art - others

Joel Cook (aka Frankhats on dump.fm) has added another 1000 icons to his icon page, discussed last fall (new link, new server). [Updated link, 2018]

A recap on the method, from Cook:

Originally I started collecting what I thought could be used as avatars on a web project I was fooling around with (mainly following a tutorial for using pubnub messaging). The idea was to give each new user a random avatar with no username. At the time it was a chat site with nothing hooked up (no history, no system for users, messages just got pushed to any open browser, chaotic), and I was liking the anonymous aspect... but I have moved on to a more fleshed out idea and haven't tried to "finish" the weird hack I was playing with.

Images are not optimized, only forced not to exceed certain dimensions with css. The php script lists every image in the directory and spits it onto the page, and I keep adding to it [currently 2468 images, 145mb --tm]... There are a few broken images and duplicates probably, oh well.

A recap on the theory: it's "image aggregating," but more thoughtfully chosen and, at the same time, Dadaist, than the pedestrian, rote lumping-together of subject matter conjured by that term. It may have loose connections to '60s-'70s conceptual art through a kind of systematic thinking but otherwise it's something different we're wrestling with here. And whereas many institutionally-validated "net artists" make work that resembles what you expect internet art to be, Cook's project squares more with what the net actually is -- vulgar, funny, and beyond the scope of any single artist genius coming out of art school.

Apropos of this post sound-graphic, thanks to Ryz and Rene Abythe, respectively, for pointing out two exponents of an emerging microgenre of "people who use Soundcloud's wave files to make words and pictograms."

"Hello" by hysyk (it's actually three "hellos" but here's one of them):

"Tajmahal," "Wifi," and "Boyz n da" by poeyfarre:

These are also pretty nice to listen to, as the cursor moves swiftly through the letters or images. A musical-sounding, white noise Morse Code of the 8 bit/videogame persuasion.
File under: "the street finds its own uses for commercial BS."

...on dump.fm

High fives to these glitch artists rattling the bars of our social media cages (have said that before).

"glitchr" showed up in my twitter timeline today, smearing a slug-trail of typography into other people's posts as I scrolled (commencing from a small puddle). Funny -- thanks, Petra, for RT-ing.

(The balance of Jon Williams' tweet says "really proud of my dad for bucking the youtube real name bullshit")