256 Disqus Comments
The comments below originally appeared on a handful of different websites (the bulk are from Paddy Johnson's); they are a complete record of my "Disqus writing" from the time these sites started using the service (in 2010) to January 24, 2015, when I last saved this list. Disqus generates the list automatically, and while the vast majority of the comments are mine, a few "replies to me" also make it into their compilation -- not sure why. Timestamps were copied at the time of posting and aren't accurate now.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3
days ago
I will say, Ryder posing shirtless is certainly
throwing down the gauntlet. Especially in irony-challenged
NYC.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3
days ago
Jezebel is following your lead with this cross-promotional
smear. They even cite you. You must be very proud.
http://themuse.jezebel.com/petty-man-builds-art-career-by-shitting-on-fitness-star-1680762441
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most offensive
project of 2014 • 3 days ago
You are blaming Ripps for your own humorless misreading of
his quip to the hotel.
I changed "don't plan to see it" to "don't plan to review it."
Your pledge to re-evaluate came only after a couple of
questions from me about the embargo.
As for letching, let's close the syllogism for your readers.
On Artnet you complained about Prince making a "leering"
comment on a fashion model's Instagram. In this post you lump
Ripps in with Prince for "a bizarre streak of misogyny." Ripps
has a show coming up involving Instagram about which you said,
in advance, "we've made our views known." Reasonable minds
could assume you meant to connect all this together.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3 days ago
We've barely scratched the surface of how this is
different from Saltz/Prince/Instagram, and doesn't deserve to
be tarred with the same brush. Ripps wasn't letching around
models' instagrams, making pervy comments, and yet you cited
this post in a later denunciation of Ripps' Postmasters show
(which hasn't gone up yet and that you don't plan to review).
That's the kind of thing happens when you make up your mind
and stop listening to people.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3 days ago
Your apology for oversimplifying this artwork, selectively
quoting from Facebook, putting Ripps in the same "macho" niche
as Saltz/Prince, and using your non-profit to force a narrow
political agenda. For starters.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3 days ago
True, and you can do much more damage than I can when you go
into full persecution mode, as you've done here.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most
offensive project of 2014 • 3 days ago
As I said to Whitney, you are prissily focusing on the term
"whore" -- it's as if it blinds you to the humor (and other
merits) of Ripps' piece. It's a complex work and you dumbed it
down.
Ryder Ripps's "Art Whore" in the running for most offensive
project of 2014 • 3 days ago
This post epitomizes the mismatch between humorous art and
humorless criticism. Naturally a hotel is concerned not to be
seen as a place for sex, but rather a place for mom and dad to
stay with the kids when they come to visit the wax museum on
42nd Street. So you have a nervous hotelier asking Ripps about
his intentions for the project. He doesn't reply "to expose
the sexual subtext of the hotel situs" as an earnest do-gooder
artist like Andrew Norman Wilson might. Instead he has a ready
non-sequitur quip. Ripps then re-used the quip to handle
anklebiters on Facebook -- in the dialogue that you
screenshotted and made the basis of this hit piece.
The online magazine Dazed did a better job describing this
artwork -- their treatment is skeptical, but balanced,
accurate, and lighter in tone. This is just a hatchet job,
reducing art to "correct" politics.
Monday Links: Rain Man Assholes • 4 days
ago
Yes, if it was an extended character demolition of Brian
Droitcour, with him mentioned by name, it would be a different
article (and likely not written at all). What's surprising are
all the thoughtful, prose-y responses from this e-flux group.
Do they not see the post for what it is, or do they just like
the sound of their own typing?
Monday Links: Rain Man Assholes • 4 days ago
The Archey post is an extended "subtweet" where she
passive-aggressively doesn't address the person she's
complaining about. With a straw man rain man thrown in for
good measure. The argument balloons from one Turing-like
critic (yeah, who the heck could that be in the art world's
land of compromise?) to generalities about all "creatives," or
rather, all male ones. For the most part, interactions between
editors and writers, and between curators and artists, are
struggles over creative control, with each party dancing
around the personality quirks of the other party. Too many
quirks on either side and the transaction falls apart. But
that's not a very dramatic article (accompanied by a painting
of Narcissus).
Nestlé Claims Trademark Infringement Against Artist
Anthony Antonellis • 9 days ago
Three things have happened in the past few hours:
the "buy" button is back, it now has a disclaimer that the
Poland Spring site is #fineart and not Nestle-affiliated, and
the comment above explaining that this is an artwork was
anonymized to "guest." This might be enough to slow the legal
freight train!
Regarding the merits of the art work, we could probably do
with less of this Jogging type project that uses brands to
"critique" other brands. The artist has a pat thesis
statement, all ready for that grant proposal: "To parody
energy drinks by combining bottled water with holographic
energy bracelets from Alibaba — a criticism of the purported
health benefits of the natural mineral element in the water
and the healing properties of hologram stickers." That point
is relatively minor, and while it might impress the
grant-givers when spelled out like that, it was lost on Poland
Spring's legal dept., as well as Corinna Kirsch, who didn't
mention that interpretation.
The Art Object Culture gallery also had a slight "curatorial
mission" -- to invite "two artists a month to create new art
objects from items preexisting in various online stores." This
could have been hatched as a cross-branding scheme by a NY ad
agency -- maybe it was. The only difference being that the
agency would be savvy enough to get the necessary rights
before going live.
Nestlé Claims Trademark Infringement Against Artist
Anthony Antonellis • 9 days ago
Playing devil's advocate, yes, I could take Antonellis'
Poland Spring Absolut-style artist promo page, question his
ethics and morals, and pronounce it the most offensive work of
2015. You could say it was a prank and I would argue that he
provoked you into exactly this defense of the embattled artist
threatened by a giant corporation, that he was playing you to
build his design company's brand. That might not be fair, but
that's why you have to be careful about declaring some artists
bold and others corrupt when they are all working in that
slippery grey area. (Arguably Ryder was more courageous by
taking on the taboos of "sexual exploitation" and yet, you
destroyed him.)
As for etoy, my memory is that their project had much more
ethical heft because they had registered etoy first, and
trademark is based almost entirely on priority in time. The
online toy company came along later and tried to displace
etoy's established mark based on brute force litigation
tactics.
Nestlé Claims Trademark Infringement Against Artist Anthony
Antonellis • 9 days ago
In an era when so many brands use artists to make "creative
riffs" on their products, those companies also want to be
careful that this or that particular creative riff is not
"their" creative riff. This bottle and Antonellis's slick web
page are right on the line. It doesn't help that he has a
"design company" handling the sales. Is this art or design? Is
he trading on Poland Spring in some subtle fashion? If you
push the envelope of what's permissible in a confusing web
environment, you shouldn't be surprised that the envelope
pushes back. (It looks like the "buy" button has already been
removed.)
Speaking of confusion, based on AFC's recent treatment of a
certain artist who fell out of favor with you, this plea for
justice for poor misunderstood Antonellis could have flipped
the other way, where you wrote a post questioning his ethics
in using brand confusion for "further[ing] his own successful
career capital."
Wednesday Links: Owl in a Towel • 10 days
ago
There might be reasons other than defending Ryder or
"contrarianism" for objecting to two NY non-profits lowering
the ban hammer on an artist. It sets a bad precedent. Saying
you're not going to review a future show because of someone's
previous art, or using a phrase like "ethically unsound"
(which has a vaguely Soviet ring to it) ought to be addressed,
so I did it. I've mentioned other artists who might also be
provocateurs, yet haven't been dissed by the art authorities.
Andrew Norman Wilson's takedown of the Google badge system was
pure click magic, and see my questions regarding Antonellis'
"Poland Spring" piece on AFC today. This is not an issue
related to one particular attention-hungry artist, but you
seem to have fixated on that.
Also, "contrarianism" as I understand the term means
opposing popular opinion for its own sake, or to stir up
trouble, rather than having actual beliefs and principles.
Wednesday Links: Owl in a Towel • 10 days ago
Your theory about the origin of the show is wrong,
and so is your speculation about my motivations. One minute
it's "contrarianism" and the next it's being overly
protective. Not sure why I'm responding except maybe others
have similar confused impressions.
Wednesday Links: Owl in a Towel • 10 days ago
Postmasters had Ripps' Adrianne Ho paintings in the back room
during their Anton Perich opening. One was hanging in a front
room, clearly visible from the street. That was October 18,
three weeks before the "controversy." Clearly a show was in
the offing. Your theory is fascinating but possibly dead
wrong.
Wednesday Links: Owl in a Towel • 10 days ago
So it all works out neatly, doesn't it. Why are we talking?
Wednesday Links: Owl in a Towel • 10 days ago
Andrew Norman Wilson's curiosity about the global "other"
could have been satisfied privately, without dragging an
outsourced "man Friday" into the bordering-on-meaningless
world of US academic conceptual art -- for an entire year. The
term "Friday" originates with Daniel Defoe -- you should watch
Luis Bunuel's version of Robinson Crusoe, that's basically
Wilson patiently tutoring his Friday about a "self-reflexive
inquiry and experimental engagement [to] strategically expand
and diffract/rematerialize the already present communicative
and creative commonalities made possible by network
capitalism." Global outsourcing is offensive; "working within
the system" to enhance the Get Friday brand is equally
offensive. Ryder Ripps engaged two non-art worlders for one
night of art making to make a point that you consider dubious
or ill-considered. You're getting all prissy about the use of
the terms "whore" and "sex worker" and glossing the relative
merits of these two projects.
As far as your power, you've in effect announced an embargo of
Ripps' future shows. Rhizome has tarred him with the phrase
"ethically unsound." You both severely over-reacted. That has
consequences for an artist's career.
Monday Links: “Breastfeed Them” • 12 days ago
It could be clearer that you don't intend to review
the show and that the negative comments you've made about it
here and in artnet are based on your impressions of the
pre-show promotion. The pledge "I won't review it" seems
extreme based on one project you didn't like.
Monday Links: “Breastfeed Them” • 12 days ago
The deleted tweet refers to the previous project,
and the promo website for On Ho is just that, a promo website,
not a show. AFC and Rhizome, after having pumped Ripps up to
major artist status the past few years, fell all over
yourselves backpedaling when he did something you didn't like.
This repudiation of your own judgment now extends to
pre-reviewing shows that haven't happened. The level of
vituperation is proportional to your preceding adoration of
this artist.
Monday Links: “Breastfeed Them” • 12 days ago
You made your views known on an earlier project of Ripps'. The Postmasters show hasn't opened yet and you've dissed it twice now, on Artnet and here. Whatever happened to looking at artwork first, then reviewing it? I realize you have to keep up with the news cycle -- in this case it appears to be running its course 10 days ahead of the show's opening. Is anticipatory criticism valid now? (Joe McKay had a website ten years ago called PreReview, where he reviewed movies before they came out. It was intended as a joke.)
Bringing Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
Hrag Vartanian doesn't know about criticism, so he uses the
term "sourpuss." "Grump" and "cranky" are also favorites of
mine.
Bringing Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
I appreciate the changes so far. Instead of "online art media
mafia" how about "Magazine Style and Group Blogs"? You have
the problem of distinguishing between a magazine and a journal
but I think people get the difference between People and Paris
Review. I could make a joke and say that having Artnews and
Hyperallergic in the same bin inspires the title "Legacy and
Wannabe Art Mafia Online."
Since you have The Jogging under "Image-Only, Active,
Influential" I would remove it from the "Mafia" category --
enough is enough.
Bringing Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
I know you're trying to be helpful, and I appreciate the
mention, but constructing an "online art media mafia" that
includes yourselves and then banishing others to the list of
mere "active blogs" is fairly damaging to certain people you
are trying to assist. I urge you to rethink these categories.
For example, why in the world is Two Coats of Paint in the
mafia but not Greg.org (isn't the latter someone you were
concerned students hadn't heard of)?
Bring Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
When you say "a billion sites trying to do that," meaning
press release-y news, right? If so, agreed. All the clickbait
and listicles. Salon has thoughtful writing but their model is
pure churn and constant shrieking scandal. I don't even know
what Rhizome is trying to do with posts that disappear in 24
hours (besides not being accountable for having opinions).
As an adamant "single author blogger," I feel the least I can
do is offer a calm place on the web, free of all this link
frenzy and pressure to monetize. The agenda and motivation is
less clear, and that's by design. Beyond the given of "self
promotion," of course.
Bring Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
In the '00s we had the "blogosphere" and there was a
fair amount of mutual support among early adopters who were
attempting something different than the "mainstream media."
That support has fractured as authors have either joined
social media platforms, with their readymade communities of
friends and followers, or returned to the old path of building
a brand by writing for better-promoted media outlets. I think
of the blogger Digby, who is now writing regularly for Salon
as "Heather Digby Parton." There is no going back to what we
did in the '00s, and I don't expect students to have heard of
me as an "indie blogger" (what the hell is that?). I'm
continuing with that platform/format because it works best for
me and gives me some sense of being in control, while still
managing to find readers through search, word-of-mouth and
(much appreciated) plugs from fellow former blogospherians
such as AFC.
Bring Back the Nerdocracy • 14 days ago
Hi, Paddy and Corinna,
Can you give more detail about what you mean by "messaging
and chat services"? Does this mean just Facebook? Are these
discussions meant to be a substitute for criticism, or are
they functioning as criticism (on the fly, without a "public
record" or accountability)? If that's the new blogging, isn't
the loss of a record and a searchable trail a pretty
significant difference?
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days
ago
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days ago
Got wood? If I hadn't asked the questions, no one would know the GIF was altered.
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days ago
Arjun, "Social media 'chat'" is a virtual environment
where people discuss the changing role of art in the smart
phone era.
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days ago
The top GIF was originally 2.3 MB, 62 frames - large for a
blog front page. The AFC version is 700 KB, 16 frames. Also,
the AFC version inserts the blinking purple rectangle at the
bottom -- an artifact of cutting the GIF short?
In the original, there is a long, slow, color morph on the
disc with instagram "vintage camera." In the AFC version it
sort of winks yellow and red.
So It appears we're discussing a different GIF from what the
creator originally made. I'm not sure it matters to the
questions re: travel photos, "the other," and insertion of the
graphics of the current "hot" social media site into this
image, Dadaist or otherwise.
Why is the app logo creepy? Why is it here at all (If hardly
anyone in India had Instagram at the time of the photo, and
the photo wasn't taken with a phone)?
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days ago
more comments from social media "chat":
oh nvm lol that is him himself in the first gif
it could still be a macbook-tumblr 'other'ness fetish
even if the artist is the "other"
although it could be self-expression (self-othering?) and my
comment could be seen as insensitive
or perhaps artfcity othering in their selection of gifs
or artist catering to that without any context for the
coconuts pics
GIF of the Day: Arjun Srivatsa • 21 days ago
Some comments from social media "chat":
http://artfcity.com/2015/01/02/gif-of-the-day-arjun-srivatsa/
what is the point of these gifs
wow those are so nice
very soothing to look at
but what is the point
blue tape is always funny
yeah i guess we are supposed to chuckle at blue-taped
instagram whatever
and unexplained piles of coconuts
interesting comparison between 1st and 3rd world but perhaps
just a macbook-tumblr 'other'ness fetish ?
