Hasta La Gadget!

If the rumors are right, Apple’s iWatch could be seeing a release later this year in October. That being said, would you be interested in purchasing one? Well Piper Jaffray attempted to find out just how many people would be interested in purchasing an iWatch and conducted a survey. The survey polled 100 individuals with an average age of 32 and a household income of $130,000.

The survey wasn’t solely about the iWatch, but about watches and wearable tech in general. Now according to their findings, they found that 14% of consumers would be willing to purchase an iWatch if it were priced at $350. The remaining 86% said that they did want to buy one, but about half of them said that if the watch were priced below $200, they might be interested. 41% of those said that they would not be interested in an iWatch, regardless of its price.

This is an interesting poll because as it stands, we have no idea how much Apple could be pricing the device. There were some rumors that suggested that Apple could create a more premium version of the iWatch which could cost thousands of dollars. There have also been talks about Apple creating a Sports and Designer versions of the watch, with Designer version sporting more premium materials, while the Sports version might feature a rubber strap.

In any case what do you guys think of the survey? How much would you be willing to spend on an iWatch? Is $350 a bit too dear for your liking?

[Image credit – Martin Hajek]

Survey Finds That 14% Of Participants Would Buy An iWatch For $350 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Growing up I spent a lot of time on my grandparents small farm in the Ozarks. We baled hay, fed and milked cows, helped in the garden, and collected eggs. And I pretty much hated all of it. Years later, after my grandparents were gone, I started loving and respecting what I’d gained from knowing my simple, happy, kind, hardworking and loving grandma and grandpa. Before I started Askinosie Chocolate, I knew I wanted to honor the cocoa farmers we work with in as many ways possible. It was and is personal for me. From day one we have worked directly with farmers: first in Ecuador; then the Philippines; then Honduras; and Tanzania. We travel to each country every year, meet with farmers, stay in their homes, and get involved in their communities, in many cases. We also pay very high prices for their cocoa beans — we pay directly to the farmers above world market price, which they typically receive only 70 percent of — and then when we return to buy the next crop several months later, we profit share. We translate our financials into the language needed, explain it line by line, and then disperse the profit share cash. Sounds easy? Well, it’s not. It’s the most complicated and professionally challenging thing I’ve ever done. And before I started this chocolate factory I was a criminal defense lawyer specializing in the most serious felony cases. That was challenging. This is more so.

I’d like to tell you a story about one of our origins, that is near and dear to my heart, that exemplifies these challenges. Four years ago when we sourced Tanzania cocoa beans and bought our first crop from Tenende, we found a village that had no improved water source. We found a school with no textbooks or electricity. We found students hungry, both literally and figuratively. We found farmers who had never sold their cocoa beans directly to a chocolate maker (not uncommon). So we worked to build partnerships in the community and together we achieved some successes. We had specifically sought a woman led farmer group, which we found. The Tenende cocoa farmer group was called UWATE and it was led by Mama Kyeja.

Group Travel: Since 2010 we have been bringing local high school students to this remote spot in the southwest corner of Tanzania to meet farmers, participate in a Direct Trade relationship, learn a little about cocoa beans and lot of about life. A handful of the students come from privileged families and pay for themselves and over half are full scholarship, for whom we raise money to cover all of their expenses. This August, we’ll be taking the third class of Chocolate University high school students to Tanzania.

Textbooks: We worked with the headmaster of Mwaya Secondary School (the aforementioned school with no textbooks or electricity) to identify focus subjects and purchased textbooks worth $10,000 with a grant from our local Rotary Club. They were the school’s first ever textbooks — even for the teachers.

Water: Askinosie Chocolate, along with students from Chocolate University, raised $15,000 to drill a deep water well in Tenende to provide potable water to its 2,000 citizens. Residents told us last year that because of the well, they suffered much less from waterborne diseases, cholera and typhoid, than the neighboring villages during the rainy season.

Technology: On our second Chocolate University trip we worked with the students to set up five projectors and five laptops, loaded with more than 3,000 educational Khan Academy videos, which have given teachers and students at Mwaya a new way to learn in their resource-strapped environment. There are now students with computer skills in a place where it was unimaginable just a few years ago. This was made possible by a gift from our friends at Brewer Science.

