Michael T. Martin

Still somewhat obscure only because of its overwhelming ubiquity, space is itself an infrastructural technology that is mobile and monetized, traveling around the world as a repeatable phenomenon. From An Internet of Things via E-Flux

If our history is a history of forgetting how to remember the past…then the city of Detroit is the engine of our conflicted deliverance. It’s the machinery we’ve used for particular acts of forgetting, each connected to the place and time where the forgetting got done. The Forgetting Machine via Design Observer

Let the age and wars of other nations be chanted and their eras and characters be illustrated and that finish the verse. Not so the psalm of the republic. Here the theme is creative and vista. Here comes one among the well-beloved stonecutters and plans with decision and science and sees the solid and beautiful forms of the future where there are now no solid forms. Leaves of Grass; Preface - Walt Whitman

The artist traveled with a blue neon billboard that read ENJOY POVERTY and worked with Congolese photographers, teaching them how to sell images of suffering to Western media and aid agencies.

Review of Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization

(via We Make Money Not Art)

I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don’t feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (via wandery)

(via thiscitycalledearth)

In exchange for struggling in the crowded city, the poorest artist can be enriched by the ideas circulating for free. from “Art and Urban Density” by James Panero