Whitney Biennial article (link; The New Yorker)

Lessness by Peter Schjeldahl

audio interview w/ Schjeldahl

(better, I think, than the video below)





Here's a panel interview w/ the author (previous to the article):

Faye Hirsch (CU lecture; Mar 12, '08)

Faye Hirsch is an established and broadly-informed art critic. In her power point presentation she discussed several artists and how they referenced art history: John Currin (she's not a huge fan of his), Lisa Yuskavage, Andrew Raftery (below#1), Tony Birch (etchings), Nicole Eisenman, Mark Greenwold (below#2), and Walton Ford (below#3).







There were between 68-100 people there, including at least one guy wearing a scarf, which was about right, considering the weather, which is improving.

current project 1 (draw; 120 ic: self-p)

I'll have this finished by the end of March (4 cards/day). It will be an ego-portrait, 10 index cards tall and 12 wide. Goin' for a large scale "middle-school" look. Pretty easy and fun.

Patrick Winfield (link)

Composites

car analysis 1 (photo; psd)

Lita Albuquerque (CU Lecture; Tues Mar 4 '08)

w/ Clay. Then we went to Taco Bell.

notes: She incubated in Africa. Something about a convent. Immigrated when she was 11. Is into mapping the cosmos. Being an artist is about freedom. She works from intuition and spreads pigment out on the ground and on the floor. Something about the procession of the equinoxes and vedic cycles. We get information from light. The sun may be in a binary star relationship with Sirius, the dog star. She was captivated by the horizon line for a while; something about her own verticality. She lined up a V to match the shadow of the Washington monument. She went to Antarctica do make a star map on the ground using blue balls: stellar axis. A companion art piece on the North Pole would invoke the idea of a spiraling DNA through the Earth's axis ... strands of star tehters, maybe. We're made of electricity and her purpose is to increase stellar awareness.

I enjoyed the scope of her ideas. I'd like to connect some stars and stories.

Picture of the Day (link)

All the good stuff is in science and computers. This pic is from "radiology picture of the day": radpod.org.



This patient underwent an fMRI to localize language preoperatively.

Patients are asked to perform specific tasks while being imaged, such as motor activity (see image) or verbal tasks. The relevant parts of the brain will therefore demonstrate increased signal.

Incidentally, I read a cool article earlier today entitled: Numbers Guy: Are Our Brains Wired for Math? It's primarily about a researcher who uses brain scans to study how the brain processes numbers. Here's a quick excerpt:

Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

Also on the subject, I suppose. Another blog of mine: counting people.