GIF of the Day: Seacrestcheadle Tom Moody Collaboration •
23 days ago
It does look sort of like a rabbit, of the flying, mutant,
elephant man variety: http://www.science-explained.com/blog/2013/09/04/is-the-venezuelan-poodle-moth-as-soft-and-cuddly-as-it-looks/
GIF of the Day: Two Squirrels, the Back of a Player Piano
and a Sheet Holder • 2 minutes ago
Thanks for the post. I call this assortment "ensemble" and
was thinking about what the music would sound like, if it
could exist. I didn't know what those mechanical devices
actually were, but imagined them providing some kind of
"industrial" percussive accompaniment to the squirrels'
rockabilly rendition of "Duelin' Banjos" (the hit song from
the '70s Appalachian horror movie Deliverance).
GIF of the Day: Kaja Cxzy Anderson and Fly Delta Tumblr
• a month ago
There might be some questions raised here about the
relationship of the phone to the animation. Is the phone part
of the GIF or is it an arbitrary static frame for the GIF? Is
the "slow, methodical perspectival move back and forth in
space" related to "swooping" or "swiping" movements on an
Apple smartphone? Would it be possible to view this GIF
fullscreen on an actual phone and have it look like this (with
or without the viewer's hand movement interacting with it)? Or
is this a purely fictional superimposing of an abstract GIF
animation that could appear on a PC or other device into the
familiar narrow, vertical rectangle of the phone? PC GIFs are
often landscape because that's the screen orientation; this
one is notably vertical -- is this indicative of a future
shift in our animation-viewing habits or is it an arbitrary
graft? That sort of thing.
GIF of the Day: OM Rider • a month ago
A gallery using a GIF to advertise isn't exactly
"embracing the animated GIF." Salon 94 seems quite taken with
Murata as a full-spectrum digital animation artist with
"innovative and evolving processes rang[ing] from intricate
hand-drawn
animations to installations accenting the defects and broken
codes of
film, advertising and pop culture." (Always with the codes --
surely that stuff's been thoroughly decoded by now.) GIFs
aren't mentioned in the press materials. The GIF you chose
here falls more in the category of "clip from longer video"
than anything inherently GIF-like. Murata got known in the new
media world for his "datamoshing" style glitch art but by the
time he appeared in the New Museum's "Free" show, he was doing
bulbous Pixar style animation, which, it must me said, was
awkwardly paced and kind of terrible. A rubbery-looking
werewolf riding a motorcycle through a wind farm isn't
something we especially need to see in the gallery environment
-- Disney and Dreamworks have this kind of material covered.
Recommended Shows: Fin de Siècle and Sara Greenberger
Rafferty • a month ago
There is risk in GIFs -- the browser might read it
awkwardly and this becomes a "new" version. Or does it? The
GIF could appear in a squeamish-making context the maker
didn't anticipate. Someone talking about it might pronounce it
"jif." Etc.
Not Just a “Soccer Mom,” Michelle Grabner Likes Math
• a month ago
Ken, no one is fooled by this sock puppet "Boxmug." As a
critic you must learn to take it as well as dish it out.
Not Just a “Soccer Mom,” Michelle Grabner Likes Math
• 2 months ago
Johnson makes a brief, distanced description of the work
in the show -- the weavings, paintings, etc. I wanted to know
more about them! They looked intriguing from the accompanying
installation shot. Obviously Johnson doesn't like them but he
doesn't go out on a limb to say why. He uses the words "bland"
and "boring" but doesn't explain why the individual works on
display deserve those terms any more than say, Brice Marden's
or Robert Ryman's work. Instead he seizes on peripherals such
as the video and factoids he knows about Grabner as a person,
to write a short character assassination. Essentially he's
accusing Grabner of hypocrisy because she doesn't starve the
way artists are supposed to -- you know, the way Koons,
Abramowicz, and Prince do. Lazy writing!
Tuesday Links: How to Be Good at the Internet • 7 hours
ago
House's gallery's website has a good range of different
periods of his work: http://www.dma-art.com/#!perry...
Tuesday Links: How to Be Good at the Internet • 7 hours
ago
The Houston painter I liked best was Perry House, who is
in Davenport's second tier. A De Chirico-esque semi-Modernist
who is slightly out of step with the city and the times, but
in a good way. His work changes from series to series, and
from jpegs at least, it looks like he's still keeping it
fresh.
Tuesday Links: How to Be Good at the Internet • 8 hours
ago
I know Davenport from my Texas days so I'm kidding him a bit.
Still, when I left (20 years ago next May), essentially the
same group predominated. Of his top ten, only four weren't
overwhelmingly familiar names, and they were in the slots
7-10. Consistency over the years isn't necessarily a vice,
art-wise, but I'd have a hard time getting out of bed to write
that same article for two decades.
Tuesday Links: How to Be Good at the Internet • 20 hours
ago
What do you mean by "Naturally Adrian Chen writes the
feature"? Is Chen the Boswell to Ripps' Samuel Johnson?
Bill Davenport's article illustrates the perils of being a
critic in a small scene: It should be called "Five Painters in
Addition to the Five I Usually Write About and/or Have
Personal Connections To (and Sorry to the Ones I Put in the
Second Tier)."
It is astonishing that Mark Flood keeps showing up on "hot
emerging artists" lists. He has been exhibiting since 1981.
That is a lo-o-o-ong emergence.
Paddles ON! Auction Exceeds Estimates in Developing Digital
Market • 2 days ago
To wiki minaj: OK, so you haven't seen the work --- your rage
about the terrible situation of Manning selling at auction is
noted.
Paddles ON! Auction Exceeds Estimates in Developing
Digital Market • 3 days ago
These were the two I saw:
American Contemporary (East Village, NYC)
http://americancontemporary.bi...
Apr - June 2014
Retrospective gallery (Hudson, NY)
http://www.retrospectivegaller...
May - June 2014
Paddles ON! Auction Exceeds Estimates in Developing
Digital Market • 3 days ago
I've seen two shows of the work in person but I was already
intrigued by the way Bill Brady presented it, just from the
installation shot: http://www.billbradykc.com/mic...
I know of one feted new media painter (via hearsay) who was
convinced by actually seeing the work.
Hotel-y is part of the story -- in quotation marks --
but in person you are vacillating between the skepticism you
would have if this work had actually been made with paint and
the digital aspect, which is all about simulation and physical
modeling (at the most accessible level of "consumer" tech).
It's a matter of scale -- these things tower over you -- but
also of presence and presentation. The gel medium is smeared
on as if it were painted, yet has little actual relationship
to the underlying strokes. This is funny, but is also adding a
weird kind of solidity to the work.
They are pretty but not merely pretty, and certainly not
cloying, in person.
By the "nose of the collector" I only meant that plunking down
money will have to do until someone actually provides the
critical exegesis. By then the flippers will be on to
something else. I don't see any of our established NY painting
critics providing this exegesis. I think they will avoid this
work because it's "digital" and they still don't know how to
talk about that. (Of course I'd be interested in any articles
I might have missed.)
Paddles ON! Auction Exceeds Estimates in Developing Digital
Market • 5 days ago
Michael Manning's finger wiggling is anything but lethargic,
wiki minaj! His muscles are toned, and so powerful he has had
to register his fingers as weapons. His studio floor is
littered with broken phones from his enthusiastic jabs.
Kidding aside, Manning has yet to find a Harold Rosenberg to
pen the definitive "American Action Painters" essay for phone
and tablet painting, ultimately rendered as printed canvas,
daubed with actual physical gel. So we are having to rely on
the collector's nose for quality at this moment. The paintings
are good in person -- have you seen them, or are you basing
your dismissal on jpegs? There is a bit of a goofing quality
to them but they also have a sense of freedom and openness,
owing to the large scale. They don't read like "digital art"
much at all, yet have an interesting artificiality. The viewer
thinks about how -- and why -- they were made.
10 years ago you could hardly give away a digital painting,
collectors were so nervous about them. Manning has broken the
ice for more people working this way.
But who gives a tinker's damn about the money? Let's talk
about the art.
Is Jeff Koons More Like Edward Snowden or Buzzfeed? • 5
days ago
In reply to my question above, "Is there any ceramic in the
show?" -- some of the Banality sculptures are polychromed wood
and some are porcelain.
Is Jeff Koons More Like Edward Snowden or Buzzfeed? • 7
days ago
I presumed to take your comment "I have only seen this work in
reproduction" to mean all the work. Sorry if that's not the
case.
Is Jeff Koons More Like Edward Snowden or Buzzfeed? • 7
days ago
See the work and read what the critics have said about it.
You've formed an opinion based on jpegs and are hectoring
people to get them to agree with it.
Is Jeff Koons More Like Edward Snowden or Buzzfeed? • 9
days ago
Thanks for giving us a glimpse of the heavy critical power
talk on Facebook, the new home of art discourse (and hoodies).
Not sure where Sally McKay is seeing "ceramics" and "soft,
glazed curves," though. The Banalities series is polychromed
wood. Koons also works in bronze, stainless steel, marble...
Is there any ceramic in the show? Koons may have been sued
over the pink panther but it was "string of puppies" that went
into law books as a damaging precedent. Cooler heads advised
Koons to settle that one and he kept fighting to prove that
everything was fair game for appropriation. Eventually he got
a judge who would definitely state, for posterity, that he
stole the idea. This gave the litigation-minded firmer ground
for coming after artists. In any event, I don't think we need
to contextualize Koons as a forerunner, the critical (and
audacious) nature of the work is fine in the here and now.
Is Jeff Koons More Like Edward Snowden or Buzzfeed? • 9 days
ago
The intended audience of "appropriating advertisements in the
hallowed white cube" is what Ronald Jones and others called
the "decisionmaking class." Yes, believe it or not, the 1%
don't actually look at the world all that critically unless
you shove it in their faces, within their chosen haunts. Koons
may be a rich and powerful artist now, but it was not always
thus. Every artist, even ones with trust funds, start from a
position of disenfranchisement because most people don't even
know what art is (only what they like). The person
"establishing critical intent to justify pleasure in Koons'
work" is Koons himself, not the author of this blog post. It's
always been a subtle dance, and will never satisfy Marxist
scolds such as Ben Davis, who took a wrong turn on the way to
a political science career and wound up in the art world.
One Night While I Was Driving • 9 days ago
The cubes inhabit an ambiguous space on either side of the
windshield. One yellow slab briefly appears as a
near-octagonal shape that could be an approaching road sign,
but mostly the action hovers over the dash, right in the
driver's field of view. High speed driving and hallucinating
do not mix -- time to pull over. Also, there is a mashup of
two very different types of 3D environments: the driving test
and the tetris-style abstraction. The forced marriage via GIF
makes me look at each more closely. This level of critical
analysis didn't come until just now, three years after I
posted it (and demanded upping the critical stakes for GIFs).
Thursday Links: Madoff’s Secret Office Art • 6 days
ago
After Paddy's review came out, GIF Bites added the
"infinity icon" that allows the user to click off a page and
move to another.
The original "white castle review" video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thursday Links: Madoff’s Secret Office Art • 6
days ago
Work and thought clearly went into the "slide show"
and it is a better presentation than a tumblr. Essentially
Rourke re-created the old YTMND format of combining a GIF with
a sound clip into a full page "media" experience. With more
variations than simple evenly spaced tiles to make it
fullscreen. Also you can click through at your own rate, using
the "infinity" icon. The "slide show" format solved the
problems I was mentioning on the Disquiet thread in 2012 --
having side by side media from two hosts was awkward. However,
the "slide show" also makes this more of a video event than a
GIF event, but that's another conversation.
Thursday Links: Madoff’s Secret Office Art
• 6 days ago
The Artnet article headline calls it an "Iranian GIF
exhibition" and you use that phrase in the post above. That
perhaps raises some confusion about what you're reviewing, and
raises unnecessary issues re: the inclusion or proportion of
"Iranian" content. The project predated the show -- GIFBites
had its own independent life and concept. Whittling 70 GIFs
from a tumblr down to 50 and making them into a slideshow is
pretty slight grooming as far as exhibit-making goes. (Not
that you can't consider it an exhibit.) Even harder to turn it
into an "Iranian show," fully accountable as such, with such
minimal, late-stage changes.
Thursday Links: Madoff’s Secret Office
Art • 7 days ago
I'm a bit confused about GIFBites in the context of
this exhibition. I first learned about GIFBites shortly after
its inception as a jointly hosted tumblr-soundcloud project.
It was written about on the Disquiet website in December 2012
and I made some comments about it at that stage. See
http://disquiet.com/2012/12/12...
It looks like anyone could submit a proposal and Rourke had
been selecting one each week since late 2012. This might
explain why so many familiar "net art" names showed up in the
roster. Paddy's Artnet review makes it seem as if this was a
project generated in connection with an Iranian art show, and
that it was conceived as a stand-alone online "exhibit" but I
don't think that's the case. It appears more likely that
curators in the Iranian space invited Rourke to "show his
tumblr," and that's all this is. Fach & Asendorf's
GIF-with-sound is pretty damned horrible work (yet, from what
Asendorf suggests on twitter, it would not violate community
norms regarding racial caricature in Europe -- really?), but
far worse things pop up on tumblr and dump.fm all the time,
and no one holds them to a very high standard,
art-quality-wise. Not sure that "being in a show in an art
space," in Iran or anywhere else, makes that any different.
E-flux Supports DeviantArt’s Application for the .ART Domain
• 8 days ago
The larger questions here are (i) should ICANN be
doing this? (No) (ii) will these top level domains create new
gatekeeper powers on the web? (Maybe) (iii) is it gatekeeping
to have a "policy board of arts professionals to implement
standards for the domain’s use"? (Yes) (iv) is curating the
same thing as gatekeeping? (Yes) (v) are the applicants for
these domains seeking to win for commercial reasons? (Yes)
Corinna, you mentioned that there were "initial fears" about
deviantart or eflux "curating" the domain. Fear might be too
strong a word but having either of these two competitors
deciding what is or isn't art is a source of ongoing concern.
If one of the other eight applicants wins, this entire issue
goes away. Far more damage can be done by well-intentioned
sounding but basically dishonest appeals to a community than
will be done by organizations that have no communities to
begin with. It would be good if ArtFCity would take a position
rather than just reporting.
Are Cat Listicles an Effective Marketing Tool? • 17 days ago
The New York article was last year but it
was discussed recently because some writers followed up on
Peretti's early essay about “identity formation and the urge
to consume,” and one of them got a response
from Peretti. I wrote about this in my post "I, Like, Reached
Out to the Buzzfeed Guy."
Friday Links: A Wall of Dicks and Some Internet
Bickering • 3 days ago
Thanks for the text. When I, a non-Zuck, go to that
link I see a broken thumb icon and the words: "Sorry, this
page isn't available. The link you followed may be broken, or
the page may have been removed."
Friday Links: A Wall of Dicks and Some Internet Bickering
• 3 days ago
The link to Marisa Olson's post about Bitforms is taking me to
a non-existent Facebook page. Did she remove the post? Change
it since you published? If you saved it, or remember any of
the substance, I'd be curious to know what she wrote.
Are Cat Listicles an Effective Marketing Tool? • 4 days ago
Paddy, you've mentioned Peretti's art world ties a
few times but am not really sure how much claim that realm
ever had on Peretti, or vice versa.
The New York magazine article sums it up: "Peretti’s first
attempts to manufacture virality took the form of conceptual
pranks, which he devised with his sister Chelsea, now a
successful comedian. For one, Peretti set up a telephone
hotline that played a recorded rejection, designed to be given
out to guys at bars. Another, 'blackpeopleloveus.com,'
purported to be the personal site of a white couple who were
trying much too hard to prove they were down. The stunts
garnered TV coverage, including an uncomfortable BET
appearance, and a show at the New Museum."
