tom moody

meant to post this a while back - it's the cubase project window for "Electro Suite No. 2" - i kept making edits to the music so this is the final screenshot. This version of cubase isn't that old (4 years) but I like how low-res the timeline is - am sure it would be fancier but for music editing you really don't want your graphics eating up processing time...

Each of these YouTube-mounted vids re-presented on a white space gallery site consists of a few basic elements. MIDI tunes with reverb or other spatial enhancements, existing somewhere between Satie's "furniture music," Mark Mothersbaugh's "Music for Insomniacs," and pompous corporate training films, anchor a series of found internet photos edited together into quasi-narratives using cheesy pans, wipes, dissolves, and morphs -- the whole arsenal of inexpensive video effects. The editing isn't MTV-rapid but slow and deliberate. Often we're asked to look at the same thing over and over.

There's a scene in Hitchcock's Rear Window where James Stewart puts down his telephoto lens, stops spying on his neighbors for a minute and observes that life can be depressing (not an exact quote and possibly Grace Kelly says it). The internet encourages consensual voyeurism and it only gets depressing when the member of one clan (say, worried artists) spies on another (people who photograph their toddlers in clothes hampers). Lonergan crosses and re-crosses this divide, not in a completely malicious way, but he certainly looks longer than you or I might.

What turns spying on the lumpenproletariat into a brilliant exercise is the creation of false stories. What is the cup game played by a quartet of college sophomores that involves occasionally standing up and kicking something? (Is this a real game?) Did the internet begin with a map of the world made of ceiling tiles, arranged on the floor? How much practice photographing strawberries did it take before the shutterbug was ready for a big spread on a trade show floor?

Other videos direct our attention to details of photos no one else is paying attention to, such as the Ansel Adams poster behind another group of frolicking college boys. Occasionally the narratives stray into the political, such as the photo-collection of people in T-shirts with conspicuous major oil company logos doing some sort of "habitat for humanity" project. Amateur aspirations are consistently acknowledged, in the manner of Michael Smith's videos such as "World of Photography" (made with William Wegman) -- for example, the assortment of terrible photos of foreshortened rulers used to demonstrate "depth of field." Lonergan's well-written music consistently adds a mood of portentousness and false drama to the most tedious of these proceedings.

Highly recommended.

Update: More

A couple from Network Awesome:

New Order playing live in a New York club in 1981. Wasn't a fan of this band - until now. The set and the music lacks a center in the best way: instruments are picked up, played for a few very tight bars, and put down again. The songs change slots from guitar rock to synth pop with no fanfare. The bass is as close as we get to an anchor - but even that is played in the higher registers, like a guitar. Simon Reynolds had a great phrase for the rhythm: "drumming around the edge of a crater." The performance is intense but deadpan and anonymous.

Jerry Lewis, The Ladies Man. Filmed on an enormous dollhouse set by... the American Jacques Tati? Here we have similar klutzy physical comedy (on meth) in a highly artificial environment, without the contintental poise or taste. Confirmed bachelor Herbert H. Heebert takes a job as a "houseboy" in a ladies' residential mansion populated by va va voomy females. Many exquisite glass objects and antique vases are broken. Terrific, often surrealistic dance numbers with Jer twitching around in saddle shoes. This is the one where the butterfly collection flies out of the frame and then flies back again.

PBS* once again tackles "art on the internet" and introduces us to some movers and shakers (hat tip Paddy).

So much bad art, flying by so quickly.
Just a few dashed off thoughts. Thumbs down to:
--the slow turntable pan they do where all the interviewees stare meaningfully at the camera
--the editing out of 'uhs' and pauses that makes each speaker sound like an auctioneer (especially noticeable in the Kickstarter guy - hard sell much?)
--the constant emphasis on newness and "never seen before" in these programs

This one's not as annoying as they way they misrepresented GIFs. But the premise goes contrary to one creative type's experience of the Web (i.e., mine): which is, people find your work through searches and viral connections, so you don't have to have funding, gatekeepers, or special copyright schemes.
Perhaps now that Google is moving away from long tail content, the emphasis is shifting back to needing a Kickstarter to make something happen. Around here we don't want to have to resort to that guy -- he sounds like a one-man ad agency.
As for Lawrence Lessig's inclusion in the program, since when does copyright law expertise qualify anyone for art punditry? Only as the most cynical admission that law completely determines what's creatively permissible.

