general

Some artwork of mine is on on view this month in an Art Micro-Patronage exhibit titled "10,000 Pixels," curated by Jeff Thompson. Each participant was given a 10,000 pixel allotment to make three images, to be apportioned among the three as the artist chose.

I'll be doing an artist talk via Ustream on Jan 12 at 7 pm eastern in connection with the show where you can question/comment via the Twitter -- more on that as the date approaches.

The way AMP works is viewers can make small donations (or not) as they navigate through the site. If you click on the "i" symbol at the bottom of each page a popup appears with info about the objet d'art (arranged in tiled, YTMND style--you can also click in the page to see an enlarged view of the pixel art).

Other artists in the show are: Travess Smalley, Ben Vickers, Alexander Peverett, Laura Brothers, Matt Cella, and Angelo Plessas.

More about AMP from Kyle Chayka.

The best of 1991: 20 Records to Celebrate Instead of Nirvana's Nevermind (hat tip Blissblog)

Completely agree with this writer that in an epoch-making time the wrong record (and everything it represented) is celebrated.

It's not just a matter of Nevermind being unbelievably overrated as a rock record, or that its “revolutionary” effect of restoring rock to its gritty authentic essence was such a forced media construct, dreamed up by a poisonous cocktail of record industry and aging rock journalists who wanted something like Nirvana to happen; the ultimate amalgam of the most lame rock authenticity clichés - garage/punk “rock out”-energy and scruffy/maladjusted indie songwriting.

and

It's not that I think rave culture (or for that matter hip hop or metal) was more or less sociologically important than grunge, I don't really care and have nothing invested in whether it was so or not, it's that it came up with such unbelievable riches, such endless innovation and astonishingly new and fresh music, that if you're looking back at 1991 and see Nevermind, you're not just missing out, you're simply missing one of the greatest musical revolutions ever, and that in favour of a triviality that just repeats the past.

and

By 1991, Kraftwerk had finally proven beyond all doubt that they had won. The unfolding future was their spawn. And with The Mix, they sort of acknowledged this.* The album should really have been the closing of the doors to the past, but sadly, grunge simultaneously reopened them and insisted that it was better to live with rock regression than with electronic progression.

*although it must be said The Mix is not a great record

While visiting the De Kooning retrospective at MOMA was telling a friend about two parody versions of the "Women" series.
The Rose Art Museum evidently owns both.
The Robert Colescott I remembered because when I first saw it in reproduction many years ago I didn't know Colescott was African American -- a biographical detail that makes the tribute postmodern rather than straight-up racist. I was blanking on who did I Still Get a Thrill When I See Bill but of course it's Mel Ramos,* another artist with a history of politically correct political incorrectness.

*(I was thinking Larry Rivers)

Paddy Johnson invited 34 people to cite their favorites links of 2011.
Mine was dump.fm. Even in its current semi-visible, invitation-only state it continues to be a creative force on the Internet.

My second choice might be Cory Doctorow's talk "The coming war upon general purpose computation." (General purpose or Turing-complete computers as opposed to chips in appliances that only perform one function.)

Doctorow believes the battle over SOPA is preparing us for a larger battle, which is the use of rootkits and hardware keys to disable computers for other purposes besides copyright enforcement. He mentions the control of gene-sequencing or radio frequencies as places where the need for government intervention may become stronger in the future, but of course the danger is that the control goes beyond regulating these areas into all-purpose political meddling. He thinks winning at the SOPA/copyright stage might slow down later, larger attempts at techno-repression.

He's entirely too optimistic in believing (i) that efforts to make "unhackable" computers aren't already underway and (ii) that people aren't willing to shackle themselves through the use of iPhones and large-scale social media platforms. Regarding the latter, he believes "middle class," Western, "technocratic" people know they can always hack around such systems and will not become too dependent on them. This suggests he is living in a bubble of other professional futurists and tech-savvy folk and has no idea how easily the "middle class" could allow itself to be controlled and vote "yes" to, say, computer-disabling to "fight terrorism."

Dampening the urge to celebrate over the weekend was President Obama's Dec. 31 signing of an indefinite military detention bill that violates every principle of freedom the US stands on. Our forebears fought for such protections as right to counsel, right to speedy trial, and habeas corpus proceedings requiring authorities to show cause for imprisonment. They believed in basic human rights. These might be limited or curtailed in "war" with respect to our "enemies" but while wars end, under the Obama detention law, cruel imprisonment does not. (Many of the Guantanamo prisoners have been locked up since the first Afghan war of ten years ago.)

Obama "promises" this won't be used on US citizens - ha ha ha.