Last breath in Alaska
In this work by Pascual Sisto, a plastic bag obstructs the Google Maps Street View of Minnie Street in Fairbanks, Alaska. Discovered while researching Google Maps Street View, Sisto preserves this “found object” by redirecting it to its own url, lastbreathinalaska.com, as well as capturing it as a back-up video, in case Google decides to reshoot the location. Swirling on a constant panoramic loop, the movement of the camera gives the abstract image an almost 3D-like quality. The piece documents Google’s fraught attempt to supply an accurate representation of Minnie Street, and, as such, Sisto sees Last Breath in Alaska (Found Object) as a response to the purportedly omniscient eye of the Street View feature, and the issues of transparency and privacy it raises. – Ceci Moss
via Rhizome
Joel Tauber - My lonely tree @Huffington Post
First came across Joel Tauber’s work in this most recent Log magazine – issue 12 (good issue by the way).
I have fallen in love with a tree in the middle of a gigantic parking lot. I cannot really explain how this happened, but love is a hard thing to explain. The tree is not something that most people notice, except as a source of shade for their cars. Yet, somehow – on a beautiful summer day in June 2005—I was drawn to the beauty of this forsaken California Sycamore tree, stuck in the middle of Rose Bowl parking lot K. I was touched by how lonely it was, and I was outraged by the many indignities it suffered.
→ Artists Forced to Explain Modern Art, Critics Complain @Eyebeam reBlog
I’m simply not convinced explanation or content gets in the way of art — though I will agree that there is no replacement for its experience.
Wilfredo Prieto @Frieze Magazine
Wilfredo Prieto’s artistic routines attempt to forge an alliance of acute commentary and serious intent with calculatedly fatuous yet memorable punchlines.
Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis), 1969
Reminded of this artwork at the Dia Beacon by this.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Concorde
From Tillmans’ Concorde series
For the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine while to watch it in air, landing or taking off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.
→ Art on the Lower East Side @WNYC
The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently added the Lower East Side to a list of “endangered places.” For local artists and arts organizations, there’s a sense they feel endangered too – but some have found strategies for survival. Brigid Bergin has this report.
334 m/s @VVORK
»334 m/s«,2007, is a room installation, which is meant to visualize the speed of sound (c = λ ⋅ ƒ), which is about 334 m/s. Two translucent tubes are filled with propane gas, which is set on fire to cause a chain reaction. A flame is burning from one side to the other, slowly accelerating to the point where it hits the end of the tube. Due to the ratio of the gas-oxygene mix the flame there causes a rapid explosion, which can be heard as a sonic boom. By Carsten Nikolai.
→ On Continuous City: A Conversation with Marianne Weems @Rhizome
Many places in Africa have gone straight to cell phones and they’re never going to wire. It’s really interesting. When I first started working on Continuous City, what I wanted to do initially was to go to some of these classic “megaslums,” which I’m using in quotes because it has a slightly derogatory feeling to it, but that’s what a lot of urban scholars call them. I wanted to see if there was a way to engage those populations in a project. And, we sort of halfway ended up doing that.
→ Ed Ruscha's best shot
When you look at it today, though, it does begin to edge into nostalgia. That’s not something that I aimed at then, because although it looks like a very old-fashioned can now, in 1961 it did not. That’s the one thing I regret about any photograph: that eventually it becomes historical, nostalgic, out of date. It begins to look like the age it came from.
