I am very excited to announce that my recent string piece was accepted into the 2012 Beam Festival hosted by Brunel University, Uxbridge. The festival is dedicated to the physical nature and live performance of electronic music.
From their web site – “ BEAM is a high-tech music weekender, a playground of homemade instruments and sonic installations, where you can listen to, watch and learn how to create your own physically living electronic music. BEAM was devised by Artistic Director Sarah Nicolls to explore the potential physicality of electronic music. The focus on electronic music being created LIVE is explored through a programme of performances, demonstrations, installations and workshops. BEAM brings together a global audience of artists, researchers, DiY electronics builders and enthusiasts, from beginners to veterans.”
I am honored, and a bit intimidated, to be a part of something that is not only a huge interest of mine, but also full of people that are far more advanced in this kind of stuff than I am. I hope to rob them of as much knowledge as I possible can.
Street art in India is very different from the its relatives in the US. During my recent trip through the sub-continent I saw lots of murals especially in the city of Varanasi. Some were new and fresh while others were quite old and showed years worth of wear and tear.
The more I saw, the larger my questions grew about the lineage of the imagery. Some of the more recent works seemed to have been influenced by contemporary American artists like Shepard Fairey. (Someone please direct me to some reading on the interface between post-modernism and non western art.) However Fairey, like many American and European street artists employing the notion of “mash-up culture”, borrow heavily from many sources, including ancient religious art, especially Hindu works.
Radiating lines emanating from the subject’s head, vivid colors, geometric shapes, animal imagery, halos and incorporated text all have strong roots in Hindu art and (by far) pre-date contemporary street art, and yet I still don’t think all of the imagery I saw in India was directly decedent from their ancient religious work. It seemed as if some of it had passed through a cultural (western) filter and came out on the other end slightly modified.
So, for any art history geeks out there I ask, is it fair to say that traditional Hindu art had a large influence on western street art, but through globalism, that western street art has come back around to influence the artists working in India today?
Studly’s level of skill is so high that I am intimidated just by looking at it. This is to say nothing of the consideration I have given to the patients he must have exercised while building it.
Work like this is truly Zen like as the builder must achieve a focus so sharp that it actually begins to blur the lines of consciousness and different states of mind. In my experience, the closest I have come to this is still miles away from the radiance of this tool chest.
One day I hope to be half as skilled as Henry Studley.
As you may already know, Daniel Yasmin and I had our proposal approved for funding by the Burning Man art dept this year.
We submitted a design for an interactive, immersive sound sculpture that uses vibrating springs and visitor participation to create a low frequency environment.
This is especially exciting for me for two reasons:
The first is that I am collaborating with a new friend and musician and hope to learn a lot about percussion, the behavior of sound waves and their influence on the human body. The second reason is that for the first time I am in the manager’s seat. All of my previous collaborative work was on the design and fabrication side. With this project I hope to gain the necessary skills to push my career forward.
I signed the contract this afternoon and our first check is on its way.
Throughout my childhood, when the deaths of celebrities from my parents generation were reported, I was always fascinated by the sincere reactions and expressions of loss by my family members.
I wondered what it might be like in the future when musicians and artists that I looked up to began to pass away. For some reason I had always thought that Ice-T would be the first to go and wondered how that would effect me.
Today I am beside myself having just heard of the passing of MCA. Not only was he one of my favorite musicians, but also a pioneer of Hip Hop, a genre of music that belonged exclusively to my generation.
The Beastie Boys formed as a group in 1979, two years after my birth. When I was eight years old I got the License to Ill album in 1985 and have closely followed the group since.
MCA had always been my favorite member of the trio representing that which attracted me most to the group’s music. His scratchy voice seemed antithetical to the flow of the rhymes, but because the genre was still so young and shapeless, it worked perfectly. He was perhaps one of the least likely people to have such a large part of the evolution of Hip Hop. Nevertheless he was a strong presence in the Beastie Boys and the genre as a whole who brought lyrics and content that always resonated with me.
Ad Rock and Mike-D, the other members of the group were the source of energy and humor respectively, but MCA was the soul of the group and I am deeply saddened to hear of his death.
The Tech Hive Beta Blog posted this yesterday about the ArtGameLab currently on exhibit at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
My friend and collaborator Sudhu Twari and I, along with three others, answered a call from the SFMOMA to design an interactive game that engages museum visitors in playful ways.
We based our game on a series of physical movements that correspond to common words used in art discourse.
The exhibit runs until August so the next time you are at the SFMOMA, swing throught the education center on the second floor and check it out.
Science Fiction has had an immeasurable influence on the work that I do and the person I am. Having been born in the 1970′s automatically makes me a member of a special group of people who got to experience Star Wars when it was fresh and new, and let me tell you, it was a powerful force on my, and many other young minds.
No small part of that was because of Ralph McQuarrie, the concept artist responsible for creating the look of some of the most famous and infamous characters in the history of Sci-fi.
Ralph passed on this week at the age of 82. With the passing of Mobius a few months back, 2012 has been a sad year me, for sci-fi, and the art world.
This is an archive of the Twitter conversation that took place during our ArtGameLab panel on 4/19/12. The panelists discussed game design, gaming culture, gamification, and the rise of so-called “serious games” — games played for an educational or training objective instead of for entertainment.
The European Union Times reports that Japan is in talks with Russia to evacuate a whole lot of people from the region surrounding Fukushima to the Kuril Islands. These islands lie off the northern coast of Japan and were snatched by the Russians after WW2. Their stewardship has been disputed ever since.
In short, the nuclear situation is far, far worse that what has been admitted by the governments involved. It is so bad in fact that Akio Matsumura, one of Japan’s Ambassadors has publicly stated that the problem has transcended that of political debate about Nuclear power and is now one of human survival. That is, the whole world.
He describes the quantities of nuclear fuel and waste that are on site at Fukushima and what it will mean if their containment continues to fail.
It’s grim and frustrating to think about all of humanity’s accomplishments currently being outweighed by the tremendous fumbling of this, and all the other environmental crises that took place in the last 24 months, not to mention their cover-ups.
Two huge interests of mine smash together in this video: Sound and space.
The velocity and inertia of high-speed charged particles ejected from the Sun during a coronal mass ejection (CME) can be measured as they slam into spacecraft; the resulting data can be presented as sound. Produced by the University of Michigan.
Now if only I can figure out how to listen to gravity.
