Links

The following list of links to sites elsewhere on the World Wide Web has been compiled with the special interests of the Museum of Find Arts, its patrons and its visitors firmly in mind. All these sites concern themselves in some way with issues of chance and accident, in life and in art, and many address themselves specifically to the uses of "found" material in creative work in all media. We welcome your recommendations of other pertinent sites, and will investigate all suggestions and add them here when appropriate.

• Like he said: "PICTUREPEOPLE is an independent artistic (monthly) e-mail project by Rüdiger Heinze (writer) and Kristofer Paetau (visual artist) without any commercial purpose. It concentrates on the human representation in found amateur photography." If you sign up for their email list, you'll get monthly sets of found photos organized around some theme (guys with fish; wedding kisses). For the archive of their offerings so far, click on the link above.

• Not affiliated in any way with this Museum of Find Arts, the Museum of Found Art is a project of a "sketch comedy group," the Van Gogh-Goghs. Curated by Alan Benson, it contains some choice items.

• At Lost and Frowned, you can view the Found Slide Foundation's poignant collection of 35-mm. slides that have somehow become separated from their rightful owners. Do your part to help reunite these woebegone works with their bereft makers.

• This doesn't exactly qualify as "found art" in the way we use the term here, but Found Art!, "A Global Art Project Using Art to Heal the World," offers an intriguing spin on the concept: people creating and deliberately "losing" small works of art for others to find. They invite your participation.

• Spencer Schaffner's Gallery of Found Objects includes found notes, found lists, found art, and more. We especially recommend his collections of notes and lists.

• XIP Projects offers a small but first-rate and well-annotated collection of found art and literature.

  At Accidental.org, Edward Q. Bridges offers a nice collection of found photographs, well-annotated.

• Just exactly who has created FoundArt.Org we can't figure out, but it includes great material.

• At FOUND Magazine, they "collect FOUND stuff -- love letters, birthday cards, photos, to-do lists, poetry on napkins, doodles -- anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life." They publish a print magazine; the site samples extensively from that.

• DiscardArt, which gathers works "found in thrift stores, junk shops, estate and garage sales and in the dust bin," has extensive collections by some individual artists and an assortment of anonymous/unknown works. A subsection of a site devoted to outsider art.

• As a thematic, concentrated found-art collection, you can't beat the astonishing range of metal sculptures gathered by artist Raymon Elozua at StoveBurner.com. Absolutely stunning. We want them all, and have begun our own search.

• Germany's Joachim Schmid has, since 1986, been compiling an enormous archive of found vernacular photographic imagery (mostly German in origin) and organizing it into revealing typologies. You can sample his findings at Joachim Schmid: Archiv, 1986-1995.

• The anonymous female blogger who posts Swapatorium offers a fine collection of vernacular photography, collages made of found images, and some useful links to related sites. Check out her "Found Art Superheroes" post.

• A fine collection of found photographs, along with stories about their discovery, is archived at Figure One e-zine.

• There's also a "Found Photos" section in the Fixing Shadows: Still Photography site, which concerns historical and contemporary imagery.

• The Eyeneer Music Archives offer a good working definition of the term "aleatory," plus portraits, biographies and discographies of John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other composers who've utilized chance methods in their work.

• John Cage Online concentrates on the work of Cage, whose theories of chance in music, art, life and mushroom hunting sparked the work of such artists as Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Includes a wonderful guestbook gathering comments about visitors' interest in Cage, various Cage links, and an ongoing mailing-list discussion of Cage.

• Eno World, constructed by Malcolm Humes, devotes itself to the music and ideas of Brian Eno, whose Cage-inspired play with chance operations and found elements have influenced everyone from Roxy Music to David Bowie.

• All kinds of material on experimental techniques in poetry, including found poetry, at the Electronic Poetry Center, from the Poetics Program, Department of English, University of Buffalo. Good links section too.

• Found/chance poetry are included in an excitingly designed, content-rich new site, ubuweb: visual/sound/concrete poetry. Among its offerings: a historical survey of these approaches.

• While not exactly "found poetry," Daniel Nester's Found Poetry: Six Exquisite Corpse Transcriptions from a classroom exercise involve various chance elements and make fascinating reading.

• Bern Porter, the late nuclear physicist, also published Henry Miller and probed into chance play as a way of creating poetry and prose. For the Bern Porter home page, Bern Porter Improvise!, click here. The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities eventually acquired Porter's "mail art" collection, 1953-1992, and offers an inventory thereof. Ubu Web gives us 9 minutes and 37 seconds of Porter reading The Last Acts of St. Fuckyou. Elsewhere there's a "mail-interview" with Porter. And here's a lengthy commentary by Andrew Russ on Porter's literary work.

• Chaos theory tells us that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a tornado halfway across the world. By the same token, an obscure Japanese Fluxus artist can cause the breakup of the world's most popular rock 'n' roll band. ONOWEB tracks Yoko's activities in the here and now, as well as her past accomplishments. Chance/found elements have played a role in her work since the '60s.

• "Bringing the worst of art to the widest of audiences" is the goal of the Boston-based Museum of Bad Art, or MOBA, which offers "Art too bad to be ignored" -- much of it found.

• And, from fabled Los Angeles, comes the Museum of Jurassic Technology, from whose permanent exhibits you can learn much about such diverse, obscure and endlessly fascinating subjects as the Stink Ant of the Cameroon and Fruit-Stone Carving. The MJT is an educational institution "dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the appreciation of the Lower Jurassic." Worthy causes, both of them, we're sure.