Last Saturday night was the opening of “Close Encounters”, a show featuring works by the legendary graffiti artist Saber from Los Angeles. Some of us from the agency, as well as hundreds of others from around the Bay Area descended on White Walls Gallery in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco to check out this highly anticipated show. The event was sponsored by Sparks, and that syrupy energybeer of doom flowed freely all night long.

The bulk of the work consisted of oil paintings of the Los Angeles cityscape at dusk and night time. This show cemented Saber as a highly skilled oil painter, illustrating his success in mastering traditional graffiti and fine art, a difficult and commendable feat.

His fine art is- like his graffiti has been for some time- undeniable. He took a straightforward approach to composition and brought the pieces to life through rendering psychedelic wisps and streaks of light emanating from city lamps, and at times blasting out of the sky, their sources unknown. Overall, his treatment of light was powerful. It alluded to a deep relationship and understanding of the city, one that has no doubt been informed by countless nights spent lurking through the maze of freeway and concrete structures that compose Los Angeles’ unique urban layout. The show also featured a scale model of his now infamous graffiti piece adorning the wall of the Los Angeles riverbed, complete with a neighboring Amtrak train. The actual piece is regarded as the largest piece of graffiti ever created, and 2007 marks the ten-year anniversary of its completion.

Links:
Known Gallery
The Seventh Letter in LA WEEKLY

Images:































































































































































































































Written by MB for EMERGE

The Tree Show last Saturday at the Giant Robot store on Shrader/Haight in San Francisco didn’t feature many big names outside of Matt Leines, but overall was a pleasure. The crowd was the typical anime/toy collector crew with a few hipsters sprinkled about, but the show wasn’t your standard-issue post-graffiti street art scene.

Featuring something close to 40 artists, the show stays true to its name, featuring works depicting and inspired by trees and forests and donating a portion of proceeds to the San Francisco Friends of the Urban Forest. While the philanthropic and eco-conscious angles are surefire winners these days, one thing EMERGE really dug about this show was the diversity of the work and the inclusion of a lot of female artists, who tend to get short shrift, especially in the dude-centric world of street art.

Here are links to a few a notables among the artists as well as a ton of photos from the show:

Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch

PCP

Matthew Feyld

PCP "Stand By Me At The Balcony Scene"























Mollie Goldstrom














































Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch "The Holy Tree"


Matthew Feyld






























Matt Leines























Matt Furie "Fine Food and Literature"























Kathleen Lolley "Willow Wisdom"






























Joe Keinberger "Tree Spirit Gives Of Itself"





























Aaron Brown "Mommy, Where Do Hippies Come From?"






























Tree Show III Crowd



Written by Scott McFadden for EMERGE

EMERGE has been on a visual art kick these days, so its nice to find a performative, new media event this exciting to talk about. What is it you say? It's called Pop Rally and its happening to celebrate Automatic Update, an exhibition going up in the Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

First up, let's talk about Automatic Update, a interdisciplinary look at new media art from 2000 or so onwards organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator for the MoMA's Department of Media. The basic idea for the show is that technology and society entered a wholly new realm with the emergence of the internet, generating a massive and often confusing churn of ideas, themes, technologies, aesthetics, and media. While much of the early media art from the mid-1990s became obsolescent as the technology evolved and adoption by the public shaped this process, later new media experiments settled into a more formalized mode of social commentary and play. As the show's literature attests: "By the year 2000, this quasi-revolutionary aura had dissipated and media art had settled into the mainstream... eas[ing] the somber mood of the times with entertaining presentations. Nevertheless, their humor does not soften their biting commentary on our social milieu. What at one time was Pop art has now become pop life." The show features work from Cory Arcangel, Xu Bing, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,  Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Paul Pfeiffer as well as the films Crash by David Cronenberg, Pi by Darren Aronofsky, the documentaries 8 Bit and Synthetic Pleasures, and six shorts by Ericka Beckman, Laurie Anderson, Miranda July, John Pilson, Pipilotti Rist, and Kristin Lucas. The show also features a more experimental program of screenings entiled The Artist and the Computer, which includes short films and animations by the likes of Arcangel and Paperrad.

Pop Rally is a program of MoMA and its affiliate PS1 focused on younger museum goers. For Automatic Update, Pop Rally has recruited Arcangel and Paperrad to curate a program of new media visuals and musical performances by Ben Jones of Paperrad, Cory Arcangel, Extreme Animals, Slow Jams Band and DJ Jazzy Jexxx and tickets include a chance to run around the Automatic Update exhibition afterhours.

The Automatic Update show runs through September 7, 2007
Pop Rally takes place Tuesday July 24
Tickets are available here.



