his site: andrew norman wilson
intern description here:
http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/crg/3623445915.html
Monday, February 25, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
For Kevin,
I read something interesting that I thought pertained to your video from last week. It's from "Looking at the Overlooked" by Norman Bryson, pages 144-145.
"When looked at from outside the limited cocoon where they belong, the scissors and combs, books and papers, all the effects that weave the warmth and familiarity of a personal habitat, at once appear pathetic and lost: they have the look of dead men's clothes. Though to each user they are unique, bearing an individual accent and all the distinctness of personal scent, when glimpsed from outside the nest of habit woven by the body itself they are simply junk, personal waste. And not just the personal effects, all of the artifacts surrounding the body share this fate of imminent reversion to debris. Though the forms of such things as plates, jugs, pitchers, glasses and so forth are robust enough to withstand the centuries, individual avatars of the forms are fragile to a degree: attrition, breakage and decay soon convert thenoble forms to shards and rubble. The immediate bodily cocoon must constantly renew itself to keep at bay the forces of dispersal and ruin. It is subject to a law of entropy that no form can survive. In the fate of the objects around the body is read the body's own creatural frailty and imminent demise. And even before entropy gets to the objects and destroys them, they threaten the uniqueness of the individual and the distinctness of a personal outline. Persons become exactly interchangeable: since the forms in still life address the generic body, they bypass the personal body; because all human beings are destined to the same actions, of appetite or comfort or hygiene, at this basic level of material existence there is no respect for personhood."
It doesn't have anything directly to do with anxiety, but I was thinking about the personal effects of grooming, and the objects that we use to do so. I thought the ideas of surrounding ourselves with objects that are detritus in order to create a schedule of familiarity and comfort was interesting in relation to your piece.
-Kayl
I read something interesting that I thought pertained to your video from last week. It's from "Looking at the Overlooked" by Norman Bryson, pages 144-145.
"When looked at from outside the limited cocoon where they belong, the scissors and combs, books and papers, all the effects that weave the warmth and familiarity of a personal habitat, at once appear pathetic and lost: they have the look of dead men's clothes. Though to each user they are unique, bearing an individual accent and all the distinctness of personal scent, when glimpsed from outside the nest of habit woven by the body itself they are simply junk, personal waste. And not just the personal effects, all of the artifacts surrounding the body share this fate of imminent reversion to debris. Though the forms of such things as plates, jugs, pitchers, glasses and so forth are robust enough to withstand the centuries, individual avatars of the forms are fragile to a degree: attrition, breakage and decay soon convert thenoble forms to shards and rubble. The immediate bodily cocoon must constantly renew itself to keep at bay the forces of dispersal and ruin. It is subject to a law of entropy that no form can survive. In the fate of the objects around the body is read the body's own creatural frailty and imminent demise. And even before entropy gets to the objects and destroys them, they threaten the uniqueness of the individual and the distinctness of a personal outline. Persons become exactly interchangeable: since the forms in still life address the generic body, they bypass the personal body; because all human beings are destined to the same actions, of appetite or comfort or hygiene, at this basic level of material existence there is no respect for personhood."
It doesn't have anything directly to do with anxiety, but I was thinking about the personal effects of grooming, and the objects that we use to do so. I thought the ideas of surrounding ourselves with objects that are detritus in order to create a schedule of familiarity and comfort was interesting in relation to your piece.
-Kayl
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Rationale for the postcards...
So Jason had suggested the other week that I offer up some of the reasoning for why I'm titling the postcard work The Exchange of Living and Nonliving Properties. Here it is...
The initial interest for the piece came from looking at how digital networks were vernacularly and academically regarded upon their commercial release to the public around the 1980s. For instance, William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer depicts a highly immersive technology that could be read as something of an allegory of the internet. Users "jack in" and find themselves disembodied into a virtual environment. While in this environment, movement through the digital reality has no correlation to movement in our normal reality, the two worlds are thoroughly distinct. It's kind of like The Matrix with the exception that in those films dying in the matrix implies a death down the line in real life.
