tom moody

Side salad for internet beef

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lettuce1 beef lettuce1

Strange times for animated GIFs: at the same time people struggle to explain what they are to a largely paint-on-canvas addicted art world, voices of angry reaction claim they receive too much attention.

Note to Man Bartlett, next time you write about animated GIFs, please consider:

--is a science demonstration GIF (e.g., an animation showing the transformation of a Moebius strip into a Boy's Surface) insincere? does an artist's appropriation of it automatically make it insincere?
--are uses of GIFs in the culture (as jokes, gags) always the same as uses of GIFs to make "art" statements a la Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, et al?
--how might a dump.fm user page be different from an animation log on a blog? (You do know how dump works.)
--might GIFs be at the same place photography once was (that is, rejected as a "serious" medium) or will their ephemeral nature always place them on the outside?
--can a file extension be only about aesthetics and post-hipster at the same time? do hipsters care about aesthetics?
--couldn't use of twitter as a medium also be considered trendy and hip and raise questions as to its insincerity?
--how might "just plain weak images" differ from what Boris Groys has called "the weak universalism"?

gold machine cosmos

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frankhats_tile_yellowmachine_crop_6frames

Made this GIF (the machinery part of the above) from a science animation I saved from dump a while back (also this one, where the motion goes two ways--poorly). frankhats incorporated it into a larger tiled page (layered with other images and patterns made by him, mirrrroring, and robocide) that is pretty spectacular.

I captured the frankhats page and made a single 1.6 MB GIF that isn't quite as detailed but features some of the high spots and is more portable. The GIF above is a cropped, 6 frame version of that one.

Am going to go on Craigslist and look for an art critic who can explain this work.

Update: Need some text filler (too close to the piano) so here's Leo Steinberg:

The flatbed picture plane makes its "...symbolic allusion to hard surfaces, or any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data are entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed - whether coherently or in confusion. It does not simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. It does not depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture, but insists on an essentially new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes… it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts. It is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, that tends to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal and is expressive of a radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture."

Update: Made a slight tweak to the 1.6 MB GIF version of the tile page. Still thinking about it.

"Duo for Piano and Shark"

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steinway_model-bshark

"Duo for Piano and Shark" [mp3 removed]

I often think about live "chamber" style music that combines acoustic and electronic instruments--this is an exaggerated, joky example. The truth is, I care less and less about live playing as compared to the "electronic object" of a studio work. This relates somewhat to what I was saying about the artist being best invisible. But there's nothing wrong with, ahem, visual cues as to where the music is coming from or going.

"Shark Shanty"

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"Shark Shanty" [mp3 removed]

A short melody played on the Shark (Reaktor) synth with fairly heavy compression--not sure how this will fare on smaller speakers. The tune was originally a demo for the very basic SQP (Reaktor) sequencer module (used to trigger the notes) that I rewrote to take advantage of the zany portamento (glide) between notes.

Russ Meyer anecdote

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From a Roger Ebert interview with John Waters (hat tip TH):

The other thing [Russ Meyer] did was attack the critics. If they said one bad thing, he would write the most hateful letters to them, which is, I believe, the exact opposite of a pro. But he was in my apartment looking through my bookshelf and I saw him lunge for this one volume and pull it out and it was The Mellons. But it was the Mellon family and he thought it was a tit book. And that summed it up. He was obsessed; he was an outsider pornographer, only soft-core. He couldn't help it.