Obliteration Room by Yayoi Kusama: an interactive happening between colored stickers, children, and a white room canvas. Part of Kusama’s major solo exhibit “Look Now, See Forever” at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia.

Yayoi Kusama, 2005

“Look Now, See Forever” from 19 November 2011 to 11 March 2012.

More:

(intro) Look Now, See Forever

Obliteration Room

Yayoi Kusama’s website

Hey Bubbles’ photos of Obliteration Room

“Before The First Dot”

Related posts:

1. Dotted Diffusion: The Art of Yayoi Kusama
2. Video Interview: Peter Hutton, Robert Gardner, the Screening Room (1977)

1.

Screenshot of Pleaselike.com taken October 27th 2011

Pleaselike.com is a browser-based artwork by Rafaël Rozendaal made in 2010.  The website consists of an entirely white page with an embedded Facebook classic-blue thumbs up ‘Like’ button positioned in the center.  To the button’s right is an ongoing tally of people who have clicked the button. As of this minute—October 27^th,2011 at 9:55 PM—18,085 people[1] have liked the website.  I have yet to participate by clicking ‘like’, a fact Facebook has made quite apparent by urging me on with the following sentence:

Be the first of your friends. 

The website first presents the user with an encouragement to submit to a seemingly interstitial request.  Nothing appears to be at stake in the user’s relationship to this request; either she clicks or she doesn’t click.  The consequences bear no apparent reward or punishment—in fact, there is a marked absence of both.  The confrontation quickly becoming slightly idiotic when prompted with the thought of not clicking.  So the user—ideally, without such prolonged apprehension—clicks and accepts, enlisting in Rozendaal’s playful game.  However, the relationship concludes at this point.  The user clicks ‘Like’, perhaps proceeds to check her Facebook profile to witness the immediate result of her action, then proceeds onto the next website in her surfing queue.

Suppose, though, that the user doesn’t click. What happens then? First, why wouldn’t someone click ‘Like’? One reason may point to the user being of the ‘private’ type, not wanting the results of her click to show up on her Facebook profile. However, anyone can hide stories like this from their profile by configuring a simple setting in their privacy settings (or alternatively the ‘Hide this Action from Profile’ option).  Pleaselike.com would still receive the user’s ‘like’, but none of her Facebook friends would see her activity.  Another reason may point to the user’s unwillingness to forgo privacy, though again this tactic is thwarted: even if the user abstains from clicking, her information will still be accounted for and collected by Facebook for merely just visiting the page[2].  Why else, then, wouldn’t someone want to click and make Rozendaal’s work ‘complete’?

1. They aren’t familiar with the site and never actually cross paths with it.
2. They simply put, just don’t care, moving on without further dispute.
3. They express disdain for the artist by refusing to ‘participate’.
4. They wonder what it means not to click.

The point here is that no one will not not-like the website and this may very well be the point of this Rozendaal work.  The user confronts the webpage with really an absence of choice, that is, the Like’s button absence of relationship to content outside of itself has already created the user’s decision for her.  Without a clear accompaniment of content (an article, an image, a video, etc.) for what the Like button is existing to support, the user has really nothing to do but to follow the authority of the website and click because of the void of other options.  The lack of harm in doing so and because of the briefly satisfying—if not mediocre—moment it offers (the chance to be a ‘part’ of an artwork, to join your peers and not feel left out, etc.) only solidifies the motivation to click.  The user here then ‘likes’ to fulfill the site’s only existence, bridging the gap of intention the artist has built.  The user clicks, not to confirm and share her taste for a specific brand, aesthetic or event, but to ‘like’ both the website and to confirm the action of liking itself; a recognition of a recognition.  The title, Pleaselike, suggests a modest tone and creates in the user an equally modest response:  “It’s no problem, really, I can click”.  Pleaselike, with no comma separating the two words is a command devoid of a command, an implication that the user do something on the page; and what is there to do but to click the only clickable thing?

Pointing to nothing but itself, the website composes an accumulation of numbers, representations of other users who also did as the user did.  There are no direct repercussions or ramifications, there is no disdain or disapproving face and no celebratory one; liking here is a seemingly empty meta-gesture. And thus Rozendaal’s critique appears to reveal itself: through the absence of any detrimental circumstances, the Like button is but a compliant form of support, producing affirmation from users and peers without requesting further textual articulation or clarification.

Just as Rozendaal’s title, Pleaselike blankly justifies its clickable implications by asking nicely, so too does the Like button and Tumblr Note carry seemingly modest and quiet but highly anticipatory requests.

2.

The Facebook Like button is a politely constructed symbol, simultaneously begging to be clicked and not to be clicked.  With no perceivable authority implied in its design and function, it never actually forces the user to engage with it. It is clicked because the user does so on her own symbolic behalf.  However, the Like button must proceed onwards under such passive-neutral pretenses, for its reliance on the user is an important determinant in the advancement of its own business model.  The Like button must exert a non-threatening interface so its users can comfortably continue to activate and integrate it into their online routine.

Besides providing a limited amount of insight to the button’s embedder, its ongoing application outside of the Facebook website, embedded into websites and blogs across all disciplines acting as basic promotional tools and neat suggestions for ‘support’ marks the convenient constructions of a self-referential Web 2.0 business strategy consisting of the employment of walled gardens[3] and financial sustainability through willingly provided user voluntarism. The walled gardens of Facebook—along with paralleling social networking sites striving for similar types of web dominance—entail that user activity is consolidated and performed through one centralized service ultimately suggesting a scarcity of ‘freely’ provided user information to those other websites and companies outside of the monopolized domain of one single, concentrated website [collecting, housing and eventually selling immense amounts of data over a supposedly fixed period of time].  These motives especially highlight themselves through the perpetual use of the Facebook Like button and of seemingly non-existant equivalents i.e. the continuation to Like using the Facebook Like button because there are no other options.  Or under similar logic, to paint a more vivid and encompassing picture (but in response to the often disregard of the expensive, fetishized computer hardware allowing for seemingly ‘free’, ‘immaterial’ social interactions and content consumption), Gene McHugh points out,

“Go on, keep chatting with your friends, watching videos, listening to music—it’s all fluid and immaterial now and that’s great—just so long as you do so through the iPad.”[4]

Though the Like button can exist off of Facebook, it never actually quite does as all action and information channels itself back into the social network.

What is of primary concern here is not the Like button’s use within the lounge environment of Facebook (liking friend’s images, statuses’, etc.) or the mining of user data for profit, but its application and accompaniment onto websites, images, articles, etc. (that today approximately 905,000 websites employ)[5] which often require and warrant an expanded critical consideration of content from its users, rather than a summarized one.  The Like button as is does its job by acting as a visual log of peer endorsement.  But what is the value in these confirmations other than providing the button’s embedder with a temporary relief from a project’s potential failure, from a user’s online alienation, from friendlessness? As well as existing as mere stepping stones in a user’s ongoing performance in self-branding? Maybe the Like button is not worthy of critique or contemplation because its utility is so specific, obvious, non-threatening and narrowly-bound.  However, a hidden, subtle conflict emerges in such evaluative scenarios that is worth noting, one that surely many users have experienced: an emptiness, a going-nowhere skewed resolve of content, of appreciation, and of understanding. 

