general

Emailing a friend about the "new VR/3D" stuff rearing its head in net art circles:

I like some of it as raw material but none of the art sites you mentioned. "Future kitsch" is exactly right but is that how it's being treated? Is the uncanny valley a problem or just something we live with? Just because someone made a "phat" effect does that mean it needs to be used?

I like seeing that stuff on Dump because the attitude is no one really gives a crap about it. When people put it on overdesigned sites and call it their art I have a problem with it. I even think I have more respect for "generative" artists because they are hunkered down in a genre doing experiments. Whereas something like Paintfx.biz* hasn't figured out its stance yet. Pretty sure at least one of the members is embarrassed by the "popping huge boners over juicy gestural marks" rhetoric but won't publicly distance himself from it.

A few months ago Duncan Alexander signed into Active Worlds, a proto-Second Life from the '90s and took a tour. This is a virtual kitsch-o-rama but no user of the site then or now thinks of it as such. Maybe we need to have a conversation about the old future kitsch before getting deeply into the new. (Back in the '90s Miltos Manetas was pushing Active Worlds as a place to have virtual art commerce and such, with "name" galleries buying cyber-real estate. This same paradigm was recycled for Second Life with zero historical memory.)

See also abstract illusionism then and now.

posthuman nightmare image above posted to dump.fm by mat3i

dump links not viewable on Internet Explorer

*Am still on the fence about Paintfx.biz. Seems like the wrong way to go but would welcome either (a) a self-serving Brad Troemel-like pseudo-history explaining that all of art was leading up to what they're doing or (b) an explanation that they actually dislike both abstract expressionism and software that bulks up brushstrokes into gelatinous 3D blobs. Are they like Depthcore? Why not?

hat tips jesse patrick martin, timothy james kelly, others

nintendocore vs apple store indie (not viewable in IE; pics from yourscenesucks.com)

Greg Egan's Zendegi envisions "side-loading" of modeled human brain functions from scans of people now dead to perform mechanical turklike tasks

finally saw Dog Day Afternoon, uncensored, from start to finish. great but only "30% true" according to the actual bank robber

they moved me to new twitter! celebrated by drinking New Coke

am i wrong to have no interest in a movie about a ballerina who becomes mentally ill? or a remake of true grit without glen campbell?

two panel post with r.m.x-ed gifs by @pjbaldes (left) and ace (right) (not viewable in IE)

"The marketing focus is to penetrate Gabriel's core fan base as well as fans of all genres and in all demographics..." (product description)

Sosuke, betrothed at age 5 with his mom's blessing, decides in high school he doesn't love Ponyo anymore & Ponyo turns into sea foam

magazine apps are failing? but steve jobs was going to be the guy who finally monetized the web through tightfisted control and hardware!

need to see the un-Americanized Ponyo - Lasseter's jones for Miyazaki is commercial blessing, creative curse

lumet's latest: from the way mom used that pistol i'd say albert finney had help turning his sons into criminals but we'll never know

dreamed about a fast food restaurant where people talked and spit food into a "smart cup" to place their orders

an interesting statement from Van Vliet was that he was "against the hypnotic" - he didn't want you to be able to sink into music

Van Vliet's harshest critics musically said he "merely" translated jazz atonality into rock - that rather ignores his songwriting & voice

worst advice ever: stop being a musician to be taken seriously as an artist (Michael Werner to Don Van Vliet)

"how would you like to own a car like that, kid?" "yes, sir!" "well, you never will" (pierrot le fou)

"I wonder what's keeping the cops--we should be in jail by now" "They're smart--they let people destroy themselves" (pierrot le fou)

people who type "muah" are not to be trusted; however, people who type "muwah ha ha" are true netizens

seeing La jetée in 2010 for the first time; visitor-from-the-future-take: it's a film about time and the poignance of silver nitrate photos

La jetée is more than its medium, of course; but was constantly struck by the beauty of the contrast-y B&W photos, so much of their era

comparison of La jetée to Ink (2009) (not viewable in IE)

The govt. says Martin Luther King would have supported US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for either or both of a pair of conflicting reasons: to fight terrorists and/or to bring humanitarian aid to the needy. That's a travesty of King's views as well as common sense. Here's what King said about Vietnam:

"I am convinced," King said, "that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society into a person-oriented society. . . . On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. . . . The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military 'defense' than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Michael Manning gives Brad Troemel's essay "From Clubs to Affinity: The Decentralization of Art on the Internet" a thorough rebuttal and fact-check on his blog. Manning's conclusion:

The historical narrative you portray: 90’s utopia disrupted by a web 2.0 capitalist regime, which paved the way for a group of elitist artists seeking institutional recognition via surf clubs, and which was finally brought down by the populist Tumblr using Internet artist, is in the end simply inaccurate, and overly dramatized.

Troemel's essay follows a familiar pattern of art world writing. Tell a story of how a particular kind of art changes or evolves, quote some interesting, semi-related theory from a Frankfurt School philosopher, and then draw analogies between the art and the philosophy. The reader comes to feel that the art changes must be important and learns some theory in the process. In "Clubs to Affinity" the philosophy is Jurgen Habermas' notion of an evolving "public sphere," which Troemel grafts into the story of "art on the internet since the mid-'90s." Yet he gets many parts of the art narrative wrong, as Manning notes, making the graft awkward and unconvincing.

An important part of a public sphere, surely, is the open exchange of ideas and information. Yet when Manning submitted his essay as a comment to the 491 online magazine, the comment "experienced 'problems' when submitted and was for whatever reason not able to be posted," according to Manning. Yet a comment supporting Troemel's essay was approved. I asked the editor of 491, Bret Schneider, about this. My comment has been awaiting moderation since yesterday (see note* below).

It may be that arguments such as this one from Manning are just too strong for 491:

The minimal shift in platform from a WordPress (surf clubs) to a Tumblr (web 2.0 decentralized artists) most importantly did not replace or make obsolete the collective site or format of the surf club. Joint Tumblrs and collective curatorial exercises perpetuate the hierarchy that the surf clubs 'created' unintentionally. These types of Tumblrs similar to surf clubs are exclusive and have received institutional recognition (which to be clear I find acceptable, exclusivity doesn’t bother me all that much). The essay assumes that by giving everyone a Tumblr that they will each carry the same clout and the democratic process of peer 2 peer social interactions (likes and reblogs) will determine the success of work. The downside of this platform is describe[d] as users that become [quoting Troemel] "hollow shells waiting for Facebook comments, Tumblr reblogs, and promotional Tweets to provide the substance of [their] being" which hypocritically seems to epitomize the type of elitism mistakenly ascribed to surf clubs.

*Here is my comment to Schneider; if he publishes it and/or replies I will do an update.

Update: After Manning posted his comment on his own blog and the response was noted on a couple of sites, his original submission appeared on 491 in mangled form (no hyperlinks, text missing, font inexplicably switches to italic halfway through). My comment asking where the post went was never approved.

Update 2: The mangled version was taken down and the comment now consists of a link to Manning's post on his own blog.

Update 3: My comment appeared a few days after Manning's.