November 2011

Telefone Sem Fio (2)

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thessia_machado

Photo I took on the opening night of the Telefone Sem Fio show I am participating in at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, 323 W. 39th St., NYC, a tribute to Brazilian concrete poet Augusto De Campos.

From the EFA website:

Thessia Machado, performing as link, will do a short solo with 'synf on the radio'. Synf is an analog synthesizer of her own design that combines 3 oscillators and a divider chip... For this performance its signal will be beamed through a radio transmitter to a portable radio, making it go through a series of translations and modulations.

Jennifer Schmidt's work is in the background, screenprints interpreting/responding to Augusto De Campos' poetry. On the floor is a piece by Brendan Fernandes, translating a Morse Code ("SOS") animation of De Campos'.

Download at your own risk (of boredom)

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As a giveaway for dues-paying members, Rhizome.org is offering a downloadable archive of... drumroll... Ryder Ripps' Facebook account.

There is bad hagiographic writing and there is wrong hagiographic writing. Joanne McNeil manages a little of both here:

In the recent issue of Bomb magazine, Geoff Dyer in conversation with Jonathan Lethem, says his short book on the film Stalker was once conceived as a text that could be read in "real time… approximately the time it took the film to unfold." Likewise, Ryder Ripps's "Ryder Ripps's Facebook" is comment on the passage of time. (1) It includes every message sent and received, every image, every wall posting and his full list of friends, in addition to all other shared content. Rather than an invitation for scandal, the work could be interpreted as a moment in time preserved and captured, providing a temporal shift — we do not so often read our own messages from 2006, but a work like this invites us to explore the past. (2)

Over email the artist told me the appropriate tagcloud for the work might be, "Facebook, purekev, time, social media, work in the age of fun, friends as art, art as activity, download, delete, temporal history, privacy through rigor, celebrity, self infatuation, self as file, self as mediation, mediation/meditation, theft, lineage in the age of anonymity, laziness, ready made." It's a response to PureKEV, Kevin Bewersdorf's performance that over the course of three years, diminished the size of a gif of a sparkling white light until it's hardly visible on the website, while in the meantime he removed the rest of his work from the web. (3) "Ryder Ripps Facebook," as interactive epistolary nonfiction, provides a frozen moment, contra to the nature of the web, which is constant flux. (4)

1. This isn't the same at all. There is no meta-commentary about Ripps' Facebook dump that takes the same amount of time to peruse--it's just the archive itself.
2. How are we invited? Isn't this the same as looking at someone's vacation photos?
3. So it's a "response" because Bewersdorf took down all his data and Ripps is leaving his up? Ripps isn't deleting his Facebook, is he? [Update: A reader says he did - this could be clearer - deleting old posts or quitting Facebook? ]
4. How does one "interact" with Ripps' archive, beyond downloading it and reading it? What is special about a "frozen moment"? The Net abounds with mothballed websites.

Update: Revisions in progress.

Update 2: Rhizome links just keep on breakin' - the one I had for The Download was changed to http://rhizome.org/the-download/2011/nov/ after I posted this. Thanks to the reader who emailed about it. Just in case it changes again, here's their teaser post for the Ripps Download, which tantalizes with the come-on that "The viewer is invited to explore all of Ripps's Facebook activity, exposing some of the most intimate and private information." Yow. For those just joining us, this idea came about because Facebook (after much bad press) made the lordly gesture of offering users the ability of saving all their own posts, messages, etc, as a single download. Ripps is making "his" download available as a found object type gesture.

Update 3: Ripps has deleted his FB account, and offers the data as a "gold account" on his personal site.

Update 4: And yes, I knew the Facebook Gold account was a six-month old joke. Jeebus. Maybe with Ripps out of FB he'll have to start making regular jokes. Here's an idea: I'm gonna start making Word Press gags and snickering when you don't get them.

Update 5: See follow-up comment to Rhizome.

Update, Nov. 14: Am told that Ripps has reactivated his Facebook account. The precise, art historical term for this is "lame."

retromania vs phone art

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Simon Reynold's new book Retromania suggests a causal relation between two conditions: (i) that for the past 10 years we've had easy access to a cornucopia of past expressions in the form of digital archives such as YouTube and iTunes and (ii) that art and music are trapped in a backward-looking malaise. Unfortunately item (ii) is just wrong--once a critic reaches this place of boredom no advocacy is possible and every trend becomes grist for "hyper-stasis," as Reynolds calls the current moment of high speed technological change and stalled paradigm-shifting.
We don't lack for exciting developments right now, but rather the ability to recognize, articulate or even proselytize for new work, in particular without lapsing into the techno-boosterish cliches of the art-and-technology websites such as "cutting-edge," "game-changing," etc. In music, new gear and software give us new sounds--the difficulty is finding a common frame of reference for describing them, when people have only the vaguest idea how anyone else did something. In the art arena, a few months ago we spent several threads yelling about whether GIFs did anything that Flash or YouTube couldn't do. This wasted energy from discussing specific examples of how GIFs are currently being used.
"Phone Arts" or "blog art" almost by their very nature couldn't be in a book called Retromania unless you were indulging in perverse nostalgia for the art of one day ago. With "phone art" we know most of it is made on Apple products but perhaps not which programs are used, or how "easy" an effect is. Easiness isn't really even the point since the work is by its nature disposable and ephemeral. But one thing we could agree on is that a group blog of mostly abstract art that is "phoned in" is not an artifact of the past.
Reynolds writes mainly about music but he mentions a recent Frieze panel where experts weighed in on the relationship of YouTube-era accelerated meme-exchange and garden variety postmodernism, so it's fair to say his concerns are larger. Speaking of crossing disciplines, one bristles at his pairing throughout of such purely cynical, commercial phenomena as the boomer TV show remake glut with artists' complaints about the difficulties of being original, if the latter is even as common as Reynolds suggests. The issues of the suits and the avant garde may sometimes converge but that's not enough material for a book.

Update: Ongoing rewriting for clarity, style, and sussing out the main point.