In August, after a summer away from NYC, I walked in to my local bike shop, and noticed that they had the same configuration of vinyl on all of the ~20 rebuilt vintage bikes they had for sale. Earlier in the year I had brought the shop a couple of sample Bright Bike DIY Kits. When I saw their modification, I talked to the guy the guy in the shop, and he quickly confirmed their origins from those kits. In many respects, this was the goal of the project: get it out there, so that others could take it and make something better out of it. Awesome.

Their mod has much less reflective material, which means it is less visible at night, but also easier to put on, and less visually conspicuous during the day. I could imagine that visual conspicuousness during the day would be a significant factor for someone buying a bike with the kit already installed. It would have to be “tasteful” enough!

The other interesting effect of this distinctive design is it brands the bike as coming from this specific bike shop. They advertise the bicycles as “recycled” rather than “used.” They rebuild the bearings, and put new chains and tires and brake cables on them. They are clearly are trying to separate these bikes from the general used bike market, and their simple vinyl patterns becomes the brand’s mark.

Recycled bicycles at Brooklyn Bike and Board

Lisbon City Council and Miguel Amado Projects are presenting the exhibition “The Philosophy of Money”, which opens on June 22 at 10 pm at the Pavilhão Branco of the Museu da Cidade in Lisbon. This exhibition brings together works by 28 artists who, in the light of the current financial crisis, examine money as the “God of the modern age”.

Works by Alejandro Vidal, Alfredo Jaar, Carey Young, Carolina Caycedo, Cildo Meireles, Danica Phelps, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Joana Bastos, Liam Gillick, Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner, Mads Lynnerup, Mariana Silva, Melanie Gilligan, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Michael Mandiberg, Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, Raymond Pettibon, Regina José Galindo, Rita GT, Runo Lagomarsino, Ruth Ewan, Sara & André, Sparring Partners, Superflex, Triiibe, Xurban Collective + Alex Villar, Yonamine e Zanny Begg + Oliver Ressler
Curated by Miguel Amado

Museu da Cidade
Campo Grande, 245
1700 Lisboa, Portugal
www.museudacidade.pt

Through September 5
Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm

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.

A walk-through of my show in Portland at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery. More photos here.

Shot in Brooklyn in Fall of 2009 and Winter of 2010 in the midst of The Great Recession

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

Bringing together an invited group of media practitioners, academic publishers, digital content developers and academics, the conference is designed to assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy and authority.

The schedule is here

Participants include:

Cheryl Ball – Illinois State University
Brett Bobley – NEH Office of Digital Humanities
Steve Duncombe – New York University
Kathleen Fitzpatrick – Pomona College
Eileen Gardiner – ACLS Humanities E-Book
Josh Greenberg – New York Public Library
David Greetham – CUNY Graduate Center
Ann Kirschner – Macaulay Honors College, CUNY
Clifford Lynch – Coalition for Networked Information
Ronald G. Musto – ACLS Humanities E-Book
Phil Pochoda – University of Michigan Press
Tom Scheinfeldt – George Mason/CHNM
Trebor Scholz – The New School
Bob Stein – The Institute for the Future of the Book
Siva Vaidyanathan – University of Virginia
John Willinsky – Stanford/Open Journal System

Conference Description

The conference is built around a series of workshops, roundtable discussions and panels, spread across the day, at which conference participants will discuss and debate a broad range of issues related to the main conference themes, including: the impact of digital technology on academic instruction and research; the transformative impact of digital media on traditional forms of publishing, including academic monographs, textbooks, and academic journals; tenure and promotion in an era of digital scholarship; and collaborative research relationships within and across academic institutions and national boundaries. Demonstrations of diverse digital media projects, developed by faculty and doctoral students, will be offered throughout the day.

The conference will culminate in the evening with a public keynote address by cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. Prof. Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). We anticipate streaming the conference panels and keynote, both to preserve a record of the proceedings and also to make them accessible to those who are unable to attend in person.

The conference is designed to launch a dialogue about the radical changes made possible by digital media as they fundamentally reshape academic practice at all levels. We hope to explore multiple approaches to these major issues, mixing together academic skeptics and enthusiasts, media visionaries and naysayers, scholars from the global North and the global South, as well as digital and traditional publishers and content developers and providers.

The Great Recession is an exhibition of new work exploring the psychic implications of this most recent burp by the American economy, late Capitalism, gold hoarding, and the end of an empire. Some of the works on display include FDIC Insured, a collection of 220+ cast off investment guide books laser engraved with the logos of all of the failed FDIC insured banks, Under the Floorboards, a video about hiding and hoarding, and 1 Million Iraqi Dinars secured in a Zero-Halliburton case.

The show opens April 1st at the Feldman Gallery at PNCA, and runs through the end of May. There will be an opening April 1st during First Thursday from 6-8. Location is: PNCA Main Campus Building, Feldman Gallery, 1241 NW Johnson St. RSVP on Facebook.

I will also be giving a lecture the night before, March 31st, from 630-8pm at The Lab at Museum of Contemporary Craft, 724 NW Davis St. RSVP on Facebook. Both events are free and open to the public.

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

I am chairing a panel this Wednesday at the CUNY Graduate Center

CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
March 17th 2010, Wednesday, 7:30pm, The Skylight Room (9100)

Online video has rapidly developed genres, conventions, and topics based around a quest for video views and internet fame. These attempts often revolve around themes and tactics as diverse as political humor, cute animals, the lulz, appropriation, instructional videos, and the ambiguous amalgam of the confessional documentary that turns out to, in fact, be short form fiction. This panel will bring together three scholar-practitioners to present and discuss specific examples of this work: Patrick Davison, Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center; Michael Mandiberg, Assistant Professor of Media Culture, College of Staten Island; and Marisa Olson, Assistant Professor of New Media, SUNY-Purchase.

Co-sponsored by the Digital Media Studies Group and the ITP doctoral certificate program