Photog by Peter Vidani
Made for Tumblr

Chicago didn’t make the top 10 worst cities for air pollution. Trying to focus on the positive while the temp drops 3 and feels like -11.

Just moved the space heater on top of the coffee table for maximum effect on the couch. As for the kitchen- warmer inside the refrigerator.

Judd put up a twitter based poetry gen http://judisdaid.com/sincere.html Imagine it will evolve into one of his intricate code works

Tending the digital garden. I’ll be sitting on this couch all weekend long. Damn my OCD! Space heater is cranked. Just need my CK bath robe.

Lost the tech-savvy edge in the family. Grandmother got an i-phone?! Meanwhile I’m doing time on a shoe phone- under contract til February.

I’ve been looking for new books on live art and sound this morning. An odd inclination considering the fairly intangible and the dynamic nature of these forms. Definitely challenging forms to find well documented in books.

To get started I looked up a Paul McCarthy show I saw this past summer at the Whitney in NYC hoping to find a nice monograph of his work or possibly a DVD. Instead, I was delighted to discover that the Whitney has begun to create editorial content of their past shows with commentary from the curators. The truly delightful part— the video pieces are enabled for pass along, hence this post. Now I have a high-quality video document that I can share.

This find on the Whitney site also touches on an important discussion I’ve been participating in of over the years as a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago about how the distributed content model can be utilized in the curriculum. Without taking a deep dive into facets of that discussion I’d just like to say that the world’s collective, virtual library is in need of quality content on art and culture and it’s a huge plus that it’s enabled for distribution. There’s plenty of teaser content promoting shows but this is the good stuff.

I hope art institutions and galleries will follow and enable their archives of documentation to be integrated into online community discourse. It will definitely help me in my job as an educator to inspire and inform students of contemporary work.

Check out Whitney Focus where they push content to the space where the masses are searching:

Whitney Focus on blip.tv

Whitney Focus on YouTube


‘Whitney Focus features interviews with artists and curators, as well as other video-based content, offering a unique and up-close view of Whitney exhibitions and programs.’

The Last Performance [dot org]

Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffery, and Fanny Holmin at the Electronic Literature in Europe conference in Bergen, September, 2008. Videography by Martin Arvebro.

Some of the most elegant and poetic content visualization I’ve seen is in this piece. I particularly like this performance in Bergen because it brings in the music that accompanies the dance from the Goat Island performance that its internal structures are based. If you have an opportunity to catch a live reading I highly recommend it.

The Last Performance [dot org]

Description from the author and programmer of the piece, Judd Morrissey:

The Last Performance [dot org] (2007-) is a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architecture, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.

The visual architecture of The Last Performance [dot org] is based on research into “double buildings,” a phrase used here to describe spaces that have housed multiple historical identities, with a specific concern for the Hagia Sophia and the functions of church, mosque, and museum. The project uses architectural forms as a contextual framework for collaborative authorship. Source texts submitted to the project become raw material for a constantly evolving textual landscape.

The Last Performance [dot org] was initiated in response to the work of the seminal performance collective, Goat Island, and their decision, after 20 years of practice, to create a last performance. The writing project and the final Goat Island performance, The Lastmaker, overlap significantly having evolved in parallel through shared generative constraints.

To read and interact with the piece online click here.

Photos by John Sisson

OPENPORT Winter Weekend

OPENPORT was last seen this past February as a month-long international festival supported by Links Hall’s Artistic Associates program. It returns now as a weekend event with performances from the festival creators and OPENPORT artists currently based in Chicago.

Friday, November 30, 7:30PM

Fiona Wright (UK) - On Lying
Judd Morrissey (US) - Books that Write Me, Books I Write Part I: The Last Performance
Nathan Butler (US) and Lori Talley (US) - double-pole / double-throw

Saturday, December 1, 7:30PM

Karen Christopher (US) and Mark Jeffery (UK) - Distance x 2 = a camel caravan on a grain of rice, A performance duet in six parts
Fiona Wright (UK) - On Lying
Lucy Cash (UK) - Sight Reading (2007, 8 mins)

Sunday, December 2, 7:30PM

Judd Morrissey (US) - Part II: from the Error Engine
Nathan Butler (US) and Lori Talley (US) - double-pole / double-throw
Karen Christopher (US) and Mark Jeffery (UK) - Distance x 2 = a camel caravan on a grain of rice, A performance duet in six parts

Photos by John Sisson

HEAT SINK by Nathan Butler

Fellow OPENPORT festival curator and friend, Nathan Butler, created a fantastic installation and time-based performance at the MCA for the 12X12 Series. I had the opportunity to participate in the actual install of the heaters and video tracking system. It was a great experience and once again is a lesson in having the right tools makes all the difference.

