September 2010

Facebook and Artists

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Nice jpeg (I assume) of a painting by Mark Dagley from 1986, viewable on Bill Schwarz's page.

I clicked on the painting to find out more but it went to a Facebook login.
It sort of belatedly amazes me that "gallery artists" embraced Facebook, since from what I'm told it has one of the worst image handling policies (no GIFs, everything converted to jpeg, images transferred to a server the artist doesn't control, no outside linking, etc.--please let me know if I'm wrong about any of this).
You would think artists would resist such an odious scheme of corporate coercion, but ironically it was Zuckerbook that "brought artists online" after so many resisted blogs in the early to mid-'00s.
Compared to say, a Word Press blog, it seems like about the worst place in the world to show work.

Update: Things got a bit ugly when I criticized Bill's use of a Facebook link. He accused me of trying to freeze the internet and let me know exactly what he thinks of trying to repurpose animated GIFs for artistic ends. (Not much.) In view of those digs, it's hard for me to focus on his defense of Facebook as a great place to be an artist.

making an old sketch new-old

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A few years back was making quite a few ink wash drawings on legal paper, steno pads, etc. The one below is fairly typical: a quasi-modernist sculpture over what may have been a bleed-through from a hastily-sketched floor plan, outlined in ballpoint. I scanned the drawing (after which it was hit by more raindrops and effectively no longer exists). Then, using an online image-editing program, enlarged the width and converted it to a black and white GIF format.

img011_400h

dumpfm-tommoody-img011_400_bw

security_paper_sketch

Using another online utility (timb's bong.gs layering tool) I superimposed the green check pattern found by stage, captured the result and saved it as an animated GIF. So now the drawing has a new retro tech sheen to go with the old, differently retro subject matter.

One of the trollgenerator "memes" from a week ago asked "Tom Moody - Who Wants to Make Shitty Art of the '40s into a GIF Anyway?" Exactly.

untitled

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87a1283963661237-dumpfm-noisia-black-transparent-strip-flash-5px-f81283963608609-dumpfm-noisia-black-transparent-strip-flash-5px-f3lettuce11283963661237-dumpfm-noisia-black-transparent-strip-flash-5px-f81283963608609-dumpfm-noisia-black-transparent-strip-flash-5px-f387a

image combination by foot; vibrating bars by noisia

take some time to page back through foot's dump.fm log; this is a quiet, absurdist visual poetry assembled from bits and pieces of web junk. lots of dumpers do this but few with such consistency of scale and tone.

Update: A stab at interpretation: The geodesic structures emit polarized radiation that creates a stasis field around the lettuce. Still working out why the field is taller than than the structures and what is special about this particular head of lettuce.

Update 2: The exaggerated height of the vibrating bars suggests a corridor, chute, or silo: possibly at some point the lettuce head will be launched or ejected from its containment field.

underground 2.0

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Continuing a run of posts on digital theorist Geert Lovink, his post Underground Networks in the Age of Web 2.0 merits a read. I disagree with parts of this statement, however:

The actual use of Web 2.0 is what counts here, not how op-eds and columnists frame the topics of the day. What we think is ‘happening’ is an outcome of the reconfiguration of the social, in favor of informal spheres, a media ecology in which we constantly check what’s going on. The erosion of official media will only make it harder to define what a true ‘underground’ looks like. Hiding in the abandoned normalcy is, and always has been an option, but with the decline of Pop, it is becoming less and less sexy to survive in suburbia. Mashups and reappropriation techniques have exhausted themselves. The ruins of the industrial age have been recolonized and turned into valuable real estate. Squatting empty office spaces, symbols of the post-industrial era, has yet to take off—and may never happen because of harsh legal and surveillance regimes. Nothing is left behind. Abandoned space itself has become scarce—except the desert.

It's unclear where the line is drawn in this paragraph between urban space as a metaphor and actual urban space. In any case, mashups and reappropriation techniques haven't exhausted themselves, even if Lovink is bored with them. In fact it's interesting that they continue below the level of copyright cop surveillance. Discussing cell phone activists knowing when to turn off their phones, Lovink talks about the "seventh sense one has to develop to locate the present surveillance video cameras." It may be that the remixer/masher/datamosher has developed the same radar for avoiding copyright harassment (which often disguises political motives).