November 2009

Guthrie has spotted the parked domain girl on an ad banner for Brown College. That's not the Brown you go to if you want to study semiotics, but it is linguistically close.

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