NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The Future of "Free"

2009-07-12T14:54:27-04:00

Illustration by David Reinfurt

via NYTimes:

What You Pay For

Published: July 10, 2009

Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigslist or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.”

That future is today, and it is the subject of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired and the author of “The Long Tail.” Despite its subtitle, the book is less about the future than the present and recent past, which Anderson surveys in a cheerful, can-do voice. “People are making lots of money charging nothing,” he writes. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00.”

Driving the trend are the steeply declining prices of three essential technologies: computing power, digital storage and transmission capacity. Reproducing and delivering digital content — words, music, software, pictures, video — has now fulfilled the prophecy once made about electricity. It has become too cheap to meter. “Whatever it costs YouTube to stream a video today will cost half as much in a year,” Anderson writes. “The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. No wonder the prices online all go the same way.”

More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching zero. The fixed cost of producing the first copy, however, may be as high as ever. All those servers and transmission lines, as cheap as they may be per gigabyte, require large initial investments. The articles still have to be written, the songs recorded, the movies made. The crucial business question, then, is how you cover those fixed costs. As many an airline bankruptcy demonstrates, it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry. As long as serving one new customer costs next to nothing, the competition to attract as many customers as possible will drive prices toward zero. And zero doesn’t pay the bills.

The answer, Anderson argues, lies in cross-subsidies: “shifting money around from product to product, person to person, between now and later, or into nonmonetary markets and back out again.” Most obviously, online advertisers can subsidize content by paying for eyeballs or, in some cases, for detailed information on potential consumers. Less familiar is the “freemium” strategy, in which a site like Flickr offers one package of services free but charges for an ad-free package with more features, allowing a small fraction of users to subsidize the rest.

Often, however, the cross-subsidy is a way to sell one product by giving away another. Monty Python created a YouTube channel with their most popular skits in hopes of enticing fans to buy their DVDs. Their shows and movies soon hit Amazon’s best-seller list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent. “Free worked, and worked brilliantly,” Anderson writes.

This technique is as old as the supermarket loss leader or TVs in sports bars. Unlike cartons of milk or six-packs of soda, however, once digital content exists, it costs nothing to hand out to a near-infinite number of customers — no limit of one per household. The Internet, meanwhile, is one huge sports bar, with Google selling most of the beer by collecting infinitesimal amounts (via advertising) across billions and billions of searches and page views. Obscured by the breezy tone of “Free” is a sobering message. “Everybody can use a Free business model,” Anderson admits, “but all too typically only the No. 1 company can get really rich with it.”

Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics, most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead, the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.

Faced with collapsing business models, today’s journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered. We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work away.

[read on...]

Closings (LES) 152

2009-07-10T20:27:39-04:00

Closings (LES) 152, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 175

2009-07-10T20:26:41-04:00

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 175, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 174

2009-07-10T20:26:20-04:00

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 174, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Wild Fire: Sepulveda Pass

2009-07-10T09:38:47-04:00

via LAist:

For over seven hours, firefighters fought the 100-acre Sepulveda Pass Fire along the 405 Freeway. It started before 1:00 a.m. and resources were quickly, smartly and aggressively deployed to knockdown the fire after 8:00 a.m. as Los Angeles started its Thursday workday. Here's a little of what it look like early this morning:

Through the Sepulveda Pass (Mike Meadows/Associated Press)

more images

Panoramic Foreclosure @ Queens Museum

2009-07-10T09:33:36-04:00

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

An item in “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” at the Queens Museum of Art; The curator Larissa Harris with the Panorama in a foreclosure exhibit at the Queens Museum.

via NYTimes:

July 8, 2009

Mapping a Bird’s-Eye View of Foreclosure Misery

By PATRICIA COHEN

When it came to representing the sprawling nature of the foreclosure crisis in New York City, the artist Damon Rich figured out that the best thing to do was to shrink it down to size.

And so he used the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the intricate architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, and hundreds of neon-pink triangles to demonstrate just how the city has been marked by economic troubles.

Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.

Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.

This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.

“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.

Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.

Mr. Rich said the exhibition provided a “physical experience” that engages people in a way that a book, a Web site or a television show cannot. “In some way, I hope my exhibitions function as strange educational playgrounds for adults,” he said.

As well as an artist, Mr. Rich is an urban designer and waterfront planner for Newark. He originally created a version of the “Red Lines” exhibition for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an artist in residence in 2007. When one of the center’s curators, Larissa Harris, was hired at the Queens Museum, she asked Mr. Rich to recreate the installation there.

The museum’s director, Tom Finkelpearl, suggested that Mr. Rich use the Panorama. When first built, the Panorama was supposed to simulate the sense of a helicopter ride over New York. Where the walkway now stands, helicopter-shaped cars on elevated tracks gave visitors a nine-minute tour.

“This was built as an urban planning tool,” Ms. Harris said of the Panorama. “I feel so proud of this because we are using it that way.”

The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project collected the foreclosure information, Ms. Harris said, as she slowly circled the Panorama. The Regional Plan Association, an independent planning group, then crunched the numbers using the Geographic Information System — a mapping program — to create maps of every inch of the city indicating where there had been foreclosures of single- to four-family homes in 2008.

Ms. Harris opened a door off the walkway and descended a few steps to a second door that opened onto the Panorama. She bent down and tilted her head so that her eyes were level with the blue floor that represents the waterways surrounding New York. “When you look at it this way, you can imagine you’re on a boat and coming into Staten Island,” she said.

The first challenge was figuring out how to mark the more than 13,000 foreclosures. “We had a brainstorm,” Ms. Harris said. The small plastic dividers put on the top of a delivered pizza to prevent the cheese from sticking to the top of the box would work perfectly. “We bought 2,000 of them and spray-painted them pink,” a color that would not clash with the Panorama, but would still stand out, Ms. Harris said.

Volunteers from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn of which Mr. Rich is the founder, translated the information from the maps to the Panorama. “We got an amazing crop of kids who just love maps,” Ms. Harris said.

Figuring out how to place the markers without damaging the Panorama proved to be another problem. To get to the East New York section, for instance, volunteers would have had to walk through the rest of Brooklyn, the equivalent of a cadre of building-crushing Godzillas. Ultimately, team members discovered that they could sit on thick squares of foam without damaging the Panorama’s wood and plastic models.

“We took off our shoes, put on little slippers and went out with these maps and pieces of foam,” Ms. Harris said.

The Panorama was last significantly updated in 1992, so the group made “educated guesses” when computer maps differed from the Panorama, Ms. Harris said. The museum, whose only recent addition to the Panorama is Citi Field, the new Mets stadium next door, has begun a new update called Adopt-a-Building. That effort asks people, schools and businesses to sponsor or buy a building for the Panorama. (So far, there have been no foreclosures.)

As for the pink triangles, there are 582 in Brooklyn; 551 in Queens; 140 in Staten Island; and 151 in the Bronx, mostly in the Wakefield section. The areas are predominantly African-American and Latino, Ms. Harris said, the same neighborhoods that used to be starved of credit by discriminatory redlining before it became illegal in the 1970s. The smaller numbers in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, she explained, are due to a combination of income (too rich or too poor) and building type (apartments instead of single- or multifamily homes).

Ms. Harris acknowledged that most of “Red Lines,” which runs through Sept. 27, is political; it emphasizes predatory and racist lending practices. On Wednesday night the museum is hosting a celebration for housing advocates, featuring a lecture by the urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

But she argued that mapping the Panorama was not about taking sides. “I don’t see how it gives a political view, mapping the facts,” she said. “I don’t think you can argue with this. That’s why it’s so powerful.”

An earlier version of this article misstated information about the founding of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Damon Rich is the founder, not the co-founder.

Radical Futures: "correlation is not causation"

2009-07-10T09:17:24-04:00

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via The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus:

July 9, 2009

Professor Says Free Lectures Did Not Boost Book Sales, Contrary to 'Wired' Editor's New Book

In his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson uses Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, as a poster child for how giving away information online can bring personal gain. But Mr. Muller says Mr. Anderson doesn’t have his story straight — and that his personal experience does not support the book’s argument.

Mr. Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired magazine, and his book (available free online) has been getting buzz in recent weeks for its argument that businesses can use free information to spark sales of related products and services.

In a pull-out box in the book, Mr. Anderson tells the story of how Berkeley put lectures on YouTube from Mr. Muller’s course “Physics for Future Presidents” that drew more than 200,000 views and turned the professor into “a Web celeb of sorts.” That part is undisputed. But Mr. Anderson then suggests that the celebrity status from the videos led Mr. Muller to secure a book deal, and led to greater interest in the resulting book. As Mr. Anderson concludes, “it’s easy to see just how good Free has been to Professor Muller.”

But in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Muller said the YouTube videos of his lectures did nothing to help him get a contract for Physics for Future Presidents (W.W. Norton).

“That is wishful thinking from someone who is trying to conclude that Webcasts lead to money,” said Mr. Muller. “But correlation is not causation. What Anderson says may be ‘easy to see,’ but it just ain’t so. He is letting his hoped-for conclusion drive his analysis of events.”

Mr. Muller said that the book deal came about when a Norton editor whom he had worked with on previous books (the professor had already published eight) visited his office and asked him if he had any ideas for a new one. “I don’t think [the editor] was even familiar with my online lectures,” he said.

“Norton wasn’t really interested in my online popularity,” Mr. Muller continued. “Best guess: they know that people who buy and read books are a very small population, and probably not the same as those who watch Webcasts of lectures.”

Mr. Anderson’s book argues that the Internet makes information so easy to distribute (and to pirate) that the best business response is to make it free and find some ancillary service to sell instead. “If software is free, sell support,” he writes. “If phone calls are free, sell distant labor and talent that can be reached by those free calls (the Indian outsourcing model in a nutshell).”

Mr. Muller doesn’t buy it, though, and says he has evidence that those video hits are not pumping up his book sales.

“I have been personally contacted by about 1,000 people who saw my Webcasts,” said the professor. “When the book came out, I arranged to e-mail all of them (using Norton’s account) to let them know that a book was now available. I then watched the sales very carefully. (I actually have a computer that downloads the ranking every hour from Google.) Although I had seen huge jumps in my sales when I was interviewed on NPR (3 times) or had a book review in The Boston Globe, and a few other things, the massive e-mailing to my Web fans produced no discernible increase in sales. My conclusion: Web viewers don’t buy many hardcover books.”

Mr. Anderson stands by his work, and his use of Mr. Muller as an example. “To suggest that all Web viewers don’t buy books seems premature,” said Mr. Anderson in an interview with The Chronicle. He argued that the professor’s exposure on YouTube most likely helped the sales of his book, even if indirectly. For instance, the popularity of the videos may have made reviewers more interested in writing about the book.

“If he believes there’s no correlation, that’s interesting,” said Mr. Anderson. “We have done the same type of experiments and we conclude otherwise.”

“Every product is different and every person is different,” he added. “You’ve got to find your own way to monetize celebrity.” —Jeffrey R. Young

Posted on Thursday July 9, 2009 | Permalink |

Comments

And to prove that he doesn’t understand that correlation is not causation, Anderson asserts that he does see a correlation. But, of course, Muller does not deny a correlation, he points out that that does not provide evidence that one thing is causing the other. Arguments about the Web seem to me often to be made up of this sort of fallacious conflation of correlation and causation, along with “wishful thinking.”

— exile Jul 9, 03:58 PM #
web fans: 1000 emailed
web viewers: 200,000 total

i’m thinking marketing departments need to learn how to better target the latter group. more wishful thinking perhaps…

— production serf Jul 9, 05:44 PM #
See my post (the first one) on Anderson’s self-promotion in the previous posting of his inane proposition that free is the future of fortune: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3869/college-lectures-should-be-free-online-argues-wired-magazine-editor-in-new-book

Anderson’s thesis is 1995 Negropontean (being digital), an immensely flawed book as it fails to see how marketing would take advantage of programming.

By now, every journalist should know that hits on a Web site do not translate into sales, whether we’re talking about books or newsprint.

I’m astounded that an author like Anderson didn’t fact check his assertions about Richard Muller whose serious science seems tainted by the hoopla leaps in logic (i.e. more interactive exposure equals more sales).

That said, I send kudos to Jeffrey Young for challenging Anderson and providing his readers with first-class journalism rather than rehashed technology “news.”

— Michael Bugeja Jul 9, 05:44 PM #
Muller might be right and Anderson wrong on the specific issue of “causality,” but I think Muller suffers from a surprisingly common delusion among academics: “People publish my books because I’m brilliant.” Not because publishers are desperate to recover their costs, and because name recognition, trendiness, pedigree, and other factors are at work, but because . . . well, because he’s so smart that editors walk into his office and say things like, “Have any good ideas?”

