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If you don't think Bush is planning to start a war with Iran, you don't know Junior. According to a Time cover story, which is greasing the skids for another subscription boostin' war, duking it out with the Iranians "is no longer unthinkable." With breathless excitement, the lapdogs tell us that minesweepers have been put on ready to be sent to the Straits of Hormuz. Folks, before you even have a chance to punish Bush's party in November, the little man is about to let fly. The eagle is about to soar again. So, in the spirit of angry punk impotence which was the only possible political posture in the nightmare Reagan years, I offer this video of Lance Blisters on MIDI guitar, with visuals by Ilan Katin, re-performing John Ashcroft's version of that ridiculous "eagle" song: [15 MB Quicktime .mov]
Below are Quicktime .movs depicting the slicing of four-dimensional stellated polytopes, created by Russell Towle. These are hypnotic, complex patterns, strangely organic for being so hard-edged and geometric. Towle explains: "These may be the first animations ever made of the solid sections of four-dimensional star polytopes. [...] Briefly, plane polygons are two-dimensional polytopes, and polyhedra, three-dimensional polytopes. Where polygons are bounded by line segments, and polyhedra by polygons, a 4-polytope is bounded by polyhedra. Just as we may have any number of planes in three dimensions, in 4-space we may have any number of 3-spaces. Two 3-spaces might be a millionth of an inch apart and yet have no common point (thus the popular idea of parallel universes). It follows that, given a fixed direction in the 4-space, we can take solid sections of objects in the 4-space, perpendicular to that direction. [...] In these animations, a 3-space is passed from one vertex of each star polytope, to the opposite vertex, and sections taken at small intervals. The star polytopes were constructed, and the sections found, using Mathematica 4.0. The sections were rendered in POV-Ray (a freeware ray-tracer)." The screenshot above is from the last .mov, "{5/2,3,5}."
[.mov files removed -- they no longer work in current (2017) browsers -- thanks, Apple!]
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Films and/or vids projected against a Williamsburg building exterior at Secret Project Robot. The one-day-only Monster Island Arts & Music Festival, on Sept. 16, was not notable for its sub-slacker gallery art but the moving images outside really popped.
Update: I found this email from Nick Hallett that explains a bit more about the projections: "NEXT SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16th: as part of the MONSTER ISLAND ARTS & MUSIC FESTIVAL, HARKNESS A/V is hosting its one year anniversary. MIGHTY ROBOT, BRADLEY EROS, SETH KIRBY, and TOM DEXTER will join visual forces atop the fortress of Monster Island (in Williamsburg at Metropolitan and Kent), throwing their images onto the giant gas tanks directly across the street. More info to come." Still waiting for that info, but the work looked great.
Update 2: In a subsequent email Hallett added "visiting guest artist: BORIS (from the MODUL8 team)" to the roster.
Red and Green 1-4, 1991, acrylic on canvas, ea. 10 x 8 inches. The red and green* are closer in value than in these photos and vibrate pretty seriously. The "obnoxious Op" factor is critical to these (not previously exhibited) paintings. I had a dream last night about a group of paintings that looked like this--only they were much more elaborate, on shaped panels that followed some of the contours.
*turquoise green, which the camera and possibly your screen makes appear more as a blue.
"Un-tribal" [mp3 removed]
I recycled a riff from "Bass-o-matic" and added some new tunes around and on top of it. Still working with my self-made drum machine samples. I called it "un-tribal" because it has a kind of pounding jungle rhythm but is still inherently geeky.
Update: Took about 50 seconds out of this.
This is not the Onion, this is from CNN:
Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs"Testy US mobs?" Protesting, say, the Iraq war? Bad immigration bills? An Air Force that wants to cook US citizens for "good public relations"? Michael Wynne would be a great test subject. We could all laugh when he staggers to the ground, incapacitated by painful invisible rays.
POSTED: 7:56 p.m. EDT, September 12, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.
The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.
Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.
Public sculpture that's actually good: Matthew Geller's Awash, which opened tonight in Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan, and will be installed through November 25. It's a "portable fountain" made of sidewalk scaffolding, Plexigas, and PVC pipe. As you sit in the swings, water flows over your head like rain sliding down a loft skylight, and is then recycled through the PVC ductwork and back up through a pump in the water tank. It's romantic, carefree, and absurd at the same time, and the materials are completely unassuming. Last year, Geller's piece Foggy Day--notable for its artificial fog bank in Chinatown's Cortlandt Alley--was criticized by no less than the New York Sun and Fox News as socially dubious "fog art." The site for this new, budgetarily conscious urban earthwork is Collect Pond Park, a bland but historically charged spot across from the Tombs (bounded by Franklin, Leonard, Centre and Lafayette). In Manhattan's early history this was once a beautiful lake called the Collect, which became putrescent with urbanization, was drained, and served as the boggy foundations for the Five Points slum, made famous in The Gangs of New York. Now the land's surrounded by courthouses and other government buildings, and is in bad need of being rescued by something as funky as this. (One thinks also of the World Trade Center kiddie pool memorial--but that wasn't supposed to be funky.)
Re: the twilight photo
Update: photo lightened and color-corrected from the original crepuscular blue; another photo moved to the comments that is still blue but shows the flowing water more clearly. Yes, I fell down in my role of NY art documentarian. I got lost in the Five Points government building maze and the hour was getting later and later...
Update: Here are some better pictures from the LMCC blog:
