This Week’s Russian Hilarity in Two Videos

Tonight, a Russian Police choir sang the pop song “Get Lucky.” Either some are uncomfortable smiling in public, which might not appear dignified, or they do not know what smiling is. Your guess is as good as mine. Better video can be found here.

Earlier this week, two members of Pussy Riot appeared on the Colbert Report having recently been released from jail in Russia. They were fantastic. Better quality video here.

Rachel Clarke’s Digital Unmapping

Currently up at the University of Georgia, Rachel Clarke’s Terra Incognita video provides a zen enticement into the gallery space at the Lamar Dodd School of Art as part of her show Unmapping . The video projects quite large on the far wall in front of a bench, and loops between a white unmapping and black mapping of sorts.

Terra Incognita from Rachel Clarke on Vimeo.

I heard the artist speak about the process of making this work, starting with real maps–American road maps–and digitizing them. Scanning their parts and lines into different parts in Photoshop, Clarke then animated their movement in a deconstructive process that then reverses in the second half of the film. The journey alluded to by maps becomes a transformed journey of movement through the layered lines and marks of maps. For Clarke what was equally important was the traces of the original map and scanning process in the final film, marks of the artist’s hand and materiality that ostensibly are lost in the digital medium.

[Note: I wish I knew why the video is displaying on the far left. Embedding videos in self-hosted WordPress, anyone?]

A Bookish Day: from Incunabila to Explanatory and Expirimental

img001

Books. Returning home has been book-oriented, from going back to school and using its library to cleaning out my parent’s library at home. I found The Worry Book dusty and forgotten in my parent’s library, and brought it along with me today to share the still-charming 1960s text that classifies basic and “baroque” worries to a friend who would appreciate it.

ra050001

Then I sat in on my friend’s class in the Hargrett Library, where the University of Georgia’s special collections are housed. There a librarian showed the group  incunabula, book’s from printing cradle of the 15th century, moving chronologically forward to a gorgeous artist’s book published in 1990, Capriccio. Capriccio hearkens back to the hand-made quality of manuscripts but with modern content: poems by Ted Hughes and engravings by Leonard Baskin, all done with an eye to beauty and craftsmanship that transforms the book as conveyor of information to art object, in this 41st of 50 total copies.

img002

I am very much a digital native and minimalist in terms of possession. But despite, or perhaps because of that, I feel such a draw to these books-as-objects and the supposed permanence of the object, as opposed to the fleeting, unfixed nature of the web. This ambivalence splits many a modern mind, which has a desire of moving both backward and forward at the same time. (There is probably room for much BAROQUE Worry about the future of publishing in this.)

img003

However, I ended my day at a lecture by Mark Callahan of UGA’s ICE Conversation Series on Experiments in Publishing, dealing both with a range of contemporary efforts and Mark’s own conception of publishing as a vehicle for the next iteration of his AUX series. Neither basic or baroque worry came up at this talk. Rather, there was playful enthusiasm toward the new possibilities and understandings of how one can publish. Predictably, this centrally involved the internet as a medium of exchange, and self-publishing options, be it Pinterest or Twitter (although the example tended to be more interesting than that). But they also expanded the notion of what a publication could be – an event, a mixture of media, to a participatory creation. At any rate, the written word no longer need have the main role it once did.

img004

During the talk, I had an AHA moment when I saw an artist’s project very similar to one that I brainstormed with friends late one night this past weekend: the blank book. We were going to call ours: The Storehouse of Useless Knowledge. This artist has produced a high- and low-end edition of a white book based on Lulu’s material limitations of price and size. Now I will have the “baroque” worry of not saying my good ideas aloud, because they might take material form elsewhere. For more baroque worries, keep scrolling down.

img005

img006

 

As a coda, in thinking of awesome bookish artistic projects, I recently came across Christina HartlPraeger’s Book of Meme which works as a book-as-object, functioning in a sculptural way as Tauba Auerbach’s RGB Colorspace Atlas does.