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Jehovah's Witnesses

2011-12-31T10:10:00.000-08:00

Rope Trick Fireball

2011-12-11T12:32:00.001-08:00

This nuclear detonation image was captured by a bank of Rapatronic cameras; each with an average exposure time of three millionths of a second. The image shows the growing fireball, taken about one millisecond after detonation.

There are two striking features about this picture - the spikes projecting from the bottom of the fireball, and the ghostly mottling of the fireball surface. The peculiar spikes are extensions of the fireball surface along ropes or cables that stretch from the shot cab (the housing for the test device at the top of the tower) to the ground. This novel phenomenon was named a "rope trick" by Dr. John Malik who investigated it.

The cause of the "rope trick" is the absorption of thermal radiation from the fireball by the rope. The fireball is still extremely hot (surface temperature around 20,000 degrees K at this point, some three and a half times hotter than the surface of the sun; at the center it may be more than ten times hotter) and radiates a tremendous amount of energy as visible light (intensity over 100 times greater than the sun) to which air is (surprise!) completely transparent. The rope is not transparent however, and the section of rope extending from the fireball surface gets rapidly heated to very high temperatures. The luminous vaporized rope rapidly expands and forms a spike-shaped extension of the fireball. Malik observed that if the rope was painted black spike formation was enhanced, and if it was painted with reflective paint or wrapped in aluminum foil no spikes were observed.

Cause of the surface mottling. At this point in the explosion, a true hydrodynamic shock front has just formed. Prior to this moment the growth of the fireball was due to radiative transport, i.e. thermal x-rays outran the expanding bomb debris. Now however the fireball expansion is caused by the shock front driven by hydrodynamic pressure (as in a conventional explosion, only far more intense). The glowing surface of the fireball is due to shock compression heating of the air. This means that the fireball is now growing far more slowly than before. The bomb (and shot cab) vapors were initially accelerated to very high velocities (several tens of kilometers/sec) and clumps of this material are now splashing against the back of the shock front in an irregular pattern (due to initial variations in mass distribution around the bomb core), creating the curious mottled appearance.

2011-12-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

2011-11-23T10:31:00.001-08:00

High resolution scan of Albert Einstein's brain

2011-11-16T11:18:00.001-08:00

+XZL

2011-09-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

2011-09-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Free Doom

2011-09-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

Uncontaminated Memories

2011-09-01T14:19:00.000-07:00

"...a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around a computer and had to add at the least 20 MB of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me because I couldn't remember a thing that day and then it became blindingly obvious all the memory that everybody keeps adding to computers comes from people. Every time somebody adds memory to a machine, thousands of people forget everything they knew."

- from Andre Codrescu 101 Damnations

Radiolab "Memory and Forgetting" (LINK)

x^8

2011-08-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

X to the 8th Power....fucking = aspirations of multiplication...aspirations of exponential genetic infinity

8bit = byte...byte = basic unit

The Family Tree and Disasters of War

2011-08-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

OWL DUST

2011-07-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

O

2011-07-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

000OO0Oo 0o00O.

The most distant known object in the observable universe

2011-07-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

A deep optical image of the afterglow of the gamma-ray burst GRB 090429B...The light from this object has been traveling towards us for about 13.2 billion years, or 96% of the age of the universe...since the universe is not static but expanding, today this object is about thirty billion light-years away

provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

oO-V

2011-07-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

The Wall vs Wizard of Oz

2011-07-09T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Dark Side of Oz from Bryan Pugh on Vimeo.

THE TRAP

2011-07-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

The Trap: What Happened To Our Dream of Freedom
(2007) by producer, Adam Curtis.
The series consists of three one-hour programs which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, "how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom.

Part 1 of 3: F*CK You Buddy

Part 2 of 3: The Lonely Robot

Part 3 of 3: We Will Force You To Be Free

DELANDA ON DELEUZE

2011-06-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

HOW ALGORITHMS SHAPE OUR WORLD

2011-06-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

2011-06-18T08:29:00.000-07:00

The Atrocity Exhibition (JG Ballard and the Motorcar) [1970]
Duration: 17 minutes

Directed by Harely Cokliss

Features JG Ballard talking about some of the ideas which would coalesce into his novel Crash, published in 1973. Intercut with footage of test motor crashes and Ballard himself are semi-dramatised scenes with actress Gabrielle Drake. Remarkably effective and disturbing.

