Yes, it sure is! Today we launched a re-design to our front page, moving it from a three to two-column format. We are planning to launch an overall re-design to the website in Spring 2010. We made this change now to give more room to the art showcased in our blog and to make our activities and programs, all detailed in the sidebar to the right, more clear. We hope this adjustment makes our site easier to read and navigate.
The metaphor of the brain as a database (or, if you prefer, the database as a brain) flatters and anthropomorphizes the machine more than it explains the mind. Gray matter doesn't seem to be organized in a way that makes the storage and retrieval of information easy; rather, the classification and categorization that characterize the database are pre-digital technologies invented to manage the ever-increasing amounts of information that civilization requires citizens to master. Cicero used a "memory palace" when delivering orations. As he spoke, he would imagine moving through a house where each room and object represented points he needed to make in his speech and the supporting evidence he needed to make them. The antithesis of such memory systems might be the dream, the mind's nightly refresher that reconfigures the day's events and data in disjointed, symbolic narratives. Both the memory palace and the dream are based on irrational elements: subjective experience, arbitrary connections, and word play. That the memory palace is created under the thinker's deliberate control only highlights the conscious mind's eagerness to do what the unconscious mind does automatically. Even as Cicero publicly performed the constructs of reason, his brain was circumventing them.
Image: Alexandre Singh, slide from Assembly Instructions Lecture (Ikea, Manzoni, Klein, et al), 2009Last July, in a New York University faculty residence on West Houston Street where Picasso's sculpture and I.M. Pei's architecture face off in a courtyard invisible to Google Earth, Alexandre Singh delivered an installment of his Assembly Instructions Lectures, a series of talks illustrated by a pair of overhead projectors. After introducing his audience to Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary who taught the memory palace technique to Chinese officials to convince them of the superiority of Western (and by extension, Christian) thought, Singh launched into a detailed recounting of a dream he supposedly had, in which Ingvar Kamprad, founder and principle shareholder of Ikea, announced that the master floor plan implemented in every Ikea store around the world encodes a classification of all human knowledge. For instance, the arrangement of shoes, hangers, and sweaters in a display closet, as Singh demonstrated, represented the kingdoms and phyla of life on Earth. What's more, the Ikea system of Singh's dream world does not merely encode--it controls. If something changes in a store--say, a new couch model is introduced for the new season, or a passing child moves a prop coffee-table book around a fake living room--the fabric of reality is altered.
Singh's talk fleshed out the dim awareness of elaborate systems that one senses in dreams but can hardly recall or convey when awake. As the Ikea thread developed, it snaked in and out of the spotlight--perhaps following the "long natural way," the meandering path of the Ikea floor plan that makes consumption leisurely and fun while forcing shoppers to view all of the store's merchandise--and subplots emerged along multiple tangents. Singh argued that brown, not white, was the sum of all colors as he turned over transparency sheets scanned from pages of John Ruskin's book Modern Painters, where "brown" had been pasted over names of all the colors. Piero Manzoni, the artist who canned the essence of light, made a cameo when Singh's Dante-like narrator found him sleeping in Ikea's mattress section. Shortly after, Yves Klein appeared in a bed next to him.
Image: Alexandre Singh, slide from Assembly Instructions Lecture (Ikea, Manzoni, Klein, et al), 2009Singh will give the lecture again on November 11 at White Columns, on the third night of a four-part series organized in conjunction with Performa 09. This Monday's offering, "The Alkahest," is a sprawling epic that relates golem tales and abstract painting to myths of the creation of the world. Storytelling is the backbone of Singh's work; several of his exhibition projects were spawned by his thousand-page book, The Marque of the Third Stripe, a fictionalized biography of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. It is probably not uncommon for artists to experience a sense of futility when they set about making objects, when "it's all been done." Artists like Singh give heft to their works by imbuing them with symbolic power in the context of narratives of their own making. Singh uses many sources, but professes a fondness for surfing Wikipedia. In an interview with ArtReview, he said: "The Surrealists made an art of finding drawings in the grain of wood. I think I do the same finding stories in the grain of Wikipedia." The superficiality and transience that make the user-generated encyclopedia a dubious resource for research are boons for a creative reader like Singh, because they make room for drawing new, unlikely connections.
