tom moody

Ted Goranson considers the treatment of science in these movies:

Frankenstein

In this first one, the scientist believes that if he understands how life works, he can heal the sick. He is a doctor, a medical doctor and studying what wouldn't be out of the ordinary today or even then. Only the experiment was unusual and grisly, messing with corpses, but even that isn't very far from ordinary.

Bride of Frankenstein

In this second one, the nature of science has changed radically. A different writer, but the same filmmaker. It's no longer a quest for discovery; now the experiment has taken priority. We've added a new scientist, one clearly and visibly deranged. He's interested not in the discovery of the principles of the cosmos as they touch on life, but on the creation of artificial beings.

Son of Frankenstein

This time, the science is changed again. Now the scientific notion is back on discovery, but it's not about life from the human perspective. Now it is more cosmic, more celestial and yes, even godly. The son — who is smarter than his dad — knows that what his dad thought was the power in lightning was REALLY cosmic rays. They are the source of all life. So it isn't merely a matter of humanity, it is a matter of understanding god.

Ghost of Frankenstein

In this fourth one, we go through yet another change in how science is handled. Once again it shifts from the cosmic to the ordinarily human. It's about brains doing science and science on brains. We are reminded that the original scientist was not misguided, it was just his stupid assistant who made the mistake of using a "criminal" brain. Otherwise, all would be well. The doctor this time is a brain healer, and he has guess what? A dumb assistant who makes a critical mistake in substituting brains.

Also interesting is this observation about science in cinema from the post on the first film:

Science, and especially mathematics, is extremely cinematic to the people doing it, but I know of few films that seem to capture it well. The cinematic path seems to be through technological gizmos, and I think we have James Whale to thank for that. The lightning business wasn't central in the book... So it is something of genius to choose all those flying, vertical, sparking things. You can sense the energy. It's literally light, and the motif of light and dark in several literal and metaphoric threads throughout works with that.

A salon-like discussion of the "demise" of literary criticism on Salon (subscription prob. required):

Louis Bayard: The problem with arguing for cultural gatekeepers is that, if you're a professional critic, you inevitably look self-serving -- "Hey, that's my job!" -- and yes, elitist -- "Don't try this at home, guys." I myself don't have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn't qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I've learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

Laura Miller: I don't think there's a real causal connection between the blogosphere and the withering away of newspaper criticism, actually. It has more to do with the economics of newspaper publishing and management and editors feeling that criticism is disposable because it's not reporting, which they see as a newspaper's core product.

I think of blogs not as alternatives to reviews or essays, but as a forum for short items, news and remarks, as well as links and responses to longer pieces posted on the sites that commission them. I could be wrong, though, as I'm not really a reader of blogs. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the book review sections of the New York and Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Bookforum, the Atlantic, Harper's, TLS, the New Republic, etc., as well as the British newspapers like the Guardian and Independent, which I read online. Yet even in those publications I often find that the pieces I'm excited to be reading are the exception rather than the rule. I'm all for cultural gatekeepers because there's way more out there than I have time to read and it's not always easy to find the best of it.

One feels kind of sorry for Laura Miller, who isn't a bad critic, having to slog through all that gatekeeper criticism that she doesn't like when she could just google around and find out what people are saying about books she's interested in (or that she doesn't know about yet). A critical eye for the Web is far more valuable at this point than having the stamina to read every established organ from the last century.

"Web Weenies" [1.6 MB .mp3]

non-embedded musical object (techno)

by Superherohype.com:

SHH!: If you could have a superhero power, what would it be and why?
Downey: How do you feel about asking me that question? Let me answer that by not answering it. Statistically, women want to fly. Men want to be invisible. But my one superpower would be to go through an entire press day in four seconds.

The rest of the interview isn't that hostile. The Rhino DVD of the 1969 arthouse movie Putney Swope includes a video interview with the director, Robert Downey, Senior. He has the same eyes as Junior, and behind them one perceives a similar wit and intelligence (but not so much the pain). Downey Senior is a god to such luminaries as director PT Anderson and an unbelievable artist but is now swallowed up in his son's considerable shadow.

Am belatedly discovering this flickr set by cosmic_disciple, aka Travis Hallenbeck, titled "Bitmap." (Above is a detail of the thumbnails.) I'm honored to have some images in the group, from when Travis visited my studio a while back and took photos. This group is a nice complement to the Bitmap exhibition, which ran at vertexList and is travelling this summer to Drexel University in Philadelphia (June 23 - July 25).

Relationships between low-resolution computer images, fabric designs, folk art, and Bauhaus-influenced modernist art are fertile territory and Travis has been seeking out this material for years.

from bring on the glitter

From the Rhizome.org discussion boards (edited slightly for length, clarity). We are discussing net.art (pre-2000) vs the so-called Net Art 2.0:

Damon Zucconi: in my mind a shift occurs when there is a move from highly 'fragile' and [technologically] complex situations to things composed of much more autonomous and portable 'bounded media objects' (youtube embeds, etc...).

