Links 8.12.08

PopRally's The Art of Dissent Tuesday August 12 7PM-10PM
Tonight, video collective Paper Tiger TV will speak on a panel at MoMA with editor of Justseeds Josh MacPhee and musician Ted Leo:
"For many artists, politics are an essential component of both their art and their interactions with community and commerce. In this panel, artists and musicians discuss how politics and art mix in their work and working processes."

Aerial music over Beijing
Array Aesthetics (Olympic Edition)

City of Sound and Teeming Void reflect on the recent opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympic Games:
"The opening ceremony is sending the same message, then, as the Games architecture: cultural and technological leapfrog. The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces. Like the flickering grid of the drummers, the ordered diversity of these structures is important too, in that it's not total uniformity, a simple (modernist) grid. In fact these buildings contain a kind of post-industrial grid, where the uniformity or regularity is not literal or material, but procedural or computational - the computer's ability to resolve complex distributions of force is what enables the 'organic' multiplicity here."

Moving towards the inevitable: Brandon Morse
From Generator.x:
"The stark videos of Brandon Morse present the viewer with exercises in tension, set tableaux in which structures morph and twist under physical constraints. Stripped-down architectural forms that ought to exhibit the rigidity of highrise buildings instead engage in a tug-of-war, the result of a string simulation distributing kinetic force through a network of nodes."

Gerald Edwards III's Psych Securities, LLC
Interview with photographer Gerald Edwards III from Lost At E Minor:
"These photographs, and now subsequently sculptures, all started with Underground Military Bunker, Formerly Krystal's Restaurant, Florida. I saw this completely benign closed down fast food restaurant, and it hit me like a brick that this was the total intersection of all of the thoughts about development, economics, and that feeding into the paranoid worlds of security and fear in this country today. Deciding to unleash the restructuring of the photograph, the manipulation, the compression of space, whatever you would like to call it, seemed to fit right in with the adapted and mis-read histories that each image contains."