Life: a user’s manual

I was just reminded by a student of this powerful performance by Michelle Teran:

Moving through the city streets with a video scanner reveals a hidden layer of personal fragments and stories which are broadcast by the private owners of surveillance cameras. The accumulation of these autonomous yet synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media permeating the socially codified spaces of our urban environments: the café, the apartment building, the store, the parking lot, and the street. Life: a user’s manual is a shared experience in visualizing the invisible. Together with the participants, Michelle Teran walks through the streets with a wireless surveillance camera scanner and broadcasts the images on a TV monitor.

[via + via]

The PriceMaster

Please take some time to watch this incredible piece of performance art. On Saturday, February 10, 2001, in Denton, Texas, a group of friends held a garage sale where all of the (absurd) prices were determined by “The Price Master“, a mysterious masked figure on a tiny stage.

This review on Letterboxd describe this little gem really well (via BroBible):

Very surreal and very unnerving little piece of public access gold focused on a stoop sale as performance art in Denton, Texas, around 2001. My friend texted me the link and said “If you have five minutes, check this out,” and I ended up watching all 30 minutes of it. Shot on a handheld video camera, vérité style, it documents unsuspecting customers finding themselves at a stoop sale in which nothing is labeled with a price and a strange figure, the Pricemaster, dictates outrageous prices for everything when inquired. “Five… HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!”

I also appreciated the Marshall McLuhan‘s quotes at the beginning:

“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.”

“Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment–of what’s really going on–affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.”

[thanks Claudio for pointing me to this video]

The Grimace Shake is Dangerous

There’s a new delightful trend on TikTok about the Grimace Shake by McDonalds. I love GenZ.

Smashing

This must be one of my favourite performance artworks of all time: Jimmie Durham, Smashing (2004).

“Wearing a suit, Jimmie Durham sits behind a desk like a bureaucrat performing his duty: smashing things. In an orderly manner, a person goes in, delivers an object, Durham smashes it with a prehistoric stone tool, violently but impassively. He stamps and signs a piece of paper as receipt and gives it to the same person, who goes off-scene. The same order of events is repeated several times during 92 minutes. This video-performance was part of Durham’s teaching residency at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy, in 2004.” – source

Bad Beuys

A German artist collective stole a Joseph Beuys artwork from a Münster museum and gave it to an institution in Tanzania—and made a rollicking video about their stunt.

The Clay Man

In this footage, artist William Cobbing wears a giant ball of clay on his head. He slices off layers with a wire to reveal a gooey, dripping face.

[via]

Human Computers: RR63+WP.png

“Human Computers: RR63+WP.png” is an installation/performance by Jeff Thompson that opened at Locust Projects in Miami last weekend. Over the course of six hours, 13 performers slowly decoded a single PNG file entirely by hand using only pencil and paper worksheets.

7/11

Conceptual art at its best!

The biggest Tik Tok cross-over

This could go on forever.

Followers

“Don’t go unnoticed. Follower is a service that grants you a real life Follower for a day. A no-hassle unseen companion. Someone that watches, someone that sees you, someone who cares.”

a project by Lauren McCarthy

Student Debt

horvitz

Student Debt by David Horvitz

Oh Dracula

burden

In 1974, at the Utah Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, Chris Burden climbed into a “chrysalis”-like sac and had himself installed in between some of the museum’s exceedingly random 18th century paintings, with candles placed at his head and feet. And there he hid all day.

[via]

Random acts of beauty (and) nonsense

Zack Danger Brown has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to fund the making of potato salad. He set a $10 goal and he already reached $34,108. Oh, Internet.

Media Burn: the ultimate media event

“Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collusion of two of America’s most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the “ultimate media event.” In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a “Phantom Dream Car”—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.”

Hyper Current Living

ryder ripps

“Hyper Current Living is a performance by Ryder Ripps in which he “lives” and “works” at Red Bull Music Academy between April 28th and May 5th 2013 – he’ll be drinking Red Bull and creating digital stuff at hyper speed. In the stream, our output is valued by its proliferation and its likes and favs – what incentive is there to spend 4 years writing a novel if it will just be a link in a stream lasting a few hours? The piece brings this trait into light by designating a time and space to the creation of such fragmented, short interactions native to social media.”