East Austin Studio Tour 2009

Color Spaces @ MASS


Co-Lab


Collaborative Mural @ Co-Lab


Michael Merck - Cantanker Release @ CRL


Michael Merck - Cantanker Release @ CRL


Bathroom - Flatbed World HQ Bathroom


Monofonus Press


Monofonus Press

Performa 09 | Alterazioni Video and Ragnar Kjartansson

C.R.R. member may recall our field trip (!) to see RoseLee Goldberg speak at ArtHouse last month. She presented a slide show history of performance art and gave a sneak peak into what to expect from this year's PERFORMA Biennial.

PERFORMA, founded in 2004, is a multidisciplinary non-profit arts organization dedicated to live performance art. To encourage the further development of performance, PERFORMA organizes a biennial in New York City that highlights performance art’s critical role in contemporary art... The 2009 biennial runs from November 1-22. It includes ten new commissions by artists like Guy Ben-Ner, Mike Kelley and Yang Fudong, and new works by more than eighty others.


New York Times' fashion and design blog The Moment recently featured the Italian collective of Alterazioni Video and Ragnar Kjartansson biennial performance. The article paints a vivid picture of the performance - tuxedos, bowling balls, exploding light bulbs, limoncello - which was summarized as “a live and multimedia piece based on joy, infinite profound joy.”

More videos can be found on the PERFORMA website: performa-arts.org/blog/tv/

Public Ad Campaign

Jordan Seiler
The New York City project Public Ad Campaign, recently featured in the New York Times, adheres to the following belief:

"...public space and the public's interaction with that space is a vital component of our city's health. By visually altering and physically interacting with the public environment, residents become psychologically invested in their community... Outdoor advertising is the primary obstacle to open public communications. By commodifying public space, outdoor advertising has monopolized the surfaces that shape our shared space."

The resulting actions, primarily the work of Jordan Seiler, are chronicled at www.publicadcampaign.com along side the work of other artists doing similarly subversive public installations.


OX, France


Sam 3, Spain

Eric Steen

Here are some links to blogs Eric Steen contributes to. He was one of the visiting artists who gave lectures at Ox-Bow over this past summer about micro-utopias and radical education. I plan on fleshing out this post more later, but I wanted to get some of his information up on this blog.

psuart.blogspot.com

(his work in teaching in Portland)

http://ericmsteen.blogspot.com/

(his personal blog with information on his beer/conversant pieces)

Jeremy Boyle

Man/boy art = gooood. Plus a good clean formal eye. He does mostly sound and video installations. Lots of clips on his website

piece consists of a concrete bench cast hollow, with its internal cavity serving as a sealed sub-woofer speaker enclosure. A recording of nearly sub-audible sound is played through this bench and is not experienced until someone is seated and feels the vibrations of the sound. The bench is designed to be typical of a public concrete bench, the only difference being its shape of a cube meant for one rather than rectangular for the possibility of multiple simultaneous users. This creates a situation where the user necessarily has a private experience with the piece, placing a shift in the function of the public bench and allowing for a private experience to take place within a public setting (without removing the person from their public position and function.



midi-controlled pneumatic guitar and drum kit

Contortionist Jazz Exotica, Devin Flynn

Contortionist Jazz Exotica

Contortionist Jazz Exotica is a newly debuted collaboration of a blog between Joe Legs (now of Austin and formerly of Richmond, VA) and Zak Loyd (formerly of Austin, now in Brooklyn). Zak has worked with the Eyeplug video collective in Texas and is now operating as Vid Kidz with Melanie Clemmons in New York.

Devin Flynn appeared along side his Y'all So Stupid web-video series at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight. The series, which was made for AdultSwim.com, can be seen on the bigger-than-your-computer-screen at Okay Moutain through October 31st. The show, titled SuperStupid, includes a collection of drawings and supplemental videos of Flynn's earlier work.

Art Swap seeking submissions...

