November 2020

upcoming projects

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December 4 - I'll be posting a conversation with John Parker, who I've collaborated with in art and music since 2004. We did an interview that year and decided to have a 16 year follow-up to discuss "where we are at" at the present moment in our work and thinking, and how we got there.

December 12 - The ICOSA Collective in Austin, TX, chose a musical work of Parker's for a group exhibit called Transmissions. The work appears under his St Celfer alias and relates to a project he did in São Paulo called The Space Between Points [see also]. For the Austin show he'll be debuting a joint project of ours called eleven tracks, a mixtape of sorts where I picked five tracks of his (including the one selected by ICOSA) and he picked six tracks of mine (because mine are shorter) and we discuss them. The mixtape will be "shown" on YouTube and physically projected in the space. The upload to YT will include bonus content that's been added using John Romero's Pitahaya program.

December 13 - eleven tracks, a musical LP by St Celfer and Tom Moody, launches on Bandcamp.

"Melding Principle (Three Nebulaes)" - bonus Pitahaya release

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meldingPitahaya648w

A track from my most recent Bandcamp album, Melding Principle, has been released on YouTube -- in a slightly unconventional way.
A streaming version of the track appears here. As usual, YouTube converts the audio into a low-quality mp3 when it's uploaded (in this case by user news.coffee -- thanks for that!) However, a full, uncompressed version of the release can be downloaded along with the video if you have a Linux or Windows PC and a bit of time to install some software.
The video portion of the YouTube, a constantly changing field of random pixels, operates like a QR code and contains all the data from the high-resolution audio file.
The Pitahaya program, created by John Romero, encodes and decodes the video. In order for it to work a handful of other open-source programs need to be installed.
As a non-expert, I was able to install everything and get it working with Linux Mint. It can be run on Windows with a program that translates Linux-type commands to Bill Gates World. The only thing I couldn't do was upload the mp4 video to YouTube, since I don't have an account. Thanks again to news.coffee!
Pitahaya has two modes, Archival and Privacy. I used the Archival mode to encode the file; Privacy has a somewhat different goal, which is encoding lower-res audio streams into videos that are silent, or running some other audio, such as Kenny G sax solos. (Your own videos, of course, not other people's.) As far as I can tell neither mode challenges YouTube's terms of service. I'm the copyrightholder and gave permission to have a video version of my song uploaded. The work exists as video (abstract art) and just happens to contain a better version of the song than is normally offered!
Some of Romero's thinking behind Pitahaya can be found here. Short version, yes, there are scads of places on the web to store stuff, but as we are warned ad nauseum, "the internet" is narrowing to a handful of gateway platforms. Many, such as YouTube, are quite profligate with their bandwidth in order to show every hair of your cat's fur with aching clarity. Pitahaya repurposes some of that waste in the service of loftier goals (e.g., starving artist product distribution).

art publications - bibliography

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Some art books are going into boxes -- how to find them again? This form of bibliography emerged:

A. Artist (alphabetical by last name)
1. Book about artist
2. "Artist's book"
3. Catalog of single artist exhibition
4. Artist biography
5. Book of artist interviews
6. Book of artist writings (e.g., Robert Smithson, Vassily Kandinsky)
7. Documentation of artist projects (e.g., Claes Oldenburg Store Days)

B. Exhibition (alphabetical by exhibit title)
1. Catalog of group show
2. Catalog of "theme" show
3. Auction catalog

C. Book about art (alphabetical by author)
1. Theory
2. Survey
3. Essay collection
4. How-to guide
5. Journalism (e.g., Naked by the Window)

D. Periodical (alphabetical by publication title, chronological within publication)
1. Magazine
2. Zine
3. Gallery guide
4. Directory (e.g., AiCA annual list of art critics)

around the web: "rethink this" edition

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• Econospeak: The New York Times is wrong in using "enslaver" to mean the same thing as "slave owner." (Using language to nudge politics is obnoxious enough without misconstruing the meaning of words.)

• I received an email from AICA, the art critics' organization, about the "Guston controversy." My first thought was that painter Philip Guston had been #me_too'd because (I recall) his daughter said he was a skirt-chaser, in her book about him. But no, some museum directors postponed a retrospective because they thought his goofy paintings of Klansmen smoking cigarettes and riding around in little cars might trigger some folks. What a world. (See, e.g. ArtNews)

• Here's what Simon Reynolds supports with all that election cheering: According to the Grayzone, Biden appointee Richard Stengel "has proposed 'rethinking' the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, 'Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.'" It's gonna be a fun four years.