PHARMAKON LIBRARY

William S. Burroughs : TIME/HEMISPHERE (excerpt)

2011-10-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Now pay attention we are going to give a few hints..Look at your book
of Egyptian hieroglphs.Just here is a boy sitting down. Now instead of
the stylized glphy suppose we had a painting of a boy which would
logically lead to painting others and some of them would be doing more
than sitting down in my army or just here is a plough we now I can
see a plow in the window of Sterner’s Hardward store that Jew in Cold
Spring charges too much for fence wire and I can see bronze plows in
corn and youn farm boys too in the old outhouse doing what boys will
do so charge it all up to fertility rise and her is ‘to pout out
water, to micturate’ hummm looks to me likes he pouring out more than
water and that brings up some pretty pictures.So you see I take a
picture that stands for and by God is a word and it just naturally
opens itself out feeling for other pictures doing what pictures will
doSO just let the words XXXXXX desolve in the picture.Why listen to
one house when you can see all the houses??So my words just disintegrate
in Gysin.I dont know if Mr.Graham Green is going to like this but he has
his place in the garden along with Truman Capotes music across the golf
course echoes from high cool corner of the dining room a queer little
breeze flutters candle s on the table and swishes away down the dead
dead days..’ Now that could just swish away calkigrapghic like mice that
slph for you. Charcter pouring water wer his self “the Priest” they called
him. A sick old junky pour water over hiself????Blood of Christ where
they made the atom bomb I went to school there..saw some boys glpy no
phallus, what is masculine glypy 94. male organs ghpy 74 to receive
77.to hold in the hand 92 and93 Sir E. A. Wallis Budge refuses to trans
late but we get the general idead and just here i Time as kin Tutt saw
it remember ‘I’d rather be a mummy’ .. secon.. We have here on screen
some dried poppy pods a hawke and the sun and a skull cap near as I can
make it out from remote landing..Well an old junky in off the xxxxxx
parched plains of Kanas ate the poppy pods and got relief..The howk
xxxxx circles in the shattered bloe sky over Mexico..the skull cap is
still there..Minutes we have here a boxer dog a skull cap and the sun..
Now that boxer dog was called Shane and he was called in to lick a girl
out of her coma I Read about it only today in the Daily Mail for June 29
her father said ‘I prey that Shane will help her to get better’ ..Well
now I would’nt want to see too much sun light on a thing like that..Is
one expected to remove one’s skull cap?? Hour:: Well we got a hare here
setting down, some nice blue water a jar the sun and a roll of film
negative..Well the hare went thataway.A film boy stripped hiself naked
filled the jar with water from a blue river magic of all movies is
remembered kid standing there poured th water over himself and jacked
off into his skull cap. So left an old junky selling Christmas seals on
North Clark St. Yes there’s the boy and there’s the blue river.Remember
the song. Yes I can see all the bandoned country clubs and weed grown
old courses a thousand lost   skull caps red mostly see the boys spitting
blood in the violet evening sky over Lima?   ‘Fight tuberculosis folks’
An old junky on North Clark St. Selling Christmas seals used too be me
Mister remember the caddy shirt o open on the golf course you’ll find him
here by the Blue River when the wind is right.And remember the old
junk on North Clark St.?? The Priest’ they called him. Used to be me
Mister..cold blue alleys of Chicago..Lake wind like a knife..Pour water
on a sick old junky??Sacred Blood of Christ you son of puta..And here is
a picture from Spain.. the abandoned railroad..tunnel in th iron rock..
Weeds in front of the tunnel..two boys in there.. I see some white gobs..
boy on a long grey beach with dusky rose colored genitals, ankora on the
beach..all the old blue calandar pictures over here..Now as to how to
present it on page and how to indicate just where I am in pictures when
I write what this poses a problem..Unless the picture just lights up when
you press a button..What I mean is why not extend our uh analogy of a
map and give precise coordinate points subject of course to change without
notice as when Clark street shifts from one picture to the other the way
an old St. will..And maybe next time I pass the tunnel those boys wont be
there just winds of Spain stirring the weeds in front of the tunnel so
refer you to The Book of the Dead..” field of grasshoppers..bushes--the
olive tree is my name..North of the bushes did you see there the leg and
the thigh’ washed back on Spain Repeate Performance page-. Maybe it was’nt
just hash Hassan J. Sabbah picked up on in Egypt..What about the glphies?
Now here is the progression.Words..glphys..drawing or painting expansion
of the glphys into a Gysin picture..You can do the same of course with
any photo..The “Priest they called him..The photo..Draw and old junk
there--blue grid of windows Winter sunlight..ice on the street..wind cold
from the lake.. Now as to presentation on page within a pracicl
budget. First page text and the phoot.Second page..drawing on image
lines-- Third page a Gysin picture.. That is using your time format   a
sapce on eace page for photo or picture..We could then wind it up with
a page of the intersection photos followed by a page of pictures.. Two
silent pages that could be immediately read by any attentive reader who
had followed the text and the intersections of text xxx wtih photos and
pictures.. (Alternately we could use glyphs instead of photos or of course
both.. -------------------------------------------------------------------
a-----------------------------------------------------------------------ns
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

                        love, Bill

excerpt from “The Hemisphere.” in TIME by William Burroughs with 4 drawings by brion gysin

“C” Press 1965

Transcribed from a copy in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections, accessed 10.17.2011 -
Christina McPhee

Katharina Sieverding: En Face World Line

2011-10-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

Katharina Sieverding: WELTLINIE #9 A/D/A process, each 100 x 100 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie #1, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm
courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

Katharina Sieverding, Weltlinie #2, 1999 A/D/A Process, each 190 x 125 cm

courtesy Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne

(please click on each fragment for the full image)

The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders possible and begins all discourse....
The first word of the face is the “Thou shalt not kill.”

-Levinas

A world line: A special type of curve
in space-time. Each point of a world line
an event marked as barcode
Date time expiration SKU number almost forgot that

Polaroid hangover: photobooth mixagraphia made that contrast
Cured it to a ripe selection by one or another hair of another, my other, the curve
of my-story when I was in the nineties;
Follicles disorder the petri dish: if curved, could only grow effluvia,
pixels, plexis or else, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, mayhem, mass hate,
Digital-insensate eliminates, fields of kills.
Twenty year kills, so throw a curve on it, go check the contrast,
Intensify the chroma, spit out of photoshop, slide into baths,
carmine garance acetone alizarin anthrazine alliterate at last
attention deficit disorder, analog digital analog, the face
of another commandment, love one another--

christina mcphee en face katherina sieverding / october 2011

upon encountering her photo-based work at Art Platform Los Angeles / special thanks to Christian Lethert

Darren Banks: BLOBS

2011-07-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

all images courtesy Darren Banks and Workplace Gallery

Darren Banks: Blobs

The Blob first crept onto movie screens, and into the collective consciousness in 1958, as an unstoppable, flesh-eating, gelatinous mass. In the fifties as we pushed to the outer limits of Space (Sputnik was launched in 1957) and the innermost realms of DNA (discovery of the double helix, Watson and Crick, 1953), so the Blob was found during excavations in remote territories...

Examined under a microscope, the Banks Blobs occupy the fragile states between animal instinct and artificial intelligence...we see visceral qualities of genetic material--held in a tenuous equilibrium with industrial looking elements, though warped and melting...with delicate menace...

In Larry Cohen's 1985 film The Stuff, an amorphous, sweetly tasting, highly addictive substance is commercially marketed to the public, gradually permeating and infecting every corner of American society...the stuff is actually a parasitic alien substance which uses humans as its hosts, manipulates them until it finally discards their dead, husk-like bodies...

Post millenium, Banks' Blobs are best viewed through a kaleidoscope...we catch glimpses of the potentially familiar debris of our everyday landscapes...could that be the arm of an easy chair, raising its head like a dinosaur from the primeval swamp?...are those collected globules the remains of an X-box controller, melted and deformed in a house fire?...

excerpt from an essay on Banks' blob drawings by Iris Aspinall Priest 2010

Leigh McCarthy: Doppelganger

2011-07-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

The project "doppelganger" developed as a response to the curator, Tricia Lawless Murray, who invited me to contribute photography to a group show titled "eros/thanatos" about the life/death drives. "Doppelganger" functions both as an ethereal-double and a harbinger -- the self and its shadow – and incorporates a process whereby I double expose film to create ghost-like images.

For the Pharmakon Library, I present unedited contact sheets rather than individual cropped images in order to reveal the photographic process which initiates a game of chance that generates latent discoveries in which a filmic narrative emerges. Paired with the seascape, this technique allows for the fecund nature of the dialectic to emerge: the self/shadow, love/sickness (madness), death/rebirth, beauty/sublime, and love as remedy/poison and the poison as panacea. By simultaneously dissolving these oppositions, the meaning constantly shifts creating a permanent state of ambiguity.

The narrative that propels “doppelganger” derived from a dream that my brother had where we climbed to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. In his dream, I was picked up by the wind and floated into marshy seagrass below. Trapped by image-repertoire, my brother described the dream by referencing a Nestea commercial and an Aerosmith music video to depict my descent – his mind re-edited pop culture images he previously consumed. In my brother’s reformation of this imagery and in turn my remaking and doubling of his dream, meaning and essence become unhinged. At the very end of the dream, just when he thought I was dead, I said, "that was fun, let's do it again", creating another doubling into an infinite narrative loop.

Leigh McCarthy is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in San Francisco. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and has exhibited her work internationally including group projects at the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Special thanks to Jaime Beechum who assisted with photography.

leighmccarthy.com

bdy dbl: new drawings

2011-05-23T17:40:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Garcia : BDYDBL

studies for THE FLOOD and SEQUENCE DEBASE
2011

(photos: Christina McPhee)

Kristen Alvanson: Spells (Poison-In Poison-Out)

2011-03-30T14:18:00.000-07:00

Poison-in/Poison-out

Kristen Alvanson’s Poison-in/Poison-out is a series of four ink drawings on paper using Persian ink (made out of gum Arabic, soot, alum, tannic acid and water) and Persian calligraphic pen. The works have been created as a part of artist Christina McPhee’s Pharmakon project.

