general

Rhizome.org has a follow-up to the post aesthetic or post internet panel mentioned earlier, and I contributed my specialty of what Sally McKay once called "lashing out like a wounded animal." (Hey that's a reflex and we can't always control it.)

Another commenter, João Enxuto, raises some interesting points while topping yours truly in the "kids get off my lawn" area:

While I appreciate the attempt to find something true and interesting in the postinternet debates and some hope among its supposed practitioners, it has become an increasingly difficult proposition when faced with the realities outlined in the very pieces cited in this article (Mute and 24/7).

"Now there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively." (Crary, 99)

Full-immersion and brand ubiquity represent the triumph of neoliberal capitalism over artistic autonomy - the author claims as much. But collectivism should not be confused with ubiquitous authorship. The Web 2.0 free-market has only flourished under such generous neologisms.

If the postinternet eludes a critical position it may be that its youthful practitioners are too immersed in the ostensible object of critique. Fish can't see water.

Under the unsparing weight of neoliberalism, debt, and privatization, an increased level of autonomy should be demanded by individual artists, not eradicated. The internet may hold some promise for future collective practices but it is also the horizon of market accumulation, manufactured desires, and forced obsolescence. The postinternet is now, admittedly, becoming outmoded. It will be superseded by another neologism, possibly from the hive mind of post-Millenials, which will have all of us, regardless of age, struggling to not be an old.

In the New Museum's 2008 Net Aesthetics panel it was easier to defend what we were then calling Web 2.0 because it was still the tail end of the relatively commerce-free blogosphere era.
I wouldn't condescend to say that millennials can't see the water they are swimming in, but can vouch that the water has gotten more polluted since the days of defending surf clubs against vintage net.art scolds.

Artists don't have to be concerned overmuch with the cycles of design fashion (which is sort of the same as fashion design). To paraphrase Dan Graham yet again: the recently outmoded is an interesting place to be working.

Thus it will be fun to make art with animated GIFs after they die a second time.

Touched off by Cosmopolitan soliciting for a "GIF artist" on Craigslist (they were also trolling dump.fm and seem to have some takers), Ryder Ripps' ad agency OKFOCUS says "ugh" and Tumblr-er extraordinaire Stephanie Davidson says "GIFs are over." Yay, now we can do some real work. Unlike when we last dorked around with GIFs in the art context, however, this time the gallery world will actually know what they are!

A site in the Sara Ludy-curated Chambers Pavilion.
Go to the launch page and click it.
The first time I did it nothing happened -- the page turned white, then dark, and I thought, huh, start-up, shut-down, I've been punked.
Came back a couple days later and tried it again. If you stay on the "dark" page (longer than I did the first time) a low humming sound begins, and a 3D shape begins to emerge out of the blackness.
[Ideal viewing conditions would be a large (1920 x 1080 and up) monitor, fast internet connection, high resolution sound and good speakers. Can't vouch for this thing on a phone.]
In any event, gradually increasing light on the 3D shape reveals a sleek mechanical form with airbrushed highlights, vaguely sinister curves, and somewhat incongruous striped wizard's hat cone shape on top of the form. The 3D form is turning, revealing more of its shape -- it's an industrial fan of some kind, viewed from the side, that HR Giger might have designed.
The rotations slowly increase speed and the humming gets louder. Soon the fan is spinning and the ambient hum has become a dull roar.

Now we've entered a realm somewhere between a wind-tunnel experiment, a renegade Hollywood FX shop, and the punk/art/industrial sublime.
The fan revs up to what Mel Brooks might call "ludicrous speed." Imagine sitting a few feet away from the blades of a jet aircraft turbine, as it encounters different exterior wind speeds and atmospheric pressures. The fan blades spin so fast they disappear, then appear to reverse motion, then disappear again. The sound is like an earthquake.
"How much can this baby handle?" is the question that applies to the turbine, the rendering engine creating the illusion, your computer and speakers, and your sanity.
At one point the illusion broke down and a striped artifact appeared in the middle of the screen -- a horizontal band. This only added to the "pushing the envelope" vibe. I mean, something's got to give. Mostly, though, you are witnessing gradations of chaos and violence as the fan blades spin at "max" and force patterns change.

Eventually the blades slow down, the noise diminishes, and the screen grows dark.

