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Saturday I attended a rare screening of the 1910 Edison Frankenstein, at the Loew's Jersey Theatre, a semi-restored 1929 film palace (and I do mean palace--it's huge) in Jersey City. Only one print of the film exists, owned by collector Alois Dettlaff, who spoke at the event; he'd never before allowed it to be shown outside his home state of Wisconsin. It's a strange, very short (14 min.) interpretation, which differs radically from the Shelley and Whale versions. Dr. Frankenstein doesn't cobble the Monster together from body parts but grows him in a kind of giant cannibal's pot, watching the process through a peephole. The stop-motion birth sequence resembles decay in reverse: the creature grows from the inside out--bones first, then flesh, then skin and hair (and rags for clothes).* The finished Monster looks like a cross between the Elephant Man and a Kabuki actor, wearing elf shoes and leggings.
Other recent Big Screen adventures: City of God is one of the most violent films I've ever seen, made even more disturbing because an awful lot of the people firing big guns and being killed by them are children. Think the bleak urban quasi-documentary style of Bunuel's Los Olvidados (set in a notorious slum of Rio de Janeiro rather than Mexico) combined with blaxploitation-cum-Tarantino cinematic highjinks. This is a gripping and, I'm sorry to have to say, entertaining sociohorror/action/coming-of-age film (the director's mordant humor helps the audience process all the tragedy). David Perry gives a good rundown of the plot here (thanks to Bruno for introducing me to this writer).
Also bleak but completely absorbing is Lilya 4-Ever, about a teenage girl in post-Soviet Russia dragged into prostitution by a whirlwind of negative forces: parental abandonment, lack of a social safety net, bottom feeders on the make. It reminds me a bit of Von Trier's Breaking the Waves in that the girl is very sympathetic and appealing and what she goes through is horrendous. The "bathtub scene" is particularly haunting in its casual brutality. Again, the director finds exactly the right tone to make a moral film that's not preachy or (too) exploitative.
Finally, please go see Phone Booth instead of Identity, while the former's still in theatres, and put some money in Larry Cohen's pocket. He's one of our smartest filmmakers and even though this is only from his script, he's clearly the auteur (fortunately paired with the directing talents of the Falling Down/Car Wash Joel Schumacher, as opposed to the Batman & Robin Joel Schumacher). It's an intricate, high concept plot: man pinned in phone booth for entire movie, taunted over the receiver by omniscient sniper, vaguely recalling a Joseph Stefano-penned Outer Limits episode from the 1960s called Fun and Games, in which a mellifluous-voiced ET probes the sordid, petty inner lives of a couple of very ordinary Americans, as they struggle for survival in an elaborately contrived game. ("Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Why did you run away from him, Miss Hanley? So that he can eat all of the food? Or so he can do all of the fighting? Your heart is a bottomless box of virtuous motives, isn't it?"--that's Stefano, not Cohen, but I love those lines.) Good discussion of Phone Booth by Armond White here; not sure what he's saying exactly about Cohen vis a vis the classic films of the '70s, though.
* The "fleshing out" sequence is a staple of current horror films (Hellraiser and Hollow Man come immediately to mind) but the 1910 version is closer to the low budget scares of Eraserhead or the Lovecraftian glop in Quatermass 2. The stop-motion-plus-decay also made me think of the Brothers Quay.
Wild Berry Crisp, 2003
Last night I went to hear Discoteca Flaming Star at the BQE Lounge in Brooklyn. It's a duo from Berlin that plays with musicians assembled on the spot in whatever area the pair happens to be touring. Practice sessions can be as brief as an afternoon, so we're talking some real Portsmouth Sinfonia potential here. I was invited by artist Tom Früchtl, visiting from Munich, who has also played guitar in German punk bands over the years. Früchtl was part of the backup ensemble, which included another guitar player and a drummer playing a laptop keypad. The music was nothing as chaotic as I expected--a lot of it was quite soulful and melodic. Very strange mix of krautrock, electro, AC/AC, Abba, and karaoke, with anti-charismatic singer Wolfgang Mayer dressed like a goth chick in arm stockings and black crocheted cap (his face has some of the cragginess of Klaus Kinski's, even with 2-inch false eyelashes). His bass-playing partner Cristina Gómez Barrio, a sultry brunette from Spain, also did the gender-confusion thing, with an emphatic song about the size and potency of her balls. Highlights included a duet in Spanish, a rad cover of the Stooges' "We Will Fall," and a plaintive riff on "Sexual Healing."
