a drawing for webmail servers and friends…

The drawing has been sent to the following people:

Rebecca Marino
Tracie Chan
Kaely Coon
Sean Gaulager
Paul Cavazos
Jay Russell
Adreon Henry
Elizabeth Spear
Chris Whiteburch
Tom Harris
Madison Cooper
Ben Aqua

They have been asked to forward the drawing on to friends of theirs. Four of the emails I sent to the original recipients contained typos. I apologized to them for the mistake.

“HOW I WROTE ‘ELASTIC MAN’ Anne Doran, Franklin Evans, Daniel Newman, Deb Sokolow, Philip von Zweck, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Sean Ripple DATES: February 1 – March 10, 2013 RECEPTION: Friday, February 1: 6-8pm INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man,’ a group exhibition featuring work by Anne Doran, Franklin Evans, Daniel Newman, Deb Sokolow, Philip von Zweck, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and Sean Ripple. * * * Obscurity and deliberate disorder can be perversely rewarding strategies for artists – performing for the viewer the experience of discovery, protecting the meaning of the work by concealing or confusing it, offering up one’s own back-story only through piecemeal contextualization, and presenting even quotidian work as arcane. It’s an increasingly common practice that promises to turn all knowledge into secret knowledge, and all meaning into gnostic meaning, available only to initiates and the especially devoted. The work that makes up How I Wrote \’Elastic Man\’ takes the cult of arcana and the gesture of self-erasure, not as strategy, defensive or otherwise, but as querulous subject. Determining the special power that accrues when information is parceled out reluctantly, or privately, and questioning why work becomes more alluring the more it withdraws from us. Hunting down what, if anything, is gained for artists by the practice of self-obfuscation and what is the aim of a practice in which work reveals its meaning to viewers through a program of careful and discrete clue-giving (biography, reference-giving, or curatorial guidance). Often, artists engaged in the re-surfacing of archival and other \”found materials\” seek to cloud those discoveries over again in a performance of their own process. Perhaps we’re forced to fetishize the unknowable in an age of information oversupply and infinite search, so much so that we elect to hide knowledge behind smokescreens of difficulty.“HOW I WROTE ‘ELASTIC MAN’ Anne Doran, Franklin Evans, Daniel Newman, Deb Sokolow, Philip von Zweck, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Sean Ripple DATES: February 1 – March 10, 2013 RECEPTION: Friday, February 1: 6-8pm INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man,’ a group exhibition featuring work by Anne Doran, Franklin Evans, Daniel Newman, Deb Sokolow, Philip von Zweck, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and Sean Ripple. * * * Obscurity and deliberate disorder can be perversely rewarding strategies for artists – performing for the viewer the experience of discovery, protecting the meaning of the work by concealing or confusing it, offering up one’s own back-story only through piecemeal contextualization, and presenting even quotidian work as arcane. It’s an increasingly common practice that promises to turn all knowledge into secret knowledge, and all meaning into gnostic meaning, available only to initiates and the especially devoted. The work that makes up How I Wrote \’Elastic Man\’ takes the cult of arcana and the gesture of self-erasure, not as strategy, defensive or otherwise, but as querulous subject. Determining the special power that accrues when information is parceled out reluctantly, or privately, and questioning why work becomes more alluring the more it withdraws from us. Hunting down what, if anything, is gained for artists by the practice of self-obfuscation and what is the aim of a practice in which work reveals its meaning to viewers through a program of careful and discrete clue-giving (biography, reference-giving, or curatorial guidance). Often, artists engaged in the re-surfacing of archival and other \”found materials\” seek to cloud those discoveries over again in a performance of their own process. Perhaps we’re forced to fetishize the unknowable in an age of information oversupply and infinite search, so much so that we elect to hide knowledge behind smokescreens of difficulty.

This series uses images from the web that relate to projects or ideas that I’ve come up with that already have precedence on the internet. While somewhat slow going, I hope to finish the project someday.

There is a more ambitious variant of the series that would involve photographing these types of cruddy sculptures sitting in front of a computer in a dark room in a video chat session with someone whose images I used to create the sculpture…

jenny odell (google street view reenactments)

connections that matter

connections that matter

connections that matter

tumblr

Syntax and Messages:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/flatlife/sets/72157631549514556/

The idea is that in the process of communication, the intended message of a communicator is often garbled/obscured/reconfigured/misinterpreted/skewed by its receiver. This tendency is fundamental to the creation of meaning (whether shared or contrary) by the parties involved in the exchange.

Given to Austin Nelsen at Spider House on 8/20/2012. Though he didn't intend to, Austin left this work at the table where we met.

Attempting to touch the peach fuzz of forever…

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1

Tour 2

Altered Art History textbook… redistributed to a textbook rental company.