Experiment in 'the Making'

I was really excited last week when our chairperson, Joel Slayton, said he was interested in doing mini-make sessions in our Seminar class. The seminar class is revolving around collaboration already and I had suggested some in class session to make gear led by myself. I am a huge fan of the DIY culture of the Bay Area (check out Make magazine) I can't wait to learn.

Jessica and I want to build some pringles-can-antennas to improve our range for wifi. I also had these ideas for classes I am proposing no particular order):
brewing your own cider,
archery (it is a scary idea but I have seen it done inside),
how to be a flaneur on SecondLife,
how to build a simple object on SL,
bluescreen technique
more to come, I am sure...

Here's a head shot of my avatar from our gallery on SL.

Youngblood's Expanded Cinema available at UBU




I was pleased to find out that this seminal (and out-of-print!) work by Gene Youngblood is now available from the site UBUWeb, an electronic repository for works of art and theory and as they describe it, "all forms of the avant-garde and beyond." Here is the direct link to the page holding the Expanded Cinema pdf. Don't miss the huge archive of sound and moving image from artists and theorists like Paik, Debord, Duchamp, and Ono!

Digital Amnesia

A LA Times article from September 13, Unable to Repeat the Past discusses the yet futile attempts to keep up with the creation of digital documents as a truly archivable material. Is this age doomed to the same fate of tragedy that befell the great Library of Alexandria? Here is an archive copy of the article as PDF in the case it is not available anymore...

;)

THE CIA????????? is recruiting on Mythbusters??????

OK so I am really bad at doing homework, especially after a night of frosty malted beverages with my art school cohort but, that is a story for another post.

While collecting images for my presentation on the yBa I had a television on in the background. Suddenly my subconscious was aware of a incongruous advertising message from the commercial break, was that really a recruitment advert for the CIA??? Was that really a hip, trendy, ANIMATED ad for the CIA!!??!?!?! yes it was... :O

language, priviledge, and sillyness
??a historiography song??

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to catch a CBC Radio One program called and sometimes y... (unfortunately it is not on the CBC site any more). The theme of the series was language and this program so it immediately caught my attention. This episode specifically because it dealt with the languages of specialists.

Being a generalist who is deeply involved with specialty fields, this is often a conflict I run into especially in my study of theory! It made me smile that the three specialty fields the highlighted were auto mechanics, art critics, and cultural theorists.

Of particular resonance (and humor), a fellow on the show, The Word Nerd, composed The Historian Song, a dulcet romp through the taxonomies of the specialists who study other specialists. He has cheerfully agreed to let me post his song via my site here, please enjoy.

Ars Virtua Exhibition 'Honesty' Opens

Tonight was the opening of the latest exhibition at Ars Virtua. The exhibition, honesty is our policy, is curated from the turbulence.org archive by Amy Wilson, James Morgan, and Jay Van Buren. The Ars V. Gallery was a buzz as participant from around the country logged on the SecondLife metaverse.

The show included three projects originally commissioned by Turbulence: Urbandale by Cory Arcangel, Heritage by Nicolas Clauss and Jean-Jacques Birgé, and Stop Motion Studies by David Crawford.

Direct and poignant, the work of Crawford rings true in his stop-motion anthropology of Tokyo commuters on one morning. The work is a realization that the world around us is much more poetic in our everyday travails than we ever tend to believe.

WOW the new semester begins with a bang as usual. Now my third semester and now for the third time two-thirds of my classes get dropped. Then at the last moment the chairperson of my department asks me to teach an Intro to Digital Video class. And they will pay me.

This graduate school life is so weird.

If you want to monitor the progress of our students please see here.