Google recently added "animated" as a filter to its Images search (hat tip @ohgod).
Two years ago, the lack of this feature was seen by some as a diss of animated GIFs, or at least Google's misplaced belief that the GIF had waned in Net culture such that it didn't need to be searched.
Around the time we were arguing over the question "why are artists interested in animated GIFs?" in Paddy Johnson's blog comments, GIFs became a "thing," mostly for rips of movie and TV clips used as conversational sweeteners. They always had that function but for some reason around 2008 or so it became de rigeuer (including by me) to say that GIFs were a dotcom era vestige.
Artists had reasons for keeping them alive and we had no right to complain that Google wasn't helping us, but nevertheless, we did complain.
In looking at the available filters now in Google Images, there are five main categories, none of which cover anything we might call "fine art." Recognition algorithms seem to be corralling images into one or more of the five categories.
The classifications (under "search tools" and "type") are: face, photo, clip art, line drawing, and animated.
Let's see how they work with a museum certified type artist, say, Rosemarie Trockel.
Face - many pictures of her face
Photo - many photos of her work but also the work itself, which includes line drawings
Clip art - whoa, Ms. Trockel is not in the clip art business! Nor is any other artist trying to sell originals for thousands of dollars. Google mostly looks for graphics here, with clean lines and especially borders - including photos of some of Trockel's minimal or monochrome style works. Whoops.
Line drawing - some of her works on paper, and much stuff that isn't hers.
Animated - not too much here. Someone on Tumblr made a GIF from a documentary vimeo (nice one but, still, Trockel is not in the GIF production business either). "Animated" means animated image files, as opposed to video files, so this is not an archive of her video art.
March 2013
"i wanted some other bloody war"
Am sick of articles by Iraq War supporters-turned-doubters such as this one by Ezra Klein that say "I wanted Kenneth Pollack's war, not George Bush's." Pollack was the "Democrat" intelligence expert who argued out his rear end that Saddam had WMDs, and convinced a lot of other "Democrats," on the eve of the war, to support Bush and Cheney.
Klein does briefly mention Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine, ex-UN weapons inspector on the Republican side of the spectrum who said Saddam had zip (and paid the price by having his personal life slimed) but neglects to mention all the other people who were right: the millions out marching in the streets who knew Bush and Cheney were lying scumbags. These Washington consensus types amaze in their ability to proudly and loudly self-delude, year after year.
crocker breaks again
screenshot (not photoshopped by me): chris "leave britney alone" crocker image found in "fat foods not to consume" ad
how we buried the '70s
From Holding Out For a Hero, a short book in blog form by Carl Neville about steroids, yuppies, Reaganism, and especially Schwarzenegger:
Westworld along with many of the Sci-Fi movies of the Seventies still partakes of a certain degree of technological utopianism, something which has evidently completely evaporated by the early eighties. Westworld still has all the trappings (as do its inferior sequel Futureworld, Donald Cammell's Demon Seed, Logans' Run. Thx 1138, A boy and his dog or Zardoz) of the future as Apollonian and post-scarcity, a techno-utopian Age of Aquarius ruled by benign and enlightened beings, though often of course this seeming paradise is built on a dirty secret which the Nietzschean central characters in their drive for truth must unmask while (to use the ugly and elitist contemporary expression) the "Sheeple" are content to unquestioningly consume and gratify their newly liberated desires. The out-and-out dystopian trend probably starts with George Miller's hugely influential Mad Max, set in a violent post peak-oil world in which civilization has collapsed and continued in the wildly successful sequel The Road Warrior from which almost all later dystopian cyberpunk/Sci-Fi takes its look.
Neville's blog/book reviews other pop culture tropes through the lens of this paragraph from his intro:
Neoliberalism may have heralded a rebirth in America, seen it rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the 70s, but this is a baptism in steroids, cocaine (and cocaine money) egotism, debt, cheap oil (and Arab oil money funnelled through American banks) deregulation and offshoring. In what sense are the questions of the Seventies, the environmental and social concerns, the Limits to Growth posed by the 1977 Club of Rome reports, actually addressed and solved by Neoliberalism, and to what degree are they simply ignored, held at bay in an essentially infantile thirty-year fantasy of growth and restructuring, that collapses along with the housing bubble of the late 00s? It seems that the financial crises along with numerous jobless recoveries have left us faced with the same set of problems that Neoliberalism was assumed to have permanently solved. The end of class struggle, the move away from manufacturing to services in the "core" economies (there is much talk at the moment of needing to "rebalance" the economy) the end of boom and bust.
Neville keeps coming back to Schwarzenegger as symbol of this inflated denial of the '70s critiques. A key text is 1977's Stay Hungry (a fascinating film, worth looking up):
Stay Hungry's vision is one of a compact between old money and the less nihilistic, more disciplined elements of the hippie/freak revolution. What it also offers is the sobering truth that generational conflicts, rejection of authority and struggles for independence and "new spaces" are often merely cyclical conflicts within capitalism, moments of rupture when the struggle for succession takes on a de-territorializing or anti-oedipal aspect that doesn’t offer any kind of definitive break with the past, but simply seeks to reconstitute old practices on new ground and in new guises.
Stay Hungry tells you that the entrepreneur, this fabled figure, the apotheosis of mankind for the Austrians, the Atlas upon whose shoulders all lesser men stand for the Randians, is not a heroic or titanic figure, not a Nietzschean self-creator, but a slumming, peevish child of privilege whose revolt consists in rejecting the family business and instead using daddy’s money and influence to do some cool shit of his own.
You start off with the Flat Earth News, a whole new business model and a bunch of wacky friends, but all the same you end up with Foxxcon.
In this passage Neville conflates the Jeff Bridges character (child of privilege) with his role model in the film (the bodybuilding, violin-playing reluctant ubermensch played by Schwarzenegger).
Afterthought: A Boy and His Dog, based on a Harlan Ellison story, had as its setting a Mad Max-like desert wasteland but there was still a society living well (if freakishly) in caves underground. Even Max had civil society, with a police force. Road Warrior was the one to really jettison all trappings of advanced civilization and imagine humans living the Hobbesian life in a vast junkyard. This is the image the current Galt-fantasists invoked when they saw images from Hurricane Katrina on TV.
Update, May 2018: Neville's blog was published by Zero Books under the less interesting but apparently copyright-safe title No More Heroes. The blog disappeared for a while but when I checked this month I noticed it was back online.
