Day: November 14, 2009

A comment I made to the Michael Smith interview at Rhizome:

Good interview, thanks. Shout out to Michael.
I was lucky to have seen Open House in its real space incarnation. It made perfect sense in the old NewMu basement, which was a loft-type space such as the one Smith and White were pseudo-documenting. That gave everything a recursive layer that would be impossible in the new "modern" NewMu. The experience was immersive: you were surrounded on all sides by the archaeological layers of this fictional Soho artist's so-called life of false starts and stopgap solutions, from old paintings stashed in a storage nook to the artist's video-editing "day job" workspace (a room within a room within a room). I remember in Mike's video intro for the installation he talks mock-enthusiastically about "getting his own home page." A late '90s-style HTML interface would have been the perfect way to do the web version.

Unfortunately I can't evaluate John Michael's handiwork because I can't get the web version to load. I launch from a pop-up and then my browser says "transferring data from rhizome.org" for a long time. I hit the start button and everything freezes. Instead of downloading the entire site with some indeterminate wait time why not use links to individual bits of content?

Best, Tom Moody