View current page
...more recent posts
Shinshi and Ohta at Narita Airport (with a few unscheduled takeoffs). From Patlabor: The Mobile Police. This file is at 109K [UPDATE: I corrected some of of the wobbliness in the framing]. In the comments to this post is a cleaner (330K) version of the file, which is truer to the source DVD. There is probably some easier way to convert DVD clips to animated .GIFs than the frame by frame reconstruction and compression I did. Let's just say I learned a lot about this 1 and 1/20 second of video.
Still frame from You Only Live Twice, 1967. The guy in the picture uses the keypunch equipment to move a surveillance camera around. If you haven't seen this Bond movie lately, check it out. It's set entirely in Japan, and the '60s Zen moderne interiors are amazing. Great dated tech stuff like this Burroughs machine. An electromagnet dangled from a helicopter picks up a car full of bad guys and dumps them in the ocean, demonstrating "the efficiency of Japanese technology." Assuming you can laugh at period sexism, the movie's practically a love letter to the Patriarchy ("In Japan, men come first, women come second," observes a Japanese agent as he introduces Bond's personal retinue of scantily-clad masseuses). John Barry's sumptuous, starkly emotional score is way better than this entertaining trifle deserves, however.
Amusing photos of error messages appearing on public screens (Macy's, the subway, bank ATMs) are here. Most are Windows, what a surprise. A sample photo can be found in the comments to this post. [via]
In the earlier thread on whether Ron Mueck is really still a Muppeteer, Sally gave some examples of things we'd miss out on with a narrowly drawn definition of "artist." One is "guitar solos as art performance," referring to a certain Cory Arcangel piece. But the art wasn't really the guitar solo, it was a mock power point lecture about hyperspecialized internet communities, in this case electric guitar nerds who devote whole sites and chatboards to legendary guitarists and famous solos. Arcangel took many of the technical details in the lecture from such sites, and then surprised the audience, at the end of the performance, with his prowess in playing Van Halen's "Eruption" solo note for note. The event combined visuals, talk, and music. Is the art world big enough to embrace this? I'd say yes. But what if Whitney curator Larry Rinder went to Williamsburg, heard a guitarist he liked, and invited him to play his instrument at the museum, as art?
Rinder is actually one of the worst offenders in the "I have the power to make you an artist" game. The 2001 Biennial included Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio, which applied cutting edge design and economizing principles to housing for the disadvantaged in rural Alabama. The designs (captured in photos and models) were nice, but wouldn't this have been more meaningful in an architectural context? Also, could the NY museum audience ever really "get" the work without directly experiencing it? Rinder also bestowed Chris Ware's comix with the magic art aura, mounting the individual pages on the walls, behind glass, as drawings. But who's going to read all those pages in a museum gallery? There's an ideal form for viewing that kind of material--it's called the "comic book." The inclusion of Ware and Mockbee meant two less slots for validating folks who have been working away as visual artists, and who are possibly even expert at projects meant to be experienced in a gallery-type space.
Sally also mentions Damien Hirst's cut-up cow as something that perhaps took a wrong turn on the way to the natural history museum (my phrasing). Should it be banned from the art arena? No, because it's very self-consciously aware of how it fits in the chain of postwar art movements, referencing Minimalist seriality, the (Robert) Smithsonian critique of 19th Century museological and taxonomic principles, even animal gore a la the Viennese actionists...much of which ground (round) had already been covered in the '60s with Paul Thek's "meat in a vitrine" pieces, only not so literally. That's Hirst. But again, if a curator had a fishtank shipped over from an aquarium because he thought the tank-designer was an artist...
UPDATE: Some may remember my "revised BitStreams" roster included all kinds of folks outside the art world, which may seem like a contradiction. My point there was that in the case of emerging "digital culture," which is so new and undefined, you have to look elsewhere to find a technical yardstick and context. Rinder did that a bit in "BitStreams," he just picked crappy examples. Does that mean people who make title sequences for movies are artists? No, just that you ought to take them into account when evaluating whether, say, Jeremy Blake is any good.
