Michael Nagle for The New York Times reports on artist Steve Powers’s simulated display of waterboarding:

“Some people look at Coney Island and see a paradise of carefree entertainment. Others see a cesspool of gritty squalor. Few are those who gaze upon its shrieking kids, grizzled wanderers and fast-talking flimflam artists and see an opportunity for engaged political discourse.

In Steve Powers’s ‘Waterboard Thrill Ride’ in Coney Island animatronic figures simulate an interrogation method used in Guantánamo; visitors view the scene through a barred window.”

Link

Controversial political artwork featuring robots? Mandated roadtrip.

And, inspired by the power of the thing, he drew this lovely portrait:

Today is deviantART’s 7th birthday. 7th! And it’s August 7, 2007. Wow, so lucky! Congrats, dA people!

People who know me here also know the story, but deviantART is partially responsible for my winding up in Southern California (and, subsequently, at USC in Linguistics and, subsequently, Rochester Brain and Cognitive Science now). My first trip here was to attend a deviantART party (where I met Mikeh). I wouldn’t normally have gone to a party 6 hours away, but I was feeling inspired by something I’d just read.

The people I met that night at the dA party are the same people I had to say good-bye to earlier today. Matt and Angelo in particular, I’ll miss you guys. Matt’s known me longer than anyone else down here. (A full 6 hours longer! He drove me down to the party from San Francisco.)

Today is a bittersweet day for me. I ate some chocolate cake earlier with dA folks, and any day where you get chocolate cake can’t be totally bad. (Bittersweet… chocolate… almost punny.) I’m very excited about Rochacha. Sad to leave, sure, but I’ll be happy to arrive in a new place.

I stopped trying to predict how things would work out a while back, and I think it’s saving me some hurt right now. Good-byes hurt less when you’re not entirely convinced it’s really a good-bye. For once, my skepticism serves me well. We rock with it, roll with it. Juvenile is also a very smart man.

I need to pick a final move away date. It’ll be something like the 15th.

In Los Angeles. And the flyer…

Opening reception Tuesday July 17th 7-11pm. Hosted by Kevin Smith & Chris Mosier. 7020 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90039.

The first transparent screen photo below was done by the amazing and multi-talented Mike Lawson, but there are clusters of transparent screen photos on Flickr. Fantastic!

Charlie Todd, comedian/actor/improvitarian at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, spends his free time pranking NYC. I should have blogged about this when I first heard of it a couple years ago, but I didn’t. So I’m doing it now.

Todd’s Improv Everywhere “agents” act out scenes in real life. Like throwing surprise birthday parties for strangers, boarding subway busses pantsless en masse, or collectively entering a Best Buy store dressed in blue polos and khaki pants. It’s a cool concept. And, except in cases where it goes horribly awry, it’s often funny.

Yeah!

Stuart O. Anderson and Shaun Slifer built a robot that keeps tumbleweed in motion for the Three Rivers Arts Fesitval Gallery in Pittsburgh. They call the project “Welcome Home, Pioneer”.

Why? Wrong question. Why not? They have a nice write up about the project, the robot, et more on the site, so I’ll let them answer that question more seriously. More info on the installation (robot + tumbleweed) here.

I love robotic installation art.

Nick Osborn of Square America, a site “dedicated to preserving and displaying vintage snapshots,” has an intriguing collection of very strange slides, and he needs your help in figuring out what exactly they mean.

From the SWAMPATORIUM blog:

“I got this lot of slides about three years ago and I’ve never been able to figure out just what is going on. There are about 50 slides in all- all dating from between 1959 and 1969 and all of young women. Some, like the ones here have letters written on their foreheads, others have press type with their names on it affixed to either their temples or foreheads. Were the slides taken by a dermatologist or plastic surgeon or were these young women part of some now forgotten experiment. In less than fifty years these slides have gone from most likey being unambiguous data for some medical study to being a complete mystery.”

The theories that have been postulated thus far speculate that the photos could have been taken for anything from gender reassignment surgery studies to rhinoplasty to fraternity/sorority hazing.

Link

Photographer Penny De Los Santos has a beautiful photo essay on children living with their incarcerated mothers and fathers inside the walls of Nuevo Laredo penitentiary in Mexico.

