January 2015

Continuing to update this RSS Reader list.

RSS is a relic of the sort-of-free, mostly-unregimented Web, which existed prior to the period when critic Ed Halter began shifting his attention to social media corrals, bingeing on serial TV, and playing with his toybox of apps (he used the first person plural in making this confession).

RSS allows you to stay informed via a host of unconventional sources without having Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin looking over your shoulder, sucking off your energy. It would be the province of old net hippies except it also has its uses for business types who trade in up-to-date information. RSS gives you full-text posts, which is superior to, say, twitter's little snippets, and RSS feeds don't come larded with the "suggestions" and sponsored posts that clog the chutes of those social media corrals.

An example of the business side of RSS is what happened to Bloglines, my reader of choice from the mid-'00s. Something called Merchant Circle acquired it, and then Merchant Circle "partnered" with something called Netvibes. Users had their emailed logins transferred to Netvibes, and for a time the Netvibes "dashboard intelligence" software continued to include our lists of Bloglines feed URLs. Last week those stopped working, but it was possible to manually import those feed URLs (I had the same list on Feedly) and continue as a Netvibes "free" user. For now.

A French company, Dassault Systèmes, in turn owns Netvibes. According to the Netvibes CEO, his company "combine[s] with Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform [to] provide customers with real-time information critical to their innovation process. The time between consumer reaction and business action is the key to providing the best experience possible."

The previous post griped about Ed Halter's use of "our" in his recent Artforum story on Guthrie Lonergan. The years 2006-2009, Halter wrote,

marked, arguably, the cultural apogee of Internet browsing itself, before such pleasures would be challenged by competing activities —- our attentions corralled into mall-like social networks, highwayed over by serial-television bingeing, or processed through a toy box of apps.

This journalistic construction seems to be catching. Here's Scott Timberg, writing yesterday in Salon about the late Neil Postman:

These days, even the kind of educated person who might have once disdained TV and scorned electronic gadgets debates plot turns from “Game of Thrones” and carries an app-laden iPhone.

Culture critic Neil Postman griped in the '80s about how everything was becoming TV, a quirk exploited for propaganda photo ops by a savvy Reagan administration. Timberg lauds that Postman spoke to the falsity of that era without curmudgeonly nostalgia for "the good old days," pre-TV. Desperate to follow this example, Timberg lets "us" know, upfront, that he is right there with the rest of "us" watching Thrones and using apps. But this subtly reinforces a narrative Apple and Amazon would approve of -- that these activities are universal and inevitable.
Today's imaginary Postman might find a way to consider what streaming TV and apps are doing to "us" without wholly embracing a particular consumption lifestyle.

It's tricky to do. Over the weekend a commenter questioned the premises of a GIF with a seemingly incoherent Instagram theme. Must he be an Instagram user to avoid being lumped with Timberg's straw-posse "who disdain TV and scorn electronic gadgets"? Is it possible to comment from the "outside" about slapping Instagram logos on images to make them topical, or even, say, to laugh at consumers who need an "app" to show them how to take and store photos? "We" don't know yet.

Ed Halter's recent Artforum cover story on Guthrie Lonergan (now offline) discusses the historic context of the Nasty Nets "internet surfing club":

The bulk of Nasty Nets’ activities transpired between 2006 and 2009. The first few of those years also marked, arguably, the cultural apogee of Internet browsing itself, before such pleasures would be challenged by competing activities —- our attentions corralled into mall-like social networks, highwayed over by serial-television bingeing, or processed through a toy box of apps.

What do you mean "our," Mr. Tool of the System? In the same article Halter speaks approvingly of "defaults":

Perhaps Lonergan’s most influential work is his piece Hacking vrs. defaults chart, 2007, a two-column HTML table attempting to parse what he saw as the two main modes of Internet art at the time. The left column, titled “Hacking,” is typified by “Hacking a Nintendo cartridge to make images” (a reference to early work by [Cory] Arcangel, such as Super Mario Clouds, 2002), “Rock & Roll attitude,” and “Sophisticated breaking of technology,” and it is counterposed with “Defaults,” the right-hand column, which offers instead “Using MS Paint to make images,” “Exuberant humility,” and “Semi-naive, regular use of technology.” The chart was received as an aesthetic manifesto of its moment, even read at times as a generational line in the sand.

Jacob Ciocci also fondly references Lonergan's chart in a recent article about the New Hive platform, where he is an invited artist. New Hive encourages semi-naive, regular use of technology by ordinary mortals who want to do creative multi-media art projects without learning the ins and outs of Photoshop, GIMP, Aftereffects, CyberLink PowerDirector, Maya, etc., and is inviting artists who do know how to use these products to do guest, demonstration pages using the New Hive software. (Like many startups, such as Moot's rapidly defunct "canv.as," the idea seems to be providing media rich tools with a social community, which either will or won't take off.)
Artist participation in New Hive inspires a delicate dance of creative skepticism vs compromised sponsorship that in Ciocci's case lacks a point of view in a way that could be called, to be kind, Warholesque. When he says "I love the System, I love thinking inside the box" is he being sarcastic? Since he knows how to make art without New Hive's readymade design and media savvy, would he ever sign up for New Hive account if he hadn't been invited?

Lonergan's chart was posted before the Snowden moment, when you could use the Man's tools without having every move sent back and logged at the corporo-governmental Mother Ship (or at least, you thought you could -- this was before Facebook started blowing privacy seals and laughing in your face). Now "sophisticated breaking of technology" is looking good again, or at least, finding a way to do it that doesn't net you a short prison term.