The “4DLK” exhibition has finished, and scanned polaroids from Haruka Nishii’s hug work are online at http://hugs.neonascent.com. They are all quite fun, so why not check them out? (She managed 101 - brilliant!)
A friend and member of the Japanese art students’ collective “A-trippers”, Haruka Nishii, is exhibiting as part of the “4 LDK” exhibition themed on Japanese-Australian distance/connection. The exhibition is being held at Arts on Bourke in Sydney, opened Monday the 6th, and will close Sunday 11th.
Haruka has a cute concept of the universality of hugs, and has created a perfectly unintimidating, accepting free hug partner - Cecil (pictured above). Of course I’m biased, but I think Haruka’s is easily one of the best works there - there are alot of very literal explorations of the question of distance, with the exception of a few sculptures, and of course hers involves fun patron participation.
Pictures are taken capturing the sublime experience of huggedness, and I’ve offered to serve them from here. Once the exhibition is over the scanned polaroids will be archived at: http://hugs.neonascent.com.
Via USATODAY.com:
A twelve-year-old boy visiting the Detroit Institute of Arts with his school has stuck a piece of gum to a $1.5m abstract painting.
The gum did not bind to the fibre of the painting (”The Bay” by Helen Frankenthaler), and the museum’s conservation department expects that after the appropriate chemical treatment the painting will be fine.
It is funny to see this sort of thing going on, and how people react to it. In a very real sense, the boy was entering into a discourse with the painting. I have a friend who due to his healthy scepticism of most modern art is constantly urged to subvert it. My gut feeling is that someones creative work should be respected. Not out of a social-relativism that judges all things as equally valid/good, but because it supposedly carries a great deal of value to whomever produced it.
I am extremely confident that this story would not have been run if the painting was valued at a more modest price. This seems to suggest that the unconsidered engagement of the school boy with the painting was apt: to the journo the story is implicitly about the high value and not about a simple act of vandalism.
via Boing Boing:
A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before.
A pakage like the Democracy suite was inevitable - combining the technologies of RSS (syndication/subscription), BitTorrent (scalable distribution), and VLC (multi-format, multi-platform video player) to form an essential tool for the new internet-based grassroots video distribution model.
Democracy has just been released as beta for PC, with a Mac version already released and Linux on the way. It seems well-suited to take its place as an ubiquitous technology to replace conventional TV.
The experience of Democracy is great. Fire it up, pick some channels, and leave it running. Flip to it whenever you want to watch your video — it’s as easy as turning on a TV…
I’m sure those of you who pay an interest to this blog will know that my colleagues and I are working on an epidsodal, free-range video narrative called Carrie & Vostok (more information through its dedicated site). Essentially it brings the stylistic diversity of the world’s budding video poducers/artists together in a conceptually coherent narrative about two characters - capturing the postmodern nature of different gazes apon any scenario. I don’t really need to explain how Democracy has arrived at the perfect time to fit the needs of this project. Serendipity or providence? 
Shanghai Street Artspace 2006 features an “anthropological investigation and disciplined scrutiny into the subversive street fashion of local teenagers” in the form of an exhibition of local cosplay.
Interesting. I’m playing particular attention to this sort of buzz, at the threshhold of a similar Syndey-centric, photographic subculture exposition project. More about this later, but for now it’ll be enough to point out the necessity of holding a good launch, with lots of the models involved… 