kunstinberlin

[kunstinberlin]

Visit my new websites for art updates and inspiration from creative Berlin!

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Yuletide Dreams

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linea de tiempo sin orientación que comporta simultaneamente pasado presente y futuro

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A short and satirical piece I wrote about the infiltration of the Internet into our everyday lives, youth culture, and Berlin. 

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"The real world is the legitimate object of an aesthetic attitude (as well as of scientific and ethical attitudes)—not art. […] Fine art can serve only as a preliminary means of education in taste and aesthetic judgment. After this education is completed, art, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, can be thrown away—to confront the subject with the aesthetic experience of life itself. Seen from an aesthetic perspective, art reveals itself as something that can and should be overcome. All things can be seen from an aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgment. From the perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art is something that posits itself between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world."

Boris Groys

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Lee Miller by Man Ray, 1929

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Man Ray

Rayograph, 1923

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Girls Title Cards Good Bad Design

Ever since I started watching Girls the stark simplicity of their title card has caught my attention. The simple typeface and the variation on color themes each week create a lasting impression. I also love how they play with color and contrast conventions, sometimes breaking them in order to create good bad design. I love when the colors combine on the border of disgusting. That revulsion is a much stronger and memorable emotion than simple pop colors. I finally sat down and collected all of the color cards in one place to create a working color swatch. I see this type of design becoming more influential in all sorts of places like the Proenza Schouler SS13 campaign for example. These designs are difficult to pull off but work really well for a younger generation that is used to seeing millions of colors present on the Internet. 

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Things That Make You Go Ooohhh

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Digital Archives, Clouds, and Dust

  We have seen steps taken further in recent years to engage us with the idea of outsourced memory with the introduction of cloud computing. Outsourced to major corporations, our personal data will now be protected by those most capable to do so. And if we choose to do so we can share as much of it as we like with our family, our friends, and even the public. Here then, we finally have the infallible archive that is an endless untapped resource for nostalgia.

  These safe and secure off-site memory banks promise to hold indefinitely our precious photographs and music; our memories! But where is the assurance, let alone the insurance, that calamity will not strike. For anyone who has ever owned a computer, the paralyzing fear of data loss must surely have been faced at one point or another. The blank screen, the whirring drive, the gut-wrenching sense of loss when an irrecoverable amount of data(memories) has been lost due to some technical malfunction or other. Why do we believe that clouds are any more capable of indefinite storage ad infinitum than our own devices? For what are clouds but dust and water, two of the very enemies of the electronic circuit. In all seriousness though, these massive servers that house the clouds are equally susceptible to physical damage, power loss, and overheating, not to mention obsolescence (a sort of technological equivalent to senescence).

  Nostalgia requires that we imperfectly remember our past and to this end the Internet as the archive of our age is an improper one. It is praised for its boundlessness, but it is actually just as fallible and capable of forgetting.[1] For Derrida, it is a precondition of the archive to destroy its contents.[2] To forget completely does not serve nostalgia, but to remember imperfectly does. The distance created by this imperfection, whether it be degradation, corruption, loss, deletion, erasure, or simply the timestamp imparted by the pixilated quality of the compressed archival methods, these are the hallmarks of nostalgic recollection and they remain very much a part of nostalgia’s transition to the digital.

[1] “Some have turned to the idea of the archive as counterweight to the ever-increasing pace of change, as a site of temporal and spatial preservation. From the point of view of the archive, forgetting is the ultimate transgression. But how reliable or foolproof are our digitalized archives? Computers are barely fifty years old and already we need "data archaeologists" to unlock the mysteries of early programming: just think of the notorious Y2K problem that recently haunted our computerized bureaucracies.” – Andreas Huyssen. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 26.

[2] “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.” -Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression". Diacritics. 25 (2) (1995), 9-63, pp. 9.

“But the point must be stressed, this archiviolithic force leaves nothing of its own behind. As the death drive is also, according to the most striking words of Freud himself, an aggression and a destruction(Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced tomneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus ashypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum. Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesisas spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.”. Ibid, p.14.

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Its official

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Sol Lewitt / Incomplete Open Cubes (detail of 'index') / 1974

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how much is too much? 

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Zizek at Birkbeck

Talking about the end of seriality, transition from film to TV to DVD as the main mode of viewership.

Specifically examining the 'Fuck' scene from Season 1 Episode of the Wire

In the Wire he proposes that it represents a new form of realism, a realism more real than realism because it engages in community self-representation.

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The Melancholy of Counterfactual Imagining

image thanks to Rebecca Wright