Artist's Choice: Herzog & de Meuron, Perception Restrained
Museum of Modern Art, New York
June 21 through September 25, 2006

ZeroOne San Jose is a swirling
constellation of events that included several self-styled summits, a
variety of public art, performances, lectures, and exhibitions
associated with the 13th biannual meeting of ISEA, Inter-Society for
the Electronic Arts. It began August 4 and ends August 13.

Well, better late than never. Now I have a better understanding of Transvergence and how it may be approached with a variety of work being done by a number of people these days. Here's a start on my attempt to make sense of it.

I've been trying to ignore nanotech as just another trendy academic catchword but several streams seem to be converging on what I would call granularity in economics, computing, databases, physics and aesthetics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granularity

Strange Powers, July 19 – September 17, 2006
curated by Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey
produced by Creative Time
at 64 East Fourth Street, second floor

Exhibition looks back on Beirut's violent past, now made cruelly present 'Fossils' drew on memories of transitory existence

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Saturday, July 22, 2006

Rayanne Tabet's installation "Fossils" should have been the last of its kind.

An arrangement of vintage suitcases covered in concrete, Tabet's piece carries the immediacy of Mona Hatoum's "Traffic" (a 2002 sculpture of two suitcases with human hair spilling out) and the solemnity of Rachel Whiteread's "Untitled (Pair)" (a 1999 installation of 18 cast bronze mortuary slabs).

Scope (a.k.a. –scope) is the little art fair that could. A scrappy competitor able to roll with the punches and come out ahead on points, it gives proof to a central precept of natural selection: survival through mutation. One of the obvious mutations of the recent Scope Hamptons (July 13 - 16, 2006) was a significant change in personnel. This overhaul came a scant four months since its last outing in March, when the fair took place in an Eleventh Avenue warehouse just one block from the Armory Show’s Hudson River piers.

Probably the best museum show I have ever seen and heard is the DaDa exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I liked it so much I was inspired and did two Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt Mash-ups. The first one uses the curators audio tour guide and the audio I recorded while Rob Murphy & I walked around the exhibit. I used a cut-up technique and shuffled the “found sound” of the curators comments.

Charles Atlas, You Are My Sister

Electric Arts Intermix showed free music videos under the stars last night on Pier 63 on the Hudson River in New York.

William Wegman's 1988 video for New Order, Blue Monday reminded me once again that a little Wegman goes a long way and the same can be said for the Tony Ousler/Sonic Youth collaboration, Tunic from 1990. Is it just me or have SY been playing the same song with varying degrees of volumn and speed for the past twenty years?

At left, a satellite image showing Florida at present; at right, a projection of what Florida will look like if the sea level increases by 18-20 feet

The Threat to the Planet
By Jim Hansen
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19131

Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too. The Earth's creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms that they can adjust for an optimum environment. Animals and plants are adapted to specific climate zones, and they can survive only when they are in those zones. Indeed, scientists often define climate zones by the vegetation and animal life that they support. Gardeners and bird watchers are well aware of this, and their handbooks contain maps of the zones in which a tree or flower can survive and the range of each bird species. Those maps will have to be redrawn. Most people, mainly aware of larger day-to-day fluctuations in the weather, barely notice that climate, the average weather, is changing.

More on the political art world flutter of the moment...
In discussing Cheryl Meeker’s take on Chris Gilbert’s resignation from the University of California at Berkeley art museum, I neglected to include the URL for her excellent piece: http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=484&fid=6&sid=17

What exactly is the show that occasioned this resignation? It is the second of Chris Gilbert’s exhibitions which I have considered from afar, never having seen them and making do with only the sketchiest of descriptions. The “Now-Time” show includes videos of Venezuelan factories. That is, it is a series of documentary works representing the revolutionary changes within the processes of production in the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez. Given that a former U.S. presidential candidate on the right has suggested that the CIA should kill Chavez (which most have viewed as an only somewhat hysterical expression of current policy), it is fair to say that this exhibition brings no cheer to the U.S. State Department.