Spectacular!

Casa Blanca 2 presents Make Them Love You, a series of hand-painted signs exhibited throughout the city of Chennai that explore the negotiation between interior desires and exterior space.

Exhibition dates: 18 May - 13 June, 2009
Opening: Saturday,16 May, 2009, 6:30-9:30

Art World Gallery
12,Ganeshpuram
3rd Street, (Off Cenotaph Rd.)
Teynampet, Chennai
044 2431 5371

Postcard

For us, the sign clusters that punctuate Chennai’s landscape seem to turn the city inside-out - masking the container (the building) while revealing its contents (the businesses inside). The signs, in a constant state of becoming, compete for attention to fill the negative space of the city’s built environment with unregulated explosions of internal desires.

Make Them Love You uses the sign clusters as an exhibition space to display the artwork of ten participants who were asked to design a sign advertising a personal interior/exterior dialectic exploring notions of celebrity, sacrifice, development, and narcissism.

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“We Intend to be Happy” by artists Roberto Freddi & Jason Moore, presents the artists themselves dressed in camouflage in front of the British flag. This self-portrait is a nod to their heroic overcoming of the strenuous administrative process, enabling them to enjoy a cup of tea while living together, as a couple, in London. The camouflage and dog tags evoke the larger debate of homosexuality and the military while also playing with the material function of camouflage. They transform the composition of flat shapes without foreground or background (camouflage’s primary function: to absorb one into the background) into a mechanism to project them and their story into the foreground by exploiting its use within popular culture. The Kollywood film actress and director Revathy presents an actual-size autograph of ‘Asha Kelunni’, her real name. And Bangalore-based artist, Prayas Abhinav’s, piece states “Now Food is Within Your Reach”, is a promotion of his current work on urban gardening while also presenting a possibility of how art can address the needs of his country.

The participants were asked to design a signboard exploring an interior/exterior dialectic and the designs were then hand-painted by a team of Chennai-based sign painters offering an additional layer of interpretation between the artist, the environment, and the exhibition.

Artist/architect Teddy Cruz confirmed his participation in the exhibition but didn’t produce a piece - so we made one for him. The artist is seen imposed on the landscape in view of the sign painter. A virtual playback of an interior desire held by the gallery projected through the perspective of the sign painter himself. The poor quality photo taken with a mobile phone camera while eating lunch in San Diego is reinterpreted, shifting both the quality and the context of what is familiar and what is foreign.

Artists Roxanne Borujerdi and Postmasters Gallery explore the ambiguity between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces as an impression of worlds within-worlds. And the work of Jessica Wallack and Sarath Babu, points to the transition from private to public and back again, playing with the external as both nemesis and ally. While, the piece made by residents and staff of The Banyan present handwritten statements and images of embroidery, interweaving the physical and the psychological into blindspots of perception.

Chennai-based artist and sign painter, S.A.V Elanchezian, will not disclose details of his sign at this moment, saying, “It’s my problem, if I just want to just put one letter, I’ll do it”.

Hanging the artworks within sign clusters around Chennai is an effort to evoke the relationship between place and self. Make Them Love You recognizes that desire is externalized in the very formation of place and that place itself is lived as much internally as externally.

The artwork will be on display at Art World Gallery on the 15 & 16 May before we hang them amngst the sign clusters on Narasingapuram street (off Anna Salai, maps provided at the opening).

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Casa Blanca 2: New No. 16 is an art gallery based in the city of Chennai, India. We have no physical space of our own, but rather we borrow public space for exhibitions. This effort is to raise a dialogue about access and agency to view and make art, while charging the ordinary proximity between people and place.
 
For more information contact Shannon Spanhake +91 90 0325 8086.

Sponsor of Make Them Love You: CSO Partners | www.csopartners.org.in

The belly of the beast

"No I don't think it is a "brilliant" idea! I hate that word! In fact, I think it is a horrible idea, up there with the Segway...and do you have any idea how ridiculous all these beanbag chairs are?!

No, Tricia and Joanne, I didn't say this outloud... I just thought this as I sat across from a Google guy.

Was he serious when he said "wiki"?! And did he say "wiki" within the context of the future?! Yup, he said it, and he was as serious as those beanbag chairs weren't cool. WTF IS UP WITH THESE BRIGHT COLORED LUMPS AND MULTICOLORED WALLS? ITS LIKE A MONTESOORI SCHOOL FOR SOCIALLY CHALLENGED ADULTS!! In the abstract I sent, they were prepared to hear me discuss "E-Governance Part III" a call to action for data to be made reusable, with interoperable standards, and regulated for co-ownership. However, by the time I got there my talk had become, "Technology and Development: The Engineer's Dilemma", this talk highlighted the conflict of priorities between development and engineering, showing examples of the 'Faster, smaller, more powerful model' failing when deployed as a development solution (Think: OLPC). Towards this I presented the dark underbelly of the entire data enterprise and how this opened up, what I think to be, the most interesting space in development for engineers to be working - that of problem identification.