Empowered Girls Club: Our Chocolate University program, along with Convoy of Hope, funded a club for girls to learn about self-esteem, pregnancy and STDs including HIV/AIDS, goal-setting and life skills.

Lunch: Most students in Tenende came to school on an empty stomach. Their only meal was at night. So, we started an innovative school lunch program called A Product of Change™ — we buy gourmet rice from local farmers who are also Mwaya School PTA members, we ship the rice to our factory on our container of beans, sell it at a premium, and return all of the profits to the PTA to source local rice and beans to provide lunches for each student, each school day. Now, the attendance rate has improved as well as test scores and graduation rates; the benefits are plentiful.

Now for the disheartening part of the story: We purchased beans from UWATE farmer group in Tenende in 2010, 2011 and 2012. We helped them open a bank account in Tanzania so they could be paid directly. Our profit-sharing model helped our cocoa farming partner, UWATE, to diversify their business. In 2013 they decided to convert their cocoa bean warehouse into the Tenende village’s Coca-Cola depot. That’s right, Coke. They would not have the cocoa beans for us. We were devastated.

As UWATE reduced its reliance on their cocoa business, we saw benefits in working with another group of nearby farmers who are solely focused on growing cocoa — we were fortunate to find the Mababu farmer group and its leader, Mama Rahabu, in a village about 10 miles down the road from Tenende.

I actually met the Mababu farmers on my first trip to the area in 2010. The village of Mababu is not far from Tenende and UWATE farmers told us that they would be calling upon their neighbors to help supply our cocoa bean order. We buy approximately 8 to 10 metric tons of dried beans which means that 30 to 40 metric tons of wet beans are needed by farmers to meet our order. For loosely organized farmers in deep poverty who are just beginning to learn about the importance of post-harvest, calling upon neighbors makes good sense. It also builds community and cooperation.

So what does that mean for our programs in Tenende? It means a renewed focus on sustainability. During our visit there last September, we met with parents, teachers, students and government leaders to talk about how the programs can operate without outside help within five years. And we discussed the different roles that parents, teachers, students, and government will have in making this innovative, profit-based model for feeding a school to be something imitated by other schools. We are bringing our third group of Chocolate University students to Tanzania this August and while we’ll be in Mababu, we’ll also be working at Mwaya, as always. We have doubled down in our commitment to the school regardless of its distance to our new cocoa bean village. This is personal. It’s not just about business. Only one girl passed the Form 4 exam in 2013 from the entire school. We’re starting a new Saturday tutoring program aimed at 130 girls at Mwaya to prepare them for the test.

The details of the transition from Tenende to Mababu has more twists and turns than room here to describe. It was not a breakdown of communication. It was cultural and tribal with super complex layers. The first resulting emotion for me was one of sadness and disappointment. What about “kujengana — Swahili for “build each other up?” How could this be after, well, after all of the connection and partnership on important issues?

Direct Trade is messy. Community development is messy enough in my own neighborhood, but it’s exponentially messy in the developing world. It’s a good reminder for me because I know that we must change our parameters of what success means, and success here was them selling Coke, us finding this new outstanding farmer group whose beans are superb and who we’re thrilled to develop a long relationship with and that is also led by a woman.

I visited Mababu in September and representatives from my company have been there multiple times since then. The village and its farmers have proven more than capable of practicing Direct Trade with us and together we are “building each other up.” Kujengana continues.

Following the dawn of the 21st century came a resurgence in performance art so swift and strong it nearly took us all by surprise.

Yes, the greats — like Marina Abramovic, Oskar Schlemmer, John Cage and Stuart Sherman, to name but a few — had been blurring the lines between theater, dance, music, poetry, activism and contemporary art since the early and mid 1900s. The genre hit a high mark in the 1970s, when everything from Action to Fluxus broke the barrier between artist and audience. Ms. Abramovic shocked viewers with self-mutilation while Vito Acconci turned masturbation into an intimidating production.

The decades to follow saw veteran figures Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney and Yoko Ono continuing the trend — not to mention people like Eva & Adele, Gilbert & George, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge essentially living and breathing as performance artists — but it wasn’t until the next millennium that more mainstream critics and patrons began jumping on the bandwagon.

