general

A few days ago, one of the artists in Carriage Trade gallery's "Social Photography" benefit emailed me a link to the photos in the show--was annoyed to click on it and discover it was a Facebook sign-in.

Then I got a note from Carriage Trade that the photos had been moved from Facebook because Zuckerberg & Co had arbitrarily taken down the entire page one day, claiming one of the photos violated the site's "terms of use." That's an example of why I never want to join.

Since the photos would now be shown on the open web I emailed Carriage Trade's director and said "thank you - now I can see the work!"

In the comments to Marc Weidenbaum's blog disquiet we've been discussing whether a long-established blog particularly needs to join the Zuckerberg empire, with all its negatives. I've asked Marc to let me know, down the road, whether his recently-created disquiet Facebook page gives him anything he's not already getting from being on the Web for years.

In connection with that query, Weidenbaum did some research and found that the following sites have Facebook pages: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, Soft Skull Press, and the Internet Archive. All kind of surprising given their integrity and what we know about Facebook's bald commercialism and non-commitment to privacy.

On his twitter page Marc said he was

Pondering the presence of EFF and Creative Commons pages on Facebook. Are they embassies, shantytowns, protest sites, provocations? AOTA*?

In his blog comments I noted, less diplomatically:

On the plane this weekend American Airlines was showing The Social Network. I sampled a few random minutes with the sound off. Rapidly-edited, choreographed closeups of tense faces shot in half-shadow or by the glow of screen light: it looks like a TV biopic crossed with a horror film. Again, no offense meant, but I kept thinking about Creative Commons, EFF, and Soft Skull Press and wondering what they could possibly find so appealing about a site--nay, a virtual reality cosmos--designed by a maladjusted Harvard undergrad.

Nothing against Harvard undergrads, but as has been noted elsewhere, the site's architecture reflects the brain of the creator in the way it yearns for indiscriminate "connection" and facilitates stalking. To quote a '90s kitsch classic: "Lawnmower Man in your mind now!"

*all of the above, not AOTA

Thanks to the University of Texas at Dallas and the CentralTrak art space for flying me to Dallas for talks in connection with the "Glitch" show at CentralTrak. Here are my notes. It was a pleasure sharing the podium with Jon Cates for yesterday's talk, seeing old friends, and tripping down Johnny Mnemonic lane to such locales as the former State Bar, Dickie's Barbecue, the "Belmont," and La Calle Doce. Many thanks to John Pomara, Kate Sheerin, and others for making this happen.

And off topic, but a large, plangent Booo to Ed Ruscha, Gagosian gallery, and the Fort Worth Modern for producing a Ruscha-illustrated collector's edition of Kerouac's On the Road and using the museum as a sales floor. We're talking a book the size of a coffee table displayed in a vitrine, with some its individual hackneyed pages in frames on the surrounding walls (featuring black and white, found "pop" photos integrated into the text). I love Ed Ruscha but success breeds hubris in the best of practitioners. Everyone knows On the Road should only be consumed as a dog-eared paperback, by anxious undergrads.

A show I have work in, in Dallas, titled "Glitch," got a bad review!

Writing in Glasstire, Lucia Simek says:

Centraltrak just mounted a show curated by John Pomara and Dean Terry called Glitch, featuring work that explores the malfunctions of digital media and what the terrain of those accidents looks like. The gallery is full of monitors and cords (lots of them) and projected images of moving pixelation, gradient color fields, or figures that blend and jump around the screen trippily. Headphones hooked to audio at each piece almost always coughed out scratchy, pulled-cord dying computer squelches, like emphysemic robots. I’m not sure what was captured malfunction in these pieces (actual computer errors), or manufactured malfunction (artist made errors). Maybe that was the point? [Shrug]

The whole show felt like it would have been compelling maybe ten years ago, maybe twelve, but certainly, whatever the premise of the show, seizure inducing computer images of scan codes, avatars and swirly digipainting just aren’t visually fresh. Even a complete non-techie like me is dulled to digital vocabularies like the ones used here: trippy, hallucinatory, color-washed screens recall screen savers c. ’97. And anyway, my brain was completely fried after the third set of headphones spewed out unimaginative, digital-jabberwocky hiccups. Can’t sick computers speak more than one language?

I left the gallery feeling how you can after a blockbuster Impressionism show full of pictures we’ve seen so often we can’t see them anymore: in a stupor, hankering for something to wake me up.

But, Lucia, trippy, hallucinatory, color-washed screens recalling screen savers c. ’97 are good! Fortunately the accompanying photos somewhat belie the reviewer's boredom.

Other participating artists include Jon Cates, Paul B. Davis, Kyle Kondas, LoVid, Shane Mecklenburger, Vjanomolee, and Jenny Vogel.

Update: the URL to the exhibition page changed; link revised.

Worth watching instead of, say, a movie: 1 hour, 48 min panel discussion about such topics as:

amazon's cave-in to Joe Lieberman over server space for a media outlet
whether you-know-what is a media outlet
first amendment protections applied to "company towns"
whether/when/where social media sites will have a "special room" for govt. perusal of data
the gov't "dropped in" on facebook one day
how the stasi could have used SocMed's personal data to create its "nation of informers"
US: tunisia or GDR?
people outside US more horrified by amazon's treachery than US residents
journalist shield law is pipe dream because no agreement on what journalist is, post-print

Panelists:Daniel Ellsberg, Clay Shirky, Neville Roy Singham, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Zittrain
Moderator: Paul Jay

top: "Strictly a limited edition model, of which only ten units will be manufactured."

bottom: "This project is designed by RD Silver, a designer who has the guts to take away everything but the guts."

via

Vinyl is dead; long live vinyl fetishism.