Blackpeopleloveus was obnoxious and not all that funny, and
that New Museum installation was dreadful, "wall installation
101." This was a man destined to be an Ad Man, not an artist.
(In fairness, the "dirt style" HTML design page he did with
Arcangel was amusing.)
The Eyebeam Reblog is credited to Peretti and Michael Frumin
(who also collaborated with Arcangel). When I did the reblog
in 2004, if I had questions they went to Frumin, or Alex
Galloway. I'm not sure how much Peretti had to do with it --
that would be worth a follow-up to the New York magazine
story.
Aaron Chan: Web 2.0 Towelette • 5 days ago
Chan's tumblr name is a tribute to wrestler Scotty 2
Hotty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotty_Too_Hotty
An amusing aspect of this GIF is that all the verisimilitude
(and it ain't much) is in the falling cloth. Rippling,
bouncing, and so forth. While the shoe, inexplicably suspended
in midair, is as motionless as a brick.
Monday Links: Social Media Loses; Wet Dog Wins • 20 days ago
First Younger than Jesus, now the Glasshole Triennial.
"Visitor Engagement Apps" sounds ominous (complimentary Google
Glasses, to be returned at the door, perhaps?)
Tom Moody and deaniebabie: It’s a Ring…It’s a Shrimp • 20
days ago
I did a reply post on this and added
something not discussed yet:
Both of us skirted an issue someone on dump.fm raised, the
most basic
content-level kind of question: what's the symbolic connection
of the shrimp and the ring (suggestive of a diamond wedding
ring)? You could ask the maker of the original morph (it may
or may not be deaniebabie -- aka Dean Schneider -- I'm not
finding that GIF on his site). You could say it's
Dada/absurdist or computer/random connection with no inherent
meaning. Or you could draw your own connection, such as
"marriage and seafood both stink after the first three days."
"Have fun," I suggested.
Tom Moody and deaniebabie: It’s a Ring…It’s a Shrimp
• 20 days ago
Thanks for the post. The color version of this (as I recall from its momentary appearance on dump.fm, when deaniebabie posted it) had vaguely greenish colors and the "tween" frames were somewhat wispy. Converting it to this black and white dot rendering gave the whole more solidity and conviction. One reason it's so engaging is the way the ellipses twist in mid-morph. You would think the circular shape of the ring would follow the curve of the shrimp, but in just a few frames it becomes a kind of Moebius strip. In a way it convinces you that almost any two shapes can be morphed. The algorithm has powers of cleverness that seem greater than ours.
T.GIF, 2014 GIF Tourney • 25 days ago
As of March 27, five GIFs have been rescued
from this ill-considered competition and given loving homes.
If my comment announcing the GIF Rescue Service could be taken
out of moderation it would be much appreciated (it probably
happened when I edited to change the URL). --Tom
T.GIF, 2014 GIF Tourney • a month ago
Please note that the name and post title has
been changed to GIF Rescue Service: http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2014/03/23/announcing-gif-rescue-service/
Competition is not fun but rescue warms the hearts of
millions.
Art F City Is Liveblogging the Rhizome Telethon • a month
ago
Thanks for these notes. Corinna, regarding your
question about artist Google use: for clarification, here's a
link to the text I was reading aloud (the slightly smoother
blog version) about a Javier Morales post on Nasty Nets. Petra
Cortright showed this Morales post when we did the Net
Aesthetics 2.0 panel in 2008.
http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/06/26/thoughts-on-a-nasty-nets-post/
http://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/53981/nastynets.com/index2d7f.html
Wednesday Links: Unicorn and Wine Class • a
month ago
Regarding your Troemel review, you're right that the
problem is translating internet excitement into gallery
excitement. Am not particularly excited by The Jogging, a kind
of Nasty Nets-lite website that has the appearance of
spontaneity but carefully stays on message. If we assume that
the artist's various online efforts are about what Nicholas
O'Brien calls "aggregation" (certainly Tumblr is all about
that) it makes some sense to try to capture that spirit in the
gallery setting, with these, let's call them "hoarder
collages" of American Apparel ads and Semiotext(e) book
covers. But aren't those references slightly out of date,
relative to elements of the collages such as Litecoins
(slightly more obscure than the highly topical bitcoins) and
“customized human hair dreadlocks” that you might have to read
the press release to identify? And what's up with those
lentils? And ultimately, are the vacuum-sealed collages
intriguing to look at, as collages? I'd say not very -- to be
nice you could maybe relate them to Martin Kippenberger's
bad-boy assemblages. One viewer I visited the show with
thought the main value of the work was as a time capsule: in
other words, you buy the work on faith that it will say more
in a few centuries about the present moment than it does now.
Wednesday Links: Unicorn and Wine Class • a
month ago
Thanks, Paddy and Whitney. One correction: I'll be
reading my comments at 12 noon, NY time, on March 19, 2014.
This will be like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, except by invitation.
APlea • 5 days
ago
Your question "How do the strategies of innovation
incubation funding effect the types of cultural production
that will occur in this studio?" is the key one for me. I
would phrase it: "is artistic innovation the same as invention
of a product?" and say, no, it's not. The two can overlap but
art is not science, or engineering. Crispin's "Turing vs
Duchamp" polarity leaves out so much. The Duchamp rotoreliefs
could be perceptual science, but the Large Glass is absurdist
poetry - it's not about learning, earning, or making the world
a better place. Where do Matta, Eva Hesse, or Oskar Fischinger
fit into a Turing vs Duchamp scheme? To answer these questions
you'd have to have strong opinions about art and willingness
to laugh at the certainties of science. I don't see anyone
with that mindset getting past the gatekeepers looking for
innovation in the logical positivist sense. You would have to
lie on the application form, which is what capitalism-averse
artists routinely do to get Creative Capital grants.
APlea • 6 days ago
The conversation seems to have stalled out after that
last bit of ad hominem analysis. It's disappointing to see so
much "wait and see" pushback in favor of this proposed, murky,
art/biz hybrid. Hard to know how much of that's fear of
reprisals on the part of readers who essentially agree with
O'Brien or just apathy as usual from creative folks to
"politics." It should be noted O'Brien encouraged his critics
on twitter to participate here (including Julia Kaganskiy,
director of New Inc) and they've so far declined. Kaganskiy
gave as a reason her fear that this thread would "devolve"
into what's actually a fairly civilized discussion: http://altcrit.tumblr.com/post....
Disagreement isn't devolution. Yet one can certainly
understand not wanting to have one's motives speculated upon,
as happens in the comment above.
All that aside, this feels similar to the First Look
situation, where left-leaning bloggers gave
tepid-to-enthusiastic endorsements of the Greenwald-Omidyar
partnership, with a tacit agreement to look the other way when
Mark Ames asked obvious questions regarding how that
partnership is going to work in practicality. (For those who
haven't followed it, Ames questioned [in advance!] the
integrity of an investigative site funded by a "free market
zealot" whose micro-lending projects in India ended in
disaster, and criticized that the Snowden docs were remaining
in private hands, instead of being widely disseminated, as the
Pentagon Papers were.)
We're in transition from the old,
government-support-for-the-arts model to a kind of forced
entrepreneurialism for what used to be called the "non-profit"
sector. O'Brien is right to question this. "The old art world
was bad, too" is a red herring - that's an entrenched model of
commerce limited to the mega-wealthy. The question is, what is
the best place for rule-breaking creative intelligentsia (the
artists formerly known as artists)? The early web briefly
promised a wide-open playground, but since roughly the time
Google successfully monetized search, the channels keep
narrowing. Talk of potlatch or sharing models (except in the
sense of sharing-for-profit) is ludicrously quaint.
I know what works for me -- low overhead, low tech, and DIY.
So New Inc isn't something I'd apply for. I'm "concern
trolling" here to address the overall change in climate, which
says something an artist makes out of pure need and/or a
post-universalist quest for what used to be called beauty is
increasingly something that has to be couched in terms of
potential profitability, in the monetary sense. That's just
wrong.
APlea • 7 days ago
These are good points, Nicholas. Take it from me, you
will be ostracized, but it's OK, you will find your own
support system and it will be better.
NEW INC - horrible name - can you believe they paid two
branding agencies to come up with that? - seems to envision
itself as a combination of MIT Media Lab and Creative Capital.
From what I've heard CC is almost like Est or the, ahem,
"science religion," where you have to repeat these new-age-y
corporate mantras and drink the koolaid to participate. NEW
INC director Julia Kaganskiy's interview with
LouiseBlouinArtInfo is full of this breezy businesspeak, while
promising to "peel back the curtain on some of these more
insider art world and business practices and ideas." Peel back
the curtain, not to debunk the practices but to improve them!
Supposedly Japan has never had a romantic,
artists-starving-in-a-garret tradition, which is why Takashi
Murakami can make Gucci bags - or was it Prada - without
feeling like he's selling out. NEW INC's and Creative
Capital's vision of a seamless art/commerce connection smells
more horrendous since we in the "West" do have a tradition of
intellectualism divorced from sales.
One thing that's notably missing from NEW INC is any kind of
"critic grant" or fellowship. Something like that might inject
some doubt and humility into their process. But only if the
critic doesn't then have to worry about clicks and eyeballs a
la Gawker or Buzzfeed - OK, forget I mentioned it.
Possibly the movement of Rhizome.org into NEW INC's building
as what Kaganskiy calls an "anchor tenant" will give some of
this needed intellectual balance. As long as you and I are
free to post comments on Rhizome's blog, the potential exists
to slip subversive messages in, like a restaurant menu under a
New York apartment door.
Thanks for bringing this up.
The Best of Us, For the Rest of Us: Karen Archey · a
day ago
Hi, Whitney. I'd be interested to know when Archey's "Image
Conscious" blog content was removed from BlouinArtinfo and why
and by whom. That seems like a story that's not addressed here
and maybe merits an update to the post (since you discuss her
later annotation and the link to the original writing goes to
blank pages). I recall noticing the "Image Conscious" content
missing before this interview because I was looking for that
"minor leagues" essay that had also disappeared from
"Bien-Pensant."
As for my linking to a past "gripe" (actually an argument
that appeared on this blog where Paddy was extensively
involved) I'm happy to provide it: http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/09/08/immaterial-dispersal-not-so-great/
Re-reading it, one of the topics was Gene McHugh's blog "Post Internet" and whether it was too cut off from Internet back-and-forth of links, comments, searching, etc. Archey tried to play "gotcha" about my lack of blog comments and Paddy put her in her place: "If you want to make an argument of authority through a false equivalency between a blog that maintains a no comment policy, no searchable url and no post linking ability to one that simply has its comments turned off, be my guest, but you won’t be talking to me any longer."
The Best of Us, For the Rest of Us: Karen Archey · 10
minutes ago
The most intriguing parts of this interview are found when you click the links. The non-clicking reader might not know that Archey's BlouinArtInfo blog now consists of twelve months of blank pages. One wonders who made the decision to purge the content and leave the blog title up: writer or publisher? Archey's previous Bien-Pensant blog seems to have suffered a similar fate. That was unfortunate for readers and commenters who were embroiled in discussions of (to cite an example where I was involved) whether new media artists were a "minor league" feeding into the commercial gallery system (I thought not, but now my commentary is gone). The same non-clicking reader also wouldn't know that the annotated BlouinArtinfo blog post is highly critical of ArtFCity -- I guess that's "brassy" but this interview would have been a good place to hash out these differences rather than washing them down the memory hole. From my limited experience of Archey's writing she seems obsessed with the economics of the art world and wears her ethics on her sleeve: she was quick to imply (in an AFC comment thread a few years back) that my own blog's lack of comments fit somewhere in her spectrum of moral failings (which was also an excellent way to avoid the topics under discussion). By her definition my writing may lack open source transparency -- although I do release early and often -- but at least it's still up on the web and not vanished without a trace (knock microchips).
The Measure Of Success: Making Art in the “Like”
Economy last month
"The most successful creators will be those who choose to work
within the system," with or without the qualifiers that
follow, reads like a Party dictate in the former USSR.
Monday Links: Economies of Scale last month
Lindsay, Paddy said "at least one person who doesn’t
give a shit about likes." It's interesting that you read
"likes" as automatically equating with "social capital." There
are other models besides Zuckerberg's.
The point I was making was the frame for your panel was "like
economy; hot or not?" and I suggested that was a bad frame
because it assumes there is a "like economy" and we all know
what it is.
(I edited this after posting --tm)
on Friday Links! All the Important News You Won’t Find at the Beach 2 minutes ago
In his "Post Human" exhibition essay from 1992 Jeffrey Deitch
marshaled ideas from 1980s theory and cyberpunk fiction and
thoughtfully applied them to artists coming to prominence at
the time. The artists and ideas now seem familiar but this was
all pretty new 20 years ago.
http://www.artic.edu/~pcarroll/PostHuman.html
(imperfect scan)
Give the man his due.
I was explaining the connection Anonymous was making, since there seemed to be some confusion about that. As for me, I hope Corcoran will be a massive sea change from what we've had and would give her every benefit of a doubt.
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 2 days ago
Anonymous says Corcoran "used to work in a senior post at the national centre for new media in the UK, FACT -- an organisation that produces so called 'museum' style shows, as well as technology related material." What is this in reference to? Paddy said that Eyebeam is "electronic" oriented and "Corcoran’s interests dovetail with those at Eyebeam," unlike Cornell, whose "curation aligned as much with traditional museum programming as with the technology world."
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 2 days ago
Actually Ben Vickers accused you of unsubstantiated claims, and then disappeared. I would say now they are partially substantiated.
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 2 days ago
Yeah but what about all the sentences in the comments? Never mind, I give up.
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 2 days ago
I would say you hold the new director to a higher standard when you have a host of qualified eager candidates. As you noted in your earlier post "OK So Who's Gonna Run Rhizome?" almost no one comes to mind. Then when the first possible candidate is rumored, you make the case in advance that's she will be an inferior fundraiser. This is one situation where a lighter touch might be called for.
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 2 days ago
Cornell had 7 years to build all her connections. As best I can remember she started from scratch at Rhizome and no one publicly questioned her ability to do it. Why hold a new director to a different standard now? If it turns out to be Corcoran you've saddled her with amazing advance bad PR based partly on research and partly on your gut.
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 3 days ago
To meaningfully compare fundraising prowess you'd need the
UK and Canadian equivalent of those 990s for Corcoran.
I'm not sure why Eyebeam is mentioned in this post. All "new
media" organizations combine web, electronic, and traditional
gallery approaches at this point. Rhizome hasn't been
"all-web" for quite some time; I would expect "hybridization"
to continue under almost any candidate.
(edited slightly)
on Rumors! Heather Corcoran Appointed Executive Director of Rhizome 3 days ago
"That said, we wonder how well Corcoran will fair [sic] in
the New York
fundraising world. Cornell’s shoes are particularly big to
fill here,
and Corcoran has less experience in this field. It will take
some time
to get up to speed."
Where is the proof of Cornell's "large shoes"? How do you know Corcoran has less experience fundraising?
"We’re particularly interested about what this means for the
direction
of Rhizome, as Corcoran’s interests dovetail with those at
Eyebeam."
How?
"That wasn’t always the case with Cornell, whose curation
aligned as much
with traditional museum programming as with the technology
world."
Examples?
on Friday Links! Arty Sex Toys and a Swedish Librarian last week
Surfing around looking for the term "cinemagraph" it appears both Google and Microsoft are using that word to describe animated GIFs with a single moving element.
