Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Fine Art Adoption/Merit Badge2


from artistorganizedart
Jason Middlebrook at RoCA

Merit Badge2
Rockland Center for the Arts (RoCA)
October 14, 2007 - May 18, 2008

correspondent, Williamsburg Artist Carrie Waldman




"My father was an Eagle Scout in Michigan. He once told me that the only Merit Badge he didn't get was due to the fact that he didn't live near an ocean. As I grew older I knew I had two possible paths to take, follow his lead and try to become an Eagle Scout, or ignore the Boy Scouts all together. ...I never became a Boy Scout, but I did follow in my father's footsteps by becoming an artist." -Jason Middlebrook





The Artists Reception Sunday, October 21, 2007 1pm - 4pm

The children, the bikes loaded into 3 cars, the trip up the palisades…is there a merit badge for family loyalty? Nepotism?

We routed our family Sunday activities to include an expedition to the Merit Badge 2 show at the Rockland County Center for the Arts. The 2 young boys in our troop immediately made like scouts and took off for the woods. The trail beckoned at the far end of a sculpture strewn field. And at the entrance to the woods hung a series of framed images on the trees. Images of trees, framed with bark branches. No, they were bark, pieces of bark from trees like those in the woods, framed with bark branches. Pieces of landscape framed by other pieces of landscape. “Woodscape” by William Stone. And off into the woods we followed.






The Merit Badge Show was organized by Jason Middlebrook, a prolific and energetic artist living in the Hudson Valley town of Craryville, NY. He curated the first Merit Badge Show on his own land in Craryville. The idea of earning merit badges strongly resembles the approach of many current artists. “Scouts must follow strict required tasks to learn about subjects that they normally wouldn't investigate”, says the catalogue (and then make a show about it, if you’re an artist). That said, this is not necessarily the approach of the artists included, who used the theme to their own ends. Jason included his father, David Middlebrook, in the show. David constructed a poetic emblem of environmental abuse in which the sky is falling, gaining him the Sculpture Badge.

According to LYNN STEIN / ROCA Exhibition Director, David Middlebrook is a California-based sculptor who specializes in site-specific work, private and public commissions, and smaller sculptural elements. He works with a broad range of stone, marble, ceramic and bronze mediums in dimensions ranging from 50 lbs. to 50 tons. Middlebrook creates art that connects people with their cultures. He has more than 35 commissioned pieces to his credit. She includes that David Middlebrook's work, The Sky Is Falling, explores the quagmire of environmental abuses and unexplained natural phenomena portrayed here as a poetic mystery of a childhood innocence, first observed by "Chicken Little."

My brother, William Stone (participating artist,) followed his own surrealist/poetic approach to earn the Forestry Badge, with his piece, “Woodscape” (described above.) Interesting. Here's his quote:

"The landscape is the landscape. What an incredible concept Merit Badges are. They seem more Grecian than military. To earn all of them, the goal, would constitute a start on a truly liberal arts education. Perhaps they were originally intended to guide a boy to a hobby. I only earned one. I picked the one that already was my hobby, a no-brainier."





Hyungsub Shin’s artificial synthesis hung from the trees like a floating upturned root system. Julian LaVerdeire’s yellow rope swing most intrigued the boys, who were not permitted to follow their inclinations and swing on it. Other pieces were missed entirely in the conflict between following the map and following the boys- I guess we don’t get our Pathfinding Badges for the day.

The works on display will be left to weather the winter outdoors. One imagines some of the pieces looking quite beautiful in the snow.







Now, there I am, an artist writing on my own brother's work, wondering why he gets more attention and noticing that my own work is orphaned in the Fine Art Adoption Network. (FAAN, a great concept for organization, see my own work in it below.) In the interest of rivalry I probably should say something more competitive, critical and monotone.






William Stone has shown his work both nationally and internationally, and has been included in recent solo exhibitions at sites such as the James Fuentes Gallery, NY; and the Art Moving Gallery, NYC. Stone's recent group exhibitions were shown at Deste Foundation Galleries, Athens, Greece; the Archivo Emily Harvey Foundation Galleries, Venice, Italy; and the Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas.

