The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Jonah Lehrer Emotions vs. Rationality in decision making. Artists need to embrace the emotional influence their work has in decision making.
Category Archives: Research Notebook
Environmental Facts
I have been working with a general assumption that most people, in 2008/9, understand that there is a climate crisis. Yet some artists and activists have been a little slow in adapting to this shift in popular knowledge; making work that tells people, again, about the horrible state of our environment. So I had James …
There is no "win"
Ok, I am kinda lovin’ Jay Smooth right now. http://blip.tv/play/gaEW57FkgpNs Success means that we move further towards the ideals. Victories are only evidence that progress is possible, and that we are moving further towards those ideals. So measuring success is acknowledging the victories along the way, and realizing there is no end.
The power of the symbolic win (do-over)
apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again. http://blip.tv/play/gaEW3O5ygpNs Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
Michael Israel inspires change!
(check 1:30 in) See, what happens is, you see this, and then you go home and you decide you’re going to do that thing that you’ve always wanted to. There is a direct line from him painting to you acting, he tells me.
Art Hoax Unites Europe in Displeasure
This is a beautiful example of how activist-pranksters can exploit bureaucracy’s Achilles heel. The artist commissioned for this work, David Cerny “is notorious for thumbing his nose at the establishment,” says the article. I mean, just look at his website. The man once painted a tank, part of a a soviet war memorial in the …
"Oblique Strategies": Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "How to Win" card game
Brian Eno, the father of ambient music and Peter Schmidt, an English artist, created this deck of cards called Oblique Strategies in 1975. It is now in it’s fifth edition. Via Drawn!: Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt after thinking about approaches to their own work …
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Jacques Ranciere on political art
n aesthetic politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms….The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of …
Utah Student Wrecks Federal Land Auction
This guy is great. He saw an opportunity and jumped on it, disrupting a corrupt auction, costing major corporations money, and drawing attention to an issue that easily could have been buried under the mountain of year-end top 10 lists and countless other examples of Bush Administration corruption. What started out as a spur of …
George Bush discusses what's effective
Not effective: Simply drawing attention to yourself. Yelling at him at a political rally. Flipping him off. Effective: throwing a shoe at him and the press asking questions. Conclusions: The more unusual things one does that stray from U.S. norms and culture that cause the press to ask questions, the more effective you will be. …
Andy Goldsworthy
Words do their jobs but what I’m doing here says a lot more.
Utopia
Outopia derived from the Greek ‘ou’ for “no” and ‘-topos’ for “place,” a fictional, this means unrealistic or directly translated “Nothing, no matter what” This is the other half from Eutopia, and the two together combine to Utopia.
Design and the end of the world
Comment from Irene Maui about JooYoun Paek’s conceptual design/art works: I’m tired of reading and looking to design as Art, making people to be confused about it. Some people are just looking for fame, and not really thinking on giving creative answers. The world is about to explode, and we have to fill our heads …
Candy Raver Russian Revolutionaries
Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ’em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the activists …
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win. Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that …
Marketing Lessons from Obama's Campaign – BusinessWeek
In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when …
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Oh Yes They Did! – artnet Magazine
My take is a little different. If anything, I think activists are already excessively focused on the media. People often judge the success of a demonstration primarily on how much media coverage it receives, rather than seeing demonstrations as a place to gain confidence, meet people and groups, and build the core of a long-term …
A Kinder Gentler Empire
Sinfest is both incredibly dark and refreshingly soft-hearted. The author, you can tell, is earnest. He doesn’t hate the US, he loves its ideals, but he also has no illusions about its past crimes and current hypocrisies. Check out Sinfest daily. via: Sinfest
Politics as Product
Happy Spokesmodel Selection Day to one and all. I am certainly not the first to comment on the commodification of American politics in general and this race specifically, but a little more can be said before we’re on the next distraction tomorrow. This election has been primarily a contest between the values of experience and …
Mark Fiore's Subversive Cartoons
Mark Fiore is a political Flash cartoonist who cranks out a new short almost every week. He is clearly a liberal Democrat and his cartoons slant that way, but even when I find the ideas annoying or simplistic, or superficially critical, the cartoons are still funny. There are objectively funny moments (if such things can …