Is It Real?

The Chicago Museum of History is having an interesting exhibition opening today entitled “Is It Real?” It is a temporary exhibition of museum artifacts that (as I have gathered) are all false. Among these are the alleged skin of the snake that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden and a pair of spectacles believed to have belonged to Abraham Lincoln.
With the unfortunate fact that I will not be able to make it to Chicago before the exhibition closes and the information on line is limited I’m not sure if the intention of the exhibition is simply to educate about how the museum determines the truth of object hood (most likely) or if the is a cleaver exploration and critique of the museum. (Maybe both, I hope!) How amazing is the power of the museum institution that it can draw in people with almost admittedly false artifacts.

thats one big snake skin

First Thursday & Anissa Mack

Last night was First Thursday here in beautiful Santa Barbara, when galleries and other venues open up for cooperative evening event down town. Among the 29 venues was Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum where artist Anissa Mack spoke about her current work On Loan.  The work is a great engagement with the cult of the ritual, exploring object hood and value in the context of the politics of display. As part of work she has place copies of the objects on display in the gallery in peoples homes and gives tours of these homes highlighting not only here objects in this new context but also the prized objects of the home owner, creating new relationships between her pieces and the belongings of the homeowner.
The last home tour is Saturday at 11am. If you are in the area tours begin at CAF

Broken down on the Continental Divide

So between graduating, getting ready to move cross-country and everything I have not been able to post much. At the moment Jason and I are dealing with the car exploding and us being stuck in Rawlins WY. Web logs will resume when I get settled in Santa Barbara.
-t

Toy soldiers

So I made these.( the last 2 posts) I’m not sure if I am doing anything with them.

Toy soldiers

Toy soldiers

Titles For Books I have thought Of But Will Probably Never Write

Titles For Books I have thought Of But Will Probably Never Write

∑ Europa Rides the Mechanical Bull; The birth of a new techno-culture.

∑ Bio. Logic Bio.Centric: The living subject as inspiration and media in contemporary art.

∑ The Gorgons Meet Narcissus: A critical look at the gaze in and in the age of the web,and electronic reproduction

∑ Thank God For an Increasingly Secular World.

∑ A Leisurely Walk Through the Impending Doom: An Autobiography.

Simulacrum and electric sheep!

Cyborg theory is of great interest to me, not because I am a techno nerd. (I wish I were more of one) but to some extent because of bioethics, and primarily because it could make all of the issues I deal with in art moot. As it relates to the body, Cyborg theory and technology, in my opinion has the potential to shift the perception of self away from the body and towards cognition. The body becomes nothing more than means to actuate our cognition and is theoretically replaceable. In this construction of Identity the body can loose the signifiers it is currently burdened with like the concepts of race, gender and sexuality. Unseating the body from the center of identity would make these peripheral.
My interests in this topic lead me to read two books this week that I would recommend. The first is Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick. The book doesn’t deal with the body but is about the replacement of life experience with simulated experience, of genuine emotion (empathy) with logic. This has been termed Androidazation by Cyborg theorist. The Irony of the book is that we see this happening in the main character; a bounty Hunter that “retires” escaped androids. The book was made into the movie Blade Runner, which managed to loose all of the theme and though provoking qualities of the book
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The other book was Monkey Vs. Robot. A graphic novel version of the battle between the binary oppositions of Science/ Religion andCulture/ Nature.

Web logs and obituaries

I am taking baby steps in to including myself in web culture. I am bloging even though I think blogs are like obits. No one really reads the right? In my mission to engage in web culture I have discovered podcasts. Which are great because I can listen to my favorite KCRW show at my leisure. Ira Glass can wait until I have time for him. One of my other favorite radio shows, and now podcast is Minding the Media. This weeks Minding the Media was about obituaries. People not only read them but they are big business. There have been 5 book recently published on the topic and soon Obits magazine. Strange? What is the cultural force at work here? You can get the podcast at http://www.kcrw.com/podcasts

Epic 2015

I love the relationship between document, and false document, discourse and truth. I came across this documentary a wile back and doing this blog made me want to revisit it. It’s about the web, information exchange and the news media I recommend you take the 8 minutes to watch epic 2015