Infoviz Art

I went for the naked people, and they didn’t disapoint: The Artist is Present, the big-deal performace art retrospective at MoMA through May 31, is well worth the trip. A few of Marina Abramović’s pieces broke through my instinctive skepticism, doing wierd and entrancing things to the passing of time. A few didn’t, but were interesting enough anyway. See it for yourself.

On our way out, my friend and I found ourselves in front of a big screen filled with bobbing pink baloons. Each represented a real profile pulled from a dating website; touching the screen sorted them by age, sex, opening and closing lines, ideal first dates. You were invited to explore the swirling shapes, wondering about the people on the other side, or try your hand at avatar matchmaking.

Around the corner were other examples of “infoviz” art, creative representaions of real world data. Carefully planned and yet largely out of the artist’s control, data mining and information visualization is fertile ground. Edits to Wikipedia entries, airplane and taxi traffic, and computers pondering chess moves translate surprisingly well to museum walls.

Every morning, planes take off in a wave that rolls across the country with the rising sun. Rendered in glowing white against blank black in a looping video, this looks like fireworks, or anemone orgasms. Wonder about all those journeys and destinations; watch the cycles, like breaths. The sensual and cerebral layer deliciously.

Explore more artist/data collaborations in this Slate slideshow. Don’t miss the massive and engrossing piece on break-ups, or the eerie Radiohead music video. Of course, most data visualization doesn’t get labeled fine art, but it can be as fascinating and moving as anything in a museum: check out some of the best here and here.

The First Pop Star

There have always been outsized personalities. Before mass media, talent was recognized and rewarded locally, in parlors and living rooms or on modest stages. Once modern technology let us find these performers and broadcast them around the world, however, a new set of skills developed: how to be a star.

Lady Gaga

The art of mythmaking and headline grabbing is a curious mixture of PR and performance. Honed by The Beatles and Madonna, it was perfected by Lady Gaga, who has made herself news with astonishing skill and speed. But nothing she’s done is new— save a few tweaks for the social media age, she’s learned from the best.

And Eva Tanguay was the best. She put on propulsive, kinetic extravaganzas, changing costumes every three minutes. She wore elaborate, outrageous outfits, had expensive taste and a “raucous love life” (including a black man!), and carried on high profile feuds with other celebrities. She sang about herself and her own fame, and even about her copycats, performing a precursor of “The Real Slim Shady” called “Give an Imitation of Me.”

Most importantly, she made sure everyone knew every juicy detail, along the way creating celebrity as we know it. Jody Rosen, writing in Slate, found the story:

She was the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity, with a cadre of publicists trumpeting her on- and offstage successes and outrages… She was the first singer to mount nationwide solo headlining tours, drawing record-breaking crowds and shattering box-office tallies from Broadway to Butte. Newspaper accounts describe scenes of fan frenzy that foreshadowed Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre and Beatlemania.

This brazen and thoroughly modern career, built around the desirability and the desires of one willful, self-made woman, lasted from 1904 to 1920.

Eva Tanguay

Rosen again:

She concocted publicity stunts (“Eva Tanguay, the Only Actress in the World Who Ever Made a Balloon Ascension”); threatened to retire before making splashy “comebacks”; contrived tell-all confessional interviews for magazines; and struck an ironic attitude toward these machinations, confessing her lust for attention in songs like “I’d Like To Be an Animal in the Zoo” (1911).

All of Tanguay’s story is like this: fascinating, eerily familiar, and unfairly forgotten. The Queen of Perpetual Motion only made one record and ended her life ignored and alone, but she paved the way for every media savvy superstar we’ve seen since. Read Rosen’s whole article, which goes into amazing detail about her singing and dancing and includes a sample of her voice. It’s well worth your time.

There’s a wonderful postscript to this story. Tanguay’s chart topping hit, the one she recorded, was “I Don’t Care.” It’s the “My Prerogative” of 1904: “I don’t care / What they may think of me / I’m happy go lucky / Men say that I’m plucky / I’m happy and carefree.” Shortly after Rosen’s article ran, Slate found and posted a clip of one of Tanguay’s most famous descendants performing “I Don’t Care.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Britney Spears.

That little girl can sing. What ever happened to her? How come these things never turn out well?

…Or Not to Tweet

I signed up for Twitter a week ago at the request of a family member, and after resisting for so long, I’ve found it to be exactly what I expected: equal parts fascinating and ridiculous. I’ve read the stories about how powerful it was this summer in Iran, and the stories calling that into question. I’ve looked up what a “hashtag” is and wondered what Ashton Kutcher could possibly be saying that is so interesting. (I still don’t know.) I’ve marveled at my ability to look up what people near me are tweeting, and been amazed by how little I care.

One Slate article I read highlights the 90% of users of the service who don’t write often… or at all. Orphaned Tweets collects messages sent by those who “sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.” They offer strange and often hilarious glimpses into anonymous lives: kttheet was “Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL),” and anord04 was “eating a miniature pie.” DouglasAllen, in his first and only tweet, wrote: “I am writing an email to the makers of Spray N Wash to thank them for making a product that got the blood stains out of my new PJs and robe.”

Click on these accounts and you’ll find most of them have now been updated, after a year or more of inattention, presumably due to this very article. The second kttheet post assures us “My clothing is now appropriately sized,” and anord04 seems to be enjoying his new fame, as he is currently “Making fun of people for following me on twitter.” DouglasAllen, however, has never revealed what came of those blood stained pajamas. I fear we may never know.