Basically exactly what it sounds like, created as a response to the seizure-inducing Rothko animated GIF.
Thomas Dexter’s XLVIIVLX
In honor of today’s big event, here’s a video my friend Tom (Vimeo) made a couple years ago.
Art Hack Day / Deluge
Tonight I am starting a two day art-making binge at something called Art Hack Day:
Art Hack Day is an internet-based nonprofit dedicated to hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is tech … Sixty artists-hackers and hacker-artists inhabit an art space to create an exhibit from scratch during 48h. We start on a Thursday evening with a meet & greet and provide good food, fast Internet, and equipment for collaborating on and creating new work. On Saturday evening we transition from hackspace to exhibition hall and the projects are shown to the public during a flash exhibit (open to the public just one evening).
Each Art Hack Day event has a theme, and this one is called Deluge.
The increased severity and frequency of extreme weather events, including recent years’ tropical storm systems, droughts and heat waves, are largely the result of human-induced climate change. In addition to widespread damage across the Atlantic seaside, Sandy’s flooding in New York’s Zone A confronted many artists and galleries directly with the reality of their environment, bringing undeniable gravity to a crisis that often seems distant. Decades of postponement and self-deceit will have to come to a close. But what comes next?
Come on out to Pioneer Works for the exhibition this Saturday, January 31st, starting at 7pm.
What is a border?
From Jason Kottke’s weblog:
Today I learned that the US government considers the US border as extending 100 miles into the country. This means that states like Maine, Michigan, and Florida are entirely within the border area and 2/3 of the US population lives within the border.
In an update to the post he explains that the border is actually more complicated than that. “Precise” and “linear” seem not at all how you would describe how borders actually behave in the world. There’s the 100 mile wide extended border, the functional equivalent border, and within those, the physical terrain where border stops occur and humans start getting involved. What your rights to privacy are in these areas seems pretty open to legal interpretation, and those rights are often abused by border patrol officers.
In addition to the This American Life episode he links to, it also reminds me of the On The Media series about the experience of being detained. It also makes me think of Francis Alÿs’s performance/video The Green Line where he physically traced the “green line” border through Jerusalem using a can of green paint.
Random Darknet Shopper
Kind of along the lines of Google Will Eat Itself, but for darknet goods:
An automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich … the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport.
The article is mainly concerned with the question of “is it legal?” This, to me, seems like a terrible metric for an art project.
Link via New Aesthetic
The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public
Cuba may be an island but its culture does not exist solely for local consumption. Bruguera’s foreign audience is the only one at present that can easily consume the flow of information about her artistic proposals, political views, and serial detentions. The Cuban people remain outside the picture so to speak, but Cuba’s status as an art world superpower comes under scrutiny.