February 2013

Manuel Fernández sent a very nice email regarding the previous post on his GIF series. While it's polite and complimentary, he has a couple of issues:

But I think that the text [discusses] if these gifs are fake. I just wanted to clarify it. The text of the project says: "The project uses the face recognition software as pretext to generate a series of animated gif images emulating the process." [Also,] the project does not talk about ubiquity of surveillance.

Reply:

Thanks, Manuel.
I did read your statement before I posted and linked to it. What I wrote is interpretation.
Face-recognition-as-surveillance is a "hot button" issue it would be hard to ignore. I'd be derelict if I didn't at least mention it.
The point of the post was I don't care that much about art's relation to hot button issues but I liked the GIFs for other reasons.
What I hadn't considered before the update was that the green rectangle was instantly recognizable code for a particular product, since I'm not an iPhone user myself and kind of hate them. That is much more problematic to me -- the extent to which your GIFs are an in-joke for iPhone users and therefore a subtle form of brand promotion.
In my own work I make jokes about primitive paint programs but when I first started doing that I thought the pixelly drawings could be read as either MacPaint (Apple/Claris) or Microsoft Paintbrush. Mostly they were (seen as generic) and I was very uncomfortable the first time a gallery described them as "Microsoft Paintbrush drawings" (this was around '98).
Nowadays MSPaint has become synonymous with pixelly paint programs (even though they are changing it), people have forgotten MacPaint from the '80s, and I've even been accused of "loving Windows." Yipe, that's insane.

Another quote from that HuffPo Live panel about Facebook Graph Search. The topic was whether there could be a life after Facebook (laughable if you never signed up), meaning, was it possible that all the changes of privacy policy could force a mass exodus a la MySpace. As mentioned earlier, panelist Barry Hoggard is a New York art collector who also has an artist webhosting business and has been a close observer of tech changes during the last 10 years of transition from the blogosphere to the social media era, so he knows what of he speaks:

I've seen some interesting evolution of the way artists and other cultural producers have used Facebook. For a long time I was seeing a move away from individual, private websites. Artists were starting to use Facebook as if it were their new website: it's where they blogged, it's where they put up images of new works. But once they started to get worried about how Facebook could use those images, and when there are rumors about things like what it actually means or you're granting the license for Facebook to use a given image, then suddenly I started seeing artists' sites really lock things down. So artists who had moved almost everything to Facebook and weren't updating their other sites, like their blogs or their personal portfolio sites, suddenly locked down so much that I didn't have a good way to look at what kind of work they were doing now.

None of the other panelists responded to this because (i) what are artists? and (ii) Hoggard left Facebook in 2010 and therefore is a Dead Man like Johnny Depp in the Jarmusch film. But let's follow up and say yeah, what are artists if not the antennae of the race or at the very least trendspotters? Their behavior vis a vis presenting themselves and their work might have a small amount of relevance. Yours truly never joined because Facebook seemed a much less flexible and attractive means of presenting work than what I had on my BLOG. According to some, that was the mistake of the century, but then, I never found myself in the predicament of waking up one day feeling stranded in a world not of my own making, surrounded by stalkers and faux friends, with all my art and writing on servers run by Machiavellian data leeches.

Buzzfeed, which was started in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, a founder of The Huffington Post, operates on the philosophy that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are America’s new front pages and that the content people view online is determined more by what their friends share than what is found on the home page of a news organization. As such, the distinction between Web ephemera like baby videos and traditional journalism has all but disappeared.

(Douglas Quenqua, NYT, Feb 15, 2013)

These has to be some middle ground between Quenqua's sneering description and BuzzFeed's airhead premise. "Bloggers as citizen journalists" has a quaint ring, now, but an RSS reader stocked with skeptical long-form blogs* (that link to other sources but also digest them) is still an excellent way to get news and opinion. This can be supplemented by a catch-all service such as Google News to see what a wider spectrum considers newsworthy. But we can perhaps all agree that New York Times editors have lost our respect as news gatherers and agenda setters, after Iraq, the Eliot Spitzer takedown ("ties to organized crime," they said), Adam Davidson, etc.

*e.g., Juan Cole, Naked Capitalism, Lobelog, The Big Picture