And that actually marks a turning point for how we currently view virtual and actual spaces. One can still distinguish between the two but they've become so thoroughly embedded into one another, it's difficult to perfectly deconstruct these two kinds of reality. It seems to me that the status quo now is not to completely externalize and distance virtual environments but to see them as an architecture of digital information that hovers around, above, through, but ultimately within our geophysical presence. Let's call this architecture a cloud (it's an industry term). Sometimes we parse pieces of the cloud reality into our physical reality through hardware like phones, laptops, portable music playing devices, GPS devices, etc. Other times, with those same pieces of hardware, we transmit data to the cloud in the form of photographs, videos, sounds, fragments of text, geophysical coordinates, etc. These two realities, one virtual and one actual, are no longer perceived as totally separate spaces. They form a hybrid spatiality. So the postcard piece is essentially tooling that idea of a hybrid reality into a work of art. Images from a virtual space are assembled into the objects of our actual spaces. But of course the virtual images are based on photographs of real spaces in the first place. And for people to take away the postcards and use them doesn't totally fulfill the cultural purpose of a postcard as a marker for the prestige you feel granted to for going somewhere, they sort of fail as actual world objects. And can you really ever go to google? The reference to the IPv4 syntax is like a little nod to the hardware that really serves as the connecting tissue of our hybrid reality.
But why the title? Well, we've been talking about a binary of two spaces with an intermediary thread that puts them into contact with one another. I came to thinking that this is a bit like a late 20th/early 21st century version of the mythos of a Christian afterlife. Now the earlier 1980s model of really transcending into a virtual reality seems more conducive to a religious metaphor than the contemporary model of hybridized reality. At first. But then I did some more sci-fi reading, specifically books by Philip K. Dick like Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and VALIS. This man's writing was highly invested in moments when spiritual realms would interject into our own world maybe in the form of divine visions or out of body experiences and so on. And the main way Dick thought we could find these moments of insight was through advanced computer technologies and huge doses of psychedelic drugs. The images in the postcard piece seem kind of visionary/hallucinogenic, they're images of bizarre colors and patterns, mountains cracked in half by malfunctions in a secret text, a plant that seems really not of this world.
Ok so here we are finally... the title comes from a paraphrased line at the end of Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. It is spoken by a character named Charles Freck who has completely fried his brain abusing a designer drug called Death. He lives in a state of total paranoia until he unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide and has a vision in which he is confronted by a paranormal deity that's half man and half insect. Freck's final observation of the world is that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." And voila. My title.
The initial interest for the piece came from looking at how digital networks were vernacularly and academically regarded upon their commercial release to the public around the 1980s. For instance, William Gibson's sci-fi novel Neuromancer depicts a highly immersive technology that could be read as something of an allegory of the internet. Users "jack in" and find themselves disembodied into a virtual environment. While in this environment, movement through the digital reality has no correlation to movement in our normal reality, the two worlds are thoroughly distinct. It's kind of like The Matrix with the exception that in those films dying in the matrix implies a death down the line in real life.
And that actually marks a turning point for how we currently view virtual and actual spaces. One can still distinguish between the two but they've become so thoroughly embedded into one another, it's difficult to perfectly deconstruct these two kinds of reality. It seems to me that the status quo now is not to completely externalize and distance virtual environments but to see them as an architecture of digital information that hovers around, above, through, but ultimately within our geophysical presence. Let's call this architecture a cloud (it's an industry term). Sometimes we parse pieces of the cloud reality into our physical reality through hardware like phones, laptops, portable music playing devices, GPS devices, etc. Other times, with those same pieces of hardware, we transmit data to the cloud in the form of photographs, videos, sounds, fragments of text, geophysical coordinates, etc. These two realities, one virtual and one actual, are no longer perceived as totally separate spaces. They form a hybrid spatiality. So the postcard piece is essentially tooling that idea of a hybrid reality into a work of art. Images from a virtual space are assembled into the objects of our actual spaces. But of course the virtual images are based on photographs of real spaces in the first place. And for people to take away the postcards and use them doesn't totally fulfill the cultural purpose of a postcard as a marker for the prestige you feel granted to for going somewhere, they sort of fail as actual world objects. And can you really ever go to google? The reference to the IPv4 syntax is like a little nod to the hardware that really serves as the connecting tissue of our hybrid reality.
But why the title? Well, we've been talking about a binary of two spaces with an intermediary thread that puts them into contact with one another. I came to thinking that this is a bit like a late 20th/early 21st century version of the mythos of a Christian afterlife. Now the earlier 1980s model of really transcending into a virtual reality seems more conducive to a religious metaphor than the contemporary model of hybridized reality. At first. But then I did some more sci-fi reading, specifically books by Philip K. Dick like Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and VALIS. This man's writing was highly invested in moments when spiritual realms would interject into our own world maybe in the form of divine visions or out of body experiences and so on. And the main way Dick thought we could find these moments of insight was through advanced computer technologies and huge doses of psychedelic drugs. The images in the postcard piece seem kind of visionary/hallucinogenic, they're images of bizarre colors and patterns, mountains cracked in half by malfunctions in a secret text, a plant that seems really not of this world.