Google is using them for events and calling them "cinemagraphs," as described here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/google-plus-events-cinemagraphs-party-mode-post-event-reminders/
Probably copying Apple's "cinemagrams," Microsoft has an app called "cliplets" that you can use to make what they refer to as cinemagraphs (along with other effects): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/cliplets/
Apple's cinemagram app is here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/cinemagram/id487225881?mt=8
If Beck/Burg successfully sued one of these giants they might demonstrate a protectable interest in that word. But the fact that there are quick-and-dirty apps available to make animated GIFs with a single moving element suggests that the artistic breakthrough they ballyhooed on PBS just isn't that special (and by extension, neither is the word they use for it).
on Friday Links! Arty Sex Toys and a Swedish Librarian last week
Anyone can trademark something, but then you have to establish a property interest in the mark. This isn't the same as a patent. Apple has an app called Cinemagram, and Google is using something they're calling Cinemagraphs to announce events. Beck/Burg will have to sue to "police their mark" if they want it to be anything other than an official-looking "TM" logo on their website. They will likely lose when courts decide what the rest of us already know: there's nothing new or unique about a photo with a single moving element. (Or the name that describes it.)
on e-flux Co-Founder Anton Vidokle Says .Art Will Not Be Curated last week
Paddy, no one on the previous thread said that E-flux would be curating the .art domain. Anton Vidokle used that word and then you quoted it and put it in your headline. It makes the criticisms seem unreasonable.
Grace Weir used the word "curatorial": "One alternative is e-flux donate .art freely back to the people. No one should decide what art or .art is. Exactly the way .com is now. .art being free does not preclude e-flux.art from pursuing their stated aims and curatorial strategies, in much the same way they do already with e-flux.com."
That is not the same as saying that E-flux will curate the art domain. Of course, "curate" nowadays means anything from reblogging a GIF to organizing a retrospective but Vidokle is putting words into the mouths of his critics. The stated objection was to the exercise of any level of control by a domain holder, beyond "is the domain name available?" and "can you pay the nominal fee?" Cybersquatting so the Brooklyn Museum doesn't get cybersquatted sounds noble but it's still a power move.
Repeating an earlier comment: Anton Vidokle says he doesn't employ "deceptive logic" but it's misleading to say, as he does in his pitch, that "the structure of the internet is about to shift in such a way that most information pertaining to food will be found in a .food domain, while most information on cars will likely be found in a .car domain, and so forth." Many commentators have argued that the new top level domains are a scam or sham -- extortion of well-capitalized companies by ICANN -- that will have no significant effect on people's search habits.
on e-flux Could Increase Future Funding for the Arts Through .art last week
Anton, it's misleading to say, as you do in your pitch, that "the structure of the internet is about to shift in such a way that most information pertaining to food will be found in a .food domain, while most information on cars will likely be found in a .car domain, and so forth." Many commentators have argued that the new top level domains are a scam or sham -- extortion of well-capitalized companies by ICANN -- that will have no significant effect on people's search habits.
on e-flux Could Increase Future Funding for the Arts Through .art 2 weeks ago
This plan has the potential to remove the heartbreak,
uncertainty, and awe of a question that has long plagued
artists and especially the public: "Is it art?"
"I may not know much about art but I know what's on the .art
domain."
"Yeah it's just a urinal but I saw it on .art so what are ya
gonna do?"
The internet eliminated gatekeepers, at least it was starting
to, and now E-Flux wants to be the uber-gatekeeper for "art."
E-Flux completely accepts, and is trying to sell us on, the
hype that the net is about to undergo a paradigm shift based
on these new domains and that people will change their search
habits to, say, only look on .food for something to eat or on
.car for wheels. To win its application it tries to scare us
that the philistines will take over art if we don't rally for
E-flux.
The beauty of art on the net is it's spread around sites like
.fm, .com, even .biz. E-Flux has the potential with this
scheme to be a new Facebook of art (in the sense of "you have
to be on it to play"). It is already Facebook-like in its
maintenance of an exclusive mailing list.
.art under E-Flux also has the worrisome potential to become a
place of knee-jerk left orthodoxy: trolls, wingnuts, and
future urinal-appropriators need not apply.
What are the alternatives? One of the above-mentioned business
entities wins .art, turning it into a tacky, profit-oriented
no-go zone for anyone with a creative bone, and art continues
to thrive in a decentralized way.
on Why is Sanja Ivekovic Plagiarizing From Wikipedia? 2 weeks ago
Am not sure if "plagiarism" is the right word for the unattributed use of open source, community-edited text..in an artwork. It makes for a nice "gotcha" headline, though.
on This Week’s Openings: Everyone’s a Curator! last month
"Portrait of a Generation," accompanied by NetGen icon "the Parked Domain Girl," includes Renee Ricard, Donald Baechler and Raymond Pettibon, demonstrating that a generation is as elastic as a gallery needs it to be.
on “C.R.E.A.M.” at Art Micro-Patronage, Now in Excessive Detail! last month
Your ennui is noted, however, Rhizome staffers were sending emails to artists and writers who mentioned the Armory incident, as recently as the C.R.E.A.M. show. The emails didn't say "We were wrong" but rather, blamed Sara Ludy for the business model and from what I've heard, spooked the email recipients rather badly. The Verge article you mentioned also had a correction added at Cornell's insistence that disavowed her involvement with "taking the work offline so the collector can have it locally." That isn't ancient history. Great if you want to assign blame for "building of general hostility" but it helps to know all the facts.
on Art Fag City at The L Magazine: What New Aesthetic? 2 months ago
Thanks for the link, Paddy. Your essay has just the right tone of being critically unimpressed by Bridle's claims. Hopefully what's "shining through" my notes isn't that Bridle isn't "one of us" (whoever us is) but that he's hodgepodging together critique and puffery into one of those "new and improved" commercial fairytales. (Learn to love the digital world, no matter how incompetent or intrusive it may be.) It's funny that Rob Myers is still complaining about surf clubs after all these years. Those were heterogeneous, improvisational affairs and made no claims to tie it all together the way Bridle's tumblr and lectures do.
on Okay, So Who’s Gonna Run Rhizome? 2 months ago
Another possibility is the New Museum rethinks its
relationship with a vaguely-defined "net art" platform and
either spins it off as a tech booster site or consolidates the
Artbase as a relatively low-cost collection of new media art.
Because one person has been running Rhizome for seven years
it's more of a series of habits than an institution at this
point. What is Rhizome? It's an art collection, but it's never
been clear whether it was curated or something like an
unvetted artist slide registry. It's a magazine-like blog,
which wavers between attempts at criticism and straight-up
press releases, and will never have any real teeth as the
"house publication" of a museum. And it's a place that
organizes lectures, projects such as "7 artists/7
technologists," and the occasional show. Most of this has been
decided in a fairly autocratic manner: instead of a
people-powered, crowd-sourced "rhizomatic" model, Rhizome for
the last several years has been closer to, say, China under
Mao.
Now that the cult of personality is ending, and given the
vagueness of the charter at this point, why keep the thing?
This post asks the wrong question.
on “C.R.E.A.M.” at Art Micro-Patronage, Now in Excessive Detail! 2 months ago
Rhizome's notion of "taking a GIF offline so the collector
can have it locally" isn't a viable business model or a
particularly good way of educating people about this
ill-defined term "net art."
That's what Ben Fino-Radin (who works for Rhizome) and 0-Day
were "fighting" about on Twitter--none of which is not
explained here. Fino-Radin said he couldn't support 0-Day
because their program is rooted in a "diss" -- that is,
criticism of his employer.
The entire controversy is glossed over here as "the Armory
fuss last year."
And apologies to Laura Brothers for the crossfire--very nice work.
on Featured Artist: Out4Pizza 2 weeks ago
Good artists can make lemonade from digital lemons (as Duncan suggests) but I don't think that's the subject of this post.
on Featured Artist: Out4Pizza 2 weeks ago
It does make sense to correctly reproduce the digital art you are advocating (which I note includes GIFs - is that partisanship?). Before these were my concerns they were Dragan Espenschied's concerns--he's been writing eloquently for years on the subject of accurate display. See, e.g., "How to correctly print low resolution screen graphics" http://drx.a-blast.org/~drx/pr...
on Featured Artist: Out4Pizza 2 weeks ago
"this is something the guy's right about" -
Paddy, I used to really like your blog, before incivility and
casual slurs became the norm.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 2 weeks ago
These questions are too speculative. If what you've called GIF partisanship exists or has a purpose, it is to make "web developers" aware of what they're thoughtlessly phasing out before it happens. Suffice it to say, the new AFC meme of automatically equating GIFs with ugly MySpace design isn't what I'd call partisanship.
on The Art Kids Are Not Alright 2 weeks ago
They had YouTubes of Iggy in 1911?
on The Art Kids Are Not Alright 2 weeks ago
Thanks, Kyle. From what I've seen younger artists are generally sussing out what matters from prior generations (e.g., a YouTube of the Stooges' "1969" that I just saw on lolumad's tumblr) and I welcome the extension of art beyond the elegant, hallowed, miserable spaces of ancient plutocrats (which Saltz is professionally forced to cover) into cyberspace and associated makeshift venues. The problem isn't younger artists but it might be the selections of younger artists' work made by seasoned players picking what they already know for an environment that is too expensive for many trial balloons.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 2 weeks ago
Ian, I was kidding. These are... oh, never mind.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
I mentioned tumblr and dump because many users there are making GIFs for the first time, long after they were "discontinued," as opposed to clinging to an old form. Tumblr also gets its share of complaints re: GIF handling. Not sure why I keep getting lumped in with the insidious conspiracy straw man camp. I would say it's underexamined groupthink at the top.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
We're talking about Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook vs tumblr and dump? Sorry if the populist message seems "off" to you; I think I'm on pretty solid ground here, ethically.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Canary--agreed. Also, artists clinging to GIFs like photographers to Polaroid film doesn't adequately explain the GIF mania on tumblr, dump, and other current sites.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
"Tying Google's tech choices re: their doodles to policies against GIFs on their other sites (like Blogger) is naive (and, frankly, stupid)." If we don't know why Google blocks GIFs in one arm of its company and pushes other animation methods in another (and we don't), why is it automatically naive to consider connections between the two? More is at stake here than the type of "film" we use; it is completely fair to consider an across-the-board GIF phase-out in the larger context of the Web becoming a more controlled and controllable place (see my comment to Duncan below). "They don't want to be MySpace" is also pure speculation.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Duncan, this is great. It's not an apples and oranges debate though, or people wouldn't be yelling so much. Google doesn't mean to replace GIFs with another filetype people can share and take apart and play with. On its flagship search page it is clearly presenting its vision of a "one way web" crafted by its owners where the terms of your interaction are "click here" and "save your results." To consider the political dimension isn't conspiracy theory or empty railing against the man, it's a question of what kind of internet (and therefore, life) we want to have.
a comment by sstage on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
“3 things I think:
1.] Imho the vigorous discussion that Tom Moody has often sparked in the net art scene is vital and great - proof that the scene is filled with passion and has lots of peoples potentials, ideas, and dreams in it. Conflict prevents stagnation.
2.] In defense of Tom's critique of the google animation: I showed this article to a heavy duty web programmer friend of mine and he told me that while not necessarily agreeing with all the content, he really appreciated the article because it brought up interesting points that he had not considered. Tom's criticism often examines things in different lights than the regular.
3.] Your attack on Tom Moody's contributions to net art is pretty shitty - I can personally say that he has greatly contributed to my curiosity and love for it.”
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
If an obsession is five posts and a couple of GIFs over the
span of about a month, then yes, I'm obsessed. Maybe not as
obsessed as you are with me, though.
You may have noticed I update my blog posts as I learn new
information.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Dragan, Alex Carlill just called you ignorant.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
"...Biblical..." (hat tip j1p2m3)
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Your critique of my critique boils down to one point--it was
easy for you to make a CSS sprite animation. Congratulations
on ballooning this up to Biblical proportions through
constant, loud repetition about my "inaccuracy." I said that
Google's Martha Graham animation required coding skills.
Duncan Alexander, above, says, "Google likes to show off what
their programmers can do with simple code." If anyone can do
it, then it's not showing off.
As for all Google's JavaScript and CSS coding instructions to
animate the Martha Graham dance being 2 kilobytes, where is
your proof of this?
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Sorry, just noticed that Alex says he has enumerated the "inaccuracies" in my post on his Twitter page. I don't follow him (should I?) so, yes, by all means post them here so they can be read/evaluated/responded to by those looking at this thread. You might also respond to Dragan Espenschied and Michael Manning who have made some good points here.
Update: Never mind, see above.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Dragan, thanks, you are brave to come on here and risk
getting slimed.
Alex--chill. You have seven comments on this thread all saying
pretty much the same thing. As I glanced through them, I kept
thinking you were going to correct my "inaccuracies," and then
you didn't.
As for "casual fabrication" or "intellectual dishonesty," as
noted above, the "open source" crack was in reply to Tim
Whidden, not Tumult Hype. He suggested that "anyone" could
make an animation for the "open" HTML5 standard using current
authoring tools, and linked to Tumult Hype as an example. I
was pointing out that you can only buy it in the Apple App
Store, hardly the nerve center of distributed authoring.
As for my being curt to Will, you must have missed the earlier
threads where he repeatedly got up in my face, as you're doing
now. After a fair bit of that, I decided to try not conversing
with him directly. (It's not working very well.)
OK, time to return to my lair and think up new ways to poison
"the net art scene."
a comment by Michael Manning on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
“I downloaded HYPE the HTML5 animator a week or so back to try it out, it sucks. It is pretty much just a bad and less capable version of flash (I'm sure things will get better as HTML5 gets older but HYPE isn't replacing my GIF practice that is certain, especially with such a shitty loop function).
For all intents and purposes no one has posited a better solution to light weight animation online yet (at least in my mind, I know Tom would agree). HTML5 has a chance but it and its champions have different priorities in mind aside from giving us a better alternative to the GIF, and as interpret it, this is Tom's beef. Not just that the technologies are changing but that the web "powers that be" are ostracizing the GIF, (for whatever reason, most likely because they think it is irrelevant, ugly and unnecessary) and they have failed to provide a better alternative in the wake of their shunning GIFs (most likely because they are too out of touch to recognize the groups of people online who still love them). HTML5 isn't focused on giving us a new cool version of GIFs it's primary goal is to replace the need for things like Flash, and more easily display video and long-form animation.
I however tend to agree with Duncan that the Google case is more likely a chance for them to show off their coding skills than anything else, but the overall disdain for the GIF by large web companies can be seen all over the web.
I'm open to alternatives, I'm happy to embrace a new, better format, but as of yet you simply can't point me to a better light weight animation than the GIF, that I can make easily in free open source software (not that open source matters to me personally, but I know it does to others) or hey, even online ------> http://www.online-image-editor...”
a comment by Dragan Espenschied on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
“Attempting to make something useful from this:
As far as I understand, Tom criticized the Googles for doing lots of complicated stuff in order to show this dance animation instead of putting the same effort into creating a simple GIF. He didn't criticize them for wasting bandwidth or other "technical" reasons, this came later in exploring their motives and thinking about other new (and more complex) ways moving images can be transferred online today and trying to make sense of them.