Sorry, who is guilty of wishful thinking here?

— Stephen Ramsay Jul 9, 05:45 PM #
Actually, Muller accounts for the points about recouping costs and making a profit by noting that he had worked with the editor on 8 previous books. That suggests a proven track record in producing books that make money, and reflect well on the publisher. While Muller may suffer from the academic delusion that he is published because he’s brilliant (who doesn’t?), his track record with the publisher would seem to be the most salient reason this book is getting published.

— exile Jul 10, 02:51 AM #
It’s no small task to be published by Norton, I assure you; nor are editors there likely to be impressed with YouTube posts of Richard A. Muller’s lectures. They do recognize that he is a member of one of the best physics departments in the world, at Berkeley, with an exceptional vita that contains both scholarly and teaching awards, indicating he can convey core truths about complex topics. Those editors also know that mainstream media continues to be the best route for book sales as many have third-party agreements with sellers. National Public Radio, for instance, has such an agreement with Amazon. Dr. Muller’s book was featured in December on NPR’s “Science Fridays.” For those who would like to hear him, here is the link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97848779

— Michael Bugeja Jul 10, 07:20 AM #

Censorship in Bordeaux

2009-06-30T18:51:02-04:00

via e-flux:

Marlene Dumas, included in the exhibition,
with one of her "obscenities."
Photograph: Martin Godwin.

June 30, 2009

"Presumed Innocents", the trial: 10 years later

Bordeaux Judge Reopens Decade-Old Child-Porn Charge
Against Curators Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude
Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon

Indicted at the end of 2006, after six years of investigations, long period during which no element was produced that could have fed the prosecution (the specialized unit for minors and the rectorship gave a favourable opinion) and after the attorney general of Bordeaux called for a not guilty decision in march 2008 the trial judge Jean-Louis Crozier has just decided to refer before the magistrate's court Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon, for having, within the exhibition entitled "presumed innocent- contemporary art and childhood " organized 2000 in the CAPC contemporary museum of art in Bordeaux exposed "violent and pornographic art works "*.

With this decision—which, in an extremely unusual move, disregards the conclusions of a Parquet investigation—the entire national and international artistic and professional community, together with the cultural image of France, have come under attack and stand accused, offended.

For the first time in France, two museum directors and a curator are to be tried in a criminal court for exhibiting works of art that have already been shown throughout the world or put on view since the Bordeaux exhibition in art shows that have not elicited the least unfavorable reaction from the public. The thinking that went into preparing the incriminated exhibition, focused on a major subject of art history, was developed collectively and was shared by the relevant state oversight authorities.

This court case from an earlier century, fiercely, relentlessly prosecuted by a single judge in contempt of artistic creation and individuals' right to accede freely to all forms of art, is indicative of a dangerous obscurantist attitude. The trial will take place in Bordeaux under pressure from a local child protection association named La Mouette, in turn supported by an extremist press that has already been found guilty of libel against one of the accused.

How is it possible that what is considered viewable and acceptable everywhere else should not be so in Bordeaux? What will be put on trial in the Bordeaux magistrates' court a few months from now is the work and personal and professional conviction of three figures of the world of art and culture unanimously recognized for their commitment to that world. They have already received thousands of messages of support from all horizons.

This attempt to "criminalize" artists and other actors for their creative work, together with the cultural sites that diffuse that work, requires us to be extremely vigilant about censorship of this kind, whose perpetrators are ever ready to use noble causes such as child protection to authoritarian, liberticidal ends.

MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC, HENRY-CLAUDE COUSSEAU, STEPHANIE MOISDON

* including works by Christian Boltanski, Gary Gross, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elke Krystufek, Carsten Höller, Annette Messager, Ugo Rondinone…..

Closings (UES) 106

2009-06-29T08:49:18-04:00

Closings (UES) 106, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 173

2009-06-29T08:48:20-04:00

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 173, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 172

2009-06-29T08:47:58-04:00

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 172, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Last Chance: Tainted Love

2009-06-27T10:01:55-04:00

Great show, open today through Sunday. Don't forget to check out the installation in the alley by fierce pussy, pictured above and below.

via email:

Tainted Love, curated by Steven Lam & Virginia Solomon. Featuring: Luis Camnitzer, Jose Luis Cortes, fierce pussy, General Idea, Gran Fury, Matt Lipps, Catherine Lord, Charles Lum, Ivan Monforte, and Wu Ingrid Tsang.