Tom Moody: ...This sounds interesting but examples would help us visualizationally challenged folks.

Damon Zucconi: overly specific but 'fragile' and [technologically] complex situations:
http://muse.calarts.edu/~line/history.html [Natalie Bookchin's internet art timeline from 1994-2000 --ed.]

autonomous and portable 'bounded media objects':

http://www.seecoy.com/3waycall.html

http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/20y.html

http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/rgbchord.html

http://www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/guitarsolo.html

http://charlesbroskoski.com/cube.html

http://www.theageofmammals.com/secret/history/riffchartwav.html

http://guthguth.blogspot.com/2006/04/halt-robot_14.html

Tracky: It seems that we (3rd generation net artists as Olia calls us) were trashed with all that cultural content by the media and finally grew up to communicate in a way which is all about quoting or remixing that garbage (even if it concerns new phenomena); whereas 1990s net.art was more trying to come up with a intentional concept and seemed to have an answer prepared for even the un-asked questions. To me it really seems like the newer net art is more about processing cultural input than it is about the dimensions and the possibilities of the web. Frames and hypertext, code and generative art, Mille Plateau and Rhizomes; [those are] all very interesting things concerning the concepts of mediated perception. But to me the stuff which is going on today is more about presets and terms of mainstream perception... Call it reactionary, but I feel like anything you do (appropriate, remix, or just getting inspired) is some sort of reaction since we have been so exposed to media (old and new). Whether it's cheesy marquee tags or fancy iChat effects or (whatevs) it's all about the cultural competence and less about a new frontier.

Tom Moody: Tracky, I'd like to amend your statement ("the newer net art is more about processing cultural input than it is about the dimensions and the possibilities of the web") to say that it's not just something your generation of artists is doing. Damon's list bugs me for being so generation-specific. Some of us have been practicing and preaching the presets gospel for years. The difference is it's done with an element of conscious opposition to old-guard net art practice, much (not all) of which is over-intellectualized and looking back to '60s (text-centric, gallery-centric) conceptual art for models. I prefer my Fluxus on the fly (hence the interest in 4chan) not through stating a proposition of what a piece is going to be and then "proving" (ie, illustrating) it.*

Damon Zucconi: I, by no means, consider that to be some sort of comprehensive list or anything. I don't particularly want to get into the business of canonization ;)

"processing cultural input" is a nice way of putting it... content with a lowercase -c...

guthrie: Yes, the newer net art treats the Internet as the present/past rather than as the future. It's too skeptical of the technology to use it in some fancy innovative way...

*In case this isn't clear, the "it" in the fourth sentence refers to "practicing and preaching the presets gospel" and the "which" refers to "old-guard net art practice." Tracky asked for examples of the oppositional practice I was talking about. It's basically 7 years of my blog(s), where I put up a lot of junk mixed in with the art and left it to the viewer to sort it out, and where I opened up a dialog to all comers as opposed to swapping grant-friendly tech talk on a ListServ. One place where I part company with Damon's canon, sorry, list, is I've put up media objects but never as embeds. I'm about being surfed by people at work and on dialup and I never put anything up that requires Flash updates or might never load (links to that, yes). I got interested in GIFs because they were a low-bandwidth way to do media stuff. Also, I'm more concerned with original content than appropriating. By "text-centric" and "gallery-centric" I was referring to net.art 1.0's application of Lawrence Wiener, Sol LeWitt, et al to web practice, not the design of websites. Damon made a later point about the blog form vs wikis, etc. and I agree the weblog format is a lot of what made me different from the Bookchinites and will probably date me if it hasn't already.

A specialty of the veteran Internet artists who dominate the Rhizome chatboards is a kind of instant dialectical materialism. Whenever a new form ("thesis") comes along, they resist and ridicule it ("antithesis"), then burn rubber to claim they were always already doing it ("synthesis").

This happened with the "8 Bit movement" and now the "surf club movement."

In the latter case, the race to the nebulous center can be seen on this discussion thread. A Rhizomer states that "discourse collapsed" with the "found object gamesmanship" of current practitioners. This statement is challenged. Soon another Rhizomer posits the existence of longstanding camps and claims the current movement has proven them both correct.

I am oversimplifying (conflating the surf clubs with Web 2.0) but that's the general drift of the discussion. Unfortunately you could never follow it because of another tendency of the veteran Rhizomers: the asynchronous verbal pile-on. This is accomplished in part by the tactic of replying to current comments with long arguments appended to earlier comments. An impossible hairball of words accumulates and all thought disappears to an outside observer. (It's also a bit like a Nature Channel show I saw where bees kill an invading Japanese hornet by smothering it with their bodies. Eventually the hornet's body temperature is raised and it cooks to death.)

But seriously, some interesting exchanges can be teased out of the hairball and I plan to post some of them with afterthoughts, in the coming weeks, prior to the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. I hope to talk about my own work vis a vis Net Art 2.0 but it will be good to have some of these arguments in mind.

GIFs from nicovideo.jp

(thanks to adrienne at lalblog--also for the nice words about this blog)