The history of middle-eastern talismans depicts a range of essentially ambiguous religio-political and cultural dynamics in the Middle East. These socio-political ambiguities are mostly influenced by the symbiosis between nomadic culture and the State, between polytheistic beliefs and the dominant monotheism on the one hand and monotheism and heretical beliefs on the other. Such ambiguities or ambivalent inclinations always manifest in the spells’ final shapes. The spells are simultaneously haunted by harmful and therapeutic effects, demonic and benevolent features. In middle-eastern spells, the pharmakonic or the profound ambivalence in intention and structure, form and content are not repressed but brought into the foreground so as to create a complex chemistry of ideas. The alchemy of middle-eastern spells involves the synthesis of ideas and intentions in the form of twists, inconclusive destinies, incurable maladies and unestablished cures. Middle-eastern spells are mostly created in the form of diagrammatic bodies formed by abstract components: numbers depict body parts, letter curvatures represent fiendish fauna, geometric elements form skeletal frames for the spells and miniature ciphers become contagious particles which conduct the effects of the spells toward targets. Moreover, middle-eastern spells require a chemical reaction in order to be effectuated. Such chemical reactions include burning or introducing the actual spell drawn on paper, fabric or metal to certain chemical components such as acid, mercury, sulfur, gold or silverMark. Therefore, the spells bridge actual chemistry with the abstract alchemy of their syncretic ideas in order to unleash their occult ambiguities. For this reason, middle-eastern spells contain textual or diagrammatic instructions of chemical initiations embedded within the spell.

Poison-in/Poison-out are Poison/Cure spells which push the idea of ambivalent middle-eastern spells further as the artist uses western and middle-eastern, personal and social, inventive artistic elements and vaguely familiar components in her spells. Like all adventurous alchemists who are preoccupied with inconclusive and indefinite chemical reactions and elements, Alvanson takes up the calligraphic pen without any compunction with regard to ‘authenticity’. Since middle-eastern spells are already syncretic, mongrelized entities, she allows herself a free hand in their contemporary re-creation by mixing Farsi, Arabic, English and other symbols to ‘see what happens’.

The Farsi word for poison (zahr ) has been incorporated throughout the spells; the second letter in the word (from right to left) is the letter Ha2 which is a dominant letter in Arabic Qabalah known as ABJAD. The letter Ha always appears as a syncretic and twisted coil which suggests both Islamic and heretical connotations. In Poison-in/Poison-out, the letter Ha has been repeated throughout as a catalyst for the effectuation of the spells and a conduit into which the poison is poured and from which the poison leaves the spells – channels called ‘Poison-in’ and ‘Poison-out’. Alvanson also uses alchemical activation and de-activation commands such as ‘Bury it’ and ‘Burn it’ mixed with elemental combinations and codes to build the spells. Some of the components include: Fire, Wind, Water (sea), Earth, Miasma, Gas, Μέταλλο including: 16/S (Sulfur) 80/Hg (Mercury) 21/Sc (Scandium) 29/Cu (Copper) 32/Ge (Germanium) 107/Bh (Bohrium) 72/Hf (Hafnium) 20/Ca (Calcium) 114/Uup (Ununquadium) 69/Tm (Thulium) 71/Tu (Lutetium) 19/K (Potassium), Heat Capacity (Cv,m J mol−1 K−1) including: Helium 12.4717 Nitrogen 20.8 Neon 12.4717 Water 74.53 Air 20.7643 Argon 12.4717 CO2 28.46, and Allotropes of Brimstone (Cyclo-S8 and S7,cyclo-heptasulfur). As syncretic congeries of elements and alchemical commands, Poison-in/Poison-out exemplifies spells which refuse to generate conclusive or definite effects.

---

Kristen Alvanson (born in 1969 in Minneapolis) lives and works in Malaysia, after several years in Iran.

She attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College. Alvanson has exhibited in shows in both the United States and the Middle East. In 2008 she participated in group/solo shows in Tehran, London, Istanbul and Belgium, including a solo exhibition of her work at Azad Gallery in Tehran and participation in the International Roaming Biennial of Tehran. Her writing and artworks have been published in Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development, New Humanist, Frozen Tears III, Cabinet Magazine and Specialten. Most recently, she collaborated with Reza Negarestani with illustrations and text for the 'speculative theology' novel Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Re:Press 2008, listed as a best book of 2009 by Artforum international.

http://www.kristenalvanson.com/

Kristen writes,

"I've always been interested in the occult not as a mystic reservoir for solely personal experiences but as a map for occluded socio-political currents which are essentially collective. A number of people have said that the drawings and paintings I was doing while I was in New York had a strong occult line running throughout and I have to agree. But it wasn't until I was researching middle-eastern talismans about three years ago that I began using 'spells' in my work. It started with a project called 'Maskh' which was 100 drawings dealing with my metamorphosis – not in a narrative manner but in a cartographic way. I saw spells as occult maps for certain concrete socio-political processes which surface in the domain of collective desires; spells show transitions and metamorphoses of these desires from the collective to the individual sphere. That's why spells usually incorporate themes like abrupt transformations of identity and possession. Middle-eastern spells are mostly created in the form of diagrammatic bodies formed by abstract components such as numbers, letter curvatures and geometric elements which are ideal skeletal frames on which to build new spells. The spells I created for the Maskh series mainly had to do with the events leading up to my leavingt he US and moving to Iran in 2006. Once in Iran I continued to work with spells. I was able to see current examples of Persian calligraphy around Shiraz (in books, on walls and other places) as well as see many examples of old talismans. I was able to actually use locally made Persian ink which is a much richer and darker substance than what I could find in the US. I also learned how to work with Persian calligraphy pens which created so many types of lines. These pens create such limitless forms of curvatures and lines which I think are perfect for narrating the transitions of desires and transformations of identity through different expressions of intensity and ink tonality. Most Iranian calligraphers use the pens and ink in a very traditional way, but I tried all sorts of techniques with the pens…for example, scraping and using them on hard paper opposed to traditional glossy surfaces. I worked on a second 'installment' of maskh drawings and over the past couple years I've continued to work with spell making. The 'Poison-in/Poison-out' drawings I created for the 'Pharmakon' project is a continuation of this work."

Lucas Michael: Rough Magic (10 Years in LA)

2011-02-20T14:24:00.000-08:00

LUCAS MICHAEL
Still Life (LM Squared), 2008
30 x 40 inches
Black and White digital print on Fujiflex
edition of 5 + AP
~~courtesy Silverman Gallery, San Francisco~~

click on the detail above to see the full image...

ROUGH MAGIC

Lucas Michael:10 Years in LA

EGHQ, Los Angeles, Jan 8th – Feb 15th 2011

Lucas Michael traces. Literally. At Emma Gray HQ, a survey of subtle objects from the artist’s years in Los Angeles, takes on the complex relations between tracing, inscription, imagined identities and over-writing. Michael superimposes his signature on meticulously hand drawn frontispieces from books on Sylvia Plath.A photograph shows him ‘being Borg’ kissing the iconic tennis player’s trophy. The artist superimposes his own face, barely visible, onto a classic Liza Minelli from the Cabaret era.

Oliver Sacks, in his new book Mind’s Eye, takes a hard look at recognition. He considers the condition of not being able to recognize things visually except by placement. Even faces are unrecognizable: the sufferer must impose some clue, some note, some mental mark, to cope. A related condition is alexia, the loss of the ability to read while still being able to write. Michael takes up tracing like that: writing, as if not being able to read. Something about ten years in LA: can he (we) still see the lines of flight, like jet trails over Santa Monica?

Lucas Michael does not lay claim to impersonation. His objects are intrigues, shards left at a site, from which he himself is long gone. “A ruin is an accident in slow time,” observes Cocteau. We look for patterns at the archaeological site, as if Emma Gray HQ has become a dig, the objects study samples in search of pattern recognition: but we cannot read the signs. In a low res performance video, the artist films himself taking Polaroids. The footage unfurls repeated Polaroid images as his face emerges from the emulsion. Beyond this, nothing happens. Lucas brings us right up to the edge of visibility.He overwrites just to the edge of the legible imprint....almost-Borg, almost-Minelli, almost-Plath, almost-Lucas Michael.

Autobiography is ‘a discourse of self-restoration - by which one’s name...is made as intelligible and memorable as a face.” (Paul de Man, via Kristine Stiles, in “Correspondence Course: Letters of Carolee Schneeman, MIT Press 2010). Lucas Michael will write that ruin and finesse that face: evidence is to the contrary. Site and citation conflate. Lucas Michael’s ambivalent attachments make light work of a heavy tranche, that deep desire to identify with the beloved who may or may not be there. Lucas Michael’s erotic economy limits love to the accidental meeting. If you want to know the glory hole in Silverlake, you have to be able to read the signs.

-cm

Bertien van Manen: "Tirana: Mother and Bride" in MOMA's Pictures by Women 2011

2011-02-20T13:26:00.000-08:00

click on the detail above to see the full image...

Bertien van Manen

Tirana: Mother and Bride, 2007

from the project Photographs of Photographs in Europe by Bertien van Manen

MOMA's Pictures by Women 2011

"I like to work with small automatic cameras because of [their] dynamic and unpretentiousness, the liveliness and the spontaneity and the coïncidental effects. Using this camera also has the advantage of being less threatening. I am not so much there as ‘the photographer’, but more as a visitor who takes pictures...I was often moved by the way people trusted me and allowed me to have a look in their most private belongings." -Bertien van Manen (2008)

more photographs by Bertien in the Pharmakon Library..

Jean Watters : My Great Recession #barbies

2011-02-06T22:37:00.000-08:00

Jean Watters as Avon Representative Barbie with inventory

Barbie Legs with Shoes from the Gallery Opening Outfit

Midnight Tuxedo Barbie

Jean Watters as Midnight Tuxedo Barbie with inventory

click on the details above to see the full images...

My Great Recession

Angela Watters

In the social media performance and photography project, My Great Recession, I document the odd jobs I take in an attempt to scrape by during this jobless recovery. The images in the Pharmakon Library project are from the Barbie doll collection I was hired to sell online. --"Jean Watters"

Barbie Inventory

Wedding Party Midge Gift Set, Cafe Society Barbie, Russian Barbie, Vera Wang LE, Hula Hair Barbie, Millennium Princess Barbie, Victorian Ice Skater, 50th Anniversary NASCAR Barbie, Pilot Barbie, Happy Holidays Barbie 1996, Starlight Dance Barbie, Spring Petals Barbie, Avon - Winter Velvet Barbie, Holiday Traditions Barbie, Ocean Friends Barbie with Baby Keiko, Angelic Inspirations, Happy Holidays 1994, Victorian Elegance, Winter Rhapsody, Winter Evening Barbie 1998, University (U of Illinois) Cheerleader Barbie 1997, Evening Illusion Couture by Nolan Miller, Holiday Memories 1995, Yuletide Romance (3rd), Member’s Choice Grand Premier Barbie (1st ed), Couture - Portrait in Taffeta Barbie, Blushing Orchid Bride Barbie, Nolan Miller Sheer Illusion, Couture- Serenade in Satin Barbie, Holiday Treasures Barbie 1999, Happy Holidays Barbie 1997, German Barbie, Ms. PFE Albee - Avon Barbie, Hallmark Holiday Voyage Barbie, Snow Sensations Barbie, Blushing Bride Barbie, WNBA Barbie, Ring in the New Year Barbie, Date at Eight Barbie (outfit), Bridal Fashion Avenue (outfit), Embassy Waltz Barbie, Holiday Treasures Barbie 2000, Spring Tea Party Barbie, Spring Blossom Barbie, Avon Representative Barbie, Happy Holidays 1998, Holiday Ball Barbie, Suits Me Fine (outfit), Radiant Rose Barbie, Winter Splendor Barbie, Midnight Tuxedo Barbie, Gallery Opening (outfit).

DRUG:

MGR blog: The Internet, ideas, connections, attention, an audience, art worldly desires, $ for hard work, crappy jobs no longer just crappy jobs, and revenge. The Barbie Collection (frequent successful career moves, impractical gorgeousness, never aging, success, and fashion)

alexandria morgue in near-realtime, egypt 29 January 2011 (courtesy Aljazeera/live video clips)

2011-01-29T11:15:00.000-08:00

parker tilghman / pharma 1 - 7

2011-01-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

pharma series parker tilghman 2011

Beverly Fishman: Future Natural + Pill Spill

2010-10-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

new FIshman exhibition at Toledo Museum of Art 2011

Fishman's new Pill Spill installation contains more than 120 unique glass capsules, ranging in size from 6 to 15 inches, placed in glass-enclosed architectural spaces at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion. Pill Spill treats the Glass Pavilion as a “body” by releasing capsules into the curved glass hollows between its exterior and interior glass walls, transforming them into an architectural circulatory system. The installation was created as part of the Museum’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project (GAPP).

Future Natural at David Richards Contemporary 2010

Interlude: Art Placebo

2010-10-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Don't you think the pharmakon library would be a perfect addition to their research 'hallway'?

Behring | Institute for Medical Research
CALL FOR: PLACEBOS FOR ART.

--I'm very confused by this CFP.

--I checked the medical references. They appear to be fictitious. The institutes, medical schools etc mentioned do not seem to exist. The pharmaceuticals don't exist. There is a Dr. Kristina U. who is a prof at University of Puget Sound, they mustve picked her name out of random searches for a cool doctor name.

-- I especially appreciate how close 'Behring' is to 'Schering,' which does fund a lot of art in their own self-interest. It's also amusing how the title is "Placebos for Art" but is asking for "Art Placebos." The latter is certainly more innovative. The world is full of 'placebos for art.'

--They at least have enough funding to buy an e-flux ad...

--very amusing! now what if e-flux is yesman-ized...

-- was seriously considering entering the pharmakon library. i mean. Get down.

-- ‎...by rich Dutch medical students who are tired of their government giving so much money to art...

-- I can't imagine a better placebo.

-- did you check out their 'research facilities' photo? it's called hallway.png.

-- After all the Museum of Hygiene is in Dresden, for real. Maybe that 's where "Mrs. Andersom" did her post-doc fellowship.

-- That hallway is great. Imaginary researchers sunning themselves in the hall... And they have an alliance with the "Banned Substances Control Group." What a riot!!

--AKA BS Control Group.

--I think the term "Paramedicine" is too good to be left to languish on a hoax website. I'm gonna resuscitate that one sometime...

-- Okay okay... one last thing: "Nocebo is used to label the harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable reactions (or responses) that a subject manifested (thus, "nocebo reactions" or "nocebo responses") as a result of administering an inert dummy drug or placebo, where these responses had not been chemically generated, and were entirely due to the subject's pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug would produce harmful, injurious, unpleasant, or undesirable consequences. "

-- The. Best.

-- "Exclusions (conditions that would prevent a volunteer from participating in this study):
Persons taking Rosiglitazone, Popglitazone, steroids, and immune suppersants."

Popglitazone!!! who knew??

2010-08-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

Christine Callahan: Trine (3) Blz

2010-07-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

TRINE: Finding the Cosmic in Queens

I am quick to tilt my camera at an arc, bending before the lightning ghosts dissolve. Pockets of grey places flicker in and out of grace.

Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....

christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (4) Fur

2010-07-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens

I am intoxicated by harsh lens flare, water, hair, the fringes of raw edges and parking lots. I hold still to harness the shine.

Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....

christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (2) Floyd

2010-07-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens

I wait for the guillotine of light. It splits the object's body from its soul. I try to catch it, severed, airy, bouncing and bowing.

Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....

christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan: Trine (1) Trine

2010-07-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Trine: Finding the Cosmic in Queens

When I see a slant of light refracted, I feel the gods breathing.

Trine: Term in astrology, of or pertaining to the trigon aspect of two planets distant from each other 120°, or the third part of the zodiac. The distance between planets corresponding to one side of a triangle.

More trine....

christinecallahan.net

Christine Callahan is a native New Yorker. She earned her MFA from the International Center of Photography - Bard College and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta and Derry,Northern Ireland. She is a recipient of the ISE Cultural Foundation Grant, National Lottery Fund, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Arts Council in cooperation with the Cardiff School of Art and Design.
She teaches photography at the International Center of Photography and Nassau Community College. Her work is represented by the Jen Bekman gallery.

naxsmash: vine thing like you don't like (hommage bruce conner) 2

2010-07-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

2010-07-02T23:02:00.002-07:00

naxsmash : like you don't like (hommage bruce conner) 5 (sweet fatigue)

2010-07-02T23:02:00.000-07:00

naxsmash : like you don't like (hommage bruce conner) 4 (plastic wrap)

2010-07-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

naxsmash : like you don't like (hommage bruce conner) 3 (night paint)

2010-07-02T22:56:00.001-07:00

naxsmash : like you don't like (hommage bruce conner) 1 (midnight oil)

2010-07-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

Midnight Oil, photomontage with clip still from Three Screen Ray, Bruce Connor 2006

"....a haecceity like a wind that stirs at midnight, or at noon."

~~-Deleuze and Guattari, On the LIne, translated by John Johnston, Semiotext(e), 1983~~

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (D/DD)

2010-06-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Justin Kruse is an architect and designer living and working in New York City. His recent collaborative graphics project won an award in the competition White House Redux, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2008.

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (C/CC)

2010-06-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (B/BB)

2010-06-15T14:29:00.000-07:00

Justin Kruse: Check out my new arm (A/AA)

2010-06-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

Over my shoulder.

Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand : Mixed Relations (1)

2010-06-11T23:50:00.000-07:00

These images portray the technology used in the series mixed relations, a collaboration between Micha Cárdenas and Elle Mehrmand. mixed relations consists of a series of performances and workshops that explore the relations between bodies and technology within mixed realities. The performances focus on using the body as an instrument to produce live audio, linking the physical and virtual worlds. The goal is to look at bodies in relation to each other, as well as in relation to the technologies which extend and multiply them, sonically, visually and physically. The performances explore themes of affective tension andanticipation, techno-fetishism, and D.I.Y. cyborg bodies.

Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand : Mixed Relations (5)

2010-06-11T19:19:00.000-07:00

The wires hanging from our bodies conjure at once torture, medicine and DIY open technologies. The blinking lights both hint at the mechanical repetition and the scopic pleasure in seeing, the enjoyment of brightly colored pixels petting our retinas and shimmering across our skin. Biometric technology can be seen as a post-contemporary pharmakon, seeming to decentralize knowledge of the body, but quantifying and shaping the form of that knowledge, presupposing its usages and facilitating surveillance. We acknowledge the problematics of the economies which bring us these devices while embracing our potential to open our bodies up to new hybrid experiences of flesh and electricity.

Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand : Mixed Relations (4)

2010-06-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

Here, the devices act as a pharmakon, both remedy and poison, oscillating between the two, both/and simultaneously. In looking at technological mediation of relationships, we see both the failure of the technology, adding distance between us, hearing noise in the recording, transmitting out pain, and the new depths opened by the technologies, hearing each other's heartbeats, bridging worlds, providing the raw excitement of the hack.

Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand : Mixed Relations (3)

2010-06-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

In technésexual the performers commit playful erotic acts in physical and virtual space simultaneously, using devices to amplify the sound of their heartbeats for the two audiences. At the Hemispheric Institute for performance art and politics in Bogota, Colombia, an analog stethoscope was connected to a piezo sensor to amplify the actual live heartbeat sound. At GLAMFA, in Long Beach, CA, an electrocardiogram was used to monitor the heart rate, playing a recording of the heartbeat at the correct rate using Puredata. The sound is used here to bridge the two spaces, finding ways of exploring the space between realities.

Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand : Mixed Relations (2)

2010-06-11T19:07:00.000-07:00

slapshock consists of a performance with a pain-sharing device, exploring symbiotic relationships. A transdermal electro nerve stimulation unit was wired to a piezo sensor through a Freeduino, creating a device which would send a painful electric shock to the other performer when each performer slapped themselves.

Christina McPhee after Carolee Schneeman: MEAT OIL JOY PAINT (2)

2010-06-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

MEAT OIL JOY PAINT

a video installation by Christina McPhee

2010

A tribute to Carolee Schneemann's MEAT JOY (1964) set in petroleum fields and dipped in red paint...bodies/becoming/petroleum, how to rebel?

MEAT OIL JOY PAINT online video

Shot at the San Ardo Petroleum Fields, Monterey County, California;

Christina McPhee is a visual and media artist based in the central coast of California and San Francisco.Forthcoming solo exhibitions include emptycube, Lisbon 2011.Recent press includes the cover image (film still, SALT 2004) and Ella Mudie's feature article, "The Spectacle of Seismicity" for LEONARDO, MIT Press Journal, April 2010.FMI Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Christina McPhee after Carolee Schneemann: MEAT OIL JOY PAINT (1)

2010-06-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

MEAT OIL JOY PAINT

A video installation by Christina McPhee 2010 now at BABY GRAND NYC June 8 to July 20, 2010

A tribute to Carolee Schneemann's MEAT JOY (1964) set in the oil fields and dipped in red paint. Shot at the San Ardo Petroleum Fields, Monterey County, California.

