hat tips to Joel Cook's icon collection
art as criticism
more new romantics
It's not sporting to criticize an exhibition in advance, without seeing it, based on the premise alone, unless it's called The New Romantics and you like some of the artists and shudder to see them branded that way. Hence the present upchucks of sarcasm.
Of the following only three can be held accountable for the newromanticization of their work, and those are the ones who organized the show (in bold): Mark Beasley, Tim Berrensheim, Alexandra Gorczynski, Ryan Whittier Hale, Claudia Hart, Jeremiah Johnson, Brookhart Jonquil, Sophie Kahn, Alex M. Lee, Sara Ludy, Shane Mecklenburger, Jonathan Monaghan, Mikey McParlane and Michael Mallis, Brenna Murphy, Nicholas O’Brien, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jon Rafman, Nicolas Sassoon, Jasper Spicero, Kate Steciw, Katie Torn, Krist Wood, ATOM-r (Mark Jeffrey and Judd Morrissey), Zach Blas, Ann Hirsch, Miao Jiaxin, Mikey McParlane, and Vincent Tiley.
Will the show convince us that any of the artists are participating in the tradition of Kaspar David Friedrich, Wagner, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Gary Numan, and "Bela Lugosi's Dead?" Do we need to be reassured that this or that chiptune musician or Google Street View appropriator is actually working in the Romantic tradition? Can anyone making art, music, and videos with Apple products ever truly be called romantic, given what we know about Steve Jobs and Foxconn's dark Satanic mills? (Microsoft users are automatically disqualified. But what about Linux -- can a nerd be romantic?) Is a cyberpunk author romantic, or a realist about present conditions? Are glitch artists romantic merely because they dismantle? Are we talking here about romantic in the sense of "feeling romantic when you sip coffee and talk to the barrista at Starbucks"? If not, why not?
hat tip Jules Laplace, a romantic fellow, for the coffee GIF that paired so well with Eyebeam's New Romantics logo.
new romantics, go back to the graveyard
When you think of "new romantics" and "internet" the first thing that probably comes to mind is goth girls posing in cemeteries.
Possibly that wasn't the first thing that popped into the heads of the curators of Eyebeam's upcoming exhibit with the unapologetic title, The New Romantics. "Just as the Romantics responded to the industrial revolution," the curators postulate, "this group of artists are similarly responding to the current information revolution."
Ever since William Gibson envisioned Haitian voodoo spirits inhabiting cyberspace, writers have been trying to depict computers and the internet as something other than what they are: soulless cold environments created by nerds to be inhabited by other nerds. The internet is the domain of numbers, statistics, menus, and multiple choice tests. The only way to imagine it otherwise might be something like David Cronenberg's fleshy "game pods" that attach to your spine with an umbilical: a "dream space out of meat space" governed by murky synaptical potentials rather than precise silicon robotics. In the real cyberspace we inhabit, however, no amount of pouty romantic acting out can overcome that it's going to be converted to pixels and aiff files and reproduced on a page where it will be tabulated with like counts and stored with thousands of other similar expressions.
my new romantic drawing above was made with the Computers Club Drawing Society "Chibi Paint" software (and resized to fit here)
GIF ladder - and we have a winner
Am not supposed to have these results so soon but as an exclusive for long time RSS subscribers, this is what's upcoming in that GIF competition we've been covering. Here are the final four and the final two:
And a winner:
Garden, by Pitchpot. It's exciting when work you like wins.
announcing "GIF Rescue Service"
So-called art GIFs deserve better than to die in a cock fight or dog fight.
They need love and white space to look their best, not some hideous "tourney" with flames in the background.
Hence, we're announcing an on-again, off-again feature called "GIF Rescue Service," where deserving creations will be given shelter from gimmicky environments of forced wackiness.
When possible, these GIFs will be nurtured by critical commentary.
Art is not sports, it doesn't have winners and losers, and its value is not decided by electronic, quasi-democratic vote.
The GIF above, by Systaime, "lost" to another GIF and is reproduced here. Ironically, Systaime's GIF also depicts a competition, imaginary rather than real, in which a graphic element on a Facebook page becomes detached from its background and plays a game of old-school Pong with itself. Systaime comments on the humdrum, cluttered boredom of another day on Facebook with his fake game, much as a disaffected cubicle worker might while away the hours playing Solitaire. Would that Systaime had remained in the realm of imaginary, masturbatory mock-competition and not submitted to the humiliation of a "real" GIF tournament, an unregulated, unvetted practice where results can be gamed by having your friends vote and there is no right of recount or appeal. Fortunately for Systaime, GIF Rescue Service arrived to save the GIF from a dubious self-promotional judgment.
Update: The name (and post title) was changed from "Operation GIF Rescue" to "GIF Rescue Service."