Beyond Nationalism: Honorable Medals and Infographic Olympiads

In the earliest modern Olympics humans excelling in the arts also received gold, silver and bronze medals.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 with the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin's hopes that men should be educated both physically and intellectually (competing in sports not wars), the arts were part of the games too. Five artistic competitions were introduced and architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture oeuvres inspired by sports would combat for gold. After 1954 this event fizzled, replaced by the slightly less competitive cultural olympiads.

The 8-Bit Games!

Anyways, I agree with Coubertin: I like critical minds more than I like nationalism, so it's nice to see all the creations that have emerged from thinking about sportive prouesses not just as physical competitions but as signs of global realities that should be challenged. For instance Gustavo Sousa has come up with these simple infographics using the Olympic flag's five rings to illustrate data from each of the five continents - from Coca Cola sales, to total populations and CO2 emissions per capita. And the Guardian reported on a team from Imperial College and the Royal Statistical Society determining in real-time the actual amounts of medals won for each country in relationship to GDP or population... so for instance while China may have officially won 24 medals, in relation to its GDP it has a petty 0,95, and while Columbia has 2, according to the study it has won an honorable 4,59.

And all the rest...

Cul-de-sac de l'Évolution: Carcharodon Megalodon

Requins, peur, mort, myths et chasse:

Published: OWT on Reprocess

Some of the images I found on Google Books were published in OWT's Manchester School of Art 13th Issue on the theme "Reprocess." According to the zine's topic they were printed over past OWT pages (in other words reprocessed): "Submissions from the OWT back catalogue form a background layer of pre-existing themes, ready to be manipulated and reprocessed by new work. This changes the context and makes new interpretations while initiating serendipitous collaborations. GF Smith Colourplan and six-colour Riso printing help add further variables. No two zines in the run of 150 are the same."

For a the rest of the zine's potential pages: http://owtcreative.com/reprocess.html

Found Public Art Fund

"Ilha das Flores": A Tomato, Thumbs and Pigs for a Short Explanation of Capitalism

Isle of Flowers (or Ilha das Flores in Portuguese) is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado. Following a tomato from garden to dump, it delivers dry narration, witty editing and eclectic visuals for an unexpectingly cruel message.

Animals and Humans: What is Art, What is Beauty?

The topic and works of the Grand Palais' current exhibition seem worth a visit. Displayed slightly lower for the child in all of us, the exhibit goes over the European art scene's take on animals. In the words of the curator Emmanuelle Héran, it gathers all art depicting animals and touches upon a variety of ideas -- the cultural norms of beauty (why is a toad ugly and a horse honorable?), or the role human historical developments since the 16th c. had on our relationship to animals (for instance if during the colonial years the endless discovery of new species meant animals were symbols of bountiful imagination, today the predicament of their extinction is underlying all of their artistic portrayals). There's art, aesthetic theory, human and natural history to produce this:

Beauté animale : présentation de l'exposition by Rmn-Grand_Palais

And my favorite little creatures - birds - are represented by the iconic Dodo, whose myth is complexified here:

La véritable histoire du Dodo by Rmn-Grand_Palais

Living Art, Being Dreams and Eating Frogs: Gala and Salvador Host a Party

Design: A Traditional Journal

"Effectively it's a museum about everything, everywhere, ever": The New Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archeology

Sylvia Plath, front-doors, humanity, Totem poles, objects made 1.8 million years ago, Captain Cook, death, sex in Ancient Rome, snakes and ladders and other things in the Cambridge University Anthropology and Archeology Museum's collections.

What in the World is Art: An Example from the Field

A few days before the 2012 Whitney Biennial opened, a web page with the museum's logo, template, language and a similar url (www.whitney2012.com instead of www.whitney.com) announced the institution's decision to give up on certain "generous corporate donations" by terminating its partnership with the Deutsche Bank and Sotheby's. According to this release by resigning from such benefits the Whitney was acknowledging and, especially displaying its role in upholding "a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers" (I would add art lovers). The Whitney was taking a stance against the Deutsche Bank's corporate conduct (the bank just settled a legal dispute of $202 million for reselling knowingly shaky mortgages between 2007 and 2009) and deploring Sotheby's recent internal policies (the lock-out of its art handlers while making record profits and increasing its director's revenue from $2.4million in 2009 to $10.3 million in cash and benefits in 2011).

The world of art is a weird one that exists through the belief that certain "things" have magical-like forces over us. Often these magical qualities are explained by using intellectual concepts, discussing production prowess or expressing notions of aesthetics, while actually most of these "things with agencies" gain their aura through the tricky powers of financial markets. So for a museum to use its own existence to reveal the inner-workings of this weird cosmology - for instance museums may use artists because their sponsors need to sell things that may gain value if the museum uses this artist's work - was impressive, almost as impressive as good art. That excitement, however, lasted only until I learned the website was a hoax and experienced the Whitney biennial's overall blandness.

If that fake virtual press release was the most creative project to come out of the Biennial, I'm also excited to say that their hoax is part of a series of fake press releases and that their latest has just denounced the Whitney’s recent actual request for donations from blue-chip artists of work valued over $500,000.

