It’s been a little too long – especially given all the great things to write about from the past few weeks. I suppose we’ll have to look back in bullet point form:

-Can’t stop talking about the Olafur Eliasson exhibit that just ended at the Chicago MCA

Other friends who’ve visited commented on the simplicity and accessibility of the experience, but also the surprises to be found there. Those type of comments remind me of the desert experiences that keep coming back to mind in our brainstorming meetings: Is there a way to simplify film (while also making it huge) that clears the mind of digital distraction, opening people to profound experiences of the world around them? That’s why I like the tagline for Eliasson’s exhibit so much: “devices for the experience of reality.” It’s not so much “fantasy” that we’re interested in, but a new way of seeing what’s really there, and imagining what could come next.

In Eliasson’s work, I kept being taken back to the experience of nature. That seems so obvious, in a sense, but it was striking on many levels. As Wittgenstein writes in his collection of aphorisms Culture and Value, “You must say something new and yet it must all be old….You have got to assemble old bits of material, but into a building.”

-Long Now Foundation meetup in Chicago on Rosetta Project and Global Lives Project

I’ve watched the presentation by Global Lives executive director David Evan Harris, and really enjoyed what I saw. If you’re interested in hearing him talk about the project, I’ve embedded the video below. You may find yourself skipping around a bit, but the most Cube-related material comes about 21 minutes into the video. Part of the goal of the Global Lives project is to make an art installation to allow viewers to wander through various 24-hour long films of interesting but non-famous people throughout the world. This is a great idea, in my book anyway – and seems to be something worth celebrating and keeping track of for future viewing (so long as it gets made).

David Evan Harris, Executive Director of Global Lives Project from long now chicago on Vimeo.

Tags: art, Cube, film, global lives, Long Now, Olafur Eliasson

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under art, film, immersive art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.