My Christmas Dream (I know I promised these recitations would be sporadic; I lied)
I was working manual labor, with a crew of guys' guys I had to get along with. We walked down a long dirt road to the work site. The bosses fed us a kind of "meat roll" of pork and scrambled eggs with pieces of shrimp hanging out of it--not on plates; you picked it up off the ground and ate it with your hands. The job consisted of leveling a vast patch of slushy ice, which had formed ridges and mounds and had to be smoothed out. Its texture was more like ice cream--it came in supercold, viscous clumps. I had to get down on my knees to push the slush off a big central mound; from my vantage point there, I surveyed the work site. In addition to men, my co-workers included giant oxen covered with ice crystals, and "rock demons"--blond colored featureless humanoids resembling something out of a Jack Kirby comic. I looked up and was shocked to see that the work site sat at the base of an immense tube reaching up hundreds of feet, with walls of smoothly polished wood. Instead of sky overhead, there was a ceiling of loose, dripping ice. I couldn't fathom why it didn't fall on us; it was very ominous.
If you're mulling over a last-minute holiday gift, please consider donating to the Washington Youth Garden, a program associated with the National Arboretum. Someone very close to me knows a lot about the program and says every penny is well spent. [begin rant] I realize our economy is dependent on consumer spending at Christmastime, but when you have influential Republicans such as Grover Norquist saying "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” someone is obviously going to have to take up the slack. My own beliefs on charitable services are that they should be publicly funded, and if private, that the donee receive the gift without being forced to accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal savior (the so-called "faith-based" plan). Churches should just give and not expect zombie-like allegiance from recipients. Why is that so hard? [end rant]
Here are the best two quotes to emerge from media coverage of the Iraq war so far, right up there with "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," from an unnamed and possible fictitious major in the Vietnam era. These are better because they're completely attributable. Please mention them to at least one person today, ideally from the Bush camp, so you can watch her or him sputter.
Quote 1 (from Diane Sawyer's ABC interview with the President):
SAWYER: But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons still --
BUSH: So what’s the difference?
Quote 2: "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." --Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, quoted in the New York Times.
Lucas makes savvy, witty use of the medium with her disc, exploring a nebulous realm between the camera and the playback turntables, sound and physical space, performance and documentation. The camera is mounted on a DJ's turntable, spinning and rewinding as the artist looks down on it. Her head bobs into the frame from different compass points as if she were moving back and forth from a mixing board or record crates. The spatial orientation isn't entirely certain to the viewer, though; the rotating image makes you think at times that you're being tricked, and that the "ceiling" is actually a wall, with the sight line of the camera aimed towards it from a normal, standing position. Either way, the occasional synchronous rewinding of image and sound (and a kind of intermediate zigzag pattern that is a cartoon of rapid forward and backward movement) suggests that the artist is scratching the video as it is being filmed.
As it turns out, Lucas's visualization of "video on vinyl" exceeds the capabilities of Sengmüller's actual technology. In a live VJ-ing performance on the Vinyl Video website, you can see the VJs adjusting the speeds of various records, fading 2 discs, and moving the needle around to different points on the record but never backwards-scratching the image. In a sense, Lucas has created the ideal dj tool for this technology: VJs could put her disc on the platter and "air scratch" so people think they're manipulating the time-sequence of the piece. Which is kind of a shame, because it would be interesting to see what a VJ would do backward-scratching in real time Lucas's own, prerecorded facsimile: the image would run forward, of course, but the overall potential for spatiotemporal confusion would edge towards the head-exploding. Even without that capability, the smeared content can be sped up, slowed down, and skipped around in, with the space of the piece relative to the viewer becoming even more uncertain.
With the deadpan Lucas as your towheaded starship trooper guide, "Scratch It" simulates a trip down the Ketamine hole in a clubland-style funhouse. Walls spin, time and space refracts, the techno score plinks and howls. DJ Spooky has spoken of "dub architecture," but what he's shown by way of example--writhing 3-D computer graffiti tags floating over shots of building interiors--falls short of the cross-disciplinary cutting and splicing that phrase conjures. Lucas scratches space the way Lee Perry deforms recorded musical performance: instead of echoes and filters, she uses perceptual and conceptual slippages among camera, performer, and background.
Another Lucas project taking place in an ambiguous narrative space is here.
New York City just unveiled the plan for the new Fascism Tower--oh, sorry, Freedom Tower--that will once again disrupt the balance of the lower Manhattan skyline and give terrorists everywhere a goal to destroy. Yay! Just what we needed. Our Republican mayor and governor think the design for the "1776" foot tall building--the World's Tallest, until it's destroyed--is super-grand. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, agreed on the height of the building, just not the design and usage of the top 30 (largely ornamental) floors. Somehow we have got to adjust our notion that pride and patriotism always means a monster phallus.
