Happy Birthday, Frank O'Hara -
Via anticipatedstranger, Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster” (1957):
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am…
[video]
Just Launched: Lost Library is a new social media project by painter, thinker and Newsgrist mill Joy Garnett. She writes, in today’s Newsgrist newsletter (which I’ve subscribed to since its inception and still adore as a stalwart of the very best days of Internet culture-gone-by, as they do.):
I am sharing the library that I’ve been accumulating for 15 years by giving some of it away. Every day I will pick a good window well in Soho, deposit some books, and immediately tweet the location with a photograph and the hashtag #LostLibrary.
These are books for people to browse and to take away if they like. Documentation is archived on flickr and tweeted photos are posted to tumblr. Begun on June 19th 2011, Lost Library is an ongoing social media performance.
I want the Smithsonian Books volume of Space Time Infinity, which could ostensibly still be languishing on Grand between Broadway and Crosby. But probably not!
PS: Also new by Joy: Virilio Now, which I want to have an exclamation point at the end but sadly does not, being the title of a book and all!
Was this meteor ordered on E-bay? There was no one to ask; all bodies were in cars or behind the fenced pool, until one small blonde child rode by on her bicycle.
Mary Walling Blackburn’s slideshow, Des Plaines Distuburbance, (a narrative about just that) is now live on Paper Monument’s website—which is all the better for it.
YouTube Time Machine - Personally, I’m into the 1960s.
Only a matter of time before someone developed this web app. I’m having a blast playing around with the year 1995.
[video]
I’m with Sister Corita.
Fragmentr is a collaborative image remixing site designed by Ryan Weafer. Users can upload up to five images, which are fragmented into 30 “shards” and shuffled at random; the site also auto-archives images at regular intervals. It’s a beta site, and I’ll be curious to see how it develops, which is to say,that I don’t think it’s entirely there yet, but I see a lot of potential.
Museum websites (because I work on one whatever sorry) are tasked with articulating works of art—their physical and intellectual properties—to an audience that may never set foot in the galleries. No small task! Image quality (and moreover, the user’s experience of said image) is of paramount importance in the development of these kinds of sites. Preciousness ensues, necessarily. We’re a museum. I love a big, gorgeous, authoritative slideshow. What I love even more though, are projects that expose the precarious state of the digital image.
[video]
A Small Linkdump of Recent Smart Things Written About the Internet/IRL Dichotomy:
+ Thankfully, someone at the Times had the good sense to publish an effective rejoinder to Bill Keller’s hysteria piece, The Twitter Trap. Jenna Wortham’s Does Facebook Help or Hinder Offline Friendships? takes a nice, smart, even tone—and a realistic portrayal of the way most of us actually roll.
+ Oh, to be a real academe. Here’s a Twitter link to Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick’s paper-in-progress, Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. I would like to write the “adult” version of this paper.
+ From Yale’s Law & Technology blog via the site of one Max Cho (a post that deserves a link if only for its title alone): Unsell Yourself — A Protest Model Against Facebook. I feel like this piece fails to account for the prevalence of irony in Internet humor (and how certain social logics emerge to form new stratas of power—we see this in the art world all the time). But hey, sure—go ahead and “like” Lady Gaga and call it protest. It’s just Facebook, after all.
GIF by Dump.fm user Timb.
E-Books and the Museum Machine -
This isn’t a ploy to see how many times I can jam the word “museum” into a headline in a given day! It’s link to a field report on this year’s Museums and the Web conference that I wrote for for Triple Canopy!
“People don’t read in museums.” —
To be fair, Benjamin H. D. Buchloch didn’t aim this flip dismissal toward the general museum-going public at Sunday’s U.S. premiere of The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s documentary on the so-called containerization of global capitalism-at-sea. More precisely, his frustrated response was directed at the fact that Sekula, longtime photographer and documentarian of late capitalism, has yet to see a major exhibition of his work in a U.S. museum. Buchloh attributed this in part to the fact that well, yeah, people don’t read in museums and Sekula’s photographs are sometimes accompanied by long, didactic texts (i.e. they make actual, measurable demands of the viewer-reader’s time and intellect).
I won’t lie: sitting still in the Cooper Union auditorium for the film’s entire one-hundred-and-twelve minute run time (plus the attendant post-screening discussion with Buchloh, David Harvey, and Sekula, patched in via Skype) felt like nothing less than an actual, measurable demand of many things—mainly, the allergy attack that I actively battled for a good, solid ninety of those minutes.
