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A Brief History Of

A Brief History of Autechre’s Album Covers

by Rhett Jones on August 5, 2016
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I’ve always hated minimalism. I don’t think that’s a blanket statement I’d make about any other artistic movement but I hate minimalism. From my perspective, it was audacious for like a year, and then it was decoration. This hatred even extends to minimalist design for the most part, though I can occasionally be persuaded to appreciate a nice, functional spice rack. But, I’ve always loved the tension between the experimental electronic music duo Autechre’s stark album packaging and dense, maximal music.

Throughout their 30-year career, the experimental electronic music duo Autechre (Sean Booth and Rob Brown) has been subverting expectations of what an album in the genre looks like. And as their music became more complex and structurally more in line with sound art and noise, they’ve crafted an uber-minimal visual identity.

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I Watched the Grand Theft Auto Deer Cam for 48 hours

by Paddy Johnson on March 22, 2016
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As I write this, I’m watching a deer run through a desolate crime-ridden industrial park set in an action adventure game. The steed is the star of San Andreas Deer Cam, a live video stream from a computer running a hacked version of Grand Theft Auto V. The hack, created by artist Brent Watanabe, follows the animal as it traverses more than 100 square miles of San Andreas, a semi-fictional state in GTA V. The landscape is obviously modeled off a combination of California and Nevada.

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Return to the Real? A Survey of the Analog in Photography

by Paddy Johnson on June 24, 2015
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Bryan Zanisnik’s “Green Owls Manhattan Bridge” is all illusion. In reality, this apparent flat collage is actually an elaborately constructed set, complete with foregrounds and backgrounds, stools, digitally printed wall paper and even windows to the outside world. Through July 1st, Zanisnik’s studio was located on the 8th floor of 20 Jay Street in DUMBO, (only a few floors above our office) with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The artist waited until sunset to shoot his still lives, which created that perfect blueprint blue you see in the shots of the bridge above. The set itself was photographed under studio lights.
This approach reminds me a little of Artie Vierkant’s digital manipulations of his exhibition documentation—in both cases, the artist’s statement seems to be that the documentation is the work. But it also seems a break from artists in the early aughts whose work relied mostly on various photoshop filters. Lucas Samaras’s self portraits and Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop gradient instruction paintings might be the highest profile example of such work, but there are plenty more examples. Is this new interest in physical illusion a shift away from digital manipulation?

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An Informal Survey of Swag: The Sociology of Hip Hop In the Micro-World of Emerging Net Art

by Jennifer Chan on September 14, 2012
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Cultural studies has established that suburban white kids love hip hop in a complex manner; heaps has been written on aspiration, colorblindedness, misogynism, emulation, and subordination. But just what makes hip hop so appealing to net artists? Instead of passing off any attempt to indulge in hip hop as a 1:1 relationship between appropriation and mockery, I’m interested in looking at how different artists incorporate hip hop in their artwork to talk about themselves.

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Circle Glasses: The Art World’s Gateway to Power

by Paddy Johnson and Whitney Kimball on August 13, 2012
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Do you have square glasses? Better put that paint brush down if your answer’s yes, because your art career is over.

Observe.

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Chris Marker’s Youtube Channel

by Leighann Morris on July 30, 2012
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This morning the French Ministry of Culture announced that influential French writer, photographer, and film director Chris Marker passed away.

In his last few years of film-making, the elusive Marker posted videos on Youtube under the pseudonym “Kosinki”. We found that channel.

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Survivability Report: The American Folk Art Museum and the Seaport Museum

by John Gawarecki-Maxwell on January 17, 2012
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2011 wasn't a great year for either the Seaport Museum or the American Folk Art Museum. The two museums have been in dire financial straits for the past several years, struggling to keep rising operating costs down while bleeding admissions and memberships. We took a deeper look at their finances to figure out what these museums’ prospects look like.

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Net Artists Warned Us About SOPA 15 Years Ago

by Will Brand on January 3, 2012
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A year ago, Paul Garrin’s DNS alternative sounded crazy. After SOPA, he sounds like a visionary. A history, and an apology.

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