Honest Elder Scrolls

Since we are back to computer games a bit, I am posting this as a footnote to the short discussion last year about epic fantasy RPG's. These guys make rather humorous videos about movies and games and I can recommend watching a few for a chuckle, especially if you have experience with the media they are making fun of.





For Mr. Bob:

Apotheon

They went and made a 2-D side-scrolling action-adventure game specifically for Art History nerds. I bought this game yesterday because it was released for Linux. It's an XNA port. The game is a gorgeous as it looks in the screenshots. It's richly textured and nicely animated.

It's a little unstable for me. I've had it dump me out to the main menu a few times when changing levels. I was able to continue after replaying the previous level each time. They're still actively patching the game, so hopefully this will go away. My only other gripe is the two-tiered inventory system, it can be hard to use when under pressure. Slight blemishes on an otherwise well executed game.

(Link.)

Repurposing the Wunderkammer: Building a New Space for Science and Art

In 2014 and 2015 I have work up in a group exhibition at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. (http://harn.ufl.edu/exhibitions/artandtechnology)

The show got some art press from an organisation based out of Atlanta.

Some of the works in the exhibition do acknowledge the more polemical aspects of the wunderkammer as a residual cultural symbol. Jason Benedict’s Romantische Naturphilosophie does so not by way of direct critical address but by co­-opting its formal logic . . .

http://burnaway.org/wunderkammers-21st-century-harn-gainesville/

Pop Goes the Easel

This is a short documentary from 1962 about four artists who were in the second generation of British Pop. I quite like Peter Phillips penny arcade inspired painting. Derek Boshier is very articulate about the exoticism of American advertising, something Robert Hughes would echo later in "American Visions". Pauline Boty died tragically from cancer only three years after the documentary aired. Also, watch for David Hockney in the party scene.

Art Easel from richard friday on Vimeo.

Inkscape v0.91

Inkscape released it's first stable build since 2010 last week. I've been compiling the developer branch on my home machine for some time, and using the stable version on my work machine. At work, I'll often use Inkscape to add illustrative flourishes to our CAD files. Inkscape's tiling tools and live path effects compliment AutoCAD very well. I've used it for radial brick patterning, batt insulation following curved walls and ceilings, and spray foam insulation and fireproofing. Also, certain drawing tasks involving organic shapes, like tracing civil plans, are much easier with Inkscape's curve editing and a pen tablet.

You can download the release on the Inkscape website. (Link.)

Here are the 0.91 release notes with screenshots (Link.)

Libre Graphics World has an interview with the lead developers. (Link.)

Tavmjong Bah's Blog is a great place to see what's in store for SVG and Inkscape. (Link.)

ExhibitBE

The most interesting cultural thing that I've seen since I last checked in was an exhibit of murals in an abandoned housing project in New Orleans called ExhibitBE. (Link.) It was part of the Prospect.3 biennial.

"The Fat Kids from Outer Space" had a mural. (The left-third of the second photo.) I've posted about Tard's monster graffiti here before, he's in that group. Here's a link to an interview with him from last year. He cites Captain Beefheart as an influence.

Candy Chang's collages reminded me of Richard Hamilton's work. (Link.) I normally don't read blocks of text in a contemporary art exhibitions. I like to focus on what's going on visually. These collages piqued my interest enough that I actually went back to read the story several minutes after my first walk-through.

Sharpening the Contradictions

Not that anyone is interested in what I am reading as news posted on this aging technology called a "weblog", but this commentary by Juan Cole is the best summary of the strategic motivations and larger political context of the attacks in Paris that I have read, and I would like to archive it for discussion and later reference. The article was posted on the day of the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

 ...

“Sharpening the contradictions” is the strategy of sociopaths and totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted purposes of a self-styled great leader.

...

The only effective response to this manipulative strategy (as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani tried to tell the Iraqi Shiites a decade ago) is to resist the impulse to blame an entire group for the actions of a few and to refuse to carry out identity-politics reprisals.

via Hullaballoo

Portland, Oregon: where work is optional.

The New York Times noticed a cultural phenomenon on the west coast. It only took 15 years or so on this one:

Portland, meanwhile, has the opposite problem. It has more highly educated people than it knows what to do with. Portland is not a corporate town, as its neighbors Seattle and San Francisco have become. While there are employment opportunities in the outdoor-apparel business (Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear are all nearby) or the semiconductor industry (Intel has a large presence in Hillsboro), most workers have far fewer opportunities. According to Renn, personal income per capita in the city grew by a mere 31 percent between 2000 and 2012, slower than 42 other cities, including Grand Rapids, Mich., and Rochester. And yet people still keep showing up. “People move to New York to be in media or finance; they move to L.A. to be in show business,” Renn said. “People move to Portland to move to Portland.” Matthew Hale may have all the kombucha he can drink, but he doesn’t have a job.

 Link.

The Cult Of Jeff Koons Must Die

Might does not always make right, although that would seem to be the proposition on which Koons’s current lofty position is based. In art history departments there is nowadays an inclination to submit all art to a sociopolitical analysis, which is convenient when critics and scholars want to rationalize the considerable attention they pay to Koons’s marketing strategies. Too many column inches have been wasted on his stint in the early 1980s as a commodities broker on Wall Street and on his powers of persuasion when it comes to pushing art dealers to bankroll the extraordinary production costs involved with his work. Why should we care about any of this? When was it that the art of the deal became the only kind of art that art people want to talk about?

Link.

One World Trade Center: how New York tried to rebuild its soul

As for the future of culture at the World Trade Center, that may be the trickiest problem of all. Numerous cultural institutions, among them the Signature Theatre, the Drawing Centre and the now-defunct New York City Opera, had envisioned a move downtown. But during the planning process Pataki, still in presidential-wannabe mode, proclaimed: “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom” – and this threat of censorship was enough to send many prospective tenants packing. A site is still designated for a cultural institution, but its location between 1WTC and the PATH terminal guarantees headaches for construction, and Frank Gehry, the project’s initial architect, was dismissed last week. Still, there will be Eataly, there will be 50 different kinds of olive oil to buy! In the city that Bloomberg made, that may be culture enough.

Vivienne Gucwa writing for the Guardian