Friday, December 14, 2007

The Fine Art Adoption Network by Adam Simon
www.fineartadoption.net

The Fine Art Adoption Network was commissioned by Art in General, NYC, as part of their New Commissions program. The web master is John Weir. We launched FAAN in April 2006.

The goal of FAAN is to help increase and diversify the population of art owners and to offer artists a new way to reach their audience. Artists post images of works they are willing to offer for adoption and potential adopters email them through the site. The artists choose an adopter from among those that solicit them. The artist receives no money for the artwork and the only costs to the adopter are whatever is required to transfer the work. Once the transaction has been completed, the artwork becomes the property of the adopter.


Carrie Waldman, More Moonbeams, 2005. 192 x 144 inches

Since the launch of FAAN in April 2006, over two hundred artists have joined and bestowed their art, almost 1,000 people are participating as adopters, and 237 adoptions of contemporary artworks have taken place. In its first six months, FAAN recorded more than 80,000 visitors, and the audience increases monthly. Media coverage has included Art News, Italian Vogue, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Sun and strong coverage on the internet.

What I would really like to see is FAAN expanding until it is functioning throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. If this were to happen, it would mean that we would truly have in place an alternative system for the distribution of art. Not one that is intended to replace the art market but one that serves as a necessary corrective, allowing artworks into homes without the prerequisite of purchase.

There is an interesting dialogue that naturally occurs around the subject of art adoption. It includes the art market, the relationship between art ownership and class, the degree to which artists are subject to market concerns and ideas about the concept of gift economy and its relation to art.

The art market is one of the few markets where supply is not dictated by demand. Artists continue to make art whether or not they are able to sell it. Meanwhile the market depends on an artificially created notion of scarcity of good art. The notion of rarity that the market requires depends on a small number of artists being selected from a large pool. Partly because of this, the art market can only accommodate a fraction of the art objects that are being produced. The market does a terrible job of putting art into a lot of homes.



Matt Freedman, Lost Puppy, 2006. 2 x 4 x 3 inches

Over 200 adoptions have taken place through FAAN in the past year. Artworks are finding homes in unlikely locations. A fifth grade class in New Brunswick, Canada adopted Matt Freedman's, Lost Puppy, an ironic site-specific work made for FAAN, as well as Perry Bard's Zone, a sculptural proposal for peace in Korea. A policeman in training adopted Cathy Quinlan's drawing of a head of the Madonna, after Duccio. Carrie Waldman’s billboard-format painting, an enormous, slightly pop view of daises in a field, has been installed on the outside of a building facing the town diner (where farmers have their morning coffee) of a small town in upstate New York. No one has adopted Sheryl Oring’s Writer’s Block, a series of metal cages each filled with approximately 30 antique typewriters, but I believe she is waiting for an institutional adopter.


Sheryl Oring, Writer's Block, 1999. 36 x 36 x 36 inches

The fact that both the artists and the adopters choose is one of the interesting features of art adoption. Ultimately though, it is the artist that chooses. Regardless of who gets to choose, a series of interactions is being initiated around the artworks. These interactions are multi-faceted and personal. For the adopters, it can resemble Internet dating. They present both who they are and the nature of their appreciation for the artwork. They are convincing artists by telling them what the artworks mean to them. For the artists, this can seem an unusual relationship to an audience. Typically in the art world, they are the ones soliciting recognition.

Art-lending institutions exist both in Europe and the United States and bartering art for services is not uncommon, but art adoption, as far as we know, is new. Both the artist and the adopter are aware of participating in something outside of the commercial norm. There is a shared sense of shaping a transaction differently, in part because they are in direct communication with each other. The art on the FAAN website is marked by its separation from expected venues. It is displayed, not as work soliciting buyers and not as part of an exhibition but as an object in a gift economy.



