Image title and source: 16 [R]evolutions (2006) – Eyebeam, NYC

Text source: VJ Theory

Date published: 12/10/06

Performance is so many things: the synchronized sounds of a symphony; actions with words in a play; steps and turns in a dance; words from a pulpit. Performance art, too, is variable, perhaps too multifarious to define, even with semicolons. At traditional performances with traditional support materials, from symphonies with program notes to theatre productions with playbills, performance acts as replay, a repeat of an event, a memorization of a string of notes or a set of lines, a reformulation of a tested formula. Then there are those performances that vary, that respond to the moment, that unfold through the implementation of chance or improvisation or, more and more, digitization. With the insertion of new technologies into performance, the question arises – do actions result from numbers? What indeed is the connection between the physical and the digital? Does the digital component determine the performance, or do actions generate a numeric pattern, which then underlies the piece’s structure?

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Here are some links worth keeping for future reference. (the videos are a must see):

Image source: Youtube

NYC Breakers:
http://remus.imeem.com/video/woQpNXHw/
graffit_rock_part_1_featuring_the_new_york_city_breakers/
A vague story on the NYC Crew: http://www.msu.edu/~okumurak/dancers/nycb.html
NYC Breakers at Grafitti Rock:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dJ76l_Xtis
Rock Steady Crew:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-mfZ1Jf15M&mode=related&search=
Intro to the main site is worth the downloading wait. Shows the new style of B-Boying:
http://www.rocksteadycrew.com/
Beat Street doxycycline online Film, battle of Rock Steady and NYC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXKTVQM_6g

Wikipedia’s got the goods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Steady_Crew

Other Histories:

Killer loop at the bottom of this one:
http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/
studentwebs/session4/39/Breakdance%20H.htm
(Included below for archival purposes)

This one needs footnotes. Definitely offers things to look up. Never really connected James Brown to B-Boying before:
http://www.jam2dis.com/j2dbreakdancehist1.htm

Source: The News Hour
January 1, 2007

New media products and programming developed rapidly in the past year. Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the largest media stories of 2006, including the rise of YouTube and the ongoing struggles in the newspaper business.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes, the big stars of what we can call old media were in the spotlight in 2006, notably when Charles Gibson and Katie Couric traded mornings for evenings.

But another old media mainstay, Time magazine, passed over the anchors and other newsmakers, and instead selected as its person of the year, “You.” That’s you, the viewer, reader, listener, and more and more creator of news content.

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Spider-Man 3 kicks off the summer blockbuster season

Source: BBC News
January 2, 2007

As Hollywood prepares to unveil its latest raft of big budget sequels, cinemagoers can expect to feel a sense of deja vu once again in 2007.

With more than half of 2006’s most profitable films being follow-ups to existing franchises, last year’s box office receipts have consistently disproved the adage that familiarity breeds contempt.

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Source: We Make Money Not Art
December 30, 2006

A short recap of Creative Commons-founder Lawrence Lessig‘s evangelization talk (or rather motivation session for the converted) at 23C3 in Berlin about the differences between culture and code.

The fundamental change is the fact that code had been used to create things like printer-drivers and such. But – since a few years, code, or rather the tools that had been coded have become a main element in the creation of culture as we use and witness it today. Especially the whole mashup-culture is heavily relying on the techniques and the mindset of digital creation and open access to other’s works for sampling from and building upon, etc. Popular examples are the anime music-clip subculture like the Muppet Hunter, the Jesus Christ the Musical-clip or lots of pieces that borrow from news networks’ footage to make their own suggestive edits.

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Source: We Make Money not Art
Reblogged at Rhizome.org
December 20, 2006

Last May, i blogged about Plagiarismo, an exhibition that tried to demonstrate that the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists’ ideas is an essential component of culture.

Vuk Cosic – who’s having a solo exhibition at the Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana- wrote me then that he was putting together a show called CTRL-C on a similar subject. The show has just opened at the galerija Simulaker in Slovenia. Here’s the gist:

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