention, solitary considerations, fear, joy, and freedom: these are all part of life’s path, and through expressing this, the paintings become very human.

Anna Glantz: Horse in the Road continues at Topless (1–89 Beach 96th Street, Rockaway Beach, Queens) through July 19.

Amazon is deciding who you are friends with—even if you aren’t. The retailer is using that information to scrub book reviews from customers who might be friends with authors, reports the Guardian. Though the tight-lipped company won’t reveal the formula it uses to determine who customers are friends with, it seems merely interacting with authors online triggers the review ban. The review ban itself is less controversial than the sense that, to make a literary reference, Amazon is acting like “Big Brother.”

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There's horseshit and then there's damned horseshit. And one of the goddamnedest piles of horseshit is "Obama says things when black guys are killed, but why didn't he say anything when [Insert Name of White Person] was killed?" Usually, they rattle off black people Trayvon Martin - who was killed by a neighborhood watch captain who thought Martin was a criminal for looking black, Michael Brown - who was unarmed and shot to death by a cop, Eric Garner - who was unarmed and choked to death by a cop, and/or Freddie Gray - who killed by cops recklessly driving a police van with the intent of harming Gray, who was in the back. Tragically, you can expand that list endlessly.

Shit, torture apologist and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen triples down in his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "Mouth foam from a rabid schnauzer"), mentioning President Obama's speaking about Martin, Brown, and Gray. And then he says, "But after Kathryn Steinle was killed July 1, allegedly by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions, Obama said...nothing."

He's referring to the shooting in San Francisco of a young white woman by the aforementioned undocumented immigrant. The fuller story of the whole incident is about institutional and individual incompetency that makes you want to beat your head against a wall. The immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez, had no convictions for violent crimes, so instead of being handed over to an overwhelmed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, he was sent out after five years in jail, homeless, drug-addicted, and possibly mentally-ill. According to a public defender, "He didn’t receive any services. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket...He was homeless, penniless and living on the streets." Sanchez claims that he had popped some pills and found the gun, which he accidentally fired. That may or may not be the truth. It's hard to tell because Sanchez is a drug-addict who might be mentally-ill.

But Thiessen and, of course, the Fox "news" junk pundits have to shit out their theories, which mainly involve how "illegals" are murdering the fuck out of good Americans. Thiessen says, after quoting the head of the ICE, "121 times over the past four years [2010-2014], the administration has released an illegal immigrant with prior criminal convictions who went on to be charged with murder. That is one every 12 days." Now, the Rude Pundit is no statistician, but he knows how to use a calculator. According to the ICE, the Obama administration has deported over 900,000 undocumented individuals with criminal records. That's 640 every day.

Of course, numbers are a game. And the rules that govern who stays and who goes in the immigration game are subject to local, state, and federal whim. Do conservatives want to take away California and San Francisco's right to deal with immigration how they see fit? Yeah, federalism is merry and fine when you want states to enact insane abortion policies. But sympathetic immigration laws? Bring the motherfuckin' federal hammer down, right?

But, to conservatives' bigger point, that somehow Barack Obama's immigration policies are responsible for some kind of phantom surge in crimes by undocumented immigrants, Thiessen cites, "In 2013, the Obama administration released 36,007 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions — 1,000 of whom were subsequently convicted of other crimes after their release. Last year they released 30,558 such immigrants." Thiessen doesn't say if the criminal convictions were misdemeanor or felony, trespassing or rape, marijuana possession or murder.

But Thiessen did work for the administration before Obama's, George W. Bush's. And it took the Rude Pundit about two seconds of searching to find, for instance, a 2005 story about the arrest of 100 mostly undocumented immigrants who were part of a violent gang that spread over multiple states. The article says, "Federal immigration officials estimate that there are 80,000 to 100,000 criminal illegal immigrants in the United States." That shit's scary. In 2006, an undocumented worker murdered actress Adrienne Shelly in her New York City apartment. In 2007, two undocumented men were part of a trio who killed three teenagers in Newark, New Jersey. Tom Tancredo, who thinks Donald Trump should tone his fuckery down, made a presidential race issue over the crime.

In other words, conservatives, shut the fuck up about blaming President Obama. You know what would prevent anyone from shooting people dead? Fewer fucking guns. Why don't we put that on the table?

Finally, there's an enormous difference between the deaths of the black men and the murder of the white woman mentioned above. Kathryn Steinle was killed during a crime by a criminal. Brown, Garner, Gray and many other black men were killed by cops in situations where no one was threatened. When people in authority murder unarmed people, that would seem to be something that demands a reaction more than another day, another awful crime.