My Spinal Cord Traversed by the Axis of the Planet

2011-04-22T05:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.headgallery.org/spinal_spinal.html

Head Gallery invites you to My Spinal Cord Traversed by the Axis of the Planet, an exhibition that "exists" as a stream of indeterminate white-code, punctuated by a series of contingent meaning-units (postulated artworks), moving through the directionless plenum and time-bends against which orbital space shores up. It accelerates in an abyssal "vertical" plunge, masked as an effort to trace the abstract lineaments of a post-solar gravitational vacuum. It's total illusory narrativizing or phantasmic integument-production as refusal to accept the coming meltdown, absolute material dissolution. The end of the mesh, networkscapes, Spirit, objects, Real. An ultimate context of no-context. The white-code speeds through deep space in a mock mission of alien contact as parody of the futile galactic transversality wish-work of uploaded and deep-stored consciousness. Like the white-code, emancipated from the gravitational slavery of the terrestrial, uploaded and catapulted consciousness as survival mechanism is left to spin in the vortex of its own unimaginative existence as solution to anything. A mixture of self-generated binary couplets, DNA string sequencing, ancient Latin, Koranic braille, cthulhic runes, pre-dessiac hieroglyph, and Zoroastrian symbols, the white-code and the meaning-units it pulls along are mathematics breaking down in the dissipative zoom of matter, "measured" by a better instrument than the metric regimes of biomass prejudice. The Axis of the Planet Traversed by the Inviolable Linearity of the Dissipative Drive of Matter and Energy.

18 April to 11 June

Ray Brassier, Eileen Joy, Dean Kenning, Rachel Kushner, Patricia MacCormack, Nicola Masciandaro, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Nina Power, Hillary Raphael and Evan Calder Williams.

head gallery
165 e. broadway
new york,
NY 34887
+212 477 5006
info@headgallery.org

A History of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology

2011-03-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

A History of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology

Graham Harman lecture

OOO and Speculative Realism

2011-03-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Ecology without Nature: OOO and Speculative Realism

Timothy Morton lecture recorded at Rice University

Hyperobjects 2.0

2011-03-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

Ecology without Nature: Hyperobjects 2.0

Timothy Morton lecture recorded at Loyola University

NICK LAND

2011-03-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

organisation is suppression
wired UK #3.02, 02.97

According to Dr. Nick Land, lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick (a title that he hates), pretty much everything the Western tradition has come up with in the way of thinking about itself and the world around it is not only wrong but bad. Using the work of French writers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a jumping off point, Land substitutes a vision of a world of flux forever constructing and reconstructing itself via the operations of countless "machinic processes" for the models supplied by the linear, rationalist thought of the classical, modernist and postmodernist traditions. He draws parallels between the processes of late twentieth century capitalism, fascism, and schizophrenia, and strongly resists attempts to categorise his work, ridiculing the notion that there is even such a thing as "philosophy". He has no time for the academic consensus that you have to produce a turgid tome every two years to prove that you are "serious". At present, his favoured medium is multimedia performance, and he works closely with arts collective Orphan Drift.

James Flint: Why is it that much of the content on the Internet, this supposedly amazingly democratic, anarchic forum, is becoming dull and corporate and organised?

Nick Land: Your question suggests that there's some pre-existing social pool of liberatory, revolutionary, emancipatory creative potential that could be expected to spontaneously express itself as soon as it had an opportunity to do so. But there is no such intrinsic power of innovation latent in the human organism that's just waiting to bounce out onto the web. So the question really is what are the assemblages that are emerging? And correspondingly to what extent are distributed systems becoming operative as such?

JF: So how do systems which are initially freeform and distributed give way to centralised power structures?

NL: You have to understand that organisation involves subordinating low level units to some higher level functional program. In the most extreme cases, like in biological organisms, every cell is defunctionalised, turned off, except for that one specialised function that it is allocated by the organic totality. And hence the preponderant part of its potential is deactivated in the interests of some higher level unity. That's why the more organised things get, the less interesting their behaviour becomes - "interesting" simply meaning here how freely they explore a range of possible behaviours, or how "nomadic" they are.

JF: I take it from that that you are not as keen on the idea of "self organsiation" as some thinkers.

NL: Organisation is suppression. It's more accurate to say that systems which avoid self-organisation whilst maintaining trajectories of productive innovation end up parasitically inhabited by organisms of all kinds, whether those organism are biological organisms, corporations or state systems. The history of life on this planet right through to Microsoft is of the successive suppression of distributed, innovated systems.

JF: Can you give me an example?

NL: Well, first of all one has autocatalytic chemical systems that are subject to code control by RNA. When RNA begins to complicate enough to start exhibiting various kinds of lateral interference and experimental deviations, it becomes overcoded by DNA. The absolute crucial event in the whole history of the planet is the point at which the earth's bacterial life system - which is very loosely code controlled, comparatively - is subjected to exterminatory gassing by oxygen-emitting, massively highly structured securo-maniac metazoan organisms. Many of the bacteria disappear except insofar as they are captured as productive subcomponents of highly organised, nucleated, concentrational systems which are now what dominate all life on the planet and have done for five hundred million years.

JF: So how would you interpret the classical picture of evolution as a tree-like structure?

NL: The bacterial net is successively suppressed by levels of organisation, tiers of control that have a tree-like structure. But that tree-like structure is not at all inherent, it's actually produced by organisation. It's incredibly similar to the relation between corporations and markets, in the sense that markets are potentially open ended, distributed transaction systems which are subjected to regularisation, hierarchical structuralisation, specialisation and concentration by the corporate structures that superimpose themselves upon them.

