Sayat Nova, 1968

I know about as much about this as you probably do. From "The Colors of Pomegranate," 1968 (of course).

Anu Tuominen

Finnish installation artist Anu Tuominen collects and categorizes everyday domestic objects, such as mittens and socks and clothespins. Her arrangements possess an ethereal and kind of comforting feeling. They remind me of cabinets of curiosities, as if Tuominen is trying to preserve a piece of Finnish natural history. -Lg

See more of her work here, via Teagan Tall.

"Home Movie Reconstructions," Elliott Malkin

Elliott Malkin had his family reenact scenes from their silent home movies and vacation movies from the 70's. Then the new movies are played alongside the old ones. Malkin appears in the originals, but in the reenactments he is absent. It's brave to look at the past this way.

You can watch them here.

Twombley Spiders and the Reused Folkway Whisper

Links below are for MP3's to the remix album for The Twombley Spiders and the Whiskey-Fueled Sparrow. Notype has been holding on to this one for about a year now, and I figured I can probably get it out faster than them at this point. I hope you like it.

The Twombley Spiders and the Reused Folkway Whisper
Remix Album + 1 new track

UPDATE: Now it's available at Notype.

Artist's Talk: Iain Kerr

Art emerges from small sources of inspiration. Proust had his madeleine cookies. Nietzsche had Wagner's opera. Artist Iain Kerr has a bunch of seagulls in Cleveland.

OK, it goes a lot deeper than that. There's paleontology, fossil excavations, Inuit history, global warming, cat harnessing experiments, Darwin and the philosophy of time. It is, you might say, dense.

Kerr is an associate professor of interdisciplinary studio and theory at the Maine College of Art, who came to speak at the University of Maine Wednesday evening. He began by describing a recent installation piece, "Deep Time, Rapid Time," forged in collaboration with the artist collective Spurse.

To continue, click to see the rest of this article at The Maine Campus.

JODI, "YouTube Records," 2009

So, JODI, apparently, is taking YouTube videos of people singing, etching them into vinyl records, playing them on a turntable and recording it, posting the resulting video to YouTube.

It's a very un-JODI project, but I love it. Here are four things I said to some kid about what the "point" was. So, here are four points.

Four Points:

1. I collect records, even though I could have MP3's. I also put out a print newspaper even though it could exist entirely on the Web. But putting something into a tangible form like a CD or a record - or a newspaper, or a printed photograph - has a much heavier resonance and feeling than simply looking at it on the screen and storing it on a hard drive. We have a vastly different relationship with digital media than we do with tangible media we can hold in our hands. Why?

2. Our relationships with the media we make. Everyone is producing something on YouTube, even if it is some kid singing along to Alicia Keys. So when someone takes that and elevates it to the status of a record, you can say they're actually taking that culture a lot more seriously than its producers are. So what does that say about the producers? And the state of what it means to be a producer, on the Internet, where everyone is producing and producing into a channel of complete obscurity? (Ira Glass talks about what a giant act of will it is to make anything that isn't mediocre, that entropy drives creativity into mediocrity. This would seem to sum up the Internet.)

3. The YouTube fantasy: When people post videos of themselves singing along to something, they do it, at least a little bit, out of the hope that they'll be "discovered," or made famous. They throw themselves a little bit into the mythology of the spectacle in the hopes of swept up into part of the spectacle's machinery. Then JODI comes along and links to a video of themselves playing a record they made of your version of a song - and it's a very weird way of playing with that idea and notion. I see it as kind of a celebration of that dorky impulse to celebrity - a "Hey, you're a star to us, kiddo!" kind of thing, but it could also be cynical. It's probably both. JODI is hard to read.

4. They're saying, "This is something we want to preserve," but why? It seems funny to want to preserve throw-away YouTube videos, to elevate them to a collectible status. But if that's the case, why look at YouTube at all?

"How To Kill a Vampire," Eryk Salvaggio, 2009

 

Still frame from "How to Kill a Vampire," a project involving corrupted jpeg files from Vampire films set back into an animation. Above is a still from Vampyr. More to come.

8-Bit: Tree Wave, Glomag

Caught the movie 8-bit at Floating Point last Friday, which was a great overview of the videogame/art scene (particularly in New York) with interviews with superstars of the new mediasphere. But I particularly loved the chiptune section of the documentary.

Tree Wave (video above): Sleep
Glomag: Disorder (Joy Division Cover)

Tree Wave's got an amazing dot-matrix printer rigged up as a synth; Glomag is all Gameboys.

Floating Point 6

Hey y'all. Still alive.

I went to a conference about Video Games. Particularly, how video games can/might/have mature(d). The folks at Turbulence have my write-up over at their networked_culture blog, check it out: "Video Games in search of a Warp Zone."

Twitter Bandwagon

I have decided to announce my twitter feed to the Crashpop Universe. I'm Owls_McGee. I post more often on Twitter. But stay tuned here, too, especially if you are interested in: Diseases, ASCII Art, or Vampire Semiotics.

Doin' Fine in the Oh-Oh-Nine.

The Sound of Arrows - M.A.G.I.C. (Mini-video) from The Sound of Arrows on Vimeo.

Well it doesn't get much better than that, does it?