Day: October 18, 2007

Another obscure Gameboy CD discussed at Mutant Sounds:

Exactly what the band name suggests and part of a host of similarly themed Gameboy projects that came on the scene around the same time (the Nanoloop compilation CD, Matt Wand's Public.exe 10" and the Klangstabil "Gioco Bambino" CD I posted a while back to name a few), this troupe feed numerous Nintendo gameboys through a nanoloop editor then tweak the results through delays and reverbs, though to their credit, the migraine-in-an-arcade aggression and mulchy grittiness of their approach causes this to successfully stand apart in tone from the other cited projects. Issued in a blink-and-you-missed-it edition of 55 copies on the Mik Musik imprint (home to the Molr Drammaz and Pathman CDR's I've posted previously), this is a real winner for those inclined to enjoy 8-bit fuckery of this sort.

This is taking Gameboy music into the industrial, Reichian* realm. It feels a bit similar to what I tried to do with DJ-mixing (cross fading) two 8 Bit Construction Set records a while back, but denser and doomier (and more original).

*Steve, not Wilhelm.

I have been invited to be a panelist for the 2007 NAMAC Conference in Austin, Texas, this Saturday, October 20, at the Sheraton Austin (701 East 11th Street, 1:45 pm - 3:15 pm). NAMAC (National Alliance for Media, Arts and Culture) is a nonprofit support and advocacy association for independent film, video, audio and digital arts. Here's a list of panels, including one with Richard Linklater; the one I'm on is "From the White Cube and the Silver Screen to the Black Hole and the Color Field: Moving Around and Beyond the Institution," and my fellow panelists are Laurence Miller, co-director of Austin's Fluent-Collaborative art space, Brian Fridge, Texas-based artist, and Kristina Newman-Scott, visual arts director of Real Art Ways in Hartford CT.

My thoughts on the panel (previously communicated to organizers and/or panelists):

--Regarding the title, I asked the organizers how they meant "color field," since that is a type of painting that is actually the epitome of "white cube" art, encompassing Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and other late Clement Greenberg-championed artists. The organizers said they meant something beyond that and into some some sort of amorphous space where new work exists free from museum constraints.

--Nevertheless, I have issues with the implied directional arrow in the panel's title. The white cube may have transitioned to the "black hole" (of cyberspace? media art?) but unlike transportees to the starship Enterprise, the white cubers are still extant and doing their thing down on the planet's surface. In fact, most cubers don't believe there's a ship up there. They are thriving in a market based largely on medieval tech (painting).

--What I'm interested in as an artist and blogger (to continue the lame Transporter metaphor) is to beam back and forth between the two worlds and gradually figure out "the rules" of what works best in the respective environments. Net art has mostly failed in the gallery setting, and the gallery experience translated by means of text, jpegs, and/or flash files communicates imperfectly online. What works across this barrier (in either direction)? Why?