Mars

Thanks, NASA! (More at the link.)

Dallas VideoFest 25th Anniversary Party!

I'm throwing a party tonite F-U-N it's called "Experiments in [Video]," bring everything that you own! (paraphrasing one of my fave videos brought to you by the Video Association of Dallas). And it's coming right up, on Sept. 14! But I'm not throwing it, AMS Pictures is; and you don't need to bring everything you own, just $25.

The event will feature a micro-fest of old VideoFest faves, a silent auction, and of course, a preview of what's to come at the 25th Dallas VideoFest! A panel of guests will also discuss their favorite VideoFest moments; the guests include:

Ed Bark, TV critic and blogger
Manny Mendoza, former DMN TV critic and filmmaker
Mark Birnbaum, filmmaker
moi, video artist
Katie Gimenez, Director of Networking at Plano Chamber of Commerce (and former DVF Festival Coordinator)

Come get prep'd for the fest, help re-create the world as a more interesting, fun place (another quote from Treetin: [s]how me something beautiful and I will go on) by contributing to a great organization, and party! – more info here, and tickets here!

Back to the Future of Video Art

The history of video art includes lots of wonderful work, much of which is rarely seen; but you'll have a few chances to catch up soon.

First, the Power Station will host four nights of video art from the past thru the present:

Aug. 30, video art from the 70's, selected by Mike Morris;
Sept. 6, from the 80's, selected by Ben Lima;
Sept. 13, from the 90's, selected by Jenny Vogel;
Sept. 20, from the 00's, selected by Nadav Assor.

All shows start at 7:30PM; the Power Station is located at 3816 Commerce, Dallas.

Meanwhile, on Sept. 14 at 7PM, AMS Pictures will host a 25th anniversary bash for the Dallas VideoFest featuring 3 rooms with screenings of favorites from past festivals, a panel briefly discussing their faves, and a program previewing Director Bart Weiss's picks from this year's festival. Tickets to this fundraiser are only $25 per person or $40 per couple.

And that brings us to the Dallas VideoFest itself, which is making new history by opening on Sept. 26 with a program of video art works created especially for and displayed on the four curved walls of the Omni Hotel, Dallas.

The remaining 4 days of the festival, most of which is dedicated to contemporary works, will take place at the Dallas Museum of Art. The all-fest pass is a steal at $50; tickets here. More details about the VideoFest to come.

New DB12

The new volume, curated by Stephen Lapthisophon, is up here.

Route Opened for Donations to Wikileaks

Per WL Central,

After almost two years of fighting an unlawful banking blockade by U.S financial giants VISA and MasterCard, WikiLeaks has announced it is back open for donations.

After WikiLeaks' publications revealing U.S. war crimes and statecraft in 2010, U.S. financial institutions erected a banking blockade against WikiLeaks wholly outside of any judicial or administrative process. The blockade came during a time of substantial economic growth for WikiLeaks but blocked over 95% of donations, costing the organization in excess of USD 20M.

The Wau Holland Transparency Reports for WikiLeaks' finances, released today, illustrate the financial consequences of 18 consecutive months of economic censorship. For the year 2011, the blockade resulted in WikiLeaks' income falling to just 21% of its operating costs.

WikiLeaks has been forced to run on its cash reserves at the Wau Holland Foundation, which have diminished from EUR 800K at the end of December 2010, to less than EUR 100K at the end of June 2012. As the graph shows, WikiLeaks' reserve funds will expire at the current austere rate of expenditure within a few months. In order to effectively continue its mission, WikiLeaks must raise a minimum of EUR 1M immediately.

More at the link above. You can donate here – that's direct from WL Central and should be reliable; I just donated.

And Now for Some Nomi:

Dallas VideoFest 25

. . . makes a big entrance with a program of new video art created especially for the nearly 200-foot high display system on the exterior walls of the Omni Hotel, Dallas, at 8:30PM on Wednesday, Sept. 26 . The program is entitled, Expanded Cinema, borrowed from the 1970 book of the same title by seminal new media theorist Gene Youngblood (see also this previous post), who will give a lecture at the festival, Secession from the Broadcast: The Internet and the Crisis of Social Control, at 3PM on Sunday at the DMA, Horchow Auditorium.