That, before we deploy another water treatment facility, or write another education policy, or make another mashup, we should think FIRST about the quality of the data we are basing our decisions on. With a closer look, we see that the technology and methods used to collect this data are old - determined in a time when the composition of the human population was less diverse, less mobile, and with a different kind of relationship to the environment. And that we as engineers have the unique opportunity to develop new tools to collect more representative data.

That, Google, yeah you...it doesn't matter if you have all the data in the world, you can give access to it, make it reusable, and legible - but it is still BAD data and your wiki won't change that. Your maps, and mail, gadgets, and search engine won't change the quality of the data. Now you may say, "this isn't our job". But I would disagree by saying, "It may not be your 'job' but it is your 'responsibility' as you hold a position of power within society and the data you present is stamped with authority and it is BAD! UGLY! And bears little resemblance to that which it represents. The promise of this wiki that you speak of reminds me, as I laugh silently, of all those fabulously mis-targeted inventions conceptualized in the name of the future - rocketbelts, Dimaxion self-cleaning plastic houses, aerocars, and of course...robots.

Fist pound to the California Court of Appeals who fabulously and unanimously ruled that Santa Clara County must make public its GIS parcel basemap, which shows real estate boundaries, appraisals, and other property data. The court rejected all arguments that Homeland Security regulation and Copyright Protection are more important than a public right to information protected under the California Public Records Act. GO CALIFORNIA COURT OF APPEALS!!

Parcel Basemap

This landmark case County of Santa Clara v. California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC) has potentially far-reaching implications. Could this decision apply to any government database that was created with public funds?

CFAC court ruling

California 1st Amendment Coalition

Challenger_explosion

Long before the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, signs were blinking and flashing with the text, "AMERICA, ALL SYSTEMS ARE NOT A GO...I REPEAT, THEY ARE NOT A GO." Clearly, America's ability to create and operate vast technological systems had long outrun its capacity for prediction and control.

And for the New Year lets look back at the man who looked forward, sociologist Charles Perrow, who forecast a series of 'normal accidents'? Notably, Bhopal in '84, Challenger explosion in '86, Chernobyl, and blood supplies contaminated with AIDS; the prolonged crises of mad cow disease; the loss of shuttle Columbia, and the embarrassing mishaps with the blurry photos taken by very expensive Hubble and the loss of several and equally expensive Mars explorers. And now, we have "discovered" a hole in our Ozone, SARS, racial disparity in new Orleans, the assassination of Benizir Bhutto, a giant tsunami, and that 300 Indian police could not stop 10 terrorists...Haaaaaappy New Year!

Perhaps America's resolution should be to seriously reexamine its human pretentions of control over technological systems...this could be the first task of Obama's future CTO...and to acknowledge that with the benefits of science and technology advancement always come with a series of new uncertainties and failures, doubt that will continually undermine knowledge, and unforeseen consequences that confound faith in progress. And that Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns" are embedded within all technologies and the systems enabled by them and that we should NOT be scared of them - rather, we should create better ways of dealing with them.

Technologies are artifacts of political negotiations between a diverse landscape of intentions all with something to gain and also to lose...in the end, it is the old, familiar, and exciting companion, 'risk'. Always returning to remind us that it, 'risk', cannot be assessed only by expert economists with expert systems of expert prediction and rather, 'risk' is afterall a fundamental part of the human condition and woven into our very fabric of progress.

To welcome the New Year I will invest my remaining predictive market funds towards Obama becoming People Magazine's Person of the Year, not as a prediction but because I believe he should be. Happy New Year to all!

OMG, I hope this is real! Creepy gnome sightings in Argentina...

Photos of frustrated brokers

An exhibition about meat! Meat After Meat Joy at Daneyal Manmood Gallery in NY

Amputee ballet

The sun...21 really nice photos of the sun

I like this guys photos of Industrial Landscapes

PetSoundsCover

From English to Chinese (Traditional) and to English again...

1.) That is not good
2.) You Still Believe in My
3.) I Did Not Say
4.) Did Not Say (To Your Head on My Shoulders)
5.) I Wait For The Day
6.) Let Us Leave To a Period of Time
7.) John B Sloop
8.) Only God Knows
9.) I Know That an Answer
10.) Here Today

SO2 unleased on global warming

In this corner is global warming, and the other, ozone depletion. Nobel laureate, Paul Crutzen and others have promoted sulphite atmospheric injection, a process that artificially adds sulfite into the atmosphere for earth cooling. This process, modeled after a natural process caused by volcanic eruptions proved to be successful in cooling the earth 1 degree Fahrenheit after millions of tons of sulfur dioxide was spewed out of an erupting volcano. 

Perfect you say...However, this geoengineering scheme is not without implications. At cold temperatures, sulfur interacts with chlorine gases created from CFCs and form molecules that destroy the ozone.

This geoengineering scheme is awesomely awkward!