You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Imagination imagined by Kafka before the Internet.

I wonder about the Internet. Does it in fact exist? Or does it prove an alternate universe? If you sit there surfing long enough it starts to pour right into your head. I’m in the middle of writing or editing something, and for some inexplicable or at least forgettable reason, I’m lead elsewhere and halfway down a rabbit hole to read a joke about some cartoon bears. So, like anyone, I bookmark it as distraction for later. I bring a plum out of my bag, but Allison Cobb won’t let me eat it:

“I know, like Subway low, like bread puffed up

with yoga mat chemicals. Yes I did

steal everyone’s detournement”

Am I now looking at a desert mountain range, a gorge, a rattler’s skin, sand designs left by a Mojave sidewinder, a natural Mandala, the mouth of a deep sea creature, or a series of close-ups of a person’s eye? I can rarely stay on one of these pages long enough to reach its end. All the subsequent descriptions and associations lead in 100,000 directions; exploring the Internet is more divergent than a Raymond Roussel stanza, more plentiful than The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Appealing to my at best curious intentions, as much as distraction and forgetfulness, artcritical’s Bookmarked feature seems a fun idea for anyone willing to share their abandoned to-dos and tabs for inspiration, or for any readily charmable reader. (I’m pressed in this moment to express just why this is. Voyeurism, compulsion, affinity, or just plain curiosity?) Sometimes I fear I won’t find my way back to the new thing I’ve discovered, as if associations won’t work without some kind of guide. Years ago, taking notes while receiving instructions from someone of my grandparents’ generation, I was admonished that excessive notation beguiles memory, which in turn can cause its loss. I think this is true.

My fits and starts on the Internet are, like anyone, a daily occurrence. Everything’s in here, and its access is seemingly ubiquitous. It’s no surprise that the saved tabs the folder of URL shortcuts are ones that I can scarcely remember any reason for having saved. As I continuing to flip through read-later tabs, I’m at a sudden rapt to the ticking of a bedside clock, followed by a soothing French voice that nevertheless sounds as if it’s awoken from a long night beside an ashtray. A sideburned fop pours hot water into a bowl in black and white. It’s Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs! What is it? Why is it there? I have no recollection, but I love it.

It’s a dream. Wonderful, terrifying, stupid, very ordinary. Researching wildlife online (again, why? because we can), I half-expect a gazelle to leap out of the liquid crystal screen, still baffled by the endless deluge that is the Internet — in the way an early motion-picture crowd feared the train arriving at its station in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) might burst right through the screen and into the cinema to overtake them. They ran to the back of the room, then returned to their seats for more.

Here I’m totally distracted by a singularly interesting, eccentric guy. I was a bellhop and John was in town from NYC, needing respite from some unpleasant associations, situations he’d describe to me at the front door on successive nights and mornings. He was cool and a great conversationalist. Told me his brain is swelling and that I ought to get the rich guests to buy all his paintings. He also once commanded, upon my delivery of the Wall Street Journal, that I return to the front desk to have it burned at once. In his underwear, no less. More on this in another essay, but I will add that John is generous, no-bullshit, very funny, and every bit of the creative spirit evinced by his many musical, on-screen, and visual-art works. In his After Dark Episode 1, you’ll catch the above-mentioned attributes straightaway.

Now I remember what I was supposed to do: read an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.

Have you heard of Sue Tompkins? This remains in my read-later tab, and though I’ve heard it many times I don’t think I ever reached the end. Being “heat-faint,” in ecstasy, longing for islands or “24 hours on my favorite planet alone” (my favorite of her hypnotic refrains here), irritation for standing by, wondering “if you feel like I feel.” How about Carla Harryman’s Memory Play? Mile’s Champion’s How to Laugh? Every different emotional state represented outside avatars to distract you. Avert your eyes awhile, you’ll come back soon. Fog everywhere. Sun whenever. Festooned in little pics of food, or all the cute pets your landlord won’t let you house. Years ago, they even foreshortened your audible laughing. What a rotten, wondrous place.

The post 24 Hours on My Favorite Planet Alone appeared first on artcritical.

