tom moody

Above, another image from the wannes deprez/ony one flickr stream: A. Gutnov, V. Iudintsev, E. Rusakov, Scheme for a tower on Trubnaia Square, Moscow, 1970. This looks like something from the 1920s rather than 50 years later. More of that crazy Soviet-era architecture that's gradually getting wider views thanks to the WWW.

Completely unrelated except in some vague rhythmic sense, a neo-Rauschenbergian photo-combine by Roy Stanfield. (Actually it's way more elegant than anything Bob ever did.) From Stanfield's website, which is now a daily, single image archive. He also designs artist and gallery websites, so throw him some business.

Below, a sculpture exhibition at the Median Art Center in China, photo by Kai Vierstra from his blog. Click image for larger view. His sculpture is the helix of wooden triangles just to the left of center. One thing that intrigues here is the commitment of indoor acreage to art and the predominance of abstraction in the work. Not one image of say, ironic Mao-era socialist realism to give the show figurative "balance" (with the possible exception of the painting up near the ceiling--can't see it very well).

Lorna Mills (aka L.M. from the Sally McKay and L.M. blog) is teaching a net art class and has published her class notes. It is a mix of syllabus, lesson plan, and how-to with much editorializing and distinction-making about the current scene of surf clubs, web art 2.0, or what have you.

Rather than embrace the Web Establishment with links to textbook examples of net art, Mills is marching off into the great uncharted and taking impressionable minds with her.

Subjects covered are things yours truly has been going on about for years and were only barely adequately covered at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panels and subsequent discussions with Rhizome chatboard naysayers. Collections, arranging GIFs on pages, using tables, distorting GIFs, YouTube hacking, hackers vs defaults, Nasty Nets, Double Happiness, Chris Ashley, Loshadka, Petra Cortright. The good stuff.

binaural, a sound-based data sculpture by Shajay Bhooshan and Daniel Widrig commissioned by Melkweg

Frozen: Sound as Space exhibition, Amsterdam, July 2008, curated by Marius Watz.

Haven't seen the piece, only jpegs from various angles. These sculpture posts are more in the nature of thought experiments than art reviews. What do the images of the sculptures say to a working artist? Would like to see this piece/image have some of the obsessive/creepy personalization of say, Cathy de Monchaux, or the sense of accident or catastrophe of the Kai Vierstra Earthquake piece posted earlier. The idea of sound visualized as pure form is nice and the execution is tight but art is more than that. This is a complaint about generative art generally. Even though the computerization tools are new, we've been there with this kind of modernist sculpture. At its worst it's a kind of kitsch that you saw a lot of in "happenin" '60s/'70s churches and synagogues. At its best it does exactly what it's supposed to do--visualizes sound waves, in the most formally pristine way. Again, we need more.

Press release for Ludwig Schwarz-curated show "Sold on Soylent" at And/Or Gallery in Dallas, through October 18. Great to see the Estate of Uma Click is represented in the show. (From the trendsetting Schmulke Bruengross gallery in Munich.)

Schwarz is rumored to have some work at art is for the people.

Kai Vierstra - Earthquake with Large Fissure

Video of similar piece showing plywood being stressed and cracks forming:

[Quicktime .mov] - dead link, try the vimeo

[jpeg and video review--haven't seen the actual work] The slow cracking of the wood in the video is aesthetically satisfying, like the popping of bubble wrap, but ominous. I like the piece's encapsulation of horrific forces into almost-pure form. The shape seems to have been determined entirely by factors other than the artist's design: an imagined civic architect's ideal plans twisted and rended by catastrophe "in the field." It's straight-up entropy--once broken the structural integrity is gone. Compare Steve Parrino's bashed-in monochromes and Jason Middlebrook's post-apocalyptic Bilbao. Or Gehry if all the "implied torque" in his buildings actually tore them apart.

Excerpt from Lynn's text, from wannes deprez/ony one's photostream [hat tip lalblog.tumblr]:

This project reformulates the vertical bundle of tubes horizontally along a strand of land between Wacker Drive and the Chicago River's edge adjacent to the existing Sears Tower. To engender affiliations with particular local events, the rigid geometry that dictated the exact parallel relations between tubes was rejected for a more supple description. Through a geometry that is more supple, the nine contiguous tubes accommodate themselves fluidly and flexibly to the multiple and often discontinuous borders of the site. The relations between tubes are not exactly parallel. These supple deflections allow connection to take place which would have been repressed by a more rigid and reductive geometric system of description.

Starting a mini-series of blog posts on sculptural/3D forms. The above has a certain affinity w/ this drawing from a few months back. Didn't know Lynn's work or much about him but like the abject quality of this architecture. It talks a good game about functionality but it seems more about a failed or impossible space which makes it considerably more interesting than Gehry or Hadid.

Their installation in a group show called "New Blood." The DVD cases are Nigerian and Thai cinema, mostly. One video was still rendering when I arrived so I didn't get a shot of it (just the default JVC screen with colored spheres). The snack station features a working refrigerator and microwave and gallerygoers were heating mini-pizzas (also note Hydrox cookie bag--there's a story involving Warren Buffett and the reviving of the brand after he received a letter from the group--they may be heroes). The scatter-orgy successfully translates the maxed-out, unrepressed, multiple-overlapping-media vibe of the group's blog. Taste and restraint are concepts they have no use for, making them the most lifelike of the surf clubs.

Note: two members of Double Happiness will give a presentation about the grocery store C-Town (Town-Town-Town...) in connection with this year's Conflux Festival. Details at the link.

Another note: barely visible in the top photo is a laptop "eating" slices of actual pizza, which may or may not remain for the duration of the exhibit.

"Waltz Alpha Tango" [7.2 MB .mp3]

Minimal techno piece (with 8-bit timbres in the percussion); 3/4 time; 140 bpm. Previously posted as "Sidbeats 3" but longer and with some spooky pad sounds added, made with the Linplug Alpha softsynth.