por·tal
noun/pôrtl/
portals, plural

A doorway, gate, or other entrance, esp. a large and elaborate one

An Internet site providing access or links to other sites

a grand and imposing entrance (often extended metaphorically); “the portals of the cathedral”; “the portals of heaven”; “the portals of success”

portal site: a site that the owner positions as an entrance to other [...]

First visit to SF Art Institute, lovely old building. Lecture on Brain, Art Science wasn’t the best. Random notes:
In hallucinations of self portraits – people’s faces are nearly always motionless and expressionless (eyes and mouth closed). Floating – top half of body only. Disembodied. Intermediate phase between waking and sleeping.
In dream consciousness, using the brain [...]

For more than ten years, Michel de Broin has been honing a trans-disciplinary art which calls systems and their articulation into question. Adopting a critical and playful attitude towards common objects and current ideas, he sets out to render visible, through richly profound metaphors and analogies, the forces at work in the movement of the [...]

Korean artist Do Ho Suh presents ‘Home within home‘ at Lehmann Maupin in New York. The series of sculptural works reflects Suh’s continued investigation of themes surrounding cultural displacement and the co-existence of cultural identities, along with the perception of our surroundings and how one is able to construct memory from a space.
Designboom link.

Just went to this great talk at the California College of the Arts:
I saw Chiharu’s work at the Hayward, maybe last year? But before that I had been using an image of her work, a piano and audience chairs surrounded by the wool in my symposium lectures. I felt the wool was a representation of [...]

drawing for a friend

Notes I made about this:
Right brain: here & now, present, pictures, body, sensory.
Left brain: linear, methodical, past & future, details, organise, association with past events, language.

and this is how much that can be done in 3 mins unedited -

bike film too – a straight 8 film by ed sayers from straight eight on Vimeo.

2 that I liked from the festival:
Pick by Benjamin Hayden:

Inside Out/Side One (2009) by Matt Meindl:

How ever much I like the orange bulb – the projections are only working on the opaque surface – might have to go back to the reuse centre and buy a few more opaque ones….

Places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves, whether island or mainland, and can be imagined in various scales [...] what we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces that cannot be delineated either by fences on the ground or by boundaries in the imagination – or by the perimeter of a [...]

When I went to her exhibition last year, I was determined to buy the exhibition catalogue, but it was over £60…so I bought this instead. I’ve been reading it slowly, mainly whilst travelling, and some of these interviews are excellent. Always a fan.
Her early projects concentrate on situating the ethnographic. Here, the ethnographic is ‘found’ [...]

He did an intern residency at Chinati in Austin. Nice found object assemblages. Few more picture at Its Nice That.

Untitled (Thermos) 19 x 16 x 4” Found thermos, caster, used paint roller, found postcard, ladle, plastic sushi, rubber bands, paint.

Love this graphic: click for animated version

Biophilia is an extraordinary and innovative multimedia exploration of music, nature and technology by the musician Björk. Comprising a suite of original music and interactive, educational artworks and musical artifacts, Biophilia is released as ten in-app experiences that are accessed as you fly through a three-dimensional galaxy that accompanies [...]

Link – Northern Spain

Toronto’s angell gallery presents a new series of 2D works by canadian artist alex mcleod, who creates chromogenic color prints of fantastical and romantic landscapes, or dioramas, both candy-coated and darkly whimsical. the anonymous and deserted scenes depicted in mcleod’s work appear as if they were first manufactured by hand and then photographed, but in [...]

oooo – check out the projection in bathtub!

Bruna Lobo, Liza Machado and Gustavo Sotero, Image courtesy Pedro Victor Brandão
 

Went to see this exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design based on the review from Time Out.
Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities illuminates the phenomenal renaissance of interest among artists worldwide in constructing small-scale hand built depictions of artificial environments and alternative realities, either as sculpture or as subjects for photography and video. [...]

NCAM
This exhibition takes its title from the German word ostalgie, a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Twenty years ago—after the fall of the Berlin Wall—a process of dissolution led to the breakup of the Soviet Union [...]