Untitled, a film on the AIDS epidemic by Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz, and Encke King (and distributed for World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art 2011 by Visual AIDS) will screen in the Whitney’s lobby—along with scores of other institutions nationwide—today.
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.
Just in time for The Rapture, we released a series of videos on whitney.org in celebration of the museum’s new building in downtown Manhattan which oh, hai! we’re breaking ground on this coming Tuesday. Wyeth Hansen and Ryan Dunn of the creative firm Labour designed and directed these five shorts—Reflections, above, is my personal pick (here, I can play favesies!)—and Ben Sterling of the Cookies/Mobius Band(s) scored them.
It’s my Tumblr, so I’ll say thanks here if I want to.
Those who follow me on Twitter (or—much less likely, given my total lock-down policy there—Facebook) are just going to have to cope here for a moment, as I need more than 140 characters to say thank you to my colleagues, who have graciously lent their skills and expertise (because hey, that’s our jobs!) to the re-launch of Watch and Listen, the section of whitney.org dedicated to audio and video content. We’ve been working with the ever-ingenious design firm, Linked by Air, for about a year to develop and implement a new, feature-heavy design that includes a public-facing tagging system and lots of cross promotion within the site’s larger architecture. The “share” and “collect” features are good, clean fun for the entire Internet, too.
Manager of Interactive Technology Brad Henslee wrangled tech from the Whitney’s end, as he does, while Marketing & Digital Content Coordinator Sarah Meller did the heavy lifting in the database and at the page level (because that’s how we make Internet on wiki-based whitney.org). In the Education department, Manager of Interpretation and Interactive Media Dina Helal and Kress Fellow in Interactive Technology Gene McHugh (yeah Gene, I found your blog) are working with collaborators Plowshares Media to produce an ongoing series of videos, including this recent piece on the Charles LeDray show, MEN’S SUITS. Margie Weinstein, Manager of Education Initiatives, keeps the site outfitted with public programming-based content, too. The re-launch of Watch and Listen marks a new focus on multimedia for the site, and I’m truly excited—people: this is me, excited—for the projects planned for launch in the coming year.
Well done, folks.
In case you’re not in New York and love modern dance and/or performance art (two conditions that can, in fact, mutually coexist); or, in case you are in New York but don’t feel like making the epic schlep to the Upper East Side: the Whitney has partnered with livestream.com to stream the final run of performances for Off The Wall Part 2—Seven Works by Trisha Brown beginning tomorrow, October 3rd, at 11:15 am on whitney.org.
A note about the photo: I snapped it with my iPhone during the dress rehearsal. Walking on the Wall was first performed at the Whitney in 1971, and the piece is extraordinary, I think, in its defiance of gravity, physics, the body—elegantly mathematical in its restraint, yet playful all the while.
Office Report: As part of the closing festivities for Christian Marclay: Festival, the Whitney Museum will stream daily, live performances from the galleries through September 26th on whitney.org and livestream.com, our partner for this initiative. Obviously, I am pleased that we’re using the museum’s website as a means of opening the in-gallery experience to a larger public; the Whitney has a stellar history of supporting the performing arts, and I hope this project is the first of many future forays into web-based performance documentation at the museum.
+ Visit whitney.org for an ongoing schedule of in-gallery performances. Generally, there are at least two live performances in the gallery every day; from 1–5 pm today, Butch Morris and Chorus of Poets will perform at random intervals in the fourth floor galleries.
+ Upcoming: Are you subscribing to the museum’s RSS feeds? If so, you already know that Thurston Moore is playing Marclay’s score, Wind Up Guitar, on Friday, September 17th at 7 pm (which is also pay-what-you-wish night, FYI). Shore up, Sonic Youth fans.
Indeed, it is Ask a Curator Day. Gary Carrion-Murayari is representing Team Whitney—not to mention, art museums in general— via our social media maven, Gretchen Scott. Tweet on over to @whitneymuseum and fire away …It’s Ask A Curator day! Click through the picture for instructions, and happy learning!
How lazy is it to blog press releases from your very own place of business? Very.
THE WHITNEY LAUNCHES STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG’S OUTLOOK: UNTITLED, SECOND INTERNET ART COMMISSION, ON WHITNEY.ORG
NEW YORK, March 30, 2010—This evening at sunset (7:18pm) the Whitney Museum of American Art will release Stephanie Rothenberg’s Outlook: Untitled, the second in a series of Internet art projects commissioned specifically for the Whitney’s website, (http://whitney.org), which was relaunched last fall. As with all projects in the series, Outlook: Untitled will appear briefly on every page of the site daily at sunrise and sunset in New York City.
Artist Stephanie Rothenberg’s Outlook: Untitled was made in collaboration with Flash Developer Jose Raymond Rodriguez-Rosario. In Rothenberg’s piece, a frenzy of faux pop-up advertisements referencing the current world economic crisis take over the screen space of whitney.org at sunrise and sunset. The advertisements are interrupted by a spinning globe that turns into a Magic 8-Ball fortune telling game, inviting visitors to “try me.” The Magic 8-Ball delivers ambiguous messages or cryptic advice about our possibilities of shaping economic structures or affecting the state of the world at the click of a button. Outlook: Untitled employs the strategies of mediated Internet culture in which all meaning is delivered instantaneously in visual packets of bits and bytes, yet at the same time, it generates messages that disrupt and question this creation of meaning.
Internet Art Commissions:
As part of the Whitney’s ongoing series of Internet art projects commissioned for its website, each project makes an appearance on every page of whitney.org for ten to thirty seconds at sunset and sunrise in New York City, marked by the change of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa. Several projects will be commissioned annually, with each appearing on the site for three to four months. Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, notes: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.” First in the series was a project by the collaborative ecoarttech, founded in 2005 by artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. The project, Untitled Landscape #5, consisted of fluctuating, glowing orbs of light that disrupt the “digital landscape.” This project ran on whitney.org from November 2009 through March 2010.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG:
According to artist Stephanie Rothenberg, her interdisciplinary practice “merges performance, installation, and networked media to create provocative interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Adopting the role of cultural anthropologist, the medium of the techno-sphere itself becomes a laboratory for raising critical questions about our interpersonal relationship to technology and its broader socio-political implications.”
Rothenberg has exhibited and performed at venues including the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah; Banff New Media Institute in Alberta, Canada; LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Center in Gijon, Spain; Trampoline Radiator Festival New Technology Art in Nottingham, England; Performa 09 in New York City; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, ISEA 2004 at the Kiasma Theater in Helsinki, Finland; and ISEA 2009 at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Ireland. Recent awards include a 2009 Creative Capital in Emerging Fields, 2008 New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Award (NYSCA) and a commission for Turbulence.org. She has participated in artist residencies at Eyebeam and Harvestworks in New York City and at the free103point9 Wave Farm. Stephanie is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at University at Buffalo.
And so, here’s this week’s tricks: Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari read the list of artists for 2010, the Whitney Biennial. Produced by Pierce Jackson and the Education department for whitney.org. Fun.
And then, the Whitney Museum got a new website: Introducing the new whitney.org, a year-plus-long collaborative effort between the museum’s in-house staff and the design partnership Linked by Air. I recently came on board as the museum’s new digital content manager, and I am thrilled—really, I am—to bring years’ worth of web and museum work together on a project as rigorous as this one. Now, we sleep.
