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

EMERGE recently went to see the newest addition to the Chelsea Market, The Milk Bar.  The once-typical Roneybrook Dairy storefront has been converted to a nostalgic space that conjures up images of Milk Bars of the past that reached the height of popularity in the late 1930’s.  Milk Bars were once a space where people could meet over milkshakes and play pinball; this soon gave way to fast food spaces that replaced the simple space and menu.

The newest interpretation of a Milk Bar has a menu filled with both new and old time favorite treats, Milk and Cookies and Macaroni & cheese is just two of the many feel good options.  The contrast of the vintage milk crates and modern fixtures creates a space that evokes memories of a childhood place one only imaged, or thought they always wanted.  We're nostalgic for the Milkman who never brought us milk.

 In doing so the Milk Bar symbolizes what Baudrillard refers to in SIMULACRA, "signs of culture and media that create the reality that we perceive".  We live in a world where our memories of childhood are mixed up with our interpretations of what is the perfect childhood. 

The media and in turn marketing has directly correlated with our desire and need to escape back into a past that is safe and secure. Although as Baudrillard quickly points out there is a distinct difference between what is reality and what is our perception thereof.
 

For the last couple years we have seen the success of products and services that capitalize on our need to reclaim a childhood that in truth very few of us have experienced.  The success of Build a Bear, Dylan’s Candy Bar and the Hershey Experience Store was achieved not through allowance money but through adults looking for their favorite childhood candy and long lost replacement stuffed animal. 

We have also never let go of our fascination with toys, Kidrobot just made it cooler to admit and display in our home and around the office. Besides the plastic characters, Tinker Toys are slowly making a comeback, as there is something about that old-fashioned feel of metal and wood in a world filled with plastic. 

A fellow marketer recently spoke about the fact that men's barbershops are making a comeback due to the fact that men seem to love an old-fashioned shave. Witness the runaway success of Freeman's Barbershop on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which incorporates the straight razor into its logo. We may not of necessarily have seen our fathers doing this but we're nostalgic for the idea of it.


Very few of us had a mother who baked cookies and made cupcakes, yet there is a line for a "homemade " cupcake at Magnolia's that never ceases to end.  The bakery is a NYC institution and has spawned several imitators around the city and elsewhere.
Along the same lines, Pinkberry may be garnering a lot of attention with its East Coast expansion, but it catches plenty of flack from blogs like Gawker, while people continue to celebrate the Summertime tradition of the old-timey ice cream truck, be it the music festival favorite Ice Cream Man or the neighborhood Mr Softee truck

The lesson here is that there is a market opportunity for products and services that capture a memory or experience for a generation who is craving comfort but who has not necessarily experienced it.






































































By Amy Daroukakis for EMERGE
 

Posted by James Friedman