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Friday, November 30, 2012

The Body Argument



The body has long been a subject for artists. Twentieth century artists, such as Anthony Gormley, took a renewed focus on the body.

Twenty first century artists continued to look at the body for inspiration:
“The Body Argument” at Emanuel Layr (Contemporary Art Daily)

I'm not going to review that show. I just liked the title and it made me think about the body as a machine.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Freedom to be bad


If you haven't heard of K-pop (Korean pop music), Gangnam Style, or Korean K-pop star Psy, I apologize. You unfortunately can not unknow this. But it's not all terrible. Or it is, but that's kind of the point.

First off, and rather surprising to me:

Anish Kapoor Dances Gangnam Style for Liberty



Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Picabia and Crypto-Water-Computers



A while ago a found a fascinating blog post about 'water computers' entitled, "Pruned: Gardens as Crypto-Water-Computers". It somehow makes a connection between early economic calculation machines, computers, and victorian age water gardens. Oddly though, I couldn't help but think of Fances Picabia's mechanical paintings when looking at the diagrams of water based calculating machines.

A Wealth of Thought






I've often thought that our current monetary system forces us to into an unwelcomed pragmatism in our daily lives. So often casual conversation devolves into talk about bills, rent payments, automotive costs, and unintended arithmetical chit chat. It's innocent enough, of course, because it's something we're all affected by. It's an absurd 'system' of quantifying an otherwise loose agreement of value. But it's all we're stuck with at the moment and we have little freedom to do anything about it. (Not least of which because we're too busy keeping track of these sets of numbers). Sorry, I'm ranting here.


The journal Science recently published a study where they attempted to determine how much difference in decision making there is between being rich and poor. In other words, does it occupy more thought having more or less money. Unsurprisingly, people with less money spend more time thinking about how to meet their expenses, whereas people with more money don't worry about it so much.,/p>

The experiment was conducted through games. People of different incomes were chosen. They limited the resources of the game and allowed people to borrow certain of those resources. After playing the games they gave the participants some sort of "cognitive test". The poor people who were given fewer game resources did worse than rich people who had more game resources.


Why is an art education student writing about this? Well, in my art ed classes we've spent a good deal of time focusing on the connection between art and games. It's a ripe area to build art lessons around. In this case, regardless of scientific viability of this particular experiment, it is interesting to see how it was conducted and to think about how an art lesson about using resources might be able to prepare students for such real life practicalities.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Underground



I realize I haven't blogged for a while, but there's going to be a machine gun blogging style here for the next couple weeks....

I don't typically write about polotics or particularly topical news items. The hurricane, however, had a rather universal effect on the tri-state area and further. For one thing, it caused schools to be cancelled not only because of the storm itself, but the extended loss of power that followed.