The image right is from OMNEY, one of the videos to be included in Expanded Cinema, by Shane Mecklenburger, who provided the transcription of Youngblood's talk at the latter link. The Omni display completely wraps the building; hence the weird aspect ratio. (Full disclosure: I'm helping to organize the program and will have a piece in it.)

Because of the unique characteristics of the Omni "screen," most of the artists had to re-invent their approach to an extent perhaps greater than usual, in order to create works that might exploit the potential of this new platform while adapting to its requirements and continuing to explore the concerns with which they prefer to engage in their aesthetic practices. They have risen to the challenge, and the resulting works are gorgeous and fascinating.

The rest of the VideoFest will be at the Dallas Museum of Art, Sept. 26 - 30; block out your calendar! It's shaping up to be one of the best fests yet. As the dates approach, I hope to post more details here, including a chronological schedule with program descriptions all in one page.

But go ahead and buy tickets for the fest (I recommend full immersion), find more info, or (please!) donate at videofest.org. You can also donate via Kickstarter here.

Here's an auditory blast from the past, ca. early Gene Youngblood . . .

An Apparently Rambling Tho' Covertly Somewhat Coherent Post

. . . that allows me to touch on several interesting yet diverse topics while making a few perhaps unexpectedly related points:

I've done virtually nothing to promote this blog; my own family and most of my friends don't read it.

So I was rather pleased and surprised to find recently that Google's Blogspot Stats say that, since Google bought Blogspot ca. May, 2008, c-Blog has averaged ca. 4,000 hits per month. (And I don't think too many could be from spammers, since I rarely receive spam comments.)

My most popular posts have been on the Hajj, the Yes Lab, Matthew Barney and Ryan Trecartin, Obama re- the Holocaust, and the 2009 NYC Art Fairs.

Somehow, my comments on Barney's and Trecartin's works drew 116 page views this week. But the Hajj post remains the all-time big hitter, with the Obama re- the Holocaust post not far behind.

In the Hajj post, I simply gave a short description of Hajj based on info found at Wikipedia: "The Hajj (Arabic: حج‎ Ḥaǧǧ) is a pilgrimage to Mecca. It is currently the largest annual pilgrimage in the world, and is the fifth pillar of Islam, a moral obligation that must be carried out at least once in their lifetime by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so. . . ."

In the Obama re- the Holocaust post, I pasted a copy of his words written in the guest book at Israel's Holocaust Memorial (see below).

None of us ever knows really what it is we've managed to do that might actually turn out to have been the most helpful toward whatever we really hoped most to help.

In Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and other writings, he periodically referred to this book he thought he should write, the Logosophia. He never finished that book. But maybe the Biographia, perhaps together with his other works, through indirection, sufficiently constituted the work he thought we needed? At least, it influenced me.

Two years before my father died, he threw his last big tantrum that I witnessed. (It was at that late date that I finally recognized that "tantrum" was what it was that he'd been doing throughout our lives whenever necessary to get his way.) During the only slightly less excruciating, semi-apologetic wind-down, he told me things that made plain he remained utterly deluded as to both his greatest accomplishments and his greatest failings as a parent.

But just because he utterly misunderstood his real accomplishments, didn't mean there weren't any; there were.

A lot of people hoped Obama might help re- the Middle East. Here's a transcript of his hand-written words at the Holocaust Memorial:

I'm grateful to Yad Vashem and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim "never gain." And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.

We can't know if Obama will ever live up to the promise he showed. All we can do is try to be the promise that he showed.

Far as I can tell . . .

this is factually accurate:

Haruhiko Kawaguchi

I want to squeeze her, too. More at Oddity Central (thanks, Ben!)

Wozniak: Cloud Computing Will Cause "Horrible Problems"

"Wozniak didn't offer much in the way of specifics . . . . [but said, 't]he more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'" Steve Wozniak was the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II computers.

More at Business Insider. You can find more re- the kinds of problems I worry about by clicking on the label, "Worldbeam," at the bottom of this post.

In honor of the Olympics