Clark puts human faces on the bodies of animals to create some of the most haunting sculptures I’ve ever seen. These are powerful and terrifying and the memory of seeing even these photos is likely to instill existential dread in me whenever it’s recalled. But all this fear on my part is probably just a subconscious recognition that we humans are animals, often wild, and yet seldom betray these qualities with our faces.
Untitled (Black Bear)
Socialist Realism is alive and well in the North Korean art scene.
Abstract painting does not exist as it is deemed bourgeois and anti-revolutionary, and if some representational art can be purely aesthetic without political overtones, many landscapes do portray places of the revolution or of political significance.
Anonymity is a hallmark of North Korean art because all artists must work out of state-run studio complexes. Artists are ranked A, B, or C, depending on skill level. About fifty top-ranked artists are further designated “Merited Artists” and a more elite group of 20 are designated “People’s Artists.”
There are plenty of gems here from Bruce Sterling, on how generative techniques have altered the creative process:
Imagine a three-dimensional kaleidoscope that can generate forms so complex that a coral reef looks like minimalism. In some ways that’s a mere stunt, yet it also breaks the limits of the human creative imagination. Artists have always sought inspiration from found forms in nature. Now we’ve got a huge new arsenal of unnatural, software-based found forms.
The liner notes begin with an interview of Marius Watz, curator of the Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen exhibition showcasing artists working in digital fabrication (also called fabbing).
My concern in putting together Generator.x 2.0 was to show that generative systems go beyond “screensavers” and purely visual abstraction. … Ultimately, digital fabrication allows for a software-based approach to physical production, meaning that computational processes can be used in all parts of the production. It’s an ironic reversal of the last decade’s transition towards the digital, for once it’s a matter of bits becoming atoms instead of the other way around.
Although the post claims the Rhizome logo is generated anew with each page view, it doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Other generative logos:
The UK’s VAT and Duties Tribunal recently ruled that works by electric-light installation artist Dan Flavin and video artist Bill Viola are not subject to the same customs duties as ordinary “image projectors [or] photographic enlargers and reducers” or “chandeliers and electrical ceiling or wall light fittings.”
It’s a good ruling. The article points out the American precedent: in 1928 a US court ruled that Brancusi’s Bird in Space was not actually a kitchen utensil.
Yeah, I’d been wondering what it looked like, too.
Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[via nielsen]
The submission was a review paper of some of the recent literature on mitochondrial interactions but the paragraph that gave it away was just a hodgepodge of lyrics from DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album.
Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World
[via hawktrainer]
The ship looks really, really cool. Except for that protrusion at the top. It’s probably called a radar cone but I can’t help but think of a dunce cap, which might be a good thing. Dunce caps are named for John Duns Scotus, a 13th-century Scottish philosopher, who accepted
the wearing of conical hats to increase learning. He noted that wizards supposedly wore such things; an apex was considered a symbol of knowledge and the hats were thought to “funnel” knowledge to the wearer.
The ships are also said to be equipped with a particularly sharp version of Occam’s razor.
Charles Avery’s altermodern island
[via rodcorp]
8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer’s Guide quizzes at the end, which said: “Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.” (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)
I carried over the links in the original post; both are worth a visit.
Preoccupations
[via jbushnell]
A blog, just added to my NetNewsWire. See also: delicious.com/Preoccupations.
[via TomC]
The video’s about how they did GIS in the punchcard era.
Sensity by Stanza
[via anne]
This artwork visualizes the dynamic data around my environment as an audio visual artwork. I set up a wireless sensor network around my house in London. I live nearby a railway line, a factory, some trees and a mobile phone mast. (This is using real data).
The city is made up of bits of data that change. This artwork captures this change to try to understand the underlying fabric of city space. The artwork monitors the environment for change and relays these changes via the sensors.
Terminus, the god
[via blackbeltjones]
In Roman religion, Terminus was the god who protected boundary markers; his name was the Latin word for such a marker.
Ancient writers believed that the worship of Terminus had been introduced to Rome during the reign of the first king Romulus (traditionally 753–717 BC) or his successor Numa (717–673 BC). Modern scholars have variously seen it as the survival of an early animistic reverence for the power inherent in the boundary marker, or as the Roman development of proto-Indo-European belief in a god concerned with the division of property.
Incidentally, Terminus was the first name for the settlement now known as Atlanta.
Torque Control
[via jbushnell]
“This is the blog of the editorial staff of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association.”
Principles of cartography
[via TomC]
Pretty much a one-stop shop for links to useful information on mapping. The outline format might turn off some visitors—the page seems to have been made to support lectures in a mapping class at Rutgers—but there’s plenty of good stuff here.
Case in point: this map of the Breckenridge Ski Resort [PDF!] has adopted the Tube map’s use of colored lines and circles instead of relying on decades of ski resort mapping tradition. Unlike these old, bird’s-eye views of airbrushed slopes, the new Breckenridge map gives skiers and snowboarders what they need when they’re actually on the mountain itself: relative positions for all the lifts and trails.
I expect network maps like this one will continue to show up in unexpected places as map users become more comfortable with the style. Take Mondrian: after the world warmed to his brand of minimalism, they put it on tubes of styling gel.
Richard Serra sculptures on Google Maps
[via blackbeltjones]
Richard Serra’s massive sheet metal sculptures are easily seen from the Google planes. Are there any artists consciously collaborating with our new abilities to drag and click from on high?
Cake Wrecks: when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong
[via jbushnell]
A collection of funny cake mistakes from Cake Wrecks.
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Every weekday, I use this space to share the best links from a select group of 21 people in my network on delicious.com. The membership of this select group (listed in the right-hand column above) is subject to change. That's where you come in.
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