artcodex reblog

CanvasPaint

A fresh link for Tom Moody. MSPaint in browser form; pure html, css and javascript. And my favorite review: “MSPaint is a bad app. It’s hard to use and inflexible… So why put it on the Web? Because you can, I guess.” via bblagojevic

Originally by Art Fag City from Art Fag City on June 26, 2007, 9:05pm

Cory Doctorow:

A local artist and his pupils decorated the dishes of Amsterdam’s “satellite city,” an immigrant neighborhood.

Link

(via Neatorama)

Originally posted by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, ReBlogged by Stephanie on Jun 26, 2007 at 12:31 PM

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Eyebeam reBlog on June 26, 2007, 10:31am

[So sue me, but I started up with an Mmorpg. It’s all Emily’s fault—she knew full well when she sent me the link that I was powerless to resist a text-based zombie apocalypse simulator.]

At the start, there’s not too much for a z00b to do, so my time has been mostly absorbed by swaying to and fro and groaning every so often—errands I can take care of while I work. I think that Penny Heights, my adopted neighborhood, might be a bad one: there’s graffiti everywhere (”PHDF Secured This BLOCK!”), and my first attempt to dine locally was met with some hostility (the business end of a sawed-off). It’s been a little lonely, sure. Beyond the occasional scientist who finds me in a brain-addled stupor and extracts my DNA—it’s a local custom, I guess—I’ve had few interactions. Quarantine might be too strong a word, but I do feel isolated. I’ve always been a union guy, and I’m thinking about joining up with the Local, which ought to improve my lot and expand my social network.

If you’re ever in the area, don’t be a stranger: I’m Armsmasher from Penny Heights, and currently I’m located outside the Salle Building, where I’m occupied with smashing a barricade in hopes of figuring out what’s going on with those lights inside. Drop by and I’ll have you for dinner!

Originally by Kriston from Grammar.police on June 20, 2007, 1:35pm

Plastic shopping bags are a scourge on the environment. What to do with all those plastic bags that seem to be just hanging around everywhere. One idea that seems to be a hit amongst the DIY and creative arty crowd is to fuse various plastic bags together and make fabric out of them. The basic process is to iron the plastic bags, with a sheet of baking paper between iron and plastic, until two or more sheets fuse together. Sound easy - well in theory it is, but it takes a little practice to get the timing and heat just right. Once you have it down, you can start experimenting with colours and patterns, using the plastic bag labels as decoration. And then …

Originally from TreeHugger, ReBlogged by Stephanie on Jun 21, 2007 at 01:16 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on June 21, 2007, 11:16am

Originally by everythingmustchange from Everything Must Change on June 20, 2007, 4:51pm

This is from another poster we’re printing for the Helvetica screening. It’s by Fairchild Semiconductor. I don’t know Mr Semiconductor, or at least I don’t think I do, and don’t know his work intimately but I really like this poster. I think it’s really interesting.

I like it because it’s for the screening that we’re very excited about and I actually like the look of it. And I like the idea. The message is coded. It’s literally coded and it’s conceptionally coded in that you have to work out what the hell it’s all about and I like that. But it is all there if you look hard enough. It’s cunning too but I won’t say why, I’ll let you work that out (you’ll have to download the pdf to see it properly). It’s its cunningness that I really like.

Download fairchild_semiconductor.pdf

I should actually say a big public THANK YOU to Northside, our digital printer, for sponsoring the event by taking care of the posters for us. Specifically to Maria for looking after it.

Thanks Maria.

If anyone’s interesting in coming to see the film, you can register and buy tickets here.

Originally by marbergrid from Ace Jet 170 on June 20, 2007, 12:33am

»EKSPOZYCJA« by Roman Ondak.

Originally by mail from VVORK on June 20, 2007, 4:03am

---

The post on the Rhizome 2007-2008 commissions as XYZ Art (reblogged here, thanks cpb) elicited the following response:

Don’t see how XYZ relates solely to these types of new media projects. Painting, sculpture, photography, many mediums use a trial-error process similar to science. For instance one commonly develops a style or signature process (the algorithm), often paying big gradschool dollars for it, then alters X strokes or colors, looks at the Z surface, changes X some, then goes for the super awesome Z for the finish.
- ssr

And my reply:

That’s funny, but we’re not talking about a trial-error process. It’s more like one application: a single transformation of something into something that “helps others.”

The art world equivalent would be a conceptual art work, something like Meg Cranston’s Who’s Who by Size, University of California Sample, 1994, where different fabric-covered sculptural stacks (Z) represent the number of inches of shelf space (X) that a subject (Edgar Allen Poe, Elvis Presley, etc) has in a college library. The algorithm or (Y) is assigning a fabric to the subject (Anna Pavlova in ballet slipper satin, etc) and making the stacks. The work has a point, and one point only, to show intuitively that “size matters” in assessing one’s historical reputation. (I got this example and some of the description from the book Deep Storage, ed. by Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen.)

