Tag Archives | Art

Wallace Berman’s Kabbalah Cinema

By on January 24, 2013 in News 0

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture.… Read the rest

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A Box For Manipulating The News On Other People’s Computer Screens

By on January 18, 2013 in News 3

The artistic creation of Julian Oliver and Daniil Vasiliev, the Newstweek device allows for “altering reality on a per-network basis” by literally changing the headlines on people’s screens:

Newstweek is a device for manipulating news read by other people on wireless hotspots. Built into a small and innocuous wall plug, the Newstweek device allows writers to remotely edit news read on wireless devices without the awareness of their users.

While news is increasingly read digitally, it still follows a top-down distribution model and thus often falls victim to the same political and corporate interests that have always sought to manipulate public opinion. Newstweek intervenes upon this model, providing opportunity for citizens to have their turn to manipulate the press; generating propaganda or simply ‘fixing facts’ as they pass across a wireless network.

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Paul Laffoley’s Architectonic Thoughtforms

By on January 17, 2013 in News 1

Artist Paul Laffoley is kicking off 2013 with a show at New York’s Kent Gallery before heading to London’s Hayward Gallery and The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Once labeled as an “outsider artist,” Laffoley is achieving the kind of recognition that many “mainstream” artists (whatever they are) can only dream of. We paid tribute to him in our classic TV series over a decade ago:

Taken from DisinfoTV on DVD.

Subscribe to Disinformation’s YouTube channel.

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The Words of Traitors: bridging expectation, mediums and genres

By on January 15, 2013 in News 1

Announcement from Modern Mythology:

Described as “Beautiful!” by award-winning sequential artist and author David Mack (Kabuki, Daredevil, Dexter), Words of Traitors is an attempt at laying bare the inner workings of hope and loss, love and despair, with the raw fury of a complete mental breakdown. At the brink of death, our life flashes before our eyes. Are those memories nothing more than lies? Our memories construct our sense of identity, but can we rely on them?

This work explores the fallibility of memory and how much our memories change over time and ultimately betray us, becoming “words of traitors.” Each story is based on a jigsaw of real memories told by a fictional narrator. The combination of magical realism and real life allows both the writer and the reader to explore the language of the  subconscious.

The production process was an intense alchemical experience, much of which was documented behind-the-scenes on the Words of Traitors website.

… Read the rest

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Brian Butler Performs Aleister Crowley’s ‘Bartzabel Working’ Ritual

By on December 27, 2012 in News 1

Witness the spirit of Mars summoned three weeks ago in Los Angeles in haunting and beautiful fashion, as Butler invokes forces I would be scared to tamper with:

L&M Arts presents The Bartzabel Working, a performance by filmmaker and artist Brian Butler, on December 4th, 2012. Based on a ceremonial evocation of the spirit of Mars, first written and performed in London in 1910 by the famed British occultist Aleister Crowley, the ritual later became part of Los Angeles history in 1946 when Jack Parsons conducted his own version of this rite with the intention of placing a Martial curse on a pre-scientology L. Ron Hubbard.

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Magick, Abandonment, and the Desolate Beauty of Decay

By on December 20, 2012 in News 12

Picture: "Abandoned Factory" by Reddit User 'NotaMethAddict' (C)

Those of you with a taste for the desolate beauty of structures abandoned to nature may find a lot to like at Reddit.com’s AbandonedPorn subreddit. With a subscriber base of almost 80,000 the page is a never-ending virtual gallery dedicated to humanity’s vainglorious efforts to hold back the forces of entropy.

I developed my own taste for this kind of thing as a teenager. We had discovered an abandoned concrete factory in the middle of a plot of land left to nature. The building, with its flooded sub-levels, half-ruined factory floor and warren of abandoned offices, held an irresistible lure for us. Later, we discovered that the very same plot of land had once been a prison camp for captured German military officers during World War II. The factory rising above the scrubby trees and fields of grass cast a long shadow upon a territory long haunted by shadows of its own.… Read the rest

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Artist Behind Faux-NYPD PSA Ads Arrested Following Investigation By Counter-Terrorism Unit

By on December 18, 2012 in News 5

The creator of the previously noted fantastic poster campaign was apparently regarded as a terrorist threat and subject to a manhunt for daring to mock the police, the Verge reports:

A street artist who hung satirical posters criticising police surveillance activities has been arrested after an NYPD investigation tracked him to his doorstep. Essam Attia placed the Big Brother-style adverts in locations throughout Manhattan, using a fake Van Wagner maintenance van and uniforms to avoid detection. Attia now faces 56 counts of criminal possession of a forged instrument and grand larceny possession of stolen property.

Months after forensics teams and a “counter-terrorism” unit was spotted on the scene, the NYPD last Wednesday successfully tracked down and arrested the 29-year-old art school vandal, who identified himself in the video as a former “geo-spatial analyst” serving US military operations in Iraq.

… Read the rest

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The Mininum Wage Machine

By on December 15, 2012 in News 30

Via Andrew Fishman’s Art, minimum wage machine is a sculpture installation by Blake Fall-Conroy, allowing anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they wish:

Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York.

This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary.  Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day…at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.

… Read the rest

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Buzz Coastin: ‘eye here amerika spinning’

By on December 14, 2012 in News 22

I’ve quietly enjoyed the work of Buzz Coastin off-site for a while, so I thought I’d share one of his more recent works with my fellow Disinfonauts.

Via Absurdist Video Art:

BUZZ COASTIN is one of the most prolific online video makers who specializes in taking the unlimited library of internet video (ranging from vlogs, online news, porn, as well as a vast array of audio sources) and mashing them together into an absurdist smorgasburg of sight and sound revealing both the absurdity of the content which is created by others, and the new process of the artist whose paintbrush  now only has to digitally dip into the overwhelming content which already exists.

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Aaron Jacob Willman’s ‘Cloudbusting’

By on December 13, 2012 in News 4

A fractured look at the purported paranormal practice of ‘cloudbusting‘ from video artist :

“combination of real-time data moshing, conventional data moshing, data bending, and editing.”

Cloudbusting from Aaron Jacob Willman on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in datamoshing (intentionally using digital glitches and compression artifacts as art), there are several video tutorials online.

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