And, by the way, Obama didn't speak immediately after Trayvon Martin's death by George Zimmerman, someone whose actions were defended by many on the right. Martin was killed on February 26, 2012. Obama spoke on June 19, 2013, after the acquittal of Zimmerman. He faced a shitload of criticism on the left for not addressing it earlier. So maybe let that comparison go. Oh, who are we kidding here? You guys will hump that corpse like a rabid schnauzer on a Confederate flag pillow.

Found this in the archives today. It’s faint, but readable. And it shows that Homer Simpson is real and evidently worked in the Fermi reactor in Michigan during the 1960s.

Sorry for the large size, I wanted to make it as readable as possible.

Further documents suggest it was in fact a beer can.

The post down the throat chanel preston appeared first on droolingfemme.

“How many times is a sculpture sculpted?” one of the docent performers asks in The Return, an interactive digital piece staged alongside Tullio Lombardo’s “Adam” (1490–95) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The answer is that everything is in constant flux due to time, but “Adam” had two major points of creation: his Italian Renaissance sculpting and the 12-year restoration after his pedestal buckled in 2002 and the marble statue smashed into bits.

The Return opened last Saturday, running through museum hours until August 2. It’s directed by Reid Farrington, who last year at Coil Festival presented Tyson vs. Ali, a match between the two boxers that never happened, imagined with both video and live performance. Similarly The Return involves actors in the small gallery where the meticulously reconstructed “Adam” was unveiled last November. One serves as a docent for visitors while in the Egyptian Wing’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, another performer plays Adam through motion capture technology, a realtime avatar responding on a six-foot screen in the gallery. This theater is open to visitors who want to witness the tech behind the piece.

“We try to create work that’s very specific to the Met as opposed to a touring concert or something that could happen anywhere else,” Limor Tomer, general manager of concerts and lectures, told Hyperallergic. She cited a recent collaboration the museum had with the Civilians theater group in the Temple of Dendur, and La Celestina, a digitally mapped opera in the Vélez Blanco Patio by performance company ERRATICA and shadow puppet specialists Manual Cinema. “It’s about how you do theater in an authentic way in a museum,” she said.

On entering the “Adam” statue’s gallery, which will soon become the museum’s new Venetian Sculpture of the Renaissance gallery, audience members select short stories represented by broken statue fragments. For example, the hand grasping the apple, held upside down in an attempt to hide the fateful bite taken from it, returns viewers to the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

“We’re trying to tell the story in a factual way, but give it an emotional color so you can hear it,” Director Farrington said. He noted there’s a parallel between the fall of Adam and the fall of the statue, and the script by Sara Farrington explores this history with the avatar actor taking on various personas, including Adam of the Old Testament, Tullio’s Adam, and a digital Adam based on the 3D scans made of the sculpture during the long period of conservation. “What was important to us was to tell a story that could reach a large audience,” Farrington added.

There’s definitely an effort for contemporary humor that might get a little grating if you lingered in the gallery all day (for example, a Digital Adam that despairs about never aging is transformed into a bearded statue complaining about $4.50 coffees and “kids today”). These skits are clearly meant to engage people briefly, albeit much longer than they would ordinarily stay with a single work of art. Farrington noted that due to our familiarity with screens, paintings and two dimensional works can often feel more accessible than sculpture, which requires more interaction from the viewer. “You walk from left to right and there’s a change to his expression, a shame to biting the apple,” he said.

The Return is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) from July 11 to August 2. 

Deep Dream

Music video by Samim Winiger for Calista & The Crashroots employs the recent Google deepdream method, which makes it one of the first music videos to use artificial intellegence effects:

The recent release of deepdream has caused great excitement among machine learning researchers and artists alike. Deepdream is a image recognition neural network, turned upside down. It hallucinates images. I decided to take the system for a test run and explore. The following video is generated entirely with deepdream.

Keep in mind, this video was released just 10 days after the deepdream code was published online. It is an exploration of generative systems, not “Art” ;-)

More background how it was put together can be found here

Crystal

Music video for track by Delorean by Joan Guasch employs 3D scanning and familiar net art styling to great effect:

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Spatial Jockey

Project from Japanese developers Psychic VR Lab combines club audio visuals with Virtual Reality, where everyone will get an Oculus Rift fitted with Leap Motion sensor:

Imagine a space in which virtual events and stories are produced and consumed. This is Spatial Jockey, a new platform that allows for sharing of experiences and images in realtime.

The SJ creates virtual spaces and 3D visual experiences, and beams them to the audience, who wear head-mounted displays. The SJ is simultaneously an operator, and a performer.

