34. Ben Fry + Casey Reas| Processing
http://www.processing.org
Notas do Editor
rearrangement of museum collections to reveal ideological commitments of the institution: silver + slave shackles = life in the 1780s In 1992, a huge sign was hanging from the façade of the Maryland Historical Society announcing that “another” history was now being told inside. The sign referred to African-American artist Fred Wilson’s exhibition project “Mining the Museum,” which presented the museum’s collection in a new, critical light. Incorporated in 1844, the Maryland Historical Society was founded to collect, preserve, and study objects related to the state’s history. This mission included accounts of colonization, slavery and abolition, but the museum tended to present this history from a specific viewpoint, namely that of the its white male founding board. It was this worldview that Wilson aimed to “mine.” He did so simply by assembling the museum’s collection in a new and surprising way, deploying various satirical techniques, first and foremost irony. For instance, in the first room of the exhibit, the audience was confronted with a silver globe — an advertising industry award given at clubs in the first half of the century — bearing the single word “Truth.” The trophy was flanked by, on the one side, a trio of portrait busts of prominent white men and, on the other side, three empty black pedestals. The busts were of Napoleon, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. None of these worthies had ever lived in Maryland; they exemplified those deemed deserving of sculptural representation and subsequent museum acquisition. The empty busts were labeled Harriet Tubman, Benjamin Banneker, and Frederick Douglass, three important African-American Marylanders who were overlooked by the ostensibly “local” institution. “What they put on view says a lot about a museum, but what they don’t put on view says even more,” [ 1 ] Wilson said in an interview about his installations. He communicated this point by contrasting what is with what should be . By drawing attention to the overlooked black figures, his installment asked whose truth was on display at the Maryland Historical Society. The installation “Metalwork 1793–1880” was another way that Wilson reshuffled the museum’s collection to highlight the history of African Americans. The installation juxtaposed ornate silver pitchers, flacons, and teacups with a pair of iron slave shackles. Traditionally, the display of arts and craft is kept separate from the display of traumatic artifacts such as slave shackles. By displaying these artifacts side by side, Wilson created an atmosphere of unease and made apparent the link between the two kinds of metal works: The production of the one was made possible by the subjugation enforced by the other. When the audience made this connection, Wilson succeeded in creating awareness of the biases that often underlie historical exhibitions and, further, the way these biases shape the meaning we attach to what we are viewing. [1] Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” TDR: Journal of Performance Studies 38, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148. ↩ Why it worked There have been other attempts to use satirical techniques to critique museum institutions from within. Often these have caused controversies due to misinterpretations and the difficulties inherent in the ambition to destabilize one’s own foundation. “Mining the Museum” worked because it was suggestive rather than didactic, provocative rather than moralizing.
This canvas by artist Kim Dingle doesn’t look like a map, more like a herd of cows. But actually it’s a collection of maps. The artist asked teen-aged school kids in Las Vegas to draw their country in the shape they thought it had. It’s one of the strange maps in a book called ‘You Are Here’ , which… collects unconventional maps.
TheSheepMarket.com is a collection of 10,000 sheep made by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk . Workers were paid 0.02 ($USD) to "draw a sheep facing to the left." Animations of each sheep's creation may be viewed at TheSheepMarket.com .
drawings by Meaghan Kombol that she had made while riding the New York subway system. She rode each of the routes that run throughout the city and attempted to draw a straight line on each trip. The result was obviously not a straight line, but rather a line that poignantly described the physical movement that happens on each route. It reminded me of a photograph in a way, how this line captured the abstract essence of a single moment in time, or a series of moments in this case. It was a visually paired down representation of a full senses experience, all summed up into a line.
drawings by Meaghan Kombol that she had made while riding the New York subway system. She rode each of the routes that run throughout the city and attempted to draw a straight line on each trip. The result was obviously not a straight line, but rather a line that poignantly described the physical movement that happens on each route. It reminded me of a photograph in a way, how this line captured the abstract essence of a single moment in time, or a series of moments in this case. It was a visually paired down representation of a full senses experience, all summed up into a line.
drawings by Meaghan Kombol that she had made while riding the New York subway system. She rode each of the routes that run throughout the city and attempted to draw a straight line on each trip. The result was obviously not a straight line, but rather a line that poignantly described the physical movement that happens on each route. It reminded me of a photograph in a way, how this line captured the abstract essence of a single moment in time, or a series of moments in this case. It was a visually paired down representation of a full senses experience, all summed up into a line.
Custom software, automatically gather all faces it finds on TV to compute an average. Here I examine eight different cable TV channels, gathering thousands of faces over the course of a day. Here we have Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, BET, MTV, CSPAN, PBS, and CBS.
Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized) 2002 Digital C-prints. Ed. 5 + 2 APs. 60" x 29.5". From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture. notes Tech notes on the amalgamation body of work: Most of the early amalgamation print work ( Playboy , Class , Homes , 76BJs ) was made with code I wrote in C on Unix-based SGIs using Paul Haeberli's SGI file format. Later amalgamation work ( Decades , Late Night , Special Moments ) was done in C/C++ on Windows boxes with the ImageMagick C++ libraries. I did The Song of the Century manually with PC audio software (I honestly cannot remember what software, but I did download a few of the cover songs with the original Napster) For the City and Loop pieces, we actually modelled much of Chicago's Loop as semi-transparent, textured rectangles and rendered this "city" from typical tourist vantage points. All of this was done in Maya. The Portrait pieces were done with Processing.