MEAT OIL JOY PAINT (Tesserae-Vermillion) 2010

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 9 [Marx-Lenin] and Ars Longa

2010-06-03T23:33:00.000-07:00

3D Virtual Socialism
Karl Marx (conception) & Vladimir I. Oulianov a.k.a. Lenin (programming)
Brussels, Belgium - Moscow, Russia, 1848 - 1917

We have created MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) which mimics
social behaviours but with slightly different rules : pulsions such as greed or love for money
are discouraged. Instead, collaborative or socially oriented behaviours are rewarded.
But we left the goal of the game open, otherwise it was to easy to win...

Postscript:

"Global Artists" was first conceived in 2003 as an online work. The project was reactivated and reworked
in March 2010 in a non virtual context, on the occasion of the exhibition "Le paradoxe du petit monde",
curated by Judith Lavagna and Cyril Verde, at Galerie Ars Longa in Paris.

3D realization for the Marx&Lenin piece: Frederic Lepeltier.

http://www.unbehagen.com/globalartists/index.htm

http://www.arslonga.fr/

About the artist:

Christophe Bruno lives and works in Paris. He began his artistic activity in September 2001.
His polymorphic work (installations, performances, conceptual pieces) is a critical take on
network phenomena and globalisation in the field of language and images.

He divides his time between his artistic activity, curating,teaching, lectures and publications.

http://www.christophebruno.com/

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 8 [Bruni-Sarkozy]

2010-06-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

Multiverse Ideology Remix (FR) keraoke video

Nicolas Sarkozy & Carla Bruni
Paris, France, 2007

(In french only)
Notre projet est une étude des paradoxes de l'identité. L'univers logique qui sous-tend le médium de la pensée est une logique des processus non apprivoisés. On ne peut plus décemment séparer ce monde en dichotomies du type vrai ou faux, haut ou bas, gauche ou droite, fini ou infini... Au contraire, la normalisation émerge de l'immanence du dispositif médiatico-conceptuel global auto-régulé, comme solution naturelle au problème de la dissension idéologique qui grève la pensée politique depuis l'origine de la civilisation.

En achevant la destruction de ce qui restait de modernité dans l'identité nationale française, nous avons pu, grâce à une série de détournements médiatiques soigneusement orchestrés par notre équipe, rétablir le statut irréductiblement marchand de toute idéologie quelle qu'elle soit. La forme marchandise de l'idéologie et le dévoilement de sa valeur d'échange permettent d'envisager l'identité sous une forme plus stable et régulée, loin des affects issus de l'enfance de l'homme, et débarrassée du fantasme d'une Loi qui serait imposée à tous depuis un extérieur transcendant.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 7 [Bush Bin Laden]

2010-06-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

A new meme: the September 11th Commandment
George W. Bush & Osama Bin Laden (collab. work)
New-York, USA, 2001

"Memes" are the symbols of our postmodernity. The uncertainty principle they are associated with
replaced the old conception of a supposed metanarrative. They evoke so many contemporary themes
from the potentially infinite duplicability of the digital medium, to the burning issue of genetic cloning
or the scale-free network theory.

Our world has become an unstable self-disregulating memeplex. The fluidity and the pervasive
aspect of global information demand a scientific control which is still beyond our reach.
In order to handle this fluctuating mediascape, we focussed on creating a large-scale
informational wave by launching a mediatic tsunami that will strike people's imaginations
for hundreds of years and dissipate the fuzziness of postmodernity and chaos theory.

As a result, individuals (minimal media units that are susceptible of maximal damages
) will have to obey a new meme, The September 11th Commandment: "Suspect your neighbor as yourself".

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 6 [Jesus Christus]

2010-06-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

L.O.V.E.: self-portrait as a virus
Jesus Christus
Jerusalem, 30 A.C.

I have programmed a semantic virus that is able to spread and infect any neural network for thousands of years. It's called L.O.V.E. It is a self-referential quantum-like virus, so that when a system tries
to fight it, it automatically gets infected.

The more it fights, the more infected it is.

The virus is actually harmless for short scale neural interactions.
But it has long-range effects that can produce interesting
collective phenomenons on disoriented networks.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 5 [A. Hitler]

2010-06-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

Fashmobs

Adolf Hilter
Berlin, Germany, 1939-1945

I created a website where people can leave their mobile phone number. The idea is that when the number of people is large enough, a SMS instruction is sent to all of them simultaneously by the server. When they receive it, people have to perform the instructions. The instructions are simple ones, like raising an arm, but the effect is amplified by the fact that many people do it in the same place, at the same time, as in a symphonic orchestra.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 4 [Spartacus]

2010-06-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

Free slaveware
Spartacus
Capua, Italy, 73 BC.

Free slaveware is a matter of the user's freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the slave.
More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom,
for the users of the slave:

The freedom to run the slave, for any purpose.
The freedom to study how the slave works, and adapt it to your needs.
The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help your neighbor.
The freedom to improve the slave, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Access to the genetic code of the slave is a precondition for this.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 3 [Mao Zedong]

2010-06-03T22:32:00.000-07:00

Facebay: cultural revolution 2.0
Mao Zedong
Beijing, 1965-1969

I have organized a global performance wherein
millions of people switched their lives for ten years.
They followed the specifications I had established, on how to perform each other.

During the experiment, we were able to track the effect
of the permutations on global economic indexes
and to observe the social implications.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 2 [Charles de Gaulle]

2010-06-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

The day I killed postmodernity before it was even invented.

Charles de Gaulle
Paris - Baden Baden, May 29, 1968

In May 1968, I organized my own disappearance to study the effect of the
presence/absence phenomenon (fort/da) on a selected network
of people that I used to be close to, with a love/hate relationship.

The resulting piece consisted in the study of the evolution
of this network of people and the phase transition
(from chaos to order) that followed the disappearance.

Christophe Bruno: Global Artists 1 [Torquemada]

2010-06-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

HyperBody Markup Language (H.B.M.L.)

Tomás de Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor
Sevilla, Spain, 1482

The intimate narrative history of a human being can be related to painful events of his life. Thus in our installation : Internauts ask questions to a volunteer thanks to a website. When a question is not satisfactorily answered by the volunteer, a non-verbal painful signal is sent to him by the administrator. The output is that our software-art installation allows us to display the resulting speech of the volunteer in real time on a weblog exhibited on the Web, joining intimacy to globality.

Lena Lapschina: Under the Water / Above the Water (2)

2010-05-30T16:07:00.000-07:00

The portraits are showing two of my voluntary victims of icy arctic circle photo shooting. Great colors thanks to Swedish sea characteristics and midnight sun!

Underwater portraits passing by remind the viewer of Ichtiander, the personage from Beljaeff's science fiction novel Amphibiousman.

Exhibition history:

"RISK" Lulea Art Biennial, Lulea Sweden, 2009
"Idyll" Atelier 030202, Bucharest, 201-

Technical data:

Under the water / Above the water
125 x 83 cm (50 by 33 in) / Ilfoflex/Diasec/Alu
edition of 6 (+2 EA)

Lena Lapschina: Under the Water / Above the Water (1)

2010-05-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

"Under the water": mind-expanding, 100 % natural!

Existence without sound and verbal communication can turn out into an advantage – at least in the short term. This is what the participants in the photo sessions for the "Under the water / Above the water" project easily find out. Cold water may limit the fun.
Hot and cold all over. Both under the water and above the water, life can be pretty harsh. Even on tropical islands – if you aren't a tourist. "Sich über Wasser halten", a German metaphor, is not about fun at all, but about the basis of one's livelihood.

Lena Lapshina

Born 1965 Kurgan, Western Siberia.
State Stroganow University of Fine and Applied Arts, Moscow 1991; Ph.D 1996.
Lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria.
Artist, co-founder of State of the Art magazine, curator for M21.
LENA LAPSCHINA
==============

curriculum vitae

Born in 1965 in Kurgan, Western Siberia.
Graduated from the State Stroganow University of Fine and Applied Arts, Moscow, in 1991 and made her Ph. D. in 1996.
Lives and works in Vienna and Lower Austria.
Artist, co-founder of State of the Art magazine, curator for M21.

Selected exhibitions:

2011:
Space, Kunsthalle Wien, Wien (AT)
2010:
Biennial of Young Artists, Bukarest (RO)
OSTRALE '010 Internationale Ausstellung für zeitgenössische Künste, Dresden (DE)
Festival de l'Image Environnementale, Paris (FR)
Resistance, Museumszentrum Krasnojarsk, Krasnojarsk (RU)
Princely Halali, Esterhazy Privatstiftung, Forchtenstein (AT)
Idyll, Bukarest (RO)
2009:
Performance III – Gender, Politik, soziale Fragen und Intercultural Studies, Fotogalerie Wien, Wien (AT)
My favorite late-night television watching pencil's diary, Kunstencentrum Signe, Heerlen (NL)
Exposition Fleuves, CNEAI, Paris (FR)
Weite, VIII. Biennale Krasnojarsk (RU)
Risk, Kunstbiennale Luleå, Luleå (SE)
unfiction, University Galleries, Illinois State University, Chicago (U.S.A.)
Videoreflex, Synagoge Trnava, Trnava (SK)

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 8

2010-04-05T22:17:00.001-07:00

Marshmallow Crash (digital video, 8 min looping), 2008

Caitlin Berrigan is an artist who works at the intersection of performance, edible sculpture, participatory actions and the life sciences to initiate dialogue about biopolitics and culture.

Berrigan has presented her work internationally, including at the Whitney Museum’s Initial Public Offerings, Storefront for Art & Architecture, Gallery 400 Chicago, Anthology Film Archives and the Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv. She has been an invited speaker at the New Museum, Harvard Medical School, and the Max Planck Institute. Berrigan received an Agnes Gund fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2008) and was an artist in residence at PROGRAM in Berlin (2009) and the Bioarts Initiative at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2007). She holds a Master’s in visual art from MIT (2009) and a B.A. in art history and production from Hampshire College (2004). Raised in Mendocino, California, she has lived in Massachusetts, New York City and Paris. She currently lives in Berlin.

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 7

2010-04-05T22:16:00.001-07:00

...we do little more than hold our breath..

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 6

2010-04-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

marshmallow suicide...

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 5

2010-04-05T22:11:00.000-07:00

That buoyant fluff promised by the giant marshmallow is never quite delivered...

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 4

2010-04-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

Violent confrontation with an oversized marshmallow amidst an idyllic pastorale....

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 3

2010-04-05T22:06:00.000-07:00

After the crumbling of capitalist monuments in the Fall and the uncertainty of American empire, the metaphors of Marshmallow Crash are oddly prescient

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 2

2010-04-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

I was compelled to create work based on the insidious, fluffy iconography of the marshmallow and the American landscape.

