MoMA Highlights 12/1/12

Atsuko Tanaka
Drawing after Electric Dress
Crayon on paper
1956

This inspired me to cover a whole wall of our apartment with red crayon.

Haus-Rucker-Co.
City 47 Project
Cut and pasted silver gelatin photographs with graphite mounted on board
1967

Diller + Scofidio
Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
1998-2003

Katsuhiko Narita
Sumi
1969

Kitadai Shozo
Mobile (Mobiru) Wood and Japanese paper
1956

Superstudio
The First City from Twelve Ideal Cities
Photolithograph
1971

Twelve Ideal Cities is a wry comment on twentieth-century modernist utopias and it represents, the architects have written, "the supreme achievement of twenty thousand years of civilization." In The First City, or 2,000-Ton City, cubic cells stacked atop one another form a continuous building that stretches across a green, undulating landscape. Each cell is equipped with technology capable of accommodating all human desires and physiological needs. In this city, humans are in a state of equality and death no longer exists, but if an inhabitant tries to rebel against this ideal state, the ceiling of his or her cell will descend with a two-thousand-ton force obliterating the dissenter and making way for a new perfect citizen, This dystopian scenario originated in a critique of modern ideals of planning, rationalization, and consumerism; it uses architecture as a device that, like literature, can express political viewpoints about society.

Bernard Tschumi
The Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York
Introductory panel to Episode 3: The Tower (The Fall)
Photographic reproduction with colored synthetic laminate
1980

Taking the A Train into the Ocean

Missed my stop on my way to JFK and suddenly found myself on the A train crossing the ocean! It felt like Chihiro taking the train in Spirited Away:



I fantasized that the train would sink beneath the waves and I'd never be heard from again.

Treehouses for the Homeless

I thought both Christo's Gates and Eliasson's Waterfalls were ugly, uninspired and over-hyped. There. I said it. Meanwhile I just stumbled across Tadashi Kawamata's Tree Huts in Madison Sqare Park never having heard of them (or that they had been installed way back in September and are coming down in February) and am in love! Madison Square Park in particular has had a series of great public art including installations by artists Mark Dion and Wim Delvoye. Here's to more great pieces being quietly installed all over the city instead of a few lame blockbusters!
























I like looking at this one next to Steichen's The Flatiron (1904):

I Love Living in the Future

Thanks to Jordan I've just found out about this fantastic new single for the band Delaware, fantastic not for the music but for how it's presented:



True, it would be a little annoying to have to open every song in your library separately but I'd like the option. Maybe Apple will purchase and incorporate it into iTunes the way they did with CoverFlow (wishful thinking?).

I thought that would be hands down the most amazing technology I'd encounter that week until I read this on Pink Tentacle via BoingBoing:

"Scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs. Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity."

The scientists claimed that with advances in this technology we would be able to see a person's thoughts, dreams, or hallucinations but I find that difficult to believe, at least using this process. It's my understanding that the computer is only able to sort out what your mind is emitting because it has a clear example, a constant, to check it against. While I assume your mind emits the same signals for thought, without this constant it won't be able to identify the variable. And as far as dreams and hallucinations are concerned, do we really see them? And is this machine picking up the raw data entering our mind from the eyes or the data that our mind has finished processing and recognizing? And at what point do dreams and hallucinations occur? Is that monster in the corner added by the paranoid brain before or after the image is processed in your mind? I think we're safe for now.

It's not really surprising that both of these are coming out of Japan, the same people who are actively on their way towards building a space elevator...

Who is the Better Ninja? (It's #3)

Catalog of Monsters

In 2005 I went to the Little Boy exhibition at the Japan Society which featured images from the book An Anatomical Guide to Monsters (1967) that I desperately scoured the internet for but couldn't find. Thankfully someone finally posted some more images from either it or a book doing exactly the same thing and has allowed me to tag this post with all my favorite labels:

On a related note, these are also cool:

Shipwrecks and Whales

I momentarily considered starting a parallel blog just of images I liked but figured I already posted on here too infrequently. Here is an image I found on Brian Wood's (creator of my favorite graphic novel DMZ) website. No information available other than that I love Japanese prints:



I have to add that the shadow of a rock in the lower left reminds me of these fantastic Right Whale photographs I just saw on National Geographic's website (via Zooillogix):

Teacups, Ping Pong & the Matrix

So I found this photo (click it to see it larger) by the Japanese artist Nagi Noda and really appreciated its wit and clever simplicity. Later I came across this video—also Japanese (coincidence?)—and felt the same:



It reminded me of Michel Gondry who, despite his many critics (including myself), at the end of the day makes me very happy to see him act upon his every child-like whimsical notion, and can we even begin to contemplate the multiple meanings of him making a "Sweded" remake of the trailer of his own movie? (Please also note his wearing black gloves to signify him being Mos Def):



Oh, and as long as I'm on the subject of weird Japanese kids, floating, The Matrix, whimsy and general coolness, here's one of my favorite animated shorts (From the Matrix spin-off Animatrix):

Little Napoleons & Japan

Today I started helping my friend Larissa make costumes of characters in her paintings, (specifically Little Napoleons) to use in front of a bluescreen towards making a performance/painting video to explain her work at an upcoming show in Denmark. I'm going to fuck this up but in a nutshell they represent patriarchal/domineering/rigid, binary gender systems trying to take over a world of Cry Babies/Maternal Men:



I'm really excited to be working on something visual & physical with another person instead of putting all my creative energy into audio/virtual stuff all alone.

They remind me of these portraits my friend Jordan tipped me to by Japanese artists who couldn't visually comprehend newly arrived westerners after two hundred of years of isolationism.


[Link to Commodore Perry & the Opening of Japan]

Oh, and I really liked this painting she had clipped out for inspiration, The Battle of Lances: