doug aitken . . .

Central to Doug Aitken’s “100 YRS” exhibition at 303 Gallery is a new “Sonic Fountain,” in which water drips from 5 rods suspended from the ceiling, falling into a concrete crater dug out of the gallery floor. The flow of water itself is controlled so as to create specific rhythmic patterns that will morph, collapse and overlap in shifting combinations of speed and volume, lending the physical phenomenon the variable symphonic structure of song. The water itself appears milky white, as if imbued and chemically altered by its aural properties, a basic substance turned supernatural. The amplified sound of droplets conjures the arrhythmia of breathing, and along with the pool’s primordial glow, the fountain creates its own sonic system of tracking time. Click here to see and read more.

catherine opie . . .

yayoi kusama . . .

No photographs here, but very visually compelling presentation of dots! maybe think photographs??

LUDWIGSHAFEN.- Visitors adhere circular stickers in a room installation at the exhibition “Dot.Systems - from Pointillism to Pixel” by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama at the Wilhelm-Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Tthe exhibition which will run until Sept. 30, the room was absolutely white. The installation was created by all the visitors who attached the colorful stickers. AP Photo/dapd, Torsten Silz.

bruce rich . . .

Bruce Rich’s insatiable quest for knowledge

Published by Mark Niemann-Ross, content manager | Developer | Friday, August 24th, 2012

Bruce Rich has watched 25,341 videos from the lynda.com video library. Thought of in a different way, he has consumed 52 full days worth of knowledge. It’s like watching eight hours of educational TV every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for a complete year. It’s like watching the complete Star Wars saga ninety-five times.

Bruce Rich has completed 508 courses, and has the certificates to prove it.

The amount of time Rich spends watching educational videos may seem outlandish. But if you’ve read Outliers, you are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s rule that 10,000 hours of practice leads to mastery of a topic—a competency. Most of us have worked on something for 10,000 hours, so Rich is unique only in that he’s mastered two and one-half competencies. Think of it like a master’s degree.

“I very seldom watch TV,” says Rich. “I get up early and do training instead. My son says I’m off in my own little world.”

During the daylight hours, Rich is the president of Hot Off The Press, Inc., a commercial printer located in Des Plaines, Illinois. He’s worked in the printing industry for 40 years, starting with letterpress, moving to offset, and now supplying brochures, catalogs, and banners. His next goal is supplying web sites and mobile app development for his customers.

“I have a customer with 100,000 products on his web site,” says Rich. “I made some suggestions, and now he wants me to take it over. I need to learn more before I take that on, but lynda.com shows you everything you need.”

Rich uses a couple of tricks to speed up his learning. Because he’s paying close attention while watching, he speeds the playback to double-speed, then slows it down when he needs to practice an example. He uses the exercise files and transcripts to preview and review the material.

“Deke moves fast,” says Rich. “Pausing the playback is crucial. When you’re doing the exercises, your hand is getting trained.”

Bruce Rich enjoys learning, and his customers benefit from his newfound knowledge. Rich used information from Deke McClelland and Chris Orwig to improve a product shot for Stewarts Coffee in Chicago. The company was thrilled with the results: a coffee can without hotspots.

“Customers see the certificates on the wall, and when they realize I’ve taken a course in something, they ask me for help,” says Rich. “I use the videos on lynda.com to preview software before I buy it, and use it to research customer recommendations.”

What’s next? Rich swears he’ll be taking a break after he finishes the series onAdobe Creative Suite 6. But then…

“A friend wants to write iPhone apps,” he says. “I’ll need to learn some Cocoa andObjective-C.”

Perhaps Rich should start clearing another room for the next 500 certificates.

rafael lozano-hemmer . . .

