tom moody

Couple of highlights from this interview with Alan N. Shapiro, in connection with an upcoming Geert Lovink-organized conference on the topic of Wikipedia:

[L]ike a lot of people, I think that Wikipedia could be improved. Community consensus about what constitutes legitimate-established knowledge is important, but so are the original insights of the individual scholar who has worked more deeply and insightfully on a particular subject than anyone else. A more sophisticated model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed. This won't be easy. Right now consensus is tending to suppress the understanding of the really advanced scholar. Many Wikipedia articles are reproducing accepted clichés. This is related also to the tendency to make a fetish of information as opposed to knowledge. What is mere information and what is real knowledge? To get beyond the clichés, we need something like a renewed Marxist ideology critique. Gustave Flaubert did this very well about 140 years ago in his "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas." We don't need to compile a new "Dictionary of Accepted Ideas," because Wikipedia, considering one major element of its complex cultural constellation, already is such a dictionary.

And:

I have never understood why unpaid work of any kind, from housework to programming, could be regarded by anyone as utopian. Money is a reality, it's based on a rational system, albeit an economic system that needs to be radically improved. Artists, creators, intellectuals, nurses, dancers, activists, under-employed academics and scientists, down-and-outers, we all need to get paid. Let's focus our efforts on figuring out how to fight for our rights to prosperity, not accept poverty. Live long and prosper, Spock said. To voluntarily work without pay is a system of self-exploitation and self-surveillance. I love the book The Simulation of Surveillance by William Bogard. We need to go beyond Foucault-, Orwell-, and Huxley-inspired models of how contemporary quasi-totalitarian systems of social control work. Individual freedom right now is in big trouble. American hyper-reality, hyper-work, hyper-consumerism, hyper-communication, and hyper-eating today strike me in so many aspects as being systems of mutual- and self-surveillance. Ask anyone in authority or performing any official job anywhere in America any question, and you will always get a no before you get a yes. The current system of ubiquitous cell phones is also a system of mutual- and self-surveillance. My friends, family, and co-workers want me to permanently account for myself. Where am I, what am I doing, and what am I thinking? And I'm asking myself the same disciplinary questions. We don't need Big Brother anymore, since we are all keeping tabs on ourselves and each other.

Shapiro has been on a roll lately, especially in Europe. I first encountered him through his theoretical essays that "read Star Trek against Star Trek" (close comparison of individual episodes against the tenets of the Star Trek Industry), which stood out from the Ctheory context where they originally appeared. Odd that he only did two essays for them--possibly because Star Trek wasn't as "cool" for academics as Blade Runner, even though it has arguably far greater impact on the culture, since it is watched and enjoyed by the engineers and techies who make all our stuff. (That is a point Shapiro explored in his book, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, which is gradually building a rep in both the science fiction and Baudrillard studies communities.)

Shapiro is using Wikipedia subversively: his "user page" is a bio as detailed and useful as a "front end" Wikipedia page.

Update: Corrected spelling of Ctheory (took out hyphen).

BBC documentary about the reclusive creator of Spider-Man (oops, co-creator) and Doctor Strange.
7-part YouTube starts here.
Ditko's '70s creation "Mr. A" (an Ayn Randian vigilante) was the inspiration for Alan Moore's Rorschach (never knew that--but wow). Moore is interviewed extensively in the documentary and shares a great story and poem about Mr. A.

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 Lonergan 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.)