This is the official blog invitation linking to the tweet that links to the facebook invite for my show opening tonight at Honey Ramka gallery. Please join me as we create conditions of artificial scarcity for the workmanlike PNG (and a GIF). (Plus, the installation looks good.)
Honey Ramka is an exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn @ 56 Bogart Street (1st floor). Tonight's opening is 6-9 pm. Otherwise the gallery is open 1-6pm, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (and by appointment).
Some notes on current/future art activities:
--A solo show in the project space at Honey Ramka gallery in Brooklyn (opening Nov 20 -- press release coming soon). It's called "Original PNGs" and it's all digital-based work. Am printing out 40 drawings from my Computers Club Drawing Society page, as well as some of the new work on the Linux PC I'm been posting. Also an animated GIF, that will be displayed on an Amazon Fire tablet (purchased on Ebay -- kind of a joke but it actually looks pretty good, display-wise). The reason for doing prints isn't merely "to create artificial scarcity" (as the new media folk love to say about galleries) -- viewing 40 drawings in a wall-sized grid has a certain impact you don't get scrolling through them online. I hope you can come see it.
--A one-month digital residency at Gazell.io, scheduled for March 2016. The residency series is a new project for the London gallery Gazelli Art House, and currently features the work of Laura Brothers. Other slated artists include Philip Colbert, Hyo Myoung Kim, Giovanna Olmos, Federico Solmi, Ben Tricklebank, Anthony Antonellis and Kari Altmann. I expect I'll be doing work similar to what's on my blog, at whatever state of evolution that's at in four months.
--In December I'll be giving a talk to a group at Bard on digital painting. More details when I have them, but it will be loosely based on these notes for an imaginary panel. Update: This has been bumped to February. Update 2: The students who invited me never got back to me, then they graduated.
--My artwork in The Wrong will be up for the next few months The Wrong is the second installment of a digital Biennale; the first was administered in Sao Paolo and I assume this one is, too. A group of curators are invited by the Biennale, who in turn invite artists. I have work in Utopia Internet Dystopia, curated by Valentina Fois.
Am pleased to announce a new Bandcamp release titled Stasis Field Day. "SID Street 4" is the sixth track on the LP.
Liner notes:
Some of these tunes date back as far as 2009 but all were remixed to bring them up to "Bandcamp standard" (i.e., loud). New parts were written and tracks that sounded sluggish got timestretched to 83.333% of their original length. Lots of modular synth, breakbeats, and vintage beatbox sounds in these. Have fun.
Your support in the form of buying the LPs or songs is very encouraging, but all the material can be streamed.
[embedded player removed]
Art F City reports that e-flux and deviantart.com lost their joint bid for .art, the so-called generic top level domain created by ICANN, the internet naming cartel.
ICANN's plan to offer specialized "not-coms" has been criticized as unnecessary at best and a protection racket at worst.
It cost $185,000 just to apply for a domain. E-flux, an art-listing-with-theory service run by artist Anton Vidokle, promised to make administration of .art broad-minded and fair if it won, but Rhizome writer Orit Gat noted that “wield[ing] a kind of centralized power ... seems incongruous not only with the egalitarian politics advanced through e-flux’s editorial, but also with the concept of the Internet as a shared resource.” [link added -tm]
The winner of the domain, UK Creative Arts Limited, plans to use it for:
the creation of an online community for artists, owners and keepers of works of art, commercial art organisations (such as galleries and auction and trading houses), not-for-profit organisations (such as museums, foundations, professional associations), supporting businesses (such as insurance, appraisal, transport) and customers and members of the general public interested in art.
That sounds kind of familiar. Going back in time, here is how e-Flux described itself when it launched in the 1990s:
The e-flux mailing list is made free for readers by a set fee paid by museums and other institutions of art to publish their press releases and other communiqués via e-flux. All information disseminated is permanently archived for reference and research. While its network is limited to public art centers and museums, e-flux offers similar platforms to commercial galleries through its art-agenda subsidiary, and to art schools and art academies through art&education, which e-flux jointly administers together with Artforum International.
This is a business model, and 17 years later it's still a business (apparently doing well enough to scrape together $185,000). Despite having "flux" in the name, what's being offered is the stability of a permanent archive. Which is a kind of power. To support e-Flux in its bid for .art, you would have to assume that (i) it would have no editorial/curatorial/gatekeeping stance in running the domain, which is impossible unless every registration is granted, or (ii) that its criteria for granting domain rights agreed with your notion of good or acceptable art. e-Flux supports many worthwhile projects (including an OptiDisc) and they'll continue to be able to do so without the added authority of deciding who has "art" appended to their names. People might actually care to have this designation, since e-Flux has spent years building a rep as a place for theory, whereas ".art" as administered by something called UK Creative Arts Limited will be seen, at least initially, as another private commercial fiefdom (i.e., of little consequence to left intellectuals). Art F City attempts to demonize the winner as the puppet of a "Russian Venture Capitalist" -- possibly a venture communist would be more acceptable?
It will be interesting to see if any cognizable editorial position emerges out of UK Creative Arts Limited's newfound "centralized power." None of this should be of any great concern since we're being told that serious art discourse has moved to Facebook.
Dorothy Howard, author of the latest pro-Facebook article on Rhizome, wrote this on her Facebook page:
Just published an essay where I use the example of Facebook Groups to argue that opting out of Facebook also involves a disavowal of crucial forms of vernacular culture and solidarity. Hi Facebook! I love you, despite it all..
In case you are missing the logic of this, it is:
Despite widely-circulated criticisms of Facebook as a privacy-blasting, government-spying, family-stalking, commercially-motivated attention-suckhole, significant numbers of naive souls continue to use it, thinking it's a place for democratic or even radical political or artistic organizing. We don't call them naive souls, we call them "the people," and as radicals ourselves we do not want to appear aloof from anything someone else perceives, rightly or wrongly, as democratic. So Howard urges not just a tolerant attitude towards Facebook stooges but becoming stooges ourselves by creating semi-ironic Facebook groups to discuss radical art and politics.
We can never be un-entitled enough. Help the people by helping Mark Zuckerberg -- he'll thank you for it.
