tom moody

Nasty Nets has released a DVD/DVDROM hybrid disc with support from Rhizome.org. The release event/DVD premiere is Friday Apr 4 at the NY Underground Film Festival.

For clarification Nasty Nets was a web surfing club, currently inactive except for "special events" such as yesterday's April Fools posting explosion.
Surf club has been misinterpreted in the media as "swapping cool links and calling it art" but it was a bit more than that.
It's not primarily film or video (web mechanics and mores were rather more the focus) so the NY Underground Film Festival event is kind of a translation exercise.
How to take a multi-user, multi-level, multi-media, cross-temporal, collective, interactive, art-made-alone-to-be-consumed-by-others-alone experience and turn it into a linear, meat space/meet space, sitting-politely-and-quietly-in-a-theatre-and-passively-communally-reacting kind of experience.

So it's a program of videos by the site's users, including most of the ones on the Joel Holmberg-edited video on the DVD, plus many others.
Thanks to Marisa Olson for organizing this event--I'm proud to be included with this group of work.

As for my own contribution, it's one of my occasional "anti-videos" (if that's even possible to make). "Hoedown" is a rather hyperactive/aggressive techno song I did. It didn't need visuals so I screen captured some B3verly H1llbillies footage off YouTube and assigned a small universe of "shots" to different musical motifs.

Thus,

Jed doing this weird high stepping dance across the floor of the mansion (verse)
A poodle on hind legs spinning around (chorus)
(repeat verse/Jed)
(repeat chorus/poodle)
Ellie picking up the poodle four times (bridge)
Granny dancing (drum break)
(repeat chorus/poodle--audience attention flags--not "cool")
(repeat verse/Jed--what is this obsession with Jed Clampett? his dancing is really spastic/funny)

Update: post edited for length, tone

Random thoughts on Aron Namenwirth's post on "Unmonumental" and the Biennial 2008 (in lieu of a comment--blogspot seems to eat them)

1. Re: the Michael Bell-Smith piece, I'm guessing the "oonce" is some nonsense he found in the original film's flashcards by playing/studying them one at a time, and that he then highlighted the display of the word as a repeated single clip (also calling attention to Allen Ginsberg in the background). Thus the only modification he made was looping the material and adding the house kick drum. Could be wrong about this. Was a little surprised that MBS tackled this subject matter, Bob Dylan holding flashcards being one of the most imitated tropes in the history of pop culture, INXS practically killing it dead in the '80s and beginning its infinite zombie afterlife as fodder for a billion YouTube home hacks. Guessing that was the point, and can't deny that MBS put a new spin on it: it's now the punk gesture we truly can't escape, with Dylan's linguistic arabesques boiled down to phatic noise, his guitar and harmonica dwindling to a nihilistic, almost-gabber thump, the saintly Ginsberg reduced to an "unidentified rabbi figure" in the background.

Nevertheless it almost seems the curators were looking for examples of artists' work to meet the NewMu audience halfway for this crazy new media stuff, hence this work and the Oliver Laric montage of YouTubers imitating 50 Cent (a rehash of Phil Collins' dull piece with everyday people karaoke-ing Morrissey) as opposed to something like MBS' "Video Created to Fix Stuck Pixels in Computer Monitors Recast (with Soundtrack and Sunset) as Video to Fix Your Stuck Mind" which is nerdy and funny as hell. (can't find the .mov described here online anymore.)

2. Aron, you were roaming the Whitney looking for Michael Smith (not Michael Bell-Smith), aka "Mike." Did you see the Sears portraits of him with 8 years of classes of his students? That should give any Young Turk feted by the art world serious pause. Smith is smiling in all the portraits but that is a sad, Buster Keaton face, trapped in a Sartrean hell of growing old amidst endlessly rejuvenating art youth.

3. Sorry to be so depressing. It's April Fools and Vvork turned 2 today.

copied and pasted:

young woman preparing to go out on the town speaks in internet acronyms, including actual enactment of rotflol-ing
funny, angry video from the 70s where woman contemptuously displays kitchen implements
fans on floor make "wind drawing"; metronome turns radios on and off so they have a "conversation"
Water samples from the Red Sea, the White Sea, the Black Sea and the Yellow Sea--no, really
screenshots of whenever Kevin Bacon's name appeared in movie, TV titles
donald judd-like cabinet with bad, bowed wood shelves
Greimasian rectangle connecting Robert Smithson with three rock and roll artists
flow chart connecting brass band music with acid house music
kippenberger/oldenburg-like giant soft streetlamp
motor scooter bedecked with multicolored drippy wax candles
cartoony cubist construction swallowed up in room with old paintings
worst splash page ever
bubble boy ca 1971 re-enacted
evil Donald Duck face in sky seen from airplane
chainsaw on tripod in empty landscape; bumpersticker with jonathan borofsky-like saying
some dude is narrating vvork on twitter--get a life!
blog of owls and owlabilia with minimal commentary patterned on vvork
feed from NastyNets blog inside VVORK blog--promises not to be very active
installation work shown on VVORK for a month photoshopped out
custom 'sexy armor' computer game mods floating in trees
giant wood sculpture of red google map locator-balloon is positioned in real space, photographed
marker pen drawing which contains the Google search string of the portrayed person in encoded form (supposedly)
stack of wood on sawhorses with crinkly stuff inside
sculpture of psychedelic striped standing waves (computer modeled)
white globe hanging from ceiling looks like earth or basketball
glass vase is covered in five layers of foil. When you tear one layer off a new one will appear and change the pattern of the vase.
kasparov vs deep blue replayed with spraypaint spritzes on masonite (supposedly)
rectangle moves like marquee through photo of spooky tree branches
white rectangle moves like marquee through photo of spooky churchyard
shoes hover over bowl; rocking rug with packages
living sculpture with knickknacks; burned-out scooter spraypainted magenta
smashed car windshield with colorful doodles; toothpaste smeared over hiphop magazine
partially painted heap of wood
utility for adding friends to dude's MySpace
damaged heavy equipment penetrated by spiky things
super-8 footage of half-time show runs through two different projectors, combines into one panoramic image
sentence consisting of 1007 palindromic coined words
link to Virilio-inspired paper dealing with "real-time" perspective of instantaneous digital communications
link to 1997 interview with Paul Virilio