Via Boing Boing:

Survey of Reissues of U.S. Recordings

Technical difficulties trace all manner of lives lived, and their material circumstances. They are all but invisible from the land-of-Cockayne of Cultural Studies, and from the professionalised production in its thrall (academic art), which makes none but the smartest of moves.

http://jcamd.londonmet.ac.uk/nowtheyaresurrounded/onemain_3.html

Via the deeply necessary NewsGrist:

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/lotringer.htm

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, philosophy

Via Boing Boing:

Haunt

I wish I could get to this and take a sketchbook…

Zeitgeist-wise, between this and that artist doing a channeling show in LA it’s time to dust off SPAR, the Society for Paranormal Aesthetic Research. Where’s my ELF meter?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Word_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Surrealist_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Surrealist_techniques

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artistic_techniques

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_illusions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_phenomena

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optics

Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud) is a special plea for the value (virtue, even) of visually impoverished 1990s neo-conceptual art. Bourriaud is careful to distinguish Relational art from what he regards as exhausted modernist forms. But his concept of Relational art is haunted by that modernist prophet Walter Benjamin.

Relational art is an aesthetic social space or event. If a social context is artistic, and activities or materials can be en-art-ed by that context, then the artwork is auratic. And even more so if the work en-arts the context. That is, there is something special and perceivable about the artwork and its context that would be lacking if the same base physical or social materials were not being used as art.
Bourriaud admits that relational art is auratic, but he does not see this as a problem:

“The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in the form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show.” – Relational Aesthetics, p61.

It is a problem, though. Relational art may not be modernistic but its auratic nature makes it pre-modern, not post-modern. This is the art of icons and fetishes, of ritual and alchemy. It is a deeply regressive art, even beyond its managerial aspirations and the nostalgia for performance and social art that Bourriaud simply chooses to ignore.

Good debunking of Danto’s latest excesses at iconoduel:

http://www.iconoduel.org/archives/2005/08/000679_fallacies_aint_too_pretty_neither.php

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

Impossible Figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object

Stereograms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram

Anamorphosis (esp. Ambassadors)

Calligram / Arcimboldo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcimboldo

3D Glasses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_image

UV Images (Warhol):

Optical Illusions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_illusions

Perceptual Interference (Riley)

Image double-coding (lenin-pollock, duck-or-rabbit, crone-or-maiden)

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

Many of my works are falsifications with surplus value. I mean “falsification” in the scientific sense, showing a theory to be false. A negative proof, a disproof. I mean surplus value in a straight-faced sense: the falsification is not all there is to the work. This is most notable with Psychetecture, Surgical Strike, and paintr. All are a kind of parody of a particular ideology that are nonetheless entirely serious and very effective in themselves.

I’ve said that with much of my best work I can’t tell whether I’m joking or not. I think this is one of the reasons why.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, philosophy

A&L mentioned this in their article on Luhmann in Radical Philosophy:

Laws Of Form

lawsofform.org

Memory Forms

George Spencer Brown and his Laws of Form

Looks interesting. Wonder how it could interact with shape grammars? 🙂

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy