It’s not uncommon to see $4 million worth of art in a museum. It’s less common to see $4 million worth of solid gold bricks in a museum. It’s called Tower of Power, and it will require a 24/7 security guard as long as it remains at the New Museum as part of a retrospective on its maker, the artist Chris Burden.
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The minimal facade of The New Museum has been host to some wild installations since it opened in 2007—ranging from a sign reading "HELL, YES!" to a giant long-stemmed rose. Today, workers finished installing the museum’s latest outdoor sculpture: A 30-foot-high remote controlled ship by artist Chris Burden.
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From typefaces that confuse robots to systems that can (allegedly) detect drones near your home, products that claim to protect you from the prying eyes of Big Brother are all the rage right now. Even art museums are getting in on the action—like the New Museum, which just opened its own Privacy Gift Shop.
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It can be tough to shake the notion that art and technology are conflicting forces — that is, until you’re confronted by a concept that lives at the crossroads of these seemingly dissonant concepts. For this latest episode of the Engadget Show, we set up shop right there, in order to explore what it means when technology itself is a work of art. We’re starting things off at the New Museum on the Bowery in Manhattan, where Tim and Brian will be diving deep into the “Ghosts in the Machine” exhibition, to check out pieces like Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome, a dome dreamed up in the mid-60s that foresaw a world in which the viewer is bombarded by visual stimuli. We’ll also discuss how the museum is harnessing the power of the web to open its offerings up well beyond its gallery doors.
We speak to the founder and principal players of comedy performance art group Improv Everywhere about the role technology has played in the rise of the group and some of its most famous (and infamous) pranks. As ever, we’re breaking out the Gadget Table to discuss the month’s latest and greatest (and not-so-greatest), including the iPhone 5, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, before Brian heads out to the private (annex) library of comedian-turned-deranged-billionaire John Hodgman to discuss how technology is impacting the publishing industry and his upcoming books “That is All” and “The Complete World Knowledge Boxed Set“.
While we’re at it, we’ll be speaking with the producer and director of the classic film Baraka and its newly released spiritual sequel, Samsara and paying a visit to the gang at Breakfast New York, who have worked with the likes of Google and Conan O’Brien to turn advertising into art. All that and the introduction of our latest feature “Ask @hodgman.” Welcome to the new Engadget Show.
The Engadget Show 36: John Hodgman, iPhone 5, Improv Everywhere, Samsara and the New Museum originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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