Rafael Lozano- Hemmer

Voice Array
Sep 6 – Oct 13, 2012 bitforms gallery nyc

"Bifurcation" (2012) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce its fourth solo exhibition with Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano- Hemmer. The exhibition features the United States premiere of two projects: Voice Array, a participatory environment that debuted last Fall in Sydney, Australia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art; and Last Breath, which was part of the 11th Bienal de la Habana. Concurrent with the New York exhibition, on September 20, Lozano-Hemmer will also unveil Open Air, a new commission by the Association for Public Art in Philadelphia.

Since his emergence in the 1990s, Lozano-Hemmer has mixed the disparate fields of digital media, robotics, medical science, performance art, and lived experience into interactive artworks. Probably best known for his large-scale “Antimonuments”, which challenge traditional notions of site-specificity, he focuses on the idea of creating relationship-specific work through connective interfaces. Often employing vanguard technologies, many of his projects utilize robotics, custom software, projections, internet links, cell phones, sensors, LEDs, cameras, and tracking systems.
The communal spaces that Lozano-Hemmer creates are an experiment in public authorship. Technology in his work activates seamless “encounters of art, self and the kinetic force of collective memory,” writes Claudia Arozqueta (Artforum.com, Jan 2012). As a conductor of this experience, he seduces the audience into participation, using tactile sensation, repetition and the simulated presence of an individual.
At the gallery entrance, Last Breath is a robotic installation that stores and circulates the breath of a person forever, between a bellows and a brown paper bag. The apparatus is automatically activated 10,000 times per day, the typical respiratory frequency for an adult at rest. With each breath the piece generates quiet sounds from the bellows, the motor and the crackling of the paper bag. The piece also sighs 158 times a day. For the exhibition in New York, the piece is a biometric portrait of Cuban singer Omara Portuondo. A short video of her recording her breath into the device is shown on a small screen mounted to the wall.
Filling the gallery’s far wall, Voice Array is a construction for vocal improvisation that uses blinking LEDs and a customized intercom system of audio playback and recording. Capturing hundreds of voices and translating each one into a series of light flashes, the piece stores a unique pattern as a loop in the first light of the array, until the next participant speaks into the intercom. Each new recording is pushed along its long horizontal band of LEDs, as sounds of the voices gradually accumulate. When the first voice reaches the other side of the piece, the participant’s phrase is once again released as sound, punctuated by the staggering pulsation of all the lights in tandem. The ever-changing voices stored by the piece play back through a directional speaker, during moments of less activity. 

Click here to read and see more.

timo klos . . .

I'm not sure how this series of photographs pertains to "frames", but I just feel like somehow it relates?

September 5, 2012

TIMO KLOS’S BUS STOPS TO NOWHERE

Posted by James Pomerantz

There are only five photos in Timo Klos’s series “To Mark Time.” In each photo, there is a bus stop. There are no people in the photos—neither at the bus stops nor anywhere else. There are no buses, either, which is perhaps not so surprising when you notice that none of the bus stops face a trafficked road. The absence of buses is even less surprising when you learn that the bus stops are fake. Constructed outside of nursing homes in Germany, these bus stops are not transit points. They are destinations. Residents suffering from dementia wait at the stops for buses that will never come. They wait and they talk and they remember, until they are escorted back inside, or return of their volition, having forgotten where it is they won’t be going that day.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth#ixzz25e4CFFSr

sao paulo bienal . . .

The Imminence of Poetics: 30th Biennale of Sao Paulo opens with 3,000 works by 111 artists

SAO PAULO.- Under the title The Imminence of Poetics, the 30th São Paulo Bienal takes its curatorial premise from the multiplicity, recurrence and permanent mutability of artistic poetics. Poetics is understood as the instrumental repertoire that enables an individual or group, discipline or tradition, to establish – intuitively, intentionally or unconsciously – the discursive strategies or platforms that enable expressive acts of artistic nature. 

As Chief Curator Luís Pérez-Oramas points out, imminence represents “what is on the verge of happening, the word on the tip of one’s tongue, the expected silence that precedes the decision whether or not to speak, art as a discursive strategy and poetics in its plurality and multiplicity”. 