3.

Though in many ways conceptually equivalent to the Facebook ‘Like’, the Tumblr ‘Note’ is considerably more animated and lively in form.

A white blank heart sits in the center of a small grey box at the upper right hand corner of a .tumblr.com webpage.  When clicked, the heart turns red, coming to life to represent a user’s ‘like’.  This action then generates a ‘Note’ affirming that such and such user ‘liked this’.  The note generally finds its location underneath the content that was liked and accumulates by number.  Interestingly enough, the heart ‘note’ icon doesn’t symbolize a ‘love’, as its symbol connotes. Instead, it represents something more indecisive and uncertain.  Love, in this instance, becomes far too committal of an act to exist in such a transient environment.

Nicholas liked the image of the landscape.

Nicholas loved the image of the landscape.

Even in reading it on the page or repeating it out loud, ‘love’ appears overly enthusiastic and may actually perpetuate certain doubtful behavior, causing a user to question the validity of her own taste or preference as well as placing more emphasis on decisiveness, rendering more time taken in arrival of a judgement.  A Tumblr note (or Facebook like) is safer, more multiplicative, approachable and effortlessly applicable because it doesn’t require too much commitment or head-dwelling from the user.  The ‘note’, also referencing a type of office or research/archival environment, creates exactly that, a note, a bookmark of sorts for the user; signifying that a ‘noted’ piece of content is merely just part of an ongoing growing collection of even more.  The ‘note’ isn’t meant to be permanent or committal.  Besides the fact that a user can quite literally, ‘unlike’ something at any point in time, the note suggests a constant process or perpetual construction of the self.  By serving the ever-changing mood of the user, the accumulation of notes demonstrates the malleability of her identity.

When clicked, the heart turns red, coming to life to represent a user’s 'like'

The declarative moment of a user’s reaction to content is consolidated into a visual summarization online.  A ‘Like’ or ‘Note’ represent the rapid symbolic acknowledgement of content that is conveniently and effortlessly employed within the accelerated environment of the internet.  However, this type of acknowledgement and its symbolic equivalencies do not necessitate that an actor really ‘like’, ‘kind of like’ or really even ‘love’, something, but rather that their attention be momentarily diverted and briefly concentrated enough for her to become weary of time and respond to the moment, confirming this ‘moment’ through clicking.  In this way, both the Like button and Note button at best can only be illustrations of a generalization. Both buttons seemingly discourage the user to extrapolate, discuss, or review; but only to coldly confirm, index and performatively grow.  Employing Likes or Notes as an option for evaluating, understanding and collecting content creates an increased likelihood in the continuation of its use as a method for contextualization that never escapes from the user.  Of course, the active user will trudge beyond these buttons to make her articulations, but how does the existence of these buttons influence the growth and progress of a niche, burgeoning community of potentially undefined, uncertain users? Of users who aren’t inclined to go beyond clicking things they kind of like?

The State, for example was an online platform based on Tumblr that featured work from artists ‘who use the internet as a primary element in their work’. For each featured work, there was also a textual accounting of the critical/theoretical underpinnings each explored or encapsulated, written by the artist herself.  The goal of The State was to ‘engage a more substantial online viewership and initiate critical dialog.’[6] Embedding a DISQUS comment box allowed users to potentially do just this [initiate and circulate conversation surrounding each featured artists work and subsequent text].  However, though now defunct and ceased from publishing, one will find upon visitation of the site to be nearly void of any commentary or discussion.  Jumping from work to work, the comment section contains either nothing or a few short-winded afterthoughts (usually complimentary words or sentences):

‘a huge AVI? is this on Vimeo or streaming somewhere?’

‘<3’

‘INTENSE.’

‘!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11’

‘amazing sense of atmosphere in this space you set up’

i dont get it’

‘radical’

In fact, what one will quickly notice is the number of notes each artwork received.  While The State obviously had admirable intentions in attempting to assist peers in ‘speaking up’, its problems can be less easily discerned.  Is the lack (or dead absence) of discussion a problem of the users or, consequently, of design?  We can postulate here four potential theories:

1. The State featured text alongside artwork. However, the text was mostly ornamental, merely a clarification or contextualized defense of the artwork featured.  The lack of criticism here could be attributed to the lack of argument or opinion found in each artist’s own texts.
2. The State was merely a burgeoning platform.  Its audience and network were limited and small and thus the site couldn’t circulate the volume of conversation that a site like Art Fag City, for example, cultivates.
3. The State was based on Tumblr, primarily an image based micro blogging platform.  The audience for such was thus limited to users accustomed to a ‘note’ and ‘reblog’ system (perhaps, WordPress would have been a better alternative).
4. The pace and massive availability of content online encourages and prioritizes a consumerist approach to content.  Clickable visual symbols replace textual response online.

Though an answer could likely be found in all of the above, it is here we see a clear example of how the employment of a ‘Note’ and ‘Like’ system creates only a vague notion of valuability and understanding of content, creating not an expansion of understanding within a community but merely a consumption of it.    Notes are an indexical tool and in this aspect they become a private gesture, providing the user an archive only for themselves.  Whatever interest, thought, research, etc. is contextualized with the click of the Note is lost within the individual’s privacy of mind and in her Tumblr dashboard of collected ‘Likes’.  All justification and defense remains with the user, because there exists no output for such intentions other than her own Tumblr blog (which will either textually clarify her content or further abstract it).  Likes are, on the other hand, almost more ephemeral in that they aren’t meant to be indexed and accessed later on; they are momentarily supportive and become of no direct use to the user after the button is clicked.  Without a clear alternate option offered within the design of these platforms, certain behaviors and social interactions perpetuate themselves due to the very design the website initially proposes and promotes.  The fact that a comment box wasn’t an option on Tumblr (until recently through DISQUS) points to the original intention and purpose of the website itself: a platform of pure image aggregation.

An archive of 'liked' posts in a user's Tumblr dashboard

4.

Online, the value of content culminates and accrues in a series of confirmations.  The Facebook and Tumblr ‘Like’ and ‘Note’ button are employed as measured representations of a user’s concentrated attention to multiple interests.  Likes and Notes are beneficial and may seem integral to maintaining and measuring the ‘success’ or ‘impact’ a company, restaurant, writer or artist has on its customers, supporters, fans, admirers, etc. because it may gauge the appeal and relevancy an entity has on its intended audience, revealing its niche target.  Both the Like and Note button hold a seemingly neutral ground to ensure comfort and control in the liking process.  Liking—on both Facebook and Tumblr—always signifies a taste and activity, a performative in-process construction of one’s own personalized brand, encapsulating a user’s style, politics, and philosophy.  Liking something is always found in conjunction with a declaration of individuality followed by either the celebratory identification of the individual within the crowd  or the dousing of identification through the suffocation of it.

