Posts Tagged ‘History’

The Cultural History of 3D! “Oddities” Launch Party! Holiday Fair! Tonight and Beyond at Observatory

Posted on December 15th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

This week and beyond at Observatory: A cultural history of 3D in 3D! Holiday Fair! “Oddities” marathon and season launch party! And a score of amazing new art classes comprising the newly launched Morbid Anatomy Art Academy! Hope to see you at one or more of these terrific events.

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The Missing Dimension: A Cultural History of 3D Images – Anaglyphs, Stereographs, View-Masters, Holograms, and Flaming Arrows Coming Right at You!
Illustrated lecture on and in 3D (glasses provided) by artist and NYU Professor Chris Muller
Date: TONIGHT Tuesday, December 13th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

An overview of the development of three-dimensional images, from the first recognition of the stereoscopic function of our two eyes in ancient times, to Charles Wheatstone’s explanation of binocular vision and his creation of the stereoscope in 1838, and the flood of three dimensional images that followed the invention of photography. We’ll look at the stereograph viewer developed by Oliver Wendell Holmes that was in every Victorian parlor, the View-Master in every baby boomer’s childhood bedroom, red and green anaglyph printing that allowed comic book characters to pop off the page, and the strange story of the development of 3D film. The unique pleasures of the 3D image will be celebrated, and its persistent failure to become the Next Step in photography and film discussed. The lecture will be illustrated entirely and gratuitously in 3D, with glasses provided to all comers.

Chris Muller is an artist and exhibit designer based in Brooklyn. He has designed exhibits for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum for African Art, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, and many others. He has designed sets for Laurie Anderson, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, the Atlantic Theater Company, and others. He teaches drawing and digital painting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Image: Image by Chris Muller

odditiesfish“Oddities” Marathon and Season Launch Party
Screening of TV’s “Oddities” followed by after party with MC Lord Whimsy, giveaways, special drinks, and DJ
Date: Saturday, December 17th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $8
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

On Saturday, December 17th, you are cordially invited to join Morbid Anatomy and Observatory as we gather to celebrate the new season launch of “Oddities,” that unlikely hit of a television series based on our favorite purveyor of curious and amazing artifacts, Obscura Antiques and Oddities in New York City’s East village.

The evenings festivities will include the screening of several new episodes of “Oddities,” special drinks and music by Friese Undine, and give-ways by Kikkerland and Obscura Antiques. The always charming Lord Whimsy will oversee the evening in his role of Master of Ceremonies, and members of the cast of “Oddities” will be on hand for questions and comments.

To find out more about the show, check out http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/oddities.

Hope very much to see you there!

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2011 Morbid Anatomy and Observatory Holiday Fair
Holiday fair with multiple vendors serving your alternative holiday needs including taxidermy, miniature insect tableaux and more
Dates: Saturday, December 17 & Sunday, December 18
Time: Noon – 6:00 PM
Admission: Free
brooklyn-brewery-logo-gold Free beer courtesy of our sponsor Brooklyn Brewery

Please join us on December 17th and 18th for a holiday fair presented in conjunction with partner spaces Proteus Gowanus and Morbid Anatomy. Here you will find such covetables as steampunk jewlery, anatomical blocks, macabre drawings, ceramic reliquary bat heads, wet specimens, photographs, and books, books and more books, all to music DJed by Lado Pochkhua and washed down with beer provided by our sponsor Brooklyn Brewery. This will be the perfect place to purchase unique, niche, and off-the-beaten-path gifts for those hard-to-please folks on your shopping list! Hope to see you there.

Image: Crocheted Skulls by Dewey Decimal Crafts, a featured seller at last year’s fair. More of her work can be found here.

And more upcoming:

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

You can find out more and get directions to Observatory by clicking here. You can join the Observatory Facebook group by clicking here.

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Notes from WJ-Spots Brussels, History and future of artistic creation on the Internet

Posted on December 10th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments

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Photo credit: Anne Roquigny

Last weekend in was at iMAL in Brussels for a WJ-Spots afternoon (that ended at midnight). Almost 20 artists, theorists, activists, bloggers and journalists were asked to give their view on the history and future of artistic creation on the Internet.

Is the Internet a disenchanted space for artists and creative people or is there a future for online arts and critical creative actions? If so, what are their possible forms and directions?

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Photo credit: Anne Roquigny

The event followed the WJ-Spots format: during our speeches, webjays used a custom-built platform to navigate live through a list of websites that we had selected. The result was shown around the speakers on several large screens. That was both exciting and a bit of a disaster for me. I tend to throw some slides together and half improvise over them. This time i had to do the opposite.

Anyway, i had a brilliant time with some of the most talented people on planet internet and scribbled a couple of links and notes along the way. The talks are online but here are a few quotes and ideas that caught my interest:

Florian Cramer opened the afternoon by telling us something most of us tend to forget (or simply ignore): the internet is not the world wide web.