JF: Might the widespread use of computers and the net challenge these structures?

NL: The thing about the potentialities of massively distributed computation capacity is that they disperse productive potential. And there's a certain sense in which the personal computer introduces a fundamental break in the traditional structure of investment by being simultaneously a piece of consumer electronics and a piece of productive apparatus. But although this is the case, the old structures are being artificially maintained.

JF: How?

NL: Buying a personal computer is treated as productive investment if it is done by a corporate entity and as a piece of personal consumption if it is done by dis-integrated [sic] consumers. And presumably this kind of trompe d'oeil is getting results, because the intersection between software, broadcast media and telecommunications is at the moment in an absolute orgiastic state of capital concentration. And clearly the key actors in this sector think that their strategies are based upon some viable avenue of continued advantage - a continuation of the modernist situation of economies of scale, if you like. Their picture is clearly not one of disintegration into small scale horizontal agents.

JF: But can't the net itself help us overcome these illusions, through increasingly universal access to knowledge and communication?

NL: Certainly the great potential in the technical infrastructure of the net is the telecoms base rather than the broadcasting base. This is not a very original thought, but nevertheless it seems of crucial importance. Capitalist and state organisations have an absolutely immense investment in disabling the telecoms dynamics of the forthcoming digital media system. But that doesn't mean that much has yet been done that is particularly exciting with this telecoms infrastructure. The more of it the better, the more that you have a multi-switched high bandwidth communications oriented digital system rather than a one to many broadcast oriented, media-production-media-consumption oriented system, the more chance there is of actually eliciting innovative behaviour out of innovative systems. But I'd be very cynical with regard to the extent to which we have seen any of that yet.

CENTURY OF THE SELF: HAPPINESS MACHINES AND THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

2011-03-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

MURK FLUID

2011-03-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Character Development:

2010-12-24T13:05:00.000-08:00

Brody Condon's Level5 and the Avant-LARP of Becoming Self written by Jennifer Krasinski

East of Borneo

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
—Joan Didion, The White Album 1

excerpt:

Condon has come to think of LARPs as weekend-long social experiments—opportunities to explore alternative cultural situations and/or political structures—and understands the games as abridged versions of the communes his parents and their generation tried to establish and failed. “They believed too much,” he says of the baby boomers’ inability to understand the true potential of the communal experience. “I’m not sure which one is more radical—real or temporary communes—but I know this one has more potential at least. You can immerse yourself within a temporary commune, but you don’t have to believe in it. The other ones are limited by reality in a way.”

When Condon decided last year that he wanted to investigate Erhard Seminars Training and other large group awareness trainings as the subject of a performance, he chose to build the piece using the tools and game mechanics developed by the LARP community. In his own words:

With a [game] structure in place to reenact a self-actualization seminar, I realized that it might be more interesting—or possibly more critical—to have the separation between this immersion and the seminar structure so that you could look at the thing critically. And it just seemed more twisted in a way—completely ridiculous—to go through a seminar that’s all about losing your games—getting to the core of your being, shedding the layers of self—via an artificial layer of self, via character.
Therefore, rather than reenactment or traditional theatrical production, Condon’s piece would be a participatory performance in which players would be invited to create a character, and then take that character through the process of self-actualization. Within this hall of mirrors—one which would invariably reflect and refract the selves of both character and player—Condon hoped that he and the participants would not only arrive at a more thorough understanding (i.e., an experiential knowledge) of what a self-actualization weekend was—how it worked and what it did to the people of his parents’ generation—but also gain some kind of insight into the value and function of self-created fictions.

Condon titled the piece Level5, and its performance took place the first weekend of September at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

THE POETICS

2010-09-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Poetics (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw & Tony Oursler)
Remixes of Recordings (1977-1983)

JOURNALISM IN THE AGE OF DATA

2010-09-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

Journalism in the Age of Data from geoff mcghee on Vimeo.

THE GLASS DELUSION

2010-09-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

The Glass Delusion at The National Glass Centre Curated by Grainne Sweeney and Alessandra Pace

'The Glass Delusion’ was the name given in the late Middle Ages and Baroque times to a form of depression. The syndrome evokes a psychological separation between reality and imagination. Sufferers were obsessive, compulsive, driven by irrational fears and envisioned themselves to be made of glass, hence delicate and vulnerable to scrutiny. More than any other material glass lends itself to speculations: as a transparent membrane it separates and connects, magnifies yet shrinks, reflects and deforms; it is a barrier, yet allows light to pass through it, it can be delicate as well as deadly and its attributes are appropriated in many symbolic ways: the Glass Brain and the Glass Man; mirror image, alter ego, Doppelganger, and split personality all come to mind. It is this duality, the ability to combine opposites, that is the inspiration for this exhibition of contemporary art, artefacts and scientific objects that tell the story of human attempts to reconcile the physical and mental worlds.