… DJs connect words and sounds, VJs connect these with images. The SJ takes this to a new level, by connecting  and mixing spaces and objects for a new layer of experience.We have embraced this new layer of connections that is the “virtual”, and are experimenting with the hyperlinks of images, sounds, and experience that has now become possible.We hope that the Spatial Jockey will create a new scene and a new culture.

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Over the past few months, the Smithsonian has been criticized for not addressing the rape claims leveled against Bill Cosby. The comedian’s private art collection makes up a third of the works shown at the National Museum of African Art‘s (NMAA) 50th anniversary exhibition, the opening of which coincided with the media storm around the growing number of allegations. The show doesn’t just include art, but also pictures of Cosby and quotations by him.

Now there’s evidence that the Smithsonian didn’t simply ignore the news, but actually tried to hide the fact — or at the very least hoped nobody would find out — that Cosby and his wife Camille Cosby funded the entire show. According to the AP, the couple donated $716,000 for the exhibit, an amount that “virtually covers the entire cost.”

While it’s not an uncommon arrangement these days, the news release and exhibition catalogue for the show did not include any indication that the Cosbys had bankrolled it. That’s in direct violation, as the AP points out, of museum industry guidelines requiring funding sources be publicized in such cases. The Smithsonian claims the information was available to anyone who requested it, but that’s just the thing — you don’t usually have to ask. Donor information is almost always plastered all over the press materials. The omission makes it look as though the museum knew the implications of showing Cosby’s art collection and tried to mitigate the controversy it would undoubtedly provoke.

When it opened last November, critics debated whether the Smithsonian should take down the show. Writing in The Atlantic, Kriston Capps argued for its removal, while Hyperallergic’s own Jillian Steinhauer felt the museum should at least address the matter more seriously. “If the institution could somehow distance itself from Cosby while still showing his artworks — release a genuine statement, perhaps add new context to the exhibition or organize an event about violence against women, push up the closing date — that would seem reasonable,” she wrote.

To date, the Smithsonian continues to deflect any criticism over the exhibition. Speaking to the AP, Richard Kurin, the institution’s undersecretary for art, history, and culture, acknowledged the sexual violence allegations but stressed that they were not relevant. “We certainly don’t condone his behavior,” Kurin said. “We’re just as deeply disturbed and disappointed as I think everybody else. But it’s not about Mr. Cosby. This is an art exhibit.” A statement posted on the NMAA’s website makes a similar argument.

But the plain truth of the matter is that the show itself has inspired less press than the Smithsonian and how opaquely it’s dealt with the problem. In particular, National Museum of African Art director Johnnetta Cole has declined to discuss the exhibit. As the AP notes, her relationship with the Cosby family goes back at least two decades to when she was president of Spelman College, a historically black school in Atlanta, and Camille Cosby wrote the university a $20 million check (the school recently cancelled the visiting scholar professorship it endowed). What’s more, Camille Cosby sits on the NMAA’s board and initiated the loan.

“It just raises a little eyebrow that a trustee of a museum is lending (her) own collection, funding part of the exhibition, and the exhibition is highlighting works … by less well-known artists whose work is considered by some to be undervalued,” art market expert Noah Kupferman told the AP. “Repositioning these artists’ works as suddenly important could have significant positive effect on their economic value.” That would, by extension, put more money in the pocketbook of an alleged serial rapist.

More than five hundred people will participate in a global event to read the roughly fifty works by Russian author Anton Chekhov, reports Russia Beyond the Headlines. On September 25th, venues around the world will begin an online broadcast lasting 24 hours. The event is part of Russia’s Year of Literature project.

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The Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science in Queens was designed to give visitors to the 1964 World’s Fair the feeling of floating in deep space. Over the following decades its 5,400 concrete panels embedded with cobalt blue glass, speckled in places with red and yellow, dulled; the mid-century building’s undulating architecture required stabilization. Last month, after a six-year, $25 million renovation, the Great Hall reopened, and now instead of transporting viewers to the stars, its new exhibition considers the ecology of our own planet.

Connected Worlds opened on June 27 as the Great Hall’s permanent exhibition for the coming years. The digital interactive environment, created in collaboration with Design I/O and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, simulates six ecosystems that are controlled by visitors’ movements. A 45-foot animated waterfall flows onto the floor, which visitors can guide with “logs.” The exhibition is aimed at engaging kids with water conservation and climate change, as choices about where to distribute water, plant seeds, cut trees, and generate clouds impact the future of the ecosystem. On my visit the adults seemed much more enthusiastic about playing with the whimsical fictional creatures and experimenting with moving their hands in front of the screens, while kids rolled over the floor logs seemingly oblivious to their environmental impact. It is a game that has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s definitely an impressive experience with a lot of different interaction points, and it’s easy to see a school group or crowd of determined kids getting really involved with this environment.

