rodcorp: rodcorp: Art etc

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

National Gallery piracy risk for print-on-demand

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 15:54:06 GMT

NG considering extending its in-gallery digital print-on-demand service to accredited print shops around the world. Would the current lack of DRM prevent piracy, and/or allow an effective redress? [via ntk]

Salt Seller not sold and/or less sold of: Duchamp readymades fall short of estimates

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 12:38:48 GMT

Mark Kostabi once said there is no "Duchamp market", because he produced so little work:

Many pseudo-purists will advise you to keep production low and prices high. But Picasso and Warhol are the kings and barometers of the art market because they had huge quantity as well as quality. Duchamp is just as important historically but no one makes an art-market decision based on how the Duchamp market is going. Because there is no "Duchamp market." He produced too little.

Interesting idea, and last year, perhaps, we saw the proof when a Phillips sale of readymades in NY failed to make their estimates:

However, the sale of 14 "readymade" sculptures by the father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, was more problematic. The collection, which Phillips had guaranteed for an estimated $10 million, brought only $5.3 million. After the sale, dealers said there was nothing wrong with the prices realised - Phillips had simply put too high a price on the works.

To bring us up to date, here's Richard Polsky recommending good summer deals in the 2003 art market (no Duchamp).

Mobile cameras. But not camphones.

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 14:15:39 GMT

Shaun Irving's Peanut is a mail-delivery truck converted to take 4x8 feet pinhole photos
Rodney Graham's Millennial Time Machine is is a 19th century horse-drawn landau, whose carriage has been converted into a camera obscura [via Wm. Gibson]

The Art of Chess

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 18:00:59 GMT

Nineteen chess sets designed by artists at Somerset House, London

On public view for the first time will be five recently commissioned chess sets designed by leading contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama and Maurizio Cattelan. These new works will be set in context by chess sets designed during the 20th century by such major artists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder and Yoko Ono.

Ducks, rabbits and Duchamp

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 12:26:19 GMT

In 'Of Two Minds and One Nature', Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould use the Jastrow duck-rabbit figure in discussing the idea that Leonardo, Duchamp and other artists successfully bridged art and science, and therefore show us the value of breaking down/through the unhelpful (false, even? - in the view of our authors, themselves a well-known partnership of art theorist and paleo-scientist) dichotomy between the two cultures.

In a key passage from one of the most influential books of our times (The Structure of Scientific Revolution), T.S. Kuhn bridged the disciplinary gap between visual representation and conceptual innovation when he used the famous gestalt illusion of the duck-rabbit [...] as a primary symbol for the meaning and nature of scientific revolution: 'It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.'

An interesting article, but not sure it tells us anything new, unlike much of Shearer's research into MD.

Art students usually discover the duck-rabbit figure via Gombrich, who says:

we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity; we will also 'remember' the the rabbit when while we see the duck, but the more closely we watch ourselves, the more certainly will we discover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.'
[Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1959, 5]

Yet this famous binary flip-flop between duck and rabbit always seemed insufficient: if you look at the picture long enough, the visual opposition starts to break down. The duck aspect becomes minimally contaminated by the (possibility of flipping over to the) rabbit aspect, and vice versa. This contamination is, we guess, what makes the flip-flop possible. You start with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit OR a duck. You end up with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit-duck OR a duck-rabbit. (Just found our embarrassingly confused explication of same, with images from 1997. Forgive our cod-Derridean enthusiasm.) Which is what we think Wittgenstein means when he writes about 'seeing-as' being a combination of seeing and thinking [Philosophical Investigations, 212e] and:

I am shewn the duck-rabbit and asked what it is; I may say 'It's a duck-rabbit'. But I may also react to the question quite differently. - The answer that it is a duck-rabbit is again the report of a perception; the answer 'Now it's a rabbit' is not. Had I replied 'It's a rabbit', the ambiguity would have escaped me, and I should be reporting my perception. The change of aspect. 'But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!' But what is different: my impression? my point of view? - Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes. [...] The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being changed.
[Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M.Anscombe, 1953, 194-5]

Various things, in brief

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 11:21:16 GMT

Stereoscopic images via animation [via mefi]
Corporate logo fonts [via boingboing]
Nice list of SF authors (on the left)
Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a tutorial on 'ranking' [via Swarz]
Qur'an as immutable latticework, and, in contrast, David Porush's Talmud as hypertext

WIP: Lament: music for printer and five voices

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:50:37 GMT

I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn’t like the newly upgraded printer’s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer’s noise had been repetitive but musical, so they used to sing along with it when it did a large run of flow charts. I asked them what the old printer song had been like, and one of them started humming it to me. Gradually the others joined in until there were about five of them humming it, in remembrance.

