tom moody

Slightly connected links in search of a theory:

1. Urban Meanderthals and the City of "Desire Lines":

The Meanderthal, a new species of urban flâneur. No longer merely out for a stroll through the streets, the Meanderthal has become a threat to the efficiencies of urban life and to the flows of pedestrians, vehicles, and capital taken for granted in the urban everyday. Whether he/she is chatting on a cell phone, standing on the wrong side of an escalator, cycling on the sidewalk, or dangerously jaywalking, the Meanderthal obliviously causes that most frustrating of urban traffic jams: the pedlock

2. Joe McKay has reconstructed the Google Street View van from reflections in shop windows, passing vehicles and various shiny surfaces.

3. Damon Zucconi found a photo of himself on Google Street View. (A virtual flaneur of the Surveillance State, not a Meanderthal.)

The following was originally posted as a comment to the somewhat fruitless Net Art 1.0 vs Net Art 2.0 discussion at Rhizome.org. The "old guard" Internet art crowd has been characterizing the art on the newer group blogs such as Nasty Nets as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog" and asking for more explanation of why this was art, or Internet art, while at the same time saying that NN was just a later version of stuff they'd been doing for years. You can't really take both positions. The following stabs at the issue by examining a specific post from Nasty Nets on April 1. It's been rewritten slightly.

Petra Cortright had this post by Javier Morales onscreen for a while during the recent Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, and I think it's brilliant. Using very simple means (screenshots of Google search results and some html scrolling), it tackles sexual content in a very distanced, fetishistic way--the words "penis" and "vagina," in boldface, slowly move towards and away from each other in a configuration that is both a mirror and conflict. It is a snapshot of current culture: some earnest websites such as democraticunderground.com, cybersleuths, and cvcorner are captured only because they use the word penis or vagina and google finds them. There are accompanying thumbnail images that seem to have no connection to the words underneath them--did google do this or the artist? Plus snippets of text, moving just slowly enough to be read: "or is the penis a very large clit?" "the craze for designer vaginas" that somehow have to be accounted for in the overall clash of contexts. And it's nice to look at, with its suprematist squares collapsing into each other.

This was not submitted to Rhizome for institutional sanction as far as I know. It existed "out there" with 4Chan and all the other mashup sites. It's true that Rhizome gave approving coverage to Nasty Nets but there is no link on NN to Rhizome or any other signifier that it exists in an approved stream of processing "art" content.

Perhaps you hate this piece but I don't think you can reduce it to "ironically posting links to existing media with your friends on a group blog." Perhaps you like it but I don't think you can claim it is what Net Artists have always done since the means (blogs, Google caches exploding with content) didn't exist in the early days of the web.

I personally believe this is a new taxonomic class to be evaluated. The fact of it being on a blog, a blog that blends into the Internet "street," existing "outside" the world of grants for technological innovation, where the surrounding posts may very well be found material (but you have to figure it out), the fact of it using Google to generate a snapshot of the present moment, using search features (images, etc) that were not commonly available in 1999, while maintaining old school simplicity, means it is different, and I think better. More complicated, more real than XYZ tech art where algorithm Y converts raw material X into social solution Z. Morales can't be blamed if some Rhizome staffers think what he is doing is important enough to rate a new version.

But regardless of whether I'm right about it being different, you can't both claim it and repudiate it.

In response to this one of the commenters said, in effect, "yeah we already did that" but continues to characterize the piece as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog." I officially give up.

The exhibition BITMAP: As Good As New, which originally ran at vertexList gallery in New York, travels to Philadelphia with a reception tomorrow, June 26. Details. The Leonard Perlstein Gallery at Drexel University hosts a screening of the movie 8 BIT at 4 pm, before the opening.

The 8 BIT scene has its own versions 1.0 and 2.0. (That versioning makes people mad so let's keep using it.) Version 1 is people opening game cartridges and reprogramming them to make art and music. Version 2 is people using default tools such as MSPaint to make pixel art and animations and posting them on blogs. The show contains both, but unlike the acrimonious discussions on the Rhizome.org discussion boards you don't often hear sentiments such as this expressed:

I think what may have upset some of the more process oriented artists who see computer language knowledge as a key to expression was being told they were an older version of something they really had no desire to be a part of.

Instead, the exhibition is one big happy family:

Cory Arcangel, Lee Arnold, Chris Ashley, Mike Beradino, Mauro Ceolin, Petra Cortright, Paul Davis, DELAWARE, Notendo (Jeff Donaldson), Eteam, Dragan Espenschied, Christine Gedeon, Kimberley Hart, Daniel Iglesia, JODI, Olia Lialina, LoVid, Kristin Lucas, David Mauro, Jillian Mcdonald, Tom Moody, Aron Namenwirth, Mark Napier, Nullsleep, Marisa Olson, Will Papenheimer, Prize Budget for Boys, jimpunk, Akiko Sakaizumi, Paul Slocum, Eddo Stern and CJ Yeh.

However, if Version 2 received institutional sanction this harmony would instantly collapse.