Before the concert, Früchtl introduced me to Nathan Abbott, who makes electro tracks under the name Freezie Freekie. Later I checked out a couple of samples on the Satamile label (a quite interesting New York imprint specializing in electro since the mid-'90s) and liked them a lot, particularly the dreamy filter-swirl of "Slow Decay." In the middle of the concert Abbott suddenly pointed out that Discoteca Flaming Star reminded him of Tuxedomoon (an art punk band from San Francisco that moved to Belgium around 1980)--the electronic percussion, the noize, the art vibe was certainly all there; the main difference being guitars (Tuxedomoon was bass, beatbox, violin, sax, and keyboards). Anyway, interesting comment; it made me listen to the music in a different way, imagining how it might have been to hear TM doing the punk cabaret of their early years (documented on the 1987 record Pinheads on the Move).
20X6 vs. 1936 The Unauthorized Script
SCENE: A futuristic landscape, with green manicured park and rounded modern buildings in the background. STINKOMAN, a masked, blue-haired Japanese animation character who looks suspiciously like STRONG BAD, is training. He boxes the air and makes martial arts yells. Videogame music (NES' Rad Racer) plays underneath.
HOMESTAR RUNNER enters from right. This is "old timey" Homestar, a cartoon figure straight out of a black and white 1930s one-reeler, complete with celluloid scratches and hair caught in the projector. Like a hologram, he doesn't appear to inhabit the same spacetime continuum as STINKOMAN, yet the characters interact. He is kicking a crumpled can, which bumps STINKOMAN's foot.
STINKOMAN: Wha-? Who are you? (NOTE: All STINKOMAN's lines are delivered in an exaggerated, shouting voice, as in a bad English anime translation.)
HOMESTAR (with nasal, "country" accent) : I'm-a Homestar Runner.
STINKOMAN: That name is dumb. It sounds like it's so dumb.
[SLIGHT PAUSE, as if STINKOMAN'S words are delayed in tachyon transfer between dimensions.]
HOMESTAR (in CLOSEUP): Well, what's your moniker?
STINKOMAN: I go by Stinkoman. That's the name of talented fighter (sic) if ever there was one!
HOMESTAR: Okay. If you say so. Would you care for some dry meal? (Bag labeled "DRY MEAL" appears out of nowhere and hits ground with a loud wheeze)
STINKOMAN: No way. I'm training for fighting. Or maybe a challenge. So what's that thing you're kicking around?
HOMESTAR: Oh, that's just an old can of water soup. (CLOSEUP of HOMESTAR looking sad) I kick it around ever since my dog washed away in the storm of '28.
STINKOMAN: You seem like you might not be from around here. Do you have any special powers?
HOMESTAR: I can play a mean washboard. (Washboard materializes. As HOMESTAR scratches it rhythmically, STINKOMAN begins bobbing up and down involuntarily.)
STINKOMAN: What is that? What is that? Some kind of robot?
HOMESTAR (another slight pause): What's a robut?
STINKOMAN: You don't know what a robot is? (Pointing) HA HA HA HA! You are so dumb. (CLOSEUP of STINKOMAN laughing with cartoon steampuffs coming out from his head) HA HA HA HA! Dumb!
HOMESTAR (while STINKOMAN is laughing): Oh, go soak your fat head.
STINKOMAN: Are you asking me for a cha-a-a-LLENGE? (Begins powering up, Dragonball Z style, a halo of energy growing around his body)
HOMESTAR (while STINKOMAN is powering up): Yes sir. Yes sir, I am.
[STINKOMAN's energy aura reaches full power and with a cry of "Double Deuce!" he leaps into the sky. As he begins plummeting downward, HOMESTAR aims a peashooter at him and fires with an audible "ptui."
LOW ANGLE SHOT looking up at the rapidly descending STINKOMAN. HOMESTAR's spitball hits STINKOMAN's eye just as he is about to land on HOMESTAR.]
STINKOMAN (back on ground, howling with pain): My eye! It's like my eye! It hurts so bad!
HOMESTAR (as STINKOMAN jumps in pain): Well, folks, you know what that means. Now I'll do a dance.
[HOMESTAR launches into a comical dance, splaying his feet and twisting his head to inane electric piano music. STINKOMAN stops wailing when he sees what HOMESTAR is doing.]
STINKOMAN (pointing at HOMESTAR): HA HA HA. That dance cracks me up. You gotta teach me.
HOMESTAR: Just kind of...shimmy and shake.
STINKOMAN (imitating HOMESTAR's dance): Yeah! Now I've got it.
[The two dance jerkily, several feet apart, calling out each other's dates of origin.]
HOMESTAR: 20X6 (pronounced "Twenty Exty-six").
STINKOMAN: 1936!
HOMESTAR: 20X6.
STINKOMAN: 1936!
HOMESTAR: 20X6.
STINKOMAN: 1936...
[The call-and-response continues as picture FADES TO BLACK]
Was Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy," a cartoon strip that ran in the daily papers for decades, any good? I googled "Ernie Bushmiller Nancy" and came up with mostly positive comments from hip cartoonists. The strip made Matt Groening's list of Top 100 Things; Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith likes it; somewhere Art Spiegelman said he liked it. The praise is always curiously mixed, though. Griffith says "I think that most people who claim to love [the strip] do so...in a slightly condescending way," before proceeding to bestow his own condescension on Bushmiller: "[He] was like a primitive artist, a kind of naive genius, who had a lot more depth then even he or his audience understood." Griffith calls the strip "zen." Curiously, even Nancy's detractors talk about it in a kind of zen way, as exemplified by Wally Wood's quip "It takes less time to read Nancy that it does to decide not to read it." This supposedly delphic, near-mystical quality is no doubt what endears the comic to the art world: Andy Warhol, Joe Brainard, and Ray Johnson all referenced it, and Nayland Blake included some Bushmiller panels in a Matthew Marks group show he curated a couple of summers back.
I found a great essay recently that eschews the zen party line and argues that the strip is in fact a tightly-constructed gag machine. Where others find slippery mysticism these authors, Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, see cold hard mathematics:
Ernie Bushmiller had the hand of an architect, the mind of a silent film comedian, and the soul of an accountant. His formulaic approach to humor beautifully revealed the essence of what a gag is all about - balance, symmetry, economy. His gags have the abstract feel of math and Nance was, in fact, a mini-algebra equation masquerading as a comic strip for close to 50 years.The authors do a close analysis of several panels to show how focused Bushmiller's thematic and design strategies were. This step by step exegesis, explaining how the eye moves through a sequence of subtly different panels, largely undercuts the thesis of another web page, much linked to by bloggers, which says Bushmiller's images are so generic and interchangeable you can play a card game where players "create their own Nancys." What many commentators call "zen" Karasik and Newgarden call "incongruity," which was just one of the many comic devices Bushmiller used (in addition to puns, inversions, misunderstandings, and slapstick). Yet even these authors stop short of completely endorsing Nancy: "To ask whether Nancy is really funny is again to miss the point. No matter how far Bushmiller reached to excite that 'gag reflex' he could never gag it down all the way. Humor is subjective and a true common denominator cannot exist. Ernie Bushmiller, however, probably came closer than anyone in his one-man crusade to find it."
Based on the strips on the pages I've linked to (and this page, from an online "history of Nancy"), I'd say the sound of one hand clapping isn't the driving force behind Bushmiller's cartoons, but rather that they're straightforward, ha ha funny. I just ordered a pre-owned copy of The Best of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, though, and I'll give an update after I finish it.
More Hayao Miyazaki stills: These are from Kiki's Delivery Service, a film that could turn the most hardened cynic into a blubbering puddle of goo (at least at did this one). Honestly, the movie's so lovely it almost has no place in our world. Miyazaki based the settings on an imagined "perfect Europe" where no wars had ever been fought--one critic described the urban setting as "Stockholm located on the Mediterranean." It's not Disney treacle, though; in fact it's kind of subversive in that it depicts a girl leaving home at age 13 and overcoming obstacles to start a successful flying-broomstick delivery business (she's a "good-witch-in-training"). The perils of the small biz capitalist making her way in a strange town provide some surprisingly gripping moments. Oh, yeah--the drawing of the crow is by an artist Kiki meets on the job--another of Miyazake's many independent female characters.
