Emvergeoning

StoneHenge in San Antonio?  When I stopped to take the photograph, the homeowner came to the screen door and told me he was a carpenter. He said,  “if anybody needed any work done, to tell them to stop on by.” The address is 327 Lone Star, San Antonio, TX 78204.  Feel free to check it out for yourself.

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I think I figured out how Chad Dawkins is reviewing all those CAM shows:

In this study, I investigated whether pigeons could be trained to discriminate between paintings that had been judged by humans as either “bad” or “good”. To do this, adult human observers first classified several children’s paintings as either “good” (beautiful) or “bad” (ugly). Using operant conditioning procedures, pigeons were then reinforced for pecking at “good” paintings. After the pigeons learned the discrimination task, they were presented with novel pictures of both “good” and “bad” children’s paintings to test whether they had successfully learned to discriminate between these two stimulus categories. The results showed that pigeons could discriminate novel “good” and “bad” paintings.

This study was published recently in Animal Cognition (hat tip).

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seems to be one of the few people to really grok the medium. (This is apparently the guy behind the hilarous Chris Walken Twitter feed).

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Well, after a good deal of rain, some unexpected cold, and a little bit of worry, Luminaria 2009 turned out to be a really nice night in San Antonio.  Aside from my experience with the overbearing police force (who wanted to tackle me for riding my bike down an empty LONG stretch of closed off road) I found this Luminaria to be much better organized and more satisfying to take part in.  I carried my camera and photographed the projects I was able to come into personal contact with.  Heres a selection of those photos, with my garbled commentary.

Laura Varela & Vaago Weiland collaborated on the Alamo this year.  Vaago (from Mönchengladbach, Germany) said, in doing research on the Alamo, he kept coming across these photos with tents in the surrounding area.  He was determined to surround the old Mission with 200 tents, however, upon closer inspection of the site was only able to squeeze in 54.  Lauras video projection played alongside Vaagos sculpture, within the top of the Alamo.

Hyperbubble was the only real music I stood still and watched an entire set from.  Not for lack of interesting options, but more in awe of the reaction of the crowd to their music.  I heard more than several proclamations of “WHAT IS THIS?” and “THIS is the best band EVER!!” loudly from behind.  I couldn’t have been happier.

My own piece (shamelessplug) was projected onto this old building(I was told it might have been called the Turner Magika Theatre?) facing out into the Hemisphere park, I showed the current version of my “Portrait of the Artist as a City,” a project I took up as a result of receiving a grant from the Artist Foundation.  The video is made up of a constantly shifting set of over 9000 still photos, and encompasses more little parts of my life than I can begin to explain before losing your attention.

This year, the real showstopper for me was Ansen Seales 100 ft photograph of the San Antonio River.  Contained inside the San Antonio Convention Center, It set the tone for the more conventional “walled,” section of the show.  After talking to Ansen for a few minutes I was able to extract from him that this image was composed of 86,400 individual “slitscans,” made by his own homebuilt digital camera, and weighed in at a whopping 1.2 gigs for the file itself…and I thought trying to get my computer to juggle 9000 still photos at one time was tricky.

This fantastic ghost image of a dancer is local artist/instructor Rebecca Dietz.  She was one of the roving performance artists, and a recent FL!GHT Gallery featured artist.  I nearly missed her moving by me, and was glad I noticed who it was at the last minute.

John Mata, part of Leslie Raymonds New Media program at UTSA, built a cardboard room and filled it with books and media discussing…New Media.

Judith Cottrell & Gary Smith built this human like glowing form, and scared children for the duration of the night.  I enjoyed watching.

Holly & Bryson Brooks decided it was best to be “Married with Paintings.” So they walked in at 6 on the dot, started working inside their makeshift studio(replete with audience the entire time), and by the time I rolled around with my camera, they were already at this point within each of their portraits of the other.

Back out on Alamo Street, Ethel Shipton had filled these two store front windows with her characteristic puffed objects, this time being birdhouses.

Kelly O’Connor was just a few windows down.  My camera was having trouble not blowing out the detail in this one.

I stumbled upon this projection by Victor Pagona & his wife Sarah Susan, an artist I’ve heard of for years, but never met in San Antonio.

Sadly, I could only get this much of the smaller Leigh Anne Lester window displays without the detail of the sculptures being blown out by the harsh jewelry store lighting.  These window displays will be available for all to see for the next month along Alamo Street.

I stumbled over this Michele Monseau projection right across the street from the Alamo, hidden on a side wall.

These patterns & lights can give you a general idea of what everything else looked like, that was not affected in some way by an individual artist or group of artists.

These two large scale Thomas Cummins Lightboxes, while difficult to do justice with a photograph, were mindblowingly detailed in person.

Another fine example of the general lighting scheme found that night.  Its almost like that time I had to shoot photos at a certain laser light show..

Jenny Browne gave away 4 shopping cartloads and a truck bed full of books, for FREE, as her piece.  It was awesome to see people swarming the truck and carts, trying to get at free books, while Jenny sat on the roof watching & laughing.

..and finally to end the weekend, Tom Otterness made an appearance with his newly unveiled(in our locale at least) public art piece, “Makin Hay’,” mentioned a few weeks back here at Emvergeoning.  Some things I’m sorry to say I don’t have good photos of, the first being the EXCELLENT Contemporary Art Month installation by Randy Wallace in the basement of the old Beauty College building on Travis Street.  I shot many photos of it, but none of them quite did it justice.  I was also sad to miss crazy Mel Feldman and his cultural arts Kaleidoscope.  Somehow 1000 artists all in one place on one night is just a LITTLE hard to keep track of.

