NEWSgrist: *AUTOPILOT, Carsten Nicolai* Vol.4, no.4 (Feb. 24, 2003)

NEWSgrist: *AUTOPILOT, Carsten Nicolai* Vol.4, no.4 (Feb. 24, 2003)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.net
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 4, no.4 (Feb. 24, 2003)
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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* AUTOPILOT, Carsten Nicolai
- *Wrapt* Christo + the White House
- *Quote/s* Gooeyness and Politics
- *Url/s* Barney; Jenin; Servovalve; Data Diaries
- *Big Fat Online Wedding* Mirapaul gets Translocated
- *Anti-Protest* Christopher Knight gets mauled
- *Memorial Core* on Daniel Libeskind and the WTC
- *Met Life* that Albers mural
- *Book Grist* Autopilot, by Carsten Nicolai
- *Call For Papers* T h e S t a t e o f t h e R e a l

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

'Autopilot' by Carsten Nicolai

"Carsten Nicolai concocts minimalist, microscopic and complex
views of the creative processes at the interface of science, art
and music." (see *Book Grist* below)

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Nicolai.html
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*Wrapt*

CHRISTO ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT
(Reuters [sic*])
World famous artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have today
announced a new project that is slated to be begin immediately.
Responding to U.S. Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge's call for
artists to rally the cause through anti-terrorist art, Christo has
received permission to wrap the White House in Washington
D.C., using duct tape and plastic sheeting. Much like the artist's
1995 project "Wrapped Reichstag" in Berlin, "Wrapped White
House" will, according to the artists' plan, seal the building and
those inside. Of the project the artists said, "We are very
excited to use our art making methods in the international fight
against terrorists. By wrapping the White House we hope to help
keep terrorism under wraps, so to speak." Unlike "Wrapped
Reichstag" which was a temporary project, "Wrapped White
House" will be the artists' first permanent work of public art.

100,000 square meters (1,076,000 square feet) of clear high-
strength polypropylene plastic, and 15,600 meters (51,181
feet) of silver duct tape, 13.2 cm (4 inch) wide, will be used for
the wrapping of the White House. The work will be completed in
as little as one week. The artist's have contacted other artists
across the U.S. who are now in-route to Washington D.C. in
order to finish this work in record time. Materials have been
provided without charge by the German Government. Recalling
the "Wrapped Reichstag," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
stated, "Wrapping the symbol of German Democracy was a
defining moment for the new Germany. Wrapping the White House
will likewise be a defining moment as democracy is restored in
America."
*[Note: the source of this spoof is unknown]
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*Quote/s*

"All art has a political dimension, and we ignore that fact to our
peril."
– Christopher Knight (see * * below)

"The subject of the review was an exhibition of antiwar art, and
therefore a degree of political background was appropriate. The
attack on the Bush policy, however, went beyond that legitimate
mission. It was, in our view, a gratuitous political statement and,
as such, a distraction from the legitimate substance of the
review. It should not have been published."
–LATimes disclaimer re: Christopher Knight's review (See * * below)

"This show is a work about a work whose subject includes the
work that took place where this work is seen."
– Michael Kimmelman, "Free To Play And Be Gooey"
NYTimes 2/21/03 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/arts/design/21KIMM.html
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*Url/s*

1) "MATTHEW BARNEY - Anything Can Happen"
http://www.hitentertainment.com/barney/index2.asp

2) LIVING ROOMS (Jenin), Gary Fabiano
http://www.pixelpress.org/contents/gary/index.html

3) SERVOVALVE
http://www.servovalve.org/2003/0104/0104.html
more works + notes:
http://www.turbulence.org/curators/Paris/servovalveenglish.htm

4) DATA DIARIES by Cory Arcangel
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/index.html

A New Commissioned Work on Turbulence
With an introduction by Alex Galloway (see INTRO below)
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/alex.php

DATA DIARIES is 11 hours of video footage which was
generated by tricking Quicktime into thinking the RAM of a
home computer is video. This was done once for each day in
January 2003. Watch as Cory's emails, letters, webpages, DSL
data, songs, and anything else he worked on that day float by as
a totally-psyched attention deficit disorder 15 frames per
second video experience.

