onetwothree - brad borevitz

An Art Practice

Brad Borevitz — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:17:08 -0700

As attention becomes a new form of capital in the networks of contest, art can function to turn attention from flowing within the channels of accumulation and competition, to focusing on them instead–to suss their mechanisms and effects. Art must remain a critical enterprise (and resist being a spectacularized one). If art employs the ubiquitous techniques of computation–as it will more and more–then it must do so self-consciously and critically, making visible the connection between the technical, social, political, and intellectual circumstances of its context.

Abu Ghraib

Brad Borevitz — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:11:23 -0700

The infamous photos of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004. Now, four years later, we are still debating the ethics of torture, and are still apparently unable to really process the contents of the images we received from the American dungeons of Iraq.

Star Spangled Banner

Brad Borevitz — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:52:04 -0700

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, I collaborated with Lee Montgomery on a musical protest: the star spangled banner played backwards five times. If I remember right, we had the anthem as interpreted by Jimmy Hendrix, Dolly Parton, John Phillips Sousa, Rosanne Bar, and one real old timey classic version too.

The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules

Brad Borevitz — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:37:41 -0700

If life were a game, what game would it be? … It must be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest. The abstract field of contest is a schematic representation of the territory beneath our feet: a map of the world. It is at once a field of combat as an un-owned commons, and the territorialized space of land as possession, with all places and possible positions marked out. Against this grid the move is made; the move is measured. The pieces find their places.

Rules, Games, Theories

Brad Borevitz — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 10:28:45 -0700

These essays are from the catalog of "The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules." They attempt to frame the constellation of game, software and political allegory that were at the center of that project. An edition of 100 copies of the catalog were printed and distributed at the Whitney ISP exhibition at Artist Space.

State of the Union

Brad Borevitz — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:09:35 -0700

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2007. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses

Untitled (After Riley)

Brad Borevitz — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:05:49 -0700

Clearly the desire for the same is operative in various ways in many domains: at the level of nationality, within the social, in terms of class, or by political identifications, subcultures, etc. Just as frequently, the desire for the same is challenged by its opposite: the desire for the different.

Flame Hardened Bed

Brad Borevitz — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:32:50 -0700

The site of production for Inscription, has a significance beyond some breezy fascination with the "making of" things. The machine shop instantiates a particular machinic aesthetic.

Inscription of the Girly Man

Brad Borevitz — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:36:01 -0700

Inscription is an exploration of the aesthetics of power in relation to the task of writing. Here, in a time when the neo-fascist spirit is casting a shadow across the political culture, and when the possibility of meaningful political discourse seems more and more remote because of it, there is a relationship between the wealth of violence–war, images of brutality–and the poverty of our communications. There is a relationship between the denigration of thoughtfulness as weakness, femininity, and gayness, and the impossibility of halting the campaign of aggression that the U.S. has embarked on, or of furthering stalled progress in the domain of civil rights or economic justice.

Inscription of the Girly Man: The Politics of Stupidity in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Brad Borevitz — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:03:17 -0700

This set of texts constitute the catalog for the installation "Inscription of the Girly Man." It's essays cover topics which range from language and machines, to the function of material metaphor in art, and finally to the vagaries of contemporary political rhetoric.