Singing Glass - Mika Aoki Japanese artist Mika Aoki creates exquisite glass sculptures inspired by her fascination with the visible and invisible qualities of the medium. What at first appears to be high-speed macro photographs of water droplets, turn out to be physical stationary sculptures carefully crafted from glass (and occasionally plastic). Aoki often derives her inspiration from the forms found in microscopic life such as spores, fungi, viruses or even sperm. With a masterful command of light and glass, Aoki depicts these propagating life forms in a haunting yet beautiful fashion, which she calls “singing glass.”
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Manufacturing Consent: A Propaganda Model - Book Excerpt By Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky ---------------------------- The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite.
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Russian anarchist guerrilla artists from the Voina art collective Nick Sturdee ............... Russian guerrilla artists from the Voina art collective are facing criminal prosecution for their controversial brand of political street art. Nick Sturdee reports on the widespread frustration that has fostered the movement... Scandal goes down well in the art world, and the organisers of this April’s prestigious state Innovation art award in Moscow clearly decided to make the most of their moment. The queues outside the cavernous Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture — Konstantin Melnikov’s 1927 constructivist bus depot refurbished as a gallery for Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich’s wife, and graced by Amy Winehouse at its opening in 2008 — were to be expected; so of course were the chic crowd and the TV cameras. But the on-stage video installation of revolution in Cairo, Japanese tsunami, and London student riots — accompanied by epic dissonant swells and jabbing chords, lyrics shouted by a male voice choir and an albino’s falsetto solo — was an unmistakable statement. We live in momentous times, Russia is no exception (or hopes not to be) and Russian art is ready for the challenge.
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Library of Dust David Maisel ... Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patient from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters.
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Occupy Dallas art photos Occupy Dallas protesters were given permission by the city of Dallas on Monday to remain camped at Pioneer Plaza near the Dallas Convention Center until Friday, October 14 at 5 p.m. [UPDATE: That permit was revoked late Tuesday. See below for more details.] The group began protesting last week in Dallas to speak against the rising costs in health care, "gross mishandling" of the mortgage crisis, and growing national debt, according to a permit the group was given Monday evening.
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A Note on the Rock Art of Lake Namtso, Tibet Lake Namtso, one of two holy lakes in Tibet, forms the centre of the valley floor and is surrounded by the Nyanchen Tanglha mountain range. In 1986, Robert Hefner, President of the Bradshaw Foundation, found himself standing here on top of the world (or what felt like it) a little while before he made a remarkable discovery. This is how he described it: "The deep blue Tibetan sky encompassed barren, craggy, rocky peaks, full of spectacular geological structures typical of the Tibetan plateau. Beside the road was a pile of carved religious rocks and a pole with many fluttering prayer flags. Only 300 metres below was a sapphire lake enclosed by snowy peaks: the great valley of Lake Namtso."
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New World Transparent Specimens - Iori Tomita Japanese artist Iori Tomita transforms the scientific technique of preserving and dying organism specimens into an art form with his series, 'shinsekai [toumei hyouhon]' ('new world transparent specimens'). Tomita began experimenting with the preservation and staining of fish while working as a fisherman, gradually developing his mastery of the nuances of the process necessary for refining the form and colour of the pieces. for each specimen, tomita first removes the scales and skin of fish that have been preserved in formaldehyde. He leaves the organism to soak in a mixture of blue stain, ethyl alcohol, and glacial acetic acid before utilizing the enzyme trypsin to break down protein and muscles, stopping the reaction as soon as they become transparent but before they lose their form. The bones are then stained by soaking the fish in a combination of potassium hydroxide and red dye, before the specimen is preserved in glycerin.
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Brian Goggin chaos-provoking sculptures Through a versatile use of materials, an intuitively driven research process, and creative visioning, I work to create artwork that poetically morphs expected notions of how we perceive and interact with our everyday environment. The work explores contemporary discoveries in the field of consciousness, and adds to a developing artistic mythology. My work grows out of the context of site-specific sculpture installation, the environment, world vernacular architecture, literature, science and philosophy. I manifest the artwork in a process that often involves teams of people including those outside of the studio, museum and gallery spaces including for example collaborations with city planners, philosophers, scientists and architects. The resulting pieces develop an identity and attain an often previously unimagined history, and wondrously nestle into the site, offering the opportunity for aesthetic arrest....
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Album-a-Day - Instant art movement, Crap Art project What are those rock stars domg wlth their months long reoordmg sessrons ln the Bahamas anyway? The bedroom genluses who partrcrpate m the Crap Art websrte Album a Day project (crapart spaoebar org/aad) wnte record and mrx an entue album (well at least 20 minutes ) worth of songs m 24 hours and upload the results for others to hear (usually at mp3 com) The site's motto IS A bad song iS better than no song.....
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