Straight From The Hip.

Tally-ho, Void! I have a label project for my Intro to Jewish Museums class and am looking for objects to write about. I was vacillating between choosing something new and exciting or sticking with old favorites (e.g. Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker). I turned my professor on to Andrea Zittel and Theo Jansen, which is enough to make me annoyingly effervescent for the rest of the day. My favorite thing in the world is getting people to jump on my bandwagon. I'd say "If only I could figure out how to get paid for doing that..." but I think I may be on a roll.

I might be doing a fundraising project with the New Center for Arts and Culture. Hopefully next spring I can enroll in that Fundraising and Philanthropy class, because there is someone who teaches that at my school. It's been a fairly spectacular week so far, what with my training at ICA Boston beginning this Friday, etcetera.

Hm. Maybe this?

"Lori Nix photographs epic scenes of destruction and grandeur, natural wonders and glittering metropolises, magnificent architecture and heroic landscapes that all have one thing in common: they're all fake." (LINK)

Okay, so I am all about the "wow" factor, but face it, no one these days bats an eyelash when you hit them with the subtlety stick. Besides, what better way to entrance people who think they live in a movie than with art that looks like a movie?

There's a Museum of My Dreams mission statement waiting to happen in this post, but I've got no time to edit or deliberate. Twenty minutes until my next class.

EDIT:

OR Miwa Yanagi? "My Grandmothers" series.

OR Daniel Rozin.

Muse-eum.

I'm allowed to post because I am all caught up with my reading (at least, the reading that is available to me right now).

Went to the ICA Boston yesterday on one of the wettest, most miserable days to take public transport ever. I think the interview went well. They seemed to perk up when I told them that I was aiming for a related career. It isn't much, but it is a start. Meanwhile, my roommate might as well have "Harvard" stamped on her forehead. She's being headhunted, and they basically told her to name her price. A-mazing.

Disheveled, wet and cold aside, the view from the fourth floor was worth the trip. One side of the building faces the river and is 99% glass. In a bleak but beautiful way, the sky, the steel, and the river were all the same color. I wonder if it's like living in snow globe during the winter.


Here's a link to Karaoke Wrong Number by Rachel Perry Welty, which is on display there. The description on the ICA Boston website reads: "Karaoke Wrong Number reveals the simultaneous connections and disconnections of contemporary life, where technology both assists and impedes communication." So my bag.


And in regards to this post, a refined list of keywords:

* a public, site-specific installation (or several) -- a video?
* video plays certain instructive "system messages"
* privacy rights (the lack thereof)
* a slick, sassy website
* some negotiation with the city THE SCHOOL
* 1984
* Walter Lippmann
* "safe, soothing" graphics, e.g. the logo for the Department of Homeland Security

I'll need to elaborate this in writing somewhere. I'm a bit scattered lately -- if anyone needs a disciplined course of instruction, it's me.

Just Not As Cool.

Back, in Boston, at 'Deis, green-eyed with envy at Virgil Griffith's grad project:

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.