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Late Capitalism’s Weapon of Cash Destruction: Shower strippers with money using ‘The Cash Cannon’
03.10.2015
09:41 am
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Ladies and gentlemen: The Cash Cannon.

If you can get this past security at your local strip club—and let’s be honest, if your local strip club has security, it’s probably not that interesting to begin with—you can be the reigning (raining?) King of Fools parted from his money.

This miracle device allows its brandisher to blow through large amounts of cash at an alarmingly high rate of speed. You’re not just “making it rain,” you just brought the typhoon up in this piece.

According to the manufacturer’s website:

The Cash Cannon™ Money Gun is a toy that dispenses paper items in a rapid but user controlled manner. The preferred item of choice to dispense is of course cash but any item that fits in the loading compartment and out of the slot will work with the device. The Cash Cannon™ is the first device that performs this function and is simple enough in terms of design to be mass manufactured for the public use.

If the psychology behind throwing out large amounts of money in a gentleman’s club is creating an atmosphere of fun from an affected lack of concern, then the Cash Canon instantly turns what might have been three minutes of self-important limelight into four and a half seconds of pathetic confusion. The top dog always spreads the money around and you can’t get top doggier than literally spewing it all over the place like a first year fraternity brother retching up last night’s kamikazes. All you have to do is load the Cash Cannon with your favorite denomination of currency, gently squeeze the trigger, and look forward to tomorrow’s regret.

Testing, testing…

 
Actual in-field use, below:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Where’s daddy?’: Amusing strip club billboard juxtaposition

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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03.10.2015
09:41 am
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‘In Drones We Trust,’ a grassroots protest of the U.S. military’s use of drones
12.08.2014
01:44 pm
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Joseph DeLappe is not your ordinary artist. He’s a professor of art at the University of Nevada, and some have called him the first “gamer artist.” In October 18, 2002, with the TV show Friends still on the air, he and five gamer friends staged a recreation of “The One Where No One Proposes,” the premiere episode of Season 9, in the medium of a Quake III Arena game server (that is, a massively multiplayer environment where hundreds of players compete in the same arena). The project was called “Quake/Friends.” Each character in the show was given an avatar in the violent shoot-‘em-up, and the players used the in-game messaging system to render the episode’s dialogue: “Our performers functioned as passive, neutral visitors to the game—we were constantly killed and reincarnated to continue the performance. The piece was presented a second time in 2003 using six projected points of view, multiple audio channels and microphones for each performer.” The episode they were reenacting was not quite a month old at the time of the first performance. It was kind of a big deal at the time—the New York Times gave the second performance of the piece a writeup with the title “Take That, Monica! Kapow, Chandler!

More recently, DeLappe’s work has shown a more explicitly political flavor. From 2006 to 2011, DeLappe undertook the impressively subversive “Dead in Iraq” project, which involved logging on to the U.S. Army recruiting game “America’s Army” with the username dead-in-iraq and typing in the names of all 4,484 (at that time) service persons who had died to date in Iraq. In 2013 DeLappe commenced the “Cowardly Drone” project, which was essentially an elaborate effort to fuck with Google Image search results. He would take images of e.g. MQ9 Reaper Drones and Photoshop the word “COWARDLY” on the vehicle’s side in large bold letters, then re-upload the images with unprepossessing titles like “predator drone” in the hopes that some of his images would come up as hits in Google Search. The images are intended as “a subtle intervention into the media stream of US military power.”

DeLappe’s newest idea, “In Drones We Trust,” is combining a critique of the U.S. military’s use of drones with the defacement of U.S. currency. He noticed that all U.S. bills in wide circulation (except for the $1 bill) feature an etching of an august edifice connected with the U.S. government on its reverse side. (The $2 has a reproduction of Joseph Trumbull’s painting The Declaration of Independence.) In each case the building comes with an entirely featureless, placid sky, so DeLappe figured, why not add a menacing image of a drone to them? “It seems appropriate,” writes DeLappe, “considering our current use of drones in foreign skies, to symbolically bring them home to fly over our most notable patriotic structures.” He has created a couple hundred rubber stamps with the drone image and you can get one for yourself for a nominal price that simple covers the price of postage ($3 for domestic orders). I ordered one, and I can’t wait to ... er, use it on non-currency bits of paper! (Actually, if I’m reading this right, it’s not illegal to draw on or add markings to U.S. paper currency.)
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
No video of “In Drones We Trust” that I could find, but here’s a look at “Quake/Friends”:
 

 
via Internet Magic.

