Breanne Trammell’s Triumphant/Normative Experience
February 20, 2009 at 11:55am | In art, design, video | 1 CommentTags: breanne trammell, giant bookmarks, potential friends
I like Breanne Trammell’s art because she asks questions like, “what if I made art like a dude?” and makes 7 foot tall inspirational bookmarks out of mean things people have said to her and did a video project called “Gossip Gulls,” which is definitely helping tide me over until March 16th.
Breanne is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Her work celebrates normative experiences via 1980s-1990s popular culture, domesticity, cute, kitsch and the culture of collecting. It shares triumphant moments of youth and adulthood and oftentimes reveals the dark and embarrassing ones, too.
I feel like we could be friends. Maybe it’s totally lowbrow/dumb of me but I think that’s a really important quality to look for in an artist.
Punk’s Not Dead
January 20, 2009 at 2:38pm | In culture, design, politics | Leave a CommentTags: atheism, barack obama, t-shirt design, up the punx
I think my favorite part of today was when PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA gave a shoutout to the “non-believers” and everybody in da club cheered! Unironically proud to be an American again this afternoon.
Jumpin’ jumpin’
January 14, 2009 at 1:44pm | In design, internet, new media | 2 CommentsTags: experimental home furnishing, interior design, light energy studio
Light Energy Studio is a company that sells “innovative decorative home furnishings, unique sculpture, lighting, furniture and art,” including all manner of LED floors, “plasma sculptures” and “infinity mirrors.”
If you have no idea what any of that means, that’s fine. Thankfully, they have a walk-through of “The Vortex Club” – a nightclub design ted entirely with Light Energy Studio furnishings – available on their web site. It is probably the greatest thing on the internet right now. Enter the Vortex!
(Thanks for the link, Cat!)
Screw Photoshop
May 16, 2008 at 10:48am | In art, culture, design | 1 Comment…wasn’t it better when film posters featured lovingly detailed, hand-drawn images of celebrities?
Where has all the good design gone?
April 28, 2008 at 8:06pm | In art, culture, design, history, illustration, photography | Leave a CommentIf you, like me, recently attended your last day of college EVER and are now desperately in need of some inspiration to get you through finals and help you finish that children’s book you’re supposed to be writing, feast your eyes on these gorgeous babies (courtesy of the National Magazine Cover Archive).
Keep it weird
April 8, 2008 at 4:15pm | In art, design, illustration, internet | Leave a CommentTags: weirdness
Adventures in Intertextuality 1: Give a Hoot
December 1, 2007 at 12:16pm | In art, design, illustration, internet | Leave a CommentTags: intertextuality, things that are cute
This blog generally doesn’t feature enough “things that are cute.”
1. Via Boing Boing: OVVLvverk: a “gallery of owls and owl-related human cultural representations,” designed as a parody of the contemporary art and culture blog, VVORK. You really have to give the internet some, umm, kudos (get it?) for opening up new avenues for the exploration of intensely epic intertextualities. The world is weird, y’all.
2. Drawn posted Meomi Design’s fanciful illustrations of the mascots for the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics in Vancouver: Quatchi the Sasquatch, Miga the Sea Bear, and Sumi the Thunderbird. I don’t give a shit about the Olympics at all but whatever, these guys are cute.
3. Squirrel’s epic swim across lake: It’s old news now, but I really relate to his struggle.
A Psychic Vacuum
October 28, 2007 at 11:17am | In art, design, new media, video | Leave a CommentTags: a psychic vacuum, mike nerlson, oliver laric
Last week, I went to New York with a class; we visited a number of galleries and art exhibits on the Lower East Side, including Mike Nelson’s “A Psychic Vacuum,” a conversion of the Old Essex Street Market into a massive, maze-like installation. The empty rooms of the former market are scattered with random, ominous and bizarre objects – taxidermic animals, portraits of the Kennedy family, statues of Buddha, voodoo dolls. By making random turns through the seemingly infinite space, I eventually came to the end of the installation – a massive warehouse space, full of sand. The confusing, endless, empty hallways and their strange contents (all right in the center of New York City) are simultaneously enticing and off-putting – the piece functions as a sort of contemporary art haunted house. “A Psychic Vacuum” closes today (October 28th) – if you’re in New York, check it out!
Another art discovery (care of Your Daily Awesome), just in time for Halloween – German-born, Tokyo-based artist Oliver Laric’s “Webchat with Andy,” a piece composed of “a conversation with Andy Warhol, contacted through a psychic with mediumistic abilities via webchat.” Laric’s other works – video, music, design, 2D and digital media – have the same playful approach – art with a sense of humor. I’d definitely recommend looking at his other works, especially the video “Aircondition.” Laric’s work is definitely a welcome break from the deathly seriousness of contemporary art that has been bothering me for weeks.
Awesome Tapes from Africa
October 8, 2007 at 6:19pm | In art, culture, design, music | Leave a CommentTags: casette tape covers, copy-cat culture, hiplife
Thanks to the superbly-well curated Your Daily Awesome, I found two great African music blogs — both written by someone who identifies themself as “thursdayborn” but who I’m pretty sure is named Brian — Awesome Tapes from Africa and The Hiplife Complex. Awesome Tapes from Africa is, umm, exactly what it sounds like. Not just well-designed cassette tape covers like this one, but also mp3s of all their tracks. Hiplife is “a copy-cat culture and an indigenized national phenomenon” in which Ghanian youth rap about contemporary issues over pirated beats. Blogger thursdayborn spent a year in Ghana chronicling this culture and its artists. Make sure to check out Obrafour’s amazing video for “Kwame Nkrumah.” Or tune into the stream at wqhs.org tonite at 8pm to hear some of this stuff and other exciting jams.
A Touching Relationship with the Medium of Tomorrow
September 7, 2007 at 5:58pm | In art, culture, design, new media | Leave a CommentTags: animated gifs, glitter graphics, life visualization, lolcats, olia lialina
Artist and Professor of New Media Olia Lialina has published Part 2 of her presentation/essay/deeply meta internet art project, A Vernacular Web: The Indigenous and the Barbarians (2005). Lialina’s project is not only an analysis of the evolution of web culture and design, but also a refuge for many of its most disdained and forgotten artifacts: animated gifs, ‘under construction’ graphics, midi tracks, starry night tiled backgrounds. I must admit a sadness at not finding angelfire.com’s classic running dog gif amongst Lialina’s archive (my brother and I once shared a deep fondness for that dog, and even named him “Fluffy”).
Lialina posits that “glitter graphics” are the contemporary answer to the animated gifs and starry night backgrounds of the mid-90s. “They … look almost the same,” she writes, “the particles of flickering light on a darker background. But there’s a huge gap between these two. Starry backgrounds represented the future, a touching relationship with the medium of tomorrow. Glitter decorates the web of today, routine and taken-for-granted.”
On the subject of what she is definitely NOT going to talk about, Lialina mentions:
1. “Unfinished research on the topic of cats in today’s Web. They are becoming so important that in the nearest future conferences binded with Internet subjects will have to announce LOLCats or Kitten of the Day panels to discuss things that really matter.”
2. “Animated cursors: a phenomenon equally ridiculous and dangerous.”
3. “Relations, Marriage, Pregnancy, Breastfeeding, Child age calendars, as an ultimate form of life visualization in online communities and diaries.”
If that little list doesn’t entice you to read further, I don’t know what will!
(This comes via Beyond the Beyond.)
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