Ekstasis

scandyfactory: copyright null and void you smug fucks

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:34:11 -0500

copyright null and void you smug fucks

tragos: msodradek: Gerhard Richter Cell 1988Oil on canvas, 201...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:28:03 -0500

msodradek:

Gerhard Richter Cell 1988
Oil on canvas, 201 x 140 cm
© Gerhard Richter/Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

An artist who has wrestled protractedly with the relationship between painting and photography (one might as well here call it “skiagraphy”, shadow-drawing) is Gerhard Richter. In the 1960s he started to make meticulous copies of photographs from newspapers, magazines and various apparently arbitrary sources. He initially said that he did this because “I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do”. (…)

In 1988 Richter exhibited fifteen paintings of members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a revolutionary terrorist under the umbrella of the Red Army Faction, at MoMA, New York. Shadow engulfs the pictures, obliterating rather than elucidating form. (…) The paintings seem disinclined to engage too closely with their fiercely controversial subjects - political violence, suicide, even (it was widely rumoured at the time) state-sanctioned murder. As in the tenebrist tradition (…), tone in the optical sense determines tone in the emotional ones. The pictures insist on the dignity of the dead, but also on the mundane materiality of death. Shadow makes them dense and concrete, but also deeply ambiguous, their meaning and sympathy (again, Richter has consistently condemned extremist ideologies of any sort) endlessly negotiable.

Keith Miller, The Emblem of Earthly Vanities.

thismachineisobsolete: dbmurphy: deathtoreason: jeffchord: ii...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:25:07 -0500

thismachineisobsolete:

dbmurphy:

deathtoreason:

jeffchord:

iisabelle:

(via sebaxxxtian)

filthygorgeousthings: Once you’ve committed to Twitter and...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:28:04 -0500

filthygorgeousthings:

Once you’ve committed to Twitter and you’re ready to take it to the next level, there are Twitter stockings. (Etsy) (F/lthyGorgeousTh/ngs)

…Analog manifestations of the digital.

nevver: Hunter S. Thompson

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:56:41 -0500

nevver:

Hunter S. Thompson

nevver: Belushi, Ordinary finds.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:01:21 -0500

nevver:

Belushi, Ordinary finds.

From "A History of Origami" by Bob Hicok

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:56:14 -0500

nightmarebrunette:

i cried
by thinking of all the people
who’ve never broken a shop window, not the baker’s
window, the bead-seller’s,
who sells beads for purposes
i find hard to list: necklaces,
the hanging of strings of beads
in doorways, the owning of beads
just in case.

breaking a shop window with a piece of shale
the size of my heart, a piece of shale
on which i’ve drawn my heart, not my actual heart
but my feelings of my heart,
since i’ve never seen my heart,
would set something free.

i don’t know what that something is
but it would be free. […]

it would be free and look like a bird, an actual bird
or a dollar folded into a bird, a dollar bird
in a dollar boat.

which is to say
i believe origami arrives
when we need it most.

i can’t prove this but i can’t prove
you’re a good person though i suspect
you’re a good person.

Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die'

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:42:43 -0500

Interview with Umberto Eco: 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die':

austinkleon:

Great interview. I particularly like this quote:

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.

psifisamurai: fuckyeahkarlelvis: (via chixnglasses)

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:39:42 -0500

psifisamurai:

fuckyeahkarlelvis:

(via chixnglasses)

It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality [...]. It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:31:24 -0500

It is a game, everything is a game. When all four of them are lying on the ground, that cannot be handled naturalistically. That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality [...]. It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive.:

tragos:

msodradek:

Beckett, about the staging of Waiting for Godot.

I’ve always loved the fact that Beckett was a huge fan of games: rugby, tennis and chess especially. Living in Paris, he couldn’t wait for his weekly rugby matches, in which he apparently played pretty well, despite lacking wind and health.

Art itself has always struck me as survival shaped into a game of forms.

So in the spirit of Beckett, I say: Go Blue!

(Though I wish they would fail better not worse at the moment.)