Cathy Nan Quinlan, Study for a Contemporary Portrait: Duccio,
2001. 17 x 17 inches

Once a system is established as the norm it becomes difficult to look at or to look for alternatives. The art market replaced a system of patronage by the aristocracy. I don‘t think anyone wants to see art adoption replace the art market. If FAAN continues to grow at the current rate, it could have the opposite effect of strengthening the art market by expanding the population of art collectors. Collectors who adopted work through FAAN have gone back to the artist and bought additional work.

It is too soon to know how many artworks adopted through FAAN are reaching homes that would be unlikely otherwise to house original artworks. Potentially, we are talking about a different relationship between art ownership and class. It seems clear that the demographics of people adopting art through FAAN are wider and more varied than those acquiring art through the gallery system.

The art world is small but the world reached by the Internet is huge. Ideally FAAN will continue to expand geographically so that someone browsing the site in Boise, Idaho or Brennero, Italy will be able to find artworks both locally and internationally. The one thing the adopters will have in common will be an appreciation for what artists do.

*artists wishing to post work on FAAN should contact info@fineartadoption.net


The Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN)


Artists selected from the online network where all of the artworks on view are available for adoption:

Matt Davis

Laura Devendorf

Danielle Dimston

Marcy B. Freedman

Ben Godward

Jill Henderson

Matt King

Dave Krueger

Jacob Rhodes

Analia Segal

Jason Simon

Tattfoo Tan



January 4 – January 27, 2008

OPENING, Friday January 4 6:00 – 10:00 pm

POCKET UTOPIA

1037 Flushing Avenue

[Just off the Morgan L, Bushwick]

Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-6 and by appointment

Call: 917-400-3869

Pocket Utopia is pleased to present an exhibition of the Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN). FAAN is an online network that uses a gift economy to connect artists and potential collectors. Pocket Utopia will function as a clearinghouse and will facilitate the adoption process. Post-studio artist and Pocket Utopia intern Audra Wolowiec selected the works on view. The adoption of artworks between the artist and collector will be finalized through the website (http://www.fineartadoption.net/); no purchases will be made.

This exhibition of FAAN is the third in a series examining creative pocket utopias that began by opening a file at Pierogi (The Pierogi Show at Pocket Utopia in September 2007). Then in December 2007 with a show titled “Etsy,” Pocket Utopia ventured into the crafty commerce of the online place to buy and sell all things handmade with the same name (http://www.etsy.com)

There will be a salon discussion held on Wednesday, January 23rd at 6:00pm where Adam Simon and FAAN artists will talk about money and its role in the art world. Refreshments will be served. This discussion is a part of Austin Thomas’s salon series titled, “Excuse me, you have art in your teeth.”

Pocket Utopia is an away-from center, off-center, exhibition, salon and social space run by artist Austin Thomas.


Pocket Utopia
1037 Flushing Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11237
www.pocketutopia.com
read the blog at:
http://pocketutopia.blogspot.com/



Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Devon Dikeou The New Yorker


-------------------------------
GALLERIES-BROOKLYN

DEVON DIKEOU

Conceptual Art meets self-disclosure. Rather than
hide a potentially embarrassing devotion to a
childhood security blanket, nicknamed Niney,
Dikeou makes it the subject of her work. "The
Niney Chronicles" unfolds in a series of photo-
graphs and hilarious text paintings. As the nar-
rative twists and turns (Niney is nearly lost on a
shuttle bus from LaGuardia to J.F.K.!) Dikeou's
homage to her sacred scrap of wool points, with
absurdist levity to the mysteries of our attach-
ment to objects- and that includes art. Through
Feb. 10 artMovingProjects, 166 north 12th st.
917.301.6680

*Note we will be open by appointment through
the holidays. Also, the sacred scrap of wool
turned out to be holy synthetic.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/art/2007/12/24/071224goar_GOAT_art?currentPage=5
http://aronnamenwirth.blogspot.com/2007/12/zing-magazine-is-out-democrazy.html

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Devon Dikeou at aMP

ReBlogged from http://www.artistorganizedart.org/commons/
Devon Dikeou's "The Niney Chronicals"


December 1st - Feb. 10th 2008

at artMovingProjects

166 North 12th Street Brooklyn NY 11211 (between bedford and Berry Sts., Williamsburg)

Devon Dikeou gives us a long awaited dose of the sharp wit and literary humor that only Devon herself can zing out. While I searched the space for familiar faces the opening was packed with Devon's fans from far and near.
Click on aMP's blog site for more info
http://artmovingprojects.blogspot.com/



Devon points to Niney's bottled bath water while engaged with a
top
Chelsea gallerist.


