"Krolock Undubbed (Beats Only)" [mp3 removed]
This was done purely with the "modular" synth. It seemed too bare bones, initially, so I did "Krolock Undubbed" with some added melodies. Having satisfied my anxiety about a "proper song" I came back to this one and liked it pretty well--it's kind of a percussion bath. The swirly Rhodes sound is actually a tom tom run through a digital chorus effect and the Mutator filter.
Spent a day remaking some old posts that were altered by the blog's new format and/or changing browser specs. It's one thing to say, "the web interprets code as it will, man," and quite another to see a fairly straightforward idea wrecked by someone trying to idiot-proof all users' experience. There is a distinction between being mad at "the web" (pointless) vs being mad at individual designers who happen to have a bad idea (whose minds might be changed through constant ridicule).
Matt Smear made a GIF I posted a while back showing how the grid above was being read in an RSS reader. Made a slight design tweak and am curious how impervious it renders this to good taste, so am reposting.
Also redone were enlargements of Charles Westerman's shrinkages of a couple of earlier GIFs, and this layered molecule animation. Folks with Macs (the "smooth jazz" of computers) will get to see these works for the first time--woo, yay.
Update: Ha, well bloglines reads the above GIF array now as a solid rectangle blinking red and orange. Not really an improvement over evenly spaced stripes, since it is the intervals that would seem to be the point here. "We don't do intervals."
Update 2: Not to overdo the self-exigesis but there are also horizontal intervals here: the lightning-like irregular arcs that crackle across the grid when the browser attempts to transition simultaneously all the (identical) vertical stripe color changes. This behavior will change across browsers.
Cropped frame from a video work by Artie Vierkant, Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset, 2009. A 35 minute real time video of the sun going down over the ocean gradually breaks up as the camera's "exposure adjustment" algorithm struggles to keep the light constant in an image that is fading to black. What should be a calm bath for the eyes becomes increasingly, violently agitated--an accidental psychedelic light show.*
This video is recommended to anyone who uses a digital zoom or similar enhancement features in a camera: it's a Dorian Gray portrait of that pretty, fake image you are presenting to the public. Instead of the aging in the Gray painting, Vierkant traces the bicubic corruption inherent in attempts to stabilize a changing reality. Paradoxically (and unlike the Gray), the digital noise is ultimately more aesthetically pleasing than the postcard sunset.
See also: Joe McKay's Sunset Solitaire
and Jonathan Horowitz's Maxell.
*The still came from a Vimeo version--the softening of pixel edges from saving it online is a whole other degradation topic.
Paddy Johnson asked 18 people to make a single pick for her 2009 best of the web post. Mine was Stephanie Davidson aka Rising Tensions (who made the GIF above). Davidson stands out on the list as the only artist making use of the web as a medium (both as content generator and aggregator). Other "best of" picks focused on individual freaky, aesthetic, or informative single web works. Not sure what conclusions to draw from that except maybe that the web is still a place of momentary sensations for most people and not a place for a sustained body of work.
Last night at a New Year's Eve party had the unfortunate "good artists can come from anywhere" argument. Since the person espousing that was too passionate or stubborn to listen, here's the counternarrative:
An artist can be outside a major metro area and be discovered in the near or long term. But if art is dependent on the person as well as the moment, as Matthew Arnold observed, then it stands to reason that the moment will be found (or accelerated) where there is the largest concentration of people who can make it happen. Given how many obstacles an artist faces, why would you handicap yourself being outside that zone if you had an ounce of choice in the matter?
Part of the chemistry of the moment is a shared professional language. Again, an artist doesn't have to speak that language or self-identify with the community that speaks it, but why would the artist choose a mute or deficient community if he or she had any choice?
Afterthought: the Internet helps the geographical hurdles somewhat, but at the end of the day, a painter, say, is not going to be evaluated based on jpegs. Someone is going to have to verify the work--why not the largest possible number of someones?
