Hard up for new material so here are recycled comments I've been making on Paddy Johnson's blog.
On the topic of yet another announcement of "artist-technologist pairings" at a major museum:
When discussing formulaic "XYZ art" on my old blog (for example, at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/41330/), the topic came up of "artist and technologist teams." In the thread I linked to spd said: "media art is rife with collaborative work (often it’s a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff)" and "while i’m actually a fan of people working together, it seems underacknowledged so far and i wonder if the collaborative process of new media privileges talking a project through over actually doing stuff." And I replied: "I…hadn’t thought about the issue of artist-tech person teams having any effect on content. It kind of makes sense–-they have to talk to each other and some simplified middle ground (and thus middle of the road) art emerges out of that dialogue."
(spd chimed in on the same thread to add some additional thoughts to his 2.5 year old statement.)
In response to Johnson's review of two Omer Fast films:
We can forgive [Fast's] emptiness and nihilism if it makes us laugh: Take a Deep Breath, at least, keeps the chuckles coming. In the midst of all the feints, false starts, gore, and revelations of artificiality Fast has cast himself as an over-intellectualizing bumbler a la Albert Brooks, agonizing about the script and acting choices while the per diem clock is running; trusting his cell phone to an actor he’s just fired; declaiming to the cops about the integrity of the film’s "tableaux vivants" (soon undercut by the revelation that he asked the actress to take her shirt off–-supposedly to make the blast from the suicide bomber "more authentic"). Several of the crew members also have laugh lines in the form of a stream of inappropriate and politically incorrect comments. From the press release, which painted the project as another earnest investigation of contested, semiotic reality, I wasn’t prepared for it to be such a yockfest, goofing non-stop on its own premises. The other film at Postmasters was pretty much a downer, however, as you describe.
