by Virginia Konchan
Emily Dickinson, autodidact par excellence, wrote a whopping 360 poems in 1862, in a small bedroom in Amherst, MA, in a home owned and inhabited by her father: it’s good to remember, in other words, that both organisms and people can thrive under inhospitable conditions.
by Nicholas Johnson
Can you remember a time before the internet? bubblebyte.org is a London “based” online only gallery for a generation of artists who probably cannot. The work on display ranges from animated gifs and flash animations to creative use of html coding and embedded video. These artworks engage with the digital space and explore the possibilities of the internet as an artistic medium.
by A.L. Major
Though I’m a perfectly socially-adequate human being, who has little issue speaking to other people, the AWP conference still seemed to me the worst possible idea: thousands of otherwise isolated, oftentimes socially inept, or rather “quirky,” writers annually come together in a confined space to talk about the very thing that drives us into insanity. It’s an event that prompts in my mind, first and foremost, “Who came up with that idea?” and, more specifically, “Why?” I might have a very romantic idea of myself as a writer, but I see myself holed up in a tiny room, frustratingly pounding away at my keyboard, not procrastinating on Facebook and certainly not schmoozing and networking with other writers, professors, agents, editors. That’s the way it should be shouldn’t it?
Seeing Writers at AWP Read More »
And … we’re off. To Chicago. Along with at least 9,300 of our dearest friends aka readers and writers.
by Monique Daviau
Plates and bowls are meant to be simple conveyances for food, but now eating at home would possess the burden of memory: each grown-up, lonely dinner of spaghetti with jarred sauce and salad from a bag would be served on plates that screamed in my face COLLEGE! YOUTH! 1998! NORTHAMPTON! NEVER EATING ALONE! Over time, would these thirty-six pieces of cracked, used china simply become my regular old dishes, no longer returning to my mind an amalgam of dusty, distant college memories? Did I want my Madeleine or didn’t I?
To Every Dish, There is a Season Read More »
by A.L. Major
Lev Grossman begins his recent Time article, writing “For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube…Sixty hours every minute. That’s five months of video every hour. That’s 10 years of video every day.” How is that possible? Most often YouTube’s content includes movie clips, short films, whole films, television shows, music videos and amateur videos. “Anybody can run [a YouTube channel] easily and for free. That puts individual YouTube users on the same footing with celebrities and major networks.” I don’t know if I’d call them celebrities, but recently, I’ve developed this immense fascination with the people who have video blogs (vlogs).
YouTube’s Usefulness Read More »
by Virgina Konchan
What is the most perfect metaphor for synthetic happiness, which Gilbert argues is virtually indistinguishable from natural happiness, both as it is felt (internalized) and shared? Fake bacon? 3-D movies? Any form of cultural simulacra, in the Baudrillardian sense of the term?
Synthetic Happiness Read More »
When Cage began experimenting with chance operations in the 1940s, he was looking for a means of stripping intention and taste from the process of creating art. In the Western world, our notion of “genius,” at least as it relates to artists and performers, is generally shaped by a psycho-historical method of decoding biography to discover the seed of ability.
Nothing Personal: Some Notes on Cage Read More »
In December, on my way back to France from Malaysia, I stopped in Paris to get a visitor’s visa at the Canadian Embassy.
World-wide Welcome Read More »
by Nicholas Johnson
Pareidolia refers to the tendency of human perception to discover meaning in random structures where meaning does not exist. It is the perception of an image in a cloud or a pattern on the surface of the moon. It can also refer to an experience of the spiritual. London based artist Saskia Olde Wolbers’ film Pareidolia explores this phenomena through fantastical imagery and a fable that tells of a miscommunication between a professor and a Zen master.
Activating Images: On Saskia Olde Wolbers’s “Pareidolia” Read More »
