Hands Times Square - Animation and Simulation with hands drawings in a digital Times Square Landscape, created by American Contemporary Artist Mirena Rhee and dedicated to New York City /  by Mirena Rhee

Hands Times Square /  by Mirena Rhee

Hands Times Square now has its own page with video stills and the full version of the animation https://www.mirenarhee.com/hands-times-square-animation.

Watch a high resolution mp4 here: http://bit.ly/mirena2020

Hands Times Square is dedicated to New York City and its people - the city I love, the city which inspires me, the city which paints on the sidewalks for no reason at all, the city that loves art and artists, the city where everyone is so different yet we live in peace.

Animation and Simulation with hands drawings in a digital Times Square Landscape, dimensions variable, 2020

Hands Times Square or as originally named - Times Square NYE 2020 - is an animation I created for Times Square Alliance and a part of a bigger Hands Scape’s project that involves New York City - it is only appropriate as New York inspires me and was the reason I do hands in the first place, it is a New York thing…

I spent new Years Eve here on Times Square ( hey it’s 2020, spent 2000 in Chicago, 2010 in San Francisco.. so time for a one of a lifetime experience ). I was amazed at how beautiful and exciting it was to share it with a million others. I learned quite a few things while there, one of them was how the NYPD does crowd control. It is quite fascinating and a science. Have you ever asked yourself why a million people running around like mad to get a glimpse of “the ball” don’t trample and stampede each other to death? Crowd control, it is good trust me - once I saw people running towards televisions I realized it would be easy to die under the heels of a half million tourists. This project is the evolution of this whole thread of thoughts and the expression of overwhelming number of exploding colored confetti.

About

This animation is also inspired by New Year's Eve 2020 at the center of the World - Times Square. Where at midnight fireworks of Confetti explode into a colorful supernova at the stroke of midnight. Times Square is a supernova of exciting imagery, of people and movement, and lights and colors. People from all over the world, ages, walks of life and languages, come here to mingle in this Babylonian Square and bask in its energy. In this animation colorful hands draw extraordinary three-dimensional shapes. As they move through space they create flowing, complex structures of hand trails. The hands travel in a series of gestures creating abstract shapes. The hands coalesce into an ephemeral three-dimensional Times Square made of beaming hands. The camera floats through the beaming hands of Times Square and hands fireworks explode and saturate the space with color.

Statement

This animation is inspired by my own experience spending New Year's Eve 2020 on Times Square, the Confetti, excitement and energy that fills the space. New York city has always been an endless animation, with hands of various sizes, colors and shapes moving and gesturing endlessly in public and private spaces in the city. It is literally a stream of hands of all kinds. This series of ephemeral hands structures arose from the realization that during simple and mundane daily activity, like holding onto the rails in the subway, the hands draw extraordinary three-dimensional shapes. As they move through space they create flowing, complex structures of hand trails - this body of work explores these ephemeral constructs. The hands are based on paintings of hands, scanned, animated and simulated on the computer. My own hands serve as the models and main building element of my work because they are present and available, constantly traversing and dominating my personal space.

Happy Eastern Orthodox Easter and The State of the Material World. Covid Death Counters /  by Mirena Rhee

I will never forgive the media for using death counters and funeral marches, perverse countdowns of the worst kind.

Because it’s Un-American.

We built this place from nothing, we built all the skyscrapers, covered the land with roads, and built a great country from the hills. Manhattan was a hilly island. Why do I say we? Because I came here with nothing but two bags like many, from a home country I loathed.

We have been through so much. Fires and wars, and 9/11.

It has come to my attention that in the quietness of this city, of the economy, the quietness of work, and all kinds of business, the media companies like Facebook ( and their now subsidiary Instagram ) and newspapers like the New York Times have taken it upon themselves to cover us with their Corporate-Speak of Fear and Loathing. I do not read the New Yorker but I see the covers of it here and there. It too Corporate-Speaks Fear and Loathing.

The Number One Fearmonger is the New York Times.

