mosaicism.org by Daniel Ingroff, 4 March — 1 April 2010

Reception on Thursday, March 4th from 6-7:30pm at the library

A work inspired by photographs and paraphernalia taken from the Art department’s “picture files” — a unique collection of newspapers, magazine clippings and ephemera collected by librarians prior to the advent of the Internet. Made up of three distinct parts: a website, video and display, mosaicism.org investigates both digital and analogue forms of the “picture” by framing some of the aesthetic and emotional assumptions associated with these binaries.

Wee See is a collection of black-and-white animations built from basic shapes — to intrigue both child and parent. As vision develops slowly over the first months of life, Wee See provides surfaces of bold, well-defined artwork to engage a child’s curious mind to bring the screen (and their imagination) to life.

Not the newest, but nevertheless essential reading: “The Courage of the Present,” an op-ed piece by Alain Badiou, originally published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010. Translated by Alberto Toscano.

Read it here and here.

In June 2009, Marc Kremers stumbled across the personals section of Haitianconnection.com and collected several hundred of the brazen images he found there. After the devastion that the earthquake on 12th January 2010 has caused, and the subsequent media coverage of their plight, we at As-found think it’s pertinent to show Haitians according to their own self-image and means. Thanks to Damien Poulain for the title illustration and Julie Rubio for the exhibition title.

New York Times obit.

An entertaining and informative interview with Sam McPheeters on the economic meltdown and the (non) future of American independent music.

“It’s like if everyone at a Dodgers game, all 25,000 people suddenly looked at each other and were like ‘What the fuck are we doing? This is a children’s game.’”

Photograph by Jeff Winterberg.

Thanks Kathy

Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!), is a time-based installation that takes the form of a one-act live theatrical play that repeats nine times over a period of three hours. This documentation is a sampling of all nine runs. Filmed during Performa 09 at X initiative on November 11th & 12th 2009. By Emily Mast.

Shrouded Monument, 2008, C-print, 48.5 x 40.5 inches

Shannon Ebner, Signal Hill
7 January — 13 February 2010
Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco

eighteen touches, one strike.

R.I.P., not really.

TorrentFreak has learned that behind the scenes the Pirate Bay operators are talking to other BitTorrent site owners to encourage them to follow suit and completely ditch torrents in the future…
“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date.”

Just an excuse to post their response to a legal threat from Linotype.

Though he is still crawling, 9-month-old Thurston Conder takes about 10 seconds to have the run of the house. It’s not that he’s exceptionally fast; he just doesn’t have that far to roam. Thurston shares 380 square feet with his mom and dad, Kelly Breslin and Ryan Conder, and a medium-sized mutt named Charlie.

The art world is now both socially professional and professionally social. Curators visit artists’ studios; collectors, dealers, and journalists assemble for a reception and reconvene later for dinner; everyone goes to parties. We exchange introductions and small talk; art is bought and sold; careers (and friendships) brighten or fade. In each situation, certain behaviors are expected while others are silently discouraged. Sometimes, what’s appropriate in the real world would be catastrophic in the art world, and vice versa.

Making these distinctions on the spot can be nerve-wracking and disastrous. So we asked ourselves: What is the place of etiquette in art? How do social mores establish our communities, mediate our critical discussions, and frame our experience of art? If we were to transcribe these unspoken laws, what would they look like? What happens when the rules are broken? Since we didn’t have all the answers, we politely asked our friends for some help.

You are invited to attend:

CONTRA MUNDUM VI
Sunday, October 4, 2009
7PM

The Enemy of All Mankind

Matthew Taylor Raffety, professor of History,
University of Redlands discusses pirates, piracy,
and the autonomy of the high seas.

The talk will be followed by a DJ set of related music by Jon Pestoni.

Mandrake
2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034
(between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd)

www.mandrakebar.com
www.osloeditions.com

Abdellah Taïa +
An American In Tangier, Mohamed Ulad, 1993, 27 mins
Chronicles/Morocco, Michel Auder, 1971-71, 26 mins
Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva, Michel Auder, 2002, 36 mins

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at Light Industry, Brooklyn
7:30pm, $7

More information here

If it isn’t already, worth putting on your reading list.
No doubt the conversation-starter of the fall.

At MIT Press
Downloadable PDF

Van der Weijde’s photographic project documents over 220 houses built in Germany between 1933 and 1945 in order to eventually provide a house for every working-class NSDAP member. In turn this ‘Siedlungpolitiek’ was both a powerful Nazi propaganda tool and a way to provide living space to loyal members. Most of these houses still exist, however unless one knows their full history they retain an unassuming normalcy.

via South Willard

New book by J.K Birksted on MIT Press.
Perfect beach reading. From the catalogue:

“Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J. K. Birksted’s Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier’s brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives. Le Corbusier and the Occult thus answers the conundrum set by Reyner Banham (Birksted’s predecessor at the Bartlett School of Architecture) who, fifty years ago, wrote that Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture “was to prove to be one of the most influential, widely read and least understood of all the architectural writings of the twentieth century.”

More here.