The fundamental tool of the 30th São Paulo Bienal will be the notion of Constellation, therefore instead of focusing on single artists or works, the exhibition will present audiences with constellations of oeuvres that share a common theme, process or ideology. 

Taking as a conceptual base the understanding that poetics overlap, assimilate, condense and diverge, the curators of the 30th São Paulo Bienal – The Imminence of Poetics have established four conceptual notions: Survivals, Alterforms, Drifts and Voices, plus a transversal zone, Reverse. These hypotheses articulate in polyphonic form the artworks that comprise the 30th São Paulo Bienal. 

Survival 
The notion of survival reflects on the selection of referential as well as contemporary works, enabling a dialogue within a shared historical field. In the 30th São Paulo Bienal, survival operates through the inscription of forms and practices constituted within the ambits of spatial and temporal distant lives. 

Alterforms 
Alterforms explores selective transformations that artists, consciously or unconsciously, produce within their own practice. Alterforms presents a panorama of the current state of de-formative re-readings of modernity, and will hinge upon investigations into the state of artistic mediums: examining the margins of painting, printmaking, poetry, theory, sound, cinema, literature, theater and photography in a time characterized by the monopoly of the image as medium. 

Drifts 
The exhibition proposes a set of altered forms in which hybridization and marginality can be understood as a drift. The remains of language in the field of art as well as spaces engendered by information technologies and digitalization resurface. What forms of nomadic practices are crucial to the understanding of our time? How can we understand drift into artistic forms and ideas as a fruitful approach to deal with contemporary art? 

Voices 
Voices manifests itself through works in which the performative dimension of art and phonetics prevail. Voices serves as a platform for the examination of relations between visual and discursive poetics. Approaching the voice as malleable artistic material in all its strands and possibilities, Voices pervades Survivals, Alterforms and Drifts and extends throughout the city of São Paulo and the Bienal’s virtual platforms. Creating a bridge between the notion of voice and the manifold performative dimensions of art, Voices provides a possibility to give the audience a voice. 

Reverse 
Conceived as a transversal zone in relation to the exhibition at the Biennial Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, Reverse is a platform that not only embraces all the curatorial elements of the 30th São Paulo Bienal, but shapes a citywide constellation. Reverse will take the form of urban interventions and exhibitions held in conjunction with partner institutions throughout the city, as well as film screenings and performances by Brazilian and international artists. Among the partners in the Reverse network are Casa Modernista, Capela do Morumbi, Casa do Bandeirante and other institutions. 

Educational Component 
The educational component of the 30th São Paulo Bienal – The Imminence of Poetics, coordinated by Stela Barbieri, is synchronized with the general curatorship of the exhibition. The educational program, conducted according to the concepts presented by the curators, is an opportunity to create dialogues that begin before the exhibition opens to the public and continue with courses, workshops and activities. 

Symposia 
The Imminence of Poetics proposes a debate on the present state of artistic activity through a number of public programs in which the Biennial itself and the general aspects of its contents serve as the focus for discussion. Three symposia are scheduled for São Paulo throughout autumn 2012 in addition to a poetic/theoretical gathering, fostering a trans-territorial and trans-poetic dialogue between two cities - Ciudad Abierta, Valparaíso, in Chile, and São Paulo, Brazil. 

sarah sze . . .

Filmed in 2010 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, France, Sarah Sze discusses the importance of improvisation and spontaneity during her installation process. Originally shown at her New York City gallery, Sze altered "The Uncountables (Encyclopedia)" (2010) for its reinstallation in France by incorporating locally found items. Sze's use of improvisation allows for viewers to trace her decision making process as they explore and investigate the artwork.

CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Field Producer: Agnes Jammal. Camera: Miguel Sanchez Martin. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Morgan Riles & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Sarah Sze & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Special Thanks: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice. Theme Music: Peter Foley.

dinh q le . . .