Before Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazake made some kickass adventure films; Disney owns the rights and they're gradually coming out on DVD. Castle in the Sky (1986), also known as Laputa, is available this month (no more links to amazon since they censored me). This is non-stop excitement and breathtaking art! The designs are straight out of Jules Verne and the scenery is based on Welsh mining country, where Miyazake took his animators for a sketching trip. In the scenes below (top to bottom), (1) a military airship docks at a castle before a fateful journey to the cloud city Laputa, (2) a gang of air pirates rides dragonfly-winged vehicles to rescue Princess Sheeta from the castle, (3) Sheeta awakens a dormant, damaged Laputan robot, and (4) discovers the crystal she's carried since childhood bonds her to it.
Here's an amusing essay by Choire Sicha called The Complicated Art of Chelsea (thanks, Linda), wherein he describes a recent gallery crawl with a non-art-appreciator who turns him from loving the neighborhood to hating it in one afternoon. I made the the rounds the same week, also with a non-fan of much of the art, but I didn't start out enthusiastic so I didn't have as far to fall. Sicha's too kind to mention most of the art he's criticizing by name, but I'm not, so let me say the "rather Harmony Korine-esque mockery of people with Down's syndrome" he mentions is a group of photos by Sharon Lockhart, at Barbara Gladstone, depicting museum preparators installing Duane Hanson sculptures. The people he thought had Downs turn out to be Hanson's slightly waxy but lifelike figures--I knew the sculptures but still had to look closely to make sure they weren't reenactors.
An essay needs to be written about the tendency of artists who hit the big time to suddenly start riffing on art history (think Lichtenstein's and Sean Landers' Picassos, Jim Dine's Greek statues, etc etc). Lockhart's '90s photos of kids kissing or leaning on car hoods were nice but hardly theoretical. Now she seems to be straining to be conceptualist, doing art-world-behind-the-scenes shots a la Louise Lawler and Tina Barney combined with the ever-popular perceptual brain teaser. Duane Hanson is one of those "iffy" artists with just enough critical support to keep him out Madame Tussaud's, but still a crowd pleaser, so in a sense Lockhart is getting a free ride on the fun technical prowess of his sculptures. Anyway, I agree with Sicha that "these photographs [a]ren't good."
Dorota Kolodziejczyk at Joseph Helman, March 7 - May 3, 2003. Painters Monique Prieto and Laura Owens, of "return to color field" fame, essentially just goofed on the Washington Color School. It's easy to do: stretch up a big expanse of cotton duck, pour paint in cartoony shapes, add fake seagulls or bunny ears, and Voila!--critic Lane Relyea pronounces it a movement. More interesting (and courageous) is what Dorota Kolodziejczyk is doing: chucking the irony and tackling "post-painterly abstraction"
as a serious project, with problems (remember those?) still to be solved. Her show at Joseph Helman actually puts the painterly back in post-painterly, in that the canvases aren't merely stained, but involve an intricate play with layers--thick over thin, hard-over soft--not visible in reproduction. Already I'm sensing the pomo types drumming their fingers and saying "but that's just formal." AAAGH. Yes, that's how we talk about this type of work. Yet Kolodziejczyk's intentions stray pretty far from the wishy-washy pastorale of say, Helen Frankenstein, I mean -thaler (I swear I typed that inadvertently): this is Mountains and Sea seen from the window of a speeding car. Or the pinstriping on the side of the car. Or the topographical readout from the Global Positioning software on the dash of the car. Or the artfully banally-colored electroclash graphics on the CD cover lying on the front seat of the car. Or...you're hopefully getting the idea. Most of the canvases employ a fairly straightforward method: the paint is poured vertically, then the canvas is rotated 90 degrees so the stripes run horizontally. Quite a bit of over-and-underpainting and brushing and other manipulation goes on, too: the work is not as methodologically pure as say, Morris Louis's. Each canvas employs the pours to a slightly different end, creating its own unique content-vector; I'm reproducing several pieces on the page so you can see a range. You'll get a lot more out of the work in person, though, so go see the show.
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From Al Jazeera: Rumsfeld Cracks Jokes, But Iraqis Aren't Laughing
If ever an Oscar was deserved for minimizing catastrophic reports coming out of Iraq with jocular "henny penny" disbelief, then Rumsfeld has a date with Hollywood.
"Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over," he joked, adding he didn't think there were that many vases in Iraq. [Need to confirm--did he actually say "There can't be that many vases in Iraq"?] The US may be the strongest nation in the world, but their history is incomparable to that of Iraq – a region that has been described as the cradle of civilization.
