school of things

prostheticknowledge:

Museum Meltdown 

1996 project first to use a gaming engine as an art medium, using Duke Nukem 3D to shoot enemies around a gallery:

From the project’s website:

In November 15th 1996 we launched our first Museum Meltdown project at Arken, Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj outside of Copenhagen as part of the Nordic Biennal “The Scream”, Borealis 8. Our piece was a 3D computer game where we reconstructed the architecture of Arken. This by using the build editor of the game Duke Nukem 3D, which allows users to create their own maps, levels and graphics etc …

…The world of computer technology contains everything from high to low, from the hackers to the powerful multinational enterprises. This culture and its networks goes beyond democracy, aesthetics and ethics of the main society and could as well be defined as a super-culture or a trans-culture. 

The technology has a vast influence on our perception of reality. As it shapes the world around us, the enviroment and the actual tools of perception and the question of identity becomes more complex and important to redefine. As the concept of space and our own presence becomes more and more unseparable, the relation between democracy and technology gets even more important. 

We decided to take the architecture of the museum one step further and turn the space into a violent computer game and hereby emphasize these questions.

You can visit the old site here - another version was created for the Half Life engine in 1999, which you can visit here.

There is also an interview with the artists Palle Torsson and Tobias Bernstrup here

austinkleon:

John Baldessari’s list of “assignments” for his CalArts class, 1970

When Baldessari was first getting started, CalArts wasn’t much of a name yet, and it was kind of a hippie school without grades or a curriculum or much structure — Baldessari started teaching there before he became “one of the top conceptual artists in the world.” Here’s a video of him talking about his time teaching there. Here are some of the assignments from his list:

1 - Imitate Baldessari in actions and speech.

10 - Create art from our procedures of learning. How does an infant learn?

16 - Given: $1. What art can you do for that amount?

17 - Cooking art. Invent recipes. They are organizations of parts, aren’t they?

23 - What are the minute differences in things that are supposed to be the same?

31 - Steal the trash from Pres. Corrigan’s wastebasket and make a collage of it.

43 - Forgeries. Ea. in class tries to forge my signature on a check by looking at an original. Or forgeries of forgeries of forgeries, etc.

46 - One person copies or makes up random captions. Another person takes photos. Match photos to captions.

68 - Make up a list by looking at art books, talking to artists on things to avoid in making art. Do them. Ask yourself if results are good or bad art.

85 - Describe the visual verbally and the verbal visually.

99 - Art that requires the rental of a Service rather than an Object.

More on Baldessari from the LATimes:

For anyone not wired to contemporary art, John Baldessari is a 58-year-old artist who grew up in the anonymous grubbiness of National City with expectations of going no further in life than teaching high school and making a bit of a local reputation as an artist. He pursued both dreams and wound up a figure of international reputation. Teaching—at CalArts instead of Chula Vista High—he evolved into a kind of guru. His influence, both direct and oblique, is downright astonishing. You can see his fingerprints on virtually every member of the younger generation who continues to dominate the high-risk lane of today’s art from Cindy Sherman to Robert Longo.

We think of artists as making their mark by adding something, something original. Baldessari has functioned by subtraction. Subtraction is not original in contemporary art; it comes from abstract Minimalism.

I became familiar with the list via Rob Walker’s review of Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment.

Filed under: John Baldessari

prostheticknowledge:

Tagtool Touch 

App specifically designed for real-time drawing and animation, particularly for large projections:

The Tagtool is a performative visual instrument used on stage and on the street. It serves as a VJ tool, a creative video game, or an intuitive way of creating animation.

The system is operated collaboratively by an artist drawing the pictures and an animator adding movement to the artwork with a gamepad. The design achieves virtually unlimited artistic complexity with a simple set of controls.

You can find out more here

prostheticknowledge:

The Artist Is Present - Marina Abramovic - The Game (via IndieGames)

8-Bit recreation of the well-known performance art piece at MoMA - you play a visitor to the Art gallery and make your way to the work, passing famous Van Goghs and Warhols in the process. You may have to wait in the queue as well …

More here from Indie Games

Link to the game itself