Mixel Typography is a hand made typeface by Senongo Akpem. The typeface was made with the new college app for the iPad, Mixel. Senongo is a Nigerian American designer in New York who works with digital interactions and websites. He loves to experiment with typography and letter-forms.

A 787 Dreamliner Drew the Boeing Logo Across the United States

INTERACTIVE

ZED
ZED is an immersive narrative experience that simulates an end of the world scenario and encourages its participants to engage with the story through various mediums. These include original online content, pervasive-style interactions and performance events linked to major arts festivals across Toronto throughout 2012. By charting the rise and fall of ByoLogyc, a fictional biotech corporation, ZED is an investigation into the hubris of mankind in its hurry to innovate and improve itself – regardless of the price.

MOTION

Crops (Gerco de Ruijter) from Michel Banabila on Vimeo.

Photographer Gerco de Ruijter who shoots aerial photographs of tree farms and pigeon’s-eye-view cinema of the city—has edited together a short stop-motion animation from satellite views of circular crop irrigation systems in the U.S. southwest.

Lillian Schwartz Youtube Channel

THINKING

A Crash Course in World History

Related Link: Crash Course

Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs Web 1.0 vs. Web Future
Related Link: The Death of the Cyberflaneur

Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature (and its garbage).

The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality – “Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.”

Call Yourself a Critic? Art Writer? Art Commmentator? Art Critic? Hack?

A Chemist Uses Google’s Algorithm to Determine the Structure of Molecules

FILM-MAKING

A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock Part I

A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock Part II

PAINTING

Dear Painter … the role of abstraction in painting today

SOUND

Cube with Magic Ribbons by Simon Katan

3-D

Speaking in Blobjects – senusal evaluation instruments (objects)

10,950 (1-930)
Jack London says “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” 10,950 follows the paradigm that to have success in any field you must practice a specific task for around 10,000 hours. For the next year I will be drawing 30 – 3″ x 2″ pictures a day, clubbing the basics of motion into something that is hopefully both beautiful and inspirational. 10,950 (1-930) is the first part of a journey as destination, the rest remains a mystery for now.

Film By: Kiri Hargie
Music By: Jake Anderson
Production Assistant: Rebecca Schraffenberger

Artists Respond to W.A.G.E. Open Forum with Hans Abbing.
Dutch artist/economist Hans Abbing, author of Why Are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, lectured at Artists Space, the first of a series of open forums organized by W.A.G.E. Artists John Powers and William Powhida attended the event, here’s what they had to say.

Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self. Recordings of UC Berkeley lectures.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Afronauts, by Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, creates an imagined futuristic landscape of Afronauts and science fiction. The works are an ongoing project exploring new landscapes of Afrofuturism.

ANIMATION

Block Alley from Andrew Sanderson on Vimeo.

Block Alley: Short animation playing with vovel animation, volselect method turned out faster than pflow + krakatoa, Rendered with single plate and HDR environment, 3dsmax + mental ray + after effects

CULTURE REMIXED


The Epic, Crowd-Sourced Star Wars
The Emmy Award-winning Star Wars Uncut project, in which hundreds of Internet users recreated scenes from the Hollywood classic, is now available online in all its feature-length glory. The undertaking began in 2009, when Casey Pugh, a developer at Vimeo at the time, created a platform through which users could select 15 second increments of A New Hope to reproduce. Using DIY production methods and delightfully inventive props and costumes, users delivered 473 clips (watch here). Now select scenes have been assembled into a director’s cut, with editing by Aaron Valdez and sound design by Bryan Pugh.

MOTION WORK

Colorful Colorado (1976) from Phil Morton on Vimeo.

Phil Morton’s Colorful Colorado

NEW / TRANS / MULTI MEDIA

On Scott Snibbe and shadow play.

Occupying the Internet: When New Media Artists Protest, by Hannah Collman

FLORA, Adafruit’s wearable open source electronics platform and accessories

Created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, Years is a record player that translates wood’s year rings into sound. Using a ps eye camera, the grain on the slices of wood is read and converted into music. Includes modified turntable, computer, camera, acrylic glass, veneer, approx. 90x50x50 cm.

It’s You’ and ‘All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures’ are two most recent projects by Karolina Sobecka,

AWARD FOR THE MOST PRETENTIOUS SOUNDING PROJECT

Andrea Galvani: Work from Higgs Ocean
“Each photograph in the series records a singular moment in this transfer of energy; they are only simulacra of a process that continues—segments of an infinite vector.”

