wow

Performance (is not) Art, made in India

Jason Kottke twitted this video as "the craziest thing you'll ever see on the web". i'm not sure I agree (it depends on your definition of crazy), but I do think it's pretty amazing, and actually very cool if read through the prism of the performative context. It has elements of early classic 1970's performance work that focused on endurance and pain (Abramovic, Pane, Burden, Acconci, etc.), alongside a more contemporary dramaturgy we know from performance recent work, and the circus-like presentational strategy; And of course, we cannot look at it without at least a hint of orientalism. Anyway it's super entertaining. I especially like the Indian Paula Abdul and her reactions. Enjoy!

RIP Evelyn Mchale

23 year old Evelyn Mchale committed suicide jumping off the Empire State Building in May 1st, 1947. This unusual image was taken by a photography student the happens to be around a few minutes after her death. It haunts me since James showed it to me earlier today. A lot was written about it already, for example here in Jason Kottke's blog, where there's also a link to a caption from the original life publication of this amazing, eerie image. She looks like a hollywood star laying in her soft bed after a hard day on the set of some stupid comedy. The fact her suicide note was so desperately sad, writing about her fiancee "He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody", only adds to the depressive glamour of this moment. A beautiful demonstration of the archaic, basic relation between death and aesthetics. 

Don't go breaking my heart

Like many other gruesome goodies, this was also waiting for me on Yair Reshef's website. The reason I like it (apart from the narrator's voice) is that it takes a metaphor seriously, and we like to do that.
I think I need to do this live

Unintentional reactions turned poetry

This is like the 2 girls 1 cup reaction videos, only much, much better!

And speaking about unintentional reactions to audio-visual stimulation, I have to acknowledge these fantastic four:

Foolin

Writing a paper about Kierkegaard, I find myself once again spending considerable amount of time at the computer, which of course means considerable youtube time, which brought me back to this one:

Devendra Banhart "Foolin'" (Official Video) - YouTube: ""

'via Blog this'

I love it!

Go Roseanne!

A recent visit to one of the (boring) Based in Berlin exhibitions brought this video back to my mind. Israeli artist Asaf Koriat had a video there which was a split screen showing nine divas singing the American national anthem at the opening of the several super bowls. I found this as a good excuse to put one of my all time youtube favs here:



I'm still waiting for an opportunity to make the "Tikva" (Israel's anthem) version with Maya.

Pink Armadillo Attack!

Thank you Dr. Johnathan

Nina Kulagina

Just a little something I bumped into while researching on Telekinesis for the Lunapark which begins on Thursday. Apparently Kulagina was a top secret weapon! Don't you just love the cold war?



And here's another lovely one, with proper gorgeous David Lynch-esque set and costume design: