tom moody

Reasons why assemblage (or "crap on crap") is now the "house style" of the art world (from an artist's perspective):

1. Everybody’s broke and there’s always an abundance of trash.
2. Six years of art education teaches that high art is dead so everyone takes the low road.
3. Disgust with capitalism and consumer culture.
4. “Nihilism.”
5. Genuine love of trash culture and its byproducts.
6. Avoidance of known art materials.
7. A way to make formal arrangements of things without being called “Greenbergian.”
8. A way to be political without sloganeering.
9. Genuine interest in the lineage of Schwitters/Rauschenberg–-considering it an unfinished project.
10. New trash (web and technology cast-offs) necessitates new ways of arranging trash (and new content unknown to Rauschenberg, et al).

"Biting Midges" [3.8 MB mp3]

Furious scratching at beginning gives way to homage to a fave drum and bass melody from 1994. Some RMV snare and hat loops are used. The structure of this is a bit odd.

found GIF, enlarged to 512 x 488 pixels - 188 KB

found mandelbrot-y GIF, enlarged, non-anti-aliased version - 425 KB

update: enlarged "8 bit" version
(or 2, or 4, whatever)

From The Simulacra, by Philip K. Dick, 1964:

Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car.

"Get off," he warned it. But the commercial, well-adhered, began to crawl, buffeted by the wind, toward the door and the entrance crack. It would soon have squeezed in and would be haranguing him in the cranky, garbagey fashion of the Nitz advertisements.

He could, as it came through the crack, kill it. It was alive, terribly mortal: the ad agencies, like nature, squandered hordes of them.

The commercial, flysized, began to buzz out its message as soon as it managed to force entry. "Say! Haven't you sometimes said to yourself, I'll bet other people in restaurants can see me! And you're puzzled as to what to do about this serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous, especially--"

Chic crushed it with his foot.

The above quote copied and pasted from a site that seems to rather miss Dick's point and thinks the fly is cool. (I may regret this link.)