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05 December 2005 by sean slemon

http://swarmsketch.com/

A great new site recently featured in the New York Times: The website allows anyone to collectively draw a single picture-each person can draw one line about an inch long. After that you can vote on the opacity of other lines that already exist in the drawings. A new drawing is posted on a weekly basis and some pretty surprising images emerge considering the amount of people that create the work and the length of the line. Collective consciousness. Its a lot of fun.
Other than that I’m working on a new project now that my show is done: The noble planting of street trees in Manhattan. More on this later maybe.

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02 December 2005 by nathaniel

William Kentridge on Net Art News: A Mechanical Masterpiece

Cool to see William Kentridge on Rhizome – I can’t wait to see this piece in action!

Link to William Kentridge on Rhizome.org’s Net Art News: A Mechanical Masterpiece:


William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most acclaimed contemporary visual artists, gained international stardom at Documenta X (1997), where he exhibited part of his animated film series about living through the apartheid and post-apartheid eras in Johannesburg. The hand-drawn films were produced using charcoal and pastel drawings in stop-motion, which left beautiful traces of erasure and redrawing. While working on a design for ‘The Magic Flute,’ his recent operatic adventure, Kentridge built a small-scale stage model to test his projections. This petite provocation became the basis for his current Deutsche Guggenheim commission. Visitors to the Berlin site can take-in Kentridge’s new short ‘play,’ staged within a miniature mechanical theatre and starring animatronic coffee pots who gesture in Italian, menacing kitchen appliances, and other lively characters, all rendered in his very recognizable, witty style. ‘Black Box/Chambre Noire’ will run through January 15. Chances are, you’ve never heard a coffee pot sing quite like this before. – nathaniel stern

http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/guggenheim/e/ausstellungen-kentridge01.php

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01 December 2005 by BradyDale

Underground Literary Alliance

I know that most of the folks who read this aren’t American… but if any of you follow American literature for what ever reason and find it wanting… it’s worth knowing that there is a group that is resisting the mainstream not just by producing its own work, but by doing the occassional protest and bellicose hollering at the tyrants of American lit.

We’re a bit grumpy.

Anyway, I’m one of the 30-something members around the states… recently inducted. Go me. We are working on kicking up a few particular storms in coming days, but I thought I’d promote a little something I’ve started doing on the site in South Africa before I really start talking about it in the states too much. I’m going to start running a weekly homily, or public prayer, on the site. These homilies will be humorous commentaries, but they are genuine prayers as well. They are audio files recorded with an old Compaq Ipaq.

Here’s the first.
And the second.

The third will be out next Wednesday. I promise it will make you laugh… though it will also be rather crass. The fourth is already recorded… in it, I’ll actually touch on literature for the first time.

I also highly recommend checking out the ULA’s Monday Report Box and other fine ULA writing.

The ULA’s leader and founder, King Wenclas, has the fine distinction of running the most threatening and hated blog in literature. Check it out! Get scared!

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Brady Russell
Underground Literary Alliance
Rank-and-file

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25 November 2005 by nathaniel

the net.artists

Howdy all. Sorry for the silence on my part – things have been so hektik, and it seems that Thando and Kags have been holding down the site (tho I’m still hoping to even out text and images soon!!!!). I’ve seen some wonderful old friends (tho not wonderfully old), done another day of art-hopping in Chelsea, spent some time in Brooklyn, and chilled with my college roomy, Tony (an astrophysicist now!).

Mark Dion’s The Curiosity Shop was an interesting installation – a log cabin room filled with Siopis-like nostalgia-ites. Michael S Riedel’s Neo was probably my favorite of the day, where he took snaps of Zwirner Gallery as the show before his was being de-installed, and hung huge, to-scale, images of the space back on itself, but sometimes slightly displaced. Edgar Arceneaux, at the Kitchen, also did a much smaller scale architectural remix.

I think it was probably the Tim Noble and Sue Webster show, the glory hole, that all four of us gallery-goers agreed on: beautiful welded sculptures of found objects that project a curious formal intrigue, but whose shadows cast concrete images of faces, bodies and other recognizable shapes in their negative and positive spaces.

from left : marek walczak, t whid (of MTAA), doron golan (mica scalin below) yohana wife of marek, liza and mark napier
from left : marek walczak, t whid (of MTAA), doron golan (mica scalin below) yohana wife of marek, liza and mark napier

Admittedly, the highlight of the week for me was when t. whid, from mtaa, invited me to a dinner among friends of his. It was like walking into the NYC net.art scene (and then some) concretized in a lot of ways: Lauren Cornell and Francis Hwang from rhizome, doron golan of computer fine arts (who owns the restaurant), several cats from the thing, Magdalena Sawon and Tamas Banovich from postmasters gallery, mark napier (who should need no introduction, in my not so humble opinion, but who currently has a solo show at bitforms gallery), and the list goes on. They were all warm, excited to hear about the South African art scene, generous with their questions and answers, and humble about their own work. The following day, I checked out a beautiful Mary Kelly exhibition at Postmasters, as well as the aforementioned Mark Napier show – stunning, painterly software art.

Today, I am making a turkey, as my parents decided to have thanksgiving one day late this year — family schedules just worked out that way. It’s Simon and Bronwyn’s first Thanksgiving! (well, sort of. I explained that thanksgiving in SA can be any time, and usually involves slaughtering a cow – different thing….)

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