Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's Myspace profile

The exhibition history and creative output of the artist Anthony Burdin is intertwined with—and often overshadowed by his nomadic lifestyle. The 2006 Whitney Biennial participant identifies himself as a recording artist and is most known for his installations and video performances. In a 2005 review for artnet.com, Jerry Saltz described Burdin as a “sort of traveling magician-maniac-minstrel, [who] lives, makes art, and stages performances in his van.”

Up until a few years ago, Burdin recorded an astronomical amount of videotape that he captured while driving around Southern California. Like most people reading this blog, he spends a lot of time online (picking up unprotected wireless networks?). His band’s MySpace accounts (1, 2) show a shift from persistently documenting the physical landscape and his relationship with it to developing a relationship with online services and trolling social networks in search of a focused type of user to friend-request.

Screen shot from Anthony Burdin's MySpace profile

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When looking at the IMDB profile for Adolf Hilter (character), not Adolf Hitler (self), questions begin to emerge with regards to how one might infer a sense of the political climate of a certain time period based on whether the majority of portrayals of the Füher in popular culture are spoofs or dramatic snoozefests. Perhaps even more cultural subtext can be found in the absence of Hilter in TV or cinematic releases of a certain year (e.g. 1986, 1980).

While Hilter’s screen-time in movies and TV may ebb and flow, he is sure to remain a staple of discussion on the Internet for many years to come. (see Godwin’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_law)

Adolf Hilter (character) IMDB spreadsheet, 1935 – 2009:
Each ’|' indicates where an actor has portrayed Adolf Hitler in either a motion picture or a TV appearance.

Citing articles published in the Economist is always a good strategy for intelligent conversation, but you don’t want to be the person at the dinner party who halts the dialogue in utter confusion and pantomiming of algebraic functions. While it might sound like a good idea to reference Greg Ip’s colorful description of the economic recovery, please stop yourself before the words “economy” and “reverse-square-root symbol” escape from your mouth.

I guess if you really want to take it there, you should be prepared to describe what a square root symbol looks like and be able to reverse it using Photoshop. First create a text field and copy and paste the Square-Root unicode character √ into the newly created text field. Make the font size big enough for you to see the symbol in details. I went with 200pt.

Next move your cursor up to the menubar and click the word “image,” select “Image Rotation” from the drop-down menu, and then choose “Flip Canvas Horizontal,”

Unfortunately, Greg Ip left us to guess what typeface to use. I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I can only hope it isn’t Lucida Handwriting.