Rhizome | Featured Articles

Performance GIFs 3: Legacy Russell

Jesse Darling | Wed May 22nd, 2013 11:22 a.m.

This is the second in an ongoing series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling, which began last week with a work by Maja Cule.

Still frame from the music video for Love You Down by INOJ.

Social Sculpture: In Remembrance of Poise and a Choreography of Loving You Down, 1:58am, Plastic People, London
Legacy Russell

Social Sculpture: In Remembrance of Poise and a Choreography of Loving You Down makes parallel the histories of social sculpture and the gendered and ritualized cultural practices found in dancehalls or nightclubs. The artist is in her studio, positioned on a chair, dressed in disco shorts and a snug-fitting shirt, indistinguishable from the white background striped in shadow behind her. Oscillating between a cross-legged, poised position that projects the stereotypical poses of flirtation, femininity and nightlife "peacocking," and a collapse that suggests a body exhausted by—or disinterested in—the scene around her, the artist shifts between "visible" and "invisible," "public" and "private," "on-" and "off-stage." Not quite loved, nor ignored, this female body—sculptural in its own right—remains stuck on loop, hoping to be recognized, as INOJ's 1997 hit "Let Me Love You Down" envelops her.

Click here to view artwork.

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Jack Goldstein, Glitch Artist? An Interview with Lorne Lanning

Michael Connor | Tue May 21st, 2013 1:04 p.m.

Lorne Lanning worked for Jack Goldstein in the mid-1980s at a time when the artist began to create highly detailed paintings of technological and scientific imagery that foregrounded the visual artefacts of computer vision. In this interview, Lanning discusses the thinking and the process behind this body of work, which is represented in several works (completed after Lanning's tenure with Goldstein) in the exhibition Jack Goldstein x 10,000, on view through September 29, 2013 at The Jewish Museum in New York. Lanning also explains how his work with visual effects for Goldstein led him, via the aerospace industry, to a successful career as creator of the OddWorld video game series.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1988, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy Vanmoerkerke Collection, Ostend. © Estate of Jack Goldstein.

MC: How did you begin working with Jack Goldstein?

I met Jack--he was teaching at School of Visual Arts--I believe it was ‘85. I started working with him in maybe late ‘85 or early ‘86…

I was an illustration student at School of Visual Arts--I had seen his paintings at the Whitney Biennial, and at various museums, and I was just blown away. I showed him my work and I was making all these comments, you know, "I aim to improve this way and that way," and he goes, "You paint just fine, you just have no ideas." And that's Jack in a nutshell.

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Performance GIFs 2: Maja Cule

Rhizome | Thu May 16th, 2013 1:17 p.m.

Over the next few weeks, Rhizome will present a series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling, beginning with this work by Maja Cule. Darling's introduction to the series can be found here.

Hanging from the 8th floor of the South side of The Trump Building at 40 Wall Street (Click to view artwork)
Maja Cule, May 2013
(featuring: Marlous Borm)

In May 1930, The Trump Building was the tallest building in the world. In the ninth episode of the Season 4 of The Apprentice, Donald Trump claimed he only paid $1 million for it.

The window depicted in Cule's work is located on the eighth floor, which is currently under construction. It looks out over Isamu Noguchi's Sunken Garden, a series of black boulders of varying sizes that Noguchi collected from the bottom of the Uji River in Kyoto, and Jean Dubuffet's sculpture Group of Four Trees, commissioned by David Rockefeller(then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank) in 1969 for the One Chase Manhattan Plaza building. Designed in 1961 by Gordon Bunshaft, One Chase Manhattan Plaza is the 200th tallest building in the world with 60 floors and sealed windows.

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Performance GIFs 1: Curator's Introduction

Jesse Darling | Tue May 14th, 2013 10:48 a.m.

Over the next few weeks, Rhizome will present a series of performance GIFs curated by Jesse Darling. Darling's introduction is below; the first work (by Maja Cule) will be on view from Thursday May 16.

2012. The year of the doomsday apocalypse. The world didn’t end, though some of us thought it might, and perhaps we even hoped it would, if only to give us something to look forward to. Žižek, paraphrasing Jameson, famously said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—and this was in a speech given at Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, in which we tried, and failed, to imagine the beginning of something else.

But following the natural order of events, as well as what Jameson called “the temporal paradox” (in which history stops but time grinds remorselessly onward in a continuous, cyclical production of “newness”), 2012 came and went and we all kept on doing what we were doing. A perky 25-year-old acronym beat the competition – teeth-grindingly zeitgeisty notables such as YOLO, superstorm and Eurogeddon – to become the Oxford Dictionary’s US Word of the year. You probably know that. What you may not know is that the OUP award went to a verb, rather than a noun: not to the name of a file format, but to the act of making one. To GIF.

To GIF is defined, somewhat redundantly, as “to create a GIF file,” but what would it mean to decouple the verb from its referent? To GIF: to capture a moment on an endless loop.

Now it’s 2013, though nothing has changed. Seeping, soul-level post-Fordism and the precarization of the labor market mean that most of us never stop working: socializing bleeds seamlessly into networking, and meanwhile, each ...

