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Rhizome.org continues its practice of "ephemeral blogging" -- apparently after becoming alarmed by reader flight to flighty social media services such as Facebook and Twitter, they decided their best course was to imitate those, rather than continue to offer an alternative (a permanent record, "substance," a way for artists to keep score).
More substantive articles continue to appear alongside "Rhizome Today," but it's the blink-and-you-miss-it content that's often the most interesting, before it disappears down the ephemera-hole.
Our sharp-eyed editors saved one such discussion and it is reproduced below. Anyone trained as an artist will weep with frustration reading Zachary Kaplan's somewhat dismissive failure to see why someone might not want a 16:9 cinematic ratio for everyday computing and art-making. Imagine an art class where a teacher hands out long sheets of landscape-oriented paper and says, "draw a picture of the tallest person you know, and you are not allowed to rotate this sheet of paper."
What follows is all from "Rhizome Today":

A very odd promotional image for the FlexScan EV2730Q

This is Rhizome Today for Friday, November 21, 2014.

Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at http://www.rhizome.org/today.

[Editor's Note: We offer Rhizome Today contributors a variety of formats to use in writing their ephemeral post. An IM chat is one.]

Dragan Espenscheid: EIZO announces square monitor: http://www.eizoglobal.com/press/releases/htmls/ev2730q.html

Zachary Kaplan: I don't get it.

DE: 1:1 ratio like a Blackberry screen

ZK: Ok, I get it, but, as we've been taught, the cinema screen is the screen above all.

ZK: 16:9

ZK: or whatever.

DE: Most users don't watch video all day though.

ZK: Ah, yes, as I see on the site:

ZK: "The extended vertical space is convenient for displaying large amounts of information in long windows, reducing the need for excess scrolling and providing a more efficient view of data."

ZK: IS THIS FOR HOME USE?

DE: I want one for sure.

ZK: But Dragan

ZK: You're an artist.

DE: The cinema format is so lame because it is optimized for not moving your eyes.

ZK: Can u expand?

DE: Cinema is supposed just to fill out your whole view and to take in the "complete picture."

ZK: Whereas a square, you're like, "why is this a square?", and then u pay attention?

DE: On the square, I can let my eyes wander.

ZK: ah. hrm.

ZK: Still think this sounds like an office piece....

ZK: Are there any artworks or other media things you think would look particularly good in this format?

DE: I believe it is more interactive, gives a viewer more power.

DE: VINE BIENNAL

ZK: Ha. Yes. Any mobile phone type thing, right? Which is based on the scroll paradigm?

DE: Casio WQV10 photo exhibition.

Dragan Espenschied, The Thousand Faces Of Pikachu

DE: No, vine and insta just chose square because it is the same no matter how you rotate the device

ZK: Well, I don't think either rotate, tbh.

ZK: Classic Blackberry owner comment.

ZK: Tho I'm starting to see the FEED use for this... but then I'm still like, "just scroll!"

DE: Well, touch screens *and* device rotation weren't worth all the trouble.

ZK: (Btw, I like the kind of opiate of the masses take on cinema you're plying here. Very Kracauer.)

ZK: (Very anti-authoritarian.)

ZK: Is the square computer anarchist?

DE: It is not consumerist for a start.

ZK: THAT IS FOR SURE

DE: The best exhibition for this format would be Olia's collection of transparent web pixels.

DE: http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/clear.gif/

ZK: Nice.

ZK: Oh wait, one last q

ZK: is this happening only now?

ZK: Is it hard to make a square monitor?

ZK: Or is the market so fractured, individualized, it only made sense to make one now?

DE: If you read the comments on tech blogs announcing this monitor, lots of users speak up that they had enough of 16:9 or 21:9 because what they need to see expands below that format.

DE: The market for screens is actually shockingly homogeneous, with everything being 16:9 or wider.

DE: I don't think other formats are more difficult to make

ZK:

ZK: Well — I'm happy for people who need this. The market should meet every need!

[Rhizome] Editor's Note: During the editing process, this last minute comment was added:

Scott Meisburger: LCD panels are manufactured in giant sheets and then sliced up. I've read that the recent move to 16:9 everything (which is further from the golden ratio than the original Apple Cinema 16:10) has to do with normalizing the assembly. because all the panels are really made by 1 or 2 companies in Asia.

SM: ^^ pro tip

Comments (2)

Golan Levin | Fri, Nov 21st, 2014 1:08 p.m.
It's understandable that there wouldn't be a lot of "home-cinema" demand for square LCDs. But many new-media artists -- particularly those who work in the field of generative software art and abstract computational imagery -- have sought a square LCD format for years. The usage case for such a monitor is the gallery or art-collection. Think about the work of artists like Manfred Mohr, John Maeda, Marius Watz, or (the Austrian software artist) Lia.