BIOGRAPHY
Cory Arcangel is a computer artist who lives and works in
Manhattan. He is a founding member of BEIGE [aka the Beige
programming crew/Beige Records], a loose knit crew of like-
minded computer programmers, and enthusiasts. Their work has
been called "genius" by XLR8R magazine, and they were recently
named in the New York Times noteworthy art moments of 2002
poll. Together they have pioneered the practice of recycling
obsolete 8bit computers and video game systems to make art.

INTRODUCTION TO DATA DIARIES
Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost
nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional
expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops. What did
Cory Arcangel do in this piece? Next to nothing. The computer
did the work, and he just gave it a form. His discovery was this:
take a huge data file–in this case his computer's memory file-
and fool Quicktime into thinking it's a video file. Then press
play. Your computer's memory is now video art. Quicktime
plays right through, not knowing that the squiggles and shards
on the screen are actually the bits and bytes of the computer's
own brain. The data was always right in front of your nose. Now
you can watch it.

In college Cory used to slip into the public computer clusters,
saddle up to a machine and pull what's called a "core dump." In
every computer's memory there are countless pieces of left-
over information just sitting there waiting for their turn to vanish
as new memory is allocated. The email you just wrote is there,
so is that Word file that was on your screen an hour ago. The
binary data from Photoshop that you left running in the back-
ground is there too. A core dump simply writes all that data into
a file and saves it on the hard drive. A born hacker, Cory would
sift through this tangle of undifferentiated code, line by line,
looking for interesting morsels. Maybe he would find a forgotten
love letter here and there, maybe someone's term paper, or
maybe just nothing. But it was always a rewarding hunt. For this
piece, Cory has simply taken his hacker mentality one step
further and converted the hidden world of computer memory into
the time-based medium of video.

Data conversions are part of computer art. This is the crux (and
also the crutch) of RSG's "Carnivore" project. Dictionary words
are converted into three dimensional spaces in Marek Walczak
and Martin Wattenberg's "The Apartment." Mark Napier did pure
data conversion with "Feed." What sets Cory's RAM videos apart
is that they don't pretend to hinge on the craftiness of the
conversion. Conversion is not what they are about. The con-
versions here are incidental, a trivial detail coming ages
before the real fun takes place. And because of this, he eschews
the A-to-B instrumentalism of these other conversion-based
works.

Lots of artists talk about memory. But for artists working with
computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If
ever computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it
as "watching your computer suffocate and yell at the same
time." They look like digital dreams-the pure shapes and tones
of real computer memory. Each video documents a new day, and
each day the computer offers us a new set of memories.

But the greatest thing about Cory's net art is that he's not a net
artist. He never was and never will be. If net art was cinema,
then Jodi would be Godard–fresh, formalist and punk-rock to the
core. Entropy8zuper! would be Tarkovsky–lush, magical and
complex. Etoy would be Verhoeven-hyper modern, sexy and a
tad fascistic. And this leaves Cory, playing in the rec room with
his Pixelvision camcorder–all dirt-style, geekcore, and what we
like.
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*Big Fat Online Wedding*

NYTimes ARTS ONLINE
Cross-Cultural Ventures With Digital Artworks
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/arts/design/17MIRA.html

The best work in "Translocations," an online exhibition of nine
new Internet-based artworks presented by the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, succeeds aesthetically because it is
destined to fail electronically. "Translation Map," one of the
works, allows viewers to write and send e-mail to any of 250
countries. There is just one small problem: the Internet is
considered a global village that inspires free-flowing con-
versations, but few of these messages will ever be received.

