August 2007

Just got my first candid inquiry asking why I switched to a worse-looking page when I moved to the new domain.

This is a Word Press template--they call it their "classic."

At the Tree the design was minimal CSS; Jim came up with it to be functional and beauty followed functionality, I believe.

The Word Press is more elegant in some ways, and way easier to use--I no longer have to type a-h-r-e-f to make a link.

But trust me, I know it's not as nice.

Part of the CSS conspiracy is you have to pay a designer megabucks to make a page that doesn't look designed. Or be a designer yourself, or make something slacker or dirt style.

I'm weighing how far down the design road I want to go with this blog. But I am thinking about it. Since I am an artist type, I'm even thinking in terms of content that clashes with the corporate look of the template (like the gnarly collage a few posts back).

Thanks to furtherfield for its nice write-up on BLOG, the exhibition where I showed my Digital Media Tree blog in a gallery for a month, and for the thoughts on my art and blogging overall. The author Palo Fabuš even discusses my signature molecules (usually a topic of resounding silence) and identifies those meshworks of orbs as "a crossing point of latent inner structures and omnipresent superficiality." I like that--I often think of them as a non-subject, "artist fodder" that both hints at and derides a conspiracy underlying everything. Also appreciated is his comment on BLOG, the exhibit: "Truly, the tongue-in-cheek situation stems here from Moody’s decision to make public something that is already public in a full-fledged way." He likes the recursiveness of the project: unfortunately just as I can no longer blog about BLOG during BLOG (since the show closed last month) I can't blog about it afterwards either, at least on the page itself, since it's officially ended after six plus years. Ideally the present blog will also create some opportunities for dizzying self-reference.