glass cube

this is just nice
more info

when traveling to asia

fly ANA, it's cheap and fantastic! the food is great and the uniforms are professionally designed

new work from new rafael

www.jellotime.com

no mfa as mfa?

gavin turk famously for his mfa piece made a plaque dedicated to the memory of gavin turk memorializing the space in which gavin turk did his work. because he just made an empty room with a plaque, the RCA went into heated discussion about whether this is deserving of an mfa. half the professors wanted to fail him because he did nothing, the other half wanted to give him his mfa and said if they deny gavin turk his mfa, they will have to say no to others who did get their mfa because it would make a double standard.

now, the fact he didn't get his mfa and the controversies involved really gave him a kick start in his career. maybe controversial figures in the history of art was kicked out of an institution of some kind where their radical ideas were unaccepted.

now, can i turn not getting an mfa into art so i can get an mfa?
....

airplane!

i'm watching airplane!, you know, the 80s comedy. it's nice to look at a time where people still smoked on planes, kids can go up to cockpits, and the only thing people feared were the bad food

this is a nice way of saying something i hope most people know

"when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." Robert Pirsig

i'd also like to add: new delusions are always called cults first then religions

narnia vs. compass

i think it's funny how there's such an anger at the golden compass movie from the public because it sends a message about atheism to kids. but kids get force fed by religion all the time at every turn. the blame can not be placed upon the religious advocates really, it's just us atheists don't protest. but who cares, the more controversy, the more people pay attention to something. i think i should stop complaining about bad art, cause it just helps bad art.

i am a wiki-addict

i keep wasting time reading pointless articles about everything. you know that natural curiosity for new information? well, since the internet, all the information in the world are now at your fingertips. who care if it's all user generated and you can't trust anything, just reading small summaries about every interesting subject you want is just a click away. ultimate satisfaction for the curious with a severe case of ADD. who wants to learn in depth when you can learn a little in a short amount of time and then move onto something else that's interesting. that constant high you get from learning something new, just a little, a fact here, a fact there. soon, you realize you spent the last week doing nothing but reading wikipedia and following links to links to links . learning about how everything works and is connected. it is the collective knowledge of the world all summarized and cataloged, footnoted, and indexed.

so because of this... i plead... does anyone have any rideline, i am an addict and i really need help

a little reprive from art

so i've been noticing certain things about women that have been in my life lately, this might be true of all women, but since i do not exist as two separate persona, i can never confirm this.

you know the age old story, the bad boy comes to sweep away the good girl and they ride off into the sunset? the bad boy is corruption and the girl as purity and the corruption invades the pure (i sound like mary douglas now) but the corrupt is titillating, not just because of it's erotic nature of transgressions, but it offers the potential to clean the corruption, correct the wrong, strive towards perfection. we have such a strong culture of needing to clean the unclean, cleanliness is godliness right? we associate the polluted with the demonic and the clean with the angelic.
so if this is true, the girl then goes with the guy also as an urge to fix him to what is established to be normal, even though it is the transgression which caused the attraction in the first place. if this isn't common place, please correct me, but for me, i just see so many people trying to correct the dirtiness of others, striving for them to achieve some higher normalness that society dictates.
(as stated in a case which an african american woman was asked to change her hair to a more straighter style thus being more inline with a standard of aesthetic more representational of her working environment, a standard look for european woman hairstyles, but not african. thus pointing out the standard of normal beauty is completely western centric)
this eventually lead people to be unhappy, because we try to constantly correct each other.
now this isn't what i wanted to talk about, it was just a blurt.
i find it in some women i know, especially once case in particular, the reverse occurs. it is the holy man who is attracted to demonic vixen. now, i am not the holy man i speak of, i'm just talking about the people that are attracted by women i associate with. i am constantly hearing about these guys who thinks there is a "good side" to them, instead of appreciating them for who they are. these men think inside the tough exterior, there's a fluffy inside that is all good and nice and they are the holy men who can unlock the angel inside. too bad they soon find out what is inside is probably much worse than the outer persona (and we all wear our masks everyday) thus they get burned when they get too close. but there's one benefit from it, i hear about them and i get a good laugh....
haha

i really wish i understood french

for two specific reasons:

Berlioz & Melissa Theuriau

watch pushing daisies

ok, i actually really like this show, it's too awkward to not be enchanting

it's like amelie + sherlock holmes
i recommend it

jeff wall, rineke dijkstra, olafur eliasson, and more

currently, the SFMOMA has some wonderful pieces on display, it's really worth the 7 dollar student entrance fee. I want to point out some high lights

when you first come in, olafur eliasson drops a bombin the form of a wildly swinging fan attached to a secured rope. the simple fan, with no other robotic controls, just swings beautiful and wildly above your head, so close it tickles your hair.

his frozen car piece, your mobile experience, is such bullshit. i know he did it for the connections and the money. it's just bullshit. it pisses me off to even talk about it

his beauty piece, with a wall of water vapors pouring down is, of course, beautifulas you walk through the mist, the rainbow created by the fine water and a strong incandescent light really talks to the brilliance of what he does in seeing the beautiful in the simple

oh, his photographs suck, i mean, to show them in the same building as jeff wall or rineke dijkstra is just embarrassing.

the only other piece i really liked of his was the yellow mono spectrum room, a room completely filled with a narrow yellow light spectrum light so that everything you see becomes black and white. this is magic, but it's entertaining magic. i think if olafur were to become a magician, he should call him self, the magnificent eliasson. hell, i'd pay to see that

i was actually quite disappointed at the pieces, i liked his other pieces i've seen before so much more. the other pieces in the sfmoma that i don't write about are more mirror reflection pieces that really speak to his obsession with reflectivity and the infinite.

Jeff wall, well, it's jeff wall, and jeff wall speaks for himself, there's no reason to talk about it, or show you photographs of it, because reproductions of jeff wall pieces just, by far, do it no justice, so you have to see it for yourself to experience it.

rineke dijkstra... wow, her girl on the piece, to see it in person, is quite amazing
it's just amazing, she photographers her subjects while they wait to be photographed, and the images are just absolutely amazing. this one in particular, look at it for a bit, think, and see what the image reminds you of.
another bombshell is my personal favorite of all her work: the buzzclub, liverpool
a video of it can be found here
the piece just films people and what happens if you put a song on at a liverpool club, brilliant!

the douglas gordon show is ok, i like maybe 3 of his works alot, but only if you understand the video art people that preceded him cause it's mostly inside jokes.

joseph cornell... i just still don't get.

so yeah, great stuff
check it out

What is art

I had quite a severe discussion about this with someone who is absolutely not in the art related world today.

Some interesting discussion points:

what is art and what is not art? well, i guess this is the important question right? but isn't arguing whether something is art or not art just semantics? similarly to the argument of whether pluto is a planet or a dwarf planet. whether something is art or not does not change what it is, it does not make it any less of a thing or more. the label just allows a people to easily identify and categorize things around them. it's like trying to find a category for a non-existent idea (what is god? or what is sadness?). you just end up describe what is art by using art (like, how do you describe to a robot who does not know what happiness is without using arbitrary concepts that are so related to happiness that without experiencing happiness, one could never know). so thus, art is about art (recently i heard vasa use this phrase), is actually true! haha. art is everything that has been art before and discovering the new art.

ok, now that we established that arguing art is just semantics, then how do we deal with that knowledge? well, let's look at the institution of art. as with all disciplines, the people who are not in the discipline subscribe to the opinions of certain few who have been popularly elected (metaphorically) as filters of all that is in the discipline and those elected choose what to expose us to. these filters are curators, gallerists, and critics. just like the magazine SCIENCE or NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, we ask these people to filter the vastness of research and the new and ask them to tell us what, of all the discoveries, is really brilliant or great.

now with all institutes like this, there will be hesitation to radical new ideas. this is not new in the sciences or the art world. just as duchamp struggled against his peers to accept the fountain, galileo struggled against established perceptions. what always holds true is, this will change, and those who can not adapt get left behind. we are all here learning what has been discovered, and constantly discovering the new to either support or refute what we learned. this is just how progress works.

just like the sciences, art has an economic and political side. how do we judge good art? the same way good theories are judged: how influential are the ideas on the masses? when duchamp turned the urinal sideways and called it a fountain, if no one was influenced from this and art didn't change, it wouldn't be as important of a piece as it is now. thus, how much something is "art" is determined by how controversial it is. the more people talk, the more popular something is. i think this goes along with my saying: if everyone likes you work, you make good art, if everyone hates your work, you make bad art, if half of the people love your work, and the other hate, you make GREAT art. the more an art piece gets talked about the more interest it generates, the more fame, and thus the more value. if enough people follow the ideas behind the piece, then the piece becomes a classic, influential, and belongs in a museum for all to see and say: this is the point in time where everything changed.

i am new to this whole blog thing

how do people submit to feeds? how does that work? any other cool things can i add to my blog?

more importantly, does anyone even read this?

haha

can i paint media art?

wait, wait, wait.... wait....

wait...

if i can pay someone to paint something, and it is done all online, and i can make some bullshit with processing or something and have people paint it, is it still media art?

funny

Giant Robot VS Murakami

so i went to see both the murakami show and the giant robot show and they both taught me what to do and what not to do (i think we should all take at least these two things from each show we go see).

first murakami

i'm going to regurgitate some things the curator spoke about during the walk, so sorry if you have heard this before. his sculptures,the lonesome cowboy really connected with this whole american influence on japanese culture statement he is all about. look at the lasso of the cowboy the ejaculation makes. perfect statement. the other just doesn't have as strong of the same americanism (is jump rope american?). what a great subtle juxtaposition of such distinct semiotics!
The rest of the works are of similar strength, there's much better writing on them out there, i just wanted to point out this work because i still feels as an american, it is the strongest (i mean seriously people, unless your from akihabara, how well will you really understand the depth of the statement about otaku culture? i mean so many of his pieces have such strong asian references for semiotics that you just wouldn't understand it and would only appreciate the superficialness of the work.

ok, now for giant robot.

i will forgive them for 3 big things mainly because i'm sure they are new to this (for any other institute, this wouldn't be forgivable) 1. SPACE, all the works were soooooooo squashed together, the impressiveness of the work detracted from the placement. 2. STATEMENT, i mean, other than an assembly of works by people they like, i can't see much of a connection between the works. and i don't buy their statement about it being a show about asian american pop art, but more about that later. 3. WHO PUT A HOLE THROUGH SASHIE MASAKATSU'S WORK! wtf people, i was there at the opening, and this must have happened either before the opening or when they were setting up. you patch that shit up man! shit, he's the best one out of the entire lot of them!

ok, after all that, what really bugs me is, why is gary baseman in this show!his work is so based on american cartoons and his influence on asian artists is questionable at best! (they should have has kozyandan instead) i mean it's gary baseman! i know exactly how he got into the show and it is very gary baseman of him. but he started his illustration style and ideology way before japanese anime became big in the US (and i wouldn't put it past him for just saying he was influenced by it just to sell more paintings).

but in the end WHO CARES because it's giant robot, and they can put up anything they like, and that's so much cooler than just an art show. it's not about art, it's about what they like, and what they like defines so much of what asian american culture now that whatever they think influences asian american culture either has or will so the point is really mute!

haha

on a side note, did anyone spot the 16 short throw nec projectors that LV had for their storefront inside the show? you can not see a seam in the projection overlap area and they are all perfectly synced. it's quite impressive

