tom moody

sketchbook page, mid '90s

Ha, whoops, the initially published, pre-edited version of a post here about the blog Post Internet was picked up from my RSS by a spam blog and appeared in Post Internet's trackback (with a weird picture of a kid looking at a futuristic heads-up display). PI revised its Travis Hallenbeck post, splitting it into two, a discussion of the YouTube middle frame and a discussion of Hallenbeck's Tinypic thumbnail book. PI has also added an afterward to the post referencing "internet aware art." Just to pound on this a little more, the Rhizome editors' and PI's interpretation of Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" wasn't more reductive than what he intended, it wasn't even the same concept. PI says it is no longer interested in defining internet aware art--too bad, because the interplay between the two definitions can be fertile territory.

In the previous post was joking about the OptiDisc sightings being "post internet." (Referring to the collection of screenshots of pages where internet users hotlinked a GIF of mine for their MySpace pages, etc). They are post- "a moment of the Internet," the MySpace moment, when social media content was open to search engines and not hidden by subscription walls a la Facebook.

I found the pages by looking at my stats, which shows referring sites where people were using my GIF. Lately I haven't been able to trace the pages without signing up for something. So I'm thinking of my collection of as an archived moment when the web was still open and intermingling rather than a Balkanized group of cliques. It wasn't just MySpace but LiveJournal, Blogger, Jappy, dozens of individual web pages, and sources I can't remember.

They are "Internet Unaware Art" because most of the users have no idea that the GIFs they find on Google and put on their pages are loading from someone else's server, or who pays for the bandwidth. When I showed the screenshots at a panel a couple of years ago, a man in the audience complimented me for "finding a way to monetize the theft by others from my site [through offering fine art prints of the screenshots for sale]." I accepted the compliment but in retrospect should have made clear that I am more interested in the aesthetics of the project than revenge. I find the wall sized aggregation of all the pages, unified by the presence of a target somewhere in each rectangle, very pleasing.

A NY dealer in the audience said she saw "nothing new here," that it was just the "found object and the collage." In defense of the project, one of the things that intrigues me about it is that I didn't have to email 60 people and ask them to post an image of mine on their pages so I could document it, which is how most new media projects work. This was a spontaneous moment that happened beyond my control. The collection is what Calvino might call an "invisible city," where most of the participants were unaware they were part of a community--the community of the dumb flashing target.

from this page - anticipating the moving version will change in the next 24 hours

some previous Post Internet optidisc sightings

"internet unaware art"

"Escape from Spring" [4.1 MB .mp3]

A two minute post-chiptunes opera inspired by Poulenc.
Live MIDI performance by Travis Hallenbeck cut up, reassembled and rhythmically augmented by Tom Moody.
(A longer version was posted previously as "H.M.M.M. 2")

Libretto:

In a pastoral landscape in rural Virginia birds and crickets frolic among some old rusted trucks.
Enid, a hamadryad, listens from inside a majestic oak.
Some goths on mopeds enter the clearing to drink absinthe while sitting on the trucks.
Enid cries out from inside her tree, wishing to join them.
The absinthe opens the goths' frontal lobes so they can hear her and summon her from the tree.
Enid, personified as a teenage girl, jumps on the back of a moped and rides into the city with the goths.
Cruising through the night streets her song becomes an atonal wail of mingled pleasure and pain.
She yearns for her tree but prefers the speed, artificiality, and rootlessness of city life. The song ends with her riding the subway with her boyfriend, who drives a front end loader and still occasionally goes out to the Virginia woods for medieval role playing.

"RMV Study No. 3" [6.9 MB .mp3]

mildly spooky Latin robo-percussion.
all done with the Linplug RMV soft-sampler except the pitched bass tones, which are analog.
The djembe with the long pingpong delay (in the second half) gets me kind of excited.
Will probably add some e-piano parts to this, this is all-percussion.

Let's keep talking about the phrase "internet aware art."
Two senses of the term are in use:

1) Offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind. (A behavioral quirk observed by the artist* who originally coined the phrase).

2) Offline art that is influenced by online conventions, trends, and jargon. (This is mostly a theory in search of artists, where curators look for examples of non-tech art informed by tech concerns. "We know the internet must be changing art, so let's go find examples. Look, here's a sculpture that uses the letters 'OMG'--it's perfect. I'm sure the artists weren't aware that this is what we were looking for.")

Both senses of "internet aware art" are present on the Vvork website, and suspect:

An example of the first type: this installation called Turbo by Baptiste Debombourg. The sheetrock of a gallery wall bulges surrealistically like a hand or head emerging from a TV in David Cronenberg's movie Videodrome, almost to the point of touching a conveniently placed viewer. The drywall is cracking but miraculously retains its convex shape during this real space morph. Neat idea but it doesn't need to exist as a piece--you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the "product" being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic's visit who noticed the piece only "read" from a couple of angles and didn't hold up to more than a few seconds' study? Vvork means never having to explain--success is presumed.

An example that combines both types of Internet Aware Art: Also very jpeg-friendly, this installation by Martin Pfeifle, titled about:blank, consisting of stressed-past-the-point-of-cracking wood (reminiscent of Kai Vierstra's work) that appears to be circulating around the walls of a gallery space. "about:blank" is Internet jargon, a command to load a blank page into a browser, to use as an "inline" frame (an HTML page within an HTML page), which can then be modified by scripts. By calling his installation "about:blank" Pfeifle wants you to think about internet browsing and how it relates to his hand-made, three dimensional work: the gallery wall is the page; the wood is the inline frame; the cracking is--the script? A virus? Time to go read the press release.

(*Have not consulted with Guthrie Lonergan on any of this--he may hate it.)

A few months ago was rewrapping some old paintings and took this photo.
The image is handpainted oil, based on a portrait of Goya by Vicente Lopez from an art history book. I made it a few years out of art school. Surfacewise it's pretty tight--it's holding up as an artwork. I didn't know Gerhard Richter at the time I did it but would have compared it to him (only warmer and more human for all the distancing of the grisaille photoreproduction).
Was laughing at the reaction to Damien Hirst's recent desire to paint like Rembrandt. Some of the fogey artbloggers were making fun of his nerve. Of course he's right--that kind of skill is still possible. The question is, is it necessary?

from Brenna on Nasty Nets: Futuristic Control Panels

A selection of wooden cabinets for the den or family room, each of which features an enormous flatscreen TV surrounded by domestic books and knickknacks.

Compare to Barbara Gallucci's photo project, where she photographed the "TV nook" under the stairs in a typical Levittown home and what owners are doing with the nook 40 years later. In case the meme has faded, Levittown is "the first and one of the largest mass-produced suburbs... a symbol of postwar suburbia," per Wikipedia.

The TV was smaller then but no less a spaceship artifact in the suburban little house on the prairie. Most of the people in Levittown filled in their nooks with something else, as shown in Gallucci's photos. Mainly because of the awkwardness of the stairwell placement--presumably their big flatscreens are elsewhere in the room now.

The flatscreen/widescreen phenomenon spreads like a disease, not just in homes. Every bar has one. Even office computers, which presumably aren't being used to watch Lawrence of Arabia or play videogames, are now coming equipped with font-stretching widescreens. The screens get bigger but '50s-style conformity never goes away.