Roberta Smith in the NYT:

Not all filmmakers create complete and resonant fantasy worlds, rife with strange, sometimes frightening beings as well as mysterious movement, emotional suspense and uncanny detail. Fewer still are honored with extensive museum retrospectives that do these worlds full immersive justice, allowing devotees and neophytes alike to grasp the essence of their achievement and its evolution, strengths and weaknesses all.

But this is what the Museum of Modern Art has accomplished for the elaborate puppet-centered parallel universe brought forth by the experimental animators known as the Quay Brothers.

By someone at http://kasparallenbach.ch, original link was http://kasparallenbach.ch/blog/weiterlesen/costa-concordia, but that is now dead.

I first heard about the Buzludzha monument (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) last summer when I was attending a photo festival in Bulgaria.  Alongside me judging a photography competition was Alexander Ivanov, a Bulgarian photographer who had gained national notoriety after spending the last 10 years shooting ‘Bulgaria from the Air’.  Back then he showed me some pictures of what looked to me like a cross between a flying saucer and Doctor Evil’s hideout perched atop a glorious mountain range.

I knew instantly that I had to go there and see it for myself.

Imagine an America in which all-female families survived the Great Depression raising children and farming homesteads in the absence of men (and in the absence of today’s detractors to gay marriage.)

Artist Debbie Grossman visualizes an alternate reality of dusty plains and simple family meals drawn from the Farm Security Administration’s archives, creating an endlessly interpretable world in which the contemporary idea of family is presented as historical.

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.

The ants are still alive : the process will continue…

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. User names, hostnames, IP addresses, unencrypted email fragments, web pages, images and voice extracted from this data and then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Danielle Sucher:

I just released my first Chrome extension! It’s called Jailbreak the Patriarchy, and if you’re running Chrome, you can head over here to install it.

What does it do?

Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.

A Chris Burden piece where no one is bleeding. The man has gotten really tame in his old age. But it rocks socks anyways.

Just goes to prove my theory: kid with OCD + Internet = art

After a good deal of introspection, and teaming up with awesome motion graphics artist Gerardo del Hierro, we decided that happy wasn’t happy for Physalia unless pliers, microchips and a bit of soldering were involved, and with this idea we resolved to create the happiest machine Physalia has built to date.

These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic.

MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch says to graffiti artists “If you harness your talent you can be in a museum some day, make a contribution and a living from it.”, so Eddie Colla responds with this nice little fuck you :)

Otomata is a generative sequencer. It employs a cellular automaton type logic I’ve devised to produce sound events.

Fun little game of life esq music app, also on the web here.

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… Two years ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future..

Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It’s interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don’t hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee’s voice after Weegee visited Kubrick’s set one day.

Via kottke.org.

Pretty Loaded is an online museum of Flash preloaders.

Via kottke.org.

From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses.

Via kottke.org.