Instead of informing and helping people and New Yorkers

The New York Times chose to count the dead Americans and the dead New Yorkers. Is the New York Times the New Media Morgue Death Counter? It is a (un)dead newspaper in a tail spin of Fear and Loathing.

I tell you what - I will boycott The New York Times for life,  for the life of the newspaper that is.

I remember the time when the New York Times was selling the Iraq war and telling all kinds of made-up stories to stressed Americans about the certain proofs of Weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq. Then they perversely enjoyed counting the dead and killed Americans and the killed and struck Iraqi people, and then they enjoyed every single blow and gun. And counted the dead with glut for blood.

Because we stopped dreaming, we stopped having dreams and lofty goals as a civilization and left corporations with no other purpose than profits to tell us what to think.

The New York Times is not a news organization, it is a yellow tabloid with a website and an army of journalists under pressure for their jobs who would write practically anything for money. They would even write about dead and dying Americans and New Yorkers to win the daily bread.

But this is a direct result of our civilization losing its grand vision, losing its dreams, and burying its marvels under piles of garbage, aka meaningless possessions.

When you bury yourself in meaningless possessions you can’t see the sky from the piles so you bury your head in the ground, your field of vision becomes a field of dirt ( or dust! ) and this is how counting dead Americans and dead New Yorkers came to be a great entertainment.

This is the naked truth - from the likes of yellow newspapers like the New York Times, which has no other purpose but to save its flailing business by selling eyeballs, you are being sold the most gruesome entertainment in the form of counting dead Americans, and counting dead New Yorkers and the more gruesome, the more awful, the bigger the letters.

We are sold gruesome entertainment instead of dreams of building a great civilization.

If the New York Times was about saving lives - this is what the headlines would have been like - Today We Saved Thousands of Lives! And they would have been the first to champion the plight of the homeless who die on the streets of Manhattan in great numbers every day, and they die of neglect. The homeless die every day in front of our eyes yet their plight was never championed, neither by Facebook nor by the likes of the New York Times. Because it is not entertaining.

Do not even for a moment think that Facebook or The New York Times care about you when they cover you with Corporate-Speak Propaganda and entertain you with the news of death and politics. Where are the Facebook and New York Times soup kitchens?

Because they sell advertisements and as for-profit corporations, they revel in the opportunity to entertain you with deathly news.

The New York Times and Facebook perversely enjoy entertaining you with death, because you are afraid of it and it feels buzzing when you are close to it when they dangle news of it.

I absolutely love it when people and corporations thrive and profit, but I loathe Corporate-Speak.

Why would a corporation feel the need to educate me and tell me things? Do they have education specialists, scientists, or visionaries in their cubicles? Or is it just marketing people and editors and writers who, to earn the daily bread, go to their cubicles and write whatever they are told to, based on whatever gets more fearful eyes?

Do not be afraid to cut loose the Corporate Speakers and find anything from the history of mankind, the greatest thinkers, artists, and writers to read about. Most of all - educate yourself about everything you need to know and think for yourself first.

Yeah, I know I left television entirely out of my essay - but see - I absolutely do not watch or even glance at television at all so can’t possibly rage about it. I have been a cord cutter for a while now.

The second part of my essay is about the Material World. What is the material? We don’t know. We do but we don’t really because we haven’t entirely penetrated the fabric of the Universe yet.

Here is the main thing that needs to be sorted out about the Material World - you need to inform yourself about it, question it, and update your paradigms about it constantly. Every human grows by updating his or her ideas about the world, and I would add to that the ideas and concepts about the Material World. This is what Plato’s Cave is about - you need to know about your shadows.

Here is how to know about the Material World - at some point, you will get anxious about all the material things around you and they will start not being enough. This is when you know that your paradigm about the Material World has shifted.

Because the Material World is a veil or series of veils. Every single iPhone is meaningless as a collection of mass of atoms but it is the genius of man in it that makes it useful to us, and marvelous. At one point the iPhone you have no longer brings you the same happiness. I will tell you why.