Artist and FAAN founder Adam Simon greets Devon with a card.


Artist Eva Mantel chats with aMP co-director Nancy Horowitz


Artist & writer Shelley Marlow with AOA correspondent, artist Sante Scardillo


Artist Mary Obering with inside scoop on identity of "you know who" with
artworld transfugee Amanda Obering



NEWS
ZINGMAGAZINE ISSUE #21 2006-2007 HAS BEEN PUBLISHED.

Artist Organized Art likes Zingmagazine because it only comes out when it wants to. It has no need to bow to any periodic release schedule. This issue is thoughtful, edgy as always, and elegant. No borders, no boundaries, no reviews. 28 curatorial projects flow seamlessly from one to the next, layed out with over 300 pages of quality print. This is the biggest and best issue I've seen Devon put out yet. In it she says "Rather than remaining isolated and apart, either through an unaware and uninformed (or aware and informed) malaise, there is a need to commingle arenas." This "curatorial crossing" and collaborative, book-like magazine comes out sporadically, and now is the moment.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Devon Dikeou and Luke Murphy at artMovingProjects

4 documents citing the carbon dating procedure mounted on sintra with non-glare Plexiglas surface
Dimensions: 8 _” x 11”


Niney Carbon Dating, 2007
C-Print mounted on aluminum with non-glare Plexiglas surface
Dimensions: 20” x 30”

La Boheme, 2007
C-Print mounted on aluminum with non-glare Plexiglas surface
Dimensions: 30” x 20”
Hospital, 2007
C-Print mounted on aluminum with non-glare Plexiglas surface
Dimensions: 20” x 30”




Niney Timeline, 2007
Acrylic on gessoed canvas
Dimensions variable


Wash Me, 2007
44 Gerber baby food jars, _ cap of Woolite, and 198 ounces of water containing the residue of washing Niney
displayed on Plexiglas shelves
Dimensions variable



Gabe Chicco


Still from the Longest Painting of Death


Luke Murphy installing



artMovingProjects
166 N.12th St, between Bedford and Berry Sts., Williamsburg (917-301-6680, 917-301-0306).
Subway: L to Bedford Avenue  Thurday -Sunday, 1pm - 6pm www.artmovingprojects.com artmovingprojects.blogspot.com
info@artmovingprojects.com

Opening 7-9 Saturday, December 1st - Feb. 10th 2008

Devon Dikeou

In her first one person show at artMovingProjects
Devon Dikeou shows the documentation of “Niney”, a child’s sweater made out of what she thought was lambs wool that she has gone to extreme lengths to keep in her immediate possession since childhood. Following in the tradition of Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, and Gorden Matta Clark she uses photography and text to augment the significance of this article of clothing. Notions of fragility, safety and comfort, collide with feelings of fear, vulnerability and voyeurism in the ongoing work that has seen earlier manifestations at Postmasters Gallery, and more recently at the Robin Rule Gallery. The installation will include photographs, documentation and paintings that cite a written timeline both sincere and hilarious that builds to form an absurd narrative of intimacy and taboo.

http://www.rulegallery.com/devon1.html
http://www.zingmagazine.com/zingmagazine.html

New Media Project Space

Luke Murphy

The Longest Painting of Death is a digital work that takes an image of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “The Race Track” (Death on a Pale Horse c.1896), enlarges it to the painting’s original size of 27 3/4" x 35 1/8", stretches it digitally until it is one mile in length and then traverses it in 02:11:20 min, the average speed of the still fastest race horse, Secretariat. This piece is an extension of two “minimalist” works done almost ten years ago. The Mile Long Page and the Square Mile Page, both digital updates of Walter de Maria’s Vertical Kilometer, consist of a mile-long line of single black pixels and a square mile of black pixels respectively. In The Longest Painting of Death, Murphy stretches the painting to the length of a race track, “moving” along the track on the screen, thereby encouraging the viewer to switch from the side of the course to the perspective of Death watching the landscape as it passes by.

