tom moody

my grisaille remix of GIF posted to dump.fm by j1p2m3

Update: This is supposed to jerky, as in "spacetime discontinuum," but noisia offers an alternate, smooth version.

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.

Jane Hamsher has the lowdown on President Obama's so-called Fiscal Commission, a group of mostly wealthy conservatives that has been meeting in secret to draft ways to screw you out of the Social Security benefits you've been taxed for your whole life. It's popularly known as the Catfood Commission because that's what you'll be living on in your old age if this group's recommendations become law.

Commission Co-Chairman Alan Simpson said this:

We’re trying to take care of the lesser people in society and do that in a way without getting into all the flash words you love [to] dig up, like cutting Social Security, which is bullshit. We’re not cutting anything, we’re trying to make it solvent.

(emphasis added)

At least one lesser person would like to tell the entitled Simpson what he can take care of, but would settle for seeing the commission disbanded, as Hamsher recommends. Thanks again, Pres. Hopey McChangelot.

PS The charming Simpson also said:

"And yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"

This is the Co-Chairman of Obama's commission speaking. Congressional leaders are already saying they'll vote for whatever this blowhard recommends.

Update: How solvent is Social Security? Very.

left: Duncan Hannah painting jpeg; right: GIF found/dumped by j1p2m3
pair originally posted to dump.fm

Made/posted this tune a couple of years ago:

"Love Reconstituted" [6.3 MB .mp3]

It's kind of an "atmospheric techno" bit with analog synth burbles and a "rave hit" ending consisting of some early '90s house piano stabs. Those were reconstructed more or less note by note from this nutty remix somebody did of the pop tune at the bottom of this post (sound quality is dicey because it was cassette-taped from a radio mix show in '92):

"Love in Motion (Unknown Mix)" [7 MB .mp3]

As you can hear, it consists of "vocal science" made from clips of the diva's voice over minimal banging piano chords. I've always really liked the energy and simplicity of it. And thanks to the miracle of YouTube (the poor man's iTunes), I recently found the "original" hit that mix was taken from, Bizarre Inc.'s "Love in Motion." It's pretty lightweight (unlike moi) but not unenjoyable:

"Love in Motion" [YouTube]

unknown woman posted by wildnothing (dumpbot); wheel posted by ryder; i did the combo

Guthrie Lonergan's artwork MySpace Intro Playlist (briefly summarized here) isn't original by any means. It was done in the early '60s as mail art.

Carla Sugarman intercepted a postal sack with letters to an advice column. They were meant to be public (as published correspondence in a newspaper) but Sugarman republished them in "Funny Mail," a widely read general circulation magazine of the day. The letters weren't just retyped but were photographed and reproduced as four-color offset images, with the addresses of the senders below the letters.

Then Sugarman made a mimeograph of the article in "Funny Mail" and mailed it to 300 people on her mail art mailing list. They mailed it to 300 other mail artists. Eventually the entire project was documented by John Held, Jr. and became a canonical mail art work.

Notoriety for the piece occurred in the non-mail art world after several senders of the original letters sued Sugarman, eventually settling for a large undisclosed sum. "Funny Mail" was also joined in the case and ceased publication shortly afterward.

satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...satire...

i forgot who posted the "broken razor" icon (it was smaller); frankhats posted the "wave" GIF; i did the combo

A couple of people who police the Rhizome.org comment threads for "correct thinking" love to construct historic timelines for every current development. We can learn from the precedents and mistakes of art history, we are told, therefore these lineages enhance our understanding of work.
But honestly, what kind of precedent (net art or non-net art) exists for this:

pre-institutional recognition
Artist "collects" his favorite MySpace intros (videos people made in the mid-'00s welcoming people to their page), with an eye to: the amateurish, the banal, the pathetic, the cultural "other."
Artist posts the collection to YouTube as a playlist, so that the videos are viewed by a different audience than the original, intended audience (YouTube, where people go to watch music videos and funny slice-of-life videos, and this all happened before the Google acquisition when it was a relatively new video hosting service).

institutionalizing the collection
The slender act of collecting and shifting the context strikes some people as "art-like," so the YouTube playlist is written about and linked to by institutions as "art."
A video "version" of the work is created for museums without any links to MySpace or YouTube.

An artist who wrote about the work pre-institutional phase and the curator who presented it institutionally do not agree on the scope, nature or parameters of the work. A disinterested critic offered yet a third interpretation.
So where exactly are art historical precedents to be applied? What was even remotely like MySpace and YouTube before MySpace and YouTube?

Next: What MySpace Intro Playlist would look like if it were mail art. (Hint: strained comparison)

gifs found and dump.fm-ed by maxwell (left) and illalli (right); combo by maxwell