While walking with Rebecca earlier today, I began thinking about how online art should be funded. Only some models of funding the material arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) can effectively translate to work that exists online. Websites can’t really be sold to patrons in the way a painting can; there is no value added in owning the domain name, and limiting access to the domain defeats the point of it being online. Grants for the creation of new work can obviously be applied to work that exists online. Corporate sponsorship is another option, although I find it generally unfit for funding personal work (since you have to promote the company’s agenda). What struck me as the most obvious and probably far-fetched method of funding online art is by designating it as public art.

Online art is inherently public art. It exists on the internet, that virtual space is where many people spend the majority of their time (Dangerous words in there; this ain’t journalism). Just as we beautify the public spaces we walk past on our way to work, we should beautify the virtual space that we visit in between trips to productive/useful web sites and applications. It’s not that we always notice the park or sculpture on our way to the office, but that we have the option to stop and appreciate it.

The obvious challenge in all of this is knowing who should fund public works in a space so public it operates largely without regulation. Internet service providers could fund unique works. 2% of their expenses could go enhancing the quality of the content they provide access to. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that AT&T or Comcast actually cares about the things they’re bringing in to your home (not in an anti-net-neutrality way)? Maybe cities should promote the online work of their residents. Physical-world tie-ins bind the content of the online works to a specific place, making the work more meaningful when you visit the city. I would be happier to run across more engaging personal content online that encourages me to visit a new city than to see a Mark Di Suvero sculpture when I get there. Or perhaps an independent entity should be formed, a branch of the NEA (miserably underfunded as it is) or UNESCO.

Yeah, making the work is not about money. However, if making artwork for the internet (or anywhere) began to at least fund itself, it would make thinking about money less critical. Right now, everything is decidedly about indirect revenue streams. I have a day-job making commercial stuff for the internet as a result of spending my free time making my own work. The money I make allows me to pay to keep my personal sites up. Just imagine the quality of work people could produce if they didn’t need to hold down a day-job.

There are lots of things worth noting in the William Kentridge exhibition: Five Themes. For now, I will simply note the superb blending of mechanical actors with hand-drawn animation in ‘Black Box’ (pictured above, not playing). The piece also incorporated found video footage of a rhinoceros “hunt”—the rhinoceros being a prominent figure throughout the piece, and much of Kentridge’s other work.

You can find out more at the Exhibition Website. The show runs until May 31, 2009.

It seems I’ve been catching shows at the last possible moment lately. The Art of Participation is closing tomorrow, leaving behind stacks of empty bottles from a few months of free beer with Tom Marioni, reams of paper covered in news stories, and crates full of portraits taken of visitors.

The pieces that worked best for me were simple concepts with simple executions. Hans Haacke’s “News” prints out an rss feed of news stories as it is published. The beauty is in the overwhelming amount of content generated; many rolls of printer paper flow out onto the floor, curling up on themselves and forming an elegant pile. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Microphones” was similarly austere. A series of microphones were arranged in a circle in the center of a darkened room. Whenever someone spoke loudly enough into a microphone, it would play back their voice, then add some previously recorded sounds in response. The piece demanded a certain level of confidence from audience members to get it towork,but also stood on its own as a collection of beautiful objects.

A number of classic performance/interactive pieces were also on display. Many of these pieces were shown alongside an updated version. Video of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” performances from 1965 and 2003 were on simultaneous display. Tom Marioni’s work from the 1970s, “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest form of Art” was recreated every Thursday for the duration of the exhibition. In other cases, visitors to the museum were encouraged to create their own work using the props and ideas of artists on display. Notably, there was a platform with props for making one-minute sculptures. The inclusion of updated participatory work with classic pieces is a great curatorial move, and really helps to keep the ideas of the older pieces relevant to todays audience.

View more images from the museum in my SFMoMA flickr set.

When I returned to San Francisco after the winter holidays, I went to see Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes at the de Young Museum. The museum was packed, but fortunately the crowds were mostly interested in Yves Saint-Laurent (which after viewing, it turned out, I was mostly uninterested in).

Lin’s recent work represents landscape data rather than the landscape itself. It is a transformation of scientific viewing into artistic viewing. The direct observation of the world is done through mechanical, sonic, or digital means by non-human systems. Lin translates this information–the landscape as it is perceived by machines–into a new set of drawings or scaled-down landscape structures, allowing us to move around and inhabit the data. The work still looks very digital, but the transcription has an obvious human hand, and the bumps in the data are smoothed to the point where the analog feel of a landscape is restored.

After meandering through Lin’s constructions, I made my way through many of the other galleries at the museum. I was really happy to run into a lot of work by Al Farrow, whose reliquary series I first encountered at 21C in Louisville a week prior. Farrow constructs iconic religious structures from ammunition and weaponry. The structures themselves are beautiful, and the obvious subtext of religiously-sanctioned violence makes the work challenging without being didactic.

Systematic Landscapes was on view at the de Young museum October 25, 2008 – January 18, 2009. It traveled to be there, so there is a chance it will travel to a city near you in the future.

View more photos taken at The de Young Museum on Flickr.

There are lots of good books out there. I want to read them all and experience the stories within them. I also want to get through more technical books faster and with better comprehension. Because of this, I made a website that doesn’t help with either of those things. It just expresses the feeling of being happily overwhelmed by the amount of good stuff that’s out there. It’s called I wish I could read faster.

I photographed a lot of books I had left at my parents house in preparation for the most recent addition to timespentalone. I wish I could read faster currently catalogues those 36 books and echoes the obvious sentiment of wishing to read more. I see some more photography and photoshop sessions ahead in order to bring to piece to a higher level of completion.

Books fall from the sky continuously, producing more content than could ever be read in the amount of time given to each book. Over time, stacks pile up and fade into the background. You can throw the books around by dragging them with your mouse.

I wish I could read faster uses the AS3 port of the Box2D physics engine to handle collisions.

I would like to add the ability for people to contribute books they either wish they could read or enjoyed reading. Right now, I’m not sure a file-upload tool would be used by anyone but me. If you would like to add books to the site, let me know, and I’ll probably build a submission form for everyone to use.