http://www.lukelab.com/

by appointment: Dec. 21 - Jan. 13 closed Jan. 18 - 20

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Linda Post's installation 'LEVEL' in Queens

opening reception: Saturday, December 1st, 5-7pm




The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th ave, long island city, ny 11101


nov 29 - dec 22, 2007

gallery hours:
thursdays & fridays 5-8pm, saturdays 3-8pm, & by appointment
(718.482.7069)


http://www.chocolatefactorytheater.org/e_lindapost.html

Friday, November 9, 2007

Natalie Moore review on ArtistOrganizedArt.org

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Natalie Moore at artMovingProjects 166 North 12th Street Brooklyn NY 11211 (Link) http://www.artMovingProjects.com
http://www.ArtistOrganizedArt.org

correspondent: NY artist, Erika Knerr






Mirage


Natalie Moore's second one person show at ArtMovingProjects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, titled "Mirage" is an graceful installation that rests between sculpture, painting and poetry. Layed out with a small map for viewers, of 12 individual pieces created from stainless steel wire mesh, with somewhat unrelated titles like Pompeii, Apricot, Lochness and Fire, the first impression is that the objects function together as a topography seemlessly inter-related. There is a casuallness to the way the forms are bent and molded into shape almost like a crumbled and discarded piece of paper, yet the thoughtful and alluring color is so over the edge elegant it creates an exquisite paradox.

Ms. Moore speaks of working with the idea of perception. The notion that we percieve things differently at different times. If we look at something one way it seems fixed, then suddenly we approach it from another angle and it becomes very different. Countless examples of this scenario occur in everyday life from thought patterns to political rhetoric, to just what we are seeing in and through the objects in this miraged perspective set up by Natalie Moore. Solid and opaque on one side, transparent and shear on the other, as you move around the room, moiré patterns, creating another level of drawing on the landscape are fleeting. You catch a glimpse of it and then it's gone. She attempts to create an image that goes in and out of visibility, like a mirage in the desert. T
he physical objects are smaller than human size and a curiously familiar scale and proportion that refer to large heavy rocks, yet are clearly light weight and fragile in reality, continuing the play on what is real and true and what is imagined, fantasy and false. Moore invited writer Melanie Neilson Junceau to write the statement for the exhibition that unconventionally functions as press release and only text accompanying the show. The poetic prose piece is titled, " Mirage: Morning Before the Fact," and is a dreamy revelation of associations to "Mirage."



Ms. Moore's first show at artMovingProjects in 1998 was the inaugural exhibition for this artist-run space by Aron Namenwirth. Moore at that time had come out of running another artist initiated space called "Sauce" from 1992-95, with a small group of other artists, also in Williamsburg. It was one of the four original artist-run spaces featured in the show "OTHER ROOMS" at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1995. Another was the senior artist organized venue Four Wall's which before moving to Mike Balou's garage space in Brooklyn in 1991, was founded by Adam Simon in Hoboken in 1984. The other two are the now long running Williamsburg haunts Perogi 2000 and the non-profit Momenta Art which emerged consecutively in 1994 and 1995. Like Momenta, artMovingProjects is going non-profit.




"Mirage" is a new direction for Natalie Moore's work which came as a surprise to some who know her as a digital media aficionado and professor. With the galleries often emphasis on new media art, this hands-on formal/informal approach is unexpected, but also a natural evolution from the physically conceptual installations of electrical, cable and/or computer wire that was embedded directly into the plaster walls of the spaces she was working as site specific installations. This work presented the idea of a room or house having a life of it's own; it's insides breaking out of the walls. The wires being the veins and hair of the space, pushing out of the walls and making the room itself come alive. Here she worked with combining mediums as well, working between drawing, sculpture and architecture. I look forward to where she goes from here and the role that intermedia might play.