Caitlin Berrigan : Marshmallow Crash 1

2010-04-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

Just before the market crash in the Fall of 2008 and the imminent departure of the Bush administration, I sensed impending doom....

Ian Giles: Desert (6)

2010-02-05T21:01:00.000-08:00

If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Ian Giles is an artist based in London. Forthcoming: Blind Alchemy, with Rachel Adams, at the Royal Standard, Liverpool, opens 12 February 2010

Ian Giles : Desert (5)

2010-02-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

There is nothing surprising in this.

Ian Giles: Desert (4)

2010-02-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the wilderness.

Ian Giles: Desert (3)

2010-02-05T20:41:00.000-08:00

This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

Ian Giles: Desert (2)

2010-02-05T20:39:00.001-08:00

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to the desert as soon as I can

Ian Giles: Desert (1)

2010-02-05T20:25:00.001-08:00

Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my wallet, and nothing particular to interest me in the city, I thought I would drive about a little and see the dusty part of the world.

MANIK: Art Macht Frei (5)

2009-12-16T15:24:00.001-08:00

MANIK

Marija Vauda (Belgrade) graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts,the Department of sculpture,in Belgrade in 1986. NikolaPilipović (1957 Kikinda)holds BA and MA degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts,the Department of Painting,in Belgrade in 1986.These artists have been working very actively on the Serbian contemporary art scene for 20 years Marija Vauda and Nikola Pilipović have been working together since 1993,but they started to sign their works as MANIK in 1999.

MANIK group:

Inselfment,video and performace,1997

From China to Banat,action,2001,Belgrade

Marija Vauda&Nikola Pilipović,installation,2001,Umetnostna Gallery,Maribor

and Modern Gallery,Slovenj Gradec,Slovenia

Luxurious,an action in the scope of Manifesta Frankfurt and Belgrade 2002,

MANIKmagazine(no.1,no.2,no.3,no.4 and no.5)

Verwerfung,video,2001

MANIK in INTELLIGENT AGENT

Vegetable life

Intensive care,24h-online work and Intensive care,video,2003

MANIK,The missing people,ambient,2004,the Gallery of ULUS,Belgrade

MANIK,2006,the Art Gallery of the Cultural Centre Belgrade

MANIK_RAW:Epic of Violence,drawings,2008,the Gallery 'Magacin',Belgrade

Since 2000 MANIK Group has been present on Rhizome.org,New Museum of Contemporary Art,New York and online as a Rhizome actions archive at MANIK’s blog,which has been entered as „Rhizome-Twice in time“

MANIK has been editing a forum called Seecultura at the portal SeeCult-for the culture of South-East Europe(Belgrade)since 2005.

Authors who wrote texts about MANIK’s work(selection):

Jerko Denegri,Miško Šuvakovic,Branislav Dimitrijević,Rob Myers,Gordana Stanišić,Jasna Tijardović,Patrick Lichty

MANIK: Art Macht Frei (4)

2009-12-16T15:15:00.001-08:00

MANIK: Art Macht Frei (3)

2009-12-16T15:05:00.001-08:00

MANIK: Art Macht Frei (2)

2009-12-16T14:43:00.000-08:00

MANIK : Art Macht Frei (1)

2009-12-16T13:54:00.000-08:00

2009-12-16T13:49:00.001-08:00

Recipe [evacuee cake] /Recette-Gâteaux_à_évacués 2008 from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

Christina McPhee + Molly McPhee: Recipe (evacuee cake) 4

2009-01-08T14:56:00.000-08:00

film stills from 'Recipe (evacuee cake)' Christina McPhee 2008
Here is the text of the poem :

Evacuee cake / Molly McPhee, 2007

[part one]

I am in receipt of words provided to me
Those that indicate we are reciprocals put into pies,
those surgical ones leading to a common maceration
Metrical, non-metric, cage, skull,
test of bars as lexical conversions, receipt with variation,
kits of taste...

Now wild words taste better so bitter whiskers against the bar
kitchen sashes, cull, play similars all

similars as to grow evacuee cakes,
minerals down buttresses
leaks into grip-tie emergencies
grow the garrison

deposit milks marbled culprits the littlest nutrient, the biggest
new fairly voluptuous in liberty around
still muling
still nailing

Let me ask you what you are trying to say.
We...
That's not what you said before. Name me five examples.
We...
You can't even do that simple thing?
We...
You live here for free. Pull your shit together.
we...
You're crying already?
we...
Get the fuck out of my vision.

Of the following, some are waves and some possible treats:
Organ juice solvent on the racks
a lobotomy yielding sweetbreads slippery of words provided,
earths of the released
evacuee cakes scoured with whip frets
Now carnivorous words taste worse so muscles ripped against the bar

Evisceration, then cooking

A recipe enters in throats vitriolic or vittles, now someone who wasn't fake
the girds contract sweats bloods
using more bills clips or leave unclipped to fly
from the arch of the gullet to quicklime

own wards pronounced anymore
for army splints only or
flung truants from bridges that boom

Don't Come

But all I wanted now you're gone was an animal to swallow and attest you never were.

Receipt of things to bake and fluff:
The brains of words, the crowns of panthers and illegals
scooped and opened to tissues,
hearings will sew up the next times still won't speak

we'll produce a slightly different texture deeper inside of us

Similars to expect:
scurried, torn, savory, mind numbing, and won,
Combine these, select similars:
roster pads, ghost arms, citizen
Positive, positive to be used in the mouth.

...

Merida T'Ho_MX: Todo en silenco

2009-01-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

todo está en suspenso, todo tranquilo, todo inmóvil, todo apacible, todo silencioso, todo vacío, en el cielo, en la tierra.

Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, interview, October 2008, Santa Cruz, California.

"I have decolonized myself in order to begin the construction of the space. I have created discourses with artists whose conceptual work is inspired by Cildo Meireles and the dialectic of the 'disappeared" and the uspoken stories of 'uncharted regions"-- notably, the Coca-Cola project of 1970. The coke bottle project involved insertion and removal processes and then recirculation--exploring 'to register informations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation.' (Cildo Meireles). The curatorial project becomes a collaborative art piece "always growing a matrix, in which not only the curators participate, but also the artists. Together, they create variable geometries." Reflecting on Cortázar,'having in our own histories those who are part of our cultural territory-- we had to bring back these histories, our cultural practices: we are now colonized by new media theorists; neo-conceptual spaces re-shifts when in the Latin American space, as we bring in through it our own concepts and issues...The omnipresence of the English language in new media meant that 'English was nominating, scripting, programming." The effect was a de facto prejudice, "we are not interested in non-English speaking artists. You couldn't be a new media artist in the late nineties" without dealing with this prejudice. This was'technopatriarchy-even though we were immersed in this transformative territory, this cross-section of disciplines, we were creating new knowledges but these served as but a fetish to the machine, to imperialist surveillance and the control of essence...such was the nature of the internet at that time (the late nineties)." We were breaking from the Cartesian model of scientific rationalism; we were concerned with the fundamental insight of [Mayan culture] of landscape as a data space. harks back, for Raul, to Rudolf Arnheim, whose empiricism was the foundation of knowledge- gained through all the senses via deep systems of metaphor underlying all the senses. Essentially, Raul argues for the primacy of direct observation and indigenous understanding-- that values and meanings arise from this matrix of sensing/perceiving/observing in a participatory context; these are his 'variable geometries" which make pathways of understanding and life-connection outside dominating systems of control.

Elin Lennox: Lubricants 3 + 4

2009-01-08T00:24:00.000-08:00

With enough lubricant, we could all slip by

But for now, let's stick together

I use strange, small, translucent toys,
eggs, oils, pigments, lights, cameras, and computers
to build organic structures. These concoctions,
like George's marvelous medicine, escape their ingredients'
original uses, by framing a new context for them,
something strong and whizz-bang unexpected.

-Elin Lennox

Elin Lennox : Lubricants 1 + 2

2009-01-08T00:18:00.000-08:00

ELIN LENNOX IS A PAINTER AND RECENT BFA GRADUATE OF CARNEGIE MELLON
UNIVERSITY. AS SUBSTITUTE TEACHER FOR DAYJOB SHE BIKES THE HILLS OF PITTSBURGH
AT EARLY HOURS TO NEIGHBORHOODS NO ONE WOULD EVER GO TO UNLESS
THEY KNEW SOMEBODY OR HAD SOME BUSINESS THERE. THE CITY SPREADS
OUT IN THE EARLY HOURS BEFORE TRAFFIC. LATER AT HOME SHE SWITCHES TO
LIGHTBOXES WITH ENOUGH LUBRICANT WE COULD ALL SLIP BY

Christina McPhee: pharmakon library magic

2009-01-05T23:29:00.000-08:00

Pharmakon Library is an ongoing series of graphic folios created and curated by Jessica Silverman with Christina McPhee. The folios comprise a series of open works by artists who address, through image and/or text, the principle of critical reversability, or proximity of poison and cure. ...

---its one of those mcluhanesque things: the content is determined by the interaction of the artists with the general notions of recipe, poison, antidote, paint, talisman, gift, drug. So the content emerges via the transaction rather than from a default or a priori position. By leaving it up to the artists I think the library retains potency as itself a pharmakon, because the artists have to engage with the topic from an inside/outside position, right on the edge of the personal, and yet not- else it would not be a spell or a paint, something that goes over something else, or covers/reveals something else. A visual text that moves between error, errancy, exile, never quite home (so it's part of that unheimlich quality we feel when we encounter the strangely familiar). It's a bit like Bergman's fascination with the theatre. A little world which is actually much safer than the cruelty outside its walls; but perhaps in the proximity of the theatrical to everyday life a kabbalistic reordering of events could happen, as in his "Fanny and Alexander." (1982) My imagination takes me back to the lost Alexandrian library, which was purported to be filled with manuscripts including many items of an incantatory nature from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Similarly then the Pharmakon Library is like a networked incantation, or even a kind of seepage of white magic into the interfaces between spirit and matter, between the virtual network and physical spaces. Also there is a really interesting idea implicit in this, that the possible/probable opacity of meaning in the images is a kind of springboard towards a making of meanings on the fly on the part of the visitor- nothing indeed is fixed, everything is relation. There is no correct interpretation nor is there correct content vs incorrect; also there is no administration of content according to morphologies beyond these extremely fluid and practically nonsensical categories of recipe, poison, antidote etc. Why do this ? well the image can function, i can dream so anyhow, as a kind of immanence- I am an iconophiliac, i like the way that images apparently have a potency beyond conscious ken.