According to press accounts Libeskind "compromised" with Silverstein's architect on the final design (the latter wants bird-slaughtering, supposedly power-generating windmills on the top floors): now, our only hope is that Libeskind plans to pull a Howard Roark and will blow up the building in the dead of night once it's completed (Roark, a character in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, did that after a developer incorrectly completed his design.*) Also, this is all contingent on shyster Larry getting the double payment he is seeking from insurance companies for his claim that two buildings were destroyed on 9/11. He needs 7 billion, not 3.5, to complete the project. C'mon, courts!
UPDATE: NY Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gets paid the big bucks to write meaningless phrases. Here's the essence of his lead today about the newly unveiled World Trade Center design: "Sir, what you have produced is, if I may say so, a...piece of architecture."
Here's what they'd get if they hired me:
"Pointing its taloned middle finger at the sky, the new design says, 'Fuck you, we need a big building complex downtown and this is what you're going to get.' The most intriguing aspect of the project is that it is both fascist--with menacing sharp angles and a haughty disdain for the scale of the surrounding buildings--and treehugging, with the top floors devoted to power generation by wind. The latter is really just a sop to environmental sentiment, however--besides killing untold numbers of birds, the giant fans will only supply a portion of the building's greedy power suckage."
Times editors: "Tom, what you've written here is a...piece of criticism. Now, get out."
*UPDATE 2/DISCLAIMER: In the movie version of The Fountainhead, no one dies when Roark blows up his own building. He is put on trial for a property crime, makes a stirring speech to the jury about the glories of American individualism, and is acquitted.I Meet My Match
A kid who I assume to be in high school but claims to be a college student starts talking to me in the video department of a crowded midtown store today. He asks if I'm browsing the anime titles for myself or a gift. I say myself. From that moment forward I am deluged with quantum packets of fan data, my feeble responses batted aside like beams from a pencil flashlight. "Didja know a live action Astroboy is coming out?" "A live action Gigantor?" "Live action Sailor Moon?" "Do you know about the Neon Genesis manga that takes place in the alternate universe where Shinji's living a normal life with his parents? He still pilots Eva, though. Did you know he sleeps with Rei? You know what Rei is, right?"
"Yes, she's a vat grown entity derived from the blood of an Angel."
"And what else?"
"And DNA from her father."
Derisive snort. "Her father?"
"Sorry, her mother."
"Anyway, remember how Shinji likes Kaoru in the series? In the manga he hates him, hates him."
"Is Kaoru gay, like in the series?"
"Yeah, but when he comes onto Shinji in the manga, Shinji gets mad and pushes him away."
Midway through our conversation the kid's father comes up behind him, taps his shoulder and says, "I'm going to that cafe downstairs so I can have a drink." I'm trying to browse the DVDs but the kid keeps going, breaking my concentration, talking about Tenchi Muyo, Ninja Scroll, the Battle for the Planets box set ("also known as G-Force; also Gatchaman"). "Cowboy Bebop is amazing animation for 1998. Amazing. Cartoon Network is trying to get them to extend the series more, but they won't. Did you hear they're expanding Adult Swim?" "Did you know that in Japan they have stores full of anime several floors high? Just anime!" "Oh, here's a box set I'm going to have to download at my school. Downloads suck, some virus always gets in." "Oh, the manga shelf! Gotta go, nice talking to you."
After he left, the spirit creature inside me was exhausted. I reported back to the Oni Dimension: "All is well on Earth."
The Capture of Saddam: A Sketch
The time traveler's hosts took him to a public eating place. Three television screens hung in the corners of the room, just below the ceiling. Each screen showed the same rapidly shifting images--repetitive, incantatory shots of talking people surrounded by colored windowframes and ribbons of scrolling letters. The traveler could make no sense of it.
Periodically a video sequence appeared on the screen in which a man in rubber gloves poked his fingers into another man's mouth, then aimed a flashlight into it so that the oral cavity glowed red. The probee resembled a crazed hermit. The screen would cut back to the talking people, then some shots of crowds, then back to the man being probed. After watching the rubber glove segment about ten times in twice that number of minutes, the traveler couldn't stand it any more. "What is happening here?" he asked.