Facebook: Sofia likes The Office, Sofia is The Office, 9,567,948 others like The Office

Tumblr: Evan likes the 3D rendered paint stroke, Evan is the 3D rendered paint stroke, 100 others like the 3D rendered paint stroke

Again we realize here that liking only represents a part of a whole. When Evan likes the image of a 3D rendered paint stroke on Tumblr and gives it a ‘note’ what can be accounted for in his gesture?  Why does he like it? How has he contextualized it? Understood it? Consumed it?  It is these clickable symbols that replace textual responses online and justify consumption without dissertation, ultimately encouraging a type of passive consumerism where things are merely nodded at and popularized through formal evaluation and understanding.  Buttons like the Like and Note firstly exist to cater to producing an aesthetic impulse within the user.

5.

A common 'feedback' button found on many websites and blogs online

The Like and Note button represent only the lowest common denominator of support.  If we are really to offer our deepest convictions, support and criticisms to our peers and institutions, let us actually actively communicate them–not merely click them.  As a mass that is already so disorganized and fragmented in both politic and philosophy, we cannot afford to have concerns so uncritically affirmed and so passively consumed.  If we are to value depth and progress in ourselves, in our peers and projects we must begin to articulate in order to actually comprehend and enact any kind of ideal cohesive organization.

Artists, designers and thinkers must begin to conceptualize new forms of establishing value online—ones that are more demanding and more ‘inconvenienced’.  But it is through these delayed methods and considerations that over time we will soon develop to perform and demonstrate criticality in faster inclinations with a contextualized acceleration.  Criticality manifests only in its continual use.  Current platforms like Facebook and Tumblr are far too basic and undemanding to represent any real content evaluation system.  Their existence is formed not within the domain of contemplation of content but in reaction to it and thus limited to the impulses and immediacy that accompanies brief encounters and assessments.  Current online value systems exist merely on a surface level and greatly dilute the motivation to expand the consideration of what we consume.

How is value created online?
How do we assign and ascribe value to content online?
How are our current online platforms lacking?
How can we rectify our disappointment or dissatisfaction with these online platforms?
Are we dissatisfied with the quality of content these online platforms are creating or influencing?
What can we create to expand these platforms?
How can we create more critical platforms?

These are the types of questions we should seek to be concerned with.  Only by experimenting with alternative methods of presenting, designing and circulating content and conversation will we create an even more flourishing and creative active user environment.  Everyone must write, create, speak and design.

If this last proposal is vague it’s because I cannot offer any concretized solutions.  I only encourage anyone interested to experiment and play.  Serious consideration of the above questions will create new platforms and specify new questions and conflicts.  We must pay attention to the architecture and politics of the website.

BuzzFeed.com's 'alternative' rating system

Related posts:

1. Notes on a New Nature at 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, Nov 10–Nov 20, 2011

“Water Rug/Portal” by Kate Staciw, 2011, photo rug, 60"X48"

It’s great to see a rug that acts as a portal. If you had a portal, where would you go?

Kate Steciw is a NYC-based artist, who studied photography at SAIC, and was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

It was a pleasure to see her “Water Rug/Portal” in person earlier this year, which was on the floor during the “A Small Forest” show at the Kunsthalle New, Chicago, July 2011, a show co-curated by Bea Fremderman & Nicolas O’Brien.

More: Kate Steciw

Related posts:

1. Sound Over Water (2009) by Mary Helena Clark
2. skin graft coat of arms and portal
3. Introducing the Dinca Experimental Film Portal

“Colored Pencil Techniques 4”, 2010, oil on canvas collaged onto oil and acrylic on canvas, 24” x 32”

“Colored Pencil Techniques 3”, 2010, oil on canvas collaged onto oil and acrylic on canvas, 24” x 32”

“Colored Pencil Techniques 2”, 2010, oil on canvas collaged onto oil and acrylic on canvas, 24” x 32”

“Colored Pencil Techniques 1” 2010, oil on canvas collaged onto oil and acrylic on canvas, 24” x 32”

The “Colored Pencil Techniques” Series, works 1–4, by NYC-based painter, Greg Parma Smith.

Greg Parma Smith (born 1983), a Swiss-American artist, lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2007. Group exhibitions include A Great Delicacy, Taylor de Cordoba Gallery and Desired Constellations, Daniel Reich Gallery. — Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, New York

More:

Greg Parma Smith

Greg Parma Smith: Adult Learning: Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, New York

Related posts:

1. “Science, Classicism, Lycanthropy” by Greg Parma Smith
2. Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg
3. 7 Frames: Mirror Animations by Harry Smith (1957)

“Science, Classicism, Lycanthropy” by Greg Parma Smith, 2007, oil on panel, 30" x 40"

Warm, holiday fire * yuletide vibrations.

by NYC-based artist, Greg Parma Smith.

Related posts:

1. Harry Smith’s Birthday Party by Allen Ginsberg
2. Harry Smith Portrait (milk & honey) by Allen Ginsberg
3. Tree of Life in the Four Worlds by Harry Smith

Paper Rehabilitation Project, Series 1
Detroit Blank Book Launch
December 9, 2011
6 – 8 pm
Museum or Contemporary Art Detroit Store
4454 Woodward Ave (map)

Nowadays, in our world that is rife with profligacy, it’s nice to see an effort to glean abandoned paper for blank book-binding purposes. Orchestrated by the International Typographical Union, series 1 of the paper rehabilitation project will officially launch on December 9th, 2011, in Detroit, Michigan, at the MOCAD store.

If you’re in Detroit, the books are currently for sale at in Detroit at City Bird, MOCAD, and Signal-Return. If you’re not in Detroit, the books can be purchased online through the MOCAD website.

Recycle, reduce, reuse.

Only 600 books available.

162 pages; 81 sheets
5.25 x 8.25 inches
7 oz

The blank books in this first series of the Paper Rehabilitation Project are made of stock found at a warehouse of excess, rejected and damaged paper. Each book contains four different sheets – Rolland Enviro, Oxford White, Cougar Natural Opaque, and Royal Cotton, manufactured by Cascades, Neenah, Domtar, and Wasau paper companies. We found three different stocks for the covers – blue and gray with a linen finish, and a plum, with a sort of faux-leather finish. They were bound by Janutol Printing on Detroit’s East side.