The swap is hosted by labotanica in Houston. From the labotanic Blog:

"labotanica seeks artists for Art Swap, a participatory exhibition in which artists of all media can exchange art with other artists for free. Art Swap centers on reciprocity and re-negotiates value and commerce in art production and presentation...

To participate, send digital images by Sep. 27th la(at)labotanica(dot)org

Exhibition installation: Tues & Wed, Sep. 29th & 30th, 5pm – 7pm

Opening reception: Thurs, Oct. 1st, 6-8pm
Art Swap takes place: Oct. 2nd & 3rd, 12pm – 6pm
location: 2310 Elgin, Houston, Texas 77004"

The Bleeding Pixel Effect: Chairlift, Kanye, Takeshi Murata

Exploitation of "the bleeding pixel effect," now a trend called "Datamoshing," is a digital phenomenon that has been receiving attention lately. The effect, created by manipulating digital compression, was recently used in Chairlift's music video for "Evident Utensil" (above or in hi-res) and Kanye West's video for "Welcome to Heartbreak" (youtube) (hi-res).

Both Kanye and Chairlift gave "major props" to digital artist Takeshi Murata (b. 1974, Chicago) for inspiration. Below is footage from his influential 2005 piece, Monster Movie. His video work is hard to come by, but UbuWeb also hosts a quality version of his 2006 film Silver, here.



Melissa Feldman writes for "Art In America":

A main part of Murata's technique involves digitally compressing the footage so that the movement of a series of frames is reduced to a single twitching image that records only the net difference in movement from one frame to the next... The video's visual effects also evoke the way Impressionist painters broke down images into brushwork and blurriness, which similarly gave way to abstraction. For his part, Murata likens the liquid look of his digital distortions to the physical deterioration of old film stock.

Murata graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and was recently featured in a New York Times' special report titled At Last, Artists Harness the Internet.

Austin Eddy

Austin Eddy (webpage)






I saw this dude on Fecal Face this morning. (go here). At first I wasn't really that interested, but after spending some time with the images and the interview (which is alright, not super insightful, but fecal face isn't really about critique as much as it is about exposure) now I've grown really fond. I think the style/subject mater is pushing trendy but maintaining canonical/intellectually stimulating references. Looking at a lot of the spaces he creates I get an immediate impression of compressed space and little depth, which is subverted by the textures he layers from which I feel infinite space.



I don't know, I'm not a painter but especially in this one I feel as though I'm vibing between outer space (as in the great beyond) and a tiny cabin. I like his working with the 'mystical' and 'magical' in subject and imagery. Its dark, humorous, and tender. And the colors aren't fluorescent, which is nice.
Also, Eddy is 22 years old. And he's also done an interview with beautiful decay (can be found here) "foremost on my agenda is defeating Gannon, closing the portal to the dark world and bring peace and happiness to the light world"





A funny thing happened when I binged his name, this guy's website came up first and got to experience a whole lot more magic than I originally anticipated. Both Austin Eddys show incredible promise.

Eric Wareheim

Flying Lotus "Parisian Goldfish" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

Just Thinking About the Internet Yall

http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/2009/09/it-takes-a-socially-transcendent-moment-to-remind-us-what-makes-life-worth-living-kanye-west-is-a-valuable-member-of-society.html

also, this

http://oonce-oonce.com/

When I say 'the internet,' I mean 'culture'

Michael Bell-Smith

Stills from Michael Bell-Smith’s Up, Up and Away (2006)

"I don’t think I’m entirely anti-narrative. I like to play with gestures of narrative (change, conflict, progression) without necessarily engaging in its structure and the pleasure that comes from it. I like to think I’m working in a tension between something pictoral, something narrative and something atmospheric, trying to create work that a viewer engages a bit differently from most time based media art."
(MBS in Artfagcity.com interview for Geeks in the Gallery exhibition)

Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly's Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (2006) by Michael Bell-Smith. Courtesy EAI. from Why + Wherefore on Vimeo.