Posted by James Friedman

Recently, EMERGE has been on an arts kick. It all started back in late May when we took a trip to Berlin, Munich and Paris. While in Paris, we caught up with our friend Sean Dack, a brilliant conceptual video artist and photographer, with a likeminded penchant for late nights and electronic music. After checking out an opening by an artist he works with at the presitigious Air De Paris gallery, Dack took EMERGE out to dinner with the artist Sarah Morris, the folks from M/M Paris and a bunch of other French art-world luminaries. Before we left to do a hilariously organized  dj gig at Le Baron, he introduced me to one of the most fascinating people I've ever met. Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator, writer, and director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. He's also consented to a rare q&a with EMERGE so to thank Sean for the introduction, we'd like to call attention to his latest creative endeavor: Future Songs.

The project pairs Dack's conceptual rigor and deep love for pop culture with the somewhat unhinged "predictions" for the future by acclaimed science fiction author Phillip K Dick. Composed as a book, downloadable from the internet, or purchasable from Dack's New York gallerist, Daniel Reich, Future Sounds takes texts from Dick's predictions- written in 1981- and pairs one for each year from 1983-2000 with the sheet music for the corresponding Number One single for that period. To find out which song  is which requires either an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music or the ability to play from sheet music.

It's a pretty interesting collision of two very disparate world views, the pop and the paranoid, and it's also interesting to see how the significance of the pop songs is coded through it's presentation as sheet music with the lyrics replaced by some oddly prescient visions for the future. Ironically, these prescient predictions are also coded in so far as they have to be separated from the more outlandish ideas involving Soviet aggression and alien viruses.

Completing the project is a brief text penned by Dack's mentor and Turner Prize nominee Liam Gillick who gleefully conflates Dack and Dick, calling them "Phillip S Dack or Sean K Dick." Pretty awesome all around.



































Posted by James Friedman

On the night of Thursday, August 2nd EMERGE went to San Francisco's 111 Minna to check out the opening of the Fecal Face 7.5 Year Anniversary show. The size of the crowd was a testament to Fecal Face's pull around the Bay Area, and to the quality of the work- which ranged from high to quite-high.

A line snaked down the alley and around onto 2nd street. Inside was packed, which is good if you're trying to get hammered and bump and grind on some fine young thing, but not quite as conducive to taking in the tremendous range of visual art on display.

What made all this notable (aside from the work itself of course) is the fact that Fecal Face has gone from a made-at-Kinko's zine to an online institution over the past several years, galvanizing an international audience thanks to regional arts listings (LA, SF, and NYC), blogs, online forums and online galleries open to public submissions. With such a scatalogical name, FF may never become ArtForum, but its carved a remarkably engaging and democratic space for itself and the artists it features both on- and offline.

For a full list of the artists, as well as short interviews with some of them, go straight to the source : www.fecalface.com.

















































































































































































 
































By Matt Bernstein for EMERGE

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Articles
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Influence Ripples + Social Media Fragmentation

Cutting Edge Abstract: "Newer social media landscapes involves content, community and conversation happening at multiple venues, times and with a varied degree of reach."
Why it's important:  What is a comprehensive marketing campaign?

No Car Day

Cutting Edge Abstract:  Sept 22 has been declared no car day in China & a 3rd of all vehicles will be ordered off the road.
Why it's important:  How would your life change if you were banned from driving?

Bike Dispensing Machines

Cutting Edge Abstract: How to make bikes publicly available?
Why it's important: Where else can we apply the Zip Car model?

Radical Honesty

Cutting Edge Abstract:  Everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying.
Why it's important:  Why not always tell the truth?

Wii Continues To Innovate

Cutting Edge Abstract:  Nintendo opens up the gaming system to indie developers.
Why it's important:  What effect does extending your business to your consumers have?

MTV So Irrelevant It's Looking to Broadway for a Boost

Cutting Edge Abstract:  MTV is playing catch up with other technology initiatives.
Why it's important:  Is MTV a dying brand?

How to Bring a City to Life: Urban Street Art

Cutting Edge Abstract:  Julian Beever paints the streets of San Francisco
Why it's important:  What's the importance of being continuously visually stimulated?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Tools
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

40 Unusual Websites

Grooveshark - P2P music trading that shares revenue with uploaders

Sunday - your own personal assistant.

Google Reader Search - Search your blogs & RSS feeds

Best Web Awards

New Video Downloader for Firefox

Dope Tee's - submit your idea or buy others'

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Events (SF CENTRIC FOR THE MOST PART)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
 
9/11/07 - Design is your business 
9/12/07 - What is Luxury? 
9/14/07 - Virtual Unreality
9/14- 9/16/07 - Dwell On Design 
9/18/07 - PSFK Conference 
10/3/2007 - Webby Awards

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Videos of the Week :
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thinking Outside the Box

Internet People

Genius: 2012 - Malcom Gladwell on collaboration in problem solving

Dangerous Knowledge

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Podcast of the Week:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Unconditional Love

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Branding Game of the Week:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My Black Valentine

Get The Glass

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DIY of the Week:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

HOW TO - Make a minimalist (and cheap) laptop case

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Art of the Week:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Real Artist

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Pictures of the Week:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

9 Wonder Brands that made it to the Oxford dictionary








































































































By Ken Fisher for EMERGE