well, what you do best is the way you use your time

also dug into a lot of Baldessari post MOCA visit this weekend. The novelty of word/image play conceptual artists (LeWitt, Weiner, Ruscha) really fails to wear off.

"I would drive around National City where I was living and randomly shoot out of the window with the camera without even looking and drive with the other hand. Wherever I shot, I would note down the location. In another series, I matched random photographs with statements. For instance, there'd be a statement about photography - about how the eye depicted, how the picture frame shouldn't be divided in half - and then I'd have a photograph with maybe a post right down the middle, and I'd match those two. Or in another one, I'm standing in front of a palm tree - you're not supposed to stand in front of trees because they look like they're growing out of your head - with an inscription that came from a book on composition about the right way and the wrong way. 8 You'd have the right image and the wrong image. I loved that there'd be wrong things, so that's why I titled it Wrong."



















the man himself... in venice, no less.

a glowing, white rectangle

this is really one of the coolest things i've ever encountered. it's a perfect intersection of cinema, photography and architecture. three of these photos were at the Geffen MOCA this weekend. more info in detail below, but basically since the 70s Hiroshi Sugimoto has been going to movie theaters all over the world and exposing single frames for the exact runtime of the feature films that play in them. the result is spectacular.















Since the 1970s, Sugimoto has worked on his photo-series entitled «Theaters,» in which he photographs auditoriums of American movie theaters, and drive-in movies, during showings. The exposure time used for the photograph corresponds with the projection time of the film. This allows him to save the duration of the entire film in a single shot. What remains visible of the film’s time-compressed, individual images is the bright screen of the movie theater, which illuminates the architecture of the space. That its content retreats into the background makes the actual film a piece of information, manifesting itself in the (movie theater) space. As a result, instead of as a content-related event, film presents itself here as the relationship between time and spatial perception.

"One night I had an idea while I was at the movies: to photograph the film itself. I tried to imagine photographing an entire feature film with my camera. I could already picture the projection screen making itself visible as a white rectangle. In my imagination, this would appear as a glowing, white rectangle; it would come forward from the projection surface and illuminate the entire theater. This idea struck me as being very interesting, mysterious, and even religious." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

"I'm a habitual self-interlocutor. Around the time I started photographing at the Natural History Museum, one evening I had a near-hallucinatory vision. The question-and-answer session that led up to this vision went something like this: Suppose you shoot a whole movie in a single frame? And the answer: You get a shining screen. Immediately I sprang into action, experimenting toward realizing this vision. Dressed up as a tourist, I walked into a cheap cinema in the East Village with a large-format camera. As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture, and two hours later when the movie finished, I clicked the shutter closed. That evening, I developed the film, and the vision exploded behind my eyes." - Hiroshi Sugimoto

I'm sure this may come as a shock...

why don't we grab some real estate? maybe pull up a tabe?

sweet dove
sweet dove
never to return again

...keats

where you learned to make the others look good so you looked good

must read

mister lister

unquestionably the greatest production company logo known to mankind. thanks to D. Wein for putting this masterpiece up on the utube. i could watch it on loop.



be sure to check out breaking upwards in spring '09

rainbow apocalypse album artwork

ELP (sister of ASP and of neon gold fame) has a new visual blog, byzantium, featuring her own patterned artwork.










About: Database of Color

Newest Series: Database of Color

This series was directly inspired from Victoria Vesna’s book “Database Aesthetics; Art in the Age of Information Overflow”.

“Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art…the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.” (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/vesna_database.html)

People use data as a way of trying to ultimately understand and control an environment of information. Vesna provokes artists to explore projects that represent different modes of databasing the self . How does one compile small and seemingly unrelated pieces of information to present a new form of a whole and a new way of relating all the parts? This new series of artwork “Database of Color” explores these questions by creating a database of the self and mind through my personal interpretation and relationship to color. The various geometric patterns represent visual databases of color (a network of relationships) within a pre-constructed host site (the pre-registered lines/boundaries) which ultimately serve as a synthesis of my personal history, experiences and influences of color that have shaped my relationship to art.

These designs thus represent my own relationship and categorization of information. They become an individualized web of identity, history and creation. Within the boundaries of the interface I organize a new way of clarifying the information. Vesna claims that the primary components of a database are navigation, organization and retrieval. My designs, though seemingly random, are in fact composed of several webs of patterns that are echoed somewhere else in the overall makeup. As a result, to navigate through the image one must find the ways in which design and color are repeated through mathematical equation or to try and follow my own personal logic. In this way organization and navigation seem inextricably tied and retrieval becomes personalized. Vesna asks, “how do you represent information without dehumanizing it?” I believe this can be answered by how the information is constructed and through the process by which it is organized. In this case using color as information and using information as a way to communicate a relationship to the self, a database of the self through color.

yo la tengo murders the classics

this (brilliant) album name back story almost tops the band name backstory:

re: i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass
"The title of the album is rumored to be a (paraphrased) quote by NBA player, Tim Thomas. Sitting on the bench together during a game, Thomas was caught on tape by the MSG Network in a profane exchange with fellow Knick, point guard Stephon Marbury. Thomas yelled at Marbury, "Everyone in this organization is afraid of you, but I’m not, and I will beat your ass."

also alternate track titles for yo la tengo's electr-o-pura:

"A Rehearsal"
"Sound Is Music And Quick Lights And The People Who Make Our Sound Their Own. That's When We're Really Turned On."
"It's The Start Of A Musical Dialogue"
"A Group Is Like A Jig-Saw Puzzle-Everything Must Fit Into The Groove"
"A Few More Beats-And Maybe, A New Sound"
"The Music Can Really Drag It Out Of You-If It Says Something"
"Waiting For A Break"
"Sometimes, Not Often, You Start A Number And Something Miraculous Happens, And Then The Scene Is Beautiful."
"The Sound Of A Guitar Is With Me All The Time-Or Am I With It?"
"A Break Like This Is Worth Its Weight In Publicity"
"By Now The Music Becomes A Little Like A Perpetual Diary"
"Play It Soft And Easy, Play It Hard-The Beat Still Comes Thourgh"
"One Of My Favorite Instruments-The Electronic Flute"
"Patterns Of Sound Are My Bag Right Now"

my alphabet is illusive

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well my kind's your kind

check out this link for some info on the map art below. some innovative cartographic stuff going on out there. thanks to ELP for sharing.