MTAA – Day 6 Hot Heads

T.Whid: Welcome back to MTAA’s couch surfing at Lee Walton’s blog.

M.River: Last week we searched the backwaters of the interweb for the the Most Awesome Post-War Artwork of All Time…Ever (MAPWAOATE). This week we will be doing some deep ego surfing for the rare, forgotten and even fake MTAA artworks

T.Whid: We’ll kick the week off with this little nostalgia trip from 2003’s

IN PREPARATION FOR THE SUMMER AIR IN BROOKLYN TO RISE FROM THE CONCRETE IN A MANNER WHICH DISTORTS ONE’S ABILITY TO JUDGE DISTANCE AND MEANING (AKA MANUAL ZOOM MIRAGE).

M.River: We did show in the early summer of ‘03 for our friend Dan’s gallery,
Rome Arts. The gallery was in a storefront on Havermeyer St. in Brooklyn.

T.Whid: He offered us a solo show! The catch? The gallery couldn’t really be open all summer so the show had to be viewable from the sidewalk. You’re thinking and we said at the time, “You must be joking.”

M. River: Yeah, anyway. We decided to do the show. The show would be our attempt to will the temperature in Brooklyn to break the world’s record that summer. The physical show would consist of 1 image. This image would be printed on a postcard announcing the show and blown up x 8 in recto verso in the space.

T.Whid: The piece was formal in a way. It was very interested in where the digital image lies, where does it exist? We put a big print of the image in the gallery, yet everyone had the *exact* same thing on the postcards they received. In the gallery it was just printed bigger. It was also on the web, freely-licensed (Creative Commons licensing was very new at the time).

M.River: The purpose was to try to get the viewer to question their relationship to a digital, infinitely-reproducible image. We wanted viewers to notice the image existing in a mesh of time and location. So, in point 8 in the text on the image we wrote:

Due to the fact this artwork contains a 1:8 scale model card, the “actual artwork,” the prediction of the hottest temperature ever, and an act of looking through the window into Rome Arts, we need to note that the “really, really actual artwork” is the accumulation of all these objects and moments.

T.Whid: Once we started thinking about doing this post we decided to release something new to go along with it. To that end, we’ve created a new black and white SVG version of the ‘hot head’ illustration in Manual Zoom Mirage. Click on the link below to download the SVG version.

MTAA Hot Head

M.River: Yup, we hope you’ll enjoy your very own MTAA ‘Hot Head’. Oh, in case your wondering if we succeeded in willing the temperature in Brooklyn to break a record in the summer of 03, I remember it as quite cool that year.

T.Whid: Yeah, it was kinda cool that year. Speaking of kinda cool, it totally will be if you joined us again on Tuesday for more ego surfing treasures.

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