Books read in 2002, 2003

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:45:23 GMT

Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.

How many ways can the (exact) centre of London be defined?

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:06:24 GMT

(in progress)

Geography/latitude: Greenwich (meridian). St Pauls / The Thames / Charing Cross as the centroid - thanks to Chris (and also: Hammersley has some interesting comments on geographic centres of continents)
Systemic
- Charing Cross station is the centre of London for Black Taxis
- Piccadilly Circus is considered the centre of the Underground network (though Victoria is the busiest, and the first line ran from Farringdon to Paddington via King's Cross)
- Postal districts: useful explanations here and here, but no mention of an origin
In name (historically): Apsley House - 'No 1, London'
Historical, again: Roman London. The square mile roughly defines where Roman London stood, and there was a basilica and forum in Cornhill, dating from 70/90AD. (Where were roads measured to? - thanks Chris)
the flow of people: multiple centres (Struan)
retail and finance: where are the most/highest transactions and revenue? Oxford Street? City of London for non-retail.

Sort of related: openguides, a network of free, community-maintained city guides to which anyone can contribute (thanks Paul)

Sources: London Encyclopaedia, various
To check: histories of London, Museum of London.

Edward Burtynsky: photos exploring the Residual Landscape

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:57:31 GMT

Quarries, mines, refineries, shipyards, dams: Gursky meets Salgado.

Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Annotations on Alan Moore

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:19:01 GMT

Madelyn Boudreaux's An Annotation of Literary, Historic, and Artistic References in Alan Moore's Graphic Novel, V For Vendetta (mirrored here)
Jess Nevins' Notes on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, since collected into a book, Heroes and Monsters.
... and a complete list (Swamp Thing, 1963, Watchmen, Swamp Thing etc) here

For reading: Duchampian NON-readymades, even

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 16:17:42 GMT

Rhonda Roland Shearer's thesis is that none of MD's readymades were genuinely off-the-shelf.

Shearer, Marcel Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not" Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art To Science: part one and part two.
As reported by Leslie Camhi in Art News: Did Duchamp Deceive Us? - "Shearer has been marshaling support for a radical hypothesis concerning Duchamp's readymades, among the most revolutionary (or anti-art) objects of the 20th century. Most people think of the readymades as mass-produced items transformed into art by Duchamp's choice and by their displacement to museum and gallery settings. Shearer has set out to prove that they are all unique creations, extensively manipulated by the artist's hand."
Opinion by Emily Liebert: Taking the 'ready' out of readymade artwork - "a larger question remains: whether or not such a discovery matters. Can a piece of information have the power to subvert a genre of art? The answer, quite simply, is no"
An Artist's Timely Riddles (with references)

Sight and Sound reviews 24 season 2

Mon, 28 Jul 2003 11:26:58 GMT

David Thomson meditates on what glued viewers to 24, and why the show fell short He hints at its fetishisation of mobile phones, which always seemed to be more than simply a plot device to glue together the different story strands and locations.

The sharpest pleasure in 24 has always been to awaken the scenarist in us all. It was evident early in the first series that hooked viewers were not simply asking story questions like, 'Do you trust Senator Palmer's wife?' Or, 'Are Jack and Nina over?' No, we were identifying with the team behind the show, and their self-imposed dilemma. We wanted to know, 'How are they going to spin this out through the middle sections without losing us?' Or, 'It's not just who is the traitor, but is anyone telling the truth?' Or, 'The secret is, it's all about cell phones.'

[...]

[T]he show required commentary. It needed its own talk show, with real-life pundits and senators coming on to discuss President Palmer's situation. It needed a great dash of what Altman tried to do in Tanner, and what Welles was always after – the organic confusion of fact and fiction. It needed to bleed over into the rest of television.

Go one step further: the commercials should have been written and directed by the show's talent, and they should have had the show's actors or characters. Thus you cut away from a car chase to have Kiefer Sutherland proposing this or that SUV. In the midst of telephonic deceit, Nina confides to the camera about the 'love-affair confidentiality' of her latest Nokia. And so on.

[...]

