"Glitch" show in Dallas

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A show I have work in, in Dallas, titled "Glitch," got a bad review!

Writing in Glasstire, Lucia Simek says:

Centraltrak just mounted a show curated by John Pomara and Dean Terry called Glitch, featuring work that explores the malfunctions of digital media and what the terrain of those accidents looks like. The gallery is full of monitors and cords (lots of them) and projected images of moving pixelation, gradient color fields, or figures that blend and jump around the screen trippily. Headphones hooked to audio at each piece almost always coughed out scratchy, pulled-cord dying computer squelches, like emphysemic robots. I’m not sure what was captured malfunction in these pieces (actual computer errors), or manufactured malfunction (artist made errors). Maybe that was the point? [Shrug]

The whole show felt like it would have been compelling maybe ten years ago, maybe twelve, but certainly, whatever the premise of the show, seizure inducing computer images of scan codes, avatars and swirly digipainting just aren’t visually fresh. Even a complete non-techie like me is dulled to digital vocabularies like the ones used here: trippy, hallucinatory, color-washed screens recall screen savers c. ’97. And anyway, my brain was completely fried after the third set of headphones spewed out unimaginative, digital-jabberwocky hiccups. Can’t sick computers speak more than one language?

I left the gallery feeling how you can after a blockbuster Impressionism show full of pictures we’ve seen so often we can’t see them anymore: in a stupor, hankering for something to wake me up.

But, Lucia, trippy, hallucinatory, color-washed screens recalling screen savers c. ’97 are good! Fortunately the accompanying photos somewhat belie the reviewer's boredom.

Other participating artists include Jon Cates, Paul B. Davis, Kyle Kondas, LoVid, Shane Mecklenburger, Vjanomolee, and Jenny Vogel.

Update: the URL to the exhibition page changed; link revised.

panel discussion worth watching

Worth watching instead of, say, a movie: 1 hour, 48 min panel discussion about such topics as:

amazon's cave-in to Joe Lieberman over server space for a media outlet
whether you-know-what is a media outlet
first amendment protections applied to "company towns"
whether/when/where social media sites will have a "special room" for govt. perusal of data
the gov't "dropped in" on facebook one day
how the stasi could have used SocMed's personal data to create its "nation of informers"
US: tunisia or GDR?
people outside US more horrified by amazon's treachery than US residents
journalist shield law is pipe dream because no agreement on what journalist is, post-print

Panelists:Daniel Ellsberg, Clay Shirky, Neville Roy Singham, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Zittrain
Moderator: Paul Jay

vinyl record turntables

anniversary

smerkufd

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top: "Strictly a limited edition model, of which only ten units will be manufactured."

bottom: "This project is designed by RD Silver, a designer who has the guts to take away everything but the guts."

via

Vinyl is dead; long live vinyl fetishism.

alpha world tour and the new VR-slash-3D

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Emailing a friend about the "new VR/3D" stuff rearing its head in net art circles:

I like some of it as raw material but none of the art sites you mentioned. "Future kitsch" is exactly right but is that how it's being treated? Is the uncanny valley a problem or just something we live with? Just because someone made a "phat" effect does that mean it needs to be used?

I like seeing that stuff on Dump because the attitude is no one really gives a crap about it. When people put it on overdesigned sites and call it their art I have a problem with it. I even think I have more respect for "generative" artists because they are hunkered down in a genre doing experiments. Whereas something like Paintfx.biz* hasn't figured out its stance yet. Pretty sure at least one of the members is embarrassed by the "popping huge boners over juicy gestural marks" rhetoric but won't publicly distance himself from it.

A few months ago Duncan Alexander signed into Active Worlds, a proto-Second Life from the '90s and took a tour. This is a virtual kitsch-o-rama but no user of the site then or now thinks of it as such. Maybe we need to have a conversation about the old future kitsch before getting deeply into the new. (Back in the '90s Miltos Manetas was pushing Active Worlds as a place to have virtual art commerce and such, with "name" galleries buying cyber-real estate. This same paradigm was recycled for Second Life with zero historical memory.)

See also abstract illusionism then and now.

posthuman nightmare image above posted to dump.fm by mat3i

dump links not viewable on Internet Explorer

*Am still on the fence about Paintfx.biz. Seems like the wrong way to go but would welcome either (a) a self-serving Brad Troemel-like pseudo-history explaining that all of art was leading up to what they're doing or (b) an explanation that they actually dislike both abstract expressionism and software that bulks up brushstrokes into gelatinous 3D blobs. Are they like Depthcore? Why not?