The paper in these books was probably originally purchased by printers for their clients, but for one reason or another it was not used as intended. Perhaps it was damaged in transit, or the sheets were jamming the machines, or the job was cancelled altogether. The printer might have made the case to the mill that the paper was unusable in order to try to recoup some of their investment. It ended up on the scrap market at a high-volume paper recycler, where there was a small chance it would be bought by another printer, or more likely it would be shredded and sold (by weight) to a paper mill where it would become the recycled content in a new sheet of paper.

It took us a long time to learn of the existence of this paper. Printers, paper distributors, and even many paper recyclers are reluctant to speak of this kind of surplus paper, perhaps because it threatens the commodity status of ‘clean’ paper. We had the feeling that by having it bound into a book we were causing a minor disruption in the circulation of paper. We captured these sheets at this particular moment in time, while they were available, and made 600 books that we will never again be able to reproduce.

More:

MOCAD Store

International Typographical Union

Related posts:

1. The Color Spectrum Series
2. Paper: The Art and Animation of Jen Stark
3. Jenny Holzer | Project Protect

The Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art commissioned Jen Stark to create a large outdoor mural on their building. The Mural, titled “Acid-Free,” is 90 ft long by 35 ft wide.

Dock your yacht and check it out.

Related posts:

1. Inside View of “Kaleidoscopic” (2011) by Jen Stark
2. Jen Stark’s Work on the Cover of the Harvard Business Review
3. Jen Stark’s t0p 5

POWER: On and Off the Grid
8:00 PM, $5 suggested
@ the Nightingale
1084 N. Milwaukee  Ave, Chicago, IL, 60642 (map)
Tonight! 15 November 2011

“The YouTube assembly consists of screening web-based video for a live and participating audience. Each YTA features 2 hosts that use YouTube to elaborate on a point of interest relevant to their artwork or creative practice. After the “talk” the assembly opens for dialog, giving audience members the opportunity to pull up videos in response or that are relevant to the topic. It’s halfway between an artist talk and film screening; yet goes beyond their conventions by channeling the social possibilities of the medium. The series is sponsored by Homeroom Chicago and is held at the Nightingale

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems – and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationships between physical environments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about freedom, expansion, security, and the regulation of space. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Pompidou, Hammer Museum and many international film festivals including Sundance, the Viennale, Ann Arbor and Rotterdam. pythagorasfilm.com

Daniel Tucker has worked as a cultural and political organizer in Chicago for over ten years, initiating a number of large-scale local projects and events. His particular focus has been on documenting social and cultural movements and the places from which they emerge. Most of his work exists in a blurry line between documentary, advocacy, journalism, curating and art-making and deals with themes of political imagination, localism, hidden history, economy and community. All of his projects utilize careful consideration of audience and distribution and involve significant research and relationship building to have effective and lasting impact. miscprojects.com”

Related posts:

1. 2009 Interview w/ Filmmaker Deborah Stratman
2. O’er the Land | A Film By Deborah Stratman
3. 7 Frames: Shrimp Chicken Fish by Deborah Stratman

Oh yeah, player, it’s time to get thrashed with another installation of t0p5. But what is t0p5? T0p5 is a DINCutorial series where artists select five embeddable videos. But how does t0p5 feel? T0p5 feels like flying over the earth; it feels like Shawn Kemp posterizing a robot; it sounds like balloons being released for orphans; it sounds like BROS; it sounds like Neptune; it smells like being in a CAVE with a Cellar Dweller; it looks like a noble surfer, surfing in the dark; it looks like “蘋果動新聞 – 2010-12-12 – 美森林現怪物　眼發光「蜘蛛俠”; it tastes like eating a fish you caught from the LA river; it tastes like buckshot; so without further ado, let us walk through the door to Jen Stark’s t0p5.

Jen Stark is a Miami-based, psychedelic artist, whose majority of work includes paper sculptures; she also makes incredible animations using paper. Her work has been featured at Art Basel, MoCA, all over the internet, on the cover of the Harvard Business Review, and many other notables — vide her CV for more.

Jen Stark (born 1983 in Miami, Florida) is a contemporary artist whose majority of work involves creating paper sculptures. She also works with drawing and animation. Her work draws inspiration from microscopic patterns in nature, wormholes, and sliced anatomy.^[1] She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), graduating Magna Cum Laude with a BFA majoring in Fibers with a minor in Animation.^[2]

Stark’s ideas are based on replication and infinity, echoing patterns and intelligent designs found in nature. Since expanding her medium from paper to include wood and even mirrors, Jen Stark’s oeuvre of optically and methodologically baffling sculptures and drawings has enjoyed a renaissance of context. Her signature creations combine a variety of materials that have acted as a catalyst for more established spiritual proclivity as expressed through hypnotic mandala-like configurations. Jen Stark has exhibited her works in various galleries around the U.S. as well as the Girls’ Club Collection, FL, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, FL and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. She was a recipient of the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship in 2008. Stark lives and works in Miami, Fl. — Wikipedia article on Jen Stark

JEN STARK’S T0P5, in her own words.

“Geometry of Circles: Sesame Street ” by Philip Glass
A simple, beautiful example of old school Sesame Street by the mastermind, Philip Glass.

“Let’s Paint, Excercise & Blend Drinks TV” by Let’s Paint TV
Just what the title says, including taking live call’s while gang members call in to curse each other out.

“Story from North America” by Garrett Davis and Kirsten Lepore
A fun song about life lessons.

“Ready, Able” Music by Grizzly Bear, Animation by Allison Schulnik
Cool video of playdough melting faces in a magical forest.

“Nobody Here” by sunsetcorp
A neverending dreamy loop of nothing.

More:

Jen Stark website

Jen Stark on Vimeo

Jen Stark Wikipedia

Paper: The Art and Animation of Jen Stark 

Related posts:

1. Inside View of “Kaleidoscopic” (2011) by Jen Stark
2. Jen Stark’s Work on the Cover of the Harvard Business Review
3. Paper: The Art and Animation of Jen Stark

We ♥ Jen Stark, a Miami-based artist and paper magician.

From Jen Stark: “This is the inside view of a kaleidoscopic sculpture I created out of wood.”

More:

Jen Stark Website
Essential viewing: Jen Stark’s Paper Art-Artstreet Miami
Jen Stark on Vimeo

Related posts:

1. Jen Stark’s Work on the Cover of the Harvard Business Review
2. Paper: The Art and Animation of Jen Stark
3. Review: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Jon Rafman, or Veritable Objective Collective Soul Earth Family Photo Album

A painting by the late George Kuchar.

Photo credit: Elisa Harkins.

If anyone has additional information on the painting, please comment. Apparently this photograph was snapped at NEXT, Chicago, year unknown.

