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Thanks to all who posted encouraging comments about my first foray into video. The piece is coming along, it's now down to 50 MB and I jury-rigged a way to sync the audio. I was able to save a thumbnailized, super compressed copy at 9.5 MB, but it looks like, um, shit.
Many of the comments were about trying to get me to switch from a PC to the Macintosh ecosystem. I have more to say on this subject, but in brief, I don't know how I can continue to claim, in my artist statement, that "My work proudly inhabits the 'lo-fi' or 'abject' end of the digital spectrum" if I am using the ideal, "hi fi" system. I wound up in PC-land quite by accident, but it's the way I think most people end up there: it's the computer of choice of managerial types in the American workplace. At a certain point I had so much PC-made work on floppies (done on lunch breaks, of course!) that when my old Mac SE no longer cut it at home, I had no real choice about what to buy to replace it. But this is boring. I also perversely like being outside the orbit of the Mac fetishists, where things tend to look and get done a certain way. I've kidded elsewhere about the laptop chic of New York art events--part of me wants to join it, but there's also something to be said for using the tools of the proles. Think Carl Andre in his carpenter overalls. Oops, not a good example.
How It Works...The Computer. Good clear scans of individual pages show differences between the 1971 and 1979 editions of this (high school?) reference book. Highly informative, high kitsch appeal, what more could you ask for? (via cory a. & eyebeam reBlog)
Reviving the ancient practice of barter that lay behind the putative origins of our fair city--that is, the ability to trade almost anything for a handful of beads--is Mondo Mondo Trading Post. Go to the 6th Floor at Cooper Union during the hours listed below and swap anything you have--a poem, a song, a piece of crumpled paper lying at your feet--for a pretty souvenir made of Perler Beads, a craft kit item I'm told I'd know more about if I'd recently left high school. The Mondo Mondo traders, Kevin McGarry and Matt Savitsky, have taken their economic roadshow up and down the Northeast, setting up temporary displays with cardboard totem poles, an array of multi-hued blankets, and a table of Souvenirs. Trades are documented with online photos of the crap (and also good stuff) people coughed up. From the website the project looks to be a combination of hippie-era hopefulness about creating an alternative system of exchange and a kind of wised-up parody of a colorful kid's show world where the bottom line is you take home something made of plastic. Judging from the pictures of McGarry and Savitsky stoically manning their booth in a host of public spaces (plazas, museum grounds, bookstore sidewalks), there is something beautiful and sweet about the activity but the stupid factor is not to be overlooked--the quality of the hapless, doomed quest to change the world through a single throwback gesture. The website captures the spirit nicely, with its melange of happy colors, texture-mapped wood grain, and sprightly MIDI tunes downloaded off of various fan sites (especially fine is the one that greets you on load-up, Radiohead's "Paranoid Android"). Hopefully I'll have a chance to go tomorrow and can give a better report.
Saturday Nov. 13th - 3PM to 5PMUPDATE, Saturday, Nov. 13: Visited the Trading Post and found it as winsome as described. One slight inaccuracy above is the trades don't stop with you taking home a Souvenir--everything ever traded is for sale. Previous swaps from New Hampshire, PA, NYC, etc. were arrayed around the room in hand-cut cardboard display cases. Poems or stories were handwritten on card stock and would be recited or reenacted by the proprietors on request. I traded a Gimme Shell 7-inch EP for a robin's-eggs-in-nest Souvenir. It's a gem.
Wednesday Nov. 17th - 9PM to 11PM
Saturday Nov. 20th - 6PM to 8PM