"Translation Map," by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks, argues
against the Internet's utopian promise. The work's achievement
is to show just how disconnected parts of the online world still
are. Before universal communication can occur, Mr. Sack said,
"there are various fractures that have to be bridged."

Despite the shimmering image of the earth that introduces it,
"Translation Map" is primarily a conceptual artwork designed
to reveal those fractures. Here's how it works: Before each
message can be delivered, its text must be translated into the
language of its recipient. There are 6,000 choices, from
Algonquin to Zulu. Once the message has been converted, it
will also be published on the work's Web site.

Don't expect the "Translation Map" site to fill up soon with
messages in different languages. The work does not use a
computer program to translate a message from one language
into another. Instead it finds online forums in which both might
be spoken, then ships the message there with a request for
human help. Whether through incomprehension or apathy, the
likelihood seems that most messages will be ignored, as has
been the case so far.

Given that all of the newly commissioned works in the Walker
exhibition involve some form of cross-cultural collaboration in
cyberspace, "Translation Map" provides a backhanded reminder
that such virtual ventures are more easily imagined than
realized. As Mr. Sack, who teaches media theory at the
University of California at Santa Cruz, said, "The borders are
still there."

Most works in "Translocations," which went online on Feb. 8 at
http://translocations.walkerart.org try to break through those
borders rather than explicitly expose their presence.

For instance, Fran Ilich, a new-media artist in Mexico, asked
artists from eight countries to contribute daily comments to a
bilingual Web log, an online journal known in geek-speak as a
blog. The Raqs Media Collective from New Delhi created an
online space where anyone could post a story, photograph or
music file, which other international visitors could alter at will.

Boundary crossing has suddenly emerged as a hot topic in new-
media circles. Earlier this month the Transmediale festival in
Berlin was built around a Play Global theme. And Paris Connec-
tion, a site with commentary in four languages about French
online artworks, opens today at http://vispo.com/thefrenchartists
For Steve Dietz, the Walker's new-media curator and the
organizer of "Translocations," it is a timely notion. With govern-
ments closely monitoring who is traversing their geographical
boundaries, he said, "it seems valuable to look at the Internet
for its ability to cross those borders and get alternate points of
view."

"Translocations" is running concurrently with "How Latitudes
Become Forms: Art in a Global Age," an exhibition in the
Walker's regular galleries. Like "Latitudes," the virtual exhibition
asks how art has been affected in a world where there is a
Starbucks on every sand dune and the country-pop singer
Shania Twain slaps sitars and tablas on her songs to boost their
overseas appeal.

So, as the world gets even smaller via the Internet, will Western
art traditions vanquish all others or will they become more open
to other perspectives? The question gets even more interesting
in the digital domain. On the Internet one can skip quickly from
digital art in one city to art in another. As artists rapidly assim-
ilate one another's work, this could lead, at least in theory, to a
drab homogeneity. Is it possible that cyberspace will lose its
sense of place?

As the work by Mr. Sack and Mr. Brooks suggests, there are still
too many impediments for this to be an urgent concern. Yet the
other works in "Translocations," with their riot of foreign sounds
and images, indicate that the question is worth asking. If any-
thing, the exhibition resembles the international-arrivals area at
an American airport. The site teems with people and their artistic
baggage. Art, texts and video clips collide chaotically, and more
pour in continually. But while the site looks like a big, fat multi-
cultural wedding of artistic sensibilities, everyone's final
destination seems to be disappointingly domestic.

For instance, "Translocal Mixer," by the Brazil-based arts group
Re:combo, is an interactive audio-control panel that allows
listeners to combine sounds gathered in Recife, Bucharest and
other cities. But except for the exotic sonic content, the project
is no different from countless online music-mixing toys.

The upshot is that, at least for the moment, voices from other
latitudes are not creating new forms for online art. But if the
Internet truly becomes a global medium, will local characterist-
ics survive in online work?

