general

Good summation of various internet-aesthetic projects and their relation to "chill time," written by Brian Droitcour on Rhizome.org.

Discussed in the article is Guthrie Lonergan's page for jstchillin.org called 3D Warehouse. As Droitcour describes it, it's

a collection of Google Sketchup drawings of objects seen in dreams, accompanied by verbal accounts of those dreams. The sharing of dreams is an odd kind of small talk, as meaningless as discussions of weather but more intimate, something you'd only do with a close friend. But the Google Sketchup users in Lonergan's collection put their dreams out there for anyone. The discomfort you feel from this distortion of social convention is reflected in the images, which -- for all the modeling skills of the artists who drew them -- are awkward and cartoonish, thin shadows of a stranger's dreams.

That said, many of the drawings are quite seductive, especially with the full screen space Lonergan allots to them. Some have the feel of De Chirico's lonely, impossible plazas, made even lonelier by the clean, sterile outlines of the Sketchup program. These are the dreams of the modern techno-state. An especially eerie one (about halfway down this page) shows crab creatures surfacing in a vast swimming pool, with the innocuous caption:

I had a weird dream a couple nights ago that there were lobsters and crabs (by Wario Ware Inc.) inside the pool! HELP ME! lol

When I first started writing for the internet nine years ago I had a small captive audience in the form of the Digital Media Tree blog collective, which is still thriving to this day (and where I still have regularly-tweaked archives and one semi-active active blog). Not really captive--everyone had a choice of whether to "follow" other bloggers, much like Twitter today. Any time someone writes a new post, if you are logged in, you see [1 new post] next to his or her name on the main page. I still look at that page every day to see what's up. I can also see if there is a [1 new comment] flag next to any of my blogs on that site--interesting things continue to pop up there.

As for how accessible I was to the rest of the internet, initially it was just sending out messages in bottles. My pages were public, in the sense of being searchable by all bots. There was a brief period where Google wasn't archiving the site (in the early '00s--a site glitch that was fixed eventually) but I kept posting anyway, figuring someone would find me via Yahoo or Alta Vista or even just by personal recommendation.

The wisdom after the dot-com crash of '00 was that it wasn't number of eyeballs (people who saw your page) that mattered but quality of eyeballs (people who shared your interests and could process what you were talking about). I still believe that--that people find you because they're searching for something you have in common. As opposed to hooking up to you through the mechanical tagging and preference-filtering of commercial social networks, which promise a "large audience" (resources that didn't exist in 2001 but are an option now).

Most of my traffic these days comes from RSS subscribers (shout out to you--thanks), links from other sites with shared interests (another shout), and links to the GIFs and mp3s that I put up (shout unless you're a mere bot). I have a twitter account but rarely use it to "drive traffic" here; I treat it as a second blog where I can take notes and pontificate in the "140 character one-liner" medium. I don't talk traffic numbers for this blog but let's say I'm damned happy for someone outside the Facebook continuum.

One thing I never did as a blogger was apologize for not posting. I might say "posting will be light" while something is going on but that would be rare. So I won't be reblogged by that artist's "aren't bloggers pathetic" reblog that captures people apologizing for not posting. To some extent this blog is my DJ remix pallette and archive; you would never apologize to your diary for not writing, you just wouldn't write.

Update: Some changes made to this post.

The Creator's Project, an internet TV station showcasing artists, has a video story up on Paul B. Davis, one of the founders of the BEIGE Programming Ensemble (with Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckmann, and Joe Bonn) and later a pioneer of a technique of messing up video popularly called "datamoshing." The story of datamoshing (who came up with it, when it originated, how it came to public attention) is one of the topics covered, and also Davis's early hacking of Nintendo games.

About a year ago, around the time Rhizome.org did a story on datamoshing, I had an online chat with Davis. We never finished it, and it runs rather long, but please give it a read. As Davis explains in the Creators Project story, he decided not to pursue datamoshing in his UK gallery show after the appearance of the technique in a couple of heavily promoted pop music videos (by Kanye West and Chairlift). Our interview was done while he was thinking about those issues* so it fleshes out some of the things he says in the Creators Project story about the problematic aspects of recycling pop culture. The interview also parallels the Rhizome chat, where I was actively sounding off at the same time I was talking to Davis.

*For example, a question Davis asks when looking at YouTube mashups (or other art), "What does this tell me that isn't immediately obvious?" was incorporated in his post-Kanye UK show into a piece called Critical Space Headgear.

Update: Added new link to my Davis interview.

Videos on YouTube of animals playing musical instruments are inherently more interesting than any art that could be made about them. Especially art that mock-innocently-but-not-really-or-maybe? equates the animals' playing with 20th Century modernist music. More discussion here.

Two entertaining and thought provoking videos of animal zen maestros noted by Alan Lockett:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM (cat)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM (birds posted earlier)

Thanks to Marc Weidenbaum for inviting me to participate in a discussion of the new release by post-rave UK minimalists Autrechre, called Move of Ten, on his site disquiet. One commenter, bart, opined that an Autechre song from that EP, "rew(1)" was "incredibly funky," and made the statement:

Autechre are playing with quantization in a way that is now familiar thanks to many post Dabrye/Dilla artists, but that they themselves have been doing since 1997’s Chiastic Slide.

Since "rew(1)" is about as funky as a ticking clock I pressed bart for clarification and got this:

I appreciate that it’s hard for you to get your head around people using technology in a creative way, but there are a number of people who do.

I said "now you're just getting personal" and bart apologized. Actually, no, he didn't:

It would be difficult for us to have a conversation about art and our appreciation of it without it being in some way personal, as it is a highly subjective issue.

He said he had no hard feelings about calling me an idiot after delivering this thorough slice of hiphopology:

I think Autechre are doing something quite different to both Dilla and Dabrye, but that there are technical commonalities. Quite a few tracks by Madlib and Dilla et al have used a technique of delaying certain channels relative to others, sometimes to achieve a kind of funk, sometimes to undermine it, or to give the track some ‘flex’. Originally this was something you would hear in Hip Hop tracks by producers like Marley Marl, (later and perhaps more famously by RZA) as a result of having sample start times occuring before the attack portion of the sampled sound. Examples of artists who have taken this way further in recent years (in a similar way to the way Autechre have) would include Mike Slott, Hudson Mowhawke, Flying Lotus, Untold, Slugabed and Rustie.
Whether these artists are all as funky as Dilla or Madlib is a matter of opinion.

I wasn't familiar with all these artists so I listened around and decided I liked Untold pretty much. Another participant in the discussion, Alan Lockett, contextualized bart's list:

If I’m not mistaken, bart is pointing to a wilfully staggered deliberately ‘off’ quantization-subverting styling that has proved popular enough with a bunch of hip-hop-inflected electronicists to have resulted in a sub-genre in itself, with its own designation: ‘Wonky’ (the most appealing of which, to these ears at least, is a bloke caled Lone, who isn’t a million miles away from a BoC* at times).

Wonky I know about and was excited to learn about Lone and Untold from the Autechre conversation, as well as a label called Hessle Audio.

*Boards of Canada