There is one day left to see the exhibition Photographs of Joe by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, MO.

The photographs, large black & white fibre prints of the Joe torqued spiral by Richard Serra (the first in the torque series, an homage to Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. of the Pulitzer dynasty), are able to be seen for the first and last time right alongside their subject matter, the aforementioned sculpture present in the courtyard of the Pulitzer Foundation.

NOW, for my homage! Accompanying the exhibition are a book and some exquisite material online at thepulitzer.org, the website for the Pulitzer Foundation exhibitions. The website contains some PDFs of text, and lots of flash embedded material, including some interviews with Sugimoto by Deborah Martin Kao. I watched a few of the interviews and thought ‘These are great…’ and pondered why there isn’t more material available online, of interviews and works by artists themselves (this thinking is all part of a larger scheme of ideas and works I’m developing myself as well.). Of course, as soon as the exhibition is over, the material online will disappear and become unavailable for public access.

Perplexed by this, I set out to capture and archive the flash streaming interviews. Of course, the Pulitzer are clever and have someone with strong coding skills running their web presence: the flash files were controlled via a javascript call and running from a hidden – or hard to locate – folder. I did some digging and was eventually able to figure out the call sequence, and locate the directory containing the flash streaming video (FLV) files. From here I could save them to my local hard drive.

I’ve now got them where I can access them, but the point is to make it so others can access them, also. So I turned to YouTube. I had an account registered but haven’t uploaded any files there, and thought this was a good opportunity to start a new series of uploaded, accessible works. Produced by the Pulitzer, made available by moi. Enjoy.

(note the light changes during and throughout the interview. awesome!)

Related websites:
the Pulitzer Foundation have a blog too
Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
more about Richard Serra and St. Louis
NYTimes article on Joe and Sugimoto