Really. What is going on?!

Die Servicekomplizen – urbane Interventionen from Armin Nagel on Vimeo.

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It’s Tuesday, so you should be right on schedule for a good cry. Because after all, Tuesday is the most stressful day of the week.

The video below shows the moving reactions of Marina Abramovic, artist, and Ulay, her former lover, as they see each other for the first time in 30 years. Ulay unexpectedly shows up during Abramovic’s performance art presentation. (Abramovic’s live performance art was her spending a minute of silence alone with various strangers.) From the moment Ulay catch’s Abramovic’s eye, you can tell she knows who he is. The former couple’s reaction is emotional and beautiful.

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Filmmaker, actor, artist and writer Miranda July can now add “techie” to her hat rotation.

The Los Angeles-based eccentric has created a new social media app, which she calls Somebody. And it’s about as awkward as you’d expect a Miranda July project to be.

According to W Magazine, July had an idea that she began to obsess over: “I’d been telling everyone about it, and trying to figure it out how to get it made.”

The idea is simple, for a Miranda July project, anyway. Using Somebody, the app sends your text to another person other than whom it was intended for. Instead, it goes to the next nearest person. The onus is then on that person—a potential stranger—to deliver the text in real life to your recipient. How they know who you are isn’t clear, and probably part of the goal. Standing inside a crowded venue could mean walking up to a dozen strangers before finding the correct recipient.

“The app makes people do things they normally wouldn’t do,” July told W. “It can get outrageous. I do like the fact that it creates these ephemeral experiences, but I also hope that some people will document their message deliveries, just so I can see them.”

If it doesn’t sound all that awkward, just imagine, for example, Miranda July walking up to you and shouting “LOL!” in your face. Out of context (in response to a funny kitty picture you texted your BF) it would seem strange, if not downright scary. But that’s just July’s point and her hopes of bridging our real life worlds with the tech bubbles we all live inside. Just how weird can we get? For July, it seems there are still no limits.

The project is sponsored by Miu Miu and presented by the New Museum and you can snag the app on iTunes.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: Cameron Wittig

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Column“Life is a dream, and death is waking up.” – Marina Abramović

Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović made international headlines last year with her career retrospective shown at New York’s MoMA, The Artist Is Present, in which she sat for 700 hours, staring at visitors.  The months long project was seen by as many as 750,000 people.

Abramović, as described by Guy Treybay in The New York Times:

 …has restaged the New York retrospective, at twice its original scale, at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow; has collaborated with Robert Wilson on a biographical spectacle entitled “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović ,” and was the subject of biographical films produced by HBO and PBS. She guest edited and appeared on the cover of the English style journal Pop (she had already been featured in Elle), became a viral Web phenomenon when slide shows of portraits taken during her MoMA retrospective went online, and found time to serve as an unofficial “muse” to her friend Riccardo Tisci, the Givenchy designer. The last fact probably makes her the first performance artist in history to wear haute couture.

Last month she unveiled plans for a new art and education center she is building in Hudson, N.Y.  The Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art will be designed by rockstar architects Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, and housed in a former theater.

For a 65-year-old woman whose oeuvre was once an obscure and conceptual art form with a limited audience, Abramović has flown to new heights in the world of culture. Her brand of art has crossed disciplines, genders and boundaries. Perhaps not what one would envision for a provocateur whose mother once burned her work:

The artist explains:

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I’m naked.

It is indeed these polarities that contribute to making Abramović a person of interest. When asked about a breast enlargement, which some found to be anathema to the feminist tradition of performance art, she answered:

Why not use technology if you can, if it can build your spirit? And I’m not feminist, by the way. I am just an artist.

This coming from an artist who is quoted as saying:

The hardest thing is to do something close to nothing. 

Inspired by EcoSalon Editor-in-Chief, Amy DuFault

Check MoMA’s Flickr page for hundreds of performances by visitors to The Artist is Present.

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her trends blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

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