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I'm happy to announce that my DVDs and works on paper will be in Miami this year--artMovingProjects is showing them at DiVa Miami, the Digital and Video Art Fair, which will have "white cube" spaces set up in shipping containers on the beach. A page for my work is here. Other artists represented include Jillian Mcdonald, Marcin Ramocki, Linda Post and Adam Simon.
Ramocki, who also directed the movie 8 BIT, will be attending with the film's producer and co-director Justin Strawhand. He reports, over on the vertexList blog:
8 BIT is going to open the party; presented by artMoving and KBP, we will be screening at Hotel Victor, Ocean Drive between 11th and 12th street - South Beach, Miami Beach, 12/08/2006, 7 00 pm - 8 30 pm. You can get the tickets for the event here. Both Justin and I will be there to answer questions and have some tropical drinks.Ramocki adds:
For those trying to catch 8 BIT here in NYC, I am proud to announce we will be a part of the historic Blip Festival 2006! Our screening is on Saturday, Dec 02, 2 pm - check it out!
"ally3" - GIF artist unknown - enlarged - 188KB
Anxiety of Influence
1999
Kristin Lucas, mousepad drawings.
Lucas inked a mouseball and let it make gestural drawings while she played games, answered email, etc.
2006
Eyebeam Open Lab - mousepad paintings
Similar gesture paintings made with a USB "double mouse"
(hat tip to jim bassett--demoted from "attack of the clones" to "anxiety of influence" since the Lucas was part meat-space, part virtual and the double mouse is all virtual. it is basically the same idea, though)
Update: another mouse doing "automatic writing," by Joseph DeLappe, from '99 (thx to ed halter)
Update 2: Some critical musings on all this are here.
More digital pog blogging:
An earlier post on the subject of digital pogs addressed only the collectible aspect of these "caps." Yet in the physical world their main purpose, and means of exchange, is a game where the pogs are stacked and knocked over, with the pogs landing face up going to the winner. Some serious thought needs to be given to how digital pogs can acquire the edge of competition, gambling, and classroom disruption that led to their banishment in schools across America in '94-'95.
To put it more bluntly, how do you kick people's asses and get all their pogs with the digital version?
Brown Wolf, 1989, oil on canvas, 54" x 64". After a big corporation purchased a canvas of mine for a high-tech training center it built in Dallas, the director of the center asked if I would accept a commission for a painting of a "brown wolf." (It was an inside reference that I won't explain here.) He stipulated only that it be "a magnificent animal, and I don't want it with its tail between its legs or howling at the moon." The money was good, and while I had done many photorealistic portraits I had never done a "nature painting" per se, so I took it as a personal challenge. As a source I used a black and white image from a Dover book of copyright-free photos, gridded and enlarged it in pencil (old school) and then added the colors (such as they were) from my imagination. The Dover image was of a rather unmagnificent animal obviously in a zoo pen so I had my work cut out for me to make him appear strong and free. Last I saw it was hanging proudly in the lobby of the office building. I have no idea where it is now but due to corporate turnover (and changing tastes) it could very well be in a storeroom or landfill. The piece led to a series of ambiguous, grisaille paintings of copyright-free North American mammals (some of which I've posted and will continue to post here). The photo of the painting is by Harrison Evans.
Looking back at the invoice for this painting reminded me that the director also bought some drawings of mine--one of which was done on the Macintosh with MacPaint. Just to bring this post back to my usual subject matter.
Non-standard digital pogs
whoops, forgot about my self-imposed bandwidth limit for the front page of the blog, so...
I really like Matt Stoller's writing at MyDD:
So anyway, if you need evidence that journalists in DC adopt the biases of their sources and eagerly sop up conventional wisdom, you need go no further than [New York Times temporary columnist Thomas] Edsall. Look at who he doesn't like in this article--pro-choice groups, unions, and minority rights groups. These groups, if you are a Democratic insider, are annoying. They make you do work. They force you to not cut deals with the other side, and they hold Democrats accountable for bad economic choices. They make people like Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel uncomfortable because they demand good policy choices, and by and large aren't (or shouldn't) be willing to trade away core principles to the right for better parking spots.
Edsall of course didn't talk to a janitor who just got a raise in Houston, he didn't talk to a Goodyear worker losing his job, or a displaced New Orleans resident, or a NJ retiree with good pension and benefits because of his union. Edsall talked to his friends, and his friends know, they just know, how important better parking spots are. To these people, knocking labor unions just feels so right, doesn't it? I guess it's a testament to how firmly the intellectual core of journalism has rotted that journalists now work strongly against their own economic interest. Even as Edsall attacks unions as an out of touch "pressure group on the left" that "no longer command broad popular allegiance," his former colleagues are relying on their union to improve journalism and stop the job cuts devastating newsrooms across the country.
[...]I suppose in Edsall's world, corporate media barons are part of the coalition of "dominant," and unions are not. So even though the Republican Party was soundly repudiated at the polls in favor of a strongly populist Democratic Party backed by labor, and a touchstone abortion ban was popularly rejected in one of the reddest states in the country, Democrats have no choice but to reject unions and pro-choice groups, or they will face judgment at the polls.