Bertien van Manen: "Paris Alice in Wonderland"

2009-01-03T23:29:00.000-08:00

"The strange, irreal effect of combining photos with objects for me is a picture of the irreallity of the world we live in. The alterations of political situations, the restlessness caused by the current threats and changes, war, migration, terrorism but also consumption, TV, Internet, the speed of life, all these things make people forget who they are. And they make them cherish their family-photos..."

Bertien van Manen: Photographs of Photographs in Europe

2009-01-03T23:21:00.001-08:00

Bertien van Manen, "Rome Fausto Coppio"

from the series: Photographs of photographs in Europe

by Bertien van Manen 2007

"In 2002 I started photographing photographs in parts of private interiors in Europe.
An interior is a metaphore for the inner being, showing in an unemphatical way the history, feelings, ideas and hopes of the inhabitants. The interior is a cocoon or a shell, that people build to keep their dreams in."

Christina McPhee: "Tillamook Air Models 3 + 4"

2009-01-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

Christina McPhee: "Tillamook Air Models 1 + 2"

2009-01-01T16:28:00.000-08:00

Shot in medium format using Agfa SCALA transparency film pushed to 1600 ASA.
Closing time, Tillamook Air Museum, Tillamook, Oregon August 2007. Printed October 2008 in folio one/ Pharmakon Library, for the New York Art Book Fair/Printed Matter with Silverman Gallery.

Dave Iseri: "Everything is Over"

2008-12-31T17:29:00.000-08:00

Everything is Over / a graphic story by Dave Iseri

TWELVE CAUTIONARY TALES FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER, CREATED BY
ISERI WITH JEFFERSON FROST, LAURA SPERRY AND JUSTIN KRUSE, IS AN HOMAGE
TO SUPERSTUDIO FOR THE WHITE HOUSE REDUX COMPETITION 2008 AT
STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE, NEW YORK. AND IN TRUE SUPERSTUDIO
FORM, IT IS ALSO A TEST FOR EVERYTHING IS OVER.

Lady in Wight (2) - from Neal Robinson

2008-12-28T23:00:00.000-08:00

Neal writes (on -empyre):

As Kevin so eloquently stated in his previous post I also didn't exactly head to Colorado to unpack my pharmakon, but was thrilled to be invited to explore a topic previously unknown to me and to take part in Christina’s vision of a Pharmakon project.

My fascination with the perception of time and space drove me to create the Lady in Wight variants. These immense and perplexing subjects have been orbiting human thought for centuries and have been at the core of my work for some time now.

Instead of delving deeply into these enormous subjects, I was thinking we could take a side road and look at my visual and photographic strategy for these pieces. So where did the Lady in Wight variants begin? Ostensibly I could say it began with the books I have been reading over the past year and a half. These have included such works as The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, A Briefer History Time by Stephen Hawking and the David Bodanis books E=mc2 and the Electric Universe.

Trying to wrap my head around the subjects that these authors introduce has proven to be quite a Sisyphean task. However, as a starting point for me it has been an invaluable endeavor. As my organic process continues I begin to hunt and gather images. Currently I am using a dslr to capture slices of time, though the Wight variants were primarily made from digital video stills.

The next step in Wight’s road to reality began with bringing everything into a digital environment. Film footage was taken using Photoshop’s automated ability to grab frames at pre-specified intervals and thus bring into the work a randomness that is associated with quantum physics. Once captured, the frames were then connected and layered into a much larger image. Layering at that point became an essential part of the process. Using the programs layers tool I was able to code and collage meaning into the image as I introduced text and various other shapes.

Even though the Lady in Wight variants are finished and have been released out into the world to make there own way as independent objects they provided an excellent jumping off point into my current work. I am a huge proponent of looking at one's work in retrospect which then helps the author understand their own art and also aids in the conception of new pieces. If you would like to see where the variants have led me then please visit
http:/www.neal-robinson.com

Until next time,

Neal

Naeem Mohaiemen: Heard It On TV Must Be True (from "My Mobile Weighs a Ton")

2008-12-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

PHARMAKON DEBATE

Balancing opposed needs for obscuring (from state censors) and revealing (to audience), I kept cutting/slicing the text. In early drafts, there was chatter about modes of production. I spent time debating whether I should keep quotes around “a very trivial matter” on a wall label, thinking that would be enough of a signpost: to a statement made at a press conference about the riots. The problem with ellipsis is, in the time of brutal edges only a hammer is understood. With a few exceptions, many did really think it was a show about mobile phones. Bread crumbs were eaten & lost. But along the way, before rushing to the printers (alway late), Annu Bonbibi unpacked the various drafts.

Naeem: Ok, no more “all you need is love” in the invite. Decided to go with FnF in the end because wanted to bring it back to mobiles…:-)

Annu: there’s a military govt on, you take pictures of curfew, Chitrak gives you space, and you decide to be cute…:-)…

Naeem: Chitrak didn’t “give space” as some act of charity. Empty slot before Ramadan. I’m happy they gave me space, but I don’t need to follow some kindness script...

FnF reference isn’t “cute”, it’s friends helping each other and building communities. Friendship love, not the boinking kind.

Annu: yeah, friendship when the mobile connections were deactivated, yeah lots and lots of communities have been built in Dhaka since 1/11 as we’re all living in a spirit of genial camaraderie and people are getting involved in issues and not being paranoid about being watched - give me a break… ar FnF tar mane ashole ki?? Finger-nose-finger??

Naeem: Friends n Family! The mobile package. You know, cheaper rates to all your FnF.

Annu: Also, was thinking why not ‘And lots of wall’?? as last line. I didn’t mean Chitrak ‘gave’ you space in the sense you understood it. Who cares if you spent your own money or not? I was thinking more along the lines of - today - Bangladesh - a young man (punk ethics et al) - wants to show his mobile pictures of an age when things are not what they seem to be - what does he need? - wall, wall, wall - be it Chitrak or outside DU.. byas, ei tukui amar boktobbo.

To really be ephemeral and for your work to, so to speak, ’self-destruct’ it would have been great to take this exhibition to the streets. Outside Charukala? Don’t worry, the rain would make sure no visual trace is left of this visceral angst I feel needs outing. Otherwise its just more talk and talk and talk amongst ourselves, FnF indeed!

Ok, before we move to the next point, I need to get this out of my system. I don’t know if I explained why FnF was keeping me sleepless. So mobile gives you this ‘free’ talk-time to call your friends and family, right? And? During curfew, communication was brought to a standstill because the potatoes just switched off a button. All our lots and lots of FnFs all switched off at the same time. Silence.

Every time I’ve been trying to talk potato politics, you’ve been paranoid and asking me not to talk about this on the phone. So yeah, our phones are tapped, brains are being eaten raw – before they’ve had time to foment the slightest ideas of rebellion – our brightest and most courageous are being imprisoned and silenced. In other words, what does FnF bring me if I can’t talk politics/organize demos/discuss religion with my friends? Silence

Naeem: But I never saw the mobile as a symbol of freedom. It’s limited, it’s role is instrumental in state control, and then there’s the ongoing bastardization of cultural space through sponsorship. FnF and many other text in the show is just using mobile jargon as language. It’s not the mobile I care about, but “FnF” as a signifier of friendship. The word, not the technical mobile function. Not the buttons, the talk time, the 25 paisa night rates.

Annu: Ok, and…let’s talk about the statement. What exactly is the image war you’re talking about? Or is it the battle against ‘aesthetic fascism’ as you earlier called it? Aren’t sunsets just your pseudonym for ‘aesthetic perfection’? And in that case isn’t ‘aesthetic perfection’ a pseudonym for a greater stifling – not just of artistic creativity but in the end of life lived with a penchant for différance, a life with punk and spunk.. ’with a little bit of creative chaos’? that’s how I read it..

Naeem: When the newspapers accidentally printed the picture of the student’s flying kick, that was image war (quickly snuffed out the next day). Accidental vs deliberate image warfare. Momentary forays and then retreat. One step forward..

Annu: I liked the Sultan part in your last draft! The bit where it says: “Remember Sultan, he was turned away from his own show because the Shilpakala guard thought he was a fokirni (only after his death could they sell him at Sotheby’s). That’s punk before the Sex Pistols.”

Naeem: I think I will take it out though, runs the risk of some thickhead thinking I am comparing myself with Sultan. By the way, what’s Bengali for DIY? Is there one?

Annu: I would say, juto shelai theke chondi path (from shoe repair to reading Chandi puja text). So somebody who can do everything by herself, i.e. the shoe repair job of the lowest caste as well as performing puja -in Brahminical Hinduism a job only performed by Brahmin males. And the juto, it goes with the kick.

Back to what personally interests me- the howl and the gall or the ‘damage and panic’. As I see it, the fear, for the man on the street, of being insignificant and powerless, or silenced and snuffed out in a world of scandalous and outrageous on-your-face consumption or in a world where his vote, read voice, will not count, where his differánce will cost him his life.

[shobak.org]

Naeem Mohaiemen: Bones of Four Seasons (from "My Mobile Weighs a Ton" )

2008-12-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

DAMAGE

"We are in an Asian century, and a local situation, that is producing beautiful imagery. But it's all a little too gorgeous and refined. Standing in this political moment, aesthetic perfection makes me queasy. We still need space for mistakes, sharp teeth and bacteria. Politics come from the context in which image war happens. Mobile phone photos-- blurry, low dpi, poorly framed, no rule of thirds, colors burnt beyond recognition. Giving you quick access to make temporary provocations, without planning, preparation or press card." -NM

Naeem Mohaiemen: Something in the Air (from "My Mobile Weighs a Ton" )

2008-12-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Election 2008: Don’t turn my mobile off

by Naeem Mohaiemen

Daily Star, December 26, 2008

IN Khagrachari this week for a pre-election visit, I saw the value of mobile networks even in the district that was last to get it and has the most sparse coverage. Because operators have not put towers everywhere, once you leave Khagrachari Sadar certain mobile operator networks go off. After eight hours in the interior, we would return to the Sadar and networks, and immediately find phones filling up with unread SMS.

Among Jumma (Pahari) election organisers, the mobile is an essential tool. They were getting SMS about irregularities in Bandarban, pre-election voter intimidation in Rangamati. Just as quickly, those SMS were getting forwarded to media, activist, and government networks. By the time the newspapers arrived the next day (usually at mid-day in Khagrachari), those events had been reported and in some cases resolved.

