David Bowie and the Occult

To some degree all these personæ are re-creations of the Pierrot figure, a disguised Gnosis in the form of parody. Bowie has repeatedly appeared on stage (and still stages) as the ‘Pierrot in Turquoise’, a sort of a Threepenny Pierrot (the colour turquoise connoting “the British symbol of everlastingness” as one of his early teachers gnomically recollected).

Moorcock’s “Cornelius Chronicles”, one of the few pieces of literature produced in England in the second half of the twentieth century, also treats life as a harlequinade. Amongst other things. I must post about Cornelius at some point.

The Public Domain: Our Shared Culture: Judith’s Web

Shown in this 1972 image is Lexington, Massachusetts, high school student Judith Miles, who discusses her proposed Skylab experiment […] called “Web Formation in Zero Gravity,”

Not quite space art, but close enough.

internet soul portrait – data visualization & visual design – information aesthetics

an intriguing set of illustrations that represent web designs as pure structural representations

Any designer worth their salt will sketch out a web page design, in pencil or pen, as blocks before they go anywhere near a computer screen. I’d like to see those sketches, but these illustrations are a good insight into the compositional design of web pages and are very cool in themselves.

Eyebeam reBlog: Center for Tactical Magic

The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.

Eyebeam reBlog: First Impressionism

On July 1st, the community of Beloit, Wisconsin came together on the banks of the Rock River to recreate George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte” — “Saturday in the Park with Friends”.

The image is a good one. 🙂

NEWSgrist – where spin is art: Endgame Art: Fear of Form

I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.

(Quote from referenced article, not NewsGrist)

Even the most original artists remixed (the Sistine Chapel Ceiling is one vast derivative work), but for me recognising this allows us to recognise true creativity rather than simple variation or fashion. And immaterial work (for example code or digital work) is not fear of materials but desire to use new materials that afford particular possibilities.

For me the fear of form is expressed in relational art, in fear of social form that leads to a desire to dominate (or ironise). This is pantomime, even where it is fixed as stage sets or posters. Art as bureacracy in a way that even the conceptualists couldn’t have dreaded.

ScienceDaily: Composer Reveals Musical Chords’ Hidden Geometry

Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though sounds were physical objects with geometric shape — and now a Princeton University musician has shown that advanced geometry actually does offer a tool for understanding musical structure.