loveitallabove

Brian Jungen, Prototype for New Understanding #1, 1998. Image: curatedobject.us I remember seeing Brian Jungen work in Canada when Karen and I were in Montreal many years ago, and was TOTALLY taken by it, like a totem, right? I mean all he need do is make one and have that one magick item have a lingering, magical, even transformative effect. To view some elegant pix in a gallery by the Washington Post, click here . Gopnik writes on DC show here : When Jungen made "People's Flag," a huge scarlet banner sewn together from red clothing, red umbrella skins and other mass-produced red textiles, it was to show at the Tate in 2006. The piece paid homage to the long history of popular protest and to England's left. "It seemed awkward for me to make some sort of statement about the native condition in London," Jungen recalls. But as it hangs in his show at the NMAI, Jungen has discovered that "People's Flag" is being interpreted as the flag of a unit...

Using Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis to study ancient Babylonian society By Patrick Schmitz, IST–Data Services March 10, 2009 In Near Eastern Studies, as in other areas of Humanities, researchers often study corpora of administrative and legal texts to understand economic, administrative, and societal structure, considering the activities of individuals and their interactions with each other. This is often painstaking work, as, for example, in studying ancient Babylonian texts where scholars must first be able to read Akkadian, and then must assemble all the references to people and activities by hand. This process is formally known as prosopography, and is used by many scholars across a range of Humanities research. Now, Professor Niek Veldhuis and Dr. Laurie Pearce are working with IST–Data Services' Patrick Schmitz to apply some more modern approaches to the problem. They are applying techniques from the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and S...

The New Children's Museum, San Deigo ROCKS! Ernest Silva, The Rain House, 1994/2008 The Rain House As a long-standing component of NCM’s programming, and a carryover from the Museum’s previous facility, Silva’s Rain House, is both playhouse and home to projects key to NCM’s bi-national programming. For Animal Art, Silva has created new foam puzzle-piece furniture to augment the way young children love to play house in The Rain House’s soothing interior. And, in the “back yard” Silva has created a new interactive felt mural. Children are invited to create their own flying creatures and use Silva’s templates to add birds to his avian menagerie that flies freely blithely ignoring the physical and political ramifications of our border region.

With Magnes as an institutional lender, I went to the opening of As It Is Written: Project 304,805 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, or the "CJM," a somewhat new museum on the SF cityscape designed by Daniel Liebeskind . For me and my host, after grabbing a bite at 'wichcraft , the evening started at Bloomingdales, and it's astounding how much the retail space of the Westfield Mall related to the lines of sight and kinda of empty signifiers in Liebeskind's architecture. And, in fact, I think Liebeskind is quite purposeful to this end, reaching for a lingua franca of the spaces we share in -- malls and museums. I cannot get out of my mind the clips from Warhol where he would talk about how wonderful the synergies between shopping malls and museums were. "I just love it," I think he said in some T.V. clip I saw once. I wish I could find the video. And that kind of Warholian euphoria informed the evening as well. Below is the description of this ...

How great is this?!...

The Nick Cave show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was a real sleeper/hit... this vid of a buncha guys strolling what looked like Central Park in whacked out African suits was just TOO MUCH!

June 2009

So far we have seen Ice Age 3D and last night it was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . This pix's from earlier this summer and Ice Age 3D viewing.

Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic Saturday, April 25, 2009 Dennis Gallagher , a San Francisco sculptor known for his work in ceramic media, died Monday after an extended hospital stay. He was 57. The day that he died was his birthday. A poignant tribute compiled by his wife just opened at the Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco last month.

September 18, 2009 David Silver , Assistant Professor: Media Studies & Davies Professor, University of San Francisco with Francesco as host and Albert Stankowski , Virtual Shtetl , Museum of the History of Polish Jews and his interpreter from the State Department Marek.