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A Parallel Image, an installation by Gebhard Sengmüller in collaboration with Franz Büchinger, consisting of an array of sensors, 2500 wires, and small light bulbs to make an “electronic camera obscura” for lo-fi video transmission.
(Via Make)
One of the artist’s desires is to give an account of reality and at the same time to protect it against oblivion and death, and this effort is bound to fail; failure is there from the beginning. For example, Giacometti knows that he cannot grasp life: he will do his brother’s bust and his wife’s portrait again and again without ever achieving his aim, but this explicit failure is part of the beauty of his work. Gerhard Richter, quoted in The Claude Glass by Arnaud Maillet, p. 200.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkl782OqqmA&feature=player_embedded
FluidPaint: An Interactive Digital Painting System using Real Wet Brushes. An experimental project by Tom Van Laerhoven of the Hasselt University Expertise Centre for Digital Media in Belgium. Unlike previous digital painting applications, this one uses actual water (detected by a surface-level IR emitter) to record strokes on the surface and more correctly models the tip of the brush being used, whether rounded or fanned, and it can even simulate a sponge. Looks like it makes some convincing watercolor-like images.
More info: Brush Design for Interactive Painting Applications (PDF)
(Via John Nack at Adobe)
The Rotating Kitchen, an installation by Zeger Reyers that was put into motion at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf late last month, where it will keep rotating for the next three months. Hypnotic, like an inside-out katamari.
(Via today and tomorrow)
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
[…]
At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker’s film essays available online. If you want a retrospective, you can have it. But the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even reedit or improve them if you think it necessary. And the results circulate. Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out of museums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs of artists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not.
– Excerpted from Hito Steyerl’s piece in e-flux journal #10
(Via Rhizome)
Artist-modded classic pinball tables must be all the rage. Seen here: artist William T. Wiley’s Punball: Only One Earth, a modified version of Gottleib’s 1964 North Star table, currently on display at the Smithsonian.
(Via the Smithsonian’s Eye Level blog)
A ‘conversational’ collection of academic theory and discourse on arts, aesthetics, architecture (along with other non-alliterative disicipines), a user-contributed journal. Who needs grad school?
Dreaming the Industrial Body. I’m not sure that I’m following the info that they’re trying to convey about the sun’s effects on our bodies, but it’s definitely an eye-catching image as far as medical literature goes. From Der mensch gesund und krank [The Healthy and Sick Human], menschenkunde 1940 … . Vol. 2, displayed as part of the National Library of Medicine’s Dream Anatomy exhibit. Speaking of which, check out their cool children’s art page!
A dog, a cyclops, and others kill some time with the help of wormholes and hobbyist self-modification. Made in 2008.
Pellet Gunn by Tim Beckhardt. Not 100% sure that I get the full story, but it’s great in a non sequitur, underground comix sort of way. His line work and hand-filled blacks are nicely composed, and the animation is fun. Extra points for the Philip Guston painting in the background.
Pretty awesome makeup job imitating an iconic Roy Lichtenstein pop art print. Not sure who the actual artist / model is, but found via Make.