Jim Andrews, a co-producer of the Paris Connection site, thinks
so. He developed the site because of its strong French accent.
"The French art has an lan and sensorial richness, an exper-
iential focus that would seem to have something to do with
French culture," he said. "I don't see this sort of art coming
much" from English-speaking countries.

New works are to be added to "Translocations," and online
viewers from around the world can augment some works with
their contributions. But if the exhibition is intended to demon-
strate that the Internet can be a global medium while retaining
its local color, that message is lost in the translation.
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*Anti-Protest*

ASK THE CRITIC
Ask Christopher Knight
Knight responds to critics of his comment about Bush's
"imbecilic plan for war."
LATimes, Jan 22, 2003
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ask-knight012203,0,5291317.story?coll=cl%2Dart%2Dfeatures

"In Graphic Protest": LATimes, Jan 15, 2003
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-knight15jan15.story

((I'm sure you've received lots of mail about the first sentence
in your anti-war art review entitled "In Graphic Protest," which
started, "The imbecilic plan for war with Iraq currently on offer
from the Bush administration has yet to register much support
from the American public." My question is what the heck does
your anti-Bush or anti-war hatred have ANYTHING to do with
art reviewing? I'm sure you don't want to hear some uninformed
politician give their opinion of the art world. You should be able
to be objective. I'm a political conservative who believes that
sometimes war IS the answer, but I'm also a major art enthus-
iast, friend of artists and gallerists, etc. and was quite offended
by your comments.
–N.W., Los Angeles))

Christopher Knight: What short memories we have! Perhaps you
were away, but I vividly recall spending much of the late 1980s
and early 1990s listening to many an "uninformed politician give
their opinion of the art world."

All art has a political dimension, and we ignore that fact to our
peril. Some art, such as anti-war posters, also has political
subject matter. Given the grave and unusual context within
which "The Anti-War Show: The Price of Intervention from Korea
to Iraq" is being mounted, it seemed sensible to state my
position on that subject matter right up front.

((Dear Mr. Knight, I found it extremely exciting and brilliant that
you opened your Track16 review with such a blatantly opinion-
ated political statement. That's why I read you–for the incisive
bold way you express your own views. Your review was such an
extension of the feeling at the show that it could be framed and
stand along side the art.
–Nancy Larson Richler, Santa Monica))

CK: French poet and journalistic art critic Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867) is one of my heroes, and he asserted that good
criticism needed to be passionate, partisan and political. That
said: Rare is the occasion when "a blatantly opinionated political
statement" is appropriate to an exhibition review, but this
seemed to be one of them.

((I'm a Beliefs editor and general assignment reporter for a
Gannett daily in Wisconsin … "imbecilic war plan" – because
you're called an art critic, are we to assume that when you talk
about news developments and foreign policy, they are your
opinions, as opposed to reporting facts? What are the differ-
ences in ethical standards for separating fact vs. opinion for
you as opposed to a reporter on the city/national/foreign desks?
–Charlie Mathews, Manitowoc, Wis.))

CK: There seems to have been virtually no reader confusion, on
the part of detractors or supporters (see above), that my opening
sentence was a statement of opinion. Like any reporter, whether
on the culture desk or the city/national/foreign desk, I have an
obligation to report facts accurately; however, by definition, as a
critic I write a column of opinion, based on my interpretation of
the facts. That is why a review ("a critical report and evalua-
tion") is labeled as such.

((Is a place for real artistic talent in this world disappearing, or
is my mind warped by the growing number of midwest craft fairs
and reality television shows? I would like to know your take on
where art stands in the minds of US citizens. As an artist I have
barely begun to step over the threshold into a new and exciting
world of visual expression. Only, I fear that by the time I reach
my destination I will have no foundation to stand on. I feel like I
live in a bubble, because in Cape Girardeau, a small city in the
boot heel of Missouri, the only good art is "pretty" art, eye-
appealing and mediocre.
–Courtney Bonney, Cape Girardeau, Mo.))

