Mona Lisa's Aura, 2009
source: Anna Von Mertens, "Notes on Aura Portraits", At Length (2010)
Mona Lisa's Aura, 2009
source: Anna Von Mertens, "Notes on Aura Portraits", At Length (2010)
Johannes Itten, "Education is revelation that affects the individual."--Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race, 1780. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man., 1966, oil and pencil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984 (source: The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery)
"History of the Sky aims to convey the rhythms of the weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate level. By recording the sky above the Exploratorium, a museum located at the edge of San Francisco Bay, programmer slash artists Ken Murphy has captured the clouds, fog, wind, and rain to form a rich visual texture, as sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen. The 6-minute movie is based on a huge collection of images, which were captured at a 10 seconds interval. The visualization consists of a grid of 360 (so almost 365) unique movies, each representing one day of the year, organized chronologically, and cycling in parallel through a single 24-hour period." (via Information Aesthetics)
Memento (Sixteen Stone), 2008 | sources: White Cube
Satellite Collections,digital prints, 2009-2011
Jenny Odell: "In all of my prints, I collect things that I've cut out from Google Satellite View-- parking lots, silos, landflls, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, reliably repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here. At the same time, like any photograph, satellite imagery is also immediately an image of the past. That is, to look at satellite imagery is to look not only down upon ourselves but back in time, even if only by a matter of hours or days. In recording the moment at which things as bizarre as water parks and racetracks covered the earth, the photograph also implies that moment's own passing, encoding each tiny structure with vulnerability and pre-emptive nostagia. My desire to collect these pieces stems not only from the fascination of any collector but from a wish to save these low-resolution, sporadically-updated pixels--these strange pictures of ourselves--from time and the ephemerality of the internet. (source; found this project thanks to Design Sponge)
The Connected States of America, from MIT's senseable city lab, "illustrates the emerging communities based on the social interactions through the use of anonymized mobile phone data." As these project visualizations make clear, "administrative boundaries are often at odds if one compares these to a bottom up approach calculating the regional delineation only based on how people interact":
Kawandi quilts on exhibit @the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco: Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India features 32 striking patchwork quilts made by Siddi women, heirs to the culture and values of Africans brought to Goa on India’s west coast beginning in the 16th century. While they have adopted and integrated many cultural aspects of the Indian peoples with whom they have lived for generations, Siddis have also retained and transformed certain cultural and artistic traditions from Africa. Soulful Stitching provides an opportunity to explore the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World through these colorful and vibrant quilts that demonstrate how cultural forms and traditions have been adapted throughout the Diaspora. The traveling exhibition is co-curated by Dr. Henry J. Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Sarah K. Khan, Director of the Tasting Cultures Foundation... Numbering about 20,000 today, [Siddis] live in small villages scattered in the forests and high plains and are renowned for their unique patchwork quilts known as kawandi. Quilts are created by women for family members and used as mattresses or covers. Small, baby-sized kawandi, often decorated with small, brightly colored patches known as tikeli, fill wooden cribs suspended from the rafters of Siddi homes. Larger quilts for three or more persons is seen as auspicious as it implies a growing family with children. (image source)
Jennifer Bartlett Detail from Rhapsody 1975-76
enamel on steel
987 plates, each plate 12 x 12 inches
overall approximately 7′ 6″ x 153 feet (image source)
In anticipation of the 2005 exhibition of The Quilts of Gee's Bend at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Women's Studies Program at Auburn University gathered a fine online trove of visual, cultural, historical materials on the Gee's Bend quilts and quilters they call the The Quilts of Gee's Bend in Context. First wander through their amazing visual catalogue.
What is this site? A think out loud space for b-plot to share ongoing research, work in process, and links to other projects.