Day: October 21, 2007

Am continuing to document, with screenshots, the appearances of my OptiDisc GIF on the world wild web (as wallpaper, avatars, etc), as sort of a meta-meta-bored at home project. This may not be up long, but please check out pol.iceman's handiwork for his Yahoo! profile--he has enlarged the GIF like a gazillion times. He might be amused to know that's how it was also displayed in a gallery context--although not limited by browser size and viewed in pieces via scrolling. (I'm assuming this is someone I don't know.)

Update: It's gone, so I removed the link and added the screenshot above. It's quite possible it was a mistake and that the user sized the image incorrectly. Oh, well, good while it lasted (less than a day?).

Just returned from my 24 hour trip to Austin, where I was a speaker on the NAMAC panel described here (that's the National Alliance for Media, Arts and Culture). Thanks to all who came and especially those who asked about blogs! Laurence Miller did a good job of moderating, addressing blunt questions to the panelists, organizers, and attendees. One curator in the audience divided the art spectrum into iterative new media types who grow and adapt to novel exhibition scenarios and "legacy artists" who presumably just need the thing they got famous for recreated as faithfully as possible. (For some reason Bill Viola comes to mind--you don't imagine him switching gears from straight up video installation to some GPS-intensive piece with a grid of embedded Quicktimes.) Miller asked her if there were any legacy artists who had made the transition and she said "of course," mentioning one name I didn't catch. I listened patiently to her inevitable "guilty liberal" refrain about internet art being the province of rich first worlders and English the lingua franca of the internet. She didn't think it was funny when I said my blog was reaching small towns in Texas.

Thanks to Steven Jenkins of the San Francisco Film Society for the invite, and I enjoyed meeting/hanging out with Laurence and my other co-panelists Kristin Newman-Scott and Brian Fridge.