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When is a graveyard not a graveyard? Answer: when it's a porno set! The title of the above photo, by Laura Carton, is www.ebonyplayas.com--no, I'm not kidding. Other images by her are here, all pretty innocuous and bearing titles of x-rated websites. These are some of the best (wittiest, most patiently executed) examples I've come across of the "erased porn" genre, a kind of deliberate, art world cousin of those altered news photos the papers keep palming off on us. Each originally had, let's just say, a human figure or figures in it, but they've been removed in a photo program so you're left with a kind of empty stage for smutty-minded projection. To do them requires getting inside the image and matching colors and textures and light--basically making a photorealist painting, a skill similar to that of an "inpainter" who restores missing chunks of old masters. By removing all the hot action, the pictures become quirky vernacular photography, as much a catalog of the archetypes and tropes of "place" as Cindy Sherman's were of "feminine roles." The porn charges up the innocent or banal location, and Carton taps the residual energy.
I referred to what she does as a genre; here are a few more examples. The first is proto-porn: Kathy Grove's erasure of Thomas Hart Benton's pin-up nude from his painting Susanna and the Elders, leaving only the old codger staring at her blanket on the grassy riverbank. Istvan Szilasi, a Hungarian artist working in New York, and Arizona artist Jon Haddock (scroll down pictures at left), however, are doing work somewhat similar to Carton's. Szilasi doesn't attempt to hide the fact that he's removing figures, he's almost expressionistically sloppy in his use of Photoshop tools. I find his approach pretty amusing. Judging by the Kent State/Vietnam photos in the Whitney's "BitStreams" show, Haddock attempts to hide the erasure, but poorly--the telltale marks of the rubber stamp or "clone tool" are obvious, and not in a good way. Carton's images aren't infallible (almost nothing in Photoshop is), but they pass the "close enough" test when printed and laminated on Plex. On a content level, Haddock's porn photos are just a record of tacky motel interiors--there's none of the sense you get with Carton's work that porn is a strange mirror for the "normal" side of life: the everyday world of recreation, communications, plumbing, TV repair, dentistry, and, um, cemetery caretaking.
Astroboy I found on the Internet; the rest I did. I like Osamu Tezuka (and this color blue).
Pres. Admits He Lied Us Into War
AP via NYT: President Bush on Wednesday accepted personal responsibility for a controversial portion of last winter's State of the Union address dealing with claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear material in Africa. "I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely,'' the president said at a White House news conference. Bush has been seeking to quell a controversy over a controversial claim that has dogged his administration for weeks.So, now he's going to step down, right?
Like the mortuary residents in Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik, some of the posts on this weblog are still ticking away in the comments section, enjoying happy and productive half-lives. The following are recommended threads:
A rousing discussion of Golan Levin's Dialtones (a Telesymphony), a new media work in which audience members' cell phones become musical instruments. After kicking it off with my customary gentle critique, artist/poet/critic/WFMU dj Kenneth Goldsmith and various digital media tree-ers chimed in, and then Levin himself responded. The nitty gritty is gotten down to here.
The discussion of 28 Days Later shifts to the film's stupid "alternate ending" strategy and iffy racial politics.
In the Marsha Cottrell vs Seldon Hunt thread, Digital Media Tree-er Mark posts a nifty chart of DCT coefficients and I try to bluff my way through a discussion of image compression technology.
In the thread on Soviet Synthesizers, Bruce Sterling's 1995 speech about "dead media" is excerpted. That brilliant bit of argument should be required reading in any college-level new media curriculum.
"With this lance of PVC, foam, and duct tape, I challenge you to joust."
"And with this lance of similar materials, I respond to your challenge." (Guy in foreground: "So, we're thinking about Thai later--are you up for it?")
More pictures from the 2003 Chunkathalon (Saturday, July 26th, 2003, North 7th and Kent, Williamsburg, Brooklyn): "a series of death-defying contests that includes...the 40 lap, powerslide competition, baby rescue, apocalyptic quickfix, the 'help-me-up,' the gauntlet, derby, flaming wall of death, jump, hurl, and spew, as well as the World Chopper and Tallbike Jousting Championships. All chopper, tallbike, etc. bike clubs [were] respectfully commanded to attend."
UPDATE: Other pictures from embedded chunkajournalists are coming to light! James Wagner has a dynamic action shot on his blog of one of the jousts, and bloggy also has great photos. (Still more pics here.) Also, check out this documentation on the C.H.U.N.K. 666 website of the possibly even more frenetic 2002 Chunkathalon, held in Portland.
Cube tower slideup, by artech-x03, 80 times
an html/internet/curatorial/appropriation piece
The film 28 Days Later is a mishmash of influences (Omega Man, George Romero's zombie trilogy, John Wyndham's "cozy catastrophes"*), but it still packs a wallop. As fellow PreReviewer Sally McKay says in an email:
The fear in this film (Danny Boyle is director, from Trainspotting, etc.) is really contemporary. Globalization protest is an undercurrent, the main character is a bike courier, and the plot is a viral plague. All this content is punched home by the fact that it's shot with consumer-technology cameras. Sort of an open-source feel to the whole thing.The use of MiniDV is discussed in this article on Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer, and the gritty, grainy texture of the video and the filmmakers' keen eye for composition & detail make an unbeatable combination. Seeing the movie a second time you become more aware of how artful (not arty) some of the images are (semi-spoilers): the eerie scenes of a completely depopulated daytime London (the Dod Mantle article explains how this was done); hundreds of colored plastic rain-collecting buckets spread like a Tony Cragg piece on the roof of Brendan Gleeson's flat; the Constructivist vortex of high tension wires outside the bike messengers's parents' home (in the extreme foreground of the shot); the weirdly Photoshopped rows of flowers on the road to Manchester; the heavy sheets of rain at the military checkpoint in the last reel; the messenger's view of the jet contrail through a tangle of silhouetted branches. Many of these shots would have been effective if done on regular film stock, but the video gives the movie a documentary urgency, so the best compositions seem accidental, which is even better.
*So called because, although apocalyptic, the action is largely confined to the British Isles and the protagonists never see the worst of it. Most germane here is the book Day of the Triffids. Giant ambulatory plants, offspring of crossbreeding experiments, are slow moving, responsive to sound, and lethal to humans--killing with a deadly stinger and feeding on the carrion. They aren't actually much of a threat until a strange meteor shower, watched all over the globe, strikes most of the population inexplicably blind. Recuperating from eye surgery perfomed before the meteors fell, a man removes the bandages from his eyes in a strangely empty hospital, and discovers a changed world...