• “Through humor and human drama, to questions about the way we live” — Huffington Post has a short post about No Impact Man, with links to several other influential pieces that brought Colin Beavan to international recognition. No Impact Man is screening at the Walker next week.
• Bad at Sports has a fun and informative interview with Madeleine Grynsztejn, new director at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Grynsztejn co-curated the Chuck Close show that opened at the Walker in 2005.
• “Deep moral truths” — Cathleen Falsani has a fascinating discussion with Minnesota Public Radio on the spirituality and morality in the Coen Brothers films.
• Lebowski Fest Minneapolis happens this weekend. Get ready.

It is a project called 555 KUBIK, projected on the side of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The concept for the video asks “how would it be, if a house was dreaming?”

The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture – the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers “Galerie der Gegenwart”. Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves – describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.

Also check out some other great urban architecture projections at urbanscreen.com.

Sound Check, Rock the Garden 2009, photo by The Current

There have been a plethora of reviews and blog posts about Rock the Garden coming through my google alerts lately, and they’ve been overwhelmingly positive. My summation of the reviews and tweets I’ve seen so far boils down to two major points:

• The new layout with the stage facing south up the hill was a big improvement.
• The Decemberists finished the show off pretty well.

Here’s a list of the reviews that I’ve run across:

• East-lake.net posts a lengthy play-by-play review, including a good deal of pictures and short reviews of each band.
• The Twin Cities Daily Planet reviews the show with a several photos.
• The Star Tribune has crowd reactions and gives the show a mixed review. There are a few more tidbits in the Pop Life blog.
• About.com’s review goes into some of the logistics of the stage placement.
• MFR has another review and came away pretty impressed by this year’s lineup of bands.
• Pop Culture Junkie reviews the show with YouTube inlines of the band’s different music videos.

And here are photos I’ve seen go by:

• The best group is probably from our partner The Current’s flickr stream, with 82 photos and 5 videos, many by twin cities video personality extraordinaire, Chuck Olsen.
• City Pages has a slideshow of 40 shots from the show.
• The Star Tribune posted 9 photos, including some great action shots of the band and crowd.
• emoeby posted a collection of  18 shots to flickr, perhaps giving the best sense of the size of the crowd.
• Plesserchick has 18 photos, including some close-ups of Solid Gold (I think) and Colin Meloy.
• WontonBrutallity has a small collection of 6 photos, including a couple night shots and a guy drinking beer.
• danlwhelan posts a large collection of iPhone images on MobileMe.
• Jacob Walter Photography posted a collection of 38 images, including a couple panoramas.

If I’m missing any reviews or photos, let me know in the comments.

We also captured a time-lapse video of the stage being set up and people filtering in to watch the show. Unfortunteately, the software we were using to connect to the camera wasn’t the most reliable and crashed a few times, resulting in some gaps in time. That said, it is still neat to see the stage go up and the size of the crowd grow:

On a side note: I was not able to attend the show, but was able to follow the happenings from my phone in the middle of Wisconsin. It wasn’t quite as good as being there, but following a twitter search for “rock the garden” gave me a good play-by-play and heightened my sense of missing out. Thanks to all the tweeters who kept those of us not there posted.

The short timeframe (just over two months) left us with more limited options for location. We initially looked at getting married in the Cowles Conservatory, but it was booked for the dates we wanted. While scouting other locations in the Sculpture Garden and Loring Park, the idea of having the wedding in James Turrell’s Sky Pesher occurred to us. The seed was perhaps planted by the Skyscape/Soundscape concert series happening in Sky Pesher over the summer. After checking with our registration department, we had the OK to get married in the artwork.

Our photographer, Kimberlee Whaley sent us a few initial pictures, which I’ve posted to flickr. And some of my new family also blogged about our wedding and posted photos.

We were initially worried that 30 people would be close quarters, but thankfully everyone was able to sit on the benches surrounding us during our ceremony. To the best of my knowledge, no one has been married in Sky Pesher before. We liked it as a location for the wedding. My wife and I are not religious, but there is a sanctity and spirtuality to the space. My wife is studying to become a landscape architect, so a connection to the earth is a big part of both of our lives right now.

