Drift exhibition

Chris Jordan, Messages from the gyre

http://www.chrisjordan.com/


Message from the Gyre

These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. Perhaps this tragedy can serve as a multi-layered metaphor for the state of our world, our culture, and our 0wn inner landscapes.

Kevin Newark, Protoplasm

Kevin Newark

My practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement. In photographing discarded plastic carrier bags found in the canals of East London, I looked to find some solace for the exiled soul of the plastic bag. After short, useful lives, discarded plastic bags enter into a perpetual state of retirement, their spent utility a metaphor for our own mortal anxiety, whereas the demise of plastic is a distant, uncertain prospect. The moment of disclosure (cognition) is delayed to induce a sense of disorientation allowing the viewer to disassociate themselves from the dogma of optical faith.

Their boundaries of scale can be breached in our allegorical thoughts allowing these photographs to be equally expandable or retractable; the electromagnetic imaging of micro-science and the radio imagery of space are seemingly alike; the Petri dish and the cosmos. Weightlessness engenders a separation of lightly form that permits a new relationship with dimensions in space. Dissociation from the atmosphere allows these tormented, utilitarian forms the serenity of an embalmed, opaque nirvana where they feign organic structures yet remain veiled with a radiant toxicity.

Environmental artists

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/top-5-environmental-artists-shaking-up-the-art-world.php

Success

'True success is a reflection of what I become rather than what I achieve or accumulate''

Goshka Macuga

Joshua Bell playing in new york metro

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story."

With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

"Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right."

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."

And that's that.

Plastic Bellahouston research

Plastic Pollution

http://www.chrisjordan.com/


http://www.inl.co.nz/environment/2008/plasticjunkyard.html

http://apusenvironment.com/english/plasticleafletdownload.htm

http://www.thegreenartproject.com/2009/12/the-plastic-wave/

http://fakeplasticfish.com/2009/06/kathleen-egan-surfing-plastic-wave/

http://fakeplasticfish.com/2009/06/kathleen-egan-surfing-plastic-wave/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/05/27/its-in-the-bag-teenager-wins-science-fair-solves-massive-environmental-problem/

http://fakeplasticfish.com/2009/11/dianna-cohen-getting-the-message-from-her-own-art/

http://www.plasticbagfreebrighton.co.uk/

Susuhuma Shingu- artist talk at gft

Tomas Saraceno

Katie Holten

http://www.katieholten.com/

Avatar Movie

Went to see Avatar movie today. Really enjoyed the 3d experience and the story line too. I was sucked right in from the start and found msyself quite emotionally charged at some bits. I also liked how the film touched on some really important issues that we face in society today such as corporate greed and environmental degradation. It was a real suprise to see such a big hollywood film focusing on issues like this as much of hollywood is owned and funded by big corporate companies. Also found this review by someone else who had seen the film, makes some really interesting observations:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/The-Avatar-Movie-from-a-Bl-by-Ezili-Danto-100104-843.html

Also an interesting fact that I just read about the film:

Every 24^th of a second in AVATAR took over 50 hours to make. Over a Petabyte – one thousand terabytes – of digital storage was required for all the CG ‘assets’ of the film. This includes the myriad forms of flora and fauna. For reference, Titanic was based on just 2 terabytes – 1/500^th the amount used in AVATAR.

Luke William

Jospeh Dougherty

Barbara Josephs Liotta