This week’s Required Reading features mashed-up video games, a lost e.e. cummings poem, an indie arcade review and a museum just for you.
Rhizome
Posted inArt
Seven Artists Meet Seven Technologists, But Who’s Who?
Seven on Seven is an annual conference hosted by Rhizome and the New Museum that pairs seven artists together with seven technologists to collaborate on projects created in a 24-hour period. The event’s second outing was last Saturday, May 14. The first question that came to my mind while attending the event was — what exactly is a technologist? Through the presentation speeches and Q+A sessions that showed off the series of thought-provoking collaborative artworks, I began to get an inkling of what the word might mean, and what its implications could be. But at a time when new media artists are technological innovators and software developers are artistic creators, where do we draw the line?
Posted inArt
What to Do This Weekend: Williamsburg Gallery Night, Man Bartlett, Su Friedrich, Seven on Seven
Can’t figure out how to fill up your culture diet this weekend? We’ve got your back, with Williamsburg Gallery Night going down tonight and Man Bartlett’s 140 hour-long Berlin performance streaming all weekend, plus Su Friedrich’s MICROSCOPE Gallery opening and the Seven on Seven art-tech collaborative event on Saturday.
Posted inArt
How Do You Sell an Animated GIF?
Last month, we learned that Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City curated a show of animated GIFs and now I’ve discovered that Lauren Cornell, the executive director of Rhizome, is selling these often trippy nuggets of Graphics Interchange Format at the 2011 New York Armory Show. Yes, that’s right. She’s a pixel pusher. Click through to see a guerrilla video interview shot on site at the Armory, featuring several of the GIFs for sale.
Posted inArt
Ryan Trecartin + Tumblr = River of the Net
If you didn’t catch the project’s announcement Tuesday on ArtFagCity, Ryan Trecartin (video artist extraordinaire, Youtube star) and David Karp (founder of Tumblr) have launched riverofthe.net, a crowd-sourced video project that strikes a balance between social media site, contemporary art piece, and documentary archive. The website collects videos ten seconds or less in length, uploaded by users, and crowd sourced. Videos are tagged and aggregated by a maximum of three terms, terms that are collected at the bottom of the site’s homepage in an ever-expanding, lo-fi html list that visually recalls sites like Craigslist.
So far, the list is a kind of Ryan Trecartin-inflected stream of consciousness, complete with everything from “sexy feet” (a video of someone pulling off a sock in a sultry manner), the omnipresent “Lady Gaga,” and “bitches be @ the club,” which links to a video of giraffes fighting, violently. Your guess is as good as mine, but that’s Trecartin’s style for you.
Posted inArt
Free (With Admission) at the New Museum
Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, gives us a taste of what we can expect from her exciting new exhibition, Free, at the New Museum this fall. Incorporating 23 artists, Free will reflect “artistic strategies that have emerged in a radically democratized landscape redefined by the impact of the web.”
Posted inNews
Short Films by Jonas Mekas Surface Online [UPDATED]
In light of yesterday’s shocking news that avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas is suing art dealer Harry Stendhal for a supposed swindle, I wanted to share one positive highlight of the business relationship between Stendhal and Mekas that just surfaced online … 14 short films, which include three episodes of his 365 web project from 2007 and 11 from the 40 Short Films release in 2006. UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, I learned that ALL the 365 web videos are on an newer Jonas Mekas site that doesn’t seem to show up on individual video searches. ENJOY ALL 40 SHORT FILMS AND ALL 365 VIDEOS AT jonasmekasfilms.com. THANK YOU, ANONYMOUS COMMENTER!
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Always Social: Getting Noticed (2008-2010), Part Two
The most striking aspect of social media art is that it contains facets of net.art, by being digital; visual art, by existing on a two-dimensional surface; public art, by existing in spaces used habitually by hundreds of millions of people; and performance art, by being inherently social. Whether the aggregate is greater than its sum remains to be seen …
Posted inArt
Always Social: Social Media Art (2004-2008), Part One
Some time in 2004, I logged onto Facebook for the very first time. My alma mater was one of the few allowed coveted access to the Harvard-originated social network. I filled out a profile, uploaded a picture and began adding friends. A coast away, Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0” … Computers and the Internet, after decades of association with nerds and misfits, were on the brink of mainstream cool.