Enter into the aughts and you have Christian Marclay, Ryan Trecartin, and Spartacus Chetwynd ushering performance art into major museum establishments, international art award ceremonies and the internet. In the past few years alone, Abramovic has partnered with James Franco and Lady Gaga to make even the most amateur of creatives aware of her brand. She sleeps, stares, and gets naked, and the world revels in the oddity.

But as this avant-garde, unrestrained type of performance art weaseled its way into pop culture, people with less than a PhD in art history asked: Why is all of this art? To answer the query, we’ve compiled a list of the most confusing performance art pieces of all time. And by confusing, we mean the most shocking, abrasive, gory, offensive and downright absurd acts that have had novices and experts scratching their heads over the years. In typical “take it or leave it” fashion, we let you know which of art history’s performances we can live without.

1. Vito Acconci’s ‘Seedbed’

Let’s hit the ground running, shall we? In 1972, Vito Acconci stunned audiences at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery when he buried himself, so to speak, under a ramp in the art haven and proceeded to masturbate, using the sound of visitors walking above him to spark his “sexual fantasies.” He also used a microphone to project his ongoing monologue — basically, a series of very dirty thoughts — to the entire room.

The performance was, as you might expect, pretty controversial. Despite the obvious sexual undertones, however, the piece had broader intentions. “The troubled personality Acconci acted out resembles the paranoid, dissociated characters in American films of the era: Gene Hackman in ‘The Conversation,’ Robert de Niro in ‘Taxi Driver,'” The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote in 2002.

Take it or leave it? Take it. This piece is provocative and voyeuristic and it’s easy to assume the work stems from a misogynistic place. But as Acconci said in 2006, “A lot of [the ‘Seedbed’] work occurred during the first feminist writings I was aware of. On the one hand I was trying to almost play this ultimate cartoon version of the male, but also to make it explode.” At the end of the day, you can’t really argue with London’s Tate museum when they say the work is “one of the most important live artworks of the 1970s.”

2. Marni Kotak’s Live Birth Performance

In 2011, New York-based performance artist Marni Kotak gave birth to a healthy baby boy during a live durational exhibition titled “The Birth of Baby X.” To do so, she built a home birthing center at Microscope Gallery (see above), invited an audience (and a doula) to oversee the labor and created a collection of birth memorabilia including a 10-foot trophy awarded to Baby X for being born.

The performance didn’t stop there, though. “She plans to re-conceptualize her role as a parent to baby Ajax into a work of performance art that will last for the rest of her life,” The Washington Post explained.

Take it or leave it? Leave it. Some have questioned whether Kotak’s desire to turn motherhood into performance is that different than the “mommy bloggers” of the web, and while that’s an interesting prompt, the fact remains: “Baby X” turned Ajax into an art object. And while we highly doubt she endangered her son, she certainly used him as a prop in the commercial art world.

3. Wafaa Bilal’s Implanted Camera

In 2010, NYU professor and Iraq-born artist Wafaa Bilal surgically implanted a camera into the back of his head for an intense, year-long surveillance project. Inspired by his past experience as a refugee, “3rdi” sought to take a photo every 60-seconds and publish his images on the web, in effect, capturing all the things he “leaves behind” on a daily basis.

“I see myself as a mirror reflecting some of the social conditions that we ignore,” he said to CNN. “This will expose the unspoken conditions we face… A project like this is meant to establish a dialogue about surveillance.”

Take it or leave it? Leave it. After all, his body physically rejected one of the titanium posts keeping the camera in place on his skull. We prefer his “Ashes Series” anyway.

4. Abraham Poincheval, the man who lived in a bear carcass for two weeks.

French artist Abraham Poincheval‘s 2014 performance stunt was simple: He slept in a dead bear for two weeks. Yup, equipped with a small amount of food and water (plus a light, cushion, reading material, kettle and toilet of some kind), he hibernated inside the remains of a hollowed-out bear stomach at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature while fans watched him on a live feed.

We’re sure the small quarters were claustrophobia-inducing, but from the photos and footage, it sort of appears as though the man was just relaxing in a cramped shelter, which, from the inside, looked nothing like the insides of a bear. Did he push his “physical limits” in the process? Maybe, but what’s compelling the audience to care?

Take it or leave it? Leave it. Though his self-imposed prison sentence inside a taxidermy animal was suffering enough, we can’t pretend the act didn’t remind us of that disturbing scene from “Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.”

