Lisa Mona, Jon Lisa, Mona Berge, Jon Berge, Mona Lisa

I was remiss in not including my friend, Jon Berge, in the Mona Lisa column. I'd forgotten he did a wonderful piece on the Mona Lisa. Berge showed a poster of the Mona Lisa to 100 inner-city children aged 7 to 14 and asked them to explain what the portrait of the Mona Lisa looks like to someone can't see or feel.

The project was created to be tactile, so that the visual aspect of the piece is not the focus. The tactility of the piece is further reinforced by the use of materials in their natural state.

The children's responses are incorporated into the piece in multiple ways. All 100 statements are thumb-tacked to the wall, forming a horizontal rectangle. In addition, four of the statements were translated into Braille, and mounted on birch wood panels. Each of those panels is the same size as the "original" Mona Lisa. The panels are hung in a horizontal row floating above the statements, held by a pair of bronze hands. All the panels are placed on the wall at the eye level of children and of people in wheelchairs. In addition, touching the piece activates a digital recording of the children reading their statements.

Jon Lisa Mona Berge, this one's for you!

Usually in your dreams...

Continuing on with the Mona Lisa, here's a South Korean exhibition starring holographic painters, sculptors and their models. Oh wait, it's not a dream, it's a nightmare...

Virtual Restoration

A lot of effort is being expended these days on the virtual restoration of artwork. Leading to new information about how the painter painted,what changes he/she might have made during the process and how the colors really looked, using contemporary pigments of the era. Interesting huh?

DIGITIZATION OF MONA LISA 240MEG.PIXELS
by LUMIERE-TECHNOLOGY

La Giaconda

In last saturday’s workshop, one of the technical assignments was to do a transfer using Golden Mix More Media and the image provided by the instructor was of the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci's painting is indelibly engraved in all our minds as one of the images that signifies art. It also crosses the line of art and commerce—you can buy your own "Mona Lisa" on almost any product, from umbrellas to fireplace screens. Here is a group by differing artists, who like Don Quixote are tilting not at windmills, but at art. In order: Duchamp, Dali, Warhol "If one is good, thirty are better", Basquiat, Rauschenberg, Wiley and my favorite an obento sushi lunch box.

Anime Tofu

I recently ate at WD-50, one of New York's outposts of molecular cuisine. The food was incredibly tasty, very elegant and it was also very funny. I started thinking about how our relarionship to food has changed. Divorced from "eat to live", like everything else these days, food seems to be all about entertainment. These two images represent this trend as well. One is high end artisinal tofu packaging; a thrusting fist asking, "Are you Jonile tonight?" The other is an obento lunch box; the contents artfully arranged to resemble the Mona Lisa, seaweed hair and clothes, framed by a sliced egg omelette. O brave new world that has such tofu in it.