tom moody

full sized

Sally McKay has written a thoughtful paper titled "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)." The venue is art&education, a website for art writing co-sponsored by e-flux and Artforum. I'm flattered to have my OptiDisc GIF featured on the front page and discussed in depth.

From McKay's text (footnotes are in the article):

Brian Massumi describes affective intensity as a "state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It is like a temporal sink, a hole in time... ."[27] This is a moment of incipience, before action is taken, before emotions qualify and retroactively determine the affect. In animated GIFs, the gaps in action between frames extend the affective suspense. They are small enough to suggest motion, but large enough to create a perceptible gap, which means there is plenty of time for the affect to take hold. As Mieke Bal might describe it, the animated gifs function like cinematic close-ups — "abstractions isolating the object from the time-space coordinates in which we were moving as if 'naturally.' A close-up immediately cancels out the whole that precedes it, leaving us alone, thrown out of linear time, alone with a relationship to the image that is pure affect." [28] Unlike close-ups in cinema, however, animated GIFs function without a "whole" — there is no ongoing narrative for them to be juxtaposed against. If, as in OptiDisc, the affect is strong and virtually uninflected by signification it can induce a light trance, taking over the perceptual system by temporarily shutting down emotion and cognition.

This kind of cognitive stupor can be pleasurable, but it does raise some concerns. Amy Herzog talks about the political potential of the affective pause in feminist film as a moment of becoming.[29] But what if the becoming never comes? What if the affective intensity remains arrested, and is never collapsed into action or emotions? Granted, many animated gifs carry more signification than OptiDisc and even in this piece there are references — such as an allusion to Jasper Johns’ target paintings — that may eventually emerge and break the spell. But the endlessly looping structure does enhance a kind of "anaesthetic" state, as Susan Buck-Morss might describe it. "The problem," Buck-Morss suggests, "is that under conditions of modern shock — the daily shocks of the modern world — response to stimuli without thinking has become necessary for survival."[30] In a culture that depends on citizens' passivity — and the contemporary context of late capitalism would certainly apply — aesthetic products and media may be designed as phantasmagorias, which, as Buck-Morss explains, have the "effect of anaesthetizing the organism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses."[31] The zoned-out state of mind induced and extended by digital media such as OptiDisc may be an affect that mitigates against the agency of enhanced perceptual engagement.

Some thoughts on this to come.

From an exhibition currently up at Michael Rosenfeld gallery, New York. Top to bottom: Ruth Asawa (electoplated copper wire), Claire Falkenstein (copper and glass), Ibram Lassaw (bronze over galvanized wire). All works from the 1950s/60s; more details at the link. This art still interests for its contradictions: the Abstract Expressionist mythos stressed immediacy and being in the moment, yet to make these chaotic drawings in space required the time and craft of fabricating a permanent object. It's not just frozen chaos but patiently made chaos. All suggest an emerging crystalline order (or flocculent in the case of Falkenstein) in a field of energy. The Lassaw announces its geometry the most blatantly but the horizontal and vertical "universals" quiver unsteadily as if they are about to melt back into the void. Making it have four legs so it could sit on a tabletop might still need to be rethought--Lassaw belongs in the "dated but interesting" category.

IMDb commenter Paul Pensom does not like the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan (2005):

Man: "You know we're always saying we could use 50 million dollars?

Woman: "Yes."

Man: "Well I have a cunning plan."

Woman: "What's that then?"

Man: "First of all we need to find an aeronautics engineer working in a foreign country, with a child, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the layout of a particular long-haul plane."

Woman: "Why's that?"

Man: "Well then, you see, we murder her spouse, in such a way as it looks like an accident."

Woman: "What for?"

Man (exasperated): "Well then of course, we bribe the mortuary assistant at the hospital into letting us place explosives inside the casket."

Woman: "But why?"

Man: "I'm coming to that. Then we wait until the woman decides to return the the U.S."

Woman: "But what if she doesn't?"

Man: "She just will, okay? So anyway, when she decides to return home we find out what flight she's on. Hopefully she is not only placed on the type of plane of which she has encyclopedic knowledge, and flying with the airline of which you're a flight attendant, but also on the same flight as her dead husband's casket. Are you following?"

Woman: "I think so."

