tom moody

"John Pomara RMX" [16 MB Quicktime .mov]

Artist, old friend, and unwitting collaborator John Pomara sent me a low res .mov of a video he's showing in his current solo show. The imagery relates to his current series of paintings and ink jet prints, discussed here. Like a cad (as opposed to a CAD) I did a remix of the video (mostly for length but with a few aesthetic choices, too) and added my own music. Saved it from a .mov to an .avi and back to a .mov so it's muy mushy. This is low rent industrial media art offered with no apologies. Resemblance to anything 8-Bit or Carsten Nicolai-ish is purely intentional (at least on my end).

Sam Sanford swirl rmx rmx
not intended for rss readers; swirl GIF artist unknown

Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma

Worth reading: "it can happen here."

Greg Djerejian notes this scary passage from a recent Dick Cheney speech:

As time passed, the terrorists believed they'd exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America. Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: "During the Cold War," Dr. Lewis wrote, "two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: 'What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'" End quote.

To which Djerejian responds:

It's really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)--openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union--our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway 'elites'. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? The stakes are high, that is, the preservation of the American democratic model as a leading force for moderation and rule of law on the world stage.

Throughout the speech Cheney refers to militants from different countries, with different religions, and different reasons for fighting as "the terrorists," as if they were one enemy working in concert. This is glib propaganda, meant to manipulate you and separate you from your money, in taxes for the benefit of his war contractor friends.

Two semi-related items on a "we the people vs the forces of darkness" theme:

Protest at Blackwater headquarters. Glad someone else is disturbed by the rise of this private police force. It should be shut down. We have an army and police--we don't need this company run by Christiofascists whose leader has a Hitler haircut.

This blog post describes how government agents detained a 9/11 suspect and threatened to torture or imprison his family in Egypt. A surface-to-air radio was found in his hotel room that subsequently turned out to be a pilot's left in the closet. Nevertheless the detainee confessed after the threats to his family, and is now suing for violation of his civil rights. The appeals court agreed he had a case, and published an account of what the government did to him in its summary judgment opinion. Several bloggers downloaded and posted it. Then the appeals court withdrew the opinion and redacted all the stuff about torture threats as "classified." Except it's not a secret, thousands now have the original opinion and are circulating it around the Web.

Am continuing to document, with screenshots, the appearances of my OptiDisc GIF on the world wild web (as wallpaper, avatars, etc), as sort of a meta-meta-bored at home project. This may not be up long, but please check out pol.iceman's handiwork for his Yahoo! profile--he has enlarged the GIF like a gazillion times. He might be amused to know that's how it was also displayed in a gallery context--although not limited by browser size and viewed in pieces via scrolling. (I'm assuming this is someone I don't know.)

Update: It's gone, so I removed the link and added the screenshot above. It's quite possible it was a mistake and that the user sized the image incorrectly. Oh, well, good while it lasted (less than a day?).

Just returned from my 24 hour trip to Austin, where I was a speaker on the NAMAC panel described here (that's the National Alliance for Media, Arts and Culture). Thanks to all who came and especially those who asked about blogs! Laurence Miller did a good job of moderating, addressing blunt questions to the panelists, organizers, and attendees. One curator in the audience divided the art spectrum into iterative new media types who grow and adapt to novel exhibition scenarios and "legacy artists" who presumably just need the thing they got famous for recreated as faithfully as possible. (For some reason Bill Viola comes to mind--you don't imagine him switching gears from straight up video installation to some GPS-intensive piece with a grid of embedded Quicktimes.) Miller asked her if there were any legacy artists who had made the transition and she said "of course," mentioning one name I didn't catch. I listened patiently to her inevitable "guilty liberal" refrain about internet art being the province of rich first worlders and English the lingua franca of the internet. She didn't think it was funny when I said my blog was reaching small towns in Texas.

Thanks to Steven Jenkins of the San Francisco Film Society for the invite, and I enjoyed meeting/hanging out with Laurence and my other co-panelists Kristin Newman-Scott and Brian Fridge.

Just a reminder that Marcin Ramocki's Blogger Skins exhibition opens Saturday, Oct 20, at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn, NY. Yours truly will be in Austin for the NAMAC panel so please go witness my humiliation at the hands of Google. (Ramocki's portraits of five bloggers are composites of the first 100 images that come up on the search engine when you type in our names--talk about Russian Roulette.)

Another obscure Gameboy CD discussed at Mutant Sounds:

Exactly what the band name suggests and part of a host of similarly themed Gameboy projects that came on the scene around the same time (the Nanoloop compilation CD, Matt Wand's Public.exe 10" and the Klangstabil "Gioco Bambino" CD I posted a while back to name a few), this troupe feed numerous Nintendo gameboys through a nanoloop editor then tweak the results through delays and reverbs, though to their credit, the migraine-in-an-arcade aggression and mulchy grittiness of their approach causes this to successfully stand apart in tone from the other cited projects. Issued in a blink-and-you-missed-it edition of 55 copies on the Mik Musik imprint (home to the Molr Drammaz and Pathman CDR's I've posted previously), this is a real winner for those inclined to enjoy 8-bit fuckery of this sort.

This is taking Gameboy music into the industrial, Reichian* realm. It feels a bit similar to what I tried to do with DJ-mixing (cross fading) two 8 Bit Construction Set records a while back, but denser and doomier (and more original).

*Steve, not Wilhelm.

Daniel Albright on the Cocteau-Picasso-Satie-Diaghilev collaborative ballet Parade:

Cocteau's most remarkable instruction to [the "American Girl," played by Marie] Chabelska, was this: "The little girl...vibrates like the imagery of films." Elsewhere Cocteau wrote: "One day they won't believe what the press said about Parade. A newspaper even accused me of 'erotic hysteria.' In general they took the shipwreck scene and the cinematographic trembling of the American dance for spasms of delirium tremens." If I read these sentences correctly, Cocteau asked Chabelska to shake in the way a film image shakes when the projector wobbles--that is, she was asked to imitate the technical errors associated with the film medium... That a newspaper would mistake her trembling as "erotic hysteria" is a delightful proof of the tenacity of systems of intepretation based on feeling-expression, even in the excitingly apathetic and technical world of Parade, where the medium is the message...

From Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts, 2000. The shaky GIF was made from an image in the book, fair use, etc.