above image:
Alan Bennett Klein Bottles Lampworked glass

Michelangelo Pistoletto
A Cubic Metre of Infinity (Minus Objects), 1966
Inward facing mirrors tied together with a cord to form a sealed box

Beryl Sokoloff
My Mirrored Hope, 1962
17' 16mm film: Clarence Schmidt (1897 – 1978) was a plasterer by trade and a movie set builder for the silent film studios of the 1930s. In 1931 he inherited land on a mountainside in upstate Woodstock, N.Y. and Schmidt and his wife relocated. In Woodstock he worked as a handyman and began building a massive house/labyrinth that would become his life's work. Over the years it grew into a huge assemblage of wooden window frames, mirrors, walkways, bedsteads and other found objects. By the time it burned to the ground, in 1968, it was a monument of outsider art — 30 rooms spread over seven stories and topped by a garden.

DAVID MANN

2010-09-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

DAVID MANN (1940 - 2004)

GENERIC OBJECTS

2010-09-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

Generic Objects by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

SYNTH BRITANNIA

2010-06-06T07:58:00.001-07:00

Synth Britannia A documentary following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesizer from the experimental fringes to the center of the pop stage.

THE UNDERWATER FORESTS OF KAZAKHSTAN

2010-04-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

Allen Ruppersberg

2010-04-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

(excerpt from Greene Naftali press release) A foundational artist of West Coast conceptualism, Ruppersberg’s work has consistently engaged with language, its slippage between mediums, and its situation amidst the familiarities of pop culture.

Ruppersberg often looks back through the records of preceding generations, as well as his own personal history, for material to reanimate. For his new installation work titled Big Trouble, Ruppersberg has revisited a comic strip he used for a mail-art piece in 1969. It recounts the character Scrooge’s competition with a rich potentate in a show of one-upsmanship for the grandest reputation in Duckburg. In the context of early Conceptualism and the eradication of the art object, Ruppersberg first sent this cartoon anonymously to a list of Los Angeles art world contacts under the acronym “SPPA” (Society for the Prevention and Preservation of Art). Now literally reviving the story, Ruppersberg portrays the contemporary moment’s increasingly complex relationship to materiality. Selecting key objects (mostly depictions of monumental sculptures) from the comic, the artist has cut them out, and incrementally enlarged them as standees in the gallery space. Also reprinting the entirety of the cartoon, he has hung the pages along the walls as a legible story, with empty holes denoting where these figures have jumped out into the room. So transforming the gallery space into a comical realm, turning a perhaps too-familiar fiction into a physical reality, and displaying what is left behind, Ruppersberg again turns printed matter into social substance.

Following its presentation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Ruppersberg will stage the New York debut of The Never-Ending Book Part Two/Art and Therefore Ourselves. The piece consists of an arrangement of brightly colored armatures (modeled from theatrical stage designs of the 1940’s), lightboxes, and cardboard boxes full of copies taken from the artist’s archive. The color copies—of found photographs, sheet music, record labels and depression-era recipes—also cover the gallery wall, serving both as a backdrop and an index of all the elements included in the “book”. W. B. Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” is reprinted here as well, echoing “old themes” and “allegorical dreams.”

Extending the journey of these documents from private possessions to anonymous information, visitors are encouraged to sift through them and keep their own selections. The records on view are for sale, both at a dollar value and for a barter agreement of at least 50 pre-1970 photographs. Ruppersberg so uses an idea of storage and the accessible model of the library as his platform for making present what seems to have passed away. With a “Wave Goodbye to Grandma” and a poetic indexicality, the artist’s work re-members our collective past.

Exhibition images: Green Naftali via Contemporary Art Daily

Exhibition page: You and me or the art of give and take at The Santa Monica Museum of Art

Project: The new five foot shelf at the Dia Art Foundation

Essay: Afterall (Certain of his books by Susan Morgan)

CARNIVOROUS PIANOS, KILLER LAMPSHADES AND FRUIT MELODIES

2010-03-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

Trailer

THE TRANSMEDIA EXPLORATIONS OF GENESIS P-ORRIDGE

2010-03-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

Link to Synesthesia: Genesis P-Orridge / Tony Ousler

Soft Focus (part 1 of 4)

Soft Focus (part 2 of 4)

Soft Focus (part 3 of 4)

Soft Focus (part 4 of 4)

Throbbing Gristle - Discipline

AGENT COOPER'S DREAM (BACKWARD THEN FORWARD)

2010-03-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Theory of Reverse Speech and Speech Complementarity:

(1) Human speech has two disctinctive yet complementary functions and modes. The Overt mode is spoken forwards and is primarily under conscious control. The Covert mode is spoken backward and is not under conscious control. The backward mode of speech occurs simultaneously with the forward mode and is a reversal of the forward speech sounds.