The idea of Wikipedia--or more broadly, the internet--as a restless data set that denies autonomous spaces for myth and history, news and fiction, offers one perspective for considering Singh's work. The slippery transparency sheets he uses as slides make for a satisfying dramatization of the flat flipping of web pages on a screen. His unbound books become legible for his audience when the overhead projector's beam of light transforms their horizontal pages into images on the wall--a low-tech, small-scale, fairy-tale version of the mass media beaming content to the people. Of course, the internet metaphor fails to provide an exhaustive reading of the Assembly Instructions Lectures. There is a lot more going on, and all real and imagined similarities between the overhead projector and more sophisticated broadcast media vanish in the striking moments when Singh exploits his chosen medium's unique physical properties. In the Ikea lecture, as he layered images of equestrian statuary on top of each other to illustrate the conventions of that genre, the darkening filmy buildup of transparencies offered silent "proof" for the thesis that white light is one of the components of brown.
Image: Alexandre Singh, collage from Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick), 2009Singh's work is now on view in another format. "Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick)", at Harris Lieberman Gallery through November 14, includes some of the visual aids from the eponymous lecture as framed collages hung on the wall. They are arranged in an order that tells loose tales while simultaneously visualizing potential fallacies and pitfalls in the construction of knowledge. It is divided into three sections, each devoted to a way in which supporting evidence can be combined to achieve a conclusion. "Linear association/causation" is illustrated by a simple progression: a bucket (A) is left outside in the rain (B), and then the bucket full of rainwater (C) is swarmed with mosquitoes (D), which bite the head of a man (E) who succumbs to mental illness (F). "Cross-linear association/causation" occurs when two of the events are connected outside of linear temporality. When (A) and (D) meet, the sight of buckets makes a woman feel itchy, while connecting the dots from (B) to (F) results in psychic unease whenever it rains. "Tangential association/causation," the concept represented on the gallery's third wall, is the logic of false etymologies and accidental similarities. The orange, as Singh's diagram posits, is related to gold by its consonance with the Latin aurum, and thence pirate's bounty. The resemblance of the orange's pithy, veiny sections to the hemispheres of the brain evinces its links to inner organs. Other such revelations pile up in a pyramid of errors to yield the final story: "Every winter FLORIDA-FACED Pirates Slaughter and Bathe in the ORANGE JUICE and entrails of SANTA-CLAUS so that the SPRING may COME AGAIN."
The trappings of logic are all over these collages. The letter Omega marks the final element of each set. "Beta" and "-iii" are dim reminders of high-school math assignments. But added to Singh's encyclopedic mix of cutouts--Disney's Snow White and Hindu temples also figure prominently in it--the letters become ritual symbols. It's no accident that the full title of the related lecture rhymes "Tangential Logick" with "Tangential Magick." Framed in the narrative of an opium eater's wandering, hazy mental state, logic and magic are equal opposites, two systems of transfiguration that take one thing and turn it into something else. If Singh's tales seem to side with magic, it could be because they are balancing out the privileged position of logic. Both are effective and fallible in his explorations of how the creative faculty eases friction between data and consciousness.
The metaphor of the brain as a database (or, if you prefer, the database as a brain) flatters and anthropomorphizes the machine more than it explains the mind. Gray matter doesn't seem to be organized in a way that makes the storage and retrieval of information easy; rather, the classification and categorization that characterize the database are pre-digital technologies invented to manage the ever-increasing amounts of information that civilization requires citizens to master. Cicero used a "memory palace" when delivering orations. As he spoke, he would imagine moving through a house where each room and object represented points he needed to make in his speech and the supporting evidence he needed to make them. The antithesis of such memory systems might be the dream, the mind's nightly refresher that reconfigures the day's events and data in disjointed, symbolic narratives. Both the memory palace and the dream are based on irrational elements: subjective experience, arbitrary connections, and word play. That the memory palace is created under the thinker's deliberate control only highlights the conscious mind's eagerness to do what the unconscious mind does automatically. Even as Cicero publicly performed the constructs of reason, his brain was circumventing them.