This digital pog design, by Jeff Sisson, is one of my favorites, so I enlarged it.
Mark Danner on the bad decisionmaking that led to the Iraq quagmire. (Part One) (Part Two) Long but well written and worth a read, the essay will appear in the December 21, 2006 edition of the New York Review of Books. From Part Two:
Nearly four years into the Iraq war...the consequences of [the U.S.'s] early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country's Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an "Iraqi face," they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists' strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the U.S. leaders have allowed them to succeed.I still think about the argument I had with someone in 2003, after I had marched in protest of the war: "I just have to believe that the government has expertise and access to information that we don't have and we have to trust that they know more than we do," I was told.
"I Hate The Others" [mp3 removed]
I posted this a few weeks back but I "pumped up the volume" so here it is again.
Update: and again, with better equalization.
Good essay by Bob Somerby about the over-analysis of Borat by the punditocracy. Or mis-analysis. He chops down several supposed examples of the film's condescension to its subjects, suggesting that the critics don't have any better understanding of the film's various awkward situations than Borat does. "[New York Times columnist] David [Brooks], a stranger in a strange land...fails to see that the film concerns Borat himself—and that Borat is in many ways us." I certainly felt at sea in the scene where Borat gets drunk with three real life fraternity brothers: I understood them on one level having grown up in the South, but in their racism and general all-round incoherency they were as strange and scary to me as bug-eyed extraterrestrials.
Somerby notes the humorlessness of many critics of the film. In one scene, Borat tries to check into a Dallas hotel after learning the vernacular and dress code of some local black kids, and is promptly evicted by security. The scene gets its yuks from the cultural disconnect and Borat's low-riding suit pants, but the earnest commenters on blogger Kevin Drum's board are tut-tutting that it makes too much fun of the desk clerk. The footage was all a set-up--the clerk thought he was going to be giving a tour of the hotel (the Adolphus), and had no idea who the erratic "walk-in guest" was. In an email reproduced by a Drum commenter, the clerk writes: "I also called a friend at the Dallas Film Commission and she told me that she was certain that this had some connection to a man who had been spotted driving around Dallas in an ice-cream truck with a bear in the back of it." But he can't see the comedy in that sentence, says Somerby--he can't laugh at himself.
Lux Provocateur TM soap commercial [.mp4 movie]. Not American TV-safe, according to cartoon brew. Girl discovers bar of soap in woods, turns into Steve Madden model. Illustrates the theories of Camille Paglia "in the field," as it were. Note aroused forest animals, and leather dude at end. (via schwarz)
Happy Thanksgiving to all, by the way.
Digital Pog Criticism (aka "pog bloggin'")
Some thoughts on Michael Bell-Smith's digital pog collection. Briefly, pogs started as illustrated milk bottle caps in Hawaii and grew into a kid-collectibles crazelet in the '90s. Digital pogs are 177-pixels-in-diameter GIF files that exist and can be "bartered" mainly via the Internet and web browsers. Whether Bell-Smith's pogs catch on and actually become viable mock-nostalgic anti-commodities remains to be seen.
As Bill Schwarz said when a few of these were first posted: the pog "is the low man on the collectible ladder. Lower than beer cans, lower than glass insulators, lower than advertising drink glasses, lower than everything. Congrats to mbs on recognizing a commodity that faint."
Whatever happens with them in the Internet's gift-exchange economy, these pogs are interesting to think of as a different kind of icon model. If you look at avatars dredged up by something like the LiveJournal icon-scraper they're all rectangular. Talk about "conventional"!
As an artist, working with the circular format makes you think about different content issues--what kind of subject matter lends itself best to this form? (Cameos for portraits, views through viewfinders and portholes, puns on circular imagery, etc.)
Down side: they require more steps to make than rectangles. Also, not every viewing situation respects the GIF's command to "transparencize" the area outside the circle--if that doesn't happen, the effect is blown.
Update: the above comments address the collectible aspect of pogs. Of course in the physical world their main purpose, and means of exchange, is a game where the pogs are stacked and knocked over, with the pogs landing face up going to the winner. Some serious thought needs to be given to how digital pogs can acquire the edge of competition, gambling, and class disruption that led to their banishment in schools across America in '94-'95.
Dear Tom, We are continuing to monitor your site for signs of Buzz. You often seem close to achieving a "buzz breakthrough," but you have a number of self-defeating elements built into your program. You don't stick to one topic, you are frequently harsh in your opinions, the mix you are attempting of art world insider theorizing and political rants seems ill-conceived, your own art is inconsistent, your music occupies an uncomfortable ground between club tunes and art music, satisfying neither constituency, and your alternating tone of outraged moral seriousness and adolescent silliness is frankly just a turnoff. We'd like to help you along with your BQ (buzz quotient) but, frankly, we don't know what the f*k you're doing and we don't care.
