November 2013

Rhizome.org has a follow-up to the post aesthetic or post internet panel mentioned earlier, and I contributed my specialty of what Sally McKay once called "lashing out like a wounded animal." (Hey that's a reflex and we can't always control it.)

Another commenter, João Enxuto, raises some interesting points while topping yours truly in the "kids get off my lawn" area:

While I appreciate the attempt to find something true and interesting in the postinternet debates and some hope among its supposed practitioners, it has become an increasingly difficult proposition when faced with the realities outlined in the very pieces cited in this article (Mute and 24/7).

"Now there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively." (Crary, 99)

Full-immersion and brand ubiquity represent the triumph of neoliberal capitalism over artistic autonomy - the author claims as much. But collectivism should not be confused with ubiquitous authorship. The Web 2.0 free-market has only flourished under such generous neologisms.

If the postinternet eludes a critical position it may be that its youthful practitioners are too immersed in the ostensible object of critique. Fish can't see water.

Under the unsparing weight of neoliberalism, debt, and privatization, an increased level of autonomy should be demanded by individual artists, not eradicated. The internet may hold some promise for future collective practices but it is also the horizon of market accumulation, manufactured desires, and forced obsolescence. The postinternet is now, admittedly, becoming outmoded. It will be superseded by another neologism, possibly from the hive mind of post-Millenials, which will have all of us, regardless of age, struggling to not be an old.

In the New Museum's 2008 Net Aesthetics panel it was easier to defend what we were then calling Web 2.0 because it was still the tail end of the relatively commerce-free blogosphere era.
I wouldn't condescend to say that millennials can't see the water they are swimming in, but can vouch that the water has gotten more polluted since the days of defending surf clubs against vintage net.art scolds.

Artists don't have to be concerned overmuch with the cycles of design fashion (which is sort of the same as fashion design). To paraphrase Dan Graham yet again: the recently outmoded is an interesting place to be working.

Thus it will be fun to make art with animated GIFs after they die a second time.

Touched off by Cosmopolitan soliciting for a "GIF artist" on Craigslist (they were also trolling dump.fm and seem to have some takers), Ryder Ripps' ad agency OKFOCUS says "ugh" and Tumblr-er extraordinaire Stephanie Davidson says "GIFs are over." Yay, now we can do some real work. Unlike when we last dorked around with GIFs in the art context, however, this time the gallery world will actually know what they are!

A site in the Sara Ludy-curated Chambers Pavilion.
Go to the launch page and click it.
The first time I did it nothing happened -- the page turned white, then dark, and I thought, huh, start-up, shut-down, I've been punked.
Came back a couple days later and tried it again. If you stay on the "dark" page (longer than I did the first time) a low humming sound begins, and a 3D shape begins to emerge out of the blackness.
[Ideal viewing conditions would be a large (1920 x 1080 and up) monitor, fast internet connection, high resolution sound and good speakers. Can't vouch for this thing on a phone.]
In any event, gradually increasing light on the 3D shape reveals a sleek mechanical form with airbrushed highlights, vaguely sinister curves, and somewhat incongruous striped wizard's hat cone shape on top of the form. The 3D form is turning, revealing more of its shape -- it's an industrial fan of some kind, viewed from the side, that HR Giger might have designed.
The rotations slowly increase speed and the humming gets louder. Soon the fan is spinning and the ambient hum has become a dull roar.

Now we've entered a realm somewhere between a wind-tunnel experiment, a renegade Hollywood FX shop, and the punk/art/industrial sublime.
The fan revs up to what Mel Brooks might call "ludicrous speed." Imagine sitting a few feet away from the blades of a jet aircraft turbine, as it encounters different exterior wind speeds and atmospheric pressures. The fan blades spin so fast they disappear, then appear to reverse motion, then disappear again. The sound is like an earthquake.
"How much can this baby handle?" is the question that applies to the turbine, the rendering engine creating the illusion, your computer and speakers, and your sanity.
At one point the illusion broke down and a striped artifact appeared in the middle of the screen -- a horizontal band. This only added to the "pushing the envelope" vibe. I mean, something's got to give. Mostly, though, you are witnessing gradations of chaos and violence as the fan blades spin at "max" and force patterns change.

Eventually the blades slow down, the noise diminishes, and the screen grows dark.

I don't think of this as computer art -- it's art, occupying the same niche that a giant wall of solid orange might have occupied forty years ago. Or a noise event with a Marshall stack in the '90s. It could be "sited" in a gallery or wherever the gear exists to replicate it. Yet it's not inconceivable that in a factory somewhere a simulation like this exists for a practical, banal purpose of testing metals stresses or the like. That is very interesting.