May 2008

Some thoughts on the found digital blobjects plucked from the YouTube mass by ???pet??? on loshadka and originally posted by crispY468.

The spiritsurfers manifesto questions the axiom "finding is making" for lack of attention to the frame for the Internet found object. The manifesto seems to suggest that the frame's formal design (via html, CSS, etc) is the key to setting off or distancing the object, and that it requires "great subtlety." spirit surfers does sport elegant design and thus achieves its own purposes formally. (Although archives ready-to-hand would be nice.)

The Loshadka or Nasty Nets frames are also adequate to achieve distance for the found object on a design level--nothing fancy but no advertising clutter, graphics overpowering content, etc. At least equally important to the formal frame is, what are the surrounding posts like? What are the reader's expectations? What is being said with the appropriation and will the finder's intentions be communicated (or miscommunicated in an interesting way)?

???pet???'s blobjects are complete in themselves, needing no additional transformation. Because they are embedded YouTubes, they bring with them their own frame ("popular video site that mashes all video into the same rectangular format and where commenters say anything that comes into their heads about it without a second's hesitation").

By changing the context of the blobjects from the popular setting to the snotty, visually superior artist setting (sorry, Loshadka, that's a joke), here's what ???pet??? has done at least for this viewer:

1. further isolated already-isolated CGI trickery so that it becomes self-contained and iconic

2. allowed us with a minimum of distractions to contemplate digital abstractions of "waving grass" and "blowing hair" in all their ill-conceived misbegotten awfulness, while at the same time being dazzled by the technical cleverness and yes, even beauty of same. (The working method of these types of animations is to have multiple versions of a single motion-captured, photographically modeled strand, or group of strands, moving simultaneously in accordance with known physical laws and to use artful blurring where the motions become too complex to be rendered, under the assumption that the eye will not notice these, even though it does.)

3. given us a frame to think about these blobjects as the atoms or molecules on which all current movies, video games, and commercial spots are built--a small compact cluster of false assumptions.

[The false assumption being that the uncanny valley can be spanned and that we need to model all visual phenomena with 1s and 0s. There are certainly monetary reasons for doing so but what are the aesthetic ones, beyond an ironic love of the artificial and grotesque?]

Although this blog is sometimes called an art blog and/or lumped in with other art blogs about 90% of my bandwidth is for music. (The other 10% is the Iron Man GIF I stupidly remixed.) This is because I've been posting original songs as mp3 files and robots sniff out the file extension in the endless quest to offer "free mp3s" to the public. At first my biggest traffic went to songs with the words beat or hiphop or blues in the title (the last presumably because folks were searching for "moody blues"--a popular '60s group). But lately some of the songs with more fanciful or arbitrary titles are the biggest bandwidth scoops. They are actually some of my better songs from about two years ago, IMHO. Probably the lag time is for the songs to be catalogued by the robots and "discovered" by listeners. I'm happy if they're being heard for the right reasons but wondering when I should put a stop to all the flagrant generosity. It's not like the bandwidth is expensive at all, but still...

Mentioning this because of "Net Art 2.0" and Seth Price's "Dispersion" concept. He asks rhetorically what it would mean for an artist to communicate to another (non-art world) public in another medium, specifically citing music. His conclusion, if I understand the essay, is it is effectively meaningless, and artists need to instead redouble their efforts to speak to the usual art world gatekeepers (possibly with a well-articulated theory about, say, dispersion) if their work is to be properly read. I'm not sure I agree. I'm rather enjoying getting my work out to people who like quirky techno music and Iron Man GIFs, even if they hold no place in the Price firmament.

this lower my bills dancing skeleton inspires--a bit large for the page so click image for moving version

Several people have commented about the dissenters in the audience at the recent Future of the Internet panel at NYU (YouTube here*). Mostly negatively.

Two impressive ones were the fellow who said (not an exact quote): "You accept conditions of social lockdown in your society [joking about the guy in the crowd listening to his earpiece or what have you] so it is no surprise you are gradually giving up your freedoms on the Internet." One of the comedians on the panel immediately made fun of him--unpleasant truths should always be laughed off.

A man who spoke up in favor of Nicholas Negroponte's "one laptop per child" for its reduction of the computer to engineering fundamentals sparked the panel's most engaging discussion. Clay Shirky had dissed the 100 dollar laptop for third world children as a social initiative where the technology was 90 percent right in terms of being innovative on many levels (new chipset, new browser, new operating system?) but violated libertarian, market principles because it was being sold en masse to governments rather than being something individual consumers wanted. The man in the audience was noting how intuitive and simple the laptop's architecture was. Shirky said yes but it has no community around it of people who can explain it friends and loved ones. The commenter spoke of the laptop as "capital" and Shirky emphasized the role of "social capital" in making it a useful, everyday item. He speculated that the child laptop could be like Xerox PARC--a failure that launched ideas that later revolutionized computational and social practice.

No one in the room questioned the absurdity of the artists and social visionaries all using Mac computers so it was refreshing to hear some "what if" regarding a completely different, completely stripped down kind of general purpose computer being the source of revolutionary change.

Some of the panelists did talk about the dangers of new software apps being written solely for proprietary platforms such as Facebook and that was good to hear.

Update: An Emily Litella-esque "never mind"--on May 16, 2008 it was announced that Microsoft is partnering with the "child laptop" program and that the computers will be running Windows XP.

Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/28/video-of-futures-of-the-internet-panel/