Structural Patterns

Can City from Studio Swine on Vimeo.

This is a brilliant project by art/design collective Studio Swine (Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves). With so much waste and stuff in the world, do we really need to keep producing more? This project recycles waste – used vegetable oil and aluminum cans to create new aluminum objects via a mobile foundry. It’s an inspiring project executed in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In 2012, as I worked on an installation for the New York Hall of Science titled “a geography of being | una geografia de ser,” I enlisted the help of undocumented immigrant activists Cesar and Vishal. I asked them to help me conceptualize a video game that would portray some of the experiences commonly felt by immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. We met a few times over food and had extended discussions. I found some of their experiences and observations so enlightening that I have been meaning to post excerpts from the interviews that others may find helpful and insightful.

Below is one excerpt concerning day to day fears that they have lived with; fears that have been confronted by becoming activists and making their status public.

Other topics include assimlation/de-assimilation, going to college, romantic and familial love. Listen to all the interviews here.

Artist Duke Riley is a pigeon guy and for his recent project, he worked as a pigeon trainer in the Florida Keys. As the New York Times Article “Avian Artistry, With Smuggled Cigars” states “He started the training in Florida last year with 50 pigeons; 23 went on the first mission, this summer. Only 11 returned.” (The NY Times video is well worth watching.) The mission for the pigeons was a small political intervention… they served as documentarians or Cuban Cohiba cigar smugglers. Some of the pigeons carried small cameras that captured their travel between the Florida Keys and Cuba others travelled from Florida with empty harnesses to return with cigars.

The pigeon project’s artifacts are installed in the first gallery of MegnanMetz until 25 of January 2014, where you can see the pigeon coop with the pigeons still living in it, pigeon paintings, pigeon mosaics made from sea shells and videos that the pigeons made as well as other artifacts.

The second gallery presents documentation of a collaborative performance along the canals of Zhujiajiao in China that re-stages a legendary race of the Chinese zodiac. A projected wall video shows the race and along another wall are mounted animal masks that performers wore to represent the various creatures of the Chinese zodiac. On the wall opposite from the video is a large scale drawing capturing the legend of the Chinese zodiac.

Alex Prager employed a soundstage in Hollywood to create her latest set of works. Near the street entrance hang beautiful large scale color photographs and toward the back is an immersive three-channel video installation that the prints appear to be taken from. As the press release describes the video installation

the film opens with a series of confessional monologues in which characters from the crowd scenes poignantly relate their own stories and insights, such as childhood memories, recurring nightmares and personal revelations. Suddenly, the scene changes and an orchestra strikes as a sea of people flood into view. The iconic heroine then leads the viewer on a journey through the crowd wordlessly expressing a range of emotions including isolation, sadness, confusion, curiosity and anxiety. The juxtaposition of character monologues and the frenetic crowd scene poignantly illustrates that within a swirling sea of strangers, there are countless individual stories and unique experiences unfolding.

The concept is striking and the video could easily be longer by portraying more individuals in the beginning portion. In fact the small number of portraits at the beginning undermines the concept. I believe that commonly, individuals living in dense urban environments desire to peak into the lives of others. That is to have the opportunity to observe the day to day lives of ones neighbors or the person sitting across one in the subway. This has been a common motif in films as characters use binoculars or telescope to spy on the neighbors.

The power of bird’s eye view of a multitude of individuals flowing in a public space that is presented in the video would be enhanced if the viewer begins to identify individuals from the portraits.

One other element that I’m critical off is the need to stylize the individuals in the video. The people in portraits were highly made up to the extent that they seem to represent stereotypes. This exaggeration reduces the gravitas that the work may otherwise carry. Perhaps by evoking stereotypes, the artist is reflecting on how mediated our lives are or that our lives are but a fiction.

Soon, I’ll be launching an RSS feed featuring illustration of famous news broadcasters such as Barbara Walters. Each news broadcast personality will be set against the icon or colors of the corporation they worked for.