Grad schools turning out cookie cutter painting is rather a different issue.

Originally by tom moody from Tom Moody on June 18, 2007, 2:59am

Just found out about this really exciting project called Schalalala from Berlin artist, designer and developer Rudiger Schlomer. We are both participating in a project Otto von Busch is organizing in Istanbul this September. Schalalala takes existing fan-scarfs and recombines them into new words and statements, there is a gallery on the site that documents the various knitted outcomes.

Originally by cat from microRevolt reBlog on June 18, 2007, 12:19pm

Now, it’s no secret, I am in to all things fence-related. I know, kind of an odd statement. In fact, I’m probably the only jerk out there you know that has a full-on fence fetish, if I must own up to it. Analyze that. Well, wait – don’t.
Anyway, so, when I saw a few days ago that Inhabitat had posted on a project by Dutch designer Tejo Remy who uses the fence as a structure for something other than just as a means to divide space, I knew had to relay it here.

[Image: Emily at Inhabitat writes, “not only are the protrusions and recessions of the fence eye-catching, but they allow for a more active interaction between those on either sides of the fence, providing seats, benches, nooks and playspaces for children.”]

With ‘Playground Fence’ he turns the barrier into a kind of space unto itself beyond its normal purpose as a mere object or plane between two spaces. Instead, the fence becomes something imaginatively more dynamic, engaging even (from both sides nonetheless), which I think works very well in this context as Remy has executed it.
But, of course, being the border-fence junky that I am, it also makes me think about the same notion applied in those other more brutal contexts where borderzone politics are far more intense than the interface between playground and pedestrian walkway in an urban neighborhood. What about this type of fence-space in divided cities, and places where violence is far more institutionalized in the barriers themselves, where neighborhoods and communities – entire nations for that matter – are split in half by highly fortified security walls, border fences, defensive barriers, and so on?

[Image: Playground Fence, a project by Tejo Remy, via Inhabitat.]

Could this same playground concept apply to these other scenarios, could it be useful in some geopolitically intense border-divided context? I realize the prospect alone may sound totally absurd, especially if I were to ask, could the Israeli Separation Barrier, for example, be converted, recycled, re-used, or re-adapted in a similar fashion… could we go as far as to somehow help it become a space within itself to help suture rather than exacerbate the volatile tensegrity of the spatial divide that is invariably created by the controversial barrier?
In essence, I guess what I am trying to ask, is: could the security wall have any other purpose, dare I even say, a bi-nationally constructive one, other than just serving its current spacio-cidal colonialist strategy of imprisoning the West Bank under the auspices of preventing suicide bombers?

Well, I may have already answered that in a previous mention about how the Israeli Security Wall has enveloped one Palestinian family’s house so that they are now literally inhabiting the wall, imprisoned by it, forcibly detained and trapped within its flexible path completely against their will. So, that would make the short answer a big fat NO.
In a recent interview I did at Postopolis! Lebbeus Woods said of his own considerations about the wall, that to do anything with it – in terms of trying to re-imagine it – would only inevitably turn out to be a de facto endorsement of the wall. And so, in his judgment the only thing more that could be done with the wall at this point was to simply tear it down. Of course, he had an idea for how that should happen which you can read more about in the interview.
Still though, I am curious about the wall as a membrane through which both sides can possibly share something, exchange in a positive embrace. Not because I support the wall, but am just curious to explore all of its effects and consequences, perhaps even possibilities in the interim of attempting to bring it down permanently, wary of course that any positive use in that time may only help to buttress its existence indefinitely.

But could the fence be transformed into a kind of bridge to at least begin the process of deconstruction, towards a structure that unites? I’m not sure what that would look like or whether it is even possible. Before, Subtopia has proposed the idea of setting up an International League of Border Ball Players, for whom some have already appeared to have accepted such a challenge. We’ve also pitched the idea of turning the world’s walls into a kind of global border musical instrument. Surely, the wall can be recontextualized in some way as an early stage in the means of dismantling itself.
If you have any ideas, let us know – love to hear them.
With that said, I have no real final thought here other than to suggest that part of bringing the walls of the future down might somehow be done creatively, as a “creative act” like Lebbeus said. In the very act of re-approaching the wall and destroying it both sides could somehow come together to construct something new simultaneously in the process. So that in the end it is not just one side achieving victory over the other or a massive collaborative celebration of destruction in and of itself, but a re-construction of sorts could come about in its place. Perhaps the materials from a dismantled wall immediately become recycled and go into the construction of another joint project nearby built and shared by both sides. The wall could come down only as fast as an adjacent mutual project could come up in its place.
Etc., etc., etc. Anyway, I’ll keep working on it.

Originally by Bryan Finoki from Subtopia