Some cheeky brats over in Cape Town had their students buy beer for them and wrap them as gifts, all in the name of contemporary art. Pictured: Bruce Gordon and Ed Young receiving gifts from Christian Nerf’s Stellenbosch students.
More pix available on their new blog, that I hope goes beyond this project: http://nerfyoung.blogspot.com/
Why didn’t I think of that?
PS – I’d prefer the URL to be YoungNerf….
So I was at Spier last night with some really cool artists. Not all of them made it on the same night, but amongst the ten finalists selected for their hotel art project are myself, Kim Lieberman, Mustafa Maluka, Matt Hindley, Usha Seejarim, Dorothee Kreutzfeld, Jo O’Connor and Nicolas Hlobo. Had a nice dinner among new friends, great conversation, perhaps some future help and collaborations. I’ll probably propose some Compressionist images for the project – got some great scans on site before my scanner finally died (another one on the way – thank you, ebay!).
James Webb also joined up for dinner, and managed to sneak the two of us into Brett Bailey’s Orpheus, for which he sound designed. We had to drive over the bridge at right. Yes, that’s the best I could do for an image – desperate times….
Sometimes over the top and obvious where unnecessary, and a few of the scenes could have been shorter to get their points across better, but Orpheus was undoubtedly a brilliant piece. The lead narrator, portrayed by Sibongile Khumalo, was an amazing presence with heart-wrenching physical character, and Orpheus (I cannot find the actor’s name) had the haunting singing voice of a dying angel (he did not once speak out of song). The set, the silence, the sound, the politics, even most of the parts that may have been OTT (over-the-top) worked seamlessly. A devastatingly beautiful rendition by all of the artists involved — see it if you can.
LED throwies in the streets of NYC
James Powderly is currently a Research & Development fellow at Eyebeam in Chelsea, NYC – a fantastic gallery-space-like residency program for art-geeks that work in new media, "etc". On a more personal note, when we were grad students, James was a huge friend and resource in helping to set up my first-ever group exhibition (Johnson Museum, upstate New York); he "gave" me the term Compressionism – something he came up with for a series of his own interactive videos about five years ago, but is letting me have for my prints right now; and he videotaped my and Nicole’s wedding (tho I still have not edited that) – just to name a few niceties. So yes, I am biased, but he was also a director at Honeybee Robotics for a number of years, so we know he is ‘wicked smaht.’ One of his many current goings-on:
Robot Clothes is an art and commercial research and development partnership, specializing in robotic systems, interaction design and product prototyping. This partnership, formed in 2002 by Michelle Kempner and James Powderly, utilizes a hybrid fine art and commercial design and engineering approach to support innovative science and technology development efforts for clients including fortune 100 companies, NASA and internationally renowned artists, such as Diller + Scofidio and Miranda July. In addition to contracted research and development efforts, Robot Clothes internally supports fine art projects ranging from a robotic public sculpture for Central Park to an animatronic opera about Crohn’s Disease.
Dude.
Also, James’ Eyebeam crew recently teamed up with the Graffiti Research Lab to produce the above Electro-Graf – a "graffiti piece or throw-up that uses conductive and magnetic paint to embed LED display electronics." Check out the link for an awesome ‘LED Throwies’ video – hit the streets, throw little trinkets at the walls that stick and light up, and so ‘write’ with live LEDs on the sides of buildings!
After a morning of various errand – running / personal – admin BS, I began the Real Day with a lunch meeting / brainstorm session starring myself and the ever-inspired and energetic Richie K. He told me a bit about his new iterative photographic – photoshoppy – inkjet process and images, which sound divine, while I shared a bit more on my performative Compressionist prints – and the two seem to work very well together. Kilpert and I are starting to potentially think about two upcoming duo shows (I’d share my Outlet show with him, and he an upcoming exhibition space with me), which would display the complimentary series side by side, maybe include some collaborative efforts as well.
This lead perfectly into our excursion to see Jill Ross at the David Krut gallery and print shop. After being dazzled by Jill’s beautiful work with Wilma Cruise (shown: Jill + Wilma print + Blurry Richard), I attempted to return the dazzle with the Compressionism documentation and some images. We brainstormed through some teamwork possibilities – Jill really is a well of printmaking knowledge, as is Richie, and we’re all pretty excited by the potentials in combining our talents and work.
We ended with all kinds of collaborative printmaking seeds, and I’m hoping to work with Jill and Richie in the near future. Oooooh, I see some New Art coming on…. It’s gonna be H-O-T. Will keep you "posted."
Under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike license; thanks to Cary Peppermint for being so SUPERCOOL. I know I could not have done this without you. I’m on the path, I know it, I can feel it, cuz I don’t care:
nathaniel is SUPERCOOL video link, 424kb, 7 seconds
No sh!t. Tomorrow, the NAN blog is three years old! As I write this, we are at “1,010 posts and 393 comments, contained within 25 categories.” On February 20th, 2003, I started using blogger in a frame on the front page of this (back then, a very different) site, to say, in my very first post:
So, I decided to take a leaf out of the books of josh and jonah and start a weblog on my site. This is the first week of the class I’m lecturing at MCAD, and things are looking good so far. In other news, odys, Nathaniel, hektor, x goes up in Cape Town on Saturday and [odys]elicit has been selected as an exhibition piece for The Chiangmai First New Media Art Festival [note: used to link, but now dead], Thailand. More to come…
Funny, Josh never really updated his blog (like, three times in 3 years) and Jonah, at that point, really just used it for news in a pop-up (and later down the road started the awesome Coin-Op blog, tho this has taken a back seat to his other great writings for more popular web sites). But hey, I didn’t know, and wanted to join (what I perceived to be) the cool club! Art Fag City says that, “2004 saw the rise of blogs in popular mainstream media, but the art community has started to see this medium explode only recently,” and MTAA-RR also only celebrated its 3rd b-day this month, so I am Mos Def an Innovator (early 2003! do I get double points for being in SA, and kind of still being the only art blogger?) and am undoubtedly in good company. (Shout out to Tim – the ‘T’ in MTAA – wazzup?) I win. W00+.
Some highlights of blogging here have been, I think:
Not bad for a three year run, and as I said in the very first post, More to come….