We are here to be more. We are here as human beings to become more, but not to have more stuff.

I believe the task of every human on Earth is to figure out how to be more.

I believe having stuff is a diversion and prevents you from becoming more. It is a distraction from figuring out how to be more.

The messages of Corporations like Facebook have become so relentless and so well crafted that you feel that they are telling you stuff that you must listen to. You have to see these entities for what they are - they are advertising networks that depend on you listening or seeing their messages.

Your life depends on you knowing the Material World around you and its messages so you can take your life into your own hands and craft your own message.

To become more you need to carefully pick your teachers - I prefer dead people, artists, and thinkers from the long past because they are not selling anything relevant to me and the context of their ideas is out of the context of the mundane they lived in.

Thirdly.

There has been a murmur in my head that has been developing in the past month but the murmur grew into a rage in the past week as I was approached on Instagram by Masked Mermaids.

Masked Mermaids!

Now don’t get me wrong, I love mermaids. I also love the human breast and I think really well of human and mammal breasts and I think they should be happily exposed at all times.

But

If you pose with a Mask to be Cute you are an Idiot

regardless of whether you have large or nice breasts or whatever - see the previous paragraph.

The number one enemy of mankind is For-Profit Corporate News Sites like the New York Times, I include in this category also Facebook which has shifted from its original purpose of connecting people - to its current business model which is to sell advertising for businesses and to show them to people. The number two enemy of mankind are Entertainment Corporations, which are usually part of conglomerates selling all kinds of things including news and entertainment.

I love being entertained and love movies. I have seen them almost all. So it is not the companies but

Entertainment Stupor is the Number One Enemy of Mankind.

Entertainment stupor includes news and especially bad and gruesome news which are designed to bring the nose of a human into the dirt where worms live.

I recently saw an article about us going to the Moon - what a marvelous thing and how exciting for mankind.

Now the news is heavily politicized and the face of our civilization are actors. I love beautiful people and of course, many actors have brought much joy to my life. But they do not define what we should be thinking about when we turn off the TV or switch off the phone laptop or tablet or whatever. We can’t pretend to act something like going to the Moon.

Let's stop worshiping actors and instead start worshiping scientists, engineers, thinkers, tinkerers, teachers, and artists.

I of course love NASA but NASA stooped really low at one point promoting Brad Pitt and his movie Ad Astra. Okay, so you are in possession of the brightest women and men, handpicked bravest, and smartest human beings and you have quite a number of them, and you end up touting a guy who.. plays something whatever it is that I did not see. Because pretending to do something is boring and doing the thing is exciting and kudos to the actual doers.

Let me say that the value of any communication, including entertainment and movies, is in the message. And I will talk more about this later in About Art at the end, but the most valuable thing in communication is the message. There are actors and entertainers who go beyond simply speaking the words or enacting a scene in front of the camera - actors who are also producers, directors, and writers and their message goes beyond speaking the words. These are artists. To be an artist is not the same as being an actor or enactor - see the end of the essay below - it explains what Artists do and why it’s important.

I love movies and love being entertained but this should end with the end of the entertainment. Entertainers and actors bring joy to mankind but they will not take us to the stars. So don’t follow their examples and do not worship the ground they step on - it is not worthy of mankind, or your life. Your life is given to you to be more. I do not know how you can be more but I am sure you are great at something.

The best inoculation against Corporate Speak is to see things for what they are. Think and carefully curate what you look at and when you look at something think of the source. Is the source a corporate boardroom, or a corporate meeting where a bunch of people come out of their cubicles to decide the fate of mankind? Not only what is the message but who is behind the message?

Take Facebook for example and Mark Zuckerberg. He is a good businessman and built a large and great business. He has however no other credentials other than being able to create and run a large business. He has no qualifications in science, education, or philosophy nor is he hiring scientists, philosophers, and thinkers to develop his message. He just.. sells stuff.

