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For those of you still living in Berlin, please go and see this natural-pseudo-scientific-spectacle for me. It’s called “Soma,” and it’s produced by the artist Carsten Holler. For 1000 euro you can also become assimilated into the work through the cultural tourist framework of a (bizarre) art/boutique hotel. The Hamburger Bahnhof made a site for the exhibition cum theme park which consists of no less than 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, 8 mice and 2 flies.

Straight from the HB PR Team:
“Before the eyes of the observers unfolds an expansive “living picture”, a symmetrical experimental field, which is divided in two parts along its center line and which compares the ordinary world with the realm of Soma in a double-image experiment. This is an experiment, that find its completion in the imagination of the observer and whose evaluation is subject to your power of observation. On a mushroom like platform in midst of the arrangement resides a bed, where guests will have the opportunity to spend a night at the museum and to dive into the world of Soma.”

Below is a video outline of the exhibition. Please pardon the advertisement.

On a more domestic note, the Hammer museum is producing an interactive event platform titled, “Houseplant Vacation.” Participants are invited to give their houseplants a vacation, during the Hammer’s August cultural retreat for plants. Throughout the entire month, participant’s plants will be installed in the light flooded Lindbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events, for plants every Saturday from 1-4pm. The project offers a plant release waiver, in case sick plants infect others, and appears to be organized in part by machine projects. Learn more about the project here.

Cinthia Marcelle just won $!00,000 from the Future Generation Art Prize. Due to the portability of her medium, you can see a compilation of her works below, embedded from her vimeo page. In a monoculture of hyper distribution, portability is everything. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before Ms. Marcelle’s methods are assimilated by some viral advertising campaign. In the mean time, enjoy them in their beautifully pure infancy stage of your relationship with her work (mentioned as though she hasn’t been included in major exhibitions such as, Biennal de la Habana, Cuba, in 2006).

CRUZADA from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

475 VOLVER from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

FONTE 193 from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

CONFRONTO from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

VOLTA AO MUNDO from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

A hilarious bit of discursive theatrics. My favorite part is undeniably the correlation between modernism and the father. Jesus… I think we’re distant cousins.

A little search helps turn up additional Jayson Musson, or Hennessy Youngman, productions. For instance, he has an album available here, and additional humorous paintings and drawings on his site.

Dear Jayson, I hope you make it.

YouTube video originally seen on ArtFagCity.

An undeniable force in pattern development, Mr. Rogers helped pioneer performative pop-models for sincerity and laid the foundation for the consciousness industry. One can’t help but admire, and thus mine, his obsolete position in media production.

This video’s non-human theatrics of depicting the relationship between an artist and a consumer [at an art fair] are perfect for confronting the complicated nature of the relationship. It’s my personal opinion that the heart of this complicated relationship belongs to a caricatured public-relation of modern art and its critical apparatus, perpetuated by both teams on the playing field, and embodied here, by these adorable little computer abstractions.

I happened upon this video on nowness, and realized that I’d never heard Jeffrey Deitch carry-on conversationally. One has to admire his gentle accessibility and progressive rhetoric. I can’t wait to see the “new model for the museum in the 21st Century” (although it sounds like it might have something to do with celebrity).

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Furthermore, regarding the programmatic browser side of this of post, one can’t help but admire nowness’ visualization of their most favored content, below.

These color field paintings, by Michael Demers, are perhaps one of my favorite works of art I’ve seen and shared in the last five years. There’s definitely something to say for portability. Additional works touching on time and programmatic behavior can be found on his site.

Aidan is a 5 year old boy who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. He loves to draw and he loves monsters. He sells some prints of his drawings to raise money for his bills.

Here is his Etsy store, where you can buy his prints.
Here is his blog, where you can read more of his story.

Having a blog is a difficult habit to adopt if you don’t have a natural proclivity for communicating through language on an everyday basis and don’t mind a little virtual maintenance in addition to your other daily organizational maintenance. Thus, blogs with massive updated delays are a very natural phenomenon. I’m guilty of it. I’m sorry. Cory Arcangel’s project, Sorry I Haven’t Posted, reposts blog posts that open with an apology. More Cory Arcangel works at his site.

The Internet medium is an awkward medium within the art industry. It has no intrinsic value other than providing a basic measurement of your advertising ROI for your site’s requests for engagement. Additionally, it’s immaterial and therefore incapable of generating monetary gain on its own, but rather directs the engaged to more traditional means [even online] of market exchange where they are able to collect material souvenirs of their online experience. Thus, net art is more directly capable of referring to art’s hidden social role as an abstract economy. After all, it’s one of the largest unmediated and illiquid markets in the [public] world.

With this said, there are Net Artists that continue to test the potential of the Internet medium. Rafaël Rozendaal, http://www.newrafael.com/, is a Dutch-Brazilian artist that has helped pioneer the “single serving site” and has developed an international exhibition reputation [e.g. "Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo and London amongst others."]. Each site/work is an interactive animation that simply does what static works of art cannot: it plays with you/you play with it. In addition to each work’s share-value [i.e. the value produced by the gesture of sending a site link to a friend and them thinking "wow, that's pretty cool; so-and-so is cool for sharing this and now I will share this and create the same cool value for myself"], and an online store that sells limited addition prints of the work, Rozendaal sells the individual domain spaces as collectible works of art.

Recently, Rozendall has opened a new exhibition in Berlin, at The Future Gallery. Below is a video walk through of the exhibition. The following links will take you to the works being exhibited: TowardsAndBeyond.com, IntoTime.com, HybridMoment.com. Please note the corresponding title information for each work at the top of the browser window.