Someone should show it all in one day (Antonia Quirke had that idea for the ICA in London – but there were print problems). And everyone in the audience has a cell phone so they can call home. Or wherever you'd call if the bomb flashes. But the doors are locked – only as much food and weaponry as you can carry in. Give claustrophobia a chance. I told you we needed Buñuel. It's The Exterminating Angel, with Nina presiding, waiting for Jack to sleep.

Also: Top 100 British tv programmes.
[via philgyford]

The work of art in the age of far eastern reproduction

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:08:20 GMT

Taipei Times: Vietnamese painters profit from copying craze:

Demand for look-alike masterpieces is so great that Dong has to turn away "vanity" clients who want their portraits done.

On average, Dong's studio of six workers churns out 400 pieces a year with about half sold locally and the rest exported.

Prices are calculated on a basic rate of US$50 per square meter and US$20 extra for paintings with more than one face due to "more intricate copy work", Dong said.

If his studio was in the Western gallery system, Ngo Dong would be Andy Warhol or Mark Kostabi.

Related: Rome is making all of its street artists perform a test to ensure that they are the artists of the work they're selling - some people have been importing pictures from Thailand at a few dollars apiece.

The Origins of Things: Sketches, Models, Prototypes

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:07:12 GMT

illuminates the process by which designers transform their often groundbreaking ideas into functional, manufacturable products. Drawings, cardboard models stuck together with tape and ultramodern computer animations are more significant here than the finished products, for they illuminate the designer's process in a way that the finished product--unless it is a deconstructive design object!--does not

Buy in UK. Incidentally, some interesting looking related books here too.
[via MachineLake]

Cabinets of Curiosity: desktops of designers

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 20:06:44 GMT

"For designers who collect, the cluttered workspace is a library of inspiration". The desks of designers Rob Cristofaro, Maira Kalman, Scott Stowell and Milton Glaser.
[via MachineLake, itself via manAmplified]

Bike courier culture, alley cat racing

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:35:01 GMT

This weekend we met a bunch of bike couriers at a barbecue. Interesting people, with a strong sub-culture - sub in the sense that non-couriers know very little about what they are like, how couriering works etc. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mad about bikes, and it's a way to earn a crust. So there was much talk of the Tour de France. They knew only one person who'd gone on from couriering to 'proper' road racing. There are 600-1000 couriers working London at any one time, and they do about 70-80 miles a day in town, mostly within the Circle line area, though they may travel further west to Notting Hill, and further east to the Docklands. This bunch had a strong sense of identity and shared culture/community. Some have expensively tricked-out rides, some something seemingly more standard (the playoffs between lightness/efficiency, reliability and cost being the key equations couriers run in choosing the tools of their trade), with single/no brakes and single gears common.

About 50+ of the London couriers are into "alley cat racing": illegal checkpoint-to-checkpoint race where the racers only know the next checkpoint. Ie: orienteering on a bike, in (and often against) the traffic. AC Racing was imported from US couriers in the mid-90s. Last night they showed a video made by film students by mounting a camera on one of the alley cat racers. 8 minutes of crazy, often-dangerous riding through traffic and people; ends with the cyclist getting hit by a truck when he attempted to zoom across a red-light and straight across the traffic going both ways (he'd successfully done this a few times already in the film). He wasn't hurt too badly, but the bike probably was. "Oh well, that's racing", he concludes.

Even though you don't quite get a sense of the true speed on film, it was fantastic, and reminiscent of several other illegal car or motorbike films (Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, the Getaway in Stockholm films, Black Prince Peripherique).

Couriers, alley cat racing, etc:

some somewhat dark alley cat video at DC Courier
Google for 'alley cat race'
Travis Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
London Bicycle Messenger Association (who also have a print(?) newsletter called Moving Target)
bikereader.com: a rider's digest of essays, humour etc
various bike movies (list), BicycleCam (races filmed from the bike)

Other films:

Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, a 9-minute 1973 short film in which he races his Ferrari through an empty night-time Paris. Buy Rendezvous here. (Lelouch also did a Tour de France film, Pour Un Maillot Jaune)
Black Prince Peripherique, in which a Kawasaki is raced round the 35km Paris peripherique in morning traffic. You can also buy Periperique here.
the Getaway in Stockholm films

(Update: Struan correctly reminds us that alley cat racing perpetuates the image of 'cyclists as arrogant, self-righteous grumps with only limited respect for the law'. Which, together with the rest of us non-courier cyclists going through red lights, really doesn't help. Perhaps the racing is symptomatic of a bike culture that sees itself as *against* motor traffic. Alley cat racing isn't safe or particularly clever, but we have to admit it was quite exciting to watch.)

Three sets of cards to help your head make connections faster

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:32:53 GMT

Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: One hundred worthwhile dilemmas, "each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations"
Charles and Ray Eames' House of Cards: Comes in five flavours. "The images are of what Eameses called 'good stuff', chosen to celebrate 'familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms'. The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to build structures of myriad shapes and sizes"
IDEO's new Method Cards: "Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. This is not a 'how to' guide. It's a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own. Use the deck to take a new view, to inspire creativity, to communicate with your team, or to turn a corner"

Best of ArtBots 2003

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:31:40 GMT

("best of" according to Rodcorp, who've only read the website)

MEART, the semi living artist: mammalian neurons (emryonic rat cortex) + software + drawing arm + feedback = drawings + behaviour
Drawing Machine, which takes feedback via microphones, and draws
Fotron2000, seemingly a photobooth which uses led light on polaroid film to draw portraits
Automated Architecture Robot creates a building design with ice and water in one hour. "The robot sculpts a block of ice into an organic form using water (The water is stored and recycled by the robot). Every 10 minutes the sculpting stops and the robot's water tubes move into their 'stored' positions. Doors, windows and other architectural elements are projected onto the ice with a slide projector. Visitors can influence the outcome of the sculpted architectural model by making adjustments to a large control knob. They can choose between 'Palatial Home', 'Discreet Home', 'Mixed-Use Development', 'Company Branch Office', or 'Company Headquarters'. The robot will do its best to create the home/office of their dreams"
Scratchrobot: send an e-mail to robot@spess.com. The scratchrobot will scratch your message and reply in a unique way

Finnegans Web

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 09:58:43 GMT

we've fount rerembrandtsers, their hours to date link these heirs 2 to here but wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays? [FW 54.2]

Be sure and link him, me O treasauro [FW 462.22]

Jorn Barger's James Joyce portal is often a good place to start, and his abstract of FW is interesting. And from there we find:

the full FW text online
search the FW text (note that the lines numbers don't always agree with the full text, above)
an index of words in FW

Kevin Kelly Recomendo has good mapping tools etc

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 13:31:48 GMT

Diagrammatic chart of world history: Displays with utmost intelligence 50 centuries of civilization, as revealed in the complex rise and fall of ancient powers. Not as linear as the (out of print) histomap (some interesting writing/maths histomaps here)
Offroute: custom topographic maps
world map wallpaper
The Tiny Book of Tiny Houses: "Each very tiny house -- or should we say each shack and shed -- is photographed and sufficiently rendered in orthogonal view that one could construct it, or at least borrow designs from it [...] George Berhard Shaw designed [his] hut himself as a tiny office built on a central steel-pole frame so that it could be manually rotated to follow the arc of the sun" (something similar at Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
Ancient Civilisations: the best one-volume survey of earlier civilizations he's found (Amazon.co.uk, Allconsuming)
and... Tools are the revolution: pdfs of pages from the Recomendo-inspired Whole Earth issue

Two good mapping blogs

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 13:29:43 GMT

Jonathan Crowe's The Map Room and Geogal's The Map Service.
[via various places]

See also:

The British Library's The Secret Life of Maps, the best exhibition about maps last year. (Also has this good list of historical mapping sources)
Anna Oliver (artist who uses maps) on Simon Patterson (artist who sometimes uses maps)

Interesting printers

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:37:39 GMT

Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys
with this handheld printing device you swipe your hand back and forth and it lays the print (of whatever you bluetoothed to it) down

[both via boing boing]

Alan Moore: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 09:12:01 GMT

Just finished: Vol 1 of The LOEG, which was excellent. It manages to be both dark (in the usual Moore manner) and lighthearted, and it's feel is steampunk-(Gibson/Sterling or Stephenson) -meets-slipstream. It's fully-packed with references to turn of the [last] century pulp fiction. Campion Bond looks like George Lucas. We recommend it. LOEG is annotated in detail by Jess Nevin, and it seems that Nevin's work is being collected and published in an unofficial companion.

More AM: long interview from 2000 and the Alan Moore fan site.

See also: the COMICA event at the ICA later this month has talks from Warren Ellis and Joe Sacco, and features the launch of the OuBaPo (the Ouvoir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle, Workshop for the potential of comics).

Previously read: Warren Ellis' Orbiter: Shuttle disappears, and mysteriously reappears 10 years later. Pretty good.