5.28.2009

Bits: 05.28.09


Martha Rosler, Invasion (2008)

• Tyler Green writes on the timing of the Hirshhorn's acquisition of Martha Rosler's photomontage series, The Gray Drape, about Americans' disengagement with the war in Iraq. It coincides with news that Dick Cheney ordered interrogators at Guantanamo to find links between al-Qaeda and Iraq "despite CIA reports that there were only sporadic, insignificant contacts between the militant Islamic group and the secular Iraqi dictatorship." Green writes, "Rosler's photomontage can be read as revealing how our blindness to and then our national disinterest in Bush-era torture led us into Iraq." Update: The Iraq photos Obama won't release allegedly show U.S. soldiers raping prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The Artvertiser is "an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art. [Its] software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual 'canvas' on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device." [via]

• "Scream at the economy." In the spirit of Munch, call in and share your "desperate and instinctive expressions of survival, warnings of danger, cathartic affirmations of power, explosions of anger and despairing utterances of anxiety and hopelessness." The resulting recordings will be transformed by six composers into a work, "Screamer," which will be "performed in front of relevant financial institutions." [via]

• The deboulonneurs are back: French culturejammers (or "unscrewers") have published their manifesto -- dedicated to reducing the visual pollution of advertising -- in English and are planning an as-yet-unspecified action in Paris on May 29.

• Tri-cycle: Bicycle bulfighting [via], a lovely 1965 ciclo-cross poster, and a jailbirds' Tour de France.

Turning empty billboards into urban abstract art... with paintball guns.

Turning empty newspaper boxes into guerrilla flowerboxes. (An earlier version's here.)

Finalists have been announced in the Good50x70 socially conscious design contest. Click on "Gallery" items here.

• Your moment of Border Collie doing squats.

1 comment:

frankygaard@yahoo.com said...

Martha Rosler made a VietNam Memorial and these things make us remember, the horror of my youth year after year. This is the background of present events, a context for the lies and the killing.Afghanistan is lost lost to itself, you can bank on it. Opium trumps oil, and when do we stop killing the civilians? Rosler had it right we need to stop war before it's all there is.