On Thursday I visited Civic Hall, an office suite on Fifth Avenue that provides work space and WiFi for social activists. A friend rents space there ($250 per month). Civic Hall is funded by Google, Microsoft, and the dicey neoliberal outfit Omidyar Networks (as in eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, a would-be William Randolph Hearst of cyberspace). A skeptic might say Civic Hall is a form of digital greenwashing. "Sure we turn user data over to the government but look at us, we support activists!"
My friend suggested sitting in on a lunch workshop for Pictition, a start-up with an app that posts your photo when you sign a petition. Their example is Stop Elephant Slaughter -- who could argue with that? When you sign the petition, your phone snaps your pic and adds it to a big grid of friendly, concerned faces, from all walks of life, etc.
Most of the workshop attendees appeared to be professionals in Search Engine Optimization, User Experience, "social" and the like. One actual activist-minded person questioned the advisability of posting photos for say, a petition regarding battered spouses, where an enraged "ex" could use the photo as a stalking tool.
A developer of the app said "I think we need to separate questions of security from user experience -- we're here today to talk about UsEx."
At that point I chimed in with "you can't separate the two -- post-Snowden-revelations, people are concerned about where their facial data ends up, and this app assures its spread to a variety of political causes."
At this point one of the SEO types said "that's how your demographic feels but other demographics feel differently, so let's move on."
As the lunch was breaking up I meandered over to the table where she was sitting and said I found her use of "demographic" offensive and resented being pigeonholed with this meaningless word. She said "well, you said millennials and I was just saying there were other demographics." I replied that "I did not use the word 'millennials'" -- which is true, she just made that up.
Was too polite to say, on the subject of spreading your pic around the internet, there's the cautious demographic and the gullible-to-apathetic demographic.
tom moody
current and upcoming projects
Some notes on current/future art activities:
--A solo show in the project space at Honey Ramka gallery in Brooklyn (opening Nov 20 -- press release coming soon). It's called "Original PNGs" and it's all digital-based work. Am printing out 40 drawings from my Computers Club Drawing Society page, as well as some of the new work on the Linux PC I'm been posting. Also an animated GIF, that will be displayed on an Amazon Fire tablet (purchased on Ebay -- kind of a joke but it actually looks pretty good, display-wise). The reason for doing prints isn't merely "to create artificial scarcity" (as the new media folk love to say about galleries) -- viewing 40 drawings in a wall-sized grid has a certain impact you don't get scrolling through them online. I hope you can come see it.
--A one-month digital residency at Gazell.io, scheduled for March 2016. The residency series is a new project for the London gallery Gazelli Art House, and currently features the work of Laura Brothers. Other slated artists include Philip Colbert, Hyo Myoung Kim, Giovanna Olmos, Federico Solmi, Ben Tricklebank, Anthony Antonellis and Kari Altmann. I expect I'll be doing work similar to what's on my blog, at whatever state of evolution that's at in four months.
--In December I'll be giving a talk to a group at Bard on digital painting. More details when I have them, but it will be loosely based on these notes for an imaginary panel. Update: This has been bumped to February. Update 2: The students who invited me never got back to me, then they graduated.
--My artwork in The Wrong will be up for the next few months The Wrong is the second installment of a digital Biennale; the first was administered in Sao Paolo and I assume this one is, too. A group of curators are invited by the Biennale, who in turn invite artists. I have work in Utopia Internet Dystopia, curated by Valentina Fois.
