32 drawings (thumbnails)

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Screenshots of thumbnailized versions of my drawings (to date) on the Computers Club Drawing Society site (titles are on the blog). Thanks to the Society for the generosity in providing the software, platform and community. When I was painting on canvas in the early '90s I worked similarly to this - eclectic subjects painted on 12 x 9 inch canvases, shown in a grid of 20 or so. The CCDS paint software is making me think about photorealism again. The perversity of painting a photograph is heightened by painting the photograph using software. The defiant uselessness (or scrutiny of the underscrutinized, if you want to be nicer) is magnified when you are this many layers removed from any "primary" perception. But I've never been able to stick to any program. Abstraction and lowbrow cartooning continue to be interesting. The grid is a way of unifying all these tendencies, not for the sake of mystical or communitarian coming together but to understand how differences can be flattened out and co-opted.

Bridling at James Bridle

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Bruce Sterling and the "art & technology" websites have gone gaga over James Bridle's theory of a new aesthetic called -- ready? -- "The New Aesthetic." I watched an excruciating video (hat tip Paddy) where the fast-talkin' Bridle puts it all together for us and made some notes:

I've been blogging this kind of stuff for over 10 years - but I promise I will never force anyone to watch all of it in a 50 minute lecture.

Bridle's thesis: pixelation, polygon skins, facile XYZ data visualizations (such as the techno-sculpture in a public square that supposedly tracks movements of a Pacific buoy in real time) is a "new aesthetic."

I've taken stabs at this kind of "digital by-product" theorizing over the years (see Wireframe Aesthetics) but have tried to avoid spinning a grand narrative about it.

Bridle is essentially an advertising pitch-man here, employing persuasive rhetoric that never stops to question its own fervor.

He "aggregates" 120 images from art, ads, satellite imagery and constructs a bold new vision narrative around them.

He rarely distinguishes between a "way of seeing" (his favorite phrase - hello, John Berger) and a style choice by highly savvy design and advertising folk (or slick artists who are 90% designers).

Bridle equates pervasive pixel imagery with nostalgia for games but also "insistent futurism." How is it the latter?

He says little about pixelation/glitch as decay, breakdown, failure. This stuff has real world consequences, it's not just a look.

"Pixel art" as a pop or folk genre has been around for years (on sites like Deviantart.com).

Bridle also seems to have just discovered CAD architecture.

Billboard of Facebook "like" symbol "makes us question what happens when we like or poke someone" - no, it doesn't.

"Making The Cloud visible" and beautiful through data center building design - this is just a pitch.

Gerhard Richter has been painting color sample charts since the '70s, at least. Why bring him into this?

Google map pixelation - Olia Lialina covered this. (I sound like Bridle in that post but I was being bitterly ironic.)

Face recognition is "adding an extra layer of vision." OK, but so much of it doesn't work yet. Such statements fellate tech industries prematurely rolling out products.

Recognition programs aren't failed, racist: they're a "different way of seeing" - cool!

"Computers are increasingly evolving on their own." No, they're not.

"Vagaries of the GPS system" is a nice way of saying iPhone tracking is flawed.

Using a pic that wasn't "meant" to be part of a before-and-after satellite view isn't new to the digital era. Such techniques are a well-known tool of astronomy. See Precovery.

The "Hawkeye" in sports (crowd watches computer replay) is no different from a crowd watching an arena rock band on a giant vid screen instead of the tiny figures onstage, a phenom has been around since the '70s. This is "new"? "Digital"?

Evan Roth finger-paintings of touchscreen gestures recycles the "mouse gesture as AbEx art" trope - rather old and overdone at this point.

Bridle keeps talking about "bleed-throughs" in "ways of seeing." We know there are bleed-throughs, what we need is understanding of them. Mass data dumps like this lecture don't help.

Conclusion: "We want this [world of ghosts and fake people]"

"Willingness, friendliness to engage with technology" - Ted Kaczynski squirms in his prison cell.

More on Retromania

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After promising to post notes on Simon Reynolds' book Retromania I keep putting it down because it's so depressing. The nut concept, repeated over and over, is: after psychedelia in the '60s, prog and punk in the '70s, hiphop and house in the '80s, and rave and jungle in the '90s, why oh why* was there no new fresh, exciting, original music in the '00s?
My answers are:

1. Because, you, Reynolds, lost the passion and ability to make the case for "new" music. You're the critic but your job isn't just to complain that earlier generations were better.
2. Because all those earlier movements had one or two "stars" who broke through and were relentlessly promoted by businesspeople. Something like the chiptune scene could have been pushed to the forefront but the '00s also saw the collapse of "the industry" in favor of all the micro-trends Reynolds discusses. Malcolm McLaren even tried to play his old Sex Pistols svengali role with chiptunes but there was no industry to back it up and ram it home through relentless airplay and marketing. There was no Bit Shifter on Johnny Carson moment.

Reynolds excels at documenting all the backward-looking trends of the last decade -- we already discussed re-enactments -- and even the pre-'00s history of backward-looking trends. He makes intriguing sociological/semiotic observations about a couple of these:

The British "trad jazz" movement of the '50s. These folks eschewed bop or anything that smacked of "art" in jazz by keeping alive the freewheeling fun and danceability of New Orleans jazz of the '20s. Problem was they only knew this music through records. Reynolds quotes Hilary Moore that when playing live, the trad jazzers would faithfully mimic the "distorted instrumental balance and faulty intonation" of the music reproduced on vinyl 78s. Wish there was more detail about this but it takes your mind in weird directions.

The UK's "Northern Soul" movement fetishized classic Motown singles. Because American soul music had already moved on to funk and slower tempos, the Northern Soulsters tried to mine gold from the same overworked vein of older, almost-hits from Motown. Because the Motown "system" cranked out so many of these in search of a single monster hit, there was enough material to keep the UK scene alive for years. Reynolds: "Northern Soul found a strangely liberating gap within this system; it transformed redundant waste into the knowledge base and means-to-bliss of a working-class elite."

Again, pretty thought-provoking. Nuggets like this make the book useful even if its conclusions are repellent.

*Richard West: "[Daniel DeFoe] was the first master, if not the inventor, of almost every feature of modern newspapers, including the leading article, investigative reporting, the foreign news analysis, the agony aunt, the gossip column, the candid obituary, and even the kind of soul–searching piece which Fleet Street calls the ‘Why, Oh Why.'"