One thing I like about /b/ is that, as an imageboard, its jokes actually require a fair amount of literacy… in the retarded *chan sense.

For example, verts. They’re comics made from film stills, and in order to create them you need to understand something about visual jokes, especially reaction shots…

… and, in this case, you need to be in on the in-jokes about:

1) The Triforce,
2) ASCII art, and
3) /b/ calling everyone fags.

Yesterday’s Globe had a good piece on the memetic response from the chans to Interior Semiotics, a piece of performance art, below (NSFW — this is not how you make Spaghetti Ohs):

The performance is a reference to a piece called Interior Scroll, roughly about sexism, and takes it in the direction of nihilism. I also think it has something to do with Warhol, and that it would have been more affective with Alphaghetti (seriously).

The video of the performance is clearly more about the audience than about the art. The author of the Globe piece eventually hypothesizes, alongside some good observations on the fascinations of the videographer, that the chans’ critique is essentially class-based, mostly being about “the kind of people who have nothing better to do than go to art school.”

… for controversial art?

I don’t know why I bother commenting, actually. Fuddies will duddie, always.

Here is an experiment I just ran of glitching a video while streaming it out to disk:

Has some speed issues, but neat effect. I’ve thought for a while now that deleting keyframes from compressed videos could have artistic uses.

I removed and looped frames in a low-level video editor, played back the video in VLC, and recorded the output to a stream. Whenever I “scratched” the video (jumped it backwards 10s) the effect was to keyframe the glitched image, and then start glitching with the delta frames again — which is video geek speak for “creating a manual feedback loop”.

Here’s Chairlift’s “Evident Utensil”, which is a whole work done using video glitching (and whose video artist I tutorialed the glitching technique from — but not the recorded live stream):

Yuri, a friend of mine who is an artist (who also curates my Mom’s gallery and is an executive of the non-profit Victoria Fine Arts Festival my fam started) is opening his studio space to the public for a show and sale in time for the holidays. If I was in Victoria on the fourth I would be checking this out — I love artists’ spaces:

Here’s the email he sent out, if you didn’t get it:

Yuri Arajs is having an Open Studio Show & Sale

Saturday, December 4th, 10am – 5pm
1115 Catherine Street, Victoria
Free and open to the public

Victoria artist, Yuri Arajs, will be opening his studio to the public
for the first time. It’s just in time for the holidays so add it to
your list of places not to miss this year!

Come see a large selection of original paintings, prints and new
cards. All work will be available for sale. Checks and cash will be
accepted.

There will be sweets and beverages served throughout the day.

For more information, please visit www.YuriArajs.com

I just came across Kumi Yamashita‘s work somehow. She uses perspective and shadows from oblique-angle lighting to create some interesting pieces.

I am thinking about how I can exploit these effects in film. Lighting and perspective is, of course, a major area of study for me now. Check out her piece Dialogue here.

I’ve blogged some Victoria-local radio coverage of One in Five on CHLY 101.7 FM’s “People First Radio” program. One in Five runs October 15th through November 6th @ 705 Johnson St.

I just posted the show card and press release for the Victoria Fine Art Festival’s* new show, One in Five. It’s a show by and for the benefit of people suffering from mental illness. It looks like it’s going to be great, and I’m extremely interested in the cause.

* Full disclosure: this is my mother’s nonprofit.

The guilty pleasure around the gallery has been watching Work of Art, a reality show about artists.

Mark Velasquez, one of the contestants who went out when his Catholicism got in the way of his work (he couldn’t interpret the concept of Heaven in non-stereotypical ways), took snaps of two of the other contestants making out at the afterparty: Ryan Shultz and Miles Mendenhall (the biggest hipster-poser and the best artist, respectively).

Most Northwest Coast First Nations glass art looks like something that belongs in a corporate lobby:

But at the Burke Gallery at the University of Washington I came across the work of Preston Singletary, which is actually glass sculpture:

He is Lingít, so it wasn’t surprising I saw his work in Washington: museums in Washington and Oregon are obsessed with Lingít art. They don’t seem to like local aboriginal art (to be fair, baskets from the Oregon desert are pretty boring), and Lingít art is almost as crowd-pleasing as Haida while being from the good old U-S-of-A.

I’ve also only ever seen Yup’ik art in the US, which is quite different from both Inuit and First Nations art, and quite awesome: