I got this heads up from random.org
and this sequence of dots from LavaRnd.
Seems that randomness is a thing of beauty to computer geeks; the Sublime for people out in code land. The truly Random is a territory that’s hard to find, a land….oh, anyway, I tried to take this test. It asks if I can actually behave randomly, which is ostensibly a very hard thing to do.
It’s like asking someone, “Are you free?” And they’re like “Sure”; only, the ball and chain is clattering at their ankle while they answer.
Scary, but way cool.
Thanks to Will Pappenheimer for pointing out randomness to me with decided purpose.
Now all I have to do is clear my mind and my computer desktop enuf to try to comprehend. Thusfar, the concept has certainly earned my respect.
randomness
street library, 08.29.10
Any street librarians out there? MLS degree preferred, but not required.
Leica Gallery’s amazing gallerist duo in Soho
Profiled in the monthly column I write for Photograph Magazine (in which photo dealers and other bigwigs get their closeup).
You can start to read it, here.
…here’s the link to the rest of the article, if you wanna keep reading. they just don’t make gallerists like Jay and Rose anymore! a true pleasure to interview them; full of Gotham lore.
Article on “TheNineDays”
…by me, about me. Yeah, people do this all the time, right?
But do they rub synagogues every day? Link provided, below.
“Rubbing My Temple, Looking for Redemption” by Sarah Schmerler.
My thanks to my editor at CJ for making it happen.
Augmented Reality meets Art Criticism
This is what I wanna do, only with killer content, and for art.
Be the first “Augmented Reality Journalist.” That’s my term.
thoughts?
(image from geeeeeky website courselistings at RPI. thanx. maybe that tablet device could, instead, be an issue of “Art in America.”)
Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art”
Long a fan of numbered statements, I commit a no-brainer post and give them to you here (they were first published by the amazing artist in 1969). Why? I came upon them in reprints of Vito Acconci’s publication “0–9″ today and couldn’t resist. Enjoy.
1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist’s will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical. Read More
“Guerilla Television” anticipates Information Age
This book is a real find. Here’s the quotes on flyleaf page:
Guerilla Television was written in 1971 by Michael Shamberg & Raindance Corporation. It has chapters with titles like “Meta-Service Economy” and “Techno Evolution” and Info-Structures.”
Now, here we are, back in 2010. Check out the Daniel Langlois Foundation, which funded this project
—thanks to which you can download issues of another publication from the ’70s era, “Radical Software.”
I wonder if Shamberg, et al, anticipated that there is currently a laptop army (yes, entrenched in a coffee bar near you) glued to that ‘Net, wearing headphones.
I will have to read on, report back.
My first QR; Guerilla Television; the Raindance Corporation
Hey you 21st-century kids: the cool tech-future that you can envision now is brought to you courtesy of your predecessors; guys like the Raindance Corporation and this amazing book I discovered at my brother’s house called Guerilla Television. I think I’m gonna have to reproduce some of it for you on the blog (guerilla style) in installments. So stay tuned (hint: that’s what it says in the above code…). The book looks kinda QR. Coincidence.?
Meanwhile, at P.S.1 (nobody wants to play?); I thought Greater New York was supposed to be…ballsy.
“Greater New York” still rules the airwaves and byways at P.S. 1. All that’s fit to hang that’s hip. Or some phrase like that applies. Still…
I hit most all of these in. Where were my hipster helpers??
I wish the vibe there encouraged cooperation. Nobody really wanted to come out and play (and help me figure out how to get all those balls off the nets and into the pool in the Warm Up section of the courtyard).
Yikes! I had to do a kind of backflip/volleyball move to wangle these. One young lady was kind enough to help me pull the plastic poles connected to the nets overhead, like a stout yeoman, after I yelled at her for help.
Inside, the work on display (especially after I’d been able to indulge in all that really cool, small-gallery /Bushwick-salon-style viewing) felt kinda…tame, somehow.
nice ad.
Maybe everyone is too relaxed in the air conditioning?
Best I can say is that I had a kind of exquisite deja vu, walking into Franklin Evans’ installation. I didn’t know that I was about to enter his room; I just stepped across the threshold and flashed back to the first art piece that was installed in that space back when P.S. 1 first re-opened: an exquisite “Cut” piece by the late Gordon Matta Clark. It sliced through 3 floors of the building, and played with your perception of time and space.
Matta-Clark's "Doors, Floors" as originally installed at P.S. 1
Only after did I read the wall label, and see that this was Evans, and that the title of his awesome/ambitious work is timecompressionmachine. Cool!!
floor at franklin evans' time machine-of-a-show
Watch his disarming video on a nifty blog/site/gallery from Milan, Frederico Luger.
This just in: seems I’m not the only one to make the connection. Colby Chamberlain of Art Agenda got there b4 me.
Jonathan Franzen: reads good books; writes on a defunct tombstone of a laptop.
Totally cool interview with writer Jonathan Franzen in “The Onion.”
Agree!:
AVC [The Onion asks about the Internet, et al]: How much do you think about the concept of readership? It’s changed so much, even since your last novel. It appears to be more about interactivity and instantaneous response, and about everyone having an equal voice. Do you think that can be good for literature? Is it changing how people read so much that it’s antiquating the experience of being alone with a novel? Or for your purposes, is it just irrelevant?
FRANZEN RESPONDS: “…I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.
I continue to believe it’s a phony palliative, most of the noise. You have the sense of “Oh yeah, I’m writing in my angry response to your post, and now I’m flaming back the person who flamed me back for my angry response.” All of that stuff, you have the sense, “Yeah, I’m really engaged in something. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.” And yet, I don’t think—maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else. ” [emphasis, mine]
Cool, right?
Turns out, he writes on an old “9-pound Dell laptop”:
[FRANZEN]…”I took the wireless card out immediately, and I plugged up the Ethernet hole with superglue. The biggest struggle was getting Hearts and Solitaire off of it. I did work on a DOS machine until about five years ago. It ran WordPerfect 5.0, which is still the best software ever written for a writer, I think. But now, obviously, I work on a Windows machine, and Windows just will not let you de-install a Solitaire program. It puts it back whenever you try to remove it.”
Don’t agree!
Image, below, from Will Pappenheimer’s blog:
re: Sue Thomas