Archive for August, 2011

In a Pickle: Pickled Red Tomatoes

Posted on August 30th, 2011 • Filed under Taste • No Comments

[Photographs: Marisa McClellan]

Late summer and its joyous glut of tomatoes is a bittersweet time for a canner. Tomatoes signal the end of summer fruit and bring with them the knowledge that the growing season is nearing its end. However, there’s just so darn much that can be done with tomatoes that the possibilities make this preserver positively giddy.

Most people go for sauces, salsas, pastes and whole preserved tomatoes. And I do all those things too. But every year, I also make a couple batches of pickled red tomatoes. Unlike those crunchy pickled green tomatoes you find at delis and gourmet markets, these tomatoes are gorgeously tender and bright with flavor.

They are made by taking firm, meaty tomatoes, quickly blanching them to loosen the skins and then floating them in a slightly sweet brine that is spiked with ginger and speckled with pickling spice. After a time in the jar, they wind up tasting like the best ketchup you’ve ever had.

I like to squeeze these pickled tomatoes into bits over homemade pizza dough, cut them into strips to eat with cheese or simmer them down with a bit of their brine into a quick topper for baguette toasts.

Before You Get Started

Make sure you choose a meaty tomato for this recipe. Because you’re taking the skin off, you want something that will hold together. If you can, pick out slightly underripe plum, roma or San Marzanos.

The best way to peel a tomato is to make two shallow cuts on the bottom in the form of an ‘x,’ float it in a pot of boiling water for approximately two minutes and then cool it in some cold water. I’ve found that a serrated edge knife is the best tool for scoring the skin without doing a lot of damage to the tomato.

Because tomatoes are fragile, you don’t want to pack too many into the jars, otherwise you’ll end up with pickled tomato puree instead of whole fruit. Because you’re not wedging them in there, chances are, the tomatoes will float towards the lid. This is just fine, no need to worry about it.

Just like last week’s pickle, this is another one that can either be made as a refrigerator pickle or a shelf-stable one. If you choose to do the boiling water bath process, know that you’ll end up with a slightly softer (but still delicious) pickle.

Get the recipe »

About the author: Marisa McClellan is a food writer, canning teacher, and dedicated pickler who lives in Center City Philadelphia. Find more of her jams, pickles and preserves (all cooked up in her 80-square-foot kitchen) at her blog, Food in Jars.

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Book review – Media, New Media, Postmedia

Posted on August 30th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Media, New Media, Postmedia, by Domenico Quaranta, published by Postmediabooks (available on amazon UK and Italy.)

The english abstract is available online, here’s just an abstract of it: Neither the label “New Media Art” nor the artistic practices it refers to were able to conquer the official art criticism or, more generally, the contemporary art world. Just a few works of New Media Art were able to enter the permanent collection of a museum, and even less were able to escape the limbo of the museum’s warehouses. New Media Art is more or less absent in the contemporary art market, as well as in mainstream art magazines; and recent accounts on contemporary art history completely forgot it.

How can we explain this segregation? Why “official” art criticism and history have still so many difficulties in integrating the artistic research on new media technologies into their interpretation of the art history of the Twentieth century, even now that this research can be considered in all its historic relevance? Why the art market, that was able to greet video, installation and performance, is still unable to accept and distribute artworks based in software, hardware or computer networks? Why many artists are so intolerant of the very term “New Media Art”, and of any attempt to stress its diversity? Why, on the other side, other artists are so proud of this diversity? Why New Media Art pretends to be “different” from contemporary art, and yet proudly reclaims its relationship with contemporary art’s very same roots, the Avant-gardes?

(…) Medium, New Media, Postmedia is the first attempt to give these questions a common, holistic answer. In order to reach the goal, this book starts discussing the current definition of New Media Art, making its weakness clear and suggesting a new definition that makes it possible to reconsider New Media Art’s historical development on a new basis and to better understand its recent developments and its positioning in contemporary culture.

But Medium, New Media, Postmedia is not just an attempt to explain the current status of the artistic research with new technologies, but also a militant endeavor to help it get the critical consideration it deserves; it’s not just a description of the present, but also an attempt to change the future, suggesting new critical and curatorial strategies.

Paul Chan, 5th Light 2007 (detail.) Photograph © Sylvain Deleu

It’s not every day that i feel like recommending a publication to anyone interested in new media art. No matter the depth of their involvement with new media art, no matter their degree of expertise. Whether you’re a student, an academic and someone who curates or collects contemporary art and is ‘just curious about new media art’, Media, New Media, Postmedia is one book you ought to read. The catch is that, so far, the book is available in italian only. The abstract i butchered above as well as the list of contents are available in english online. It’s not much but it should give you an idea of the breadth and tone of the publication. Media, New Media, Postmedia is a brave book, one that might ruffle a few feathers sometimes (but oh so elegantly!) The publication gives a carefully researched overview of the state of the ‘new media art vs contemporary art world’ debate, navigating deftly between opinions and ideas. As far as i know Media, New Media, Postmedia has no equal in english and i do hope Quaranta looks for and finds a publisher who will be willing to translate it.

Hopefully my review will be of interest not only to the 3 readers i have in Italy but also to other readers who might like to know what happens beyond the abstract and the list of contents. This is not going to be a thorough review nor a summary of the book but more of a way for me to digest it and highlight a series of ideas that help me keep the love/hate relationship i have with new media art on the healthy side.

The first three chapters lay the basis for the whole discussion. The first one looks into the definition of medium, of new media (art), but also delineates their identity and analyzes how pertinent these terms are. The second chapter traces the history of new media art from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The third chapter brings side by side the world of contemporary art and new media art. it is a rather painful confrontation as new media art seems to emerge as the eternal loser in terms of critical recognition and economic perspective.

