inside wildchatster's apartment (YouTube apartment tour with voiceover by Guthrie Lonergan)
...more 2008 offerings on Lonergan's recently revised web page, including the collection of depressing self-published book covers (now in 3d!), Google 3d warehouse drawings, a popular locution you might be aware of but at the same time not, and other gems.
Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her blog. Please consider contributing (here), even though times are lean. I concur with her self-assessment that her blog "represents a strong presence in an otherwise thin field of art world professionals working on the web. Considering how traditional media is currently gutting arts coverage, sites such as [hers] are not only important, but essential to the field of art criticism."
Johnson's blog is a necessary counterweight to the institutional writing that constitutes current criticism: magazines chasing ad dollars, 501c(3) organizations that have to say nice things about everyone, and museum curators at the beck and call of powerful board members. Johnson produces a staggering amount of original content each year, including interviews, essay series, and reportage. Her comment boards are moderated in a civilized fashion and are a good place to hash out issues that aren't being discussed elsewhere. Plus she is that rare writer that can cover both the art gallery scene and the online scene with equal knowledge and confidence.
If that's not enough reason, she has upset her commenter "Lisa":
I think highly of your site and wish you all the best with your fundraiser, but there’s still an underlying problem:
Newspapers have cut back on their coverage precisely because bloggers (many of them former newspaper writers or top freelancers) have been giving away the same kind of coverage for free. Now readers expect this content to be free. The idea that writers ought to be paid for their expertise seems to have vanished.
Dear Lisa, the demise of certain print writers' cults of power and personality and concomitant elevation of articulate but previously voiceless commoners is one of the best things that's happened in my lifetime. It's worth $25 to see that bloggers keep giving away content.
hippos by ricky at double happiness
found abstraction with arms, legs and tops of heads; polyrhythmic clicking soundtrack; chaos gradually resolving into order; observable and individual styles of game play; rigorous symmetry challenged by bobbing, rocking movement; play of light and shadow; unusual, severe camera angle; overt pop culture reference; mesh of nostalgia and aesthetic disassociation; medium that works across media (photography, flash video, social networking, "found object art," color field painting, amateur video).
From wikipedia:
In a 1990 short story published in The New Yorker (and sarcastically named after the game), Edward Allen wrote, "The object of the game [is essentially] to press your handle down again and again as fast as you can, with no rhythm, no timing, just slam-slam-slam as your hippo surges out to grab marble after marble from the game surface...."
[...]
In the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Mr. Plow", Homer says, "Now we play the waiting game... Eh, the waiting game sucks, lets play Hungry Hungry Hippos." Another Simpsons episode, Hungry, Hungry Homer is a reference to the game (as well as Homer being one of the four hippos). It also has a mention in Donnie Darko when Donnie informs his psychiatrist that he always wanted Hungry Hungry Hippos for Christmas but he never got any. The Futurama episode "300 Big Boys" features some homeless men who refer to themselves as "hungry hungry hobos."
Re: Milton Bradley dropping one of the "hungrys" in the game's name in 2008, that's corporate thinking in microcosm, "if it ain't broke, bland it down."
"Medium that works across media" is Damon Zucconi's phrase.
"George, it's come to our attention that someone is using the THX Sound without authorization."
"Who is it?"
"Some obscure synthesizer fan site has a page called Famous Sounds."
"You shut down those little rat bastard motherfuckers, RIGHT NOW, you hear me? Get the lawyers on their asses."
"Gotcha."
"I mean, if these people are allowed to post crappy sound clips of the THX Sound, then every little rat bastard will be doing it."
"Gotcha, George, we will burn the motherfuckers."
Didn't want to "explain" that GIF in the same post, so this is a "related text."
Photoshop always goes haywire when resizing the "crosshatching" of 1-bit (monochrome) MSPaint drawings. I think the program's trying to make a nice smooth photographic image and the grids confuse some algorithmic averaging process (just a guess). There are "tipping points" where the image partially disappears or goes black, or turns into various-sized checkerboards.
I changed the size of Gradient Circle (or rather, a single still frame from that earlier black and white GIF) in Photoshop's "view" mode 14 times (more or less equal steps from small to large) and took a screenshot each time.
The screenshots, unaltered, are the GIF frames for the "Gradient Circle (Crushed)" GIF.
Thus are the bugs turned into features of interesting (to me) chaotic patterns, and art is made about how previous art has been unintentionally messed up in reproduction.
