The Goons have been building! Goon City is a pixel-art project by Ryan Allen which is growing rapidly[1] because it is built on two of the staples of web 2.0[2], user-generated content and Google Maps. If you ever played Sim City the isometrically tiled layout will be instantly familiar, and the bustling streets are filled with everyone from the little lego man to Mr Orange staring down Mr Blonde. The result is brilliant, a technically slick train smash of fanboy art and pop culture references.

Here’s a couple of snaps of how Goon City has grown over the last while.

circa 16 July

circa 16 September

19 September

My favourite inhabitant is Thich Quang Duc (who sits near the city center) and apparently Waldo is also around.

Thich Quang Duc

Christmas ’07 brought a new level of high-end retail to Cape Town. The charge was led by Louis Vuitton which opened an impeccably designed and massively intimidating store in the V&A Waterfront’s new luxury shopping hall. Gucci, Prada and Jimmy Choo followed shortly thereafter and now even Canterbury has taken its place, peddling a luxury line called Off Field.

What originally drew me to the LV store was the window display which I had read about in an ’07 edition of Wallpaper[1]. The display, named Latitude 48.914/Longitude 02.286, was the winner in an international design competition and the elegant lines of its balsa contours are just so – luxury. The display was very impressive, very high-end. But now LV have a new display and I’m ready to name this as my design statement of the year.

The display is of a wall of chromed surveillance cameras hovering around an LV product. The cameras watch the product adoringly, fixated by its beauty. The arrangement of the cameras render them more like silver hummingbirds buzzing around a flower than their cold steel counterparts on wet London streets.
By fixating the cameras on the product in such a swarm the display makes several powerful associations all at once. The first is about desirability; the way the cameras fawn over the product is more about desire than control. The second is about pervasive celebrity. The cameras act as paparazzi[2] to the scene and the products are the images of a pristine 24/7 society.
But it is the last association of the display that immediately made it, to me, the culmination of 2008 modernity. I don’t like using the word zeitgeist, but the LV display makes an immaculate case for total surveillance as being desirable – a powerful luxury. The cameras themselves are chromed and, unlike the viewer who is separated from the display by glass, share a rarified, exalted space with the products. By desiring the beautifully made bag or tie we also reach out for the privilege, wealth, exclusivity and protection of the cameras.

The standard conservative[3] response to surveillance is ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong you shouldn’t be worried about it’, and invariably total surveillance like that which is emerging in the UK ends up being a protective shield for the wealthy who remain behind the deeply tinted windows of their estate cars until they are ready to emerge into the public eye. The last few years have crystallized a deep-rooted desire for luxury as defined by LV, Ralph Lauren and Armani[4], their products are the standard-bearers for a life lived well. And within such a well-lived life surveillance is not something to be feared. Pervasive surveillance loves you, it holds you in its tender gaze as you emerge from your SW1 home and it protects you from the grime through which you temporarily pass.

Update - 19 September: AnimalNetwork featured a variant of this display which places the product in a museum-type glass case. In this version the cameras act as protection against burglars and offers a humorous spin, in effect – this is what we need to do to keep people from stealing our product. Very desirable.

I first saw the work of Mark Jenkins on a Discovery channel short feature[1] which shows both his street installations and his nature sculptures. Mark Jenkins is resident in Washington DC who uses clear packing tape[2] to create sculptures that he then installs on city streets or poses in natural settings (notably his hometown of Fairfax Va). He has said that visiting a Juan Muñoz exhibition in 2001 inspired him to start doing street installations using a casting technique that he came upon as a child and later developed while living in Rio de Janeiro.

