Andreas Wacker

A very nice project

A small vertical slice of (Socal) life. Marvelously documented while it is fading out of existence.

Bought an awesome painting today:

I had not heard of the monome before. I saw one today and it looks very nice. Could be so much fun. If I’d had the time + skills for it. Still a pretty awesome device.

It turns out that Google has fogiven twexus.com for its past sins. The site exists again according to Google. I forgot when the ban started. It was certainly justified back in the day. Long story. Anyway, now it is google-legal again. With a cute little page-rank of 3 even.

In honor of this I bumped the image resolution of its pair play mode up by a notch. Screens got bigger since 2002.

The Rolling Stone writes about audio technology and music and how things have changed in recent years.

Technology and Art influencing each other is a very interesting topic for me. This article touches on a couple of interesting points. Not more though. Without any respect for the matter it tries to discuss it merely assembles unrelated facts and sound bytes along one imaginary audio/digital axies. From production to consumption it bounces back and forth. Emitting half educated statements along the way.

A couple of articles, better researched would have been much better.

The bigger question is how I get my wife to approve the move of the Stereo from the attic into the living room.

Adib Frickes latestword installation is showing at Realace GmbH in Berlin right now. It is hard to judge the work of a friend. I like this room. There was relatively little time between opening day and commision. And it seems, that the work is great, as it always has been. There is a certain directness. Other works, that in the making for months or even years are perfect. But by missing perfection amplifies the initial impact of the work. It might become easier approachable by the unintiated. And, with Adibs work, we all are just that.

Matt Stuart’s pictures are really really nice. He writes that he needs optimism for his work. I like that. I also like that much of his commissioned work is almost as good as the pictures that I would be believe are real found ones.

more predictable, yet still kinda nice are these images from the seventies

Both links I found this morning on BlogsNow. I spend some time yesterday with it. Brought the specific views back, that I had droped a while back. I still like it.

Lot’s of blog rave about thiscomputer animation right now.

I think it is horrible. Smetana is easy to abuse and misunderstand. Dragging Fallingwater into this is just horrible. The first couple of seconds of this Quicktime from hell are nice enough. Although the font choice and especially the animated glow should have been a clear sign of trouble. Fallingwater is one of the more important things that have been made in the last century. Seing it disolved to death is pure horror. The tasteless low point was certainly the eschereseque pan away from that mirror ball.

Not much more to say than this

From what I read (cursory) the tchech artist Roman Tyc replaced the usual live landscape images to been at this time of day with this recording. This seems to be a rare case that the local german paper reported such mixed / pseudo news before BlogsNow. Usually it’s the other round.

Roman Tyc did replace some traffic signs in April in Praque

Yet another way of reading time

Which got me looking and I found, that Yugo Nakamura is still writing down time.

Of course he is cheating, while Roman Opalka is not.

In Germany this device got some attention 30 years ago.

Sgt Pepper forty years.

Listened to it 3 times in a row at 2am on deck of some dodgy vessel in the middle of the mediterian in August 1993. Portable CD player. Hard to forget.

morphing had been around for a while.
All of these images as well. Still needed youTube to get this out:

I am not a fan of this implementation. The idea itself is great. A bit more understand of art history would have been helpful. The track I can mute, the jumps in time and obvious omissions are harder to fade out. Maybe this time the rip-off in a commercial (bank, insurance, dove soap?) will be better than the you-tube-inspiration?

I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.

twexus @ appartment therapy

nice. that the work still makes sense after 4 years. Which is probably a long time for an internet art site.

Why is it, that the good causes have always the worst
implementation of their communication attempts?

Hummer commercials are pretty cool. The car is pretty much the definiton of ’sucks ass’. Ah, there is the ‘Sucks-Ass-one’, look how small the ‘Sucks-Ass-Three’ actually is. The commericals are pretty good though.

Maybe the sixteenth chapel is the way it is, since Mr Buonarrotti did it to pay the bills?

pointless, yet cute

Ahh, Laser Solidifier. Can I have one? Beats a Deckel FP1, or maybe not?

it’s the little things that matter. Apple recipe is so simple: Just make things better. As much as you can. And don’t stop there. Jobs could say for years “Our products look from the back better than the other guys from the front”. Yet nobody really started to compete with Apple in the design league. Sony was good in the 80s and early ninetees. Right now there isn’t much industrial design that would be worth mentioning. Despite the fact that Apple makes a killing, vastly based on design. Go figure.

in halflife

The most expensive paintings were made during a brief period. Most of them in Paris. If you were an Artist in those days you better rent in and around the Montparnasse. Even though back in the day the money was not flowing their way, a handful of artists seem now to make up the quintessential olymp of the fine arts. A show of them will raw big crowds only matched by sports events.

Pop stars. Big freaking Madonna like box office hits.

All along during the times of mass society there was this big and scary void below the mega stars. Nobody would have want to be caught during the travels to fame. The rise of the Popstar needs to be instant, overnight. The uncanny valley between nobody and stardom had to be passed instantly. It was the nowhere land of mediocrity. Where those not so good artists dwelled. Who wants to buy a painting from a ‘not so good’ artist?

Mass media made those Pop stars by putting the massive firehose gush of its attention on specific individuals. It was and is a hit or miss game. Mass media as it developed in industrial societies means that few outlets serve to millions of minds.

Along came the internet. And the thing happened almost unnoticed that would fill the gap between unknown knitting grandma and Picasso. It is filled with content. Decent great content. Lot’s of it. The cost to publish it, allows for an revolutionary amount of diversity.

An example. While window shopping in Hamburgs ‘Stilwerk’, more or less an Ikea for the rich, I came across David Steets “Australia”. I liked it allot. Lumas has a shop in the former Coffee factory, and it seems to do well. Their concept is not to build and sell few popstars, they have maybe a hundred Photographer’s to pick from.
The actual framing is done very well. So well that I used Sander myself, and they have been great. Only complaint is that they don’t have an LA office. So my large prints will probably remain in Europe.

The Lumas concept works well. Based on technological break throughs it allows the content to broaden: Steets sells his images for a couple of hundred Euros. Both sides do well in this transaction. The digital prints make beautiful images. Thirty years ago the alternative would have been a mass produced poster or an original that was unaffordable.

The middle grounds between nobody and pop star artist is now filled with a range of great work that fits all tastes. Other examples of this new art economy could be Etsy but also Flickr qualifies. There is no ‘lower boarder’: Back in the day the Pop Stars clinging on to the
arts Olymp had to defend the few square feet in the spotlight. “That’s not art, that’s amateur stuff” used to be one of their pump guns to defend it. The middle range art market that is emerging does not share this problem. It allows for growth around demand.

well known photographers and how the internet would treat them

interesting images

The recipe seems simple enough: Take the ‘look’ where people appear to be people lost in tought and apply to real existing contemporary people and place them into settings that look much like porn sets.

Via flick ‘interesting’ via popurls which is one of the many crutches during these sad “BlogsNowLess days”

portland

The image is of the real thing. Interesting what a some added lens blur does to our perception.

I thought he had died already

8 minute piece. skip one or two in the beginning instead of clicking away.
You will not regret it.

After I sawBeing There again I was really curious how Shampoo would like these days.

It had been more than twenty years since I saw both movies for the first time. And it was worth revisiting both of them.

From the Perry Bible Fellowship

The internet can be nice.

a very nice piece by Adib Fricke

Sorry, but I think you need to know a little bit of german for this one.

amazing

carpet
no really.

fallingwater according to flickr.

flickr is worth every cent that yahoo paid for it.

everywhere !
thanks for the link: Biddy.