Just found the torn-off cover from the November 2009 issue of W Magazine buried beneath a pile of papers in my desk drawer. Prescient!
On Digital Fundraising: join me at the #ArtsTech Meetup on November 9, 2011.
Are you interested in digital fundraising? You don’t say.
Join me, my Whitney Museum colleague Briana Lowndes, Cindy Au of Kickstarter, and Farra Trompeter of Big Duck for a conversation on that very topic on November 9th at 7 pm, hosted by the inimitable Julia Kaganskiy at Pivotal Labs. I suggest registering now, while we’re here, talking about it.
Bri, the Whitney’s Membership and Annual Fund Manager, is the primary liaison between Membership/Development and the Whitney’s web team (and also a ninja, I suspect). She and I will tell the tale of CLICKISTAN, the online videogame commissioned by the Whitney in 2010 from the Viennese artists Ubermorgen as the Museum’s first microdonation fundraising effort in support of its Annual Fund. Brace!
Book-as-Content Management System? →
“It’s a book as content-management system, a new design for reading, etc.” says Triple Canopy of its first anthology—#olds!—Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, designed by Project Projects and available for pre-order now. If PP designed it, that book-as-CMS must purr like a kitten.
Speaking of the 3rd Athens Biennial, Monodrome: Paul Chan/Badland Unlimited’s Phaedrus Pron will be adapted for the stage—time and date TBD, apparently—whose set was designed by Andreas Angelidakis, who has a Tumblr.
The Styrofoam Order: Installation for Paul Chan’s / Badlands Phaedrus Pron project. Just added some gold branches to a styrofoam column, and here is the tree under which Socrates fell for Phaedrus
Walter Benjamin meets the Little Prince? Nicholas Bourriaud curated the 2011 Athens Biennial, which opened today—the only possibly illuminating point of fact that explains the conceptual premise for this promotional video.
Incidentally, I wrote an essay on Nan Goldin’s 1996 solo exhibition at the Whitney, I’ll be Your Mirror—which just slayed the sixteen year-old suburban, My So-Called Life-watching, Doc Marten-wearing me—in order to gain admission to my undergrad art school. Not so sure that I’m psychologically prepared to receive this gesture just as Cindy Sherman’s M.A.C. line hit the market and Kim and Thurston announced their split!
Museum Nerd Alert: #MCN2011
On November 17th, I’ll be speaking at the 2011 Museum Computer Network conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on a panel called Beyond the Blog: New Waves in Digital Arts Publication, which I co-organized with Elisabeth Neely, Director of Digital Information and Access at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sam Quigley, Vice President for Collection Management, Imaging and Information Technology / Museum CIO at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Molly Kleiman, Deputy Editor of Triple Canopy.
The quick and dirty: I will focus on Whitney Stories, the online magazine whose second issue I’m putting to bed as I type; the AIC folks will discuss the implementation of their Getty-funded Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative project; and Triple Canopy will simply do what it does so well.
The proper précis: “New technologies and design innovations have inspired a nascent renaissance in digital publishing. These advances in web publishing can be largely attributed to the Apple iPad that launched in 2010. Many of the emerging innovations improve the experience of digital reading, often by craftily emulating features from print publishing, such as columns, horizontal page ‘turning’, and inline imagery. This panel presents examples of new directions in digital arts publication from the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the online arts magazine Triple Canopy. Unlike the more pragmatic content delivery of web pages and blogs, the projects presented focus on delivery of a superior reading experience. The panelists will discuss successes, challenges and the exciting future of digital publishing.”
+ Museum Computer Network Conference 2011: Hacking the Museum You’ll be there, Right? Right.
Reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble in preparation for an exhibition catalogue essay I’m just beginning to write. Fifteen pages in, and I’m already justly terrified.
“What if I go around the museum, look around, and I just don’t get it?”
First, Jason Schwartzman shilled for the New Yorker’s iPad app. Now, he does the same for the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time project, which started three hours ago on the West Coast because it’s 3 am in Brooklyn and a handful of people are screaming at one another below my window in a language I do not speak so really, why not blog about something that’s happening thousands of miles from here? Also: John Baldessari.
I can’t think of a better icon image for the New York Art Book Fair—whose schedule is actually on the Internet this year, not-so-incidentally—given today’s public launch of the Kindle Fire. Meta.
Remains of Kindle, Original Kindle Fire
by Paul Chan, 2011
9” x 12” x 6” Glass Display Vitrine
Remains of a Kindle set on fire in the summer of 2011
Courtesy Badlands Unlimited, who will premiere the print version of Yvonne Ranier’s Poems over the weekend.
Just Launched: TC LABS →
Congratulations to the team at Triple Canopy, who have announced the official launch of TC Labs, a project that “draws upon and helps sustain Triple Canopy’s expansive network of artists, writers, designers, and developers.” Good things to come, surely.
My conversation with Paul Chan, A Thing Remade, is now live on Rhizome. We began this project following a piece I wrote for the May issue of Frieze on his publishing house, Badlands Unlimited, as I realized that I had, in fact, been downloading files and texts from the online analog to his practice, National Philistine, for well over a decade. The online distribution model thing is not new, in other words!
Bonus points to those who make it through the whole interview (which is admittedly epic) to the last question, wherein I ask Paul what it’s like to convene with the ghost of Saddam Hussein. We went there.
BONUS: Paul dug up some old school GIFs from his archives and re-released them for Rhizome’s audience, including the one above, Cursor (2000).
And yet, the structural model of the art world remains relatively unchanged. In the art district, we still commute to museums and international biennials, pay for admission and revolve around large-scale, in-person events. These are the art world’s prescribed behaviours, and the problem is that they are insular. Although performance and moving image have made major inroads into exhibition programmes, institutions have traditionally been less supportive of works that don’t take the form of objects, and they take little advantage of the publishing potential of the Internet.
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You’ve all emailed/”@” replied/donated to Rhizome/sent good vibes to Lauren Cornell in order to thank her for writing this, right?
+ In the Nostalgia District (Frieze)
Thought I’d kick off this vacation with some inspirational reading before digging into the fiction. (I did not play a rare wind instrument before opening this book, for the record.)
I’m thrilled to announce today’s launch of Whitney Stories, the Whitney Museum’s new online magazine which was designed to provide a space for readers to engage with the Museum’s multiple histories and narratives. “Whitney Stories” is a quarterly publication, produced and written by Whitney staff and designed by the partnership Linked by Air.
As the project’s editor, I’ve worked with my colleagues to develop an iterative, feature-driven approach that will grow to suit the changing needs of the Museum and our community. I hope that you’ll log on and have a click around—now, and into the future! Feedback is welcome and encouraged.
Highlights from the first issue include:
+ What Do You Think? is a social feature that allows readers to share their thoughts about a range of topics related to the museum. Please join our community and contribute your thoughts!
+ Cory Arcangel Re-Blogs the Internet: A feature on Cory Arcangel’s online projects, including a special media partnership between the Whitney and Buzzfeed for his exhibition, Pro Tools.
+ Into the Future with CHERYL: Come party with CHERYL, the performance art collective that hosted a special party to celebrate groundbreaking on the Whitney’s building in downtown Manhattan.
Thanks for your support! Also, I am tired.