The show is up through sunday, November 18th, 2007.
-- Erika Knerr


Natalie Moore at artMovingProjects






Thursday, November 8, 2007

Programming Chance at Emily Harvey Foundation




PROGRAMMING CHANCE
curated by James Fuentes

John Cage, Jean Dupuy,
Alison Knowles, William Stone
& Aaron Young

at
EMILY HARVEY FOUNDATION
http://www.emilyharveyfoundation.org/

11/13/07 - 12/08/07


The Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, Second Floor
New York, NY 10013

Hours Tues. - Sat., 1pm - 6pm
Tel 212.925.7651
Fax 212.966.0439

Attachments

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Donate

Rhizome Needs You!

November 7, 2007

This week, Rhizome begins our 2007 Community Campaign. We need to raise $30,000 by midnight, December 31st. We're calling upon the artists, critics, curators, scholars, scientists, and general digital culture fans in our network to achieve this goal. Now is the time to become a member (it's only $25!), renew your membership, or make a generous donation. Rhizome serves an emerging field and we rely, to no small extent, on our community for support. Your contribution will seed the development of our web-based programs, such as commissions, discussion, and digital art preservation, all of which aim to increase the visibility and vibrancy of this growing field. Helping us will help make new media art history. Please support us today!

http://www.rhizome.org/support/

artMovingProjects is going non-profit!

Monday, November 5, 2007

Paddy Johnson ArtFagCity reviews bloggerskins

Marcin Ramocki, Blogger Skins

Marcin Ramocki, Blogger Skins, 2007

You’ll have to excuse the lack of content on this blog as of late. Unfortunately, Art Fag City hasn’t proven to be awesome in the paying bills department, which results in time spent on cash generating projects I naturally have about half the interest in.

If time and money weren’t issues, you’d probably read a few more responses to material on Tom Moody’s blog over the last week. In the next couple of days I’ll be covering three topics he’s raised recently, beginning with Marcin Ramocki’s Blogger Skins at artMovingProjects and moving on to his discussion of the Nasty Net Halloween post, and Net 1.0.

For those who are either not aware of Ramocki’s project, or only aware of our fresh link to the exhibition reading “Dear Mr. Ramocki, Next time please paint a giant portrait of my face”, Blogger Skins is basically a portrait created by arranging the first 100 google image results drawn from their first and last names. Bloggers Tom Moody, Joy Garnett, James Wagner, Regine DeBatty, and myself were the chosen subjects for this piece, the results of which can be seen here.

One of the more obvious points of interest in this piece lies in the reading of the results, an aspect Moody covers well;

Clearly Debatty, who publishes the blog We Make Money Not Art, is the most successful personage among us, as the first dozen hits are photos of her. This means people with huge amounts of Google juice have linked to her and pushed these images to the top of the heap. Garnett is the most successful artist, as it is her paintings that fill the top slots. James Wagner is disadvantaged by having a common name, while I have been sharing Google with an Australian cricket player and coach for many years now. The drawings occupying the #1 and #2 slots for my name are actually drawings by me published in a Dallas zine when I lived there years ago. Almost two decades later and the artist is still sniffing the critic’s butt and shining the curator’s shoes.

While it’s hard not to respond to the fact that Tom Moody’s portrait is largely defined by cartoons he drew of an artist sniffing a critic’s ass, and then later shining his shoes, the reading of what is essentially statistical data strikes me as a slightly different animal than the term portrait suggests. To my mind, the strength of Blogger Skins lies less in its “completeness” as a portrait, than in its austere arrangement of digital profiles. The timestamped titles may suggest an evolving digital skin, but Ramocki’s visualization tells us what Moody must already be grumbling about; Our digital selves don’t change nearly as much we might like.

smith review of blogger skins and Campanelli on Torcito Portraits and The Wall street Journal




Even Boring Blogs
Are Things of Beauty
In Some Artists' Eyes

By ANDREW LAVALLEE
December 19, 2007; Page B1

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people's pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

[portals]
A zoom of Guthrie Lonergan's "Internet Group Shot"

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. "I'm sort of interested in that boringness," he says.

