tom moody

Have revised my artwork archive so it's a little more up to date. Style-wise it's still a plain old HTML page but have added some new thumbnails. Like most artists' archives these days it's a collection of bottomless labyrinths but at least the "portal" sort of says where the work is coming from. Lo-fi, old paint programs, cartoony, GIFs, abstraction, photorealist portraits, noise--a true unified vision. [ironic smiley]
But, no tactical media, no back stories, no XYZ narratives, it's mostly WYSIWYG art.

Hard up for new material so here are recycled comments I've been making on Paddy Johnson's blog.

On the topic of yet another announcement of "artist-technologist pairings" at a major museum:

When discussing formulaic "XYZ art" on my old blog (for example, at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/41330/), the topic came up of "artist and technologist teams." In the thread I linked to spd said: "media art is rife with collaborative work (often it’s a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff)" and "while i’m actually a fan of people working together, it seems underacknowledged so far and i wonder if the collaborative process of new media privileges talking a project through over actually doing stuff." And I replied: "I…hadn’t thought about the issue of artist-tech person teams having any effect on content. It kind of makes sense–-they have to talk to each other and some simplified middle ground (and thus middle of the road) art emerges out of that dialogue."

(spd chimed in on the same thread to add some additional thoughts to his 2.5 year old statement.)

In response to Johnson's review of two Omer Fast films:

We can forgive [Fast's] emptiness and nihilism if it makes us laugh: Take a Deep Breath, at least, keeps the chuckles coming. In the midst of all the feints, false starts, gore, and revelations of artificiality Fast has cast himself as an over-intellectualizing bumbler a la Albert Brooks, agonizing about the script and acting choices while the per diem clock is running; trusting his cell phone to an actor he’s just fired; declaiming to the cops about the integrity of the film’s "tableaux vivants" (soon undercut by the revelation that he asked the actress to take her shirt off–-supposedly to make the blast from the suicide bomber "more authentic"). Several of the crew members also have laugh lines in the form of a stream of inappropriate and politically incorrect comments. From the press release, which painted the project as another earnest investigation of contested, semiotic reality, I wasn’t prepared for it to be such a yockfest, goofing non-stop on its own premises. The other film at Postmasters was pretty much a downer, however, as you describe.

The following was originally posted as a comment to the somewhat fruitless Net Art 1.0 vs Net Art 2.0 discussion at Rhizome.org. The "old guard" Internet art crowd has been characterizing the art on the newer group blogs such as Nasty Nets as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog" and asking for more explanation of why this was art, or Internet art, while at the same time saying that NN was just a later version of stuff they'd been doing for years. You can't really take both positions. The following stabs at the issue by examining a specific post from Nasty Nets on April 1. It's been rewritten slightly.

Petra Cortright had this post by Javier Morales onscreen for a while during the recent Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, and I think it's brilliant. Using very simple means (screenshots of Google search results and some html scrolling), it tackles sexual content in a very distanced, fetishistic way--the words "penis" and "vagina," in boldface, slowly move towards and away from each other in a configuration that is both a mirror and conflict. It is a snapshot of current culture: some earnest websites such as democraticunderground.com, cybersleuths, and cvcorner are captured only because they use the word penis or vagina and google finds them. There are accompanying thumbnail images that seem to have no connection to the words underneath them--did google do this or the artist? Plus snippets of text, moving just slowly enough to be read: "or is the penis a very large clit?" "the craze for designer vaginas" that somehow have to be accounted for in the overall clash of contexts. And it's nice to look at, with its suprematist squares collapsing into each other.

This was not submitted to Rhizome for institutional sanction as far as I know. It existed "out there" with 4Chan and all the other mashup sites. It's true that Rhizome gave approving coverage to Nasty Nets but there is no link on NN to Rhizome or any other signifier that it exists in an approved stream of processing "art" content.