CK: Far be it from me to speak for others, but I suspect art
doesn't stand much of anywhere in the minds of US citizens,
taken as a whole. If it did, the nation would experience robust
public-sector support for art, from the regular commissioning of
significant architecture by enthusiastic federal, state and local
governments to direct subsidy of art museums and performing
arts venues, large and small. Obviously we don't–but don't
despair. Lots of Americans are crazy for the stuff, and they
expend a good deal of energy making, looking at and talking
about it. I don't know how many of them live in Missouri's boot
heel–but then, how many people who can't thrive without seeing
the jungle choose to live in the desert?

[NEWSgrist NOTE: The LATimes keeps the article in question
archived and accessible on their website, but they include the
following disclaimer near the top of the page:

"The first sentence of an art review in Calendar on Jan. 15
characterized the Bush administration's plan for war on Iraq as
"imbecilic." The article went on to state that the administration
lacked a "coherent argument." It was an unusually harsh
political judgment, particularly in the context of a work of
cultural criticism.

"The subject of the review was an exhibition of antiwar art, and
therefore a degree of political background was appropriate. The
attack on the Bush policy, however, went beyond that legitimate
mission. It was, in our view, a gratuitous political statement and,
as such, a distraction from the legitimate substance of the
review. It should not have been published." ]

related links:
The AntiWar Show: The Price of Intervention From Korea to Iraq
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news7/news314.html
Center for the Study of Political Graphics
http://www.politicalgraphics.org
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*Memorial Core*

Daniel Libeskind, a finalist for the World Trade Center
"But this is also a place for people to work and live", says the
architect
By David D'Arcy
The Art Newspaper, Feb 21, 2003
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart855

NEW YORK. The two finalists in the competition for the replace-
ment to the World Trade Center are Daniel Libeskind and Think,
the team made up of Americans Ken Smith and Frederic
Schwartz, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and the Latin
American, Rafael Vinoly.

Libeskind's status as the architect of the moment is rising ever
faster. He is the architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and
the Imperial War Museum North in England, both completed, the
designer of a military museum in Germany (a curious jump in
subject matter and imagery), an addition to the Royal Ontario
Museum (ROM) in Toronto, and a new building for the Denver
Art Museum.

Denver locals expect the new structure to make the city a desti-
nation a la Bilbao, so acquisitions have been put on hold during
construction so that the entire staff can be deployed in the
communal barn-raising. In Toronto, the ROM has already
christened the new gallery a "blockbuster space."

Libeskind has also been commissioned to design the San
Francisco Jewish Museum, a media centre for the City Uni-
versity of Hong Kong, a department store in Dresden, and a
shopping centre in Berne. This is a huge amount of work for a
firm with some 120 employees worldwide.

Now Libeskind, 56, plans to relocate to New York from Berlin,
where he promised local officials he would stay until his Jewish
Museum was completed. He is said to have been offered the job
of dean of the architecture school of Columbia University.

Yet is Libeskind, a prodigious talker about architecture, the man
whom you should now hire to design infrastructure? "Architecture
is architecture," he responds to this question, which many are
raising. He stresses that his World Trade Center design is not
just poetry: "It's all reality. We were given a programme; we were
given some densities. This is not just some fantasy, at least not
the way I approached it. It's a realistic, attainable scheme which
provides the space for the memorial competition, provides the
linkage and the connectivity of the streets, provides the space for
retail and parking and all the technical issues, and, of course,
creates a social space for New York which has a meaning and
significance for the future of the city."

The lower Manhattan project, Libeskind says, is not a choice
between memorial and mammon, even though the initial goal
included restoring 11 million square-feet of commercial space to
the area. "It's how to balance the two," he says. "At the
beginning, people said, 'Build nothing there, because it's a space
of tragedy, people died there.' Others said 'Build in defiance of
terrorism; build higher; don't acknowledge it.' These seemingly
opposite poles should be combined in a single space that thinks
about the history, the memory of those who died there, provides
a dignified and profound memory of what that means, but also
opens the city to future development as a 21st-century city to
be one of the best new creative spaces anywhere."