Update: last year's "memo from the suits"
Digital Pogs from the collection of Michael Bell-Smith. T to b, l to r: Matt Smear, Michael Bell-Smith, Jeff Sisson, John Michael Boling, Paper Rad, Matt Smear, Michael Bell-Smith, Sarafina Engfer (2). The ones below are all by me, except the blond "parade lady" which is my pog of a Thorrific photo.
More YouTube Sequencer Demos
Fairlight CMI Sequencer (vintage digital interface on early sampler! I like the sound, graphics, and keyboard clicks in this Japanese subtitled video)
Korg Radias-R Demo ("state of the art" digital signal processing is kind of cheesy but placidly filmed and fun to watch)
Roland System 100-M (demo in Japanese of pattern-creation on modular analog synth)
Below: two recent "found street sign" photos from Curbed. The top one is from the Gowanus canal area, where they really are building a Whole Foods. The bottom one is from wherever Beavis and Butthead live.
Dear Music Diary,
Last night I decided to fix a glitch in the string quartet piece I wrote last February. It has been bugging me all these months. Turns out it was one discordant violin note that needed to be muted.
We are a 2-PC family here at the studio. The quartet was produced on my laptop using (among other things) the Kontakt sampler, version 2.0. I have since installed a later version of Kontakt (2.1) on my desktop PC and wanted to do the fix on that computer. All the instruments worked fine except the cello, which produced no sound.
Turns out that the cello was "improved" in version 2.1 so that you can play in different styles--sustained, plucked, etc. So I substituted the new cello for the old one, and tried all the styles to find the closest one to 2.0.
None matched. In fact, the sound was loud and awkward and didn't obey the volume parameters I'd set down for each instrument. The balance of the instruments was destroyed.
My options then were: (i) try to massage the new cello so that it fit with the other instruments, (ii) uninstall version 2.1 and use the backup version of 2.0 (making songs produced in 2.1 unplayable) or (iii) just make the fix in 2.0 on the laptop. I chose (iii).
But if I only had one PC and had upgraded to 2.1 I would have been f*ed out of several hours of my life. If I was a professional soundtrack composer this would be a serious annoyance.
This is not a complaint about Kontakt or Native Instruments per se. The issue applies to all commercial software. The capitalist business model requires (a) constantly rolling out "improvements" in product lines and (b) creating anxiety in customers that they need these improvements. The resulting tangle of compatibility issues assures that creative work (or any work) with digital tools is a chaotic mess.
The great thing about being a romantic starving-in-a-garret type artist (as opposed to a for-hire illustrator or composer) is at any point you can choose to jump off the treadmill. Or use the industry dysfunction proactively, as content. I work in a paint program that's about 15 years old now and I'm not feeling the urge to acquire any new music software. My beginner version of Cubase dates to early 2004 but I'm still learning new tricks with it, even though Steinberg has introduced a couple of versions since then. In my latest piece I used Kontakt 1.5, which I found pleasant, like driving around a stripped-down dune buggy and leaving the Hummer in the garage (if I had either of those vehicles).
Blogs and other linkage:
Jim Woodring's blog. How art should be--artists make art and post it, whoever likes it finds and consumes it. In this case, lovingly crafted, f*ed up surrealist drawing and painting by a master from the underground comix sphere.
Across the divide. Edward B. Rackley reporting from Africa, offering "critique from within the international aid industry [and] political commentary from a number of African countries." A recent post on the African-Chinese trade bonds intrigues.
Seminal, sub-nugatory New York band Neg-Fi composes theme song for this year's installment of La Superette, "where artists showcase original, handmade gifts including recycled accessories, multifunctional stuffed animals, artist publications, funky house wares, and homemade clothes, with a special focus on 'hacks,' the custom configuration of pre-existing hardware or software." Neg-Fi's contribution this year will be "a mini-cd EP packaged with a jar of homemade organic peanut butter."
Nasty Nets internet surfing club is a page I'm proud to be involved with (mostly with the occasional bad animated GIF)--a mix of discriminating smartass net-trolling and original art projects for the web, with an emphasis on askance looks at the popular web technologies bubbling up from Silicon Valley that help us live, love, communicate, and work better.
Mellon Writes Again. Web page of writer Mark Mellon, whose fiction spans a range of genres and who lists his credits thusly: "My work has appeared in Aberrations; Chasm; Gothic.Net; Terra Incognita; Anthrolations, the Magazine of Anthropomorphic Dramatic Fiction; the Irish magazine Albedo One; Black Satellite; City Morgue; Aoife’s Kiss; Zahir; Hadrosaur Tales; the English magazines Sutekh’s Gift and Premonitions; and Whispers From The Shattered Forum. A vampire story, Shtriga’s Kiss, has been published in chapbook form by Anxiety Publications. I have also written four novels, The Empire of the Green, Hammer and Skull, The Pirooters and Libertarian in Love (respectively a science fiction novel, a historical novel about World War II, a Western, and a contemporary satire), and a fantasy novella: Escape From Byzantium."
"Throbbing and Tinkling" [mp3 removed]
A "heavy" bass riff is dismantled in the sampler (that's the throbbing part) while a heavily delayed frequency modulated piano tinkles. A rav-y synth solo pops up in the middle and at the end. The piece has a horror-movie ambience but I consider it contemporary classical music, using tropes and textures from the club underground as building blocks.
