Off Center

Like the name might imply Zine Machine is a vending machine selling zines, books and minicomics with prices from $1 to $10. It’s located in the University of Iowa’s Library, but you might spot them at a zine workshop or conference near you. The machine has an open submission policy that could get your zines distributed right in the heart of the USA.

The project began as Book Drop, a book vending machine showing the value of hand binding by selling individual kits of book parts. It picked up it’s more contemporary mission earlier this year.

The vending theme similar to the Art-o-Mat project, but focussed more specifically on DIY literature.

Paddy Johnson interviewed Cory Arcangel for Fanzine a few days ago. It’s an entertaining read about a big name in the field of software/hardware art hacks.

RSS Jockey mixes (by hand) RSS Feeds, with some surprising results. They sent a call out on the Rhizome list yesterday “LOOKING FOR RSS FEEDZ WITH ACIDIC VIDEO LOOPING, MASSIV SOUND SCAPING, FLASH BANGIN SCRIPT, AND TEXT SPLITTING CONTENT.”

So if you’ve got one of those feeds handy send it to RSSJ@RSSJOCKEY.COM

I’m a bit late on this one but I just saw our long time colleague, former Senior Designer at the Walker, now chair of MCAD’s Design department, got included in ID Magazine. They put together a list of 40 of the world's most important and underappreciated artists, designers, architects and other visual professionals in the February issue.

MCAD has an announcement on their site with link to the PDF featuring Mr. Piedrafita. I always knew we were working with an underappreciated design star here, now it’s good to see the national design press has picked up on it.

Billed as a textual performance, otherwise known as a blog, Ten-sided is Turbulence.org’s latest commission. The blog features 10 authors who adopt fictional personalities which develop over time in response to each others public posts.

The resulting improvisation resembles a jazz performance or a session of exquisite corpse, but in a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the multi-vocal nature of blogging communities.

There is more complete information on Rhizome. It looks like blogs for invented characters are “in” this year, maybe Toni was on to something.

The diaries of Andy Warhol are being posted one daily entry at a time on 29 year time delay at the Andy War-Blog. For instance yesterday (29 years ago). Since we know how this story ends you can expect the Warh-Blog to wrap up sometime in 2016.

The diaries document the last nine years of Warhols life so none of the work from Andy Warhol/Supernova will be in it, but it’s a great read in a surprising format for any Warhol fan.

Among other curious work at the Art Shanty opening last week was robotic ice carver by Jesse Hemminger & Bruce Shapiro. A PC sends horizontal and vertical directions to the carver much like it would direct a pen plotting printer, but this printer doesn’t have ink, it has a two cycle weed eater motor spinning a router bit. The result is a series of computationally drawn holes in the ice.

The Art Shanties are on view on Medicine Lake, and there is a full schedule of programming in defiance of the unseasonable warm streak of that’s flustering most of us here in Minnesota.
(click for the more…)

The Swarm exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philidelphia juxtaposes new media generative artists with well known contemporary artists. Featured in the show are some artists with connections to the Walker including Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze and Matthew Ritchie who are in the exhibition with less established artists Casey Reas and Jason Salavon. I found the Walker’s site had rich information about several of the artist featured in the Swarm exhibition.

Julie Mehretu
Mehretu’s collaboration with entropy8zuper! was featured in the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms and is currently hosted by the Walker. In 2003 the Walker showed Julie Mehretu: Drawing Into Painting. It looks like the catalog is still available as well.There are also three segments of an opening day talk featuring the artist available through Art on Call. (1, 2, 3)

Sarah Sze
Grow or Die was a 2002 commission for the Cowles conservatory. The Art on Call page has two files where the artist describes Grow or Die ( 1, 2).

Matthew Ritchie
Ritchie’s project The Hard Way hosted by the Walker as part of äda’web, there is more info on the Walker’s Collections and Resources page.

source:Generator.X