La MaMa La Galleria
6 East 1st Street

Exhibition continues thru Sunday, June 28, 2009
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Sunday 1-6PM

Tainted Love was reviewed in The New York Times by Holland Cotter.
"This smart group exhibition, organized by Visual AIDS, which sponsors art shows that promote AIDS awareness and H.I.V.-prevention, is far more about bonds of affection than it is about fear of disease. Yet the curators, Steven Lam and Virginia Solomon, give equal time to queer art past and present, and there are surprisingly close correspondences between work done now and then, in the years when AIDS was more in the news and more central to gay identity." read more here

Directions:
La Galleria is at 6 E 1st Street, New York City, between Bowery & 2nd Avenue, (212) 505-2476
F, V to Second Avenue

Tainted Love is presented by Visual AIDS, New York’s premier non-profit organization working between art and AIDS. Visual AIDS utilizes contemporary art to promote the message that “AIDS IS NOT OVER” through exhibitions, publications and events, and collaborations with artists, museums, schools, and activist organizations. We provide support for visual artists living with HIV and maintain a visual record of their contributions. www.visualAIDS.org

Corban Walker: New Installation @ Pace

2009-06-27T10:00:46-04:00

via Pace Wildenstein site:

NEW YORK, June 17, 2009—PaceWildenstein is pleased to announce a new installation by Corban Walker at 534 West 25th Street, New York City from June 26 through July 31, 2009. The artist’s three new glass sculptures, the result of his recent experiments with the process of casting glass in rigid forms, will be on view in the East gallery.

Corban Walker gained recognition for his installations, sculptures, and drawings that relate to perceptions of scale and architectural constructs. Local, cultural, and specific philosophies of scale are fundamental to how he defines and develops his work, creating new means for viewers to interact and navigate their surroundings. The new glass pieces in Walker’s installation are the culmination of his recent experimentation with the difficult process of manipulating glass forms to create rigid edges. The artist began each project with the premise of making a hollow box and used three different work processes to achieve unique ends.

In 2008 Walker worked with master glass fabricators in a glass factory outside of Prague in the Czech Republic that specializes in Borosilicate glass. Walker blew into a rectilinear mold to create hollow glass rectangles that he stacked together, relying on gravity to hold the delicate yet resilient units in place without the use of adhesion. In addition to a grouping of these hollow-blown stacks, Untitled (10 x 4 Miter), 2009, a stack constructed from 40 square hollow glass tubes, will be on view. Each of the 40 individual units comprising the sculpture were created at a multi-international manufacturer based in Brno, Czech Republic from a specific glass plate form designed by Walker which was cut and mitered to make the rectangular units. At 47-1/8" x 22-3/4" x 28-3/8", the stack is within the scale of the artist’s own height of 4 feet. Untitled (Less 50º Sand) was conceived of at a residency at The Glass Museum in Tacoma, Washington in November of 2008. This 27-1/4" x 25" wall-relief is composed of 36 glass cubes cut at 50º angles and mounted on a painted black background. Walker explains:

The three different stacking arrangements of the pieces mark an intervention in the gallery space that is minimal and also theatrical, where the viewer becomes the fourth element in the installation. I am interested in the perception of scale and architecture; how we determine our surroundings whether in a domestic dwelling or a public environment. To me, a contradiction plays an essential part of this organization where glass objects occupy the space and yet present a visceral void in navigating the installation. I question the assessment of the rules of scale and measure that we seem to hold on to as the basis of our relationship between body and structure. This also applies to the material; glass always wants to be spherical and when enormous stress is applied to create rectilinear objects the glass becomes awkward; defying the norm.

From August through January 2010, Walker’s Wall 1 (2006-2007), a 3' x 12' x 10' aluminum and stainless steel sculpture, will be on view at LentSpace, a temporary park created by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at the convergence of Canal, Varick and Grand Streets in New York City. Work by Walker can also presently be seen at The American Irish Historical Society in New York, and from August 7–16, in the group exhibition Something Else at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, Rothe House, Ireland. This fall, The Golden Bough: Corban Walker will go on view at The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Art in Dublin (September 30, 2009–January 16, 2010).

