Roxy Paine at Madison Square Park

Roxy Paine has three new stainless steel sculptures on display in Madison Square Park (map). While less conceptual than some of his other work, these sculptures are pretty beautiful and are sited particularly well in the small oasis of green between the tall office buildings on 23rd street. Watching the light change on them last night made me wish there was a time-lapse video of each piece over the course of a day.

Paine showed a similar sculpture in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has done some really interesting process-oriented work in the past creating machines that make paintings and sculptures based on a set of variables. See links below for some of that work.

Madison Square Park Conservancy - Includes a video interview
James Cohan Gallery
Ronald Feldman
From Grand Arts:
- SCUMAK (Sculpture Maker)
- PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit)

Tim Wu, On Copyright's Authorship Policy

"It has long been the stated aspiration of copyright to make authors the masters of their own destiny. Yet more often than not, the real subject of American copyright is distributors, book publishers, record labels, broadcasters, and others, who control the rights, bring the lawsuits, and take copyright as their industries' 'life-sustaining protection.' This paper offers a new theory and defense of the role of authors and authorial copyright in the copyright system. I argue that the device of making authors rights-bearers can seed new modes of production in the industries under copyright. Rights-bearing authors can, in other words, help unsettle industry structure, by taking their rights to competitive disseminators or new modes of dissemination. Recent examples include the role of authorial rights in the rise of open source software and creative commons, while older examples include the rise of competing publishers in 18th century England." - Tim Wu

Via BoingBoing

God? Dad?

Life 2.0

Scientists research creating new forms of life.

via drew.
via kb.
via newsweek.

via 100th chippies post.
word.

Where science meets culture: Phylotaxis

An autonomous news feed for science and culture:

Phylotaxis

I am a strange loop.

To talk about desires as if they existed is a shorthand. When you come down to it, so is talking about apples as if they existed. In a sense, apples don't exist--all that exists is particles and their interactions.

But living creatures aren't privy to particles, because life resides on a level so far above them that no being could survive if it concentrated on that level. To survive, living creatures find shortcut descriptions of the world's regularities. Therefore, smart living creatures believe, and believe equally strongly, in apples and desires.

Douglas Hofstadter
(Seed, #9, p72)

thought you'd all find this interesting

this guy locked himself in his studio for a month straight with a webcam attached to a paintball gun. go check it out

Life Explained in 3 Minutes 58 Seconds

Le Grand Content is a video by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit. It can be watched on Kogler's site or on YouTube. I highly recommend downloading the video off of his site, turning off all of the lights and watching it full-screen with the volume turned up.

The video is inspired by/based on Jessica Hagy's blog Indexed, and showcases Hagy's witty view of our lives. Kogler and Szmit's treatment of Hagy's material raises it to the next level. The video clearly references the PowerPoint world we now live in and presents its simple "ah-ha" diagrams in a visually stunning manner with a beautiful score and narration in English with a heavy but pleasing accent. The animation is sophisticated, subtle and deserves multiple viewings.

Indexing Our Lives

"I was just reading Alec Wilkinson's story in the New Yorker about Gordon Bell's quest to archive his life. For more than three years Bell has been saving recordings of his voicemails, phone calls, computer and web usage as well as wearing a SenseCam and having a, "pleasant, determined, and resourceful woman," scan all of his documents and apparently anything else (t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters)..."

Read the entire post

Summer of Love Brand

A few quotes from a NYTimes article about the reemergence of the Summer of Love "Hippie" Brand that has been reemerging recently, and how the media created/ shaped that moment in youth culture history.

"The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon."

"Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became."

“Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”