William Betts returns to the Jennifer Kostuik gallery this week with a new series of paintings that explore our notions of privacy in the digital age. Whereas his last exhibit dealt with the passive mediating agent of the surveillance/CCTV camera, this series shifts towards the theme of voyeurism depicting beach and swimming pool scenes that reflect our paparazzi/Facebook-fueled fetish for consuming personal moments within the public space.
The paintings are created using a technique that involves drilling small holes in the back of acrylic mirrors and filling these holes with paint. …

“Lately, I’ve been wondering if sitting quietly in a café, pretending to read a newspaper, and not writing is the most earnest expression in our age: no echoes of language, nothing to reblog, just pure unmitigated self sitting with self. I might, after a time of blank staring, find myself constructing sentences in my head, maybe a paragraph, simply letting the words roll around in my mind. I will not. I repeat. I will not write them down. They are my secret sentences, not yours.”
—Andrew Simone (via Amanda Mooney)
Not doing …

This struck me as very fresh. A mashup is, more often than not, the sampling of pre-existing media — music, movies, even sport intervews– to create something new. And yet in the case of the Adidas Originals Star Wars ad, the media being used here is entirely new footage shot specifically for the ad itself. What has been mashed up are the cultural narratives of these two iconic pop entities.
Conceived of by the boundary-defying minds over at Sid Lee and directed by new favorite director Nima Nourizadeh, the celebrity …

This link is blazing across the internets like wild fire but thought it worth posting here: yet another timely and beautiful New Yorker cover by Chris Ware.

The calls start coming in on Thursday. Wrong numbers — or so it seems at first. All of them are from the United States. All of them looking for the same person: Tony Johnson. Upon answering the 3rd or 4th call, from Rhode Island, the voice on the other end is that of a frail and elderly woman and I ask her what specifically she is calling about. She reveals that she has received a letter in the mail from Citiwide Bank in Nevada with an enclosed cheque for $3853.00. …

In adapting new mediums, there is always a period where the shape of the old form is mirrored in the new form’s space. For example, an early television ad looked like this. Radio had simply repositioned itself in front of a camera. It took years for advertisers to fully realize what could be achieved on the small screen. Nearly half a century later, the highly polished 30 second spot that those early sponsor announcements had evolved into would make the jump online with little change –aside from a …

“…the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture—a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism—turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.”
–Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker
“Word has it that the building is close to explosion. Whole thing pretty much toast, all in all.”
–@DavidFeng

It is snowing again here in Vancouver. Giant flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the streetlight. We are now into our sixth consecutive week of uncharacteristic and rather unsettling weather patterns. Last week we experienced something called a temperature inversion where it was 27 degrees Celsius on the ski hills and minus eight in the city creating a fog that made skyscrapers disappear into thin air.
Strange times indeed. My thoughts tonight are further derailed by an advertisement, on the back cover of a magazine that splays itself across our …

“Whether or not this is even true – after all, I never think truth is the point in stories like this – … the idea of appropriating a construction crane as a new form of domestic space – a kind of parasitic sub-structure attached to the very thing it’s helped to construct … is totally awesome;”
-BldgBlog