May 2008

WeAreChange.org, one of the 9-11 truth organizations, was handing out flyers at the World Trade Center PATH (subway) entrance today. Standing near them but clearly by herself was a young woman holding a crudely hand lettered sign that said "Beam Weapons Destroyed the WTC." I noticed tourists taking her photo. I walked over to her and said "OK, I'm curious. What's your story? Are you with this other group?" She said "No, I'm not, I'm just here by myself." As she was talking, she was slowly backing away from me but keeping her sign very steady. I said, "Why are moving so far away? Don't you want to talk to people about your message?" She said, "I want people to see my sign. Can't I talk to you from here?" (Ten feet away.) "You can hear me, can't you?" I said, "You lost me as a potential convert, sorry."
As I was walking to the subway entrance some WeAreChange.org guys said to me, "Ahh, don't talk to her," waving dismissively in her direction.

copied and pasted:

photograph of exploding floral still life
instructions for the design-challenged to make flower vases out of discarded plastic bottles
photoshopped plant and flower arrangement appear to have natural bilateral symmetry (shadows fall to right on both sides)
photo of man with stack of "welcome home" flower garlands covering his shoulders and most of his face
participatory living sculpture where people stand facing corner for "12 to 20" hours--anyone can join in
jenny holzer-like LED text crawl of words entered into Lycos search engine (supposedly)
ordinary shipping palette made of polished mahogany (supposedly)
standby lights on video cameras, other gear photographed in dark rooms
stills from a single film scene montaged into stretched or panoramic spaces compositing all views of the space around the characters
group show installation shot with orrery sculpture of moons of Neptune made with tables and found sports equipment
installation shot of exhibit of artworks re-using existing material for "dissolution, stuttering and the space that opens up when... "
selections from exhibit of artworks by artists that use cultural products in an "art of postproduction"
installation shot of exhibit of artworks that use private information as raw material and subject matter
excerpt of interview with Serpentine Gallery co-director re: online exhibitions
link to interview with assistant curator, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
website continuously arranges list of world capitals according to their current air temperature (supposedly)
bodybuilders arranged by skin color pose in front of gradient with reverse values
tableau vivant of rescue from burning building where rescuer tires of holding victim in "fireman's carry" (Quicktime)
working modified digital clock where every digit has been rotated by 180 degrees
staged-looking photos document people in art galleries emphasizing the eccentricities of the scene
severely compressed image of woman in dress made into 8 Bit style animated GIF
hooded prisoner and child backlit (neon?) contour drawing on wall
terrorist in ski mask neon lamp wall sculpture
"light pen" style neon sculpture namechecking Bruce Nauman
angular cubist/futurist style sculptures made of bent neon, Plexiglas
eerie TV kids show footage made eerier with abstract patterns, timestretched music, bilateral symmetry
laser hits rotating Plexiglas discs and casts spectral and non-spectral light on wall
photo of shaft of light hitting prism and splitting into spectral sub-shafts
flavinesque installations with beams of focused light
photo of full length mirror custom-built to the artist’s width and height (supposedly)
collection of online images where mirror shows no reflection
trick mirrors as art (5): automated "narcissus pool" ripples when viewer nears
trick mirrors as art (4): "observer can see reflection of surroundings and yet he is never able to see himself"
trick mirrors as art (3): viewer sees clear reflections of others but his or her own image diffused
photo of mirror that makes people invisible but not surrounding objects
SIEMENS in mirror-surfaced block capital letters on wall
oil paintings of zoo animal habitats sans animals (walrus)
fluorescent lights behind spy mirror wax and wane
little dutch girl links to vibrating ascii site
194 cm long terracotta piggy bank
ceramic orca boxing glove piggy bank
collages of videogame imagery and background textures
oil paintings depict violence inflicted by Chinese government on its own citizens painted by professional Chinese craftsman via the internet
cruel scene from popular movie about dubbing dubbed by artist (YouTube)
3-D trompe-l'œil paintings of cabinets with tape or stickers on them
masklike photomorph of face increasing skin surface
c-print of shroud of turin-like face on charred fragment of something
abstract "topographical" light show on wall and floor linked somehow to data on website somewhere (YouTube)
smashed umbrellas in frames hanging on wall
installation with video of artist confined to car by therapist
artist "refreshes" self with court-ordered name change to same name
edible perennials, trees, goats in compact food forest garden type system (theme park-like installation with wooden fuller domes)
snare drum where each day at 11:40 p.m. a motorized drumstick strikes the head once (supposedly)
flash pong game that is impossible to lose (or enjoy)
online book with GIFs of elderly woman; shaky two-frame animations make her movements appear spastic
each word in (ungrammatical) sentence is the brand name of the product displayed under it

