“”With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
-MLK
“It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to …

“The amount of building becomes obscene without a blueprint. Each time you ask yourself, Do you have the right to do this much work on this scale if you don’t have an opinion about what the world should be like? We really feel that. But is there time for a manifesto? I don’t know.”
–Rem Koolhaas

Stumbled upon a brilliant exhibit at the Yaletown Jennifer Kostuik Gallery during lunch break today. Texas based artist William Betts (whose website curiously bares an “iPhone Optimized” icon) taps into the Big Brother omnipresence of our modern world, taking webcam and surveillance video screencaps as his subject matter and, by exchanging pixels for pointillism, reinterpreting them in often abstract and beautiful ways.
Says Betts in his Artist Statement:
“Today we have so many layers between the individual and direct experience, it fundamentally changes how we see the world…I am intereseted in how …

In one of the most blatant epoch incongruities since Spartacus’s Rolex-wearing Roman, Australian artists, The Glue Society have rendered satellite photographs of various Biblical events as though seen via Google Earth. Awesome.

“In the form of cached Web sites, evacuated blogs, forgotten MySpace pages and abandoned Flickr feeds, ghosts frolic, beeping and flashing on autopilot. The jolly online zombies look the way they did the day they died, but the light left their eyes the last day their souls logged in.” –Virginia Hefferman, The Medium
“ok so this is my page for me and all the spooky things that happen to me don’t think Iam crazy and don’t think that I am makenig things up but for the true believers you can find …

In November of 2005 in Paris, a professional clockmaker named Jean-Baptiste Viot, was recruited by a group called UnterGunther for the purpose of restoring the clock in the Pantheon, the 18th-century architectural masterpiece that houses famous crypts including those of Voltaire and Hugo and was the site of Foucault’s pendulum experiment.
UnterGunther are the restoration unit of a larger underground organization in Paris known as UX. I say “underground” in its most literal sense: formed in the 1980′s, UX began as a group of students who threw parties in the …

“The idea is that one artist takes a hardcover from a book, tears out the pages and draws in one half (or half draws in both halves) of the binder/diptyque. In a nod to Ray Johnson, the two books are mailed (swapped) and each of these will be finished by the other.”
-from the intro to the Flickr group “The Library” by Alex Itin, the current artist-in-residence at the Institute for the Future of the Book.
“For the past five hundred years, humans have used print — the book and its various …

“Today we give birth to a new violent conception of life and history, which exalts the battle against … the toadies of false power, slaves to the global market. You wanted just a red carpet; we want a city entirely in vermilion…”
– Excerpts from the statement made by the Neo Futurist group Azionefuturista after they threw a bucket of dye into the Trevi Fountain on Friday colouring the water red.
“We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the …

“Tom Sawyer got it right. Why paint a fence when you can get your friends to do it for you for free? He would have been the perfect new-media mogul. Spending time and money creating content on the Internet is so hopelessly dated, so dotcom, so very, very 1.0. The secret of today’s successful Web 2.0 companies: build a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff…” – Time, May 8th 2006
Hmmm…case in point: …

“The first video news I watched on a cellphone was a smoke signal. I saw it in the back of a cab. The Pope had died, and CNN had its cameras trained on the chimney over St. Peter’s Square. Viewers were told to expect white smoke when the cardinals had elected his replacement.
The sight of this primitive signal on a screen the size of a Saltine in a taxi in New York City was mind-blowing. I peered into the machine in my hand. I could make out the image. I …