Related posts:

1. An ASCII Eulogy for George Kuchar (R.I.P. 1942–2011)
2. Untitled Video Painting 02
3. A Note on DINComments

a fundraiser for Roxaboxen w/
Xina Xurner
Mr. 666 (techno set)
JEROME BAEZ in Panthervision (Theodore Darst)

Friday, September 2, 2011
8:00pm – 11:00pm
Roxaboxen Exhibitions
2130 W. 21st ST.
Chicago, IL
(map)

Bring your looks
Bring your evil donations for Roxaboxen too

Roxaboxen Exhibitions is an artist run gallery and performance space in the heart of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. We are dedicated to displaying work of awesome artists we encounter, providing a space for creative collaboration, as well as distributing/acquiring ideas and information. We can be contacted at roxaboxen.minicastle@gmail.com

Related posts:

1. Mega Mall Chicago Aug 28 – Sept 3, 2011
2. POWERUP! A chiptunes event to benefit PLAYPOWER, SEPT 10, 2011, 3PM, at the Nightingale Theatre, Chicago
3. April 17, 2011: SPACE PROGRAM presents: Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun

Hardly ever are there strange nodes of business journalism and good paper art. Jen Stark‘s work on the cover of the Harvard Business Review is one instance. Sources say Stark now has a full-ride for Harvard’s M.B.A. program. Have fun, Jenn! Study hard and take lot’s of vitamins.

More:

More of Jenn starks work featured in this interview.
Jenn Stark’s website
Harvard Business Review

Related posts:

1. The Most Impressive Business Card
2. Paul Sahre: Selected Work: NY Times
3. Wellness: A Big Doc on Small Time Business

A series of seven day-long exhibitions at Booth 415–416 of the Chicago Megamall.

Mega Mall Chicago is a series of seven day-long exhibitions curated by local artists, gallerists, and curators. The event takes place from August 28 to Septemeber 3, 2011, at the Mega Mall Flea Market, located at 2500 N. Milwaukee Avenue. Each exhibition is one day only and will be open to the public from 4–8pm. It’s just like, it’s just like, a mini mall.

(Map)

Artist/curator dates & lineup include:

August 28 – Marcel Alcala
August 29 – Jose Lerma
August 30 –  Diego Leclery
August 31 – Eric May
September 1 – Alex Herrera
Septemeber 2 – Jason Lazarus
September 3 – Bea Fremderman

“I am the organizer for a week-long series of one-day, pop-up art exhibitions at the Mega Mall, in Chicago, IL. The series will feature a revolving display of work culled from a multitude of Chicago-based artists. My intent is to expose Chicago to the broad expanse of relevant contemporary work produced here.

Organizing a show in a place designed explicitly for non-luxury commerce runs contrary to the model used by current art fairs, where access is denied to those without status or privilege. A tattoo artist in the Mega Mall becomes equivalent to a museum director, and personal, real world, life-applicable experiences such as the purchase of a diet coke at a Chinese restaurant become more relevant than the auctioning off of some century-old Cubist painting.”

— ♥ Marcel Alcala

More: megamallchicago.com

Event organizer: Marcel Alcala
Assistant organizer: Hiba Ali
PR / installation: Brandon Seckler
Installation: Natacha Stolz
Website: Walter Latimer

Related posts:

1. Let Each One Go Where He May (2009), Ben Russell, 19 Sept 2010 at Cinema Borealis, Chicago
2. Tonight: Theodore Darst and Louis Doulas on Curating New Media at Upgrade! Chicago, The Nightingale, April 12, 2011
3. SPEED SHOW CHICAGO, 27 April, 2011

“Harry Smith's Birthday Party” by Allen Ginsberg, 1998, estate stamped 32 1/4" x 24 1/2"

A helpful commenter (thanks!) lead me to “Harry Smith’s Birthday Party,” a two color lithograph and screenprint by Allen Ginsberg.

Edition of 39, available through Gemini GEL.

(Sidenote: DINCA welcomes all comments. Comments are fun and helpful, especially when contributing additional informational. To obviate spam comments, we close dincomments after 60 days. Aight, rip it up.)

Related posts:

1. Harry Smith Portrait (milk & honey) by Allen Ginsberg
2. 7 Frames: Mirror Animations by Harry Smith (1957)
3. Tree of Life in the Four Worlds by Harry Smith

ABOUT THE SHOW:
Beautiful Friend, this is the end!  My Only Friend, the end!  Of our elaborate plans, the end!  After approximately 778 days,72 artists, and 12 group exhibitions of the most contemporary of the contemporary arts, BEN RUSSELL offers you a misty-eyed finale to what has undoubtedly been the greatest curatorial collaboration this city may have ever known.  What with our lease expiring at the end of July and one of our directors leaving Chicago indefinitely for Parts Unknown,BEN RUSSELL : US will be our 13th and final show.  And so: in pre-memorium and now-celebration of the hyper-intellectual pseudo-aesthetic alliance betwixt Brandon Alvendia (aka Chicago’s Best Artist) and Ben Russell (aka Chicago’s Best Local Filmmaker) and ummm You (Chicago’s Best Audience), the umpteen artists participating in BEN RUSSELL :US represent a veritable smörgåsbord of artistic alliances as drawn across fraternal, familial, romantic, pedagogical, and altruistic lines.  Hand-picked for their collective sensibilities and their beguiling confidence in the generative power of directed camaraderie, these are artists that work together because they live/work/love together – they are US, plain and simple.

Inasmuch as US is “we” and “we” is BEN RUSSELL, we will exit as we entered, 25 months prior:  A Lazy Sunday Opening, With Grilled Meats and Un-Meats, Libations and Fireworks and Goodwill Aplenty.  A week shy of Independence Day, we will send bottle rockets to the sky while interrogating the monumental semiotics of national identification (OKÓN); we will hold hands and dive into the virtual summertime sea, hunting electric crabs and manatee-smiles (TM SISTERS).  We will consume live Ham Dances (POOPER & PIZZA DOG) and roast the last marshmallows and bask in the illuminating/illuminated minimalist monolith to the challenges of communication (HIDEOUS BEAST) as our psychic hearts and Six Degrees of Separation to Everyone Everywhere are mapped out in chalk dust and memory (CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL). From Miami to Mexico City, Bridgeport to Pilsen, and Inner to Outer Space, BEN RUSSELL : US is the US in your USA, the WE in your WE THE PEOPLE, the NOSOTROS in your NOS(O)TR(O)ADAMUS.  BEN RUSSELL : US is Goodbye to our Past and Hello to our bright uncertain Future.

—–

THE CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL is an Artist-Run School for and about the advancement and understanding of contemporary Chicago Art. Through guest speakers and class member presentations we shine a light on the contemporary art scene of Chicago.  One of our goals is to break down the panel discussion dialogue of Chicago’s art and bring it to a more informal group discussion format in which shapers of Chicago’s Art World themselves tell of the contemporary scene.   Members can discuss their own work, or the work of others. Past guests have included Daniel Tucker, Hamza Walker, Paul Klein, Duncan MacKenzie,  Cody Hudson, Carolne Picard, Jason Foumberg, Carrie Gundersdorf, Tom Torluemke, Tom Burtonwood, Aron Packer, James Duignan, Nandipha Mntambo, and Barbara Koenen.

HIDEOUS BEAST is a collaborative effort between two artists, Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Through organizing structured participatory events we attempt to encourage cultural activity outside the bounds of mainstream entertainment and fabricated desire.  Critical of the audience as a passive participant, Hideous Beast seeks to coordinate events in which an acknowledged exchange between the event (as entertainment) and the spectator (as collaborator) can generate meanings beyond traditional formalized modes of entertainment.

It is their intent as artists and beings in common to shift perceptions of authorship and participation within the realm of constructed entertainment and art generated activities. This might change, though.  HIDEOUS BEAST is always looking for others to collaborate with, both in carrying out our own projects and realizing others. Please contact them with any ideas for activities or events.

–
www.dimeshow.com

Related posts:

1. BEN RUSSELL : BLESS – Opening Reception – 5 Feb, 2011
2. BEN RUSSELL: NURSES: Nov 6 – Dec 11, 2010, Chicago, Il
3. This week: Ben Russell Week

— Wassily Kandinsky

Related posts:

1. Wassily Kandinsky on the True Artist
2. The Spiritual Life

Before time, before you were born, and before your mother and mother’s mother were born, (in 2007) Google, IRL, emailed a fleet of cars o’er the land with the goal of documenting the street views of the world, street level. Each car a carriage with a pole fixed with nine cameras; each camera indifferent to art, art history, and the human experience; each camera a nebula ball that rests in a google fantasy claw.

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View is a project by Jon Rafman, a Montreal-based artist and Paint FX club member; the project is an indelible collection of images gleaned from Google Street Views. Google street view is a subset of Google Maps, comprised of images captured by a nebula ball camera mounted atop a moving vehicle. It looks like, well, you know, one of those nebula balls that rests in the fantasy claw, except it moves around the world snapping copious photographs. The resulting images are typically mundane, because the nebula ball exists to capture and upload informational and topographical imagery for Google. The nebula ball does not pursue art; however, there are instances where the nebula ball (unintentionally) renders fine-art: images remarkably within spitting distance of the pure human experience, and quite well nigh to artistic objectivity. Rafman’s project is Rafman’s subjective aggregation and presentation of these special moments, via internet and post-internet.

By dint of Rafman’s curated 9-eyes.com collection, the participant opens a leather-bound book that might as well be titled, “Mother Earth’s Family Photo Album,” inasmuch as we are all living together, here on earth, as one big family — an unfathomably large family — with 6,835,508,543 mouths to feed (as of 12:11am on 5.19.2o11, vide this graphic, rendered by this source): we are family, we are happy and mad, we are capricious, tempestuous, and sad; a disfunction with a function ; a family, here on Earth, together at this present moment. So, with altruism, let us all hold hands and form a hand-holding chain around the earth, because this likely will alleviate all the ills of this difficult human experience . . . the sense of accomplishment, too . . . I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to say, “Hey, we did it! Finally, everyone on Earth held hands to wrap around and give the Earth a warm hug.” Obviously this was the impetus for Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White,” “Man In The Mirror” and “Heal The World,” or Agularia’s masterwork “Genie In A Bottle,” or Kool Aid ’89, and the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the ’90s, go Bulls.

Back to the Nine Eyes project, the participant journeys and cruises the streets of the world — images, visual artifacts — from country to country, from coast to coast, from truck stop prostitute to prostitute, from vagabond crawling babies to friendly guinea pig walkers — all moments that define our collective conscious and unconscious human experience.

Take the time to stop and smell the pixeled flowers of the 9-eyes.com webpage: you might find that the curated images evoke a visceral feeling; moreover, a profound sense of spirituality tinges: the profound sense of spirituality that we all experience every day, every night, this human (and much more than human) experience that we call death and that we call life. Sex, drugs, guns, murder, death, disease, hockey, knee surgery, wet jeans, earning Gs, jet-skiing off the coast of a coast of the coast of the Andes — moments like these are found by the google vehicle and viewed by many, but Jon Rafman sedulously devoted his time wandering, cruising, screen-capturing, surfing.

Rafman inevitably went Post-Internet with this project: the selected images are screen-captured, blown up to a very large scale, and mounted on a wall for gallery presentation. The project makes a graceful crossover. John Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View is brilliant project; thoughtful work that congeals the four corners of the internets’ imagery, a pleasing contrast to the meretricious, impetuous and vapid work of his Paint FX crew. Nine Eyes is an outstanding accomplishment of new media art: it’s net art with a concept that appeals to the multitude, inasmuch as it is google, and most people have heard the word google and most people understand the services google provides.

With sophisticated execution and vision, the Nine Eyes project initiates Rafman as an august figure and trailblazer of the incipient net-art and post-internet art movements vis-a-vis the overall ethos of new & experimental media today, 2011.

Below are 18 selected images from http://9-eyes.com:

More:
Jon Rafman’s website
Official website for 9-eyes, Google Street View
‘The Nine Eyes of Google Street View’ essay
http://9-eyes.com

Related posts:

1. Eyes, Stan Brakhage Photographed by Michael Chikiris circa 1970
2. Christo’s Valley Curtain | Film Review
3. Test Pilot Collective: Typography and Design

1716 S Morgan #2F Chicago, IL 60608
May 7, 2011 – June 19, 2011
Opening reception: Saturday 5-9 pm, May 7th, 2011

Private viewings by appointment*
*The Presentation Theme (14:00, 16mm, 2008) by Jim Trainor will be projected twice during the opening reception.

About the show:
“XQQQQME Dear Friend, but your FAMILYYYYYY at BEN RUSSELL sure is feeling a bit FAREDCE! We usually have TIMING TI MING in bringing you, TIME TIME, the finest of the fine arts, but for some reason we got LAL in putting together this month’s 5-person exhibition — BENRUSSELL : REBUS! While putting this show together hasn’t been a P WALK ARK, but believe us when we say that the line-up is M1LLION — an SYMPHON that has finally been completed, that LOV that you dream of at night. We’re  getting ahead of ourselves, though — we should really TAKE PETS and remind you, Dear Friend, what it is we’re getting on about.

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is art-word and art-puzzle made manifest! From Lewis Carroll to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the British game of Concentration to your older brother’s collection of Lone Star Beer bottle caps, BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is yet another move forward in wo/man’s eternal quest to arrive at symbolic meaning through pictogrammatic signification! With the ever-clarifying but perpetually complicating metaphoric powers of art at our ready, we call upon you to venture in/out of that great unknown we call Meaning with naught but a Wi-Fi trail marker as guidepost for your deeply personal inner quest (ARCTANDER). Your path, as it were, will be bound by strange lines and drops of blood (TRAINOR), it will lead you to a painted cave wall of glyphs and symbols (PRICE) and an outcropping of transformative image-combinations (MOSK), at which point your world will rotate entirely. That thrum of voice and hum of light will settle upon your head, echoing out from smaller-cave to skull and back, an HD image-sound cipher (KNEZEVIC) cracked by your own delicate puzzle of eyes and ears.