Flippant remarks cannot replace priceless artefacts that have disappeared from the National Museum in Baghdad, or the books of the University of Mosul – one of the oldest and best universities in the whole of the Middle East.
The NY Times report on the gutting of the National Museum is just unbelievable. Why wasn't this immediately secured by "coalition" forces--if for no other reason than to protect a multimillion dollar asset? Is it farfetched to imagine that professional art thieves participated in the "looting"? This really goes beyond Bush and Co being a bunch of art-hating philistines. It was gross negligence.
Artist Jack Goldstein recently died at his home outside LA, sadly a suicide. Jim Lewis has a tribute in Slate (the slide show is also worth a look). He writes "Goldstein is probably best-known for his early film segments. In [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975], the MGM lion is isolated on a red background, his roar looped over and over, until it attains the status of an annunciation that heralds nothing but its own presence." Those are beautiful words, but if we think of the clip as an annunciation it's because of information extraneous to the work itself: that the lion comes before the movie. Except, we don't think of that knowledge as extraneous because it's so ubiquitous in our culture. That's what the piece is about: what Craig Owens meant (I think) when he repurposed the term "allegory" for the "pictures generation" of media-savvy artists--a code instantly recognized by everyone, which would be discussed in the '00s in terms of memes or branding. "Heralding nothing but its own presence" probably also doesn't get at how annoying the loop is if you stay in the gallery longer than five minutes. Like the techno or industrial music that followed, meaning is reduced to pure noise, which becomes a new kind of meaning.
Also, I suspect (hope) Lewis is just trying to ingratiate himself with Slate's conservative readership when he calls the words spectacle and simulacrum "risibly dated." As our recent experience with shock-and-awe bombing and staged statue-toppling shows, the concepts are very much alive, and no better buzzwords have actually come along.
On that subject, here's a later work by Goldstein, one of the photorealist paintings from the '80s (still checking on the particulars):
The two posts previous to this one--drawings titled Starfish Disaster and Melting Appliance--are my first (official) stabs at Pixelist art. I used to enjoy the pixel contests on the sadly-defunct word.com, and was intrigued to find "pixel art" listed as a genre at deviantART, an anyone-can-post visual art site. You draw these things mostly in the "fat bits" or zoom mode of a simple paint program and the finished product is meant to be a low-res understatement. Some works still manage to be over the top: this piece by gunstar-red, Edge Retro Cover, is a tour-de-force crammed with myriad pop-culture references, neatly arranged in a kid's isometric playroom. Other drawings are more concise, sometimes gems of miniaturization:
| wenstrom: | pixelthork: Cute Little Cube (Rubik's) |
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Nobody does "delirious urban spectacle" better than Japanese animators, and Cowboy Bebop, which you might be lucky enough to catch on the big screen for a few more days, is sheer techno-poetry. Visual highlights include people watching a scratchy John Wayne western in cars parked in a multilevel cinema-stadium; a shootout in a high-speed monorail, intriguingly designed with tracks switching between the tops and bottoms of the train cars; a Macy's-style Halloween Parade with huge floating jack'o'lanterns casting ominous shadows on the crowds below; a descent into the atmosphere of a partially terraformed Mars where the sky is jammed with dancing, shimmering product logos; a walk through a multicultural Martian city where kids breakdance a block away from Moroccan market stalls--there is more sumptuous drawing on view here than you'll see in a month of gallery shows. Also, the chemistry of the bounty hunter protagonists is decidedly un-blockbuster; they work at cross purposes and frequently wander off on their own for no reason (the Onion describes their camaraderie as "uncommunicative, uncooperative cooperation.") Oh, and the Welsh Corgi "data dog" is cute as hell.
Cripes! With the news media announcing victory over the hapless Iraqis, the right wingers and '"liberal hawks" are dancing in the aisles. Finally, we can start imposing liberal democracy over there at gunpoint! Yippee! (Just like we did in Afghanistan!) Evidently a war is considered successful, or a "cakewalk," if American casualties remain low. If at all possible, I'd like to spoil the party by mentioning that a lot of innocent Iraqis did die (and are still dying) horribly. After watching the newscasting insaniacs on Fox the other night (I tried to avoid it but a friend of mine had me over for dinner and watches it "ironically") I came home and made myself look at some of the pictures on the web of people mutilated and burned beyond recognition by our military--what Fox would never show us. I'd been avoiding this kind of material but after an intense dose of jingoistic shouting I suddenly felt the need to see what my tax dollars were paying for. I'm posting a link here; I'm not saying anyone else has an obligation to look. But in response to Nat Hentoff, an old-school liberal who smugly announced he "would not be marching" because we needed to make Saddie the Baddie our business (forget all the torturers in the "coalition of the willing"), and to all the "liberal hawks" enabling Bush & Co--when I look at these pictures, I can't get around the fact that Saddam didn't do this, we did.
I'm tryin' to run an art weblog here, but it's been hard with all the war news. The daylight mugging of Iraq is appalling, and what's happening here in the US--the jingoism, the hate speech, the corporate media propaganda--equally abysmal. The moral minority used to complain bitterly and vitriolically about Bill Clinton--a President who did nothing to the country as bad as what's transpiring now--and I swore I'd never stoop to discourse that low. I've been cheating on my promise, though, because of the downhill spiral we've been in since the 2000 election. The "hands off the Saudis" edict to intelligence agencies obviously contributed to the 9/11 tragedy, and so far no one's been fired. The military takeover of Afghanistan, and now Iraq (and soon Syria, Iran, etc.) are the worst things to happen to this country since Vietnam. Suddenly after 9 years of (relatively) low-level conflicts, we're in total, pumped-up, IOU-funded war mode, with most of the world hating our guts. And our economy, which depends largely on selling products and rendering services around the globe, is sucking hard. (The war's been great for war profiteers, though.) Anyway, I just want to say it's difficult to focus on the things I know and love with all this wretched shit going on. End rant.
"Rolling Victory" declared in Iraq
From today's Washington Post: "During early preparations for war, one official said, some U.S. thinkers 'operated on the assumption that it was going to be a relatively clean break, that the end of the regime would be clear for all to see. That may not be the case. I think we're seeing a rolling end.'"
What a great concept! Now when your boss asks if a job is finished, you can say "Yes, it's kind of a rolling finish." All-your half-completed household chores, too, can be characterized as "in a rolling state." And so on. It's always exciting to hear a new phrase enter the language--I expect this one is going to be BIG!
Above is a screen capture from Cory Arcangel's "Data Diaries," a series of Quicktime videos based on the raw memory lurking in his--and for all intents and purposes, everybody's--computer. Alex Galloway's text, excerpted below, describes the project eloquently:
Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops. What did Cory Arcangel do in this piece? Next to nothing. The computer did the work, and he just gave it a form. His discovery was this: take a huge data file--in this case his computer's memory file--and fool Quicktime into thinking it's a video file. Then press play. Your computer's memory is now video art. Quicktime plays right through, not knowing that the squiggles and shards on the screen are actually the bits and bytes of the computer's own brain. The data was always right in front of your nose. Now you can watch it.
[...]
Lots of artists talk about memory. But for artists working with computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If ever computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it as "watching your computer suffocate and yell at the same time." They look like digital dreams--the pure shapes and tones of real computer memory. Each video documents a new day, and each day the computer offers us a new set of memories.
--Galloway/RSG
Looking at Arcangel's videos it's hard not to think of Jeremy Blake's better-publicized animations (thumbnail below right). The former is early House to the latter's late Synthpop--doing it more economically, energetically, and without all the gear. To continue the analogy, picture poor Blake, hunched over his screen plugging one color at a time into his designer grid, then giving it a tasteful blurry wash; when along comes the artist equivalent of Larry "Mr. Fingers" Heard, plugs in the visual equivalent of a cheap synth and drum machine, and rocks the house! Someone else doing it the hard way is Xose Salgado, an artist from Spain (?) I found surfing the net--his work looks similar to Arcangel's but is apparently carefully crafted from combinations of images viewed at low res.
The four-color map problem also comes to mind here. This was one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics, eventually cracked in the '70s with a "brute force" solution of letting a computer crunch numbers for days, as opposed to an elegant Occam's-razor theorem, which still doesn't exist. Paradoxically, Blake's way of working corresponds to the brute, time-intensive method, while Arcangel has invented a new technique that is both a means and an end: a kind of binary frottage that neatly bypasses off-the-shelf programming and shows us the beauty in a simple core dump.