 Well folks, after five years, this blog is now defunct. It will remain online as an archive, but I'm moving to a new design, a new blog name, and more of a focus on what I've been writing about anyway: art, design, technology, culture. Please stop by and consider subscribing:
9:10 PM | Thursday, August 19, 2010 |
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 It's dark. Sorry. But I spotted this on an office whiteboard and it got me thinking about pictographs and the evolution of the Chinese language. The above look like 田命 (Tian Ming), the characters, respectively, for "field" and "life". What would modern pictographs look like? Something like the above, I suspect - inspired by PowerPoint and graphs, rather than images from nature.
11:20 AM | Monday, June 28, 2010 |
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Louvre-DNP Museum Lab at Onishi Gallery
Swung by Onishi Gallery this weekend to check out the Louvre-DNP Museum Lab's display of augmented reality and other technologies for museums and cultural institutions. Longer review to come, but I wanted to get this post up, as it's well worth a visit--the show runs till June 10 (this Thursday!)
More info about the Museum Lab. Labels: art, technology
7:06 PM | Sunday, June 06, 2010 |
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Artist interviews: Sky Kim and Peter Emerick
I recently visited the NARS Foundation Open Studios to see friends and find some inspiration for art. I had a lot of interesting conversations that day, and I decided to try to capture two of them with Sky Kim and Peter Emerick, a lovely couple in residency at NARS.
Not quite the quality of the James Kalm Report or Alan Lupiani and the newly-launched Two Coats of Paint channel, but I've been enjoying experimenting w/ impromptu, unedited video interviews and hope you enjoy them. Have a few more coming up, and you can find the rest on my Vimeo page.
9:28 AM | Thursday, May 20, 2010 |
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Escape From New York - Performance
This weekend, I'm showing alongside Whitney Biennial artists Kate Gilmore and the Bruce High Quality Foundation in... Paterson, NJ. It's a massive warehouse space featuring a number of contemporary artists, and I'll be leading a participatory performance piece:
The Artist Is Kinda PresentThis will be my last show, sadly, before I move back to Los Angeles later this summer (more details on that below). I hope to see you there!
8:04 AM | Wednesday, May 12, 2010 |
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 Sorry for the relative silence here; lots of thinking, reading and doing, not a lot of blogging. I've started a new photo diary to capture little things I see that don't really have a place here but catch my eye nonetheless. Someone asked me recently why I take pictures with my Blackberry when I sport all the power of a digital SLR. I didn't have a good answer, but wabi sabi came to mind. Enjoy. Labels: art, personal, photography, zen
2:31 PM | Monday, May 03, 2010 |
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My reservation request for the portrait of MuseumNerd, as painted by Nic Rad. More context about the show here, and about MuseumNerd here. I unfortunately have to be in DC on business during the great giveaway this week, but I'd still like to have the portrait. We'll see if Nic's okay with that, esp. given my competition.
... I fall in love at least once each day. I fall in love with the kitten that lives in my neighborhood. I fall in love with good sandwiches at the delicatessen. I fall in love with those close to me, even if they don't understand. I fall in love with gadgets and gizmos and books and everyone and everything else that makes me happy. The glaring exception is art. I realize this is ironic. I have dedicated so much of my life to art. I grew up writing poems on scraps of paper and drawing my own paper dolls. Before I ever laid hands on InDesign, I scribbled out comics and Xerox'ed hand-drawn magazines. Armed with floppy disks and stamps, I was a social media artist long before AOL made the computers accessible. But some time between then and now, art became a business, and artists became entrepreneurs. Artists now must map out goals, measure metrics, strategize and analyze with nearly-Machiavellian discipline and find the words for nonverbal work that will resonate with the reporters and the curators. The work of art is entwined in the work of art, and, without making or demanding judgment, PeopleMatter lays that process bare for all to see and make their own conclusions. This weekend, I did a very nerdy thing and went to a museum by myself. I spent three hours with the exhibition, absorbed fully by the work, without any pressure to be anything but present. It took me a while to realize that I was seeing the way @MuseumNerd sees. The feed has opened my eyes again: museums large and small are once again mysterious, the art is spiritual, the stories bring tears. In so much as love is possible when it comes to art, I have @MuseumNerd to thank, and that's why, Nic Rad, I'd like to own this portrait. Labels: art
3:21 PM | Monday, April 26, 2010 |
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Lingua Plebis (The Language of the People)  The Library of Congress just announced the following (big!) news today via Twitter: Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.I'm in a Roman state of mind right now, perhaps (been watching HBO/BBC's Rome and reading the terrific Pagan Holiday). This news raises a number of very important questions about intellectual property and the ownership of tweets. But once those issues are sorted out (and we quickly delete all our most embarrassing tweets), I think future historians will find this archive invaluable. Yes, trending topics like #ihatequotes and #nowplaying may seem inane to us now. But they'll be just like the "tweets" from Pompeii preserved forever on walls and doors, shedding light on the colloquial language and plebeian values that never made it into Plutarch's Lives: On April 19th, I made bread Image via Laura Padgett. Labels: history, internet, language, technology
9:44 AM | Wednesday, April 14, 2010 |
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Back in New York after a week in Los Angeles. As I watched one city fade away from view and another city emerge a few hours later, I realized that the next time I'm in Los Angeles, I'll be a resident once again.