Update: "Maximized" the sound with a mastering plug-in. It's still quiet relative to other tracks--I guess because it only has three instruments.
Update 2: Substituted a "maximized" version with better equalization. (Thx to JP)
From Curbed: New Willliamsburg Condos to Offer Free Oil?
Related, from Bad Advice: "Luxury Condos" or Toxic Death Dump?
Some funny writing about an unfunny topic: unscrupulous real estate developers building on environmentally suspect sites and then lying about it to buyers and renters. The New York metro area feels as lawless as the Wild West when it comes to property issues. Unlimited freedom to screw up: as when the guy next door dug down ten feet to add a basement apartment to his building and collapsed my downstairs neighbor's back yard.
Three Kings, 1999. George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze drive an open jeep around Iraq after the end of the First Gulf War, looking for a cache of Saddam's gold bullion. Wacky adventures ensue before the men become sensitized to the plight of the Shiites, who are attempting an uprising against Hussein's still-dominant forces.
Four Kings, 2009. Sequel to Three Kings. Soldiers leave the Green Zone in a self-armored Hummer during the Second Gulf War, looking for a cache of weapons left over from the Saddam years. Three die when their vehicle strikes an improvised explosive device; George Clooney loses an arm and a leg in the blast. The film deals with his painful recovery and his eventual radicalization into a staunch political foe of the "Bush regime." No wacky adventures are had.
More linkage you need (the New Net Art):
All of the phony names from spam emails Joel Holmberg has received this month as a rockyou textpix slideshow. Not sure which makes you want to drill a hole in your own head more--the thought of all that spam or the endless cheerful banality of "rockyou"'s personalized animated graphics.
Audio clip: hear George W. Bush, president of the United States, use the words "peeance" and "freeance" in a sentence (as adjectives, apparently). Not really net art, but worth putting in to flout conceptual purity.
Almost as depressing as the rockyou slideshow: Stock footage from Getty Images that is pulled up with the search request "artist looking at camera" (found by Guthrie Lonergan--who has a great nose for postModern anomie).
Updated: backgrounds are now transparent so the discs are round against a colored background--finally figured out how to do that this morning--takes a long time with the clumsy tools I'm using.
Update 2: fixed bad image tag--OK now, bloglines?
Not to be out-pr'ed by warmonger and torture bill endorser John McCain, "America's mayor" Rudy Giuliani today announced an "exploratory committee" for a 2008 presidential run. While he may have given Americans the brave-face-for-the-TV-cameras they needed on 9/11/01 while Bush was retreating into the Midwest, let's just say here once again that people in New York hate Giuliani. During his tenure as mayor he's remembered as a finger wagging control freak with a terrible record dealing with minorities. His "bravery" on 9/11 was damage control after his mistake in locating his 15 million dollar "command bunker" high up in 7 World Trade Center. Then, after leaving office, he milked the tragedy for personal financial gain as an expensive "security expert." Blogger Steve Gilliard thinks his dallying with mistresses and ties to corrupt individuals like Bernard Kerik will keep him from a successful run--sure hope so, he's a creep, not a "hero."
Found a couple of Dopplereffekt YouTube vids on this page: "Scientist" (without vocals) and "Satellites." Lots of grim laboratory visuals in the first one. This is Detroit electro--really great stuff.
Types of Artists
This list applies to all creative people but is especially geared to visual artists. I wish critics and art historians paid more heed to these distinctions.
1. Only one good piece in them. This type stumbles onto a work of genius despite general artistic inactivity. Provides valid material for shows such as Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings," as well as Google Images.
2. Comes charging out of school and then disappears. Probably the majority of artists are in this category.
3. Works privately entire life. For example, Henry Darger, a posthumous sensation.
4. Works publicly entire life--badly. Probably the second largest category. It includes: art professors who need a show every year to maintain credibility or academic standing, artists from category 2 who are canonized before they would otherwise disappear, human steamrollers whose egos will not let them be anything less than financially successful, or some combination of the above.
5. Works publicly entire life--well. Probably the smallest category, the self motivated artist who keeps it fresh through good times and bad, gallery and no gallery, and also engages other artists as well as the surrounding culture.
Most artists who read this will say they are in Category 5. This list is aimed not at you so much as the professional trainspotters who never seem to take these differences into account, resulting in bad survey shows and meaningless constructions of art history.
Good, clearly laid out survey of the chip music scene by Marcin Ramocki, on the vertexList blog. Originally appeared in Yard magazine, with added photos and links. Sample quote: "Many analogue-heads don’t understand the technical concept of making music on Game Boy and confuse it with sampling video-game tunes. This couldn’t be less accurate. Working with a Game Boy tracker is a very complex composition process; perhaps much more demanding because of its 'bare bones' sound library and minimal interfacing."
One correction to Ramocki's post should be made: the second of the two "pioneers of chiptune music" he mentions should properly be identified as the BEIGE collective, consisting of Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckman, Joe Bonn, and Paul B. Davis. See my post on them from '02.
