May 2008

16-color art from the year 1990, made for an EGA screen, looks like today's pixel art made with MSPaint. (hat tip drx) Art is better when people have to work within limitations (hooded figures excepted).

(but it is kind of good.)
From Wikipedia entry on Ron Moore, TV producer who revamped Battlestar Galactica and briefly worked on Star Trek Voyager:

Moore's re-imagining of Galactica is noted for taking a more serious tone than its [1970s] predecessor, something that was foreshadowed in the January 2000 Cinescape interview, where he discussed what he saw as the root problem with Voyager.

"The premise has a lot of possibilities. Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and [Voyager's producers] were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn’t going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn’t going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want. That didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen at all, and it’s a lie to the audience. I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this."

We were mainly watching it for Seven, Tuvok, and the Medical Hologram.

Disquiet on peer-reviewed hiphop mp3s: an analyis of the site Crate Kings, where beatmeisters trade beats and evaluate them, and post tech talk.

Most of the participants in the dialog post their own work, backing up their words with their own efforts. At cratekings.com, there are several places where users post their beats for the public. One is the Beat Battles forum, where a single sample is shared by competitors who, Iron Chef-style, seek to best utilize it in a rhythmic backing track. There’s also a freeform forum, where a typical heading will read “New Beat. Thoughts Wanted.”

Haven't spent much time there to see how in-depth it is but enjoyed the MySpace-posted songs of Organixlives that Disquiet recommended. Minimal ambient sample-bending provides the hooks and a driving, almost off the shelf beat runs throughout. Initially started listening with the idea that these were just backing tracks for vocals but then started thinking of them as little Philip Glass-like compositions or Varese with a pulse.

A word on "peer reviewed." The way Disquiet uses the term is completely accurate yet turns the notion of peer review, in the academic "final word by experts" sense, on its head. Internet sites such as Crate Kings can be hothouse labs where ideas incubate but they are communities of passion and shared interest and tend to come and go. As opposed to the academic journals where continuities of subject matter, archives, etc are built slowly across decades and unshakeable cults of expertise (Thomas Kuhn's paradigms, if you will) are harder to demolish.

An artist who I have intermittently clashed with on Rhizome.org and elsewhere (rarely productively) keeps saying "there are artists and there are critics and each does his or her thing." (Not a quote, a paraphrase.) Who are the artists and who are the critics at Crate Kings? There are only people with passion for a subject. Cults of expertise aren't good. Everyone has his or her own best way of "articulating" the art, and takes turns playing litigant, advocate, and judge. The internet has made this possible, but demands critical readers. Ironically the artist who reveres criticism enough to give it its own job is a net artist.