One of my favorite pieces at the Venice Biennale, Democrazy by Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli. It stars Sharon Stone and media philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. The Guardian has a nice little write up here.

The only thing to note is that the videos were shown at the biennale in an small American themed rotunda, with the videos on opposite sides, facing each other. Those details really make the piece.

A video about the making of one of my favorite pieces in the Documenta 12 exhibition, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Phantom Truck (2007).

Jenn Stein and Okwui Enwezor outside of the Shloss Wilhelmshohe, documenta 12, Kassel, Germany

I am back again from across the pond. Unfortunately, I was not able to post anything while I was there because a) internet connections were few and far between and b) I had a total of about 10 minutes the entire trip to check my email, we were so busy. But, it was an amazing trip. Follow the link for a chronological breakdown.

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If you are going to be in San Francisco, I’m going to have some work up at this show. It’s going to be up June 25th through the 29th with a closing party on the 29th. Check it out.

Here is a test render/animation of some of the things that I have been doing lately. Click the image to view the video. The link might take a while to load, its about 12megs or so, so give a sec. But it only took about 12 hours to render 30 seconds of footage on my little iBook G4.

If you are interested in the source code, let me know and I will send it to you. I would post it, but I have been constantly working on it and tweaking it, and by the time I post it, I will have made some change to it. So just let me know and I will pass it on to you.

The past week or so, I have been working with Processing and POVRay as part of a group collaborative project. I haven’t worked with either program before, but you can see the results up top. I use Processing to generate random shapes, which then passes them POVRay to render out. I am having to use POVRay, as that is what we are going to be using eventually to make videos.

So, I really haven’t been posting much lately, but I have been really under the gun with the end of classes last week, this trip to Europe that coming up in a few weeks, work, and a few other assorted long term projects.

On the more immediate front, I have also been working on some new work for a show that will be going up at the end of June. (I will post the details when I get them, but the theme of the show is “Best Friends”) But the show goes up a few days after I get back from Europe, so I have been trying to get the work done before I go. I have been working with a new process, by combining low resolution GIFs into an HDR image. You can see one of the results up top. There are some problems that I am running into, but hopefully they will be solved by the time the show goes up.

So barrring some unforseen event, I am going to be going to Europe this June for some of the art fairs. I will be going to the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, Documenta, and skulptur projekte muenster. I will be going with my dean, Okwui Enwezor, who curated Documenta 11, and so we will be meeting with a lot of the artists and curators as we go to these different places. I am very excited about this, and it looks like it’s going be a lot of fun.

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