MOMA show

I went to see the MOMA show Design and the Elastic Mind, I found it overall quite a good show, although I did feel that as the MOMA tends to do they lumped art and design together based on something random in this case technology.  My favorite pieces were Troika piece titled Newton Virus, in which a virus is inserted into a laptop and it causes the Mac user’s interface to fall down and be subjected to Newton’s theory of gravity.  It’s almost a one liner but it’s funny so it gets away with a lot in my book.  On the other hand I felt Simon Haldane Lightweeds was more of a commentary how we experience nature these days and how little of it is real. Lightweeds is a living piece of art they grow indoors but rely on the sun and rain in the real world to do so.  I also enjoyed Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin it’s an animated piece which documents the flight pattern for domestic flights in a 24-hour span.

In Exile

I spent a lot of time combing the internet, looking for a net art piece that I actually wanted to review. There is a lot of interesting work out there, but it took some time to filter through it all to find something that actually had some emotional and intellectual resonance for me. Finally, I stumbled apon Carlo Zanni’s My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar. The concept seems pretty simple: a daily video stream of the sunset in Naples. Upon poking around the website, I learned that the foreground of the video is actually pre-recorded, and is not in Naples at all, but rather Ahlen, Germany, so we have a city in Germany superimposed over the sky in Naples.

It didn’t happen to be sunset in Naples when I found the website, but there is an archive of previous days, and the archive videos have been “time accelerated,” so you can watch the sun set on fast-forward. I watched several sunsets – each video begins with the reading of a poem (“A Tormented Owl at Home and in Exile” by Ghada Samman, a Syrian poet) by a man with an American accent, and features music from the Gotan Project, an Argentinian band. The artist himself is Italian, and according to his bio lives in Milan and New York, and the website was created by a company in Argentina.

The piece therefore reaches from South America to North America to Italy to Germany to Syria, just in its creation. It deals with issues of space and time, home and exile, distance and community. It provides the viewer with choices in how they wish to experience the work: live and in real time, or archived and time-accelerated, subtitled in English or German or not at all, and with or without the additional information provided by the website.

funny but is it art?

In the piece entitled “hit em’ up” the artist xtina1693, or better known as Kristina Williamson, uses you tube as a sounding board. This is by no means a finished project but rather a sketch of a larger idea she is interested in. I received this as part of her weekly email in which she asks her community of artists to critic her work. The video starts with a slight move of a red blanket on a bed of similar color. Music starts and what happens next is what you imagine the original video to look like; bopping and gesturing but instead of Tupac it’s the artist covered in the blanket making these gestures and dancing performing as if channeling Tupac. It’s a funny sight. The video goes on and you notice the movements get more indignant, at the same time you get glimpses of a naked knee and behind the figure you notice a drawing of a women on the wall and a sun drenched window with plants and you begin to ask; who is underneath? is she naked? The end of the song quells our question and out emerges a woman in underwear to turn off the video camera, and at that point you wonder is this art or just an average 14 year old playing on a sunny Saturday. In that respect you tube provides a sea of information that can be and will be interpreted in so many ways. As easily as this can be read as deconstructing rap videos to their base form of the music and posturing you can also clam it to be an American’s funniest home video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYiBs4-3KRs