Nathan’s Description of the work:

Heat Sink is a method of accumulating, recording, and translating the bodily presence of a performer over time. The gestures, translated from one medium into another - from live performance to video, from video to a computer program, from a computer program to an electronic circuit, from an electronic circuit into a space heater - explore how performance can be presented in multiple modes and serve as an instrument for a continued performance. In an era of high technology where live performance can be easily replaced by automated systems, Heat Sink explores not only the role and presence of the live performer but also how automated systems can extend the duration of a performance.

The Internet Is Not Flat. I recently visited the new, very beautiful and video rich Stella Artois experience. The above screen grab is from Le Courage. Around the same time I had been thinking about the future of the virtual islands advertisers tend to create for brands and whether or not it makes sense to continue positioning a brand’s communications in this way. Then I came across this image which intended to make fun of the danger of falling off the edge of the earth when Stella’s brewers were first gathering hops in the 14th century. Despite Stella’s new site being a technological achievement for a video rich branded experience I still couldn’t help but wonder why Stella had spent millions of dollars to build an island on the Internet. In that moment the site itself seemed as equally anachronistic as the belief that the earth is flat.There was a period of time in the near past when the Internet, for all intents and purposes, was flat. Websites functioned more as islands of isolated activity and interests. Portals pushed preferred content. Surfers bookmarked favorite virtual discoveries for a return visit. Search was quickly dominated by one engine and the act itself took on the engine’s name.Thanks to a resurgence of visionary thinking about what the Internet could be and perseverance through a stretch of post .bomb malaise interesting new web-based models began to emerge. Programmers and developers were rethinking the underlying protocols of the Internet and architectures of websites so that community could be fostered through revealing shared interests. Alongside this social networking evolution of the Internet a virtual arms race ensued fueled by google’s unrelenting drive to shift computing to a web-based model giving way to a growing collection of interconnected gadgets, widgets, aggregators and web-based applications. Collectively these modular tools and services aim to free people from being tethered to any one computer. Program preferences, social networks, email, RSS feeds, dapper apps, bookmarks, blogs, music, maps, news, etc., are all virtually persistent and accessible through a variety of devices. Not just a desktop. Intrinsically, the web is a decentralized network. Along with the advances in how data, media and communication interchanges online there have been parallel advances in wireless, cellphones, GPS, PDAs and data storage that are enabling further physical decentralization. The obvious examples of this are working from home or remotely, getting directions from a WAP application on your cellphone, OnStar remotely unlocking your car door, using Twitter to broadcast to your friends up to the minute as to what you are doing.Increasingly, users are creating dashboards of personal expression by configuring, tuning and arranging their FineTune player, weather.com gadget, mashable news feed and youtube play list widgets. This demand to be able to freely aggregate content has created a growing market for mash-up tools that enable anyone to grab and combine bits of code to create their own delivery “windows” for their blogs, myspace pages, youtube channels, whatever. Meanwhile, the networks a user participates in takes on a “knowing” of that user’s interests and desires tirelessly spinning a web of meaningful connections to data, people, retailers and services. This is all made possible by the network members posting personal information, tags about themselves, their interests; posting media and streaming play lists that tap the world’s archives of media and it’s their continuous grooming, organizing and defining of these blocks of data with descriptive meta data that makes it possible to find whatever they may be looking for whether in their own collection or in the collections of others. Through the searchable ease of semantically organized pools of data and media we find relevance. People find one another following the clues provided to others in the profiles of our many affiliations. These networks facilitate discovery of commonality among others, a unique kind of comfort made possible through the visualization of easter eggs found in vast amounts of interconnected data. Individuals coalesce into micro networks and naturally proliferate into ever-refining communities. There’s even a community for virtual personas and avatars created in Second Life, World of Warcraft and Sims at Koinup.None of this is breaking news but it is worth taking a moment to note that the Internet has reached a certain level or critical mass of interconnectedness, of agency. The methods of communication are numerous and the number of platforms and frameworks are multiplying. It’s a medium forever in flux teeming with possibility. Content distribution is non-linear and the masses rule by tagging, rating, posting and passing along the relevant content and disregarding the rest—tending the data garden in massively parallel. Individuals pull, filter and push content. It’s an amazing time. If a brand can position a message or provide a relevant offering in this dynamic system of interconnected networks it will quickly spread and the message will have resonance because it is relevant.Brands can no longer sit back waiting to see if their highly produced and locked-down bits of interactive communication living on an island are going to be discovered and blow-up into a viral hit. There are more interesting possibilities available to marketers now to leverage the viral potential of the web that offer consistent, and if deployed smartly, persistent returns. By enabling consumers to borrow and share bits of embed code (widgets, gadgets, photo loops, video players, custom tools, desktop apps, etc. that are integrated with existing networks and databases) to use wherever they choose the brand is then acting as a facilitator of culture and community that the consumers integrate with their browsing behavior. Recently there have been some interesting branded applications that follow a decentralized model launched in Facebook—Gimme Love aims to extend 1-800 Flowers existing loyalty program and Lemondade Stand puts a new spin on e-commerce. It will be interesting to see how these applications fair. I imagine that they will find their way to the right people like capillary action through the Facebook networks.

