Alicia Keys: "I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out...

Artist's skin cell work cultivates concern

There is outrage at a Hobart artist's move to cultivate skin cells for art.

Alicia King has received ethical clearance to use her own cells and those of consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital.

The artwork involves growing skin cells over glass forms, and fixing and dying them before they are added to an art piece.

"I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out until there is a thin membrane," she said.

"It's quite hard to see with the naked eye so I dye it with a tissue culture dye."

It has taken the University of Tasmania's Human Research and Ethics Board six months to approve King's application to use her own cells for the mixed-medium work.

"It's much more clear-cut with ethics if I am using my own," she said.

"There is no issues of consent that are there with animal tissue."

The clearance also means waste tissue from consenting patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital can be used.

But the hospital says it is inappropriate and has refused permission.

An exhibition of the work opens in Melbourne tomorrow.

(ABC News online Aug 16, 2006)

glass grows!

Anyone who knows of or makes work where the pristine, immortal, clinical and casteless associations of glass are transgressed.....Please post links.

We need for glass to grow... and very literally.

"Slow Glass"

A show at Lisa Cooley Fine Art

http://www.lisa-cooley.com

 Slow Glass takes its theme from the titular substance, an invention of scence fiction writer BobShaw described in his novel Light of Other Days(1968). Slow Glass is a transparent material that tremendously slows down the speed of light that passes through it, so that a piece that had looked out

on a picturesque countryside setting, for example, could later be used to provide a view of the pastoral scene from a city apartment window. 

In Shaw's novel, slow glass plays a key role as evidence in a mystery by

 "recording" a criminal act.

Article excerpted from New York Art Beat: http://www.nyartbeat.com/

CALL FOR ENTRIES

Exhibition and catalog (working title): Post-Glass Artists / Glass Guerillas
Exhibition date and location : June 2009, Corning NY
Deadline for submissions : Oct 01, 2008




Description:

Post-glass Artists / Glass Guerillas questions the adequacy of the current definition of a glass artist, its associations and implications, in light of the studio practice of a significant number of emerging artists.

We are looking for works that toy with the idea of “guerilla intervention” in glass practice. For example, the method or production of your work may use the vocabulary and tools of alternative media rather than glass; the final form of work may not be glass. Perhaps, not even an object. Or maybe the object is made of glass but behaves in a remarkably un-glass-like manner. Maybe the outcome of your artistic process or its mode of distribution exceeds the focus of conventional glass art channels(throughsay, street performance).
We seek works whose concepts are unarguably derived from the direct experience of working in the medium of glass and yet, are risk-taking in their approach. They are hard to accept in conventional glass art avenues, challenging to existing discourse and uncomfortable or unfamiliar to encounter. To this end, we also welcome proposals.

To submit:

Please email yukanjali@gmail.com. You may submit upto 3 works/ideas for consideration. Indicate whether work or proposal in the subject line. In the main body of the email, include a brief description (upto 100 words) per submission and why you are interested in submitting (150 words total). For a proposal, send a written description of your project [max. 500words] with up to 3 images [drawings, pictures etc.] that exemplify the project.
Attach image/video/sound files as needed, less than 10MB. Please label the attachments as follows: yourlastname_entrynumber_imagenumber.fileformat (eg. genius_01_03.mov for a movie file sent by Jane Genius in support of submission 1 and image 3 within that submission). Do not forget to list contact information at the bottom of your email to us. Works that are of interest will be posted at http://howisthisglass.blogspot.com/ for open discussion, which you are welcome to join. For more information and questions about this project as it develops, please visit the blog or email us.

LIFE -fluid, invisible, inaudible...

LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible ..."is a collaboration between world-renowned composer/ musician SAKAMOTO Ryuichi and TAKATANI Shiro, core member of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type.

While the genesis of this piece is in SAKAMOTO Ryuichi's opera "LIFE" (first performed in 1999, for which TAKATANI Shiro the video aspects) as is evident in the title's "fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." it revisits the resources of sound and vision in "LIFE" now,several years later, in this new millenium, for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work. If we say that "LIFE" was an experiment conducted in opera's linear, modern form at the end of the 20th Century, then the installation configuration of "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible..." must surely be a non-linear, decentralized flow of audio and visuals which the visitors themselves enter to experience.

