Old New York
Though crowds throng the Disney store and marvel at the mass of flickering screens, there are those who long for the old Times Square, when it was porn not promos, shady characters not Slim Shady. The "Crossroads" Webwork by Annette Weintraub recalls the days when Times Square was the crossroads of the world, rather than merely a focal point of global branding and commerce. Weintraub captures this postwar-era sense of energy and excess in her fantastic collage of short films, animations, historical postcards and even a film by Rudy Burckardt. But it's the evocative audio that knits the work together: "audio zones" allow visitors to enter a bar or leave a bus, overhearing mini-dramas Weintraub has staged for our delectation. From New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
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Navigating Anew
Martin Wattenberg's "Spiral" is a clever artist's variant on the old-fashioned "menu"-style model of structuring information. Vistors to the new media-art site Rhizome can access the group's archive in chronological order by visiting "stars" along a spiral-shaped timeline. Reading texts from the history of new media art, moving backward and forward in time, can almost feel like flying. From Rhizome.org
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Belgrade On Stage
"The Balkan City: Stage for the End of the XX Century" is the third in a series of multidisciplinary conferences organized by the Yugoslavian Performing Arts Association. While subjects under consideration — the influence of politics and commerce on public urban space and public events, private initiatives contra the privatization and usurpation of public space, the city as theatrical arena for artistic, sports, social, religious and political rituals — supposedly focus on the troubled region, they seem downright universal at the beginning of the XXI Century. The talk fest will be held in Belgrade, from September 14-16, e-mail: yustat@Eunet.yu for information.
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Old New York II
In Gary Simmons's "Wake," fragments of photographs appear as the mouse-hand rolls over them to the tune of nostalgic, popular songs. Visitors to the site can't see the empty New York ballroom-dancing spaces in their entirety; moving the cursor reveals only a few parts of an image at a time. It's a brilliant metaphor for memory: the photos fade away and cannot be recaptured. From Dia Art Center
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Graphically Challenged?
SIGGRAPH, the computer-graphics industry trade show/extravaganza gets bigger and bigger each year, reflecting increased demands for special effects in movies, computing and gaming. This year the $7.4 billion gaming industry will surpass Hollywood as the highest grossing entertainment industry! Last month's SIGGRAPH drew 25,000 people to New Orleans, presumably not primarily to visit the show's usually anemic art exhibition. From Rhizome
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Proto Paparazzi
"Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan" displays the remarkable amateur-photo archives of Gary Lee Boas. Spanning the years 1966 to 1980, this pre-"Entertainment Tonight" collection is comprised of thousands of candid snaps of Marlene Dietrich, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, Dennis Hopper and Marilyn Chambers, among others. The show is part of a mega exhibition dedicated to "series, collections and obsessions," up at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, through October 22. From Yerba Buena Arts
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All The News That Flits
The New York Times has just eliminated Matt Mirapaul's "arts@large," a four-year-old column only available online at the paper's Web site and one of the first regular mainstream venues for commentary about the digital arts, and the news sent readers of global media-arts mailing lists into a dither. Mirapaul has already accepted commissions to write non-arts pieces for the print edition of the so-called Paper of Record (reflecting the writer's professionalism), but that hardly clarifies what a Times spokesman called a "business decision." Could the editorial higher-ups really believe that the digital arts are a passing fancy? From Arts Wire
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(c) 1997 Dick Hodgman
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Summer Drag
Public art often generates controversy, frequently whipped up by the media. This time the print media took a principled stand: After convention-goers from the Advanced Training Institute International (a home-schooling group) were offended by the nudity of a copy of a classical Greek statue of Poseidon at the Sacramento Convention Center, the Convention and Visitors Bureau agreed to clothe the King of the Seas. He was dressed in a toga, then in khaki pants, and finally in shirt, tie and slacks when his picture was taken for the front page of the Sacramento Bee, which editorialized against the city's willingness to accede to the request of the conventioneers. From Arts Wire
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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News & Reviews
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ALSO SEE:
Franklin Furnace went cyber in late 1996; its final exhibition, "In the Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies" attempted to historicize art as info, rather than object. The original Web site and catalog are back online.
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Exhibition visitors and those with outsider info can register online at virtualtelemetrix.com to receive a stock certificate representing a share of John Bielenberg's fictitious Virtual Telemetrix corporation.
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The Future of Music Manifesto is
a declaration of independence for the musically-minded progressive.
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The Leonardo Art and Science Network — a longtime proponent of art-science collaborations and publishers of Leonardo, the journal — persevere in defending themselves against a Jean-come-lately French financial corporation seeking to trademark the name Leonardo. For an update, click here.
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Create your own genetically-modified baby online.
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MoMA STRIKE REPORTS
Filmmakers, artists and writers including Steven Spielberg, Pedro Almodovar, Mike Leigh, Edmund White, Susan Sontag, Leon Golub, Barbara Kruger and Sol Lewitt have signed an open letter to the management of New York's Museum of Modern Art demanding good-faith bargaining with UAW Local 2110, which represents some of the museum's lowest paid, and still-striking, workers.
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