One reason the square format is appealing is that it doesn't "privilege" the horizontal over the vertical; it is neutral or ambivalent on the question of the inherent "orientedness" of the frame, which has (until now) not been an available option. Another reason it's appealing is that it's simply a 'different' format; we are so accustomed to 4:3, 16:9 and 5:4 screen ratios, that the square helps distinguish and defamiliarize the graphics. Finally there is a strong connection to historic abstraction and modernist image-making: think of the Malevich square, or this terrific article (brought to my attention by Zach Lieberman) about Eisenstein's thoughts on the "dynamic square" in cinema: https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/cinema_journal/v051/51.2.wasson01.pdf
best
Golan Levin
flong.com

Zoë Salditch | Fri, Nov 21st, 2014 2:53 p.m.
Good Today post. Impressed with Scott's knowledge of panel manufacturing.

I'm biased towards the 9:16 ratio or "deep portrait" as Andrew Benson likes to call it. ( ^-^)

In a slightly higher price tier ($200) than the USB media players we looked at ($30) are mini-PCs (e.g., the Asus Vivo). These are small, fully functional desktops. A few hours work could get most of the Windows 8 crap and bloatware off of these so they could do something simple like accurately loop a GIF in an art gallery for 8 hours. You might get through a few shows before they start to break.
There is an open-source, Raspberry Pi version of a mini-PC called Vero (hat tip JS). It's advertised on the classic startup website design of the current era -- lots of large type and bold graphics and scrolling but no "about" page that gives you detailed biographical information regarding who's behind it, or in-depth specs or photos of the product (just a couple of images and a short list of attributes that don't answer all your questions).
The intrepid new media artist of the present era only has one question: how does this baby handle animated GIFs? So the email below was sent to the company sales team -- that was yesterday -- will update if a reply is received.

Hi,
I have been trying to find a media player that will play animated GIFs accurately, for looping in an art gallery setting.
Can Vero do this?
If I were using a PC or Mac, I would load the GIF in Firefox and let it loop from there.
Does the Vero browser respect the file, for example, not adding antialiasing, or resizing it or slowing it down, etc?
You have very little detail on your Vero website about the browser, and I'm concerned it's just a web connection for accessing the app store.
If not in the browser, how does Vero display a "picture" and does a picture include an animated GIF (subject to the above concerns)?
Any information you can give me would be appreciated.
Best, Tom Moody

Update: Vero replied to my email:

Vero ships with Chromium, so yes, your GIF should just be fine.

Ugh, yes, well, the New York Times (which is using house-brand URL shorteners for its permalinks now) but honestly, look at this article. Do you believe a word of this? It's like the old Saul Steinberg "view from 10th Ave" New Yorker cover, only with food. The Times-men look West and see what the rubes out there eat on Thanksgiving -- but it's scientific! it's based on actual Google searches! So, yeah, "frog eye salad," "snicker salad," and "pig pickin cake" were the number one searches for Thanksgiving recipes other than turkey in Idaho, Nebraska, and North Carolina, respectively, for example.
The giveaway that it's just patronizing fun at the expense of yokels is the entry for Texas: "sopapilla cheesecake." That may be demographically brilliant but Texas is still 70% anglo and the anglos don't eat sopapilla cheesecake on Thanksgiving. They just don't.
When there is no news fit to print, make it up.

The previous post journeyed into the brave new world of cheap USB media players and found the Incredisonic to be lacking on a couple of fronts as a GIF-looper. First, antialiasing turns the clean, straight lines of pixel graphics into mush, and second a black frame is inserted at the loop point if you convert the GIF to .mp4 or H.264 or whatever variant of the old Quicktime codec you choose. Turns out you can improve the sharpness somewhat by switching the default to a higher HDMI resolution, and also making sure your monitor is reading the HDMI as well as it can, but it's still not as sharp as a GIF can be.

Most of the players in this price range are clones of the same hardware and software as the Incredisonic's, with slight tweaks to the menus and remote control configuration. The ones marketed under the names MDN and Keedox have the same issue with the black frame.

Two players don't add a black frame to a looping video and have more-or-less seamless long-term play. Amazon markets one under the name Blusmart but it's also called the "MP018 full HD media player." A better choice is the Micca Speck Ultra-Portable Media Player. This has no added black frame and also better design and an easier-to-use remote. Even this one, though, employs some of the same basic software layout and wording as the other players. And it plays GIFs at half-speed if you load them as "photos" rather than exported-to-video. Am curious how these features are licensed around and which Chinese company came up with the original clunky design.

All these devices handle most common media files, including VOB so you can transfer DVD content to the player with no loss of quality. But these are still poor ways to show GIFs, so, if you want to do that for "fine art display" reasons you either need to (i) spend about $200 on the Windows versions of the Mac Mini, or (ii) accept that it's no longer a GIF but rather some sort of weird lo-fi compressed video animation that may have charms of its own. Some GIFs that don't need to be particularly sharp will look perfectly fine on these little players, but either way, you no longer need the extra step of burning a DVD (but then what are you going to sell? that's another post).

originally posted June 2013, so not very deep in the vault