A few pretty things:
- Recommended by a reader: horizon magazine, the last issue being focused on retro digital art.
- Found via Infosthetics: State of the Union by Brad Borevitz, a visual analysis of all the State of the Union speeches, from George Washington to George W. Bush. You can see the vocabulary analysis, the relative importance of each word, and even see each of the speaches with the selected word hilighted. This is very instructive, scary, impressive. You see the history of a true power through the lens of a precise moment. These speeches are incredibly political, they are propaganda, and they show in a surprizingly clear way the evolution of the social mind, the social consciousness. These words, some of them highly charged concepts ("peace", "struggle", "leadership"), others apparently simple and trivial ("American", "must", "but"), often tell the stories better than the sentences they are part of. One of them surprized me the most, and I'm not sure it should be included in the analysis. In the G.W.Bush speeches, the most frequent word is "applause". Which, of course, is the applause of the public, transcribed. Was there no applause when the other presidents spoke? Then why suddenly do we need to be reminded of it, time and again?
- Finally, via Happy Famous Artists, someone I haven't heard from in a while: Pipilotti Rist. This punkish, trashy video artist (see here and here, with a fragment of the famous I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much) has a punkish, trashy web page with some really nice images (great sense of space!), and a few projects... Obviously, it's hard to understand or follow, but you get it, don't you? Rist was really the precursor of the Vanessa Beecrofts and other "post-feminists". Interesting to see how she still uses the punk esthetics to her favor.
