AndrewBlum.net

Hard Focus (Print Mag)

Digital technology is transforming photojournalism in hot spots around the world. (link) (photo by Riccardo Gangale)

What does conflict look like? Some people are fortunate enough to know only from the photographs they see in newspapers and on the web. But between the moment a picture is taken and its appearance on our computer screen or in our morning paper there exists a technologically remarkable chain of communication. Gone are the days when photojournalists lugged a chunky Rolleiflex TLR into the field and sent film home on planes. Digital technology has streamlined the process—while adding a few of its own complications. To find out more about how technology is changing photojournalism, I tracked down a few of the conflict photographers who travel around the world from hot spot to hot spot, snapping images and sending them back to their editors at home.

Olafur Eliasson is Playing With Your Mind (Wired News)

Weather Project Artist Eliasson Brings Techie Installations to U.S. (link)

For Take Your Time, a major new exhibition that opened September 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the internationally-celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson changed out the gallery lights, put mirrors on the ceilings, created a small fog bank, filled a room with a pool of water, and turned a skywalk into a trippy disco kaleidoscope, all in an effort to tinker with the way we experience space and light, and how we navigate the world. Open through February, the exhibition travels to New York's Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in April, then to the Dallas Museum of Art in November 2008.

Eliason became famous as an artist in 2003, when 2 million people visited The Weather Project, a giant installation at London's Tate Modern that created an artificial sun from 200 yellow sodium lamps.

But, explains SFMOMA curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Eliasson's work is never mere special effects. Like a DIY guru morphed into an international art star, Eliasson likes to show the mechanisms behind his artwork. "The revelation of his process is part and parcel of the work," says Grynsztejn. "It's equal parts 'wow' and 'a-ha.'"

Dreaming In Code (Metropolis)

Jonathan Harris distills the Web’s infinite avalanche of thoughts, facts, and feelings into exquisitely framed portraits of humanity. (link)

One late-winter morning Jonathan Harris sat in front of a MacBook in his Brooklyn apartment and opened the Web site We Feel Fine. Candy-colored digital balls and dots bounced around a black background. He clicked on one, and it shattered into a spinning sentence of text that flew to the top of the screen: “I feel for you.” Then he clicked on another, and another—all statements beginning with “I feel,” harvested live from the Web’s millions of blogs by this artwork he cocreated:

I feel so lonely today.

I feel he is there watching over me and even more so when I am in the garden.

I feel like I’m in tenth grade all over again.

I feel your might; I only have relinquish’d one delight to live beneath your more habitual sway.

That last one is from William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” Janiele, a 23-year-old in Radford, Virginia, posted it on her MySpace blog “twenty-one minutes ago.” Unsurprised by the serendipitous beauty his Web site creates, Harris then clicked on “Montage,” and a grid of colored squares dissolved one by one into thumbnail images, the visual confetti of the blogosphere: American Idol contestants, the Eiffel Tower, prom pictures, a puppy. Clicking on one created an elegant little explosion of more candy-colored dots, as the image—a corgi frolicking in the grass, suddenly worthy of Tibor Kalman—expanded to fill the whole window. Clicking again launched the page the dog came from, with an intimacy so sudden it felt like magic: “Bron’s Blog: Knitting Without a Net.”

Then the wizard pulled back the curtain. “We realized there was all this amazing humanity hiding on the Web, but most people considered it to be a cold, inhuman space,” Harris explains, speaking for himself and his frequent collaborator, Sepandar Kamvar, whose day job is technical lead of personalization at Google. “So we asked, ‘How can we systematically quantify feelings using the Web?’” In a process Kamvar describes as “not quite rocket science,” they wrote a program that scrapes new blog posts, looking for the statement “I feel.” With the duplicates thrown out, it yielded 20,000 “feelings” a day. Harris punched up the raw feed of XML code in a source file—in other words, plain text. “Just in this form we could tell it was amazing material,” he says. “Which is when the next big layer comes in: how to visualize all this information.”

We Feel Fine—together with the handful of Harris’s other works—defines a profound new kind of information design: it whittles down the world’s 70 million Web sites and blogs into a framed image of humanity. And it does it live, continuously, and autonomously. Architects and designers have experimented with computational design, letting a computer run through a spectrum of possibilities within a given set of parameters. But Harris’s creations are different: rather than static buildings, magazine covers, or shopping bags, they are constantly changing artistic responses to a constantly changing world. By using the Web as both site and material, they offer a way of seeing rather than merely being a sight.

If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the largest number of people possible,” he says.

Art Capturing Art Capturing Art Capturing... (New York Times)

Arts & Leisure (link)

ST. LOUIS -- In the autumn of 2004, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer went to Berlin to work on a libretto for the opera called “Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence,” about prisoners who have lost the power of speech. But his mind was at least partly on another version of silence — one found in a set of photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto he had been carrying around.

