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From Flat against the wall, Olia Lialina’s essay for the Media Art Undone panel at transmediale:

“Comfort for all parties is a feature of Contemporary Art. New Media does not know this word. In New Media artists fight, curators suffer, audience gets angry. And that’s how it should be.”

Originally from we make money not art at February 15, 2007, 14:34, published by Marisa S. Olson

Originally from Rhizome.org on February 15, 2007, 1:59pm

Gunnar Green experiments with living matter in order to create slow graphic design.

He went to Humboldt University’s applied botanics department and got a place to work with tiny plants (especially the lab rat of botanics, Arabidopsis thaliana) which he wanted to treat as pixels. (Apparently the scientists there were, at least initially, not too impressed by citing art-related reference projects like Biopresence) After different interesting approaches such as a Bio-printer (essentially an inkjet-printer which would put seeds on a flat surface instead of drops of ink), vertical gardens and jackets from Tyvek to sample bio-material during a day in the city and then later cultivate it, he finally decided to focus on the letter (in both of its meanings) as means of communication, especially between individuals with emotional relationships. Four project focus on living letters, letters as signs of life and procedural shapes in different aspects.

For example a letter that grows flowers – the text is planted inside the letter and will grow as the recipient starts to actively care for it – tiny plants come up from the surface to form words. “Closeness” is a sheet of soap-like material which has a message in the form of E. coli-bacteria. Since those usually live inside us, they are very well adapted to body temperature and also grow best under these conditions. Thus, to be able to read the letter, its recipient will have to keep it warm, preferably close to the body, so the message can grow. “Very Alive” is an experiment with using animals for the display of messages – ants use pheromones to create paths which other ants then follow. Gunnar used this to actually draw letters and shapes which the ants then traced and – rudimentary but very visibly – formed a representation of the drawn, in this case the letter A. “Spitting Image” plays on the English term, which means “exact likeness”. In this Spitting Image, the user is actually asked to spit on a prepared sheet of paper. It then will grow basically everything that has been spat at it and indirectly creates a very intimate representation of the person through what lives in him or her.

More impressions on Flickr.

Related: Aperture, Parasite, Ghosttrain.

Originally posted by Sascha from we make money not art, ReBlogged by Rosanna Flouty on Feb 15, 2007 at 07:21 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on February 15, 2007, 6:21pm

Originally posted by iamspanky from del.icio.us/tag/art, ReBlogged by Rosanna Flouty on Feb 14, 2007 at 05:05 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on February 14, 2007, 4:05pm

Cory Doctorow:
Ever wonder what a lightbulb looks like at the instant it burns out? This looks like a fun high-speed photography project:

What you are seeing is a capture of a lightbulb in the process of burning out. To create the shot, my friend Harley and I removed the glass enclosure of a standard household lightbulb (while leaving the innards intact) and powered it up in a pitch black room. The result was an immediate burn-out, which we were all too ready to photograph. The red hue on the smoke was added in post-processing.

Link

(via Make)

Update:

Ryan sez, “The photographer actually does it in bulb mode, which is basically the opposite of high speed photography.”

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on February 16, 2007, 7:56am

Xeni Jardin:

Pronounced just like the portion of the human anatomy responsible for excreting waste, the “B’owl” is a mythical parody critter that once flew high and proud.

Video Link to Tim and Eric classic. More on the comic geniuses who created this: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. (Thanks, Jesse Thorn!)

Previously on BB:

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 15, 2007, 2:53pm

Xeni Jardin:
This just in, snip from Xbiz:

In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an Alabama statute banning the commercial distribution of sex toys, saying that there is no fundamental right to privacy raised by the plaintiff’s case against the law.

According to the statute, it is ‘unlawful for any person to knowingly distribute any obscene material or any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.’

American Consitutional Society blog has more: Link (thanks Violet Blue and Jason Schultz).

Previously on BB:

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 15, 2007, 5:44pm

Falafel (2006, 1MB, 43 sec)

ShotCutScoredAndPostedByEmailFromMyNokia93Phone (2007, 2.4MB, 2:41 min)

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on how, whatever is the ostensible
subject of movies, they are all in some sense ‘about’ everything we see
in every frame. And with the passing of time how this often becomes
more true as if, like a dog from water, the meaning is shaking itself out.
The Bas Jan Ader ‘falling’ movies exemplify this ( & how poignantly!) for me -
their conceptual motor aside, I remain most haunted by their background landscapes..
Rupert Howe of FatGirlInOhio brings this sharply to mind -
the subject might be a morning jog or Falafel but the totality of each movie
contains some of the best evocation of the glory & the grime that is
2007 London I’ve yet seen. That doesn’t exhaust it, of course, which is why this
work is deft & it is fine.
He is gravely mistaken about the Falafel though - undoubtedly the
best Falafel in London is at Gaby’s on the Charing Cross Road…

Originally from DVblog on February 16, 2007, 2:00am

Xeni Jardin:
In this fine specimen of commercial vernacular video, the portly and loudmouthed “Family Man” of central Florida offers “boo-coo minivans” to all comers. Video Link.

BoingBoing reader and Florida resident Gavin Baker explains:

“If you thought the ‘mini-mall’ TV ad was bad, you gotta check this one out. Here in Orlando, we’ve grown to love the Family Man of Family Auto Mart. I have a CD signed by him. No, really. They released ‘The Family Man Rap’ on CD.”

May I also suggest loading this familyautomart.com page with sound on, then mousing over all of the sound-producing buttons at the same time, then screaming and running away from your computer.

Previously:

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 15, 2007, 12:53pm