general

This blog recently participated in a seance and asked the late Theodor Adorno some questions:

TM: Which version of the Mariah Carey green screen video do you like better, Oliver Laric's* or Caspar Stracke's?

TA: They are both rather terrible. Art that relies on the simplistic device of subtracting information with digital tools isn't really art at all, is it? No, strike that, Joe McKay's UFOs made from partially erased street lamps were quite poignant, so it can be done in the right hands.

TM: But if you had to choose, which would it be, Laric or Stracke?

TA: Laric's video, I suppose, because it allows you to ogle this magnifique sexy woman with no surrounding distractions, other than the fact that she is hovering somewhat clumsily in a green monochrome. Whereas with the Stracke you are forced to look at the horrible actor who plays the computer nerd "rocking out" and such and the femme fatale is reduced to a green silhouette.

TM: What did you think of the Mariah Carey video when "net artists" were just linking to it as a found object?

TA: Bad, bad. Carey's producers reached out to the nerd demographic and the nerds took the bait. We are still doing it with this interview.

TM: Thank you for your time, sir.

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jun/30/go-ahead-touch-her/

TH emailed with a question for a hypothetical "What Kind of Net Artist Are You?" quiz. I've broken it down into two questions and rephrased slightly.

What are your favorite filetypes?

What domains do you mostly inhabit?

Please add to your quiz answers and hand in by 9 am.

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from Gangsta's Mafia Death profile. Update: Thanks to JMB for telling me about the "pre" tag that insulated these designs from the surrounding, overbearing blog template. Somehow the effect wasn't quite the same with the palatino or garamond font (or whatever this is) and the elongated spacing of Word Press Classic.

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From a listServ post found via Wikipedia, The writer is John Kilgore:

Back in the dark ages when I was a young whippersnapper of an apprentice
engineer, I worked in a studio (Apostolic) where Frank Zappa made four
albums (We're Only in it for the Money, Lumpy Gravy, Reuben and the Jets
and Uncle Meat). When Frank was building ...Money, we used this thing
called the Apostolic Blurch Injector. Frank would fill up the Scully 12
track with snippets of his old abums (varispeeded, of course), interviews
with guys who were trying to get him to drop acid (Frank's only vices were
Coffee, Kools and CocaCola), chopped up snippets of stuff the censors
wouldn't let him use (no kidding - and this was 1968) and mics planted to
catch what the cops said when they came to bust us in the middle of the
night cause we were keeping the neighbors awake. All of this would be mixed
down to a single track and put on a new fresh 12 track tape which he would
fill up with these collage tracks. The Blurch injector was a keybord made
up of twelve switches which were patched in line between the 12 track
outputs and the console. Then he would play the 12 track, which he called
the BROWN NOISE master, and wail away on the keyboard. This is how he made,
in part, Nasal Retentive Calliope Music an other stuff of that ilk.

A much cruder version of this concept is Leon and Brian Dewan's home-built synthesizer/mixer hooked up to three vintage 8-track players. [photo] [link]. Undoubtedly many others have done some variation on this pre-digital or non-digital way of manipulating sound. Possibly one thing that made Zappa's work so compelling and dynamic was the use of top-of-the-line studio gear and recordings. Unlike the various basement producers, he got in there and used the Suits' equipment, guerrilla fashion (because they thought he was going to produce a hit album).

New York Times graphic.