tom moody

My bird could play that

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YouTube of birds perching on an electric guitar neck, unconsciously dispensing power chords. (posted by bustram) [update, 1/1/2012: video removed by user--why?]

Prefer this to the famous Schoenberg cats, which subtly reinforce bubba dislike of modern music. These birds are creating their own score (although the digital delay helps quite a bit) and the artist who set it up isn't showing off I-hate-it-but-I-really-like-it musical acumen: creating a highly structured work product around a highly structured score to imply (without really meaning it, natch) that the score is just random splooge. What is the point of that?

Hat tip Disquiet - the link to the birds came up in the course of a discussion of the new Oval disc (first in many years from Markus Popp). Haven't heard the recording but it sounds like Popp's old fans are mostly dancing around that it (i) isn't anything like the '90s records that they loved and (ii) possibly is mediocre.

Brandon Blommaert

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brandon_jan_blommaert

Now this is an efficient GIF - 24 KB. That's a lot of bang for your memory buck.
The artist is Brandon Blommaert, who also did this video:

GREYCON4
"an animation about a scientist in a computerized cave" - what's not to like?
Tron meets the Brothers Quay (and Jim Henson)
The sequences of old school wireframe mixed with synthesized blorts give me animatronic goosebumps.
What caught my eye for the video were these cardboard consoles.

hat tip un/stage, which has a page of Blommaert's GIF work.

previously noted on Rhizome - the GIFs got better since that post but are still probably a little too much on the slick side for my taste - the organic form in the one above helps warm it up a little - while at Rhizome be sure to read about coal-fired computers and feel really bad about yourself. (I seem to recall this was a late '90s canard designed to spur coal production - one lump per megabyte or whatever - but I'm sure the artists have done their homework this time and aren't just passing around bogus industry statistics. Nothing like having a coal stove hooked to a laptop to make your point - subtle!)

Chest+sink of despair

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chestsink

Image found by unicorngirl.

The calm and precision of a Vermeer wedded to a David Lynch view of suburban normality. You can almost hear the white noise hiss and imagine the severed ear lying in a field outside the house.

Disorientation, surrealism: why is a sink in the foyer?

The great Duncan Hannah also comes to mind, mood-wise.

But it's just some disposable digital catalog imagery.

Finding is the new making.

See also: The dumping styles of several people.

anti-sit

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antisit

Examples of anti-sit devices from google images (hat tip Curbed)

One website calls these "architectures of control in design." No sitting, no leaning, no resting, no skating, no enjoyment, pain, pain, hurt, sadomasochism, move along, you animal. That is the world we now live in, courtesy our fine owners of property.

"Software Caddy"

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"Software Caddy" [mp3 removed -- a newer version is available on Bandcamp]

A slab of techno-primitivism (more than usual). All done in Reaktor - two sequences, some muting/unmuting of tracks. The variations are programmed into the presets (which I "tuned" to get this group of six percussion instruments) - don't know if there's any randomization or if it's LFOs sweeping various parameters - should re-read the manual.