Perhaps you hate this piece but I don't think you can reduce it to "ironically posting links to existing media with your friends on a group blog." Perhaps you like it but I don't think you can claim it is what Net Artists have always done since the means (blogs, Google caches exploding with content) didn't exist in the early days of the web.

I personally believe this is a new taxonomic class to be evaluated. The fact of it being on a blog, a blog that blends into the Internet "street," existing "outside" the world of grants for technological innovation, where the surrounding posts may very well be found material (but you have to figure it out), the fact of it using Google to generate a snapshot of the present moment, using search features (images, etc) that were not commonly available in 1999, while maintaining old school simplicity, means it is different, and I think better. More complicated, more real than XYZ tech art where algorithm Y converts raw material X into social solution Z. Morales can't be blamed if some Rhizome staffers think what he is doing is important enough to rate a new version.

But regardless of whether I'm right about it being different, you can't both claim it and repudiate it.

In response to this one of the commenters said, in effect, "yeah we already did that" but continues to characterize the piece as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog." I officially give up.

Joel Holmberg's Rhizome Commission proposal: Live Streaming Video of Some Dude's Mac Screensaver (thx, cosmic)

This is funny, underdetermined, and an example of XYZ art where X becomes X using no fancy algorithm whatsoever and does not purport to save the world through art. Holmberg says of the nascent work: "Like many of my previous works LSVoSDMS uses the computer environment as a generative system while conflating parody and sincere appreciation."

Petra Cortright, "Horizon Trackx"

In this rather stunning grid of Quicktimes from a larger project (above is a cropped screenshot of the page), artifacts from a rotating plane are enlarged, cropped, and presented side by side in multiple views, dissolving into randomness while suggesting larger things going on. Abstraction's ability to create a screen for projection and imagination makes it an exciting place to be working, as opposed to all the algorithms-with-obligatory-"political"-backstory that comprise so much XYZ new media art. It is not "formal"--one seriously doubts Cortright cares about practical Bauhaus laws of pictorial organization as ends in themselves; those are problems for the designers of the programs she uses. In fairness, the Quicktimes above occur within in a larger project that explores the dismantling and layering of built space(s), but the "big picture" is equally tantalizing and puzzling. The index for the entire piece is here.

Cortright's work echoes Cory Arcangel's "Data Diaries" project (screenshot above), and the flow of pages feels diaristic, but in Arcangel's case the flickering, seductive grids sprang from a paradoxically rational, deductive method--tricking Quicktime into reading a home computer's numeric (alphanumeric?) memory as images. Cortright's work is a more deliberately expressive and conscious page sequence, with each causal transformation yielding some new spatial contortion. Both bodies of work have the feeling of spelunking inner machine space and discovering a boundless world.

Another variant on the "pulsating pixel grid" is David Galbraith's work at Diapason (detail above scanned from ink jet print). Haven't seen it in person yet but it sounds intriguing. Like Arcangel's piece, which whirred and screeched like a CD-scratched fax machine, it has an audio component, in this case lock grooves triggered by the pixels:

lgOpre (luh - GOP - ruh)* is an audiovisual installation of multichannel sound and projected digital animation created with real-time software that links vintage grid pattern algorithms with vinyl record lock-groove samples. The software behind lgOpre, written by the artist, uses customized abstract image generation routines (c.1970), appropriated color schemes, and self-similar number patterns to create an animation that is also a visual controller for a modular digital sound studio. Each of the 34 grid pattern building blocks used for lgOpre is mapped to its own set of processed and unmodified lock-groove samples. The color of the underlying grid is used to select which sound will play as the basic grids from each animation frame are visually highlighted in turn for a determinate duration before advancing to the next frame. Aleatoric color scheme variants introduce a degree of chance to the sound-image mapping.
Compositionally, lgOpre first introduces each visual building block as a full-screen matrix using black and white, grayscale or a few saturated colors to create monochromes or relatively simple patterns accompanied by solo sound samples. The screen splits in half horizontally, then vertically, producing four quadrants with increasing pattern complexity. New color schemes and faster sequencing within a single animation frame trigger the look of blocky color video games or visualized computer core dumps and densely layered multichannel sound.

