Prometheus (re)Bound

If you have not seen Ridley Scott's Prometheus, what follows will not make any sense. I decided to gently rewrite the film; to bolster what I felt was the movie's greatest strength: the cosmicism of Weyland and David. This is full blown fan fiction. The hardcore Alien and HP Lovecraft fan, William Powhida corresponded with me a great deal while I worked on this, and helped give what follows a distinctly Cthulhu feel, but also supplied a number of suggestions to help make the story fit squarely within the original Alien cannon. Spoiler Alert: What follows is a word for word script of the film's dialog and stage direction. What remains of the original is in black, my changes are in red. [The illustrator PJ McQuade, whose Prometheus fan art project inspired me to tackle this rewrite, has illustrated the revised opening sequence. Anyone else interested in illustrating other revised scenes should email me at info@johnpowers.us]

For Those In Moscow: The unModern

John Powers, Big Gini (2012)


I'll be giving a talk tomorrow night at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture at 6PM tomorrow evening (Saturday June 9th). I'll talk about my art work, the project I just completed, as well as share some thoughts on architecture and what it means to modern (or unModern) at the moment. I was invited as part of an effort to make some small connection back to the Russian Futurists. But what has been most striking has been how very different a project it is to be modern than is a was to be a hundred years ago. Those early revolutionaries were working from small, shallow data sets. Today our worlds are just as fraught and confusing, but we robust data to mine and refine. Please spread the word.

Star Wars & Modernism: Episode VI - Return of The Ugly Americans

Below are the slides for the third part of a three-part, 8-bit, art history lecture on Star Wars and American Cold War Modernism I gave via Twitter. The Introduction and Episode IV are supplemented with text that give a key for those unfamiliar with some of the artworld figures mentioned and texts alluded to. This final section will be presented without comment. (Return to Episode V)

Star Wars & Modernism: Episode V - Cold Warrior Clones

Below are the slides for the second of a three-part, 8-bit, art history lecture on Star Wars and American Cold War Modernism I gave via Twitter. The introduction and Episode IV are supplemented with text that give a key for those unfamiliar with some of the artworld figures mentioned and texts alluded to. This, and the final section will be presented without comment. (Return to Episode IV)

Star Wars & Modernism: Episode IV - The Hope of the NEW

Below are the slides for the first of a three-part, "8-bit", art history lecture on Star Wars and American Cold War Modernism I gave via Twitter. (Return to Introduction for more explanation.) I have added text to this episode to introduce some of the charicters and texts that are referenced in the "slides."

Star Wars & Modernism: An Introduction

Earlier this week on twitter I 'tweeted' what might be thought of as an 8-bit art history lecture. By "8-Bit" I mean that, in the same way an 8-bit portrait is accurate, if radically simplified, this is a blocky generalized history. I was spured to give this lecture after Todd Florio passed on the artist, Tom Sachs' observation that "Darth Vader IS Hitler. Yoda IS Buddha." Sachs owns Foamcore, police barricades, and can make an almost entirely air-tight claim on NASA, but Star Wars is mine. Sorry Tom. The "slides" I tweeted yesterday come from a "primer" I assembled as a joke while working on an essay for Triple Canopy a few years ago. Just as Florio spurred me to tweet, Dan Phiffer has spurred me to blog (he assemble the tweets into a blog post before I had a chance to, happily forcing my hand). Just as I broke up the tweet-lecture into three parts, I'll repost the slides here in three "episodes," starting with Episode IV (you haven't missed anything, thats where it starts - and no, there will be no be prequels). For twitter I introduced each slide's link with a short phrase, which would be a little redundant here. Taking advantage of the blog format, I've added some text to this intro and Episode IV that explodes twitter's 140 character limit. Like all lecturers, I look forward to questions and comments. For those interested there is also an archive of my posts on Star Wars here. Enjoy.

Archive

For some tie I have wanted to build an archive that would allow those interested to quickly search through old posts. Seeing how Sha Hawng was using Pinterest to reblog SWM posts inspired me to use that platform as a visual archive. So far I've created a number of "boards" each dedicated to a general subject. It isn't a perfect solution, but it seems to be a pretty good one. You shouldn't need to be a member of Pinterest to view the boards - if anyone does have any trouble navigating the Archive, or suggestions on how it could be improved, I hope they will comment either here or on my Pinterest page.