5. Adrian Parsons’ Live Circumcision

In 2007, a courageous masochistic DC-based artist named Adrian Parsons circumcised himself on stage, in front of an audience, with a dull Swiss army knife. Then he proceeded to stuff the removed foreskin into a glory hole.

“I was trying to penetrate — in, yes, a direct, literal way — the gallery and the audience. I wanted to be organic shrapnel,” he explained to HuffPost. “Shrapnel” is, in fact, the name of the performance.

Take it or leave it? In this case, we’re not being figurative. Leave it.

6. Rachel Mason’s FutureClown

Once upon a time a politically-minded performance artist named Rachel Mason decided to reenact Paul Rand’s infamous 13-hour filibuster. But, in typical contemporary performance art fashion, she did so dressed as her bizarre alter ego, FutureClown. Horror ensued.

“I happened to hear about Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster on the news and as a performer, it just struck a chord,” she explained to HuffPost. “I perform a lot and think about what it is to simply perform for any duration. It just seemed like an epic durational performance piece… In a strange way I would say aesthetically it almost feels like a Gertrude Stein novel.”

Take it or leave it? Take it! What’s better than Rand Paul’s original filibuster (besides, nearly everything)? Rand Paul’s filibuster reenacted by a terrifying clown.

7. Clayton David Pettet’s ‘Art School Stole My Virginity’

Achieving Narcissism, 2013, Performance 18:00 mins, Clayton Pettet

Clayton David Pettet, a 19-year-old from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, found himself at the center of a media firestorm in 2013 when he announced his plan to have sex with an anonymous male partner… in front of a gallery audience. The project, called “Art School Stole My Virginity,’ was inspired by his own experience as a 16-year-old student questioning the cultural significance of virginity. But what actually happened, was a little bit different than the show’s tease.

The 120 audience members didn’t end up watching Pettet engaged in his first “sexual” experience; instead, they were asked to “penetrate” the artist’s mouth with a banana. “I think if people were expecting something else, it shows what they really wanted,” the artist told Dazed Digital. “They didn’t want an art piece, they wanted to see me have sex. If they came for the art, they wouldn’t be as disappointed — they’d know there were things to read between the lines for.”

Take it or leave it? Leave it. There are better ways to scrutinize society’s perception of heteronormative virginity. Or, at least, we hope there are.

8. Ron Athey’s “Incorruptible Flesh”

Ron Athey began his “Incorruptible Flesh” project back in 1996, but here’s what his 2014 iteration looked like: The artist, naked and strapped to a metal examination table, transformed into a frightening corpse-like figure. The skin of his eyes pinned back, a baseball bat impaling him from behind, he invited viewers to “anoint” him with a white, foamy substance.

According to Grace Exhibition Space, Athey and his collaborators “studied the lives of saints, the relics and in particular, the display of the ‘incorruptible’ bodies, most of which are wax sculptures with a corpse inside.” He then adopted the ‘incorruptible’ status as a representation of his HIV positive diagnosis, chock full of references to his childhood experiences with the Pentecostal church.

Take it or leave it? Take it. This is a macabre take on mortality that satiates the history buffs and iconoclasts.

9. Milo Moire’s ‘Plop Egg Painting’

For some artists, creation is a labor of love. For others, it’s literal labor, of the birthing variety. Swiss-born Milo Moire counts herself in the latter party, as evidenced by her 2014 performance piece, “Plop Egg Painting.” In it, the female artist pushes paint eggs out of her vagina onto an empty canvas, taking Jackson Pollock’s expressionist painting method to new and very nude heights.

“The ‘PlopEgg Painting’…releases a loose chain of thoughts — about the creation fear, the symbolic strength of the casual and the creative power of the femininity,” a video description for the performance reads. “At the end of this almost meditative art birth performance the stained canvas is folded up, smoothed and unfolded to a symmetrically reflected picture, astonishingly coloured and full of [strength].”

Take it or leave it? Leave it. We know that Moire uses nudity as a handy weapon in her performance art toolkit, but what is supposed to be meditative (not to mention, spark some type of contemplation about feminine creation) ends up looking like an Easter celebration gone wrong. It didn’t help that the venue of choice for this particular performance was outdoors during Germany’s Art Cologne. Passersby were too concerned with skyrocketing art prices to take notice of Moire’s artistic disruption.

10. Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’

In her 1964 performance “Meat Joy,” Carolee Schneemann had eight underwear-clad men and women perform a partially choreographed routine, set to music, that involved writhing on the floor in a pile of paint, paper and lots of raw meat. Schneemann staged the strange happening in New York and London following the initial debut at the First Festival of Free Expression in Paris. It was described as an “erotic rite,” simultaneously sensual and repellent.

“‘Meat Joy’ has such an intensive dynamic and carries all the themes of physicality, intensive improvisational contact and training with me,” Schneeman recounted to HuffPost. “It carries itself through time and that’s been very interesting to look at.”

Take it or leave it? Take it. Schneemann is a pioneer of feminist art who does brutal sexuality better than Paul McCarthy. “I never thought I was shocking,” she once proclaimed to The Guardian. “I say this all the time and it sounds disingenuous, but I always thought, ‘This is something they need. My culture is going to recognize it’s missing something.'”

11. Vaginal Knitting

Feminist artist Casey Jenkins, a self-professed “craftivist,” caught the attention of the pop performance art world in 2013 when she opted to knit from a ball of yarn wedged inside her vagina. “I’m spending 28 days knitting from wool that I’ve inserted in my vagina,” the Melbourne-based artist stated in a video of the act. “Everyday I take a new skein of wool that’s been wound so that it will unravel from the centre and I stick it up inside me… and then I pull out the thread and knit.”

The work was called “Casting Off My Womb,” and it incited a hilarious storm of Twitter outcry.

Take it or leave it? Take it. We do appreciate Jenkins’ commitment (she knitted during menstruation) to the delightfully radical genre of “craftivism.”

12. Tilda Swinton’s Naps at MoMA

In 2013 Tilda Swinton napped at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, showing up several times unannounced to sleep in a glass box somewhere in the famous art institute. Called “The Maybe,” the work was a reprisal of an earlier Swinton napfest (circa 1995), and was, well, kind of boring.

MoMA’s description of the work: “An integral part of The Maybe’s incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real — shared — time: now we see it, now we don’t.”

Take it or leave it? Leave it. Social media has profoundly changed the way we interact with celebrity, and this piece just doesn’t do the job it might have done in the 1990s.

13. Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater

From animal slaughters as religious sacrifices to faux crucifixions, Hermann Nitsch has long been known as a “cult provocateur” and the “Pope of Viennese Aktionism.” Whether he was drinking blood or drunkenly processing, his pagan rituals often involved the audience as participants, rather than mere viewers.

Take it or leave it? Leave it. Nitsch’s work, in a contemporary context, often comes off as a form of glorifying violence. You either like the Aktionists (for their attempt to examine the depths of spirituality) or you don’t.

14. Deborah de Robertis’ ‘Mirror of Origin’

In an homage to Gustav Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” (that saucy, unabashed portrait of a woman’s genitalia), Luxembourgian artist Deborah de Robertis transformed the two-dimensional masterpiece into a live performance art piece by sitting in front of the 1866 artwork and baring her own “origin of the world” for all patrons of Paris’ Musée d’Orsay to see.

The artist was arrested for her bold move (she did not plan ahead with the museum to see if, you know, they’d be cool with her showing her vulva to unsuspecting kids and adults), but she managed to make her intentions known.

“If you ignore the context, you could construe this performance as an act of exhibitionism, but what I did was not an impulsive act,” she explained to Luxemburger Wort. “There is a gap in art history, the absent point of view of the object of the gaze… I am not showing my vagina, but I am revealing what we do not see in the painting, the eye of the vagina, the black hole, this concealed eye, this chasm, which, beyond the flesh, refers to infinity, to the origin of the origin.”

Take it or leave it? Take it. The applause of excited museum goers that can be heard during recorded footage of the act is enough to convince us. This black hole will suck you in.

15. Zhu Yu

In 2000, Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu recorded himself eating what appeared to be a dead fetus stolen from a medical school. It was presented at the bombastic “Fuck Off” exhibition organized by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi. When stills of the act (which did not actually involve a human fetus) hit a Channel 4 documentary in the UK, critics tore the artist apart for courting recognition with deliberately shocking art.

“No religion forbids cannibalism,” Zhu Yu claims in the video above. “Nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it.”

Take it or leave it? Leave it. Leave it all.