Tim's reply, that GIFs are regarded as simple and the mere mortals can create GIFs only because there is software that allows them to do so, is of course true -- however the software is there in bucketloads, it doesn't only theoretically exist in the future :) GIFs are files that are definitely easier to understand and handle than Google's scripting. If the animation would be a GIF, one could for example take the animation and post it to some forum or whatever, change the colors, play it backwards, etc. There is effectively not so much difference between the source material and the finished version to create a serious obstacle to work with it. So, a GIF would have been, also to my understanding, adequate to the spirit of the web. On the other hand, there is no tool for re-creating the source material from Google's animation "compiled" to Javascript. Of course it can be done, there is no standard way of doing so though. And it wouldn't make sense to create a tool that would do it because it is unlikely that Google or anybody else will use this exact technique, producing similar output, again.
The quite confrontational remarks that Tom doesn't know enough about the web and its technology are probably exactly the core of he issue. Tom's general question *is* why the hell one should have to know so much arbitrary stuff about the web to understand how a conceptually primitive animation is made. Does it mean only developers, who know every in and out of the latest tech, Google's organization and internally used tools, are allowed to interpret this piece of online art? These questions have nothing to do with Tom's age, his music or how often he checks his Twitter. The user facing web used to be simple yet powerful, it is made more complex and diffiult to understand, especially in an area where it seems completely arbitrary; what is the driving force behind this, how does it affect artistic expression and evaluation?
In general I think Tom's critique of the animation is exactly this: a critique, and interpretation of an artwork. And the seemingly superfluous complexity of it is part of the interpretation. Based on Google's artistic output to the world, he made an attempt to understand what are Google's motives, how they see their role and the role of their users.
And while Tom is pinned down on technical inaccuracy, nobody else seems bold enough to make definite technical counter claims. Maybe because there is so much potential for getting stuff wrong?
Technically, there is in many cases a right way to do something to achieve a verifiable goal. There are certain tricks to make web pages load faster, animations look smoother, etc. So let's assume that Google managed to save some bytes by delivering the animation in the means they decided to and therefore saved some money.
Culturally, however, there is not one right way to do stuff. Different choices, also in trechnology, express different things.
Interestingly, while animator, coreographer and dancer are credited for the dance animation, the "developer" is not, see http://www.google.com/logos/ (as long as it is listed under this URI). That probably means that somebody assumed that technology can be transparently applied here and "just" has to deliver the animation in the most effective way or something. As it turns out, this is not the case. So, if Google are not consciously widening the gap between professionals and users, they are at least naive.
I love you all by the way!”
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Tim Whidden links to Tumult Hype (available in the App
Store) and says the program makes it possible for "anyone" to
work with HTML5. HTML5 is supposedly an open standard. (You're
welcome, since you couldn't find it on the thread.)
And yes, I knew about the Store and GPL.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Paddy, Will designed the web page for you that has links to many of my (and others') writings on the subject of "why artists use GIFs": http://www.artfagcity.com/gif/...
He knows my answers to his questions, he is being needlessly confrontational here.
As I said in one of the posts linked to on that page: "Have said before that I'm not married to the animated GIF for 'artistic expression' on the web. If at some point only of 40% of browsers, mobile devices, etc read them then it will be time to use something else."
Michael Manning is correct that we use GIFs because they're still the best for what they do--quick easily loaded animations that read on the most browsers. He's also right that the big companies are phasing them out without offering a better alternative. Some of us like the "GIF aesthetic" of reduced frame rates, compression, etc, but that's mainly a stylistic choice.
In light of "cinemagraphs" Reddit has a discussion on "successors to the animated GIF": http://www.reddit.com/r/AskRed... (hat tip Andrej)
That thread reiterates some of what has been said here but doesn't mention CSS.
I wish in these shouting matches we could agree on some basic post-GIF nomenclature. I originally referred to Google's Martha Graham animation as "html5 or canvas." Will called it "CSS sprites and JavaScript to animate them"; then Tim Whidden went back to calling it HTML5. According to Wikipedia "A common misconception is that HTML5 can provide animation within web pages, which is untrue. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. Animation is also possible using JavaScript and HTML."
I assume that Google's animation was a combination of CSS and JavaScript--that isn't automatically HTML5. Either way, our current GIF alternative seems to boil down to, as Michael Manning says about Tumult Hype, a "bad and less capable version of Flash."
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
It is certainly gibberish if you quote an incomplete sentence.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Outside of that, a more general question, which you're free to answer here or on your blog or not at all: why does YouTube matter to artists? Does it matter? Is this YouTube partisanship a social project, or is it relevant to the working methods of net artists today? Specifically, I'm looking for an answer that isn't equally applicable to another format.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
As for why Google chose HTML5 over GIFs, Tim Whidden says he doesn't know why and I don't either. I don't know why Blogger disables animated GIFs or why Facebook doesn't allow them.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
You definitely haven't been following this--that has been clearly established over several long comment threads full of sound and fury. Why did Paddy exhibit this GIF partisanship in curating a show called Graphics Interchange Format, or declare 2010 the "year of the animated GIF"? Maybe you should ask her.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Re: "It turns out I was right" - I didn't say anything about the Martha Graham animation's efficiency in my original post. You made that pronouncement without doing any fact checking and I checked.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
My "interpretation of Google's motives" isn't based on one
animation, gang. We've been talking for a few months about the
hurdles Google put up to searching for animated GIFs on Google
Images, and the Google exec's comment about "not remembering
the last time he saw an animated GIF." Facebook, Apple, even
Microsoft are all making it clear that GIFs will be replaced
with something more friendly to their various design/sales
schemes (Windows no longer allows you to browse through moving
GIFs in its photo-browser--you have to open them individually
in a web browser). Pointing out the obvious isn't
conspiracy-mongering.
Nor is asking why we need "next level" animation tools when
they aren't actually as efficient as the one we have.
But Tim is right, you should only listen to people who make
their living as programmers and web designers--they have done
such a great job managing the Net so far.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
Let's add that the "open source" Tumult Hype editor plugged above only works on Apple devices and has to be purchased through the dreaded App Store.
on Massive Links: What Can Curators Tells Us About Not Shitting Ourselves All Day | Jim Carrey’s Nuts Are A-Okay | Some GIFs Are Small 3 weeks ago
My post was a response to a statement by an AFC commenter: "Google's decision to use CSS sprites and JavaScript to animate them was the most bandwidth-efficient way to create a cross-browser animation." Admitting that I am not a developer, I made a GIF that was smaller than Google's sprite sheet (and therefore more "bandwidth efficient") without losing any of the image. This seems to have upset someone.
on Massive Links: Lars Von Trier ... | Google Hates GIFs | Calling All Artists last month
Re: "Google's decision to use CSS sprites and JavaScript to animate them was the most bandwidth-efficient way to create a cross-browser animation"
Where is the proof of this? The CSS sprite sheet is 312 KB - that's big. The reason CSS sprites are "efficient" is they require less http requests to a server but a GIF also only loads once.
on Tim Griffin’s Second Act | The New York Observer last month
"After an interview, Mr. Griffin and The Observer walked in the rain to his new employer at 512 W. 19th Street, in the heart of the Chelsea art gallery district..."
Actually the "heart" would be around 22nd or 23rd Streets.
on Massive Links: Lars Von Trier ... | Google Hates GIFs | Calling All Artists last month
Paddy, there's an effort to phase out Flash and move to
other codecs that are seen as more open but Flash is still
ubiquitous. H.264 is the current "hot" spec but it's not
really open source (as GIFs are). Google has changed its mind
a couple of times about the YouTube standard. (See notes from
Wikipedia below.)
I guess I should be clearer and say "Flash, H.264, or whatever
file format runs or has run in YouTube" is the "preferred"
animation file choice of art, along with DVD (mpeg2) and
Apple's .mov format. Use of scripts or CSS or whatever to
animate frames in the browser is an even less common method of
web animation, but it's one Google would obviously like to see
in greater use. A handful of upstarts have been using GIFs--by
all means let's make a sarcastic dig at them.
From Wikipedia on H264 (supposedly Flash's successor-to-be): "Controversies surrounding the H.264 video compression standard stem primarily from its use within the HTML5 Internet standard. HTML5 adds two new tags to the HTML standard: < video > and < audio > for direct embedding of video and audio content to a web page. HTML5 is being developed by the HTML5 working group as an open standard to be adopted by all web browser developers. In 2009, the HTML5 working group was split between supporters of Ogg Theora, a free video format that its developers believe is unencumbered by patents, and H.264 which contains patented technology. As late as July 2009, Google and Apple were said to support H.264, while Mozilla and Opera support Ogg Theora. However, in January of 2011, Google announced that they were pulling support for H.264 from their Chrome browser and supporting both Theora and WebM."
on Massive Links: Lars Von Trier ... | Google Hates GIFs | Calling All Artists last month
The "preferred file formats of art" are jpeg and Adobe
Flash.
Duncan, the Martha Graham drawings are ugly because of the
sepia fake ink wash and middlebrow idea of modern dance. The
anti-aliasing is the final layer of unnecessary
pseudo-refinement.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 2 months ago
The crux of the argument here is Will Brand's statement "Firstly, the 'interchange' bit is absolutely the key word, insofar as these acronyms mean anything at all." I don't agree that it's key, absolutely or otherwise. It's an element of the appeal of GIFs but not the main one. In a subsequent thread Brand seems to be attempting to back away from his own words by saying our positions are the same and I don't know what we are arguing about. That is, to put it politely, rubbish.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 2 months ago
I didn't say you wouldn't listen to it, I said you hadn't listened to what Duncan, MTAA, and other artists were saying about the show.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 2 months ago
"I see your concern - you feel that an essentially visual
and tribal
movement has been placed under the shadow of a foreign,
conceptual rule.
MTAA are image-makers only incidentally, where your GIF tribe
is about
visual effect first and foremost. I get it."
That is not what I wrote.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 2 months ago
"I see your concern - you feel that an essentially visual
and tribal
movement has been placed under the shadow of a foreign,
conceptual rule.
MTAA are image-makers only incidentally, where your GIF tribe
is about
visual effect first and foremost. I get it."
Again - that is not what I wrote.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
Afterthought:
Will Brand does get angry and personal in this thread and the previous one ("If I wanted to suck wizard cocks for a living I'd be under a magical bridge of some sort," from the previous thread--that's just bizarre). I was a little surprised that Paddy Johnson relaxed her front page standards to allow this extended dig. I can take a joke (old man surfing in bathrobe, ha ha) but let's correct some stuff in the headline and lead paragraph:
--"Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand" - Well, no, I don't and that "publicly" has a bit of a dominance ring to it.
--"Tom Moody is pretty sure we’re fighting over something, but he can’t quite put his finger on it" - Implies I'm thickheaded, thanks.
--"We got in a little tiff" - I found it ugly, what with the wizard cocks and all.
--"I think it’s a decent read" - Not really, it was so unpleasant some people told me they didn't want to leave comments. This thread is also pretty bad.
--"he doesn’t allow comments on his blog" - Not true, my email is on my FAQ page and I often publish people's comments and complaints. Paddy once said that people who brought this up had very little to say, since everyone has a right to configure their site in the way that best suits them. I was surprised and disappointed to read this in AFC.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
When Paddy said "sites like Dump" a while back and Ryder said "what other sites are like Dump?" it should have been obvious that building historical precedents for it was going to be a hollow exercise. (I'm mentioning this since Will is very big on the importance of these historic timelines.)
I'm not the forerunner of dump and neither is MTAA's faux-participatory art--it took a particular kind of software/design/community/filetype to make this happen and it never did before in history.
This has been lost in the ridiculous discussion of "where the art happens" and remixing. It will always come back to MTAA as long as we're talking about what happened in 1997 but MTAA could never have created dump. If they could have, they would have. I would have said more on this but I've been busy trying to separate my own work from their non-precedent in the face of Will's angry harangues.
The piece in the show, "Gold Machine Cosmos" has many dump contributors that added little bits and pieces, including Mirrrroring and robocide.* Frankhats' tiled version was probably the definitive take but I was thinking of a way to make it more portable. Some of this history was linked to/referenced on my blog.
*originally I said LAVAR_LAMAR rather then robocide but I'm pretty sure L_L wasn't involved.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
^at least I have.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
"Active objects" - could be a puppet show. "[GIFs online] occur less like narratives or films and more like...like...like...ummmm...GIFs" is positively tautological.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
Thanks, Sally. Re: "agreeing on the battlefield":
Paddy Johnson's statement in the press release "Like any
product of the Internet, sampling and remixing is a dominant
method of working with GIFs and a theme in the show" has been
enlarged by Will Brand, who worked on the website, to say that
"the main appeal of a GIF is that it's so easily
interchanged." We have been arguing about that change in
direction of the show's rhetoric.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
"You're not some kind of guru that I need to listen to" is another ad hominem argument. Since you asked.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
"Has everybody else learned not to indulge you already?" is an ad hominem argument. (You asked for examples.)
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
I agree with all the commenters and "likers" who think this discussion is silly but not because "hey we're all artists together in the same new media pod." There are valid differences we are working out here, Will's ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. if you don't think GIF doctrine is important, read other blogs.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
OK, I've had my morning coffee and here's a "decent" reply to Will:
"Tom seems to believe that my thoughts on 'the preference for GIF as a medium' refer to a reference for GIFs by viewers rather than a preference by artists." Wrong, Will--I knew you were presuming to speak for the artists' reasons for making GIFs. You still are--you think that remixing is the main appeal of GIFs to artists. As for "your remix culture," you do know I started working in this vein 7 years before dump, right?
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
To paraphrase Keith Olbermann, "you talk of decency, sir, below a picture of a smug, middle-aged man in his bathrobe?"
I see Sally is making her usual "pox on all their houses" contribution.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
Speaking of mountains and molehills, where does a post titled "Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand" fit in that spectrum? Also, who am I arguing with here? I didn't say the show was bad, I said Will is wrong about GIFs. He still is--we don't agree. "Lodged complaints" is a bit strong.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
If you agree that "The Art Happens Here" graphic has dated badly and probably shouldn't be used to symbolize the rather more sophisticated things people are doing with GIFs these days (and no, we're not talking about cinemagraphs), then we definitely do agree and the title of this post is actually true. That *was* what we were arguing about--anyone can read the earlier thread and see that's the issue I raised.
on Tom Moody Publicly Agrees With Will Brand 2 months ago
As long as we're helpfully omitting information, here's a reminder of what we're disagreeing about. A vector graphic from 1997 (later converted into a GIF) says "the art happens here" and points to a cartoon lightning bolt (the only moving element) somewhere in the network space between 2 computers. This image was used as a defining graphic for a show of artists currently working with animated GIFs, even though its creators aren't particularly interested in GIFs, and think that talking about the network as the locus for art is more interesting than any final product that springs from that location. You insist it's a great image for the show and that "interchange" is the most important story here. You can find examples of where I've remixed GIFs and talked up the interchange aspect but it is of secondary importance. If you've changed your mind about that (and agree that's the wrong image to represent the show) then you are, in fact, publicly agreeing with me.
The photo of the middle aged man in the bathrobe--is that your Dad?--was funnier when it was paired with flaming text that said "you are curated" (by SeacrestCheadle on dump).
on Massive Links! New Media and NYTimes Trends Edition 2 months ago
An earlier, funnier reference to the parked domain girl was when Guthrie Lonergan spotted her on the Brown college website ( http://www.tommoody.us/archive... )
She was declared "most infamous" in 2008: http://yousuckatwebsites.com/w...