Corban Walker (b. 1967, Dublin, Ireland) graduated with honors from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, with a degree in Fine Art Sculpture, in 1992. His first solo show was held in 1994 and since then, he has mounted numerous solo exhibitions and realized eight public commissions worldwide. Walker first exhibited at PaceWildenstein’s Greene Street gallery in the fall of 2000 and his work was included in the gallery’s Logical Conclusions exhibition (2004) alongside works by key artists from the 20th century who use objective systems to explore the complex and chaotic realms of the subjective. His 2007 exhibition at the 25th Street gallery, Corban Walker: Grid Stack, presented the artist’s foray into aluminum, steel, and industrial materials alongside his architecturally striking glass works. Corban Walker has lived and worked in New York since 2004.

Decoding Shane Hope

2009-06-25T10:17:23-04:00

Molecula Simianus En Balloonus Animalia Meet Nanotubular Lepidoptera, 2009

Shane Hope's solo show opens at Winkleman Gallery tomorrow, Fri, June 26, 2009:

Shane Hope
Your Mom Is Open Source

June 26 – August 1, 2009
Opening: Friday, June 26, 6-8 PM

637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
T: 212.643.3152
Summer Gallery Hours: Tue - Fri, 11-6 PM

more images and info @ Winkleman Gallery

Article via Rhizome.org:

Futurespeak:
Shane Hope's Keywords Defined

By Brian Droitcour on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 10:00 am.

Image: Shane Hope, Copylution, 2009

Shane Hope’s sprawling prints can’t be processed with one or two looks. They are built on thousands of tiny details, rather than around a single focal point, and as the eye travels across the picture field, it sees lines and pieces accumulating in recognizable bodies and then collapsing into chaos, or maybe an order that can’t be discerned by the naked eye. Hope calls them Molecular Modeling prints, or “Mol Mods,” and they are informed by his belief that “the molecule is the brushstroke of the future”—that nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale, will transform industry sometime soon. For now, Hope’s tools are coding languages Python and Perl. Because of the Mol Mods’ size he can only work on one screen-sized swath at a time, and because of their complexity, that is all that can be rendered even on Hope’s homemade desktop, which he proudly calls "faster than any factory-built Mac on the planet.”

“Your Mom Is Open Source,” an exhibition of Hope’s work at Winkelman Gallery that opens Friday, features Mol Mods as well as the series “Compile-A-Child,” imagined school assignments by artificial kids (only the latter are reproduced here, because the Mol Mods lose too much when shrunk to bloggable dimensions). Hope’s art is a visual analogy to hard science fiction, a genre where authors base their narratives on projected technologies rather than transposing contemporary dramas to a fantasized, futuristic stage. For viewers poorly versed in hard sci-fi, the conceptual platform of Hope’s work can be opaque; the announcement for “Your Mom Is Open Source” concludes with a mystifying list of keywords, both of his own coinage and borrowed from the fields of his interest. Hope agreed to discuss some of them here.

Image: Shane Hope, mehums are going, 2009

Singularitarianism
In an analogy to the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity, Vernor Vinge defined the Singularity as a theoretical future point which takes place during a period of accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence, an artificial brain more intelligent and creative than the human mind. Hard sci-fi authors, as well as professional forecasters, realized some two decades ago that nobody could realistically write about anything occurring past this Singularity. Far-flinging extrapolations could be flung no further. Simply put, they realized that we were inching toward inventing the next inventors and couldn't presume to imagine their imaginings. Futurological films and other envisionings became sort of mostly doomed to deploy dystopic dramatic drivel—a.k.a. disasterbation—because it's plainly more possible, however implausible, to picture a future having fallen into decay than having been sustainably built. An exponentially divergent Posthuman technocracy couldn't necessarily be pictured as a trompe-l'œil, for it was as likely that everything would be powderized into fuzzy storms of computational matter as it was that advanced augmentations would invisibly piggy-back upon what looked no different from the current everyday reality.

Transhumanism
A Transhumanist actively trend-spots technological trajectories with special emphasis upon feasible applications toward radical yet relatively safe human enhancements. A Transhuman proper accelerates artificial selection by early-adopting resultant enhancements, thereby willfully functioning as bio/non-bio sub-species set on transitioning into a Posthuman. A Posthuman is post, that is to say no longer strictly human... i.e. Homo evolutis. A vitally important take-away assumption of all this: Clearly, we go from growing ourselves to building ourselves.

