I’ve got a lot I’ve saved to share with you all, but haven’t had a chance to post until now. Most people, when confronting the internet are overcome with a Library Of Alexandria feeling – brought on by the presence of more information in one place than any human could peruse in a lifetime. This is why I rely on, for the most part, all the amazing people I subscribe to with google reader to help me filter it out. I then, to a much less heroic extant, try to supply the same kind of service to you. So without further ado, here’s some stuff I thought was interesting:
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via Artifacting
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In Mottos We Trust?
via Strange Maps
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Harper’s Index: The Bush Years
A gigantic edition of the Harper’s Index dedicated to the Bush years. It’s not pretty. A sampling:
Total amount the Bush campaign paid Enron and Halliburton for use of corporate jets during the 2000 recount: $15,400
Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50
Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069
via Eyeteeth
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Keven Bewersdorf Runs In Circles
[Kevin is Maximum Sorrow.]
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Ennobled
by Brad Troemel
“What do color-editing techniques mean in relation to a generation of people who have used them to present themselves to the world? When the user has touched up every image on a Myspace or Facebook profile autobiographically? Photoshop itselfhas replaced clothing, braces colors, hair gel and every other object of self-conscious youthful presentation.”
via Art School
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Simon Hoegsberg
via Ground Glass
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Spy
via It’s Nice That
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Growing Up Star Wars
“With the creation of this group you now have permission to post that Polaroid of yourself as Princess Leia in 1977 (I’m talking to you, Bob) or that crayon portrait you did of the Death Star Droid that hung on your parent’s fridge for months in 1979 until someone spilled Kool-Aid on it. “
via Flickr Blog
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Demise of the Critic
“As newspapers and magazines lay off professional critics and young twentysomethings anoint themselves experts, the review has fallen on hard times. As critics shift from being the sole educated authorities into a percentage point on review-aggregating websites, some fear the nuance they once brought has fallen victim to the nagging blogger.”
[Interesting arguments at times]
via Daily Gorilla
via ArtsJournal
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The Origins Of ‘Good Taste’
“During the 17th century, Britain witnessed the birth of a consumer society. But, as the number of possessions grew, so did the concept of ‘taste’, a subtle and elusive yardstick by which people advertised their social position and sensibilities.”
via History Today
via ArtsJournal
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Scott McCloud Talks Comics Theory on TED.com
“Watch as Scott McCloud explains his theories on comics. Scott is engaged and engaging and these explanations of the history of comics as a medium, his theory of the “four tribes” of comics creators, and the idea of a limitless canvas all make for a fun 15-minute primer of his first two books, Understanding Comics, and Reinventing Comics. Also, don’t miss Scott on The Sound of Young America, my favourite podcast.”
via Drawn!
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Walter Benjamin’s Archive
“Walter Benjamin’s Archive presents material from 13 different areas of study from miniature Russian toys (Physiognomy of the Thingworld) to documents that make up his famous Arcades Project (Rag-Picking). Each chapter presents introductory essays that do their best to give an idea of the basic concepts and Benjamin’s thinking.”
via 5B4 | Photography And Books
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New Website, New Work, New Haircut
Check out Josh Poehlein’s work on his new website.
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High Five Escalator
via Luthien Rising
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Conversations With A Computer
“Contained within the operating system of Mac computers is a rudimentary electronic psychotherapist program. Meant to simulate a Rogerian therapist, it engages the participant in a cyclical conversation by taking his or her statements and roughly reconfiguring them into questions. I met with this program three times a week for a month in order to discuss my fear that I was disappearing completely. These are three stills from our conversations.”
via Rhizome
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Zevs Liquidates Google
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Ad, Graffiti… What’s the Difference?
“Answer: The difference is obviously whose paying for that space in the public eye. In lay terms, money. But in the last few weeks there has been a lot of push-back to renew the debate.”
