Romain Laurent’s great GIFs

One Loop Portrait a Week – #18
For 2014, Eric Beug is working on his lung strength

Oh, these are so fun. It’s really refreshing to see an artist/photographer who is making fun work. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful at first look, people!

 

One Loop Portrait a Week – #14

Sophia Wallace‘s fire extinguishing thoughts

Romain Laurent challenged himself to create one of these a week. Check out more on his Tumblr. 

Extinct Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I’m talking at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts about the work I did for their photography Art Cart. It’s sort of like a petting zoo for the history of photography–I made 12 images in 12 different historic photo process–cyanotype, Van Dyke, tintype, color slide, silver gelatin, direct positive paper, calotype (paper negative), albumen carte de visite (with Gocco printed personalized photographer’s back…yessssssss), salted paper, stereographs, Polaroid, and digital image. The Art Cart will be out so you can hold a tintype or look at a 3D stereoscope picture. And we’ll look at new daguerreotypes! Here is the MIA’s description of the evening:

Listen as some of our cities’ most interesting artists give us the back stories about their work in this series of on-stage narratives.

In 2011, the MIA commissioned photographer Lacey Prpic Hedtke to document the museum’s collection using archaic photographic techniques, such as tintypes, collotypes, and stereograms. She commenced upon an intensive exploration of history, representation, and visual interpretation, resulting in a kind of photographic archaeology that unearthed new connections and fresh interpretations of familiar artworks.

Prpic Hedtke will discuss this project, the history of photography, and how she decided to pair certain art works with particular archaic photographic techniques.

$10; $5 for MIA members. To reserve tickets, call (612) 870-6323 or reserve tickets online.

Heineken’s World Brick

Come on manufacturers! We can do this! In the 1960s Heineken and Dutch architect John Habraken collaborated to create the “World Bottle”–a beer bottle that can be used as building material. After Alfred Heineken saw Heineken beer bottles wash up on a Caribbean beach, he was inspired to produce 100,000 World Bottles.

Why can’t we do this now? I love double- or triple-duty items. Bring the World Bottle back, Heineken! We could build fences, garages, houses–you name it. And we could cut down on trash. Brilliant.

The Collective Tarot

I LOOOVE this. It’s the tarot, updated for queers of today! Two dozen artists created a deck of 78 cards, updating the imagery for contemporary wants. They changed the Major arcana to found objects: bones, feathers, bottles and keys. Here’s what one of the creators, Annie Murphy says about the project:

We set out on this project because we wanted to access the ancient tradition of the Tarot, but were unable to relate to what we saw as archaic Christian, Euro- and hetero-centricities of modern decks available on the market. With the Collective Tarot, people can expect to see beings and bodies of size and of color represented, as well as differently-abled, multi-gendered and multi-generational characters. Tarot itself is Euro-Centric, originating (arguably) in 15th-century Italy. It is folk-art-magic that has amazingly survived through centuries of repression. We wanted to be able to use the Tarot as a tool while making the images relevant to ourselves and our communities.

You can order one today!

 

Hand cookies

Oh my. Look at these hand cookies made by patissier Ayako Kurokawa of Kuroiwa Patisserie in Brooklyn. Wow! Check out their website–they make all kinds of kooky pastries. I want one of these cookies so I can sneak up behind people and stroke their shoulders with these manicured hands.

Free Feminist Review articles

 

In honor of the Feminist Review publishing their 100th issue, they’ve made 20 articles F-R-E-E on their site.
Want to read about class politics, Jamaican nationalism, anti-trafficking and Imperial Feminism? This is your place!

In condom news…

Pronto is a new, really-fast-to-put-on condom. Invented by South America’s inventor, Willem van Renburg, developed it in the hopes that it will help to bring South Africa’s HIV rate down, as it is currently home to the world’s largest HIV-positive population. The foil IS the applicator.  I hope they’re cheap and available everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New York City Department of health developed the NYC Condom Finder, which helps you find free condoms near you. It uses the iPhone’s GPS to locate free condoms near the person who needs a handful.

Produce fruitwash label

 

This is such a good idea–a fruit label that turns into fruit wash. Amron developed a label for fruit that turns into fruit wash when wet. Not that I ever buy fruit wash, cause water is just fine and I buy organic anyway, but I like that there will be fewer tiny labels in the trash. YAY!

Moveable Type coming to Minneapolis!

First, head to MCBA (1011 Washington Ave S) from 4pm-7pm for a visit with Kyle Durrie and her type truck–a truck turned mobile letterpress studio. At 6pm, the slideshow will commence. Pull a print in a mobile print shop and hear about the life of the itinerant letterpress printer.

At 8pm, the Type Truck and the Fly Away Zine Mobile will pull into the Zine Apothecary (3310 15th Ave S) for an afterparty potluck with zines and zinemakers. Bring the bounty from your garden or a treat to share, and we’ll take over the alley with underground press and zine-y fun times. Potluck + letterpress studio + 2 zine libraries= an amazing Monday night.

http://type-truck.com/
http://www.mnbookarts.org/
http://zineapothecary.wordpress.com/
http://zinemobile.wordpress.com/

Non-Time and Hauntology

Malcom Harris went to a talk by Mark Fisher on hauntology, and wrote an incredibly fascinating breakdown of it. Including this definition of a hipster, which we’ve all be wondering about: Hipsters don’t experience non-time negatively, as a loss, as melancholic, as indicative of deep alienation. Instead they seem to be thoroughly subjectivized by neoliberalism to the extent that they regard it as opportunity to show off how creative they can be in their cycle of appropriations. That last thing they want is to be reminded of how their personality is conditioned by the times they live in; in nontime, one can feel transcendent and immortal, one can permanently defer adulthood.

Here is a description of the talk:

Through their generic and transient qualities – workstations devoid of personal effects, relations with colleagues as fleeting as those with passengers on a commuter journey – many workplaces now resemble non-places, either literally, as in the case of a hotel, corporate coffee chain or out-of-town supermarket, or symbolically, in the form of temporary assignments for faceless employers (dis)located in anonymous buildings, where the worker-commuter then follows the same global timetables, navigates the same software applications and experiences the same sense of placelessness, the feeling of being mere data in the mainframe.”

So writes Ivor Southwood in his analysis of precarious labour, ‘Non-Stop Inertia’ (2011). In the last decade, the proliferation of corporate non-places has been accompanied by the spread of cyberspace-time, or Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality. It’s no coincidence that, as this unmarked time increasingly came to dominate cultural and psychic space, Derrida’s concept hauntology (re)emerged as the name for a paradoxical zeitgeist. In ‘Specters of Marx’, Derrida argued that the hauntological was characterised by “a time out of joint”, and this broken time has been expressed in cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present. Sometimes accused of nostalgia, the most powerful examples of hauntological culture actually show that nostalgia is no longer possible. In conditions where pastiche has become normalised, the question has to be: nostalgia compared to what?

James Bridle has recently argued that “the opposite of hauntology … [is] to demand the radically new”, but hauntology in fact operates as a kind of thwarted preservation of such demands in conditions where – for the moment at least – they cannot be met. Whereas cyberspace-time tends towards the generation of cultural moments that are as interchangeable as transnational franchise outlets, hauntology involves the staining of particular places with time – albeit a time that is out of joint. In this lecture, Fisher will explore the hauntological culture of the last few years in relation to the question of place, using examples from music (Burial, The Caretaker, Ekoplekz, Richard Skelton), film (Chris Petit, Patrick Keiller) and fiction (Alan Garner, David Peace).