implicit art

I was planning on writing about this, but have been sick in bed all day, and then T.Whid of MTAA did a much better job of reviewing the features than I would have from behind this haze of flu, so here comes a re-blog, via their site:

A superb upgrade of the new media community site

Some of the changes:

1. A major change (for RHIZOME_RAW email list subscribers) is the breaking up of the list into 3 different categories: discussion, opportunities and an arts calendar. This required me to redo my email filters a tad, but also gives me the option to filter categories I don’t want or filter them more granularly.

2. The member pages have been transformed into profiles pages with lots more features: enhanced portfolio section (unclear of whether the portfolio entries get added to the artbase automatically), ability to upload audio and video (very cool) and include the feed from your blog. The organizational improvements to the profile page makes it much easier to read and see how the person is interacting with the platform.

3. There has been a major visual re-design. The front page is easier to scan quickly and is laid out more logically. The top navigation has been improved.

4. The discussion board is much better. One can now drill way back in time very quickly. The only problem is that it seems to go back only to 2002. Also, it would be nice to filter these pages (Max Herman is just as annoying now as he was then) but I suppose that’s what the advanced search is for. Which brings me to…

…Bugs. I did run into some bugs. The biggest bug being that the advanced search form isn’t working (I’ve been waiting and waiting this feature). I’m hoping to see major speed improvements in the search. Also with search, it would be nice to have the same sort of pagination in the search results as we get in the discussion area.

But enough of bug talk. This is a major, major upgrade for Rhizome and a big improvement. Lauren, Patrick and Marisa should be very proud. Congrats!

A continuation from The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction #1, performance 2 (passage) is a similarly site-specific, publicly performed architectural structure made of rope. The piece, erected in Joubert Park, Johannesburg South Africa (2007), twists the idea of ‘public space’ by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch its form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the park’s inhabitants, which gives the structure a performative turn.

Although the design is, itself, a passage - several doorframe shapes in series, swinging freely from atop four wooden poles - it can only move between hard and soft, virtual and actual, public and private, through its contact with people. This is juxtaposed with the inconsistencies of South Africa’s major inner-city: crumbling art deco buildings surrounded by crowded streets and busy taxi ranks, all making way for the quiet of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s neo-classical architecture, and the leisurely games, picnics and ice cream stands in the inexplicably carved-out Joubert Park. The surrounding areas of the park have historically been a bundle of contradictions - before, during and after Apartheid - sustained as civic spaces because of how they’re used by the public. performance 2 playfully mirrors the contradictions of this space and its utility, and further underpins the tensions between work and play, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence.

video documentation

download as quicktime or ogg / theora

Performers / Documentarians: Brendan Copestake, Ismail Farouk, Anthea Moys, João Orecchia, Rat Western. Click for photos and sketches.

The video, images, concept and design of this work are licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

holy crap. who knew anyone remembered the dominant seven? somebody just emailed me this link via the cornell alumni magazine. a little snip:

… Nat Stern spent most of his time in Ithaca leading the town’s reigning dance band, The Dominant 7, but he also slept in Goldwin Smith with the rest of the protesters after Arts and Sciences announced the cancellation of the Latino Studies program. He even wrote a song about it. Nat hasn’t been in the US much since he graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and he recently moved from South Africa to Dublin, where he’s working toward a PhD in art. You can find Nat’s artwork over the next year in Croatia, Aspen, and quite a few places in between. …

If you haven’t noticed, my main site has had a massive overhaul, with which the royal ‘we’ are very pleased.

Besides the new design, some new work and texts have been added in the upgrade process, most notably the digital and traditional prints I did at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium this summer, the Johannesburg-based public intervention from a few weeks ago (a continuation from my Wireframe Series started in Croatia), and new writings on my research and artistic inquiry.

For non-geeks:

The new site is driven by categories, so as to showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. Artworks are each listed across all the concepts and media they might fit into, and are then organized by date. A hidden system of keywords also helps to show related pieces, and there are other goodies such as lightbox slideshows, youtube videos, RSS feeds, and more, throughout the site. Feedback welcome!

For geeks: 

There are now 2 WordPress installs on this site: the blog (what you are reading now, this is a standard install) and the main site, which is using WP as a Content Management System.

The idea was to have an artist portfolio that did not look like a blog, but that did use a similar database for cross-categoried posts and related works (through tags) in a way that could showcase interesting through-lines and trajectories in my pieces. After a lot of research - and not wanting to have to do any database coding on my own - I came to Wordpress as my best choice for a starting point; there are no changes to the wordpress core at all (just a very customized theme and a bunch of plugins) - I’m very pleased with the result:

http://nathanielstern.com

Feedback welcome! More geek tidbits below the fold… (more…)

Moved a bunch of stuff around on my servers today, in preparation for the big update on Monday (I hope on Monday!). A simple refresh should give you exactly what you are looking for in most cases (like if images are missing), very close to it in all (like, you may be redirected to the same content on another site). If this is not the case, and you are missing images or getting errors, please let me know! And definitely, the same holds true after Monday, when you will see a very different site (erm, but the blog will look the same, maybe with less spelling mistakes and dead links - see below).

In this process of making a dynamically-driven site, beside lots of help from php.net and codex.wordpress.org (yes, I hacked an open source blog software for my portfolio), I found these two great resources:

• free site-wide link-checker
• free site-wide spell-checker

The top one is unlimited, the bottom one checks up to 1000 pages for spelling errors, and there are some useful options in the wares (but do not use the “email results to me” option on the top one - I had to start over 3 times because it could not connect to my mail server….).

Sorry, this has little to do with my work or art, but…

I’ve been recommending hostgator to students and friends for years - they are fantastic: never down, have a great control panel, huge amounts of space and resources, unlimited domains and traffic, and I’ve never waited more than 1 minute when entering the live chat for support - no matter what time of day or night. For $10 a month (and yes, they have both cheaper and more expensive options), I get 600GB of space, unlimited traffic, unlimited databases and all kinds of open source goodies (php, mysql, wordpress, zencart, cpanel, fantastico, joomla, mambo - you name it, it’s available for one-click install). Now, I’ve signed up for their affiliates program. Bear in mind that I’ve been recommending them anyhow (and probably would have made a LOT of money had I signed up long ago), so this is not just to make me some cash (tho I’d love it if you did): they are really great.

Thinking of getting a site, changing servers, or sharing domain services? USE HOSTGATOR (and please use my links, cuz it’ll make me some much-needed dosh).

Back in the office today, despite battling a cold. Re-reading Manovich and Paul to see what I can use in chapter 2 of my dissertation, rather than diving right back into the hard-core stuff, like Massumi and Hansen (most of which will go into chapter one, which will be an extended version of this paper). My new art site (have you noticed the color palette change here, to match the upcoming main site?) and the performance I did in Joburg should be live in the next week or so (will let y’all know), and the afore-promised notes on my dissertation should be flowing on the blog at least once per week starting then, too.

Missed me?

New UK community for artists and filmakers - some fees involved on parts of the site, other parts are free.

Ripple.

Here.
It’s been re-blogged several times already, but I want to re-iterate that Paddy Johnson is really smart. Again. The former link is especially relevant to me, given my recent printmaking adventures, which touch on several kinds of expression and abstraction, through time and performance (among other things)…