NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Visual AIDS: STRIKE III - Bowling for Art!

STRIKE III - Bowling for Art!
Strike III will feature Rollin', a silent auction curated by Geoffrey Hendricks and Pavel Zoubok. Plus limited edition prints by Karen Heagle.



Rollin’ is a silent auction of round artwork featuring international aritsts: Bill Armstrong, Barton Lidice Benes, Omar Chacon, Steve DeFrank, Marietta Ganapin, Geoffrey Hendricks, David Poppie, Donna Sharrett, Barbara Takenaga, Christopher Tanner, Richard Thatcher, and Mark Wagner.  Images and advance bidding information will be online starting on May 4, 2009 at www.visualAIDS.org.



Silver Bowling Ball, a limited edition print by Karen Heagle will also be available on the day of the event for $100 (valued $180). The purchase of a lane comes with a complimentary print.

Monday, May 11, 2009
300 New York @ Chelsea Piers
Pier 60, 23rd Street and West Side Hwy

Tickets:
To order online by PayPal click HERE
To pay by check, click HERE to download your RSVP form
To order by phone with a credit card* call 212-627-985

Individual $250
Single Lane $2,500, up to 6 bowlers + limited edition print
Double Lanes $5,000, up to 12 bowlers + limited edition print
Artist Tickets $150 (limited number of tickets available)
(*credit card payments are subject to a 3% surcharge)

All proceeds supports Visual AIDS.  Visual AIDS utilizes the visual arts to promote AIDS awareness and, through the Frank Moore Archive Project, historicizes the contributions of artists with HIV and the estates of artists lost to AIDS.  www.visualAIDS.org

Help spread the word, forward this email to your friends (see below), or click HERE for our facebook invite.

Stormy Weather

Via

via NYTimes, City Room blog, September 4, 2008,6:00 pm

Yet Again, Astroland Threatens to Close
By Sewell Chan

Cai Guo-Qiang's Explosive Olympic Remix

Cai Guo-Qiang
Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing OlympicGames 2008. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio.

via Artnet magazine, 8/19/08:

REPLY TO THE OLYMPICS CONTROVERSY

by Cai Guo-Qiang

Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.

The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.

Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:

The explosion event Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games consisted of a series of 29 giant footprint fireworks -- one for each Olympiad -- over the Beijing skyline, leading to the National Olympic Stadium. The 29 footprints were fired in succession, traveling a total distance of 15 kilometers, or 9.3 miles, within a period of 63 seconds.

It is quite customary to prepare a backup reel for major televised events of this scale, and this has been true of the opening and closing ceremonies of previous Olympic Games. We were aware of this and thus created our own reel from dress rehearsal footage of the footprint fireworks. The sequence was then created using computer graphics.

From my own perspective as an artist, there are two separate realms in which this artwork exists, as two very different mediums have been utilized. First, there is the artwork that exists in the material realm: the ephemeral sculpture. This was viewed by people attending the ceremonies inside the stadium and standing outside on the streets of Beijing. This artwork was documented from various vantage points on video, which has been broadcast by many international media outlets.

Second, there is a creative digital rendering of the artwork in the medium of video. It is a single version of the event viewed by a large broadcast audience. Such a conceptual work can exist simultaneously in these two separate realms. And perhaps to also take Footprints of History into this second realm was necessary because in many of my explosion events, such as Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, the very best vantage point is not the human one.

CAI GUO-QIANG was director of visual and special effects at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Golden Arches Front Seat @ Olympics

Here's a funny juxtaposition from today's NYTimes piece on China, the Olympics, economic change, and the Communist Party:

Screen shot:

Okay, now click to enlarge:

Now check out the Golden Arches on the girls' t shirts:

Bordering on Debord's Board Game (or, Professor Accused of Infringing Copyright of Man Who Opposed Copyright)

KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com

via WaterCoolerGames:

Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972.

via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}

Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright

By ANDREA L. FOSTER, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a01603.htm

Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher who died in 1994, was no fan of private property. But apparently his widow is one.

A lawyer representing the widow, Alice Becker-Ho, has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway says the lawyer has sent him a letter demanding that he stop distributing his online war game, which the lawyer says infringes a copyright held by the Debord estate. The French philosopher had created a similar board game 30 years ago.

But copyrights and some forms of intellectual property were anathema to Debord, says Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement, which Debord founded, in 1957, is a mix of anarchism and Marxism. Its followers scrawled "Abolish copyright" on walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.

The humor in defending the property rights of Debord, a Marxist, has not been lost on scholars, who have publicized the case on their blogs.

Mr. Galloway does not deny that the two-person computer game he developed is based on Debord's creation, the Game of War. The philosopher, an avid student of war strategy, released a few handcrafted copies of the board game in 1978. The object of the game, which resembles chess, is to corner and destroy opposing pieces. Debord and his wife wrote a book about it that was translated into English last year.

<Image via, tirée du film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Guy Debord, 1978.

One of Debord's games, cast in silver and copper, is on display at Columbia University's Buell Center for the Study of Architecture, alongside Mr. Galloway's computer version, called Kriegspiel. The object of Kriegspiel, German for a generic 18th-century war game, is the same as in Debord's game.

A computer programmer, Mr. Galloway says he spent about a year designing the digital game, which can be downloaded from the Web at no charge. "It's part of my scholarly research into how antagonism is simulated in war games and computer games," he said. "It's also part of my research into the work of Debord."

Despite the similarities between his creation and Debord's, Mr. Galloway disagrees that he is breaking the law. "I don't think I'm infringing on anyone's copyright in the creation of this game," he says, declining to discuss his legal situation further.

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, says only that it received a similar cease-and-desist letter and has responded.

Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, is familiar with Mr. Galloway's case. The Debord estate, she says, is overreaching in accusing him of copyright infringement.

The idea for a game is not copyrightable, she argues; only the image of a game is. Mr. Galloway's game uses the idea of Debord's game, she says, but does not duplicate its artistry and detail. {note: this perfectly illustrates the Idea-Expression Dichotomy }

Ms. Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University School of Law, sees similarities between Mr. Galloway's case and one involving the Facebook-based word game Scrabulous. In that case, the owners of the board game Scrabble have accused the developers of Scrabulous of infringing their copyright. Ms. Seltzer says that claim, too, is without merit.