Vi Hart’s Youtube channel, one of Susan Jenning’s favorite bookmarks

1. Aurora Borealis from Abisko National Park in Sweden. Turn off the sound.

2.  Photos by the Hubble

3. Snowflakes.

4. Angelo Plessas’ Mirage Machines. (Hint: cursor)

5. This video by Steve Roggenbuck is as offensive as it is gorgeous. You will not regret watching the whole thing.

6.  Community Weblog, kinda like wiki for blogs

7. Occupy Wall Street, which is still active. Occupy Sandy was and remains an amazing mutual aid movement helping those devastated by Sandy. The Rolling Jubilee is a very interesting debt elimination experiment. Keep you eyes peeled for more projects to come.

9. Vi Hart’s Youtube channel.  This is actually one of my favorite bookmarks and I go back to it regularly.  Vi Hart is a smart, sassy, super creative math grrrrl. I love everything she does.

10, Facebook!  Everyone’s Facebook experience is dictated by the “friends” they manage to collect. From activists to artists to critics to writers to eccentrics, these people are not posting kitty photos or reporting on their laundry. Go ahead and friend them.

Jenna Pope, Photoactivist

Jerry Saltz, art critic

Damien Crisp, Artist/Writer/Activist

(Also by Damien Crips http://dthtxt.wordpress.com/)

Baratunde Thurston, writer,

Dina Seiden, Writer/Performance Artist

Oliver Wasow, Artist

Simon Beck, Snow artist

click to enlarge

“Hyperallergic relieves my sense that I’m constantly missing something cause I’m too busy to get to a gallery show or open-studio weekend”

I live in the world between art and technology, using sensors, devices and self-tracking iPhone apps to hand-build art installations and objects from the numerical patterns captured from measuring sleep, weight, travels, mood, computer usage and most any personal item that can be quantified. And the truth is, I run a background tracking app on my laptop that measures everything, and I could do a search and tell you exactly what I’ve opened this week…but that is simply too weird to share.

And anyway, asking what you’re reading on your electronic devices is like stealing a look into a friend’s medicine cabinet when you use the bathroom during a dinner party: a whole ‘nother peek into your life.

That said, right now, on my kindle is 2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly, and although the writing itself is horrible, the topics are curious and fresh. And you’ll find Science News and MIT Technology Review. Sadly, no art pubs.

Daily in my email, I read Mike Allen’s Playbook from Politico, and open it quickly no matter what else is happening.  I stay on top of the QuantifiedSelf.com as well as Hyperallergic.com, probably my favorite arts-blog (in addition to artcritical!) with massive coverage of New York arts. Hyperallergic relieves my sense that I’m constantly missing something cause I’m too busy to get to a gallery show or open-studio weekend. More like having a super-smart opinionated art friend keep me in the loop.

I’m reading more and more on my iphone, curiously longer reads than on my laptop. The New Yorker on my iPhone gets read almost cover-to-cover on my phone. New favorite is TNW Magazine. Also reading The Magazine, Appville and have apps on my phone and check them at least couple times a day for – The Verge, Tech Crunch, Politico and nytimes.com. Watch Rachel Maddow on my iphone too. Just started using Summly and the interface is incredibly good, am guessing they’ll aggregate more – but it’s new, and content feels a little thin. Oh, and never miss weekly TWIT podcast on my iPod.

Laurie Frick, Making Tracks, 2012. Cut wood, Abet Laminati samples and paint pen, on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Conn., December 6, 2012 to March 31, 2013.

Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to investigate the nature of pattern and the mind. She completed an MFA from the New York Studio School, and now studies each summer at NYU’s ITP technology and arts program. Formerly an executive in high technology, she also holds an MBA from the University of Southern California. Using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores self-tracking and human patterns.  Frick has been awarded residencies by the UT Neuroscience Imaging Research Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is the winner of the Austin Critics’ Table Outstanding Artist Award in 2012. Frick has published articles in The Huffington Post, Austin Statesman, Los Angeles Times, New Scientist, and has appeared on NPR’s Arts Eclectic. She has exhibited at Robert Steele Gallery in New York and Edward Cella in Los Angeles.

Archipelago: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artists-in-Residence 2012, curated by Kaegan Sparks is at the Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune Street at Washington Street, January 17 to 27, 2013

Mira Schor’s blog, A Year of Positive Thinking

Yes, we’re all reading non-stop mashups of images and ideas on Facebook. I like the immediacy of the scroll and the occasional real-time discussions that take place—these days, mostly about politics—but when it comes to viewing art and reading about it, short of the gallery or museum experience, I still prefer blogs. For this installment of Bookmarked, I have selected four blogs I visit regularly, all different from one another in form and content, but each one deeply satisfying.

