apologies to rick
art - others
my drawings in chris shier's "line 02"
Chris Shier designed the interactive drawing HTML element one uses to make these.
You move your mouse or stylus around until you get a design you like and then screenshot the result.
Essentially it's a drip painting process that yields fluid, Naum Gabo-like structures melding the organic and the geometric. These also resemble photograms and William Wood paintings.
The geometry part is more apparent if you use the full-screen version on Shier's site - you can see the "wireframe" patterns comprising the swirls. I made these using a smaller window Shier posted on dump.fm and found I had more control with it.
What's good about this "virtual instrument" is also what's bad: it's almost impossible to make a poor design. Stubborn artist types want to do more than play, they want to break the boundaries of things and feel like they're doing at least some of the work.
In electronic music there's a better-understood distinction between "performer" and "instrument maker" (thanks to Paul B. Davis for pointed this out to me) than in so-called "generative" visual art -- or at least an acceptance of the blurring and overlapping of these roles. Hybrid drawings such as the above "challenge notions of authorship" or "raise interesting questions about artistic autonomy," depending on how tendentiously you want to phrase it.
Sarah Oppenheimer
Opening tonight at P·P·O·W Gallery in Chelsea.
Saw this work earlier today - hard to decipher from the photo but Oppenheimer cuts into the physical walls of the gallery to create these portals of glass and aluminum. One of them you can walk through and one is sealed by angular glass panes seated in deftly mitred trim. These relatively slight Matta-Clarke-esque interventions create funhouse spaces that are austere and elegant -- three-dimensional abstract compositions of available light, depending on where you're standing.
One also thinks of Dan Graham's rooms where you view other people viewing from behind transparent barricades. Yet design-wise the closest comparison I can think of is Australian artist Stephen Bram's gallery revamps, which I saw in Munich years ago. He is much more aggressive about building out additional walls to create his angled spaces. Oppenheimer only makes you think she is doing that much labor-intensive work. Her labor is thinking and observation to find the slightest pressure points in existing architecture to turn rooms inside out.
"Hacker Fashion II"
"Hacker Fashion II" [mp3 removed]
This mini-techno wah-wah harpsichord dub thing does kind of bounce along in spite of the restraint exercised in writing riffs. You need full stereo since two "sessions" are hard-panned one to each channel.
Except for the drums, all sounds were made with the above modular synth (hardware work-in-process), although not necessarily with these patches.
Dynamic gear photo by Nullsleep, who came to my studio while this was being assembled.
The original Hacker Fashion track.
The original hacker fashion photo shoot that inspired the title(s). Just learned that Nullsleep is in this spread, wearing "ultra-wide UV glasses with wraparound lateral protection flaps."