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'Beautiful Evidence'
"Edward Tufte has been described by The New York Times as 'The Leonardo da Vinci of Data.' Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. That might sound like a dry subject, but with Tufte, information becomes art. Tufte's most recent book, Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there's an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird's wing works and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing. They all demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death..." Here for more of NPR's review of Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence
3:12 PM 8/27/06 |


Global Warming: The Hottest Hoax Around!
Cartoon: Climate change real? Caused by humans? Don't buy it! Check out Mark Fiore's flash cartoon: Global Warming: The Hottest Hoax Around!
3:12 PM 8/27/06 |


The UnAmerican Century
The Twentieth Century was the American Century, as Time publisher Henry Luce famously asserted in 1941. The son of a Presbyterian missionary, Luce called on Americans to spread their values throughout the world. As a student at Yale, he belonged to the same elite fraternity that later welcomed George W. Bush, whose fraudulent election in 2000 dealt a grave blow to the democratic process that was once the foundation of America's powerful moral vision. It was an ominous beginning to a new century... (Deborah Campbell) Here for more of The UnAmerican Century
3:12 PM 8/27/06 |


Wireless in Himalayas
"Western 'hacktivists' and Tibetan refugees build a mesh network in the Himalayas using junk parts and free software. It's decentralized, robust and reliable. And it's monkey-proof..." Read Wired's "Wireless binds Tibetan exiles"
7:43 PM 8/21/06 |


The Year of Spaghetti
"Stefana McClure turns text into image. Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize her drawings and sculptures. Her films on paper are minimal compositions of blurred lines consisting of the superimposition of the subtitles of an entire movie. All of her work involves translation, transposition and reconstruction. In this new exhibition music is changed into text, text is turned into image; a world atlas becomes a globe..." Check out McClure's "The Year of Spaghetti"
7:43 PM 8/21/06 |


"Subterranean Monuments"
A small show at Vassar College features three artists, who worked in bohemias, where art was a shared aspiration, not a competitive business. Read Holland Cotter's review: "Subterranean Monuments: Up From the Underground"
7:43 PM 8/21/06 |


Trashstones
"Dusseldorf-based sculptor Wilhelm Mundt creates sculptures of production waste and fiberglass that he calls Trashstones, in reference to their origins no doubt. The smooth and shiny 'stones' are the size of boulders and appear in an assortment of vivid colours, sometimes mottled and veined. The Trashstones are numbered and their surfaces are such that they seem to cry out to be fondled..." Here for more of Mundt's Trashstones
7:43 PM 8/21/06 |


Bar Code Clock
Scott Blake created this web clock using code from a JavaScript resource found on the Internet: "I replaced the standard digits with my own bar code files to convert time into a hypnotic pattern. The actual numbers take up a considerably small space to leave room for the black and white code to animate..." Timecheck: Bar Code Clock
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Spam Plants
Romanian visual artist Alex Dragulescu creates unique botanical images with attributes and qualities based on the ascii values found in the text of spam messages. What else to call them? Spam Plants
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Imaginary Emoticons
Here is designer Ze Frank's amusing instructional video on how to incorporate and use imaginary emoticons in emails. Here for more of Imaginary emoticons
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Pixelfest
Here's the game: can a group of random people, each contributing a teensy weensy bit, make a coherent piece of art/design/garbage purely through the influence of the work itself? Check out this collaborative game: Pixelfest
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Jolt Culture
Trivia books— which strip meaning from knowledge, giving us info, but the not the context we need to apply it— are part of a general dumbing down. They include "Why Do Men Have Nipples?" by Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D., "Vitamin Q: A Temple of Trivia Lists and Curious Words" by Roddy Lumsden, "One Letter Words: A Dictionary" by Craig Conley, "Why?" by Erin McHugh, "Schott's Original Miscellany" by Ben Schott, and "Do Blue Bedsheets Bring Babies?" by Thomas Craughwell (they don't). Call it Jolt Culture
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Tire Tracks
A new film documents one town's automotive version of graffiti. "Tire Tracks" memorializes the work of drivers who use a combination of technique and raw horsepower to create a kind of rural car- and truck-made graffiti... Here for more of Automotive graffiti
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Computers and clay
Scott Rench's ceramic work, consists of computer generated images printed with a ceramic glaze onto a large canvas of clay. Creating and collecting images, he scans them into the computer and manipulate them to fit the concept. The new image is output onto transparent film that acts as a stencil for transferring the image to a silk-screen. Glaze is then used (instead of ink) to print the image on to a slab of clay. Once completely dry the slabs are fired in a kiln, producing an image that will stand the test of time indoor or outdoor. Check out Rench's Computer & Clay
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