Image: Alexandre Singh, slide from Assembly Instructions Lecture (Ikea, Manzoni, Klein, et al), 2009Last July, in a New York University faculty residence on West Houston Street where Picasso's sculpture and I.M. Pei's architecture face off in a courtyard invisible to Google Earth, Alexandre Singh delivered an installment of his Assembly Instructions Lectures, a series of talks illustrated by a pair of overhead projectors. After introducing his audience to Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary who taught the memory palace technique to Chinese officials to convince them of the superiority of Western (and by extension, Christian) thought, Singh launched into a detailed recounting of a dream he supposedly had, in which Ingvar Kamprad, founder and principle shareholder of Ikea, announced that the master floor plan implemented in every Ikea store around the world encodes a classification of all human knowledge. For instance, the arrangement of shoes, hangers, and sweaters in a display closet, as Singh demonstrated, represented the kingdoms and phyla of life on Earth. What's more, the Ikea system of Singh's dream world does not merely encode--it controls. If something changes in a store--say, a new couch model is introduced for the new season, or a passing child moves a prop coffee-table book around a fake living room--the fabric of reality is altered.
Singh's talk fleshed out the dim awareness of elaborate systems that one senses in dreams but can hardly recall or convey when awake. As the Ikea thread developed, it snaked in and out of the spotlight--perhaps following the "long natural way," the meandering path of the Ikea floor plan that makes consumption leisurely and fun while forcing shoppers to view all of the store's merchandise--and subplots emerged along multiple tangents. Singh argued that brown, not white, was the sum of all colors as he turned over transparency sheets scanned from pages of John Ruskin's book Modern Painters, where "brown" had been pasted over names of all the colors. Piero Manzoni, the artist who canned the essence of light, made a cameo when Singh's Dante-like narrator found him sleeping in Ikea's mattress section. Shortly after, Yves Klein appeared in a bed next to him.
Image: Alexandre Singh, slide from Assembly Instructions Lecture (Ikea, Manzoni, Klein, et al), 2009Singh will give the lecture again on November 11 at White Columns, on the third night of a four-part series organized in conjunction with Performa 09. This Monday's offering, "The Alkahest," is a sprawling epic that relates golem tales and abstract painting to myths of the creation of the world. Storytelling is the backbone of Singh's work; several of his exhibition projects were spawned by his thousand-page book, The Marque of the Third Stripe, a fictionalized biography of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. It is probably not uncommon for artists to experience a sense of futility when they set about making objects, when "it's all been done." Artists like Singh give heft to their works by imbuing them with symbolic power in the context of narratives of their own making. Singh uses many sources, but professes a fondness for surfing Wikipedia. In an interview with ArtReview, he said: "The Surrealists made an art of finding drawings in the grain of wood. I think I do the same finding stories in the grain of Wikipedia." The superficiality and transience that make the user-generated encyclopedia a dubious resource for research are boons for a creative reader like Singh, because they make room for drawing new, unlikely connections.
The idea of Wikipedia--or more broadly, the internet--as a restless data set that denies autonomous spaces for myth and history, news and fiction, offers one perspective for considering Singh's work. The slippery transparency sheets he uses as slides make for a satisfying dramatization of the flat flipping of web pages on a screen. His unbound books become legible for his audience when the overhead projector's beam of light transforms their horizontal pages into images on the wall--a low-tech, small-scale, fairy-tale version of the mass media beaming content to the people. Of course, the internet metaphor fails to provide an exhaustive reading of the Assembly Instructions Lectures. There is a lot more going on, and all real and imagined similarities between the overhead projector and more sophisticated broadcast media vanish in the striking moments when Singh exploits his chosen medium's unique physical properties. In the Ikea lecture, as he layered images of equestrian statuary on top of each other to illustrate the conventions of that genre, the darkening filmy buildup of transparencies offered silent "proof" for the thesis that white light is one of the components of brown.