16. Aliza Shvarts

Aliza Shvarts, a 2008 art major at Yale, documented her nine-month process artificially inseminated herself on a regular basis while simultaneously taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. The resulting exhibition featured video recordings of the miscarriages and physical evidence of the experience, including blood.

“For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages,” Shvarts wrote in a column for Yale Daily News. “Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding… Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there (sic) was ever a fertilized ovum or not.”

“The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading,” she added.

Yale University, rather predictably, took issue with the artist’s project, calling it a “creative fiction.” When Shvarts spoke out against that claim, reaffirming that the piece was in fact “university sanction,” Yale said that statement was “part of the performance.”

Take it or leave it? Hoax or not, we say leave it. While she wanted to “provoke inquiry” around politics and ideology, she merely prompted a he said/she said media frenzy. Shvarts went on to pursue at PhD in Performance Studies at NYU, so she no doubt has the chops to do better.

17. Franko B’s ‘I Miss You’

For a 2003 piece titled “I Miss You,” Italian artist Franco B walked down a catwalk at London’s Tate Modern museum covered in white body paint and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds on his wrists. “I don’t make work that lives in somebody’s living room,” the artist said to Metro UK, “but lives in the memory because it speaks to them. Art is about creating language and memories. Language is like a virus that can invade you, and I love that.”

Take it or leave it? Take it. He essentially staged the contemporary performance art world’s version of a fashion show, giving spectators exactly what they expected from him: blood, nudity and shock. We’re sure the Tate hasn’t been the same since.

18. Voina’s Public Orgy

Before there was Pussy Riot there was Voina (meaning “war” in Russian), a collective of radical street artists and performers who challenge Russia’s authoritative regime through a series of public disruptions, based largely in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The acts can range from painting giant penises on bridges to violently overturning police cars to tossing cats at McDonalds employees, but their most infamous performance was a public orgy.

The orgy took place at the Timiryazev State Biological Museum in Moscow in February of 2008 as an action titled “Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!” Aiming their outrage at presidential hopeful Dmitry Medvedev (whose last name comes from the word medved, or “bear”), the Voina members stripped naked and engaged in sexual intercourse on the floor of the museum as a means of “subversively affirming” the state’s fertility and reproduction goals.

Take it or leave it? Take it. This particular blend of shock art and activism certainly has a place in politically tyrannical environments. Just leave the cats alone.

19. Marina Abramovic’s ‘The Artist Is Present’

Who could forget Marina Abramovic’s 2010 endurance spectacle “The Artist is Present,” in which the Serbian artist spent 736 hours staring at Museum of Modern Art visitors across a table. It was a giant exhibition that prompted headlines like “Wait, Why Did That Woman Sit in the MoMA for 750 Hours?” and blogs like this.

“It’s narcissistic, exhibitionistic work, and it has brought out the crowds’ own narcissism and exhibitionism, in a self-fulfilling feedback loop,” New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz wrote. “But it’s also very compelling.“

Take it or leave it? Take it. We sincerely cannot resist the allure of Marina Abramovic. She will always be the grandmother of performance art.

20. Chris Burden’s ‘Shoot’

We began with Vito Acconci so why not end with Chris Burden, the artist who allowed a friend to shoot him with a .22 rifle from 15 feet away… all in the confines of a gallery in 1971.

Take it or leave it? Take it. Even though Burden himself describes the act as “incredibly stupid,” the shooting was, in many ways, the start of Burden’s 40-year long career. As Roger Ebert said, “For Chris Burden, I believe, the experience is what remains. His experience, and ours.“

BONUS: James Franco doing anything.

Wish we could solve this art world mystery, but alas, there’s no explaining the wacky world of James Franco.

These are just 20 of the world’s most confusing examples of performance art. Let us know your favorites that we missed in the comments.

I have three kids, and they all swim on a swim team every summer. I decided to capture my experience at a morning swim meet, for those of you not in the water cult.

6:00 a.m.: Wake up, drink coffee. Wake up grouchy children.

6:45 a.m.: Arrive at pool. Parking lot is already full. Let the kids out and park far away. Carry/drag chairs, bags and a cooler as if I were large pack animal. It occurs to me suddenly that as mother of three there is no denying that I am a large pack animal.

6:58 a.m.: Small miracle occurs. I find a great place to set up chairs, etc. Next to friends. With a good view of the pool. In full shade. Wish I’d brought a sweatshirt actually, it’s kind of chilly.