From the website:

“Incarceration, like law, is a bit different in Mexico. Conjugal visits are permitted; small children younger than six can be locked up with their moms; and men and women peddle goods and themselves within the walls in order to survive. Mexican prisons often do not provide grub. I’ve stood in line with family members who toted a week’s supply of food on visiting day, seen women reel out of cells in disarray after their weekly intercourse sessions with their men. Drugs are commonplace inside the walls, as are gangs. Money can buy anything. For years the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has complained about the posh quarters given to major drug players and how they continue to do business without interference while theoretically being under lock and key.

The women may come in clean, but they don’t stay that way. In Nuevo Laredo, they’re high by 10 a.m., then they spruce up and go off to the men’s area to make some money. By afternoon they return, their necks laced with hickeys. Convicts run the prison, and the guards do as they are told by the dominant inmates. People get killed. And all this goes on with toddlers underfoot.”

Link

Jenny L. Chowdhury’s “Cell Atlantic CellBooth” is a wearable, portable cellular phone booth that a cellphone user could carry with her while on the go. The idea is that creating an intentional, purposeful space for cellular phone calls makes the conversations themselves more meaningful. The use of the object becomes a kind of performance art.

The artist explains on her website:

“As I grappled with these issues of privacy, personal space and nostalgia for a ’simpler time’, the idea for portable phone booth was born. The portable phone booth, which I call the ‘Cell Atantic CellBooth’, is a wearble object you can carry around with you and set up when you need a moment to talk. The deliberate nature of setting up the booth and standing in place while one talks enforces the idea that the call is important -not something to do while picking up the kids, working out, or driving. Ultimately, I desired to recreate the illusion of privacy and stillness afforded by oldschool, 4-walled phone booths, but also to update the booth as a portable object that would fit into a modern life.”

Link

For once, it’s nice to see a shopping cart on the street! This fantastic street art from Toronto was created by Specter of Kops Crew and posted by Marc of the Wooster Collective.

How’d he do it? I don’t know, but it certainly is wonderful.

If you’re interested in Kops Crew and the work that they do, you can also check out this article from Hour.ca about the group, or you can check out the website for the Kops Crew’s studio space in Montreal, Massive Riot Gallery, although the website is a little light on visual content for a gallery site.

From the Hour.ca article:

“The Kops Crew collective came to be in the late ’90s, when, says Ill_relevance, ‘it started as a graffiti crew, definitely. It was really about street bombing for a couple years, and our natural desire to get attention and be creative just kept growing and growing and growing, so we started to involve musicians and DJs, trying to create a foundation for us to work off of, use the natural resources that were there for us to work with. And so it became about multimedia events at that point, in the form of one-off parties where we’d do full installations and live music, and live painting, site-specific artwork…’”

And from the Massive Riot Gallery website:

“The Massive Riot Gallery project’s prime objective was to showcase the wealth of talent that has emerged from Montreal’s graffiti and street art scene. Hosting five exhibitions and several special events, the gallery was credited by critic Isa Tousignant as releasing ‘the city’s art scene from a state of arrested development.’”

Link (via Wooster Collective)

Polanoid.net is a growing community of people who love Polaroids… and their Polaroids. You know I had to post this.

“We are presenting a rapidly growing group of amazing Polaroid enthusiasts that are polanoid enough to believe in the unique power of vivid instant photography. We are searching for instant addicts all over the world, ready to support this project, ready to register and upload. For free and just for Instant Fun.”

Link

A series of wheatpastes of kids playing hide-and-seek were spotted in alleys and on buildings in Istanbul, Turkey.

I love the Wooster Collective. So much. Thank you, guys, for doing what you do.

“The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.”

Link (via Wooster Collective)

Sick of shelling out a Lincoln for your favorite magazine only to find it packed full of more ads that content? Well, now you can fight back, with this simple and fun DIY jam!

Are You Generic has designed a snarky little insert for you to print out and stick into all your ad-heavy magazines. The printable inserts read:

“The confessions of a generic magazine: ‘We loaded this issue with more advertising than content. The content we did publish was edited, censored and manipulated to please our advertisers or as lame filler between the product pushing ads. We got paid quite handsomely to produce this issue and are glad you will pay to read what we already got paid to print.’ Are You Generic?”