Considering the clamorous and literally unbelievable results of the life-editing that has corrupted our presentations of who we are — replacing them on social media with desperate assertions of who we would like to be seen as — rather than contrive a list of what I would prefer my topmost visited sites to be, thereby concocting some intellectual fantasy about myself, I remonstrate here against digital self-denial and provide the list of my actual recent most visited sites, and what impact they have on my life as an artist. They are in no particular order.

www.pornmd.com

This site is the Kayak of porn, alleviating of hours whirring about the web in frustration, by efficiently finding the pornographic clips that a person most responds to. Type in the word or phrase that you are looking for, and it searches all the top porn sites in an instant. It even makes suggestions. PornMD frees up oceans of time for considering my next exhibition, while simultaneously offering up the male physique as artistic inspiration. And anyway, it’s on doctor’s orders.

Kate Bush Youtube/Google searches

She is only considered bizarre or banshee-like by incompetent journalists without the capacity to consider a songwriter/singer existing beyond the narrowly defined societal prescriptions of what a female artist ought to be.

The worlds, sentiments and experiences that she has conjured through her intellectual, sonic and visual individualism have been a constant source of reference to me since youth, outstripping that of any visual artist. The two minutes and seven seconds of “Under the Ivy” (1985) are among her most excruciatingly beautiful retreats. Bush is one of three principal figures who anchor my artistic sensibilities by forming a trajectory of sweeping gothicism across art, music and literature; the others are Emily Bronte and Casper David Friedrich.

Wikipedia entry on Scottish castles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_castles

Having left Scotland at age 19 to live among the tumult of London and New York, I often long for the solitude, brooding history, and enchantment of my ancient home. When the rigors of urban life mount, I’m afforded distance from the present by an Internet journey back in time through the presence of spellbinding buildings that embody the gruesome, captivating march of humanity.

Castles have lent me an artistic dowry since I was young and spent time investigating ruins, searching for secret tunnels and seeking the supernatural. The experience of such places endows the mind with boundless imaginative force, lowering the divisions between reality and the mythological. Related artworks include Portrait as a Gargoyle (2013), photographed at the Tolkien-esque Castle Glume, situated above the Burns (rivers) of Sorrow and Care in the Ochil Hills; and Portrait as the Devil (2014), taken at Glamis Castle, and referencing the Devil’s visit there one stormy night to play cards on the Sabbath with the fiery Earl of Crawford.

www.wordsmith.org

Words are to me what clay is to a sculptor. As a text-oriented artist, words are the pleasure and pain of my existence. The limitless potential that text contains for communication, connection and harm, positions words as the most powerful tools for construction, and weapons of destruction, that humans possess. This website remains a source of delight, humor and alternate truths in relation to my ongoing series of anagrammatized vinyls.

www.darrenjonesart.com

Physical exhibitions of contemporary art in galleries have been around for perhaps 200 years. They ideally present much art, which is often created with consideration as to how it will appear in the gallery. It’s hard to imagine now, but they may not always exist. The computer disseminates work far more efficiently and to a larger audience than a traditional gallery, while the computer screen need no longer be considered a virtual gallery but an effective and autonomous exhibition space. If the requirement to experience the work in person is reduced or eliminated, and if the sentiment or intention of the work can be liberated from the physical and adequately conveyed across the internet, then the need for an actual site is lessened. I visit my website a lot, to regard and refine the work, and what I say about it. It is a working platform not dissimilar to an artist taking up residence in a gallery space. It functions as a studio, and a place to present work, ideas and observations that are sometimes fabricated and pictured in situation as completed pieces, but increasingly that exist entirely in sketch, or conceptual format on the screen.

www.maploco.com

Maploco enables viewers to create personalized maps of the states, countries or continents that they have visited by clicking to highlight each territory. The thrill (or disappointment) lasts about 10 seconds. By inserting various maps into photoshop, cutting, resizing, flipping and rearranging various regions I have formed a series of geographic motifs that include responses to empire, gay marriage and the recent tragic events in France.

www.thesaurus.com

Another marvelous tool for an artist enamored with vocabulary and words, who also writes about art. Clichéd phrases and art-world gibberish so quickly become bankrupt husks exhausted of impact and meaning, and deft new ways of saying something are refreshing. However, there are artists whose descriptions of their work are so stuffed with superlatives and overwrought language that they are downright fuliginous… I mean opaque.. I mean, well, confusing.

www.logolalia.com

Concrete poetry is the use of visual or typographical arrangements or patterns of words to convey the meaning of a poem or text. It wasn’t an art form I was familiar with until discovering this site, which is a portal to some brilliant, simple combinations of word, image and meaning.