7:00 a.m.: Kids jump into the freezing cold pool for warm-ups and exchange looks with each other like — WHY DO WE DO THIS AGAIN?

7:30 a.m.: Children begin harassing me for money for the snack bar. I try to hand them something healthy from the cooler. Suddenly every other kid at the swim meet is eating large, chocolate-frosted doughnuts.

8:00 a.m.: A 10th grader is now singing the national anthem. She is really good. Why do I get slightly (and embarrassingly) choked up by this, yet again? And why is it a surprise every time it happens? I am dumb.

8:05 a.m.: Child number one swims and makes it across the pool without a near-fatal drowning accident occurring. Success!

8:25 a.m.: Children two and three have raced, and I screamed my head off to KICK! KICK! KICK! even though I know perfectly well that they can’t hear me underwater and so it’s pointless. I don’t want to yell KICK! KICK! KICK! But it just comes out.

8:30 a.m.: Give in and take kids to the snack bar for doughnuts (as I am out of coffee anyway).

8:55 a.m.: Child number two runs over to me, dripping wet and beaming. “Did you see that, Mommy?! Did you see that?!” I blink twice and answer: “Yes! That was awesome! Here, have a dollar! Go get another doughnut!” The moms sitting next to me giggle.

9:00 a.m.: Still cursing myself for participating in a sport where if you get distracted for literally 30 seconds you miss the whole thing.

9:20 a.m.: Child number three swims her best time ever and is so happy she can’t stand it. It might be the best feeling in the world.

9:40 a.m.: Feel momentary surge of guilt for not volunteering today. Then remember that husband is traveling and I’m on my own with the kiddos. And also how I stayed until 10:30 p.m. to move chairs around on the pool deck and take out trash at the night meet last week.

10:05 a.m.: At some point, the kids drag the cooler of healthy snacks over to the picnic area. I go to retrieve it and observe that all of the food in it appears to have been consumed by wolves.

10:15 a.m.: Get to see lots of familiar faces and families from last year, which is great. Why do all these kids keep growing so much? Dear GOD — that one has a mustache. Last year he was playing with Pokemon.

10:20 a.m.: Child number two has apparently forgotten how to do the backstroke and gets disqualified. He is devastated for five minutes and then says: “I’m hungry! Can I have a doughnut?”

10:30 a.m.: A kid is swimming breaststroke for the first time. He is tiny and can barely make it across the pool. All the other swimmers in the race have finished and are hanging onto the wall, watching him. He looks around and sees he’s dead last. He starts to sag in the water. Parents who don’t even know the kid begin to cheer their hearts out. KICK! KICK! KICK! Teenage coaches from the other team start clapping for him and running up and down the side of the pool. He touches the wall and the whole place goes nuts for him. The swimmers in the lanes on either side of him shake his hand and pat him on the back.

10:40 a.m.: Still thinking about how happy I am to be participating in a sport where a kid who comes in last still walks away feeling awesome.

10:45 a.m.: My chair is now in full sun and it’s hot as balls.

10:49 a.m.: The timers are switching to the other side of the pool and “Gangnam Style” starts to play over the speakers. A horde of small children start to boogie down. Some of them know all the moves and it quickly becomes a dance battle for the ages.

10:55 a.m.: Child number three swims her hardest and gets crushed by the kids who train all winter. She’s still smiling because she beat her best time.

10:59 a.m.: Child number two wanders over and says: “I’M HUNGRY.”

11:05 a.m.: Misplace my youngest child, age 5. Find her sitting with John Ross, a 15-year-old boy she adores, who is very patiently discussing Spiderman with her. I ask her to come back to our chairs. She glares at me and says: “WE ARE TALKING. ABOUT SPIDERMAN.”

11:30 a.m.: The crowd has thinned and the meet is winding down. Watching the teenagers swim butterfly now. It’s kind of beautiful. I make a comment about this to my kids, in the hopes that they’ll watch and really observe how it’s done when it’s done well. The big kids glance at the race for two-fifths of a second, then go back to playing Uno in a towel fort with their friends. The little one is asleep in a lounge chair with a ring pop dangling off one finger.

Noon: Arrive home. Face sunburned to a bright red. Want to collapse into the dark, air conditioned living room and not move ever again.

