general

carriage trade gallery is having its annual fundraiser, which for the past several years has been a show of cell phone photos called "Social Photography"; installment IV opens Nov. 12. I donated (i.e. bought a photo) last year and enjoyed seeing the exhibit.

Possibly the premise is dating as cell phones become smart phones and 3 x 4 inch standard sizes with point-and-hope-for-the-best aesthetics have given way to extra megapixels and more especially Instagram, where every lousy shot can be doctored with "arty filters" to look like a masterpiece.

Instagram is the elephant in the room of Social Photography IV, because of (a) The Kids (who left Facebook for it, in droves, and stayed after Facebook bought it, also in droves) and (b) Richard Prince, who put Instagram front and center in the white cube environment this year. Read Vulture's obsequious review, artnet's criticism, and ArtFCity's follow-up.

Is Instagram social photography? Yes. Is it a wildly successful model compared to say, Flickr's storage bin approach? Yes, it has supermodels artifying themselves and getting mad likes. You might hate this and want nothing to do with it, but you have to acknowledge it's the new normal for passing around photos.

Thomas Frank, in a Salon article comparing Pres. Obama to Jimmy Carter and discussing Rick Perlstein's new book on the '70s:

Like Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter was drawn instinctively toward austerity—keeping the White House thermostat down and advertising his personal devotion to domestic thrift by donning a cardigan in a televised chat on the energy crisis.

Felt compelled to leave this comment, even though it's hopeless:

Ahh -- the myth of the Carter "energy sweater." The "sweater" wasn't about turning down the thermostat -- he began wearing it shortly after inauguration to show he was a down home guy, in reaction to the pomp of Nixon's "imperial presidency." Sometime in the '80s it became a Republican meme that Carter was a wimp shivering in the White House rather than a manly energy squanderer, and the sweater's meaning transferred from "humility" to "thrift." Perstein's book should have clarified this but perhaps it didn't.

Am pleased, and yet, humbled, to announce a new LP on Bandcamp: Quantum Leap Sideways.
10 tracks, consisting of mostly new material, continuing some lo-fi sampling ideas explored on the releases 40 Yards from the Machine and Household Kit. A small, nerdy collection of Eurorack sampling modules makes many of the sounds. Lower sampling rates and bit depths sidestep the tech world's inevitable drive to bigger files and bloatware, while still exploring some twisted notion of the "state of the art" -- hence the title of this release.
This is my ninth release in 2014. Your support in the form of buying the LP or songs would be very encouraging, but all the material can be streamed.

Paddy Johnson mines a recent "post-internet" exhibition's catalog materials for some nuggets about this non-topic.

First, the conventional wisdom, sort of the half-asleep collector's understanding of the term "post-internet" and the artists it covers, from the curator Domenico Quaranta:

The term was coined by Marisa Olson, adopted by Gene McHugh for his art criticism blog, and popularized by Katja Novitskova’s art book Post Internet Survival Guide and by Artie Vierkant’s essay “The Image Object Post-internet.” Surfing Clubs and VVORK, Seth Price’s Dispersion and e-flux journal, the work of artists such as Cory Arcangel and Oliver Laric have been all influential in the development of post-internet.

That's a lot of unrelated stuff lumped together. Whitney museum curator Christiane Paul, who the same catalog describes as a "post-internet thought leader" despite being the personification of the digital art establishment, questions the Olson mythology and pretty much all the rest of it:

I find the term mostly annoying and don’t believe it will have traction in the long run. The concept of a “post”-scenario has been kicked around for more than a decade. Josephine Berry Slater talked about post-internet art in 2003 in her introduction at a symposium at Tate, and of course Steve Dietz and Sarah Cook have been writing about and curating art “after” new media since 2004.

The fact that I have major issues with the “post” in this terminology aside, I find it interesting that it typically seems to take a decade for these concepts to gain traction. (This was also the case with regard to blogs; the blogosphere took off roughly a decade after blogs, as software, were created.) The term post-medium—as it has been defined by Felix Guattari, then Rosalind Krauss, then Peter Weibel over the past few decades—makes sense to me. Referring to Krauss and Weibel, in particular, we are indeed in an era after medium distinctions (as defined by Clement Greenberg), due to the convergences the digital medium has brought about. Post-medium to me still is best as a term for getting to the core of what post-internet and post-digital tries to grasp, a condition of artistic practice that fuses digital into traditional media.

“Post” is a temporal classifier and temporality is where post-internet and post-digital fail for me. Both terms try to describe a condition that is very real and important; I am by no means debating the condition they outline, but the usefulness of the terms. The internet and the digital are pervasive—not disregarding the fact that there is a digital divide and parts of this world are not connected or digitized—and we are by no means “after” the Internet or the digital. Claiming the latter is similar to stating that we are post-car while being stuck in a massive traffic jam on the highway.

That just about nails it, let's move on. One quibble: blog software appeared around '99, the blogosphere flourished about five years later, then collapsed when everyone moved to Facebook.

If you're going to say a term is highly contested you probably shouldn't use it in the next sentence as if it were established term of art:

the PDF comprises responses to a questionnaire on the nature of the highly contested term “post-internet.” This questionnaire is intended to preserve the widely varied opinions and oral histories of post-internet thought leaders throughout the world. (wince)

Hence this proposed rewording:

[T]he PDF comprises responses to a questionnaire on the nature of the highly contested term “post-internet," in order to preserve the widely varied opinions and oral histories of thought leaders [of the highly-contested term "post-internet"] throughout the world.