Cabinet

"Hopeful" explores headshots—photographs of actors looking for work rather than publicity portraits of stars—both as genre and as material artifact. First appearing in the 1950s, these peculiar images routinely disregard conventions of portraiture: the intended viewer, who is in a position to hire the actor, is offered... no environment, professional emblems, or trace of social context.

Today, New York City agents alone receive an estimated ten thousand headshots weekly, ninety-nine percent of which are routinely thrown out. What is the ecological impact of this rejected material? And how much waste—not only trashed photographs but also image CDs, demo tapes, slides, and manuscripts—does the culture industry need to generate in order to maintain its supposedly meritocratic reputation? Read More

As part of the ongoing exhibition, "Fabrication of Blindness," Julia Mandle will conduct a participatory Embroidery Circle, collaborating with the staff of Cabinet magazine to conduct “craft-based interventions.” During these sewing circles, participants will have access to detainee poetry, letters, and stories, the co...ntent of which they will then stitch onto the hoods and add to the installation, giving voice to previously hidden detainee narratives. Embroidery Circles are open to the public. People without craft experience are highly encouraged to participate.

Embroidery Circles go from 1 to 5 pm on Saturday and Sunday.Read More

Please join us on Saturday, 19 September 2009, 5–8 pm, for the opening of Julia Mandle's exhibition "Fabrication of Blindness." Presented as part of the ""Crossing the Line" festival organized by the French Institute Alliance Française, the exhibition is a memorial to, and protest of, America's use of torture in Iraq, ...Guantanamo Bay, and beyond, "Fabrication of Blindness" takes the form of a large dark cloud made out of the black military sandbags that are used to hood prisoners. For the work, Mandle has collected letters, poems, and stories by the detainees, words from which have been embroidered onto the hoods during a series of embroidery circles in New York City and Washington, D.C.Read More

Cabinet is presenting "Speed Reading" at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture. The event, a relay race of sorts, will feature 20-25 writers, artists, and others running on treadmills while reading aloud a short passage addressing the notion of speed. Texts, which will be a maximum of 4 minutes, can be from a nov...el, manifesto, poem, philosophical treatise, children’s story, timetable, recipe, parable, scientific experiment, or any other relevant genre.Read More

Working with time, music, color, and, temperature, "Ice Music" allows for fantasies of intimate visceral mischief with folk and electronic sound patterns. Performances made for 1-2 people will be available by Emily Lacy inside a small, freshly cooled homemade music environment, similar to an igloo or personal camping t...ent. Though not required, reservations for 20 minute appointments are recommended.

Email or call for reservations:
718-473-2989
emilylacy@gmail.com

(NOTE: ALL SATURDAY SLOTS ARE GONE BUT ADDITIONAL 20-MIN SLOTS ARE AVAILABLE ON SUNDAY BETWEEN 2 AND 6)

2:00-2:20
2:20-2:40
2:40-3:00

3:00-3:20
3:20-3:40
3:40-4:00

4:00-4:20
4:20-4:40
4:40-5:00

5:00-5:20
5:20-5:40
5:40-6:00

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Emily Lacy is a folk artist generating works in music, film, and other media. She has performed in exhibitions at PS1 MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and LACMA, in addition to various livingrooms, subways, and DIY spaces all throughout America. She works very closely with Machine Project, while being based in NY and LA. Read More

Please join us on Thursday, August 20th, 7-9 pm, for the opening of “Victor Houteff: At the Eleventh Hour,” an exhibition of prints drawn from the collection of Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. A Bulgarian immigrant to the United States, Victor Houteff was running a hotel in the Midwest when, in 1918, he attended a ...tent meeting of a Seventh-day Adventist group. He joined the church, and in the late 1920s began teaching doctrines that eventually resulted in his expulsion from the Seventh-day Adventist church in Los Angeles, where he had relocated. Despite his ousting, Houteff continued to preach his message. He and his followers, now known as the “Shepherd’s Rod Seventh-day Adventists,” finally moved to Mount Carmel, Texas, on the outskirts of Waco, where the group changed its name to the “Davidian Seventh-day Adventists.” After Houteff’s death in 1955, numerous factions broke-off—the largest was led by Benjamin Roden, who named his congregation the “Branch Davidians.” In 1983, Vernon Wayne Howell, later to change his name to David Koresh, joined the Branch Davidians.

Jim Shaw first came across Houteff’s prints in 1994 at the Pasadena City College Flea Market.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Saturday­, 12-6 pm, and by appointment
Opening reception: Thursday, August 20, 7-9 pmRead More

In 2002, MIT partnered with the US Army and a small group of military contractors, such as Raytheon, to make a battlesuit for the Future Force Warrior—a project that sought to use nanotechnology (or the purposeful manipulation of matter at nearly the atomic scale) to create an invincible American soldier. This battlesu...it was not just any new soldier uniform—it was, in essence, a superhuman suit that would give its wearer the ability to become bulletproof at light speed, to jump great distances or lift heavy weights, to monitor vital signs and perform CPR if the soldier needed it, to detect chemical and biological weapons and deliver an antidote (custom made from a library of ingredients stored within the suit), and to sense explosives as well as a trained bomb-sniffing dog. Almost seven years later, the supersuit is still in development, but one aspect of it—a handheld synthetic dog nose called Fido that allows soldiers and security personnel to "sniff" explosives—has left the lab and is being implemented everywhere from our nation's airports and harbors to military checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Laurel Braitman, a doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an affiliate at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, is a historian and anthropologist of science and has been researching the story of the supersuit for the last three years. She will discuss nanotechnology, the development of the synthetic dog nose, and our ongoing national efforts to create superheroes to save us from ourselves.Read More