12:05 p.m.: Child number three wanders into the living room and says: “I’m bored. Can we go to the pool?”

Julianna W. Miner has three kids, ages 5, 9 and 11. She teaches at a college she couldn’t have gotten into because she made bad choices in high school. Her blog is Rants from Mommyland, where this post originally appeared.

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It was hard to miss the giant mechanical giraffe grazing on the White House lawn last week. For the first time ever, the President organized a Maker Faire–inviting entrepreneurs and inventors from across the USA to celebrate American ingenuity in the service of economic progress.

The maker movement is a California original. Think R2D2 serving margaritas to a jester with an LED news scroll. The #nationofmakers Twitter feed has dozens of examples of collaborative production, of making, sharing and learning.

But since this was the White House, I still had to ask myself, what would the maker movement be if the economy was not the starting point? What if it was about civics? What if makers decided to create a modern, hands-on democracy?

What is democracy anyway but a never ending remix of new prototypes? Last week’s White House Maker Faire heralded a new economic bonanza. This revolution’s poster child is 3-D printing– decentralized fabrication that is customized to meet local needs. On the government front, new design rules for democracy are already happening in communities, where civics and technology have generated a front line of maker cities.

But the distance between California’s tech capacity and DC does seem 3000 miles wide. The NSA’s over collection/surveillance problem and Healthcare.gov’s doomed rollout are part of the same system-wide capacity deficit. How do we close the gap between California’s revolution and our institutions?

• In California, disruption is a business plan. In DC, it’s a national security threat.
• In California, hackers are artists. In DC, they are often viewed as criminals.
• In California, “cyber” is a dystopian science fiction word. In DC, cyber security is in a dozen oversight plans for Congress.

• in California, individuals are encouraged to “fail forward.” In DC, risk-aversion is bipartisan.

Scaling big problems with local solutions is a maker specialty. Government policymaking needs this kind of help.

Here’s the issue our nation is facing: The inability of the non-military side of our public institutions to process complex problems. Today, this competence and especially the capacity to solve technical challenges often exist only in the private sector. If something is urgent and can’t be monetized, it becomes a national security problem. Which increasingly means that critical decision making that should be in the civilian remit instead migrates to the military. Look at our foreign policy. Good government is a counter terrorism strategy in Afghanistan. Decades of civilian inaction on climate change means that now Miami is referred to as a battle space in policy conversations.

This rhetoric reflects an understandable but unacceptable disconnect for any democracy.

To make matters more confusing, much of the technology in civics (like list building petitions) is suited for elections, not for governing. It is often antagonistic. The result? policy making looks like campaigning. We need some civic tinkering to generate governing technology that comes with relationships. Specifically, this means technology that includes many voices, but has identifiable channels for expertise that can sort complexity and that is not compromised by financial self-interest.

Today, sorting and filtering information is a huge challenge for participation systems around the world. Information now ranks up there with money and people as a lever of power. On the people front, the loud and often destructive individuals are showing up effectively. On the money front, our public institutions are at risk of becoming purely pay to play (wonks call this “transactional”).

Makers, ask yourselves, how can we turn big data into a political constituency for using real evidence–one that can compete with all the negative noise and money in the system? For starters, technologists out West must stop treating government like it’s a bad signal that can be automated out of existence. We are at a moment where our society requires an engineering mindset to develop modern, tech-savvy rules for democracy. We need civic makers.

Some tech opportunities are simple sound and stagecraft challenges. Look at Congress. Hearing rooms have the production capacity of a basic television studio. How can we use the new equipment– LCD screens and computers– to help Members evaluate data while they make decisions? How about predictive modeling in hearings using relevant, high reputation data from the chair’s district? That would be a way to use transparency, strategic location and big data on behalf of accountability.

One other civic challenge for the maker movement is how to be truly inclusive. Like Silicon Valley itself, these brilliant inventors are too often white, wealthy and male. A citizen maker movement is one way to broaden the appeal.

Throughout history, the public square is where we contribute to the common good. Our future public square is in a garage somewhere in the USA and we need to get it out. America’s “value-proposition” to the world is that we re-invent our reality time and again. Today, democracy stands at an impasse almost everywhere. How are we going to re-invent hands-on, interactive government? This is the decision we’ll need an entire movement to make.