The post Aural Sex: Kate Bush, Word Play and Towering Old Erections appeared first on artcritical.

http://eastmanhouse.org/events/detail.php?title=burley_2014-15
http://robertburley.com/disappearance-of-darkness-2012/

I leave tabs open as reminders to myself — references or links to things I might, could, or should be doing. Often, these sites serve as surrogate memorials, remaining open only so that I can allow myself to feel better by acknowledging that attention is being paid, and that I have a plan. A part of me is invariably trying to forget, to ignore the ignored, and leave behind the burden of everything I cannot or simply will not do.

I track the memory usage of my web browser. My computer is showing its age, and it is usually these unread, unexplored tangents that bog down its ever-shrinking resources. It serves to further remind me of all that I might be doing. For months now, lurking in the background, I have had a tab open to the personal website of the photographer Robert Burley, who for five years documented the demise of analog image making. Burley traveled around the world photographing what amounted to a literal dematerialization of his chosen medium. Captured in his photographs is the corporate contraction experienced by all of the giants of the industry. There is the never-ending stream of building implosions at the Kodak Park in Rochester and the simply deserted factories of the bankrupt Polaroid, companies both decimated by the rapid shift to digital imaging. This shift proved inevitable, and yet, caught so many entirely off guard. Although the finality of the transition was never quite clear while it was unfolding, now, after the buildings have fallen and the thousands of layoffs completed, Burley’s images serve as a succinct summary of this abandonment of the analog.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transformation of technology; I attended art school during the thick of it, to study photography, and watched as it unfolded. At times, I felt like I was being abandoned by my own medium, falling behind in the future I had always embraced. As it no doubt is for many in college, the alchemical thrill of photography was nearly extinguished in me, the sheer magic of watching images emerge from the baths was something that played little role in the work I found myself making. Preoccupation with craft proved to be the undoing of many of my friends, lost in the labs spending hours upon hours in overly complicated modes of printing, making perfect, airless photographs. I fought against such elaborate production in my own work: I wanted something else from my images, a reason for the photography to have occurred. The weight of technicality is a burden not easily shifted in the making of photographs; it’s an inescapable fact of the medium that many can never seem to reconcile their work with. This fundamental problem has, of course, been discussed to no end, always to rear its head every decade or so, critically.

Such are the problems of art school. I never entirely resolved my concerns with craft, and my work most likely reflects this. Perhaps these are the building blocks of many photographers’ educations. I can only speak to my own experience, but I will say that there were many questions that certainly should have been asked of us as students, but were not. All artistic mediums, to varying degrees, contain their own material-based justifications, an inherent logic to their representative ends and uses. Photography obviously has its own, and yet we constantly ask for these once-simple definitions to be expanded and reconsidered.

This compulsion to define the medium is further complicated by our world’s full-scale digitization, and now these conversations often shift toward this electronic inevitability faced by photography. While the allure of the darkroom seems to be something that many fondly remember, few speak of it. Rather, when it is invoked, the analog era is employed as an all-encompassing nostalgia, and merely another emblematic loss of the well-worn past, demolished for a harshly gleaming replacement. In the wake of prolific, all-seeing, skill-less iPhone photography, such an assessment is inevitable, but also understandable in light of the endless of hardware and software upgrades we must all take part in, brought on by corporate-imposed planned obsolescence. The past, as we remember it, was never plagued by such artificial limitations.

There is something both wonderful and deeply depressing about this act of photographing the systems and places central to the development of photography, yet now no longer needed for its practice. Appropriately, the final venue for the current traveling exhibition of Burley’s photographs in the United States is the George Eastman House, named for the founder of the now much diminished Eastman Kodak, and the oldest museum dedicated to photography. In 1932, faced with severe disabilities, Eastman chose to end his own life, leaving behind a legendarily brief suicide note, now viewable in his namesake museum’s permanent collection. “My work is done, why wait?” Eastman wrote; could there be a more chillingly upbeat assessment of death?

The month before I started in art school, Kodak announced the discontinuation of traditional black-and-white photographic paper. The company’s inexorable slide into insolvency over the last decade was a protracted comedy of corporate errors, with each misstep launching several more, a latticework of insurmountable loss forming with each futile restructuring. Following this saga, I found it to be one of the more depressing episodes in the recent history of photography; in Kodak’s unraveling, I see my own failures reflected back at me. Try as I might to justify the upgrade, I know that for my purposes, there is little that a new camera could do that my long-outmoded one cannot. I see in Kodak’s failure of vision the fate of many of the things I care very much about — a broader, dark renunciation of possibility.

Burley’s photographs are laden with the latent potential that compels many to take their own, an analog security that can’t easily be replicated. In one image of a former Agfa film factory storage room, huge master spools of film are stacked upon racks, awaiting their final coating and cutting before being packaged as 35mm rolls. The spools stretch out into a florescent-lit horizon, making clear the incredible capacities once required to supply our unlimited desire to capture images on film. A part of me that pines for unchecked progress can dismiss these documents of a world that is rapidly being lost, and firmly place my faith in the perfected vision of cloud-powered futurity. There is another part, though, that finds such collectivism abhorrent, a terrifying disfiguration of placid continuity. This part longs to know the final destination of those prospective rolls of film, through chemical transformation, and it’s the part that believes in a tangible reality, and discards the well-marketed replacement.

The post For All Digital Futures appeared first on artcritical.

1. The New York Times, “Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar,” by Cara Buckley, July 19, 2012 — Yeah, most of the places you can go to socialize in New York are way too loud. Maybe I’m just getting old and I’ve blown out my ear canals with too much loud, bad music. But if we go out somewhere, I’d like to be able to hear you talking to me from across the table — not just the person I’m rubbing shoulders with. I’ve got an agenda to share with people and I want to be able to hear them when they tell me why I’m mistaken about something. I can’t learn anything if all I hear is a dull mix of some sentimental and ironic pop songs from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s blared at me at 120 db.

2. 3AM Magazine, “romanticism, punk rock, and the importance of rim jobs,” Andrew Stevens in conversation with Brandon Stosuy, March 4, 2007 — Brandon Stosuy is pretty rad. I like the way he writes a lot. There’s a bunch of cultural flotsam from the 1980s that’s in the process of being rediscovered, saved, found, or retained. That stuff is really important since there was a lot of artistic and cultural development going on then that we’re just now trying to think about a little more clearly. (Koons is an OK example of this, though there are also far, far better ones, like Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler and Richard Prince). Stosuy has shown a pretty cool dedication to that excavation work. So thanks, Brandon Stosuy, for helping with that whole thing.

3. Vice Magazine, “KOMP-LAINT DEPT.: TRUST NEVER SLEEPS,” by Bob Nickas, February 5, 2014 — I’d read anything Bob Nickas writes, whether it’s an essay on art and culture or a grocery list, or some graffiti he scrawled on the wall of a public toilet. He wouldn’t do that, maybe. He writes a column for Vice and I feel like he’s doing some of the best writing of his long, totally illustrious career. I also haven’t read this or his current essay yet, but I would strongly suggest everyone read and re-read and re-read “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, Part II,” “To be Read (Once Every Two Years),” and “Why. I Hate. Graffiti.”

4. sweettomb.com — This is the website of Trinie Dalton, who (full disclosure) was my thesis advisor. She’s absolutely awesome and makes really cool zines. Pick up MYTHTYM, Baby Geisha, and Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is.

5. seanjosephpatrickcarney.com — After reading Walter Benjamin and other cultural criticism-type stuff for a long time, SJPC and his Social Malpractice project finally explained that stuff in a way that made way more sense than a grad school seminar discussion and was also more entertaining than a grad school seminar discussion.

6. skeptoid.com — I volunteer copyediting services to Skeptoid’s blog. I like the science and skepticism community’s encouragement of questioning, thinking about rhetoric, doubting and thinking systematically. I do better when I’m suspicious of my own preconceptions and assumptions. Plus also science is very, very cool.

7. The “Egyptian hieroglyphs” entry on Wikipedia — I like hanging out in the Egyptian wing at the Met. And the history of how this stuff was used and later decoded is really cool. Maya hieroglyphics is also incredibly interesting and weird, and prizes inventiveness.

8. Slate Magazine, “Why Joseph is my Hero,” by David Plotz, June 1, 2006 — I tried again to read the whole Bible. I got into Exodus. It can just be so boring. I’m reading another novel right now and will possibly return to the Bible when I’m done. David Plotz, the former editor at Slate, wrote a blog about his thoughts, reactions, and curiosities while reading the Bible. He’s an atheist, but he takes the book earnestly and generously, and his insights are very cool.