(2) These two modes of speech, forward and backward, are dependent upon each other and form an integral part of human communication. One mode cannot be fully understood without the other mode. In the dynamics of interpersonal communication, both modes of speech combined communicate the total psyche of the person, conscious as well as unconscious.

(3) Covert speech develops before overt speech. Children speak backwards before they do forwards. Then, as forward speech commences, the two modes of speech gradually combine into one, forming an overall bi-level communication process.

BACKWARD

FORWARD

A DIFFERENT KIND OF MIST

2010-02-05T22:44:00.000-08:00

THE GAIN OR LOSS OF MASS

2010-02-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

KARIN DREIJER ANDERSSON

2010-01-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

THIS MAN

2009-11-02T13:17:00.001-08:00

In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.

That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist's desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.

The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.

From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world: Los Angeles, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Tehran, Beijing, Rome, Barcelona, Stockholm, Paris, New Dehli, Moskow etc.

At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man of the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams.

READ TESTIMONIAL AND THEORIES OF 'THIS MAN'

JOHN MILLER AT KUNSTHALLE ZURICH

2009-10-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

VIEW

John Miller (website)
Kunsthalle Zurich

Fever Ray at The Music Box, LA

2009-10-08T17:06:00.001-07:00

2009-10-08T17:04:00.000-07:00

THE COMMODITY AS A COUNTRY MUSIC THEME

2009-09-13T09:35:00.001-07:00

John Miller Essay:

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5

Lyrics to song written by W. Kemp and sung by Johnny Cash LINK FOR MP3 CLIP

Well I left Kentucky back in '49
And I went to Detroit workin' on assembly line
The first year they had me puttin' wheels on a Cadillac.
Every day I'd watch those beauties roll by,
And sometimes I'd hang my head and cry,
'Cause I always wanted one that was long and black.

One day I devised myself a plan,
That should be the envy of most any man;
I'd sneak it out of there in a lunch box in my hand.
Now gettin' caught meant gettin' fired,
But I figured I'd have it all by the time I retired.
I'd have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.

Chorus:

I'd get it one piece at a time,
And it didn't cost me a dime.
You'll know it's me when I come through your town.
I'm gonna drive around in style.
I'm gonna drive everybody wild,
'Cause I'll have the only on there is around.

The song goes on to describe how various parts were filched, how parts from different years had to be modified in order to fit and finally, the absurdity of the completed project:

So we drove uptown to get us some tags,
And headed right down to the main drag,
I could hear everybody laughin' for miles around.
But up there at the court house they didn't laugh,
'Cause to type it up took the whole staff,
And when thy got through, the title weighed sixty pounds.

It closes with a CB dialogue wherein the driver is asked to identify the vehicle:

Uh, what model is it?
Well, it is a '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '54, '55, '56, '57, '58, '59 automobile.
It's a '60, '61, '62, '63, '64, '65, '66, '67, '68, '69, '70 automobile...(fade out)

SURFING FLORIDA: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY

2009-08-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

above: Reef Road (West Palm Beach) Christmas Swell 1989. Photo: Tony Arruzo

SURFING FLORIDA: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY is an exhibition and book project that documents the history of Florida surfing as experienced and impacted by its sons and daughters within the state and beyond. The project is organized by the University Galleries at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.

Above: Daytona Beach, 1930s. This early photo represents the sport’s origins in Florida and includes waveriders Dudley and Bill Whitman, considered to be the State’s first surfers. photo: The Gauldin Reed Archive

LINK TO SURFLINE ARTICLE

THE YOUNG ALCHEMIST'S HANDBOOK

2009-08-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

ALEXANDRE DE CUNHA

2009-08-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

Alexandre da Cunha recycles discarded objects and defunct consumer items—everything from old furniture to beach towels and car wheel hubs—to create his sculptures and installations. These cheap, throwaway materials often take on a functional appearance. In a sense, Da Cunha improvises on the concept of the readymade by reusing everyday objects in ways that reflect on those objects' specific histories and aesthetics. The artist is concerned with issues of formalism, such as shape, technique, and materiality, but his practice also has an essential playfulness and humor. Moreover, it expresses a wider concern with the human condition, in particular a critique of the distribution of wealth in his native Brazil.

Born in 1969 in Rio de Janeiro, da Cunha now lives and works in London.

*excerpt from Interview with Jens Hoffman and Alexandre de Cunha from CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco
LINK TO WHOLE INTERVIEW

Future egg carton, cement

Untitled rugs and copper pipe

Skateboarderistismatronics (fan)) 2004 skateboards and mixed media

Territory (Sunflower Oil) 2007 metal tins, concrete, copper pipes, parasol and fittings

Busts (I-V) 2008 mops, dyed wool, concrete

2009-08-02T12:26:00.001-07:00

Terracota Ebony (2006) rubber toilet plunger heads

Passengers (2007) brass tubing, found preprinted industrial cloths

Public Sculpture (2008) sliced concrete tube and foam

They really work for me (2000) clothes, tape, brooms

POOR MATERIALS WITH RICH MEANING
ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA IN CONVERSATION WITH JENS HOFFMAN

Jens Hoffmann (JH): How do you choose the objects that you alter?