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This “full” transcript of the Christian Bale rant, sans profanity, is like watching The Big Lebowski on basic cable: confusing and pointless.

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George W. Bush: “Lame duck, huh? I’ll show you what a lame duck can do!”

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Let’s get you caught up on all this Electronic Election Voter Fraud business.  If you’re having voting problems, here’s something to alleviate your constitution.{Highly recommend watching that with the sound OFF}

The above image is evidence of our friend Mantecatron’s adventure across Mexico, documenting subversive art that looks vaguely familiar to a gigantic woven receipt at the Museo Alameda’s Escultura Social exhibition. If you’re into the Mad Men series, you might appreciate this opinion piece. And does any mortgage-foreclosing, American citizen really have time to sift through the 1,000 art pieces to see before you die? Seems Brobdingnagian at best.

In other news, I’d like to take a reader’s poll regarding upcoming interviews. What would you rather read about? Interviews with curators/artists/collectors/musicians/or others? Just post a comment. I’ll leave you with some more images from Beto…

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Looks like Emvergeoning has been collecting dust! Eek! Thought I could at least post a new image and some linkies. Who is afraid of Sarah Palin? Everybody’s talkin about golden parachutes but what about The Golddiggers? What will you be for Halloween? Do you see the vitality in a line? Don’t forget to vote early, or we will kill you oh so softly with this .

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{A brief excerpt from the menu of a local restaurant}

ATTENTION

Due to the high cost of supplied foods Siagon Express is obligated asking customers to read this agreement and understand clearly before placing the order. From time to time Saigon Express encountered customers with behavioral discrepancy trying not to pay for the order: By law customers have to pay the order even if they like the food or simply saying cannot consume the food. This trend of behavior raises an extra cost to our operation. It is time such behavior must be put to the hold any tolerance will be faced to the law accordingly and probably will bean to all court costs.

Sincerely,

Saigon Express

The Management

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In an essay from , Luis Buñuel, while arguing that gin stimulates the imagination, explains how he came to use two actresses to play a single role in his final film:

If I had to list all the benefits of alcohol, it would be endless. In 1977, in Madrid, when I was in despair after a tempestuous argument with an actress who’d brought the shooting of to a halt, the producer, Serge Silberman, decided to abandon the film altogether. The considerable financial loss was depressing us both until one evening, when we were drowning our sorrows in a bar, I suddenly had the idea (after two dry martinis) of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before. Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, and the film was saved. Once again, the combination of bar and gin proved ubeatable.

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{Hat tip}

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First there was Friendster. Then MySpace. Now Facebook. Next… HoffSpace?

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In between running around shooting photos of record stores and weird museums today, I managed to make it by the Alamo and catch Jacob Goudreault (fresh in town from Chicago, IL) doing a performance / painting give-away in front of our favorite old mission.

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Russia and Georgia are at war; the Olympics start; John Edwards confesses his affair; but the biggest news this week for those of us in San Anto: serrano chiles are back!

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Emvergeoning’s exclusive footage from the 2008 Pushcart Derby:

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Matt Fleeger from KRTU 91.7 (where I am a volunteer DJ) just sent us his interview with Cruz Ortiz about the Contemporary Art Month Pushcart Derby. The interview aired this airs tomorrow morning, and the Derby is this Saturday at Dignowity Park (see our event listing). We’ll be posting photos and video of the derby for those of you out there who crave mediation. Click on the little play button below to listen.

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public art? aqualung? pigeon coop? design by committee? I’m trying to get a good angle on it, but nobody seems to know ANYTHING about these. Pictured below, I’ve spent the last 2 months asking people “in the know,” if they know of, or have seen these objects, to no avail. Do you know anything about these giant acrylic hollow boxes, sheathed in metal and bathroom tile on the fore-front of our walk through downtown to the Alamodome? I’m not sure of the exact install date, but I have seen them unchanged in their current condition since the 2 weeks preceding the Final Four basketball games that gripped downtown San Antonio for a week. Possibly its unfinished? ..or maybe I just don’t get it.

(more images by clicking below)
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The lengths people go to to keep street art fresh (personally, I’m a bigger fan of the Indian Justin posted last week):

[via]

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Daniel Finkelstein discusses the intricacies of logo design.

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Ken Littles Rodeo HO HO made its final REGULAR appearance last night.  See for yourself :

a LOT more are available here.  

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Everything got screwed up. Emvergeoning’s calendar editor forgot to post Ms. Southtown, San Antonio’s artsiest drag beauty pageant, to our events listing; last night, when Ms. Southtown was happening, our trusty photographer was out working for The Man; and our amateur backup paparazzo filled up the camera memory right before the trophy was handed to the winner. I guess that’s why we don’t get the big bucks, and why I’m typing this from a cardboard box in an alleyway off Houston St. But here it is: Ms. Southtown in photos.

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Check in with Photoshop Disasters, a new blog documenting the travesties arising from careless use of the clone tool and other weapons in the photo “retouching” arsenal. Naturally, they mostly involve adding, removing, and distorting women’s body parts, as well as a few unruly hands. [hat tip]

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(The community gives him a saucy welcome.)

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