ARTISTS TO WATCH

Drew Moody NYC, USA. – Illustration/Sequential

Cynthia Daignault NY, USA. – Painting

Our instincts know how these things go, right? Mix revenge, aristocracy, religion, a hefty dose of Italian swaggoo and what do you get? Sex, lustful insanity, and dead people. Lots of dead people.(1)

If you’ve ever seen Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet you can instantly identify with the vibe of (I am Still) The Duchess of Malfi. There’s a certain “thing” about adapting really old plays into modern times… a certain smarmy something. Greasy, perverted, slightly off-key. You know what I mean? *wink wink* *nudge nudge*. It’s probably due to the fact that humanity should have learned something in the intervening 400+ years. Which of course it hasn’t. That’s okay, because we can still laugh at ourselves. You got the text, right?

And that’s where the Duchess of Malfi arrives, dragging her tired Prada shopping bags, and widowed and undersexed gams into the confessional cum dungeon, with one incestuous and one hyper-greedy-unfeeling zealot Cardinal, her brothers, dogging her. Of course her future lover-husband is a studly “mongrel” and her best friend a bougie hobaguette from the wrong side of the tracks with an intellectual streak. Last but not least, and lest we forget, our gay tour guide narrator, and the cyanide pill as revenge-filled assassin man, as the ultimate instruments of “they’re all gonna die” to round out the Duchesses’ entourage.

Because in the end it is all about The Duchess.

The staging is slick but spare resembling something between a bordello, a mob restaurant, and a castle dungeon. Which is par for the course as the narrator leaves us no doubt to the character of Malfi when he says that there is nothing “holy in the word religion”. But there is plenty of unholy in its residents.

Our tour guide narrates us through the machinations of Malfi during the first act, which felt more like a preface, a setup for the juicy bits which come round in the second. Liberal one liners set up Malfi as an echo-chamber of modern issues of corporate greed, fascist control, protest/revolt, familial obligations, and hypocritical Christianity. Praise be to God. Amen! Unfortunately some of the jokes seem forced (2), invoking snickers instead of guffaws. But then these issues can be uncomfortable in their familiarity. I wanted them to take the acting a lot further – I wanted them to make me feel a little bit dirty and sleazy and smarmy about these characters. I wanted to feel some emotional investment in them. Instead I felt a bit flat after the first act.

The second act opens with our heroine tied to a gurney in an antiseptic room with Mr. revenge-filled assassin man (Bosola), the lighting is shocking. She’s been kidnapped to a torture chamber and the streets are revolting. It’s “Duchess Spring” in Malfi. The extended battle of wits between the Duchess and Bosola is the first truly gripping scene in the play. The second a little later in the torture scene with her lover/husband Antonio. BANG BANG. They’re all dead. That’s it? Despite the 2nd act finally settling in a stronger brew, I found myself emotionally wanting more from the characters right up to the all good gays go to heaven end.

I’ll give the play a C+/B- in the ultimately enjoyable, but wanting more category. The heroine should have been more heroic, Antonio more naive, Bosola more angry, the Cardinal more sleazy, Ferdinand more crazy… I don’t know if its the weird unengaged combo of comedy and tragedy that doesn’t quite gel in the writing, or the acting of this particular combo. I do give props to the actors for keeping us engaged and never bored for the entire 2 hours despite the fact that I never cared a lick for any of the characters.

(1) My ears are still ringing from the gunshots.
(2) I think I was only one in the theatre that got the Shepard Fairey joke.

(I Am Still) The Duchess of Malfi
January 10, 2012 – February 12, 2012
Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison, Portland, OR.
By Joseph Fisher, an adaptation of John Webster’s play
Directed By Jon Kretzu

This play runs with one intermission.

The black blank wraps. Tightly bound, but not forgotten. Brutal truth triggers set around every corner. Watch your step. Plead surrender. Portents seal the deal with strangers. A take down waiting in the wings. Waiting to pounce. Erase by retaliate. Censure by dollar for dollar. Censored out right. Wrong seeps, slithers, slimes Main St dollar by collar. Wound to wounding. Under control now. The future bleak from black respiration.

—
NO SOPA, NO PIPA

IN PDX THIS WEEK

Fertile Ground Festival starts on Thursday 19 Jan. A festival pass is only $50. What a deal to see all the new shows!

(Our) eagerly awaited new documentary !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION by Lynn Hershman-Leeson is showing on 22 Jan at 4pm at the Whitsell Auditorium – Portland Art Museum – 1219 SW Park Avenue.

NEW/TRANS/INTERACTIVE/MULTI MEDIA

Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev – Electroboutique

I would rather my street opened itself with all the stories it contains by Gui Machiavelli.

I have placed some of my memories created in Stockholm in the same places they were formed. Deposited in QR Codes as a memory layer on top of the world. Small narratives, from commonplace to slightly extravagant, from confessions to puzzling moments, hints of the countless brief experiences that populate our world.

450 Free Movies Online from Openculture.

ANIMATION

The Monk and The Fish by Dutch-born animator Michael Dudok de Wit.

SCULPTURE

Where Math and Art intersect – MIT Mathematics PhD student Zachary Abel delights in discovering hidden patterns even in the most mundane of objects.

Grayson Perry at the British Museum

MOTION WORKS

Portrait of the ghost drummer from odaibe on Vimeo.

This animated drawing is a recorded motion path of drum sticks in process of performing rhythmic composition. Motion trajectory was captured by Vicon MX system, raw CSV files were translated into visual language in C4D.

A piece from the “Times Topics” section of the January, 28, 1898 edition of the New York Times enumerating the many names for the newfangled medium of cinema.

The Noise of Cairo (Trailer) from scenesfrom on Vimeo.

The Noise of Cairo

Twelve influencers from Cairo’s cultural scene lead us on a journey to understand the unique role artists played during the revolution in Cairo. This documentary bears witness to Cairo’s vibrant artistic underbelly, as it raises its voice once again. The artists of Cairo, who refused to quiet down, come together to be heard. These individuals create “The Noise of Cairo”.

THINKING & SPEWING

Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky’s: State of the World 2012

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

ARTISTS TO WATCH

Jason Eppink – NY, USA. – Interactive Experiences & Etc.
A dude who is just trying to make things a little better.

Ben Woodeson – London, UK. – Sculpture.
Taking prolonged anticipation with a hint of danger to the max.

Anri Sala – Berlin, Germany – Film
Why the Lion Roars

VIDEOS

Greyson Perry Studio Visit
Tate Gallery’s Youtube Channel is a gold mine of interviews, curatorial adventures, and other art schtuff.

On a lower brow note, check out the fabulous ramblings of Hennesy Youngman’s Art Thoughtz. Here’s an interview with Hennesy aka artist Jayson Musson.

Generative Art: Computers, Data and Humanity

ARTISTS

Nayland Blake has started a new experiment tumblr called Piece by Piece. He writes a little piece about his old artwork. Sometimes the context of creation is way more interesting than the artwork.

Shinique Smith “is inspired by the vast nature of ‘things’ that we consume and discard, which resonate on a personal and social scale. The graffiti of her youth, Japanese calligraphy and Abstract Expressionism are influences from which she extracts ‘ the graceful and spiritual qualities’ in written word and the everyday.”

Tauba Auerbach @ Bergen Kunsthall “Tauba Auerbach has long worked with different types of book production. Recently these have developed into independent sculptural works that continue Auerbach’s research on multidimensionality and the importance of colour for spatiality.”

Sota installation documentation from Ofri Cnaani on Vimeo.

Ofri Cnaani
Artist Profile from Rhizome.org

NEW/MULTI/TRANS-MEDIA

Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

“Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.”

Super Art Modern Museum
SPAMM MANIFESTO: Visual arts have entered a new era. It’s a place where immediacy rules, where visual arts becomes virtual, a place that links the world together. A new era for artists who have invented new concepts, using digital medias, from video to graphism, static, animated or even computer-programmed. They have created a flamboyant design for a super-society created in the Web’s image.

History and future of artistic creation on the Internet: a summary of a recent discussion on “Is the Internet a disenchanted space for artists and creative people or is there a future for online arts and critical creative actions? If so, what are their possible forms and directions?”

PRISMA 1666 – Interactive Installation from Wonwei on Vimeo.

Pretty, but ultimately kinda boring.

ART COLLECTING

How to Be a Click-and-Buy Art Collector: discusses online ventures Art.sy, Paddle8, Artspace, 20×200, Artsicle

I COULD MAKE THAT

Poketo Clay Chain Necklace

RECIPES

Pumpkin Custard

Happy New Year! Bring it on 2012!

I’ve been on an extra busy (insane) holiday hiatus, but have no fear we’ll be back to regular posting schedule on 9 January. I’ve got reviews of Devon Damonte’s animation and Xenobia Bailey’s brilliant crochet in the hopper, and of course much much more.