Vitiated Center
"Two new books detail, and sometimes lament, the recent history of liberal and conservative ideas in America: Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual and Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind.Together, they explore the perils and possibilities of radical ideologies in a centrist nation..." Lasting political change— from the end of slavery to woman’s suffrage to Social Security— starts on a radical fringe before it rules the center. Today, the fringes... Read the review: The Vitiated Center: The successful failures of right and left intellectuals.
7:42 PM 8/21/06 |


50 great ideas for the 21st century
What were the great ideas of the last century? A random list might include abstract art, behaviourism, corporate identity, automation, digital theory, futurism, the uncertainty principle, Gestalt psychology, industrial design, jet engines, fast food, television, the marginal productivity theory of wages, the hit parade, best-sellers, miniskirts, consumerism, modernism, cassette tapes, nudism, VAT, pop and linguistics... Read the 50 great ideas of the 21st century
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


Objects to Move the Assemblage Point & Other Tools
"Objects to Move" will be installed in Artspeak’s (Gastown area of Vancouver) front entrance and can be viewed through September 2, 2006 from the street through the gallery windows. In jumbled and dusty windows there is often an intentional sly nod to the passerby-- a newspaper clipping or sequence of noteworthy objects... Erica Stocking, using a number of genres of display, balances disparate narratives to introduce a story without the linear engine of a plot. More on Stocking's Objects to Move the Assemblage Point and Other Tools
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


Stop the bloodshed! Ceasefire now!
Tell our Leaders to act now in Lebanon! Sign the petition below and your message will be delivered to the UN Security Council and publicized in newspapers in the US, Europe and the Middle East. The world cannot allow the bloodshed in the Middle East to continue. Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and wounded, almost 1 million made homeless, and a catastrophic larger conflict is possible. We call on US President Bush, UK Prime Minister Blair and the UN Security Council to support UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for an immediate ceasefire and an international force to stabilize the situation. Sign the Ceasefire Now! petition
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


Chaos Theory in the Middle East...
The belief of political and military leaders that they control events is folly, as they're finding out in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan... Read Tomdispatch's Mideast Chaos Theory
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


Between Trecherous Objects
Check out this new flash-based net art creation by Jason Nelson "Between trecherous objects" (beta)
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


"Timeline"
"On the one hand there is the sense that there's a continuous flow, somewhere a whole video that makes up our lives, but on the other there's the sense of the fragmentary and the random. "Timeline" is a metaphor for this contradiction. The user of "Timeline" creates a poem out of random acts, i.e. selecting images from a database of images each of which is associated with a few lines from the original poem..." Check out this montage of text and images, remixed in Flash from Myron Turner's new media application/poem 'Timeline'
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


Road Monument no.1
"The roads of the Cuneo province in Southern Piedmont are the most dangerous in Italy and amongst the most dangerous in all Europe. Every year around one hundred people die and thousands are wounded in road accidents. What remains after the crashes is a series of debrises that crowds demolition area or remains abandoned at the side of the road. Road monument no.1 puts together different pieces of cars involved in crashes as if they were part of the same accident. The installation explores the meaning of monument as something that helps to remember and scans an imaginary and material landscapes that populates the everyday life of the inhabitants of the region. Here for more of Netzfunk's latest project Road Monument no. 1
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


The Chelsea Gallery Wars
The summer group show wars are raging in Chelsea, and, in fact, they have become something of an annual rite over the last few years. Preview the slideshow: The Chelsea Gallery Wars
3:04 AM 8/15/06 |