A building without precedent, for a tragedy without precedent?
Not quite. Libeskind offers one model: his own museum in Berlin.
"[New York] is a unique place in the world, but in my experience
of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, there is an analogy. This is a
museum where I dealt with the tragedy of the murder of Jews. At
the same time, it's full of hope, has life and shows that Jewish
culture didn't come to an end, but continues in to a future in that
place, in Germany and Europe."

"New York is not just a tabula rasa to be played with by mega-
structural fantasies. It's a piece of history. There's a tremendous
burden now because that history will not go away. And yet we
know that nothing would really be able to happen if this could
not be developed into something exhilarating, because it's also
a place where people work and live".

In the sheer number of recent monuments honouring victims of
various tragedies and the fallen, the area surrounding the World
Trade Center has begun in recent years to look like an open-air
museum of history.

Libeskind, now the seasoned memorialist, has no fear of over-
memorialisation in lower Manhattan. "It's a day that changed
the world. Those people went to work that day and became
heroes. They didn't know. They were not in a war. The heart of
New York was attacked, and it's something that is ongoing.

"We are in the midst of it, because history doesn't have
deadlines that just stop-it goes on. I think that to participate
in the development of Ground Zero and all the buildings around
it to give it a future, is part of the response."

It is Libeskind's "memorial core", the rectangular blast crater
that looks in his rendering like a sacred site in Jerusalem, that
seems to have won New York over.

Soon after the competing architects' plans were presented (with
plenty of populist rhetoric from Libeskind), former Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani stressed that priority should be given to the memorial
nature of what had been understood as a commercial project.
Overnight, the Wall Street types funding this project took
Libeskind, the aesthete, much more seriously.

Local sentiment so far gives Libeskind something of an edge
here. Even if he loses the WTC commission (although, at the
very least, he will probably be given some role in shaping its
memorial spaces) Libeskind will emerge as something of a
winner who can play to the crowd and design from the heart.
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*Met Life*

INSIDE ART An Albers Mural May Reappear
By CAROL VOGEL
NYTimes , Feb 21, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/arts/design/21INSI.html

For more than two years, the giant red, white and black mural by
the German-born artist and colorist Josef Albers, which had
adorned the lobby of the MetLife Building on Park Avenue since
it was completed 40 years ago, has been sitting in storage.
Taking down the mural during a renovation brought more light
into the lobby and made the layout more open, MetLife exec-
utives have said, so they decided not to put it back up.

But "Manhattan," as Albers called the piece, may come to life
again. If the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation has its way, an
exact replication will end up on the Fifth Avenue side of a
building owned the New School University at 65 Fifth Avenue,
at 14th Street

"We are very interested, but our funding is speculative," said
Stefano Basilico, curator of the university's art collection. At
this point, he said, it is not known how much the project would
cost.

After the mural was taken down, the New School expressed an
interest in the work, said Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive
director of the Albers Foundation. But because of the size of the
piece - 55 feet wide by 28 feet tall - there was nowhere it could
fit inside any of the New School's buildings. So Mr. Basilico
thought of making a copy for the exterior. "Since it's a cityscape,
my idea is to give the mural back to the city by putting it
outside," he said.

Mr. Weber said the original mural wasn't needed for the project.
Before his death, in 1976, Albers left exact specifications of the
work so it could be replicated, which is exactly what the New
School will do if it can raise the money.

Initially Mr. Basilico thought of installing "Manhattan" on the
14th Street side of the building in a way that would make it look
as if it had always been there.

But Mr. Weber decided to consult the Milan-based architect Gae
Aulenti, with whom he had worked when she designed the
installation of an Anni Albers retrospective that traveled to
Venice, Paris and New York four years ago.