So good it must be SICKBIRD, so affecting it’s like a punch IRIGHTI, this is proof positive that art and BEN RUSSELL : REBUS are PPOD — come on down and see for yourself!

About the Artists:
ZAK ARCTANDER is a Chicago based artist who makes sculptures, videos, and photographs. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. He works as an Artist Guide at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is an assistant at Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park.

IKA KNEZEVIC is a Serbian artist based in Chicago. Her work occurs in various program-making media, physical objects and moving images. Current areas of research are: secrets, involuntary movement, dream-wreck, liquidity, topical and tropical disasters, downward spirals, bright lights, vibratory inscription, record making, dude art, double dude art, forensic exhibition models, Germany’s infatuation with minimalism and shit.

SARAH MOSK was born in 1978. Lives in Pilsen, Chicago, USA. Has a BFA from Northern Illinois University.

CARMEN PRICE‘s drawings create new relationships between familiar visual elements to express joy in contemporary culture. His celebratory works use personal symbolism and a strong faith in the accidental to form occasionally narrative and often confusing scenes. Originally from Kansas City, Price currently lives and works in Chicago.

JIM TRAINOR is a filmmaker, mostly an animator, living in Chicago. He is just now completing a series of films called The Animals and their Limitations, of which Harmony is the latest installment, with The Bat and the Virgin, The Bats, The Moschops and The Magic Kingdom its predecessors. Most recently, he has been working on a long comic strip project called Sun Shames Headhunting Moon. Jim Trainor teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Space:
BEN RUSSELL is an art space in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.  Co-curated by artists Brandon Alvendia and Ben Russell and situated around the front two rooms in the apartment of its namesake, BEN RUSSELL began presenting a series of month-long 5-person shows on Memorial Day Weekend in the year 2009.  Participating artists are invited to produce and exhibit work that is in accordance with the title/theme of each show, the name of which will be derived entirely from the 10 letters in the words “ben russell.”  Future shows may include BEN RUSSELL : LENS, BEN RUSSELL : REBELS, and BEN RUSSELL : US.  In keeping with the structural conceits of the French Oulipo language group and the spatial and material limits of what is effectively a rented apartment, BEN RUSSELL maintains a strict set of restrictions for all exhibiting artists by which:

• One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work scaled at a minimum of three quarters of the thirteen by ten foot wall.
• One artist shall produce a wall-mounted work at a maximum of one half of the opposing wall space between the two adjacent doors.
• One artist shall produce a time-based work to be presented via a CRT flat screen monitor (and associated components) with Dolby 5.1 audio in the adjacent screening room.
• One artist shall produce work to be installed in the all-weather sculpture garden.
• One artist shall produce work to be performed for the duration of 15-30 minutes during the opening.

BEN RUSSELL features a rotating roster of Chicago-based and non-Chicago-based artists and will be open for viewings one night a month and by appointment, as needed.”

–
www.dimeshow.com

Related posts:

1. BEN RUSSELL : BLESS – Opening Reception – 5 Feb, 2011
2. BEN RUSSELL: NURSES: Nov 6 – Dec 11, 2010, Chicago, Il
3. Let Each One Go Where He May (2009), Ben Russell, 19 Sept 2010 at Cinema Borealis, Chicago

Takeshi Murata // Art and The Future // 2011 // Pigment print 32.5 x 50 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata: Get Your Ass to Mars
April 29 – June 11, 2011
Ratio 3 (website)
1447 Stevenson Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, USA (map)

Ratio 3 is pleased to present Get Your Ass to Mars, new work by Takeshi Murata, on view from April 29 to June 11, 2011.

Takeshi Murata // Cyborg // 2011 // Pigment print // 28 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Expanded Cinema // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.43 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Golden Banana // 2011 // Pigment print // 30.45 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Gumbone and Coke // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Jazz Funeral // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // The Heretic // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.3 x 42 inches // edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata // Salon Kitty // 2011 // Pigment print // 27.3 x 42 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Takeshi Murata The Sisterhood // 2011 // Pigment print // 23.2 x 32 inches // Edition of 3 with 2 APs

Honestly, I guess I’m either credulous or oblivious with realist computer art these days: I was trusting these were photographs taken at the exhibit IRL, one of my initial reactions being, “Does Takeshi have to cut fresh oranges everyday for the ‘Art and Future’ piece?” (irl?) In real life or not, this is impressive, alluring work, and for those in San Francisco — or California — you should make yer merry way to SF and visit Ratio 3 for Takeshi Murata’s “Get Your Ass to Mars” exhibit, which shows April 29 – June 11, 2011. The exhibit gleans its title from a line of movie dialogue, spoken by Arnold Schwartzenager, in Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven, a personal favorite.

Fun fact: Total Recall is such a favorite that I acted a scene from it in my Acting for Camera course in film school. James Franco was in that class as well, for he is enrolled in septendecim schools simultaneously.

More on the exhibit:

For this exhibition, Murata will present a new series of prints using imagery rendered entirely on the computer. As in his previous work, Murata uses objects that already exist in the world, playing with their inherent narratives and associations. Murata’s still lifes are composed of arranged objects such as VHS cassette tapes, fruit, skulls, cracked iPhones, musical instruments, and beer bottles. He places these objects in a virtual space that appears eerily real, accentuating their strange relationships with each other as they rest in a timeless abstract space. With these prints, Murata moves in the opposite direction of time-based video, emphasizing stillness, tension and pictorial illusion.

The gallery will also present the West Coast debut of “I, Popeye,” which premiered in 2010 in the exhibition ‘Free’ at the New Museum, New York. By animating Popeye in three dimensions, Murata’s personal interpretation of Popeye casts a dark yet humorous shadow on the iconic cartoon character. As in his previous videos, Murata’s deft control of the image draws the viewer into moments of both wonder and confusion.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. He has had previous solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC , gallery.sora, Tokyo and The Reliance (The Approach), London. His work has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York, and Gladstone Gallery, New York. Murata currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. This is his third solo exhibition with Ratio 3.