Renovations on the Great Hall began in 2009, and the outdoor plaza’s revamp is still underway through the fall. The space has been closed in the interim, although there have been periodic events, such as Björk’s 2012 futuristic five-show residency and Arc Attack’s Tesla coil performance during Maker Faire in 2010 and 2011. Few major structures remain from the 1964 World’s Fair, and several of those that survive, such as the New York State Pavilion and Terrace on the Park, have decayed in plain view. The Great Hall is exceptional in that regard, and in mid-century architecture in New York City, where gleaming glass skyscrapers and relics of the Gilded Age tend to be more readily celebrated.

Nicknamed the “cathedral of science,” the Great Hall was designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison of Harrison and Abramovitz Architects, who previously experimented with the illumination of glass and concrete at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, in 1951 and the “Fish Church” in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1958. The Great Hall was perhaps his most ambitious, with a 100-foot-high ceiling and not a right angle or straight wall in sight. From the exterior, the building is stern, with a brutalist heaviness, but inside the “dalle de verre” slab glass technique in the curved walls instills in the darkened room a sensation of limitless space. The renovation, by Ennead Architects, involved cleaning by hand each of the glass panels and tracking down the original glass manufacturer in Philadelphia for replacements. The six-year wait was worth it, as the Great Hall is not just completely different from any other space in New York, it’s also the heart to the science museum, still captivating young visitors with the potential for human exploration, now focusing on our environment while its simulation of the stars hovers above.

The renovated Great Hall is now open at the New York Hall of Science (47-01 111th Street, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens).

burdenedwithgloriousassbutt:

just blue steel it out, chris

….may have overshot.

In other news, HELL YEA exams over, and we’re BACK.

bitch-media:

A new series of prints by artist Roger Peet aims to address a tricky topic: cultural appropriation. In his series In//Appropriate, which debuted at Portland State University’s Littman Gallery this month, Peet printed images of white Americans engaging in cultural appropriation on tall banners. Frozen in time, Miley Cyrus joyfully twerks with her tongue in its signature position, a hipster wears a keffiyeh, and Katy Perry smiles in her American Music Awards geisha costume. Behind them, another vision of whiteness—a violent one—is printed in red: Miley is starkly framed against a scene of police in Ferguson, a bohemian white girl in a feathered headdress is juxtaposed with an iconic photo of a mountain of buffalo skulls.

To accompany the images, Peet constructed special glasses made from cardboard and red plastic. These are “whiteness goggles,” a sign explains. When you put them on and look at the images, suddenly the red, violent image disappears. Viewers are left with just the visions of Miley, Katy Perry, and Elvis with none of the violence behind them. The viewers are forced to consider the blinders that race creates: One of the privileges of being white is the ability to ignore racism. All too often, the reality of the white supremacy is rendered invisible to people who don’t want to see it.

“When you put on the Whiteness Goggles, the colonial, military and police violence that underpins casual cultural consumption disappears,” explains Peet, in his artist statement of the project. Peet himself is a white immigrant to the US from Britain—he works as a politically minded printmaker with the Justseeds Collective. In addition to well-known celebrities engaged in cultural appropriation, the In//Appropriate show includes an image of Peet, foregrounded holding an American flag against a backdrop of the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Including himself in the show was important, Peet says, to make clear that as a white person coming from England, he benefited in ways from racist societal and economic structures. He faced few hurdles in immigrating to the United States. “I was welcomed with open arms,” he says—a contrast to the racial stereotyping many people of color face when they immigrate the US.

Read more about the show—and listen to voicemails from people calling in to discuss cultural appropriation—on Peet’s Tumblr.

birdandmoon:

Bogs are beautiful.

Original on my site | Patreon

untitled on Flickr.

The weather was partly cloudy today in Kyoto. But through the clouds, a rainbow was apparently spotted in the sky over Nintendo’s headquarters.

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craveyardcat:

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

Being John Malkovich, Sandro Miller

via http://hypenotice.com/news/the-atlantic-road/26/

via http://washyourubbish.tumblr.com/

Are you determined to trump your Google Fiber-toting friends by signing up for Comcast's 2Gbps Gigabit Pro service? You'd better have deep pockets. The telecom has revealed pricing for its multi-gigabit data tier, and it'll cost you up to an eye-wate...

mindcrankismycommander:

herbaby:

Parents magazine August 2015

Just fucking freeze their toys fucking show those little shits