9. The “Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” entry on Wikipedia — This was a landmark lawsuit about the teaching of evolution in schools. My cousin works at a non-profit, the NCSE, that consulted with the plaintiffs and provided some of the best arguments for the difference between intelligent design as a conceit and evolution as a theory that’s scientifically demonstrable. In the arts we tend to abuse the word “theory.” What we usually mean by that word is a hypothesis or a proposition or a description. What it means in the hard sciences is very different. Here’s a good definition, from Wikipedia: “A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. A scientific theory is differentiated from a hypothesis in that a theory must explain actual observations.” Also, as you might be able to tell from this list, I use Wikipedia all the time and hope to someday be able to state unequivocally that it rivals the achievement of the Library of Alexandria. Fingers crossed.

10. Common Spark Collective, FAQ — I’m sad to say that I’ll likely never contribute to this project, even though I find it really intriguing. These people are mapping “the shared national and cultural resources we inherit and pass around.” That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. It’s an enormous project. I’d like to see what they do with it. The commons is one of the best assets we have in a free society, and recognizing what they are (both as cultural products and as shared spaces) is one step towards thinking about what we can do with them, how we relate to one another, and what our socio-cultural environment is. I found out about this project from a bumper sticker.

11. SolveForX, “Power from Nuclear Waste,” by Leslie Dewan, February 10, 2014 — Most of what we call nuclear waste and store in places like Yucca Mountain, where it will remain dangerous and toxic for thousands of years, is actually unused nuclear fuel. About 90% of the available material in nuclear fuel goes unused, so then it just gets dumped in the middle of nowhere. So, but, Dewan says that technology that allows for more complete consumption of the available fuel in the uranium pellets that nuclear power plants use has existed since the 1950s or so. It’s safer, produces a much shorter half-life (hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands), and is more energy efficient. Plus it requires smaller installations that can exist at current nuclear plants or that can be set up all over the place, which means that any given site is much less dangerous than something like Fukushima (which was a very old and more dangerous model than the ones currently being built). Look: nuclear power is kind of scary, I get that. But the accidents that we’ve seen have all been preventable and aren’t very likely with the current nuclear power facilities that can be built. It’s a way, way, way, way better source of energy than gas, oil, or coal (which, coal, by the way, dumps enormously larger amounts of radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power ever will).

There are also some cool articles from Slate that explain the attempts by various committees to figure out how to warn future generations how horrifically dangerous nuclear waste will remain. It’s a really hard project, since we have no idea what people will be like thousands of years from now. We don’t know what language they’ll speak or what various signs will mean to them. It’s like trying to figure out how to make a Rosetta stone that will retain its communicative clarity easily and effectively for dozens of centuries.

12. Giacometti: A Biography, by James Lord — Lord quoted Giacometti as saying, “In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.” Amen, man. That cat is better for people than any painting. And despite their flaws, this and Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait are amazing depictions of the artist.

13. The Bloggess, “Women Who Are Ambivalent about Women Who Are Against Women Against Feminism,” by Jenny Lawson, July 21, 2014 — Jenny Lawson’s a good writer and I really dig this essay on the difficulty that reactionary forces have imposed on disrupting structural inequalities and outright bigotry.

The post This Project is Experiencing Some Delays: Noah Dillon’s Deferred Reading List appeared first on artcritical.

Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Tumblr  

Here’s a snapshot of my bookmarks on Wed., Sept. 4th, 2013. This feels essential, but I know there’s still a ton, a terabyte (well it’s the web, so a megabyte) I’ve left out, as I don’t expect, or want, that you endlessly scroll and click.  I’ll preface this with a quote by William Gibson: “The Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.” Vive la Net!

Sites/Blogs/Tumblrs

Animal, ArtFCity, Artcritical & Hyperallergic  — aaah, I had to include AAAH, these essential art blogs. I know you all know them, but did you know when you search for AAAH what you get is this…?

Art & Tech/ Net Art

the creators project —- Art, Film, Design, all manifest through innovative digital means

cloaque — You’ve got to love this digital landfill!

netartnet  — Exhibition archive and directory of you know, that art you watch on screen and interact with

further field — Around since 1997, as arts communities on the internet were taking form

@wwtxt — wwwtxt (1988-94) If you were alive and old enough to use a computer in 1988-94, this is a great twitter resource for blasting you back to the past: “Revisit the early Internet through real online conversations ” If you weren’t alive back then, well, find out what people had to say when there were dialing up and using DOS commands.