Henry Samelson’s Buddy of Work has an interesting premise: inviting artists to submit “an example of their primary work alongside an example of their peripheral (buddy) work.” The format allows us to see the connections in an artist’s work, a window that’s pried open a bit wider by the words each artist shares about the pairing. Gelah Penn shows an installation and a work on paper; Lori Ellison, a drawing and a poem; Katherine Bradford, a small oil of a stack of syrupy pancakes and the same subject painted large on a construction wall in DUMBO. The viewing is addictive. Karl Bielik pairs a chromatic gestural abstraction with a moody black-and-white video of his band, Lark, while Emily Auchincloss’s painting and potholder pairing is a lark, sharing an unexpected compositional thread. Over 70 artists have participated since Samuelson started the blog early this year.

A different kind of pairing take place in Chris Ashley’s long-running Look See. The Oakland-based artist alternates his HTML drawings—digital minimalist compositions created by computer code and made for viewing on a monitor—with photographs he has taken in his travels. I find Ashley’s unpretentious views of nature personal and quirky, but truth to tell, it’s the color-saturated HTML drawings I log on to see.

Mira Schor’s A Year of Positive Thinking, now in its second year, is wordier and thinkier than the average blog. Feminism looms large, intertwined with politics and art. To read it properly you need time, but you will be rewarded with long pieces on Louise Bourgeois, for instance, or a three-part consideration of cave paintings inspired by Werner Herzog’s film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Don’t take forever to get there, though; Schor’s “year” may be drawing to a close. “I intend to continue for a while longer,” she writes, “although other writing projects I’ve been germinating may claim my attention.”

With art coverage on the decline in conventional media, Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof’s The Artblog is a model of how to write about a city’s art scene. The city is Philadelphia. Fallon and Rosof, both artists, along with a staff that includes art historian Andrea Kirsh and a number of contributing writers, offer reviews, picks, features, interviews and podcasts. The format, with seven opening-paragraph teasers on the home page, is now more magazine than blog, a testament to the big need this online publication is filling. If you’re planning a trip to Philly, this is your guide. But you may want to log on even if you’re not headed that way, just because it’s a good read—and there’s plenty of international coverage in there, too.

Unlike the rolling queue of social media, blogs offer their content for the long haul, archived and accessible. There’s context. I can linger.

Joanne Mattera, Diamond Life 22, 2012. Encaustic on panel, 25 x 25 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

Joanne Mattera is a widely exhibited painter who works in a chromatically resonant and reductive style she calls “lush minimalism.”  She is represented in New York City by DM Contemporary. Her work is in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, (Connecticut), and the Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey); at the latter it can be seen in “Patterns, Systems, Structures:

Abstraction in American Art,” curated by Gail Stavitsky, through early 2013. In her Joanne Mattera Art Blog she reports on exhibitions in New York City and wherever she travels, including the Miami art fairs in December. Mattera divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts.

Front page of Paul Corio's blog, "No Hassle in the Castle"

As an artist I am most drawn these days to reading blogs of other working artists.

In the painter Paul Corio’s “No Hassle at the Castle”, a ‘weblog on painting, horse racing and other subjects’ (the other subjects being mostly jazz and politics) I feel I am in a conversation with an informed and critical mind. Recently, Corio came to grips with Romanticism, in response to Mark Stone’s “Henri Art Magazine”, which has been preoccupied with ‘Romanticism in America” – perhaps the single most enterprising and enlightening analysis I’ve encountered in years on this subject –  one which lurks in the background of every artist’s thinking. Stone writes, for example, about DeKooning, and why he was different, especially at the end, from the other Abstract Expressionists – that his work was both transcendent and physical. More lately, Stone on Courbet is something every painter should read.

I’ve also encountered “Immaterial Culture”, by the pseudonymous d.richmond; this, again, is writing from the heart.  An artist like d. richmond writes out of a need to know, for his work.  Sharon L. Butler’s “Two Coats of Paint” and Joanne Mattera’s “Art Blog” are two others I frequently look at.

What sets apart the artist’s blogs is their earnestness and faith.  Critics analyze and dissect, but do they write from the heart, as artists do?  Artists may wish to promote themselves, but in writing they are usually working, and thinking.

It is the spirit of inquiry that sets the artists apart: they strive to understand, and the blogs give us the conversation, the searching coming to grips that once animated the New York scene when everyone lived below 14th Street.

Artists who write write for a purpose. They may be working out their own trajectories, erratic and capricious, but, mostly, they are writing out of necessity. This is a big part of what now actually moves art along; in my view, we need it.

George Hofmann, Duccio Fragment (No. 12), 2011. Acrylic on board, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

George Hofmann is a painter who lives and works in Albany, NY.  He grew up in New York, trained at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste in Nuremberg, Germany, and taught for many years at Hunter College.  A former director of the Francis J. Greenburger Foundation, Hofmann has served on the board of Art Omi and as a visual arts juror for SUNY/NYFA.  He maintains the website ArtistsResearchGroup.com, on the history of the Hunter College Art Department.

http://georgehofmann.com/