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.08.2014
01:44 pm
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U.S. money redesigned with contemporary icons
09.30.2014
10:36 am
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Ah, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Iggy Pop were on the five-dollar bill? Or if Warhol were on the ten? I used to live in Austria, and back in the pre-Euro days, when they still had the Schilling, their banknotes had Erwin Schrödinger and Sigmund Freud on them—not bad. Belgium used to have Magritte on its 500-franc note. France put Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on one of their bills. James Joyce at one time was on Ireland’s ten-pound note.

How long before Iceland puts Björk on a bill? 

It’s difficult to look at these defaced U.S. banknotes, part of James Charles’ “American Iconomics” series, and not think of J. S. G. Boggs but Charles’ satires are less totalistic in their intent—closer to Mad Magazine, say.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via Ufunk

Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.30.2014
10:36 am
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Moneyballs: A million bucks shredded for… art
06.25.2014
04:58 pm
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Alberto Echegaray Guevara
 
What is it about seeing massive sums of money collected in a single place (and also rendered useless) that exerts such a fascination on us? On his first album The Top Part, standup comedian John Mulaney has a bit where he asserts that he’d rather pay $10 to see a pile of 100 million dollars in a room than pay $10 to see most of the movies that cost 100 million dollars. The KLF created a significant public spectacle when they burned a million pounds in public—indeed, some observers say that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF were never quite the same after that odd event.
 
Alberto Echegaray Guevara
 
Alberto Echegaray Guevara was “an advisor to the Argentinian economic minister who pegged the country’s currency at a 1:1 rate with the US dollar” in 1991, a move that unquestionably sapped the Argentine government of flexibility and almost certainly led to the country’s massive economic meltdown in 1998-2002. In those years Argentina suffered an economic collapse that makes the problems the U.S. suffered between 2007 and 2010 look like a joke: the economy shrank by a whopping 28 percent. Understandably, the economic shock caused significant unrest in the country and toppled the government of Fernando de la Rua in 2001.

A cataclysmic event of such magnitude is bound to discourage one a mite about the world financial regime, and stance surely made all the more pronounced by the world economic collapse in 2008. In response, Guevara created Moneyball: Power Spheres, a work of art that uniquely expresses a deep pessimism about the ubiquitous institution of money: the work consists of 12 Murano crystal orbs, 11 of them filled with a million shredded Argentinian pesos each, surrounding an orb with a million shredded U.S. dollars. (The ratio of orbs is meant to comment on the exchange rate between peso and dollar.) The work saw its debut at arteBA, Latin America’s largest contemporary art fair, in late May.
 
Alberto Echegaray Guevara
 
In an essay for the Atlantic titled “Why I Shredded $1 Million,” Guevara explains his motivations and the process of making Moneyball:
 

The central theme of my work was the idea of destruction. I wanted to break something down to give it a new meaning, or to see what new meaning it would be given. To find out, I shredded $1 million, and the black-market equivalent of that sum in Argentine pesos: 11 million. The money was then displayed in Murano crystal spheres in an installation I named Moneyball: The One Million Dollar Installation.

-snip-

No matter who saw the crystal spheres, the first question was invariably, “Whose money is this?” or “Where/how did you get the money?” All of the bills were out-of-circulation, already rendered valueless in the traditional sense. While I was probably the first person to ask, obtaining permission to take the shredded money was complex in the United States and at the European Central Bank.

Argentina’s Central Bank was the only institution to be withholding, though. It was an ironic move, given that the Argentine peso is the least valued of all the currencies, but not surprising considering how secretive the country is when it comes to its books, having reported inflation rates for years now as much lower than what independent economists assess. The Central Bank surprisingly keeps no official records of how many bills it destroys, either. For months, I followed trucks with out-of-circulation bills to wade through dumpsters with their discards until I finally accumulated enough for the installation.

 
Guevara hopes to take his art work all over the world. In this video, he waxes philosophical about the evanescent and arbitrary power that money holds over us. But for his audience, the work is mainly about seeing all that money.
 

 
via Hyperallergic

Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.25.2014
04:58 pm
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Future currency: redesigning the American dollar
08.17.2010
05:36 pm
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image
 
Duncan Dowling has come up with some stylish concepts for redesigning American dollars. The vertical layout makes the money easier to handle because that’s the way paper currency is exchanged between people and machines.
You can read more about the project at Dowling’s website.

We have submitted a design concept to a competition being run by New York designer Richard Smith. The Dollar ReDe$ign Project hopes to bring about change for everyone. We want to rebrand the US Dollar, rebuild financial confidence and revive our failing economy.

 
More bucks after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.17.2010
05:36 pm
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