More: Ramocki's post has been updated with an email from Paul B. Davis giving some detail about who did what on the 8 Bit Construction Set record. This is fascinating stuff for those of us who had our worlds rocked by that disc.
Still more: Davis' update, which seems to be undergoing some revision over on the vertexList blog, says that the 8 Bit Construction Set was Paul's band and
Even more thoughts: while I do find the "who did what" breakdown fascinating, I'm going to continue to live with my illusions that this was a group effort, particularly since the LP did an excellent job of mystifying the consumer and not parsing credit. Cory Arcangel has been good over the years about describing his projects as Beige projects. It's not his fault that art world movers and shakers seem incapable of acknowledging communal authorship. The "Great Men" theory of art history has brought the world so much pain. Whether or not it is "Paul's band"--and I'd like to read some other band members' thoughts on that before laying down some journalistic edict--they all deserve props for an epoch-making work.
Final (?) update. Davis says the following in the comments. Since no one else has come forward with any disagreement I extend him belated and heartfelt congrats for his role in a brilliant record:
hiya tom, while i think you misinterpreted my post a bit and don't need an illusion about the group effort on the record, i'll go to my grave--or rather our deitch enterprises tv/vh1 8bit construction set behind the music special--saying its my band cos i write the tunes [and im a bit proud of them].Davis explained in an email, regarding the earlier wording of the vertexList update: "i wrote the songs myself on the 8bit record [dollars and saucemaster] and as a result cory and i discussed 8bitcs as being 'my band,' but it's definitely not 'my self titled l/p' but 'our self titled l/p' because the record had contributions from everyone." In the email Davis also mentions that he designed the LP cover, which had the "cracker" aesthetic down pat.
it's not normally an issue, one of BEIGE's purposes was to avoid these sorts of things and i take the steady art world goofs about cor's individual role in the 8bitcs project and Nintendo stuff with a grain of salt - it's none of our fault that people don't do their research. it's just that I got forwarded two really bad ones in one day [marcin's and francesco spaminato's essay in the "sound & vision" book] and snapped.
btw, i'd like to announce here that a box of mint condition, 8bit construction set records has recently been found [!] in my parent's basement and will be made available to discriminating art-buyers [sic]. seriously if ppl want one drop me an email paul AT beigerecords DOT com, i dont know how yet cos my pops isn't about to mail them out, but at some point i'll sort it.
Link dump:
Time on German Rumsfeld prosecution
Koons wins copyright case
Matthew Geller's Awash extended through Dec 24
more
"Psychic Superhighway" [mp3 removed]
I've been wanting to do a longish house thing that you could kind of get lost in. This is that thing. I'm continuing to use the Mutator filter to make the Sidstation more fluid and mooglike. I still need to do some clean-up--there's some hum to get rid of from plugging the Mutator into the wrong outlet.
I also updated "Kay Whole Again," a few posts back, adding a bass line and making it a bit more like this piece.
Let's watch George Felix Allen insult the opposition's cameraman again. [YouTube] Although intrepid bloggers were quick to define "macaca" as a North African insult, I think Allen was probably telling the truth that he just made up the word on the spot. What's disgusting is the "...or whatever your name is" that follows it, and Allen's smugly superior delivery. This was a genuine blunder, as a huge part of his constituency was from ethnically diverse Northern Virginia. Thanks to YouTube and the Net community, everyone could see this a*hole for what he really is. It's great he lost his campaign for Senator.
Regarding the elections:
So, America came to its senses 6 years late.
All it took was untold carnage in foreign wars, the loss of a major city, the hemorraghing of the Treasury to epic corruption, and mounting fear of religious nuts making people's personal and family decisions.
Some of us have been saying the leadership was bad since '00. But it's great folks finally came around.
It would have been ideal if the traitor Lieberman had gone down in Connecticut. But as has been pointed out, the money the Republicans (hello, the opposition party?) spent to save his hash probably cost them the Senate. Also, the Lamont primary win gave people hope that these bastards could be beaten.
Clearly the internet and bloggers had a major role in this seismic shift. I believe they'll continue to act as a corrective to corrupt government and media complicity with same.
Who knew all these people existed around the country whose talents the system wasn't recognizing?
"Kay Whole Again" [mp3 removed]
Update: extended the length about 30 seconds, made minor edits throughout. The idea here was to explore one e-drum sample kit--adding pitch to some of the drums and seeing what happened with a tempo change. The Sidstation parts added for melodic interest kind of took over, as usual. I wrote the rhythms using overlayed fragments from a MIDI demo track.
Update 2: I added a bass line (d'oh, I always forget those) and some other changes to make it more "house-y."
"Streetsong (Beat Up Remix)" [6.1 MB .mp3]
John Parker's mix of my Mac SE tune "Streetsong," and my mix of his mix. Incorporating a famous drum lock groove.
The chart doesn't really apply to this song, because there's very little Mac SE in it. But it describes the working method for most of the other tunes we're doing.
