September 2014

surge molecule 3 animated

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Have mostly lost interest in painting-on-canvas but can still make a case for collage of printed-out materials.
You could say the unique object is problematic because it creates "artificial scarcity" (a favorite bugbear of new media) but that assumes the object is permanent.
We have no idea how long a paper work using 10 year old ink jet prints and even older photocopies is going to be around once it is framed and hung on a wall -- that's scarcity all right, but not necessarily lucrative.
Economics aside, a case can be made for "devolution" of media, not so we can live in the past but as an examination of present assumptions.
Images that start out "cyber" have a brief life as a hand-made object that can be eventually folded back into cyberspace via jpegs and (as here) GIF animation.
I feel like the same thing is happening in my recent music. Slickly produced percussive sounds are downsampled, saved to SD cards, played on an old-fashioned modular synth, and then reclaimed for "higher end" production.
These comments were written a few days after the GIF below was posted. --TM

surge_molecule300

original size 528 x 508

around the web

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Three "long-form" posts that give you something to mull over:

Netherlands-based cyber-thinker Geert Lovink considers the state of theory after the Sn0wd3n m0m3nt. (Caution: arty not-safe-for-work photo from e-flux also graces the page.) This essay from April 2014 makes a nice (though more opaque) bookend to the talk by cybersecurity expert Dan Geer about opting-out. Lovink isn't saying we should opt out, precisely, but acknowledges a "God is dead" situation for new media types: after the years of accelerated transparency and sharing that were going to change everything we suddenly realized we had compiled a dossier on ourselves. So, now what?

Matt Stoller's piece on the censored 28 pages in the government's 9/11 report that possibly tell us about the involvement of U.S. "allies" in the attacks. If this information had been known years of pointless violence might have been avoided, etc. Stoller posted this on Medium, another startup content-suck.

Richard Prince reminisces about his days hanging out with Jeff Koons in late-'70s NYC. The item is dated 9/17/2014 and can currently be found at the top on this large wad of non-permalinked writing on Prince's personal website. Prince makes a good case for Koons' art, woven into a rambling autobiography. (hat tip sdb)

Small Universe Model in The Limited Collection

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My GIF Small Universe Model appears today on Tumblr for the online portion of the The Limited Collection exhibit, organized by La Scatola Gallery (based in London, Berlin, and the internet). See previous post about the show.
This is the anti-aliased Tumblr conversion remix -- the original is 1000 x 1000 pixels and much sharper, pixel-wise. Presumably that will go in the limited edition version but the gallery hasn't restricted the artists from posting on their own pages so I will put it up eventually.

art-pizza connection belabored

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1275591886038-dumpfm-melipone-pizza

Yesterday (Sept 16) Rhizome.org's ephemero-blog "Rhizome Today" quoted a post of mine (thanks!) but the link appears to have been broken; 'twas my documentation of a Double Happiness exhibit at VertexList gallery in 2008.

A laptop "eating" a slice of pizza, slightly visible in that post, was featured more prominently in a Rhizome post on the same show a couple of years after mine. Rhizome's photo became the "hero image" this week for a trendspotting article in The Hairpin about the so-called "snackwave" phenomenon.

Rhizome Today listed a few net art-pizza precedents and asked if it was missing any. Hey, this is important! OK, a "surf blog" that was running contemporaneously with Dubhap, called Loshadka, posted Thomas Galloway's Enter Tha Pizza Palace in 2007 (in case you get a malware warning here is the GIF by itself). I liked it so much I linked to it from Nasty Nets (note the trackback "right now" in comments -- that was from NN -- the NN post itself inexplicably disappeared).

Dump.fm has been all over crap food since 2010. See foot's ramen stunt driving GIF from the hall of fame. Pizza-specific posts include melipone's click for pizza screenshot (also above), illalli's Lindsay Lohan's pizza party, GucciSoFlosy's post-pizza, timb's pizza sirens, thekraken's pizza face IDGI guy, UAE's so pizza, and hundreds of others (there may be some tumblr overlap here).

Since Double Happiness touched this off, it should be noted that Jeff Sisson of that group rules the snack food beat -- in 2009 he and Bennett Williamson (also Dubhap) took a group of lucky individuals on a tour of C-Town, which included extensive consideration of junk food packaging, shelf placement, etc.