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Pit three or four plump cherries and toss them into a cocktail shaker. Add 1/2 oz of the homemade rosemary cardamom bitter liquor and using a wooden spoon or a muddler mash the cherries and the liquor. Fill shaker with ice and add 1 1/2 oz the Willet’s Rye. Shake vigorously and strain into a cocktail glass. Squeeze a few drops of fresh lemon juice into the drink and add a sprig of fresh Rosemary as garnish.
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This game concept is the result of an ongoing series of conversations between two friends, curator Joseph del Pesco and game designer Al McElrath. McElrath was involved in the production of the single-player console (Xbox) version/translation of the popular PC game America’s Army (AA), the most successful tool ever deployed by the US Army’s recruiting department. “The game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined.” But AA is more than an advertisement. Like a flight simulator used for the education of pilots, AA purports to “provide players with the most authentic military experience available”. In other words, it occupies a slippery ground between a simulator designed for soldiers-in-training and a commercial game intended for the entertainment market. In fact, its proximity to “authenticity” may be the very thing that makes it such popular entertainment.
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“At this point, it is not so important to make “art.” Art cannot be taught. Anybody who wants to can make art. But how to make your money back after making video art?… I want my students to be well prepared to make video art. I will just teach about art politics.”
-Nam June Paik -
“Quotation, then, is the ultimate weapon for making one believe. Because it plays upon what the other is assumed to believe, it is a means by which ‘reality’ is instituted.” Michel De Certeau
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“FBI Agents showed up at the Whitney Museum of Art after the World Trade Center towers went down and asked to see one of Mark Lombardi’s drawings. The agency was interested in Osama bin Laden and his associates, and one of Lombardi’s precise hand-drawn flow charts was useful for this.”
- Good magazine (Fall 2011) -
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“Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.”
E. L. Doctorow via E.O. Wilson
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“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us to how live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse “negative capability.” He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had “the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.”
Jonah Lehrer
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Sherry Turkle, a professor of computer culture at MIT… in her 2011 book, Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.” The problem with digital intimacy is that it is ultimately incomplete: “The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy,” she writes. “We don’t want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in ‘real time.’”
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from Human, All Too Human, 1878
“Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continually good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgement, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. ”
Quoted in Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, 2012
“The Artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give us the most fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain. ”
Quoted in Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, 2011
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“Luhmann sees social systems as comprised of communicative events – meaningful utterances – which form part of a recursive network of communicative operations. In other words, for an utterance to figure within a social system it has to give rise to further utterances, otherwise it no longer contributes to the system.” … “Within this schema, art forms one of many social systems, which include, in modern society, the economy, law, politics, love, science. While Luhmann is sensitive to the materiality of the artwork – indeed he explores the ways that art draws attention to processes of perception – it is its communicative function that makes art into a social system.”… “The social effect and meaning of the artwork is tied to its role as an ephemeral communicative event, and although it might continue to exist as a physical object, this is no guarantee that it will have any further communicative, and hence social, significance. If it continues to function within the art system, this is because of its capacity to continue to produce further communicative events. Thus the artwork, when first produced and exhibited, constitutes a particular type of communicative event. If its production prompts the production of further works then it has functioned within the recursive network of the art system. It may of course prompt further communications beyond its immediate impact.”
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The conditions for artists in San Francisco have become increasingly precarious since the dot.com boom and bust of the late 1990s. Housing prices have ballooned as has the cost of living. In the US, California suffers from the least state funding for the arts as a result of the professionalization and privatization of the arts that began in the Reagan years and continues under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. The aftershocks of the culture wars continue to be felt on a national level as a general mistrust of artists as a political liability, despite growing audiences at major museums. The San Francisco Bay Area, however, has been feted as an oasis for the newly identified “creative class” which have, for better and worse, influenced policy makers and real-estate developers who see a thriving culturati as an important register in a city’s quality of life index.
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“Wittgenstein appeals to this picture in his ‘Philosophical Investigations’ to illustrate the point that if the same object can be seen as two different things, it shows that perception is not purely sensory and that we must attend to aspects in our account of perception”
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“There are now almost two million Americans who describe their primary occupation as artist. Artists constitute one of the largest classes of workers in the nation—only slightly smaller than the total number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the U.S. military (2.2 million).”