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Did 'Vertigo' Introduce Computer Graphics to Cinema?

Tom McCormack | Thu May 9th, 2013 10:40 a.m.

Extract from Vertigo (1958).

As Slavoj Žižek and others have argued, the credit sequences designed by Saul Bass for Alfred Hitchcock's unofficial trilogy of late masterpieces—Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960)—announce the visual motifs of each film and suggest their psychological underpinnings. The broken lines in Psycho are echoed in the slashes of the killer’s knife and the broken pathway from the Bates motel to the old Victorian cottage in which Norman lives, supposedly with his mother. The grid in North by Northwest mimics the Manhattan skyscrapers where Cary Grant’s dopey adman initially toils, as well the train tracks on which he travels as his identity is further and further confused and effaced, and the cornfield in which he famously ducks for cover under the attack of a faceless machine. The spirals that open Vertigo suggest the roads through hilly San Francisco on which Scotty pursues Madeline, the twist of her hair, the staircase that causes his eponymous vertigo to flare up.

Each credit sequence is echoed by the soundtrack of each film, all composed by Bernard Herrmann. The theme for Psycho is the famous staccato ee-ee ee-ee. North by Northwest is set to an interlocking, pulsating orchestra. And for Vertigo, Hermann lifted the most famous musical phrase from the Liebestod of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: a rising and falling sequence that fails to ever resolve itself.

All of which suggests that Hitchcock—a famous tyrant—was actually, or also, one of the most canny collaborators of the 20th century.

For the title sequence to Vertigo, Hitchcock had an additional, often unnoted, collaborator: John Whitney. A pioneer of computer animation who worked in television in the 50s and 60s and in the 70s created some of the first digital art, Whitney ...

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A Queer History of Computing: Part Four

Jacob Gaboury | Mon May 6th, 2013 12:11 a.m.

In Part Four of our ongoing genealogy of queer computing (Part One, Part Two, Part Three), we introduce a second generation of queer scholars who made important contributions to the field of computer science, and from whom we may trace a direct connection back to those familiar foundational figures.

On June 20, 2009 at 4pm at The Hampstead Quaker Meeting House in London, a memorial service was held for Professor Peter Landin. In attendance were his family and the friends whose lives he had touched over the last 78 years. It was a collision of worlds, a sudden mixing of two communities that Landin had kept separate his entire life. Landin's friend and colleague Olivier Danvy likened the event to the memorial for the French mathematical logician Jean van Heijenoort, author of From Frege to Gödel (1967).^[1] In the early part of his life, van Heijenoort had been the personal secretary and bodyguard of Leon Trotsky, the famous Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. Van Heijenoort left service only two months before Trotsky's murder in Mexico City by Stalinist assassins, but was a devout Trotskyist until his death, publishing extensively on his relationship with the revolutionary figure and editing a volume of Trotsky's correspondence before his own death in 1986. In attendance at van Heijenoort's funeral, Danvy recalls, were two disparate groups of people: on one side the logicians, and on the other the Trotskyists, each one incapable of communicating their own sense of importance of the man to the other.

Peter Landin had also led something of a double life. He was a foundational figure in computer science, and a pioneer of programming language design based on mathematical logic and the Lambda calculus. He was ...

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Commissions Deadline Extended to May 15

Michael Connor | Wed May 1st, 2013 1:21 p.m.

Over the past couple days, my inbox has been filled with pleas for deadline leniency from bleary-eyed artists around the world who, presumably upon stumbling from their beds after several weeks of napping, suddenly realized that proposals for Rhizome commissions were due imminently. Never fear: we hear your pleas. You now have until May 15. Get cracking!

I would like to remind you of several salient facts. Awards are typically between $1,000 and $5,000. Four of the awards will be given to artists from New York. One of the commissions will go to an artist (from anywhere) with a proposal for a socially-engaged project to take place in New York. Three commissions will be given to projects that engage with Tumblr. I'm not sure of the math, but some grants will also go to artists who are not from New York and engaged neither socially nor with Tumblr.

As always, members will vote for one of the commissions; voting will now open on May 16.

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Emoticon, Emoji, Text II: Just ASCII

Tom McCormack | Tue Apr 30th, 2013 11:39 a.m.

Artwork from ASCII Art Dictionary (possibly 1999).

This is the second in a three-part series to be published on Rhizome. The first part, exploring the history of the emoticon, can be found here. The final installment (forthcoming) will explore the history of the emoji.

1.

Following in the footsteps of Baudelaire—and paving the way for the Surrealists and the French New Wave—early 20th-century artist Guillaume Apollinaire cultivated a cerebral taste for the most sensational elements of modern life. A poet by calling and a publicist by trade, Apollinaire seized on the outrageous whether he found it in the avant-garde (he coined the term "Cubism" in praise of early paintings by Braque and Picasso) or mass culture (he called the serialized tales of fictional super-villain Fantômas "one of the richest works that exist.") Apollinaire’s poetry fed on the chaos of Paris in the early 1900s. Take this representative passage from 1909’s "Zone":

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