Sarah Maple

Interviewed in Flavorwire.


A post in Bitch Magazine.


Her official site

Harold Cohen

Harold Cohen, former director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), was an English painter with an established international reputation when he came to UCSD in 1968 for a one-year Visiting Professorship. His first experience with computing followed almost immediately, and he never returned to London. Cohen is the author of the celebrated AARON program, an ongoing research effort in autonomous machine (art making) intelligence which began when he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1973. Together, Cohen and AARON have exhibited at London's Tate Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and many more of the world's major art spaces. They have also been shown at a dozen science centers, including the Ontario Science Center, the Boston Science Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry. Cohen represented the US in the World Fair in Tsukuba, Japan, in 1985. He has a permanent exhibit devoted to his work in Boston's Computer Museum.

One of the few artists ever to have become deeply involved in artificial intelligence, Cohen has given invited papers on his work at major international conferences on AI, computer graphics and art technologies. His work is widely cited in the literature, and it is the subject of Pamela McCorduck's AARON's CODE: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen (Freeman).

In more than two decades AARON has produced many thousands of drawings, to a few dozen of which Cohen has added color. The goal of his current research -- by far the most difficult to date, he says -- is to have AARON do its own coloring. This phase of the project is now well under way. The painting machine with which AARON colored real drawings in the real world was premiered at an exhibit at the Computer Museum in Boston in the spring of 1995.

http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_w05/cohen_h.htm

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa the creator of 'The 99'

Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa is the creator of THE 99-the first group of superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. THE 99, has received positive attention from the international media including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine, Wired, Elle, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Recently, Forbes named THE 99 as one of the top 20 trends sweeping the globe.
http://www.al-mutawa.com/?Biography

The story of 'The 99' the comic
As the leader and mentor of The 99, Dr. Ramzi Razem directs the quest to find the lost Noor Stones of Baghdad, which is the comic book’s main plot line.

As legend has it, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, they razed the largest library in the city, Dar al-Hikma. To erase any record of the civilization, they threw the books into the Tigris River, which ran black with ink. But the caliphate guardians, in a desperate attempt to save the vast knowledge of the library before it was destroyed, concocted an alchemical solution that would absorb the contents of the books. The solution solidified into the 99 Noor Stones, which supposedly contain the lost knowledge of the Library of Baghdad.

Ramzi believes the legend, including the idea that the stones activate superpowers within certain people. He conducts his search through the nonprofit 99 Steps Foundation, and although possessing no superpowers of his own, he helps other characters to use theirs.

Darr-The Afflicter (one of the characters), an American paraplegic who manipulates nerve endings to transmit or prevent pain.
http://www.the99.org/the99/
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0619/p04s01-wome.html

CVM - Center for Visual Music

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Library.html
http://www.si21.com/interakt/

Processing

http://processing.org/
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students.

120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class
Dan Shiffman isn't like most professors. Instead of Scantron sheets and bluebooks, Shiffman prefers to give his final exams on a 120-foot video wall that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays linked end-to-end.
Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

view more here



Shiffman is the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor.That hasn’t really been an option thus far in Processing, unless you were to go the hardware multiple-monitor route. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

Read more here

Compagnie Amoros & Augustin

Watch some video from this amazing theatre company's performances:

on shadow theatre

Sunjata

mixing shadow theatre and film

360° à l'ombre

mixing theatre and film

The Never-Ending Shooting

video and photos of the technique

More videos: http://fr.youtube.com/BrunodeBeaufort
Official site: http://www.amoros-augustin.com/accueil.html

Blog: http://leterneltournage.theatre-contemporain.net/

The Collages of John Ashbery

American poet John Ashbery, making his solo debut as professional artist at 81, with a modest but polished exhibition of two dozen small collages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/arts/design/14cott.html?_r=1&ref=design&oref=slogin
more collages: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/09/12/arts/0914-COTT_index.html

Dance Images

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/

wordle

http://wordle.net/
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Create your own http://wordle.net/create

A BRIEF HISTORY OF OPTICAL SYNTHESIS

INTRODUCTION
The technology of synthesizing sound from light is a curious combination of research from the realms of mathematics, physics, electronics and communications theory which found realization in the industries of motion picture films, music, surveillance technology and finally digital communications. As such, it's history is an interesting cross section of 20th century history, reaching from the euphoria of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century inventors (who often struggled between "scientific" and "supernatural" explainations of their work) through the paradigm-smashing experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920's and 1930's to the cynical clash of ideologies of the Post-war years and finally to the dawn of the digital era in the 1970's.
This history has its fair share of eccentric and fascinating characters, such as Lev Theremin, Arseny Abraamov and Daphne Oram--the first woman to create and run a sound studio, as well as the first woman to "design and build an entirely new sound recording medium" (Jo Hutton in Organized Sound). There is quite a bit of work left to do, particularly in recognizing and translating the legacies of the Russian avant-garde artists such as Boris Yankovsky, Evgeny Scholpo, Nikolai Voinov and the forementioned Abraamov, whose works are largely unknown outside the former Soviet Union. A forthcoming article on "Russian Graphical Sound" for the Computer Music Journal by Andrei Smirnov could be one of the biggest English-language breakthroughs in this area.
Quite clearly, the connection with filmmaking is very close. Optical sound technology was developed first solely for recording soundtracks for early "speakies", and every one of the Russian innovators used their graphical sound techniques to provide music scores for the kino. But the connection with the "Visual Music" movement in cinema is also very close, with perhaps the works of Norman McLaren providing the strongest bridge. But the "direct cinema" techniques of many filmmakers from the 1920's and 1930's on through the 1960's and 1970's show more than a casual relationship with the techniques of direct optical sound synthesis. The works of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, John Whitney, Hy Hirsch, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Larry Cuba and many others all reflect an ongoing lineage of this "visual music" tradition. (The "Kinetica" screening programs, available from the iotaCenter of Los Angeles, provide the most comprehensive overview of this fascinating film history, and the Visual Music website gives an excellent synopsis and timeline as well.)
MORE: http://umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html