Facebook and the New York Times are advertising businesses, they have no business telling you stuff, they are just bigger than the guy who holds a large Subway sign on the corner - he just tells you where to go buy stuff.

Facebook and the New York Times are advertising businesses, just like the guy who holds a large Subway sign on the corner, they just tell you where to go to buy stuff.

Don’t build your life around a sign on the corner.

My other big problem is the heavy politicization of all kinds of messages, including the entertainmentalization of politics. Okay, I get it, the people who run our country must be heard. That’s it. I don’t want to hear about it more than once a week to make sure they do a good job. I do not want to hear or watch the faces of politicians - they should be at work, solving problems and getting mankind on the next undertaking.

Now all the knowledge that has ever left a human brain,  has ever left a human mouth, is now absolutely free for you on the internet to learn. What other stuff have you got to do? Learn and think directly from the source of all mankind’s wisdom. The best and brightest, the most talented, the most eminent humans that ever lived are now with all their thoughts, at our fingertips.

Before you pick the message, carefully pick the source of the message.

Don’t let a corporation barely 20 years old tell you stuff. It is just a bunch of people going to work and coming home like me and you, their message is no more or less valid than the message of any random stranger on the sidewalk. At least with a stranger on the sidewalk, you know who you are speaking to.

What About Art.

Artists are the creators of human culture.

Wait, what about the entertainment companies and movies? Aren’t they culture?

Culture is about deep human experience, it is encoded in human objects and experiences like art, great books, and great music, for other humans to enjoy and contemplate.

Take Disney for example. Disney’s best entertainment products are based on great works of art created by artists like Walt Disney himself, the Brothers Grimm, A.A. Milne, and other writers and artists.

Some of the best and most famous movies are based on the works of artists and writers like Tolkien, the Star Wars franchise is the brainchild of the great artist and filmmaker George Lucas. Their message is diluted once the works are removed and extrapolated away from the artist as happened with the Star Wars franchise.

Among some of the greatest artists of our time, I consider people like Steve Jobs who sharpened and took his message to the greatest heights to produce great works of art in computer design and app and device design. It is a unique and not easily repeated contribution to human culture and every single device you hold in your hand is a copy of what the great wizard Steve Jobs, of course together with other great geniuses in his employ, came up with.

Artists master the human experience, not a medium. Artists make the human experience their message and craft objects or works based on the human experience.

The deepest human experience is encoded in the greatest works of art.

Ever wondered how it is possible that the simple message and brush strokes of a humble artist like Van Gogh are among the most recognizable human culture messages, and simple reproductions of Van Gogh paintings hang in villages in China, in huts in Bhutan, and in the basements of apartment buildings in Manhattan. Read Van Gogh’s letters - you will find the deepest most profound experience of being a human being, and this is what is in his paintings.

Artists are crafters of deep, human experience. And thus their objects carry the message of the human experience. Human culture is about the individual human experience, encrafted and encoded by an artist into an artifact or an experience that later delivers a message or an experience to the percipient.

If you are one of those people who reads the weather in the newspaper - there’s an app for it and believe it or not they can tell the weather based on a radar. The weather radar is good enough for NASA to plan the launching of their rockets - it must be good enough for you.

If you meet me and I have an umbrella it is because the app told me there’s at least a 30 percent chance of rain.

More Pictures and The Story of Hands Icosahedron /  by Mirena Rhee

Hands Icosahedron is an Interactive Performance and Installation with Public Participation created at the Armory Show in New York City in March 2020 by American Contemporary Artist Mirena Rhee.

The new Hands Icosahedron page is up here.

Hands Icosahedron, detail

Happy Easter and much love from NYC /  by Mirena Rhee

A message from Mirena Rhee.

Here is the short link:

https://bit.ly/happyeasterNYC

I have been thinking long and hard,

while painting.

Here in Manhattan.

But I decided to spare you my lecture,

I will leave it for another time.

This is simply a message of love.

Because I'm not really sure I'd like to think of anything else today.