Artist Monica Johnson created the online graphic novel “The Adventures of Dorrit Little” to bring some transparency to the mechanisms of the student debt system in the United States. According to the About page, the average undergraduate student loan debt is $27,000 and the average graduate student loan debt range is $30,000 to $120,000. This country has effectively created an educated population in indentured servitude.

The graphic novel is a quick read, however in eight chapters, the artist presents a concise and clear history of the origins of the student debt system and why it continues to prosper. If you live with student debt it is a very worthwhile read! Go to The Adventures of Dorrit Little by Monica McKelvey Johnson!

Through the BOMBLOG, I just launched a series of compositions titled “Helsinki Web Sketches” that combine photos that I took during a residency at HIAP with WebGL code using three.js, rotoscope animations and video. Interact with the pages and click through them to see the various sketches.

The Helsinki Web Sketches are designed for modern desktop browsers that support WebGL.

Play the NSA Game by choosing which word is a “Terrorist Threat or Harmless Phrase?” an NSA word guessing game. You will see two words, one is listed in the NSA’s watch list, the other is not, can you guess which one is not listed? The two words are set against a blue sky background with puffy clouds, flying birds, green grass and a nice tree. However, every time that you guess wrong a hidden image below the natural landscape is revealed, a dark image of a surveillance society.

Four wrong guesses and the natural landscape is entirely gone, instead a Google search window appears with your bad picks filled into the search field… Click search and your IP may now be added to the NSA watch list as you search for key terms on the NSA database.

The project is a second of a series by artist Grayson Earle who a few weeks ago created NSA Haiku Generator that does just what the title describes. With both of these projects the artist is problematizing the fact that the NSA maintains such a list and the list itself. The games portray how inane the list is and contribute to their pointlessness by generating more searches with these terms by anyone playing the games.

See a physical installation by the artist titled “NSA Lights” at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute this Saturday, December 14th, 2013 located at 47-49 East 65th Street, New York as part of Hunter’s Integrated Media Arts MFA exhibition.

At Hunter College’s Film & Media Studies program, I teach an introductory production course in visual communication in which I cover graphic design basics, image and text composition, typography basics as well as an introduction to data visualization… The course is a medley of current topics related to visual communication. One of the lectures focuses on layout and the use of the golden ratio in art, design and architecture. As Euclid described the golden ratio: “A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the less.” We look at examples dissected by Kimberly Elam in her book Geometry of Design. We apply shapes such as the pentagon, star pentagram, the Fibonacci spiral to historical graphics such as the work of the Stenberg Brothers…

Since I cover this sort of material in teaching, I was struck by the work of Claudia Wieser upon entering her October 2013 exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, NY. Generally, I prefer work that is socially and/or politically engaging, but these galleries presented such a beautiful twist on design elements that I found myself in a visual funhouse. Work is presented throughout the gallery on the walls and floor, not as individual pieces, but rather constellations that speak to one another. The individual elements to the exhibition are simple – geometric shapes cut into mirrors, tiles or wood, graphic elements layered on to classical Western art. She seems to effectively extract the geometric design formulas applied to traditional Western sculpture and painting and then reapply them as sculptural elements to create new visualizations.

Artist and IMA MFA candidate Grayson Earle has just launched the NSA Haiku Generator. Set against a GIF-style rainbow sky background is a haiku composed of NSA watch words. The use of any of these 845 words or character combinations over internet communications can land one on the NSA’s terrorist watch list. Grayson Earle edited the list down to some 300 terms to construct haikus that poke fun at what seems like a ridiculously sweeping effort to construct a flawed terrorist watch list. As the artist states:

This web app uses the NSA’s database of terms which can land you as a suspected terrorist if you use them in electronic communication. Rather than being all ‘doom and gloom,’ I decided to make a game out of it. I’ve assigned each phrase a syllable count which enables you to create random haikus out of hundreds of words.

Click the haiku text to generate new haikus and then share them over various social media, to make the NSA list even more pointless.

The information page to the site also presents links to organizations that are taken a serious stance against the NSA monitoring of our electronic communications:
Fight For The Future
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Stop Watching.Us and the October 26th Rally in DC