Image: Alexandre Singh, collage from Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick), 2009Singh's work is now on view in another format. "Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick)", at Harris Lieberman Gallery through November 14, includes some of the visual aids from the eponymous lecture as framed collages hung on the wall. They are arranged in an order that tells loose tales while simultaneously visualizing potential fallacies and pitfalls in the construction of knowledge. It is divided into three sections, each devoted to a way in which supporting evidence can be combined to achieve a conclusion. "Linear association/causation" is illustrated by a simple progression: a bucket (A) is left outside in the rain (B), and then the bucket full of rainwater (C) is swarmed with mosquitoes (D), which bite the head of a man (E) who succumbs to mental illness (F). "Cross-linear association/causation" occurs when two of the events are connected outside of linear temporality. When (A) and (D) meet, the sight of buckets makes a woman feel itchy, while connecting the dots from (B) to (F) results in psychic unease whenever it rains. "Tangential association/causation," the concept represented on the gallery's third wall, is the logic of false etymologies and accidental similarities. The orange, as Singh's diagram posits, is related to gold by its consonance with the Latin aurum, and thence pirate's bounty. The resemblance of the orange's pithy, veiny sections to the hemispheres of the brain evinces its links to inner organs. Other such revelations pile up in a pyramid of errors to yield the final story: "Every winter FLORIDA-FACED Pirates Slaughter and Bathe in the ORANGE JUICE and entrails of SANTA-CLAUS so that the SPRING may COME AGAIN."
The trappings of logic are all over these collages. The letter Omega marks the final element of each set. "Beta" and "-iii" are dim reminders of high-school math assignments. But added to Singh's encyclopedic mix of cutouts--Disney's Snow White and Hindu temples also figure prominently in it--the letters become ritual symbols. It's no accident that the full title of the related lecture rhymes "Tangential Logick" with "Tangential Magick." Framed in the narrative of an opium eater's wandering, hazy mental state, logic and magic are equal opposites, two systems of transfiguration that take one thing and turn it into something else. If Singh's tales seem to side with magic, it could be because they are balancing out the privileged position of logic. Both are effective and fallible in his explorations of how the creative faculty eases friction between data and consciousness.
An appropriated educational film found at the UCLA physics lab where the artist has worked for several years, "Hypercube" aims to illustrate the idea of 4-dimensional space. Re-narrated by Cunningham, the video emphasizes her interest in the way scientific ideas can be articulated and offers a context for the artist's interest in experimenting with complex geometric forms.
An appropriated educational film found at the UCLA physics lab where the artist has worked for several years, "Hypercube" aims to illustrate the idea of 4-dimensional space. Re-narrated by Cunningham, the video emphasizes her interest in the way scientific ideas can be articulated and offers a context for the artist's interest in experimenting with complex geometric forms.
Gears of War depends on a conventional anti-hero/redemption narrative set in another world where it is up to a motley band of once-disgraced brigands to save what remains of humanity from a subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde. Its formidable commercial success aside, the game is simply a well-executed shoot-’em-up that offers no significant expansion on that well-worn genre. Its television advertisement is of far greater interest: the emphasis on the melancholy, pathos and self-reproach communicated by ‘Mad World’ connects Gears of War to a contemporary understanding of war produced in large part as a response to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conundrum for the producers of war-based video games is a delicate one: how to craft and market a war game in an era when public opinion has turned against war as a paradigm? How, for instance, is heroism rendered in a fictional narrative when the most obvious contemporary social referents – the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – do not, as social histories in the making, embody the kind of unambiguous moral bases easily identified, for example, in World Wars I and II? How can our period eye, in all its ambivalence, be satisfied while still offering a compelling narrative of heroism?