But another thought: Strolling through LAX and JFK with crisp efficiency (I always travel carry-on, even on month-long trips), I also got to thinking about Up in the Air, which I watched last week. It surprised me by how much it captured this moment in time--the anxieties of the recession, our culture of false intimacy--, and for the non-megastar vulnerability George Clooney brought to his character. As technology is always on my mind, I couldn't help but see the story as a critique of the technologies that are meant to bring us closer. Commercial airlines, frequent flyer cards, hotel amenities, mobile phones, video chats. I've been traveling regularly almost literally since I was born, and I started to see my life in Clooney's life, lived in airports and flying over blurry cities, everything I need in a rolling suitcase. All the little things I do to keep grounded and sane as I've crisscrossed the country.  All the little things. They bring us the comforts of home without actually being home. As we march forward with all these new technologies (and I love watching every new development), it's important to remember to look back and critique them too. Which technologies bring us closer together and which only seem to? When we do use technology as a shield against intimacy, and when is it a bridge? Labels: culture, film, review, technology
7:49 PM | Tuesday, April 13, 2010 |
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Alan Lupiani - YouTube Star and Artist
On occasion, I meet folks doing interesting things, and I like to interview them to get to know a little bit more about their process. The last person I spoke with for this blog was Stefan Goodreau, a five-time Jeopardy champion this past summer.
I recently met artist and YouTuber Alan Lupiani during the opening night of #class, when he interviewed me about my performance piece, Photoglam. I've since seen him at a number of openings, and he's quickly become a regular face in the New York art world, both offline and on. I chatted with Alan briefly over email about his creative process: So I love your YouTube show. It's quirky, fun and interesting, and it looks like you really only got going recently. Where did this idea come from? I started with the video work back in 2006 with the advent of YouTube. I wanted to get out of the studio and do something more interactive. I read an article in USA Today about these young bloggers making videos in their bedrooms getting like 100,000 views in a day, and said "wow, I have to give this a try." I especially got into a video blogger named "Brookers" who now attends NYU I believe. I remember watching her video, "The United States of..WHATEVA" and thinking I had never seen anything like that. I made a few videos about a character named "aluminaman" and one of actor/comedian Tom Green's fans saw my work and suggested I contact Tom about helping Tom promote his online night time show, "Tom Green Live." It was all very exciting as Tom was at the forefront of the online streaming video thing and I was happy to be a part of something new and different. Tom would give us video "Deputies" different assignments to help promote his night time internet show and we would carry them out. One assignment had us going out into the streets with a chicken tied around our waists with a piece of rope and asking people in the street why the chicken was following us. It was the first time I felt really vulnerable in a public environment and in retrospect, the experience qualified as my first fluxus style art performance. It gave me confidence to do performance work in public and motivated me to go on my own. That's amazing. From there, I started my own online LIVE! streaming show in 2007 called, "Dear Immaculately Groomed Italian Guy" which received a lot of positive response and viewers, but as with all new trends, there was a small window of opportunity to succeed before new players and corporate America caught on, making it difficult to stay relevant and on top of the online LIVE streaming craze. After my brief moment of internet popularity, I decided in 2008 to get back to the studio to make paintings again. Now, I am back again and taking my performances to the art world. I have been surprised and humbled by the positive response and am looking to do my show again in the context of a gallery/museum environment. What are your production tools like? Hardware and software? My production tools now are a Logitech webcam, Toshiba PC, Adobe Premier, Kodak hand held Zi8 HD camera, Radio Shack lavalier microphone, small mixing board, studio microphone. That's a great array of tools--flexible but totally affordable for a small production team. What do you hope to accomplish with your video series? I would like to turn galleries and museums into broadcasting studios where I perform my show. I know you paint and are an artist yourself. How does this YouTube channel tie in with your broader art work? YouTube and other video sites are tools to get my work out to a broader audience. Currently, YouTube acts as a vehicle for dissemination, nothing more, nothing less. Ultimately, the video clips may serve as a revenue stream. I hope they do. Thanks so much, Alan. Alan Lupiani's YouTube channel can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/Aplupiani. You can also follow him on twitter at @alanlupiani.
9:51 PM | Sunday, April 11, 2010 |
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