Andreas Hofer

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/walkthrough.php?exhibition_id=538

Lynda Abraham

New York-based artist Lynda Abraham combines video, installation, and performance to create scenarios for the contemplation of complicated relationships. Many of these works engage the viewer's body to intensely dramatize these connections. In Compassion (2006), two people with a contentious relationship are strapped into a device that will alternately shove each partner's face into a trough of water until they learn to work together, in balance. In Toxic Drink (2001), Abraham presents a dark sculptural proposal to replace the liquid in water coolers at corrupt corporations with the excrement of their poisoned victims. Other capital ideas include inventions like the Humbler (2000), which keeps subordinate workers shackled into a crawling position, and the Neglect-O (2000), which "transfigures the adult from a useless parental unit into a toy" by allowing the child to play with and control the movements of an adult confined to a contraption th! at resembles a classic red wagon. These and many of Abraham's other projects allude to the interpersonal fallout that results from the "advances" of a technologically-evolved culture, while recalling the conventions of early, sketchy social science experiments and turn-of-the-(Twentieth)-Century kinetic novelties.
http://www.lyndaabraham.com/

PAINTING CHINA NOW by Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau

Painting China Now is a collection of thirty new oil paintings by Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau. These works, depicting instances of violence inflicted by the Chinese government upon their own citizens, are rendered with a breathtaking realism. Such masterful craft and handling of paint has become alien to the west, specifically in our contemporary arts, provoking the artists to commission a professional Chinese craftsman via the internet to realize the paintings for a cheap price and to import them to Europe. The results are beautiful, seductive and desirable works whose motivation, through suggesting 'painterly qualities', is in fact to embody the realities of capitalist profit and political oppression in a painting.

View HTML documentation: http://brodypaetau.com/?page_id=79

http://photo.minghui.org/photo/images/persecution_evidence/E_death_300_1.htm

http://www.brodypaetau.com/

Interview with Phyllis Kind

Katsuhiro Terao

Hiroyuki Doi

Carlo Zinelli

AK: What are the differences and similarities between an outsider, or self-taught artist, and an insider, or classically trained artist?
PK: I believe the major difference is that self-taught artists are working for a different motive — an interior motive. Someone like Howard Finster was working to proselytize for Jesus. Both Wölfli and Ramírez had a personal narrative in mind, but it wasn't necessarily artistic, per se; they weren't thinking of themselves as artists or making art for the world. They just didn't have that historical conception of art in their heads, or the ideas of criticism, so what they're doing is outside of the conventional dialogue. I can't say it's a monologue because the word "monologue" has a derogatory, boastful side to it, and the impulse of outsider art isn't the least bit boastful. It's a job. It's a need. It's something that completely takes over their lives — whether they're doing it for Jesus or for God or for the apocalyptic end of the world. Their interior motive is something that's just intrinsic, and they don't identify it in relation to others. They aren't concerned about selling art to others, for money or critical approval. Although, the broader issue of approval is interesting; for instance, Ramírez used to bring people into his little room, and he would arrange them in the way he wanted them to view his work, which was tacked up on the wall. And Wölfli loved it if someone liked his work. But that has nothing to do with why they made it. There's no parrot of approval sitting on their shoulder and involved in a dialogue with them.

As for the similarity, something I've only just realized is that genuine artists, who invent their own vocabulary of form, become super involved with the activity of art-making itself. This might happen when they're just working and working, and all of a sudden, the work takes over and tells them what to do. And afterwards, they say, "Jeez, did I do that?" There's a film I was just watching about self-taught artist James Castle, and Robert Storr is quoted in it as saying something like, "It's frequently said that many artists have no intentions." I want you to know that all artists have intentions — but those intentions, which may or may not actually manifest in the final work, are beside the point. For years, I've spoken about something called intentional fallacy, and what intentional fallacy is about is that you cannot judge a work of art by what the artist intended to do; the work itself has a kind of agency. So an artist's intention for the work of art is neither necessary nor sufficient to make it a work of art. It's even more interesting when we try to make a connection between whatever the hell the artist intended and the resulting piece. Once an artist starts to think that they're doing what critics tell them they're doing, they sometimes take on this attitude about what they should be making and who they really are, and it stiffens their work. But every genuine artist, whether self-taught or trained, has a deeper level of involvement with their work.

keep reading

paul brown

artist and writer specialising in art & technology
http://www.paul-brown.com/

The Computer Arts Society (CAS)

The Computer Arts Society (CAS) promotes the creative uses of computers in the arts and culture generally. It is a community of interest for all involved in doing, managing, interpreting and understanding information technology's cultural potential.
http://www.computer-arts-society.org/index.html
See also PAGE bulletin
http://www.computer-arts-society.org/page/index.html

Bug Art - Steven R. Kutcher

A Californian entomologist uses insects as living paintbrushes to create abstract art. After loading water-based, non-toxic paints on to the tarsi and abdomens of insects, Steven Kutcher directs his bugs to create their 'masterpieces'.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v450/n7170/full/450613a.html
http://www.bugartbysteven.com/index.htm