general

From my hand-made Twitter archive (don't you wish you had one of these?), vol. 1, long before disillusionment with the owners set in:

using my cognitive surplus 08:32 PM May 10, 2008

voyager where aliens from The Void have a calculator jam session while the Doc bobs head appreciatively and 7 looks on 10:03 PM May 09, 2008

ideas for music series: more acoustic jazz trio songs; a suite of songs in the vein of the DEVO Corporate Anthem 09:48 PM May 09, 2008

premise of Gutenberg Galaxy: understanding transition from oral to literate culture helps us understand transition from literate to media 09:45 PM May 09, 2008

starting the first of the Octavia Butler "patternist" novels, Wild Seed 09:44 PM May 09, 2008

finished the action-packed Iain M Banks downer space opera. it's a bit like Star Wars where Greedo didn't shoot first 02:04 AM May 08, 2008 from web

all batman movies suck 12:17 PM May 07, 2008 from web

@piotch - yes, the museum tours are good, from what I know of them; the artist acceptance speeches seemed like too easy targets 03:16 PM May 05, 2008

what is it about YouTube comments--people are completely uninhibited to say whatever comes into their heads, at all times 08:11 AM May 05, 2008

andrea fraser's striptease video on vvork--she needs to stop obsessing about the success of these assholes (just an initial reaction) 08:07 AM May 05, 2008

am reading my first Iain M.Banks sf novel--he writes non-sf without the middle initial 11:53 AM May 03, 2008

apollo (stringed instrument/mathematical music of the spheres) flayed the satyr marsyas (piped instrument/earthiness and sex) (albright) 11:52 AM May 03, 2008

adorno's appreciation of music has little to do with the ear but rather music's connection to mental structures 11:47 AM May 03, 2008

like Greenberg, Adorno is a purist: art is valuable to the extent it is disillusioned, authentic (albright) 04:27 PM May 02, 2008

adorno adds music to the laocoon analysis; his Philosophy of the New Music praises Schoenberg and ridicules Stravinsky 04:25 PM May 02, 2008

greenberg: each art should remain inviolate within its own private domain (albright) 04:21 PM May 02, 2008

gotthold ephraim lessing: nebeneinander (spatial arts) vs nacheinander (temporal arts) - each has distinct protocols 04:03 PM May 02, 2008

laocoon problem: man crushed by snakes screams in poem but is impassive in statue owing to different protocols of those media 04:02 PM May 02, 2008

I have some work in a show organized by La Scatola Gallery (based in London, Berlin, and the internet). Curators Rozsa Zita Farkas and Valentina Fois asked 33 artists each to submit a GIF. A new GIF will be displayed each day on Tumblr over the next month and then the GIFs will be taken down and archived in a limited edition version to be sold by La Scatola (details TBA). The GIFs will continue to circulate on the internet and elsewhere, depending on whim and circumstance, thus avoiding the public relations gaffe of "taking the GIF offline so the collector can have it locally" (which one institution attempted a while back). Having a limited edition documents the moment and the collected nature of the work, although I'm sure skeptics will be ready with the well-worn explanation that "galleries create artificial scarcity." (It's a lot of trouble to go to if that's all they're doing.)

Am not sure yet which day my GIF, Small Universe Model, will appear. Will do an update with a link to it.

Participating artists and curators' statement:

We asked some of the artists we love to send us a gif each. They are artists that use digital tools at various stages in the production of artworks, and occupy online modes of distribution for both presentation and development, of practice and discourse - around the nature of art today and the relations that implicate the artist within these very social economies.
*
ARTISTS
Alexandria McCrosky . Alice Khalilova . Anne de Boer . Arvida Byström . Beth Siveyer . Chris Shier . Christopher Schmidt . Eloïse Bonneviot . Emilie Gervais . Faith Holland . Georges Jacotey . Hanna Nilsson . Jeff Baij . Jenna Sutela . Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach . Lawrence Lek . Leah Beeferman . Maja Malou Lyse . Mary Bond . Niko Princen . Petra Cortright . Rachel Lord . Raquel Meyers . Rob Chavasse . Sabrina Ratté . Samuel Kenswil . Sæmundur Þór Helgason . Sullivan and Flint . Tom Moody . Vanessa Omoregie . Viktor Timofeev . Yuri Pattison

The tumblr version commences here.
La Scatola's site is here.

Was on Church Street near the WTC around 10 pm last night. A young-ish man (to old to be a "kid" but let's call him that) was randomly walking alongside me, talking loudly into his phone.
"They're gonna buttfuck you," he said. "And they're not going to use Vaseline. And I think you know that is gonna hurt."
I was trying not to listen but it just kept going.
"Wait a minute," the kid said to whoever he was talking to, "are you taking a shit right now? You are -- I can tell. Are you? C'mon, you gotta tell me. You are! Ha ha ha, I knew it, man! Ha ha!"
I fantasized about knocking the phone out of his hand and stepping on it.

work in process

Rhizome.org's Community Manager Zachary Kaplan has brought some needed zip to the website with a series of daily posts linking to and discussing various web content he is following. Sometimes Rhizome's editor Michael Conner makes contributions. How often does Conner weigh in, and in what proportion to Kaplan's blurbs? What types of things are they covering? Unfortunately I can't tell you, or I can tell you only in the most vague and general way, because they delete the posts the next day.
Kaplan says the content isn't lost -- he is planning to have a "best-of" post each month -- but the record that's created is entirely at his (or Rhizome's) discretion.
In a way, this solves a problem Rhizome has always had: is it a museum, being studiously neutral and objective in picking the most important "internet art," or is it a magazine, with a feisty and opinionated voice about what people are doing online (whether art or not)?
Kaplan's posts give us the pleasures of the latter but regrettably throw out the baby of a permanent record with the bathwater of studied faux-neutrality. Why should a record be treasured? It's a way to keep score -- one of the few honors for a so-called internet artist. Also it keeps the writers honest. If you think your words might trip you up a few years later you write them more carefully.

Below is an example of some of Kaplan's writing, from the Friday, August 22, 2014 Rhizome Today post. By Monday it will be gone. This sucks for Ryder Ripps, whose project Kaplan is discussing. Maybe Ripps will make the monthly best-of, maybe he won't. Do readers get a say in this? Maybe, or maybe not. Comments are deleted along with the daily posts (I tried a few days back). You can always email, or hit up the Rhizomers on commercial social media channels.

Instagram Corny-Core
Ryder Ripps is thinking about Instagram's "mawkishly sentimental tone to everyday common things," a heavily filtered, hypermoody selfie-lifestyle confluence. He takes Adrianne Ho's Instagram account as its apotheosis, and it's no coincidence that Ho's is a sponsored feed, tied to the clothes she's given to model.

I've been aware of a profusion of variously branded content on Instagram for a while now, a result of friends working in the lifestyle publishing world — food, in particular, is a good way to see how this, pardon the pun, sausage is made. Brand diffusion on Instagram takes different forms. There is that which is obviously sponsored, as in paid (to the social network) ads that pop into feeds, or clearly demarcated sponsored 'editorial content' with brand @ing on 'independent' accounts. There is also a shadow economy of soft sponsorship by way of freebies then imaged by trusted native accounts. What Ryder is thinking about is what I see on a daily basis.

One reason that Instagram is so fertile for both styles of advertising is that its discoverability is so horrible — like its owner, Facebook, Instagram closes your feed in on itself, with very little invitation to explore different Instagram experiences, different Instagram worlds, different people. The Explore tab used to filter in all sorts of weird images that were trending, but as of late last year, it now displays things your friends are liking. Vine — wonderful, amazing Vine — in contrast, is all about discoverability, randomness, and blur. One powerful mechanism here is the ReVine, which allows anyone to republish anything. Instagram instead is personal, owned, and hermetic. A closed world where one can fully know and expect another's audience is a world built for advertising.

http://rr-ho-presi.tumblr.com/

Does Ripps' project deserve a permanent, implied thumbs-up validation as important internet art on Rhizome's front page, or is it half-amusing, ephemeral, daily link fodder? Kaplan hedges his bets here. Ripps' slide show on Tumblr, On Ho, commenting on the closed loop style of image evaluation of the popular Facebook-owned Instagram application/database/website/thing, would seem to have the right blend of front page critique and cheek. But perhaps it falls short of that, and is only a curmudgeonly rant with elements of dashed-off creativity (Ripps's smartphone defacements of Instagram images and painted versions of the defacements that may or may not be done by Jeff Koons' assistants -- more on those paintings later). Also, Kaplan wants to get in his own point of view, which is that Vine (a rival application/database/website/thing owned by Twitter) is a better, less hermetic, less commercial experience (and therefore more innately art-like?) than the product Ripps is critiquing. As a Rhizome editorializer, this is within bounds, as a curator, it's probably overstepping. Imagine a museum wall-label that suddenly goes off on an artist for deconstructing the wrong thing. Whatever problems this raises, rest assured they will be not be discussed, because by the time you've wrapped your mind around them the post will be gone and we will be on to something else.

Paddy Johnson's history of animated GIF art continues on Artnet; here is Part Two, covering what Henry Kaye and Corinna Kirsch call the "golden age of social media GIFs" and what I usually call the blogosphere era.* Johnson's essay covers solo and group blogs, pre-Tumblr, and includes so-called surf clubs. (Her generous mentions of my contributions to this madhouse are much appreciated.) Interestingly, she includes Dump.fm in this group, which makes sense in terms of the spirit of collective improvisation even though Dump didn't launch until 2010, when Tumblr was well under way. Its real-time image chat offered a kind of "sped-up Tumblr." And it's still going strong, with several generations of user sensibilities having rapidly cycled through over the last four years.
Another note: according to a Lorna Mills quote in the article, Mills and I were "originally influenced" by Sally McKay to go down the GIF path. McKay gave me valuable instruction and conceptual feedback when I started making my own GIFs but I had already been making "GIF art" consisting of arrangements of found GIFs. See, for example, "Cube tower slideup, by artech-x03, 80 times, an html/internet/curatorial/appropriation piece" from July 2003 and "Hug Emoticon Pyramid," from August 2003, the latter consisting of a found HTML arrangement of found emoticons, copied more or less intact from deviantart.com and represented as an art piece. (In a later post will screencapture those as a single GIF, since I can't rely on newsreaders and other rebloggin' apparatus to translate those patterns reliably now.) Am not suggesting these were radical innovations, but the strategies weren't as familiar then as they are now.

*roughly 2001-2010, when self-hosted blogs thrived prior to the mass movement to Facebook, but you could say surf clubs were 2006-2010.