*Update: Have been referring to these Off Book programs as PBS shows. A commenter on Paddy Johnson's Google Doc, Tim Bavinka, notes that Off Book is wholly produced by a third party content company called Kornhaber Brown. It appears these are just ad agency-produced infomercials getting a ride on the PBS brand. (Kornhaber Brown also calls Carnegie Hall a "brand" - ugh, I feel like I need to take a shower.) Let's keep calling them PBS shows, though. Ultimately the network is responsible for this one-sided happy talk quasi-journalism.

Above is a revised version of Ryder Ripps' original "stop talking about GIFs" rant. When I first encountered Ripps a couple of years ago he was a big fan of GIFs; now he thinks talking about them too much will somehow endanger web animation as we know it.

This sudden concern was touched off by a rather bad PBS documentary short where 80% of the interviewees pronounced GIF as "jif" (among other problems). Ripps didn't go postal over the documentary, though. He believes major media always lies and misrepresents its subjects; presumably that's why he appeared on the same PBS program last year. What angers him is that other people are criticizing and fact-checking PBS's treatment of GIFs. Giving his logic every benefit of a doubt, because PBS did a poor job of explaining GIFs, correcting it just makes it worse, to the detriment of all other forms of web animation.

But what other web animation cultures should we be discussing? Macromedia Flash and the people who embrace it? The brave new world of iPad-based HTML5 animation? Subversive uses of badly compressed YouTubes? For the last few years we've been discussing GIFs as a low-entry-level, vernacular, "native" way to animate on the Web and it's been fun. Ripps even co-created a site (dump.fm) where talented GIF-makers flourish. It's not a "GIF site" but that's what you see a lot of when you logon (now by invitation-only).*

PBS emphasized recent attempts to clean up and dignify GIFs by calling them cinemagraphs. According to Ripps, we're not allowed to have an opinion on that because TV always lies. Thanks for your support -- go make a cinemagraph now.

*Update: Am told dump registration has re-opened.

Update 2: What we've been calling PBS is actually a producer of near-infomercials under contract to PBS. See later post. It's ultimately PBS' name on the product but worth mentioning in the context of a "media always lies" discussion. By "four walling" content like this it's possible they are lying in a new and different way!

Olia Lialina has also questioned the accuracy of PBS's Off Book documentary on animated GIFs:

The historical part in the beginning is a disaster. The first few seconds of the video already mention "the Web 1.0 of the 70's, 80's and 90's". Come on ... I mean you don't need to know web history and GIF history to make GIFs and to admire them, but if you put yourself in front of the camera to talk about "the birth of the medium" check at least some basic facts. There was no web in the 70's and the 80's. The web started in 1993. If you like you can also count from 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol. I never do, but in this context it would be at least catchy. This way you could say that animated GIFs and the WWW are of the same age. After all animated GIFs as we know them now started with version number 89a.

On what Ryder Ripps has called "some weird Google docs comment thread" (set up by Paddy Johnson to fact-check PBS), the person who talked about the "Web 1.0 of the '70s, '80s and '90s" in the Off Book program, Patrick Davison, says he mis-spoke.

Update: Responding on Facebook to Lialina's post, Ripps also says discussing GIFs is "retarded" (and he's not talking about the slow frame rate), likening it to painters arguing about "how fucking paint is made and how to pronounce gesso." We've been down this road, with Ripps insisting GIFs are "just another format for animation." Right, because you can put a YouTube on your blog and set it for infinite loop and it'll just boot right up the way you want it to, and it'll be easy for others to save to their drives, edit, and share!

