Author Archives: amandine

Books bound in human skin 

The use of human skin as a medium may be as old as human history itself – the flaying of defeated enemies or prisoners and the use/abuse of their skin dates back to ancient and perhaps even prehistoric times. The ancient Assyrians, in particular, were known for flaying their captives alive and displaying the skins […]

Les chemins du désir (Gaston Bachelard)

This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried […]

Graffiti: overground archaeology or environmental crime?

Alison Barnes ‘In a city that belongs to no-one, people are constantly seeking to leave a trace of themselves…’ (Sennett 1990:205) Graffiti, by its very nature, is inevitably temporary type. Whether due to chemical cleansing agents deployed by local councils and property owners, or simply the effect of the wind and rain over time, at […]

Help

The album cover features the group with their arms positioned to spell out a word in flag semaphore. According to cover photographer Robert Freeman, “I had the idea of semaphore spelling out the letters HELP. But when we came to do the shot the arrangement of the arms with those letters didn’t look good. So […]

Carved white horse(s)

The Saxons carved white horses into the chalk downs of southern England. This one at Uffington< oxfordshire, was carved more than 1,000 years ago. The Wiltshire White Horse The Horses you can see today are relatively new, certainly when compared to the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, which is around 3,000 years old. The oldest […]

Introduction to Communication Studies, John Fiske

“For semiotics, on the other hand, the message is a construction of signs which, through interacting with the receivers, produce meanings. The sender, defined as transmitter of the message, declines in importance. The emphasis shifts to the text and how it is ‘read’. And reading is the process of discovering meanings that occurs when the […]

‘250cm line tattooed on six paid people,’ Santiago Sierra

  Espacio Aglutinador Havana December 1999 Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich In 1999, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra paid six unemployed young men in Cuba to take part in one of his installation pieces. The men were offered $30 each to participate, and stripped to their shorts to become a part of another of Sierra’s human experiments, […]

Arthur Mole’s Extraordinary Mass Photography

Published on 4/14/2008 under Art – 56,844 views Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-generating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community. […]

Via This kite from China and assembled in the U.S. flies at the Art in the Sky Kite Festival at the Stone Quarry Art Park near Cazenovia Saturday. The kite built from recycled plastic bags depicts 34 figures jumping rope. It was built by Yong Mao Huang of China visiting the area with theire daughter.

Water Propelled Rocket

Water rocket demonstration by the author. The rocket itself was built by the author’s 6 year old son. We begin with the derivation of the basic rocket equation, using of course conservation of momentum. We then add the external forces, and later continue with calculating the velocity of the ejected water. This is achieved by […]

Tamms: Mud stencils

Tamms is shorthand for a supermax prison located in a town by the same name that has been operating under conditions considered torture by many human rights organizations and Tamms Year Ten is a grass-roots campaign to bring attention to it and at least bring it back to its original, legal mandate. As you can […]

Raven Smith

Raven Smith’s performance-based photographs train a sharp eye on themes of identity, vanity, myth making and notions of the ideal. Smith’s work is both elegant and irrational—fundamentally stripping down complex notions of how we build our own image in the face of our personal and collective histories or myths. Smith catalogues his decisive misbehaviors with […]