Grand Text Auto

It’s been a while since I stopped over in Buffalo, but I’m finally unfrozen, and I’m unfreezing my blog, too, to comment a bit on the exhibit I saw — this was the purpose of my brief wintry sojourn — Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art at the Albright-Knox Northland. I visited the show with my spouse, Flourish; Tina Rivers Ryan (who curated the exhibit with Paul Vanouse) was kind enough to give us a big chunk of her day and provide a detailed tour.

Generative Unfoldings is an online exhibit of generative art, running live in the browser and consisting entirely of free/libre/open-source software. I am curating the exhibit. Sarah Rosalena Balbuena-Brady, D. Fox Harrell, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and Parag K. Mital worked with me to select fourteen artworks. The show will feature:

• Can The Subaltern Speak? by Behnaz Farahi
• Concrete by Matt DesLauriers
• The Curse Of Dimensionality by Philipp Schmitt
• Gender Generator by Encoder Rat Decoder Rat
• Greed by Maja Kalogera
• Hexells by Alexander Mordvintsev
• Letter From C by Cho Hye Min
• Pac Tracer by Andy Wallace

Please enjoy Post Hoc, a show I’ve put together with generous contributions from a baker’s dozen artists and seven writers. There was no pre-established theme for Post Hoc, which was prompted by our inability to get to IRL galleries and museums. Artists were simply asked for digital images, any digital image they considered an artwork. (Several works in the show do have other manifestations.) The work in the show is all from 2020. I solicited 1000–1200 character responses to each piece.

Agnieszka Kurant   response by Mary Flanagan

Christian Bök   response by Paul Stephens

Risk Management [Europe]
Agnieszka Kurant
2020
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The Library of Babel – Hexagonal Drawing in English
Christian Bök
2020
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FLY PIECE
Daniel Temkin
2020
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Cabaret #7
Derek Beaulieu
2020
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of 8″ × 8″ Letraset on Paper

Lauren Lee McCarthy
2020
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of Performance, Custom Software and Electronics, Installation, Digital Image

“Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.” Isolation #6
Lilla LoCurto & Bill Outcault
2020
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of 18″ × 12″ Cattle Marker, Powdered Pastels, Pencil, Graphite on Paper

Outtake
Olia Lialina
2020
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Visual Entanglement, 2020
Manfred Mohr
2020
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Head 4.054
Mark Klink
2002
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Yellow Melting Like a Firework Petal, from Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words)
Renée Green
2020
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also, 42″ × 32″ Double-Sided Banner. Part of a Series of 28 Banners

THESE N—-S IS WATCHING
Sly Watts
2020
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of 42″ × 59″ Charcoal, Oil, Oil Pastel, Acrylic, Ink, and Paint Marker on Pastel Paper

Devil May Care
Susan Bee
2020
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of 24″ × 18″ Oil & Enamel on Linen

Panthéon
Forsyth Harmon
2020
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of 9″ × 12″ Ink and Watercolor on Paper

The untitled poem by Eugen Gomringer that we can only call “silencio” is a classic, perhaps the classic, concrete poem. According to Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, the “silencio” version of the poem dates from 1953. In my 1968 edition of The Book of Hours and Constellations I find the German manifestation of this poem (with the word “schweigen”) and the English poem (with the word “silence”), on the same page at the very beginning of the book — but no “silencio.” The place where I do find “silencio” is An Anthology of Concrete Poetry from 1967, edited by Emmett Williams. My copy is the re-issue by Primary Information.

At the  recent annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, from January 23rd and 26th, Mary Flanagan offered her thought leadership on panels, dinners, and gave a presentation on games for impact. The panel “Putting Jobs Out of Work” had an excellent team of business leaders and academics; watch the video of  her solo talk, “Game Changers: Playing Games for Good” and read a (mostly) accurate description of the talk.

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At the  recent annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, from January 23rd and 26th, Mary Flanagan offered her thought leadership on panels, dinners, and gave a presentation on games for impact. The panel “Putting Jobs Out of Work” had an excellent team of business leaders and academics; watch the video of  her solo talk, “Game Changers: Playing Games for Good” and read a (mostly) accurate description of the talk.

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We are looking for a full stack developer to create a small mobile application that can capture, process, and display images. The software is to run in a standalone setting— the main reason for mobile is to use the touchscreen on wall-mounted tablets (likely iPads) and access the camera. Therefore the project could be made in a wrapped browser window inside something like Phonegap — it’s not intended for distribution on the app store.

I had a launch event Saturday afternoon for my new book, Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. Not a typical reading or book party, but a workshop for people completely new to programming but interested in pursuing it. It was at the excellent gallery and venue, Babycastles, on West 14th Street in Manhattan.

March is a time of many talks! Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan spoke at the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series at the University of California Berkeley. The audience represented those interested in art, dance, post colonial studies, gender studies, game design, and even peace studies. It was fantastic to meet you all!

A recent production of mine, Running All Night, was shown at Babycastles in New York recently during the Playdate, July 23-August 7, 2015.

The piece is a 128-byte Commodore 64 program that functions as a clock or timer. It was executing during the whole show and presented a different image every moment of the day. Here’s once glance as what it looked like as it ran on a TV turned to face the window.

There was also a TV inside and a single page (dot-matrix printed) of the assembly source code.

[Some excerpts.]

… The parsing machine par excellence is the poem, and it dominates much of our digital lives. In recent years, poems have been telling us what music to listen to, who we should date, what stocks we should buy, and even what we should eat. It comes as no surprise, then, that it should also tell us what art we should view. But what happens when the art we are looking at becomes the poem itself?

… Are poems art? What happens to the intellectual property at the point of sale? What is actually acquired when one purchases a poem? Who would even buy a poem?