Taken the previous summer, the images were of “Joe,” a sculpture by Richard Serra that was named in homage to Joseph Pulitzer and sits in the courtyard of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts here. Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who designed the foundation’s home, collaborated with Mr. Serra on the placement of the sculpture.

This summer Mr. Sugimoto’s photographs of Mr. Serra’s sculpture in Mr. Ando’s courtyard were published in a book titled “Joe” (Prestel), along with a prose poem by Mr. Foer that follows a protagonist also named Joe. Mr. Sugimoto’s photographs are on view through Oct. 14 at the Pulitzer Foundation, just steps away from their subject.

Got all that?

When Emily Pulitzer opened the Pulitzer Foundation in 2001, she conceived of it as a gesamtkunstwerk — Wagner’s term for the synthesis of multiple art forms — and “Joe,” in all its permutations, lives out the notion to dizzying effect. As Mr. Ando, Mr. Serra, Mr. Sugimoto and Mr. Foer have engaged with one another’s work, they haven’t collaborated so much as converged. And sometimes it seems as if they haven’t converged so much as collided.

Welcome to the Art Hotel (BusinessWeek)

Innkeepers around the world are tapping local artists to make their work an essential element of a new breed of hostelry (LINK)

"It's over for design hotels," says Ian Schrager, the man who invented them. "What once was the exception is now the general rule. It doesn't interest me anymore. I have taken it as far as it can go. This for me is a new beginning. I’m trying to change the game again."

By “this” Schrager means "art," at least as it's embodied in the 185-room Gramercy Park Hotel, set to open this August in New York City. Schrager, who famously worked with designer Philippe Starck on New York's Royalton and others, is collaborating on the property with artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel to create a "bohemian" spirit -- "but a bohemian with money," Schrager qualifies, describing their vision of “organized chaos,” with canvases propped up against the wall and a sense of "individuality and spontaneity."

Rather than just slapping art up on the walls of the lobby and guest rooms (although they'll do that too), its spirit will permeate the place. Picture flowers plopped into water pitchers set before a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

AROUND THE GLOBE.  If Schrager's track record is any indication, the "art hotel" is about to become a big deal. And yet this time around, the man who co-founded Studio 54 isn't the first at the party (even if he is arriving in style).

Hotels have always had artwork, but today the concept is being stretched to new limits, as boutique hotels replace hospitality-as-theater with hospitality-as-installation-art. Around the globe, hoteliers are working with artists (if they're not already artists themselves) to create environments with a sense of style and authenticity -- in explicit retort to the boutique hotel formula, with its contemporary furniture and dimmed hallways.

In part it's a backlash against the democratization of design: Now that there are "W" hotels by the dozen, hoteliers are seeking new ways of standing out. And yet, the hoteliers say, it also reveals the tastes of a generation that has come of age in a flat world.

Mirage Building (Surface Magazine)

A Portland art organization earns a reputation for architectural achievement -- without a building to show for it.

Raising money to construct a signature building designed by a famous architect is on the to-do list of most art institutions these days. That's simply not a problem for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. “We’re itinerant by nature by choice,” says Victoria Frey, PICA’s executive director, explaining the group’s unorthodox approach to design "We don't mount a capital campaign to build a facility to house a theater, because the kind of work we’re presenting may not always fit within whatever box we build.”

Model World (Metropolis)

Olivo Barbieri's Model World (link)

It's often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs are real. They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography--a complete overview, like military surveillance. "I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything," Barbieri says. "After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again."

From the Ashes (Metropolis)

A photographic exhibition on the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shows a city determined to rebuild. (link)

One of the most famous photographic images of San Francisco is Eadweard Muybridge's 360-degree panorama taken from the top of Nob Hill in 1878. With the San Francisco Bay glittering in the distance, and sparkling new mansions and vacant lots readied for building in the foreground, it portrays a city on the make--the glorious burgeoning capital of the American West, where anything is possible and the future is limitless.

Suicide Watch

The New York Times, Arts & Leisure, 3/20/2005
Timeline

The board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge recently voted to explore installing a barrier that would jeopardize the bridge's least welcome claim to fame: its status as the world's most popular place to commit suicide. That decision was the result of a distinctively San Francisco process in which psychiatrists, lesbian activists and-- perhaps most surprisingly --documentary filmmakers had a direct impact on the making of public policy.

The White Zone is for Loading and Unloading Art (The New York Times)

At the Toronto Airport, Air Canada Shares Space With Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt
Arts & Leisure - March 28, 2004

TORONTO - People don't often go to an airport for the art, but that might begin to change next month when travelers start hustling by Gate 122 of the new Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Here, working from high up on a scissor lift, the German artist Katharina Grosse spray-painted a 75-foot-long burst of color on the gleaming white walls. Unruly abstract clouds of orange and pink climb up into the skylights and surround the windows as if this Air Canada gate were an Abstract Expressionist chapel. Ms. Grosse thinks her mural "looks like a child has gone mad with a felt pen." But really it looks like artists have taken over the building.