and/or on YTMND

More reminiscing about And/Or Gallery:

They also did a show putting YTMND (what we would now call a meme site) into a gallery setting. There has been writing praising sites like YTMND and 4Chan for their participatory democracy art model, which is kind of BS because there is no reversibility: to these sites the art world is just a bunch of [insert gay slur]. The YTMND forum thread about the And/Or show pretty much proved this. (Hat tip to RA.)

The best reason for people with MFAs to appreciate sites like YTMND is the same reason everyone else appreciates them: because they're funny. Also there is art in the way pages are put together and a kind of shared meta-critical attitude about the Web and the world. But you can keep your Nicolas Bourriaud references: it's so colonial and Margaret Mead to talk about sites that way, and the natives ain't having it. Guthrie Lonergan's text on the And/Or page makes the case well (also published as text-to-speech on YTMND - am sure they hated it).

and/or gallery, 2006

And/Or Gallery, currently on hiatus, put some images up of the show I did with them in January 2006, a two-person exhibit with Saskia Jorda.
This was an early-ish net-in-the-gallery experiment in the sense that co-gallerist Paul Slocum took screenshots of GIFs off my blog, burned them to DVD as video files, and showed them on old TVs/monitors.
Another piece consisted of GIF frames printed out.
I didn't see the show but I like the remote collaboration aspect (based on trusting what Paul was going to do) and the DVD/CRT method of showing GIFs was something I continued to work with after the show.
Other work wasn't net-based but all of it involved some lo-tech use of the computer: MSPaint drawings, collages of printed-out molecule designs (taped together or glued onto product packaging). Also a music video.