hat tip erik stinson for "lofts"
art as criticism
grind yourself away (with the internet)
From Absis Minas's tumblr Free Proposals for Art World Art Critiques.
As a pre-native have been on both sides of this argument. In the early days of blogging the howls and jeers from print media made you adopt a pro-technology stance; what you could do with self-publishing (linking, choosing your own visuals, correcting-as-you-go) compared to the tyranny of magazine compartmentalization (and editors) was liberating. But gradually over the last ten years "media" has wrapped its tentacles back around expression, so that if you are talking about the revolutionary power of Facebook or Twitter you are just a dolt.
The infrastructure of, say, brand-name author blogs on major newspaper sites with "like" buttons allowing you to cycle the content within accepted social media channels is a giant interlocking engine designed to feed you to advertisers. Making a political statement on twitter adjacent to a promoted web consultant tweet in your timeline feels particularly futile. Controlling the tone and context of your utterances isn't essential to an artist's survival but you'd like to think you had a choice.
low-level generative art
On Nasty Nets in '06, Marisa Olson linked to the generator page where the above was made. Her error message read "In the future, all web sites will be generators." Jon Williams questioned that prediction recently on twitter in light of Zynga style games where you don't do much generating but use pre-set character templates.
It's like the devolution of model kits from elaborate balsawood parts that had to be cut with a knife to 1960s glue-and-paint kits with hundreds of plastic elements on trees to the kits of the '70s and '80s consisting of a handful of snap-together parts. Ultimately, though, it's just degrees of lack-of-choice. Even 3D and paint programs that yield elaborate personalized results start with someone else's menus.
Am prejudiced against all of it from years of making unique, quirky objects that a handful of people might theoretically view together in real space but am trying to overcome this. Snobbery is what artists have in lieu of barrels of cash (or Simoleons).
Generators haven't gone away: see downfall generator (hat tip Jon Williams).
Update: Also via Jon, the Generator Blog, where you can Warholize and Jesufy yourself, or make fake iPhone text, or spew loren ipsum consisting entirely of hipsterspeak (some popular art blogs use this). In view of all this variety the next stage will be a generator generator, if one doesn't exist already.
we don't quite have this down yet but let's launch it anyway
worm reports: "little did i know that my venus de milo gif was secretly...lettuce"
facebook II
161 million souls reside inside this Book of the Damned.
Forced to deal every day with ungenerous page layouts, bad-looking visuals, cumbersome navigation, endless time-wasting dramas involving fake friends and stalkers.
Every click going straight into government filtered databases.
Even the "glitch community" and other so-called intellectuals have sold their souls to a rich, mentally ill eternal college sophomore and his backers.
PRAY FOR DAY
PRAY FOR THEM