Ok so here we are finally... the title comes from a paraphrased line at the end of Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. It is spoken by a character named Charles Freck who has completely fried his brain abusing a designer drug called Death. He lives in a state of total paranoia until he unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide and has a vision in which he is confronted by a paranormal deity that's half man and half insect. Freck's final observation of the world is that "living and nonliving things are exchanging properties." And voila. My title.
For Kayl{a}, better late than never
Here is the article I had mentioned the other week plus one other. The first is Luke Turner's "The Image Object Post-Photoshop" from the online forum Notes on Metamodernism. It is something of a response to the second essay, Artie Vierkant's "The Image Object Post-Internet".
http://www.metamodernism.com/2012/12/10/the-image-object-post-photoshop/
http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf
The argument is an interesting one and pretty telling of the postmodern/metamodern split as a whole. On the one hand Vierkant argues for the legitimacy of a new media practice engaged with the (re)production of images ad infinitum, images that can be iterated in both physical and virtual realities. Turner disputes this by claiming that while such a practice is commendable for being open to collaborative labor, it's ultimately an apathetic and anachronistic gesture of postmodernity.
Hope you enjoy!
-Mickleburgh
http://www.metamodernism.com/2012/12/10/the-image-object-post-photoshop/
http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf
The argument is an interesting one and pretty telling of the postmodern/metamodern split as a whole. On the one hand Vierkant argues for the legitimacy of a new media practice engaged with the (re)production of images ad infinitum, images that can be iterated in both physical and virtual realities. Turner disputes this by claiming that while such a practice is commendable for being open to collaborative labor, it's ultimately an apathetic and anachronistic gesture of postmodernity.
Hope you enjoy!
-Mickleburgh
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Key words for black artists
-->
Black
Colored
Artist of color
Post-black
African-American
Afro-surrealist
Afro-futurist
Afro-(insert word here)
Africa
Diaspora
Africa
Diaspora
Ethnographer
Historian
Archivist
Documentarian
Installation artist
Site specific artist
Public artist
Street artist
Urban artist
Community engagement
Muralist
Community outreach
Collective
Movement
Affiliate
Community activist
Community builder
Urban redeveloper
Social interventionist
Performer
Expert
Natural
Identity
Race
Politics
Culture
Politics
Culture
Experience
-Rashayla
Thursday, February 14, 2013
congrats Rashayla!
World Less Traveled Grant
2012–13 Recipients
2012–13 Recipients
We are very pleased to announce the winners of the World Less Traveled Grant for this academic year!
Marion Parry, a friend of SAIC, has endowed a travel and research grant named the World Less Traveled to provide funds for thesis research, conference attendance, travel for exhibitions, and self-initiated study trips available to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Out of more than 40 exceptional applications that we received this year, the jury has chosen to award four grants to the following students:
Rashayla Brown (BFA, Photography) will travel to Los Angeles to create a series of conceptual portraits that document and challenge the representation of black women in reality TV. In particular, Brown will focus on Sharhonda Stockman and her friends, women with philanthropic and socialite lifestyles tied to the entertainment industry.
Elizabeth Ensz (MFA, Fiber and Material Studies) will travel to Los Angeles where she will realize two projects based on the idea of a "post-petroleum" world. The first is to experience the daily commutes of friends and contacts on foot instead of by car. The second is to examine elements of the LA freeway as examples of landscape.
Robyn Farrell (MA, Art History) will travel to Germany to research the projects of Gerry Schum, who broadcast the first television transmission of contemporary art in 1969. Farrell's thesis focuses on Schum's Fernsehgalerie (TV Gallery, 1969-70) and Videogalerie Schum (Video Gallery, 1970-71). While these projects have had a significant influence on media art, there is little existing in-depth scholarship on them.
Kathryn Taylor (MArch, AIADO) will travel to the Rewa River in Guyana to collaborate with Dr. Lesley de Souza, a biologist at the Shedd Aquarium. Taylor and Dr. de Souza are designing a fishing lodge that will help support the local economy and wildlife. The lodge, to be built later this year, will also function as a research lab and education center.