Alexandre da Cunha (AC): I am attracted to them either because of what they signify in society or because of their specific forms, colors, and materials. I decontextualize them, modify them, and create artworks that often mimic modernist sculptures. Yet, when one looks more carefully, these modernist forms turn out to originate in everyday life. Often they are inexpensive or perhaps defunct consumer items.

JH: What do you think of the idea of your works as contemporary reinterpretations of Arte Povera?

AC: Obviously Arte Povera was very specific to the Italian context in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I think some of my works could be regarded along similar lines. In the end it is all much less complicated, though. I started using "poor" materials when I was studying art simply because I could not afford to buy anything expensive. Later I realized that my choice was not based on how much money I could invest in my process, but on the challenge of making viewers appreciate something that is made of materials whose monetary value is negligible. It is neither the technique nor the beauty of the material itself that is special, seductive, or valuable for me. It is the challenge of turning something "poor" into something rich in meaning.

JH: Let us talk about some of your works. Maybe you can speak a little bit about the series of sculptures that incorporate old skateboards and look like large ceiling fans?

AC: Those pieces are made of found skateboards, household utensils, and fittings. Their titles are based on either the brand names of the boards or writing that had been added to them. One I made in 2006 is titled Greasy, which was written under the board. The idea of making a ceiling fan also relates to tropical places such as Brazil, my home country, where such fans are common household objects. These works offer an approach to appropriation that goes beyond the plain use of the object itself. The found boards have scratches and stickers that tell a story, a sort of personal narrative of the former user, and they refer to a lifestyle that is very familiar to many but in this case not something I can very much relate to. They are abandoned trophies or, to me, fragments of found secrets that have been exposed. They are also about forcing together objects that belong to completely different spheres of culture.

JH: The first work of yours that I saw was They Really Work for Me (2001) at the 50th Venice Biennale. I liked the idea of artworks as crutches very much. I also remember that it was unclear whether they were intended to be used.

AC: That work was part of a series of sculptures that looked like homemade crutches. I continued doing them until about 2003. They are made of isolated volumes of used, soft clothing and cleaning materials such as sponges that form padded elements, which are fixed with adhesive tape to broomsticks of various colors and sizes. Upside down, they suggest odd, improvised orthopedic devices.

JH: Sometimes you make direct references to well-known artworks such as the stripe paintings of Daniel Buren or the columns of Constantin Brancusi, two icons of twentieth-century art. Can you elaborate on this?

AC: The first work in my ongoing series titled Deck Paintings (begun 2005) started in London, where I saw canvas deck chairs with stripes of the same width and colors as in some of Buren's paintings. All I did was take the canvas off the chairs and put it onto stretchers. The column series you mention is titled Platinum, also begun in 2005. Those pieces are made of mass-produced metal bowls and ice buckets, arranged to mimic modernist sculpture. I was interested in the fact that Buren and Brancusi often worked in series, following a strict set of rules. I think my pieces talk about the playfulness that might be hidden behind the severe look of those historic, iconic works. I also wanted to explore questions of authenticity, authorship, and uniqueness. Those issues run through all of my work.

JH: Terracotta Ebony (2006) is also an interesting piece to talk about. It is another sculptural work that, upon first glance, looks like a minimalist sculpture.

AC: Terracotta Ebony is also part of a series, which I made by combining the heads of different-colored toilet plungers to form abstract geometric sculptures. I was intrigued by the colors and shapes of the plunger heads, but also by the metaphor of art as a plunger of some sort.

JH: Your practice seems to combine a Latin American artistic sensibility, particularly with respect to your alteration of found objects, with a Neo-Formalist style that has emerged specifically in Europe over the last five years. Would you say that this observation is accurate?

AC: Yes, you are definitely touching on the right issues. While form is certainly important to me because I have lived in Europe for a number of years now and have seen a revival of that sort of work, my interest in Neo-Formalism also relates to my formation as an artist in Brazil, where Modernism played a crucial role in the development of the arts—not only visual art but also architecture and literature, for example. This specifically Brazilian modernist legacy has only recently been disseminated internationally, but in Brazil it has always been the core of the education of young artists. The Neo-Concrete movement, with its aim to revitalize the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, has been very important for me. Yet unlike the Neo-Concrete artists in the 1960s and 1970s, I think that many artists of my generation who are concerned with the legacy of Modernism are revisiting it with a new approach that is based more on shapes than slogans and ideologies. It is maybe a more introverted form of artistic practice, which has at its center a genuine interest in techniques and materiality—something that would have seemed rather reactionary only a few years ago but now seems pertinent. What I found in Europe and specifically in London, where I live now, is a similar interest in modernist history among artists of my generation. It is a return to a more classic notion of Formalism, and it certainly has had an influence on me.