GALLERY HOURS: WEDNESDAY – SATURDAY; 11am – 6pm, and by appointment.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION/IMAGES CONTACT:
МICНAЕL GUIDЕТТI @ 415.821.3371 / gallery@ratio3.org / http://www.ratio3.org

Related posts:

1. Video: Takeshi Murata's Melter 02
2. Video Interview with Takeshi Murata
3. Conversations at the Edge Annouces Spring 2010 Film Calendar

SPACE PROGRAM presents
“Mercury, or One-Half a Life Spent in Darkness is One-Half a Life Spent Facing the Sun”
Curated by Ben Russell

This Sunday!
April 17, 2011 | 7:30pm
at Thalia Hall
1807 S Allport, Chicago, IL, 60608 (map)
$5 suggested donation

Messenger Mercury is retrograde until April 23, but with this SPACE PROGRAM screening series, Mercury turns direct on Sunday, April 17th, 2011. Guided by the afflatus of the planetary teachers, Space Program projects indelible cinema in the historic, Pilsen-based Thalia Hall — both NASA employees and non-NASA employees are invited — but please note that this space is unheated, so bring warm clothes, sleeping bags, blankets, beaver pelts, caribou furs, and other warm goods. Considering the typical 40°–80° Chicago-flux of weather this time of year, it is advised that you bring extra beaver pelts and warm materials.

Synopsis of the Mercury Programme: “In honor of its eccentric orbit, its 176-day day, its large iron core, its tidal bulges and Beethoven Crater and its ‘gently rolling, hilly plains,’ your navigators at SPACE PROGRAM hereby propose an audiovisual third fly-by of the smallest galactic sphere: MERCURY.  The innermost planet of our Solar System, Mercury is metaphorically volatile, changeable, fickle and flighty.  It is a slow rotation with a sharp edge; one that occupies the two poles of our human psyche – Mercury is radical darkness, sorrow and despair; Mercury is blinding radiance, heat and wonderment.  Mercury is youth.  It is the cusp of adulthood, the terrors of development, that bittersweet joy of (not) knowing enough.  Viewed from our telescope, Mercury is Eva Marie Rødbro’s constellation of Texan teenagers, all infrared desire and insect and nipple pierce and imminent danger — the anxiety of that next rotation is deep, soul-shaking.  When we focus again, we see Mercury in the overwhelming sweetness and sorrow of Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks’ Streetwise (1984) — a document of a 1980s gang of Seattle street kids living in abandoned spaces (echoes of Thalia Hall), with the sort of heart-baring openness that can only come from living far too close to the sun … Where there is light, there is darkness.”

Below is a letter from the curator, Ben Russell:

Fellow Travelers,

On behalf of your friends at Mission Control (Pilsen), I am proud to announce the launch of SPACE PROGRAM* – a screening series in four parts that will temporarily re-colonize a world heretofore lost to Silence-and-Darkness in the name of Light-and-Sound.  Presented in the shadowy maw of Pilsen’s historic Thalia Hall under the guidance of artist/astronaut Ben Russell, SPACE PROGRAM is a satellite alternative to dominant media practices, a time-image map for those new constellations rapidly forming in your heads.  From April 17th onwards, each of the initial four SPACE PROGRAM screenings are named after and thematically curated in relation to one of the planets of our solar system.  Come, discover new worlds with us!  More specifically:

April 17th, 2011: MERCURY (see details below)
April 24th, 2011: VENUS (details TBA)
May 1st, 2011: MARS (details TBA)
May 8th, 2011: JUPITER (details TBA)

Space Is the Place,

Ben Russell

MERCURY PROGRAMME DETAILS

Featuring:
I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
Streetwise by Martin Bell and Mary Ellen Marks (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
TRT 106:00

I Touched Her Legs by Eva Marie Rødbro (15:00, video, 2010)
These Texan youth are the descendants of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’, and they are both invincible and as fragile as a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching car. The Danish artist Eva Marie Rødbro’s sound-and-image montage is an extraordinary experience – a deeply poetic anthropological study of the self-destructive rites of passage of teenage life. This is the fragility of youth, caught shattering.  Everything is simultaneously animal and human, domestic and ethereal – that kid backflipping off his couch is an astronaut, untethered in space; those forgotten Jesus hymns are portals to St.Elsewhere, true.  If this video is a document then it’s also a vision – not just about what one looks at, but how one sees and hears the world.

Streetwise by Martin Bell (91:00, 16mm, 1984)
“The first time I saw this film, when I was a child, I felt like running away and living under a bridge, someplace or other. It’s an extremely beautiful film, which captures a time and a place that no longer exists in this way.” — Harmony Korine

Martin Bell’s unforgettable vérité documentary was shot on the streets of Seattle in the mid-1980s, and follows a group of homeless teenage kids aged between 13 and 19, who live off ‘container-raiding’, stealing and hustling. Rat, the dumpster diver, Tiny, the teenage prostitute, Shellie, the baby-faced blonde, DeWayne, the hustler, all old beyond their years.  They talk as if they were port workers, but behind the tough façade lie the vulnerable, small beings that have chosen the freedom of the street instead of the broken homes they come from. A raw masterpiece, and a kind of documentary precursor to Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), which Harmony Korine himself wrote the screenplay for as a teenager.  This is a film that is rarely screened, one that you’ll never forget.

===========================================================================

STREETWISE courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SPACE PROGRAM is made possible by a grant from Propeller Fund and through material support from the The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.).

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400, UIC and threewalls. Initial support for the program is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States.

The Foundation for Emerging Artistic Talent (E.A.T.) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promote the arts by providing exhibition opportunities and educational resources for emerging artists in the Chicago-land community. E.A.T.’s goal is to enrich the neighborhood of Pilsen through inspired artistic productions showcased in Thalia Hall’s 800-seat theater and gallery space. E.A.T’s dynamic programs will cultivate a supportive artistic network where emerging artists can be empowered to share their voice.

More:
www.dimeshow.com

Thalia Hall

Related posts:

1. Ben Russell: Uh-Oh It’s Magic: March 11-April 23, at Threewalls, Chicago
2. The Complete Films of Fred Camper: Program Two
3. Frame: Someone Should Be Happy Here (2010) by April Simmons

Ben Russell
The Artist’s Talk As A Disappearing Act (With Live Video Feed)
3/31/11 at 7:00pm
Threewalls, Chicago, IL, USA
119 North Peoria #2C, Chicago, IL 60607 (map)
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm

For those of you in/around Chicago this week, Ben Russell will be giving an artist’s talk/performance about his current solo show at threewalls on Thursday at 7:00pm.  It is a delicious exhibit of BR’s mystic acuity. Superluminal; punk-rock; enchanting; ton-o-fun.

***

***
In case you haven’t yet seen the show, it’ll be up until the 23rd of April — here is what some kind souls have said about it so far (in both image and word):

1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/threewallsgallery/sets/72157626176089321/show/
2. http://www.artslant.com/chi/articles/picklist#p22299
3. http://blog.art21.org/2011/03/18/ben-russell-at-threewalls/

Related posts:

1. Ben Russell: Uh-Oh It’s Magic: March 11-April 23, at Threewalls, Chicago
2. UBS 12 x 12 Artist Talk: Ben Russell
3. MAZES at the MCA, Chicago, Ben Russell and Joe Grimm