Those responsible for the advertisement of the juggernaut franchise that is Gears of War obviously concluded that to acknowledge the public’s ambivalence was key to eradicating it as an obstacle to the game’s commercial success. While the game’s story is not a romanticized one, the commercial relies on age-old Romantic notions of self. This is, of course, a rather insidious strategy.
Gears of War depends on a conventional anti-hero/redemption narrative set in another world where it is up to a motley band of once-disgraced brigands to save what remains of humanity from a subterranean enemy known as the Locust Horde. Its formidable commercial success aside, the game is simply a well-executed shoot-’em-up that offers no significant expansion on that well-worn genre. Its television advertisement is of far greater interest: the emphasis on the melancholy, pathos and self-reproach communicated by ‘Mad World’ connects Gears of War to a contemporary understanding of war produced in large part as a response to the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conundrum for the producers of war-based video games is a delicate one: how to craft and market a war game in an era when public opinion has turned against war as a paradigm? How, for instance, is heroism rendered in a fictional narrative when the most obvious contemporary social referents – the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan – do not, as social histories in the making, embody the kind of unambiguous moral bases easily identified, for example, in World Wars I and II? How can our period eye, in all its ambivalence, be satisfied while still offering a compelling narrative of heroism?
Those responsible for the advertisement of the juggernaut franchise that is Gears of War obviously concluded that to acknowledge the public’s ambivalence was key to eradicating it as an obstacle to the game’s commercial success. While the game’s story is not a romanticized one, the commercial relies on age-old Romantic notions of self. This is, of course, a rather insidious strategy.
Check out these snapshots of Rhizome's New Silent Series event from last week "Variety Evening at the New Museum." Organized by VVORK, local performers staged works by artists Wojceich Kosma, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. The acts were presented together in a dramaturgy to be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. The evening is intended to be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future.
"Wait" by Wojciech KosmaCheck out these snapshots of Rhizome's New Silent Series event from last week "Variety Evening at the New Museum." Organized by VVORK, local performers staged works by artists Wojceich Kosma, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. The acts were presented together in a dramaturgy to be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. The evening is intended to be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future.
"Wait" by Wojciech KosmaSince his first Apparition on Tournez Manege (1993), Matthieu Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls 'Apparitions' on TV and in the media. (In French, the word apparition means both 'apparition' and 'appearances'). For Pandora's Sound Box, Laurette will develop a new performative series of Apparitions, airing on various American national TV channels from October 27 through November 1st, and continuously on the Video Box in White Box's exterior window. For the opening on November 2nd, Matthieu Laurette will conceive a site-specific related performative event.
-- FROM THE PRESS RELEASE FOR "WHITE NOISE III: PANDORA'S SOUND BOX" AT WHITE BOX (OPENS TONIGHT).
Since his first Apparition on Tournez Manege (1993), Matthieu Laurette has been developing an ongoing series of what he calls 'Apparitions' on TV and in the media. (In French, the word apparition means both 'apparition' and 'appearances'). For Pandora's Sound Box, Laurette will develop a new performative series of Apparitions, airing on various American national TV channels from October 27 through November 1st, and continuously on the Video Box in White Box's exterior window. For the opening on November 2nd, Matthieu Laurette will conceive a site-specific related performative event.
-- FROM THE PRESS RELEASE FOR "WHITE NOISE III: PANDORA'S SOUND BOX" AT WHITE BOX (OPENS TONIGHT).
Flying down the back roads and divided four lane highways that cross the southern part of the United States has given me pause over the years to think about the rapidly shifting landscape. Granted being born in the mid 1980’s was like being dropped into the rushing river to maddeningly fast growth and development. When the first Best Buy came to my town it was like dreamland opened its gates right up, with the Sunday circular fueling my insatiable desire to get that fresh video game, or the hot discounted DVD player. As the time passed though, and I began to take these road trips with friends across the south, I realized what was eating me. The disappearing sense of regional diversity, passing through Dothan, Troy, Ozark, Alabama each town had become defined by its strip, the reconfiguring of Main Street, into a bypass road lined with the shiny, glowing colors of economic growth and progress.
