io9: moma

Tim Burton Pours Out His Brain At The Moma Exhibit

Meredith Woerner — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:20:00 PST

Take a peek into Tim Burton's Museum of Modern Art exhibit and watch little robots do his bidding. Then listen to Burton talk about bringing his art to life, and why his stripey socks keep his brain from floating away.

Here's a collection of some of the images:

For more images see New York Magazine the show starts on November 22 and runs until April 26.

Curator Forced to Kill Out-of-Control Bio-Art Exhibit

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:40:58 PDT

The problem with bio-art is that it's often made of living tissue — and sometimes living tissue gets out of control. That's what happened late last week at a New York MoMA exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," where a tiny living jacket made out of stem cells had to be put to death for growing too fast and trying to burst out of its container.

The art piece was called "Victimless Leather," and according to The Art Newspaper:

The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened . . . Paola Antonelli, head of MoMA's architecture and design department and curator of the show, says she had to make the decision to turn off the life-support system for the work, basically "killing" it.
Ms Antonelli says the jacket "started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I've always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I'm here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown."

I'm glad Antonelli made the right choice. You've got to kill these things before they grow into the lady from Species and start killing impressionable young art student boys in the bathroom after weird alien sex.

MoMA Exhibit Dies [Art Newspaper]

The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations

Lisa Katayama — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:20:27 PST

You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up.

AT&T is a sponsor of the project, and handed over reams of phone records to the group so they could link NYC with cities around the world based on phone calls and IP traffic. No, it's not a surveillance spree, though it's hard not to wonder about that given AT&T's recent eagerness to hand over its phone data to the government without warrants. But this project merely aims to show how busy NYC can be. And just how pretty busy can be. This will be part of the MoMa's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition starting February 24th.Images by senseable city lab

New York Talk Exchange main page