the technobabble happens here (part 2)

We've made fun of the hyper-punctuated technospeak of this tweet by Lozana_Rossenova:

Lozana_Rossenova_crop

In terms of verbal communication, someone who grew up learning English in the classical sense might have no idea what any of the above meant. Also, what is a "PhD w/ Rhizome?" Is Rhizome.org now "accredited" is that just some fun thing? Must have missed this somewhere.

The tweet also comes up mysteriously short in the visual department. Those familiar with MTAA's decades-old "The Art Happens Here" cartoon know that the image was a blinking animated GIF (the lightning bolt trembled). You can't upload those to Twitter -- Twitter converts them to video -- but Rossenova didn't take that step; it was simply rendered as a flat .png. So much for net-art-as-inspiration (&more!). Worse, what is that swirly stuff surrounding MTAA's rectangle? Apparently it was one of a series of ambient backgrounds uploaded to Rhizome's server by an ad agency that did Rhizome's last design. It's basically decorative fluff and has no business being attached to "art" -- imagine a show of 1960s conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum with Rainbow Brite patterns instead of white walls. So much for "designing archival interactions" and "interface transparency" (again, whatever those might be).

exhibition diary: the new CRT

One of the cathode-ray TVs I was using for GIF display in my Honey Ramka show failed shortly after the opening, emitting, as the gallery described it via email, "a distressing high-pitch sound from the back & a nasty burning smell."

A quick eBay search for a replacement uncovered this gem:

magnavox600

New in box, under $100. One thing I learned in my research is that many sellers of unwanted CRTs describe them as "perfect for retro gaming."
That makes sense for me, since I am using them to show looping animated GIFs with a strong "pixel art" component.
On unboxing the Magnavox (no, I didn't do an unboxing video) and connecting a DVD player I discovered this TV cropped about 5 percent off the left side of my perfectly-centered looping GIF. Not acceptable. This necessitated burning a new DVD with a slight offset to the right. My video editing software is too primitive to do this, so I had to do a Rube Goldberg sequence of: resizing the GIF "canvas" and overlaying the GIF slightly off-center; screen-capturing 2 minutes of the GIF looping as an .avi file; exporting the .avi in lossless mode to keep the pixels sharp (especially since the conversion to DVD muddies them slightly); loading the .avi into a Windows 7 DVD-authoring program called "DVD Flick" (hat tip Paul Slocum); burning to disc. Voila, a centered GIF on the Magnavox.