Update 2: My original paraphrase of Ripps' gesso quip was inaccurate so I changed the language to his exact words. I'm not a Facebook member or I'd link to his comments on Lialina's article so you could read them yourselves. The reason we're talking about a file format is because PBS did a show on a file format. Ripps, from his position on the sidelines, thinks we should be talking on the Google doc about "the people or culture behind" web animation. I'm sorry if my comments on the doc don't sufficiently recapitulate 10 years of blog writing - I thought I made a few good points.

Update 3: Michael Manning sent a link [removed, see below], thanks - if you're logged in to Facebook you should be able to read this. I got it all secondhand, via screenshot.

Update 4: Instead of a link to Facebook, here is the screenshot Ripps asked to have sent to me, where he also expresses surprise that Olia Lialina would expect PBS (a network on which he has appeared) to be "honest or accurate or give a shit."

Update 5: PBS or PBS contractor.

Above is a fairly typical example of "cinemagraphs," or what Paddy Johnson has called "hair GIFs," due to their ubiquitous strands of blowing hair. A fashion model with tens of thousands of tumblr followrs and an Atlantic article last year brought this uber-kitschy style to a large Web audience, giving the lie to claims by Ryder Ripps, Brad Troemel and others that democratic "liking" has anything to do with art. People also "like" Thomas Kinkade and McDonald's hamburgers.

We're talking about this now because PBS uncritically promoted this trend, actually just a couple of designer teams working in the fashion world, in a recent documentary short.* One of the teams, Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg (who made the image above), make loud claims for their work as some kind of new art form, or advanced or enhanced photography. It's not new if you've ever seen a stereogram, hologram, or lenticular postcard, and in terms of art theory it's pretty retrograde.

A famous essay from the '70s by Laura Mulvey explained how the masculine gaze drives moviemaking: the story is about a man and some dilemma he solves, the woman is there to give his plight added sympathy, but the problem is, when she is on camera for any length of time, the action stops dead because we just want to stare at her.

Laura Mulvey, from "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975 [PDF]

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.

This problem was solved, Mulvey suggests, by having the woman be a dancer or showgirl so you're supposed to be staring at her. Or to make a "buddy film" where another man provides the sympathy factor.

Hair GIFs reverse the problem described by Mulvey but don't do much in the way of anti-objectifying. Instead of a gaze magnet (icon) interrupting the flow of cinema we have a cinematic element disrupting the icon. The result isn't so much subversive as unintentionally comedic. The mood is blown with every robotic swing of a forelock.

*Update: PBS or PBS contractor.

Paddy Johnson has a post on PBS's rather awful, inaccurate, commercially-oriented documentary short on animated GIFs. She has made a Google document of the show's transcript where people can pick their bones with the content on a line by line basis.

Most people interviewed on the show have a business interest in GIFs, either through involvement with a social media site ("you can use GIFs to enhance your persona!") or in their day jobs in fashion and/or photography. Nothing inherently wrong with that but it explains much of the "new art form/unexplored country" rhetoric you hear over and over -- that's pure bizspeak. One interviewee has some academic affiliation and says all the wonky historical stuff (interestingly, he's the only one who doesn't call them "jifs"). His wonkery is misleading for reasons being explored in the Google doc. I've added a couple of comments to that doc and will do a post later summarizing some of the errors and wrong impressions created by PBS on the topic of GIFs.

Also, if I can find any fashion GIFs that load reasonably quickly, will try to do an analysis of the claims that they are art. On PBS they blow by very quickly, making it difficult to test what at least one interviewee says about watching GIFs repeatedly and finding new meanings in them.

Earlier post on this.

Update: PBS or PBS contractor.

Am not using twitter much for what one departing Google exec calls "social" (as in "Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+" and his daughter's 2.0-savvy formulation "social is people* and the people are on Facebook").