His hosts looked at each other conspiratorially.
"Do you want to do this?" said Betty.
"Sure," said Bob. "You see, Qwarlo, many of our people's lives are quite meaningless. They work terrible dead end jobs with no hope of advancement. If they should be so unlucky as to get sick, they can quickly become pauperized and homeless. To keep them complacent, the corporate state amuses them with tales of frightening villains--in reality potentates from far away countries that would never have any impact on their lives, but who are made to seem like menaces to all. The man you see on the screen was recently captured after twelve years of being marketed as the Great Satan. He was unquestionably a bad guy, but our government supported him for years before deciding he was more useful as a heel."
"Why is that man sticking his fingers in his mouth?"
"Ostensibly searching for poison capsules or contraband, but since it's being filmed, I'd say the main purpose is public humiliation. Every successful TV series needs a climax, and since this man did not die in a shootout upon apprehension, the public needs to see him treated like an animal." Bob was trying to keep a straight face.
"Why do they keep showing the same clip again and again?"
"Again, the excuse would be that 24-hour news repeats things for the benefit of people just tuning in, but the reality is this is government propaganda. The constant repetition reinforces the idea of overwhelming state power, and provides a kind of 'bread and circuses' entertainment for the vast majority of the public."
The traveler looked appalled. "I realize this is my own distant past, but I can't believe things were ever this corrupt and barbaric."
"Welcome to modern times, Qwarlo," Betty said.
Saddam's Capture: An Objective Report
(Originally posted 5 hours ago on dratfink's page.)
Just got back from brunch--saw the clip of the doctor probing Saddam's mouth about 15 times on the restaurant TV. Then the staff turned up the sound so we could all listen to Jr's platitudinous speech, after which they applauded.
Spent an enjoyable day walking around the dreaded Chelsea art district, then over to Billburg, as they say. Highlights: Sergio Prego at Lombard Fried (moving walls and stop motion wallsurfing by the artist); Michelle Grabner & Brad Killam videos at Ten in One ("Dale Chihuly Glass Camp for Boys" is priceless); Eunjung Hwang's psychosexual Fabulous Creatures computer animations at Eyebeam Atelier; Adam Frank's & Zack Booth Simpson's Shadows, also at Eyebeam; Carolyn Swiszcz at M.Y. Art Prospects, LLC (thanks to bloggy for recommending these excellent paintings); Rachelle Mozman's "semi-staged portraits and landscapes" shot in "newly developed parts of New Jersey" (at PH Gallery, 547 West 27th). An opening at Vertexlist in Brooklyn featured a pyrotechnic insanitarium hair curler floor installation by Thad Simerly and Michael Stachiw's web interface that "sings your website" to the tune of cheesy '80s MIDI files.
In the comments to an earlier post I've been having an interesting debate with artist and blogger Sally McKay (with contributions from Bill Schwarz) that includes a belated appraisal of the formerly Young British Artists, whether the term "artist" should be defined inclusively or exclusively, and more specifically, whether Ron Mueck is a capitalist plot.
Welcome to the browser wilderness of mirrors. The image immediately below is my website on Safari, courtesy of iCapture, a site that allows non-Mac web designers to view their handiwork on a Mac. The bottom image is my web page running on Netscape or IE (or Mozilla, I'm told). I'd say Mr. Jobs isn't helping me out here by artistically blurring out the enlarged gif.
Welcome to the browser wilderness of mirrors, part 2. The image immediately below is my website on Safari, courtesy of iCapture (see part 1). All 9 animated gifs are supposed to be moving in synch. The bottom image is my web page running on Netscape or IE (or Mozilla, I'm told). I'd say Mr. Jobs isn't helping me out here by starting the gifs in arbitrary groups of 3-6.
Awesome Flash ad for Dennis Kucinich lists names of soldiers who have died in Iraq and asks what they died for. (Answer: Halliburton, Bechtel, the President's rich friends...) It would be wonderful if this could run on television, to penetrate the propaganda fog most Americans see, or just to piss people off. Never forget: Bush is a monster (and stupid). Peace out.