JH: I would add, though, that in contrast to pure Formalism, context plays an important role in your case. You have a very specific way of appropriating found objects.

AC: This is correct, but let me first explain my relationship to Brazil, as I think it is relevant to your question. I have lived in London now for quite some time, and its distance from Brazil and my experiences when I go back there have made me realize a lot of things about my culture and my home country that I was not aware of before. I have begun to understand certain aspects that for the most part I simply rejected or did not even notice when I was living there.

JH: What you say is interesting, considering the fact that the gesture of the readymade is something truly European.

AC: In Brazil, as you know, the claim that we have formed parts of our cultural identity by cannibalizing other cultures is very significant. The idea of the found object, which is in itself a cannibalization, might be one of those things we have appropriated in this way. What is important to note, though, and this also relates to the idea of cannibalization, is that everything we take in is digested in a very specifically Brazilian way. I am altering most of the objects I use, so they are not readymades in the classic Duchampian sense. They are for the most part fairly universal, but they also carry the specific context of where they come from—a particular aesthetics and history. Obviously many of them are things I have seen and observed in Brazil. Maybe it is a kind of tropicalization of the concept of the readymade. I also notice how people in Brazil improvise objects in everyday life, and some of my sculptures carry that improvised quality into the gallery space. I am talking about objects that are supposed to be used for a specific purpose, but once they cannot fulfill that original function any more, people use them for other things.

JH: I know you made a piece about repurposing old car tires.

AC: The Glaze works (2005) are made of car wheels turned inside out after being cut, to make the shape of a planter. They are very common in suburban areas in Latin America, where people use them as decorative and utilitarian pots for plants. I wanted to highlight the existence of the object, applying a glossy, elaborate, painted surface with modernist echoes and then bringing it into the aura of a gallery space. The titles—for example Vegas, Savanna, Capri, or Monterey—are the names of the colors I used, and they also refer to a change of status, where the paint and its name have the power to lead you to another, perhaps imaginary, place.

JH: You work a lot in series. Has this something to do with the fact that most of your pieces are based on mass-produced objects?

AC: That might be part of it, but to be honest I never know if a first piece might originate a series or not. I only find that out when I get close to the end of making it. There are never too many works in the same series, either; I like to think of them as small families with interrelated dynamics. The other aspect of working in series has to do with realizing that there are different possibilities with respect to the physical manifestation of a work. So if I make three, four, or five variations of the same piece, each one expresses a different aspect of the overall idea.

JH: Recently your works have become more political and critical. I am thinking for example about the Velour series of 2006.

AC: Those works are made of beach towels, household materials such as curtain rods, metal fittings, ribbons, and adhesive tape to form pieces that ultimately look like flags. They play with the idea of identity, and the stereotypical iconography of tropical and exotic countries. I see them as a response to how cultures can be misunderstood and misrepresented—using an image of a tiger or a girl in a bikini, for example, as if it was an official national symbol. But I do not have the ambition to contextualize my work in a political discourse that focuses on social or cultural differences. I can raise issues through my practice that might provoke someone to have a new perception of the world, or engage in a momentary state of contemplation, and I am happy with just that. When I am transforming a toilet plunger into what looks like a rare terra-cotta pot, I am trying to deal with subjects related to status and class, the conflict between opposing forces, but there are many other meanings as well. There might be a social nuance in the context of the piece, but it is essentially about belief, illusion, and frustration, which are universal human feelings unrelated to any particular social condition.

JH: What are you planning to present in your exhibition at the Wattis Institute?

AC: Currently I am working on a series using preprinted industrial and found materials. The printed items range from beach towels to flags to banners. Some of them are intended to be used as bedsheets, curtains, or domestic partitions. The content of the printed images is often very loaded. Some of them are iconics such as Bob Marley or Mahatma Gandhi or the rainbow flag, but incorporated into a pattern, as if the ideological content is secondary to a mood or trend. I am interested in the slightly neglectful use of those images and the possible confusion among identity, consumerism, and taste. For San Francisco I am making a piece that incorporates versions of the rainbow flag, from Buddhism or Judaism, for instance, where the rainbow serves as a metaphor for inclusion, diversity, freedom, and hope.

ECHO LOCATIONS

2009-07-03T15:10:00.001-07:00

LEARNING FROM LITTLE HAITI
BY GEAN MORENO AND ERNESTO OROZA
E-Flux Journal

LINK TO READ ESSAY

FORDLANDIA: THE RISE AND FALL OF HENRY FORD'S FORGOTTEN JUNGLE CITY

2009-07-03T12:15:00.001-07:00

LAURA

2009-06-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

4 PRESS PLAY

FEVER RAY

2009-05-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

WHEN I GROW UP

THE LAST CONTINENT TO BE DISCOVERED IS TIME

2009-04-09T09:33:00.000-07:00

THE BLUR BUILDING

2009-04-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

BACH AND THE MUSIC ANIMATION MACHINE

2009-03-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

One Million Years (Past and Future)

