Giant Alert:

The FDA has just approved human growth hormone for healthy children who are considered short. I'm imagining something similar to the SUV syndrome happening within a few years: after all, shortness, like the size of one's vehicle, is relative rather than absolute. (This particular giant is a product of Eastern European experimentation with HGH: it was spotted in Dresden, Germany in December of 2003)
1:58:21 PM    

Blogs to watch: a new group blog called Grand Text Auto "about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments." The bloggers include well-know figures in the digi-art world and hypertext world such as Stuart Molthroup, and the unfolding conversation between these central characters and whoever jumps in with a commentary gives one the consistent sense of being in on a fairly significant conversation -- a sense one gets only infrequently these days on the more freeform mailing lists centered on digital art and culture.
1:40:32 PM    

Making Sense Of The Bogdanov Physics Scandal. Plastic::SciTech::Hoaxes: At the center of the controversy are the brothers Bogdanov, five papers on mathematical physics and a skeptical scientific community. Many claim that the work the Bogdanov's did to earn PhD's was a scam and that their articles are incoherent. [Plastic: Most Recent]
5:38:50 PM    

Months ago, I wrote about The Wierd Tale of the Ironville Virus, a bioterror novel from the 1920s. Now I find that in the 1974 science fiction anthology MUTANTS, that there's another story about viral takeover from the 20s, this one a tale of a sentient virus called "Liquid Life." The virus, loose in a pond, begins a march towards the ocean. Apparently, the author who wrote it , Ralph Farley, was popular and well-published. So are they many virus tales from the 1920s that I haven't stumbled across?
5:26:48 PM    

From a store in Brooklyn called Swallow, glass spiders the size of one's head, so much like "Maman," Louise Bourgeois' 20 foot tall spider at the Tate Modern.

From Mieke Bal's book Louise Bourgeois' Spider, The Architecture of Art Writing:

"The compulsion to fall back into a narrativity that spiders promote depends less on their hyperbolically figurative status than on something altogether different. They...embody vicisstudinous temporality. And it is within this vicisstudinous temporality that childhood memories impose themselves as mood while witholding themselves as narratives."
10:07:15 PM    

Glenn Gould: "Goldberg Variations". A new box set offers the ingenious 1955 interpretation of Bach's odes to God that turned Gould into a star, and the remarkably different version he recorded in 1981 out of contempt for the former. [Salon.com]
8:07:48 PM    

Fish from Williamsburg. Soon they will steamed in banana leaves and served as "mummy fish." If this seems unappetizing, read the piece about Marina Abramovic's plan for an 11-day public fast in a Soho gallery.
12:43:22 PM    

Self-destructive artwork, #4 (see previous)

In the 1960s, German artist Gustav Metzger pioneered the auto-destructive art movement. Here's a blurb from Gerhard Jochem:

"Metzger who first used and explained the term in his "Manifesto Auto-destructive Art" in 1960, for instance applied the technique of 'painting' with acid on nylon to create Auto-destructive Art. The premier "demonstration" of his theories "The Times" described on the occasion of a retrospective of his works at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art in 1998 as follows:

"Summoned by a green-tinted manifesto called Auto-destructive Art, a crowd assembled at the South Bank, London, on July 3, 1961. The time was 11.45 am. Three large nylon sheets, coloured white, black and red, stood flapping on a metal frame. They must have looked like an extreme assertion of abstract art at its most minimal, but Gustav Metzger regarded them more as sacrificial victims. Protected by a gasmask, he stepped forward, lifted up a spray gun and covered the sheets in hydrochloric acid. Seconds later they began to disintegrate and after 20 minutes the ragged remnants had dissolved."

In 1966 Metzger organized the international Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), which brought Viennese followers of Aktionismus and various artists of the Fluxus movement as well as poets, musicians and psychologists to London to create and discuss the social implications of Auto-destructive Art. The participants, among them John Lennon and Yoko Ono, also addressed recent political topics like the war in Vietnam. This attracted much attention in the press but also gave much momentum to the development of kinetic and performance art in Britain."
3:26:46 PM    

Self-destructing William Gibson novel: Agrippa. A Book of the Dead, published in 1992 on a floppy which is designed to crash after a single reading. Eventually hackers managed to pull the text off the book and put it on the net.
12:53:49 PM    

More self-destructing artworks (see below) : Suburo Murakami, 1956, 'Peeling Off Painting.' Murakami was a member of the Gutai group, Japanese postwar action artists. After their first exhibition, the Gutai group apparently burned all of the works in the show in a collective bonfire. 'Peeling Off Painting,' a work completed after that show, is still around, if dessicated: the point of the painting is for the paint to peel off. In an essay titled "Intentionality and Performance-Based Art," Paul Schimmel notes that the curator of Murakami's estate loans the painting out for exhibitions in order for it to be further ravaged by the stress of transit, following Murakami's intentions.
2:07:55 PM    

More on the postcorporeal (see below):

1.) a quote from Brian Massumi's Parables For the Virtual (2002):

"Outer space? Who needs it. The body is perfectly suited to its current terrestrial habitat....The terrestrial body will be obsolete from the moment a certain subpopulation feels compelled to launch itself into an impossible, unthinkable future of space colonization. The obsolesence of the body...is driven by desire."

2. A quote from Robert Fripp (1974): "In the new world the characteristic unit will be small, highly mobile, independent and intelligent."
7:35:17 PM    

New thing to collect: self-destructing artworks, tales of same. Here, an account of a film screening this week on the Lower East Side, from the weekly Flavorpill events guide

"From birth to death, decay, and rebirth, Decasia by Bill Morrison weaves new meaning and narrative into old, decaying film footage. The spliced segments of found film footage tell their own story, but as the celluloid warps, bubbles, and peels, the impact of the scene changes dramatically. New scenarios are built out of the mutilated images of the decayed stock. The film is scored by Michael Gordon, cofounder of Bang On A Can, following the theme of decay and dissonance (it actually calls for four untuned pianos). If the medium is the message, what does it mean when the medium falls apart as we watch it?"(AD)

To come: SRL performances, Sterling's (or Gibson's?) virus-infected computer disk. Other examples that anyone knows of?
7:20:40 PM