If people over 65 in each state made the laws, 0 states would have gay marriages; if people under 30 made the laws, 38 states would have gay marriages.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:30:20 -0500

If people over 65 in each state made the laws, 0 states would have gay marriages; if people under 30 made the laws, 38 states would have gay marriages.:

syntheticpubes:

Old people are the enemy, and they vote (more than you).

Re: paradigm shifts…

“Q: What happens to people who still believe in the old paradigm?

A: They have to die and go away.”

nevver: Electric Mountains | Design You Trust

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:49:45 -0500

nevver:

Electric Mountains | Design You Trust

lrnhnsz: ihavegoodtaste: “Nothing happens in the world? Are...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:35:44 -0500

lrnhnsz:

ihavegoodtaste:

“Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

The value of voids

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:33:00 -0500

The value of voids:

cloois:

On the presence of absence:

Perception is at least a twofold process: the first stage is an awareness; the second attends more directly to the particular stimulus. In staking out our place in the world, we begin by reforming the relevant order as a means of overlaying significance onto that terrain. Disturbance, whether by adding or subtracting from the landscape, is the first realization of environmental design.

[…]

The power of absences is felt in varying contexts. We notice for the first time certain structures when they have been torn down for a parking lot or when the site is vacant, awaiting construction. Like the exaggerated sense of the missing tooth, one becomes more aware after it has been extracted. Departure from the normal order, whether it be construction in the natural setting or destruction in the urban environment, controls our attention. We can focus only on the void, at times forgetting the subject that has been removed.

In all instances of design, a void invites us to participate in a way that the solid cannot. The challenge is to discover the voids we pass through, staking claim to see both the voids and the solids, discovering both equally.

(roomthily:bobulate)

…This is becoming a thing.

Apropos of Nothing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:21:59 -0500

mills:

Sometimes when I review what I’ve written here, I am greatly relieved to remember that it will all be lost. It is a common enough trope that we fear death not solely because of oblivion but also because of erasure, not solely for the cessation of consciousness but also because everything we made, said, and did will disappear from the Earth someday. One reads that many “want to leave something behind,” don’t want their lives to dissolve into the froth and scum of generations, cannot bear that their entire worlds will become historical trivia and eventually will be forgotten.

But I am pleased that whatever the advance of the ubiquitous archival process the Internet represents, however sophisticated the indexing or permanent the storage, someday there will be none of this nonsense left, none of these noxious little emissions nor anything of the best ones, none of the preening and straining and posing or the fortunate moments of slight quality; and even were it to remain somehow, no one will care to read it: there will be too much else to sort through. The mathematics of populations ensures that all the photos, all the glib assertions about subjects I barely understand, all that I have made and indeed all that I am will be gone.

This noise! One can see, after years of being shamed by the voracious appetite of one’s self for attention and approval, its contemptible posturing and pageantry, how nice it will be to have no self, to be no self, and to have nothing of the self remain.

Won’t it be nice when this all disappears?

…Except it’s not nonsense, at least as far as WE are not nonsense. You’re right that our “emissions” are unlikely to have any real staying power on their own, but two things should be considered:

(1. Those bits of ourselves we choose to share, choose to have archived, don’t exist in a vacuum, nor do those of all the others who have made the same choice. Any one may be meaningless, but the larger that data set grows, the more information can be extracted from it, as a whole. You say, of our various and sundry pieces of information, that, “…even were it to remain somehow, no one will care to read it: there will be too much else to sort through.” Thats’s just it, though…everything we write here, everything we experience, is an integral part of that “too much else.” We’re adding to that bulk, right alongside the information you more highly value and with larger and larger data sets comes the possibility for more and more meta-data, more culling of our pictures and our words and thus more layers of information (context) being added on to them. Context brings me to me second point…

(2. Actually, it’s Lyn Hejinian’s point (and a bit of Arendt, too) from her essay “Reason”:

Along comes something — launched in context.

