Aaron Cockle today with results of the 2017 Composition Competition; Kara Walker; Sally Ingraham; Trevor Paglen; CBLDF at SPX
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Comic Workbook Composition Competition 2017 Winners
Congratulations to all who created and submitted work for this contest. We really enjoyed reading each and every work.
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Kara Walker, September 7 – October 14, 2017
Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!
Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.
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The SPX Interviews: Sally Ingraham on Teaching and her Daily Strip Suzy & Cecil
CW’s Sally Ingraham is interviewed over at The Beat, in the first of a series of SPX-related pieces. Congrats, Sally!
Philippe Leblanc: You’re working on creating a comics curriculum for girls. Can you tell us a little bit more about this project.
Sally Ingraham: We all need good examples to follow, and it’s especially important for girls to have other cool women to look up to. As I pursue my own development I have been looking for masters of the medium that I can more readily identify with, and this has led me to the obvious conclusions: There are and have been loads of female cartoonists, but their work is still under-documented, less celebrated, and straight up forgotten. I’m interested in developing a comics curriculum for girls that documents, celebrates, and remembers the women who came before us while making new spaces for the women working today, and the ones that will be making comics tomorrow. I won’t exclude the comics of the many male cartoonists whose work I admire and aspire to, but I want to push the balance in a different direction with my own curriculum, placing the emphasis on female creators first. I’m in the development stages at the moment, still learning as much as I can from whomever will teach me, but I’ve discovered very quickly that I can’t sit around waiting for someone else to make the moves that I see opening up on the board – I’ve got to stay in the game.
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Trevor Paglen: A Study of Invisible Images
September 8 – October 21, 2017
Trevor Paglen’s A Study of Invisible Images is the first exhibition of works to emerge from his ongoing research into computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and the changing status of images. This body of work has formed over years of collaboration with software developers and computer scientists and as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University. The resulting prints and moving images reveal a proliferating and otherwise imperceptible category of “invisible images” characteristic of computer vision.
Paglen’s exhibition focuses on three distinct kinds of invisible images: training libraries, machine-readable landscapes, and images made by computers for themselves. For Machine-Readable Hito, for example, Paglen took hundreds of images of artist Hito Steyerl and subjected them to various facial recognition algorithms. This portrait of Steyerl presents the images alongside metadata indicating the age, gender, emotional state and other signifiers that the algorithms have interpreted from the images. In another portrait in the show, Paglen trained facial recognition software to read the face of philosopher Frantz Fanon. A ghostly image of Fanon shows the facial signature–the unique qualities of a face as determined by biometric recognition software–used by computer vision to identify an individual.
To make the prints in Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Paglen trained an AI to recognize images associated with taxonomies such as omens and portents, monsters, and dreams. A second AI worked in tandem with the first to generate the eerie, beautiful images that speak to the exuberant promises and dark undercurrents characterizing our increasingly automated world.
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CBLDF at SPX
This year’s annual Small Press Expo Lecture is The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Comics & The Power of Intellectual Freedom
Friday, September 15, 2017, 12-1PM, Library of Congress Madison Building, West Dining Room, 6th floor; Metro Stop: Capitol South
A trend that began in the 1940s continues today—challenges to comic books! Charles Brownstein, Executive Director of the non-profit Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, will share the history of comic book censorship from the medium’s origins to the present day. Participants will learn about the history of comic book censorship, and how that history still informs challenges to graphic novels happening right now. Learn what CBLDF does to protect this valuable medium, discover some of the most frequently challenged comics and graphic novels, and what you can do to make a difference. Emerge from this session with a new or renewed passion for comics, graphic novels, and manga and as a strong advocate for protecting this form of free speech! A selection of comic books from the Serial and Government Publications Division will be on display. This is the sixth annual SPX festival program sponsored by the Serial & Government Publications Division. http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/calendar.html
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A Cosmic Journey – 9-12-2017 – by Cameron Arthur
This concludes A Cosmic Journey – look for the whole comic archived here on Comics Workbook soon!
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Suzy and Cecil – 9-12-2017 – by Sally Ingraham