Taking Shakespeare's name in vain......

......or the art of  insults.
Because its cool....
Like bow ties.

Improve your linguistic dexterity in insults

(Americans take note - these will sound so much classier if spoken in an English accent)

Just because.


OK ......
..... its A.MUsing.

A.MUse

Riot in a jam jar.

 I found out about this show today and I wished I was back in England. This chap, James Cauty is just fabulous. Stick-it-to-em in-the-ear. Sarcastic satirical and I wish I had made them. Teeny tiny re-enactments in a jam jar. I want to go see this show. So if you are in England or at least somewhere not separated by the Atlantic GO SEE THIS SHOW.

Fuck fees

 "Riot in a Jam Jar presents small world re-enactments that depict past and future riots... reality blurred ... all within a jam jar! The jam jar suggests containment... violent disturbances served up in manageable doses .... like news bulletins. Complex situations reduced to mantelpiece ornaments and souvenirs."

                                             POLICE DOG pisses on a cripple film

Victory over protest

The sisters of perpetual resistance

You need us We need you

HE WAS A BIT OF A BASTARD but he didn't deserve THAT

 Riot in a jam jar website

L-13 LIGHT INDUSTRIAL WORKSHOP         1st JUNE - 3rd JULY 2011

Tues - Thurs 12 - 7 pm        Sunday 12 - 6 pm

31 Eyre Street Hill
Clerkenwell
London
EC1R 5EW

Tel: 020 7713 8255
e-mail: L-13@L-13.org
web: www.L-13.org

If you are in London GO SEE THIS SHOW. It is A.MUsing.

A.MUse.

Beautiful destruction

"Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies
and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time :
being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.

Photography appeared to us as a modest way
to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state."

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

                                  The Ruins of Detroit 

Up and down Detroit’s streets, buildings stand abandoned and in ruin. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city. Their book “The Ruins of Detroit“, a document of decaying buildings frozen in time, was published in December 2010.

"Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire."

A whole city of wabi-sabi , sad beauty, poised for a brief moment in time. Captured forever by these amazing photographs.


A.MUse

Imperfect beauty

In understanding beauty, intuition is more of the essence than intellectual perception. Soetsu Yanagi

There is an aching poetry in the patina of time, it caries the shadow of faded beauty. Precise delicate traces on the borders of nothingness. The mystique of collapse and disintegration.

The universe deconstructs, the inclination towards nothingness is is unrelenting, nothing is more of an illusion than permanence.

The inconspicuous, the overlooked details, the notion of imperfect flaws that we only notice when the scales of perfection fall from our eyes are what makes the imperfect beautiful.

As things break down into their primordial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular, and within this limit of perfection the imperfect shines.

Seeing beauty in the obscure is an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry to be coaxed out of ugliness.

I hope my photo's bring a little bit of Wabi-sabi to your day and that the scales of perfection start to slip from your eyes.

A.MUse

Bio-Rythm Art and Technology

Humans are tool users and the biggest tool that humans have ever used is ‘technology’. Technology today has shaped our lives in ways that were unimaginable thirty  years ago and it will continue to shape our lives so that we cannot possibly predict what life will be like in thirty years’ time.

Cutting edge technology has had a big influence on art, and this crossover of technology into art is generating some very interesting work and blurring the lines between disciplines that were once considered very separate, computing, fashion, music, biotechnology and medical science.

Way back in 2003 there was a project called Whisper, an acronym for (wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive system). This project integrated engineering, computer science, design and dance. It was a “participatory installation that uses small, custom-designed wearable computers and handheld devices. Focusing on body architecture, whisper aims to unearth physical data patterns of the body, mapping physiological data onto linked and networked devices worn on or close to the skin and in garments. In other words, it involves collecting data from the bodies of participants, and through visualisation and sonification techniques, interpreting that data.”

 It was an extrapolation of how humans, clothing, computer technology and interactivity might mesh together and how it could interact with our lives.

More info on Whisper project here

Last night in New York Eyebeam Art and Technology Center had the opening for their latest show.  Bio-rythm Music and the Body

Eyebeam's mission statement is

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution. 

This their latest show is in conjunction with Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. It explores music through body interaction and participatory art works.

It was very interesting show but ultimately left me feeling a bit let down. Some of this let down was due to it being opening night and a huge amount of people descending on Eyebeam making it very difficult to see/hear the interactive exhibitions. There also seemed to be a degree of technical problems associated with some of the pieces, they were either turned of or not working correctly. 

The live interactive performance part of the opening was really interesting, the 'linking' of music and body rhythm together. One violinist, one cellist, one human beat box who also played a specially designed electronic beat box, one dancer with EMG pickup on her arms and one huge projection of the EMG pickups on the wall. Did the music affect the dancer? Did the dancer affect the music? It seemed observational in nature rather that being truly interactive and I was left being reminded of WHISPER and wondering where the advances in science, discourse and art were that should have happened since 2003.

If you are in New York, go see the show and play with the interactivity because that is so much fun. It will make you think and maybe inspire you, but ultimately you may be left wondering where is the experimental push forward, where is the progression in this art/technology hybrid.

A.MUse