The Resolutions have been set, and since they say resolutions work better when you share them – why not share them with everyone. Here goes:

1. Say ‘YES’ to adventure. (not that this is ever a problem)

2. Continue and finish 365 day animation project (you can see the first 750 frames above) -> 30 frames a day

3. Watch 1 movie a day for one month. Started this month, cause why wait! so far:
The Help, Hugo 3D, Picasso & Braque Go to the Movies, and about 20 films from Edison, Lumiere Brothers, and Melies which I count as one.

4. Cycle an avg of 10 miles a day -> 3650 miles

5. Run 6 days a week -> ~700 miles

6. Swim 2x a week -> 200,000 yards

7. Be kind to my relationship and help it continuously grow -> at least 1 date a week.

8. Travel abroad. Didn’t get out of the country in 2011, wrong, very wrong.

9. Read at least 1 book a week -> 52 books

10. Lose those last stubborn 30 pounds. GDI!

So there she blows… see you on Monday.

Faces
gender, technology, art

The Thing
a flexible and supportive venue for developing, presenting and distributing innovative forms of on-line activism, media art and cultural criticism concerned with exploring the possibilities of electronic networks.

Fakeshop
Core members: Jeff Gompertz, Prema Murthy, Eugene Thacker Fakeshop is both an ongoing electronic art project and a performance and installation series. The website serves a dual function: broadcasting Fakeshop’s live performances in real time and later exhibiting extracts from these performances in what founder Jeff Gompertz describes as “a series of multimedia tableaux vivants.” A visit to the website automatically opens a series of windows that reproduce text and still and moving images, accompanied by a soundtrack.

Espace
e.space was created to explore new art forms that exist only on the web. These commissioned online projects explore new forms of storytelling — taking a fresh look at what constitutes an exhibition — within the unique space of the personal computer screen.

bampfa
The mission of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through art and film.

CCC
In the European context of Higher Education in Visual Arts, the Research-Based Master Programme CCC is specifically dedicated to critical research through art. Founded in October 2000 as a pilot transdisciplinary teaching unit (critical cross-cultural curatorial cybermedia studies), and bilingual (French and English), the Programme is conceived and organized by a faculty of international researchers.

Curating Degree Zero
An exploration of critical and experimental approaches to curating contemporary art.

Rastasoft
pioneering multimedia on GNU/Linux with many JAH People in the World

Digital Craft
was founded in 2003 as a spin-off of the “digitalcraft“ section of the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt am Main (2000-2003). Its mission is to research and document fast-moving trends in everyday digital culture and to present them to the public.

Network Cultures
The Institute of Network Cultures is a media research centre that actively contributes to the field of network cultures through research, events, publications and online dialogue. The INC was founded in 2004 by media theorist Geert Lovink, following his appointment as professor within the Institute of Interactive Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam).

Wizards of OS
The Wizards of OS with three conferences and several workshops has firmly established itself as a place where the foundations of cultural creativity in the digital age are being debated internationally, interdisciplinarily and at high level. The fourth Wizards of OS under the title „Information Freedom Rules” again wants to infect its participants with the radical spirit of freedom and creativity, in talks, discussions and workshops present the most impressive developments of the last two years and entice its participants to collaborative explorations of the possible.

Bookchin
Natalie Bookchin’s videos and installations explore new forms of documentary, addressing conditions of mass connectivity and isolation and exploring the stories we are telling about ourselves and the world.

Ressler
Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler

Centre Image
SITE D’ÉTUDE DU SÉMINAIRE WALTER BENJAMIN

CTheory
is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology, and culture, publishing articles, interviews, event-scenes, and reviews of key books.

House of Electronic Arts Basel
The House of Electronic Arts is dedicated to exploring art that applies, addresses and reflects on new media and technologies. As sole successor to [plug.in] Art & New Media and Shift –Electronic Arts Festival, the House of Electronic Arts combines their previous activities and its new agenda under one roof. The House of Electronic Arts also pursues research into how best to conserve, archive and document digital artworks.

Centre pour l’image contemporaine
The Centre d’art contemporain Genève has taken on therefore a new mission, alongside its habitual programme, to develop a strong platform for the moving image and digital arts.

Surrey Tech Lab
The TechLab is the only dedicated venue for the production and presentation of digital art in a contemporary art museum in Canada.