I don't think of this as computer art -- it's art, occupying the same niche that a giant wall of solid orange might have occupied forty years ago. Or a noise event with a Marshall stack in the '90s. It could be "sited" in a gallery or wherever the gear exists to replicate it. Yet it's not inconceivable that in a factory somewhere a simulation like this exists for a practical, banal purpose of testing metals stresses or the like. That is very interesting.

The New York Times famously hasn't apologized for its role in promoting the Iraq War, except for the standard "we were wrong in the way so many others were wrong" manner. And there are various ways not to apologize. One is for your chief White House correspondent to write a book analyzing the "complicated" and (yes) "Shakespearean" relationship between Bush Jr and Cheney in an ethical vacuum verging on open admiration.

Recently PBS discussed that book and invited me to be on the show via webcam for the perspective of someone outside "the usual DC circle jerk," as Gwen Ifill put it in her invitation to me. Excerpts from the transcript follow.

GWEN IFILL: And now to a look at a complicated partnership between President George W. Bush and his vice president, a relationship that shaped more than a decade's worth of war and politics.

TM (via webcam): To the detriment of all of us.

GWEN IFILL: That's the focus of a new book, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House," by Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Judy Woodruff talked to him recently.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Peter Baker, thank you for joining us.

PETER BAKER, The New York Times: Thanks for having me.

JUDY WOODRUFF: An exhaustively reported book, a wonderful read. Congratulations.

PETER BAKER: Thank you. I appreciate that.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, you write that Vice President Cheney wasn't the puppet master, President Bush wasn't the pawn. And if that wasn't their relationship, then what was it?

PETER BAKER: It was much more complicated than that.

TM (via webcam): Yadda yadda yadda. Let's move on.

[snip]

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you do write, though, in the first term in particular, the vice president very influential with the president. But I want to -- specifically about the Iraq war.

PETER BAKER: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: How much of that was the president and how much of that was the vice president? Would it have happened if it hadn't been for the vice president...

PETER BAKER: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: ... and the secretary of defense?

PETER BAKER: I mean, that's the great question. Right?

TM (via webcam): You mean in the sense of who contributed more to the debacle?

[snip]

PETER BAKER: In July of 2002, seven, eight months before the actual invasion began, Cheney and Rumsfeld went the president and said, you need to go ahead and attack Iraq now, because there's a chemical weapons facility in Northern Iraq, and Bush said no.

So there were moments where Bush kind of resisted the train and said, no, we are going to do it my way.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And yet -- and yet there were also moments when President Bush was going around the world making sure everybody was comfortable long after the vice president was absolutely certain this was the right thing to do.

PETER BAKER: Yes, yes.

TM (via webcam): Except it was the wrong thing to do.

[snip]

JUDY WOODRUFF: What -- why did President Bush grow to be less dependent on the vice president?

PETER BAKER: Right.

The evolution of their relationship is really fascinating. It's really almost Shakespearian,

TM (via webcam): Let's just end this right here. Gwen? OK to cut to commercial?

Ian Welsh on the failure of the progressive blogosphere. A couple of stalwarts who folded their blogging tents in the early Obama years, Matt Stoller and Jerome Armstrong, add their thoughts in the comments.

Welsh:

The reason is simple: we could not elect enough of our people. We could not instill sufficient fear. We could not defeat incumbents. We did not produce juice. Clark and Dean didn’t win the 2004 Presidential nomination. Dean was taken out in a particularly nasty fashion (via the manufactured Dean Scream.)

Armstrong:

But, I view the clincher happening a bit later, with Bill Halter’s loss in the 2010 Democratic primary in Arkansas. That is when it really ended. The whole Labor-Netroots coalition, Accountability Now, the blogs went all-in big (still barely united) and MoveOn and PCCC. Over $10 million to defeat a BlueDog that gave us this crappy corporate ACA debacle. But Obama did all he could behind to the scenes to defeat Halter.

Stoller:

After Lieberman won, and I remember that moment very well, it was all downhill. Clinton and Obama realized they didn’t need the netroots, and openly smacked us around with the retroactive immunity policy lie.

Facebook also happened around the tail end of the Bush years, siphoning a lot of audience share from the blogosphere's "sidebar network" of indie publishers. Initially Facebook was seen as a place to organize politically but that became a joke when all the privacy stuff started to come out. Now you can't even run pictures of an anti-GMO protest.