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.
