general

Am sick of articles by Iraq War supporters-turned-doubters such as this one by Ezra Klein that say "I wanted Kenneth Pollack's war, not George Bush's." Pollack was the "Democrat" intelligence expert who argued out his rear end that Saddam had WMDs, and convinced a lot of other "Democrats," on the eve of the war, to support Bush and Cheney.
Klein does briefly mention Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine, ex-UN weapons inspector on the Republican side of the spectrum who said Saddam had zip (and paid the price by having his personal life slimed) but neglects to mention all the other people who were right: the millions out marching in the streets who knew Bush and Cheney were lying scumbags. These Washington consensus types amaze in their ability to proudly and loudly self-delude, year after year.

More reminiscing about And/Or Gallery:

They also did a show putting YTMND (what we would now call a meme site) into a gallery setting. There has been writing praising sites like YTMND and 4Chan for their participatory democracy art model, which is kind of BS because there is no reversibility: to these sites the art world is just a bunch of [insert gay slur]. The YTMND forum thread about the And/Or show pretty much proved this. (Hat tip to RA.)

The best reason for people with MFAs to appreciate sites like YTMND is the same reason everyone else appreciates them: because they're funny. Also there is art in the way pages are put together and a kind of shared meta-critical attitude about the Web and the world. But you can keep your Nicolas Bourriaud references: it's so colonial and Margaret Mead to talk about sites that way, and the natives ain't having it. Guthrie Lonergan's text on the And/Or page makes the case well (also published as text-to-speech on YTMND - am sure they hated it).

And/Or Gallery, currently on hiatus, put some images up of the show I did with them in January 2006, a two-person exhibit with Saskia Jorda.
This was an early-ish net-in-the-gallery experiment in the sense that co-gallerist Paul Slocum took screenshots of GIFs off my blog, burned them to DVD as video files, and showed them on old TVs/monitors.
Another piece consisted of GIF frames printed out.
I didn't see the show but I like the remote collaboration aspect (based on trusting what Paul was going to do) and the DVD/CRT method of showing GIFs was something I continued to work with after the show.
Other work wasn't net-based but all of it involved some lo-tech use of the computer: MSPaint drawings, collages of printed-out molecule designs (taped together or glued onto product packaging). Also a music video.

Got some reports on the Hyperallergic Tumblr panels at 319 Scholes on Mar. 9. Since many creative people use Tumblr it makes some sense to consider the sociology, tech assumptions, and pathologies of this enormous web host. Having Tumblr as a co-sponsor of the event assured that the data would be as compromised as a global warming study funded by the Koch brothers. As previously noted, the theme of at least two commissioned essays was that we must learn to love compromise and accept the limitations of the platform, because it is your new reality as an artist.

Several dumpers were watching the live stream and giving a play-by-play, along the lines of "that panelist is fucking insufferable" and

that [guy] who is MC-ing [said] that they didn't talk to [James Bridle] because "We think New Aesthetic is too nebulous of a concept to be related to tumblr art"

That says something about how nebulous the New Aesthetic is! Also got some info via email:

Last night, there was huge technophobia happening at the panel and [some] panelists were making an argument that being open was a result of "generational differences," and that adults aren't interested in sharing anything about themselves online.

[Those] panelists were trying to create critical distance by dismissing young artists, saying they didn't understand the platforms they were working in... It was a huge buzzkill, especially since the panels were stacked with "experts" so artists weren't given the opportunity to respond...

Reports were that things improved a mite when two art types who actually use Tumblr came on. Both are writers whose "net art" views maybe aren't so interesting but the witnesses said they "weren't too bad," especially compared to what preceded them. Many thanks to those who watched or attended so the rest of us didn't have to.

A couple of excerpts from Hyperallergic's retardataire Tumblr symposium (in progress right now at 319 Scholes). First a screenshot from a Kyle Chayka essay about selling out:

And the final paragraph from Julia Kaganskiy's essay The Measure of Success: Making Art in the “Like” Economy:

Stats are woven into the fabric of the web and, tied as they are to the business prospects of many of our favorite service providers, the metrics aren’t going away anytime soon. If anything, we’ll probably see more attempts at the “gamification” techniques meant to encourage this behavior, like the addictive buttons and animated feedback that liking and reblogging currently feature. Short of choosing to disengage from the metrics system completely, as Benjamin Grosser did with his “Facebook Demetricator” project, which erased all visible numbers from his Facebook profile, there’s not much artists can do to extricate themselves from this data-driven system as long as they hope to make and display work online. The most successful creators will be those who choose to work within the system, but do so with self-awareness and purpose, and perhaps a good dose of humor as well.

I commented on the Kaganskiy essay:

"The most successful creators will be those who choose to work within the system," with or without the qualifiers that follow, reads like a Party dictate in the former USSR.

These writers live in a narrow tunnel defined by a handful of web providers. The point of these essays is "let's make our tunnel as comfortable as possible because we ain't never getting out."