general

In response to my previous post about old GIF posts being FUBAR'd by current browsers with mandatory anti-aliasing or smoothing features, S. R. emailed wondering if the solution might be "an emulator on the server side, that forces rendering of any number of pages/urls that the designer wishes, to any number of possible browsers/versions." I have heard talk of such but replied thusly:

I don't have a problem with web standards being a consensus and artists working within that consensus. Unfortunately the consensual notion of progress in this case was that Safari-style anti-aliasing was the right way to go. But now I've lost and I represent the crank fringe. My guess is web professionals have enough worries without having to accommodate every crank fringer that's out there. Having a grab bag of different browser settings on servers is thoughtful but not very elegant. How many nutty settings need to be accommodated? Who decides? Eventually you have to have a Wikipedia style vetting process.
It's easier for me to change a few GIFs than agitate for broader change in this case (except for occasional griping).

Next time you come to this page your entire screen will become dark and a little man on video will appear and start talking to you really loudly as you desperately hunt for the X to turn him off. Just kidding, this blog wouldn't do something like that, we're not media vulgarians here. For a while it seemed things had settled down with annoying pop-ups, after the dot com era, when failed businesses were soul searching and consultants told them consumers were turned off by these distractions from content. With the gradual "improvements" in streaming media and the ubiquity of Flash players in browsers, the wisdom now seems to be, "Yeah but we'll make our pop-ups so entertaining people will like them."

Josh Marshall's ever-worsening blog, sorry, news portal, now features video ad pop-ups that roam around your screen.

Of course pop-ups never went away on the cruder sites, they just became less of a pain as blockers became standard issue in browsers. We're talking here about the media brahmins who kept their temples austere for as long as they could but are gradually resorting to carnival barkerdom as times get tough. Only the low-overhead solo shops can afford to stay bland, elegant, and gimcrack-free.

[edited slightly since initial posting]

CNBC: "Anyone Who Owns a Suit Can Come on Television"
from The Onion but it might as well be true.

Over at Paddy Johnson's blog, the second installment of a summer series called IMG MGMT (do we need to spell it out?) merits a look. Artists can be obsessive picture collectors and computer archiving and web distribution have advanced this formerly secondary practice to the forefront of many careers.

The eye-as-sponge approach prevails in Claudia Wieser's enjoyable dump of art, architecture, and found photo jpegs. The viewer threads connections among curvilinear (and occasionally hard-edged) utopian modernism in many guises, from not-so-famous buildings to random street views.

One of Petra Cortright's trademark ascii-meets-new-age-crystal explosions inspires until about halfway down the page, when she begins including famous artists' work on a "rainbow" theme. The New Museum's execrable "Hell Yes" logo breaks the fourth wall, but not in a good way.

Other artists have taken narrative approaches. Michaela Melián's post isn't a collection per se but a fairly focused art-and-photo essay on Hedy Lamarr, whose career ran the remarkable gamut from glamorous film actress to inventor of a patented "frequency hopping" communications protocol with both military and civilian applications. This technique, developed with avant garde composer George Antheil (Ballet Mécanique), is a rare instance of art-for-art's-sake contributing to the world of advanced technology. By interspersing her own techno-flavored paintings and collages on a Lamarr theme, Melián brings this secular story back to the realm of art.

Jon Rafman's gathering of images from Google Street Views isn't really collecting at all but solid, groundbreaking journalism. Obviously untold hours were spent perusing this recent-but-everyday tool for images in very specific, focused categories. Photos that look like art photos, photos of mishaps, photos showing the success and failure of Google's face-blurring software, photos that show class issues in a supposedly "universal" product (the down and out are more likely to be photographed unsympathetically than the up and in). As much as one hates to see more attention paid to the monopoly that aspires to put the happy face on Big Brother, this is worthwhile, thoughtful research.

Congressman Alan Grayson asks Ben Bernanke who received the half-trillion dollars that went to "foreign central banks" in the recent bailout. Bernanke replies "I don't know." [YouTube]

I've watched this a half-dozen times and can't make heads nor tails of it. Bernanke's apparent apathy about the figures Grayson's quoting seems scandalous but I could use an honest economist's commentary to untangle what it means to trade dollars for euros as Bernanke is describing. I would welcome any thoughts from the macro-economically inclined.