We had a great turn out last night for the opening of Presents: Three Months of Mail Art for Hyperallergic HQ. Over a hundred people came through to take a look at the 120+ submissions from around the world.
Joanne McNeil
Posted inArt
Digital Nostalgia
Sometime around February 14, an internet phenomenon erupted as Charles Hoey and Pete Smith announced they had found a lost game cartridge for the original Nintendo video game system (NES). This cartridge was an unlabeled video game version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famed novel The Great Gatsby. Depicted in chunky 8-bit pixels, a boomerang-hatted Nick Carraway dashes through a game world of flappers, bellhops and gangsters. It even came with a vintage advertisement and a game manual that looked straight out of the 80s. The trick? This game wasn’t found; it was made in 2010. Thus we are rushed into an era of digital nostalgia.
Posted inArt
This Tuesday, Join Us for Nostalgia for the Net
Please join Melissa Gira Grant & Joanne McNeil for an evening of personal stories about the Internet of long ago. The years of BBS, IRC, ICQ, MUDs, Mosaic, Usenet, Fidonet, Telnet, dot matrix printers, 28.8k modems, and saving those AOL startup disks until they broke in two. Special guests: Katie Baker (Deadspin) & Eric Mortensen (blip.tv)
Posted inArt
Sound of Art is Loud, Sound of Partying Louder
Last Thursday, Paddy Johnson (AKA ArtFagCity) held a debut party for her ambient sound-collecting DJ battle record Sound of Art at Santos Party House, and I think our small sector of the art world collectively took the morning off on Friday. This short vacation ended with your humble writer as well as the Hyperallergic editor stumbling into work around 11am accompanied by groans and sensitivity to light. Thanks to the musicians that spun the album in their sets that night, the conclusion after the party, and post-copious LP and vodka sales, was that art sounds pretty loud, but art-partying sounds louder.
Posted inBooks
Reading New Museum’s “Free” Catalogue
The New Museum’s “Free” exhibition is based on the freedom of cultural exchange that has followed the advent of the internet and digital technology. Following up on that emphasis on online activity, the exhibition’s catalogue is entirely digital as well, a website-hosted document that’s somewhere between an online PDF and an interactive vertical blog.
If you’re wondering why I’m reviewing a digital catalogue as a book, it’s because this is a book — it’s just online.
Posted inArt
Photos From Escape From New York
Organized in collaboration with Paterson Arts Council, Lambert’s Escape From New York exhibition includes work by 43 top contemporary New York artists. The artists include such 2010 Whitney Biennial talents as Bruce High Quality Foundation and Kate Gilmore, but there are some emerging and even some relatively unknown names in the mix that are sure to surprise even the most art worn observer.