Here are some of the fascinating entries in the Dollar Redesign Project. Many more on their site.
Adrian Chesser and Timothy White Eagle
“We are a team of two artists who work together under the name Mercury Vapor Studio. Adrain Chesser was given his first camera more than 20 years ago and has been taking pictures ever since. He is a photographer who over the years has developed a working style which often involves using aspects of ritual to capture his photographs. Timothy White Eagle spent his twenties involved in theater, visual and performance art. He spent his thirties diving deeply into ceremonial ritual, working extensively with native American, pagan and Haitian traditions.”
“Together we explore the intersection between art and ritual. We use ritual to create an environment of opening and safety. Together with our subjects we go into an undiscovered country. We ask our subjects to expose their truth. Through our lens we seek that same truth. We do our best not to expect anything in particular from a shoot. We play the sacred fool stepping off the cliff, trusting that we have everything we need.”
Video explains the world’s most important 6-sec drum loop
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac]
Anthroposcenes (Equivalents)
Landscape as inhabitations experienced by people of various socio-economic status, race, and class…
Landscape as spiritual or allegorical visages and the detritus in our wake…
Emotional intersections that have indistinct borders as much on actual land as they do in our experience of our environment, whether it be and exterior or interior space.
“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.” —Aurthor Rimbaud
“Equivalence is a pregnant discipline. Hence the photography that grows out of its practice is bound to develop and change with the photographers and writers on photographic criticism who become mature enough to understand the nature of the theory or approach. The Equivalent is one of those ideas that in practice grows by the efforts and accomplishments of the people who explore it.”
“…photographs originate in a known feeling state. They are not self-expressive, or self-searching; they are self-found. Communication is of no importance, evocation of little significance, competition nonexistent. They are shown as an event out of which Equivalence might occur. The possibility of the reader’s being confronted with something of himself is their only reason for being reproduced. They will function as mirrors of the viewer, whether he admits it or not. It will not be pointed out which of the images knows happiness, the one that knows anger, or the one that knows sadness because viewers of photographs need the opportunity to learn faith in their own feelings.”
Anthroposcenes (Part 10: Steven B. Smith)
Steven B. Smith is a photographer whose work chronicles the transition of the Western landscape into suburbia. For this work he was awarded the First Book Prize for Photography by the Honickman Foundation and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. His book The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West was published by Duke University Press (2005). He has received Guggenheim and Aaron Siskind Fellowship.
“When I encountered developers or other construction people, they tended to be pretty conservative, and they’d let me know my views weren’t really appreciated. [Laughs.] But I tried to avoid asking them what they thought—politically, I’m not in favor of this massive expansion and development.”
Exit Through The Gift Shop
voyage périlleux
Anthroposcenes (Part 9: Sze Tsung Leong)
The Artist on his work from a lecture series at ICP.
There are moments in history, however, that accelerate the rate of urban change: warfare, changes of regime, transformations of social structure, economic prosperity. These moments force societies to evaluate their relationship to their own history and their attitude to their future, in turn affecting their relationship to their environments.
China presently finds itself in one of these moments, as its recent transformations in politics, society, and economics have triggered changes to its cities to a degree not previously seen in its contemporary history. . .” — Sze Tsung Leong
Anthroposcenes (Part 8: Richard Misrach)
“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas.”—Richard Misrach
Anthroposcenes (Part 7 David Maisel)

Anthroposcenes (Part 6: Laura McPhee)
New Harvey Milk coming soon
March is Women’s History Month
Overdrawn
The New Yorker has a great piece on how Timothy Geithners policy recommendations “saved” the economy… at least the fortunes and futures of the 4 big banks. For the rest of us… I’m not so sure… interesting read.
“When President Obama came to office, the Bush Administration had already committed two hundred and thirty billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to big banks—a policy that Geithner, as president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, helped to enact. During the transition, he warned the incoming President that more “repugnant” actions would be necessary to shore up the financial system and restore economic growth. (In the first three months of 2009, G.D.P. declined at an annual rate of 6.4 per cent.) “We knew it would be politically costly, but not nearly as costly as if we hadn’t got it right,” Geithner said to me of the financial stabilization plan. “And we didn’t think we had other options available that were credible.”
“Geithner seemed exasperated by these critiques, and by the idea that the Democrats were now viewed in some quarters as beholden to business interests. “I don’t think the Democratic Party is seen as the party of Wall Street,” he said. “I think there are some in the Democratic Party that think Tim and Larry are too conservative for them and that the President is too receptive to our advice.” The reality, Geithner insisted, was that the Obama Administration had given just seven billion dollars to banks—mostly small and midsize banks, not big Wall Street firms—and it had proposed the biggest regulatory overhaul in seventy-five years. “Some on the left have fallen into a trap set by the Republicans, allowing voters to mistakenly think that the biggest part of the bank bailout had come under Obama rather than Bush,” Geithner said. He suggested that his critics draw up a balance sheet comparing the Administration’s expenditures on programs that benefitted Wall Street with those that benefitted Main Street. “By any measure, the Main Street stuff dwarfs the Wall Street stuff. Compare money for housing versus money for banks. Measure tax cuts for working families versus money for banks.”
“Geithner’s figures are accurate. But he and the Administration have failed to persuade the public. For whatever reason, a large chunk of the population—from liberal Democrats to right-wing Tea Party activists—does indeed believe that people who used to work for Wall Street firms, particularly Goldman Sachs, run the Administration. At Capitol Hill hearings and other public events, Geithner himself, who has been a public servant for almost his entire career and has never worked on Wall Street, has sometimes been identified as a former investment banker.”
R.I.P. Mark Linkous
Amon Tobin: Live In Brussels
“Recorded by Studio Brussels at the world famous AB theatre in Belgium – which arguably has the best sound system in Europe. After months of back and forth and despite everyone’s best efforts the mix was in danger of being edited into the ground to accommodate big labels and publishers. Rather than release a compromised version commercially, the decision was made to give it away for free instead.”
more from around the interwebs
Tumbling, drifting, amazed at how others manage to do balance art and life. I’m not talking about the million dollar “successful” ones, but the rest of us who are still toiling away for the that elusive carrot.
In my head everything is ruins, in perpetual collapse.
I used to go to art galleries to see new art, but now all you have to do is roam tumblr, or surf personal blogs, flickr and websites to see an astonishing array of incredible work… humbling and incredibly inspiring.
“If God is a DJ
Life is a dance floor
Love is the rhythm
You are the musicIf God is a DJ
Life is a dance floor
You get what you’re given
It’s all how you use it…”
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”—Mark Twain
“Men appear to prefer to ruin one another’s fortunes, and to cut each other’s throats over a few miserable villages, than to extend the means of human happiness”—Voltaire
“A Tale of Love and Darkness”
“Six years ago, when violence was the order of the day here, Elias Khoury’s 20-year-old son, George, was killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack. The Khourys are Palestinian, so the murder of George — who was out for a jog and shot from behind by gunmen in a car — produced an apology. Sorry, the killers said, we assumed the jogger was a Jew.”
“So, in memory of George, a charismatic law student and musician, Mr. Khoury did something that shocked many in his community. He paid for the translation into Arabic of the autobiography of Israel’s most prominent author and dove, Amos Oz.”