C'était un rendez-vous: Space, Speed, Mapping

Meat

This is a literal (hence difficult) short documentary called Le Sang des Bêtes by Georges Franju about animal slaughter and meat production. Although filmed in the late 1940s in two slaughterhouses and meat markets near Paris, this should be footage to think how we (whether in France, Canada or Italy) today (or in the 1940s) consider animal-slaughter (whether that of a horse, calf or lamb) and the ethics/responsibilities and labour behind it. 

Do we inflict more 'pain' today than yesterday on the animals we eat (how can this be assessed)? Are we more alienated from the meat we eat? Where do the butchers killing these animals come from today? What are the contemporary methods used to kill these animals? What implications do these questions have on today's food production and consumption?

Everyone's Watching

Shibuya, Tokyo (Japan), 2012
Les Archives Nationales, Paris (France), 2010
Pelourinho, Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), 2011
Imperial Palace, Kyoto (Japan), 2012

Tourisme d'Antan: Couleurs, Rayures et Ruines

Extraits de la superbe collection Pathé: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/holidays-in-greece/query/delphi

Bienvenue/Welcome

I collaborated with Ming Lin and Didi Ohri on the latest edition of their anthropoartistique interventions on Montreal's foodscape: the Bienvenue/Welcome placemats. Come join the launch of the set de table tonight at the Nouveau Palais on Bernard. There will be food presented on thoughtful stuff and beats by DJ CadenceWeapon.

... And in an perfect concidence of sorts the CCA is having its own montreal food event this same afternoon: "A taste for Montréal" goes on from 4 to 9 pm in collaboration with spacingmontreal and avenue 8, and people from the SAT's foodLab and Toqué.

Death and the Virtual Platforms that Make You Look Alive Forever

Hundreds of Facebook users, bloggers, and twitterers die a day. What agency do their profiles, still present on these virtual platforms, have on the living? Do their web-based identities ease the mourning process or make it more difficult? Could the virtual be the only space where the dead and the living co-exist with similar materialities?...

The Atlantic just published a great interview of Patrick Stokes, a philosopher working out of Melbourne University about these ideas. Best quote from How Facebook Lets You Live Forever (Sort Of):

"we really have continuing moral duties to dead people even though they don't exist anymore; they exist as objects of duty. That's something Kierkegaard talks about, the fact that we have these duties to dead people, like the duty to remember them, or the duty not to slander them, and so forth. We live with this very profound ontological ambiguity with dead people: they both absolutely don't exist anymore, and yet they exist as these people that we have to love and care about."

Back from Japan

Published on Social Networks and Memory

C Magazine's spring edition on Memory just came out, with my article on the 9.11 Memorial - "Reflecting Absence or When Social Networks Memorialize."

The Rare and Popular Art of Google Books

Since my blog post on scanned fingers in Google books to question the medium/message dichotomy I found this wonderful little tumblr: called the Art of Google Books, it archives Google's virtual library's best incidents.

p.44-45 of Sketches of Young Gentlemen: Dedicated to the Young Ladies by Charles Dickens, Hablot Knight Browne (1838).

p. 270 of A Popular History of Reptiles (1843)

p. 22 of Cunningham's textbook of Anatomy by Daniel John Cunningham and Arthur Robinson, 1918.

Things and Happiness

Boris Vian et sa La complainte du progrès (1956) (The lament against progress). Le frigidaire, l'évier en fer, le tabouret à glace, l'armoire à cuillère, un four en verre, la tourniquette pour faire la vinaigrette, le canon à patate, les draps qui chauffent, ou l'arrache poulet et le bonheur sera à vous?

What's That Made Of?

Here is a fascinating designer from Holland called Christien Meindertsma. Her work focuses on cycles of production. To do so she follows materials from their origins to their consumable form. With her project pig 05049 she went to the source - the specific 05049 pig - and collected all the products resulting from him/her. The original question behind this project was if all the parts of the animal were used. The answer is yes. 05049's remains were used up entirely: finding their way into candy, paint, shine, glue, soap, breaks, tiramisu, beer, collagen and American bullets (among others). All these were photographed in a book.

She's also explored lambs and wool, flax and string, plants and paper.

It's inspiring!

Buying Individuals, Data Collections and Online Ads

From the great article A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click, published in The Atlantic by Communications professor Joesph Turow.

Mapping Movement: The Black-throated Gray Warbler Migrates

Generated by Cornell University and public contributed observations, there are a whole lot of mesmerizing interactive maps capturing a whole lot of bird migration patterns, here: ebirds. 

Two Mediums, One Story: Damien Hirst Does the Art World One Spot at a Time

Damien Hirst's International art world invasion continued on January 12th 2012 with 331 of his spot paintings on display-and-sell missions in every Gagosian gallery world-wide (that's 11 - three in New York, two in London, and one each in Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills).

Two fantastic art critics similarly discuss this cruelly banal cultural phenomenon through two different mediums  - Peter Schjeldahl covered it in this week's New Yorker with his article Spot On and Hennesy Youngman propagated his thoughts via YouTube.

(Hennesy the younger art critic will be talking at Concordia U. in Montreal next week thursday 26th. for an event called What Does It Mean, And What Can You Do About It? )

Jan 18th Wikistrike: Free Knowledge, Copy Rights, Intellectual Property

"SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet."

- Wikipedia