how to make a molotov cocktail!

whoa!

If you are going to be in San Francisco anytime this coming year make sure to visit the Contemporary Jewish Museum and check out The Torah Project exhibit which details what goes into making the Torah and the history of the text. Very breath-taking.

Click on text to read more

Richard Whitehurst is a Columbus-based artist who made his mark on the Ohio scene by showing at the William Strunk Jr. Museum of Contemporary Art in Akron and internationally regarded galleries such as Alexandria Asheton Gallery and Seward Projects Space. He was the 2006 recipient of an Akron Culture Committee fellowship and has quickly become a seminal figure in the often overshadowed Rustbelt regional art scene, rapidly moving from sculpture and installation to more challenging situational based work that would make Nicolas Bourriaud’s head spin.

hecka awesome

a new painting

been working on some paintings. and mopping the floor.

also a friend of mine sent me this which just tickled me inside

Art Fair Vs Comic Con

programming

I was without internet at hone for three days, to kill the time I have been trying to learn the programming language Processing.

If I got to the lesson on how to embed applets, id totally show you guys on blogger, until then, here is a link to a sample applet that I made.

< ^_^ >

This week, the subject of honesty over truth came up during one of our class' reading discussions. Lately, I have been thinking about the different ways in which artists can be more honest with their practice. In this week's lecture series, Joseph Park mentioned how admitting to being a painter is a bad thing to do as a contemporary artist. I wonder what other things contemporary artists might be reluctant to admit.

I want to be more transparent as an artist and as a human being in general. I feel like this is something that I have been working on for awhile now but because of my upbringing, my problems with expressing myself through words, and my experience of being a compulsive liar throughout my teens, I can't help but sometimes feel like its a struggle. I feel like a lot of the ideas I have been coming up with as of late are inspired by this struggle.

I found a net artist who has some other quotes on his project website that I feel are related to my obstacle course idea.

Some quotes from Dennis Knopf's You as In User: Audience Economics and the Web

"As it became crucial to pay attention to the customers’ demand,
the industries have developed strategies to satisfy the oversaturated
customers and their desire for uniqueness while still
keeping the efficiency of mass production. Through modularity of
the separate components, manufacturers can offer their customers
a limited yet flexible system of personalization, which is supposed
to communicate the possibility for individuality and thus lower
the degree of saturation. Consumers have the option to customize
an item in a way that expresses their own uniqueness – by combining
the preferred components to an individual furnishing."

"Personalization implies a persona: a profile is set up
to store all data about the customer and keep track of his/her
consumerism. Either the consumer provides the information him/
herself or a profile is derived from documented behavior which is
associated with either name, a phone number, screen name, customer
number, or any other identification – Marco Tannert
divides these into explicit participant profiles and derived
profiles"

"Since the media landscape of today’s society of the spectacle
as Debort described it is oversaturated with impressions and
advertisement, the consumers’ attention is becoming more scarce
and therefore more precious. When the attention received from
the potential customer is decreasing, the advertiser needs to
increasingly promote only products that are of interest to the
consumer – or at least in the appropriate way."

"Wether you’re looking at desktop applications
for creating text, still and moving image, sound and music compositions,
or at the function patterns of operating systems,
templates are commonly used as sample layouts and documents in
order to allow a perspicuous interaction between human and
computer for a simple and easy work flow. The approach of using
templates for easily producing websites on a large scale could be
compared to the production strategies of fordism where standardization
allows mass-production and makes commodities available
to a broad public, of course looking at it within its postmodern
appearance."

"The Web seems to foster the interchange of cultural assets
and an endless loop of produtcion; online communities have
created a new level of expertise by appropriating, interpreting,
and annotating cultural content and occupying a cultural competence
that seeks comparison. The Web as a platform for creating
content becomes most apparent when looking at projects where
the sum of contributions results in a collective product."

"When consumers
are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed.
And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People
gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests
better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some
narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).“

read the whole paper here

a bad but potentially interesting idea:

make-up a blog that's supposedly written by 31 people who are part of a doggy time-share. Each of them gets the dog once a month with a person not getting the dog at all on months with only 30 days. S/he only paid half of what the rest of the time-share people paid. They blog about how the dog is doing.

Ideally, there will be a seperate blog where the dog talks about its side of the story.

When I think about it, its really similar to the plot of this movie.

some stuff

Lately I have been thinking about games, architecture, and obstacle courses and the different ways that they might tie in to the paintings that I have recently been making. Having moved to my new studio, one of the projects that I have recently started is an upright obstacle course which I can then record myself go through. Thinking about this obstacle course, I don't think that my initial intention is to create a traditional game that has objectives but rather, to create a platform that limits and forces the body to perform a small set of gestures that are informed by the media and tribal rituals. I am still thinking through this. Below are some images that I feel sort of tie in to what I am thinking about.




