Instead twitter is for important crap like tracking subway graffiti. The above is a recreation of a Florida tourism poster in the 49th Street N/Q/R station, which has been replaced twice in the last few weeks. Above is how I first saw it, with the handwritten message "Dolphin is not smiling - it's just a muscle crease, fool" and the thought balloon "Get me home!" It was completely replaced, and the next time I saw it the model's tooth was re-blacked and the thought balloon said "Set me free!" (I think). A fresh poster is up now with none of this graffiti -- looking forward to my next visit to the stop.

*I thought that was Soylent Green

A.A. Attanasio, Wyvern. Intense, violent, mystical re-imagining of the pirate tale. A half-white, half-native man raised in the Borneo jungles and trained as a shaman gradually sheds his animist, Castaneda-psychedelic belief systems as he moves "up" through stages of Dutch/English/American society: first as pirate, then as husband of a renegade English noblewoman, and finally as Gentleman merchant in colonial Brooklyn. Bloody, exciting, unpredictable, ultimately somewhat narcissistic novel with a continual focus on masculinist coming of age tropes. Our hero becomes the mercantilist power ideal he despises but this is treated as inevitable, hard-won growth rather than a disappointment. Attanasio's tripped-out, poetic writing enchants through every level of the adventure.

Four by Charles Stross:
In Accelerando's and Glasshouse's post-human milieu, materials and consciousnesses are uploaded and shunted around the galaxy by means of A-gates and T-gates (I forget which is which). Glasshouse imagines a group of re-embodied souls participating in a voluntary Psych experiment modeled on 1950s suburbia inside a hollowed-out asteroid cut off from the rest of society. Or perhaps it's a captive breeding program run by a repressed faction that once thrived during an earlier, Balkanized phase of the cosmos-spanning Net...
The Atrocity Archives. Some interesting ideas of combining technology and magic but Lovecraft and breezy do not mix well.
Rule 34. The best of the four, a more or less pure cyber-thriller with scheming Turing-complete beings who may have more control than anyone knows.

Richard Stark's last three novels, episodes in a single narrative. In Nobody Runs Forever, amoral tough-guy hero Parker and two other hoods rob a string of armored cars using anti-tank weapons. The gang's exit doesn't go as planned so the men hide the money and separate. Ask the Parrot, one of Stark's most gripping novels, concerns the detour Parker takes as he holes up in a nearby town and plays mind games with the locals in order to survive -- and still has time to commit a second robbery. In Dirty Money, the gang returns to the scene of the original heist to claim the cash; they're now at cross-purposes after one is arrested spending some of the bills (which turn out to be numbered), and escapes, shooting a guard. The writing is terse and economical but Stark has a strong sense of place: the rural and post-industrial locations of Massachusetts and upstate NY seem vivid for only being rendered with a few strokes.

Mark Mellon
Roman Hell. Horror novel set in 1st Century Rome. Mellon's trademark unsympathetic characters, including a weaselly emperor Domitian and a down-and-out poet who attempts to curry his favor, become snared in a plot involving vicious and powerful witches. Story and characters are secondary to a historically researched Rome that is almost hallucinatory in its detail: sounds, smells, architecture, and customs contribute to a mood of mounting strangeness. The alien-ness of the setting and uncertain morality of the distant past keep the reader on edge.
Napoleon Concerto: A Novel in Three Movements. More dazzling, incantatory detail, this time concerning a naval plot to conquer England by an Irish patriot working for Napoleon and aided by genius steampunk-transplant Robert Fulton. The English are such asses that you actually want Napoleon, richly depicted in the novel as strutting, order-barking maniac, to clean their clocks.

Two by Jeff Noon
Might have been blown away by Vurt if I read it in my teens but its world of club kids racing around in a van in post-apocalyptic Manchester, with bureaucratic authority almost completely absent, just seems unlikely. There are token cops but they are mostly buffoons who disappear for long stretches as the kids trip out on hallucinatory feathers and navigate various parallel universes. Nymphomation, a prequel written later, at least has recognizable antagonists and a plot structure that doesn't entirely involve questing in videogame-like worlds. Noon's language play scintillates in both books.

Minor edits.