The Geeky Singularity is Near

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence — Where I go to augment my cyborg intelligence.

Geeks Are Sexy — My wishful thinking resource.

grrls and gUrls and badass women in the arts

Janestown by Jane Harris — “Where naval-gazing meets the cancan”  Her latest random musings include taking up for sassy sparkly fairies (Tinkerbell) and Chelsea Manning

A Cups  — Only a 10 episode podcast produced by artists Ann Hirsch and Angela Washko this summer — such great conversations on feminism, pop culture and art. I hope there will be an encore when they’re both in the same state again! (full disclosure they interviewed me for one of their episodes after taking me out for drinks.I was the loquacious one)

Pop Culture Pirate aka Elisa Kreisinger — Nobody remixes Mad Men into feminists and Real Housewives into lesbians better.

KEP Projects — Coming to Chelsea. Keep your eye on Kianga Ellis

@tartnyc  tART collective ?— A support twitter feed for women in the arts

C-Monster aka Carolina Miranda — Her mission is to “cover the cultural industrial complex and its many, many by-products” and that’s a real mission accomplished. Follow her on twitter too @cmonstah

More Art & Culture Smarts

Bad At Sports — Although I have been known to run marathons, I’m still bad at team sports and like the art talk here.

DIS Magazine — A multimedia arts magazine (understatement)

Ed Winkleman — I actually considered just making a vine video “appropriation” of Ed’s “websites you should know” column. A lot of its there with insightful commentary on a host of topics.

Miscellaneous

@everyword — I love words (I used to read my real-life physical dictionary on planes and such). “Everyword” is tweeting EVERY word in the English language!

Stumble Upon — A guilty pleasure. My search is always set to Bizarre/Oddities.

Old Time Radio — Yeah, that’s right I’m a digital artist, alas I’m addicted to listening to Old Time Radio on the web. Favorites are Sam Spade, Johnny Dollar, The Falcon, The Fat Man, and Candy Matson (one female detective in the mix!)

Artists To Check Out on Tumblr and Vimeo

Anthony Antonellis  —  It’s been said: “The networked practice of Anthony Antonellis pokes holes in the boundaries between the Internet and the Artworld” and more importantly he just got an RFID chip inserted in his hand!

Faith Holland — Faith fits in bad ass gUrl list above too!

Man Bartlett — THE Social Media Artist (Check him on twitter and vine too, just no Facebook)

Art People To Check Out on Twitter

@magdasawon  — The ultimate “Postmistress”

@JohnPowersUS  — I miss Starwarsmodern, but John Powers has a lot to say and he’s saying it. Check him out.

@Powhida — “Fabricating things.” always with a sharp cultural critique.

Facebook Faves

https://www.facebook.com/jerry.saltz — I know, I know everyone loves him

https://www.facebook.com/marina.a.galperina — Marina is a Russian-American ART FORCE!

paper.li

Smart Ass by Jaded Ibis Press

The Art-Smarts Daily by Katarina Wong

Google+

Philip Hartigan is still there and staying active!

Linked In

ah I’m not really coming up with anyone here… but <3 the endorsements. I’m endorsing “you” back every chance I get.

APPS

Okay, I’m not adding hyperlinks for apps but check these people out for 1 to 15 seconds…

Vine 

Heartasarena

JiaJia Fei

Aaron Zimmerman

Jayson Musson

Instagram

YaelKanarek (her project High Performance Gear at Bitforms Gallery #sanctifythyself)

dylanschenker

alex_mcleod_

jonmeasures

CARLA GANNIS has exhibited in solo and group art exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has shown at Pablo’s Birthday Gallery and Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, as well as The Boulder Museum of Art in Boulder, Colorado and TZR Galerie in Dusseldorf, Germany. Gannis is the recipient of a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts, an Emerge 7 Fellowship from the Aljira Art Center, and a Chashama AREA Visual Arts Studio Award. Gannis holds an MFA in Painting from Boston University. She is currently Assistant Chair of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.

The post The Geeky Singularity is Near: Carla Gannis Shares Her Bookmarks appeared first on artcritical.

1. Aurora Borealis from Abisko National Park in Sweden. Turn off the sound.

2.  Photos by the Hubble

3. Snowflakes.

4. Angelo Plessas’ Mirage Machines. (Hint: cursor)

5. This video by Steve Roggenbuck is as offensive as it is gorgeous. You will not regret watching the whole thing.

6.  Community Weblog, kinda like wiki for blogs

7. Occupy Wall Street, which is still active. Occupy Sandy was and remains an amazing mutual aid movement helping those devastated by Sandy. The Rolling Jubilee is a very interesting debt elimination experiment. Keep you eyes peeled for more projects to come.

9. Vi Hart’s Youtube channel.  This is actually one of my favorite bookmarks and I go back to it regularly.  Vi Hart is a smart, sassy, super creative math grrrrl. I love everything she does.

10, Facebook!  Everyone’s Facebook experience is dictated by the “friends” they manage to collect. From activists to artists to critics to writers to eccentrics, these people are not posting kitty photos or reporting on their laundry. Go ahead and friend them.

Jenna Pope, Photoactivist

Jerry Saltz, art critic

Damien Crisp, Artist/Writer/Activist

(Also by Damien Crips http://dthtxt.wordpress.com/)

Baratunde Thurston, writer,

Dina Seiden, Writer/Performance Artist

Oliver Wasow, Artist

Simon Beck, Snow artist

The post Snowflakes, Auroras and Facebook Friends: Bookmarked… appeared first on artcritical.

I live in the world between art and technology, using sensors, devices and self-tracking iPhone apps to hand-build art installations and objects from the numerical patterns captured from measuring sleep, weight, travels, mood, computer usage and most any personal item that can be quantified. And the truth is, I run a background tracking app on my laptop that measures everything, and I could do a search and tell you exactly what I’ve opened this week…but that is simply too weird to share.

And anyway, asking what you’re reading on your electronic devices is like stealing a look into a friend’s medicine cabinet when you use the bathroom during a dinner party: a whole ‘nother peek into your life.

That said, right now, on my kindle is 2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly, and although the writing itself is horrible, the topics are curious and fresh. And you’ll find Science News and MIT Technology Review. Sadly, no art pubs.

Daily in my email, I read Mike Allen’s Playbook from Politico, and open it quickly no matter what else is happening.  I stay on top of the QuantifiedSelf.com as well as Hyperallergic.com, probably my favorite arts-blog (in addition to artcritical!) with massive coverage of New York arts. Hyperallergic relieves my sense that I’m constantly missing something cause I’m too busy to get to a gallery show or open-studio weekend. More like having a super-smart opinionated art friend keep me in the loop.

I’m reading more and more on my iphone, curiously longer reads than on my laptop. The New Yorker on my iPhone gets read almost cover-to-cover on my phone. New favorite is TNW Magazine. Also reading The Magazine, Appville and have apps on my phone and check them at least couple times a day for – The Verge, Tech Crunch, Politico and nytimes.com. Watch Rachel Maddow on my iphone too. Just started using Summly and the interface is incredibly good, am guessing they’ll aggregate more – but it’s new, and content feels a little thin. Oh, and never miss weekly TWIT podcast on my iPod.

Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to investigate the nature of pattern and the mind. She completed an MFA from the New York Studio School, and now studies each summer at NYU’s ITP technology and arts program. Formerly an executive in high technology, she also holds an MBA from the University of Southern California. Using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores self-tracking and human patterns.  Frick has been awarded residencies by the UT Neuroscience Imaging Research Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is the winner of the Austin Critics’ Table Outstanding Artist Award in 2012. Frick has published articles in The Huffington Post, Austin Statesman, Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, and has appeared on NPR’s Arts Eclectic. She has exhibited at Robert Steele Gallery in New York and Edward Cella in Los Angeles.

Archipelago: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artists-in-Residence 2012, curated by Kaegan Sparks is at the Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street at Washington Street, January 17 to 27, 2013

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Yes, we’re all reading non-stop mashups of images and ideas on Facebook. I like the immediacy of the scroll and the occasional real-time discussions that take place—these days, mostly about politics—but when it comes to viewing art and reading about it, short of the gallery or museum experience, I still prefer blogs. For this installment of Bookmarked, I have selected four blogs I visit regularly, all different from one another in form and content, but each one deeply satisfying.