Fire for Pixel, by pixelthork, enlarged from 47 X 46 pxl original. I am in awe of this picture. (I'm told the pixels are fuzzy on Safari and sharp on IE. I'm about ready to say, you aren't "getting" my page if you browse with Safari. Bill Gates is paying me a lot of money. Actually, Netscape and Mozilla work fine, too.)
Update, 2010: GIF remade at 400 x 391 after all browsers followed the Safari lead and involuntarily fuzzed out enlarged graphics. The original sized version looks like this:
UPDATE to my previous post: It appears that everyone sees the animations (e.g. here and here) the way I see them--all moving, all in synch--except Apple Safari users. The "8 frozen gifs, 1 blinking" is a glitch in an earlier version of Safari (only one animated gif per page would move) that can be fixed with an upgrade. Current Safari users see the gifs moving asynchronously because they start moving the instant they load and stay on that uneven "schedule." That might be nice but it's not as rigorous as what I intended (the reason for making a grid out of the image was so the pulsation would happen on a larger scale). I've also had problems with Safari fuzzing out pixel blocks that were supposed to be super-sharp. Of course, it would be the browser associated with the operating system the most graphically literate people use. Oh, well, I'll have to think about this.
One solution would be to have grids where all the animations move at different speeds. In the one below, the dark rectangles move more slowly than the light ones. It probably doesn't matter if all these start at different times:
This is boring, but a friend with a Safari browser running on a Apple PowerBook sees the animations on this page as 8 frozen gifs and 1 moving gif in the corner. It should be 9 animated frames--all identical, all moving. If you're seeing anything different please leave a comment, anonymous or otherwise, and let me know what browser you're using. I'm planning to do more of this work and am curious to find out what anomalies are cropping up. Thanks.
Below: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and "Toby" in Escherland (Labyrinth, 1986). As a teenager, A Beautiful Mind Academy Award winner Connelly played the most appealing Everygirl imaginable. Much of what Jim Henson did to her implicitly in Labyrinth Dario Argento did explicitly the preceding year, in Phenomena (released stateside, heavily cut, as the horror film Creepers). In Argento's movie she is poisoned, thrown into a dungeon, immersed in a pool of maggots, and witnesses unspeakable slashings and beheadings and still emerges victorious. What was it about this wholesome, fresh-faced, straight-ahead actress that made directors want to put her in peril? That question doesn't really merit an answer, I just find it weird that Argento's film is the evil twin of Henson's and they both star Jennifer Connelly.
Speaking of A Beautiful Mind, I highly recommend this review by Ted G, who took an MIT class from Nash after the ailing prof was first released from the psychiatric hospital, and whose grasp of the math is better than Ron Howard's.
"Ludo," movements and voice by Ron Mueck (Labyrinth, 1986). Although included in the London-based "Sensation" show as a YBA, Mueck is neither young (he's 44 now), British (he's Australian) or, shoot me for saying this, an artist. Thanks to ad man/collector Charles Saatchi's money and influence, he successfully crossed over from Jim Henson puppeteer to a museum career without significantly changing his schtick--a kind of sentimental high craft. In 1939 Clement Greenberg attempted to nail down what made artists different from illustrators and came up with a dichotomy he called "cause vs effect." Picasso's art made viewers question how the picture was working on them or even what art was (cause) while the Russian neoclassicist Repin painted pictures that told you in every detail exactly how to react to them (effect). For Repin, substitute Mueck's Duane Hanson-style realistic sculptures, which are even less ambiguous than Hanson's because they're deliberately stagy and "spooky." The art world should be more wised up by now. Below: Boy, 2001 (exhibited in the Venice Biennale and elsewhere).
More on the house track "House of God" and R&S Records, the label where it first appeared:
R&S is a Belgian imprint and it's obvious why they liked "House of God," because it's a dark and pounding track (for all the fun--more below) and Belgian techno tends/tended to be over on the industrial side of the aisle. DHS is from Chicago but I know nothing about that outfit. I see "House" as a refinement & updating of "Welcome to Paradise V 1.0" by Front 242, an actual Belgian band frequently described as "techno/industrial crossover" or "electronic body music." It's amazing what happened to electronic music between 1988 and 1991, as exemplified by these two tracks: an astonishing quantum leap in equipment, philosophy, or both. "Welcome" features samples from a Jimmy Swaggart-style televangelist over the metallic "drum machine" sound that everyone was using in 1988, not sure what brand, which now seems brittle and jarring and dated. Also wailing psychedelic guitar samples. The televangelist's words included such club-friendly ironic soundbites as "No sex until marriage!" but also scrambled nonsense phrases like "Hey, Poor, You Don't Have to be Jesus." (An even earlier precedent is Negativland's "Christianity is Stupid" which hacks up a southern sermon.)
