general

Recommended: "Mermaid Intern," a video short by Julio Torres and Lena Einbinder [YouTube]
This deadpan comedy, floating between conventional SNL-type skit and performance art, explores the plight of the creative soul in the modern office environment. Einbinder's earnest fin-footed Seapunk finds herself "trapped in a world she never made," as Steve Gerber once wrote about Howard the Duck.

Some more oppositional writing in response to a Rhizome.org post, in this case Ceci Moss' Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu. Hers is yet another screed attempting to nail down a recuperative art of connection, which she calls "expanded" (a la Rosalind Krauss' "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," although Krauss isn't mentioned) after offering a laundry list of the damned of similar terms: Post internet, post media, post media aesthetics, radicant art [no, really], dispersion, formatting, meme art, and circulationism. Am not sure if I believe in hermeticism or if it's just agitprop in my role as Rhizome's resident angry comment dude. The contours of hermeticism are defined mainly by disgust with the top-down editorial conceit of circulation qua circulation as a desirable or necessary condition of the present moment. The van den Dorpel and Murphy examples are taken from Moss' essay and re-spun.

In view of the plethora of terms all saying the same obvious thing (not all internet art takes place on the net) let's propose a new term suggested by Ceci Moss' essay: hermeticism. The hermeticist artist keeps to herself in spite of the widespread and much-flacked availability of online connections in the social media era. While not shunning collaboration or eclecticism, the hermeticist artist believes "the buck stops here" with regard to artistic expression, "here" being the artist's own judgment and decision-making process. The hermeticist artist still has a studio, even if it is located in a single device. The hermeticist pursues shamanic and occult practices in the face of consensus art-making. Many hermeticist artists operate as artistic outsiders, a considerable achievement in an era of maximum surveillance and self-surveillance (i.e., commodified confession), but not all hermeticists are paranoid loners. Harm van den Dorpel's Assemblages is a classic hermeticist work, where noise from the digital economy is obsessively collected, mixed with the artist's own gestures, and fused into a primary structure resembling an atomic sphere. Van den Dorpel's private studio activity de-recuperates a wealth of data that has meaning in other contexts, creating an autobiographical talisman others find pleasurable to view. Similarly, Brenna Murphy produces discrete objects in the form of floor patterns that are individually photographed and operate according to their own perverse internal logic. These will be mistaken after the fact as metaphors for communitarian circulation when they are in fact monuments to a kind of sublime self-awareness. The hermeticist artist is not concerned on any level [with] whether art "pushes us forward" but instead moves inward at tangential angles to the dominant networked culture. [To be continued]

Logitech is selling a bluetooth "keyboard cover" for iPads that promises "the reassuring 'click' of real keys." They refer to it, in advertising pitchspeak, as "the other half of your iPad."

This means, as some of us have been saying, that the iPad is half of a laptop. But you probably bought one, so you know that.

Posted this comment on Rhizome in response to Michael Bell-Smith's essay CREATIVE 2 PROFESSIONAL: 7 Things to Think About:

Hi, Michael,
It's tempting to call this essay "7 Things in Search of a Stance"; what is your point exactly? Amateurism is bad? Prosumers are victims, and you, as a professional new media artist, are above all that?
It's fine if you want to inform us of some recent products that exploit creative hopefuls but what is the point of tracing this back to '70s rock and roll examples?
The Scott Halpin story fascinates because, for a brief glorious time, he had the skills to "step up" and substitute for Keith Moon. Townsend asked if anyone in the audience was good, not whether someone in the audience had a dream of playing with famous rockers.
The punk "three chord" example reacted to the professional excesses of progressive rock, with its symphonic scores and complicated time signatures. The punkers were saying anyone can do it, but as a means of promoting energy and angst in the face of irrelevant refinement. You still had to be "good" in your soulful rage.
None of this has any bearing on "no skills are necessary" phenomena such as paint-by-numbers or Beamz.
The Andrew Norman Wilson-style Olympian art view of pathetic little people "employed in the service of selling yet another product" exasperates.
An essay about how you (as artist) did something interesting with an amateur-aimed process might be more viable than creating this chain of non-causation.
Best, Tom

"Annoyed Greek Chorus" is preferable to peanut gallery but lately my hobby is providing a stream of oppositional commentary to the Andrew Norman Wilsons and James Bridles who lodge in our institutions like cockleburs.

Following Apple (or was it Google), then Firefox, WordPress.org is now on an accelerated update schedule. This locks them into having to think of ways to "improve" the product once a month or so.
Then the hapless user must submit to the ordeal of a full database backup, finger-crossing during the one-click install, then dealing with follow-up releases to fix the updates and broken plugins.
Worst of all, they are now naming releases for famous jazz musicians. Release 3.7 was "Basie"; Release 3.8 (stylistic changes to make Word Press more tablet-friendly) is "Parker."
I posted this comment on the Dreamhost blog, but it's also aimed at Word Press empresario Matt Mullenweg:

So if you don't have a smart phone or tablet and don't care about cosmetic design tweaks, you can skip this release, right?
Was scanning this post and Mullenweg's for any information about security issues, which are the user's main concern, release-wise. Didn't see anything.
Also, calling the release "Charlie Parker" is pretentious. The designers are comparing themselves to genius jazzmen (minus the heroin addiction, money problems, etc.).
You said it all with the phrase "update fatigue."