Hello to President Obama and goodbye to Bush and Cheney. Bush is going to Dallas to do nothing and Cheney will no doubt return to lucratively cashing in on his failed government experience. It would be good to say that the Republican philosophy of no regulation for business and no help for the poor was dead after 8 years of these bozos but unfortunately most of the Washington establishment (media, lobbyists, "consultants") still inclines to their views. Best of luck to Obama if he is truly trying to buck these entrenched powers but his favorable mentions of Reagan on the campaign trail were ominous. Let's hope that was just to get elected and we never hear the Gipper spoken of again.
January 2009
Collage 2008-9
paper, ink, linen tape, 22 x 17 inches
(posted earlier, have continued to work on it)
An animated GIF showing the changes since first posted: [.5 MB .gif] (the GIF isn't really art, just a studio record that helps me figure out if the piece is finished--I think it is)
Each change involves cutting out existing paper, inlaying new paper and retaping from behind.
The GIF is an animated record of the changes but the piece shows a physical record in the form of fairly rough cutting and seaming. The paper and tape are thick; an X-acto knife is used to saw through it with less than surgical precision.
An artist asked for images of mine for a gallery of digital artists. I thanked him but said I wasn't really a digital artist, that there is all this physical process that reproductions don't show very well.
He said I should stop "hiding" the digital nature of my work. Well, if anything, I'm hiding the analog side because it doesn't translate well to the web.
People have asked, why the molecules? (one writer said they look like giant gumballs). In this case I envisioned an experiment gone wrong, a perfect order breaking down as unexplained forces metastasize the "atoms." The text on some of the balls is the Epson loading support sheet that inadvertently got printed on, so real accidents happen as well. I see the imagery as attractive and repulsive though some will only be repulsed, or nonplussed.
I am also inspired by something the artist Charles Long said about his installation "Bubble Gum Station." He talked about how in classrooms children are engaged in intense learning and memorizing of science and language data that prepare them to enter the modern world. Meanwhile, like the Freudian unconscious, these gooey shapes of bubble gum are accumulating under their chairs, mingling--the complete opposite of the dry abstractions being exchanged topside.
My "digital" art has a literal flip side, which is a messy network of cotton tape applied with finger pressure and water. By necessity this is not seen but only implied from the front of the piece, viewed in person. That's actually much harder for me to deal with or understand with than any sort of "digital" nature.
"Dark Entertainment"
"Dark Entertainment" [mp3 removed]
Caution: fairly compressed and loud. Two Sidstation patches, Entertain and Chord Memory, sampled and tricked out with effects: reverb, phaser, limiter, etc. so the sound is very "heavy." The ditty at :24 is Entertain's factory sequence, played by pressing a single note, I guess you call this a scherzo, but depressing because it's slowed down in tempo. The sequence at :45 is mine, played with a step sequencer in the sampler. The other tunes are midi notes triggered in Cubase. I wanted a kind of a cappella, classical feel.
Update: An earlier use of the Entertain patch was the song "Dark Materials" (with Krypt percussion).
Internet Unaware
Below, my comment to a Rhizome "best of 2008" post about "Internet Aware Art." The post says I.A.W. "attempt[s] to describe the tendency for artists to translate behavioral or situational tendencies occurring online to other contexts, particularly offline" and kinda-sorta attributes it to Guthrie Lonergan. I replied:
Guthrie Lonergan is unusually perceptive and has a caustic wit. That said, credit is generally given for defining a term when it's actually defined. "Internet Aware Art" is a Delphic utterance that flatters each person who uses it with his/her own definition, as seen in the posts here following the Net Aesthetics 2 panel discussion, when it was clear that no one knew what it meant. You attempted to qualify your attribution to Guthrie [by saying he "used the expression to explain a trajectory within his work, and not of others"] but people who don't follow the link can't know how thin his authorship is:
"Beard: You recently told me that you were working on some ideas for 'offline art.' Care to elaborate on what shape they might take?
"Lonergan: Right now I'm scheming how to take the emphasis off of the Internet and technology, but keep my ideas intact. Objects that aren't objects... I got a couple of books and a t-shirt in the works. Right now I'm really into text (not visually/typography... just... text...), and lots and lots of lists… 'Internet Aware Art.' :)"
I'm not reading where it says internet aware art is "an attempt to describe the tendency for artists to translate behavioral or situational tendencies occurring online to other contexts, particularly offline." I think the authors of this post are giving themselves "best of 2008" for a Boswell-like coinage.