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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Do you have a nerdish interest in colour and $30 to spend on a made-in-California-new-media t-shirt? Joester is helping to promote the online conference 080808 and so are we.
As you may know, BCNM and Greg Niemeyer have been running the algorithmically timed 0n0n0n conference series since 01/01/01.
This time round we are stripping everything away from the conference except an online discussion...and the conference T-Shirt.
The conference theme for 080808 is Digital Color: Something from Something or Nothing. This refers to the standard digital format of 24-bit color. Each one of 24 bits (0 or 1) describes how computers should mix light to achieve a specific color. We will focus in on this process with our website, which allows you to change individual bits of the color format to see colors change. When you register (fee $30.00), you can reserve a bit, set the bit to either 0 or 1, and then explain your choice. You can also review other participant's explanations of their choices. This, we hope, will produce a conversation online about color, something and nothingness. It will also determine a palette of four colors which will define the custom-designed and custom sewn conference t-shirt (hence the fee). The conference t-shirt will be shipped to all participants after the conference closes.
Visit: http://studio.berkeley.edu/080808
It would be great to see your comments up there, and you will get a unique T-Shirt from the process.
The conference ends on Friday August 8 at 8 PM.
UPDATE: conference has been extended to 08/23/08
(the competition for who gets to control the shirt colour is heating up)
Photos by Andrew Wright from Death by Chocolate.
An animated discussion (Catch that pun? Did you? Did you?) at simpleposie on the AGYU's current survey of artists.
(I'm closing the comments here to avoid cross posting)
(This rule does not apply to me)
(opened again)
Selections from The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man"
Gläserne Frau, 1935, from Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden.
Note: the exhibition The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man" did not
have this piece, but did have Replica of The Glass Man, 1995,
After original by Franz Tschakert, also from the
Deutsche Hygiene-Museum.
André Masson, Goethe and the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1940
Carl Strüwe, Snail Tongue, 1928
Ivo Saliger The Judgment of Paris, c. 1939
Salvador Dali Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),1936
Alex Colville, Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 1946
Me and GVB went to Ottawa to see The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man" at the National Gallery with our friend J. A major theme was artists' interest in biology, and the physiological workings of the world. The show opened with a replica of the very first "Visible Man", a life-sized sculpture by Franz Tschakert. I was also really taken with André Masson's painting of Goethe's brain/mind as he worked on his biological observations. As these nifty science inspired works gave way for massive eugenics-inspired paintings of Aryan uber-citizens, my own present day enthusiasm for art/science combinations started to irk me a little. But the exhibition was really comprehensive, lots of surrealism, and post war art as well. Alex Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave, Belsen kind of brought it home to me that the artists of that dense era were both engaged in the ethos of the time, and passing comment on it as well. Even the most politically embedded were bearing witness to facism and its horrors, and now, in the museum, we can get a pretty good look at that socio-political era with all the compromised ethical complexity that comes with a humane point of view. It's a great show, very well curated. GVB pointed out that no curators are named or credited anywhere in the exhibition, which is odd.
Because it seems related, I'm pulling and repeating a paragraph from L.M.'s recent comment, an excerpt from George Friedman writing about Solzhenitsyn...
Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008
From a 2007 essay Solzhenitsyn’s Refusal by Pierre Tristam
The Gulag Archipelago is a study in power’s perversions at every level of a society unwilling to dilute it, from the very top (Stalin) to its bottom-feeding power-trippers: the secret police, the interrogators, the privileged prisoners, the prison guards (every one of which is analyzed in chapter-length details). Those hierarchies shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to anyone who’s known the hierarchies of a school, of a corporation, of any organization built on the pyramidal notion of power. Nor would Solzhenitsyn’s endless tales of policing, suspicion, torture, subtle or grand repressions sound unfamiliar to those of us pawned and pawed by the convenient terrors of “homeland security” and the “global war on terror.” If “The Gulag Archipelago” isn’t read much nowadays, it’s from ignorance, not irrelevance.