There are so many things in the world. That could be better, potentially,

we are such marvelous living machines.

We can do anything, we can be anything. We can make wonderful machines and things, we can communicate and convey messages. We can look at the sky and see giraffes.

So, be well NYC, and World, and see you soon.

From me to you, to my favorite city, the city i love, the City that paints and the city that loves artists /  by Mirena Rhee

The sun sets over the Armory show during my #installation and performance March 8th. Feels like years and years ago.
#performance #performanceart @thearmoryshow 
But we will do this and a lot more of it soon!

#wellbeback but it will get better we will get through it, and #NewYork will come together.


My best wishes for all of you to #bewell and #GetWellNY 

#getbetter soon

Courage NYC ! Get Well New York ! A get Well Card from me to You /  by Mirena Rhee

Last Night

I watched the sun

set over New York City.

And I thought,

to tell you

to give you this message.

Courage,

New York City !

Get well, New York.

Because

we're the most awesome city on the planet.

Because we're strong,

because we love each other. We love

our neighbors,

love our friends.

We talk to each other.

We ride on the subway.

We are so very different.

And we live in peace.

Photograph of my performance at The Armory Show right before Covid virus shut down New York city /  by Mirena Rhee

Photograph of my performance right before Covid shut down New York City it was really amazing to see people painting at the Armory Show even holding napkins.

Artists who took part in the Armory show came out to paint, passers by, friends, joggers, art lovers of all ages and walks of life.

Thank you all for painting and for being there to celebrate art and color.

Also - Thank you so much to my photographer who had to deal with changing dates and the weather and my work turning into a kite and all kinds of things, it was amazing to be there together. 

Thank you so much for putting up with changing dates as you know March 7th was a really windy day, and also a very cold day, so it would have turned into a kite chasing adventure, so thank you so much for agreeing to change the dates and having an amazing day on March 8th.

As you know due to security at the Armory Show - Show Security, parking attendants, NYC Park Service, NYPD and the fire department, and the bomb squad - all showed up and I had a nice chat with all of them and everyone was really nice.

It really is a great thing that I showed up early and had the opportunity to meet everyone and everyone got to know me.

We really had the cutest dog as the bomb-sniffing dog - basically I was working in the middle of the lawn and then I looked up and I saw an animal, a dog with a big sign across his chest saying  "BOMB", and then I looked up and there was this bulky guy and of course I had to ask are you a cop and he says yes I'm a cop. The dog ended up sniffing around me and maybe not my bags :). Both the cop and the dog were really friendly we eventually ended up being friends.

Actually the least comfortable interaction I had was with New York City Parks, the only complaint was that I was not supposed to tie anything to a tree branch or a tree, everything else was fair game. Well on March 7th I had very strong winds and everything turned into a balloon and kite adventure so I had to tie everything to a tree. I had to keep everything tied to the tree to prevent everything running into and rolling into traffic.

In addition to taking into account the strong winds, of course I had to deal with the cold.

I had to work during fairly cold weather so I ended up wearing all the clothes I own and of course catching a little bit cold so hopefully not the #covid virus.

Over the course of several days working at the Armory I became friends with a lot of the supporting staff, and they ended up helping me dismantle my stuff at the very end - thank you so much!

Mirena Rhee performance at the Armory Show

Hands Icosahedron was a series of day long works I created using the Icosahedron Structure and the Hands. /  by Mirena Rhee

Over several weeks and over three days - March 5, 7 and 8 - in front of Pier 94 at The Armory Show I continually re-created the structure every morning and collapsed it in the evening. On March 7 I made the structure and used it more or less like a Hands Tent for the day which was also pretty funny and produced different reactions in the public, even in animals :)


A Husky gets really interested in my art :) Cute husky @ 0:44 'He never barks!' the owner said. Wait for the barks...

I had someone stop by to ask if I was making a political work taking pictures of people from inside the tent. I assured the man i was not going to photograph him for political purposes.