2012-04-13
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Transmission by Dan Holdsworth, via Architizer:
At first glance, British artist Dan Holdsworth’s work might depict any number of things: crumpled up paper napkins, a washed-out image from the surface of Mars, or even microscopic fractal patterns.
In fact, the images are 3D renderings of America’s most famous natural wonders. There’s the Grand Canyon, Mount Saint Helens, and the Great Salt Lake: by cloaking the models in a featureless white, Holdsworth shows us America’s “backyard” as a scaleless study in texture and detail.
Holdsworth worked from digital terrain models created by the United States Geological Survey Data to create the series, called Transmission: New Remote Earth Views.
There’s a lot more at the artist’s site, including more conventional in-landscape views. The series is being exhibited at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London until 19 May 2012.
2012-04-07
The Creators Project and the New Aesthetic
This week has seen an explosion of writing about James Bridle’s new-aesthetic project (if one may call it that), from Bruce Sterling’s essay, through calls to politics, references to art history, and riffs on music. Finally, today, there was a collection of responses from several artists on the Creators Project blog (as referenced here earlier).
I found that interesting, because when I visited the Creators Project show in San Francisco in the middle of March, I found it one of the biggest outbreaks of new-aesthetic I’ve seen in a while; probably since decode at the V&A in late 2009 (although Talk To Me definitely had its moments too). In particular, there were a number of works - Strata #4 by Quayola and Overscan by Sosolimited spring to mind - that seem to me to really sum to embody parts of the NA “thing”, whatever it is.
Strata #4 is a work that uses scans of Flemish classics in the collection of the Palais de Beaux Arts in France as a starting point for an animation based on polygonal deformations. It’s probably easier to watch the video, but it certainly ties in to the sort of low-res rendering some have connected with NA. Meanwhile, Overscan was easy to overlook, as it’s designed for a bar, not an exhibition space. It consists of five screens, one showing live TV, with the other four processing that data in different ways: showing visualisations based on word usage (from the closed captioning / subtitles), face detection, image manipulation, and so on. It’s a lovely piece that, like Strata #4, is easier to watch than describe.
That’s just two of the dozen or so projects that were on display, which (naturally) varied in quality, longevity, and impact, but which generally felt like some sort of now, if not some kind of future. Some of the friends I went with were annoyed that the event had been bundled with talks and music, but I think my regret was that this wasn’t an exhibition that ran for a couple of months in a museum (SFMOMA, or perhaps San Jose’s Museum of Art) so that there would be time for word of mouth to get people interested.
Perhaps the point of this is that the collection of new-aesthetic works and influences on Tumblr is a recognition that this stuff is already out there, and that if a curator (as in, someone actually employed by a museum, as opposed to the looser internet definition) decided to organise an exhibition at an established venue, the work needed would be out there. There’s already a movement- it just didn’t have a name.
2012-04-04
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Queen of Swords: Drones, from the Hexen 2.0 Tarot deck by Suzanne Treister:
HEXEN 2.0 looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society.
Hexen 2.0 is on show at the Science Museum, London, until 1 May 2012. (Thanks, Kevan.)
2012-03-26
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Margaret Calvert’s classic UK “children crossing” roadsign, from the Guardian’s gallery for the new exhibition, Celebrating in style: British Design at the V&A, London.
2012-02-14
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Forthcoming at SFMOMA, The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area.
(I’m looking forward to a device with iOS 5 so I can straighten photos.)
2011-05-11
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Byways, by Clay Lipsky, from the 1650 Gallery’s exhibition, On The Road.
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Will you still love me… by John Girt, from the 1650 Gallery’s exhibition, On The Road.
2011-02-14
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“A Natural History Museum employee poses as she looks at a taxidermy exhibit featuring two rabbits having intercourse during the press view” from photos of the ‘Sexual Nature’ exhibit in London, at the Natural History Museum until 2nd October. Photograph: Carl de Souza, AFP/Getty Images.
2011-02-04
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Collage by John Stezaker, part of a show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until the 18th of March.
Seen in Exhibitionist: The week’s art shows in pictures in The Guardian.
2010-12-07
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U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon. July 21, 1973
This photograph by Stephen Shore that is part of the series Uncommon Places is currently on view at the exhibition Der Rote Bulli in Düsseldorf. The image on the billboard could have been a painting by Ed Ruscha.
Instantly collected for my billboards tag.