After the wedding ceremony, we quickly ducked into the Sculpture Garden and got the necessary Spoonbridge and Cherry wedding shot, with jumping:

We kept things relatively casual and fun, having a delicious dinner at Azia, followed by bowling at Memory Lanes. In between dinner and bowling, a number of our guests slipped back to Sky Pesher to see the lights change at sunset:

Photo by Lisa Longley

Despite the fact that we got married there, my wife and I had never seen a sunrise or sunset in Sky Pesher. After all our guests had left town on Monday and we came back to see it for ourselves. The optical illusion of the sky descending into the space is subtle, but stunning, and it was the perfect way to cap a great weekend.

A Canadian team sport resembling ice hockey and played with sticks and a ball. (via)

Lumber Baron:

…a partially informal term used to refer to a person who has reached a prominent place in a particular industry (or set of industries) and whose wealth has been derived primarily therefrom. (via) The occupation of T.B. Walker, founder of the Walker Art Center.

The 2009 Lumber Barons. Top row, L to R: Rebecca Yaker, Justin Heideman, John Vogt, Joe King, Ashley Duffalo, Dawn Fredericks. Bottom row: Megan Leafblad, Brian Lesteberg, Peter Eleey, Gene Pittman, Jess Durant.

For the past several years, the staff of the Walker Art Center has formed a Broomball team. Being sequestered indoors for the 6 months of winter isn’t a lot of fun, and broomball is the only team sport left if you can’t ski or skate. I’ve played for two years, and we’ve yet to win a game (yes, this is sad). We’re working up to it.

Each year, a team member designs a new logo for our jersey. Here are two of them:

Logo for the 2007 Lumber Barons

The 2009 Lumber Barons

Games are played outdoors and are only canceled if there is a windchill below -40 or temperature below -15. Each year, it seems as if we end up with one game that freezes the hair in your nose and another game where the ice turns into a lake. How cold is that? Here’s a photo that explains:

Here’s a sample of our dominating gameplay:
Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are the details:

Make: Day celebrates the ingenuity and inventiveness in our community. Building off the success of Maker Faires and the American Maker events, Make: Day will give local engineers, artists, tinkerers and inventors the opportunity to showcase their DIY creations to Science Museum visitors.

Festivities will take place on Saturday, March 14th, from 10 am to 3 pm throughout the Science Museum’s exhibit galleries. The event is included in the regular admission price and free to all members of the museum.

• Here are some of the things you’ll find:
• Dozens of other local talented Makers, several of which appear on the first season of Make: television
• All of the Maker Workshop projects including the Burrito Blaster and the DTV Antenna
• Demonstrations from Makers and musical performances emceed by our very own William Gurstelle

Tons of hands-on activities for people of all ages

I hope to see some mnartists there, too.

…a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via social mediaor viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt.

The call for this flashmob went out on craigslist and was spreading around Twitter and Facebook. The instructions were simple:

The general idea, for all of those who don’t know, is to dance for 3 minutes to your iPod/MP3 but no music is allowed to be played out loud (just in your headphones). 
The point of this is that it has no point. Total pointless, random fun! 

At 8:00 PM on the dot neon colored poster board will be held up-that is your queue to start your tunes and start dancing for the cars driving by. You must silently dance to your iPod. Simple! 
At the end of 3 mins the signs will go up again, this is when we all calmly walk away from our “dance floor.” 

There were about 50 people at the event. Most in the crowd seemed to be around high school or college aged, making me feel old. Most people had iPod earbuds in during the dancing, so there was not much interaction between participants, unlike the pillow fight, but everyone was smiling. As total pointless, random fun, it did the job. 

Waitingline also posted a video:

I saw about ten other people there taking pictures last night and talked to a few of them. If anyone has photos, adding them to the Walker Art Center flickr group would be swell.

• “An ingenious amalgam of painting and printmaking techniques” – mnartists.org’s Susannah Schouweiler shares a review of Carolyn Swiszcz’s work in Innovation Road, a show at Franklin Artworks. Swiszcz was half of the husband and wife team behind the an unforgettable song, created for the Worlds Away Exhibition, and the call for art for The UnConvention’s I Approve This Message.
• “Not your basic draw a line here draw a line there architects” – rolu. links up several images and videos of Best, the failed big box retailer, whose iconic buildings were designed by SITE. This video was also featured in Worlds Away. The designs never cease to amaze me. 
• A bit eyebrow raising - Perhaps in the 2009 British Television and Advertising Awards?
• Fishing pole photography - MNKiteman added a couple photos to the Walker Art Center pool on flickr, both from a high angle. How he did it is almost as intersting as the photos: “My camera was mounted on the end of a fishing pole and triggered using an infrared device. You can do a search using PAP for the tag to see more pole aerial photography photos.” His other photos of the Art Shanties are worth checking out. 

