Graffiti is preserved and improved with a new open-source software project and iPhone app

From Jacob Resneck at Cool Hunting…

The brains behind the daringly clever TSA Communicator project, iconoclastic technology artist Evan Roth is now spearheading an equally compelling software project, Graffiti Analysis.

Roth and his co-collaborators have developed an open source application that works with iPhones and others to capture the movements of graffiti artists and digitize the motion-rich styles into programming language that can be stored, swapped and recreated.

“The project aims to build the world’s largest archive of graffiti motion, and bring together two seemingly disparate communities that share an interest hacking systems, whether found in code or in the city,” Roth states. More…

Chakaia Booker: In and Out is currently on show at deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, May 15, 2010 – August 29, 2010:

Over the past decade, Chakaia Booker has become one of America’s most important contemporary sculptors. Chakaia Booker: In and Out is the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition of this African-American artist’s work to date, and represents the wide range of Booker’s practice from the mid-1990s to the present. The exhibition includes monumental outdoor sculptures, indoor sculpture in a wide variety of formats and sizes, drawings, and photographs.

Chakaia Booker is best known for the material and process that characterize the majority of her work: cut-up automobile tires that are reassembled on wooden or steel armatures to create abstract sculptures. This recycled material, and the surface patterns that it creates, reference African textiles and body decoration to evoke issues of black culture, identity, gender, and environmentalism. For more information…

From Roberta Smith at The New York Times…

When the photographer Philippe Halsman said, “Jump,” no one asked how high. People simply pushed off or leapt up to the extent that physical ability and personal decorum allowed. In that airborne instant Mr. Halsman clicked the shutter. He called his method jumpology.

The idea of having people jump for the camera can seem like a gimmick, but it is telling that jumpology shares a few syllables with psychology. As Halsman, who died in 1979, said, “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears.”

A wonderful exhibition of nearly 50 jumps that Halsman captured on film from the late 1940s through the ’50s — sometimes on commission from Life magazine — can be seen at the Laurence Miller Gallery at 20 West 57th Street in Manhattan, through Friday. More…

By Jessica Flint at VF Daily…

So far this spring we’ve witnessed public displays of art ranging from British sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Event Horizon,” 31 statues of atomically correct naked men standing on roof ledges and street corners in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, to the “Elephant Parade,” 250 life-size painted elephant sculptures positioned throughout central London. Now we can add another installation to the list of this year’s big P.D.A.’s: Spanish artist Manolo Valdés’s exhibition “Monumental Sculptures on Broadway,” 16 bronze sculptures situated along Broadway from Columbus Circle to 166th Street, in New York City. The word monumental is no exaggeration; some of the works are more than 12 feet tall, while others weigh in at more than 2,000 pounds. The show, a collaboration of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the Broadway Mall Association, Marlborough Gallery, and the New York City Department of Transportation, runs from today through January 31, 2011. More…

From Doug Harvey at LAWeekly…

Artist/filmmaker Pat O’Neill’s 1989 Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning experimental feature Water & Power — a sort-of Chinatown-meets–Koyaanisqatsi-on-nootropics dealie — is rightfully recognized as one of the signal artifacts of late 20th century L.A. culture, not to mention a radical turning point in experimental cinema. Since making that splash, after a quarter-century toiling in the experimental-cinema mines (and the somewhat more lucrative special-effects fields), O’Neill has expanded his reputation into the art world with gallery and museum exhibitions of his sculptures, drawings, prints and projection-based installations. His double-barreled 2002 magnum opus film/interactive CD-ROM, The Decay of Fiction, took his ambivalent relationship with narrative into even more interdimensional realms (by way of Hollywood noir and the Ambassador Hotel), and marked his first artistic engagement with digital media. More…

From n+1…

“That deaf, dumb, and blind kid / sure plays a mean pinball!” the Who sang about the eponymous hero of their rock opera Tommy. And when the audience responded too rowdily to one live performance, the drummer Keith Moon is said to have yelled back, “Have some respect! It’s a fucking opera!”

Tommy was widely understood at the time to be campaigning for the aesthetic dignity of rock and roll, a battle that has long since been won. Less apparently, this was also the opening salvo in a similar battle on behalf of games: “arcade games” at the time, and computer games as we know them now. Computer games are the latest cultural form to benefit from the collapse of the old and now embarrassing categories of high-, low-, and middlebrow. Once a slightly seditious form of loafing in teenage wastelands of the ’70s, games have won ever greater cultural legitimacy in our own unibrow period. More…