Via attaturk, posting on the Eschaton blog:
And now a special message from the Republican National Committee:Re: the election generally: yay us, boo them. Now that we're getting the idea that the netroots works better than Rove's fear machine, we need to keep pressure and sunlight on these bastards as they inevitably get all clubby again with crooks and munitions lobbyists on the cocktail circuit of that stupid hick town DC (apologies to friends and loved ones there for the crack).
Attention Montana Election Officials:
Cheney is nearby and he's armed.
Just something to think about.
Update: Montana now has a Democratic Senator. Still waiting to find out whether Virginia will reject its current racist and sadist--sounds like it will be a while.
At the blog of new media artist duo MTAA you can listen to an .mp3 file of artist Marisa Olson "kicking the ass" of MTAA-er T.Whid (as he phrases it). This is the eighth and next-to-last in a series of MTAA's "live at the art opening" online field recordings. It's very entertaining and informative.
In the recording, Olson, who also blogs and makes new media art, coolly, efficiently, and amusingly dispatches T.Whid's leading questions such as:
--Is the 8 Bit movement evolving, since Cory Arcangel is the leader of the movement and his most recent show contained nothing 8 Bit in it?
--Is it a problem that artwork requiring specialized knowledge to appreciate (i.e., Net Art) is on the Web where anyone can consume it in a mass media way?
--Is Net Art devolving into something that can be judged very easily and quickly and rated according to its hit count?
--Isn't it getting harder and harder for Net artists to work in the context of the other Web culture (i.e., popular, amateur) that is steadily growing?
(The above are my paraphrases of the questions. I believe the drift is accurate.)
Update: I characterized the questions as "leading" (stating arguments rather than open-endedly eliciting information) but they are actually more in the nature of "when did you stop beating your wife?" questions (containing more than one assumption the questionee is being asked to assent to or not). Here, for example, are all the assumptions packed into the first query: (a) that an 8-bit art movement exists; (b) that it has a leader; (c) that Cory Arcangel is the leader; and (d) that his switch from hacking Nintendo cartridges to a computer-assisted critique of films, TV, and pop music necessarily constitutes evolution. For what it's worth my answers to T.Whid's questions would be Yes, No, No, and No.
Thor Johnson, photo of Christian Wrestling Federation event in Rockwall County, Texas (near Dallas). More photos documenting the match. One funny thing about Johnson's photos is he seems to be invisible. He is obviously all over the room, yet none of the locals are reacting to his presence. You'd think they'd have better radar for Satanic, I mean, sardonic intent.
My collaboration with John Parker, documented here, is continuing. We are working on a CD of his remixes/mashups of chiptune songs I wrote (some during the '80s).
The original tunes were somewhat out of step with the "8 Bit movement" we've been discussing lately. The Mac SE I used included a four-voice, 8-bit sound chip but it wasn't one of the game computers such as the Atari or the Commodore. But it is digital signal processing and I was conscious at the time of using the chip "to the limit" of the sound it was capable of. A piece called "Monster Scales" (written around '98) is a four note chord that goes up and down the scale from the lowest note the machine could play to the highest. The chip couldn't "keep up" with the requirement to produce pure tones so you got rhythmic "artifacts" that lagged behind the sound. These were quite beautiful--like gamelan or thumb piano plinks.
John's remix takes advantage of the time stretching features of Ableton (basically a DJ or live mix tool--with sequencing functions) to slow down and speed up the already fragmented scales. Tones and artifacts alike are heightened and "drawn out" during this process--slowing it down, say, makes audible many textures you couldn't otherwise hear.
I'll be plugging the CD more here as it gets finalized: it's not some damn cult of nostalgia, nor a paean to "state of the art" digital consumer products, but rather a present-tense hybrid of the unique sound textures made by older gear and skeptical types of things you can do with current instruments. Plus it's fun.
The White House's press secretary Tony Snow has denied that the U.S. had any role in the timing of the Saddam death-by-hanging verdict two days before US elections. "The idea is preposterous," he said, according to the AP, "that somehow we've been scheming and plotting with the Iraqis."
That's right up there with Ari Fleischer's "But think about the implications of what you're saying. You're saying that the leaders of other nations are buyable. And that is not an acceptable proposition. (Laughter from press corps.)"
Above: Susan C. Dessel, Our Backyard, A Cautionary Tale, photo by James Wagner, from the exhibition "Dangling Between the Real Thing and the Sign in the Window" at Dam Stuhltrager, Brooklyn, NY, through November 13, curated by Wagner and Barry Hoggard.
Acknowledging that the Iraq war "may not be popular with the public," Dick Cheney says that it "doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right." He speaks clinically because so far, only the families of soldiers have been affected and the majority of Americans aren't "feeling the war" except through fleeting, carefully controlled images on TV. The work above is a protest piece, icy in its own way as Cheney's statements. The bodies, or lumps shaped like bodies, are wrapped in plastic as if tagged for the morgue, and arranged in neat rows. Their placement in this verdant courtyard is doubly incongruous, since the courtyard itself is fairly out of place in a gritty Williamsburg block near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (the yard sits behind the gallery, out of view of the street). What might be a fairly common sight in Baghdad these days looks beamed down from space in Brooklyn--for now. The photo is good but you need to see the work in person. It really hits you. Goddamit, we didn't do enough to stop the meaningless retaliatory slaughter by this, our supposed democracy.