Daniel Rozin, Peg Mirror, 2007.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is currently exhibiting a show called Act/React. I visited the show just over a month ago and have been meaning to blog about it for some time. It is coming down on January 11, so if you’re going to be in or passing through Milwaukee over the holiday break, take a moment to stop in and see the show. It is worth it.

Going into the show, I was most excited to see the work of Cammille Utterback. Her piece, Liquid Time, is one of my favorite pieces of artwork. Several pieces from her External Measures Series are in the exhibition. One piece in the exhibition that really surprised me was Daniel Rozen’s Peg Mirror. The mirror consists of a collection of rotating pegs. Each peg’s end is tapered, and when they rotate in the light, the change in shadow represents shades of light and dark. While it’s a mechanical device, it feels very warm and inviting, certainly due to the warmth of the wood and the amazing precision it shows in reflecting the viewer.

Nathaniel Stern wrote a wonderful in-depth review for Rhizome:

…all the works on show are unhindered by traditional interface objects such as the mouse and keyboard. Most of them instead employ computer vision technologies, more commonly known as interactive video. Here, the combined use of digital video cameras and custom computer software allows each artwork to “see,” and respond to, bodies, colors and/or motion in the space of the museum. The few works not using cameras in this fashion employ similar technologies towards the same end. While this homogeneity means that the works might at first seem too similar in their interactions, their one-to-one responsiveness, and their lack of other new media-specific explorations — such as networked art or dynamic appropriation and re-mixing systems — it also accomplishes something most museum-based “state of the digital art” shows don’t. It uses just one avenue of interest by contemporary media artists in order to dig much deeper into what their practice means, and why it’s important. “Act/React” encourages an extremely varied and nuanced investigation of our embodied experiences in our own surroundings.

Stanley Landsman, Walk-In Infinity Chamber, 1968.

Another exhibition currently on view at the MAM is Sensory Overload: Light, Motion, Sound, and the Optical in Art Since 1945. It is a perfect companion exhibition to Act/React, highlighting some of the MAM’s new media collections, and connecting the contemporary work in Act/React to a deeper history of new media work. The exhibition web site notes:

The Museum has collected and exhibited new media art ever since 1967 when it co-organized Light | Motion | Space with the Walker Art Center, one of the first exhibitions on this form of art in the United States. Sensory Overload features some of the most popular works in the Museum’s Collection as well as key works on loan from other institutions and private collections.

A couple notable pieces are Erwin Redl’s MATRIX XV, Josiah McElheny’s Modernity circa 1952, Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, and Stanley Landsman’s Walk-In Infinity Chamber, to focus on just a few. Many of the artists in the exhibition are also part of the Walker’s collection.

• Potty Art again: The New York Times’ City Room blog takes a seat and looks at some art museum toilets by way of The Art Museum Toilet of Museum Art. The name is a mouthful and I think the joke is on us. The Walker isn’t part of the museum, but our restrooms are rated highly and named lovingly.
• 2010 Whitney Biennial curators named: Francesco Bonami will be the curator, working with the Whitney’s Gary Carrion-Murayari as associate curator. Bonami curated Unfinished History in 1998 and was an contributing curator on Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972 in 2001, both at the Walker.
• Money and Art: Giant Robot is making money from art, having a print sale. Included in the Giant Robot print sale is the work of Mike Perry, has been mentioned on this blog before, resulting in some, uhh, interesting search terms. Mike’s latest book, Over & Over, full of hand-drawn patterns is excellent. Rirkrit Tiravanija is making art on money.  Rirkrit created untitled, better known as the stage, in 2006’s Open Ended exhibition and has several works in the Walker’s collection. [via]
• Two things beautiful: Manhole art from the streets of Japan and Miquel Barceló’s ceiling installation at the UN’s palace of nations in Geneva.