derive

Schnoooze.

“Late last night, artist Terence Koh asked for a volunteer to follow him for 24 hours with a camera…”

ooh, this is a really interesting piece written by Matthew Battles of hilobrow on, among other things, what it means for a writer to write by use of an app, and the set of “habits” that said apps encourage in both readers and writers. Several paragraphs down Battles discusses Information Architects’ iPad app Writer, with which he was initially “smitten,” but says he has trouble getting over the app format itself,

“which militates against every habit of attention and concentration in which Writer wants to enrobe us. Writer is a raiment-stage habit that celebrates the practice-stage era of novel-writing by engineering a cybernetic set of compulsion-stage reflexes.”

The thing that I haven’t heard much discussion about w/respect to the iPad as a reading or a writing device is the physical pain that it causes. Seriously, am I the only one who gets terrible neck and back aches after only a few minutes of using the thing? I can’t get comfortable no matter what position I try, yet it’s such an addictive device I can’t stop using it either.  I can’t imagine writing a freaking novel on an iPad. Sheesh, put the chiropractor on speed dial.

(Photo by Brian Ulrich for the New York Times).

“Rome has nothing on Detroit. The industrial ruins in this American city are at least as spectacular, and largely unmatched in scale anywhere in the United States. They are also fertile ground for a growing number of artists like Scott Hocking, who find inspiration in the tatters. To make his large-format photographs, Hocking has built anomalous sculptures in two ghostly auto plants, Fisher Body and Packard, both designed by Detroit’s leading industrial architect, Albert Kahn.”

Via Eyeteeth.

New podcast is up! This week’s guest is San Francisco’s Chinese Cultural Center curator Abby Chen! One of Chen’s most recent projects was a 2010 solo exhibition of Stella Zhang, whose “o-Viewpoint” installation “explores the constantly shifting inner landscapes of self and femininity,” according to the CCC’s website. Check it out!

“If Basquiat’s affectless buddy Andy Warhol—with his Big Brother–like films and camp Factory version of Hollywood stardom—is the father of reality television, then Basquiat is the classic fatal victim of the body snatching we’ve gotten used to calling celebrity, a condition that is as coercive as it is voluntary, instant powdered mass fame. When Warhol biographer Victor Bockris wrote about Basquiat in his book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol, he pegged the shooting-star routine with these words: “Jean-Michel’s career paralleled many [of Warhol’s] Superstars’—two years of extreme fame, and then disintegration, even death.”—Christian Viveros-Fauné

ICK. Nonetheless, a super interesting post on the subject of the website MyFreeCams.com, brought to you by Thought Catalog. Excerpt below; make sure to read the full article.

“It is precisely the banality of it all — the eating, exercise, bedroom, the quotidian — that makes it all the more intimate and hence all the more palpable, powerful, engaging.  This virtual experience is not premised on lack, on what’s not there.  On the contrary, this event is excessive, fecund, seething. It is a live, real experience in and of itself — and at times quite powerful.

Day after day, night after night, the same men return to the same women.  They greet each other, joke, tease with a familiarity, a canniness, a domesticity.  You can taste the intense loneliness of these men and, in turn, the great relief this site brings (not that loneliness is the only driving force; there is also pure old pleasure).

Facebook is a dead experience, a series of uninteresting monologues, one-liners that go nowhere.  It is not a conversation; it is not alive.  Videos — porn or otherwise — offer divertissement and pleasure but they can never offer the solace, the intimacy, that MyFreeCams does.

This is the future: the whole world before you, always on, the digital ushering a tether for the lonely and the lost, a delight for the decadent and curious.  The living interweb brings us face-to-face with the world, forging an impossible but actual intimacy.”

I love the way New Scientist magazine describes the effects of certain types of art as “brain-hacking.” It’s so interesting to read about art from a geek-science perspective; more please! This article on why people tend to love Impressionist painting is but one example; the magazine has done other, equally fascinating pieces on the artist as “brain-hacker.” An excerpt:

“The Impressionist movement arguably produced some of our best-loved paintings. A study of more than 90,000 people in the UK, aged 13 to 90, found that they preferred Impressionist art over cubism, Renaissance or Japanese styles (British Journal of Psychology, vol 100, p 501). But what is it about this movement, led by Claude Monet, that we find so irresistible?

Harvard neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh puts it down to the way these ambiguous images force the brain to create a more personal interpretation of the work. The blurry shapes and splashes of colour mean that people have to draw on their own memories to fill in the missing visual details, he says. So each painting is interpreted slightly differently by each individual, making the experience more visceral. “Our visual system reflexively fills in expressions and mood… going deeper into our mental state than any fully explicit painting could.”

These paintings may also be attractive because their blurred forms speak directly to the amygdala, a brain region involved in the processing of emotions. The amygdala acts like an early warning system, on the lookout for unfocused threats lurking in our peripheral vision, and it tends to react more strongly to things we haven’t yet picked up consciously. In 2003, a study by Patrik Vuilleumier, a neurologist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, found that the amygdala responds more enthusiastically to fuzzy faces than to sharp versions of the same image. Cavanagh says this indicates that blurred images seem to have privileged access to the subconscious. Indeed the brain regions typically associated with conscious image-processing were noticeably subdued when subjects looked at the blurred images (Nature Neuroscience, vol 6, p 624).”

Read this post, it’s funny. ANIMAL is now officially my favorite NY-centric art blog — the only one I can read without rolling my eyes and/or wanting to puke at the hubris of it all.

“When two furries do finally get down, it is referred to as yiffing, due to the sound mating foxes make, or something. Yiffing can happen in a number of ways (fur suit on or fur suit off, mask or painted face, etc.), but can be considered yiffing as long as the action consists of two sad sacks sticking it in one another.”

New podcast is up! This week B@S interviews Wendy White, who has a show up at Andrew Rafacz gallery.

You could be listening to this album right now, like I am: it’s available in full as a web stream (click above), or you could like, buy it even. Comprised of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and Franklin Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue, and the Human Hearts, it’s a product of their Inland Empire years.

At any rate, it’s really lovely. It took me a long time to learn to appreciate music sung by singers who don’t have traditionally “good voices,” but I think I’m old enough to get it now.

heh!

“So, apparently Kim Kardashian offended France by prancing into the Louvre and mugging it in front of the Mona Lisa as tourists snapped away with their flashes. Flash photography is prohibited in the museum because it deteriorates the precious art. Sabotage! Kim tweeted this photo, and soon after, she had a motorcycle paparazzi pack on her ass.” (Animal).