general

Art or Not is an amusing concept based on the late '90s proto-meme site "Hot or Not." In "Hot or Not" the user rated pictures of girlfriends by clicking a radio button, which then took you to the next picture. It might have been boyfriends, too. With Art or Not there are no limitations placed on what can be rated, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, the art and technology websites will soon tell us (it only launched yesterday).
Early indicators suggest the site is easily spammed. Anything with a whiff of "net art" or possible institutional support brings out the usual narcissists and tamperers.
Computers excel at tabulating and number-crunching; we know this. Every commercial social media site promotes ratings of people and things. Art or Not brings this systematic tyranny of the majority to a supposedly sacred realm that has in fact been de-sacralized at least since Pop Art.

Two ugly, Hollywood-sponsored, so-called anti-internet-piracy bills are winding their way through the Congressional poop chute with the prejudicial names SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy) and PROTECT IP. Critics of the bills such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation say they are unconscionably broad and will threaten the "safe harbor" provisions of the current digital copyright laws. (Briefly put, an Internet Service Provider is presumed not to be infringing copyright even though one of its customers might be, and must first respond to a takedown notice before any drastic action is taken against the provider, whereas SOPA allows the government to tell the ISP how to do its business just on some movie rat's say so.) Per the EFF:

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs...

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough)...

Whether something infringes copyright is the grayest of legal gray areas, which makes it an ideal tool for social control (when the Putin government in Russia wants to shut down a critic these days it claims "software piracy"). These US bills result from an unholy alliance of entertainment moguls upset about losing their monopolies on people's time and the usual shady government operatives who want to stanch the free flow of information. The public hasn't quite awakened yet to how bad the bills are. (As in "the end of the internet as we know it.")

Congresscritters are trying to ram the House bill through before Christmas so please take a minute to contact your Senators and Representatives: the EFF has an online email form and contact info.

Ben Fino-Radin, the Victor Frankenstein of internet art, has just given 20,000 volts to another zombie artwork.
Petra Cortright's VVebcam was removed from YouTube because of her use of spam tags as art.
That's unfortunate because the spam was the least interesting aspect of the work.
(In 2007, before YouTube was bought by Google, it was funny to ironically draw traffic to your post through the use of sexual and other hot-button words. That landscape--the context of the artwork--has changed utterly, and Google's removal of the piece now validates it as a bit of 2007 idealism in need of cleaning up in the new corporate environment where color coded badges for workers are the norm.)
Who'd have guessed this YouTube-based artwork would be "taught in academic curricula" when I linked to it in Mar 2007. That post and a discussion four days later with Paddy Johnson probably doomed this guerrilla effort to a future of respectability but I have no regrets.
Trying to remake a piece that relies on "defaults" (YouTube + dancing webcam graphics that can still be seen in this Make magazine video--still on YouTube) isn't too exciting, though. Better if Fino-Radin just did a little homework, beyond looking at a Vice magazine interview from earlier this year, to document the piece through its contemporaneous accounts on the web. That's what we're doing here.

By radii, November 24th, 2010, about the TV show Walking Dead:

Starsky & Hutch + zombies does not make good television … this show is terrible … the only good thing in it was the half-torso lady crawling around in hunger – this extra has been the best actor on the show so far

This is not to slight Eileen Jones' review--she's great in her bile-dispensing way, as usual.

My notes for last night's talk at EFA are just the "slide show" portion, meant to be supplemented via live, human, mostly unscripted (but not unprepared) speech. Thanks to folks who came, asked questions, and hung out. The topic, broadly, was the poetics or avant garde roots of internet mash-ups and image combos, traced from early 20th Century experiments in mixing media, through the 1950s concrete poetry movement, to the present, ending with a step by step explanation of how this Augusto de Campos remix was done (the GIF version of my piece in the de Campos-inspired exhibit that was the impetus for the talk).