Showin’ some stuff in Brooklyn.
Free booze et cetera.
Facebook Event // Google Event
AMO Studios presents an exhibition by New York GIF Collective, GIFRIENDS, titled From Point A to Point B. Gifriends, consisting of Michael Fivis, Marisa Gertz, Peter Marquez and Alex Thebez, has been making GIFs together since 2010. The exhibition opens on December 7th, 2012 at AMO Studio space in Brooklyn, New York, running until December 9.
“From Point A to Point B” features a collection of GIFs made between 2010 - 2012, all relating to and created in the act of travel. Shot across Asia and the United States, the GIFs tie together instances separated only by space and connected through the artists’ point of view.
The animated GIF is an Internet specific format. Finding itself somewhere in between stills and motion, the looping, moving images act as vignettes of a familiar urban experience. The subjects of the GIFs mirror the in-between nature of the medium by capturing the often overlooked moments that occur between point A and point B.
This is not travel photography as it is in the context of a “travel magazine” which is associated with leisure and, depending on the means, luxury. Our kind of travel is maybe more accurately described as transit - a constant, endless, frenzied, everyday motion. As travel has become easier, and more necessary, the experience of travel has become flattened and regularized. We are taking these non-places and reanimating them using the GIF format. Technology allows us to capture video quickly and cheaply and the continuing evolution of the Internet as a platform to share this imagery has created an environment in which the GIF can flourish. It allows us to view a video like we would a still image, a singular moment in time being replaced by a looping moment in time.
The GIFs in “From Point A to Point B” are unstable. They twitch, they flow, they have no end and no beginning.
*A website mirroring the installation at AMO Studios can be viewed at
http://a-b.giftedtogether.com/.
AMO Studio, New York NY
55 Waterbury St. Brooklyn, NY 11206
Dec. 7 - Dec. 9, 2012
Opening: Dec. 7, 20:00 - 23:00PM
www.giftedtogether.com // www.amostudios.biz
And the other 59 seconds in Changzhou and Shanghai.
46 Seconds of Beijing
Favorite New York Experience #197: The MTA Maintenance Lights
(Bushwick, Brooklyn)
The GoPro is all that’s left.
(Bushwick, Brooklyn / Meatpacking, New York)
About Julia & Edward
Last December a TracPhone was found at the restaurant I work for and it remained unclaimed for some time.
I found a charger to check if there were minutes left on it. I found that it had a little over a hundred minutes remaining and about a year’s worth of text messages between the phone’s owner and his prostitute.
While the conversation is soppy at times, it’s never disgusting. In certain periods you might even believe that the phone’s owner, Ed, and his provider, Jul, shared a connection that transcended the “business”-only relationship. But maybe she’s just that good.
A ton of facts can be inferred from the hundreds of messages. He is a painter of some sort who gets at least one or two commissions during this time. She is (likely) a Brazilian citizen with an elementary/middle-school aged son. They tend to meet in midtown hotels.
For all of my friends I have taken the time to transcribe and timestamp every message into a spreadsheet so that the conversation can be read in sequence.
A couple editorial notes:
- It begins January 2011 and ends when the phone is lost somewhere around the start of December 2011.
- The call logs on this phone only collected the last 30 incoming and outgoing calls. As such, the insertion of call information only begins around September.
- The texts at the end of the spreadsheet with no timestamps had their timestamps mangled by the TracPhone’s lack of storage space. These messages, which could be from several points in the timeline, kept appearing as new messages dated from whenever the phone was powered on last. Maybe you can figure out where they go.
- The phone was handed in by a guest who originally found it outside the restaurant.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
