general

The discussion on Rhizome about bad social media art criticism has continued and has now reached the "dudes bludgeoning other dudes with theory" stage:

Greimas' approach is still a kind of post-Saussurean (or post-Peircean) structuralism, used by Jameson and others to transition into something that might be considered proto-post-structuralism...

Nothing wrong with any of that, per se, except it avoids talking about specific examples. In the course of the conversation I re-read and linked to Paddy Johnson's notes comparing two "net aesthetics" panels, one in '06 and one in '08, and the ensuing comments. Here actual artists are talking about actual work being done on the net. So refreshing. But in a way nostalgic--the summer of '08, when that discussion took place, was pre-crash and has a feeling of hopefulness and possibility that I miss.

Dump.fm has added a new feature called "fullscreen," that takes the most recent image posted to the chat room and automatically resizes it to fill the browser window.
Last night Ryder Ripps veejayed an Anamanaguchi show in Brooklyn with a projected version of "fullscreen." Dumpers were alerted beforehand and for an hour or so the group's collective efforts fed the screen a constantly changing procession of pics, animated gifs, movie clips, and text-bites that might be up from anywhere to a fraction of a second to...a few seconds.
The automatic resizing and fast, continuous chat room feed solves some problems with live presentation of GIFs. In 2008 GIFs of mine appeared in a live group screening in Chicago organized by Dain Oh. Animations were placed on browser tabs and the performance consisted of moving from one tab to another (with live piano accompaniment!). Dain's vimeo documenting the event looks and sounds great but there is a certain amount of logistics of navigating between live internet images: sizing, scrolling, and cropping are being constantly fiddled with in real time. The Dump chat room + fullscreen solves the logistics/down time issues and results in an almost seamless flow. Ripps was also dumping and had a screen name "~photobot" feeding images into the chatroom so he had more control than just watching others dump. Needless to say it was all uncensored/filtered.
Was discussing with some people yesterday how or if dump.fm could be presented in a "live" space such as a gallery. Fullscreen would be the best way, I think, but it would need to be set up and scheduled as a piece of performance art. Dump.fm is best for lurkers, watchers, and non-participants when everyone in the chat room is "on."
Fullscreen is still a compromise because it eliminates some dump specialties such as multi-image "shrines" and tiling. But for a live situation it would be powerful - I was torn between the fullscreen tab and wanting to see what was happening in the chat room - the fullscreen was mesmerizing. Can only imagine how it looked behind a live band.

Update: This is a good time to give a shoutout to the "dump team" that has given us so many good innovations (including the fullscreen feature described above): Tim Baker, Stefan Moore, Scott Ostler, and Ryder Ripps, who are described on the about page, except those pictures aren't to be trusted. From what I've seen, ideas, suggestions, and criticisms come from other dumpers too numerous to name, or who have screen names that are not work safe.

Update 2: The "~photobot" screenname I mentioned is a script that dumps images sent to an email address at dump. Not sure if the address has been publicized so will hold off on posting it till I know for sure.

Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man as an animated GIF, by Emily on Supercentral II.
The figure inscribed in the circle turns independently of the figure in the square.
You watch it rotate slo-o-o-wly as the file is loading (depending on your computer speed, I guess).
When it is fully loaded it spins at a stately pace.
The subject is pretty overdone--him again?--but this GIF is very crisply and elegantly made.
It deserves to be the definitive version.

MEMORANDUM
To: Heritage Foundation, Department of Free Market Sociology
Date: March 12, 2080
Proposal for White Paper on the Digital Native Problem

"Digital Natives," the generation born between 1993 and 2013, present a continuing social problem. Much has been written about this group recently as they are beginning to seriously tax voluntary resources for the elderly. Like the so-called "baby boomers" of an earlier era, their early sense of entitlement and privilege makes them uncooperative and noisy senior citizens.

Other papers have discussed the possible consequences of shutting down the dwindling cyber-network that is their social lifeline, the so-called "Public Internet." My research topic proposes investigating the roots of this self-identified caste, to better understand their mindset and frame of reference.

It is hard for us to conceive now the heady sense of sharing and ease of obtaining information in the days when the Public Internet reached almost every home and mobile device. Children who grew up in this environment were told that theirs was a new way of thinking and that they had special insight into information processing and use of search tools within this vast living archive.

By the early 2010s, however, special services introduced by WorldGoogle (then called simply Google) and other telecommunications giants arrived on the scene. Elite children born after 2013 only knew these services (games, libraries, education facilities) and use of the existing infrastructure (what is now called the Public Internet) massively declined. Digital Natives resisted these services and continued to be "jacked in" to the old P.I.

Now, of course, the P.I. is a quaint shell of social media utilities with links to a few thousand volunteer-run "websites," but the D.N.s still use it as their primary source of communication with the rest of the world. They are truly like a "hive mind," the old nightmare of collectivism, which makes them a stubborn social force even if they have no real political power. How to repurpose them for Special Services is not my topic; rather it is understanding their thinking, perhaps with an eye to disentangling them from the hive.

[Remainder of abstract omitted]

Artnet's Ben Davis recently posted the above chart but forgot to add filetypes so I plugged a few in (in red). I was being snotty (I don't think Davis actually knows what an animated GIF is or why an artist would use one), but this annotated chart actually kind of works. Read Davis's piece if you want to see what the art world thinks of media artists, social and new. (hat tip bill)

Update: See also: visual explanations

Update 2: Got a little carried away on the ad hominem tip--this post has been dialed back to semi-polite status.