general

Two semi-related items on a "we the people vs the forces of darkness" theme:

Protest at Blackwater headquarters. Glad someone else is disturbed by the rise of this private police force. It should be shut down. We have an army and police--we don't need this company run by Christiofascists whose leader has a Hitler haircut.

This blog post describes how government agents detained a 9/11 suspect and threatened to torture or imprison his family in Egypt. A surface-to-air radio was found in his hotel room that subsequently turned out to be a pilot's left in the closet. Nevertheless the detainee confessed after the threats to his family, and is now suing for violation of his civil rights. The appeals court agreed he had a case, and published an account of what the government did to him in its summary judgment opinion. Several bloggers downloaded and posted it. Then the appeals court withdrew the opinion and redacted all the stuff about torture threats as "classified." Except it's not a secret, thousands now have the original opinion and are circulating it around the Web.

Am continuing to document, with screenshots, the appearances of my OptiDisc GIF on the world wild web (as wallpaper, avatars, etc), as sort of a meta-meta-bored at home project. This may not be up long, but please check out pol.iceman's handiwork for his Yahoo! profile--he has enlarged the GIF like a gazillion times. He might be amused to know that's how it was also displayed in a gallery context--although not limited by browser size and viewed in pieces via scrolling. (I'm assuming this is someone I don't know.)

Update: It's gone, so I removed the link and added the screenshot above. It's quite possible it was a mistake and that the user sized the image incorrectly. Oh, well, good while it lasted (less than a day?).

Just returned from my 24 hour trip to Austin, where I was a speaker on the NAMAC panel described here (that's the National Alliance for Media, Arts and Culture). Thanks to all who came and especially those who asked about blogs! Laurence Miller did a good job of moderating, addressing blunt questions to the panelists, organizers, and attendees. One curator in the audience divided the art spectrum into iterative new media types who grow and adapt to novel exhibition scenarios and "legacy artists" who presumably just need the thing they got famous for recreated as faithfully as possible. (For some reason Bill Viola comes to mind--you don't imagine him switching gears from straight up video installation to some GPS-intensive piece with a grid of embedded Quicktimes.) Miller asked her if there were any legacy artists who had made the transition and she said "of course," mentioning one name I didn't catch. I listened patiently to her inevitable "guilty liberal" refrain about internet art being the province of rich first worlders and English the lingua franca of the internet. She didn't think it was funny when I said my blog was reaching small towns in Texas.

Thanks to Steven Jenkins of the San Francisco Film Society for the invite, and I enjoyed meeting/hanging out with Laurence and my other co-panelists Kristin Newman-Scott and Brian Fridge.

Just a reminder that Marcin Ramocki's Blogger Skins exhibition opens Saturday, Oct 20, at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn, NY. Yours truly will be in Austin for the NAMAC panel so please go witness my humiliation at the hands of Google. (Ramocki's portraits of five bloggers are composites of the first 100 images that come up on the search engine when you type in our names--talk about Russian Roulette.)

Another obscure Gameboy CD discussed at Mutant Sounds:

Exactly what the band name suggests and part of a host of similarly themed Gameboy projects that came on the scene around the same time (the Nanoloop compilation CD, Matt Wand's Public.exe 10" and the Klangstabil "Gioco Bambino" CD I posted a while back to name a few), this troupe feed numerous Nintendo gameboys through a nanoloop editor then tweak the results through delays and reverbs, though to their credit, the migraine-in-an-arcade aggression and mulchy grittiness of their approach causes this to successfully stand apart in tone from the other cited projects. Issued in a blink-and-you-missed-it edition of 55 copies on the Mik Musik imprint (home to the Molr Drammaz and Pathman CDR's I've posted previously), this is a real winner for those inclined to enjoy 8-bit fuckery of this sort.

This is taking Gameboy music into the industrial, Reichian* realm. It feels a bit similar to what I tried to do with DJ-mixing (cross fading) two 8 Bit Construction Set records a while back, but denser and doomier (and more original).

*Steve, not Wilhelm.