MUTO by Blu
Blu animates walls in Buenos Aires with about seven minutes of awesomeness:
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Archive for Art
The sky will fall tomorrow!
It’s true. I saw something that must have been flakes of the cement that keeps it up fall outside my window. It’s mid-april, and it shouldn’t snow now, so in my opinion it must be proof that the whole firmament will come tumbling down within 24 hours. I’ve already checked out this building’s air raid shelter, and as soon stores open I will go stockpile canned food. Now, quickly, post on your blogs, journals and the forums you frequent – everyone must know! Hey, start a petition as well, we have to make sure to reach the people who can do something about it.
And people do take action from things they read online. Througout the day, I’ve seen several heated calls to action based on an article on Animation World Network, in which the author discusses a propes bill that would force everyone to register copyright for all their works to avoid that they become orphaned works – which supposedly would allow companies to reap everything including flickr, your blog and your family album for unregistered works and put them to commercial use.
Of course, that prospect worries me as an artist. Regestering works would be an added cost, and one that would feel hard to justify for works that won’t immediatly yield any profits – like those all creatives have littering their studios, desk and harddrives. And it would probable affect me here in Europe as well a few years down, since our governments often follow suit.
But I can’t say I felt an urge to to join any discussions before I had a bit more facts – something which I found lacking after a glance on Simon’s article. And a while later, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing (my must regular source on such matters, btw) pointed out this article, whose author has done a bit more research and found that no such bill as the one mentioned on AWN is in progress of being legislated – only mention of one from a couple of years ago that didn’t become anything. She also provides a lot of useful information regarding the subject of copyright and orphaned works as it is today.
So, my strategy of finding (or waiting to be provided with) a bit more facts seems to have saved me some trouble again. Not only the work of arguing against something that doesn’t matter, but also saving me from looking stupid after passing on what just seems to be a blimp’s worth of hot air.
Now, get going on the sky thing. You read it on the internet – so it must be true…
Suggest me some art blogs
By the way, I’m interested in finding good blogs about what’s going on in the art world, so feel free to drop a comment with any links you might think of.
Some ideas…
I think I mentioned somewhere that I’m a wannabe artist, so here are two renders visualizing wannabe abstract sculptures:
Things you can’t do without?
This is one of my favorite pieces of software, it was only a short while since I discovered it, but it’s one of those interface additions that I got used to immediately:
FoxyTunes for Firefox is just one of those indespensable things you can’t do without once you’ve started using them. When looking for skins for a mediaplayer I’ve always wanted them to be compact and functional, but now I don’t think there’s any better way to save desktop space than having the controls right there on the browser.
Something you maybe can do without is Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca machines (I suggest to unblock the pop-up on the first page).
What Cloaca does is to artificially digest food and produce the closest possible analogue to human feces. I didn’t learn about this work of art until recently, and I’m not going to present any sort of thorough analysis of it here (analysises by people much better at such things than I am can be found in the essays section of the Cloaca site). I just wanted to mention it because I find the whole concept intriguing. I mean, what else can you think about a big, expensive machine whose only purpose is to produce shit? Maybe the only useful aspect of it is to be a an example of near-complete uselessness.