For Josephine Bosma, net.art doesn’t have to take place or be made on the internet. However, it can be linked to the internet in a conceptual way. For example Alexei Shulgin‘s 1997 Vienna performance, Real Cyberknowledge for Real People for which he printed out and handed out to passersby copies of ‘Beauty and the East’ / ZKP4, published online by the mailing list nettime.

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Tobias Rehberger, Seven Ends of the World in the Italian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2003

Or Tobias Rehberger’s Seven Ends of the World, lamps that glow with an intensity that corresponds to local light conditions in various places around the world, relayed over the Internet.

And of course there’s also Aram Bartholl‘s giant Google Maps marker that doesn’t need any time of internet connection.


Alexei Shulgin, Form Art [Tank], 1997

Alexei Shulgin was by far the artist that speakers referred to the most. Gordan Savičić showed Shulgin’s Form Art before discussing the fact that nowadays the web is more about consumption than production. He mentioned a recent(ish) Wired article about the decline of the World Wide Web: Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.

Paolo Cirio made a noteworthy point when he said that net.art pieces as performances. Mostly because they are time-based, they are getting shorter (e.g. a twitter neatart piece that would last a week) and need to be documented.

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Le 9ème collectif de sans-papiers & Act Up-Paris

Raphaël Bastide & Yannick Antoine showed posters that were plastered a few years ago in the streets of Paris. They had the face of Nicolas Sarkozy and the slogan “Vote Le Pen.” The poster was designed to denounced the far-right tendencies of Sarkozy (who was then Minister of the Interior.) 6 members of the collective were arrested because, allegedly, the photographer of Sarkozy’s portrait didn’t agree with its use on the posters.

Rafael Rozendaal presented some of the most successful editions of BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer. The exhibition format invites people to bring a projector and create their own exhibition for one night, screening images onto spaces and exploring ways to free digital work from the screen. Each edition reinterprets the format in its own way.

Julian Oliver gave a brilliant talk on the ‘ideology of seamlessness’ and the infrastructure that sustains our dependency on internet, even if we tend to forget/ignore their existence. Nothing can exemplify his point better than the Submarine Cable Map. Or Newstweek, the project he developed together with Danja Vasiliev and that looks at the infrastructure of the internet as a material.

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In his presentation, Alessandro Ludovico talked about how Jodi compelled him to ‘print net.art’. In December 1999, he interviewed the duo for the 16th issue of Neural magazine. They answered every question with a .gif showing clipped screenshots featuring bits of their own games and artistic software, or manipulations of webpages, etc.

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Image courtesy of Alessandro Ludovico

Jodi also gave a text to speech performance at the end of the evening. Brilliant! These two are brilliant!

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Photo credit: Anne Roquigny

Domenico Quaranta would probably agree with my over-enthusiastic comment since he started and ended his presentation with them. The ending was particularly memorable: he had the WJ-S webjays open http://oss.jodi.org/, one of the websites he would most miss if ever it disappeared because, he explained, “it keeps destroying my browser :-)”

Heath Bunting found a victim to fill in an Identity Bureau questionnaire.

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Miltos Manetas, Thank You Andy Warhol, 2007

Miltos Manetas (one of the very few artists in media art who has a real sense of style) painted joysticks and websites at a time when websites and joysticks were regarded as the oddest subjects to paint, created machinimas when no one had heard of machinimas, dreamt of an “electronic orphanage” where digital creatures could meet and do things together long before Second Life made the headlines of newspapers.

All that is history now, he added.

WJ-Spots Brussels was curated by Anne Roquigny et Yves Bernard and the video archives are online: part 1 and 2.

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Photographing the Dead: The History of Postmortem Photography from The Burns Collection and Archive, Monday December 5th, Observatory

Posted on December 6th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments






Tomorrow night at Observatory! Be sure to arrive early, as this one is sure to sell out! Above are a few more of the hundreds of images that will be discussed.

Full details follow; hope to see you there!

Photographing the Dead: The History of Postmortem Photography from The Burns Collection and Archive
Illustrated Lecture and book signing with Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS of the Burns Collection and Archive
Date: Monday, December 5th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
*** Books will be available for sale and signing; see bottom of this page for complete list of books available

Postmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs, from the beginning of the practice until now, are special mementos that hold deep meaning for mourners through visually “embalming” the dead. Although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of nineteenth-century American genre photographs, until recent years they were largely unseen and unknown. Dr. Burns recognized the importance of this phenomenon in his early collecting when he bought his first postmortem photographs in 1976. Since that time he has amassed the most comprehensive collection of postmortem photography in the world and has curated several exhibits and published three books on the subject: the Sleeping Beauty series. Tonight, Dr. Burns will speak about the practice of postmortem photography from the 19th century until today and share hundreds of images from his collection.