Each constellation is a set of points on a laser etched map that correspond to photographed franchises of the projected logo. The first in the group is of Eighteen McDonald’s that spread across the beautiful city of Memphis, Tennessee.
Flying down the back roads and divided four lane highways that cross the southern part of the United States has given me pause over the years to think about the rapidly shifting landscape. Granted being born in the mid 1980’s was like being dropped into the rushing river to maddeningly fast growth and development. When the first Best Buy came to my town it was like dreamland opened its gates right up, with the Sunday circular fueling my insatiable desire to get that fresh video game, or the hot discounted DVD player. As the time passed though, and I began to take these road trips with friends across the south, I realized what was eating me. The disappearing sense of regional diversity, passing through Dothan, Troy, Ozark, Alabama each town had become defined by its strip, the reconfiguring of Main Street, into a bypass road lined with the shiny, glowing colors of economic growth and progress.
Each constellation is a set of points on a laser etched map that correspond to photographed franchises of the projected logo. The first in the group is of Eighteen McDonald’s that spread across the beautiful city of Memphis, Tennessee.
American Landscapes takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally "made." In these occasionally abstract photographs, the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as 'scenography for a free market economy' or simply 'Landscapes'. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.
American Landscapes takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally "made." In these occasionally abstract photographs, the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as 'scenography for a free market economy' or simply 'Landscapes'. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.
In the spirit of Raphaël Rozendaal's One Question Interviews, I conducted a "1-bit" interview with Rhizome-commissioned artist Tristan Perich. (I felt the idea was apropos given the artist's interest in the possibilities and constraints of basic forms.) Perich performed earlier this week at bitforms gallery in a benefit for his new album 1-Bit Symphony, which is a 45 minute long, five movement composition for a single microchip. 1-Bit Symphony is currently on display through November 7th at bitforms in New York City, along with Perich's Machine Drawings and his 1-Bit Video. Perich will also kick off a two month, cross-country tour with Lesley Flanigan beginning tomorrow, at the Stone in the East Village. He will be performing his composition for harpsichord and 4-channel 1-bit electronics titled "Dual Synthesis". (Full dates and details here.) I visited his bitforms show today (see photos below) where I had the opportunity to listen to 1-Bit Symphony, and it's truly extraordinary. I encourage readers to stop by. - Ceci Moss
What is your favorite unit of measurement and why?
The first unit of measurement to blow my mind was the parsec, which I came across in middle school in that amazing book, Powers of Ten. It described immensely vast distances, larger than a light year, which was really large. It quantified the universe. It was the first time I realized measurements could actually be cool, really cool. The book also went down to angstroms and fermis and pico fermis, accompanied by colorful illustrations of molecules and atoms. They're the only way we can relate to these huge and small places beyond our perception, essentially meaning, "bigger than you can possibly imagine" or "smaller than you can possibly imagine." A great book called Where Mathematics Comes From goes into how we can only understand mathematical abstractions through "grounding metaphors," like "number as distance." We seek recourse to our ineptitude by further refining our measure on the world, which Lorentz and Einstein proved will ultimately fail, our Icarus syndrome. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has some blocks on its campus that measure exactly 1 cubic inch, or weigh exactly one pound, creating the official word on measurement. They are free from inaccuracies since they define what an inch is in the first place: a physical embodiment of language.
But recently, I have settled to truly appreciate the millimeter. As a kid I always thought millimeters were too small to perceive, but they are actually pretty big. I've put them to work a lot recently to determine the precise wire lengths for 1-Bit Symphony, adding a mm here or subtracting a mm there. It's finally supplanted their intangibility with a new meaningfulness. Then Squires Wires, my wire company, blasphemously converts them to decimaled inches…