It's been 13 long months since the leaders of the G8 gathered for their annual talkfest. I'm sure the details of last year's communique are etched into your brain but just in case you've forgotten what was agreed in Heiligendamm, here's a reminder. "We noted," the G8 said, "that the world economy is in good condition and growth is more evenly distributed across regions." This was June 8 2007, two months to the day before the entire global financial system came to a shuddering halt. If you like your humour black, it's rather funny isn't it?

But wait, because it gets better...

full article from the guardian

As far as I know MGMT is the first band to release a music video which is also an interactive video game, a psychedelic VJing tool kit, a visualization software or whatever you want to call it. Their music is amazing, the boys are hot, and the visual imagery they use is so reminiscent of mid-nineties web designing that it makes me want to go back to those epic illegal parties where I left a good 60% of my chance to become a serious scholar iiiihhh.

You can download the interactive video "music" game here, if you do not feel like playing  here is a low-res demo..

And then, of course, there is also some good art that beeps
 

Rosalind's book "A Voyage on the North Sea: Art In the Age of the Post-Medium Condition" (Thames & Hudson) is so well written, original and inspiring that everybody working in the stinky contemporary art scene should keep it in his night table, especially those curators who still think of new media art as the art that beeps.

"Maurice Denis's famous 1890 dictum about the pictorial medium - "It is well to remember that a picture--before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote--is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order" - was now being read, for example, as merely presaging an essentialist reduction of paintings to "flatness." That this is not Denis's point, that he is instead describing the layered, complex relationship that we could call a recursive structure - a structure that is, some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself - was (and is) just ... ignored. Further, that this recursive structure is something made, rather than something given, is what is latent in the traditional connection of "medium" to matters of technique. ... Although [medium-specificity] is another, unfortunately loaded concept--abusively recast as a form of objectification or reification, since a medium is purportedly made specific by being reduced to nothing but its manifest physical properties - it is (in its non-abusively defined form) nonetheless intrinsic to any discussion of how the conventions layered into a medium might function. For the nature of a recursive structure is that it must be able, at least in part, to specifiy itself."

So it is official, I received this email yesterday..I will post more details about our participation to the event at the end of this week.

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"Congratulations! On behalf of the curatorial team of the Wight Biennial, we would like to officially invite you to participate in our exhibition, "Group Effort: Collaboration as Process and Form," which opens Thursday, September 25^th, 2008. We received over 200 proposals, and yours is amongst 20 projects we are honored to present.

 
This year, the Wight Biennial consists of three components, including the gallery exhibition and related programming. Additionally there will also be an evening of performance at the Hammer Museum, and a 100-page color catalog/publication.

 
As part of the catalog/publication, we would like to propose that you participate in a series of interviews between the artists, as a way to further extend our discussion of collaboration into the textual realm. Details will be forthcoming."

When I will be finished writing with my graduate thesis, I will have spent the month in California to work on the new DoEAT's performance for the Whight biennial at UCLA, I will have married my boyfriend Jason in San Diego on the 11th of August,  and I will have moved to London..

then I will read Roy Christopher's summer reading list 2008, starting from DJ Spooky's Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, (MIT press) that Roy co-edited.

 The summer will be over of course, but there will be so many trains to ride in London..

"to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It was very much a matter of using an environment for one's own ends, seeking not only the marvellous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world."

Sadie Plant

Few days ago I was watching music videos by one of my favorite bands...The Blow. I run into a really hot video made by this chick, Kat, who edits clips from Kingdom Hearts with bits of her favorite music and sound fx.

Last Stand is my favorite between the ones she created so far. Not only she used the Blow and the Postal Service in the same video (right on girl), she also did a very fine job with sound editing. Unfortunately her collage of sound and video is annoyingly literal, I think the best part is where the music (lyrics) overlaps the subtitles creating random, lyrical, funny moods.

Situations of old media getting remixed through technological tools offered by new media, still maintaining the grain of the old, is what I like to call meta-aesthetics. The beauty rises from a nostalgic crash of a brand new metalanguage against shreds of its own matter of expression. It is interesting that in natural languages this never happens. There could only be languages and then metalanguages, not the other way around.

from wired: "So yeah, we're calling bullshit on this one. Nice picture, though."

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what difference would it make if it was for real? did he really had to do this with DHL tracks in order to make it interesting?
Is it the cost of the operation? Its scale? is it a problem of reference to the actual territory? would your connective emotions to the artwork be different? I love that this was a graduation project and he got away with it.
That suitcase made the journey all right

Pioneer Russian web artist  Olia Lialina's favourite thing in the world are glitter graphics (and starry backgrounds or the two combined) and she is goddamn right. Her article on this subject "A vernacular Web 2" cracks me up.

 

"I think there are two important aspects to the glitter graphic phenomenon.

Firstly, glitter became a trademark of today’s amateur aesthetics, and I’m certain that in the future sparkly graphics will become a symbol of our times, like “Under Construction” signs for the 90’s. Glitter is everywhere (in the universe of user-generated pages), it has become a meta category. It has absorbed all other categories of ready-made graphics – people, animals, buttons, sex graphics.

Secondly, I can’t stop marveling at how similar to each other and dull they are. Even naked gals from the “Glitter/Erotic” category don’t move – they just sparkle, even my favorite hero Felix, the never-stopping Felix, is frozen in mid-air.