ASPECT v. 15, “Influence and Reference” includes video documentation of AfterSherrieLevine.com. The original project is from 2001, the video documentation was made in 2009. As ASPECT is a DVD publication they use the audio commentary tracks for a critical analysis of the works. I was very fortunate: Marita Sturken gave an awesome audio commentary.

Chas Bowie wrote a really tight insightful essay for the show’s mini-catalogue entitled Total Money Makeover. Pacific Northwest College of Art’s UNTITLED magazine has just re-published the essay here. A choice snippet:

Monuments invariably testify to their own physicality as much as they do to the memory of the subjects they commemorate. Mandiberg’s installation of investment guides emblazoned with the logos of fallen banks is no different. The get-rich-quick volumes that comprise FDIC Insured were purchased from the dollar bins of Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where they served as pitiful markers of their own failure. For every bank that the government bailed out or brokered into sale, Mandiberg laser-cut the fallen institution’s logo on the covers of tomes such as Nothing Down, The Business Bible, and Dress Like a Million. At more than 220 titles and counting, Mandiberg’s library of financial failure is built upon the promise of buying even when you have no money, trading when you have nothing to trade and profiting when you have nothing to provide.

The full essay is here

The Frankfurt Book Fair covers Collaborative Futures.

Whether this form represents a challenge or indeed a threat to publishing companies is viewed differently. The booksprinters themselves are convinced of it, at any rate. “What we are doing is just one of many forms of writing and distribution that threaten the publishing houses”, according to a confident Michael Mandiberg. Publishing consultant Ehrhardt F. Heinold holds a similar view. He can certainly imagine that the growing self-publishing culture will one day make the classic publishing company superfluous. “In the USA, self-publishing is already a big issue”, as Heinold has observed.

The Japanese magazine Pen covers Collaborative Futures, the IMA Design Village, and Berlin in general

The German newspaper Taz.de has covered our Collaborative Futures booksprint. (English translation here) There has apparently been a lot of buzz about the book during Transmediale. I have received a lot of emails about it, mostly from people who think I am still there and want to pick up copies.

The US release will be March 4th at Eyebeam. Pre-order a copy now.

As I get ready to take part in the Transmediale/FLOSSmanuals book sprint for the “Collaborative Futures” book, I thought it was relevant to drop this blog post about an older interview about FLOSS and art.

A bit ago Dominic Smith of CRUMB interviewed me about my practice in relationship to Open Source and Free Culture. This interview is going to be included in a forthcoming 10 year anniversary book about CRUMB’s activities. Posting this slipped through the cracks, but you can find it here (along with a snippet below):

So there is ‘Open Source’ the Noun, and then there are 2 different versions of the verb ‘Open Source’, ‘to Open Source’. So you’re working on a project and you release it Open Source, that’s to Open Source a project. But the other version of to Open Source is a certain kind of reverse engineering, it’s kind of hostile or confrontational, and it’s to Open Source somebody else. I was open sourcing Sherrie Levine in a sense. So I think that a lot of my work comes from that appropriation and that’s a starting point.

OMG LOL in The New Yorker’s 1000 Words. Posted by Macy Halford

Graham Parker stopped by for a studio visit, and we had a great conversation. The highlight was when he told me to “choose my words less carefully.” In the description he writes:

First in a series of studio and show visits with contemporary artists. I’ve known Michael for some years – probably since a friend directed me to his Shop Mandiberg project. He’s recently been a research fellow at Eyebeam and is having an open studio there soon – mostly showing off work he has been producing with a laser cutter. He invited a few people along to do some studio visits in advance of that and I happened to have my camera with me when I went along. He’d set up a lot of work in one of Eyebeam’s main display spaces, so the effect was much more like a solo show than a regular studio visit.I asked Michael to talk me through a few pieces on camera and he generously agreed to do so – despite having no time to process what we’d just been talking about in our visit. It’s mainly shot under existing lights with a few stills dropped in, so the footage is a little grainy in places, but it should give an idea of what he’s up to.

James Wagner and Barry Hoggard came to see my installation last Monday. James has written up his impressions. James says:

Mandiberg goes where no laser cutter has ever gone before. Some of the work physically and dramatically distinguishes important newly-established contemporary technologies from their aging or defunct antecedents (many of which could once have been described as cutting edge themselves), The result is a visual dialogue charged with the passage of time and composed in the empty spaces we see “written” in and on various kinds of reference books.

One piece, a work in progress (surprisingly, lasers take their time), is titled “We have never had a year of peace”. When finished it will comprise the three volumes of the “Encyclopedia of the Third World”, lying on their spines next to each other, open at a random page in the middle where the artist has deeply burned the name and year of every war fought by this peace-loving republic since 1890.

Another body of work consists of a wall display of cast-off volumes describing how to make money. Mandiberg has “whittled” with a laser into their hard front covers to describe the logos of, according to the artist, “all of the failed banks of the Great Recession”.

Not directly related to the re-worked dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone directories, or investment monographs are some breathtaking laser-cut drawings of the security patterns ordinarily found printed inside those familiar small mailing envelopes used by banks and similar institutions.

More here (tx James!)