Tonk is a photographic collaboration between Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs primarily working out of Berlin and Zurich. I’m really into their 2004 series The Hypochondriac. The series depicts the hyper-awareness that obsession creates in a humours and precise manner. In one photo a figure is shown waking up under a blanket with an image of the body, sans skin a muscle, embroidered on it. The figure looks suspicion and alert in a way that most people don’t when they first wake up. The idea of his body cover him during all waking hours. In the photo above, germ-like object has obtained a mass far greater than any germ possible could. It weighs heavy the human figure down so that he is doubled over. Germs, as small as they are can render us helpless, but only the idea of getting sick could weigh someone down like this.

Lately I’ve been wondering if we are still in a Post-Modern state, or have the prevailing winds of culture changed directions? This of course is a tricky question, given how slippery the definition of Post Modernism and Modernism are. I’m inclined to think that something has changed, but dose it require a complete rethinking, or just a minor retooling, I’m not quite sure. We’ll probably be in some mutation of Modernism, until the Helvetica font is no longer used in everything. Perhaps that answers part of my question. The following thoughts might not be completely true in the scientific sense, but they might be true enough for a blog, by which I mean they hit on something that feels truthy that can describe something happening in the cultural sphere, so take it as you will, but before I go any further, a quick Wikipedia dump to summarize

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An installation created by designer Robert Stadler for La Nuit Blanche festival in 2007. The statment on his website reads:
“Visitors enter the church through a lateral door and first see a scattered group of luminous spheres hovering in the choir. As one approaches the center of the nave, the spheres form a giant question mark. They become a punctuation mark superimposed over the religious symbols. Then as one moves through the church, the question mark decomposes. The figure becomes abstracted again in order to echo the hanging lights of the cathedral. Contrasting with the symmetry of the edifice, these luminous suspension points are like a musical notation, or holes punctuating the architectural volume. The question (or doubt) is absorbed by the space.”
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Jonathan Schipper’s Invisible Sphere (although I’ve been affectionately referring to it as Media Ball starring LL Cool J) contains 215 monitors and 215 cameras, each camera is opposite the monitor it feeds. The sphere constantly recreates it’s surroundings on it’s monitors in a technique that is akin to camouflage. However, the viewer is intended to notice just how uncamouflaged the sphere is. It’s presence, in fact, is somewhat ominous, Deathstar like( AT&T logo?) as it takes in your image and projects it back, in a digitally fuzzy, monitor-blue. The sphere highlights the fact that one cannot recreate the world around them without a bias. The signal to noise ration is never 1:1

Here’s a bit of javascript fun from Andrey Yazev. You need Google Chrome or Safari 4 to view the effect.

Jodan Schwab likes to work. He likes to do good work. Subsequently he must have an an interest in his relationship with entropy; the limits on a systems ability to do useful work. If one wants to know entropy then evaluating the process in which one produces, will yield the amount of entropy within that system. Schwab’s MFA show How to get Things Done, puts us into his process. The gallery becomes his construction site, complete with a “Post No Bills” wall . Schwab breaks his artistic process down into a series of works that resembles a contractor’s plan. Instructional drawings are followed by models and then photographs of the previous two built in reality.
Schwab’s process, however, does not follow a linear progression. If one goes from drawing-> to model-> to photo, they will not only find out how much work they have to do to view something in this manner, as the pieces that fit together are scattered throughout the gallery. They will find out that the drawing may not be the starting point. In some works inspiration comes from life (the frame of a condo building on stilts for example) first and the process may be photo->model-> drawing or photo->drawing->model.

Regardless of the order, the viewer has a tendency toward homogeneity. We can’t help but groups like pieces together. As I mentioned previously one will even put extra work in zipping around the gallery to do so. The effect of viewing the pieces in this continuum like nature is that difference between the three pieces start making themselves evident. The elements which are gained, lost or changed as they move between the three mediums become the subject, or perhaps the amount of entropy with in the three-piece continuum.
The overall effect of the show is that one feels that there is no finished product (which is not to say that the work doesn’t look finished), that we are in a continual process going back and forth. Each piece is just a way to get to the next one.

Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experince is a film that depicts the intersection between commerce and fantasy and what happens when the two begin to drift apart. At the centre of this Venn diagram you might find advertising, desire, facades, and con artists. Certainly Chelsea, the films protagonist played by porn star Sasha Grey, encounters all of these elements, if she does not contain them herself.
Chelsea (or at times Christine) is a high-class escort who offers companionship for a modest fee. To succeed at her job Chelsea has developed a cool-as-ice neutral identity, that her clients can project their desires onto. Chelsea can be anything to anyone. This Identity serves as armour which protects Chelsea from some of the dubious aspects of her vocation, but it is also a method of self deception. Chelsea has become insulated from the real relationship in her life much like any workaholic. Her live-in boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer with clients of his own, starts to be rebuffed by Chelsea’s work identity. As the film progresses, Chelsea’s armour begins to crack and reality is let into her fantasy, as she is tempted by a client she is attracted to.
The economic crisis looms over the film like a dark premonition. Chelsea’s clients, and Chris’s too for that matter, take us into a world, where wealthy businessmen talk of uncertain profit margins and the unstable markets. One can’t help but draw connections between Chelsea and Chris and the bad mortgages which tipped the financial scales. Unstable mortgages given a safe rating served as a deception that fantasies of wealth were projected onto. As the bubble began to burst the reality of the emptiness of the financial situation seeped in.

This morning I found some great photos of a decaying hotel in the Catskills Borscht Belt. The Borscht Belt is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan and Ulster Counties in upstate New York. (The hotels were featured in Art Speigelman’s graphic novel Maus and Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, if you’re looking for a mental picture.) What intrigues me about this photo is the way the mass produced chairs have decayed into an organic form, that when put inside the context of the pool tend to read as a wave. As the pool accurately states “No Diving”… good advice
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In his series Fake Holidays Reinder Riedler photographs simulation and our negotiation between the real and imaginary. Fake Holidays finds that fantasy element that exists in all vacationing spots, that thing that makes people say  ”I don’t want to be a tourist, I want to experience the real thing,” in places that are one step further into the realm of simulacra than a resort might be. In Fake Holiday the clouds, water, snow, sun, and wind may all be artificially created, putting the viewer one step further from the real experience, but perhaps one step closer to the ideal vacation. Some of the featured locations are indoor beaches in Germany and ice caves and ski resorts in Dubai.

“Imaginary worlds are created, often under massive technological exertion, in order to offer us experience as reproducible merchandise. Although the quality of these adventures on demand sometimes proves to be rather dubious, the boom does shed light on one thing the yearnings and dreams underlying people’s daily lives.”

Good Magazine has a fantastic collection of bomb shelter images from Zurich, Montana and Texas. The shelters depicted are amazing projects that people have poured their time, resources, and anxiety into. Thankfully they’re all vacant, which means the world hasn’t ended.