general

Another recommended post by Tim Bavlnka reminisces about camgirl/camboy culture of the early '00s and how it stacks up against the twitter/facebook era. He calls it the "Everything/Nothing" scene, a term I hadn't heard, which seems to encompass everything from camgirls coding their own sites to people talking about nothing in particular on early blog hosts such as Livejournal. I did a post about the scene in '07, Cindy Sherman vs T Shirt Ninjas, using some old campics for a semi-cheeky comparison of self-published internet role-playing with Sherman's film trope re-enactment. As I tried to articulate in another post:

One afterthought on Cindy Sherman vs Webcammers: the comparison made the most sense in the earlier days of cams, when bandwidth and the "state of the art" limited the cammer to a series of still photos. Most of the journalistic focus in say, the late '90s, was on privacy issues and the pics were treated as straightforward documentary "slices of life" rather than what they also were--a string of self-composed photos placing form and content demands on the cammer. A series of fictions that may or may not have related to someone's actual life, and in the case of "sex worker" camming were home-run small businesses. Thus you had playacting, dressing up, and adventurous camera angles just to keep viewers interested, and the record of these performances was a series of individual photos that could be collected, separated from the main stream, passed around the net, etc. The difference between this and Sherman's untitled film stills was just a matter of highbrow vs lowbrow intent, a vastly different collector apparatus, and no critics willing to furrow their brows over the cammers. Some might say that's all the difference in the world but I think the gap is pretty small. In the age of MySpace intro videos Sherman's relevance fades because of the time element. Now instead of postModern tableaux vivants we have basement cinema that refers to other cinema.

Dump.fm is interesting because it revived both real-time chat and self-shot webcamming as an expressive tool. It's different from the Everything/Nothing scene because it happens at poetry slam speed and there is no time or space for long ruminative posts. Despite my moaning about publicity photos camming can be an art and some do it very well.

Tim Bavlnka's PBS’s Problematic Representation of GIFs, Culture, and Art gives a close reading of that awful PBS segment on animated GIFs a while back. He's especially good on how the show packages so-called cinemagraphs as a more advanced form of expression, over the lowly GIFs whose file extension they share.

The final segment of the video deals with cinemagraphs. These are quickly established in contrast to GIFs, and it makes me angry. I find many of the statements made by these creators to be somewhat deluded in order to serve their own established personas. Kevin Burg states that “I think there’s opportunities in this kind of hybrid medium to show people something they’ve never seen before. We have these moments that can just exist forever.” There are a few things going on here. First, Burg is quick to mention that their work is a hybrid medium, not the lowly and pathetic GIF. This connects to the statements above about how their work is more closely related to photography than to something else. Not only that, but the music of the video changes to a somber and serious piece. It established this form of GIF as more auteured and separate than those wacky GIF makers we saw previously.

Bavlnka also develops an idea I tossed out in the post Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze:

Like the gaze of the privilege of patriarchy, the camera’s gaze enforces a system of power over women. This is an important point to bring up due to some of the statements of the artist involved. Beck states “It’s so voyeuristic. You look but you feel like you should look away, but then you can watch it, and then you can watch it some more and it’s like ooooh.” This is an oddly placed bit in the discussion and forces a sexualized perspective at the consumption of their own work. Voyeurism is that system of power that [theorist Laura] Mulvey is talking about, where the audience watches over the powerlessness of women and engage in the powerfulness of men. Moody adds “you’re supposed to be staring at her” and thus enforcing power over her. Beck seems somewhat oblivious to this connotation, which I find a bit troubling. They capture forever a moment of a sexualized woman, and she becomes powerless in her GIF form, forever victim to the gaze of the viewer. Its associations with the fashion industry just seems to perpetrate the power of gaze over models and the enforcement of beauty and aesthetics over women because of it.

But as I noted, the joke's on them because cinemagraphs are too unintentionally ludicrous to be particularly erotic.

more jifs / gatekeepers

As predicted, The Jogging blog is back on Tumblr after its creator turned it into an attack site to protest Tumblr and the evil repression of the man. Or something. Paddy Johnson and I wasted a day trying to figure out what Troemel was even doing. He has some new accomplices, and together they post Vvork-like sculpture and performance documentation with one-line explanations of their relentless critiques of capitalism 2.0. The new, zombie The Jogging specializes in Rhizome-Ready (tm) art - easy-to-absorb visual bullet points for harried site editors. The Joggers obsess over commercial brands as much as any ad blog but the captions let us know that it's tenured-radical-safe.

Am not sure how meaningful the above numbers are but the chart fills me with hope.
Not for Google but against the inevitability of Facebook.

These are cropped screencaps of the .wav file from "Triangle Wave Modulation." The patterns are similar to what you see on an oscilloscope but narrower on the horizontal axis. Because this is Cubase on Windows, the bells and whistles factor is pretty low - the idea is to generate these sound files on the fly with just enough resolution to see them but not so they slow down the music processing while rendering. Saved as a bitmaps, the files are converted to GIFs without losing any detail; each is around 20KB - that's efficient. One thinks of Argyle socks, and Vasarely paintings, but it's just a diagram of a warbling bloop.