March 2010

from Brenna on Nasty Nets: Futuristic Control Panels

A selection of wooden cabinets for the den or family room, each of which features an enormous flatscreen TV surrounded by domestic books and knickknacks.

Compare to Barbara Gallucci's photo project, where she photographed the "TV nook" under the stairs in a typical Levittown home and what owners are doing with the nook 40 years later. In case the meme has faded, Levittown is "the first and one of the largest mass-produced suburbs... a symbol of postwar suburbia," per Wikipedia.

The TV was smaller then but no less a spaceship artifact in the suburban little house on the prairie. Most of the people in Levittown filled in their nooks with something else, as shown in Gallucci's photos. Mainly because of the awkwardness of the stairwell placement--presumably their big flatscreens are elsewhere in the room now.

The flatscreen/widescreen phenomenon spreads like a disease, not just in homes. Every bar has one. Even office computers, which presumably aren't being used to watch Lawrence of Arabia or play videogames, are now coming equipped with font-stretching widescreens. The screens get bigger but '50s-style conformity never goes away.

Have been enjoying the writing on the blog Post Internet.

A dissenting remark: the author misinterprets Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" based on a interview Lonergan gave (where he didn't define the term) as opposed to a more recent public talk (where he did give a definition). See discussion on Rhizome. Post Internet subscribes to Marisa Olson's idea in her piece Netacronyms and this interview of an art based on internet jargon and conventions, whereas Lonergan was talking about art made offline with an eye to how it would look on the internet (for example on the website Vvork, where art is represented by a single installation shot and compelling tag line). The latter is a more subtle and caustic notion.

A quibble: Post Internet's recent analysis of Travis Hallenbeck's Tinypic Video Thumbnails, an 85 page artist’s book and .pdf, is excellent but mistakes the source of the thumbnails collected in the book. It is not YouTube, which PI gives considerable space to describing, but a less-well-known image and video hosting service called Tinypic. Tinypic is very popular with children, which explains the prevalence of "youthful goofing around and skateboarding." Unlike YouTube it doesn't use the middle frame of the video for a screen shot. The screen shots that Hallenbeck chose for his book are generated by some automatic, server-side process (the selected thumbnail frame seems to be occurring about two seconds into the video) but this makes PI's discussion of the folklore of the middle frame mostly superfluous.

Update: Deleted some portions of this post. Still thinking about some of the issues of post-internet art.

Update 2: Ha, whoops, the pre-edited version of this post was picked up by a spam blog and showed up in Post Internet's trackback. PI revised the Hallenbeck post, splitting it into two, a discussion of the YouTube middle frame and a discussion of Hallenbeck's Tinypic thumbnail book. PI has also added an afterward to the post referencing "internet aware art." More on that later.

Update 3: Forgot an intermediate step in the timeline of critical massaging of the term "internet aware art." After the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel in 2008 at the New Museum, Paddy Johnson mentioned Ed Halter's use of the term and Lonergan commented: "'internet aware artist' is partially a sarcastic joke, because everyone is supposedly quite aware of the internet (but the art is not yet.) i’d bet its the same thing that you were/are talking about, Marisa, can’t wait to hear your response in rhizome board dudeland." A year later, in his Light Industry talk, he proposed the "art made for the net" definition.

"Hoarding" is definitely a topic in the air--why are we suddenly obsessed with obsession?
There's the TV show Hoarders (Bill Schwarz says they need to meet the Pickers--ha ha).
Wikipedia has an entry on digital hoarding.
Seth Price in his entertaining but incoherent Teen Image essay also talked about hoarding in the digital context.
OK, that's all, gotta get back to my stuff.