Inside the gallery, the mood swings back and forth between the dire and the ebullient. A little Joy Garnett painting of a fireman's ladder surrounded by an uncontrolled blaze captures a random, but sadly all-too-familiar moment of urban chaos with flailing gestures of orange. Jacques Louis Vidal's pixelated digital photocollage on Duratrans depicts a pyrotechnic insanitarium in both senses of that term: the actual archaic nickname for Coney Island and a Mark Dery-esque, meth-shooting evangelical quasi-culture gone berserk. (I wish my camera's "memory stick" hadn't chosen today to break--I had a good photo.) I also liked Ina Diane Archer's Jazz Age, Deco film credits excerpted from her video "The Lincoln Film Conspiracy," conjuring an alternate-universe African American Hollywood studio with its slick production Black Ants in Your Pants 1926, starring the artist herself in various guises as well as Sun Ra as "Dr. Cosmos." And Nicolas Garait brings us back to the Middle East with his video installation "28 Months," an abstract montage of 8mm film and found sound evoking Algeria during the 1954-1962 War of Independence, as if seen through a haze of smoke and imperialist propaganda. Lots to like (and worry about) in this show.
Marcin Ramocki, artist, curator and director of the film 8 BIT*, writes about his Brooklyn gallery vertexList in the Journal of National Taiwan Museum of Arts--the text is on the gallery blog: "VertexList disclosures took very different formats: anything from an acrylic painting to a sensor based Jitter installation. I tried to prove to my audience and to myself that the digital condition is hidden in the way of thinking, communicating and the medium of its deconstruction is really secondary." Marcin's gallery and art has given me a lot to write and think about the past few years, and unlike some folks in the "new media community," he actually doesn't mind dissent! (Or at least handles it in a graceful and civilized way.) And belated props to eteam for their show with vertexList a few months back: it was excellent and completely baffling with or without the backstory.
*with co-director and producer Justin Strawhand.
Joshua Johnson annotated:
[Cory] Arcangel's new show at Team Gallery, appropriately and ostentatiously [true that] titled "Subtractions, Modifications, Addenda, and Other Recent Contributions to Participatory Culture" samples various elements of popular culture and manipulates their presentation in order to effect an aporia of presentation. [An "aporia" is a rhetorical puzzle, but these are easily solved by a trip to the gallery desk--they will tell you exactly what the work means.]
While this sort of investigation is an old hat by now [true that], Arcangel has revived it by turning his attention to media whose substrata are so deeply integrated into the system of their presentation as to become almost invisible. Consumer culture is broadcast on increasingly complex instruments of distribution, while the very platforms that make their availability omnipresent have themselves multiplied in complexity. Recording instruments, encoding devices, and mixing instruments all require levels of technical ability and knowledge that cannot easily be mastered by the dilettante, in the same way that a Sunday painter could approximate the works of Vermeer. [You're kidding, right?] This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that often those who manipulate these devices are themselves unaware of the basic engineering features that allow them to function; I might upload a video to YouTube, but I know next to nothing about the Flash encoding technology that makes it possible. [Gosh, I thought the genius of YouTube was that you didn't have to know how it worked to use it.]
Untitled (After Lucier), 2006, confronts that specific issue head-on; Arcangel appropriates the strategy of avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier's 1970 piece I am Sitting in a Room, in which Lucier continued to re-record a recording of himself reading "I am sitting in a room..." until the recording became an abstract sonic portrait of the space he was recording in. Untitled (After Lucier) examines the implications of compression, by continuously digitally re-compressing a video of the Beatles' famous Ed Sullivan appearance. As the video compresses it becomes more and more abstract-- a visual representation of the process of compression. Essentially, Arcangel asks us to question how the experience of culture is transformed by the container it is presented in. When a video is uploaded to Youtube it is modified by the technology, and thus takes on the characteristics of the "room" in which the viewer experiences it. [Anyone who looks at YouTube notices the pixelation right off the bat. Also, just because Lucier says the piece is about the "room," you believe him? The end of the piece sounds like a vocoder (listen), very electronic and piercing--surely that is not the "room" but the amplified mechanical errors of recording "room tone." In other words, the point was made in the Lucier piece--Untitled (After Lucier) just brings it into the YouTube era to tell us something we already know about the bad effects of compression.]
related: Jonathan Horowitz / Baby We Were Born to Run (updated again)
Update: Just remembered that Arcangel had done an earlier piece (with RSG) on the theme of compression called TAC, or Total Asshole Compression. To quote coin-operated: "Drag and drop a file into TAC and it will make your file exponentially BIGGER than what it used to be." I dropped a 15k HTML file in there and it compressed (expanded) to 7.2 MB! The project emphasizes the fact that with hard drives and memory getting so cheap and expansive in space, that compression formats might not be needed in the future! Why not just expand instead of trying to make everything so small! Hasn’t the advent of broadband made us realize this yet? Anyways, TAC only runs on MAC OSX currently and I wouldn’t advise dropping a DIVX movie into the compressor or you might end up crashing your machine... wait a minute, I think I just discovered the point of this project." One supposes the sudden rise of YouTube made compression the other way relevant again, but either way the attitude is missed. Like Woody Allen, Arcangel's biggest problem is going to be competing with himself.