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Tonk
via On Shadow
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Zoe Strauss
via Zoe Strauss
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Valentine’s Day Kisses
“This is the kind of uplifting and personal messages you get instead of advertising when you allow the public access to its visual environment on all levels. To those responsible for this, thank you for a beautiful takeover.”
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Tactical Media
via lalblog.tumblr
via tom moody
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Spacehacking: Pravdoliub Ivanov
A reminder that mundane things can be transformative by looking at them in new ways. From a series of installations titled ‘Confusion’ by Bulgarian artist Pravdoliub Ivanov.
via pan-dan
via PSFK Conference
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On The Side of the Egg: Haruki Murakami
Here’s a bit of his stirring speech, in which he shares a personal philosophy:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?”
via Eyeteeth
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Available Online for Free
“he opening coincides with the release of Evan’s new self published book project called, /AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE: Selected works by Evan Roth 2003-2008/ (made entirely in Linux using open source software and fonts). The book can be downloaded for free in its entirety here.”
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Rainbow Brite – It’s Your Birthday Party!
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This Is This Morning
via Scott Cowan
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Updated Website
Lisa Wiseman updated her website. I’d put a picture here, but it’s flash [boo].
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Ted Rall on the Comics Collapse
Ted’s latest column covers the ongoing plight of editorial cartoonists.
As publications shift their focus to their websites, comics should be a part of it. Comics can generate way more pageviews than articles or columns. Even if an op-ed was fantastic, who has the time to plow through an archive of long-ass essays? A reader can (and frequently will) click through a dozen comics in a short amount time if they liked the cartoon. More pageviews equals more advertising revenue and maybe even getting more people to read your paper, which is what editors want, unless they are bad at their job.
via Big Fat Blog
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Current State of Art In NYC
Bad
via Tom Moody
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The Artworld Is Not The World
“To take just one example: a recent conference on the idea of ‘Art after Aesthetic Distance’ states as its remit the following:
“Their projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships. Art historian Miwon Kwon stated that such work ‘no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process’.
“To ‘mediate’ ‘frameworks’ as ‘relationships’… one could switch the terms around with similar effect: to ‘framework mediations as relationship’, or perhaps to ‘relate mediations as frameworks’. The art historian quoted above is quite right to state that ‘such work’ likes to think of itself as a process rather than an object – if it stood still for more than five minutes someone might just notice that it makes absolutely no sense at all.” – source
[Personally I'm torn about this, the examples given often make sense to me, but it's probably because I'm used to the verbiage and I assign meaning where I need it.]
via Conscientious
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“Fuck Photography” written 22 times with my eyes closed so I wrote just as blindly as we shoot photographs.’
via What I Didn’t Understand I’ll Tell You Here
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Paris Hosts New Exhibition of Nothing
Voids, a retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
“At the top of the bill is Klein, the original void-enthusiast, whose 1958 show at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris started the ball rolling with an “anti-blockbuster” whose defining characteristic was its lack of physical character. Such was hype ahead of The Void (or, to give it its full title, The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, The Void) that around 3,000 people queued outside for their turn to pass through a blue curtain into an empty room.
The Pompidou accompanies his work with that of other artists who followed in his wake, such as Maria Eichhorn, Bethan Huws and Robert Irwin. The British collective Art & Language also plays its part with the resurrection of its 1967 Air-Conditioning Show, while Laurie Parsons‘ solo exhibition from 1990 is recreated with its original disdain for clutter (the invitations for the original New York show contained no names and no dates, just the address of the Lorence-Monk Gallery).
Denis Comy, an artist from Wales who was exploring the empty spaces this morning, said he was stunned by the “purity” of the concept.”
via Guardian UK
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That’s all for now, folks!
Repost Megapost / Desktop Dump - May/June 2009 | Ian Aleksander Adams Pingback on June 2, 2009 9:35 pm:
[...] all the interesting stuff from the last month and few days. Here’s the link to the last Repost Megapost from March. I’m going to have to start doing these more frequently so they don’t get huge. I try [...]