Tehran (AFP) Jun 07, 2005
Switch on your satellite television receiver in Tehran nowadays and
something is amiss - "No Signal", the otherwise fuzzy television screen says
for much of the day and night.
With presidential elections just over a week away, Islamic Iran's
technological guardians appear to be waging a war against enemies in the
I hate that idea, too, not that I like Brian Eno's solution better (or that he looks all that great):
"I started to notice that you could buy keyboards of such complexity that you basically press one note on them and you've got a career as an ambient artist. I thought, there doesn't seem much challenge in that any longer." Instead, he says, he has been trying to rethink the way songs are written. His voice on the album comes laden with effects, in an attempt to "break down the idea that the voice represents the personality of the music and that that voice is my voice, speaking to you - I hate that idea".
Brian Eno interview in the Guardian on why he tried to unseat Tony Blair.
Five minutes of improvisation combining an electronic double bass and a modified Casio-SK1 synthesizer. As a duo, Margarida and Barry have developed a spontaneous language and a dynamic range that is all their own. She journeys with the bass and electronic pick-up with her fingers, bow, sticks, stones and anything else she finds fit, while he experiments with electro-magnetic devices, homemade circuits, and modifications to existing electronic instruments. The textures that emerge from their performance peel back the layers of air, knot them together, and then let them simply hang.
Across-Offshoot was recorded and broadcast by ORF radio in Vienna in April of 2005. In the words of the artist: it is an ‘acoustic laptop’ recording with radio and laptop computer interaction as pure sound.
Barbara Kruger and William Gibson -- a marriage made in heaven or hell, depending upon your point of view -- talk about information at Tate Britain last year:
Internationally renowned artist Barbara Kruger, notorious for her photographic and text-based works that challenge mainstream ideas and ideologies, joins novelist, William Gibson for this discussion. From I Shop Therefore I Am to recent large-scale installations, Barbara Kruger is a key figure who has shaped the way art audiences think about ideology and information.
Alan Sonfist's Time Landscape is a fenced-off quarter acre or so at the intersection of Houston and LaGuardia in New York City and looks as though it's always been there: a small patch of pre-colonial Manhattan that through some miracle evaded the developers. In fact it was conceived by Sonfist in 1965 but not completed until 1978 -- a year after I moved to the city -- and only landmarked for protection in 1998. Thousands of people pass it every day though few probably take the time to read the informational plaque at the south end or know the name of the artist who made it -- or that it is, in fact, art and not just an abandoned (or more likely, contested) Manhattan weed patch.
Communique 16: The Future of Media Activism Jammers,
Media activism, in all its disparate strains, is slowly but surely becoming a movement. In part, it's being spurred by the rise of information insecurity. But also by the growing realization that our corporate media system has a profound effect on nearly every other social and political issue we face. People, desperate for change, are organizing around media like never before. There's a feeling that media reform is truly the issue of issues, and that the wind is finally in our sails.
The June 2005 gatepage for artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet art, features the C5 GPS Media Player:
The C5 GPS Media Player was developed in conjunction with The C5 Landscape Initiative, a series of projects initiated by C5 that involve mapping, navigation and search of the landscape using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The Landscape Initiative examines the changing conception of the landscape as we move from the aesthetics of representation to those of information visualization and interface.
Employees at Wal-Mart who can't afford the company medical plan are adivsed to apply for Medicare so we all subsidise the billionaires who own the company.
Robert Greenwald is making a documentary about Wal-Mart and is asking people to send in stories and/or video for the project.
Today I'm getting on a plane to go to Paris. My collaborative piece (with Peter Sinclair) A SoaPOPera for Laptops/iMacs is in the Summer Exhibition of the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. This is a big deal for me considering the fact that I don't have an art dealer backing me. Anyway, The Jeu de Paume was orginally Marie Antoinette's handball court.