Residency Unlimited
Residency Unlimited explores innovative art residency formats and fosters customized residencies to support and advance the practices of local and international artists and curators. We operate across multiple platforms and communities, we foster collaborative partnerships and tap into multifaceted resources locally and internationally. We further our investigations online by disseminating critical information on the evolving field of art residency. We believe in the transformational potential of residencies on creative development and their impact on the communities in which they exist.

Location 1
The Location One International Residency Program’s unique structure allows emerging and mid-career artists to interact and converse with more established artists who are at the top of their career. This sort of discourse is at the heart of Location One’s philosophy of experimentation and collaboration. Unlike most other residency programs there is no direct application process; artists are selected by our partner foundations and arts organizations who directly sponsor artists from their home countries. When logistically and financially possible, American artists are invited to participate and are proposed by Location One’s curatorial team.

White Columns
White Columns is New York’s oldest alternative art space. It was founded in 1970 by Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark as an experimental platform for artists.

Northern Lights
Northern Lights.mn is a roving, collaborative, interactive media-oriented arts agency from the Twin Cities for the world. It presents innovative art in the public sphere, bothttp://www.hargie.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2981&action=edit&message=10h physical and virtual, focusing on artists creatively using technology, both old and new, to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment.

01sj
01SJ Biennial is predicated on the notion that as artists, designers, engineers, architects, marketers, corporations and citizens we have the tools to (re)build the world, conceptually and actually, virtually and physically, poorly and better, aesthetically and pragmatically, in both large and small ways. 01SJ is about how powerful ideas and innovative individuals from around the world can make a difference and come together to build a unique and distributed city-wide platform for creative solutions and public engagement.

01Sj
we’re a NFP dedicated to inspiring culture on the edge of art and technology.

Dietz Pencilmedia
s t e v e . d i e t z b e y o n d . i n t e r f a c e : net art and Art on the Net II

Fair Assembly
Fair Assembly is an experiment not just on exhibit but in exhibiting. It is an online fair at a very large scale, which is, as Bruno Latour suggested in early discussions about Making Things Public: accessible to all the institutions, activists, teachers, political parties, artists who would have a wish to present, not so much their views on contested topics but the practical mechanisms to try to solve them.

on1
In this pioneering project over one hundred artists, scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians re-explore the term ‘politics’. At a time in which many people doubt and despair of politics it is crucial that they should not be fobbed off with standard political responses to contemporary problems but that the question of what actually constitutes politics should be raised anew.

Curatorial Masterclass
An initiative of Eyebeam’s Summer School program, the Curatorial Masterclass was led by Eyebeam research partner Sarah Cook from CRUMB, the online resource for curators working with media art. The series provided an opportunity for emerging and established curators of art to get together within a focused period of time to learn from each other’s practice, and to develop a greater understanding of curating, open source methods, and working in the public domain.

Flossmanuals
FLOSS Manuals is a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools. They include authors, editors, artists, software developers, activists, and many others. There are manuals that explain how to install and use a range of free and open source softwares, about how to do things (like design or stay safe online) with open source software, and manuals about free culture services that use or support free software and formats.

Utopia
During a debate with Theodor Adorno in 1964, Ernst Bloch, pushed to the wall to defend his position on utopia, stood firm. Adorno had begun things by reminding everyone present that certain utopian dreams had actually been fulfilled, that there was now television, the possibility of travelling to other planets and moving faster than sound. And yet these dreams had come shrouded, minds set in traction by a relentless positivism and then their own boredom. “One could perhaps say in general,” he noted, “that the fulfillment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same ‘today.’”

Loca Lab
Loca is a group project by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK), Mike Raento (Finland) A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading: “We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave your network device in the air.” Loca engages people by responding to urban semantics, the social meanings of particular places:
“You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 mi nutes in the park, are you in love?”

Chapter
Art For Networks

Scratches on the wall. Dustless. A nose buried in wool. Tireless and unobtrusive. A quandry. What lies between the mediated and the intuited? Endless oscillation? Amplitude? Amped up on anxiety. Different stories singing different tunes. Hard to catch the lies between the doomie and the rainbow. I’ll spare you the details as the suffice it to say. A topic still questioning the uncomfortable dodge. Unique and different continuing their flounder towards diatribe. Two eyes-up tripping over the consequences. Enduring. Silence still standing ground against the noise. Make a mountain, dig a molehill, tell the fake from fortune to tune it out. Don’t stall out on the information superhighway, or topple the regime without consulting the mystical focus first. Let er effin rip – tomorrow has no touché.