In view of all that, I didn't understand John Michael Boling putting the crappy painted version on the Rhizome.org front page in 2010 ( http://rhizome.org/editorial/2... ) or why we're still talking about it.
on Massive Links! New Media and NYTimes Trends Edition 2 months ago
The "parked domain girl" was already an iconic bad Net image before she was painted (badly). I've never understood the need for this to be a painting subject. (Maybe if she was painted well...)
Thanks for the shout on the McHugh bio.
on Chris Marker at Peter Blum 2 months ago
This is the filmmaker who made La Jetee. A legend, yadda
yadda, but readers might want to know how the iconic still
photography in that and other earlier works compare to what
he's doing now. Does his careful style of framing and eye for
vernacular street scenes make the jump from
"quasi-documentary" to "urban flaneur" modes of working? How
much of the magic of his photos lay in chemical darkroom
technology? That sort of thing.
From his Wikipedia bio I see he was a digital pioneer, and
made an "art" CD-ROM in the '90s. Another avenue to explore in
writing about him is how such (now dated) media have informed
current so-called (and likely-soon-to-be-dated) image
aggregators such as Tumblr, and where he fits in the spectrum.
Reviewing cliched writing in the press release is usually kind
of a low blow. You are privileged to be in New York seeing the
actual work--others have to travel here.
on Talking With Images: Is Dump.fm the New 4Chan? 2 months ago
My link to Encyclopedia Dramatica's explanation of "direct action elements" and "invasion elements" is dead as of this month. ED self-sanitized and is now called "Oh Internet."
on Talking With Images: Is Dump.fm the New 4Chan? 2 months ago
Ryder's glitter text died but it said "What are you Groys talking about?"
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
trackback, 4-7-11, http://www.tommoody.us/archive... : "The above-linked thread grew progressively nutty. If you have the stamina to read it, please note the number of times my arguments are paraphrased, each time with increasing levels of speculation, paranoia, accusations of disloyalty and ingratitude, and plain old ad hominem abuse. The case for a difficult artist bucking the show for reasons of ego (as opposed to simple disagreement on principles) is vastly amplified."
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
Tim, Mike, thanks for making me possible!
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
Tim and I clearly don't agree, and Will is saying, "no, you not only agree, you're famous buds and will go down in the sinking GIF ship together!!"
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
"The relationships between the images (and how those relationships evolve) is usually more interesting than any of the individual images"
Riffs are great but there are also strong (or in Groys terms, universally weak) images that get the process going. Paddy mostly didn't pick works in process for the show, she picked finished statements that the artists worked hard on and thought about. OptiDisc has been remixed many times but those aren't what she picked. Embarrassing, but someone made a choice.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
This isn't Johns being represented by Pop, this is Rosenquist being represented by Kosuth. Duncan Alexander's point - "there isn't a cohesive 'art hack' online culture any more, or it's been overshadowed by the much more cohesive image-making culture" - is a good reason why MTAA's image isn't a good symbol for the show. Theirs is an illustration of an idea, "code as art," or "network as art," and it belongs to a self-conscious, semantic, Charles Harrison/Victor Burgin/Art & Language school within new media, which no one else in the show is really doing. Bewersdorf is responding to them in one GIF--is it typical of his work? I'd say not. Even MTAA has cast doubt on whether their file is a good symbol for the stand-alone GIF-making others are doing. By all means don't listen to the artists in the show, though.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
"and the position of the GIF is shaky enough that you're going to be remembered together or not at all"
That would be harsh even for a negative review of the show. It's awkward enough being reduced to a file format (a necessary fiction most artists would accept for the sake of context) without being told your art career will sink or swim depending on how it fares.
To underscore a point that was made late in the discussion: Some artists in the show use code in art but only one uses code as art. "Tribes" is the wrong word--this isn't anthropology--but these are some pretty strong camps. The discussion is much larger than flavors of GIF use.
Paddy, thanks for listening and responding.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
Thanks, hopefully Will Brand will read this and rethink his remarks above.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
See comment below.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
I don't like this kind of arguing. The comment I made below ("Will and I have a strong disagreement that 'interchange' is the most important reason someone would make a GIF") is really the crux of the argument to me.
a comment by Duncan Alexander on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
“Minor point: Some people really dig the compression:
http://dump.fm/images/20110219...
You should see what modern browsers do to screen-door type
compression when GIFs are resized with antialiasing. When used
correctly, it leaves the audience begging for moire.
Bad puns aside, if we ignore the politics for a second, I'd like to argue that this show is a great "sampler" (not to be demeaning) of how things have been branching online since the whole GIF as art thing took off in the 90s. It's historical, it shows what people remember from when and what we're all up to today. Paddy has done a great job.
That said, I think that Tom is right in that there isn't a cohesive "art hack" online culture any more, or that it's been overshadowed by the much more cohesive image-making culture. This is natural; it's a lot easier to plunk down in front of Photoshop (or the GIMP - cheaper!) than to learn HTML, CSS, Java, Javascript, JQuery, Flash, PHP, Processing, Ajax, etc.
When the web was younger, the demographics leaned more nerdy because of the initial hurdle of computer access/knowledge/internet access. Now, not so much. Because it's easy for your average Joe to make an image, a demand for image hosting sites popped up with the rise of niche forums in the late 90s and early 2000s. This led to sites like Tumblr being developed; whereas no large social sites appeared for image/art/hack culture.
My guess is this is because coding is a liability; when you let your users screw around with the fabric of your chunk of Internet, you run the risk of someone damaging the site, damaging other people's computers, and getting you into a lot of trouble. Images are much easier to control as they are passive files by nature. Just ask Ryder or Scott how many times I and the other dump mods have destroyed rooms by playing around with recursive iframes or chat z-indexes... I don't think it's necessarily a culture thing that has kept the coders and hackers separate in net art, I think it's that there's nowhere to meet up and do what they do best.”
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
And congratulations to m.river not only for dominating the show but for kicking my ass in the "like" button war.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
I don't know what Will's intentions are, Paddy, I am talking about his language and word choices. He puts me in a defensive position when he says I must "prove convincingly" that MTAA and I occupy different parts of the art map. That was demonstrated pretty well, and it's all a matter of public record, during the arguments over surf clubs three years ago, and four years before that in the "art happens here" discussion.
Will and I have a strong disagreement that "interchange" is the most important reason someone would make a GIF. My guess is that the reason people put "OptiDisc" on their websites isn't because they thought, "oh this is something I can remix" but rather because it appealed on some more fundamental level. I'm interested in what that fundamental level is--probably a combination of formal properties, psychological investigation, critique, humor--and "remixability" comes somewhere further down the list. Will uses strong language to make his point (that I am wrong about my own reasons for making work) and I'm replying in kind.
Please don't get upset, I appreciate having the forum to hash this out and appreciate having a voice in the show.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
It's pretty lackluster--"available," wow--and it follows sentences that suggest that GIFs are "eclipsed," un-modern, and with lingering issues of patent "tyranny." (Why bring that up now? The patent lapsed 7 years ago, 8 in the US.) Will disputes almost everything I say in my comments here, with hints there is even more he has to argue with. His phrasing--"your remix culture," "circlejerk shows," "your GIF tribe"--goes beyond dispassionate into active disgust with the people he is writing about.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
Right, but in the PDF and word doc the GIFs don't move. Much of the excitement of your post is lost, and the press release seems tacked on to the MTAA narrative and Will's dispassionate view of GIF makers as some weird throwback tribe. I would like to see you integrate your story into the website!
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
Paddy's post announcing the show ( http://www.artfagcity.com/2011... ) does a good job of communicating the spirit of the event. There are multiple images that can be read at a glance, and the writing is warm and enthusiastic.
Will's phrase from this thread -"GIF support is integrated into every layout engine worth considering" - gets at the urgency of the medium. Contrast that with phrases from the website: "Today the format has been eclipsed by the near-universal support for Flash and PNG," or the idea that GIFs thrived "before the general turn to modernist web design and free professional CMSes like Wordpress." Not such a strong case.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
More biting the hand and amusing the boys...
The Simple Net Art Diagram isn't just used as the main image for the website, it is shown next to the words "Graphics Interchange Format" in the signage for the physical exhibition. The word "interchange" is reinforced by nearby images of "network art" and circulation, implying that (i) "interchange" is the key word in the GIF acronym and (ii) the Simple Net Art Diagram is first and foremost a GIF, rather than a piece of '90s clip art used to illustrate a utopian concept of how art would operate on the Net. It's certainly true that remixing is an attribute of 2.0 or social media art but it mostly just happens, it doesn't announce itself as a new principle complete with its own diagram.
Simple Net Art diagram imagines a world of programmer artists practicing the art of the hack. The more interesting story is how the GIF slipped out of the hands of programmers and became a popular medium, reducing artists to mostly invisible fellow remixers. Contrary to the implications of the GIF Story told on the exhibition website, GIFs have been completely open source worldwide since 2004 and during that time their use has grown, despite the indifference of the major software and social media providers. Sites like YTMND, 4Chan, and various "meme" purveyors contributed to this explosion of GIF usage, which even the mainstream media has noted in the last year.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
The distinction I'm making is between an art that is predominantly text and critique vs an unabashedly visual style. Much of late '90s '"net.art" was visually starved, partly of necessity (low bandwidth and puny CPUs) but partly because it was made by academic-based conceptualists who favored bare bones documentation as art. I'm happy you didn't include more of that--it's really another show ("How Art on the Net Got More Interesting to Look At, 1997- 2011").
Even GIFs in the '90s were mostly silly flying mailboxes. Charming, but so much has been done with this filetype since then.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
^is that net.art?
Paddy, it's true I was interested in how that GIF made its way around the web but I was collecting screen shots of the target patterns and presenting them as a kind of mega-painting. The Web Art 1.0 style would be a list of IP addresses followed by a long string of dots.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
With all due respect to Paddy and my esteemed online
colleagues:
I dislike that simple net art diagram and all the pretentious
assumptions it stands for ("art is like, on the net, and
happens in the space between computers, like wow") and wish it
was not on the front page of the GIF show website. GIFs happen
on the screen where they are made and the screens where they
are shown, not in some vague in-between place. It's true that
GIFs can be collaborative and take elements from various
locations on the web but they are not an "art of the network."
That is MTAA's position but it is an old, Web Art 1.0 position
(art solely as critique of invisible hegemonic structures) and
doesn't speak for at least one artist in the GIF show. I also
dislike Kevin Bewersdorf's hippie zen new age "art circulating
through our chakras" GIF--that is no better as an alternative.
DH Lawrence might have liked the idea of the solar plexus as
the seat of creation but I'll take the mind, thanks. I made my
own "art happens here" GIF seven years ago and don't feel like
posting it again. I basically don't care "where the art
happens."
on Forget in Ten Parts, Part 7: The Aesthetics of Impermanence 3 months ago
Agreed that socializing and being cool carries weight, but only in the short term. (As Dan Colen recently found out, I think.)
on Forget in Ten Parts, Part 7: The Aesthetics of Impermanence 3 months ago
The reconstituted interview has a little clearer frame here: http://www.tommoody.us/archive...
The intro reads: "GF, a philosophy student, interviews FP, a visual artist with an MFA in studio art who shows in top museums around the globe. In his studies GF has come to think that contemporary philosophy, whether of the British analytical or continental post-structural model, is specious nonsense, so he seeks out an artist who famously scoffs at his discipline as it is currently practiced, to get her thoughts:"
I added Ayn Rand to Timothy Leary as an example of a thinker operating outside the academy who acquired a significant following. (fixed spelling of "Ayn")
on Forget in Ten Parts, Part 7: The Aesthetics of Impermanence 3 months ago
Why should her critique of the art field be presumed more valid than an artist's critique of hers? If you had suggested that her quest for philosophy accreditation was the result of ego-driven striving, she would probably be upset. But it's fine for her to say that about artists.
on Forget in Ten Parts, Part 7: The Aesthetics of Impermanence 3 months ago
GF: So you don’t think philosophy has a defining feature?
FP: If there is a defining feature, it’s a secondary one, which is strange. As open as philosophy has become, it’s still very much constrained by one very conservative characteristic. That thinking is only thinking insofar as it is accepted into the academic system, or at least expressly wants to be part of that system. By this I mean it’s philosophy if it’s in a peer-reviewed journal, or it’s philosophy because a journal is where it belongs. It’s philosophy if it’s validated or presented as such.
GF: So if I just do something that I consider philosophy out in the street, it’s not philosophy? It wouldn’t be identifiable. I mean, it wouldn’t be a book or something, maybe a rant through a bullhorn.
FP: Your bullhorn rant would be philosophy since you consider it such.
GF: Why, because I say so?
FP: Sure. You’re the one validating it.
GF: Like Timothy Leary or whatever. So thinking that’s self-aware is philosophy, even if I’m the only one who ever knows about it.
FP: More or less. If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?
GF: I always thought it would. I never understood that one.
FP: Most times thinkers are looking outside of themselves for validation of their ideas, where in fact, should they have the strength to recognize it, their work is work insofar as they deem it so. It just gets more complicated when other things come into play, like wanting to be recognized by an acceptable audience or to get tenure or whatever. A lot of it is ego driven.
on Introducing The Graphics Interchange Format Exhibition Website 3 months ago
This show needs to be in New York. It would upset Man Bartlett, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
on Meeting JstChillin IRL: Turns Out It’s Actually Fat 3 months ago
Will, you are so mean. Just chill, d00d.
on just chillin – not really at tom moody 3 months ago
This gets back to the discussion we had a few years ago about the importance of bracketing for surf club type posts: http://www.artfagcity.com/2007...
"Spirit" is a highly loaded term to apply to yourself. I wouldn't go there. "Moody," however...
The best name for a future blog is going to be Will Brand.
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
I have been continuing to update my "broken links to Rhizome" list in the post Paddy links to above. Nick fixed a few things by creating an archive page, but I still have a slew of "front page" and "thread" links that don't redirect to their new homes.
Much of the content reblogged from my blog in the '05-'07 period gave me attribution in the form of a hyperlink. Those seem to have been stripped from the new, tagged "reblog archives" so it appears that Lauren Cornell or Marisa Olson did the artwork or writing. Am not the only one affected by this--many no longer have credit for their work.
Mattf has got me thinking about a book. It's just vaporware or a thought experiment at this stage but covers a multitude of ills. It's called The Lost Years: Art on the Internet Between the Dot Com Crash and the Rise of Facebook.
on RISD’s President John Maeda Responds to No-Confidence Vote 4 months ago
Am looking at the "President's Page" and having a good laugh at the design. Maeda can't fit an organizational chart on a webpage without mashing it down to illegible size ( https://sites.google.com/a/ris... ) and note how badly compressed the arty "visualization" of the school population is: https://sites.google.com/a/ris...
The man needs to take some courses at his own school!
on Blogger Announces ArtKrush Interview to be Killin’ 4 months ago
The Artkrush interview link no longer works - I found it
again at http://artkrush.com/33189.html
Probably better save this interview - somehow I get the
feeling it won't be long for the web.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
Hi, Sara,
Lack of curiosity is a two way street, I think. Only a few
years ago Paul Slocum was running And/Or Gallery in Dallas and
Aron Namenwirth was running artMovingProjects in Brooklyn. I
was involved with both galleries as an artist and there was a
fair amount of discussion on my blog, Paddy Johnson's blog,
and at Rhizome about the exhibition and, yes, sale of the art
by these and other spaces. You may not have been aware of the
history but Lauren Cornell certainly is. An email to any of
these parties asking "how did you folks do it?" would
certainly have been answered.