2009-02-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

ON KAWARA

THE ORIENTING STONE

2008-11-20T08:29:00.000-08:00

"A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of existentially reversed qibla (this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as they are known, are a pair of sensors—the utricle and the saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear. Grossly speaking, each consists of a bunch of tiny pebbles (of the white rock known as calcium carbonate) embedded in a gooey wad that sits atop a carpet of delicate hairs. The saccule is roughly vertical in our heads, and the utricle more or less horizontal. Together they orient us in the world, since they work as tiny inertial references: raise your head suddenly (or get in a jerky elevator), and the pebbles of the saccule get momentarily left behind as your skull starts upward; this bends down the hairs against which those pebbles lay, and the sensitive hairs function like switches, sending signals to your brain that you register as a feeling of ascent. The utricle does the same work for motion from side to side, and between them these tiny organs generate the neurological data that give us our normal sense of being in the world. What would it feel like not to have those pebbles? Delete them from a mouse and it spends a lot of time falling over." Leftovers/The Orienting Stone by D. Graham Burnett

STREET VIEW

2008-11-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

THE SUN

2008-10-31T09:13:00.000-07:00

(click for more pics)

FUTURE SHOCK

2008-08-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

THE COLORS OF INFINITY: ARTHUR C CLARKE

2008-08-24T10:32:00.000-07:00

THE OBSCENITY OF THE JUNGLE - WERNER HERZOG

2008-08-11T18:19:00.001-07:00

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER

2008-08-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a 17 mile long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, begins its first particle beam tests this month. The first particle collisions will happen before the end of the year. The Big Picture shows us various stages of completion.

House of Cards

2008-07-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

In Radiohead's new video for "House of Cards", no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

Radiohead - House of Cards
Directed by James Frost

The Making of House of Cards:

L'Inconnue de la Seine

2008-06-20T12:46:00.000-07:00

The unknown girl from the river Seine
In the early 20th century, the unidentified body of a young girl was pulled from the River Seine in Paris. An employee of the morgue was so entranced by the young girl’s ethereal smile that he made a plaster death mask of her. Eternally capturing her blissful appearance.

Generations later, the Girl from the River Seine would be rediscovered when Asmund S. Laerdal began the development of a realistic and effective training aid to teach mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He believed that if such a manikin was life-sized and extremely realistic in appearance, students would be better motivated to learn this lifesaving procedure. Moved by the story of the girl so tragically taken by early death, he fashioned her mask for the face of his new resuscitation training manikin, Resusci Anne

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

2008-06-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

STINGRAY MIGRATION (FLORIDA KEYS)

2008-06-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

JANTAR MANTAR

2008-06-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Jantar Mantar is a collection of architectural astronomical instruments on an massive scale, built by Jai Singh II at his then new capital of Jaipur between 1727 and 1733. The observatory consists of fourteen major geometric devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars in their orbits, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes.

SPAM ARCHITECTURE (DRAGULESCU)

2008-05-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

The images from Alex Dragulescu's Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts as input, junk email. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures.

LOGOLOGOS

2008-05-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

http://logologos.blogspot.com/

LYGIA CLARK

2008-04-10T09:52:00.001-07:00

HELIO OITICICA

2008-04-10T09:51:00.000-07:00

GEGO

2008-04-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

CITY DEVOURED BY THE DESERT

2008-01-25T10:16:00.000-08:00

THE SLIDING ROCKS OF RACETRACK PLAYA

2008-01-01T22:16:00.000-08:00

A GIRAFFE AND THE WIND

2007-12-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

WHALESONG

2007-11-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

ACCUMULATED BLUR

2007-10-26T15:59:00.000-07:00

A MINOR HISTORY OF GIANT SPHERES

2007-10-23T22:43:00.000-07:00

AMBIDEXTERITY

2007-10-16T19:59:00.000-07:00

PHANTOM ICE CIRCLES

2007-10-15T09:32:00.000-07:00

2007-10-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

BUBBLE PHYSICS IN ZERO G

2007-10-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

HI REZ MOON

2007-09-28T21:32:00.001-07:00

ZODIACAL LIGHT AND THE FALSE DAWN

2007-09-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

TODAY IS THE DAY

2007-09-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

DANIEL STIER

2007-09-21T09:49:00.000-07:00

2007-09-21T09:48:00.000-07:00

ODD SYNCHRONICITY

2007-09-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

THE FROZEN MAIDEN, THE GOLDEN BOY AND THE LIGHTNING GIRL

2007-09-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

TSUNAMI

2007-08-31T18:39:00.000-07:00

SNOW CRYSTALS [ATOMIC ZOOM]

2007-08-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE

2007-08-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

2007-08-22T23:36:00.000-07:00

2007-08-22T23:34:00.000-07:00

ALDOUS HUXLEY

2007-08-04T09:31:00.001-07:00

JG BALLARD

2007-08-04T09:18:00.000-07:00