"I went to Gae's office and showed her pictures of the mural and
the building," Mr. Weber said. She immediately responded by
saying that it should not look as though it was designed for the
site.

She did a quick pencil sketch showing how the mural, with its
crisply interlocking forms of color, could be installed on the
Fifth Avenue side to look as if it had just landed there.

Mr. Basilico said the New School was particularly interested in
the Albers piece because it has a history of putting art in its
buildings. In 1930, when the school inaugurated its first made-
to-measure home at 66 West 12th Street, it commissioned
three site-specific projects from contemporary artists. Jose
Clemente Orozco painted five frescos; Thomas Hart Benton
made a series of paintings (sold to the Equitable Life
Assurance Society of America for $3.4 million in 1984); and
Camilo Egas created three large paintings for the school. Sol
LeWitt is finishing two wall drawings for University Hall that
have been donated to the university.
============================
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*Book Grist*

AUTOPILOT
by Carsten Nicolai
Die-Gestalten Verlag
http://www.die-gestalten.de
USA Release; September 2002
Isbn: 3-931126-80-3
Features: full color softcover with special plastic sleeve,
includes CD with 50 minutes of experimental audio.

Renowned worldwide for his multi-medial performances and
exhibitions (e.g. Dokumenta X, Guggenheim NYC, MOMA SF,
PS1, MOMA Oxford and NTT Tokyo) Berlin-based artist
Carsten Nicolai concocts minimalist, microscopic and complex
views of the creative processes at the interface of science, art
and music.

A member of experimental electronics label Raster Noton
(awarded the Prix Ars Electronica 2000), Nicolai is a master of
the focused tightrope walk: after raster-noton.oacis, Autopilot
twists the polarity of self-organization and order into a mixture
of innovative documentation and audio components.
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*Call For Papers*

CALL FOR PAPERS : T h e S t a t e o f t h e R e a l
An Interdisciplinary Conference
Glasgow School of Art, UK
21-22 November 2003

Deadline for abstracts: 22 April 2003
Abstracts may be sent by email to [email protected].

Keynote address: Prof. Linda Nochlin, New York University *
[* A second keynote speaker of high standing is currently being
approached.]

"How real can you get?"
The conference organisers propose a debate on the subject of
'the real' in aesthetic philosophy, criticism and practice.

"When is representation not real?"
Recent years have seen notions of reality discussed in the
open. What relationship do current views developed by this
discourse have with those tenets of realism and represent-
ation that once provided the foundation for aesthetic study?
What are the philosophical consequences of the introduction
of technologies that increasingly blur the boundaries between
art and popular culture? What is the effect of aesthetic culture
on Realpolitik?

What has happened to the notions of social realism, verisimil-
itude, and the imaginary? Are they still relevant, and how have
they been changed, if at all?

"Reclaiming the real."
The organizers are also interested in how notions of reality are
affected by, and continue to affect, aesthetic practice in the
fields of art, design, and media production. With the popularity
of haptic technologies, what has happened to ^real haptics?
How do practitioners and academics view older technologies
in the light of their electronic avatars? With the development
of notions of virtual space, what has happened to our
understanding of the body, the mind, and corporeal space?

The organisers particularly welcome proposals on, or dealing
with, the following related subjects:Reality and realism in Art &
Design History; New media technologies Virtual Reality, CGI
photography and cinema, the Internet, haptic technologies;
Modernity and Post-modernity/Modernism and Post-modernism;
Philosophies on ^the real in popular culture; Philosophy and
art/design and cultural practice; Reality television, realism in
film.

Proposals for panels (no more than three papers) and workshops
are also welcomed.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to:
'The State of the Real',
Dept. of Historical and Critical Studies,
Glasgow School of Art,
167 Renfrew St,
Glasgow,
Scotland, UK
G3 6RQ

Abstracts may be sent by email to [email protected].
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