"Internet Group Shot" is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they're saying "cheese." For "MySpace Intro Playlist," Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they're introducing themselves.

"There are defaults in our culture," Mr. Lonergan adds. "MySpace doesn't set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things."

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Marcin Ramocki is another. He got the idea for his portrait series "Blogger Skins" when a documentary film he made was being shown world-wide. After setting up search-engine alerts to notify him whenever "8 Bit" was mentioned, he was struck by the unrelated images that came up.

INTERNET-INSPIRED ART
"Internet Group Shot," a collage of group photos scavenged from the Web by Guthrie Lonergan
"MySpace Intro Playlist," also by Mr. Lonergan, a collection of personal videos embedded on their creators' MySpace pages
"Blogger Skins," a series of "portraits" made with Google search results by Marcin Ramocki
"Unmonumental," an online and offline group show at the New Museum and Rhizome, its new-media affiliate.
Rhizome has also sponsored exhibits such as "Professional Surfer," which addresses Web surfing as an art form, and "Faultlines," a look at online communities.
"Time-Lapse Homepage," a one-minute video by Paul Slocum that traces a Web page's look over time.
"Monitor Tracings" is a series of drawings based on Google Images results, by Marisa Olson. Her Internet-based work also includes "Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs," in which she sang journal entries in a blues style.
"Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense," by Cory Arcangel, pairs the Nirvana singer's words with keyword-based ads.
Mr. Arcangel's del.icio.us bookmarks have also attracted attention in digital-art circles. Some artists also flock to "surfing clubs" such as Nasty Nets, Supercentral and double happiness.

For "Blogger Skins," he Googled a handful of bloggers who write about art, then assembled a virtual mosaic of the images that resulted. "The idea is that a Google search for people who are very active in this community changes every day, so I wanted to capture one specific search," he says.

The image reflects the original order of the search results, he says, "and that creates, sort of accidentally, this beautiful shape, but that shape also reflects the popularity of different images." Subjects with common names had wildly random images associated with them. The artists, though, exerted control over their search results by filling them with their work.

Some of these Web-inspired works have been included in the recently reopened New Museum's "Unmonumental" exhibition, parts of which are on view at its New York location and others of which can be seen on the site for Rhizome, its new-media affiliate. "This generation really knows the Net," says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's executive director. "They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it."

"Art is just going to be what's going on in the world around you. It makes sense to do work about this thing that's changing our life so much," adds Paul Slocum, a 33-year-old Dallas artist whose day job is in systems programming. His video "Time-Lapse Homepage," part of the New Museum exhibit online, is intended to follow the development of the digital aesthetic: in 1,200 screenshots and at 20 frames a second, it chronicles the evolution of a single personal page's look.

He also created a functioning replica of MySpace's log-in page. "I was interested in how you go to these pages all the time that are constantly in flux, changing all the things they show you," he says.

One of the best-known artists in this medium, Cory Arcangel, has "performed" the deletion of his Friendster account in front of an audience at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, N.Y. "People kind of cringed and then cheered when it was all over," he says. He published on his personal site Kurt Cobain's suicide note alongside Google AdWords that served up ads to social-anxiety treatment and spiritual-growth classes.

"Surfing so much, I get ideas of things that I would like to see that don't yet exist," Mr. Arcangel explains. "This is when I make a project."

This year, Rhizome organized an online group show called "Professional Surfer" that took the prosaic idea of bookmarking Web pages and posited it as art.

On other Web sites, such as Nasty Nets, Supercentral and Yahoo's bookmarking service Del.icio.us, artists link to videos, photos and other digital ephemera they've come across.

"They're like sketchbooks," says Paddy Johnson, a Brooklyn art blogger. "Your ability to spot the best stuff speaks to your eye as an artist. ... The better your quoting ability, the better artist you seem to be."

Even some "offline" works are inspired by Internet culture. For a series called "Monitor Tracings," Marisa Olson searched Google Images for headphones, radios and other devices, then drew the results on paper.