Photography and the modernization of technology

i recently watched a bbc news report about the serious problem stock photographers are facing due to the large influx of non-professional photographers into the market of stock photography. armature photographers armed with a canon rebel and photoshop now can make stock photography and sell it with relative ease and thus relatively cheaply. what does this mean for stock photographers? their coveted profession is now disintegrating before their eyes and they will either have to do shoots that are either technically too impossible (thus creating a narrow market for the product) or conceptually much stronger. two things we really do need school for.

now why do i mention this, i think it's interesting. photographers in the past held onto the their world because the high costs involved in properly developing images and time so the average joe couldn't take 1000 shots in a month and learn what they went wrong and correct it. also, the large reliance on developing techniques to create spectacular colors and compositions was another monopolizing quality of the past. a simple person with a point and shoot just didn't have the necessary time or money to be shooting at such amounts or on such film.

then comes photoshop and digital cameras. these things replaced the cost of film, thus allowing everyone to shoot 1,000 per month (i think i once averaged 10,000 in one month) and pick out the good ones. they learn from this experience, and if something doesn't come out great, you don't need to learn proper dark room techniques anymore, a simple photoshop correction will do it (and no one really cares about it being "authentic", hell, you'll be lucky to see something that isn't photoshopped these days (i know, i used to work photoshopping models skinnier).

there's even online sites which allows amateur photographers to post up the photos they have taken and sell them. obviously in the future, stock video will go the same way, it's really just a matter of time and bandwidth.

now what does that mean? i think it points out the flaws of technological reliance and the strong need for conceptualization. no matter how cool you know how to engineer something, it will always eventually become ubiquitous. i think the projector is going to become this soon, so many artists are like, look, i can project something! (and i mean myself as well) and that's it. once projectors are cheaper and everywhere, no one will care anymore because everyone can make themselves.

this brings up a funny point my classmates have shared before, you know how alot of media art or digital art all look like screen savers? why not make then into screen savers and distribute them? as more prevalent the image of the piece as a screensaver, the more cheap the original will look and there's nothing the artist can really do about it. (it's like how ikea cheapen the look of minimalist furniture, which is another example of need for concepts and higher technical excellence due to technological development).

another solution i just realized is brand marketing, but that requires still a little conceptual work. i was thinking about how murakami can withstand the assault from the LARGE explosion of asian artists now all making cartoon styled work but with none of murakami's conceptual statements (THE GIANT ROBOT SHOW WAS SHIT). but illustrative style is still something technology can not emulate. photography is easy because you can photograph something that another photographer shoots, and the two can look very much alike (i mean, you won't be able to shoot a jeff wall simply because many of his things are so staged that it's too costly for the average person, but that's under superior technique+concept).

so photography is in trouble, unless you are graduated from some conceptual photography school or you photograph famous people (sam taylor wood). sculpture is still ok, form is still like illustration of painting, so it's safe as long as people don't find out about this service where you send a photograph of what you want painted to china and they send back a painting (to expedite this process, go here). with media art, everyone is subject to not only the problem of not being taken seriously as art, but also the progress of technology can put the amazing into the mundane quickly, just look at terravision (sorry joachim). but there's nothing wrong with that, people need to get over it and accept that this is the future. as artists, we are somehow above what everyday people can do and that is what gives us value. we must all adapt to progress. those who can't adapt die

Media Art that will never be Media Art

i hate media art, well, i hate what people consider media art. i mean, you see all these stupid projects that have use for them, USE, that has a purpose, god damn it, it just leaves the taste in your mouth that they intend to try to pawn it off to some company inorder to sell as a product or something (when in truth, the companies just come and steal the idea and sell it themselves). i recently had an encounter with a man at the STRP show, he asked me about my flowers piece. he asked whether the moaning was the only sound you can make the flowers speak in. i replied you can make it anything you want. he replied, why not just let anyone control the sound or change the sound to whatever they want. i said, options makes it a tool, no options makes it a statement. i think this says something very important about interactivity.