Man:"Good, we're nearly there. Then all we need to do is falsify the checking-in information to remove all record of her daughter, make sure she gets on the plane half an hour before everybody else, ensure there is a row of empty seats behind her and get me on the flight, sitting nearby."

Woman: "And then?"

Man (laughing): "Now this the cunning part. She takes the empty seats, allowing her daughter to sit in the aisle seat, then when she goes to sleep, all I have to do is steal a food trolley, stuff the daughter into it and hide her in the hold. Oh, and did I mention that we must ensure that nobody on the entire plane sees the daughter?"

Woman: "Isn't this getting a little farfetched?"

Man (angry): "What d'you mean? It's a great plan! All I have to do then is remove the child's boarding pass from wherever the mother is keeping it without waking her, assist her search for the missing child in the guise of an Air Marshal, convince the captain that the woman is mad and that the child died with her father (through a forged note from the mortician), and wait for the mother to escape from my custody.

Woman: "Escape, why?"

Man: "Because the casket can only be unlocked by her, so once she's unlocked it I can set the timer on the explosives. From there we're home and dry. I merely have to recapture her, convince the captain that she's actually not mad but a hijacker who wants 50 million dollars and give the Captain our account number, asking him to ensure the money is paid straight in. Oh, Then we land, everybody gets off the plane, I shoot the mother and blow up the daughter and nobody is any the wiser. We walk away with a cool 50 million. Simple eh?"

Pensom is right about all this but the genius of the movie is that it keeps rollicking along in spite of the absurdity of all these complications. The producers are banking on audiences hating air travel so much they will believe almost any bad thing associated with it.

Questioning the official 9/11 narrative ("19 men, armed only with boxcutters..." etc) will get you fired from the Obama administration, we all recently learned. And deservedly so. To suggest that those 19 foreign nationals evaded a superpower's intelligence-gathering by any means other than their own native cunning and guile, or that anyone in the US stood to profit from the 9/11 attacks, or that the subsequent investigation avoided key areas of inquiry, is the height of folly.

The "one lone nut" theory of the Kennedy assassination was upgraded for 9/11 to "19 lone nuts plus some people in caves in Asia." Accept it or be banished from political life in the US.

Update: And if you consider it a contradiction that the US fought (and continues to fight) the most expensive military campaigns since World War II in response to the boxcutter cave guys, that is just a sign of how deeply crazy and unworthy of a job in DC you are.

collage made in MSPaint; late Picabia reproduction found on the Internet

Per a Walter Pincus story in the Washington Post, "as the United States withdraws its combat forces from Iraq, the government is hiring more private guards to protect U.S. installations at a cost that could near $1 billion, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. "

For installations, read bases (which aren't permanent, of course). Also from that article:

The Central Command study found that of the armed private security personnel working in June, 623 were Americans, 1,029 were Iraqis and 11,580 were third-country nationals. Most of that group "were from countries such as Uganda and Kenya," according to the inspector general's report.

These aren't mercenaries but "contractors." The US is in Iraq not for the oil but to spread democracy.

some mine, some found, some remixes (credits)

Have continued the process of manually enlarging animated GIFs that rank and file browsers no longer size properly. Redid about 40 in all; it is now possible to page back through my old animation log (if you are feeling bored/insane) and not encounter any tastefully fuzzed out pixels. (This wasn't all pointless labor--I learned some things in the process.)

As explained here many times, there are two main types of images on the web, graphics and photography. When you scale up a photograph (with an html command to make it two times larger, say) you want it smooth, not full of jagged pixels. Graphics are different: if you have a blue square that's 100 x 100 pixels the browser can tell it to be 400 x 400 and the edges stay nice and sharp. No resampling or filtering computation is necessary--the blue just spreads out to a larger surface area and stops at the same clean line--very efficient, very ecological.

Up until this year, most browsers assumed the main content of a web page was graphics. Now, with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8, the assumption is that everything is a photo. So anything enlarged or zoomed by the browser will be "anti-aliased," or tastefully fuzzed out. This means all the formerly sharp graphics enlarged with html commands get treated like photos, i.e., the "vaseline on the lens" look. That totally blows the desired effect of some "internet art" conceits, which were to put it simply, creating mini-Mondrians with blown up, formerly invisible pixels interacting with whatever content already existed.

The real pain (as in throw up your hands and go do something else) will occur when the nerd authorities (with Adobe calling their shots) decide that GIFs are a silly old file type and browsers no longer need to read them.