Congrats to Mark and his great project for this coverage!

check it out: Giving New Life to Protests of Yore (NYT)

First few graphs:

WASHINGTON, July 26 — It’s not an unfamiliar tableau these days: people gathered on a grassy expanse of the National Mall here, listening to someone deliver an impassioned antiwar speech with phrases like “aggressive, activist foreign policy,” “the war we are creating,” “vigorous governmental efforts to control information” and “distorted or downright dishonest documents.” At some point, the crowd breaks into applause and a young woman yells out, “That’s right!”

She shouts this, however, just after the speaker behind the lectern refers to men with last names like Johnson, Rusk and Bundy and to the destinies of the Vietnamese people. And at its high point, the crowd numbers only about 30 people, many of them involved in videotaping, recording and photographing the event as flags snap majestically in the wind around the Washington Monument.

In other words, if you had wandered into this spectacle on Thursday evening, you would have found yourself not exactly in the midst of an actual protest but somewhere slightly removed, in the disorienting territory where art meets political engagement.

Paul Potter’s Speech (mp3)

The web site for the Port Huron Project permanent link to this post

Interesting story in the sunday NYTimes about collectors living with video art.

Yet, as the first generation of video collectors is discovering, video remains a confounding, ornery medium - especially when it’s placed between the silver-framed vacation snapshots and the door that leads to the laundry room. Most artworks sit, mute and distinguished, on a mantel or behind a couch. Video pieces demand attention, and they never blend into the background the way even the most monumental Rothko or vibrantly colored Stella can.

[…]

THE first odd thing about collecting video art is this: the medium came into being partly because artists wanted to make work that couldn’t be collected. It was born in 1965 when Sony introduced the first portable video camera, attracting artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci. “The dream we had was art that couldn’t be sold, but broadcast on television,” the video artist Bill Viola said in a recent phone interview.

By the 1980’s, however, dealers and artists were turning video into a commodity. Now prices range from a few thousand dollars to six figures.

If collectors are figuring out how to collect and live with video art, it seems a simple matter to expand that habit to encompass digital, software and/or networked art. Some software art is already easily collected since it can run locally from a computer (John F. Simon Jr. is mistakenly referred to as a video artist in the article). To the collector there is no difference: they need a deck to play the video; they need a computer to output video. In both cases there is one appliance to output the media to a display.

[…] technicians are familiar presences for anyone who owns video art. Each time a new piece is installed chez Kramlich, electricians are brought in to snake audio, video and power lines to the location and punch new sockets into the walls.

With networked art there is an additional requirement to consider: the internet connection. But if committed collectors are willing to go through the hassle of hiring techs to install new video pieces, it’s a small step to adding an ethernet cable or wireless network to support the art work. permanent link to this post