obsequious kowtows to stage for shiered coolkid and plams/nasa for dish
art - others
phone call to Karen Archey
"Hello, Karen Archey? Mr. Hyrax here. Listen, I'm a busy man, but I read your institutional blog post about Joel Holmberg and had some bones to pick with what you said about Nasty Nets. I loved that blog and it wasn't Art, it was trash, it was nuts.
"The way you write it up it sounds like a vehicle for getting into galleries and you even gave a recap on who from the group was exhibiting and who was a miserable lapsed artist. Ms. Archey, who gives a shit about any of that. You need to stop reading so much Brad Troemel. The beauty of Nasty Nets was it had people working on all levels simultaneously (lapsed artist, non-artist, fanatic climber) with the idea of creating something that had nothing to do with the existing art world. It was the internet, man. That was the subject. Also, you could use a fact checker, or at least an implication checker: several Nasty Netters were exhibiting artists before the group, including Michael Bell-Smith. Whether any of the self-identified artists in the group had "considerable success in the art market" before or after only matters to capitalist tools such as yourself. Also, as Tom Moody noted in his comment, you ignored the most prolific contributors to the group and concentrated on a handful of less productive users--why was that? I'd say because it fit your bogus rags to riches narrative. Also, it's like you're picking your favorite members of the Beatles. It was the Beatles, right? OK, gotta go, I'm a busy man, but I'll be keeping an eye out for your corrections."
collage posted to dump.fm by Island had nothing to do with this post
Ficus Focus
Ficus
GIF, 500x400 px. 2013
Manuel Fernández, from his Recognition series
The back story is pretty funny. A camera's face recognition software is desperately seeking a human mug in various images: this plant, a pigeon, a dildo, a table lamp.
Let's assume it's true. (The whole thing could be faked.) The images are compelling, though, with even lighting and classical proportions (Greek new media! meets stock photos) and the slithering, erratic green rectangle has good animated GIF eye feel (a term borrowed from culinary "mouth feel"). I like them as photography with the intervention of an arbitrary, Baldessari-like formal element as much as for whatever they are saying about the ubiquity of surveillance or [insert obligatory grant-friendly language].
Found this through uncopy, an art database with a taste spectrum similar to the recently-shuttered Vvork (the latter is still online as an archive).
Update: an Apple iPhone user says the green rectangle is iPhone-only so therefore the project is fake because obviously they aren't made with the phone. I was hoping not to have to talk about Apple but if the green rectangle is that well branded then this is an iPhone community in-joke and deserves to be discussed that way. Can the GIFs be enjoyed without being dragged into that swamp? Doubtful; oh well, I tried.
More.
numbercult, "Generator"
...generative animation recorded in real-time [vimeo]
via dataisnature
Watch in fullscreen if possible. A slightly more pared-down, elegant version of '90s rave videos, where we gawked at a single pulsating machine from multiple POVs, with zooming, cropping, and rotation in precise sync with a techno score. Here lathed, exploded-view robotic cylinders spin like spitted birds on raster line rotisseries, toggling rapidly between horizontal and vertical orientations, as the soundtrack coughs out a melody of reverberated clicks and digi-beeps.
Other selections on the numbercult page recall the Hexagrama video complained about a while back, where a kind of false equivalency is suggested between music and visuals. "Generator" claims to do that somewhat ("a virtual machine that produce[s] music as its by product") but we can manage to enjoy it without looking and listening for clues to the shared structural foundations of all sensation. Whereas other compositions such as "Collision Music," seductive as it is, seem like self-proving hypotheses to illustrate such philosophical themes (dataisnature invokes Hesse's Glass Bead Game in discussing it). It's obvious that a computer program employs the same temporal triggers to make an image change color and a sound go bleep but at some point a human, arbitrary decision was made of what variables to employ in the respective spectra. There is no actual translation between "blue" and "boing."