Love Me, Love My Doll (aka “Guys and Dolls”)
http://www.bbcamerica.com/content/245/index.jsp
From the website:
Love Me, Love My Doll focuses on a group of men who have fallen in love with their life-size dolls, called “Real Dolls.” For these men, their $10,000 lifelike, built-to-order creations have replaced human women. Find out what makes these men tick, as they give you a peek at life with their synthetic dreamgirls.
Nadine Jarvis: Carbon Copies
http://www.nadinejarvis.com/projects/carbon_copies
From the website:
Pencils made from the carbon of human cremains. 240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind.
Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings - a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.
This work forms part of a larger research project into post mortem.
Flux: Who is Aaron Rose
via http://flux.net/who-is-aaron-rose
excerpt from the article:
Aaron Rose’s bio reads like a creative person’s dream–artist, writer, independent curator, publisher, editor, musician and now accomplished filmmaker. In the 1990s, Aaron founded the highly influential Alleged Gallery in New York, dabbled as a producer/director for MTV Networks and more recently mounted the highly successful art exhibit “Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture”, which will tour the world through the end of 2008. We worked with Aaron last year on the Flux-produced Swerve Festival where he curated the art show and screened a work-in-progress version of his new documentary Beautiful Losers. I chatted with Aaron as he prepared for the World Premiere of his film at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. (Read the full interview)
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
via http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/arts/design/14rauschenberg.html?hp
excerpt from the article:
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died May 12, 2008. He was 82.
Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.
Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.
No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”
Torley: THE BEGINNING: It’s a start. Keep doing.
Ge Jin: Chinese Gold Farmers
http://www.chinesegoldfarmers.com
From the video description:
The documentary investigates gaming workshops in China that hire people to play online games like World of Warcraft and lineage. The gaming workers play at least 12 hours a day to produce in-game currency, equipments and whole characters, which are sold to American players.
From the video description:
I visited more gold farms/gaming workshops in the past several months, so here is more footage of this mysterious industry. The first workshop in this clip is operating 40-people group raids in order to obtain the most precious items and create epic characters.
From the video description:
This is the story of Lao Liu, one of my favorite interviewees. Here he talks about the pleasure and pain of being a gold farmer, also his interaction with regular gamers. I’m experimenting distributive filmmaking. If you would like to participate in this documentary, please just use an camcorder and record an interview with yourself or your friends, then contribute the tapes to me. Please check out www.chinesegoldfarmers.com
Brandon Morse: happy day, happy day.
Derek Lerner: Show&Tell
http://flickr.com/photos/dereklerner/sets/72157604984410259/
Show&Tell Fig. A
Show&Tell Fig. B
Show&Tell Fig. C
Batman: The Dark Knight
Winners of IRON MAN in Second Life fan art competition announced
via http://www.theppc.com/silverscreen/2008/05/and-winner-is.html
From the post:
And the winner is…
Damon Varriale, with ‘Clash of the Titans’:
The judges felt that this entry had true artistic merit and achieved a transcendant quality, rendering Iron Man with a god-like quality and making imaginative use of the avatar in order to portray his counterpart. They felt that, despite being a still image, it managed to be genuinely cinematic, and that it captured the majestic feeling of what it would be to be a super-hero, putting the ‘art’ in ‘fan art’.
Picture: Damon Varriale, winner of the Iron Man fan art contest. Picture by Annie Ok.Coming in EXTREMELY close behind was our runner-up and winner of L$25,000, ‘The Fall’, a machinima short directed by Shatner Gumbo:
The judges saw this as an entertaining and technically savvy alternative take on Iron Man, making imaginative use of the character of Tony Stark and the avatar itself. They all complimented Gumbo on the work he and his team had put into creating a highly accomplished example of Second Life machinima.
Pictured (left to right): Runner-up Shatner Gumbo, Silverscreen General Manager Dannyboy Lightfoot and contest winner Damon Varriale. Picture by Annie Ok.The event itself was as fun and frantic as usual. In true Second Life style, grid-wide problems were reported bang on 10.00am SLT, just as the event was due to begin, and we only achieved a full compliment of finalists seconds before I took to the stage to make the announcement at around 10.30am.
It drew a small but distinguished audience, comprising principally of our finalists, an assortment of friends, fans and well-wishers, creator of the Iron Man avatar Jonny Dusk, members of the judging panel including virtual world evangelist and multimedia artist Xantherus Halberd (AKA Annie Ok), SL ‘video tutorian’ and watermelon enthusiast Torley Olmstead (AKA Torley) and V3 Group CEO and content creator Liam Kanno. Unfortunately two of our judges, Infromation Week exec. editor Mitch Wagner and Iron Man writer Matt Fraction couldn’t make it along, but took the time to vote in advance nonetheless, for which we’re grateful.
Pictured (left to right): Torley Olmstead, Ravenelle Zugzwang, Iam Yumako, Sadakos Frog, Dannyboy Lightfoot, Roosevelt Dagger, HazelUES GossipGirl, Shatner Gumbo and Zinc Karas. Picture by Torley.
Pictured (left to right): Aemilia Case and Jonny Dusk. Picture by Annie Ok.I was careful to thank everybody involved, insofar as - true to the user-generated spirit of Second Life - this contest was made by the enthusiasm of the entrants, the contribution of the content creators we commissioned and the, er, judgement of the judges. This is particularly true of Annie Ok, who went way beyond the call of duty on this one, and to whom I’m personally very grateful.
Everybody present seemed to agree that it was to Paramount’s credit that they had commissioned this initative, and that their commitment to engaging the Second Life community with this type of creative call-to-action was commendable. For my part I recognise that the business of movie marketing rarely affords the opportunity for long-sightedness, but that aspects of this initiative definitely sign-post the way to the marketing campaign of the future.