Congratulations to Rashayla, Elizabeth, Robyn, and Kathryn!
new readings posted to portal
eliot's readings now live on the portal...
second, we have some blog writing assignments from last week's critique:
-david is to write about working in the legacy of robert adams, and deciphering the range of adam's images
-rashayla is to create a larger continuum of labels, real or imagined, for african american artists
-christie c please write about the possibilities of photographing outside of your grandparents but maintaining underlying themes in your current work
-ayesha is to share the writing of agnes martin's writing, and set the class up for discussion of 'opacity' in the making of artworks as well as read:
second, we have some blog writing assignments from last week's critique:
-david is to write about working in the legacy of robert adams, and deciphering the range of adam's images
-rashayla is to create a larger continuum of labels, real or imagined, for african american artists
-christie c please write about the possibilities of photographing outside of your grandparents but maintaining underlying themes in your current work
-ayesha is to share the writing of agnes martin's writing, and set the class up for discussion of 'opacity' in the making of artworks as well as read:
- The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition
October
Vol. 18, (Autu
Vol. 18, (Autu
and also read irwin's book he talks about the perceptual field throughout his book!
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
new reading posted on portal
couldn't resist when i saw david's hand captured in the first page, see the second image, part of andrew norman wilson's wonderful series google scan ops
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
2 quotes
"One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is idiocy.” (From Richter, "Notes 1973", inThe Daily Practice of Painting, p. 78.)
At a Q&A ahead of his retrospective at the Tate Modern on October 4, 2011 he was asked: "Has the role of artist changed over the years?" to which Richter replied: "It’s more entertainment now. We entertain people.”[79]
Karsten Lund Talk : Can we think of photographs as strangers?
students, i'm going to this on wednesday night, thought i'd encourage you to think about attending--karsten is a respected thinker/writer/curator here in chicago (jason):
Please join LATITUDE for our free monthly lecture series where we ask Curators, Artists, Writers, and Critics to pose a question of their choice. We launch 2013 with Karsten Lund, a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He asks, “Can we think of photographs as strangers?”
As Lund explains, It takes off in part from one of Susan Sontag’s observations:
“Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes, and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.”
When: Wednesday, February 6, 2013, 7:30pm
Where: 2041 W. Carroll – Suite C223, Chicago, Illinois 60612
We look forward to seeing you there!
This series is free and open to the public. Seating is limited so please come early for a spot, or stand along side us!
Monday, February 4, 2013
troubling vision: performance, visuality, and blackness
just heard great things about this book today:
http://www.amazon.com/Troubling-Vision-Performance-Visuality-Blackness/dp/0226253031
http://www.amazon.com/Troubling-Vision-Performance-Visuality-Blackness/dp/0226253031
Sunday, February 3, 2013
desiree more videos
thought of these as first a helpful reference for jackie rivas (how do you transcend the justine kurland 'type' of photography):
http://vimeo.com/gurltalk/videos
this one in particular as a starting point:
http://vimeo.com/39025337
http://vimeo.com/gurltalk/videos
this one in particular as a starting point:
http://vimeo.com/39025337
article schedule (email us article 1 week before)
readings will be posted on the class portal
2/26
chris P
2/13
david A
2/20
eliot
2/27
ayesha
3/6
hayden
3/13
su
3/20
christie
3/27
jackie
4/3
rashayla
4/10
kale
4/17
tyler
4/24
elliott M
kevin and brian h need placement, we'll discuss in class...
2/26
chris P
2/13
david A
2/20
eliot
2/27
ayesha
3/6
hayden
3/13
su
3/20
christie
3/27
jackie
4/3
rashayla
4/10
kale
4/17
tyler
4/24
elliott M
kevin and brian h need placement, we'll discuss in class...
crit schedule
group A (2/6, 2/20, 3/6, 3/20, 4/3, 4/17):
soo kim
tyler L
payden M
chris P
ayesha
yu su
eliot T
kevin @
group B (2/13, 2/27 3/13, 3/27, 4/10, 4/24):
david A
rashayla B
christie C
brian H
elliott M
kayla P
jacklyn R
soo kim
tyler L
payden M
chris P
ayesha
yu su
eliot T
kevin @
group B (2/13, 2/27 3/13, 3/27, 4/10, 4/24):
david A
rashayla B
christie C
brian H
elliott M
kayla P
jacklyn R
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