It is almost automatic to us to assume that this something (on the one hand) and we (on the other) exist independently — that something was independently elsewhere (out of sight and mind) prior to coming into the zone in which we perceive it and which we, at the moment of this perceptual encounter, designate as context. Furthermore, it is at the moment that we perceive this something that we ourselves come into that context — into our coinciding (by chance?) with something. The context, in other words, is the medium of our encounter, the ground of our becoming (i.e., happening to be) present at the same place at the same time. By this reasoning, one would also have to say that context too is launched — or at least that it comes into existence qua context when something is launched in such a way as to become perceptible to us and thereby to involve us — whomever we are — strangers (even if, perhaps, only momentarily strangers) to each other previously and now inseparable components of the experience…

…But the phrase or sentence with which I’ve become obsessed, “Along comes something — launched in context,” announces a moment of incipience; one could even say that it is itself, as a phrase or utterance, a moment of incipience — an appearing, a being born — coming into what Hannah Arendt calls “the condition of natality,” the condition we all have in common.

Something which wasn’t here before is here now; it appears and it appeared to us, and it is acknowledge by the sensation this is happening. And as such, as a moment of incipience or point of natality, it constitutes, in a very particular and crucial sense, an action — since (to continue Hannah Arendt’s argument) it is “engaged in founding and preserving” something, which “creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” and it thereby undertakes “the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.” This “new beginning … can make itself felt in the world … because [it] possesses the capacity of [itself] beginning something anew.”

…Our context is important, whether any one of the individual bits which comprise it is or is not.

Photo

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:55:00 -0500

Temporary.cc

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:29:00 -0500

Temporary.cc:

“For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.”

…There’s nothing wrong with indexing, with time shifting, with blogging and reblogging, with the tools we have at our disposal to remember bits of our world. There is however, something very right about the possibility (inevitability) of forgetting, about the character it lends to an object or situation. That object or situation, faced with the possibility of being forgotten, becomes an event, a spectacle.

Forgetting is important, but remember that a life proceeded by addition and not subtraction and that our archiving mechanisms are more than just hordes of data; they are physical manifestations of our “context,” our relations and our reality.

modfetish: spitclub: The Brave And The Bold - selfportraits -...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:00:51 -0500

modfetish:

spitclub:

The Brave And The Bold - selfportraits - Fleshbot

Purdey2000 I heart her.

Ana Marie Cox's Twitter FAQ

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:50:45 -0500

rkb:

Just watched her on Rachel Maddow and wound my way to this:

Okay that’s two whole answers that seem, like, earnest and stuff. Are you okay? Running a fever? Or, more seriously, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ANA? Ha ha. While, yes, you may have noticed a certain lack of reverence for Washington, its traditions, its residents, and its society, that doesn’t mean I have contempt for it, or them. Washington is the sausage factory that produces democracy and while it can get ugly inside the end-product is both tasty and relatively good for you. I’ve never really understood why journalists get jaded about politics. Cynical, sure, but if you’re jaded about covering THE FUCKING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES who, you know, HAPPENS TO BE BLACK THIS TIME, then go home. I’m excited to be here, and thank you, readers, for helping to make that possible.

…I’ve had a crush on AMC since I was in highschool, when I only knew her as Wonkette. I’m probably one of only about 500 people who has a hardcover copy of her book (which is a great read, for the record) Dog Days.

tiredofbeingignored: ihatethismess: loveandzombies: queero: O...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:35:09 -0500

tiredofbeingignored:

ihatethismess:

loveandzombies:

queero:

OUTRAGE: delivers a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted politicians who actively campaign against the LGBT community they covertly belong to. “Outrage” boldly reveals the hidden lives of some of our nation’s most powerful policymakers, details the harm they’ve inflicted on millions of Americans, and examines the media’s complicity in keeping their secrets. (www.outragethemovie.com)

So they are gonna out them? Im kinda confused.

…Outting closeted politicians always seemd like the LGBT-rights nuclear option to me. It’s going to get a lot of press and it will almost certainly damage the careers of prominent conservative political figures, but, in the end, it just seems to be re-enforcing the meme that “gay = bad.” This is to say nothing about the ethics of it.