Image: Shane Hope, To be Imortel, 2009

Nanofacture
Nanofacture, aka Molecular Manufacturing / Assembly, is atomic-scaled precise fabrication of, well, ultimately just about anything. Rapid dissemination of this capability could catapult our kind into post-scarcity, i.e. by printing printers. Basically, by developing nanofacturing, we teeter toward twisting objects (and life) into existence at ever smaller scales. The precision placement of atoms is poised to become the new pen, conflating or at the very least problematizing pictorial representation and objecthood.

Compile-A-Child
If you know where/how to look, you'll discover that some of the more awe-inspiring contemporary hard-sci-fi speculations regarding superintelligences involve not so much disasterbatory apocalypses nor runaway self-replicating molecular machines, but rather accounts of augmented children. Additionally, AI field experts now posit that the first artificial general intelligences will aptly be raised in online virtual worlds. And of course, there's Marvin Minsky's answer to whether AIs will inherit the earth: "Yes, but they will be our children." True, we routinely will all to our descendants. The more important latent point here to consider is that we ought to take great care in birthing/building these mind-children. AIs will arise in any case. The good news is that, in the wake of this understood eventuality, plenty of investigations now underway aim to proactively explore issues of machine morality in order to precautionarily engineer friendly AIs.

Image: Shane Hope, Substrate Colocation, 2009

Transubstrational
Not certain I've coined the term “transubstrational,” but I use it to concisely communicate the likelihood of living/thinking/existing in or across substrates. By substrate, I mean the material within or upon which our default, for now human, general intelligence system operates, i.e. biology. As we technologically augment ourselves, we'll ontologically wiggle our way out of the current default substrate of biology and into/across novel material structures. Most are warily familiar with the concept of uploading, that is, the transfer of a personality from the biological human brain to a suitable synthetic computing device in order to allow easier upgrading of intelligence, self-modification, and backup of the self. To counteract the reactionary yet somewhat justifiable concern over what could be considered an essentialization of our ridiculously complex human personalities, some amend that uploading will be gradual, almost unnoticeable, proceeding update by update, right up until we upgrade. Personally, I prefer to explain it in this willful way: We will think our way across.

Neda Soltan's family 'forced out of home' by Iranian authorities

2009-06-24T19:04:01-04:00

via The Guardian, first spotted on Nico Pitney's Iran Elections Live-Blogging (Huff Po):

Neda Soltan's family 'forced out of home' by Iranian authorities

Parents of young woman shot dead near protests are banned from mourning and funeral is cancelled, neighbours say

A correspondent in Tehran
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 June 2009 18.00 BST
Article history

The home of Neda Agha Soltan

The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world.

Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.

"We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat," a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.

The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan, describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring "thugs" to shoot her so he could make a documentary film.

Soltan was shot dead on Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators, turning her into a symbol of the Iranian protest movement. Barack Obama spoke of the "searing image" of Soltan's dying moments at his press conference yesterday.

Amid scenes of grief in the Soltan household with her father and mother screaming, neighbours not only from their building but from others in the area streamed out to protest at her death. But the police moved in quickly to quell any public displays of grief. They arrived as soon as they found out that a friend of Soltan had come to the family flat.

In accordance with Persian tradition, the family had put up a mourning announcement and attached a black banner to the building.

But the police took them down, refusing to allow the family to show any signs of mourning. The next day they were ordered to move out. Since then, neighbours have received suspicious calls warning them not to discuss her death with anyone and not to make any protest.

A tearful middle-aged woman who was an immediate neighbour said her family had not slept for days because of the oppressive presence of the Basij militia, out in force in the area harassing people since Soltan's death.

The area in front of Soltan's house was empty today. There was no sign of black cloths, banners or mourning. Secret police patrolled the street.

"We are trembling," one neighbour said. "We are still afraid. We haven't had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family. Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can't imagine how painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but the police didn't let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested some of them. Neda's family were not even given a quite moment to grieve."

Another man said many would have turned up to show their sympathy had it not been for the police.