Best, Tom
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
Sara, why work in the GIF format at all, since one of its main properties is ease of transmission? There's always a possibility your work will leak back online and be circulated by the unelect. Perhaps you're adding some DRM code that disables the GIF for all but the collector, as well?
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
Talked to a couple of my net artiste friends about "taking the work offline so the collector can have it locally." The drift seems to be, yeah, it sucks, maybe the collectors will have the good sense to post the GIF and put it back in circulation, and ultimately we don't care how non-open-source Cornell has to be to get people to buy GIFs--it's important for new media type art to be making inroads in the gallery world. So there you have it.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
OK, it's your site, you win.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
Hrag, you should listen to people's criticism and not just try to be right all the time. Lindsay has some valid points.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
This gets back to a subject Paddy and I have been discussing--the disappearance of links from institutional websites (including Rhizome) that would make it possible to learn about the history.
Rhizome co-sponsored a show called "The GIF Show," at a space in San Francisco, in April 2006. The link for the show is dead ( http://www.rhizome.org/events/... ) but a reblog post discussing it is still active ( http://rhizome.org/editorial/2... ).
Here is a Rhizome post discussing a 2008 show in Brooklyn where GIFs were sold: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2... ("they were all commissioned on three days' notice ... and are being sold in unlimited editions [accompanied by a personalized note from the artist] for $20"). Probably a bit lower price than what Cornell is asking!
Some artists convert GIFs to DVD and sell the DVDs as editioned works. Others sell the software on dedicated hard drives. The norm is what works best for the display of the piece, although the bigger norm, I would argue, is staying true to the nature and spirit of the work.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
When you say "there were so many questions swirling in my head about how you can buy pixel-based art" this suggests not having had much previous thought or knowledge about the subject. My apologies if I'm reading too much into that. In any event, the question I asked above, about what it means to "take a piece offline," deserves further consideration and inquiry, I think.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
She gave two examples so the post should be called "how do you sell software as art?" or something like that. You say there is no norm for selling animated GIFs. How do you know if you just learned about this?
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
Right but your post is titled how do you sell an animated
GIF? And she only gives one example. You're continuing to
suggest this is without precedent and that isn't true.
In any case, it might be good to have some clarification of
what Cornell means by "taking it offline so the collector can
have it locally." Does that mean save a copy to a thumb drive
and sell the drive and GIF (with the artist's authentication)
while allowing the work to circulate online? Or does it mean
removing it from public circulation to "lock up the rights"
for a single (or edition) owner? The latter is kind of the
antithesis of both an open source ethic and the democratic
appeal of GIFs.
on How Do You Sell an Animated GIF? 4 months ago
My first gif sale was 5 years ago.
Hrag, one of the items Cornell is selling is a web page--it
hasn't been unusual to market those since the dot com era.
That was ten years ago. Many museums own websites and
internet-specific art.
As for "taking it offline so the collector can have it
locally"--Lauren, Lauren, where have we failed you? No
director of a new media website should be promoting work in
those terms.
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
Nick, great, glad this is getting done. I know we're riding you hard, but as Paddy noted on the Rhizome thread, "of all the broken links that need to be fixed, I'd say the exhibition links should take top priority." Also there is a longish list of broken URLs in the post of mine that Paddy links to above.
Mattf, thanks for the kind words. A book of epic battles from Rhizome and AFC comments might be fun but it could take years to do the explanatory annotations.
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 4 months ago
Replying to Walter Latimer's "What Brad Troemel and others in the same school of thought have going for them is a strong understanding of formalist net art about itself, which is in a way fantastic."
I think the point of Paddy's post is that Troemel's school is the "school of Brad Troemel"--no one else particularly shares these beliefs because the essay is a manifesto for his own activities disguised as an objective assessment of others'.
That said, the surf club activities described in the Marcin Ramocki essay linked to above don't really constitute "formalist net art about itself," anymore than the science of linguistics is only concerned with the interplay of signs. There is always a connection to, and a concern about, the world these signs represent. When a web 2.0 artist talks, jokes, or makes art about art (or politiics or science) expressed in internet terms--i.e., reduced to jpegs and YouTubes--a comparison to the underlying "signifieds" of physical reality and history--their original meanings--is usually part of the equation. Not always, but with the better work.
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
Auralee, in answer to your question, no, I haven't asked Rhizome or Eyebeam if I could host their archives. It's more than just saving the database, despite how easy Dragan makes it sound. Rhizome has changed several times the way posts are organized and named --when you go from, say, a numbered post to having the word "reblog" in the url to removing the word "reblog" and assigning a content tag "reblog" to those old posts, links break and commands to "redirect" to the old links have to be written. You could go post by post and do this but usually programmers try to find a way to automate the process, so inevitably content gets lost. It's still in the database, but invisible to anyone using the site. Also, sites change their CSS design and information specific to the original post is lost that way, too. (E.g., removing a date stamp or a comment link by making it invisible in the CSS script.) Eventually you end up needing massive detective work to find posts (using Google's cache, other blogs, etc) and can never fully reconstruct a site as readers originally saw it. (I am open to any correction of my understanding of the above--these observations are based on my blog and observing others' over the years.)
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
drx, thanks, I have been saving my archives but will try these out. If one of us had been using them to save web pages of public institutions that are now inaccessible we wouldn't be having this discussion. I haven't checked, maybe Internet Archive has this page of the radical software group:
I linked to it from my blog, that's the only way I know it ever existed.
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
At least a couple of recent histories I know of started with the precedents in Rachel Greene's book "Internet Art," published in 2004, and proceeded to erect shaky timelines leading to whatever artist they were championing at the moment (that is, Jon Rafman). This was possible in part because Eyebeam's archive is gone and Rhizome's is a "work in process." The moral here is: write a book. L.M., it's time for us to put our heads together and write the Digital Media Tree Guide to What's Important in Internet Art. On second thought, we need to find a ghost writer so our own roles aren't sidelined.
on Give Me Back My Reblog Archives: Bringing An End To The Perpetual Rediscovery of Net Art 4 months ago
When "net natives" talk about living in a timeless vacuum of contextless data, this is partly because their elders are too weary or cash-strapped to create a decent archive. Contentious academic types wishing to write pseudo-histories about net expression can get away with bloody murder since they can't be fact-checked.
Rhizome has had at least three technical directors since the mid-'00s; every time the site architecture is revamped stuff breaks and much of it doesn't get fixed.
My three weeks reblogging for Eyebeam in '04 vanished down the memory hole, along with Paddy's work and many others.This was content from easily over a hundred websites as well as comments I added to posts--a snapshot of the state of tech, art, and politics in the dark days right before Bush's re-election. Even if someone doesn't want to read that, they might be interested to know what Alex Galloway, Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel or SCREENFULL reblogged.
We've complained about this several times and the current Eyebeam regime clearly doesn't care. They launched a new reblog that replaced the old without so much as an explanation. The new model doesn't have timestamps, which makes it easier to hide that it hasn't been updated since November.
Ironically solo bloggers have a better record and memory than public institutions. I will try not to abuse this power.
on The Love List: Power Couples of the Art World > 5 months ago
Also, what is "power"?
on Graphics Interchange Format At Denison University’s Mulberry Gallery 5 months ago
Paddy, a topic on my blog(s) for the last six years or so is how--or whether--to show animated GIFs in a physical, public space. As part of your follow-up documentation to this show, would appreciate any thoughts you have on how the GIFs you chose "translated"--better, worse, the same? Does a GIF on DVD become a video? How does scale and projection alter a GIF? As a participant, working with Chris Faur was helpful because he clearly "gets" GIFs and their display issues and made helpful suggestions. For those of us who couldn't attend--but also for the nay-sayers who see GIFs as some mindless post-hipster conspiracy--some installation notes would be very useful.
on Graphics Interchange Format At Denison University’s Mulberry Gallery 5 months ago
It's a shame that Man Bartlett never responded to my blog questions about animated GIFs, he might have been able to talk you out of doing this show. Just kidding, looks great, looking forward to Phase Two, The Documentation.
on The Long Lost Burnisher: Do Tools Ever Disappear From Use? 5 months ago
Wired should read its own writers. Here is Bruce Sterling's speech on the Dead Media Project: http://www.alamut.com/subj/art...
It's where I learned about the Incan quipu ("a dead medium which was once the nervous system of a major civilization").
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
Well, historians don't have to live in the time they write about, but peer-reviewed articles are generally fact-checked. Still thinking about Anna's near-instant response to Paddy's list of errors and mutations in the essay. It's like the spouse of a serial killer who says "Yes he did kill ten people, but that doesn't affect the narrative arc that he's basically a good person. The dead people didn't like being murdered but it's all subjective."
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
My comment to 491, asking where Manning's essay was, got published eventually, after Manning's link appeared in the 491 comments.
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
Agreed. The footnotes are an anachronism in web writing but they lend an air of objectivity. Even when a note doesn't stand for the proposition stated in the essay.
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
You mean Bret's?
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
The interesting questions are (i) if or how the ironically-named "surf clubs" changed visual practice on the Web (e.g., through the process of near-real-time semiotic play described by Marcin Ramocki in a more credible essay) and (ii) whether Tumblr and Dump have altered or merely accelerated that process. Troemel distorts the "exclusivity" of the clubs because that is the only real difference he can see between the clubs and Tumblr. A better essay is still waiting to be written on these topics.
Ramocki's essay: http://www.ramocki.net/surfing...
on The Decentralization of Art on The Internet: An Imagined History 6 months ago
A link to Manning's essay appears in 491's comments--not the essay itself, as Paddy notes in her correction.
on Art Club Calendar: Seth Price, January 25th 6 months ago
But not too lazy to comment!
on News Desk: Incident in Art Land : The New Yorker 6 months ago
Just for clarification, it's the New Yorker article that's long-winded, not Gagosian. Although the Kiefer show was somewhat visually long-winded. Towering heels are the new jackboots.
on The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words 6 months ago
Hi, Joanne, This timeline is helpful, even though I can't find my own experience as a longtime blogger in it anywhere, exactly. If you click on a few links in the 2001 blog archive for my first site ( http://www.digitalmediatree.co... ) you'll see I was writing what you're calling First Draft essays, combining pictures, art criticism, political essays, and artwork by myself and others. I was somewhat swept up in the warblogger madness but always hated that the mainstream media characterized that as mostly a pro-war phenomenon. Because my first site had open, largely unmoderated comments, I found myself by the mid-'00s with a "nascent social network" mostly based around art and new media criticism (see, e.g.: http://www.digitalmediatree.co... ) I've been twittering since March '08 but mostly on a lark and mostly disconnected from my blog. My basic style of blogging was established ten years ago and I haven't deviated much from what has proved to be a successful model (in terms of building a readership), even with my comments turned off. As for Facebook, it violates every empirical, open society principle I believe in so I'm not on it but am happy to be providing content Facebookers can link to. Best, Tom
on Playlist Opens Tonight at Postmasters! 7 months ago
Heffernan didn't have to "worry" about the concept because it hadn't been done before! Will, we had an interesting discussion a few weeks ago where you proposed the idea of a gallery show consisting of works that failed to translate the internet into real space, or that concentrated only on the inherent limits of such an endeavor. One category of such work might be social media "playlists" where the "artist" undergoes a transformation from "one of the gang," a peer picking "favs," to an all-seeing, all-knowing, Roland Barthes-like genius who steps outside the fray and plucks his/her former peers out of their former shared environment for gallery delectation, like Gulliver grabbing Lilliputians. Haven't seen this show yet, but it doesn't seem to buck the trend started by the Kitchen and continuing with the Guggenheim. Will let you know.
on A Steve Martin Event That Disappointed the 92nd Street Y – NYTimes.com 7 months ago
This post suggests it had nothing to do with art and
everything to do with Deborah Solomon's abominable
interviewing style: http://emdashes.com/2010/12/mo...
I believe it, but the solution would be for 92Y not to invite
her, as opposed to trying to micromanage the result.
on A Steve Martin Event That Disappointed the 92nd Street Y – NYTimes.com 7 months ago
Might have been the same audience that booed Robert Wilson at the Met a few years back: Homo Manhattan Neanderthalensis. On the other hand, not wanting to hear Deborah Solomon is perfectly understandable, but it does seem cruel to Steve. One last quip: sounds like the Y is getting back in the gymnasium business.
on New Style Curators: Do They Exist? 8 months ago
Paddy, did you talk about your IMG MGMT series at all? That has been one of the brighter lights shining through this foggy topic. You curate the essayists, the essayists curate online "artifacts" they care about, the artifacts lead to more content-- the whole spreads out, ahem, rhizomatically, taking the reader further and further away from the original cult of expertise and deeper into realms where they have to make their own judgments. Almost 10 years ago William Gibson wrote about "the otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects..." Gibson felt that "understanding otaku -hood [was] one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not." ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/book... )
The blogging tools you and Sorgatz are talking about are high tech ways to fine-tune personal obsessions and make them marketable (if not financially then in terms of building readership). Yet at the same time we are told newsreaders such as Bloglines and Google Reader are falling out of fashion. I wonder if Zuckerberg's vision of "connection" and "likes" chips away at the authority of the obsessive--in the world of corporate social media, everyone needs to know about everything in order to be the best informed consumers of paid-for goods and services, and the old web of carefully cultivated "weird" collections begins to disappear.
on BYOB: The Best of What Didn’t Happen 8 months ago
(Justin's link goes to a Rickroll.) Thanks, Rene and RR for posting additional documentation; RR also posted some photos of the show here: http://www.byobworldwide.com/tagged/nyc The thing about rectangles is when you project them on the wall at odd angles and without keystoning they become a collection of trapezoids, parallellograms, and irregular polygons.
The photos include a more dynamic shot of the fishtank by Hayley Silverman and Charles Broskoski (with live lobster) casting a shadowy clone of itself on the back wall.
on BYOB: The Best of What Didn’t Happen 8 months ago
Would like to see the videos if you could provide non-Zuckerberg links for those of us on the "public internet."
on BYOB: The Best of What Didn’t Happen 8 months ago
Hi, Will,
Connections could be made to past art (and among works in the
show), but you've skipped lightly over descriptions of what
was actually in BYOB. Some artists may not have felt any sense
of responsibility to Wodiczko or other precedents you linked
to and are possibly more interested in what the computer can
show us at this point--BYOB was medium-specific in that way.
