vibrating coffee cups with mocha tone generator, 2009

This is a piece I made for the "Past Presence" show at Redux on view through August 16. It is an encapsulation of a couple of ideas I have been playing with over the years. One of the main ingredients is the image of a vibrating coffee cup. I have always liked the feeling of a coffee cup vibrating and moving under it's own engine. in earlier versions I just put battery powered vibrators or homemade motors inside coffee cups and set them loose. In order to refine the piece for an installation I thought about how I wanted to experience these portable consumer fetish objects in a gallery setting. Along this line of thinking I began to imagine the sound that these cups would make if placed upon a series of minimalist style sculptures. That evolved into a mixture of found objects, pristine steel shelves and a simple plywood cube built on a human scale.

To enhance the relationship of the portable consumer fetish to that of the viewer the vibrating coffee cups are motion activated, triggered by conventional security light motion detectors. This sets up a quite literal relationship where the viewer "turns on" the vibrating coffee cups, reversing the usual relationship of the fetish to the consumer. The final component is the audio. The cups create a sort of off kilter drumming/meditation cycle. The noise is focused through a conventional bass guitar amp which creates an overall system of meditative white noise, that I hope intensifies the spiritual nature of the installation. i used a series of homemade contact microphones, to amplify the noise of the vibrating coffee cups

The piece is of course just plain fun and enjoys a relationship with previous coffee-cup-centric work viewable here
http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/coffee_cups/index.html

and a full gallery of images with an explanation of this piece is viewable here

http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/vibrating.html

for my next trick I will pull a stir stick installation oout of my suitcase when I land in Norman Oklahoma on August 18 for the second stop of my "Have sticks will travel tour". speaking of upcoming exhibitions I have printed a small run of the tour poster designed by slowe

buy now for 10$ shipping included, plus a special gift

There will be some available for purchase at the city gallery on Saturday during the closing reception for a reduced price. The rest are available online, and at each subsequent venue I am creating work for through 2010. I made one of those google checkout buttons, if you click it you should be charged $10 which includes shipping and a "special gift" these are archival inkjet prints on nice poster stock paper.
Along the way I hope to get some t-shirts, buttons, and other ephemera created, but more than likely i will revisit this apsect in January as I now need to focus my energy on creating and planning the work.

social media is dead, long live social media

Those who know me know that I am all but obsessed with search engine algorithms. I do google myself and other things regularly ,mostly out of curiosity about the changing of the algorithm. The google algorithm in particular experienced a major shift sometime in late 2007, i think. Before that it was pretty straight forward. the algorithm would sniff out mutual links and related text to establish a relevant hit. I know this because in 2006 I began to take interest in the internet. i had been online, and even emailed and blogged before then, but that was the year i set up my website. For most people this is as far as they need to go to start creating some google juice for themselves. For me the problem was unique(or at least as unique as the other two jonathan brilliants i am now facebook friends with.) The problem is that my given name contains an adjective, a common one at that. even after a year of a website, and a blog, i still couldn't be found on a simple google search. rather the algorithm found occurrences of the name jonathan, plus the adjective brilliant. while accurate this wasn't me, but it got me thinking. So in 2006 after googling, the way that google bombs, and google searches work, I set out to claim my google ranking. As an artist this is part of my ongoing quest to understand my place in the world. It is true that a part of me is just wholly invested in the creation of content that is a reaction to what i experience as a human being. In 2006 a big part of what i was experiencing in addition to the rigors of my studio practice was a new understanding of how the internet works. This was the year i really began to understand the internet as something malleable, another material i could tinker with. It was a given that if someone wants to find something or someone they will google it, or whatever search engine they like. So this was the year that I made a 5 year commitment to create a non-stop stream of mutually linked content and documentation of the work i make. part of this is a genuine desire to communicate with people I meet in my journey through life, and part of it is a little bit mischievous and doubtful of the internet. What has been interesting to me is to watch the erosion of true stream of consciousness ways of living and making work. I think the impatience that people have developed fro simply letting their minds or lives wander without stopping to document it or google what it is they just discovered really robs us of one of the joys of the human mind. That tendency to wander is what always leads me to new discoveries, and true I am no luddite, but more and more I am throttling back from my reliance on the Internet and google searches to lead me to the next discovery. I still rely 90% on my life as experienced off line to provide content and inspiration for what is mirrored online. I should point out that my relentless mutual linking and content spewing is still fun, although less so today. True my blog automatically imports as a note on facebook and posts to a tumbler, but in both those locations the formatting is lost, which is fine by me. It brings me to an article i just read in wired, online no less, that talks about some of these same ideas and brings up one thing that frightens me. While I was an early adopter and fan of Facebook(which could be where you are reading this but if you want to see this in it's original location click here) I am dubious of their newly developed frame re-directing when you click links. Full disclosure i love frame redirecting and use it all the time, but I don't like the way facespace changes the way we interpret the interweb. I do however enjoy the fact that in many ways facebook has taken the internet back in time five years. By this i mean it doesn't provide any new experiences of what is out there but rather has repackaged everything the internet has to offer in blue and white lowercase letters. and while it might be humanizing the internet homepage, i am still a fan of the old fashioned classic google page as a starting point, sometimes you can't improve on simplicity,

or can you