Now They Tell Us
From Columbia Journalism Review, reporters from CNN, NBC, New York Times, Cox Newspapers, et al, reminisce about the immediate aftermath of the US invasion in Iraq--how bad it really was when they were telling the American public how good it really was (thus helping to usher in four more years of Bush).
Geffen Sells Pollock to Pay Paul
"[In addition to selling a Pollock for $140 million, j]ust last month Mr. Geffen sold two other 20th-century paintings — a Jasper Johns and a Willem de Kooning — for a total of $143.5 million. Given that he is among many business figures who has expressed interest in buying The Los Angeles Times, media industry analysts speculated that he was trying to raise cash for a potential bid." [via]
So, a man who made his pile robbing musicians in one old tech milieu (pre-Napster CDs) sells his holdings by artists who make even older tech objects, unique (uncopyable) paintings, most of which value never accrues to the artists directly, to buy yet another old tech (dying) business (newsprint), premised on gatekeepers choking the flow of information.
What a guy!
Republican-tied Bechtel Corp. Doesn't Stay the Course; "Cuts and Runs" in Iraq
This is interesting:
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:When will Bush be questioning the company's patriotism?
Bechtel Corp. went to Iraq three years ago to help rebuild a nation torn by war. Since then, 52 of its people have been killed and much of its work sabotaged as Iraq dissolved into insurgency and sectarian violence.
Now Bechtel is leaving.
The San Francisco engineering company's last government contract to rebuild power, water and sewage plants across Iraq expired on Tuesday. Some employees remain to finish the paperwork, but essentially, the company's job is done.
 Tomorrow, Thursday, Nov. 2, after Olia Lialina's talk at Bryce Wolkowitz I'm heading over to the Lower East Side to hear David Humphrey and Adam Hurwitz do DJ sets at Spinart. This series has been featuring artists who also spin records; Humphrey is a great painter whose work is in the poster above. Adam sez: Please come out and join David Humphrey and myself for what will be the last in the Spinart Thursdays series at Loreley Lounge in the lower east side. David is a returning Spinart veteran and he will definitely be getting the party started right with his hip hop infused eclectic selection. I will take over with the ass shakin' beats that will bust your bass-bins!As in bratwurst, etc, not auto-fellatio. An excellent Hurwitz mix of dubby techno house can be downloaded at the blog A Brooklyn Life. I can't name individual tracks but I especially like the growly thing at 25:00, the weirdly pitch-shifted thing at 29:20, the the Rhodes thing at 38:50 and the Berlinoid electro trance thing at the very end. |
Jonathan Horowitz looms large in the "art as mediacrit" field. He currently shows with Gavin Brown gallery, and has been an influential force on the New York scene since the early '90s. Although he now uses the Internet as a tool and playing field, his work came to prominence during the VCR era. In his piece Maxell, a tape made in 1990 and projected on a large scale at Greene Naftali gallery in 1998, a black screen with the single word MAXELL has been dubbed and redubbed on a VCR so that it gets progressively grainier. But it isn't just degrading--random visual and audial noise is being picked up and amplified with each copy that begins to aggressively overwhelm the original source, in a way that is almost performative. When projected on a large screen, ugly violent electronic sounds and wrenching, spasmodic lightning zaps build dramatically, so that by the end of the tape the video becomes assaultive, almost scary in its sense of total abject breakdown. The piece shows the unintended consequences of mechanical reproduction, data transmission that is supposed to be seamless taken to its most extreme conclusion, so that it actually feels toxic. In other words, Art reveals a dark side to technology that has been there all along. The ultimate irony is the use of MAXELL as subject matter, a brand built on clarity and trust.
guthrie says on his del.icio.us page: "...youtube is totally reaching its golden peak (like napster did..), really gotta download all my favorites before they vanish....."
No kidding. They're vanishing as fast as copyrightholders decide they have had enough free (grainy) exposure. As far as saving them, the thing is, you won't, and I won't. File that under the best of intentions.
I have some Quicktime vids that I created up on this page--this marks me as a pre YouTubian dinosaur, yet most have been made since 2005.
I avoided YouTube because I dreaded that uniform rectangle and feared the Procrustean distortions that odd-sized formats would suffer. Also, I knew some evil f*ckw*d like Rupert Murdoch would end up with all my content on his server. Turns out it's google, but I don't have a gmail account, either.
I'm enjoying the YT ride, finding out what bands actually look like that I listened to a million times on vinyl and CD, and otherwise glomming onto bits of my cultural heritage, past and present. I'm filing them away in my mind because I don't trust that I'll find them again.
update: some ordinary vulgarities trimmed so the blog maintains its lofty tone