general

The interviewee below may or may not be Gerald Donald, the surviving member of Drexciya, but it sounds like him and in any case these are words to live by:

Why has your music remained so singular?
Endurance is relative to the observer.

Why the anonymity?
The music is more urgent than the organizers of it and should take a place of primary importance, so it does not matter if one is known or not known directly. Personality is not a requirement for serious music production and they should remain separate. When the cult of personality displaces the importance of the creative process, problems begin and degeneracy unfolds.

How did you stay so true to your creativity?
To never compromise their original creative vision and amplify its intensity over time. For it to be definitive, it must increase chronologically.

Despite what she says now, reading back over the posts Lorna Mills and I have written about each other's work over the years, one does not find all that much disagreement. I would say they were mutually respectful. In her notes for a class she gave in 2008 she wrote: "This is the gif I first saw on Tom Moody's blog that indicated to me that there was some wonderful stuff going on created by people were weren't necessarily thinking of themselves as artists." (That was early '06.)
Lately, as she notes, we even have the same taste in hair gifs.

What is this festival about? I'm guessing the theme is how tech businesses use academics and museums to normalize alienation and marketing. Were any dissenters present? It looks like a happy event.

Lauren Cornell's curatorial statement for Professional Surfer, January 2007:

Significantly, some of the featured artists grew up with the web, and aspects of their work chart the digital half-life of pop cultural images or icons from their youth. Others took up the Internet later on, after working with painting or other mediums. In this way, professional surfing is not restricted to a certain generation but shared by all those who engage the overwhelming atmosphere of the web by embroiling themselves deeper in it.

Lauren Cornell, in Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty In Some Artists' Eyes, Wall Street Journal, December 2007:

Some of these Web-inspired works have been included in the recently reopened New Museum's "Unmonumental" exhibition, parts of which are on view at its New York location and others of which can be seen on the site for Rhizome, its new-media affiliate. "This generation really knows the Net," says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's executive director. "They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it."

You may have read about the new TLDs (Top Level Domains) that are in the process of being created to add new extensions for future websites. So in addition to dot com, dot org, etc, we will have dot food and dot car. Below is a list of applicants for the Dot Art (.art) domain; registration has closed so one of these will be picked. Paddy Johnson thinks we should support E-flux in its application because they've promised to plow the money they make from .art back into the community through foundations and grants. I'm skeptical about having an established art player in charge of "art," as seen in the comment I posted on her blog, also reproduced below.

The applicant list for art, as provided by ICANN:

ART .ART REGISTRY INC. KY - - John Kane Jkane1@afilias.info 1-1013-98331
ART Dadotart, Inc. US Yes - Joshua Wattles josh@deviantart.com 1-1097-20833
ART Aremi Group S.A. LU - - Mr. Brian Winterfeldt bwinterfeldt@steptoe.com 1-1844-98392
ART Top Level Domain Holdings Limited VG - - Mr. Antony Van Couvering tas.minds.machines@gmail.com 1-927-15036
ART Baxter Tigers, LLC US - - Daniel Schindler baxtertigers@donuts.co 1-1344-70608
ART UK Creative Ideas Limited IM - - Mr. Christopher John Glancy cglancy@whitecase.com 1-1211-27884
ART Merchant Law Group LLP CA - - Mr. Brendon James Ralfe bralfe@merchantlaw.com 1-875-17602
ART Uniregistry, Corp. KY - - Bret Alan Samuel Fausett bret@internet.pro 1-855-66616
ART EFLUX.ART, LLC US Yes - Mr. Anton Vidokle avidokle@e-flux.com 1-1675-51302
ART Top Level Design, LLC US - - Mr. Raymond King raymondking@gmail.com 1-1086-100

It cost $185,000 just to apply for .art. The losers forfeit the money. Here's my comment on Paddy's blog:

This plan has the potential to remove the heartbreak, uncertainty, and awe of a question that has long plagued artists and especially the public: "Is it art?"
"I may not know much about art but I know what's on the .art domain."
"Yeah it's just a urinal but I saw it on .art so what are ya gonna do?"
The internet eliminated gatekeepers, at least it was starting to, and now E-Flux wants to be the uber-gatekeeper for "art."
E-Flux completely accepts, and is trying to sell us on, the hype that the net is about to undergo a paradigm shift based on these new domains and that people will change their search habits to, say, only look on .food for something to eat or on .car for wheels.* To win its application it tries to scare us that the philistines will take over art if we don't rally for E-flux.
The beauty of art on the net is it's spread around sites like .fm, .com, even .biz. E-Flux has the potential with this scheme to be a new Facebook of art (in the sense of "you have to be on it to play"). It is already Facebook-like in its maintenance of an exclusive mailing list.
.art under E-Flux also has the worrisome potential to become a place of knee-jerk left orthodoxy: trolls, wingnuts, and future urinal-appropriators need not apply.
What are the alternatives? One of the above-mentioned business entities wins .art, turning it into a tacky, profit-oriented no-go zone for anyone with a creative bone, and art continues to thrive in a decentralized way.

*That is one scenario but it has its critics (scroll down to "The new TLDs might be moot in practice.")

Update: Deviantart.com would be an interesting choice because its large community of creatives thrives despite near-invisibility to the theory-driven art world represented by E-flux. Its winning would be noteworthy because it would mean a web-based art culture bested one rooted in a gallery-based power structure (evidenced by E-flux's closely-held mailing list of curators, museum directors, critics, etc.).