About Sleeping Beauty: Dr. Burns’ first book on postmortem photography, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (1990) has been widely recognized as one of the most important photography books of all time. Sleeping Beauty has influenced an eclectic array of fields, from bereavement counseling and education to cultural anthropology, history, medicine, philosophy, religion and spirituality (not to mention pop music) and has been cited in debates on the death penalty, euthanasia and abortion. It has been the subject of numerous scholarly papers as well as seminars and exhibitions at notable institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The New Museum of Contemporary Art. A decade later the Archive published Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement & The Family in Memorial Photography American & European Traditions in conjunction with an exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay. Sleeping Beauty III Memorial Photography: The Children, the third installment in this series was released this year to accompany a traveling exhibition.

About the Burns Collection and Archive: The Burns Collection, founded in 1975 hosts the nation’s largest collection of early medical photography and has been generally recognized as one the most important private comprehensive collections of early photography (over one million photographs). The Collection is best known for images of the dark side of life: death, disease, disaster, mayhem, crime, racism, revolution, riots and war. Dr. Burns has authored forty-three photo-historical texts and curated more than fifty photographic exhibitions. He is a founding donor of several museum photography collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. In addition to being an internationally distinguished author, curator, historian, collector, publisher, and archivist, Dr. Burns is a New York City ophthalmologist and Clinical Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. The Burns Archive produces publications, exhibitions, and manages image licensing for the Burns Collection. To find out more, you can visit the Burns Archive Blog, website, or press website.

These Burns Archive titles will be available for sale and signing:
Sleeping Beauty III Memorial Photography: The Children $36
Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement & The Family in Memorial Photography… $85
Shooting Soldiers: Civil War Medical Photography by R.B. Bontecou $50
News Art: Manipulated Photographs from the Burns Archive $50
Deadly Intent, Crime & Punishment: Photographs from the Burns Archive $75
Seeing Insanity: Photography & The Depiction of Mental Illness $40

More on Observatory can be found here. To sign up for events on Facebook, join our group by clicking here. To sign up for our weekly mailer, click here. Directions to Observatory can be found here.

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“Not for the Squeamish: The History of Artists and Anatomists,” Lecture/Studio Class, Jonathon Rosen, School of Visual Arts

Posted on September 4th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments



For all of you New Yorkers out there: friend of Morbid Anatomy Jonathon Rosen has just alerted me to an amazing sounding class he’ll be teaching as part of The School of Visual Art’s continuing education series. He has also asked me to give a lecture as part of the course, so maybe I’ll see you there!

This class is open and available to all; full details below. Hope very much to see you there!

Not for the Squeamish: The History of Artists and Anatomists

ILC-2196-A

T, Sep 20 – Nov 22

Hours: 06:30PM – 09:15PM

2.50 CEUs; $335.00

Course Status: Open

Location: TBA

Register for this class by clicking here!

Temple of the soul or soft machine? The human body is a place where art, science, culture, politics and medicine intersect. This lecture/studio course will focus on artists from ancient to modern who use the body as a point of departure for personal, political, religious or scientific commentary, and will provide an opportunity for students to do likewise. The influence of traditional medical imagery on contemporary art-making and pop culture will be explored through the lens of history, culture and aesthetics. Examples will range from medieval manuscripts and obscure Renaissance medical surrealism through enlightenment era wax-works, Victorian charts and medical devices to Damien Hirst, the virtual human project, Bodyworlds, and beyond. Aesthetic surgery, genetics, biomechanics, medical museums, anatomy in movies, French underground comix and anatomical oddities will also be considered. Your assignment will be to respond to the lectures with several editorial artworks that incorporate medicine or anatomy-be it personal or political, singular or narrative, 2D or 3D, static or moving. Students may use the medium of their choice; projects are not required to be anatomically correct. Prerequisite: A basic drawing, photo-collage or photography course, or equivalent.

Jonathon Rosen

Painter, illustrator, animator

One-person exhibitions include: La Luz De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; Adam Baumgold Fine Art; Studio Camuffo, Venice

Group exhibitions include: Triennali, Milan; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; P.S. 1, Contemporary Art Center; Kunstwerk, Berlin; Exit Art

Publications include: American Illustration Annual, Print, World Art, LA Weekly, Eye (London)

Books include: Intestinal Fortitude, The Birth of Machine Consciousness

Clients include: The New York Times, Snake Eyes, Time, Rolling Stone, MTV, Blab!, Sony Music, The Ganzfeld, Details. Journal drawings for Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton, director

Awards and honors include: Gold and silver medals, Society of Publication Designers; artist-in-residence, Harvestworks

Website: http://jrosen.org/

You can find out more–and register!–by clicking here.

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