Tom Sachs

"For more than a decade Sachs has pondered the homespun technical ingenuity and romance with the unknown that brought America the Apollo program. Experimenting with models of varying scale ("Lunar Module (1:18)," 1999; "Crawler," 2003) has culminated in the realization of his own life-size SPACE PROGRAM. Pirating the milestone in collective memory when man took his first walk on the moon, Sachs reconstructs its key components, built to scale his way. By recollecting this historic event as a custom-made experience from the free domain of public imagination, he renders it totally in and of our time, charged by a vigorous artistic idiom that is ambivalent to the core. In a new twist on his shameless cannibalizing of corporate identity, Sachs now has the giants of high-style branding - Nike, Prada, and the like - working for him to produce items (lab coats, space boots) for the detailed inventory of his funky space odyssey.

In addition to the huge, intricately built lunar module that is the centerpiece of SPACE PROGRAM - replete with such classic Sachsian features as a fully stocked booze cabinet, toolkit, and soundtrack necessary for survival on an alien planet - visitors will find a fully functioning mission-control unit. On a grid of monitors, the liturgy of space exploration unfolds in a live demonstration by Sachs and his team, involving countless rituals and procedures, from instrument checks to moon-walking and sample-collecting to splash-down. Thus the gallery becomes a sort of reliquary of both the material traces and special effects of the artist's encounters with the terrible sublime." - http://www.tomsachs.org/

"NASA-loving artist Tom Sachs’ new show will see a team of thirteen attractive astronauts simulating a mission to the red planet using low-fi bricolaged components manufactured by the artist to take them to the surface and back. with handcrafted parts ranging from paper spacesuits to an entire ‘Landing Excursion Module’ based on NASA’s lunar version, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is kid’s bedroom fort-building space fantasy come to life" - http://www.super-collider.com/publishing/space-camp/

Archimeters

"Archimeters focuses on Ordos – a near empty ghost town in Inner Mongolia, China which has been newly built but remains almost entirely empty.

The work lays out a plan for appropriating the town and constructing “a fully integrated auto-poietic and auto-effective mechanism”.

From a central point within the empty Ordos Art Museum the plan is described, particularly focussing on ‘effects’ and ‘affects’ referencing both the physical and virtual structure of the town and the video’s own construction.

The digital effects used at certain points within the editing software are exposed in textual form “signal blur at 30%” – as if the video is itself becoming an auto-poietic mechanism.

The text that forms the voice over is appropriated from software testing handbooks and has been used due to its focus on creating a fully integrated and predictable, self-sufficient system, that continually improves itself and enhances its method of control over all things."

By Charlie Tweed http://www.charlietweed.com/category/news/

Seen: Samsara

Visually incredible but also shocking to see the destruction humans are causing.

Seen: Prometheus

"They made me because they can"

Drawing Room

I took part in a study to identify links between dyslexia and drawing at college. The results seemed to prove inconclusive but I got a three day lesson on how to draw.

Top = before
Bottom = after

Visited: Phil Collins: The Most Sociable Loner I've Ever Known @ Röda Sten konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden

projected images of women on the telephone, sofas, lampshades, with soundtrack and talking playing loudly.

The street views Google wasn't expecting you to see

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/feb/20/google-street-view-nine-eyes-in-pictures#/?picture=386213490&index=1

unplanned moments captured.

"Yesterday, i went to the Saatchi Gallery to see Korean Eye and the most charitable comment i'm willing to make about the show is that it has a few good moments. However, the exhibition on the top floor, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, is worth the trip to King's Road.

The nine eyes are the cameras mounted on the pole on top of each vehicle that Google sent around the world 5 years ago. The technology of Google Street View has sparkled moments of deep humiliation, interest from the press photography community, privacy concerns and brilliant artistic reactions.

Jon Rafman was one of the first artists who spent hours looking at the images collected by the cars and searching not just for the amusing, the ridiculous and the fortuitous but also for postcard perfect moments. And does he have an eye for stunning images..." - http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2012/08/the-nine-eyes-of-google-street.php#.UCF72VHGqfR

Toshiko Horiuchi-MacAdam

Japanese artist and designer Toshiko Horiuchi-MacAdam (Canada-based, she is a world-renown fibre artist) knitted a whole playground for the young children of Sapporo.

http://www.sleekdesign.fr/2012/07/09/toshiko-horiuchi-macadam-knitted-playground-sapporo-japan/#.UCF701HGqfR

Attilia Csörgo: Archimedean Point

"Attila Csörgo's exhibition leads us into a universe of scientific exploration, providing a comprehensive overview of his unbroken and consistent career, beginning from the early 1990s and reaching international acclaim in the form of major art exhibitions and awards. Empirical folding of great mathematical complexity, hypnotic plays of light resting on indecipherable mechanical movements, and other inventions that combine fantasy with curiosity about extremely varied physical and mathematical phenomena – all bear the stamp of Attila Csörgo, the great do-it-yourselfer who introduces, with the joy, humour, and detachment proper to artistic creation, science into the world of art. " - http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=547

http://www.c3.hu/~acsorgo/angol/projektek_terkep2.html

Jeremy Deller talks about Manchester Procession

More - http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2009/jul/08/manchester-international-festival-jeremy-deller?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3486

Artists doing community events

The Medium is the Message

How Technology Is Making Time Tick Faster

"The pervasive use of gadgets could affect our experience of time, as neuroscience begins to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of human consciousness"

http://www.mobiledia.com/news/142890.html

v-e-n-u-e

Venue — a portable media rig, interview studio, multi-format event platform, and forward-operating landscape research base — will pop up at sites across North America from June 2012 through fall 2013.

Under the direction of Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography. In collaboration with the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art and with Columbia University’s Studio-X Global Network Initiative, Venue will traverse North America in a series of routes, visiting such sites as New Mexico’s Very Large Array, Arches National Park, the world’s largest living organism in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, and the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival.

As Venue sets out on its ambitious, sixteen-month series of loops across the North American landscape, its curatorial mission is to document often overlooked yet fascinating sites through the eyes of the innovators, trendsetters, entrepreneurs, and designers at the forefront of ideas today. 

From architects to scientists and novelists to mayors, from police officers to civil engineers and athletes to artists, and from landfill-remediation crews to independent filmmakers, Venue’s archive will assemble a cumulative, participatory, and media-rich core sample of the greater North American landscape, by means of a rolling festival of site visits, interviews, film screenings, discussions, debates, presentations, performances, and more.


http://v-e-n-u-e.com/