A grid of 3 x 3 acrylic aquariums, 30cm high and 1.2m square are hung, in a darkened room. Each carries a thin film of water inside. Each has speakers affixed at both ends. Inside of each a fog is artificially created using ultrasonic waves, percolating fluid patterns which hover between transparency and opacity. Imagery transmitted down into these tanks from projectors attached above them--at times synchronizing all aquariums, at times decoupled and seemingly autonomous--shines down through this screen of kinetic patterns woven of water and fog, connecting the imagery while ceaselessly melting, floating endlessly between flows of meaning and meaninglessness, the concrete and the abstract.
The sounds and visions in "LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." including the newly added materials, are divided into categories of 20 and 30, and stored on a computer hard disk. Being run by a random control program, the audio and visual files are called up randomly from this depository, to create an installation which is constantly changing.

"I wanted to distance myself from the curse of time." (SAKAMOTO)
"I wanted the imagery to project completely free of control." (TAKATANI)

In both of their comments we can see their embrace of the emergent potential of the flowing phenomenon that is fog and the randomness of the computer to escape typically linear and conclusively established time and space.
*"LIFE--fluid, invisible, inaudible ..." was produced as a commissioned work at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), and exhibited from March 10 to May 28 2007 at YCAM to great critical and popular acclaim.
http://rsst.ycam.jp/

original text derived from NTT ICC communication center
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/Exhibition/2007/LIFE_fii/preface.html

Perspectives offered by contemporaries

Museum of Glass Presents Mining Glass (June 16, 2007 - February 3, 2008)

The Museum, in its press release claims," Glass may have been disregarded by twentieth century art as decorative, but today it is not simply a major medium in its own right, it is also one that opens new visions for the artists who are approaching and mining it."

Another excerpt: "Mining Glass is the first major survey to examine how the rich and unparalleled material of glass has expanded beyond its traditional application in decorative and functional art in the early twenty-first century.The installations are organized around eight narratives that act as suggested passages to help viewers see beyond the technical matters associated with the medium.By moving through the themes of artifice, boundaries, desire, enchantment, excess, identity, intersections, and landscape, the exhibition concentrates on the deeper issues that concern artists, allowing the meaning of the work to take precedence over the technique of how it has been executed. The featured artists, none of whom are glass artists, thus present a stunning diversity of approaches to the material to reveal the multiplicity of glass--precious, magical, and mystical, yet common, practical, and functional--while challenging the notion that work in glass is merely pretty."

Question is: "Merely pretty" ??? Heyyyy, what's wrong with pretty?

Question 1: How does our standpoint (in terms of "mining") differ? Is our take but a variation on postmodernist multiculturalism and hybridism? Are we interesting in the fundamental redefinition of glass through artistic practice? Or is it something else?

Image credits:
Jean-Michel Othoniel (French, born 1964), Black Hearts, Red Tears (detail), 2006-2007,
Blown glass and glass beads,
108 x 132 x 4 inches (274 x 335 x 10 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Photo by Russell Johnson

Bubbles

Glass+New Media=? Brainstorm for a new word

What is glass?

The idea of in-between-ness is inseparable from glass. The material exists at a threshold chemically. It is an amorphous solid or a super-cooled liquid, the debate continues as to which. What is clear though, is that glass exists as a state somewhere in between a liquid and a solid. This means that despite having properties of both liquid and solid, glass is neither. It is too viscous to be a crystalline solid and too cohesive in molecule structure to be a liquid, just as I am too Indian to be Tamil and too regional to be a global citizen.

Glass is matter. It is light. Glass is immortal yet fragile. By virtue of being indetermined at multiple levels, glass lends itself to alchemical and phenomenological transformations. Through my experiments with glass, I realize that it embodies the defining quality of a threshold: it is a dialectic.

Threshold = (to) thresh + (to) hold, thres. hole, thresh. (W)hole.


Image source: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

Transparency