Robin Mackay: The Barker Topos

p.268 - Polymath scientist Dr Daniel Barker, ejected from NASA under dubious circumstances,
is called out of retirement to assemble a crack team of specialists
(mathematician, cryptographer, cartographer, psychoanalyst, environmental
chemist) after an apparently commonplace homicide investigation opens
up wider and deeper complicities—firstly with the financial meshwork that,
beneath the everyday surface of capitalism, grotesquely binds together coltan
mines, art auctions, pork futures, and arms deals; and subsequently with the
history of modernity and its petroleum-lubricated time-travelling relationship
to the physical history of the planet, the sun, and the universe beyond. These
genre devices give the work a performative relation to the complex concept of
‘plot’—as a narrative thread and as a tract of space separated for a specific
work, but which retains unknown complicities with its original matrix.


The investigators’ forensic analyses take them back and forth across the
surface of the earth, to interrogate protagonists and suspects not limited to
human beings but also including built structures and synthetic objects which
must be coaxed into ‘speaking’.

A few old sketches from Urbino

Still keep on finding the sketches I made last year during our trip to Urbino! Here's a new batch.

Sketches from Wilderness Festival, August'15

Bernd Becher, Hilla Becher Framework Houses (1959-73)

Source: Sonnabend Gallery

RS Chemistry: two slides for the beginning of interactive

Nam June Paik Art Center:Super-spreader: media virus

Media as authority

—and how this changes the lives of individuals in the current period. In the past, media was mainly used as a means to maintain authority or sustain a system through surveillance, control or blockage of information. In the 21st century, however, different forms of media influence each other through sharing, participation and diffusion. It is now changing into a strategic tool for individuals or minority groups. The current change confirms the prediction made by Nam June Paik, who observed that even televisions would cease to function as a means of one-way communication and become a participatory, interactive medium. A new generation of artists recognizes media as a living organism: when they work together, they can disseminate information or opinions on certain events of the society in a terrifying pace, overthrowing existing systems and networks of information or proposing new ways of interpretation.

Source: e-flux

Sketching from Citypoint with Urban Sketchers London

Last Sunday Carlos Olvera and James Hobbs organized a sketching opportunity fro mthe 32st floor of one of the London's high rises, Citypoint. Other participants included Susanne du Toit, Jane Smith and Adam Jefford.

HISK open day, plus SMAK Ghent and WIELS Brussels, May 2015, Ghent

(Includes work by various authors, will need to track down from Instagram and update.)