Things that make demands—art, ideas, people—are hard to market, and Buchloh’s most obvious concern was that this film be seen at all, given Sekula’s demonstrated disdain for commercial culture. As Sekula noted his film’s rejection from the Sundance Film Festival, I leaned in toward my old friend Ben, a career academic and longtime writer on the artist’s work who regards my engagement with the Internet as a source of mild amusement. “I have the answer,” I whispered. “Tumblr.”
We locked eyes. His blues went blank. I was vindicated.
Coming soon: Art Micro-Patronage is the brainchild of San Francisco friends Eleanor Hanson Wise and Oliver Wise, founders of art subscription service The Present Group. Art-Micropatronage is described as “an experimental online exhibition space featuring monthly curated shows of digital, new media, and intermedia work. As visitors navigate through the exhibitions, they will be encouraged to become micro-patrons of the arts, associating their appreciation of the works with small monetary values. Only patrons will be able to view the exhibitions once the show is over and they will receive a link and image as recognition for their generosity.”
This project poses a lot of possibility as a means of engaging with the still-developing realm of online micro-patronage; it is also a distinct consideration of online curatorial practice, too, as AMP backs proposals for web-based projects with curatorial stipends and development funds. (Interested parties should sign up on the website for more information on the curatorial program—the parameters of which, I might add, are wonderfully open.)
Finally, it’s really great to see Eleanor and Oliver work toward launching AMP, as I’ve been continually heartened by the agile quality of their projects since The Present Group came online in 2006. TPG has grown and changed over the years, employing the Web in various ways—including their own Web hosting service—as a means of supporting artists. The methods and metrics of success for this project aren’t entirely unclear, which makes it even more compelling from an experimental standpoint.
Never, ever underestimate Bay Area Internet, folks.
![A Midnight Bit on the History of the Book-as-Tactile-Experience:
Up late as ever, working on a series of interview questions about electronic book publishing and thinking about the tactile differences between various publications, from artists’ book to the iPad. A conceptual predecessor to e-book controversy-to-come, Marcel Duchamp’s Please touch (Prière de toucher) was designed for the cover of Le Surréalisme in 1947, the catalogue that accompanied the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition organized by Duchamp and André Breton at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. As legend (and also, the National Gallery of Australia’s website) has it:
“Duchamp collaborated with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati on the design and production of the catalogue cover. Donati, based in New York City at the time, purchased 999 pre-fabricated foam and rubber breasts, otherwise known as ‘falsies’, from a warehouse in Brooklyn. Once in Paris, he and Duchamp undertook the protracted task of hand painting each readymade to more naturally resemble the female anatomy. Discussing the creative process, Donati recalled a conversation between himself and Duchamp: ’I remarked that I had never thought I would get tired of handling so many breasts, and Marcel said, ‘Maybe that’s the whole idea’. Maria Martins, with whom Duchamp was having an intimate affair, is said to have modeled for the work. The completed breasts were adhered to a circular piece of black velvet and affixed to the cardboard slip-cover of the catalogue.”
See also: Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade by Janine Mileaf. [Dartmouth College Press/ Google Books]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkynzqIipN1qz9e79o1_500.jpg)
A Midnight Bit on the History of the Book-as-Tactile-Experience:
Up late as ever, working on a series of interview questions about electronic book publishing and thinking about the tactile differences between various publications, from artists’ book to the iPad. A conceptual predecessor to e-book controversy-to-come, Marcel Duchamp’s Please touch (Prière de toucher) was designed for the cover of Le Surréalisme in 1947, the catalogue that accompanied the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition organized by Duchamp and André Breton at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. As legend (and also, the National Gallery of Australia’s website) has it:
“Duchamp collaborated with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati on the design and production of the catalogue cover. Donati, based in New York City at the time, purchased 999 pre-fabricated foam and rubber breasts, otherwise known as ‘falsies’, from a warehouse in Brooklyn. Once in Paris, he and Duchamp undertook the protracted task of hand painting each readymade to more naturally resemble the female anatomy. Discussing the creative process, Donati recalled a conversation between himself and Duchamp: ’I remarked that I had never thought I would get tired of handling so many breasts, and Marcel said, ‘Maybe that’s the whole idea’. Maria Martins, with whom Duchamp was having an intimate affair, is said to have modeled for the work. The completed breasts were adhered to a circular piece of black velvet and affixed to the cardboard slip-cover of the catalogue.”
See also: Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade by Janine Mileaf. [Dartmouth College Press/ Google Books]