AvantBlog

I spent part of this last weekend working on a new layout. You’re looking at it now, and your comments are most welcome. If you really miss the old layout, it’s still available at http://avantbard.com/blog/index_newspaper.php.

UPDATE: Safari and Mozilla (and Firefox) render my page exactly as I intended, but I’ve got a display bug in IE 6. There’s a huge space between the post titles and their underline/horizontal spacer below them. I know I’m probably not implementing this the best way right now (using a bottomBar empty div), but it’s all I could hack together. Can anyone help me out to achieve the same effect but in a better way that renders correctly on IE6, too?

Yesterday, Margaret and I decided to take a trip over to MOMA. I’d never been, and was excited to see lots of cool modern art. Luckily, we didn’t have to pay the $12 ticket price (per person) because Margie’s MT&R ID badge gets us in to most NYC museums for free. I’m really happy we didn’t pay to get in; their collection at MOMA Queens is really sparse. Sure, I saw some Mattise, Pollack, Johns, Picasso, Dali, and Sherman (Cindy), but only a few of each. In less than an hour, we had seen everything they had. (I don’t look at art really slowly, like some, but I spend maybe 30 seconds on the not-so-interesting pieces, and up to 5 minutes on the kick-ass art.)

We left MOMA pretty unsatisfied. Luckily, there’s always the galleries in Chelsea, which have never failed to show me great art.

Hands-down, the coolest thing we saw in Chelsea was at Eyebeam, my favorite exhibition space (it’s where I saw ArtBots a while back). One of the pieces currently on display had us cackling and howling with glee.

It’s a stage with a microphone in front of a projection screen. An image is being projected onto the screen from behind you, so that when you stand at the mic on stage, you see your shadow’s sillouette against the projection. The fun starts when you make some noise into the mic and a ton of colored balls start flying from your shadow’s head to the top of the screen. A minute later, they start falling, and you can use your shadow to bounce them back up and keep them from falling off the bottom of the screen. If you get four people on stage, you’ve got enough shadows to keep most of the balls on screen as long as you want. Margie and I giggled as we used our shadow’s hands to fling the falling balls at each other. Tres cool. And then we noticed that the balls was just one setting, and there were other interactive pieces you could choose. If you’re in NYC, go see it.

Also of note in Chelsea right now: Jeff Koons has some fantastic paintings of inflatable pool toys mixed with provacative nudes of porn stars. I don’t remember which gallery they’re in, but I know that the gallery doors were frosted glass (note: if you’ve never been to Chelsea’s gallery district, this description doesn’t help much, but it narrows it down to about 3 possibilities per block instead of five or six), and I’m pretty sure that it was on 22nd St.

And so, to sum up the lesson of the day: Chelsea kicks MOMA QNS’s ass.

He came up behind me and squeezed two pounds of soggy toilet paper over my head, and I liked it!

But wait, hold on, you look confused. No, I wasn’t drunk. Yes, I was pretty soaking wet for a few hours.

Maybe I should start at the beginning. (more…)

Man, yesterday’s retro design fucking sucked. I hated it so much that I spent four hours today making this new one. Comments please?

Oh, and in case you wanted to revisit some old ones: - War - Kylie - 3 Columns - Retro

I’m still working on the new w00t redesign. I was feelin’ the back to basics thing, ya know….

I heard about ArtBots, the robotic art talent show, from a post on b0ingb0ing. Typically, I love anything that involves technology and art, so I checked out the ArtBots web site. It was full of information on each of the pieces in the show. A robot that carved 3D architectural models out of blocks of ice? Two circular robots names Adam and Eva that have to learn how to keep rotating despite their shifting centers of gravity? Kal, fire-wielder extraordinaire of SEEMEN, is showing his newest creation, an exoskeleton with claws? When I read all this, there was only one possible reaction: Dude, I am soo there! (more…)

I checked out Mariko Mori’s public art sculpture/experience Wave UFO the other day. It was very pretty. On first glance, I thought it was just a sculpture. Sitting in the middle of the atrium/lobby of the IBM building on 56th and Madison is this huge, smooth, and silvery blob of a craft. It reminds me of the ship in Disney’s Flight of the Navigator (which is, incidentally, one of the few Disney movies with a cuss word in it (“Shit! It’s the alien!”)).

(click for a bigger picture)

But it’s not just something you look at. You get to go inside. So, I got in line. People go in three at a time, and they stay in for 7 minutes. Oh, and did I mention the electrodes? Right. See, before you go in, you get stuck up with these electrodes on your head and neck.

(click for a bigger picture)

Cool bonus fact: the electrodes have Firewire connectors on the ends! The interactive portion of the exhibit is probably powerd by a Mac.

So, once Margie and I were properly electroded, we were seated inside the craft. The seats looked great. They were these wavy white temperfoam looking dealies that promised comfort akin to a cloud in heaven. Sadly, they felt like lying on a pile of crushed soda cans. However, aside from the physical discomfort, the exhibit was quite neat.

We were treated to a projected display very similar to that of a planetarium. It was like iTunes visualizations meets your brain waves. Apparently, the graphics being displayed were 3D-ified results of our brain activity. Cool shit. Then, after a bit of that, we were treated to a pre-rendered sequence of alien graphical coolness that lasted several minutes. And then it was over.

All in all, it was a cool thing to have gone and seen. Not so much on account of the brain visualizations or the UFO sculpture in the lobby, but rather due to the fact that the experience was made available to us. That’s public art at its best. Something New York has plenty of, and which LA is sadly lacking in.

More pictures & info from others, via Google.

Wow. Artist Mariko Mori has created a pretty badass sculpture called Wave UFO. I passed it the other day, and it looked neat: a big white curvy UFO-ish vessel in the middle of a building’s lobby on Madison Ave. I had no idea you could go inside. The Village Voice has the scoop.

Expect pictures and a full report from me sometime soon.