I went to the ICA in Boston on Saturday. The museum has just opened in a new location and building, and the design has some nice features: I like the huge glass elevator, and the Mediateque, a cantilevered room on the fourth story with a glass wall tilting downward, so that all you see is water when you look out the window. A bit hard to describe.

The art was okay. Some good stuff, but it was all on one not-huge floor, and the quantity didn't seem like enough for $12 admission. We did not, however, spend any time in the "Mediatheque" browsing through their digital video art archives, which would have been fun. My favorite piece was this: We walked into a darkened room -- there were a number of these scattered around, usually with some video installation playing inside, but this one just had a large rectangle of orange on the wall, and a museum guard standing next to it. The orange seemed to be slightly glowing. I went right up to it, almost touching the wall but keeping my hand a couple inches away so as to not upset the guard. The rectangle appeared to be painted directly onto the wall; it wasn't being projected, because my hand made no shadow. Was the paint itself glowing? I wondered that out loud, and the guard said, "Actually, it's --" and she stuck her hand INTO THE RECTANGLE. I actually, literally gasped, and said, "You just blew my mind!" The rectangle was an opening to a seamless little room, that was somehow illuminated completely evenly. It was incredible, funny, awe-some. All good things for art to be.

Speaking of art (of the much-less-ambitious variety), my one-of-a-kind mini-watercolor blocks are now in the Northampton art-o-mat! Stop on by and take a look, it's still in the lobby of Faces. Half the money goes to a good cause (supporting art in the schools or some such) so go and vend a piece of my very soul. Cheap!