But not exclusively: many artists thought about the space. You
mentioned Ripps' nomadic, interactive (parasitic?) piece. I
don't know if you saw Britta Thie's landscape (with figures
and floating gossamer FX blobs), which had symmetrical
flipping in the video that she aligned perfectly with a
gallery corner. I know you saw Jeremy Bailey roaming around
the gallery with his projector strapped to his chest,
essentially a portable webcam with geometric effects beyond
the capability of most webcam software. Believe it or not, the
GIFs I showed were "auditioned" beforehand and chosen for how
well they "scaled up" to wall size. Am guessing most of the
artists recognized that in the chaos of a large show, nuances
of their work would be lost or out of their control. Yet they
were willing to sacrifice to the "lack of planning" to see
their work in a panoramic conversation with other art. I'm
biased, but I'd submit that BYOB was collectively beautiful
and more energetic and up-to-date than most of what I see in
gallery spaces.
on Art Fag City at The L Magazine: A Disappointing Thomas Nozkowski Show at Pace 8 months ago
Making side by side comparison the focus basically says to the viewer (i) we're not confident about these works individually or (ii) this artist is so important you need to see a show documenting his thought process while he is still alive. Pace needs a resident "no person" to veto such ideas.
on BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) and The Social Graph Open Tonight 8 months ago
Ha ha, one back-of-the-class miscreant made virtual picture frames that could be moved around the room and positioned around others' work. For 25 cents your precious digital creation could be adorned with the frame of your choice, from a selection that included gold baroque, medieval, modern, office (binder clips), etc. One of my loved ones visiting the show commissioned a frame and I feel it set off my artwork nicely.
on BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) and The Social Graph Open Tonight 8 months agoLots of projections but not too many animated GIFs at BYOB. Only a handful of back-of-the-class miscreants doing that in the midst of all the data-wrangling, special effects video, regular video, bouncing light through gels and along floorboards, projecting video onto objects Tony Oursler-style, conglomerations of found footage and photos, vintage computer animation made with assembly language, etc.
on Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art 8 months ago
It appears Troemel's essay was deleted from Mediafire. No idea of the reason but a person might have more martyr-like sympathy if he were arrested for talking in a dispassionate way about yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, as opposed to just doing the yelling.
on Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art 8 months ago
Thanks to Brad Troemel for confirming that the goal of the project was to shut down Rhizome.org (for the greater cause of ambiguity). But everyone knows you can be denied access to a plane for talking (or joking) in the security queue about a bomb, and threats of cyber-mayhem similarly have hosts in a panic--this is not a stunning insight about the modern world. References to Duchamp, LeWitt, Morris, Manzoni, Buchloh, Dominguez, Cage, Groys, Haacke, Bourriaud, Baudrillard, and Fraser do give the project more torque, though.
on From The Comment Section: Breaking Down the Lynchsons 9 months ago
thx for the close reading and confirming my guess that "pieces of this same episode [were] spooling in a different time continuum"
on From The Comment Section: Breaking Down the Lynchsons 9 months ago
Thank you Jackson!
I laughed while watching it and also this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
on From The Comment Section: Breaking Down the Lynchsons 9 months ago
"Dart," you have a hard time recognizing when compliments are paid to you. People *like* this work!! As for apes and fingers, sorry that's all I could come up with. I lost interest in the Simpsons when I found out recent Ivy League graduates were writing it (this was about 10 years ago--I thought it was Matt Groenig!). But am always interested in work that derails the mechanics of popular entertainments running on networks such as Rupert Murdoch's, and would like to see YouTube "glitching" replace TV's faux transgression and facile insights. The chaos is its own best message.
on Is The Value of Abstraction Lessened on The Internet? 9 months ago
Someone on dump.fm told me people want to have sex with me so I guess all those Google hits are finally paying off. I foresee an army of sandy haired kids with glasses and a glib and aggressive internet manner.
on From The Comment Section: Breaking Down the Lynchsons 9 months ago
In the previous thread Howard claims the Duarte doesn't make him view the Simpsons or animation conventions any differently than he did before. Jesse states well the effect the video has of making "one kind of abstraction - cartooning - more explicit through density and layering." For example, when you take away Homer's yellow skin (why is it yellow?) and replace it with a recursive void of old episodes (or pieces of this same episode spooling in a different time continuum), his beige beard stubble makes him look like an ape. And Lisa has three fingers, which you especially notice when her skin turns into a dark silhouette. Is she mutilated? Do all family members have this deformity? I enjoyed the musicality of Nelson's high pitched laugh.and learned from this video that he is voiced by a woman. Maybe others could list tropes this video made them notice in the Simpsons.
on Is The Value of Abstraction Lessened on The Internet? 9 months ago
Reply to Howard Halle: the consensus of the Newsome threads Paddy linked to above was that the Newsome video was a "forced meme" that didn't tell us anything we didn't already know about rap videos and Carl Orff. You made your views to the contrary known. Thanks for weighing in on the Duarte video's (presumed) lack of "difficulty"--good to know it tells you nothing about animation and/or Simpsons conventions. Please see the comments to Paddy's next post.
on Is The Value of Abstraction Lessened on The Internet? 9 months ago
Dan, who gives a crap what sells?
Sally, if you speed-scroll through the Lynchsons it lessens
the humorous impact of the reprise of "Nelson's theme."
on Is The Value of Abstraction Lessened on The Internet? 9 months ago
What Beau said (damn that's good) with the added thought that the "difficult" elements of the Duarte make us think about the source material more and it's therefore better than the Newsome, which repackages what we already know.
on Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art 9 months ago
Maxwell, your faith in sites willing to blow up for no reason is commendable!
on Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art 9 months ago
I'm actually still not clear on the mechanics. You said "Once the offending site was chosen, JstChillin.org would serve as the site of protest, hosting 25 constantly reloading iframes on one day only (November 1st). Troemel then invited people to visit the site and keep their browsers open all day. This would use up the bandwidth, and result in a denial of service (DoS)." Troemel invited people to visit the site--which site? The offending site or jstchillin? And whose bandwidth was going to be used up by this? The offending site's or jstchillin's? Had an offending site been chosen? (Democratically determined abuse--how nice.) I know Rhizome was chosen in the "Assembly" poll on Troemel's blog, but was there an earlier poll on jstchillin and if so, what were the results? Was Rhizome actually going to be shut down by Troemel's tumblr? Or was jstchillin going to be shut down in protest as some act of virtual self-immolation? How would the latter be possible if jstchillin was already shut down by Dreamhost?
on Meaningless Protest in The Name of Art 9 months ago
In my post I linked to a recent Nasty Nets thread where I
mentioned EDT and Floodnet: http://nastynets.com/?p=3319#comments
(Interestingly - or disgustingly - it seems Google disabled my
link to an Alex Galloway book explaining that vintage flooding
controversy. Apparently, these days, if enough hits come to a
Google Book page it is erased from view, like disappearing
ink. Who needs to hack when our rulers do it for us?
Back to the topic: Paddy, I don't think Troemel's idea is all
that simple. It's still not clear to me who was hosting, who
was protesting, what was being protested, and who was going to
be shut down. I had to keep updating my post this morning.
This isn't complexity in the academic sense of
"problematization" but in the "not thinking it through and
explaining it clearly" sense. As a certain wise man has said
(I'll let him take credit for it), if you can't explain a net
art idea to someone at a bar, it's probably not so hot.
on IMG MGMT: New Century Modern Surface Magazine 9 months ago
"Building a lifestyle out of recreating various obscure moments from the past" aka "temporal defection" means you can time-travel back to a past that doesn't include anything remotely postmodern--seems to be the point of Kline's essay (great job, BTW) even though such defection itself is thoroughly poMo. The appeal of the "rat pack" early '60s continues to escape me (see also "lounge" and "library" revivals of the early '90s) but Kline does a good job of connecting this yen to current trends. A sketchy reply is here: http://www.tommoody.us/archive... (caution: Palazzo Chupi reference).
on Survival in New York: An Interview With William Powhida 9 months ago
What artist expects to be paid for an interview? Most are honored to have a chance to explain what they're about. Powhida says press is part of his business, blogs are press, why the extreme moralizing? "Slaves," such melodrama.
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
My point was there isn't a consensus, it's Net Gen Skeptic vs the New Museum (which itself can't definitely state a thesis). It's Paddy vs Duncan on the relevance of childhood experiences to adult work. One could argue that all the multi-tasking and "moving across media" you describe are conditions the modern techno-state is forcing on everyone, regardless of age, and imagine a counter-exhibit to "Younger Than Jesus" called "Techno-Paternalism and The Cult of Youth." If you want to argue that there is a radical break in the type of work being made between generations (sounds like you do), I would start with the New Museum exhibit and the writers cited in its 512 page catalog.
on Jeff Koons Does Just Fine As An Adult 9 months ago
He regrets making the slides?
on Jeff Koons Does Just Fine As An Adult 9 months ago
Koons spoke in Dallas years ago right after Made in Heaven--I was living there at the time and likened the performance to a combination of art historian, zen master, and Ronald Reagan. Koons had constructed a retroactive narrative--essentially the "story of banality" that he told and retold--to explain each phase of his career, leading up to the Made in Heaven images. Like Reagan, who generally said nothing but was very congenial, Koons walked us, with calm, slightly psychotic certainty, through wacky explanations of how earlier pieces laid the foundations for the current work, for example, "this is a porcelain pig ushering in banality, the herald of my future perfect love for Illona." It was all so measured and plausible-sounding that by the time he got to showing enormous, projected slides of his skanky porn (in one of the most conservative cities on the planet!), the images seemed logical, inevitable and normal. Commenter Sven (and from what it sounds like, Roberta Smith) aren't accounting enough for the irony in Koons' schtick; porn is not "perfect love" or, jeezus, "emotional vulnerability" any more than his "wholehearted embrace of capitalism" uh, wholeheartedly embraces capitalism.
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
Vera (is that your real name?), there was a recent exhibit at the New Museum in NY called "Younger than Jesus." The YTJ generation was described as "incredibly diverse, with artists moving seamlessly across mediums. Instead of radically breaking from the past, these artists draw from a myriad of influences across historical movements and geographies to highlight the intergenerational dynamics that drive contemporary art.” At the same time a claim was being made that net natives were unique in their ability to move seamlessly across mediums, the museum was assuring us that they weren't radical in any way. This could use some elaboration.
on Dirty Hands at Soloway 9 months ago
Also, these photos don't necessarily have to be Jessie Stead's desktop - it could be a fictional nerd with lots of files, and time to arrange them, who likes Realdolls.
on Dirty Hands at Soloway 9 months ago
As I recall, those Strawhand drawings were reblogged by Eyebeam Art & Technology center. But we'll never know, because Eyebeam took down several years' worth of archives in a colossal extended middle finger to the new media community.
on Dirty Hands at Soloway 9 months ago
"Desktop still lifes" is good. This reminds me of drawings Justin Strawhand made by dragging icons around his desktop and capturing the results: http://www.digitalmediatree.co...
on Dirty Hands at Soloway 9 months ago
I wasn't clear on the relationship of the foreground to the background in those photos. For example, I didn't notice that the X and O file icons form an American flag when I was in the gallery--I see it now. My guess is the photos are high res screenshots of a computer desktop, with the "dolls" serving as provocative wallpaper for someone's working files, which may or may not be related to the dolls. Thus "dandylion copy 22" could refer to whatever file has that filename. A quick look at the realdolls site - uggh - shows the dolls all have names like Britney and Nika, no Dandylions. Your photo of the photo, Paddy, has more extraneous elements, such as the vertical stripes of the gallery veneer reflected behind you, and a guy in the lower left corner staring with puzzlement at the photo.
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
PaintFX isn't such a bad example. I would call this writing of Parker Ito's "digital native-esque," especially since he's elsewhere self-identified as a net native (from State - http://thestate.tumblr.com/pos... ): "PAINT FX (imagine a really badass voice saying this) is the newest, hottest, sexiest, nastiest, chillest, painting collective/ club/ company/ brand/ website/ blog/ party consisting of Jon Rafman, Micah Schippa, and myself. We’re kinda like Jogging meets Poster Company meets shiny stuff, but we’re way juicier. Each work featured on the site is intended to belong to the brand PAINT FX as opposed to the individual who created the work. Maybe we’ll outsource some work too. We started the project because we were popping huge boners off of juicy gestural marks and we thought it would be fun and easy to make a lot of those. But PAINT FX doesn’t favor styles or themes, but favors shiny computer screens..."
De Kooning is spinning in his grave over "we thought it would be fun and easy to make a lot of those."
on IMG MGMT: Untitled 9 months ago
Stock images are also squeaky clean and upper middle class, like most of our TV shows and movies. The circulation you describe takes place in a rarified, mostly fake social stratum. (Although there are also images of poverty stricken Others used in similar way.) Your essay has some interesting parallels to Marc Handelman's earlier IMG MGMT essay equating images of skies in defense ads with a vague, magisterial perspective: "In many of the skyscapes of the 20th century, the sky would cease to function as a mere backdrop, but take on a central role becoming an ostensible protagonist of visual and rhetorical effects." ( http://www.artfagcity.com/2009... )
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
To paraphrase a new media colleague: "I meant you, but no one's feelings were hurt because I emailed everyone else on the thread to tell them I didn't mean them."
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
Would rather not talk about this issue at all. For the record, dump.fm is a brilliant site and it was conceived by "children of the net." I've been 100% supportive, even if the site provides a forum for the NetGen nazi who told me my "perception of dump was horribly fucked and wrong."
on The Year of The Animated Gif 9 months ago
Your system gets great results, Jesse, and I'm not knocking it. It's pointless of me to criticize Google's handling of animations at this stage, since the big boys are thinking ahead to whatever image mechanism they're going to force on us (probably some kind of video spec). As a consumer you are supposed to be buying animation apps that play on your phone and make someone money, not sifting through the rubble of "free," failed dotcom era artifacts. Artists do that, but Google is only incidentally interested in artists.
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
If you look at the jstchillin manifesto ( http://www.jstchillin.org/abou... ) they hit the digital native stereotypes pretty hard ("If ur lukin 2 meet nu frndz, enemies or if ur lukin 2 ave fun..." "a new material idealism that is being bred out of the culture of digital natives..."). Older curators buy into this "authenticity." I talk about home computers and workplace computers (i.e., Windows) in my artwork - tools and subsistence jobs that affect every generation (and provide a rich source of negative inspiration). I didn't think it was generation-specific until spending some time on dump.fm, where I constantly have to field questions and criticisms about my age. Just the other day, Duncan, you were arguing that older people are more easily shocked by porn and gore on the Net--it's not true but it puts me on the defensive against your supposedly more thick skin.
on Taking Stock of Art Making in The Age of “I’m A Child of The Internet” 9 months ago
There is a blog called Net Gen Skeptic ( http://www.netgenskeptic.com/ ) that questions - mostly in the context of education - whether "digital natives" have different cognitive skills or insights that need to be understood and addressed by teachers. It's an interesting inquiry. The so-called Pictures Generation of the '70s-'80s was proud of itself for being "TV babies" who were supposedly more media savvy than their parents but I don't remember critics claiming special powers of perception for these folks--everyone was too damned jaded. By contrast, the way current curators talk about the Net Gen is really like the second coming of Christ. Not just the curators, I have many Net Gen friends who speak this triumphalist rhetoric. I don't really understand it: we all "grew up with the net," it's just that some of us don't remember anything before it. As a fan of science fiction and cyberpunk, I don't rule out that there's some David Bowie-esque Homo Superior growing in our midst, I just wish curators would shut up about it until we have proof.
on The Year of The Animated Gif 9 months ago
Just did a test. If you search "atom" in Google Images this doesn't come up:
http://sciencejunkies.com/medi...
But if you search "atom animated" it is the second result and is in fact a moving gif. So you have to go to advanced search and choose ".gif" and add the word "animated" to the search string and even that provides no certainty you'll get what you're looking for. Clearly it's a case of "Google to Animated GIFs: FU."
on The Year of The Animated Gif 9 months ago
Paddy, regarding your update: Google lets you search for the.gif file extension but if you want an *animated* GIF you have to put the word "animated" in the search string. Very awkward and it won't always pull up what you are looking for. The new Google Images search popups are not animated so you could end up clicking through to several URLs before you found a moving image. This may be apocryphal but a Google executive was quoted as saying "I don't remember the last time I saw an animated GIF."
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