Yeah, I know, you’re subtly advertising the anti-advertising group by using their inserts, but if you’re going to be that picky, you can design your own!

Link (via Are Your Generic?)

Paul Notzold projects private text messages on walls in public space. Why? It’s art.

Notzold’s project, Txtual healing, uses a cell phone, a computer and a projector to create a mobile public performance by putting text messages into speech bubbles and up onto buildings.

His website, www.txtualhealing.com (which was linked to on the Wooser Collective blog), was down at the time of this post, but if anyone has any info on this artist or project, drop me a line! I’d love to know more.

UPDATE: Notzold’s website is back up! (Thanks for the head’s up, Mr. Notzold.) Also, he’ll be showing at Peer Gallery in NYC, 526 West 26th St., Suite 208, from May 23-June 2, 2006, if you’re in the area. The opening reception happens Tuesday, May 23 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. (May 16, 2:14 p.m.)

Link (via Wooster Collective)

Universial Connections, presented by art collective dialog05, are a set of objets d’art that attempt to relate the analog world with a digital one. Although I’m not precisely sure what the artists are attempting to say, if anything, some of the pieces are quite intriguing.

I particularly like the memory box filled with labeled flash drives. It reminds me of that scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise is watching quasi three-dementional home movies of his son and wife from little memory cards.
I wonder if my boxes of papers and trinkets will one day look more like this. (Yeah, I know the answer is probably ‘no,’ but it’s a fun thought anyway.)

Link

The Room is a a quirky film by director Tommy Wiseau that’s gaining cult popularity in Los Angeles. The movie’s not a comedy, but attendees certainly do seem to think it’s funny. As NPR reporter Nihar Patel put it, fans find the movie “so painfully bad, it’s actually painfully funny to watch.”

The movie attracted an audience via a billboard on Sunset that featured a very large close up of Wiseau’s face. Wiseau, who wrote, directed, and stars in the film, actually attends all of the screenings. The next one is May 27, at Laemmele’s Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, so mark your calendars!

Wiseau seems like quite a character, and I love characters. A Variety article pinned him as “a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.”

The plot of the film sounds like a blend between a softcore porn flick and a Tennessee Williams stageplay: Wiseau plays a banker who is betrothed to a beatiful, blonde bitch, who’s seducing Wiseau’s best friend, who’s giving into the temptation. Not that the plot really matters. It’s the technique we’re interested in here!

There’s an NPR story on the film here, and also an official website linked to below with trailers, etc.

Link

This incredible clips shows Jeroen Offerman singing Stairway to Heaven in reverse, in reverse, in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. That is, Offerman performed the song backwards live and then reversed a recording of it and added a karaoke track, so the lyrics were forwards again.

This is incredible for two reasons:

First one? This particular song has been running backwards through my head all week. Why was it in my head backwards? Because I was helping some students I tutor write an investigative article on the veracity of backwards messages in rock music. I listened to a whole lot of music backwards, and for some reason, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven stuck.

Second reason? This clip is making its way around the blogosphere in a very funny way. WFMU’s Beware of the Blog posted a list of 37 versions of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven here yesterday. Then Bloggger-user Krup posted a ripped version of Offerman’s video from a Wholphin quarterly DVD magazine a few hours later. Then a guy named Matt read it and e-mailed Boing Boing who posted it in the late, late hours of yesterday. And now I can’t resist passing it on even further.

My point? This clip isn’t remotely new. The video, entitled “The Stairway at St.Paul’s,” made its way around the short film festival circuit and even won a noteworthy mention in The Village Voice—three years ago, when it was created.

Bloggers love to tout blogging as the new, faster media outlet, but we seem to be the last ones to jump on the story this time. Today, I hang my blogging head in shame. But even with my head hung low, I can’t stop smiling because this video is just so rockin’!

Check out Offerman’s website with all his other performance projects here, Krup’s post complete with links to full-length ripped Wholphin versions here, a ripped version on DailyMotion here, an alternative version on Loop TV and Video here, and, finally, Boing Boing’s coverage here.

Link

This “tank cozy” was produced and displayed for a Copenhagen peace protest. Knittastic!

The Photo was taken by Flickr user mms. This is prettier than but reminds me of Adam Ellyson’s Hummer cozy.

Link