Editorial Articles

Mass Cultural Production

Jean Tinguely first exhibited his 'Meta-matics' in the late 1950s. Motorized contraptions that aided viewers in producing abstract drawings, they pulled the artist out of the immediate creative equation and simultaneously parodied both postwar te....

Seeing It; Swimming in It

Literature accompanying a new exhibition at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art writes the history of video art in terms of two modes of expression: "feedback" and "immersion." The first encompasses work that uses the camera to literally r....

Viewer-Generated Art

While Google, Rupert Murdoch, and their corporate peers have just begun to grapple with ways to profit from the phenomenon, artists were early in embracing user-generated content as a way for viewers to help create what they consume. Work that di....

Deutsch DV

Though he primarily makes sculpture and graphite works on paper, US-born, Berlin-based artist John von Bergen has organized a screening series of contemporary video work from his adopted country. Trans Video Express: Recent Video Art from Germany....

Modern Culture Mash-Ups

The brainchild of artist Gursoy Dogtas, Matt Magazine bills itself as "a synthesis between a fanzine and a current affairs magazine," but while it comments on contemporary political and social issues with a zine-style combination of appropriated ....

Cable Cosmologies

Storytelling, on a universe-shaping scale and in a spastic, homespun-costume style, has underpinned most of Bay Area-artist Kamau Amu Patton's work, from advertising posters mounted on the sides of bus shelters to animistic works on paper. Having....

Interrupting the Program

By the late 1960s, a decade after the television became the centerpiece of the suburban living room and sin qua non of American--if not yet global--culture, artists had begun to appropriate the power of official communication represented by broad....

Architecture of a Blog

If you were to take an informal survey of both practicing architects and lay enthusiasts of inhabitable design about their favorite architecture blogs, the result would probably place the Los Angeles-based BLDGBLOG at or near the top. Founded ove....

Design by Performance: Out of Thin Air

Design technologies constantly strive to reduce the material resistance between concept and fabrication, and few developments have done as much to this end as rapid prototyping. Like an old-fashioned printer for three-dimensional forms, the techn....

Stealing Audio in San Diego

Recognizing the influence of DJ-derived techniques of appropriation on artistic practices, for the past ten years, curators at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art have had an initiative in place to acquire work that demonstrates strategies o....