One thing most of these artists haven't solved is how to make money off work that is available to anyone online. Ms. Olson says she sells her drawings and editioned copies of video pieces, but never an Internet-based work. "You would think that the contemporary, hip art world is ahead of the curve on this," she says, "and it's not -- yet."

blogger skins

Marcin Ramocki - Regine Debatty blogger skinConsidering all the chatter about interoperability and social presence this week, it is worth drawing attention to project I recently discovered. Brooklyn-based new media artist and curator Marcin Ramocki recently launched a web-based piece called Blogger Skins. The project uses Google's image search to create photo-mosaics representing the web presence of a number of prominent art bloggers including Tom Moody, Paddy Johnson, James Wagner, Joy Garnett and RĂ©gine Debatty (whose "skin" is on the left). On the surface, the project is a bit of a one-liner, but I think it is a fun exercise in speculating the nature of presence, personality and influence across a distributed network of sites and communities. The project statement elaborates on the contemporary notion of identity:

We have entered the era of identity superstructures: complex sets of search engine outcomes based on our activities, popularity, name itself, purposeful efforts and a whole bunch of random data fluctuation. We are growing second skins, made out of words, links and images: exciting, addictive and sometimes completely meaningless.

http://www.neural.it/art/2007/11/torcito_project_sonic_portrait.phtml

Torcito Project, sonic portraits
Marcin Ramocki, a Polish artist who's also a director of documentaries and independent curator, since his first experiments has focused his research on the construction of metaphors by using the most diverse software programs. Non-linear narration, be it generative and random or interactive, is the common theme of his many projects, even though there are other central themes, such as videogames aesthetics (especially the retro ones), combining old and new technologies, the DIY philosophy (which has recently become DIWO, thanks to a Furtherfield collective provocation or - more likely - thanks to the interactive nature of web 2.0), for example in works like Torcito Project (sonic portraits). This work is composed of seven portraits made in the Italian region of Salento (Masseria Torcito is in Cannole, near Lecce) in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an "old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki. In this grid there's the bitmap image of a human face which eventually turns into the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano. All these, in fact, are applications of the simple binary principle of full and empty. As is easy to understand, there's nothing too far from the basic principle modern digital technologies, and our information society, are based on.
Vito Campanelli






Monday, October 29, 2007


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October 29, 2007
Rhizome News: Blogger Skins

October 29, 2007
Blogger Skins
It used to be a bit creepy to admit you googled a new friend or business acquaintance, but these ad hoc background checks are now customary. Marcin Ramocki's latest project 'Blogger Skins,' at artMoving Projects in Brooklyn, references the layer of character these simplistic queries impose upon us. Often out of date, decontextualized, and in some cases shockingly spot-on, our google search results, for good or bad, have become inextricable from our identities. To visualize this process Ramocki used Google's image search on art bloggers Tom Moody (tommoody.us), Paddy Johnson (artfagcity.com), Regine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art.com), James Wagner (jameswagner.com), and Joy Garnett (newsgrist.typepad.com), and tiled the first one hundred images that appeared into a mosaic 'portrait' of each critic. The snapshots point to the absurdity of such cursory investigations, and flip the dynamic between the artist/critic and researcher/researchee relationship. Regine Debatty becomes an art world supermodel, Paddy Johnson appears to have a relationship with Lou Reed, and Tom Moody is an abstract art-creating cricket player. In his own words Moody notes, 'I like what Ramocki says but vaguely wish I didn’t have to be the proof.' - Caitlin Jones
http://www.artmovingprojects.com

Friday, October 26, 2007

New Door, New Paint, New Media Project Space

Natalie Moore reinstalled after a new coat of paint to the floor. The color comes from Pace Warehouse their special mix. Thanks to painter Bill Smart.

John Giglio folding door rear of gallery
Marcin Ramocki's blogger skins and John Giglio's door from inside.
The Front Doors installed By Giglio in 2005
Some might argue that because of functionality these installations fall into the catagory of architecture. While they do function- their relationship to Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Donald Judd seems more direct.

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