Given that experience, and many others like it through the years, I’m baffled by the claim that shutting off mobile networks will ensure election rigging doesn’t take place. The example given is that political thugs will use mobiles to plan intimidation. This argument removes agency from citizen voters themselves. If one example can be given of the goon squad using mobiles, a hundred counter-examples can be given of citizens recording, reporting and preventing abuse using that same device.

The mobile phone camera, with its grainy real-time visual aesthetic, has replaced video cameras as the on-the-fly recording mechanism. More than once, we have seen mobile phone video being sent by MMS to TV stations and used for breaking news. “By mobile phone” is the ubiquitous on-screen scroll for election reporting on our major TV networks, whenever it is in a remote area where the camera crew has not arrived...

Naeem Mohaiemen: Sign Said Stop (from "My Mobile Weighs a Ton" )

2008-12-28T16:50:00.000-08:00

Something is making me queasy. We are inside an Asian century, and a local situation, that is producing endless beautiful imagery. But it’s all a little too gorgeous and refined. I get worried facing so much aesthetic perfection. Still need space for mistakes, rudeness, bacteria, and things that just don’t fit.

My work is interested in damage and panic. Politics come from the context in which image war happens. Mobile phone photos– blurry, low dpi, poorly framed, no rule of thirds, no color depth. Giving you quick access to make temporary provocations, without planning, intention or press card. As accidental as the boy snapping his lover on Dhanmondi Lake. Koi, amar kotha shune hasho na to…

We crave more spaces for DIY. Yes, anyone can do this, and everyone should. No barriers, no high culture priests, no hierarchy, no gurus. Eventually of course, every rebellion becomes it’s own clique. That’s when we need to move on to the next space. Friction and creative chaos. Accidental images get in the way of blueprints.

Some people want us to shut up and become a nation of shoppers. But we’re not quite ready for our Singapore moment.

-Naeem Mohaiemen

Naeem Mohaimen: My Mobile Weighs a Ton

2008-12-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

100 spoons but I need a knife

Naeem Mohaiemen

Ever have a morning so shitty you can’t get out of bed. Or when you won’t go to work unless Congress passes that $700B bailout. I’ll look back at 2007-2008 as a time when Bangladesh nursed that kind of hangover. A state of continual limbo, as we wait and wait. For elections to happen, for the Army to return to barracks, for the foul-mouthed politicians to return to the podium. For a limbo state to end.

Security panic is viral: crossing borders, morphing strains, bringing along multiple, overlapping agendas. Ominously, it replicates rapid-fire from North America to Europe to South Asia. Bomb in front of Indian Parliament, round up Pakistani insurgents. Then bombs go off on a commuter train and the lense shifts to illegal Bangladeshi migrants- there are so many more of them inside India. Then a day of synchronized bomb blasts inside Bangladesh as well. The terror analysts go into frenzy, Hiranmay Karlekar’s “Bangladesh: The New Afghanistan?” is one among many off the hook concoctions. Fear feeds hysteria.

A friend predicted early that panic over the Dhaka bombs would play into the hands of a security state. Aren’t you worried I asked, and she replied, I’m more worried about who benefits from panic. Sure enough, by the end of 2006 the message was seeping out from Dhaka’s meddlesome Embassy Row: the politicians have failed, the country was being over-run by terrorism. A desperate nation turns to the institution seen as strong on security: the Army. A “Caretaker Government” (CTG) takes over on 1/11 (‘07), a world driven by numerology.

By the end of Year two of CTG, good intentions had been defeated by brute realities (neither the Army nor the Politicians get what they want). Exhausted by a seemingly endless national melodrama, I could feel my dissident energy seeping away. Using pen names is strangely disempowering. The only space in which I was able to be more vocal were projects that were published outside these borders: in distant art journals or gallery walls. In contributions for Raimundas Malasauskas’ William Blake Saved Documenta and Carlos Motta’s Buena Vida/Democracy project. Where people would absorb the aesthetics but the politics be too remote to have street impact. I wrote with grim pragmatism that I knew there would be no “Last man in front of Tiananmen tanks.”

As catharsis for failure of nerve, I’ve been getting into arguments with old friends. This sometimes degenerates into shouting matches. Later we apologize over sms, email, gchat. On campus, it seems that everyone is strung on some narcotic. But maybe it’s just nerves. As our brains cook to a crisp from un-ending political limbo, mass psychosis is tearing at friendships/communities/alliances.

August 2008 was the first anniversary of the anti-army riots that exploded on university campuses– a tectonic disturbance that was the first challenge to this neat security blueprint. Invited to show at Gallery Chitrak around this time, I finally thought I could dare a shadow commemoration of that August. The first priority was making sure the gallery stayed open for the full ten days. They wanted no fuss, no bother with the government.

It was true, I did have a set of mobile phone photos. Accidental ephemera from the moment. On day 3 of the riots, when the army lifted curfew for two hours, I went on a motorcycle ride with my friend, snapping shots of the wreckage from my mobile. “Don’t bring out your camera,” my nervous friend warned, so I didn’t. The mobile shots, disposable and forgotten (I had almost erased without downloading), now became the tentpole for this project. Blown up to wall size, dyed in RGB palettes, they took on the timeline for the unravelling.

"Lady in Wight" -Neal Robinson

2008-12-23T11:24:00.000-08:00

There was a young lady of Wight
Who traveled much faster than light.
She departed one day,
In a relative way,
And arrived on the previous night.

In the Sum Over Histories Theory American scientist Richard Feynman put forth the idea that a particle in space-time
would go from point A to B by every possible path. Thus inspired by the human perception of time and space the Lady in Wight variants are rooted in the subject of quantum mechanics, a branch of mathematical physics that deals with atomic and subatomic systems.

Shot in three different locations around the country Miami Florida, Columbus Ohio, and Salt Lake City Utah, the pictures combine to form a photographic collage that explores the phenomena of a quantum universe. These images, which were taken mostly from airports, create a literal association about time travel. Board a plane in one state, exit in another, and you can gain or lose hours just by crossing a time zone. Travel far enough and long enough and one can even cross an international date line to gain or lose a day. The Lady in Wight pieces explore a multitude of questions. What changes when we finally abandon the idea of an absolute time and recognize that each observer has their own personal measurement? Since the laws of science do not distinguish between the past and future, why do we? What happens when we don’t?

Kevin Hamilton: Mount of the Holy Cross

2008-12-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

The Mount of the Holy Cross has been my entry point into exploring the construction of race and racism through place and space.

I chose this site, and Colorado as a larger political entity, because of its central role in my own moral education about civic space, land, and Belief. This line of work for me is a first attempt at trying to describe and see my own "whiteness" - whiteness as a racist ethic - when as a white male I'm of course largely allowed to pass as unmarked..

The mining ruins that litter the Colorado mountainscape emerge like the wildlife,unseen at first but revealing of a presence upon the land. To my eyes a scan across a mountainside there usually registers an untouched or even unreachable space, a place not even hospitable to the flora and trees I'm used to from the older mountains in the American east. To then glimpse the mining ruins, camouflaged through age, calls to mind (white) humanity as an alien presence on that scape. From afar, the remnants of human presence appear obviously alien in a way that bears the colonizing promise of a satellite in space or a modernist slab, and the colonizing threat of a first encounter.

Up close, the same ruins call much different things to mind. One is reminded of the hardship of living in those spaces, the threat to working bodies. Consecutive failed attempts at reworking the earth are revealed through a palimpsest of materials and signage from successive eras of mining engineering.

But for me it's all too easy to separate myself from those spaces. Even walking among them, I can extract myself from "those" histories. With the Mount of the Holy Cross, I'm less easily extricated. Is it really a cross in the mountains?...I activate it by looking at it. A matter of subjective perception, but of subjectivity constructed and informed by centuries of violence.

In the 1920's, the Cross became a site of religious pilgrimage while still remote enough to require great sacrifice by travelers. Entrepreneurs eager to see their mining prospects improved by roads and rails grabbed on to the religious fervor, and pushed for state- sponsored construction toward improved access for the faithful. They got what they wanted, the Mount became a National Monument, with all the funding and attention attached. New mining towns appeared around the Mount, and as Colorado filled with new white workers from the East (the Utes long relocated to New Mexico or Western Colorado), the State began to brew with tensions around its own distinct identity in relation to Eastern politicians and barons. The Klan took hard hold at that time, and many a poor mining worker in the mountains joined the efforts of white monied Denverites to unite around the purity of race. Colorado saw a Governor elected on a Klan platform, and Denver a mayor. For a while in the thirtes, during the

Mount's greatest popularity, the Klan controlled the State, including most of the Supreme Court and police force.

The mines began to decline as the State's great economic promise just as WWII gripped America. Around the Mount, the Army set up a large military base that cut off access for the religious faithful for decades. Colorado's "skiing soldiers" later returned from Europe after the War to start all of today's largest ski resorts, and Colorado found itself a new industry. Moving into the Cold War, the base finally looked to close, its last act serving as a training ground for Tibetan soldiers later dropped into Communist China and never heard

from again. By that time, all the surrounding mines had long closed. The Mount is again accessible, but at its base one finds Gilman, a former Viacom-owned mining town closed to all and sitting atop a Superfund site.

A Conversation : Eye and Gut (Mickey Smith)

2008-12-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

Overheard at the Circulation Desk

E Back then periodicals represented a tangible common culture
around shared interests, shared standards, shared identities.

G The content I am looking for is, how blood and guts transmute
into books and then into your image and then into our brains

E But looking at them past their expiration dates
has the opposite effect!

G Still I would find it boring to read 'how ' something works as a
pharmakon. Once one can 'say' what it 'is' is it no longer effective
as a spell?

E Publications seem insufficient. The audience for them is a
universe of disparate and disunited lives loosely bound.

G Just imagine coming upon these bindings. How you felt when you found them in the stacks.

E A library was the lifeblood of culture, and the central repository of
intellectual activity.

G Against the cold outside the radiators shutter and pop.

E The written word goes there to die.

G You wander into the general medicine archive circa 1970. To your surprise you spy an unfamiliar sequence.

E Printed matter enters its period of neglect.

G When I was in art school worked as a shelver in a medical library.

E The titles represent a serial aspiration on the part of an
immigrant nation toward a finally resolved sense of identity.

G I worked nights.

E We think now of the library as a cemetery

G A sick sweet smell of farts and dust intermingles with sweat.

(Mickey Smith press release with anonymous remix)

Eliza Fernbach: Rushing to Your Death?

2008-12-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

In 2001 at an empty French airport I was shoved aside by a harried "fonctionnaire". Searching the vast space around me for some potential hazard, I found nothing apparently dangerous and I wondered why, given the room available, this person needed to shove me.