'Dada'
"It's good to be reacquainted with a generation of artists who had no market to speak of and for whom society’s corruption and exhaustion seemed golden opportunities to make themselves useful. Cynical and traumatized, the Dadaists were tireless young optimists at heart. They discovered a world full of wonders, and we are, on the whole, their beneficiaries..." On view through September 11 at the Museum of Modern Art. Here to preview moma's online feature:
1:53 PM 8/6/06 |


Dada's Women
Want more dada? Six women artists are being celebrated in "Daughters of New York Dada" on view at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art. Here to check out the slideshow from nytimes.com:
10:10 AM 8/6/06 |


Under Cover: Artists' Sketchbooks
An exhibition of over 70 sketchbooks and 45 drawings originally part of sketchbooks, will be on display at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, US) from August 1 to October 22, 2006. Featuring works from a collection of nearly 150 sketchbooks, dated from the 18th century to the 1990s. Intact sketchbooks include works by Jean-Honore Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, Sanford Gifford, Edward Burne-Jones, John Singer Sargent, Henri-Edmond Cross, Reginald Marsh, George Grosz, and Christopher Wilmarth. Also on view will be drawings removed from sketchbooks before they were acquired by the Fogg by artists such as John Constable, Paul Cezanne, Henry Moore, and Brice Marden, as well as sketchbooks and drawings on loan from Harvard's Houghton Library and Museum of Comparative Zoology. Preview
8:33 AM 8/6/06 |


A Turn of the Crank: Sink into Script
A collection of innovative three-dimensional pieces by Casey Curran comes to Viveza Gallery (Seattle, US) from August 2 to September 3, 2006. Through Currans mechanical manipulation of texts, the enduring symbols of great literature are set in motion by the viewer's playful interaction. Turn a tiny crank and kinetic energy breathes life into the skeletal framework of Melville's great white antagonist, Moby Dick, or sends Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet spinning toward their fate. Here for more of Casey Curran's
7:16 AM 8/6/06 |


Objects found or lost?
"How do concepts surrounding the use of found objects in 20th century art (following Marcel Duchamp's style) inform creative work with found objects in digital media arts practice? How does the creative process change when working in the found objects tradition within a digital media environment?" is a collaborative work which explore the use of found objects in digital art through both a theoretical approach and live performance work. The project interrogates the value of the right to use, convert, transfer, alter or modify any sort of 'found object' on the web as source material for performance.
10:44 PM 8/5/06 |


Blackrain: Work by Yeo Shih Yun
Best known for her bold use of the colour black, Singapore-born artist Yeo Shih Yun incorporates an exciting blend of vigor, impulsiveness and the element of chance into her works, fusing these with her fascination with randomness, uncertainty and surprise, as she attempts, in this exhibit, to explore the play of black (ink) and white (paper). She chooses paper for its 'ready-to-use' quality as it compliments her spontaneous painting process in non-traditional tools like droppers, syringes, palette knifes, rollers and even household brooms. On view from 1 to 30 August 2006 at Singapore's Instinc gallery. Here for more on
2:10 AM 8/5/06 |


New Paintings by Alexandra Rozenman
Vividly colored and crammed with fantasy imagery. Rozenman's figures look straight from a Russian folk tale, her original place of birth. Rozenman came to America 16 years ago, as a Jewish refugee. She brought all her imagery with her, intresecting these with the world of theater and circus. Show of Rozenman's new paintings will be on view at Argyle Zebra Gallery (St. Paul, US) from August 4 to 26, 2006. Here to preview
1:40 AM 8/5/06 |


Materiality
A stuffed leather-and-plywood tree by Carolyn Salas; a geometric landscape with a slowing-moving, wartlike kinetic element, covered in reflective Mylar, by Charlotte Becket; a neat display of more than 200 pieces of breakfast cereal by Tom Friedman; and a sumptuous stuffed object resembling a much-enlarged amoeba by Ernesto Neto. "Materiality" runs through August 25 at Kravets/Wehby Gallery. Here for more of
3:25 PM 8/4/06 |


Marshall Poe on Wikipedia Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge. Read Or check out this Atlantic Monthly web-only on the marvels and pitfalls of Wikipedia, the fastest-growing encyclopedia in human history.
2:10 PM 8/4/06 |





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