Other things that are in the forefront are:
* Sociology of Deviancy elective project that would require a research paper on 3 devious websites and then creating my own (thinking about web 2.0, alter-ego's, bodily fluids, poetry, etc.)
* Thinking about making a set of posters for my upcoming thesis show early sans- actual work and letting the poster content inform the work that I will be doing for the rest of the school year.
* Creating a rabbit suit and performing games with it on.
* Building a food-cart post thesis project.

my thesis proposal

Since I started graduate school, I have been interested in making works associated with topics of collectivism and alienation. These two topics have eventually combined to form my interest in a singular idea that could be called collective isolation. This term seeks to describe a feeling of loneliness and alienation that I have found prevalent in many people despite being participants in communities and subcultures. So far my research has expanded to subject matter pertaining to the sources and symptoms of this condition. Through the writings of Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno, I have been able to expand my research to include collective isolation's relationship to capitalism and the media. I am also interested in how this condition manifests from the internet and the growing technocracy within global culture. Moreover, I am also investigating technology’s relationship with spirituality and myth-making’s relationship to rationality, allowing me to get a better perspective on how these issues inform the way that we as a society relate to each other and collectively envision progress. In investigating these topics, I am able to approach my own feelings of alienation from a minority standpoint as part of a bigger social phenomenon that many people are a part of.

Thus far, I have made works that refrains from blatantly addressing the subject of collective isolation, but rather, attempts to portray its possible manifestations. My works have ranged in subject matter which include soul-searching, hysteria, apathy, spiritual materialism, hedonism, and apocalyptic narratives, all of which seek to connect to a larger narrative of contemporary social disillusion. Through the use of humor, I attempt to make these dark notions less daunting for viewers to contemplate.

I am naturally drawn to using a wide range of materials—having used paper sculptures, drawings, plants, jewelry and others to actualize my ideas. I would like to continue exploring different mediums in which my ideas can manifest. Particularly, I am interested developing an online platform for my ideas as my research has led me to artists such as Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, JODI.org, Maximum Sorrow, and many other net-art identities, most of which have overtones of nihilism and regression in their work-- notions that I have come to believe as some of collective isolation's main symptoms.

For my thesis show, I foresee myself accumulating a combination of internet material with studio-made objects, seeking to emphasize the physical world’s fusion with the virtual. I am hoping that having been able to delineate the ideas that I am interested in, I can begin to create a body of work that more articulately expresses the issues relevant to my main subject of interest, yet leaving the viewers with enough space to pick-up the pieces together for themselves. I see my thesis project, at this point, as reliant on rigorous accumulation of material culminating in their display as historical artifacts of a foreign, yet familiar world. In doing so, my desire is to open up the possibility for these topics to be issues the past in the hope of a less alienating future.

Maximum Sorrow Interview Excerpt

"Well, the internet has hardly changed our physical lives at all, but it has drastically changed our spiritual lives. I think this perspective goes largely undiscussed when the web is viewed through less pertinent but more common sociological and technological lenses. While the internet is a physical body of wires and chips, the web is a shared non-physical realm of experience that requires many aspects of spiritual faith to interact with. We post and commune on a plane of information that we cannot touch or see. We tend to wander the web in private, confronting the massive database alone each day. We are inclined to use the web for the satisfaction of our emotional and intellectual needs rather than for our physical needs. We make pilgrimage to the same web sites at regular and repeated intervals, paying homage to them by contributing or partaking, and then we move on to our other daily needs like eating and sleeping. But all the while, we have faith that this plane of information we have become so dependent on is tangible enough to provide a worthwhile connectedness. For many of us, the web has become almost sacred, its ritual use is the embodiment of our spiritual needs. So I suppose that my conclusion is this: surfing the web can be a fulfilling spiritual experience and a direct interaction with a transcendent reality." - Kevin Bewersdorf

House passes bill too gross to talk about
by Michelle Cole, The Oregonian
Tuesday April 07, 2009, 12:51 PM

Count it among the shortest "debates" to ever occur in the Oregon House.

"Good bill. I urge your aye vote," Rep. Chris Garrett, D-Lake Oswego, said Tuesday about House Bill 2478.

Any closing remarks?

"No," Garrett said firmly.

The proposed new law nobody wants to talk about would make it a second degree sex abuse crime to propel "a dangerous substance at another person." That substance being semen or other bodily fluid flung out of sexual desire.

Yep. Apparently such behavior is part of a gang initiation rituals.

The proposed law follows an incident last June when a man threw his semen on a mother in a Portland area Target store. Her little girl saw it first.

The man was convicted of assault, said Rep. Scott Bruun, R-West Linn. But Bruun and others thought the crime should fall into the category of a sexual assault.

"The bodily fluid in question was not the same thing as throwing a coke at somebody," Bruun said during an interview earlier this month.

He kept quiet Tuesday when the bill hit the House floor. It passed 57-0 and now moves to the Senate. -Michelle Cole

http://myfrienemies.herokugarden.com/

necklace

I've been making necklaces.
I am having a hard time considering them as art
because they are so haphazardly and cheaply made.
I can't really see them as craft either because
I feel like they don't function the way craft
objects usually do.
but I like them

MCGI and Fun With S&M