Henry Samelson’s Buddy of Work has an interesting premise: inviting artists to submit “an example of their primary work alongside an example of their peripheral (buddy) work.” The format allows us to see the connections in an artist’s work, a window that’s pried open a bit wider by the words each artist shares about the pairing. Gelah Penn shows an installation and a work on paper; Lori Ellison, a drawing and a poem; Katherine Bradford, a small oil of a stack of syrupy pancakes and the same subject painted large on a construction wall in DUMBO. The viewing is addictive. Karl Bielik pairs a chromatic gestural abstraction with a moody black-and-white video of his band, Lark, while Emily Auchincloss’s painting and potholder pairing is a lark, sharing an unexpected compositional thread. Over 70 artists have participated since Samuelson started the blog early this year.

A different kind of pairing take place in Chris Ashley’s long-running Look See. The Oakland-based artist alternates his HTML drawings—digital minimalist compositions created by computer code and made for viewing on a monitor—with photographs he has taken in his travels. I find Ashley’s unpretentious views of nature personal and quirky, but truth to tell, it’s the color-saturated HTML drawings I log on to see.

Mira Schor’s A Year of Positive Thinking, now in its second year, is wordier and thinkier than the average blog. Feminism looms large, intertwined with politics and art. To read it properly you need time, but you will be rewarded with long pieces on Louise Bourgeois, for instance, or a three-part consideration of cave paintings inspired by Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Don’t take forever to get there, though; Schor’s “year” may be drawing to a close. “I intend to continue for a while longer,” she writes, “although other writing projects I’ve been germinating may claim my attention.”

With art coverage on the decline in conventional media, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s The Artblog is a model of how to write about a city’s art scene. The city is Philadelphia. Fallon and Rosof, both artists, along with a staff that includes art historian Andrea Kirsh and a number of contributing writers, offer reviews, picks, features, interviews and podcasts. The format, with seven opening-paragraph teasers on the home page, is now more magazine than blog, a testament to the big need this online publication is filling. If you’re planning a trip to Philly, this is your guide. But you may want to log on even if you’re not headed that way, just because it’s a good read—and there’s plenty of international coverage in there, too.

Unlike the rolling queue of social media, blogs offer their content for the long haul, archived and accessible. There’s context. I can linger.

Joanne Mattera is a widely exhibited painter who works in a chromatically resonant and reductive style she calls “lush minimalism.”  She is represented in New York City by DM Contemporary. Her work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, (Connecticut), and the Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey); at the latter it can be seen in “Patterns, Systems, Structures:

Abstraction in American Art,” curated by Gail Stavitsky, through early 2013. In her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions in New York City and wherever she travels, including the Miami art fairs in December. Mattera divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.

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As an artist I am most drawn these days to reading blogs of other working artists.

In the painter Paul Corio’s “No Hassle at the Castle”, a ‘weblog on painting, horse racing and other subjects’ (the other subjects being mostly jazz and politics) I feel I am in a conversation with an informed and critical mind. Recently, Corio came to grips with Romanticism, in response to Mark Stone’s “Henri Art Magazine”, which has been preoccupied with ‘Romanticism in America” – perhaps the single most enterprising and enlightening analysis I’ve encountered in years on this subject –  one which lurks in the background of every artist’s thinking. Stone writes, for example, about DeKooning, and why he was different, especially at the end, from the other Abstract Expressionists – that his work was both transcendent and physical. More lately, Stone on Courbet is something every painter should read.

I’ve also encountered “Immaterial Culture”, by the pseudonymous d.richmond; this, again, is writing from the heart.  An artist like d. richmond writes out of a need to know, for his work.  Sharon L. Butler’s “Two Coats of Paint” and Joanne Mattera’s “Art Blog” are two others I frequently look at.

What sets apart the artist’s blogs is their earnestness and faith.  Critics analyze and dissect, but do they write from the heart, as artists do?  Artists may wish to promote themselves, but in writing they are usually working, and thinking.

It is the spirit of inquiry that sets the artists apart: they strive to understand, and the blogs give us the conversation, the searching coming to grips that once animated the New York scene when everyone lived below 14th Street.

Artists who write write for a purpose. They may be working out their own trajectories, erratic and capricious, but, mostly, they are writing out of necessity. This is a big part of what now actually moves art along; in my view, we need it.

George Hofmann is a painter who lives and works in Albany, NY.  He grew up in New York, trained at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste in Nuremberg, Germany, and taught for many years at Hunter College.  A former director of the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation, Hofmann has served on the board of Art Omi and as a visual arts juror for SUNY/NYFA.  He maintains the website ArtistsResearchGroup.com, on the history of the Hunter College Art Department.

http://georgehofmann.com/

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