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Story

1:1 ping pong ball replica

9th September 2024 by philcain

I made a near-perfect replica of a ping pong ball out of clay. ■

Filed Under: Story Tagged With: art

Robert Longo at the Albertina

4th September 2024 by philcain

An exhibition of the huge photo-realistic charcoal drawings of Robert Longo opened today at Vienna’s Albertina. The skill is mind-boggling. Catching my eye was Freud’s couch pillow and a meticulous drawing of a Pollock drip painting. ■

Filed Under: Story Tagged With: art

Alfred Kubin, the aesthetics of gloom

27th August 2024 by philcain

Life is”a dream and a fear” mused Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, an outlook shown in a new doomscroll of his pen and ink drawings. It seems less the “Aesthetics of Evil”, as the Albertina Modern exhibition is called, but that of unremitting gloom.

“I do not work for pleasure, but to forget the disgust I feel for myself and the whole world,” he said. It does not appear to have been a joke. ■

Filed Under: Story Tagged With: art

Calling time on “Where’s Wally?”

16th July 2024 by philcain

This is fiction. There’s more here

“Where’s Wally?” demand the covers of dozens of Martin Handford’s picture books. This has gone on long enough. The question we should ask ourselves is, “Why?” What is the purpose of locating Wally? What is in it for us?

 The same question might be asked of the four other characters the same author demands we locate, namelym Wizard Whitebeard, Woof, Odlaw and Wenda.

Does complying not simply making us complicit in what is likely to be an unlawful surveillance campaign, an infringement of privacy at least, if not civil liberties? 

If any of them are activists, might we not be imperilling their civil rights? Or, if they were covert agents of the state, we might be undermining delicate counterterrorism operations.  Why rely on human agents for automisable surveillance tasks if not to condition Wally’s fellow citizens to see themselves as part of the machinery of mutual surveillance.

If we discount the clear wider social concerns, is the Wally phenomenon not encouraging an unhealthy personality cult and normalising mass stalking.

It is also outmoded. In this digital age the whereabouts of Wally and his cohorts would be more efficiently found using artificial intelligence techniques. 

For all its shortcomings and dangers AI can already be used to free us from robotic uses of our intelligence for more creative ones. We should take full advantage. Our kids should be honing their Javascript rather than wasting their time with a routine image recognition task.

Another hypothesis is that the Wally-seeking imperative is posed by the character Wally himself. If this is the case, should we not be concerned by his ceaseless demand for our attention?

 Psychologists will tell us that the demands to be seen and pursued are typical of someone who reliant on constant affirmation. Who but a rampant narcissist would keep up this attention seeking charade for nearly forty years?

Let’s be cynical for a second: What better way would there be for an egomaniac in search of biddable acolytes than to induce an unquenchable need to find their leader’s likeness in any given scene.

  We should, finally, recognise that, after nearly four decades, Wally’s location has proved to be of no material importance. It is high time we accept this and stopped concerning ourselves with it.

In doing so we might ask ourselves: Who made us responsible for finding Wally anyway? Surely he has friends and family who can look for him? We should rest assured somebody else will find him if necessary.

And, if not, he can just stay lost. He has all the necessary tools to navigate and make himself known. Could he not simply instagram selfies with geolocation like the rest of us?

Finally, I must ask, would Wally search for us if we were lost in a large crowd? I think not. I for one would need to see signs of reciprocation before investing more time in searching for him. ■

Filed Under: Story Tagged With: fiction

The End

18th March 2024 by philcain

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Filed Under: Story Tagged With: fiction

“The Beauty of Diversity”, Albertina Mordern

17th March 2024 by philcain

An exhibition to show the breadth of the Albertina Museum’s contemporary collections, 10am-6pm, until August 18th 2024

Smooth Running (2005-2013), Claudia Märzendorfer

Dancing Figure, Sungi Mlengeya

Creature, Michel Nedjar. Made from cloth, sticks, straw, fibres, mud, animal blood. ■

Filed Under: Story Tagged With: art

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