"House of God" samples a black radio preacher, from Chicago I'm guessing, who is trying to raise contributions of "50 dollars or more" to build a church called "The House of God." Phrases from his pitch--"I am excited", "50 Dollars or more"--are cut up, stripped of context, and sprinkled throughout the track, or used as rhythmic elements in themselves. The underlying music is minimal, just a thumping beat (an 808?), synthetic cymbals, and a sonar-like pulse--with the occasional hammer-hitting-a-railroad-spike percussion that I'm sure attracted the Belgians. The production is silky smooth, seductive, hypnotic. DHS emphasized the connection between the word "House"--frequently spoken aloud in house music--and "House of God," thus secularizing a concept already corrupted by the phony preacher (and he does sound like a shyster)--or maybe recuperating it? There's a kind of liberating sacrilege in the track's repeated use of the word "God": at one point a sample of the preacher saying "God's House" alternates over and over again with a little girl saying "God" (God's House--"God"--God's House--"God") which almost sounds like cursing and makes me think someone in DHS had a bad religious upbringing. But it also recalls the joyous call-and response you hear in gospel services. It's a brilliant piece of music in the way it tugs you this way and that.
DVD captures from Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). In the top frame Ghost Dog removes a license plate from a car he has just stolen and in the bottom, replaces it with a plate from some unsuspecting picnickers. I saw the movie twice before noticing the deadpan mottos for nonexistent states. The music is by Wu-Tang Clan guiding light The RZA, who is featured in cameo (and camo) near the end of the film as a fellow urban samurai. The RZA, who also did the Kill Bill score, is the subject of a wild interview over at the Onion AV Club. Amazing that music so heavenly could come from such a down-and-dirty talker.
(O: What was ODB like before the Wu-Tang Clan? RZA: He was similar, without the money and without the name. I've been involved in a lot of things in my life, and I'd always count him in. Like if I wanted to see some girls, I'd call him and say, "Yo, I've got these girls. These girls are going to steal some shit for us, and all we have to do is hang out with them, spit right with 'em, fuck 'em, and then they'll do that for us." He'd come over, and then the next day, the girls would be ready, and he'd do something to fuck up the whole shit, or get the dough and spend it in one day, or something that's real fucked-up. Like if he got hold of a car, he'd crash it. He was always like that.)
The Ghost Dog score is a strangely heart-tugging melange of hiphop beats, Asian temple chimes, industrial ka-chings & whirs and wispy, pretty recurring melodies. According to the DVD notes, RZA assigned the film's characters their own musical motifs a la Peter and the Wolf. Well, I'm damned if I find any relationship, but each motif is heard exactly when it's needed. The music, working in tandem with Jarmusch's entranced views of the city and frequent close-ups of Forrest Whitaker's sad face, creates an elegiac mood so powerful that it survives even the director's characteristic outbreaks of weird humor and inexplicable behavior (e.g., the old mafia guy suddenly yelling "passenger pigeon! passenger pigeon's been extinct since 1914!"). To hear the score properly you need to get the DVD, because the CD soundtrack is mostly songs by other artists, apparently (or get the Japanese version of the soundtrack for $44).
Wow! Thanks to Sally for tuning up my .gif. It's running much better now.
Here's a detail of Double Molecule, the animated .GIF in the post above. I'm putting up this close-up photo to show conclusively, I hope, that my recent animated .GIFs, installations, and works on paper are NOT HAND PAINTED. They are drawn in MSPaintbrush, a very old but very digital program, then printed, cut out with scissors, and collaged and/or pinned up on the wall. For the animated .GIFs they are photographed in crude stop motion. I realize that shrunk down to a small scale & fuzzed out by compression, they look like little painted maquettes but I assure you nothing could interest me less. I like painting OK but I'm sick of the "romance of paint." Hence I am "painting" in a readily available electronic/digital medium. The animations are just an extension of my usual 2-D practice. Thanks to K. and J. for pointing out that I haven't been making this as clear as I need to. Now if I could only make the animation this bright...