art - others

lucy-as-performance

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1462472409425-dumpfm-tommoody-modern_furniture Lucy-gif

 

On the left, random photo-detail-crop of Cally Spooner performance work at the NewMu (hat tip helvetica12); on the right, a clip from Luc Besson's Lucy, depicting Scarlett Johansson telekinetically flinging a mobster into a wall. Caught on the fly, Spooner's work resembles standard Trisha Brown-style gesture art but there's so much more. As the press release tells us, this is "a group of dancers who respond to conflicting choreographic instructions: to stay intimately bound together while remaining fiercely separate." Moreover, "trained by rugby players and a movie director, [their work follows] the logic of a 'stand-up scrum' -- a daily meeting often used in collaborative, responsive practices such as software development." Darn, that's a lot for one work of art.

Scarlett Johansson may or may not have had a rugby coach, but she is definitely guided by a movie director. Cally Spooner perhaps didn't need the theoretical overkill to institutionally legitimize her dancers' movements. In our current critically relaxed state where Laura Poitras and Tim Burton are shown in museums as "artists" it's only fitting to consider Johansson's genetically enhanced superhuman Lucy as form of po-Mo body practitioner. Semioticians may have already noted that the name Lucy is a trans twist on Luc, etc etc.

Miracleman - favorite panels

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Miracleman is an Alan Moore-penned series of comics riffing on Marvelman, the 1950s British version of the 1940s American Captain Marvel. The series was Moore's first big hit in the comix biz, predating Watchmen. After the latter's success in the US, the Marvelman stories were anthologized (in 1990) under the name Miracleman, for various boring legal reasons.

In the series, Moore makes fun of the lameness of the original concept, which featured a "Marvelman Family" including Young Marvelman and Kid Marvelman. In Moore's re-telling, Mike Moran is a lugubrious middle aged investigative reporter who, late in life, accidentally discovers he can turn into Miracleman by saying the word "Kimota" (atomik backwards). He also inexplicably inherits a full suite of Miracleman's memories, which he relates to his incredulous wife of 15 years:

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She kids him about these memories, causing a reaction that stays in your mind long after you've read the comic:

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"You're laughing at my life!" and the floor shatters to matchwood. Miracleman has a number of these overreactions throughout the story, including his response, below, to certain revelations about his career-long foe, Dr. Gargunza (which I won't spoil). The evildoer is not present for this mind-blowing news, the discovery of which causes Miracleman to yell out his nemesis' name in another arc of pure fury...

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...followed by destruction of everything in the room. This is at the end of Book One -- I haven't read Books Two or Three (recently reissued by Miracle, I mean, Marvel). Grant Morrison's excellent writing on comics in the book Supergods reminded me of this series -- I haven't gotten to the part yet where he discusses Miracleman but am looking forward to what he writes.

With these rings i thee kill

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Catchy variation on the matrimonial pledge, circa late 1960s.

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Am reading Grant Morrison's Supergods (hat tip SW) and it's sending me to "the internet" to look for screenshots of Silver Age comix. In the perspectivally adventurous example above, the incomparable Inhumans appear in cameo as rings on the tuber-fingered hand of the Mandarin. This is a typical Jack Kirby stylization that shouldn't work but kind of does -- note Mandarin's absence of a thumbnail.

The late '60s abounded with such graphic experiments. Here's another one, a cover illustration by Neal Adams (possibly unused) depicting the X-Men crucified on their own logo:

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Destiny Clock demo at Eyebeam

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Last night at Eyebeam, resident Brendan Byrne gave a talk on his project Destiny Clock (formerly, Theseus), a music interface/installation/environment that sends MIDI notes to Ableton and triggers sounds. Essentially this is a modular, patchable computer, with components (sequencer, multiplexer, clock divider, logic gates) that the user connects in various ways by means of patch cables of ordinary thin wire. The design is extremely elegant but the output is bottlenecked by being limited to a stream of on-off notes. Patching changes the sequence, speed and volume, but the device is not sending MIDI CC commands to affect timbre, envelopes, effects, or other typical aspects of electronic music. Also, because the computer components are unlabeled, you aren't really learning much about computation.

Byrne might be cut slack for these limitations except that, in his slide talk, he posed the interface as a challenge, or alternative, to Eurorack-style modular synthesis. He showed examples of "Eurocrack" addicts whose homes have been taken over by their gear purchases, by way of contrast to his modest circuitboard (about 8 x 12 inches). This was kind of unfair -- there might be some middle ground between those lost souls and what he's doing.