#ignews

"Protecting your privacy can be a difficult task in today’s world of information technology. With surveillance cameras on every corner and a recording device on every smartphone, there’s a good chance your image has been captured somewhere without you even knowing it. Safeguarding your mug in the future is set to become even more difficult with advancements in facial recognition technologies and wearable computers like Google Glass.

So what can you do to ensure your identity remains intact? In Western countries the answer would be simple: put on a pair of sunglasses. In Japan, however, sunglasses are a much less common sight, and many consider them to be worn only by those trying a little too hard to look cool, and in more extreme cases associate them with the yakuza lifestyle. Researchers at the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo have addressed this issue by designing a non-threatening pair of white shades to protect both your identity and your public image, dubbing them the “Privacy Visor”..."

To read the rest of this article, please visit: http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/11/18/new-privacy-glasses-protect-your-identity-and-your-image/#more-102575 *we do not own these images

Check out this thrifty and informative article that sheds some light on the mysterious realm of art collection.

"Woody Allen made fun of art galleries. They were always his preferred backdrop for the most pretentious conversations on earth. Add to this the crazy cost of art and you have a rich comic stock indeed. The first work I bumped into at the recent international art fair Sydney Contemporary was Transportation by Damien Hirst, price on application but understood by many to be offered at $900,000 – the kind of price that makes collecting art appear a hobby for Russian oligarchs. But I collect art and I am not rich. And most people I know, including very serious collectors, began their collections with $1,000 or less.

Gallerists and artists need collectors and we are actually expected to start small. Even the gallery noted as featuring the most expensive item at the Sydney Contemporary, Gow Langsford in Auckland, sells younger, emerging artists alongside scary brand-name labels such as Warhol and Picasso. I quite fancied the small canvases by Richard Lewer, and at NZ$1,500 (AU$1,315) the prices are decidedly less terrifying. Sometimes you need to take a risk and spend more. If had $10,000 I know that the purchase of a large Rosemary Laing photograph would be a sound aesthetic and financial investment. Sydney dealer Annette Larkin spent a week's wage on a photograph by Robyn Stacey in 1987 and said it was both "terrifying and very grown-up".

Matthew Day Jackson, "Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue"

Running till October 19th

Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street

“The unobtainable distance, no matter how small, is an infinity, Artists go to that space. It is a space where others cannot or do not want to go, a space which is real and often dangerous and they report back from there.”

  Artist Matthew Day Jackson works with both traditional craft techniques and cutting edge computer mapping to make work that exposes the layered and often dark relationships between technologies abstractions and the effects of time. To locate the viewer into a space beyond the limits of physical experience into a possible sublime, where, as he describes as “the Horriful”, the power, sacrifice and morality of this infinite realm contains the potential to create both horror and beauty.

He opens the show with a custom built car “VICTA” and “House”, a silkscreen on paper mixed with grape flavor aid, rust, ink, lacquer and scorched wood. Resembling a foreign planet, more so a moon, this piece placed besides “VICTA” almost welcomes the viewer to take a ride into this foreign place that Jackson speaks of, a place that is vague, fearful, foreign, but intensely familiar. Next we encounter his “Scholars Stone” a huge mass of basaltic ash, magnesium chloride, polyurethane foam, epoxy and steel, this piece replicates that of the “Scholar’s Stone” which is famously located in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Scholars rocks have been admired as a Chinese literati for centuries as objects of contemplation, sculpted by time by nature, these spirit stones represented a distant inaccessible paradise, a dream destination. Sculpted with the aid of digital technologies, Jackson is playing between the fissure of reality and fiction, reminiscent of Vija Celmins rocks, where the original was indistinguishable between the copy.

The most interesting pieces consisted that of his deconstruction of the human body, in “Veins”, “Nerves”, ”Muscles”, and “Bartholomew”. Other than the striking reality of these structures, resembling tree branches, decaying skulls, and twitching nerve impulses. The titles are what really peaks interest, as they are all distinguished for what they really are, and belong to know particular person at all. Except that of the outer skin, “Bartholomew” whom of which was on the Twelve Apostles of Jesus, and is usually identified with Nathanael, who appears in the Gospel of John. His martyrdom is identified with his many miracles, one mainly dealing with weight. The people of Lipari took his solid silver and gold statue from inside the Cathedral of St Bartholomew and carry it throughout the town, where it progressively becomes heavier, and heavier until it cannot be lifted at all. Within seconds walls further down where the towns people were headed, collapsed. If the statue had been able to be lifted all the towns’ people would have been killed. The statue also deemed itself to be of no value during World War II when the Fascists looked for ways to finance their activities. When the statue was weighed for its worth in silver, it only weighed a few grams. However in reality it is made from a monumental amount of kilograms of silver and is considered a miracle that it was not melted down. This added layer of history to this piece brings us once again deeper into the inner layers Jackson is drawing us into, as his “Bartholomew” has been stripped of its vital layers, and entered certain weightlessness as well. 

By Irene Maro

*I do not own these images