GIF from screen capture of GIFs (see previous post)
Day: July 18, 2009
C.M.T.
This won't stay up long but I wanted some of my friends to see one of my more abstract GIFs "in the wild," so to speak. These have been showing up a lot lately. The word balloon "Cool moving thing" made my day.
I Knew There Was a Catch
"Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."
The "apparently" was inserted due to the Times' squeamishness about making a direct statement. Books were deleted from people's Kindles. Everyone is noting the irony that the books were Animal Farm and 1984, which Amazon didn't have the e-rights to.
As a past recipient of censorship by Amazon, yrs truly can only imagine how the Red (Bush supporting) company will use the synchronization feature to mess with blogs people subscribe to on their Kindles.
Folks, there is a great reading device out there--it's called the general purpose computer. This whole fetish for dedicated hardware (iPods, etc.) is a bad way to go.
Staples
Opening July 24, Left Cube Gallery presents "Staples," an exhibition of artists who use an under-recognized fastener.
Kim Clockauer, Eric Treacher, Maureen Lane, Ben Tye Nollins, and Randy Marsteller all have worked with staples as both an adornment and a sculptural unit. This exhibition plays on multiple meanings of the word: a reflection of the office culture that is a "day job" reality for many artists (punning on the name of the pervasive office supplies franchise), a sense that minimalist art has become a new "staple" unconnected to the biological world, and the plain factual signifier of a small metal object that can be gathered, pounded, and folded into a new art.
Clockauer uses staples to affix small fabric swatches to the wall, pulling them this way and that in a kind of indecisive determination of form. Treacher looks back to the punk era of the '70s for ritual fashion cues, "scarifying" his body with staples punched into earlobes and elbows, then photo-documenting the results. Lane's deceptively seductive arrangements of ceramic kitchenware feature clusters of staples dissolving in sulfuric acid, creating strange crystalline patterns. Video artist Tye Nollins places thousands of staples on flatbed scanners as the raw material for his generative, morphing abstractions. Lastly, Marsteller presents meticulous photoreal paintings of staple packs and guns, treating them as enduring but ultimately empty Pop icons.
The exhibition opens 7 pm with a performance by Treacher. Left Cube is located at 617 W. 28th Street, NY.