"Fratres" by Arvo Pärt
Drony, haunting medieval-modern classic played with two SID chips. About 10 minutes--very nicely done. There is a version for a .sid file player but I just downloaded the .mp3. The arrangement is by Linus Åkesson. The organ sounds produced by the chip make the piece reminiscent of early Terry Riley.
Thanks to drx from Bodenstandig 2000 for mentioning this.
Thanks to Paddy Johnson for the plug on her page and for using my artwork in her masthead. Just to be totally "meta," I added a couple of notes to her text.
"The piece is meant to be big, dumb, and iconic, a moving, pulsing symbol of both the promise and failure of technology," said Tom Moody of OptiDisc* during Geeks in the Gallery, a detail of which now resides in my masthead. Aesthetically the gif looks just as Moody describes it, the rings klutzy yet mildly hypnotic; though past this, its life as a meme underscores the artist’s excitement and reservations about the web as a medium. Referencing artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns, without reiterating color field painting or Minimalism, Optidisc speaks as clearly to a tradition of Fine Art painting, as it does regular surfers looking for something "different" for their myspace page.**
* The wall-sized projected version.
** This version of the GIF has "gone viral," meaning it has been used on scores of MySpace, YouTube, and LiveJournal pages, and as a web graphic and avatar. (example) I have been collecting screen shots wherever it appears and I have 60 so far (the ones that hotlink the image from my server). I'm saving them out of simple boredom/vanity but also for a work in progress--more "meta" web stuff. Here's a group of thirty screen shots on my studio floor.