Dinh Q. Le is known for his technique of weaving photographic images together; he continues in this tradition with this new series. Le investigates two highly intelligent cultures of the past: one of ancient Sumer, the other of 12th century Cambodia. Both cultures are remembered in his work through their remnants and ruins. 

To read more about this work click here.

Empire #2, 2012

6 C-prints and linen tape, 53 x 78 1/4 inches (framed)

Installation view

Sumerians #3, diptych, 2012

2 C-prints and linen tape, 77 1/2 x 53 inches each (framed)

The Headless Buddha of Angkor, 2012

15 digital prints, 129 3/8 x 153 3/4 inches each (framed), Edition of 5, 2AP

michelle given . . .

Moving On is an installation that is contingent upon audience participation. The piece is comprised of a 16mm projector and a paper shredder plugged into a timer set to thirty seconds. A viewer must start the timer to see the old family movies, thereby committing themselves not only to thirty seconds of footage, but also to the permanent destruction of thirty precious seconds of the same film, someone else’s memories, which glitter in the light as they are spat out of the shredder. The nostalgia traditionally associated with viewing old family films is undermined by the shredder’s jarring sound. I am intrigued by causality and responsibility; those that choose to fully experience the piece are also complicit in the destruction of its key component. The title can refer to the act of forgetting or destroying the past and/or memories, as well as the unromantic advancement of audio-visual technology.


To see more work by Michelle Given click here.

zoe strauss . . .

Strauss’ I-95 project is a ten year long endeavor for which Strauss displayed her photographs by affixing them to the pilasters supporting the overpass of Interstate-95 in South Philadelphia. For a single day each May (from 2001-2010), Strauss revitalized and transformed a derelict and unused public space into a site for art, facilitating community and social interaction through her installation. At the end of the exhibit, the laminated installation photographs were free for the taking. As an artist, Strauss prioritizes accessibility and she enthusiastically promotes discourse regarding her work and artistic process via her well-known and widely followed blog. She describes her work as an effort to create an “epic narrative that reflects the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” While her chosen subjects and scenes of the American urban landscape can seem unflattering, troubling or blighted, they reflect the artist’s interest in confronting and depicting life in America—not in a manner of pure social journalism, but as a method of exploring her interests in visual abstraction as well as the self-reflexive nature of the medium.

Click here to read more.

penelope umbrico . . .

Read more about Penelope's work here.

"This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4" x 6" machine prints from them. For each installation, the title reflects the number of hits I got searching "sunset" on Flickr on the day I made/print the piece – for example, the title of the piece for the Gallery of Modern Art, Australia, was 2,303,057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07 and for the New York Photo Festival it was 3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08 - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities, and a reflection of the ubiquity of pre-scripted collective content there. I think it's peculiar that the sun, the quintessential life giver, constant in our lives, symbol of enlightenment, spirituality, eternity, all things unreachable and ephemeral, omnipotent provider of warmth, optimism and vitamin D, and so universally photographed, finds expression on the internet, the most virtual of spaces equally infinite but within a closed electrical circuit. Looking into this cool electronic space one finds a virtual window onto the natural world."


Titles of installations to date:

2,303,057 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07

3,221,717 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08 

4,064,589 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/02/08
4
109,500 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 9/09/08
4
786,139 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 1/14/09
5
009,279 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 2/20/09
5
083,088 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 3/06/09
5
332,272 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/22/09
5
377,183 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09
5
537,594 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09 

5,858,631 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/26/09
5
911,253 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/03/09
6
069,633 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 8/27/09
7
626,056 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/17/10
7
707,250 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 7/30/10
8
146,774 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 10/15/10
8
309,719 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 11/20/10
8
313,619 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 11/21/10 
8
730,221 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 02/20/11 


Screen-saver: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/SunBurnScSvr/Installers/ScSvr2.html 
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunsfromflickr-umbrico/ 
Second Life: virtual post-cards of these images made to distribute on the open-ended virtual world “Second Life” as virtual ditritushttp://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.htmlhttp://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.html