computers-R-stupid

tm the "facehugging hardware paradigm" makes me nervous
cb Well its not making me nervous
cb There's a lot of competition in the space
cb I know some of the usual suspects are working on it but I was hoping you might know some other ppl that might not seem [to be] the kind who would do VR but are
cb There's PlayStation VR, Facebook Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive
cb Also there's the gear VR for Samsung phones and Google cardboard/glass
tm i can't really evaluate without strappin on the gear
cb So one ring to rule them all isn't something I'm all that worked up about because Oculus might come out as the defacto device, but I don't think that will invalidate experiences on other VR headsets
tm i really like feeling air circulating around my face when contemplating the sublime
cb You should try it
tm i have
tm i hate it
tm i think it forces participation
cb Whens the last iteration uve used ? DK1?
tm in a way that other art doesn't
cb You could say that about the internet too
tm no i can walk away from that
cb u can just take the headset off tho
tm since i don't have the addictive phone/facebook combo
cb im not a facebook person either, but VR seems like there are some great experiences to be had
cb i dont think the world will descend into some matrix-esque hell
tm putting on the headset is unaesthetic to me -- too confining
tm i already wear glasses
cb i think you need to try the newer headsets, theyre much more comfortable
cb and glasses friendly
tm it's not a matter of comfort
tm i don't strap on a feedbag to have a nice meal
tm plus all my objections to bad 3D rendering
tm i think it's the wrong way to go
cb ok, but if there was a better way to have a cheap, widely accessible IRL experience like that, people would have done it already
cb VR lets everyone enjoy it
tm i think IRL is fine without imitating it whole
cb i think it goes with the notion of distribution on the internet
tm art should work on lighter, more lo-res levels
tm i'm against the gesamtkunstwerk

(from memory)
cb art doesn't have to be only lo-res
tm not saying that - the met has many hi-res paintings and i like them - but i hate Pixar

Update: Youtube version of this discussion by Jules Laplace

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.

The hot new concept among academic new media mavens is "the blockchain." Rhizome.org is pushing this heavily, as they did earlier with Facebook, as a technology the radical left should be comfortable with. See, for example, this article linked from their (browser-crashing) front page.
The article makes a strange, slightly incoherent case for why Bitcoin, a utopian technology of the libertarian right, should appeal to artists.

Bitcoins are "mined" by performing cryptographic calculations, so an underground industry of server-farm-resembling stacks, thousands of them, sucking hydrocarbon power, have sprung up in what Tolkien might have called "the dark places of the Earth." The article is accompanied by intrepid documentary video footage of a shady third world bitcoin mine (these clips have everything but a VHS tape of "Simple Jack" playing in the background). The article explains this quasi-criminal enterprise:

These industrial mines are a visceral reminder that the work of Bitcoin, despite its being an abstract, invisible tender, is physical. They are also a reminder that this is a global competition organized around fairly amoral principles in an unregulated field. May the most ingenious and ruthlessly efficient win. Individual enthusiasts mining on their home computers have given way to entrepreneurial miners, brute-force extracting the bitcoin pool, capped at 21 million.

Which sounds awful. And yet, the article explains, the same Silicon Valley forces that brought you liking and poking are also interested in it: "Risk-takers from Peter Thiel to Mark Andreesen to the Winklevoss twins are betting that Bitcoin can and will become the basis for future exchange."

What possible creative uses can be made of this borderline-criminal-meets-Winklevoss technology? Turns out, the article isn't talking about art, it's mainly interested in e-commerce. For visual art, several examples are mentioned, couched in the language of finest vaporware:

A few evolving architectures, built atop the blockchain, seem poised to serve artists. Organizations like Ascribe, Mine, Monegraph and Ethereum all believe solutions to the license management problem lie along the blockchain. Mine is an application using the blockchain’s digital signature protocol as proof of ownership, linking the meta-data fingerprint of a digital work with its creator. Another contender is Monegraph, first presented at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference: a tool for digital creators to produce a license for their work’s use. Currently, a creator can upload their .PNG, .JPG or GIF, set a license contract that binds the buyer and owner, and claim a username to publish to one’s personal public catalog, all along the blockchain. The system takes management of blockchain transactions out of the equation, with the ultimate goal of creating a thriving digital art-marketplace. Ascribe goes a step further, helping digital artists use a cryptographic ledger (the bitcoin blockchain) to register original work, verify provenance, and securely transfer of ownership of works to galleries.[emphasis added]

And finally, music. Again, we're not talking about "blockchain techno," this is more like some kind of Napster for crypto-heads:

Peertracks is one front-end (a centralized gateway) for this blockchain. It is a space where fans can store their artistcoins and where artists can crowdfund. Fans can get better prices on merchandise depending on how many artistcoins they have. It gathers peer-to-peer recommendations and playlists.

Am guessing art and music will continue to be made, consumed, and even sold without yet another technologically-overdetermined system being put in place. We're all looking for something we can live with, post-Snowden, but this probably isn't it.

Four years ago Rhizome.org did a site re-design and kept me busy tracking all the broken links from my blog. I lack the heart to go through that again for their latest gratuitous re-do.

This time the links are crashing my browser (Firefox on Linux Mint and Windows 7). My current plan is to only visit Rhizome using the Wayback Machine, to find links to old content that is now unreadable due to formatting errors, and to try to rebuild my profile with all the comments that have become de-linked from it.

Judging from what I heard on dump.fm and elsewhere, many artists were shocked when they visited their profiles after the redo. I sort of felt like crying.

Fortunately Nasty Nets can still be found if you have an existing link. But it doesn't come up when you search the Artbase.