Golan Levin with Greg Baltus / Standard Robot Company, Opto-Isolator, 2007

The last two chapters The boho dance: New Media Art and contemporary art and The postmedia perspective are where the action is at. The title of chapter 4 refers to the Art Mating Ritual (the Boho Dance then the Consummation) ironically described by Tom Wolfe in The Painted World. In this case, however, the attempts of new media art at seducing the contemporary art world have failed repeatedly and miserably. Quaranta analyzes the reason of this fiasco by going through a series of exhibitions in major art museums that celebrated the ‘newness’, ‘brightness’ and ‘avant-garde’ of new media but never quite met with the respect of contemporary art critics and curators, due too often to the excessive focus on the technological perspective rather than on the art perspective of the works exhibited. Apart from a few exceptions, new media art has not yet found a comfortable place in art institutions and public or private collections. According to Quaranta, the usual excuses brought forward do not stand a close observation. Is reproducibility the culprit? No, think of the limited editions of photos, and of the price that a print by Cindy Sherman or Andreas Gursky reaches at auctions. Is it because of the ephemeral nature of many of the works? That didn’t prevent Damien Hirst’s shark to get the icon (read ‘bankable’) status it has nowadays. Is it the rapid obsolescence of the material used in new media art works? Quaranta replies with the example of VHS video works that have been transferred onto digital support and of neon installations by Dan Flavin that cannot use the original red neon anymore because in the meantime it was discovered that that particular shade is toxic. The real problem of new media art is that many in the contemporary art world have doubts about its value as art and as an investment.

The final chapter, The postmedia perspective, opens by laying the blame of the foul reputation of new media art on art critics and curators. On the one hand, the new media art world has tried to impose on the rest of the art world the criteria used internally to appreciate a work. Moreover, they have failed to do justice to new media art by presenting it as a uniform phenomenon instead of the heterogeneous reality that it is. On the other hand, many contemporary art critics have failed to go beyond the technological aspect of the works of new media art. Or they have also seen it a ‘uniform phenomenon’ and condemned it as a whole.

What unifies new media art is not the use of ‘the media’, it is its familiarity with the cultural impact that these media have had on society.

Dirk Eijsbouts , Interface #4 TFT, Tennis V180, 2004

For Quaranta, the New Media art world should turn its frustrating complex of inferiority into a virtue: that is, to act as an incubator for art forms that wouldn’t be accepted at a first stage by the mainstream art world. He gives as an example Tft Tennis v180°, an installation typical of ars electronica ‘gadgetry’. It might not stand raise up to the standards of a contemporary art critic, but it has value as a prototype ahead of game research, as a precursor that paved the way for the Wii. Without new media art, works like this one would struggle to find a suitable context to be produced, exhibited and discussed.

As i mentioned above, Media, New Media, Postmedia is a book that required audacity. And it took someone like Domenico Quaranta, a critic and curator whose involvement and respect for new media art doesn’t need to be proved any more and who has rubbed shoulders with the contemporary art world, to dissect and appraise in a way that was at time harsh the world of new media art. I suspect it was sometimes a distressing process but one that was necessary if new media art wants to get rid of the stereotypes, weaknesses and misunderstandings that weights it down.

Unsurprisingly, i’m going to end with the conclusion, not mine, but the one Quaranta has written in the abstracts:

Check out the blog Media, New Media, Postmedia.

Domenico Quaranta is a contemporary art critic and curator whose research focuses on the impact of the current techno-social developments on the arts. He’s a prolific writer, his articles and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and he has written and contributed to many books and catalogues. I was particularly enthusiastic about GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames which he authored together with Matteo Bittanti. You can either download for free or get as a print on demand his recent In Your Computer, a collection of texts he wrote between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews.

He curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions all over Europe (right now you can see ITALIANS DO IT BETTER!! at the Venice Biennale.) Domenico Quaranta is the Director of the MINI Museum of XXI Century Arts and a founding member and Artistic Director of the very promising and much needed on the Italian territory LINK Center for the Arts of the Information Age. If all of the above were not enough, he also lectures internationally and teaches “Net Art” at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan.

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Fresh Stuff From Faith47 in Johannesburg

Posted on August 30th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

More from Faith47 here.

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Mining Dwarf Fortress

Posted on August 30th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Image from Dwarf Fortress’s intro animation.

As we enter the last weeks of summer, take some
time off and check out Tarn and Zach Adams’ Dwarf Fortress, an indie game that has earned
a cult following and recently garnered some mainstream profiling including an appearance in MoMA’s Talk
to Me exhibition.

Developed over the past decade, Dwarf Fortress promotes depth and complexity of game-mechanics
over graphics. As an example of this, amidst its ASCII aesthetics, the game
includes its own world generator, economics system, three-dimensional world
exploration, fluid dynamics, complex names and languages, and character
profiles that allow emotional responses to the world you build around them
(i.e. the dwarves can appreciate art, but can also hold a grudge.) The game’s
complexity generates an equal proportion of difficulty that has subsequently
produced a community of dedicated followers who share their stories online, donate to Bay 12 Games (Tarn and Zach’s company), and even suggest improvements
on the game’s forums. Foremost, playing Dwarf
Fortress requires patience – followed by an appreciation for
intricate details hidden in primitive graphics. At one glance it’s a scrambled
mess; at another, it holds a profound resemblance to our own lives.

In-game image of Dwarf Fortress’s ASCII aesthetics

Excerpt from the New York Times’ profile on the game and its makers:

This bare-bones aesthetic allows Tarn to focus resources not on graphics but on mechanics, which he values much more. Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive; many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand — in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path — but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”

Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.

 

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