tom moody

copied and pasted:

contest where one participant guides another's line drawing through several circles "blind" using only verbal instructions
browser within browser loads pages by various artists
video from POV of Internet shopper looking for imagined docile, traditional, pre-feminist, but Web-savvy mate, 2000
open browser windows hover like clouds in landscape photos
3-D wall drawing of satellite connects electrical socket to water cooler
webcam-like view of people milling about church interior--someone with backpack (artist? student?) walks around floor maze
dense spiderweb of black yarn covers piano and recital chairs
still from extreme camera angle video of women reciting details of a kidnapping (or something--the Quicktime is choppy) as if in a seance
artist strips while quoting speeches by critics, collectors, curators, politicians (YouTube)
nude, seminude women stand in formation, ogled by collectors (YouTube)
car sculpture: crystal shape made of glass (supposedly), metal, and bolts rests on axles connecting standard rubber auto tires
sculpture of streetlights bent down from bridge to near surface of river, illuminating water
animated GIF of highway receding to vanishing point
painting of highway receding to vanishing point
photo of man holding assemblage of joined-together foodstuffs in his mouth (apple, cauliflower, etc)
eating a hamburger as video art, 3: artist "destabiliz[es] pre-established codes of perception by sabotaging the very logic of his material"
eating a hamburger as video art, 2: warhol plus four others
eating a hamburger as video art, 1: warhol
exhibition where scrap cars serve as individual performance spaces
life-sized tattoo-like line drawing of erotic-costumed anime kewpie doll on nude body of Japanese woman
drawings of heads with curving or curling directional arrows in place of facial features
polluting rivers for art, 3: green dye in Gran Canal, Venice
polluting rivers for art, 2: "nontoxic" green dye in four cities' rivers (artist has bigger travel budget)
polluting rivers for art, 1: red powder in Lin Xian, Henan Province, China
acrylic painting with 200 Euro note collaged onto Qing Dynasty Brick
people stand on each others' shoulders and pretend to hold up bridges and concrete ceilings (performance photos)
bad lookalikes pose in front of Flavins (YouTube)
hamish fulton-like walks directed by the wind, filmed and plotted by GPS
positions of gallery visitors captured on webcam, mapped with LEDs
red thread suspended in monofilament grid graphs artist pulse compared to Sarajevo temperature
backlit wall-silhouettes of Native Americans
youtube of judy garland vocal science
digital line drawing with wireframe mountains seen through window
photo of photographer photographing black leather catsuited headless woman
multi-beveled panel cut in shape of chinese calligraphic character "double happiness," painted in gold glitter paint with red and black trim
copper & nickel clump made of 10 Swedish crowns (coins) exposed to electrolysis and redistributed through ionization onto 2 copper plates
real-time webcam feed of Washington DC augmented by a virtual overlay of approaching flood
ordinary people pose with photoshopped-in "giant" items--floppy disc, CD
socialist ballad slipped into musical repertoires of over 100 London buskers for a week
glass, aluminum, vacuum gear, computer, high voltage transformer, tantalum grids sculpture

Some thoughts on the found digital blobjects plucked from the YouTube mass by ???pet??? on loshadka and originally posted by crispY468.

The spiritsurfers manifesto questions the axiom "finding is making" for lack of attention to the frame for the Internet found object. The manifesto seems to suggest that the frame's formal design (via html, CSS, etc) is the key to setting off or distancing the object, and that it requires "great subtlety." spirit surfers does sport elegant design and thus achieves its own purposes formally. (Although archives ready-to-hand would be nice.)

The Loshadka or Nasty Nets frames are also adequate to achieve distance for the found object on a design level--nothing fancy but no advertising clutter, graphics overpowering content, etc. At least equally important to the formal frame is, what are the surrounding posts like? What are the reader's expectations? What is being said with the appropriation and will the finder's intentions be communicated (or miscommunicated in an interesting way)?

???pet???'s blobjects are complete in themselves, needing no additional transformation. Because they are embedded YouTubes, they bring with them their own frame ("popular video site that mashes all video into the same rectangular format and where commenters say anything that comes into their heads about it without a second's hesitation").

By changing the context of the blobjects from the popular setting to the snotty, visually superior artist setting (sorry, Loshadka, that's a joke), here's what ???pet??? has done at least for this viewer:

1. further isolated already-isolated CGI trickery so that it becomes self-contained and iconic

2. allowed us with a minimum of distractions to contemplate digital abstractions of "waving grass" and "blowing hair" in all their ill-conceived misbegotten awfulness, while at the same time being dazzled by the technical cleverness and yes, even beauty of same. (The working method of these types of animations is to have multiple versions of a single motion-captured, photographically modeled strand, or group of strands, moving simultaneously in accordance with known physical laws and to use artful blurring where the motions become too complex to be rendered, under the assumption that the eye will not notice these, even though it does.)

3. given us a frame to think about these blobjects as the atoms or molecules on which all current movies, video games, and commercial spots are built--a small compact cluster of false assumptions.

[The false assumption being that the uncanny valley can be spanned and that we need to model all visual phenomena with 1s and 0s. There are certainly monetary reasons for doing so but what are the aesthetic ones, beyond an ironic love of the artificial and grotesque?]

Although this blog is sometimes called an art blog and/or lumped in with other art blogs about 90% of my bandwidth is for music. (The other 10% is the Iron Man GIF I stupidly remixed.) This is because I've been posting original songs as mp3 files and robots sniff out the file extension in the endless quest to offer "free mp3s" to the public. At first my biggest traffic went to songs with the words beat or hiphop or blues in the title (the last presumably because folks were searching for "moody blues"--a popular '60s group). But lately some of the songs with more fanciful or arbitrary titles are the biggest bandwidth scoops. They are actually some of my better songs from about two years ago, IMHO. Probably the lag time is for the songs to be catalogued by the robots and "discovered" by listeners. I'm happy if they're being heard for the right reasons but wondering when I should put a stop to all the flagrant generosity. It's not like the bandwidth is expensive at all, but still...

Mentioning this because of "Net Art 2.0" and Seth Price's "Dispersion" concept. He asks rhetorically what it would mean for an artist to communicate to another (non-art world) public in another medium, specifically citing music. His conclusion, if I understand the essay, is it is effectively meaningless, and artists need to instead redouble their efforts to speak to the usual art world gatekeepers (possibly with a well-articulated theory about, say, dispersion) if their work is to be properly read. I'm not sure I agree. I'm rather enjoying getting my work out to people who like quirky techno music and Iron Man GIFs, even if they hold no place in the Price firmament.