comment re: Michael Connor's Jeremy Blake essay

For me, as an artist trying to figure out something interesting to do with a computer in the mid-to-late-'90s, Jeremy Blake was the competition. (He won.) There wasn't much actual critical dialogue around his work, though. Blake died a few years ago, and now Michael Connor, as curator, is doing some post-mortem chin-scratching in the course of keeping the Blake myth fires burning by grouping Blake with current young Blakes. As a witness to history and the MSPaint road not taken, I hurled this Solo Jazz cup of cold water in response to Connor's Blake essay currently up on Rhizome:

The Fahrenheit 451 connection is intriguing -- a '60s vision of abstraction-as-dystopian-mass-entertainment is certainly an interesting jumping-off point for a '90s body of work. As one who watched Jeremy Blake's career from the start I'd say he hit it around '98 with Bungalow 8, depicting transparent walls of a modernist apartment sliding in and out of each other - and then it was all downhill, as his work became "pure" abstraction (such as what appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson's film Punch Drunk Love), and then the later narrative, collage-y stuff, which was the least successful work he did (except in the commercial/exposure sense). Liquid Villa was essentially a repeat of Bungalow 8, with what seemed to be gratuitous Mediterranean stylings.

One quibble with this essay is the use of "prosumer" at the end. One reason Blake was able to distance himself from new media (or what was then still often being called "computer art") was that no one in the art world knew anything about the programs or effects he was using and he didn't talk about it. The "prosumer" dialog that you've identified with artists such as Michael Bell-Smith is all about "look what we did with this or that program that mid-level professionals use." Blake's work would have benefited from that kind of demystification at any stage. Instead it was treated as some kind of mysterious painted video that emerged from the mind of a genius.

Not that anyone asked, but here's what I wrote about Liquid Villa in 2001, discussing a Tim Griffin-curated group show:

"Only two of the artists make direct, hands-on use of the computer. Conjuring post-human exercise videos, Asymptote Architecture's looping, slowly morphing pod-shapes on small display screens combine machine curves, body contours, and textures scanned from athletic apparel. In Jeremy Blake's DVD light-show-in-a-box, pulsating color field patterns alternate with views of a synthetic Mediterranean villa, as if to say that inside the computer, it's all just planes and colors. Both artists favor the sleek airbrushed look typical of commercial digital work and display their pieces on pricy appliances such as wall-mounted plasma screens and Apple G-4 hard-drives; this is fine, but the danger of embracing the dominant economy's techno-fetish is that (as Joseph Kosuth once said of painting) one also embraces 'the tradition that comes with it': consumption, fascination, waste."

you've got it all the wrong

"The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale" has already vanished into the aether with this page promising "we'll be back in two years."
But, but, we thought the Internet was forever.
Fortunately Joel Cook made this clear and comprehensible user interface for the various pavilions, for those of us who had planned to spend two years perusing all the art data in that bursting-at-the-seams event. (Up to now I'd barely covered my own pavilion-mates).
In 2015, The Wrong should hire Cook to make their front page -- the one they had was kind of a mess.
In fact, many of the pavilions could have shed their high concept landing pages, which recalled the Flash intros of the early 2000s, and not in a good way.
In art as in life, people just want to get where they're going, not to be entertained en-route.

Mutations: Email GIF Collaboration

Simon Baker, aka Stage, put up a series of GIF collaborations he did with various people via back-and-forth email exchanges. Participants in the Mutations project are listed below.

Our collaboration started with this GIF of Stage's:

tm1

And nine emails later ended with this GIF of "mine":

tm10

The word "mine" is in quotes because by the final step we had both added ideas, edited, cropped, enlarged, etc, so that it's properly "ours," even though I had the final cut.

Links to individual collaborations: Agathe André, Aaron Chan, jimpunk, Sara Ludy, Michael Manning, Tom Moody, Sabrina Ratté, Ryder Ripps, Chris Shier, Rick Silva, and Yoshi Sodeoka.

From my email to Stage, after he had everything up (and note the use of the "gallery" top level domain -- what, no "art"?)

The [website] design is intuitive and simple, even though the work is cumulatively neo-baroque psychedelic.
I like the banners compressing all the collaboration steps into a single strip.
Will be curious to see the reactions. There are interesting facets to the "politics of collaboration" and many single images that stand out from the flow.

Will be posting some of the other collaboration GIFs from the project soon.