now for some art, this is tim hawkinson's piece EMOTER
the piece moves various photographic elements of randomly creating various expressions and viewers can't help but read into what they mean
how he communicates random is very interesting, i mean, it's so easy for programmers to write random() to create a random number. he interfaces it with a tv set gathering random tv signals which the viewer can see and uses that to control the faces. the tv is definitively random and uncontrollable for the viewer.
this is definitively media art, but you will never learn about it from any media art conferences or shows. and, ok personal opinion, this kicks so much ass, way more than any media art pieces out there.

look, Gundam!

this is the hand of god by....
by.....
Freerk Wieringa
that's the guy
it's a big gigantic hand that moves and can do the finger
instant audience and newspaper favorite
but other than that
it's total shit! (i even told a newspaper reporter that)
i mean, the idea of an enlarged hand of god has been around a long time, and probably most beautifully rendered by michaelangelo. what does a moving one do? add more reality to it? it just looks like he sawed off the hand of a gundam and displayed it. i mean, what's the point of making something that will eventually become common place? just wait a few years and the robot masters will be back and enslave us all, when that happens, a big gigantic robot hand won't look too out of place

i am too sad to tell you, really

oh, i never talked about why this is named this at all.
i am too sad to tell you is a piece by bas jan ader
one of his best, maybe his best best
it involves a man, who uncontrollably starts to cry, so painful and hard, that you can not help but feel the painrene daalder is coming out with a documentary on him

it was the inspiration for the www.iwanttogooutwithyou.com piece

I promise better

ok, i need to post more interesting things, and not about what i do, about what others do

i'll start by talking about rafael rozendaal

this is his work
he is just, in my opinion, the best of the neen stars

as you know, neen is what moved me to make my websites
rafael is what made me not care
ha
check out all his works
www.newrafael.com

Just returned from STRP

I have returned from the land of Bas Jan, flowers, and bike lanes. I stayed at the Benno Hotel, this little hostel type hotel attached to a restaurant|bar run by hot blonde waitresses.
The room was annoyingly small, not small small, to the point where it is ridiculously small, but big enough of a small where it's just annoying and not comical.and for some reason, the room had 3 remotes, yes, 3 remotes for the tv...
go figureI got to the show and was shocked that they painted the box the wrong color. It was neon green! ok, it wasn't their fault, they based it off the color of the print out from the pdf i sent them, i should have sent them specific color numbers instead. oh well. the set up people were super helpful, especially the lighting guy who had to put up with me and my anal squaring of the light to exact specification (it took about 3 hours to set up the light properly at the right height).

The show was good, 19,000 people came, i had to replace the flowers once a day basically because people's constant touching just overwhelmed it. there's no point in hiding the fact that most people came because of the Chemical Brothers concert (which was totally awsome since i got an artist pass to move around freely)they were ok, i thought the music was a little boring actually. but the visuals were amazing. they featured artists from Susan Kare to Simon Goulet to our own Sachiko Kodama! (and i can see some banksy influence in there as well)
the biggest critique i have with these shows is, people who go to these don't treat the works as valuable things and treat it instead like toys. because of that, 3 of the installations broke. there's just no respect for the pieces. parents let the kids stand on the pieces, teenagers kick the piece, and someone even spilled beer into two of my flower speakers! what is up with that! I mean, the way people behaved completely changed when i put a sign up on the piece showing a price. not only are people more cautious in touching the piece, the price tag itself attracted people's curiousity

i got some nice photos in the morning on my 20 minute walk to the space where the show was at
the show ended pretty well, not much people on the last day, but got massively wasted with all the people from STRP that night (and someone put a buncha things in my pocket like someone's glove and an air freshener....) franz dj-ed and gave us free booze and i got a cut on my hand from broken glass. that's a recipe for a great night

...

oh i didn't tell you the best part
a guy came up to me and said:
guy: i really really like your work
me: thanks
guy: no, i don't think you understand, i am so moved by it
me: well, thanks alot, i really appreciate it
guy: i want to give you drugs
me: *gasp

haha

i am too sad to tell you

ok, i started a blog, there's too much shit and fucked up things in the world, i needed something to keep track of it all