In Situ vs Site Specific

Vladimir Putin with Ronald Reagan; John Powers, Die Die Die (2007)
I'm traveling to Vyksa Russia today to take part in an arts festival. Vyska is home to a water-tower, built by the engineer/architect Vladimir Shukhov for a local metallurgic plant. The festival is built on realizing a connection between Revolutionary Russia of the early 20th century and the "street-art" of today. I won't be making any street-art, but I will be working "in situ"

Mind The Gap: Art & Ethics

MEI Chart from Andrea Fraser's “L'1% C'est Moi” in Texte zur Kunst 83; Michelle Vaughan's Instagram of vandalized Damien Hirst

I was on two panels recently. One was on the question of Art & OWS, the other was on Art & Ethics - I found myself making the same point at both: that high art prices are not the problem, they are symptoms of a problem. Along with high rates of mental illness, violent crime, and lower life expectancy, high art prices are not symptomatic of extreme poverty or extreme wealth, they are symptomatic of extreme gaps between the very rich and the very poor. Here is the point that I made to the OWS activists in the audience of the first panel, and the would-be artworld movers and shakers in the audience of the second: wealth is not the problem and the wealthy are not the enemy. The gap is a problem, and it's a problem for wealthy as well as the poor. If you are the richest American your life expectancy is shorter that the richest Greek, your likely hood of mental illness is higher, and the likely hood that your life will be marred by violence is higher. Corporations are not the problem, consumerism isn't the problem; the problem that plagues us all is the gap.

What Mike Daisey Did Wasn't Fair - It Was Right.

Moses crossing either the Red Sea or the Reed Sea (one make a better story); Mike Daisey opening up an enormous can of worms

So when I found out that one of my favorite episodes of This American Life turned out not to be true I didn't care. Not at all, not one iota. I understood that the author had presented the story as fact, had urged his listeners to check his facts, but that he had lied. It was a great story, while it cast doubt on the practices of an well regarded company, and cast doubt on the enterprise of journalism itself, it in no way made me think less of the author, TAL, or The Washington Post. I still love Malcolm Gladwell even though I now know he lied throughout the story TAL broadcast. My lack of outrage is because when I listen to TAL I don't expect "All The News That's Fit to Print," I expect something closer to the way TAL describes itself: “It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.” So while I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Mike Daisey had lied about the narrative TAL had broadcast - I was just as surprised, that by doing so, he had somehow besmirched TAL's journalistic credibility. When did Ira Glass graduate from being a talk radio Casey Kasem to NPR's Dan Rather?

Twinkle Fingers Are No Way To Decide A Death Match, or: Why I Won The Flux Factory Art & Occupy Debate

I couldn't find a picture of my Deathmatch opponents, so I tried to approximate the best I could (I imagine Hrag is Master)


This past week Paddy Johnson of Artfagcity, Hrag Vartanian of Hyperallergic, the artist Bill Powhida, and I were invited to debate the topic of the art community's place within the Occupy Wall Street movement. The debate was hosted by Flux Factory and organized and moderated by Douglas Paulson & Christina Vassallo. The debate is now available as podcasts. As I told my fellow panelists, the debate format made this the single most enjoyable panel I've ever been on. It helped that I know and like everyone else on the panel, respect their work and opinions, but I really enjoyed that there was no pretense at agreement, no impulse to reach a consensus. It made for a fun night of arguing with a group who all enjoy arguing. Perhaps because it was billed as a "Deathmatch" I swore like a sailor (or maybe because I always swear a lot), so by that metric I clearly won the debate (except the method actually used: twinkle fingers).

Freedom Towers and Political Fear

David Childs presenting his "Freedom Tower" design (2006); Occupy Wall Street protester being bodily removed (2011)

Recently I was asked to contribute a piece for a group show in Hong Kong about the "ways objects produce space." Rather than contribute a sculpture and hope for some sort of latter-day phenomenological experience between ‘object’ and ‘subject’ however, I decided to revisit an urban design project that I had not worked on for over a decade. In addition to recreations of three architectural counter-proposals I originally showed in March of 2001, I added a fourth that has been gestating for almost a decade, but has suddenly taken on new relevance. I proposed building nine “Freedom Towers” arranged in a tight grid formation and completely occupying the available open space of Tiananmen Square. I wrote a post for Rhizome about the entire project, but in review my thoughts I returned to a video of talk I attended by David Childs, the Chief Architect of SOM's "Freedom Tower." Child's 2007 talk was called "Building and Fear", and while the fear he was addressing in his talk was the fear of terrorism  - a fear he calls "anti-urban" - it is interesting to note that he reports that the push to close of the streets surrounding the New York Stock Exchange began before 9/11. My project is concerned with an older fear that has been shaping of cities, the fear of political protest. A fear I might call anti-civil. Modernity is city life. Civilization and civility both draw their meaning from the same place, the ways we have learned to behave by living together in cities.