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Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk. The second most influential pop group after the Beatles is touring in support of Tour de France Soundtracks, their first CD of new material in 18 years. While not as aggressive, funky, or strange as their earlier work, it's good: kind of shimmery and ambient and yes, they can still write hooks. "Vitamin," "La Forme" and the remixed 80s hiphop classic "Tour De France" are quite hummable. They sound as if they spent all those years tracking down every trace of hiss and hum in their studio and then carefully mastered every millisecond because it's an amazingly clean, refined production. One thing they still have over the generation of electronic dance musicians they inspired is great technical finesse, and I'm guessing machines expensive enough to produce sounds and textures beyond the budgets of most basement producers. They don't flaunt it, though; the music is very understated. More tour photos in addition to the ones above, by Swedish photographer Henrik Larrson, are here. A review of the Brixton Academy show is here. |
Proposal for Abstract Expressionist Wall Projection (Party at Bill Gates')
"Knowledge Transfer"=Train Your Indian Replacement
Here's a sickening story, from USA Today, explaining how job outsourcing works. You get a pink slip, and are offered one more paycheck and some increased severance if you will train your replacement. A new employee, who will be working for about one-fifteenth of your pay, is flown over from India or China for a few weeks, and you get to teach him or her how to do your job. This is called "knowledge transfer."
UPDATE: I removed my angry comment about this story because it didn't make me feel any better. Suffice it to say, labor issues are growing steadily worse as society becomes more mobile and faceless. You cant picket the big factory on the hill because nobody knows precisely where the owners are anymore. And by having security guards escort you out when you're laid off, employers never see your face or feel any consequences of their actions.
UPDATE: See the comment to this post for more on the mechanics of "knowledge transfer."
From Aaron in Japan, the website of a Japanese-speaking Canadian working for Hitachi in Yokohama. Many affectionate bad english quotes, a Dance Dance Revolution page, photos. Almost as good as traveling there.
Just a few more thoughts on this Net Art thing (hey, someone has to do this, if the Times won't).
1. Early Net Art was made by software writers who knew their way around the enabling programs, hence the prevalence of flow charts, clickable steps, etc built into the art. Now, more artists are just working with the tools (image-making, sound-making software) and using the Net as a delivery system. This newer work is less about commenting on, reproducing or "deconstructing" the tools, or the Net itself--although those concerns do (and should) linger, since proprietary programs are controlling and kind of evil.
2. Early Net Art was made in a era of limited bandwidth, hence all the ASCII drawings and text-based art.
3. Bandwidth-hogging current Art on the Net (as opposed to Net Art) is aimed at an "elite net" of broadband users.
4. For a few examples of non/anti/post Net Art please see the links column to the left and my revised BitStreams roster.
Lt. Col. Nate "Heavy Dose of Fear and Violence" Sassaman is back in the news this week. His men allegedly forced some Iraqi curfew violators to jump off a bridge into the Tigris (wearing flex cuffs, apparently), and one of the Iraqis allegedly never came out of the water. Oh yeah, and then Sassaman allegedly covered it up.
But otherwise, things are going well over in Iraq. Looks we'll have a nice orderly transition of power to the new government (Ahmed Chalabi) come June, and then we can all pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. Sure, there are a few problem regions and an "outlaw cleric" to be dealt with, but overall, the Bush team--and especially the "brain" Dick Cheney--has done a superlative job on this thing.
Below is my own reconfiguration of the "MTAA simple" and "Linkoln complex" net art diagrams, a stab at representing graphically the point I was trying to make in a (somewhat rewritten) previous post. File this under art criticism (or trainspotting), not art.