"In Iran, when someone dies, neighbours visit the family and will not let them stay alone for weeks but Neda's family was forced to be alone, otherwise the whole of Iran would gather here," he said. "The government is terrible, they are even accusing pro-Mousavi people of killing Neda and have just written in their websites that Neda is a Basiji (government militia) martyr. That's ridiculous – if that's true why don't they let her family hold any funeral or ceremonies? Since the election, you are not able to trust one word from the government." A shopkeeper said he had often met Soltan, who used to come to his store.

"She was a kind, innocent girl. She treated me well and I appreciated her behaviour. I was surprised when I found out that she was killed by the riot police. I knew she was a student as she mentioned that she was going to university. She always had a nice peaceful smile and now she has been sacrificed for the government's vote-rigging in the presidential election."

Closings (Soho) 6

2009-06-24T09:20:03-04:00

Closings (Soho) 6, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 171

2009-06-24T09:17:20-04:00

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 171, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 170

2009-06-24T09:16:57-04:00

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 170, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

CULTURAL POLITICS 5:2 now out; ARTISTS' WEBSITE launched

2009-06-23T09:06:46-04:00

Sarah Trigg
Aman Setu, 2008, acrylic on panel, 35 × 40 inches.

I am pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 2, July 2009, which is a General Issue. The new and much improved Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website is now up, and is exclusively dedicated to presenting the projects of artist contributors. This issue presents recent work by Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Trigg.

Please distribute widely.

Joy Garnett

Arts Editor, Cultural Politics

Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org

Official website

Subscribe to the journal

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Cultural Politics

Volume 5, Issue 2

July 2009

The Haunted Nomos: Activist-Artists and the (Im)possible Politics of Memory in Transitional Argentina

Vikki Bell and Mario D Paolantonio on the role that contemporary visual art and activist-artists have played in transitional Argentina

The Fantasy of the Elite Force Aviator: On Dolls and Desire

Neal Curtis explores the relationship between mimesis and fantasy and the changing face of the military-industrial complex

Activism, Acceleration, and the Humanist Aporia: Indymedia Intensified in the Age of Neoliberalism

Ingrid Hoofd considers the humanist aporia at work in the Indymedia project and the techno-acceleration of neoliberalism’s speed-elitism

Daily Markings on the Face of the Earth

Brooklyn based US artist Sarah Trigg discusses and presents her most recent series of paintings: satellite photographs, missiles, politics, and nonlinear history revealed as the land, sea, and airscapes of a truly paranoid humanity

Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization

Soenke Zehle and Ned Rossiter consider the return of political ontology, the critique of representation, and the antagonistic conception of the political

Book Review

The Cultural Politics of Once Were Warriors

Jo Smith on Emiel Martens’ Once Were Warriors and the ‘war of interpretation’ surrounding Maori writer Alan Duff’s novel and the film adaptation of the book by Lee Tamahori.

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About Cultural Politics

“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition. In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky. It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.

Edited by

John Armitage, Northumbria University, UK
Ryan Bishop, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It investigates the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and interdisciplinary subject area.

Each issue publishes artwork by selected artists reflecting contemporary cultural and political issues.

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Joy Episalla, 'scarf dissolves' @ SENZA FRONTIERE Film Festival

2009-06-23T09:04:53-04:00

Joy Episalla: scarf dissolves (still).

scarf dissolves, by Joy Episalla, video loop on 4 monitors.
This work raises questions about how individuals overlap and merge — transforming time, gender and the body through gestures of touch, memory and their relationship to nature.

lo scialle si dissolve, video loop di Joy Episalla.
Quest’opera mette in evidenza come gli individui si sovrappongono e confluiscono - trasformando tempo, genere e corpo attraverso gesti, ricordi e rapporto con la natura.

JULY 1, 2, 3 2009
Time, each day: h 16.00 — h 21.30
opening: Wednesday July 1: h 16.00 — h 21.30

CASA DEL
CINEMA
Largo Marcello Mastroianni 1
www.casa del cinema.it
Tel: 06 808 8854

Schedule & Programming

Official Site

SENZA FRONTIERE mostra films capaci di scoprire quanto abbiamo in comune noi esseri umani. Il cinema ha l'opportunità di raccontare storie, che dissolvono le barriere sia fisiche che mentali.

SENZA FRONTIERE shows films that embrace a common humanity among people. Filmmakers expose powerful stories, which transcend mental and physical borders.