general

When you’re an outsider, you’ve got two choices: You either become a target for people to hit you, to bully you, and con you, to take advantage of [you], and you wind up marrying people you shouldn’t, and you wind up in a job you shouldn’t have with people who bully you, or, you get tough. Now tough doesn’t mean hard. I’m not a hard guy; I’m a tough guy. That means that I take no shit and I’m wrong more often than I’m right, and when I am, I admit it. And that’s another part of being a tough guy. When you’re in the wrong you’ve got to face up to it and you’ve got to take responsibility for it.

from the blog of Clifford Meth

hat tips Peema and TheKraken

Shoutback to Marc Weidenbaum at disquiet.com for his post on The Sound of One GIF Animating. I like that GIFs have become a meme sufficient to consider what they might be like in other media.

The consensus of Weidenbaum's commenters is that a MIDI file is the GIF's closest musical equivalent but Weidenbaum is kind enough to consider my proposal of a short GIF-like demi-song.

...a short story written in 1962, depicts life in an eerie Panopticon world, a city that resembles modern London or New York except for the alien towers of smooth metal that hang inexplicably from the sky. Spaced a few blocks apart, these structures give their inhabitants, mysterious "watchers," clear lines of sight down onto the streets and rooftops of the metropolis. The city folk seem accustomed to the strange sky-turrets and try to lead normal lives in spite of them. Nevertheless, the presence of so much silent power overhead inevitably affects politics and mores.

The watchers are a passive lot; most days no visible activity takes place in the towers. However, on rare occasions movements can be glimpsed behind the semi-transparent windows. When this happens the city dwellers become fretful, avoid conversations, and try to stay indoors as much as possible. No one has actually seen a watcher, only the shadowy gestures overhead, but rumors abound that the watchers have influence with the city's main political body, called The Council. The Council lays down edicts about who can be romantically involved with whom, and the degree to which people can publicly assemble in large numbers.

The plot commences when a character named Renthall petitions the Council for an outdoor party, or fete, in a particular vacant city block in open view of the towers. The response from the Council's emissaries is furtive, bureaucratic, and heavy with innuendo and veiled threats. Renthall begins to be personally shunned. Through his innocent-sounding request he hopes to glimpse the inner working of the murkily-understood Council, and even better, to find out once and for all its connections to the watchers. Ballard creates a mood of danger all out of proportion to the innocuousness of Renthall's proposal--what is it, exactly, that the watchers aren't supposed to see?

The story has twists but let's not spoil them, except to say that in Ballard's fiction the line between personal and consensual paranoia can be blurry. And fortunately it's all a story and has no bearing on the modern world.

Update: The "modern world" link above went to a page that has since been removed. This thread quotes liberally from it even though the link is dead there, too. See also.

The Michael Manning-organized exhibition-on-a-stick (as in USB) that includes (included?) some work of mine was written about on:

ARTINFO

Today and Tomorrow

ARTINFO's Kyle Chayka writes:

The exhibition is a species of "Dead Drop," a genre of digital art exhibition (or publication, or seeding) originally conceived by Aram Bartholl that involves loading up a USB with art and leaving it up to the viewer to decide what to do with it: exhibition-goers are free to download the contents of the USB, delete or alter them, or upload their own work. Once it has "dropped" in public, all bets are off. The strategy brings a needed physical dimension and an imposed scarcity to work that is difficult to pin down to a particular source or venue. In the case of "Street Show: The Things Between Us," Eyebeam is not so much the exhibition's venue as merely the location of the "drop."

and

The über-public, democratic nature of Manning's "Street Show" puts it in the standard open discourse of Internet art, but its artificial scarcity provides an interesting element of danger and chance of loss to the viewing experience, feelings not normally applicable to safely viewing from an Internet browser.

Let's forget for the moment that all the content was immediately scooped up and "put back on the net" and consider the idea of artificial scarcity. Usually in new-media-friendly discussions "scarcity" is a word aimed at those backward art galleries* that try to create markets by selling unique objects. Here the scarcity was self-imposed, ironically (although not stated in the exhibition prospectus, I think we can assume this), in reaction to Rhizome.org's recent effort to sell GIFs at the Armory art fair with some possibly poorly considered words ("we're taking it offline so the collector can have it locally"). Let's give Rhizome's director Lauren Cornell the benefit of a doubt and note that these words (which would seem to contradict the open source goals of many artists working with software) weren't officially published but were uttered when a roving reporter aimed a video camera at her at the Armory table. The maker of the GIF in question has since clarified that she takes work on and offline as part of her practice but no explanation has been given about the implication that it was done for the collector's benefit or convenience (which would be kind of gnarly).

*Three years ago, in a panel on the "Future of the Internet," Cornell [14:05 on the video] talked about the art world as a system "based on an economics of scarcity" and suggested alternate ways that artists could make money (e.g., moving more to the musical band model--she didn't elaborate). "Taking the work offline so the collector can have it locally" was not on the agenda at that time.