I want you to want me (and whales too)
Jon Harris and Sep Kamvar have a wonderful installation piece up at MOMA: I want you to want me. They take profiles from dating web sites and use the information in them to present a view of humanity & our search for self and identity - as seen through the lens of the search for love (read the artists’ statement here). The piece is part of MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, up through May 12. If all goes well, I’ll be seeing it next Friday - yay! In the meantime, here’s a short video m ss ng p eces created about how the piece was made and how it works.
Jon is an amazingly talented and creative young artist - I met him while working on this project, for which he did the design work - very small potatoes compared with most of the creative work he does but it was wonderful to get to know him. Also take a look at his web piece The Whale Hunt, which is up for some Webby Awards (Best Personal Site and Best Visual Design) - go on and vote! This piece is about the spring whale hunt of a family of Inupiat Eskimos - one of the few people legally allowed to hunt whales in Alaska. Jon and A. took a trip together to spend 9 days with this family last May, and The Whale Hunt is what Jon created out of that experience. Me - I just worried they’d get eaten by polar bears, fall into icy cold water and die instantly, mundane things like that… In other words, I know how extreme the conditions were under which The Whale Hunt was created, which makes me have even more appreciation for its beauty.