*locked groove Open research.

Update: Another treatment of this theme comes from the perspective of appropriating pop culture and/or pseudoscience: Robert Wodzinski's animated gif made from 100 found color therapy swatches.

Update 2: pierre has a post about generating pixel grids [update: dead link], coming from a set theory perspective; he sees it as a diy project in computation rather than as an art project, per se, although the resulting patterns are nice to look at and certainly have some connections to gridmeisters John Simon and Manfred Mohr.

Blog post from MTAA:

On Friday April 11, 2008 as part of its monthly curatorial project, art collective MTAA premiered "The Surrogates," a performance art piece exploring the nature of perceived identity and representation, credited to European-based art collective 0100101110101101.ORG (in absentia).

Presented at MTAA's OTO art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the two-hour piece began at 7 p.m. with an open bar and velvet rope welcoming attendees in the hallway.

Inside the OTO space proper, two rows of two chairs (numbered 1-4) faced a low stage featuring a 4'x6' projection screen (center) and a small television monitor (stage right). Attendees entered the darkened room four at a time, their assigned seats facing a slightly delayed projection of themselves. The monitor revealed hallway activity in real time.

The attendees (now participants) were given no explanation of the piece, though they were invited do as they pleased within the space and to leave at their leisure. Re-entry was not permitted however, and those exiting the piece were immediately replaced by those next behind the velvet rope.

"The Surrogates" reaches its 180-degree apex via this text. Please note that while the Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG.) are credited as the authors of this seminal performance, MTAA designed, built and executed this work in its entirety.

Similar idea done in Dallas, early 90s:

Young artists fresh from school, let's call them the XYZ Collective, invite all their classmates and a large swath of the general public to a new, then-hot art space called the Hickory Street Annex. They show a room full of paintings, hung salon style. At the suggestion of area dealer Chris Byrne, they have "mediated" the show by installing spy cameras in some of the paintings.

After looking at the paintings and attending what seems to be a normal opening, viewers enter a second room of the exhibit through a black velvet curtain. In that room is a video projection of the people in the first room, viewing the paintings and chitchatting. The viewpoint rotates from one spycam to another, like a convenience store security camera.

Viewers were allowed to go back and forth between the rooms, so the dynamic was this:

Someone would enter the second room, see what was going on, and go back into the first room to tell other people. People in the second room could watch people in the first room being "wised up" to the trick, then peering *much* more closely at the paintings. Because the show drew a large crowd and there was a constant influx of new people through the door, at a given time only about half the people in the room knew they were participating in a social experiment.

To make it work, the artists had to be willing to use their own paintings as fodder, or props, since the real subject matter of the show was people gazing at other people on TV (half of whom were gazing back without seeing their observers).

A late thought to the thread over at Paddy's about surf clubs and the Great Internet Sleepover:

Something I said above I'd like to explain further:

"I should clarify that the context of Marisa’s and my exchange was a question on my blog about collaboration. Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split. And I was questioning whether, in the tech art arena, that made art more bland because both team members had to understand it well enough to explain it to others."

The second sentence should probably read "Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split, say, between an artist and an engineer."

The context was XYZ art. Someone noted that a lot of this bland, by-the-numbers tech art was the fruit of teams, which were "often...a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff." In reply I was conjecturing that in order to work together, the engineer had to dumb down the hardware or software theory to explain it to the artist and the artist had to dumb down the art theory to explain it to the engineer. The product they announced to the world was then doubly dumbed-down, hence XYZ art.

This would never happen with the surf blogs because it's not that type of collaboration. The surfers either (i) act as their own engineers or (ii) proudly have no skilz whatsover except roaming the internet and mashing up its by-products using off-the-shelf software.

(This comment reworded slightly from when I submitted it at Paddy's.)