On one of the highways that lead into the great rushing metropolis of New York I wonder in much the same way as cars speed past narrowly missing each others' bumpers, sides and spewing smoke from their neglected engines.

At the airport my knee-jerk response was to cry out "Rushing to Your Death?" The man stepped onto the escalator at that moment and stood quite still staring at me as the moving stairs smoothly carried him aloft. It was a moving pause. The question is now embedded in my psyche and my work, I have been posing it by way of various media ever since. Pascal suggested we stop and reflect- every artist is in some way dedicated to precipitating this full stop.

So to the Pharmakon...and rushing, I suppose, to your death or to anything. Christina invited me to ponder this intriguing duality when we met at the Book Arts Fair in New York this Fall and talked about illness and velocity. I'm not sure a billboard, a question or even speed itself have duality but Kevin's references to skepticism and enchantment struck me as very apt lens' through which to look at the potentially fatal nature of speed and at the same time the exhilarating super-heroic possibility of eternity that supersonic nay even super-galactic speed suggests.

Until now there was no upside to speeding for me. It is dangerous, it burns more gas and it blurs vivid color into dull greyness. But in the world of Superman and since he's been in the news Batman too- speed actually allows for time travel. More so for Superman who can really go back in time and well, isn't that the most enchanting way of imagining REALLY slowing down? Slowing so much you can actually re-do something...And so, if you don't speed you may get a little closer to Superman by not HAVING to re-do anything because you did it slowly enough to get it as right as it needs to be.

The only time I have seen speed enchantingly benefit anyone was when it was combined with precision. A tap dancer navigated a contemplative labyrinth I had set up and I was amazed at how he maximized his passage and his experience of the journey. Perhaps that is why speed has doses on the highway. It is poison at one point and er, shall I say useful if not healing at another.

There's something in Jacques Prévert's quip about the passage of time that touches this duality of velocity..." Time,you say that it passes just as it stops to sit down and watch you go by."

So is the billboard a sort of pharmakon? I'm not sure. It certainly made some people irate enough to submit poisoned reactions in the comment section of the accompanying website and inspired others to enchanting, maybe even healing epiphanies which they graciously shared with me too.

I suffered pretty rugged symptoms with chemical and environmental sensitivity myself and found the use of antigens successful in healing my broken immune system. As a result I am no longer a skeptic about the importance of moderation and the idea albeit more and more a fairytale that there is "Just enough, just exactly enough of something" and finding it can be a real joy ride.

-Eliza Fernbach

Kevin Hamilton: "Magic Wand Tool"

2008-12-14T13:45:00.001-08:00

He stood transfixed.There was his blessed mountain in all its magnificence. Unknowingly, he removed his hat and bowed his head humbly. Tears welled in his eyes. He dashed them away and focused his gaze again on this miraculous symbol. And while he gazed, the clouds folded together again- a curtain closing before a wondrous spectacle. -Clarence S. Jackson, 1952

Kevin Hamilton: "Healing Brush Tool"

2008-12-14T13:42:00.000-08:00

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality,when the perishable has been clothed wit the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." "Where , O Death, is your victory? Where , O Death, is your sting?"

I Corinthians 15: 53-55

Kevin Hamilton: Pharmakon "Clone Stamp Tool"

2008-12-14T13:36:00.000-08:00

Over one of the largest and finest, the snow-fields lay in the form of an immense cross, and by this it is known in all the mountain views of the territory. It is as if God has set his sign, his seal, his promise there, a beacon upon the very center and height of the continent to all its people and all its generations. -Samuel Bowles,1869

Kevin Hamilton: Pharmakon Rocky Mountain High

2008-12-14T12:39:00.000-08:00

TAKE THE MOUNTAIN CURE
Kevin Hamilton

The Mount of the Holy Cross is a real place, and one of Colorado's highest peaks. Each summer the winter snow melts away first from the mountain's rock face, and last from the two ravines that form the snowy shape of a cross. Hidden behind other high peaks in the vicinity of former mining towns and present-day ski resorts, the Mount is only visible from either very close or very far. As a result, this hard-to-reach location achieved the
status of lore and legend until the Hayden Survey finally mapped and measured the peak in 1873.

During that same visit, photographer William Henry Jackson captured an image of the cross that would serve him in various iterations throughout his career. Reproductions of his famous picture found their way into countless American
homes; painter Thomas Moran borrowed from Jackson's image for a popular and epic painting.

For many, this white cross served as divine confirmation of the right of white men to possess the land. The "red" Utes were forcibly removed from the Rockies, while the Mount was made a National Monument, an economic
boon to tourism and mining. Only when the surrounding forests were claimed by the military for Camp Hale during World War II did the Holy Cross begin to fade from the public imagination. By the time Camp Hale closed in the 1960s, re-allowing public access to the Cross, religious faith had been successfully confined to the private domain, and no longer a subject for collective civic attention. No longer a National Monument, the Mount today is a popular destination for "peak-baggers" in their quest to climb all of Colorado's mountainsthat measure over 14,000 feet in elevation.

Zippy the Pinhead is the subject of a syndicated comic strip by artist William "Bill" Henry Jackson Griffith, great-grandson of the photographer William Henry Jackson. In the Summer of 2008, Zippy finally paid a visit
to the Mount of the Holy Cross, where he posed for a photograph and answered some questions from artist and fan Kevin Hamilton.

KH: Zippy, it's pretty high up here above the treeline - are you newly inspired by the oxygen-thin air, the unfiltered UV rays, the glinting skin of commercial airliners?

ZP: Actually, I just keep thinking about Ferris wheels!

KH: Really? Don't the vast views and unspoiled tundra leave you feeling closer to the divine?

ZP: I don't know, something about the total absence of Cracker Barrels and Toyota Scions just leaves me dizzy.

KH: Maybe you need to drink more water. Do you think the Ferris wheel is some repressed memory from your childhood, revived by the sight of the 1000-foot cross of snow before us?

ZP: No, I never wore white. A muu-muu isn't a robe exactly, and the hood gets in the way of my MYSTICAL THIRD EYE.

KH: Yeah, I keep meaning to ask you - what have you got against pants anyway? I hear that Schlitzie the Pinhead wore a dress because of the incontinence caused by microcephaly.

ZP: Yes, tectonic plates are moving even as we speak! The mountains sing of an impending ideological earthquake!

KH: No, Zippy, that's just more unexploded ordnance down the hill at Camp Hale. Some poor hiker probably just lost his shit.

ZP: You would too if you'ld just seen the ghost of Orion W. Daggett!

KH: The storied newspaperman of Red Cliff! If only his dream of a highway to the Cross had come to life. Then we'd be standing on a real tourist mecca.

ZP: Well I've always been a believer.

KH: Me too! But what good is a private fantasy? Don't you long for the old days, when thousands trekked up this peak to hold mass in the morning light?

ZP: There's plenty of light! Just take the picture!

KH: I know, you're probably right. Who needs another mass cult in the snow? Besides, with global warming there won't be enough snow anyway, the cross will be gone.

ZP: Pine beetles! Kludd and Kleagle! Is there a sequel?

....It seems to me that the "magic" power of a pharmakon comes
from its duality, no? It's magic when a poison heals me, or when a
remedy kills me.

There's a lot going against this in the modernities I know. We moderns
don't believe in magic - we either rationalize it away or banish it to
the domain of counter-rational romanticism. To read subjectivity into
the pharmakon - to allow the poison to be a poison only to whom it
kills - is to kill it. Or maybe it's the other way around - we
construct subjectivity through splitting the pharmakon's powers.

Within an enchanted world, the pharmakon will still be a poison even
for the person it cures - it will still be a remedy even for the
person it poisons. The power in the thing grants it ontology apart
from our perception of it. In the disenchanted world, the pharmakon
will be only a poison to the dead and will only be a remedy to the
cured. The thing only exists for the receiver.

We can look, for example, to the function of the Colorado Rockies as a
pharmakon for white Americans, seeking a pastoral remedy from their
urban/suburban lives.

As a modern skeptic, I can divide the poison from the remedy, and see
how what heals me there in my fancy hiking boots is what kills the
place and the people displaced by white settlement. I'm racist without
meaning to be - sounds like the definition of white guilt.

But what if that's too subjective for the pharmakon? Can I look at how
what's healing me is also a poison to me, in addition to looking at it
as a poison to someone else?

Is my Rocky Mountain High a poison to me as well, a changing agent
within me, that I exist in those spaces as someone who benefits from
genocide? I think so. But it's hard to get my modern mind around - I
fall so easily into displacing the evil done by attending to my own
positive or negative transformation.....

coming into play : Derrida and "Plato's Pharmacy" - Tim Murray

2008-12-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

My understanding of the "pharmakon" remains
influenced by Jacques Derrida's text, "Plato's
Pharmacy" (in La dissémination), which reflects
on the irony that Platonic therapeutics and the
valence of catharsis occur via the agency of the
"pharmakon," which is both remedy and poison (whether cure,
illness, or cause of illness). Through exorcism,
catharsis is said, by Derrida, to eradicate
excess by chasing the parasite outside. What's
important about his analysis is its insistence on
the irony that the parasitic logic and structure
must be shared by both poison and remedy, which
paradox must be repressed by the state apparatus
intent on maintaining the purity of an essence
clean of the charms and poison understood to
originate from without. Rather than being
governed by the oppositions inherent in the
pharmakon (remedy-poision, good-bad, true-false,
positive-negative, US-THEM), the pharmakon, as
Derrida argues so skillfully, permits the coming
into play of oppositions without being fully
encompassed or stifled (or blinded) by them.

Derrida adds, by the way, the the pharmakon also
signifies the artificial tint of painting, thus
inscribing the pharmakon into the fabric of
artistic representation,which, of course,
remained questionable to Plato as a dependable
apparatus of the state.

Recipe (evacuee cake)

It is a similar flexible play of highly charged
societal tensions that I mean to invoke by
emphasizing the paradox of "digital terror"
within the context of artistic blowback. While
differences certainly remain between the extent
of state terror employed in different regions
(not to mention by the shift of terror employed
by state surveillance systems and alternative
actions of locative media), I would suggest that
Steve Dietz's legal harrassment is directly
inscribed in the logic of state of state terror,
just as CAE's artistic reflections on critical
and technlogical terror employ the logic of the
pharmakon in resistance to the deadening logic of
us and them.

pharmakon library

2008-12-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

pharmakon imaginary, artists, real.

pharmakon library