(Twitter is a new-ish social networking web utility where people post short text messages in reverse chronological blog format. Vvork is a blog that endlessly catalogs mostly conceptual artworks from all over the world using photos and bare bones text, without taking any stance on the work at all.)

Rhizome.org* on Twitter Vvork narration: "There's a larger resonance to the fact that so many of this constant flow of artworks can be conveyed in just a few words...re-vvorking parodies both the technological and artistic moment for a shared investment in instantly readable messages."

*Update: Rhizome link changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/may/16/tweaking-tweets/.

"Two days after his film's premiere, McQueen met a group of reporters at a rooftop apartment while his sales executives worked the phones, fielding distribution deals from all over the world."

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, writing about McQueen's film Hunger. You gotta love the breathless hype and deep, abiding worship of capitalism in that sentence. (We're talking about a film that interprets the 1981 IRA hunger strike as a "semi-experimental sight-and-sound sculpture.")

In anticipation (dread) of the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel* went back and looked at a series of posts I did on "the blog as delivery system for art" vs "stationary sites that critique the web."

These grew out of a New York Times article in 2004 on the topic of whether Net Art was dead.

The post about the New York Times article (and comments).

A first stab at defining the earliest surf clubs, in 2004: "These largely basement producers handle Net graphics in a painterly or expressionistic way, cocking a half-appreciative, half-horrified eye on all the weird content out there on the Internet. The phenomenon isn't about marketing (yet) but rather thrives within the Net's potlatch or 'gift economy' of upload exchange. Artists put up simple animations made with .GIFs or Flash, with sound or without, as well as appropriate, resize and mutate found .GIFs and jpegs, attacking visual phenomena the way a junglist attacks sound (to make an electronic music analogy). Rebellious defacement and smartass humor trump the tedious academic-cum-Sol LeWittoid pallette of earlier net practice."

Reconfiguration of the "simple MTAA net art diagram" for the age of shovelware.

Follow-up to the above, 2004: "Early Net Art was made by software writers who knew their way around the enabling programs, hence the prevalence of flow charts, clickable steps, etc built into the art. Now, more artists are just working with the tools (image-making, sound-making software) and using the Net as a delivery system. This newer work is less about commenting on, reproducing or 'deconstructing' the tools, or the Net itself--although those concerns do (and should) linger, since proprietary programs are controlling and kind of evil."

Thoughts on the first Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, in 2006. Written without having attended the panel.

MTAA's thoughts on the first Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel.

From the Rhizome 4chan thread [afterthoughts in brackets]: "My [2004] comments about the blog as delivery system for finished artwork were made pre-YouTube and pre-surf clubs [or pre-Nasty Nets, since arguably Linkoln, jimpunk, et al had a surf club with 544x378 (WebTV)]. Things are potentially much more communal now [because of all the social bookmarking and corporate file-sharing sites]. Though I've never been comfortable with YouTube's 450 pixel scrunch, and now that the Kitchen is doing "gallery artists who use YouTube" (this from Rachel Greene, who seems to have fled her net.art years as fast as her Segway can carry her) I really want to flee, too. 544x378 (WebTV) was about finding things on Google with those dimensions (among other things), not shoehorning things into them..."

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jun/2/net-aesthetics-20/.