I was teaching English in Rio de Janeiro and had a lot of downtime between classes. One afternoon I’d made a large tinfoil ball, just to have something to play catch with while lying on the sofa. I decided to make a second one out of tape, but there wasn’t enough left on the roll to do it. The trick I’d figured out as a kid popped back into my head, and I cast the tinfoil ball with the tape. I was impressed with the results and decided to do a coffee pot. A couple months later, I’d gone through several hundred rolls, casting everything in my flat, including myself. The walls were thin in my apartment building, and my neighbors weren’t too thrilled at the sounds of packing tape spinning off the roll all night and day. One annoyed neighbor threw mud at my clothes drying on the window ledge, but I couldn’t be stopped.
themorningnews

Jenkins’s street installations (the series is named Embed) remind me very strongly of Banksy‘s work in that because the pieces are life size figures in everyday situations they are at first invisible to passers-by and only register as art installations when you at the second glance actually see them. The surprise effect of finding an installed/embedded piece of art which appeared over night in your neighbourhood is what makes these installations valuable and fun[3].

I want my work to get urbanites to question the authenticity of their surroundings.

Another series, named the Storker Project, places clear tape babies on streets performing feats that they shouldn’t be able to. The Storker effect is more disturbing than the embedded pieces because the babies are clearly unnatural[4].

Babies are wonderful but also fragile, and installing the kids outdoors to fend for themselves like a fresh crop of cicadas hits an unsettling nerve with some people. [...]. Sometimes I install them in playful positions, while other times they’re scavenging or hanging on for life.
themorningnews

Part of what appeals to me about Jenkins’s work is that the pieces exist, but are not really there. They are either temporary, or partial or fantastic/unnatural or (most appealingly) transparent spectres. And when the sculptures are left transparent they are no longer human or animal, nor are they the cocoons or shells left by humans or animals. They seem to me to rather be nothing more than memories of or ideas about their subjects.

But without doubt it is Jenkins’s nature work that appeals to me most. This consists of two parts, transparent tape sculptures of man made items (and men) in natural settings and transparent animals in urban settings[5]. The sense of displacement that comes from seeing ducks float in curbside ponds is deeply melancholic. And these are the pieces that are the art of not being there[6].

We’ve redesigned our environment to surround ourselves with the artificial and in the process alienated ourselves from the natural environment and our own animal selves. We are more like the tape men then our ape men forefathers.
Belio

Mark Jenkins’s nature sculptures are things that are missing from their surroundings, sometimes their being missing is ok and other times I wish they were really there.

The world keeps exploding; a Burmese cyclone and the junta block all ports, China’s earthquake inconveniences the Olympics and in South Africa xenophobia causes barbaric violence. There is no beauty to be found in misery or fear, but a Chinese wedding photographer recorded something haunting[1].

These photos were taken when the recent earthquake (which has thus far claimed 50 000 lives) struck during a wedding in Sichuan, China – all 33 guests survived.

The combination of the formal intention of the photographer who is flung into a documentary role together with the detached shock of the wedding party produces some amazing images that seem at once posed formal and lost. I want to connect the image of the bride with Marie Antoinette as Versailles is lost.
More than anything it reminds me of my favourite Cindy Sherman image – particularly the colour.

PS. The above slidy script is modified from CrossFade2

As part of my quest to combat bandwidth thieves with Satan I came across DearComputer.nl’s Google Image Ripper[1]. It’s a service that will query Google Images and display the full-size images of the search results in no apparent order. Essentially it rips the images from the warm womb of their hosting site and spits them out in an explosive bricolage.

Dear Computer – surprise me

What’s interesting about it is that it seems to have a magical ability to present, in one jumbled up mess, the intimate aesthetic of its subject. Somehow, through its collected images, each subject comes to its right. And, of course, that aesthetic changes daily as the internext changes its mind about its subject – what the internet thinks about abortion today is not what it’ll think of it tomorrow. It’s fucking profound, man.

My next post will be a music review for Burial’s Untrue and Cocteau Twins and for both of these Dear Computer gets it right. Of Burial we know nothing more than his single sketch. The Cocteau Twins shoegaze from the 80s 4AD.

So go ahead, have some fun with George Bush(easter bunnies and Jesus), global warming(Al Gore, children and graphs), suicide(Tibet, Singulair and Pete Wentz), Zimbabwe(hands and queues), best life(astronauts, Oprah, Joel Osteen and Patrick Dempsey).
Your dear computer will project the glowing light of its subject onto your wall.