The Internet Is Not Flat.

I recently visited the new, very beautiful and video rich Stella Artois experience. The above screen grab is from Le Courage. Around the same time I had been thinking about the future of the virtual islands advertisers tend to create for brands and whether or not it makes sense to continue positioning a brand’s communications in this way. Then I came across this image which intended to make fun of the danger of falling off the edge of the earth when Stella’s brewers were first gathering hops in the 14th century. Despite Stella’s new site being a technological achievement for a video rich branded experience I still couldn’t help but wonder why Stella had spent millions of dollars to build an island on the Internet. In that moment the site itself seemed as equally anachronistic as the belief that the earth is flat.

There was a period of time in the near past when the Internet, for all intents and purposes, was flat. Websites functioned more as islands of isolated activity and interests. Portals pushed preferred content. Surfers bookmarked favorite virtual discoveries for a return visit. Search was quickly dominated by one engine and the act itself took on the engine’s name.

Thanks to a resurgence of visionary thinking about what the Internet could be and perseverance through a stretch of post .bomb malaise interesting new web-based models began to emerge. Programmers and developers were rethinking the underlying protocols of the Internet and architectures of websites so that community could be fostered through revealing shared interests. Alongside this social networking evolution of the Internet a virtual arms race ensued fueled by google’s unrelenting drive to shift computing to a web-based model giving way to a growing collection of interconnected gadgets, widgets, aggregators and web-based applications. Collectively these modular tools and services aim to free people from being tethered to any one computer. Program preferences, social networks, email, RSS feeds, dapper apps, bookmarks, blogs, music, maps, news, etc., are all virtually persistent and accessible through a variety of devices. Not just a desktop. Intrinsically, the web is a decentralized network. Along with the advances in how data, media and communication interchanges online there have been parallel advances in wireless, cellphones, GPS, PDAs and data storage that are enabling further physical decentralization. The obvious examples of this are working from home or remotely, getting directions from a WAP application on your cellphone, OnStar remotely unlocking your car door, using Twitter to broadcast to your friends up to the minute as to what you are doing.

Increasingly, users are creating dashboards of personal expression by configuring, tuning and arranging their FineTune player, weather.com gadget, mashable news feed and youtube play list widgets. This demand to be able to freely aggregate content has created a growing market for mash-up tools that enable anyone to grab and combine bits of code to create their own delivery “windows” for their blogs, myspace pages, youtube channels, whatever. Meanwhile, the networks a user participates in takes on a “knowing” of that user’s interests and desires tirelessly spinning a web of meaningful connections to data, people, retailers and services. This is all made possible by the network members posting personal information, tags about themselves, their interests; posting media and streaming play lists that tap the world’s archives of media and it’s their continuous grooming, organizing and defining of these blocks of data with descriptive meta data that makes it possible to find whatever they may be looking for whether in their own collection or in the collections of others. Through the searchable ease of semantically organized pools of data and media we find relevance. People find one another following the clues provided to others in the profiles of our many affiliations. These networks facilitate discovery of commonality among others, a unique kind of comfort made possible through the visualization of easter eggs found in vast amounts of interconnected data. Individuals coalesce into micro networks and naturally proliferate into ever-refining communities. There’s even a community for virtual personas and avatars created in Second Life, World of Warcraft and Sims at Koinup.

None of this is breaking news but it is worth taking a moment to note that the Internet has reached a certain level or critical mass of interconnectedness, of agency. The methods of communication are numerous and the number of platforms and frameworks are multiplying. It’s a medium forever in flux teeming with possibility. Content distribution is non-linear and the masses rule by tagging, rating, posting and passing along the relevant content and disregarding the rest—tending the data garden in massively parallel. Individuals pull, filter and push content. It’s an amazing time. If a brand can position a message or provide a relevant offering in this dynamic system of interconnected networks it will quickly spread and the message will have resonance because it is relevant.

Brands can no longer sit back waiting to see if their highly produced and locked-down bits of interactive communication living on an island are going to be discovered and blow-up into a viral hit. There are more interesting possibilities available to marketers now to leverage the viral potential of the web that offer consistent, and if deployed smartly, persistent returns. By enabling consumers to borrow and share bits of embed code (widgets, gadgets, photo loops, video players, custom tools, desktop apps, etc. that are integrated with existing networks and databases) to use wherever they choose the brand is then acting as a facilitator of culture and community that the consumers integrate with their browsing behavior.

Recently there have been some interesting branded applications that follow a decentralized model launched in Facebook—Gimme Love aims to extend 1-800 Flowers existing loyalty program and Lemondade Stand puts a new spin on e-commerce. It will be interesting to see how these applications fair. I imagine that they will find their way to the right people like capillary action through the Facebook networks.